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Archive for the ‘technical’ Category

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.

If you make porn these days, you really need a system for storing and backing up your photos and video files, even if you just run “amateur” sites with homemade content. We are going through growing pains ourselves, so I’m taking this opportunity to outline some storage suggestions for my fellow webwhores:

*Maintain copies of all of your raw, unedited, full-size photos IN ADDITION to duplicates that you have edited and resized (but NOT optimized/reduced in quality for the web or stamped with a domain name – those versions will be saved with your site). And have backups of all that (basically four copies of each photo).

*KEEP LOCAL COPIES OF YOUR ENTIRE WEBSITE(S), BLOGS, ETC. ON HARD DRIVE. Yes, your hosting company should have backups, but don’t rely on that. Everything you upload to your blog, website, etc. should also be saved offline with you on your machine or wherever. If you create content online (using wordpress, google docs, etc.) download backups to your hard drive. Guess what this means? You now should have at least six copies of each good photo you’ve taken and published.

*Shoot video on tape NOT digital or cd/dvd. Keep your original tapes safe. Like, IN a firesafe. Capture them as AVI’s and keep those, too (we burn ours to dvd).

*Keep your old emails and make backups of them. You are/should be a business-person and keep copies of all of your communications with customers, colleagues, service people, etc.

*Develop a backup schedule and log for recording each of your backups, what you backed up, where you put it, etc.

*Remember that anything you burn to dvd or cd will degrade with time. Don’t have your only copy of data stored on this type of media. Seriously, google it. Also, remember that hard drives fail. It does no good to make a backup copy of your email, for example, and save that backup on the same exact drive as the originals.

*Rent a safe deposit box to store your backups, your will (including what you want to be done with your website(s) and content when you die), and a small flash drive or something like that with backups of your will and all the login information needed to take carry out your wishes plus software licenses, etc. You might consider making private, clandestine arrangements to have this maintained out of the country if you live in a fucked up nation such as the United States of America where the feds can bust down your door and seize everything because you are guilty of making OBSCENITY. If you want to know what that would feel like, you should watch The Notorious Bettie Page for a dramatic recreation of purging your art-porn to try to save yourself from prison. And then recognize it happens still today. The feds ARE searching and seizing, and indie webwhores ARE madly deleting and trashing their archived homemade porn because someone called Child Protective Services or the local police complaining that someone in the neighborhood is having sex AND TAKING PICTURES OF IT AND SELLING THOSE PICTURES!!

Basically you should get twice as much storage as you need to house all of your most precious data once for your safe deposit box, then switch them out; let’s pretend you have 600 GB of photos you want to keep safe so ideally you’d buy TWO one terrabyte hard drives for your backups. Make your first backup and put it in your safe deposit box. In three months make another backup on your second 1TB backup drive with all your old and NEW pictures you’ve taken since then, take it to the bank (or send it to whoever) to replace the backup that’s already there, and bring that one home to use next quarter.

*Insurance. Insurance is tricky because if you’re working online from home and renting, but need to protect your BUSINESS assets (that are in a house that you rent where you’re not supposed to be operating a business). . . well. Yeah. TRICKY. Anyway, insurance money could never totally compensate you for losing photos/videos/original work, so while it’s good to have insurance to replace your cameras, computers, etc. if there was a fire or break-in, money can’t buy back the DATA on your computer so back that shit up.

Is that expensive and time consuming all to maintain archives you will never need if all goes well? Yes, it is. But this is your business and you don’t want to lose all of the work you’ve done, especially if you care about your work and are proud of it. If you don’t have the money, do the best you can, and save up so you can afford the security of having your work backed up and kept safe.

********

Do I take my own advice in all of these matters? No, not yet, but I know that I should. Part of the problem is that I’m extremely reluctant to spend money on external hard drives; when you read the reviews it’s hard not to notice that HALF OF THEM ARE NEGATIVE. They fail, they are poorly designed, they’re loud, they overheat, THEY FAIL, etc.

This has some promise though: the Thermaltake Hard Drive Dock. Instead of buying a bunch of external drives (with their funky, clunky, fucked up designs and tendency to fail), installing a bunch of internal drives (which you don’t have infinite amounts of space to house) or setting up a server, you can hot swap naked hard drives which is cheaper, saves space, saves time and is really convenient for maintaining backups especially if you are putting them in a safe or if you don’t want to buy drives with lots of storage just because you feel like you NEED to since you only have so much room in your case. I haven’t bought one yet, but it’s a huge relief just to know it exists. There are loads of other benefits, like being able to access laptop-sized hard drives (I have one of those packed away with stuff I’d like to get at) and being able to switch out hard drives almost as casually as if they were game cartridges.

Yes, I enjoyed watching the dorky little geek porn video.

Any webwhores with further suggestions or people with special insight on this stuff, feel free to comment; I would love to read more advice from people who take porn and blog backups seriously.

Let’s see, what have I been up to lately? Here are a few links to fill in the gaps:

*In case you haven’t already read it, I’m not pregnant. I feel much better since I posted that entry, but yeah. That’s what I *did* feel like.

*I updated my radio station playlist after realizing I need to step it up about ten notches if I want to justify the increasing expense of having one. Note: it’s probably not interesting reading unless you’re “into” reading process-oriented planning stuff.

With my emotional state and my choice in tunes, listening to my own station gave me a bloated throat-lump and more crying. In a sorta good way.

*For the past few weeks it seems like the viewers/chatters in my webcam shows have been MUCH more pleasant than usual. I wind up the shows loaded with lots of warm fuzzies and really appreciate the change in tone. Coincidentally, most of these shows were during my vibrator-abstinence period and my PERIOD period so they were very chat-oriented shows with less actual showing-off of my body. Normally a less explicit show leads to the natives getting restless and very rude, but for some reason the crowds have been noticeably more tolerant, receptive and respectful than they have been in the past few years. I think that the big cam network might be filtering out some of the freeloaders because the crowds also seem smaller. Whatever it is, I like it; it’s a lot more fun and relaxing.

*Our hosting company had some hiccups and is doing some upgrades so our sites have had (and might have more) downtime than I’ve seen with them for the past six years. They are doing some upgrades April 1st Monday Night/Tuesday morning
between 1:00am – 6:00am and hope to limit the down time to fifteen minutes, but it’s possible there could be more.

I hate the impact that has on people’s perceptions of our sites, but it happens to everybody at some time or another so I hope everyone will be patient with it. Members: if you want all the technical details and apologies from our hosting company, I’ve posted them HERE and HERE.

*****

We’re going to have to do some heavy time (and semen) management in the upcoming weeks to try again to get pregnant, shoot content, and do some major work to try to get our income boosted (this week is going to be TIGHT) so I’m making a lot of lists, plans and goals. It might make me even more boring than usual, but also more productive (but maybe not more productive in the “fun” way).

Wondering how my appointment went at the fertility clinic? HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED.

I have another dentist appointment soon so not a lot of time to blog, but I’m happy that I finished another step in my site redesign process. HERE’S MY NEW PROMOTIONAL “TOUR”. There’s a new sample video, which is funny and hot (I think), but my favorite parts are my BookWormHole fantasy, my answer to the question of why I don’t offer cheap trial memberships to my site, and some more commentary on how I feel about porn bargains.

Next on my redesign agenda is the REAL free area and this blog; I’m really disturbed by how much stuff is outdated, missing and/or broken on the free side of my site and how I’ve let it go this long. I’m also overwhelmed and really just tired of working on web design projects at this point. I feel really URGENT about finishing, weary about how long it takes me, and excited about the possibilities (yet depressed by my lack of skill and time in executing them). I feel like I can’t do anything else until I am done with our overdue overhauls; I’m kind of going crazy.

I also just ordered some new video editing software; Delia used to edit our videos using premiere but the version we have is really old and I really didn’t like using it myself so we switched to using good old, free, windows moviemaker. It’s not great, but it’s been efficient. Unfortunately it just doesn’t do the trick for more ambitious projects, like my dollface video which we shot with two different cameras; just trying to insert an extra minute from another tape is pretty much impossible, requiring TEDIOUS amounts of cutting and pasting and trying to sync-up audio. It’s a fucking nightmare. We’re also way overdue on offering dvd’s and videos formatted for ipods and the like. I ordered Pinnacle based on a rec from Torn who said it does everything well without being overwhelming to learn. I can’t afford the price or the learning curve of Vegas, etc.

Okay, I’m late now on getting ready for the dentist. I need to shower and eat now before my mouth is rendered completely useless for hours.

In addition to the resolution I posted here, there are a couple of other things I plan to focus on in 2008 that members might enjoy:

*REVIVE PODCAST & DO MORE VIDEO BLOGGING
One of many reasons (all rooted in bizarre insecurities) I dropped off the podcast map before I really got started (but AFTER I’d been happily making informal phone posts since before podcasting became popular) was sorta because vlogging picked up at the same time and suddenly there seemed to be so many different tools and ways of doing what I’d BEEN doing (informally) over the phone without much thought. I started getting performance anxiety about it and feel overwhelmed by the need to research all of the different tools and techniques and platforms and places to syndicate and worrying that everyone would lose interest in audio without video. At the same time the service I’d been using to make phoneposts died and the service I switched to (hipcast) requires me to remember a lot more numbers and codes to make a post.

Whatever. I got a new microphone and am going to let go of my worries and just ramble the way I used to (okay, with maybe a little more focus) and start posting more video, too.

*WATCH LESS TELEVISION
I’ve gained a lot of weight and we have a lot less sex since we got Directv. I don’t want to give up television altogether (even though I was perfectly happy without it for years) and I don’t feel a morsel of regret or shame over watching every episode of “Flavor of Love”, so it’s not really that I want to watch less tv (in fact, I fully intend to catch up on “A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila” which looks to be GROUNDBREAKING), it’s that I want to do more of the other things I love (dancing, listening to music, fucking, reading, etc.). I think voyeurs will appreciate seeing us paying more attention to each other than the small screen.

In order to motivate myself to watch less television I’ve decided that before each time we turn it on, I’ll figure out something I really want to do that’s enjoyable (dance around the living room listening to Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3, for example, or exchanging foot baths with Delia), and keep that in mind, promising myself to do it after the show we’re watching is over. A lot of times I’ll lie in bed watching SITCOM after SITCOM, groaning to myself that I need to get up, I have so much WORK to do, and I realize that vague whipsnaps of gigantic piles of WORK are not enough to get me enthusiastic about getting up out of bed. If I’m going to make myself stop watching tv to do work, then I need to promise myself to do something very specific that I’ve been looking forward to (a blog entry on a specific subject, for example – something manageable that I enjoy doing yet is more productive than rotting my brain).

Speaking of resolutions, Seska was(is?) looking for sexual resolutions. I guess the less tv is indirectly a resolution to have more sex, but I don’t know think it SOUNDS sexy. And I don’t want to (nor have I ever, as far as I can recall) make any New Year’s sexual resolutions; I’d love to resolve to get pregnant, but that’s clearly not how it works, at least not for me.

Our cable internet connection went down (and most of our spycams with it) about fifteen minutes ago so I’ve been on hold ever since trying to find out what the deal is. Apparently some change they made that was supposed to be transparent to customers wasn’t so transparent. They have to send a signal to our modem to get it working again, but because of how many people are affected there are loads of signals trying to get out so it COULD TAKE FOUR OR FIVE HOURS before ours goes through.

And they don’t have any way of prioritizing business accounts like ours over regular ones, SO the only cams we’ll be able to broadcast until it gets back up are our Rude cams which we run from our DSL machine.

Eventually I will get a wireless router for the DSL modem and wireless for our other machines so we can switch to the DSL connection when this happens, but for now we’re a little stuck, which sucks since a bunch of our cams were down last night, too since a bunch of our machines auto-updated overnight. Blargh.

LIGHTS, CAMERAS . . . LOOGIES!

If you’ve never been to one of my hour-long camshows with a group audience, here’s the type of chatty performance you are missing:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syDveOyuwA0]

How’d you like that? I have a show scheduled in 2.5 hours so you can get in on the real live action or even ask me pesky questions yourself that will make me groan with impatience and respond with condescension. If you’re patient you might also hear me talk about a variety of bodily functions. If you’re *really* patient you will certainly see my nude boobies and me having an orgasm with my hitachi magic wand.

That’s also the first video I’ve ever posted on YouTube. Part of me would love to make weird videos for YouTube, but another part of me really detests editing video (which is why it’s taking me days and days to finish the video compilation I’ll finally be posting for members today). I *hate* watching footage OVER and OVER again and doing all the little time-wasting things you have to do just to produce something completely amateurish and mediocre. Fortunately I like amateurish, mediocre videos as long as they have a wee bit of personality so I don’t feel totally bad about My Crappy Videos — as long as they’re getting a few people off and/or eliciting a few giggles I’m happy.

I’m also going to be posting the first in a series of questionnaires/forms for members to fill out so we can get to know them better. This is yet another task that sounds deceptively simple (just type out a few questions, Trixie — you’re a fast typist!) but took shitloads of time to concoct even after I bought a subscription to a site that does the hardest parts of the server-side coding for me. I actually enjoy doing this kind of work, though, much more than I enjoy editing video because the video stuff requires a lot of waiting around (for things to encode) and watching things over and over . . . you aren’t actively working or thinking all of the time so it really makes me want to slit my throat with boredom and aggravation. The form thing actually feels much more creative to me and I actually enjoy repetitively fucking with the little details to make it work.