Since returning from Reykjavik, my body’s been stuck in this thing where I wake up at 4:30 AM, can’t get back to sleep, haul myself out of bed, and then by 9 PM I’m crashing.
But hey, I did get some amazing photos, even if the trip wrecked my sleep schedule.
While I hate this with every fiber of my being—I am firmly of the opinion that if I’m up at 4:30 in the morning it should be because I’m still up, not because I’m getting up—I do have to admit it’s done wonders for my productivity.
This morning, before noon, I worked on a novel, updated my Patreon, finalized a new page on my BDSM site, wrote a blog post for More Than Two, put up a new essay on Xeromag, reset all the FTP passwords on my web server (thanks to a security issue at my webhosting provider…man, this has been a rough week in the infosec world), finished unpacking from Reykjavik, cleaned the tub, and did a load of laundry.
So, from the top:
A short while ago I got a rather snarky email from my BDSM for Nice Guys page.
Which, I mean, wow. “Barely any submissive males”? Oh, my sweet summer child.
Still, this person made a good point that there aren’t a ton of BDSM guides aimed at women out there. I didn’t write one because I’m not a woman; I’m not qualified to write such a thing.
Fortunately, I know people who are, and Dr. Jenny Hale graciously volunteered to step up and fill that space.
And so, the first new page on my BDSM site in quite a long while is now live:
I also added a new page to my Essays section on Xeromag. Most people think of themselves as basically good. Most people are wrong. People tend to get their ethics from the ambient morality around them, and abide by them so long as doing so doesn’t cost them anything, so in their local frame of reference they generally are pleased to consider themselves “good people.” However, step outside the local ethical frame and you see that ethics are more Einsteinian than Newtonian.
Over on the More Than Two blog (and its companion Substack), I published an essay about the skills and traits that make for vibrant, strong relationships:
And finally, I apparently now have a YouTube channel, upon which I just put a new video on the subject of how writers find the drive to finish writing books. (Spoiler: We don’t. The book gives us no peace until we finish it.)
I’ve had a Patreon for years, but have for most of that time done very little with it. I’m now making a point of updating it quite frequently, with behind-the-scenes peek at creative projects, original photography, and excerpts from books I’m working on. You can join for free, and see all my content for just a dollar a month!
While I was in Reykjavik, Iceland last week with the extended polycule, I am pleased to report that we were able to do a beta test of the Project Ladybug prototype…which succeeded beyond our most optimistic hopes.
Monster sex is a huge fetish, with dozens of companies producing endless variations on monster and mythological creature dildos, but my Talespinnrer and I have noticed a shocking, dare I say even dismaying, lack of monster-sex toys of the opposite sort: monsters they prey not on people with innies, but those with outies. Where are the toys that parasitize women, living within them, driving them into frenzies of need, forcing them to copulate endlessly with men, giving those men pleasure beyond imagining in order to steal their precious bodily fluids whilst denying the host any hope of satiation? This will not stand!
This is exactly the void Project Ladybug was designed to fill.
So it came to pass that after making an alginate cast of the inside of my Talespinner’s vagina, 3D scanning the cast, and bringing it into a 3D modeling program, as extensively documented in the links above (not safe for work, natch), I finally made the mold for the alien parasite, a super-soft silicone sleeve designed to fit precisely the exact shape of my Talespinner’s ladybits.
Fun fact: the project became known as Project Ladybug when my smartphone autocorrect keps changing “ladybits” to “ladybug.”
The Ladybug is a pouch of soft silicone, about a millimeter thick, that conforms to her insides and is ridged for his pleasure. It features two internal tentacles that caress the head of the man making use of the host, and as it completely covers her inner bits, it makes sure the host can feel nothing but a vague sense of pressure, but no pleasure.
Why? To keep the host in a state of extended need without relief, so as to make the host copulate fiercely with whatever male subjects happen to be nearby, of course, so that the parasite can feed.
I 3D printed the mold, which took over a day on my old and rather slow 3D printer.
The supports for the inner part of the mold ended up looking rather organic, like alien hands sprouting from the print bed to hold it warmly in a tender embrace.
Partly assembled (half the mold is not shown here), you can get a sense of how large it is and how thick it is.
Pouring the silicone turned out to be a huge hassle, because the inner clearances are so fine and there are so many undercuts that allow for bubbles to form that it actually took more than an hour to cast. I ended up doing the casting in two steps because the silicone started curing in the pot.
So it was with no small measure of nervousness, Gentle Reader, that I cracked the mold open, expecting to find a mess. Instead, the casting turned out flawless.
You can see the ridges inside the parasite, designed to offer greater stimulation for the male subject. When you look at it head on down the opening, you can also see the inner tentacles.
So enough of that, how does it work?
That’s the question we set out to answer in Reykjavik. It turns out the answer is: Rather brilliantly!
Inserting and properly seating the Ladybug proved more difficult than we’d anticipated. It needs to be pressed completely into the host, and we ultimately ended up using a pair of chopsticks for that; fingers alone didn’t really do it.
For the final version, I’ll likely design a tool for the…um, insertion.
Once in place (a process that was, by all accounts, quite pleasant for the host), it stayed put nicely.
To create the best possible simulation of the parasite experience, one that most closely replicated the aphrodisiacs the parasite pumps into the host, we both took bremelanotide (PT-141), a potent aphrodisiac that works like gangbusters on both of us, before we began the experiment.
Sex with the host was…magnificent. The final version will need larger internal tentacles, but the ridges? *chef’s kiss* The parasite absolutely, without question, amplifies the pleasure experienced by male subjects. The ridges are quite soft, and absolutely delightful on the head of the subject’s penis. What’s more, I could remain still within her and each twitch and clench, however slight, felt like a massage on the most sensitive parts of my shaft. Truly delightful.
The host, on the other hand, reported an unbearably frustrating experience, often while on the verge of tears. The host feels nothing of the subject’s pleasure. Indeed, the host feels nothing but a slight sense of pressure, even while the subject is experiencing crashing waves of overwhelming ecstasy.
There are a few minor changes I plan to make for the version 1.0 parasite. The interior tentacles need to be larger, to better stimulate the subject to heights of ecstasy. The outside portion of the parasite will be bigger, to cover the host’s clit and prevent even accidental stimulation. I may make it slightly thicker, and I plan some changes to the mold to make casting easier.
But overall, the effect is exactly what my Talespinner and I had hoped for, and I hope it opens new avenues of mad science to explore.
Alas, this is unlikely to be a sex toy I can produce in any quantity. It turns out there’s enormous variability in the human vagina (there is, of course, a PubMed article on the subject), so making these literally requires 3D scanning a casting of every individual user’s bits. I’d hoped I could maybe make 3-4 standard sizes, but no.
I am not, as a general principle, that much into recreational drugs. I drink on occasion, and discovered when I burned my foot that low-dose cannabis edibles are absolutely magnificent for pain management, but beyond that, and some good experiences with bremelanotide, I don’t use or seek out recreational drugs.
I have, however, always been curious about ecstasy.
I’ve never used it, in part because it’s quite difficult to find in the US and in part because it has a rather alarming risk profile, so it was with considerable interest I learned about 5-MAPB, a designer empathogen quite similar to MDMA but with a milder risk profile.
So it came to pass that my Talespinner and I tried 5-MAPB for the first time on Friday evening. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, being a complete novice to empathogens/entactogens in general, but what I got definitely wasn’t what I expected nor signed up for. 5-MAPB is a wild ride, and definitely deceptive. We both experienced waves of effects, with a general diminishment between waves that made it feel as though the drug was wearing off when it absolutely was not.
5-MAPB is, as of the time of writing this, legal in the US and in the EU except Germany, where it’s prohibited. It’s also prohibited in Canada, China, and Finland.
A normal dose of 5-MAPB is generally between 60 and 80 milligrams, with 75 mg the most typical. We both took 50 milligrams, two-thirds of a typical dose, since approaching these things with caution is generally well advised, and honestly I think that for both of us, 75 mg would likely be much too high a dose.
With her help, I sat down this morning to reconstruct something approximating our experience, which I’m documenting here both for my own future reference and in the event anyone else might be interested and looking for other people’s experiences.
The drug has a nominal rise time of about an hour, which is what we both experienced. Our experiences, however, were radically different from each other, which I gather is quite common for entactogens in general, so if you’re reading this, keep in mind that our experiences will likely be different from yours.
Let me start by saying the drug gave us both a rough ride, me moreso than her. I am not at all sorry I tried it, not even a little bit, but parts of the trip were quite brutal and not what I thought I was getting into. My Talespinner and I reconstructed this timeline, which will show you how different my experience was from hers:
I call it a “deceptive molecule” because it tends to come on in waves, with peaks separated by hours, so you can genuinely believe it’s letting go of you when it is most definitely not.
We both experienced a first peak starting about an hour after taking it, with a second peak about an hour after that, though subjectively those peaks were quite different. That first peak was marked by intense skin hunger and sensitivity, though my Talespinner also felt an absolutely overwhelming desire to be hurt. She is generally much more masochistic than I am (she loves impact play, whereas I am not a masochist at all, until this evening, more on that in a bit), and asked me to use her crop on her. Her experience when I cropped her was not, interestingly, one of pain, more like intense sensation that was pain-adjacent without being painful at all (more on that in a bit as well). We both came down from that peak at about the same time, which left us both with a generalized euphoria that felt as if the drug were wearing off.
David Attenborough voice: “It was not, in fact, wearing off.”
The second peak came out of nowhere, very quickly, characterized by an overwhelming, intense subjective sense of empathy, though we both felt it so radically differently that our subective experiences were close to polar opposites.
I fell into her, as if every touch on her body was a touch on mine. She felt herself expand outward, until her awareness consumed the rest of the polycule sharing the rental flat with us and then from there outward until it touched everyone in Reykjavik.
One side effect of generalized 5-HT receptor agonists including 5-MAPB is anorgasmia (inability to orgasm) and, in men, inability to get an erection. That took sex off the table, though not orgasm, and in fact this was one of the wildest parts of the trip. My Talespinner got herself off repeatedly, and every time she did, I had an orgasm as well. And I don’t mean like an emotional or intellectual orgasm, I mean the full deal, a full-on ejaculatory orgasm. She started murmuring in my ear that she wanted me to come—and yes, each time she did, I did. (And yes, this was just as sticky and messy as you imagine.)
That was a new experience for me, one I’ve never even imagined, being so intimately connected with another person that even my physical responses mirrored theirs. It really is just as intoxicating as you, Gentle Reader, might imagine.
Then things came off the rails quite spectacularly.
We came down from that peak and once more, because your humble narrator is sometimes a slow learner, I truly thought the drug was wearing off.
Ha ha ha ha ha oh my God.
We cuddled up together and drifted off. I had just reached that twilight between wakefulness and sleep when it started: intense, visceral pain everywhere she wasn’t touching me.
It.
Sucked.
Dear God it sucked. It sucked it sucked it sucked.
My Talespinner rose to this problem with amazing compassion and almost supernatural grace. Her deft, incredibly adroit reassurance guided me out of a miserable experience and even, by some subtle magic, transformed it into something quite exquisite. She held me through the worst of it while somehow, through some kind of nimble emotional alchemy I don’t pretend to understand, taking it from me and transforming it from pain into…something else. I won’t say pleasure, exactly, but something adjacent to pleasure somehow.
Near the worst of the drop, in the part of the timeline shaded in red, I started to hallucinate. Nothing dramatic, nothing bad, just things moving in the corners of my vision, and curious shapes crawling from the edges of the walls and ceilings. Subjectively, the experience was as if the drug itself were a living thing within me, something selfish trying to claim me and my attention for itself, that when it realized hurting me wouldn’t accomplish its goal, decided to trick me with false visions. At no point did I think the hallucinations were anything other than hallucinations, and at no point did I find them at all frightening, though I distinctly remember having the impression that the drug wanted me to be frightened of them, that it intended to frighten me.
A deceptive molecule indeed.
Anyway, thanks to that subtle magic, my Talespinner somehow turned the pain into something else, a bit of deep magic for which I was and remain deeply, profoundly grateful. Her guidance and presence changed an awful experience into something, and I do not say this lightly, transcendent.
Having transformed into something that was no longer pain, that experience became a deep longing to be hurt, to experience intensity in all its forms. By the time I’d reached the height of that last peak, I recall begging her to hurt me, which is, in all my experience in this body, never something I have done before.
And, like her, I discovered the most astonishing thing: I was not capable of experiencing pain. Everything she did to me, with crop and teeth and even a scalpel, I experienced as delirious, intense joy. She cut her mark onto me and it was absolute rapture.
Curiously, she didn’t feel that third peak at all. After it ended, we were, finally, able to sleep (the blue-shaded part of the timeline).
We woke severely dehydrated and fuzzy-headed. I ended up with a hangover considerably worse than hers, and one that lasted longer; for her, it was no worse than an evening with a couple of drinks, for me it was wretched. It’s kind of ironic, since one of the selling points of 5-MAPB is it doesn’t have MDMA’s legendarily awful, 3-5 day hangover (MDMA users call it “Tuesday blues” because, I’m told, if you take it before you go out on Saturday night, the worst of the headache hits the following Tuesday). As it turns out, it’s “better than MDMA” in the sense that beaing beaten with a tire iron for six hours is better than being beaten with a telephone pole for three days.
Will I ever use it again? I don’t know. Right now I’m leaning toward no, but I’m still a bit fuzzy, so it’s possible I may one day change my mind.
Will I ever use it alone? Not just no but hell no. This is not something to take into yourself without the presence of someone you trust very deeply indeed. I had briefly considered using it before this trip, just for the purpose of getting a handle on dosage and longevity…but if I could describe in words how glad I am I didn’t do that, there might never be a negative thought in all the world again.
There are, in the event I ever decide to allow this wild and unpredictable chaos magic in the form of a chemical substance into my body again, perhaps four people in all the world I would even consider doing it with. I am so absolutely fortunate far beyond anything I can take credit for that I shared this with her.
