Am I distracting you?

I'm waaaay too busy with work this week to come up with a proper Wednesday post, but maybe if I flash a boob (not mine ;-)), you won't notice.

You can't say I don't know my readership!

Hypnosis this, MC that

First, thanks to Deep Helix for pointing me toward Scott Adams' blog post about hypnosis. I had no idea that Dilbert's creator was trained in the field, but he's written a fantastic analysis of it. I suppose you might consider it a little spoilery in places, if you don't want to know how hypnosis does what it does, but all in all it's fascinating. Here are a few (non-spoilery) choice quotes:

I describe the state of hypnosis as acquiring a power. The subject has all of his regular faculties operating plus he gains some more, if he has no objection to those new powers.

About one person in five can experience what hypnotists call “the phenomena.” For those people, their powers of imagination become so strong it is almost indistinguishable from reality. Those are the people who can give birth without pain, or see an elephant in the room, or eat an onion and think it’s an orange, or have multiple orgasms on suggestion. My name for that group is “lucky bastards.”

Some people have a problem with the idea of hypnosis because they don’t want someone else having control over them. That’s the wrong way to think of it. A hypnotist is more like a coach, or a tour guide. He shows the subject how to unlock his extra powers. He doesn’t “control” the subject. In fact, I’ve never known anyone who didn’t totally enjoy the feeling of being hypnotized. It’s like getting a pedicure on your brain. It’s deeply relaxing, and the hypnotist does all of the work. It feels a bit like being pampered.

I had already planned to make today's entry about my own hypnosis experiences, so Deep Helix's link makes a nice lead-in. I can't say I experience all the "phenomena" that Adams describes - and I really envy the people who do experience them - but at least hypnosis has made some deep, positive changes in my life. I've been going at this for roughly a year and a half now, and as a result of the suggestions in my morning and bedtime Virtual Hypnotist sessions, I feel happier, more confident, more in control of myself (especially my tongue), better able to see through people's manipulations, and better able to fall asleep at night. It's also fun, throughout the day, to think about the kinky secrets I'm keeping from my coworkers. ;-P

Now, from time to time I offer tips for use with Virtual Hypnotist, and here's another. I'm continuing to work on suggestions that will help me stop thinking and analyzing, so that I can just enjoy the depths of mindless bliss that feed my fetish (and help me wind down enough to sleep at night). The best I've come up with so far is this. I use the fact that I can't hear myself think, but I can hear the voice of the hypnotist (meaning the speech synthesizer - I'm still using "Mary in Stadium") and any music and/or recordings of my own voice chanting mantras, to make my own thoughts so insignificant that they almost disappear.

Here's what I mean. This is a screen grab from the text behind my morning session. I've chosen to give you the code, rather than the words alone, because this way you can see the various elements I added to get the most out of the speech synthesizer. If you're using VH and want to make the voice sound as natural as possible, you can drop this text into your own program and get very nice results (more tips along those lines here, of course).

Note: In my 100% nonprofessional opinion, it's very important that, if you use this suggestion, you make it clear that the effect will only work during trance. You certainly wouldn't want to be going about your daily business and realize, out of the blue, that you couldn't hear your own thoughts so you must not be able to think!

Now I'm off to update my VH tutorial, which I relocated to this blog not too long ago. It occurred to me that people who are interested in hypnosis but who aren't actually hypno/MC-kinky might find this site through Google and be put off by some of the other stuff in here...not least the "adult content" warning you get when you first click the link! Poor little vanillas. I'll do what I can to make them feel comfortable. ;-P

Dilbert does MC/robofetishism

Finally someone in the mainstream gets it!

An early inspiration

This is a post I've been meaning to make for ages, but it's taken until now for me to think about it when I actually was at home, with the book in question available for me to quote from.

I've been a fan of Clive Barker practically since his first short story collection was published, which goes a long way toward explaining how I ended up the way I did. ;-) Below is a passage from one of his lesser-known novels, the fantasy/horror Weaveworld, which has informed a lot of my plant-based MC over the years. Of course, since this is Barker we're talking about, his version makes my knock-offs look positively cozy.

You don't need much set-up for the scene. The woman's the heroine, and the man's a random nameless bad guy who showed up just to become cannon plant fodder. At this point they've both been absorbed by the Weaveworld, a fantasy realm that owes a lot to Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, especially in this section. Oh, and if you think the woman's reactions in this passage are understated, that's only because you don't know what she's already been through:

It was a plant, the first living thing she'd seen here beyond the limits of the trail, with which it shared the same multiplicity of forms and brilliance of color. It was about the size of a small tree, its heart a knot of boughs so complex she suspected it must be several plants growing together in one spot. She heard rustling in the blossom-laden thicket, and among the serpentine roots, but she couldn't see the creature whose call had brought her here.

Something did become apparent, however: that the knot at the center of the tree, all but lost among the foliage, was a human corpse. If she needed further confirmation it was in plain sight. Fragments of a fine suit, hanging from the boughs like the sloughed skins of executive snakes; a shoe, parceled up in tendrils. The clothes had been shredded so that the dead flesh could be claimed by flora; green life springing up where red had failed. The corpse's legs had grown woody, and sprouted knotted roots; shoots were exploding from its innards.

There was no time to linger and look; she had work to do She made one circuit of the tree, and was about to return to the path when she saw a pair of living eyes staring out at her from the leaves. She yelped. They blinked. Tentatively, she reached forward and parted the twigs.

The head of the man she'd taken for dead was on almost back to front, and his skull had been cracked wide open. But everywhere the wounds had bred sumptuous life. A beard, lush as new grass, grew around a mossy mouth that ran with sap; floret-laden twigs broke from the cheeks.

The eyes watched her intently, and she felt moist tendrils reaching up to investigate her face and hair.

Then, its blossoms shaking as it drew breath, the hybrid spoke. One long, soft word.

"Amialive."

Was it naming itself? When she'd overcome her surprise, she told it she didn't understand.

It seemed to frown. There was a fall of petals from its crown of flowers. The throat pulsed, and then regurgitated the syllables, this time better articulated.

"Am ia live?"

"Are you alive?" she said, comprehending now. "Of course. Of course you're alive."

"I thought I was dreaming," it said, its eyes wandering from its perusal of her for awhile, then returning. "Dead, or dreaming. Or both...."

[At this point, she realizes that he really is dead, a victim of the cataclysm that brought her here, and that his body has been repurposed by the Weaveworld.]

Her face must have registered her distress at his state, for the tendrils empathized, and grew jittery.

"So I'm not dreaming, then," the hybrid said.

"No."

"Strange," came the reply. "I thought I was. It's so like paradise."

She wasn't sure she'd heard correctly.

"Paradise?" she said.

"I never dared hope...life would be such pleasure."

She smiled. The tendrils were soothed.

"This is Wonderland," the hybrid said.

"Really?"

"Oh yes. We're near to where the Weave began; near to the Temple of the Loom. Here everything transforms, everything becomes. Me? I was lost. Look at me now. How I am!"

I chose the image at the top of this post (by Zdzislaw Beksinski) because, well, it seemed as appropriate as anything else I could think of. ;-/

Holy crap

Some artwork from Stuntkid, who also takes awesome fetish photos. Check him out!

The keys, if you want them

There's a section in Stephen King's nonfiction book Danse Macabre where he talks about the folly of trying to analyze a great story because that takes all the magic it....Then King proceeds to analyze The Haunting because, well, he just can't help telling you why it's as great as it is.

In a similar spirit, I've decided that I probably should say a little more about that Neil Gaiman story I linked you to last Wednesday. So here's a direct cut-and-paste from an e-mail I sent a friend who asked me about it. I don't think I'm a good enough literary analyst to get the deepest levels of the story, but this is what I've come up with so far.  If you hated English class, feel free to stop reading now. ;-)


BIG-ASS SPOILERS BELOW:


-- The narrator never names himself.
-- Calum's son is also named Calum.
-- The narrator says he never saw Calum's wife and doesn't know what color her hair was.
-- The narrator and Calum discuss their views of how you arrive at truth: are there lots of ways to arrive at the same spot, or is there only one right way, with every other path leading you astray?
-- BUT the thing in the cave says, "You are thinking like a mortal man, making things always to be one thing or another." This implies that things really don't have to be just one thing or another. They can be many things at once. With that in mind....
-- Note the ambiguity in this passage: "I was remembering every landmark — climb at the sheep skull, cross the first three streams, then walk along the fourth until the five heaped stones and find where the rock looks like a seagull and walk on between two sharply jutting walls of black rock, and let the slope bring you with it . . .I could remember it, I knew. Well enough to find my way down again. But the mists confused me, and I could not be certain." Why would the narrator say he was "remembering every landmark" at the top of this paragraph if he was really seeing everything for the first time? You think you know what he means, but maybe you don't. Not entirely.
-- Think about the scene where the narrator and Calum both see what appears to be another version of themselves, and ask yourself which direction they're looking when they see it.
-- The narrator steals sheep. Calum is a "reaver," which is another word for someone who steals - but think about all the connotations of that word.
-- Think about the ambiguity of this quote from the ferryman: “For not every day is it that I take a reaver and a little dwarfy man to the Misty Isle.” Is he talking about two people or one?
-- The Misty Isle is west of the mainland, where the narrator begins his story. One of the narrator's secrets is that his father came from the West.
-- The old woman says Calum's hand is "burned," which isn't quite the same as saying it has a burn scar. There is also a "burn" outside Calum's house. "Burn" is a Scottish term for "brook," but of course it can also mean a place that's been burned by fire - and you can also say someone was burned if they were cheated and/or stolen from. Again, Calum and the narrator are both thieves.
-- Calum burned his hand taking his father's dagger out of a fire and refusing to give it up. The narrator takes Calum's dagger.
-- When the narrator and Calum come to the croft house with the abused woman inside, Calum says, “No one at home.” The thing in the cave tells the narrator, "You leave the way you entered, through the mouth of my home." The last line of the story is, "There were a hundred roads and a thousand paths that would take me back to my home in the lowlands, where my wife would be waiting."

Are you starting to see now? These are just the things I've noticed so far, and I always feel like I miss a lot of things real literary scholars notice. Besides, Gaiman is just absolutely freaking brilliant and extremely knowledgeable about things like fairy tales and legends. So I feel like I'm just scratching the depths he built into this story. But from what I can see, it appears that the narrator and Calum are the same person - and Calum's son and the abusive husband in the croft house are other aspects of him (just as Flora, Morag, and the abused wife are all aspects of the same woman). The thing in the cave keeps sending him out and calling him back, taking more and more, making him a worse and worse person. The narrator doesn't care about gold (And characters in the story note more than once that gold is bad but silver is acceptable), but that's all Calum cares about - while the abusive husband doesn't seem to care about anything at all. You can't really make a linear path from one version of the main character to another because that's a "mortal" way of thinking. But clearly, the narrator is a more innocent version of Calum; and the abusive husband is probably a more corrupt version - which means Calum did survive the end of the story in one way or another. Since the thing in the cave says it sends a piece of itself out into the world with each person who visits the cave, then calls that piece back to itself, this is entirely possible. Now you start to see different paths leading back to the same truth, which is in that cave in the Black Mountains. And you begin to see the thing in the cave as being like a spider lurking in the center of a web.

The numbers game

Last night, and again this morning, I peeked in on my blog stats. This is something I haven't done in quite awhile, but it's always an interesting pursuit. For instance....

I always get a little nervous when I see someone visiting from a country that I know (or suspect) censors the websites its citizens can see - and punishes those who visit censored sites. Some of you out there are really playing with fire. You have my sympathies, and I hope you stay safe.

Here's a more detailed breakdown of who's visiting from where. Remember that the free version of Stat Counter only tracks the last 500 visits to my site, so if you don't see your own country on here, that's why.

And here's an analysis of the keywords people are using to find my blog.It's always worth a chuckle, and today is no exception.