“girls”

The weird thing about fetishy pics^ELZR like the one below is they’re so beyond-words good if you were actually on the look for them you wouldn’t find any. This one, for instance, I found yesterday (here) while looking for pictures of sakura^WP, cherry blossoms, on Imagery.

Sexy Loners^WP is (or rather, was, it just closed this March) one fetishy, weird, morbid, scabrous, bizarre, twisted, risqué, potentially-offensive webcomic (really, so don’t click ahead and complain about it!) with subtitles to match (Story of my life… got the right girl, got the wrong sexual fetish—I jerked myself today, to see if I still feel. I focus on the stain, the only thing that’s real.—Sometimes I think God hates me, but then I remember that it’s probably because I do strips like this one.—When the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers—The biggest threat to otakus is natural selection.—If I really knew a surefire way of getting laid, do you think I would have time to write a strip about it?). It also has the best interface I’ve seen for a webcomic and got me excited all over again at the possibilities of a wikicriticism (see The Lighter Side of Tentacle Hentai or Video Girl Etchi I to see how much the commentary adds to the strips).

Annzah’s was the first blog I read, back before there was a word for blogs themselves. A belle with a knack for writing, drinking, geeking, musicking, and partying—all with flair—, she used to blog her life at glitterkitty.net/anna: living and growing up in Sweden, her many girlfriends (wives, she called them), her parents (she’s a single child), her extended family, going through one strange boyfriend, moving to London, reading, cooking, clubbing, living with the second (webdesigner!) boyfriend, working at a bar and a clotheshop, getting hurt—falls, car-accidents (hates cars), whatnot—a surprising amount of times, and starting an English major. Her candid blog got her intermittently into trouble and after many false starts she finally changed to LiveJournal, where she blogs very different stuff, far too far and in between.

She was somewhat obsessed with Suede^WP (whom I know thanks to her) and used many of their songtitles for her posts. Today Suede’s Saturday Night^MP3 played randomly and I missed her suddenly, with a vengeance. “Having a public voice can make you a non-stranger, even to people you have never met.” This is a post to her.

Blogs are many different things to all of us, but sometimes, if the stars align just right, they can be empathic enzymes of sorts. They have been.

I’m in the middle of (among many things) an intriguing music experiment. More to come in a month or two.

I’ve been looking for cool art lately (yup, there is a girl :) and I’m happily surprised to find there are lots of great stuff on the web. There are hundreds of web shops of amateur and independent artists out there (here’s one: boygirlsparty). DeviantArt was a first stop, of course; later followed by Etsy, a big place to find craftsy stuff which has some nice things going on and thru which I found Poketo, an artsy store specializing in wallets and apparel, where I finally found the gift (which will be perfect for her, I swear—had I had it custom-made it wouldn’t be this good).

And ogling through artist’s websites I found the perfect gift for, well, me: Io: Art of the Wired. I don’t know, I can simply feel it: this is a great book. Look at the rave reviews and the great art included:

But what really blew me away was Poketo’s flat worldwide shipping rate and Guu Media’s even bolder FREE global shipping. Nothing says one world louder than free shipping anyplace.

I found this out in the Wild Wild Web and am not able to ascertain the author¹, which is a shame since she’s a genius:

¹ All I know is they probably come from ZatteVrienden but I don’t grok Dutch.

Being childfree myself —well, I’m somewhat young to claim that title for myself but that’s the lifestyle I want to live and I’ve already considered sterilization— it was a nice surprise to find The rise of the ‘childfree’ in Reddit’s¹ homepage today. It was interesting to find out about Mariah, a Swedish girl who was sterilized at age 25; to read somewhere mainstream (The BBC) how much of a taboo the subject is; and to discover that there are actually groups lobbying for equality for people without children² (Kidding Aside is the name of one!). That said, the article itself is quite irregular, too short, and too focused on women (though I may as well be reflecting my own biases).

And I don’t quite agree with most of the reasons put forth in the article (specially not with “I can’t believe the amount of waste that children produce.”). My personal reason for shunning child-rearing is that it is usually a cop-out to the existence question. It’s an usually unthinking way to give meaning to your life, to feel like you’ve “done something”, to achieve transcendence. I respect if you consciously want your children to give meaning to your life and you want them to be your life’s achievement —me, I’d like to explore different answers. (That said, life span is so long these days that one may try to juggle several answers that were of yore mutually exclusive.)

² That’s one group of neurons I never thought would fire…

The review itself is long and, though interesting at times, overall not that good, but there was a quiet, demure paragraph in it that kept me laughing the whole (did I say it was long?) review. Today I reread the paragraph in my notes and I’ve had a smile in my face ever since. This one’s a keeper:

What would you do if you realized you had become a 21 y.o. petulant, cranky, old fart¹?

Golly! That’d be some positively nasty tidings² —or not. Would you rather not know? There’s nothing left now but pick up the pieces, apologize, and start over.

¹ I was on my way to becoming Melvin, from As Good As It Gets, wasn’t I? (Mel, btw, was so obviously a formist.)

² Specially if you thought of yourself as one happy idiot.

(Parental Advisory: Some barely concealed nipples ahead.)