Tag Archives: high weirdness

Writing amidst the Hellstorm

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So it came to pass last month that I boarded a miraculous machine that can fly through the air, intending to spend a few weeks with my Talespinner working on the fifth draft of our novel Spin in seclusion.

Life, as they say, is what happens when you make other plans. Our plans did not account for hail, floods, and other disasters, more fule us.

It was a simple plan, I thought. A good plan. A plan that inspired confidence. I was to fly to Springfield, something I hadn’t done in almost exactly a year thanks to a certain orange buffoon’s ridiculous war of choice on Iran that led to airline prices hitting the stratosphere, but when a rare opportunity wandered by my Google alerts for a round-trip ticket for only $140, I lept upon it, and off I did go.

When the day arrived, I stumbled to the train station at an awkward hour—that $140 flight was truly horiffic, with brutal arrival and departure times and an extended layover in Texas. As I waited for the train, an inauspicious pigeon occupied the only available seat at the train stop and would not be moved.

That should’ve been a sign.

Inauspicious pigeon is inauspicious. And also had zero fucks to give.

Nevertheless I persisted on my way, eventually reaching Springfield at an ungodly hour of the morning more or less intact.

For a while, all was quiet. Too quiet.

Well, I don’t mean that literally. There was considerable noise, but of the good sort, mainly screaming and such. My Talespinner is a lot of fun in bed. Like I mean a lot. No, more than that. But I didn’t go out there for sex—okay, I mean, I did, ngl, but not just for sex. There was also the creativity! Namely, our novel Spin, which we’re currently shopping to agents.

What is Spin, you might say? I’m glad you asked. Imagine if Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children had a love child. When we pitch it, we call it a “far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel,” which it is, but that doesn’t tell you what it’s about.

So imagine that thouands of years from now, human civilization has collapsed, the population is far smaller than it was, society is at a pre-industrial level even though they know about everything from atomic physics to metallurgy to genetics because it doesn’t do a whole lot of good to know how to build steam engines if all the surface deposits of iron and coal are gone, fertility has cratered so those few fertile women become Mothers in the care of the Church and have babies until they can’t anymore, and every so often someone comes along with the ability to reweave reality. Unreliable narrators are cool and all, but we wrote an unreliable reality story, where things that happen in chapter 6 can un-happen in chapter 7.

The nation is a quasi-Calvinist theocracy built on a foundation of reproductive slavery, yet most people are generally happy. That’s the thing about The Handmaid’s Tale: you get the sense that everyone in it, from the Handmaids to the aunts to the Commanders and their wives, is miserable. It’s hard to build a stable society if everyone including the leaders are miserable. But ah, if most people are generally happy, and if most people are able to look away from the ugliness at the core of the society, now things are different, right? Right?

The fourth draft weighed in at about 150,000 words, but we got feedback that most agents won’t take a new client with a work over 120,000 words, so that meant 30,000 words had to die.

To accomplish this massacre, we devised a Cunning Plan. We would print it out, go off to the woods, and spend some time going through the book with red pens, editing the old-fashioned way in a place near where the story’s action takes place. (We’d recently followed the path our protagonist takes through the Dominionate, so it seemed fitting.)

Ah HA ha ha ha, oh the things Nature does to the plans of puny humans.

To implement our Cunning Plan, we first needed a printout of the manuscript. That proved harder than we expected. The FedEx Office website is a mess, attempts to create a FedEx account to get a break on the price were for naught, and it turns out that the Fedex site gives you a 404 Not Found error when you click a link to enter business tax ID information. Seriously. It’s amazing these people can run a shipping empire, or even a hot dog stand.

So we ate the cost of doing it without a corporate account and ended up with…

You’ll note it’s in a binder. This was not the original plan. The original plan was a Big Box of Paper. This original plan was also a stupid plan, as my Talespinner’s other boyfriend pointed out. He insisted we get a binder, which, as it turns out, saved our collective asses…more on that in a bit.

We detoured for a time to spend a few days in a remote, secluded cabin where we had nothing but endless kinky sex interspersed with making art from EL wire and body paint, before we set off to rural Missouri for secluded camping and wordsmithing.

We chose our campsite in the rain (which should have been a warning)…

…before setting up camp in the rain (which should have been a warning).

Nevertheless, we soon had a camp…

…and by the next morning, the weather had cleared, and I thought all would be smooth sailing from then on.

Oh, how I was wrong.

The morning sun rose on clear, fair weather, perfect to go down into the word mines and massacre some words.

I even took the time to film a video on cyanobateria and gray goo, as one does, because I apparently seem to have started a video channel without really intending to.

For a while, all was good. We worked on the book, massacring words with ruthless enthusiasm until red ink spilled down the page in a river of blood and tears.

And then, Gentle Reader…and then…

And then, my Talespinner’s other boyfriend and I went to the store for drinks and candy bars. And oh, the tragedy, the tale of woe that unfolded next, tribulations so ghastly as to make Job quail.

The rain started, large fat drops falling from a sky the color of television tuned to a dead channel, but, like, an old-fashioned CRT television, not a smart TV because kids these days have no understanding of what that means. And oh, did the heavens open, in a re-enactment of the Deluge, but, like, real.

And then we got The Text.

The Text came from my Talespinner, and, well…

Three simple words with an entire universe of badness behind them.

Let me pause a moment, Gentle Reader, to ask you a question. Did you know that gel pens use water-based ink? The reason will become clear in a moment, but let me say that I…did not.

So.

By the time we reach the campsite, it’s a wreck. The tents are flooded, along with all our bedding.

And so did the manuscript. Remember how I said gel pen ink is water-based? Yeah. The rain completely obliterated our edits on a handful of pages—fortunately not all (the manuscript printed this way is three hundred and eighty-something pages long!), but some of them.

We bailed to a hotel. I will spare you the trials of finding a hotel room in the middle of the night in the pouring rain, to hit only the highlights, like the fact that when we finally found one and were checking in, someone stole my Talespinner’s smartphone right off the reception desk, bold as you please.

So after we checked in, my Talespinner and her other boyfriend dealt with the stolen phone, her by filing a police report (which involved trials of her own, because the process demanded that she do part of it by email, but she couldn’t log in to her email because it uses two-factor authentication with the code sent to—wait for it—her phone, because of course it did, because this part of the trip was a fractal series of unfortunate events) while he blew up the phone with texts and messages to make life for the thief as unpleasant as possible.

Meanwhile, I used the hotel hairdryer to painstakingly dry the manuscript.

The hotel itself turned out to be surprisingly nice, all things considered, except the part about “people steal your phone right in front of you.”

We slept (well, I slept; there were in which Shenanigans I was much too tired to participate), followed by the first stroke of good news in a while: my Talespinner’s other boyfriend called her stolen phone and, amazingly, someone answered. It seems the thief, having grown frustrated that he couldn’t unlock it (or perhaps that it kept ringing over and over and over—it turns out on Samsung smartphones you can’t turn off the ringer when you don’t know the passcode!) had stripped off the case and abandoned the phone on the side of the road, where it’d been found by someone who returned it.

So, that done, after a brief delay checking out owing to the fact that I got lost inside the hotel, it was back to the campsite.

The day, as if apologizing for its previous mischief, grew bright and sunny and wonderful, perfect editing weather, but for the fact that cleaning up our campsite took precedence…

…which is how we learned that a massive branch had fallen during the hailstorm and damn near flattened the tent with my Talespinner in it.

So that was a bit unnerving.

We also discovered that in our absence this furry little fucker had chewed his way into our supply tent and ransacked our supplies.

I can’t escape the feeling that we had it coming. In Spin, we put our protagonists through hell, a great deal of which involves being cold and sodden in rural Missouri, facing down miserable weather and wildlife.

I don’t know if there’s an equivalent of Method acting for novelists, but if there’s such a thing as “Method noveling,” we did it.

Stories from the Past: Tacit Rainbow

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As I move into my sixth decade of life, I’m posting a series of stories from my past. This is part of that series.

A few weeks ago, as I waled to the coffee shop where I spend a lot of my writing time, a woman coming the other way pointed to me and said “Tacit Rainbow!”

Normally I answer people who randomly greet me on the street (when you wear bunny ears everywhere you go, this happens a lot), but on this occasion I was so gobsmacked I just stood there with my mouth hanging open until she’d passed.

So, a little backstory. “Tacit Rainbow” was the code name for a US Air Force project in the 80s and 90s. The plan was to create a cruise missile that could be launched near suspected enemy surface-to-air missile batteries, to replace Wild Weasel pilots.

The missle (by today’s standards, it would be considered a cross between a missle and a drone) would loiter, flying circles around the area until the enemy activated its anti-aircraft radar. At that point, the Tacit Rainbow would automatically lock on to the enemy radar and follow it down, destroying the SAM battery’s control and tracking capability.

AGM-136 Tacit Rainbow, the only one left in the world, on display in a museum. The Tacit Rainbow was the world’s first loitering munition.

Flight test of an early Tacit Rainbow prototype. It has two sets of wings to give it tons of lift for extended loiter.

The Tacit Rainbow project was canceled some time in the early 90s without ever going into production. I wasn’t particularly a military buff or anything, but when I heard about the project in the 1980s, I really liked the way those two words, “Tacit Rainbow,” sounded together. I adopted Tacit Rainbow as my handle on old-school computer BBS systems. For a time, more people knew me as Tacit Rainbow than knew my real name.

Thing is, I only used that name from about 1988 to about 1996 or 1997 or so. Classic computer bulletin board systems were text-only, no graphics. To my knowledge, there are no photos of me from those days attached to the name “Tacit Rainbow.”

Not that it would matter. I looked a lot different back then. Here’s a photo of me from the days I ran a BBS called a/L/T/E/R r/E/A/L/I/T/Y:

Today, not only have I not used the name Tacit Rainbow in 30 years, the only vestige remaining is my AOL email address “tacitr”. I got that email address in 1992, truncating it because at the time AOL dodn’t allow names as long as “Tacit Rainbow.” I still have it, and even still use it occasionally.

The idea that someone randomly wandering down the street would recognize me from a computer BBS handle I used thirty years ago was so jaw-droppingly improbable I just stood rooted in place until she was gone.

Had I had my wits about me, I would have been like, “Wait, hang on, do we know each other? Were you a BBS regular back in the day? How on earth do you know that name?”

Somewhere around, I don’t know, 1998 or 1999 or so, I was sitting in front of my computer when a chat window popped up asking me if the name “tacitr” came from Tacit Rainbow. When I said it did, the guy was like “OMG, were you on the project at Northrop? I was one of the lead engineers, retired after it got canceled. Did we work together?”

I explained that I wasn’t part of it but I knew about it and took my name from it because I liked the way those words sounded together, and we ended up chatting for about two or three hours. Really interesting guy. The project was fascinating and had some incredibly advanced avionics for the time, though apparently it was plagued by mismanagement, which is apparently one of the biggest reasons the DoD canceled it.

I still would dearly love to know why a random woman on a random street in Portland looked at me and said “Tacit Rainbow!” There’s a story there I will likely never know.

On Not Being Nosey

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A typical nose, the sticky-out bit of the face part (photo by lightwavemedia)

I have, as many who know me can attest, a rudimentary, almost vestigial sense of smell. I’ve always been this way. I can detect really strong smells, like bleach, but for the most part I’m all but nose-blind.

So it came to pass last Friday that I headed home from Lenscrafters, where I’d just picked up a new pair of glasses to cope with the more ordinary sort of blindness. This being Portland, and March, Portland did what it does in March and started to rain.

This isn’t new. I’ve lived in Florida for decades, where it rains all the time, and now live in Portland, where it rains all the time but not as hard. However, on this particular day, something most peculiar happened.

Midway home, rain started falling. That’s not the unusual bit. The unusual bit was the smell. The heavens opened up and for a few brief, glorious hours, I could smell…everything.

Imagine you’re born blind. Imagine that you go to a nightclub one day, and whilst you’re there dancing to the beat of music, abruptly and without warning, you can see. But not just see, like, vague colors and shapes, but something like this…

Everything had a smell. The storm drain I stepped over had a smell. The cars driving by had a smell. People! People have a smell, my God! Who knew? A dude walked past me eating gummy bears and I could smell them! Half the thing I smelled I couldn’t identify, nor figure out where the smell was coming from.

Like our hypothetical blind person granted sight in the middle of a goth club dance floor, I was a bit overwhelmed. You have to understand, in my five-plus decades of life I’ve never experienced anything remotely like this.

It lasted for five hours or so after I got home (it took half that much time to figure out the cloud of scent that seemed to follow me around everywhere was my laundry detergent, which I’d always assumed was unscented), then slowly faded. I woke on Saturday back in my normal state of nearly complete nose-blindness.

The whole thing was weird and freaky and I do not understand it, like, at all. (According to the Internet, a particularly acute sense of smell is called “hyperosmia,” and can be caused by a brain tumor, because we learn from reading Dr. Google that everything is caused by a tumor.)

For one brief, shining moment, an entire sense I’ve never had before opened up, then closed again. Which is a little sad. It’s one thing to live your life without having a particular sense; it’s quite another to have it and then lose it.

AI Considered Silly (and Harmful)

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I don’t know when it happened. I know when I noticed it. I was using the Facebook app on my phone while I was in Florida working on getting a solar battery setup in my wife’s RV.

“Huh, what’s this?” I thought as I looked through the posts on my profile. “There are a bunch of buttons beneath each post, asking followup questions.” So I clicked one.

Dear God.

So you know how ChatGPT will spout the most absolutely flat-out bonkers bullshit in this weird, bland, “corporate email meets the Institute of Official Cheer” voice? Like asserting with confidence that Walter Mondale graduated from Princeton University (he didn’t), or inventing hyperlinks to imaginary reviews of a Honda motorcycle that doesn’t exist?

Meta, in its ongoing effort to cram LLMs into every orifice of the great throbbing pustulent Facebook experience, is wedging LLM chatbots, often with the aid of a crowbar, onto the bottom of Facebook posts (but only, at least so far, in the app; I don’t see this on the browser).

And the things it imagines are sometimes…weird.

I was called for jury duty a couple of weeks ago. The waiting room featured a stash of complimentary fidget spinners (yes, seriously). Something Facebook’s AI insisted wasn’t the case.

It got way weirder, though, when I posted that the first drft of my first novel with my talespinner was done:

AI invented a question that it couldn’t answer, then answered it with nonsense. “I don’t know who Kitty Bound is, so let me ramble about unrelated authors who go by ‘Kitty.’” And the thing is, the question buttons are invented by the AI.

It doesn’t know who Kitty Bound is (understandably, this is the first novel we’re attempting to get published together), but it will cheerfully say “click here to learn more about Kitty Bound” and then say “Kitty Bound’s work isn’t well-represented in search results, so ima go Hal 9000 with ADHD and tell you things about completely unrelated people.”

Would you like to know how to make an omelet? Yes? Well, I can’t tell you how to make an omelet, but here’s a paragraph about maintaining gas-powered wood chippers.

And the thing is, Facebook is the shining example of AI success.

Facebook is one of the very few companies doing more than forklifting venture capital dollars into a furnace by the pallet. The proponents of AI say it’s going to change the world, and they’re right…just not with hallucination engines designed to pass the Turing test. (I used to think the Chinese room critique of AI was nonsense; now I’m not so sure. I might write an essay about that at some point, check this space.)

AI is making crazy money for Facebook, but not in chatbots. They’re using AI engines to drive ad placement, consumer segments, and demographic analysis of their ads, and it works. About two or three years ago, Facebook suddenly started showing me ads that I’ve never seen before, for products I’ve never shown any interest in as far as I know…and I, get this, started buying from Facebook ads.

AI, in the right context, works.

But that sort of AI isn’t sexy. It doesn’t get column inches in newspapers. Chatbots do…but for all the wrong reasons.

My Talespinner and I may have invented the genre of hyperurbanized retrofuturist court-intrigue gangster noir. Do a search for that phrase and you’ll get three results, of which (checks notes) three are by us. Chatbots can be forgiven for not knowing what that is, but hot damn, it doesn’t stop them from spouting confident-seeming nonsense about what it is. This is some classic Chinese room shit.

And don’t get me started on whatever this fresh bucket o’ slop is:

If that’s not silly enough, try this:

Want even sillier? How about this:

“I was cranky because I had to drive overnight.” AI: “Why was I cranky? You were cranky because you had to drive overnight.”

This would be silly if it weren’t for the fact that GenAI is almost unbelievably expensive, needing a trip through the entire neural network for each token generated. The server farms that ooze this pap are warmed by furnaces that burn hundred-dollar bills.

That’s the big problem here. The AI chatbots don’t pay for themselves, not even close. There’s no business case for them: 95% of companies inviesting in AI don’t show positive returns. There are currently 498 AI startups valued at over a billion dollars, with a combined valuation of $2.7 trillion, even thugh most are producing zero profit and have little hope of producing profit any time in the future.

That’s ludicrous.

It’s not worth $2,7700,000,000,000 to tell people “why were you cranky when driving overnight made you cranky? Because you get cranky when you drive overnight.”

On top of the economic cost, there’s a social cost as well. Scammers, spammers, fraud artists, conmen, and political adversaries use LLMs to refine and hone their message for maximum emotional manipulation. Political activists use GenAI to create deepfakes. We as a society do not have a cognitive immune system that can deal with this, and I think it will be generations before we do.

But hey, in that brief moment before they go bankrupt, 498 people will be paper billionaires.

My knee hurts. I blame Sigorney Weaver.

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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).

Of Medical Misadventure and Waffle House

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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!

Adventures in Mad Science: When Tentacles Attack

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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.

“Incompatible with Biblical Morality”

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A while back, some wag left a comment on one of my Quora answers stating that I am, quote, “incompatible with Biblical morality.”

Which is a fair cop and no mistake. I mean, he thought he was being insulting, but there it is: I am indeed incompatible with Biblical morality.

So I made a T-shirt.

I put this on my social media, and right away people started messaging me to say they wanted one. Which isn’t what I expected—it’s a rather odd thing to say, which is part of why I made it a shirt—but hey, apparently there are a lot of us.

So I’ve made it available at Villaintees.com, for those of you who, like me, are incompatible with Biblical morality and proud of it. You can even get a sticker and a coffee mug!

Adventures in TSA

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In which our hero has alien sex toys scanned for bombs, and urethral sounds confiscated…

Okay, so. I travel a bit, sometimes internationally, and so it was I found myself jetting off to Barcelona for a vacation with the extended polyamorous family a few months back.

I have, as those who follow this blog know, been working for several years on a Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon, inspired by (a) my lifelong fear of the alien from Alien (a movie my parents took me to when I was, like, 11 or 12 or something, thinking it was like a new Star Wars…no exaggeration, I had nightmares aout that alien for more than 30 years after), and (b) a suggestion by my wife that I should make a sex toy inspired by the alien, because she loves to push my buttons.

In fact, a photo of one of the early prototypes ended up going mad viral on the Internet, and I’m told has even been uploaded to the official Sigorney Weaver fan page, which means Ms. Weaver has likely seen it. 0.o

Anyway.

I cast four prototype xenomorph hiphugger strapons and one xenomorph facehugger gag in the runup to Barcelona, with the idea that having multiple lovers in the same space would be a fine opportunity for a xenomorph gangbang, truly a test of the design.

So it was I packed all these xenomorph hiphuggers in my luggage and jetted off to Springfield, MO, to meet my Talespinner, who would be accompanying me to Spain.

You would not believe what this looked like on the X-ray. Sadly, they refused to allow me to take a pic.

The problem started quite early. Whilst carrying my luggage aboard the plane, the X-ray showed a suitcase absolutely packed with aggressive alien endoparasites, which, as you might imagine, elicited some…excitement at screening. (I didn’t put them in my checked bag because it was mainly filled with photographic gear and clothes.)

The bag got bounced, the TSA checker opened the lid, and gentle reader, if I could have photographed his expression and shown it to you, you would know that it is possible for surprise to take on human form.

Within minutes, there was a crowd around the table: the TSA inspector, the woman running the X-ray, and two other people, all of them staring in slack-jawed astonishment. The TSA checker called for his superior, who was like “What the…?” One of the other TSA screeners said “Holy shit, that looks like the alien from the Alien movies!”

TSA screener: “Should I—”

Supervisor: “Yes.”

And then they, hand to God, scanned the hiphuggers for explosives.

Eventually convinced the hiphuggers weren’t actually bombs, they allowed me to board, where I sat in a chair that through the miracle of Science flew through the air.

But that’s not the end of the story, oh my no.

When the time came for us to head from Springfield to Barcelona, I re-packed everything, in no small part because of the way TSA freaked out about the xenomorphs, but also prompted by the need to rearrange in order to fit two rather large studio lights for the xenomorph photo shoot we had planned. (That was an adventure in itself; the tripods for the studio lights were an inch and a half too long to fit the suitcase, but fifteen minutes with a hacksaw soon fixed that.)

We set off for the airport, confident that this TSA experience would be far smoother. Alas, it was not to be.

During the rearranging, I’d put the more conventional sex toy kit in my carryon whilst the hiphuggers ent in checked baggage with the studio lights, UV-reactive body paints, UV blacklight, and other miscellaneous orgy supplies.

I did not know, Gentle Reader, I did not suspect, that I had planted the seeds of my own undoing.

For you see, in my conventional sex toy kit I’d placed my collection of sounds. If oyu don’t know what those are, I won’t disturb you with the details, except to say that I had about ten or fifteen and they looked like this:

The TSA guy…

…confiscated and threw away the sounds.

When I asked him why, he looked me straight in the eye and told me, you could stab someone with them.”

You. Could. Stab. Someone. With. Them.

Words…words fail. Whatever danger these may pose as a weapon, Gentle Reader, let me assure you that the 100% sustainably made, biodegradable wood cutlery they gave us aboard the plane would be a far better stabby weapon in every single axis.At this point, it’s hard to escape the perhaps paranoid conclusion that my name exists on some TSA list somewhere. I had a slab of Barcelonan chocolate in my computer bag on the way home and it got scanned for explosives every single time I went through security.

They do it with malice.

Quick xenomorph hiphugger teaser

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I’ve now been back from Barcelona for a week, but I still don’t have my luggage (thanks, WestJet!). I’m way, waaaaay behind on processing and posting photos from the trip, including from the two days I spent at the Sagrada Familia (which was magnificent beyond what I ever imagined), so here’s a quick teaser from a Barcelona photo shoot of the alien xenomorph hiphugger Borg Queen parasite.

Want a hiphugger of your very own? You can find the FAQ for the xenomorph hiphugger here!