So I just finished writing a post about the Sandia Z-Machine over on the Stormy Weather blog. Why? Because it’s cool and it involves lots of electricity, which is sort of related to lightning, kinda, if you squint hard enough.
This is the sort of science that’ll ruin your day if you make any wrong moves around it.
So as most of you already know, I work with an electronics startup that makes lightning and storm detection equipment. One of the projects I have at the office is maintaining a Weblog of storm and lightning related stuff–not directly as an advertising vehicle, but more as a neat-stuff-about-lightning deal. When the company’s Web site eventually gets redesigned (and sweet Jesus, does it need to be redesigned!), the new site will have an entire lightning education section, but in the meantime we’re keeping a separate blog for fun stuff.
And, I have to say, I’m actually very proud of it. Check it out: Stormy Weather.
Note: This is part 5 of an occasional ongoing "how to" series on BDSM.
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.
Part 3 of the series, How to Tie a Shinju, is here.
Part 4 of the series, How to Make a Custom Dildo out of Ice, is here.
As you can probably figure out, most of these tutorials are really, really not work-safe.
This particular tutorial is work-safe, and describes how to make a very unusual style of collar that’s perfect for clubbing, wearing to a play party, or whatever else you like. And if you make it from UV-reactive cable ties, it even glows under black light!
…in which Franklin raves about his current favorite toy, made by NJoy:
This thing, which I’ve recently heard compared to a prop from Star Trek, is an NJoy Pleasure Wand. It’s about eight inches long, it’s heavy (weighs nearly a pound!), the ball on the right-hand side is about an inch in diameter, it’s made of surgical stainless steel, and it is without question one of the Coolest. Sex. Toys. Ever.
It even comes in a neat red-lined display box.
And man, this toy can do just about anything. Any kind of sensation you can imagine (and as a seasoned, veteran pervert, I can imagine quite a lot) you can get with this.
Let’s start with the obvious uses. The right-hand side is for vaginal penetration, the left-hand side is for anal penetration. As a straight-ahead dildo, it’s quite good. The stainless steel warms up very quickly, and it’s very smooth. The end is curved, and manages to find the G-spot of everyone I’ve used it with very nicely. Insert, move vigorously or not so vigorously (as your own personal taste dictates), repeat ’til orgasm. It’ll certainly never wear out or need to be replaced, and it does the job quite nicely.
But it’s got so much more to offer. Oh, my word, does it have more.
This thing is exactly what the doctor ordered for any mad scientists out there–and I know I have more than a few of you on my friends list. It looks the part to a T; it’s hard to show in a photograph just how beautiful this toy is, and it’s got that slightly sinister, slightly alien look to it that’s always in vogue among mad scientists and evil geniuses everywhere.
It can be used to create and manipulate sensation within your victim partner with exquisite control. If temperature play is your thing, it holds both heat and cold very well, and unlike most glass toys, you can actually put it in the freezer without worrying about thermal stress cracking it.
It’s hard but very smooth; the smoothness means that when it’s exactly at body temperature, if you move it slowly, it almost doesn’t feel like a solid object. If it’s moved very slowly and gently, it’s more a rush of sensation than a feeling of penetration; one of my partners has described it like feeling a gush of warm liquid, rather than like a hard object.
That’s if you move it slowly and gently, of course.
If you move it less slowly and gently, then it feels a bit more like a conventional dildo, except that if your partner is lying on her back and you’re holding it so that the end curves upward, it has a quite effortless habit of moving precisely along some very, very sensitive bits inside, with all the effect you’d expect from that. You can even, if you’re of a suitably wicked bent, rest the ball precisely against your partner’s G-spot and then turn it slightly from side to side, rather than in and out, and move more and more slowly as she gets closer and closer to orgasm, and stop right when she’s on the edge. If you hold it still, then she might even be able to come just by contracting around it.
Or not, if you tilt your hand upward slightly when she contracts, bringing the ball away from the inner wall of her vagina. If you do that, she’ll just be frustrated and horny.
Not that, y’know, I’m actually recommending that, or anything. I’m just sayin’.
And it’s even useful for secret police, interrogators, and space aliens everywhere. If, for example, you were to have abducted an earth human and wanted to probe your captive as part of some kind of weird alien experiment, or if your captive was resistant to most normal interrogation techniques and a bit more persuasion were called for, well, this little implement is just the thing. It can go from “Oh my God I’m going to come!” to “Sweet Jesus, I’ll tell you anything!” in just a flick of the wrist, and the transformation is…dramatic.
Should this be the sort of thing that suits your tastes, you might want to tie your partner down first. Again, I’m just sayin’.
One of my own personal favorite things to do is to use it on my partner directly after I’ve just fisted her. Three or four nice, hard orgasms around my hand is really good at getting the blood flowing and getting all the sensitive bits especially sensitive, when even the slightest touch is almost unbearably intense…that’s just the right time to get out the probe. And just…barely…move it.
If you’ve got your partner tied down for this, might want to have a gag handy, too. You don’t want to, y’know, disturb the neighbors or anything; that’s just rude.
Just to be perfectly clear on this point: There’s no evidence that the people who designed this toy are actually Cylons.
…woudn’t be necessary if nobody stayed in the closet. Staying in the closet wouldn’t be necessary if people, on the whole, weren’t a bunch of judgmental monkeys. It gets more complicated, though, when one considers that staying in the closet means not confronting the fears and prejudices of others, which means that fear and prejudice tends to take firmer hold.
I thought about making a “national coming out day” post, but it’s kind of difficult to do that when one is already about as “out” as it’s possible to be without getting posterboard, Magic Marker, and glitter involved. So what does that leave to say?
Straight. Check. Though honestly, that’s a bug, not a feature.
Poly. Check. Three current partners, one potential new partner, and I still live alone. Clearly, I’m doing something wrong.
Kinky. Check. Just bought forty feet of lovely black rope the day before yesterday, which I may even have a chance to use soon.
Mad scientist. Check. One day, you will all revere me as your overlord. Unless you’re Steve “Monkey Boy” Ballmer, that is. He’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes and my army of unstoppable hunter-killer bots sweeps the globe.
Linux-basher. Check. Yeah, I know, I know, that’ll get you killed in some places, but… Gnome sucks. KDE sucks. The entire open-source community can’t create a decent user interface to save its collective ass. I’m sorry, but I just can’t live a lie. It needs to be said. Even if nobody else will say it.
And now, off to dinner with the surrealistically sexy feyscorruption.
Going to be a busy evening. After work, I need to:
– Go grocery shopping
– File a formal, written DMCA copyright infringement complaint against kinkychristians.com for copying large swaths of my Web site without permission or attribution, and on top of that having the gall to claim copyright on the material themselves
– Buy rope
– Do laundry – oh, sweet Jesus, do lots and lots of laundry
Any theologians out there on my flist? Who would Jesus crib copyrighted material from?
That means, no drunken naked bondage Werewolf for me this weekend. And that’s just very sad. I even missed bonedaddybruce and kaithia‘s engagement…congrats, guys!
On the good side, however, I had pie for breakfast last week. Every day last week. Very tasty peach pie, from the very tasty feyscorruption. And I didn’t even frighten her off!
Mmm, pie.
The lack of drunken naked bondage Werewolf was the unfortunate result of an unhappy coincidence involving Shelly’s test schedules and some last-minute changes of Greyhound bus schedules (“Go Greyhound, and leave your mind on the bus!”); up until mere hours before te convention was to have started, we still believed we’d be there. I did get to spend a nice weekend with Shelly, though, and wish her a happy birthday. (Happy birthday, sweetie!)
I am, however, facing something of a pickle. I’ve been invited to an Alice-in-Wonderland-themed party soon, at which, I’m told, costumes are mandatory. I don’t really have any costumes, nor anything from which to make one, nor the skill to make one even if I had the requisite materials. Does a pair of ears, a tail, and a Nitzer Ebb T-shirt qualify as a minimalist interpretation of the Cheshire Cat? Or is the Cheshire Cat more of a Einstuerzende Neubauten type, do you think?
Mmm, pie.
Several years ago, I designed a gizmo that was intended to allow people to control sex toys through an Internet connection. The idea was that you’d fire up a chat client, the person at the other end of the chat would have one of these things, and that person would plug some sex toys (up to three of them) into the gizmo. While you were chatting, you could switch the various toys on and off.
I actually tried building and selling these things, a project that was something of a flop–in part because of some design shortcomings, and in part because I don’t really have the money or resources to do something like this properly. I called the gizmo “Symphony,” and lost money on the project.
The Symphony design actually started as a phone-sex gadget; in the original conception, you’d plug the gizmo into your phone jack (remember those?), plug your telephone handset into the gizmo, and talk to someone on the phone. If your partner pressed buttons on the touch-tone phone, he could switch the sex toys plugged into the gizmo on and off.
For that reason, the Symphony works on DTMF–the shrill noises you hear when you push buttons on a phone. Basically, it’s nothing more than a DTMF decoder (that recognizes the buttons), a series of bi-stable latches, and three relays. When you push the buttons on the phone, the relays switch on or off, depending on which buttons you push.
In fact, there’s a schematic of the Symphony below this cut
