Everything In Between

Of the Ten Commandments, only 3 are phrased in the affirmative. The other 7 are phrased as negatives. Why? Doesn’t that seem kind of oppressive to anyone else?

Here’s the Ten Commandments as listed on Wikipedia:

1. I am the Lord your God
2. You shall not make for yourself an idol
3. You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God
4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
5. Honor your father and mother
6. You shall not murder
7. You shall not commit adultery
8. You shall not steal
9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor
10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife

Well, it certainly sounds like Insert-Your-Favorite-Deity is having a bit of a power trip. Let’s take a closer look at these commandments, but this time let’s phrase them all in the affirmative.

1. I am the Lord your God
2. You shall identify falsehoods and treat them as such
3. You shall respect the power of words, names, and language
4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
5. Honor your father and mother
6. You shall let other living beings live
7. You shall honor the relationship contracts that you enter and those of others
8. You shall honor the property of others
9. You shall uphold truth as you have seen it
10. You shall strive for your own happiness

Doesn’t that sound infinitely better already? Interestingly, I feel that this rephrasing not only covers more ground (e.g., “You shall honor the property of others” turns “You shall not steal” into protections against stealing and vandalism), but it’s also a lot more inclusive of diversity.

Now let’s take this one step further and rephrase even the ones that were originally affirmative so that they not only reflect positive ideals, but also engender self-empowerment in the reader. Now my ten commandments read as follows:

1. I am lord over my own body and mind
2. I identify falsehoods and treat them as such
3. My power comes from words, names, and language
4. I honor my memories and choose my traditions
5. I honor my chosen family
6. I protect and create free life
7. I demand respect for the relationship contracts I enter and grant respect to those of others
8. I gift wealth to others
9. I uphold my own convictions
10. I spread joy

I wonder what kind of world we would live in today if this list had been the Ten Commandments so fervently adhered to. Since nothing in life is unchangeable, I’m going to start believing that these self-empowering words are the Ten Commandments for me.

I’m very excited to announce a new initiative that I’ve begun working on in collaboration with Emma, co-unorganizer of KinkForAll Providence and my co-host on Kink On Tap. The new project, called SexEdEverywhere, is going to be our biggest and most challenging project to date. It also has enormous potential.

(This announcement was originally made on another blog of mine, but I’m cross-posting it here to spread the word rapidly.)

The core of the project is a sexual health education and empowerment video campaign highlighting the reality that we learn about sex from disparate sources in many locations. I believe that the time has come for people to realize that “sex education” is not, has never been, and never should be confined to health class. I believe that young people, sexuality minorities, and certain other disenfranchised groups (still including, sadly, women) have an enormously important role to play in reforming the empty-vessel, top-down model of education and turning it into a peer-to-peer meritocracy where accurate information wins out over misinformation because it saves lives rather than being politically expedient.

And I believe that this change is only possible when it comes from the very people who need such change most: young men, women, and other people like you and me.

That’s why Emma and I have put together a proposal for the project and submitted it to the International Women’s Health Coalition Young Visionaries contest, a contest that, if we win, would seed our project with $1000 USD of necessary funding to get it off the ground. Part of the criteria for winning the contest is based on popular vote, which means I need your votes to win.

If this sounds like a project worth supporting, please go to the Sex Ed Everywhere IWHC voting page and click on “Vote” right next to our picture. And then come back and vote again the next day, and every day until voting ends on March 25, which I understand is totally fair for the competition!

Here is an excerpt of our proposal for the IWHC Young Visionaries contest:

With the $1000 grant from the IWHC Young Visionaries contest we will fund a sexual health education and empowerment video campaign that highlights the reality that we learn about sex from disparate sources in many locations. The heart of this campaign, which we call SexEdEverywhere (“SEE”), will begin with a competition calling for submissions of 30 to 90 second videos that will be reviewed and featured on a network of 5 (or more) microsites over time. The campaign will be based at SexEdEverywhere.com, a website that will actively engage the people to whom it will speak: women and youth across the globe.

[…]

Our vision of lasting change is to create a world in which accurate information about sexual health and freedoms reaches more students and young people than suffer from misinformation or a knowledge deficit. By engaging young people in the creation and distribution of knowledge, we hope to help them recognize their power to enact social justice in their local communities. This would be a world in which women and young people are aware of their sexual and reproductive rights from an early age, and are empowered to make informed decisions for themselves and educate those around them.

Please vote for SexEdEverywhere and help us SEE a world where everyone is aware of their sexual and reproductive rights! Thank you for your daily voting support!

I quit my job today. I’d been working there for less than 4 months, and it’s one of (if not the) best normative corporate gigs I’ve ever had. And yet I handed in my 2 weeks’ notice today, without anything “lined up” and no concrete idea about how I’m going to make a living. And in this blog post, I’m going to tell you why I think quitting was the only sensical thing for me to do.

Economy of opportunity

I recall that when I first came to San Francisco and started looking for work, the first interview I had began with a very telling exchange.

“May I ask you a personal question?” the interviewer asked me.

“Of course,” I said, bracing for a question about my sex life, which I’m very open about online, or about my views on education, which are radical if not heretical. My beliefs clash so dramatically with so much of traditional Western society, and yet I’d never been asked a directly personal question at a job interview before. I was almost looking forward to it. But the question I got wasn’t anything I could have expected.

I was asked: “Are you crazy coming to San Francisco without a job in this economy?”

“I’m sorry?” I said, surprised.

“You said you got an apartment before you had a job lined up.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I confirmed.

“That’s very brave,” the interviewer said.

I smiled silently to myself, mentally noting that my interview of this company, the one I conduct simultaneously as any company’s hiring managers were interviewing me, was showing results. I reasoned that I probably wouldn’t want to work there.

“I don’t think of it as being brave,” I said after a moment’s pause. “I choose to believe that, with my skills, I can find a way to do whatever I want. I believe everyone can, if they only believed it, too. So I don’t need to be brave, I just need to be resourceful.”

I didn’t end up in that job but, obviously, I did find a job quickly because otherwise I wouldn’t be quitting that job now. :)

I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a strange breed. A careful look at my résumé will reveal two somewhat odd things. First, that I’ve almost never kept a single “9-5″ (job) for more than a year. Second, the entire education section, often mistakenly believed to be “required” in résumés, is—and always has been—completely missing.

It’s therefore unsurprising that a very common question I get asked during interviews (and parties, and when I’m out at bars, and basically all the time with everyone, always) is, “where did you get your degree?” It’s a funny question because I don’t have a degree. I don’t have a high school diploma. I don’t even have a GED. In fact, I never actually graduated from middle school.

“Why don’t you go to college? You’d love university!” I’m frequently told. Although I love learning, and although I believe that education is one of if not the most important thing in the entirety of human experience, of life, our society, species, and even existence, I vehemently fought to free myself of the poisonous, debilitating reach of schools and institutionalized education way back in 2^nd grade.

The fight was painful and unnecessary, damaging me like almost nothing else possibly could. I feel less capable, less skilled, less intelligent, and a less happy person today because of that miserable fight to leave school. However, I believe I would have been even worse off succumbing to the incessant dulling of my creativity had I relented to “the educational system.”

When they learn some of my history, people are often quick to credit my current abilities to this dreadful experience, or else they dismiss my insistence that I deserved better by saying, “No pain, no gain.” But I reject the cruel idea that misery is necessary to build character or strength, as well as the misguided compliment that I am somehow better, stronger, or more abled than “normal” people for having experienced a largely unhappy life. Although I certainly learned a lot during my fight to leave the school system, that was a result of my human nature, not an inherent characteristic of the painful struggle.

My traditional successes, such as having little problem finding well-paying work, for instance, coupled with my lack of formal education makes me exceptional only in the literal sense: I do not meet most people’s expectations in many ways. But my unique experiences also exposed me to a profound truth that many others aren’t as fortunate to be routinely confronted with: we live in an economy of opportunity. We always have, and we always will. As Tim Robbins is fond of saying, the problem is never resources, it’s resourcefulness.

You might be familiar with Warren Buffet’s well-known advice, “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” But the whole of his sentence was, if [investors] insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. In other words, it is always the right time to do the right thing, regardless of the market’s current circumstance.

The value of appropriate valuation

Conventional wisdom says I shouldn’t quit a good job in a rough time. But it’s a matter of valuing appropriate valuation: even though they provide negligible or no monetary income, I value my “personal” projects, the Kink On Tap sexuality netcast, the free (as in free and as in freedom) KinkForAll unconferences, the “not safe for work” and subversive exploration of sexually submissive masculinity, the various digital outreach and educational efforts for queer people that I help with, and many other projects of mine, far, far higher than the salary I was getting working in my day job. And besides, I have been defying conventional wisdom my whole life.

When I was a pre-teen, I was diagnosed with early-onset bipolar disorder and handed medications. After 6 years being told it was impossible, I had completely stopped taking the pills my doctors were still prescribing. I’ve remained clinically “stable” (doctor-speak for “just fine, thank you very much”) for the 7 years since.

Throughout my school and early teen years, I was told lies about reality by caring but fearful and brainwashed adults. Lies like “you’ll never get a job if you don’t graduate” are, depressingly, still repeated to children today. Of course, a quick look through the histories of some of the most successful and influential people on the planet—people like Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Rosa Parks, and Mae West—show that this fearmongering is complete rubbish.

Just as I love learning but hated schooling, I love doing good work but hate working at jobs. I’m quitting my day job because I feel similarly about it to the way I felt about school. The idea that people have to sacrifice what they want to do by segregating it into whatever crevices of their lives are left after they forfeit 8 hours a day (and often much more than that) to their job is a reprehensible illusion that the school system conditions many to accept and which corporatism, consumerism, and classism perpetuate every day.

The institutionalized indoctrination laughably dubbed education that’s widely deployed today is a travesty, a prison for the young. Similarly, the rigid, outdated understanding of “having a job,” especially as the only valid form of “contributing to society,” is an economic jail for the working class.

To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. Now I will also no longer let my job interfere with my work.

Pricelessness and survival

Many of our current societal systems are unsustainable. We all know it. We’ve all felt the effects.

Global financial crisis. Depreciation of college degrees. Ecological disasters. Massive civil unrest resulting in groups of unhappy, violent people (“terrorists”). If we as the human race are going to survive the century, we simply have to change the rules of this game. And that starts with normal people like you and me committing to doing what we want to do, not what we were told we have to do. I wasn’t comfortable playing by the rules of the so-called well-schooled majority, and I’m no longer comfortable playing by the rules of this economy. I now aim to change it.

And I’m not willing to merely survive, because I demand excellence and happiness. I demand it of myself, and so I demand it of you. Watching the clock while thinking about doing other, “non-job” things is not a valuable investment to me.

Unlike school, however, at work I also have a responsibility to others, not just myself. Whereas poor performance at school largely hinders only oneself, poor performance—and, by extension, lack of interest—at work directly impacts co-workers. And y’know what, I have more than enough respect for my co-workers to believe that they should be working with someone who really wants to be there, because that person exists.

I believe that everyone should be thusly respected. Was it a mistake to take this job and quit only 4 months down the line? Maybe. But mistakes we learn from are good things. It is right of me, upon realizing that I no longer want to be where I was, to leave, to change my status-quo. It would be wrong to pull up a facade of either indifference or resignation because neither of those can inspire excellence.

On a personal note, it’s worth saying that I’ve quit jobs before but, this time, I didn’t quit because I no longer like the job. If I were a different person, or the same person 2 years ago, the job I had would’ve been great. This time I quit because I’ve finally gotten to the point where my skills are well-developed enough and my desires well-formed enough that I know enough about what I want to do, and I believe that I can do it.

I believe there is more value in doing, being, and getting what I want than in sacrificing it. I believe that there is more richness in the world than can be measured with all the world’s riches.

Doing good work is priceless not because its execution is necessarily of superb quality, but because its value can only be determined by the people who find it useful to them. But I can’t magically transport us out of the economic jail of living paycheck-to-paycheck that so many of us are in. It’s going to take many intermediate steps to get us from here to a place where the value that people create by doing what they love is also what sustains us.

And I have only the vaguest of idealistic dreams for how I’m going to help get us there. But I do have those dreams, and I can’t ignore them.

They say that when there’s a will, there’s a way. Well, I have more will, more skill, more knowledge, and thus more opportunity today than ever before. Now, imagine what kind of world we would inhabit if you, your friends, and all the people who look up to you understood that their opportunities today, like mine, are greater than they’ve ever been before.

That, dear fellows, is the value of passion. And no matter what your schoolteachers or bosses might tell you about “the way things are,” passion—excellence, not resigned acceptance—is the key to survival.

This post was originally published on my other blog, a much more Not Safe For Work site, at maybemaimed.com. However, it turns out that blog is censored in various countries, such as Dubai. Gotta love Internet censorship. Sigh. Anyways, since I think the material there is interesting and technology-relevant, and in order to help people avoid Internet censorship, I’m cross-posting the contents here. Enjoy.

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Social media. Internet publishing. Privacy. Three phrases that have seemed to be at tenacious odds with each other in a multitude of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For people like me, who have progressive views about sexuality, these three things are constantly on our minds. How do we participate in the online revolution without being forced to “come out” about every sex act we enjoy, some of which are still illegal thanks to draconian restrictions on sexual freedom, even (and especially?) in America.

This month, a new social network called Blackbox Republic (BBR) is attempting to tackle this head-on and aims to create a place for, as Marshall Kirkpatrick put it, this particular large and unserved group of people. Although BBR is clearly a business, it’s a business whose creators have laudable intentions for positive social and cultural change. In that respect, and in many others, Blackbox Republic is worth a close look.

I was informed about the venture via Clarisse Thorn many months ago. I got in touch with BBR and signed up for a limited-offer “founder” account—basically a private beta. The founder account gave me free access to the features of the BlackboxRepublic.com website for what would normally be a $25 monthly subscription fee.

So, without further ado, here are my impressions about Blackbox Republic, and how its launch may be just what the Internet needs to get us moving in the right direction with regards to personal privacy, and mainstream awareness of the different needs of different people on the Internet.

Mainstream sex-positivity or a VIP room in cyberspace? Or both?

Over the past few months, Blackbox Republic has been building a marketing arsenal of anticipation and intrigue. Its creators are successful in non-sexuality-focused spheres of influence: Sam Lawrence is the respected former Chief Marketing Officer of Jive Software, Inc., and April Donato, has experience in community management. They also both jive (pun!) well with the sex-positive movement, discussing it at length in the early stages of their marketing efforts after de-cloaking the new company.

In an interview for Social Networking Watch, Sam Lawrence said,

[Sam Lawrence:] The co-founder [April Donato] and myself are part of [the sex-positive] community. Sex positive means that your sexuality is not an issue. You don’t have an issue with other people’s sexuality. You’re open to what other people are interested in and what their boundaries are, and you’re open with your own.

[…]

[Interviewer:] To what extent do you practice a sex-positive lifestyle?

[Sam Lawrence:] From the perspective of sex not being an issue, I think that love is generated by people being open enough about who they are as people to put all of themselves out on the table. As far as putting all of myself on the table, it’s something that I do every single day.

I have an enormous amount of respect for anyone able to so capably present themselves as authentically as Sam does. On the eve of KinkForAll New York City 2, I met Sam and April at one of their “founder meetups” and had the chance to talk to them face-to-face. Our conversation revolved around the importance of steadfastly holding true to one’s own desires and having appropriate places to express those things with appropriate communication tools. I really liked their emphasis on self-identification over labeling throughout our discussion.

I also really appreciated the way that Sam and April spoke about their target audience. Blackbox Republic will welcome everyone, but it’s not designed for everyone, and I think that’s a good thing. David Evans writing at Online Dating Post says,

BBR has room for everyone, but is not for everyone. Definitely catering to non-mainstream folks, it will soon feature a constellation of micro-communities, or groups, called Camps. BBR doesn’t tell people how to organize their camps; we’ll do it ourselves, thankyouverymuch.

So is Blackbox Republic a dating site, or a social network? Well, both, kind of. Part of BBR’s slogan includes, “Dates will happen. Sex will happen. It matters how you get there.” The implication, of course, being that the current suite of tools for finding love or play online—sites like Alt.com, OkCupid, and countless personals boards—focus too strongly on the end result, turning matchmaking into a meat market instead of the natural process of getting to know one another. The focus BBR is placing on each person’s “journey” is an extremely welcome paradigm shift in the online dating world.

Along with the welcome and (IMHO, painfully obviously better) new approach to online dating, however, Blackbox Republic faces some real challenges. For new users, the service costs a minimum of $5 a month to use (and $9 per month for new sign-ups starting in 2010), which gives access to basic features like a personal profile. For $25 a month, members get added features like the ability to list real-world meet-ups, send private messages, and partake in a virtual “gifting” economy (think LiveJournal’s “virtual gifts“).

For that reason, BBR has been called a “members-only club.” There are some legitimate differences of opinion as to whether this is a positive or a negative thing. In a press release over the summer, Blackbox Republic is reported as stating:

Blackbox Republic will be a members-only experience that will unite the sex-positive community and give them a personal, private and secure way to connect online and in person.

Writing for ZDNet, Oliver Marks likens Blackbox Republic’s approach to online dating to the fashionability of owning an Apple computer:

Think of Blackbox Republic as a fashionable online ‘members-only’ club where you might expect to meet people with similar interests to your own, and ideally the person of your dreams. […] Blackbox Republic is arguably an Apple product to Facebook’s Windows look & feel: a much more intimately crafted, fuller featured personal user interface which should appeal to Apple generation sensibilities.

Indeed, almost everything about Blackbox Republic’s marketing and design seems to me as though it’s positioning itself as the equivalent of the hip, new, and exclusive nightclub down the street. There are images of super-chic women in short skirts and tight pants all over the Blackbox Republic promotional pages—way more than there are pictures of men. I was (yet again) put-off by this over-prevalence of women in all advertising material.

This isn’t really a criticism of the site, but rather a statement of disappointment that the marketing gurus behind the effort seemed to me to have succumbed to overwhelming cultural pressure to sell their site with old-school sex appeal: women’s sex appeal, of course. How…traditional.

Not only is the Blackbox Republic intro video markedly gender-skewed, but somewhere along the line Sam and April decided to drop the “sex-positive” phraseology from their marketing:

[L]ike most startups, Blackbox decided it needed to change up. Observers were confused by the sex-positive label.

Oh well. I think this just goes to further showcase how much more social change we really need in our culture.

However, while the clubby, cliquey feel is totally my own subjective perception, there are other issues at play here, too. Most notably, as Clarisse Thorn and many others rightfully remind us very often, the sex-positive movement is overwhelmingly white, middle- to upper-class, college-educated, and privileged in a huge number of ways that many people often take for granted. Even without a for-pay social network, not everyone who wants to can participate in the great-sex-for-everyone party atmosphere of many sex-positive niches.

Will creating a “members-only club” of sex-positivity on the Internet really be a positive thing for “the movement”? Well, maybe. Although it has the potential to exclude lower-income people from the experience, who are sadly also often the people with the most pressing need for the kinds of privacy-related tools BBR offers (school teachers spring to mind!), one upside is that Blacbox Republic promises to pledge a portion of membership dues to a charity of the user’s choice.

It’s $25 a month and $5 of those community dues go to charity. One way to think about it is if you’re sex-positive, you can either spend money on expensive coffee every month or upgrade your social life and meet other sex-positive people like you.

Inescapably, the major selling point of any social network is, of course, the network! If your friends aren’t on Twitter, then you’re probably not going to find it useful. The same truth holds for Blackbox Republic: if the users you want to interact with aren’t there, I doubt you’re going to find the experience fruitful. Due to the membership fees and the socioeconomic realities of the sex-positive community, I’m concerned that BBR’s current business model is too exclusive, and as a result it will have a lot of trouble attracting the kind of diverse community its creators seem to be hoping for.

Yet, some others think differently (pun!). For instance, Dennis Howlett welcomes the for-pay model for a social network:

anyone can join provided they’re willing to pay the $25 a month (I like that he has a pay model from the get go. That sorts out the weirdos and hangers on from day one)

I wonder if adopting a free-mium approach might work better. Still, there are real-world limits to business. Everyone needs to make money, and I don’t think Blackbox Republic’s business model is inherently more exclusive than, say, purchasing access to porn. If anything, BBR’s got some real promise to inject much-needed financial awareness to the sexually insensitive corporate infrastructure of our society. Nevertheless, convincing people to join “the Republic” is going to be a hard sell.

Show me the features!

Let’s say you do decide to join. What do you get? Other than the sex-positive mindset, what’s the benefit?

Well, the bulk of the experience is what you’d expect. Profiles (called “personas”), messaging, user search capabilities (called “explore”), and so forth. A Twitter-like “activity stream” dominates the main page where you can post text, picture, or video status updates. Event listings fill the sidebar. (I’m not going to provide internal screenshots in deference to BBR’s strict confidentiality rules.)

While that’s fun, it’s nothing special. What makes Blackbox Republic different is flexibility, and privacy.

Goodbye drop-downs, hello sliders!

Blackbox Republic’s most visible feature is the way its interface allows you to flexibly self-identify various facets of yourself. Rather than give you static drop-down menus or radio buttons for things like your sexual orientation and relationship status, you’re presented with sliders you can change at will. Perhaps you’re feeling particularly same-sex attracted one day. Just move the “Orientation” slider towards the “Gay” end and away from the “Hetero” end. If that changes tomorrow, just move the slider back. Sho-weet!

BBR offers you 5 different sliders for your profile. In addition to the one for sexual orientation, you also get one for relationship “status” (ranging from attached to unattached, with Facebook’s famous “it’s complicated” neatly in the middle), whether you’re available for more partners or not, how comfortable you are with casual sexual activity, and how eagerly you’re looking to par-tay. I’m instantly reminded of FetLife’s innovative, if dull-looking, mechanism for specifying multiple relationships. Blackbox Republic gives you similar flexibility as FetLife does but presented in a superb and far more intuitive interface.

All that said, one slider is conspicuously missing: the one for gender. The sliders are a very interesting idea and might just be the most innovative feature of the entire site. It speaks volumes about the sensitive and thoughtful mindset of the developers, and that’s why I’m so disappointed that the interface for self-identifying gender is relegated to the Sex 1.0 days of a single, binary option of “male” or “female.”

What gives? Are polyamorous people more welcome here than those who don’t fit the gender binary? I hope this is simply an omission that will be fixed as the service matures, since I couldn’t find any other reason why gender was absent from the sliders. For extra credit, I hope to see different profile options for “Sex” and “Gender,” two distinct concepts that frequently and incorrectly get used interchangeably. This would make it possible to represent complex gender presentations like additive gender on a social networking interface for the first time ever, and that’d totally be something to write home about!

Privacy and security

The other major selling point of Blackbox Republic is its careful attention to privacy. The entire offering, including its name, is predicated on letting users very carefully segment their information based on their privacy boundaries. I love some of the things BBR has done to enable this, and I can only imagine it’s going to get better from here.

Blackbox Republic’s Web of Trust

There are three levels of privacy, which (as far as I can figure out) map directly to the level of trust other members have gained within the Republic’s community. It works like a web of trust. New users are “un-vouched.” As they begin to interact with others on the site and, hopefully, make some friends, they should receive “vouches”—or votes of trust—from previously-vouched members. As a member, you get to control whether something you do, such as posting a status update, gets sent to the “public,” (i.e., the entire public-facing Internet), to all Blackbox Republic members (i.e, to both vouched and un-vouched members) or only to vouched members.

Additionally, privacy settings allow you to specify whether you want to allow un-vouched members to send you private messages, to follow your updates, to comment on your posts, or to see you in search results.

Unlike Facebook, which has very good privacy controls that almost nobody on Earth is aware of (thus negating the control’s usefulness), Blackbox Republic makes it a point to highlight their privacy controls at just about every sensical turn. Each of the settings I found defaults to the most private setting, not the most public, which is exactly the right move. I gotta say, I found turning off privacy settings instead of having to turn (or leave) them on to be a really empowering feeling.

You’re not a “friend,” you’re an acquaintance!

Moreover, the Blackbox Republic platform makes a native distinction between “friends” (again, like Facebook, or FetLife) and “followers” (like Twitter). When I friend someone, I’m connected to them in a way that I’m not if I just follow someone. I’m not yet certain what the practical distinction between “friending” and “following” are, other than the fact that your view of the people you’re connected with is segmented based on which button you clicked, but I think the distinction is a very appropriate and natural one to embed in the software.

This separation is probably the single most important innovation in the space of social networks as a medium of communication and collaboration that I can point at. I love that I can indicate without ambiguity which people I want to remain in constant communication with and which I simply want to watch from a distance. After all, aren’t at least some of your “friends” on Facebook really just “acquaintances” in reality? I think that for the first time ever in a social network, Blackbox Republic gets this feature right. Now, if only I could figure out what it actually does. :)

What? No on-the-wire encryption?!

With all that being said, there’s still at least one really frightening problem with Blacbox Republic’s careful attention to privacy: as far as I could tell, no part of my session is SSL/TLS encrypted!

The entire BlackboxRepublic.com website is served over HTTP, including the login form and—again, as far as I could tell—every page on the inside of the site. This means that it’s trivial for malicious people who don’t even have a Blackbox Republic subscription to intercept, eavesdrop, and modify my interaction with the site. They could watch—and save—private messages between me and one of my friends (or lovers!), for instance.

In Blackbox’s defense, I don’t know of any social network that protects you from this. FetLife is another example of a website that should seriously consider HTTPS-only pages, but as of this writing hasn’t implemented it. Therein lies one of the most frightening oversights in the entire social networking space: regardless of so-called privacy settings, everything you do on the vast majority of social networks, blogs, and other sites on the Internet are the equivalent of passing notes between friends in a classroom. Better hope that big bully who likes to steal your lunch money doesn’t open the note and read it himself while he’s passing along your login details!

The thing is, few other social networking sites place so strong a spotlight on user privacy and security. Since Blackbox Republic seems to be nobly and rightfully holding itself up to a new standard of privacy, I feel justified in pointing out this glaring omission in their service offering. Given everything else they’ve done so well, and how well-aligned the majority of their technical implementation seems to be with their philosophy, this omission came as a big surprise to me.

Until Blackbox Republic only serves HTTPS traffic for all private areas of their site, I can’t make a recommendation in good conscious that it’s the place to be for privacy-conscious people. But again, despite public opinion to the contrary, I’ve never been able to make that claim for FetLife either.

Conclusion

Blackbox Republic is one of the most interesting websites on the Internet today. Its privacy-conscious and sexually open approach to social networking and online dating deserves huge praise. Its technical implementation—although plagued with some glaring oversights for now—is to be seriously respected.

From a social change perspective, I think the site is a mixed bag. Its exclusivity arguably makes the insularity of the sexuality communities an even bigger problem than it already is. On the other hand, the market-value of that very same exclusivity, if steered toward a benevolent purpose, can end up benefiting philanthropic, non-profit, and other sex-positive endeavors that often struggle to find necessary financial support.

Moreover, Blackbox Republic’s internal gifting economy does seem to encourage a sort of altruistic nature among members. How that may or may not translate into increased support for non-commercial activists has yet to be seen. Nay-sayers should remember that this kind of thing simply hasn’t been done before and the net effect could be quite positive.

Having just launched, however, I don’t think Blackbox Republic should be touted as the go-to site for sex-positive people quite yet. Like other social networks, it needs to grow to become truly useful, and its subscription fee business model poses a serious obstacle to many people. I was fortunate to get in with a free “founder” account, but I have mixed feelings about encouraging my friends to join me knowing they—or someone nice enough to “gift” a limited-time subscription to them—will have to pay for the service.

Additionally, its focus on being, well, a black box and its commitment to not allow Google or other search engines to index its internal content simply doesn’t resonate that strongly with me.

Lawrence emphasizes that what members say in Blackbox Republic will stay private. There’s no danger of what they post inside becoming part of their “Google resume,” as he puts it. He says he would resist efforts from search engines to index content the way Facebook and Twitter allow. “The value proposition is this is the first private, large social network out there,” Lawrence says.

Put simply, and noting that I’m probably not the majority case here, I rely on my “Google résumé,” to use Sam’s words, to live the life I want. My lukewarm reaction to this isn’t a criticism of the goal, simply an observation that it turns out I’m not in the ideal target market for Blackbox Republic’s value proposition.

In other words, I think I’m “too out” for this site to be immediately useful to me. The fact that FetLife is not readily available to the public Internet is the single biggest reason why I don’t sign on to that site very often, and so I have the same reason not to spend all that much time behind the curtains of Blackbox Republic.

Nevertheless, many other people do. If you’re among the cross-section of the populace who’d like a sociosexual experience online and would also like to effectively outsource your social reputation management, if you will, but you feel that sites like Facebook just aren’t cutting it, then Blackbox Republic is definitely worth checking out.

If you do check it out, or even if you don’t, I’d love to know what you think in the comments. And if you’re definitely sold, consider signing up via my partner link. Full disclosure: signing up that way earns me a small commission. If you’d rather sign up but not give me a commission for the referral, just register from the front page.

After recently moving to San Francisco, I joined the San Francisco Freecyclers’ Network. Freecycle is a really cool set of local groups who prefer to give away items to people who want them instead of throwing them away into the trash. The group uses email to connect people who offer items and those who want them. In order to stay sane, a simple, conventional format for writing an email’s subject line lets you quickly figure out what’s on offer and where.

Thanks to this simple text convention in subject lines, I could trivially automate the process of sorting through the approximately 100 emails a day that the email list generates in order to single out only the emails that interest me. Here’s how I did it.

Define Your Goals

Before setting out on any task, it behooves you to take a moment and think about what it is you’re trying to accomplish. For me, with the San Francisco Freecycling Network (SFFN) email list, I wanted to achieve the following goals:

• Keep my inbox clear of email from the SFFN list unless a message was particularly interesting.
• Browse the SFFN messages when I wanted to look at them without having to go to the web site.
• Highlight particularly interesting messages in my inbox visually and play a special sound to alert me that such email has been found in case Mail was running in the background (since free stuff gets taken fast!).

I defined “particularly interesting” messages as ones that offered items of need for my recent move. With this in mind, I set out to create email rules that accomplished each goal in turn.

Step 1: Create a mailbox to store the appropriate messages

I began by creating a new mailbox to store all the SFFN messages I was getting. This alternate mailbox would be the mailbox I would shunt all SFFN email to so as to keep my inbox clear of it. I called the mailbox simply “SFFN”.

Do this:

1. From the Mailbox menu, select New Mailbox…. The New Mailbox sheet appears.
2. Select any location (“On My Mac” is fine, as is the account that receives the mailing list messages), and give it a name.
3. Click OK.

Step 2: Create an email rule to move all appropriate messages to the new mailbox

With the new mailbox created, I now needed to get all the appropriate messages in there and out of my inbox.

Apple Mail’s email rules work by looking at each incoming message and matching it against a set of conditions that you provide. If the message being evaluated matches the conditions you specify, such as “from the San Francisco Freecycler’s Network mailing list”, then an associated action is automatically performed. Every email you get is evaluated against every rule you have unless a rule moves the message to another mailbox or until you trigger the “stop evaluating rules” action.

Since moving an email message to a new mailbox ends the process of evaluating rules and moving messages to the SFFN mailbox I just created is the goal of the rule I’m creating, I decided to name the rule “END – SFFN”.

Do this:

1. From the Mail menu, select Preferences…. The Mail Preferences window opens.
2. Click the Rules button. The Rules pane appears.
3. Click the Add Rule button. The Add Rule sheet appears:
   1. Enter a meaningful description (I chose “END – SFFN”) in the Description: field.
   2. Provide the conditions you want to match. Since all SFFN emails must be addressed to the mailing list, I simply provided the email address of the mailing list (sffn@yahoogroups.com) as the condition for the To header.
   3. Provide the actions you want Mail to perform. I simply wanted to move the matched messages to the SFFN mailbox.
4. Click OK.

For me, the above configuration looked like this:

Step 3: Create an email rule to highlight a message of particular interest

At this point, any and all email I receive from the San Francisco Freecyclers’ Network is being moved to the SFFN mailbox I created for it. This is nice because it keeps my inbox clear, but it’s still not very helpful since I still have to go trudging through the SFFN mailbox in order to find anything that might be interesting to me. The whole point of this exercise is to reduce the amount of time I spend actively looking for interesting things and let my computer do that work for me. So the next step is to tell Mail what I’m looking for so it can show the interesting messages to me.

Now, as it happens I’m in need of a wireless router. Since “router” is an appropriately unique word, I’m going to tell Mail to look for that word in a subject line. However, since I only want Mail to tell me when a router is available and not when other people like me are looking for routers, I’ll also tell Mail to look for the keyword “OFFER” in the subject line. (And this is why the Freecycle guidelines tell users to format their subject lines in a conventional way.)

Finally, since I don’t want to have to go digging for the interesting email message and since my inbox is already going to be kept clear by the previous rule, I’ll simply have Mail highlight the message in a bright green color and leave the message in my inbox without moving it to the SFFN mailbox I created earlier.

Do this:

1. From the Rules pane in Mail’s preferences, click Add Rule.
2. Enter a meaningful description in the Description: field. (Since I’m looking for a router, I called it “SFFN – Search for OFFERed ‘router’”.)
3. Provide the conditions you wish to match. For me, this meant email sent to the Freecycler’s mailing list with the two words “OFFER” and “router” in the subject line.
4. Specify the actions you wish Mail to perform. I wanted Mail simply to color the message green and to leave the email go to the inbox (where it was originally destined for), so I chose “Stop evaluating rules”. (I also decided I’d want Mail to play a special sound to alert me that it had found something interesting. This is optional, of course.)
5. Click OK.

When I was done creating my rule, the above configuration looked like this:

I can now repeat this step as many times as desired to tell Mail to highlight other messages that may be of particular interest for some other reason. For instance, say instead of looking for a wireless router, I wanted to look for a toaster. I would simply need to click on “Duplicate Rule” and replace all instances of “router” with “toaster”.

Step 4: Place email rules in appropriate order

Since Mail will repeatedly check incoming email against all the active rules, we need to be sure to place the rules in the correct order. You can think of each email rule as part of large Rube Goldberg machine, each message getting funneled through some piece of the logic at each successive rule. That’s why I began the name of the first rule I created with “END,” so that I’d know it should be placed after the rest of the SFFN-related email rules.

I decided that I wanted Mail to look for anything related to cameras and, of course, to toasters. This gave me a total of 4 rules (three to search for items of interest, and one to keep my inbox clear). Since the three highlighting rules all perform the same action, it doesn’t really matter which order they go in, but it is important that all of them appear before the rule to move messages to the SFFN mailbox.

To order rules, simply click-and-drag them into the order you wish Mail to evaluate them in. When I was done, my Rules pane looked like this:

Conclusion

Mail rules are an extremely powerful feature that most email clients have, but that too few people use. They can save you enormous amounts of time and increase your productivity by automating simple yet time-consuming tasks.

The conventional, standardized subject lines that the Freecycle mailing list uses simplifies the logic required to have your computer automatically process your messages for you. This is a useful observation because it can be applied to other areas of your life where using simple conventions can help to organize otherwise overwhelming information tasks into manageable batches. Although this particular example uses stock, simple commands, you can get as fancy as you like by having an action trigger an AppleScript.

Now, hopefully, finding some additional housewares and a wireless router for my new San Francisco apartment will be as easy as checking (but not manually sorting!) my own email!

Over the past month or so, several people with whom I am close—either because we were once close and reconnected, or because we are newly close—have remarked on the jewelry I wear. I have five thin chain bracelets; one around each wrist and ankle, and a fifth closely fitted at my neck. I remember the nights Sara put them there.

“You’re still wearing these,” each of these friends said to me as they slipped a finger underneath one of them.

“I know,” I reply each time. “I’m still figuring out how much of them are me, and how much of them are Sara.” Who am I today, without the life I thought I’d have?

New York City has been a difficult place to be in. Instead, I have spent much of my time North, shuffling between Boston and Providence. The “organized” Boston communities are vastly divergent from The Scene that I am used to. I like the differences—I like that they exist, and that one place is different from another—even if I don’t like all the specifics.

In Boston, I attended the second NEPups.org puppy munch. I went with a friend and met a few gay pups and a kitty girl, and I spoke about queer masculinities and how uncomfortable I feel in the gay communities I’ve tentatively explored. I have never been gay, and I still feel a twinge of discomfort “admitting” to bisexuality in such spaces.

I have a growing connection to Providence. In large part, this is due to the people I’m coming to think of as the sun girl and the metal boy. They are young (younger than I am), which for the first time in my life is a notable thing. They live in slow time and enjoy the physical world in ways that are not entirely new yet not entirely familiar to me. There is much of Sara—a goodness and comfort—in each of them.

The metal boy in particular has been a quiet revelation for me. I find myself more unsure around him than I would have thought, as though I am younger, less experienced, more hesitant. I’ve been sexual with other men before but only now, after being with him, can I wholly and without silent reservation answer “Yes” to the still often asked question, “Are you really bi?” The sun girl, for her part, is in many ways a pure blessing. She is magic and warmth and a grounding force that has helped me move forward.

My trip to San Francisco these past five days proved useful but disappointing. It’s now obvious to me that the plan I had conceived before I left Sydney and which I so steadfastly tried to make happen despite the financial and emotional burdens of losing my relationship with Sara will not actually work. I’m thankful that I met with several other friends who have each generously offered support and crash space for my planned arrival time in late June. It may have perhaps been destined for me to be alone (but not isolated) when I arrive in San Francisco; it’s been almost a decade in the making for me by now.

I’ve been to San Francisco twice before this trip, but I’ve never been so happy to leave it before. I am still determined to move there, but as I write this in my airplane seat somewhere over the landlocked middle of the continent, I find myself eagerly awaiting a return to Providence. I can’t stay on the East coast, but I can’t leave. Not yet, not when there is still so much for me to do here.

My thoughts are consistently drawn to productive pursuits; my second CSS book, my sexuality projects (KinkForAll.org and MaleSubmissionArt.com). I feel strong in ways I’ve never felt before: I bend the world. I change reality. I can.

But I’m still so, so sad, and so, so pained. I don’t cry every day anymore, but I do feel overwhelmed by it. I suspect that, in part, Sara left me because I am so driven by the things I need to change rather than the things that work. Some parts of me want to reach a point where I’m no longer fueled by things that way, but other parts of me doesn’t. As one Bostonian friend fondly reminds me, “All progress is the work of unreasonable men.”

I speak about KinkForAll so often everywhere I go that I’m uncertain whether I’ve latched onto it or if it has latched onto me. I fear for it like a father fears for a child growing too fast and yet I keep pushing it out from underneath my own auspice because I know it can’t ever be what I want it to be without experience in the world. The weekend after I was in Boston, KinkForAll Boston was set into motion by the people I spoke with there and now I am determined to be a part of it.

In the mean time, I am also thinking and becoming increasingly excited about the Sex 2.0 presentations I will give on May 9^th. In particular, I’ll get to meet the likes of Sarah Dopp, one of the inspirations for the Gender and Technology presentation that was accepted (and seems to be in increasingly high demand) at the Sex 2.0 conference. I’m just learning to speak with the people I admire to that degree, and in a week and a half I’m going to stand up and present my own version of the very things they inspire me to be. I will feel like I am standing in front of the very giants whose shoulders I stood on when I was across the planet.

So again, I ask myself, who am I? What is my sexual submissiveness without the dominant presence that revived it when I had given it up those four long years ago? What is my career when I have achieved, for me, an unprecedented level of recognition after 8 long years of being in the workforce? What is my contribution to my own future, and to people like me who are still young children today?

What kind of man am I if so much of the world I live in refuses to see manliness in what I am? Because today, having considered the possibility that I was perhaps a woman at earlier stages of my life, it turns out I am a man. And I am going to make the world know it is good to be the kind of man I am.

Last week, I was invited to make a guest appearance on a technology talk radio show called Technocolor, which airs on 90.3 FM locally in New York City. The radio station is WHCR. The invitation was rather unexpected but I had a great time and a fun conversation with the host, Lena Marvin. We had such a fun time, actually, that Lena invited me to make a second guest appearance this week and, unlike the first show, I managed to record the audio stream, so you can replay the taping of the show and download it.

Here are my late-night and very sleepy attempts at listing some of the stuff we talked about, with as many links for show notes as I can manage to find:

• April Fools’ Day jokes: GMail Autopilot automatically writes your emails for you, Identi.ca acquires Twitter, The Guardian will publish its archives by tweeting them.
• NetFlix will demolish traditional cable television.
• Drop.io can replace email attachments.
• Skype has an official iPhone client; AT&T is not happy.
• Stanford University to offer free iPhone development courses. Why go to college anymore? MIT already offers plenty of educational material from Open Courseware, iTunes University does something similar.
• iPod Shuffle randomly maximizes its volume when people exercise. Owch. DRM physically bad for your ears?
• New York Public Library offers free access to language learning courses from MangoLanguages.com, a $150 value.
• Internet not actually good for job hunts.
• Identi.ca hopes to add OpenID support (eventually). It’s a distributed “micro-blogging” platform. Fear vendor lock-in; Laconi.ca implements the open micro-blogging standard. Community organizations are especially vulnerable to vendor-lock in.
• Free as in beer is an open source cultural reference. But wait, there is actually a “free beer”.
• How to create your own secure, yet memorable, password algorithm: use the name of the site you’re on combined with a secret prefix to create unique passwords for each site.
• Financial software to help you do taxes: Mint.com versus Quicken or Microsoft Money. TaxSlayer.com helps you file taxes electronically, possibly for free! Also, online government tools exist at, for instance, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance.
• PDFs should be used better than they are; PDF creators can use PDFs as online, electronic forms. Lots to learn about Adobe’s products for free at CreativeSuitePodcast.com.
• Newer Microsoft Word document formats cause pain for the uninformed. Also, will newer versions of the PDF standard stay backwards compatible with older PDF files?

Listening to myself is a bit odd, and makes me realize just how quickly I speak. I need to learn to slow down a little. Nonetheless, I think I did okay, although I suppose I should have plugged my own web dev book a bit more. Meh, whatever. I was just there to have a good time, and I did exactly that—it’s incredible how quickly an hour goes by when you’re having fun!

Still, I’d love to hear feedback from listeners, as I very much welcome constructive criticism of what I could have done better and how. I’m also hopeful that I’ll get even more opportunities to chat with Lena, Javier, and the rest of the Technocolor crew semi-regularly from now on, since she mentioned something about being able to Skype me in even after I move to San Francisco.

Immediately after arriving in New York City, I turned myself into a tornado of work and worry in order to make sure KinkForAll was the success I desperately needed it to be. To my indescribable relief and happiness, KFANYC wasn’t just a success, it smashed through even my wildest expectations, topping at 45 presentations with well over 100 participants physically present and countless others watching the online feeds. (I was so worried about presentation shortage, I prepared 4, but only ended up needing to present 1. Likewise, I originally thought we’d top off at maybe 35–45 participants, and in the end one of our biggest problems was simply lack of physical space!)

On that front, I’m now looking at the amazing possibility of helping people in sexuality communities who have contacted me from Washington DC, Toronto, and San Francisco emulate the success of New York City’s event in their own hometowns. But not yet…. Not quite.

As the unconference ended, Sara and I were joined by a group of over 20 friends (and friendly acquaintances) for dinner at a nearby Asian restaurant. Despite my hunger (I only ate at the behest of my concerned friends during the day ’cause I was so busy), I didn’t want to finish my meal; I knew that would be the end of dinner, and the day. Nevertheless, day turned to night and as Sara and I walked around the corner for a modicum of privacy, excitement gave way to sadness and we said (temporary) goodbyes in tears.

I retreated from the city then, headed towards Providence, Rhode Island to stay with close friends who generously offered me the opportunity to create a small sanctuary in their spare room. This has been helpful, and I can begin to feel myself recovering, but I’m still having trouble grounding myself in the here and now or focusing on the new tasks at hand. For one thing, there are so many, and for another thing, they are so vastly different from what I’ve just done that mentally changing gears so radically, so quickly, under so much pressure, is actually painful.

When I moved my self and my life half way around the globe to Sydney last year, I felt optimistic about what I would find. Sadly, I didn’t find what I wanted. Now, having moved myself and my life all the way back across the planet and then some, I’m determined to make what I want—because it doesn’t exist yet, and no one knows what it’s going to look like…except me.

My hosts, Emms and Zac, are nothing short of a godsend. They are literally a healing warmth of a magnitude I could not possibly express adequately in words. Unfortunately, shortly after arriving in their home, I fell ill. Of course, this is not at all a surprise considering my physiological history for exactly such mind-body connection.

My attempts to focus on my writing (for my second and much more advanced web development book on CSS I’m authoring; my first book was much more 101-level) have been only partially successful, but I’m encouraged by this anyway. As Emms told me last night while cooking a pasta dinner for us all, “Comfort yourself with the standards of the world,” a piece of advice she wisely preceded with, “Now’s the time to focus on only the most important parts of your chapters.” This, all while taking my hand every time my eyes unexpectedly overflow with the salt water I feel like I’ve been storing up in them.

I’m a little…not annoyed…chagrined at the admission that yesterday was the first full day in more than 4 weeks that I didn’t cry at all. Not only this, but earlier today while my hosts were at their day jobs and I mainlined enormous quantities of tea as though it were a blood transfusion, I couldn’t stop myself from crawling backwards in time towards happier memories. I cried again, embarrassingly loudly since no one was home, and resigned to let my head rest for a while instead of forcing it further into failing attempts to create reusable patterns of CSS code for styling semantic markup.

To help with the memories, I’ve been playing MGMT’s Kids on repeat for what must be an hour or more now. I first heard it on Australia Day (apparently Australia’s almost-equivalent of America’s Columbus Day), which Sara and I spent with Janek and company at his house on a tropical, warm, rainy day in Sydney. The radio was playing all day but the only song I remember was this one because, somehow, it stood out like a spotlight. I remember laying on the couch in the living room with my head in Sara’s lap, eyes closed, as she pet my head and I purred along with the kittens in the far corner of the room. The memory is emblazoned in my mind’s eye as a vivid still frame.

When Zac came home and gave me a hug to comfort my tears, he remarked on the song. “It’s always weird to hear this song,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because Emms and I went to college with them—the band.”

And now I have two memories.

A few minutes ago I awoke in a friend’s bed in their apartment in Harlem. I wanted to do nothing but stay there and not get up. I feel like there is too much to take care of, way too much to handle.

My flight from Sydney to New York City was less than good, better than terrible. I already knew I hated United Airlines, now I’m just more committed never to flying with them again. More than that, I’m frustrated that my flight was so dependent on choices Sara’s family made for her without consideration for me. If little else, I’m happy to be finally out of reach of their influence.

It’s been weeks, literally, since I haven’t cried at one point or another, usually multiple, in the day. I’ve been falling asleep in either tears or unmatched stress and restlessness—each has benefits over the other. Last night was no different.

Today I have errands to run for the KinkForAll New York City event I’m helping to run tomorrow. I’m extremely proud of the work Sara and I have managed to accomplish on it not only for the first time ever in our lives but also literally from the other side of the planet.

Simultaneously, I’ve been chasing and feeling continually frustrated by failing to make significant-enough progress on writing my book on CSS. My co-author Joe has been fantastic, and one particular employee, Clay, from the publisher has also been equally supportive. However, the rest of this project feels extremely precarious and that is endlessly aggravating.

It’s aggravating because it was a project I sincerely wanted to see done well, and have been working toward for a long time. I quit my day job something like 6 months ago now in order to focus on getting it accomplished successfully, but I am now further behind than I was then. Despite my best efforts, life kept throwing me curveballs to the point where I already know it’s not going to be the book I wanted it to be. I’m extremely angry at…everything…for that.

As if that weren’t enough, as many already know by now, Sara and I are no longer together, for reasons I’d rather not discuss quite yet. As painful as this would be in general, this is even more painful when seen in light of the fact that it’s one of the reasons my book has suffered. The book isn’t some great money-maker for me, but rather an opportunity for professional exposure and recognition that I’ve been working towards for 8 years—that’s how long I’ve been making money in the web development industry. To have that opportunity suffer pours salt into wounds that moving to Sydney in the first place had already re-opened and which the loss of this relationship is a 3^rd degree burn.

All in all, I’m struggling to keep professional commitments afloat, organizing a first-of-its-kind unconference for the sexuality communities in New York City, ending a 4-year relationship (with the person I’m organizing the unconference with), and moving across the planet. All. At. Once.

I want to change the channel off of this ridiculous soap opera, but can’t. Instead, I keep playing everything in fast-forward in my head until I can again see a point somewhere in the hopefully not too distant future where everything I’ve worked on is successful and I’m peaceful once again. Please let that day be soon.

For those of you who don’t already know, I’ve been a blogger over at SitePoint for a few months now. Today, I’m even happier to be a participant in the SitePoint community because, for a limited time only, SitePoint is offering the sale of the century: buy 5 SitePoint books for the price of 1. Every last cent of the proceeds from the sale of these books will go towards relief efforts for the recent Victorian bushfires that have claimed over 300 lives and are among the worst fire disasters on record.

The books are full-color PDF downloads, and include some really awesome titles. These are precisely the kinds of books you want as PDFs, too, since you can search through them and always keep them with you while you’re coding and looking for inspiration or a reference (even when you’re without Internet access). I couldn’t help but pounce on this deal, and I’m now the proud owner of the following books, which have all received some pretty great reviews:

• No Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP
• Build Your Own AJAX Web Applications
• The Principles of Beautiful Web Design (on Raena’s recommendation)
• The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques
• The Art & Science Of JavaScript

In just 3.5 hours, SitePoint has managed to raise over $15,000 AUD, according to employee Kevin Yank on Twitter. And that’s just on this side of the world. All my North hemisphere friends were asleep when this was announced, but not to worry. SitePoint’s sale will last until this Friday, so there’s plenty of time to take advantage of it.

Obviously, I think you should do so. Not only are you getting some really quality content and helping disaster victims at the same time, you’re also sending a loud and clear message that companies whose humanity outshines their accounting are the ones you’re going to support. I’m thrilled to see that SitePoint is one of these human companies, and ever more thrilled to be a part of it.