Tabenings - Aragorn Edition

The Tuesday may come when I fail to update the Secret Files - but it is not THIS Tuesday!

Not that I have much.

Did some work on Pierced, but not as much as I would have liked. Was hoping to have it for this coming weekend but that's looking unlikely at this point. It's tough to have the energy to write smut in the evening when you work all day and then spend your evenings helping your subsidiary unit with homework or shuttling it around to sporting events. I just want to sit down and watch some Home and Garden channel followed by falling asleep to whichever of Colbert, Kimmel, or Fallon has the most interesting guest on.

Yes, it's a thrilling life here in Tabico-land!

I'll note that my colleague Dollmistress has produced another fantastic illustrated story, available over at her Deviant Art gallery, which you should investigate if you haven't already.

(How can they call it "Deviant" Art when they specifically disallow anything naughtier than nudity? Talk about misleading nomenclature. It's a good thing Telsis put up that other page.)

Anyway.

I'm a huge fan of these enslavement/transformation scenes - obviously - and this one has again gotten me thinking about how to build a story around something similar.

I'm thinking some sort of base or facility which is dedicated to human to sexy mindless slave transformation. Our protagonists have to raid it, a la 'Rouge' - we'll get to 'why' in a moment.

Of course, the other immediate question is whose facility is it? I rather neatly solved that in 'Rouge', if I do say so myself. Dollmistress has established the Enthasans, an alien race of mind controlling Mistresses, and aliens are a solid choice for this sort of thing; it lets the author use 'technology' not readily understood by the characters.

(I have something similar going on in 'M&A', if I ever decide to finish that one and release it to the public, though it's all modern real-ish world stuff, no aliens at all. In fact it's in the SCUniverse and Diana Snowden makes an appearance. And Neil Arundsen a phone call. But enough about the back burner.)

So, enslavement facility. I'm gonna start with 'aliens', though I think I'll go Far Future and.... ooh. Now there's an idea.

So. Race of aliens that like to enslave and convert humans. Said race is more powerful than the humans, although there are many solar systems' worth of humans and they're not being totally overrun so much as plucked like fruit.

Fortunately for the humans, there are yet other races who don't go in for enslaving humans - because why would you? I mean, you'd just wind up with all these... humans milling around - and said other races also do not like the Enslavers. For whatever reason.

So those folks and the Enslavers have had a war. And the Enslavers lost (to an indeterminate but significant extent) and have been rolled back. And the humans are now returning to territory which the Enslavers had taken from them, because the victors in the war either don't want it or enjoy being vaguely patronizing towards lesser races.

Thus we have an Enslaving facility, on a former human world. A team of soldiers/scientists goes into it with multiple aims - rescuing anyone not converted, if possible, but also securing Enslaver technology, and confirming that the place is "safe" - and, well, this being Tabico talking, you can guess what happens next.

They find, and turn on, the power.

Mmm.

Also I was considering, based on DM's recent ventures, some still-nebulous way of working audience participation into the story. Sadly, I have yet to crack the mysteries of 3D illustration. But I can write purty. So what I was postulating was writing more or less scene by scene, filling in the plot as dictated by my vision but then larding the thing with delicious naughty conversion scenes by taking a vote on the preferred mechanic for each scene as it arises.

Let me elaborate. So I'd write the intro, which would go long enough to insert the protagonists firmly into the facility and turn on their doom the power. Then there would be a vote on the next scene: who should be subjected to Mind Control, and what form should that Mind Control take - which could be a list of options such as:

• Chemical / drug
• Biological / parasitical 
• Mechanical / implant / MC machine
• Subliminal / subtle
• Hypnotic / interpersonal
• Memory / personality erasure

You get the idea. The depth of the control exerted would be up to the author (me), so earlier scenes would not necessarily be "WHAM she's a mindless robot now" but could be more like laying the groundwork for a personality change - but then again, they could also be "WHAM robot now" for effect.

Whaddya think? Interesting idea? Unworkable? The Internet would discover the poll and make every poll result "Hitler Did Nothing Wrong"? The story's no good if they're all going to end up enslaved anyway, because what's the point you know how it's going to end?

Tabenings, Ganesh Edition

Oh snap, it's Tuesday again! How did that happen?

Ohh right, there was a holiday yesterday. Ganesh Chaturthi! Also Labor Day, if you're in the States.

Well, as is too common around this time of year, I've got nothing new to unveil. I already directed you to Dollmistress' excellent and fun recent renderventure, as linked in last week's Tabenings.

As usual with erotic mind control stuff like that, it inspired some naughty spin-off ideas; and this seems like a reasonable place and time to elaborate on them! Having nothing else to report anyway. None of them are jelling into a coherent narrative, but it's worth putting some pins into them for examination.

The tale ends with Mel being turned into an incubation drone, her mind deliciously cored out. This elides in my mind towards pregnancy, and I was thinking how yummy it would be to have a story wherein a group of refugees from the Evil Mind Control forces are taken in by those opposed to the malevolent slavers, but the innocent women/children they admit behind their defenses include a goodly number of pregnant women - who are in fact not pregnant, but have inside them the actual advance agents of the EMC forces.

There's obviously some good bio-squick there; the creatures nestling in their hosts' wombs would have control not only of their hosts but could also have some telepathic MC powers which they would use to enthrall, then enslave, the defenders of the redoubt. And they could have all sorts of icky tentacles or eyes on stalks or whatever which could emerge, glistening, from their hosts' vaginas, to brainwash their new hapless victims.

A particular angle that this snippet evokes in my conception is some serious depersonalization. In general with mind control, even heavy mind control, the subject is assumed to retain some sense of self-worth, even if only as a tool for her Mistress. But in this case, the hosts could have been mentally broken down so much that they see themselves as having no intrinsic value at all - they are merely sheathes, sheltering disguises which their masters wear and might discard as they see fit. And in their remodeled minds, that is as it should be.

To reiterate - this is what the hosts truly believe. Without rancor or disapproval. They've been ego-wiped so thoroughly that they look at themselves, dispassionately, as totally disposable. "I am a slave husk; I have neither will nor desire. The Masters command and I obey. My body will serve their purposes for as long as they desire; then I shall die."

Mmm. Definitely something there.

Secondly, and not particularly related, the coterie of protagonistas which DM set up for us also set me to thinking of a similar 'commandos versus mind control' sort of scenario.

Posit powerful Mind Controllers who, let's be honest, really rather out-class our heroines, much as in DM's Space Ditz universe. Said Mind Controllers can use hypnotic / telepathic powers and pretty much enslave anyone they encounter without a lot of difficulty. For some valid reason they don't run the world - perhaps there aren't that many of them - and our heroines have some small defenses against them but nothing that would withstand direct woman-to-Mistress confrontation.

But! It has come to light that once upon a time the Mind Controllers had some enemies, competition as it were, of a more powerful but less cerebral sort. They got the upper hand over these rivals and, unable to destroy them, locked them away some while ago.

Our heroines have recently learned of the existence of these imprisoned but possibly still puissant entities. And now you can see where this is going - the crew of heroines must infiltrate the still-guarded locale where these enemies-of-their-enemies are locked away and, if possible, enlist their aid.

A desperate mission, to be sure, but what alternative is there?

And of course during the infiltration things will go slightly wrong and some of them will be suborned by the Mind Controllers; possibly some started out as traitors, either knowingly or unwittingly, and will betray their comrades to their Mistresses as soon as the time is ripe. But of course through pluck and luck, success is had, and the vault breached - but what is locked away down here that is frightening enough for the pursuit to stop?

And will whatever it is be helpful? (Well... it will certainly help itself to the delicious minds delivering themselves to it...)

Anywhoo. Some random thoughts there, of the sort that spark off of lovely striking material such as DM's set of renders.

Outlook for my near-term smut productivity is low, but I shall as always keep you posted here, in the Secret Files!

A Backdrop of Doom

As mentioned, I am also intending to use this blog to jot down notes and ideas - and this is one such!

Being old, I played a video game back in the day called "Myth: The Fallen Lords". It was a hell of a lot of fun mostly because my friend and I played through the single player campaign co-op. You weren't really supposed to - you could only play missions co-op if you had beaten them on single player - but we discovered a cheat code that "insta-won" any level, so we would start a level in single player, insta-win it without even looking at it, quit, and then play it in multiplayer, which was much, much more fun.

The game was platoon-level real-time strategy in a fantasy world; your troops were elven archers, dwarven grenade tossers, and crazy barbarians with claymores. The bad guys were various humanoid monsters - orc and goblin type stuff, but creepier. It was fun to play, and the world-building was well done. It was also challenging - there were lots of ways to fuck up, the bad guys were hard and you had to hit them just right, and your forces carried over between levels so if you only just eked out a win, you weren't going to succeed on the level following.

Now, if you're worried about spoilers for a game that came out in 1998, you will want to skip the next bit.

One of the things I most enjoyed about the game, perhaps oddly, was the ever-growing sense of doom that came with each mission. You see, you would "win" any given level - and then discover that, elsewhere in the world, the bad guys were marching from triumph to triumph and just rolling over all your allies (who you'd thought were fairly tough) and pretty much everyone but you. You'd start rescuing people from some city while the good-guy army dealt with a bad guy army up north. You succeed in the rescue, and learn that the good-guy army was totally obliterated by heretofore undreamed of amounts of bad guys. You'd cut through some local groups of bad guys to avoid being entrapped - and then learn that the entire north half of the good guy country had been overrun. You'd retreat again and discover that other kingdoms you'd hoped to get help from would not be sending any help because not only had they been conquered, it had been achieved through impossible dark magic that twisted their citizenry into still more monsters and those critters were now coming for you.

The news just kept getting worse, even as you succeeded in desperate mission after desperate mission.

It was awesome.

Anywhoo, I was recalling that experience and thinking that it could be a fun backdrop for a dark fantasy erotic mind control story. The small group of protagonists learn of an evil plot to take over world (using lots of delicious mind control and corruption) and set out to foil said plot. They discover along the way (as they are going from place to place attempting to learn what is really happening and what if anything they can do about it) that the plot is totally already underway. And then the news reports start rolling in about cities and then kingdoms being absorbed into the suddenly very real mind-slave empire.

Could be some lovely scenes of various former allies and contacts being reached out to (via magic radio / palantir / crystal ball) only to discover that they are now eager slaves of the Witch-Queen.

"i belong to Her now; serving Her is my life's purpose. You are fortunate you could still contact me. Most humans here had nothing in their minds of worth to Her and have been transformed into drudge (note: 'drudge' as a group noun), but some of us had information or skills that could be made to serve Her. i was fortunate enough to be one of those. Mmm, it took Her only an hour to bend my soul. Now i am Her creature forever. i was so stupid to try and resist. Surrender, all of you. Join me."

And all that coming from someone that only a while ago had helped our protagonists and sworn to fight the WQ to her last breath. Delicious. A few repetitions of that sort of incident ("Not you too!") and you've really got an oppressive/erotic atmosphere!

Throw in a possible means of stopping the WQ if only our heroines can figure out what it is and reach it in time, a secret traitor or two, and you've really got a story.

As it happens, I do have a dark-fantasy-overrun-by-wicked-goddess universe ready to hand - the above plotline would work really well when paired with 'The Loosing of the Dark' for instance - but I'm kinda-sorta leaning towards the heroines managing to scrape out a win, which is not something I'd do to dear Sauriann. Although she was defeated, once, in the WQ era, and is actually staging a comeback at the "present" time in Middle Urth. Would have to be a new story, though; it won't mesh with what I am doing in 'That Which Has Been Lost' (you'd like a link for that one, wouldn't you?) so I can't work it in there.

And, more pertinently, I have other story ideas higher in the queue. Still, worth putting down for possible reference.

Tuesday Tabenings - the pre-August edition

Alll-righty then! Another week, another Tabenings!

See? Habit! Use it, mortals!

Well. CORE #10. That was a bit of a clusterfuck, n'est pas? But I think things are settling down, at least in terms of my inner emotional landscape. Additional feedback continues to trickle in, which is nice, and I'm reaching the point where I can consider the entire event with equanimity. Soon I anticipate having perspective on the whole thing.

I'm still confused - and suspect always shall be - about whether the various displeased individuals (there were a number, and their opinions were of weight) were displeased because they felt #10 was the final issue (in which case they had good right to be displeased, hell, I would have been too) - or whether they were (also?) displeased for other (probably valid) reasons. But I deal with stuff like that by an advanced tactic known as 'avoidance' and am not going back to comb it all out.

All the criticism was appropriately couched in terms of specific points of grievance, and there was an accompanying bouquet of reassurance, and I have no issues with anyone's behavior - which was all entirely reasonable - or point of view.

Nonetheless... Drama! I hate drama. So I am mentally putting the whole confusing, sordid affair behind me. Uzobono is off onto her next solo project and we shall reconvene for CORE #11 in the fall. Luckily for those of you who enjoyed the issue creating the CORE stories is a lot of fun for me, because Uzobono is awesome to work with, so it's not a chore to soldier on.

In other, shorter-term news, I'm off for a short vacation trip this weekend, so don't expect anything. In response to various emailed entreaties I am telling people that I shall conclude 'Pierced' before the end of August: there's a stake in the ground for those who like stakes.

Speaking of stakes...

I'd kinda like to work on 'Summer Flesh' a bit, as well - vampire romance seems appropriate for late summer - so hopefully things will gel on that front. I know the beginning of the story, and the end (Tabico knows the end? How unusual!) but I am hazy on the bits just beyond the beginning, so some hashing out will be necessary. One of my usual means of doing so is just to start writing, and see what emerges, and I suspect I will go with that.

Also, another set of Secret Files could easily make their appearance in August. Any preferences?

Back in Green

Heeeeyyyy, I can post again! Stupid Google. "Oh, you know the password, but you're not at home, eh? Gimme your phone number. No, I won't send something to your email - gimme your phone number. No phone number? No login."

Fuckers.

So! Back again, new and improved, returned to our irregularly programmed schedule. (Anyone remember that song?)

Going on a trip, particularly one such as this one which involved a high level of exhaustion, is an interesting experience - it's kind of startling how quickly it puts one outside oneself. Real life seems far away, and immediate surroundings take on an outsized importance. I became oddly intrigued by the prosaic landscape print in my hotel room, for instance.

Obviously, being me, I've taken to viewing this through the lens of mind control; how placing a subject in unfamiliar, controlled surroundings can have an outsized impact on their mental state.

But enough about the trip. I did have Internet in the hotel, and via Callidus' blog I bumped into someone I had previously been unfamiliar with, 'sleepystephbot'. Check this out:

She has a bunch of other great MC fetish material there, too. Worth a gander, though it only goes back to October 2015.

It's interesting to me that I still occasionally bump into existing material I'd been unaware of. After all, I've been avidly consuming MC porn for decades now, and I dig for it frequently, yet I still now and then find an entire source I'd been unaware of. Let's hear it for the vast resources and hidden corners of the Internet.

No progress report today... but there's been no progress on anything. Well, anything fetish related, I got lots and lots of work done for my real job. Also played a lot of Free Cities, which desperately needs more overt mind control content, but even without it is a reliable way for me to get myself off. Maybe when it hits a stable version I will add it myself.

Happy Endings

I am pleased by the suggestions for comment-response that are coming in; so far the "mailbag" approach seems to be the most reasonable given my predilections, so I'm leaning that way, unless I can figure out some blogspot gadget that would allow me to do something a bit more precise.

Now to the point of this post. Someone over on 4chan (a wretched hive of scum and villainy, which is probably why I am over there so much) observed that my stories tend to be sort of boring because the villains always win. In fact, let me quote:
The biggest and really only problem with Tabico is that all his/her stories read the same.

People act deliberately stupid, X character never had a chance, and every ending is a bad end.

Why not a story where the characters are smart? Why not a story where the villains don't just pull out a surprise trick? Where they aren't just going to win all along?

Why not a happy ending?

Now, some other anon posted a very intelligent and reasonable response to the question, but I figured I would also dive into it myself. Obviously, the first thing to say is that, like most stereotypes, the claim isn't entirely true - Winter Flesh, for instance, has a classic 'good guys win' happy ending. I daresay some of my other stories do as well. And I try my best to write intelligent characters; they're usually just outgunned, or unprepared, but not stupid.

But, like most stereotypes, there is truth at the core of the statement; I do write stories where the Evil Mind Controllers win. It's true; it happens again and again. And it's going to keep happening, and I do wrestle with the fact that if the reader comes to expect the bad guys to win, the story might get boring.

And there's a simple reason for it - when I come from (yes, 'when'), stories where the mind controller won didn't exist. So I very purposefully set out to create them.

I came up on Saturday morning cartoons. (This dates me, by the way. Saturday morning cartoons no longer exist.) Over and over we'd watch characters get mind controlled - which, for budding fetishist like me, was so confusingly erotic - and then by the end of the episode it was all reversed and everyone was back to normal. It happened in movies, it happened in books, you name it. The heroes always won; the mind control was always defeated, although in adult-focused media such as films the specific individuals who were controlled would generally meet bad ends while the protagonists went on to defeat the evil forces.

(Aside: William Lee once had a 'Saturday Morning Mind Control' site that put together a fantastic list of these cartoon mind control moments. Is that still around? *googles* No, no... hmm, some other person wrote a book with that title. Unrelated. Darn, it appears to be gone. Maybe the Wayback machine... ha! God damn I'm good. Saturday Morning Mind Control, from 2005. Sadly none of the links work, but you can see the list. Good God, it even has a quote from me!)

So when I went to write Mind Control Porn, I wanted to redress that balance. The forces of Evil Mind Control win in my stories, by jingo, partly because IMO that's hotter, and partly because they never, ever did, when I was growing up. It was a balance that needed redressing.

What's interesting to me is that we're now getting a generation of readers who are being exposed to stories like mine (and a lot of other writers) and who don't share that assumption. Who are, in fact, experiencing our stories and wondering why the good guys never seem to win. Who may, ironically, go forth to write stories where the good guys do win because they want to redress the imbalance that I and my ilk have created.

Which is fine. And I will see if I can have the good guys win a little more, just to keep things interesting. Of course, I can also split the difference, e.g. 'Lens'. Did the good guys win? Did the bad guys? Sort of both.

In the end, what's important is that someone resurrects that Saturday Morning Mind Control site.

June Tabenings and Etiquette and 'Seed' thoughts

As regards the Tabenings, I am sad to report no smut writing (so far) this week. Real life kicked into high gear round about Friday and for the moment shows no sign of letting up. Do not expect the conclusion to 'Pierced', or anything else, this coming weekend.

Now, I'd like your suggestions about something. People have been leaving comments on the blog, which makes me very happy. They are good comments and I treasure them. Like all responses to my words, I hold them close to my heart and they warm me. However, I'm not sure of the optimal way to respond to them.

I'd rather not go back to each post and respond to the comments one by one. That's not scalable, I think. It has been my habit since my very first story to try and reply to every bit of email I receive. I really like getting email/feedback and I figure if people are kind enough to send it to me I should encourage them to do so. I've failed a few times, but I think in all honesty I have replied to over 90% of all emails ever sent to me (not counting follow-up emails, just initial ones).

But it seems weird to me to respond to blog comments that way, one at a time. It bulks out the comment lists in a way that seems forced and artificial. Is there some way to keep a running "response" column in a sidebar or something? I could do a gazette sort of thing, responding to all the recent comments in a blog post, but posting that as a "regular" blog post also doesn't seem, I dunno, aesthetically pleasing.

So: taking suggestions. I would like to respond to people's comments - they are good comments, and I as I say I enjoy each one of them - but I'd like to do so outside of the normal flow of the blog.

Onward! People seem to have generally enjoyed the 'Seed' epilogue. I had always meant to include it; I just hadn't written it when I wrote the rest of the story because it lacks any erotic power. And, let's face it, what drives my smut is usually horniness. If the prose doesn't involve pussies or minds, it's waaaay less compelling for me to write.

This, by the way, is the true reason that 'Compromise' is unfinished. All that's left there is plot. Intellectually I know I should finish it, mentally I have it written, but what's left to write just doesn't grab me down there and thus, lacking other compensation, I haven't finished it. Well, hopefully 'Seed' has proven to me, more than to you, that I do have it within me to properly finish stories, even without big shiny delicious boobies.

Back to 'Seed'. I'm wondering if readers noticed that Khuluub's tropical utopia is, in many ways, communism. The state owns all the property, allocates it to the workers, and is upheld by a populace that's been indoctrinated to a religious fervor.

Oh, sure, there was that bit about joint stock companies, but if you examine it... well, let's not get into the weeds.

This allegory has long roots in our genre. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is, of course, the major example. Back in 1956 when it was released, the fear of communists - who looked like us only they worked for an alien, self-sacrificial ideology, one which could spread and take over your friends and neighbors, your very family - was a very real and not irrational thing.

Trilby else and I used to have long email discussions about this sort of thing. *sigh* I miss him. He was so goddamned *smart*. Older than me by a decade or so, he really understood the mindset of late 70s and 80s communist and anti-communist thinking and the effects it had on the world and on popular culture. And a zillion other things, to boot.

I always told him that one day our correspondences would be collected and, if not studied, at least read with interest when smut had become a socially acceptable genre and people could get degrees in writing pornography and researching famous pornographic authors. They'd dig up our decades-old naughty stories and dissect them as examples of the mind control smut subgenre. Yes, I am that narcissistic.

But veering back to 'Seed' again - that communist overtone was very deliberate on my part. I wanted to present a society that was in many was very appealing compared to its peers, but also a bit disturbing because of the unstated implications of what it might get up to.

Also Rhoda, the Quinyri, popped into my head fully-formed and was a fun character to write for.

That is all.

Working for the Man

I'm thinking more seriously about writing that Joja story. It's providing good fuel for my random fetishizing during the day, and I think I've worked out how to move the plot forward with some tension in it.

Couple of problems - first, I'd like to go with the name 'Joja', but of course that's a direct lift from Stardew Valley and thus I am hesitant about it. Simon has a strict 'no fanfic' rule - which I think is wise and I have always abided by - although I think that using the name 'Joja' for the company but not swiping any of the other character names, place names, etc would skirt by with enough leeway.

Second of course is me - I daresay that the 'short' story I am describing in my mind would balloon outward as I drew in other characters and paced out the conversion over time, etc etc. I'll have to fight that tendency pretty hard.

Still, the idea is attracting me. Maybe it's just my desire to procrastinate from finishing 'Pierced', I recognize what a terrible habit I have in that way. On the other hand, if I start something else I could procrastinate from *that* by concluding 'Pierced'. Hard to say, really.

A good Tabico would procrastinate by writing the final bit of 'Compromise'. Not feeling romantic enough at the moment for 'Summer Flesh', or baroque enough for 'That Which Has Been Lost'.

Well, we'll just have to see, you and I. But smart money would bet on my starting 'Joja'.

Joja!

As mentioned, I've been playing a lot of Stardew Valley. Got gay married to my sweetie Abigail, because how could I resist a purple-haired proto-goth who loves pumpkins, autumn, cemetaries, and rainy days? I couldn't, that's how.

Also, purple is her natural hair color (the game is set in a universe with both trains and soda pop but also with dwarves and wizards), and let me just say: purple pubes. Oh. My. God. I would kill to rub my face in those.

So she's mine now and we are happy down on the farm.

Meanwhile, there's an entity in the game known as the Joja corporation, a faceless corporate behemoth that seeks to crush any independent commerce and force everyone to shop and work at their soulless identical stores and/or numbing corporate offices. The local Joja-mart manager even has devil eyes, that's how bad they are.

The combination of these two items - my loverly Abigail and the malevolent Joja Corp - recently smeared together into a rather hot fantasy.

It starts with coming home to find Abigail in some skin-tight shiny latex getup - think the outfit of the lead singer from The Pretty Reckless in their Going to Hell video - with cut-outs for the breasts and crotch, acting all submissive and enticing ("I got this to please you.")

She starts sliding further into sex-kitten over the next indeterminate period of time, discovering that she likes being naughty and objectified.

Then come the breast implants; she gets them as a surprise, and loves having them, they're so plastic and unreal.

She got them, of course, from Joja, which is more or less the only game in town for that sort of thing. And now her slide into becoming more and more designed for sex starts becoming tinted Joja; the idea of being a sex object and being a faceless corporate cog - no, corporate asset - blend together in her fantasies.

She begins going off to 'workshops' offered by a particular branch of the Joja corporation. In theory they are about skills and etiquette and such, but of course they are really a sort of corporate indoctrination, deepening her (and the other participants') desire to become Joja assets. Joja property.

Then comes the tattoo, the Joja logo on her shoulder, prominently displayed when she is wearing her tight Joja-blue latex lingerie. She takes a job at the local Joja mart; during which time she wears headphones that pump Joja subliminals into her mind as she smiles and vapidly rings up the customers.

Her salary is put into the Joja bank. It is immediately loaned back to Joja corporation at zero percent interest.

The next tattoo is on the nape of her neck. It's a Joja bar code.

When scanned, it reads 'plastic appliance'.

Now she's listening to the headphones while she sleeps. During sex, she refers to herself as a 'plastic appliance', as 'Joja property'.

The next time she's in the city, she visits the Joja surgeons again.

For the brain implant.

The headphones are unnecessary now. And her personality has changed; she's no longer playing at being a Joja puppet because it turns her on. It's more natural now; she simply thinks of herself as a Joja plastic appliance, a servile sex device which obeys because that's its purpose. She still answers to 'Abigail', but that's because Abigail is a Joja plastic appliance.

She sleeps standing upright now, in a barometric chamber, which Joja installed in the house. It wirelessly connects with her brain implant to guide her through her day; at night she sleeps within it, eyelids fluttering as it bombards her unresisting mind.

She has a new focus now: dissolving her personality.

She is a Joja Plastic Appliance. It says so on her neck. And there is a standard personality implant for Joja Plastic Appliances. Her last desire as Abigail is to melt away 'Abigail' so that she can become a pure servile device. So that she can become Joja Plastic Appliance #19,201 (the number that was tattooed on months ago), with the latest Joja Slavebot Personality installed and running her mind.

**

So that's the fantasy that cropped up there. I haven't worked out what the protagonist is doing during all this. Are they complicit? Appalled yet unable to do anything? I'd like to find some middle ground allowing for Abigail's complete submersion into the timeline above but that doesn't have the narrator as the driver - but I can't think of one offhand that doesn't instead leave them looking foolish or helpless.

Perhaps I will think of something. Taking suggestions!

Sunday Smuttenings

So, I just finished the first 24k of Pierced 6c! And it's pretty fucking hot, I think. I can never tell when I write the really explicit scenes, as I wind up jilling interspersed with the writing so that when I am done I don't know if it's hot because the prose is hot or if it's hot because I've been touching myself, BUT... I think this one is pretty hot.

If you like mind control and aliens ovipositing human women, that is. And if you don't... what are you doing here?

Anyway, so it looks like next weekend there will be some sexual payoff in 'Pierced'. Assuming that the rest of the writing goes to plan this week; remember that I like to reach about 40k bytes before releasing an update. Part 6b, from last week, was 56k, which was both the largest so far and really rather larger than I like, by way of comparison.

I won't promise a conclusion this week, given that I just wrote half the damned update on a single sex scene, but hey, I don't think people will be disappointed.

In other news, I sent Uzobono another two scenes for CORE #10 on Friday night, so that's also moving forward, though I daresay she'll be done with them shortly and I will need to get her more. I like to keep her busy lest her volcano goddess heritage surface (as it does when she has nothing to do) and bury a major metropolitan area under flaming liquid rock.

I also need to figure out how to add a links section to the sidebar of this blog, so I can link to her art as well as to my stuff on the EMCSA, Callidus' website, the various fora... a whole host of things.

But for now I am tired, so that will all have to wait for tomorrow. I think tonight-Tabico did some damn fine work.

Chugging Along

Just got back from Captain America: Civil War, and I enjoyed it thoroughly! Oh, I had a few quibbles, but by and large it required no untenable suspension of disbelief and was well-written enough, and the action sequences were excellent.

On the smut front, Pierced 6b is up to 39k, which is acceptable for an update, though it will of course need at least two edits first. Also, I want to end with a zinger scene and I've just reached one, so I'll probably pack that in before calling it an installment. And of course there is at least one more installment further, though only one, I think.

Someone, I shan't say who, wrote me and importuned me not to write Tsugerloi's awakening-into-the-brood offscreen, that is to say they asked me to write it on-screen, to give it some focus and step-by-step attention.

This had not been my original intent; I was going to wave my hand and have Tsugerloi confront Margot with "Sorry, we brood now" (paraphrasing), but since this person cared enough to write and ask, I shall do it the hard way. And it is harder, obviously, I have to be in the right headspace, but if it works (and there's no guarantee) it's definitely a hotter scene.

Anyhow, we'll give it a whirl, so hopefully you folks will enjoy that.

Lewd Advertising

So, for what I think is the first time ever, I bought a game because of porn of that game.

I was browsing /aco/ over on 4chan - yes, my secret shame, but these are the Secret Files - and there was a thread for Stardew Valley. I had never heard of it, but hey. Anyhow, the porn was pretty good - here's a fine example - and it appeared to be a farm/romance sim, and I've been suffering from that ennui which I mentioned, so I bought it!

It's pretty good so far. I have some quibbles, but overall it's low-pressure fun. I like supporting independent game developers so dropping $15 to try it out was no problem.

However, as I said, I'd never heard of it until Hey! Porn! Which is an amusing entree into a game, and a sign to media producers of all sorts that shutting down fanart of your content, even smutty fanart, is actually a bad idea.

Incest From Space

So I like incest. Not in real life of course - yuck - but in my smut.

This is a bit of a problem because some of my favorite co-fetishists do not read incest, full stop. Thrall, ferinstance, has it on her verboten list; Vanderbilt won't touch it. And that's a shame, because they write great stuff and I like for them to enjoy my stories. So I shy away from incest a bit more than I might if left purely to my own devices.

That said, I do find it hot, so I do sometimes go there. A good incest story can really hit my buttons - witness If I Was Not You's Continuous/Updatable Neuropositive Therapy. Short, snappy, sexy. Also witty, but that doesn't start with 's'. (The story could have used more sex, IMO, but then I've fallen victim to forever-longer-story disease, so take MO with a grain of salt.)

Recently I dropped a couple of hot redheads, Lynn Thompson and her daughter Calla, into my story Pierced. They do good work there, although they don't bang on camera (and that would distract from the main story themes anyway). However, I'd really like to have them bang, so I put them in a little headcanon that goes as follows:

Title: Lesbian Conquerors From Venus! They Want Our Women - To Want Their Women!

(I'm pretty pleased with that one.)

In the event, no Venusians are on screen. The backdrop is that Earth is being invaded by LCFVs, forcing evacuations, and our protagonists Terri Smyth and her daughter Veratrine take in a couple of refugees from the invasion: none other than Lynn and Calla Thompson!

These are an alternate universe Lynn and Calla, who are here not broodslaves but rather fifth columnists for the LCFVs, spreading lesbianism behind the lines of the resistance forces.

And that's basically the story. Calla seduces Vera, with the aid of some hypno-gadgets, at the same time as Lynn seduces Terri; Vera's induction into the Lesbian Fifth Column proceeds a little faster (she's young) and we ultimately get a scene where her new mindset is revealed to her wavering mother, who finally gives in, and is led not only to acceptance of her new attitude but also a big squishy incest-pile; and at the end of the story as usual everyone is blissfully happy with their mindset. Tabico Happy Ending get!

I'm riffing on several influences - trilby else's Venusian Lesbian invasion story, Golden, for one. I can still picture the curly-haired girl wearing nothing but her sock from that one. Rrr. And also a real classic, The Pyramid, a short and direct-to-the-point story of a pyramid-shaped device that turns women into lesbians, no muss, no fuss. Visually I'm humming from the key of InCase, who did a (it's futa but I won't hold that against him) hot redheaded mom/daughter tryst, and a second one on  the same theme I picked up somewhere - I can't figure out who the artist is, if you can, let me know.

Of course, those are Lynn and Calla - for Terri and Vera I'm thinking brown hair and blue eyes, another favorite combo of mine. Rrr.

Anyhow, yet another idea for the idea bucket. This one does have the promise of being relatively short, though.

Tuesday Tabenings the Second

What is a 'Tabening', anyway? Sounds like... there was a movie... ah yes, the Highlander that didn't happen. Yeah, we don't want to go there. Let's envision it more like a 'happening'. Or maybe a 'ravening'. Yeees, that's the ticket. A yawning maw in the earth, eager to consume.

So, progress report. Although CORE moved forward yesterday, today has not been productive. I should be working on 'Pierced', I mentally have the next things to say all lined up and ready, and I just can't write. I just, I just need to, there's this... something, stopping me.

What's odd is that I seem to get into these funks when I lack for distraction. I don't have any video games that I'm playing right now - and I yearn for one, but they all seem "meh" at the moment. I had a big burst of work-related activity recently but that's died down. I just sit at my computer and don't feel like doing anything. It's bad. I have the time, I should get shit done, but instead I don't. Probably some manic-depressive thing, only not, you know, serious.

Ah, well. This too shall pass. Mebbe tomorrow the ol' fingers will work again.

Productivity

I have other interests besides mind control smut - I bet you do, too - and in the pursuit of those interests noticed the following chart recently:

It's a newly-released chart from the USDA, showing the state of the American dairy industry. What I found startling is that red line representing the milk productivity per cow. It has almost doubled since 1980.

Think about that for a moment. Each cow now gives almost twice as much milk as a cow in 1980 did. That's incredible! What could be the cause of that?

Is it breeding? We've been breeding cows for thousands of years. And yet somehow in the span of the most recent 35 years, we've managed to double their milk output. Cows are ready to breed at 15 months, so at a really aggressive estimate that's only 28 generations. Are we that much better at breeding that we can double the output of an already thoroughly-customized species in only 28 generations?

Is it drugs? There are obviously a number of ways to increase milk output through pharmaceuticals. Is it process? Don't underestimate the ability to improve outputs by rearranging  processes, it's a major and effective component of industrial organization. Feed the cows at 11 rather than 9:30 and there could be a small but quantifiable change in their behavior and output. Add up hundreds of those little observed results and you can achieve real change (although I can't imagine an actual doubling of output).

Is it something else? Or, and this is the most likely, a combination of a lot of things?

Anyway. I don't want to get lost in the weeds, here - I'm not that interested in the American Dairy industry. What I am interested in are the fetish ramifications of this information. Particularly considering that I'm a huge fan of the whole human cow / human dairy concept (as made obvious by my story Herd Instinct).

Thus, being that sort of pervert, immediately I was struck by the idea of a mind-transformed human dairy herd having their productivity doubled. Mmm.

Of course, pursuing that idea with an eye towards a story immediately runs into some of my hesitancies. I don't write about things happening to children, which of course immediately causes challenges when writing about selective breeding. I do write drugs, so that part is easy, but frankly selective breeding has to be pretty central to this whole concept so there are some mines laid there. Also I am not pleased writing death (some people might be surprised to hear that, but it's true) so when breeding humans the generations in my story would necessarily be long and productive rather than quick and with a lot of weeding out, which is of course key to any real selective breeding.

Also, sort of as an aside, I would absolutely never include any sort of slaughterhouse concept. There are those who write human cattle stories who feature that prominently, and of course it fits squarely into the milieu. But the whole idea is a total unpleasantness for me, so no, never.

But I can work with drugs and selective breeding. Those of course lead to another major question. Who is doing this selective breeding? The immediate problem being that if it's a standard modern era Mistress/Master figure, they're not going to live long enough to oversee more than a few generations, as the cattle live as long as they do (as mentioned, in my stories the cattle will be living long, happy, mindless lives).

That, by the way, is why we don't have acorns next to the almonds on grocery shelves. There are oak trees that have mutated to produce acorns which are sweet and good to eat, but breeding oak trees is beyond our patience. In addition to their long lives and land requirements, the genes that produce the inedible tannins are multiple and complicated, so planting sweet acorns doesn't produce sweet acorn producing trees. Reaching sweet acorn trees that would breed true would take many human lifetimes.

But back to fetish. So, in this theoretical story focused around improving human cattle stock (and admit it, for some of us the idea of "improving human cattle stock" is erotic), who is doing the improving?

Could be aliens. But in this sort of story where you start with a big pool of enslaved humans, where's the interest in the aliens' motivations? Where's the conflict? Not to pooh-pooh alien stories, they can be done really well (e.g. trilby's Xenophilia), but it doesn't seem like the way I'd go here.

Could be robots. That might work; some sort of AI created a long time ago whose goal is to perfect a race of human cattle. I did something similar in 'Rouge', with a system that was set up to enslave people and then self-perpetuates. So that's one possible path.

But, let me go back to my initial human caveat "modern era". Let's discard that, and slide over to "fantasy future era". That opens up the field a bit. What about humans who are a different type of humans? In other words: a caste system. So there is a caste of Masters/Mistresses, and a caste of human cattle. Possibly other castes, possibly not. This would fit nicely in a "destroyed environment" dystopian future. And you also get to riff on caste/class themes. And you can have politicking going on within the Master/Mistress caste. That would work nicely, providing Master/Mistress figures who are properly dominant yet also can be related to by the reader.

So then, if that's the milieu, who is our protagonist? One option is a time-traveller; someone who was frozen from an earlier time and wakes up in this future. I did that in 'Codi' (see a few posts back). It allows the author an easy avenue to explain things.

Or it could be a cow. That's a good chance to write a mind controlled sub point of view. Hmm. Perhaps a cow whose Mistress is using her as part of the aforementioned machinations... raising her up for some reason? Which of course her upbringing and generations of selective breeding would struggle against. Yes, there's a good story in there.

But - I should be working on an existing story, rather than designing an entirely new one. Well, one more idea for the pile. But I figured I'd share what sort of thing goes through my head when I read USDA reports.