What has been once Aforementioned

Mispelling titles makes me happy, it sets the right tone. Anyway holy crap did last month suck. I mean sure the updates have been tapering off for awhile now but I figgured they would pick up again one way or another but literally for most of last month I had no fucking time what so ever. I am not going to harp on this point long. See in general my job treats me pretty well. However, there is a large degree of incompetence when it comes to upper management. This is fine as they leave us alone for the most part. However, when they actually have to do something for us, things become really really bad. SO last month sucked. Also we had one guy quit, one guy go on medical leave, and one guy go to a funeral, so I mean a lot happened. So hopefully we are going a little bit back to normal. For the first time in a long time I got off at 8:30 and I actually had the energy to write afterwords! Awesome. Hopefully this trend will continue all next month otherwise.... well that novel will just be painful.

Of course I just lost 20 minuts while dicking around with face book. I wanted to link up my other blog so that I could just update everything as I go but that isn't happening. So I think what I am going to do is to keep it written in the other blog cause tradition and whatnot and I will do weekly updates in this one. So every sunday there will be a MASSIVE wall a text as a week's worth of novel hits. Or maybe not. I don't care. TOPIC.

So I wanted to return to the BDSM thing. Because it really did peak my interest. See in popular media there really is only two outlets that tried to portray BDSM in a symathetic light. One is Secretary which does a wonderful job of it and the other is the Night Porter which is an utterly profane movie that I happen to love. Beyond that we have some distant outliers, there is the Pillow Book which is a movie I find to be highly erotic but my goodness it can be a vexing visual experience. That man loves dresses. There is also Crash but Crash fits more into the other group of movies. The other group of movies uses BDSM for shock value or to set the charecters apart, like the leatherbar in Irreversable, Matchine from 8mm, or that most memorable scene in S7ven. Man I love that scene. The problem is that people learn alot from the media and as a result there are some noticable gaps in most bdsm lines of clothing because we all get lumped in this one weird sort of area and most people just sort of make due.

As a result most BDSM things tend to be brutish and kind of awful and it fails to properly represent the full range of things I would want to do with someone. I could talk about men's wear which consists of things like this:


Oh god WHY! What the hell are those buckles doing down there? But instead I think I am going to talk about the nature of restraint and what actually is happening when you are tieing someone up. I might tackle the clothing later, but really? REALLY? Where the hell could I possibly start? WHY IS HE WEARING GLASSES? *cries*

No seriously we are going to talk about restraint. You see I am going to start this by saying something rather obvious and depressing but when you tie up your partner you vastly reduce the dynamic possiblities that could happen within the session. There is no more leading around on leashes, no making unreasonable commands and then punishing them when they fail to comply, no more dancing for your amusement, knocking away their attempts at gental caresses before knocking them to the floor and savaging them, no more being bent over a desk reading to you, no more making them pick out their favorite switch, no more movement. When they are tied down that is pretty much the last place they are going. Sure you can drag them elsewhere, but ultimatly you have focused the range of possible actions down to a fairly limited spectrum. Sure sure you can get out the cloths pins, spiders, candle wax, knives, leeches, squids, vomit, used tampons, used condoms, pickles, you name it. The thing is though that once agency from the scene has been removed then there are only a certain number of things that can still happen. What happens, and what order they happen in is up to the dom but the sumbissive is no longer actually submissiver. With their agency removed via restraints there is little left to do but fuck them for a bit and go get a sandwich. You and l both know that there will be eventual untieing no matter how long you leave them so a lot of the suspence goes away. All the sub needs to do is endure.

Note that play sessions with fixed time limits also suffer from this problem. I can put up with a lot less shit when all the sudden I am not sure when it is going to end.

I would also like to take this time to point out that this isn't a case of my kink is better than your kink. If you like tieing people down or being tied down and that is where you want the end to be that is perfectly fine. I would also like to point out that once you tie someone down there really is a variety of things you can do to them. However, sexually I equate this variety with having mundane sex in zany locations. It works just fine for some people and more power to them, so long as I am not mopping up after them. However, I would like more out of my sessions.

This also isn't to say that tieing someone up isn't something I wouldn't do. See there can be an increadble amount of intemcy involved in the tieing down process. It is something I would want to drag out which is why Japanese rope bondage appeals to me far more than the whole bars and typical restraints sort of thing. I am a fan of this idea, however, I do recognize that once this happens I am going to do something that I can't just easily undo which is a shame.

The down side to all of this of course is that there is a much higher creative demand placed on the dom. See when you tie someone down sure you have lots of options but in a limited frame work. There is more control over the possible outcomes of the action. To put it in roleplaying terms it is like using a WIZARD to kidnap the players, and dumping them in a dungeon. Whereas not tieing them down leaves more freedom but also there are more things that can go wrong. We owe our submissives to be creative and wonderful in our punishments. I mean if they are willing to drag jugs of water by their testicles for us then we in turn should be willing and able to flex our creative muscles when coming up for things for them to do. They deserve better than a tie up, butt plug, rough fuck, and good night.

The tricky trick is adopting that sort of persona. This is where I am at a loss. Sorry kids. I've spent so much time repressing this part of myself that I have no idea what I need to do to someone to make them happy. I have some rough ideas though.

1) Gloves. I have an obsession with gloves, I always have and always will. I am not sure what it is but a caress while wearing a glove is something spectacular. When l take the gloves off that should be something special. Kinda like my socks. THis reminds me that I want some latex gloves. I shouldn't of bought more Call of Cthulhu cards. Oh well.

2) Dice. I am not sure what I would do with the dice but I do very much love them, also not the boring normal sex dice I am talking the geek dice. I like the way they look against skin.

3) Fake blood. Yeah I don't know what the deal is with this but I have always wanted to do a wide variety of things in, with, and around fake blood. Does this extend to real blood? I don't know I am afraid it might but cutting has to many practical concerns. Fortunaltly women bleed once a month and I'd like to exparament with that someday.

4) Risk. This is the ultimate reason why I am not a fan of the binding process. It removes the risk. I always want the danger present of having my partner turn on me and all the sudden I am the one taking the beating.

5) Marks. I love it when marks are left on me, especially scratches. I want my evenings to have geography etched into my skin, so that with the right kind of eyes you can see the progress of events.

There are other things. This is all I can think of right now. Also I am hungry which is a shame. I find that there is this increadbile inherent intamecy within the confines of how l view bdsm and like many of my emotions l have a hard time expressing them. Oh well somethings you just need to work through with time, honesty, exparamentation, and practice.

Okay next time you see writting in this space there will be a novel in progress.

Sissors!

This title has not very much to do with my intended post. To bad, years of tears. So I had a topic in mind, it is a good topic too. I was going to write about BDSM and the generalized lack of elegance associated with the subculture. I realized today that the only real elegant examples I can think of in media is BDSM Madonna, Secretary, and The Night Porter. Of course the Night Porter is a little bit to intense for most people. I was going to meditate on the idea of a scene or session and then talk a little bit about the inherent problems of using restraints.

So I am going to write about something else. So the new Malifaux mintures came out and I finally got to see the hooded rider. The hooded rider is the first time I've ever seen a figure so bad that I do not want it. I mean he has Conan muscles. Aweful :(.

Moving on NANO starts in a couple of days. I am going to do it just like I did it last year, daily blog updates so that I can track my progress and have my novel be acessable to me anywhere the internet is. That will also make it easier for anyone who feels like reading it to actually do so. This means I have to remeber to link up the other blog to my face book. Hopefully I will do that tonight. By the way if you do choose to read it, it isn't going to be very good. It is going to be unedited prose and considering at the pace which I have to write and my fuzzyness as to what will happen at any given time throughout the novel it is going to be bad. Still that is the point. like the idea of it. In fact I love it. For one month you plege to put aside the time, and write so much a day, and you don't care about what you are writting you just fucking do it. That last part is the most important thing to me. So many people get so tied up in the quality of the final product that they forget to feel the pure unadulterated exhilaration that is creation. Creativity is a gift like no other and I see NANO as the ultimate expression of it. Oh well and now I go back to work.

The Eternal State of Ready

I'm not the sort of person who does things in order, or rather has things happen to him in order. For the majority of my life it feels like things are happening to me in the wrong order and I need to spend my time running aroun putting things together in the way they are supposed to go. Not complaining mind you, I think it is fun! It also leads to ordinary excitment which is some of my favorite kind. I could explain what I mean by that but I don't want to. Instead I want to talk about weapons.

Recently I've read three articles in three very different publications. The first was in Harper's and it was one man talking about his experiences with carrying a concealed weapon. He discussed a sense of hightened awareness and the line between being ready for something to happen and wanting something to happen started to become blurred. The article really did go out of its way to paint gun carrying in a positive light but ultimatly it makde the whole thing look kinda creepy and paranoid.

The next article I read was a Time magazine cover story where a reporter managed to spend some time hanging out with an extreme militia. There are people who have military level training, sometimes at the hands of former memebers of the military, and they prepare themselves constantly so that they are able to go to war with any threat, to be attacked from any direction at any moments notice. These enemies could be in the form of a sudden terrorist uprising, helping to overthrow an unjust government, the feds, the census worker, mexicans...erm wait no cartel members, et cetera. Again the line between being ready for something to happen and activly desireing something to happen is once again blurry to the point of being indistinct with only the leadership of the various militias holding some of the more agressive members back.

Then I read about Isreal's nuclear program, or rather the fact that Isreal might have a nuclear program in Forgein Affairs. The discussion focused around the pros and cons regarding the secracy surrounding Isreal's nuclear capabilities.

A paticularly favored professor of my used to spend her time terrorizing us. More importantly, she would constantly ask us, "What time is it". We we start seeing reoccuring threads in varying forms of media what does that means in terms of our current cultural moment. She was big on the whole current cultural moment thing. I love Blyn. So here we are three articles discussing the use of weapons, rights, ideas, and what some may call (ie me) an excessive state of readyness. Where does all these things leave us and what concusions can we draw from it.

I can tell you right now that I am not sure. I've totally bitten off more than I can chew. Not in terms of complexity of thought or ideas, but definetly in terms of my current ability to process all of this. I am exhausted, I've had a grueling month at work, and I am taking a break from sorting On the Edge Cards before preforming deck building and this is the first thing I thought of doing to entertain myself. I also have a headache and I don't have one or two of the articles with me so I can't do any fancy quoting. So we are going to treat this like a rough draft, something that I may or may not come back to at a later date....I hope it is may because I do think that this topic is very important and it is worth of some serious thought.

So lets do some concealed weapons first. I learned some interesting things in this article. First of all the whole "everyone gets to carry concealed weapons" thing is relativly new. As late as the early 80's you had to go, register with the poilice, and pass an intereview in which you prove that you have some sort of need to carry a concealed weapon. These needs included private security or living in a paticularly dangerous nieghborhood. Otherwise if you were just a person there was no carrying of the concealed weapons. The next interesting thing I learned is that the number of crimes stopped by armed private citizens and police in 2003 is roughly equal. This makes sense because really just how often are cops around when you need them? They are much to busy patrolling speed traps or whatever the hell it is that they do. This is also in line with some of my beliefs. I believe that to a certain extent that people should be responciple for their own protection, that the cops can't be everywhere at all times and even if they could be we wouldn't want them to be everywhere now would we? God I hope the answer is no.

However, armed citizens breed problems. First of all it creates a divide between the armed and unarmed. It is a divide that I feel is dangerous. The harper's article is rife with it. While I am here the culture surrounding concealed weapons is also rife with increadbl amounts of irrational fear. Condition white is something you are only allowed to be in when you are in your house, with your door locked, alarm system on, and there is a dog at my feet. Oh umm this all comes from the August issue of Harpers 2010 and right now we are on page 32. This paticular passage ammused me because my door doesn't lock, I have no alarm system nor do I have a dog. So guess I never get to relax then or something. I am expected to be terrified both of an ever increasing crime rate and liberals that want to take away both my guns and my McDonalds...honeslty I am okay with the McDonalds I'll just get french fries elsewhere. I am a moral dud, hell even if I were armed I am still a moral dud because it is imperative that I remain on alert at all times forever. The author then goes onto other things and at the end of the article confesses that he will give up his gun because it really is a pain in the ass. He doesn't talk about the adversarial attitude of the people he encounted while getting his permit. Well okay he mentions it but in such a way that it mostly fades into more of a subtext than anything else. The thing that raises my alert flags more than anything is the sense of moral supuriority these people are encouraged to feel as they lug around their guns under their coat. It is the same sort of supuriority that makes "that cop" into a dickhead. I don't mind you wanting to feel morally supurior to me. In fact I encourage it, I think it makes for a wonderful filter in terms of people who I feel like talking to. But now their moral supuriority is made manifest because of a gun. It isn't the gun that freaks me out but rather someone who is willing to excercise potentially lethal force against a target is willing to feel better than me because of the ability to excercise said force. Sure sure you can shoot them in the leg, but as all dexter fans know there are arties in the legs that will kill someone just as certainly as a shot to the neck.

You know what before I get carried away lets hop onto the other side of the coin for a bit. On this other side of the coin, where there is a hightened awareness of one's situation, a blurred line between wanting something to happen and being ready for it, the moral supuriority, and the fear there is also a healthy respect for the awesome responciblity placed upon them. While carrying a gun, along with the heightened responcibiliy comes the knowlage that even minor altercations can portentially ballon outwards into a leathal conflageration. Wow I just used all sorts of big words there didn't I? Gold star for me. I am not going to harp on this point over much because it seguays into the time article rather well. It also midtigates a lot of the stuff I am talking about above significantly an it isn't to be ignored. It isn't so much that I think the guy next to me carrying a gun is some sort of wacko, or an unbalanced fear mongering freak job. It is part of a far more subtle interconnected movement in our country where everything is going wrong so we need to arm up and everyone not arming up is the enemy. Amen.

So now we are at the time article. Oddly enough I came away far more comfortable with these people than the people from the Harper's article. Isn't that a little strange? There are reasons for this though. See with the militia you know where you stand. THey are a public organization which operates out in the open and they arfe pretty clear about thier views. Now granted a lot of these views are distinctly anti government and unusually intense but they are up front about it. They talk with an increadible degree of frankness concerning their willingness to use voilence against any enemy that dares show its face regardless of origin. Let me be clear on this some of these people are really really scary. But I find their openess comforting

Around the Bend

Hrm I'm not going to have a lot of time for this but I was reading something fun so I don't care. So I finally think I've come around the bend. Essentailly what this means is that I have been doing a lot of extra work recently...lots and lots. It isn't going to end any time soon, we are talking a month minimum and it is going to be longer than that. I know. It isn't so much that I am doing to much work or anything like that, I am just doing more of it. As a result I needed to get to a point where I am used to doing this new amount of work and I am pretty much there right now. Which is nice. Tonight it pretty much the ultimate stress test. If I can get out at 8:30/9 and not be compleatly dead tired I will have made it.

This is many good things. I doesn't mean a return to Mutants and Masterminds unfortunatly. Of course I was going to take a break for National Novel Writting Month anyway so I guess this is just how that is going to work. I am hoping that after NANO the whole work thing will be better under control and I will be able to resume gming *crosses fingers*...or maybe not. See last year NANO taught me something. It taught me that I can set a goal and a schedule, I can adhere to both of these things without encouragement or understanding from my friends, and I can succeed. This isn't a knock against my friends in any way it is just that most people didn't understand what I was doing and why just that I was. I wonder how many people read it?

Oh well this year I am realizing the cold hard fact that I just need to plain old write more, and that instead of just doing it when I feel like it I need to set a production schedual and stick to it. See I came up with the novel idea and that is what I wanted to do. But then I realized I could also get a jump on a serialized fiction thing, I could write all the fluff for NA25, and I came up with another novel idea. The thing is that NANO doesn't need to be once a year and once I pop out the other side of this thing I am going to seriously consider start throwing writting months on maybe a bi monthly basis or something like that.

In other news I got to sit down last night and play the new DS Final Fantasy game, and by god I like it, I really like it. I've been wanting to play a consol rpg for awhile now and as much as I love SMT, and Etrian Oddesy I HATE first person rpgs. I always have and I always will. It is just a perspective thing I guess, or something like that. I just find overhead maps more pleasent to navigate though I will argue that Etrian Oddesy just wouldn't be the same game if it wasn't first person, though over the shoulder 3rd person wouldn't kill them either. This game though? It is nice. Really nice. The graphics are postivily beautiful. I hated the graphical style they used for the 4 remake, and I am not a fan of the crystal chronical graphics, but this seems to get it all just right. The game play style is pleasently old school both in terms of difficulty and presentation and I think they stuck the right mix between three's class change system and five's. All in all I really like it, I got my ass kicked a couple of times, and two party memeber just ran off with all the best weapons and armor but that's okay. I'll get over it.

Lastly I've gotten a fuckton of On the Edge cards and I want a fuckton more. God damn do I love that game, but that is a post for another day.

Something else

...I am not sure what though. Man it has been a long time since I've really had the oppertunity to just sit and write. I've not been getting home until 10pm at night which is to late to go to books a million, hell it is to late to go to the grocery store. There also isn't really an end in sight so it looks like this is just going to be the way it is for awhile. I am not sure how I feel about it. Part of me just wants to jump ship, but the part of me that wants to jump ship is a voice that is attached to a MUCH bigger issue that I will deal with in my own time. Right now it is just one of those things that happens from time to time in every job, especially the crap ones. It isn't a big deal but it does require changes. Like I don't think I'll be able to continue running Mutants and Masterminds. This really disapoints me because I just cleared the decks with a major event, reset the scene, and I was ready to go back at it, full steam ahead. Now... because of work I am dead in the water. Recently, I've been so tired when l get home that I can't even tank in city of heroes...so I've been doing other things.

I would love to go back to mutants and masterminds though. I really like the setting I came up with and all sorts of other things. I hate the game system though and I am thinking of just homebrewing something. Most of the nuts and bolts are okay but the damage system is aweful, especially when you factor in how rediculously cheap regeneration is. Really, it isn't a flaw in the basic design so much as it is just part of the problem with the d20 system. You can literally make everything you want with that game system and it can support many many styles of play. However, having ONE BIG villian that poses a credible threat is really hard mostly because you are either bruised or knocked out. There isn't really a whole lot of stuff inbetween.

Oh well so I might homebrew up the damage. I was going to take a break in November anyway for national novel writting month cause that is important to me and I wanna do it again. I am going to resuse the idea I had from my first aborted attempt because...well I really really liked it. Also I mean I lost it in a data transfer acident. I was a good halfway there and then, all gone. I don't really see it as cheating I don't think I am going to reuse any of the same scenes from last time, and I certainly am not going to be resuing the actual files. Just the ideas. OR! I did want to do a serialized fiction thing. I still want to do a serialized fiction thing. I know evan did one for quite a bit and it was pretty impressive. I still want to do this. So what I might do is use NANO to get a jump on it. This means I wouldn't publish it in my blog as I went. Instead I would keep them and then just edit them up a bit before posting them. Then I could make a schedual of one or two additional episodes a week leaving me WAY ahead prolly long after I loose interest in it. I might do that. I'll think about it.

Unit whenever.