Category Archives: Uncategorized

Some Thoughts on Consent and the Right to Say Meh

Posted on by
5

My Talespinner and I are just putting the finishing touches on a book we co-authored together with her other boyfriend, an anthology of supernatural erotica called Spectres.

This isn’t actually an essay about that, it’s an essay about consent, agency, and the right to say meh. Hang on, I’m getting there.

One of the stories (actually more of a novella; Spectres is a chonky book) centers on an archaeologist working at a dig site in Türkiye who unearths a Hittite artifact that, spoiler, contains the soul of a priestess of Šauška, the Hittite goddess of sex and healing. Shenanigans happen, she seduces a grad student named Sarah, they start a weird D/s relationship, and near the end of the story it’s implied that she may offer Sarah’s sexual favors to another of her lovers…something Sarah consents to.

I will have ARCs soon. Hit me up if you want a copy!

So. A few days ago I saw a post on social media to the extent of “Remember, if the consent is not enthusiastic, it’s rape.” And, of course, that post had the usual performative affirmations: upvotes, replies like “Yes! This!” and “Right!”

It kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Not just the performative virtue-signaling aspect of the responses, but the post itself.

Don’t get me wrong, I get where it’s coming from. If you wheedle, beg, pressure, coerce, whine, cajole, browbeat, bulldoze, blandish, exhort, compel, or otherwise arm-twist someone into shagging you, that’s not really consent. Consent, to be valid, must be free, informed, and uncoerced.

But here’s the thing:

Consent can be unenthusiastic without being coerced.

We like to draw hard lines. We like to put everything and everyone in neat, tidy boxes. But real life is messy and chaotic and it sometimes requires thought and judgment rather than platitudes and rules.

I’ve consented to sex unenthusiastically. I’ve agreed to do things I don’t particularly enjoy, because my lovers really really wanted to do them. That isn’t rape.

Yes, I know, I know, the person who posted on social media was (probably) trying, in a clumsy way, to say that sex without uncoerced consent is rape. And that’s true, but it’s not what she said.

Look, I get it. Enthusiastic sex between participants who are really into it is good. But you know what? There are times when one person is more into it than another, and that’s okay.

I have the right to say yes even to things I’m not overjoyed about.

I’m not a masochist. I don’t enjoy pain. I do enjoy making my lovers happy, and so I have freely, without coercion, consented to be spanked, cropped, caned, have needles stuck in me, and bottom for knife play. My body, my choice…and that means I have the right to choose things I’m not really into for the sake of a lover who is.

I am not, and I know there will probably be people who push back on this, but I am not a victim of a sexual assault when I say yes to something that I know in advance is not particularly going to crank my motor. I have the right to say yes to sex I am meh about.

In fact, thad this’ll really bake your noodle, not only do I have the right to say yes to sex I’m meh about, I think that under many circumstances it’s a good thing to do so.

We human beings are terrible at predicting in advance how we will respond to unfamiliar things. I have said yes to sex I was sure I’d enjoy and discovered after the fact that I didn’t like it at all and will never do it again. My consent was not violated.

I’ve said yes to things that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like in order to please a partner, and then discovered that, wow, it really turned me on. My consent was not violated.

Part of having agency means, I believe, having the right to agree to do things I’m not enthusiastic about doing. I may express that thus-and-such isn’t really likely to float my banana, but I can still choose to do it anway.

So. Back to Spectres.

Why would our character agree to have sex with someone she doesn’t want to have sex with and wouldn’t choose as a lover? Because it’s not about him. It’s about her relationship with the protagonist; it’s her way of showing that she is willing to give herself to her lover in that way, by consenting to allow her lover to choose another person for her to have sex with.

I’ve done that in real life, by the way; consented to have sex with someone I wouldnn’t otherwise choose to have sex with because another lover told me to. If you play with D/s, that’s a very powerful form of submission. (And isn’t that what D/s is, for a lot of us? Being willing to do things that another person tells us to do, things we wouldn’t otherwise do, because we’ve chosen to surrender power?)

Look, a lot of folks don’t play this way, and that’s fine. Part of what makes me willing to play this way is the fact that I’m not sexually attracted to people I don’t already have an emotional connection with, so it pushes my buttons in a big way, and that’s where the power, the kick, comes from.

If you don’t understand that, hey, that’s fine. You absolutely don’t need to play that way. The point I’m making here is not that you should run out and do things you don’t want to do because a lover tells you to; the point I’m making here is that it’s absolutely possible to give free, uncoerced consent that is not enthusiastic, to sex you know you’re not likely to enjoy particularly…and that isn’t automatically rape.

The problem with morals that fit conveniently in one Tweet or on a bumper sticker is that people are more complex than bumper-sticker morality. Trying to reduce human ethics to bumper-sticker slogans causes harm.

You personally don’t need to embrace the meh to acknowledge that others can, if they choose.

Dispatches from the Front of Mad Science

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve returned from Wales and London, a trip that turned out to be the absolute embodiment of chaos, from canceled flights and impossible connections to ticket snafus and a wedding in which one of the brides rolled her car into a ditch on her way to the venue (she was fine; the car, less so).

All that plus many pics later. First, whilst visiting my Talespinner I had the opportunity to do a live field test of the Giger-inspired biomechanical nipplesuckers I designed for the alien xenomorph tentacle violation pod, and the trial went quite swimmingly, all things considered.

The nipplesuckers are powerful to the point of being right on the edge of pain, just the thing to add authenticity to an alien violation experience. And of course the mechanical suction never gets tired. Like some kind of unstoppable Nipple Terminator, it can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are a spent puddle.

The glowing electroluminescent wire turned out to be quite lovely, so we did an entire EL wire bondage photo shoot in Wales, sadly not at a castle (the weather didn’t cooperate) but in the charming little AirBnB we stayed at.

Got a couple outtakes from the nipplesucker test that turned out unexpectedly cool, though!

An Unexpected Journey

Posted on by
2

I’m sitting in my Talespinner’s living room, tending to her dogs, who believe with surety and absolute conviction there is something Outside that requires their immediate attention every fifteen minutes or so. The fact that they’ve been wrong about this three times in a row now does not in the slightest deter theri certainty that this time will be different. She (my Talespinnter) is at work, where she will be until ten o’clock tonight.

I flew in from Portland, after an entire day of travel. When I left, it was suny and 40 degrees; I connected in Huoston, where it was dark and in the 70s, and arrived late last night.

A week from today, she and I fly together to London before traveling on with much of the extended polycule to Wales.

This wasn’t the trip we had planned.

We’d planned for me to fly to Springfield in late November, when she’d be able to take some time off work, rent a cozy little cabin she found in a remote corner of Missouri, and isolate ourselves from the outside world to work on the third draft of our novel spin, a sprawling far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel that is, in structure and narrative, the most ambitious, challenging, difficult writing project I’ve ever been part of.

Life got in the way.

We’re flying to London and then on to Wales because a person in our extended polycule, my girlfriend’s girlfriend, has received devastating medical news. Almost the entire polycule dropped what it was doing to go out there to support her.

I would not have been able to make the trip on such short notice without help from the rest of the extended network, and the unexpected generosity of complete strangers on the Internet, for which I am incredibly grateful.

The situation is unimaginably shitty, yet I am deeply, profoundly thankful to be part of such an amazing, supportive, generous, resilient, healthy, vibrant polycule.

If there is one lesson I could go back in time to give my younger self, it would be…well, it would be buy Bitcoin when it was still 25 cents. But if there were another, it would be this:

Franklin, there’s a word for what you are. That word doesn’t exist yet, but it’s “polyamorous,” and it means “loving many.” You aren’t alone in this, and you don’t need to settle. There are others like Find them. And if ever it should come to pass that a person you love tells you that you must break up with another person you love, or that they refuse to be around your other partners, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever say yes. It is, in fact, possible to be part of an extended network of people who genuinely support each other, and don’t play those kinds of games.

Is It Graft or Is It Cruelty?

Posted on by
7

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

Posted on by
8

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

Posted on by
2

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)

Posted on by
2

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

Posted on by
5

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

Posted on by
3

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

Posted on by
2

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.