Great-Great-Great-Grandaddy Hiram Powers

Nice butt on that statue!
I'm not one to brag on my long and proud lineage as a bondage artiste, but there it is: I have one. One of my most famous ancestors that no one has ever heard of is Hiram Powers, a sculptor. And the sculpture that earned him his place in the art world was a little piece called "The Greek Slave," an image of a naked, chained woman looking a uncertain and defensive, being naked and chained and all.

Here's how one of my favorite authors, James Burke (best known for his "Connections" TV series on the history of technology)
describes the work in his book American Connections in the chapter on Declaration of Independence signer John Morton:

Frances Trollope (author Anthony's mother) ... wrote "Domestic Manners of the Americans" (Brits loved it, Americans didn't) and set up a money-making wax-museum project entitled "Infernal Regions" featuring dummies, mechanical figures and electric shocks. Most of the show's figure-modeling work was done by young sculptor Hiram Powers. Who eventually made it to D.C., where he sculpted the president and other luminaries, then headed for Florence, Italy. In 1843 he produced his blockbuster (possibly the most influential American statue ever) Greek Slave. The statue of a nude, shackled slave girl, her pose evoking the thought of terrible Turkish perversions, toured the United States for two years to standing-room-only prurience.

Heady company, you betcha! The most inflential American statue ever! A naked slavegirl in chains! In short, the most influential American statue ever was SEXUAL BONDAGE PORN! The more you learn about history, the weirder it gets! And I'm part of it! You, too ... probably.

A Rare Ring Gag in A Mainstream Film

"Say AAAAAH? How can I NOT say Aaaaaaah?"
Seen here an image from "The Unborn" by all reports a mediocre 1990 horror flick about giving birth to the devil's child, or something like it. Odette Yustman's character voluntarily submits to bondage and gaggage for exorcism-related reasons. Gags like these show up in Japanese bondage imagery a lot, much more than in US bondage imagery. Guess this is an example of cross-cultural influence at work. Huzzah!

Slave Auction Mystery Solved

Won't somebody PLEASE take the lady with the skinny legs?"
Years ago ... a decade or more, in fact, I first encountered the mystery images of the slave auction, one of which you see here. For years I wondered about it and it led to my brilliant deduction that the photos were a documentary depiction of Kyle McLaghlan selling the mothers of the Spice Girls into slavery. Well ... I've discovered the true origin of the photos, you can read all about it here. Truth may not be as strange as fiction in this instance, but it's still pretty good!

Octoberfest Is Over!

And I don't care!
Our beerfest waitress is modeled by professionally-large-breasted adult model Chloe Vevrier, you can see more of her here.

When Tupperware Parties Go Bad!

It happens!
Just a fun image I picked up on the web. Something about the lady in the background said "Suburban moms" so what else could this be but a tupperware party gone wild? The guys in the suits? Hey, whose idea do you think it was?

Bikini Jones And the Temple of Sexual Bondage

Rebecca Love does some oral loving while cuffed in this topnotch (for Skinamax) sexual bondage scene.

It's been 15 years since we had a sexual bondage scene this good in a Skinamax film, and it might be another 15 years before we do again. In fact, this Skinamax scene has something all the others do not ... lighting! Check out my review of the movie on Bondagerotica.

Shibari Goes Public AT DragonCon 2010

Every year Dragoncon manages to bring up a new surprise. So far as I can tell, for the adult-oriented costumers, the game is to come up with something that is as blatantly sexy as possible and sexual as hell that still does not get you thrown out of the convention or arrested. Given that the sexual mores get pretty damned relaxed during the Con, especially late at night in the bar areas, attendees have rung up some fairly imaginative changes on the nudity, sex and bondage themes that predominate among them.

2010 has been no exception and might well be a winner. Just check out this lovely bit of shibari bondage, worn atop the young lady's skimpy but definitely legally covering all the naughty bits and then some clothing. The ropes are obvious to anyone who knows bondage, particularly Japanese bondage, and of course, the reason why there's a great big knot right over the young lady's sweet spot is also obvious to those who know bondage. All in all, it's quite a daring thing to wear, and yet ... perfectly legal. Now that's plausible undeniability!

(I put the masks over the young ladies' faces because I had heard that some attendees who cavorted about in sexy costumes one year and whose images were then shown on a DragonCon website had faced the possibility of some job losses. These young ladies might be wiling to take such risks and appear in public thusly attired, but I'm not willing to take it on their behalf.

Now THIS Is Sexy Bondage!

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Hank Johnson's Guam-Tipping Revelation Tip of the Iceberg!

U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga, Dist. 4) revealed in Congressional testimony that Guam Island is in serious danger of capsizing due to overloading by U.S. military personnel. This is the first in what will undoubtedly be many stories about the fact that many islands are extremely unstable and can easily be tipped over if too many people inhabit them, or if too many inhabitants/visitors move to the "wrong" side of them.

In fact, the largest island in the world, the island continent of Australia has long been known to be extremely unstable ... that's why England only sent convicts, debtors and other "expendables" over as colonists initially. It is also why the vast majority of the inhabitants are on the western coast of Australia ... if too many people moved to the eastern coast ... and it wouldn't take many ... the entire continent would plunge to a watery doom.

This is also why the largest island in the world that is NOT a continent ... Greenland ... has an ice sheet over it. Contrary to many published reports (think "cover up") Greenland's ice sheet was built in the 1800s, an entirely artificial structure designed to hold the highly unstable island down and keep it from tipping over. This is why Greenland was never colonized ... it was so unstable that the first settlers could feel it shifting beneath their feet when they landed.


A Japanese slavegirl is chained to a cement block to help keep her island country from tipping over ... yes, they have their problems, too!

The downsides of allowing extremely large islands to tip over can easily be explained with one single word ... Atlantis!

Would You Like A Blowjob With That?

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Paga Sluts: A Viable Fantasy, Even on Gor?

This is part 2 of a three part series on paga taverns. Links to parts 1 and 3 at the bottom of this post.)

"They guy at table 12 is about to blow a fuse waiting for his Rancho Deluxe Burger ... wait a minute, he just hauled Suzy off to an alcove!"

So if you want to have paga sluts, you’re going to need a lot of them, enough to fuck all the men who order booze and then request sex, with others on hand to serve food and drink while their co-workers lie chained and naked with their legs spread, providing whatever sexual delights their customers order.

If you had the only such establishment in town on Earth, you’d have to figure on a 1/1 ratio of customers to girls, almost. But we’re not talking about an individual paga tavern, we’re talking about paga taverns as an institution. So let’s switch tracks and see how paga taverns work as an institution on Gor, to get a better idea how they might work on Earth … hell, they might not even work on Gor, as described.

Paga taverns that provide the use of a girl with the price of a drink or a meal would undoubtedly have a much higher number of girls working than a paga tavern that did not, if only because squirming in her bonds underneath various customers is both labor-intensive and time-consuming.

If you had to pay wages to these additional staffers, or paga sluts as Norman calls them, it would be MUCH more expensive to run a paga tavern with paga sluts than it would be to run regular paga tavern where the slaves just served liquor and food.

But on Gorean tavern masters did not have to pay wages to their paga sluts, because they were of course slaves. And slaves on Gor are not expensive to keep on hand. Let’s look at the economics of the deal.

FOOD

Mmmmm, Purina Slave Chow, made from reprocssed tarsk scraps, keeps their skins so soft and silky!

Food for slaves is cheap for slaves because of course you are not concerned about taste or appearance, you just want to keep the slave able to perform their duties without passing out from hunger. So you buy a big bag of ta-sarna wheat, mix it with some water and table scraps and leftovers from the previous day’s meals that are too dodgy to throw in today’s soup but not in a poisonous state, and voila! You have a day’s worth of feed for up to 50 slaves.

And of course, patrons will sometimes feed the girls table scraps themselves, right at their tables, for the fun of it and perhaps to give them a positive incentive to perform well in the alcoves, always having the whip as a negative incentive, of course. As far as management is concerned, it's free feed for the slaves, since the customer has bought the food.

And that’s the ONLY regular expense a tavern master of Gor would have for his slaves. Slave wine is a perfect, long-lasting, side effect free contraceptive, so no worries there. The stabilization serums keep the girls healthy, prevent aging, and ensure they live hundreds of years, which means no medical expenses and very little in the way of turnover due to aging and death by aging.

SHELTER

Iron cages do not a prison make, but they make pretty good cages!

So we’ve got food covered, shelter is just an iron cage not much bigger than a cardboard box a large screen TV comes in here on Earth. And the iron cages are stackable so you don’t need much room to house them. Kinda tough on the slaves on the lower levels, but what the hell, slaves are washable.

CLOTHING

A paga slut in the scullery, waiting to be called to serve, dressed for her job.

As for clothing … why would a paga slut need clothing? It would just get in the way. So it gets cold in the winter or rainy in the summer … it’s indoor work! You might have a house winter coat or three on hand for when you want to send trusted slaves out on errands, but the majority of them can stay in the cozy confines of the paga tavern’s serving rooms, kitchens or in the furs of the alcoves.

So food, shelter, clothing are all covered as regular expenses. But there are some one-time expenses associated with keeping slaves: cages, cuffs, chains, shackles, whips, collars and such, so these can easily be amortized over the hundreds of years the slave will serve you in a state of complete beauty and youth on Gor. IN fact, there might even be a tax break associated with the depreciation of collars and cages and so forth because, let’s face it, if there is any place in the universe where you can get a tax break for the expenses involved in keeping slaves, it’s Gor.

Therefore, I propose that on Gor the cost of keeping 20 slaves is not all that much more expensive than keeping 10 slaves, and the difference between keeping 30 slaves and 20 slaves is even less pronounced, once the slaves are purchased.

Furthermore, there is ample precedence for slaves being cheap … really cheap … on Gor. In Outlaw of Gor its stated that ordinary untrained slaves might sell for as little as five copper tarn disks, and as much as 30 tarn disks. (The smallest unit of currency in Gor is the tarsk bit, it is literally one eighth of a tarsk disk (that is, a copper tarsk disk can be broken into eight pieces, each piece is a tarsk bit). Paga tavern owners who are buying girls as paga sluts would of course look for pretty ones, so I suspect they would be paying 20-30 copper tarns rather than 5 coppers tarns.

Still, that’s pretty cheap. For example a copper tarn at a paga tavern will buy food, drink and the use of a paga slut. So it wouldn’t take a hell of a lot of time for a paga slut to pay for her purchase price. Thirty customers in a week seems reasonable, even conservative, so one week after she's bought she's earned her purchase price.

I was going to go into a long dissertation on Gorean economics to support my point, but the more I learned about the subject the more I realized that it made little or no sense, so I chucked that plan. Norman was not an economist, and there’s no reason he should have been, remember, he was writing novels, not world-building. He had a lot of fundamentally contradictory stuff in his Gorean economics, the biggest howler being his claim that slaves were rare on Gor, amounting to just 2 or 3 percent of Gor’s population, even though in the novels the characters can hardly move without tripping over a slave, but most tellingly, even though slaves are consistently described as cheap.

I mean, you ever heard of a rare and desirable commodity that was also cheap?

Still, I’m comfy with my analysis of the expense of keeping slaves, so, yeah, paga taverns made sense on Gor … the paga tavern owner whose slaves were NOT sexually available to customers would be destined to a fast ticket to being an ex-paga tavern owner.

But … could it happen on Earth?

Would You Like A Blowjob With That, Sir?
Part 3: How Would Paga Taverns Work On Earth?

Paga Taverns of Earth … And Gor
Part 1: A Brief Introduction To Paga Taverns

Paga Taverns of Earth ... And Gor ...

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The Simpsons Strike Back!

"Help me, Obi-Kent Brockmani! You're my only hope!"

Marge Simpson has joined the ranks of hotties who have donned the Slave Leia outfit. Further comment would be gilding the lily.

Why Are The Democrats So Fucking Incompetent at PR and Debating?

A whipped-dog-democrat assumes proper fighting stance!

Image Source: Sandra Romaine's lovely butt in kink.com shoot 3494.

An interesting point was brought up on a politics board I frequent: why are Democrats doing such a TERRIBLE job of debating/PR, with regard to the health care debate?

They should be ALL OVER this debate. They’ve got the numbers, they’ve got the human interest, hell they’ve got the fucking BLOODY SHIRT to wave.

America’s health care system is rated #37 in the world by the World Health Organization, yet we pay FAR more than any other country for health care. There. That number is the bottom line. The Democrats should have been beating the Republicans over the head so vigorously and repeatedly that everyone in America would know the statistic by heart. It is a fucking awesome club for beating Republicans and conservatives over the head on health care policies, especially in tandem with the rising health care costs most Americans are experiencing in their personal pocketbooks.

The Dems have the option of “waving the bloody shirt” (a term coined to describe the practice of waving the bloody garments of downed partisans to incite crowds to more violence in revolutionary times, now watered down to mean any emotional rhetoric concerning victimized people inclined to incite listeners/readers on their behalf) thanks to the insurance companies. The pro-health-care position’s bloody shirt consists of all the people who have lost health care benefits along with their jobs, or who have been denied health care benefits because of the infamous “pre-exiting conditions” and have been dropped from the health care rolls because they got sick, and who’ve died and/or lost all of their money as a result. People are dying because of the way health care is run in this country, and the Republicans/conservatives don’t give a damn about it. It’s a simple and effective bit of rhetoric that should be used constantly by Democrats.

Americans by and large hate these perils of modern society, and only now that the reconciliation bill is under debate are SOME of the Democrats actually using their most powerful rhetoric. Not for the purpose of promoting single payer or the public option, mind you, just to justify passing the current bill via the reconciliation process (which requires only 50% of the vote as opposed to 60 percent) watered down and crippled though it has been in the Senate.

Instead of seeing the Republicans endlessly mugged by Democrats while defending a hopeless position , what we saw was the Republican beating the damn stupid Democrats over the head with the made-up issue of “death panels.” (It’s made-up because there are no “death panels” or anything remotely resembling them in the new legislation.) The Republicans’ made up outrage was more effective as a rhetorical fighting point than the real outrages of our present system.

This is just the latest in a long line of Republican rhetorical victories stretching all the way back to the “Contract with America,” the most infuriating and telling example of which was the “swift boating” of John Kerry. Kerry was indisputably the braver man than his opponent Bush II (I.e., Dubya) during the Vietname War era, as he fought in the very dangerous swift boat campaign and was shot at with real bullets by North Vietnamese troops, and wounded, receiving a Purple Heart, while Dubya did nothing but take a safe post in the National Reserve (it was considered a “safe” way to avoid the draft) flying over the skies of San Pedro Island, Texas, undoubtedly on pussy patrol most of the time.

The Republicans were able to dredge up a bunch of drunken old reprobate swift boat sailors who never sailed with Kerry who were willing to say that Kerry didn’t get wounded as much as the medical papers claimed and that he didn’t get shot at as much claimed either, though they never disputed that he was in action, or that he did get wounded to some extent. They couldn’t deny that because they weren’t on the swift boat with Kerry. And the guys that WERE on the swift boat with Kerry all said Kerry did perform bravely under fire and deserved a Purple Heart.

Didn’t matter. It worked. The made-up story about Kerry not truly earning a Purple Heart allowed the Republicans to say, “Well BOTH men had dubious records during the Vietnam War. On the one hand, Bush got a cushy post in the National Reserve, from which he may have gone AWOL and certainly never was in any danger of serving in combat, on the other hand, the severity of the wounds Kerry received in combat may not have merited a Purple Heart.” To a sloppy, timid or lazy journalist, this constitutes “balanced reporting.” And there were an awful lot of sloppy, lazy, timid journalists back in the build up to the election of 2004.

And the Contract with America worked. And the incredible string of lies and chicanery that constituted the Presidential and Congressional campaigns in 2000, 2002 and 2004 worked. They worked, they fucking worked, and they worked BEAUTIFULLY, and the only reason we STILL don’t have a Republican President and a Republican Senate and House is that the Republicans fucked up so incredibly badly that their lies couldn’t cover them up any more. Doesn’t matter what Fox News analysts say when you or people you care about have lost your job and/or your house because the economy is in the toilet and your health insurance got taken because you got sick.

As I said before, I don’t think the people who lead the Democratic Party don’t know how to fight rhetorically. They’ve been doing it since they started in politics, and for the most part, they’ve been in politics for decades. Real veterans, they were probably fine rhetorical wrasslers in their time.

But I think the particular experiences that these Democratic leaders have had over the last couple of decades, rather than honing their skills and cranking up their abilities at rhetorical fighting, they’ve learned that when a public debate gets hot the thing to do is not strike back but give ground and shield yourself as best you can, because you are gonna get hammered.

The Democratic leadership fails so thoroughly now that they are in a position of strength relative to their Republicans because they STILL don’t have the ability to attack the Republicans when the Republicans tell one of their blatant lies. The Democratic leaderships’ reflexes are all to cover up and protect themselves, what punches they do throw are timid feints and jabs, not the devastating haymakers that the Republicans’ blatant lies and misrepresentations call for.

To be more specific, I’m sure that at one time Harry Reid in the Senate and Nancy Pelosi in the House were tough, hard-bitten rhetorical fighters who knew how and when to relentlessly hammer an opponent for a blatant lie, but those days are long gone. Now all they are really suited to do is count votes and proceed only if the tally indicates things are absolutely certain to go their way.

Considering all the beatings they have taken, you can kinda understand it, but still they are an anchor around the neck of most Democratic initiatives.. The whipped dog Democrats aren’t doing the progressive cause any great favors, any more than the blue dog Democrats are. What we need are some biting-dog Democrats … or at least some barking ones.

"C'mon! You want a piece of me? Hunh? Hunh? Hunh? You wanna mess with me? I'm right here!" A whipped-dog democrat sends out her traditional challenge.

Image source: Carissa Montgomery in kink.com shoot 35037.

Rigged for Love

"All right, missy. If THAT rig doesn't make you cum sometime in the next eight hours, nothing will!"

Image courtesy of the Hogtied website. Christina Carter models. She once was a glamour model, and I still find her glamourous, in a bondage-y way.

Wrist Ankle Bondage Gets Fashionable

Writhing down the runway ... the new trend in fashion presentations!


Well, if you asked me what I thought would be the VERY LAST bondage technique to be adopted by the fashion industry, I would of course have said "hogties." And it’s true that no hogties have showed up in fashion shows that I know of. But hot on the heels of hogties in the lastness department would be ‘wrist-ankle bondage.” Because most fashions are about clothes, which generally allows you to move fairly easily, and wrist-ankle ties, although allowing more freedom of movement than many other forms of bondage, definitely inhibits walking, in fact, it kind prevents walking.


Wrist-ankle bondage done right. Note that in this case, unlike the one in the fashion bondage photo, the wrists are secured right to the ankles, forcing the bondagette to spread her legs. Not very fashionable.

Of course, the fashion bondage is not all THAT bondage-y because the links between the wrists and the ankles are long coiled cords that don’t actually inhibit the wearer’s ability to move very much. Then again, fashion isn’t ABOUT getting bondage right, it’s about making sly references to it in something you might conceivably wear in public if you are the sort of person who buys that crap. I mean, if you are fashion-forward.


Wrist-ankle bondage is a favorite of mine because it allows more motion for the bondagette, and it allows you to sex her sunny-side up or sunny-side down, without doing any untying and retying.

Images of actual bondagettes courtesty of Fucking Dungeon.com.

Super Friends Logic In Earthquake Weather

Empowered and the Super Friends … add in some Tim Powers and you have something that is so very, very, very … wrong!

OK, because I’m so jazzed about Tim Powers’ “On Stranger Tides” beng the official basis for the next Pirates of the Caribbean (PotC, henceforth) movie (instead of the unofficial basis, as it was for the first three PotC movies) I’ve started reading “Earthquake Weather” the last book in the “Last Call” trilogy.

It’s been hard slogging, to be frank. The best Tim Powers novels (like “On Stranger Tides,” “the Anubis Gates” and “Declare”) grab your brain and hurl it through story so hard and fast that after you finish the book your brain skids for a couple of days.

Earthquake Weather” is hurt by having too many protagonists and by long sections of exposition in which the many portagonists try to figure out the nature of the supernatural problems and perils they keep encountering. Now Powers is famous for doing extensive research for his supernatural stories, filling them with accurate historical details, telling facts, strange but true science and just plain fun, but if you don’t know the basis for all the supernatural background, things can get a little dicey.

It’s a problem because you frequently find characters making deduction and so forth that are not at all reasonably derived from what’s going around … so far as you know. In fact, in Earthquake Weather this phenomenon becomes so pronounced that for me it was a lot like encountering Super Friends logic.

And that’s a harsh, harsh thing to say. “Super Friends logic” is a phenomenon identified by the Internet blogger Seanbaby on the infamous Seanbaby’s Super Friends Page, perhaps one of the most malefic, hilarious examples of Internet snarkery on any topic known to man.

To be fair, the “Super Friends” -- a 1970s Hannah Barbera cartoon based on DC Comics’ Justice League of America series -- is a near-perfect target for snarkery. Badly drawn, badly edited, badly wiitten and badly voiced, it was a truly feeble-minded enterprise that insulted the intelligence of the two-year-olds that were undoubtedly its primary audience. But Seanbaby skewers it with such precisely placed barbs that you find yourself reading the essays on the various character over and over to because you just can’t stop laughing. (Wonder Woman’s travails with her invisible plane and Aquaman’s entire review are my faves … good stuff.)

When the Superfriends were faced with some puzzle or mystery as they fought their arch villainous enemies (also essayed, to hilarious effect) they would of course combine their brainpower to puzzle out the mystery. But because the writers knew the conclusion they wanted the SuperFriends to reach already, and because they didn’t give a damn about how they reached it, the “logic” employed by the SuperFriends tended to be a series of unsupported non-sequiters having no relation to each other at all.

For example:

Superman: All the Fishmonger could say before he died was “Purple monkey dishwasher,” so we STILL don’t’ know where Lex Luthor has stashed Empowered!”

Hawkman: Maybe we can figure it out!

The Flash: Wait a minute! Mountains are sometimes purple … purple mountains majesty … and volcanos are a kind of mountain!

Robin: And … monkeys fear lava!

Green Lantern: And dishwashers spew hot water, just like volcanoes spew lava!

Batman: (Batman always announces the conclusion, the writers undoubtedly hoping you’ll buy it because Batman is “the smart one”) “So, ‘purple monkey dishwasher’ can only mean that Lex Luthor has Empowered trapped inside an erupting volcano!”

And so the Super Friends would go haring off to the nearest erupting volcano and sure enough, there would be Empowered, bound and gagged but not naked because, Super Friends was a family show. Dammit.

This sounds like an exaggeration but really it’s not -- the non-sequiters that the Super Friends actually used in lieu of logic were every bit as ludicrous as the one I just made up.

Tim Powers is on the exact opposite end of the scale from the uncaring hacks who spewed out the Super Friends stories, stories so bad they insulted the intelligence of the toddlers who were its only audience. Yet, surprisingly, the effect of his well-researched, intricately plotted writing is the same. Let me demonstrate with this passage:

Kootie had lifted out of the cardboard boxes an electric pencil sharpener and now the boy carefully unsnapped its wood-grain printed plastic cowl. Underneath, instead of the crossed grinders of a pencil sharpener’s works, a thick stick of yellow chalk was attached to the rotor.

“This middle section is pretty deeply grooved from the last time,” Kootie said, peering at the chalk. “But we can attach the spring to a different section, closer to the motor, and I remember how Edison set it up.”

“I’m not sure Edison himself knew what he was doing,” said Pete.

“I remember how he set it up.” said Kootie.

“Fine,” said Pete. “Good.” He glanced at Cochran and smiled. “That’s our speaker, our receiver -- that pencil sharpener. Most speakers used induced changes in the field of a magnet to wiggle the diaphragm; we can’t do that, because an actual physical magnet would draw ghosts the way a low spot on a pavement collects rainwater. If we did this a lot, I’d hook up a piezoelectric quartz, or an electrostatic setup with perforated condenser plates, but this arrangement actually des work well enough. We’ll soak the chalk with water, and then attach the diaphragm spring to the surface of the chalk, which will be spinning when we turn on the pencil sharpener -- wet chalk is toothy and full of friction ordinarily, see, but it gets instantly slick when there’s an electric current going through it. The changes are variable enough and rapid enough to get decent low-quality sound out of the attached diaphragm.”

Cochran understood that the man was sociably trying to let him know what was going on, so he returned the smile, jerkily, and nodded. “Clever,” he said.

“It was better sound quality than a lot of the headphones out there,” said Kootie.

“I’m not dissing your old orisha, son,” Pete said mildly. In one hand he picked up a rack of glass tubes and in the other a glass cylinder that had a little metal rod rattling in it like a bell clapper. “I’m gonna take the vacuum pump out to the kitchen and hook it to the faucet to evacuate the Langmuir gauge. You might get everybody crowded into the laundry room, Kootie, or out in the back room. Out of this room, anyway.”

Earthquake Weather, p. 116-117.

As you can see, it’s a combination of Amazing Super Science and a kid’s science project, with a smooth patina of supernatural blah-blah-blah. It’s fine in small quantities, but Earthquake Weather is jam-packed with this sort of stuff, and after awhile, your eyes gaze over, if not out-and-out cross, and you start mumbling … pencil sharpener … wet chalk … TV set … jar of penies … bug spray … orisha … Langmir gauge …” of COURSE … THAT’S how you communicate with the dead!

True, it MAY possible to construct a speaker using a pencil sharpener and wet chalk , and you may be able to communicate with ghosts on a TV set if you set up the aerials JUST SO and do the proper chants (I understand this is how EVERYBODY got TV back in the 1960s) but still, jumble enough of that stuff together and what do you have?

Purple … monkey … dishwasher.

World of Warcraft and Hyborea and Gor Evolved, Oh My!

Combat ... the common coin of the World of Warcraft, Hyperborea and Gor Evolved.

A fellow showed up on the Gorums saying that he was working with a well-heeled company that was interested in developing a pay-for-play virtual world (think World of Warcraft) that would include adult content (think Second Life, thought it is a freebie world, not pay for play). He asked for suggestions, which sparked some thinking on my part, which I'll share with you, because I'm such a nice guy.

You should really look at Gor Evolved (which you apparently did not do) if you want to really assess the potential of Gor for helping populate your virtual world. One of the advantages you cite would be HUGELY popular for Gor Extended players, who typically engage in the dreaded combat thing much more often than BtB players, which is ... no lag. SL Gor fights between huge groups with dozens of players participating typically result in arrows hanging in the air in rows. If your lag solution fixes that, and I'm pretty sure it would, you'd have a huge advantage over SL Gor right there alone.

The ablity to have 1000 avatars on a single sim would be good too. Right now we don't KNOW how big battles in Gor Extended might be because sims typically can't handle more than 60 players at a swat (as the BtB guys how often their battles ... hell, their ANYTHINGS ... bump up against sim limits on the number of players). I can see battles with hundreds of players that last for hours. Tremendous fun for me and the despised "pew-pewers" I think.

And because of its greater emphasis on combat, and on it's better range of roles for women (i.e., female warriors, not permitted in the more tradional Gorean sims) Gor evolved is likely a more productive source of new players from outside Gor. I'm thinking about World of Warcraft (WoW) here. It has eleven million players I understand. I imagine that every months tens of thousands of WoW players think, "Damn, I'm getting bored with WoW and all the other games out there ... I mean, I still like the fighting, but I wish there was more to it."


Sexy slavegirls, the common coin of Hyperborea and SL Gor. That would amount to "more to it," wouldn't it?

Well, what they are thinking about is what Gor Evolved IS. If you can communicate that to WoW players somehow, you might have a conduit that could pump thousands of new players to your world every month, and there's nothing WoW can do about it, because they have to keep that youth market. Your world could sort of "harvest" the WoW players as they mature.

Now an original thought. Why do Gor? Why not do something like the Hyborean world described in the "Savage Sword of Conan" comics? Slavery is rampant in that world, Goreans slavegirls, Masters, Mistresses and such would fit quite naturally into it. I wrote a long article about the Hyborean Age's Gorlike aspects at one time, and came to following conclusion:

The thing about Savage Sword of Conan other than being damn good in and of itself, is that all the elements were there to make it a Gorean-in-everything-but-name comic (as it is, it's damn close to being that). All it would have taken is a little more focus on bondage where the slavegirls are concerned.

My point is, Goreans could live very easily in the Hypborean Age, taking roles as slavegirls, warriors, free women and such that are pretty much the same as their roles in Gor, and you wouldn't have to fight all the prejudice against Gor that now exists. Frankly I think Goreans have a better feel for roleplaying barbarians than anyone else, because they alone have dared to play roles that run counter to modern ideas concerning egalitarianism, sexism, slavery, etc.

You could follow Alice's idea of creating a new land that didnt have any copyright entanglements very easily in such a situation, because much of what Howard laid down in his Conan stories has become generic. Wouldn't be hard to create a Hyperborea-in-another-name because there are a huge number of such places already.

In fact, you might want to consider creating a Gor continent and linking it to a Hyperborean continent. The distance between Cimmeria and Torvaldsland is just not that great, just as the distance between Aquilonia and Ar is not that great.

From the guy's response to my post, he's not interested. Tsk, tsk. I have a tendency to be right about these things.

I'm Excited By A Disney Movie! Now THAT'S Kinky

This image has nothing to do with the story at hand, I put it in here for those who like their beautiful bondage imagery, and this certainly is that. It's a vidcap from kink.com shoot 38903 starring Penny Pax, where somehow the pose, the lighting and the background in a simple vidcap combine to create a really striking image.
When the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out, one of the things that I and an awful lot of other people said was, "SOMEBODY (meaning the scriptwriter) has read Tim Powers' novel "On Stranger Tides." Not that Disney plagiarized the work, really, it's just that an awful lot of the atmosphere and feel of the movie was an awful lot like the atmosphere and feel of "On Stranger Tides."

Well, it turns out that Tim Powers has confessed that his book was in part inspired by the "Pirates of the Caribbean" amusement park ride, just as the movie was based on it.

And it turns out that the fourth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean series will be titled "On Stranger Tides" because Disney has finally done the right thing and bought the rights to Powers' book, and the movie will be LOOOOOOSELY based on the book. As indicated in the ending to PotC 3, there will be a search for the Fountain of Youth by pirates, as in the Powers book, but that's the only lock for the fourth installment. All else is up in the air, though there's a general feeling that Barbosa the pirate will probably play a similar role to the one Blackbeard played in the book, since the characters are VERY similar.

In any event, this is the first time I've really been jazzed about a Disney movie since "The Black Hole," since Powers is one of my favorite SF and F authors, and I've read a LOT of SF and F. Unfortunately, there is a potential lesson there. The first three minutes of "The Black Hole" with the majestic music and the simple yet powerful graphics, were wonderful. After that, it rapidly degenerated into a squalid mess of hackwork. So, I'm jazzed, but my anticipation is ... tempered. Even if the movie turns out to be a wreck, it's amazing to see a movie company do the right thing and acknowledge the source material it borrowed from. Especially (cough-Lion King-cough) Disney.

Pondering Pinder's Pendulous Pecs Pics

(Points to the caption provided for the picture by the magazine that published it): And I thought MY captions were kind of a reach sometimes. Presumably several people would have had the opportunity to come up with a caption, and "There must be an easier way to eat this spaghetti" was the best they could come up with. Granted, it's funnier and makes more sense than MOST laddie mag captions, but here's a few alternatives:

1) She chewed idly on the chain of her wrist bonds, fondly remembering the taste of last night's bacon-flavored ballgag.

2) She thought it a very strange way to floss her teeth, and she was puzzled as to why she had to do it in the nude, but the man WAS a professional dentist.

3) The feel of her wrists in cuffs made her long desperately to have something, ANYTHING in her mouth. Why had her captor not had the decency to gag her?

Five minutes for the three of them. Granted, I am sort of a specialist at this sort of thing, but really ... was that so hard?

Lucy Pinder is a celebrity of some sort in England, starting her career as a Page 3 girl. (Page 3 girls are women who pose for mildly racy topless photos that traditionally appear on page 3 of the British tabloid "The Daily Mail" and on other pages of competing tabloids.) She's moved on to television, appearing on various programs such as "Big Brother" and something called "Nuts TV."

Cheeky Lesbians

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Queen Victoria -- Bondage Hose Beast

"Just Relax Your Throat and Think of England, Dear!"

Now, I'm not one to start unfounded Internet rumors, but it's a well known fact that before she went all chastity-crazed, Queen Victoria was a major hose beast and slutbag. In fact, she and hubby Prince Albert (he of genital piercing fame) made a few French postcards (the sex tapes of their time).

Here we have a pic of Victoria engaging in a little sexual bondage, draining the royal lizard with her hands tied behind her back. It seems that even in her cock sock days, she was kinda guilty about sex, especially the little matter of having it, and liked to be bound "during coition" as they called it in those days, thus relieving her of any sense of personal responsibility for her total sluthood.

Here, for the doubters and naysayers among you, are paintings of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert clothed. (Photographs were Simply Not Done in official images in those days, Queen Victoria distrusting such modern innovations for OFFICIAL reasons.)


Look at those eyes ... you know she wants it!


My good man, I have never in my life been in a can! Why do people keep asking me that?

Virtual Worlds Found To Be Most Efficient Internet Time-Waster

You never know what you'll wind up doing in a virtual world!

The creation and use of virtual worlds has been discovered to be the most efficient time-waster on the Internet by a whopping 37 percent margin, a new study shows.

"The numbers were virtually astounding," said Marco Sofapommedeterre, president and CEO of Virtual Studies, Inc., the Internet survey firm that conducted the survey, which is famous for keeping its headquarters in Mrs. Sofapommedeterre's basements even after it had grown to become a $10,000 Virtuabucks a month business. ($10,000 Viruabucks equals $3.95 US.)

"Although porn downloading remains by far the biggest time-waster in the Internet by virtue of the fact that a whopping 103 percent of Internet users do it regularly, virtual worlds is MUCH more efficient in terms of the results/time ratio," Sofapommedeterre said. "You spend MUCH more time sitting staring at your computer while the world downloads with virtual worlds. Plus, virtual worlds are MUCH more demanding of computer resources than porn or any other application. It's hard to explain the thrill of staring at a frozen computer screen while your cpu is 98% occupied, and knowing you aren't even downloading a virus -- but it's a real thrill nonetheless!"

The creation of virtual worlds software of various sorts is an even more efficient Internet time waster, Sofapommedeterre said, as 99 percent of all programming activity related to virtual worlds is bound to lead to the creation of virtual worlds that are fated to never have any actual inhabitants.

The proprietary nature of Virtual Studies' survey software means that they can't reveal anything about their methodology or even the number of users polls, but as Senior Media Analyst Susan Whiffenpoof of Bondagerotica says, "Gee, ain't that something?"

Read the Disclaimer

For God's sake, just ... read the disclaimer for Jon Woods' Bondage Babylon site. God, I wish I had written it ... the only truly honest disclaimer I have ever seen on the Web. Then go on and check out the rest of his site. Judging by the disclaimer, it's got to be fairly awesome.

Nobody Wants To Buy A Dildo Harness in August

"Paging Mr. Spock. Your love slave is here." Click on the pick for a most informative news article.

Actually, this is Camilla, who makes a line of vegan (no animal products, such as leather, used) bondage gear. Mostly she makes belts, but she does have that flashy sideline of bondage gear.

Avatars in Heat!

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Tanked

"Wow, I had no idea the penalties for tapping on the glass lobster tank at Red Lobster were so stiff!

Image courtesy of Kink.com's "Water Bondage" site.

Frontline's Digital Culture Could Use A Yeast Infection

"Hi, I'm Bob Executive. Which way is business?"

Frontline, PBS television's desperate attempt to seem hip and cutting-edge, continues its long history of epic fail with its "Digital Nation" episode, which is a tremendous exercise in viewing-with-alarm at all the terrible things digital media is doing to American culture, most notably, rendering shows like "Frontline" obsolete.

They covered "Second Life" in the episode, and I was all agog, of course. The segment dealt with the Philip Rosenthal's claim (billed as "the creator of Second Life") that he wanted to use Second Life as a way of changing the way people interact with one another -- to make them more socially connected rather than less socially connected. And what did they focus on ... Second Life's attempts to lure the business market by hosting virtual meetings. (See image above.)

The episode COMPLETELY ignored the really interesting part of the way Second Life changes human interaction, and the one Second Life is most famous for ... the addition of sexual elements to online life, making the virtual life experience all the real. The self-censorship that was involved there ("It's NOT the sex!") made the episode seem lame, dowdy and hopelessly out of touch, which of course, it was. (I KNEW they were not gonna touch on SL Gor, but they ignored the ENTIRETY of Second Life sex.

Granted, nobody else in the mainstream media has done a hell of a lot to cover this powerful aspect of our culture, so Frontline IS ahead of the rest, but what a pale, pale compliment that is, considering how really retarded and out of it mainstream media typically is. And if any of them DID cover it, you know that most of them would focus on the most out-there sexual elements they could find, to the exclusion of all else. That's the way it goes with the mainstream media with sex, it either ignores sex or goes ape-shit over some aspect of sex. Thinking about it rationally? Not gonna happen.


"Come on in to the Second Life orgy pool, boys and girls! I'm a slave, I'll clean ALL those naughty bits -- the hard way!"

A Shocking Image

I always find images like this so shocking. I mean, look at that chair. It could REALLY use re-upholstering!

Image courtesy of Fucking Dungeon.

Spartacus Has The Hotticus

"I want to wrestle with a few gladitors!" Viva Bianca as a Roman patrician lady with the hots for the gladiators.

Well, I didn’t have much hope for “Spartacus” an original sword and sandal series produced by the Starz network. That’s because it was created for the Starz network, which trends heavily toward family-friendly fare. That tends to detract heavily from the potential for hot slave girl action of course.

But hell, it was On Demand for free and I had nothing better to do for various reasons so I watched the first two episodes. It turned out to be the usual buff-guys-in-leather-diapers stuff that defines peplum, borrowing heavily from the cinematic techniques of “300” with lots of slo-mo blood spillage in the fight scenes.

However, there have been a couple of naked slave girls, some slave girls in chains, and even a slavegirl blowjob.

In a scene between the owner of the gladiator stables and his wife (played by a still red-hot Lucy Lawless) the slave girl is used as a slave girl should be. Lucy and her man are planning to fuck, and as they are casually chatting prior to fucking, planning this and that, and the man gestures to the slave girl, who silently walks forward, kneels before the man, and gives him a blowjob.

The whole scene is done exactly right, it’s not a big deal, just a slave girl being used, absolutely no consideration given to her feelings. A little bondage would have been nice to add to the slave girl feel, but really, the deft handling of the scene kinda makes up for that.

Unfortunately, the slavegirl is wearing the usual baggy slave dress while she gives the blowjob (really, if you can’t strip a slave while she’s giving a blowjob, when CAN you strip a slave?).

Lucy Lawless and Viva Bianca, who play Roman noblewomen, both get naked, interestingly enough, but I saw no naked slave girls There was a slave girl in chains, but clothed. It’s like they are shooting all around the target but missing the bulls eye.


A slavegirl in chains ... and a baggy dress. Sigh. Have they learned nothing?

There are of course, many, many, many, many images of mostly naked men, and some images of totally naked men, far outnumbering the images of naked women.

There are two factors that make me think Spartacus might turn into something other than a naked manfest, and they are:

1) Spartacus’ wife has been enslaved by the Romans, it’s logical she should go through a lot to make Spartacus all mad about Rome and stuff, and hopefully that’ll include a heaping helping of bondage and sex.

2) Spartacus is a Sam Raimi production, he of the busty babes with guns action flicks (Think “Day of the Warrior”). The guy knows his cheese.

All that said, Spartacus isn’t one tenth of one percent as exciting as playing SL Gor. Though if you are female or gay, your mileage just might vary.

Kink.com Goes Mainstream With Sexy Wrestlers

Either an Ultimate Surrender tag team match, or a genetic experiment gone terribly, terribly wrong. It's hard to tell which really.

Kink.com, the parent corporation of Sex and Submission erstwhile sponsor of my Bondagerotica site has a number of other sites under its banner. In addition to Public Disgrace and Training of O, there is Ultimate Surrender, a porny wrestling site in which naked and nearly naked opponents spend a time in sweaty grappling on a mat, without being tied up, unfortunately, but while being tres sexy. For example, in addition to scoring points for escaping from holds and making the opponent submit, you get points for putting your fingers in her pussy. And after the three rounds of actual wrestling, there's a fourth round where the winner sexually uses the loser in the ring in an orgy of femdom/femsub lesbian sex.

I was checking my cable networks adult listing the other day, and I noticed a listing for a channel called "Catfights." I was bored (catfighting is not my thing, I never subscribed to Ultimate Surrender) and I checked the listings and started seeing a lot of familar names ... Wenona ... Darling ... Vendetta ... Hollie ...

I just had to know. I bought a "Catfight" video from the cable network, and in a moment the logo shnowed, and it was ... "Ultimate Surrender!"

It was startling to see programming from MY favorite porn provider on cable TV. Frankly, all the good stuff, as far as I am concerned, and I mean, ALL the good stuff, is on the Internet. It is NEVER available on more mainstream media. It was REALLY startling to see it on a national cable network.

I'm ready for my Sex and Submission channel now. But ... I have a feeling that might take a while. The panting, squirming, naked women of Ultimate Surrender are actually kind of wholesome. They're really just an extension of Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, the embodiment of the fantasies that most guys had while watching that series.

I think Sex and Submission models may not so easily be mistaken for wholesome.

Tathassa ... A Gorgeous Gorean Sim

A lovely slavegirl in Gor rests on a ledge in a beautiful Gorean sim called Tathassa.

One of the things about working with virtual worlds is, being virtual and all, virtual real estate and materials are much cheaper, being made up and all. What this means practically is that sim designers do not have to build to human scale or worry about physics. This has some implications.


That's a HUGE statue she's kneeling next to. It totally dwarfs her! Click on the pic to see a larger version.

Gorean builds are noted throughout Second Life for their beauty, I think, because they impose limits on the builders. The architecture has to be something that people might build and live in with the technology available to human beings at their techno level of development (think Roman Empire-> early Middle Ages for everything except medicine) and cultural background. But there's nothing restraining them as to the particulars of their designs, or the topology of their world (so long as it's Earthly as in the books).


I guess the statue is not all that big. Nor are ... any of the others ...

And the thing is the Gorean sim designers don't just think in terms of scale, though they are clearly capable of doin so. Check out the large sized image of Brundisium from my previous post ... the detail there is subtle and amazing. And some very nice stuff is done on a smaller scale in many Gorean sims.


Our lovely kajira lounges in a shallow pool tide pool. Very nice work on the small scale.

Without these constraints most SL designers come up with pedestrian imitations of current topology and architecture or stuff that looks like a vidcap of a Hanna Barbera cartoon. This is not to say that SL non-Gorean designers don't come up with some brilliant designs. Some do, creating mind-bogglingly striking and appealing designs for sims. But it is fair to say that many do not.