From an Interview with Daniel Stewart of Total Control:

The week I wrote [Carpet Rash] I read three Phillip K Dick Books and I was probably getting high a lot as well. Later on I was at Mikey's house and he showed me a basic demo of a new song he had and I was thinking about this weird futuristic sex dream. It was basically about a guy trying to make it with a robot in all these different situations. I guess that song is about being really disappointed with the future. In the 80's there was a show in Australia called beyond 2000 and every week it would show you what we'd be capable of doing in the future. It was all crap and I remember being young and thinking "shits gonna be so fucking cool," but then when we get here the future is just more terrifying instances of what we have now. In between the 50's and 2001, American culture was always about how the future is going to be fucking great. But then 9/11 happened and the myth of a great future disappeared. At the time I was pretty deep into utopian and anarchist communist politics, and then when 9/11 happened I just totally lost all sense of the future. So basically that song is about a guy who got a robot to have sex with but it turns out he's not enjoying it at all.

Slashdong now has a theme song.

(Album available on Bandcamp)

There's really nothing like getting to write "fuck" in a pretty font on someone else's website.

I'm now writing for medium.com as part of the Boinkology 101 collection, curated by the lovely Lux Alptraum of Fleshbot. My first post is a critique of the current state of sex simulations, with an eye toward the new VR Sex Kit because I love giving Brad a hard time.

I'll probably be doing a couple of posts a month over there, though if that actually happens, that'd mean I'm posting more there than here. Oops.

Dialing a phone usually mean calling someone or choosing options in an automated system. However, the sounds created for dialing provide a highly available system for sending signals a machine can understand.

Why not have sex using it?

DTMF, or Dual Tone Multi Frequency is a way of transmitting a pair of frequencies that allows them to be easily recognized by cheap, simple circuitry. While not an incredibly popular control form for sex toys, there have been a few toys that have harnessed it to allow for interaction between any two parties with access to a phone line. We'll be looking at three of those toys: The Televibe, The Symphony, and the Asterisqué.

Read the rest of this entry...

So, let's go on a little field trip down history lane...

September 2012: Lovepalz does first PR launch, says they got "rejected from kickstarter", gets shitloads of press. Starts taking "preorders" basically harvesting emails.

February 2013: Lovepalz announces ship date of March, starts taking REAL MONEY FROM CUSTOMERS for their product that does not yet exist. No one has seen a set of Lovepalz toys working together yet.

March 2013: Lovepalz does another round of press, gets a shitton, again, because reporters love the internet buttplugs. Slips ship date to April due to "WiFi module". No one has seen a set of Lovepalz toys working together yet. Only videos that have been released look like dev units.

April 2013: Lovepalz slips ship date to May due to "Wifi module". No one has seen a set of Lovepalz toys working together yet. No one has seen a set of Lovepalz toys working together yet. Only videos that have been released look like dev units. NO ONE HAS SEEN A SET OF LOVEPALZ TOYS WORKING TOGETHER YET.

May 30, 2013: Lovepalz announces they are shipping.

Real products. To customers. Who paid 4 months ago. No one has seen a set of Lovepalz toys working together yet. Only videos that have been released look like dev units. NO FUCKING ONE HAS FUCKING SEEN A FUCKING SET OF FUCKING LOVEPALZ TOYS FUCKING YET.

June 2, 2013:

11:21:18 pm: qDot checks twitter. He loves checking twitter! And he always does it with an arctic fox on his shoulder because shut up.

11:21:29 pm: Ooooh, a post from Lovepalz!

11:21:52 pm: Wait. What?

11:22:15 pm: qDot notices that LovePalz is announcing that their beta program is now full. 3 days after they claim to have shipped to customers.

qDot goes and looks at the LovePalz blog that states they FOUND A LEAK IN THE PRODUCT AFTER CLAIMING TO SHIP THEN HALTING "SHIPPING" IMMEDIATELY.

Beta, in the usual definition, is the thing you do to get your product ready before shipping, to work out kinks and make sure it does what you want.

Beta, in the usual definition, is something you do before taking money from customers, though I realize we live in a world of adorable crowdfunding these days where that rule may not apply but hey remember who got kicked off kickstarter, didn't crowd fund, and instead took preorders for something that was supposed to ship?

BETA DOES NOT HAPPEN AFTER YOU HAVE TAKEN MONEY AND SAID YOU SHIPPED

YOU DO NOT CLAIM TO SHIP A SEX TOY THEN FIND OUT IT LEAKS AND WAIT I DON'T EVEN REMEMBER LOVEPALZ MENTIONING THERE IS LUBE INJECTION SO WHAT IS LEAKING OH GOD WAIT DON'T ANSWER THAT

THERE IS QA FAILURE. THEN THERE IS JIZZ ON A FUCKING MOTHERBOARD.

(And no I did not preorder but if you'd like to find out what's on the minds of customers that DID preorder, check out their facebook page)

11:22:41 pm: qDot is sad. Arctic fox is sad.

Someday, maybe, someday, I'll be able to write a post about how the hardware actually works. But bless their hearts, LovePalz is fucking up every single step of the way toward that goal. They are following in the footsteps of many other companies I've watched come and quickly go lo these past many years in the internet buttplug mine.

God damnit.

OpenDildonics is dead. Long live someone else's sex toy wiki.

For those that weren't aware, the original OpenDildonics was a project that was started Brum2600 in around 2003. They were working on an open source teledildonics framework long before I'd gotten around to even registering Slashdong.

After Slashdong came along and the OD project lost momentum, the Brum2600 crew was kind enough to donate the opendildonics domain to me. I turned the site into a wiki which I was planning on compiling all of the information on slashdong into, in order to have a community based site that everyone could update and grow. Unfortunately, my (lack of) attention span won out and spammers took over. The site became an unusable mess.

Opendildonics has been dead for a while, actually. I redirected the domains off the wiki to point at Slashdong a few months ago. However, with some of the upgrades I've done lately, I've seen a few of the 404's we've been getting from it. I'll be redirecting all requests from the wiki to this post, just so everyone knows what's up.