Slashdong - Sex Tech, Teledildonics, and Whatever Else I Can Make Dirty

Arse Elektronika 2009 - Call for Papers

2009-06-29T10:38:29-07:00

Arse Elektronika 2009 - Call for Papers

It’s that time again! The call for papers for this year’s Arse Elektronika conference is up. The title this year is “Of Intercourse and Intracourse”, with a focus on biotechnology and sexuality. Here’s the full conference description:

Scottish SF author Iain Banks created a fictitious group-civilisation called “Culture” in his eponymous narrative. The vast majority of humanoid people in the “Culture” are born with greatly altered glands housed within their central nervous systems, who secrete - on command - mood- and sensory-appreciation-altering compounds into the person’s bloodstream. Additionally many inhabitants have subtly altered reproductive organs - and control over the associated nerves - to enhance sexual pleasure. Ovulation is at will in the female, and a fetus up to a certain stage may be re-absorbed, aborted, or held at a static point in its development; again, as willed. Also, a viral change from one sex into the other, is possible. And there is a convention that each person should give birth to one child in their lives. It may sound strange, but Banks states that a society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other. Pressure for change within society would presumably build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity will be established.

Does this set-up sound too futuristic? Too utopian? Too bizarre?

We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. And that’s why our annual conference Arse Elektronika deals with sex, technology and the future. As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough. “Bizarre enough for what?” – you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century.

Don’t you think, replicants?

The conference will be taking place in San Francisco (at a few different venues yet to be announced), October 1-4th, 2009.

Canada Loves Teledildonics

2009-06-21T23:10:51-07:00

Good lord, the Canadian press sure has been on about teledildonics lately.

First off, Cory Silverburg, of Come As You Are and pretty much all around completely awesome person, gave a talk at the Sexuality Conference at the University of Guelph. Apparently, there were a couple of reporters there.

The first article starts out tame….

Sex and Tech

The headlines for the second article are… Well, it starts with…

I’ve seen the future: It’s techno-sex

But the Guelph Mercury, even though it was picking up the same article off the wire, just wasn’t happy with that headline. So they went with…

Big Brother may be watching you – with cybersex on his mind…

Damn. Daaaaaaaaaaamn.

Does it stop there, though? No! New article, even BETTER headline, via Canada.com.

Virtually nasty: cybersex is pushing the boundaries of human behaviour

Whew. What a game of headline oneupsmanship that was. I’m not sure who won out of those last two.

Anyways, a completely different article on the Ottawa Citizen, talks about Sharon Moalem, and his new book, How Sex Works. I post it here because the article has the word teledildonics in it.

The science of sex from A to Z

Slashdong Version 2 - Far Too Open

2009-06-21T19:07:09-07:00

Welcome to Slashdong Version 2.

Didn’t notice any differences? Good.

Through the past 8 months, I’ve been blogging very little. There are a few reasons for that:

Most of the technology that’s been announced this year is rehashes or will most likely never see the light of day (RealTouch, I’m looking at you here)
I hate MovableType. I hate it so fucking much. I just don’t deal well with that workflow. At all.

Now, instead of just letting things rot, I’ve decided to actually do something about the second issue, and have moved to a new system. One that works the way I do. That is, minimally and with lots of emacs bindings.

Slashdong is now running on top of Jekyll, the violently minimalist static page system used by the people at GitHub (Thanks go to Cory Ondrejka for blogging his experience with it, which got me looking at it, even though it’s forced me to write some Ruby. cringe). I’ve recently started hosting my software projects over there, and ended up using jekyll to generate some of the project websites, like the libnifalcon site. This worked out well enough that I decided to take a shot at hosting my larger blogs on it.

There are going to be a few things missing from this that we had over on MovableType.

Aggregate Date/Category Archives - Jekyll has a very, very simplified archival system, that doesn’t handle monthly/yearly indexes. But, really, did anyone ever really use these? The only year I posted enough for that was 2005.
Message Boards - Ok, that’s not specifically MT, but I’m removing them completely anyways. They never got used much, and I’ve ported most of the interesting information off of them.

There are also things that will start out broken but that I’m working on fixing:

A lot of the post formatting got hosed as I moved from MT/HTML to Markdown (Thank god for html2text though).
All message board links (from when articles were still stored on the message boards, what a horrid idea that was) are still broken, as they have been for about a year. Working on redirecting these to posts now.
Most of the MT formatted archival links should redirect to new URLs properly, but I’m sure there’s still a few broken things
Most of the the Projects and Articles pages have completely fucked formatting.
There are no categories or tags for any posts.

I’ve done a lot of work adding new features and information, though.

Comments are now hosted through Disqus
RSS is now hosted through Feedburner. I’ve established redirects to the old feeds, hope that doesn’t screw anyone up.
The Projects and Articles page is back online, with a few posts that’ve been missing since 2007.

One of the other features is that Slashdong is now quite literally an Open Source blog. No, really, feel free to go fork it, it’s at http://www.github.com/qdot/slashdong.org. Everything is covered under the Creative Commons Attibution-NonCommerical-NoDerivation license. Not really anything special, since all of this data was very easily retreivable through RSS or simple web scraping in the first place, but, well, it’s there now, if for some reason you feel the need to datamine 4 years of sex tech posts or something.

If you find any problems with the site, please feel free to email the tips address. Otherwise, here’s hoping all this work was worth it.

Dildroid - Teledildonics for Google Android

2009-06-08T20:54:26-07:00

Dildroid - Teledildonics for Google Android

Wow. This has to be the cutest teledildonics interface ever.

This is Dildroid, a new teledildonics interface for machines running Google Android that have vibration capabilities. It allows the setting of multiple vibrator levels through a touch interface, and the interface… Well…

Ok, yeah, that’s awesome. But even better?

Congratulations, Dildroid programmers, you just won teledildonics.

Dildroid is available for free from mobidroid.com, but really, come on, give the guy some cash. Just for the low battery image alone.

I am walking 2018

2009-05-13T21:38:29-07:00

So, Wired UK has been out for about a month. Thanks to the craptastic Technorati feed that I track to regurgitate news onto here and act like it’s new, I’m just now seeing this.

Wired UK’s Top 10 Predictions for the Future: 9 - Teledildonics (2018)

Yes. According to Wired, Teledildonics exists as of 2018. So, I hereby declare myself to exist in 2018. As a courtesy to the rest of you fucking cave dwellers, I will extend 2018 to also be anything that exists in the 5 ft. around me.

What 2018 currently has to offer: This cat, a fuzzy pink ball, a macbook power adapter, one of my shoes, and teledildonics.

Aren’t you excited about the future now?

Update: New come-on line - “Hey, wanna exist in 2018?” (emphasis random)

Porn in Computer Science

2009-05-10T20:59:08-07:00

Keeping Abreast of Porn in Computer Science

Curious about what Computer Scientists do when they get grant money to look at naked people? Did you know that the most oft-used image for doing image processing work is porn? Use this article to convince others that getting your CS grad degree means you get to stare at tits and/or cock all day long, and get paid for it.

It does, doesn’t it?

Halflife Crowbar Dildo

2009-03-31T18:14:06-07:00

Obviously if I can’t be arsed to post any real news this year, I also can’t come up with good April Fools Jokes. So, time to use the humor of others.

No. Really. A Crowbar Dildo. It’s even called “The Freeman”. While it’s an April Fools Day joke, it’s actually real, and you can actually buy it, assuming you do so in the next 18 or so hours.

Yeah. We already saw awesome Half Life fan movies, now it’s time for Half Life fan porn.

Wait, no it isn’t.

Happy 4th Birthday Slashdong

2009-02-24T21:53:15-08:00

It was 4 years ago today that I decided to hook a vibrator to an xbox controller and post it on this website.

Yup.

Talking Head Vibrator: So close to Slayer, yet so far...

2009-01-11T16:22:52-08:00

after much humor aimed directly at it (wind around 3 minutes into that video for the relevant part), I finally managed to get my hands on a Talking Head Vibrator. The fine people at Virtually Adult were nice enough to contact me out of the blue and not only sent me a Talking Head, but also a Televibe, which I’ll do a post about some other time.

For those not familiar, the Talking Head is a vibrator with a sound player built in. It was also the topic of one of the most offensive posts ever to be seen on Slashdong. It appears their main website is gone, and the store on the site I linked above doesn’t work, but if you still actually want one after you read this, you can get one from Virtually Adult. Also, this toy is responsible for the Bergen the German Mountain Man vocal sample, which may be one of the best things I’ve ever found in the history of running this site. But we’ll get to that later. If you want to get an idea of what the vibrator does, here’s a little demo video I whipped together because I don’t use NEARLY enough Slayer on this website.

Talking Head Vibrator Demo from qDot on Vimeo.

Now, being the oafish klutz that I am, I managed to shatter most of the control unit portion of the Talking Head simply by trying to remove the battery casing cover (in my defense, it seems the plastics welding on the unit I had was a wee bit overzealous). Doing this also managed to break the 30 gauge wires they used for the vibrator power. I’d certainly planned on taking the thing apart at some point anyways, just wanted to, you know, see it work first. I decided to take the chance to open the whole thing up and take a peek inside.

Oh, epoxy dot, will you ever stop making this posts boring?

So yeah, I don’t have a whole lot to say about the insides, because I can’t really see the insides. According to the patents claimed by the Talking Head site archive, this is basically an answering machine output circuit in a vibrator. All of the claimed licensed patents had to do with answering machines. Not all that interesting.

Here’s the other half of the vibrator. It might be hard to notice since it’s in pieces right now, but, uh… The speaker is pointing out the bottom of the vibrator. Now, I’m pretty sure I know people who, in a metaphorical sense, fit the anatomical description needed to be in the sound throwing area of a speaker directed out of their crotch or ass, but in reality, there’s very few people who are going to be using this vibrator in a way that the speaker will be pointed toward the interested party. You know, unless you’re a guy that likes to the cuckolded by toys as well as other men, in which case, you totally win some sort of humiliation kink award. One involving very frilly panties.

Anyways, that means that the special output of the vibrator that makes it something more than just a rabbit vibrator will always be pointed away from you. So you can’t hear it. Where would be a good alternative speaker position for a sound player built into a vibrator? I think the only proper answer is “Nowhere, because it’s a really fucking stupid idea.”

Finally, the sound chips. Instead of putting a small internal flash card in that you could load sounds to over USB, they decided using audio cards that you can switch out would be a better idea. Yeah, I don’t fucking get it either.

That’s them. I got “Slow Ride with Koby” and “French Boy f/ Jean Phillipe”. The original talking head site sold 7 or 8 samples, as well as a “make your own” kit that I would SO have put some Slayer on. Totally.

Since the original site has disappeared, that means that I can no longer send people there to be subjected to my favorite sample, possibly of all time, ever.

Bergen the German Mountain Man.

Luckily, I’ve used this sample in so many presentations, so many times, that I have multiple copies of it laying around, to be preserved forever and ever in the name of stupidity.

Click here to download the Bergen the German Mountain Man Sample and help the stupidity live on. Someone please make some bad industrial with this. Please.

While we’re at it, here’s the full version of Latin Lover featuring Juan. 4 minutes of… I don’t even think I have words for it.

Man. I forgot how good it feels to rant about toys I’d probably never use in the first place. It’s good to be back.

Thanks again to Virtually Adult for providing the Talking Head

Mermaid Toy Dissection Gone Wild

2009-01-07T21:35:46-08:00

Ever wonder what it’s like to be a sex toy hacker? To receive random boxes in the mail filled with toys of various shapes and sizes? To take them apart and admire their insides?

Well, thanks to the hard work of Varka at Bad Dragon Toys, you can now live vicariously. You poor bastard.

Disassembling the Mermaid Toy from Varka on Vimeo.

It started innocently enough, an engineering endeavor to work on designs for a new masturbatory tube toy by taking apart an already existing one. However, as the 19 minutes of video above will show, it all goes very, very, very wrong.

I’ve taken apart a lot of toys in my time, and I’ve never run into anything quite this, and I hope I never do.

(But that jackhammer linear actuator thing is pretty interesting. Or would be, were it in better condition…)

via Bad Dragon Toys Forums