If you could move inside my head, you’d…well, honestly, you’d probably find the experience a little disconcerting, because who does that? Moving into someone else would likely be unsettling no matter who you did it to, unless they were, like, an identical twin or something.
But if you could move inside my head, you’d probably find it especially unsettling, because I don’t live in my body. People assume that a body is something you live in, but actually, from an entirely subjective viewpoint, my sense of self is more a big ball of wibbly-wobbly…stuff. I am, most of the time, a ball that floats behind my eyes and operates my body like one of those mecha things in a certain genre of Japanese science fiction. A meat mecha. A meat mecha made of flesh and bone and bizarre squishy biology.
But this isn’t an essay about that. It’s an essay about dancing.
I like dancing. I enjoy dancing. Some years ago, I started getting into partner dancing. My wife and my crush are both avid, skilled, talented dancers, so they were, as oyu might imagine, thrilled at the idea I might extend my repertoir beyond goth/industrial dancing at a certain flavor of loud, frenetic nightclub.
There is, however, as you might imagine, a difficulty that comes from not living in one’s body. Learning to dance is a bit like learning to make a marionette dance; when you’re operating a meat mecha made of biology and fluids, getting it to do exactly what you want it to do is a bit of a challenge.
I learned through a rather strange set of circumstances some time ago that psilocybin mushrooms can, for brief moments, make me inhabit my body. The first time that happened, it was…um, startling. When you’re accustomed to living life as an invisible ball floating somewhere behind your eyes, operating a meat mecha by remote control, the sensation that you reach alllll the way to the ground is jarring.
Then, when I burned my foot and learned that opiate painkillers do nothing but make me puke profusely and exuberantly, but cannabis edibles actually work for pain management, I discovered that edibles also put me into my body, which was wonderful because, you know, inhabiting one’s body without hallucinating is a marvelous thing.
So it came to pass that Joreth offered to take me swing dancing a few nights back, and I thought, hey, I wonder if it will be easier to learn a new dance if I’m inhabiting my body?
Morgan Freeman voice: “It was, in fact, easier to learn a new dance when he was inhabiting his body.
The entire experience was, for lack of a better word, extraordinary. It’s far easier, as it turns out, to learn how to move one’s feet when one’s sense of self extends all the way to the floor. I don’t think I’ve ever caught on to something new in…well, in ever.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it helps that Joreth is the best teacher I’ve ever had. But still, never underestimate the power of living entirely within your body, rather than operating your body the way you might a particularly fiddly meat-robot.
Interestingly, when the edible started to wear off and I shrunk back into that ball behind my eyes, she could tell immediately. (Her, mid-dance: “You’re becoming a ball again, aren’t you?”)
Anyway, the whole experiment turned out to be a resounding success, one I definitely hope to continue exploring again in the future.
Okay, so sit back, and ima tell you a story. It’s a story of kink, and depravity, and surprise serendipity.
So. I’m in Florida, helping my wife Joreth get the RV ready for a cross-country trip, during which we plan to do a photo tour of the abandoned amusement parks that litter the American Midwest like so many broken dreams of a bygone era. (We’ll likely do a coffee table photo book sometime in the next couple of years.)
Anyway, the day after I arrived, the local dungeon hosted a party, so your humble scribe and his beautiful wife showed up, of course, for an evening of kink and Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
The dungeon had electronic consent forms to be filled out on an iPad. On the consent form there was a profile, and on the profile there was a place to pick one’s favorite kink from a dropdown list.
Me: “I guarantee my fvorite kink is not on this list.”
Cheerful Woman Behind the Desk: “It cannot possibly be any weirder than this kink I just learned about!”
Whereupon CWBTD pulled out her phone and showed us…
…The Picture.
You know the one. The Picture that broke the Internet. The Picture that, every now and then, undergoes a new wave of virality. The Picture that, I’m told, ended up briefly on the official Sigorney Weaver fan site until a moderator took it down.
There are two things to know about The Picture:
That’s a photo of Joreth;
Wearing a xenomorph hiphugger strapon designed and made by your humble scribe.
In other words, CWBTD was right. My kink isn’t weirder than the thing she’d just discovered, it’s exactly as weird as the thing she’d just discovered.
Anyway, she was thrilled, and asked us to come back in yesterday for a bit of show and tell.
Which we did. The Borg Queen xenomorph parasite has been in storage since Barcelona, but it required surprisingly little repair, and we were soon on our way.
It was marvelous. They let us use the dungeon for a photo shoot!
The bad: I didn’t have my real camera, and we couldn’t lay hands on the Borg mask, so we did the best we could.
The good: There’s a photo night coming up next week, for which we will be better prepared.
The better: We met a lovely couple who were all like “ooh, Borg Queen parasitized by an alien xenomorph? That’s exactly my kink![1] Victimize us, please?”
Innocent victim: Mittyrin (image by author, reproduced by permission)
Fantastic fun, if that’s the sort of thing you consider fun. (Tautalogical cat is tautalogical.)
We drove home beneath the symbol of God’s divine blessing, or, you know, non-traditional relationships, which is almost the same thing, so truly I feel like Divine Providence smailed upon a fantastic evening.
[1] When I first started working on the xenomorph hiphugger, I remember saying “I don’t know what the point is, there are only three people in the world with this taste and I’m dating two of them.”
It’s not necessarily her fault, mind you. And yet, and yet, the sex party blew out my knee, a fact for which Ms. Weaver bears some responsibility.
Lemme back up a bit.
I saw Star Wars (the original, before it was “Episode 4: A New Hope”) at the tender age of 11, when it first came out, and oh. My. God. It blew me away. I’d say I was obsessed with it, but that would be, if anything, understating the single-mindedness with which I obsessed over that movie. I collected all the trading cards (which I no longer have, the awareness of which gives me the same feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I think about the fact that I could have bought Bitcoin at $2 a coin but thought, “what’s the point?”), I built a flying model X-Wing (and ended up in the ER when the XActo knife I was using slipped…I still have the scar)…that movie moved into my mind and took up residence like a meth addict in an abandoned single-wide.
This isn’t a post about Star Wars. It’s actually about a sex party. Hang on, I’m getting to that.
So. My parents, who wanted to feed and nourish my interests, heard about this movie called Alien. They, being generally reasonable people who didn’t know the genre of sci-fi horror existed, largely because Alien kinda invented the genre of sci-fi horror, decided, he likes space movies with spaceships and stuff, this is a space movie with spaceships and stuff, he’ll like this movie.”
And so, I trotted into the theater, expecting something like Star Wars and getting…something else.
That movie traumatized me. Like, I had nightmares about the alien in Alien. Literal, actual, wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat nightmares.
For the next thirty-five years.
That alien became the shape of all my fears for decades. And so it came to pass that my wife, who loves pushing my buttons, during the course of a casual, ordinary conversaion on a casual, ordinary day, wouldn’t it be intersting if, given that I was teaching myself to make sex toys, I made an alien facehugger strapon? A…hiphugger, to coin a phrase?
Now, the thing about me is that once I get hold of a project, I don’t let it go until I’ve figured it out. The alien hiphugger moved into the space in my brain hollowed out by the Star Wars prequels (which not only killed my love of the franchise stone dead, but squatted over the corpse and farted in its face), I fired up Blender, and, two years and seven design revisions later, I created…
…the Alien Hiphugger Strapon.
It took seven design revisions and years of work to get here, but this is my wife during the first test fit of the first completed, assembled, and usable hiphugger.
Which she had never, until two nights ago, actually used.
Okay, so.
I am currently in Orlando, helping her get the RV ready to move cross-country to the West Coast. (Well, more likely we’re replacing the RV with a new one, but anyway.)
There is, here in Orlando, a swinger’s club which my wife and her boyfriend frequently attend. Not for sex—well, not just for sex—but also because they have the cheapest pool and hot tub in Orlando, where she’s been doing physical therapy for an injury for quite some time. Yes, people can go to swing clubs for therapy, and read Playboy for the articles, shut up.
Anyway.
Since I got to Orlando, we’ve been going to the swing club regularly. My wife does her PT, while I sit and write porn (specifically, a porn novel that takes place in two parallel narrative threads, one in London in 1871 and one in Buffalo in 2025), while people have sex around me, because that is, apparently, the life I lead now.
Two days ago, we decided that we should maybe go to the swing club for sex, because, you know, sex, and so a Plan was hatched.
My wife couldn’t find the syringe that I included with her xenomorph hiphugger strapon, so I procured a replacement on Amazon, for free, as I belong to their “free stuff if you write a review” program…but only for certain products. The lineup changes daily. The good news: they had a syringe available. The bad news: It was ludicrously, comically large.
Problem solved, the next step was acquisition, at remarkable effort, of tiny tapioca pearls, as you cannot have an alien violation experience without alien eggs (obviously, duh).
So.
We packed the hiphugger, the Ludicrously Large Syringe, and the eggs, with a carrier fluid of milk because at this point why the hell not, in a Box™ with some other toys and set off, the three of us, to the swingers club. Along the way, I took a quarter of a cannabis edible, on account of the fact they make me suuuuuper suggetible.
Now, there’s a thing you have to understand about swingers.
Swingers are, generally speaking, extremely conservative. They’re basically, by and large and painting with a very broad brush, PTA members and homeowners’ association managers who happen to enjoy shagging other people.
The swingers club inspects incoming packages. My wife cheerfully presented The Box™ for inspection, with its horrifying dildo-tailed alien facehugger and its Ludicrously Large Syringe and mass of Far Too Many Alien Eggs, owing to making just a bit too much tapioca…
The people doing the inspection behaved the way one might if one were to be served a lightly grilled roadkill opossum on a plate with a side order of Klingon gagh.
The injury toward which I am slowly working my way happened in one of the swing club’s themed playrooms, each of which has a door and a large window, through which other people can watch the goings-on within.
Now, I am not a voyeur. I’ve watched people have sex countless times, which is occasionally interesting in a “huh, I didn’t know people could bend that way” sort of way. It’s a shame I can’t hand those experiences to someone who would appreciate them better, because I know if watching people shag is your thing then it is very much Your Thing, but for me, it’s like, eh.
So my wife started with her boyfriend, and they started Doing Stuff, and I guess I blanked out a bit thinking about a scene in the porn story I mentioned earlier and how it needed some rework, so she’s like “you okay?” and I’m like “I was thinking about the novel” and she’s like “of course you were.”
Because of course I was. Writers: we’re not like other people.
My writing setup in the RV. That’s my wife’s tea mug. Twice the size means half as many trips to make more tea!
Anyway, a short time later I was on my hands and knees for the Great Xenomorph Parasite Violation.
If it seems like I’m Using Caps a lot, it was that kind of night.
Now, my wife is a dancer. And the play rooms had music piped in. And my wife started swaying to the beat of the music, and at the risk of using more capital letters, Oh My God.
Remember that cannabis edible? Cannabis does two things to me: it makes me hyper-suggestible, which my partners love with the love of a benevolent Divinity to all creation; but it also puts me in touch with my body, in a way that I’m generally not.
So fast forward two hours, during which I’m either on my knees or flat on my back. I won’t disturb you with the details, because they would…err, disturb you, but let me just say, So Many Alien Eggs. The tapioca had congealed into a slippery mass and it was So Gooey that, could I adequately express it in text, your computer screen would start dripping.
There was this kind of back and forth between “ooh, that’s nice” and absolute horror: in one particular position, the alien ovipositor would encounter the mass of eggs and…again, I won’t disturb you with the disturbing details.
Anyway, after hours of this, we went home sated and happy and just a touch horrified. After a brief Denny’s stop, because low-quality food after kinky threesomes seems part of my life now, I wrote in the car on the way home, then tumbled into a deep sleep.
I took this self-portrait on the way out of the sex club.
The next morning, I woke with a knee that refused to bend without agonizing pain. As I write this, I’m wearing a brace.
I blame Sigorney Weaver.
Not that it’s her fauly, exactly, but she is the sexy part of a casual chain that led directly from the theater to nightmares to the hiphugger strapon (I think it’s safe to say my wife may have, with her simple suggestion, invented the entire genre of xenomorph play).
In which Franklin makes everyone on all sides of the political divide angry
Okay, so. Some short while ago, a question floated through my Quora feed: Should men’s rights be more talked about, yes or no?
The thing about this question is it does not, and cannot, have a simple yes or no answer, because “rights” are not one thing. But even talking about talking about men’s rights tends to get people’s backs up. I will try to be as evenhanded as possible, in full understanding that I should be able to make everyone very angry indeed.
Let’s start here: The things people talk about when they talk about “rights,” especially in the context of systemic oppression, fall into two camps: rights everybody should have, and rights nobody should have. Conflating these things eradicates nuance and causes people to talk past each other.
Before I go any further, fair warning: Whataboutism, sealioning, and oppression Olympics in the comments will be terminated with extreme prejudice.
The most common objection I hear to any discussion about men’s rights is some variant of “men already control most of the world’s wealth, men are overrepresented in government and the upper tiers of corporations, men wield disproportionate power, the last thing on earth men need is more rights.”
That’s good sound bite activism, but it’s also a fetid, steaming pile of bullshit that’s irrelevant to any thoughtful discussion of men’s rights.
Yes, it is unquestionably true that men have all these advantages. We live in societies that overwhelmingly advantage men, absolutely. Yes, this is undeniable. Conservative men in the back who are getting pissed off because I said that, sit down. You hold tremendous advantages over women. American society gives you breaks that women don’t have. That’s just a fact.
Liberals, wait your turn, I’ll piss you off in a minute.
Yes, men are advantaged. Obviously. And that has fuckall to do with men’s rights, because those advantages are not rights. No reasonable person is saying that men should have more of that, because those are advantages nobody should have merely because they were born with a certain configuration of genitals.
When I worked as a designer, there was a ha-ha-only-serious notajoke common in the industry: “This would be a wonderful job if it weren’t for the clients.”
There’s a similar problem with men’s rights: it would be a wonderful conversation if it weren’t for the men having it.
Men’s rights activists (at least in the US; I don’t see this nearly as much in Europe) include some of the most terrible people you will ever find outside a Khmer Rouge death squad. They use “men’s rights” as a platform to bang on about how much they hate women and whine about how women’s liberation ruined the world because now they can’t find a nice passive sperm receptacle who will fuck them and make them a sandwich. I mean, they’re so awful, malignant narcissists look at MRAs and say “my god, there goes a bunch of toxic self-obsessed losers and no mistake.”
But beneath the self-indulgent whining, they do, and I have to grit my teeth to type this, they do have some legitimate points.
Like, for example, and this is the bit where having alienated a bunch of conservative men, I’ll piss off a bunch of liberals: Abuse of men by women, physical and emotional, is way, way, way, way, way, way more common than most people believe.
Like, we live in a society that trivializes, dismisses, and denies abuse of men by women—so much so that many people actually support abusive women.
Like, we live in a society that mocks male abuse survivors. I’ve experienced this myself.
Like, there are in fact double standards about men who sexually abuse young girls and women who sexually abuse young boys; women who sexually abuse underage victims consistently receive lighter penalties, according to peer-reviewed studies.
Like, men are more likely to die by suicide than women. Like, men are disproportionately victims of violence, though to be honest that’s a bit of an own goal because we’re more likely to be perpetrators of violence as well.
Ideally, conversations about rights are independent of the identity of the person having them. All rights—men’s rights, women’s rights, gay rights, Black rights, trans rights, religious rights—are human rights.
In practice, we cannot always frame the conversation that way, because patterns of institutional oppression mean that the abrogation of human rights always, always affects some groups of people more than others. This is why “all lives matter” and “feminism should be humanism” fail. (Well, one of the reasons, anyway; another is they’re disengenuous claptrap, but even assuming they were put forward in good faith, they’d still fail.)
It’s reasonable to pay more attention to the house that’s burning than the one that is not. It’s reasonable to pay more attention to the groups that are more disenfranchised than the ones that have more structural power.
Having said that, the lens with which we look at rights should always start with, is this something everyone should have? That’s a good first-pass filter to separate rights from privileges.
Should everyone have the right to be free of violence and abuse in their intimate relationships? Yes. Obviously.
Does intimate partner abuse disproportionately affect women? Yes. Obviously,
Does that make it okay to declare intimate partner abuse of men a non-issue? No. Obviously not. (Well, you’d think obviously not, but…)
People abuse and people are abused. Men abuse women. Women abuse men. Women abuse women. Men abuse men. We need to acknowledge that and we need to take it all seriously. “More women suffer so it’s okay if men suffer” is fucking monstrous and anyone who plays oppression Olympics that way does not deserve a fucking seat amongst decent human beings, and that’s a fucking hill I will die on.
At the same time, men, listen up.
Yes, it’s true that men can be drafted and women can’t, and it’s totally reasonable to frame this as an issue of men’s rights…
…but here’s the thing. There are 535 people in Congress and 384 of them are men, so please, for the love of God, stop yapping that this is a problem women need to fix. Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ.
Men passed those laws. Not women. Men hold the balance of power in Congress. Not women. The president is a man, not a woman. Shut your yaps about “I wOn’T sUpPoRt WoMeN’s RiGhTs UnTiL tHe WoMeN tAkE a StAnD aGaInSt ThE dRaFt.” Men, not women, created that problem. Men, not women, have the power to change it.
Same goes for men being more likely to die by violence than women. Yeah, we are…
…at the hands, overwhelmingly, of other men. How do you expect women to fix this, exactly?
A lot of the problems MRAs yap about can be traced directly to toxic masculinity, which is overwhelmingly those beliefs and attitudes held by men that are harmful to men. Don’t shove a stick in your own bicycle wheel and whine about what women did to you, my brother.
Alllllll that being said:
Society is fucked up and unequal and advantages some people over others, and yeah on balance men have a lot of things better than women do, but privilege is intersectional and there are places men are disadvantaged and yeah, if we’re talking about groups that are disadvantaged by structural social institutions we need to talk about places that happens to men too, and if that hurts your liberal fee-fees maybe it’s time to go take some remedial courses in basic human empathy and come back when you’ve grokked the notion that systemic harm is always wrong, even when it hurts people who are otherwise advantaged.
And now that I’ve pissed everyone off, I will say good day.
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.
