Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Adamsing My Deadlines

Whoosh. That's the sound of deadlines whizzing by.

Literotica's Nude Day Contest. FAIL.
The story morphed into something too long and complex to get done in time. I'll stick it on the back burner and chip away at it in time for next year's competition. (This happens a lot. The Christmas story I've got lined up for this year was supposed to be for the competition two years previous :) )

eXcessica Anthology. CRITICAL.
Damn, another story way outside my comfort zone. I really should stick to the big-boobed succubi I know and love. I've got an extension on this one, but I'm probably going to be quiet for the rest of the week while I get it done.

Hmm, now how in the hell am I supposed to make two people skinning each other alive romantic and erotic...

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

All your fetish are belong to me

Fellow eXcessica writer, Dr Mabeuse, posted a link to this interesting little fetish map in the Literotica forums.


Here’s the original location. (At a size where it might actually be possible to read it!)

It’s quite an educational little diagram. The fun part is working out which fetishes I’ve already covered in stories and which I plan on covering in the future.

I think I might have been playing a little too much Civilization IV recently. I see a map and the first instinct is to work out how to conquer it. Hmm, so I start in Demon with my Succubus harem. S/M’s easy. I’ll leave NĂ¿te and Physalia to run that one. Various soapy massage type stories give me a route into Messy Fun. My lovely Naga, Amanda, is quite partial to a little bit of Breath Play. From there we’ll take the strategically important Vore, and that will…

Yeah, I should probably cut back on the Civ.

Friday, July 08, 2011

The real masters of literary corruption...

I'm writing in the wrong genre. There I was, merrily typing up twisted tales of hot demon sex in order to corrupt the internet and collapse the whole of humanity into a black abyss, and it turns out the real masters of corruption write romance novels for Mills and Boon.

It’s not the first criticism to be aimed at romance novels. Recently another psychologist claimed they can be as addictive as pornography. They do have a smidgeon of a point. I’m sorry to burst your bubble, ladies, but that super-rich, super-handsome Mr Right you’ve been dreaming of will, in real life, probably (but not always!) be a complete dick and chronically unfaithful. Why? Because they can get away with it.

Somehow, I suspect the M & B crowd would be less than thrilled with a book where the spunky heroine finds her Mr Right…only for him to ditch her for a younger model with a bigger rack ten years down the line. The whole point of fantasy is it’s supposed to be escapism, i.e. better than the messy complications present in the real world. Sure, problems can arise when the fantasy forms the basis of a wholly unrealistic set of expectations, but that’s just about true for any situation where fantasy and reality get mixed up.

Unsurprisingly—and understandably—it’s provoked a bit of a backlash from romance fans quick to defend their reading preferences. There are a lot of them in the comments section beneath the Guardian article.

Presumably those same people will be right behind us in the trenches the next time equally stupid things are written about video games or different flavours of pornography…won’t you? ;)

Tuesday, July 05, 2011

Nostalgia Gaming: Splatterhouse

Still on the topic of violent video games, here’s a classic from the prehistoric days of lumbering arcade machines.



There was a Splatterhouse arcade machine at my local ice rink and I remember spending a few Saturdays in my youth feeding it 10p and 20p coins. The graphics were totally wacko and disturbed compared to other games at the time. There was a boss with chainsaws for arms, crawling baby things with oversize heads and many vomiting alien monsters/torture victims. The first boss section had waves and waves of bloody worms springing out at you from all angles in a room piled high with red meat. It was sick, it was gruesome and it was fun. There was a satisfying ‘Thwack!’ to splattering enemies up against the back wall with a meaty swing of a pipe.

It was also fiendishly difficult. Back then most arcade games followed a simple formula—a fairly pedestrian stage one, followed by a harder-but-still-possible stage two, and then ramping up into a black hole of difficulty designed to suck all the small change out of your pocket. Mr Chainsawman did for me on many an occasion, although I did see the occasional player stumble past him only to fall at the floating cross and severed ghoul heads at the end of stage four.

A few years back I managed to find a version to run on my PC with MAME (a fantastic program for nostalgia gaming geeks). With infinite simulated 10p coins I would have my revenge, bwahahahaha…

Just about. By level six and an organic corridor full of wibbly embryo monster-things jumping on your back at every opportunity, the game developers are telling you to ‘sod off!’ in no uncertain terms. If it wasn’t for some gratuitous save state scumming (yeah, because even infinite coins isn't enough...) I’m not even sure I’d have completed it at all.

It’s a game I have many fond memories of. It was the first arcade game I remember to really go for it when it came to gross horror visuals. There’s a recent remake I’ve been meaning to check out, even though I’m sure it won’t have that same…you know…Thwack!

I never could pull off that damn sliding kick…

Friday, July 01, 2011

Won't someone think of the children . . .

I’m normally against all forms of censorship, but the recent overturning of a proposed California law to ban the sale of violent video games leaves me perched rather precariously on the fence. Don’t get me wrong, I love violent video games. Whatever games console I have lying around usually gets updated around the same time the next Silent Hill or Resident Evil instalment comes along. I also thoroughly enjoyed playing the notorious Manhunt. However, I’m not sure twelve-year-old kids should be playing these games.

Attitudes are changing now that the Nintendo and PlayStation generation have grown up and are old enough to have children of their own. Video games have grown up too and are no longer seen as solely for children’s entertainment.

Not everybody appears to have caught on
.

It always reminds me of a (possibly) apocryphal story about a video/DVD rental store clerk and a certain, highly notorious, Japanese animated film.


Dad walks up with two young sons in tow and puts a copy of Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend on the counter.

Dad:
I’d like to rent this film.

Clerk looks down at fresh-faced young boys.


Clerk:
Um, I’m not sure it would be suitable for them.

Dad:
Whaddya mean. It’s a cartoon. Action, explosions, giant robots, that kind of thing.

Clerk:
Um, it’s quite . . . extreme.

Dad:
Don’t be silly. It’s a cartoon. Rent me the goddamn film or I’ll call your manager.

Clerk (hands up):
Okay. Whatever you say.

The next day.


Dad storms back into store and slams video down on the counter.


Dad:
You sick fuck! What are you doing renting me this sick filth! Fucking pedo! I’ll call the police on you.

Clerk:
Um, I did say it wasn’t suitable for minors.


I don’t mind age restrictions. They’re good defence when the moral meddlebutts try to use the Think-of-the-children! card when they want to ban something. Britain, I think, uses a similar ratings system to the one used for movies, which seems sensible to me. When the moral meddlebutts next get in an indignant froth about the latest GTA or Manhunt and how children shouldn’t be playing such sick filth, it’s easy to counter by pointing at the 18 certificate and asking how children are playing the game in the first place. Think-of-the-children! becomes Where-are-the-parents? and draws a lot of venom out of the meddlebutt’s attack. I’d rather developers had the freedom to create games for adults covering adult themes, without worrying about a latter-day Mary Whitehouse whipping up a moral panic and shutting them down.

Like the original blogger, I’m not sure if this is a victory to be celebrated. It’s always hard to know with these things. The moral meddlebutts are getting sneakier at depriving the public of things the meddlebutts disapprove of. There are ways to ban things without explicitly banning them, in the same way a NC-17 rating will financially destroy a film in the US. Maybe this was a battle that needed to be fought and won.