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Author Archives: tacit
Back from Florida Poly Retreat…
…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.
It’s all about the guns
Does anyone still care about Britney Spears?
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!
Cats! And deconstruction
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.
Some thoughts on memes
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. 🙂
Being productive…
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.
For all you steampunk Star Wars fans out there…
I bring you this link, which contains (among other things) re-interpretations of famous Star Wars characters if they were in a steampunk universe. You’ll find Jabba the Hutt, Han Solo and Chewbacca, and my own personal favorite, a clockwork Darth Vader. You’ll also find a mixed assortment of zombie greeting cards and dire warnings of the coming of the evil robot overlords. Good stuff!
Things that do not make Franklin happy
There is a list of things that make me happy.
It’s not actually a literal, physical list. It’s more of an abstract idea of a list; a Platonic list, if you will. It is to a physical list of things that make me happy with the Platonic ideal of a chair is to a chair; and just as one can measure the chair-ness of an object by how far it deviates from that Platonic ideal, and conclude that a well-worn La-Z-Boy has more chair-ness than, say, a hacksaw blade, or Dick Cheney, or the TV show “Friends,” so can one look at an activity and tell how happy it makes me by seeing how closely it resembles things on that Platonic ideal of a list of that which makes me happy.
There are many things that make me happy. Science fiction conventions make me happy; flogging people makes me happy; taking pictures makes me happy; pictures of me flogging people at science fiction conventions make me triply happy.
Root canals, on the other hand, not so much. Dick Cheney, either. And mornings. Mornings do not make me happy.
Being awakened early in the morning never makes me happy. Being awakened early in the morning by one of the principals of the company with which I work, telling me that the Web ecommerce system is down and angry customers are calling the toll-free number to complain that they can’t buy the company’s products, definitely doesn’t make me happy.
*yawn*
Ceci n’est pas une LiveJournal update
First, because the one thing LiveJournal needs more of is pictures of cats, I give you Molly, perched regally atop the new loft in my apartment. The loft has definitely become her space; Snow Crash has not once climbed on top of it, so it’s the place she goes when she gets fed up with him.