Sunday, December 25, 2016

H-space MGB Profile: Crynolie

Name: Crynolie
Type:  Demon
Habitat:  Fertile plains and valleys.  Artificial gardens.

Description:
Outwardly looks like a pretty young lady in a gaily coloured and extravagantly large crinoline dress.  An eyewitness described them as looking like a group of actresses on the set of a period drama.  One thing most observers notice is that the proportions of the crynolies seem off.  They are deceptively tall, as if their legs are longer than they should be.

Underneath their 'dresses' the crynolies have four long and spindly legs, with each pair arranged perpendicularly to the other—like the legs of a small table.  The legs look insectoid in shape, but resemble human flesh and skin, and terminate in what looks like human feet.  Their most alien part is a bulbous sac or abdomen hanging down from the centre of their body.  This too is covered in what looks like human skin, but otherwise resembles no part of the human body aside from the vulva-like orifice at the tip.  The 'vulva' is surrounded by clusters of short tubules.  These emit the fumes the crynolie uses for defence and to overpower her prey.

Attack Strategy:
The crynolie is capable of emitting fumes that put anyone breathing them into a highly suggestible state where they blindly follow any instruction give to them by the crynolie.  While in this state the victim is unable to take any actions of their own volition.

Once she has her prey under her control, the crynolie will then ingest them into her fleshy abdomen through her 'vulva'.  Initially it was thought they simply ate their victims, but—as with most HSIOs—the reality is far more complex.

The crynolie's abdomen contains a stretchy bag organ—a kind of stomach or womb—large enough to contain an adult human.  This organ has thick padded walls and is surrounded by a net of muscular fibres that give the crynolie fine control of internal movements.  At the top of the containment organ is an air bladder.  The crynolie places her prey's head within this bladder and supplies them with oxygen so they do not suffocate inside her.

The next stage is to overload her captive with sexual excitement.  The air the crynolie gives to her prey is laced with various sedatives and aphrodisiacs.  Stronger aphrodisiac juices are secreted inside the containment bag and sensually massaged into the flesh of her captive.  The containment organ also contains various structures analogous to human sex organs and the crynolie selects and uses them depending on the sex and sexual preferences of her captive.

The big question is why?

I don't believe the crynolies are feeding off our sexual arousal.  I believe, like other HSIOs, the crynolies are after something else from us, and massive sexual overstimulation is just a tool to expose or loosen it.

(As to what this 'something else' is—I think it is what various religions throughout history have referred to as the human soul.  As to what this infers about the nature of H-space and the HSIOs...  No, I'm not ready to believe this.  Not yet.)

Countermeasures:
The mind control fumes of the crynolie must not be inhaled.  Fortunately they have a relatively short range of effect and require concentrated amounts.  Likely the reason why crynolies are encountered in groups.

Unfortunately, tackling them from a distance is also difficult.  The 'dress' of the crynolie is part of their body and composed of a flexible, durable material that is resistant to both small arms and bladed weapons.  If threatened the crynolie retracts her upper half down into her dress and emits a dense fog to cover her escape.

Threat Level:
Medium to High.

As devastatingly effective as their paralysing fumes are at close range and as awkward as they are to engage at distance, I suspect the crynolies are actually low down in the 'demon'-type hierarchy.  I fear there is worse out there.  Far worse...

Saturday, December 24, 2016

H-space MGB Story: Crynolie

SGT Stewart Peter Bate knew those dresses weren't right.  The proportions didn't fit.  The dresses were too big—like the women wearing them were standing on cut-off stilts, or really tall platform boots.

Or weren't human.

Bate tried to tell Cox, the leader of their explo squad, but he wouldn't have it.

"We don't know for certain.  They could be innocent humans transported here through a displacement effect.  We can't go in guns blazing."

'Guns Blazing.'  Goddamned civvies.  Bate thought each explo unit was supposed to be led by a military officer.

"Mendez.  Bain.  Stay back and provide cover as we go in," Cox ordered.

In was an immaculately tended garden in the middle of nowhere.  The squad had come upon it in a sheltered valley—a splash of green standing out against the scraggly, blood-red grass covering the hillsides on either side of them.  It was clearly an artificial garden with a lush green lawn and neat rows of flowerbeds.  There was an open structure constructed from wooden beams—a pergola the size of a church.  Climbing plants ran up the support beams and across the top.  It looked pretty, but where were the other buildings?

"No hostile moves," Cox said to the rest of the squad as they approached the central structure.  "We want to show them we mean no harm."

Standing under the pergola were the women in the odd dresses.  The dresses were big and bright and resembled the extravagant crinoline dresses and ball gowns from the middle of the 1800s.  They were so absurdly large it looked like each woman was poking out of the top of a giant lampshade.  Bate wouldn't expect any modern woman to wear anything like that unless they were actresses playing aristocratic ladies in a historical drama.  That's what they looked like—a group of fine old Southern Belles taking afternoon tea on a lovely summer day.  As if a god had chopped a square out of the old Deep South and randomly left it here.

Those dresses, though, they weren't right.  The closer Bate got the more it nagged at him.  They were too tall—as if the top halves and bottom halves of the women wearing them didn't match up.

The women spotted the squad and buzzed amongst themselves in excitement.  One of them, a woman with a sunflower-yellow dress and platinum-blonde hair tied up in an elaborate beehive, approached the men.

"What a delightful surprise," she said.  "A group of young men, and such handsome ones as well.  Welcome.  I am Galulpia."

Galulpia looked surprisingly attractive in spite of her archaic attire and hairdo.  As did the other women.  They stood behind her and whispered and tittered to each other behind brightly painted fans.  If he had to guess, Bate would have placed them all in their early to mid-twenties with Galulpia the eldest.

"A pleasure ma'am.  I am Dr. Theodore Cox and my men and I are here as representatives of the great country of The United States of America.  May I ask the name of this place?"

"This is the garden," Galulpia replied.  "My ladies and I came out here to enjoy this lovely afternoon.  Would you and your handsome young men like to join us?"

Galulpia was smiling like one of those wholesome Southern Belles in an old TV drama.  The smile was too sunny to be natural.  Bate couldn't shake the feeling something was off.  Something about the women that creeped him out.  They all looked about a foot taller than they should be.

And there was the garden.  It was also too nice... too neat.  It looked like a perfect film set, constructed only to last for as long as it took to make the shot.  Bate noticed the plants climbing up the corner supports of the pergola.  Some of the flowers looked like dicks.  Some of the flowers looked like pussies.  Some of the dick flowers were in the pussy flowers.  Everything felt off.

They shouldn't be here.

And that motherfucker Cox.  Now he'd got the formal introductions out of the way he was actually flirting with her.

"...that does sound a mighty tempting offer," he said.  "We have been on our feet all day."

Galulpia glanced over Cox's shoulder to where Mendez and Bain had taken up covering fire positions.

"Are those your men?" she asked.  "They look so lonely all the way out there.  Why don't you ask them to come and join us."

When you saw her standing next to Cox, the height thing really jumped out, Bate thought.  Cox had to be over six foot tall and Galulpia had an inch or two on him.  It didn't match her otherwise petite and dainty features at all.  Nothing matched.

"Sure thing," Cox said.  He turned around.  "Mendez.  Bain.  You can come in.  Everything's fine."

What!  Wait!  No, Bate thought.  He went to raise his voice in objection... and nothing came out.  He just stood there.  What the fuck?  He wanted to say something.  Why wouldn't it come out?

He glanced down and saw his boots had vanished beneath a thick ground fog.  Where had that come from?  It looked like early morning mist, but it wasn't morning.  Then he looked up and saw the source.  It was the women.  The mist billowed out from beneath their dresses in little puffs of fluffy white smoke.

You fucking ass, Cox, Bate thought.  How many times had they been told about the HSIOs?  How many times had they been warned?  Their stupid fucking idiot civvie CO had led them right into a trap.

Mendez and Bain would be no help either.  They'd already rejoined the squad.  Mendez's nostril wrinkled, then a certain slackness entered his features.

"It's so warm," Galulpia said.  "I'm sure you'd be far more comfortable out of those heavy uniforms."

"You know, that's a really good idea," Cox said.  He dropped his kit and started to take his clothes off.

"How about the rest of you boys?" Galulpia said.  "Wouldn't you like to be naked as well?"

Yes, that was a really good idea, Bate thought.  He put down his kit and rifle and started to climb out of his uniform.

What was he doing?

It didn't matter.  He couldn't stop it.  It was like he was a passenger in his own body.  All he could do was watch as his hands unbuckled his pants and let them drop into the thick mist swirling around his feet.

He stood naked along with the other men.  A warm breeze whipped up wisps of white mist.  The women in the too-big dresses watched them with naked lust in their eyes.

"Mmm, such lovely young men," Galulpia said.  "I'm positively salivating."

She reached down.  Her dress opened at the front and she swished it aside like opening a pair of curtains.  Bate knew now why her proportions seemed off.  Revealed behind was her true monstrous form.  Her legs were long and spindly, and she had four of them.  They were reminiscent of the legs of an insect despite being covered in pink flesh and terminating in dainty pink human feet.  To Bate the juxtaposition of the familiar with the alien looked far worse than had they actually been the legs of a giant insect.

Worst of all was what was hanging down between them.  Bate saw a bloated pink sac like the bulbous abdomen of a grub or insect.  As with the legs it was covered in soft pink human skin.   Puffs of white mist emerged from tubular openings clustered at the end.

Galulpia reached over to caress the side of Cox's face.  "Shall we—as they say—get down and dirty?" she said.

Cox was smiling, but his eyes trembled and water collected around his lower eyelids.  Good, Bate thought, he wanted the fucker to be fully aware of how he'd doomed them.

Galulpia sat down with her bloated abdomen laid out before her.  She had a fleshy slit at the end.  It looked uncomfortably similar to a human vulva.  Bate watched as the labia peeled aside and revealed a lurid interior slick with lubricating juices.  It stretched open wider and wider, a widening pink tunnel.  Four large tentacles, fleshy and muscular like tongues, slithered out and wrapped around Cox's upper body.  They lingered lasciviously over his exposed flesh before pulling him headfirst into the gaping orifice.  Waves of contraction shuddered through the bulbous pink abdomen as she gulped Cox into her.  The science officer's feet wiggled out of the end before they too were drawn inside.  Galulpia let out an orgasmic sigh as her labia folded back behind them.

"Ooh, a wriggler," she said.  "They make me so wet."

Her bloated pink abdomen churned and convulsed.  Galulpia moaned in orgasmic pleasure.  It didn't take long for the violent motion to settle down to slow regular throbs, like the beats of heart.  Galulpia sighed and cooed as her bulbous abdomen swelled and contracted.  Every so often it would give a little shake and white juices would ooze out of the tip.

It was perverse.  Sexual in a way that should not be sexual.

All around him Bate watched helplessly as the other members of his squad were engulfed.  He couldn't move, could only wait his inevitable fate.

It came with a sweet voice.  "Aww, are you feeling left out?  Turn around."

Bate did as he was told.  He saw a pretty young woman with platinum-blonde hair lying on her back with her upper body propped up on her elbows.  Her lower body...

The vagina-like opening at the end of her abdomen opened up and livid red tongues shot out to coil around Bate's upper body.  Her vagina gaped wider, revealing a long pink tunnel that contracted and dilated with muscular throbs.  The tentacles tugged and Bate was pitched face-first into an orifice that opened wider to admit him.  His head went inside and he breathed in humid air thick with the stench of sex.  His shoulders followed and the fleshy walls of her sex pressed around him.  Muscular peristaltic motion took over and Bate was inexorably drawn into her.

Only then did the queer hypnosis that had prevented Bate from resisting wear off.  With his body back under his control he started to struggle.  It was like being inside a giant elastic bag.  The walls were too slick for his scrabbling fingers to gain any kind of purchase.  The walls pressed in around his body with muscular contraction and hauled him in deeper.  Soft spongy flesh contracted around his ankles and then wrapped around his feet as her vaginal opening closed behind him.

Bate kept pushing against the fleshy walls as he tried, desperately, to find any kind of weak spot.  He was running out of air.  He was going to suffocate... suffocate and be digested.

Another wave of peristaltic force gripped his body.  His head was pushed up through some kind of muscular sphincter and into a space mercifully filled with breathable air.

Breathable, but not fresh.  The breaths Bate took were tainted with sweet perfume and the organic stink of sex.  The sphincter closed around his neck—tight like a collar, but not tight enough to stop him from breathing.  His head was also not alone within the air bladder.  Things slender and moist wormed into his ears.

Bate heard the voice of the hindig that had swallowed him.  It came through as clear as if he was wearing headphones.

"Are you okay there?  I couldn't let you suffocate inside me.  That would be such a waste."

Bate heard air sacs working like bellows on either side of his head, keeping the tainted air circulating.  And it was tainted... corrupted.  Bate could feel the same taint spreading through him with every breath he took, awakening immoral thoughts and causing his loins to throb with unnatural need.  He had no choice.  It was that or suffocate to death inside her.

"What do you want?" he called out within his little bubble of air.

Glands within the main cavity's walls squirted hot fluids all over Bate's naked body.  Bate panicked at the thought of her digestive acids eating into his flesh and started to kick out again.  It did nothing more than provoke a series of ecstatic sighs and moans from her, as if his desperate struggling was getting her off sexually.

"Ooh yes," she moaned.

"You're not melting me to mush," Bate raged.

He drove elbows into the soft fleshy wall.  He tried to gouge it with his fingers.  All it did was trigger more orgasmic moans and induce her glands to squirt more juices over him until Bate was covered all over in warm oily secretions.  They made him feel hot... and prickly in a weird way, like he hadn't had sex or masturbated in days and was getting antsy.

"Silly boy," the hindig giggled.  "I'm not going to melt your body to mush.  That's not how we consume."

The central cavity contracted and the space for Bate to struggle in shrank and shrank until his legs were squeezed together and his arms were pinned to his sides.  It felt like someone had wrapped a wet air mattress around him and held it in place with rolls and rolls of thick tape.  Bate couldn't move, but she could.

The meat walls quivered with low throbs and crawled all over his exposed flesh.  To his aphrodisiac-drenched senses it felt like hands, naked butts, or even voluptuous breasts rubbing all over his body.  Like he was playing sardines and jammed in a closet with a team of naked Vegas strippers.  His cock, already bloated with blood, swelled out in a full erection and pressed up against the cushion-soft walls of flesh.  He couldn't control it.

How could he be turned on, here of all places?

The hindig laughed.  Her walls contracted and squeezed him.  Bulges of soft flesh rubbed against his rock-hard erection.

"We let desire consume you."  Her voice was a husky whisper in his ear.

A wet hole opened in the fleshy wall and Bate's erection was drawn into a tight muscular tunnel.  Waves of peristaltic contraction rippled up his shaft. It felt like she was gently tugging him off.  The hot itchy feeling in his balls intensified until it was hard to think about anything else.

"And we feed off what you're only too eager to give us... in the end."

The cushioned walls moved against him with slow sensual throbs.  His cock slipped back and forth inside a warm muscular sheath that stoked his pleasure with rhythmic squeezes.

What was she doing to him?

The throbbing pulses grew stronger.  The grip on his cock grew tighter.

No, she couldn't.

The hot itchiness in his balls bubbled up until he could no longer hold it in.  He let out a surprised groan as her cushioned walls of flesh stroked him all the way to ejaculation.  The hindig climaxed with him.  She moaned ecstatically in his ear and her body shivered all around him.  Her glands squirted and bathed Bate in frothy warm juices.

As he came Bate felt her tug at something inside him, something precious.  He realized then what she was and what she wanted.  Her hunger was an ancient one and it craved something more than flesh.  Bate knew he mustn't give it her.  Must hold onto it at all costs.

It was a battle he couldn't win.  He was inside her.  She had as much time as she needed.  She filled his lungs with clouds of perfumed poison that drove his mind mad with lust.  She soaked him in powerful aphrodisiac secretions and massaged them into him with her fleshy walls until he burned hot all over with need.  She took his cock and sucked the resistance out of him one nerve-jangling orgasm after another.

Bate relaxed within her.  If felt so comfortable—warm... soft... safe.  And all she wanted from him was one little thing.

And—after a while, a long sweet while—he gave it to her.

Sunday, December 18, 2016

Hentai Game Preview: Rooted in the Succubus Prison ~Imma House~

Now this is a game I'm excited about.




It's called Rooted in the Succubus Prison ~Imma House~ and it's from the same people that did the Momusu Delicious meal series.  It also features a trio of succubi conforming to the usual types of the loli, the big-boobed middle one, and the even bigger-boobed MILF.

It's another Wolf RPG game, but the same fix I used for Drain Dungeon seems to work here as well.


You sure you want to run away...?

The plot puts the player in the role of a thief burgling a mysterious house with two accomplices.  The owners reveal themselves to be succubi, the accomplices get sexually slurped to withered husks and the player is imprisoned in the house.  I'm assuming the goal of the game is to escape without being 'eaten' by the succubi.  There also seems to be some weirdness with an artefact found in a library that seems to bring the player back to life.

What made the game stand out for me were the H-scenes I saw in the demo.  They're as hot as fuck and the best succubus Bad End scenes I've seen in a while.  The screenshot I've put below doesn't really do the scene justice.


Okay. maybe we should have run away.

Yes it's a Shiki'bus and that artist is well known for their luscious pictures of succubi (they also did the artwork for the new succubus characters in Monmusu Quest: Paradox).

You know what's better than a Shiki picture of hawt succubus draining... an animated Shiki picture of hawt succubus draining.

The scene is really awesome and I highly recommend giving it a look.

The game isn't out yet, but you can download the demo from here.  (Click the big yellow button to the right of the artwork)

I think it's due to come out near the end of December and I can't wait.

Saturday, December 17, 2016

Hentai Game Review: Drain Dungeon

I checked the demo of this out a week or so ago and it looked interesting.  The main sticking point was it was made using the Wolf RPG system and that doesn't usually play very nice with the AGTH + TranslationAggregator system I use for automated Japanese -> English translation.  What normally happens is a lot of characters get dropped from the text, making it impossible to translate.  After searching around I managed to find a fix.

If half of that paragraph was gobbledegook I recommend checking out this hongfire subforum.  There are plenty of helpful guides here to help you setup text hooking and machine translation for Japanese games.  It is fiddly and the results are highly variable, but in most cases you will be able to get the gist of what's going on.

Generally, after putting the relevant programs on your machine (and changing locale to Japanese), you create a shortcut to the game and in the top shortcut path add a link to AGTH before the address of the game.  (Some IT knowledge is required - I'd follow the guides I linked to rather than asking me.)

The fix for the Wolf RPG games is to use this path to AGTH in the shortcut path to the game (paste it into the dialogue box before the address of the game):

[your local path to AGTH]\agth.exe /c /v /x3 /kf /ks2

Then select the thread that hooks the right text from the AGTH dropdown box while the game is running.  The only problem is it tends to go berserk on menu/item screens and the game becomes a little unresponsive.

Right, now the fiddly stuff is out of the way, let's take a look at the game.




Drain Dungeon is a basic dungeon crawler RPG where the dungeon is abstracted into a series of left or right choices.  The choices lead to either no encounter, a fight, a chest, an event, or a kitsune shopkeeper, with all visible before taking that choice.  In this respect it's similar to the continuous corridor of Desire Dungeon.

(Game Design Tip: Abstraction like this is your friend if you are a small indie developer with limited resources.)

In this case, it doesn't matter whether you go left or right - a boss fight is imminent.

The central quirk of the game is that all adventurers have their levels mysteriously set back to 1 on leaving the dungeon.  With this in mind, a trio of enterprising succubus sisters offer to drain those levels out of you, sexily, before you return to the surface and lose them anyway.  A splendid deal for all concerned.

That's not the only quirk of the game.  For some reason the player is restricted in the number of items they can take back into the dungeon, although this number can be increased using the game's alternate levelling system.  Rather than XP and levels, which are fed to the hungry mouths and pussies of the succubi, the player gains another value (which I never managed to translate the name of correctly) which can be spent to change their class, improve their starting stats, and provide other benefits.  This is the key to beating the game as the player goes in as slightly stronger level 1 each time, enabling each run to go deeper than the last one.


The monster girl boss sprites are actually rather nice.

The fights are typical generic RPG affairs against what I'm guessing are stock monster sprites.  However, there are monster girl bosses at regular (every 80 paces) intervals and these provide additional hentai content.  Losing to a boss will see the player getting their levels sucked out by the monster girl in a sexy loss scene.  There are four bosses in total - a slime girl, a harpy, a dragon girl and a succubus.

The player can exit the dungeon at any time, which will take them to the boudoir of the succubus sisters for a spot of sexy draining.  Each sister has four scenes, each unlocked after experiencing the previous, and requiring the player to hand over 5, 10, 15, or 20 levels respectively.


Bad Ends aren't so bad when you know you're going to be reset to level 1 anyway...

The H-scenes are varied and there are plenty of them - 5 with each succubus sister, 4 from the bosses, 2 bonus ones (a random mimic encounter and an occasional offer of sex from the kitsune merchant), plus a big ole orgy at the end.  I thought the scenes were okay, but felt the H-scene art was weaker than the normal character art.

There are multiple ways to complete the game.  Defeating the last succubus boss unlocks a harem scene where all four get to have fun with the player.  The other way involves feeding a total of 200 levels to one of the succubi, at which point she'll be powerful enough to defeat the last succubus boss on her own.  It's a little fiddly to spot as it doesn't come up in the list of options - you have to keep selecting the top option to talk to her until the option to end the game that way comes up.  This also unlocks her final H-scene, which ended up being a disappointment to me.  I did it for the big-titted eldest sister and while the story was sweet, the H-scene was a re-run of her first scene with slightly tweaked artwork.

How would you like to be drained today, brave adventurer...?

While I loved the idea from a thematic perspective, it is flawed from a mechanical perspective.  Grinding through the same goblins and wolves over and over at the start does get tedious, although at least the player does level up quickly.  The grind is real, but at least the game is relatively merciful about it.  Once you figure out what's going on, it doesn't take many missions to reach the end and unlock everything.

I wonder if the drain-back-to-level-1 theme might work better with rogue-lite mechanics.  There is a hint of them in the item restrictions and constantly being reset to level 1, but the game could definitely do with a bit more RNG madness in the dungeons to liven things up a little.


A mutually beneficial transaction, I think!

Overall I liked the concept and wanted to like the game more, but it's a little too generic and the one sister's ending scene I unlocked was a bit of a disappointment considering the grind to unlock it.  If I gave out scores this would be the 5'est 5/10 ever (very very medium).

Thursday, December 15, 2016

How not to make your print cover

As promised, here is the whole sorry saga of why it took so long to make the print version of Succubus Summoning 201 available.

First off I should go through the process I follow to make print versions of my books available for readers to buy.  My publisher, eXcessica, uses Amazon's CreateSpace to produce Print On Demand paperback versions of their books.  The files they need from me, the author, are a correctly formatted manuscript and a high resolution pdf of the coverflat.

The coverflat is the full cover of the book - back, spine, front - laid out flat.  In order to create this CreateSpace asks the author to fill in a bit of data on how big they want the finished paperback to be and how many pages the manuscript is.  The number of pages value is needed to determine the thickness of the spine.  Once CreateSpace has all the info it spits out a template that looks like this:




I'll go over what the dotted lines and other stuff means in a mo.  First there's the obvious dependency - CreateSpace can't give you this template until you know the total number of pages in your book, and you won't know this until you've finished and correctly formatted the manuscript.  This is a problem for people like me who have an unfortunate tendency to push our deadlines rather fine.

When I get caught in a time crunch, my usual approach is to focus on making sure the ebook version is ready in time and then try to get the print version done as soon after as possible (the manuscripts are formatted a little different - nothing major, but it does take a little fiddling around).

As a result the cover art is done backwards.  Rather than getting my artist to create the full cover art and then cutting out the front cover part to serve as the ebook front cover, I have them create the front cover first and then give them the full template to do the rest as soon as I have it.

The ebook front cover is relatively straightforward.  What you see is what you get and the artist has control of where the boundaries occur.  For Succubus Summoning 201, that gives us this front cover:




My art direction was to follow on the theme of Succubus Summoning 101 and make the cover look like one of those old leather-bound tomes with clasps and bits of metal around the edges.  Sort of like this:




For the ebook cover this is relatively straightforward as the artist knows the exact margins and where the exact edge of the cover is.

For the print coverflat is becomes a little more complex.  If you look at the template above you'll see there are dotted lines and a salmon-pink border.  The dotted line indicates where the cover will be cut out, but this is not 100% precise, hence the salmon-pink border.  This represents the bleed area and everything in it is a sort of Schrödinger's artwork - it might get cut off and not appear on the final cover, but you have to have something there in case it doesn't.  So this something should look okay enough that you don't mind it being on the front cover, but also shouldn't be important enough that it has to be on the front cover.

For most book covers (and the case with all my short story collections) this isn't a problem.  The edge is background stuff that can be chopped off at any point.  Then we have the Succubus Summoning 201 cover and those little corner pieces...

Oh boy.

Somewhere in the (sort of) commissioning process I managed to totally confuse my artist on what the bleed area was and what it meant.  Many mistakes were made, over and over...

I should also mention at this point that my cover artist is also my brother and he volunteers his time for nothing more than thanks and beer.  As he has a family and full-time job, he only has the spare time to work on things at his own pace.  This means that turnaround times are going to be, by necessity, slow and inconsistent.

The first mix-up was with the dimensions.  The correct dimensions for the coverflat should be 3468 x 2475, 600 ppi.  The coverflat template comes with a resolution of 300 ppi.  In between our respective art programs we managed to get stuck between the right resolution but four times the size, or the right size but the wrong resolution.

I found this out after sending a ridiculously huge file to Stacey, the assistant at eXcessica, that took some finangling to even send it through email before she realised it was way too big for CreateSpace.

We managed to get that sorted and then the bleed area problems hit.

The next submission was rejected by CreateSpace for having text too close to the edge.  This was where I managed to confuse my brother.  He misunderstood what I meant by having a bleed area around the edges and his first fix was to increase the size of canvas to add a bit around the edges.  This doesn't work as the cover is still going to be cut out at the same dotted lines.  The next attempt had the right-sized canvas and the blurb on the back moved away from the margins.  It also positioned the corner ornamentation right in the bleed area.  When I overlaid the template I saw straightaway that virtually all of the corner pieces would be cut off, and sent it back.

My proposed fix was to position the whole coverflat inside the salmon-pink border and then fill the edges with background cover.  I wanted to extend the pseudo-metal ornamentation to the edges, so I told my brother to widen them to fill out to the edges.

This didn't work either as Stacey came back to say the coverflat had been bounced again for having essential art bits within the bleed area.

I asked her if we could just overrule it as I didn't mind if some of it was cut-off.

Unfortunately this was something she didn't have any control over.  My guess is CreateSpace has some automated checks on the cover art.

So, back to the drawing board for the umpteenth time.  As my brother's time is limited, these back and forths took place over the course of a couple of months.  Rather than bother him again I repositioned an old version of the coverflat inside the safe area and filled the borders with a flat colour taken from the background to blend it in.  This left me with this:




...which was thankfully good enough to pass as well as turning out okay when displayed on the Amazon site:




So there you have it - less of an excuse and more an acknowledgement of me and my brother being giant idiots.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little peek behind the scenes of the publishing process.  Thankfully, there is a happy ending.  As I posted on Monday, the print version of Succubus Summoning 201 is now available to buy on either Amazon, or directly from CreateSpace.  Sorry for making you all wait so long!

Monday, December 12, 2016

Print version of Succubus Summoning 201 is finally here!

A little (lot!) later than planned, I can finally say the paperback version of Succubus Summoning 201 is available to buy.  This continues Phil's sexy (mis)adventures with Verdé, Rosa and friends as the hapless warlock tries to learn magic while surviving the amorous advances of various seductive succubi and monster girls.



You can get it from Amazon here, or directly from my publisher, eXcessica here.  I get more money from the second link, but sales from Amazon bump up the book's rating and make it easier for new readers to find, so I don't mind where you get it from.  Go to whoever suits you best.

Here are some 'inside-baseball' answers to a couple of questions I imagine people will have.

Why is it so expensive for a paperback book?

POD (Print on Demand), I'm afraid.  This is the reality of being a quasi-independent author.  Mass-market paperbacks have print runs in the thousands to keep the costs down (with the downside that the publisher ends up out of pocket if the book turns out to be a dud).  I'm below that level, so the only way to produce paperback versions is as a speciality item with prices to match.  On the flip side, independents can price their ebooks lower as they don't have to worry about cannibalising their print market.

Why did it take so freaking long to get the print version done?

Um, yeah.

The tl;dr version is my cover artist and I managed to get horribly mixed up on what was meant by bleed area on the cover template and mistakes were made... over and over.

The even shorter version - see those metallic embellishments on the corners of the book, don't do this on your book designs.

I'll go into the full sorry saga tomorrow as it might be of interest to other self-published (quasi or otherwise) writers looking to put out print versions of their books through CreateSpace.

But back to our regular scheduled content...

The print version of Succubus Summoning 201 is now out.  Sorry for making you all wait so long.  I hope you all enjoy it and find a place for it on your bookshelves.  Although you might want to put it somewhere where innocent neighbours don't pick it up and flick through by accident.  Or maybe you do... 😈

Thursday, December 08, 2016

Game Design Fumbling: An Arachne Scenario

While playing around with some GameBook/text-based videogame ideas I sketched out this scenario for an arachne encounter:




It ended up coming out a little more complex than I thought...

Wednesday, December 07, 2016

H-space MGB Profile: Leech-Tongue Succubus

Name:  Leech-Tongue Succubus
Type:  Succubus
Habitat:  Unknown.

Description:
Pale or slightly bluish-skinned humanoid with the typical succubus/devil girl additions of horns, wings and tail.  Only one specimen has been encountered so far.  Her horns, wings and tail were very dark blue in colour, almost verging on black.  As with other succubi, she was slightly taller than the average human woman and possessed a figure straight out of typical male fantasy—slender, toned and extremely busty.

Their identifying feature is a long black tongue terminating in a leech-like sucker mouth.

(Again I'm uncomfortable classifying the different variations of succubus as separate species.  They could be, but they could also all be part of the same species, and the different feeding strategies and attack strategies we've observed could be the result of other factors such as exotic body augmentation and different training regimes.)

Attack Strategy:
Only the primary feeding mechanism is known for this succubus.  They feed using their long leech-like tongue.  They use it to suck in a man's penis and then stimulate him to repeated ejaculations (usually with the help of mammary intercourse) until the man is fully depleted of fluids.

This happens rapidly, as fast as if the succubus was draining their blood.  How do they induce the man to produce so much semen, so quickly?  An agent in the saliva can't be enough.  There must be some other factor.

Countermeasures:
As of yet we don't know anything about the offensive capabilities of this type of succubus.  It's possible they are part of a civilian class and rely on other HSIOs such as the scarlet imps to bring them human captives.  This is not an assumption I feel safe making.  All succubi-class HSIOs encountered so far have shown formidable mind control skills and regenerative abilities.  As always the best strategy is to disengage.  If this is not possible, hit fast and hit hard before the mesmeric abilities of the succubus compromise your ability to fight them.

Threat Level:
Unknown.

(Who am I kidding—High!)

Tuesday, December 06, 2016

H-space MGB Story: Leech-Tongue Succubus (part 2)

continued from part 1

The wet, slurpy sounds grew louder and sloppier.  Kowalski's moans rose above them before tailing off in an exhausted rattle.  Then...

Silence.

Bate heard the clicking sounds of the succ's high heels against the stone floor.  She rounded the pillar and turned to face him.  Was it his imagination or had the pale round globes of her boobs grown even bigger since he'd last seen her?  It didn't matter that she wasn't human.  Those twin bulges triggered a powerful surge of arousal in his groin.  She crouched down and smiled sluttily up at Bate.  Her hands were covered in shiny black gloves.  She stroked one hand up his cock and it swelled out rigid like an iron bar.  Her other hand pulled down her top and let her big tits flop out.

Bate spat on her face.  With his arms and legs currently trapped within the meat wall it was all the defiance he could muster.

The she-demon smiled up at him.  She licked the spittle off her face with a tongue as black as the lingerie she was wearing.  It wasn't just the color of her tongue that was off.  Bate thought he saw the end open up, like the blind maw of a leech or maw.  Only briefly, easy enough to miss, but Bate had seen it.

Not that it mattered to his raging hard-on.

The succ slid Bate's cock between her big slutty tits.  Being wedged between her big soft boobs felt even better than the soft caress of her hand.  Her skin was warm and silky smooth, and her boobs felt like big soft pillows.  The succ pressed them together and they smothered his cock completely.  She looked up at him with her smoldering slutty eyes and started to tittyfuck him.  She pressed her hands into the sides of her swollen breasts and lifted them up and down, rubbing that sensually smooth skin against Bate's bulging cock.  Her lips pouted in a wanton pout as she switched to alternating her up and down movements, jostling Bate's member between her flesh cushions.  The movement and the feel of her tits turned Bate on even more.  He felt like he was heating up all over.

Squeeze.  Rub.  Plump plump.  Jiggle.

Bate's temperature kept rising.  His balls felt tight and itchy.

They made you want to come.  They made it so good it felt like you had no other purpose in life but to come.

The scarlet imps watched like creepy children out of a horror or science fiction film.  Bate barely noticed they were there.  The succ pressed her tits together around his cock and a cracked moan escaped his lips.

The succ's mouth opened and her tongue fell out, and kept falling.  It was long, far too long.  It was black and shiny like a leech, and with a gaping maw at the end like the mouth of a leech as well.  A mouth within mouth.  The inner one dilated like it was tasting the air.

Her tongue kept reeling out of her mouth like a snake slithering from a cave.  It was long enough to reach all the way down to her breasts.  There, it wormed down into her cleavage.  Bate felt it sucking on the end of his cock.  It stretched and engulfed first his glans and then the rest of his penis.  He felt the muscular walls grip him as her tongue covered him like a warm living sheath.

"Now she's going to suck you all up," one of the imps said, her eyes shining in expectation.

The succ pressed her tits together and started jiggling them again.  Her tongue flexed and squeezed so that it felt like continuous rings of pressure were rolling up his shaft.

Sucking on him.

The heat in Bate—the tension in his balls—grew unbearable.  He let out a loud moan as his hips bucked and he spurted cum up the narrow tube of her long flexible tongue.  He heard wet noises as she sucked it up.  The wet noises intensified and with it the suction.

Oh God.

Bate tipped his head back as another ejaculation erupted from him in a white burst of pleasure.  The succubus kept plumping her tits against his cock.  Her tongue kept tugging on him with muscular squeezes.  Kept sucking.

A third ejaculation burst from Bate.  A fourth.  His head thrashed from side to side as he was lost in thrall to the pleasure she was giving him.  A fifth.  A sixth.  He fancied they were travelling up her tongue in little bulges, dragged out of him like a string of precious pearls.

Seven.  Eight.  Nine.

So many Bate could no longer keep count.  They all rolled into one continuous flow of pleasure up her gulping tongue.  His cries and sighs rose to a peak and then terminated in a final weak rattle as the succubus sucked up the last of him.

She retracted her tongue, stood up and moved onto the next one.



"Wait.  Go back to the start."

"Where?"

"The moment the squad was able to fire their guns."

"Oh right, the moment the dimensional phenomenon passed."

"What else happened then?"

"Squad-Sergeant Henry Dunlop ran a succubus through with a piece of steel rebar.  Then Specialist Benjamin Hicks and the other members of the squad opened fire and—"

"Stop."

"What is it?"

"A thought.  No, it's probably nothing.  Unless...  But how?  Hmm, I need to think about this.  You can go now."

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

H-space MGB Profile: Nuru Nuru Girl

Name:  Nuru Nuru Girl
Type:  Humanoid
Habitat:  Only seen so far in the inflatable cave system, an unusual structure discovered underground.

Description:
Close enough to human to be mistaken for one at first glance.  They resemble women of East Asian descent, with bronze skin and straight black hair.  As with other observed HSIOs, their features mimicking human sexual characteristics are highly exaggerated.  Their breasts are considerably larger than a typical human woman of their size, although in this case there is a functional reason for this as their breasts contain the glands that produce the copious amounts of lubricating fluid that give the nuru nuru girls their name.

Other divergent features include the hands and feet.  Their wrists and ankles are longer and allow their hands and feet a greater degree of rotation and movement.  The feet also have much longer digits, to the point they resemble a secondary pair of hands.

Attack Strategy:
The nuru nuru girls are named for the complex lubricant exuded by their skin and in particular their breasts and sexual organs.  This has a similar appearance and consistency to nuru gel, a product used in a special type of Japanese massage.

(I assume this is a sex thing.  My assistant was curiously reticent when pressed for further details.)

The lubricant is a complex blend of oils, enzymes and some compounds that defy chemical analysis.  Aside from its lubricating properties, the substance is also corrosive—but only to non-living fabric.  There is also a strong narcotic component that induces a euphoric state in the subject once absorbed through the skin.  The body-to-body massage a nuru nuru girl gives her victim is thought to aid in this absorption.  With their prey docile and non-resistant, the nuru nuru girl covers them with a fluid that softens human tissues while still preserving their intactness.  As of yet, we have been unable to duplicate this softening effect under laboratory conditions.

(Maybe it requires the unusual physical laws of H-space.)

Once her prey has softened to the point of liquefaction, the nuru nuru girl draws them up into her body through her vaginal opening.

Countermeasures:
Physically, the nuru nuru girls are no more strong or agile than a human female athlete of comparable size.  Their main threat is their secretions.  Unprotected skin contact results in a euphoric state that impairs mental acuity and combat effectiveness.

Thankfully, liquefaction of tissues only occurs after prolonged and sustained contact (and possibly only while engaged in physical copulation with the nuru nuru girl).  Smaller exposure to the lubricant appears to have no long-term deleterious effects, although it is advised to wash it off at the earliest opportunity.

Threat Level:
Low.

Some of my colleagues are excited by the pharmaceutical potential of the nuru nuru girls' secretions.  My personal opinion is that the lubricant will not behave in the same way under Earth's different physical laws.

Monday, November 28, 2016

H-space MGB Story: Nuru Nuru Girl

SGT Stewart Peter Bate was running with the others when one of the nuru nuru girls took him down.  They hadn't been that threatening when Bate and the others had first come through this way, but the men had had guns then and were still functioning as a well-drilled unit.

Now...

They were fleeing in panic.  Bate didn't have his gun.  He'd dropped it and left it behind, just like the others.  What was the point of having a gun?  They were no use against that... thing.  All they could do was run.

Run for their immortal souls.

The nuru nuru girls were one of the more human-looking hindigs.  They looked like pretty Asian girls, the type you might find in a seedy downtown rub'n'tug joint.  Except their hands and feet were a little too long.  And no Asian chick had boobs that big unless they were fake.  Neither did most other women either.

At first glance they'd looked so close to human their science officer, Briggs, had mistaken them for unfortunate wretches pulled into H-space by some weird unidentified inter-dimensional phenomenon.  He'd been very surprised when one of the girls had tackled him to the ground and leaked a clear fluid on him from her over-sized breasts that had melted his clothes away like it was acid.  Fortunately for Briggs, the corrosive properties had been restricted to his clothing.  The science officer had been none the worse for wear after they'd driven the girl off and helped him back to his feet.  If anything he'd been a little too good, a little blissed out as if he'd just taken a heavy dose of psych medication.

The explo team had carried on and...

Bate didn't want to think about that.  He didn't want to remember the cave, the thing in it... and he definitely didn't want to remember what it had done to Briggs.  All he wanted to do was run.

The cavern where they'd encountered the nuru nuru girls was strange even by H-space standards.  It resembled a giant inflatable, as if they were walking inside the world's largest bouncy castle.  The floor was a patchwork of bright, artificial colors.  It had even felt like they were walking on large, air-filled bladders—soft, spongy and yielding.

Briggs had said it must be artificial.  The first time through Bate had wondered who or even why someone would take the time to build this.  Especially here, underground.

The second time through he was more concerned with trying to keep his footing.  The yielding, pitching surface made running hard work.  Out of the corner of his eye he saw men slip or stumble.  The nuru nuru girls were upon them before they could get back to their feet.

Bate kept running.

The exit was maybe ten meters away when Bate felt a weight crash into his back and he fell forward onto the swaying ground.  The weight came with him, pinning him to the floor as it lay on top of him.  He felt wetness flood his upper back as if someone had emptied a jug of warm water over him.  Breast fluids from a nuru nuru girl.  He already knew it ate through clothes after seeing what had happened to Briggs.  Now it was happening to him.  He felt the cool air of the cavern against his back.

The exit was so close.  He could see it.  He tried to buck her off, but any force he generated was dampened by the yielding surface beneath him.  Another flood of warm liquid was poured onto his exposed back.

Oh.

Bate stopped struggling.  He understood now why Briggs had looked so blissed out after they'd forced the nuru nuru girl off him.  The warm liquid felt like a miracle drug that soaked into his flesh and made all the aches and twinges of his back and shoulders melt away.  He felt the pressure of two soft objects against his back and realized the nuru nuru girl was lying on top of him with her big tits squashed against his back.

"Relax," she whispered, her lips close to his ear.

Her words slithered past his surface understanding and burrowed into deeper folds of his brain.  They triggered a pleasant static-like tingling on his scalp that tickled down his neck and spine.

Bate didn't resist as the nuru nuru girl started to massage him using her whole body.  She rubbed her big soft boobs all over his back as if they were sponges laden with warm water.  The fluids melted away more of his uniform until her naked flesh was rubbing directly against his.

His fear and the flight—all were forgotten and pushed aside.  The cave, H-space, went away with it.  He was lying on an air mattress by the side of a pool on warm summer day while a hot girl with big tits rubbed warm oil into him... with her body.  He relaxed and murmured his pleasure as she rubbed her big soft boobs up and down his back.  She lay on top of him and her hands glided across his shoulders and then down his arms, spreading relaxing warmth in their wake.  Bate wondered if she had a friend as it felt like a second pair of hands were rubbing down his thighs and the back of his calves.  Her touch was bliss.  His aches and twinges melted away beneath it.

The heat of her body—or was it her desire—lay over him like a warm blanket.  She whispered seductive suggestions in his ear and followed them up with cheeky thrusts of her hips against him.  The floor, soaked in lubricant, made squishing sounds as her weight shifted on top of Bate.

She sat up and her nimble fingers went back to work kneading the meat of his neck and shoulders.  Bate didn't resist as she slid an arm underneath him and turned him over onto his back.  Why would he?  It gave him a better view of her body and she was gorgeous.

Straight black hair curved around and framed an exotically beautiful face.  She smiled down at him over the soft rounded peaks of her big tits.  Her skin was a rich bronze in color.  Her whole body was slathered in oily lotion to the point it dripped from her in glistening strands.  She flopped down on him and rubbed those shiny boobs up his chest.  Bate lay back and let her pamper him.

There was one bit of tension she made no attempt to smooth away.  Instead she encouraged it by rubbing the smooth skin of her belly against his rampant erection.  Then, after sitting up, she coaxed him to maximum hardness with sensual strokes of her hands.  Bate's excitement grew as she lifted herself up over his hard-on and let the pink folds of her pussy rest against the top of his swollen glans.  Hot thick juices poured out of her vagina and dribbled down his shaft.

Put it in, he thought.

She obliged.  She pressed down, her labia parted around his cock and he entered her.  She was tight, but so wet he slid smoothly into her.  More fluids bubbled out and flooded down his shaft.  Their warmth seeped through his skin and coagulated in his balls.

She smoothly bounced up and down on his shaft.  Bate watched mesmerized as her heavy breasts swayed with her movements.  He didn't have to move as the inflatable-mattress floor rocked and bucked for him.  He felt the pressure of her tight pussy gently squeezing him.  Her vaginal walls massaged his member with the same care and attention her hands and breasts had given his body.

Massaged him until...

Bate let out a soft moan as his balls clenched, his cock throbbed and he emptied his seed inside her.  The nuru nuru girl flopped down on him at the moment of orgasm, covering him with her warm body.  The walls of her vagina pulsed in time to his own throbbing ejaculation, coaxing him first for more and then milking the last dregs from his spent cock.

Then she sighed and came.  Really came.  Her orgasm was a great shuddering quake that flooded his crotch with warm fluids and set her vaginal walls vibrating all around him.  Her big boobs, trembling under the same forces running through her, poured oily lubricant all over Bate until he was covered in a layer of clear gel.  He liked it.  He felt comfortable beneath it.  Relaxed.

The nuru nuru girl wasn't done.  That meant Bate wasn't done either.  Little bounces of her hips and squeezes of her pussy brought his cock twitchingly back to life.  From there it didn't take long for the wet friction of her tight little pussy to take him back over the edge.  He released another burst of semen inside her.  Much more this time.  Long.  Slow.  Relaxed.

The aftermath felt like nirvana—like she'd drawn out every bit of tension in his body until he'd melted into a warm, blissful puddle.

And like a puddle, once his muscles had softened too much to enable ejaculation, Bate's liquefying form was sucked up into the nuru nuru girl's vagina.  To Bate it felt like another, greater feeling of release.  Finished, her belly distended as though she was pregnant, the nuru nuru girl slithered back to her hole to quietly enjoy her claim.

Friday, November 25, 2016

H-space Monster Girl Bestiary Fan-art - Boob-Snake

I received this through email:


She's a boob-snake, one of my H-space monster girl demons.  You can read her story here and the profile to go with it.

The artwork is lovely.  I love the way her serpentine lower body is just breaching the surface.  It's as if she knows you've strayed too close and no longer cares about hiding what she is.

The artist is Yenn-Ash.  You can check out more of her work on DeviantArt here and her own blog.  I think she did a brilliant job with this piece and I hope my writing (and others) inspires her to create more like it.

Now to get off my lazy ass and get that next batch of H-space stories written and posted.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

New Monster Girl Games up on DLSite - Demon Angel Sakura vol.4, Drain Dungeon, Bifrost's Brothel of Mamono

Lorks o'Lordy.  You wait ages for a monster girl game and three come out on the same day.

First up we have Demon Angel Sakura vol.4.


Long time followers will be familiar with this series.  I've already reviewed vols 1, 2, and 3 on the blog.  This is the 4th and last entry in the series.

It's a 2D platform/action game where you control the diminutive Sakura as they fight off various hungry monster girls eager to eat him (her, them?).  The first two games were boss rushes.  The third added a lot of random mooks, each with their own animated Bad End scenes.  The fourth carries on the changes introduced in the third.

Oddly, it's not actually completed yet.  The creators fell behind schedule, but decided to release what they had with the final area (and 3 bosses) to follow early next year.  Despite this, there's still plenty of content with 3 bosses and 15 or so mooks.

I must admit Demon Angel Sakura never really turns me on that much.  Normally this would be a failing for an eroge, but I'm mostly playing to see what ridiculously over-the-top indignities are heaped on poor Sakura in the imaginative Bad End sequences.  The game rarely disappoints.

If you've ever fantasized about having a giant succubus fart in your face and then insert you headfirst into her pussy as a human dildo, this is the game for you.

What, did you think I was joking...?
I've already bought this one and will bring you all the vore-y details in a couple of days or so.


Next up we have Drain Dungeon.


I played this demo a few weeks back after seeing it mentioned on ulmf.org and it looked interesting.  It's a dungeon crawler, but with the dungeon abstracted to a linear sequence of left or right choices (similar to what Desire Dungeon did).

The main gimmick here is that the hero (i.e. you) is always reset to level one upon leaving the dungeon, so a trio of enterprising succubi strike up a deal to... um... "drain" those levels from you before leaving rather than letting them go to waste.

Yes, that kind of "draining".
The three succubi fit the usual range of body shapes, so you have the busty milf one, the slutty elder teen one, and the blatant loli one (who's probably the eldest of the three).  The loli is a bit too loli for my tastes, so that likely means a third of the game's H-content won't interest me.  The busty milf however...

Levels?  I'll get you levels.  All the levels you want...
The dungeon also has some additional H-content provided by various monster girl bosses.  I ran into and afoul of a slime girl in the demo.  The rest of the monsters were the standard stock RPG Maker sprites, so there is a danger the game might get too grindy and repetitive later on.

The biggest problem I found is that the game uses the Wolf RPG Maker system and that traditionally hasn't played very nice with text-hooking.  I like the premise and it looks interesting, but I'll hold off on getting it until I can find the h-code (or alternate text hooker) to make it translatable.


The third game out today is Bifrost's Brothel of Mamono.


This is a genre I don't look at too often - the brothel simulator.

The back story is that you've ended up in debt to the devil/some kind of succubus and have been whisked off to an alternate world to run a brothel in order to pay it off.  Unfortunately, AGTH failed to hook this one at all, so I wasn't really able to work out what was going on in the demo.

From what I saw the gameplay appears to be purchasing captured monster girls off slavers, breaking them in with various sex stuff and then pimping them out to clients to bring in the cash.

Aww, poor lickle Harpy.
Not my cup of tea to be honest, but it might be of interest to people who like their sexy monster girls to be served up without a side helping of femdom and potential death-by-snu-snu.  The art and UI looked fine from what I saw, although not being able to translate anything means I don't know how well the strategy/gameplay mechanics hold up.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Obligatory Post-Election Political Post

I've been off-grid for a few days. Did I miss anything important? /s

After the election result came in I did think about writing something.  It seemed like every other bugger was doing it.  Then I wondered if that in itself was a symptom of the problem.  I'm an entertainer.  I entertain people with filthy sexy stories of succubus porn.  You shouldn't give a shit what entertainers think about politics.

Then I saw this video and it sums up what I think far more eloquently than anything I could have wrote:



It's a comedy skit and Jonathan Pie is a satirical creation, but Britain has a long and distinguished history of letting their comics sneak out uncomfortable political truths and this is spot on.  Hats off to Tom Walker and Andrew Doyle for six minutes of glorious sweary brilliance.

It's what I've been saying for a while now.  Continually throw rocks at people in the middle ground and eventually they'll move over to the side not currently throwing rocks at their head.  And when elections are won by which side can most successfully overlap the middle ground...

I'm not going to lie.  I did derive some pleasure in watching some of the more horrible holier-than-thou types in the media (social and mainstream) go from smug confidence, to panic and then finally to full-fledged meltdown over the course of Tuesday night.  They'd earned that.  Less pleasant was seeing a lot of folks on my personal facebook, mostly decent lefties of the non-sanctimonious variety, be genuinely fearful about what the future holds.  I feel for them.

One thing I did think genuinely odious in the aftermath of the election was the number of "If you voted Trump don't read/watch/play my books/films/games" comments from people that really should know better.  Fuck that shit for the condescending bilge it is.  Every person's circumstances are different and I'm never going to begrudge you for voting for the candidate you think is personally better for you, even if it wouldn't be my choice.

I don't mind if you voted Trump.

I don't mind if you voted Clinton.

I don't mind if you voted third party.

Heck, I don't even mind if you didn't vote at all.  (To be honest, if faced with the choice between Trump and Clinton I'd have probably thought "sod it all!" and buggered off down the pub for a pint.)

Neither do I mind if you don't give a shit whether I mind one way or another.  As I said before, you shouldn't give a shit what entertainers think about politics.

I'm not you.  They're not you.

It was your vote.  Don't let any fucker try and guilt-trip you over how you used it.  They haven't lived your life.

And now... I guess we're in the Chinese definition of "interesting times".  On the plus side, the media were so horribly wrong about everything there's a good chance they were horribly wrong about Trump being the second coming of Hitler as well.  I think a lot of the energetic centipedes on reddit that voted for Trump, the human-shaped Fuck You! sign to the liberal media establishment, will be a little disappointed when Trump, the man, doesn't live up to their expectations, but that's a lesson we all learn about politics eventually.

In the meantime, there are some scared people out there and not all of them are obnoxious SJW shits.  If you were one of those that rode the big orange wrecking ball to see it smash SOCJUS political correctness to bits, remember and reassure the vulnerable.  Have their backs against the lunatic fringe of the other side when it slithers out of the rocks to take advantage of the current pendulum swing, and it will.  The right side of history is now you.  Be better.

As for me, I'll continue writing.

The new novel is progressing, if a little slower than I'd like.  There is a new batch of H-space monster girl bestiary stories on the way.

I'm an entertainer.  Time to get back to entertaining.