Tag Archives: sex

Sex for Science! Chapter 2: Orgasms and Striped Socks

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Sex for Science! Chapter 0
Sex for Science! Chapter 1
Sex for Science! Interlude
Sex for Science! Chapter 2
Sex for Science! Chapter 3
Sex for Science! Chapter 4

Apparently, I have a thing for striped socks.

I’ve never realized this before. I don’t know if it’s a new thing, this thing for striped socks, or if it’s just been lurking there in some far corner of my brain, latent, awaiting the day when the whims of fashion would free it from its dark, lonely cerebral cage.

Once lapis-lazuli had departed back for San Francisco, with its cold and its fog and its hypothetical approach to traffic control, we started getting serious about doing some brain scans for Science. My fellow mad scientist who’d contacted me on Twitter and I began proposing dates and experimental protocols, and I started casting out feelers (as one is wont to do) for some victims experimental volunteers willing to be rigged up to an EEG and sexually stimulated for Science.

One of the places I inserted a feeler happened to be one of the local poly groups, because hey, we all know that polyamorous people are easy to talk into being experimental subjects, right? It kinda goes with the territory. Once you’ve cast monogamy to the wind, it’s a long and slippery downhill slide, and the next thing you know, you’re in some seedy motel in Seattle being hooked up to experimental equipment and–

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We picked a date, and I made an announcement at one of the poly groups I attend about searching for volunteers for a bit of kinky mad science. A new couple, recent imports from Australia, had decided to attend that particular meeting, and they both signed up with enthusiasm.

I like folks who’re not only not put off by that sort of thing, but are willing to say “Sure! I’d love to head off to a different city with a bunch of folks I’ve only just met and engage in sex acts while being monitored by brain-scanning equipment!”

When the appointed day arrived, zaiah and I set out to pick up our Aussie volunteer lab rats and head off toward Seattle.

We had previously reserved a suite in a motel in downtown Seattle, carefully chosen for its location just blocks from where the EEG machine we were intending to use was stored. The EEG in question had recently been purchased by one of zaiah‘s sweeties and transported to a space in Seattle’s industrial district, and as it was large and cumbersome and heavy and quite delicate, we didn’t want to move it very far.

As it turned out, that wasn’t an issue, though again I’m getting ahead of myself.

What we didn’t realize, when we reserved the suite, was that it was in The Worst Motel In Seattle. And I say that with confidence, even having not personally visited every motel in Seattle, simply because it would be impossible for any motel to be worse without actually being under active NATO artillery bombardment.

The Web site, with its carefully retouched photos, promised us a stove and refrigerator in our suite. What it didn’t mention is that the stove would have had its burners and most of its guts stolen by previous tenants, nor that the refrigerator would not actually work. When we arrived, there was no power to the room; the office switched on the power about five minutes after we checked in.

The Web site also didn’t tell us about the mural.

Dear sweet Jesus on a pogo stick, the mural. It would have been considered tacky by 1977 standards, and that’s no lie.

The suite also featured such amenities, testifying to a careful attention to detail overlooked by more pedestrian sleazy motels, as a fist-sized hole in the door separating the front room from the bedroom, and a bullet hole in one of the windows:

The only thing the motel staff didn’t think to provide us with that might have completed the experience was a sniper on the rooftop across the alley.

Setting up for the experiment itself turned out to be a bit problematic. I brought volunteers and lab jackets, but unfortunately, the EEG itself had, upon inspection, turned out to have been damaged when it was transported to the place where it was being stored. My erstwhile mad scientist partner had spent the entire night attempting to repair it, only to discover that the programming manual for it had somehow gone AWOL as well.

All was not lost, however. It just so happened that with an Arduino and a toy MindFlex game, it’s possible to rig up a crude but still effective (at least for my purposes) EEG. The MindFlex toy uses a Neurosky chip, which seemed fitting, as the experiment had gone full circle and come home to roost, or something like that. The Arduino/MindFlex combination is pretty close to what I intended to use for a brainwave-controlled sex toy, so while it was less than perfectly ideal to my fellow mad scientist, it was ideal for my own nefarious purposes.

At least the nefarious purposes involving sex toys and EEGs. I have other nefarious purposes, at least one of which involves commandeering an alien armada of space battleships…but I digress.

Technical difficulty resolved, I finally met my partner in mad science in the flesh for the first time:

I paused long enough to admire her fabulous striped socks (about which more later) and she paused long enough to admire our fabulous motel suite, and we were ready to start with the Science.

I’m still not quite sure which was more fun, being the experimenter or being one of the lab rats volunteers. But that will have to wait for the next chapter, which is the good bit and has kinky sex in it.

Sex for Science! Interlude: Snogging and such

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Sex for Science! Chapter 0
Sex for Science! Chapter 1
Sex for Science! Interlude
Sex for Science! Chapter 2
Sex for Science! Chapter 3
Sex for Science! Chapter 4

With the trip to MacWorld far behind and the seedy motel suite in Seattle still some distance ahead, I turned my focus to the notion of a brainwave-controlled sex toy with a singleminded determination that I set aside only temporarily when lapis-lazuli suggested that she might be able to make a trip up to Portland to visit me.

Okay, that last sentence is a lie. I don’t approach anything with singleminded determination; I usually have at least three things going on my mental plate at any one time, and even those can often be derailed by–oh, look, potato chips!

Ahem. Sorry, where was I?

Oh, yes. Singleminded determination. I focused a part of my attention on the notion that it might be possible to make a sex toy work by brainwaves, in a sort of “Hmm, I should look into this more!” kind of way. I exchanged a few emails with the person who knew someone I knew on Twitter, and we both sorta thought “Hey, maybe this idea has potential,” and that’s where it sat when lapis-lazuli said “Hey, I really liked meeting you in San Francisco; how ’bout if I come up for a visit?”

To which I said “Gee, that would be swell!” and off she went.

lapis-lazuli writes fiction. Sometimes, she writes sexually explicit fiction. She also has a wonderful sexy reading voice, so it came to pass that on a particularly interesting evening when she was up visiting, she started reading one of her published stories to me. Then she started doing…err, other things while I continued reading the story myself.

And it was good. Oh, yes, it was good. The story, too.

There came, however, a moment in the story in which one passing character made an offhand remark to another passing character, and for some reason, I thought of the lady who says “But I don’t like spam!” in the Monty Python Spam skit. And read the line out loud that way. I definitely think that she should do the same thing if she is ever called upon to read that particular story for an event of some sort, because who doesn’t like a MOnty Python reference embedded in their pr0n?

One of the many things I love about Portland is Science Pub, hosted frequently by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, and more specifically by a friend of mine upon whom I’ve been harboring a mad crush for quite some time.

Science Pub is an awesome idea. Invite speakers on a wide range of science-related topics, get an audience of a few hundred into a bar, drink beer (or not, if you’re me–never could stand the stuff), and geek out. It’s hard to describe in mere words how much win and awesome it is.

As it turned out, the Science Pub while lapis-lazuli was in town was on the subject of music and brain development. And as it also turned out, lapis-lazuli‘s college background is in music theory and neurobiology. Put those things together, and it turned into quite an epic win.

Well, except for the bit where we left the pub and discovered that the car battery was dead. But, y’know, you have to break a few eggs if you want to make an omelette. Or, err, something.

The next day, there were pictures.

All this served to do two things: first, to distract me for a while from the fate that was still barreling toward me like a truck, in the form of a meeting with destiny in a seedy motel in the heart of Seattle’s industrial squalor, and second, to illustrate once against he dangers of meeting up with strange people on the Internet. You can never quite tell when they might bust out with a Monty Python voice while reading the porn you’ve just published in an anthology of erotica about casual encounters.

The Mathematics of Sex Toys, Revisited

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Quite some time ago, I wrote a post about the Most Annoying Sex Toy Ever, a hypothetical wearable vibrator that would run in an irregular pattern that the wearer could never get used to, but which also would not get the wearer off.

Lately I’ve been playing with an Arduino programmable board, and I’ve come one step closer to achieving that goal! This is a prototype of an annoying vibrator that’s intended to frustrate the user but not get the user off. I’ll post more about it later, but for now here’s a teaser.

Interestingly, someone else who’s read my previous post has written an Arduino program to do sine wave mixing the way I talked about in my earlier post, though the Arduino software I’ve written works a bit differently. The software I’ve written delays for a random time between 15 seconds and a minute and a half, then randomly chooses a pattern to run the vibe in. Each pattern has random variability baked into it, so whoever is wearing it can’t identify the pattern when it starts.

Once the prototype is tested and made more portable (it doesn’t have to be tethered to the laptop to work, just to upload the software to the Arduino board), I’ll probably be posting schematics and software. Stay tuned!

I really, really love being me.

This is what an orgasm looks like

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Orgasm button pressed
877051,631426,273670,148368,337897,357081,156687,252130
1066507,153786,63145,57488,129078,50440,173709,109819
1585110,580090,160991,167229,157232,260284,79462,27377
147919,82705,11760,43571,55125,60752,33791,31729
146346,70311,5912,46054,53651,58255,33226,29107
246097,296325,162358,86699,203578,368388,273746,160780
788224,423060,299575,274288,351033,216863,198371,100922
296435,696530,190339,144327,378529,613425,149675,95380
801372,581291,271888,274933,386881,207813,135433,116997
300081,165239,23121,56824,42235,40362,31752,32249
1050677,198894,228346,179001,327919,288723,200497,73206
1902006,219078,213577,99485,107608,277309,249533,199702
522238,139126,277209,238029,720111,257846,287912,252290
659995,778016,146931,187483,229644,229198,114254,85620
Orgasm button released

Numbers are 32-bit representations sampled at 1-second intervals showing delta, theta, low alpha, high alpha, low beta, high beta, low gamma, and high gamma brainwave activity during an orgasm by joreth. i love science!

OMG Tax!

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I just did my taxes yesterday, and was kind of horrified to learn that not only was I not getting a refund, I ended up owing the IRS quite a lot more than I thought.

So in the interests of helping to ease the bite for all my blog readers, I’ve decided to create my own tax relief program. From now until the end of May, you can take $6.00 off the price of a registered copy of my sex game Onyx. And if you scored a tax refund this year, well, this is a good time to give the gift of sex!

Use the coupon code omgtax2011 in the shopping cart when you check out to get your tax relief.

Sex for Science! Chapter 1: The Genesis

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Sex for Science! Chapter 0
Sex for Science! Chapter 1
Sex for Science! Interlude
Sex for Science! Chapter 2
Sex for Science! Chapter 3
Sex for Science! Chapter 4

San Francisco has a store that bills itself as the largest independent pirate supply store in the city.

I don’t know if it is in fact the largest pirate supply store in San Francisco or not, but it is indeed a large pirate supply store. lapis_lazuli and her partner brought us there in part because I needed some pirate supplies, and in part because it’s a cool place to visit.

The store sells really cool hand-made cast-iron padlocks. My sweetie zaiah has a large cage which will be part of the dungeon furniture once the dungeon is finished, and every cage needs a hand-made cast-iron padlock, so the pirate supply store turned out to be just the right place to visit.

The very cute young cashier who sold me the padlock asked me if I already had a use in mind for it. I told her that I did, and that would have been the end of it, except that she kept on pressing. “What do you plan to use it for?” she asked.

“A cage.”

“Like a cage for a dog?”

“Not exactly, no.”

“What kind of cage?”

“A big cage.”

“What’s it for?”

“It’s part of the dungeon.”

“You have a dungeon?”

“We’re building one, yes.”

“What kind of a dungeon? Like for–”

At that point she turned a brilliant shade of red from the tips of her ears down to her toes and started saying “Oh my God” a lot. She also started stuttering quite a bit and generally looking flustered. Finally, after a lot of “um”s and “err”s and a bit of hand-flapping, she said something about it taking all kinds of people and turned away.

That was the second most fun thing that happened in the pirate supply store, for some value of “fun” that means “I don’t believe in protecting people from the results of their own questions.” The first most fun thing was when lapis_lazuli took me by the hand, looked me straight in the eye, and said “kiss me.”

Which I did. And then did again. She’s rather a nice kisser.

Smart, confident, direct women are sexy. Ahem.

The Porn ‘n’ Cupcakes, the tour of the submarine, and smooching lapis_lazuli in a pirate supply store all aren’t directly related to finding myself in a seedy motel room in Seattle with a bullet hole in the window and a door that looked as if it had been kicked down repeatedly, watching a tattooed grad student in striped socks having a huge screaming orgasm, but they’re indirectly related in the sense that I can perhaps be forgiven for having sex a little bit more on the brain than I usually do during the drive back to Portland, and to the idea that would inevitably bring us to that motel room in Seattle, to which I am by degrees coming.

In fact, the trip to MacWorld led to two different instances of watching a pierced, tattooed woman having a screaming orgasm. This story has several branches, which I’ll get to later.

At this point, the genesis of that idea that brought me to Seattle was less than twenty-four hours and a quick side jaunt through Shasta Caverns away. That side jaunt deserves a bit of talking about of its own.

Shasta Caverns is a cave system near Shasta Mountain, which has an interesting history. It was, apparently, discovered in 1878 by a Native American fishery worker who’d been out hunting and followed an animal through a small hole into what he believed would be a tiny niche in the mountainside.

Scott and I stopped at Shasta Caverns on the way back to Portland partly because our original plan, to head back along the coast and take pictures, was thwarted by reports of rain.

The cave system at Shasta Caverns is accessible only from the top of a mountain across Lake Shasta from the road. Entrance to the cave system involves taking a WWII-era landing boat across the lake, then taking a bus up a very steep, narrow, winding trail that’s so curvy in some places that the bus actually overhangs the edge of the road when it’s turning. The buses themselves were carried across the lake by that very same boat;, which was barely big enough to accommodate them; the guide said the landing ramp can’t be raised while a bus is on the boat, meaning that a ripple any bigger than a matchstick will swamp the boat while it’s transporting them.

The mountain itself looks like this from the edge of the lake.

I still have yet to get used to how folks just leave scenic natural wonder lying around all over the place here in the Pacific northwest.

The cave itself is small but quite spectacular. Unfortunately, a guided tour is the only way to go through it; visitors aren’t allowed to wander about on their own, the way they can at Carlsbad. Which is a damn shame, because I’d love to return here one day with a model and do some nude photography in this place.

Scott and I lagged behind the group as much as our patient and remarkably tolerant guide would permit, shooting long-exposure images from a pair of tripods. The cave system is small but spectacular, and features every type of rock formation that can exist in a limestone cavern.

After we left the cave system, through an exit five hundred feet or so above the entrance, we were confronted with this view:

At the very peak of the caverns is the remnants of this rusted ladder, which for nearly a century was the only way in or out of the cave system. The hole in the ceiling is the original entrance through which the cave’s discoverer made his discovery.

Detour complete, we hopped back into Scott’s car and headed north. That’s when it happened.

Scott has a habit of listening to books on tape via his iPhone whenever he travels–a habit which, by the way, I endorse.

On the trip down, he had introduced me to Wooster & Jeeves, which is pretty funny stuff. On the way back, he opted for something a bit different: Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson.

I’m not quite sure what made him choose that particular book. Maybe it was simply the next one in the queue. Maybe he’d decided that entertainment a bit more meaty than turn-of-the-centry tales about an incompetent buffoon and his hyperconfident butler might be suitable. Perhaps it was entirely random, and the hand of fate reached out to touch him. In any event, the moment he pressed “play,” the dice were cast, and the Seattle motel room became inevitable.

The book, you see, talks about a company called Neurosky.

Neurosky makes a single-chip EEG device that’s designed to be embedded in small electronic toys and gadgets. Neurosky got into business making neurofeedback devices–gadgets intended to train a person to control her own mental state by analyzing her brainwaves and then providing some sort of reward for reaching the goal state.

Their earliest gizmos were video game controllers, which would read the player’s brainwaves and let her control some part of the video game accordingly. They made a race car game, for instance, in which the harder the player concentrates, the faster the car goes.

More recently, Neurosky has started making chips for other companies. One of their customers is Mattel, who makes a toy called the MindFlex, in which you move a ball around by concentrating on it. The game has a motor connected to the chip’s outputs, so that when you concentrate, a fan blows and levitates a ball in the air.

Pretty cool, I think, for the first five minutes, and then probably quite boring after that.

To me, though, in my already riled-up state (and to be fair, my baseline state is pretty riled up to begin with), the connection was obvious. Here is a brain-scanning device that could be used to activate a motor.. Think about that for a minute.

A brain-scanning device. That could activate a motor.

The idea hit like a lightning bolt. If a MindFlex could turn on a motor attached to a fan, surely it could turn on a motor attached to something else, too. Like, say, a vibrator.

It was Twitter that provided the last bit of the puzzle.

On the drive home, I tweeted, as I always do. “Is sexual arousal a discrete brain state?” I said. “Can you use neurofeedback to condition it?” All good questions, I thought. That’s the nice thing about neurofeedback; you can use it to train yourself to be able to go into a certain metal state, like meditation or concentration, at will.

So why not apply the same idea to sexual arousal? If an EEG could detect sexual arousal, ad run a vibrator whenever the wearer became aroused, could it become a neurofeedback training device to teach people to become aroused whenever they wanted? And more to the point, wouldn’t be fun?

There are a lot of folks who read my Twitter feed. One of those folks is partnered to a neurobiology grad student who was thinking along similar lines, although for entirely different reasons. Shortly thereafter, she got in touch with me.

Of course I’d like to collaborate on a project involving hooking people up to an EEG and getting them aroused to see what happens…I mean, really, does the question even need to be asked? It’s Science, right? Science is something I’m in favor of, after all.

So you see, the seedy motel room lurking in my future was all part of the great enterprise of Science, the noblest of all human endeavors.

Sex for Science! Chapter 0: The Prequel

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Sex for Science! Chapter 0
Sex for Science! Chapter 1
Sex for Science! Interlude
Sex for Science! Chapter 2
Sex for Science! Chapter 3
Sex for Science! Chapter 4

The English language has no word to describe the experience of watching a pierced, tattoed woman you’ve only just met have a huge, screaming orgasm, then pull off the electrodes for the EEG machine, roll over, and start talking about sex-based differences in brain activation during sexual arousal.

It has no single word, but there are three: “incredibly fucking hot.”

However, the story that leads up to a sleazy hotel room in Seattle with a laptop, an EEG, and the screaming orgasm I referred to earlier is quite long, and begins in San Francisco, about 809 miles south of that sleazy hotel room. More specifically, it starts (as these sorts of stories often do) with the MacWorld Expo, and also with a book about neuroscience called Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson.

Personally, I blame my friend Scott, who invited me to drive down with him to MacWorld last January. It’s a straight shot, nine hours by car from Portland, or eleven if you stop along the way for photographs. We opted for the latter, as both of us had brought our DSLRs and he had an infrared filter that he thought might prove interesting. to play with.

Now, I do have to admit that I feel as if Hollywood has let me down. I’ve seen a number of Hollywood movies, so I felt I had a pretty good idea of what to expect from a road trip. You can imagine my surprise, then, when we had been on the road for almost four hours without so much as a single hilarious run-in with bungling bank robbers or Brazilian supermodels. The entire trip offered no bank robbers, amusing misunderstandings involving Homeland Security agents and local sheriffs, Russian gangsters, or international monkey smugglers at all, and only the briefest encounter with a Brazilian supermodel, in a subway station in midtown San Francisco. (That encounter TOTALLY didn’t go the way Hollywood led me to expect.)

It did, though, give us a chance to play with the infrared filter. We stopped at a scenic viewpoint north of Mount Shasta, a nominally dormant volcano in the Cascade mountain range. I took a couple of pictures, one normal and one with the infrared filter, from roughly the same spot. The CCD in my camera is not terribly sensitive to infrared; the normal image was taken at 1/250th of a second at f/13, whereas the IR image was shot at 30 seconds at f/8. I like the way that the infrared light easily penetrates all the haze in the air.

I’m not sure what the light-colored smudges are in the left center and left top of the frame. At first I thought they were artifacts like lens flare, but it’s possible they’re areas of cooler air between the camera and the mountain.

Infrared photography done, we continued down on toward San Francisco, and figuratively speaking toward a date with mad science.

There’s little to say about the MacWorld conference itself. MacWorld has become a bit rubbish over the past decade or so. It used to be one of the hilights of my year every year, but it never quite recovered from the Trade Show Slump of Death. These days, it’s a strange mix of small vendors, a smattering of big-name companies like Hewlett-Packard trying desperately to look relevant, and folks who have little to do with the Mac community at all.

I chatted for a while with a bored Russian goth girl (or she might have been Ukrainian–I still can’t tell the accents apart) at the Data Robotics booth and made fun of the immense New York Times booth, where a small group of old-media dinosaurs struggled to figure out a way to make money on the Web. The expo runs for three days, but we hit everything worth hitting in one longish afternoon.

That night, we were invited out to Porn ‘n’ Cupcakes by lapis_lazuli.

You’d think that porn ‘n’ cupcakes would make for a no-fail evening. As it turned out, the porn was a wash and the cupcakes were Vegan, so overall the Porn ‘n’ Cupcakes experience lack both the erotic titillation and the sweet, sweet sugary excess that one might normally expect from porn ‘n’ cupcakes.

The evening was a smashing success.

In fact, hanging out with lapis_lazuli and her partner was so much fun that I stayed up talking to them after Scott had called it a night, and the next day we played hooky from the expo to run around the city with them and spend a bit of time in the bowels of an old diesel submarine.

There is (or rather, was–they’ve recently announced they’re going out of business) a BDSM-themed coffee shop called Wicked Grounds in San Francisco. They have some very cool furniture, including this rather fetching chair-cum-St.-Andrew’s-Cross thing (which I’d like to build an example of for myself). They also sell copies of my Map of Human Sexuality for sale there, but more to the point, they also have a table that they made by cutting apart one of the posters and laminating it down. Scott, whose photographic skills are considerably better than this image might suggest, got this iPhone pic of me sitting at that table.

We elected to meet up with lapis_lazuli and her partner there, before setting out exploring the bits of San Francisco that aren’t the Moscone Convention Center. There are many of them, as it turns out, and quite a few of them are more interesting than the sad sad remnants of MacWorld.

One of them is the Pampanito, an old WWII-era diesel submarine that’s been turned into a museum.

I think submarines are very cool, in a sort of “I would never, ever actually want to be a crew member on one” kind of way. I have not, however, been inside a submarine before.

lapis_lazuli‘s husband offered to bring us on the tour. It was, I have to say, sexy and fun and kind of a turn-on in a way that porn (badly read) ‘n’ cupcakes (all vegan) were not. Imagine the most primitive steampunk machinery you can, and then bring it kicking and screaming into reality, and you have a WWII submarine. It’s astonishing that these things actually worked.

Take this torpedo tube, for instance.

Shooting things with torpedoes is this craft’s entire raison d’être, but the process of doing that was incredibly baroque. Spin the knob, open the door, slide a torpedo down a rail into the tube, close it up, and then perform a series of arcane acts involving a startling number of levers and knobs and dials and little widgets on the ends of arms that move these hydraulic rams around…it’s amazing the war wasn’t over by the time you’re done. And it’s all made of brass!

The torpedoes themselves, well…

If I understand how they worked correctly, the torpedos burned alcohol for fuel in a burner which was used to heat water to steam. The steam then drove a steam turbine, which was connected by a shaft to a complex mechanical transmission that spun the propellors. A mechanical “computer” of sorts guided the submarine through a programmed series of turns that resulted in the torpedo (hopefully) hitting the target. Subs generally fired while they were on a roughly parallel course with the ship they were shooting at, rather than when they were facing the ship directly; the “firing solution” was the sequence of moves the torpedo would have to go through to catch up with and hit the ship.

Apparently, this actually worked, at least sometimes. It’s amazing what a little bit of ingenuity and nearly unlimited funding can accomplish.

Early submarines were diesel-electric jobs, using two four huge diesel engines (in this case, straight unmodified diesel train engines) to turn enormous electric generators that charged 200 tons of lead-acid batteries stored in the bottom deck of the sub. This control panel was used to control the flow of electricity from the generators into the batteries, and from the batteries into the sub’s engines.

The levers moved gigantic rheostats, basically the same thing as the fan speed controller on your wall only five feet tall and six feet wide, all locked in a giant metal cage to keep crewmen from stumbling into them and going up like a fly in a bug zapper.

I say this again, with increasing astonishment: this actually worked.

Old tech, especially old tech involving huge levers and knobs and dials and stuff, gets me hot.

I include this photo because one day I will have live in a place that has a gray steel box mounted on the wall with a metal label reading “Battle Telephone” on it. With a big gauge and some valves next to it. Oh, yes, I will.

Now this…

This is the control room of the submarine.

It’s a bit less “Hunt for Red October” and a bit more “Someone threw a box full of dials and valves into the room and then bolted them down wherever they landed” than what I had expected. The thing in the foreground, which the camera was actually resting on for this quite lengthy exposure, is the combat table, which is basically a big glass light table that you can draw on with grease pens.

It’s appallingly primitive and beautiful and by the time we were here I was ready to pin lapis_lazuli to the wall and do things to her that are illegal in one hundred and seventeen countries plus the District of Columbia. Did I mention that old tech gets me hot?

All of this still doesn’t explain how I came to be in Seattle with a woman I’d just met who has tattoos of the structural formulas of various neurotransmitters tattooed on her body having a screaming orgasm while wired up to a computer, except perhaps in the sense that it set a baseline for general sexual arousal that would come into play during the trip home.

Which I’ll get to in the next post.

Playing mad scientist

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A couple weeks ago, a friend and I drove down to San Francisco for MacWorld.

That’s not actually what I’m going to talk about. We met some folks, toured a submarine, and explored a cave system, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about either.

Instead, what I’m going to talk about is sex. And brain research.

On the drive back, we were listening to a book on tape about neurology, which talked a bit about a company called Neurosky that was making brain research available to everyone. And it talked a good deal about neurofeedback, and learning to change one’s brain states at will by using neurofeedback devices.

Now, Neurosky makes a full-fledged EEG machine on a chip. It’s starting to show up in toys, like the Mattel Mind Flex, which teaches meditation by reading the user’s brainwaves and letting the user control the toy with her mind.

Which, as I’m sure you can anticipate, got me to thinking about sex.

So the thing I’ve started pondering is the notion of a gadget a bit like the Mind Flex, only that runs a vibrator or some other sex toy. Which got me to wondering if sexual arousal, like meditation or concentration, is associated with a characteristic set of brainwave patterns.

So I am talking to someone in Seattle with a similar interest, and she might be able to get me access to a brain lab and an EEG. The first step would be to find out if sexual arousal can indeed be identified by a specific pattern of brainwaves. The next step would be to see if the Neurosky chip can be hacked to detect that pattern, and to run a sex toy like a vibrator. The third step would be to see, if all this works, whether or not it’d be feasible to actually build a self-contained, brain-operated sex toy system.

So for the first part, I am looking for volunteers willing to go to Seattle, get wired up to an EEG, and sexually aroused while their brainwaves are recorded. There are a few folks who I’ve talked to who are interested; any more takers?

Adventures in Europe, Chapter 34: Too Many Monkeys!

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The day after our nocturnal traipse around London’s gristly but sadly amber-free sites-of-historic-horror-cum-tourist-attractions and equally livestock-free Tower Bridge, your humble scribe awoke and, after tea and eggs (marred only by the horrifying sight of seinneann_ceoil‘s flatmate digging into black pudding with gusto) travelled to the House of Joy, the domicile of emanix and company, for a stretch.

The House of Joy has since, I’m told, relocated to a different house, and seinneann_ceoil is now a resident therein, so it would be rather an easier journey to make now. As it was, it required some faffing about on the London Underground, which is interesting from a Yankee perspective on account of its efficiency (relative, at least, to Portland’s public transportation system) and for its maniacal and almost reckless disregard for the safety, well-being, and limbs of its many passengers.

Here in the US, where we prefer not to dismember the public in public (but prefer instead to starve them to death and deny them medical care so that they die in private instead), we build subways that have little folding stair-step things that extend when the cars stop, so that folks don’t fall down between the car and the landing and end up getting run over on the tracks or something. On the Underground, they will have one of that highfalutin’ engineering; instead, they leave a gap between each car and the subway platform that’s just about the perfect size to devour one’s leg, one’s child, or one’s Jack Russell terrier, and play a recording of an English gentleman saying “Mind the gap. Mind the gap.” over and over again as the train arrives. Presumably, folks who don’t heed the warning and fail to mind the gap are removed from the gene pool, for the greater good of the Kingdom or something.

Along the way, I passed the long-disused Battersea Power Station, an old decommissioned coal-fired power plant that was the inspiration for the design of Allied Advanced Power PLats in the real-time strategy game Command & Conquer: Red Alert. It was a beautiful sight to behold, and made me long for the days when I would hear the oh-so-British computer tell me “New Construction Options” or “A-Bomb Ready.”

Once at the House of Joy, seinneann_ceoil left me in the tender merciless hands of emanix for a time.

Her bedroom is, or rather was (in the old house) on the top floor, rightly lit by large skylights. I say this because I quite like skylights, and I have been lobbying zaiah to install some in our house, which we are currently remodeling into a dungeon (as those of you who read my Twitter know). zaiah believes that skylights inevitably leak in rainy climates–something that the skylights in emanix‘s room do not. Apparently, it’s all about the engineering, or something.

We spent the day lounging around, having slinky hex and faffing on the Internet. I got to learn what it’s like to be the object rather than the perpetrator of needle play, which was…interesting. Interesting, and more than a bit scary.

Which reminds me, I still have the story of the lemon drop at the lesbian Halloween party to write about at some point. I’m not quite sure why I tend to end up surrounded by women who enjoy scaring me, but it seems to happen quite a lot.

I also met emanix‘s tiny stuffed unicorn Herbert.

I’m not quite sure exactly how it happened, but we ended up talking about creating a cartoon character based on Herbert, named Herbert the Rape Unicorn. The original conception involved creating a Web site that would mock common rape-culture ideas (like “if she dressed that way, she obviously must have wanted it” or “If she led him on, then it’s her fault”), but we quickly realized that no matter how obvious or over-the-top the mocking was, someone somewhere would probably take it seriously and walk away with precisely the opposite of the intended message.

emanix drew this cartoon on my arm, which is quite likely the only Herbert the Rape Unicorn comic that will ever see the Web.

Every city has That District. You know, the one where all the cool happening stuff…err, happens. In Atlanta, it’s Little Five Points. In Tampa, it’s Ybor. In San Francisco, it’s San Francisco. In London, apparently, it’s Camden.

After the slinky hex, needle play, and other miscellaneous goings-on which involved sounding and you probably don’t want to know the details of, seinneann_ceoil rescued me and whisked me back to her flat. Some amount of slinky hex, a great deal of cuddling, some British television, and another meal in which her flatmate put something horrifying beyond the measure of man into his mouth later, we opted to venture to Camden.

Which was pretty damn cool, really.

We met up with emanix in Camden, in a sort of Gibsonesque ramshackle assortment of repurposed shops offering T-shirts with political slogans, cheap sunglasses, jewelry, posters, and the opportunity to have your feet nibbled by fish in large tanks of water.

I’m serious about that bit about the fish, by the way. One of the shops we passed had big tanks filled with small fish similar to the ones that tend to cling to the undersides of sharks. For a few pounds Sterling, you could stick your feet in the water and let the fish “exfoliate” your skin. Apparently, it’s all the rage amongst people for whom it’s all the rage.

The place is a weird mix of Victorian-ish sculpture, most of which seems to concern itself with maidens and horses, and neon signs…making it, really, quite like a perpetual steampunk science fiction convention.

She has a gaze that suggests she’s seen it all, and a complexion that suggests quite a lot of it involves pigeons.

Or maybe those are tears, one for each pigeon she has KILLED AND DEVOURED DURING HER UNHOLY ANIMATED RAMPAGES IN SEARCH OF THE SECRET TO ETERNAL LIFE. I don’t know.

The horse sculpture is kind of cool.

It’s always nice to see some commemoration of the life and toil of the essential working man. The working man depicted here would probably have preferred a pay raise to a bug relief erected in his honor, but one takes what one can get.

Maybe I used…

…but isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?

At one little booth, we found a series of prints of grafitti art by the British artist Banksy, who does some really mind-bogglingly amazing stuff. seinneann_ceoil bought me a print of his “There Is Always Hope” piece, on account of ’cause it totally makes me cry.

Exploration of Camden complete, we went off to a university in London-town which was evidently hosting a series of lectures on sexuality and society called Critical Sexuality, or CritSex for short, which sounded like quite an interesting way to spend an afternoon.

The timing of my visit was fortuitous, as it turned out, because apparently they host these things only once or twice a year or something.

We traveled to the university (mind the gap!), whereupon I saw two things that struck my attention.

The first was in the foyer of the lecture hall, before we’d actually got as far as the room where the CritSex lectures were to take place. I saw, for the first time, a woman wearing a full burqa. Not just the head shawl and cloak, but the whole, top-to-toe deal, that even included the chadri that totally obscures the face, including the eyes.

And it was, if I may put it delicately, profoundly fucked up. Seriously, deeply fucked up beyond any rhyme or reason.

Now, I have heard it argued that one can not impose the value system from one culture on another culture. I have also heard that the burqa is ennobling and liberating to women, because it frees them from having to compete in the arms race of sexualization in order to feel that they have value.

To both of those things, I say bullshit. Absolute, unmitigated piles of fresh, steaming bullshit.

First, to the cultural argument: The notion that human beings are persons inherently worthy of being treated with dignity and respect is not a cultural artifact, like a style of watch or the design of a sofa. It is absolutely possible, without resorting to appeals of invisible sky-beings or the trappings of tradition, to construct a rigorous moral framework that demonstrates the benefit of this idea. One need only look at history, at the fact that people of all kinds have tangibly and materially improved the lot of the human race as a whole, to see that any society which deprives itself of the contributions of entire classes of its members harms not only the groups so discrimated against, but itself as a whole as well.

The first surgeon ever to perform open-heart surgery, Dr. Daniel H. Williams, was black. Alan Turing, the man who arguably won WWII for the Allies, was gay. Double Nobel Prize-winning physicist Marie Curie, who not only developed the first understanding of radioactivity but also pioneered radiation treatment of cancer, was a woman.

Any society that cuts itself off from some portion of its members, deprives itself of the benefits, innovations, and discoveries those people might make. Women can fly fighter jets, lead nations, explore space, build buildings, design bridges, fight fires, create art, and discover new medical techniques. The notion that one society can utterly quash the most basic and essential of all human liberties for half its population, ad then claim it to be merely a “cultural value” neither better than nor worse than any other society’s values, is absolute rubbish of the highest order. “Cultural values” are not and can not be the excuse for atrocity, the justification for oppression.

The same goes for the notion that wearing the burqa is somehow empowering or liberating to women. Leaving aside for the moment that the whole purpose of this garment is to dehumanize women, on the grounds that the sight of a woman will drive men to sin (and how many shades of fucked up is THAT notion?), let’s be perfectly clear on one very important key point here:

You do not, BY DEFINITION, empower someone by saying ‘If you don’t do what I tell you to do I will stone you to death.’

That is, in fact, precisely the opposite of empowerment. Empowerment lies in giving people greater control and more choices in their lives, not in killing them if they fail to wear what you want them to wear. Remember that should anyone try to argue that the burqa represents empowerment; You do not, BY DEFINITION, empower someone by saying ‘If you don’t do what I tell you to do I will stone you to death.’ That includes any rationalization of the ‘do what I tell you to do’ part whatsoever, whether supposedly handed down by an invisible sky-being or not. It certainly applies to any reasoning that concludes with “No man should see a woman nor hear a woman’s footsteps lest it excite him. Women must not speak loudly in public as no stranger should hear a woman’s voice.”

It’s difficult for your humble scribe to even conceptualize in the wildest flights of fantasy the sort of topsy-turvy, up-is-down universe in which any of this could be called ’empowering’ by any person with even the slightest modicum, however small or insignificant, of sense.

The other bit was cooler. One of the presenters that the CritSex lectures we attended used my map of human sexuality in her presentation. So, yeah.

And that, save for a flight out of London the next day and a miserable 20-hour layover at the airport in Copenhagen, brings me to the end of my travels in Eastern and Western Europe. I arrived, after a total of eighteen hours’ travel time, back in my home town of Portland, on a cramped flight with my knees in my nose and no power outlet at my seat for my laptop; my luggage, which had somehow ended up flagged for a hand search at customs in Atlanta, arrived approximately seven hours later. (It was, according to a Delta representative, somewhere over Wyoming as I was arriving at my house, having opted after being searched to take entirely a different route home.)

Adventures in Europe, Chapter 32: All Good Things…

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It turns out that you can’t actually make a living at staying in a castle with a whole bunch of kinky poly folks and having orgies all the time. Not unless you’re, I don’t know, Hugh Hefner or something…and to be quite honest, judging from the outside, I think my sex life is probably better than his.

So it came to pass that the last day of our stay at the castle was upon us, and rather sooner than I would have wanted. After the morning’s slinky hex–err, kinky sex, I spent a good bit of the afternoon running around the castle grounds and exploring the nearby village taking pictures, many of which you’ve already seen.

Later that afternoon, I was joined on the castle grounds by Emily, who suggested we take advantage of the opportunity for more photos. This seemed like a most excellent plan to me.

NSFW. Click on this link only if pics of nakedness in front of a castle won't get you fired or, y'know, make you explode or something.