I had no idea, when I designed the Resist sticker, that it’d touch such a nerve. My first shipment disappeared in less than two hours. I’m getting messages and emails every day asking when there will be more, so here’s an update:
The first batch have now all been shipped out.
If you ordered five or fewer, you’ll get them soon. You should’ve received a confirmation email in the past few days that your stickers shipped, but unfortunately some of the confirmation emails bounced as spam, so they may not have gone through.
If you ordered ten or fewer before the shopping cart showed zero left, then you’ll also have them soon.
If you ordered more than 10, you will only get ten in the first mailing. If you ordered more than ten after the shopping cart showed zero left, I’ll send some out when the new ones arrive.
Yes, there are more on the way.
The second design will be here next week. Alas, I had no idea what to expect, so I didn’t order very many, only 175. I expect it to be gone the same day it’s available. I’ve ordered more of that design as well.
I’ve made changes to the shopping cart.
My shopping cart fell over under the load. People were seeing weird error messages, or couldn’t check out, or the cart wouldn’t load at all. I’ve completely rebuilt it from the ground up; it still looks the same but it’s running new software underneath that should be a lot more reliable.
Dozens of people asked if there’s a way to tip me.
I’ve added the ability to include a tip in the new shopping cart. For free stickers this is 100% optional, but it’s there if you want it.
I’ve also received a number of donations on PayPal and Venmo. Thank you all so much, it’s been incredible to learn how many people want to support this idea. All of the donations I’ve received, every penny, have gone into ordering more stickers. I have about 1200 stickers on the way that should be here by the end of the month.
Many of you, like over a dozen of you, have messaged to ask if there’s a way to get the stickers in quantities of 100 or 200 or more.
I didn’t make any provision for that because I honestly had no clue so many of you would get behind this project. So, I’ll be making changes to the shopping cart to add a provision to order in bulk. I plan to charge my own cost for this and ship the stickers to you directly from the company that makes them. The price will likely be around $35 for 100 or $45 for 150.
I will need to limit quantities for free stickers.
I’m really sorry. I had no idea this was going to blow up. The Resist stickers will be limited to 10 at a time for free orders or 3 at a time for the first batch of the new design, which I’ll post here and on social media when it arrives.
A bunch of people have asked me if I can make the design available in pins or clothing or other formats.
I’m looking into doing this. I won’t be able to offer free pins and such, so what I’ll likely do if I can find a good vendor is make things like pins, clothing, and holographic stickers a nominal charge (I’m not looking to make a profit from this project), but continue to keep the vinyl stickers free.
Thank you all so much for the incredible support. I can’t tell you how deeply gratifying it is to know I’m not the only one who feels the way I feel about what’s happening to our country right now.
It’s heartbreaking to see the country gutted and its values torn apart by a fat psychopath in bad makeup, and even more heartbreaking to know that a third of the country voted in favor of hatred. There was a time when we could believe that people on both sodes of the political aisle wanted what was best for the nation. Now we cannot.
So I’ve been having trouble sleeping. And when I wake at four AM with that despair in the pit of my stomach, I sit down and design stickers. In the past few weeks, I’ve ordered hundreds and hundreds of them.
The first design just arrived today. I have more designs arriving in the next few weeks. I am giving them away to anyone who wants them for free, and when I say for free I mean I will even cover postage in the US (international is $2).
Here’s the first design:
These are four inches by two and a half inches. To give you a sense of how big they are, here’s one on a 15″ laptop:
Want one? Order them for free on my site here. Want a bunch? Let me know and I’ll have 100 of them shipped to you at my cost. Got an idea for a design? I’d love to hear from you.
New designs will be coming soon, so stay tuned.
[Edit] Wow. Um, I didn’t expect that to happen. It took two hours for my entire first production run of Resist stickers to disappear.
To anyone else trying to get one, I’m really, really sorry. I’ve ordered more. It usually takes about two weeks for them to be produced.
If you ordered multiple stickers, I may send you less than you wanted, to make sure there’s enough for everyone else. I’ll let you all know when I have more. In the meantime, I’ll have some new designs soon as well, they’re already in production.
I’ve long had a list in my phone I call the “Dunning-Kruger List.” It’s a list of pop-sci arguments I see over and over and over and over again from people with poor science education: Creationists, homeopaths, and so on, all of which are based on a deep misunderstanding of science.
I’m not sure where these pop-sci ideas come from, but they’re all totally, completely 100% wrong, as in the opposite of true. Generally, hearing any of these in a conversation, especially in the Internet, instantly activates my “you’ve never seen the inside of a university science classroom, so you’re so far up Mount Dunning-Kruger it’s not worth the effort it would take to talk you down from its icy slopes.” So that that point my eyes glaze and I route everything further they say directly into my intellectual /dev/null.
This morning, I saw this on Quora:
Since this is officially the 17,000th time I’ve seen a Creationist make this argument, I decided it was time to Do Something.
I grew up in a tiny town called Venango, Nebraska, a rural farming village of 242 people. A lot of my formative memories took hold there, even though we only lived there for my middle-school years.
I went to school in this building right here, Venango Elementary, which housed the entire kindergarten through twelfth-grade population of Venango.
One of my teachers, a guy named Mr. Shepherd (I don’t think I ever knew his first name—in fact, I don’t think it ever occurred to me he had a first name) had a reputation in my class for assigning “punishment writing” to any kid who acted out in class, by which I mean committed some transgression like speaking out of turn. He’d demand that the offender would write the same sentence 250 times or 500 times or whatever, as befitted the severity of the transgression, then took malicious glee in throwing the pages away right in front of the student who’d transgressed.
Because there’s nothing like making young children associate learning with mind-crushing tedium and then watching their work destroyed in front of them to instill a deep, lifelong passion for learning and a keen intellectual curiosity, amirite?
One day, a day I still remember quite clearly, Mr. Shepherd accused me of talking in class. The actual transgressor was the kid behind me, a kid named Mike, the school bully who loved seeing other people get in trouble.
I have never, ever liked being accused of something I didn’t do. I did something wrong? Cool, man, lemme know and I’ll cop to it. Accuse me of something I didn’t do? Fuck you, I’ll burn my own life down before I take responsibility that isn’t mine to take.
So it was that Mr. Shepherd, with the absolute conviction available only to autocrats, abusers, and teachers of middle school, decided I was the one responsible for the voices he heard, and demanded that I write “I will never talk in class” 250 times that night, to be handed in the next day.
I was livid when I got home. The wrath in Heaven at the rebellion of the angels was but a candle beside my incandescent rage at the injustice of a teacher believing I’d done something I hadn’t done.
Enter my mom, who taught me a valuable lesson.
My mom in 2016, wearing the same expression she did on that day in 1980.
We didn’t have that lovely, evocative expression “malicious compliance” back then, but that’s exactly what my mom suggested I do.
She explained that yes, teachers could be wrong and no, not all injustices could be rectified, but as long as I was going to be writing something 250 times, why not use it as a covert opportunity to express how I felt?
So I sat down and started writing.
I will never talk in class. I will never talk in class. I will always talk in class. I will never talk in class. I will never talk in class. I will celery stalk in class. I will beaver balk in class.
She encouraged me to adjust my letter and word spacing so that, on casual glance, the lines of text would all look about the same.
The next day, when Mr. Shepherd took my neat stack of handwritten papers and dropped it in the trash in front of me, I couldn’t help grinning. I’d stuck my thumb in his eye, my small act of defiance against injustice, and he never even knew.
My mom died in December 2023. I still haven’t adjusted to the reality of living in a world where she no longer exists.
There has never been a moment in my life I did not have the absolute, rock-solid certainty that she would always, always be there for me. My mom always had my back. She taught me, not just facts and skills and things about the world, but how to think. She encouraged the boundless, limitless curiosity I still have today.
She taught me how to think. How to ask questions and find answers. How to see the world, not as I want it to be, but as it is.
I still keep in my phone a list of the things she would say, the things I heard again and again growing up, that I continued to hear even as an adult:
Education is not the solution if ignorance is not the problem.
Information by itself almost never changes attitudes.
The curse of being middle class is you can afford anything you want but not everything you want.
People vote their identity and their feelings, not their interests.
People in groups will agree to something that each one individually knows is stupid.
We are predisposed to believe what we wish were true or what we’re afraid is true. Understanding what is true is hard work.
You can’t reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.
Never ask a question whose answer you don’t want to know.
There is a fetish I quite like. It’s not terribly common, but it’s also not uncommon as these things go, and it’s called somnophilia. It’s the fetish for either having sex with a sleeping partner, or having someone have sex with you in your sleep.
Now, if you don’t get the appeal, that’s totally okay. Fetishes kinda work that way: if they get you hot, they get you hot, and if they don’t, they’re complete mysteries. Take foot fetishes, for example. I don’t get them. They don’t make any sense to me. I struggle to imagine how someone might be aroused by feet. Like, of all things to get you hot, feet? Why feet?
And that’s okay. I don’t need to understand it to know there are people who are turned on by feet, even if I don’t understand why.
Somnophilia has been dipping in and out of the news lately, because of a rather horrifying case in France concerning a man, Dominique Pelicot, who is on trial for drugging his wife multiple times over a period of years and then recruiting strangers (about fifty or so have been identified and are being prosecuted, if I recall correctly) to rape her.
Court drawing of Dominique Pelicot (Europa Press)
This isn’t actually about the way whenever someone introduces fetishistic elements of a rape into his crimes, people who enjoy that fetish consensually sigh, roll their eyes, and brace for the onslaught from folks who don’t actually understand that the thing separating rape from sex is consent, though I could write that essay, and maybe eventually I will.
I get the taste for somnophilia. I love the idea of being half asleep, one of those really deep sucking sleeps you just can’t drag yourself from, partly aware that my body is being used for someone else’s pleasure but unable to do anything about it, and waking the next morning with the barest of hazy, fragmented memories of it. Whew! *fans self* I personally find that super-hot.
I also enjoy doing this with a lover who finds it as hot as I do.
Yum.
What I want to talk about today, though, isn’t somnophilia itself, nor even the way pop media conflates the fetish with the rapes that Dominique Pelicot staged, but I want to take a step back and ask: Is it even okay at all? Can we consent to sex in such a way that we cannot revoke that consent?
Sex and Commerce and War, Oh My
Sexual consent, according to a lot of folks in the kink community, is informed, freely given, and exists in the moment. Informed means you know what you’re getting into. Freely given means you’re not being coerced, blackmailed, wheedled, pressured, or forced into it. Exists in the moment means you can always tap out, even if you agreed up front.
A lot of folks are deeply uncomfortable about sex you consent to without a way to back out. That’s why they’ll tell you to have a safeword if you’re playing, say, with rape fantasy, where “no” and “stop” might not mean “no” and “stop.” That’s why they’ll tell you to have a nonverbal signal like a bell if your partner is gagged.
And I get that. It’s okay to be deeply uncomfortable about sex you can’t tap out of.
But, as I believe I’ve blogged about in the past, I personally like agreeing to things that I can’t tap out of. That gets me hot.
And here’s an interesting thing: If you take sex out of the picture, we as a society are quite comfortable indeed with agreeing to things you can’t back out of. Like contracts. Or mortgages. Or military service. Try getting three years into your four-year enlistment and saying “you know what? I changed my mind. I don’t want to do this any more.” Ha ha ha ha ha.
It’s really only with sex when we say “consent isn’t consent if it can’t be revoked.”
But…is that really true?
Unyielding Devotion
Last October, Eunice and I published a book. It’s the fourth novel in our Passionate Pantheon series of far-future, post-scarcity philosophical science fiction theological pornography, and pretty much the entire book is a deep dive into Eunice and I exploring the idea of whether you can give irrevocable consent to sex. (Spoiler: We think the answer is yes.)
It’s an even-numbered book, which means it’s erotic horror (the odd-numbered books in the series are Utopian, the even-numbered books are erotic horror). Here’s an example of what you’ll find:
Two doors in the far wall slid open to admit a tall, muscular man and an equally tall, strong-looking woman. He had bronze skin and brown hair that fell around his shoulders, and looked out at the world through piercing aquamarine eyes with cross-shaped pupils. She had shoulder-length hair of brilliant purple that matched her purple eyes, pale skin, and a warm face that smiled easily. They met in front of the cage. She offered her hand. “Hi! I’m Lanissae. I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Royat.” He shook her hand. “This is only my second party. I came here for the first time last month. I agreed to serve as entertainment at this party, so here I am.”
“Royat.” She inclined her head. “It’s lovely to meet you! This is my fifth time as a cage entertainer. Do you know what to do?”
“I think so. Jakalva explained it to me.”
“Good.” A door in the round cage folded upward. Lanissae stripped, then stepped nude into the cage. Royat undressed somewhat more awkwardly and followed her. A drone flitted down to whisk away their clothes. The cage door folded back down. The woman who had given Jakalva and Kaytin their vials approached the cage, moaning with each step. Her tray now held only four vials, two bright red and two deep turquoise.
“What’s happening?” Kaytin asked Chasoi, who stared at Lanissae and Royat with bright, hungry eyes.
“They’ll each take two Blessings,” Chasoi said. “The first one ensures their bodies will remain physically aroused no matter what happens to them. And the second, well, that’s the magic.”
“The magic? What does that mean?”
“One of them,” Jakalva said, “will become desperately horny beyond all reason. Are you familiar with the Blessing of Fire?”
“Yes,” Kaytin said.
“It’s like that, but more violent. It removes inhibition and obliterates self-control. The other does just the opposite, causing intense aversion, repulsion even, to the idea of sex. The cage makes sure neither of them can escape.”
“Oh.” Kaytin blinked. “So whoever gets the first vial will…”
“Yes. But that’s only half of it.”
“Half of it how?”
“That’s the beauty,” Chasoi breathed. “The moment either of them has an orgasm, they switch. Whoever was needy becomes averse. Whoever was averse becomes wild beyond control. They stay in the cage until they collapse from exhaustion.” Her eyes glittered.
I…would volunteer to be cage entertainment. I bet the number of people who would willingly do this is very small indeed, but I would absolutely do it.
Why?
The character Lanissae, who who has signed up to be cage entertainment many times, explains:
“Okay, let me try to explain,” Lanissae said. “It’s…” She paused, regarding Kaytin through hooded eyes. “I like…I like the tiny spaces. I like that little moment of clarity that happens when you switch, you see? There’s that one second when you know what’s going to happen. You see it in their eyes. You know that when that second is over, they will want you so badly that nothing you can do will stop them.” She shivered, eyes half-closed, and slipped one hand inside the plunging neckline of her shimmering, lacy dress. “Mmm. To be seen with such desire, to know that when the moment passes you will not want it and would do anything to make it stop, to know that it will happen anyway…there’s a delicious inevitability to it.” She cupped her breast. Her eyelids fluttered. “It’s such an exquisite surrender. You exist only to be ravished.” She exhaled in a soft moan. “You can’t get away. You lose yourself in how much you don’t want it, but it doesn’t matter. You stand on the brink and for one instant, you see it all so clearly, and you know what’s about to happen, and you also know that you chose to be here. You walked into the cage yourself, of your own free will…oh!” She leaned back on the couch and caressed her nipple beneath her thin dress.
Kaytin stared at her, desire and revulsion roiling within her. “And then,” Lanissae went on, “the violation is over, and the change happens, and you have that moment of clarity again. You feel the heat in your body. For that one delicious second, you know. When the heat reaches your head, the need will take you, and nothing in the world will matter except the person you are about to ravish. Everything stops. You balance on that edge. You recognize each other. You see the humanity there. In that instant, you share a connection that’s absolutely magical. For that one brief second, you see each other, really see each other—not as predator and prey, but as two people sharing an experience. You know that when the moment passes, you will not be able to stop yourself any more than you could stop what was coming when you were the object. You can feel your mind going…mmm.” She caressed her neck with her fingertips. “You embrace that moment of humanity, before it all slips away. It’s…uh! It’s so magnificent to stand on that cliff and feel yourself about to fall.” Lanissae arched languidly, running both hands down her arms. “When I’m in the cage, I live for those moments of connection between the moments of madness.”
Now, I don’t believe that you should explore irrevocable consent in your relationships, of course. If you find that idea repulsive, I 100% get that.
What I argue is that, in the spirit of agency and bodily autonomy, you have the right to explore irrevocable consent in your sexual relationships if you want to. And I have the right to do so as well.
I believe that, if I choose, I can tell a partner “I consent to you doing X to me, and I also consent to being placed in a situation where I can’t change my mind.” I don’t think I have to, or should, but I think I can if I choose to.
My body, my rules. If I want to give a lover permission to use me in my sleep, I have the right to do that.
You may or may not agree (and if you don’t, I’d love to hear your arguments in the comments). I do, though, find it interesting that society enshrines this right to irrevocable consent in basically every aspect of commercial and social life, except sex.
Isn’t that interesting? Sex, something whose connection to consent we’ve long been shockingly indifferent about, now gets an exception carved for irrevocable consent.
I think, honestly, this is at least in part a sign of the intrinsic distrust and fear our society has about sex.
A couple weeks ago, I ended up on an unexpected last-minute trip to Dublin, Ireland (my client literally emailed me on Thursday evening to say “hey, can you be at the airport on Sunday?”). On the way back from Dublin, I spent a week or so in London visiting Eunice, my lovely co-author.
Our novel London Under Veil, about a young British infosec worker in Shoreditch who ends up drawn into a secret underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a society of Tory rage mages, is (rather unexpectedly) turning out to be the most popular thing we’ve written so far.
Whilst I was in London, we spent a couple of days visiting some of the important places in the novel. All of the locations in the novel except the headquarters of the Guild are real; we wanted the novel to be as grounded as we possibly could.
We had a blast touring and taking photos of the key places in London where the story unfolds.
The first key location, where May takes refuge from the people trying to kidnap her, learns that magic is real, and finds herself drawn into the Guild of the Women of Saint Thais Under Royal Charter of Her Majesty Catherine Parr, Queen Consort of England and Ireland, founded in anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi 1544, is the Lalit, a tiny luxury hotel and restaurant:
We had high tea in the dining room, the very place where May meets Serene, the leader of the Guild and a powerful spellcaster.
The table on the right hand side of the photo, on the balcony, is where May has her first introduction to Serene.
“So, okay, just so we’re clear.” May folded her arms. “You’re telling me you can cast magic spells. Something like that.”
Serene smiled benevolently. “Something like that.”
“And the people who were after me? Can they…cast magic too?”
“They can, though they use a different system. A different way of seeing the world. A different programming language, if you like.”
“And you expect me to believe this, just by a sleight of hand trick with ID badges and some tea.” Even as she said it, May thought of the metal badge, hard and smooth beneath her fingers, a visceral memory that still lingered in her fingertips.
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re crazy. I think you’re trying to manipulate me. I think you’re trying to trick me for—for—for reasons of your own. I think you’ve arranged to drag me here so you can mess with my mind. You…you put something in the tea.”
“You haven’t had any of your tea.”
“Even so, this can’t be real!”
“All of those are sane, rational, and reasonable responses,” Serene said. “Offered a choice between accepting that which is by its very nature impossible, and accepting that someone is trying to fool you, the smart money is on someone trying to fool you every time. Normally I would suggest you go home and sleep on it, get adjusted to it a little, then come back with your questions, but this situation is not normal.”
“Because people are trying to grab me.”
“Because people are trying to grab you.” Serene sipped daintily at her tea.
“You seem quite blasé about all this.”
“Would you like to finish your tea before we go?”
“I’m fine.”
“I expect you’re not, but you are doing well considering. And you have a healthy degree of suspicion that will serve you in what is to come, I think. Still, time for us to be going.”
The Lalit is gorgeous, and we ended up staying there until well into the night.
Next up, the Barbican, that sprawling marvel of Brutalist architecture. Not many people know this, but the pools in the Barbican are part of a sophisticated magical warding system.
Toward the end of the novel, the Guild seeks shelter at the Barbican:
May finally broke the silence as they neared their destination, the sprawling Brutalist retro-dystopian complex of the Barbican, with its pools and gardens giving rise to slablike concrete buildings like strange plants. “I keep thinking nothing else can surprise me, and I keep being wrong. I suppose you’re going to tell me the Guild owns a flat here?”
“Several,” Janet said.
“Of course you do. We do. Whatever.”
“Why wouldn’t we? On hindsight, perhaps we shouldn’t have abandoned it for our new headquarters. It seemed a sound decision at the time, but this is a far more defensible position, magically and practically speaking. The pools—”
“Forget I asked,” May said.
She helped Janet slide the stretcher from the back of the van. Spencer’s tail whipped back and forth, back and forth. Serene’s expression didn’t change as the wheels hit the pavement. “Where are we taking her?”
“The flat to the left,” Janet said.
May guided the stretcher through the door into a posh, beautifully-furnished flat with large windows overlooking the reflecting pool in the plaza. “Nice digs,” she said.
“It’s maintained by a small corporation owned by a holding company that’s a subsidiary of a concern operated by the Crown,” Janet said.
“Seriously? I kinda thought, with the Tories being all Them—”
“The Adversary’s takeover of the Tories is a recent development, historically speaking. Our special relationship with the Crown has endured for longer than any of us have been alive. I see no reason that won’t continue for as long as the Guild exists.” She looked down at Serene’s placid face. “Which I fear might not be much longer. We need to prepare a response.”
The Shard doesn’t occur in the story directly, but there is a version of the Shard in the weird surreal magical alternate London, and it tears a hole in the sky.
Which, honestly, it kinda looks like it’s trying to do anyway.
When her stomach quit spinning, May walked to the edge of the roof and looked around. London spread out below her…not her London, but a bizarre, fantasy London, a storybook London from one of those stories spun of equal parts wonder and dread.
The buildings sprawled in classic London chaos, dark and forbidding, an urban canyon of twisting passages, all alike. A bit south of her, along the Thames, the grand clock tower rose hundreds of metres from the Tower of Westminster, its glossy obsidian sides black and brooding, tipped by a yellow crystalline spire that blazed with incandescence. Beyond it, the Shard thrust upward from the ground, transparent as glass, its peak piercing the heavens, creating a jagged rip in the bowl of the sky through which the stars gleamed like hard pinholes in the black velvet of night. She turned her gaze across the bridge, to where the London Eye spun madly, a glowing blur of red atop a tall monolith of grey steel and white concrete. What she had taken as boats floating along the river were actually scribbles, charcoal impressions of boats hastily sketched by the hand of an impatient artist, each identical, each with a gleaming lantern in its prow. Static fuzz rippled just beneath the water, as if the river itself were a television signal badly degraded.
The story’s climactic showdown takes place in the Guildhall, which is a stronghold of magic if ever there was one. The door they enter through is on the right, behind the group of people standing there.
“Ah. Right. Just so I’m clear, it’s us, the people in this room right now, breaking into the Guildhall, which is also not coincidentally the stronghold of a fantastically powerful band of, and I say this with some reservation, evil spellcasting wizards, without any idea what we’re walking into.”
“That’s about the long and short of it, yeah,” Claire said. “I might feel better if I knew exactly how you plan to keep the Adversary’s prying eyes off us.”
“No way,” Claire said. “That’s a terrible idea, from an opsec perspective. Compartmentalization of information. If you’re caught, you can’t compromise the rest of us.”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“There is a certain…improvisational element to the plan, I will grant.” She turned to Zoe. “All-Girl Nude Beach 2014?”
“Got it in my pocket,” Zoe said.
“I’m sorry, what?” Lillian said. Zoe pulled a small thumb drive from her pocket and handed it to Lillian. The thing, badly scuffed and scratched, had a strip of masking tape stuck to it with “All-Girl Nude Beach 2014” scribbled on it in felt-tip pen.
“I don’t get it,” Lillian said.
“Loaded with all the best malware money can buy,” Zoe said. “When it falls out of my pocket in front of some mark, I guarantee he’ll race to his office just as fast as he can to plug it into his computer.”
“And then?”
Claire grinned. “And then we root his system. Hasn’t failed yet.”
We also spent quite a lot of time at the British Library, in the member’s room since Eunice is a member (because of course she is).
Some libraries have rare books rooms. The British Library has four immense walls of rare books, visible through the charming round porthole by these cozy chairs.
I have a number of…um, fairly ambitious projects I’m working on right now that I’ve hit roadblocks on. Since the Internet is a marvel of modern technological accomplishment that allows instantaneous access to not only the entirety of human knowledge but also domain experts in every conceivable field of human endeavor, I’m throwing out a request for ideas and suggestions here.
Project 1: The Alien Pod
I have, through a strange set of circumstances, come into possession of an old “bod pod,” a medical scanner designed, I’m told, to measure BMI. It doesn’t work—it’s just the pod without the computer software and such to drive it—and my goal is to turn it into a gigantic alien egg, like the kind in the Alien movies, but large enough to hold a person.
So the plan is to cover this thing with silicone, to make it look like one of the eggs from the Alien movie (which were basically garbage bags and chicken wire covered with silicone). The effect I’m looking for is something like this:
My thought is to cover the pod with silicone (probably condensation-cure rather than the medical-grade platinum-cure silicone I ise for sex toys, whcih is more than $200 a gallon).
Why silicone and not paper-mâché? The pod weighs more than 400 pounds, so it’s very difficult to transport, and the egg needs to be strong enough to survive handling and moving in a truck. My goal is to use it for a photo shoot, with a model halfway out of it, being dragged back in by tentacles.
The problem is that silicone won’t stick to the surface, like, at all. Not even a little bit.
The pod is a stainless steel shell overlaid with fiberglass and with some sort of textured polymer layer on top. Up close it looks like this:
My first thought is to epoxy a whole bunch of short pins to the pod, to give the silicone something to grip. Many years ago, I remember seeing a product that would be perfect for this: small steel pins, about a centimeter or less long, with a ball on one end and a flat base on the other, kind of like so:
They’re quite small, and a whole bunch of them sticking out of the pod like spines on a porcupine would give the silicone something to hang on to mechanically. Trouble is, I don’t know what they’re called or what they’re used for (I vaguely recall that they’re used in aviation, maybe?), so I don’t know how to search for them.
Alternately, any small, cheap, epoxy-able pin or whatever I can glue to the pod might work. I’m also open to other suggestions. Keep in mind it has to stand up to rough handling—this bloody thing is almost unimaginably heavy and hard to maneuver!
Project 2: Machining Molds
I’ve started making alien xenomorph hiphugger strapons and alien xenomorph facehugger gags for sale.
Right now, I’m 3D printing the molds, a 6-part mold for the hiphugger and a 7-part (yes, seriously) mold for the facehugger.
I’d hoped to get maybe ten castings from each mold. In fact, I’m getting 2-3 before the mold is ruined and I have to print a new one. The facehugger mold takes two weeks(!) to print on my 3D printer. Obviously this isn’t sustainable.
I’ve been planning for a while to move to machined wood or aluminum molds, and I have a 4-axis desktop CNC machine:
I’ve been teaching myself CNC milling, but the learning curve is a cliff; I’m getting reasonably good at 2D and 2.5D machining, but man, the molds are complex.
Here’s a 3D model of one part of the hiphugger mold. This is what I’m looking to machine, either in aluminum or even in wood:
As you can see, it’s a complex shape with aggressive undercuts.
I have not been able to make a CNC program to carve this. (One person online looked at this mold and was like “um, yeah, you’ll need four years of trade school plus at least four years of apprenticeship to even think about machining something like that.”)
So, hey, I have the machine but not the skill, why not hire someone to design the CNC program, right? I’ve talked to a few folks online who are like “yeah, pay me and I’ll do the program for you,” then when they see that part they’re like “oh hell no. Hell. No.”
If anyone reading this knows a skilled CNC machinist who can create a program to mill this part, and parts like it, on my machine (a Makera Carvera with a 4th-axis module), send them my way! This is a paying gig.
In the meantime, I’m also exploring ways to treat the 3D printed molds with resin or epoxy or something to make them more durable. Right now I’m only making one facehugger and one hiphugger per month, and even at that slow rate of production, the process I’m using is unsustainable.
So yeah. I have an eclectic set of friends out there with some highly unusual skills, so I’m hoping that some of you might have insights or ideas to offer.
A few months back, Elon Musk, the right-wing owner of Twitter and Grok, his pet Generative AI project, posted something I wrote on his Twitter feed, with the caption “This is the quality of humor we want from Grok.”
He even had it pinned to his profile for a short while.
I wrote this over on Quora in March of 2024. On the one hand, it’s interesting to know that Elon Musk reads my stuff. On the other, do you notice anything funny about the screenshot of his Tweet?
Yup, no credit.
The Tweet went viral, and has since been posted all over Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok…all without attribution.
Right now, as I write this, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has a market cap of $157,000,000,000, making it more valuable than companies like AT&T, Lowe’s, and Siemens.
It is not a profitable company; in fact, it’s burning cash at a prodigious rate. Unlike other companies, though, which burned cash early on to achieve economies of scale, OpenAI’s costs scale directly with size, which is not at all normal for tech companies. At its current rate of growth, in four years its datacenters will consume more electricity than some entire nations.
But I’m not here to talk about whether AI is the next Apple or the next Pets dot com. Instead, let’s talk about what generative AI is, and how it represents the greatest wealth transfer of the last fifty years.
AI is not intelligent. Generative AI does not know anything. Many people imagine that it’s a huge database of all the world’s facts, and when you ask ChatGPT something, it looks up the answer in that immense library of knowledge.
No.
Generative AI is actually more like an immense, staggeringly complex autocomplete. It ingests trillions of words, and it learns “when you see these words, the most likely next words are those words.” It doesn’t understand anything; in a very real sense, it doesn’t even “understand” what words are.
As the people over at MarkTechPost discovered, many LLM models struggle to answer basic arithmetic questions.
AIs make shit up. They have no knowledge and understand nothing; when presented with text input, they produce text output that follows the basic pattern of the input plus all the text they’ve seen before. That’s it. They will cheerfully produce output that looks plausible but is absolutely wrong—and the more sophisticated they are, the more likely they are to produce incorrect output.
If you want to understand Generative AI, you must, you absolutely must understand that it is not programmed with knowledge or facts. It takes in staggering quantities of text from all over and then it “learns” that these words are correlated with those words, so when it sees these words, it should spit out something that looks like those words.
It doesn’t produce information, it produces information-shaped spaces.
To produce those information-shaped spaces, it must be trained on absolutely staggering quantities of words. Hundreds of billions at least; trillions, preferably. This is another absolutely key thing to understand: the software itself is simple and pretty much valueless. Only the training gives it value. You can download the software for free.
So where does this training data come from?
You guessed it: the Internet.
OpenAI and the other AI companies sucked in trillions of words from hundreds of millions of sites. If you’ve ever posted anything on the Internet—an Amazon review, a blog, a Reddit post, anything—what you wrote was used to train AI.
AI companies are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. All that worth, every single penny of it, comes from unpaid work by people who provided content to the AI companies without their knowledge or consent and without compensation.
This is probably the single largest wealth transfer in modern history, and it went up, not down.
There are a few dirty secrets lurking within the data centers of AI companies. One is the staggering energy requirements. Training ChatGPT 4 required 7.2 gigawatt-hours of electricity, which is about the same amount that 6,307,200 homes use in an entire year. (I laugh at conservatives who whine “eLeCtRiC cArS aRe TeRrIbLe WhErE wIlL aLl ThE eLeCtRiCiTy CoMe FrOm” while fellating Elon Musk over how awesome AI is. Training ChatGPT 4 required enough power to charge a Tesla 144,000 times. Each single ChatGPT query consumes a measurable amount of power—about 2.9 watt-hours of electricity.
All the large LLMs were trained on copyrighted data, in violation of copyright. Every now and then they spit out recognizable chunks of the copyrighted data they were trained on; pieces of New York Times articles, Web essays, Reddit posts. OpenAI has, last time I checked, something like 47 major and hundreds of smaller copyright lawsuits pending against it, all of which it is fighting. (It might be more by now; there are so many it’s hard to keep up.)
That, I think, is the defining computer science ethical problem of our time: To what extent is it okay to build value and make money from other people’s work without their knowledge or consent?
Elon Musk recognizes the value in what I write. He recognizes that it has both artistic and financial value. He posts my content as an aspirational goal. He doesn’t credit me, even as he praises my work.
That’s a problem.
Those who create things of value are rarely recognized for the value they create, if the things they create can’t immediately be liquidated for cash. That’s not new. What’s new is the scale to which other people’s creativity is commoditized and turned into wealth by those who had nothing whatsoever to do with the work, and are merely profiting from the labor of others without consent.
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression – including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents – it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials. […]
Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.”
It also claims their use of other people’s work is “fair use,” even while they admit that chatbots sometimes spit out verbatim chunks of recognizable work. This is a highly dubious claim—while fair use doesn’t have a precise legal definition (the doctrine of fair use exists as an affirmative defense in court to charges of copyright infringement), one of the key components of fair use has always been commercialization of other people’s work…and with a market cap of $157,000,000,000, it’s pretty tough to argue that OpenAI is not commercializing other people’s work. It charges $20/month for full access to ChatGPT.
So at the end of the day, what we have is this: a company founded by people who are neither writers nor artists, producing hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth from the uncompensated, copyrighted work of writers and artists whilst cheerfully admitting that could not produce any value if they had to pay for their training data.
And it’s not just copyrighted data.
OpenAI Dall-e cheerfully spit this image out when I typed “Scrooge McDuck stealing money from starving artist.”
Here’s the thing:
Scrooge McDuck is trademarked. Trademark law is not the same as copyright law. Trademarks are more like patents than copyrights; in the US, trademarks are administered by the Patent and Trademark Office, not the copyright office.
In no way, shape, or form is this “fair use.”
Generative AI recognizes trademarked characters. You can ask it for renderings of Godzilla or Mickey Mouse or Spider-Man or Scrooge McDuck and it’ll cheerfully spit them out. The fact that Dall-e recognizes Scrooge and Spider-man and Godzilla demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt it was trained on trademarked properties.
So far, all the lawsuits aimed at AI infringement have been directed at the companies making AI models, but there’s no reason it has to be that way. You “write” a book with AI or you create a cover for your self-published work with AI and it turns out there’s a trademark or copyright violation in it? You can be sued. That hasn’t happened yet, but it will.
(Side note: The books I publish use covers commissioned from actual artists. Morally, ethically, and legally, this is the right thing to do.)
Why do I call OpenAI and its kin a socialist wealth transfer? Because they treat products of value as a community property. Karl Marx argued that socialism is the transition between capitalism and communism, a system where nothing is privately owned and everything belongs to the public, and that’s exactly how OpenAI and its kin see creative works: owned by nobody, belonging to the public, free to use. It’s just that “free to use” means “a vehicle for concentrating wealth.”
From creators according to their ability, to OpenAI according to its greed.
It seems to me that what we need as a society is a long, serious conversation about what it means to create value, and who should share in that value. It also seems to me this is exactly the conversation the United States is fundamentally incapable of having.
Somehow, between a lot of other projects we’re working on and this last-minute trip to Europe, the fact that Eunice and I have released another book sort of fell through the cracks.
So hey, we released another book!
Presenting, the fourth novel in the Passionate Pantheon series, Unyielding Devotion. Sexy far-future post-scarcity science fiction theocratic body horror philosophical erotica, for your reading pleasure!
I’m particularly proud of this book. It’s probably the most philosophical of the Passionate Pantheon novels, but still has a ton of sex so kinky the kinks don’t even have names.
It follows a group of people who meet at a party hosted by Jakalva, a power broker in the City who worships none of the AI gods but nevertheless is still one of the City’s most influential citizens, and explores how their experiences at the party change the course of their lives.
You can read it as really really kinky porn, and it works, but it’s also sort of a sustained meditation on unconventional choices, growth, and relationships.
Sex! Zero-gravity gladiator matches! Skydiving from the tops of buildings! More sex!
Here’s an excerpt:
Jakalva leaned back. “My, my. A person comes to our City seeking to atone for her wrongdoing, and instead is selected to punish others for theirs. You have an interesting story indeed.”
Kaytin looked down. “I don’t feel interesting.”
The music stopped. A melodic chime filled the air. Jakalva touched Kaytin’s arm. “A moment, please.” She rose. “Friends, the entertainment is about to start. I invite those of you who wish to watch to be seated.” With the music gone, the drone above Kaytin flitted away.
Two doors in the far wall slid open to admit a tall, muscular man and an equally tall, strong-looking woman. He had bronze skin and brown hair that fell around his shoulders, and looked out at the world through piercing aquamarine eyes with cross-shaped pupils. She had shoulder-length hair of brilliant purple that matched her purple eyes, pale skin, and a warm face that smiled easily. They met in front of the cage. She offered her hand. “Hi! I’m Lanissae. I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Royat.” He shook her hand. “This is only my second party. I came here for the first time last month. I agreed to serve as entertainment at this party, so here I am.”
“Royat.” She inclined her head. “It’s lovely to meet you! This is my fifth time as a cage entertainer. Do you know what to do?”
“I think so. Jakalva explained it to me.”
“Good.” A door in the round cage folded upward. Lanissae stripped, then stepped nude into the cage. Royat undressed somewhat more awkwardly and followed her. A drone flitted down to whisk away their clothes. The cage door folded back down. The woman who had given Jakalva and Kaytin their vials approached the cage, moaning with each step. Her tray now held only four vials, two bright red and two deep turquoise.
“What’s happening?” Kaytin asked Chasoi, who stared at Lanissae and Royat with bright, hungry eyes.
“They’ll each take two Blessings,” Chasoi said. “The first one ensures their bodies will remain physically aroused no matter what happens to them. And the second, well, that’s the magic.”
“The magic? What does that mean?”
“One of them,” Jakalva said, “will become desperately horny beyond all reason. Are you familiar with the Blessing of Fire?”
“Yes,” Kaytin said.
“It’s like that, but more violent. It removes inhibition and obliterates self-control. The other does just the opposite, causing intense aversion, repulsion even, to the idea of sex. The cage makes sure neither of them can escape.”
“Oh.” Kaytin blinked. “So whoever gets the first vial will…”
“Yes. But that’s only half of it.”
“Half of it how?”
“That’s the beauty,” Chasoi breathed. “The moment either of them has an orgasm, they switch. Whoever was needy becomes averse. Whoever was averse becomes wild beyond control. They stay in the cage until they collapse from exhaustion.” Her eyes glittered.
This is not a novel for the faint of heart. You’ll find some pretty radical kinks between its covers.
Check it out! It’s available on Amazon US, UK, and Canada.
