So much to do! So little time!
This is a list of Bonnie’s current-ish projects, the ones she’s always meaning to work on. Since they fall outside of her paid work, they often don’t get the attention they deserve. Still, good intentions count for something, right? Pretty much she wishes there were seventeen of her, one to do professional writing, fifteen to have a blast with these ideas, and one to go off and learn how to use a sewing machine properly.
“The ‘This American Life’ of Sex”
Bonnie wants to learn audio. Specifically she wants to do interviews with various people from various sexual backgrounds and cultures. She wants to give voice to the colorful and sometimes moving stories that go often literally unheard. She also wants to figure out how the heck to use her sound software.
Inspired by the culture of sex blogging, Cybersexy was a blog about Bonnie’s online sex life. In it she chronicled her cybersex encounters, her qualms as a sex writer, and her occasionally hilarious stories about awkward internet hookups. Those posts then got funneled into her column “The Clickable Clit.”
Beautiful Stranger
As a cybersex enthusiast constantly challenged to find other decent humans online, Bonnie decided to start a social network for smart internet explorers who also happen to be looking for pixelated booty. Unfortunately Ning, the network host community, shut it down along with all adult content in December of 2008. Not cool.
BDSM Ethnography
This is research Bonnie has been meaning to put together for a special issue of Culture of Virtual Worlds. In theory she would go into Second Life and do direct observation, Tea Room Trade style. Sadly, time constraints are make this one look less and less likely.
Sexual Safety in Children’s MMOs
As someone who’s done a lot of first-hand work on sex in virtual worlds — even virtual worlds meant for minors — Bonnie thinks it’s time the people who build MMOs start approaching sexual safety as an issue of mechanics. Want her to do consulting for you on the topic? Because she wants to consult.
Translating Gisèle Prassinos
As part of her undergraduate thesis, Bonnie worked with female surrealist authors, including one that’s now her pen pal and eighty-nine-year-old buddy. Her work barely exists in English. She needs to get a’translatin’.
One of the things Bonnie really wanted to do is start an internet culture blog, something that approaches online life anthropologically. Without the ability to self-replicate, she settled for setting up a second Tumblr and filling it with net culture links.
A few years ago, driven by her irrational love of video-game-themed cakes, Bonnie joined Tracy John from MTV Multiplayer and Michael Fahey from Kotaku in starting GameCakes.com. That site has since died, leaving Bonnie with no choice but to post random confections on the sparse GameCakes.tumblr.com.
Oh, and this is only the beginning. Details on even more past projects are forthcoming. It’s just bumming Bonnie out to see how many ideas she didn’t follow through on. She’s going to go console herself by blogging now.
Bonnie Ruberg is a sex, technology, and video games journalist who contributes regularly to publications like The Economist, Forbes, and The Village Voice. By day she's also a comparative literature PhD student at UC Berkeley, where she studies French, English, gender, sexuality, surrealism and perversion. You can reach her at [her first name and last name, all one big word] AT gmail DOT com.
