TastyTrixie.com

Archive for the ‘technical’ Category

I’ve got some awesomely cute pictures to post for members if/as soon as my main machine can be salvaged.

Last week my google search got all hijacked by adware that was SO SMART it disabled two anti-virus programs I used. I thought I had it all cleaned up with combofix but then I visited the same site where I think I got the first dose and it messed my machine up BUT GOOD. To the point where I asked the only person in town who I know for sure knows about our sites if she knew a good IT-type person we could trust to help us out at our house with our porn-laden computers.

SHE TOTALLY RECOMMENDED THE PERFECT PERSON!! In about two seconds flat after messaging her!! You could even have seen him on our lifecams if you’re a member and were watching.

He is trying to fix it the slow way (by backing everything up, getting rid of the crazy malware and updating all of my shit rather than wiping everything out and starting over, which would make more sense but I balked because I don’t want to have to reinstall all of the millions of pieces of software I use to be a webwhore: photo-editing, video-editing, content-processing & creation things, multiple hunks of cam software, project management & to-do software and like dozens of other things).

Sometimes bad shit happens for good reasons – I’m really grateful that being recognized in town by this one person years ago has only resulted in awesomeness and sometimes I just want to hug her super tight for her discretion and helpfulness.

Of course, my productivity has been down along with my main machine. I did edit and post a pretty funny/potentially sexy video for members and I did write a blog entry that I did not post because the formatting got all messed up, but processing some of my other porno is having to wait while a billion scans and fixes take place on my super-stuffed hard drive.

I’m pretty excited about having someone local help us with tech stuff who we’re comfortable with and I can talk to about Star Trek. I think our secret porno lives are as safe as they can be with him so we’re going to put our entire array of machines at his mercy to maintain and improve our network and systems, etc.

Here is what I have to say over on Tits and Sass about the new .XXX domain:

.XXX Makes Me .MAD

I haven’t decided yet whether or not we’ll try buy .XXX versions of our .COMs. I certainly don’t want to. And after writing such a critical post about the asshole extortionists trying to force us into it, I’m apprehensive about putting my sites in front of them for approval or giving them my personal information. But I’d be apprehensive about that anyway. And folks in the adult industry are pushing for all of us to boycott .XXX (but I for one don’t feel sorry for Kink.com with their 10,000 domains – they’re not just protecting their brand, they’re part of the problem with that kind of excessive domain hoarding). Besides, my content is hardly consistently “Triple-X” enough to warrant that kind of a stupid-ass rating.

Anyway, do check out TitsAndSass.com not just because I’ll be contributing every so often, but because it’s awesome! Here’s what it’s about:

Tits and Sass is a group blog run by sex workers who saw a void when it came to witty commentary on the public image of our industry. The ideas promoted about us in the public eye have an impact on the realities of our lives as sex workers every bit as strong as the law, so we’re not letting any more dead hooker or stripper bones jokes pass by without comment.

We come from different backgrounds and locations, work as strippers, porn performers, pro-dommes, prostitutes, and have a love of ripping apart stereotypes. This is our space for calling out pop culture fails, celebrating sex worker culture, and talking shop.

A few points of (non?) interest:

*I’m taking a break this cycle/month-or-two from the birth control pill. I’ve exercised almost every day this month (HINT TO VOYEURS: I do that in the morning/early afternoon on our “anywhere” cam broadcast on SOY with audio, usually) and want to see what will happen. We’re not trying to get pregnant, I just want to monitor my body and see how it does without the extra estrogen now that I’ve done other things to make my endocrine system and brains work better.

It’s likely that my boobs will shrink, but on the positive(?) side my clit will grow and I’ll become even more of a raging, horny bitch.

*Delia is going to LA to claim her Tranny Award without me. She’s going to be gone for five nights — we have never been away from each other that long. I’d love to go with her but can’t figure out a way to justify spending the money or worse taking the time off. I thought about trying to line up some shoots to at least pay for my ticket, but the only way a pale old girl like myself could make any quick porn money down there is to do hardcore, and I don’t know anybody that pays to shoot with condoms.  I mean, I really don’t know anybody PERIOD in order to navigate that kind of thing so it seems far less stressful to just stay home and do my nerd work.

Yes, I should write a blog entry about how I feel regarding testing in the porn industry, condoms, and (shudder) regulating the use of such things. But not tonight.

I would love to take some time off or take time away from some kinds of work to do other kinds of work, but if I do, it needs to be in a way that’s healing and relaxing, not anxiety-riddled. The truth is I don’t want to pay money to pick out LA clothes and pack them and go to social events, etc.  If I pay money to take time away from work any time soon I need to either a) know I’ll safely be making a lot  more money or b) have absolutely nothing to do with people (except Delia) or agendas or PACKING or being photogenic or even clean or c) be doing creative work my way by myself. So yeah. I could probably find a way to pay to go down with her, but I think I’d be stressed out leading up to it and even resentful to be throwing time and money away on an excursion that I don’t need as desperately as I need to do, well, “B” or “C” above.

But then I think maybe I’m being stupid. And I’m actually kind of freaked out about being in the house alone that long. AND I WILL MISS HER AND NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MYSELF!! But I hope she has an awesome time full of fun and sunshine. Sigh.

*Our DSL modem died last week, taking two of our bedroom voyeur cams (”MoreBed” and “BedroomDesk”) down with it until we could get a replacement up and running today. It was kind of a stroke of luck because the new modem they sent has a wireless function so I moved one of our other machines over to that connection, the one that broadcasts our Kitchen Cam and “Anywhere” (usually the living room) cam.

Before the old modem died, our DSL connection was EXTREMELY stable, so I hope it will continue to be that way with double the bandwidth/cam broadcasts. If it isn’t, we’ll be in trouble because I can’t remember the password to our cable network router and that machine’s wireless interface didn’t retain the profile so switching it back isn’t an option until I can unearth the piece of paper I can SEE IN MY MIND where I carefully recorded that information. I know I didn’t wipe my ass with it so it has to be around here someplace, but it could take years of excavating to unbury it from its resting place. I’m sure I could totally reset and reconfigure our router but I honestly am not up to living through that headache again. I know this shit is easy for other people but it rarely goes as smoothly as it should for me and isn’t the kind of thing I want to or can afford to spend days troubleshooting and repairing. So FINGERS CROSSED that the DSL smoothly keeps those four cams broadcasting, trouble free and without interruptions.

Anyway, I’m hopeful that subtracting two cams from our cable connection will make uploading content faster and our other cams (and shows) stream faster.

*We’ve been bombarded by some back-end frustrations coming from a couple of different directions. Stuff that’s even more boring and hard to relate to than the above, but also more “sensitive” in terms of what we can/should say about those issues so I won’t bother boring you with them and getting ourselves into trouble talking loosely.

*I really do have more interesting things to blog about, and I promise, I will. I am so fat with drafts . . . fat with drafts.

After eight years of hearing that my blog is most people’s (even some members’) favorite part of my site, I decided to make it Stop-Number-One when you hit TastyTrixie.com, totally integrating it into the free area of my site and making it the focus. Instead of trying to create a structure and design out of thin air for all of my content, I’m (finally) taking advantage of awesome Wordpress tools that are already out there so I can focus on things I really ENJOY doing, instead of busting my brain and ass making half-assed, unworkable, amateur designs.

I’m posting it up before it’s totally done because I’m afraid if I don’t get it up NOW, I won’t want to post any new entries in my old blog (which will stay up as archives so that links will stay active/won’t break/die).

Yes, I’m losing some of the uniqueness of my old homemade designs, but I’d rather have my work be organized and accessible. Also, I’m sick of porn industry people making fun of my wacky attempts at design (but not so wacky that people didn’t like them and other webgirls even COPIED them, like, almost exactly).

Most importantly, I can feel proud to promote my site and blog again. For years now everything here has been outdated and it felt too depressing and large for me to fix it (especially not wanting to throw time and energy into something that would quickly become outdated and have to do it all over again). I didn’t even *want* people to come to my site, it looked so outdated and confusing with old pictures misrepresenting my current age and body type, old text misrepresenting my girlfriend and our relationship, etc. As a result, I have less traffic and not enough signups (people who pay to see the porn in my members-only area). Now I can get happy about inviting people to come here again. AND spend more time blogging instead of worrying about how stupid my blog LOOKED.

To Do:

• My links are messed up & I still need to add a lot more of them, more widgets, etc.
• TONS more pages to write/add/pornify & convert from old site stuff
• make a new free video sample
• Fix the template so people can comment on PAGES in addition to posts.

Concerns:

• Will my site look generic and fake now? Too much like other blogs?
• Will I feel pressure to always make the most recent post AWESOME since it’s the first impression people will have, and a) not post enough for fear of not being AWESOME enough, b) veer away from posting anything mundane and/or “too” honest/”negative” about things, and/or c) wind up being too fakey/hyper-pornographic in an ultimately counterproductive attempt to reel in sales?
• Wordpress is great and all, but it does introduce a lot more complexity, headaches & needs for babysitting.
• Will people looking for porn who are accustomed to a certain “tour” design for personality sites GET that this IS also a porn site? Or will they just be like, “oh, blog, generic, nothing naked to see here . . . nothing more to get beyond this boring, unoriginal template and all of these annoying WORDS”?
• -OR- will people think, “awesome! another free porn blog where everything is free free free and all I do is skim through it for the free free free pussy pics stolen from other sites that I totally don’t care about and have no intention of supporting!”? In other words, have all the free porn blogs shaped people’s responses to seeing a sex blog so that they view it in a totally depersonalized, ENTIRELY freeloading pic-trader way? Will they think I’m just some hobbyist webmaster/blogger dude/chick sitting here distributing a bunch of free shit?
• Is it too overwhelming? Too bright? Too RED?
• Is it loading too slow because there are too many dynamic elements?
• Do I really want Twitter fucking my whole layout & load time up when it’s crapped out?
• What about nudity on the front page? If I hide the pornyiest stuff behind cuts (where you have to click for “more”) and on clearly-labeled pages, will it be TOO hidden for people with urgent jacking needs and again they just won’t get that there’s more going on here than billions of words?

Awesome things:

• blends in well with my members-only area
• the search function actually WORKS
• Recognizable, USEFUL navigational structure: good for visitors and VERY GOOD for my brain – a huge relief; it’s like finally having a closet with hangers and drawers and shelves when all I had before was a giant box on the floor to throw my clothes into. Structure is what my brain needs to have the freedom to be creative without so much chaos.
• I don’t need to completely revamp everything whenever I want to add something new
• lots of other boring (on the outside) things like many easy ways to customize shit, use cool plugins, better search engine optimization, “cuts” (if I have a long post I can hide some behind the “more” link), etc.
• switching to wordpress and really figuring out how to make the most of it (especially now that it’s come so far) makes all of our other smaller porn & special interest blog projects more doable AND makes part of our revamps of SpyOnUs.com and Trixie.com more manageable.
• I can stop fretting about having to redesign my site – I’m so glad it’s not hanging over my head anymore like a giant ominous sandbag of timesuck inevitably ending in mediocre results
• it should stand the test of time / be functional and good-looking for a few years, I hope
• in the process of looking for make-do free wordpress templates I found this fairly-rad software, Artisteer, to make our own (which is what I used to create this theme).

Need/hope to fix:

• embedded videos in old posts aren’t showing up
• tags & categories are all fucked up (and most REALLY old posts don’t have them at all, nor do they all have titles)
• old comments are here and visible if you click on the post pages, but they’re not indicated in the footer’s comment count
• not entirely sure ALL of my old posts came over; need to check on that
• some formatting is messed up on old posts (pics not centered, blockquotes look fucked up . . . not a big deal, but it would be nice to fix it)
• need to add a plugin to help filter out spam comments
• I need to finally make sure I understand how to set up cron jobs so I can have posts queued up to post automatically.

Eventually:

• I’d like to have someone customize a layout that’s more original / exclusive . . . unless, of course, this works so well there’s no need to

This redesign is about four years overdue and I would LOVE to sit here and gripe about more technical matters that my fellow bloggers and webwhores could relate to, but I’m trying not to continue whining about how MOTHERFUCKING TIME CONSUMING AND BORING AND FRUSTRATING this process has been. Oops. Oh wait, AND SO NOT SEXY!!! Instead I’m going to enjoy being fifty steps closer to being happy with my site and celebrate having a plan and tools for revamping the rest of our outdated sites. I am also inches from promising myself to never fully rely only on ourselves to design anything important AGAIN. I like coming up with SOME ideas, but we don’t have the time or know-how to do EVERYTHING. I am really desperate to have more time to fuck and actually MAKE content instead of working on the boring cosmetic issues of how we present and organize and promote it.

So! What do you think?

The Fourth of July isn’t my absolute favorite holiday, but I do enjoy it a lot — especially small town fireworks displays like ours. We also bought a small tabletop propane grill today to celebrate the American way with cheeseburgers and replace our rusted out charcoal grill.

In keeping with a celebration of our great capitalist country:

I hate to break it to those of you who read my blog through a feed reader, but you’ll have to click through now and actually VISIT my blog to read my posts from start to finish (if you want to). I actually set my feed settings years ago BEFORE I actually started reading other people’s blogs through a feed reader myself so until recently I didn’t realize how unlikely it is for anyone to see my blog presented in all of its obnoxious glory when they can have it generically spoon fed to them through a reader.

I totally understand how much easier on the eyes it is to read through a feed reader but other than that, it’s not very hard to click through to the original post and see it presented with the personality of the blogger who wrote it (me, in this case). After about a year of using a feed reader (I use Google Reader) to keep up with my favorite blogs I’ve noticed I feel more detached from the people who write them. It’s like swallowing food without chewing it — just gulping it down. I also don’t like that some elements in my posts aren’t properly displayed, if they’re displayed at all (example: flash or video elements).

On top of that, my blog doesn’t make as much money as it used to before the rise in popularity of feedreaders. Of course there are a number of reasons for that, but the fact that more people are reading me while fewer people are seeing advertisements for my sites and other sites I promote PROBABLY plays a pretty big part. I have never been one of those people who feels the need to apologize for wanting my work on the web to make some money so I’m not going to start now, especially since I think most of my selling is pretty soft/laid-back. I don’t shove advertisements down readers’ throats constantly, but I am also not going to keep throwing away my real estate when I can least afford to do so. I want people to be reminded every time they read my blog of my little amateur porn empire and crappy design “skills”. Every time people read my blog, I want them to see my picture in the sidebar. I do not want people to see me as something contained within google or feedburner or whatever-the-hell. It’s depersonalizing and also just not very smart on my part as a webwhore.

I know for SOME people the whole point of using a reader to consume blogs is getting all the content in one place. For me, using a reader is actually more about being alerted when posts are made to my favorite blogs without having to compulsively click and refresh a million links in a list to see if my beloved bloggers have updated yet. It’s also about being able to organize, favorite and label blogs and posts. Reading other people’s blogs has always felt very intimate to me and I want it to keep being that way; I don’t like the way my reliance on Google Reader has made all the blogs I used to recognize on sight conform to the same look and feel. I’ve also hardly added any new blogs to my lineup because I’m not visiting people’s blogs and clicking on their links anymore. I’m totally missing out! So yeah — I’m just not going to give readers the option anymore to ignore my sidebars and shit. Plplplplplpl!!

Just to rub salt in your wounds, I added a gigantic flash animated Fleshlight banner over there. BECAUSE EVERYONE WITH A DICK SHOULD HAVE ONE and it makes me totally hot to look at those kinds of things being played with or even just presented on display (see also my entry on Tiny Fake Pussies). If I find a less obnoxious banner that I like just as much that shows some “action”, I will replace it, though. Or maybe if someone says that it gave them a seizure.

*****

Anyhoo, here are a few little images from the video we posted yesterday for members:

The goofiest stuff to be seen and heard on our spycams comes from our kitchen cam where Delia cooks and I come in to harass her. Whatever song I have stuck in my head is screeched out loudly, bizarre dance moves are revealed, body spasms are articulated.

Here’s a little photographic evidence (shot by remote on our Nikon D300, not webcam snags) of us dork dancing to the soundtrack in our minds:

*****

In less fun news of self-employment on the internet, we’ve had our share of little challenges. One of the big ones: our sites got hacked and a malware script was installed on most of the main index pages. Our hosting company immediately helped me fix it when I discovered it RIGHT as I was about to do a show but we weren’t fast enough for one site, BloodyTrixie, so it got a big warning slapped on it by google which they quickly removed after I used their webmaster tools to report that the malware had been removed and *I* didn’t put it there (this type of hacking happens to people — has even happened to google, yahoo, etc. THEMSELVES — so often they had a really good, easy-to-submit-to, process to go through to get it remedied). I hope everyone realizes how important it is to have good security software to detect these things because this can happen to any site you trust and have surfed safely forever. I personally use PrevX (which is how I discovered the problem in the first place when it alerted me that I got malware from one of my own fucking sites).

Anyway, it could have been much worse, but even then it’s one of those freaky things that makes you realize how ephemeral and vulnerable your content, reputation, page rank, search engine placement, trustworthiness, etc. are to having some stranger in motherfucking Russia or Belarus or wherever-the-hell robotically shitting on all of your work. The REALLY scary thing is imagining how ruined you could be if someone actually had a personal vendetta against you and decided to fuck with you.

We’ve also had a random power outage this week (making our spycams go down), then almost two hours of our main internet connection being down for everybody in our county (making most of our spycams go down AGAIN), and before that our main spycam host taking a dive in the middle of the night PLUS one of our OTHER spycam hosts having a bunch of downtime (meaning cam downtime on THAT system). AND when I finally got around to running a backup of my main machine’s hard drive the whole thing took a gigantic shit and I thought I might have been too late. Two dozen blue screens of death and many hours later I got it fixed (AND backed up), though (and no — I’m not buying that this is because I use PCs; in all my years of PC use I’ve never had a problem like this; I’ve never even had a hard drive fail on me [except for the one in my old laptop that I spilled liquids on] and LOOK! It’s all fixie-pooed!).

Anyway, at times these are the things that lend a nightmarish quality to working for yourself and relying upon electronics and stuff. Maintaining your vulnerable little tools is, you know, WORK. And sometimes I feel like I have no control over any of it or competency to deal with it. You’re always babysitting and battling a bunch of overheated computer monsters.

*****

We’ve got webcam shows and a members-only chat scheduled today. Members can check out our google calendar here for details.

The other night we heard Martin Short ask Conan O’Brien if it’s okay to say “penis” on television. Conesy assured him that if it’s a “medical” word you can say it on tv. So they said it, “PENIS”, over and over. Martin also said, “ding dong”, “my unit” and a whole bunch of other terms as he used his hands to indicate EXACTLY what part of his body he was talking about.

Google agrees that “penis” is a word that should not be censored; even if you have SafeSearch on “strict filtering”, you’ll get 33,000,000 returns.

Guess what happens if you do a search for “clitoris”? BIG FAT ZERO.

I only learned of this reading Susie Bright’s post about this twisted double standard. Of course, to be fair, “vagina” doesn’t seem to be considered a dirty word since I just turned on strict filtering and did a search for that term and came up with (considerably fewer than penis) results so . . . yeah.

It IS upsetting and there’s clearly a weird double standard; it’s hilarious (in a very dark way) that anyone would think a clitoris is more dangerous than a penis, and “dangerous” IS the opposite of “safe”, isn’t it? Still, I don’t know that I feel exactly the same way about it that Susie does, though I think hers is an important perspective full of many truths and that we should all be pissed off about this kind of bullshit. But part of the hate, shame, and willful ignorance of women and women’s bodies is wrapped up in the shame and disgust men feel (and women AND MANY *FEMINISTS* REINFORCE AND ENCOURAGE) over straight men’s sexual response to women. If it’s a part of the body that makes a straight man’s dick hard — something they want to see and touch and lick and talk about and see pictures of — then it needs to be censored to save those crazed pudwhackers from themselves and the women from the damage that is wrought when men think of women in a sexual way!

I’m not sure “the giant obscene ‘F’ word in Internet censorship is feminism”. Yes, I think this is a feminist issue, for sure, but I don’t think the sole or even the primary motive for/cause of banning a word like “clitoris” from google’s safe search is a clear desire to silence feminists and shroud women and their bodies in a reinforced veil of ignorance. Sure, that’s one of many RESULTS (and there are plenty of places where plenty of people DO make silencing feminists and campaigning against women and knowledge of women’s bodies number one on their agenda) and it’s easy to see why Susie would feel especially pissed about it when she’s not one of the sex-negative feminists who thinks that every boner sprung is a rape waiting to happen (a way of thinking that, combined with the conservative, supposedly apolitical woman’s belief that every time a man masturbates to pictures of women who aren’t his wife that a family is destroyed, has made the men who are still in charge very eager to PRETEND to try to disapprove along with us of their dirty habit of jacking off over images of our bodies) . . . and when you turn safe search off to find “clitoris”, the seventh page-one result is her post on the internal clitoris, etc. Obviously safe search filters could make it harder for Susie to sell books.

A little diversion: laughably, the retarded UNfactual “ask men dating and love tip” page on “understanding the clitoris” ranks higher than Susie’s or Scarleteen’s pages, but that’s probably because a site like AskMen works a lot harder on search engine optimization than educators, artists, writers, political activists, etc.). The web used to be more of a woman, but now it’s poorly micromanaged by algorithms cooked up by men. Are their little mathematical formulas conscious attempts to censor feminist obscenities (like truth)? No. I don’t think so.

There are so many more pointed ways that women and the truths about our bodies told from our own perspectives are smacked down by corporate censors that the banned google clitoris isn’t at the top of my list of things to use as an example. It’s the more obvious and uncomplicated stuff I’ve had to deal with as a pornographer (one of those “commercial porn-makers” Susie identifies as someone who she thinks doesn’t suffer from bans and censorship the way artists, writers, educators and political activists do, which is an annoying and probably unintentional slap in the face I’ve felt delivered from the latter group and their “poor, starving, I-do-it-for-love-not-money mentality” before — I guess they always think we’ll know that they don’t mean pornographers like Tony Comstock who of course get to be included as ARTISTES) that really chap my hide as clear-cut cases of misogyny combined with the anti-sex backlash perpetrated by the feminists who deign to speak for all of us. Again, it’s not that Susie is one of those people, it’s just that I see feminism as one of many complex contributors to internet censorship, not just a victim of it.

So what IS a clear cut case of anti-woman, ignorance-enforcing internet censorship? When credit card companies and their processors tell me my body (and yours, if you’re a woman) is OBSCENE when I’m menstruating and I’m not allowed to talk about it or show pictures of it or have sex with myself or other people while I’m having my period on any domain where I make money selling my porn. When they spider our sites looking for banned words, take them out of context and threaten to take away our ability to be paid for our work even when it IS political, educational, artistic, etc. Guess what? Google is not the entity afraid of my bloody pussy. Google is not the entity hiding or demanding I delete blog entries discussing political, legal and ethical issues containing banned words. I just have to cross my fingers when I make posts like this one that they won’t come fuck with me, but technically I am defying their terms of service right now by posting this and could have my business shut down because of it. And it’s not just “the man” who’s against me, it’s the (other) feminists, too.

Censorship isn’t something you can blame all on men and their holy penises and their desire to stamp out feminism. And I’m starting to rethink that great old joke she mentioned; “if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” It’s totally true, but I’ll bet if that were the case today, feminists would quickly become the new pro-lifers. The gender wars are far from one-sided and I’ve been hit by a whole fucking lot of “friendly fire” over here on “our” side.

I know I’m being oversensitive and carelessly lobbing my own grenades in the wrong direction at people who are my allies, but oversimplifying everything as “anti-feminist” undermines all of our arguments and neglects to acknowledge the ways that some of feminism’s “successes” have led to these failures along the way. There’s a bit Bill Maher does that annoys the FUCK out of me to listen to (off-topic sidenote: I didn’t like much about “Religulous“, fyi), but I can’t help thinking of it right now because some of it’s true and applicable:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z8j4QJ0oiY&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&border=1]

My guess is that banning “clitoris” has very little (if anything) to do with a campaign to censor feminist thought and information and women’s bodies, and
a whole lot more to do with thoughtlessness along with this thing Bill Maher talks about, with men trained to bow to “feminized”/feminINE values that anything that makes them erect is BAD. When you layer that onto the big problems that we SHOULD be focusing on like a) the people that make decisions in big companies being men, and b) men assuming everyone who uses their tools (like search engines) ARE men, and c) all men are straight, you wind up with guys jumping to the conclusion that any search for a clitoris is one that’s going to make someone bust a nut and is therefore unsafe. Or maybe a whole lot of confused and retarded thought WAS put into it (with a, b and c still factored in) and they decided that since, as feminists will proudly point out to you, they’ve heard that clitoris is the only organ with the sole function of PLEASURE, and MEN HAVE BEEN TAUGHT THAT THEIR PLEASURE IS BAD if they experience it themselves, especially by objectifying women in pictures or on the internet, that it should be banned. Or maybe it’s totally ridiculous to imagine ANY THOUGHT WHATSOEVER went into this arbitrary “decision”. I highly doubt that a bunch of people came together in a room with a picture of a cock on one side of the chalkboard and a vulva on the other, and came to a consensus that CLITORIS is a dirty word but PENIS isn’t, and high-fived each other on the way out the door saying, “right on, man! Another way to stick it to feminism!!”

Ultimately I think it’s paranoid to say, “it’s been clear for a long time that the giant obscene “F” word in Internet censorship is feminism.” And untrue. And I say that as someone who believes it IS true that feminism (and accurate information about women) is censored, misrepresented, considered obscene and something to quash and oppose on a very large, grand scale. I just don’t think that’s the case here with google and the clitoris, and if you want to point at double standards, the more glaring one is ignoring how much power and influence feminists and women in general have had and continue to wield in censoring the internet, art, and women who capitalize (the first offense) on men’s desires by selling them access to their bodies (second offense). It’s wrong to imply that feminist writers, artists, etc. have suffered more from internet censorship than pornographers.

Sure, feminist writers, artists, etc. make less money than smut peddlers as a whole, but that disparity has nothing to do with censorship – porn makes money in SPITE of censorship that FAVORS women writers and artists (who don’t create graphic material that is VISUAL), and is DEMANDED by the tag team duo of feminists and conservative women. You want to know why most women don’t make money on the internet? BECAUSE THEY DON’T WANT TO. Because they don’t even try. Because they are content sitting around bitching and blogging and crying on each other’s shoulders feeling superior because they aren’t whores motivated by money, no they care about PRINCIPLES and getting warm fuzzies commiserating with each other and expect the “community” to take care of them rather than creating something marketable and making enough money to buy influence and support their causes themselves. Because they rely on the man to pay them just enough that they can bitch about it being unfair and that they only do it because they HAVE to, rather than BECOMING the man long enough and with enough success that they can subvert the system. Women don’t make money because they love just scraping by and they think that makes them superior to men, because they don’t think big except in terms of imagining some big plot designed to keep them barefoot and pregnant.

Whatever. Enough of this baloney — I need to stop being a hypocrite and make me some fucking money.

Tonight’s ending on a very positive note that could even be viewed as a metaphor for other things going on in our lives; we finally installed a second hard drive for storage on my main work machine so I’m moving big files off my weighted-down C drive. It feels like a fresh start! Right now I’m filling up some of that space by transferring non-work photos over to this machine so I can enjoy playing with shots we’ve taken for fun/to learn about our camera.

November 20th: a buck Delia spotted in our neighbor’s backyard:

Our “new” camera (Nikon D300) has been therapeutic for me, making me stop and take time out to really LOOK and lose myself in details outside of myself. I’m not the kind of person who tries to capture EVERYTHING with a camera — I definitely appreciate being in the moment with family, friends and on vacation — but when we’re at home (which is the same as being at work unless we make a really concerted effort for it not to be) doing the daily grind it’s a big challenge for me to get out of my head. But now, when something mundane and beautiful captures my attention I feel justified in grabbing the camera, ostensibly to learn to take better photographs, and spending 5-20 minutes to really SEE and try to understand what I’m seeing: the light, the textures, the motion . . . challenging myself over what’s real and not real because it can look so different viewed with my eyes compared to how it’s captured by the camera. Immersing myself in all those different versions of truth and light and darkness and the stories we instantly create and details we insert after pulling them out of our asses when we think we’re looking at our surroundings.

Looking out our window a few hours ago:

We actually bought three 500 GB hard drives months ago for three different machines and up until today, had only installed ONE of them because of little nuisances like not having Dell’s annoying little drive “caddies”, not having serial ATA cables with the 90 to 180 degree corner jobbies so the case will close properly, me despising crawling around on the floor fucking with all the cables and cords tangled around dust bunnies, etc. If you heard me screaming last night it was when I bashed my elbow into the corner of my desk during that process. Anyway, we finally took care of it and I ordered everything we need to install a couple more on other machines.

The past couple of days I had the alarm set for 8:30 in the morning to try to get us back into a groove of semi-normalcy; at least I *thought* I set the alarm for 8:30. Turns out I forgot to adjust the ipod when the time changed so we were actually being woken up at 7:30 which just didn’t feel right. We’ll try again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll even start my day by going outside with the camera.

November 2nd as the sun took a dive:

And now a couple of random notes:

*Check out Delia’s post about today being the Transgender Day of Remembrance (and way to go Governor Gregoire for signing the proclamation – the most we could have expected Dino Rossi to do would have probably been to wipe his ass with it).

*Last night I enjoyed a conversation with my wanker in which I wasted lots of time raving about this Teddy Thompson fellow and a performance we saw on Later with Jools Holland. Here it is, and it slays me:

I’ve only downloaded one of his songs (a cover of “She Thinks I Still Care”, one of my all-time faves) because there’s no way I can narrow it down so I’m trying to hold out to be able to buy some of his albums, though I will probably download his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Tonight Will Be Fine”:

I’m glad there’s still no clear winner from yesterday’s pick-me-a-blog-topic post because I don’t have enough time to blog or masturbate or do anything enjoyable except snatch some tv while we’re eating as therapy to recover from the stress of . . . not having enough time/having time sucked up by STUPID stuff. Uncreative, unsexy, uninspiring, frustrating, lame-ass, stupid stuff.

Specifically? Too many hours spent over three (not consecutive, phew!) days replacing our router. Summing it up in one sentence like that hardly seems fair to me and only makes ME look stupid. Like only a dumb fuck could lose days of work on what sounds like such a simple little task. But it wasn’t simple (and even when it was, it was still excruciatingly time and money-consuming) and was connected to many other things. Being a camgirl/pornographer? So not fucking glamorous most of the time. And it’s not just me: pretty much all of my fellow camgirl/pornographer friends are constantly battling the same obnoxious tech shit that interrupts the fun parts of our jobs and makes us all want to just go bathe in gravy-covered carbs. Tech problems are the ultimate turn-off.

Sometimes when my eyeballs feel like they’re about to pop out of my head from the force of my frustration and I start hyperventilating and looking around for things to throw out the window (or AT the window while it’s still closed so they’ll both make satisfyingly loud shattering sounds), I try to calm down by asking myself, “what would I do if I were an Officer on the Starship Enterprise? I certainly wouldn’t behave like this, even if WebWhore Headquarters were about to blow up in forty-five seconds!” Patience! Faith in one’s own problem-solving abilities! Barely a sense of urgency: just a confident, one-step-at-a-time pursuit of a solution with nary a raise in my heart rate.

So far this technique hasn’t worked for me. But maybe someday it will; it’s dorky enough that it might do the trick when nothing else can. Or maybe I just shouldn’t skip my Ritalin.

*****

Tomorrow night we’re going to *try* to trek to Ron’s to do some shooting for IMakePorno. Hopefully I’ll have gotten most of my “asshole” out of my system today, part of my tax return done (I *have* to get that done, like, yesterday), my hair colored (it’s the color of faded, sun-dried feces from a malnourished cat right now) and have time to pack and plan before we get there.

I am a Starfleet Officer, though. I can do anything.

Actually, I’m like an unholy (and super-irritating) union between Barclay, O’Brien (cranky DS9, O’B) and Quark. Sprinkled with the annoyingly pompous, bossy, hypercritical, controlling, buttinsky loudness of Kira and Riker.

Yes, you *should* feel sorry for my friends and family.