Well, things have certainly come a long way since my SL teledildonics experiments almost a decade ago.

Thanks to work by HorseyToll, you can now control DreamLover 2000 Chastity Cages and DreamLover ChronoVaults via Second Life. The video above shows the code at work. Being able to unlock real things from virtual worlds makes for all sorts of interesting possibilities.

Via FetLife (Account Required)

Following the lead of Comingle, I've started moving some of my sex tech specific programming projects over to the new Metafetish Github Account. I've added the icon to our header bar too!

Rest assured that I really tried to find some sort of octocat rule 34 for this post, but it didn't pan out. This fantastic image by Robert Bowen will have to do.

Right now, the only thing on the account is the repo for this website. I'll be slowly migrating projects over from my personal account, and will post about them here as I do. There's a lot of software/libraries I've written then just kinda forgot about, so hopefully it'll be useful to someone.

Tenga is already known for providing add-ons for their single use onaholes. They've had warming stick available for years, for instance. However, this new electronic vacuum creator is... Wow.

Ok that really needs an animated gif.

Yup.

No word on price or release date yet.

I've been mulling over a "Will anyone really have sex/masturbate with your app?" post for a while. Then Durex comes along and does it about a million times better.

God damnit.

Seriously, between this and Fundawear, I'm seriously impressed with their marketing choices. So damn good.

Yup. It's been 10 years since that fateful post that kicked off my career as the world's foremost expert on a type of sex toy very few people use.

The SexBox is sitting here on my desk, with a new round of epoxy curing so that the jacks don't fall out on their way to an art show in Austria.

What a long, strange trip it's been.

When I started the site, I... Ok fuck it I honestly can't remember why I started this site anymore. I bought the domain in late 2003, didn't do much with it through 2004, started things up in early 2005. The SexBox got onto BoingBoing, and I've been doing it ever since, albeit sometimes with also a year between posts. I've come up with a million different reasons for keeping the site going between then and now, all of them valid, and all of them temporary.

I've been unhappy with the name 'Slashdong' for a while. In 2004, people still read slashdot, and this was all about open source teledildonics or something, so it was funny. Now I'm just sick of saying the name and explaining what slashdot was. Sick of having people wonder if I run a website about cutting dicks off and why that would make me internet famous (people that obviously don't know the internet very well).

In celebration of 10 years of internet buttplugs, I'm destroying the brand I've worked so hard to build. I've been mulling over new names, but the one that stuck with me was actually a domain I've owned for years.

metafetish.com

The plan was to turn the name Metafetish into my own custom sex toy/object/whatever building company. That was before I realized that I hate dealing with people and I hate dealing with customers and most customers are people so fuck that.

Why metafetish? Well, it feels like it reflects the aim of the site these days.

• I don't really use the toys I get or do sex toy reviews, and honestly, with people like OhJoySexToy around, I don't feel I need to.
• I don't really build much in the way of toys anymore, and companies like Orgasmatronics and Comingle are taking ideas that were talked about here and running with them farther than I could ever hope or care to go.
• I can't be at the forefront of news like I used to, as almost every gadget blog will pick up and reblog tech sex toy releases faster than I'll be able to.

So, this is now just me nerding out over weird aspects of sex toy design that I find interesting, with no real regard to being the end user. People still seem interested in that perspective, so hey.

Of course, the word fetish is probably going to be taken in a BDSMy context or whatever. Kinda planned on that. Ah well. I'll deal. I have some thoughts of technological sex toys being/requiring their own fetish, but that's a post best saved for when I'm drunk.

I should point out that none of the above list items are complaints. It's been really fun/educational/exhausting watching where things have gone since 2005. I'm looking forward to another decade of being horribly pessimistic about humanity's attempt to get itself off with machines. I've learned more about people from this project than probably anything else I've done in my life, which is probably why I'm so alone now.

Here's to another 10 years of whatever the hell this is, even if most of that is spent rebuilding my search engine ranking after today. There's no plans to change the site focus or content, and I won't be replacing the slashdong name in old posts or anything. Just means I now have a site name I won't hate saying, and as an added benefit, I have something new to correct people on. I've been practicing my "Actually" all week in preparation.

Most importantly, this new domain name means I'm finally done sharing part of my site name with another old website no one uses.