Tertiarymatt

The stream of new whiskies keep coming. Here are my thoughts on some that I’ve tried over the past month or so.

Starting with scotch, I’m enjoying the new Ardbeg “Ardbog.” I must be. I’m halfway through my bottle. (Okay, so I had some help.) It’s contains some Ardbeg matured in Manzanilla sherry casks. I think the Manzanilla integrates a little better than the Marsala in Ardbeg, which was the sherry influence in Ardbeg’s previous release, Galileo. Plus, I find myself in the mood more for Ardbog than I do Galileo.

At WhiskyFest Chicago, I tasted the new Port Charlotte 10 year old (PC 10) from Bruichladdich and really liked it. Great balance to it, along with a nice maturity. This whisky has really come of age.

Regarding Irish whiskey, I tasted a new Powers Signature Release Single Pot Still whiskey at WhiskyFest, bottled at 46% and not chill-filtered. There’s no age statement, and it doesn’t taste as old as Powers John’s Lane 12 year old, but I really enjoyed it. It’s another nicely balanced, flavorful Irish whiskey. (I’m told it will be in the U.S. this September.)

Up north in Canada, Canadian Club has introduced a Canadian Club 12 year old Small Batch. According to my contact, it contains a higher percentage of barley and is aged in more first-fill casks than the standard CC 12. I think I would enjoy something light like this during the warmer summer months.

Here in the U.S., there’s a bunch of new releases from Beam. The Limited Edition “Distiller’s Masterpiece” is an “extra-aged” bourbon finished in Pedro Ximinez (PX) sherry casks. Those of you who know PX sherry won’t be surprised when I tell you that there’s a lot of raisonated fruit in there, along with layers of toffee and other caramelized sugars. It’s a polarizing whisky, given the fruit, but I’m enjoying it as a change of pace. It’s also expensive ($200) and only available at the distillery. Those of you drinking bourbon as long as me will remember the Beam released two previous Distiller’s Masterpiece whiskies over a decade ago, one finished in cognac and the other finished in port wine. They were older (18 and 19, respectively), and I liked both of these more than this new release.

Beam has also released two Beam “Signature Craft” whiskeys: one is a 12 year old (which will be a regular stock item), and the other is finished in Spanish brandy (the first of a series of limited edition releases). I like the 12 year old. It’s very traditional, polished, nicely rounded and easy-going. It’s not going to set the world on fire with excitement, but it is indeed very enjoyable with nothing to complain about (except perhaps for the ABV, which is 43%. I would like to see it at 45% or maybe even higher.) The Spanish Brandy  release is more of a mood whiskey, given it’s Spanish brandy influence. It’s rich, fruity and sweet. Just like the Distiller’s Masterpiece above, I think some of you might like this for variety, but “traditionalists” might not be so receptive.

Heaven Hill has released a Limited Edition Barrel Proof Elijah Craig 12 year old. It’s nice to see the age statement still on this whiskey. (It seems all too often that when a producer introduces a barrel proof version of a brand, they do away with the age statement and release it at a younger age.) I like it! It’s very much in the EC style: lots of chewy, nutty toffee notes. In fact, given its higher proof, I would describe it as chunky–in a good way. It’s not a polished or refined bourbon, but it sure is flavorful.

Finally, I would like to mention two other new whiskies I’m enjoying. The new Amrut Greedy Angels  (50% ABV) proves once again that this distillery from India can release lovely whiskies. Also, the whiskies from Taiwan’s Kavalan distillery will be here in the U.S. later this year. I recently tasted my way through their line-up. While I was pleased with most of their offerings, I was particularly impressed with the Kavalan Solist Vinho Barrique bottling. It was complex, distinctive, and nicely mature.

Updated: Two late additions I almost forgot about. (Thanks Adam for the reminder in the comment section on both.) My Editor’s Pick for the Summer issue of Whisky Advocate is the new Angel’s Envy Rye. I really like that whisky. I enjoy the spice from the rye and how it dovetails with the Caribbean rum notes. I also am enjoying the new Four Roses 2013 Limited Edition Single Barrel Bourbon. It’s 13 years old, but the oak is kept in check, with plenty of spice, fruit and sweetness.

How about you? What new releases have you been enjoying lately?

 

 

 

 

As many of you know, I was at the Mother Earth News Fair all this past weekend.

The MEN Fair is an interesting gathering place. Walking through the big, gravel parking lot across from the Puyallup Fairgrounds where the MEN Fair is held, you pass pick-up trucks and minivans festooned with Conservatarian bumper stickers that say things like Make Yourselves Sheep and The Wolves Will Eat You and Invest In Precious Metals: Buy Lead. These are parked right next to Priuses and Nissan Leafs with their own declarative slogans: My Other Car Is A Bike, Dirt Worshipping Tree Hugger, and of course, Think Globally Act Locally.

Inside, tee-shirts declare people’s personal political beliefs about raw milk, gun rights, soil fertility, heirloom seeds and more. What, you didn’t think it was possible to have a political perspective on heirloom seeds? I assure you it is.

It’s an interesting collection of people, is what I’m saying. A crowd with strong ideas and, in many ways, very polar worldviews. From the preppers and strongly conservative libertarian folks interested in unhindered living to the environmental activists who push for stronger regulation of industry and carbon neutral communities, most people who come to this Fair seem to have a real opinion about things.

People who, on the surface, seem to have very little in common with each other join this gathering of vendors and speakers and demonstrations because they want to learn how to live a life more in keeping with their own values.

This is something I see over and over again in this community – seemingly insurmountable political differences fade into the background when practical How To Live The Life You Want issues come to the fore.

Then, suddenly, there is common ground. Self-determination and frugality make natural bedfellows with green and sustainable living. Issues of food freedom – the right to grow your own food and choose what you’ll eat – bring people together over samples of pastured milk and Seed Saver’s Exchange catalogs.

The bearded hippie with the ear gauges and the tattered sandals and the crew-cut dude who almost certainly has a progressive reloader in his basement swap tips for mortgage-free living, cob home-building and DIY rocket mass heaters. The born-again Christian homeschooling mom and the Pagan herbal healer both support labeling GMOs.

The practical trumps the political, at least for awhile.

I just adore this aspect of the Mother Earth News Fair, and of the Modern Homesteader community in general. Diverse, passionate, disparate individuals all together, learning the common skills they need to live the life they want. Side-by-side, learning canning, gardening, herbalism, bokashi composting, animal husbandry, seed saving, solar cookery and more. It’s like a giant Fuck You from the DIY community to the divisive, pigeonholing soundbite-world of Fox News vs. MSNBC, elephants vs. donkeys, red states vs. blue states. (And honestly, I can think of little more deserving of an upraised middle finger than drummed-up conflict for conflict’s sake.)

It’s almost as if there is another axis, another spectrum, different and maybe more important than the Liberal-to-Conservative spectrum. Let’s call it Engaged-to-Apathetic. This axis represents just how much people care about what they see as the big picture issues. And though not everyone at the Mother Earth News Fair would agree on the exact ranking and criticality of those issues, there is a common vibe one gets from attendees: these people give a damn. They care about what’s going on around them.

And here’s the really important thing. These are not armchair activists, screaming at their TV in angry futility or leaving pointless, abusive comments on a news website. They care enough to put down the remote, to step outside, to learn, and to ask, and to investigate their own options for action. They are willing to do what they can, with what they have, in their own life.

What a boring place this world would be if we all looked at things the same way. But how nice it is that the different ways we look at things doesn’t have to compromise our ability to learn from and with each other.

Because you read this blog, it’s safe to assume that you give a damn, right? Do you ever feel like you’re the only one, or are you surrounded with fellow I-give-a-damn-ers?

 

Last year at an event in Los Angeles, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed he'd come up with the idea for an entirely new form of transportation. He called it the Hyperloop, and here's how he described it:

...How would you like something that can never crash, is immune to weather, goes 3 or 4 times faster than the bullet train... it goes an average speed of twice what an aircraft would do. You would go from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes. It would cost you much less than an air ticket than any other mode of transport. I think we could actually make it self-powering if you put solar panels on it, you generate more power than you would consume in the system. There's a way to store the power so it would run 24/7 without using batteries. Yes, this is possible, absolutely.

Naturally this got people's curiosity up, and at this week's AllThingsD conference he was asked about it again. Not wanting to divert attention from Tesla, he briefly allowed that the Hyperloop would be a "cross between a Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table."

This sounds a lot like the futuristic ET3, or Evacuated Tube Transport Technology, we wrote up last year (pictured directly below and up top).

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When an Italian police force was given two Lamborghini Gallardos in the mid-2000s, there was at least some pretext: The Polizia Stradale were to respond to emergencies along the lengthy Salerno-Reggio Calabria freeway, and the cars were kitted out with organ transplant coolers in the luggage compartment. To date I've never read of them actually ferrying kidneys from Salerno to Reggio Calabria, but it sure made for some great ink.

Dubai Police got the same ink, but made no such claims when they pulled the sheets off of a Lamborghini Aventador done up in their green and white livery. And that car quickly acquired stablemates: Next came a Ferrari FF (to be driven by the female officers only, not sure why), a Mercedes SLS AMG, a Bentley Continental GT, and the absurdly exclusive Aston Martin One-77.

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Photos by Simon Markhof

With the help aerospace engineers at EADS, Somerset, UK-based Charge Bikes have refined and expanded their 3D-printed dropout production since we first came across them last August, as evidenced by a new vid from last week. However, German IDer Ralf Holleis does them one better with the VRZ 2 Track bicycle, developed under the VORWaeRTZ moniker. (Further details on Holleis's practice are scant; from what I can determine, he's connected to the equally mysterious designlab coburg.)

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Earlier this month, we took a look at Sunglass, a product design collaboration site where users can download plug-ins to connect their local CAD environments to the cloud. Their partnership with Cadenas Part Solutions, a company that creates digital catalogs for major parts manufacturers, is starting to reveal the promise of such a system.

The two companies' newly-announced joint venture, the Sunglass Parts Library, provides users the ability to instantly access parts files—gears, motors, hinges, etc.—and integrate those parts directly into their CAD files. "It's the first interactive application with the ability to integrate an enterprise-grade manufacturing library directly into the 3D design environment," they write. The analogy isn't perfect, but the team-up is sort of an industrial design version of the iPod-and-iTunes ecosystem: Its success is dependent not only on the interface's ease-of-use, but also on the ability to sign up multiple bodies—in Apple's case, the music labels; in Cadena's case, the parts suppliers.

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Those photos above are from the shop at Autologistics Japan, a company in that country that specializes in converting the driver's position from one side of the car to the other. While the before/after shots don't appear to be of the same exact car—unless they switched the transmission from automatic to manual as well, which I understand can be done—the company claims they can convert some 30-odd models at a rate of 80 to 100 per month. In Australia, a company called Performax does similar work using digital manufacturing tools.

On the interwebs you can find decidedly jankier belt-driven conversions:

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Watch Biologist Dr Jonny Miller introduce the spectacular common potoo. It’s brown, blends in, and doesn’t move much… so why is it so spectacular? Exactly for those reasons. The common potoo is a camouflage master, bravely controlling its movements — or lack of them — in the face of predators. From Dr. Miller: 

Although you might not see them, the common potoo is, indeed, common in at least parts of its range. This rage extends from Nicaragua in Central America, south to Argentina. Six other species of potoo are known of, all generally similar in appearance and all performing the same posturing cryptic behaviour.

We’re always thrilled to find a scientist out in the field making videos about their work. Dr Miller is currently in Paraguay, South America, studying capuchin monkeys, and has been blogging about the animals there at planetparaguay.com.

Bare by Helen Dallat and Daisy Gould. After this, watch more videos about seasons…

Angel’s Envy Bourbon has no doubt been quite a success story. The company set themselves apart with a sourced (not distilled by Angel’s Envy but procured) bourbon finished in port barrels. This easy drinking, fruity bourbon has won over a lot of folks, including me. I rated it a 9.3, which is an extremely high rating on my site. What I appreciated most about Angel’s Envy Bourbon is the company took a pretty standard, “good” bourbon whiskey and made it FAR better than the sum of its parts through this finishing (a second aging) process.

So what does the company do for the next major release?

Angel’s Envy has just answered that question with a new Rye Whiskey finished in Caribbean Rum casks. Offered at 100 proof, Angel’s Envy Rye Whiskey begins with a sourced rye from Midwest Grain Products (MGP, formerly LDI). Unless you have been sleeping under a rock, or not paying attention, you’ve likely had an MGP rye in the form of Bulleit Rye, George Dickel Rye, or many other products on the shelves. MGP has built a name for producing unique bourbon and rye whiskeys that many independent bottlers are working overtime to make less unique.

Needless to say, a whiskey geek like me certainly looks forward to trying something like this. Here are my thoughts….

Angel’s Envy Rye Whiskey, 50% abv (100 Proof), $70.00/bottle
Color: Light Amber
Nose: A trip to the islands. Brown sugar, Orange and grapefruit rind, candied pineapple, coconut cream, clove, and cinnamon with the green, fresh herbal and gin botanical spice notes ever present in MGP rye whiskeys. The rum influence is heavy handed, and I’d prefer something a bit more harmonious, but it’s intriguing and completely unique. A splash of water brought out some lemon-lime soda (WTF?).
Palate: Creamy on the palate with spiced honey, brown sugar syrup, golden raisin, cinnamon, and a sweet rye notes. The rye spice is most prevalent on the palate.
Finish: The finish lingers moderately with a big return of the rum, tropical fruit sweetness, and green rye spice.
Overall: I haven’t been more confused about a whiskey in a long time. In a world of sameness (all those other MGP ryes that taste VERY similar), it’s nice to nose and sip something different. Angel’s Envy Rye Whiskey certainly qualifies as “different”. More similar to rye flavored rum from a profile perspective, I cannot say I have ever tasted a whiskey that’s picked up more aroma and flavor from a finishing process. That’s good and bad because the fresh, green rye notes fought the heavy, sweet rum influence from sniff to finish. I’d have preferred something a bit more harmonious and well integrated. One interesting little note – my lips and hands (dripped a little) smelled like I’d been drinking pina coladas all day. If you love (I mean LOVE) rum, and are looking for something totally different in the American Whiskey category – this one ticks all those buttons. I predict most will either love it or hate it, but give it a try and let me know what you think. It certainly has character (and a big price tag). Ahoy me hearties!
Sour Mash Manifesto Rating: 8.2 (Very Good)

***Sample provided for this review***

This is a more half-baked entry than most, but I feel it’s as far as I can push it right now without additional reading or feedback. Please do comment to share thoughts, or send me emails.

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. – Neil Gaiman, American Gods

The balance between the formal and the informal is a constant. The formal being the structures, agreements, legible interactions of people trying to exact control and predictability out of their world. It is the tallying of food on a ship to ration for a voyage gone awry, it is the systematizing of forestry to produce a known quantity of wood, it is the manual of building types by address on the secret shelves of a fire truck. The informal is the learning to fish, the grazing of sheep on a multigrowth forest, the running in to do what you can when the books don’t have a reference for the fire you’re looking at.

For generations, we have optimized for outputs rather than for adaptability. We have chosen for formal over the informal, in the belief it was the only way for us to survive. We have made our systems predictable with the factors we were aware of, but we did not see enough. This has made us fragile.

We have optimized our objectives and approaches for the removal of cognitive and emotional barriers, allowing ourselves to produce at scale and have use impact via torque. Slower moving, but persistent and consistent. This allows us to produce and plan, a necessary approach for growing populations. The current (and hopefully continuing) trend of glorifying innovation is a response to this. It is about difference and barriers forcing examination and collaboration. That brings out creativity and the ability to adapt. This is quick, but not patient, and rarely replicable. It is the wibbly bits around the edges, the water that flows between the scaffolding.

I have started comparing these aspects to the level of detail we can get out of digitization approaching and surpassing what the human brain can process. The beauty of analog, and of those wibbly bits, is that this is where the smoothness of sound comes in, the ease of a brush stroke. The deep quality and enjoyable nature of an LP, as opposed to the lossy MP3 of the same song. But digitizing means we can replicate, send, readily share that song, and as our processing power increases, we are able to approximate real life more and more.

This has entirely to do with how much detail is available for you at each level of zoom, and what your ability to perceive those differences is. As I talked to Kav about this blog entry yesterday, slowly sunburning on a walk through New Orleans streets, he pointed out that one theory of chaos is it as order complex beyond the ability to process.

Pixels and paintbrushes. Our desire to plan and optimize has interrupted our ability to create and adapt. There is a tension here which could be used to better each component, rather than have them at odds. We now have the ability to see and use more complexity, but we are bringing the mindset of optimization through simplification to it. Big Data^TM shouldn’t just be about what falls within allowable standard deviations, it’s about acknowledgement and examination of the tails; and more importantly, the complexity of interaction. We now have the ability to have a large quantity of qualitative data. And that is amazing.

If each of us is a set of pixels in an image, or we produce the pixels which make up a digital self, at some point you get high resolution by sharing more, but it’s still in the abstraction of viewing the whole picture that people get a sense of who you are. Strangely, because we are each sharing things with metadata, we are also able to get abstraction divorced from the individual, and rather across the topic (EverydayCarry being a great example of this). These pixels, if we each are keeping our heads down for fear of how we are treated in the future, lead to one bland picture when you step back from the individual into the zoom setting of society. Civic Media blog

That thing about the map becoming more and more accurate, and that making it too bulky to be useful in any way is now negated by filters. And filters which inform each layer about context. We now CAN have the map as the territory.

There are remainder thoughts here about how this self-documentation now means explicit selectiveness in the enforcement of law. And how the process of making the illegible (those woobly, informal bits) legible is what monocultures a system. But this is already wordy, and I am hungry. Maybe another time.

For the last month, the kids have been super into Florentijn Hofman’s Rubber Duck in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour. On display until June 9, the Dutch artist’s six-story tall duck has previously floated around waters in Osaka, Sydney, Sao Paolo, and Amsterdam, and will soon be coming to a (currently secret) destination in the United States.

This is the Otamatone Jumbo, not to be confused with the Otamatone or the Otamatone Deluxe. They were developed in Japan by the Cube Works Company along with Maywa Denki and Novmichi Tosa. Otamatones are available on ThinkGeek and Amazon.

via io9.

How is an Etch A Sketch made? MAKE: Inventions host Steve Hoefer gives a bit of historical background on the classic toy, and then, with the original patent and some trial and error, tries to make his own.

via 22 words.

From 0 to 75mph in just three seconds — in just three strides, it’s faster than most of the world’s fastest super cars — the Smithsonian Channel describes the biomechanics behind why the cheetah is the world’s fastest land animal.

Follow this video up with this singular slow motion video of a cheetah running.

via Viral Viral Videos.

To know how food is grown — and how to grow it — to know who grows it, how it’s processed and shipped, and how far it might be coming from to get to our plates… we like finding videos that chronicle how these systems happen.

The Perennial Plate is a great resource for not only learning about food’s origins, but how people eat and endeavor in cultures around the world. Chef Daniel Klein and camerawoman Mirra Fine are currently traveling the globe to tell these stories.

From Splendid Table, Mirra and Daniel talk about their experience filming Coconut: Nose to Tail, and how efficient the use of a tree can be: 

MF: For the people of Sri Lanka, the coconut is really a source of life. Not only because it is an ingredient that is found in most Sri Lankan foods, but also because the coconut tree itself, from the trunk to the leaves to the actual nut, is used in non-food elements of their life… 

DK: They are selling really every part of the coconut. They are selling the toddy to a toddy producer, they are selling their husks to a rope producer, they are selling the oil to an oil producer, and then they use the coconuts for their own cooking and also to build huts and things like that.

Watch another Perennial Plate video: Lifen Yang’s small farm to table restaurant in Kunming, China, and then spend time on some farms around the globe.

What every bee needs is a good watering hole, and the bees at the Oak Creek Center for Urban Horticulture in Corvallis, Oregon have the fanciest one I’ve seen. Water comes in through a drip irrigation-type system. The hose from the source runs up the side of the structure and through the middle of the [...]

Until May 30th, THE YAWHG is available for pre-order! It's half off 'til then, and after May 30th it'll officially be released (for PC Only).

This is the game I made with Damian Sommer last year for TCAF's Comics vs Games jam, though now there's loads of new writing, not to mention some more lovely music (and there's a little bit more art too)! I also made this post about it a few months ago, showcasing more art from the game in case you'd like to have a look.

For more info on what The Yawhg is all about, please do check out the game's press page. Thanks!

This is a story I’ve shared a handful of times in real life, but had never thought to write it down until Babeland reached out and asked me to recount an experience with their products.

Babeland, at the time called Toys in Babeland, is responsible for my sexual awakening and very first orgasm and I cannot think of either of those lifetime landmarks without picturing their candy-colored Seattle storefront with artificial ivy lining its windows.

Growing up, my mother taught me a very warped view of what sex meant. In her misguided efforts to keep me “pure” she told me my virginity was a “gift” to give my husband on our wedding night, and that sex itself was “just something you have to do to keep your husband from leaving you” Sex, as I understood it, was something that was painful and forced on you, an unpleasant chore you simply had to do, like getting a pap smear. There was no mention that I may have my own desires, that my own pleasure may somehow be included in this marriage/business transaction. In addition to this misinformation, I also had some painful vaginal afflictions as a child that made me associate that area with suffering.

Around the age of 16 or 17, I became aware that other girls my age not only did, indeed, feel sexual desire, but were actually acting upon it. In the locker room or huddled in groups in the hall, they’d talk about how far they’d gone with partners or even… by themselves with their own hands? Huh? How did THAT work? At this time I was also starting to feel uncomfortable aches that I would attempt to cure by awkwardly shoving my dry finger inside my equally dry vagina. I made valiant, unpleasant efforts that left me feeling like I was missing a fundamental part of my body that everybody else seemed to posses. I wanted what “all the other” girls said they were able to do, I wanted to know how my body worked, I wanted to orgasm, damnit!

Which brings us to the brightly painted Toys in Babeland shop, with its playful, inviting window displays of vibrators suspended to look like they were flying with little taped-on wings and pun-y signs and that artificial- though not tacky- ivy lining the edges of the glass. Located at 707 E Pike, not more than three blocks away from my high school, my best friend (and sort-of girlfriend, though I wasn’t ready to realize that at the time) and I would nervously-bravely poke inside during our lunch breaks in 12th grade, which is when senior students were officially allowed to go off campus between classes.

Inside there was always one or two queer-looking ladies with short spikey hair, glasses, flannel and chunky boots (this was the late ’90s) who would greet us. They never sized us up, never made us feel like trespassers and, without being over-enthusiastic, they welcomed us. They encouraged me to ask questions, patiently and kindly explaining all the exotic and confounding objects they stocked, never patronizing me or making me embarrassed for my lack of basic knowledge.

I will always be grateful to the young woman -probably in her very early 20s, though at the time she seemed like a total adult to me- who gave me her email address and offered to answer any more of my questions that I may think of later, outside of the store and away from my friend. She didn’t need to do that, she was only being paid to work in that shop, volunteering her personal time to answer a teenager’s basic, obvious questions was definitely not in her job description when she signed on to work there. But she wasn’t offering this to me because it was her job; she genuinely cared about sex education and saw an opportunity to help a young girl learn about her body, about sex, about pleasure.

I don’t remember her name, but I’ve appreciated that act of kindness for a decade and have tried to pay it forward to others any chance I can, especially in my comics.

Enough about the customer service, lemme tell you about my very first sex toy.

The Silver Bullet Vibe.

Given that I was a high school student without a job, I didn’t exactly have access to large funds. My purchases were dictated by their affordability, and the $9.95 price tag of the Silver Bullet made it, I think, my only option in the store. It’s one of the most basic vibrator models you can find; a silver plastic egg connects through a black cord to a control stick that fits easily into one hand, with a sliding, heart-shaped button that you push up or down to increase the power of the egg’s vibrations. It remained hidden in its discreet brown paper bag in the bottom drawer of my wardrobe for three days until I worked up the courage to pop in two AA batteries and turn it on.

You know how in sci-fi movies, the villain will point a giant laser at a planet and the entire surface of it gets spiderweb cracks with brilliant light shining through, moments before it explodes?

That is exactly how my body felt as I touched down that vibrating egg, on its lowest setting, to my vulva for the first time.

Over a decade later the memory of my first orgasm is still vivid to me. I remember feeling all the nerves in my body flood with electricity, experiencing blue and white light shatter through my skin and loosing all control of my body as it convulsed in a turbulent fit.

After my first orgasm had concluded, I couldn’t move. I lay there paralyzed, panting, feeling like I’d been hit by a Mac truck.

That was the first time I loved my body.

In the decade since my sexual awakening, I’ve tried out many other toys, fancier, more expensive ones. I’ve learned how to orgasm from my hand and with a partner. My body comes from stimulation to my nipples, my clitoris, my vagina, my anus, from performing oral sex on a partner and, in some cases, from not even being touched at all. I know my body well and it delights me.

I shudder when I think about the lies my mother told me, the sex life she was training me to have. I could have been robbed of all this, of the love and pleasure I’ve experienced since I bought my first, tiny vibrator as a scared, ignorant teenager.

Babeland is a business, yes, but to me they will always be more than that.

When I see their logo online, when I pass their brick and mortar shops, I always take a moment to silently tell them “Thank You” in my mind. Thank you for your fun, brightly lit stores. Thank you for your kind, welcoming staff. Thank you for my first vibrator. Thank you for my first orgasm.

Thank you, Babeland.

Thank you.

---

This essay was generously sponsored by Babeland but the opinions expressed are Erika Moen’s and not Babeland’s. Read Erika’s 2005 comic about her first orgasm with the silver bullet here!

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

We have two delightful new prints available in the QC Store!

VanCaf is this weekend! I will be there! You should also be there!

“After three months I should be finding deficiencies, and I did. I started having joint pain and found I fit the symptoms of a sulfur deficiency. This makes perfect sense as I consume almost none, and sulfur is a component of every living cell. Sulfur is hard to miss in a typical diet so the FDA would have little reason to recommend it. A typical male physique has 140g of sulfur, making it the sixth most abundant element in the human body. Ten grams of sulfur from Methylsulfonylmethane cured me right away, and I now consume 2g/day. Sulfur is also what gives flatulence its characteristic odor. Most gas is just Hydrogen, but humans have evolved to be extremely sensitive to Hydrogen Sulfide, which is by the gram as deadly as cyanide, and produced by the bacteria in our colon. Before this change my gas was odorless. Releasing the equivalent of deadly cyanide gas from our anuses is a questionable design decision, nature. I have not experienced any other deficiency symptoms and am quite confident I am now getting everything I need, but I will keep testing. I have been keeping better track of my physical traits. I’m holding steady at 180 lbs, and my muscle mass is about 46%, which is optimal for my lifestyle. I have 6.4lbs of bone mineral mass and am 63.8% water by weight, both normal. My body fat is currently 9.6%, which is a little too low for a non-athlete. Because of this when I do take the time to eat I converge towards bacon, which serves as an efficient source of fatty acids and happiness. Bacon is high in Oleic acid, the principal component of adipose (fat) tissue so it is great for increasing body fat. While the environmental effects of livestock farming do bother me, I think eating meat as rarely as I do is completely sustainable. However, bacon also has Palmitic acid, which is closely associated with cardiovascular disease so moderation is still in order. By the way, an acid is anything that donates protons. Only a few have corrosive properties like sulfuric acid, and bases can be corrosive too. Additionally, I track my sleep now, using a device called the “Zeo”, an EEG headband that measures characteristic patterns of different sleep cycles. According to this device, I sleep like a baby, with an average “ZQ” of 104. Typical 20 year olds score 84.”

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Soylent Month Three : Mostly Harmless

Soylent Guy keeps at it.  There will be crowdfunding, through Crowdhoster.

I just nerded in my pants a little

Easy experiment: Drink orange juice. Brush your teeth. Drink orange juice again. What just happened?

From Bytesize Science, an explanation as to why most toothpastes change the taste of orange juice. The video includes an intro on the five basic tastes that we’re able to detect: sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, and umami — a Japanese word that we’ve borrowed to describe a “pleasant savory taste” or “a pleasant, brothy or meaty flavor” — and the ingredients of toothpaste.

More videos about the body and how things work.

Obligatory Daft Punk comic!

Looks cool...

Move over, Rain Tail—there's a new ultraminimal rear fender in town. The Plume is a recoiling mudguard that is deployed by unrolling the coiled strip of stainless steel and 'retracted' with a simple flick. The hardware slides neatly onto a bicycle seatpost and it looks something like a sideways cupholder when not in use, functioning something like a reverse slap-bracelet.

Note: Animated GIF for purposes of illustration only

Founders Dan McMahon and Patrick Laing met three years ago in London and have been developing the Plume for about as long. Now that they've filed a patent on the recoiling design, they're pleased to present their creation to the public via Kickstarter.

It's certainly a clever solution to a common problem, and the Kickstarter page duly features a couple examples of what Sparse deemed to be "bike hacks," i.e. variations on DIY mudguards. The main advantage of these ad hoc fabrications is that they're inherently disposable; the tradeoff is that they're ugly as sin.

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Color me impressed! I figured the next generation of designer-relevant input devices would come from Apple or Wacom, but surprise—it's Adobe. The software giant is venturing into hardware, and their resultant Project Mighty looks pretty damn wicked so far.

The Adobe Mighty Pen is designed for sketching on tablets, and it's got at least two brilliant features integrated with their drawing app: Since the screen can distinguish between the pen's nib and your mitts, you can draw with the pen, then erase with your finger. No more having to click a submenu to change the tool. And when you do need a submenu, you click a button on the pen itself to make it appear on-screen.

The truly awesome device, however, is the pen's Napoleon Ruler. Adobe's VP of Product Experience Michael Gough was trained as an architect, and wanted to bring the efficacy of sketching with a secondary guiding tool--like we all once did with our assortment of plastic triangles, French curves and the like--to the tablet experience. What the Napoleon does is so simple and brilliant, you've just got to see it for yourself:

Presumably they're still working out the kinks, as the release date is TBD.

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“

Laurie Penny’s Saudade

There are more of us than you think, kicking off our high-heeled shoes to run and being told not so fast

The best minds of my generation consumed by craving, furious half naked starving-

Who ripped tights and dripping make up smoked alone in bedsits bare mattresses waiting for transfiguration.

Who ran half dressed out of department stores yelling that we didn’t want to be good and beautiful

Who glowing high and hopeful were the last to leave the gig our skin crackling with lust and sweat and pure music

Who wrote poetry on each other’s arms and cared more about fucking than being fuckable

Who worked until our backs stiffened and our limbs sang with the memory of misbehaviour that was what it was to be a woman

Who dared to dance until dawn and were drugged and raped by men in clean T-shirts and woke up scared and sore to be told it was our fault

Who swallowed bosses’ patronizing side-eyes stole away from violent broken boys in the middle of the night and vowed never again to try to fix the world one man at a time

Who slammed down the tray of drinks and tore off our aprons and aching smiles and went scowling out into the streets looking for change

Who stripped in dark rooms for strangers’ anodyne dollars because we wanted education and were told we were traitors

Who sat faces upturned to the glow of the network searching searching for strangers who would call us pretty

Who bared our breasts to hidden cameras and fought and fought and fought to be human

Who waited in grim hallways with synth-pop crackling over the speaker system for the doctor to call us clutching fistfuls of pamphlets calling us sluts whores murderers

Who crossed continents alone with knapsacks full of books bare limbs clear-eyed vision running running from the homes that held our mothers down

Who filled notebooks with gibberish philosophy and scraps of stories and cameras to prove we were there keeping our novels and the name of out children close to our hearts

Who were told all our lives that we were too loud too tisky too fat too ugly too scruffy too selfish too much too and refused to take up less space refused to be still refused refused refused to be tame

Who would never be still. Who would never shut up. Who were punished for it and spat and snarled and they shook the bars of our cages until they snapped and they called us wild and crazy and we laughed with mouths open hearts open hands open and would never not ever be tame.

Sara, I’m with you in hospital, in the narroe rooms where you have put off your veil to count your ribs through your T-shirt, short hair and secrets and quiet defiance crying together that we don’t know how to be perfect-

Lara, I’m with you in mandatory art therapy, where we draw pictures of weeping cocks and are told we are not making progress-

Lila, I’m with you in a north London bathdroom, watchhing unreal maggots crawl in the cuts in your arms and listening to your girlfriend drunk and raging through the wall-

Andy, I’m with you in Bethnal Green where you love ambitious angry women with heart brain pen fingers tongue and you have a line from Nietzche tattooed over your cunt-

Adele, I’m with you in the student occupation, with your lipstick and cloche hat and teenage lisp drawling that there’s not enough fucking in this revolution and we must take action-

Kay, I’m with you on the night bus, half drunk and high dragging bright-eyed boys home to our bed, where we watch them worn out sleeping and whisper that we will never be married-

Katie, I’m with you in Zuccotti Park, where a broken heart is less important than a broken laptop is less important than a broken future and we watch the cops beating kids bloody on the pavement for daring to ask for more-

Tara, I’m with you in Islington where you have thrown all your pretty dresses out of the window and flushed your medication so you can write and write-

Alex, I’m with you and a bottle of Scotch at two in the morning when you tell me that no man will make us live for ever and we must seduce the city the country the world-

We are always hungry.

There are more of us than you think.

”

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Laurie Penny’s Saudade, from Fifty Shades of Feminism (via mollycrabapple)

Thank you.

(via mediapathic)

As data continues to indicate that spending all day on your ass isn't good for your health, there are exciting opportunities for workstation and seating designers. Standing desks, treadmill desks and funky chairs may fade in and out of popularity, but we like seeing the weird permutations and risks that designers are willing to take in their quest to find the "correct" solution.

One such new seating product comes from Turnstone (the Steelcase brand dedicated to furniture solutions for small companies and startups) with their Buoy, designed by Michigan-based ID'er Ricky Biddle. "Research shows that even people who typically work out after work don't receive the same benefit if they are sitting all day," writes Turnstone. "Overall, we recognize that movement is good so any way we can bring movement to the office is something we look for."

To that end, the Buoy is designed to be off-balance, like its namesake bobbing device, though not as extremely as a Pilates ball; the idea is that the microadjustments you're continually making with your body are not annoying enough to be a hassle, but adequate to burn some calories. Also unlike a Pilates ball, the Buoy is height-adjustable.

We wanted to find a simple seating solution that would allow for movement and work in multiple environments and applications. Turnstone had explored some initial ideas around active seating with a rocking stool concept called Humma shared at Neocon a few years ago, but for Buoy we wanted to allow a greater freedom of movement and a create a highly functioning product that could complement multiple settings and work with different height tables and related items around the home and office from both a functional and aesthetic point of view.

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