Still Around...

This is just a really quick post to let people know that I'm still around. Lots of boring real world stuff (mainly work and travel) have been taking most of my attention. However, the Christmas/New Year hols should give me the time to make a proper post.

P.S. A special greeting to SusanHotwife! You look truly fantastic in that costume!! I'll send you a PM over the holiday period.

Regards.

Tickling

First, sorry for my silence over the past few weeks.

As far as the past week is concerned (or, more specifically, the time since Friday November 6), the reason for that silence does at least give me something to write about. Here goes...

In a way, browsing porn on the internet is like mining for gold. You may find one or two nuggets here and there every time you do it, but occasionally you hit a “rich seam” of material that really pushes your buttons and exists in reasonable quantity (e.g. a website, model, author or artist that you were previously unaware of).

Then again (and this is something that’s only happened to me once before, when I came across a “cuckold story” site more than ten years ago), you may encounter a “game changer” that really gets under your skin and affects your fantasies for life.

Well, whether what I encountered on the above Friday was a “game changer” or just a “rich seam”, it’s certainly taken full occupation of my fantasies over the past week.

As I suppose is true of most people, I have varying degrees of interest in a range of sexual subjects and fantasies. In my case, these have always centered on BDSM. So, among many other topics, I’ve had an interest in the BDSM potential of tickling for some time. In my case, I think it’s because the combination of bondage and tickling makes punishment a possibility without physical brutality or damage to the body of the victim. This, combined with the unique, maddening, “unendurable” sensations that tickling produces, gives the practice a kind of refinement and delicacy that’s largely absent from other forms of corporal punishment. Anyway, whatever the reason, I have (what I assumed was) a mild interest in “bondage tickling”.

Therefore, over the years, I’ve looked on the internet a number of times for related material, but what I found was usually disappointing. There’s definitely a lot of tickling material around, but only a very small proportion of it is at all satisfying. A lot of the artwork is very “cute cartoony” (in the Smurf/My Little Pony/Charlie Brown etc kind of sense), and the amount of more “serious” art emphasizing the punishment and suffering angle seems very small (at least, I haven’t been able to find very much). Photos and videos were also disappointing. The “bondage” was almost always makeshift and often looked ineffective. In many cases, the emphasis was on all of those involved “having fun”, the atmosphere was lighthearted, and tickling was treated as a humorous subject.

However, at least as far as videos are concerned, the situation seems to have changed since the last time I looked. On said Friday, I found a tickling video on one of those “porn YouTube” sites, and that soon led me to the webpage of the people who had made it. I guess that my requirements, when I think about them and list them out, are more or less as follows:

(1) The bondage device is purpose built, clean, stylish and (most important) inescapable. The victim is completely unable to get free, and can’t avoid or mitigate what’s being done to them in any way.

(2) The tickler is impassive, methodical and merciless. She isn’t just having “a bit of fun” with the person being tickled, she’s torturing them.

(3) The person being tickled is obviously having a hard time. Of course, if we’re talking about an actual video (rather than fantasy), this clearly has to be within safe, sane and consensual limits.

The videos on the website in question (or at least some of them) fulfilled all of those requirements, and I found them an enormous turn on, to an extent that surprised me enormously. Consequently, “tickle torture” has taken full occupation of my fantasies over the past week. How largely and how permanently it will figure in my future personal “sexual landscape” is not clear as yet. Whatever happens, whether this new found interest exhausts itself like a “fad” or continues long term, the experience has taught me that there’s still stuff I don’t know about my own sexual feelings.

I would be happy to hear from anyone who has been surprised by the strength of their response to a particular sexual fantasy or scenario. I’d also like to point out that I’m not about to abandon LLP! From today, after a week off (please see the above!) I’m continuing work on my current LLP project.

Incidentally, if you’re interested, you’ll find the site in question by googling on “tickle abuse”. A large number of the videos have been uploaded to free porn video sites.

Cheers.

Update (or “I never realized you could do that with your breasts!!!”)

First, thank you for your messages of support, they really are appreciated. Since my last post, I’ve been working on the same ‘motion comic’ (which this time will be in the form of a movie file). In particular, I’ve been doing the fully animated ‘naughty’ section that comes near the end of the story. Originally, I intended this to be quite limited, but when I’d finished setting up the female character I noticed that I could use her to perform certain intimate ‘actions’ that I hadn’t expected. Therefore, I’ve expanded that section and will add some extra dialog to it.

As a diversion, I’ve also been working on what I could call my ‘workflow’ project. Although this won’t apply to the comic I’m doing now, I intend to use it for the one after that. I’m hoping it will significantly enhance the speed with which I can produce my motion comics. It should allow me to create a baseline version of the whole comic with relative ease, after which I can make enhancements to the bits which are most important or have most impact. I’ll give more details in a future post.

Regards.

Meandering...

It’s been longer since my last post than I intended, so here’s an update regarding what I’ve been working on over the past few weeks.

After I finished the ‘Black Snapper’ video, I wanted to do a quick illustration style project before carrying on with Episode 3. However, I fell into a pattern of starting something that I thought I could do quickly, and then realizing that it was expanding into something that would take rather longer. At that point, I’d have another idea, and start work on that new idea in the belief it would take less time. After a number of repetitions of that process, I now have lots of ideas, and a number of half finished projects!

I’ve been making attempts to use a simpler style for the less important illustrations and reserve more detail for the ‘punch line’. However, that hasn’t been very successful because all of my illustrations tend to ‘gravitate’ towards more detail as they progress (I’m making that happen of course, but it kind of feels like it’s happening of its own accord).

Anyway, I’ve been trying hard to develop some means of producing ‘motion comics’ quicker and with less effort than they’ve required so far. That’s really become a necessity for me, because the rate at which new ideas occur to me hugely outweighs the speed at which I can produce finished stories.

After various attempts, I think I’ve hit on a technique that might improve the situation quite a bit. However, I won’t explain it here. I’ll leave that until I’ve actually used it to produce something I can show you.

With regard to my next upload, I’ve finally settled on a single story and have produced the majority of the artwork for it (all of which is in the same style as previous comics). It should be ready within the next two weeks.

In any case, I’ve decided to post some information on progress etc every week. That way, at least people won’t feel left in the dark.

Finally, thank you for all your comments and messages. I read them all with great interest, even though I haven’t replied to any individually for a while. One or two people have suggested working in collaboration. It’s great to hear that some of you feel interested enough in my stuff to propose working together, but at present I feel totally snowed under just with my own ideas! However, please feel free to make suggestions or comments. Hearing from people is what makes it all worthwhile.

Regards.

The Black Snapper

Update

Here is a quick update, just to let you know the state of progress.

'Snapper' is coming along well. I'm mainly at the stage of editing and creating the motion graphics for the descriptions that appear during the movie. When I've edited together a rough version, I'll go back and tweak some of the animation. At the end of the story, a certain object (I won't say what!) has to fall onto the floor and bounce off it, and since that's easier to create in Unreal Engine, I need to look at one or two tutorial videos regarding physics simulation. In any case, I think the whole movie will be finished within the next two weeks.

A word of warning though, Snapper was originally intended as a kind of 'proof of concept' for doing movies using UE4 (although—as always seems to happen—the form of presentation has grown a bit). For that reason, the 'Snapper' is the only character that fully appears and moves around. I hope the little blighter is enough to keep your interest!

I've also been thinking a lot about ideas for one-off artwork. The trouble is that, to do them justice, they need to involve a dialog, monologue or short sequence of images. They're best realized as a 'motion comic' style movie (like Pamphlets), or as 'kinetic short story' (like Teasehouse). In either case, from the lessons I learned on those previous projects, the workflow will be simpler. I think I've settled on doing one particular idea, and I'm really intent on it not dragging on or taking too long. It involves one character drawing (+ different expressions) and a 'motion comic' style monologue.

Visitors is still on ice. The next time I mention it will probably be when I release the whole thing (including the earlier frames) as a slideshow. That's because, at this stage, presenting the whole story together will help the impact of the final frames, so that's what I've decided to do.

Regards.

ADJUSTIA

Here’s a heads up regarding the home planet of the Black Snapper. If you don’t know what a 'deballing world' is, please refer to this post.

Update

First, as always, I’d like to thank everyone for their comments. I haven’t posted anything recently, but as some of you may know, I’m doing a bit of research into rendering alternatives for future CGI animations. Nevertheless, I can appreciate that people like to feel informed about what’s going on, so from now on, I’ll attempt to provide some updates with regard to progress, even if that doesn’t involve posting actual artwork.

In addition, (and as a change of pace from work on the CGI animations) I’m going to try to do some one-off pieces of artwork each consisting of a single ‘frame’ only. Whatever I start to do always seems to grow in scale (and effort required) as I develop it, so as a counterbalance to that, I’m going to do some stuff that strictly consists of one frame only, keeping to that as a kind of rule. These one-frame efforts could also function as a precursor to more ambitious projects.

With regard to the CGI side, I’m progressing OK on “Snapper” using Unreal Engine 4 as the renderer. I’d already briefly considered Source Filmmaker as a possible candidate for producing animations, but after receiving a comment about it, I took a more in-depth look. It’s certainly got some good points (such as automatic lip-synch and creation of the animation within the application itself), but the process for preparing custom models is extremely involved, and the rendering doesn’t seem to be as good as the physically based rendering available in Unreal. It looks like Blender will get a real time PBR based viewport renderer in around a year’s time, and if that’s close to being as good as the UE4 renderer, then that would be terrific! It would mean being able to do everything (apart from editing) in one application, with instant feedback on the final render. In the meantime, I intend to produce some stuff using Blender + Unreal.

“Visitors” is on hold at the moment, but with a little more work, the next frame will be finished, so I’ll be posting that before too long (probably shortly after I upload “Snapper”).

Regards.

Episode 2.5

First, I’d like to thank everyone for their encouraging comments. They really are appreciated.

Here is Episode 2.5. It’s kind of a short extra, and not really part of the main narrative, but I liked the idea, and had done some work on it before my CG projects went into hibernation. Many of you will no doubt notice that the 'device' involved owes a big debt to a certain comedy movie of the 1970’s…

I’ve also been busy with something else. One of the big 'pains' involved in CG animation is the time it takes to render the final images. However, the real time rendering now available in some 3D games engines (especially Unreal 4), is already impressively realistic. Furthermore, these games engines make the creation of various environments, lighting and volumetric/particle effects (such as fire, smoke, fog, etc.) easier than in 'conventional' CG animation software. For that reason, as a kind of 'proof of concept', I’m creating another short animation using a combination of Blender and Unreal Engine. So, prepare to meet the cruel, disgusting, atrocious Snapper from the planet Adjustia! If all goes well with that, I’ll produce Episode 3 using the same animation pipeline.

Episode 2.5 Coming Soon

Apologies for the recent silence. I'm not very good at multitasking, so Visitors is on hold just now. I haven't been idle, though...

Visitors: Frame 11

Blood and Gore in LLP

As Frame 8 of ‘Visitors’ might have raised the question of ‘dark’ fantasies in some people’s minds (torture, blood and gore, etc), I thought I’d use the opportunity to explain my stance with regard to that. It’s quite simple: there is absolutely no blood, gore, physical torture or snuff in the LLP universe.

‘Deballing’ naturally requires some explanation, as it’s obviously a form of mutilation. In the LLP universe, castration (deballing) comes in a highly ‘sanitized’ form. The basic notion is that, from the time the male guest arrives, his balls are attached to his body not by blood vessels and tissue, but solely through the connection between the two parts of his chastiring (remember, almost anything is possible in a virtual universe, and the LLP Authorities make the rules to suit themselves!). Therefore, to retain his manhood, the guest must ensure that this precious connection doesn’t become cut or broken.

From the fantasy viewpoint, this allows explicit depictions of castration without the associated pain and gore. I’m not sure how much this will find resonance with other people, but in terms of my own fantasies, it’s quite a useful innovation. It retains what (at least to me) are the exciting aspects of the scenario (chopping block, intimidating blades, and other raw, physical elements) while excluding the stomach churning, unpleasant ones (i.e. the ‘guro’ elements).

Another important factor with respect to deballing is the automatic ‘tinyfication’ process that follows it. Castration on its own would be cruel and entirely negative, but tinyfication makes the overall ‘adjustment’ process far more morally ambiguous. Although the victim loses his ‘manhood', and even has penis reduced to a pitiable size, he gains a greatly enhanced capacity for excitement through his cuckold fetish, and greatly increased orgasmic pleasure through his sensitized little cock. Hence, adjustment, although appearing to do something horrendous to the victim, actually gives him something extremely valuable (although strictly on its own terms).

So, to summarize, you won’t see any blood, gore or desperately extreme sadism in LLP, but you definitely will see a few ‘coin purses’ flying around, and even that turns out with everybody happy (in their own different ways) in the end!

Regards.

Visitors: Frames 9 & 10

Some Serious Thoughts about ‘Masturbation Material’

I wanted to give a clear explanation of my motives for developing the “kinetic story” idea, and hopefully get some feedback regarding people’s views and preferences.

My main aim in creating stuff relating to the LLP fantasy is to provide material that people will find sexually exciting and, in particular, that people can ‘masturbate to’ enjoyably. For the sake of brevity, let’s refer to it as MM (masturbation material).

Now, although people tend not to talk about the subject, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that masturbating to stuff on the Internet must be an enormously popular and widespread activity. For me, that raises an interesting question, i.e., “What form of material makes the best MM?” When I say ‘form’ here, I’m thinking mainly in terms of categories like still images, comics, animated GIFs, videos, etc.

Looking around on the Internet, I was surprised to discover very little discussion regarding what form of material makes the best MM. So, (taking as read that it should be erotic in content) here are my ideas on the important characteristics that may make stuff suitable as MM:

(1) Progressiveness: The material develops some kind of story, or follows some kind progression that the viewer can enjoy.

(2) Motion: Moving images can be more exciting than still ones

(3) Controllability: The material should be controllable, so that things happen at ‘just the right moment’ from the masturbator’s point of view. An alternative way of stating this is to say that the viewer can look at the image they want, when they want.

Now, in terms of these characteristics, here are the pros and cons of some different types of material, considered as MM:

Still images: Good controllability, but no motion, and any progressiveness is in the mind of the viewer only.

Comics: Good controllability and progressiveness, but no motion.

Animated GIFs: Good controllability and motion, but no progressiveness (in terms of progression of a story) and somehow suppresses imagined progressiveness in the mind of the viewer.

Videos: Excellent motion and progressiveness (depending on content), but low controllability.

It’s because of the above considerations that I like the possibilities offered by a carefully constructed ‘flash’ style animation or ‘kinetic story’. Here I’m imagining a comic style narrative that includes short or looping animations to make the ‘interesting bits’ more exciting. By including sufficient user interaction, the viewer would get good progressiveness, motion and controllability.

So, what do think? These are just my ideas, based on my own experience. It would be great to hear other people’s preferences, views and impressions.

Regards.

"Kinetic Short Story": Teasehouse

Visitors: Frame 8

Whiplash Tease House

Here is the cover of a "tease house" brochure that will appear in my forthcoming "kinetic novel" type short story. As a reminder, here is a description of what a tease house is:

Tease houses

The purpose of these special facilities is to sexually
arouse male guests so that they generate large quantities
of sex credits. Tease houses often operate along similar
lines to those of a bordello, except that clients do not
actually have sex or obtain sexual relief. Since most
male guests have masochistic tendencies, many tease
houses have a 'femdom' theme.

Visitors: Frame 7 + Quick Update

Here is ‘Frame 7’ and a quick update on my current progress etc.

- First, thank you for your comments. I haven’t answered any individually for a while, but the following points will hopefully answer some of your queries.

- As many of you may have noticed, the “Visitors” series is not big on “artistic consistency”. In part, that’s because I was trying to do something using raster graphics (in which I have very little experience) rather than vector graphics. However, as an experiment, it’s really just confirmed how much I love producing vector art, which is far more suited to my temperament and way of working. So I’m going back to vector illustrations. Frame 7 was produced entirely using Inkscape, my favorite vector graphics editor. The rest of the series will be in the same style, and I’m actually looking forward to producing it! I think that, without realizing it, producing the raster illustrations (using Manga Studio) had become something of a drudge.

- My first ‘kinetic short story’ is very nearly finished. I’ll be working on it again from tomorrow onwards. That’s also been a learning experience, as some of the features I implemented now seem more trouble than they’re worth. However, I’ll say more about that when I upload the story itself.

- Starting next month, I’m going to work on Episode 3. I’ve been putting it off, but once I actually get into it, I know I’ll enjoy it. So I’ve made up my mind. Susan and John are coming “back into play”!

Cheers.

Visitors: Frame 6

Visitors: Frame 5

What I've been doing...

As you may have noticed, it’s been a little while since my last post. I haven’t been inactive though. In fact, I’m working on something that I feel will be extremely useful for helping me produce the stories that I want to tell. My previous motion comic turned out to be rather a drag to do, and I ended up producing it as movie file rather than the flash animation that I had originally planned. I think part of the problem was that I didn’t have a clear enough idea of the “structure” it would have. By “structure”, I don’t mean the structure of the story itself, but the mechanics of how the user makes it progress. However, a couple of weeks ago, I came across something which I thought—with a little adaption—would be perfect for my stories: the visual novel.

As many of you will already know, visual novels are basically games that consist of a lot of dialog, and also include pictures and a (usually limited) amount of animation. It’s basically the dialog that drives the story, i.e. the characters speak, and the user clicks to read the next piece of dialog. Many VNs are pretty long, and the emphasis is not particularly on the pictures—and still less on animation. My stories are much shorter, but they are usually centered around conversations, so I think that having them driven by dialog is a good idea. On the other hand, I want my stories to be more visual, and to have full blown animation at the most “interesting” points.

I’ve done quite a lot of looking around on the internet, and have found several virtual novel engines that make the process of producing a visual novel considerably easier. However, they tend to suffer from the same deficiency, i.e. poor support for animation. The upshot was that I decided to write my own VN software (not an ‘engine’, more like a VN generating program that I can easily amend and reuse for different stories). The work has been progressing pretty quickly, and it looks like I’ll be able to include the following features.

1. Web based—implemented in HTML5 and javascript
2. Efficient sprite based animation allowing animation of facial expressions etc as the characters talk
3. Seamless integration of short animations in the form of web video files
4. “Typing effect” style dialog in comic style speech bubbles

All of that has taken quite a lot of reading up (I knew virtually nothing about HTML or javascript), but it’s been fun. I’ve got to the point now where I’m almost ready to start work on producing an actual story, so please stay tuned!

P.S. Of course, that also means that “Visitors” is slightly on hold, but I hope to move that forward too in the next week or so.

P.P.S. I should point out that virtual novels usually have branch points at which the user makes choices. I’m not so interested in that just at the present, so what I’ll be producing is something closer to a “kinetic novel” (or in my case, a “kinetic short story”).

Visitors: Frame 4

Google has backed down

Google has reversed its "no explicit content" decision. It seems that a lot of people actually like looking at porn on the internet—Stap me, what a surprise!

Moving to Tumblr

Thank you to everyone who posted messages encouraging me to continue. Actually, there's no chance of me quitting, I enjoy doing this stuff too much!

Anyway, I've moved to Tumblr. Apart from the flash animations, I've transferred all relevant images and movies that were posted here. There seems to be some technical issue with the flash animations (probably related to domain access) which I'll look into when I have some spare time.

Here is the tumblr link:

http://lamivex.tumblr.com

Time to get the hell outta Dodge...

Evidently the time has come to look for a new home. I just received the following from "The Blogger team":

Dear Blogger User,
We're writing to tell you about an upcoming change to the Blogger Content Policy that may affect your account.
In the coming weeks, we'll no longer allow blogs that contain sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video. We'll still allow nudity presented in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts, or where there are other substantial benefits to the public from not taking action on the content.
The new policy will go into effect on the 23rd of March 2015. After this policy goes into effect, Google will restrict access to any blog identified as being in violation of our revised policy. No content will be deleted, but only blog authors and those with whom they have expressly shared the blog will be able to see the content we've made private.

Any suggestions regarding a new location would be welcome. Hopefully a site where censorship isn't an issue.


Regards.

Visitors: Frame 3

New comic, different style

I've recently been getting into raster (as opposed to vector) illustration. I'm a big fan of vector illustration (the kind that you produce using inkscape or Adobe Illustrator etc.) because of its elegance and ease of amendment. However, I also realize that, for detailed painting-style pictures, raster images (as produced by Manga Studio, Paint tool Sai, Photoshop etc.) are more flexible, and can give better results.

So here's the start of a new "Tableaux" comic, done in that style. This time, as an experiment, I'll be posting episodes as I complete them, so that blog updates will hopefully be a bit more regular. My idea is to run a few stories like this concurrently, and post updates when they're ready.

P.S. I'd like to thank everyone who has posted comments or suggestions. Even if I don't reply to them individually, they are all noted and appreciated.

Best wishes.

'Enforced Chastity' Game

Update (June 3 2016): I got a comment from someone who said that adverts on the current hosting site were preventing them from playing the 'Enforced Chastity' Game, and I happen to have just discovered a much better site that has no adverts. You can play the game on the new site by clicking on the widget below. If the new site doesn't cause any problems, I'll delete the original embedded game from this post around the end of this month.

   

 P.S. I you like the game, please feel free to support it!

Update (May 8 2016): I am developing a new 'enforced chastity' game that features a measure of real enforcement! Please see this post for details.

I have created a simple 'enforced chastity' game that you can (hopefully) play online. Strictly speaking, it's slightly off topic as far as the LLP scenario is concerned, but definitely falls into the same area of interest.
Here is an explanatory video:

and here is the game!