Author Archives: tacit

Is It Graft or Is It Cruelty?

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A few years back, I dropped a kettle of boiling water on my foot. The burns sent me to the ER, where I was given a shot of morphine, and then to the burn clinic, where I was prescribed oxycodone. (I have pictures of the burn. They’re not pretty.)

The morphine was awful. I could feel it coming on, like an unpleasant prickly hot surge that passed over my body in a wave. It was a bit like…it’s hard to describe, but imagine being cocooned in a malfunctioning electric blanket that keeps shocking you—a sense of flushed warmth accompanied by extremely unpleasant little zaps like touching a badly grounded electrical appliance with an intermittent short.

Then came the vomiting: vigorous, profuse, and enthusiastic, as if my body, not content with throwing up in a more pedestrian fashion, had decided to twist the spacetime continuum to expel food I hadn’t even eaten yet.

What didn’t happen was pain relief. At all. I was still in exactly as much agony as I was before the shot (and believe me, boiling water burns are awful, the only pain I’ve ever experienced worse than kidney stones).

The oxycodone? Same deal. Spectacularly, implausibly vigorous vomiting, fuckall pain relief.

Finally, in desperation, I tried a cannabis edible, and lo, it was as if a chorus of angels did sing, saying, “let this man’s pain be erased.” It also made me high, which was unpleasant, but every silver lining has a cloud around it, amirite?

Quite a bit of systematic experimentation later, I learned that the sweet spot for pain management for me is 2.5mg of THC and 2.5mg of CBD. That dosage is effective at pain management without leaving me incapable of functioning or unpleasantly high.

I’m probably unusual in that regard. I can definitely feel 1mg of THC. 2.5mg leaves me a little high, but it’s tolerable. 5mg of THC leaves me high AF and not in a good way. 10mg of THC, the one time I tried it, left me curled up on my side hallucinating vigorously.

I use it when ibuprofen doesn’t work, which isn’t very often. This:

is about a three-year supply for me; I cut the gummies into quarters and take a quarter if nothing else works.

I was able to try cannabis edibles thanks to a senator named Mitch McConnell, known to his friends as “that sour old turtle-faced motherfucker,” who in 2018 introduced legislation into an appropriations bill legalizing hemp.

Senator McConnell in an undated Senate photo

Fast forward to 2025, when a senator named Mitch McConnell, known to his friends as “that sour old turtle-faced motherfucker,” has introduced language into an appropriations bill that would ban hemp products across the board.

Now, we’ve all known for many years that Old Turtle-Face has no integrity, shame, scruples, or backbone. This is not new.

What’s new is that his motivations, usually as transparent as the film wrap over a styrofoam tray of ground meat at a discount supermarket, are completely opaque.

When he first said yay to hemp, before his about-face flip-flop, he raved on and on about how it would help Kentucky farmers…farmers he’s now shot, stabbed, and tossed under a bus.

My take on that is someone with a financial interest in cannabis farming offered him a lot of money, then somehow the deal soured.

My Talespinner disagrees. She deals with chronic pain and, like me, has found cannabis a godsend for pain management…only to have it yanked away, leaving few options between, you know, addictive opioids and over-the-counter pain relievers. Her take: it’s intentional, calculated cruelty. Turtleface gets off on it.

And the thing is, either of those two explanations—political crony corruption or deliberate, calculated cruelty—fits. They’re both within Senator Turtledick’s wheelhouse. They both fit his pattern of observed behavior; the man has never met corruption he doesn’t embrace or pointless sadism he doesn’t indulge. He’s basically a walking encyclopedia of the worst impulses of humanity, a case study in unscrupulous, dishonorable barbarism.

So what say you? Is it merely greed, or is he letting slip is inner spite?

I am tired of that man

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My metamour, my girlfriend’s girlfriend, has received some absolutely devastating medical news.

The entire polycule has done an absolutely amazing job of stepping up to support her. In two weeks, I leave for Springfield, where I will join my Talespinner to fly out to London and from there travel to Wales to be with her. The extended polycule did an amazing job of pulling this together in a very short time, and supporting each other to make it happen. My metamours and meta-metamours who were able to even helped the rest of us financially so that we could make arrangements to fly out last minute.

Even complete strangers helped. I would not have been able to go without the kindness of people on social media who offered financial support, completely unasked and unexpected. I am overwhelmed grateful beyond measure for the kindness of people I don’t even know who contributed out of the blue to make this happen.

Thanks to the government shutdown, the FAA is reducing flights at many airports, including PDX. It’s not clear yet whether or not my flight will be one of the ones cut, or what will happen if it is.

United Airlines has offered no-questions-asked refunds on flights ahead of the FAA cuts in air travel…but because international travel isn’t affected by the mandated cuts, they’re only offering me a refund on my domestic flight. I have tickets from Portland to Springfield, then Springfield to London and back, then Springfield to Portland, and right now it’s completely up in the air when (or even if) I will be able to get to Springfield.

I am so goddamn tired of this.

I’m tired of him.

I’m tired of the pettiness. I’m tired of the meanness. I’m tired of the grift, the selfishness, the pointless purposeless malice. I’m tired of his followers, so eager to hurt themselves as long as the people they hate are hurt more.

I’m tired of trying to have empathy for people who are sobbing that they’re losing their jobs or ther farms because he isn’t hurting the people they think he should be hurting. They voted for the leopard and now they’re shocked their faces are being eaten, too.

The stupidity, the venality, the cruelty, the mendacity, the sadistic malignity, I am just so absolutely sick of all of it.

One day, this will end.

Some thoughts on information in the Information Age

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My dad called me yesterday. He received an invoice in an email for $899 for something he didn’t remember ever ordering, and it upset him pretty badly. Fortunately, I’ve worked very hard over the years to educate him about scams, so he calls me before he does anything like call a number or click a link.

The invoice he described was basically identical to one I received a few days ago myself:

These scams are incredibly common right now; I’m getting about 4-6 a month. The scam is the “customer support” number I circled.

The mark calls that number and is greeted by a kind, helpful, polite voice on the other end who says “yes, I’m very sorry, sir, I will take care of it right now, sir, please give me your name and credit card number, sir, and I will be happy to reverse the charges. Oh, was this a PayPal invoice? Okay, can you give me your PayPal name? Yes, sir, perfect, I’ll need your PayPal password too, please…and do you have a passcode on this PayPal account, sir? Yes, yes, thank you, sir, now, do you have a bank account linked to your PayPal? Oh, you do? Can you give me that account number and routing number, sir? Okay, yes, got it, I’ll reverse the charge immediately, sir.”

$$$cha-CHING!$$$

But I didn’t come here to talk about Internet scams. I came here to talk about design, and specifically, how entire generations of people were raised to be gullible and easy to scam, all because of design.

In ages past (like when I first started in the design world), design was hard. Making a simple letterhead was hard.

A company would go to a graphic design studio. They’d bring a copy of their logo as either a camera-ready slick or a square piece of negative film.

A designer would typeset the letterhead using a phototypesetting machine, then output it to a sheet of photographic film. Then, using an XActo knife and a light table, the designer would cut rubylith and use it to burn the letterhead and logo together onto another sheet of film, which would then be used to burn a printing plate for a press.

This was difficult, expensive, and highly skilled work. When I started working prepress professionally, the building I worked in had an entire huge film stripper’s room where people spent their workday sitting at enormous glass light tables, XActo knives in hand, surrounded by sheets of film and rolls of rubylith, doing this work.

Design was hard.

Because design was hard, only large, well-heeled companies could afford good design. Shady fly-by-night scam businesses were largely locked out of the world of design, which is why scam ads in the 70s, 80s, and 90s tended to have that cheap, low-quality “look” about them.

Good design became a proxy for reliability, for legitimacy, for dependability. Only legitimate companies could afford it, which means generations of people, including the Boomers and those of us on the leading edge of Gen X, ended up trained to associate design with a company’s legitimacy and trustworthiness.

Scammers could never afford something like this.

Enter the era of desktop publishing.

I was in on the ground floor. Desktop publishing revolutionized design and prepress. I was working in the industry during the transition from light tables and rubylith to QuarkXPress and Photoshop, and I cannot overstate how much DTP democratized design. I helped publish small-press ’zines in the 90s and early 2000s, something that was all but impossible to do with any quality before the 90s.

Suddenly, design that would’ve been out of reach to anyone but Fortune 1000 businesses became possible for two dudes right out of uni working from an apartment. (In fact, that’s why my website at xeromag.com exists; it started as the site for a small press magazine called Xero.)

This is unquestionably a good thing…but just as it empowered small-press ’zine communities and business owners, it empowered scammers.

Suddenly scammers could create official-looking business stationery, logos, websites, ads, fake invoices, fake receipts, all completely effortlessly.

I talked to a person online a few weeks back who’d fallen for a pig butchering scam—a fake Bitcoin scheme where marks are lured to “invest” in what seems like legitimate Bitcoin sites, only to have their money stolen. “But the site looked so official!” she said. “It even had graphs and charts of real-time Bitcoin prices and everything!”

I’ve heard that countless times before. “But the site looked perfect! How was I supposed to know it wasn’t really PayPal?” “But it looked like a real bank site!”

You can buy templates for websites that look like anything you want. With a two-minute search, I found a pre-created template for a Bitcoin trading platform that included real-time feeds of Bitcoin prices, login, activity tracking, fake account generation, the whole nine, for $39.

You can, with a few clicks of a mouse, use online tools to have fake letterhead and business cards made, then with a few more clicks ship it off to production.

The point here is, design is no longer a proxy for legitimacy. You can no longer measure something’s validity by how it looks.

But millions of people, mostly Boomers and Gen Xers, haven’t got the memo.

The sudden revolution in design created an exploit in the minds of a large number of people indeed, a way to slip past their defenses to take advantage of them with scams.

What’s the solution? I don’t know. I do know that a lot of people base their judgment on something’s legitimacy on how “official” it looks, and nowadays that veneer of legitimacy is available to everyone.

When people get taken by scams, it’s not necessarily that they’re stupid. Sometimes, it’s that they’re using markers for scams that no longer exist, because the world changed in the blink of an eye and the cues that once separated scammers from legitimate enterprises no longer exist.

We live in a world surrounded by design. Design is both invisible and essential, so when the design world changes, it can have weird knock-on effects nobody ever imagined.

AI Considered Silly (and Harmful)

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I don’t know when it happened. I know when I noticed it. I was using the Facebook app on my phone while I was in Florida working on getting a solar battery setup in my wife’s RV.

“Huh, what’s this?” I thought as I looked through the posts on my profile. “There are a bunch of buttons beneath each post, asking followup questions.” So I clicked one.

Dear God.

So you know how ChatGPT will spout the most absolutely flat-out bonkers bullshit in this weird, bland, “corporate email meets the Institute of Official Cheer” voice? Like asserting with confidence that Walter Mondale graduated from Princeton University (he didn’t), or inventing hyperlinks to imaginary reviews of a Honda motorcycle that doesn’t exist?

Meta, in its ongoing effort to cram LLMs into every orifice of the great throbbing pustulent Facebook experience, is wedging LLM chatbots, often with the aid of a crowbar, onto the bottom of Facebook posts (but only, at least so far, in the app; I don’t see this on the browser).

And the things it imagines are sometimes…weird.

I was called for jury duty a couple of weeks ago. The waiting room featured a stash of complimentary fidget spinners (yes, seriously). Something Facebook’s AI insisted wasn’t the case.

It got way weirder, though, when I posted that the first drft of my first novel with my talespinner was done:

AI invented a question that it couldn’t answer, then answered it with nonsense. “I don’t know who Kitty Bound is, so let me ramble about unrelated authors who go by ‘Kitty.’” And the thing is, the question buttons are invented by the AI.

It doesn’t know who Kitty Bound is (understandably, this is the first novel we’re attempting to get published together), but it will cheerfully say “click here to learn more about Kitty Bound” and then say “Kitty Bound’s work isn’t well-represented in search results, so ima go Hal 9000 with ADHD and tell you things about completely unrelated people.”

Would you like to know how to make an omelet? Yes? Well, I can’t tell you how to make an omelet, but here’s a paragraph about maintaining gas-powered wood chippers.

And the thing is, Facebook is the shining example of AI success.

Facebook is one of the very few companies doing more than forklifting venture capital dollars into a furnace by the pallet. The proponents of AI say it’s going to change the world, and they’re right…just not with hallucination engines designed to pass the Turing test. (I used to think the Chinese room critique of AI was nonsense; now I’m not so sure. I might write an essay about that at some point, check this space.)

AI is making crazy money for Facebook, but not in chatbots. They’re using AI engines to drive ad placement, consumer segments, and demographic analysis of their ads, and it works. About two or three years ago, Facebook suddenly started showing me ads that I’ve never seen before, for products I’ve never shown any interest in as far as I know…and I, get this, started buying from Facebook ads.

AI, in the right context, works.

But that sort of AI isn’t sexy. It doesn’t get column inches in newspapers. Chatbots do…but for all the wrong reasons.

My Talespinner and I may have invented the genre of hyperurbanized retrofuturist court-intrigue gangster noir. Do a search for that phrase and you’ll get three results, of which (checks notes) three are by us. Chatbots can be forgiven for not knowing what that is, but hot damn, it doesn’t stop them from spouting confident-seeming nonsense about what it is. This is some classic Chinese room shit.

And don’t get me started on whatever this fresh bucket o’ slop is:

If that’s not silly enough, try this:

Want even sillier? How about this:

“I was cranky because I had to drive overnight.” AI: “Why was I cranky? You were cranky because you had to drive overnight.”

This would be silly if it weren’t for the fact that GenAI is almost unbelievably expensive, needing a trip through the entire neural network for each token generated. The server farms that ooze this pap are warmed by furnaces that burn hundred-dollar bills.

That’s the big problem here. The AI chatbots don’t pay for themselves, not even close. There’s no business case for them: 95% of companies inviesting in AI don’t show positive returns. There are currently 498 AI startups valued at over a billion dollars, with a combined valuation of $2.7 trillion, even thugh most are producing zero profit and have little hope of producing profit any time in the future.

That’s ludicrous.

It’s not worth $2,7700,000,000,000 to tell people “why were you cranky when driving overnight made you cranky? Because you get cranky when you drive overnight.”

On top of the economic cost, there’s a social cost as well. Scammers, spammers, fraud artists, conmen, and political adversaries use LLMs to refine and hone their message for maximum emotional manipulation. Political activists use GenAI to create deepfakes. We as a society do not have a cognitive immune system that can deal with this, and I think it will be generations before we do.

But hey, in that brief moment before they go bankrupt, 498 people will be paper billionaires.

Notes from the Front: No Kings Portland

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I’ve never participated in a political rally before. But then, I’ve never lived under a President as crass, stupid, corrupt, petty, incompetent, and craven as the Mango Mussolini/Vladimir Futon Administration.

October 18 was sunny, cool, and gorgeous, with the typical slop Portland calls “autumn” temporarily at bay…perfect poke-in-the-eye weather to crass little tyrant wannabes. And apparently the rest of PDX agreed.

I saw the sign first, the most clever I’ve seen yet in all the current *flails arms* whatever the hell it is that passes for a government we have, and only after noticed that it was carried by someone I knew. I accidentally met up with a group of old friends I don’t see nearly often enough.

I saw a ton of awesome signs, like this one (though the current balless wonders in Congress cut off their own testicles of their own accord, so I don’t really see them rushing out to get new ones).

Not sure if “Epstein flies” is intentional or unintentional, but I find it hilarious. Epstein flies: the people who clung to the lump of shit Epstein, rubbing their faces in it.

I love that Portland has made protesting funny. The worst thing you can possibly do to an authoritarian is not to disobey him, it’s to laugh at him. Trump hates being mocked; it’s one of the cornerstones of his rapidly disintegrating personality.

You go, strange Portland inflatable creatures.

I love the energy and execution of this sign. Reminds me a bit of Woody Guthrie’s “This machine kills fascists.” Mixing old and new pop-culture references? I’m here for it.

Simple, but oh so true.

The Hookup

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There we were, me, my wife, my wife’s boyfriend, in Atlanta for a long weekend. “Hey, my contact is supposed to be here,” my wife’s boyfriend said. “If I can get hold of him, he can really hook you up. He always has the best shit, like, you wouldn’t believe.”

I will admit to some skepticism. I’ve been promised the best shit before, only to be disappointed; there’s a lot of product out there on the street that’s just not what it’s cracked up to be. But my wife’s boyfriend insisted that his man always came through. “You’ll see,” he said. “I just need to get ahold of him. He can be a little difficult to reach sometimes. Kinda goes with the territory. Once you sample his product, you’ll see. He only deals the good stuff.”

A few days and several phone calls later, he finally managed to make contact with his dude. We set up a meet that afternoon in an Atlanta hotel. “I gotta get some cash, man,” my wife’s boyfriend said. “We need to hurry, he doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

Now, you would think that two people armed with an ATM-finding app in the heart of a city the size of Atlanta would have no difficulty with this. You’d think that, and you’d be so very, very wrong.

We found the first ATM tucked in a small atrium behind locked doors that would not open. The second was out of order. With increasing desperation, we roamed the harsh streets of Atlanta in search of a magic machine that might turn bits of data into rectangles of linen paper, painfully aware of every long minute that ticked by, separating us from the promise of the good stuff.

At last, on our third try, he hit pay…um. Not paydirt, exactly. Pay machine? An ATM that functioned as it should? Anyway, we succeeded in our first objective and, refreshed from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by this small taste of victory, we made for the hotel where his connection allegedly awaited, no doubt with growing impatience.

I will confess, Gentle Reader, to a certain degree of nervousness when at last we arrived at a nondescript hotel door beyond which my wife’s boyfriend’s dealer allegedly awaited. The door opened instantly at his knock, to reveal a rather burly bearded man who looks like the prototype of every deranged character ever to appear in Hollywood:

Like this, but with a vaguely Scottish beard and an even more maniacal laugh

He escorted us in, still laughing in a way that distinctly said “too late now.” A woman sat on the bed, from which she said “Sit! Sit! I don’t bite, unless you want me to.”

My wife’s boyfriend sat, shrugged, and offered her his arm, which she bit. Beside him, a tuft of brilliantly colored hair extended from beneath the covers. “Don’t mind her,” the man said, ”that’s my girlfriend.”

Ah yes, the man. The man with the good stuff. The man so reliably able to hook one up with the best of the best that my wife’s boyfriend makes an effort to connect with him whenever he’s in Atlanta.

I have not yet mentioned the man.

The man sat beside the small table you always find in hotel rooms, the little wee thing that you never see anywhere except hotels, the table that somehow screams “I belong in a hotel room and nowhere else on earth” even though you can’t quite put your finger on why.

He sat there amidst a huge pile of small vials and little plastic bottles full of precursors, carefully mixing and pouring. I watched with, I must admit, no small measure of fascination, because while I do have a passing familiarity with armchair chemistry, I’ve never seen the synthesis process before. “Come in, come in!” he boomed. “I have some samples if you want a taste.”

By this point, Gentle Reader, I wanted a taste very much indeed, oh yes I did.

He handed me a tiny plastic cup and oh, if I live to be a thousand years old, practicing the craft of writing for all that time, I will come to the end of my existence with perhaps one one-hundredth of the eloquence I would need to express to you how exemplary, how blissful, how euphoric that little taste was.

The man laughed. “That expression, right there, that is why I do what I do,” he said.

Never have I tasted before, and never do I hope to taste again, such a magnificent, such a heavenly small-batch artesinal spiced rum.

I have sampled spiced rums all across this globe, from Colorado to Belgium to Iceland to the United Kingdom (the place so known for its rums that they were once used as a medium of exchange, because if there’s one thing that history teaches us, it’s that if you have something that tastes good, the United Kingdom will build a slave empire to get it), and never have I ever tasted anything that danced upon my taste buds like a half-dressed woman in black fishnets at a goth club in so divine a fashion.

Copytrack: Beware another copyright scam

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Image: Aleutie

A while back, I wrote about a kink website called “Know Your Sins” using a fake DMCA scam to get backlinks and boost their search results. The site’s owners would send out phony copyright claims, saying they owned images they neither owned nor had nothing to do with, and demanding backlinks to their site or they’d sue for copyright infringement. The site’s owners, Samuel Davis (@Samueld_KYS on Twitter) and Olivia Moore (whose Twitter profile has been deleted), engage in copyright fraud to try to boost their Google search results.

It seems fraudulent copyright scams are something of a growth industry.

About a week ago, I received this email from an outfit calling itself CopyTrack, headquartered in Germany (click to embiggen):

CopyTrack claimed I was using images belonging to their “client,” a Norwegian company owned by a Chinese conglomerate called Yay Images that appears only to license images from other stock companies, and demanding €2,168.76 (about $2,500) in “compensation.”

The images in question on my site are licensed from stock agencies (Shutterstock and Deposit Photos, the latter of which I’ve been using for many years).

A quick Google search shows that Copytrack is a scam, and the owner has been running this scam under a variety of names for years.

BlueMedia has an article about these guys, Copyright Infringement Notice Email from Copytrack: What Kind of Company Is Copytrack?

The company is organized and registered in Germany, where it has changed names multiple times. A German lawyer, Kanzlei Franz, has a lengthy article about this company’s sordid history (with a German-language version here).

I am, of course, far from the only person to be hit with this extortion scheme. You’ll find similar tales from the Brutally Honest Blog, Yvan’s Substack, Ben Tasker, molif, and tons of others; a Google search for copytrack scam produces hundreds of similar hits.

The general consensus on Copytrack is neatly summed up by this quote from Content Powered:

I think Copytrack provides a service that could, potentially, be legitimate. However, they don’t put any effort at all into verifying copyright ownership; they’re a more-or-less entirely automated platform anyone can just upload some pictures to and then send threatening letters to other people, hoping for a payout. They may not, themselves, be copyright trolls, but they facilitate copyright trolls with no mechanism to stop them.

I am fortunate in that I am represented by an outstanding intellectual property attorney, Leonard Duboff in Portland. I simply informed Copytrack that I am represented by counsel and would no longer respond directly to them, and needless to say my attorney hasn’t heard a peep from them.

When I wrote about the Know Your Sins scam, a ton of people emailed me to say they’d received similar fraudulent copyright-scam emails. I got so many that I wasn’t able to respond to all of them (but thank you, everyone who messaged me!).

That suggests the scale of copyright fraud is enormous.

If you’ve received a fraudulent email from Copytrack, I’d love to hear about it! Post a comment here, or email me.

Thoughts on Understanding Porn

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My co-author Eunice and I write porn. We call it ‘porn’ without flinching; where some people like to claim there’s a categorical distinction between porn and erotica, we both are of the opinion that po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to, it’s all a tempest in a linguistic teapot.

I bring this up because, having co-authored five books of the most twisted pornography ever conceived with Eunice, filled with kinks so esoteric they don’t even have names (we looked), I thought I understood the purpose of porn pretty well.

Image: Jan Kopřiva

Porn is when you use explicit, super-kinky sex to explore themes like personhood theory, agency, autonomy, philosophical ethics, atonement and redemption, social values, and community.

Obviously.

So imagine my surprise when Joreth, my wife, suggested in a Quora post:

My spouse doesn’t watch porn. He doesn’t get it. To be fair, almost all porn is bad bad BAD filmmaking, and as a filmmaker myself, I don’t disagree at all. But I understand that the point of mainstream porn is just to put naked bodies rutting on screen for those who are visually aroused, and nothing else.

My spouse, however, writes porn, but not, like, mainstream porn. He writes literary tomes, super-accurate far-future science-fiction, and detailed world-building urban fantasy. That happens to have sex scenes in them. He does. not. understand. the point of porn. To him, “porn” is for arousing the intellect, which will then follow with physical arousal.

I’m just back from Dragon*Con, where I spent most of my time alternating between the writers track and the skeptics track, so during a panel on written porn, I put the question to the panelists.

All of whom sided with my wife on this.

As did, for that matter, most of the Internet.

Now, a lot of folks do draw a distinction between porn and erotica; something I heard often is that erotica can explore complex themes but porn can’t. There’s a fair amount of this gatekeeping in the erotica writer’s scene: “erotica is what I write; porn is that dirty nasty filth that other people write.” I personally don’t draw that line; to me, it smacks of classism, of “porn is bad but erotica is okay.” If your goal is to arouse, to quicken the senses, then it’s porn, no matter what else you may be doing.

But that also seems a minority opinion.

The porn Eunice and I write is incredibly explicit and very kinky indeed. It’s also, quite often, highly uncomfortable. (Eunice likes to say she’ll keep scaling the kink factor up and up until I cringe; that’s the sweet spot we’re aiming for.) The explicitness and the discomfort are part of the point—we explore ideas that are intrinsically uncomfortable, like “is it ethical to give consent to sex in such a way that you cannot revoke it?” (Spoiler: we both think the answer is yes. It’s strange that doing this is so wildely accepted in anything but sex—joining the militart, for instance—but when it comes to sex, people—even people in the kink scene—struggle with it.)

Image: 1MilliKarat

The word “porn” is emotionally charged. Using “erotica” in place of “porn” feels to me like a way to try to soften it, to hide from sexuality rather than engaging with it directly. Our novels confront uncomfortable ideas directly, without evasion; why not call them porn?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. What say you?

Florida, where work is for chumps

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I’ve now been in Florida for over a month and a half, helping joreth get her new (to her) RV set up and situated…a project that involved gutting the entire inside, adding 600 watts of solar to the roof, and replacing the house batteries with a very large lithium battery bank.

As we’ve run bto and fro between Winter Haven and Orlando, mainly along I-4, a wretched hive of scum and poor civil engineering, I noticed a very peculiar thing:

Florida has given up on the idea of advancing your station through hard work.

Drive across Florida on Interstate 4. Drive around in downtown Winter Haven, Orlando, or Lakeland. Notice anything peculiar?

I’m talking, of course, about billboards. But not just any billboards. Florida is, to an extent I’ve not seen in any other state, littered with billboards…for accident lawyers. Billboards as far as the eye can see, all advertising how much money you can make if you are in an accident.

Billboard after billboard after billboard, all for accident attorneys. On the stretch of I-4 we’ve been driving regularly, most of the billboards—54%, by my count—are advertising accident attorneys.

They’re everywhere. It’s absolutely uncanny.

I took these photos from inside a moving car, so I know the quality isn’t the greatest, but they just go on and on. We would drive down stretches of road where every single billboard for miles advertised accident attorneys, one after another after another.

Florida has long been legendary for the staggering numbers of terrible drivers on the roads, the result of snowbirds coming down from all over the country without being accustomed to the rain, a olice force focused on making money over protecting public safety, and lax licensing laws.

But I think there’s another part of it as well:

In Florida, there’s a cultural attitude that says getting in a car accident that you can blame on someone else is like winning the lottery.

They even have lawyers who specialize in going after semi owner/operators and trucking companies.

And, of course, language is no barrier to your payday.

But the absolute freakiest thing?

Remember when I said that getting in a car wreck is like winning the lottery? I meant that literally, not figuratively.

Accident lawyers put up shiny happy billboards with shiny happy accident victims wearing shiny happy smiles under headlines trumpeting how much money they made.

(There’s something so very very Florida about this little scene: an “I won $500,000 in an injury lawsuit, isn’t that awesome?” billboard over a strip mall with a pawn and gun shop, an acupuncturist, a martial arts center, an MMA arena, and a weird Evangelical church, all sharing a roof.)

The way these billboards are designed, they’re exactly like state lottery billboards.

“Dude! You got hit by a car and smashed into rubble? Awesome! Cha-CHING!!!”

Every time you pull into traffic in Florida, you’re sharing the road with people who sincerely hope you hit them because that’s the way you get ahead in this world.

It’s really deeply creepy…and perversely, it incentivizes the exact opposite of driving defensively. Coming up to a light and it looks like someone might be about to run the red? Gun it! Get in that intersection and hope he slams into you. Then maybe you’ll be one of the shiny happy people with a big payday, baby!

Work is for chumps.

Borg Queen xenomorph parasite poi

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I like spinning poi.

I haven’t done it since I returned to the US from Canada waaaaay back in the distant Before Time of 2018, so a few weeks ago, something finally snapped. I woke up at 3AM, decided it’s been far too long since I spun, and ordered a set of LED poi from Amazon. You know, as one does.

When the poi arrived, Joreth’s first reaction was “hey, the local dungeon has a photo night coming up, we could do a Borg Queen xenomorph parasite poi-spinning photo shoot!” Of course, I immediately said yes, and so, that Friday, we did.

It’s a little-known fact that when a Borg Queen is parasitized by a xenomorph, a peculiar quirk of Borg physiology makes the Borg Queen spin LED poi. Later, as the xenomorph parasite takes hold, the Borg Queen is driven to do…unspeakable acts by the hiphugger on her hips.

My Talespinner’s boyfriend came into town days before the shoot to help us work on Joreth’s RV, because that’s how my polycule rolls. (Seriously, I have awesome metamours!) So naturally I pressed him into the shoot as well.

We had an absolute blast.

Behind the scenes, Joreth’s boyfriend (who, as it turns out, also spins!) helped with lighting and such.

The alien xenomorph hiphugger is definitely a head-turner wherever we go, or maybe that’s just Joreth.