Arse Elektronika 2009 - Call for Papers
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
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….
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
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
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
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)
