Lock Box, Mark II

So I built a little key lock box a while ago. I also have a kitchen safe acquired back when they first came out. But geek that I am, I wanted to go one better. In fact, I mentioned this in a thread about it:

It’s a pity the timer doesn’t have separately configurable “on” & “off” intervals. If I had a lot more time and money on my hands, I’d be thinking about using some kind of micro-controller or single-board computer to do the timing.

Well, I now have more time, a small stack of (now) obsolete single board computers, and, AliExpress wasn’t a thing eight years ago when I made that first box.

Why is ruru67 not on FetLife?

Well, I was. Obviously. And I expect to be again, which is why I haven’t removed references to my user-id from here. But for those wondering where I’ve gone:

OK, I’m a geek. Small things interest me. Like, how since FetLife user-IDs (e.g., https://fetlife.com/users/337350) are sequentially assigned, one should be able to determine from a user number when the user first showed up, and therefore how experienced in the ways of Fet they possibly should be. I’ve long used this to indicate how I might respond to a post, especially if it’s one that breached group rules and was in need of moderation.

So I thought to myself, if I had a short, representative table of dates and user numbers, a quick glance will give me a fairly accurate idea of when they person first joined.

So what I did was pick a number, e.g. 5,600,000. Looked up that URL, and browsed to the oldest picture on the profile. If you hover the pointer over the “date” (e.g. “1 day ago”), it displays the actual date.

I’d do this for, 5,600,000, 5,600,001, 5,600,002 and so-on, moving on to the next profile if it was missing, if it had no pictures, or if the date was obviously more recent than the profile. I’d do this until I had two dates that looked plausible and agreed with each other. Typically, this took 10 or so profiles. Then I’d move on to a new base number some distance from the previous.

The table I collected looks like this. In fact it’s the entirety of what I collected from this exercise:

5600000 2/1/2016
5500000 7/12/2015
5400000 12/11/2015
5300000 15/10/2015
5200000 19/9/2015
5100000 28/8/2015
5000000 29/7/2015
4800000 9/6/2015
4500000 19/3/2015
4000000 3/11/2014
3500000 28/5/2014
3000000 11/12/2013
2500000 14/6/2013
2000000 8/12/2012
1500000 2/5/2012
1000000 9/7/2011
500000 8/6/2010

I was going to fill a few holes toward the bottom of the table, since those dates were getting a year or more apart. At this point, FetLife tossed a login box at me. I logged back in, and it tossed it back with,

Please contact support@fetlife.com so we can help you get back in.

Bugger, I thought. I’ve tripped over a bomb. Given the “meatlist” incidents, and the maymay stupidity (Google “maymay fetlife”), I’m not surprised there’s the odd landmine in Fet to prevent abuse. I work on web and mail systems, and have personally written such countermeasures, and in discussions on Fet about these, I’d even suggested them myself. But I wasn’t expecting one to go off from what I was doing. Nor was I expecting anything more than a temporary IP throttle or something.

Let’s just be clear. I can’t see any particular rule I’ve broken here. There are rules in the ToU that forbid automated searches, publishing personal data and so-on. All my queries were done manually. (I’m perfectly capable of writing an automated query; but this job didn’t need it.) There weren’t all that many queries – perhaps 150 or so profiles visited over half an hour or so. (I wasn’t counting.) And there is no personal information being collected, just a list of numbers and dates.

So I mailed support@fetlife.com. I told them what I was doing and why. Of course it also had to be the day they were having trouble with their support system. I also created a new account, ruru68, and posted to the FetLife Tech Support group. At least with the temp account I could see if there was any response.

The response came over a day later. And they banned ruru68! They didn’t tell me this of course; the response was just a low level, “we’ll look into it” and some copypasta questions. The sock was active for a while; its disappearance seemed to correspond with the human attention, including a response from Pairadox to the Tech Support post.

Which seems petty.

It was Friday in Vancouver when they finally and uselessly responded, it’s now Sunday here (Saturday in Vancouver) and I’m not expecting a reply until Tuesday. I’d like a reply before then, but, well, ’til then I’m not on Fet. I’m sure I could create a new sock account, but they’ve made clear they’re don’t want that to happen.

And that, dear reader, is why, despite being an active, vehement – and financial – supporter of FetLife, I’m currently offline. And why I’m more than slightly pissed off at the way they seem to automatically assume that I’m of the ilk of FatherJon and maymay, and don’t just turn the tap back on, but instead took additional action and delayed fixing the problem.

 

FetLife: Really?

If you’re not on FetLife, or not interested in its politics, you might want to skip this one.

So a friend posts an image of a work of art – a painting, photograph, meme, whatever – to FetLife. You’d like to see if that artwork is reference anywhere else; maybe you think it’s by a famous artist, maybe you want to know more about the work, when it was done, what other works by the artist there are. You suspect that more information about it out there.

So here’s what you do.

When there’s trouble in Paradise

So you’re enjoying being in your local kink community. Or you’ve recently started coming to events. Or maybe you’ve just joined FetLife and started interacting online. Most of the people you bump into are friendly and helpful, and great to be around.

But there’s a problem. You can’t walk in without one individual monopolising the conversation. Or they follow up every post you make. Perhaps they keep asking you to play with them.

Maybe the attention has become physical. Or when you try to rebuff them, they threaten to out you to your vanilla peers. Or worse.

Whatever the circumstances, you can’t interact properly with the community at large, because there’s this one person ruining the experience for you. What can you do?

I wrote this article to discuss how people should conduct themselves when there is a dispute. It’s aimed at the New Zealand cultural and legal environment, so please don’t post “but it’s not like that here” replies if “here” isn’t NZ. I know. (Not everybody can live here. Sorry.)

Good Faith Kink

In my previous post, I stated that, “I get a bit tired of all the discussion of RACK or SSC.” Subsequent discussion on FetLife got me thinking about this a bit.

I’ll start by pulling these apart.

SSC, Safe, Sane & Consensual, has been a popular slogan for as long as I’ve been reading about kink, and then some. My main beef with this is the words “safe” and “sane”. They’re absolutes, something you do either is or isn’t “safe” and/or “sane”.

The world I live in isn’t like that. Your safe is my too risky to contemplate, and my sane is your stark raving bonkers. Cases in point:

The safest player in the room

I just read this post of FetLife, and it resonates strongly with me.

At a play party a while ago, someone described me as, “the safest player in the room”. I took that as a complement (because the alternative interpretation is that I’m a complete wuss, and I’m just arrogant enough to dismiss that), but here’s the thing:

I fuck up in every scene.

Story: The Facility

In several stories, I’ve explored the question of how to do permanent and semi-permanent bondage without turning my characters into monsters. For this story, I’ve dispensed with such inconvenient niceties.

If you want a human being to be your permanent work of art, you might be able to obtain it from The Facility…

In search of Raul Fernandez

So, back in the mid ’90s, when Usenet was still usable, I came across this image. It was called “danni.gif”, and yes, it was a GIF file, as many images were then – JPEG hadn’t completely taken over as an image format. The quality is about what you’d expect from the drawing tools of the time, and there are some problems with proportions – there’s something about her legs that doesn’t quite look right, and the wrist restraints look like they were installed by a drunk …

… but the predicament … oh …

… her expression …

… those shoes are going to be a problem in a short space of time …

… is there any hope of rescue?

Suffice to say, it tickled me in some dark and scary places. And a decade and a half later it still does. In fact, the “Danni” stories take the title character’s name from the name of this image.

The image disappeared from my collection, but after a while I stumbled over it again, and it’s a permanent part of my image collection. I always wanted to know who the artist was, and whether they had any more work. The only clue I had was the signature.

But now there’s a feature on Google Images that lets you give it an image URL, and it will go look for matching images. And so I set it to work. A bit of creative Googling from the initial set of results, and it turns out that the artist is one Raul Fernandez of California. And he has a web site, “Raul’s Sexy Females“. It’s not a bondage art site per se, but some of the work is really quite good. And fun. Go and look.

But here the trail goes cold again. The contact emails don’t work; they point to a valid domain name, but the mail server basically says “sod off” when you try to connect to it. Lots more Googling and whois-ing reveals other associated email addresses, but so far no answers.

So, Raul, if you’re out there somewhere, I love your work. If there’s a way I can show appreciation for an image that tickles me in a way that makes me keep coming back to it beyond mere words, please get in touch.

Don’t ask me for my safeword.

Also posted to FetLife. Sorry, not a story, just another rant in the BDSM myths series …

If I had a dollar for every time I heard people talking about safewords as if they were the number one thing to negotiate in a scene, I’d … have quite a lot of dollars.

I don’t negotiate a safeword when I play.

Now, I’m no BDSM veteran. I’ve been kinky my whole life, and been around the local scene off and on for mumbleteen years, but am more of a solo kinkster. I haven’t done much play with other people, partly due to my own introverted personality, partly due to a decade long (but now safely over) kink-excluding relationship. But when I started to play with other people, and the discussion of safewords came up, I started to think about this in my usual, never mind the received wisdom let’s start from first principles kind of way.

And the first principle is this: consent. Consent is what separates play from criminal assault. So, what we need in a scene is the ability to communicate consent. Other communication is important to driving the scene in the best way for both parties, but in this game, consent trumps all other considerations.

At this point someone will chime in and say, “that’s what safewords are for!” Well, yes, that is what they’re for. But let’s explore that further.

TENS above the waist

I posted this on FetLife in October, but figured it could use some more coverage …

Here’s the thing. We’ve all heard the “rule” that you should never play with electricity above the waist. Some people are quite vehement about it.

On the other hand, I’ve never actually heard of above-the-waist electro-play, at least not using electro-stim or TENS units, killing anyone, or even putting them in danger. Medical supply outfits routinely sell TENS (transcutaneous electronic nerve stimulation) units for pain relief, and folks put the electrodes in all sort of places, mostly well above the waist. Nobody appears to have ever died from this.

Since for the most part, when we talk of electro-play, we’re really talking about TENS units or electro-stim units that work on fundamentally the same principle, this seems to fly in the face the oft-quoted advice. Somehow, if there was, I’d expect that somewhere along the line, at least some of the vast numbers of vanillas with a TENS unit and no clue about electricity or physiology would have managed to fry themselves by now.