The Little Hacker's Room

saddondraper.tumblr.com: What does this mean? Don Draper all the way across the sky. Oh my god. It's so intense.

(Meme provenance: A defining scene in this Mad Men episode + Sad Keanu)

(Warning: this post is for adults, and the video embedded contains sexual content)

I haven't read Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade yet, but it sure sounds amazing—BB mod Antinous just hipped me to it this morning. The new book by Justin Spring new book chronicles the contents of an archive he discovered in San Francisco a few years ago, including a thousand-page diary belonging to Samuel Steward, a man of many identities.... ...including several that the subtitle of the book omits: pioneering sex researcher, collector of celebrity conquests, drug addict, masochist, Catholic (briefly), Navy enlistee (even more briefly), conquistador of vast provinces of America's pre-Stonewall homosexual subculture. Most fortuitously, he was apparently a graphomaniac who documented his long, dark, exuberant, sad, dangerous life in journals, an unpublished memoir, reams of letters, poems, erotica, semifictionalized short stories and even a 746-entry card catalog of his sexual history, scrupulously maintained over five decades and in some cases ornamented -- perhaps for future biographers? -- with what Spring decorously calls "DNA-verifiable" evidence of his liaisons. That, from the New York Times review (which ran with a terrific title).

All told, Steward is reported to have had sex with 807 different people, a total of 4,647 times, including Rock Hudson and Rudolph Valentino. Regarding those impressive numbers, Adam at Butt Magazine opines, However, the true value of his promiscuity lies not in the number of loads blown, but in what those loads can teach us. (...)

At times he was Samuel Steward, drunken professor, obscure literary figure and pen pal to the stars. He was also an author, first of serious fiction - Angels on the Bough - and later acclaimed memoirs - Dear Sammy: Letters From Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. George Platt Lynes, Alfred Kinsey and Tom of Finland all counted him as a friend. As a tattoo artist he went by Phil Sparrow. He mentored Ed Hardy and inked the Hells Angels. He even engraved 'LUCIFER' on Kenneth Anger's chest. In his dirty work he was the ripped Greek hustler Phil Andros. This particular alter ego dealt in filthy stories, pumping out titles like Shuttlecock and $tud, and attracting the attention of literary heavyweights like Christopher Isherwood.He was all of these things and more. Mr. Steward was also a sex researcher and self-proclaimed whore. Perhaps his most important occupation, however, was that of historian. For in the cache of his remaining belongings exists an individual history unparalleled in its meticulousness. Video trailer for the book follows (contains sexual content.)

Video at Blip.tv.

More about the book and what it all means: Huffington Post, Facebook page for book, website.

Amazon: Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade

Here's Jay Shafer of Tumbleweed Houses taking you on a tour of his clever, 100-square-foot house, which reminds me of a wooden, super-luxury first-class plane-seat on the flagship airline of some oil-soaked, cash-infused land.

Living in the Smallest House in the World (Thanks, Pddro, via Submitterator!)

• Tiny house sculpture
• Design for nine-square-feet house
• Tiny themed prefab houses
• To Do This Summer: Build a Tiny House Gadgets
• Tiny houses -- slideshow
• Terrific 180-square-foot shack houses family of four plus dog ...
• HOWTO make rim-perching adorable tiny gingerbread houses for your ...
• Spite Houses, built to piss off the neighbors

Connal Hughes and Anjel Van Slyke's photos of a 1980s-era Soviet arcade machine reveal that even light-hearted recreation was a grim affair behind the iron curtain.

Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines (Thanks, Rachel!)

After a quiet August recess in Washington, DC, it’s time to refocus our efforts on public policies that impact online commerce. And today we consider not the good, and not merely the bad, but the awful – iAWFUL.

NetChoice unveiled an updated version of out Internet Advocates’ Watchlist for Ugly Laws (iAWFUL) where we track the ten instances of state and federal legislation that pose the greatest threat to the Internet and e-commerce. Our efforts so far this year have helped to remove two of the worst offenders from the February 2010 iAWFUL list, including a federal bill giving the Federal Trade Commission more powers to make new rules for online activity without Congressional guidance, and a Maine law restricting online marketing to teenagers.

In our second update for 2010, NetChoice identifies new legislation that has the potential to stall Internet commerce. Our top two are Congressional bills:

Number 1:  Federal online privacy efforts such as Rep. Rush’s “Best Practices Act” (HR 5777) and the staff discussion draft from Boucher / Stearns.

Number 2:  The expansion of Internet taxation HR 5660, the “Streamlined Sales Tax Bill”

This iAWFUL list targets federal privacy proposals that would curtail the continued development of ad-supported content and services that consumers have come to expect from the Internet. No one’s saying that privacy isn’t important or that we shouldn’t be concerned with our personal information. However, one federal privacy proposal would regulate small websites that don’t collect personally identifiable information but add just 100 users a week, even when users provide only a nickname and password.

And where these proposals attempt to mitigate new regulatory burdens, they don’t go nearly far enough. The proposals would grant the Federal Trade Commission broad powers to dictate the details of self-regulatory programs, effectively transforming the FTC into a “port authority” of the Internet. Moreover, the safe harbor “choice program” found in Representative Bobby Rush’s (D-IL) legislation is no real solution for online businesses, who would be forced to conform to avoid costly lawsuits enabled by the bill’s private right of action – with statutory damages of $1,000 per violation.

An updated federal push to expand Internet taxation via the Streamlined Sales Tax (SST) jumped into the number two slot of the 2010 iAWFUL list. In their hunt for additional tax revenues, a handful of states have again asked Congress to force out-of-state businesses to be their tax collectors. H.R. 5660, sponsored by Representative Delahunt (D-MA), would take money from consumers and move it to two dozen state capitols while imposing costly new burdens on small businesses in all fifty states. This new collection burden would be a jobs-killer that cannot be justified by the grossly overestimated revenues trumpeted by advocates.

Although sales tax systems are as complex as ever, SST supporters have abandoned their original promise to exempt small businesses and compensate sellers for the burdens of collecting taxes. The proposed legislation once again shows that serious simplification of sales tax systems has become just a slogan — not a standard.

Individual legislative proposals from a broad swath of states including California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, New Mexico, Virginia and Oregon round out the iAWFUL list through additional tax grabs that seek to use the Internet as a novel revenue source at the cost of consumer privacy and convenience.

The entire updated 2010 iAWFUL includes:

1. Federal Online Privacy Legislation – New to iAWFUL

2. Federal Legislation to Expand Internet Taxation

3. Consumer Purchase Tax Reporting Initiative (CO)

4. Hotel Taxes on Online Travel Companies (NY, FL)

5. Advertising Nexus Taxes (CO, IL, NM, MD, VA, VT)

6. New Taxes on Digital Downloads (OK, SC)

7. Nevada Encryption Mandate (NV)

8. California Data Breach Notification (CA)

9. Regulation of Free Trial Offers and Renewal Agreements (OR)

10. Component Nexus Laws (CA, CO, OK)