What a prudish American TV network won't show you

Those of you outside the US might not be familiar with the annual American phenomenon known as the Super Bowl - or the spectacular lengths advertisers go to, creating memorable commercials to air during the game. A year or two ago, one of those commercials featured a couple of rednecks being horrified when they accidentally kissed each other on the lips while trying to eat the same candy bar. This year, a gay dating service submitted the commercial below and got rejected because, as the network said, the ad "is not within the Network's Broadcast Standards for Super Bowl Sunday." More details here - and a look at the candy bar commercial, if you're so inclined.

As for me, I say fuck CBS. I'm going to broadcast the commercial right here*, and I encourage you all to do the same. Let's get this ad out into the public eye and give Mancrunch as much publicity as it can handle. Go, man love!



*Not that I have a huge readership, but it's the spirit that counts. ;-)

These are a few of my favorite things III

As I mentioned in my last post, I have a bit of a history with art, but nothing like a professional history; and I'm no expert in photography, either. All I know is what hits home for me...and a lot of photographer Lithium Picnic's photos hit home for me. It's the bright colors, the high contrasts, the striking designs, the poses he pulls out of top-flight fetish models and unknowns alike.

That's Mosh at left, in case you couldn't guess; and there are hundreds of Picnic pics of Apnea floating around the web since they were lovers for quite awhile. Below are more photos of Mosh and Apnea, as well as Jade Vixen and some other lovely ladies you've probably never heard of. I got some of these shots from Lithium Picnic's gallery on Deviant Art and some from his gallery on Model Mayhem. They're not necessarily his best work; but after all, I'm not qualified to judge "best" in this category, anyway. I've just picked some shots I like, that I think you'll like.

Lithium Picnic also has a website here.

Ahem

There'll be another post for Wednesday, but I can't not call your attention to this. Last night, Jukebox and I finished the rough draft of "Hazy Shade of Winter," the first part of our trilogy, and he asked if I'd mind if he sent the rough draft to Lady Ru'etha. Of course I didn't. ;-)

On a related note, I told Jukebox that I'd been listening to Simon and Garfunkel on my mp3 player yesterday, and up popped "Hazy Shade of Winter." "But isn't that a Bangles song?" he asked. Bwah!

Writing in public

Jukebox wrote a bit about our current collaboration project on Wednesday, but he took a completely different angle than I'd been planning, so I still have more to say on the subject. :-)

As I've mentioned before, this collaboration is different from my previous work with Tabico and trilby else in that Jukebox and I are collaborating live, by phone, on the same sections of story; whereas Tabico and trilby and I worked on different sections via e-mail and then edited the whole thing afterwards.

But there's another way in which my collaboration with Jukebox is a new experience for me. His style is very different from mine, so we have to come from further apart to meet in the middle. As he put it (And this really made me giggle), "She writes nigh-apocalyptically dark stories about the total enslavement of whole worlds, and I get weepy when my main character gets a paper cut." Or as I'd put it, he laser-etches portraits into grains of rice, and I sledgehammer monoliths...carefully, I hope, but a sledgehammer is a sledgehammer. Thankfully, working live allows us to blend our styles more easily than e-mail would. I think the finished product might come out something like, say, a life-sized statue of a recognizable human being. ;-)

Meanwhile, I've finally put my finger on another aspect of the live process that took some getting used to. When I was in my teens, I belonged to a local art league. The members would gather once a month to hear from an area artist, and then we'd practice together on our various pieces. At the same time, I was also taking art lessons with different teachers in small groups; so I was constantly working on my technique in semi-public settings, often with people looking right over my shoulder. That always made me nervous. I didn't want anyone to see my art until it was at least nearly finished. I didn't want them to see the flaws I'd get rid of further down the line. Chalk it up to my innate perfectionism, I guess.

Anyway, Jukebox is seeing all my (writing) flaws now. It's a little unnerving, but 25 years have eased my perfectionism a lot, and I can always remind myself that I'm seeing just as many of Jukebox's flaws as he's seeing of mine. But he's still much better at conversational patter than I could ever hope to be. ;-)

Collaboration in action

Looks like Jukebox "tagged in" for me when I got distracted this morning by Amanda Palmer's Golden Globes...or maybe it was just another case of Lady Rue'tha's brain cable putting us in sync. ;-) Anyway, his latest blog entry offers lots of interesting tidbits about the collaboration, including the title of the first story and an amazing revelation about what erotica writers really talk about when they get together on a story. Check it out.

Who's that frumpy-looking bloke next to Amanda Palmer?

I was going to say more today about my collaboration with Jukebox, but then Neil Gaiman blogged about this picture, and of course I just had to share. ;-) So tune in another day for an update on the vampire story/stories.

These are a few of my favorite things II

Back in 2008, I wrote a post lamenting the lack of women in color in the fetish community. That was before I knew much about Skin (pic at left by Allan Amato, latex by Blacklickorish), aside from the fact that she shaved her eyebrows. Thank goodness she stopped doing that. Maybe it was having one painted back on for this shot that showed her how much more expressive she could be with two of them. ;-P Anyway, I do love the look on her face here. It's like she isn't sure she digs this whole prissy look...but we know it fits her perfectly.

Skin has galleries at both Model Mayhem and Deviant Art.

Photography credits, left to right above: Christine Kessler, Maxime Avet

Photography credits, left to right, above: MatthieuRichardoz, Trevor Goldsmith, Wayne Kahn

Picture, if you will....

Fetishists can find amusement in the oddest of places, even the lower levels of unfunny-comedian-hosting-a-talk-show hell. But in order to avoid exposure to unhealthy levels of George Lopez, I suggest you start with the intro paragraph of this blog entry , then skip right to the 2:40 mark. Trust me, you'll be glad you did.

Word of the Day

The word of the day is Harajuku.

That is all.

A quick but very, very necessary public service announcement

As I hinted yesterday, I have a temporary ailment that's keeping me from being online as much as I'd like right now....Okay, I have a concussion, and my eyes are extremely light-sensitive. But this has to be said.

I have just seen Daybreakers, and I cross-my-heart-hope-to-die promise you that the vampire trilogy Jukebox and I are working on will be a hell of a lot better than that piece of predictable fluff.

Well, predictable bloody fluff.

But don't give up on the vamp genre yet. There's still plenty of room left for originality and real storytelling.

This blog entry is brought to you by the letter "G"

I don't know what it's like in your part of the world, but here in the US, the favorite news topic of the week is a British study that "proved" there was no such thing as the G-spot. Naturally, some people had a problem with this.

Me, for one. That bathtub scene in Ethna Redux? Uh huh. ;-) I think all those British women who said they didn't have one are lesbians and just don't know it yet. ;-)

Seriously, I don't see how you could hit the G-spot properly with a penis; the angle is wrong. But a straight woman with an accommodating man should be able to find a way around the problem.

I don't know if my readers outside the US will be able to see this video or not, but let's give it a try. It's very funny and informative, and the woman in the lavender suit is quite lovely. ;-)



P.S.: This might or might not be my last post for a few days. I'm not feeling well.

The best thing about collaborating with Jukebox is...

Oh, I haven't told you yet who my latest mystery collaborator is? Well, surely I've dropped plenty of hints! ;-P Yes, Jukebox and I are working together on the vampire story I first teased about here. During my visit with Lady Ru'etha and him last November, one of the group (I think it was Lady R, but I'm no longer sure) suggested Jukebox and I should write something together; and when he seemed as interested as I did, I said, "Well, I do have this idea for a vampire story." I described it, and Jukebox liked the idea...as, I think, did Reth Eldirood, who has a thing for vamps himself. ;-) If you like well-written EMC stories but don't want too much horror in the mix, check Reth out. You'll enjoy.

Now, as I was saying, the best thing about collaborating with Jukebox is that I can do it live, by phone. Even when one or both of us is too brain fried to work on the actual story, we still have fun gabbing. For instance, Jukebox and I have decided that the famously "fully functional" Data from Start Trek: TNG was originally designed as a sexbot, but that he doesn't look more studly because his creator was too vain to conceive of a sex machine that didn't look just like him.

As for the actual collaboration process, it's coming along very well. We're approximately halfway through the first of three stories that you'll be able to read as stand-alone's or chapters of a single tale, and we're writing in shared Google documents so we can both work on the same paragraph at the same time. I have to admit, that was a bit nerve-wracking for me at first, since Jukebox at least seemed to write much faster than me; but he's finally convinced me that it only looks that way because his stories are shorter than mine. Working with him live, when both of us are "on," we write at about the same pace.

Now, of course, it's much too early to have any idea when we might be finished; but don't worry. You know Jukebox: he'll probably keep posting a story a week over at the EMCSA from now until forever. And I'm still thinking of turning my morning Virtual Hypnotist session into a dark EMC fantasy. I imagine I could write it pretty quickly, since I'd just be embellishing scripts I've already finished. Who knows when I might find the right combination of time and inspiration to make that happen?

In the meantime, hugs to all my friends - and big, sloppy kisses to my previous collaborators, Tabico and trilby else, whether they want them or not. ;-) I'd work with either of you again in a heartbeat.

These are a few of my favorite things

I had a bit of time off from work last week, and I put it to good use, working with a collaborator on a new EMC story (teasers below - including a couple of very revealing tags that I added to one post a week or two after publishing it. ;-)) and working on my personal picture collection. In fact, I got a bit OCD about all that, making new subdirectories for different models, trying to group them in meaningful ways, and of course finding lots and lots of new images for the collection.

And that gave me the idea for a new recurring blog topic: just sharing some of my favorite pictures from a particular model or photographer or even designer, as the mood strikes me.

I've decided to start today with Angela Ryan, perhaps not one of the best-known fetish models, but certainly one of the loveliest. She's so scrumptiously curvy, but in a natural-looking way (and I do stress "natural-looking"), and she often has a playful, teasing expression in her shots - not these, particularly, but you can see in other places, like her Model Mayhem portfolio and her various photos on Deviant Art.

The picture at the top of this post is my favorite. Christine Kessler's photos are always interesting, and I love the toughness Angela conveys in this shot. Mmm, that jacket is just perfect, even if it's not latex. And, of course, we've got the latex below, don't we? ;-) I'm particularly entranced with the way the strips in that first pic above hug the curves of her ass. I could stare at that forever.

Just for the record, the other model in the second picture above is Porcelain/Porsylin, who's not nearly as interesting but does have a gallery of her own on Deviant Art if you want to see more of her. The photographers, from left to right on the bottom row, are Stephen McClure, Viva van Story, and Trevor Jansen.