Happy Valentines Day! Has it really been a year already? How times flies…
And so, it is my great pleasure to announce that LOVETHEDON is now available for iOS, an exciting new app that connects your favorite sex toys to President Trump’s twitter account.
Features:
- View Don’s latest tweets and save off your favorites!
- The phonetics of each tweet drive vibration patterns and intensity!
- Adjust playback speed. Speed things up or take it slow!
- Discover special words or phrases that unlock unique vibration patterns!
- Let Mr. President know that you love him by replying to his tweets from right within the app!
Just look at all those exclamation points! It must be good.
(Right now the app only supports the Lovense Lush and Hush wearable vibrators. I’d love to support more toys in the future if I can find others with friendly APIs.)
Links:
Playing back a tweet
LOVETHEDON is really just a gussied up version of the app I used for The Don and I last year. As the original app’s UI was literally just a text field with @realDonaldTrump’s latest tweet, this new version is a big step forward. I even added ads, figuring that if Twitter and its ilk are profiting off Don’s steamy cybers, I have every right to as well. This is America after all god damn it!
While it didn’t take me a year to develop the app, it did take me a year to decide to publish it. Believe it or not, I actually spent a lot of time reworking the presentation of The Don And I to make sure it reflected what I was trying to say. A surprising amount of nuance can go into hooking up an inflatable rubber vagina to your president’s twitter account. But would this nuance and would my larger message still get through if those same ideas were presented in app form? The loss of context was a risk, but also one of the appeals. And maybe it will work and maybe it won’t. Who knows.
I covered the how and why of The Don and I in some detail last year and so will not repeat myself at length. To review: I believe that, if done correctly, hooking sex toys up to Donald Trump’s twitter account is a valid artistic statement. It speaks to the persona he has cultivated and his need for adoration and attention, as well as his rather pathetic manner of trying to project power (which is often overtly sexual). These are very ugly things when you get down to it, so why not use an ugly idea like this app to show these things as they truly are?
At the same time, trying to counter President Trump using sex toys is absurd. It’s masturbatory activism quite literally, and far too much of the resistance to him falls within that category. In my view, the intentional contradictions of this project emphasize rather than soften its broader anti-authoritarian and anti-tribal message. The original write-up also had stuff about modded reality and Woody Guthrie and so on.
In what can only be described as the most accurate ad placement in history, this ad started showing up during testing.
If nothing else, the app certainly has created its share of memorable moments for me in the past year. I mean, I got to ship a vibrator off to One Infinite Loop in order to verify an app that literally lets Americans get off on their President’s chest thumping! So much winning.
But enough blabber. Don’t listen to me. The app is ready. The world is waiting. Once more, I give you what you want.