I feel pretty, oh so pretty

I feel pretty and witty and gay, yes I do! Pretty, because just look what I'm working with. ;-) Witty, because I've finished the rough draft of "Union, Reunion" and have managed to tickle even even myself with the Easter egg I threw into the final section of the final chapter.* And gay, because...well, that one should be obvious. ;-)

There will be three chapters in all. I'll probably send the first one off to Simon sometime next week and follow my usual pattern of adding one in each update afterwards until I'm done.

*Here. Now don't say I never gave you nothin'.

trying to believe it's a *good* thing

My internet cable connection is semi-fucked up, so right now I never know if what I'm trying to access or do will go through. Still, that didn't stop me from writing a long, gabby e-mail response to my latest collaborator last night. I get so excited about mind-melding with my favorite EMC authors.

Plus, I'm about 90% finished with the rough draft of "Union, Reunion," and knowing that surfing the internet right now is more trouble than it's worth gives me incentive to stay off it and just write. Maybe. Anyway, I am planning to finish the rough draft by this weekend.

Oh, and BTW, the cable technician is coming to fix my connection later this week. I should be back to normal (well, as normal as I ever am) in time for the weekend.

Brainwashing is fun

I'm still discovering new ways to turn Virtual Hypnotist into a brainwashing machine. Thanks to advice from Follow the Watch, I can now raise and lower the volume of a background file in the middle of a session or even change from one background file to another.

Think about the implications: Your session can start slowly, innocently. Deceptively slowly and innocently. But once you get too deep to easily withdraw, once you realize how much pleasure you feel, a sinister note creeps into the session. The background mantra changes, perhaps only subtly at first, so that you're not sure it isn't just your imagination. But then you notice that the chant is getting louder, beginning to fill your head until you have no room for any thoughts but the ones it puts there. And now the words are changing again: noticeably, now that you have no will left to resist.

Perhaps the subliminal messages change at the same time. First they were just telling you to relax, but now they're telling you how horny submission can make you. And maybe now a message pops up in the middle of the screen, where once there was only a color tunnel. It's telling you to submit and obey, and it's growing larger by the minute. More insistent. But you can't look away because the voice that fills your head won't let you close your eyes except to blink, and the brainwashing machine is just too powerful to resist.

Not that you really want to resist, anyway.

But in the end, the voice finally allows you to close your eyes and rest. Then the background audio fades, the count back to wakefulness begins, and when you open your eyes, everything has vanished except the color tunnel.

My Virtual Hypnotist tutorial can tell you how to create all these effects and more, but I'll leave it to you to decide how to apply the knowledge. This time. ;-)

I was in love with her before this, but...

Holy crap, Tai looks hot in that first panel today! And the comic itself is hilarious - both today, and almost every day.

Do yourself a favor and check out Questionable Content.

BTW, Marten is only yelling because he's startled. He already knows Tai well, and his dad is gay.

Sinister fun

One of these days I'm going to write an EMC story based on my morning hypnosis session, making it just a tad more sinister than it is in real life. And it is pretty sinister in real life - at least, until I get to the suggestions, which are purely practical. But by the time I reach that point, I'm so deep that I can almost completely ignore them and just enjoy the thought that I'm being brainwashed.

You can turn Virtual Hypnotist into a pretty effective faux-brainwashing machine with a few simple steps:

1. Set the "brainwaves" loud enough for you to hear the hum.
2. Set the color tunnel to fill the whole screen, and reverse the direction of it so that the rays appear to be beaming straight into your head.
3. Use a central "video" image that flashes through words like "obey," "programmed," etc., and gradually increase the size of it through the course of the session.
4. Since you're actively using that image throughout the session, include commands wherever necessary to open or reopen your eyes and focus on it. (You should also include commands telling yourself you're being brainwashed, but that almost goes without saying, doesn't it?)
5. For maximum effect, create a background audio of yourself in trance, repeating mantras that are stimulating for you. If possible, use multiple tracks.

Information on how to do all this can be found in my VH tutorial.

My first time

So...what to say about my first personal trance with Lady Ru'etha? I have to admit that it's still a little vague to me, which is pretty funny, considering how I don't want to forget things in trance (unless temporarily in the middle of it all) and how clear the events of Wednesday morning are to me. Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, or maybe it was the act of being linked to Jukebox, who trances so deeply and easily and has no problem forgetting anything Lady Ru'etha wants him to forget. Who knows? Anyway, I've done my best to remember as much as I can, so I can share it with you all.

Let me begin by saying that now, after several days have passed, I'm glad Lady Ru'etha waited until everyone else had left except Jukebox and me. It's true that I was jonesing like crazy by that point, and it's true (as I said right there in front of Winterrose when I begged Lady Ru'etha to go ahead and drop me) that I'm a closet exhibitionist. But my first trance with her was indeed a very personal thing and was worth waiting for. Besides, I was probably able to go deeper without having to think about people I didn't know watching me. So thanks, Lady Ru'etha, for taking care of my comfort when I was too worked up to care for it myself. :-)

And now the details. Practically the moment the last guest left, she had me lie down with my head in Jukebox's lap, turned on the metronome, and gave me a selection of pocket watches to choose from. I picked a silver one with a soft finish, and I was both surprised and delighted that she was going with such classic tropes of hypnotism. Of course, I would have been just as surprised and delighted by anything else she'd chosen, but the familiarity of the metronome and pocket watch gave me a little thrill - and no doubt primed the pump a little further. And I was well primed by that point, having spent several hours watching her drop Jukebox, Reth, and Kitty. I must have been in and out of light trance several times already that night, and I knew it, but I also knew I wanted the "real thing," the deep and personal thing.

She held up the pocket watch and began to swing it gently, and I have absolutely no idea now what she said. I just know my eyes started to flicker almost instantly, and I fought to hold them open, enjoying the fight, enjoying knowing I was going to lose it, and enjoying knowing that Lady Ru'etha was enjoying it too. Finally fighting became too hard and I let my eyes do what they wanted to do. That felt so very nice. So very relaxing. So very natural.

Now, when you're deep in trance, you're so passive that it's almost impossibly hard to say or do anything on your own, even shifting to make yourself more comfortable. So Lady Ru'etha has a habit of commanding the people she hypnotizes, "Tell me something you need me to know." She started with Jukebox, and he said (at least, I think this is when he said it) that he hoped I'd enjoy my experience. Then she asked me what I needed her to know. Well, I'd known she'd be asking this and had already thought of some of the things I might want to tell her; but when the time came, I couldn't think of a single damn thing. I'd gone so deep, so quickly, that even when she commanded me, responding took more effort than I had to give. So I mumbled that I was too comfortable to talk, and she had me imagine the control room in my head and the cable running between my brain and my mouth. Then she had me temporarily disconnect them. That relieved all the obligation to talk, and for the rest of that trance (and, to a large extent, the later ones), all I really wanted to do was go "mmm hmm" and "uh huh."

Then Lady Ru'etha told me she was connecting a cable between the back of Jukebox's neck and mine, and that his trance was flowing down into me. I felt the cable very clearly, and I knew it was the perfect image for me, with my robo-kink. It didn't even occur to me until I read Jukebox's blog that the image had been as much fun for him as for me, but that makes me very happy. And you know, even today I can still feel that cable if I think about it. I wonder if he can, too. I'll bet he can.

A little later, Lady Ru'etha installed the power switch and tested it a few times; but honestly, I was so limp already that I couldn't tell much difference after she pressed it. I had no idea it would become so hotly effective the next day when I wasn't in trance.

At some point I think she must have had me sit up, though I don't clearly remember doing it. I just remember being upright (I think) when she told me that I tried to so hard to be a good girl (which I've said here and elsewhere; it's a big key to why I developed this particular fetish), and that that was okay; she gave me permission to be a good girl. And that was absolutely wonderful, because I do wrestle with this part of my personality. In real life, it's sometimes appropriate to be the good girl and sometimes inappropriate; but it takes effort for me to be assertive. Here, though, I could just give in to my deepest self. She gave me permission. And by giving permission, she assumed the right to command me - which she absolutely had, but saying it that way concretized it. I understood all that, even in the depths of trance, and thrilled to it.

There were other commands, and there were mantras, maybe even some I don't remember at all. Then Lady Ru'etha woke me and Jukebox up, not with the five-count I'd come to expect from her mp3's, but with a simple "wake" command. It amazed me that I could wake up so quickly and easily from such a deep trance with a single word. But of course, I also learned to fall that quickly and easily, too. ;-)

She tranced me several times that night, until even when I was awake, all I wanted to do was like with my head back, resting on the top of the futon, and my hands resting in her and Jukebox's hands or on their thighs. It was all just so very comfortable, so very nice, so very relaxing. I told them I didn't think I'd ever snuggled between two people like that, except with my parents when I was a kid.

Like Lady Ru'etha says, warm.

Subconscious allies

Lady Ru'etha told me Tuesday night that there would come a point when my subconscious would decide whether or not to ally itself with her...or maybe she just said it would decide to ally with her; I don't quite remember now. Anyway, her meaning was clear: if my subconscious made that decision, it would take me into deeper and more exciting hypnotic experiences than I'd ever had before.

I suppose this (and a lot of my other experiences that night) were priming the pump, but I didn't mind a bit. I wanted to be primed. I wanted those deeper and more exciting levels of trance. And hoo boy, did I get them. :-)

The alliance happened Wednesday morning, during the several long hours of trance I spent with her and Jukebox before we decided to go to IHOP. And the mere fact that I was content to hang around trancing instead of looking for something to eat tells you just how much I was enjoying myself. I'm a hobbit, remember: I love my food. But there's food, and there's food, you know? ;-)

I won't go into much detail about the morning, but I will share this interesting tidbit. At one point I told Lady Ru'etha that I wanted to see if the famous old "floating hand" trick would work on me. I was already in trance with my eyes closed, and she began stroking my hand and arm, telling me they were getting lighter and lighter. They didn't move at first, but she said that for some people the motion started very slowly, so I didn't worry. And soon enough, my arm began to stir...just a little to begin with, then more and more. And once it was in the air, it began to lift more and more quickly until my fingers were pointed loosely at the ceiling (because she said that was where the strings were attached).

Then Lady Ru'etha told me to open my eyes and look at my hand. I did, and then I caught a glimpse of Jukebox out of the corner of my eye. He was on the other side of her, and his hand was in the air with fingers pointed, just like mine. Later Lady Ru'etha told us that our arms had gone up almost in tandem, even though both of us had our eyes closed, and that when they'd first lifted off they'd almost touched each other before turning upward. I guess that's part of whole neck cable phenomenon, which I don't want to examine too closely; I'd rather just enjoy it.

The subconscious alliance phenomenon has some pretty interesting effects, too. In the time before that happened, even while visiting Lady Ru'etha, my conscious mind was always very active in my trance experiences. For instance, listening to my trigger via Virtual Hypnotist, I'd think, "Now my eyes will roll up and close" - and then they would. Not that it would have been easy to resist, but my conscious mind was involved. Just as it was involved in my first trance with Lady Ru'etha, which I'm going to write about tomorrow.

But back to the subconscious alliance. Lady Ru'etha blogged about "installing a power switch" in me, which is something she does with all her pets. It's at the back of the neck. All she has to do is press it, and you "turn off." Now, this isn't the same as going completely blank...at least, not for me. But it does mean dropping straight down into trance and going blissfully limp - very, very quickly.

And now we come to my first Wednesday blog entry. ;-) Lady Ru'etha had teased me before my visit that she might command me to blog in trance, and I'd loved the idea. So after we got back from breakfast, we booted up her computer and I signed into Blogger and my e-mail program (Someone knows why! ;-)). And because Lady Ru'etha was busy in the kitchen while I logged in and I wasn't sure when we'd do the blog thing, I also pulled up a Deviant Art picture I wanted to show her. She came up and admired it with me, and I started to say something about it. Then, right in the middle of my sentence, she pressed the back of my neck.

I barely had time to say, "Here we go," or something like that. I don't even remember what I said, and I doubt she heard me since I was already on my way down, from the very first word. No time to think, "Now I will fall into trance," just boom. Even if I'd wanted to resist, I would have had to do it after going down, because (as she said many times that day) she had me. My subconscious mind was allied with her, and my consciousness was just along for the ride.

Oh, I did know what was happening, even as she deepened me until I was lying with my head on my arms in front of the keyboard. I knew what was happening and loved it. But I was in a deeper, more blissful trance than anything I'd experienced prior to that visit. In fact, I was absolutely stupefied. I couldn't even have thought of a title (such as it was) if she hadn't been standing right there, commanding me to write. I had to write because I had to please her, and when I was too helpless to think of anything on my own, I just copied down what she was whispering in my ear.

And even now that I'm back home and several days have passed, my subconscious is still firmly on Lady Ru'etha's side. She gifted me with a few mp3's while I was there, including a preview of one of her upcoming vampire sessions; and she'll know what I mean when I say the alliance is still going strong! The rest of you will just have to wonder...and anticipate a great experience of your own when that mp3 debuts online. I don't know when she plans to release it, but the copy she gave me seems entirely finished, and entirely fantastic. I'll be sure to blog about it in more detail when it becomes available so you'll know what you're in for. ;-)

In the meantime, keep watching this space for "My First Time."

Lady Ru'etha weighs in, and Jukebox weighs in *again* :-)

I have to say, I'm really tickled to see all the commotion our little get-together has caused. ;-) And I also appreciate the care Lady Ru'etha and Jukebox have taken with what they've shared and what they've left to our readers' imaginations. After all, I might be a closet exhibitionist, but I'm also (somewhat to my dismay) a semi-decorous Southern belle. So, that being the case, I'll just say that an absolutely fucking incredible amount of fun can be had even when everyone keeps their clothes on. ;-P

If you're starting with my blog, Lady Ru'etha's post about the visit is here, and Jukebox's second post is here.

I'll try not to repeat anything the two of them have said; but Lady Ru'etha will be amused to know that not only didn't I realize when she began to actively guide Jukebox and me in our reinforcement game, but I entirely forgot the metronome she used during my first trance - and even half-forgot her using the pocket watch! Really, all I remember clearly about the first night's trances was lying in Jukebox's lap and actually feeling that golden cable running between us.

I do remember plenty about the non-trance moments, though, and I giggled to read in Jukebox's post that he actually noticed my head whipping back and forth and understood that I was trying to be polite! I would have sworn he was too deeply entranced (or fractionated when not in trance) to know what I was doing at all. ;-) But he knew a lot more than I thought he did, and not just about my perceptions. I guessed at some of what Lady Ru'etha was doing with the two of us, but not all of it.

I was very pleased with the collar and the neural net and the light-and-sound machine; but I can't think of anything to add about those bits at the moment. Maybe this weekend. I do plan to blog about "subliminal allies" on Saturday, anyway, so watch this space.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with one more amusing note. I had several hours of travel time to and from Chez Ru'etha, so I just shuffled all the songs on my mp3 player and let it do what it wanted. Well, apparently, what it wanted was to make me grin a lot - first in anticipation of what I was about to experience, and then in remembrance of what I had experienced. Here's a sample of its most grin-worthy offerings:

* "Zombie" by the Cranberries
* "Welcome to Paradise" by Green Day
* "Freak on a Leash" by Korn
* "Banditos" by the Refreshments (Stumped? Think about the first few lines of the song)

All in all, it was a great visit, and I can't wait to do it again!

Ah, Jukebox has posted, too! :-D

I figured he would have, but I wanted to make my own entry before I saw what he had to say. So here you go. The only thing I'll add to his excellent (and entirely truthful) report is that "codile" is "docile." ;-) It really does get very hard to type when you're in trance. And hitting that shift key at the same time as another letter is damn near impossible - except when typing Lady Ru'etha's name because, well, you can't lowercase her name. That just wouldn't be right at all. ;-P

THE END...of chapter one :-)

So, I'm home now...after giving many of you a thrill, I hope. ;-) Jukebox is still with Lady Ru'etha and intends to write his own blog entry about my little drop-in sometime later. I can't wait to see what he says, especially since I know he had at least three times as much fun as I did. And I had quite a lot of fun. Quite a lot. :-D

I've been trying to figure out how to blog about this ever since I kissed the two of them goodbye (Jukebox will be tickled to know he's the first guy I've kissed since somewhere around 1991) , but I'm afraid I'm not much closer to organizing my thoughts now than I was then. And I can't even blame it on the fact that I've just finished reviewing the pictures and videos we took while I was there: an act that put me right back into trance again - though not as deep as Jukebox went, watching the video I took of him - even when he was just viewing it on the little screen on the back of my camera! Bless his heart, he really is every bit as much of a tranceslut as he says he is. And he looks so adorable like that!

Lady Ru'etha's pretty adorable, too: so mischievous, and yet so completely scrupulous. In fact, I practically had to beg her to get sinister with me. But she did when I asked. Ohh, yes, she did. ;-) I can't wait to see what she comes up with after she's had more time to think about it!

So...a few quick details in this blog entry, then more later after I've had time to process.

I have now met several of Lady Ru'etha's friends and/or pets, including Reth from EMCSA, Spot/Kitty (whom I gave a mini-makeover and who shrugs so cutely when coming up from trance), and Winterrose (with whom I engaged in a bit of mutual admiration). I got to watch Lady Ru'etha put all of them except Winterrose under. In fact, I got to watch her put them under several times, without her doing anything to me because that's just how very ethical she is.

Well, let's just say I really learned to sympathize with the protagonist of Transylvanian Concubine. ;-/ Of course, I didn't tell the rest of them that until they'd been around me long enough to know I wasn't likely to stake Lady Ru'etha to my floor and force her to force me to do her bidding. ;-p

Lady Ru'etha didn't hypnotize me until everyone except Jukebox had left, but in the meantime I got to enjoy plenty of world-class geekery with the others. We talked about everything from Dr. Who to Lord of the Rings to Watchmen to Lovecraft to Gaiman to Star Trek to Star Wars to hell-if-I-can-remember, but there was plenty more. But then she hypnotized me, and hypnotized me again, and hypnotized me again - and, well, you get the picture. :-) Eventually I became so conditioned that she could drop me in the middle of a sentence just by touching the back of my neck. That was awesome.

But the most awesome part of all, I think, was when the three of us recreated a scene from one of the "Lulu and Bex" teasers on Hypnofantastico's site. Jukebox and I sat facing each other with him dangling a pocket watch between us and Lady Ru'etha beside us, taking video and interjecting her own suggestions while we reinforced each other's trances by repeating the same mantras. Eventually the pocket watch dropped quite literally out of the picture (I didn't realize that until I watched the video just now, since I was too deep at the time to care) and Lady Ru'etha told Jukebox and me just to stare into each other's eyes and keep falling deeper as we each saw how deep the other had gone.

In case I haven't made it clear yet, watching Jukebox in deep trance is an incredible experience...and so is watching myself, I'm happy to say. :-)

I can't thank Lady Ru'etha enough for being willing to do all she did for me. She fulfilled what has been very nearly a lifelong dream for me, and I don't think the dream is over yet. Mmmm. :-)

But that's all for tonight. Sweet dreams, everyone.

i am with Lady Ru'etha

i am a good thrall. i am with Lady Ru'eth and Jukebox. Totally obedient. Must type. Deeply s feels so good. so obedient now. deeper and deeper. oh god. collar. good thrall. mmmmmmmm. must type. must obey. good girl. captured. obedient. g. obeying now. good girl. mmmmmm. so nice. blissful. passive. happy. ehtnthralled.

I will soon be having an adventure

Watch this space....

Happy Sunday

I just found the picture at left in Perry Gallagher's gallery over at Deviant Art. I think the model had a lovely MC vibe, like she's posing and smiling because she's been told to pose and smile, and that's the only thing in her extremely empty head at the moment.

On an (only mostly) unrelated note, be sure to check out Jukebox's most recent blog entry. Holy crap!

A little robot goes a long way

I'm not really a fan of Beyonce's music, but there is one thing about her I really like: her robot fetish. I've read about it and seen a video or two, and the fetish is pretty damn apparent - not only in her costumes but even in some of her gown choices.

Beyonce wore the outfit at right during a recent BET Awards show. It opened up to reveal, well, a more revealing costume - and also opened Beyonce up to charges of idea-stealing from Kylie Minogue. (Gah, I can't believe I just wrote that sentence in this blog!).

Anyway, while exploring the links above - purely in the name of robot fetishism, I assure you - I ran across the video below. Damn, if only I could find an original version! This is just incredible.



BTW, the robot suit Beyonce sports here is a takeoff not of the Metropolis robot at left above, but of a famous design by Thierry Mugler:

I got nothing...yet

But just you wait until this time next week!

So *that's* how you pronounce "Nyarlathotep"!

Or at least, that's how someone thinks you pronounce it. It's not like we can dig up ol' HPL for a definitive answer.*

Anyway, this. is. brilliant.



*Well, not unless we dig up Herbert West first

Better, perhaps, than you've been led to believe

It seems to be an all-video weekend for me...so far, anyway. Who knows what else I might think to post before Sunday's end? But in the meantime, there's this. Friday night I stumbled across a reference to The Cell, a surrealistic horror/crime drama starring the mind-boggling combination of Vince Vaughan, Jennifer Lopez, and Vincent D'Onofrio.

Now, despite what the critics said when it came out, I actually enjoyed this movie. A lot. For me, it captured the literally-anything-can-happen horror of a real nightmare, played intelligently with dream symbolism, and (highlight for a mid-level spoiler about the ending) [allowed the heroine to kill the bad guy entirely on her own]. And once my mind had turned back to the movie, I remembered a wonderfully kinky MC scene that occurs maybe a third of the way in.

A quick bit of background before I share the clip: Lopez plays a counselor who inserts herself into the dreams of catatonic patients - with only the aid of some sketchy technology since, appearances to the contrary, this is not a supernatural film. D'Onofrio is a serial killer who's fallen into a coma, and Vaughan is the detective who recruits Lopez to enter D'Onofrio's dreams so they can find his last victim before she dies. Unfortunately, "Catherine" ends up falling prey to the killer while in his mind, and he run some kind of psychological voodoo on her that brings her under his control. Thus, Vaughan has go "go in after her." Just remember what I said about the ending, okay? ;-)



Now, if you want to see how this scene plays out, here's the next bit - but be warned: it's pretty damn squirmy.



I really like Lopez's eyes during this second clip, where she's looking just a little upward: not enough to count as an eyeroll, but suggestive of one. Of course, me being me, I'd rather have had her eyes swirling with an oil-slick sheen rather than simply being black. Then, when she begins to cry, the oil slick could have washed away in her tears.

Still, that's just me; the scene is awesome exactly as it is. If only it could have gone on longer.