Tickling Tacos in TJ

Name: David

Age: 19

About 5 years ago when I was 19, we drove down to Tijuana, Mexico for a night of partying.   I myself am also Mexican, unfortunately I don’t know the language.  My Mexican friends refer to me as a coconut (brown on the outside white on the inside).

So we head down to TJ and immediately hit a club on the strip.  In TJ you can pay something like $15 to drink all of the beer you want at clubs.  After about 2 hours of continuous drinking, we decided to leave the dance club and hit a strip club.

Another great thing about TJ is that you are able to touch the strippers.  The stuff that goes down on a regular night in Mexico is enough to get anyone a life sentence in the states.  So anyway I get a liking to this “stripper” and I think she is digging me as well.  Her hand was rubbing my junk over my pants until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

She says something in Spanish that I don’t understand.  Finally I am able to make out the words “35 dollars”.  35 dollars for what?  I made the universal sign for sex, and she nodded.

Minutes later I am out $35 dollars and feeling pretty shameful.  Not that I really regret it because she was great, but I regret that my friends were there.  On the drive home they made jokes how I had aids and stuff which really pissed me off.

Dear David, Let me get this straight.  You had sexual intercourse with a prostitute in the dirtiest Mexican city known to man, and your only regret is that your friends saw you do it?  You might just be one of the coolest people in my cool book right now.

Digg is the Power

This is not usually the type of post you will see on our site.  However, I do recognize this person because I spend time reading the front page of Digg.  Also, about 1/3 of the subscribers to this site are digg users, so when this person approached me, I thought a lot of you might be interested in what he had to say.  For you regular readers, I apologize if the lack of vomit, feces, and unprotected sex in this article bores you.  Just to prove that we haven’t become all serious, I will leave you with a link to our photoshop contest.

Digg is the Power (an essay about Digg and how it will never win The War.) - Michael Wong

Several years ago, I decided to level up my drinking game. Up to that point, I had been a decent drinker. I could go drink for drink with the best up until about 10 beers/shots/glasses of wine. But starting with the 7th one, fear would creep into my mind - the fear of throwing up and the fear of nausea and a splitting hangover headache the next day.

Enough is enough, so I took a bottle of Remy Martin from my dad’s stash and opened it. I stood over the kitchen sink and poured myself an ounce.

First shot, gulp. Ah!, warm bliss.

Second shot, heated contentment.

I spaced the shots a couple of minutes apart. By the 7th shot, that familiar feeling of fear returned, but I was adamant to overcome it.
As a man of the world, especially since much of my business takes me to Asia where drinking is equated with mental and physical prowess, I was determined to kill my fear.

8th shot, rumble.
9th shot, palpitations.

Then as I raised the 10th shot of cognac to my lips I had to put it back on the counter and let it out: a brownish torrent splashed into the sink, mixed with rice and bits of meat I had had for dinner.

I fixed my eyes on the shot glass. “Time to walk the talk Michael” I said to myself and raised it to my lips. Some more vomiting. Less liquid, more air. Dry heave.

11th shot, no prob.
12th shot, dry heave.

The rest were pieces of cake.

* * * * *

What the hell does drinking have to do with digging?

My first Digg account was opened back in 06. At the time, I did what most noobs do.

-Add all strangers including MrBabyMan as friends: 1000.
-Submit your blog post or your own site URL.
-Shoutall your new friends.
-Hope they’ll digg it to digg’s front page.
-Wait for the money to roll in.

The money never rolls in.

I started digging seriously in June of 08. I don’t know what happened or how I figured it out. All I can say is that it was definitely an AH-HA moment.

I realized that asking people to digg your stuff just doesn’t work.
People aren’t interested in altruism. People are selfish and only interested in themselves.

So using that wisdom, I started digging anything and everything people shouted at me. No discrimination. If you shouted me, I dugg you.

The more I dugg, the more people shouted at me. More importantly people started adding me to their friend’s list. Before long, I received 20-30 shouts for diggs per hour. I remember going out for an evening with friends and upon my return, I was met with several hundred shouts for diggs from my friends.

The upside to this predicament was that now people dugg my stuff.

I remember my first shoutall like my First Time.

My submit made the digg front page in less than 8 hours. My friends were glad to digg my submit because they all felt bad that I was always digging for them without asking for anything in return.

You know that scene in the Matrix where Neo goes “Whoa, I know kung fu…”?

Well, then and there I remember thinking “Whoa, I finally GET Digg…”

Things progressed quite nicely. I dugg and dugg and dugg and my friends reciprocated.

* * * * *

What attracted me and still does to Digg is that even an average joe like me had the ability to grab the world’s attention.

This point is so important that I must repeat it again.

“Even an average joe like me had the ability to grab the world’s attention.”

This isn’t possible with traditional media. Imagine phoning up the New York Times and saying “um could you put my blog post on the front page of tomorrow’s edition?”

But with digg it was possible.

In fact, this one facet assured that I was hooked on Digg. More so, I started acquiring tools and scripts to make digging easier.

Imagine cutting down your digging time in half. Yes I was able to do that by saving one click out of two through script usage. Imagine shouting to only the people who haven’t dugg your submits. Yes, scripts helped me accomplish that.

Back to the drinking metaphor.

Though I had succeeded where others had not, one thing nagged at me like a shrewish wife.

The Fear.

I was scared of being banned. All my Digg friends equally so. We’d seen it happen to the best.

Several of them had been banned and then given a second chance upon agreeing to honor the Digg TOS (terms of service) from then on.

And who can forget that Brian Cuban was banned for good.

That was a big thing, since Brian’s brother Mark is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, amongst other things.

Some of us stopped using scripts, others like myself continued to use the scripts except dugg slower, because we figured that Digg couldn’t tell.

Regardless, all during this time, the fear of being banned played like a soundtrack in the back of our minds. And the soundtrack got louder and louder as we got more powerful.

* * * * *

Then it happened.

I had just come home from dessert at my favorite Persian cafe, when I was met with THE MESSAGE. It said my account couldn’t be accessed and that I should contact support@digg.com.

I did, expecting to be admonished, given a slap on my wrist and given another chance - just like Brian Cuban had been given a second chance.

Support replied that my account was banned for violating the terms of service. Digg argued and still argues that scripts place an undue burden on their servers. This is false.

Whether I click twice, or whether I click once and my browser through the use of Javascript scripts clicks once, there is no way to avoid two clicks. The problem is that when my browser clicks instead of me, no one looks at the Digg ads. My Firefox browser certainly has no interest in buying a Snorg tee. It has always been and always will be about money.

The ban was final.

I replied back saying that it was my first transgression. They shot back - it’s final.

I demanded to speak with a supervisor. They asked me what part of “it’s final” I didn’t understand.

* * * * *

For the last week since I’ve been banned, to say that I’ve been depressed is an understatement. I had just gone 300mg Effexor cold turkey, and now this. Like being thrown in the deep end of the pool - with your arms and legs bound.

Before I was banned, I had close to 300 solid friends and close to a thousand fans. I had close to 30,000 diggs and several thousand profile views. Then overnight, poof!

I’ve been smoking this and that to get over it and finally this morning I did.

I had debated about opening a new Digg account, but the thought that I would be banned again deflated me. Like a volleyball, I shuttled back and forth between missing Digg and hating Digg.

Most of my friends were considering leaving Digg for good, but I had mixed feelings.

My feeling is that Digg, is still the most powerful news aggregator bar none. Sure there’s Mixx, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Propeller, Yahoo Buzz, the list goes on, yes I have accounts on all of them, but for me Digg is still where the action is at.

If I did open a new Digg account, I knew that Digg would track my IP address(es), track who I dugg and who dugg me, and sooner or later I would be banned again.

Ennui.

* * * * *

15th shot. no problem.
16th shot. Getting sleepy.
17th shot of cognac, good night.

Like a sweet prince, as I drifted off to sleep something opened up inside of my mind.

Something born of the hatred for what Digg had become - it regularly
censored: political stories which painted John McCain in a bad light, posts which criticized its preferential treatment of Digg top dogs like MrBabyman and MSaleem, and of course the lie about scripts harming servers.

I came to the realization that my ability to digg, to grab the world’s attention, could not be suppressed by something as primitive and inelegant as being banned.

I would open another account. If they banned me, I would open another one. And another one.

===>IMPORTANT

The account itself doesn’t matter. It’s what the account symbolizes.
What matters is the hundreds of friendships I had made. I went underground, asked around, and within hours I had found everyone of my friends from before.

I added them all back on my new digg account. But, more importantly I added all their contact information on my gmail contact list.

* * * * *

There is a reason it’s called social networking. The term suggests that social comes first, not the network infrastructure.

At first I thought it was disaster that I had been banned. Gone were all my friends. Gone was all my work. But no! I got all my friends back within hours. As for duggs, who needs Digg to tell people that I digg a lot. All my power digger friends know my habits. They know I am a 15 out of 15 digger.

So what if I get banned: again and again and again.

This time around if I get banned, I’ll be up and running again within minutes because my friends are in my gmail contact list. Furthermore, instead of shouting to friends on digg, I’ll shout to those same friends on gTalk.

Kevin Rose cannot erase my gmail contact list. And if Google tried, I have paper backup.

This is the next generation of power digging. Offsite digging through gTalk, rss feeds, etc. My identity as a power digger is not confined by my account. It exists in the ethereal world of 1s and 0s and is facilitated by email and instant messaging.

This is to say, that having a Digg account is irrelevant to Digging and that once you don’t care about whether you are banned or not, then you really, really become a Digg power user.

Whether it is the fear of throwing up, the fear being banned, or the fear of Death, freedom comes when we penetrate the illusions: Digg is no longer in the hands of Kevin or Jay or whoever else manages it.
It’s in the hands of all my brothers and sisters who have fallen and those to come: stronger, smarter, and faster.

Yes, as the title of my post said, Digg is the Power.

But as Public Enemy, one of my favorite rap gods of all time, said:

Right on, c’mon
What we got to say
Power to the people no delay
To make everybody see
In order to fight the powers that be
Fight the Power.

In closing, I’d like to offer the following quote. If you don’t know it, don’t bother googling it. You just won’t get it.

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. MY CRIME IS THAT OF OUTSMARTING YOU, something that you will never forgive me for. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.

Dear Michael - you sound like an alright dude.  If you’re ever in the San Diego area and want to get hammered let me know!

Leslie the buzzkill and the little boner that could

Name: Leslie

Age: 23

This took place last summer when My ex-boyfriend and I spent the weekend with some friends at their lake house.  Long story short, we planned on having a fun filled four day weekend doing all sorts of recreational activities, and it was great for the first two nights.

More Buzzkill

Yoda and the butt beads

Name: lord vader
Age: 23

Not too long ago I went to the north part of town with a friend of mine.  The north side of town is well known for it’s night life.  We hopped a bus and a train and after ten minutes reached some streets that were lined with bars and clubs.  This particular area was close to a well known university and so had many of it’s students in attendance.  We saddled up to a nameless bar and began to “pickle” ourselves.

More Yoda (this gets gross, you've been warned)

Fatty Two-Times

Name: Jack
Age: 26

This takes place a few years ago while I was in the Navy, on the way back from the Gulf.   I was 19 at the time.  We had been at sea for 90 days straight and we were all getting restless.   We finally pull into port on the Med around noon.

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My Rendevous with Atlas

Name: Howie galt
Age: 26

I had sex with a statue.  The statue was holding a globe on his shoulders.   It empowered me.  It made me feel like I could take over the world.  The statue, though, didn’t respond. It just stood there.  Expressionless.  Boy, he had a lot of weight on his shoulders.  By fucking him I thought I could relieve some of that pressure. it didn’t work.

More Statue Sex

Cops, Coke, and Hippos

Name: Dan

Age: 26

This is a video submission from Dan, who did some things on New Years Eve that he wishes he hadn’t.

Drinking Story - Regretful Morning - Watch more free videos

Dinero-rhea

Name: puffmatty

Age: 34

Myself, my girlfriend, and her friend went to Cancun for a vacation 4 years ago.  After a few days of sun, beaches and tons of local food and booze, we decide to go club hopping one night.  After a couple dozen drinks a piece we needed to find an ATM for more Pesos.  Her friend did not want to stay alone OR use the bathroom at the nasty nightclub we were at, so she tagged along.

More Dinero-rhea

I didn’t cheat…I think

Name: ThatGuy

Age: 23

While living up north I had numerous friends at UMass Lowell.  I would visit occasionally, but I never partied there.  One day my chance came along. A buddy of mine was turning 21, and I was invited.  I drive down from Maine, and grab a bottle of tequila for myself on the way. We started the afternoon playing Guitar Hero waiting for people.

More Non-cheating guy

Sheila Bangs a Bobble Head

Name: Sheila (Alias)

Age: 24

Cinco de Mayo. (’Nuff said.)  Started drinking at 5pm while my cousins and I got ready to go out to several parties.  Curl hair, shot, mascara, beer chug…

More Bobble Head

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