Pictures to make your mind wander

In between bouts of writing, I've been binging on Cthulhu mythos stories - which in turn, got me rummaging around Deviant Art in search of Old Ones pictures and and whatever else happened to grab my attention. Here's a fraction of the result.

Some of the pictures below became part of the Call of Cthulhu game, and some just stuck in my head because they're hot. But I'm going to refrain, very intentionally, from giving you any context in this blog post. You can imagine whatever scenario fits your fetish; and if you want to know what the artist really intended, you can click the author links at the bottom of this post. The author above left is Dave Palumbo. In the middle, left-to-right, the artists are Jowie Lim, Felicia Cano, and Thaldir.

 I need to say a bit more about the painting at right, by Donato Giancola. He's not a fetishist (although he does like robots and all the other SF/F tropes most of us enjoy); he's just an excellent artist whom I follow because I love his work. I'm including this picture because it perfectly feeds my fetish without even trying. But in fact, Giancola says in his description of the piece that it was inspired by a George R. R. Martin short story called "The Glass Flower." That intrigued me enough to make me buy the e-book (It's just $1.99); and I'm happy report that the story is excellent, it involves possession (I know some of you are into that), and Giancola's picture really is just "inspired by" the story. It doesn't spoil the plot at all. But ohh, does it makes me think of other ways the story could have gone!

Follow these links to find the pictures on Deviant Art:
Dave Palumbo (picture at the top of this post)
Jowie Lim (first of the three pictures in a row)
Felicia Cano (second of the three pictures in a row)
Thaldir (third of the three pictures in a row)
Donato Giancola (final picture)

The fantasies could just spiral on forever

First, thanks to K for pointing me toward the video below, which shows real-life models who don't just act like unmoving mannequins, but are hypnotically programmed to remain motionless until they're "unlocked." Especially notice the descriptive text. These models are trained with three hours of hypnosis every day for three months, and then they receive two hours of reinforcement every week thereafter. Three hours of hypnosis every day for three months! Then weekly reinforcement! Can you imagine how suggestible you'd be after that much time in trance? I'd give anything to have this job.



Okay, now that you've watched the video, let's free associate about it.

First, I love the scene beginning at 1:46 where the model is just sitting there, frozen, while other people are talking about her. She seems totally unaware of them, but the hypnotist says she can see and hear. That's a shame, don't you think? It would be hotter if her mind was as blank as her face.

But the fact that she can hear makes me wonder what goes through these models' heads when they're frozen. The "instruction sheet" shown at 2:16 says the models can pose for up to 30 minutes at a time.What do they think about while they're frozen? I'd want to be programmed to be in a state of bliss every time I was frozen, loving my obedience and helplessness, and loving the amazed stares of everyone who saw me.

The guy at 3:41 has a smooth, shiny face and hair that reminds me of Gigolo Joe from the movie A.I. Thinking that takes me off on a new round of fantasies about how hypnotized models could be made up to look more like mannequins than people...and then how they could be programmed to think they were mannequins. Three hours of hypnosis a day for three months could have all kinds of interesting effects.

Now let's take it a step further. Remember fashion Thierry Mugler's famous "robot suit" from the 90's? Here, let me remind you...and let me also add a quick aside to say I like the third picture best  because the woman seems to have been forcibly robotized and now she's about to do the same to the other woman.

Now imagine that the women modeling these robot suits were hypnotized to believe they were robots: to hold poses for 30 minutes at a time, and to move and speak like robots when they did move and speak. The designer might even hide tiny ear buds under the women's headgear that would play a loop of hypnotic mantras. Maybe a recording to be beamed into their earbuds so that they all heard the same commands at the same moment and moved in perfect synch. They might even be able to blink in synch, although you know me: I wish they could wear silver contact lenses and not blink at all. But blinking once every 30 seconds, in synch, would still be pretty hot.

Now, again, let's go further. Imagine hypnotized sex workers who could be programmed as robots, like the models above, or made into anything else a client could imagine. A vampire fetishist could have a hypnotized sex worker who believed the fetishist really was a vampire, and act accordingly. Or - and IMO, this would be one thousand times hotter - the sex worker could be hypnotized, but also a hypnotist herself. Then she could be programmed to believe she was a vampire; and she'd hypnotize her client during their role play until the client really believed s/he was being mind controlled, seduced, bitten, and finally either turned or made into the vampire's "permanent" slave.

So far I've been trying to stick to real-life fantasies, things you could actually pull off if you had the time and the money and a suggestible subject. But just think of how much further we could go if we leave the world of the real. Our hypnotic subjects could be shaved, get full-body silvery tattoos, get corneal tattoos or implants (Those are actually real, and they're creepy as fuck), get other body implants, wear earbuds that chanted mantras and commands 24 hours a day so that they never left trance, be programmed to sleep in glass cases and/or display foam....

I could go on like this for days, I think, but there's at least one idea that I want to save for a future post or maybe even a story. Stay tuned for that one.

If you're into living statues...

I have an embarrassing confession to make, but I know you'll be accepting. After all, you're the kind of person who reads this kind of blog.

You know those "living statues" you see in big city squares? I'm talking about the people who paint themselves in silver or gold and either dress in elaborate costumes or simple bodysuits. They pose stock still until you toss them some money, and then they do some little routine and return to stillness. Like clockwork. Like robots.

Seeing those performers always make me squirm inside because what they do in public skates so close to my private fetish. They're pretending to be dolls or robots, and in my mind, I'm imagining that they're people who've been turned into dolls or robots. When they stand still with their eyes either closed or unblinking, it's so easy to imagine they're in trance. Someone has hypnotized them into motionless mindlessness, and although money can break the spell for a little while, they always return to the truth: they're thralls.

I get these thoughts even when I see bad living statues: ordinary faces and out-of-shape bodies stuffed into cheap unitards, wannabe robots who don't look any sleeker than me - and believe me, I am not sleek. But experiencing these fantasies while in public, with even the living statues themselves probably watching me even though they pretend they're not, I feel simultaneously horny and embarrassed. It's like having that dream where I find myself naked in public.

Well, just a little ago, I stumbled across an article written by a guy who performed as a living statue. He writes about his experiences as a Times Square regular and as hired entertainment at an increasingly bizarre party. It's a wonderful read. I'd love it even if I didn't have this crazy fetish, but having it makes the article that much better. It's so easy to imagine myself in his place...only without the dirty old man. So if you're into living statues, follow this link and enjoy the Lurid Confessions of a Times Square Silver Man.

And while we're on the subject, I also highly recommend "Feminine Endings," a short story in Neil Gaiman's latest anthology, Trigger Warning. I don't dare say too much about this one except that it's another first-person narrative by a living statue, and it will leave you feeling like you've taken an ice pick to the brain.

Use your imagination - or better yet, use mine

It all started with a YouTube search. I'd seen a ton of makeup tutorials by people who can turn themselves into anything from monsters to aliens to fairies to anything else you can imagine; and some of their ideas almost, but not quite, met my fetish to a tee. Almost, but not quite. So one day not long ago, I set out to find a makeup tutorial that did fit my fetish. By then I knew makeup artists could create mouthless and eyeless effects, and I'd seen other artists warp their heads and faces into all kinds of interesting shapes. Based on those videos, I figured a really good makeup artist could use these techniques to erase their face completely, becoming just the kind of mannequin you see above. (Incidentally, that's the look that inspired the Peacekeeper hoods in Sleepwalkers; and I'll use it again in the sequel to A Tenpack of Trixies, if I ever get around to writing that).

I've always been obsessed by the loss of identity, and being turned into a mass-produced, featureless doll is about as identity-free as you can get. So take a moment now to savor this idea with me. Look at the pictures above and imagine there are real human beings beneath those shiny surfaces, but they're so deeply controlled that they don't even know they're human anymore. They really have become mannequins, and they can neither see nor speak nor hear, nor even think. All they know is obedience. Their Mistress controls them through a brain implant and a remote control device, so that they receive no input but hers. And of course it goes without saying that most of her input involves commands about posing. She's turned these people into living statues, decorations at an exclusive ball or a private event for the best mind controllers on the planet, and she is the guest of honor.

But now let's back up (Don't worry; when we go forward again, we're going all the way). The reason I was searching YouTube is that I fantasize about playing out this scenario in real life. All I'd need is an artistic hypno-domme, a hell of a lot of conditioning, and the right supplies. Unfortunately, I don't have any of those things; but maybe someone out there does. I like to imagine someone does, anyway, and that they'll take these suggestions and (if they're enough of an exhibitionist) send me the pictures. I promise to post them here!

Well, the YouTube search didn't entirely work out, but I found something close enough to let me imagine the rest. There's a really excellent Slenderman makeup tutorial out there which isn't embeddable, but I recommend you watch it to help you picture the ideas I'm about to share.

Let's start with what this guy really did. He covered the top of his head and his mouth just perfectly; and he covered his eyes with muslin so that he looks like he doesn't t have eyes at all - but he can still see through the thin fabric. Now, this is where the problems begin for me. We can see the shadows of his eyes because he wanted it that way and used black makeup beneath the muslin. It also bothers me that he built up his features instead of smoothing them out, and he added shadows where I'd have flattened everything.

But with a bit of imagination, we can change that. Suppose Mistress starts out the way this guy did, but then she goes in a different direction. She puts white circles around your eyes instead of black ones, and if that isn't enough to produce the eyeless effect She wants, She gives you white contact lenses. Now imagine that instead of creating eyebrow ridges and painting your face in shadows, She instead fills out your features until your face is a smooth, inhuman arc. She'll probably have to leave your nostrils uncovered, but maybe muslin will work there too. How hot would it be if even your nose was missing?

But we're just getting started. Next, Mistress fits your ears with earwigs that pump out a steady mix of hypnotic suggestions, mantras, and binaural beats to keep you deeply in trance for hours. She then covers your ears with muslin and latex paint until the sides of your head are as mannequin-smooth as your face. From an auditory standpoint, you really can't receive any input except hers. Then She covers your whole head with clear liquid latex, making you mannequin-smooth and inhuman. Your makeup is already white, so the clear coating over the muslin won't impede your vision much. You'll be able to trail in Her wake without stumbling, and that's another testament to Her control. Now, do you prefer robotic movements or eerily smooth movements? Whatever you want, She'll program you for it. You'll be perfect.

Next comes the smoothest, slickest bodysuit money can buy - something like the ones in these images, only they'll be white to match your head. And since we can imagine anything we like, let's go with a bodysuit that's been individually tailored to your every curve. There's not a wrinkle to be seen from the top of your head to the bottoms of your feet. Of course, your feet will be covered. You'll have both footwear and gloves so there's not a scrap of flesh visible anywhere on your body. And if you like, you can imagine that those gloves and footwear are fashioned so that each hand and foot is a single piece that just hints at the digits inside. After all, you are a featureless mannequin. Featureless mannequins don't have fingers or toes. Being fingerless also puts you more at the mercy of your domme, and that's exactly what you want. It's what She's made you want.

Now maybe, if you like, you can imagine Mistress attaching a futuristic radio receiver (perhaps with LED lights) to your head. Do you want it on your forehead, the top of your head, or the nape of your neck? Whatever you want, it's yours - or more properly, Hers. The receiver has wires trailing from it: some seeming to plug into your temples and other sensitive spots on your head, some twisting down your spine like a tree trunk and stretching out branches to tweak your erogenous zones. Maybe those branches pulse.

And now for the finishing touch: a collar around your neck to hide the seal between your mask and your bodysuit, and a chain for Mistress to lead you around like the pet you are. The ceaseless hypnotic commands keep you totally enthralled, and She can use Her remote control to interrupt them any time she likes, giving you new orders. She might command you to kneel at her feet, or to adopt a certain pose; and you're so deeply controlled that you can maintain that pose for hours. You can become perfectly rigid, perfectly still, and almost perfectly mindless.

Well, you can become perfectly mindless if you like, but then what will you have to enjoy or remember later? I want to see the stares of my Mistress' peers even as they think I see nothing at all. I want to to watch their lips move as they express admiration and jealousy, and to know that whatever they're saying isn't nearly as important as the mantras in my head. I want them to caress my arms and legs and marvel at their slick rigidity. I might even want them to kiss my absent mouth, but they can't touch my breasts or pussy. Those belong only to Mistress.

And so I stand there, rigid but reveling, because I know that everyone who sees me realizes my Mistress must be the most powerful domme on the planet. I am a living testament to Her power, and I am nothing else at all.

Lovely lady robot

Last week, in the midst of obsessively gobbling down every bit of data even tangentially related to The Force Awakens (Don't worry; I won't blather about here - but feel free to get me going in the comments section), I decided to rent Ex Machina. It's a movie I'd been wanting to see for several months, but the impetus for renting it now was that two of its stars, Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson, have large roles in The Force Awakens. Both are playing characters here that are polar opposites of the ones they played in TFA, and I wanted to see if they could pull off the switch. They absolutely did; and Alicia Vikander, whom I'd never seen before, was every bit as good in her role.

Now, let me say right up front that this is a five-star movie. I'd recommend it to anyone, regardless of whether they like gynoids or not. But the fact that the gynoid is arguably the lead character in the movie makes it even more tempting for robot fetishists.

Vikander plays Ava as being very obviously a robot, but she's not the jerky, stilted-voice kind we're all familiar with. Her movements are graceful if not entirely human, and her face is lovely and expressive. But there's all that mesh in her torso and limbs, showing suggestive tubes and LED's that make up her internal "organs." Depending on how the light hits her, the mesh can disappear so that you see her robot sections displayed in full; or a ghostly female outline can half-hide her robot parts so that you almost believe she's a real woman. It's a fascinating effect.

This trailer gives you a good synopsis, and below it I'll give you a few more tasty pictures to appreciate. As you can see, this film features another robot trope so many of us enjoy: that of a seeming human who peels back part of their skin (preferably on their face) to reveal their true nature. It's a bit of a spoiler in Kyoko's case, but the trailer spoils it too and you wouldn't have much doubt about her anyway.

Now, I'm not sure whether you want my detailed review of the movie or whether you're just here for the gynoid pictures, but I'll make it easy on everyone by pasting in a review I already wrote. This was for a different audience, so it's a little more "professional" that the above. You can read it or not as you please. There aren't any spoilers.

Ex Machina is a low-budget indie movie with one remarkable visual effect: turning Alicia Vikander into a robot who looks utterly convincing (She acts utterly convincing as a robot, too - a heartbreakingly human one named Ava.).

The rest of the movie looks incredible too, thanks to the cinematography and set design, but that's all secondary to the story. It's too high-concept to summarize quickly, but I'll try: A nice young programmer named Caleb (played by Domhnall Gleeson) gets the chance to spend a week at his CEO's secret hideaway. That CEO, Nathan (played by Oscar Isaac) is a staggeringly rich asshole who runs the world's biggest search engine, and he's brought Caleb in to be "the human component in a Turing test." In other words, Caleb is supposed to decide whether the robot Nathan has built possesses true artificial intelligence or only mimics it. Things get more complicated, though, when Ava warns Caleb that Nathan can't be trusted and asks him to help her escape. Nathan really doesn't seem trustworthy, but can we trust Ava? Should Caleb help her, or is she just a machine after all? Maybe Nathan programmed her to be paranoid, either to mess with Caleb's head or for some other inscrutable reason. He's such a sociopathic weirdo that there's no telling what he's really up to. This is one of those stories where you don't know whom to trust or who's capable/incapable of what until the end. Because the three leads are all so wonderful, you're willing to believe each of them at various points, or at least believe that they believe what they're saying.

Ex Machina asks a lot of deep questions about the nature of consciousness, gender, creativity and responsibility. Writer/director Alex Garland attempts to answer all those questions, but that doesn't mean you'll agree with his answers. I didn't. In the DVD extras he explains which character he was rooting for as he wrote the script, but it's not the same character I chose at the the end; and you might not choose that character either. But that's just the kind of provocative movie this is. It'll leave you with your brain buzzing.

We can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way

copyright Melinda Gebbie

I'm not always sure which posts - or parts of posts - will be most interesting to my readers, but I suspect the image I'm starting with here will grab everyone's attention. It's not the most blissful scene in the book I'm about to discuss, but it will appeal to the robot and BDSM fetishists.

So anyway, the book in question is actually a graphic novel: Lost Girls, by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie. It's been out since 2006 and has gained huge (and totally justified) notoriety in that time, but I've only just now gotten around to reading it. I'll try to discuss it on the most superficial, porn-y-est levels first and then dig into the darker stuff. That way, you can bail out any time you decide I'm getting too deep...but I hope you'll hang on until the end.

copyright Melinda Gebbie

Lost Girls tells the story of Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan, and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz as if they're real, grown women meeting up at a hotel in Austria and discussing their sexual awakenings...while simultaneously becoming more sexually inventive with each other and with the rest of the hotel staff. Alan Moore has described this book as pornography, and you really can't argue with him. There are X-rated acts in every chapter and X-rated images on almost every page. These include thing that seem intentionally designed to shock those (like me, I must confess) who bought the book with the idea that it was just particularly edgy erotica. Nope. Parts of it are erotica - and beautifully written erotica at that. I'll give you an example in just a moment. But before I go on, I need to warn you that the book also contains some truly horrible sex acts which Moore and Gebbie do not intend for you to enjoy. I'm not a serious student of Moore's work, so I could be wrong about this, but I think part of his intent in writing this story is to slap you across the face and shout, "Do you really get off on this, you sick motherfucker?" That's pretty much what he implied in an interview I read about Lost Girls. He's trying to say a lot of different things about sex and pornography here, and sometimes the messages contradict each other.

copyright Melinda Gebbie

But let's keep things light for a little while longer. For me, one of the most erotic passages in Lost Girls is Alice's journal entry about her trip to the ballet with Dorothy (Miss Gale) and Wendy (Mrs. Potter). They're watching the debut of The Rite of Spring, which was so shocking for its time that it caused a riot among the audience. But our heroines are too caught up in each other to notice much about their surroundings:

Between my pearl incisors, Miss Gale's lip was plump; the sweetest segment of a tangerine. Nobody noticed save for Mrs. Potter with her eyes upon my back, two small hot points of stifled longing and anxiety. Withdrawing from Miss Gale, I turned to smile at Mrs. Potter. When she looked surprised yet unoffended, I leaned in and kissed her neck. A gorgeous shudder left her body like some heavy soul escaping....

The audience were whooping, crying. Did that really happen? Did I lean back Mrs. Potter like a cello sloped across my lap and kiss the smoked and olive dark between her breasts while Miss Gale licked tart powder from her cheek?

I think I pressed my hand against their wetness, there beyond the footlights; think we shifted and moaned like aching continents....

copyright Melinda Gebbie

I cut that quote where I did for a reason. See, Rite of Spring portrays the ritual sacrifice of a maiden to bring in the springtime; so Alice, Dorothy, and Wendy are basically getting off in the face of death. This is the point where I start my descent into the darker aspects of Lost Girls.

The book is divided into three sections, the first dealing with the heroines' sexual awakenings, the second bringing in complications and conflict, and the third delving into some seriously sick shit. I'll give you a summary of the sections one and two first. They both include some lovely erotica, but the second section gives you a sense of impending doom.

Dorothy's sexual awakening is the happiest of the three: when the tornado strikes her farm and she thinks she's about to die, she realizes she can do whatever she wants in the time she has left. So she frigs herself into the first - and probably best ever - orgasm of her life. Then later she starts messing around with the farm hands. At first it seems she's helping them over their sexual hangups, but as the story progresses, she loses her sense of self and becomes just a sex toy for the men, not the real person she wants to be seen as.

Wendy's - and her brothers' - sexual awakening occurs when they encounter a group of homeless children whose leader is a slightly older boy named Peter. His group has no taboos whatsoever; in fact, the first time Wendy sees Peter, he's screwing his own sister. Before long he's climbed up Wendy's drainpipe to finger her in her bed while her brothers watch and wank each other off (This is one of those bits Alan Moore does not want you to condone - but the worst is yet to come, so bail out now if you need to). Later Wendy plays a very twisted game of "mother" with the other homeless boys and fantasizes about being ravished by a pedophile who spies on them.

copyright Melinda Gebbie

Alice's story is the saddest. Her first experience of sex is being raped by a friend of her father's - an experience she copes with by staring into a mirror and fantasizing that she's with herself and no one else. Later she falls in with a predatory teacher at her boarding school, and after graduation she moves in with her as a "personal assistant." In reality she becomes a "kept woman" - and an opium addict too.


Now, all this time, Europe has been edging toward the first World War. As the final section of the book begins, all the steadier-minded guests are fleeing the hotel and the rest have decided to go out with a bang - a gang bang. I'm not sure how much detail I want to give you about this section. Let's just say that if you don't get squicked out before it's over, you really are a sick motherfucker.

But everything in this section is contradictions. A character who writes pornography argues that it's fine to enjoy any story, no matter how dirty it gets, because the characters aren't real...but then he follows that up by noting that he's screwing a 13-year-old while arguing this point. This is Alan Moore getting meta and fucking with your brain like a drunk monkey. I'm sitting there reading that passage and thinking about my own MC erotica, which I always feel a little guilty about because yes, it's fantasy and I'd never approve of that stuff in real life; but I realize at heart that my fantasy involves rape. Reading that passage, I wondered whether Alan Moore was calling me out for my hypocrisy or telling me it's okay to fantasize but I have to keep fantasy and reality separate. Then I told myself that no matter what he was saying, he's not an infallible judge of human morality. And then I just got my brain all tied in knots and kept reading in the hope that everything would make sense in the end. And mostly did.

Copyright Melinda Gebbie

Again, I don't want to get too specific about details. Some of what happens in the last section is too unsettling to describe, and some of it's just spoilers. But if you've gotten this far into my post, I will say this: by telling each other their stories - and not hiding the most sordid parts - Alice, Dorothy and Wendy rescue the "Lost Girls" inside themselves. Sexual abandon allows them to shed the neuroses they'd developed about sex and become free again. That being the case, I don't think Moore is calling me out for hypocrisy. I think he's saying we find healing in turning our hangups into stories. And that pornography is good. ;-)

Now I'll hint at one more thing: this isn't just a story about sex and pornography; it's also a story about violence and war. By the end of the book, Moore has presented you with two very different worlds, and he's asked you which one you'd rather live in. Me, I'll take sex over death any day of the week.

Sneak Peeks

Life has been happening to me lately, and not in a good way, so I'm a little behind on my writing. But for some reason I've been doing a lot of artwork - some on the covers you see below, and some on vanilla topics related to my other life. It's like my creativity with words is running low, but my creativity with images has increased to fill the gap.

At left is the cover for my next story, which was originally called "If Wishes Were Horses." On the advice of The One-Handed Writers Facebook group, I've changed the title to "What Happens in Decon." They also gave me lots of great tips on the cover, although I have to brag that the subliminal images in the nebula were solely my idea. ;-) You might recognize the model as Agna, whom I've featured before on this blog. She has a Deviant Art gallery that used to be just photos of her wearing latex and zentai, but that now includes some not-very-good poser art. But oh well, you can skip those images and still find plenty to enjoy in her gallery.

Now here's the in-process cover for "Dark Spaces," the anthology coming out at the end of May. I started with a grungier, less sexy picture of a gynoid that you can view here if you're so inclined. The original artist is innovari, and he does a lot of stuff with aliens and sexy robot women that I know you'll all enjoy. I encourage you to check out his gallery.







So...where to now? I'd originally hoped to publish "What Happens in Decon" at the end of April, and I still might make it. I have the whole day to work on the story, and if Life continues to happen the way it's been happening, I might have several more free days. To my beta reader/reviewer volunteers: I hope to get you the story by next weekend. I'll let you know if that changes, and no matter what happens, I'll make sure you have at least a week to pre-read the story before it goes to publication.

To everyone else, especially those who don't know about the beta reader/reviewer thing, don't forget to check out this post. You still have time to get a free copy of "What Happens in Decon" and "Dark Spaces," and you still have time to get an autographed copy of "Dark Spaces." Just read the contest rules and decide whether you want to participate.

Robot love is queer!

My first true post-Sleepwalkers post is going to be a short (not to mention prescheduled) one because I plan to work all weekend on getting the e-book ready for publication. That's not to say I'll finish it by this weekend, but I'm working hard: polishing, fixing typos, and writing new scenes and parts of scenes. Yes, that's right, entirely new material that you haven't read yet! But I promise I wasn't holding back on purpose. Most of the new stuff came as a result of suggestions by Aaronhalt. Then there's a prologue I came up with on my own, about Angela and Reynaldo.

I hope that whets your appetite. In the meantime, I thought I'd share a favorite robot-fetish video by a favorite musician, Janelle Monáe - who, coincidentally, put out a new album this week. That's where I got the title for this post. I love the way Janelle plays around with her orientation, making her music about that but also about so many other things that people use as excuses for mistreating each another. Okay, she's never made a formal "I'm gay" statement, but she's not trying to hide it, either. If you're in any doubt (or if you just want a good laugh), check this out.

Now I'm off to do some e-book preparing.

Robot and doll fetishists, right this way

Thanks to Slyspeaker for the videos below. He found them in an article on io9 about post-apocalyptic K-pop. The other videos on the page are also worth checking out, but these two were my favorites. Slyspeaker said the first one reminded him of Willing Subject. I can see that, but what it mainly reminded me of was A Tenpack of Trixies - in fact, it reminded me so strongly of my story that I could half believe the video directors read it.

The second video isn't as fetishy as the first, not once you get past the incredible introduction, but I do love the silver foil suits. They're like what the costume designers of classic Star Trek wished they'd come up with for The Gamesters of Triskelion.

freeze, unfreeze

Janelle Monae has just released a new video that will have all the statue fetishists (including me) going crazy. It reminds me a lot of an old Wonder Woman episode - I bet a lot of you know which one I mean before I've even reached the end of this sentence - where the villain puts people into suspended animation, pretends they're sculptures, and sets them in museums to "unfreeze" later and steal things. Of course, he eventually tries to do the same with Wonder Woman. You can find clips on YouTube if you're so inclined.

Anyway, another great thing about this video is how Janelle comes oh so close to formally outing herself. There's one moment in particular with Erykah Badu where I was almost panting for them to kiss. Dammit, they didn't. But anyway, the song has some great lyrics about the people who try to oppress us. A sampling below, and then the video.

Hey brother can you save my soul from the devil?
Say is it weird to like the way she wear her tights?
And is it rude to wear my shades?
Am I a freak because I love watching Mary? (Maybe)

Hey sister am I good enough for your heaven?
Say will your God accept me in my black and white?
Will he approve the way I'm made?
Or should I reprogram the programming and get down?

Even if it makes others uncomfortable
I wanna love who I am
Even if it makes other uncomfortable
I will love who I am

Ode to crap

For the past few weeks I've been trawling YouTube, lookinbg for videos of songs I enjoyed in the 1980's. Sometimes the music holds up, but the videos are almost uniformly awful. Take, for instance, the one below: "Mr. Roboto" by Styx. Right here in one tidy little package is everything that was wrong with the '80's pop/rock zeitgeist. I don't even have to make a list of the atrocities. If you're brave enough to watch for yourself, you'll catch them on your own.

So why am I posting the thing here? Because it typifies something else that many of you can relate to. When I was a teenager coming to grips with my fetish, shit like this was hot to me. It made me squirm, half happily and half uncomfortably, because it felt so weird to be turned on by something this - let's face it - dumb. I was especially uncomfortable watching robot or MC material with anyone else around. It was like having one of those "naked in public" dreams. I got the same sensation watching Dance Fever (part of my weekly Saturday night routine) whenever anyone did The Robot, or with Superfriends, or dozens of other totally innocuous TV shows and movie scenes.

So this post is really about nostalgia, and how much tougher things were for my generation. This is my version of "When I was a kid, I had to walk ten miles to school every day. In the snow. Uphill. Both ways." It's also a good opportunity to fantasize that the segment beginning at 4:20 ends differently, and/or to laugh at the suggestion of male cameltoe.

What do you get when you cross a mannequin with a marionette?

One of my earliest childhood dreams was of mannequins in a local clothing store coming to life and chasing me. Somehow I think I'm not the only one who's a little creeped out by these almost-human-but-not, frozen-in-place...things. Well, this morning I ran across an interesting article about a shop in Japan using mannequins that mimic the motions of passers-by. The ads are suitably creepy/kinky for this blog, but only one of them is embeddable. You'll have to visit the link above to see the other. Anyway, here you go. Have fun!

Because it's impossible to get too much of this

I posted this video once, long ago, but I was watching it again just now and realized there might be some poor, benighted fetishists out there who have yet to see it.

Then again, even if you have seen it before, you really can't see it often enough.

Love Kills

As you know if you've been following this blog, I've begun work on the longest EMC story I've ever written. My current outline calls for eight or nine chapters. It will be a purple story, according to the EMCSA's color codes, and it will have straight and gay inductions of every possible combination.

Not too long ago I wrote a particularly nasty M/f induction for this saga. I knew going in that if I was going to write an M/f induction, I had to go all the way with it. I couldn't skimp on the details just because they made me uncomfortable - and some of them certainly did. But the relationship between the man and the woman in this scene made it satisfying for me to write, from a hot-button standpoint. You'll see what I mean when I publish the story. Me being me, I won't post it until I have the whole thing written; and I'm still not sure how long that will take. But I can tell you that I'm so excited about it that I'm writing or at least brainstorming in every spare moment.

Meanwhile, I stumbled across this video last night on YouTube. The theme of the song ties in neatly with this post, and the famous Metropolis robot scenes provide an added dash of fetish - especially since they're presented with almost no context.




Finally, if you're still in the mood for betrayal stories, you might enjoy (and/or be horrified by) this poem Neil Gaiman recently offered up on his blog.

Happy pre-Halloween.

titillating tubing

I've had Sorayama on my mind lately. No point asking why - just enjoy!

Most of these images can be found at d4rkw00d.net

If only I spoke Swedish

I just found an article on my standby source for all things SF, io9, about a new Swedish TV show called Real Humans. It's all about robots, and the ads I've found make it look nicely fetishy. Let's start with this 30-second clip, which I found on the Real Humans website:



And here's the (decidedly darker) one I started with on io9:



If you follow the link to the Real Humans website, you can view several more 30-second ads by scrolling to the bottom of the page. For purely fetish purposes, it doesn't matter if you speak the language or not...but these ads do make me wish I knew Swedish and could see the show online.

A Peek Beneath the Duct Tape: What to Expect from Your Alien Brainwashing

So now you see why, in a previous post, I said the picture at left had influenced a part of my latest story. ;-) I think I'm going to have to create a new tag for gas masks. Yes, I really will. I know a lot of people fetishize about gas masks, and to a certain extent, I'm one of them. For me, they have to have an organic quality and/or a hood and goggles that hide the entire face. As always, it's the robotization, depersonalization and voicelessness that most appeals to me.

So anyway, about What to Expect from your Alien Brainwashing. The first bit that occurred to me (in a dream, as is often the case), was the title. And the first title that occurred to me was, "What to Expect from Your Alien Overlords." I liked the idea because it had an inherent humor based on the popular meme, and I could tweak it to be more MC-specific while still keeping some of the humor. Of course, the first tweak had to come with the title.

The idea developed gradually, with the part I'm proudest of - Tinker Toy sex lattices - coming to me again in a dream. Gah, I love my subconscious!

I wasn't sure what my aliens would look like until I found the picture above (all credit to Kimatica). Then, of course, they had to be Greys so I could fit in the huge eyes and pointy faces. Sorry if that's a let-down for anyone expecting more exotic aliens, but it's been my experience in reading SF that it's really, really hard to come up with truly alien species. Vernor Vinge did a great job in A Fire Upon the Deep, of course, but I still fault him for not making the most of the MC possibilities. ;-) As for me, I knew my audience was more interested in the MC than whether my aliens had fur or scales, so I decided to take a pass.

When it comes to the wall installations, I was probably subconsciously influenced by all those weird '80's videos that had people running along corridors where human hands or heads stuck out of the walls. Funnily enough, though, I stumbled across this just yesterday, via Oddee.

Another funny thing, as far as I'm concerned, is that I chose this story out of the three percolating in my brain because I thought it was the lightest; and yet it turned out pretty grim in the end. I hope you still find some humor in it (I do; I always find it funny when MC victims blather earnestly about the favors they're doing their recruits), but the story as a whole got pretty dark. It seemed that with each successive polish, I came up with creepy new ideas that slotted in just perfectly with the plot.

For instance, the idea of elites creating a presentation for their processees was originally just a joke: that's their notion of waiting room reading material. And I had to make my processee desperate enough to read it, so I came up with "wait times might be longer than usual" - a common recorded message Americans hear when they dial toll-free numbers for any sort of assistance. It was only later that I realized why the wait times would be longer than usual: the new architectural craze was sucking up more slaves than ever. That added a whole new layer of horror to the ending. Our poor processee will probably end up a mindless bit of X-rated wall decoration.

Is it just me, or does anyone else now have Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" running through their heads?

And it's off!

I've just finished my newest MC story and sent it off to Simon. It turned out to be a bit darker than I expected, but I still think it's kind of funny. I'm not sure what anyone else will think, though. As I've hinted before, this one's pretty...odd. It might even be polarizing. Anyway, be on the lookout for it in the next EMCSA update. It's called "What to Expect from your Alien Brainwashing."

Robophiles, rejoice

I had intended to blog about something else today, but as is often the case, io9 stepped in with something so mind-bogglingly appropriate that I set the other idea aside.

There's nothing subtle about the video below, nothing implied. It's all right out there on crystal-clear display. So, robophiles, start your downloading engines. You're going to want to keep this one!

Things on my mind

Well, I've started writing again, sporadically. I'm working on one of the three stories I mentioned in my last post, but I won't say which one just yet. After all, I have three ideas in my head; it's possible I could switch over to one of the others and get it finished first.

Anyway, the picture at left has inspired a portion of the story I'm working on now. I found it here, along with plenty of other goodies for fans of robots, altered eyes, etc. In fact, you'll even find a few shots from another post I made once upon a time.

Giving credit where credit is due, the bodypainting and prosthetics are by a design team called Kimatica.This is not the same Kimatica you can elsewhere on the net, so don't go to YouTube expecting a bunch of fetishy videos. Sorry. ;-)