Flutterby™! From 2000-04-01 to 2000-04-24

Safe Sex.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Got Norplant?

Sex Toy OTD: The Amazing Chi Machine. You lay on your back and put your ankles on the notches on the machine. It travels about 5 inches back and forth, about two and a half cycles per second. Nominally a device for better health, the brochure has all sorts of gobbledygook about how fish don't get sick and this is because the waving motion of their swimming and all that, but the practical upshot is that this sets up a wave through the body with nodal points at the shoulders and midway between the bellybutton and groin. With a friend... er... helping to stimulate the other senses, tensing all those muscles that normally precede orgasm becomes pretty impossible, and combined with the regular motion things get... well... intense. Not something I'd wanna do all the time, but...

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

So I'm not gonna ask what cave all these people who are selling Microsoft stock in anticipation of the anti-trust ruling later today have been living in, I'll just point out that it's probably those same savvy investors who tried to invest $6.5 million in a a fictional company that claimed to make fried air. Needless to say, none of them asked for a prospectus first...

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

I'm gonna try really really hard to have the code that runs the comments in CVS by tomorrow, but for now... There's a new comments feature (up in the top bar, too), the formatting engine has been reworked to not screw up so much.

David Steinberg talks about the difficulty of drawing sexual versus non-sexual lines.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Woohoo! Why can't we have politics like this? Dimosthenes Vergis running for Greece's parliament with naked ads.

[ related topics: Politics ]

I'm reluctant to link to this one except that it does show the sort of a bubble I live in: The Erotica USA trade show may be too tame for San Francisco. Sounds like a trek to Good Vibrations would give me all the content with the crap filtered out...

[ related topics: Good Vibrations Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Kathleen Turner goes nude for stage production of The Graduate.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Keith Knight proposes a solution to T-shirt shops masquerading as restaurants.

[ related topics: Humor Web development ]

Eric Boutillier Brown's December photo diary has some nudes worth a look.

[ related topics: Photography Erotic ]

Via Scribble comes more proof that the 'net peaked in '96 or so: Joseph's Innocent Inanimate Objects: "On Dec 17 1995 I went out with a bunch of groceries and shot them with .357, .45, 9mm and .22 pistols."

Completely annoying stupidity of the week: I got a new hard disk for my laptop. My Debian 2.1 disks are wearing out, and rather than wait a few days for a new set to arrive from Cheap Bytes (a whopping $6.99 including Debian donation) I bought the $24.99 New Riders Debian GNU/Linux book and CD set so I could install it yesterday evening. I'd like to meet up with the authors Messrs. Goerzen and Othman in a dark alley with a large stick some evening, the bastards trimmed all the stuff that would have made the CD useful to me, including the disk images necessary to boot via floppy so I could do a network install. Ya know, if you morons are gonna charge me $18 for "added value" by way of your extended documentation, the least you could do is not sell me a crippled version of the free software. Sigh. Back to the FTP site.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Books Music ]

Good deed time! Marin County School to Career Partnership and BaySCAN want volunteers to take a high school student with 'em to work on May 9, 2000 from 9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Contact Contact Daisy C. Kops, School to Career Liaison, at 415-460-2194, or email me for a contact email address (I don't want to expose their addresses to spam). In today's job market, it might even be a place to pick up a hiree willing to work cheap for that startup you're planning: Marin County high school students will be participating in the First Annual Multimedia and Hi-Tech Job Shadows and Luncheon (venue to be determined). Job Shadows introduce students to potential careers by allowing them to visit the work site as observers where they "shadow" an individual for only a few hours. We are looking for dedicated technical professionals with an interest in today's youth to participate and be willing to be "shadowed."

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

John Hoffman points out: For all you science fiction fans: If by chance you notice your partner is sporting underwear emblazoned with the letters "FTL", please note it is not a comment on how fast he-or-she makes his-or-her moves, or how quickly he-or-she reaches... Erm, well anyway, it's none of that; rather, the "Fruit of The Loom" company has changed its embroidered logo.

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama ]

UltraSonics-America's Secret Police.

"Turkey's oil wrestlers -- burly men who cover themselves in olive oil and grapple with each other wearing leather trousers -- <link url="http://news.excite.com/news/r/000407/07/odd-wrestling">are trying to stop a group of homosexuals coming to watch</link>."

During and after the Seattle WTO protests I read various journals and talked to assorted people who had been involved, from residents and downtown workers to tear-gassed outside agitators. Afterwards I was pointed to http://www.indymedia.com when I'd asked for elaboration on the hows and whys and whats from various people, and I was sorely disappointed because it seemed like the tales of a testosterone charged mob rather than the glimmerings of thoughtfulness that I'd picked up from others. The folks of Monkey Fist have set up an April 16th Web Log to cover the up-coming protests of the IMF and World Bank policies in D.C. I'm still dubious about the politics of the protesters, but I think they deserve better than the treatment they got by both the mainstream and the alternative press during the Seattle incidents.

[ related topics: Politics Weblogs ]

Looks like someone took the Spike Bike chronicles a little too seriously. Except that Spike Bike eventually rode off into the sunset with the girl.

Eric passes along the Jesusifier via this example: http://www.askjesus.org/ask.cg...chives/2000_Feb/4_Vasectomy.html

[ related topics: Religion ]

Via Scripting News, for all of you libertarian folks who were having trouble endorsing the antitrust actions, Microsoft has hired Ralph Reed to lobby George Bush. If there was ever doubt that the lurking horror was evil incarnate, hiring the former head of the Christian Coalition to fight for their cause should put all such uncertainties to rest.

[ related topics: Language Religion Interactive Drama Politics Web development Libertarian Books Dave Winer Microsoft ]

Erotic fruit and veggies. You'll never see eggplant in the same way... I'd love to find the original source for these images if anyone knows.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic ]

Keith Knight has a little trouble interacting with Playboy Playmates.

[ related topics: Humor Web development ]

tulip butt prints.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Via Pursed Lips, an article with pictures about that Roman erotica collection.

[ related topics: Web development Erotic ]

More evidence that deodorants may be detrimental to your sex life.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Dow down over 600! I was feeling foolish for holding an extremely strong cash position for the past month or so, but not now. A symptom of why we're seeing this much needed correction: Pixelon.com founder was a scam artist fugitive from Virginia, nevertheless he still managed to get $35 million in funding, $12M of which he blew on a launch party which included a performance by The Who.

[ related topics: Web development ]

A reminder! May is National Masturbation Month, and Good Vibrations is holding their second annual Masturbate-A-Thon, raise money for women's sexual health organizations, get an "I Came for a Cause" bumper sticker, and have fun doing it!

[ related topics: Good Vibrations Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Rusty is a Homosexual

[ related topics: Web development ]

DC cops arresting bystanders and charging $50 for freedom. I knew they had budget issues, but...

[ related topics: Web development Privacy ]

"<link url="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2000/04/17/national0135EDT0429.DTL">This is not a demonstration, this is a rock concert held at the expense of the local population.</link>" says Vladimr Budney on the A16 protests.

Marylaine takes stock of her year off in My Word's Worth.

[ related topics: Web development Marylaine Block ]

As if we needed any other reminders that the spirit of sport has been lost, Australian Olympic swimmers plan to swim in high-tech suits, full length body suits "designed to mimic a shark's skin".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Soe does all of this peaceful arrest of A16 protestors thingie give anyone else the heebie-jeebies? Just a little too close to that old Star Trek episode about simulated war for my tastes...

[ related topics: Politics ]

Via Medley, an incomplete article about a ruling against data aggregators. This ruling was about a site that collected info from various auction sites, but it doesn't take a heck of an imagination to extrapolate to question the legality of search engines and, from a comment by one of the lawyers, even browsers other than that for which the site was designed...

[ related topics: Web development ]

Well, it seems to be link poaching day here at Flutterby, the always excellent Backup Brain points to someone brave enough to point out that the "digital divide" is a load of hogwash. "By far the most important factors facilitating or inhibiting Internet access are education and age, and not income-nor race/ethnicity or gender, each of which accounts for less than a 5 percent change in rates of access and is statistically insignificant."

[ related topics: Web development ]

Keith Knight takes advantage of rent control.

[ related topics: Humor Web development ]

Know I've seen this a bunch of places, but porno helps pandas.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Womyn who want it both ways decrys the further erosion of equal pay for equal work: "Employers violate the law when they make employment decisions on the basis of gender or family circumstances but must respond to every employee whim based on gender or family circumstances."

[ related topics: Web development ]

I am not a Noam Chomsky fan, but Monkeyfist has a remarkably coherent answer by Chomsky on why third world debt needs to be reconsidered.

Whoopsie! Via Genehack, those hot-dogging folks at Celera mixed up portions of a fruit fly with their human genome data.

[ related topics: Web development John S Jacobs-Anderson ]

Feds organizing anti-filtering forces to support anti-porn laws. Which brings me to: Wait a minute, aren't these folks supposed to be serving us rather than trying to push stupid rules over on us?

[ related topics: Politics Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Snitched from Baylink, an SF Weekly feature about Tom Lehrer (yes, it really is, starts about the middle of page 2). Ahh those carefree childhood days singing about Boy Scouts, Catholics, and dope peddlers... "Spring is here, spring is here, life is skittles and life is beer..."

[ related topics: Web development ]

Aaargh! Just have to vent. I'm working through some godawful Perl code. Some people say Perl lends itself to this, but I'm not so sure. I think that the real problem is that most people writing in this language are like native speakers of swahili trying to write the great American novel. Please, if you're going to pass yourself off as a programmer on some poor unsuspecting overfunded bay area startup, take the time to learn the bloody language you'll be implementing your con-job in! Please, those of us who have to pick up after your incompetence are begging!

[ related topics: Perl ]

RIP: Interval Research.

Interesting look at the movie "The Lifestyle" and swinging. Schisgall's research revealed that every state but North Dakota has a group sex club. Robert McGinley, president of the Lifestyles organization and one of the film's subjects, estimates that North America has at least 3 million swingers: "So it's enough," he says in the film, speaking from his office in Anaheim, "that if they all thought alike and all voted together, hey, we would elect a president." Considering how many of them live in Orange County, they already have. though they also may have helped to keep a Democrat in office. As Schisgall later tells me, "I showed the film to Pat Cadell [former Carter pollster and advisor, and a backer of the short-lived Warren Beatty presidential bandwagon] and afterward he said to me, 'This explains why Bill Clinton didn't get impeached.'"

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Web development Erotic Sexual Culture ]

Ya know, ya try to sleep in on a Sunday morning, but there's always some schmuck who thinks it's his duty to roll the damned rock away from the mouth of your cave. Grumble grumble grumble.

RIP: Phil Katz

[ related topics: Nostalgia ]

Frank passes along: Philanderers.com: Extramarital Affairs Information Website

The Website dedicated to those involved in or considering an extramarital affair

Sensitive Subject Matter

Best Viewed Alone

[ related topics: Ziffle ]

I'm way time pressured today, and tomorrow morning I'm off to Las Vegas for the week for my youngest sister's wedding, so don't expect any more updates 'til Sunday (No, I'm not giving away any information helpful to burglars, besides the usual parade of people who wander through my house on a regular week Charlene'll be house-sitting). My laptop has chosen to stop recognizing 32M memory cards, so I'll be sans computer and therefore connection during the week. Probably good for me. Anyway, a few days with the family is always interesting, Vegas isn't a place I'd ever go on my own initiative, but if the drinks are cheep and the pool-deck sunny, I suppose I can survive it. Don't get caught doing anything I wouldn't get caught doing. No, cancel that, it's a bit restrictive. Don't get caught doing anything my friend Steve W. wouldn't get caught doing. That leaves it pretty open.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Las Vegas ]

Okay, maybe one more comment: If I can't get this laptop thing sorted out, I've become too attached to portable computing to not replace it immediately. I'd rather not support the evil hegemony any more than necessary, so does anyone have suggestions for a laptop that runs Linux well, battery life and memory far more important than raw CPU power, if I can get it without having paid a Windows license fee so much the better, with a recent Debian distribution or without a hard disk so I can use the new big one I just got would totally rock. Either email or add 'em to the comments.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft ]