Waffle House is a strange place at 2AM on a Saturday.
My Talespinner came home from work yesterday in a bad state…bad enough to bundle her off to urgent care, where we met The Worst Triage Nurse in the World, a statement I feel quite confident in making even without, you know, having met every triage nurse in the world. He failed to recognize symptoms of anaphylaxis when it was right in front of him…
…so we spent over an hour in the waiting room and another half-hour in an actual room before a nurse came in, took one look at her, said “ER, right now,” and had her admitted.
The ER reached the same conclusion, shot her full of antihistamines and steroids, and a surprisingly short while later she was right as rain. Funny how correct diagnosis works. I will say the whole thing was a wonderful example of the best things about polyamory. Her other boyfriend came up to meet us in hospital and helped her roomie and I care for her.
Once she was discharged, we landed at Waffle House. Waffle House is, as I may have mentioned, a strange place at 2AM on a Saturday. The two burly guys in the corner wolfing down immense plates of hash browns were clearly werewolves, and I think our server was a fey changeling or something.
Of course, because she is who she is, my Talespinner came up with a new story idea. She didn’t earn that name from nothing!
This morning, I answered a question over on Quora, the social media site where I spend most of my time these days.
The question asked, What do partners say to each other in sex, like when you are thrusting and such?
As it turns out, I had an example from some rather spectacular sex last night, the kind of sex that makes you see the face of God, that may have led to my lover and I creating a new literary genre…one that we’re tentatively calling “hyperurbanized noir retrofuturism.” It’s kind of a spinoff of the cyberpunk retrofuturism of entertainment like Bladerunner or Akira or Cyberpunk 2077.
Okay, so.
I call my Talespinner my Talespinner because she has a gift for weaving worlds from words, something she does pretty much all the time, including during sex.
When we have sex, we build shared worlds—we talk about fictional characters and settings in which characters are having sex. We explore fantasies together by inventing these characters and setting them loose in a shared universe very different from ours.
Like the dystopian, oligarchical world we’ve created where the State is controlled by a kleptocratic class and the apparatus of the State, modeled loosely on Stalinist Russia, arrests political dissidents who are conditioned and brainwashed to serve as pleasure objects, leased to the oligarchs for staggering sums of money to fulfill the oligarchs’ most perverse desires. (We’ve opened this shared world to my crush and her other boyfriend, and written over 170,000 words of fiction with a cast of dozens of characters.)
So before I go further, a bit of backstory is necessary.
Some time ago, I shared this H. R. Giger image with my crush:
I said it looks like a machine for forced sexual stimulation, she pointed out that all sexual stimulation can be forced sexual stimulation if it goes on for long enough, and at that point it was off to the races.
Before long we’d invented a world in which an all-female Yakuza-style street gang had arisen with a unique punishment for members who erred: rather than cutting off a finger to atone, they were strapped into this device, then raised into a soundproofed plexiglas cube in the middle of a posh restaurant owned by the gang, where the machine forced orgasm after agonizing, unendurable orgasm from their helpless bodies for eight or nine hours while they screamed and sobbed in uncanny silence for the amusement of the restaurant’s patrons.
I shared this scenario with my Talespinner. One of the things I love about my polycule is that it’s fertile ground for creativity: my Talespinner’s other boyfriend is contributing to an erotic anthology my Talespinner and I will be publishing next year, my wife has created the entire history of fashion for my Black Iron universe; my wife designed the Victorian house that serves as the setting for a novel my crush and I were writing, that my Talespinner may help finish…you get the idea.
It’s magnificent.
Anyway. I shared this scenario with my Talespinner, and together we fleshed out the world a retrofuturist, quasi-cyberpunk world that abandons the signature chrome-steel, neon, weirdly Orientalist fetishistic background of traditional cyberpunk:
for a more grounded environment that’s less chrome and neon and more Cubist hyperurbanization:
Imagine an endless, densely packed urban environment, but not the Sprawl from Neuromancer; rather, this is an immense vista of great towering Cubist architecture, spanned by a complex web of covered pedestrian bridges far above street level—a huge multilevel Cubist metropolis in which you can walk for a dozen blocks or more without ever descending to street level.
Subways accessed through stations beneath the buildings allow travel to the far corners of the immense city without ever setting foot on the street (which is dominated almost exclusively by robotic taxis and self-driving supply vehicles).
Our main character is a member of this all-female gang, young but ambitious and on an upward trajectory through the ranks.
You will notice that the Giger painting features space for two people. What, then, happens when only one person transgresses against the gang’s rules?
In such a case, another gang member may volunteer to serve alongside her or, if no volunteers are forthcoming, one is chosen at random. Serving in this capacity awards a certain measure of honor and respect, more if it’s voluntary than if it’s assigned randomly.
The tale my Talespinner and I wove over many hot kinky sex sessions during the past week or so, involves our unnamed gang-member heroine and an unnamed gentleman who happened to be dining in this restaurant (owned and operated by an ostensibly retired former gang member, of course) on a day when our heroine is randomly chosen to endure hours of unimaginable sexual torment alongside another member caught transgressing the gang’s rules.
He becomes so enamored of this mysterious tattooed woman locked in this cube, suffering so magnificently, that he waits until the restaurant closes and follows her, still shaking and weeping, home.
A dangerous game to be sure, but he is a civilian and has no idea what he’s up against.
He spies on her for weeks, but somehow whenever he tries to follow her to figure out what she does for a living, poof! She vanishes like a ghost.
Eventually, he works up the courage to ask her out for coffee, and is quite surprised when she accepts. They have a few dates, and soon become lovers…
…but…
…but…
…she knows, of course. She knows how she first came to his attention. She knows he has stalked her. And she resolves to teach him a lesson.
Which brings me, in roundabout fashion, to my answer to the question, what do lovers say to each other during sex, like when thrusting and such?
You need to understand that at this point, my Talespinner and I had had sex…um, four times, I think? Not including the threesomes with her other boyfriend the night before.
The last time we had sex, I’d already had…oh, man, I don’t know how many orgasms. Enough I was convinced I couldn’t have another.
That’s when it started.
My Talespinner murmured in my ear an entire scenario in which our heroine took this fellow out on a leisurely day-long date, one where she gave him every possible opportunity to come clean. She even took him to the indoor garden cafe in the building across the street from her apartment, and had lunch with him at the one table overlooking her apartment from which he spied on her.
She was disappointed, of course, that he failed to be forthcoming about his behavior prior to asking her out. Disappointed, but prepared.
So when she invited him back to her apartment, she’d already set up the chair with the straps and the projecting rod and all the implements she needed to impress upon him the value of open, honest communication in a relationship.
Including a rather lovely item of jewelry something like this, but with the blades blades on the fingertips wickedly sharp:
She has, while she binds him, a calm, reasoned conversation with him, about honesty and openness, and how she’d really hoped he’d be more forthcoming, but regardless, the time for that conversation had come, and now there was nothing for it but to talk.
It was around the point where she described the narrow, almost thread-thin, but very strong cords she wrapped around his body to encourage him to remain very still without struggling lest the cords cut painfully into his skin, and the way she ran those thin sharp blades down his skin, that I had the last, strongest, and definitely most painful orgasm of the evening, and indeed of the past several months.
We will likely end up writing a novel set in this world, but there are so many projects in the pipe ahead of it I don’t see us starting on it until 2027 at the earliest.
Now, of course, I’m not suggesting this is what you, dear reader, should necessarily talk about during sex. It may be that hyperurbanized noir retrofuturism isn’t your particular taste.
Perhaps you’d rather talk about the interpersonal social dynamics of My Little Pony, or the alternative economics of non-monetary tips for the pizza delivery dude.
The point is, talk about your interests. Listen to your partner talk about their interests. Find the overlap. Explore the area between.
This might mean that you talk about what you’re doing, or what you’d like to. It might mean you invent characters in fictitious worlds and talk about them. It might mean you talk about Vulcan philosophy, or pon farr rituals, or how the latter doesn’t really mesh with the former but is really more about Gene Roddenberry’s own particular and peculiar sexual tastes.
Whatever.
You don’t need someone else to tell you what’s okay to talk about. Explore! It’s your life and your relationship.
For years, my wife Joreth has teased me about getting me a RealDoll—you know, one of those horrifyingly realistic sex dolls that almost but not quite looks like a wax figure that almost but not quite looks like a real person.
It’s not out of any particular fetish, you understand. Oh, no, it’s far more sinister than that. You see, those sex dools creep me out. I mean really creep me out. The thought of putting my willie in one of them makes my skin crawl. And, since she loves pushing my buttons (this is, in fact, the reason the xenomorph hiphugger sex toy exists), well…
It is only the fact that those dolls cost more than the first three cars I owned combined that has saved me from the squick of mounting a thing that looks just enough like a person to be skin-crawling but not enough to be, you know, pleasurable.
But that’s not what I came here to discuss.
So it came to pass that my Talespinner’s other boyfriend found a full body suit on Ali Express for somethig like $2 including shipping, because globalization and low wages and all the economic hegemony that *flails arms* is part of, you know, all that.
And it came to pass that I thought, hmm, it might be interesting to cast a silicone tentacle on something like that, so the person wearing the bodysuit would seem to have tentacles crawling up their body.
I brought one with me to visit my Talespinner, where my hopes were quickly dashed: the degree of stretch and the fineness of the material precluded any reasonable means to cast silicone tentacles on the fabric and have them stay pot when it stretches.
We ended up doing an impromptu, last-minute photo shoot with the body suit and a prototype tentacle feeldoe strapless strap-on. The results were…
…horrifying.
Gentle Reader, the skin-crawling horror I felt taking photos of this would, if I could sufficiently communicate them to you, send you screaming from your computer in terror this very moment.
Since I am often the agent of my own undoing, I immediately had to run off to show them to Eunice and Joreth and say “hey, hey, check this out, these photos make my skin crawl!”
We are all drawn like moths to a flame to our own destruction.
Some time ago, I found 45 meters of electroluminescent wire on Amazon. A few months after that, I found thin sheets of edible 24-carat gold foil on Amazon. When one finds EL wire and gold foil, one’s mind, of course, wanders to thoughts of old-school cyberpunk dystopias and the nude female form.
I’m writing this from Springfield, where I’m visiting my Talespinner, who is remarkable in many respects, not the least of which is the way she encourages my incorrigible nature. So naturally, when I expressed the inchoate thoughts brewing in my head re: EL wire and gold and lots of silicone lube, she not only agreed to become a work of art, but even helped make those inchoate thoughts choate.
So it came to pass that we three (me, my Talespinner, and her other boyfriend) gathered around her coffee table cutting thin (as in about 400 atoms thick) gold foil into geometric shapes and putting an entire case of AA batteries into EL wire battery packs, upon which we retired to her bedroom to cover her with silicone lube for that wet-n-shiny look.
Gold foil is, as it turns out, difficult to apply to skin without tearing, a process that requires patience and careful attention. That done, after a brief delay so that the model could have a spontaneous orgasm, we started wrapping her in wire.
At last, more than an hour after we started, all was ready. Ans the results were…well, I find them extraordinary.
That last one kinda makes me think cyberpunk yoga. “You do Downward Facing Dog. I do Ronin Steppin’ Razor. We are not the same.”
Cutting the thin gold foil turned out to be so problematic, I plan to try laser-cutting it to see if that works. (My 10-watt diode laser cutter isn’t generally up to metal, but hey, literally only 400 atoms thick, so who knows?) I’m picturing something like the Matrix waterfall cascading down her chest, but in gold.
We’re still finding teeny flecks of gold in unlikely places.
Regular readers are no doubt aware that I quite like tentacles. I don’t mean I like tentacles the way a marine biologist likes tentacles, but rather I like tentacles the way a schoolgirl in a dodgy Japanese animated movie of the sort you don’t share with your parents likes tentacles.
I have recently been working on a project to make a tentacle strapon, but not the sort of strapon that’s just shaped like a tentacle, oh no. I’m looking for a more…authentic tentacle experience.
To that end, I’ve 3D printed an articulated three-wire tentacle core in soft TPU. It took some faffing, but I eventually ended up with a tentacle core that can be attached to a strapon harness. Here’s a first test of the v2.0 articulated tentacle core:
I plan to wrap this core with a silicone sheath. I’ve already made test castings of a couple of silicone sheaths, and plan to shoot video of them next week when I visit my Talespinner.
This is a test casting of the sheath; I’ve since tweaked the mold and made a second test casting, which I will be using in the tests next week.
I plan to change the design to make it more…err, usable based on what I learn next week.
My goal going forward is to mount an Arduino and stepper motors on the back of the harness, so that the tentacle writhes and wriggles on its own. Once that version is done, the next step is to equip the harness with motion and proximity sensors, so that the tentacle moves toward anything that comes near the wearer.
I am currently unable to post any comments anywhere on Quora. It seems moderation has suspended my commenting privileges. Buckle up, the reason is a wild ride.
In the past few months, I’ve noticed more and more often that Quora is being used as a platform for malware distributors to ply their wares. I’m increasingly often seeing spam on Quora that doesn’t go to shady pharmacy sites or dodgy penis-pill mongers, but to sites that redirect, often through multiple intermediaries, to malware.
A while back, I found a Quora “SEO spammer” whose spam posts go to a site that, thanks to a malicious JavaScript, redirects to malware. It’s not a consistent redirection; sometimes it shows a banner ad from a shady ad platform, sometimes it tries to drop malware disguised as phony antivirus software.
The ads are posted by Quora user Anafmadi20, who uses a URL shortener to disguise the destination of the ads he posts. The URL shortener redirects to a Google Sites site (which is now down; I filed a report with Google, which terminated the Google Site) that then redirected to a traffic handler that redirected to a site with the malicious JavaScript. This is one of this posts:
The link on this site leads to a terminated Google Sites page, but before his Google Sites account was terminated, it led through several intermediaries here:
Now, I’ve reported all of Anafmadi20’s content for spam, and Quora deleted some of it but allowed him to continue posting more. So, after posting the malware distributor for spam, I also posted a comment warning others not to click on the link because it goes to malware.
Apparently Quora moderation decided that comment was spam, so I’m now unable to post comments at all (even on my own answers).
This isn’t an isolated instance, by the way. There are multiple Quora users who are posting malware links; in fact, on the BlackHatWorld forum[1], an online forum catering to spammers, con artists, scammers, and malware distributors, there is an entire tutorial on how to use Quora to do this. (Yes, I’m serious.)
Quora is one of the favored black hat spam and malware distributors, thanks to a combination of weak technical defenses against spam, permissiveness toward repeat abusers, poor mechanisms to spot serial abusers, and weak moderation.
How embarrassing.
Anyway, there are organized rings for malware distribution operating on Quora.
For example, the History Hist spam gang. These are a group of people who post spam answers copy-pasted from other sites and run through ChatGPT to change the wording slightly, on various topics pertaining to history, often WWII. The things this spam group posts are often wildly inaccurate (that creates engagement in the comments, which feeds Quora’s distribution algorithm), and end in a link that says (Read Full).
The (Read Full) link goes to a Quora space called “History Hist” that then has links blog filled with answers copy-pasted from Quora. The blog site has rigged JavaScripts that display ads and sometimes redirect to malware downloaders.
I have, of course, reported the accounts and posts used by this spam and malware ring, and Quora has, of course, failed to act; the links continue to remain active. (See reference to “weak moderation” above.)
Not all of the History Hist posts have links. This is straight out of the BlackHatWorld tutorial: effective Quora spamming is done by posting content, often with deliberate errors on a subject people feel passionately about, to generate engagement.
Then, after people have started commenting, and the Quora algorithm has started putting the content into wider distribution, edit the content to add the rigged link.
So. Apparently Quora is, if not okay with this, at least tacitly tolerates it.
Why am I writing this?
Two reasons:
I won’t be posting comments any more, apparently. I’m not ignoring you lovely people.
Be very very very careful about any link you click on Quora. Quora has long been filled with spam, but it’s now getting increasingly dangerous as well. I strongly advise not clicking on Quora links unless you’re quite careful and you know what you’re doing.
1. Yes, I read BlackHatWorld, for much the same reason I read incel dot es and other incel forums—it’s nice to keep up with what the shitty people are doing. I’m not linking to the tutorial.
Last night, whilst casually doomscrolling Elon Musk’s weird hatesite Twitter (if he can deadname his daughter, I’ll deadname his propaganda engine), I randomly came across a long screed from a MAGA True Believer that I screencapped, because it offers such an interesting insight into the alternate reality of MAGA.
Here it is for the benefit of screen readers:
No one in my family who voted for Trump owns any stocks
For all the rich Democrats panicking today- you now know how it must have felt
When Jimmy Carter destroyed 400,000 trucking jobs
When Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, shipping jobs to Mexico and Canada, causing industry to board up in the middle of the country, left to rot
When he deregulated the finance industry and lead us to the 2008 housing crisis
And When Obama told us: “sorry, some jobs just aren’t coming back”
If you see this post, I hope you look in the mirror at some point today and recognize the destruction your own party has played in the lives of working class Americans
This is what liberation day is all about
No one is going to weep for your stock portfolio
Where were you when we lost our American dream?
If this isn’t the perfect example of self-sabotaging, “hurt myself to own the libs” alternate history narcissism, I don’t know what is. It’s absolutely fascinating.
And the thing is, it’s not completely bonkers. It starts with a kernel of truth. Yes, the American dream did bypass a lot of people, especially poor, uneducated workers who were told that factory job would always be there for them after they dropped out of high school, and for generations it was…until it wasn’t any more.
They woke up one day to a bleak landscape of poverty, unemployment, drugs, and complete irrelevance. They have few prospects and no path forward.
They’re angry, reasonably. They’re suffering. They feel neglected and passed over because they are neglected and passed over. They’re unable to put food on the table, they’re spiraling into drug addiction, and whenever they try to say anything about it, they’re treated as the butt of standup comedy jokes, if anyone pays any attention to them at all.
And in their rage, they’re shooting themselves in the gut with a shotgun in the hopes that some of the splash will make life worse for the liberals they blame for all their woes.
So, let’s talk about this post.
This is too long to fit in a Tweet, thanks to the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: it always takes more work to counter bullshit than it takes to vomit it up in the first place.
So from the top:
Yes, she’s correct that her MAGA family doesn’t own stock. It’s quite likely her MAGA family can’t really explain what the stock market even is or how it works. When you live in, say, rural Kentucky, Wall Street seems like it’s on another planet, utterly unconnected with you or your life. It goes up, it goes down, who cares? Doesn’t affect you. If some rich people (not sure why they say rich Democrats, the people who make money in the stock market tend to be Republicans) lose money, what of it? Doesn’t affect them!
They actually believe this, because they don’t understand how the stock market works, so they see no connection between the price of stocks on Wall Street and the construction of a new factory in Louisville.
But more than that, they are hurt and angry, and their pain and rage has been manipulated to point at the wrong target. (This is easy to do; angry people are always vulnerable to manipulation.)
I’m going to go from the bottom up, because the first bit, the one about Jimmy Carter “destroying trucking jobs,” is especially delicious and ironic, cutting right to the heart of the intellectual dysfunction of MAGA.
So:
When Obama told us: “sorry, some jobs just aren’t coming back”
…he was right.
One of the fundamental conceits of the MAGA movement, which is first and foremost a populist movement of low-information voters, is that the President is somewhere between a king and a dictator, with a bunch of buttons on his desk that control everything from the price of eggs to the number of jobs at the local Piggly Wiggly.
To them when Obama said “those jobs aren’t coming back,” he wasn’t stating something that was already true, he was making it so. He decided those jobs wouldn’t come back, and then did…whatever it is they imagine that presidents do to make it happen.
They genuinely don’t get that their jobs disappeared because their boss outsourced to China, not because Obama made them go away. They genuinely don’t get that this is fundamental to how capitalism works. They genuinely don’t get that coal mining is done by machines today, not by dudes in overalls carving coal from dark tunnels. They genuinely don’t get that fewer people want to buy coal now.
It’s easier to blame the brown person than to learn basic economics. They genuinely don’t get that the president doesn’t decide how many people the mines hire.
Given a choice between the person who said “your coal mining jobs will never come back, but I will pay you to learn something else!” and the person who said “durr, I love coal, durr,” they chose the latter.
And guess what?
The jobs didn’t come back. Obviously.
When he deregulated the finance industry and lead us to the 2008 housing crisis
This is a common narrative on the Right. “Bill Clinton signed a law that stopped banks from redlining Black people to keep them from buying houses. A bunch of Black people with no money bought houses they couldn’t afford and boom.” Simple, easy to grasp, easy to understand if you don’t have an education.
Problem is, that’s not what happened. For one thing, if it was all Bill Clinton’s doing then why did the housing crisis happen everywhere in the world, not just in the United States? (Easy answer: MAGAs tend not to know or care what happens in the world, the USA is the only thing they know about.)
For another, if it was all about those dumbass poors buying houses they couldn’t afford, how come it overwhelmingly affected lenders who weren’t covered by Bill Clinton’s law? And how come the overwhelming majority of foreclosures happened in suburbs, not inner cities?
There’s a whole dive into this here, but the tl;dr is: It wasn’t Clinton. The truth is complicated; “Clinton did it” fits on a bumper sticker. If you’re poorly educated, bumper sticker logic wins every time.
When Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, shipping jobs to Mexico and Canada, causing industry to board up in the middle of the country, left to rot
One of the things we see among MAGA over and over is this idea that the president who signs a bill is the president who made it. They don’t understand how laws or agreements work; they don’t know how long it takes to egotiate complex treaties.
Bill Clinton signed NAFTA. He did not negotiate it. NAFTA was negotiated by…
Mexican President Carlos Salinas (L), President George H.W. Bush (center), Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (R), October 7, 1992, negotiating NAFTA: The photo MAGA doesn’t want you to see
Typical MAGA, blaming Democrats for what Republicans do, and too incurious, too fundamentally uninterested in understanding the world we live in, to do even the tiniest bit of research. A Google search turns this up in ten seconds, which is nine seconds longer than MAGAs typically want to invest in their knowledge of politics.
And finally, the pièce de résistance:
When Jimmy Carter destroyed 400,000 trucking jobs
One of the articles of faith amongst the right, one of the pillars of the right-wing ideology, is “government bad, m’kay?” As the holy Prophet and Saint Ronald Reagan, peace be unto him, said, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
So in light of that, let’s talk about “Jimmy Carter destroying 400,000 trucking jobs,” because oh, man, this is delicious. MAGA doesn’t know what it wants.
Let’s talk about shipping before 1980. Specifically, let’s talk about how the government regulated shipping:
Trucking companies could only use routes approved by the Interstate Commerce Commission, the government agency overseeing trucking
Truckers could only apply for new routes if they could demonstrate that nobody served those routes, and the ICC approved
Truckers could not add new stops to existing routes without ICC approval
Trucking companies could not take over another company’s route without ICC approval
Sales of one route to another company demanded astronomical prices
Truckers could only charge rates approved by the ICC; requests for rate changes had to be submitted to the government for approval at least 30 days in advance
New trucking companies could not start shipping without government approval; you could not start a shipping business unless the government allowed it
Shippers in an area could object to new companies trying to get started in that area, and could object to new routes being added in their area—which they often did
In other words, trucking was pretty much the exact opposite of what conservatives wanted: No competition, no free enterprise, nobody allowed to start a business without government permission, government approval required for any changes, government setting the price.
The thing about MAGA is it wants what it wants until it wants something else.
There’s too much government regulation in oil drilling! We need to cut the red tape! Drill baby drill!
There’s too much regulation in home mortgages! We need to end government meddling in free markets! Redline, baby, redline!
There’s not enough government regulation in trucking! We need to bring back those old regulations! Protect our truckers’ jobs!
MAGA trying to decide if government regulation is good or bad today
Wait until next Tuesday and they’ll want something else. The only thing all their conflicting, contradictory desires have in common is it’s all the liberals’ fault.
No, that’s not fair. That’s not the only thing these conflicting desires have in common. The other thing they have in common is you have to be utterly ignorant of the basics of how the world works to believe any of this garbage. My God.
This is the fundamental contradiction of populism: populists don’t know what they want, but they sure are passionate about having it.
So there you have it. Insight into the MAGA mind, from a MAGA. Rage, fear, spite, all wrapped up with a neat bow of fundamental ignorance and incuriosity, weaponized against targets they truly do not understand.
Where were we when you lost your American dream?
We were telling you that your anti-intellectualism, your hatred of education, would destroy you in an advanced, technological society.
We were warning you that the world was changing and anyone who didn’t change with it would perish.
We were offering you free education and free training to make your lives and the lives of your children better.
That’s where we were.
The people who destroyed your dream are the ones telling you to blame the libs.
This afternoon I crossed an amazing threshold: I officially shipped out my 1,500th free “Resist” and “Empathy” stickers.
I started this project because I felt helpless about the wholesale dismantling of the United States government and the slide into authoritarianism. I designed two vinyl stickers, one saying “Resist” and one saying “Commit the Sin of Empathy,” which I started sending out for free.
I had no idea this little project would run away from me like it did. Fifteen hundred stickers! Wow.
Today, on the day I passed the fifteen hundred mark, I received some Resist enamel lapel pins. These are now up on my online store too. They’re $10, including shipping in the US and Canada ($3 shipping elsewhere in the world).
I have rainbow holographic foil versions of the stickers, also.
I’ve been absolutely blown away by all the support you all have given this project. I’ve received so many donations so that I can keep printing and distributing more stickers. I would never have been able to do it without this amazing outpouring of help.
I’ve set up a Tips capability in the shopping cart, and I can also take donations at franklin@franklinveaux.com on PayPal or @Franklin-Veaux on Venmo. All of the donations go to printing and distributing more stickers.
In November of last year, I noticed something interesting.
For the past three years, the #1 source of spam reaching my email inbox has been Salesforce, which bought out a bulk email provider called ExactTarget quite some time ago, and took off all the constraints. ExactTarget customers were, post-acquisition, permitted to spam, and the abuse team stopped enforcing anti-spam policies. Result: spammers flocked to SalesForce (hey, SalesForce needed to make back the $2,500,000,000 they spent on ExactTarget somehow!) and my inbox was flooded with crap.
Starting last November, however, the flood of crap from Salesforce dropped to second place. The new #1? An outfit called Mailchannels.
As near as I can tell, Mailchannels is now the preferred email delivery service of choice for the lowest of the low: scammers, people sending fake phish emails to steal passwords, romance and Nigerian prince fraud, you name it.
Over the past few weeks, 46 of the 48 phish emails I have received (95.8%) came through Mailchannels. 100% of the Nigerian prince scam emails I’ve received? Mailchannels. 100% of the romance scam I’ve received? Mailchannels. 92% of the spam overall? Mailchannels.
I took a screenshot of the Mailchannels emails I’ve received a while back, and the results are rather grim:
Wow, that’s a lot of scam, fraud, and phish emails! With percentages like that, Mailchannels must be so proud.
There’s a particularly delicious irony here. See the highlighted entry at the bottom, the one in blue? I have been reporting all the spam emails to Mailchannels. That is a bounce email, when I reported a computer virus I received through Mailchannels. It bounced.
In other words:
Mailchannels knew the email was malware. They sent it to me anyway, but refused to accept it themselves.
Which really tells you everything you need to know about this organization.
What is Mailchannels?
Mailchannels is an “email delivery company.” In English: You pay them money, you send an email to hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of email addresses, and they do everything in their power to make sure your emails don’t get flagged as spam.
A list of their services includes:
Sending emails from “clean” IP addresses not in any spam blocklists.
Switching the servers an email comes from should emails start getting flagged as spam
Using scalable cloud servers to send vast quantities of emails
In other words, if you’re sending Nigerian scam or romance scam or password phish emails, which have a very low rate of return, a service like Mailchannels is exactly what you want.
How do they respond to spam reports?
Ah HA ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
I’ve sent hundreds (literally) of spam reports to Mailchannels. Every single one received the same reply:
From: Swathi Karun <skarun@mailchannels.com> Re: Spam Hi, Thank you for contacting MailChannels support. I have taken necessary action against the reported abuse activity. Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.
And the spam still rolls in. Every day, often from the same spammer with the same content. They don’t even block phishers who send identical phish emails through their servers over and over again.
It cannot possibly be more clear: Mailchannels is a bulletproof spam service provider, that through deliberate action or negligence permits their service to be used by the lowest criminals on the Internet.
What can you do?
Mailchannels doesn’t care. They know they’re in the spam business; they make money from delivering phish and scam emails. They don’t accept spam reports from spam-fighting services like Spamcop.
And repeated emails to Mailchannels abuse doesn’t do anything. There’s one email phisher in particular who sends out fake emails to Dreamhost customers, trying to steal their webhosting passwords; I’ve received more than two dozen of these phish emails from this same phisher through Mailchannels, reported every one, and they keep rolling in.
Fortunately, emails from Mailchannels are easy to spot. If you view the headers, you’ll always find a line like this near the top:
I strongly recommend setting up an email filter using your email program. If the headers contain the word “Mailchannels,” auto-delete the email. Your inbox will thank you.
A short time ago, I started thinking about the fact that I will often do things that are Type 2 fun when I’m having sex.
Quick recap for those who aren’t familiar with the types of fun: Type 1 fun is stuff that’s just fun. Things you enjoy. Things you like doing in the moment. Type 2 fun is fun that isn’t enjoyable in the moment, but that you enjoy the memory of, or telling stories about later. (For many marathon runners, for example, actually running in the marathon itself isn’t fun; it’s painful, uncomfortable, exhausting, and miserable. But there’s joy in having run the marathon—joy in being able to reminisce about it later and in the knowledge that you did it.) Type 3 fun is stuff that just isn’t fun at all—not in the moment, not in the remembering of it, and you are not likely to do it again.
My girlfriend Maxine says there’s also a Type 4 fun: something that isn’t fun in the doing or the remembering, but that a third party has fun telling others about. “Hey, you remember that one time when Bob had that firecracker, and there was that big pail of fish heads…?”
Anyway, I saw an online article that suggested you should never do anything sexually that makes you uncomfortable, which frankly I thought was terrible advice. That got me to thinking about my personal sex onion: the layers of things I will and won’t do in sex.
It looks something like this. Everything inside the largest circle is stuff I’ll do; everything outside it, stuff I won’t.
There’s a lot of stuff inside the circle I don’t enjoy. I’m not a masochist; I don’t get aroused from pain, and it never feels good no matter how sexy the context is. But I will allow lovers to do things like needle play or impact play on me if they’re into it.
I spent years developing the Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon because my wife, who knows my parents took me to see the movie Alien at far too tender an age and it terrified me for decades, suggested the alien facehugger could be made into a strapon sex toy:
My wife wearing a prototype (photo by author)
I am what Eunice calls a “reaction junkie.” It gets me hot seeing my lovers get hot. If there’s something that really really does it for you, something that lights you up and revs your motor, something that turns you on to the point of incandescence, I can probably make it work for me even if it’s not my thing. There’s something amazing and unbelievably sexy about seeing someone you love light up.
Even if it’s uncomfortable in the moment.
In fact, hidden beneath the layers of“ooh, sexy!” is a profound truth of the human condition, one that people who explore kink and people who run marathons share in common: Sometimes, in those moments of discomfort, you learn something about who you really are. Intense experiences bring out hidden parts of us.
As far as intimacy goes, it’s the most intimate thing I can imagine: allowing your lover to push your buttons, or being with a lover who allows you to push theirs, to see you in those moments of genuine authenticity.
I’ve allowed lovers to spank and crop me, to put needles into me, to give me forced orgasms one after the other until I pass out. All those things are inside my personal sex onion. I won’t say I enjoyed them in the moment of doing them, but I feel like all of those experiences have value—they’ve given me insight I might not have any other way.
Life’s cost of entry
The cost of entry of that insight is being willing to do things that challenge you. Which isn’t common, thanks in no small part to the number of people who will tell you, with apparent sincerity and the right intentions, never to do anything that makes you uncomfortable.
Which is advice we apply to no other area of human activity. (Can you imagine someone saying that about running a marathon, signing on for the Marines, learning to sail, learning ballet, or going mountain climbing?) We accept discomfort as the price for many valuable experiences…except sex.
Of course, none of this means you should allow yourself to be pressured into doing things you genuinely don’t want to do. I will almost certainly never run a marathon. Doing something onlyi because it’s uncomfortable…well, that’s the road to madness.
But rejecting something only because it might be uncomfortable? That’s not a way, I think, to live an interesting life. (You may not agree, and that’s okay. Your life, your body, your rules.)
Outcome vs Consent
See that circle down in the bottom right, the one labeled “things I’ve tried at are now a hard no”?
A long long time ago, in a whole different digital age, when LiveJournal was new and social media seemed alight with possibilities beyond political tampering by hostile state-level actors, I saw a conversation online where a guy said he’d never do anything sexual he wasn’t 100% comfortable with, because what if he tried it, he didn’t like it, and then his girlfriend asked him to do it again?
I told him, “then you say no. It’s okay to try something and decide you don’t like it.”
Boom! Mind. Blown.
But it’s true. It’s okay to say no to something you previously said yes to. Again, we understand this intuitively with everything except sex.
I’ve talked about this before, but many people also do a terrible job of separating consent from outcome. If you say yes to something, and decide that oyu hated it, even felt violated by it, your consent was not violated. If you say no to something, and someone does it anyway, then you decide you actually kinda liked it, your consent was still violated.
You cannot label something you agreed to do and then decided you didn’t like a consent violation. You can label something you never said yes to a consent violation, even if after the fact you enjoyed it.
If you freely consent to something, decide you don’t like it, and claim your consent was violated, you’re a shitty person. If you do something to someone who didn’t consent to it, then claim that it was okay because they liked it, you’re a shitty person. I feel like this ought to be obvious, but no matter how many times I say it, it’s not.
If no means no, then yes has to mean yes.
There are things I’ve tried I won’t do again. There are things that I didn’t agree to that weren’t terrible, that I even kinda liked, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was not okay to do something that violated my consent.
It’s okay to agree to things that you later find you didn’t like. Just don’t do them again. Your body, your rules, remember?
Taking apart the onion
The point here is that sex is a lot of things. You can have fun (Type 1 or Type 2!) during sex, yes, but you can also learn about yourself, and your lover, from sex. We know that we do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons…maybe we simply need to remember sex is no different. We know marathons are uncomfortable, but also that people choose to do them anyway, and running a marathon last year doesn’t obligate you to run another next year.
