August 2006

My pals at YesButNoButYes email to tell me about “a new piece we have up – part gonzo journalism, part erotic fiction, as we go undercover in the online world of Second Life, and discover the pleasures of the virtual ladies of the night. The piece is called ‘The Best Little Whorehouses in Second Life‘. With graphic pictures…”

Well, except for the annoying black censor bars on the important bits… Still — awesome! I’m so glad someone finally did this. Update: Jonno reminds me there was a similar writeup specifically about SL escorts early this year.

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Wow, the response to my Chronicle news* is overwhelming and humbling! For instance…

The blogs: Xeni at Boing Boing posts “Meet the SF Chron’s new sex columnist: blogger Violet Blue” * Scott Beale at Laughing Squid posts Violet Blue, The New Sex Columnist For The SF Chronicle * Jonno at Fleshbot pings me softly in the Morning Wood post * Poor Mojo Newswire posts Violet Blue now writing a sex column at the Chron! * Mark Pritchard at Metroblogging San Francisco posts Metroblogger cracks MSM: Violet Blue to Chronicle * SFist: mad props in the Bay Area Blog Round-Up * Blogebrity Violet Blue Joins Phil Bronstein’s Team * Starked San Francisco says nice things in Talk of the Town: Hump Day (these are all positive: please send me negative links if you find them ’cause I’ll post those, too)

My inbox is flooded with all kinds of wet sticky bloggy love! Dig a sampling of the hotties who hit ‘send’ and made me blush:

* Sean Bonner blogs, “YEA!!! congrats on the official announcement. w00t!!!!”
* Clayton James Cubitt “Congrats on your new column — Pervette…”
* sex podcastress =Melissa Gira “OMG, congrats on the Chron gig, that’s so fabulous! Do us proud!”
* Chris Gimelli from the Chronicle and SFGate “in the immortal and cliched words of the intertubes “I for one, welcome our new hyper-sexy sex columnist sex overlady”(…) I’ll dispense with the usual ‘welcome aboard’ BS and just say that I think it’s smashing that Phil had the brains and balls to woo you into the job and that he’s giving you free rein. So what if you *do* offend 88% of the staff? Rest assured that the remaining 12% (of which I am squarely, firmly and proudly a member of) are rooting for you. (…) So yeah, bring the sexy.”
* Cyrus Farivar from Engadget “Congrats! You’re totally awesome and I definitely will be reading your columns in the future. :)”
* Bre Pettis from Make Magazine “Congrats on your chronicle gig going public!”
* LeE from NPR “Super Duper Congratulations on your new gig… that’s fucking Crazy!!!! You now move from “favorite local celebrity” status to “hero” status with this move..at least for me. I will be sending you a super hero cape post haste.”
* Charles Russo, SF Bay Guardian “Congrats on the new job at the Chronicle. Pretty impressive. I can’t quite shake this high idealism for both the city of San Francisco and the field of Journalism, so its nice to see things fall into their right place. Thursdays then….”
* Eve from SFist “They are so lucky to have you! Looking forward to seeing how you shake things up over there.”
* Rachel Kramer Bussel of Lusty Lady and Village Voice “Violet! Congratulations! That is AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME news about the Chronicle. I’m so so happy for you and can’t wait to read the first one. I shall buy you a celebratory cupcake for sure.”
* Regina Lynn “Wooo hooooo! Congratulations on the new gig! That’s awesome. Looking forward to reading it. :)”
* from France, Olivier Mevel from Nabaztag “Congratulations from the french rabbit! … for your new job at SF Chronicle!”
* my friend Adam, from London “Congrats on the new job and finally being able to go public. Fuck, old media is slow eh?”
* evil bunny “I am wearing black satin panties, red sparkle nail polish, and nothing else, in your honor. You. Rock.”
* Sabrina Morgan “I just wanted to say congrats on the Chronicle gig – and especially for doing it “your way.” I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.
* Diary of An Unrepentant Sex Addict “OMG!! WTF!! (My luck, the net-n00b-ish subject line will trigger a spam filter :-) CONGRADULATIONS! This is so amazingly cool!”
* Richard Kadrey “Congratulations! I saw the mention of your new gig on boing-boing’s site. The only downside for people like me is having to look at the Chronicle again. The horror… The horror…”
* Tony Comstock of Comstock Films “Congrats on your new gig with The Chronicle. You’ll be a great addition to the paper. You’re worked very hard for a very long time and taken risks that would send most people running. What’s more you’ve made it work. Very few people can do that; very few even try.”
* Craig from Tangents “WOW, The SF Chronicle! Check you out!! You will totally rock their worlds.”
* Paul Sarkis “Many, many kudos on scoring the SF columnist gig! You can’t see it, but I’m totally lifting up my shirt and flashing my erect man-nipples at you!”
* Thomas Roche, being strangely sedate “Congrats on the Chronicle gig — I’m thrilled it came through!”
* Viviane’s Sex Carnival “The fucking SF Chronicle! That is the awesomenest!”
* Gram Ponante “I just read of your new columnisthood. That makes me very happy. Not only is traditional media deliciously retro, but it pays. I like people I like to get paid for what they do. Now go demand a raise.”
* Paul Joannides “I’m very proud of you! You’ve worked very hard and this is really, really good news.”

And there’s much, much more… If I could fill a room with all this email I’d swim around in it wearing nothing but 8″ black shiny fetish heels. Thank you!!!!

* Clarification: I will be writing for the Chronicle empire, but for now we have not agreed that it will be old-fashioned analog RSS, meaning this is a web-only column. For the Chronicle. Which is (online) the SFGate. Even though they have a Gate/Chronicle page… uh, confused? Don’t worry, all of you will read it online anyway and I’ll have a smoothly shaved RSS feed for your reading pleasure.

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It’s official. I’m now the sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Not just ‘plucked’ from the blogosphere to freelance for a 141-year-old mainstream media institution; Phil Bronstein hand-selected me to be their frontline sex writer, with a column and everything that comes with it. I just got home from the Chronicle building — today was the final meeting with the PR department, and to set the launch date (I wore my Laughing Squid shirt to the meeting). At one point David Wiegand said, “We’re just making sure it’s okay before we plaster your face on buses.” I don’t remember my reaction to this, though my memory tells me I shrieked like a little girl and ran in tight little circles with clenched fists tight against my sides in the middle of the circled chairs of Chron/SFGate staff. I think I actually said “yikes” in an extremely composed way. I’m pretty sure he was teasing. Ulp.

My column launches on September 21, the day before my birthday. It will be every thursday, and I’ll have an RSS feed for you to subscribe to. The Chronicle is planning all kinds of crazy publicity for the launch, and the column is called “violet blue: open source sex”. Nothing else will change; my blogging, my work, my snarkiness torwad MSM and the Chron, none of it. Yay!

I am, in fact, totally freaking out right now. This was the big news I’ve been alluding to for the past few weeks. If you want to hear the whole story, what I’m up against, how important I feel this is for local sex culture and online media, how fierce my deal is with them and what I think about being a blogger writing for a paper I’m extremely critical of, it’s all after the jump.

Update: the response to this has been so overwhelming I’m putting comments and blog posts in a chorus of lethal machines sing congratulations.

[SATISFY your CURIOSITY and CONTINUE READING…]

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Yup, I brought it. Open Source Sex #44 has an audio and a video slideshow version, and both are textcasts! My first textcast (last episode) was great and got a lot of positive feedback.

I still don’t know if anyone else is doing this besides Slate; when listening to the podcast, click the center of your iPod’s trackwheel three times to read the story along with me. Listeners wrote in last time to tell me this works with their older iPods as well, yay!

This is an exciting podcast for many reasons; not only is it a textcast and there are audio and video versions, but I was inspired to go all multimedia crazy thanks to Ernest Greene (editor of Hustler’s Taboo Magazine and my fave S/M director) and Nina Hartley, whose upcoming film O: The Power of Submission looks to be an incredible, modern hardcore retelling of the Story of O — all about female submission. They sent me early cuts of the film so I could see if I liked it (I do, a lot), and a bunch of stills that I’ve used in my podcast’s video version as an ongoing slideshow during my reading of N.T. Morley’s story, The New Fiancee. Special thanks to Ernest for everything, and to N.T. Morley for the story sent at my request just for this fun episode. Text from my podcast page, and links to episodes, follow. Snip:

A very special female submission episode, thanks to an exclusive story from N.T. Morley *and* exclusive, just-for-us images from my friends Ernest Greene and Nina Hartley’s new movie, othepowerofsubmission.com. In Morley’s story The New Fiancee, a bride-to-be undergoes a very intense and decadent examination and a lesson in submission at the hands of a powerful dominant woman, and her husband-to-be joins in the activities. The first-time girl-girl theme is really fun here, especially in a dominant/submissive context. This story is a little more master-slave than the stories I usually read on Open Source Sex, but it’s a perfect fit for the very hot new Story of O movie “O The Power of Submission”, which Ernest worked really hard on and is so excited about he sent me rough cuts from the film (!); check out the trailer on their site.

Links: audio post * video post * m4v file direct download * MP3 file direct download * Open Source Sex on iTunes (get episodes on iTunes for full textcast versions)

A few sample stills after the jump!

[SATISFY your CURIOSITY and CONTINUE READING…]

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This is so exciting! Regular readers will remember a while back when I went to an all-male amateur strip night in Oakland, where hotties from the local art and music scenes stripped for an all-female audience, just for fun (“For The Ladies“). The clear highlight was my friend Mateo doing this incredibly sexy dance number; the other major highlight (for me) was the all-too-brief Harvey Birdman strip routine. I’m a big Birdman fan, so imagine my surprise when the Harvey Birdman (Adult Swim) people contacted me to ask if they could use my photos for an upcoming DVD they’re putting together! I jumped at the chance to see some hot Birdman action included in their new project and I agreed faster than Phil Ken Sebben can drop trou, ask to be called a pretty little girl, and fire Birdman (again). Last night I got a special delivery of a wonderful hand-written note of thanks and these two awesome gifts; I’m especially tickled because (as you may well know), many voices of this cartoon are done by Stephen Colbert, most especially the voice of dirty-hilarious Phil Ken Sebben. Le sigh.

[SATISFY your CURIOSITY and CONTINUE READING…]

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