National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo, is an annual online literary festival that is celebrated every November. As the name suggests, the idea is to write a novel in a month. Not a good novel, necessarily, but the idea is to just put pen to paper (or finger to keypad) and get it done. — Read the rest

Did I say Cornhub? Sorry, Pornhub. Pornhub will be inaccessible in two corn belt states in just a few days, and Pornhub wants users to know about it.

Rather than comply with contentious age-verification laws enacted by Kentucky and Indiana, Pornhub's parent company Aylo has decided to salt the earth completely. — Read the rest

We've seen the wave of states that have fallen to regressive, draconian age verification laws of late. In a surprising turn of events, Arizona, the home of much controversial legislation, has knocked down a bill that would have enforced age verification on websites that contain 33% porn.   — Read the rest

There's no place like the Kansas senate, Toto.

This wave of draconian age verification requirements for websites that feature adult content have been steadily spreading across the US, a particularly nasty strain of some unspeakable STD. But rather than unexplainable bumps way down you-know-where, the symptoms here include completely draconian, invasive, and in this case, downright offensive legislation that reflects the most regressive opinions and policies of extremely conservative government. — Read the rest

I don't know anyone who grew up with abundant internet that wasn't crossing their fingers behind their back when they clicked the "Yes, I'm over 18" button. Who on earth would choose the "Get me out of here!" option? The Amish? — Read the rest

Like most AI-generated software, Bing's new DALL-E3-powered image creator comes with some strict content guidelines. While some asshole on Not Twitter will inevitably whinge about how this is some sort of restriction on free speech, it tends to be more about companies covering their asses—so that users didn't exploit their software to do things like circulate deepfake child porn or brutally violent revenge fantasies. — Read the rest

Netflix Japan recently released a short anime film called Dog & The Boy. What sets this short apart. The content of this mini-movie matters less than the context — as the company boasted in a tweet, the film was created was AI-generated backgrounds, a choice that they claim was specifically made to address a "labor shortage." — Read the rest

Pop singer Claire "Grimes" Boucher admitted to hacking, DDOSing and taking down Hipster Runoff, a popular early-2010s site which had posted a photograph of her at a party, and "basically blackmailing" the site's operators. The photo had already been published elsewhere; the site never recovered from the attack. — Read the rest

Katey O'Connor, a teacher at Muncie Central High School, had her students read V for Vendetta, the classic graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, and create some posters reflecting on how the ideological mission of the eponymous V from the book might relate to current real-life social conditions. — Read the rest

Vice reports that doctors in the Netherlands have recorded the first known case of "scrotal necrosis" after a highly venomous snouted cobra bit a man on the testicles while he was sitting down to use the bathroom.

The 47-year-old patient was on vacation in South Africa at a wildlife reserve when the cobra surprised him from below.

Samantha Cole reports on a pandemic trend that's nothing to sniff at: vagina-scented face masks.

For fetish item sellers, the pandemic is an opportunity for a new kind of item: pussy masks.

Cat, who sells panties and socks as well as masks on Snifffr, said she's been selling the masks for almost a year.

Archie McPhee, sellers of curios, realized that any PayPal transaction containing the word "tardigrade" — that being the name of the adorable tiny space-surviving creatures they sell ornaments of — would be blocked.

"We've contacted them and they told us we should just stop using the word tardigrade," Archie McPhee wrote on Twitter. — Read the rest

Brandi Campbell is a sex worker, specifically a stripper. Since 2016, she's also run a blog for Stripper Labor Rights, that includes resources for other sex workers who want to protect themselves from exploitative labor issues.

In 2018, Campbell had been working at the Centerfold Club in Columbus, Ohio. — Read the rest

Motherboard has an interesting new piece about musical copyright law, and the fact that there are only so many musical sequences using half-step frequencies possible. What happens when they're all used up, and the copyright trolls take everyone to court for any song that even remotely resembles another one, just by virtue of the fact that it relies on the same music theory? — Read the rest

A family in DeSoto County, Mississippi, bought a Ring security camera so they could keep an eye on their three young girls in their bedroom. Four days later, they learned that a hacker had broken into the camera and subjected their children to continuous bedroom surveillance, taunting the children through the camera's built-in speaker.

We knew it was a matter of time before someone tested Facebook's claim they won't remove so-called 'deepfakes,' aka convincingly real faked videos like that recently viral clip of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, edited to appear 'drunk'.

Amazon's Ring doorbells are surveillance devices that conduct round-the-clock video surveillance of your neighborhood, automatically flagging "suspicious" faces and bombarding you and your neighbors with alerts using an app called "Neighbors"; it's a marriage of Amazon's Internet of Things platform with its "Rekognition" facial recognition tool, which it has marketed aggressively to cities, law enforcement, ICE, businesses and everyday customers as a security measure that can help ID bad guys, despite the absence of a database identifying which faces belong to good people and which faces belong to bad people.

"What I saw before the darkness" shows a human face created by a generative adversarial network, next to the neural memory map representing it. Neurons are removed, and as they go the face loses detail, becomes vague, and finally decays to something that may speak ill of the machine and the mankind that made it. — Read the rest

Anti-porn troll Chris Sevier (previously) has built his career by convincing grandstanding Republican state lawmakers to introduce doomed, unconstitutional porn-tax laws that would require in-state ISPs to implement default-on censorship of "adult sites" (or, more specifically, "sites appearing an an arbitrary, unaccountable secret blacklist of allegedly adult material") and then charge $20/subscriber to turn off the filters.

When Tumblr announced its plan to purge "female-presenting nipples from its service, the volunteer Archive Team leapt into action, working furiously to preserve years of material before Tumblr tore a huge hole in the internet's historical record.