Today, in The Street Finds its Own Uses for Things:
I noticed something funny when I logged into Facebook last week. My feed, which is normally filled with ads for video games, photography gear, and complicated kits for Stirling engines you can build at home, was absolutely jam-packed with ads for far-right pro-Trump merchandise, antigovernment T-shirts and posters, gun holsters, and “conservative news” sites.
And I mean jam-packed. I’ve never seen this quantity of advertising on Facebook before; literally an ad following every single friend post.
The whole secret of advertising on Facebook is you can target your ads. You can specify exactly who you want to see your ads; for example, when we ran ads for the first porn novel we co-authored, Eunice and I targeted people with an interest in reading who were 35 or younger and lived close to a university, figuring this would likely be the sort of person interested in far-future, post-scarcity science fiction smut.
So why would Facebook, that giant creepy Hydra in the cloud, show me alt-right ads when it knows I’m a lefty Portlander?
Because the advertisers know I won’t buy their products. They don’t care. That isn’t why they’re spending tens of millions of dollars on Facebook advertising.
So first, the ads.
I’ve gotten in the habit of aggressively blocking these ads when they appear, and blocking the companies that place them. Doesn’t matter. There are a zillion other companies placing near-ident0cal ads for near-identical products, and sometimes (this is a telling bit) even with the same stock photos.
The ads look lik e this:
If you ask Facebook “why did I see this ad?”, Facebook will show you the demographic the ad was targeting. And these ads are completely ignoring the laser-focused demographics Facebook likes to brag about. They’re shotguns, not sniper rifles.
So why? What’s the point? Why target so broadly, when it increases your spend without generating sales?
So here’s the thing:
I don’t believe they’re trying to generate sales.
That’s not the point. They aren’t interested in selling you gun holsters or T-shirts. I mean, if you buy some, that’s a bonus, but I believe these ads are a propaganda effort. The purpose is to put right-wing slogans and ideas in front of as many eyeballs as possible. They’re advertising ideas, not T-shirts.
The American political right is very, very good at propaganda. Liberals sneer at “Let’s Go Brandon,” the right-wing oh-so-clever “fuck Joe Biden,” but the thing is, it works. The people who use it don’t care that it’s juvenile. It makes them feel part of something. It’s a tribal identity marker.
And human beings like feeling like part of a tribe.
The hoodie up there that says “Proud member of the LGBFJB” community? It means “Let’s Go Brandon Fuck Joe Biden.” VClever? Not really. A great identity brand for a certain kind of person? Oh yeah.
And this brand is everywhere.
Branding and marketing and propaganda matter in political discourse. Arguably they matter more than policies and proposals and all that other wonk stuff.
They want this branding everywhere, and they’re willing to pay to make that happen.
People don’t make rational decisions. People make emotional decisions and then rationalize them. Often, those emotional decisions are predicated on feelings of belonging and inclusion. The right gets that, in its creepy way. The left? Not so much.
The thing is, the political left is doing nothing to counter any of this.
Do I think this Facebook propaganda is working?
Yes. Yes, I do.
It creates the illusion that right-wing ideas are more popular than they really are. It paints a false picture of what Americal looks like and what Americans want. It lets the right dominate the discourse in ways that the left won’t even try to counter.
The modern American right is intellectually and morally bankrupt, a seething cesspool of reactionary hate. But they get propaganda. They get it on an instinctive level, in ways that confuse lefties.
And that makes them far more effective than their numbers and policies alone would suggest.
Only a few days out from the end of 2021, and man, what a ride. I don’t usually do restrospective years-in-review, but this year…fuck me sideways.
I’m not saying it’s been a bad year, mind. On the contrary, this has been the single most productive year of my life, creatively speaking. My co-author Eunice Hung and I wrote, not one, not two, but three novels this year, in two unrelated genres: far-future post-scarcity science fiction theocratic erotica, and near-future dystopian post-cyberpunk. (Well, near enough, anyway. We have about two thousand words left to go on the cuberpunk novel. Might juuuuust squeak by.)
Two of those novels are slated for publication in 2022, the third in 2023. Yes, we’ve got manuscripts that are two years out.
One of the novels coming out in 2022, The Hallowed Covenant, I am more proud of than anything else I’ve ever written.
Isn’t the cover gorgeous? I love the way it calls back to classic book covers from the Golden Age of science fiction.
It might seem a little weird to be so ferociously proud of what is, at its core, a porn novel, but Eunice and I do some (I think) really interesting explorations in this book on themes of commitment, wrongdoing, redemption, and acceptance. Plus it’s filled with really hot sex involving fetishes so obscure they don’t even have names.
A tall, striking woman wearing nothing but a simple wrap of translucent red fabric around her waist greeted them. The left side of her body was black as darkest midnight, the right side as pale as new-fallen snow. Complex fractal patterns of light and dark swirled slowly down the center of her body where the two shades met. Her long, straight hair was black on the right side and pale on the left. As she moved, her hair changed color, so that the division between black and white always remained still. “Welcome! My Festival name is Rainshadow,” she said in a low, throaty grumble that made Yaeris’s mouth water. “Would you like to play a game of chance?”
Lyrin tilted his head. “What kind of game?”
“It’s simple, really,” Rainshadow purred. “You spin the wheel like this.” She sat gracefully in one of the chairs and spun the large wheel set into the table. With each fluid motion, Yaeris felt her heart hammer.
Rainshadow dropped a ball onto the wheel. It bounced around for a bit, then, as the wheel slowed, fell into a red slot. “If the ball lands on red, you drink a red vial. If it lands on black, you drink a black vial. Then you allow me to tie you to my bed, where I do wonderful things to you.”
Lyrin shivered, his expression dazed. “What happens then?”
“If you land on red, I give you pleasure beyond imagining. I am a skilled practitioner of the erotic arts.”
“And if I land on black?”
Rainshadow smiled. “I offer you the most exquisite pain. I worship the Lady by making pleasure into art and worship the Wild by making art out of intensity.”
“Oh, you sound like fun. Do you want to play? You must promise to follow through before you spin.”
We’ve also written some short stories in that same universe—all in all, we’ve produced somewhere around 290,000 words of porn in the world of the Passionate Pantheon, plus a whole lot of words of meta-analysis of those porn words. Seriously, nothing about this world is accidental; we have, quite literally, had six-hour conversations that turn into two sentences in one of the stories. You can read and enjoy them on a surface level—they aren’t lectures—but if you want to, you can also read them as extended meditations on consent, agency, and what a world might look like with radically different ideas about sex and sexuality.
And sometimes terrifying ideas. The odd-numbered books are post-scarcity Utopias; the even-numbered books are dark erotic horror.
Podcast!
Holy shit! This year I finally launched a podcast I’ve been thinking about for over a decade! My wife Joreth and my co-author Eunice and I finally, after all these years, sat down and got serious about The Skeptical Pervert, a sex education show that takes an evidence-based, factual, empirically supportable look at ideas, myths, and ttopes about human sexuality.
We plan on putting out one episode a month, and right now we have episodes recorded to February and planned out to April or May.
If you read my Twitter feed, you’ll know this has been a year of cats. A feral cat had a litter of kittens beneath our front porch, which means, of course, we’ve been caring for them. Earlier this year we caught the ferals, took them to the vet to be checked for FIV and vaccinated and fixed, and we’ve been caring for them since. They’re still not pets (or as close to pets as cats ever are), but they’ve become friendly and allow me to pet them.
Mama cat is totally feral; she’s allowed me to pet her only once, when squishy food was involved, but mostly you can’t get near her. We trapped her with a live-catch trap and took her to the vet for shots and spaying, then let her go after she recovered.
Some of the kittens the day they went to the vet:
I really, really like the tortie. Zaiah calls her “Eclipse.” I’ve been working to try to get her to trust me, and she’s allowed me to pet her several times.
They all come to the porch for food, and live beneath the porch when it’s wet and cold outside. Here’s three of them, hitting me up for food:
The orange boos are the most tame. They’re basically not even feral at this point–they’ll frequently try to push their way into the house when I open the door. A few days back, one of them ran into the house, and while I was trying to chase him out, the other one ran in too.
When we first started caring for them, they were skittish and would flee at the slightest movement. Now they won’t even get out of my way when I come home with a bag of groceries; they make me step over them.
I’ve still been grinding away at the massive archiving job scanning all the 35mm film from my days as an amateur photographer. I thought I’d be done by the end of the year, but that was before I found two more boxes of negatives. I have, no exaggeration, thousands of frames left to scan.
This shot dates from the late 90s or early 2000s, somewhere thereabouts. I foolishly didn’t think to record dates when I filed the negatives.
Looking ahead to 2022:
Eunice and I wrote three novels in 2021, which made it the most productive year of my life, but we’re planning to write four in 2022, in two different unrelated genres. Writing with her has been an extraordinary experience. We mesh better than anyone I’ve ever created with before. In fact, so many people have asked us how we write together we’re planning to live-stream the start of one of the novels, which should be a ton of fun.
The extended polyamorous network was supposed to go to Barcelona in 2019 for a group vacation. COVID, of course, scuttled that, but we plan to try again in 2021. A dozen kinky people in a castle in Barcelona sounds like a blast.
Plus visiting the Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudi’s Gothic masterpiece, has been on my bucket list for decades.
Joreth and I are also planning a cross-country trip in her RV, photographing abandoned amusement parks. In the late 90s and early 2000s, the bottom fell out of the industry, and a lot of operators just walked away. These parks have been left to decay for the last couple of decades, and many of them are now in a glorious state of ruin. We plan to put up an Instagram or maybe even publish a coffee table book of photos of amusement parks quietly returning to nature.
We also plan to drive the Dalton Highway, the world’s northernmost road, in 2023. It runs from Fairbanks, Alaska to the Arctic Ocean, and should make for a spectacular photo tour.
I also have been invited to participate in a couple of projects and started a third project I’m not quiiiiite ready to talk about yet. Stau tuned!
So as extraordinarily creative as this year has been, next year will, I think, be truly marvelous.
Let’s set the Wayback Machine to December of 2004. My then-partner Shelly, at the time a big fan of video games, said “hey, there’s a new MMO out, we should play!”
“Cool!” said I, “what’s an MMO?”
The new MMO was, of course, a game called World of Warcraft, in a genre I’d never before heard of. (A video game you play online with thousands of players? Whoa!)
Since I knew exactly fuckall about MMOs, I said I was in as long as I could play a character with a mohawk. I had no idea what kind of character to try, so Shelly said “Play a warrior, they’re usually pretty easy.” And thus was Ragnarokkr born: a troll warrior with a Mohawk.
I’m not sure how I ended up in a guild. I think Shelly knew someone who knew some folks who’d started it, something like that. Anyhow, we ended up joining a guild called Clan BOB on a server called Medivh, and spent countless hours over the next year or so running through dungeons and walking the endless desert of the Barrens.
To this day, this music still transports me back to a certain very specific place and time
It took the better part of a year to get to the highest level, though part of that was we didn’t realize if you log off in an inn you get double XP for a while.
We spent so many hours, so many hours, running through Blackrock Depths with the rest of the guild, just generally having a blast. I rolled a hunter alt named Margath just to see what this whole notion of a “pet class” was all about, but Ragnarokkr (or “Rags,” as the guildies affectionately called him) was me in this weird new world.
Then the worst thing that could have happened, happened: success.
The co-founders of Clan BOB created what was one of the first, if not the first, World of Warcraft Webcomic, “Life of Riley.” It turned into a runaway hit, and some kind of Drama ensued. I never got the full story, but there were server problems and, I’m told from sources that may or may not be reliable, fights over money the comic was bringing in.
Anyway, the founders quit, on (again I’m told) bad terms, there was bad blood all around, the guild collapsed, I rolled Alliance characters on Eonar, and that was that.
Years later, I moved to Atlanta while Shelly went off to Tallahassee for her graduate degree. She got in touch with me to say she’d moved her undead healer to a different server, and would I like to play WoW with her again? I said sure, paid to move Rags to her new server, and joined her new guild.
We played for a few months before she quit the game again, so I went back to my Alliance characters.
Fast forward to 2019. World of Warcraft has its fifteenth anniversary. Characters who logged in got special bonuses, including a “15th anniversary” balloon.
I logged on to all my old characters, including poor forgotten Margath. I was astonished to find he was still a member of the Clan BOB guild, and even more astonished when I opened the guild registry to see if any old friends were playing and saw a message saying the guild leaders hadn’t logged on for an extended period of time, would I like to take over the guild? I clicked yes, logged off, and went about my day.
World of Warcraft is in a kind of lull period between content updates right now. I’ve raised several characters to the highest level, run my main (a worgen boomkin named Ortin) through the current highest-level raid dungeon, and the leader of my raiding guild isn’t running raids at the moment because of some sort of personal family thing he’s dealing with.
So I turned my attention back to Rags, my old, old, character from way back.
I transferred him back to Medivh, brought him back into Clan BOB, and brought him up to max level—something that only took a week of casual play rather than the year it took the first time round, as Blizzard has drastically streamlined the leveling process.
Then I geared him up and ran the current top-tier raid a few times, just for old times’ sake.
When I look at the Clan BOB character roster, it’s a sad and tragic thing:
Last login: 15 years ago, 13 years ago, 10 years ago. Ah, how the past crumbles into dust.
So I now find myself in the weird position of being the owner and sole active member of a once-legendary World of Warcraft guild with a long history. I can’t even find out if the original owners still play the game at all; a search for their character names on the WoW character database turns up nothing, suggesting they have deleted their characters or possibly deleted their accounts.
And I’m not sure what to do with it. A part of me wants to resurrect the guild again, maybe build it into a raiding guild once more, but that’s a lot of work and I don’t have time. (That’s the thing about being a full-time writer; it’s not an 8-hour-a-day, 5-day-a-week job. Eunice and I are currently, as of mid-December 2021, on track to have written three novels this year.)
But I still want to see this once-proud guild rise again from the ashes, like a phoenix from Tempest Keep.
I’ve been thinking a lot about machine learning lately. Take a look at these images:
These people do not exist. They’re generated by a neural net program at thispersondoesnotexist.com, a site that uses Nvidia’s StyleGAN to generate images of faces.
StyleGAN is a generative adversarial network, a neural network that was trained on hundreds of thousands of photos of faces. The network generated images of faces, which were compared with existing photos by another part of the same program (the “adversarial” part). If the matches looked good, those parts of the network were strengthened; if not, they were weakened. And so, over many iterations, its ability to create faces grew.
If you look closely at these faces, there’s something a little…off about them. They don’t look quiiiiite right, especially where clothing is concerned (look at the shoulder of the man in the upper left).
There are ways you can spot StyleGAN generated faces. For example, the people at This Person Does Not Exist found that the eyes tended to look weird, detached from the faces, so the researchers fixed the problem in a brute-force but clever way: they trained the Style GAN to put the eyes in the same place on every face, regardless of which way it was turned. Faces generated at TPDNE always have the major features in the same place: eyes the same distance apart, nose in the same place, and so on.
Okay, so what happens if you train a GAN on images that aren’t faces?
That turns out to be a lot harder. The real trick there is tagging the images, so the GAN knows what it’s looking at. That way you can, for example, teach it to give you a building when you ask it for a building, a face when you ask it for a face, and a cat when you ask it for a cat.
And that’s exactly what the folks at WOMBO have done. The WOMBO Dream app generates random images from any words or phrases you give it.
And I do mean “any” words or phrases.
It can generate cityscapes:
Buildings:
Landscapes:
Scenes:
Body horror:
Abstract ideas:
On and on, endless varieties of images…I can play with it for hours (and I have!).
And believe me when I say it can generate images for anything you can think of. I’ve tried to throw things at it to stump it, and it’s always produced something that looks in some way related to whatever I’ve tossed its way.
War on Christmas? It’s got you covered:
I’ve even tried “Father Christmas encased in Giger sex tentacle:”
Not a bad effort, all things considered.
But here’s the thing:
If you look at these images, they’re all emotionally evocative; they all seem to get the essence of what you’re aiming at, but they lack detail. The parts don’t always fit together right. “Dream” is a good name: the images the GAN produces are hazy, dreamlike, insubstantial, without focus or particular features. The GAN clearly does not understand anything it creates.
And still, if artist twenty years ago had developed this particular style the old-fashioned way, I have no doubt that he or she or they would have become very popular indeed. AI is catching up to human capability in domains we have long thought required some spark of human essence, and doing it scary fast.
I’ve been chewing on what makes WOMBO Dream images so evocative. Is it simply promiscuous pattern recognition? The AI creating novel patterns we’ve never seen before by chewing up and spitting out fragments of things it doesn’t understand, causing us to dig for meaning where there isn’t any?
Given how fast generative machine learning programs are progressing, I am confident I will live to see AI-generated art that is as good as anything a human can do. And yet, I still don’t think the machines that create it will have any understanding of what they’re creating.
I’ll admit I’m probably a bit late to the party here, but I’ve only just recently learned of the existence of Roman spintriae coins, coins that were (allegedly) minted at Roman brothels either as a form of token patrons could buy representing different sex acts or as an alternative form of currency because Roman law forbade paying sex workers with coins bearing the likeness of the Emperor, depending on which archaeologist you believe. Or maybe neither of the above; it’s complicated.
Anyway, they’re super cool: each coin shows a sex act on one face and has a number on the other. And, of course, the world being what it is, you can buy replicas on Etsy, because of course you can (though this particular design is, at the moment, sold out).
I have, for completely unrelated reasons, also been doing a dive into the archaeology and anthropology of sex work in ancient Rome and Greece, since we’re doing an episode on the subject for the Skeptical Pervert podcast, and it turns out nobody really knows how sex work worked back then.
I mean, there are lots of competing ideas, and the general consensus was that sex work was definitely a thing, but if you try to drill down deeper than “yes, it existed” you quickly run into all kinds of ambiguity.
Like, surviving writings from ancient societies frequently make no distinction between “prostitute” and “woman who likes sex and wasn’t ashamed of it” (rather like, oh, I don’t know, modern society today!), and on top of that, few records exist that detail how brothels worked.
In fact, it’s not entirely clear if there were dedicated, single-purpose brothels at all; some archaeological evidence suggests “brothels” may have been any place where women worked, and that dedicated sex workers were few—people who did sex work may typically have had other jobs as well.
And its not entirely clear spintriae were used exclusively or even primarily as currency or tokens for sex work. They’ve been discovered all over the place, leading some folks to the hypothesis that they may have been used as part of a game.
Which, I mean, I can get behind that—the folks in my social circle have already started talking about fun kinky uses for Etsy spintriae coins, and I reckon they’d be a big hit at a play party. But I digress.
Anyway, I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, and I appreciate the fact that people in ancient societies were complex, messy, cool, and, well, very human.
