Welp, 11ish years of Metafetish, or Slashdong, or whatever.

Going back and reading last year's anniversary post again, I'm realizing that things didn't really work out like I thought they would. My plan was that I'd rebrand the site, and maybe by changing the name, I'd write more.

That wasn't much of a plan, though. This site hasn't been very active since about 2011. That was the year I stopped really doing much in the way of new sex tech projects or hosting workshops, and just started writing about what everyone else was doing. For the past 5 years, this blog has mostly been me pointing and laughing at large commercial ventures, or talking about new indie producers/art projects/random stuff. Very little, if anything, has been about what I've been working on.

I'm looking forward to another decade of being horribly pessimistic about humanity's attempt to get itself off with machines.

From the aforementioned post, that's the line that really got to me. I'm not looking forward to being pessimistic about sex toys. I'm fucking sick of talking about crap sex toys that barely survive a year on the market, or answering the "will we fuck robots in the future?" question for reporters that need sex tech clickbait. I haven't been writing here is because I am ambivalent about the sex tech industry now. It's not love or hate, it's that I just don't care either way. I have my magic wand and my furry porn, why do I need to continue being an expert on products no one gives enough of a shit to buy anyways?

It's time to get back to what this site started with: me doing silly sex tech projects just to see where they go. There's a lot interesting left to do in sex tech, as long as you aren't worried about getting as many people off as possible in order to make money and stay afloat as a business.

So, here's a few things I've been thinking about for the site:

• Bring the site into this century: I just finished overhauling my personal site, now it's time to get this place bootstrapped and responsive. I just got a Let's Encrypt up and running on here, though I've got a LOT to fix before that's working well. If you absolutely can't wait to have a secure version of the site, just change the http in your browser bar to https and watch the breakage!
• Code: I'm going to try to post more about some of the code I've been working on over the past couple of years. There's been a few things kicking around my github account that could use more attention. I've also made a metafetish organization on github that I'll slowly be moving more of my sex tech oriented projects over to, so that others can help if they're interested, without having to wait on me to merge all pull requests.
• Weekly summaries: While I'm ambivalent about sex tech, I'm not going to stop tracking it completely. What I said last year still holds true, I can't keep up with large media outlets that report on this stuff. Trying would just be stupid. Vice alone is putting out multiple stories a week. I'd still like this to be a place people can come to get information though, so I'm working on weekly summary posts for news stories, crowdfunding campaigns, and other things of interest. This may also branch into a weekly email.
• Begging for money: I'm contemplating starting a patreon, mainly to fund buying hardware to work on. I don't run ads on this site, and it doesn't make me money, but there's a lot of toys I'd love to work on drivers or control software for (Erostek ET-312B, WeVibe, Kiiroo, etc...).
• Figure out community: We need an IRC channel or a telegram channel or an email list or just SOMETHING where people can talk to each other about this. I still haven't figured out what it should be though. I've tried to start multiple mailing lists and chat channels, all of which have died from attrition. Even so, I still get people asking where they can go for more information or help on sex tech. Hard problem.
• The return of comments?: I took comments off the site a couple of years ago, because disqus was violently slow, and no one was really saying much. I'm contemplating bringing them back in on-demand form, if only for getting responses on posts like this.

This looks a hell of a lot more like a plan than the anniversary posts from prior years. It could be that my (lack of) attention span will get the best of me again and little if any of this will actually happen, but we'll see. I did my first sex tech lecture in 2 years last month, and I've been doing a surprising amount of interviews lately, so things have a bit of momentum.

Here's hoping this year is more buttplug filled than the last.