Ashton Kutcher is the pretty much undisputed leading twit on Twitter. As of this moment, he has 2,839,413 followers, outflanking people like Barack Obama, Perez Hilton, Shaquille O’Neal, Britney Spears, and Oprah Winfrey, and even CNN and Twitter itself. He has held the number one spot for quite some time. So, when Ashton Kutcher tweets that his wife Demi Moore has gotten a mohawk, people listen.

I know an awful lot of extremely physically beautiful people, yet, even among celebrities, Ashton Kutcher is so freakishly good-looking that I remember him being in the movie Reindeer Games, even though I don’t think his character had a name. And I think his part was so small it consisted pretty much of stumbling into a bathroom or something at the wrong time. So I stop and think about it and realize that I can’t come up with any other movie Ashton Kutcher has ever been in. I know he was on a TV series called That 70’s Show which ran for a long time, but I don’t even know what network it ran on. So I go and check IMDB and I have actually never seen Ashton Kutcher acting in anything other than Reindeer Games. Yet he is clearly up there at the top of Mount Celebrity. I’ve apparently never really seen him act, yet I know that he dropped out of a biochemical engineering college program to become a male model.

Ashton Kutcher has managed to parlay a certain kind of famous access into something far larger than most. He is a perfect spokesman for digital cameras and micro-blogging services because he has managed to commodify certain parts of his existence in such a flawless and innovative way that, in 2009, the rest of society is panting to catch up.

The Punk’d reality show Ashton Kutcher co-created with producer partner Jason Goldberg at Katalyst Films took the Candid Camera genre to a whole new level. By playing pranks on recognizable people, Punk’d made the viewer feel much more invested in the show; it made the show feel ironically more real and most of the punked celebs more humanized. Maybe this makes some sort of statement about the alienation of modern man and how so many people feel more connected to famous faces on television and online than their, err, IRL peeps. Punk’d was spoofed on The Simpsons as the show Chop Shop with the pranked person crying out anguished “Why would you do that?” in response to their car being chopped for the purpose of filming their reaction for reality television.

Why would Ashton Kutcher do that? To get paid? To become a powerful producer? To be feared? To amuse himself? To get MTV to foot the bill for expensive pranks he wanted to play? To be able to have people to play pranks for him? To come across as more of a man’s man and less of just a pretty boy? To become that special sort of celebrity of the new millennium where he is nominally a famous actor, but the real description is much more complex . . .

So anyway, it appears that Demi Moore would look really hot with a mohawk. But the widely-covered haircut is just a photochop (Chop Shop!) Ashton Kutcher posted to his Twitter via TwitPic. Most of the news covering Ashton Kutcher punking the news media with what is not the most convincing photo manipulation say that Ashton Kutcher actually photoshopped the image. Never mind that minutes after posting the chop with the tweet ” wifey just got a new hair cut what do you guys think? I love it”, he tweeted, “@mrskutcher I”m just playing baby but I think you’d look great with that cut”. Which apparently was enough to convince a large proportion of the news media that Demi Moore actually had gotten a mohawk hairstyle. Because the Punk’d guy would never play the prankster in such matters. And apparently some pundits have poor reading comprehension. Which is ironic, given how many serious think pieces I have seen about Twitter decreasing people’s aptitude to comprehend complex thoughts. How much more complex than j/k are they themselves capable of? And what makes them think Ashton Kutcher did that photoshop job? Surely someone, who can pay other people to do pranks for him, has people for that.

When I started writing this article, a short time ago, the Demi Moore mohawk TwitPic had 179,571 views and now it has 181,371.

I attended the Fictional Bloggers panel at SXSW. The panel featured Liz Henry and Odin Soli. They are both active in Latin American political writing, which is an area I admit I don’t follow. I spent some time in Brazil when my mother was stationed there and got some creepy awful illness which caused blood to exit from strange places and caused me to take medication which made everything taste like metal for a month. Also, despite huge natural resources and local wealth, there were homeless children there and that kinda freaked me out. I haven’t followed much in the way of anything Latin American since. Even though I live an easy drive from Tijuana, the only people who generally try to get me to go south of the border with them tend to be professional adult webmasters. These are the sort of guys who just can’t help bribing public officials and finding out where the donkey show is. As a result, despite having lived all over the world and living in Los Angeles now, I have never even visited Mexico for an hour.

Liz Henry’s work these days is working for Socialtext, which is a company attempting the interesting enterprise of introducing wiki technology to the corporate environment. She also blogs for Feminist SF which lists yours truly in their index of female authors of science fiction, so they have to be awesome. Bonus points: Liz Henry wears purple hair well. Odin Soli works for a company called Aveso, which is either a webhost, or more likely a company striving to sell big business on the cyberpunk giftcard accessory of teensy weensy electronic displays. I know it doesn’t seem like this is a more likely thing to even exist, but the Interactive portion of SXSW is about new tech and next time someone mails me a Starbucks giftcard as their holiday thanks for helping them have a good year, I’d like that card to have an animation of ice cubes in a latte. Actually, I’d like to claim ironic detachment on that one, but I really do think miniature electronic displays on cards would be pretty spiffy.

However, what Odin Soli is best known for is creating a fictional blog. And that was the main topic of the panel. From 2001 through 2004, he wrote an online diary of the supposed life of a young woman named Layne Johnson or Plain Layne. Odin Soli explains his concept of the character of Layne on his site saying, “Layne Johnson was an unlikely protagonist for that kind of fame. She was cute but gap-toothed, a twentynothing infowaif laboring in the lower GI tract of Corporate America. She struggled with her conservative Lutheran family and a revolving door of boyfriends — and later, girlfriends. She described herself as “un-out-dorkable” and tended to finish sentences with “hey?” And most of all, she shared her innermost thoughts and feelings with brutal honesty.” He thought it would be an interesting creative exercise, writing in the first person, with a female voice, in a medium like the internet where the readers could interact with the fictional character of Layne. He had previously written a travelogue in this style from 2000 to 2001, but, The Sex Pistols are Alive and Well and Living in Sohatsenango, the travel diary of the fictional female journalist Acanit became ethically uncomfortable for him after the events of 9/11. So he created Layne. Usually, an author would be very pleased if something he or she wrote garnered hundreds of thousands of fans. Unfortunately for Odin, his fans kinda thought Plain Layne was a real person and they cared about her like they would a real person. And, when he grew weary of the creative exercise, his creation’s fans clamoured for more. And, when he actually stopped writing Layne’s story, “her” readers turned sleuth, did some detective work, and outed the real author as being a man. The mainstream press went beserk and Odin had a pretty unpleasant time of it.

Liz Henry, whose BlogHer blog identifies her as “feminist, geek, punk, poet, mom”, made the point that, in situations where fictional journals are being put out there, the “dominant culture can be speaking for people who actually know much more about what it is like to be them.” She also pointed out to Odin Soli that all testimony is undermined if you undermine the social trust. His view was that, if the writing could potentially impact international public policy, then that was ethically dicey, but, even after all he had been through, he seemed to still feel that there ought to be a way to be entertaining with a fictional blog.

I admit I’ve played both LARPs and table top games with the best of them. But, in those situations, everyone knows you are not really a 10th level illustionist/assassin of half-orc descent. To write good fiction, a writer absolutely must be able to express voices besides his or her own. When I had one of my fiction pieces in Susie Bright’s Best American Erotica, I participated in a reading for it at Slim’s in San Francisco. I never do readings because, although I enjoy public speaking, actually reading my work aloud makes me experience agonizing shyness, but, hey, it was Susie Bright asking and she’s a real inspiration. At any rate, the story I had written was from a first person male point of view. I wrote it under my own name and Amelia sure ain’t a boy’s name. There was no question that the story was intended to be taken as fiction. Yet, some people who reviewed the show said that they found it sort of odd to see me up there in my red sequin corset talking about my cock and not meaning a strap-on. But it only struck them as humorously off-kilter, not actually enraging. Because they honestly did know, in a general way, what was real and what was not. Then again, they certainly couldn’t know which characters in my short story were based on which real life people and which parts were wholly fiction and which ones less so.

So how far is too far when it comes to online roleplay? Lots of writers use pseudonyms. Is that wrong? Does it become wrong when they use more than one? Does it become wrong when the illusion is broken? Does it become wrong if they have an actor perform the role of being their pseudonym on book tours the way J.T. Elroy did? One of the reasons so many people felt J.T. Elroy was more a hoax than a pseudonym was because they felt they were having a relationship with a real person, but their friend turned out not to really exist. Another reason people felt J.T. Elroy was so wrong was perhaps because the hoax was so very successful. Is it wrong for someone to pretend in their online profile that they are someone they are not? Is it more wrong if they pretend successfully enough to get laid IRL?

When does fiction bridge the gap and intrude too far into real life?

The sex blogger panel at SXSW was entertaining and provided food for thought, but I’ve been having trouble writing about it. I finally realized that the problem with writing about sex bloggers is the same problem bloggers have writing about sex: Specifically, sex and sexuality are very core to self, so even the most gentle critiquing of someone’s sexuality can be terribly hurtful. If any sex bloggers are wounded by what I say here, I apologize, but please keep in mind how you feel when you write about sex with a date who doesn’t like your review.

I attended the Do You Blog on the First Date? panel because Rachel Kramer Bussel was on it. With credits including Penthouse, Bust, and Punk Planet, I think of her more as a writer writer than as exactly a blogger, but she does blog very diligently about both her life and cupcakes, so she absolutely has blogging cred. Yes, I said she writes about “cupcakes” and that is not slang for some depraved sex act you are unfamiliar with. Sometimes a cupcake is just a cupcake and I can’t help loving quality food porn; it is hardwired into my system. And apparently I know now that I am not alone in my longings. Rachel Kramer Bussel’s writing is intelligent and raw. She manages to be very self-aware without injecting pounds of that fakey emo I-don’t-really-mean-it irony. No mean feat and a breath of fresh delight in the current online writing landscape. Especially in the blogosphere.

So I showed up to hear Rachel speak and found out about the other sex bloggers on the panel along the way. The moderator was Mikki Halpin who was a good SXSW selection because of her tome The Geek Handbook: User Guide and Documentation for the Geek in Your Life, although she is also a contributing editor to Glamour and known for her It’s Your World–If You Don’t Like It, Change It book of advice to teens on how to engage politically. Unless there is more than one Mikki Halpin writing from New York City, in which case I feel less informed, but that doesn’t seem super likely. She once was on People’s Court because someone’s mom sued her for putting their picture in her zine. She says Judge Wopner threw it out because the woman was bringing son on national TV, only she didn’t mention what the nature of the photograph was.

Then there was Melanie Boyer who does a dating blog called About Last Night for the Alt Weekly from my old stomping grounds, the Washington City Paper. She has great hair and big jangley earrings and lists a nice writerly assortment of life credits ranging from a Masters in International Training and Education to being a Peace Corps volunteer. She was kind enough to give me a turquoise pair of her signature boy short panties featuring her bird logo on the front and the line “a little birdie told me, About Last Night, dispatches from the morning after” inside.

Next up was Emily Listfield who does the Sex and the Single Mom blog for Redbook of all places. For some reason, I was surprised to see that Redbook was technologically ahead of the curve in the magazinosphere. I found Redbook also annoyingly on top of their pop up advertising technology and keep in mind what far reaches of the web I, uhm, surf. Emily Listfield is best known for her novels which genre-wise fall somewhere between chick lit and noir and I definitely intend to check them out.

I’m less surprised to find out that Glamour has a dating blogger Alyssa Shelasky. After all, Glamour and Wired share a corporate parent. Prior to blogging about her dates for Glamour, Alyssa Shelasky was a staffer for Us Weekly and before that apparently was so impressive a PR pitchwoman that journalists not only wrote about the products she repped, but also wrote about how awesome she was at getting them to do so.

Now you all know the cast of characters, so what are the ethics of blogging about dating? Melanie Boyer, of The Washington City Paper, said she initially thought she would get permission from each of her beaus. She says she believes men think they know the score when they don’t. So now her rule is to tell them what she does immediately and then the gloves are off once she is not seeing them any more, although she never uses names and attempts to be minimal enough on details that her guys are not easily identified. Still, she has more or less accidentally busted out at least two cheating lovers with her blog. Alyssa Shelasky, of Glamour, says that she tries not to humiliate people and to be friendly, nice, ethical, and kind, but sometimes she finds herself saying, “I would have thought you’d be flattered by that and instead they hate your guts and they’re going to therapy.” Rachel Kramer Bussel, of Penthouse Variations, agrees that people tend to “freak about little things.”

In addition to the ethics involved with the responses lovers and potential lovers may have to being blogged about, there are possible repercussions for third parties and other people’s opinions can come into play. Alyssa Shelasky worries about her parents’ response, so she won’t write about more than kissing. She initially thought her readers would be impressed if she talked about partying with Paris Hilton, but she quickly understood that they wanted to see her vulnerable, emotional, human side. Then again, she says she pretty much quits her job whenever she gets hate mail, so being her editor is probably kind of hellish. Emily Listfield’s blog is precisely about being sexual and being a single mom, but Redbook readers apparently can get a bit perturbed about her having sex at all. She understandably feels that her thirteen-year-old daughter shouldn’t know about her mother’s love life and has her friends lie such that “it gets very complicated to have that many realities out there.” She jokes that when your offspring turns thirty is the appropriate age to tell your child you blog about sex. Rachel Kramer Bussel has the luxury of blogging more for herself and thus having more control and says she will remove comments which are just mean and not constructive. She explains that “people really personalize whatever you write about and then they get affronted” and feel like they have to defend themselves.

The combination of invading the privacy of a writer’s romantic partners and having to stand behind whatever is blogged in the moment can be painful. Pretty much everyone on the the Should You Blog on the First Date? panel said they either wish they had blogged anonymously or were considering blogging anonymously. Emily Listfield feels that the anonymity of the women who comment on her blog entries gives them the freedom to really share about themselves and she feels that is a wonderful thing. Having her own name on her words makes Emily Listfield feel that her blog may be “destroying her life.” Alyssa Shelasky explains that Glamour wanted a face for the blog, someone who could promote on television and so forth, so being anonymous was not an option. She did enjoy it, however, when she got a MySpace account, despite feeling like, at twenty-nine, she was too old for it, and was surprised by the really really personal messages she received privately from readers. She felt like it was almost a group therapy evolution which made her like her blog more. Melanie Boyer says that the paper wanted journalistic integrity, so she had to use her name. Although she got a thrill from the whole “there’s that fat nerdy girl from junior high and now she’s a sex columnist” thing, she has found having her name on her blog inconvenient. In almost the same breath that Melanie Boyer makes the very astute observation that “anonymity erases integrity,” she expresses her own longing for anonymity. She doesn’t say whether she thinks her integrity would stay strong in such a situation. Rachel Kramer Bussel has considered doing an anonymous sex blog because she made the interesting observation that her friends who blog more anonymously than she does can be much more detailed without the same fear of upsetting those they blog about. It “makes you reconsider what you say when your name is on it,” she explains.

Pretty much all the sex bloggers agree that the people they blog about tend to be bummed about it and that they don’t much care for being blogged about themselves. Rachel Kramer Bussell says it felt weird to be blogged about by a peer, a woman she was in the same anthology with. Alyssa Shelasky says she hated having one of her guys, BostonBoy, stating his perspective in her comments and she also hated Gawker slagging her. Then again, she says she did get called “dating whore of Conde Nast” which might be a little brutal. Although I couldn’t find that exact phrase on the Gawker.com site, I did find a place where they had re-posted Alyssa Shelasky’s engagement announcement from a relationship which obviously didn’t work out. Ouch. In fact, she says, the only guy in six months who she dates who loved the Alyssacentric blog was on drugs, a “raging cokehead,” and she also had no trouble with a semi-homeless guy she had a three week fling with. Because he had no computer.

At this point in the panel, I apparently passed Forrest Black, who was shooting the presentation, a note which read: “MY BROTHER SHOULD MARRY SHELASKY ONLY HER FACE IS NOT HEART-SHAPED.” (For the non-Luddite savvy, note passing is a sort of low tech Twitter.) My brother is not a homeless coke addict with no computer (and I love my brother) so I guess there is just something wrong with me. I just thought she was awesome, really adept at coming across sweet, but in a way where you could tell she could handle high pressure socializing. I made sure to get her cell number and email, but, alas, reading her blog upon my return from Austin, I discovered that she is already in a relationship. Drat.

Emily Listfield says that “strategy-wise” doing a date blog is very hard because some guys say they won’t read it, but she wonders if they can really avoid that. The panelists all agreed that dating involves a certain amount of deciding what to reveal when and blogging about it messes up the timing on revealing oneself bit by bit. Rachel Kramer Bussel says she finds it problematic that sometimes she is fine with blogging about really personal stuff which is at a deeper level that how well she knows someone she is dating. To be a good blogger, she feels it is very important to “go beyond the surface” and she points out that her favorite blogs to read are not necessarily written by people she would want to be faced with in person.

Melanie Boyer says “ I write every day and it has become like exhaling; it has become my way of processing things,” only reading her entries makes me want to shake her, tell her how good she looks, and give her a mirror where she doesn’t see her junior high face. But she is a little oblivious and apparently still cranky at men for slights which must be far in her past now. Once they opened it up to questions, all of the panelists, except Rachel Kramer Bussel, made some fairly sexist remarks about men and male insight. Most of them seemed to be agreeing on the preposterous claim that men don’t blog about dating, and certainly straight men don’t, until Rachel Kramer Bussel brought up Tucker Max. Perhaps realizing how they sounded, Melanie Boyer made an attempt at a partial save by pointing out that the members of the sex blogger panel all have the perspectives of totally heterosexual women. Except, just from data presented during this specific panel, this is patently not the case. Rachel Kramer Bussel says that “it’s really hard not to internalize stereotypes about sex writing” and that some people look at writing about sex as frivolous, but she disagrees. Alyssa Shelasky says “you have to own it to feel good about it, like anything else,” only one gets the impression that she isn’t planning on being a dating blogger for much longer.

So should you blog on the first date? Going by the experiences of this panel of bright female writers, I’d have to say you probably should not. The question is posed: Does a great writer have to not care what anyone thinks? Going by my own experiences, I’d have to say that is probably true. Ouch. Are all great artists destined to die alone? I guess that is a topic for another article.

So it has been crazy busy in the Blue Blood compound this week as we ready ourselves for the 2007 SXSW extravaganza in Austin, Texas. Gotta paint my nails and make sure my purple hair dye is fresh and, oh yeah, make sure BlueBlood.com and its associated sites will be updating in our absence. Blue Blood hottie Halcyon will be moderating the panel I am speaking on. Halcyon and I are returning speakers and I’m looking forward to meeting long-time camgirl Seska, who will be joining us this year. Forrest Black will, of course, once again be doing press photography of the whole shebang and some editorial afterwards.

If I remember to bring them in all the hullaballoo of modern air travel, I will also be giving out some free SpookyCash T-shirts. They are 100% cotton black T-shirts with kickass original artwork by the incomparable Ed Mironiuk.

Here are the details of my panel for those who wish to stop by, reap the fabulous benefits of my wisdom, and say howdy:

Panel Title: Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path?
Panel Location: Room 9AB, Panel Date: Saturday, March 10th, Panel Time: 5pm-6pm
SXSW Panel Description: “As the public becomes more comfortable paying for premium content and services, what can we learn from the pornographic trailblazers? What billing models and payment systems are working online in porn that would successfully crossover to mainstream? What types of content and services are ready for the Porn Path of Pay to Peruse? The panel will include veterans in the online adult industry discussing relevant trends and lessons learned.”

Despite the lurid title, the main topic is essentially a discussion of the pay-for-content business model (which allows Blue Blood to give back to the community with all the free goodies you all get to enjoy.) I’ll have more to say on the SXSW panel and I’ll probably post more here later, but, in brief, SpookyCash is the Business2Business affiliate system by which people with high traffic websites can make some beer money by linking to some of the membership sites we support. I’ll explain more later, but that is the core of it.

I’d also like to state for the record that Halcyon totally came up with the name for our panel. I don’t make porn and I tend to be suspicious of people who really segregate their sexuality from who they are as human beings. For example, if you like light bondage and you also like Nine Inch Nails (Thanks for advertising again, Trent.) then you would ideally seek a partner who enjoys both. I think porn porn tends to isolate the act from the personality and I find that really lame. But “Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path?” is a catchy title. Last time we spoke, our panel got one of the highest ratings of any panel at SXSW and I’m hoping Halcyon’s inflammatory title will incite even more interested souls to attend. Hopefully, despite the raunchy title, our audience this year will be as interesting and friendly as last time.

This feature was originally published May 18, 2005. With this year’s SXSW looming close, I thought it would be fun to bring it back.
–Amelia G

photography by Forrest Black

Every time I take a trip to some place which is not Manhattan or San Francisco, I start drooling at real estate. Property is at such a premium in Los Angeles that I can’t help it. On my recent jaunt to SXSW, the cab driver who picked me and Forrest Black up at the airport must have known this. He launched into the most amazing dissertation on the socioeconomics of the city of Austin. He told us that 120,000 of the city’s residents are students at any given time. The majority of cab drivers have at least a Bachelors. The city is the live music capitol of the U.S. and perhaps the world. Nightlife is hopping. Booze stops flowing at 2am, but some clubs stay open dry until 4am on weekends. Finding nightclubs which serve coffee should not be difficult. Panhandling is not totally uncommon. High speed wireless access is quite common. There was once a student at UT Austin who dropped out after his frosh year much to his doctor father and stockbroker mother’s dismay, but now he is one of the biggest employers in Austin and his name is Michael Dell, you might have heard of him. Forrest and I might even have gotten some tips on playing Texas Holdem as the cabbie was also a tournament poker player, but alas we arrived at the Hilton. I kicked myself for the rest of the week for not getting that first fascinating and wonderful cab driver’s phone number. Later on we kept getting this chick who must have bribed her way or something into being the main cab driver in front of the Hilton during the big SXSW convention and she was a total scammer who repeatedly claimed not to have change and snarfed an extra $20 from us when she dropped us off at the airport at the end. Regardless, being used to the cablessness of Los Angeles, it was kind of nice to be able to be driven places fairly easily.

The checkin guy at the Hilton was adorable and super friendly and nice and I headed upstairs to sack out. Due to loathsomeness on the part of American Airlines, which I will for the moment spare you all the details of, I sort of missed the first night of SXSW Interactive. It involved a talk about the success of Alien Hominid I think. My bed at the Hilton was tiny but the mattress was oh so very comfy and the sheets felt super nice to the touch. Apparently a prior guest had broken into my mini bar before I checked in. The Hilton folks were amazingly nice and friendly and told me that sometimes this happens with underage guests who they don’t give a bar key.

I ate at a place called The Boiling Pot my first night in town. Not only did they have crawfish which I expected, but they also served blue crabs which I had thought were something one could only get in the Chesapeake Bay area. The waitress was charming and friendly and discussed my beverage tastes with me. I couldn’t get sparkling water, but she recommended the local Shiner Blonde based on my preferences and totally steered me right. Shiner Bock by the same company is apparently more commonly consumed but is a bit darker craft beer.

I ate waffles and steak for breakfast the next day at the Hilton and the hostess was friendly and the waitress was so amazing she almost made me like morning. I kept waking up early and eating breakfast in Austin and then wanting to go back to sleep. Of course, I had panels and seminars and keynote speeches and such to go to most days, so I ended up a little sleep-deprived the whole time. I was not alone in this though. The panel I got up earliest for was the Blogging Software showdown which was totally worth losing a few zzzz for. It always makes me happy when something I enjoy is created by someone who is just as great as I would want them to be. Matthew Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, came across so passionate and brilliant that it made me feel all warm and fuzzy about loving his creation.

The second day Halcyon and Tassy swept into town. They had just participated in a reality show in Jamaica. They basically got to the airport in San Diego, pulled some things out of their bags, threw some clean things in, and headed back to the airport to hit Texas. Despite all this air travel, they looked tanned and lovely and once they arrived, the party got going in earnest.

Apparently famous cyberpunk author and futurist Bruce Sterling used to always give a party at his house during SXSW Interactive. But now he has succumbed to the siren song of Los Angeles. So Wired sponsored him throwing a shindig at an American Legion Hall where he ran around in pajamas demonstrating how a still works. Actually most of the parties were just as educational as the seminars because of the intelligence and curiosity about the world of the people partying. Ben Brown, the self-proclaimed Internet Rockstar, gave a bash at his Home for Wayward Boys which includes a hot tub and which a biker-looking cabbie told us was in a shifty neighborhood. Whatever that means. Looked great to me, although I guess the host did say something about bodies being dumped in the area. Then again, some folks just need killin’. Blogger gave a party and we got groovy baseball caps. Gawker gave a party at a bar which is one of an apparent 211 nightlife locations in Austin which chose to be smoking establishments. What this means is that patrons can smoke in side, but everybody has to be over eighteen years of age. I guess so second-hand smoke won’t stunt their growth or something. This bar didn’t have Shiner Blonde, so I had a Lone Star to keep with the local theme, but it wasn’t totally my thing, so I switched to Amaretto sours. I appreciate Gawker buying me the drinks but kind of wish I hadn’t mixed alcohols.

Halcyon, among other things, is in the process of launching a site called Pinkgasm with Tassy. He says it is going to be “love-infused porn” and I believe him. Jonno D’Addario is the editor of my favorite sex news site Fleshbot. Halcyon and Jonno are collectively two of my favorite people who move in online naughtiness circles. When I told Halcyon, who is a SXSW vet, that I wanted to go to the convention this year, he set me up to speak on a panel called “The Business of Pleasure: Turning Pink Into Green.” For the record, he named it, not me. The convention quite reasonably thought we should have a third person on the panel. Halcyon asked me who I thought would be good and Jonno was the first person I thought of. We both loved the idea of having him speak with us and happily the convention organizer agreed. I was a little bit worried that the panel would be such a lovefest that we wouldn’t be interesting enough for the audience. But we actually got together beforehand and planned and stuff and, although we all like each other, our viewpoints and experiences are not identical, so I think the panel actually went super well.

I’ve spoken in front of a lot of different audiences over the years, but this one was very different. I try to pay careful attention to audience response and see which topics I should spend more time on, according to what they seem most interested in. This was a new experience for me because the audience was so techie that many of them were blogging about the panel while it was going on or talking in IRC about the panel. The conference takes place in a convention center with wireless access in every nook and cranny. I definitely came home thinking that I crave all sorts of new tech toys.

Returning to eating which is my favorite thing to do, the Blue Blood contingent all lunched in Austin with a bunch of cool interesting people at a place with Asian food of some sort called Mekong Somethingorother which was pretty nummy. There were whole shrimps with the tail still on sticking out of my sort of egg roll and the lemonade was delicious. In the middle of the night, the always-open Magnolia Cafe supplied me with a taste of gingerbread pancakes and other folks with all sorts of Tex-Mex breakfast fare. No bottled water though. We ate pizza at a place which played death metal. Loudly. We ate pizza at a bunch of other places nestled in between clubs with different sorts of music emanating. We ate at a place called Jazz which specializes in cajun food and we got to eat beignets made from mix shipped in from Cafe du Monde in New Orleans and fried oysters. It seems like every place in Austin features raw oysters, so I knew they had to have fresh ones, but I like mine cooked thanks and was overjoyed to find such especially excellent fried ones on my last day. Technically, I guess I also had cooked oysters at Finn & Porter, the Hilton’s higher end restaurant, but they had some creative wasabi thing going which would probably be done better where I live, although the service was great and the steak was perfect and, unlike most every other place in Austin, they had some damn sparkling water for me.

It is really easy to get booze and coffee in Austin, but it is kind of difficult to get anything actually thirst-quenching. Juice tends to be high quality when found but not too common and sparkling water is just a fantasy. Austin is right off a river so it is much less dry than Vegas, but I got way more dehydrated there. Forrest opined that perhaps this dearth of hydrating beverages is the reason cowboys look like raisins. I tend to think this must be an accurate observation.

But I could be a pruney mofo with some damn affordable real estate in a great walking neighborhood with friendly if sometimes a little disorganized denizens. Then again, Bruce Sterling is a smart guy and he left Austin for Southern Cali. More research in the field is clearly called for. Now where should I check out next . . .