One of the many people at smoocherie‘s party, james_the_evil1 brought rope. This should come as a surprise to nobody, really. S volunteered to be tied up, so I tried an experiment with incorporating her hair into the tie.
This is a two-layer harness, which looks deceptively simple from the front:
From the back, it’s a bit more complicated, though. I think it worked well; I like the asymmetry. Continue reading
Much to post about, but most of it will have to wait. In the interim, however, I will tease you with this picture of the trebuchet I designed for the communication and conflict management workshop:
There is also a movie of the trebuchet firing here (3.5 MB direct download).
Whee!
This guy was standing near where Shelly goes to school this afternoon. She called and told me about it, and then we drove down to try to get a pic. He was still there, and I got a great photo of him:
I can empathize with him, really. The world is filled with gullible suckers.
Generally speaking, when I go to bed each night I pile all my stuff (you know, keys, wallets, and so on) on the coffee table. That way, I know where all this stuff is every morning, and I don’t have to waste time searching for it; God knows I’m a shambling, barely-literate mess in the mornings as it is, and anything that adds to my list of intellectual tasks at hand increases the chances for catastrophe significantly.
Our cat Molly, who is quite observant, has learned this little ritual, and it suits her just fine. Each morning, as I’m preparing to leave in the morning, she bounds over to the coffee table and waits for me to pick up my keys and wallet and whatnot, so that she can give her claws their morning sharpen.
On my leg.
She does have a scratching post, mind, which she uses all the time. To sleep on.
Spent the weekend at a trade show (Graphics of the Americas) in Miami this week. Shelly and I headed down there Thursday night, returned late Sunday. It’s a yearly convention; I go on behalf of one of my clients, and demo prepress software (imposition, page pairing, that sort of thing) at their booth.
Joining me in th booth this year was the daughter of one of the company’s employees. She and I spent a good deal of time Saturday and Sunday talking about transhumanism, polyamory, life extension, nanotech, and other fun stuff…she turned out to be very interesting to talk to indeed.
She and a couple of other people from my client’s company wanted some idea of what Photoshop was capable of, so I snapped a couple quick digital pics of her (one in the convention hall and one outside of it) and gave an impromptu 30-minute Photoshop lesson:
Lots of fun. By the time I was done, one of the people watching had run off to buy a copy of Scott Kirby’s Photoshop book from the Adobe booth.
It’s amazing how much difference having someone to talk to makes.
Shelly and I have season passes to Busch Gardens. On weekends, we like to go there and hang out sometimes. Busch Gardens has a “wild animal encounter” section where you can go nose to nose wih various animals, separated only by Plexiglass.
We went there last weekend. Among my favorite animals at Busch Gardens are the hyenas; I took a picture of this fellow some time ago:
I have heard many, many people say “Oh, those hyenas are ugly!” when they look at the hyena display. Hyenas look a bit like dogs; but they look like poor dogs. If you compare a hyena to a domesticated dog or to a wolf, they look all kinds of wrong–heads too large, snouts shorter and sloping, necks longer, fur all short and spiky. As dogs, yeah, they’re pretty ugly.
And I think that’s very interesting.
If you watch animated porn, you start to notice something. Most animated porn, like Japanese hentai, uses characters that aren’t photorealistic by any stretch of the imagination. The women in hentai tend to be completey disproportionate to real human beings–huge eyes, tiny mouth, really only crude sketches of the basic form of a person. And that works for us; we look at these characters, who are only approximately human, and say “Aww, cute.” (Well, some of us do, anyway. others of us say “Satan! The sins of the flesh! Out! Out! Devil, begone!” Still others of us say “What’s with all the tentacles, anyway?” But I digress.)
If you watch animated porn that’s been rendered in 3D and strives to be photorealistic, though, you find that at a certain point, it becomes very, very creepy. There’s a certain threshold that gets reached where our brains start interpreting the characters as people…but people who are, somehow, wrong.
We’re very, very good at looking at people. We have a part of the brain just dedicated to parsing faces. Even tiny, almost unnoticable inconsistences in the way photorealistic characters move look off to us. A character that is nowhere near a real human being is fun to watch; a character that is rendered almost perfectly, but not quite, is creepy. If there are tiny flaws in the way the characters move and the way the characters look, we notice. (i had this problem withthe “Final Fantasy” movies–the characters looked great as long as they were standing still, but whenever they moved, it just looked all kinds of weird.)
On another forum I read, there’s a conversation about how significant a person’s physical appearance is to a relationship. There seem to be two basic camps; the “I could never date someone if he isn’t gorgeous” camp (which tends to resent being called ‘shallow,’ even though that is in fact a shallow attitude; the word ‘shallow’ merely means ‘penetrating only the easily or quickly perceived’ in this context, or so says my dictionary; and if people want to base their relationships on the surface or easily perceived, hey, more power to ’em. Nothing wrong with that, as long as they’re up front about it…but again, I digress); and the “If I love someone, I can see past their flaws and imperfections and be attracted to them in spite of the way they look” camp.
Me, I don’t belong to either camp. And i think the hyenas are beautiful.
You see, the people who don’t like the heyenas are to some extent, I think, judging the heyenas on the characteristics of a dog. And a hyena does not look like a dog. If one looks at a hyena and tries to impose the shape of a dog on it, the heyena doesn’t fit very well. Heyenas are damn ugly dogs, especially if your idea of what a dog should look like is informed by, say, a wolf.
But a hyena is not a wolf, nor a domestic dog; and as an example of an animal viewed in its own light, it’s gorgeous. If you look at a heyena without trying to impose the shape of a dog on it, it’s a beautiful, powerful, graceful animal. I love hyenas.
For me, a hyena is beautiful because I appreciate it for what it is, not for what it isn’t. And the same is true for people.
If you look at my past and current partners, they are physically all over the map. And every one of them has been beautiful–not because I have a standard of beauty that is flexible, but because my appreciation of what someone looks like is shaped by my experience with that person. A person to whom I am deeply connected always looks attractive to me; a person to whom I am not, does not. I don’t fully understand “Well, if I love someone I’m attracted to her in spite of what she looks like;” when I love someone, I am attracted to her because of what she looks like. Everything about that person is attractive to me; it’s not a question of “getting past” or “looking beyond” whatever perceived ‘flaws’ she has. All of these things make her who she is.
I think what happens is that people try to impose an idealized model of “woman” onto their partners, rather like the people at Busch Gardens try to impose an idealized abstraction of what a dog looks like onto a hyena. A hyena is not a domesticated dog, and an individual is not an abstraction. I don’t think I was born with the gene that causes me to try to impose shapes on things, at least not that way; certainly, I don’t try to impose an aesthetic shape onto the things around me.
It’s taken me a while to understand why people even talk about what physical traits they require in their partners, or even have those requirements in the first place, and I’m not sure if I’m quite there yet. But the hyena is helping.
Edited to fix broken HTML that garbled the last couple paragraphs.
Pope Benedict XVI, Dark Lord of the Sith, addresses the Imperial Senate moments before permanently dissolving that troublesome body. The last remnants of the old Republic have finally been swept away…
…from a link ganked from alem‘s journal…
Seems the same effects company did the effects for both shows, and slipped Serenity into a scene from Battlestar: Galactica. Apparently, there’s an episode where a character is in a room overlooking a spaceport, and through the window you can see Serenity lifting off:
Beneath the cut is an image created as part of a French AIDS awareness poster series, which has been making the rounds of the Internet lately. It’s work-safe, at least in the sense that there’s nothing particularly indecent about it (it was designed for public display, after all), but…
May be triggering, especially if you have a spider phobia. You’ve been warned.
I finally got my own copy of James Huges’ transhumanist book Citizen Cyborg, after flipping through smoocherie‘s copy some time ago. It actually arrived last week, just as Shelly and I were preparing to drive out to Ormond Beach to spend the weekend camping with smoocherie and her partner Fritz. It’s one of the tangible benefits of my Web site; I maintain a list of books and resources about polyamory and another similar list of resources about BDSM, and every year enough people visit my resource pages and buy books from it that I can afford to get two or three books myself from Amazon.
I just recently had a chance to settle down and start reading it, which I need to do soon as we’re scheduled to have dinner with James Huges, the author, the first week in January.
I wrote some time ago about how my kitty Snow Crash is not an Extropian, and why this was bad for society. The same cannot be said of Molly, the other kitty, who is an extropian of the highest order. No sooner had I settled in and begun reading than she was all over me like white on…er, on public water fountains and in public schools in the segregated South before more reasonable people intervened and said “Listen, I don’t care what your goddamn tradition says, treating people as inferior just because they’re black is wrong.”
The camping trip was great fun. We stayed out in Ormond Beach for a couple of days, talking philosophy and kayaking and watching Invader Zim on Cherie’s laptop and gathering around the campfire for lesbian orgies. (Campfire + toasted marshmallows + chocolate + graham crackers + Shelly + smoocherie = lesbian orgy, but I digress.)
I’ve actually become quite spoiled. I’ve seen quite a lot of smoocherie lately; it’s almost enough to make me forget that it is, technically, a long-distance relationship. She and Fritz spent last weekend with us, and it’s been so jam-packed with industrial poly goodness I’ve scarcely had time to catch my breath.
Friday: What’s outside? retailiation what’s outside? burning flags what’s outside? the pressure of daily life what’s outside? nothing to be afraid of we believe in we believe in the future of the human race
Front 242 played in town on Friday. The four of us joined nihilus, datan0de, nekidsteve, and alias_node–who’d gone off his pain meds to be there–for an evening of industrial/EBM goodness at 130 beats per minute. great show, but the real pleasant surprise was the opening act, Gray Area. I know nothing about these guys and hadn’t even heard of them, but wow, they’re really, really, really good.
alias_node got clipped pretty hard in the back during the show and was in a great deal of pain, complaining that his vision was all funny, so he went to the after-show party at the Castle and the rest of us went out for ice cream and headed home. If there were two words to describe alias_node and they weren’t “deleriously happy,” the first would be “hard” and the second would be “core.”
Saturday: What the flame does not consume, consumes the flame.
smoocherie had been invited to the Southern Polyamory Gathering, which I’d never heard of. She, Fritz, and I piled into her Prius, sans Shelly, who had far too much homework to do but gave us quite the cute sendoff anyway:
She’s such a cutie…but I digress. Anyway, the three of us scoped out the pagan poly folks for a while, then crushed them all in our iron fist inadvertently ended up dominating the talk circle with matters of practical, hands-on polyamory.
Neat bunch of people, for the most part, though many of them seemed remarkably unaware of the Internet, which probably accounts for the fact that there’s near-zero crossover between the local pagan poly community and the rest of the poly community at large.
I’m always surprised when I encounter some counterculture group that doesn’t make use of the Internet. How do they find each other?
In the foreword of Citizen Cyborg, James Huges talks about “bioLuddites”–people resistant to technological change in general and change in biomedical technology that threatens to make us re-examine our ideas abouut what it means to be human and what it means to be a person in particular. What’s interesting about these people is they come from all over; they’re a mix of far-right religious Fundamentalists, social conservatives, environmental activists, far-left anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist advocates… you name it. I catch a faint whiff of resentment to technology and to transhumanist ideals in much of the pagan community, which makes the irony of the fact that smoocherie‘s Toyota was the only hybrid among a sea of hulking Ford and GM SUVs all the sharper.
Afterward, Aeon Flux.
I won’t give away any of the movie, though I will say that they did an excellent job of preserving the visual language of the original comic, live-action aside. Charlize Theron was not an intuitive choice for Aeon, though she handled the role magnificently. The story was okay; had some glaring plot holes, and it, too, had an undercurrent of anti-transhumanist ideology. (“Humans were meant to die”? WTF is that all about? But again, I digress.) Pros: More coherent than the cartoon, though that’s not saying much; an epileptic who’s just overdosed on PCP is more coherent than the cartoon. Cons: Not the same characters.
Fritz observed, right on the mark, that the characters of Trevor and Aeon in the cartoon can be seen as archetypes of radical order and radical chaos; each is more or less indifferent to the consequences of their actions on the people around them. The movie redefined the characters radically; Aeon was still more or less recognizable, but Trevor wasn’t even in the same ballpark, or for that matter in the same city, or the same sport, even. in the cartoons, the single overriding factor in his psychological makeup is his boundless, cast-iron arrogance, something completely lacking in the new, redesigned Trevor.
Sunday
I have no clever quotes for Sunday. Sunday was PolyCentral, a once-monthly Orlando meeting of all us polyamorous freaks. Shelly accompanied us, despite the crushing amount of homework piled atop her as she goes into finals; she did homework in the car on the way there, homework at the restaurant, and homework in the car on the way back. PolyC’s current home is a Thai sushi restaurant, whose owners are apparently involved with two other couples in some capacity I’m not entirely clear on, and plan at some point to sit in with the rest of us freaks.
Then back home for studying, sex, and World of Warcraft, more or less in that order.
Tonight, my sweetie S‘s other partner, whose name also begins with the letter S, has invited Shelly and I to Cirque du Soleil. God is an iron; he lives in Orlando, she lives here in Tampa (a very short distance away, in fact), and her schedule has been so over-the-top busy lately that I’ve seen more of him than I have of her in the past couple of weeks. (No, not that way, you perv!)
Bad poly: Resenting your partner’s other partner. Good poly: Going to Cirque do Soleil with your partner’s other partner because she’s busy for the evening.
And now, alas, more work beckons.