O'Connell / Review: Harmony Wireless Wonder vibe / Monday, March 8th, 2010

Harmony Wireless wonder vibe

The Harmony Wireless Wonder

I am now reviewing sex toys for sextoy.com. While I don’t receive any money for these reviews, I am receiving free sex toys. You can find the Harmony Wireless Wonder and other vibrators on their site.

You can imagine how eagerly I’ve been waiting for my first shipment of sex toys to review. It was wonderful timing that the same week my toys arrived I had a perfect opportunity to try one out — in just a few days I was due to attend a social occasion with my ‘pet.’ It seemed like the perfect opportunity for us to experiment with wireless toys.

The Harmony Wireless Wonder from Doc Johnson is a wireless vibrator, meaning that it can be controlled from a distance with a remote control. It comes in two versions, yin and yang, which are identical except for the color (I got yang, the white vibe pictured above). The vibrator itself is insertable, but safe only for vaginal use. It is waterproof, but the accompanying controller is not. Since the vibrator is  made from hard plastic you can clean it in soap and water. According to the packaging, this vibrator is free of phthalates. Like most Doc Johnson sex toys, it is labelled ‘for novelty use only’ though this does not mean it is necessarily ‘unsafe.’

The first thing I noticed when unboxing the Harmony was that it had no instructions whatsoever to assist in its setup or use. The next thing I noticed was that it has strange batteries; I’d been a little worried that the toy would use button batteries, which run out quickly and are expensive to replace. Instead, the vibe itself uses three ‘N‘ batteries and one ‘12v‘ battery, which are included. These look like stubby AAs. While they are more powerful and long-lasting than buttons, you’ll still need to go out of your way to replace them, probably with a visit to your local or online sex toy vendor.

The remote control takes the single 12v battery, and it’s a slightly different size from the N batteries, preventing too much confusion. The top of the vibrator screws down over a rubber ring, meaning you’ll want to keep it screwed on as tight as possible to maintain the vibrator’s ‘waterproof’ nature. I had a little trouble figuring out how to put the batteries in until I noticed the diagrams, which are around the shaft of the vibe under the cap rather than on the top where I expected.

Because it runs on three batteries, the Harmony Wireless Wonder is fairly powerful. It’s about as powerful as your typical egg vibrator with an attached powerpack. The vibrations are evenly distributed throughout the shaft of the device and it’s quiet; while you can hear some quiet sounds when the vibrator is being held or used externally, once inserted and under clothing it was totally silent.

The biggest drawback of this vibrator is its controls. While the remote control is small enough to conceal easily in a pocket or the palm of your hand, that’s pretty much where its advantages end. The small LED light on the remote lights up when you press a button but it gives no indication of whether the toy is currently active. If you sit on the remote control by accident, like in that memorable scene from the movie Shortbus, you’d be clueless about whether or not you had turned it on until you found your squirming partner. The remote also gives no indication of which of the 7 modes is active, and each time you turn off the remote you have to cycle through all the modes again to get back to the one you were last on.

At one point during the evening the toy stopped working entirely, however I suspect interference from an outside source — as soon as we moved to a new area it began working again.

I can’t give any comparisons between this vibrator and other wireless toys as it is the first and only one I’ve experienced. It’s not as strong as a electric vibrator of course, and it won’t provide any direct clitoral stimulation unless you hold it in your hand. I think most women would find it to be a delightful tease rather than deeply orgasmic.

For us, playing with the wireless wonder turned the whole party into an act of foreplay interspersed with multiple furtive yet noisy visits to a nearby private location. The toy was dripping wet each time we took it out, so we can attest that it is waterproof, or at least pet proof. There was an instant reaction any time I turned the toy on, and it seemed to work at a short distance though we didn’t test its limits much. It was wonderful sharing a naughty secret all night. The first mode was hard for her to feel when she was very worked up, as the most gentle vibrations would be lost in her natural internal movements. The third mode, which is the toy’s maximum steady vibration, was definitely noticeable and the fifth mode, a series of steady hard pulses, made it hard for her to stand up when combined with any other kind of stimulation. She told me the next day that she really enjoyed how she had to work against the weight of the toy to keep it inside; my pet was wearing a dress and panties, but a pair of tight jeans would probably make things easier. Being teased for hours had a definite effect: late that night my pet ejaculated twice when I fingered her, harder than she ever has with me before — but of course there’s no way to guarantee the toy has a similar effect on you or your lover.

If any of this sounds good to you, I recommend you try the Wireless Wonder or a similar vibrating toy. Its drawbacks were slight compared to the fun we had with it, and the fun we hope to have in the future.

O'Connell / Brief Notes / Thursday, March 4th, 2010

I’m feeling a lot of push from my muse to write, which is good overall (except when I get cranky with a friend or loved one who ‘interrupts’ her). I’ve got a couple reviews in the works, various ideas kicking around in my head, a coauthor eager to continue work on Honeycutt Tales and the germ of a brand new collaborative project which I won’t be able to tell you about for a long time. Believe me though, it’s a thrilling one and the possibilities have lit a fire under my creative spirit.

I’ve got an upper respiratory infection and probably have had one for a while. I only just yesterday got on Houston’s gold card, so today I was able to see a doctor and get some much needed prescriptions. Not only that but I am back in treatment for fibromyalgia and finally have a prescription for muscle relaxers again. If you live in Houston and don’t have insurance, you should really have a gold card (even if you make more money than I do).

The new edition of M. Christian’s The Bachelor Machine should go on sale soon from Circlet Press, featuring a new introduction by yours truly. In addition to excitement over seeing my words in print alongside this favorite author of mine, I’m also especially pleased that the new edition features a dialogue between Chris and Cecilia Tan. It was a freebie given to reviewers of the old edition and I once lamented that most readers would be unable to enjoy it; now it’s in its own appendix. I will be sure to post here when the book is available.

The second Houston Art Nerds salon is tomorrow. Our theme this time is ‘Storytelling,’ but as always we welcome artists in all media. If you’d like more information, visit the Facebook group or contact me directly.

O'Connell / Balance / Friday, February 26th, 2010

February has not been a great month for writing as far as putting words on a page. I’ve been under a lot of stresses, including financial ones and the quest for a place to live. I haven’t stalled out completely, which is a relief, but it’s been hard to find the energy to put towards a lot of concerted writing effort and I don’t like this.

What I have done very well at in February is creating infrastructure for me to write within. The first Houston Art Nerds salon was a huge success, with lots of art, photography and creativity in evidence. But I spent most of that time facilitating the group rather than creating for myself. Likewise I’ve successfully begun the process of reviving my online writers’ group, the Society of Voluptuaries but haven’t contributed new work to it yet myself. I’ve also gone a long way into making my life more stable and secure, at least for the next few months, which helps facilitate an environment in which to write and keeps stress from interfering with creativity.

In March, though, my goal for the ongoing healing of my muse is to work on balance — to keep writing while continuing to work on the day to day work of keeping myself fed and housed. Writing does not (yet) pay the bills, but it’s necessary to my sanity. And being able to pay the bills keeps me from stressing out to much to write (not to mention making sure I have a place to put a desk!). I am pleased with myself at working so hard to create this infrastructure, but now I need to make sure I continue to both enhance that infrastructure and create within it.

I’m highly motivated  and have a lot of ideas kicking around in my head ready to be matured into words on a page. March should be good to me.

O'Connell / Privacy and Sousveillance / Friday, February 26th, 2010

I’ve recently been engaging in conversation on ReadWriteWeb’s Google Buzz feed. Not only have there been lively discussions there,  but it’s gotten me thinking about privacy, social networking and related topics. As Google Buzz has undergone an extremely shaky launch it’s been fascinating to watch the various reactions people have. My mother, a tech savvy individual and regular participant in some major political blogs reacted with abject horror to the problems with Buzz. While I can see her side (and that of the many other people who were and are in an uproar over Buzz’s privacy concerns), it seems you react by either seeing Buzz as a useful tool or running away screaming into the night.

I think RWW’s buzzfeed is a great example of the potentials for the service as a place for active and intelligent discussions about news and webcontent. I’ve also been experimenting with using buzz through the google maps application on my Android phone, but this still seems unstable and buggy. Of course, some concerns have been raised about the effect of location-based services. Yet services like Facebook, Twitter and Google which integrate my location have done wonderful things in my life — especially in enhancing my ability both to plan organized social gatherings and meet my friends for impromptu ones. I think we end up with issues of surveillance versus sousveillance: now that the location cat is out of the bag, it will take draconian legislation to put it back in again. What tech activists really need to be doing is to pressure the government and corporations to protect our privacy even while enhancing our the opportunity to give it up voluntarily. I’m deeply concerned by how quickly ISPs roll over for government surveillance and yet I want to enable the creative, empowering sharing of personal data that these services also allow. I think it will almost certainly take an active, tech-education population to ensure we forge the right balance.

In any case, I’m thrilled to have been quoted in ReadWriteWeb’s discussion of this topic. Hello to any new visitors to kitoconnell.com that stop by because of that link. I update this site a few times a month but the best way to follow me is on twitter.

O'Connell / Other Notes / Housing / Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Writing has been slow lately. Some stresses — see below for one of them — combined with computer difficulties put a cramp in my output. I’m working slowly on the former and have mostly solved the latter: a bunch of friends (Maenad, Alan, Chris, and the A’s, thanks!) donated computer parts to me, so I was able to assemble a frankenPC on which I am typing this entry.

The newest, biggest stress in my life involves my living situation. I’ve been living with two other roommates for about a year, and was not hoping to move anytime soon. But through circumstances essentially outside his control, the actual lease-holding roommate is going to be forced to make either myself or the third roommate move out. I’m already basically broke and struggling to get myself on a more stable financial footing, so this has been an unpleasant development to say the least.

Maybe you can help me? What I need are leads on pre-existing places looking for roommates in the Houston (or possibly Austin) area. Even moreso, I’m looking for potential roommates in the Houston area who might want to go in together on a lease with 2 or 3 other intelligent weirdos. I’ve done some searching and there are some affordable 3-4 bedroom houses for rent out there and I know I’ve only just scratched the surface.

My requirements for places I will consider are:

  • For Houston locations, somewhere inside the loop.
  • Accessible to reasonable amounts of public transportation
  • 420- and noisy, kinky sex-friendly
  • Pet friendly. My cat is antisocial and will probably live mostly or entirely in my bedroom.
  • Cheap. I’m paying a maximum of $300/month for both rent and bills and want to keep it under that if possible. But I may be willing to trade added chores for reduced rent.

If you have any useful information then please leave a comment, email kitoconnell at pobox dot com, or use the mobile number on my homepage (yes it really works).

O'Connell / Book of Eli / Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

So the other day I went to see the Book of Eli with one of my girlfriends. I love a good post-apocalyptic adventure, and I’d read a review by Roger Ebert that had piqued my interest. Unfortunately, I had a real problem with the movie. Since seeing it, I have checked various reviews and not seen my issue discussed elsewhere. Sure, critics complain about the ridiculous reveal near the end, or comment on the questionably pro-Christian message, or the general unevenness of the story. Some complain that while it sets up potentially juicy themes of the positive vs. negative uses of religious faith, it instead chooses to wallow in hyperviolent acton sequences.

Hyperviolent actions sequences that are very stylish. The Book of Eli is beautifully shot in crisp over-exposed, mostly black and white.  The Mad Max aesthetic and dusty setting will please any Burning Man enthusiasts in the audience. The movie makes (I think) clever and conscious use of the tropes of post-apocalyptic fiction, a trick it hangs a lampshade on by putting villainous Gary Oldman’s lair in a movie theater and putting a poster for A Boy and his Dog on the wall in the background of a scene set there.

But the Book of Eli is so sexist it doesn’t just fail the Bechdel-Wallace test with a F-, it travels into some whole other territory where it gets flying colors on some new, mythical test where you get points for denigrating and abusing female characters. I’ll let you come up with a clever name for it.

Here are all the women I remember from the Book of Eli:

  • The first woman we see is a sexual decoy, used to lure Eli into a trap lain by men who plan to murder and cannibalize Eli.
  • Next, we see an anonymous woman travelling with her male partner. She is raped and murdered to establish how hardcore evil a group of villains are.
  • Jennifer Beals’ character, who is Gary Oldman’s property and abused/used as a pawn.
  • Mila Kunis, who plays Beals’ daughter. She is completely passive throughout almost the entire film, the victim of an attempted rape by the cannibals from the beginning of the movie, and only learns to stand up for herself under a man’s (Eli’s) tutelage.
  • Another anonymous woman, a sex worker at Oldman’s whorehouse who is raped in the background to provide extra color in a chaotic scene during the denouement.
  • Oh yeah, and a doddering elderly cannibalistic matron who invites our heroes in for tea despite husband’s misgivings. Then she gets killed. But at least she’s funny.

And yes, Kunis’ and Beal’s characters have a few conversations… about either Oldman or Eli.

In other words: No sir, I didn’t like it. When we came home, we watched a few episodes of Firefly just to purge the bad taste from my brain.

O'Connell / New Reviews / Not So Continuous / Monday, February 1st, 2010

The SFSite has published their first February update, and with it, two of my reviews. First up, my review of the UFO ‘documentary’, The Billy Meier Story: UFO’s and Prophecies from Outer Space:

“watching this film is like diving headlong into a disorienting, paranoid world of outer space visitors, grainy super-8 footage of floating trash-bins, and gun-toting bearded cultists from Switzerland”

This film is great fun if you are a lover of the occult, the Fortean or the weird like me. I recommend watching it with a few of your friends and perhaps a chemical relaxant of choice. The rest of my review is here.

My review of FlashForward by Robert J. Sawyer is also available. I couldn’t help but compare the book to the TV series, which I watched a bunch of before giving up in frustration:

What I found incredibly frustrating about FlashForward, the television series, was the way it took this fantastic concept and buried it in a slightly futuristic procedural police drama about the brave FBI agents who investigate the crisis. … The deeper metaphysical issues of what it means to see the future were rarely played out to their full potential. Perhaps it’s to be expected, but the two versions of the story have almost diametrically opposed strengths.

It’s interesting to see the contrast between my review and this older SFSite review of the same book. Reviewer Donna McMahon pretty much panned the book back in 2002; she even criticizes some of the things I specifically cite as enjoying. While personal taste obviously plays a big role in any review, I can’t help but wonder if I went a little easy on this book simply because it was so much better than the TV show, and I spent so much time ranting about the TV show’s lost potential while I was watching it.

This may be the first time I’ve actually been reviewed rather than being the reviewer: Paul Graham Raven reviews the 2008 Arse Elektronika anthology, Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep, which features the paper I co-wrote with Reesa Brown, “What is the 21st-Century Novel?” Raven has quite a lot of praise both for my paper and the anthology. Even though I don’t see a penny if you buy it, I really recommend that you check out the anthology for yourselves.  You can also hear a mp3 of my presentation and follow along with a slideshow.

Sadly, the Continuous Coast project, which we discussed extensively in our paper, is quite moribund. Personal issues sank the project in the end, and I doubt it will ever be revived. I hope that people find the ideas we laid out in both the project and the paper useful, and I am curious to see where the 21st-century takes storytelling; I hope to be some small part of that tapestry too. I still mourn the ideas and nifty potential of the project though, and hope that at least some of our notes for it can still be released into the Creative Commons as we always intended them to be, eventually.

I’m feeling slightly discouraged at the moment. A rejection letter combined with a fairly hefty personal setback arrived within a couple days of each other. I’m sitting on the story for another day or two then reevaluating whether to send it out as is. I gotta keep writing anyway. If nothing else, I hope the first meeting of the Houston Art Nerds, which we’ll be scheduling soon, will perk me up again.