Sex With Matt

Welcome home

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:48:09 GMT

Moments in Black Rock City:

- Walking the half-built city. In some places, the city is so empty that we can't even tell where the streets are.

- Gifting pancakes and bacon to our neighbors.

- Struggling to keep the shade structure intact through Monday's horrendous dust storm. We spend twelve hours repairing and re-engineering the structure in the middle of the storm. One of our corner poles is bent 90 degrees by the wind, and we have an Iwo Jima moment of bracing the structure with temporary poles while replacing the original.

- The playa environment agrees with me. I sleep briefly but well each night, and am in good spirits and full of bounce pretty much all day every day.

- Helping Rossi celebrate a neighbor's 30th birthday. We bring him to our camp in a cage, and Rossi administers the requisite spanking. He goes home happy but with a large ice pack in his pants.

- Watching numerous members of our crew drop from a combination of exhaustion and the unbelievably brutal environment.

- Watching our street fill with bicycles as our first class filled to capacity. We had to turn away crowds at every one of our public events.

- Giving numerous strangers their first experience with bondage, and watching their faces light up.

- Two late arrivals bring us fresh pizza!

- Tying up so many people that my fingers bleed. Finding out that all our other tops had the same experience.

- Walking the deep playa with a new friend.

- Picking up MOOP in the deep playa and finding strange and sometimes wonderful things among the trash.

- Riding a gigantic covered wagon to Grace and Dammit's wedding at the temple.

- Walking the streets of the city in assless white vinyl chaps, yellow panties, a skin-tight metallic red tank top, and a zebra print hat. Nobody looks twice, because my appearance is in no way unusual or noteworthy.

- Climbing an eight story steel tower built in the middle of the playa.

- Shiva Vista: watching the fire performers while sixteen fire cannons roar over our heads.

- Guerilla bondage: helping Zang suspend Sparkle Pony from the stage at Opulent Temple.

- 3 AM coffee and conversation at Center Camp.

- A second wedding: a couple from an earlier class want us to help us marry them. Hot Sauce officiates, and Buddy hand-fasts them.

- After the wedding, a gift: our new friends bring us ice cream. On the playa. On Thursday.

- Turning away too many wonderful people to count, because we simply don't have room for them. Our entire crew is exhausted.

- Geeking with our camp ecologist about ice-dwelling insects. We make plans to go photograph some.

- No matter how much art I see, new pieces continue to amaze and delight me.

- Standing on the deck of the temple in a full white-out, all the chandeliers flying sideways in the wind. The wind screams at us, and we scream back.

- Walking the temple at nght, reading a tiny fraction of the inscriptions. I write what I need to write on one of the columns.

- Impromptu cuddling with a new friend.

- Helping the crew at Illusion inflate their weather balloons.

- Playa dust. If you haven't been to BRC, you simply can't comprehend how utterly pervasive it is.

- The man burns.

- Watching the temple burn. The burn is deeply moving to me, but for reasons completely unrelated to what I'd written earlier.

- Getting lost in a screaming white-out returning from the burn. We end up on the opposite side of the city.

- Walking the almost-deserted streets of the vanishing city. Once again, it's hard to tell where the streets are.

- Coiling my trusty old rope kit for the last time, and throwing the coils into a fire installation. Before this week, I could (with effort) remember every single person I'd ever suspended. Now, I can't even remember everyone I suspended this week. I have mixed feelings about that.

- Black Rock City is gone. We get up before dawn in the bitter cold, strike our tents, walk the MOOP grid, and leave.

We go home in 51 weeks.

Energy efficiency and mass transit

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:53:52 GMT

Continuing my alarming digression away from degenerate perversion, Brad Templeton has some profoundly interesting things to say about the energy efficiency of different forms of transit. The short version is this: on average, mass transit isn't nearly as green as you think. In fact, it's often less energy efficient than private cars.

For example, private cars use (on average) 3,500 BTUs / passenger mile. City buses use (on average) 3,800. All forms of rail combined do a little better (2,800), but many systems are worse: the NY subway consumes 3,400 and Seattle light rail comes in at 5,300.

There are two important caveats to all of this. Firstly, these numbers don't mean that it's greener to drive your car instead of taking the bus. The bus is less efficient (assuming that you're driving with the national average of 0.57 passengers), but the energy cost of the bus is fixed: once Metro has decided to run a bus, the incremental energy cost of you being on board is almost zero. The second caveat, of course, is that mass transit is almost invariably less time-efficient than private cars, and human time has value.

Gory details here: http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

Cooperative dragonfly

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:54:40 GMT

2008_07_24 03 Dragonfly
Originally uploaded by Tornus

Normally, these guys are pretty skittish, but this one was uncommonly cooperative. He spooked once or twice while I was getting closer to him, but each time he circled around and landed in exactly the same place he'd been before. In the end, I was able to get pretty close from a couple of different angles.

Dragonflies have particularly odd heads: note the utterly bizarre mouth structure and the strange eyes, which in many species are for some reason almost impossible to get a sharp image of.

Small creatures fear me

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 05:21:29 GMT

Bee
Originally uploaded by Tornus

In spite of being ridiculously busy lately, I've managed to grab a little bit of time to go harass the local microfauna. It's good to be back at it-- I haven't done this for several years. I'm finding that it's just as hard, and just as fun, as I remembered.

Speaking of which, the Nikon D3 rocks my world. In addition to all of the obvious points, the high ISO performance is truly game-changing. Macro photography in the 1:1 range is immensely technically challenging, and having an extra factor of 10 (literally) to play with makes a huge difference.

Coming home

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 05:48:53 GMT

After a kick-ass week, I'm headed home tomorrow. Had a great time with family, played with my new camera, scrambled across lava fields, crawled on my hands and knees into mile-deep caves, and got in some serious kayak time.

Vacation was awesome, but I'm really looking forward to being home.

How my days begin

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:30:45 GMT

The alarm goes off at 6:00 AM. Because I don't share imperator_mei's unique sense of masochism, my life begins with a slow ramp of the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony. As soon as the alarm goes off, Oliver races over to me and bats at the covers. I lift them up enough that he can crawl underneath, and he wriggles around so that he's cuddled up next to me with only his head sticking out.

I pet Oliver, and the room fills with the sound of his happy noise as he commences a very thorough exploration of my armpit. While he's working on it, my phone tells me what the universe is likely to do to me today, and what I'm planning to do to the universe. After a few minutes, Oliver decides that today will not be the day that my armpit suddenly starts giving milk, and it's time to get up.

In the bathroom, Oliver sings a song to let me know that somebody has poisoned the water in his kitty bowl. Apparently he is dying of thirst, and I must run the bathroom sink so he can drink. Next, we go upstairs and I get first breakfast for both of us: blueberries, hazelnuts, and milk for me, and kibbles (not enough) and water (why do I bother?) for Oliver.

I take my breakfast to the gym with me, and Oliver goes to his morning job at the Ministry for the Promotion of Avian Tourism.

Nonsense by request

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:09:41 GMT

Over the course of the weekend, I promised to send various people links to some online nonsense. In a couple of cases, I can no longer remember who was interested in the nonsense in question. Therefore, I'm doing the only responsible thing and spamming the entire internet with it.

Here's a fishing cat living with a remarkably indulgent Russian family. I'm glad I'm not in charge of cleaning their carpets.

And here's Jonny McGovern's Soccer Practice video. It is without question the gayest (and also the best) music video ever.

An open memo to Seattle

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 17:11:11 GMT

Dear Seattle,

We have tried to turn a blind eye to your West Coast idiosyncracies for as long as possible, but after an especially shameful incident last night, we feel we must speak up. In order to preserve the True Art as handed down to us by the Ancient Masters, please take note of the following:

Every scene shall have a clearly identifiable Dom and a clearly identifiable Sub.
Subs shall speak respectfully at all times. Comments like "You suck! You're doing it all wrong!" aren't clever-- they're just disrespectful. Nobody likes a mouthy bottom, missy.
Dripping blood is a serious matter, and must be cleaned up right away. Otherwise, SHE MIGHT DIE!
Gluing googly eyes to your needles isn't funny.
SM is Serious. Hysterical laughter in the middle of a scene is inappropriate.
Needles are not swords. They do not go "schwing!" when you draw them. Having a longer needle does not give you "reach advantage." See point 1, above.

Your prompt attention to this matter is appreciated.

P.S.: Please review and comply with our recent memorandum, "Straight boys don't cuddle with other boys".

P.P.S.: You aren't going to throw that needle away after just one use, are you?

Wretched excess

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 05:37:49 GMT

Tons going on right now. I have a couple of interesting things that I'm working on on the suspension front-- hopefully they'll germinate into posts sometime soon.

In the meantime, however, I had family in town Friday night, and I made the mistake of going shopping while in an indecisive and easily-swayed mood. The resulting menu:

First
Toasted hazelnuts with salt
German-style salami
Salami gentile
Prosciutto
Dates stuffed with Valderon cheese and wrapped in prosciutto, with balsamic vinegar
Toasted bread with olive-garlic tapenade
Peña Azul cheese

Second
Potato-leek soup with crème fraîche
Grilled pork tenderloin with soy sauce
Spicy shrimp
Roasted acorn squash
Steamed vegetables
Raw vegetables
Brown rice

Finally
Sliced mango
Dark chocolate
Milk chocolate
Warm chocolate chip cookies
Meringue cookies
Port

The dates were accompanied by some astonishingly good balsamic vinegar that my parents just brought me from their trip to Italy, and Peña Azul continues to rock my world (even if it was plastic-wrapped).

This was possibly the most ambitious meal I've attempted solo, and it went really well. We ate over the course of about three hours, with nice cycles of eating, talking, and relaxing along the way. I actually managed to scale things so that most of the prep was done in advance, and once the meal started I didn't spend an excessive amount of time in the kitchen.

The quantity of food was stupidly excessive for 7 people, but just occasionally, that's not a bad thing.

Incidentally, I blame my current interest in food porn on some recent posts by certain individuals. You know who you are.

America Unzipped

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:29:44 GMT

This was a good weekend for reading: I was able to plow through both In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan (which I'll have something to say about in my other blog), and America Unzipped by Brian Alexander.

On the surface, America Unzipped is an amusing, fairly irrelevant piece of light entertainment. It's quick and easy to read, tolerably well-written, and sufficiently full of amusing anecdotes to remain entertaining throughout. Plus, a number of my friends are in it, and it's always fun to read about your friends in the mass media. Beyond that, though, I'm somewhat torn about it.

The book is a superficial but open-minded tour through the frontlines of the sexual revolution. Alexander talks to everyone from an evangelical preacher who's on a crusade to give Christians permission to have better sex through our own Allena Gabosch at the Wet Spot. By the end, he's come to a couple of conclusions:

Even very conservative Americans in the fly-over states are far more open-minded about sex than you (or they) believe.
The religious right has lost the war over American sexuality.
There's an immense generational gap surrounding sexuality: younger Americans are profoundly comfortable with a surprisingly wide range of sexual expression.
It's kinda good that people are more open about sex, because, you know, it makes them happier. On the other hand, maybe it's not so good, because, you know, maybe it's not so good.

And there, in a nutshell, you have what's good and bad about the book. On the bright side, he talks to an interesting range of people, many of whom are seemingly very conventional, and discovers a remarkable new openness about sexuality. The book isn't a comprehensive survey, of course, and I think it would have been a much stronger tome if he'd spent some time examining how typical his subjects actually are. Yes, he's talking to Republican cops in the heartland, but they're nonetheless Republican cops in the heartland who've chosen to come to a sex-toys Tupperware party.

A more serious critique, though, has to do with Alexander himself. He goes out of his way to point out that he himself isn't a pervert, which is fine if a little distracting after the first few protestations. Beyond that, though, he's clearly uncomfortable and ambivalent about a lot of what he's turning up, but he isn't able to articulate his unease in any coherent fashion. His discomfort might have to do with the escalation of sexual practices, and it might have to do with removing the erotic charge of the forbidden, and it might have to do with something else. At the end of the day, he's clearly uncomfortable with much of what he's seen, and he wants you to know that he's uncomfortable, but he's incapable of presenting any cogent analysis.

Sex writing needs a Jeffrey Steingarten. It isn't Brian Alexander.

Christmas stocking

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 04:55:47 GMT

For Christmas this year, Silver made me a Christmas stocking. Not just a Christmas stocking, but a seriously bad-ass tactical Christmas stocking.

My life is good.

Alligator lips

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 05:45:11 GMT

In spite of being way behind on my photography, I managed to find some time today to shoot another doll for amare's RISD application. Here, for your aesthetic enjoyment and sound nocturnal repose, is Alligator Lips.

Helpful safety tip

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 06:10:38 GMT

Max has a safety rule that he teaches in a number of his classes:

"Any time you rig a partial suspension, you should keep in mind that it may unexpectedly turn into a full suspension, especially if you have a bratty and energetic bottom."

After last week's Grind, I'd like to offer my own corollary:

"Any time you rig a full suspension, you should keep in mind that it may unexpectedly turn into a double suspension, especially if soapysophie is in the room."

tightbound and I were in the middle of a very nice suspension of silvergoth (essentially a suspended hogtie), when Sophie showed up. After spending a few minutes flirting, Sophie abruptly climbed onto the rig and spent a few minutes hanging upside down underneath Silver. Happily, the rigging was adequate to the task, and a delightful time was had by all.

Diving in Roatan

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 23:51:19 GMT

As promised, here are a few photos from our vacation in Roatan about a month ago. These were shot with a snapshot camera inside a cheap plastic housing, so the quality isn't always great, but the subjects themselves are fun.

We spent our vacation at Anthony's Key. Anthony's Key is a small island off the coast of Roatan, which is a small island off the coast of Honduras. The main part of the resort (the dining room and the dive boats) are actually on Roatan, so you end up taking a lot of boat rides back and forth between the Key and the dock. It's a pretty good arrangement: you go to the dock and ring the bell (actually, an old SCUBA cylinder), and the motorboat comes over and picks you up. Naturally, the kids spent a lot of time arguing about whose turn it was to ring the bell.

Here's our cabin, seen from the dive boat. At the beginning of the week, you're assigned to a dive boat for the week. It has 3 or 4 scheduled departures each day, depending on whether you're doing a night dive or not. You just load your gear onto the boat in the morning, and then show up for each of your dives, most of which are only a 5 or 10 minute boat ride away. In between dives, little elves magically replace your tanks for you. It's a pretty cushy life.

And now, the obligatory suspension bondage. All I'm gonna say about this is that I hate inversions. I don't like them any better when I'm doing them at high speed, 60 feet off the rain forest floor, using gear that I don't totally trust, half a day away from a real hospital. That said, the canopy itself is pretty damn cool, when it's the right way up.

The kids spent the week in a dolphin summer camp, doing things like training dolphins and learning to dive. At the end of the week, we got to spend a little time with the dolphins as well.

The main reason to go to Roatan, of course, is for the diving. The main reason to go diving, of course, is that you get to blow bubbles.

We saw a lot of these groupers. They're very friendly, and very big.

Parrotfish are everywhere, also. If you listen carefully, you can often hear them crunching coral in their beaks.

These little guys are all over the place, if you take the time to look for them. They just hang out on the coral, filtering their food from the water.

I love diving wrecks. In this case, we got to do two excellent wrecks, both quite large freighters sunk in about 100 feet of water. There's something almost magical about the transformation that a mundane ship undergoes when it's underwater, broken into pieces, and covered with life. There are numerous portholes, cargo bays, and fractures that you can stick your light into and get a glimpse of the inside of the ship. Everyone in my team except for me penetrated the wrecks, which I consider to be completely insane. Even a sanitized shipwreck is an incredibly dangerous place, and an 80 cf single tank gives you almost no safety margin if anything goes wrong.

Hey, you knew I couldn't do a whole post without a safety rant, right?

We got to see a couple of sea turtles up close and personal. This one's chowing down on some coral while the fish in the background helps himself to the leftovers. Sea turtles are very graceful when they swim but somewhat ungainly when they're dragging themselves over the coral with their flippers.

Moray eels aren't aggressive, but they aren't particularly friendly, either. This one has holed up and is waiting for us to go away.

You looking at me?

Photos for Amare

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 05:32:28 GMT

A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to shoot some of Amare's dolls for a grant application she was working on. Because I'm lame, it's taken me this long to get around to posting them. It was a fun project, and very different from the work I normally do. Enjoy!

This is Trouble. She's Amare's favorite, and she's the one that I think I did the best job on, in part because I was able to spend the most time with her.

Some of the technical challenges of this particular doll included capturing detail in both the black skirt and the very pale tentacles, getting a good shine off the wings, showing detail in the mesh of the wings, and getting some highlights into the hair.

I tend to imagine Trouble emerging from a litter-strewn alley, but didn't feel ambitious enough to try and compose that image myself.

A closeup of her remarkably expressive face.

This is Mr. Too Good To Be A Porcupine. For the full story behind his name, you'll need to refer to Amare's blog. Suffice it to say that he turned out very differently than she'd originally envisaged him.

To my mind, it's clear that he's welcoming the rising sun, and I'd love to try and shoot him in that context sometime. For this particular project, though, I was trying to maintain a strong consistency between all the images.

I love the serenely benevolent expression this guy has.

Also fun, but not quite as benevolent is Moqui. In case it's not immediately obvious to you, he's a sort of mutant mosquito creature.

He's a creepy SOB. I'd love to line a hallway with a series of framed portraits like this one. I'm not sure I'd want to walk down that hallway every day, but it'd be cool.

The cloud cat. I'm not particularly happy with this image: it captures the basic shape of the piece well enough, and I got a respectable shine off the metal, but overall it feels rather lifeless.

A red wheeled critter. I like the colors on this guy (in fact, I had a hard time restraining myself from doing ridiculous things with them in Photoshop), but again I'm not wild about the image as a whole.

Red with his family.

Belated thanks to Amare for the opportunity to shoot the dolls!

There's a new CSPC website!

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 19:11:22 GMT

If you pay attention to the CSPC (formerly the Wet Spot) newsletter, you've probably noticed that we have a new website. This long-overdue updating of the previous site is something that I've been working on for a long time now, and it's good to finally have it out in the real world. There's still a lot of work left to do, but I think we're off to an excellent start.

Up until now, the focus of the project has been on making it easier for CSPC members to find the information they need most often, and in particular to make it easier to find out what's happening at the CSPC. There's also a rudimentary system for letting people renew their memberships and donate money, although there's a lot of work remaining to make that part of the site more user-friendly.

There's also been a lot of work behind the scenes to make it easier for CSPC staff to update the website and keep the calendar current, and to allow event owners to update the information for their events. Future projects include adding more extensive support for existing members and overhauling the existing CSPC members-only forums.

Although I've done pretty much all of the core technical work, a number of other people have put a lot of effort into this project, and I want to take a moment to thank a few of them.

The outstanding graphic design for the site as well as the initial HTML template was done by D.
Lydia did a great deal of work updating content from the old site for the new site.
R did some critical work on the e-commerce part of the site.

Take a look at the new site, and let me know what you think.

www.sexpositiveculture.org

Rigging plates

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 19:04:19 GMT

Like just about every other rigger on the planet, I own a steel ring, which I normally use as the center point of my rigging. The point of the ring is provide a large area for attaching carabiners and/or rope. With a complicated suspension, it's not uncommon to have four or more vertical lines, each of which needs an attachment point at the top of the rig. Depending on the suspension, one or more of those vertical lines may be used as pulleys, in which case the line (which is always doubled) will need to make several passes over the top attachment point. Pretty soon, you find yourself needing a lot of surface area, especially if you don't want your ropes to cluster together and bind.

Lately, I've been experimenting with alternatives to the traditional ring. The best one I've found so far is the Petzl Paw, which is used by climbers as a rigging plate. It's a single block of remarkably light aluminum which has been drilled to accept carabiners. The Paw is rated for a breaking strength of 36kN (about 7,920 pounds), which is far more than you'll ever need. I know and trust the guy who made my ring, but there's still a part of me that likes having a real strength rating on my gear.

I normally rig mine with a single large pear carabiner for each of my vertical lines. Although this system uses a lot of carabiners, it keeps the lines well separated and makes it easy for me to keep track of them during a complicated scene.

It's worth noting that the holes in the plate have fairly abrupt edges and are not suitable for passing ropes through directly: you should always use a carabiner for any rope that's under significant load.

The Paw comes in three sizes: the S (one top hole, three bottom ones), the M (three top holes, five bottom ones), and the L (five top holes, seven bottom ones). The M is probably adequate for most purposes, although I've found that the L is useful on occasion. Mine came from Karst Sports.

Fire Safety

Thu, 24 May 2007 20:06:18 GMT

Build a zombie a fire and he'll stay warm for an hour.
Set a zombie on fire and he'll stay warm for the rest of his life.
-Seen on a Half-Life 2 forum

It's spring, the season when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of juggling. After a long lull, I started getting back into juggling last year, and with the return of nice weather, I'm all excited about getting more serious about it this year. In the spirit of recklessly trying new things, I decided to learn to spin poi, and ordered a bunch of goodies from Home Of Poi.

I've always enjoyed juggling fire, so I ordered some fire poi with an eye to extending my pyrotechnic capers. My order arrived with an excellent fire safety video, so in addition to repeatedly whacking myself in the head with flying poi, I've been spending some time thinking about fire safety. I'm realizing that I started juggling fire back when I was young and foolish, and have never really thought hard about the safety issues involved. My initial take is that I want to make some changes to my technique, but also that the professionals at Home Of Poi are doing some things wrong.

What I've learned:

- HoP talks a lot about safety gear. While I think some of it is overkill in many cases, much of it makes sense. In particular, I've ordered a fiberglass fire blanket and some heavy gloves for squeezing wicks.

- Using the right fuel is important. When I started using fire, I used lighter fluid because that's what all my friends used. It turns out that some fuels are significantly safer than others, and for most uses, kerosene is probably a better choice.

- HoP recommends having a second person take the role of "safety" during a fire performance. They have some excellent thoughts about the safety's role and about how the performer and the safety communicate and share duties during an incident. I don't think it's necessary to have a dedicated safety for certain activities (including flaming torches), but it's a useful concept, and one that I'm sure I'll use on occasion.

What I disagree with:

One of my core beliefs about fire safety is that fuel is inherently dangerous. I put considerable effort into ensuring that all my fuel either goes back into an approved container or else gets burned. That means that I don't let anything except wicks come in contact with the fuel, and I burn my wicks all the way down (especially at the end of the last burn).

HoP, on the other hand, recommends extinguishing wicks before they're spent, and using towels to extinguish wicks and to remove excess fuel from them. Unless I'm missing something, that means that at the end of your burn, you're stuck with a bunch of materials that still contain a significant amount of fuel. That's pretty scary: transporting kerosene-soaked rags in a plastic bag seems like asking for trouble, and even when you get home there's no good way that I can think of to wash them.

So, I'm curious: for those of you who play with fire (in either a juggling or a BDSM context), how do you handle your fuel?

Return of the toilet brush

Tue, 08 May 2007 20:16:33 GMT

I'm continuing to re-shoot Scott Paul's catalog, most recently focusing on his Click-A-Cuff system. I've never been entirely satisfied with the shot that I took of the toilet brush attachment for the humiliator, and I recently took a little time to take another crack at it. It's still not perfect, but I think it's good enough that I can move on with a clear conscience.

It's a challenging piece to shoot, and I thought that some of you photography geeks might enjoy a discussion of how I approached the shoot.

Here's the first shot that I ever took of the toilet brush. It's not exactly a masterpiece, but it captures the basic nature of the product. The biggest problem with this shot is that in order to make the white bristles stand out, I shot the brush against a black background. That's fine in principle, except that the rest of Scott's site uses a white background, and this shot would stick out like a sore thumb.

This was my second attempt, and it's a credible first attempt at a white-on-white shot. The problem, of course, is that a white brush will naturally tend to get lost against a white background. This is compounded by the fact that the human visual system will correctly interpret a shot like this if the foreground object is darker than the background, but not if it's lighter. Furthermore, in this case the white plastic bristles of the brush are considerably brighter than the "white" creaseless paper that I was using as a background.

I solved the problem by placing a gobo (a small card or other object) to cast a shadow on the brush, making it a little darker than the background. The final result is OK, but it's a little harsh, and it doesn't entirely capture the really cool, high-tech nature of Scott's gear.

Here's my current effort, which I like a lot better. The shot feels a lot cleaner and brighter, while capturing the shape of the brush and the texture of the bristles. In addition, I like the horizontal alignment of the brush.

Here's the setup that produced the shot. The brush is sitting on a roll of creaseless paper on a table, propped up by a small cardboard stand.

The primary lighting comes from a Speedotron Force 5 monolight on a boom stand, via a reflective umbrella. This provides a bright, even light from above, with enough diffusion to soften the shadows, but not so much that I can't use a gobo to create shadows where I need them.

Additional fill lighting is provided by a second monolight mounted behind and to the right of the camera, also using a reflective umbrella. The goal of the fill light is to even out the shot and soften the shadows, so you want a fairly dim but very large light source.

A third monolight to the left and slightly forward of the scene provides raking light which helps cast shadows that define the texture of the bristles. For this light, I wanted a very tight light that would cast fairly sharp shadows, so I used no reflector. I did end up having to use a diffuser (a sheet of paper, in this case) to attenuate the light to the necessary level.

As I mentioned before, it's necessary to cast a shadow on the brush in order to darken it and make it stand out from the white background. This is done with a gobo (which is photographer-speak for "the side panel of a Gardenburger box") held in place by a flexible clamp arm.

Here's the raw shot produced by the above setup. It's not bad, but it would benefit from some Photoshop work.

First of course, the cardboard stand needs to go. I removed it using a combination of the clone stamp tool and the blur tool. This kind of work is a huge pain in the ass, and never looks quite as good as an unretouched image. My advice is to avoid editing and get the raw shot right whenever possible. Next time, I'd do this with a thin wire stand, which would cast a much smaller shadow.

In addition, the image needs some level adjustment. The original shot was a little under-exposed, and I wanted to blow out the background as much as possible in order to make it a uniform shade of white.

Finally, I wanted to increase the contrast of the 3rd quadrant of the curve in order to emphasize the texture of the bristles.

Here's the final shot. A careful inspection reveals that something funny has happened underneath the right end of the brush, but it's good enough for an online catalog.

The shape of the brush head is clearly defined, and the texture of the bristles is clear without being harsh. The details of the hardware are clear, and the shiny nature of the handle is apparent (note, incidentally, that this brush was from a different batch than the one in the first two shots, and has a slightly different finish on the handle).

The final work isn't really professional quality, but I'm satisfied with it (for now). If you're curious, here's how the professionals at JT's Stockroom handled the same piece

Photos for Scott Paul

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:19:55 GMT

I've recently been helping my friend Scott Paul re-shoot his online catalog. For those of you who don't know Scott, he's a local guy who makes amazing bondage equipment. Someone once commented that Scott is to bondage equipment what Apple is to computers, and it's an accurate description. He makes some of the sleekest, sexiest gear out there.

In any case, the photography on his site was becoming a problem: although some of it had been shot by some very talented people, some of it was just snapshots, and there really wasn't a coherent aesthetic to the site. The existing images were a hodgepodge of different background colors and aspect ratios. That's a problem for a guy who's all about style.

Taking a look at the site, we decided to standardize on a square aspect ratio because that simplifies a lot of layout problems. The nature of a site like Scott's is that you need to show a bunch of images on the same page, and it's hard to control whether they're all in landscape orientation or all in portrait. By making everything square, they all look good together. We also decided to standardize on a white background (because a lot of his stuff is black), and on having any models wear a full-body red spandex suit.

The suit's been a mixed blessing, and we may revisit that choice in the future. We chose it because it keeps the focus on the product rather than the model, because it keeps the site consistent if we use different models, and because it fits in with Scott's sleek, minimalist design aesthetic. On the downside, there are some technical issues with the shade of red that we ended up using, and the suit has some unfortunate seams on the head.

For me, the project has been a chance to develop my lighting and commercial photography skills. I've done a lot of photography over the years, but have never had a chance to work on a lot of the classic lighting and posing problems. It turns out that Scott's products are an ideal subject for learning about lighting because they bring up almost all of the traditional problems. Scott uses lots of black (which is hard to show details in), lots of materials whose texture is important, and lots of very shiny surfaces that highlight any defects in the lighting setup.

The re-shoot is still very much a work in progress, but I thought I'd share a few of the images that I've shot so far.

The usual disclaimers apply. Although there's no explicit sexual activity in these images, they do show real bondage and suggestive imagery. If images like that are likely to upset you, maybe you shouldn't look at them.

These are some of Scott's basic cuffs, in a PVC finish. They're typical of his look: black and shiny, with very high quality hardware and finish. They also demonstrate some of the technical challenges of shooting his stuff. They're shiny, which is hard because it means that you need to manage the glare of the lights and the reflection of the photographer. They're also black, which is hard because you need to balance getting the blacks really black (because that looks better) with showing detail in the shadows. In this case, I wanted to make the cuffs look cool while still showing off texture of the lining.

This is the half moon bit gag, in the same PVC finish. The goal here is to make part of the gag a really dark black, and part of it whited out by glare, to show the shiny texture. I did a reasonable job of that, although there are a lot of distracting details in the reflection.
The mysterious and seductive woman behind the gag is, of course, Silver.

The same gag, this time in a leather finish. I'm again using glare to show the texture of the material, but the effect is very different.

These are two versions of Scott's latest design, the formal collar. It's an amazing product.

Silver wearing the gold formal collar.

Scott makes an evil (but very pretty) souped-up Wartenburg wheel.

Here's another black-on-black detail shot. In this case, we're looking at the inside of one of Scott's best sellers, the Humiliator. It's an aptly-named gag system with a modular front attachment for adding a variety of service-oriented devices. In this case, the goal was to show off the shiny black look of the gag, capture the texture of the interior lining, and allow a clear view of the half moon bit gag. I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out.

Here's Silver helpfully demonstrating the Humiliator with the floor brush attachment. Note the distracting spiky seams along the top of the suit.

I have mixed feelings about this shot. On the one hand, it just isn't that good. On the other hand, it's a very technically demanding subject, and I think I did a reasonable job under the circumstances. The problem is that the subject (in this case, the toilet brush attachment for the humiliator) is a brighter shade of white than the creaseless paper I was using as a background. It turns out that the brain will perceive a scene like this as "white on white" if the foreground object is darker than the background, but not if it's lighter. The challenge, then, is to light the scene so that the brush (which is brighter than the background, and closer to the lights) is slightly darker than the background.
The solution, as it turns out, is to place a lot of the light above the scene, and use a gobo (a carefully shaped card) to block some of the light that would fall on the brush.

Here's one of Scott's canes. The trick in this case was to shoot the cane at an angle, to keep it from being a tiny horizontal line in a huge blank frame, and to manage the reflection off the chrome handle. If you look carefully, you can see that this was shot in a light tent, which blocks out all reflections except for a single black dot (which is the unavoidable camera lens).

The three different handle finishes on the cane. I'm rather pleased with the iridescent finish on the middle cane.

Scott wanted to show off how flexible the canes are, so Silver got a chance to show off her buff biceps.

This is a fun shot of the Dead Blow Devil, also in the light tent.

This is by far my favorite shot from the whole series. I hate the clutter in the relection, but am otherwise very happy with it.

This is a case where I went with a non-square aspect ratio, because it looked so much better.

gmail is awesome

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 16:56:39 GMT

For a variety of geeky reasons, I use gmail as my mail client. Because gmail's ad-supported, it shows ads next to your email, choosing ads that are likely to be relevant to you based on the contents of your email. If you haven't seen it in action, it's actually better and less intrusive than you'd think.

In any case, I got some email this morning from Nasty Pig (purveyors of fine rubber fetish gear) letting me know that they've got a sale on a particular line of rubber uniform pants. The first of the context-sensitive ads next to it was for "LDS [mormon] missionary clothing".

This pleases me.

One-off book publishing

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 08:06:21 GMT

Another piece of the future has arrived

Here's the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of high technology making human life almost unbearably cool: publishing technology has evolved to the point that it's now possible to print very affordable, high-quality books in any quantity.

For Christmas this year, I printed Tom a book of the shoots that he's been involved in over the last year. It's a 150 page 8x10 hardcover book, with a nice binding and a real dust jacket. The print quality isn't quite up to art book standards, but it's comparable to a nice cookbook or travel book. The cost: under $40. If I'd gone for softcover, I could have brought it in under $35.

The service I used is blurb.com, which has a good reputation for high-quality color printing. There are a number of similar services out there, including lulu.com. The design process is pretty straightforward: Blurb has a nice downloadable client app for designing your book, or you can use the software of your choice and upload the book as a PDF file. Turnaround is fast (about a week), and the whole process is remarkably painless. If you choose to do so, you can make your book publicly available, which lets the general public buy copies. The print service handles order-taking, payment processing, and fulfillment: all you have to do is create the book and collect your check.

Some of the more obvious things you can do with this capability include:

- Self-publishing almost any kind of book. There may be some issues with printing hardcore pornography, but the kind of arty bondage stuff that Tom and I shoot doesn't seem to be a problem.

- Portfolios. A portfolio bound as a book is infinitely more impressive and attention-grabbing than a traditional portfolio.

- Memory books. I know people who print a book of each major vacation they take. Print a life retrospective to give out at a memorial service. Document your house remodel.

For some kinds of content, being bound as a high-quality book fundamentally changes the nature of a document. Books are simply cooler, more authoritative, and more impressive than loose pages in a binder or portfolio.

Kevin Kelly has a good overview of self-publishing services.

Economic costs

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 07:37:12 GMT

As I've mentioned before, I think that the concept of coma time is a particularly helpful way of evaluating the expected cost of a risky activity. A more conventional way, however, is to measure that cost in dollars. As it happens, there's a large body of literature concerning how to do this in the context of highway safety. In many ways, highway safety is much like BDSM safety: in both cases, we're concerned with very low-probability events that kill otherwise healthy and productive individuals.

Organizations like the NHSTA commonly use two measures of the value of a life: the economic value (mostly due to the loss of an individual's lifetime earnings) and the total value (a much vaguer method that attempts to capture not only the direct economic costs, but also the intangible value of a life). Different agencies use slightly different estimates of these, but typical values are $970,000 for the economic value of a life, and $3 million for the total value. We can use these values to calculate the cost of various risky activities in dollar terms. Here's an extension of our previous table:

Risk of death	"Coma time"	Economic cost	Total cost
1% (1 in 100)	164 days	$9,700	$30,000
.1% (1 in 1,000)	16 days	$970	$3,000
.01% (1 in 10,000)	39 hours	$97	$300
.0001% (1 in 1,000,000)	24 minutes	$1	$3
.000001% (1 in 100,000,000)	14 seconds	$.01	$.03

This table means that an act that has a 1 in 10,000 chance of killing you (which I would generally consider to be about the absolute maximum acceptable risk) carries an expected economic cost to society of $97, and a total cost (including the "cost" of bereavement and the intangible value of a life) of about $300.

Anecdotal safety data

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 07:35:32 GMT

Picking up from our previous discussion, let's say that you're interested in a particular activity (we'll continue to refer to it as cow-tipping), but you're concerned about it being risky. How do you decide whether it's safe enough for you? An obvious but wrong answer is to ask people who've had extensive experience with cow-tipping about their experience.

Let me start by saying that talking to experienced cow-tippers is an excellent idea. It's a good way to find out about correct (and safe) cow-tipping technique, and to find out about common but minor safety hazards. If you're concerned about getting your clothes muddy, or about suffering a broken bone, anecdotal data is a great place to start. However, for severe but uncommon risks (such as death), anecdotal data is grossly inadequate. Here's why.

1. There isn't enough data
As I've noted before, I believe the absolute maximum acceptable risk of death is 1 in 10,000 per incident, and a much more reasonable risk is 1 in 100,000 (which still incurs a cost of about 4 hours of coma time). How much anecdotal data do you need in order to determine that cow-tipping has less than a 1 in 100,000 chance of killing someone? On average, you need data about 100,000 incidents. That means that you'll need to talk to approximately 100 people who've gone cow-tipping once a week for 20 years in order to find out whether it's acceptably risky. That may be possible for extremely common activities (like flogging), but for anything remotely unusual (like breath play, or blood sports, or full suspension), you simply don't have anecdotal access to a large enough pool of incidents.

Realistically, how much safety information can you get anecdotally? If you talk to 5 people, each of whom has gone cow-tipping once a month for 10 years without killing someone, you can only say with confidence that cow-tipping has a less than 1 in 500 chance of killing someone. That's 200 times more dangerous than the threshold you ought to be looking for.

2. Survivor bias
People who've been involved in a catastrophic cow-tipping incident (say, one in which someone was killed or gravely injured) are likely to stop cow-tipping (perhaps because they're dead, or in jail, or simply scared). By interviewing people who are currently cow-tipping, you're skewing your sample set toward people who've had good outcomes. An extreme example of this is erotic auto-asphyxiation. Even though it carries an very high risk of death, you will never hear a first-hand account of an erotic auto-asphyxiation death.

3. Correlation of results
This is non-obvious but important. Anecdotal data often gives you less information than you think because the results you're hearing are likely to be strongly correlated. Here's the idea: your friend X tells you that he's gone cow-tipping 1,000 times without getting killed, so your chances of getting killed on a cow-tipping expedition are no more than one in 1,000. Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily work that way. When you investigate a little further, you discover that X has only ever tipped 10 different cows (each unlucky cow, presumably, having been tipped 100 times). Based on X's experience, you can only say with confidence that the incidence of killer cows is less than 1 in 10. If one cow out every 50 is a killer, your real chance of death is closer to 1 in 50, not the 1 in 1,000 that X would have you believe.

What does that mean for BDSM? Many BDSM-related risks are highly dependent on individual characteristics. For example, the risk of retinal detachment (from being struck in the head) and the risk of cardiac arrest (from asphyxiation) will vary dramatically from person to person. Doing breath play many times with one person tells you very little about the risk of a bad outcome when you do it even once with a different person. If you're looking for a 1 in 100,000 safety factor, you need data not only about a very large number of incidents, but about a very large number of different participants.

Given all of that, is anecdotal data useless? Absolutely not. It's an essential starting point, and it may be good enough for evaluating very common activities, or for assessing the risk of minor injury. My point is simply that anecdotal evidence isn't a sufficient basis for deciding that a potentially deadly activity is safe.

Remember this the next time somebody tells you "Sure, cow-tipping is totally safe. My friends and I have been doing it for years, and we've never killed anybody."

Acceptable risk

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 21:51:18 GMT

Let's talk about death. Specifically, let's talk about the risk of dying, and how to decide whether a particular activity is "safe enough" or "too risky".

We all make decisions about risk every day. Every time you decide whether to go skydiving, eat a Caesar salad, or have sex with a stranger, you're making a tradeoff between pleasure and dying. Leaving aside (for now) the question of exactly how likely a particular activity is to kill you, how do you decide how much risk is OK? For example, if going cowtipping has a 1 in 10,000 chance of killing you (angry cows, don't you know), does that mean it's safe?

A good starting point is to look at what an economist would call the expected cost of cowtipping. The basic idea is to figure out, on average, how much a cowtipping excursion will shorten your life. For the sake of argument, let's say that you're 40 years old, and expect to live to age 85. That means that you have 45 years = 16,425 days = 394,200 hours of life left. On average, then, going cowtipping will shorten your life by 1/10,000th of 45 years, which turns out to be about 39 hours, or almost 2 days.

An economist would say that the expected cost of cowtipping is 39 hours of life. Here's how the math breaks down for a variety of risk levels:

Risk of death	Expected life cost
1% (1 in 100)	164 days
.1% (1 in 1,000)	16 days
.01% (1 in 10,000)	39 hours
.0001% (1 in 1,000,000)	24 minutes
.000001% (1 in 100,000,000)	14 seconds

The thing that strikes me about these numbers is how big they are. Even an activity with a 1 in a million chance of killing you is still robbing you of 24 minutes of life. It's not until the chance of death falls to 1 in 100 million that the life cost becomes truly trivial.

So, once you've figured out how much life it'll cost you to eat that Caesar salad, or go home with that hunky number from the bar, or whatever, how do you decide what's acceptable? Obviously, it all ultimately comes down to a judgment call, but here are 2 interesting ways of thinking about the problem:

1. Is activity X riskier than driving?

Driving is frequently cited as an example of a risk that's reasonable to take. So how risky is driving? The short answer is that if you're reasonably safety-conscious (you always wear a seatbelt and don't drive drunk), 1 hour of driving has about a .000022% chance of killing you (about 1 in 4.6 million), at an expected cost of 5 minutes of life.

(Here's the math, for the geeks among you. The 2004 US highway fatality rate was 1.46 per 100 million miles of driving. Assuming an average speed of 30 MPH, that's 43.8 deaths per 100 million hours, or .000044% / hour. We'll divide by 2 because we aren't idiots: for example, 55% of all fatalities weren't wearing seatbelts, even though only 25% of all US motorists don't wear seatbelts.)

If you're OK with doing something that's as dangerous as driving, you should stick to activities whose risk of killing you is no more than 1 in 5 million per hour, or a life cost of 5 minutes per hour. If you're OK with doing something that's 10 times as dangerous as driving, your threshold would be 1 in 500,000 per hour, or a life cost of 50 minutes per hour.

2. How much "coma time" is this activity worth to me?

What does it mean to say that cowtipping has an expected cost of 39 hours of life? On average, every time you go cowtipping, you're shortening your life by 39 hours. One way to think of that is to imagine spending that much time in a coma. Is going cowtipping so much fun that I'd be willing to spend 39 hours in a coma, instead of doing all the other things I could do during that time? Obviously, your answer will depend on your personal preference, but at least as far as sex and BDSM are concerned, I think we can make some general statements:

An activity with a 1 in 10,000,000 chance of killing you will cost you about 2 minutes of "coma time". That's not that much: I think most reasonable people would agree that's an acceptable price to pay.

An activity with a 1 in 10,000 chance of killing you will cost you 39 hours of "coma time". That might possibly be worth it for a very rare, "once in a lifetime" experience, but if you're OK with regularly taking that kind of risk, either your day to day life is pretty lame, or you're having way better sex than I am.

So, a 1 in 10,000,000 risk of death is probably OK, and a 1 in 10,000 risk probably isn't. Beyond that, you'll have to make your own decisions.

[Note to self: remember to pack a calculator in the toy bag]