Vinnie Tesla's Blog, page 6

Democracy!

View Poll: This Poll is Totally Scientific

Female Sexuality Wars: The Archipelago of Regret

You may have heard that the FDA this week refused permission to German drug company Boehringer Ingelheim to market a new female libido pill they'd developed with the catchy name flibanserin.

You heard wrong. The maker had NO EVIDENCE that it enhances female desire for sex any more than so much distilled water, and made, so far as I know, no claims that it does.

Why were reputable newspapers filled with false headlines then? Because our culture only intermittently and reluctantly acknowledges ...

We don't need change, we just need coinage, or, the Dannite Solution

I got some linky love from Dan Savage!

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/06/28/cant-wet-be-a-noun-too

The debate in comments is already pretty lively, though Dan and many others still seem to think they're talking about something orgasmic rather than simply excited (can you imagine a guy shouting "I'm hard! I'm hard?").

An open letter to Dan Savage

Dear Dan--

I write you not in your capacity as advice columnist, but as sexual
America's Neologist-In-Chief, the man with his finger on the perineum of
contemporary English.

Here's a list of words: blood, sweat, tears, come (or semen, or jizz, or,
if you must, cum), precome. Lymph, bile, pus, piss, snot, earwax. Human
bodily secretions have short, common names.

There's one glaring exception: vaginal lubrication. Two words, seven
syllables, all suck. There's not a simple clinical term, there's not a
sl...

Overstuffed

A sentence in a story has a large but finite range of purposes it can serve. Here's a roundup of likely candidates:Advancing the narrative
Showing character
Being beautiful
Establishing the setting
Having an emotional effect on the reader, including, but not limited to:
pathos
joy
mirth
disgust
arousal
curiosity
I've probably missed a couple important ones here, but you get the idea.
In good writing, every sentence should do at least one of these things. A passage that does none of them does not belong i...

More Like Dancing

My first year at Burningman, I was entranced by the hundreds of poi spinners performing every night.

By my third, I was getting a little tired of them.

The standard vocabulary of poi movies is limited, and after seeing a few dozen people spin fire, you won't often see anything technically surprising anymore. Exotic fire spinning implements can extend the novelty a fair bit, but that too has its limits.

I think it was at Firefly (a small New England Burningman spinoff) that I learned the next l...

NASA Scuba Milf Snafu/ OMG and BBQ!

View Poll: Destroy All Acronyms

I have, it appears, issues.

Executive summary: I kind of despise neophyte writers who dispense advice about writing as if they were Charles fucking Dickens. I propose to embark on becoming one of them now, but it doesn't count because blah blah blah.

In more detail: I have a fraught relationship to the whole business of Being a Writer. As a child and adolescent, writers (which to me has really always meant novelists first and foremost) were of course of course the most noble and romantic creatures in all of creation. I a...

Be sure always to call it please research

Hitting Google to see what it has to say about subjects you're writing about, and subjects relating to those subjects, and subjects suggested by those subjects is a fantastic way to put off actually writing. Here's what I managed to find today instead of working on the book project:

Obscure Fetish of the Day (pretty much worksafe, though you may get some funny looks), ( rvandeuren , if you're still reading LJ at all, you totally need to check this one out)

Unexpectedly NSFW Google Image Search...

Over all results

View Poll: Overall Assessment

Now, you see, this is the sort of place where slightly more sophisticated result-display options would make writing the poll much simpler.