How Real Cocks Work: A Tutorial.

A real cock comes on command. A real cock never provides you with that embarrassing moment where you’re trying hard to orgasm, but can’t quite get there in time, so your partner’s on their knees foreeeeever waiting for you to ejaculate.
Real cocks never get almost close enough for you to come, so much so that your chest is heaving and your heart is pounding, and then coast up to the edge of sweet release before going “NOPE” and leaving you to have to start all fucking over again.
Real cocks never come too soon. Premature ejaculation’s for teenagers and the inexperienced.
Real cocks switch on hard whenever you want them and stay trembling stiff for as long as you need them to. A real cock never requires you to jerk off for a little between positions to keep your groove in. Real cocks never lose their erection while you’re fumbling the condom on. Real cocks never have problems with the loss of sensation from the condom, even though yes condoms are brutally necessary, come on, stop being a jerk like that and trying to spread STIs.
Real cocks are tied directly to desire. When you’re turned on, a real cock is hard. When you’re not interested, a real cock is soft. A real cock never has a moment where it’s stiff and you look down and go “What the fuck, why are you hard, I wasn’t even paying attention to you!” A real cock never has a moment where you think, “Wow, buddy, every other part of my body is into this, would you mind joining me?”
Real cocks have one level of hardness: rock. Real cocks never have varying levels of hardness, some of which may be inadequate for the job, where trying to work this 70% stiffy into a recalcitrant asshole is like trying to stuff a marshmallow into a parking meter.
Real cocks are all eight inches. Minimum.
Real cocks are all perfectly straight. No bends or curves. Just this divining rod of erection.
Real cocks all bulge real good. Real cocks never require you to say, “I’m a grower, not a shower!” Real cocks are like 80% of a full erection at all times, pushing out through any underwear like a peacock’s plumage to show all the penis-loving people “PENIS, HEY, GOTCHER HOT PENIS HERE.”
Real cocks are pretty amazing.
Man, I wish I had a real cock.

The Complete List Of Obvious Pokemon Go Story Cliches, So You Don't Have To Write Them.

As a former slush reader, I can tell you that lots of writers get their ideas from the news.  Right now, Pokemon Go is in all the headlines, and so every science-fiction and fantasy writer is writing a story that’s a spin on Pokemon Go.
Don’t make that spin obvious.  It’s going to be a lot harder to get your story published if it’s got the same plot we’ve seen six times this week.  And I can tell you from experience that in the months to come, magazines will see tons of stories with the following plotlines:
A Pokemon Go-style game is an evil plot designed to lure humans to their de –
What?
Kris Straub did it?

Well, I think my point’s been made.  If you want to be published – and I love it whenever a new writer gets published! – you’re going to have to work harder than the first ideas that come to mind.
But if you want more examples of the obvious twists slush readers will be seeing a lot of in the near future:
A lonely/abused child discovers his Pokemon Go-style capture is a real actual talking friend, and their new magical buddy humiliates and/or beats up the meanest character in the story.
A Pokemon Go-style game turns out to be the work of leprechauns (or fairies, or whatever) wanting to teach humans to accept finding magical creatures everywhere. 
A Pokemon Go-style game turns out to be the work of evil demons using the game to teach children in the secret ways of HATRED, even though honestly most of the people I’ve seen playing Pokemon Go personally have been in their early twenties.  
Pokemon Go-style creatures have real thoughts, and their own desires when humans aren’t looking, and yet none of them seem to realize this is the plot of Toy Story!   
A Pokemon Go-style game alienates a boy from his friends and he learns the amazing power of books.
Civilization has collapsed because every last human was playing Pokemon Go and nobody else mystically did anything, so now we’re all crawling through the ruins looking for Pikachu.  (Optional variant: A Very Smart Person tries to warn person about the dangers of a Pokemon Go-style game, and is ignored, and everyone is soooo foolish!  For extra chunky in your salsa, combine that with Pokemon Go-style games are the work of evil aliens and/or demons!)
A boy is sucked into the world of Pokemon Go, and now HE is the one who must be caught, and learns a valuable lesson about cruelty to animals.  
Maybe WE are all living in a virtual videogame, did you ever think of that?  Cooooool.
Pokemon Go-style… rape.  Someone will do it.  Someone always wants to tell the rape story.  Nobody ever buys them.
Pokemon Go-style characters comment about how silly the lives of humans are!  (We don’t have an actual plot here, just Squirtle making Seinfeld-style observations.)
A Pokemon Go-style game is a secret test by mysterious aliens to prove who really has the guts to catch them all.  (Although, you know, Ernie Cline got paid millions for that plot, so maybe you can do it too!)
I don’t mean to scorn, writers.  I bring up Ernie Cline at the end because if you write well enough, you can put a good spin on the hoariest concept.  But slush readers are going to be seeing a lot of stories like this, and even if you’re writing the best possible spin on this, an overworked slush reader may write you off because you sound too much like the last seven stories they’ve heard on this.
There’s good ideas for Pokemon Go out there.  Be inspired!  But be next-level inspired.  Think of an idea, and wonder if anyone else has thought of it, and take it to the next level.  Maybe the Pokemon Go AI has become sentient, and it doesn’t want to take over the planet or save a special child or make twee observations, so… what interesting things could it want?   Maybe the Pokemon Go changes society in fascinating ways – it already is – but that change is not as simplistic as “Pokemon Go leads us to the Rapture” or “Pokemon Go destroys civilization,” but rather has a subtle effect that leads to more unique story ideas than “save” or “break.”
You’ve got a good source material, here.  Now take it somewhere nobody but you is going to take it, write it, and submit it everywhere until, as they say in the Viable Paradise Workshop, “Until hell won’t have it!”
And good luck.
(But seriously, don’t write the “Pokemon Go is the lure of the devil” story.  Kris Straub’s done it.)

Ask Me Anything, Stressed Weasel Edition

So I had a pretty crappy day yesterday, what with a cavity and a gruellingly ignorant tech support experience:

“Now, is the tech still there? At your house?”
“…why?”
“Doesn’t he need to install the IP address?”
“It’s… not a physical item.”

— Ferrett Steinmetz (@ferretthimself) July 12, 2016

So I’m doing my usual “I want to reach out to people but don’t want to write an essay to do it” trick of saying “Whaddaya wanna know about me?”  All serious questions are on the table, which is to say, questions you actually want to know the answer to: the answer to questions like “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?” is “You’re not nearly as clever as you think you and shouldn’t post in this thread,” which generally makes people sadder than they’d like to be.
But anything else: up for grabs.  Wanna know about the new novels?  Polyamory?  What’s happening with me and Pokemon Go?  My opinions on random news events?  I’m up for anything, because last night was so stressful all I had for dinner was cupcake frosting and Ativan, so g’wan, distract me.

Your Secret Dental Weapon: Waterpiks

I just went to the dentist, as I do every three months, because about seven years ago I lost ten of my front teeth.  Cue three years’ worth of agonizing, embarrassing gum implant surgery.
…I’m better now.
(And a little better this morning, because I had the strange reward of “going downtown to see the dentist” and finding how Poke-packed the dentist’s office was! Seven Pokestops within an amble of the receptionist’s desk!  Two new Pokemon, a Zubat and a Koffing!  The only thing that might make random doctor visits fun is, indeed, Pokemon!)
Anyway, because of this, hoo boy am I familiar with dental hygiene!  And if you’re slack on your own teeth, I have some advice you need to know:
Get a Waterpik.
One Waterpik, even used improperly, beats the hell out of really good flossing.
Flossing requires a lot of knowledge, both in how to manipulate the string properly and in the personal topography of your mouth.  If you get the angle wrong, you don’t catch the plaque you need to.
A Waterpik, however, is basically pressure-washing your mouth – it requires no particular finesse, as you’re just flooding the spaces between your teeth with water.
I used to spend half an hour at each dental cleaning, being told I needed to be more careful as they scraped my teeth, me bleeding the whole time.  (I build up a lot of tartar.)  Now, post-Waterpik, I can be in and out in ten minutes, and at best my gums are a little red.
And it’s pretty quick, too.  Fill the tub with warm water (cold water hurts my gums), add a shot of Listerine to ensure that the bacteria get killed (and diluted, it doesn’t taste as awful as the direct stuff), and after about a minute you’re as squeaky clean as you can be.
So seriously.  If you’re looking to up your dental game so, I dunno, all your front teeth don’t have to be yanked out in a traumatizing surgery, get you a Waterpik.
Advice ends.

Pokemon Go: First Impressions Of A Game That's Changing Everything.

1) I’ve had a lot of friends sniffing how Pokemon Go isn’t as good as Ingress (which is the game it’s literally based on), and I don’t think these folks understand how deeply a game’s theme affects your appreciation of it.
Take Magic: the Gathering, for instance.  I can give you a card that’s an Equipment:
Equipment
Equipped creature gets +1/+0.
Whenever equipped creature blocks or is blocked by a member of Faction X, destroy that creature. It can’t be regenerated.
And if you’re big into Magic, you’ll understand what that card does, but it’s not a particularly memorable card.  If you don’t understand Magic, it’s a bunch of random words.
But that’s not the real Magic card.
The real Magic card takes place in Innistrad, the Gothic horror plane overrun by werewolves and zombies, and the actual card is:
Wooden Stake – Equipment
Equipped creature gets +1/+0.
Whenever equipped creature blocks or is blocked by a Vampire, destroy that creature. It can’t be regenerated.
Suddenly, all those random statistics coalesce into a story.  It fits into your brain a lot easier.  It becomes a pleasure to see this card, even if you don’t think it’s a good card (it isn’t), because the flavor of the card conveys and reinforces rules.
And I played Ingress for a bit, and I just didn’t care.  The flavor was dead: oh, you’re the blue color or the green color.  There was some vague text in the game about one being the rebellious color, but functionally both sides were perfectly identical, so I forgot which side was which because it was meaningless: there was “my side” and “the other side.”  And I went around checking in places for a while, but my rewards were pretty much “Hey, you’re more blue, go blue,” and I wound up not caring.
Pokemon Go is saturated with flavor.  First off, collecting little cute animals?  A major upgrade, even if nothing else happens.  But these animals are also iconic, giving you the choice of finding a Pikachu or a Charizard, so the collectibles you get in the game are more desirable.  And you can photograph them in the places you got to share them with your friends, so it’s automatically more entertaining than pressing a button when you’re within thirty feet of some restaurant and getting random numbers added to a meaningless score.
Flavor matters.
And maybe Ingress got better once you got to a super high level, but the fact is that at the early levels, the rewards were not particularly well defined.  They were an equipment, not a wooden stake.
Making Pokemon Go a wooden stake is a major upgrade even if you change nothing else, and if you’re a game designer you ignore that flavor component at your peril.
2)  Pokemon Go is a super-popular videogame, yes, but what strikes me about it is how it takes a solitary pasttime and makes it visible.  I mean, millions of people were playing Call of Duty and Dragon Age when those came out, but they were seated in their living rooms.  Pokemon Go makes you go out and be seen.
In a way, it’s the most brilliant marketing ever.
3)  I suspect it will also be a real sea change for how games intersect with real life from now on.  Already we have people who’ve had their houses tagged as gyms complaining about the way random folks showing up makes them look like a drug dealer, and they have no effective way to “un-gym” themselves.  We’ve had a Pokemon Go player stumble over a dead body. We’ve had robbers setting up camp by Pokemon Go stations.  We’ve had businesses putting up signs that “Pokemon are for paying customers only.”
We’ve seen black dudes and white dudes bonding over Pokemon Go at three in the morning, and concerns that Pokemon Go could get black men in trouble, wandering suspiciously in white neighborhoods.
What I like about the game is that it encourages real-world exploring.  I live in the suburbs, and I’m pretty much all rat and bird creatures.  My friend Dave went to the woods this weekend, and he found all sorts of water Pokemon I’m unlikely to find here, and I got a little jealous – which, if you know how much I hate the outdoors, is a strange strange feeling for me indeed.  I like the idea that Pokemon Go rewards people for going to new places, and you’d be surprised just how little incentive people need to change their behavior.
We’ve never really seen what augmented reality does before, and this is going to have so many surprises – both good ones and bad ones.  It’s going to get more insane, just you wait.
4)  It’s also going to cause a run on external power packs.  This game chews through batteries like there’s no tomorrow.
5)  This game is both good and bad for your social life.  On the one hand, I like the way it encourages small talk between strangers – I know if I see a guy with his phone in the “Pokemon hunting” hand position, I can say, “Hey, what’s in the neighborhood?” and talk shop with him.  Given that the game also encourages me to get out, that’s lovely.
But it’s terrible for talks with friends.  I went for a walk with Gini yesterday, and every three minutes the game buzzed and we collected a Pokemon.  We kept going, “…as we were saying” until we realized that it’s hard to discuss anything but Pokemon while you’re playing Pokemon, because it snatches your attention away.
6)  The game itself is… okay.  Like most MMORPG variants, it rewards “time” over “skill,” which is to say that a guy who grinds a lot will be rewarded a lot more than a very talented person who only has a half-hour or two to put into the game.  And it’s annoyingly undocumented, as there’s all sorts of things the game doesn’t bother to make clear, like what you’re supposed to do at a gym or what the little footstep-meters next to the Pokemon mean.
(Forbes Magazine, of all sources, has some hints for you.)
However, the “catch ’em all” formula has worked for years, and I do feel an urge to catch all the possible Pokemon in my neighborhood.  I found a crab wandering on my neighbor’s lawn today.  I don’t know why he was there, but hey, I caught him.
Will this game have lasting value, or be a fad?  A bit of both, I think.  We’re watching the high tide crest as Pokemon Go eclipses Twitter in “number of active users” (in under a week!), but eventually it’ll subside as everyone’s tried it and levels up enough to decide hey, I’ve seen enough.
But Nintendo hasn’t unleashed everything.  Once we can start trading Pokemon, that’ll be a major change in how we interact.  And the mass-captures, where everyone assembles in a city at a given time to capture, say, a Mewtwo, will be legendary – and they’re coming, it was in the game trailer.
And with each of those changes, societal ramifications will also ripple.  What happens when you can trade Pokemon, so some enterprising robber sets up shop at a gym to force people to trade him their strongest Pokemon at gunpoint?  And then he sells them on the black market to other Pokemon users? What happens when a kid gets sick and someone decides the best way to cheer him up is to get everyone to trade him the world’s best Pokemon, making him a tremendous owner of massively overpowered artificial monsters?
This is a fascinating world, my friends.  Pokemon Go is gonna change it a lot.
Let’s see what happens.
Until then, anyone wanna go into the woods to get a Magikarp?

The World Is Sad And So Am I. So Have Some Pretty Pretty Fingernails.

You may note I haven’t blogged much this week, because the news is pretty overwhelming.  So many people dead, and what the hell can I do about it?
(Well, I can join Campaign Zero to see which lawmakers are passing laws that might help the shooting of innocent black men, and write to those lawmakers – and I’m doing that – and to donate money to those law reform campaigns – and I’m doing that – but that doesn’t really help the blue bloodbath in Dallas, either, so I just wind up feeling overwhelmed and inadequate.)
I’m retweeting an awful lot on my Twitter feed, but my personal thoughts are a whirlwind.  It feels like every new headline knocks the last blog idea out of my hands.  This is a chaotic time, more turbulent than even the 1960s, and I’m pretty sure we’ll get through it – we have until now – but what scars will be left behind?
So fuck it.  I also realized I hadn’t posted my last three fingernail shots, so let’s put some joy in this world.
(As usual, all manicures are done by my Mad Manicurist Ashley, who currently works down at Fantasy Nails in Ohio City. Ask for her by name!)

Here’s perhaps the most amazing scientific feat of the year – we flung a three-ton robot across millions of miles to put it into orbit around a distant planet, and hit our target so precisely we were less than ten miles off by the time we got there. So why not Jupiter nails?
(Alas, Ashley forgot to put the little probe on my finger, but hey, she was busy and I had writing to do.)

Before I went on my two-week trip to Greece, I asked Mom if she wanted to have her nails done with me. I got sailboats, because, well, we were on a cruise. My Mom, who already had done her nails in deep blue, got Ashley to paint anchors on them, which coincidentally made her nails look like the Greek flag. We both got a lot of compliments, although I doubt my mother ever expected to be in a “fabulous nails” competition with her son.

When Game of Thrones premiered, everyone went “Get Game of Thrones nails! You love Game of Thrones!” But I was in my seasonal depression, and the world seemed bloody enough as it was, so I went with the other show premiere – the one that promised love and redemption.
Steven Universe nails are pretty wonderful. And I got to sing the theme song a lot, which I will do at the drop of a hat.