Monthly Archives: June 2018

Sex toy review: Lovense Hush

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I met her at a castle in France. Twenty-two people or so all came together to celebrate the birthday of my partner Maxine in the best way kinky poly people know how: by spending a week having kinky group sex in a castle.

I found myself with a bit of a crush on her almost immediately. We had a lovely time snogging.

I talked about that crush in an answer on Quora, in fact.

Fast forward about eight years. I invited her to my wedding. We’re all sitting there at dinner: me, my wife-to-be, Maxine (who graciously agreed to be the best man at the wedding), my other partners, the bridal party, mutual friends, when Maxine says “Hey Eunice, did you know Franklin has a crush on you? Check out what he wrote about you on Quora!”

Because that’s just the kind of troublemaker Maxine is.


Maxine, me, Eunice, arranged in order of height but not in order of evil

Now, Eunice lives in London, and I do not. She also doesn’t do long-distance relationships. So we’re in a…well, let’s just call our situation a “situationship” and leave it at that.

A long-distance situationship requires a fair bit of creativity, to overcome the logistical incompatibility inherent of being a very small creature living on a very large world.

Fortunately, we live in an era of technology. And the last half-decade has seen a renaissance in high-tech sex toys.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the culmination of thousands of years of relentless technological progress, stretching in an unbroken line from the first stone tools to the Information Age: the Lovense Hush.


So much better than flint knapping!

When you buy a sex toy that comes with a 40-page instruction booklet, you know you’re in for a treat. (Granted part of the reason it’s that long is it’s written in several languages, but still.)

Remote-controlled sex toys are the greatest gift to long-distance relationships since the invention of writing.

They’re not everything, of course. Part of the creativity we’ve had to exercise as part of this situationship has involved installing new server infrastructure in the house and brushing up on open-source streaming video server software. I now have a streaming camera in the bedroom that any of my partners can log in to so as to make sure I’m properly behaving myself, which, given the sorts of folks I like to date, generally means behaving very improperly indeed.

It was nice to find a turnkey gadget that allowed her to reach out and touch me without the need for fussing with Darwin Streaming Server or dynamic DNS configuration. The current state of the art in open source software is why we can’t have nice things…but I digress.

This is a lovely device. It’s absolutely fantastic fun. The smartphone software is easy to use, though you need to register an account with Lovense to make use of it…such is the nature of our modern, interconnected world. (And, as we recently discovered, it won’t work long distance if the vendor’s authentication servers are down. This, too, is the nature of our modern, interconnected world.)

While the Amazon description doesn’t mention this, the control app included an alarm clock function.

Let me say that again to let the magnificence sink in: The app includes an alarm clock function! I anticipate that making waking up in the morning a whole lot more interesting.

The plug itself is quite well-designed and definitely stays put even when you’re out and about. It’s not silent, but it’s a lot quieter than many other wearable toys I’ve used. In a normal environment like a restaurant, the sound it makes is not likely to be noticeable.

It offers powerful vibrations, of a deep, raspy sort. I quite prefer this to the high buzzing of some other vibrating toys.

From an engineering perspective, it’s covered in silicone, but it is not solid silicone all the way through; the electronic gubbins are inside a hard plastic shell beneath the silicone. For that reason, it’s a lot harder than pure silicone plugs. I was debating whether to get the small or large size. I’m glad I went with the small. (If you’re contemplating getting one of these but on the fence as to size, I’d recommend going with the smaller size, simply because if you’re accustomed to other toys the hardness of this one makes it feel a bit bigger than it is.)

The description advertises 1.5 to 2 hours of use. We get 2 or more, but that might be because my crush is a tease and likes to run it at low levels just to frustrate me. If it’s not running at all, expect about a full day of standby power on one battery charge, which means if you’re in, say, hypothetically speaking, just as a random example, the Pacific time zone, and your significant other is in London, and you wear it to bed, you might expect to be jolted out of your sleep at 4AM when your London partner is waking up for the morning. Just, you know, hypothetically speaking.

All in all, this thing is quite lovely. Definitely worth the price. We’ve talked about getting one for her.

My new book!

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I was out on the porch enjoying the lovely Portland weather this morning when the postman came by with the advance review copies of my new novel, Black Iron,, straight from the publisher.

No, it’s not about polyamory. Not at all.

So what’s it about? Well, that’s kinda hard to say. It’s a bit steampunk, if you interpret “steampunk” very loosely. It’s about a heist, kind of. Well, it’s really a murder mystery, sort of. No, wait, that’s not quite it. It’s a story of political intrigue, in a manner of speaking.

Think Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books or Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, only set in an alternate 19th-century London where there’s no British empire and the British don’t drink tea. (Joreth read the first draft and described it this way: “Imagine if Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman had a love child who grew up on a steady diet of George RR Martin.”)

It’s the same kind of loopy, over-the-top humor that you see in books like Night Watch or Hitchhiker’s Guide, the sort of absurdist comedy that’s really social commentary.

There’s a petty thief and a princess, of course, because if you have a 19th-century heist political intrigue steampunk murder mystery, you have to have a petty thief and a princess—it’s required by law. There are undead things, after a fashion. There’s a cameo by Doctor Frankenstein; in this world, his experiments worked, but not quiiiiiiiite the way he expected them to.

There are airships. The New World colonies are still colonies. Oh, and people die, because we now live in a world where Game of Thrones is a thing, so gone are the assumptions that sympathetic characters are immune to being killed.

It’s also available for preorder on Amazon (pub date is October 1).

Oh, and if you know anyone who would like an advance review copy, let me know!

Series review: Altered Carbon

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Note: This post started out as an answer on Quora, but I thought it deserved its own space.

Very minor spoilers below.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, Altered Carbon is a dystopian science fiction series on Netflix. It’s based on the novel of the same name, a particularly bleak look into the future by Richard K. Morgan.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Dystopian scifi? Again? Hasn’t that been done to death already?

No. Not like this.

First of all, this is a very dark show. I don’t mean dark like Blade Runner or Pan’s Labyrinth. I mean black. Black as midnight, black as pitch, blacker than the foulest witch. This show makes Silence of the Lambs look like Happy Fun Times with Rainbows and Unicorns. I know folks who got 2–3 episodes in and couldn’t keep watching it.

The show’s central tenet is that shortly after birth, everyone is fitted with a “stack,” a device that constantly backs up your memories and consciousness. If you’re ever killed, your stack can be removed from your body and placed in a new body. You can travel to other places by copying your stack into a new stack somewhere else, like transferring a file over the Internet…no need to get in an airplane (or spaceship!) and haul heavy, fragile bodies around.

Instantaneous travel! Death has been conquered! The show takes those Utopian premises and uses them to build a society that is almost unbelievably twisted, cruel, and bleak.

Imagine a society where people like a young Bill Gates—not the current mellow, charitable Bill Gates, but the greedy, paranoid, Machiavellian Bill Gates of the 90s, the guy who was one part robber baron and one part Lex Luthor—never age and never die.

In this society, the wealthiest people don’t own 99% of humanity’s resources, they own all of them. They’re hundreds of years old, they’re redundantly backed up, and they own everything.

Which means they control…everything. A small group of the uber-wealthy control all the lawmakers, all the laws, all the police, all the justice system…it’s Citizens United taken to its gruesomely logical end. There is not one single aspect of human society that does not bend, in a kind of grotesque fiduciary tropism, to the will of a tiny handful of the most greedy, amoral, wealthy sociopaths all of humanity can produce.

Now, combine that with the idea that the death of your body means you don’t really die, and what do you get? Brothels where you can kill the sex workers. No big deal, if she dies you just resleeve her in a new body! (“Oh, he’s one of the good ones,” a sex worker says of a rich client who likes beating women to death with his bare hands, “if he breaks it, he buys it.”)

The return of gladiator combat! After all, if death is only a minor inconvenience, why not have entertainment where people fight each other to the death? In bodies with enhanced strength and reflexes, just to make it interesting? One character stages death matches at his parties—using a husband and wife team as gladiators, because he loves watching people who genuinely love each other kill each other with fists and knives. (Winner gets an upgraded combat body. Loser gets a downgraded body. They go home to their kids after the match and their kids don’t recognize them.)

Or hey, you want information? You can torture someone to death over and over and over again and still keep asking them questions!

Buckle up, that’s what you’re in for when you get on this ride.

If that sounds like the sort of entertainment you’re looking for, Altered Carbon is your bag.

It’s a brilliant show, brilliantly done. Everything about it, from the writing to the acting (at one point, we see a huge LA biker who has first an elderly Spanish grandmother and then a Russian professional assassin transferred into him—it’s some of the best acting I’ve ever seen) to the set design is just astonishingly well-done.

I’m serious about the set design, by the way. I’ve watched the entire show twice, and the level of attention to detail borders on obsession. There’s a lot of interesting background stuff you only notice the second time through.

The world of Altered Carbon is incredibly misogynist (there’s a scene in a cloning lab for the uber-rich where we see a custom-designed naked female body with the advertising slogan “Put your wife in me!”), but unlike Blade Runner 2049—another movie set in an incredibly misogynist society—it gives us female characters who aren’t victims or MacGuffins.

Yes, the characters are tropes, written in broad, bold strokes. They have to be. The show, for its dystopian technological setting, is noir. That’s one of the defining characteristics of noir.

And within those broad strokes, the show does some really interesting things. The sidekick is a brooding and occasionally homicidal AI obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe (he even calls himself “Poe”).

If there’s an overarching theme to the show, it’s the tedious banality of evil. Power corrupts; power accumulated over centuries corrupts in dark and horrifying ways. The most awful parts of the human psyche rise to the surface, where they’re polished to a high sheen.

Even when they’re not human. There’s a very minor character who’s an AI. It loathes and detests humanity. But not in a Skynet, “I’m going to exterminate humanity in a nuclear cataclysm and then build an unstoppable robot army” kind of way, oh no.

It runs a VR brothel, where people with a tendency toward sadism can beat and murder women without actually having to do it to real women. Unknown to its customers, it records the VR scenes using real women, “because,” it explains, “they scream better.”

That’s the world you’re getting into: a world where the most grandiose acts of evil are directed at the grubbiest, most tawdry ends.

Classic works of cyberpunk like Neuromancer are set in societies where the greediest people are struggling to control the fate of human society.

In Altered Carbon, they’ve won. They control society absolutely, and now have century after century to look for novel atrocities with which to entertain themselves.

10/10, highly recommend.