jwz: Oct 2013 | Page 2

Hey, go buy my friend Meredith's The Parlour Trick album, as seen in that first video! It's spooky.

Five of the bands on this mixtape have performed at DNA Lounge recently. So that's exciting.

Hysteria Therapy is apparently still a thing! Filtered through EST, Landmark Forum, and with a healthy dose of Dot Com Multi-Level Marketing thrown in. You can be a Certified Bean-Flicker! Oh, Internet.

My Life With the Thrill-Clit Cult

This was the first night of OMXperience, a three-day August conference meant to "kick off the industry of orgasm," with speakers including Naomi Wolf, New York Times bestselling author Dr. Sara Gottfried, and Robbie Richman, the former "culture strategist" at Zappos. Roughly 1,400 people had paid between $200 and $400 to attend. [...]
OneTaste offers sessions ranging from Coaching certification ($15,000) to six-month Mastery Programs ($7,500) to a one-day Play Class ($195) and evening TurnOn events ($10), as well as t-shirts, organic lube, and OM warmers for your legs in the winter. After the conference, a newsletter went out welcoming acolytes to a private social network called the OM Hub, a formalized version of their once-secret Facebook group, accessible with an OM badge ($49/year.) [...]
Daedone [...] relayed an endorsement from foundational futurist Ray Kurzweil, whose Singularity University counts Reese Jones as a board member. "The next thing we knew we were invited into all of these tech circles and, whoa, man, the testing there was rigorous and crazy," she said. "But finally we got the blessing of Ray Kurzweil that we are officially a technology, and they said it's based on scientific knowledge about physiology and psychology and it goes far beyond insight or a piece of advice." [...]
About that connection: In the realm of OM, "partner" does not connote a prior relationship. It's not unusual, at OneTaste events, to get stroked by someone you've only just met. Over the course of the conference, nearly every guy who asked me to OM -- the collegiate startup cofounder, the burly acupuncturist, the weaselly 20-something from Austin, the dashing cognitive scientist, the white-haired yogi -- would suggest it within 60 seconds of our first meeting. A couple of times, the request arrived before they even gave me their names. [...]
And now that another presenter had briefed us, like a vadge sommelier, on the "reverent, light sensation" from the clitoral ridge, versus the "rich, deep earthy sensation" down at the base -- it was showtime.

Don't poke fun: Ray Kurzweil has officially blessed it as a technology. The "testing" was "rigorous and crazy".

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Today in Computational Necromancy:

Turning the Apple //e into a Lisp Machine

But, while we didn't have extra floppy disks, we did have our laptops. So, we ended up writing some C code that allows us to encode arbitrary binary data as an audio signal. Using this, we were able to write the lisp prototype on our laptops, and simply transmit the program via the audio jack to the Apple //e.