Many people criticize the web for being dull, pointless and puerile. This is ridiculous, because they should be criticizing it for being monumentally disturbing. With all the bizarre sexual practices that have been revealed, facilitated and perhaps even created by the web, it's surprising any two people are turned on by the same thing. I suspect some people are doubling up, getting turned on by both terrines shaped like John Hodgman and opera glasses that have been used by virgin longshoremen.
Even more striking is the idea that not all fetishes have been invented yet. Clearly, the technology and discoveries of the future will provide us with even more strange things upon which to focus our raging and confused libidos. For example:
High-G fetish: Accelerating to high G-forces causes blood to pool in parts of your body, puts enormous physical stress on the body and temporarily makes you look like a particularly vicious caricature of Popeye. Somewhere out there, someone is reading this and thinking, "Hot!" Once space travel becomes more commonplace, some entrepreneur is going to manage to take nudie pictures of this process and put them up on a web page, or even get a live cam going. Suggested fetish nickname: Pancake Flippers.
Alien fetish: Why haven't extraterrestrial life forms contacted us? Maybe it's because they know that as soon as they make themselves known, lusty earthlings will immediately start hooting at them to flash their gills, show everyone their nictitating membranes or participate in a wet tentacle contest. Aliens want to be liked for who they are, not because they have especially shiny electroreceptors. Try getting to know one first, maybe going out for coffee or ferrofluid and having a conversation, before trying to get it into the copulation chamber. Suggested fetish nickname: Elliots.
Hyperspace fetish: When asked, "What's the first thing you'd want to do if you were translated into a state of quasi-existence in which you are simultaneously nowhere and everywhere at once?" 68 percent of people answer, "Totally get it on." (Next most-popular answer: "Blog about it.") Hyperspace sex becomes a popular pastime for adventurous college students and bored married couples. The main difficulty with the practice is that children conceived in hyperspace end up existing only as an uncollapsed wave of quantum probability, which often leads to discipline problems once they hit school age. Suggested fetish nickname: Crop Dusters.
Nanotechnology fetish: Obviously, in the future nanotechnology will affect all aspects of human sexuality, giving us everything from self-peeling condoms to spermicidal linebackers. Having your sex life enhanced by billions of imperceptible molecular devices will be seen as completely normal. However, a few people will become attached to nanodevices on an individual level, fantasizing about one particular nanomachine, giving it a name and writing elaborate erotic fiction involving shrinking down to an atomic level and consummating their attachment to a firm but gentle microscopic lover. Suggested fetish nickname: One Nanite Stands.
AI fetish: As the Turing Test gets closer and closer to being passed with a low D, some people will decide that humans, with their flaws and smells and need for periodic hydration, should be left out of the sexual equation entirely. Even robots are prone to breakdown and unsuitable for coitus in its pure intellectual form. Instead, these people will program elaborate sexual algorithms and release them into shared memory with similar programs by other people, then watch the output as the two programs interact. At first, these acts of AI intercourse closely mirror human interactions, but as time goes on they become more and more abstract. Eventually, a small but dedicated minority of human beings become instantly turned on by the phrase "swapping buffers." Suggested fetish nickname: Geeks, Only More So.
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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to bequeath 20 Nerd Points to anyone who gets the "crop duster" joke.
