Many random things, and pickles

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First off, I present to you a stuffed animal inspired by my post about conduct in the dungeon, given to me by dayo, who upon reading it went out to Build-A-Bear and created this soft, floppy-eared, leather clad specimen:

Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you to Bunnykin Spankypants. And yes, dayo is in SO much trouble.

Many cell phones use a predictive text entry system called T9. T9 attempts to make texting faster, by “recognizing” common words as you begin to key them in, and filling out the rest. For example, if you hit 8 4 on your keyboard, the T9 system will recognize that it’s more likely you are attempting to type “th” than “vg”. T9 uses a dictionary of words, which it consults as you hit letters to try to anticipate what word you’re typing. Everyone knows this.

The T9 system built into my Motorola Razr is an adaptive T9 system; if you type a particular word multiple times, it will “remember” that word and rank that word higher in its probability table than other words that begin with the same combinations.

I inherited my Razr from figment_j. Apparently, she has used it to do text messaging in the past. If I hit the number 5, which corresponds with the letters “j,” “k,” and “l,” the phone’s very first guess about what I intend to type is “lust.” If I hit the number 2, which can be “a,” “b,” or “c,” the phone immediately guesses “boots!”. If I type 66, its first guess is “not here.”

Shelly would like to hijack the collected perversion wisdom of my friends list to a devious noble end. Involving pickles. Literally or figuratively; it’s up to you.

There is, you see, a past time that has become a fixture at church socials and picnics and other wholesome get-togethers called “pickle spitting.” It’s exactly what it sounds like: people put wole pickles in their mouths and see who can spit them the farthest.

“Pickle spitting” just sounds obscene. In fact, it really sounds like it should be a euphemism for a deviant sex act. And, sadly, it’s not.

That’s where you come in.

In a comment to this post, leave a suggestion (or two) for a deviant sex act that you think should be referred to as “pickle spitting.” By working together, we can corrupt and pervert this harmless activity, once and for all!

The Rules

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In Which Franklin gets all Old Testament about conduct in the dungeon.

ON CONDUCT

When thou dost come unto me and beseech me, saying, “Verily, do I request of you a good paddling,” then surely I will grant unto thee a good paddling. During the period of the paddling, thou shalt not say unto me “What was that, a mosquito?”, nor compare thy paddling to the flight of any other insect, or any creeping thing upon the earth, be it a moth, or a caterpillar; nor draw any likeness between the instrument of thy paddling and the feathers of the birds above; for surely shalt thy paddling grow mighty and endless, and welts shall be upon thy backside for four and thirty days.

And in those days when thou art being flogged, thou shalt not giggle and wag thy ass in a taunting manner, nor squirm and attempt to escape when the flogging becomes greater for it, for then wilt thou be cast into bondage, so that thine ass will no longer be able to wiggle, nor shalt thou be able to squirm.

Thou shalt not speak with thy mouth full, though moaning is okay.

Neither shalt thou allow the passions of thy loins to reach the pinnacle of their fruition, save for those times when I commandeth thee; and in those times, thou shalt come with the force of a raging firestorm, with much screaming and wailing; for thy screams of ecstasy are pleasing to me.

Thou shalt wear no clothing that is displeasing in my sight, nor place within thy pants back issues of National Geographic magazine, to protect thy backside from the force of my hand; for verily I will notice, and remove the magazine, and upon your backside shall I become medieval. So it is written.

Thou shalt not take thy master’s name in vain, nor forget thy master’s title when asked. Thou shalt say “sir” or “maestro” when asked thy master’s title. Thou shalt not say “buttercups,” nor “sugarpants,” nor even “bunnykins,” nor refer to any other cute and cuddly beast that doth roam the earth. Neither shalt thou say “Oh yeah? Make me!” For truly will I then make you, and the bruises shall be on your bum like a plague of locusts unto Egypt.

And speaking of Egypt, when the wetness doth issue from between thy thighs like the waters of the Nile, say not to me “Please, i do not want it,” for verily shall I judge thy words to be falsehoods, and these words shall not be heard.

WTF?

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I feel like I missed something.

I spent most of the evening and most of the night working on the new Symtoys site; dayo has actually developed a timetable for me (bless her process-loving heart), and Im int he habit now of doing nightly uploads to the sandbox server as I finish new sections. Looks like it’ll actually be finished ready to make live very soon.

I didn’t get to bed until about 2 AM last night (the kitty Liam was being exceptionally affectionate, even for him, and kept waking me up with “I CAN HAS LOVE NOW PLS?”). Got up late for work today, and…

…nobody’s at the office. There’s not a car on the road, which is a nice change from Duluth traffic, but I did see a car piled into a tree on the way in to the office. Door was still open, nobody there. All of the businesses in the business park look like they’re closed. The Intertubes have been in yoyo mode all day–up and down and up and down. There’s a funny smell in the air, and what looks to be a wrecked helicopter, of all things, in the parking lot across the street.

What’d I miss?

In which Franklin learns what it is to be overwhelmed

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“Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”
–Henry Miller

This post is likely to seem a bit disjointed and chaotic. (And long; deal with it!) This is as it should be; life these days has been a bit disjointed and chaotic. This is not necessarily a bad thing, mind; normally, I thrive on chaos. But every now and then, it’s kinda nice to have a break, y’know?

My mother has this saying that she used to use to irritate me with. Any time I complained about any element of my life, she’d look at me and say “It’s a consequence of your chosen lifestyle.”

She’s right, too.

On the nature of work

The company I work with (and I’m a minority partner in) has been, for lack of a better phrase, on the verge for many years now. The company makes a hand-held storm and lightning detector and tracker; it’s actually a pretty slick little gadget, which can detect lightning storms from about 75 miles away by the extremely characteristic EMP profile produced by cloud-to-ground lightning, and by virtue of a great deal of mathematical wizardry involving fast Fourier transformations and other big words, calculate the distance, speed and direction of travel, and ETA of the storm. It then tracks the storm right to the device.

The company has been desperately underfunded and desperately short of cash for the entire time I’ve worked with them; in fact, for about a year they couldn’t pay me regularly at all. They recently got some venture capital (not enough) and relocated to Atlanta, where they’ve been paying me more or less regularly a quantity that’s more or less sufficient to keep a roof overhead and food on the table.

Recently, they’ve encountered a problem that many startups face without being aware that it’s a problem: they’ve suddenly become too successful. We’re now selling gizmos faster than we can build them, in part because of a significant change in marketing strategy. In the past, these gizmos have sold to military, government, and commercial users; after all, these are the people likely to be left with their ass on the line in a sudden thunderstorm. You don’t want to be climbing telephone poles or cell phone towers with a storm on the way.

But now the gizmo has been picked up by retail resellers–something that we never thought would be significant, because focusing on home consumers never really seemed like much of a business opportunity.

And it’s going bonkers. We’re signing deals with retail chains left and right. Hammacher Schlemmer just bought an entire production run. And this is a problem, because producing more gizmos on very short notice is very expensive, and the fact that we’re selling these things so fast doesn’t mean we’re making money as fast; we don’t see the cash for 30, 60, or even 90 days. But we still gotta pay to build ’em up front.

Interesting times indeed.

On the nature of opportunity

When opportunity knocks, it’s always at the most inopportune of times.

For months, I’ve been working on a major revision to my sex game Onyx, which has been going quite slowly for a number of reasons, not the least of which are that this isn’t my day job, the new revision involves a total rewrite of very large sections of code, and the beta testers keep pointing out playability issues which I believe are valid.

Concurrently with this, I’ve also been working on an enormous revision to the Symtoys itself, which will see it become roughly ten times the size it is now and will also sport an entirely new look, as the current site is, to be blunt, appallingly ugly. The new site will have all kinds of kinky sex how-tos, tutorials on everything from rope bondage to improvised sex toys, and even a sex toy store.

Last week, I got an email from the editors of Playgirl magazine. They have a “do it yourself” how-to column, apparently, and in October they want to feature the Symtoys Web site in the column. Which is good, but the timing sucks, since I’m still depressingly far from having the site revision completed. Or if not “completed,” at least in a state where it can be uploaded and made live.

And on top of that, an interested party has offered me an advance on the book on polyamory I’ve been working on (but mostly not working on) for a while now. I really want to finish this book, and now I have a strong incentive to move it to the top of the List Of Things To Do.

I have a pile of proposed changes to the outline suggested by the editor I’d been working with; I need to dust off the files, make the changes, and get back into that again.

On automobile license tags

I’ve finally got ’round to doing things like registering my car in Georgia and stuff. I got some personalized license tags, for the first time ever:

The tag reads “H PLUS,” which only a small number of transhumanists is likely to get. It’s okay, though; the people who do get it are cool. 🙂

I love my little car…

On Links and Stuff

slouchinphysics, you’ll appreciate this one; it relates to the conversation we had last weekend about China surpassing the US as a center for research and technology. It’s an excerpt from a paper published in the 60s about particle physics in China, the prequel to which is a great example of what happens when science and political doctrine collide. But lest we think that the same sort of nonsense doesn’t happen over here: the Creationsits, unable to get their bullshit rubbish published in respected peer-reviewed journals, are trying to create a ‘peer reviewed’ journal of their own. (Props to 6-bleen-7 for the links.)

phoenixgeisha has proposed a challenge: create a CD of songs which, when heard by another listener, give the listener a sense of who you are as a person. I think this sounds like great fun.

Some other folks have created a programming language based on lolcats. Here’s Hello World written in lolcode:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE “HAI WORLD!”
KTHXBYE

And finally, satellite view of contrail clutter left by passenger airline flights. This is an amazing picture.

On cats

Shelly was up over the weekend, and took the kitty Molly with her when she returned to Florida. Now figment_j‘s kitty liam is all I have left.

Liam and Molly didn’t much get along (or rather, Liam was madly, frantically in love with Molly, and Molly didn’t care much for Liam–its a good thing cats don’t feel heartbreak as acutely as people!), so the relocation of Molly was necessary.

I like having Liam. He reminds me of figment_j. The fact that all my relationships are long-distance now sux0rz.

Visions of Chicago

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Last month, dayo flew me out to Chicago for about five days. I didn’t take as many pictures as I’d planned to, because we were to busy having fun, but I did get a few, which I resent (edit: Present! Present!) for your viewing pleasure.

Chicago from the top of the ferris wheel at the pier on a particularly gorgeous day. The first day we’d planned to run around exploring the city turned out to be rainy and yucky, but subsequent days more than made up for it.

Nothing to see here, move along…

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Your Score: Sauron

70% Evil, 90% Intelligence, 80% Common Sense

Annatar, The Black Hand, The Ring-maker, The Red Eye — Sauron went by many names over the generations of his dark and twisted rule. For thousands of years, he terrified the inhabitants of the land. His knowledge was vast, his ability to control was unmatched. Originally the servant of a greater evil, he took command when his master was banished from the world, never to return. He had an intimate knowledge of craftworks and various magics, which he employed to great effect to build one of the greatest, darkest of lairs in a region so twisted and corrupt, life itself simply gave up upon entering. He also went on to create what may possibly be the smallest, simplest of super weapons known, that granted him near complete control over the lands. The one crucial mistake he made, however, was to bind his very existence to that super weapon, and when it was destroyed in the very fires that created it, Sauron found his essence shattered and destroyed.

Sauron is identified as being extremely evil, possessing incredibly high intelligence and great amounts of common sense. For all intents and purposes, Sauron is quite possibly the greatest of Overlords to have ever reigned.

Quote:

Of old there was Sauron the Maia, whom the Sindar in Beleriand named Gorthaur. In the beginning of Arda Melkor seduced him to his allegiance, and he became the greatest and most trusted of the servants of the Enemy, and the most perilous, for he could assume many forms, and for long if he willed he could still appear noble and beautiful, so as to deceive all but the most wary.

Source of Overlord: Lord of the Rings

Link: The Evil Overlord Test written by veqhturi on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

The truth, painful as it is to admit, is that I’m far too much of an optimist to make a proper evil overlord. While I can appreciate the value of post-apocalyptic nuclear devastation as much as the next guy, and God knows that I could scarcely do a worse job of ruling the world than those who’re doing it right now, I think at the end of the day I’m basically too happy to do it properly.

J.R.R. Tolkein, who invented the avatar of evil which this quiz says is closest to my own personal style, didn’t believe in divine punishment for evil after death. He felt, and with some cause, that evil is punished now. All the characters in his books who might reasonably be called “evil,” including Sauron himself, were miserable.

There’s a connection between unhappiness and evil. It’s not positive, happy people with plenty to live for who strap bombs to themselves or fly airplanes into buildings. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, which I’m too sleepy to dig out at the moment.