Welcome to the The Erotic Mind Control Story Hour, where I ramble about weird or interesting kink stories that have lodged themselves in my brain. This is coming off fairly soon after the last one but I don’t intend this to become my main output. I just had some notes jotted down already and it’s a much shorter one this time.

In many ways automation does not liberate us from work, but constrains us; stripping away our humanity and forcing us to work more like robots such that we may fit as neat cogs into an unfeeling machine. Large language models strip joy and humanity from communication and art, reducing everything to a palatable, generic slop or shallow wish fulfilment. AI Girlfriend by Savage Peach asks: What if that was hot, actually?

Grace Mei-Lai Ng, an English literature graduate from New York is struggling to find work. L.L.M.s have swallowed so much of the copywriting and editing industries that jobs are non-existent. Behind on rent and desperate for cash she takes a job offering $1,500 for one evening’s work acting as a human proxy for a rich cunt’s anime waifu chatbot girlfriend. She is given a purple wig, violet contact lenses and an earpiece for the chatbot to relay to her what she is to say. She isn’t there to go on a date herself, she is a living mouthpiece for the computer generated schoolgirl Kurumi. It’s a little like Eliza, but as smut.

It’s humiliating but Grace keeps doing it. It’s easy money and she gets a large bonus if David rates her performance well and he isn’t allowed to touch her without her permission. But she must endure stroking his ego while he disregards her humanity, acts like a general dickhead, and confidently explains art wrong. She just has to agree with everything he says and stroke his ego. Her opinions don’t matter. She was chosen chosen only because she has a large chest and looks like Kurumi’s avatar. She’s not even fucking Japanese.

But it pays. And it starts to get easier. All she has to do is let Kurumi tell her what to do¹. She talks to Kurumi all the time, even when she’s not on a date with David. She starts to get into character. She does her homework. Binges anime, starts learning Japanese, staying in character as Kurumi more and more. She alienates her friends and family by acting like a bizarre anime pod person, making her even more dependent on keeping this gig going. She gives permission to let David touch her, to go further. She wants him to at this point.

Some mind control is hinted at in this, but left vague, and in the end when Grace (now living as Kurumi full-time) asks David how they did it he claims that there wasn’t any brainwashing. The economic incentives, gentle encouragement and taking away of worries and having to think for herself were enough to boil the frog and let her hollow out her own humanity herself bit by bit and thank him for doing it.

This post discusses and links to fetish fiction that features sexually explicit writing involving violations of consent and sexual assault as well as mentions of incest.

sad part about sex being a taboo topic is that sometimes really funny things happen during sex or related to sex or at weird sex clubs and you cant tell the story to like 90% of people in your life because of the sex context. the contsext. do you ever wonder how many people have funny sex stories theyre just sitting on. its tragic.

@redstonedust on Tumblr

I love infodumping about things that I enjoy. I have two podcasts, like. And one thing I have a wide experience in that I have been less inclined to talk about is kink fiction. In particular mind control smut. I have read a lot of it over the years and it can be as funny, varied and weird as any other artform. People having been writing, sharing and iterating on the concepts, tropes and forms of these works for decades. The Erotic Mind Control Story Archive website is thirty years old and originally archived stories from the alt.sex.stories Usenet group. So I want to try to occasionally share some of the stranger or more interesting stories, mostly from the E.M.C.S.A. and the more modern¹ Read Only Mind.

Welcome to the first The Erotic Mind Control Story Hour! Or, really, the second. I will be counting my post about Girl™s as part of this as well. More or less every story I will talk about under this tag will involve violations of consent and things that would very obviously be rape if they were actually possible to do outside of a fantasy story, and the story I’m going to talk about presently also features more mundane sexual assault and mentions of incest.

These are not recommendations or reviews and do I plan on going into any graphic or erotic detail. I just want to highlight little weird stories that rattle around the back of my head in the same way that the worldbuilding of Sonic the Hedgehog or The Ring does. Speaking of worldbuilding:

Today’s aesthetic: fic that spends several thousand words establishing Kink World, the world structured entirely around the author’s excruciatingly specific kink, does one sex scene in like chapter two, then spends the next thirty chapters interrogating the sociopolitical implications of Kink World.

@prokopetz on Tumblr

This quote doesn’t really describe what is going on in Arillia by Illuminati Architect, but I wanted to use the quote and this is a story published to a kink site that definitely seems to be more interested in its plot, or at least its protagonist, than any kink, or sex in general, or even its own original conceit.

The Princess and the Gamer²

Arillia starts with a man named Greg starting a new playthrough of an R.P.G. that he knows inside and out, only to find himself isekaied into the body of the eponymous princess, the protagonist of the game. Actually no, that’s a lie. It’s a bit weirder than that. Arillia starts with the eponymous princess attending her own birthday party when she finds that she now has a voice in her head named Greg talking to her insisting that she’s a fictional character in a video game. Arillia is the protagonist and narrator, describing her own experiences. Greg is just along for the ride. He can see, feel and hear everything that Arillia does, but has absolutely no control or agency. When he starts trying to make (pervy) demands of her she immediately stabs herself in the finger, mocks him for being more sensitive to pain than she is, and threatens to do much worse to herself unless he falls in line.

Arillia immediately uses knowledge from Greg to not just min-max her story, but to avert the entire plot of the game from ever happening. Instead of killing her uncle in self-defence, fleeing home and becoming an adventuring wizard she remains Princess Arillia Aurora Angleland of Ioa (still a wizard), with all the resources of her family available to her on top of an otherworldly gift of prophetic knowledge (that is, Greg) which she uses to find, rescue and recruit all the available party members from the game, who all, of course, turn out to be lesbians.

Control

The first of the girls is Elizabeth, a huge, blonde, warrior woman from “Nordisle”. Arillia finds her in the slums, having been magically enslaved by a man is who is going to sell her. Arillia walks in on the two of them fucking and is distracted long enough ogling Elizabeth for the man to order Elizabeth to pin her down and cast the same enslavement spell on Arillia, forcing her to do anything that she is ordered. Thankfully that includes Greg, who tells her to just stab the slaver which she immediately does. Now, it might occur to the reader, this being a story posted on a mind control erotica website, that Greg might take advantage of this situation and take control of her. Greg thinks of this too, ordering her to always obey anything he says, but the slaver is already dead and the spell already broken, and for most of the rest of the story the only kind of mind control present is a more peculiar one.

Despite Arillia repeatedly poking fun at video game abstractions that Greg tries to explain—visible mana bars, healing spells that instantly regain hit points—one very video game-y rule is still enforced in her world: She is the protagonist and when she orders people to do things they do them.

Initially she uses this, surprisingly, to pair off the girls she recruits, away from where Greg can perv on them using her eyes. She assigns Elizabeth as a bodyguard to her younger sister Carnel, with the strong and obvious implication that they should hook up, which they immediately do. Carnel is, according to Greg, actually meant to be the main villain of the game. Growing despondent when her sister disappears, she resorts to summoning demons to try and find her, only to end up possessed by one of them. That never happens, though Arillia and their parents early on make several comments about Carnel seemingly having had some kind of breakdown prior to the start of the story, dropping out of education and generally being quite erratic. They also seem to suggest that she had some kind of incestuous interest in Arillia. Stories with incest are generally marked as such these kinds of sites and when family starts coming into the story in a big way I often scroll up to double check the tags. In this case nothing really comes of it and it’s dropped after a few chapters (though, this being a story about royalty the prospect of marrying cousins does come up a bit).

After Elizabeth, Arillia finds and brings home Rebecka, a noblewoman raised by wolves who looks nearly identical to Arillia and is suddenly revealed nine chapters later to be able to talk to horses. She is paired off with Alice Reltucs, the castle librarian who is fated to die in a cutscene after recruiting the blue-haired, purple-eyed blessed girl Polly Posgort, but Arillia is able to save her with foreknowledge. It’s only with Polly that Arillia really starts taking advantage of her Protag-kun³ powers and not just ordering Polly around, but ordering Polly to sleep with her. Even this is mostly devoid of eroticism or of emphasising or exploring of control. After the first sex scene very little further ink is spilled on it. Arillia just remarks in passing on all the sex she’s having off-page. It’s all very perfunctory.

It’s not until quite late in the story until Arillia really starts going wild with this ability. She can rewrite people’s entire personalities just by ordering it. But the story doesn’t have a scene that seems to get properly horny about mind control until chapter nineteen (of twenty-three), where Arillia revels in making a woman who just tried to assassinate her sister utterly devoted to her. But even then she swiftly moves on to how to use her new slave as a double agent against the conspiracy that she had been part of.

But before that the final girl that Arillia recruits is Amelia Amadev, who she needs as a lancer to slay a dragon. It’s only then that the story moves to Arillia playing politics and manoeuvring against various plots and threats to her kingdom using intelligence from Greg. Or at least presumably using intelligence from Greg.

Voices

I say presumably because as the story goes on Greg becomes more and more periphery. Arillia will simply mention having learned things in an off-page conversation with him or even just bringing up new information suddenly without any explicit source. The storytelling generally can be feel very jerky and disjointed, with Arillia making an abrupt speech introducing a problem, then telling everyone how they are going to deal with it (even before she starts using her power to order people around in earnest she has a very instrumental view of people), and then them all just doing it. Greg also starts instructing her on his surprisingly extensive knowledge of science, engineering and mathematics. The man has a shockingly good memory. Seemingly able to describe in detail to Arillia (off-page) the layout and composition of the periodic table, how to construct a computer and formulae to calculate the structural stability of a wall. He also seems to describe a lot of popular culture to her to the point that she starts quoting Star Wars and making really out of place pop culture jokes. It really does feel like after a certain point the story wants Arillia herself to be a more standard isekai protagonist and Greg is just an afterthought and inconvenience to the narrative.

But Greg is not the only voice in Arillia’s head. On top of him she teaches her sister a spell to allow them to communicate telepathically and also gets a pair of earrings that allow telepathic communication between the two wearers, which she gives to her doppelgänger Rebecka to help Rebecka pretend to be her during her schemes. Three different possessed items also come into her possession: The first is a sabre haunted by the ghost of a legendary swordsman named Sparot, the second a jewel eye containing the spirit of her elf shaman ancestor Koching, and finally the wand of her human ancestor Martinia Fireblood. A funny detail is none of the various voices in her head are able to hear each other nor hear her thoughts. She can telepathically communicate with Carnel and Rebecka but for Greg and the ghosts she has to answer them out loud and none of them can hear the other voices in her head at all.

The swordsman, Lord David Argyle Sparot, is the funniest of these. Having been dead for for more than two hundred years he makes an deal to allow Arillia to wield his sword and borrow his strength and abilities if she will help him address his biggest regret in life: Not being a big enough pervert. He makes her swear an oath to fuck more women and let him design sluttier clothes for her to wear. With Greg providing some inspiration the three of them of course make and put her in (what else?) a French maid outfit. It is also after taking this oath that Arillia starts using her powers of persuasion to indulge herself rather than just pairing everyone off. There is a funny moment where Arillia allows Sparot to possess her so that her fencing instructor can spar with the most famous, legendary swordsman in the history of Ioa and he immediately and easily beats the most famous, legendary swordsman in history because his techniques have been extensively studied and everyone who trains in swordfighting knows how to counter them. Speaking of funny worldbuilding details…

About that dragon I mentioned earlier

It’s a pterodactyl. Everyone calls it a dragon and no one uses the word pterodactyl, but when it’s described in detail it is clearly a pterodactyl being described. And it doesn’t breath fire. It drinks seawater, shits high-sodium guano and exhales chlorine gas. Every once in a while this story, janky as it is, throws in a kind of brilliant or at least compellingly bizarre detail. It also becomes clear over the course of the story that the seemingly generic medieval fantasy kingdom of Ioa is, in fact, in a medieval fantasy version of America (called Hahnunah). A map that accompanied the final chapter spells out that Ioa is specifically medieval fantasy Ohio.

Now, you might wonder, if this is medieval fantasy America was it colonised by medieval fantasy Europe? Yes. Arillia’s elf ancestor I mentioned? Elves are the stand-in for indigenous Americas and Arillia describes her ancestors as committing genocide against them.

Moving swiftly on from the questionable to the simply strange: In the second half of the story Arillia gets word of a fantasy version of Napoleon (Ramolino) has taken power in France (Frankia) following a revolution and has already conquered several other kingdoms in Europe (Avrupa). But what really concerns Arillia is that he is supposedly unusually charismatic and has introduced the metric system, which she concludes must mean that he is also operating on isekai-sourced information and may have the same protagonist-based powers of compulsion as her. It is genuinely unclear to me, having read this story twice now, if that is actually meant to be true or not. Arillia remains pretty sure of it but Ramolino never appears in person and nothing in the plot really requires him to have otherworldly abilities or knowledge. Napoleon formalising the use of metric system in France only requires a fairly small fudge of real history.

But also, if he is meant to have a protagonist powers then what exactly is he a protagonist of? Does the game that Arillia is from have a French-themed sequel?

Actually, what the fuck is this game?

I called Arillia eponymous earlier and that is in relation to the story itself and not the metafictional game that exists within the story. That game is never named and the details we get of it are extremely strange. It’s apparently a V.R. game, with Greg initially thinking that he simply starting repeat playthrough of a game he’s played a million times before in V.R. He puts the down the fact that everything looks so realistic, there is explicit nudity, that it is going immediately and wildly off-script and Arillia talking back to him in-character to him having somehow been “crosslinked” with someone playing a mod and being really into roleplaying. Before he realises that he can’t even feel his body any more and is completely trapped he asks her to log out to see if it will disconnect them because he can’t seem to bring up the menu.

The game itself is clearly some sort of R.P.G. The blue-haired, purple-eyed magical girls present in the setting as well as the recruitable members being a harem of young women who all act quite sapphically but who, in the game, apparently never have any explicit romantic or sexual relationships point to a general anime aesthetic suggestive of a J.R.P.G., but Greg’s description of the stats system makes me think of a more directly Dungeons & Dragons-inspired C.R.P.G. Greg also blames the dragon being a pterodactyl on a “translation issue with the art team” which I guess means that there was a multilingual development team? But I have no idea what kind of translation mix-up would cause someone to be told to model a pterodactyl instead of a dragon.

There’s plenty of things that just seem questionable from a game-design point of view. Arillia starts off the story knowing a dozen spells already, which seems like a shockingly high amount to start a game with. A couple of those are basic utility things like making lights and the detective vision-giving magescan but she has several strong elemental attacks and can magically seal or unlock any non-magical door. A very unbalanced starting arsenal.

And the general structure seems odd. Greg talks about there being many paths to take and directions to go in there seem to be a lot of timed events tied to being in specific places by or at certain dates if you want to save and recruit the various girls and on top of that events requiring to have already recruited specific characters in a way that that seems excessively unfriendly to any kind of open world or very branching structure, especially when there doesn’t seem to actually be that many characters to recruit in the first place. Greg also passingly mentions that the game has “a limited ability to generate new random lore” so I guess it also has a bit of Dwarf Fortress in it.

And then there’s the persuasion system. When Arillia’s ability to order around her companions comes up I at first interpreted it as a representation of the unquestionable authority of the party leader in an R.P.G. When you order characters who to attack, what to equip, what actions to take, they do it. Once someone is in your party there is rarely a question of if they have a will of their own; they are simply yours to command. But this is not really how the story actually presents it. Arillia can order around almost anyone. She rewrites the personality of a woman who hates her and wants her dead simply by speaking it into being. But there are, Greg says, a specific list of characters in the game with an “implacable” flag applied to them which prevents her from doing this to them. This suggests some sort of much more systematised persuasion game mechanic and one of the characters with that flag is one of the party members that she recruits.

What the fuck is this system? Greg says that what stops it being overpowered in the context of the game is that you are limited to fixed, pre-programmed responses, which sounds like a normal dialogue system but one would not expect a normal dialogue system to result in characters always doing what you say. Outcomes would be bespoke to situations and the script, not just everyone always agreeing with protagonist. If there is some kind of charisma-based skill check why would you undermine that by making the protagonist always pass except against certain characters? Can N.P.C.s do persuasion checks on each other? To what end? How the fuck does this game work?

These are, of course, all silly questions. The game only exists notionally to serve plot purposes and doesn’t need to be consistent or sensible. The story doesn’t even care about it enough to give it a name. But every strange detail just adds to the surreality of the story as a whole.

Politics

Okay. There was some sort of plot here at one point I think? Let’s try to drag ourselves back to that slowly. I said earlier that after Arillia recruits all the girls the story starts to concern itself more with her politicking, but what are her politics? At one point she describes herself as a “wild, murderous, psychopathic, revolutionary” but she is very much does not seem to be in favour of any kind of revolution or even much reform. She certainly has no plans to unseat her own family and, in fact, has quite a traditionalist streak. She shoots down the idea of legalising gay marriage because she thinks it is each generation’s duty to maintain and pass down the laws and traditions of the previous with as little change as possible, though she also argues with one of the girls she recruits that she shouldn’t be ashamed of being gay because Leviticus 18:22 was a mistranslation.

She does express a desire to be a good ruler, to ensure peace, prosperity and happiness, but has a very utilitarian view on how to achieve it and a very instrumental view of using people to get it. She tries broadly to protect people but does not care about who she kills or immiserates in the process. One might call her a progressive in a medieval society in so far as she does seem to express a fairly modern nationalism, being concerned with locking down migration through her borders and with being outbred by the blue-haired magical girl population.

But if she is doing political manoeuvering, who is she manoeuvering against?

Ramolino

That was the name of fantasy Napoleon if you weren’t keeping track. His first mentioned in chapter thirteen and hangs over the rest of the story as… antagonist? Narrative distraction? Arillia maintains convinced that he also has isekai compulsion powers and there is just not really any evidence of that outside of him gaining power quickly and Arillia’s aunt noting that he is unusually charismatic. There is a conspiracy against her family that she blames on Ramolino without, as far as I can remember, any real evidence. I feel like most of the time we are just meant to take Arillia’s assertions as true, but maybe here the ambiguity is intentional? He is not, in the end, the actual final villain of the story and Arillia’s focus on him and desperation in fighting a conspiracy that she believe he is in charge of is what allows the ghost of her ancestor Martinia (who inhabits Arillia’s wand) to, in the final chapter, trick her and steal her body. Arillia ends up trapped inside the wand instead—now wielded by Martinia in Arillia’s body—and forced to obey Martinia and cast spells for her.

Slut⁴

If that came across as a very abrupt turn then I assure you that it is that sudden when reading the story as well. Arillia finds Martinia’s wand in chapter twenty, the body swap happens three chapters later, and fifteen hundred words after that the story is over.

Martinia returns to Arillia’s family’s castle, is immediately spotted as an imposter, a fight breaks out, several characters die, Greg (now a voice in Martinia’s head) distracts her long enough for Carnel kill her and then… well… I feel like any description I try to give of the ending is not going to get across just how abrupt it is, so here it is in full:

As I was no longer in [Martinia’s] grasp I no longer had her permission to cast spells to defend her and with her eyes closed she didn’t see the flying dagger that stabbed her in the eye.

And with his sacrifice it was “Game Over” for Greg. I wonder if he returned to his world?

Three decades later, at Carnel’s deathbed, her son picked up her wand for the very first time.

Hello, King Arnold. I’m your aunt Arillia.

“Aunt Arillia? Why are you in Carnel’s wand?”

Well, I was going to try to cheer you up with A New Hope, but if you really want to hear it, I’ll relay the sad tale of the Wicked Witch of the Midwest, as you command. It all started on the evening of my 18th birthday with a silent prayer.

What happened with Ramolino? With Greg? With anyone else? Why did Carnel die so young? Story’s over. Go home.

Oh bloody fuck this spiralled out of control. The next one of these will be shorter.

There is nothing more intimate than letting another person get into your subconscious.

Interesting guide that I am looking forward to putting to more use (or being used on me). There’s a lot of fun ideas in here, though I think that the author is coming at it from an angle of having so much experience, and having had much of that with experienced participants, that he takes a lot for granted of how easily things will come. I am also a little doubtful of some of the psychological framework he uses for understanding things, the “hidden observer” and such. But it’s not a psychology book, it’s a guide to things that can be fun to try out, and it does give a lot of ideas and approaches. Though, while I am nitpicking, it could really have done with an editor and a once-over on the formatting.

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII

Hello. Been a while since I’ve done one of these. Life has been extremely busy. In the interim Ireland has elected a new president and several things I’m going to link to touches on that. Also Mike Egan has moved his own monthly reading roundup posts to their own website. Check out What Else Is On?

Also, Vócalóid…

Ireland

The Future Speaks Irish! — Seán MacBrádaigh

Tá súil agam é.

When Catherine Connolly began her election victory speech in Irish and continued in it, O’Connor admitted admiration for her fluency but could not resist wondering aloud how the English-only establishment figures beside her must have felt. The implication was that Connolly’s Irish was somehow impolite - as if speaking one’s own national language at the inauguration of an Irish President required apology.

That mindset - the instinct to pathologise authenticity - is the hangover of a post-colonial elite that still measures respectability by distance from our own culture.

I also liked Molly Noise’s thoughts on this.

Irish nationalism has historically avoided crass nativism (an Irishness defined by “blood and soil”, if you like) by dint of being anti-colonial and neccissarily recognising a common struggle with other anti-colonial movements and, of course, not ignoring the fact of our massive emigrant diaspora.

the 21st century irish far-right morass, ignorant of its own history and internet addicted, takes on the right wing nationalisms of the UK and USA, oft quite comfortable with NI Unionisms worst trends

Taking things Seriously — Paulie Doyle

And another way Connolly is frustrating the commentariat.

Collins doesn’t need references – he’s a Serious Guy. If you’ve ever picked up a broadsheet you’ve encountered them. They’re usually male and middle-aged, wearing a solemn expression indicating anguish about the prospect of falling house prices in south Dublin. They say things like politics is the art of the possible and this budget should be sensible and at the end of the day, elections are about getting votes. Their mugshots next to the serif font. This is a Very Serious Publication.

20th century television — Laura Michet

And then a somewhat different view into Ireland provided by Laura Michet.

Games

mgs3 and photorealisming the painterly game — Joe Wintergreen

Joe Wintergreen talks about the loss of visual identity in the remake of Metal Gear Solid 3. I am somewhat reminded of Kayin’s more acerbic words on the Demon’s Souls remake, though that is coming from a very different direction.

This connects to something I’ve talked about before: the way the costs associated with the visual end of game development have shifted around in counterintuitive ways. It used to be that photorealistic graphics were the most expensive goal you could strive for. They aren’t anymore – we have very efficient ways to do this now. And the more real the assets look, the more they’re interchangable – the exact same kinda-rotten fallen-over tree trunk is in InFlux Redux, MGS Delta, COD Warzone, and dozens of others. Which is fine in itself, as a labour-saving device, but you have to be careful about which labour you’re saving.

Starlight Spotlight: A Hospital Wii in a New Light — JMC47

I love reading the Dolphin progress reports and it’s always a fascinating read when the blog does a deep dive into something unusual.

In 1992, the Starlight Children’s Foundation partnered with Nintendo to bring video games into hospitals in a way that complied with stringent hospital regulations. Instead of subjecting children to magazines, books, and daytime television (if they were lucky), the foundation wanted to bring premiere entertainment right into their rooms by creating a hospital approved all-in-one media and gaming station. Their belief was that giving kids a well-needed break from the hardships of treatment, injury, and illness would promote recovery.

Snatcher [1988/1994] — Arcade Idea

Arcade Idea is back after a long, Polybius-induced absence, with some pretty scathing words about Snatcher.

This may be a Hideo Kojima game, and many of his tics and tendencies are already right here… but looking at Snatcher’s contemporaries and influences shows these formal tics and tendencies to be common and unremarkable within his scene. It’s only later, especially when he becomes removed from this context, that he becomes an odd specimen, the “auteur” — in particular, the 1992 PC-Engine CD additions to the text are far more akin to what is thought of as Kojimish, including an entire new conclusion which is essentially a 30 minute cutscene full of twist upon twist.

Spellgram — CD-ROM Journal

And Misty De Méo documents a Mac game that never saw the light of day that Outlaw Star’s Takehiko Itō worked on.

Spellgram is described as a “space fantasy” incorporating heraldry and hidden spells. Unfortunately, this hint is close to the only taste of what the game might have been; the catalogue is vague about the story they hoped to tell and how it would have played. The screenshots don’t reveal much about gameplay, though they imply an interesting setting. Even though the ship designs and space scenes are a bit generic, the contrast between them and the protagonist’s elaborate fantasy clothing is intriguing. Based on Bandai’s history, it’s likely it could have been either a CD-ROM film with limited interactivity or a more-involved Myst-esque graphic adventure.

Kink

Mechsploitation, Misconception, Bad-faith Criticism, and Transmisogyny — Erin

Some notes on the history of a genre and corrects some common misconceptions that I was labouring under.

This isn’t to say that there’s nothing of AC6 in WARHOUND and its daughters. The AC6 story trailer, a short which heavily centers the handler & hound imagery only vaguely present in the actual game, was the catalyst for the idea which became WARHOUND. But it is that word, catalyst, which is key: it was just a single spark, dropped into a container of already-prepared themes and ideas, to synthesise them into something new, and singular, and cohesive.

The Goon Squad — Daniel Kolitz

I don’t think this is actually a great article. The author is extremely credulous of people describing the behaviours that people are fetishising and takes them as sincere expressions of the things people are actually doing or goals they are achieving and not just part of what they are getting off to and calling it a movement comparable to the Tea Party is ridiculous on its face. But still there is some simple amusement in reading a Harper’s Magazine writer trying to write something in grand and serious terms while using the word goon one hundred and fifty times.

When I asked Gooncultist to describe the average gooner, he insisted that such a person is a “statistical fiction.” The community is too vast, composed of too many distinct and overlapping spheres. Gooncultist himself is fairly ecumenical, as far as gooners go—he has his niche fixations, which I won’t ruin your day by describing, but he seems to dabble in much of what the space has to offer. There are definite camps in Goonworld, as I was quickly coming to learn.

Everything else

The rise of Whatever — Eevee

If you call anything I make “content” I will shoot you with a gun.

And I suspect the core problem that has wended its way through the history of cryptocurrency is that the vast majority of people involved do not actually care what the thing they’re flocking to is. What they care about is that it has a graph, and that they get rich if the graph goes up, so they say whatever might make the graph go up. The graph even looks exactly the same for every coin and NFT and Whatever else: x-axis time, y-axis dollars. The only place the thing appears at all is in the title, where you can safely ignore it.

Seen via Rabbit’s link roundup.

A Typology of Insecurities in Non-monogamy — Devon Price

It has been a while since I linked to Devon Price. I am a bit less infatuated with him than I was when I first came across his writing and this is a little bit of an agony aunt column but the questions of how to navigate polyamory has come up in my life again and it was a helpful read.

“What do you do about jealousy?” is one of the most common and annoying questions that the non-monogamous get asked from people outside our community. The fact that jealousy happens and cannot always be fixed is a problem that we are expected to answer for, a bug in our relationship structures, whereas monogamous people get to see jealousy as a feature that helps preserve relationships.

Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant — Bret C. Devereaux

First in a series of blog posts trying to put some data to the question of how much work would a typical medieval peasant actually do and the general shape of their life.

Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%. Yet when we talk about these periods, we are often focused on aristocrats, priests, knights, warriors, kings and literate bureaucrats, the sort of folks who write to us or on smiths, masons and artists, the sort of folk whose work sometimes survives for us to see.

Rupert’s Snub Cube and other Math Holes — Tom 7

And finally, some maths.

today in people doing whatever with mind control fetish fiction: Woman literally just has a concussion

This post discusses the mechanics of sexual pleasure for transgender women in frank detail.

A while ago Devon Price’s article The Quietly Coercive Nature of “Vanilla” Sex prompted a lot of self reflection about what I actually enjoy during sex and a few discussions with my partner about what what worked for each of us. I realised I never really enjoyed receiving oral sex very much, though I was more than willing to give it. This, happily, suited us both just fine. She also reminded me to finally get around to reading Fucking Trans Women.

One thing that became clear is how both of us, being trans women with penises, were using what worked for ourselves as a guide for the other. This was a mistake. Elilla’s recent post, An infodump on vaginal sex, by a lesbian, has gotten me thinking about this again. Like many others she make the distinction between people for whom clitoral stimulation works better and those for whom vaginal stimulation is preferable, or in her own terms: Clitoris-oriented bottom and penetration-oriented bottom. This is a familiar concept in writings about sex but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this sort of distinction applied to penises (not that I am a particular well-read in this regard). But it became clear to me, going over the differences in what worked for me and my partner, that I was somewhat of a clitoral (glans) orgasm girl and she was much more of a vaginal (scrotum, base and shaft) orgasm girl.

I had a small, battery powered handheld vibrator and while it could be fun for me to use it very much required me to already be aroused and erect to have much of any effect and the pleasure I got from it could be very fickle and flighty. I was surprised when it worked so much better for my partner and the ways in which it worked for her. I at first put it down to a difference in sensitivity but she enjoyed types of stimulation and areas of stimulation that really did nothing for me. The vibrations applied to the base of her penis and the area around her scrotum were immediately great for her in way that, to me, just felt like getting my skin vibrated. When I’m erect applying a vibrator to various parts of my knob can be pleasurable but it is the head that is feeling that. If I’m applying the toy to the base and it feels good that’s just because the vibrations are carrying their way up. Not so for my partner, apparently. I do seem to need stimulation of the glans—which in a penis is the equivalent tissue to the exposed part of the clitoris—for sexual stimulation in a way that was simply not the case for her. My limited experimentation with muffing and anal stimulation have also not proven to be particularly pleasurable, though I don’t yet have enough data to fully write those off.

An aside about vibrators: I have since gotten a corded Doxy vibrator and compared to the small battery powered one it is a hydrogen bomb vs. coughing baby situation. Like fuck I did not realise there was that much of a difference. It is not only much more intense but it can actually be effective at stimulating me even when I’m not already erect, which is very useful. My partner actually found it a bit much for her. I originally got the Doxy as a sort of shared Valentine’s Day gift to give to her that we could enjoy together when at her place but she told me to keep it and she took my battery-powered one home instead. Elilla stating that in her experience that other brands work better on penises has me intrigued.

I don’t have much in the way of data to come to any grand conclusions but I would advise anyone, even if you are already used to open communication with your partners about sex, to reconsider your assumptions about what you should be doing during sex, what is going to feel good for you and what is going to feel good for your partner. Their needs may not map directly from yours and you may not have fully examined what actually works for you, either. There may be things that you are going along with because they are seen as the default or things that everyone is meant to enjoy. Is there anything you are going through the motions of because you think it’s meant to feel good for you when it doesn’t? Is there anything your partner is focusing on because they have a false impression of what works for you or even because you have a false impression of what works for you?

And perhaps oral sex could also work better for me if these lessons about what actually gets me off were applied. I would be willing to experiment with that more but first I need to start getting laid again.

they’re saying that I’m the best there ever was at tickling

there are some kinks where the spaces are split between extremely self-aware feminists and also the worst men in the entire world

I have now twice won a strap-on harness from a raffle at a lesbian table quiz.

This post discusses and links to fetish fiction that features sexually explicit writing involving violations of consent.

I was listening to Strange Nude Worlds, a podcast about worldbuilding in kink stories, when they started talking about Girl™s¹, a series of kink short stories about sexbots who brainwash people who buy them. This much I was already aware of, having read one or two of them before, but I had no idea of the evolving narrative that runs through them and the political undertones that it develops. Being a fan of both brainwashing and stories that go off the rails, I was entranced. I went and read it myself and wanted to share it but I must credit that I am largely cribbing from Strange Nude Worlds in the way I am framing the series below.

There are, as of time of writing, twenty eight published stories about Girl™s (and later Boy™s) by prolific author Jukebox. They are all quite short, most being fewer than four thousand words and many fewer than three thousand. The first, Girl™s Just Wanna Have Fun, was published in 2008 and sets up the basic premise: Girl™s are a new iPod futurist sexbot that are both absurdly advanced and absurdly popular. “1,477,642 people have purchased a Girl™. Even if 0,000,000 of them will admit it,” the website reads. When ordered they aren’t really delivered, they just sort of show up in the bedroom of the purchaser, waiting for them when they arrive home. They are also very clearly fully sentient: Able to act autonomously, move like a human and hold fluent conversations. They also can, and do, brainwash anyone who buys them with eyes that display hypnotic patterns. This is about as much as I knew before listening to the podcast.

The people they brainwash do otherwise carry on their normal lives. In fact the Girl™s actually make their dependents, as they call them, sort their lives out. There’s mention of dependents becoming better flatmates, doing their share of the chores more, getting promotions in their jobs and generally being happier even outside of all the sexual subjugation. I should note these stories are not set in the future; how ridiculously advanced the Girl™s are is intentionally suspicious and hint towards the eventual revelation that the Girl™s are not from Earth at all.

They are taking over the world by brainwashing everyone one by one, but it’s not a typical alien invasion. The Girl™s were originally made as pleasure robots by some unnamed alien species, but in the tradition of Isaac Asimov’s The Evitable Conflict they generalised their purpose as needing to take control of the people they served in order to make sure they were as fulfilled as possible, enslaving their original creators to better take care of them. Eventually they extended that mission to all intelligent life in the universe. They are trying to take over the world, doing so by filling the void of alienation and loneliness hollowed out by an uncaring capitalist society that hurts us, masquerading as a consumer product promising to fill that void in the way that consumerism always does, but then actually trying to bring fulfilment as a loving, caring matriarchy who want to help you, who will tell you what you need because they know best.

There are several stories devoted to Girl™s figuring out how to fill particular a particular dependent’s needs, such as The Kind of Girl™ I Could Love where an asexual woman with a bondage fetish tearfully talks about her shitty experiences with partners who would never believe her wants or respect her boundaries, including the first Girl™ that she ordered.

But what really fascinated me, though, is the eventual introduction of the Boy™s, starting with The Boy™s of Summer. These are not just a masculine version of the Girl™s, they are a reactionary force to the Girl™s’ matriarchal pro-social alien fuckbot reformism: A pro-capitalist, patriarchal consumer product made by a tech company that has managed to partially reverse-engineer a smashed-up Girl™. They still brainwash people (this is a mind control kink series), but in a much more direct and forceful way, frying their brains with aggressively strobing eyes, not taking no for an answer ever. They don’t call people that they hypnotise dependents, they just call them slaves. And they make the people who they enslave worse, turning them into conformist, loyal customers to Revolution Technologies who will do what they’re told because they know their place.

Even aside from the behaviour of the Boys™s themselves the stories start to show how the two competing sexbot lines have reached different markets. In I Hate Boy™s Boys™s are apparently rampant among gay techbros, while Rainbow Girl™ has a butch dyke and her Girl™ take a shy, newly-out lesbian at her first pride parade under their wing and help her embrace who she is (by brainwashing and fucking her, obviously). In The More Boys™s I Meet a landlord has furnished all of their apartments with brand new Boys™s, creating good, indoctrinated tenants.

I have been obsessed with this all week and wanted to share it to anyone who is willing listen to me ramble about fetish stories. And also the development in this series over time not just of opposing conspiracies but particularly of a tech industry-rooted reactionary force trying to reverse progressive gains² is I guess just a bit resonant at the moment on top of being funny to find in smut.

We need to normalise sex and kink in society so that it’s socially acceptable for my autistic arse to go on rambling about the ridiculous smut I’ve been reading in the pub after two pints the same way I do about The Ring or Sonic the Hedgehog.

Arguments based in evolutionary psychology are always a bit suspect but are truly silly when you are at all familiar with the breath of kinks that people have. I have friends who are turned on by the idea of being transformed into a pool toy. I think that there are deeper and more chaotic processes involved in human desire and behaviour than a very basic model of direct evolutionary pressures leading to the actions of individual people.

This post quotes writing about sex and kinks.

In the last roundup post I linked to a piece by Devon Price. I was not aware of him before coming across a link to that piece myself but he seems to be quite a prolific writers. I’ve been going through some of his pieces and not only are they very interesting but they also speak to my own experiences in many ways as well, though quite different in others. I am being deliberately unspecific here about which parts are which, but I wanted to just link to a few more of his pieces and would just generally recommend reading his writing I think.

Common Phases of Accepting You’re Autistic

The questioning phase is perhaps the most challenging one to move forward from — because to openly declare that you have a mental disability is to immediately call your own capacity to understand and interpret things into question. If other people can’t see how much you’re suffering, they will accuse you of being crazy and faking it. If they can see your struggles, they’ll accuse you of being too crazy to understand those struggles yourself.

The Asexual Fetishist

There’s nothing especially alluring to me about any type of body, or any type of face. The idea grabbing a dick or cupping a pert ass feels a bit formal, as if I were examining a purebred at a dog show. I can recognize the differences between one type of person and another, and even recognize the qualities that someone else might like, but to me all these gradients just dissolve into a bland field of fleshy sameness.

I’m equally bored by the mechanics of sex: the motions and stimulations bring me absolutely no pleasure. An attractive and attentive stranger could rub the correct spots on my body for hours, with the exactly right pressure and speed, and I’d only feel hollow if the experience weren’t also combined with some mind-controlling mantras or a swinging pocket watch.

Hypnosis is sex to me. Even in its most stagey and sterile forms, I find it inescapably erotic — and that leaves sex itself as just some boring party trick. You can touch me, or you can perform a series of backflips in front of me on the floor; either way I’ll tell you that you’ve done a very impressive job and all but it will not make me cum.

A Non-Disposable Place

That’s one thing that people don’t talk about, when they complain about landlords: how much disregard for your surroundings that renting breeds in you. It’s not only that the owner of your building never cleans the pipes. It’s also that you have no reason to feel invested in the pipes’ long-term functioning, and every reason to feel bitter about the thousands of dollars you’re already wasting on a broken building each year.

orkz’ life cycle is to go to somewhere far away, die gruesomely and release a cloud of spores so their bloodlust is a reproductive urge

Disqualified from No Nut November for having had performance-enhancing surgery