What is wrong with this picture?

Nothing! Not as far as I am concerned.

This animation I made wasn't an animation at all, until I converted it from a series of still pictures from the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge.

THAT Eadweard Muybridge, the man who predated the motion picture by formulating the idea that a lot of still pictures shown in rapid succession would help us see exactly how people and animals moved.

Muybridge only toyed with the idea of looping all these pictures together to attain the illusion of motion. That came later, with the Lumiere Brothers, a few dozen others, and anyone but Edison.

Who ripped off ideas right, left and centre, but was quick on a patent like Billy the Kid was quick on the draw.

SO. I decided to try an experiment and just take a few seconds of video of my little animation. Which I did, and posted it on YouTube. Or at least I thought I did.

Next time I tried to get on YouTube, a stern full-page warning flashed on the screen telling me I had violated their Code of Decency and that my video had been censored/deleted. Forever. Well, maybe that was OK or maybe not - it seemed stupid to make such a fuss over a few seconds of educational material. But then they started talking about "strikes against your account". I already had one strike against my account by posting an obscene pornographic video of two women frollicking with a bucket of water (though obviously they saw it as the sort of explicitly sleazy garbage I see on YouTube every single day).

If I got to three strikes against my account, my days with YouTube would be over. Forever. All my videos would be gone.

I have something like 800 videos on YouTube, most of it personal stuff only meaningful to me, but I didn't keep 800 originals, I just couldn't. And over the years, I had no idea how much these videos came to mean, a record of my life, my pain and joy and discovery.

So to lose it forever. . . 

But then I thought of something: hadn't I SEEN a Muybridge video not long ago, one which showed very similar scenes (motion studies!) which lasted four minutes and went into a lot more detail?

Of course! And it looks like this.

Not only that, but you can see MY animation at 2:23. Exactly the same thing, all two seconds of it.

I don't know what is going on. I don't understand the double standard, or why Muybridge is suddenly such a threat to common decency. I find it hard to see these pictures of women as "dirty" or titillating - they weren't meant to be, though some say Eadweard favored comely young women over men for a reason. Be that as it may, THIS ISN'T PORN, it's nothing to do with it or even with sexuality or eroticism. If it's censored, what we are censoring are women's bodies. What we are saying is that the female body is inherently sexual, and sexuality is (of course!) dirty, bad, and wrong.

We need to do this, to make sure our children get the message. Particularly our female children. The sooner they learn that their bodies are filthy, depraved, and slimily disgusting, the better.

These photos were taken in the Victorian era, but not much was said about their erotic content. As far as I know, NOTHING was said. The Victorians were quite OK with Muybridge because he was he was a scientist and educating the public in a fascinating way. He also provided work for young women who might otherwise have been shop clerks or chambermaids.

When you look at how sick this all is, when you look at how contradictory - . The slobbering idiots at YouTube are the ones with  the dirty minds, sexualizing something that's meant to be innocent and even has an important historic and scientific origin. But what's worse is that a much longer and more explicit version of MY VIDEO is still up, under someone else's account, someone who has no "strikes" against him and probably never will. 

(Please note. Several paragraphs just dropped into oblivion, and I have no way of reconstituting them. Sorry about that - something to do with the photos).

Post-blog thoughts. I did contest the "strike", which you are allowed to do, by pointing out to YouTube that I had only used material already in a published video. I doubt if I will win this, however. Something about the way I presented the material, perhaps? I don't know. I hope contesting it doesn't count as another "strike". Sounds almost as bad as a stroke.

On top of that, after perusing what passes for "commentary" on thousands or perhaps millions of existing videos, I see hatred, racism, white supremacy, the n-word, the J-word (Jews, universally evil and hated), and all manner of other vile ideologies, if you can call them that. Those people are allowed to say anything they want under "freedom of speech". Now I worry about my two bucket ladies (which, by the way, I had already posted on an earlier video) being censored by Blogspot, my reputation besmirched by posting utterly disgusting pornography. A bucket of water! Imagine.

Maybe I should just join a white supremacy group. It would go down a lot better, and I'd have a lot less worry of being shut down.

Post-post. The offending nine frames. Cover your eyes if you're easily frightened, have a weak stomach, or have never seen a naked woman before. 

Depressed post-script. Today I had one of those fantastic ideas, encouraged by someone who actually made a comment on one of my YouTube videos (something which is, to my astonishment, happening more and more these days). I kept wondering aloud "why isn't there a troll channel on YouTube, like all those reborn doll channels?", and this person said, "What a brilliant idea! You should do it."

I had almost 50 videos already in my troll playlist. My idea wasn't to run a serious collector's channel, which interests me about as much as worms. I don't care if the troll has a 456 stamped in its foot, or if it was made in 1959 in Oslo or wherever they were made. I care about whether it's "trollie" and FUN.

So I eagerly began to title the videos in my troll playlist as The Troll Channel. And I was all the way through adding this title (laboriously, one at a time) to all of them, until I realized - 

There was a good chance YouTube would shut me down for it.

Why? Do I need to tell you why? Even though there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of videos labelled The Troll Channel, MINE would be seen as "violating community standards" and outside the realm of common decency. They had already hit me in the face with that one. That one strike had made me vulnerable, bleeding on the jungle floor, a thing carnivores love.

So, very reluctantly, I changed the title to The Troll Doll Channel. I like the double-oll, the way it looks at least, but it lacks punch. And yet. When I finally looked up The Troll Channel on YouTube, I was horrified at how obscene, violent, and thoroughly awful these videos all were. 

But it is also the fact I would have two strikes against me, you see. I am teetering on the brink. But now that I think of it - and I have been on a total rollercoaster about it all evening - I don't want a channel, or even a playlist, called The Troll Channel, not even with a museum called The Troll Hole somewhere in the States. (Now, just think if I started a channel called The Troll Hole. Probably there already is one, if not 4 or 500, considered perfectly acceptable. Who's doing favors for whom here?)

The word has been poisoned, and not by me. I don't want any idiot looking up obscene violent crap and finding MY little innocent playlist with its 47 videos, me playing Mama to a bunch of trolls.

It's really too bad that word got so  poisoned, and I don't know where it came from - Lord of the Rings, perhaps? But keep my trolls out of it! 

A lot of this was a desire to get out of those snotty Facebook  groups that DO go into troll foot size, number of fingers, etc. Who gives a  royal rip! Dates, times, and price tags mean nothing to me. And I found myself trying to get into their good graces, trying to get "likes", and hating myself for it.

So it's now The Troll Doll Channel, much as that takes something away from it. But I cannot afford to have YouTube squeeze me any further by using a title 5000 other people are already using withoiut penalty. I've learned a lesson or two about that.

(Wouldn't it be funny if I lost my account because my troll account was about TROLLS and not. . . trolls? We can't let the public down, can we?)

Josh Duggar: let's read that first draft!

Thus, the abject, Jimmy-Swaggart-esque apology written by Josh Duggar's lawyers, before yet another lawyer edited the thing. Red-pencilled are the remarks that might be considered "litigious". In other words, too close to the truth.

Needless to say, Josh's little escapades led to TLC cancelling (after long and ratings-conscious deliberation) the wildly-popular paean to assembly-line babymaking in the Fundamentalist realm, 19 Kids and Counting.

So what will Josh do now? I think he ought to drag his sorry ass to jail for some serious time, but that won't happen. He'll twist things around so that if WE don't forgive him, there will be something wrong with us. We'll be choosing to hold bitterness in our hearts rather than surrender the whole icky mess to the Lord God Almighty and his sidekick, J. Christ.

But it's more likely TLC will choose to build another reality show around Josh. Shall we call it 19 Sins and Counting? 

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Bigfoot porn: the modern-day fuck book

I have something to say about all this, but I'm not sure what.

About a zillion years ago, I blushingly bought a book called something like "Ladies' Home Delight: Women's Erotica". Never did it mention genitals, breasts, or anything except dishy gamekeepers and chocolate fondue. No kidding, one of the only stories I remember involved a woman sneaking into an empty banquet room and messing about in the fondue pot, sticking her hands in it and rubbing it all over her face and body. In an especially steamy scene, she licks the palms of her hands.  In another entry, a woman describes in ludicrous detail biting into a large, steamy sausage.

And now this!

There's a whole new genre out there geared specifically towards women (I think). What age and station they are, I do not know. This is loosely called paranormal erotica, though that title encompasses unlikely historical romps and bestiality (especially in the form of wolves) and - well - dinosaurs, who aren't quite paranormal but who haven't been around in a while, except in museum form.

I stumbled across references to Bigfoot porn quite some time ago, but shook my head and moved on. Quickly. There were claims these authors sold millions of Kindle copies and became multi-bestsellers spewing out stuff that would have given women heart attacks a couple of decades ago.

Even Harlequins have turned dirty, but I don't even want to find out HOW dirty. Women now masturbate to these things the way men used to masturbate to the old-fashioned fuck book. I don't know exactly why this is done, but an incredible number of them feature nude male torsos (never with a head) with washboard abs you could play like a xylophone. All the covers look like tkey were designed by one artist, maybe someone who was put out of business when Fabio got too old to pose. These books never exist singly, but multiply into many-volumed series in the author's secret lab in the basement (or something). 

Which is OK, I guess. I have nothing against masturbation, but have always chosen to invent my own fantasies, which are pretty damn tame compared to this stuff. What sort of a dirty mind would even go there? As the authors of the Bored of the Rings parody wrote, "It's us, buddy. CHING!"

(P. S. I can't help but notice the mass-produced-sounding names of these authors, obviously invented for legal protection as well as uniformity. Like those covers, perhaps these are all cranked out by one person, like Harlequins used to be before they became too dull to give anyone an orgasm. My personal favorite pseudonym is Dixie Swallers, and I won't go into why.)

Meet The Stay-At-Home Mom Who Makes $30K Per Month From Her Bigfoot Porn Novels

BY ROBO PANDA / 01.16.14
#AMAZON

“From within the tufts of matted hair, the creature released a huge pale c*ck that defied logic.” That purple-headed prose sprang from the mind of Virginia Wade [not her real name], a stay-at-home mom from Parker, Colorado, who stumbled upon a way to make huge sums of money from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. The quote is from Cum For Bigfoot, a bestseller in the subgenre of cryptozoological erotica (AKA “monster porn” or “monsterotica”).

Wade has published sixteen short novels about messin’ with Sasquatch, in addition to less successful erotica about pirates and dark lords. She told Business Insider that she makes up to $30K per month in Amazon sales alone from her Cum for Bigfoot series. It still pulls in $6K per month during slower times. Why the hell am I still typing this when I could be writing dinosaur porn?

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing pays 70% royalties for books priced at $2.99 or more, and it pays 35% royalties for books under $2.99. Meanwhile, authors for mainstream publishers receive only 8% to 15% royalties. Wade’s first Bigfoot porn novel (only 12,000 words long) was priced under a dollar, but it sold over 100,000 copies on Amazon in 2012. The book was also selling on iTunes and other stores.

Wade tells Business Insider that her Bigfoot porn was her most profitable series.

“I started cranking them out,” she says. “If there was a market there for monster sex, I was gonna give it to them.” She even brought in her family to help with the workload. “My dad, who’s an English instructor, was my editor,” Wade says. “My mom did the German translations” — including the equally popular “Komm für Bigfoot.”

[...] “I was putting my daughter through college with the profits,” Wade says. “I used to joke with her, ‘Bigfoot smut is paying for your school.'”

So many things about those quotes. Referring to a writing career as “cranking them out”. Asking your parents to edit and translate your Bigfoot porn. Telling your daughter that Bigfoot porn pays her tuition. This is mesmerizing.

Wade ran into some trouble last year when more than half of her ebooks disappeared from Amazon after The Kernel published a story about businesses allowing the sale of ebooks with “rape fantasies, incest porn and graphic descriptions of bestiality and child abuse.” The Kernel’s article triggered a kerfuffle in the UK, and many stores (Amazon among them) pulled several titles, including some featuring mythological creatures.

Wade got around the ban by renaming and re-submitting some titles (Cum For Bigfoot became Moan For Bigfoot). Giving tamer titles to erotic ebooks takes a toll on sales, however. If you want to make the big money on self-published erotica, you’ll need to have an especially on-the-nose title.

Current titles on Amazon — most of which were not written by Wade — include Ravaged by the Hydra, Mounted by the Gryphon, Frankenstein’s B*tch, Taken By Pirates, Taken by the Tentacle Monsters, Fertilized in Space, Sex With My Husband’s Anatomically Correct Robot, and the conversely vague yet direct Gang Banged by Mysterious Monsters in the Woods.

Those are all real and we’re not linking to any of them.

Monster Breeding titles:

Bred by the Centaurs
Bred by the Demon
Bred by the Sasquatch
Bred by the Yeti
Breeding with the Beast
Breeding with the Beast II
Outer Space Tentacle Gangbang

P. S. There's a reason I'm not including an excerpt from one of these things. I can't find more than a single sentence, and they all have "cock" and "balls" in them. You can't find a "look inside" feature for these on Amazon, maybe because they cost a buck and are something like 49 pages long. But don't worry - like a streetcar, there'll be another one along any minute.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Housewife porn: sluts in the city!

The other day I'd had enough - just had enough - just had ENOUGH of that crappy new trilogy called Fifty Shades of Grey that is burning up the bestseller list. I don't need to read it to know that it is sleaze, soft-core porn, and dangerously sick in its attitude toward exploiting women through male violence and female masochism (which doesn't exactly help the cause of battered women, does it?). Hey, don't worry about tying up women and beating them: they like it, they like it! They're even forming clubs to re-enact some of the slimiest scenes because - no, not because it turns them on but because "everyone else is doing it".

I was also incensed - still am - that a book like that (excuse me, a trilogy like that - some publisher somewhere saw the first volume and said, "More, more, more!", so she squeezed out more like some sort of awful polluted Dairy Queen soft-serve) could tear up the charts when "real" writing either languishes at the bottom of a very wide pyramid, or just isn't published at all.

Mine fits into the last category, and there are times I feel almost suicidal about it. But never mind all that. It's all over, you see. Because then I found this video!

I LOVE this video. It is totally lame and does not pretend to be anything else. People have called it the worst music video ever made, but that's debatable because I've seen that other one, Hot Problems, which is merely bad.

But there is a cleverness in Friday's imagery, a very funny and inspired riffing on the banal stereotypes of REAL music videos. There's also an innocence there, something like an Archie comic, with her friends leaping around in the background. It looks like everybody had a blast making this thing, and their joy is contagious.

And much needed. I had just about run out of joy.


I don't know much about this Rebecca Black except that she had a lot of moxie to do this, and it has brought her considerable fame. Not only that, in spite of everyone calling it the worst video ever, it isn't at all: Friday was made quite professionally and doesn't meander around like something two girlfriends might throw together after a pot party. It was well thought out in advance using some very funny images that everyone will recognize. She obviously had some funding to do this, which means someone must have believed in her.


This kind of notoriety and fame I don't resent, because, like old guys picking up pop cans and cashing them in, she is actually DOING something rather than sitting on the street corner showing her tits.

People think this is stupid? Then how stupid are they not to "get" it? Plenty stupid. I saw a so-called prank video the other day where someone's "boy friend" dressed up like a burglar and ambushed three or four girls as they came in the door of their dorm or whatever. They all "eeeeeeeek"-ed, jumped up and down rapidly flapping their hands, then ran out the door waving their arms back and forth, eeeeeeek-ing all the way down the sidewalk until the guy said something like "Hey! It's only me!" "Ohhhhhhhh."


Staged, staged, staged, staged, staged: yet people unanimously said, "Oh, what a devil he is to upset his girl friend like that! Will she ever forgive him?" I suppose her "forgiveness" statement will go viral now. Jesus God, why are people so goddamn STUPID???


Why is intelligence never rewarded any more? What has happened to us? Now more than ever, mediocrity is the norm. Sadomasochistic novels are nothing but a form of literary prostitution. So there. But they are as wildly popular today as ever (smut has always been with us), except it's right out in the open now and celebrated as "cool" (and if it's popular, hey, it must be good for us, eh? Like the Third Reich.)
Anyway. I like Rebecca Black because she is smart and funny and has her finger on the pulse. She may say this video is straight and not a satire, but it works on several levels. She too is an example of "going viral", a bizarre new phenomenon. If I could, I'd go viral even if I had to ingest some sort of virus to do it.


That's because my stuff is good, and nobody gives a good goddamn.

Friday, Friday! I remember Friday. I STILL like Friday, even though my husband is retired now and every day seems to blend into every other day. As a kid I had a secret name for it: "free, frosty Friday". Don't know where I got it, but as Rebecca Black will tell you, Friday is frosty. . . and it's free.

(By the way, I deleted yesterday's furious post. I felt like I was giving that horrible so-called trilogy too much space, and probably even promoting it, inspiring even more people to rush out and buy or download it. Dirt sells, every time. I was also letting it rent space in my head, so I evicted it to the best of my ability, and there it will stay, out on the street corner showing its tits.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm