I won't lie. I don't really use most of the stuff I build. I put it together, write something witty about it, and then it gets thrown in the box labeled "Sex Projects" and I move on to something else.

Update: At some point, the "Sex Projects" box was reappropriated for bunny food storage. The staff of slashdong did not build the bunny food, in no way finds bunny food to be a sex toy, nor do they have anything witty to write about it. We apologize for the error.

No one really seems to notice or care. We all have a good laugh, I get invited to another conference to act like I know what I'm talking about, and life continues.

But, that's not really a very fulfilling existence, is it? To be famous for something that you don't really care about. The money, the power, the men/women/indeterminate that throw themselves at you. It all becomes a blur after a while, and you realize that you need to remind yourself that, deep down, you're in this for a reason.

I've concentrated on haptics for 4 years now. Vibratey things, thrusty things, whatever, it's all been physical interaction on one level or another. There might be another person controlling it, but it's all pretty rudimentary stuff when you get down to it. Apply physical stimulation to proper portion of body, ????, profit.

This was the wrong approach.

What I needed was something that was more that just buzzythrusty. I needed something that appealed to a portion of my psyche that a quick rush of genital stimulation triggered endorphins just couldn't do.

I needed a lifetime achievement award that was controlled by USB.

This is the Prixxx Arse Lifetime Achievement Award that I won at Arse Elektronika 2008, for excellence in the area of, like, butt plugs, or something.

It's been sitting on the upper level of my desk for a year now, but it's not really been on all that much.

The lighting mechanism is 2 red LEDs with a battery pack. However, as you might notice in the picture, there are no batteries in the battery pack! The black and white wire is going to this:

This is the LED casserole board I built a few years ago, as a test project for using the USBTiny firmware. This board is a single channel power control with USB communication for as many things as a single USB port can power (500mA @ 5V). Before today, it was just controlling the rave spider riding, wiimote weilding ninja.

All I had to do was add an extra friction lock port, and solder some wires into the battery pack, and presto, I have USB controlled award.

Now, you may be wondering, what does this have to do with teledildonics?

Well, it's all about this button right here:

(Ed Note 2013-05-20: Award button down indefinitely because eh.)

Presses of this button are recorded, along with the IP of the presser, to be played back when I'm sitting at my computer. Every press of the button will translate to a 5 second lighting of the award. When the award is lit, I will look up and realize that I have a lifetime achievement award. This memory will send triggers to the most important part of my brain, my ego.

From this, I will get a raging power boner

While multiple presses of the button are appreciated, please be sincere in your presses and don't go too crazy, so that I will have some hope of having enough bloodflow to actually do whatever it was that I was going to do when sitting at my desk.

Forget the old teledildonics. Join me in this new world of interaction that truly has an impact on the user.

Or, well, join me as long as you have a lifetime achievement award in something. If not, well, obviously you have some work to be doing, don't you?

Last week I ended up at the ESRI 2009 Conference in San Diego. It's one of the larger annual Geographic Information Systems conferences. Basically, if you want to know where something is, or if you want to tell other people where things are, and I mean, like, really, seriously let them where the fuck they, or the things they desire, are, with maps and charts and graphs and lasers and hand waving and so on, this is (one of) the conference(s) you go to.

One of the more interesting portions of the conference (since I couldn't actually go to any of the talks, damn expo only badge) was the map gallery on the top floor. Rows and rows and rows of informatics porn. Maps about things you care about, things you don't care about, things you haven't heard of, things you didn't expect (pirates and what looks to be the worst game of SimAnt EVER, for instance). Took me over an hour to get through it, and by the end I could no longer process numbers, graphics, or geography. It was awesome.

Now, if you'd asked me before hand if I thought I'd get a slashdong post out of this visit, I would've laughed at you. In fact, I'm laughing as I write this. But, sure enough, there were a couple of maps that actually stood out.

The Spatial Distribution of the Seven Deadly Sins by County within the United States was the first one that made me do a double take. This map establishes different metrics for sins, such as per capita density of fast food restaurants for gluttony...

Or occurances of sexually transmitted diseases for lust. Really, just the fact that the legend has a header of "Standardized Lust" makes this one of the best pieces of information graphics I've ever seen.

For more information on this map: Las Vegas Sun Article Chart Porn - No. Seriously. Chart Porn. This is getting a sidebar link as soon as I have sidebar links again.

Onto the next map...

Say you live in Yakima, Washington. You've got pornography, possibly some adult toys, and maybe a few naughty board games for couples looking to spice up their relationship. You know that somewhere in Yakima, someone else has cash, and is ready to give it to you in trade for these goods (but not services, as this is Washington, not Nevada). How can you know where to place your business so that you can maximize profit while minimizing neighborhood backlash? Time to fire up ArcGIS and get mappin'!

This map takes into account proper buffer zones around areas that would not be acceptable (parks, schools, residentially zoned land), as well as creating larger buffer zones around places where stores already exist. It uses this data to create viable business spaces with in the city limits of Yakima.

In the end, you get a small strip of land down the eastern side, following what I believe is North 1st Street, as well as some slightly random places right around the western edge of airport (South 36th Ave). Great for rooftop advertising to weary, horny travelers!

All in all, I learned quite a bit at this conference. There'll be more stories over on Nonpolynomial Labs in the next couple of days, so keep an eye out there for the non-sex stuff (but it'll involve missles AND rockets at the same time!)

I've been finding the most wonderful things thanks to following teledildonics on twitter search lately. For instance, the Pelvotron! It's a video game control project by Andrew Styer, a student at NYU's ITP school.

Yup, using your hips to control a game. Combine this with the Joydick...

And... Well, I'm not really sure what you'd get, other than awkward. But I'd post of video of it.

Via Someone telling Andrew he should do his thesis on Teledildonics. Do it, Andrew!

So, as you may've noticed, the slashdong message boards are dead. Due to spam accounts, they've had registration shut down for the past year if not longer, and I really just don't have time to manage them anymore. However, that doesn't mean you're out of luck in terms of places to talk about sex tech.

First off, we've now got nice, shiny Disqus driven comments here on all the posts for slashdong, so you can talk amongst yourselves in the contexts of our posts.

There's always Regina Lynn's Sex Drive Mailing List, which has been around longer than we have, and is still more consistently active than us.

In terms of new places to chat, FetLife has many great forums on pretty much every fetish topic under the sun. The Fucking Machines and High Tech Sex Forums is moderated by the knowledgeable author of the KamaSutronics sex blog. The forum is frequented by many of the major names in sex machine building, such as the inventors of the HugHer, and Slashdong friend + Thrillhammer creator Allen Stein, and I throw a random post or two in every so often.

Over at the Milovana web teasing site, there's now a Hardware and Teledildonics Forum, with lots of discussions about protocol building (which I'll be posting more about here soon) and interesting hardware like Penile Plethysmographs.

In terms of broken links to old articles on the message boards, I'm currently working on fixing those, and hope to have something up and running to redirect broken links by next week. While our own boards may be dead, there's now many other places people interested in these topics can gather.

But that doesn't mean you should stop reading Slashdong.

Arse Elektronika 2009 - Call for Papers

It's that time again! The call for papers for this year's Arse Elektronika conference is up. The title this year is "Of Intercourse and Intracourse", with a focus on biotechnology and sexuality. Here's the full conference description:

Scottish SF author Iain Banks created a fictitious group-civilisation called "Culture" in his eponymous narrative. The vast majority of humanoid people in the "Culture" are born with greatly altered glands housed within their central nervous systems, who secrete - on command - mood- and sensory-appreciation-altering compounds into the person's bloodstream. Additionally many inhabitants have subtly altered reproductive organs - and control over the associated nerves - to enhance sexual pleasure. Ovulation is at will in the female, and a fetus up to a certain stage may be re-absorbed, aborted, or held at a static point in its development; again, as willed. Also, a viral change from one sex into the other, is possible. And there is a convention that each person should give birth to one child in their lives. It may sound strange, but Banks states that a society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other. Pressure for change within society would presumably build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity will be established.

Does this set-up sound too futuristic? Too utopian? Too bizarre?

We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. And that's why our annual conference Arse Elektronika deals with sex, technology and the future. As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough. "Bizarre enough for what?" -- you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century.

Don't you think, replicants?

The conference will be taking place in San Francisco (at a few different venues yet to be announced), October 1-4th, 2009.