Callidus

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