So recently merovingian got Shelly a gift from Amazon.com. Apparently, he also got a gift for Molly the kitty, too–the Amazon box that the video came in.
Molly really, really likes Amazon boxes. They are precisely the right size.
Note: This is part 3 of an occasional ongoing “how to” series on rope bondage.
Part 1 of the series, How to Tie a Rope Harness Part I, is here.
Part 2 of the series, How to Tie a Frog Tie, is here.
As you might well imagine, none of these posts is even remotely work-safe.
In Japanese bondage (or “shibari”), a breast harness is called a “shinju.” A shinju can be applied to just about any woman, though most shinju harnesses don’t work well on men.
The style of shinju shown here is very simple, and easy to learn. More complex harnesses may have several layers of rope that cross the breasts directly, or vertical sections that are designed to press on and stimulate the nipples. This simple shinju can be used as a starting point for you to explore more complex forms of breast bondage, or can be tied beneath the karada demonstrated earlier.
So, without further ado, on to the tutorial!
You probably don't want to click this link at work
So over the past two weeks or so, this journal has been under constant attack by LiveJournal comment spammers; I’ve been averaging about 2-5 pieces of spam a day, mostly for penis enlargers, “herbal Viagra,” and tooth whiteners, in comments to various posts.
Interestingly, all the spamvertised Web sites are hosted by the same ISP: Sago Networks, an American Web hosting ISP located in Atlanta.
I’ve emailed the abuse team at Sago Networks repeatedly. They refuse to take action against their pet spammers unless LiveJournal actually provides them with the LJ server logs showing the placement of the spam.
Now, here’s the interesting thing. Sago Networks is headquartered right across the street from my office. I mean that literally; right across the street. You can see their building from my front door; they’re a ten-second walk away.
I woke up this morning to still more comment spam, all of it hosted by Sago. If this continues, I think I’ll walk over there and ask them in person why they like hosting spammers so much. (Not like I don’t already know the answer: money. It’s profitable to host spammers, at least in the short run.)
I’m thinking of putting a Spam Supporter Hall of Shame on my Web site, listing pro-spam outfits like Sago and Pipex (who do not consider Usenet spam to be “spam,” and permit their customers to spam Usenet newsgroups with impunity) and the email exchanges I’ve had with them, so people who don’t like spam supporters can make informed decisions about who to host with.
[EDIT] The Sago facility across the street from me is their data center. Their corporate headquarters are (ready for this?) in Tampa, about five minutes from my old Tampa office. They’re stalking me!
…and still flying from it. Best weekend I’ve spent in a long, looooong time. smoocherie, you really outdid yourself; I had a blast. It should be criminal how much fun I had.
Come to think of it, it probably is.
Florida Poly Retreat is a learning experience, and offered no end of things I can take with me into my life. In fact, I think it’s probably a good idea to record some of the lessons for posterity.
Things I Learned from Florida Poly Retreat
– When teaming up with your archnemesis to declare war upon a peaceful people, make sure they notice that you’ve declared war on them. The answer to “what if they had a war and nobody came?” is “things wouldn’t be very interesting.”
– Spinning fire is fun! Spinning fire when you’re sleep-deprived, you have bronchitis, and you’ve been drinking, on the other hand, is a good way to get whacked upside the head with flame.
– punzel rocks. If you get a chance to see her present, do it. Try not to give her bronchitis, though. (I hope that wasn’t my fault…)
– 70 feet of rope is more than enough to create a karada and also then tie your partner to an antique high-backed wooden chair in a very interesting and aesthetically attractive way.
– Ancient medieval siege weapons, like cars, have a breaking-in period before they start firing consistently and reliably. Once they’re suitably broken in, however, they just keep getting better and better.
– I’m too optimistic to make a good evil overlord. This epiphany has forced me to re-evaluate my plans, and made me seriously reconsider my goals in life.
– Driving an average of 90 miles per hour rather than 65 miles per hour turns a 7-hour trip into a 5-hour trip.
(Okay, so technically these last two don’t count as “things I learned at FPR,” but rather “things I learned in my car while driving to FPR and listening to A Perfect Circle on the iPod, but close enough.)
– A trebuchet actually makes a good metaphor for transitioning from monogamy to polyamory. The weapon, while sitting there quietly doing nothing, is like a monogamous relationship; it can be perfectly stable and hold up just fine. But when you start involving other people, whether as romantic partners or as targets, the machine becomes dynamic, and any design flaws are likely to cause it to rip itself apart in a shower of wood splinters and stones and grief.
– Sleep is optional. Food is optional. Tech is mandatory.
– 3 out of 4 polyamorous people prefer Macs.
– Size matters. No matter how big your Compact Flash card is, it isn’t big enough.
– The best relationship you can have is with yourself. Or, if you’re merovingian, the best relationship you can have is with your evil robot double.
So recently, someone on another forum I read posted this link to an article about a Britney Spears lesbian sex-tape scandal.
Whee! Another day, another drug-fueled media superstar homosexual orgy!
Maybe it’s just me, but c’mon. A Britney Spears lesbian sex tape? Isn’t that, like, so last-century? Drug-fueled homoerotic scandals have become so trendy that even the Religious Right is getting into the act, and when they’ve started embracing a fad, you KNOW it’s all over.
Okay, so I can see how it might have had a certain mass appeal at one time. I still remember the Billboard magazine poll that showed that 53% of all American middle-aged men have had fantasies of Britney Spears bent over a pool table taking it in the ass from a strapon-wielding Russian dominatrix in “Knight Rider” Underoos. (Oh, don’t look at me like that. You know she’s into anal; she’s been getting it up the ass from the Recording Industry Association of America for long enough!) And I’m sure it’s probably those same 53% of American men who’ll end up acting all outraged when the next Britney sex tape appears on boringcelebrityescapades.com. Virgin-Whore Complex, thy name is American pop culture.
But still. While I admire her spirit, I gotta think it’s too little, too late. I mean. she’s technically a MILF now, and that’s a whole ‘nother demographic altogether.
I’m a bit mystified by the news report. “According to several sources, the footage inside the sex video is so outrageous and shocking that it may be the ‘final straw that broke the camel’s back’.” Exactly what camel are we talking about here? People, we live in an age where sites like “sexandsubmission.com” are so thoroughly mainstream that the owners have to engage in multimillion-dollar real estate deals just to get new digs to film in. Whatever Britney is up to with a couple of strippers, I guarandamntee you it’s not “outrageous and shocking.”
Now, maybe if you threw in a wildebeest, sixteen cases of Silly String, a dozen feet of rubber tubing, three titanium sporks, and a life-sized cardboard cutout of Karl Rove, we’d be talking shock and awe. But Britney doing the nasty with two strippers? That’s not shocking and outrageous; that’s the pilot for the new Fox prime-time sitcom! You get more “shocking and outrageous” in an average apartment building on a weekend night.
Well, okay, not in my apartment this past weekend. I’ve been sick as a dog, and spent most of the weekend loaded up on NyQuil and ibuprofen…but I digress.
Russian dominatrix and Underoos aside, I have a feeling that if this alleged video of Britney ever surfaces, it’ll be every bit as bad as the Paris Hilton sex tape. And I don’t mean “bad” like “Out! Out! Cruel demons of the flesh, begone! Tempt me no more with your carnal delights! Get thee behind me, Satan!” so much as I mean “bad” like “Jesus, will someone PLEASE teach that woman how to fuck?”
If it ever surfaces. Which, frankly, is something I’m a little skeptical of. We have no proof that this video even exists save for a low-resolution photograph of Britney walking up a flight of stairs with two strippers. Many’s the time I’ve walked up a flight of stairs with two strippers, and there was no frenzied lesbian bacchanale at the top. Okay, so I’m sure we can all agree those times are the exception rather than the rule, but still. The photo’s not exactly a smoking gun, y’know?
I don’t know. Maybe Britney was asleep during the Pop Celebrity 101 class where they covered the Madonna Rule…you know, the one that says if you make outrageous, over-the-top images of yourself in sexual situations, for God’s sake make sure you keep the marketing, licensing, and merchandising rights. Maybe Britney’s been replaced by a Pod Person. I dunno, maybe Britney started out as a Pod Person, and now she’s been replaced with a confused child whose life started spinning out of her control long before puberty even hit.
What I don’t get is what’s “shocking” about what she or anyone else wants to do to get their rocks off. Nor why anyone cares at all to begin with.
Oh, and the guy who’s quoted in the article as firing the strippers when he saw the tape? Listen, man, I gotta say, you just made the dumbest business decision of your life. Since people obviously go in for this shit, you shoulda promoted ’em and put up a marquee sign saying “We have strippers who’ve shagged Britney Spears.” Maybe set up a little kiosk selling Knight Rider Underoos. Bet that’d pack the shocked-but-tittilated Baby Boomers in!
The cats and I have developed, especially since I’ve moved to Atlanta, a number of little rituals we go through almost every day.
These rituals begin when i get up in the morning. I stumble blindly into the bathroom, making noises like “rrrrrgh” and “ungggggh,” ad run the water. That’s the cats’ cue to run into the bathroom and sit on the sink while I shower.
As soon as I’m done with the shower, I turn it off and stand in the tub to towel off. At that point, Snow Crash hops onto the edge of the tub, pokes his head through the shower curtain, and starts lapping at the water dripping from the faucet.
It’s really cute.
So I’ve seen seeing this “crush tag” thing floating around LiveJournal, and visited the site and got one. It looks like this:
Crush this person!
Get your own ThisCrush.com CrushTag!
Got me to thinking about online memes in general. Not just memes in the sense of “little things you put in your blog that other people see and put in their blog as well,” but memes in the original sense of “self-replicating ideas.”
There are a lot of them out there. Most of them are offered up with little or no supporting evidence; many of them, such as the meme that vaccinations are a conspiracy on the part of pharmaceutical companies to “keep people sick,” spread despite a great deal of contradictory evidence.
The interesting thing about the Internet is that when a person visits a Web site, his assessment of how reliable and trustworthy that Web site is depends a great deal of how the Web site looks and not at all on who wrote the content of the Web site. This creates all kinds of problems for security people; people who fall for scam “phishing” sites will ignore the URL in the address bar and base their decision on whether to trust the site solely on the way the site looks. Since copying an entire PayPal or bank site can be done with only a couple mouse clicks, that’s bad news for anyone who cares about security.
But issues of phishing aside, the trust people place in Web sites often interests me, because the way that people make their decisions seems opaque to me. For example: the meme site that generated the crush icon above offers a space for a person to type a username, a password, and an email address. Nothing else. Since many people use the same password for all their online activities, it would be trivial to create a meme site whose purpose was to steal passwords from the users. (Note that I am not saying the “crushme” site does this!)
I’ve been debating, on and off, for several years the idea of putting up a Web site that makes some totally outrageous claim, probably about medicine or health. I’ve been thinking of talking about non-existent studies that support whatever the claim is, putting pictures that claim to support the claim, making emotional arguments in favor of the claim; all for the purpose of seeing how many people will believe anything that presses their emotional triggers, even if the claim is pure fabrication made of whole cloth without one single shred of evidence to support it. I have a suspicion the results would depress me.
You can click on my crush link if you like anyway. 🙂
I’ve just posted a major revamp of my polyamory site. The design was getting a bit long in the tooth…I first did it about ten years ago(!), in a time when most people browsed at 640×480 or perhaps 800×600 resolution, and the page was looking a bit cluttered and more than a bit cramped to modern Web visitors. The new design is intended to make the content clearer and easier to read.
I’m in the process of moving off my current Web provider altogether, but the nontrivial complexity of the site and the number of CGIs and server-side includes on the site is making that a big pain in the ass.