Month: September 2004

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65064,00.html

The UPS guy delivered my Sinulator the morning of the day I was giving a party. I signed, sent him on his way and returned to my preparations. It wasn't until hours later, draped around the room with about 20 friends, that I remembered my new toy.

The Sinulator is a device that lets you connect a sex toy to your computer so that other people can control it for you over the internet. After announcing to the room that I had one of these, I really had no choice but to open the box and pass the thing around.

If you've ever been to a baby shower, you're familiar with the “oooohs” and “aaaaahs” that ensued. We were all impressed with the surprisingly substantial vibrator, which features rotating plastic pearls in the shaft and a vibrating bunny for external stimulation. Also, it's pink.

Here's how it works. Your Sinulator package includes the transmitter, a vibrator and a receiver. You download the client application from Sinulator.com. During installation, you connect the transmitter to a USB port. (If you use Windows XP, make sure to read the installation note in the user guide and save yourself some frustration.)

When you're all installed and have the client running, you attach your toy to the wireless receiver and switch it on. Finally, you go to Sinulator.com and choose a name for your toy. After that, anyone who knows your toy's name can set your toy a-buzzin' using the Sinulator control panel. Neither of you has to register or divulge any personal information — not even an e-mail address.

The control panel looks like a grown-up version of a driving toy for baby, with buttons and levers and sliders that you manipulate with your mouse. I laughed when I first saw it — now you can have sex and drive a race car at the same time! If that's not a popular male fantasy, I don't know what is.

But it gets even better. You probably want to stick to the dashboard if you're at the office, but for home use, the Interactive Fleshlight is where it's at. The Fleshlight is a standard, sleeve-style vibrator for men, with a twist: It's also a transmitter. It measures the speed and force of each thrust and communicates those metrics to the software, which translates them into vibration and pulse on the other end.

In other words, a man can be thrusting in Cleveland while a woman is penetrated in Seattle, and the cybersex experience gets one step closer to the holodeck.

In part, cybersex appeals to women because it takes place in writing. The attention, the wordplay, the sensual imagery of great cybersex attracts us because it requires both parties to be present and to communicate. It's like starring in your own erotic story. Even when you add the visual excitement of a webcam, you can't tune out and get a woman off in cybersex.

The Sinulator relies on communication, too. The better you communicate, the better your Sinulator experience will be. Just watching my vibrator propel itself across my desk onto the floor was enough to tell me that anyone who wants to spend time with me is going to have to use the Jackhammer button sparingly, or it's going to be over real quick. (You can set local overrides, so no matter what the other guy does, the vibrator won't exceed the intensity levels you set. But we don't have to tell him that, now, do we?)

Like with real sex, you can thrust too hard or too fast, or finish too soon, or not finish at all. You can leave each other hanging or draw the experience out as long as you can stand it. If you're on your own, you can log on to SinulatorCams and pay to play.

Cybersex gets blamed for a lot of things, including social isolation, infidelity and divorce. It's a temptation previous generations of lovers didn't have to face, and it's technology, and therefore it's scary for a lot of folks.

Yet remote interaction technology — or, as I like to call it, teledildonics — has as much potential to bring people together as it does to drive people apart. If you travel often, or if you're in a long-distance relationship, this technology provides another avenue for intimacy, especially if it's harder for you to use toys with a partner than have sex au naturel. (More on that in a future column.)

As for me, well, I'm enjoying the novelty of it. I'm on the road as I write this week's column, and I can honestly say that the Sinulator beats the pocket rocket hands down, even if I am getting strange looks from the other Starbucks patrons.

Hee! Hee!

I'm a lazy bugger. This is not news. The fact that I had to fire up my FTP client to upload files to my website so I could share them with all you lovely blog readers was a hassle. So, being a geek, I did something about it. Behold:

I now simply have to right click on a file and select Send To->LJ Image Directory and the file is automagically uploaded. I just hacked a little application in C# that uploads a file as a background thread to my webserver.

*does the happy dance*

Former Minnesota governor says he won't vote in presidential election. Jesse Ventura says he'll take a pass on the voting booth in November.

The former governor of Minnesota told an audience at the University of Illinois in Urbana Wednesday that he won't vote in the presidential election because he doesn't like Democrat John Kerry or President George W. Bush. “Look at the position I'm in,'' said Ventura, who served as Minnesota governor from 1999-2003. “If I vote for John Kerry, I'm going to get my taxes raised.''

Bush won't get his vote because of the president's positions on social issues, including his opposition to gay marriage and stem-cell research, Ventura said. “It scares me when a president says he won't support stem-cell research because it goes against God,'' Ventura said. “I have news for you. If you're waiting for God to cure Alzheimer's, then we are going to be waiting a long time.''

Ya. Don't exercise your right to vote. That'll show 'em.

You nimrod.

Ruined by R ratings
John Patterson
Friday September 24, 2004

The Guardian

I had me a Proustian moment at the used-video store this week. I stumbled on a copy of the first movie I ever saw that had been blatantly and brutally cut. It was called Last Summer and I saw it late at night in maybe 1980, on the old Metromedia Five station in Washington DC that Rupert Murdoch later bought and used as a launchpad for the Fox network.
Back then it played weekend-long movie marathons and Last Summer – adapted in 1969 by Frank and Eleanor Perry, who also made The Swimmer – rolled around just once, in the dead of night. I'd read the book by Evan Hunter and remembered a sleazy, exploitative scene at the end when a teenage girl goads two boys into raping another girl among the dunes on Fire Island. Come time for the rape, the station cut to commercials, and when they came back the credits were already rolling. I was used to British TV of the 1970s, a veritable cavalcade of knockers and duffings-up until Mrs T started waving that handbag. I knew Metromedia Five hacked movies to bits, but here the moment toward which the whole movie had been building was simply gone – it was amputation, not editing.

Around the same time came the first network TV airing of the ice-hockey comedy Slap Shot, which offered another approach to making nasty, sweary movies palatable to five-year-olds. I believe this was a unique cultural moment, as it constituted the public debut of the word “freakin'”, which the network superimposed over the original movie's every use of the more sensible f-word. Nowadays people use “freaking” in everyday speech in bars and on buses, the first instance I know of a network faux-obscenity taking on a life of its own.

Movies like Slap Shot and The Last Detail (87 f-words) were among the first examples of what later became a thriving parallel universe: TV versions of foul-mouthed and violent movies. You haven't lived until you've seen Goodfellas cut for TV. All 250-odd obscenities are just gone, replaced by ridiculous euphemisms (“melon-farmer”, indeed) and tin-eared pseudo-cussing. See The Usual Suspects on TV and the phrase “you fucking cocksucker” becomes “you fairy godfather”, which, come to think of it, is no less homophobic. Die Hard gives us Bruce Willis in his wifebeater vest yowling “Yippee-ki-yay, Mr Falcon!” And so on.

With uncensored movies, be they at the picture house or on cable stations like HBO, things are better, but censorship information in the US has expanded now to the point where it can actually interfere with the enjoyment of the product. An episode of say, Six Feet Under and any movie on HBO will be preceded by what I call the menu: a list of exactly what kinds of unpleasantness will be heavily featured in tonight's attraction. For example: “Graphic violence, nudity, foul language, rape” came before Dr Melfi was assaulted on The Sopranos, so they ruined that episode before it even started. Sometimes the list may extend to as many as seven gruesome items, with mutilation or torture added, until it feels like a full house in bingo.

Movie posters and ads likewise have their own little box next to the rating, explaining the things mothers may wish to protect their sprogs from. Not having any sprogs myself I feel this is information I can do without but hey, I already saw the meagre fare on offer – “Mild profanity, action violence, partial nudity”, blah – and it's already put a ceiling on my expectations. I know I won't be shocked or surprised, both of which rank high in my pantheon of cinema-going pleasures. The LA Times even adds its own spin on the rating at the end of reviews: “Too intense for young children” and so on, though I recall a wonderful misprint relating to some plasma-drenched Halloween hack-n-slasher: “Gore. Beheadings. Elviscerations.”

I was talking about all this recently with Robert Parigi, who directed his first movie, Love Object, from his own script last year. We were bemoaning the censorious state of what we like to call “Crybaby America” and Love Object, a horror movie with lots of sexual deviancy, contains plenty to rile and unnerve that constituency. A splendidly macabre psychodrama about a Collectorish young tech writer and his lifelike sex-doll, it jabs innumerable hot buttons and combines perfectly judged black humour (“You don't have to take a sex-doll to see The English Patient!”) with some deeply disturbing moments of degradation and sexual perversity. Yet its rating – “R for violence, sexuality and language” – scarcely hints at what's in store for the viewer in terms of mindbends and sweaty palms.

Parigi is not as worried by TV censorship as he is by the new phenomenon of “bespoke” or “DIY” censorship as practiced by companies such as ClearPlay and Trilogy Studios. ClearPlay will mute, bleep, skip and jump its way through the horrid and naughty bits in any DVD you want altered, while Trilogy's MovieMask software digitally alters your DVD to accord with your own comfort level. You can reduce or remove entirely all sex, violence or language. You can expunge any “vain reference to the deity” or “strong profanity”. You can cut all the bloodshed out of Saving Private Ryan without any dealings with, or permission from, Steven Spielberg or Dreamworks, who are naturally incensed.

As an artist, Parigi reasons that, since this service is likely to proliferate, he is being caught at both ends of the process: by the ratings board, and by the end-user's local censorship service. This essentially puts his work in the hands of small-town busybodies, bluenoses and religious bigots, especially the latter, as the digital censorship software folks all reside in Utah or Colorado, white bastions of the religious right, and Love Object would send these people screaming for their assault rifles. If they're going to cut it up without Parigi's permission anyway, then he wonders why he even bothers to deal with the censor's exacting and tiresome demands in the first place.

Meanwhile, Trilogy is negotiating with TiVo to see if MovieMask can be used to ruin more TV and movies than it already does. I'm reassured by one fact: the only movie Trilogy say they can't filter effectively is The Passion of the Christ. It would be like throwing away the turkey and keeping the wishbone. Hell, I might pay to see that.

Original link: http://film.guardian.co.uk/patterson/story/0,12830,1311239,00.html

Ever since I put Boris on an adult cat food diet (Purina One instead of Science Diet kitten formula), his litter box smells like something out of a psycho nightmare. Is this normal? Anybody ever had something similar happen? Which good cat food would you recommend? His kitten food poo was never this bad.

I just realized that I've spent 21 hours talking to the UK in the last month.

Wow.

Went to bed early last night, but I slept poorly. Lots of changes in my life these days means lots of anxiety, which mean muscle tension, which means me waking up in the middle of the night.

loads of fun.

… and that makes it all better.

Just came back from Dinner with Stepane, Robin and a friend of hers whom I don't even recall the name at the moment. I feel.. meh. Robin is, and I believe always will be, a source of mixed feelings. She's beautiful, and a good friend, and I know it could never be more than friendship. At the same time, it's almost impossible to reconcile the, well, lust I have for her with who I am and how I feel about her.

Tonight was just another of those evenings. I felt… jealous. Excluded. Because they'd all come from a nude photo shoot. From what they were saying, it seemed like a good time. They kept going on and on and making little inside jokes, and teasing me about the pictures. Now I understand why she – very politely – told me i couldn't come. They're excellent reasons. For her, nudity is nothing. For Stephane, it's a professional shoot and he's beyond reproach in that regards. Her friend, well, they used to live together. For me, given the fact that she knows I lust after her, it wouldn't have been a good idea for all the obvious reasons. Doesn't change the fact that I resent it, just a wee little bit. I hate feeling like this. Jealousy is a self-defeating process. I just have to deal with it.

it's still not fun though.