Off to Florida

Tomorrow I fly to Florida, pick up a car, and drive it back to Maine. This should resolve some of our mobility problems, but it is only a temporary quick fix. Poverty really sucks.

I think I am going to start writing in this blog again, because I am in the midst of the worst bit of piece-specific writer's block I have ever experienced, and blogging seems to help.

I have the universe, I have the characters, I have the theme, I know what I want to say, and I have done an enormous amount of work on this one 'project'. what I DON'T have is a story.

It has been a while

It has been a bit more than a year, I think, since I last wrote to this blog. I still get hits, but now very few.

I am going to try to get back to this blog, health permitting, and pending agreement with my ethereal Muse (who is a rank lazy BITCH)and pursuant to gently pressure from my tangible muse (Thanks, Lady Dusk).

I have been writing a lot, most of it is either garbage (which I don't share because it is... well..... garbage) and a lot more is background work (lists of Neofelid names, governmental structures in the 14 worlds, Variken team names, etc, which is basically self-generated reference material, sort of an encyclopedia of the 14 worlds. I am saving most of this work, but I do the majority of it away from the computer, so it is actually ink (graphite, dye, crayon) on paper (menus, the backs of prescription forms, napkins, etc)

I have a moral question, and I really want answers.

Okay, here is the situation. I am asleep in the daytime (as usual) and my doorbell rings. It is, say, noonish. It is a sunday. At my door is a twentysomething woman and her son, who is about 8. They are well dressed, and holding copies of some colorful christian religious propaganda. I am grumpy and annoyed. If the woman had been alone, I would have either slammed the door, or given her one of a number of verbally abusive but clever lines that I keep in the back of my head for such intrusions, but the kid's presence alters the tableau a bit.

What I want to do is ignore the woman completely, kneel down, and say to the child, in a very pleasant voice "Hi. The only difference between Jesus Christ and the Easter Bunny is that your mommy thinks one of them is real." and then stand up, and smile, and hold out my hand for the mother to shake.

Am I justified in doing that?

The Dragon's Sway

Chasing the dragon
whisps of smoke,
dense, fragrant,
slowly rising
curling
blurring the spaces
between me
and the fire I am taming.

She rides the crest of the wave
floating, radiant and alluring
her black hair's curls adrift
like the Dragon's breath
playing soft about her shoulders.
Her almost-smile,
Her closing almond eyes,
Her softly swaying hips,
spellbind me
as I watch the Dragon
seduce her
and She moves in the slow cadence
of it's beating wings.

The Dragon floats between us
tendrils in a mist of mingling spirit
and entwines us
a welcome third
a presence, a binding,
and the black whisps of the Dragon's breath
holds us together
and we are overtaken, we three,
into one.

Tentacle Hentai

Okay, I admit that I am not a normal person, in many ways, one of them sexually. I learned about sex from Gor novels, incredibly poorly informed back-of-the-bus talk and an unbelievably kinky first girlfriend. I can understand, appreciate and practice deviance of many types (a subdivision of BDSM that will remain mercifully unspecified being my personal favorite). My motto is "If sex is a physical thing, you are doing it wrong". I own handcuffs and whips and -=CENSORED=- -=CENSORED=- and a really nice set of -=CENSORED=-s.

All that being said, WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THE TENTACLES?????????????????

I watched Urutsukidoji (legend of the overfiend) which was, I believe, the first appearance of the marauding penis-tentacle-beasts. I thought to myself "That's original, really kinky, and a bit much". That was some twenty years ago, or thereabouts.

There are now HUNDREDS of japanese cartoons featuring these bizarre and quite disturbing critters, molesting their ways through hordes of biologically impossible japanese superheroines (who, as a seeming rite of passage into superheroism, must be sexually assaulted by somebody or, more often, some thing. With tentacles where penises should be)

There is even a LIVE-ACTION version, with real, human actresses, and marauding tentacle-penis beasts. Really badly designed marauding tentacle-penis beasts. I mean, they look like something out of an x-rated version of Dr. Who, circa the 1970's. I watched these as comedies (cough cough). All three of them.

What disturbs me most is the possible effect these tremendously violent, bizarre and sick depictions of the sex act will have on an entire generation of young japanese boys (the obvious target demographic). Literally ALL sex acts depicted are violent and nonconsentual.

I am comfortable with my own sexuality, but even as bizarre and troubling as my sexual education was, I was never really exposed to the wholesale degradation of women until I was an adult, had already learned the important difference between fantasy and reality, and had, in real life, respectful and very fulfilling relationships with women. I can hardly imagine how hard it would have been to deal with my own sexuality if it had been formed by japanese cartoons.

I am a devoted liberal, and a free-speech fanatic absolutist.

Tentacles make that somewhat more difficult to justify.