Author Archives: tacit

Wow! A lot more interest in the poster than I thought

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I’m quite overwhelmed and surprised by the number of folks who have expressed an interest in pre-ordering a poster version of the Map of Human Sexuality. Since it seems like something that people are really interested in, I’ve decided to accept pre-orders for the map at $12 each (plus shipping).

Here’s the scoop: If I can get 50 pre-orders, which will pay for two thirds of the total printing cost, I’m going to go ahead and do the print run. If I don’t get hat many pre-orders by March, the entire amount of the pre-order (including shipping) will be refunded to everyone who pre-orders…though judging from the responses to my last LJ post, I should hit that threshold very quickly.

Turnaround on printing is eight to ten business days. Leaving a couple of days for shipping to me, that means I expect to start sending pre-orders out about twelve business days after I hit 50 pre-orders. At least, that’s the plan.

I’ve set up a place for pre-ordering on my ecommerce site; the direct link is here. Unfortunately, I can’t take PayPal orders; credit card only. (The checkout page is secure.)

The poster will be big (24″x36″), offset printed on 100# gloss text. Since the map itself is square, I’m probably going to put a glossary of terms on the bottom part of the map. One of the things I’ll likely do is put a few different versions of the finished poster design with glossary on my LJ and let folks vote on them.

So, here’s your chance. If you’d like a poster (or two), you can pre-order now!

The economy, she is a-sucking

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The company I’ve been working with and am a minority partner in, as I’ve mentioned before, is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. It’s been closed down for the past three weeks, and tomorrow the principals and shareholders are holding an emergency meeting to decide whether or not to keep the company going. At this point, the equation is very simple: We have $100 left in the checking account, and debts in the hundreds of thousands. We get more venture capital or we die.

This is, as you might imagine, putting a beating on my own finances. My Web site is the only thing keeping a roof over my head right now, and it’s not bringing in enough.

So, decision time.

The situation: I’m in a lease here until May. The lease can not be broken for any reason. That commits me to Atlanta whether I like it or not, and I don’t have the capital to move, even if I were to try to sneak out in the middle of the night.

Biggest expenses are credit card bills, run up many years ago when the company was first getting started and was paying me in stock rather than cash. (Stock which is now worthless, of course. Ha!)

The options:

– Pray for a miracle at Spectrum. Ha!

– Find a 9-to-5 job somewhere else. Possibly in IT or Web work, possibly in prepress, possibly in advertising, possibly saying “You want some fries with that?”

– Hang out my shingle as a computer consultant again. I’m told the market’s pretty good for consultants, as companies fire their in-house IT staff and outsource.

– Find a way to increase the revenue from my Web site. Doubling it would let me survive; tripling it would mean I’m actually better off than I was before.

I’m leaning toward the latter option right now. To that end, one of the things I’m working on is setting up an affiliate system for Onyx, my sex game. Affiliates would get a unique URL, and would get a share of every sale they made. I know a lot of folks out there have Web sites and wouldn’t mind some extra income of their own.

Another of the things I’d like to do is to print and sell posters of the Map of Human Sexuality I’ve created. A lot of folks have asked me about this, and I (just) have enough room on a credit card to pay for a production run of offset posters, of which I would need to sell 77 in order to break even. Doing this and not breaking even would be a disaster at this point.

So, here’s the scoop:

– If you ae interested in selling copies of Onyx from your Web site, let me know. I’m still setting up the affiliate management software. I’ll have to make banner graphics for it as well. Right now, I’m looking at probably paying out $10 for each affiliate sale.

– If you’d buy a poster at $12 (plus shipping), let me know. I’d like to gauge interest before I commit the funds. A part of me thinks I need to be committed for even considering taking that gamble.

– Any other brilliant ideas? I’m all ears!

More sexuality…it never ends!

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It seems that no matter how thorough one tries to be, the total range of human sexual expression is always bigger than one thinks it is. Even if you, y’know, keep in mind that no matter how big you think it is, it’s bigger than that.

So here’s the latest update on the Map of Human Sexuality. As before, clicking on the small version will lead to a bigger version. A much, much, much, MUCH bigger version.

I haven’t had time to put the updated map into the interactive version yet; eventually I’ll do that, and fix some problems with the interactive version,a nd probably add a new “fantasized about it but not interested in experimenting with it for real” pin.

I still want to make posters of it, though the fact that the company I work with is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy is creating a problem as far as that goes.

Still haven’t heard back from Penthouse magazine. They are talking about running an article about the map in the March edition. Guess we’ll see.

Update on the Franklin

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Still sick.

That’s the bad news. The good news is I’m not horking up internal organs any more, and I can breathe without feeling like I’ve got bits of broken glass where they shouldn’t be. Even felt good enough yesterday to leave the apartment to go shopping and do laundry, both of which needed to be done in the worst possible way.

On the down side, it’s hard to walk from the door to the mailbox without wheezing, and all the various medications are making me feel almost as crappy as the damn bacteria. Plus I still sound like a frog being strangled at the bottom of a deep well when I try to talk. Thank God for Netflix, that’s all I can say.

Liam the kittycat has been absolutely delighted to have me home for the past three weeks, at least. Poor little guy is going to think I’ve abandoned him once I start working again. He follows me around the apartment and curls up on my lap when I crash on the couch. He’s in the habit of sitting on the edge of the tub when i shower and watching me with this expression:

Doctor’s appointment again the day after tomorrow. Probably more chest X-rays and stuff. If they don’t like what they see, the next step may be to go into the hospital for IV antibiotics. Ugh.

Ugh yuck.

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Spent the entire afternoon at the doctor’s office today, on account of this nasty hacking coughing yuck that I’ve had for the last three weeks and that has been hanging on like an uninvited house guest. I was swabbed, poked, prodded, X-rayed, poked some more, and several people looked at me and said “hmm” a lot.

After hours of poking, swabbing, prodding, X-raying, and “hmm”ing, the diagnosis is: antibiotic-resistant pneumonia.

Fuck me dead.

The doctor is taking it seriously and treating it aggressively. My kitchen counter now looks like I knocked over a pharmacy. Two different steroids, two different antibiotics, one shot in the ass (that burns like a motherfucker), an inhaler, industrial-strength cough medicine, some foul-tasting bright-orange pills that I don’t even know what they are, two different OTC cough medicines and expectorants that my doctor suggested, and another appointment to go in next week for further evaluation. Hundred and seven bucks for all the prescriptions, and my insurance paid more than twice that.

Apparently it’s going around. Doctor told me I was the third case of antibiotic-resistant pneumonia she’d seen today. Ye gods.

You know it’s bad when you’ve been too sick even to be horny.

Link o’ the Day

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Forced orgasm belt. Lockable belt that holds a Hitachi Magic Wand in place. Dear God, I know some folks I’d like to lock into this for an hour or three.

Link totally NSFW.

The Russians are at it again

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Mac users, we had a three-month respite. The Russian Zlob gang, which last September lost its servers that were distributing the Mac DNSchanger malware when the corrupt hosting company EST Hosts went dark, are back after Macs again.

Just discovered a server being used to spread Mac malware from

http://brakeplayer.net/download/get7003.dmg
*** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING *** This link is live as of the time of this writing. The payload, named get7003.dmg, contains a new version of the Mac DNSchanger, aka OSX.RSplug.A, OSX.RSplugin.A, or OSX/Zlob, computer malware.

The malicious server brakeplayer.net is brand new and is hosted in Latvia, on an ISP called “zlkon.lv”.

whois brakeplayer.net

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

Domain Name: BRAKEPLAYER.NET
Registrar: REGTIME LTD.
Whois Server: whois.regtime.net
Referral URL: http://www.webnames.ru
Name Server: NS1.BRAKEPLAYER.NET
Name Server: NS2.BRAKEPLAYER.NET
Status: ok
Updated Date: 26-dec-2008
Creation Date: 15-dec-2008
Expiration Date: 15-dec-2009
Name servers:
ns1.brakeplayer.net
ns2.brakeplayer.net

Registrar: Regtime Ltd.
Creation date: 2008-12-15
Expiration date: 2009-12-15

Registrant:
Nikolaj Selivestrov
Email: paul.aspen111@gmail.com
Organization: Private person
Address: ul. kosmonavtov, 132-13
City: Moskva
State: Moskovskaya
ZIP: 129301
Country: RU
Phone: +7.4957854978

I’ve also noticed an uptick in the number of hacked Web sites hosted by iPower Web lately. As I’ve talked about extensively here, here, here, and here, iPower is basically a mess. For more than a year now, hackers have been walking all over their servers, planting virus redirectors in sites that are hosted by iPower or their subsidiaries.

For a while, the number of attacks against iPower dropped to next to nothing, and I thought that they’d fixed their security problem. Now, Im not so sure–now, I think that iPower is as compromised as it always has been, but the hackers toned down the attacks when they started getting attention. Can’t prove it, but my hunch is there’s a long-standing zero-day exploit in vDeck, iPower Web’s home-grown Web control panel software.

I think we’re going to be seeing more Mac malware in the near future.

Dear God, what have I done?

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Bless me, Internets, for I have sinned. It has been ten days since my last confession of kinky sex.

I…have a Twitter account now. At “franklinveaux”. And strangely, I already have two followers, even though I haven’t told anybody.

What…what is happening to me?

Portland bound!

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OK, folks, looks like I will be in Portland [Edit: Portland, Oregon!] for the last week of January, where I hear it’s cold. I’ll be spending quite a bit of time with zaiah, and apparently there will be get-togethers at the home of edwardmartiniii on the 24th and 31st. But I will still have some unallocated time available as well, mostly on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday (the 25th, 26th, and 27th).

I will not, however, have a car.

So, anyone fancy a meetup? What’s a good thing to do in Portland on a weekday with no transportation?