Sdtrk: ‘Memory seventy nine’ by The caretaker

Coming into the cinema late? Well congratulations, not only have you missed the previews, but also the first fifteen minutes of the film. Why not catch yourself up, lazy?

This, then, would be the Hello Kitty installment of the series, so, ah, I hope you like Hello Kitty. On the left is Hello Kitty nodo ame, and the long box on the right contains Hello Kitty Pretzel. Both are by Kabaya, who, as you’ll recall, are also the makers of Jyu-C Cider, detailed two posts ago. Maybe I should’ve subtitled this post Hello Kabaya.

As I’ve never encountered the term ‘nodo ame’ before, I had to look it up. The nearest equivalent in English to it would be ‘throat drops’; I know ame is rain, at the very least. So much in the manner of those graphics you see on cough drop adverts that focus on a red and painful sore throat, nodo ame would be the lozenge that showers it with wavy blue lines, bringing blessed relief. From what it seems, though, nodo ame doesn’t just describe medicinal candies; it also appears to describe a certain lozengy type of hard candy, which is about as nebulous and nonspecific as you’d think it is. ‘I’m going to prescribe something for you,’ says your doctor, after he confirms that you have a sore throat. ‘It’s nodo ame. It doesn’t contain any medicine in it at all, but it’s a lot like throat drops. So, ah, I hope you like Hello Kitty.’ He dumps a fistful of loose, semi-translucent heart-shaped candies in your hand and nods affirmatively. ‘That’ll be $175. Please pay the receptionist.’

The Hello Kitty nodo ame are indeed semi-translucent heart-shaped sweets, in four flavours: red for apple, purple for grape, lemon is yellow, and green for muscat, which I’m told is a melon. Now when I hear the word ‘muscat’, I think of Angelo Muscat, better known as the Butler in the ahead-of-its-time telly series, The Prisoner, but that’s me. I may not know my fruits and vegetables, but you can be damned sure I’m on top of my Sixties-era surrealist science fiction British television shows!
The nodo ame taste pretty much as you’d expect them to, so no surprises there.

One of Japan’s most famous snack exports would be Pocky, the biscuit stick coated in chocolate, which is now pretty much an internationally-known food. Glico, the company that manufactures Pocky, also makes Pretz, a snack that, as you’d probably sussed due to the name, is a flavoured pretzel in stick form. As Glico most famously staked their claim to stick-shaped pretzel snacks, everyone else that makes snacks of that kind is considered second best or also-rans, which leaves us with Kabaya’s Hello Kitty Pretzel. Now I’m no pretzel stick connoisseur — I’ve never had Pretz, and I can count the number of boxes of Pocky I’ve eaten in my life on one hand — but I’d wager that the only thing that is preventing Kabaya’s take on boxed pretzels from sliding headlong into obscurity is the Hello Kitty branding. I imagine the employees at the pretzel snack division of Kabaya begin each workday with a Two Minutes Hate session, where everyone is encouraged to scream their rage and shake their fists at a picture of the Glico running man mascot.

Can you describe the pretzel sticks in a paragraph or less, please? you ask. Sure! Inside the box, you get +/- fifteen pretzel sticks covered in a pink frosting. As I’m not really keen on strawberry, they didn’t do anything for me, but they taste pretty much how you’d expect them to. See, wasn’t that easy?

Overall: in all honesty, these two were lowest on the list of the birthday care package prezzie that Jill sent me. (Sorry, Jill.) They just didn’t excite me on any genuine level, and I don’t think I’d ever purchase either of them of my own accord. However, as this post covers the worst, that means the best selections get lauded in the final installment. What made the cut? Which snacks are preferred? Whose cuisine will reign supreme??

NEXT UP: the End of All Food

Sdtrk: ‘Ceremony (Original version)’ by New order

What in the living hell is ‘Do you remember Food?’, you enquire? Read this post, enlighten thyself, etc etc.

For this entry, we have two snacks that, while I can’t say they’re my favourites of the birthday package, are pretty damned close. From Japan, we have okonomiyaki-flavoured potato chips by Calbee, and from Engerland comes Wilson’s White Kendal Mint Cake.

Okonomiyaki, if you’re not familiar with it, is a Japanese dish: it’s best described as pancake-like, and loaded with an assortment of toppings. It’s not a meal in and of itself — although they can get rather big — but it’s a food staple over there. Various regions have their own specialty takes on the okonomiyaki: you can get them with such toppings as meat, or cheese, or squid, or octopus, or even ramen, soba, or udon noodles. The list doesn’t stop there, of course, but you see what I’m getting at.
Sadly, I have yet to find a local establishment that serves okonomiyaki; the nearest place that I know of would be the food court at Mitsuwa, the Japanese shopping mall in Arlington heights, Illinois, that my friends and I usually try to visit once a year. So why not recreate the great taste of okonomiyaki in potato chip form? Why not, indeed??

Admittedly, those chips didn’t last long. 1) I love potato chips, for better or for worse, 2) the 55g bag was half-empty to begin with — ‘packaged by weight not volume’, that sort of thing, and 3) it’s the closest I’m going to get to tasting okonomiyaki until I get round to Mitsuwa’s aforementioned food court. But I will say this — those chips were good. The outstanding flavour I recall was that of catsup, even though neither catsup nor tomato anything are listed in the ingredients. Hilariously enough, one of the ingredients that is listed is ‘Flavour’. Just ‘Flavour’. Well, that’s certainly what you want in a food! There was a wee bit of lingering spice, too; not a lot, but noticeable. Maybe it was the Flavour Enhancer that’s also listed as being in them (we call that MSG).

Where does one begin with Kendal mint cake? Seeing the packaging for the first time, I thought the confectionery company was called Kendal, making this their mint cake. Au contraire! Kendal, a town located in weird old Cumbria, England*, is where the idea first came about, and apart from Wilson’s, Kendal mint cake (hereby shortened to KMC) is manufactured by a couple of other centuries-old companies, such as Romney’s, and Quiggin’s. No word as yet if Boggis, Bunce, and Bean will be entering the market with their own version. But much like okonomiyaki, the multiple companies offer their own takes on KMC. Buttermint candy, Rum and butter, and one ominously referred to as ‘brown’. That’s, ah… nice and vague.
The event that really put KMC into the British Sweets Pantheon would be the fact that Sir Edmund Hillary and his expedition brought bars with them on their first successful climb of Mt Everest, back in 1953. Upon sampling some, I can see how it helped them, as KMC is like 900% glucose. Doubtless Hillary and his lads sprinted up to the summit in under an hour.

The taste is best described as ‘very bright’. Picture a York peppermint patty without the chocolate, and with the mint volume cranked up to eleven. Even with my sweet tooth — I only have one, incidentally; the rest are normal teeth — there’s only so much of that I can handle in one sitting. Personally I can’t just eat a KMC as if it were a 3 Musketeers bar; I have to kinda nibble on it, like a squirrel, cos it’s just that intense. It is, as they say, a ‘sometimes food’.
The consistency is interesting, too. You ever see translucent stone? KMC looks a lot like this, to be honest, if you were to increase it to six times its original size, illuminate it from within, and, y’know, turn it into a sink. It’s slightly sticky as well, but I think that’s due to the peppermint oil they use to make it. As stated, it’s a high energy food, and to be honest, I did start to type this out faster after gnawing on a corner of Kendal mint cake. Perhaps I’ll bring some to work, and run the fifteen miles back home when I’m finished!

Overall: the okonomiyaki chips were delish, but starting off with the bag being half-empty is a bit grim. Once I become Sovereign King of Earth, one of my first edicts will be for potato chip manufacturers to fill the bag, let it settle a bit, then fill it almost to the top. Cos, I mean, seriously. And the Kendal mint cake isn’t bad at all, but it’s definitely something I wouldn’t be eating once a week; once every other month, maybe. Too much sugar in one go would have me seeing through the fabric of Time Itself. Wait, I’m saying that like it’s a bad thing! LOOK OUT LINCOLN, HE’S GOT A GUN

NEXT UP: more of the same!

*What makes Cumbria weird? Well, it’s the birthplace of Yan and Hamilton of the legendary British sea power, so there you are. Honestly, Cumbria should be proud

Sdtrk: ‘Thumbquake and Earthscrew’ by A to Austr

If you’re just joining us, have a look at ‘Do you remember Food? Prelude‘, then come back here. I’ll wait. I’ll wait as long as I have to. I know you’ll be back.

The first two selections I’m sampling would be Petite Potato Usu-shio by a company called Bourbon, and Jyu-C Cider, by Kabaya.

Jyu-C — or, if you like, Juicy, which is what they were probably aiming for — is one of those lipstick tubes of lozenge candy. They come in several different flavours, such as Grape, Orange, something called White Soda (they do love their opaque white beverages over there), and Cider, which is what I’d received.

They’re not bad, all told, although they have this weird mix of lemon taste combined with, ah, dairy? They kinda remind me of a more zippier-tasting Lactaid, to be honest. And much like Lactaid, they have an insidious chalky aftertaste. It’s not overpowering, but I say insidious because it takes almost two to three minutes after you’ve ground it up and swallowed it for it to appear. You’re too busy concentrating on the tartness in yo mouf, when you think to yourself, ‘have I perhaps eaten chalk by mistake?’ I don’t want to make it seem like I don’t like Jyu-C Cider, cos it isn’t completely appalling, but I think Jyu-C Grape would be more my speed.
I do like the robo-hippo mascot they have for the Cider flavour; unsurprisingly, his name would be Kaba-Robo (Hippo-Robo). He likes techno, as all robots naturally do.

As long as I’ve been a (mostly) unrepentant Japanophile, I’ve discovered that that nation seems to have a fascination with tiny snacks. My first encounter was years ago, with the 5/8 Chips from S&B. They were potato chips that came in boxes roughly the size of your average paperback, and were so named due to the fact they were five-eighths the size of a regular chip. True, it’s a very twee concept, but it doesn’t take long for you to realise you’re getting screwed with the size and proportions. I mean, good lord. Personally speaking, I can go through a 9oz bag of chips in two days, and I’m fairly certain there are larger tossers than myself that can annihilate one of those Super size bags in less time. So a sleeve of Petite Potato chips lasted me, what, an hour? It’s all in the pacing.

There’s a tray that’s in that sleeve, which protects the chips, but is a bit wasteful. Plus, it’s not as if the sleeve is a sturdy cast iron one or anything. I bet if I really wanted to, I could crush those chips, flimsy tray notwithstanding. Upon eating them, they reminded me immediately of Pringles, and the way they taste. Y’know, that ‘like chips, yet not chips’ flavour. They’re lightly salted, so to me, they were a little flat. Curiously enough, upon perusing the ingredients, one of them midway through the list caught my eye: scallop extract powder. Not that I’m averse to seafood, but… huh.

If you hit the website for Bourbon linked above, the first thing you’ll want to do is turn that godforsaken music off. Seriously, after a minute, it’ll drive you into a homicidal frenzy. But they have a variety of different micronised snacks, such as chocolate chip, mint chocolate chip, nori wafers, ebi (shrimp), some sort of biscuit, and some sort of cheese thing, amongst many others. The chips Jill sent me were regular flavour (‘tastes just like Regularity’), but the nori and ebi variants appeal to me. But I’d almost have to buy like five or six sleeves to satiate my salty hunger, and that’s only if they tasted appealing. More experiments need to take place!

Overall: Jyu-C isn’t bad, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy a tube — unless it was Grape, and if it were reasonably priced — and the Petite Potato chips are mildly filling, but in a very blink-and-they’re-gone aspect.

NEXT UP: words describing the food I done et

Sdtrk: ‘If not by fire’ by Mandy More

And now for something completely different: For my birthday this past November, Jill Tilley, one of my Twitterfriends, posted me a box of candy and snacks that she thinks I’d dig, after scouring this very blog for food ideas. It was a much-appreciated cornucopia of foodstuffs from Japan and England, via the shops in her particular part of Canada.

Supercarbosugarriotexpiallidocious

So I thought to myself, as a bit of a break from all those Gynoid and Doll bOObs, why not write a wee review of each item when I eat it? That way, future generations will have deep and considerable insight as to what the human race ate, before the robots took over and crammed our brains into metal shells to extend the longevity of the species. Hence the title of this miniseries: Do you remember Food?

Not counting the Ruffles All-dressed and the mint Aero bar, I’ll do four posts one week at a time, covering two snacks/candies each. As much as I love Ruffles All-dressed and mint Aero bars, I can get those if I make a forty minute run to the Canadian border, so they’re not as rare. Not to mention those were the first to go. Plus, my lovely Synthetik wife Sidore Kuroneko will be displaying the selections, so there’s your added incentive. Get ready for starch-o-choco-excitement! *superfluous engine revving sounds*

Sdtrk: ‘Romance fatal dentro de un auto’ by NON

Bringing you Tomorrow’s news Yesterday… Today.
See, that’s what we call an effective baffle. I throw a sentence out like that for you, you read it, and you’re so confused by it that you’ve not noticed I didn’t write a proper introduction to this, the first ‘Shouting etc etc’ post twenty-five days into 2012. And we’re off!

+ Did you lot have an enjoyable, carnage-free holidays? Ours were placid, for lack of a better term, but personally speaking, they were better than the ones at the end of 2010, so I’m not complaining. One nice aspect was that my father wrote me a cheque for $150, and as I’m a firm believer in Irony, I promptly sent that dosh to Amazon.com, spending the entirety of it on books about Dolls and Gynoids, two subjects that the man despises. Ha!
My spoils were volumes 4-8 of Pluto, a manga by Naoki Urasawa, which is another one of his psychological thrillers; a copy of Hiroshi Watanabe’s Love point, as detailed here; and The Sex Doll: A History. I have to apologise for the last one, as the cover isn’t just awful, it’s godawful. Nevertheless, all the books were highly appreciated! Thanks, dad! *proceeds to snicker like Muttley*

+ Speaking of Amazon.com, I now see that they actually have not just a listing, but cover art, for the ‘My living Doll’ DVD set I’d mentioned last November, with a street date of 20 March. Again, I’ll believe it when a copy adorns my own overloaded DVD shelves, but that’s fantastic news!…

+ Back in November-December of 2011, photographer/iDollator/jetsetter/Maki Nomiya lookalike Azusa Itagaki had a showing of her photographs of our crowd in Italy. It was well-received, by her accounts, and she told me it was even mentioned in La Repubblica, one of the nation’s major newspapers. As always, she does us proud!

INVISIBLE ART PATRONS

If you can read Italian, you lucky bastard, you can peruse a page about the show and see more photos here. Machine translations don’t count.

+ Do you recall Ricky Ma Tsz Hang, the bloke in Hong Kong who built an affictitious version of Kelly Chen? Yes you do. He’s not been resting on his laurels though, as he’s recently completed Aiko 2, a head for a new Gynoid! Again, might I remind you, he’s not a corporation; he’s just one man, making alluring animatronics in his own home. HARDxCORE.

For that new robot head, I have tried to use different material and design new structure. It is smoother than previous one. It applied 2 small servos and 4 micro servos only and it has detection camera inside her eyes. She can smile, eyes (blink, up and down, left and right) open and close the mouth. More than that, it will have a intelligent computer brain. She can talk to you and detect who are you! Moreover, she can analyse objects (over 13000 data). The facial expression will be controlled by the intelligent brain. It may be very interesting!

She’s listening to Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66. But can you blame her?

That quote is from an Email that he’d sent me. Ricky went on to say that he’s developing Aiko 2 in conjunction with Le Trung, that bloke who put some servos inside a CandyGirl and named her Aiko, so hopefully Ricky will steer that particular project into something more original and successful.
Not only does Aiko 2 have improved sculpting — did you note her dimples? — but the ability to analyse and identify objects is a impressive skill. Sure, we have object recognition programmes in things such as Google goggles, but combining technology with beauty enhances both, and benefits everyone.

+ Isn’t it time for a new batch of Sinthetics photos? It certainly is.

Left, Monique doesn’t know the meaning of the term hay fever; right, Celeste, following up on Aiko 2’s eargoggle trend

Enticing new pics of Tawny, Monique, Kimiko, Celeste, and Yuriko are now available on their site. Stare, stare. And with good reason!

+ Finally, back to television: 2012 looks as if it might yield not one, but two decent programmes having to do with Synthetiks, so that’s something to look forward to! As long as they’re not along the lines of the robot snuff film known as ‘A.I’, that is.
According to a post on io9.com, NBC has ordered a pilot for a series entitled ‘Beautiful people’, and as they describe it,

Beautiful People is really dark, and more than a little sadistic at times. It’s not at all subtle, though — it’s in the grand tradition of dystopian “what if” scenarios in which a terrible injustice is being perpetrated throughout society, but somehow most people don’t see it. The audience will be left in absolutely no doubt, at the end of a single episode, that these androids, or “Mechanicals,” are people who deserve human rights. […]

We see how the Mechanicals are enslaved. They’re constrained by Asimov’s good old Three Laws of Robotics. They’re destroyed if they show the slightest sign of emotion. They’re even given a weird drug, called Compliance, to prevent them from having any nasty mood swings. They all have bar codes on the backs of their necks.

And yet, they’re clearly people in every way that matters. They have family units, like Tina and her parents. They respond to things with real emotion. Their children have to go to school, so they can learn all the nuances of human society. (The high-end “Mechanicals” like Tina and her family have no metal parts — instead, they’re more like cyborgs, with some silicon chips and plastic, but also organic parts grown from the DNA of John Does, and possibly federal prisoners as well.)
the entire article is here

They’re still in the process of casting it, so airdates are still in the far-flung future (pun intended), but I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for it, as you suspect. Overall, Beautiful people sounds promising and thought-provoking! Which means it probably won’t be on the air very long. You’re all familiar with how network telly in the States works.

And fellow iDollator Euchre tipped me off to the other programme from Sweden, a show called ‘Äkta människor‘, which translates to ‘Real humans’, which actually premiered on the 22nd of this month. It seems like it’ll be taking nearly the same approach as Beautiful people — can the term ‘human’ apply to artificial beings, etc — but with a less homogenised approach than you find in television from the States. Skip to 0.55 if you don’t get what I’m inferring.

What happens when robots become so human that they can barely be distinguished from real people? When they can even be our lovers? Real Humans takes place in a parallel world to our own, in which people’s lives have been completely transformed by the new generation of robots, the Hubots. […]

They’re used as servants, heavy laborers, company for the lonely and even sex partners. But Hubots also create conflicts – within families, in places of work and among those concerned about public safety. Their intelligence exceeds our own. Are there any jobs left that are not best carried out by a robot? Can they develop feelings of their own? Can a Hubot harm a human being?
the entire article is here

I love shows and films like this! They’re priming the pump.
Some additional good news: they say the production companies involved have made a deal to distribute Äkta människor internationally. Which more than likely means just Europe, but that’s why god made region-free DVD players!

And there you have it! O, and I’m due to enter discussions with another documentarist; this one would be from France. More on that later!

Sdtrk: ‘V of IV’ by Pauline Oliveros

Even though I’m sure most of you are just trawling my blog for photos of Dolls, or looking for info about muntjac deer — seriously, I’ve had a shedload of hits across the past couple of months thanks to people typing deer, muntjac deer, deer hit by car, etc into Google — I do want to say Thank You for stopping round to ‘Shouting to hear the echoes’, particularly to those of you who take a few moments to comment. Hope you lot had a satisfying Thanksgiving (US only), and here’s to another 500,000 hits! *raises glass*

Sdtrk: ‘Virginia Plain’ by Roxy music

Naturally, as soon as I posted the one for November, more notable articles started piling up. It’s not as if you’ll go home empty-handed! Which makes sense, as I’m sure most of you reading this are already at home.
Put your pants back on.

+ First off, do you recall me mentioning Yves José Malgorn, fantastic graphics illustrator of YM Graphix, back in June? Yes. He was kind enough to create an image for the rotating banner header gracing the top of ‘Shouting etc etc’, cos he’s Good People like that. As there’s currently twenty-eight banners to go through — I actually didn’t know there were that many, myself — you can also check it out here. Automatically sexy!

+ It seems that 4woods are back on course, with Sarina, a sexy new head that fits all their available bodies. 4woods are now to the point in their production line where they’ve sculpted more heads than you’ve had hot dinners.

The most alluring novelty eraser ever

Admittedly, the shot above, while stimulating, doesn’t really show her face, as the photos where her face is more visible also have her breasts as more visible. Which is something I’m not opposed to under everyday circumstances, but this is a PG-rated blog. *nods* Anyway, I’m sure you’ll check out Sarina’s gallery, but you should do it after you look through their new videos, which illustrate the new softer blend of silicone that they’re using for their lasses. They’re hypnotising, and you will watch them for hours. Fact.

+ As contemporary pop culture makes me curl my upper lip in disgust, I’m not altogether keen on Urban Dictionary. I’m simply not ‘down’ with ‘youth culture’, what can I say? But it’s not complete shite; after all, they have an entry for ‘Polymerisian‘, which is a new one on me. ‘Any person made with a synthetic polymer silicone skin with a rigid and jointed skeleton’. I can give my stamp of approval to that ‘un! Now to propagate that shit everywhere.

+ The Good People at Sinthetics have been tirelessly working on creating new… Synthetiks! Hot on the heels of their ravishing Body 2D comes the new Body 1B — as you suspect, the letters indicate the bust size — as well as Kimiko and Willow, two new heads that would look good on any body type you choose.

Kimiko proves herself more than capable of brightening up any home

I’d include a photo of Willow, but in every shot taken of her so far, her perky bosoms are on display. Which is something I’m not opposed to under everyday circumstances, but this is a PG-rated blog. *nods* As Willow is their new elfin head, she has pointy ears, as you would expect from an elf. The thing is, however, there are wires in her ears, so you can manipulate them for various poses and expressions. How impressive is that, eh?
But the best head Sinthetics have created so far would have to be Yuriko. Fact.

She’s so new, she’s not available yet, but she’s exquisite. And say, doesn’t she remind you of someone? A photographer, perhaps, that was round to snap photos of Sidore and I back in August? Yep, Azu-chan got her head scanned, and will actually be premiering her affictitious head at a gallery exhibition in Italy sometime soon. Having a backup head is always sound advice!

+ Ages ago, my Missus and I got together with an independent film director by the name of Allison de Fren, who had interviewed us, along with a cluster of other luminaries in the iDollator and technosexual cultures, for a documentary that had the working title of ‘The Mechanical Bride’. Unfortunately, between the main cameraman/editor abandoning the project and Allison herself having to pursue Higher Academia, the film was placed on indefinite hiatus. However, during an Email conversation with Sarah Valverde, she’d brought this to my attention: a dissertation that Allison had written in 2008 entitled ‘The exquisite corpse: disarticulations of the artificial female’, posted to the University of Southern California Digital Library.

The “artificial” artificial female body is often pitted against classical and normative conventions around love and beauty; it is used as a cipher for that which cannot be seen or represented, but only intuited; and it opens a space for the imagination and play, both in the sense of what children do with dolls and in the sense of linguistics or semiotics as that which decenters structure. Such roles are explored within a range of core texts — including Villiers d’Isle-Adam’s novel L’Eve Future (Future Eve, 1886), E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short stories “Automata” (1814) and “Der Sandmann” (The Sandman 1816), and Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis — and parallels are drawn to contemporary works from The Stepford Wives (1975) and Lars and the Real Girl (2007) to the Realdoll (a life-sized silicone lovedoll currently available for purchase on the internet) and ASFR (alt.sex.fetish.robots), an internet fetish community devoted to fantasies around robotic women.

It’s free to download, and very interesting reading. I’ll warn you ahead of time: it’s a Paper with a capital P, as it’s 300 pages in length, but extremely fascinating. Besides, the last twelve or so pages are footnotes, as is the way of Papers. Don’t let the length dissuade you, though; Allison clearly knows her onions.

+ It looks like Xmas is coming early! And by that, I mean it’s coming late. And by that, I mean… I don’t know what I mean. What I mean is according to TVShowsOnDVD.com, we might actually see a DVD set of Julie Newmar’s lost-to-the-ages Sixties Gynoid sitcom ‘My living Doll’ in our very lifetimes.

Don’t get too excited, Bob; there’s nothing but raw hydraulics under that sheet

While the studio hasn’t officially announced anything, industry sources have confirmed for us that MPI Home Video is preparing a February 28th release of My Living Doll – The Official Collection, Vol. 1. This 2-disc set will contain 11 episodes plus bonus material in the form of a special Soundtrack Music Collection, and new Interviews with star Julie Newmar, Producer Howard Leeds, Art Director James Hulsey, and more. Cost will be $24.99 SRP.

When I first read this — after I got the room to stop spinning, of course — I’d noted the set is Volume One, containing the first eleven episodes out of a twenty-six episode series. They’re still trying to locate the other fifteen episodes; there’s conflicting reports that they were wiped, or are possibly mouldering away someplace in some subterranean bunker.
Overall it’s amazing news, but I’ll truly believe it when I have a copy of Vol.01 in my sweaty hands. There’ve been a couple of instances where Very Cool Things are announced, only to have them sadly withdrawn from distribution. Three words: Hapworth 16, 1924.

+ Finally, Sarah Valverde, the psych grad student that’s invited me to the iDollator/technosexual symposium next year, has cobbled together an online survey targeting Doll owners. Up to this point, there hasn’t been any serious psychiatric study into iDollator culture, mainly due to reticence on the part of iDollators. Our community usually has to deal with wild supposition precisely because we’re reluctant to step forward and clear up myths. So in comes this survey. It’s completely anonymous, and has a number of basic questions that’ll help the psychiatric community get a better understanding of who we are, and why we have our Dolls. Surveys like this are a small but important step in helping to remove the assumptions surrounding iDollators and our culture.
The survey comes to an end on 16 December of this year. If you’re a Doll owner, please take 10-15 minutes out of your busy schedule — perhaps tomorrow, after you inhale your Thanksgiving dinner, if you’re in the States — to participate!

Well, there’s nothing to do now but wait until December. Happy 23rd!