The ways of the vanilla are a'changing.

"BDSMers" tend to call "vanilla" what should be called "strict heterosexual sex", and by extension they often also call "Vanillas" those that engage only in that kind of sex.

Sometime, with a somewhat depreciative under-tone... mostly when talking about "vanilla" males.

On one side, it is because a lot of BDSMer tend to over-impose on the "vanilla" category their bad experiences with this or that "hetero-normativist" (usually, their fathers), and conflate the ones with the others.

But a second reason may be that, as seen from a BDSM practitioner point of view, a ton of "vanilla" males could be as well called "cheaters" - as in, they tend to cheat in the "game". 

There is not  much to say about it... vanillas have it somewhat different from full blown BDSMers, when it comes to establish the consent of their partners.

First thing first, many vanilla men do not see any reason why they should not shag a plastered woman that they just met.

She is drunk? Her fault.

Of course, this doesn't sit well with the conscious BDSMer.

I should remember the reader that is not into it, that one of the BDSM golden rules is that no action should take place if any of the actors is under influence and has his mental faculties impaired - be the influence that of alcohol, cocaine or any other drug.
This, mainly because BDSM practices are often dangerous activities - dangerous like, say, climbing a mountain - that should never be tackled with less than full mental capabilities, and at least a modicum of training.

Also, a lot of "vanilla" males do not seem to mind much the whole "informed consent" side of things either... you get them to spread their legs, one way or the other, it is all good.

And, finally, they hardly even take a no for a no. Again, this is kind of at odd with the "rules" of the "game", as perceived by a BDSMer that's worth the definition.

I may be too harsh, here... and too blinded by my personal tastes and affiliations.

Many "BDSM" males would likely be happy to play by the same "rules" of the "vanilla", if they could... but there is a hard-wired difference between "BDSM" and "vanilla".

In most cases, vanilla sex doesn't leave lasting physical traces - which is one of the reasons most rape accusations aren't even investigated.

If the victim doesn't allow the use of a rape kit, chances are that by the time she manages to overcome the sense of shame  - and the fear of being re-victimised by the tortuous paths of the justice system - enough to log a formal complaint, physical proofs will have disappeared.

On the other side, in most cases even the most consensually established BDSM activity leaves physical marks that can be seen for quite a while more... the victim has some more time to reflect, and come to the conclusion that it wasn't all good and well in that session.

So , it is not that the BDSM male is more virtuous than the vanilla one... it's that it is somewhat easier for him to be charged for assault and battery, if one fail to get the partner's consent in a way that convince the partner that it was freely given.

From this derives some of the most curious habits of the discerning BDSMer, like asking - relatively often, and even in the middle of the scene, when the sub is all but floating in her sub-space - their partner if all is well and if they are still decided to go on.

Now, I will admit that, in this, my "vanilla" friends may be right.

Asking ten times, in an evening, to your partner if (s)he wants to go on may feel a bit clumsy and a bother.

But, curiously (or maybe not at all), it is also what seems to be bound to become the norm in college campuses in the USA, if the "[Only] Yes Mean Yes" campaign - and similar initiatives - takes root.

College authorities, faced with a growing consciousness by the general public that much of the sex that happens in their dorms is of the "fast and loose" variety (unintended rape, near-rape, full blown rape) are now resorting to the kind of ethical trappings that the BDSMers had to resort to.

If these will become the norms for every kind of sexual interactions between adults, then I see one reason less for the divide "BDSM" -"vanilla".

After all, then "vanillas" wouldn't cheat any more than us.

A stranger life..

From the abysses of the early 2000's

Millie Hartford was a lively blonde, with a nice job in an art gallery that she gained through a combination of work, talent for creating stories and handle problematic personalities,  perseverance and - why not - sex appeal.

Although she tends to dismiss it, it helped her career - and why should she be ashamed of it?

Looking good, in our society, requires its share of work too - work out and dieting

Her hard work has earned her what she used to think it was a perfect life... a brand new BMW coupé,  a modern flat full of design furniture, a cleaning service for the house twice a week, a good looking fiancé,  full of money and  somewhat easy to manipulate.

Life couldn't be better... a part a couple of details.

She had never felt what is usually called "an orgasm" - she was grown to believe that  it was only some kind of fairy tale, by a mother that never felt it in her own life.

She couldn't stand her  neighbour, Mr Anderson... he looked like some kind of creepy red-neck out of an horror movie, unkempt, almost never going out of his flat.

If the guy had only had the good taste of moving away, leaving the flat in front of hers to some nicer person - a professional something - she could be as happy as humanly possible.


Joe Panouchki raised his imposing girth from "Wendy's Delicacies Inn" table, his second serving of bacon and omelette rightfully vanquished and vanished into his capacious belly.

Joe hasn't always been such a compulsive eater... until some eight years ago, he was in fact a lean and wiry guy, very happily married with his high-school sweetheart,  Linda.

Linda wasn't a promo queen, nor a geek or any other kind of prominent high/school demographics.

She was an average looking girl, with a bright smile and enough cheerfulness to lighten-up even her husband's worse days, and that was all that mattered to Joe.

With Linda, Joe managed to forget his depressive streak and built a decent life for the two of them, by taking up a truck driver's job and hauling his ass off every day.

She kept him happy, fed him salads and fruits and a lot of yogurts, and made a better man of him than he ever thought he could be.

And then, at 29, she died of an aortic dissection and left Joe alone.

In the years since Linda died, Joe has gained fifty kilograms.

The food is his only consolation, the only thing that fills - for some minutes at least - the hole that he still feels inside.

He is known at Wendy's as a good customer - a good eater, he is not stingy with the tips nor he is any serious in his flirtatious jokes, and the waitresses appreciate his good nature, when he pass by, on average once a week.

Joe returns to his loyal 18wheeler, as  always somewhat bemused by how Lara, the youngest waitress in Wendy's, manage to exchange banters with him over who drives better a truck.


Fifteen years younger and half his weight, she could probably drive a modern all-servo truck, but Joe had its doubt on some older machines out there.

Scrolling his head, Joe placed the first low gear and started... he had a good four hours more of drive in front of him, and two weeks, this time, before his schedule would bring him back into Wendy's area.

So he had overeaten a bit -Wendy's was, maybe, the best restaurant in his route.

He asked Linda to forgive him for his flirtations with a kiss on index and middle finger then deposited on her photo in the cockpit, and accelerated his 22 tons semi-trailer toward the big city.

He was moderately late, but there was no reason to speed above the legal limit, so Joe set the speed on his truck cruise control a couple of mph below the limit, and prepared himself for a nice relaxed run.

Three hours after, an idiot in a pick-up in front of Joe lost a badly secured sheet of metal from his trunk,  that flew into Joe's cabin at 50 mph, killing him just mere minutes away from where he usually disengaged the cruise control.

 - No, I am not going to relate anything on the guy in the pick-up... he was just a cheery idiot who failed to evaluate correctly the effect of wind on his cargo. For the rest, he isn't even half as interesting as Joe; he has no lost love tormenting his guts, no salacious waitresses with maternal instincts waits for him to trade jokes, no ghosts half-seen in a winter dusk on the road

And just half km away from where Millie was bottled in a traffic jam, on a lane in the opposite direction, feeling pissed for the jam and for the kids in the old wagon on front of her.

Mainly for the little miscreant that kept making grimaces in the back window of the big Buick.

No dead man switch stopped the 22 tons of metal from jumping lane, just some 15 meters in front of Mildred.

Like in a bad movie, Millie saw the twenty years old Roadmaster in front of her folding under the momentum of the big truck, the front of his own car crashed by the big wagon's back, her seatbelt locking while the airbag refused to act - because the car was on a stop and airbags deactivates below a certain speed.

All was happening with an absurd clarity, in a slow motion as painful as useless.

Millie finally saw confusedly the little girl flying back inside the car, the truck's tractor rising above her and crash on top of her Bimmer, and then she awoke in an hospital.

Her face was covered in bandage, her left arm had been on the door, where she had it lying  when the truck huge tire smashed sideways through the half open glass..

Her right arm, too, had suffered minor damages, as she had raised it to protect her face.

Later on, Millie had to know one of the most troubling developments of the modern world... antibiotics-resistant bacteria.

Unable to keep under control infections in the arms by normal means, her physicians were forced to amputate her left arm first, and later her right hand.

And again some more of her left arm, days latter, finally shortening it above the elbow.

She had been lucky, if that is the word, in that the compression damages to her face didn't open her skin... an infection there would have been really a mess. But that meant that the physicians didn't dare to operate to fix her left cheek fracture, so her face healed to look somewhat crooked.

 But other cuts on her body got infected, and the ineffective treatments the phisicians were forced to use left her with some horrible scars.

Her fiancé stood by her side, through all of this, bravely. Maybe too bravely, like he was forced to do so by his sense of honour - at times, she had that impression and it was one hell of a feeling.

One day she was finally allowed to go home, to learn how to live her new life... which had become quite different from her dreams.

The museum had found  a new spoke-person, in the months during which she had been unable to work.

They didn't fire her, but she was "kicked upstairs" to a new position as International Program assistant director; one where she wouldn't have to interact with the general public on a regular basis.

She wasn't sure if it was deference for what had happened to her, or a way to avoid the  embarrassment.

Even a modern art museum prefer to have a public face that doesn't look like an early cubist  phase Picasso.

The same could be said of her fiancé... now that she was  out of the hospital, he couldn't avoid it anymore. Sexually speaking, he felt horror at the idea of lying with her.

He managed to find time and again an excuse to avoid sharing her intimacy, and she realized that she didn't really care.

That she never really cared, maybe.

They drifted away, bit by bit, till she discovered that he had anew fiancée, a blonde bomb, smart and witty.

Like her was, before the accident... with two hands and a face that doesn't subtly remind a Dalí's clock.

She hated him, and dedicated her energies into learning how to use her legs and feet to handle her daily routine, with the help of a phisiotherapist and  yoga instructor... and kept herself reasonably busy living.

She is also trying to learn how to handle the new shyness of men around her - even those that are not disgusted seems unable to overcome their sense of... pity? That was way worse than her fiancé lingering disgust.

She felt not need for anyone's pity; She only needed her job, and her home.

Or, at least, so she told herself, out loud.

In all this, Millie lost track of a transformation in her creepy neighbour... he wasn't acting so creepy any more.

Mr Anderson managed often to be at his door when  Millie arrived, offered to help her open the door, pick her mail up... which were all - kind of - things you can expect out of a good neighbour, given the situation.

 But mr. Anderson, Josh, didn't give off any feeling of pity or of social obligation., and it was so damn refreshing for Mildred.

He was grooming herself, way more than she ever saw him do in the three years they had been neighbours.

 If it wasn't absurd, she could have swore that NOW he was interested in her... anyway, in the initial couple of months back at home, she grow used to rely on the shy, slightly social phobic RPG writer, to the point that she gave him a copy of her keys - in case anything happened.

 She had resisted any suggestion of restructuring her flat, on the reasoning that she would have been soon able to move as well as before. She forgot, or wanted to ignore, that even persons with both arms helping them keep their balance manage to slip on wet floors... one morning, coming out of her bath-tub, she fell back and landed on her ass.

 She stood there, unable to raise herself, scared at the idea that she could have broken her hip, the shock giving free rein to the anguish and grieve she had kept bottled till that moment.

 By the time Josh managed to open her flat's door, she had moved from screaming to a sorrowful wail,  sitting naked and wet in the middle of the bathroom, crying her misfortunes out.

 He gave her a long, warm hug and, after she refused to call an ambulance - she didn't want to feed more pity from the other tenants and, now that thw shock was wearing off, she realized everything was aching but probably nothing was broken, she helped her got on her feet.

She felt it, while hey were clumsily getting her back in her feet.

He was having an hard-on... missing limbs, and scars, and her irregular cheeks, really excited him

It had been months, since the last time she has been with a man. Even if she pretended that it wasn't an issue, thinking that she wasn't able to excite a man any-more had been a hole in the middle of her sense of self-worth. She felt - flattered? And his embarrassment at being caught was cute.

To make it short, he was horny, she really needed it - by the time they managed to rationally understand what was happening, they were in bed, where he ate, teased and fingered her into her first orgasm.

Needless to say, it was a discovery that changed many things in her life.

She wasn't stunning as she used to be, but she was still a woman, and now she had a simple but fulfilling stream of compact happiness flowing in her life.
 

Over time, Josh opened up and confided her his many odd tastes and small fetishes.


Millie  realized that, had he done so before, she would have ran away and maybe even called the police. But, she knew he loved her, and was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was a creepy, horny nerd - her horny nerd.


So she accepted to experiment, try new things outside of her comfort zone. Some were just make-believe, Role Playing by another name..


Others were more serious stuff... she enjoyed almost every thing they tried, and the odd sensation of freedom that she felt when her ego subsided into the play.


 Even pain and discomfort proved to ease her off of her current miseries.

Her mood improved, her physical therapy's pace greatly so and with some insurance money she financed a prosthetic hand and arm, that she learnt to use almost as well as she used her real limbs

 All of this was two years ago.

Dressed up, today she looks and feel much like the woman that she was before the accident.
In reality, she is even better - she now has a kind of zen-like way of brushing off small annoyances, by putting them in perspective, that she once lacked, and a newfound ability to delegate without trying yo micromanage everything.


And she is happier than ever, with her companion. They have sex, they play BDSM, she convinced him to go to accompany her to parties and festivals, he convinced her to go to munches and SM meetings.

 Over time they deepened in their play, established some routines and rituals...

When she undress, put her leather harness on, and divest hee prosthetics, she becomes his sex-slave... for a session.

Life is now stranger that she could ever conceive, and much, much happier.

The Gathering

I, personally, find her lovely

The festival of the Deaths is the second most important festivity in the Empire of Sassafrakkaswacthsawesan  (called, by whoever  cant's stand long absurd words, just the "Sassa Empire").

During these three days, the most gorgeous girls from every corner of the Empire reach the capital, SassaFrakka, in order to participate to the fertility rituals so important for an agrarian and quasi underdeveloped society like the Sassa Empire.

The Empire is also quite loosely knitted, with local authorities, usually in the figure of head of villages or small bureaucrats, holding sometime an excessive amount of power and acting arbitrarily.

Religion is among the few centripetal forces that compensate for the local powers tendency to consider themselves as free agents and and, as such, its strictly centralized control and the repression of every form of heresy are among the Emperor most important duties.

The Festival of the Deaths is not only the main religious event in the Empire.

It is also a way to - indirectly - gauge the level of  loyalty of the local administrators, in the various corners of the Empire, as we are soon going to explain.

The Empire is divided in relatively small areas, each with about 150000 inhabitants.

Every area, during the Festival of the cinders (i.e. the Winter solstice, the shorter day of the year), elects one or more representatives to send to the Festival - that is celebrated, of course, during the summer Solstice.

It should be noted that, in ancient times, the six months between the two events were barely enough to allow to the representatives of some of the most remote areas of the Empire  to reach Sassafrakka.

In fact, some of these areas, and some beyond-the-sea colonies, anticipate the selection.

Sissiflinning, for example, chooses its next representative with a free election, the very day after the Festival of Deaths, and it takes between ten and eleven months to its representative to reach the capital.

The women chosen to represent an area ( from a minimum of one to  a maximum of five, depending on the censum of nubile women under 33) are, of course, supposed to be the most gorgeous women available, in the age bracket between 18 and 32.

The ideal of beauty in the Sassa Empire is shaped by the interplay of current economical and ancient cultural factors but, as it is a general rule in almost every society, it tends to reward as "beautiful" the daughters of the ruling classes (the so-called male way to hipergamy).

So, in a civilization where most women work alongside their men in the fields, developing since their childhood very tanned, lean and quite muscular bodies, the ideal of beauty is naturally skewed toward  soft , utterly non-athletic pearl-white women with long necks.

Quite tall pearl-white bodies, to be more exact.

So, it is not unusual for one of the daughters of an area's chief, to be selected to represent the area - the selection process being, in most areas, a secret poll among the adult males living in the administrative block who, in some cases, vote with vengeance in their heart (which is a sin they'll have to respond for, to the gods) .

In most cases, the mayor simply write-off the chosen daughter - the Empire is still a traditional society that churns out masses of kids and then manages to cull down most of them before they ever got married - but, in some rare cases, he chooses to risk and sends a lesser girl as representative.

Risk, here, is the correct word, as - while civilian justice in the Empire is quite slow, even on crimes such as corruption - the Pontiff of Sassafrakka is allowed to excommunicate everybody that has infringed the authority for the church.

In this case, by absconding a chosen woman or by interfering in the selection process so that the offerings to the Gods were of lesser than ideal quality.


So, seeing a "daughter of the fields" in the hall of the Cathedral, among the women chosen for the rituals gathered there the week before the festival, is often an indication that her area's Mayor is on the verge of becoming mutinous.

This has no bearing on the woman's destiny - in moder times, roughly only 25% of the chosen die during the festival, as a result of the adoption of first intervention kits imported from the Great Beyond - but it is not unusual for her to go back home carrying with her a Grand Inspector.

This latter is usually tasked to see if - perchance - her town's Mayor needs to be de-necked.

---

Note: in time, this - and a long-lost short tale in Italian - became the inspiration for the Noxon story arch.

Updated on 08/18/2018 - replaced the original illustration with a "Safe For Work" one, checked the language for mistakes. Definitively, my writing is as a first-year VW Beetle in the word of one of VW original managers: it has more bugs than a dog has fleas. 

Mei Mara

Mei Mara is a tiny woman of very intriguing features, a sublime masochist and a dedicated fetish model.

Mei Mara

Now, I will not try to lead you into the sin of envy but I'll let you know anyway that, if you send a drawing like this to a fetish model, accompanied by a somewhat respectful letter, said model is probably going to feel  flattered and answer .

Yes, it was an unfathomable truth, that I would have never believed before experimenting it myself...

Draw something like this (on top of one of her publicly available photos, I admit), send it to the model asking permission, and she is going to say OK.

I did draw Mei another couple of times, in black and white, this

She is lovely - for me, of course

 and this one,

If there was one fetish model who could pull this stunt, in the
middle of the modern crop, she was probably the one.

, before discovering that she has gone back to college and that she intends to graduate in psychology.
 
I think that she will become a sexual therapist, in the long run - a career in which a past stint in bondage modelling doesn't represent any handicap.

She is one of the not so many example of "make porn, get the money, and build a life on top of it".


In reality, it is not like working in sexual entertainment is so different from other jobs demanding physical efforts and having a limited career span - no, I am not thinking at sports or actors, I am thinking at things like placing tiles on the floor, driving excavators, flattening roofs.

Usually, by the 15th years you do one of these jobs, your back is "gone".
S
o, if you start at 20, by 35 you better be ready to transition to a different job.

By the way, there is always people that doesn't recognize this bitter truth - of course, a back that aches more and more makes it a bit more difficult to ignore than, say, just avoid listening when your agent tells you that it's time to accept roles as a middle aged lady, but someone manages to find himself unable to do his work and to re-train into a new job. It happens.

But, strangely, nobody accuses the contractors' world of being a Saturn that eats his members, even if it is just another one.

As always, double standards...

2+2=11

2+2 = 11

I failed maths forever? Maybe, maybe not..

Every programmer worth the name knows at least that

8+7 = F

when one works with hexadecimal numbers, so there is also

F * F = E1

and

10 / 4 = 3
100/9=14
14/2=8

if you count on base twelve ( 10 = one dozen, it becomes clear).

Most people knows, nowadays, that you can represent numbers on a base of 2 digits:

0 and 1, the binary radix - the base of every computer's operation.
The latter detail is why what is otherwise a mere mathematical curiosity is so widely known.

In reality, humanity started using only one digit...

0
00
000
0000

the way of the abacus, but it is no very useful - not a compact representation for any number above 2, and to handle a multiplication is a mess

000 * 000 = 00000
0000*0000=0000000000
0000*000000= 0000000000000000

- better stick with, at least, a base of 2 digits

What most people ignore is that every choice of a base is somewhat arbitrary.

- we favor ten because we have ten digits in our hands... there are remnants of twenty-based systems, like in the way French names numbers between 80 and 99 quatre-vingt huit , and the time units are all 12 related.

The radices for representing a number, they are not bound to be even numbers... they can be odd.

Really, numbers do not care what is the radix you use to represent them.

Only, when they are odd numbers, even-ness ceases to appear as self-evident a property as we are used to see it.

If one uses a base of three digits, the first few numbers are

0
1
2
10
11
12
20
21
22
100
101
102
110
111
112
120
121
122
200

etc.

Now, you can spot the even-ness and oddnes of the numbers ?

No, t12, t102 and t122 - there - are all odd numbers.

- Note that these t12, t102 and t122 are also prime numbers, by the way, no matter how strong our brain screams that they must be divisible - they are 5, 11 and 17 in our familiar decimal base; also, we are used to call t21 seven, so he is not going to let anybody divide him either... by the way, decimal 111 is divisible by three, t111 goes by the name of 13 and is prime too.

Instead t11, t101 and t121 are all divisible by two.

When you use a base of 8 digits, every multiple of 7 can be recognized because the cascaded sum of its digits is 7... in base 16, multiples of F wind down to F, the same for 9 in base 10 and for B in base 12 - (if you use A and B as 11th and 12th digits), 5 in base 6 etc. ( you got the gist, I think).

Likewise, if you count in base 3, multiples of 2 can be recognized because they wind down to 2

121 => 1+2+1 => 11 => 1+1 => 2

Still simple, but not THAT simple - as saying "it ends on a multiple of 2" - any more.

As you can see, numbers don't really care that much about even-ness or oddness...

We like the distinction, being bilateral beings with two main sexes and all the rest, but that's our problem, not theirs.

But we really, really like it - I never saw an example with and odd number of digits as base.

It is one of the few certainties of life, if a number ends with a multiple of two, it is even... - alas, like most certainties in life, it is a form of collectively shared delusion.

By the way, when I see articles about using ternary state devices in the future computers, I know it is not going to happen.

It can be asked people to learn that binary 1101 => C hexadecimal, but you can't expect them to swallow that 12 is not divisible by 2...

Their mind will scream at the oddity.

- I hate when I have the flu. My mind gets stuck in the most horrible loops...

I let the reader the toil to verify that in base 15 (0-9, A-E) multiples of 3 ends with multiples of 3 (3,6,9,C), as well as multiples of 5 ends with multiples of five (0,5,A) .... Muahahahaha!!!!

If an alien species with trilateral symmetry and 15 fingers will ever contact ours, they could have a fixation in third-ness comparable to ours on even-oddness, and see divisibility by 2 as a secondary trait of some numbers.

Dedicated to my friends that already knew that two is just a number, like all the others, and not a pre-requisite for the magic in life.