I’m about to leave to pick up kellyv from the airport. Big grins… 🙂

Shelly just told me I walk like a geek. And not just any geek, but specifically an electronics geek.

I’m confused…

Last week, I introduced Shelly and my friends K., E., and K. to oneof my all-time favorite games, Mao.

Mao is named after Mao Tse Tung, the one-time Communist dictator of China. It’s a card game with a simple premise: The players (except the dealer) are not allowed to know the rules of the game before they play, and the players are punished for not knowing the rules.

Kind of like life in China, really.

The dealer can’t win the game. The dealer is the only person who knows the rules when play begins, and players must learn the rules by being punished when they break those rules. If you’re a good player, you strive to learn from other people’s mistakes.

It’s a great party game. There are thousands of varieties, with new ones cropping up all the time, so that players who’ve played before can still enjoy (if enjoy is the right word) Mao. Varieties exist which are drinking games, stripping games, sex games, or all three, though the basic version of Mao involves none of these things.

Just in case you want to inflict this game on those you know and love, here’s the variant we played:

Rules for Mao

…and indeed it has been. This has not been a day for Getting Things Done.

Five more days…

…until kellyv gets home. She’s been visiting her folks in Virginia for over a week, and the bed isn’t the same without her in it.

Lions and Tigers and Hyenas, Oh My!

Shelly and I went to Busch Gardens on Saturday, and stayed until an hour and a half after closing. We didn’t realize the park had closed, see, and we had to be escorted out by security…

…oops.

I haven’t been to Busch Gardens–a local theme park and wild animal exhibit, for the non-Floridians out there–in quite a number of years. I used to go there often, once upon a time, with an old friend of mine named Robin; our relationship ended on a very bad note, due in no small measure to my own poor behavior, and I haven’t returned much since then. It’s changed dramatically in the past eleven years.

Shelly got the once-over from a very large lion at a very close distance (think four inches here) who no doubt thought she might be about as tasty as I find her; that was kind of fun.

Peace and quiet, sunshine, and pornography

Sunday brought a trip to Lettuce Lake Park, the place where kellyv and I were married. It’s a gorgeous nature preserve on teh edge of the Hillsborough River. Shelly and I though it’d be a nice place to get away from the computer for a while.

Have I ever mentioned that I have a poor sense of direction?

I live near the part. I was married in the park. I had to call kellyv for directions to find the park.

Yes, I’m lame.

It was a beautiful day, though, and we had a wonderful time nonetheless, observing the tranquil splendor of wild animals devouring each other with ruthless, pitiless determination in the eternal struggle to survive.

Afterward, it was time to make some pornography. With a large, steel battle axe.

The idiocy of the Patriot

Been spending a fair bit of time lately with my friend J., who is in the middle of a nasty divorce from her husband. Said husband is fighting for custody of the kids, despite the fact that he has a past record of…er, abusing the kids.

Apparently, this doesn’t matter much to the judge involved in the case, a man with a line of reasoning that goes something like “Well, I see you serve in the military, and everyone in the military is a good person…and I think people deserve a second chance. So I’m going to give you the kids for a while, just don’t abuse them this time, okay?”

Where do people like this come from? Do they spontaneously generate from clogged toilets in City Hall? I don’t get it.

…it’s 10:17 in the morning, you still aren’t dressed, and already you’ve done the electronics assembly for two remote controlled sex toys and hired an outside salesman.

Soldering naked is an…er, interesting experience.

I should get dressed now.

…I haven’t been posting anything of substance lately. Part of the problem, I think, is that it’s difficult to properly document your life when you’re up to your eyeballs in the living of it.

Better documentation is coming. In the meantime, here’s a silly throwaway test (but it must be true, the Internet says so!):

I’ve put several new T-shirt designs on the Villain Tees Web site that lordfuckbeast and I own, including some of the ones shown here:

Check ’em out…I’m very proud of them.

With thanks to feorlen:

American Values at work in Iraq.

And do you know what that means? It means it’s time for another conservative Republican lunkhead to stand up for bigotry and prejudice!

In the spotlight today, following in the footsteps of other notable conservative Republican bigots such as Trent Lott and “Bouncing” Bobby Barr (the man who made none other than Larry Flynt say “That guy’s a pervert!”) is Republican Senator Rick Santorum.

Our buddy Rick, obviously not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, appears to espouse a somewhat paradoxical view of the American heterosexual nuclear family–that is, that it sucks, and nobody in his right mind would choose it unless forced to.

Of course, he probably doesn’t know that’s what he’s saying. But how else can you explain his idea that condoning non-traditional relationships “ the death knell of the American family“?

Yep, that’s right, this yahoo believes that if gays get together, the American family will cease to exist. Implicit in this strange notion is the unspoken belief that people choose heterosexual monogamous families only because there is no other choice–that if we allowed other choices, then nobody would choose a heterosexual monogamous marriage, and that would be the end of the nuclear family.

Psychologists say we do tend to re-invent the world in our own image. One has to wonder if Senator Rick believes nobody would ever choose a heterosexual, monogamous marriage unless forced because he himself would…er, not choose a heterosexual, monogamous marriage.

Yes, this is a rant. Read at your own risk.

I’ve been involved in both BDSM and polyamory since long before I had words to describe eaither (and, for that matter, since before the word “polyamory” even existed). I’ve been part of the organized poly community for quite a number of years, but generally speaking, I’ve tended to avoid the organized BDSM community.

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot more time in the BDSM community, and I’m beginning to remember why it is I’ve avoided it.

A friend of mine who lives, like I do, in both worlds once described a poly meeting as “Kind of likea BDSM munch, but the people are nicer.” And there’s a bit of truth to it.

This is not a diatribe against everyone in the BDSM community. I’ve met some very cool, very intelligent people in the scene, and many of these people I count among my friends.

But there are also quite a number of people I’ve encountered who are about as much fun as a toothache. To wit:

– The “7th Level Antler-Headed Yak Boy (fourth house, nineteenth tax district)” types. These are the guys (and they’re almost always men) who form elaborate societies with intricate rules and protocols, and give themselves flowery titles to boot.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that. The problem comes from the idea that once you’ve mastered someone’s list of rules, probably yanked from some old pulp science-fiction novel, that you’ve mastered the intricities of domination and submission. You haven’t; you’ve just memorized someone else’s rules. D/s is arguably one of the most complex forms of all human relationships, and it’s different for everyone–something that works for one person doesn’t apply to another. Mastering one set of protocols no more makes you an expert than mastering macaroni and cheese makes you a five-star chef.

– The pathologically insecure. These people often refer to themselves exclusively as “Master (or Mistress) Thus-and Such,” and are more than happy to describe you exactly, in great deal, how and why they’ve mastered the fine art of BDSM, and why you should be grateful to sit at their feet and pick up such crumbs of arcane knowledge they see fit to provide.

Disagree with them, even about something minor, and the entire elaborate facade built to protect their insecurities comes crashing down. You have not seen histronics until you’ve suggested to such a person that perhaps there’s some element of D/s he hasn’t considered.

Hint: Being a master is like being enlightened. If you have to tell people that you are–you aren’t.

– The Domly Doms. These guys–and again, they’re almost always guys–self-identify as alpha males; they strut, they preen, they impress one another with the size of their stables of submissives. Their submissives never stick around for long; the stables rotate, because at the end of the day, interspecies dating never works. It’s just too damn hard for a human submissive to maintain a romance with a peacock.

– The completely unsocialized. These are the ones who can make a convention of Trekkies point and say “Damn, those people have poor social skills!” Many of these guys lead one to suspect that they’re part of the community because no other community’ll have them.

Hint: I understand foot fetishes as much as the next guy, but do not walk up to me and, without introduction, ask me to take off my shoes. Especially if you don’t know my sexual orientation and you’re a guy. What’s that, you say? There’s nothing sexual about feet? Well, guess what–anything that arouses you or gets you off is an intimate act, even if, in a different context, it might be completely benign.

– The One True Wayers. These are usually the people in “TPE” (total power exchange) relationships–people who live acting out a full-time master/slave relationship, who sneer at the “players”–namely, those who don’t live their entire lives in their roles–and especially those who (oh, dear God) switch roles.

Hint: If you predicate the whole of your romantic relationship, and indeed the whole of your life, along a single axis, don’t think even for half a second that you have a deeper understanding of D/s than those whose experience is broader and whose palettes are wider. You want to live in a master/slave relationship? Hey, that’s cool, whatever turns you on. You want to think that gives you a better understanding of the right way to do it? Go sit in the back of the bus with the Baptists, the fundamentalist Muslims, and all the other yahoos who think there’s only one right way to live.

…or, how to be goofy and creepy at the same time.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which in the past has funded such experimental projects as ARPAnet (an experimental computer network that was later renamed the Internet) is currently funding a project called the “Self-Healing Mine Field.”

The basic premise is this: An army lays down a field of antitank mines. The mines all communicate with each other, and have the ability to move. If someone clears a path through the minefield, the mines react by automatically rearranging themselves so the path is closed.

And you though people had trouble clearing out minefields left behind from long-forgotten wars now.

There’s a Flash animation about the project that you have to see to believe here.