Tag Archives: pictures

The Altar of Hideousness

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Last month, Shelly and I and her partner and his wife went to Disney. We stayed a couple of days at a Disney “economy hotel,” the All Star Music Hotel (translation: a Motel 6 with a theme and a different brand name on the sign), a music-themed place whose various buildings were all dedicated to different kinds of pop music. The buildings ad gigantic sculptures in front of eac one–a huge guitar for the Rock and Roll building, a burning cross in front of the Country Music building–you get the idea.

Each room had artwork on the wall.

I’ve been meaning to post about the artwork for some time, but only now have I been able to muster the courage and the strength to do so. For this is no ordinary bland, corporate motel artwork, oh my no.

I photographed the artwork on our wall, which was apparently the same as the artwork in every room throughout the motel–a thought that to this day keeps me up at night.

The theme of the artwork is deceptively simple: children, three of them to be precise, one playing a banjo for the entertainment of the other two. Such a simple description, however, utterly fails to communicate the true ghastly horror of this artwork.

Good art has the power to move. This art has the power to crush the viewer’s very soul.

The artwork is untitled. I speculate that this is because “Hideously Deformed Children of the Post-Apocalypse” is too large to fit on a corner of the painting; Shelly’s sweetie suggested that perhaps the true title of this art is “You Should Have Paid More and Stayed in a Different Hotel.”

Since misery loves company, I have placed a photograph of this artwork beneath this cut, thus ensuring the eternal damnation of my soul.

All hope abandon, ye who enter here

Paying for my sins

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This past weekend was one of the best I have had in a very long time. I got to see the movie Pan’s Labyrinth with Shelly and figment_j, then dayo came into town for a visit from Chicago, and… bliss. Snapped this pic of dayo and I at Panera Bread using the iSight built into my MacBook:

And now today I get to pay, karmically (karmacally?) speaking, for the wonderful weekend. The battery in my car has died. I know a dead battery when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now. It’s stone dead. It’s definitely deceased. It wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts through it. It’s bleedin’ demised. It’s passed on. My battery is no more. It has ceased to be. It has gone to meet its maker. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. It’s shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile! It is, not to put too fine a point on it, an ex-battery.

This presents, as you may surmise, certain practical and logistical difficulties. Not insoluble ones, as I drive a car with a manual transmission, but difficulties nonetheless. Quite frustrating it is, especially seeing as how, at this late hour, I have little choice but to procure a new battery at the altar of consumerist greed and avarice that is Wal-Mart, and I loathe all things Wal-Mart almost as much as I loathe large, soulless corporations that have forgotten their ethical roots and become little more than gigantic, indifferent profit-vacuuming machines willing to do almost anything and commit almost any atrocity in their quest to improve the bottom line.

But I repeat myself.

And now, gentle reader, I am off, to leave work in quest of a battery that has not shuffled off this mortal coil. I was going to make a pun on the phrase “aggravated battery,” but restrained myself at the last moment. Consider yourself fortunate and escape while you still can.

“So what did YOU do this evening, Tacit?”

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I have a problem. I am, you see, plagued by boredom. My days stretch out before me in an endless vista of dreary ennui, because I never seem to have anything to do. At least, that’s what I must be thinking, since I’ve started working on a huge new Web site with tips and tutorials and how-tos on BDSM, in spite of the fact that Onyx 3 still isn’t finished yet, I haven’t touched the book I’m allegedly working on in months, I have at least two other unfinished writing projects on the back burner, I need to set up my darkroom again, and the apartment still looks like a Category 4 hurricane went through it just moments after a Columbian drug gang staged a violent coup in it.

Ahem. Anyway, the first tutorial I’m working on is a photo how-to for making rope and chain harnesses, with the lovely joreth as my model.

I haven’t even begun to process all the images yet, seeing as how we just finished shooting all the pics, but I did pick out this rather lovely image from the raw photos, which I rather like.

Not even on your BIRTHDAY is this image work-safe. Seriously. I mean it.

Shelly

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Before the play party in Atlanta last Saturday, Shelly and I and figment_j and her sweetie went shopping for fetishwear in a tiny shop in Atlanta’s Little Five Points. Shelly found this:

Shelly fetish

The store was quite charming…an entire display of Blasphemous Christmas Cards; a section of action figures that included the Librarian Action Figure, the Leonardo da Vinci Action Figure, and the Carl Jung Action Figure; and posters of remixed 1950s propaganda on the “demon weed” Marijuana.

I think the outfit looks quite yummy. 🙂

A brief mention of some of last weekend’s goings-on

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So last weekend (not the one just past; the one before that) was Necronomicon, an annual roughly-around-Halloween science fiction convention in Tampa. It’s always a good time; and this year was no exception. Easily worth the drive down from Gainesville to attend.

I’m still sorting through pictures (nearly 700 of them), most of which are definitely not work-safe, or indeed safe to share around small animals or those with delicate sensibilities. Those will remain locked on my computer, away from the women and children (sorry, folks).

A small number of interesting pictures that are (reasonably) safe to share, though:

First up, my sweetie joreth in Con gear with the addition of a karada made of chain. True story: we bought the chain (25 feet of it) at Home Depot just before arriving at the convention. I pulled it out of the bag in the parking lot so I could find the center point; as I was doing this, a random guy walked past and said “Oh, bondage party, huh?” No way to answer a question like that except truthfully, so I said “yep.”

Tying a karada with chain rather than rope is remarkably different. The chain does not slide, so you can’t adjust the tension as you go; you have to get it right the first time. It took a surprising amount of work, and helpers, to get this to work. I loved the results, though.

  

At the pre-con orgy, I had the opportunity to linger over her with the floggers. It’s been much too long since I’ve been able to give her a proper beating, so we took advantage of the opportunity to spend an hour or so of quality time together, in a room full of people fucking, which is always a good backdrop to this sort of thing.

The rope here is a basic karada with the addition of a frog tie. Kept her backside nicely…accessible.

Someone got this pic–don’t know who, but I like it.

The second night of the con, I snapped a self-portrait reflected in the hotel window. Long exposure, no flash, and I really like the gritty, almost surreal way it turned out.

In unrelated matters: I now have a firm date for the move to Atlanta; I’ll be there a week from Wednesday. I had planned to go spend some time with smoocherie today, but I need to meet up with the principals of my client’s company (the one that’s hiring me), and they were supposed to meet with me here in Gainesville this afternoon and give me a check. They were delayed, and I likely won’t see them ’til tomorrow, so I didn’t get the chance to see smoocherie after all. Work is interfering with my romantic life, and that’s not okay with me!

Also, Shelly came home from seeing her other sweetie with a hickey on her neck, and that is absolutely delightful. There is very little in the world more totally hawt than when she comes home marked. 🙂

More pictures of Sunland

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As promised, more pics of Sunland, the abandoned asylum in Tallahassee. Cross-posted to urban_decay.

In the early 50s, it was believed that sunlight and fresh air could cure tuberculosis, so many TB wards were built with large, open sunrooms. Each of Sunland’s two wings ended with a series of these sunrooms. This same design was used in TB hospitals all throughout Florida.

One of the first shots I took. We arrived when the sky was still light. The building consists of two wings which are virtually identical, with an extension coming out at right angles where the two wings meet. The overall building is huge, but very narrow.

Many more bandwidth-crushing images under here

Fun at Sunland

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So. Back from Dragon*Con and back into the work week; I haven’t had time to post ’bout the con, and this is not that post. Perhaps later.

Instead, this is a post about Sunland.

Sunland Asylum, Tallahassee

Sunland is a ruined insane asylum for children, located in Tallahassee not too far from where Shelly’s sweetie lives. It started out in the mid-1950s as a tuberculosis ward, and was repurposed when a vaccine for TB was developed. It spent the rest of its existence as an asylum, primarily for children, until it was abandoned a couple decades ago. It’s sat there ever since, slowly crumbling away. There’s a badly-written Wikipedia entry about the place, in fact.

When we drove back from Dragon, we stopped for an impromptu photo shoot at Sunland. We arrived as the sun was setting, and as a result couldn’t enter the buiilding–poor light, treacherous footing, and tons of broken glass (literally–every window in the building has been shattered, and there are thousands of pounds of glass strewn everywhere) made entry too dangerous. But we got some great shots nonetheless, which I’ll likely be posting over the next few days.

Experiments in asymmetry at 2:30 AM

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One of the many people at smoocherie‘s party, james_the_evil1 brought rope. This should come as a surprise to nobody, really. S volunteered to be tied up, so I tried an experiment with incorporating her hair into the tie.

This is a two-layer harness, which looks deceptively simple from the front:

From the back, it’s a bit more complicated, though. I think it worked well; I like the asymmetry. Continue reading →

Whew! Back from FPR…

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Much to post about, but most of it will have to wait. In the interim, however, I will tease you with this picture of the trebuchet I designed for the communication and conflict management workshop:

There is also a movie of the trebuchet firing here (3.5 MB direct download).

Whee!