I talk a lot on this blog. I’ve never really mastered brevity. But, as much as I talk, I don’t think I’ve ever discussed how I became interested in erotic mind control; or how I first discovered the online emc community; or how I actually got started doing photo manips way back when.

I’ve answered these and many other excellent questions posed by thrall in an interview she conducted with me recently. The first part is online now over on her blog and the second part should be released this weekend. So, if you’re interested in knowing a bit more about me, how I approach my work, and why am as hopelessly kinked as I am, then pop on over and have a read!

Thanks to thrall for giving me the opportunity to talk about all this. I’m glad to have had the occasion to force myself to recall some of the details surrounding my early emc memories and getting involved with the online scene. I hadn’t really thought about any of that for years so it was nice to remember for it myself and to share it with her.

I hope you’ll have a read and learn something new about your humble artist and his kink. Be sure to let her know if you enjoy it.

What’s that you say? You don’t know A. Regina Cantatis? Well, I bet you do. Ms. Cantatis is the pen name of prolific erotic mind control fiction author, and I’m proud to say my good friend, thrall. “But wait,” I hear you already thinking, “isn’t ‘thrall’ already a pen name?” Yes, that’s certainly true. But I think you’d also agree that its better-suited to the pages of The Archive or The Garden than the pages of say…an honest-to-goodness e-novel.

That’s right my friends! thrall has ventured out into the world of e-publishing and already has released three of her most imaginative tales of EMC-sci-fi-sexiness as downloadable e-books. Currently, she’s selling Love in a Silver Socket, one of my favorites from her back-catalog, and her most recent (and some of her finest) work: Sleepwalkers on Amazon. You can also pick up those titles, as well as her seminal squick classic Octopus Vulgaris over on her store at Smashwords.

Now, you didn’t hear this from me but… I bet if you wandered over to her blog and checked out this post, you might just snag a coupon code to save 25% off Sleepwalkers on Smashwords; good for the next two weeks.

Now, I certainly can’t speak for all of you and the e-reading devices you might own, but I can say, with some authority, that I, and my iPad, are really quite tickled to have a few titles from thrall sitting alongside my complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories and a deluxe edition of HP Lovecraft shorts.

Every week I visit The Archive, I wish there were donation buttons so I could show my appreciation for the talented authors that I follow there. I’d love to be able to show them how much I value the time they invest in sharing their imagination and craft with all of us. I’m so very, very pleased to finally have the opportunity to give a little something back to support the writing efforts of one of our communities greatest authors.

The fact that she is a dear friend of mine is just icing on the cake.

So, I hope you’ll join me by checking out the Amazon and Smashwords store-fronts for A. Regina Cantatis and that you too will find a happy home for her e-books in your electronic reader of choice.

Welcome back dear reader. I hope September has been as fun for you as it has for me. I’ve taken some well-deserved time off, enjoyed the company of friends, and, now, I’m back in the saddle and have several new pieces of work that I’m going to be unveiling in the coming weeks.

Tonight’s piece is one pulled from a large, unorganized folder of potential material that I call “Loose Art.” Its one of many random images I come across and save for a rainy day, I’ll explain more about all that in the rest of this post. For now, I hope you enjoy Forward and then read on for my director’s commentary.

Pretty much anytime I come across a pic that prominently features a TV or computer monitor, I save it. Many times, upon second glance, I decide I can’t really do anything with it after all. Of course there are times when I find a way to make even those types of images work. See Assignment as a case-in-point.

The long and short of it is that I have a folder filled with these kinds of random images, not because I have an idea of what to do with them, only because I think I might…one day. Such was the fate of tonight’s image. The laptop in the background certainly offered possibilities but I was very taken with the image of this pretty woman having her neck ravaged by another girl. Anyhoo, the image and a few others from the same gallery were saved and forgotten about.

This week, I happened across it again and the inspiration finally came through. I suddenly ‘heard’ the hypnotist, whispering hotly in the subject’s ear. Tempting and teasing her as she nibbled and sucked on the seated woman’s neck. That sense of tactile passion was a real driving force in the caption and something I hoped would convey heat and erotic hunger. That theme of hunger ended up being a big part of a relatively small narrative, but I was happy to be economical with a caption for once.

As for the actual work of manipulation, I did composite in the subject’s left arm from another photo. I was very smitten with the idea of her masturbating to help cement her hypnotist’s control over her. Tying the words being whispered into her ear with the pleasure of her own fingers. I think that final scene from trilby’s Bond was coming through there.

Beyond that, I just needed to create some kind of sexy-smexy hypnotic imagery for the laptop screen. Fortunately, I recently took the time to download a massive amount of animated backgrounds from a stock video site I subscribe to. It made the work go rather quickly since I didn’t have to create something from scratch myself.

I hoped you enjoyed and, as always, your questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome.

As some of you are already aware, my site was down late last week. Fortunately it wasn’t anything too serious…other than an erroneous report of being infected with malware. Anyhoo, things are back up and running now, hopefully even a bit faster than before.

As part of combatting the strain on my web hosts’s resources (which is why my site was taken down to begin with), I’ve installed a cache plugin which should serve up pages more quickly than before while also reducing both the amount of CPU cycles my site burns through and the chances my web host takes me offline again.

Now on to some fun stuff.

As you’ve probably noticed already, I’ve redesigned the Gallery page into a single archive containing all of my work, sorted by year of release, with options to filter by the type of Manip (Photo, Animation, etc). I think this format will make it far easier to drop in and quickly see if there’s been any new artwork uploaded. It should also facilitate some future developments in being able to quickly find Manips with similar criteria such as quickly seeing all artwork featuring swinging pendants or headphones.

Speaking of finding Manips, I’ve also implemented a Related Manips feature. So, now, when you view the page for a piece of art, there will be thumbnails below it linking to similar Manips. This is a feature I’ve wanted to implement for some time but its taken quite a while to actually tag every single piece of artwork, behind the scenes, in order to make it happen.

Now, to some really fun stuff.

I’ve added some new header animations to the site. I’ve always enjoyed those as a design element and I appreciate those of you who have taken the time to write and let me know that you like them too. There’s four new ones that are now in the rotation (they come up at random) and I want to explain why they are a bit special.

The four you’re already acquainted with were my first venture into HTML 5/CSS 3 animated graphics. That is to say, all the animation is being done natively in your browser (as opposed to using some sort of plugin like Flash or Java). These new four go a step further: they are natively-embedded video.

I’ll talk more about this in my next blog entry, but the long and short of it is that, similar to graphic animation, html 5 supports playing video right in the browser without the need for plugins like Flash or Quicktime. This allows me to create much more rich animations that don’t require you to have additional software installed and will be better-positioned to support mobile platforms like iOS and Android in the future.

Being able to utilize video-embeds also opens up some other exciting possibilities, but I’ll talk more about that next time. For now, the site is back up with some new features and there’s more new stuff on the way.

June 18, 2012.

That’s the date that Callidus proposed working something out of this
awesome footage he’d found.

No, I didn’t remember that off the top of my head, I just now went and
looked. I have the memory of an eggplant.

We had been working on this other set of photomanips – which gives me
too much credit, he’d been working and I’d been making a few useful
suggestions, as per usual – and that was kind of petering out, the way
these things sometimes do, and at the end of an email wherein we were
discussing video games, politics, life, the usual, he mentioned that he
had found this smexy video clip and had the beginnings of an idea about
what to do with it.

So all told it took about a year. We weren’t working fast, sometimes a
week or a couple would go between email exchanges. And of course he was
doing all the work, I was just saying “well what about this” and “what
about that” and “you know you misspelled ‘masturbate’, right?”

I enjoyed every minute of it.

Obviously, Callidus is immensely talented. As with any artistic
endeavor, the erotic mind control field has a whole lot of tyros –
nothing wrong with that and some of my favorite material is actually
either trite or riddled with grammatical problems – a fair-sized group
of decent writers, and a handful of real top-notch ‘what are you doing
here?’ creators. The same holds true in the visual, image manipulation
side of the house. And when it comes to visual effects Callidus is even
above that apex. He’s working at a professional, major budget level.
You’ve seen ‘Orientation’. Now you’ve seen this. Tell me I’m wrong.

So there’s that. It’s nice to know when you start that what you’re
going into will fucking rock. And it did – that computer desktop? He
made all that! I mean, the icons, the GUI look and feel, etc… It still
awes me a bit. And that’s just like one part of this work. But more
important than the startling technical chops, Callidus is fun. He’s fun
to correspond with generally, and he’s fun to work with. During
‘Decisive Results’ he consistently came up with really good ideas,
ranging from the hot dialogue between post-MC Holly and MsR3 to
hilarious little throwaway quips (“Twice the Doppler”). The kind of
ideas that make your mind smile – particularly if your mind savors
erotic mind control. And for being as good as he is, his ego is, like,
half the size of mine, so we could really dig into the work without
worrying about treading on each other’s feelings – shoot down ideas,
point out flaws, and yes also praise improvements without it being pure
ego stroking.

And like a good role-playing session, collaborating on this was a good
reason to find myself in constant dialogue with a really cool guy,
talking about fun stuff. Were it not for ‘Decisive Results’ (or
something similar) we might have exchanged a dozen or fewer emails all
last year. As it was, we talked all the time. And my life was richer for
it.

So I love working with Cal. I’ll damn well do it again.

As for ‘Decisive Results’ – it’s pretty fucking awesome, isn’t it? I
could go back through my email thread and suss out some places where I
did the writing or came up with the idea or whatever, because honestly I
don’t remember, but it seems like a foolish exercise. Callidus made it.
I helped. And hopefully you’ve enjoyed.

– Tabico

I received an interesting email recently. A hypnotic domme called Mistress Love messaged me to inquire about basing one of her audio files on my manip, Tera Bot. She said she liked the story and wanted to re-tell it from a first-person perspective, with some tweaks of her own.

I told her that sounded like fun and that I was eager to hear the audio once she’d completed it. Well, Love works fast, as it turns out, because it was hardly a day later when she was kind enough to let me have a listen.

I won’t spoil anything too greatly, but the premise of the file is essentially the same as my story. In this case, the listener steps into the shoes of a person lucky enough to have their own Love-Bot. A Love-Bot that knows about your submissive fantasies and is programmed to bring those fantasies to life.

Love has a very lovely voice (see what I did there?) and it was so enjoyable to hear her use it to tell her version of this story and to bring some of the dialog I’d written to life. Very fun.

So, if you’d like to hear this mp3 for yourself, she currently has it for sale on her site, along with a free sample, which you can find here. A few items of note: the file is gender neutral so its sexy fun for guys or gals and there are some light suggestions related to being submissive to Mistress Love and purchasing items for her from her Amazon wish-list.

I just want to thank Love for sending that note, it was a very fun experience to see her bring this project to fruition.

Its not every day that I get to say that in a blog title: “New Video.” After more than a year of work, I am very happy to announce a new entry in the Videos section. You can read on for my director’s commentary, but first, on behalf of Tabico and myself, we are very pleased to unveil: Decisive Results.

This manip, like most of them, starts with me saving something to my enormous ‘manip material’ folder and then forgetting about it. It was probably May of last year when I came across it again and had that little voice in my head whisper ‘Do something with this, now!” So, I started doing some editing with the footage and cut together a scene that I thought played quite convincingly as erotic mind control. I knew with some visual-fx kung fu I could turn it into full-on hypno-fetish fodder (three times fast), but I wanted more than just a hot scene with EMC, I wanted a story.

At the time, Tabico and I had already been working together for months on a different project (in fact it was the ‘big collaboration’ I mentioned in the post for Nickelodeon). I had gotten burned out and needed to move on to something else or I was just going to stall creatively. Tabico completely understood and very patiently went along as I proposed shelving what we’d been doing and starting fresh with this video.

Well Monday, and the release of Decisive Results, is just a weekend away! At the moment I’m uploading the file to various file sharing sites so everyone can download it but I would really love to have a streaming version available to post here on the site. Unfortunately, just uploading the file to my web host isn’t really an option. Hosting the file myself would push me over my bandwidth allowance and shut my site down…or require me to pay hundreds of dollars in overage fees.

I suppose what I’m looking for is an adult-friendly alternative to YouTube that will allow embedding. I’ve looked into a few of the porn tube sites but the quality is so hideous that I don’t think its a viable option (there’s on-screen text during the vid that needs to be readable). So far the best option I found was dailymotion but they only allow nudity (not graphic sex) and they cap the vid length to 20 min (our vid is around 23).

Alternatively, I’ve looked to see if there are any hosting sites, such as NearlyFreeSpeech, where I could upload a single file and then stream it to my site from there. If I multiply the file size of the video by the number of visitors my site had last month that still ends up costing me several hundred dollars.

I don’t know if there is a free way to solve this problem but I wanted to ask you all if there were any options I haven’t thought of.

Thanks in advance if anyone has a suggestion.

Welcome back faithful reader. Just checking in with a brief note to announce that my latest video, Decisive Results, will be premiering online next Monday, July 29th!

I also wanted to take a moment and thank all of the readers from the beta test group who helped out Tabico and myself with their great comments and feedback. I was really surprised by the volume of response to the post calling for testers and while we couldn’t include everyone, I’m happy to announce that you’ll all be able to check it out soon enough.

Tabico and I are both really anxious to share this with you all, Decisive Results has been in-development for a long time its really exciting to finally be this close to unveiling it. We’ll see you here next Monday!

Greetings intrepid reader and welcome back! Well its been a busy year for me, but I’m here today to deliver some exciting news. I will soon be releasing a new video manip! Tabico and I have been hard at work on this creation and, I’m happy to report, its nearly ready to be released to the world-at-large.

Before that happens, however, we would like to do a little focus-testing, a beta-test if you will. We’d like to screen it for a small group of fellow-fetishists to get their feedback before it goes out to the general public.

So, to that end, I’m asking for volunteers. If you would like to get a sneak-peak at this new video project, use the Contact link to send me an email expressing your interest. The only caveat is that you must agree to provide your honest opinion on the film once you’ve had a chance to watch it.

It will be first-come-first-served to the first twelve people who get in touch. If you miss out on the beta-test group, don’t worry…you’ll get a chance to see it for yourself soon enough.

Thanks in advance and we look forward to hearing from you!