Tag Archives: humor

The revolution is Nigh…Impossible

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As part of the ongoing development of the bionic cock project I’m working on, I’m in the process of teaching myself 3D modeling and 3D printing. We’re using 3D printing to make positives for molding silicone prototypes.

3D printing is amazing. It offers incredible potential for people everywhere to be able to make whatever they want on demand, as long as “people everywhere” means “people with access to computers and the Internet and 3D printers and spools of plastic, and the cognitive ability to be able to design things and operate the equipment.” So not really people everywhere, but no matter, right?

3D printing is also incredibly stupid. The state of the art is so appalling. The software is deplorable–a throwback to the bad old days of obtuse design usable only by the select few.

The first time I tried to make a print, I was horrified by what passes for design in the world of 3D printing. It’s a case study in why Linux has never made significant inroads into the desktop, despite being free. Open source software is still software made by developers for developers, with no thought (or sometimes, with active contempt) for users who either don’t want to or don’t have the time to learn every small detail of the way their systems work.

By way of comparison, if color inkjet software worked the way 3D printer software works, every time you hit the Print command on your computer, you’d be confronted by something like this (click to embiggen):

A twisty maze of confusing ad indecipherable options poorly laid out

This…is why we can’t have nice things. The open source community isn’t democratic; it’s elitist.

Kickin’ it Old-School: Wololo

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I’ve rediscovered a love of the old real-time strategy game Age of Empires II, which might arguably be the apex of the Golden Age of RTS games.

Those of you who share my love will get this joke.

Movie Review: Live and Let Spectre Die Hard with a Vengeance

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The life of a sociopathic British secret agent isn’t what it used to be. Time was when you could expect that evil supervillains bent on making doomsday weapons from their space lab in space could be counted on to invite you in for dinner, explain the entirety of their sinister plan to you, and then concoct some ridiculously over-the-top way to kill you while they conveniently absented themselves from the room to deal with pressing matters elsewhere.

Alas, times change, and even the most dense of today’s modern supervillain has become wise to the various flaws in this otherwise cunning course of action. Previous James Bonds have had the luxury of knowing that the supervillains they faced, while no doubt quite super and unparalleled in their villainy, were perhaps a few bricks short of a deck in the “dealing with British secret agents” department.

And so a new James Bond was needed. A tougher James Bond. A more resourceful James Bond. A James Bond with a steely gaze.

And that James Bond is back for another romp through the gardens of man’s inhumanity to man in the delightful little movie Spectre, featuring car chases, explosions, sinister villains, fluffy Persian cats, acting, plot, and dialogue.

The movie goes something like this:

RANDOM HOT WOMAN: Oh, James, ravish me! Ravish me now!
DANIEL CRAIG: Hm.

DANIEL CRAIG takes off his SKELETAL COSTUME and goes out the WINDOW onto the ROOF OF THE BUILDING in pursuit of a MAN IN A DIFFERENT SKELETAL COSTUME that is NOT THE SAME as DANIEL CRAIG’S SKELETAL COSTUME

MAN IN THE DIFFERENT SKELETAL COSTUME: Let us blow up the stadium and then go see the Pale King, because we are villains in a James Bond movie and so we can not assume that our co-conspirators know what we’re conspiring about and we need lots of exposition to establish that we’re the bad guys.
RANDOM BODYGUARD: There is a man listening to us from the top of the roof outside our window. I think he may be James Bond.
MAN IN THE DIFFERENT SKELETAL COSTUME: Well, shoot at him, then! Isn’t that what I pay you for?

A bunch of people shoot at DANIEL CRAIG

DANIEL CRAIG: Hm.

DANIEL CRAIG shoots the BOMB they wanted to use to BLOW UP THE STADIUM. The entire building CRACKS and then FALLS OVER onto DANIEL CRAIG, who fixes the crumbling building with a STEELY GAZE

DANIEL CRAIG: Hm.

DANIEL CRAIG slides through the CRUMBLING WRECKAGE and lands on a CHAIR, then pursues the MAN IN A DIFFERENT SKELETAL COSTUME through the streets of MEXICO CITY

MAN IN THE DIFFERENT SKELETAL COSTUME: James Bond is chasing me! Meet me in the square!

A HELICOPTER lands in the SQUARE and picks up the MAN IN THE DIFFERENT SKELETAL COSTUME. DANIEL CRAIG fixes the HELICOPTER with a STEELY GAZE and then HOPS ABOARD. They have a WILD FIGHT. The helicopter goes UPSIDE DOWN

DANIEL CRAIG: Hm.

DANIEL CRAIG steals a RING, throws everyone else OUT of the HELICOPTER to their GRUESOME DEATHS, and then FLIES AWAY into the SUNSET

The rest is down here! Beware, here be spoilers.

Sisters of Cathy

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Cathy is a long-running comic strip that premiered in 1972 and has graced the pages of American newspapers for the last four decades. In all that time, the entirety of the strip has revolved around five jokes: Cathy is insecure about her weight, Cathy is insecure in her job, Cathy is insecure in her relationship, OMG gender roles, and Cathy likes to shop.

But what if…

What if the insipid innocence of the strip hides a dark secret? What if the world of Cathy is a more dangerous and dramatic place than it seems? What if Cathy lives a secret life of sinister plots and awesome goth music? What if…Cathy is really the heroine of every Sisters of Mercy song?

It turns out it works rather well.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present: Sisters of Cathy.

My two favorite strips are posted for my backers over on my Patreon blog.

Movie Review: Inside Out

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I will admit to some small measure of skepticism when I first learned of Inside Out, the new animated movie from Pixar. The premise of the movie is we all have emotions living inside us, you see, that look kind of like us except Fear (which resembles a purple Al Pacino, only skinnier), and Anger, which I don’t know what the hell it looks like, but it’s red.

But it’s Pixar, and Pixar is usually a pretty safe bet. They gave us Up, Toy Story, The Shining, Finding Nemo, and Brave, so I figured I’d give the movie a shot.


Al Pacino in Pixar’s hit movie The Shining

The movie begins with the birth of the main character Ripley Riley, who is dragged non-consensually into the world nine months after the end of last year’s surprise Pixar hit, Carnal Encounters of the Barest Kind. Upon the abrupt cessation of her non-existence, Ripley Riley begins to feel her first emotions, hilariously voiced by Al Pacino, gruff Al Pacino, Sigourney Weaver, unhappy Sigourney Weaver, and smug Sigourney Weaver.

Ripley Riley grows up in an idyllic Minnesota town, where she faces the normal challenges any young woman encounters on the path to maturity: she learns to play hockey, builds relationships with her parents and friends, goes to school, and drives a loader (in one particularly poignant scene, she gets a Class Two rating after her flight license is revoked).

The rest of the movie goes something like this:

Avast, ye landlubbers, there be spoilers below!

“Most likely a sociopath”

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As many folks who read me probably know by now (and goodness, I’m doing my job wrong if you don’t!), I’m polyamorous. I’ve been polyamorous my entire life, I’ve been writing a Web site about polyamory since the 1990s, and I recently co-wrote a book on the subject.

A lot of folks ask me if I get negative responses from being so open about poly. And the answer is, no, I usually don’t. In fact, it’s extremely rare that I hear anything negative about polyamory, all things considered. I generally encourage folks who are poly (or in other non-traditional relationships) to be as open as they feel safe in being, both because stigma is reduced when many people are open about non-traditional relationships and because, almost always, the pushback is nowhere near as great as people are likely to think it will be.

But that’s not to say I never hear anything negative. Like this, for example, left as an anonymous comment to a post I made about dating and relationships on a social media site recently:

“This is what a woman had to say about you “Let me put this franklin, frank is a user/manipulator. I am sure he tells the women he is with that by being in a relationship with him and 4 other women that he is “empowering” them. You have to realize that there is a new “modern” type of feminism, these women misconstrue the term femism. The original feminist wanted to feel equal to men, they wanted more opportunities that we (women) are now given due to thier efforts. Nowadays women are empowered in a completely different way, women are mislead (in my opinion by manipulative men such as franklin) to believe that being overtly sexual is empowering, so that is why you see these women bending over backwards for men. I dont know exactly who is misleading women of our generation to believe polyamory is empowering or being overly sexual is but its someone, perhaps the feminists in the media but the question who is behind the media in the first place? I just feel bad for young feminists because they have no true understanding of what it means to be empowered and they are very confused. Franklin is smart and manipulating each girlfriend he has and he most likely a sociopath.””

Formatting, quote marks, and spelling as in the original.

So now you know, the media feminists are pushing women into the arms of sociopaths like me. Curses, my secret is out.

#WLAMF no. 27: “Polyamory is wrong!”

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If you’ve been part of any poly community online for more than…oh, about 400 milliseconds or so, you’ve unquestionably seen someone post the “polyamory is wrong” T-shirt. You know the one I mean:

Get it? You’re supposed to think at first that it’s saying polyamory is morally wrong, but really it’s just saying it’s wrong to mix Latin and Greek roots! Get it?

Except that…err, it’s totally okay to mix Latin and Greek roots. We do it all the time. In fact, even purely Latin words might have mixed roots, because the Romans had their grubby paws all over the place, and mixed words from different languages with gleeful abandon. Latin itself is about as pure as a Baptist in a tavern, and as it says in Job 14:4, “Who can bring what is pure from the impure? No one!”

But I’m not one to stand in the way of a good linguistic joke, so I most humbly propose the following additions to the canon:

I’m writing one blog post for every contribution to our crowdfunding we receive between now and the end of the campaign. Help support indie publishing! We’re publishing five new books on polyamory in 2015.

#WLAMF no. 6: Stonepeckers

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During our travels around the country talking to folks about polyamory, Eve and I passed through Colorado. We spent a night at Colorado National Monument, sleeping in the back of the van at a weird angle that made us keep rolling into each other.

Colorado National Monument is awesome in the “nature is grand on a scale beyond mere human endeavor” sense, rather than a “this architecture is grand because it’s designed to manipulate you” sense. It’s filled with towers of stone that look like something right out of an old Roadrunner cartoon, separated from each other by deep canyons that could comfortably swallow a blue whale and a dozen tour buses and you’d never even notice.

Some of those towers of stone are pockmarked with great holes that resemble nothing so much as the holes made in telephone poles by optimistic woodpeckers.

I asked a park ranger1 about the holes. That’s when I first learned of the great stonepeckers.

The similarity to woodpecker holes is no coincidence, for they’re formed by similar processes. During the dry season, giant stonepeckers, with huge talons and beaks like carved diamond, land on the buttes and chip away at the stone, seeking the rock burrowers that live within. They look a bit like woodpeckers, but on a far grander scale. Their iron-feathered wings can stretch more than thirty feet, and when they peck at the cliff face, the sound travels for miles.

They’re not related to woodpeckers at all, I learned. Their similarities are purely a matter of convergent dimorphism; form follows function. The stonepeckers are actually not birds at all; they’re related to wyverns, dragons, and thunder lizards. You can tell not only by their size, but by the morphology of their talons and their skeletal structure, particularly around the hip.

The sky was once full of them, tens of thousands of years ago. We see evidence in the fossil record–not only of stonepecker bones but of their great nests of pine trees, lined with flint. Drying climate reduced their numbers; today, only a handful of stonepeckers remains. They are carefully managed by the Parks and Recreation Service, that uses specially modified Apache attack helicopters to keep them from straying too close to people.

1 By which I mean I thought about asking a park ranger, then decided to run with my own story instead because it was probably more interesting.

I’m writing one blog post for every contribution to our crowdfunding we receive between now and the end of the campaign. Help support indie publishing! We’re publishing five new books on polyamory in 2015: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/thorntree-press-three-new-polyamory-books-in-2015/x/1603977

Sharks and Loathing in Las Vegas

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I am a man who wears bunny ears.

As I write this, I am on the last leg of the book tour–six events over the next four days and I am finally done. Part of the tour took me through Las Vegas. And Vegas…Vegas is not what I expected.

Close your eyes. Imagine Las Vegas, that epicenter of sin and decadence in the desert. What do you picture? Giant neons. Slot machines. Organized crime. Women in huge feather headdresses. Not, you might think, the sort of place where a man in bunny ears would exactly stand out…

…and you’d be wrong.

Vegas is, it seems, not prepared for a man in bunny ears, oh no. The hostility with which the Las Vegas culture1 responds to the sudden appearance of a man in bunny ears in its collective midst is remarkable.

But let me backtrack for a moment.

As I have traveled the country talking about polyamory and ethics and such, I’ve brought a stuffed shark with us. The shark, who joined our team2 in Atlanta, has made appearances all over North America, solely for the purpose of being exploited.

It started as a lark, you see. There is person is a marine biologist who studies sharks. He also writes angry blog entries in response to phony stories on the Discovery Channel, stories with lurid titles about how mermaids might be real (spoiler: they aren’t) and speculating whether Megalodon, the enormous prehistoric dinosaur-shark, might still be alive (hint: it isn’t).

There are trolls on the Internet, and some of these trolls want to believe in mermaids and Megalodon. So they follow this person about online, posting pictures of him and diatribes about him with the Twitter hashtag “#nerdsexploitingsharks“.

Which is, thought I, absolutely begging for hijacking.

So, half an hour before I was scheduled to do a lecture in Atlanta, I darted out in frantic search of a stuffed shark to exploit. I found one at the Atlanta Aquarium, and it’s been accompanying us ever since, being photographed in exploitative situations and posted to social media under #nerdsexploitingsharks.

So. Back to Las Vegas.

Las Vegas doesn’t like a man in bunny ears. Las Vegas especially doesn’t like a man in bunny ears carrying a stuffed shark.

Now, there are many ways to carry a stuffed shark. If you ever find yourself in Las Vegas wearing bunny ears and carrying a stuffed shark, you might try one or more of these carry techniques. I present this information in the name of Science!3


The Security Blanket

An attitude that says “Yes, I have a stuffed shark, and what of it? I need my shark if I am to face a cold, cruel world.” Advantages: Few people will approach a person who uses a shark as a security blanket. Disadvantages: Few people will approach a person who uses a shark as a security blanket.


The ‘Shark? What shark?’

Who, me? I’m not carrying a stuffed shark! Oh, this? How did this get there? Advantages: From the front, you simply look like a man in bunny ears, not a man in bunny ears with a stuffed shark. Disadvantages: Las Vegas loves guns. The sight of a man in bunny ears with his hands out of sight might upset some folks with delicate sensibilities, and some of those folks with delicate sensibilities might be armed.


The Casual Carry

This technique challenges the observer: “Yeah, I’m carrying a stuffed shark, and how do you like THEM apples?” Advantages: People might assume you’re a famous performer, or, failing that, an eccentric Mob hitman with a pistol inside the shark like that one scene in Hudson Hawk, only with a shark instead of a teddy bear. Disadvantages: People might assume you’re barking mad.


The en garde!

Yeah, I have bunny ears. And a shark. Which might or might not contain a concealed pistol. Don’t fuck with me. Advantages: People give you a wide berth on the sidewalk. Disadvantages: You might get shot.


The Binky

Similar to the Security Blanket, but less neurotic, the Binky tells the world that, yes, the world is cold and cruel, and yes, your shark helps you navigate the rivers of cruelty all around you, but you don’t really need the shark. You just like the shark, okay? Advantages: More relaxed and casual than the Security Blanket; this attitude tells the world you really can stand on your own two feet. You know, if you want to. Disadvantages: Small children point at you.


The Bromance

“I love you, man!” This attitude tells the world you and your shark have a special friendship…but, like, totally in a heterosexual way. Advantages: It’s totally, like, a heterosexual thing. Not, like, that other thing. Disadvantages: You may be mistaken for a dudebro. Who wears bunny ears. And carries a stuffed shark.


The Two-Handed Casual

“I’m just carrying a stuffed shark from one place to another place. Nothing to see here. Move along.” Advantages: Very workmanlike. People won’t get the impression that you’re, y’know, attached to the shark or anything. Disadvantages: It’s still pretty weird to see a guy in bunny ears carrying a stuffed shark, no matter how workmanlike he may be. Plus you don’t have a hand free to drink alcohol, play slots, and convince yourself that this thing you’re having is fun.


The Secure in my Masculinity

This pose shows the world that you’re absolutely certain of your manhood and you’re not too threatened to express your true feelings, even if you happen to be in the middle of one of the world’s largest casinos. Advantages: People will stay far, far away from you. Disadvantages: Unless they’re security.

1 Insofar as Las Vegas can be said to have a “culture.” My observations of Las Vegas culture suggests it is made up primarily of people who have no idea how to have fun desperately trying to have fun and convincing themselves the thing they are having is, indeed, fun. And alcohol.

2 Was purchased and exploited.

3 I am frequently asked “are you a scientist?” I usually say “no.” I think I am probably going to have to start saying “yes,” so when people ask “what kind of scientist? Chemist? Biologist?” I can say “Mad.”

Movie Review: Snowpiercer

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Last week, zaiah and I decided to spend an evening sitting in a dark room with a bunch of strangers staring passively at a flickering screen. We were in the mood for B science fiction, so we decided to go watch a low-budget sci-fi allegory about classism and economic repression whose characters are faced with losing body parts and whose plot heavily involves ice.

No, I don’t mean Ice Pirates. I mean the one that’s set on a train. I mean this one:

I must admit, it’s a worthy heir to the Ice Pirates crown. Without question, Snowpiercer is the best low-budget sci-fi allegory about classism and economic repression whose characters are faced with losing body parts and whose plot heavily involves ice that’s ever been set on a train.

The movie goes something like this:

Well-intentioned but incompetent scientists: Global warming is a thing. To fight global warming, we will spread a magic chemical in the air that will reduce global temperatures because magic, and also chemtrails. We will not model the results first, nor pay attention to the effects, because in this world modeling and verification are not things.

The WELL-INTENTIONED BUT INCOMPETENT SCIENTISTS spread MAGIC CHEMICALS in the AIR because MAGIC and also CHEMTRAILS. Global temperatures PLUMMET OVERNIGHT because THERMAL INERTIA ALSO ISN’T A THING.

Well-intentioned but incompetent scientists: Wow, we didn’t see that coming! The entire earth is now a frozen snowball and all life is extinct. Oops, our bad.

Jamie Bell: It sure does suck being one of the last human beings alive and being stuck in the back of this train. We should rebel and go to the front of the train. Chris Evans, you should lead us!
Chris Evans: Waitaminnit. If the world suddenly started freezing, why are the only survivors on a train? Why wouldn’t people make domed cities? Or dig shelters underground? For that matter, how come this train is even moving? Where does it get its fuel from?
Jamie Bell: It has a perpetual motion engine, of course! Duh.
Chris Evans: Oh, boy. It’s going to be one of those movies. And I thought my role in Captain America: The Winter Soldier was implausible. Man, I have got to talk to my agent about these winter-themed movies I keep getting cast in.

Click here for more (here be spoilers galore!):