TastyTrixie.com

Archive for the ‘technophobia’ Category

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.

I just added a new gallery for members with pictures of me naked in a fog. Here are a couple of samples:

Member Galleries: 1024 or 1600 pixels | Non-Members: JOIN HERE for access.

*****

I think I’m on electronic overload since we got home. There’s a certain feeling I get in my head, throat and upper chest when I’ve been talking on a cell phone, listening to an ipod, sitting too close to a webcam, or just having too much computer time; it’s like metal and static inside me, almost like the taste of static if static had a flavor (and if I had taste buds all throughout my upper body). I don’t think I’ve ever gotten it from cameras, but other things — yes. Maybe I have it right now because of the new laptop. Maybe it’s emitting some weird . . . something. Probably it’s the noise and the frequency of the noises, but it feels more like it’s the heated metals and plastics and ozone scents (which I like at first, but then feel like they’re seeping into me).

Or maybe I’m just crazy.

HOT POTS

I have to get a loudly-whistling kettle SOON before I burn the house down.

Tucker bought me a beautiful BEAUTIFUL tea kettle; it was large and shiny and lovely. I don’t remember how I managed it, but I burned it to death (perhaps the whistle was too soft-spoken? I don’t recall, but it made me sad when I destroyed it).

I tried getting a new, pretty, red one, but I had to take it back to the store because the whistle was SO weak, and I knew that spelled disaster. I bought a cheap replacement that I also recently managed to neglect during it’s hot process (did I forget to put the whistle-thing down? Or did I forget to tamp down the lid and the steam escaped through there so it wouldn’t whistle?). Whatever; it’s burned up, the black plastic handle melted into hot lava down its silver sides and the bottom blackened and flaky.

Through all of this I’ve managed to not set fire to a house (these aren’t the only water-boiling mishaps I’ve had, just the ones during the past two years). The past few months I’ve been boiling water for my breakfast tea in saucepans. Today I decided to put in a little more water in the pan than usual, which was fortunate because I totally forgot all about it until I left my office to go pee and smelled hot burning something coming from the kitchen. FUCK. Water all boiled off, only mineral remnants frying in the bottom. I *love* that saucepan, too, with its copper bottom. It’s one that came from my mom’s kitchen so it’s been in my life for . . . ummm . . . twenty-five years, at least. I hope it’s still usable since its my favorite pan for popping corn, but it looks like most of the copper is going to flake off.

This latest kitchen casualty will probably motivate me to buy a good new proper tea kettle, which will probably be a relief to Tucker; he gets stressed out when I hold onto my mug with my left hand while pouring boiling water into it using my right. He keeps telling me I’m going to burn myself and I need to SET THE MUG DOWN FIRST. It’s charming, really, how bothered he gets when I take this minor risk.

You might wonder why I don’t just use a microwave to boil water (and pop popcorn). Well, I hate microwaves. HATE them. The only thing they’re good for is softening chocolate chip cookies. Microwaves disgust me — I hate the way they sound, the way they always wind up smelling, the way they look, the way they take up so much space. HATE them. If we had a huge kitchen and money to burn on scary appliances, sure — we’d have one and use it for heating up leftovers and stuff. But I’m not going out of my poor way to stuff one into a tiny-ass kitchen.

By the way, I hate dishwashers too. So there.

There are certain things that should be done by human hands, the old-fashioned way. Washing dishes is one of them. No matter how many times people scoff and tell me about the advances in dishwashers, no one I know has a faultless dishwasher. They all leave crusties or break things every so often. And I HATE the smell of dishwasher-washed dishes (or just the SMELL of a dishwasher running). Blech! I would rather smell food mouldering on a pile of stacked-up dishes waiting to be hand-washed than catch a whiff of that hot steamy dishwasher aroma and have to HEAR its noisiness on top of it. Maybe the problem is that no one I know is able to afford the latest and greatest dishwashing technology, but whatever . . . I doubt I will ever fully trust dishwashers. Even if I were rich enough to have a maid to load the dishwasher for me, I know I’d be skulking around the kitchen making his/her life miserable by questioning her judgement on which dishes s/he would put into the evil machine. Not my favorite mug — noooooooooo!

I know it’s crazy, but I just don’t like the way microwaves cook food. I don’t trust it. I’m suspicious. While it’s delightful that you can microwave bacon and it will come out perfectly cooked and FLAT (instead of curly), there’s something horribly wrong about that. I’ll still eat it and everything, but not before narrowing my eyes at the microwave contraption to let it know that I’m onto it and it better not try anything funnier than making flat bacon.