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About Us |
HistoryIn March 1995,Discovering Sex (SX) was founded as a registered student organization at University of Washington. From that time until its key organizers graduated in Fall 1998, as a student organization SX hosted a wide variety of events both on and off campus, and in parallel began its work to improve the quality and scope of the peer sex education material available on the internet. [A list of all the events we hosted, and other documents from when we were a student organization, is available here.] Amongst all other sex-positive student organizations known to have existed up to that point, the inclusive nature of SX was apparently a first, and it is perhaps only with the founding of Noire at Bard College in late 2004 that anything similar may once again be found. Although SX unfortunately did not continue to exist as a UW student organization following the graduation of the students who founded it, there was nevertheless a strong sentiment that amongst those individuals that this kind of work should somehow continue. So, Discovering Sex (technically now, "Discovering Sex, LLC") was founded in late 1998 as an off-campus entity completely separate from the UW. Discovering Sex, as a fully off-campus entity, registered the domain name searchxxxadultvideos.com and began to build and maintain this web site. Obviously, this online side of its work continues to this day. In parallel, from December 1998 to the first few months of 1999, the real-life side of SX's work was expressed in a series of off-campus events, such as workshops on erotic dance, erotic talk, and even "erotic gift-giving for the holidays." However, beginning in the Spring of 1999, we were honored to have had the opportunity to participate in the formation of the non-profit Seattle Sex-Positive Community Center, a wonderful and unique organization that carries forward our values in real life better than we ever could. This is where all of our real-life volunteer time goes these days, and if you're someone who fondly remembers the real-life events that SX sponsored as a UW student organization, it's probably where you want to be. For AuthorsAuthors are welcome to submit their work for inclusion in the "Contributed Documents" section of this web site. Depending on volume, authors and columnists can have their own sections, with introductions to their work, links to their books or other offerings, and a permanent URL. You keep the copyright to anything you send us, and we are willing to immediately take down any or all of your writings should you change your mind and no longer wish to make them available here.
Just so there are no misunderstandings or hard feelings, we need to say that due to time constraints we are unfortunately no longer able to write full, page-length reviews of books: at most, mailing us a review copy means if we really like the book it may be given a place in our book guide. However, having said that, please understand that review copies are helpful to us, and we definitely appreciate receiving them: as long as you understand that in all likelihood a full-length standalone review not will be the result, you are absolutely welcome and encouraged to send them.
About this Web SiteStandards and PracticesThis web site collects no information for advertising purposes, sets no cookies, opens no pop-up windows, and engages in no browser trickery (i.e. it's a simple collection of text pages that you can browse when you like and leave when you're done). Furthermore it neither purchases nor sells advertising, nor does it engage in any form of strategic or reciprocal linking (i.e. when we link to or recommend another web site, it's because we actually want to). And finally, it is offered to you completely free of charge, as a public service. How Expenses are MetAlthough running this web site is nobody's day job, and it has no "staff," it does have regular expenses. To meet these expenses, and to spare readers the experience of being nagged for donations, we've chosen to simply sign up for affiliate programs in cases where a particular service of relevance to sexuality that we would have recommended anyway happens to offer one. Fortunately for us, since almost any serious internet retailer these days offers an affiliate program, this has presented no conflicts of interest. In the interest of full disclosure, the following are the affiliate programs we have joined. Basically, this just means that if you follow a text link to that service from this site, and buy something, we get a small credit. In none of these cases is the service they provide something we are in a position to provide ourselves, and in each case it's something we deemed important and relevant. SoftwareThe computer on which we do most of our writing uses Linux as its underlying operating system (currently the RedHat 7.3 distribution, though if we were to reinstall it today we'd probably use either Fedora Core or Debian). CVS is used for both version control and backups. The outliner plugin for the Vim editor is used to sketch out the basic structure of new documents, after which LyX is used for the actual writing. Bibliographic references are maintained using gBib, figures are edited using GIMP (then converted to Encapsulated Postscript as needed with ImageMagick's "convert" utility), and the ps2pdf utility is used as needed to generate printable PDF files for proofreading. Once the LyX document is complete, tex4ht is used to convert the TeX output to HTML. Moneydance for Linux is used to keep track of expenses, and while working we generally use XMMS to tune into either KEXP or KUAT. Meanwhile, the computer that hosts this web site uses FreeBSD as its underlying operating system and Apache (with the mod_gzip module) as its web server. The site's scripts are written in Perl or PHP, and SWISH-E powers the search feature. The site's pages are served as static (and typically fully standards-compliant) HTML for speed, though the command-line version of PHP is used as needed to refresh the navigation elements at the top and bottom of each page. In other words, this site is created, maintained, and hosted entirely using free and open-source software. Happy Loving!
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