California v. CTRLPEW
California Attorney General Rob Bonta together with San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu today announced a trailblazing lawsuit against Gatalog Foundation Inc. and CTRLPew LLC for unlawfully distributing computer code for 3D printing ghost guns, machine gun conversion devices including "Glock Switches," illegal large-capacity magazines, and other firearm-related products and components to individuals who are not licensed to manufacture firearms in California. In addition, the defendants are being held accountable for promoting and facilitating the unlawful manufacture of 3D printed firearms and machine guns. The lawsuit was filed in the San Francisco County Superior Court.
There's a lot to be said, much of it morbid, about this case. The sticker price on each claim is already steep -- 50k+ USD per -- but the state seems to be arguing each download of each file is its own violation, and doing its own downloads; it's not just possible but likely that this is trying to slap glorified hobbyists with millions or tens of millions of dollars in fines. For even more fun, it likely passed a law specifically to make this suit more painful and with a harder standard to defend against. It's also hard to overstate what and how broad an impact banning merely making information available for someone to download is. The defense's countersuit spells out some of the more overt aspects: merely submitting evidence to a filing that ends up on PACER would run headfirst into this theory. And a malicious actor could do some absolutely hilarious stuff to violate the text of the law, excepting of course that the state will only bring charges against people it doesn't like.
A lot of other people in the 3d Printing world have, unsurprisingly, had to put together some geolocation-based blocks. It's not clear how well that would actually protect them, though.
On the upside, this is clearly protected speech. The normal slogan is about how Code Is Free Speech, and that's pretty well-established under standing precedent, but this isn't even 'just' code. The lawsuit here is overtly focusing on instructions, documentation, and image files. Whatever exceptions for crime-facilitating speech or speech integral to a crime exist, they can't possibly be stretched so far as to cover content that was lawful for a wide majority of the country to discuss or receive, right? Sure, we're talking the Ninth Circuit, so Ivan The Troll is going to have an expensive time finding lawyers, but surely cooler heads will prevail?
Well...
Code is <not> Free Speech
The Third Circuit has given an answer in Defense Distributed v. New Jersey:
We are not the first court to consider these nuances and their First Amendment implications. Indeed, some twenty-five years ago, three of our sister circuits grappled with the issue. These cases—Bernstein v. United States Department of Justice, Junger v. Daley, Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley—are often cited as the origin for a “code is speech” theory of First Amendment coverage in which all code is presumptively protected by the First Amendment and thus subject to constitutional scrutiny. And, consistent with that understanding, Appellants rely on these cases for their argument here. But fresh appraisal of their contents reveals a more complicated landscape that warrants our attention...
There's a variety of technical frustration, here. This court case happened in the not-favorable Third Circuit at all because of some hilarious hijinks with intercircuit transfer. I'll gloss over most of the procedural ones, but if you want a dark chuckle, the official position of the Third Circuit is now that "While the complaint lists a variety of file types (e.g., (.igs), (.stl), (.skp) (.pdf) (.stp)), it is unclear which, if any, of those are CAD or CAM files." So you can take the entire concept of the educated elite and gives it the Ol' Yeller treatment. Three college-educated judges, all with the powers of their offices and modern technology and over a year to write this opinion, claim that they did not understand what a PDF was.
((For those interested and somehow browsing this site without internet access, "Initial Graphics Exchange Specification", "Stereolithography", "SketchUp", and "STEP" files are all CAD files. They show 3d-images of a firearm; they are not code that you would run on any 3d printer. Especially SketchUp, what the fuck.))
But the more damning one is that the points don't matter, the rules are all made up. This isn't an explanation of why Defense Distributed lost, just a story saying that they did. The judges are lying, they know they're lying, you know they're lying, the dog knows. Say what you will for the limits of judicial notice, but when the courts require PDFs in specific formats, judicial notice can tell what a PDF is when it wants, and this court does not want to do so. Bernstein, Junger, and Universal City Studios may well all have protected code as free speech, but the it's not that the Third Circuit has built a new standard here. After all, they refused to do that.
The Third Circuit's opinion holds that Defense Distributed did not adequately allege that their prohibited content was speech, because 3d images of a thing -- to the surprise of the Supreme Court -- could be something other than speech, and then shies away from actually distinguishing one from the other. How would you demonstrate that to the adequacy of an East Coast judge?
In theory, en banc or a SCOTUS appeal is potentially available, and either would give a more honest favorable draw. Were they to happen.
Spoiler alert: it ain't going to happen.
Louisiana v. Pill Mills
The news that Louisiana wanted to arrest Coeytaux first surfaced in September, when the state filed a motion as part of Louisiana’s effort to join a federal lawsuit that seeks to limit access to the common abortion pill mifepristone. In that motion, Louisiana revealed that it had issued an arrest warrant for the doctor who supplied abortion pills to the boyfriend of a woman named Rosalie Markezich. Markezich alleged that her boyfriend obtained abortion pills by filling out an online form for Aid Access – an organization that mails abortion pills nationwide – and coerced her into taking pills in October 2023.
This is a messy case, without a lot of sympathetic actors.
Coeytaux is a prescribing doctor for Aid Access, an org that exists for the sole purpose of making abortion medications available, and while some of that reflects cases where people don't have the economic opportunity to purchase, more of it reflects cases where the law says no, and Coeytaux (or associates) filled out a package envelope for that specific address to no. Outside of the legal concerns or the moral objections to abortion, a lot of its economics depend on basically being a pill mill, and hasn't always been the most consistent about only using FDA-approved formulations, or checking out who the drugs are going to. The spectre of induced 'miscarriages' pushed by a boyfriend who doesn't want to become a father, to a mother who did, has long been a possibility anti-abortion advocates point toward, and there have been other cases that seem to have clear evidence of coercion by other family members. I'll instead point toward the lackluster available counseling about side effects or complications, a matter that's been far messier from other providers.
But a lot of those concerns are more imagined than demonstrated, in this case. The FDA's animosity for overseas generics sometimes reflects adequate skepticism, but mostly seems driven by provincialism. Like a previous case involving Coeytaux, it's unclear exactly how coercive the 'boyfriend' in question actually was. Actual serious side-effects can happen, but I'm not able to find any obvious cases where that happened involving AidAccess.
That is, as often highlighted, a series of questions for the jury. Which seems unlikely to ever happen. Louisiana issued an extradition request for Coeytaux, who resides in California. The governor has given a precise and formal response:
@AGLizMurrill: Go fuck yourself. California will never help you criminalize healthcare.
In theory, this is settled law: since 1987, there are extremely limited grounds to refuse extradition, and 'don't like the public policy of the state in question' isn't one of them. In practice, the New York doctor from the case where a pregnant minor was alleged forced to abort a pregnancy she wanted to keep wasn't extradited, either.
Somewhat counterintuitively, this is probably a better defense as an individual in a criminal case than a civil one. For civil trials, not showing up just gets you a default judgment. The confrontation clause strictly limits American criminal trials in absentia; there are a few rare exceptions if someone stops showing up (or needs to be removed from court) once the trial has started with them present, but none before then. Of course, that just kicks the can down the road one step: I don't think anyone would be happier if Louisiana just gave abortion providers civil liability that requires Knuth's Up-Arrow Notation to write down, then arrested them when they showed up for their day in court for the criminal trial.
SCOTUS has original jurisdiction over lawsuits between two states. There is not, as far as I can tell, a Louisiana v. New York or Louisiana v. California docket on this question.
Trans vs. Detrans
The Atlantic reports:
In a recent lawsuit in New York State, a detransitioner called Fox Varian testified that she’d had her breasts removed at 16, only 11 months after first identifying as male. She had also been diagnosed with autism and had struggled with an eating disorder and anxiety. By the time of the surgery, she had changed her name twice already. Varian asserted, according to the reporter Benjamin Ryan, who attended the trial, that her doctor “served as an enabler, repeatedly assuring her that the mastectomy she desired would greatly improve her well-being.” Varian told the court that she regretted the surgery instantly, and detransitioned three years later. She was awarded $2 million in damages. The court heard that she had been left with scarring and a lack of sensation, and would be unable to breastfeed.
Sorry, that's as close to left-leaning coverage as I can find without getting unmoored from the facts (compare the New York Times tries to reframe it as mere miscommunication). Most coverage in serious detail seems to be from right-wing sources speaking to right-wing readers, including the reporter that The Atlantic is highlighting here.
As do the facts of the case. Varian's situation does seem to have been on the harder end -- both in terms of what procedures happened when, and in the rhetoric from medical professionals justifying them. When WPATH advocates think you need to slow things down a notch, and are willing to testify so in court, you're gonna have a bad time. Benjamin Ryan has a list of other detransitioner (or -adjacent) cases, and it's a single page, and most of them are either more complicated or much less clear-cut.
But, at the same time, the facts are not that extreme. The psychologist in question denies telling Varian's parents that delaying transition might result in suicide risk, but it's... hard to believe that, given its prevalence as a topic of discussion. WPATH's advocate says that the doctors in question were pushing too hard and too fast, but the process here didn't actually breaking any explicit rules from the most recent WPATH SoC. It's hard to get numbers on how many trans people get a masectomy or orchidectomy before the age of 18 -- most eyepopping numbers of 'surgeries' include laser hair removal -- but Varian near-certainly isn't the only one.
And those distinctions matter, because a lot of trans-skeptical people have been pointed to this lawsuit as the first pebble in an avalanche. Whether people who aren't already trans-skeptical even hear about it, and whether there are other pebbles, control some part of that avalanche.
Because ultimately, to medical insurers, a couple million here and there only starts being 'real money' in plural. Successful lawsuits against psychologists are rare, but medical lawsuits are not, and doctors don't stop offering a procedure because of a single misuse or serious side effect, even far worse ones. Moreover, there's an opposing force: depending on who's in charge of the government, it can violate federal law to not act, with a bunch of fun questions when those regulations change after the action or inaction happens. Failure to treat or medical discrimination lawsuits are harder to bring as an individual, but they're not implausible concerns, either.
More broadly, because of how market forces work, I'm skeptical that the trans-skeptical position clears the board even of the specific matter of minors undergoing large-scale surgery, without using either regulatory force, persuading the other side, or completely delisting trans-related care from medical assistance. At the same time, they're likely to consider it a major victory every marginal clinic that drops the service, and every person they dissuade. And, on the flip side, there's some obvious countermanuevers that are going to come down the beltway soon enough.
gattsuru
4hr ago
Yeah, and it was already sketchy-adjacent by the 1930s. But it wasn't 'get the flamer, the heavy flamer' in the way that a 25-year-old going after a 15-year-old was even then.
Hard to tell what the actual story is, here.
The Guardian story talks about some deeply unpleasant ageplay focuses and grooming-adjacent stuff that squicks me the fuck out but would be fairly novel to get a conviction over, but the reddit comments suggest that the actual story had a mix of 'just' ageplay and sexualization of fictional children that have parallels (cw: gross-as-in-violence-to-children) to convictions in the United States (cw: gross-as-in-Simpson's porn). Now, that might just be people on the internet lying, since they point to a Goodreads listing and you're saying the story was not actually sold, but it's a mess and one I don't really want to look into deeper.
There's some philosophical and foundation of law problems even with the latter, but it wouldn't be new and Australia doesn't have freedom of speech in the American sense (instead having a mess of toothless international treaties and a limited right to political communication). In the defense of Australian authorities they tend to target people who make at least moderately unsympathetic defendants rather than those with Romeo And Juliet - Extra Spicy Edition, just as a lot of the more 'does this pass the Ashcroft test' convictions in the US tend have lots of reasons to plea guilty, but the Australian populace is generally supportive enough of aggressive policing that it might not matter anyway.
gattsuru
6hr ago
This actually isn’t that self-evident in retrospect; in fact, I’ve seen the observation on the SSC subreddit once that it’s actually difficult to pinpoint the one decisive event which propelled the Gamergate scandal to mainstream exposure. Was it one of the blog posts? One of the youtube response videos? A tweet? It’s difficult to tell, especially because most of the first-hand sources related to Gamergate have been purged from the internet.
... that's probably truish, but I'd give better-than-even odds that, had 4chan not banned the post, it would have gotten little more than a few sages and some 'not your personal army' posts (possibly 'i ain't reading all that sorry/happy' meme?). There's a hole-shaped gap in the narrative because the actual contention is about a thing that never got visibility, rather than the stuff that did.
gattsuru
18hr ago
A very consistently popular franchise is Little House on the Prairie, a story about an acceptable-for-the-time romance between a bright fifteen year old girl and a mid twenties man, but it's all good because he knows her dad.
I'll caveat that the books (and even official record) are flaky on Almanzo's age when he started courting Laura: the book where the romance actually happens claims that Almanzo was 20 and Laura was 15, while later books after Laura is older give a ten-year age gap. The reality's... messy, with Almanzo officially being ten years older, but enough people lied about their age for homesteading act purposes that some people suspect he was only eight years older.
While the original age gap would have only been a little on the larger side in its original timeframe, by the time Little House On the Prarie was published the author was well aware it wouldn't have been acceptable among her intended readership. So it's especially interesting as an example of how a story can be sanitized and that sanitized version in turn become.
(For another example a different direction: Catcher in the Rye features a scene where the main character hires a prostitute. The main character is sixteen. They don't actually have sex, so it's all good, right? Eh... the prostitute is, pointedly, the same age as Holden. Contemporaneously, there was more outrage for having a prostitute at all in that class of novel, than for having an underage one.)
gattsuru
21hr ago
Her removal from the cast comes following comments Zarin shared about Bad Bunny‘s Super Bowl Halftime Show. The former New York Housewife shared critiques for his performance in a since-deleted video, calling it “the worst halftime show ever,” continuing to slam the show for featuring mostly Spanish songs and “no white people.”
gattsuru
2d ago
for all I know there are trans men who try really hard to lean into a macho concept of masculinity.
At the very least, trans guys with Short Man syndrome abound, even when they're not literally shorter than the average guy. There's more direct and immediate responses from other men, if sometimes more dangerous ones, though. Screw around with women's social norms and you don't even realize what's wrong until you're in the middle of fucking nowhere; screw around too much with most guys and you'll be lucky to just get hauled out of a room by your shirt.
gattsuru
3d ago
Fair, and apologies for the unsolicited advice. Hope you're feeling better soon.
gattsuru
3d ago
A good part of Veggie Tales specific look is due to the time it started: the first videos came out in 1993 using CGI animation common to the time, where their competition was stuff like Reboot. At the time, they weren't amazing, but the gap between VeggieTales and more mainstream media works were a lot smaller. While they've done some improvements as graphics have advanced, they've always been fairly cautious -- even reverting Bob and Larry's more Pixar-looking appearances after the Netflix series got mixed responses in 2015.
Most of the show's selling point is the surreal humor and decentish songs, rather than art direction or its non-confrontational nature. There's absolutely a lot of Christian- or ex-Christian people who will recall the Song of the Cebu, the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything, or the Hairbrush Song. I think there's a post-Netflix revival, but I'm pretty far removed from that culture now and from what I understand it's more aimed at teens and tweens.
SuperBook has similar problems: the CGI series started in 2011, and it was competing against shows that basically were game and toy ads. Here, the gap was bigger from day one given how much was getting poured into the best on the field, but even they struggled a lot.
There have been more recent Christian media, including from animators with more 'mainstream' support (eg, the Animal Farm CGI movie came from a company normally doing religious flicks, and I'll give the necessary pun about missing the underlying material here), but there's far less crossover from the Christian world to the rest of it, especially in the last five years. I only know about the Pilgrim's Progress movie because of some parents for a STEM outreach program were talking about it; they think it's good, but it's not really something that would even show up in my world.
gattsuru
4d ago
I don't want to say I'm the ambassador of the straights, but yeah. That's not to say that a woman who's thin in a fit way isn't seen as attractive, straight guys really don't focus on the abdomen to the point where "fit" is meaningfully distinguished from "thin and untoned."
Huh. Surprised that it's so broad rather than just not T&A-priority, but would explain a bit.
I don't know, I'm going to disagree with you there. Boyshorts aren't really interesting to me at all. They seem femboyish to me. Actually the twitter, uh, meme? strikes me as more resembling boyish aesthetics than what I associate with straight women, even though the characters are depicted with breasts. Maybe they're tomboyish?
Ah, that could be a good part of it, and one that's not accessible to me.
It's funny that you'd say this in a post where you've linked to images of what I take to be furry femboys in striped thigh-highs... I think before that it had an association with scene girls, and that subculture was definitely around at a formative time for me, so I guess maybe it was a straight thing before it was a gay one.
Tbf, I'm pretty sure outside of Always Online subcultures, you're still going to see more straight (not-trans) variants of the striped thigh-highs bit. Even for furries, it's pretty close to a 1:1 ratio on e621, and that's about as tech-programmer-trans as you'll get outside of a Rust convention. Definitely something the gay and trans side of things stole, but not exactly something taken over.
It just interests me how much of this stuff is just accidents of fate, and how quickly and randomly it can swing around. Hell, I resemble that remark myself : obviously furry fandom as a whole is about fixating on a concept, since there's people glomming on a foxy Robin Hood (checks notes 50 years later?!), but there's a very specific video I can point to regarding topping guys in plaid skirts, or for a hetero-friendly example the whole 'male swimwear challenge' (cw: female furries topless, but with featureless nudity aka no nips) was something with basically zero presence outside of porn, didn't have any presence there until the meme took off and wouldn't make sense before the late 1950s, but just unlocks something for some people.
Contrast it with more mechanical or sensation-focused kinks, or where social interactions are the real drivers, or where the material is available to get fixated on but it doesn't seem to connect to almost anyone, and it's kinda fascinating how varied interests can get.
[if you're reading this from the firehose feed, you probably don't want to]
A cursory search for "skirt waist height" on Google* indicates that the waist of a skirt generally is supposed to be placed near the woman's natural waist/bellybutton. A cursory search for "skirt midriff standing" on Gelbooru indicates that this style is followed surprisingly often (with the skirt waist just barely below the bellybutton) even in erotic art, where the woman is skinny and there is no incentive to hide a bulging belly.
Uh... at least to my knowledge, most modern skirts of that style use pretty stretchy elastic banding as a single point of contact, where pants are naturally stuck with a compromise between the waist and the crotch that limit how high they can go. The most comfortable location to wear that will naturally be where your figure is most narrow. For most women and a surprising number of men without pronounced guts, that's generally pretty close to the belly button, just because of hips. Anything lower will ride up as you walk, anything higher will feel like it's trying to escape.
((TMI :
It's kinda interesting that it shows up that way in erotica? Guys are quite willing to imagine targets of lust without interest or awareness in their comfort, as evidenced by the prevalence of girl-on-girl smut with long fingernails. But a lot of focus on the abs and hip lines near the abdomen have always struck me as more androphillic an interest, and while it shows up sometimes there, it's far from universal, as would be expected by androphiles liking focus on the space in men's clothing too. (cw: no nudity, but really gay.)
I'd expect that for straight guys (and possibly lesbians?) this is one of those cultural things where you fixate on what you're exposed to, and what you're exposed to is more driven by what's realistic. Teenage guys can see a lot of women in skirts in the real world; they're not going to get invited to many non-porn girl-on-girl scenes where they can make any analysis of lesbian preferences re: fingernail length.
On a somewhat related topic, one item that has confused me for a long time in erotic art is the popularity of outfits (most prominently the iconic "bunny suit", but also many one-piece swimsuits and bikini bottoms) where the edge of the fabric rises from the crotch at a very steep angle (i. e., straight to a point lying above the hip bone), rather than a gentler, almost flat angle (to a point lying in the middle of the hip bone, or even below it) that to me seems much more alluring.(Also, I guess a predominantly-horizontal bikini bottom might have trouble actually staying up IRL, since a belt cannot be used with it.)
Yeah, this one confuses me a bit, too.
For bikinis, there's a physics explanation. Attaching any less-than-maximally-stretchy cloth from the groin to the outside of the thighs is going to Cause Problems for anyone walking, sitting, kneeling, anything other than legs straight. There's a porno trope about swimwear working its way loose, but I think a lot of that trope works off of 'surprisingly' being naked, so not gonna really function if it's completely unrealistic wear.
But on the other hand, there are very stretchy fabrics, and they’re pretty commonly used for bikini-like clothing. The counterintuitively-named boyshorts are sometimes designed with the near-flat crotch-to-hip angle and do work perfectly fine, even for women with very pronounced shapes (either hourglass or apple), even if they're still not quite comparable to a men's speedo. They can be pretty hot on women and are imo underutiltized (cw: women in underwear for once)... but then again, I'm looking for different things (cw: guy in women's underwear, kinda?) than straight guys are.
There's some fun options that only work with the steeper profiles ("underwear aside" has 18k submissions on e621) and is hilariously uncomfortable in boxers, and presumably the greater-if-only-in-theory 'proximity' of bathing-suit-areas to not-bathing-suit-coverage is part of things, but I doubt that's driving that much of it.
A few weeks ago, after dabbling with local LLMs...
I've had better success, even success with pretty weird kinks, using a script-like prompt format: give the characters, setting, conventions, and major plot points to ask for an outline, then have the LLM go through each scene one by one. Doesn't help with every LLM weirdness, but especially for kinks where it probably doesn't understand where the 'climax' isn't just because someone climaxed once, can avoid the problems that throwing negatives or indirection tends to get.
The result was two of the most excruciatingly boring """erotic""" stories imaginable (1 2)... Probably, the entire difference can be explained by the hypothesis that my brain has been completely fried by depression since 2022.
That's leaning pretty hard into the allegations. With the caveat that I don't grok a lot of the kinks, here...
Anhedonia definitely doesn't help writing, and especially writing erotic fiction, but I think some of what's going on reflects a difference in the expected forms and conventions of a story. You've got a lot of skill as a conversational writer, and given your professional background I assume you've done a lot of technical writing, but the expectations in genre fiction and especially erotic genre fiction are different enough that a lot of behaviors that are preferred elsewhere just don't work in normal storytelling, or are actively counterproductive. In technical writing you want to bring the priorities, plans, and details as far forward and early as possible with as much precision as possible knowing that readers will start skimming; in genre fiction, that’s going to get in the way.
Let's look at "A Brothel Visit" first. That's a pretty well-established set of story beats, but it's one that can work out reasonably well. Where it's failing to be erotic, it's not because of the author not wanting anything or the character not getting what they think they want -- if anything, it's a little direct there -- but because it's written like an epistolary story. You're telling people what happened, rather than giving them reason to want to know what's going to happen. In particular:
- You need a grabber. For short stories, you've one to three sentences (for novellas, one to three paragraphs; novels might get a whole page). The ideal grabber has implications for what's going to be the central theme of the story, a motive or contradiction for the main character, and leaves some unanswered question. More realistic grabbers hit one of these three, hard. You've got that in your full story: the tension between sex and masturbation isn't very highbrow, but it's still a question; whether this visit to a prostitute means something deeper is literally a classic trope. You just don't get there until sentence five, where it feels like an afterthought, and it doesn't really drive whether the action here will happen so much as whether the protagonist will enjoy it.
- When possible, add something that's a) uncertain and b) answered at the climax. That's a little tricky in smut, because 'x gets laid' isn't uncertain outside of cuckolding. But some form of rising tension is necessary, and that's the easy one.
- When possible, give central characters a twist, usually something that only shows up more than a loose hint as you near the climax. Tomboys have a sensitive feminine side in bed, the most masc top can really want to cuddle, the sub starts getting pushy, yada. Not enough to override their normal character, maybe not even enough to put them at 'average' for whatever that trait is, but enough to add some complexity. If the protagonist here is supposed to be really fastidious and analytical, have him get increasingly figurative or approximate; if he's supposed to be cautious, throw a bit of spontaneity. This is a lazy way of just signaling to the reader that the character is getting worked up or emotionally vulnerable, but it's also a nice bit of realism. Short story characters are prone to becoming stereotypes, and this doesn’t solve matters alone, but worth using.
- Smut is almost always written from either first-person or third-person limited perspective, and in the latter case, put a big emphasis on 'limited'. It's not just that the viewer isn't going to know things that the viewpoint character doesn't know. They aren't even going to think about things unless the viewpoint character would, or did, at that time. If you want a protagonist that practiced with condoms back at the hotel, you need a reason why that matters to them that very second : did their hands tremble for their first time doing so in front of an expert, or were they confident, or overconfident? If they notice that the prostitute is wet, they don't assume one option, they guess multiple possibilities and at best only one answer can be right.
- The saying "great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people" is a little... out of its normal wheelhouse when talking about smut, but it's a good rule of thumb for writing, at least in terms of priorities. Specifically, the pneumatics are seldom going to be very interesting in vanilla sex, and even a lot of pretty deep kink. Anything plausible to write is going to make your male character(s) look like one-pump chumps, but leaving that aside you're just going to get more mileage from how people react, what they touch or respond, and how they sound or feel beyond just the holes and/or poles. This one's very genre-specific -- doesn't matter the gender of a sub in a breeding kink story, they're gonna notice when they get filled with wet heat because that's the point -- so you can excise too much. Unless you're into cherry popping, though, "X entered Y" isn't doing you any good. Unless you specifically want the sex to be awkward and mechanical (which can sometimes be a useful trick, I'll admit, as someone into orientation play!), put more emphasis on reactions, sounds, anything to keep the partner from seeming like a dead fish. Your reader is already able to stimulate themselves; you want to tell them what their sexual partner being stimulated does in return. That's a particularly valuable space here if you want the protagonist's analytical nature to err into paranoia or imposter syndrome (sure, the prostitute's having sex with him for money, but she's still an expert and will know if he's big or not, or good or not; even self-conscious and selfish considerations about how she seems him makes him come across as multifaceted and less schizoid).
- Excise what's unnecessary, procrastinate what is necessary. There are a very few number of writers that can get away with highly-detailed ultra-realistic sex scenes, but you're almost always going to do better leaning into vague verisimilitude. (alternatives: comedy or drama). Not explaining what 'special service' acts as a good example, here, since readers could presume it's anything from anal to femdom to bareback, but you can do the same from currency conversion to background plans to specifying ages beyond decade-level bands or less direct hints. Procrastination is more subtle: think 'this woman is wearing a bikini and getting wet' starts with 'noticing a damp spot', then 'testing with a finger', then 'oh, this hole's self-lubricating and it slides in'. It's a cheap way to tie details and observations together, and a clever way to have the observing character seem focused on what he's doing.
- Alternatively, if you really want to push hyperrealism, you gotta go the whole way. If your protagonist puts his underwear back on after a shower, either spell out something happening to them before he puts on a condom, or readers will assume he's using his fly like the world's least comfortable cock ring. If you're having a guy initiate PIV from the edge of a bed with a woman laying face-up, unless the guy's dick naturally stands at the exact right height, somebody's going to have to do some work to penetrate or be penetrated comfortably. If your main character is a virgin (and sober), he's nearly always going to have nerves and struggle for a little bit with his aim. To make it sexy, you take these things and make them relatable, like you did with the aside about labia. Given your themes, draw out how it's different from porn, sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better, and then fold the bits that are worse into opportunities to see something different.
- Pacing absolutely drives smut, and pacing of descriptions are one of the easiest ways to tell readers what the protagonist is thinking about and focusing on. If your protagonist is faced with a choice of three women, the one that he describes in the most detail is the one he's going to read as most attracted toward; the parts of her he focused on will tell what his interests are. A short paragraph can have the viewpoint character's breath catch in their throat or dick twitching in their pants; a long one can mean he's introspective or deliberating or spiraling.
- Avoid parentheticals and asides. Yes, I'm a hypocrite. They still fuck over pacing in genre fiction. Most publishing houses will just axe them, entirely. In fanfic or lj-style writing, you can get away with one a page, maybe.
- The goal is rising tension. They're kinda stupid, but look up a Fap Hero video matching your preferences with your pants zipped up, and you'll notice how the pacing and speed is set to ebb and flow until it hits the climax, ideally around the same time the in-universe and reader money shots are happening. A lot of smut-writing's just higher-brow approaches to that.
- Word choice matters a lot. Connotations can pull people entirely out of the right headspace: whether a vagina is 'slimy', 'moist', 'wet', and "dripping" is saying the same thing, but they imply 'gross', 'clammy', 'neutral' and 'aroused', respectively. Likewise, the complexity of the word matters. Just as you can increase tension and perceived speed of action by favoring shorter sentences and paragraphs, dropping down to simpler words will do the same. This part tends to be hardest for non-native speakers or for very specific kinks (both sadism and cherry-popping needs a little bit of blood and wincing that'd tell vanilla people they did something wrong; voraphiles have entirely different connotations to 'slimy', for example).
- While there are a few genuine sensation-only links (eg silk, feet, some water sports), the overwhelming majority are bound more to social affiliation, often with multiple variations depending on the kinkster. As a writer, you want to id a possible social affiliation, and make it into a process, then tie it into the progression of the sex itself. Noncon can be about losing responsibility for doing and enjoying a ‘wrong’ thing; writing noncon stories in that facing benefits from having the victim character fighting as much with his or her growing enjoyment as with the assailant. Breeding can be about making or being made indelibly tied to another person; exploring that needs the top to make the bottom “forever mine” well before the cumshot. Dollification can be partly about being ‘made’ into an attractive and unglazed form; exploring that means noticing long-standing imperfections as they’re removed.
- Barring some extremely specific kinks, you're generally going to want a viewpoint character to have a good, complete orgasm at least one 'scene' before the end of a work, before their 'twist', major change in perspective, or denouement happens. For short stories that's usually around 3/4s in; novellas and novels can have it get closer to the end. Porn usually runs on the tethercat principle, so if you end on someone getting fucked that can imply they're having an orgasm forever... but you can't have that transition period go forever. It needs to be a one-and-done, with enough separation that the character (or observers) can reflect and identify how much they've changed. For really dark works that can err on the side of bad end, mind break, permanent chastity finally getting to them, but 'corpse bride' isn't specific enough.
A lot of these aren't really 'written down' as rules. You can break them, once you know what you're doing. But they reflect an evolved equilibrium regarding what people expect, and what people are going to find most gratifying (uh, mostly men: women's erotic fiction and some chastity stuff tends to a more gradual pacing and can handle a number of sequential 'money shots' in ways most men don't). That's one of the reasons that erotic fiction can be either squicky or arousing to write -- successful works consider, whether at the level of awareness or not, what's the reader's doing with one hand.
[cw: very hard death-related kink]
And I don't think your 2018 piece avoids these problems. Having a strong core to your story's plot papers over a lot of habits incompatible with genre fiction, and having a strong core to a genre's style does even more, but it's still going to struggle to get third-party arousal.
Take the example of the "trapped soul" story. It has a strong grabber, and that grabber comes with some level of question driving readers about when or if the main character will be freed (uh, for people not actively repelled by death/snuff as a framing story, and dollification as the kink). That holds a lot more attention than "A Brothel Visit" info-dumping about the traits of the main character: had "trapped soul" started by listing the protagonist's breast size and economic class, it would have been stolid as well. And some of the time-weirdness and discomforting word choice is (presumably? dollification isn't my thing, and the furry version is drastically different) part of the kinks conventions, so I won't criticize that too much.
But the rising tension needs work. You've got opportunities -- both 'why aren't I getting out of here yet' and 'oh no, I'm getting trapped more and more' -- but the former is a static condition, and latter is only dropped in three quarters of the way through the story. Janice's body doesn't have reactions, but her spirit and brother is supposed to... and they're more emoting at each other rather than telling us how they're being driven to act or react. There's a lot of background detail being dropped, but it's given early enough that it feels disjointed rather than a genuine observation. Jason is rich and has criminal connections, but it's not introduced as something Janice finds out as he's able to have her corpse dollified, just because it's setting him up to be creepy and the dollification is a result of that. Too many parentheticals, characters being having screen time or being named that don't matter, and a main character that who doesn't really work up to the radical change in personality toward the end so much as dive into it wholesale.
Sorry, that came across as more harsh criticism than I'd intended, but it's important to see writing not as a state where your muse drops from the sky and everything comes out right, but a set of rules and habits that have to be cultivated to push you toward that flow state. Writing smut well is a hard skill, not one well-taught if it's taught at all, and one that's hard to evaluate yourself how it's going.
That comes with the gripping hand that it's something you can improve on, even when fighting with depression.
gattsuru
6d ago
Dayum, you managed to find a reason to use that one again! That's some dedicated hatin'!
It's almost like you drew a line in the sand, shrugged and said you weren't impressed when I pointed out the line had been trampled already, and specifically said I "should be able to point this out in a few years" when you were wrong. And now it turns out that of course this isn't the sort of prediction that anyone actually commits to, on the basis of your long-extant experience?
Yes, that's the sort of thing that's pretty memorable.
No, as someone who has complained about overuse of fascism myself, no, I do not use fascism to mean "something I don't like" and you should know better.
No, I don't know better. That's a good bit of the frustration, here.
You keep talking about how you push back against unreasonable claims of fascism, and that happens, sure. But in this conversation you KoolAid manned in to nitpick about poker tactics while the other poster is saying 10% Literally Hitler (and making up autogople meetings with generals, and yada yada noonecares).
You dive into conversations about students yelling at professors with discussions of concentration camps, throw calling homosexuality a sin into conversations with the Day Of The Rope, put "don't have free speech (as you fedpost on reddit)" alongside with literal "gulags" out of your own volition.
((and, of course, when it turned out that we didn't have free speech to fedpost on reddit, or to fedpost here, because of course there's wildly hypocritical and politically biased sanction and investigation of Red-leaning fedposting even under a Republican administration, it doesn't even seem like it matters. But, hey, you'll invite me to talk about how I can violate the rules of this website, in case I'm dumb enough to think that anything I could offer would be anywhere near as persuasive as the sword of damocles that a federal subpoena would.))
Fine, there's a range here. Where's the dividing line? Because the Blue Tribe sure as hell hasn't provided an example beyond "things we don't like", you haven't provided an.
And all of that would be fine: you're allowed to have your wrong opinions. But it's never a matter of actually defending these positions, or even defining their borders out to say what they are. It's throw out a cloud of ipse dixit, say whatever can be proven doesn't count, and jam.
Spell it the fuck out, and actually commit to a bit for long enough to risk being proven wrong.
I do happen to think Trump has fanned the flames worse than Biden or Mamdani or Nancy Pelosi or whomever you'd prefer to blame, but he's not the sole or first cause.
For someone who doesn’t care who’s the wrongest person in Wronglandia, you sure do love to insist that this guy is The Worst One ever.
(while coincidentally glossing over the obvious competition for past examples that could compete on "appeal to identify politics, cults of personality, and disregard for previous Constitutional limits"? The last couple Dem presidents that didn't have brain damage only had scandals about a tan suit and a luxurious cigar, right?)
Is this something that you're actually willing to discuss and provide concrete examples around, or should we just be taking it as gospel that, hey, there's a ton of protesters that you can see, it must be a new level of escalation.
Can we engage with the bit where supposedly sober and serious actors, the best and brightest available from the ratsphere community, are just repeating made-up hundred-kilodeaths numbers because they don't like a policy this time around, when last time they were crying themselves to sleep every night over a photo that -- whoops! -- turned out to be from the Obama admin?
Note also that this is an admission that I have updated my priors somewhat since that argument I had with @FCfromSCC way back when - I still mostly believe the things I said then, but with weaker confidence.
Thank you for at least occasionally updating on evidence.
On the other hand, the fact that Trump was reelected should have made him update his.
This punchline would be funnier if a) FCfromSSC, rather than Nybbler, had predicted Trump could never ever ever ever be reelected or b) a bullet hadn't come within inches of making very sure he didn't, or c) that judges didn't order already-cast (primary) ballots for him to not be counted.
gattsuru
6d ago
I guess there aren't any machine gun sanctuary states, so the local cops could still go after you, but those theoretically could exist in the current framework.
Missouri tried it, and it was specifically shot down by a federal court. For some strange reason, none of the people screeing about federalism now were offended then.
gattsuru
6d ago
Results:
On one hand, embarrassingly close for Elon Musk, as the media coverage is quick to point out.
On the other hand, a) it's not a target that Starlink was optimizing for, since they've spent the last three years cut off from the RDOF program, hence the far larger number of subscribers under current service than in their RDOF submission, and perhaps more critically, b) the 2025 milestone only required 40% completion. We don't have the information to know what the range and distribution of upload speeds hit, and for some strange reason Musk-unfriendly media doesn't seem interested in the question.
gattsuru
6d ago
Aside from that coming across like a reason to never bet on anything that sounds like it might matter, I did explicitly caveat lump value risks. And MadMonzer isn't putting all his chickens in one bet, for better or worse.
((and to bite on the obvious bait: that hasn't stopped you from offering that style of wager unsolicited.))
Of course there is also the fact that if someone wins betting on "Will the US become a fascist state?" then their payoff is going to be small comfort…
I dunno!
Half of the time, Monzer's definition of and pathway to fascism is absolutely trivial, or even stuff the Democratic party had done for years or even decades. Oh, the Republican party might bring politically-driven lawsuits to shut down disliked opposition media sources in the scuzziest ways possible (successfully)? They might crack down minutia of contracts when enemies are around, and find myriad exceptions when given political donations? Fire a bunch of federal officials based on nakedly political criteria, and damn the disruption? Defy SCOTUS by just lying to everyone?
Not great stuff, but it's also not exactly the end of the world.
And those are the things that actually seem remotely plausible. MadMonzer loves to ponder deeper hypotheticals, but either they require trivializing the matter to such a point as to set it wholly within the first category ("arrest political opponents" is technically hit by arresting Don Lemon; "concentration camps" by holding people in jail after they've gotten an order of removal before deportation, and I'm not going to insult MadMonzer by implying that it's what he's talking about)...
... or hilariously implausible.
(And yes, while "literally Hitler" is absurd, I think 10% is a reasonable estimate of how likely we are to see something like a descent into fascism. But I'm not going to put money on it because I can't bet on 10 different alternate timelines.)
Are you even pretending to believe that there's a 10% chance of Trump suspending the Constitution? Pulling off his suit jacket, falling back on his WWE bonafides, and punching the shit out of Mamdani? Invoke the Insurrection Act "on some spurious pretext" (when several cities have already had politicians and staff directly coordinating groups trying to block enforcement of federal law)? "[W]aging a war against political opponents" with the actual military?
It's just a word, and it just means 'something you don't like'.
gattsuru
7d ago
If you thought there was a 10% chance for anything, you should be willing to take a bet, just one at steep odds. (Modulo ethical objections to gambling in general, lump value risks, yada.) Even with counterparty risk, I'd take a 10% chance at 50x returns and smile all the way to the bank.
But no one actually believes that number. I'm not sure many people buy 1% as a number.
gattsuru
9d ago
It looks like the adoption form is very specifically about Parent #1/Parent #2. I'm not able to find much information about lesbian IVF specifically, but some sites are claiming that there's a version specific to that case which recognizes them as 'parents' rather than mother/father.
At least from other jurisdictions, every pretty butch lesbians tend to complain a lot about having to id as 'fathers', even on far-less-formal paperwork, although it doesn't seem as philosophically aggravating at it is for transwomen.
... there's a fun kink sense for 'making a trans guy a dad' , but ime most of the ones that don't get incredibly squicked by the whole idea of pregnancy tend to be into getting sexually misgendered, so there's a whole bunch of off-color comedy here that doesn't actually work in practice, to the disappointment of a lot of bi men and Blanchard theorists.
On one hand, yeah, the transwoman needs to grow up and deal with a bit of paperwork that isn't custom-built for their specific extremely rare circumstance, especially if the child's citizenship is of any serious relevance (and if it's not, having this whole tempest in a teapot for something that's just paperwork is more than a little obnoxious). On the other hand, while Irish law prefers to recognize gestational mothers and genetic fathers, it recognizes citizenship by adoption, has since 1956, recognized gay adoption since 2017, and IVF since 2020; you could well have a 'mother' that isn't the actual egg donor and a 'father' who wasn't the sperm donor, and it seems like the IVF provisions specifically are dependent on where the turkey basting occurred(?). If the transwoman wasn't the sperm donor, that wouldn't necessarily stop citizenship so much as add extra steps. On the gripping hand, there are places where it's genuinely relevant to know things like genetic ties, and this does smell a little too much of the activists who go rabid at the idea that transwoman might have XY chromosomes or different bone structure, and damn any evidence otherwise.
I guess it just seems like the whole things filled with namespace collisions. Are fathers just sperm donors, and mothers just wombs? Well, no, for a wide variety of reasons ranging from the legal recognition of adoption to more serious ones about deadbeat dads (and from a quick google, the status of unmarried-but-present biological fathers gets weird)... but the law here isn't about that, either. Genetics? No, IVF screws that up, and even pre-IVF there was a presumption of paternity (since 1987?) that can probably get into weird spaces if uncontested even where the facts clearly aren't in compliance. Okay, well, are we really focused on a more spiritual or philosophical definition of parenthood? Eh, not that either, because a surrogate can figuratively flip the kid the bird and walk out and remains the 'mom' if she got IVF in the wrong country. And while I like that perspective on parenthood, my preferences aren't something that has to happen in every country on the planet, or even necessarily the best policy.
That makes this legal argument stupid, but it's hard to get too worked up about it while the Irish legal system's definitions seem kinda broken for situations well outside of this one. Which doesn't leave this specific legal argument in a better place, but makes it kinda hard to get too worked up over it.
What I don't understand is why people with this personality -- which is often skeptical, critical, capable of immense analysis of technological and engineering tradeoffs -- are often unable to see that there are elements in politics where different policies have different tradeoffs for different people.
There's been recent, massive, and overwhelming change to see conceding any genuine motivation for the political enemy as not merely misguided or wrong, but active and malicious betrayal. The Blue Tribe's further down that slope, but the Red Tribe isn't exactly slow at it, either.
((for an extreme example, I'm trying to write up the Varian Fox verdict, and it's a mess because the only people covering it are the ones that are absolutely uninterested in the pro-trans viewpoint, while the pro-trans people are largely unaware it happened.))
I don't know the cause. It's tempting to point at the growth of 'animus' as a Kennedy-school legal theory, or social media filtering, or increased polarization, or the takeover of HR-focused careers, or just external pressures making being the knee in search of careerism.
But it's bad, and it's getting worse, rapidly. There's always been a little on the edges, where knowing enough about guns set you outside of the acceptable discussion window with gun control advocates, even when that knowledge was necessary to make the very laws gun control advocates wanted. Now, it's hard to think of a culture war fight were that isn't the norm.
Perhaps worse, even for those of us autistic enough to be skeptical and analytic, where do you think the information's going to come from? A Blue Triber that goes looking up some Red Tribe values, you're going to be lucky if the best you find just looks like an overt scam site; more likely you'll get to something like thefp or fox news that 'everyone knows' isn't even a good model of what Red Tribers think, and completely disconnected from reality. And Red Tribers going to wikipedia can honestly say the same thing. What's left? Talk to your Other Tribe friends?
gattsuru
10d ago
For tile, specifically, you'll usually see some waterproof membrane or backing board, leveled with grout of self-leveling concrete, then using thinset to keep the tile attached, and the finally grout to interfere the gaps.
I don't think I've ever seen that used for carpet, hardwood, or linoleum, and at least in my neck of the woods tile is rare outside of restrooms and kitchens. Both my current house, last rental, and several of the other houses I'd looked at when in the market had joisted floors, though I was specifically looking for houses with a basement.
That's definitely part of it; even for the specific question of bench trials brought all the way to final judgment, there's a lot of state courts (and even some state appeals courts!) that just don't do opinions for all but the most noteworthy matters.
I think some of the confusion is more about what counts as an 'order'. For laypeople, we tend to think of judicial orders as serious decisions: even if we recognize the difference between a final appealable order and something like a motion to stay, the latter's about as far down the line as we really put in the same bin.
But there's a lot of other things that are 'orders' in the sense that the court will fuck you over if you don't obey it, but not 'orders' in the sense of any serious legal decision. At the lowest level, there's a lot of stuff that's just 'we're going to next meet at X date' or 'parties should send me Y paper of Z pages on A, B, and C' subjects, withdrawal or substitution or an attorney, extension of time, yada yada. These are orders, technically, but they're just standard process stuff rather than serious evaluation of legal policy. In the middle, there's things like orders on motions pro hac vice, or discovery orders, or even demands to prepare around certain topics. These are 'decisions', but they're decisions that have a fairly standard answer, or where the logic underlying them is self-explanatory in the order.
At the higher end, there's stuff that could plausibly be serious and sometimes even final orders if granted, but basically never are and don't really need serious introspection to get there: this entry is an order on motion for judgment on the pleadings, and that'd be worth a long digression if it were actually granting judgement, but it's not, and it's very rare for that sort of order to exist. Recognizing a jury verdict is technically an order, and there's some ability for judges to issue things like judgment notwithstanding verdict, but it's not something you have to explain most of the time. Sometimes this stuff gets an opinion, and sometimes it doesn't, even when it's a final order.
By contrast, it'd be a little weird to see a final judgement for a federal case (where not settled, defaulted, consent judgements, yada), without an accompanying opinion explaining the law in detail. It probably happens, though the examples I can find tend to be civil forfeiture cases that are closer to default than I'd consider.
The messy bit is where, exactly, this order falls. Grants of writ of habeas corpus are kinda appealable orders, depending on situation, but they're not exactly the 'everybody's presented their full argument and had their day in court', either. I'd expect to see at least some attempt at a serious explanation for a high-profile case, but I can't swear every single one has been treated seriously by the courts, either.
((On the gripping hand, neither Grok nor Claude could find an example of a federal grant of the writ of habeas corpus without an accompanying opinion. Which doesn't mean much!)
gattsuru
11d ago
Necessary starting caveat: Unikowsky is an absolute putz when it comes to anything Trump-related, and his analysis should be recognized as on the "ought" side of any is-ought divide, and, more damningly, an "ought" that will not apply to any case where he doesn't like the victim. That doesn't completely destroy his analysis about AI effectiveness, but it does undermine how and what he's evaluating.
For more specific problems:
- Hallucinations happen. Newer models are better about avoiding them, but they're still prone to it. This is critical because, whether it's a hallucinated citation, incorrectly summarizing the contents of a citation, or hallucinating facts or claims by parties in the case, it's a central example of sanctionable behavior.
- Even large-context models struggle with the amount of information in a lawsuit, and most models aren't large-context (and many APIs will obfuscate when you're getting downgraded).
- Worse, they get loopy under certain nonobvious situations: going toward the last 20% of a context size, repeating a word too often during a prompt, so on.
- It can be very hard to get the LLM to understand core constraints for a specific environment. Citing out-of-circuit cases as if they were binding, not checking if a case was overruled or constrained to its own four corners, even basic formatting stuff can be a problem, here.
- Most LLMs, unless very carefully prompted, are people-pleasers. They'll quite happily give you the answer you want, even if you aren't explicitly saying what you want, even when this means disregarding well-known counterexamples
There's a defense that people, even lawyers or judges, make many of these same mistakes, and that's true. It's still a problem and a limitation.
AI can be a useful tool, but it's a tool.
gattsuru
11d ago
January 27th. It turns out a judge can read and write copy someone's homework without needing a month, sometimes.
The Court therefore enjoins Defendants the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, its Director, and the Attorney General of the United States, as well as their officers, agents, servants, employees, and all persons in active concert with them and who have actual notice of this Judgment from enforcing within the jurisdictional boundaries of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (i.e., Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas), the provisions referenced in paragraph 2 against the Plaintiffs to this action or anyone who is a member of one or more of the Plaintiffs as of the date of entry of this judgment.
This doesn't require any organization hand over their membership lists for a federal government group that hates them, but more critically, it also applies to all of the plaintiffs, not just the specific combination of buyers and sellers that the original version did that made it completely pointless. Now, if/when a Democratic administration wants to say fuck it and bring these enforcements again, there will be genuine risk that the seller is covered by an actual injunction. And it didn't even take a universal injunction to do it.
Just three days short of a year.
gattsuru
12d ago
The shop owner's a little too overtly villainous -- you do get real-world management shooting themselves in the foot repeatedly, yet that's almost all this guy does -- but having the other gobs be tempted by capitalism not because of lingering evil but because it seems like a reasonable approach helps temper it, as does other goblins only being in the coop for the minimum. There's more that could be explored, and it's hard to tell where the gaps are left undone for future comic material, which because the author isn't aware of them (or wouldn't run into them, just as Americans don't have to care about VAT-likes), and which because the author doesn't have a good grip or counter on them.
Still, nice to see someone trying to steelman their own positions, especially given the tendency of Marxists to be pretty shallow about it. I'd rather read well-executed works, even and maybe especially where I disagree.
I'll caveat that the Position Statement specifically constrained to:
This would still leave some 'surgeries' (like laser hair removal) or surgeries on the table, and the median 16-18-year-old trans person is afaict going to be focused more on them. And there's definitely a lot of the endocrinology stuff that's Controversial. But it might not stop there, and yes, that's likely to have a larger impact in the short term.
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