Long ago, in a land far far from here, I lived in a punk rock group house with a lot of fans of Steve Purcells’ Sam and Max characters and their unsavory pals. Sam and Max was a hilariously antisocial comic strip. Assuming one thinks punk humor is hilarious and freelance talking animal police are a good source of humor.

Some time later, LucasArts decided to make a game based on the Sam and Max comics. The internet tells me that LucasArts was Steve Purcells’ day job and Sam and Max were a long-running LucasArts in-joke, which is the sort of little fun fact to know and share that tended to be unknown pre-internet. I could comment on this more, assuming I read all of the background info (which I haven’t yet), but suffice it to say that LucasArts actually made a pretty pleasingly unsavory game based on Sam and Max. The internet also tells me that the characters were eventually made into a television show which aired on a secondary FOX channel called FOX Kids. Which is weird both because it is simply weird and because I’ve never watched it, despite my affection for Sesame Street and Back at the Barnyard.

I’m excited to report that the awesome old Sam and Max comics are all back in print now. Full disclosure: the source of the new mega-packs of Sam and Max comics, DVDs, XBox, swag, etc. is an advertiser on Blue Blood. I haven’t checked out the new game yet, but the printed stuff is definitely worth picking up. Watch out for the bunny.

Friends keep pointing out that there is a bacon of the month club. Actually, I think there may be a number of bacon of the month club options.

The Pig Next Door comes up quickly in a search engine attempt to locate the bacon of the month club. The Pig Next Door offers artisan bacon from sustainably-farmed specialty breeds. If you are a bacon fan, and I am, this sounds pretty good and they offer six month and one year bacon subscriptions, priced according to just how special the pigs are. Speaking of pigs, my friend senior Blue Blood writer Will Judy has a really thing about cartoons of animals being used to sell meat products. He is offended by cartoon cannibalism. Although I did not come to this concern on my own, I always think of it when I see a comic strip style pig raising a trotter to vote in favor of bacon.

So I do a little more research and it turns out that The Pig Next Door is a Johnny-come-lately, started only a year ago, looking to cash in on the bacon of the month concept pioneered by The Grateful Palate. The Grateful Palate has been selling bacon and bacon-related products online for more than a decade. Ah, the joy of the internet age, when nothing is so esoteric a niche that it hasn’t been knocked off and repackaged by someone. In addition to what may be the original bacon of the month club, The Grateful Palate also offers pig noses and pig T-shirt memorabilia. You can always go with the less cannibalistic T-shirt option of showing off the “I got porked by the Grateful Palate” slogan across your chest. You get a shirt and a little rubber toy pig with your bacon club membership. You also get an official Bacon of the Month Membership Card, in case a bouncer ever asks you to show one. And you get a pig nose, in order to facilitate cannibal role play.

My friend writer/director David Aaron Clark once took me to BDSM club The Vault in New York, in its heyday. And there was the option for gents to be dominated while wearing pig noses or masks. I have trouble eroticizing rubber facial prosthetics shaped like pigs or like anything else really. Yet I love muppets, fun fur coats, and the bottom half of most furry costumes. Go figure. For those less specific in their tastes and needs than I am, there is always pet play. Bet you’ve never seen someone in a pig or panda head do that before. Or maybe you have. I’m going to go fry up some uncured, sustainably-farmed, artisan bacon now, even though I’m not yet a member of the Bacon of the Month Club.

Webcomic JEFbot has a comic strip panel set where actor roommates JEFbot and The Cornfather discuss the embarrassing videos they have posted of one another.

As a kid, I recall being repeatedly told a story about how, when I grew up and brought dates home, I should expect that my family would tell really awful humiliating stories about me. The idea was that this would be humorous. I don’t know whether or not it would have actually been funny as, by the time I passed puberty, my family was indifferent to meeting my dates whether they were the offspring of sitting US Senators or international drug dealers.

I did, however, do a print zine called BLT ::: Black Leather Times where my unsavory pals and I would often post embarrassing things about one another. This was definitely very funny. Unfortunately, it has proven potentially either less hilarious or much much hysterical since the advent of the internet. See, when Forrest Black was teaching himself HTML, he practiced by creating digital archives of a whole bunch of issues of BLT. BLT’s editorial policy at the time was very punk and so there are some people where the number one search engine result for their name is an extremely witty descriptions of a sexual peccadillo from 1990 which they might prefer went forgotten. Now, these are all people who absolutely deserved whatever was said about them, or at least certainly deserved it in 1990. After the first year or so, BLT’s circulation tended to be 2,000 to 3,000 copies, so probably many people have print archives of all this regardless.

So does the internet actually make embarrassing ones compatriots, even in a humorous context, better and more fun or much much less of a good idea?

The Cornfather: The video I shot you being attacked by your ferret and hamster has already gotten 50,000 views on YouTube!
JEFbot: Awesome.

JEFbot: Last time I checked, that video I shot you doing your best Flashdance impression while playing Wii Fit was at 800,000 views.
The Cornfather: Cool.

JEFbot Remember when humiliation was a personal thing, shared only with family members and close friends?
The Cornfather: I know, it’s so much better now.

I enjoyed LiveJournal because sometimes I have fragments of ideas which are not ready to be an official article, but it is nice to be able to start giving the words shape. I also felt like I could actually get to know people on there. Like, if I met someone at a rock show, we could exchange info and continue getting to know one another. I was extremely bugged, however, when I started seeing people out at night and I’d ask them how they were and be told to read their LJ. Why bother leaving the house if you refuse to have a conversation? Over time, people started taking LJ more and more seriously. This meant that, first of all, that, if I complained about work on there, some dick would take it as uber-personally and big deal as if I had sent out a press release and posted “I had a hard day because blah blah” to every high traffic site I operate. Secondly, there started to be too many people on my LJ list for me to keep up with what everyone was up to. Most disappointingly, treating LJ as a publishing platform rather than a diary meant that other people started writing less and less personal entries and more and more press release-like entries which had more to do with how they wish to be perceived than who they truly are.

At first, I hated MySpace because it seemed like a service whose only application was to allow other people access to my Rolodex without having to say “thanks for the introduction”. Then I also hated MySpace because it seemed to pull audience from LJ, which I had enjoyed the interactivity of, and MySpace didn’t really seem to have any way to get to know people. MySpace is like this menu of people who seem like, in another life, I might have really enjoyed knowing them, but MySpace gives just enough of a taste to feel weird about people, without really enough to know them at all. Partly, MySpace is so terribly public that one really ought to keep anything private off there, but this means that there are always aspects of a person left off there which would be important to know if you were truly meeting them. And, if you are forthcoming with someone who has a popular MySpace account, you can’t trust that they will know to keep private things private, libel laws or no. Who wants to spend all their time in legal battles? It is easier to just be really private and closed off. I hired people to handle my MySpace accounts for me because MySpace filled me with such a deep keening sense of loneliness. There are certain sorts of MySpace messages, I enjoy answering personally. (If you got a message with my name signed to it, I wrote it.) For the most part, though, every time I’ve thought a Los Angeles person I met on there seemed like someone I’d want to know, they ended up digitally booty-calling me. Part of me thinks I should be flattered by this, as I generally am motivated to converse with people who are accomplished, intelligent, talented, creative, famous, etc. But it just makes me ache inside. Do human beings no longer meet in person for anything besides sex?

Then, one of the years I spoke at SXSW, the big interactive launch of the season was Twitter. Everyone was all a-twitter over this new ADD version of LiveJournal. Instead of having to read long transcripts of arguments someone had with their mom or extensive deconstructions of the merits of macaroni with and without cheese, Twitter only leaves room for 140 characters in a post. If you have a Blackberry or an iPhone or similar cell phone, it is easy to update your Twitter even while driving in traffic. (Not that I recommend this, as I’m pretty sure it might be illegal or dangerous or something most places.) Because of the SXSW launch and general tech community culture driving the initial Twitter world, I had mostly people I knew from that part of my life on my read list and I felt like I actually was getting to know some interesting and accomplished people a bit better on there, seeing cool links as news broke, and generally getting to enjoy a new Web 2.0 property. I’m not sure if there was a panel at the recent adult trade shows in Vegas where everyone was told that Twitter is great for interacting with fans or getting traffic or what, but I’ve recently had a couple hundred new people add me to their Twitter follow lists. Although early on, I just had my assistant add back all new follows on Twitter and I’d just remove the boring or annoying ones later, I now prefer to check out each new follow personally. This means that now, when I think of posting what delicious things I am consuming for breakfast (iced soy latte and smoked salmon on low salt sprouted grain bread), I feel guilty like I should really get on checking out all those new accounts which have expressed interest by following my account. Only then I have to wonder how many followed my Twitter because they are interested in me and how many followed because they want me to be interested in them? And, of course, I recently got to discover that 140 characters is not too few for someone to start drama, but it is too few to explain one’s point diplomatically enough to get them to chill.

Although I was an early adopter on Twitter, I came to Facebook late. Partly it had trouble with my name and partly I had to get alumni email stuff set up for it to be useful in finding former classmates. Plus the places in Germany, Belgium, Israel, and Switzerland where I went to school in my teen years were not listed and the system seemed to be set up for fewer high schools. Facebook tech support is impressively by far the most responsible and effective of any of the social networking sites and I eventually did get an account properly set up there. On Facebook, I used a different rule of thumb for friending people or approved friend requests: I only wanted friends on there who I would deliberately have a meal or a tasty beverage with. If the person is someone I’d be pleased to get a dinner or drinks invite from or a person I’d be likely to extend a dinner or drinks invite to, then I’d approve them. If the person is just someone who would like me to take their photo or who would only be interested in dining with me if I brought important (to them) or fuckable (by them) people with me, then that would be a no. I find it unfortunate that my morbid college friends can’t shut up about my two friends from that time period who died tragically. If the deaths of those two people saddens my living friends half as much as me, I’d expect they would want to think about it a bit less often than daily. My Facebook friend add process is slow because when a new person adds me who I want to add back, I like to write a personal note to them and I do keep up with my friends status feeds and such. I update my own Facebook status with Twitter and import notes from my LiveJournal, so my Facebook friends probably get a mildly more complete view. But tonight, I logged onto Facebook thinking that maybe I would do something sociable and just felt a wave of social anxiety. Although there are five or six pending requests on there I was really really looking forward to approving and interacting with, there were also a hundred I was kind of stumped by. Lots of women I’ve known have naturally changed their names. Lots of people I’ve known by fannish names or punk rock nicknames and I don’t recall what their mamma called them, even if I knew once. Remembering multiple names for every person becomes really hard once one has met enough people. I recognized some of the add requests as people I’ve photographed but don’t know and some as people who dated friends of friends of friends or who were otherwise tangentially part of social groups I was in. Not people I dislike at all, but not all people I’d be inclined to hang with if I were in town for a weekend or vice-versa. Some people ring a bell and I agonize over where I know them from, but don’t want to offend by asking. My time is so limited that I’d really like to have just one social platform where everyone on my list is someone who might actually care if I had a death in the family. Or at least enjoy getting coffee with me on a good day.

Actually, although I still minimally participate in LiveJournal, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook, I find that, for me, all the new Web 2.0 modes of interaction feel great for a few months and then feel kinda ache-inducing. If I’m so connected, why do I feel so disconnected? The only web interaction sites which tend to consistently be enjoyable for me are forums. This is why it is so important to me that the BlueBlod.net boards be a place where people from varied backgrounds can exchange different viewpoints in an intelligent and real way, without tonal BS bulletpoints, without flame wars, without being unable to back up what they say.

But, every once in a while, it just all fills me with such a deep keening sense of loneliness, I pine for the days when I used to just drop by friends’ houses and vice-versa, when it felt worth getting dressed up to go out, whether or not photos would be taken. I realize this is the internet age equivalent of longing for the times when people dressed up to go visit the town square. I remember my grandparents talking about country clubs taking the place of the town square or something along those lines that a child’s mind couldn’t quite grasp. A country club is too geographically local for today’s mobile world, though. I wish I could take a year off and just travel and write and eat right and visit people from different times in my life and different areas of my interests and see who I really connect or re-connect with and who is just a pleasant memory. The country club of Web 2.0 is just simultaneously overwhelming with the constant clamor of thousands of apparently potential friends and lonely with lack of anything real enough to feel . . . well, real.

In case some of you are getting too much work done, there is a web comic I’ve mentioned in the forums before, that I’m going to remind you of again now. The xkcd comic strip is probably most accurately described as tech culture humor. At a time in history when so much of the population uses the internet so extensively, tech humor probably has a pretty broad audience though. The site could be more cohesively designed, but the strips are some of the most insightful and hilarious on the web. The “Someone is wrong on the internet” panel is pretty much my favorite thing I have ever seen in a comic strip and I think of it often. Normally, I’d talk a bit about genius strip creator Randall Munroe and how his strips started life as an archive of scans from his math notes and who he is and all, but his bio is just so awesome that I feel like paraphrasing its info would be leaving something out:

I’m just this guy, you know? I’m a CNU graduate with a degree in physics. Before starting xkcd, I worked on robots at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia. As of June 2007 I live in Massachusetts. In my spare time I climb things, open strange doors, and go to goth clubs dressed as a frat guy so I can stand around and look terribly uncomfortable. At frat parties I do the same thing, but the other way around.

That is sufficiently awesome that the only thing I have to add at the moment is that I’m buying myself a “Stand back, I’m going to try science” T-shirt if I finish everything in my inbox tonight.

If I were in Portland for NYE, I can guarantee that I would be at Darklady’s Empire of Pleasure New Year’s Eve. If you’ve ever read the words in an adult publication, you are most likely familiar with Darklady’s work. She is a successful prolific journalist and sexpert and knows so much about so many of my favorite things. She describes her areas of expertise as “adult entertainment industry, free speech, internet technology, and alternative sexuality” and I’d have to agree that is deliciously accurate.

What you may not know is that Darklady Productions, Inc. also produces a series of good events for the perverse. We’ve got a little taster gallery of event photos from her Burlesque-a-thon themed 2008 Portland Masturbate-a-thon and her 2007 NYE Masquerade. I’m always down for wearing giant hoop skirts which knock everything over, although, because I don’t have a real hat head, sometimes crowns can be difficult to fit. Tiaras work fine though. Yes, I’m planning an outfit in my head for an Empire of Pleasure themed event I probably won’t be in town to attend; I work too much, but it sounds really fun. Darklady described the theme, saying:

“The snows are melting and Darklady’s Empire of Pleasure has physical, emotional and spiritual warmth to spare. Pay homage to empires past, present and future while lovingly indulging your senses in celebration of life and the coming New Year. Darklady’s Empire of Pleasure pays homage to days past, present and future that shape us. Whether your favorite “imperial” spreads like butter or starred Shaka Zulu, the Son of Heaven, the Chrysanthemum Throne, Imperium Romanum, Stormtroopers or genuinely Byzantine thinking, Darklady invites you to lovingly indulge in a celebration of the senses and New Year.”

They will also have giveaways from Big Teaze Toys, Topco Toys, Taboo Video, Stockroom and Astroglide too if you count the fact that Astroglide is sort of sponsoring the play room. They take their play seriously in the Pacific NW. Plus all you can eat Mediterranean buffet. Mmmmm.

You can get more info at Darklady’s site and RSVP to Darklady@darklady.com.

The sexy lead-off picture for our Darklady photo gallery is of her and Dale the Nail from this year’s Portland Masturbate-a-thon, photographed by Bryan Grimes. Darklady and I were chatting about her party and just random stuff going on and this photo made her think of a great story she shared:

“It’s so weird about Dale and I. We were punk teens back in the 70s/80s and hung out downtown — then dropped out of contact until after 2000 when we discovered I was writing throwing parties and writing about sex for a living and he was hanging from hooks and creating weird “guerrilla art.”

Nice to know we didn’t all grow up to become accountants and housewives.“

Amen to that, sister.

The Sisters of Mercy will be playing The Music Box at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008. Read on to find out how you can win tickets courtesy of GoldenVoice and Blue Blood.

In the same way perhaps that Guns n’ Roses is essentially Axl Rose at this point, Sisters of Mercy is essentially Andrew Eldritch. Having different collaborators on different Sisters albums gave different ones slightly different feels, but I personally enjoy the music on all of them. I even liked Vision Thing when all my unsavory pals derisively referred to it as the “Sisters Metal Album”. (I maintained that the Egyptian iconography on the cover made it totally gothic, but whatever.)

My friend Jeanne has been emailing me nostalgic photos recently and this made me think of of an amusing related anecdote. Uncomfortable with the goth label, Sisters of Mercy has tended to tour with potentially incongruous acts. So Jeanne and I were at some stadium show. I don’t recall all the acts on the bill, but the arena was probably the New Haven Coliseum or the Hardford Civic Center. This was pre-internet, so she and I were really enjoying the people watching and deconstructing the different tribes which had come out for the various bands playing. And looking for cute boys. So Jeanne spots this totally hot guy with dark hair and pale skin, a type we both favored, and she grabs me to point him out (I’m the forward one), only the guy disappears into some door and we can’t figure out quite where.

Eventually Jeanne figured out that she had been scoping out Sisters frontman Andrew Eldritch. Apparently he had managed to walk around the arena hallways unrecognized, simply by not wearing his trademark sunglasses. Absolutely classic when one can be incognito by taking the sunglasses off.

I’m sure Andrew Eldritch is a difficult man to like in real life, so probably for the best. Sometimes you have to love the art and not the artist. Now I realize that Andrew Eldritch has repudiated the goth label, along with his former music label, bands who wanted to support him, and a laundry list of former bandmates. I find it really tragic that things went this way for someone who could create such consistently brilliant music and intriguing lyrics. I know genius is often tortured and alienated. I have days when I feel stabby too, but I try not to interact too much if I’m feeling like lashing out at everything around me; that feeling is nature’s way of saying to take the day off. I admit that I didn’t create art for years because a junior high art teacher was mean to me, but, in my defense, I was in junior high at the time. The Sisters of Mercy haven’t had a proper new album in years because Andrew Eldritch was on strike because he didn’t like his record label and hasn’t landed with a new one since breaking up with East West.

Word is, however, that you can hear new Sisters material at a live show, so I’d expect to hear some new music in the mix at The Sisters of Mercy show at The Music Box at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008. If you want to win a pair of free tickets, either post in this thread or message privately here or on MySpace or VF. Your post or message should include a personal anecdote about Sisters of Mercy, such as the one I told about me and my friend Jeanne, or your thoughts about the band or one of their songs. Basically, talk about something related to Sisters of Mercy and the most entertaining anecdotes or insights win free pairs of tickets to the Hollywood show.

Astroturfing is the word of the week. My brother just told me that one of his model/starfucker friends just called him up to chortle over the word astroturfing. This tells me that it is officially part of the internet lexicon and everybody needs to know the expression.

The term is, like the term spam, derived from an actual product. AstroTurf is the leading brand of fake grass ground covering. Developed in 1964, AstroTurf has been a particular boon for major sports arenas in areas where real grass is not easily grown or cared for. AstroTurf takes their products very seriously and promises to provide whatever is needed for every possible sport:

” The broad range of AstroTurf products ensures that there will be a synthetic turf system engineered to meet the demands of your team’s sport. Whether it’s a field hockey team that prefers the hydrophilic properties of AstroTurf 12™, or a soccer team that prefers the high-density fiber of AstroTurf PureGrass®.

Whatever sport your team plays, there’s an AstroTurf product ready to take the field.”

Grass roots support used to be what you called it when a band or political candidate had a lot of people who believed in them, whether or not the record labels or political machine did. Astroturfing is the act of faking grass roots support.

For example, if you see a point being made over and over again on MySpace or LiveJournal or in forums, and the point is usually made by people who nobody knows in real life, who tell you nothing plausible about themselves, and who do not have known online nicks, then you are probably looking at astroturfing. This means that, when you see certain points made over and over again, by potential sock puppets presenting what they supposedly think in a bullet point sort of structured way, you are looking at astroturfing or fake grass roots support. It is my understanding that often dating sites and sites which sell music street team services to bands are the two types of organizations which most commonly set up fake profiles. Astroturfing is not the only function of a fake profile, but it is a favorite. A non-digital example of astroturfing would be when the news media found out that the enthusiastic fans waiting in line to buy various products when they first came on sale . . . were not really enthusiastic fans. Many bands, when either touring or showcasing, hire good-looking girls to come cheer in the front row, but traditionally one at least had to find real live good-looking girls to be willing to act like they supported the band. Now they can be wholly fictional.

Astroturfing has become popular for three primary reasons. Firstly, the current younger demographics have been bombarded with traditional advertisements for so many years that a certain immunity to them has resulted, forcing marketers to be creative. Secondly, because the internet was initially (ROFL) supposed to be a noncommercial environment, a lot of marketers came up with innovative (and icky) ways to circumvent people’s resistance to blatant and honest commercial presentation. Thirdly, artists and politicians who have actual grass roots support are very hard for the corporate world to entirely control, so corporations prefer popularizing something fake through astroturfing to having to deal with individuals who have personal power.

Now everyone go use the term astroturfing in a sentence this week.

Since 1992, Blue Blood has been about encouraging people to think critically and not just go along with the herd. My hair is purple and red at the moment. But the hair color is a signifier, not the endgame. What I mean by this is that all of us who fought the battle to convince the world that someone with primary-colored hair or tattoos could be beautiful or sexy, we can all pat ourselves on the back and go home, if that was all the whole thing was about. That battle is won. But the point is that the physical appearance was supposed to be about being a maverick and living on your own terms, about marching to the beat of your own drummer. If mohawks become trendy, then having one does not necessarily signify that one is a nonconformist. You can still aesthetically enjoy very tall hair, but the most important body part in the battle against conformity is slightly lower — your brain. You need to have an evolved intellect to avoid being a bah bah sheep conformist.

I’m about to tell you all the most important lesson of a liberal arts education and it is not even going to cost you a hundred grand or whatever higher learning is priced at these days. I was less enamored of the lessons I learned in school, while I was paying off the tab, so here is the most crucial stuff for free. My parents certainly deserve most of the credit for my brain, but my education really helped ingrain some of their lessons.

In order to have an intelligent and human approach to the world, you must learn to be analytical and think critically. Some people are born more or less disposed to having these abilities, but they are definitely learned skills. The direction culture is moving, driven by technology, does not nurture skills in analysis and critical thinking. First television advertisers, and then internet marketers, found that people respond most primally to sound bites and slogans, as opposed to actual data. As a result, a lot of modern debate, especially online, sounds like the old “Tastes great!” vs “Less Filling!” argument. A person capable of analysis and thinking critically would look at that argument and realize that a discussion of Miller Lite probably entailed a beverage which did not taste good at all to most people and which would indeed be less filling because fewer people would drink much of it.

Which is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that you need to make up your own mind. When you are presented with a debate or controversy, you need to deconstruct what is actually being discussed. What are the sides of the issue? What is each side actually trying to accomplish? Who are the people presenting the sides of this issue? What, if anything, do these people stand to gain from one or another outcome? Are the people debating a particular side anonymous?

Politicians and salesmen will frequently present their own viewpoint as the side that all people of a certain type will be on. This is to induce everyone who is that type of person to side with them. For example, “if you care about children, you have to donate to my campaign.” Or, “if you are artistic and independent, you have to buy my product.” You need to analyze what the actual issues are and what the actual qualities of a product are. If you do not, then you are doomed to sheepdom.

Once you figure out what the actual issues and values being presented really are, as best you can discern, you need to think critically about them. You might love children and think of yourself as very artistic and independent. But that does not mean you need to buy what a politician or salesman is selling. Thinking critically means deciding for yourself, being able to process new data as it becomes available for your analysis, and determining for yourself how the real issues actually fit with your personal values. Thinking critically means not just wholesale swallowing whatever the last person you talked to told you to think. It means questioning authority and thinking for yourself.

I am often asked why I permit dissenting opinions on the Blue Blood boards. How can I permit people to disagree with me, with the only rule being that they have to be capable of explaining and supporting what they say, preferably without sloganeering or name-calling? So many forums online censor what can be posted in order to make sure as many people as possible will eat the sound bite argument and site owners will not have to back up what they say. So I try to provide a venue where people from many different walks of life can come together to exchange their varied points of view.

Thinking critically combined with being analytical means being able to find the real answers which are best for you, means being your own person. Even if some of your tastes and decisions end up being common ones, coming to your conclusions via critical thinking and analysis means being a nonconformist inside your own gray matter. Where it counts the most.

I believe there is nothing more important than individual liberty. Black eyeliner and glitter lipstick might be ways of expressing your love of freedom, but they will not make you free. Only application of your unfettered brain can do that.