I just got the press release, cut and pasted after the jump. I’d take anything about the rest of the industry as a hopeful grain of salt, with a dash of kudos to A&E for moving forward. Let’s hope (A&E President) Phil Harvey’s “focus on the customer” extends to dumping their stock of harmful numbing and shrinking creams as well. Notes about sex toy safety here.

Update: an employee at Adam and Eve scanned Phil Harvey’s handwritten note about phthalates (left in her inbox last week) and emailed it to me — see + read it after the jump.

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* I’ll start with this verrrrry interesting non-sex item that I hope doesn’t stay low on the radar, Teen accuses record companies of collusion, snip:

“A 16-year-old boy being sued by five record companies accusing him of online music piracy accused the recording industry on Tuesday of violating antitrust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats.

In papers responding to the record companies’ lawsuit, Robert Santangelo, who was as young as 11 when the alleged piracy occurred, denied ever disseminating music and said it’s impossible to prove that he did.

(…)

Robert Santangelo also claims that the record companies, which have filed more than 18,000 piracy lawsuits in federal courts, ‘have engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud the courts of the United States.’

The papers allege that the companies, ‘ostensibly competitors in the recording industry, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and public policy’ by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency ‘to make extortionate threats … to force defendants to pay.’”

* ABC has a confusing article about porn and Blu-ray DVD, pondering whether or not porn will have anything to do with consumers’ choices around evolving home media choices and porn consumption. It’s little more than an old-fashioned application of “DVD vs. VHS” to a genre already hearing the death knell of DVD, but still, waste some time on Porn Factor: Why Erotic Movies Won’t Decide Next Gen DVD War. Oh, they just wanted to say “porn”.

* Why bother saying “porn” when you can be all like, OMG, DICK! I giggled like a schoolgirl when I imagined the schoolyard pride behind the Guardian piece, Schoolyard penis seen from space. (via Digg)

* As many of you can imagine, there’s an amazing amount of buzz here in San Francisco about Kink.com buying the historic Armory building for their new studio space. Even though Kink has the highest standards for what they do, detractors are jumping on the anti-porn, NIMBY bandwagon, including former SF Giants relief pitcher (and promoter of our ass + tit tastic yearly festival, Carnival) Roberto Hernandez. Mark Pritchard has a fantastic post about it on Metroblogging SF — Planning Commission to hold useless hearing on porn palace — and the comments (especially from “concerned citizens”) are seriously entertaining all on their own. Yup — we have conservative prudes here in SF; for further proof see Mark’s other stellar post Local far-right millionaire launches foamer website, about PayPal millionaire nutjob Rod Martin’s new right-wing website, thevanguard.org.

Image: adorable local porn star Satine Phoenix on the set for a Fucking Machines shoot at Kink.com (And hey — I recognize that porn set! That’s the spaceship set! I drank beer in there with prop builders before it was finished! Neat!)

Oh, Engadget. My blog wants to do the same thing to you. Check out Robotic arm rides, 5 cents. One SRL member commented, “What fun, with such an expensive robot. It appears that the programmer didn’t fully calculate the floor clearance, but all’s well that ends well.” (Thanks Adam! Reference: Big Arm)

Yesterday I snapped this adorable pic of the adorable Eon McKai when we had coffee for like four hours yesterday. The irony of this photo is that we were just talking about 2257 raids and the police when the cops walked in… There’s another hot one here, and I also snapped his ballpoint knuckle tats… Writeup coming soon. Eon is truly one of the reasons there’s hope for porn.

My pal London Boy (who is actually Australian) just emailed me a link to preview trailers for the next film from the Shaun of the Dead crew — Hot Fuzz! Sadly it’s not a sequel, but it does have many of the same actors from both Spaced and SotD, in similar relationships, which is something I’m really starting to enjoy from this ensemble.

But don’t think they could make a movie without gratuitous blood and dark-humored demise; there’s a serial killer! Yay! Watch the trailers and you’ll be grinning like me. And check it out; they also have a Hot Fuzz vlog and podcast, well done. The Flash Hot Fuzz website leaves a bit to be desired, tho…

I was scanning the news and saw this story, MySpace donates sex offender database to US center, and I thought, groggily over coffee, hm, that bugs me… why does that bug me… hmmm, sip… Snip:

“News Corp.’s popular Internet social network MySpace said on Monday it will donate a national computer database on U.S. sex offenders to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Sex offender data is collected by individual state authorities. MySpace and background verification company Sentinel Tech Holdings Corp. developed a technology that combines close to 50 U.S. state registries, aiming to help police keep track of an estimated 600,000 convicted sex offenders.” Link.

Oh, that’s right. These are state registries, and depending on the state you’re in, you’re a “sex offender” under Megan’s Law if you get caught urinating in public, mooning, skinny dipping, or if you get busted having consensual sex in public. Think of how lopsided these charges must be in homophobic states. Also, it’s a lesson in what sites like MySpace can and will do with personal information. I’m definitely an advocate for speeding up natural selection when it comes to rapists and pedophiles, but I worry about what could happen to individuals and personal privacy when a questionably informed company casts a wide net, and turns it over to anyone who asks.

I seldom link to the Worth 1000 ‘tests, but this Mac one is very fun indeed. Of course, I love the naughty ones like the (done, done and done yet again) iBrator, iSuppository the iPump (oh my!), and iCondom. Cute! Now we just need a strap-on kit — the iPeg?

As many of you know, this weekend I’m finishing up a sex guidebook, The Adventurous Couple’s Guide to Strap-On Sex. Over the years I’ve noticed some funny things around Word and spell-check. Mostly, I have to add a lot of words, from “prostatic” to “Feeldoe“. But I’ve noticed that Word is reluctant to suggest some sex words as spelling alternatives when it doesn’t recognize what I wrote. For instance, if I write “Windoze” and spell-check it, the program will suggest “Windows” and a few other alternate words. If I insist on my spelling and click “ignore” it tells me I picked a word not in the dictionary, and am I sure I want to continue?

But with some sex words, it behaves differently. Here’s an example I’m running into repeatedly tonight: in my draft, I typed dildo as “didlo” a couple of times. Word’s spell-check caught it as a mistake and suggested the following words: dido, idol, dodo and dado. But when I corrected the spelling to “dildo” it unhighlighted (what it does with correct spellings), and when I clicked “ignore” it didn’t tell me I was using a word outside the dictionary or if I was sure I wanted to continue.

So, it knows how to spell “dildo”. Why won’t it offer me the correct suggestion in the list?

* I’m also noticing that Firefox’s spell-check thinks “dildo” is a mistake, too.

OMG! A few posts back I confessed my love for ducks and posted the story of the lucky duck that survived the gunshot wounds and refrigeration — and now she’s had another brush with death and survived! Her name is Plucky, and she’s apparently sensitive to anesthesia. But what has me all giggly is that CNN has video! The feets! THE FEETS! (Thanks, A!)

Snip from my post,

“Something I haven’t announced is that I just quit editing the Best Women’s Erotica series — so the one I’m working on (2008) will be my last. The 2007 version has to be one of the best erotica anthologies I’ve ever done (or read, if that’s not too vain), and the powerful stories speak for themselves. Tonight I read the final story in BWE 07, by one of my favorite erotica authors Rachel Kramer Bussel — a very intense sexual encounter with lots of sweet rough play and spanking — called Animals. Makes me wish my lovers weren’t hundreds of miles away.”

Link to MP3; link to post.

Image of Mistress Simone Kross by Aaron Hawks.

A reader emails jauntily late on a saturday night, “Hi Violet, You might find the fusion of geek and genitals presented at everything2 amusing. Alternatively you might merely find it tragic, I don’t know.” Tragically, I present a snip:

“Putting these together, the average amount of information per ejaculation is 1.560*109 * 2 bits * 2.00*108, which comes out to be 6.24*1017 bits. That’s about 78,000 terabytes of data! As a basis of comparison, were the entire text content of the Library of Congress to be scanned and stored, it would only take up about 20 terabytes. If you figure that a male orgasm lasts five seconds, you get a transmission rate of 15,600 tb/s. In comparison, an OC-96 line (like the ones that make up much of the backbone of the internet) can move .005 tb/s. Cable modems generally transmit somewhere around 1/5000th of that.” Link.

My deadline is making me crazy. So I started this. I’ll add more later tonight.

I’ve read a significant amount of erotica that involves washing machines. I’ve never questioned the validity or enjoyment that passes between girls and bathtub taps; but often while reading masturbation tales I’ve just sort of puzzled and shrugged when people suggest that a girl might hop on a washing machine during spin cycle for a quickie. Even artist Dominic Wilcox took that idea to the extreme last year with his black leather, be-saddled Orgasmatron 3000. Wilcox’s is a pretty sexy washing machine. But would I fuck it?

Not sure. But — thanks to Engadget today, I’d get up on a Hauzen. Wash and bling, baby.

OMG update: Jonno reminds me that it’s not just girls who are inclined to get jiggy with the washers — video at your own risk!

I really missed podcasting. And what better way to distract myself from a friday night — and a whole weekend — given over to my book deadline (hating, hating softly), and no hot date in sight? (Okay, I have a hot date next week. But still. I whine.) Snip from the post for open source sex #51:

Yay! It’s been a few months — and for that I’m sorry. Hardware issues, software issues, the flu, travel, a book deadline that I think might kill me by next week… and as all of you know, this podcast is a labor of love; I make no money from it so I do it when I can. It’s been so long, I have a backlog of material, so expect more soon. Thank you for all of your emails of love and support (and teasing). Now, on with the show:

In this episode, I read “Picture Perfect” by Donna George Story. This excerpt from Taboo: Forbidden Fantasies for Couples just got purchased for Italian translation (congrats Donna!), and centers around a woman’s first-time shaving experience. Oh — and a video camera and a few exhibitionistic twists. Yummy!

Link to MP3; link to post.

Image via Tokyo Undressed, where every post is amazing.

The deadline is looming for submitting nominations for the EFF’s 2007 Pioneer Awards. If there’s someone you’d like to see recognized by this badazz organization as a leader of the electronic frontier, someone who is actively “extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology”, lube up your mouse and peep the EFF’s Pioneer Award page before January 30.

This week in teh chronic I waxed about the GayVn’s coming to town next month and the hot new (virtually unrecognized by AVN) wave of dyke porn — as seen in local pomo homo porno company Pink and White’s ouvre and upcoming flick. Read all about it (and see nasty stills in an exclusive gallery) in my Fleshbot post from today. Bizarrely, on SFGate they made it seem like the column was all about the GayVN’s, which is pretty much the opposite of the point I was trying to make but… they don’t invite me to their parties anyway, /snark. But seriously, don’t miss the fun I had with the column, snip:

“So the great news is that the GayVNs are going to be in town, and it looks to be a glitzy, glammed-up event oozing VIPs and some of the world’s hottest men bedecked (bedicked?) in Armani and Prada, and drag queens so outrageous and beautiful and perfect that you want to thank your lucky stars for living in the greatest, gayest city in the whole world. What better place for gay porn awards than here? None! Harvey Milk! Folsom Street Fair! The Castro! Dyke March! The LGBTQQ center! The Pride Parade!

It still seems odd to me that in the world of Pride Parade inclusiveness, gay women are invisible to AVN. In mainstream porn, women having sex with each other is marketed as “lesbian,” but it sure ain’t defined as “gay.” Confused yet? Note that “GayVN” and “LGBTQQ” only have one letter in common — that would be the “G” for gay, as in “gay male.” That’s no trick of the rainbow light — Dorothy knows how to spell just fine. We may never see the “LesVNs,” but it’s certainly not for any lack of talented dyke pornographers, gay or straight porn awards aside. “Link.

You see, I’m also still miffed about the pissy email I got from the AVN judge/reviewer in regards to my last column about independent porn. Her email summed up exactly the porn bubble I’m trying to pop. She wrote, “There was a good indie porn presence this year, but primarily from big name companies like VCA and Vivid.”

VCA and Vivid have “altporn” directors and performers, which must be what they think equals a representation of independent production companies. However, these are big, mainstream porn companies cranking out the same old porn, just with alterna-performers, and perhaps a bit more style with (excellent) people like Eon McKai and Joanna Angel under contract. But don’t tell me altporn co-opted for Vivid and VCA is indy porn. Don’t tell me it’s a fucking cultural revolution.

Image: a still from Pink and White’s upcoming film, In Search of the Wild Kingdom.

The Berkeley law students might have been shocked when I said “ass’, or maybe when Thomas said “mindfuck”, but a couple of them truly registered shock when I explained to them the day to day realities of 2257 laws and privacy. I said, it’s interesting that 2257 adult content record-keeping laws are ostensibly to protect children from being used as porn performers. Many people have pointed out that mainstream porn has been following previous record keeping laws to the letter since the Traci Lords scandal in the 1980s; and also that the burden of onerous record keeping (such as requiring people who take a movie of two adults having sex and distribute it must also keep the record of their proof of age in a business open to the public 20 hours a week). And yes, this has made the big mainstream producers slightly headached, while putting small and indy and artsy and fringe makers of smutty goods out of business or unable to even get started. And it’s made many sites, like Eros Zine, just not want to deal with it and only featuring “safe” content — for adults, as oxymoronic as that is.

But I offered up one of the most troubling points in my story. I am friends with many pornographers and porn stars; they often want me to blog about their newest movies, etc. Late last year I said, sure, I like the video, can I have some still images for a blog post? They sent them in a FedEx pack of disks. Included was the 2257 CD — and on it were scans and photos of each performer’s state ID (or passport), Social Security cards (often held in a photo next to their faces), and forms including their real names and real addresses. I became the proud owner of everything someone would ever need to steal their identities, stalk and harass, blackmail, whatever. It freaked me the fuck out to even have that in my house. And the performers have no idea I have that — they probably have no idea how many people have access to their personal information under this bizarrely executed law. But hey — think the DoJ cares about what happens to porn stars? Most vulnerable, of course are female performers — when 2257 went into effect, performer Kami Andrews got a pile of fan mail at her home and a few lurkers in her driveway. Can’t they come up with a better way of “protecting the children”?

The talk went great — thank you so much for your emails of support. I *oozed* confidence, on your behalf! I also asked Thomas to speak with me — we lecture about sexuality at SFSI together a couple times a year, and I knew we’d have good energy together. Plus, I traffic on a day-to-day basis with blogging and sex and porn sites; he runs an online adult magazine, and I felt we’d compliment each other nicely in terms of relating our online professional porny experiences to the class. Turns out I was right — I even mock-interviewed Thomas for a bit (hee!), getting him to explain how his job had changed since 2257 went into effect.

The class was a UC Berkeley law class — Jason Schultz’s Internet Law: “Indecent Speech on the Internet”. I took two videos of Jason talking to the class about COPA, Ashcroft, filtering, the adult right to porn and much more before taking the podium — they’re embedded after the jump.

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You know, one of my posts got “dugg” recently and I was overwhelmed by the cruelty of the comments — and I have a fucking thick skin. Nice to know by reading Publishing 2.0’s Not All Traffic Is Created Equal that it’s not just me having a thin-skinned moment. (Thanks Jonathan!)

My friends are split, and I can’t decide: should I agree to be on the Adam Carolla show? On one hand, he’s said some lame shit; on the other he hung up on Ann Coulter which is worth something. Discuss: violet at tinynibbles dot com

It’s 1:30 am; I *have* to sleep — I am actually guest speaking to an internet law class at UC Berkeley tomorrow about the internets and obscenity and blogging and — more. I’m nervous. Email me.

Update 1/25: Wow, you all have a lot to say about this. When I got the email that read “Are you interested in coming on as a guest on the ADAM CAROLLA radio show?” my first instinct was to write back immediately saying ONLY IF YOU DON’T YELL AT ME ANYMORE. But you all had a lot to say about it — and all comments are *anonymously* published, after the jump.

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I’ll confess that I’ve been writing about pegging all the ding-dong day and am absolutely, totally punchy — but Scott just sent me this post (via Digg) about christian sex toy site, My Beloved’s Garden. Set apart because it’s marketed specifically toward sexed-up christians and claims to be devoid of “pornographic pictures or language”, it also has a WWJD (WWJF?) sex advice section. And while comments on other blogs are all like, how sex-negative and saying how this keeps christians sexually shamed by candy-coating the realities of sexual material (they are right) — I simply cannot stop laughing. And what’s more, I am indeed devouring the hee-larry-ous text as though it were — yes, pornography. I can’t stop reading and laughing. Dig the photoshopped bathing suits on the packages! Pure comedy!

I mean, you have to love sections like “IS SEXUALLY EXSPLICIT MATERIAL O.K?” (no, and neither is spell check) and their biblical bottom lines about “good” and “bad” sex acts boggles and elicits giggles: so, god is totally down with oral sex, anal sex (they say it’s okay even if homos do it but they think it’s still really dangerous and you’ll need surgery if you do it too much), masturbation isn’t really all that okay, but adult nursing (!?) is just fine. God will smite your lusciously lubed ass for: having a fetish, trying S/M (don’t smite each other! don’t smite yourself!), porn, and all the usual things like enjoying anything on the “okay” list a little too much.

Oh, but it’s totally cool to buy sex toys. It’s basically your garden-variety, sell-the-worst-kind-of-toys online sex shop. They actually sell Thunder Balls, but contrary to my overactive imagination, there’s no bearded guy extending a finger from the clouds depicted on the packaging. Bummer. Actually, the bummer here is that they sell almost every unsafe sex product on the market. Anal numb-ers, dick desensitizers, vaginal shrink creams. And the advice for women about sex is damning, if not just damn depressing.

A little nonjudgmental sex information goes a long way — and with some of the products, it’s the short way to the ER. Christians should have hot sex, that much is sure, as everyone should; but they should also have safe sex.

Image via Fetish by Anna

Today Forbes has published their first annual list of the top celebrities on the interwebs: The Web Celeb 25, “From penniless bloggers to geek entrepreneurs, these are the biggest and brightest stars on the Web.” I knew from all the congratulatory email in my inbox before I even clicked that they named me as #25! w00t! I’m on the list with quite a lineup, including Xeni Jardin, Ze Frank, Daily Kos, Drudge, Instapundit, Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington, Jimmy Wales, Merlin Mann, Mark Lisanti, Om Malik and many more big names.

There’s just one thing: in the mini-bio, Forbes cites me as “pseudonymous”. I do not operate under a pseudonym — Violet Blue is my real name. Oh, Forbes — it’s ON. Don’t *make* me get all up in your CSS.

Update update: I just got a sweetly complimentary email from Forbes apologizing for calling me pseudonymous and saying they fixed/updated the bio (and they’re excited to have me on the list). Yay! Thank you! Phew, now I don’t have to *bring it* ;)

Update: Jackson West comments on the list in detail over at NewTeeVee, yo!

Update, more mentions: This is being blogged lots, but special link thanks to Scott for this great Laughing Squid post where he picks a *very* appropriate photo of me, and Richard Ault for the sweet congrats post at Metblogs SF!

I broke away from the book and the career pressures tonight and convinced a hot girl-friend to come out playing with me, and we had champagne and hit every 24-hour Safeway in San Francisco. We didn’t buy anything.

Can you tell which basket is mine?

We left baskets like these all over town.

I’ve seen “porn stars” in person. Some are friends. At Macworld, I joked with someone I’ve done fetish photos with about HD porn, cracking evil snaps about butt pimples and rank surgery scars… and then, as timing has it, today there’s a great piece in the New York Times about porn in HD. (We pinged it on Fleshbot here.) But the best response to this has to be in Clive Thompson’s post when he wrote about *regular* celebrities as seen in HD, snip:

“Back when I wrote my original New York Times Magazine piece on this phenomenon, I was actually pretty gentle in my descriptions of some of the stars I saw in red-carpet footage. I didn’t want to be mean. But the truth was, the majority of them all looked like hell warmed over, and when the camera zoomed in on each full-screen interview headshot, I screamed and screamed like a little girl. It was like being Gulliver in Brobdingnag, queazed out by the sight of the giant’s pores looming like lunar craters. When one well-known celebrity power couple went in front of the camera, both of them looked sephulchral (…)” Link.

* Note: the “$3.6 billion in the United States” that porn allegedly makes, cited in today’s NYT piece — I’d like to see that number verified.

Here’s an excerpt from today’s work:

“To ‘testify’ is to swear upon the truth of your words; the word comes from the male ritual of gripping their most prized possession while making an oath upon their sexual chestnuts, as it were. I swear on my nutsack to tell the truth, the whole truth. Of course, we’re talking about the scrotum, which is the container of loose, thin skin that holds the testicles inside. Its unusual characteristic is the cremaster muscle, which causes the testicles to wrinkle here and there and to go up and down as they contract and relax. It’s really a heat regulator: when it’s chilly, the muscle will pull the scrotum up and the testicles close to the body, and when the temperature rises, it relaxes and lets them hang. Before he’s about to ejaculate, the muscle retracts, pulling the testicles close to the base of the penis, as if to say, I swear this is going to feel really good.

It may seem like all they do is hang around waiting for something to happen, but the testicles are like a continually running software program, quietly performing many functions in the background while we’re all online browsing cock. (…)”

(Image via friend Siege’s Rearview Mirror on Nerve.com — free temporary Fleshbot special pass is still good — user: fleshbot1 pass: nervepremium)

While the women on Pillow Fight League keep their clothes decidedly *on* and Fox News has video with one pillow pusher claiming that she doesn’t think it’s a “sexual thing”, the rest of us can sit back and smirk quietly about videos and galleries of really cute girls bedecked in ruffle butt fighting gear all grinning and tussling and taking their aggressions out on each other with the ultimate in blunt instruments — feather-stuffed sacks of destruction, as it were. Nope, nothing sexual here. Move along.

Of course, if this gives you a taste for the harder stuff, as the yawn-worthy myths about sex predictably go, like how a huff of pot leads to heroin and a Bush administration appointment, you can always squint at the teeny tiny (yet fun and sexblog appropriately nasty) thumbnails on offer at Ultimate Surrender.

Just thinking about this (Hilarack? Hilbama? Mission Brokeback Democracy?) has a few of us thinking about this today…

Sent by a reader, a link to pics of these gorgeous white tattoos posted last season on body modification blog ModBlog. Unfortunately I can’t get far back enough in their galleries to give you a link to the whole photoset the post mentions, but this post has a few more. And yes, they’re real, even if the blog’s watermark technique makes the photo look doctored. (thanks, sweet Miss T!)

Wow, so as I read in the RE/Search email newsletter, it looks like the offer to buy out book distributor PGW is official — subject to the bankruptcy court’s approval, of course. But that means all of us will only be getting 70% of the money owed to us.

Someone remind me the relevancy of writing books the old-fashioned way so I can crawl to the finish on my book deadline this week. Please.

Link: Perseus Makes Formal PGW Offer; Levy Next? (thanks, Thomas; background on the AMS bankruptcy here)

Update: Galleycat has good coverage of the Wall Street Journal’s piece on the AMS bankruptcy (which is retardedly behind a reg wall — boo on you, WSJ).

I have a weird, personal confession to make. I love ducks. Not duck figurines, not duck pictures, not weird stuffed ducks or people who like to dress as mascots and have sex — when I am depressed or sad, I get a loaf of bread and head to the park. Ducks in nature cheer me up. Their beaks, their quacks, and their fucking adorable little flat feet fill me with glee.

Which is why this story makes me so smiley.

Update: picked up on Boing Boing (thank you!), now on CNN, Digg, Tailrank, etc; also, two readers have emailed telling me to check out the book Fup, and one other pointed me toward the ‘infamous’ review for Ping on Amazon by John Fracisco — which explains *everything*, really.

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Michael Cohn has a very interesting writeup at Red Herring about my favorite video service, Blip.tv and how they’re at the epicenter of media delivery evolution, with comments from sweet Dina Kaplan in Blip.tv Brings Vlogs to Masses. Snip:

“But another Democratic candidate who threw his hat in the ring a few weeks earlier, Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, has set up a video blog of his own on Blip.tv. Another candidate, John Edwards, was one of the first people to appear on Blip.tv.

Vlogs are a step forward from the blogs popularized by Howard Dean’s bid for the Presidency in 2004.

‘Video blogging will have a much bigger impact on the general elections of 2008, more so than the blogging in the last elections,’ predicted Ms. Kaplan in an interview Thursday.

She comes from a political background herself, having worked for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign and later at the White House. She moved from politics to media, with stints at both NBC and MTV before founding New York-based Blip.tv in April 2005.” Link.

(Photo of Dina Kaplan and Mike Hudack taken at the Vloggies 2006 by Scott Beale)