March 31, 2007
Help JD-1116 Buy a Robot Suit
JD-1116, admin of the MaleBots Robotics Fetish Site, is having a fucking kick ass suit of armor built by Nightmare Armor Studios, and needs help to fund it. I'm not usually up for shilling for charity on this site, but dude. It's a fucking suit of robotic armor. I mean, I want a pony (please send me money too), but this is so much more badass than a pony that... Dude. IT'S FUCKING ROBOTIC ARMOR. GIVE THE MAN YOUR MONEY BEFORE HE TAKES OVER THE EARTH. Maybe he'll spare you then.
Also: MaleBots is having their end of month special for site sign-up, so go do that too. It's a damn fine site.
(Also: Really. I wasn't kidding about the pony. Plz send me money. Or a pony. See, here's a link you can buy it from, even. But send JD money first.)
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Yuri's Night w/ Plaid - April 13, NASA Ames, Palo Alto, CA
So yeah, this has nothing to do with sex tech, but I figure there's a good portion of the readers of this blog that will want to know about this if they don't already.
Yuri's Night
In the MOTHERFUCKING BLIMP HANGAR AT NASA AMES
Performing:
Plaid (2 HOUR MOTHERFUCKING LIVE SET)
Telefon Tel Aviv
Bluetech
Sutekh
Mr. Projectile
And others...
Live science demos and interactive exhibits.
Did I mention 2 HOUR SET BY PLAID!?
Tickets are $25 (Plus ridiculous ticket site fees). If you live anywhere near the Bay, or hell, anywhere PERIOD and you miss this, you suck. A lot.
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March 30, 2007
Czech Geeks in Love
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March 28, 2007
Chemistry Not Sexy Enough?
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This post doesn't even require text.
via Improbable Research Blog - One of my favorite pages on the net
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March 26, 2007
qDot on Bloggers Undressed
Wheee, even more footage of me being a dork at SXSW.
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March 24, 2007
Twitterdildonics: The Video
Look ma, I'm on GETV!
While at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas, Roving RoboReporter Violet Blue caught up with a unique hacker by the name of Kyle Machulis. Kyle isn't your ordinary teledildonic hardware hacker. No, Kyle created the ultimate real-time sex device mashup by linking public Twitter updates to a Rez Trance Vibrator allowing users to FEEL Twitter messages. Kyle demonstrates and explains how it all works to Violet. You will never regard Twitter the same way again. (This video is safe for work, no matter what your industry).
Episode links: Violet Blue, qDot (slashdong), MMOrgy, IGDA Sex, Twitter, Rez Trance Vibrator
You know, I've heard myself on podcasts multiple times since I started Slashdong, but I'm pretty sure this is the first video I've done. I'm totally having that whole "hear your own voice recorded for the first time" reaction...
So, there it is, the underground hit of SXSW, Twitterdildonics. I still plan on overhauling a few things with it and possibly making some different interfaces (Morse Code and Motor Based Phoneme Projection were both recommended), but even so, nothing beats the original.
Remember, if you're interested in using Twitterdildonics, it hooks up perfectly with the Drmn' Trance Vibe, the open source sex toy!
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USB Nuts
Remember the 'MP3 Titties' article?
Now there's talk of USB Nuts!
via the front page of youtube. Yay for random advertising!
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March 19, 2007
The Look of Post Con Depression
The conference season, he/she/they/it/hir/xir/??? is a harsh master/mistress/whatever the fuck you genderqueer BDSMers call yourselves.
One week, you're standing in a bathroom stall next to the guy who wrote your favorite WordPress plugin, doing fat rails of coke that were divided up using the pocket knife you picked up as swag at the expo booth of some pretentious Web 2.0 startup that won't exist next month.
Then the next week, you find yourself sitting in front of a strawberry sundae you inhaled in record time (with beer chaser), lamenting the loss of the power supply for your bowling pin vagina which you were totally looking forward to using after a bunch of bloggers stuck their best typing finger in it, getting yourself a vicarious handjob from half the hip side of the internet, with the heady thoughts of your 5 seconds of importance because you made a couch vibrate to microblogging fueling your hard-on that could only be described using adjectives that would also make a great tagcloud for a gay porn streaming movie site that you'd totally visit.
So you do what anyone would do.
You go to Toys r Us and buy yourself a robotic pet to rip apart and pervertify to do your own horrific biddings, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with sex but since you're posting it on your big, well-known sex blog, people are just gonna assume.
And then, you end by making it a link post to all the spiffy blogs you've found over the past few days:
- Suicide Bots - This is what I wanted to do with the deathbots.com domain that I got. Yay that they're doing it awesomely.
- Good Math, Bad Math - Back in college, I used to refer to 'bad math' as 'hippie math', referring to the type of math that happens when pot, fractal posters, and a low grade understanding of high school mathematics get together. This is a blog all about kicking people's asses on that. Makes me VERY happy.
- Sexerati - Neat sex blog
- Shake Well Before Use - Another nifty sex + other stuff blog
Now then, back to the bionic kitty project.
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March 17, 2007
Motion Portrait: Speeding over the Uncanny Valley at Warp 9
At GDC Expo, I happened upon the Silicon Studios booth, where they were showing off Motion Portrait, a new piece of face mapping/morphing software that... well, it hacks the uncanny valley into tiny, bloody chunks.
Here's a decent video of it so you can get an idea of what's going on:
And then here's my face mapped into it, as taken by my cellphone:
Now, all they had to do was take an expressionless picture of me in order to get the facial manipulation to work. Since I'm posting this on a tech sex site, right after a post on transhumanist ethics in sex, the discussions of the horrid misuse of this technology is left as an exercise for the reader and/or reblogger.
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From Virtual Sex to No Sex?
Just found an article from the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies by Dr. James Hughes (a transhumanist ethicist who has a whole bunch of cool articles, check that link for them) about the neuroethics of virtual sex. Much of the beginning of the article actually references some of my writing here on slashdong, and I found it through my referrers. I was all giddy that someone had written me up in IEEE somewhere then realized that was a T not an E and got all pouty, but continued reading anyways.
And now I wanna go curl up in a corner and rock back and forth while crying for a while, I think.
But the equipment has been so crude that it has not provided a very interesting experience for many. In about ten years however I’m sure that Wii-sex will be quite popular.
Agreed. Equipment totally sucks. (I'm not kidding here. I'm never one to defend our current teledildonics technology, nor am I saying I'm doing much to advance it. I just make the easy stuff and hook it up to the silly stuff). However, I'll ask again... Why does everyone love the Wii-sex idea so much?
Eventually we will be able to directly stimulate the parts of the brain that desire specific partners or experiences. In the future we will be able to specifically turn off sexual thoughts about children, and turn on appropriate sexual thoughts about adults. We will be able to make gays straight, and straights gay, and everything in between. There will be no more necessity for sexual boredom between long term partners. We will be able to wire ourselves to only desire sex with our spouses, to only desire it in-body, and to desire it according to an agreed upon frequency. Or we can turn off our jealousy, and turn up our libidos, if we have agreed to a polyamorous lifestyle.
... Man, what the fuck are we gonna do for sitcoms on TV when this happens?
In all seriousness though, there'd have been a time when I would've knocked this whole article off as fucking nonsense (possibly earlier this morning even, before I took all the cold medicine I'm on right now). However, 2 years down the road, spending all my time working on or in virtual worlds and watching how people are innovating in sex tech, all I can do is stand by the side of the road, crack open a beer, and say "Yup."
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March 15, 2007
MariaScript - The Interactive Sex Language
MariaScript - The Interactive Sex Language
Someone (who's managed to keep their contact information pretty well hidden) has come up with a language specification (but I don't believe a parser is yet available) for having sex with an android. I don't think we're gonna be seeing this language on Lambda The Ultimate any time soon.
Honestly, I'm not sure why this /needs/ its own language, but I guess I can applaud the effort nonetheless. Or at least give it that weird, tilted head, "Huh?" kinda look. Doesn't look like there's any implementation or examples available as of yet, but lord knows I've built things for no reason before...
Since there's a good chance we'll kill the tripod bandwidth limit for this site, I've mirrored the two PDFs onto here to make sure they're available.
- Maria Language Background Information - PDF, ~500k
- Maria Language Specification - PDF, ~400k
The creator of the language also runs XXXToyTech, a site about building sex interfaces that predates Slashdong by a good 2-3 years if not more. I'm trying to mirror down the site right now as breathing on it trips the bandwidth alarms, but what I've gotten so far is kinda fun...
- Female Sexual Mechanics for Android Makers - PDF, ~3mb
- Male Sexual Mechanics for Android Makers - PDF, ~900k
I so, so want a shirt with this graph on it.
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Ze Frank meets the Nue Tube
So during my trip to LA (which I still need to write up), the guys from Nue were nice enough to meet up with me, tell me about their product, then give me a 24 pack. These things have been nothing but fun ever since. I took a few to GDC and handed them out at the Sex in Games Roundtable, then took a big ol' batch to SXSW, threw them out during The Sex and Computational Technology panel, and handed some out at the parties I went to. Well, one thing led to another, and sure enough, a grainy, dark video of Ze Frank giving one a quick test poke has hit the internet.
And here's Philip Torrone with one! All of the Internet Celebs are being seen with Nue!
Thanks again to the people from Nue USA for making this possible. I'll be writing more about their product and others in our upcoming FuckTube Roundup Videocast.
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March 14, 2007
The Vibrator Control Protocol
Over on the opendildonics.org wiki, there's been some talk of nailing down a standardized protocol for open source sex toys so we don't have to support a million different communications ideas in software. However, it looks like this has been going on for longer than we've been talking about it. The Vibrator Control Protocol was written as a April Fool's RFC back in 2003, to do just this sort of thing. Wonder if the creator knew there'd be people seriously looking at it some day.
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March 13, 2007
Podcast of SXSW Panel on Sex and Technology
The panel is /already/ available (MP3 link). Wow. Damn. Technology works fast these days.
Thanks to everyone that was on the panel, it was a GREAT experience, I learned a LOT and it was really really fun. I really want to work on combining the ideas of patterns plus biometrics (Corey FTW, like, twice) for a synesthetic experience now.
(listening to the stream now... Good lord I talk fast. That was 37 slides in 10 minutes.)
link via Tiny Nibbles
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March 12, 2007
Twitterdildonics
UPDATE: I totally flaked and uploaded a version without code attribution (massive apology to everyone who (unknowingly) contributed and got left out for a few hours) or compile/use tutorials, and just realized it. I fixed a couple of tiny bugs, but a million huge stupid ones still exist. Anyways, new version is in the link below.
So Scott Beale was all like "New term: "twitterbaiting", trying to get people to come to where you are, often by name dropping" and yoz was all like "@laughingsquid - could be mistaken for Liz's term "twitterbating" (no i) which is similar but... stickier." and then I was all like "twitterbaiting. Hmm. *eyes hardware in his backpack and realizes he /does/ have xcode on this machine...*" and then Chip Poutine was all like "@qDOT: I'm not even going to say what the obvious name for that is..." and then Spin Martin was like "Hahahahahaha @ 'clitter'" and I was all like "TWITTERDILDONICS: I will hopefully have it done by the parties tonight."
And 3 hours later, it's done. It's shitty, it's hacky, but it's vibrating in my lap RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
TO CONTROL THROUGHOUT THE EVENING FRIEND TWITTERDILDONICS ACCOUNT: "TD" (I will make posts on this twitter account when it is live)
Right now, it just pulls the last 15 messages from the friends list and runs through them using the follow algorithm:
- Search for TranceVibrator and initialize if found, otherwise exit
- Fetch friends status updates from twitter using CURL
- Parse into NAME: STATUS pairs using XPath
- For each character from a status
- Take character and add 100
- Set motor speed to value
- Sleep for .1 seconds
While this was the shortest path to finish, it's actually very interesting, because word length, placement and choice of characters actually emerge into a sort of cadence (" " sets the motor to near zero).
REQUIRES:
- Trance Vibe
- Twitter Account
- libUSB
- libCURL
- libXML
My test platform is OS X 10.4.
NEEDED FEATURES:
- Someone please fucking rewrite this in python. It'll be like, 4 lines then. I was just too lazy to try and get the swig shit working for libusb
- Some sort of compressed control protocol for actually sending patterns
- Queuing (Right now I just pull the whole list and replay it over and over. Should only play new messages. I might finish this one at a party tonight.)
I'll have this with me at all the parties I go to tonight (EFF, LifeHacker, ?!?), but it does require wireless + my laptop being on to run.
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March 4, 2007
The Drmn' Trance Vibe: NOW ON SALE
The Drmn' Trance Vibe: NOW ON SALE
This it the first project I've seen go from instructions to sales since I started this site, and it makes me awesomely happy.
If you've always wanted a Rez Trancevibrator, but didn't want to order one off eBay or get your friend in Asia to hunt one down for you, now you can get one of your very own, for $30. Sure, it's not made to fit in your "shirt pocket", but I'm sure you can find other locations for use.
They're also selling circuit board kits for $15, so you can use them in your own projects and enclosures.
So go! Buy! BUY! BUY DAMNIT!
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March 3, 2007
Virtual Hole: Take Zero
So I just got back from my meeting with Segment, makers of the Girls Rainbow.
I have a demo unit! I'll be bringing it with me to the panel at SXSW, so if you're there you can check it out.
More info on the toy and the meeting as soon as I have time. And stop playing the sample video over and over and over...
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March 1, 2007
X Rated Patents
Yup, I love me some patents. Just wish I had the wherewithal to stop all this open source shit and actually get me a few, then ride out the rest of my creative years bleeding poor dildo start-ups dry. However, I'm a lazy bastard, so it's just easier to throw it all out there for free and let someone else make the money. I'm fine with fame.
So, to prove those someone elses actually exist, there's x-ratedpatents.com. This site tracks all the newest and latest in hoohahs and weewees and things that will now cost you a licensing fee to do with them. There's some neat, some odd, and some both. Needless to say, it's great for giving me ideas of things to build. Now I just need to execute on some of those... Someday.
Not to mention, this site fulfills my "line/explode diagram with many tiny callouts" fetish.
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Sultry Services
Sultry Services: Adult Copywriting Services
You know, there's probably a million of these, but not all of them link to me, and I hadn't really thought about this as a business model before, so they get the luxury of being an offtopic post on a sex tech blog. Sultry Services does Adult Website Copywriting.
No, not copyrighting. Copywriting.
As in, they write the ads for adult websites. Now, I'm sure anyone reading this will have the same thought as I did the first time I saw this... "WTF, I could totally do that shit!". Unfortunately, I then realized that I would probably end up sounding like Cheech's ever so famous monologue from Dusk 'til Dawn. Over, and over, and over. I can only think of so many words for pussy/cock/otherwise before I either start:
- repeating myself
- getting really esoteric and weird
- getting really, really stupid
So, to the adult copywriters of the world, my hat is off to you, for writing all those words that I don't even notice because they're situated above, below, and around porn.
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Message Boards Open Again
Did you know we have message boards? Yeah, I kinda forgot too.
I shut down signups sometime last year due to massive spamming, and never did fix it. That is, until now. The Slashdong Boards have returned.
Hopefully they won't turn into a big pile of spam again, but I'm not keeping my hopes up. So go and post your little perverted heart out before I get sick of administrating them again.
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1TrackMind covers me for 29 seconds
Save yourself the trouble and wind in to 2:16.
Titris?
Titris?
TITRIS?!
(Not to be confused with Titler)
Update: Yup, Titris. And there's even a sequel.
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