New Stories...

As promised and nearly a week late, the end of The Ritacha War. I know some of you are wondering, "That's it? Where's the war? Where's the Kaboom? There was supposed to have been an Earth-shattering kaboom!"

I never meant for there to be a huge battle in this series. This is all about Sandahl and Darch and company dealing with the stress of their lives, new circumstances, and one hell of a self-imposed deadline. There are matters unresolved, and I'll be dealing with them in future events.

There are whole subplots missing, thrown aside because I couldn't fit them in, or they wouldn't gel with the rest of the series: Ken falling in lust with a dragon, for example, or one dealing with Tylia's "other life", the one she has outside the Castle.

I'm up to episode 263. By my schedule, I should be releasing episode 264 next Friday. (Assuming a twice-monthly release schedule and a month off every year.) Ah, well. I said I would try to stay on schedule. I never promised that I would make it. Besides, I've been writing other things. Does that count?

Speaking of "count", if you put the argument "?count" after the url on the index pages, you'll get a word count as well. Try it.

For my next trick, I stab Ken in the back. Episode 264, "The llerkin Moment," October 3rd.

182 / 01029 'Tis Better...
235 / 01029 HOMOS and SMOF
238 / 01029 Random Orbital Buffer
246 / 01029 Bullets and Banquets
267 / 01029 Uncia Night
001 / 01030 Ritachan Morning
097 / 01030 Ritacha on Terra
202 / 01030 Sitting Help

Pornostalgia.

So, I've been early collecting 80's porn recently, mostly from around the first year I went into college and had access to a lot of it. There were rental places near my dorm that freely gave me access to a world of sights and sounds to be found nowhere else. It's kinda neat to watch old names and faces: Erica Boyer, Rachel Ashley, Elizabeth English, Eric Edwards... yeah, even the awful Mark Wallace, whose two claims to fame are that he banged Traci Lords a lot and sweat so bad on camera that... yech. Another man who resembled the Hedgehog, if only in aesthetics.

I'm kinda fond of it. The women were real-- no surgery back then, what you got on camera was the tits nature gave her. The same was true of the men, although you could sometimes see that Eric Edwards desperately needed a fluffer. The cameras were bigger then, harder to get into the really tight corners, so you often got a good look at whole bodies, not just the kinds of images reserved for gynaecologists. There was very little shaving back then-- women had their pubic hair, which these days is a kink all by itself. And there were no condoms in use. It was straight bareback, all the way. Watching those films is a bit like watching innocents at play. Marilyn Chambers pretended interracial sex was a very big deal. So was anal sex. These days those are both simply par for the course.

They had plot, too. Sometimes, rather than being "a fuck film," what you get is a film with a lot of fucking in it. Oh, sure, Rachel Ashley as an undercover police agent trying to bust up a money laundering scheme involving a horse ranch seems ludicrous, especially when you see how badly she handles a gun, but at least it's there. And watching Eric Edwards holding Liz English by the hair while doing her doggy-style is worth the wait. Hmm... I wonder if my taste in porn is reflected in the smut I write. Ya think?

Anyway, I'm just blathering. I find most modern porn so dreary. Susie Bright once commented that most men in porn look "as if they were involved in some grim task." That seems to be more and more true as time goes on. So few people look like they're having fun, or give voice to the fun they're having. Porn from two decades back involved real bodies slapping up against each other in real time; often, the artifical distance the camera demands now for those close-in shots just wasn't there, and when someone made a mistake, the performers just giggled and moved on. It was shot on film, not digital video or even analog tape, it was expensive to do over, and the results had a warm, grainy feeling to them that digital filters have not yet duplicated.

I can't help but wonder if I'm getting old. I think that the crystal clarity of digitally recorded endoscopic viagra-and-meth-fueled nonstop fucking between people we don't know and don't care about kinda misses the whole point of why people have sex in the first place... or, at least, why I want to have sex...