That is utterly false advertising, but I wouldn’t pass up the chance — those vlogger sex tapes are going to be worth something someday, start now if you can. The new episode of Bloggers Undressed is up, where I put my dear friend Eddie unforgivingly on the spot and ask him if he does the dirty and blogs about it.

Bloggers Undressed: Eddie Codel, do you blog on the first date?

I just finished and turned in another book, Lust. What a week.

It’s actually quite good! The pictures are nice, too — I’m glad to see an article on Kink focusing on the tech questions, and gets them talking about their new hi-def streaming enterprise, and how they’re protecting their data. Wonderfully, the new Cnet article about Kink.com explains how they’re doing it better than MSM video and keeping the quality high — my only quibble with the piece is that they link to the negative Armory publicity without linking to the positive Armory publicity. But McCullagh also talks about the great working environment and even employee benefits, so alright. It’s still a great article. (Image of friend and Kink founder Peter Acworth in the SF Armory, via Cnet/Declan McCullagh.) Snip:

(…) That, simply put, is Kink.com’s business model, and it has propelled the company to a prominent position in the adult entertainment business. Revenue was reportedly $20 million last year, and the company recently made headlines for buying San Francisco’s former National Guard Armory, a sprawling structure with a dank and dilapidated basement said to be perfect for filming the so-called fetish entertainment for which the company is known.

It’s often said that adult entertainment companies were the first to figure out how to profitably sell content on the Internet and that they have continually found new and inventive ways to take advantage of the interactive medium while titillating their audiences.

Now Kink.com is on the cutting edge of the fight against video piracy. While mainstream entertainment outlets like Viacom and NBC complain noisily about YouTube, Kink.com, with neither the resources nor the mainstream appeal of its giant counterparts, is in an even tougher fight: Protecting the content it produces that’s continually copied and reposted on the dozens of Web sites that traffic in poached adult material.

“It’s an uphill battle–it’s never-ending,” Kink.com founder Peter Acworth said about copyright infringement in an interview with CNET News.com. “That’s one reason we’re moving in a live show direction.”

Like other online publishers, Kink.com has had to puzzle out ways to deal with the perennial problem of copyright infringement on peer-to-peer networks and Usenet. Kink.com’s solution is live shows. In some ways, it’s is a throwback to a more analog era, back when the Grateful Dead encouraged taping and sharing of live concerts (while still charging admission). The band Phish follows the same model today by authorizing taping and Internet sharing for “non-commercial purposes.”

Earlier this month, Kink.com began streaming live 1080i high-definition video–at a time when mainstream sites such as CNN.com offer jerky, blurry pre-edited clips at roughly one-tenth the resolution of high-def.

Link.

I interrupt this blog for a much-needed application of senseless cuteness. It’s duckie time! Suicide Bots sends me the brain rinse I needed — Cute Overload’s video of a baby duckling having a blast *feeing* a pondful of huge Koi. Ahhh, that’s better now.

I am glad to say that I have never sported, nor ever dated anyone with, “troll hair”. But we see it is an impressive shade of turquoise. SFGate reader Bill at Freeluna writes with a great post (A Plea For Civility) in reaction to all the evils that trolls do: result, a kewt but serious troll free zone badge! Snip: “(…) it struck to me that there is a certain complicity in silence from the bloggers who tolerate troll postings, either by failing to respond to the troll or by failing to remove the troll’s posts.” Nice. The graphic is everyone’s for the taking.

The amount of email I received today for my column When A Man Hates A Woman was torrential. Almost all of them were supportive. A good number of people just wanted to tell me, yes, you belong here too. Some wrote to tell me their stories, and a few told me they really appreciated my even-handed perspective of the subject and one said “I found your article one of the most instructive on the Sierra attack and counter attack. You belong. Keep writing.” I was especially glad to get emails that directly acknowledged the man behind the still-running hate site — who, if you clicked through to the NYT piece you’d see is a man named MNS (no links to his name will lead here, thanks). Some of you might remember I took that NYT article to task on my blog when it published, and replied to the writer’s responses here as well.

Imagine my surprise when I Googled MNS and saw in these blog comments that he’s an Apple employee — and he’s now located in the Bay Area.

I am an Apple customer. I am an iTunes artist. Am I concerned that this sick dude has access to my personal data? You bet I am.

Wouldn’t you be?

Sooooo…. Lock and load. About the other responses to my column: This afternoon my friend Chriso emailed me with the subject line, “Mind. Totally. Boggled.” He was trying to figure out how my column was being seen as dangerous propaganda — I looked over the angrilicious hate-flavored email and saw a pattern: each of the writers were pissed about the transgender issue — specifically, in each email the writers were set off that I was taking at face-value that a transgender woman is, well, a woman. What a thing to react angrily to, especially in the context of this column, eh? The thing is, (to me) no portrayal of violence against sexual minorities is so acute or clear as when a man kills a woman after sex. And these are indeed women — one emailer insisted on using the pronoun ‘he’ in reference to Gwen throughout, insisting that she was just a troubled gay boy who ran with the wrong crowd. This, to me, is dangerous thinking. And though the events are different, the issues are the same. Chriso has a very eloquent response to the dangerous propaganda accusation here. This is a particularly beautiful snip:

Now one could argue that Violet truly is trying to spread information and ideas to “harm” a certain person or group. Maybe this comment isn’t totally off base. What she’s doing is trying to point out the insidiousness of this violent misogyny and declare that it is no longer acceptable and the parties responsible should not have the right to perpetuate it, hide behind anonymity or have major publications gently slap them on the wrist for it and then send them 8 zillion tons of free traffic. So sure, call it propaganda if you will. But don’t try to put a negative slant on it, because this is the kind of information that needs to be spread far and wide. It needs to damage the reputations of the perpetrators to the point where no one lends credence to their work, turns their backs on them and deletes them from their fucking bookmarks.

It’s 2007 people. The notion that a man is still threatened by a woman in the same field as him is beyond pathetic.

My last thoughts on the Sierra issue are complex. I had a difficult time writing the column not because of the intensity of the case, but because I was worried about joining a witch hunt — Sierra’s post was very emotional and she named a lot of names, without clear substantiation that I, or anyone else, could reasonably cite (imho). I was worried about stating fact. Unlike the MNS issue (hello, case not closed over here), there was no NYT article citing the author of the hate. That’s why trolls are tricky — but that’s also why the police are here to do their jobs. With my piece, I couldn’t just jump on any bandwagon of implied accusation — what if it *wasn’t* someone she named, as confusingly as she did? Some statements, upon examination, were basically, ‘it might be x, or someone imitating x, who said this about another woman’. And in Blogistan people were seeing linked names next to vitriol and panic in the post, and reacting like crazy — making me want to stress that we bloggers need to be very clear in situations like this about what is fact and what is feeling. Even though, I know, it’s hard to think in times of panic. Personally, I was put off by the helplessness of the post, begging me to ask the question — do we women really need to be seen as victims, threatening to run away in order to get people to stand up and support us?

And no, I didn’t know when I wrote it that there was another story on Sierra running the same day as my column — though that wouldn’t have changed anything. And no — I didn’t like the piece. Into the sewer, indeed. Oh, how utopia has fallen! n00b.

…that I’m getting hate mail today with the subject line that is the title of this thursday’s column.

“Quite frankly, I’ve thought of your publications as dangerous before and this
column continues to reinforce that belief. Hopefully someday soon, upstanding
citizens will not be subjected to your propaganda in such a blatant way.”

Big hyooge congrats to my friend Kevin Burton and crush-object Jonathan Moore on today’s launch of spinn3r! They’ve worked super-hard on it — here’s to an exciting future of blog indexing! w00t!

In case you missed it, I put a new episode of bloggers undressed up: qDot, his couch of Twitterly love, and his first date tech techniques… Also, don’t miss the very excellent Fleshbot post for the Sex Toy Techwatch!

This is very serious: it’s looking like the firing of the Gonzales eight is connected to the Bush administration’s ‘war on porn’ — and it’s clear that it’s the war on adult porn, not cases involving minors, as the prosecutors would have preferred (after wishing that the DoJ resources had been directed at the ‘war on terror’ instead. This is a big, horrifying scandal revealing a deep religious agenda behind Justice Department policy. Aren’t we supposed to be dealing with a *real* war!? There’s a huge article in The Nation about it, but the really concise excerpts are at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, snip:

Max Blumenthal has an article in The Nation that ties the firing of the 8 US attorneys to the DOJ’s obsession with prosecuting obscenity cases for porn starring consenting adults. It revolves primarily around Brent Ward, head of the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force that John Ashcroft created at the DOJ. It was Ward who urged that Paul Charlton, the US Attorney for Arizona fired by Gonzales, be let go because he wasn’t sufficiently enthusiastic about prosecuting adult porn cases.

(…) And he quotes other sources about the completely wasted focus of Ward and the DOJ on obscenity cases, and about why they did so - solely as a sop to the religious right:

“Ward’s endless stream of mandates, the source revealed, were a source of frustration to many US Attorneys. “There were countless child obscenity cases crying out to be prosecuted,” the source told me, “but [Brent] Ward wanted to focus on cases involving consenting adults. That’s just not a good way of dedicating resources. When you have so many children being harmed, why not allocate your resources towards that?”

“Ward’s heedless prosecutions of legally available pornography reflected more than his ideology; they also defined his power within the Justice Department. Once Bush began his second term in the White House, Gonzales declared the prosecution of pornography portraying sex acts between consenting adults “one of the top priorities” of his department. He signed off on an FBI headquarters memo that recruited agents for an anti-porn task force. That memo stated that prosecutions would focus particularly on material depicting “bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior.” These acts, according to the memo, were most likely to offend local juries.

“Christian right organizations, from the Family Research Council to Concerned Women for America, lavished praise on Gonzales’s anti-porn initiative. “We will watch closely, though with a growing sense of confidence in our new Attorney General, to see who is appointed to direct the effort,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.

“When Gonzales met with Phil Burress, a self-described former porn addict who directs the anti-pornography group, Citizens for Community Values, Burress praised Ward for an aggressive and single-minded attack on sexually explicit material over nearly three decades, which had earned him the adulation of the Christian right. “He’s one of my heroes,” Burress said in describing Ward to the Salt Lake Tribune . As Utah’s US Attorney during the 1980s, Ward prosecuted phone sex operators, shut down Utah’s last two porn theaters by nailing their owner on tax charges, and tried unsuccessfully to force nude art-class models to wear bikinis. When Gonzales tapped Ward as his top porn cop in 2006, the Christian right’s confidence soared.

Link to post; Link to Nation article.

…is very, very hot (and is, in fact, keeping me warm on a cold SF night) — and having finished two big articles in the past two days (thus my silence here), I offer you a toasty, erotically compelling link to Fabrice Robin’s wonderful nude work. Via my pal ponyboy at ponyXpress.

Doh! Update: I get so miffed when other bloggers re-blog stuff that was already re-blogged in detail here, and I totally missed that we had Fabrice Robin’s work on Fleshbot a couple weeks back (right before I went to SXSW). My bad. Jonno’s totally making me wear the fuzzy pink furry Fleshbot punishment bikini and matching handcuffs for the rest of the week, not to mention that I have to file *everything* on the bottom drawer ’till friday. Le sigh.

I got a tour of stockroom.com friday afternoon, and convinced Chris Kalev, their purchasing manager, to demonstrate an electrified single-tail whip (violet wand powered) for me. He burned his arm (and broke a toy) for vlogging!

What’s awesome (besides the fact that with my new-ish camera I can edit video now) is that Stockroom flew me down to LA to do the Fetish Sex workshop (with my sex-ed pal Thomas Roche, who appears in the video), put me up in the cute Figueroa Hotel, and then invited us to their warehouse the next day for a tour. I’m honored to say that our tour guide was none other than Steve Diet Goedde, who is one of the sweetest, most humble artists I’ve ever met (we had lunch; I found out he works next to my friend Geoff Cordner!). While touring the Stockroom warehouse — surprise — the film crew from Kink.com’s Behind Kink were there, and we got to laugh at having just seen each other a week ago for happy hour in SF. But what’s really, really great is that Kink had reps there to make a business partnership with Stockroom. Seriously. Two amazing companies, founded each by a kink-positive web-savvy man in his apartment; two huge high-quality empires with employees who tend to stick around for nearly a decade, and incredible working conditions, plus a sex-positive message fueling their fires. I mean, mon dieu — just look at the Stockroom employee kitchen. So cool. Plus, they totally have a Segway in their warehouse!

Watch the video of the violet wand whip demo after the jump; see more photos from my tour here. Image: happy easter, slave! It’s Stockroom’s upcoming bunny bondage hood. Run rabbit run, indeed.

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Wow! I’m getting to this a bit late, but… Gina Hughes named me one of the top 5 sexiest female geeks in the world! Thank you, Gina! Yay!!!!

Then on friday, she asked Techie Diva readers, who’s the sexiest geek of all time and why?

* okay, just disabled my shift key to give myself an exclamation point time-out.

I just peeped the new GETV episode that just went up — my interview with Kyle Machulis (qDot) at SXSW! In it, he explains the Second Life booth’s twitterdildonic couch.

GETV text: While at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas, Roving RoboReporter Violet Blue caught up with a unique hacker by the name of Kyle Machulis. Kyle isn’t your ordinary teledildonic hardware hacker. No, Kyle created the ultimate real-time sex device mashup by linking public Twitter updates to a Rez Trance Vibrator allowing users to FEEL Twitter messages. Kyle demonstrates and explains how it all works to Violet. You will never regard Twitter the same way again. (This video is safe for work, no matter what your industry).

Episode links: Violet Blue, qDot (slashdong), MMOrgy, IGDA Sex, Twitter, Rez Trance Vibrator

Video embedded after the jump.

(more…)

Even though Miss Slutsky *scooped* my own blog announcement… !

It’s official today (friday): I am now represented by ICM.

Tonight I’m home alone avec kitten after much hectic travel, reflecting (video from right after I finished the last signing).

When I was 14, I stood on streets not far from this apartment asking people for money for food.

Here’s to a starting a new, crazy storyline to add to the rest. I have lots to tell you (and, BTW, will always be free to do so). For those who’ve asked, I stayed at the adorable Figueroa. Tales of travels — and a video of a violet wand electrified single-tail whip in action from my Stockroom offices tour today — to follow, once I’ve rested. (image: ICM, right when I walked outside)

Just saw this, snip:

Software filters work much better than a 1998 federal law designed to keep pornography away from children on the Internet, a federal judge ruled Thursday in striking down the measure on free-speech grounds.

Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. also said the Child Online Protection Act fails to address threats that have emerged since the law was written, including online predators on social-networking sites like News Corp.’s MySpace, because it targets only commercial Web publishers.

“Even defendant’s own study shows that all but the worst performing (software) filters are far more effective than COPA would be at protecting children from sexually explicit material on the Web,” said Reed, who presided over a monthlong trial in the fall.

Link.

Just got to my hotel — the funkiest, cutest old-school Hollywood hotel imaginable (in fact, there is a movie being filmed here right now, in the lobby). I feel like I’ve flown back in time to old Hollywoodland days here, as the style is crazily Santa-Fe refurbished Art Deco, and if I didn’t feel retro-glam enough, the rental car place ran out of economy cars and gave me a silver convertible instead! So awesome. But not anywhere near as awesome as Jonno’s mischevious post about me at Fleshbot today, which has me giggling and bouncing and flopping about my hotel room with delight. Except for the part where he reveals all my secrets…

I started a Flickr set for this trip here. Wish me luck tonight, I’m a bit nervous, as usual. Eeep!

That’s the title of this week’s Chron/SFGate column, snip:

From Barbary Coast days to the Beatnik era, the life of the San Francisco sketch artist has always held a romantic, nay, a racy allure. I’ve always imagined that someday I could pry myself away from the blogging and sexing to pick up a more bohemian lifestyle, like the Barbary Coast era’s A.D.M. Cooper, who paid his bar bills (and likely what the IRS now would call other “professional services”) from Santa Cruz to San Francisco in the late 1800s with his paintings — notably of partially clad saloon lovelies. How easily I see myself in those paint-stained breeches certain ladies wore back then, thumbing my nose at society matrons and glaring intently at Barbary Coast boobage for the sake of art.

Better yet, eschewing mouse and Movable Type, I would transport myself back to North Beach’s beatnik days for a paint-stained smock and painfully tight beret. I’d put one over on “the man” by spending my hours scrutinizing beefy models, whom I’d render not as man-meat but as free-form geometric shapes, only to trade for grease to get my kicks and score.

I get the distinct sense that artist Molly Crabapple had the same visions when she entered art school, only to find that she wouldn’t be scrutinizing the bounty of bohemia’s booty call amid her Beardsley-esque, absinthe-sipping fellow artists — but finding instead a dry run of bored models and stale atmosphere. Which is why she created the worldwide network of burlesque life-drawing events, Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School — and why we’re lucky Dr. Sketchy is invading the Barbary Coast.

Link.

Embedded after the jump! Ever one to put people on the spot who I someday may need to ask for help, I pulled out my video camera on a visit to San Francisco’s EFF offices and asked cyberlawyer and staff attorney Jason Schultz if he blogs “on the first date”. You can tell how surprised I was by his answers — and his excellent tips for flirting via your blog. (Note: I have crazy hair.)

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A bit of silence today — getting my affairs in order and deadlines met before leaving for LA tomorrow morning. Like usual around this blog, it’s just the calm before the storm: I’ll be blogging the whole trip, from the moment Thomas and I get off the plane and do a tour of Stockroom, the fetish workshop/lecture, then an altporn porn release party with sweet Eon McKai. The next day: coffee with Eon, and maybe a chance to officially announce a surprise.

Thomas is my best friend, but — I am SO packing earplugs for the hotel room. He crashed in my (bizarrely) Playgirl-funded suite at the Venetian for AVN a few years back, and — it’s quieter to sleep in the SRL shop, I’m tellin’ ya…!

Yesterday I had the chance to visit the EFF offices, and delightfully, Jason Schultz gave me a mini-tour of their beautiful space. I shot a few photos, in this Flickr set. Everyone was so cool and friendly and funny — it looks like a great place to work, even if it is like a secret fortress of doom where it looks like an ordinary dot-com warehouse on the outside but once you enter you have to take an elevator several miles beneath the Earth’s crust — important for keeping temperatures stable during the development of their DRM and patriot act abuse-destroying, privacy and free-speech enforcing robot army, and the cryogenic tubes with which they will eventually freeze the entire staff, and awaken triumphant at a later date.

I can’t remember where I found this, but it seems to me this electro-stim mouse would make for an interesting teledildonic experience of some sort (site in Japanese).

Irina and Eddie made the perfect SWXSW wrapup video — Panels, Hallways, or Parties? Always reporting the issues that matter and striking deep, GETV is on the scene. The video is sooo cute (and I have a cameo)!

Also, the newest episode of bloggers undressed is up, asking the fascinating, the unexpected and the underreported questions — this episode: does Galacticast kiss and blog? Casey and Rudy’s answers are simply blasphemous.

For something I rarely do, lecture/workshop with non-student educators (scroll down to events for details). Steve Diet Goedde designed a flyer, I hope to get a digital copy to post here. I’m glad to have a chance to talk about Fetish Sex, as it’s such an important book (and a misunderstood topic) — but the event is at Syren, where I’ll be wishing I owned every item in the store. ::sigh::

I really miss educating people about sex in person. This will be great!

Update: My bestest pal Thomas, who is co-presenting with me, tells me that this has been made an Eros Zine: Los Angeles Featured Event! Also, my latex-loving blogfriend 3xL has a nice writeup here (thank you!).

In case you missed it at Laughing Squid, I got a chance to take my dear friend Scott (and two other very dear friends, Lori Dorn and Eve Batey) to Kink.com for happy hour last friday. I may not go again for a while, so savor the *incredible* photos Scott took — of course, the beautiful photos we’ve all been hoping to take each time we visit. Don’t miss Scott’s thoughtful and thorough post on Kink.

I loved getting this awesome photo with Kink’s adorable IT guy, who I grabbed for a pic because he was wearing an Ask A Ninja shirt! I got to meet Kent and Douglas from Ask A Ninja at SXSW, and meeting/hanging out with them was one of the highlights of my trip. They are just as funny, smart, sweet and unassuming as can be — oh no, wait: they’re macho, ruthless killing machines and I saw them kick like ten puppies and kill twelve security guards on the way to get interviewed by Irina (watch the interview!). After sitting on the Second Life Twitter-powered vibrating couch with me, that is.

I totally want a case of these matches — think how fun it would be to be the cool girl at the party with the bottle rockets *and* roman candles in her purse — and a bootylicious firestarter?! These are Blush matches, from German lingerie company Blush. They have fun and sexy ads in general — like this street ad concept, and this tongue-in-cheek billboard. (thanks, Scott!)

Thanks to the lovely people at Tantus, a box full of colorful, potential new sex partners landed on my doorstep yesterday. I, uh, erhm, seem to be running out of places to put them. Eeep! Just look at all that hygienic, lucky silicone…

Click To Play

Also, a few new images in my shop days album (like this gem).

Rant:

I just peeped the Chronicle/SF Gate article Where old and new media collide by Dan Frost. They are using two of my pictures (with permission) and one of Scott Beale’s — they are mislabeled, giving me my long-awaited moment of Beale photo perfection.

But here’s what’s retarded — snip:

Pagel, who joined Congdon and others on a panel, “Show Me the Money! Making Money From Independent Video Content?,” is the co-founder of Podaddies, a startup looking to help video bloggers put ads on their vcasts, as online video broadcasts are called.

First of all — I also write for the Chron/SF Gate and I WAS ON THAT PANEL as well. But — I sat across from Dan Frost over breakfast *right* after I finished the panel and told him about how it went, while he lamely told me how he’d lamely missed it.

The ultra-retardo part — what the *fuck* is a “vcast”? Why, why, WHY are there no tech writers in mainstream media that are actually *embedded in tech*? Aaaaarggghhhh!!!!!

/rant

Update: Like, omigawd, “vcast” is a term in use *by someone*. Oh DRM, how you vex me everywhere I turn! Also, what’s up with a tech article with like no links? Are we in 1997?

Update: A very reasoned response to my accusations about tech writers and arrested development from a regular (anonymous) reader:

Well, I hope you will concede that *I* am not retarded, though I’ve been
selling tech articles for longer than I want to think about.

Why, why, WHY are
>there no tech writers in mainstream media that are actually *embedded in
>tech*?

well, there’s John Schwartz of the NY Times. . . he usually gets his facts
straight. But the people who are actually “embedded in tech” usually write
for publishers like CMP, IDG, ZDnet, etc. and write for other people who
are serious about technology. (serious as in if our readers don’t get the
info they need, they are likely to stop getting paid)

It’s just a general case of sloppy journalism.

You don’t do it, I don’t do it, but there are entirely too many people in
the MSM who don’t get their facts straight and who don’t have editors and
fact-checkers that will MAKE them get their facts straight. This is
exacerbated in tech fields because the editors generally have no clue about
what the facts are, either.

It’s probably a generational thing. As the last generation with a
significant number of computer-illiterate (unfortunately, mine) in it
retires, tech-related writing in the MSM should improve. I suspect that the
sloppy fact-checking will get worse in general, but at least editors and
journalists will have a better idea of what the facts actually are.

Update: I have received not one, but two emails from Fost (yup, I misspelled his name) that I consider to be intimidating. One begins with,

I just read your blog post about my story. Wow. I wish you would have contacted me directly.

Let’s see if I can understand why you are upset, and I’ll give my explanation. And just to be up front, I am not ccing anyone on this, like my editor or Eve Batey, but I’m thinking about it, because I think these points merit consideration.

The middle is long, and I may just publish the whole thing here, but it ends with the spelling correction and,

Your post leaves me with a real question about how you handled the matter. I only stumbled across your post when I saw the link on Scott Beale’s blog. I’m still in Austin, leaving first thing Saturday morning for home. I am going to get some sleep, and give you a chance to respond, before I decide what if anything I should do next.

Then, a follow-up email that consists solely of a Chronicle internal staff email about Chronicle’s self-criticism policy. In case I didn’t get the memo, which I didn’t, because I’m an indy contractor. (Part of the body of the first email was excerpts from the staff email.) I’m going to SRL now to think about my deep, deep relationship with this prolific man.

I just launched my new video series for techyum, bloggers undressed!