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Boston Episode 2: To Utah And Beyond!

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Late in the evening, we arrived in Salt Lake City at Claire’s friend’s house. I was a bit afraid that I’d have difficulty sleeping, as my ear was…

Okay, I need to back up a bit, to the day before we left, and explain something about my relationship life.

I live with zaiah. She and I share a very kinky relationship, in which various forms of consent play and consensual non-consent play a large role. Large enough, in fact, that I think we sometimes frighten some of our friends…and nearly all our friends are kinky, too. You might think this has little to do with traveling to Boston, and you’d be right, except for the thing with the ear.

It started while I was on my computer chatting with a friend of mine, who like Claire is also whip-smart and knowledgeable and courageous and generally sexy as hell. (This is, as some of my readers might recognize, a common feature in my life. I really dig smart, strong women who aren’t afraid to make unconventional choices. But I digress.)

Anyway, while I was occupied with my chat window, zaiah walked up to me, set a bottle of alcohol on the corner of my computer desk, and walked away. A minute later, she walked back, set a pair of latex gloves on the desk, and walked away. A minute after that, she walked back holding a needle. She put on the gloves, opened the needle, put her knee in my chest, pushed me back in my chair, and stuck the needle through my ear. That done (and howling subsided), she cleaned my ear with alcohol (more howling), and stuck an earring through the newly-minted hole and walked away again.

I had to explain to the friend I’d been chatting with why I’d stopped responding for a time, which led to some interesting conversation. The real point here is that I would be sleeping in strange places with a brand-new, and still sore, piercing. I normally sleep on my left side, and zaiah had (naturally) added the new hole to my left ear, so…yeah. I was expecting a difficult night of sleeping on the wrong side.

Claire’s friend lives, as I previously mentioned, in a former Mormon polygamous compound that’s been converted into apartments. Each apartment is basically a series of bedrooms arranged around the outside of a central living room, connected to a huge kitchen–a quite serviceable floor plan if one has a number of wives who may not necessarily be too fond of one another, but all of whom are expected to spend their time in the kitchen when they aren’t raising children or on their backs making more.

I managed to survive a harrowing night of sleeping on the wrong side (the wrong side!), mostly by telling myself that when one is traveling the breadth of a continent, there are certain privations one is expected to endure. In the morning we were off adventuring again.

When one is traveling across Utah, a certain sameness begins to set in. Most of the scenery looks like this:

Most of the roads look like this:

After a certain number of bare-knuckle close calls with enormous tractor-trailer rigs being driven at lightning speed along narrow roads by people who are either five-eights asleep or hopped up on a combination of crystal meth, cocaine, and Monster energy drinks, the experience ceases to enthrall, and one soon finds one’s self thinking “Wake me when something interesting happens.”

So it was that we made our way through Utah and into Colorado, which is just as dry but a lot less wrinkly.

Claire had been waxing enthusiastically about the hot springs in Glenwood for some time prior to the trip. Now, ordinarily, water is something I’m pretty much against. I mean, I recognize its utility and all; it is, after all, the primary ingredient in Mountain Dew. But immersion in it is something I don’t much fancy, especially when it’s hot.

However, life in Oregon has been a period of transition for me. I have, since moving here, found myself in a hot tub on no fewer than two occasions, largely at rekre8‘s urging. “Give it a try!” she told me. “It’s not as bad as all that!”

So when we arrived in Glenwood in the evening, I was game to give this “hot springs” thing a go.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. When I heard the phrase “hot springs,” as in “we’re going to stop at the hot springs and immerse ourselves in them,” the image that was conjured up in my mind looked something like this:

though to be perfectly fair, this picture is lacking in the human skeletons my imagination had thoughtfully arranged to provide scattered all around the edge of the springs as a warning to those luckless enough to linger in them too long.

What I actually saw was this:

The principle behind a hot spring is quite simple. Millions of tons of molten rock, heated to fantastic temperatures by intense radioactive decay deep within the earth, forces itself under tremendous pressure through miles and miles of solid rock, until finally it comes near enough to the surface to contact water percolating down through porous substrate. When they meet, the water flashes instantaneously into superheated steam, which blasts up with ferocious energy to the surface, where it…

…manages to feel quite pleasant, really.

The hot springs were surprisingly enjoyable. And I don’t mean that in the “it was surprising any part of the experience was enjoyable at all” sense, but rather in the “I had quite a wonderful time” sense. In fact, all too soon was it time to be off on our way to Denver, where we stayed with another friend of Claire’s.

Or so it is alleged.

We didn’t see hide nor hair of this friend. We arrived at a lovely house in a charming suburb of Denver quite late at night. Claire claimed to have been in contact with her friends, who had, or so the story went, elected to go to bed after leaving a key for us on the porch. We let ourselves in and set ourselves up in the supposedly “spare” bedrooms. The next morning, Claire announced that her fiends had left for work early that morning, so we would not be meeting them.

To this day, I have no way to prove that what actually happened wasn’t that she had scoped out a house whose owners were away on vacation or something, and confabulated an entire yarn about friends of hers who live in Denver as part of a ruse to make us agree to a little breaking and entering.

At this point in our adventure, Louisville, Kentucky, and our encounter there with the Guatemalans, was growing ever nearer..but that tale will have to wait for another time.

A Taxonomy of Crackpot Ideas

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Some time ago, when the anti-science, anti-evolution, religious literalist movie “Expelled” was making the rounds, it occurred to me that a strict 6-day, young-earth creationist idea of the world requires a particular confluence of perceptual filters in order to exist. There has to be an unquestioned acceptance of literalist religious dogma, a profound ignorance of some of the basic tenets of science, and a willingness to believe in a vast, orchestrated conspiracy on the part of all the world’s geologists, biologists, archaeologists, geneticists, and anthropologists in order for this notion to seem reasonable.

I’ve been chewing on that thought for a while, and looking at the perceptive filters that have to be in place to accept any number of implausible ideas, from moon hoaxers to lizard people conspiracy theories to anti-vaccinationism.

And, since making charts is something I do, I plotted some of these ideas in a Venn diagram that shows an overlapping set of prerequisites for a number of different flavors of nuttiness.

As usual, you can click on the image for an embiggened version.

Hey, folks in and around the Portland, OR area!

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Christopher Ryan, the author of the awesome book Sex at Dawn, will be giving a lecture and a Q&A session in Portland on Wednesday, November 2, at the Bagdad Theater in Portland.

This is an awesome opportunity to meet the author of what’s arguably one of the most important books on human sexuality in the last twenty years. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a meticulously-researched (and very fun) treatise on human sexuality going back to the very beginning of the human species. It’s full of surprising information (did you know that swinging first became popular in the United States among WWII fighter pilots?) and demonstrates how human sexual behavior is very unusual for other animals (a lot of folks like to say that frequent recreational sex is “animalistic,” but nominally monogamous animal species rarely have sex, and generally only when the female is fertile).

The book looks at human sexual behavior throughout time and across cultures,and along the way manages to piss off a lot of social conservatives, who have, the authors argue, a completely mistaken notion of what human sexual behavior is and how it works.

If this sounds like oyur cup of tea, you can get tickets here…but be aware that this book tour has consistently sold out everywhere Mr. Ryan has spoken.

Boston Episode 1: The Phantom Move

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It has been, as regular readers of this blog are no doubt aware, some time since I’ve posted a meaningful update.

This is not because nothing has been going on in my life. Far from it; there’s been so much going on lately, for good and ill (much of the last involving Eastern European organized crime, though that’s a post for another day) that I have scarcely had time to talk about it.

I have, for example, been spending quite a lot of time camping lately. My sweetie zaiah, her husband, her daughter, a number of friends, and I all went camping for her birthday; then shortly afterward she, her husband, her daughter and I did it again, only this time with kittens. Yes, I took pictures. Yes, you will get to see them. (Kitten in a tent! Kitten in a sleeping bag! Woohoo!)

And then there was the Boston trip.

We didn’t know, when we set out for Boston, that Guatemalans would run off with one of us. We also didn’t know about the hurricane. It– Wait, hang on, maybe I should back up a bit.

This is Claire.

Claire is a friend of mine. She’s smart and geeky, she’s spent time in Israel doing archaeology and in a metal workshop learning how to weld, she has a background in immunology, she does computer graphics, she’s whip-smart and charming and generally all-around interesting. Sexy, too.

This is Claire’s friend Ero, who I met mere days before the trip to Boston.

I don’t know that much about her, to be quite honest, other than she’s fluent in Chinese.

This is me.

The bunny ears belong to my sweetie emanix. On a trip such as this, they are mandatory, not optional.

And this is Boston.

Okay, so now that the major players have been identified, let me start over.

Claire recently decided to go to grad school in Boston. She wanted to have her car available, which meant driving cross-country…not quite the longest possible drive from one place in the US to another, but pretty close. And for obvious reasons, she didn’t want to make the drive herself.

She put out a call for folks willing to help her drive. Both Ero and I volunteered. Operating under the notion that when given a choice between two people, the best thing to do is choose both-a notion I heartily endorse, by the way–she opted to select both of us as her traveling companions for a week-long journey through America’s heartland. Adventure! Excitement! Really wild things!

We didn’t know, when we set out, that Guatemalans would run off with one of us. We also didn’t know about the hurricane. In those lazy, carefree, naive days before our adventure started, we thought that things would be simple. We would take turns driving, we thought; we would stop and see the sights along the way; and then, once we arrived, we’d chill for a few days, after which Ero and I would fly back home to Portland.

Ah, the naivety of youth.

The original plan was to depart from Hood River, Oregon at about six AM. I should have known just from that plan that hurricanes and Guatemalans lurked in our future. Nothing good can ever come of anything that starts so early in the morning, the way I see it.

This plan was amended so that we’d be leaving closer to 9 on account of OMG six AM WTFbiscuits, so when the day arrived, I found myself, somewhat blearily, meeting up with my fellow travelers at the home of mutual friends, bleary of eye but still (mostly) functional. We set out toward Utah, where we had planned to spend the night with a friend of Claire’s in a former fundamentalist Mormon polygamous compound.

The drive out through the Columbia Gorge was gorgeous, because the drive through the Columbia Gorge is always gorgeous. Oregon manufactures nearly 60% of the world’s total yearly output of natural scenic beauty, so it’s pretty much all over the place here. One can scarcely swing a cat without it sinking claw and fang into stunning natural beauty round these parts. We stopped on the climb up out of the Gorge to take pictures:

Yeah, I know, right? They just leave it lying around!

The first part of the trip went seamlessly. We listened to music, we talked about Chinese culture and archaeology and anal sex1 and social stratification and geekery, the whole while snapping pictures out the window of the car. We passed through the mountain range dividing the wet half of Oregon from the dry half, without any particular incidents; I had halfway hoped to see some of Oregon’s famed giantic pterodactyls that ride the thermals over the mountains and occasionally eat an unwary hiker, but there were none in the skies. Wrong time of year, I guess.

And then we hit Utah.

When we reached the border, the culture shock was so great it rattled the car. There ought to be signs warning motorists, really; I don’t know how many people get killed every year just from the sudden icy plunge into an alien culture alone. It damn near knocked us clean off the road.

Utah has nearly as much scenic splendor as Oregon, owing no doubt to its proximity to Oregon’s massive natural beauty factories.

They put their own spin on some of it, though, Utah takes stunning natural beauty and adds a certain lovely, stark barrenness to it that’s quite beautiful.

I don’t know what it is with Utah. We made two pit stops on the way to Salt Lake City, City of Perverts2. At the first, when I went to make use of the facilities, I was confronted with this…rather ominous sign:

Now I personally have to wonder, with more than a fair amount of horror, about the kind of folks who need to be reminded to close the bathroom door in a gas station.

I mean, not closing the bathroom door in the sanctity of one’s home is one thing. I mean, really, who among us hasn’t occasionally left the bathroom door open while peeing, just in case an Italian supermodel or the entire Brazilian women’s volleyball team should happen to wander into the house by mistake and be stunned into silence by the merest glimpse of the awe-inspiring throobing manhood on display? Guys, I’m sure you all know exactly what I’m talking about. But in a gas station? Really?

Our next stop was even higher on the creepy-meter. We paused at a rest stop along the side of the Interstate, and a woman walked up to me, pointed to the bunny ears, and said “What’s with them rabbit ears? You think you’re some kind of funny bunny or something?”

Which, I will admit, was a new one.

Now, I’m accustomed to getting odd looks when I wear bunny ears out and about. Usually, the odd looks I get fall into two camps: hostility and amusement. And the reactions tend to be neatly separated across gender lines; most of the hostile looks I get are from men, whereas women tend to be amused by them. That probably says something about the social construct of gender roles and gender normalization in Western society, and I’m sure there’s a master’s thesis or two luring in there somewhere, though at the moment I can’t be arsed to tease it out.

But I’m not generally confronted about it in such a hostile way.

There were a lot of things I could have said that I seriously thought about saying. Like, “It’s part of the gay agenda!Once gay marriage is passed, next comes making everyone wear bunny ears!” There were even more things I considered later, like “What’s with them manners? You think you’re some kind of rude douchenozzle or something?” However, I took the high road3 and just smiled politely at the nice lady.

Encounter with the locals over, we piled back into the car and headed on toward Salt lake City, where we would spend the night before traveling on. At this point, the hurricane was only days away, lurking in our future like a gigantic swiriing monster of spirally doom, but we were as yet unaware of the surprises Mother Nature had laid away in store for us. More on that, and things that delight the eight-year-old me, later.

1 I have been told by reliable sources that whenever two or more women spend more than a certain critical threshold of time talking, the subject of anal sex inevitably comes up. I don’t know if this is true or not, but it was true during the trip. The vote in the car was two to one in favor.

2 Supposedly, Utah has the highest per-capita rate of porn Web site subscriptions in the United States. The most popular of these? The various kink-related properties owned by Kink.com. Mormons apparently might be against pervy sex when they’re in church, but when it comes time to watch Internet pr0n, they know how to get their kink on!

3 Or the lazy road, depending on how you look at it.

If Microsoft Designed Facebook

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About five or six years ago, before Microsoft decided they wanted a slice of the portable MP3 player pie and introduced the Zune, a video called “Microsoft Re-Designs the iPod Packaging” made the rounds of the Internettubes.

At the time, I was running a small consulting firm that shared office space with an advertising and design company, who was also my biggest client. I passed the video around the office, and it got quite a few chuckles. It’s spot-on what was, back then, Microsoft’s biggest marketing weakness: a colossal, sometimes hilarious, and always hamfisted incompetence in all matters of design. (Steve Jobs is reported to have once remarked “t’s not that Microsoft keeps stealing our ideas, it’s that they’re so ugly!)”

If you haven’t seen the video, it’s worth a look and a chuckle or two, even though it’s a bit outdated.

But I didn’t come here to talk about Microsoft. I came here to talk about Facebook.

Apparently, Facebook introduced a new design change today. I didn’t actually notice until someone called me up and asked my opinion on it; I rarely use Facebook. For the most part, it’s just a repository for my Twitter nattering. I hear it’s a big deal in some quarters, though, so I wandered over to take a look.

And my goodness, have they got things wrong.

Now, Facebook is ugly. Facebook has always been ugly. Most Web 2.0 properties are ugly. Web programmers, by and large, don’t understand design (or user interface), and like almost all computer people everywhere, they figure that anything that they don’t understand is not worth understanding, so they have contempt for design as well. To a Web 2.0 programming guru, design means making a pale blue banner with the name of the Web site and a line drawing of a logo or an animal or something on it and slapping it at the top of the page.

That’s not entirely the fault of the programmers, of course; the basic, fundamental structure of CSS discourages good design, just by making it more of a pain in the ass than it really needs to be. You can do good design in CSS, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t mind doing linear algebra in your head while walking a tightrope stretched across the Grand Canyon with no net, and you don’t mind that it won’t render in Internet Explorer anyway…but I digress. Where was I again?

Oh, yeah. Facebook.

So. Facebook is a business, and a profitable one. Everything about it, from the back-end infrastructure to the HTML that appears on the home page, is about making money. That means that any analysis of anything they do, including changing their design, needs to be done through the lens of how it benefits Facebook financially. And the new design is clearly intended to do that.

Unfortunately, they take the same approach as Microsoft: throw everything that might make money (Third-party endorsements! Bullet points! Big colorful discount offers!) at the wall and see what sticks. Each individual design decision, by itself, has a financial goal…but the end result is a mess.

Good design is worth money, too. People gravitate toward it–and here’s an important bit–even if they don’t understand it. There are a lot of folks who hate Apple, but their design strategy works.

And the evidence is written all over the Web 1.0 wreckage. Take Yahoo’s home page (please!). Yahoo, desperate for money, decided to keep packing crap onto the home page. News, video ads, horoscopes, music, movie trailers…each element, by itself, either directly or indirectly brings in money.

Yet Yahoos proverbial clock has well and truly been cleaned by Google, whose home page is Spartan in its simplicity, and yet who makes money faster than the U.S. Mint can print it.

Design matters. Today’s Facebook looks like a social networking site designed by Microsoft in 2005, only creepier.

For me, it’s the creepiness factor that really does it.

I’m used to Web 2.0 being ugly. I’m resigned to it. Examples of beautiful Web 2.0 design are about as thin on the ground as snowmen in the Bahamas, and on some level I’ve simply accepted that and moved on.

But the new Facebook design? It’s like someone took Microsoft’s aesthetic and combined with with Google’s tentacular creepiness, and put the result in one place.

In the past, my Facebook wall was a chronology of what was going on in my friends’ lives. Now, I don’t answer most Facebook friends requests, unless they come from folks I know to one degree or another, and apparently that’s a bit unusual. But my Wall was useful; I could glance at it and see, roughly, what was going on in more or less chronological order, and that seemed like it worked just fine.

But now? The “top posts” on my wall come from Facebook’s attempt to understand me and my interests, and that’s a bit freaky. “Hmm, I wonder what Franklin might be interested in today? Let’s see if we can tease that out and then show him what we think he’ll want to see.”

It’s as if a stalker camped out on my doorstep, went through my garbage, read my mail, followed me around town, poured over my grocery receipts, made detailed lists of everyone I spoke to and when…

…all for the purpose of cutting up and rearranging my newspaper so that the articles he thought I’d like the best were on top.

So that, y’know, I would buy his newspaper.

Creepy.

And it gets creepier when I look at Facebook’s suggestions for my “close friends” list. Facebook not only wants, in its particularly stalkeriffic way, to know what sorts of subjects interest me, it also wants to know who my REAL best friends are. And not content just to ask me, it…makes suggestions.

Suggestions that world-class supercomputing infrastructure has been brought to bear on. Suggestions that involve analyzing every little telltale crumb of information I let it have.

Google, to be fair, is just as creepifyingly stalkeriffic as Facebook; it’s just (slightly) less in my face about it. Google stalks me to know what sorts of ads to present to my eyeballs; Facebook stalks me to make things easier for me.

Thanks, Mark “The Age of Privacy is Over” Zuckerberg. At least you’re refreshing in one sense; you’re one of the few business bigwigs who actually puts his words into action.

Since I started this with a video, it’s reasonable to end it with a video. It shows Steve Jobs, until recently the CEO of one of the most financially successful businesses in history, responding to an openly insulting question about his return to Apple with grace and dignity. Granted, he’s basically a sociopath, but the interesting bit is when he talks about prioritizing user experience over technical faffery. He’s another of the few business leaders who practices what he preaches, and I think the example of Apple Computer shows that priortizing design and user experience can be profitable too.

“You’ve got to start with the customer’s experience and work backwards from that.”

Web projects ahoy!

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Occasionally, visitors to the polyamory section of my Web site at www.xeromag.com ask me if I can move the poly information to a new domain, so they can share it with friends or family members who might not be comfortable with the rest of the content on the site.

I am pleased to announce the creation of a new Web site dedicated only to polyamory, More Than Two. The More Than Two site contains all the pages from the polyamory section of xeromag.com, rearranged in a more logical order, and several new pages as well. The existing pages on the Xeromag site can be found in both places, but new articles and essays about polyamory will be found only on More Than Two.

In kink news, JT’s Stockroom is having a sale on violet wands; just $110 for a complete set, which is an amazing price. I’ve placed a link to the sale, as well as a $6 off coupon for my sex game Onyx, on the Special Offers page of my site Symtoys.com.

And speaking of Symtoys, I’ve finally created an eBook of the first part of the porn story I talked about in my Analysis of User-Generated Replies to Porn Stories of Non-Consensual Sex blog post. The story, which is rather longer than I remembered, has been extensively broken into two full-length novels, the second of which has an all-new ending. The first part is available in PDF and as a Kindle and Nook eBook, and the second (and more stories besides) will be available soon.

And finally, just a reminder: zaiah and I are still looking for artists to work with us on our tentacle monster hentai Tarot deck. If this sounds like a project you or someone you like might be interested in, let me know!

Movie review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

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Hollywood is awesome. Hollywood serves an important role in society, by warning us of the many dangers that bedevil mankind. For example, Hollywood teaches us that if we create artificial intelligence, it will kill us; if we genetically engineer potatoes, they will kill us; if we build self-determing machines, they will kill us; if we make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, it will kill us; and, most recently, if we uplift another species, we will all die horribly.

Which, at least in the latter case, is not necessarily that far off the mark, as two or more organisms competing for the same ecological niche generally results in what biologists like to call “a bit of a sticky wicket.”

However, the fly in the ointment of this particular Hollywood trope is that there are currently just south of seven billion human beings on the planet, making us one of the most populous species of vertebrates in the whole history of ever, and therefore a rather difficult adversary to unseat.

Plus, we have, like, machine guns and cell phones and stuff.

Fortunately, Hollywood screenwriters are up to the task of disposing of such trifling little technicalities with the flick of a plot twist. Unfortunately, they aren’t up to doing it well. The end of Rise of the Planet of the Apes had me screaming “EPIDEMIOLOGY, MOTHERFUCKERS! DO YOU SPEAK IT?” in my best Samuel L. Jackson voice (which, truth be told, isn’t really that good), but still…EPIDEMIOLOGY, MOTHERFUCKERS! DO YOU SPEAK IT?

The movie goes something like this:

A group of CHIMPANZEES is chilling in the FOREST
CHIMPANZEE: Ook?
A bunch of MACHETE-WIELDING PEOPLE capture the CHIMPANZEES and ship them to a SCIENCE LAB for UPLIFTING
CHIMPANZEE: Ook?
An UPLIFTED CHIMPANZEE solves a TOWER OF HANOI PUZZLE slower than a COMPUTER but faster than a FOX NEWS COMMENTATOR
MAD SCIENTIST: Check that out! An uplifted chimpanzee can solve that puzzle! Faster than that dude on Fox News! How cool is that?
RESEARCH DIRECTOR Can we make money? Because I’d really like to make money. I drive an expensive German car. Money is cool.
MAD SCIENTIST: An uplifted chimpanzee! Solving a puzzle!
RESEARCH DIRECTOR Money?
MAD SCIENTIST: I can totally cure Alzheimer’s.
RESEARCH DIRECTOR Cha-ching!
Cut for spoilers; click here for more!

More on the Mathematics of Sex Toys

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I’ve been posting a bit about the Tormentor, a sex toy I’m designing for the sole and nefarious purpose of not letting the user get off. Quick recap in case you haven’t seen the project so far: it’s a vibrator connected to a programmable microcontroller that’s programmed to run the vibrator in random patterns for random lengths of time with random pauses in between, to keep the wearer sexually aroused but without being q-u-i-t-e enough to allow the wearer to come.

Because, yeah, I’m kind of a bastard.

My sweetie lapis_lazuli beta tested the first standalone prototype, the Tormentor version 0.2, and the biggest problem that arose was that the deice was just too damn bulky.

Part of this was the fault of using a 9V battery to run the microcontroller, but part of t was the fact that the Arduino Uno board I’m using is just plain big.

I mentioned this problem to roadknight last time I was in San Francisco, seeing how he’s also a micorocontroller hacker and general mad scientist. He suggested that I use a Teensy USB board in place of the Arduino, and even gave me a spare that he happened to have handy.

The name doesn’t lie.


Size comparison, top to bottom: 9-week-old Tonkinese kitten, Arduino Uno, Teensy USB

The Teensy is certainly that; it was the second-smallest programmable microcontroller in his collection. (The first was an obscure Chinese something something on a flexible board, about the height of a grain of rice and three times that long.)

I’ve started looking into building the Tormentor version 0.3 around a Teensy. It’ll take a bit of work; the Teensy lacks an on-board voltage regulator, for instance. I’m thinking of using a 6.3v lithium battery to drive both the Teensy and the sex toy; I’ll have to cobble together a recharge/regulator circuit of some sort, but it should let me get the finished gadget very, very small indeed.

The Teensy people don’t understand something that Apple does: User experience matters. The Teensy board is unlikely ever to knock over the Arduino as the reigning champ of DIY microcontrollers, even though the Teensy is smaller and has better technical specifications, because the user experience when it comes to programming a Teensy is, to put it bluntly, abysmal.

You don’t get no Arduino-style all-in-one IDE and device programmer, where you can type code into a window and press a button and bam! The device is working! Oh, no. The Teensy requires you to install a gcc compiler, then type your code in a text editor, run it through gcc with make, and then load the resulting hex file onto the board with a loader program. It’s archaic and barbaric, and it brings back memories of my Programming 101 class in college, in which I wrote 8080 assembly on a CDC Cyber 760 mainframe, compiled it to a hax hex file, copied it onto a floppy disk, then ran it on a CP/M machine using a hex loader.

Someone, please kill me now.

There is, though, an Arduino IDE plugin for the Teensy, and though it’s a bit weird and doesn’t run all Arduino code, it looks like it should work for me.