April 19, 2007
An Odd Day for Sex
Ok, I'm not usually one to do linkposts, but it's just been such an odd day for this stuff...
From robots.net (who I think got it from someone else but it was the first place I saw it and boy was I shocked to see it there...), we have:
In reaction to no longer allowing live people to advertise on the street, the Japanese are now using robots to advertise for sex clubs. So next time you see that old Showbiz Pizza bot in front of a Japanese strip club, you'll know why.
And then, from robots.net AGAIN...
(For those of you not familiar with the picture above, check out this wikipedia article.)
Have a wife? Are a wife? Like robots? Wanna make some cash? Wife Swap wants you! The show that's ruining America is "currently casting for our fourth season and we are looking for families that are ROBOT ENTHUSIASTS". God only knows where this means you'll be sent. I'd say something rude like "Oklahoma", but, well, I lived there, I was a robotics enthusiast (can you still be an enthusiast if you were being paid for the enthusment?), so it does happen.
And finally, thanks to Gizmodo...
Sometimes... You see something, and you're like "Holy shit, that was put on this Earth specifically for me to mod." And so it was...
The Hotdoll, a sex doll for dogs. I mean, I don't even know what I'm going to mod it to do, but who cares. The concept alone is awesome. (Please note: my 'awesome' is most people's 'sick'. But if you haven't figured that out yet... Well, now you know, I suppose.)
But really, doesn't it kinda look like the dog the Cingular Logo would own?
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April 16, 2007
Wheee, I'm in EGM!
OMG. I'm in EGM! Rilly! For finally accessing the Sheng Long fight in Street Fighter II! 14 years of work is over!
Ok, not really for the Sheng Long thing. This month's issue is all about the future of games, and while I've got some choice words for a few of their ideas, who cares, I GOT UNSOLICITED PRESS!
I think this is the first time I've shown up in a magazine without knowing it was gonna happen. Someone from the IGDA Sex in Games Mailing List posted about it, which is how I found out.
It's a tiny, tiny blurb in a part of the magazine about sci-fi movies and their real world counterparts. Lists things like CAVE systems vs. the Star Trek Holodeck and 3D Displays vs. Star Wars. Here's the part of the article I'm in:
The flick: Demolition Man (1993)
The flicktion: In the future, people no longer kiss, touch or watch The Notebook together. Instead, they have VR boom-chicka-boom-chicka. When Stallone asks Sandra Bullock to do it the "old fashioned" way, Bullock responds, "Ew! You mean...fluid transfer?".
Reality check: Kyle Machulis, a "teledildonics" researcher, invented the SeXbox in 2005. It goes beyond hi-def nudity to actually reach out and touch special someones in their special places with a homebrew dildo doohickey. More recently, Machulis wrote a programming script that lets denizens of the PC virtual world Second Life use a "trance vibrator" to, er, titillate one another. That's one peripheral we won't be sharing.
Holy. Fucking. Fuck.
THAT RULES.
I CAN NOW ADD GAME MAGAZINE (THAT I WAS NOT SPECIFICALLY INTERVIEWED FOR) FAME TO INTERNET FAME.
Time to break out the hookers and blow.
Except I haven't quite reached the level of fame to afford hookers and blow.
I guess furry porn and twinkies will have to do.
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April 13, 2007
Latex for Blogger!
For those of you that are returning rather disappointed after hitting that link, you are probably pissed that you aren't getting to see some hot blogger in latex.
For those of you that:
- Took the time to read the whole post
- or
- Know exactly what I'm going to be talking about when I post about anything having to do with Latex (even though I didn't properly capitalize it just because it's a trap)
You may now laugh at the first group of people. For they are to be mocked.
via Geomblog
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April 10, 2007
Let me see your papers!
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That is all.
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April 8, 2007
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Modern Audio Toys
8 months in the making, it's finally here...
Thanks to the Walkman-esque personal audio revival brought on by the release of the iPod, audio vibrators seem to be the toy du jour. Audio triggered vibrators have existed for years, but until recently there'd only been one player in the field. Now there are 3 choices for your bass (or possibly treble) powered thumper, each providing a different experience in terms of both hardware and usability. In this article, we'll take a look at the hardware ideas behind audio vibrators, as well as the pros and cons of each product. We'll also end with a few ideas of what can be done with these vibes that no one seems to have picked up on yet.
The Very, Very Basics of Audio Triggering
(I'm totally glossing here. If you want the straight-forward, more correct version of this, read the wikipedia entries for Band Pass Filters and Low Pass Filters.)
You've probably seen what an audio waveform looks like before, but for those of you that haven't, here's one from a piece of audio I like to use for testing audio vibes, "Akku akku" by Acid Scout.
As you can see, the waveform shows us the patterns in the song. We need to pick up the beat out of that and make our motor go with it. If we were using software and a nice processor, we could look ahead and come up with an accurate version using comb filters (mmm, DSP anyone?). But, since we're playing with toys, manufactured as cheaply as possible, we've gotta do this while the music is playing with no forward knowledge of what's coming up.
The most common way of doing this in hardware is what's known as a band pass filter. These consist of a tuned Resistor-Capacitor (RC) or Resistor-Inductor-Capacitor (RLC) network that only passes frequencies that fall in certain ranges through a circuit. Since most audio toys are interested in picking up the beat, which is a low frequency, we'll be talking about Low Pass Filters in this article.
A low pass filter can be, well, a lot of things. That wall between you and your neighbors blasting some sort of bass heavy music at 3am? That's a low pass filter! Notice that what's keeping you awake and calling the cops is just the low notes! Isn't science annoying?
Low pass filters only transmit a signal for the frequencies under a certain cutoff point. For our needs, we'll call this like, ~180-200hz. We can isolate the values in that range, and use that data (run through an amplifier, then ADC, then rectified and all sorts of other stuff that I'll post about in the "building your own" article) to control other functionality. Other filter setups can be used to pick up mid-high range values and react accordingly.
See/hear the difference? This is the data we want to pass to whatever is supposed to react to the music.
Anyways, this is how an audio vibe does what it does. Most audio vibes (I only own the OhMiBod and iBuzz) run band pass filters to ADC lines on their microcontroller (uC). The uC then samples the ADC lines as fast as possible and uses the delta between samples to scale the motor speed through PWM. If the incoming audio is stereo, the ADC values for both lines may be averaged on the chip to provide proper reaction values if the audio is right/left shifted.
Enough theory, let's talk implementation.
Audi-Oh
The Audi-Oh was the first major market audio trigger vibrator available. The company seems to have existed from the mid-90's up until sometime in 2005, when their website completely disappeared. No more information is known about them, at least, by me. You can still find them in random online sex toy stores, though. (If you happen to have one, please contact me through our tips at slashdong org email address.)
Ghett-Oh
The Ghett-Oh by Afrotech shows how easy it is to make an audio vibe. Of course, Afrotech was established on the idea that you could make a whole bunch of things from salvaged parts for really fuckin' cheap, so it's no surprise that all this involves is a CD-ROM drive and a soldering iron.
Remove the disc spinning motor, attach a weight, yank one of the transistors off the circuit board, solder it all to a battery pack properly, and you're ready to go. It's got that upstate prison flavor that'll keep you ugly all night long.
OhMiBod
(Opendildonics.org article on the OhMiBod, including pictures))
Now to the current commercial toys. First off, the OhMiBod by Suki Interactive. According to the press release, Suki was founded by a New England mother of two who wanted to make sex toys more accessible to the mainstream. Of course, this description has lodged in my mind alongside Suki from the Gilmore Girls, which makes either looking at this thing /or/ watching Gilmore Girls just plain wrong (though the current season of Gilmore Girls now far outweighs the wrongness it used to be up against. DAMN YOU, NEW WRITERS.).
OhMiBod Hardware - Eye on Marketing Version
The OhMiBod is a fairly standard hard plastic white vibe, the kind you'd find in most adult toy stores in even the most conservative parts of the nation that still sell these. Now, Good Vibrations and many other major toy stores have started making a majority of their stock ergonomic toys, however, when aiming for a toy with mainstream viability, you want to give people something they're comfortable with the idea of, even if the physical implementation leaves something to be desired. This is what the OhMiBod offers. The idea of having a toy with enough technology to react to music may cause people to feel uncomfortable, and handing them something with a "normal" footprint is a good way to get them sold in the first place.
No. NO. I am lying. I cannot continue writing this way. Let's try that again.
OhMiBod Hardware - Angry Engineer Version
The vibe itself is nothing special. It's your basic hard plastic, baseball bat pearl white vibe that looks as much like a bludgeoning tool as it does a pokey tool. You'd think with all of the modern amenities afforded to us by years of ergonomics research, you might want to use something with a few more curves to introduce the main stream to the world of the buzz-buzz, but why go out on a limb when you can reduce production costs, eh?
AND ANOTHER THING. While these types of vibes are... "acceptable" for front butt play, they fail miserably in one of my favorite areas of usage: in the butt. Yes, these suck for guys. I know. I'm a guy. As guys, we ain't got shit for toys due to lots of reasons, but there's issues of footprint of thrusting tools and then there's just outright fucking ignoring half the species. Yes, I have a hole, yes, it accommodates the general shape of the OhMiBod, but hell if I'm going to act like that's the only thing on the fucking market and use it.
(Note: So I was going to include some imagery here, but have you ever tried doing a google images search on "rectum" and "colon"? Wow. Damn. googlegoat.se)
Now I'm sure you're saying "qDot, can't you take it apart in that signature way that we know and love and read your ranting posts for?". Yes. Yes I could. But I shouldn't fucking have to. If you're going to specialize you vibrator to have interesting trigger features, with NO ergonomic specializations, then WTF are you thinking? "Let's make it suck for both sexes!"
Mmm. Ok. Much better. I need a cigarette after that.
OhMiBod Functionality
The OhMiBod function mechanism is held in the cap of the vibe. Change caps, and it changes function. The Audio Cap has a circuit board that you plug your audio line into, and the speed cap is a simple potentiometer based control that everyone knows and loves.
To change the intensity of the vibe, you raise or lower the volume of your music, which is in serial with the vibe processing. This, too, is fucking stupid, because it works with no processing to prevent clipping in the amplifier. Let's look at a graph of how the reaction level in a low pass filter works when volume is changed.
First off: Our first filtered waveform, just so you remember:
Think of the range of the y-axis on that being 8 bit, so between 0-255. That means, once you hit the top of the graph, the motor is going as fast as it can.
Now let's crank the volume by some unspecified amount so we can avoid math but still get the point across:
Notice how often we're above that line now. A lot. A whole lot. This is what is called "clipping". Now, this is not representing what is coming out of your headphones or speakers, this is what the chip is seeing. This may be what the perfect volume for listening for you looks like to the chip. It means that we'll have the motor on at full speed, all the time. There's no way for the processor to differentiate between low and high and whatever else because the base signal is overpowering the amplifier and the amplifier is all "OMGWTFBBQ" and the chip is all like "O RLY?" and the PWM is like "SRSLY 255" all the fucking time.
The way to alleviate this without building your own damn circuit is to get a headphone volume patch cable and put it between you and the audio in vibrator. That way you can act as a manual cutoff between the music and the vibe, and have the music at the volume you want while still getting proper reaction from the vibe. The fact that this isn't provided with the toy or just outright fixed is a serious oversight, though.
The OhMiBod Community
Seeing as the lovely people at OhMiBod were the first to send me free hardware for writing about them, I feel like I should leave a least a little positivity in this article, so I'll talk about their community. Building a community around your toy is a fucking fantastic idea, especially when you're aiming for a demographic that might be otherwise uncomfortable. It allows owners of the OhMiBod to recommend music to use with the vibe, as well as featuring mixes that accentuate
a certain mood. They also have DJ mixes available to accommodate play with the vibe.
Honestly, it's a decent idea, especially since it's set up by the distributor themselves. It lets people know that others like them use this type of product, and embarrassment is always one of the tougher parts of buying a toy.
iBuzz
(Opendildonics.org article on the IBuzz, including pictures))
Ah, the iBuzz. The second company to send me hardware for running this site. However, not only did they send me hardware, they sent me TWO iBuzzes: One for personal use, and ONE TO TAKE APART FOR THE SITE (which I did).
iBuzz people, you are my bestest friends evar.
iBuzz Hardware
Man, it's all about the 2.5mm jacks. If you read this site, you know how much I love them. They're like an open API for toy control (Ok, that's a really horrible analogy, but I figure it'll let some of you 2.0 kids out there understand this newfangled "hardware" stuff). I have eggs all over the place, and I have all sorts of toys that will drive them. Modularity kicks ass. Sure, they aren't ergonomic, but there's still a range of them to choose from. Just go check out the Blowfish.com bullet vibrator page to see.
Anyways, the iBuzz delivers on this end, much better than the OhMiBod. The iBuzz itself with a small white box with a switch (to change between modes) and a button (with LEDs! Blinky lights++!). The package size was reduced by 50% in the current version from the v1. Yay small!
In terms of jacks, you've got audio input, /dual/ audio output (No more losing that stupid splitter!), and single motor output. The toy comes with an interesting 2 way egg set, too. 2 eggs, one jack. So, you can share one iBuzz between two people, with two audio outputs and two eggs on the same box. Or you get double the fun yourself. And if you happen to lose the eggs at any point, you can easily replace them. Fucking brilliant.
The audio circuits for the iBuzz and the OhMiBod are exactly the same, and I mean /exactly/ (more on this later). So the kvetching about clipping from the OhMiBod part of this still totally applies. Insert that rant down here again.
iBuzz Functionality
The iBuzz v2 supports 3 modes:
- Audio activation
- Pattern mode - 7 different selectable vibration patterns
- Speed mode - 12 different speed levels
And of course, the LIGHTS! The LEDs flash to pattern or audio activation). My inner raver is totally PLUR puddling over this.
iBuzz and OhMiBod: Separated at Birth, literally
A few months ago, I pointed out that after taking apart the iBuzz and the OhMiBod, I found them to have almost the same exact hardware. The iBuzz people were happy to send me the explanation. Apparently both the iBuzz, OhMiBod, and a fair amount of other toys are all made by the same manufacturer in China. Even the Vibraexciter is made there. So they are, outside of some of the programming for the patterns and speed modes in the iBuzz, the EXACT SAME HARDWARE. However, as I ranted about muchly above, modularity > baseball bats.
Talk2Me
It's always the case that the thing that gets it (somewhat) right also isn't out yet. The Talk2Me Vibrator by SoftLabs uses not one, but TWO Band Filters.
The first toy will be a rather slickly made rabbit vibe, with treble being relayed in the clitoral stimulator and bass in the insertion part of the vibe. Not only that, it's wireless! They've actually built a small RF system that will allow you to stray from your music system and concentrate on the vibe. While it's going to be on the pricey side ($150), I certainly can't wait to get my hands on one of these. Even if it isn't particularly suited to my anatomy.
IGoGo: All in one! Only $500!
Update: The iGoGo is a TENS unit, not a vibrator. This should've been obvious by the pads, but I'm a lazy bastard who didn't read his own linked article.
What if you want to carry your music ON your TENS UNIT, though? Then there's the OSIM iGoGo! 128mb of memory, and only $500!
Now, I mean, there's not a lot to say here, except that it's a violently overpriced MP3 player that costs more than a nice manygig iPod plus 2 of the toys here. But really, with pictures like this:
Wow. Electrostim MP3 player. That's.... I'm not real sure what that is.
DIY
In the time it took me to get around to finishing this article, something popped up that I wasn't aware of, which should make doing DIY audio projects a little easier. There's the LM4970.
This chip is made for LED reaction on cell phones due to audio input. It takes 3 channels, all tuned for whatever band you please, and then translates that to what I believe is logic level PWM signals. So DIY could quickly move ahead of current product and have one MORE level of response. Of course, you could also wire up your own chip to do all sorts of crazy multiline filtering, but, well, whatever. This is easy. Assuming you can solder it.
Audio as Teledildonics Control Mechanism
So we've talked about solo play and distributed DJ lists, but why not create a remote control mechanism for audio toys through networks? All that needs to be done is to isolate the frequency response bands on each toy, document it, then create a program that can quickly make patterns inside those boundaries. Hook your toy into your sound card and you're ready to start playing.
While this sounds perfect up front, there's a few issues. First off, getting the toy connected correctly. You either need a multichannel card or a way to split right/left channels to have one running to the toy and the other to speakers/headphones (unless you don't mind running in silence). However, both of these are pretty common these days. Secondly, this is not the most precise of control mechanisms, even though you can send lossless audio across if you're using the audio channel only for control. However, since most people will want voice or music or something else, you can't get a good guarantee on what kind of control resolution you'll get. But, since we're using cheap, crappy motors most of the time anyways, this might not matter too much.
I plan on writing a quick test program that will work with the iBuzz and OhMiBod in this way, and will have it out sometime between now and forever.
Well, there you have it. An overview of all the audio toys currently available, and some new ideas on controlling them. So get out there and play! 'cause it very well could be 8 months before my next article.
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April 7, 2007
Hector, the Robot Porn Star
Yeah. I... yeah.
Technology is awesome.
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April 6, 2007
The Naughtyizing of Croquet: Day ??? of I suck.
(Thanks to I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER for the above image. All the fun of caturday with none of the hell of /b/!)
So, um, hi.
You're probably wondering where day 4 was. And possibly where day 5 is. And if day 6 is coming.
Yeah.
About that.
So in the 2+ years I've spent being an amateur blogger, I have never, ever, on any blog, been able to do daily posts. Why I thought this month, where I have things happening constantly would be any different, was beyond me.
So, the 29 days may just not be, you know, consecutive anymore. Which kinda sucks, since all sorts of odd parts of the blogosphere has picked up on it. Then again, I've also got some toy manufacturers threatening to break my kneecaps if I don't finally post about the lovely things they've sent me. And even though I can only play two levels of Every Extend until I either break down and buy a PSP or wait for it to hit XBLA in August, I'm still trying to beat the high scores.
However, I've got a ton of email with lots of links that I'll be picking through, and it looks like things have already taken a life of their own on the message boards here, so you might want to have a look over there.
Oh yeah, and to everyone saying that I've ditched Second Life: Come the fuck on, people. Go back and read that first post, please. The whole thing. You'll be quizzed on it this time.
Remember, between my old http setup and the release of the Drmn' Trance Vibe, you can do this stuff in SL /right now/. And, if you're an SL developer looking for help on implementing interaction with the TranceVibe, just ping our tips email or hit up the message boards.
Or hell, someone has even meshed together an unholy amalgamation of LSL, JS, and Smalltalk to make a SL/Croquet/Whatever else will talk of HTTP bridge, which was going to be part of my project. This could also be an interesting idea for tying different pieces of software into virtual worlds using HTTP streams.
But more on that somewhere else. I have cubes to explode. I mean, articles to write. I mean, emails to reply to. I mean, cubes to explode.
yes.
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April 4, 2007
The Naughtyizing of Croquet: Day 3 of 29
Well, they say one is the loneliest number...
But zero is really fucking depressing. So depressing that I'm gonna go play Peggle now.
Intermission
God damn that motherfucking horse and his motherfucking brightly colored pegs. Anyways.
Tonight was research night here in Croquet land. Time to strike out and see what other brave adventurers had established on the wild planes of P2P worlds. The answer seems to be... not much.
The image above was taken from the University of Minnesota's "Public Croquet Spaces Directory", which, according to the screenshots on the Croquet Current Projects page, seems to at one point have had at least 2 things on it. But, no more. It is sad and lonely. Doing more googling on "public croquet servers" did me no good, other than finding what seems to be a fairly defunct blog. Last posting was about SL going open source. I wonder if the client source ate the author.
It has big teeth.
Alas, this is a journey I will begin alone, which totally makes it like some awesome anime type shit, and since it's a virtual world, I can TOTALLY have a big sword, like, all Berserk style and stuff. However, right now, I'm still stuck being a bunny on a sailboat right now.
Of course, this is starting to make me question my own project in general, 'cause there's probably something going on... It's most likely an amalgamation of these 3, at least, in my head.
(a) - There just hasn't been enough publicity
Totally feasible. Most of the press is still cleaning out their pants so they can shit them all over again about Second Life.
(b) - Croquet is gonna be REALLY HARD to use
It seems like there's a lot of cool stuff being built on top of Croquet which people are then using for creative purposes, but the innards are pretty daunting. Just check the description of TeaTime in the Croquet Wikipedia Article (The amount of stuff built into the base object structure makes the embedded engineer in me go into seizures, but I do understand why it's there.). Now, I can come up with a paragraph just as eye crossing about the internals of SL, but it seems like it's a lot more prevalent that you know this stuff before nosing down to the dev grindstone on Croquet. But, hey, they're 1.0 as of like, last Tuesday.
(c) - I'm most likely using this in ways that, though they've been mentioned, probably weren't planned on seeing daylight until maybe, I dunno, 1 year after version 1 came out, not 1 week
In all of the Sex in Games talks, one of us always says "As long as there's a world with two people in it, there will be sex". I realize we're totally doing an "OMGZ FIRST POST" version of cybersex with new virtual worlds, but if being the first at something totally attention whorish isn't what the internet is about, I don't know what is.
And hey! It inherently supports BVH animations, which means moving already created assets (for SL, which uses the same for its animation uploads before they get mangled into its own format), so direct importation is possible and has already been done almost a year ago (before the Beta 1.0 SDK even!).
So, the research tonight did lead to a couple of useful blogs, too:
Julian Lombardi - Chairman of the Board (of Croquet), wearer of shades
Croquet-Bento - The Blog of Mark McCahill, one of the lead designers on Croquet and head of a lot of the projects happening with it. Also helped design Gopher. God damn.
So there, some good for background reading on what's been happening with Croquet so far. Looks like the use getting the most attention right now is Qwak, who are working on a business collaboration product called Qwak Forums. If you want more info, go check out 3PointD or something, 'cause that's like, their thing, not mine.
Tomorrow: I start the tutorial, which is about the only one I could find. This shit is all sorts of MS-Paint core. Can't freakin' wait.
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April 3, 2007
The Naughtyizing of Croquet: Day 2 of 29
Well, it's downloaded! The first step has been taken! Of course, it's been downloaded on my newly christened and otherwise bare Macbook, so it's been an evening of trying to get everything in working order, not just Croquet.
So, in the words of Bill Murray from What About Bob...
Iiiiiiiiiiii'm SAAAAAAILLLLLINNNNNGGGGGGG!
But really, that's about it. Mostly making sure things work tonight. More progress tomorrow I hope.
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April 2, 2007
The Naughtyizing of Croquet: Day 1 of 29
It's pretty easy to get confirmation of how completely fucking random my brain is. Just ask anyone who's met me. I have problems keeping on a subject for more than 2 minutes, much less months at a time.
So, even though I've got ton of backed up projects and writing (hi audio vibe people and fucktube people! I swear I'm working on it!), why not jump in and start a new one... Right now? Unfortunately, there's only one way to do this pure, and that's by starting it the second it hits my brain.
So. Croquet. I have chosen what is possibly the most unhelpful image ever to illustrate this because that is how I roll.
Croquet is a 3D collaborative development environment written by some very smart people. Very, very, very smart people. However, in easier to understand terms, think of it like Second Life (and if you don't know what Second Life is, um... shit.), except the major differences are:
- Everything is open source
- versus just Second Life's client being open source. For now. Gonna change. At some point.
- You run your own server and host everything
- versus Linden Lab running and maintaining all of the servers
- and running your own isn't necessarily a good thing. Do you know how much bandwidth this shit takes? Well, you'll find out. Remember to dip your TiSP lines in some crisco to make things faster!
- Everything is written on top of the Squeak platform, which is pretty much Smalltalk "with benefits" (well, benefits like pretty much being an operating system. I think I'll start calling these 'emacs benefits')
- versus Second Life's C++ core with LSL language on top of it
And there's a whole bunch of lower level architecture issues, too, but if you care about those... Well, god, I wish there was an article I could point you at, but on initial google, there doesn't really seem to be a "This is Croquet, This is SL, this is the apples, these are the oranges" type deal. It's all "[Croquet/SL] [is/is not] an [operating system/true open source/the next big thing/dessert topping/floor cleaner]". At this point, I don't have enough information to say anything, either.
The question remains, what the fuck does this have to do with Slashdong? Well, the idea is pretty simple.
Don't get me wrong. I loves me some Second Life. And not just because they, you know, pay me and let me make virtual worlds all damn day. Which is totally fucking sweet, let me tell you (Hell, come work for Linden Lab! Did I mention the awesomeisity of it? 'cause, really, it is.). But really, there's some ways that SL works you just can't change (and should never be changed, 'cause the idea works for what it's supposed to do, but more on that in a later post), mainly that whole "LL serves up everything" deal (Ok, so this /is/ slated to change at some point in the future, but bear with me for the moment). This is fine and dandy if you can drop the 16 or so Benjamins on an island of your own then sell your virtual (or real) body on the real (or virtual) street to keep up the maintenance fees. It also means you've got a built in user base of something like a bazillion people (plus or minus a hojillion. Yeah, go ahead and hump those numbers 'til they bleed, blogosphere) of people who might be (and I 100% guarantee a few that ARE) into whatever it is you're into.
But, not everyone has the $tack$ needed to roll on virtual dub$ of Second Life. More importantly, not everyone wants their business happening in public, or even the "private but not totally private" that is owning your own SL region. If you're still completely clueless of who I'm referring to here, just read this article and focus on the shouldn't part. Now, of course, even peer to peer, someone could be sitting outside your window (network) with a camera (packet sniffer or maybe some actually totally awesome scifi movie shit where it renders out all your network traffic into really neat graphs and pictures which make for a great show on a 30" LCD. But most likely, packet sniffer.), so the usual "I don't care how many Tor hops your going through, this shit ain't private" rules apply. But still, there's levels. Second Life gives you one of them, and it's great for many, many people. There's others that want different things, though. Thus, we arrive at the apartment model.
The apartment model is my term for a virtual, collaborative 3d environment that allows pure, peer-to-peer connections. Sure, you can join nets or meshes or grids or whatever, but if you want, you can also just hook up person to person (or person to machine to person to machine or...) and go about your business.
Funny enough, Playstation Home runs this sort of model. As far as I understand it, you will host your own apartment, and other people will come visit and completely stomp the shit out of your tiny little cable modem pipe 'cause you're hostin' it all! (ever wonder why they're not allowing user created content?). Not to mention, assuming you're one of the majority, you most likely don't have a PS3, nor do you have any plan to buy one any time soon. So that's just right out, anyways.
However, Croquet is totally like "Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades" and will let you render anything you damn well please (even if it does mean slicing your face off). They have VNC, web browsing, all sorts of crazy shit. I bet there's totally a ninja in there somewhere. Waiting to slice your face off. Because that's what they do.
Obviously, this is HUGE for the kind of things that, um, well, I do, and this project is all about me doin' my thing.
Back in July of 2005, I managed to get a full hardware and software interface together for Second Life in a concentrated total of 3 days from starting my first account (I think I actually took a day off work, even). For this one, since the platform is a little bit more daunting and I'm starting from scratch (well, almost, I did play with one of the beta builds for a while well over a year ago), I'm giving myself a month. I'll be blogging on my progress daily (Woooooooooooooo a full month of content! That'll be a first!), as well as rethinking my interface for Second Life, and, god (or whatever the hell deity it is that puts this shit in my head) willing, by May 1st, I'll have a Second Life to Croquet bridge.
Along the way, I'll be blurting out my thoughts on Croquet, SL (which, having now spent 10 months in the prim mines, I think I kinda maybe sorta get like, a little), Squeak, virtual worlds, programming, the internet, and anything else I feel like rambling about.
You'll also get a look inside my head during my development process of things like this. If that doesn't send you running away, you should have your fight or flight response tuned post-haste.
It'll be a fun ride. Or at least, a ride. Or hell, it could be a total failure. But I try to keep negativity out until day 2. Wanna help out? Join our message boards and tell me what the hell I'm doing wrong, then tell others what they're doing wrong in telling me what I'm doing wrong! Viva Open Source Community!
And BTW: Alan Kay, if you're reading this... Can I have your autograph? Object Orientation is, like, totally, hella awesome.
Oh yeah. And, um, sorry in advance.
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April 1, 2007
YouTubeZoo: Porn For Your Pets
Because pandas need porn too.
Remember when April Fools Jokes weren't also viable business models?
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Teddy Babes
So you've built that wonderful piece of machinery to do whatever it is that gets you off, and now, for some reason which I won't question 'cause I'm open-minded like that, you need an inanimate female object to mount it to something. Why settle for a simple stand when you can really crank up the creepy factor and use a plush female? Clocking in at a little under ten times less than the cost of a Real Doll, Teddy Babes claim to be "the most sensual, warm, and unique love dolls ever created".
And yeah, it gets worse.
"Remember when you were a kid and used to cuddle up at night with your favorite teddy bear? Well, now you're all grown up, and a beautiful plush girlfriend is waiting to share your bed!"
Remember, just because you own a company doesn't mean you're instantly a good copywriter. And when you creep out someone that hangs out at furry cons anyways, you've done fucked up but good. But they kinda make up for it with this picture.
Aw yeah. Teddy Babes diggin' themselves some Slayer.
Anyway, the dolls come with a hole which can accommodate "many conventional silicone or latex inserts", so your toy of choice might just fit, and cloth is a hell of a lot easier to repair than the stuff real doll uses... But then there's a whole cleaning issue.
*shudder*
via monochrom
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