TastyTrixie.com

Archive for May, 2006

CREDIT REPORTS
If you hear me swearing on the spycams, it’s because I’ve been trying to get copies of my credit reports and am having a very annoying time in between my printer freaking out, my computer freezing up, and them asking me really stupid questions about old addresses, etc. I can barely remember how old I am, let alone ten different addresses. I don’t even remember when I got married OR divorced, so I’m going to have to dig through piles of shit in the attic to figure that out to dispute some of the crap my asshole ex fucked up (a lot of thanks I got for leaving him the house). Grrrr . . .

I know I should have all of this stuff written down in one place, but at the time of divorce, moving a billion times, etc. I just never thought about it. It was like, living there, being married to that person, and working at those places . . . I remember lots of things about them, just not dates and addresses. I *hate* trying to remember numbers. Blech.

TODAY’S SHOWS
I have a group show for members today at 2 pm (Pacific), and Tucker’s is right afterwards. For those of you who like hairy armpits, you’re better off in my show than his; I haven’t shaved mine in months now and they’re fully grown-out.

FYI: for those of you who checked today’s schedule on SOY I mistakenly posted an additional show at 4 pm — that was supposed to appear on THURSDAY not on SATURDAY, so I deleted that from today’s agenda. Sorry I did not notice it sooner; someone had to point it out to me before I realized the mistake.

I’m up much earlier than normal today with my nose to the grindstone so I better get back to it (the “grind”).

Wicked, WICKED Women!

I get a perverse thrill reading about women who kill.

Elderly woman arrested in insurance scam: “Police are investigating two women in their 70s who they believe hatched a scheme to offer two homeless men shelter, then collect more than $2 million in insurance policies after they were killed in hit-and-run crashes.”

Ah yes, this is the stuff contemporary fairy tales are made of. Makes you wonder what other crimes are on the resume of these “longtime friends”. Seventy years is a long time to be making mischief. Of course, young men beat and set fire to homeless people for pure recreation, and it rarely makes the news (I’m not making this up or guessing at this either, my sister works in a hospital). When it DOES make the news, it’s often described as “a joke gone horribly wrong” or some other nonsense. At least these old biddies had a sensible motive instead of just sheer pleasure gained through brutalizing strangers. And they *did* give the old codgers someplace to stay for years. NOT THAT I’M JUSTIFYING OR ROMANTICIZING MURDER!

FEMALE CHAT-ROOM NAMES GENERATE MORE THREATS

Wow! Who’d a thunk it: FOXNews.com – Study: Female Chat-Room Names Generate More Threats: “A new study finds that using a female screen name like Cathy, Melissa or Stephanie is more likely to elicit threatening and sexually explicit messages.”

I’m curious if all of the messages counted in the tally to reach the 100 average were actually BOTH threatening AND sexually explicit, or if they counted them if they were one or the other.

And I wonder as I wonder if there IS a difference when a stranger hits you up. I mean, for sure if a stranger walks up to a woman in real life with no facial expression and asks how big her tits are, that is implicitly threatening. It would be threatening because the person clearly disregards normal standards of behavior and is dehumanizing the woman. On the internet, however, there are different standards of behavior and everyone is dehumanized by the anonymity, so I wonder if it’s legit to equate “sexually explicit” with “threatening”, particularly when these random “attacks” are happening with such anonymity and distance instead of an arm’s length away at a bus stop.

As a woman who believes scary things do happen to women all too often and that people should be more aware of the different ways we are treated, it feels strange for me to view this study with such suspicion BUT I DO. It seems like another way for neocons to blur the distinction between sex and violence and to make it the domain of PREDATORS coming out of the woodwork online, creating distance between your average god-fearing joe and the PREDATORS instead of acknowledging that they are one and the same. The message is, “stay off the internet. Even chatting under a pseudonym is dangerous! Don’t talk to real people for entertainment, watch TeeVee instead! And anytime sex is mentioned on the internet, it’s by predators and child pornographers! SEXUALLY EXPLICIT ENTERTAINMENT IS THREATENING”.

God, I thought I would be the LAST person to sound like I’m defending men bombarding women online with unsolicited, annoying, and often disturbing harrassment and pleas for free Hot Chat. It’s not that I’m defending that, just a bit concerned at people not being able to put it into perspective or context. It’s funny when the Fox “News” types think that sexual harrassment in the workplace is pure bullshit made up by whiny hypersensitive women, but someone sending “Cathy, Melissa, or Stephanie” an instant message about his ten inch dick is THREATENING. I’m not exactly trying to say it ISN’T, just that something’s fishy about the story; it reeks of the intent to further induce hysteria about the evils of the internet, pornography, and SEX.

One of my internet porn colleagues, a female webmaster operating a network of fetish paysites, uses a male-sounding alias on her instant messenger and contact information for her websites. She does this because it dissuades people from sexually harrassing her online when she’s trying to WORK. Her instant messenger and contact information is FOR OTHER WEBMASTERS. That’s right, we’re not even talking about site members who are paying for sexually explicit material, we’re talking about her fellow “professionals” and affiliates of her sites. Many (if not most) of the folks pushing internet porn have people divided into three categories: members (aka suckers and freaks), content (aka women aka ho’s who appear in the porn they peddle), and web”masters” (aka guys like themselves). This female webmaster has to disguise her gender from these asshats because harrassing her sexually is a higher priority to them than doing actual business with her. It’s hard to describe how extremely tiresome this type of behavior is as a female professional, and honestly IS threatening when you consider that you’ll run into some of these people at industry conventions. Do you really want to interact with someone face-to-face when he is the type of person so fixated on trying to engage you in sexual conversation even when it’s totally inappropriate, unprofessional, and uninvited?

So. I definitely won’t argue that there’s not a problem, I just wonder at Fox’s interest in the story.

Trixie’s Fair and Balanced postscript: I clicked on a video link from that page to an interview with a Vivid guy about download-to-DVD technology — I was pleasantly surprised there was no porn-bashing, just a discussion of the technology and questions about why Hollywood hasn’t done it yet.

A fun/funny blog: Romance Novel Reviews – Smart Bitches: Come for the Dominican Bitches, Stay for the Man Titty

SUNSHINE
At nine this morning it was already warm outside, so I had my morning tea and luna bar in the yard and then I took a walk on the beach. The weather was perfect, almost TOO warm (for me), the tide was low. The scent of hot lilacs in bloom was everywhere. Everything was perfect except that I chose to wear my glasses instead of putting in contacts. This meant I couldn’t wear sunglasses (I don’t have prescription sunglasses) so I wound up with a headache from the bright sunshine and a touch of sunburn. Blech.

I got a lot of work done today, but also wasted time surfing an embarrassing fantasy. Lately I’ve been fantasizing about going to a fat camp. I know, I know . . . I’m not “fat”, but I’d love to go to one of those health spa retreat things where your agenda is all planned out and people cook for you and you just focus on your health and well-being. So yeah, I sat on my ass and looked at websites like this one: Bikini Boot Camp. It sounds shallow and vain, but really I don’t know why it should seem that way.

Mere hours after fantasizing about getting fit the “rich” way, I ate a couple of candybars and sat on my ass watching tv. For Idol fans: That son-of-a-bitch Taylor Hicks never understands a damned word that comes out of his mouth. Have you noticed how he mush-mouths certain phrases in songs, making it plain as day that he’s not at all sure what the words are, or more importantly, WHAT THEY MEAN? Tonight was the worst with his version of “Try a Little Tenderness”. SHAGGY dress? SHAGGY dress? How do you have people coaching you for a television show and none of them fill you in that it’s a SHABBY dress? How do you get a standing ovation singing about weary women in SHAGGY dresses? Jesus fucking Christ. What’s worse is that there’s a whole scene from a movie (Bull Durham) lecturing a similar dumbass on how he’s fucking up the words to that exact same song. How could Taylor Hicks go his whole life without seeing Bull Durham? Am I that old? Jesus. JESUS!!! On a positive note, I sprung tears in response to McPhee’s Rainbow, and couldn’t understand the judges’ dislike of her own song choice — I thought it was splendid.

Upcoming Events for Members:
NEWS FLASH! Wednesday 11 am -12 pm Pacific Time.
Click on the SpyOnYou link on Members-Only page.
Join TastyTrixie.com or SpyOnUs.com for our spycams & chatroom.

FIREWIRE NOT WORKING
Sigh . . . I’m frustrated, and posting about it in hopes someone may have some insight into my problem:

I cannot believe this — two out of three camcorders in our house seem completely incapable of communicating with our computers via firewire. First it was a Sony Handycam — we didn’t have firewire on our computer when we bought it so the warranty had already expired by the time we installed a firewire card and realized it didn’t work.

I *just* bought a Canon camcorder a couple of weeks ago. I was able to capture video from it with the firewire once. Now I try plugging it in? NOTHING. On two different machines. NOTHING. The only camcorder that works with firewire is our JVC with the jammed tape-thingy so I can’t eject and load tapes on it. PERFECT.

Am I the only person who consistently has troubles with firewire? Anyone else have any tips or similar frustrations?

I hate returning things, particularly when we live 150 miles round trip from the big stores. I just want my shit to work.

*****

Hmm. . . one thing I notice on my canon is when I plug it into a computer with the firewire, the display on the camcorder says “dv-in” — shouldn’t it say “dv-out” if I’m trying to move video from the camcorder TO the computer? I wonder if a setting got changed (I have no idea how) in between the time it WAS working when I captured some video and . . . now. When neither firewire-ported computer will even acknowledge the shitting camcorder is plugged into it . . . I’m not sure what the display said when it WAS working (if indeed it said “dv-out”. I can’t yet find anything online addressing this problem or anything in the manual. Blargh. This is SO NOT WHAT I WANT TO DO WITH MY TIME.

NOTORIOUS
We just got back from seeing The Notorious Bettie Page. I’m afraid I can’t offer an objective opinion of the film; I know it’s gotten bad reviews, but it was fantastic from my perspective, the perspective of someone who has never seen a whole movie on the big screen devoted to her own job and industry with a protagonist of her own gender. Even though it’s a story about a famous person in an era before my birth, it still feels like “my” story and it was a rare treat to hear and watch it played out.

I *was* a little surprised to see Bettie portrayed as such a naive and fairly passive person; the few biographical impressions I’d had of her before is that she was more . . . active and less acted upon. That she was more of an activist for nudism and weed. Oh well, she’s a legend now so I doubt it’s possible to depict her real off-camera character with any accuracy; still, I should read more about her. The movie still presented a good story. A lot of the points were subtle ones that I doubt people will really GET if they aren’t women or aren’t pornographers or haven’t interacted with fans and people who have special fetish interests. I really don’t know if the average guy, for example, would really SEE that teeter-totter balancing act being played out on the screen between having safety and control and experiencing mutual respect and human kidness, and NOT being safe or in control or respected or having your kindness appropriately returned. I really don’t know if the average person could understand the real power of what she felt in the church at the end and the source of her need for it — that it might not have to do with shame, but with sheer fucking isolation and exhaustion at fending off the attacks, the presumptions and the bullshit. Of not being allowed to define what you do or who you are yourself and to only have God as someone to give you a fair fucking shake and know what’s in your heart.

Favorite moments? Anything with Lili Taylor as Paula Klaw. Especially her horror at burning the negatives and destroying all of their work. That right there is one of my greatest fears: having my work seized by the government and destroyed. I can barely stand it when someone removes their blog from the internet; it’s not that I think most of them are all that valuable or even that I think my own work is all that valuable, just that it’s precious enough that it kills me to think of it destroyed. All that effort and work, and in the end nothing to show for it. It’s a shame when that happens.

Another thing the movie captured very well was the different dynamic when women photographed women, and when men photographed women. I thought the difference was palpable, but again — it’s impossible for me to be objective about something like that. It wouldn’t surprise me if some people watched the movie and didn’t notice that at all.

*****

On our walk to and from the theatre we saw more cats than usual, and two of them ran up to us for love. Is it the full moon? At dusk on the way home I was babbling when Tucker stopped suddenly on the sidewalk; he’d spotted an owl on a power line about twelve feet away from us. All we could see was its stout silhouette framed by black tree leaves against the deep blue sky. We stared at him for a few minutes and he swivelled his head around like he was looking for an exit and asking himself why the fuck these humans were gazing at him so intently.