June 12th, 2009 at 3:59 am | Filed under: Weekly Picks | Tags: sara castle, XXX4
…but I’ve been stealing quick glances at sara castle’s recently completed XXX4, and I’m here to tell you…this one’s a scorcher. Sara is one of the finest authors we have in the community, so let’s get that out of the way, and XXX4 is one of the best stories she’s ever penned.
All the usual suspects are in on this one; bleak visions of an oppressive future, a paramilitary force of ass-kicking hotties, and more cyber-punk mind controlling nasties than you can shake a steel tentacle at. Yet far from being a repetition of past ideas, XXX4 is a refined celebration of all the things that make a sara castle story great. There’s mass-quantities of mind control (three times fast), there’s love and betrayal and revenge, there’s girl-sex so hot it’ll melt your eyes right out of your friggin’ head.
I’m speaking ambiguously because I really don’t want to ruin any of the fine work she’s done crafting her narrative, but in the broad stokes, four women are in competition for a single position. They each have mind control tech, fancy weapons, and three women standing in their way. From there, sara does just delicious things with her characters; love, betrayal, see above for more.
The point is that’s its a ridiculously good story, its one of the hottest things you’ll ever read, and I am so glad I put off what I was supposed to be doing to read it. I recommend you do the same.
Congrats sara, you’ve really outdone yourself with this one (waves).
June 11th, 2009 at 2:15 am | Filed under: Updates | Tags: FD/MD
While I haven’t been quite as productive this week as I’d hoped to be (I was honestly hoping to have a full update ready by now…so naive), I have been working on some new material and I thought I’d share a sneak peek with those loyal readers (all twelve of you) who are kind enough to keep visiting.
This pic was one I’d instantly seen the story in when I laid eyes on it. It was just a matter of finding the right props and fashioning the text. I’d intended to keep the text quite breif, just a couple sentances, but what I wanted to convey simply needed more. Influenced very heavily with this one by the terrific betrayal in Daphne’s Fairie Tale, the inducer is right out of trilby’s Watering Hole, and some vibes from a very hot scene in Tabico’s Winter Flesh.
Speaking of the inducer, I wanted something flashlight-ish but nothing too recognizalbe. What I found was the K2 Porcupine tactical light. Its a self defense torch that has a retractable ring of spikes around the lamp. Somewhere, someone is butchering watermelons with one of these things.
June 8th, 2009 at 4:20 am | Filed under: Blogging, Maintenance, Weekly Picks | Tags: jukebox, RSS, sara castle, The Beatles, zorkmeister
Hey all and welcome back. Its been a hell of a month for me. My vanilla job is going really great and keeping me extremely busy. This has been a particularly trying month for me, but I’m happy to say I made it through and things are returning to some semblance of normalcy.
I’m working on some new manip material and desperately trying to return emails this evening; hopefully if I owe you correspondence, you’ll have something in your inbox soonish. I’m also doing some housekeeping on the site and trying to fix some broken things. Incidentally, the rss feed should be functional again.
Lastly, I had time earlier tonight to read a couple items from the new update at mcstories. Betrayal, by zorkmeister was quite good as was the always delicioius Jukebox with Play the Game. There’s still several I haven’t gotten to yet (including sara castle’s newest chapter to XXX4 which I’m dying to check out), but hopefully I’ll make up for lost time tomorrow night.
The announcement this week of the The Beatles Rock Band video game has me thinking about the greatest band that ever was and reminded me of a story I’ve been meaning to tell you all about the Beatles break-up and how some nefarious mind control may have played a part. But I’ll leave that as a tease for next time.
May 15th, 2009 at 4:16 am | Filed under: Blogging, Updates | Tags: Aria Giovanni, The Room
Well, its like…a month overdue, but my new animated manip is online!
This one had a long road to completion. The actual animated frames I’ve had finished for months now, but I knew I didn’t want to just have four individual animated manips that would force the viewer to go forward and backward through browser pages in order to view each panel. That, of course, meant I needed to learn some flash.
Or more precisely actionscript, which is the programing language that drives flash. Animation I can do, but even simple user-interaction (like Next and Back buttons) takes some programing. So early this year I decided I wasn’t going to let my lack of programming knowledge hold me back anymore. I bought a book and started teaching myself how to write flash applications.
It seems almost silly, all this work for what amounts to a slideshow, but such is the nature of my illness. I’m a perfectionist you see; not always in a healthy way. Its not enough to do something, it has to be done right. Also, I’m a hopeless control-freak and know-it-all; if I can’t do something myself I get cranky.
But enough of my problems.
The point (finally) is that it took me a while before I had the programming skill to put together the interactive part of this latest manip (and truth be told I still leaned heavily on some handy online tutorials). Plus there was that whole “lets completely redesign the website” thing right as I was finishing up.
So, I’m very glad to have the new site up and running and very, very glad to finally have this new manip on display for everyone to see. As we’re all beginning to discover, I’m an Aria Giovanni…uh…enthusiast. I’d had a pic set of one of her few fetish video shoots and after looking at them for a while, finally figured out where they could go..with a little Photoshop.
The source pics required some extensive work: duplicating and blending large sections of foreground, head replacement, logo removal, and I still had to fabricate one side of the head clamps from scratch. The large “Enable” button was a 3D model dropped in from the Google warehouse, then textured and lit in Photoshop to blend into the background.
The visual fx were really inspired by an episode of Hart to Hart where a neferious hypnotist uses light bouncing off a crystal chandeler to put Jennifer under. Its a really neat effect and I sort of used that as my jumping off point. The subliminal text and images were added at the eleventh hour when I realized I had more story than would fit into three panels, and decided to insert a POV shot of what Aria is seeing.
Anyway, enough of my rambling. Time to enter The Room.
May 6th, 2009 at 3:30 am | Filed under: Maintenance |
So here we are. The migration is nearly complete, still some broken links to hunt down and some images to restore, but, failing that, the new site is up and open for business. I’d appreciate any thoughts you have on the new design, particularly if you’re experiencing any problems. If that is the case, including your operating system, web-browser, and screen resolution with your comment would be much appreciated.
My over-hyped, much delayed animated manip is still on the way, and if I find time to work on that tomorrow night, might even get uploaded by the weekend. Cross your fingers and throw the blood of a goat over your shoulder…or something.
See you soon.
