Welcome to the first of a new weekly (we'll see if I actually keep up with that) feature at Metafetish. This is a roundup of sex tech sites and news over the past week that I didn't have time to make a full post about, with my own hot takes (or more likely, just quick summaries) on them. Think of this as half notebook entry for future sex tech research, half filler content.

• Porn is Already Deciding VR's Future - VentureBeat
  • Because it's porn
• Why Aren't Vibrators as Good as Other Gadgets? - The Verge
  • Great article by Lux Alptraum on the issues of data collection around sex toys, featuring interviews with Dame Products founders.
• What Would Sex Robots for Women Look Like? - Vice
  • Vice ruminates on what the often overlooked world of sex robots for women, featuring a robotics ethicist interview. Contains the line "humans may come to think of sexbots in the same ways that we feel for cats" which is just... I... uh... yeah.
• We Get People to Draw Their Ideal Sex Bot - Vice
  • Seriously, Vice is like 80% of the reason it's not even worth it for me to post news entries on this site anymore. They're just killing it with posts like this. Any time I do consulting from now on, I'm making whoever I consult for draw their ideal sex bot first just to see if they're even working in the same reality I am.
• We've Seen The Future of Adult Toys and it is Filled with Networked Sex - The Daily Dot
  • And none of it is very good.
• Sexual Health Expo in Los Angeles - The Guardian
  • List of new toys seen at a Sex Toy Fair in LA. New things I hadn't seen include the Piu from IMTOY, which looks similar to Fun Factory's Cobra Libre, except with bluetooth for movie sync. There's also the Candy from IMTOY, which is their entry into the kegel exercise/sex health market.

• High Tech Sex Toy Could Improve Long Distance Relationships - The Sun
  • I think I'm just gonna say "Kiiroo" whenever an article is just about Kiiroo, because they are a fucking marketing juggernaut these days. They pretty much own the word "teledildonics", mostly thanks to the TZU lawsuit. Anyways, this particular article is apparently about the "Virtual Reality Virgin" show on the BBC, which covers a bunch of different aspects of VR, including adult toys. Whole thing is available on youtube, hopefully it will stay that way.
• Sex of the Future: A Brave New Worlds of Hi Tech Goo and VR - The Independent
  • Ok. Futurists get the same treatment as Kiiroo. So:
  • Futurists.

That'll do it for week one, especially since I still have a couple of articles to expand into their own posts. Hope this helps anyone else doing sex tech research!

Marty Mcguire did an awesome presentation on sex tech at 4-play Baltimore, featuring some stuff from my CMU Workshop, as well as mentions of Metafetish friends Orgasmatronics and Vibease. Check it out (Marty's presentation starts at 1:17)!

Metafetish is now running on HTTPS, thanks to Let's Encrypt!

Not that I ever plan on taking credits cards or other sensitive information through this site, but if I'm going to rail on products for lack of security, I might as well secure what I can on my end.

I'm pretty sure I covered all the internal URL redirecting and image links so everything should work. If you see anything wrong, please file an issue on our github project or throw email at the tips address in the page footer.

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.

Nothing like reading the "paper" (twitter) and having coffee while waking up, even if it does end up in reading one of the weirder coffee references I've seen in a while.

Wow. It's like the K-Cup of anal toys. Interesting business model... https://t.co/bmPUVn9CRB

— Purpletail (@purpletailed) September 7, 2015

Here's a video review of the toy in question:

Having never heard of the Cruiser Anal Toolkit, I did a little bit more research. It's apparently part of a line from Love Life Products Ltd, a company that seems to be trying to make themselves known by having toys that automatically squirt lube.

They're certainly not the first to this. Bad Dragon toys have come with manual syringe tubes for years, and the Real Touch (RIP) has an automatic lube injection mechanism that was... well, it was an interesting idea. Turns out automated pumps that push out hard to clean liquids that go near sensitive bits are hard to engineer to be reliable for an end-user who's adding their own hard to clean liquids to the system.

However, in the case of both Bad Dragon and Real Touch, refilling the lube resevoirs was up to the user, using whatever lube they wanted. The Love Life toys use a proprietary cartridge system, hence the K-cup reference in the tweet. Could be that the cartridges are refillable, but I can't find any information on doing so.

Each £8 3-pack comes with 3 ~40 use cartridges. So, you've got about 120 uses until having to refill. Now, £0.07/use isn't exactly a lot, but still, locking down lubrication of your toy to your own system seems a little odd. Sure, you can lube up your toy without it using the injection system, but at that point, why are you spending the cash? It very well could be that this cartridge system addresses the issue with user-fillable systems breaking down quickly, and it definitely keeps hands cleaner, but it's unclear whether the tradeoff is worth it.