Author Archives: tacit

Plans and intentions for the next year or so

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This is largely for my own benefit, as I have a whole lot of irons in the fire right now and I’m not going to be able to pay attention to all of them. Trying to get some of these projects out of my head and somewhere more tangible, because my head, she is full!

Upcoming plans

Necronomicon

October 15-17. This one is non-negotiable; I’ll definitely be there. Need to think about what I’m going to be doing–costumes and such.

Tampa Fetish Con

September 23-26. This one is coming up fast! Don’t know yet if we’ll be there. It’ll cost us $60 apiece for all four days, and the deadline for registration is in a couple of days. I’d like to go, but it’s still highly uncertain.

Fetish Factory’s Alter Ego party

September 24 at Underground in downtown Tampa. This one I definitely want to attend.

[Edit: Almost forgot!] MacWorld San Francisco

January 2005. This is my annual pilgrimage to MacWorld, which accomplishes two thigs: gets me up to speed on Apple’s plans for the coming year, and lets me spend time with altenra, who I don’t get to see or hang out with NEARLY often enough.

Projects

The Impossible Woman

This is a photography series I’ve been planning for a while. I’d like to get moving on it soon, as it’s quite elaborate and requires a tremendous amount of time and more than a little Photoshop work. This is a high-priority project; I want to get at least 5 images done before next September, because if I get them finished, I’d like to produce a series of giclees and bring them to next year’s DragonCon.

(lightgatherer, you might be interested in this project. Remind me to talk to you about it next time I see you guys.) ladytabitha would be perfect for this project, but she’s in Boston and I’m not…

Xero

I’m already getting quite a bit of material for the re-launch of Xero magazine. Whether or not this project moves ahead depends on how much advertising I can sell; I don’t intend to finance it out-of-pocket any more. I have some ideas about making it pay for itself, but need to find the time to pursue them. I’d like to see Xero develop along the same lines as something like, say, On Our Backs from a business perspective–that magazine has succeeded quite nicely in its market.

Flying

I want to get my RC plane back in the air. Biggest obstacle so far is getting around to renewing my AMA membership, and transporting the damn thing to the flying field; it’s way too big for my car. This isn’t something that’s really terribly important at the moment, though.

Coding

There’s a new build of the card editor application for Onyx, my sex game, sitting on my hard drive. Waiting for feedback from a couple beta testers before I release it. I’ve also made a lot of progress on the second sex game I plan to release, which could, with a couple weeks’ concentrated effort, be ready for alpha testing soon…but I haven’t felt terribly motivated to write code lately, and coding is virtually impossible for me if I’m not in the mood (and impossible not to do if I am in the mood).

Villain Tees

This has been sitting idle for a while, as I haven’t had any way to get shirts printed or take online orders until recently.

I now have my own credit card merchant account, and I’ve found a new screen printer who’s cheaper and more reliable than the previous screen printer I’d been using, so this project may start moving again. I’ve also received an email from a clothing store in Iowa that wants to carry some of the Villain Tees designs. I think what I’m going to do is trim down the number of designs significantly, print a couple runs, and start pursuing retailers. The place that’s already approached me has given me a better idea about how to go about doing that. I believe Villain Tees has the potential to be very successful, and it’s worth investing a bit of energy into.

Doomsday Sex

This project has been on hold for about a year now. Eventually, it will be the home for a Flash-based Web comic set in the classic dystopian post-apocalyptic wasteland we all love so much, and it may act as a home for the Impossible Woman project as well. I’ve also been tossing around the idea of writing erotica for the site as well, but that’s not a high priority.

Obviously, i can’t develop all these projects in the next twelve months–especially not in light of the fact that one of my clients, which has been searching for venture capital for years, finally got their funding and is threatening to bury me in work. Right now, it looks like I may need to start hiring people within the next few months, or phase out some of my other clients, or both.

Hang on, it’s gonna be a wild ride…

Some thoughts on the human condition

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[From a post I made on the newsgroup alt.polyamory]

It seems like a simple enough question. Why do I want the human race to get its eggs out of one cosmological basket and spread to other planets? Why do I care what happens after I die? What difference does it make if the species succeeds or fails? What does it matter if we do not escape the earth by the time the sun dies? Is it a parenting instinct? A desire to see human civilization succeed? A bid for some sort of immortality?

For me, none of the above.

I appear to have no parenting instinct to speak of; apparently, that option wasn’t installed at the factory. Nor am I particularly up on human civilization, which I find flawed at best and ridiculous at worst. And I don’t want to be immortal though my work, through children, or through my species; I want to be immortal by not dying. 🙂

While I’m not particularly impressed by the vast bulk of humanity, I have a tremendus faith in the human potential: I see humanity in its current form as a beginning point, not an endpoint. I believe we have the potential to become something that is to our current civilization what current civilization is to Neanderthal civilization, and that many things we accept as a fixed and immutable part of the human condition–including death and even being fixed in the physical forms dictated by our biology–are actually not a necessary or permanent part of the definition of humanity at all.

Further, I do not see humanity as separate from the universe. I do not believe any part of the human soul or spirit comes from outside the universe; we are a part of the universe just as surely as comets, asteroids, and stars, but unlike comets, asteroids, and stars, we are that part of the universe which has the ability to comprehend itself–and to me, that gives us a value lacking in comets and asteroids.

It’s not us-in-our-current-form I want to see succeed; it’s those things which we have the potential to become. We have virtually limitless potential–potential that would be unrealized should life on this planet fail.

Yes, I do believe that we are not unique in the universe; there is almost certainly life elsewhere. However, it’s just as probably not like us, and in all probability is extremely different from us; that means that even if we are not unique in our ability to comprehend, we still have a unique *perspective* to offer…and that, too, has value.

If Earth dies, if we and our children die, what makes it matter that some branch of humankind is somewhere surviving?

Our ability to comprehend. We are that part of the universe which knows itself, and by extension, we are the way the universe can understand itself.

This is probably an argument that either makes sense to someone or it does not, and if it does not, I do not think I have the skill to explain it in a way that makes it accessible to someone who does not feel it. But there it is.

9-11-2004

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Lest we forget:

“Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself–a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.”
–Frank Herbert

Link o’ the day

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A microbe that grows in the Dead Sea is teaching scientists about the art of DNA repair.

Halobacterium appears to be a master of the complex art of DNA repair. This mastery is what scientists want to learn from: In recent years, a series of experiments by NASA-funded researchers at the University of Maryland has probed the limits of Halobacterium’s powers of self-repair, using cutting-edge genetic techniques to see exactly what molecular tricks the “master” uses to keep its DNA intact.

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“We have completely fragmented their DNA. I mean we have completely destroyed it by bombarding it with [radiation]. And they can reassemble their entire chromosome and put it back into working order within several hours,” says Adrienne Kish, member of the research group studying Halobacterium at the University of Maryland.

Slowly but surely, we’re getting there…

Cyborgs, half-nekkid chicks, and transhumanists, oh my!

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So. We’re back from DragonCon in Atlanta, the science fiction convention we were going to, then weren’t going to, and then at the last minute were going to again. We visited Atlanta while Hurricane Frances was beating up Tampa, more’s the better.

Thirty thousand science fiction geeks. The mind reels.

Shelly got Borged out and made an outfit out of saran wrap, which was great fun:

Lots of other fun photos, of zombies and faeries and cyborgs and carbon nanotubes and zensidhe getting assassinated, cut for your viewing pleasure…bandwidth-intensive and probably not work-safe.

Without further ado, Show me the half-nekkid geek chicks!

More grammar-type stuff

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In light of smoocherie‘s and fatesgirl‘s comment on my recent grammar rant, I started thinking, and what I thought was, “hey, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate,” and then I thought about how much it’s not cool to be a chalky, powdery substance that settles to the bottom of a teacup, and then I started thinking…well, you really don’t want to know what I thought after that.

Nevertheless, they both have good points. So, in the interest of being part of the solution, I’ve decided to add a grammar cheat sheet to my Web site, so that if someone’s confused, it’s there and easily accessible. Any suggestions are welcome. 🙂

I also updated my BDSM and polyamory pages, while I was at it.

Parties, angry spammers, and linky goodness

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The House Not Found housewarming party was a great deal of fun, so much so that we’re thinking about turning on the webcam on a semi-regular basis, just for the benefit of all you voyeurs out there. If I get another Mac laptop in the next few months, I may even dedicate my current laptop, which is running OS X Server, to being a QuickTime Streaming Server for the camera so i can stream live video. 🙂

In other news, I’ve recently started receiving death threats from a well-known spammer and software pirate named Art Schwartz. These threats are, in their own particular way, far too funny not to share, and Art’s even been reading my LiveJournal lately. So I’ve put ’em online here. I particularly like the one about how he’s going to expose my child-pornography ways to my wealthy parents so they’ll quit supporting me. 🙂 One wonders what color the sky in his world is.

And now the linky goodness:

Dog Available. Read the description BEFORE you look at the picture.

LoveChess: Chess as a sex game. And people think I’m a pervert.

Courtesy of ladytabitha: The Myth of Unconditional Love.

In the Department of Homeland Stupidity department of the Axis of Asshat: Brown Equals Terrorist. The thing about this story that most strikes me is that it reveals the same flaw the writers of Star Trek often have. The Star trek writers don’t actually know anything about research and have never met any research scientists, so the Star Trek version of a research scientists is cartoonishly distorted; local cops have never met any terrorists and have never been trained in terrorist tactics, so their imagination of what a terrorist would act like is also cartoonish and unrealistic. Hint; Terrorists blend in. They don’t stand out. The 9/11 hijackers were instructed to shave their beards, wear cologne, and forego traditional Muslim garb in favor of casual American attire, remember? A terrorist who wanted a photograph of a bridge would not stand out by the bridge, exposed, with a tripod, day after day. He’d be in a pack of tourists inconspicously with a digital camera, fools! Assuming, of course, he needed a photograph at all…

It’s party time! (Well, almost)

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The House Not Found Housewarming Party Webcam is up, though there’s nothing to see yet…most of the guests haven’t arrived. Tune in and see what’s going on!

Quotes Out of Context

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“‘I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner’ doesn’t technically qualify as transhumanism, does it?”

Aaargh! The grammar nazi rants…

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Okay, people, listen up–the next time I read something in LiveJournal, on a newsgroup, or in an email that makes one of these mistakes, someone’s getting stabbed. Fair warning.

1. It’s “Lo and behold,” not “low and behold.” The word “lo!” is a Middle English expression of surprise. “Lo and behold” is kind of the equivalent of saying “Well, hey, look at that!”

2. It’s “Nothing fazes me,” not “nothing phases me.” To “faze” is to disturb or frighten. “She was unfazed” means “she retained her composure.” “He was unphased” means “he was not made of a number of waveforms that were in synchronization.” Big difference, folks.

3. It’s “etc,” not “ect.” “Etc” is an abbreviation for “et cetera” (two words), which is Latin for “and so forth.” “Et” means “and,” which is why “etc” is sometimes written “&c”. “Etc” is correct. “&c” is correct but archaic. “Ect” is not, never has been, and never will be correct.

4. The abbreviations “ie” and “eg” do not mean the same thing! You use “ie” when you mean “in orther words.” It’s Latin for “id est,” which means “that is.” For example: “He is a businessman; ie, he makes his money by operating a business.” On the other hand, “eg” is used to mean “for example.” It’s Latin for “exempli gratia.” “I do not like spectator sports–eg, football and baseball.” For example: eg. In other words: ie.

5. And while we’re at it, “insure” and “ensure” do not mean the same thing either! “Ensure” means “to make sure of.” Double-check your math on your tax return to ensure you don’t get an embarrassing phone call from the IRS. “Insure,” on the other hand, means “to provide insurance for,” you insure your house in order to ensure that you won’t be financially ruined if it burns down.

6. To be caught “between the devil and the deep blue sea” does not mean “between two unattractive options.” It means “to be in a position where you have no room to manuver.” The ‘devil’ on a wooden sailing ship is the main spar of the ship–a brace that runs the whole length of the ship from front to back, around which the frame of the ship is built. There is a very narrow space–typically less than 3′ high–between a ship’s devil and the bottom of the hull; this was sometimes the space where the most lowly members of a ship’s crew slept–“between the devil and the deep blue sea.” It’s a very, very tiny space.

7. “Too” means “also” or “to a great extent.” “To” means “in the direction of” or indicates an infinitive. Get these two wrong, and you might end up in the position of the unfortunate street racer I saw yesterday whose vanity license tag reads “TO L8 4U”. “2 L8 4U” or “TOO L8 4U” would’ve communicated the idea that he was trying to convey; the idea conveyed by “TO L8 4U” is “Hi! I’m illiterate.”

Don’t even get me started on “accept” and “except,” or “affect” and “effect.”

Any typos in this post are a feature, not a bug. We now return you to your regularly scheduled friends list.