A sort of odd art experiment from an NYU student: a virtual—albeit 2D— girlfriend. A far cry from the virtual lovers David Levy has prophesied for us, this woman is merely a projection on a bed sheet that responds to movement sensors. When you turn, she moves, among a variety of other (clean) positions.

I honestly don’t know what to think of this, other than I don’t see any viable application for this.

Oh, wait, sure: porn. Wait, no.

Heh.

Via Feministing, original article here:
Weird Science! NYU Student Invents Virtual Girlfriend — Daily Intel — New York News Blog — New York Magazine
]]> http://cyberspacebabes.com/2008/05/20/virtual-girlfriend/feed/ 0 http://cyberspacebabes.com/2008/04/29/kittenhatecom-rocks-my-orgasms/ http://cyberspacebabes.com/2008/04/29/kittenhatecom-rocks-my-orgasms/#comments Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:37:34 +0000 Mercy http://cyberspacebabes.com/?p=907 You may or may not be familiar with my orgasm chart.  The basic premise is to rate every orgasm of mine on a scale of one to ten.  For that, I’ve been using Pasi Matilainen’s Simple Chart plugin. It’s an amazing adjunct to any WP blog, but it no longer works for me. I need to be able to display month-to-month stats, and have a timeline that can be perused.  If you take a look at it, you’ll see my stats from November 11, 2006 to present.  On Simple Chart, it looks as if I’d scribbled in a square. Another issue: what was I doing, thinking, feeling, and where was I when I was?

Scribble, scribble. So, fine, I need something else.

Enter KittenHate.com. WTF, you ask? Remember that fabulous photo emblazoned with the legend “Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten—Please, think of the kittens” that every single person (AND their mothers) have forwarded to you? Okay, so we all hate kittens. Every time you masturbate, you register your “kill”. Right on. Social climaxing.

You have your own microblog, complete with a feed, that shows up in a public timeline, much like Twitter’s. Your profile (or blog) shows your statistics: total kills, lifetime and daily average, number of friends, along with your world, state, and country ranking. You can also share photo galleries, public and private, allowing your some control over who sees what. Most users aren’t that shy, so you’ll be seeing quite a bit of penis and breasts. Their posts are explicit, but usually not out of the ordinary. You can filter the list by gender or whether it was solo or not (did you get fucked, or did you have to do it yourself?), but not by sexual orientation, which would have been helpful to me.

Your latest kills are listed at the bottom, and while there’s no pagination, there’s a link to your complete kill list. Each post has three sections: location, what you were thinking of, and comments. Those would be your comments on the orgasm. Personally, I’m adding a rating to mine, because that’s just what I do. While users can’t comment on your posts, they can send you a private message. Not my favorite way to communicate, particularly because of the sexual nature of the site, but this can be turned off in preferences. If you leave it on, though, there’s a very basic instant messaging option, but you have to keep the page to the person’s message open. If you don’t, though, you’ll see a blinking envelope in the side bar. Be prepared for cybersex propositions. It’s a friggin’ gold mine, if that’s what you’re looking for.

A couple other interesting things to note:

Good:

• You can link to your own blog or site on your profile page.
• There’s a new feature that rounds up all the videos that were posted by members as part of their kills.
• You can search for posts about pre-selected topics, like blow jobs, threesomes, and orgies. You can also enter your own search terms, and select an age range to further filter the results.
• You can choose not to be shown in the “online” section in the sidebar. Helpful in reducing private messages.
• Ads are unobtrusive. Five text links in the side bar and a few almost unnoticeable links in the footer.

Eh:

• No direct link to the FAQ.
• Interacting with your contacts is kind of hinky; you can view their posted kills by clicking on “Friends” in the nav bar, but you can’t see if they’re online or not, unless they’re showing up in the online section. No notifications. You can manage them by adding or deleting them in the preferences section. You can also see a list of your followers. No blocking, as far as I can tell. (I don’t care, but I’m sure some do.)
• There’s no option to opt out of the public timeline. If you’re shy, I suggest you don’t sign up, or post a kill if you do. The public timeline is also listed in the widely distributed Sex-Kitten Sex Feed (which you can see to the right here). I really like that, personally. In fact, that’s how I found Kitten Hate; a sweet little gem about a micropenis:

The site seems to be in a beta stage, but new features are being added all the time. Maybe some of those Eh items will get crossed off the list. In the meantime, I’ll be importing the feed into this blog and using it in place of my orgasm chart. Until I get that set up, you can find me here.

During all the site/hosting turmoil that was going on a couple weeks ago, I was doing my best to keep up with comments and private e-mails from you awesome readers, when my friend Melissa totally floored me with an immensely flattering post about yours truly on her blog, The Virtual Future.

I want you to read her post, but I’ll break down the pertinent bits that I want to respond to. Melissa’s thoughtfully used a list that I can easily post with impunity.

• Mercy IS Cyberspace Babes. That’s right. She OWNS the domain. It’s not like E! didn’t know this- they had to do research after all. And given their web’s sexiest women are called Cyberspace Babes, I think it’s highly unlikely they didn’t check the domain.

I am a cyberspace babe. So is she. So are you, for that matter. It’s why we’re all here, being our sexy, cyberotic selves. When I first came on-line, lo, these many years ago, there were few women. Among those that were here, we were a fucking hot commodity. Not so much any more. Of course, I’m no longer a teenager, not twenty-one, nor twenty-five. I’m thirty-one, and I have to tell you, though the quantity of cyber suitors has gone down, the quality has actually gone up. This site has done that for me. Cyberspace—including Usenet, IRC, blogging, IM, and the permutations that we have now as social networks—has given me a lot more in the way of sexual expression than I got through working as an exotic dancer and erotic instructor, and that’s saying quite a lot. I know it’s done the same for a great many people.

So E! can bite me. I saw their version of cyber babes, and we’re much, much hotter.

• Mercy charts her orgasms.

I do indeed chart my orgasms. I had the vague idea that I’d be able to correlate them to my period, events in my life, foods I’ve eaten. If only I’d kept track of those, as well! Maybe one day.

• Mercy gives us glimpses of her breasts and her face without ever truly revealing who she is. Who doesn’t love mystery?

Ohh, Melissa. The glimpses of my breasts and face…well, I’m really not into showing off my body anymore. While passive objectification doesn’t bother me (after all, I was objectifying a young guy I saw at the bus stop this morning), many people don’t look beyond that to what I really have to say. Anyone with a bit of net-savvy (and Mel was too nice to point this out) can definitely find quite a bit out about me. And I don’t really care for my face. It’s mine, we’re comfortable together, sometimes even good, and that’s about all I can say.

• Mercy is on every social network on the web- which means she has more friends then anyone else online. Her favorite networking obsession is Twitter.

I don’t mean to be on every social network—I’m probably not, but I am on most of the big ones. I do eschew Myspace, having pegged it early on as a place I did not want to be. One of my best friends is still very active there, and I routinely ignore her pleas to join her. The rest kind of draw me in with a mystery of their own. Yes, I do absolutely adore Twitter, to the point that my blog has flagged, and people have to sign up to send a message I’ll respond to. So don’t you dare trash it. It’s gonna have mah baby.

Mercy speaks openly and honestly about everything sex and sexy. From vaginas and penises to what happens when two or more sex organs come together to every type of sexuality and fetish, you will find it in her posts. If you want information about something you don’t see- don’t worry, she’ll get around to it. And if it’s not there, check out her blogroll. If Mercy hasn’t written it, someone she knows has.

• Aside from getting off on talking about sex and everything sexy, this blog does have a message: your fantasies and desires are not as twisted and weird as you think. You are not alone. I write about things that arouse and interest me in the hopes that it’ll make one person (I just need one!) start to do the same. I want more honesty between couples. I want to say the things that others are afraid to say, because they have too much to lose, or they just can’t, for whatever reason. Yes—it’s scary, I do worry, and I certainly feel exposed. People freaked when they saw my name in Information Week’s article, “Sex in Second Life”. A new acquaintance at the time, my friend Mitch Wagner, wrote this:

She’s Been Doing Cybersex Nearly 20 Years

Jenna Leng has been looking for gratification online since just before she entered junior high school. She started on local BBSes in 1988.

“I was a good kid. Aside from the cybersex. ; )” she said in an interview conducted through text chat in-world. But then she amended herself. “I wouldn’t really call it cybersex. It was, strangely enough, cyber ‘petting,’ much of what normal teenagers do without the physical aspect. I talked about thoughts, or urges, kissing, touching. But again, that didn’t head towards sex until much later.”

She credits cybersex with helping her overcome early sexual repression. She says she is bisexual in real-life, and cybersex helped her overcome her sense of shame.

A multimedia designer from Los Angeles, she uses Second Life with the avatar name “Liennna Jael.” When I teleported to interview her, she was wearing provocative bra and panties, but she quick-changed into a low-cut sundress for the interview.

Using her Lienna Jael pen name, she writes for Pixel Pulse, a Second Life adult blog that’s also distributed in-world.

She enjoys exotic cybersex, “Hermaphrodites, shemales, alien avatars, futuristic cyborgs,” she said.

zOMfuckingGAWD, right? Twenty years. And cyborgs.

Resistance is futile.

And I’ve been privileged to meet a host of wonderful people on Second Life. Love you, Mel! *muah*