November 2006

A few years ago, San Francisco artist/art student/667 Shotwell member Liz Cohen started her art project, coverting a Trabbie into an El Camino, and now it looks like she’s a year from completion — but more importantly, sexy photos of her working on the lowrider/East German twostroke mashup are being sifted to the surface of the interwebs again. There seem to be a few new pics as well.

Webhistory: a Wired article from 2003, a Boing Boing post last year, and we blogged it on Fleshbot this time last year. Now she’s popped up on sexblo.gs after her recent photo show in France, with sexblo.gs liking to an extremely annoying Artnet article with pics, and I found this way, way better Phoenix New Times piece about Liz, her machine shop learning process and the nitty gritty about cramming two unrelated cars together. Also, another great gallery of pics here.

Why does the Artnet article irk me? As you all know, I’ve been working in a machine shop for the past ten years with a lot of other really amazing women, and a few of us are ultra-femmes. And particularly me — I’m a fetish model who enjoyes being feminine and sexualizing myself especially in relation to the machine/heavy industrial work I do. I don’t dumb myself down for it, and I’m not — as the Artnet article suggests for girls-in-the-shop-context — I’m not “crossing class lines in a kind of willed downward mobility, and conflating gender divisions, as she masters both male and female roles within a distinctly working class subculture.” What a pretentious bunch of dated bullshit! I’m not taking on a male role. I’m taking on *my* role. And I’m not afraid to go all the way with my machines; I can be honest and celebratory about my very female sexuality at the same time I work in the shop. While a sexy girl in the shop who *is capable and skilled* might blow the minds of some people, who then scramble to label her with with some higher-minded context — I’m here to tell ya, it needs no context, because there’s nothing wrong with thinking a girl is hot while respectfully asking her if she can show you how to drive the forklift.

Pushup bras and Carharts: I call myself a ‘tomboy femme’. Regressive trappings of sexuality, my ass. Literally.

* Note about the pic — you should never, ever weld in a bikini, unless you want some nasty arc-sunburn. Not that I would, uh, know…

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Well, now… ever text some sugar to your squeeze, thinking you wanted to send them a little more? Looks like someone had the same idea and did something about it. I just got an email from someone doing work on The Toy, a blandly named but very intriguing-looking text/SMS activated vibrating bullet. I’d love to give it a run in the Tiny Nibbles Research Labs — the vibe responds only to tagged messages (a private 6-digit tag your lover includes in the message), buzzes when you choose to read the messages and they claim each letter has a different vibe effect, like buzz, pulse, etc. (26 letters with 3 different function profiles; each has 5 speeds, 3 time settings). They also claim it’s not discoverable in a Bluetooth search.

Anyone try this? It’s definitely not anal safe, but what about coverage!!??? I’d cry if I had to run back and forth between my kitchen and living room trying to get a quickie…

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Last year I did a top ten sexiest geeks of 2005 list for Tiny Nibbles, which was followed a week later by Wired’s ten sexiest geeks (and they sweetly included me). As seen on Fleshbot and Kotaku this week, it looks like Wired has announced their call for nominations on their year-end sexy geek list earlier this year; definitely click on over and add to their comment-nom chaos — it’s fun, fascinating and exciting to see friends nominated (and a few noms for me — thank you!!!!). I’m still going to wait until closer to year-end to announce my sexy geek list (same time as last year), and you can bet that like last year, mine will be very different than theirs, for lots of reasons. In fact, people have been sending me tips and links for it all year, and I’ve amassed quite a file.

So now I turn into Miss Ranty McRant for a minute. I usually don’t pay any mind to comment trolls, but I was cruising the comments on Wired’s post and saw this:

“I’m sorry, but Violet Blue and Xeni Jardin are just fluff in the incestuous blogosphere. Just because they’re ‘sex positive’ (Geez, who isn’t?) and girls doesn’t make them candidates for the ‘Sexiest Geek Girl’ title. I think that Morgan Webb & Kari Byron (who are actually geeks and actually DO STUFF) would be better candidates. They both do hands-on geek things instead of just writing about tele-dildos and C-list porn.”

I know not to feed the trolls, but I have to say this: Uh, SRL? Ten years of sitting around looking pretty and filing my nails — when not doing robotics, industrial metal fabrication, dreaming up and creating wild lethal props and machines, welding, driving a forklift, running production crews, electrical work, carpentry, wrenching on engines and operating bizarre lethal robots. I fluff with lathes, I motherfucking craft with flame throwers and shockwave cannons and web-tele-operated air launchers for *fun*. Yeah, I stand in front of cameras on Geek Entertainment Television (and I vlog), but I know what I’m talking about from solenoids to splogs because I *do stuff*. And there’s no rivalry with Mythbusters; Kari is a hottie, and they have invited me to participate in the show twice now. Also, I built this website myself in 2001 with nothing but a book on HTML and a ripped copy of Dreamweaver, and have grown it ever since (I have one sexy geek chick friend who now helps me with MT). I figured out how to podcast when there were only like a few dozen podcasts in existence. When Slate did a textcast this summer, I figured how how to do it, and did it just to see if I could (second podcaster to do it, and first female, yo). There’s more, but I don’t pose with PSP’s.

But Xeni? Now you’re in dangerous territory. Two things: this year she went to Tibet to do a story on hackers in the Himalayas — and you don’t do anything like this fluffily unless you want to end up in a Chinese prison. Right now she’s in Guatemala — you figure it out. *That* is hardcore.

Okay, now the trolls can go ahead and call Xeni and I fluff. Just don’t come crying to the sexy girl geek who heads the SRL security staff when my finely-tuned Running Machine accidentally runs over your troll foot.

/rant. I guess the way to make me see red is to say I don’t do anything! Image: I’m getting ready to pack for Roboexotica — I leave for the robot festival in Vienna this friday; I am an invited, featured guest, which makes me all excited and nervous. I will help run a drinkbot with Miss Suicide Bots and be on Austrian TV talking about robots and sex. Note about the Running Machine: it’s actually *our* machine, as in SRL. It’s one of the three main machines I’ve maintained and operated for shows for the last ten years — “senior” SRL operators like me tend to refer to machines we’ve worked on and fixed a lot in the first-person possessive — that is until the cops show up, at which point they all belong to Mark…:)

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I’m calling it the first because I’m going to do several holiday shopping guides this year, and I’m seriously drooling on my keyboard right now over some of the goods to be found at Kiki de Montparnasse (eternal naughty thanks to David for the link).

Most of Kiki’s stock is out of my reach, but if I were a rich girl… for instance, I’d love to play with the (pictured) solid silver Tension Set Cock-Ring with 5MM Cubic Zirconia. Think Make would laser-etch “Hacker Boy” on it for me if I asked really nicely? (We watched one of my favorite movies last night, it was *fun*!)

More on my Kiki LUST list:
* Glass is smooth, retains body heat divinely, and feels incredible. Ultimate lust: the $1750 Hand Sculpted Obsidian Glass Diletto.
* Every girl needs a $450 titanium vibrator for her space station of love (aka my bed).
* You could play dirty Clue with this one: it was Colonel Mustard, in the study, with the $750 Rose Quartz Anal Plug.
* Also, to wear at the machine shop, while blogging, or lazily taking control of that little planet by the sun — why, the $150 Frame Bra with the $395 black Layered Baybydoll, of course. Don’t even get me started on which shoes I’d get…
* And because I have such a problem with my cupcake pink accessory fetish these days, I’d have to take really naughty pictures with the $425 frosting pink Panasonic Digital Camera. I think it’s really honest to buy gadgets at sex toys stores — I mean, there’s never any confusion in my mind that I have a fetish.

Kiki MUST list — if already shopping, I’d get these items too:
* Solid silver $15 X-Rated decision dice, includes ‘bondage’, yum.
* For the nipples, dear jeezus in a sparkly rubber thong, $15 Sauce L’Amour.
* Open a copy of my fellatio or cunnilingus books and road test my super-fun oral sex mint techniques with the $5 Before & After Mints.
* Massage candles are incredible — for massaging, teasing, tormenting, and giving out-of-control hand jobs. I’d love to try the $35 Kiki Massage Candle.

Le sigh! I could do a whole other list with Kiki’s even more outrageous UK twin, Coco de Mer (sound alert), where my dream riding crop lives…

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* This story is fun for oh so many reasons, and not just because I already have *two* work uniforms if I needed a job in Arizona: Erotic eatery’s nurse uniforms criticized. Snip: “The Heart Attack Grill features flirtatious waitresses serving food in the skimpy uniforms, the Baltimore Sun reported. But the head of the nurses’ organization, Sandy Summers, said that the marketing technique reinforces the main unfortunate stereotype associated with the health profession.” To which I say — Dear Miss Nursing Association, by any chance, was your pet’s name Sandy and the first street you ever lived on was Summers Ave? And, don’t you think George Clooney (and now Grey’s Anatomy) are the truly deliciously slutty, medicine-administering problems for your “image”? Let’s just hope that Domino’s doesn’t get the same idea about the wholesome image of their delivery staff, or we’ll never see any porn with a “plot” again.

* I live in a Victorian that overlooks the dirty Uncanny Valley of the blogosphere — because I’m obsessed with sex dolls, humanoid robots and AI, my pal Thomas sent me this great article, Lifelike robots: Cool or creepy?

* I went to a party last night where I saw some really bad Shibari, complete with rude models (I called them the rope dude’s “grumpy little minions”). Too bad — Shibari is fun and can be really exciting, but there was this whole superiority attiutude, made more ridiculous by their use of badly dyed, unsafe-slippery rope. My companions and I laughed that they were coming off as experts “teaching” people about the history of fetish and had crappy rope — someone (not me!) even said “I can’t believe they’re not even using Monk’s rope, which is the best.” I was told I couldn’t take photos or write about it, while others shot photos freely, so rude. Anyway, here’s my antidote, found at lovely Viviane‘s — French clothing company Arayal’s incredibly hot Shibari commercial (video), where you can’t even tell what they’re trying to sell you. Beautiful girl, graceful viral marketing.

* OMG — check out Monk’s HOWTO videos!!!!!

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