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.

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.

“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.

I just finished a review of The Billy Meier Story: UFO’s and Prophecies From Outer Space. For some reason, it’s also known as The Silent Revolution of Truth in certain markets. It’s almost exactly what you’d expect from the title, but I still managed to go on for 1,000 words about it. I’ll be sending the review to the SF Site later today and I’ll let you know when they publish it. I also know they will be posting a review of the Arse Elektronika 2008 anthology which features my paper on the future of the novel; I’m excited to share that with you when I am able too.

I didn’t include it in my review, but does anyone else think that the venerable RE/Search ought to be either offended or flattered that their logo was ripped off by Reality Entertainment, distributors of The Billy Meier Story?

So I am NOT actually doing novel in 90, this round. I had some minor setbacks around when it started, and was actually out of town for the first few days of the session. I can jump in later, and am working on increasing my output in other ways. I’m partway into a work of erotic short fiction, but am also unfortunately just a few days from the deadline of the anthology I wish to submit it too. It will be an experiment in turning work around quickly, and I hope I succeed.

Otherwise my life is quite good right now. A few interesting people have come into my life lately, people I may be enlisting to ‘help’ with my reviews. Although the cold weather has been hard on my fibromyalgia, and I have a lot of work to do get my life where I want it to be, I find myself happier so far in 2010.

Black and White by Lewis Shiner. I am hoping to write a review of this for sfsite. An interesting book that uses the tropes of horror — a creative type (not a writer for once) returns to his childhood home to uncover the dark secrets of his past. However, the story itself is without supernatural elements, being based extensively on the history of race relations in the Hayti region of Durham, NC.

The Bottoms by Joe Lansdale. Lansdale is the master of living master of southern horror, and this book is no exception. One part idyllic story of childhood in Depressian-era east Texas, one part loss of innocence, one part serial killer story. Reading this book, it occurs to me that much of horror is based on the collision of differing realities — in this book, that of black and white, child and killer, even child and grownup.

Deep Inside: Extreme Erotic Fantasies by Polly Frost. Another one I want to review. This is great stuff. I think it is really cool that this book was published by Tor — although the stories are thought-provoking and have genuine, meaningful fantasy or genre elements, they are also true erotica — not the tasteful, suggestive stuff, but actual one-handed reading. I hope the divisions between erotica and genre really are blurring as M. Christian has suggested.

In other news, my partner-in-crime Reesa Brown just made an exciting announcement about one of her stories appearing in print. She will also have a story in the upcoming Unspeakable Horror anthology from Dark Scribe Press.

And my computer is still broken. We recovered all my files from it, thanks to our local computer repair place, Micro Age. Dell sent me a box to return the computer to them last week. Only it didn’t have a return label in it for me to use to mail it back. In response, they told me they’d send me another box (that’s right, not just another mailing label) but that didn’t arrive. Now they are sending me yet another, third shipment of an empty box, hopefully with a mailing label. With luck I might have my computer back by… wel, probably around September 1st. :(

Wasteland by Francesca Lia Block

Beautiful, sensual and a little disturbing like many of her books. I didn’t feel as beaten in the head with the One True Love theme in this, there was even a momentary glimpse of someone with a polyamorous desire, which is shocking for one of Ms. Block’s books. A rather haunting exploration of some incest themes that I found worth reading.

Alternate Presidents edited by Mike Resnick

Some of these were clever. I liked ‘Tricky Dick’ the acid-dropping talk show host in “Fellow Americans” by Eileen Gunn. Pat Cadigan’s story was quite effective. Laura Resnick’s “We Are Not Amused” led to some fun reading on Victoria Woodhull. Most of the stories had a sort of formula: In X election, the other (guy/girl) wins and as a result the country goes to hell/becomes the awesomely awesome America our founding fathers wanted. Even with the better stories my history was often too lacking to fully appreciate what was being done — but this is my fault, not that of the author or editor.

Tea from an Empty Cup by Pat Cadigan

I was disappointed in this. It’s another cyberpunk book that asks the question, what does identity mean in a virtual environment where you can become anyone? I’ve heard this question before, now I am ready to have it answered in some more depth. In fairness, this book is ten years old.

Best Fantastic Erotica edited by Cecilia Tan

Ms. Tan sent me this fine collection of genre erotica some time ago and I fully intended to review it for SF Site or elsewhere. I was reading it and took it on a trip with me to Austin, and left it at my friend Bret’s house. Given the sort of people he hangs out with (i.e. pervs like me) it took him a while to figure out which of his friends had lost it. I’m glad to have it back, enjoyed it a lot, and hope to review it soon (as well as another book Tan sent me).

Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and the Ghost Brigade — really darn fun. Heinlein would be proud. Worth reading at least the first, but the second was a good time too.

John Wright’s Orphans of Chaos — Solid fantasy, a complex mythological background that was satisfying and engaging, and contained one of the hottest spanking scenes I’ve read in some time. This review is short not because the book is not good, but that going into it relatively ignorant was quite rewarding for me, so I would avoid spoilers if I were you.

I read Orphans of Chaos and Old Man’s War as pdf files that I got free from Tor. Giving away free books rocks, especially as I sought out the Ghost Brigades (though in this case from Steve’s bookshelf) and will probably look for the rest of this series by Wright. In both cases I did not know I was starting a series until the end, but I guess that’s how they hook you — the first one is free.

I like how these pdf files encourage me to not only try new authors, but to go into the stories with little to no knowledge of their contents. In a bookstore I will pick up a book and read its back cover, but here I just start reading. I’ve gone and looked at the jacket copy of Orphans of Chaos on Amazon since reading the book, and I am glad I got to uncover the book’s secrets as the characters did rather than having them handed to me by the cover.