Pleasure

There's a fine line between pleasure and pain.

It is a rare pleasure nowadays to gather in company with friends and neighbors and pass an evening without gruesome politics intruding at some point.

the pleasure of good company is priceless.

the pleasures of the flesh, likewise.

the very word sounds like sinking into crushed velvet.

Do you know the 116 paths to pleasure?

^116

The most intriguing use of the word 'pleasure' came from the Duchess of Wellington – who appropriately spoke of her triumphant husband pleasuring her »with his military boots still on« after some continental battle.

It gives me no pleasure to keep receiving these rating points. As fast as I spend them more are offered and I feel obliged to accept. There's no joy in it, simply a compulsion to accept a gift and find something for which to use it. They continue to accumulate and all I can hope is that in 30 days I will be free of them all.

Is reality obsolete? From low-tech function like body piercing and artificially-stocked fishing pools, to the latest in bionics and VR gaming, Iara Lee's cyber-age intellectual survey – call it a *.DOCumentary – downloads a Future Shockful of data and defines the parameters of advanced technologies that delete nature and reprogram mankind. Cryonics defy death; the Internet exists outside time and space; smart drugs and surgery upgrade the mind and body. But are we headed
toward human optimization, or system crash? Timothy Leary, RU Sirius, Lisa Palac, John Barlow and others offer sound bytes against a mesmerizing screen display of cutting edge computer-graphics and archival clips. Exhilarating and disturbing, Synthetic Pleasures raises issues nobody today can afford to abort /retry / ignore.

The greatest pleasures are often the least complex. Unfortunately, with all the societal advances, I feel that we achieve less pleasure than any other era in human history.