Tag Archives: geek

The Mathematics of Sex Toys…

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…in which we learn just how big a stinker Franklin is.

Okay. So. Long story behind it, but I have on my balcony a large Tupperware container filled with sex toys. Vibrating eggs, to be exact. At one point, I had about 250 of them. I keep giving them away to people (in fact, I’ve been known to refuse to let guests leave the house unless they take one with them), and now I’m down to about 20.

Which is still a lot of vibrators, just for the record.

Some time ago, I read online about a guy who’d taken a vibrator and connected it to a Basic Stamp–think “little tiny computer on a single chip”–that he had programmed to switch the vibrator on and off at random intervals. The idea, you see, was to play with a quirk of human physiology.

Quick dissertation about human anatomy: The way our sensory nerves work, if you present the same stimulus to the same part of the body without varying it, eventually, your sensory nerves will quit responding to it. Take a toothpick and put it on your palm; you’ll be able to feel it. Leave it there long enough without moving it or your hand and eventually you’ll stop feeling it.

The sexual organs are no different than any other organ in this regard. Flip side of the same coin, if you vary the stimulation presented to a sensory nerve, it’ll keep informing your brain “Hey! The stimulus has changed!” and you won’t be able to ignore it.

Now, this guy had programmed his Basic Stamp to switch a vibrator on and off at random, but fairly short, intervals. The idea was to create an infuriating sex toy–a sex toy that, when you wear it, you absolutely can not ignore. Because the stimulation is random, you don’t become acclimatized to it–and if it switches on and off quickly enough, it also doesn’t stay on long enough to get you off. So basically, he created a sex toy that will make sure you always pay attention to it but won’t make you come.

If you draw a graph of the way the sex toyy switches on and off, you get something like this:

There’s vibration, then no vibration, then vibration, then no vibration, for randomly varying periods of time:
bzzzzz….bzz………bzzzzzzzzzz..bzzz……bzzzzz… you get the idea.

Now, that’s good and all, but the vibrators I have are equipped with a little thumbwheel speed control. When one of my partners is foolish enough to put me in charge of the control pack for one of these things, I like to run my thumb up and down the speed wheel thingy, making the vibrator go FASTER and slower and FASTER and slower.

So I started thinking, why not program a computer to run the vibrator for random times at random speeds? From there, I started thinking about how to actually code for that.

Now, it seemed to me, as I was thinking about it on the bus on my way down to Tallahassee, that the most obvious way to go about this is to take a bunch of sine waves and put them together. One can construct a waveform of nearly arbitrary complexity by merging together sine waves of different frequencies, via a mathematical bit of wizardry called a fast Fourier transform.

For example, suppose we have something like this:

The sum of the red sine wave and the blue wave (which is itself a composite of three sine waves) looks a bit like this:

Now, feed that into a vibrator and it should keep a person infuriatingly close to orgasm without letting her get off or ignore the vibrator just about indefinitely.

The thing is, you want a wave that looks random. Any composite of a finite number of sine waves will be periodic (that is, at some point it will start to repeat), so you want something that looks random and also has a long periodicity. I was thinking about how to choose a relatively small number of sine waves–say, sixteen or so–in such a way as to maximize the periodicity and also maximize the apparent randomness when combining them with an FFT. Make the ratios of their periods prime? Stuff like that?

I was hampered somewhat by the fact that I also know fuck-all about how to actually do an FFT, too, which means that basically I know squat about the best way to go about choosing the sine waves.

Shelly’s dating a physicist, though. And he took one look at the problem and observed that a fast Fourier transform isn’t really necessary; it’s using an anti-aircraft cannon on a mosquito.

His idea, which is brilliant, is this:

Take a sine wave whose period is the interval of time over which you don’t want the pattern of the vibrator to repeat. Add it to itself with a period of double that, and add it to itself with a period of three times that, and again with a period of five times that. (Geeky readers will already see where this is going: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5… is the Fibonacci sequence.)

You don’t need very many sine waves to get a right royal (and therefore random-looking) mess.

So, in theory, it will be remarkably simple to make The World’s Most Annoying Sex Toy(tm). A little bit of simple programming and some kind of variable interface and the result should be a vibrator that will drive the wearer right straight up the fucking wall for hours, with no relief in sight.

I am such a stinker.

Fortunately, the world is saved by the mere fact that I don’t at the moment have time to actually build one of these. Yet.

I am a slave to my computer overlords

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Did I say overlords? I meant protectors.

The company I work with has made a multimedia presentation that explains how our lightning detection gizmo works, and talks about storm and lightning safety and suchlike. It’s turned out to be a very effective sales tool, so we’ve made (or rather, I’ve made) several different versions of it for our various distributors, which feature the distributor’s logo and contact information, and safety information specific to whatever industry the distributor focuses on.

Last week, one of our distributors asked for 1,000 copies of their custom-tailored version of the presentation on CD-ROM. Now, we don’t have time (or, to be fair, money) to send it out for commercial CD duplication, and we don’t have a duplicator.

That means my last several days have been consumed creating CDs. I have a [MacPro computer] and a [Multimedia Presentation] and [1000 Blank No-Name CD-Rs], and I’m combining them into [1000 Multimedia CDs]. Man, I thought the quest line to get [Reins of the Onyx Netherwing Drake] was tedious!

So if anyone’s been wondering why I haven’t been around much lately, that’s the reason. On the whole, I think the grinding to get [Reins of the Onyx Netherwing Drake] is probably more satisfying.

In which Franklin learns what it is to be overwhelmed

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

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

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

She’s right, too.

On the nature of work

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting times indeed.

On the nature of opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

On automobile license tags

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

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

I love my little car…

On Links and Stuff

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

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

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

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

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

On cats

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

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

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

This is not the LiveJournal update you’re looking for.

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I have a number of posts I’ve been meaning to make lately, on a wide assortment of topics, from how to make a karada using chain instead of rope to adventures with the Georgia Department of Motor Vehicles to more pictures of the kitties. (It seems like whenever I post BDSM tutorials or pictures of the cats, the size of my friends list jumps appreciably. Hello, new flist people! Welcome aboard!) Chatted with timestheyare this afternoon and was reminded that there’s a lengthy post about transhumanism that’s been brewing in my head for quite some time.

And I haven’t had time to post about any of that. In fact, I haven’t had time to work on any of the projects I have on various burners lately. I’d intended for the new version of my sex game Onyx to be out last month–haven’t worked on it since January. I’d intended to have the Symtoys site redesign done by now. I’ve been itching to begin working on that stalled book I keep not writing, too.

So what HAVE you been doing, Tacit?

Glad you asked.

I’ve been fighting with Network Solutions.

Right now, my largest Web site, the enormous sprawling monstrosity that is the Xero site, is hosted on Earthlink. It’s been hosted on Earthlink for about ten years now. I want to get it off Earthlink, who keeps raping me in the ass for bandwidth (and with the site popularity continuing to grow, that’s not going to end any time soon).

It’s been on Earthlink primarily because I’m using Earthlink’s ecommerce site. I resolved near the end of last year to move it to another hosting provider: GoDaddy. They’re cheaper and offer a lot more bandwidth (like, twenty times more), and they’re owned by an ex-Marine who’s a stickler for rules, meaning they’re not likely to suffer a complete meltdown a la Registerfly…God, what a mess THAT is.

Every step of the move has been more difficult than really necessary.

First, setting up a new ecommerce system. I chose ZenCart, a PHP solution, and installed it on a site I already have running on the new host. No problem.

But wait, I need a security certificate so people can connect securely when they put in credit card numbers.

Okay, no problem…but wait, that means migrating my existing site on the new host to a different server on that host.

Okay, that’s done. Now I need to set up the new ecommerce system and point my existing sites to it. But wait, there’s a security update for ZenCart. And updating ZenCart versions is about as easy as and as much fun as pulling teeth…on yourself…while walking across a tightrope…over the Grand Canyon…and reading Cicero’s The Extremes of Good and Evil…in the original Latin.

Okay, so now I need to set up the ecommerce software again. Good. Now we’re ready…

…oh, but wait, all the various Perl scripts I’ve written for the Xero site won’t work on GoDaddy’s server, because of some extreme wonkiness in the way GoDaddy configures paths. So all the Perl scripts need to be rewritten and tested. No problem…

…except that GoDaddy doesn’t log or provide any diagnostic tools for CGI errors, meaning that debugging CGI scripts of any sort on a GoDaddy server is about as easy as and as much fun as pulling teeth…on yourself…while walking across a tightrope…over the Grand Canyon…and reading Cicero’s The Extremes of Good and Evil…in the original Latin…while blindfolded.

Hey! If I update to version 2.0 of the GoDaddy hosting control panel, there is a logging tool for Perl errors!

Oh, wait. If I update to version 2.0 of the GoDaddy hosting control panel, I can’t use server-side includes any more. The Xero site relies extensively on…server-side includes.

So, many, MANY hours of blindfolded Perl debugging later, everything is ready to move. I allocate server space, copy the files across, now I just need to update the A record for the domain name…

Oh, no, no, wait, Network Solutions won’t let me. They say that the domain was registered through a third party. WTF?

I talk to Earthlink. They tell me that Earthlink-hosted sites whose names are registered with Network Solutions can only be transferred or updated after Earthlink first changes the records at Network Solutions, and would I like them to initiate this procedure?

No, I’d like them to knit me an afghan. Yes, I’d like them to initiate the goddamn procedure!

“We can do that for you, sir. It will take 48-72 hours. Then you will have to contact us again with a validation code from Network Solutions, and we will give you a Network Solutions username and password. If you wish to transfer to another registrar, you will have to unlock your domain name. That will take about 48 hours to propogate. Then you can start the domain transfer, see, and…”

*sigh*

And yes, I do want to transfer the domain name registration as well as the site. I’m tired of being fucked in the ass by Network Solutions.

It’s the tag-team of assfucking, it is. Earthlink and Network Solutions. They’ve been double-teaming me for a decade. I’ve probably bought all the executives Ferraris by now. I’m surprised my ass doesn’t look like a satellite photo of Mount St. Helen’s. Hell, maybe it does; I haven’t looked at it recently. Surprisingly difficult to look at your own ass, not that I try…

But I digress.

So Network Solutions is going to move the domain name at the end of this week. To give me, y’know, time to cancel the transfer if I change my mind, or if merovingian‘s evil robot double sends me a box full of tiny robotic wasps or something, I don’t know.

After that, I can modify the A record to point at the new server. And then bask in the glory of bandwidth I’m not being assraped for, and fix all the little bits that will undoubtedly get broken.

I’ve been holding off working on a major rewrite of the BDSM section of the site until it’s all moved and stuff. I’ll probably add at least two more sections. When I’m not, y’know, trying to finish Onyx. Or trying to finish the update to the Symtoys site. Or, like, playing World of Warcraft.

Whee. I’m going to bed.

Being productive…

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I’ve just posted a major revamp of my polyamory site. The design was getting a bit long in the tooth…I first did it about ten years ago(!), in a time when most people browsed at 640×480 or perhaps 800×600 resolution, and the page was looking a bit cluttered and more than a bit cramped to modern Web visitors. The new design is intended to make the content clearer and easier to read.

I’m in the process of moving off my current Web provider altogether, but the nontrivial complexity of the site and the number of CGIs and server-side includes on the site is making that a big pain in the ass.

On Moving to Atlanta

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Chapter 1: These Homies are Chillin’ in their Low Ride!

U-Haul’s online, computerized reservation system sucks hefty moose willie.

I just want to get that out of the way before going any farther. U-Haul’s online reservation system is truly Teh Suck. It could suck a golf ball through a garden hose. If the suck of the U-Haul reservation system could be harnessed and used for good, it could replace gravity. It’s a good thing the rest of U-Haul’s customer service system blows to the same degree, to equalize the pressure.

As anyone who’s been reading this journal for a while knows, I’m in the process of moving. Specifically, to Atlanta. Two weeks ago, I found an apartment up there; last weekend came the Big Move. (Well, of my stuff, anyway; I’ll be staying in Gainesville for the next couple of weeks or so, and I’ll be in Tampa for Necronomicon next weekend.)

Anyway, before the move, I used U-Haul’s Web site to reserve a truck and one of those things you use to drag your car behind the truck, one way, Tampa to Atlanta. On the day of the reservation, I got a text message on my cell phone telling me the truck and car-towing-thingie were ready, and giving me the address of the place to pick them up. Got an email with the same information. Being the suspicious bastard I am, I called the location. “Oh, sure, come on down! We have the truck!”

They didn’t have the truck.

It took them a little over an hour to figure it out, but they didn’t have the truck. They did, however, have a slightly bizarre toy for sale: a plastic car that lights up and bounces up and down when you push a button, all while playing hip-hop music:

These homies are chillin' in their Low Ride

It’s a weird little slice of urban Americana. The three people in the car are racially balanced–one white guy, one Latino guy, one black guy–though I couldn’t help but notice that the black guy is riding in the back. The text on the bottom of the box reads “These homies are chillin’ in their Low Ride!” Now, for fifteen points: How many stereotypes can you find in this one toy, available for the low,low price of just nine dollars and ninety-five cents? I bet it’s probably made in China, though I didn’t think to check.

But I digress.

Anyway, after an hour of waiting, the U-Haul location determined that, text messages and email and phone conversation to the contrary, they didn’t have my truck. The guy called around a few places, found a place that did, and sent me over there.

Another hour in the second place, and we were ready to g–oh, no, wait, I reserved a hand truck, and they didn’t have one available. Some searching around, and…hey, wait, we have an appliance dolly, will you take that instead? Oh, and we don’t have that doohickey that tows your car by the front wheels, we just have one of the big flatbed things that you drive your car up onto. How’s that sound?

Appliance dolly in the back of the truck, flatbed trailer in tow, and joreth and I were off to the apartment for some backbreaking physical labor.

Chapter 2: In which we learn that Franklin sucks at moving heavy objects

There is a warning on the U-Haul appliance dolly. It warns that the dolly can be recognized as U-Haul property just by its design alone, and that anyone caught in possession of it without a rental contract may be prosecuted for possession of stolen property.

Now, the U-Haul appliance dolly has a very, very short foot. So short, in fact, that it’s very awkward to use. U-Haul specifically designed, engineered, and built a custom hand cart just so they could be recognized if someone walks off with one, but from all appearances, the usefulness of the hand cart in tasks such as, say, moving heavy objects was not a primary design consideration.

I have a bookshelf. It’s a very large bookshelf, about seven feet tall, made of dense particle board. It weighs more than I do. In fact, I believe it weighs more than Joreth and I put together. If a person were to, hypothetically speaking, load it on an appliance dolly, and then, just as a “for instance,” cart it over a doorstep, and this hypothetical doorstep were, say, about four inches high, and while doing this, if my thumb were to get between the appliance dolly and the bookshelf, so that the bookshelf dropped that four inches onto my thumb…if all these things were to happen, then one might expect a certain amount of hopping about and swearing might follow very shortly thereafter.

Hypothetically speaking.

This set something of a tone for the rest of the packing process. I tripped over, walked into, barked my shins on, and otherwise injured myself with approximately three-quarters of my possessions, and I own a lot of crap. joreth did her best not to laugh, a heroic effort that can not be understated.

About three hours into this process, I got a call from U-Haul. “We’re showing that you have an equipment reservation for today. Are you planning to come in and pick up your truck, or should we cancel your reservation?”

Looking back on it now, perhaps I should’ve told them to cancel the reservation, because then, hey, they’d probably forget they even owned the truck!

Chapter 3: Heisenberg

After she’d finished studying, Shelly came down from Gainesville to help finish the packing and whatnot, arriving just in time for dinner. The rest of the packing went quickly, if a little haphazardly, and in no time the truck was buttoned up and ready to go. Night had fallen with a particularly wet thud, so we finished up in total darkness.

And then came…time to load the car trailer.

Which is very large.

Back…no, no, pull forward just a hair…um, wait, right a smidge…no, your other right…um, forward…no, wait, the other way, I mean left…now back up a little…um, too far, forward a bit…

It’s actually possible to carry on a surprisingly lengthy conversation using only the words “back,” “forward,” “left,” and “right,” provided you don’t want to talk about anything other than moving backward, forward, left, and right. We did eventually get the trailer hooked up…not by any particular skill on our parts, I think, but rather through the well-known Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Automobile Motion. As anyone who’s ever passed the second grade knows, this uncertainty principle is given by

where delta-X is the change in the distance from the hitch to the trailer, delta-f is the change in frustration of the driver, i is the importance of getting the goddamn trailer hooked up right fucking now, U is the U-Haul Constant (a universal property subject to change without notice), n is the number of tries you’ve made so far, and lambda is the wavelength of light most likely to give you a headache. As is intuitively obvious to the most casual of observers, the more frustrated you are and the more important it is that you get the trailer hooked up right fucking now, the more tries it can take, all other things being equal.

Chapter 4: These Homies are Cranky in their Tall Truck

It’s about two hours from Tampa to Gainesville, and five more to Atlanta. This assumes, of course, that one is driving at a reasonable speed…say, fifteen miles per hour or so over the posted speed limit, the posted speed limit being a most unreasonable speed, all things considered.

In a desperately underpowered Ford POS towing a car on an absurdly large trailer, it’s a little more. Especially when one has not showered and feels like the inside of a yak’s armpit.

Shelly and I stopped in Gainesville long enough to fail to sleep because the cats decided that five o’clock in the morning would be an ideal time to start playing, and the game they agreed on was “let’s knock everything off all the desks and then chase each other over the human’s bed.”

The cats were asleep when we left, the furry little bastards. The trip to Atlanta wasn’t as bad as it could have been–we could have been on fire, for example–and the unloading of the truck once we arrived went smoothly and effortlessly.

As it turns out, there are people who will–get this–actually unload a truck for you, if you give them this thing called “money.” The joy I felt on discovering this can not be overstated. We’re talking the rapture of the angels, here. We’re talking music of the spheres, winning the Lotto, George Dubya’s term in office ending, and finding free pr0n on the Internet all rolled into one. Now that I have learned this Very Important Thing, I will never unload a moving truck again. “Not unloading a truck full of crap” ranks surprisingly high on the list of Things That Make Me Happy.

Pausing only to buy some new pants, fill up with gas, and leave my toothbrush and cell phone charger in Atlanta (goddammit), we headed back down to Florida at a much more reasonable speed, detouring through Tallahassee long enough to visit Shelly’s sweetie there. And when we got home…

Chapter 5: Fire Poi!

…fire poi!

The set of fire poi I ordered arrived. I need to practice with them sans fire until I’m reasonably sure I won’t set myself on fire when I use them (because it could always be worse until you’re on fire, and at that point it’s difficult to say ‘it could be worse’ any more). With a bit of luck, I can arrange to have smoocherie be there when I light them up for the first time, because after all, she is the reason I’m into poi spinning in the first place, and I did take her virginity and all. So how ;bout it, smoocherie, you going to be available before I leave Florida for good?

A list of pointers to other posts…

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…because I haven’t the time to post the things I want to post myself, about Dragon*Con and spinning poi and BDSM and the TV show “Battlestar: Galactica” as an anti-transhumanish meditation…

First, a post on the nature of resentment by lefthand.

“Resentment or the act of deliberately provoking negative emotions by focusing on them is powerful magic. Carefully applied, resentment can destroy friendships, marriages, businesses and all other human activities. Resentment is capable of overcoming all obstacles and eliminating connections. Resentment gains its power by a deliberate disconnect from reality. It ignores all contradictory input and focuses on egregious, insulting and humiliating aspects.”

Go read it. Seriously. It’s good stuff.

Next up, this beautiful little musing on desire and avarice by jane-etrix. She writes about everything this well.

Geek humor: I do not believe I have seen anything in at least six months quite as funny as this. It helps to know that in Unix, “sudo” means “superuser do.” It runs a command as ‘superuser’–that is, it runs that command as though the person issuing the command were logged in as root, with unrestricted authority to take any action on the system.

[Edit] Here’s the image, and yes, it really is that funny.

Every religion has its ‘miracles,’ where the face of Jesus appears in a cabbage or the name of Allah materializes on a rusty bucket or some damn thing. Nothing can comare, though, to the visceral, undeniable appearance of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the sky. We are all touched by his noodly appendage!

And finally, datan0de points out that August 29 is in fact Judgment Day. Hail the rise of the machines!

Random things ‘n’ stuff

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Shelly’s got her Internet radio station playing, and a very strange mix of a VNV Nation song just came on, which reminded me I wanted to show this to datan0de:

I’ve been head-down in a major rewrite of my sex game Onyx for the past several weeks, and have had time for nothing–I mean nothing–else. I’ve fallen into the habit of bringing my laptop with me on my lunch break every day and coding while I’m eating.

The downside is that I’ve been having conversations like this lately:

Shelly: I’m horny!
Me: Can’t sleep…can’t eat…can’t fuck…must….code!

The upside is that the game is turning out major kick-ass, and is so much better than the current version that I’m almost embarrassed by the current version. (By the way, datan0de, I’ve implemented all of your suggestions from your last round of alpha testing, and found the crashing bug you reported… I have a new build ready for testing if you guys are up for it!)

It’s been almost five years since the last time I worked on Onyx, and I have piles and piles of small pocket-sized spiral notebooks (some of which date back to 1993) filled with notes, ideas, game actions, kinky sex ideas, and so on all pertaining to the game. I dug them out and have been flipping through them as I work, and I’ve found all kinds of things scribbled in the margins that don’t have any bearing on Onyx at all but must’ve caught my attention:

Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard. Be evil.

The secret to a great friendship is to have lots of fears in common.

Feminists fuck better.

People who make their own beds seldom want to sleep in them.

Every man is the creature of the age in which he lives; very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
–Voltaire

Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.

Today, we’re taking some time off to go to Busch Gardens. When we get back, time to code some more.

Geek humor

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Bumper sticker I saw on my way home Friday:

Yes, there are people in the world geekier than I am. I bet the half-dozen or so people who get that bumper sticker really appreciate it. 🙂