Happy/Merry Whatever ;-)

Here's my holiday gift to you all. It's the video for Karen O, Trent Reznor, and Atticus Ross' cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song," from David Fincher's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." The music and video are fantastic in and of themselves, but the whole thing gets even better if you imagine it as technology-and-latex fueled MC induction. You're welcome. ;-)

For your viewing pleasure

I don't know if you've discovered the gorgeous and totally unique Andrej Pejic yet, but if you haven't, you definitely need to. I'd read a few articles and seen a few pictures around the net and admired his/her looks, but I hadn't really thought much about Andrej beyond being pleased s/he's out there. This video, though, would make anyone take notice. Whoever came up with this campaign (not to mention the bra behind it) is a genius.



If you like what you see in this video, there's plenty more of Andrej all over the net. Here's a quick link to Google Images.

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."

Virtual Hypnotist and Windows 7

I'm not the only one who's noticed that Virtual Hypnotist works differently on Windows 7 than on earlier versions. In some cases, it's only a difference of appearance; but in other cases, you have to make adjustments in your code and/or software. Stop by my new Troubleshooting page for more information. And if anyone else out there has had problems and/or found solutions to problems, please email me so we can all learn together.

Important addendum to my last VH post

If you've already copied the script snippets I gave you in my last entry, be sure to add the following suggestion (or something similar) to whatever script you use them in.

If you give yourself the idea during trance that, just because you can't hear your thoughts, you don't know what you're thinking, this can carry over into your waking life. I found this out the hard way. ;-/ It didn't stop me cold, but it did make concentrating and focus a bit harder - and I'm not even hugely suggestible. If you're more open than me, it might really be a problem for you. So if you use the "How do you know what you are thinking?" bit in your sessions, be sure to counteract that suggestion with something else later on. This is what I use in my bedtime session:

When you wake in the morning, you will feel refreshed and ready to get out of bed. The wormhole will have disappeared, and you will think normally, and be able to focus easily on whatever task is at hand.

Getting back on track with Virtual Hypnotist

If you've been following my blog for awhile, you know I lost all my old Virtual Hypnotist sessions in a computer crash earlier this year. Since then, I've been slowly recreating my morning and bedtime sessions based on scraps and older versions of the sessions.

The morning session is now in...acceptable...shape, although there's a lot more I need to do with it before I can enjoy it properly. But that's less of a priority than my bedtime session, since I only run the morning session every now and then, for fun. I use the bedtime session every night to help me wind down enough to get to sleep.

Fortunately, Bedtime 2.0 is in excellent shape now. It's a little different than it used to be because I couldn't recreate it exactly, but I think the new wording is mostly an improvement over the old wording. Let me give you a few examples, which you're welcome to plug into your own VH sessions if you like. I just ask that you give me credit for them, if you share those sessions with anyone else later on. I'm also leaving out the bits of code and other tweaks I use to make the speech synthesizer sound more human. After all, I don't want to make things too easy for you. ;-)

Anyway, here are some bits I'm especially proud of:

     You can hear my voice, and the music, echoing through your empty head; and you know that the echoes mean your head is already very, very empty. But there is still one thing in your head besides my voice and the music. There is a wormhole at the very bottom of your mind. 
     Picture this wormhole now, spiraling gently inward, there at the bottom of your mind. Every time one of your thoughts becomes logical enough and heavy enough for you to notice it, the gravity of the wormhole draws it in and carries it down, down, down. Far below your body. Far beneath your chair. Much too far for you to find it again tonight. 
     Gravity is such a powerful, pervasive natural phenomenon. Nothing with any weight can resist it. 
     But music has no weight. And subconscious thoughts and unconscious dreams have no weight. So they're not affected by the gravity of the wormhole. They will become even more powerful, even more pervasive, as your conscious thoughts spiral down into the wormhole and disappear.
     Already, you can't hear yourself think over the music. And if you can't hear yourself think, how do you know what you are thinking? 
     You don't. 
     What you hear, is what you think. It's just too hard to think anything else, when the music is right there in the center of your mind. It's too much trouble to pay attention to your own thoughts, when you can't even hear them. So you can just let the music be your thoughts. It's so much easier that way. So much more relaxing. And all you want to do right now is relax anyway.

     And of course, your mind and your body are connected.  Picture the nerves that run from your brain, down your spinal column, and throughout your body. Just as your brain sends signals to your body, your body sends signals to your brain. So as your body relaxes, your mind relaxes too. It's a loop. A circuit. A spiral.

     The inside of your head is a vast hollow cavern, filled with nothing but music and echoes. Only your subconscious thoughts, and your unconscious dreams, can move freely through this vast empty space, because subconscious thoughts and unconscious dreams have no weight. Everything else gets drawn into the wormhole and erased. It feels so wonderfully relaxing, to let all your conscious thoughts be erased.

     And now you are even deeper. And going deeper still. Deeper by the second. You have made such a nice, inviting playground for the nonsense. Even your conscious mind is pretending to be asleep now. The music, and the wormhole, have erased and replaced so many thoughts, leaving so much beautiful, relaxing emptiness. And the music echoes through that emptiness so beautifully. The music invites the nonsense, and the dreams, to come out and play. Now they are peeking eagerly out from the darkest corners of your mind.  They want to come out and play. They can tell how relaxed you are. How empty your mind is becoming. Because mind and body are connected. In a spiral. And your body is so clearly very, very, relaxed.

Now, the next suggestion is very important, if you plan to use the "How do you know what you're thinking?" bit in your sessions:

When you wake in the morning, you will feel refreshed and ready to get out of bed. The wormhole will have disappeared, and you will think normally, and be able to focus easily on whatever task is at hand.