Category: Essays & Bad Ideas

An assortment of ramblings; some thoughtful, some thoughtless

Gaslighting Today

When Business Models Wear Fedoras

Let me start by saying that this is really, really stupid. First, because the service is only going to be effective at extracting money from a gullible man’s wallet; I’m afraid adtech isn’t going to make your wife want to suck your lazily manipulative cock, Jeff.

Second, because you’re handing over your credit card info and your “loved” one’s online whereabouts to people who are even less trustworthy than you are. Go look in the mirror, think about that for a minute, and try washing some dishes, you creepy fuck.

With that said, The Spinner* is the kind of thing that could be fun if it were actually much worse. It purports to use cookies planted in your woman’s browser to track and influence her through online ad placement, but it’s insufficiently granular.

I want her to tell me how she overheard one of the girls at work whisper that her new haircut makes her look queer, and then bombard her with ads encouraging her to come out of the closet. I want to casually mention that I saw her dad eyeing her ass at the family picnic, and then watch her face as she finds that every page on the web seems to be encouraging her to consider the importance of father/daughter bonding. I want to get her a nice card for Valentine’s Day that tells her how smart, pretty, and lovable she is, and then relentlessly push her to a website that’s running an article about how men always lie to shut women up.

Like every idea an MRA or incel will ever have, The Spinner* lacks imagination.

Cranky Old Man Shit: Neighborly

Have you ever found me reblogging your original content and felt uncomfortable being associated with me and my kinks? Send me a link and I’ll delete it, easy-peasy. I want content creators to be pleased to show up here, and I don’t get off on making talented strangers unhappy. It’s kind of a no-brainer.

No, this policy is not derived from law or Tumblr’s TOS. This policy is derived from my desire to be something other than a sociopathic dickweasel to my neighbors.

I just had to stand up in my dog’s eyeline, cup my hand to my ear, and mime paying attention so he would believe I was taking his fireworks warnings seriously and go back to sleep. He didn’t understand what was happening, but as long as I was on it, that was good enough for him.

It occurs to me that I do a lot of that sort of thing.

Even with ostensibly higher mammals.

A Sinister Proposal

You know what’s missing from this kink scene? The one immutable characteristic of a woman that no one takes the time and artisanal pride to degrade with any enthusiasm?

We need more southpaw-shaming.

How many of you left-handed perverts are out there, rubbing your clits counter-clockwise or some weird shit, trying to be little but realizing you still can’t cut construction paper like a normal four year old, and turning your hand into a crab claw so you can scribble your deepest, darkest, most awkward, and klutzy thoughts into your dream journal?

No more sex with your left hand, freak. No more touching men’s cocks with that back-assward man-grabber of yours. The entire world voted, and we don’t want you sitting next to us in a restaurant booth.

Yeah, this feels right.

The day Apple releases a semi-affordable Animoji-enabled phone —presumably this fall— will be a great day indeed; I will just sit back and watch my Tumblr dashboard fill with hilarious videos of 3D monkeys and unicorns and puppies saying the most filthy, violently sexual things in giggly girl voices.

The next week, when it hasn’t stopped… will be significantly less fun.

But let’s face it, there has probably never been a better time to be a furry in an LDR.

Since emerging from my latest depression-chrysalis earlier this year, I’ve been trying to be a little more open with people. Girl-people, anyway. And since this is inevitably going to lead to a person or two getting a look at me and my life, I decided to give my online identity a once-over for the first time in years. And I discovered a number of things:

  1. Back in the early/mid-2000s, I was in the top twenty Google results for a search of my first name. Now I’m barely in the top ten for my full name.
  2. The Google image search results for me are, frankly, terrifying. There’s exactly one photo of me (my Myspace profile headshot) and a scribbled self-portrait… and then a shit-ton of police booking photos for a guy with a similar name. Dude looks like he stepped right out of a bait house on To Catch A Predator; “creepy motherfucker” doesn’t even begin to describe him.
  3. Speaking of Myspace, I visited that for the first time since 2009. At least a third of my photos are gone, and all my videos and text posts were wiped… unsurprisingly, they managed to keep the photos of my friends and associates in bikinis. (NOTE: don’t visit myspace.com without a content blocker running in your browser, ‘cause you’re going straight to popup/redirect hell if you do.)
  4. Some of the photos I shot in 2006 are still seeing a steady drip of activity on photo sharing sites in 2018, so I can confirm: hot pieces of ass will live forever on the internet. I’ve actually seen one or two of them show up on Tumblr babe-blogs, thought about sending in a DMCA takedown request, and then promptly forgot about it.
  5. The only video I have left on YouTube has a grand total of 41,000 views in 12 years; it probably wouldn’t even have that many if I hadn’t posted it when YT was still a baby. (Today, it would be lost in the swamp.) I still think it’s pretty decent, for a no-budget thing shot in SD by one guy and a production assistant who was too busy flirting with the drummer to actually do any assisting.
  6. I can find no trace of my ‘98-’07 kink writing in the index. Which is by design and for the best, but I’m wistful about it. I’ve got backups, at least. I think. Somewhere.

I Keep A Woman In A Box

Or more accurately, she is the box. She’s a virtual machine running in my head, and I use her as a staging area for the things I say and do. It’s obviously a woefully incomplete emulation; she would probably get stuck in a loop if I asked her about kids, for example, and would immediately crash if asked to process male submission. I’m constitutionally disinclined to fix either flaw, so she’ll always be pretty broken.

But I like her that way. Her error rate —while objectively high— is low enough to produce useful results, and her missing pieces can be easily mistaken for the empty, out-of-order, or walled-off areas one often finds in a real woman’s psyche. And slowly but surely, with enough input, she gets just a little better.

Some people, of course, simply refer to all of this as “empathy”. But that’s only because they’re no fun.