Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Tabenings - Spooky Edition

Happy Halloween!

Things are still tight around here, time-wise. I swear, back in the summer I was all "oh in the Fall I will have more time" and now I have what seems like *less* time, and the holidays are coming up... frak. Stupid adult life.

I have been just barely staggering along with CORE #12, Uzo has part 7 now and I'm working on 8. I will say that it is massively hot, if you like what we like, which most but not all of you do. But if you do squick that way, oh my gosh. Double gosh.

I got to see the new Blade Runner flick, which was enjoyable, although less internally consistent than the first one. Sexy robot girls - well, holo-girls - though, and who can say 'no' to that? Not I!

That's it. Gotta help with some homework and then do some grading, and then maybe some Internet before bed. Hope you have a fun halloween!

...I remember when I used to go to parties...

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Tabenings - Black Dress Edition

Greetings and salutations!

So I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that Anaximanes released 'The Anax', the massive game he's been working on all year, and it's *awesome*! Super naughty, with lots of good smut and hot photomanips, intriguing plot and writing, and fun game effects. It's super high calibre. You must check it out. Go log into the Hypnopics Collective, hit the MC Game Zone board, find the "[HTML][FREE][FINAL]The Anax (Halloween 2017)" thread, and viola there's the download link. Enjoy!

The bad news is that there's been some bad news in real life around the Tabico household, and it put the kibosh on smut writing for a while, starting last Friday and extending through this week. I did manage to get a bit more CORE #12 over to Uzobono, but other than that I have been doing a bunch of RL things and not much Internet for the last several days.

Hopefully I will have better tidings next week!

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Tabenings - Next Up Edition

Hello again! I actually went upstairs and brushed my teeth and was all ready for bed when I recalled that it was Tuesday and I had a blog post to write. So here I am!

Obviously there won't be a lot tonight but I can natter for a bit. I got scene five over to Uzo, so CORE #12 is proceeding; scene five is pretty hot, too, I think. Scenes six and seven should be pretty quick. Right now it's fifteen scenes total, but some of those are just a couple of pages. Do not expect it for Halloween.

No progress on the 'Modding' front. I am trying to decide if my hand is too open in some of the scenes so far, where I am showing the brainwashing rather than simply proceeding with the story and implying the brainwashing. Undecided on that.

On the video game front, what I had suspected might happen, has actually happened. Sunday evening I sat down, ready to play some more Divinity 2, and I realized: I didn't want to. I looked at the icon on my desktop and thought "Shit, another long-ass fight that will only be won by abusing the mechanics after having to reload a dozen times... nah, fuck that."

I'm like two or three fights from the end of the game, the big reveals and all that story stuff. But... it's just... work. It's not fun.

This is what I was bitching about from the start. The fight mechanics are so unforgiving that every fight is a chore. And instead of finding cool new gear and learning new skills which make the next few fights easier because I'm more of a badass, the next fight is totally impossible unless you have leveled up as much as possible and found all the higher level gear you can and min-maxed everything. At no point in the game are you ever a badass. The bad guys are always more powerful than you, and you can only ever win by the skin of your teeth.

It's not fun.

So it looks like Divinity 2 will now go to that grey Hades where games that were kind of cool but ultimately not something that was worth playing go, at least as far as I am concerned. I switched back over to my Europa Universalis IV campaign, and diplo-annexed Savoy which finally gave me that land bridge between my Austrian heartland and all of my low country possessions. After several vicious, close-run wars, I managed to break France, and it was nice to spend an evening tinkering with my government and occasionally helping Poland to remove kebab without stressing about one mis-click sending my rogue out of backstab range in the second round and having to re fucking load yet again.

Yes, yes, I really should have been working on 'Modding'. Thursday. Definitely Thursday.

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Tabenings - Sebille edition

Good news, everyone! I've just donated blood!

Yours!

Mwah hah hah!

Sorry, just getting into the Halloween spirit. However, all tricks aside, I do have a treat for you. A video game clip!

I know, I know, not what you came here for. You only thought I was a pornographer. I'm really a video game player with a pornography hobby.

So, as mentioned last week, I have been playing this game "Divinity: Original Sin 2", or as I call it "Fuck! Reloading again...". Part of what has gotten me through the head-desking combat system has been the unusually heavy mind control fetish content. As I said earlier, one of the major plot points is the magic sucking-out of "source" from hapless victims, leaving them drained, with a big black sigil on their forehead and black-on-black eyes, and mindlessly obedient.

Mindlessly obedient. Mmm.

Well, another major Mind Control plot point revolves around one of the main playable characters, Sebille. You can pick her as your main character, and as with all of the six possible main characters, even if you don't pick her she can be part of your four-person party. As she is in mine.

Now, Sebille is an elf. Elves in Divinity are a bit more feral than usual - small sharp teeth, cannibalistic, a bit more on the creepy side than elves in Tolkien or D&D. And Sebille is an assassin. A brainwashed one.

At some point, she was captured by a shadowy character referred to as "the Master". He brainwashed her through the use of a magical scar on her cheek, which utterly enslaved her to him. Once she was his mindless tool, he kept her in a box. Now and then he would take her out and send her to kill people, which she would do.

Anyhow, she escaped one day when some bozo left the box open, and managed to put back together a bit of her personality. She's now focused on getting revenge against the Master.

The main problem with her plan, of course, is that if she meets the Master he will simply turn her back into his mindless slave. The mechanism by which he will do this is a song, which was programmed into her earlier and which will re-activate the brainwashing.

Luckily for her, she has discovered a counter-song, which she teaches to the player character. Thus, the plan is they will confront the Master, he will sing the brainwashing song, the PC will sing the counter-song, and Sebille will kill him. And finally be free.

Of course, when I played this, I got to this scene and said "Oh my God I have to watch him re-enslave her", so I did. And I did again. And a few more times.

It's not played for the fetish, sadly. If we were doing this there would be a LOT more "Yes, Masters" and follow-up slave-sebille scenes. Oh, the potential follow-up slave-sebille scenes. Sadly, no. But even so, the one scene was still hot enough to grab me right in the sex when I saw it.

And because I love you, I recorded it! And brought it here for you!

As a foreword - there is a lot of wordplay at the start of the scene, but I have skipped through that. I'm sorry if you want to hear all the exposition; you can pause and read it if you want. I wanted to get to the good stuff without the clip being ten minutes long. Everything past the halfway point of the clip is in full. I also included some of the initial loading screen, because it has a picture of Sebille front and center so you can have a good look at her.

I'll natter a bit more afterward, so: here's the scene!




Okay! It's like a quarter page later but I am gonna assume you watched it.

Obviously, it's much much more potent when you've been playing with Sebille in your party for hours, learning her backstory over time, using her as your heavy hitter in fights, and, in my case at least, romancing her. To then succumb to the need to see her enslaved, and have her taken away permanently, just because you betrayed her... RRRR. So hot.

Of course, in my "real" playthrough I ultimately reloaded and did sing the song, and saved her, and killed the Master. I mean, of course I did. And although it was tempting to let her get enslaved, go away and do that quest that the Master then offers you, and then come back to see if slave-Sebille has any new dialogue or has changed any, I am 99% certain that would not pay off and basically be a big waste of time without any new slave-sebille fun at all, so I haven't tried that. Yet.

Really, aside from the hot backstory, and the snapping fingers / snap to attention, all we get is one good "How may I serve you, Master." But given that this is not fetish porn, that's a lot!

Also, THE-HYPNOMAN really should nab that "How may I serve you, Master" audioclip, it's very hard to find those and it could be nicely re-used for the various shorts he does.

Alright, those of you here for the smut are dismissed. I'm now gonna ramble on a bit about HOW MUCH WORK it was to bring this clip to you.

I don't stream or twitch or any of that new-fangled stuff. So from the moment of "OH SO HOT I should share this on my blog" to me posting this here required that I perform all sorts of really bothersome computer bullshit.

To whit:

1. I needed a game recording program, so I downloaded and installed CamStudio. Which I'm not going to link because the fucking thing didn't work - the video recorded but I could NOT get the audio to work. I spent hours on google searches and hapless attempts to coax it to pull from my audio card. No dice.

2. Eventually I gave up on that and downloaded OBS. Which I am also not going to link because that fucking thing installed a smidgen of malware which I had to remove; thanks Malwarebytes! (It wasn't terrible, just an ad-bot, but come the fuck on.) And then OBS did not work for VIDEO; it recorded the audio just fine, but the screen was black.

3. This time google searches said I should update my video driver, so I did that. I have a GeForce 960 which I got a few years back to play Witcher 3, and the NVDIA driver upgrade was (relatively) painless.

4. But now OBS decided to only detect my game screen some of the time. I would hit the record hotkey and get game video, but then when I did it again a moment later I got blank screen. I gave up and went to bed.

5. Tried again the next day and finally came up with the video AND the audio. But then Blogger would not let me upload a video larger than 100MB, and the FLV file OBS produced was 255MB, so... compression time. I installed Avidemux, which is a nice little video editing program and made me very happy by easily doing exactly what I wanted it to. Probably because it's made by French people. Anyway, it has a super nice feature wherein you simply pick your desired filesize and it compresses it in the optimal way to reach that filesize! *Happy Tabico noises*

All told, I put in way more fucking hours on this than I probably should have. Especially when I could have been writing smut! I hope you fucking appreciate it.

Speaking of writing smut, I haven't been entirely unproductive - 'Modding' is up to 21,038 words! I'm still thinking 38,000 when it's done. And Uzobono is working on Scene four, although at this precise moment I don't have a lick of scene five ready. So I guess I know what I'm doing next!

P.S. Callidus could have done all of that stuff in, like, 20 minutes. I know.

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Tabenings - Getting Spooky Edition

Hello again!

Well, it was slow going this week. I do have CORE #12 up to halfway through scene four, and Uzo's done the renders through scene two. So progress is steady.

Nothing to report on 'Modding', unfortunately. However, I am strongly considering taking Friday off from work, and if I do, I solemnly promise to you that I shall put in several good hours on that front. I don't get my serotonin until people can read the story and I ain't releasing even a bit of it until it's finished, so it's got to get finished.

Say, did I mention that Callidus is back? He is! Go check out his website!

In other news, one of the reasons progress is currently slow is that I have been playing Divinity: Original Sin 2. Although it seems like it should be Divinity 2: Original Sin. Or, to be the most accurate, Divinity 2: Save and Reload Boogaloo.

It's an isometric fantasy RPG, one of the prolific spawn of Baldur's Gate. I... can't actually recommend it. Oh, sure, I'm still playing it, but it's teeth-grindingly frustrating and, as I observe, involves tremendous amounts of reloading. It's packed with fights where one fuckup, one click where a character moves when you meant for her to cast, one random die roll where one of the bad guys crits you, and you lose. And that's almost every fight. There is no build-up where you get to beat some minor baddies before hitting a mini-boss. Any random fight has a good chance of being lethal, and if you don't cheese the fights by using tricks to confuse the AI or doing things that don't fit the story, well, you're not going to get any further. There are plenty of mobs that can one-shot your characters, and they come in packs to boot.

Player level is critically important as well - if you are level 12 and you get into a fight with level 14s, you lose. Not that you have any idea where the level 12 area is, and if you miss a quest or two, well, they don't grow on trees so head back and find one because you need those XP to have any chance in the next fight.

So it's almost more frustrating than it is fun. But the reason I bring it up is that it has lots of really good fetish potential in it. In addition to succubi, corpse witches who lasciviously kiss you to deliver a nefarious spell, and demonic possession, the major plot revolves around the Magisters, a sadistic group of Inquisition types, rounding up people who have connection to Source, which is one way of casting spells. Also a type of shiny liquid, if you juice those people (no, really).

The problem is, using Source has started to summon other dimensional monsters who then murder pretty much anyone nearby. To forestall this, the Magisters, as a magical authority, are rounding up anyone who can use Source.

And then they suck the Source out of those people with magic wands. And, in so doing, the person is turned into an obedient zombie! Mmm. An obedient zombie with a big black sigil on her forehead and liquid black eyes. And then the Magisters dress these drones up and use them as shock troops, for although they are mindlessly obedient they haven't forgotten their combat skills.

And this is a major part of the plot, this life-energy-sucking dronification. I mean, that's how you get involved in the first place.

So it does have that going for it.

Aight, that's it for this week. I'm looking forward to Halloween and the reveal of Anaximanes' game the Anax! Also candy.