My New Work-From-Home Setup, Part 1: Working in Bed

Kate Sloan

Lately I’ve been overhauling my entire work setup at home, and loving it. Seeing as I’m now fully self-employed and perpetually juggling a full docket of blog posts, client work, podcasting, and book-writing, it felt important to make some changes so my setup would be as well-tailored to my needs as possible.

I’m gonna do another blog post soon detailing the changes I made to my main workspace at my desk (I’m just waiting on my new monitor to be delivered!), but today I thought I’d tell you about another “workspace” of mine that I’ve also overhauled recently. Let’s talk about what I use when I’m working from my bed.

See, as a chronically ill person, there’s usually at least 1-2 days per week when I’m too achy, sleepy, and/or gloomy to sit at my desk for long stretches of time. On those days, I tend to curl up under my duvet, surrounded by strategically-placed pillows, for a supine work sesh.

My old bed-work setup consisted solely of my laptop (a MacBook Air) and a lap-desk from IKEA that keeps my computer from overheating on the duvet and also has a compartment where I can store my iPhone upright for easy access. However, my 13” computer is a bit bulky for this purpose, and I wanted a system that was smaller, sleeker, and more portable, especially since (in non-pandemic times) I travel a fair bit and don’t always want to bring my big ol’ lap-desk with me.

The main component of my new bed-work setup is an iPad mini 5. Mine is a 64GB model in space grey which I bought refurbished last year, having noticed that my chronic pain had gotten bad enough to warrant a smaller, lighter device for difficult days. In the months since, I’ve more often used it as a leisure device, for watching Netflix, YouTube, and (yes) porn – but it works quite well for professional tasks as well, because it’s fast, powerful, and versatile, and has a beautifully bright and vivid screen.

When I want to work on my iPad, I hook it up via Bluetooth to my pale pink Logitech K380 keyboard. I picked this keyboard because it’s one of the Wirecutter’s top recommendations, and I absolutely love it. The keys are pleasantly clicky-clacky, which I enjoy in contrast to my laptop’s hyper-quiet keys. I also love that this keyboard can be connected to up to 3 devices at a time, which you can switch between with a press of a button. This means I can use the same keyboard whether I’m typing on my computer, my iPad, or my phone. It’s quite slim and light, so it’ll be easy to throw it into a purse alongside my iPad if I ever want to get some work done at a café or another public place. The one thing this keyboard lacks, that I wish it had, is a slot for propping up my iPad so I don’t have to bring an iPad stand with me. I recently ordered a typewriter-inspired Knewkey mechanical keyboard which will do a better job of this when I need it.

Speaking of iPad stands, I do need one while working in bed, and the one I chose was a recommendation from my tech-nerdy spouse Matt. It’s the Yohann iPad mini stand, a gorgeous piece crafted from walnut. Matt recommended this stand for me largely because it’s designed to work well on soft surfaces, like a bed; its curved design enables it to keep my iPad upright at a workable angle even as I shift around in bed, adjust my pillows, etc. At $129 USD, this was a pretty hefty investment for something that simply holds my iPad up, but it’s 1,000% better than what I was doing before (attempting to prop up my iPad against a stack of pillows or books), so to me it was worth the dough.

The final component of my work-from-bed setup is my Adonit Mark stylus, which I bought because the Wirecutter recommended it and also because it comes in a stunning shade of turquoise. (I love this shade so much that it’s actually the exact color of my duvet cover, which unfortunately means I sometimes misplace the stylus in my bed due to how well it blends in!) At just $20, this was the least expensive part of my bed-work overhaul. A stylus enables me to “click on” things on my iPad’s screen without having to reach too far with my hands, which is suuuper helpful on bad shoulder/neck pain days.

I also have a 6-foot-long charging cable for my iPad, so I can charge it while I’m working no matter where I choose to situate myself in my bed. I am a big fan of extra-long charging cables in general, especially for chronically ill people, because unlike shorter cables, they don’t require you to choose between charging your device and staying in a comfortable position.

Software-wise, on my iPad I usually use Google Chrome for any in-browser writing (such as this blog post), Google Docs for articles and client work, and Scrivener for my books. These all sync across my various devices seamlessly, making it easy to move my entire workflow from my desk to my bed when I need or want to.

This is what’s working for me; I’d love to hear from other writers in the comments about what works for you when you write in bed!

Review: Loveorl 2-in-1 High-Frequency Clitoral Sucking Vibrator

Kate Sloan

 

Loveorl sent me their 2-in-1 High-Frequency Clitoral Sucking Vibrator to review, and I thought, hey! It’s a double-ended toy where I might actually enjoy both ends!

Usually in this type of toy, one of the functions is good, while the other is just so-so – or sometimes they’re both bad. I had higher hopes for this one, because its two ends seem to be modelled after two types of toy I already know I enjoy: a Zumio-esque “high-frequency” hard-plastic vibrator designed for pinpoint clitoral stimulation, and a pressure-wave toy like a Satisfyer or Womanizer, meant to pulse around the clitoris, creating a suction-y sensation and triggering ethereally indirect orgasms. Neat!

This toy is rechargeable, and has a satiny silicone coating on most of its body. This makes it feel surprisingly luxe for its $22 price point. There’s one button for each of the two functions, and you cycle through each function’s various speeds and settings using its respective button. You can enable both functions at once, but I’m not sure why you would; this toy isn’t shaped well to allow for two clit-possessing people to use it simultaneously.

The Zumio-ish vibration portion disappointed me, for the most part. It claims to use the same “spiral oscillating waves” that you’d find in the Zumio (of which it is an obvious copycat, which, as you may know, I’m not a fan of on principle), but to me it just feels like too-buzzy, too-strong vibration. It overloads and desensitizes my clit in short order the way an overly buzzy vibe does, which the Zumio doesn’t do, at least not as quickly. It’s also very loud, and the entire toy vibrates when this setting is enabled, making my hand feel numb and itchy within seconds of turning the vibrations on.

 

The toy comes with two little silicone attachments for the vibrating end, which is cool. One of them is spherical and one looks like flower petals that can flap and flutter against your clit and labia. Interestingly, the toy is much quieter when there’s an attachment on it. I liked it best with the flower petal attachment because I could hold it on the top of my clit, with my clitoral shaft placed between the two petals, allowing for much more spread-out and indirect stimulation than the vibrator allows for sans attachment. I probably could get off using the toy this way, but eking out an orgasm with super buzzy, surface-level vibrations is not my favorite thing, and tends to take me forever.

The suction side of the toy is better. It, too, feels “buzzier” than many of its competitors in the pressure-wave space, like the thrillingly thrummy Lelo Sila. But design-wise, this is in the top half of pressure-wave toys I’ve tried: its silicone “mouth” is comfortably shaped and wide enough for me to fit more than just the hypersensitive tip of my clit into it, so I can get some of the clitoral shaft/clitoral hood stimulation I tend to crave when using this kind of toy. There are only three steady speeds and I found myself wishing, in the moments before orgasm, for just one more setting at the top end, probably because of the aforementioned buzziness having lessened my sensitivity a bit. But I can achieve orgasm readily with this thing, and it feels just as involuntary, spasmodic, and surprising as it does with other pressure-wave toys.

I have to say, for its price tag, I think the Loveorl 2-in-1 High-Frequency Clitoral Sucking Vibrator is a great value. If you only have $22 to spend on a clitoral toy and you want to try a broad range of sensations, this toy’s dual functions and two included attachments will give you a lot of bang for your buck. I wish it was quieter and rumblier, but frankly it’s pretty astonishing that Loveorl managed to make a rechargeable, body-safe, two-function sex toy for under $25, so maybe I’m asking for too much.

Get this toy if you want to experiment with pinpoint vibrations and/or pressure-wave stimulation without breaking the bank, and you don’t mind a moderate-to-loud noise level. You can always upgrade to higher-quality options later, but for an entry-level clit stim toy, you could do a lot worse than this petite pink creation.

 

This post was sponsored, which means I was paid to write a fair and honest review of this product. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Guest Reviews: Anal Toys for Discerning Assholes

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Editor’s note: I asked my spouse Matt to review some of their favorite anal toys. Enjoy!

I’m much more deeply into anal penetration than Kate is. Some of that difference probably has to do with our anatomy – I have a prostate with lots of nerve endings there, where she does not. Plus, she has a vagina as another option for penetration, and I don’t. But I think another part of it has to do with our personal histories. I’ve been incorporating anal penetration very regularly into my masturbation and partnered sex for 10 years now, and I’ve grown to love it more with each session whereas she’s had relatively few experiences with it and only enjoyed those moderately.

At first, putting something in your butt might seem like it would be scary, painful, or just weird, but after a while many people can adjust or attune themselves to the sensations and find great pleasure in it. And I’m certainly one of those people. Today, I want to discuss three anal sex toys that should be on your radar and perhaps in your holes, and how they each fit into my sexual repertoire.

 

Aneros Helix Trident

One of the first things I ever put in my ass (after fingers) was an Aneros toy. After hearing glowing reviews of them on the now-defunct Sex is Fun podcast in the early 2000s, I knew I needed one. Aneros is a prostate pleasure-focused brand that makes interestingly shaped prostate massagers designed to stimulate your P-spot without any thrusting, instead relying on just the contractions of the anal sphincters and PC muscles. Devotees of the brand wax lyrical about the so-called “Super O” (a prostate-only, ejaculation-free orgasm) these toys can generate, and develop elaborate routines for achieving it on the company’s forums and associated subreddit.

I was happy with my original Aneros MGX Trident for years and used it frequently whenever I had an evening entirely to myself because it could make me come harder than any other toy I owned, if I was willing to put in the time – usually 45-60 minutes of focused tensing and relaxing my muscles while on my side or back. But when Aneros reached out to Kate in 2018 to see if we’d be interested in trying another one of their massagers, I jumped at the chance to see what had changed in 6 years.

Aneros sent me the Helix Trident ($55), one of their “beginner” models, which has 4” of insertable length and a tip-width of 1.06”. The toy improves on the shape, tab position, and cleanability of the MGX, and it comes in both medical-grade white plastic or black silicone as part of their Syn line ($69.95). I tested the plastic model, and like the MGX before it, it blew me away. The toy looks less like Poseidon’s trident 🔱  and more like an alien probe or some kind of unidentified intelligent lifeform. Its curves and bulbs are designed to mirror the internal anatomy of folks with prostate glands and its small tabs at the end of two curved arms both stimulate the perineum and act as a fulcrum by which the toy moves when you perform kegels.

Inserting the lubricated Trident for the first time is super easy and almost feels like there’s nothing there because it’s so light. The toy doesn’t vibrate and you’re not supposed to move it at all, so what happens once it’s in? I usually start watching or listening to porn, reading erotica, or having phone sex with a partner, and everything changes. Because the toy is so light, as my ass starts to squeeze around the toy, it begins to rub back and forth and “awaken the prostate.” After a while, without ever touching my dick or the toy with my hands, I notice intense tingling in my ass and cock, and if I ride those waves of pleasure I can usually come hands free (sometimes with ejaculation and sometimes not). I am always left feeling completely blissed out. A few times, I’ve pushed through and done this multiple times in a row before removing the toy and passing out from how good it is.

As far as downsides, the toy feels a bit cheap because of the material, and it can discolor slightly over time even when properly cleaned, and can occasionally need manual realignment during use, but those are minor nitpicks. I’d recommend an Aneros toy to anyone with a P-spot who wants to experience entirely new kinds of pleasure and stimulation, and all my friends who I’ve told to get them over the years have thanked me profusely after using them. Aneros toys are as great as they’ve ever been, and now I’m eyeing an even bigger one…

Njoy Pfun

It’s no secret that Kate and I are both huge fans of the Njoy product line. Their toys are premium stainless steel objects, and their designs feel at once inevitable, beautiful, and ingenious. The Njoy Pfun ($89.99) is no exception. It’s a lot more than “pretty fun;” it’s extremely fun to use. Kate recommend me this toy years ago as part of one of our D/s protocols, and it’s hands-down one of the best sex toy purchases I’ve ever made.

The Pfun is a solid medical-grade stainless steel prostate massager with a polished mirror finish. It’s a very manageable 4.75” long (3.5” insertable) and its sculpted head measures 1.25” wide. It’s silky smooth once lubricated with whatever lube you like, and slides in easily with a handy looped base that can be used for thrusting or easy removal.

Unlike an Aneros, the Pfun is very heavy and holds your body heat (or the chill of an ice bath if you’re into temperature play) so the stimulation comes less from automatic movement and more from the pressure of unyielding steel. Squeezing on the Pfun feels eyes-rolling-back-in -my-head incredible. The density and solidity of the steel even makes it seem like it’s growing, inflating, or pushing back on me as I tighten around it and allow the toy to subtly stroke my prostate like some kind of skilled robot lover that’s amazing with its chrome hands.

There are so many ways to play with this toy and it excels at all of them that I’ve tried: alone with or without dick stimulation, or partnered during intercourse, oral sex, double penetration, or a kink scene. In each case, the Pfun makes everything else feel much more intense and makes my orgasm noticeably harder, longer, and stronger, leaving me panting in a puddle of cum. When I think back on the best blowjobs I’ve ever received in my life, they were all accompanied by this exact object in my ass.

The only thing this toy isn’t great for is long-term wear. Because of its shape, it’ll more easily get squeezed out as you go about your day than, say, an Njoy Pure Plug, which excels in that context. I’m fortunate to have both, and I use them each for what they’re best at.

If you’ve tried prostate stimulation, and you’re ready and able to upgrade to the best of the best, get a Pfun. You won’t regret it.

B-Vibe Rimming Plug 2

While it may not be completely original, the B-Vibe Rimming Plug 2 is my go-to vibrating butt plug. Also suggested by Kate, I’ve used this toy enough times since I got it a few years ago that I’ve had to replace the remote battery. The Rimming Plug is marketed as mimicking the sensations of analingus, and while it doesn’t exactly hit that mark for me because nothing quite feels like a wet tongue, it does feel amazing in a slightly different way.

The waterproof, magnetically-charging plug, which comes in a few different sizes and colors, has two rumbly motors – one inside the bulb that vibrates, and one inside the neck that rotates internal beads underneath the toy’s satin-textured silicone exterior. This allows the toy to stimulate both the inside of your hole and the sensitive opening at the same time! Or you can start with just one and ramp up to both, if you prefer. The sensation of the rotating beads feels like someone fingering or fucking my ass, and if I get the patterns just right, I can come from just this toy alone. While the shape doesn’t directly target the prostate, it’s more than powerful and large enough to hit the spot consistently.

The toy has a bunch of really nice touches: a well-designed and discreet travel case, an included wireless remote for partner play or to avoid reaching between your ass cheeks to adjust it, 7 really great rotation patterns and intensities, and 6 of the same for the internal vibrator.

My only gripe with this toy is that the tip shape is not tapered enough for me, which makes insertion a little uncomfortable no matter how warmed up I am and how much lube I use. But once I get past that, this toy wins me right back with how good it makes me feel. Get it for yourself or the rimming fan in your life and you won’t be disappointed. Promise I’m not just giving you lip service. 😜

Cybersex in Roleplaying Games Made Me Who I Am

Kate Sloan

Content notes: This essay discusses some of my early experiences with cybersex. I was underage at the time (probably 12-14 in most cases). All of this was consensual on my part (personally, if not legally), but if underage sexuality squicks you out, that’s understandable and please feel free to skip this one! There are also mentions of master/slave language.

 

Cybersex in online roleplaying games made me feel like an adult for one of the first times in my life. In some ways, no other online sexual experiences I’ve had since then have quite scratched the same itch.

I was always a sexually precocious kid, scribbling anatomically uninformed erotica in my journals and googling for lists of masturbation techniques to marvel over. Porn didn’t particularly interest me – there were few safe porn sites at the time that would neither load a virus onto our shared family computer nor crash it with pop-up ads blaring autoplay moans – but I loved to read about sex. That’s still largely how my sexuality works to this day: although I’ve gained an appreciation for some types of porn, in many cases I’d rather read someone’s detailed cunnilingus guide or a well-crafted erotic fanfiction story than ogle cumshots and gangbangs.

Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) were some of my first online social spaces, after early forays into ICQ chatrooms and TeenOpenDiary blogging. My two favorite games in this genre were Furcadia, a highly user-customizable world where everyone was an anthropomorphized animal and you had to learn a basic coding language to craft your own private rooms, and Runescape, a vast medieval fantasy world involving quests, guilds, mining, and magic. It was in these two strange universes that I began to understand the massive implications the internet had for people like me, people who were shy and reserved in the “real world” but came alive online, making friends and having adventures.

I was surely too young to be having cybersex, legally speaking. That’s the detail of this story that makes me cringe to type out. Sometimes I told other users my real age – and many of them were, or at least were pretending to be, teens as well – but sometimes I didn’t. Young people’s burgeoning sexuality is a highly controversial and fraught topic I’m probably not qualified to make any definitive statements about. But I can tell you that in my case, everything I pursued in these mediums was something I had consented to and was not traumatized by, and any time anyone made me feel at all uncomfortable, I had no qualms about closing the window or teleporting to a different corner of the virtual world I was navigating.

In Furcadia, as I mentioned, you could create your own areas – called “dreams” – by coding them yourself and then uploading them to a communal space, where others could visit them if they so chose. I have always been profoundly nerdy and was immediately interested in this aspect of the game, for the huge amount of freedom it provided. It wasn’t long before I started building myself elaborate mansions with big, ornate bedrooms, complete with doors that locked at the flip of a lever due to my careful coding. It delighted me to build secret entrances, hidden teleportation pads, dim dank dungeons no one would know about unless I showed them.

There was an 18+ area in Furcadia, where, of course, I spent a good deal of time long before turning 18. Within that area was a place called The Slave Auction. (I must note here that the language of slavery is no longer something I’m comfy playing with, in kink or otherwise, due to, y’know, centuries of systemic white supremacy and horrific violence against enslaved Black people. I’m white so that language isn’t mine to reclaim or subvert.) In that area, you could line up to be “auctioned off” to a buyer in the crowd. No money was exchanged, actual or virtual; this was all fantasy. I find it telling that this was probably the communal space where I spent the most time in my years as a Furcadia user, despite believing until about a decade later that I was vanilla and had no kinks. (Oh, precious baby Kate, there is so much you didn’t know.)

When someone “bought” me, typically I would take them back to my “dream,” lead them to the ostentatious bedroom I’d hand-coded for the occasion, and commence having cybersex.

Much like sexting today, different people had different ways of approaching cybersex. I would always click on potential partners to see the bio they’d written for themselves, and if it was a long paragraph full of big words and impeccably-employed punctuation, I knew I’d get the type of cyber-fuck I liked best: articulate, loquacious, and seductive. When I had them in my virtual bed, we’d start describing – in walls of text that took so long to type, you could be waiting 3-5 minutes between missives – removing each other’s clothes, kissing, touching, and whatever came next. My replies were probably fairly generic and naïve. I was much more interested in what the other person typed.

It’s telling, too, that I tended to guide the conversation toward cunnilingus. Being a person who’d learned to masturbate via only clitoral stimulation, and had rarely – if ever – done anything else, I found descriptions of penetrative sex boring and hard to relate to. Instead I would prompt my pixelated paramour to craft strings of sentences about going down on me, and would reply with paragraph-length descriptions of my own moaning and writhing. A pillow princess in the extreme.

There were people who, upon noticing these limitations of my lust, would vanish to another realm, leaving me alone in my abandoned dream. That is fair enough. But there were also people who would stick around the whole time, giving me what I obviously wanted, and those people shaped my sexuality in ways they’ll never know. These were some of the first instances of me ever formulating a clear sexual desire and asking someone else (albeit indirectly) to fulfill it. The skills I took away from these interactions (including typing fast one-handed) would serve me for many years to come.

While some therapists and friends of mine, in the years since, have sometimes (very reasonably) expressed concern upon hearing about these youthful dalliances, for me, cybersex was never a site of victimization or violation. I know many people have had a different experience. I’m lucky enough to be able to credit those late nights of furtive typing with making me into the sexually fulfilled, adventurous, and communicative person I am today.

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Rest is Crucial, Sacred, & Sexy

Kate Sloan

I recently quit my part-time social media job after 4 years of working there. I’ve long called this gig my “dayjob” because it did the thing for me that dayjobs do for creative types: it gave me a steady, reliable income that tethered me to the working world and afforded me the time, money, and brainspace to do my passion projects on the side. But in recent months, my “dayjob” had begun to bring in only about 7% of my total income, while taking up about a quarter of my working hours – and with book deadlines and health issues weighing heavily on me, I decided it was time to move on.

This was a challenging decision for me, in no small part because I have loved working at that company and with the people there, albeit remotely, these past 4 years. I had other resistances to leaving, though, and spent a whole hour discussing them with my therapist recently. I worried that my other projects would dry up, leaving me regretful to have quit – although there’s no evidence that will happen. I worried that without time-sensitive morning tasks to complete each weekday, I’d let my depression get the better of me, lazing about in bed into the afternoon. I worried that firm daily deadlines were the glue holding my life together, and that without them, I’d lack the conviction and self-direction to manage my time effectively.

But as my therapist reminded me, this is internalized ableism, internalized capitalism. The discourse around “laziness” is too often aimed at people whose systemic struggles and marginalizations are framed as personal failures. The freelancer community’s obsession with “hustling” is borne of capitalistic imperatives. A person’s “hustle,” or lack thereof, says nothing about their inherent value as a human being. Not all people have the same abilities; we can’t all hustle as hard as we think we “should.”

It feels shameful to admit that one of the reasons I quit my job was so I could rest more. I feel like I already rest a great deal, certainly more than my friends who work long hours at cafés or retail stores. But this mindset comes from holding myself to able-bodied standards despite being increasingly, invisibly disabled. My chronic pain and chronic fatigue are worse and more frequent than they’ve ever been. I often need a 3-hour nap just to get through the day, or to “catch up on sleep” into the luxuriant afternoon hours on weekends. The simple fact of living in a pain-wracked body is uniquely exhausting. I can’t pretend that away.

I have to banish culture-borne ideas of “laziness” in order to plan a schedule that actually works for my body and my brain. Now that I’ll soon be fully self-employed, with most of my deadlines being self-imposed or flexible, I can rearrange my schedule as needed to fit with my lifestyle and desires – something I’ve longed for my entire adult life. I’ve been fantasizing about “Weekend Wednesdays” and impromptu staycations and “the 4-hour work week.” It feels blissful, in the truest possible sense of that word, to envision the freedom my self-employment will now afford. And I know it is an enormous privilege, one that comes from my position in society as an educated white person as well as my many years of hard work to establish this lifestyle for myself. But I can’t shake the feeling that it’s wrong somehow to rest as much as I do, or as much as I want to. That I “should” work more, to “earn” the happiness I get from having a career that genuinely delights me.

My therapist told me, “You’re working as much as you comfortably can, and you’re earning enough money to live on. That’s all that matters here.” I felt my body relax when she said this. It’s so wild that capitalism instills in us, from birth, the belief that our work, our productivity, and our output are what define our value as human beings. Even sworn anti-capitalists sometimes still struggle to unlearn this. It’s as if we’ve forgotten that “jobs” and “careers,” as they are defined in modern times, did not always exist and do not need to exist. If human didn’t need to work in order to survive, what would we do instead? Would we make art, socialize, have sex, eat, drink, sleep, think? Would we feel fulfilled then? Would we feel we had done “enough” at the end of each day?

It’s impossible to say. But I’m working on accepting that my rest time is every bit as valid and important as my work time. When my achy, sleepy body demands a 1 p.m. nap, I need not admonish it or deny it. When my inner child pipes up to say that Wednesdays should be days off for playing in the sunshine, I can and should listen. When all I want, at a bone-deep level, is to stay in bed all day playing Pokémon games and listening to comedy podcasts, that’s likely a signal I should heed. This feels sinful and embarrassing to even type out. But that’s because it’s a new belief system for me, one that butts up against bullshit I’ve been inundated with my whole life.

We need rest to survive. That’s especially true for disabled folks. I feel no sensuality and sexiness in my body when my nose is constantly pressed to the grindstone. I get precious little joy from life when my every waking minute is mired in work and worry. I have no time or energy left over for the fun things, or even the necessary things, when work swallows me whole.

Rest is crucial. Not all of us have the ability, or the privilege, to honor that fact and live it out fully. But don’t let anyone tell you it’s not. You deserve the rest you need – and the rest you want.