Update 8/17/07: This post is not my resignation from SRL. It is a rant. I am still a member of SRL, despite the best efforts of rumormongers.

/update

I tried to write this five days ago.

“we all need a giant photo of ourselves radio controlling the end of the world as it all burns down”
–my closest friend, re: this photo

My hoodie still smells like fire, and my skin still crackles with certain electrifying and forbidden memories. It was loud. The show was small and yet miraculously, it was the full SRL effect at Maker Faire: audio overwhelm, concern for safety, the fine line between the safety of technology and violence of machinery in a tangled mass of confrontation, no script, all surprise, destruction, smiles, no sleep. Aphrodisia, dystopia, heartbreak. I worked for weeks with little sleep, never gave up, ran the most beautiful machine in the world until I broke her in half like a lover and crawled away literally scarred from the razorblade beauty of our bed.

After the Running Machine broke, I still ran her, finding that sweet spot only a few operators know about on the Futaba (controller) that makes her shudder and jerk on her feet until someone else shut the engine off.

It should have been louder. After, everyone slowly went mad; I was flamed to the bone on the SRL list for three days following the show, while I tended to Hacker Boy flat-out with viral bronchitis (through the week, actually), the white noise of his pale skin at odds with the black sound of his lungs. Something about the sound of the machines that day blends in my mind now with the screeching mania heard on the SRL list, the flaming when no one hears you, and they just attack. Someone screaming at you, via email.

About the show, Wired wrote,

Survival Research Laboratories put on an unannounced show at the end of the Maker Faire today, nearly setting the crowd on fire — literally — as wind whipped flames and hot ash towards the bleachers. After just ten minutes of gasoline-powered, ear-splitting robotic mayhem, event staff cleared the stands. Sensible people were leaving anyway, as the smoke was getting thick and there was, at least once, a noticeable smell of burnt hair, as ashes landed on arms, heads, and pants. But for all that, there was a kind of transcendent, heartbreaking beauty to the robots as they walked, rolled, and lumbered over the asphalt.

This blog post is my experience, with photos from friends, and the rest of it is after the jump. Top image by Lori Dorn, second image by Jake Appelbaum.

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At the gym, on the monitors they play CNN. Today CNN showed the video of the girl being stoned to death in Iraq. I really wish I hadn’t seen that. I mean, it needs to be seen, but a big NSFW or some kind of text warning would have kept me from almost passing out on the treadmill. Thanks, Wolf Blitzer.

I’ve spent the past couple days working on my next book and my thursday column Lara Is Not A Porn Star: Or, How to make it in porn before you were even born. I actually called the people who used her (underage) image, and boy, taking to Texas Bob and learning “ALL WE KNOW” (which did not, unfortunately and to the great disappointment of my editor, include the recipe for vegan creme brulee) was the, er, highlight of my week. Yup, it’s another week like *that*. Snip:

Some porn lovers wax romantic about the good ol’ days of so-called classic porn. Made in the 1970s and ’80s, the classics, they say, exude a sexual playfulness and enthusiasm not found in today’s going-through-the-motions releases. They say film quality was higher, taboo topics were explored and bodies were more realistic, more natural. Others, like me, will simply wish they waxed, period, and we’re more likely to think that “Deep Throat” should have really been called “Hair.” Few of us wish we were stars in porn’s golden age — especially U.K.-based photographer Lara Jade, who discovered her image was being used to sell the repackaged 1982 porn release “Body Magic” last November. Lara isn’t exactly eager to line up for her long-awaited AVN award.

It’s not just that Lara didn’t want to be associated with green doors and deep throats and the “fun-loving” days of zero STD testing. Nor was it simply the violation of image use that capped the problems associated with becoming the unknowing face of a Sven Conrad (?) star vehicle. Perhaps one of the problems is that Lara is 17 and was only 14 when she took the self-portrait (with help from her mum). Or maybe, just maybe, that the porn film whose cover she’s on was made about eight years before she was even born.

Link.

Update: Lara Jade emails me saying,

Hey Violet, just reading the article when this popped up

“We e-mailed back and asked to talk on the phone to her parents to verify any of this stuff, and we did talk to someone who didn’t have a British accent but we still don’t know exactly who is involved here.”"

I never recieved an e-mail of TVX about phoning or ANYTHING like that… this is a total lie.

Reader responses to the column are after the jump.

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David just emailed me The Celebrity Breast Conspiracy over at (friends) 10 Zen Monkeys, where they try to convince us that there’s a real celebri-boob media conspiracy that makes a whole huge post about celebrity boobies somehow super-justified. Like we care about such petty legitimacy concerns at Fleshbot. Tinfoil bra, anyone?

“Public diplomacy” in Hollywood isn’t exactly an exercise in subtlety. But sometimes, publicists, studio executives, or whoever dreams up these boob-headed propaganda schemes, actually try to trick us by presenting “authentic” incidents of titillation. Which are totally not authentic.

In fact, call us paranoid, but we strongly believe there is a well-established, but never openly-acknowledged, plan among movie marketers and star handlers to manipulate the constituencies of female celebrities. Shocking? Yes.

However, here’s five tabloid examples that make the case.

1. Dead Man’s Chest?

Three franchises compete this weekend over the biggest box office in movie history. Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is the big contender, and suddenly its lead actress starts jabbering about… well, here’s the resulting headlines.

Keira Knightley Wants Bigger Breasts
Keira Knightley Wishes She Had Larger Chest Size
Knightley Not Happy With Her Breasts, Wants Them Bigger
Knightley: ‘I don’t have tits!’

Link.

I mean, at least show Keira Knightley like we do on the ‘bot…

Arrrgh, there are too many HOT stories to choose among… That’s what I did until 5am last night (along with agonizing over tomorrow’s column) and my whole day/night today: making final selections on Best Women’s Erotica 2008. I have too many good stories. Too many. It’s interesting to see the themes this year; last year it was sex with priests, war/military sex, and fetishes I noticed lots of. This year it’s m-m-f threeways with bi male action (!!), gay male sex fantasies, lots of female submission, female voyeurism, plenty of pegging, nonconsensual and anonymous sex (lots), and more black (Af-American *and* Brit) characters than I’ve ever seen — which is very, very welcome and refreshing. It’s the most diverse selection so far, even with a drop-dead sexy dominant Asian male in the mix. Yummy.

Midnight update: I’m sipping sake and nibbling grapes, still editing the book. In the course, I have discovered and am completely enraptured by the erotic writing of Peony.

Mired in column and book deadlines, and a massive upcoming post about Maker Faire, posts will be a bit sparse for a few days. First:

* Readers will remember the Chronicle tech writer I got in an internet fight with after SXSW, who wrote about vlogging and called it “vcasts” among other great hits (and sent me intimidating emails when I posted about it). Underscoring the need for embedded tech journalists and tech journies that take proper nouns as seriously as people in 2.0 tech, oops he did it again. Check out the story of Dan Fost’s misreported Zune sales meme on Business 2.0, via Gizmodo.

* Over on Consumerist we see that Lara is not a porn star: it looks like Texas porn company TVX Films (um, who?) snagged a self-portrait of (then) 14-year-old British photographer Lara Jade and used it on a recent porn cover, without consent or permission. The company was so uncooperative, insulting and all-out rude in response to her requests to please stop it already, that she took her need for help to this Flickr photo post and her DeviantArt page. The company’s super-lame and rude responses to her are in the Flickr post and they also responded in the Consumerist comments — but they’re either not web savvy at all, or just don’t care enough to truly clean up their awful mess, which is still in distribution all over the web. Plus, how about a serious apology? Nope. So porn goes on with a few assholes making a shitty reputation for the many. (thanks, Jackson!)

There was a gay rights demonstration in Moscow yesterday — all they want is the right to have a Pride parade. Police watched as “neo-Nazis” (and religious people) beat the gay rights demonstrators, but then arrested *the victims*, allowing the people who beat them to go free. So, if they’re allowed to have a Pride parade, do they get tanks? Snip from Guardian UK:

Riot police used violence to break up a gay rights demonstration in Moscow yesterday and arrested several European parliamentarians in what critics say is the latest violation of human rights in Russia.

A group of gay rights activists came under attack from neo-Nazi thugs when they tried to present a petition asking Moscow’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, to lift a ban on a Gay Pride parade. He has previously dubbed gay rallies “satanic”. Witnesses said riot police watched as far-right skinheads chanting “death to homosexuals” beat up several activists.

The police failed to arrest the skinheads but detained several of the Europeans - including the German MP Volker Beck, a member of the Green party, and the radical Italian MEP Marco Capatto. Riot police threw Mr Capatto into a police van. “Why don’t you protect us?” he shouted.

“It was absolutely shocking,” the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell told the Guardian yesterday. “The police stood there while people knocked me to the ground and kicked me. Four or five neo-Nazis attacked me. The police watched. At a certain point the police then arrested me and let my neo-Nazi attackers walk free.”

Link.

No, “fetish dressing” does not go on a rubber salad. It’s a lecture — a short talk, really — I give to SFSI students a couple times a year. I was supposed to do exactly this at 2:00 this afternoon when I got over to the Mission District, where the UCSF Annex is, and got stuck in — Carnival. I totally forgot about it today, ugh! I got stuck in hellacious traffic with a dead phone. I stood up the students and SFSI, and now I have the fetish dressing lecture stuck in my head with no one to tell it to. So why not open source it? I pasted it in here and after the jump. Just imagine me saying it all with added giggles, a huge smile on my face, a little blushing when I talk about corsets, and occasional fearful/bemused looks shot at Thomas when he heckles me, and me heckling him back for being the house expert on corpse-fucking.

Image via. Dirtier ballet boot images here.

* * * * * * *

When someone has a dressing fetish, an manner of dress, uniform, fabric or feeling inspired by the outfit or garment takes on a magical quality, has deeper meaning, and is often required for satisfying sexual release. The item or outfit is that person’s most reliable sex toy, and as we all know when it comes to coming, when you find something that works, you mine it for all it’s worth. There seldom is a rational explanation as to why a particular person is attracted to a certain pair of shoes, wearing restrictive and beautiful corsets, ot the smell, feel and look of rubber.

Fetish fashion, and its refined connoisseurs, makes a couture designer’s obsessions seem trite. Leather, shiny rubber, PVC, plastics, liquid latex, corsets, stilettos and fantastically high heels, stockings and more all occupy this highly sexualized realm of style. Fetish fashion is a huge worldwide industry, especially in North America and Europe, and the sexuality inherent in “fetish” blends with S/M practices and Gothic style — and it’s a common to see fetish events that are also S/M play parties. For the moneyed rubberist, corset-wearer or hard-core human animal fetishist, the fashion has become a fetish unto itself—the women at San Francisco’s renowned corset house Dark Garden have told me tales of fetishists who have custom-made rubber suits for every imaginable occasion, including a rubber undertaker’s suit. Fetish balls and conventions are typically high-fashion events with strict dress codes that embrace a wide variety of fetishes—as long as they dress to the nines.

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… Did she leave boob prints on the piano? Free gallery here; the rest of the galleries they sent me are quite boring and full of girls that are creepy-skinny. Hegre used to be so much more exciting; I miss the early days of Luba. Well, I guess there’s always the old Attu Likes Luba (remember that old iPod shoot?).

It’s his Wikiality: The Truthiness Encyclopedia (fyi, the HTML is a little rough around the edges). The best part so far is the Pastafarian entry, with it’s creepily-accurate-funny cults sidebar (via Sean’s cap on Flickr). Snip:

Pastafarianism, the more common name for the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is a religion whose followers, which include liberals, communists and godless sodomites, believe that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. He did not however create the universe, and midgets are not real.

Link.

And, of course, the snarktasmic entry on Sex is good to the last drop, snip:

GOP Approved Flavors of Sex:

* Man on dog
* Man on Child
* Man on Bear Corpse
* Man on shotgun/9mm hand gun
* Man on God
* Priest on Child
* Congressman on IM

Link.

A reader who prefers to remain anonymous took the time to retouch one of my *favorite* self-portraits. It just looks incredible (thank you!) and is a wonderful gift at the end of a week that’s been much worse than I’ve let on. Still, I can’t help but hope that I was Drucilla Strain in my last life…

For this week’s column, I had the absolute pleasure of getting a grand tour of local fetish and BDSM retailer (and 30+ year institution) Madame S and Mr. S Leathers. (Craziest toy: the human box/vacuum cube.) A few weeks ago I was at Kink.com’s happy hour and was introduced to Paige White, a respected and talented BDSM filmmaker and Mr. S’s Director of Operations. She was super-sweet and friendly, and excited about my Fetish Sex book (!), and invited me to see their digs — and it was *amazing*. Everyone there was so genuine and warm and dedicated; it made me so proud that they’re such a ‘San Francisco treat’. The tour was tuesday, they graciously allowed me to shoot photos and video, and I made it my thursday column.

The video is on this show page and embedded after the jump. In the video, Paige locks me in the “isolation cell” — good times. The owner, who is just the coolest, Richard “Big Daddy” Hunter, sent me a bunch of photos of customers having fun getting tied up (and more) in the store — these are in my Fleshbot post about the experience, Mr. S Leather: Tops In Customer Satisfaction. Here’s a snip from my Chron column this week, Everything’s Better With Leather:

An adorable, enthusiastic, grinning Paige White crouches down on the Mr. S showroom floor next to a dildo that looks to me like the size of a small — OK, medium-size — fire extinguisher. She is crouching because, in my tour of the amazing facilities at San Francisco’s Madame S (madame-s.com) & Mr. S Leathers (mr-s-leather.com), this is one item I simply cannot photograph without a human for comparative perspective. She laughs, “Isn’t it incredible what guys stick in their butts!?” I’m cracking up, knowing she’s at least half-right, because part of me still thinks, “That’s got to be a prop.”

But if anyone would know what BDSM fetishists, leather lovers, rubber dollies and the kinky cats and kittens of the world want, it’s most certainly the staff — who seems more like family — at Mr. S. A couple weeks ago, I’d met Paige, Mr. S’s director of operations, over cocktails. When I found out that Mr. S employs nearly 100 people, and designs and manufactures literally thousands of goods in its SOMA warehouse, I asked her if I could see it for myself.

And what surprised me wasn’t the big butt plugs or the rubber hoods with funnels on the mouths — hey, I’ve shopped at Safeway on Market Street during Folsom before. No, what surprised me was all the giddy retellings of customer interactions, the sheer smiley joy with which employees describe testing every product Mr. S makes, and then the quiet, passionate seriousness exuded by the designers and makers in the giant manufacturing rooms behind the storefront.

The giant dildos were in the dildo annex off the main store floor, and we’d interrupted the quiet shopping reverie of a grinning boy-girl couple — Mr. S really could be called “a clean, well-lighted place” to shop for riding crops (and rubber isolation suits). Paige explained to me that customers were allowed to try much of the product in the store, and there are occasional hands-on “try before you buy” episodes involving ropes, cages and restraints. And some very naughty boys, I was assured by Mr. S’s charismatic owner Richard Hunter (affectionately also called “Big Daddy” Hunter).

Link.

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From Sean Bonner!

From a sweet reader (me, pictured with the hotness of Mistress Morgana on Halloween, funny ‘cuz I’ve never been a stripper):

More at my new favorite meme.

Update, May 25: Merrill has taken down the post I referenced below, but has a new post (with one of my CC-licensed photos) called Violet Blue’s Torture Threats saying a lot of interesting things about my ‘cult followers’ (!), but also claiming the the photos SFGate ran with my Thursday column — one in her post — are a personal threat directed at her. The column is about my Tuesday visit and tour to local fetish manufacturer and retailers Madame S and Mr. S Leathers. I took this Flickr set and shot this video, but I’m waiting to do a full post on it here until after my Fleshbot exclusive gallery goes up this weekend. More updates after the jump, as readers weigh in on the headers I posted. Also, I’ve gotten some emails intended to intimidate me, claiming to provide evidence as to the alleged impersonation and email hijacking with Merrill’s first email — my calls today to two different police departments (looking for an officer who did not, in fact, exist) combined with the new post on her blog make this seem like one crazy mess. None of the claims here add up; instead of making a factual case explaining how I’m wrong on her blog, she’s invented a new threat.

Why am I feeding the trolls? Well, first because I keep finding posts like this and this when I Google her name. Also because this person, though obviously going through a very difficult time, has tried to intimidate me in a variety of ways. Perhaps she was indeed spoofed, which I can’t quite find a sane thread of evidence to bear out, but her harassing emails, legal threats and now claims that my new column is somehow directed at her make me see a pattern of intimidation — making me want to see what happens when you face down online intimidation. What has happened since the contested original email was sent is a whole new issue. Reminds me a lot of Michael Crook, except it’s about sex. To me, sex has been used very interestingly here. It was the reason I got the first threatening email. The death threat email was explicitly sexual. Then, in the sixth email I got from Merrill (of the 8 she sent me on the 24th), she wrote,

“I am truly shocked at your feeling it necessary to post any e-mail that offends you. As I’ve posted on my blog, we all receive offensive e-mails and we don’t’ go around trying to smear someone over it. If I went around trying to get revenge against all the offensive e-mails I’ve received via spam, it would take a lifetime. Why me? I work at a top law firm and live a conservative life. Why did you have to attack me over so wanting to find guilt in someone else?

If you do not remove this information, I will consider it a form of “S&M” you have in your article today in which you want me in some kind of sexual bondage to you for another’s offensive e-mail.”

So, sex comes back in again, this time in another context — where I am a perpetrator. Her next move was to put up the now-removed post (conveniently simultaneously sent to me in pdf form) where she seems to be saying any case against me would be assured in her favor because I’m associated with sex (specifically fetish and BDSM). Perpetuating the mindset that sexual association automatically discounts someone as a person. Like, it matters less if a hooker dies than a schoolteacher (though I’ll argue these days sometimes there’s crossover employment opportunities between the two). Now, the sexual thread is in her now-current post, where she conflates my new column as a threat, making me a perpetrator again.

It’s interesting to me, the intersections of sex and online intimidation and harassment. In this instance, sex been used as a tool to shame (and threaten) the entire time — this is, without fail, how sex is used online against women. I wonder how different it would have gone if Merrill were male, regardless of whether she sent the original email. At any rate, I’m ready for sexual intimidation to stop being an effective tool against women, regardless of the context. Sex is normal. And I think it’s important to start chasing down people who intimidate online. Sometimes I’ll be right and sometimes I’ll be wrong, but I’ll never be intimidated.

/update

Cheryl Merrill — the name on the starvation email, etc — says that someone is impersonating her and hijacked her email address and that she didn’t send the original email. But if you look at the headers below it certainly looks like they were sent from the same DSL account with login, and the same email program. I’ve also included the most recent email from her of the *seven* she’s sent me today (the last sent from a different email address), where she says she’s going to sue me. Oh, and don’t miss her blog post where she says, “Attorneys would love to take on this case of the S&M Diva into whips, sadistic sex toys and leather who wants to punish some premenopausal jazz singer who hasn’t sung in 20 years.”

Feel free to email me with suggestions on this one. Anyone at SBC wanna see who actually owns this DSL account?

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Dash just sent me one of his — perhaps our — finest moments on Our Lady Fleshbot: LOLpr0n!!!!! Make more and send them to Dash (and cc me!). In UR post:

You Can Has Lolpr0n!

One of our favorite things to do after a long day of slogging in the porn mines is to spend some time at I Can Has Cheezburger? for a relaxing dose of lolcats; it’s a nice way to unwind and remember that there are indeed different kinds of pussies out there to look at. Little did we realize, though, how quickly kitteh speak would take over our entire society: we now how have lolbees, lolStar Trek, lolgays, and even lolpresidents to giggle over as well. So it was really only a matter of time before we would be forced to get in on the act. (Don’t pretend you didn’t see this coming—after all, we live to take everything that is sweet and innocent in this world and corrupt it beyond all measure.) So we now proudly present to you the debut of lolpr0n. Plz to be enjoying our filthiness, and feel free to warm the harbls! Kthxbi!!!!!1!!!!

Link to post; Fleshbot gallery.

Like a dusty sunburn and a $10 side of fairground fries, this GETV episode will make you feel like you were really there at the Maker Faire with us! As usual, Eddie’s stellar editing and camera work make me look like a million bucks, which is about what it cost for a hot dog at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. Watch A Day at the Maker Faire on our show page or embedded after the jump. Image by Eddie Codel of Sarah Meyers from Gizmodo (yay Giz was there!!!), me, and Andrew Baron from Rocketboom — Laughing Squid has a great roundup of excellent videos shot by Meyers and Baron.

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I briefly posted about my column last week, but never got a chance to talk about it, share reader mail, and I also wanted to share the really malicious email I got, which I feel compelled to because I don’t think women should be quiet about, or afraid of, these things. Yes, the email was forwarded to authorities, and I’ve included it after the jump with all the other mail I got. What’s amusing is that I Googled the sender’s email address and found her profile on this site — amazingly she signed her real name to the email — and ta-da, Cheryl Merrill has a website and blog. She’s even local.

The column wasn’t particularly inflammatory, though obviously it did manage to push a few buttons. I wrote about the newest round of oral sex, cancer and HPV hysteria — recent headlines had been saying that oral sex gives you cancer, which were the same as headlines three years ago. Basically, JAMA released a new study about correlations between cancerous tumors and HPV found in the tumors, and the headlines just ran with it. I felt there needed to be a less hysterical voice out there about it, input from people who work with communities who seek testing, prevention or are infected, and to actually provide information about HPV transmission — none of which was happening in magazines like Time, who were reporting on the story. My intention wasn’t to debunk the JAMA study, only to provide commentary from a practical sex-ed angle (also without MSM’s sex whitewashing). I was delighted to get comments from Yvonne Piper, who is extremely active in Bay Area sex and and is the Clinic Manager at SF’s Women’s Community Clinic. There’s also info on where to find the shot — wouldn’t it be nice if Time had included that? Snip from Skin Flutes, Carcinoma and Chasing the Unicorn: Oral Sex Will Give You Cancer, and Other Mythological Sex Beasts:

(…) What the quoted study was referring to was a link between HPV and oral cancer. But the message being repeated all over Google News like a game of sex-hysteria telephone is that the sex act itself — fellatio, cunnilingus, rimming — is the cause of cancer.

Is it, and is there really a link? Not very likely, explains Women’s Community Clinic Manager Yvonne Piper (who also is training staff, switchboard coordinator, and resources coordinator at San Francisco Sex Information and off-site sex educator for the Center for Sex and Culture): “This new research states that oral sex may not be the actual cause of oropharyngeal cancer. The study states that ‘[o]ral-genital contact was strongly associated with oropharyngeal cancer, but we cannot rule out transmission through direct mouth-to-mouth contact or other means.’”

Direct mouth-to-mouth contact … as in kissing? Oropharyngeal cancer may be caused by kissing! Does this mean that we should all stop kissing, too? This study is posing just a link — a correlation — between HPV and oropharyngeal cancer. If we checked everybody’s throats, we may very well find HPV, since we’ve learned that up to 80 percent of people have genital HPV, and I’m willing to bet that a fair number of those people have engaged in oral sex.

Link.

And now for that mail. In order of arrival in my inbox.

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Her photostream and albums (like Vintage French Boudoir and Vintage Showgirls and Vintage Harem and Belly Dancers (image via) are breathlessly beautiful; her blog has me hooked.

I found this one interesting — all your porn thumbnails are go(oogle):

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — A U.S. appeals court lifted a preliminary injunction Wednesday against Google Inc. from showing thumbnail-size photos from sexually explicit Internet sites, but said the company might be liable for allowing links to sites displaying pirated photos.

The case is the latest in which courts are seeking to strike a balance between fostering the free flow of information on the Internet and protecting copyrighted content.

A lower court had found that Google’s (Charts, Fortune 500) thumbnail images violated the copyright of adult magazine and Web publisher Perfect 10 Inc., but said the Internet search company was probably not responsible for displays of the underlying images from Perfect 10’s Web site.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals based in San Francisco reversed those findings on Wednesday.

“We conclude that Perfect 10 is unlikely to be able to overcome Google’s fair use defense and, accordingly, we vacate the preliminary injunction regarding Google’s use of thumbnail images,” Sandra Ikuta wrote for a three-judge panel.

Link.

If you read Defamer as voraciously as I do, you already saw some of these, but a quick search on Flickr brings up a nice batch of photos taken of the “drunk Paris Hilton” sexualized autopsy sculpture (photo via laylac). As you can tell, it’s by Daniel Edwards, the same artist who brought us the sexualized preggo/birthing Britney Spears sculpture. An exhibition of the sculpture opened at Capla Kesting Fine Art (more photos + videos of the sculpture with interview comments from the artist) on the 12th. And around the interwebs, fetishists rejoiced. Or something.

Great machine demo this afternoon at Maker Faire. Except, um, for the part where they’ve impounded our machines. Update when I get it.

Still, I had an outrageously good time operating the Running Machine. I sort of broke it, but the damage is repairable :)

Meanwhile, Monochrom blogs from my couch; I don’t call it the Blogger Bungalow for no reason…

Great news as I get ready to conk out (tomorrow I staff the SRL booth at Maker Faire). My book Best Women’s Erotica 2007 won the Gold Medal — first place slot — for Best Erotica Book 2007 in the IPPY Awards! Second year I edited the series, second win in a row, and first awards for the series. YAY! I’m working on 2008 right now, so it’s extra exciting. Smart Girl’s Guide to Porn won the Bronze! Eeee, an award for *my writing*! Congrats to all the writers in BWE, and congrats to me for being an award-winner again!

I’m working day and night loading and making (new!) machines with a very small crew as part of SRL for Maker Faire — I’m actually sitting on the SRL couch blogging this on a small break before putting the Hovercraft on the flatbed. I am photoblogging a lot; follow along on this page (or this feed); I’m updating instantly sometimes with my new Helio Ocean, which makes it scary-easy to shoot and send right to Flickr. Thanks for the phone Helio! I’m giving it the SRL treatment, and will report back…

In the meantime, do read my Chron column Skin Flutes, Cancer, Other Myths: “Possible fatality from oral sex! It’s more scary sex beasts”. It’s been in the #2 most-read spot all day! Wheee! I got some nice mail about it, but also an email from someone who would “enjoy” it if I would die. I’ll blog more about *that* later, too.

Update: WOW, Mr. Satan tests @ SRL right now (2:30am pst). Aaaand, Nina is telling me to go to sleep, which I’ll do now…

I decided to take the night off from SRL — I’ll be full-time through monday after this — and do some much-needed site updates. I added The Smart Girl’s Guide to the G-Spot to the sidebar; I know I don’t promo my own books much around here, but that one is about to come out and it *seriously kicks ass*. To the entry page, I switched the under-18 link to this amazing online sex ed resource for teens (they’re only missing Gurl.com and Boyfriend). Aaaand, I updated my porn page to a “porn for women” page for a couple of reasons. One — there *needs* to be a non-commercial page like this in the world. Two, I got to put a bunch of porn I love in one spot. Three, I included a bunch of things I recommend in my upcoming O Magazine “porn for women” article. In the article and in the “Violet Recommends” sidebar O asked me to make (!!!), I included, among others,

* Tina Tyler’s HandyMan series — one of my favorite porn performers gets straight guys to masturbate just for her — lots of hot men jerking off just for the camera. No plot needed, yum!

* Tristan Taormino’s Chemistry 1 and 2, and her House of Ass. Sex-positive activist and post-post-post-feminist Taormino (who is a really good friend and all-around cool chick) made these incredible “reality porn” videos where the focus is on female pleasure and porn performers having sex with people they’re in a house with over a weekend — but only having sex with people they really *want* to have sex with. Authentic and incredible.

* Comstock Films‘ Xana and Dax and Marie and Jack — insanely high quality production documentary style videos about couples deeply in love, who talk about how they met, and sex, and then show us all how they make love to each other. Shot on film, thigh-clenching chemistry between people who are sexy as hell and really love each other.

* Jenna Jameson is The Masseuse. Mainstream porn star Jameson is in the role of a lietime when she stars in this film that is the one of the closest things to a regular movie with hardcore sex — a love story — I’ve ever seen. Jameson is an erotic masseuse who crosses the emotional line with a client, played by her (then) real-life husband, in a movie that’s as watchable for the plot and acting as it is for the really hot, lightly kinky sex. High production values and focus on female pleasure.

* Audacia Ray, kick-ass sex-positive blogger at Waking Vixen and author of the amazing book about women’s sexual expression online, Naked on the Internet, had an opportunity to make a porn film with money and resources form a major mainstream porn house — so she made The Bi Apple, a bisexual feature showing a New York hottie’s sexual explorations in the NY sexual underground, and more. If you loved Shortbus as much as I did, and wanted more hardcore sex, you’ll enjoy The Bi Apple.

* Films by Maria Beatty — especially The Elegant Spanking, The Black Glove, Ladies of the Night. Beatty’s films are independently made and distributed, and have outrageously decadent production values — so muc so that they are frequently the belles of international film festivals. Her work is kinky, usually lesbian in nature and often Gothic.

Yup, I really have all of those and more in the July issue of O Magazine. Amazing and oh-so-cool. I also added few porn sites to my porn recommendations page that I think girls like me will dig:

For the Girls * Fleshbot * Vivane’s Sex Carnival * Kara’s Porn for Women * Tina Tyler’s (upcoming) Guys Pop By * Sean Cody * Delta of Venus (hardcore vintage) * YouPorn (good YouTube for porn) * Comstock Films * Oysters and Chocolate (erotica) * Stella Films * Hot Movies for Her * Adult DVD Talk

Black Sheep has some choice quotes to remember Falwell by (via Gawker). Also, Wonkette screencaps Falwell’s Wikipedia death update. Let’s also not forget, while Fox rolls out the barely-disguised tributes and Bush mourns his hero, and I regret that I did not yet get famous enough to have a chance to challenge Falwell on CNN (a fantasy) — let’s not forget this choice forget-me-not he said on the 700 Club in regard to the September 11, 2001 attacks:

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”

He called the Teletubbies fags, said the antichrist had to be a Jew, said the MCC Church (locally home of the Sisters) will “one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven.”

A toast under the rainbow flag it is.

I want to write a weekly column called “This Week In Sex Hysteria”.

But right now I’m writing my Chron column instead (after breakfast with sweet and truly wonderful Viviane, a trip with her to SRL, and back home now emailing with HPV researchers). Until my next posty goodness, check out:

* In bed with Hacker Boy
* Vlog Deathmatch: Irina Slutsky’s Vlog Deathmatch Entry
* Vlog Deathmatch: Phil Campbell & Estabans Deathmatch Entry (fun + a namecheck, w00t!)
* Graphis: When All You Need Is Boobs
* MS Paint Porn: Take A Break From The Sexy
* Fetish Sphere Encircles You With Smut
* Wild Gasmasks: Get Your (Kinky) Head On Straight

Video of my weekend at the shop here. Embed after the jump. Starring SRL crew Mark Pauline, Jonathan Moore, Eddie Codel, Todd Blair, Liisa Pine, Amy Bean, Jeremy Moore, Kent Cates.

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Great news in my inbox upon return form SRL (where I found new appreciation for safety glasses today). Sweet Life 1 and 2 are both being translated into — Italian! So wonderful, especially since I named those books after La Dolce Vita, one of my all-time favorite movies. And I also found out this week that Best Women’s Erotica 2007 is an IPPY semi-finalist for Best Erotica title, and Smart Girl’s Guide to Porn is in the running for Best Sex title. Yay! Hard work for books I’m proud of, and some recognition too.

It’s just been announced; I’ll be one of the judges for SXSW’s Click mobile media film festival. Click is in its fourth year, and it aims to be, “A year-round initiative created to showcase short-form storytelling via mobile devices and the web.” The post sez, “Among the jury who will be charged with watching the finalists this year, are Namesake star Kal Penn, Mr. Show co-creator Bob Odenkirk, Scratch director Doug Pray, bestselling author, pro blogger and vlogger Violet Blue, doc blogger Agnes Varnum, Kurt Cobain About a Son director AJ Schnack, and more.” I see that Eddie is also on the jury, so I know this is going to be fun!

I’m still on a couple of good artporn lists, but it’s been a while since anything has landed in my inbox worth sharing — and especially with the case of Hegre, last time I posted a few galleries I liked, I heard back from you that the models were TOO skinny, and I agreed. But I just got a batch of galleries with three I really like. They all happen to be water-themed. I think they are reminding me of my sea and sun frolics last weekend, especially with foggy San Francisco outside my window right now, and a delightfully musty machine shop awaiting me this afternoon…

Here’s Katarina bathing, Sian in the pool (pictured), and Valia in the shower.