I’ve returned from Wales and London, a trip that turned out to be the absolute embodiment of chaos, from canceled flights and impossible connections to ticket snafus and a wedding in which one of the brides rolled her car into a ditch on her way to the venue (she was fine; the car, less so).
All that plus many pics later. First, whilst visiting my Talespinner I had the opportunity to do a live field test of the Giger-inspired biomechanical nipplesuckers I designed for the alien xenomorph tentacle violation pod, and the trial went quite swimmingly, all things considered.
The nipplesuckers are powerful to the point of being right on the edge of pain, just the thing to add authenticity to an alien violation experience. And of course the mechanical suction never gets tired. Like some kind of unstoppable Nipple Terminator, it can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are a spent puddle.
The glowing electroluminescent wire turned out to be quite lovely, so we did an entire EL wire bondage photo shoot in Wales, sadly not at a castle (the weather didn’t cooperate) but in the charming little AirBnB we stayed at.
Got a couple outtakes from the nipplesucker test that turned out unexpectedly cool, though!
I haven’t done it since I returned to the US from Canada waaaaay back in the distant Before Time of 2018, so a few weeks ago, something finally snapped. I woke up at 3AM, decided it’s been far too long since I spun, and ordered a set of LED poi from Amazon. You know, as one does.
When the poi arrived, Joreth’s first reaction was “hey, the local dungeon has a photo night coming up, we could do a Borg Queen xenomorph parasite poi-spinning photo shoot!” Of course, I immediately said yes, and so, that Friday, we did.
It’s a little-known fact that when a Borg Queen is parasitized by a xenomorph, a peculiar quirk of Borg physiology makes the Borg Queen spin LED poi. Later, as the xenomorph parasite takes hold, the Borg Queen is driven to do…unspeakable acts by the hiphugger on her hips.
My Talespinner’s boyfriend came into town days before the shoot to help us work on Joreth’s RV, because that’s how my polycule rolls. (Seriously, I have awesome metamours!) So naturally I pressed him into the shoot as well.
We had an absolute blast.
Behind the scenes, Joreth’s boyfriend (who, as it turns out, also spins!) helped with lighting and such.
The alien xenomorph hiphugger is definitely a head-turner wherever we go, or maybe that’s just Joreth.
Okay, so sit back, and ima tell you a story. It’s a story of kink, and depravity, and surprise serendipity.
So. I’m in Florida, helping my wife Joreth get the RV ready for a cross-country trip, during which we plan to do a photo tour of the abandoned amusement parks that litter the American Midwest like so many broken dreams of a bygone era. (We’ll likely do a coffee table photo book sometime in the next couple of years.)
Anyway, the day after I arrived, the local dungeon hosted a party, so your humble scribe and his beautiful wife showed up, of course, for an evening of kink and Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
The dungeon had electronic consent forms to be filled out on an iPad. On the consent form there was a profile, and on the profile there was a place to pick one’s favorite kink from a dropdown list.
Me: “I guarantee my fvorite kink is not on this list.”
Cheerful Woman Behind the Desk: “It cannot possibly be any weirder than this kink I just learned about!”
Whereupon CWBTD pulled out her phone and showed us…
…The Picture.
You know the one. The Picture that broke the Internet. The Picture that, every now and then, undergoes a new wave of virality. The Picture that, I’m told, ended up briefly on the official Sigorney Weaver fan site until a moderator took it down.
There are two things to know about The Picture:
That’s a photo of Joreth;
Wearing a xenomorph hiphugger strapon designed and made by your humble scribe.
In other words, CWBTD was right. My kink isn’t weirder than the thing she’d just discovered, it’s exactly as weird as the thing she’d just discovered.
Anyway, she was thrilled, and asked us to come back in yesterday for a bit of show and tell.
Which we did. The Borg Queen xenomorph parasite has been in storage since Barcelona, but it required surprisingly little repair, and we were soon on our way.
It was marvelous. They let us use the dungeon for a photo shoot!
The bad: I didn’t have my real camera, and we couldn’t lay hands on the Borg mask, so we did the best we could.
The good: There’s a photo night coming up next week, for which we will be better prepared.
The better: We met a lovely couple who were all like “ooh, Borg Queen parasitized by an alien xenomorph? That’s exactly my kink![1] Victimize us, please?”
Innocent victim: Mittyrin (image by author, reproduced by permission)
Fantastic fun, if that’s the sort of thing you consider fun. (Tautalogical cat is tautalogical.)
We drove home beneath the symbol of God’s divine blessing, or, you know, non-traditional relationships, which is almost the same thing, so truly I feel like Divine Providence smailed upon a fantastic evening.
[1] When I first started working on the xenomorph hiphugger, I remember saying “I don’t know what the point is, there are only three people in the world with this taste and I’m dating two of them.”
It’s not necessarily her fault, mind you. And yet, and yet, the sex party blew out my knee, a fact for which Ms. Weaver bears some responsibility.
Lemme back up a bit.
I saw Star Wars (the original, before it was “Episode 4: A New Hope”) at the tender age of 11, when it first came out, and oh. My. God. It blew me away. I’d say I was obsessed with it, but that would be, if anything, understating the single-mindedness with which I obsessed over that movie. I collected all the trading cards (which I no longer have, the awareness of which gives me the same feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I think about the fact that I could have bought Bitcoin at $2 a coin but thought, “what’s the point?”), I built a flying model X-Wing (and ended up in the ER when the XActo knife I was using slipped…I still have the scar)…that movie moved into my mind and took up residence like a meth addict in an abandoned single-wide.
This isn’t a post about Star Wars. It’s actually about a sex party. Hang on, I’m getting to that.
So. My parents, who wanted to feed and nourish my interests, heard about this movie called Alien. They, being generally reasonable people who didn’t know the genre of sci-fi horror existed, largely because Alien kinda invented the genre of sci-fi horror, decided, he likes space movies with spaceships and stuff, this is a space movie with spaceships and stuff, he’ll like this movie.”
And so, I trotted into the theater, expecting something like Star Wars and getting…something else.
That movie traumatized me. Like, I had nightmares about the alien in Alien. Literal, actual, wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat nightmares.
For the next thirty-five years.
That alien became the shape of all my fears for decades. And so it came to pass that my wife, who loves pushing my buttons, during the course of a casual, ordinary conversaion on a casual, ordinary day, wouldn’t it be intersting if, given that I was teaching myself to make sex toys, I made an alien facehugger strapon? A…hiphugger, to coin a phrase?
Now, the thing about me is that once I get hold of a project, I don’t let it go until I’ve figured it out. The alien hiphugger moved into the space in my brain hollowed out by the Star Wars prequels (which not only killed my love of the franchise stone dead, but squatted over the corpse and farted in its face), I fired up Blender, and, two years and seven design revisions later, I created…
…the Alien Hiphugger Strapon.
It took seven design revisions and years of work to get here, but this is my wife during the first test fit of the first completed, assembled, and usable hiphugger.
Which she had never, until two nights ago, actually used.
Okay, so.
I am currently in Orlando, helping her get the RV ready to move cross-country to the West Coast. (Well, more likely we’re replacing the RV with a new one, but anyway.)
There is, here in Orlando, a swinger’s club which my wife and her boyfriend frequently attend. Not for sex—well, not just for sex—but also because they have the cheapest pool and hot tub in Orlando, where she’s been doing physical therapy for an injury for quite some time. Yes, people can go to swing clubs for therapy, and read Playboy for the articles, shut up.
Anyway.
Since I got to Orlando, we’ve been going to the swing club regularly. My wife does her PT, while I sit and write porn (specifically, a porn novel that takes place in two parallel narrative threads, one in London in 1871 and one in Buffalo in 2025), while people have sex around me, because that is, apparently, the life I lead now.
Two days ago, we decided that we should maybe go to the swing club for sex, because, you know, sex, and so a Plan was hatched.
My wife couldn’t find the syringe that I included with her xenomorph hiphugger strapon, so I procured a replacement on Amazon, for free, as I belong to their “free stuff if you write a review” program…but only for certain products. The lineup changes daily. The good news: they had a syringe available. The bad news: It was ludicrously, comically large.
Problem solved, the next step was acquisition, at remarkable effort, of tiny tapioca pearls, as you cannot have an alien violation experience without alien eggs (obviously, duh).
So.
We packed the hiphugger, the Ludicrously Large Syringe, and the eggs, with a carrier fluid of milk because at this point why the hell not, in a Box™ with some other toys and set off, the three of us, to the swingers club. Along the way, I took a quarter of a cannabis edible, on account of the fact they make me suuuuuper suggetible.
Now, there’s a thing you have to understand about swingers.
Swingers are, generally speaking, extremely conservative. They’re basically, by and large and painting with a very broad brush, PTA members and homeowners’ association managers who happen to enjoy shagging other people.
The swingers club inspects incoming packages. My wife cheerfully presented The Box™ for inspection, with its horrifying dildo-tailed alien facehugger and its Ludicrously Large Syringe and mass of Far Too Many Alien Eggs, owing to making just a bit too much tapioca…
The people doing the inspection behaved the way one might if one were to be served a lightly grilled roadkill opossum on a plate with a side order of Klingon gagh.
The injury toward which I am slowly working my way happened in one of the swing club’s themed playrooms, each of which has a door and a large window, through which other people can watch the goings-on within.
Now, I am not a voyeur. I’ve watched people have sex countless times, which is occasionally interesting in a “huh, I didn’t know people could bend that way” sort of way. It’s a shame I can’t hand those experiences to someone who would appreciate them better, because I know if watching people shag is your thing then it is very much Your Thing, but for me, it’s like, eh.
So my wife started with her boyfriend, and they started Doing Stuff, and I guess I blanked out a bit thinking about a scene in the porn story I mentioned earlier and how it needed some rework, so she’s like “you okay?” and I’m like “I was thinking about the novel” and she’s like “of course you were.”
Because of course I was. Writers: we’re not like other people.
My writing setup in the RV. That’s my wife’s tea mug. Twice the size means half as many trips to make more tea!
Anyway, a short time later I was on my hands and knees for the Great Xenomorph Parasite Violation.
If it seems like I’m Using Caps a lot, it was that kind of night.
Now, my wife is a dancer. And the play rooms had music piped in. And my wife started swaying to the beat of the music, and at the risk of using more capital letters, Oh My God.
Remember that cannabis edible? Cannabis does two things to me: it makes me hyper-suggestible, which my partners love with the love of a benevolent Divinity to all creation; but it also puts me in touch with my body, in a way that I’m generally not.
So fast forward two hours, during which I’m either on my knees or flat on my back. I won’t disturb you with the details, because they would…err, disturb you, but let me just say, So Many Alien Eggs. The tapioca had congealed into a slippery mass and it was So Gooey that, could I adequately express it in text, your computer screen would start dripping.
There was this kind of back and forth between “ooh, that’s nice” and absolute horror: in one particular position, the alien ovipositor would encounter the mass of eggs and…again, I won’t disturb you with the disturbing details.
Anyway, after hours of this, we went home sated and happy and just a touch horrified. After a brief Denny’s stop, because low-quality food after kinky threesomes seems part of my life now, I wrote in the car on the way home, then tumbled into a deep sleep.
I took this self-portrait on the way out of the sex club.
The next morning, I woke with a knee that refused to bend without agonizing pain. As I write this, I’m wearing a brace.
I blame Sigorney Weaver.
Not that it’s her fauly, exactly, but she is the sexy part of a casual chain that led directly from the theater to nightmares to the hiphugger strapon (I think it’s safe to say my wife may have, with her simple suggestion, invented the entire genre of xenomorph play).
Regular readers are no doubt aware that I quite like tentacles. I don’t mean I like tentacles the way a marine biologist likes tentacles, but rather I like tentacles the way a schoolgirl in a dodgy Japanese animated movie of the sort you don’t share with your parents likes tentacles.
I have recently been working on a project to make a tentacle strapon, but not the sort of strapon that’s just shaped like a tentacle, oh no. I’m looking for a more…authentic tentacle experience.
To that end, I’ve 3D printed an articulated three-wire tentacle core in soft TPU. It took some faffing, but I eventually ended up with a tentacle core that can be attached to a strapon harness. Here’s a first test of the v2.0 articulated tentacle core:
I plan to wrap this core with a silicone sheath. I’ve already made test castings of a couple of silicone sheaths, and plan to shoot video of them next week when I visit my Talespinner.
This is a test casting of the sheath; I’ve since tweaked the mold and made a second test casting, which I will be using in the tests next week.
I plan to change the design to make it more…err, usable based on what I learn next week.
My goal going forward is to mount an Arduino and stepper motors on the back of the harness, so that the tentacle writhes and wriggles on its own. Once that version is done, the next step is to equip the harness with motion and proximity sensors, so that the tentacle moves toward anything that comes near the wearer.
I have a number of…um, fairly ambitious projects I’m working on right now that I’ve hit roadblocks on. Since the Internet is a marvel of modern technological accomplishment that allows instantaneous access to not only the entirety of human knowledge but also domain experts in every conceivable field of human endeavor, I’m throwing out a request for ideas and suggestions here.
Project 1: The Alien Pod
I have, through a strange set of circumstances, come into possession of an old “bod pod,” a medical scanner designed, I’m told, to measure BMI. It doesn’t work—it’s just the pod without the computer software and such to drive it—and my goal is to turn it into a gigantic alien egg, like the kind in the Alien movies, but large enough to hold a person.
So the plan is to cover this thing with silicone, to make it look like one of the eggs from the Alien movie (which were basically garbage bags and chicken wire covered with silicone). The effect I’m looking for is something like this:
My thought is to cover the pod with silicone (probably condensation-cure rather than the medical-grade platinum-cure silicone I ise for sex toys, whcih is more than $200 a gallon).
Why silicone and not paper-mâché? The pod weighs more than 400 pounds, so it’s very difficult to transport, and the egg needs to be strong enough to survive handling and moving in a truck. My goal is to use it for a photo shoot, with a model halfway out of it, being dragged back in by tentacles.
The problem is that silicone won’t stick to the surface, like, at all. Not even a little bit.
The pod is a stainless steel shell overlaid with fiberglass and with some sort of textured polymer layer on top. Up close it looks like this:
My first thought is to epoxy a whole bunch of short pins to the pod, to give the silicone something to grip. Many years ago, I remember seeing a product that would be perfect for this: small steel pins, about a centimeter or less long, with a ball on one end and a flat base on the other, kind of like so:
They’re quite small, and a whole bunch of them sticking out of the pod like spines on a porcupine would give the silicone something to hang on to mechanically. Trouble is, I don’t know what they’re called or what they’re used for (I vaguely recall that they’re used in aviation, maybe?), so I don’t know how to search for them.
Alternately, any small, cheap, epoxy-able pin or whatever I can glue to the pod might work. I’m also open to other suggestions. Keep in mind it has to stand up to rough handling—this bloody thing is almost unimaginably heavy and hard to maneuver!
Project 2: Machining Molds
I’ve started making alien xenomorph hiphugger strapons and alien xenomorph facehugger gags for sale.
Right now, I’m 3D printing the molds, a 6-part mold for the hiphugger and a 7-part (yes, seriously) mold for the facehugger.
I’d hoped to get maybe ten castings from each mold. In fact, I’m getting 2-3 before the mold is ruined and I have to print a new one. The facehugger mold takes two weeks(!) to print on my 3D printer. Obviously this isn’t sustainable.
I’ve been planning for a while to move to machined wood or aluminum molds, and I have a 4-axis desktop CNC machine:
I’ve been teaching myself CNC milling, but the learning curve is a cliff; I’m getting reasonably good at 2D and 2.5D machining, but man, the molds are complex.
Here’s a 3D model of one part of the hiphugger mold. This is what I’m looking to machine, either in aluminum or even in wood:
As you can see, it’s a complex shape with aggressive undercuts.
I have not been able to make a CNC program to carve this. (One person online looked at this mold and was like “um, yeah, you’ll need four years of trade school plus at least four years of apprenticeship to even think about machining something like that.”)
So, hey, I have the machine but not the skill, why not hire someone to design the CNC program, right? I’ve talked to a few folks online who are like “yeah, pay me and I’ll do the program for you,” then when they see that part they’re like “oh hell no. Hell. No.”
If anyone reading this knows a skilled CNC machinist who can create a program to mill this part, and parts like it, on my machine (a Makera Carvera with a 4th-axis module), send them my way! This is a paying gig.
In the meantime, I’m also exploring ways to treat the 3D printed molds with resin or epoxy or something to make them more durable. Right now I’m only making one facehugger and one hiphugger per month, and even at that slow rate of production, the process I’m using is unsustainable.
So yeah. I have an eclectic set of friends out there with some highly unusual skills, so I’m hoping that some of you might have insights or ideas to offer.
I am not, it must be said, the sort of person who gets to the airport early.
I am the sort of person who rolls up to the gate just as they start boarding, then says “hmm, I’m in Boarding Group 8, that means I have time to dash down the hallway to grab a bite to eat.” (I’m serious. I’ve done this. My wife hates it.)
And so it came to pass that I woke on the morning of my recent trip to Springfield, started packing, and then saw a message from the airline: they’d canceled my flight and put me on another, scheduled to depart an hour and a half earlier.
Folks, if you ever see the distant gray not-a-moon shape of the Death Star in a clear blue sky over your home town, panic will not do to you what it did to me when I saw that text.
I grabbed whatever was close to hand and shoved it frantically into the suitcase: a couple pairs of pants, some shirts, maybe some socks I think? (I’d already packed the important stuff, the sex toy prototypes, the night before; I’m not a complete barbarian.)
I will spare you the harrowing and wildly improbable roller-coaster tale of what happened next—arriving just in time to discover that flight had also been canceled, flying standby on yet another—and skip ahead to the part where I arrive, exhausted but grateful, a couple hours earlier than I would have had things gone to plan. Suffice to say I eventually arrived in Springfield, through the magic of flight turned into something tawdry and uncomfortable.
I flew Airbus, so the flight was uneventful—nothing fell off, split open, or went “Sproing!”
My Talespinner and another of her lovers I hadn’t met yet greeted me at the airport. He turned out to be a lovely chap, and we immediately got on like two people who have a lover in common and are both dedicated to making her life as fun and interesting as possible. We got back to her place, yadda yadda yadda, a few days later we were off to the future city of Kanzit to do some sanity checking for a novel.
We are, you see, my Talespinner and I, spinning a tale. It’s a far-future, post-Collapse, magical realism novel about a young spinner named Aiyah and a brilliant but eccentric master tinker named Lazlo who specializes in making windup toys, who live not far apart from each other in the future Dominionate, a neo-Calvinist theocratic empire erected upon a horrifying slave society that has built their entire social foundation atop a legal and moral edifice of systemic subjugation of women.
In the novel, Aiyah takes a journey from her small snug cottage in the tiny village Half-Circle Cothold to the big, bustling city of Kanzit, the capital of the Dominionate. Along the way, she has many adventures, she meets all kinds of people, she makes new friends, she flees cross-country from the Inquisition without food or supplies, and she is forced to confront some uncomfortable moral truths about the horror that sits at the base of her society. Whee!
There’s a particular part of her flight that has some complicated timing and a lot of moving pieces, and even with Google Maps we weren’t certain about how the timing would work, so when my Talespinner was just like “fukkit, I’m gonna trace Aiyah’s path and see” I was like “you son of a bitch, I’m in” and that, rather than kinky group sex, was actually the purpose of the trip.
We rose and bundled into the car, my Talespinner, her lover, and I, to follow a path that does not yet exist through towns that aren’t there in the path of a woman who isn’t real, fleeing from an inquisitor who is both a proxy for the society we’re holding up as a mirror to our own and also far more complex than he lets on at first, to the complaints of her cats, who seemed to know something was up.
I’d say we traveled over hill and through vale, but that would be a lie. Much of that part of Missouri is as flat as workers’ real earnings since Ronald Reagan and as interesting as soggy gerbil bedding, so I will jump ahead once more to our arrival in Half-Circle Cothold, from which our protagonist set forth.
It’s not much now, but in two thousand years, it will still be…not much.
Fortified by convenience-store pizza and candy bars after a drive that would’ve been rather boring if not for the conversation and the company, we set out on foot across what will, in two thousand years and the deaths of billions of people, become a sleepy village on the water’s edge. (Neither geologic upheaval nor global change in temperature are likely to erase the spot; it’s safe against even six meters of sea level rise, which is beyond the most pessimistic projections.)
Onward we went, traveling not through the realm of the real but the realm of what Terry Pratchett calls ‘L-space,’ that place where untold stories await the person who will write them, discussing as we did everything from glassblowing to the economics of guild systems, observing how even today towns in rural America tend to be spaced about the distance a person on horseback can ride in a day.
Accommodations that night were to be in an America’s Best [sic] Value Inn. That failed to work out as planned, because it seems that while America’s Best [sic] Value Inns are fairly solid on the concept of taking a reservation, they are a bit less clear on what it means to keep a reservation.
Considerably frustrated with no room at the end, we at last located another hotel thirty minutes away, which turned out to be, Gentle Reader, the third worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in, and given that rodents and bullet holes figure prominently in the story of the first and second, believe me when I say that’s saying something.
After dinner, we settled in for more kinky group sex. Yadda yadda yadda, the next day found us at the seat of the Dominionate, or what will be in thousands of years. Right now, it’s home to a genuine Caravaggio, which truly was extraordinary, though I didn’t realize St. John the Baptist was quite so…buff.
All good things must end, and so we tore ourselves from the contemplative glower of Buff John the Baptist to follow the path of a different character, our villain rather than our protagonist, back to Springfield.
More group sex, followed by testing of xenomorph facehugger sex toys…
…somewhat interrupted by certain cats who insisted on photobombing the shenanigans…
…and yadda yadda, yadda, the next thing you know, we’re at a FedEx Office printing out pics from the trip for our very first Murder Wall™. (At least my very first Murder Wall™, I don’t actually know that my Talespinner has never made one).
I thought there would be more cackling involved in making a Murder Wall. I didn’t realize it’s so…prosaic. Hollywood never shows the obsessive conspiracy nutter dropping pins, or cutting the yarn too short.
Eventually, as time must do, the moment to leave came. It came inconveniently, at 3:30AM, since this entire adventure had been predicated on the cheapest airline tickets possible and that meant flying out at 5AM, but we do what we must because we can.
When my Talespinner’s cat figured out I was leaving, he became inconsolable in that way kittens who have taken a shine to you sometimes do.
So I hardened my heart, said my goodbyes, and disappeared into the night, leaving, or so I am told, rather a lot of my clothes scattered about her bedroom, because who can really pack at that hour of the morning?
Now, days later, we are still girding our loins for The Rewritening.
Whilst the extended polyamorous netowork and I were in Barcelona, we took time out from seeing the Sagrada Familia and doing…um, other stuff to take a ton of photos of the xenomorph sex toy prototypes.
That’s right, now you can order your very own hiphugger, for all your xenomorph ovipositor violation needs.
These things each take about three days of fussy, fiddly work to make, so for the foreseeable future I will only make one of them a month. First come, first served, and yes, they’re expensive.
If you order one, I’ll make it specifically for you, in whatever color you like.
We had a ton of fun doing the photo shoot, and got pics of some other xenomorphic goodness as well, including the xenomorph pacifiers and nipple pasties. (Yes, I made xenomorph pacifiers and nipple pasties. What can I say? My parents brought me to see Alien when I was, like, 12 or so, and it scared the holy hell out of me for the next thirty years.)
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.
Earlier this year, I received a significant sum of money in a settlement for a lawsuit. This settlement was enough to pay my lawyer, with a bit left over, which I had earmarked for a car since I’ve been sans vehicle after the unfortunate death of the Adventure Van (which needed new parts that are no longer manufactured).
I had earmarked some of the settlement for a cheap used car, when I was captured by Facebook. I spotted an ad for a desktop CNC metal-milling machine for almost exactly the amount I’d set aside for the car, and I thought, if I can machine aluminum, I can make molds for sex toys without having to 3D print them any more! The molds would be higher quality, last longer, and produce better toys!
So of course I ordered the CNC machine instead of the car, and arrived home from Barcelona to an enormous shipping crate…
They call it a “desktop CNC machine,” but I don’t own a desk large enough or sturdy enough to hold it—the thing weighs in at almost 120 pounds(!). So it sits on my bedroom floor, still in the bottom of the shipping crate.
And My God, what an adventure.
I didn’t fully realize what I was signing up for. Carving 3D models out of metal is nothing like printing 3D models on a 3D printer. You don’t give it the model and say “here,carve this.” You have to specify the tool to use, the speed, and (this is the difficult part) the exact path the tool will take, over and over and over again, to carve the shape out of metal.
As one wag on Quora put it, “Dude, what you’re trying to cut requires graduating from trade school plus four years of apprenticeship.” (Whoevel writes an AI-driven expert system to automate some or all this process will become ridiculously wealthy, just sayin’.)
Anyway, I’ve been teaching myself CNC milling, and the learning curve is a cliff. This is quite possibly the most challenging thing I’ve ever attempted in my life.
I’ve worked out basic engraving…
…and I’m teaching myself Fusion 360 and Lightburn (it has a built-in laser engraver too). My wife has come up with some very cool projects to help teach myself, like tentacle fans with metal blades, which I’ll probably start selling once I’ve worked out how to make them.
But at the rate I’m going, I’m still quite a distance off from carving metal sex toy molds.
