. . . and peace.

Work by Victor Eredel, via Fubiz.

I’ve written before about how much I love games, poker, and every type of wager.  I can’t imagine much that could make the sexy game of poker sexier.  But it’s important never to say never, and now a lovely, kinky friend of mine has designed the back of this deck of fetish-and-Mardi-Gras-themed poker cards.  She and three other artists have all chipped in to create the face cards–masked men and women in bondage or doing lovely, awful, wonderful, nasty things to each other.  Robbie and I have joked for months about how these are the real definition of stocking stuffers, and now the cards are out, just in time for the holidays.  $20 per deck, available through the Deck of Art.  I get nothing in kickbacks, but I do confess that I’m hoping for a little smooch for being such a good girl this year.  *Mwah* to the lovely tartdesweet, whose own paintings can be found on her website.

I have an urge to post about a million things, but the fastest thing I can slap up on the internet right now is a picture of me in a karada that Robbie whipped up over Thanksgiving. His rope technique is getting much better; he’s been reading and studying for a long time–before he met me, really. He very much wants to learn more, and he has all the ingredients I imagine would make a good rope top: 1) toppiness; 2) the ability to tie things–he has been using knots for practical purposes since he was a kid; 3) an OCD-type focus on learning things–he’s willing to look at a picture of someone in rope until he figures out what’s going on, whereas I look at it until I get distrac–squirrel!

What he doesn’t have is a rope bunny (at least one that’s close to hand) or a mentor. A few weeks ago, he got to go to a rope workshop, and then he got to come see his preferred bunny. The rope workshop was awesome for him–he learned a lot, got a lot of feedback on his ties, and felt, I think, like he was doing it well enough.  Certainly when he got his paws on me at Thanksgiving, I could tell the difference; he was much more confident and much faster.

Lots of our previous attempts at rope ties have been abortive, because I get so turned on by rope that I hyperventilate and get dizzy within seconds and we have to stop.  (I gather, too, that I’m not supposed to lock my knees?)  This time, he sat me down on a stool for the first part of the tie, and had me in this body harness in under 5 minutes; I was comfortable and happy the whole time, and he was talking to me and checking in.  Because I was talking to him, I didn’t spin off into loopy la-la sub-land . . . at least, not until after he got the rope on and got about 500 pictures of me.  He spent an hour or an hour and a half watching me gradually cream myself before he fucked me.  Such is the hard, hard life of a bunny.

Could someone with the merest scrap of WordPress sense take a few moments to explain to me, either in comments or via email, how to password protect a post?  I have some thoughts I really would like to get out, and perhaps publicly publish at some point, but they are refusing to even consider coming out to play without a little more privacy.

Or perhaps they are just pouting, waiting for a pretty lock, like the ones The Curious Nomad collects, at flickr and etsy.

I’m leaving in a few hours for a 46-hour visit with my sister in the Rockies.  My father insists that I’ll be breathless the whole time.  (I think that’d be sort of endearing.)  I can’t wait.

The location of this photo is not exactly where we’ll be.  I can’t give away any more information about our secret bunker than I already have.

Robbie is highly jealous.  Like my sister, he’s fit, outdoorsy, and athletic.  I’m adventuresome-ish, but only if one of them is there to watch out for me.

Not much point to this post, except to gloat, preen, and brag.  I’m walking on air–or soon will be!

When I first started blogging, I had huge crushes on other bloggers out there.  I absolutely adored chelseagirl and wanted to be her; I even emailed her for advice.  I wanted to fuck Jefferson, with Robbie and three or four other guys there.  I eventually got up the nerve to email him, too (though not to fuck him).

After I’d been blogging for awhile, I got more comfortable with bloggers, and started to feel, rightly or wrongly, as though most of them were colleagues and some of them friends.  I think this is pretty common.  We admire what others do, and if we’re lucky or smart or foolhardy, we get up enough nerve to try it ourselves.  Once we try it, it doesn’t seem superhuman or impossible.  It’s just normal.  It’s kind of like the awe you felt for grown-ups until you were one.

About a year or a year and a half ago, though, something distressing began.  Blogs started to disappear.  The blogs I loved the most died off in a giant wave of blog extinction.  The first one to go, as I recall, was spiral submissive’s.  She was a young woman in Virginia, very devoted to a rather strict Sir, and I often worried about her after her web page disappeared and her url sported a title in Arabic.  Puppy Tales, Brooke’s outrageous and filthy fantasies about humiliation, was next, deleted, so the story went, by a moody and (over?)protective Master.  Then came chelseagirl, who gave up blogging in a the wake of a wave of post-breakup mourning.  One Life Take Two went dark when Jefferson’s ex-wife sued him for custody of their children on the basis of information she’d discovered in his blog.  Kitten in Chains petered out because Kitten and her master decided that D/s was not for them anymore.  And various other people, like Marianne at Indiscretion, just decided to stop.

All of this has left my blogroll rather patchy.  And yet, even though dead links have always infuriated me, I’ve intentionally not updated mine.  When spiral submissive disappeared, I wanted to keep her name in my personal lights, because of what her existence had meant to me at a time when I needed very desperately to figure out what kinky sex was.  It was the bad old days—that’s right, before FetLife—and knowing she was out there, and might still be, was comforting to me.  And when each of the bloggers who followed her winked out, I kept that tradition of tribute.

Time has passed, things have changed.  chelseagirl and Jefferson are back, their writing as fine as ever.  Brooke and Kitten have returned, as has a blogger named milla, whom I love.  And I have met or stumbled upon many, many new bloggers who work I want to honor and note.  So I’ll be changing my blog roll soon and gradually.  But before I do, I wanted to pay a small tribute to the people whose names will of necessity be removed from it, as well as to the people, like aag and TBK, who continue to write day in and day out.  I want to say thank you, and to say, along with Confucius, that “Words are the voice of the heart”.  Thank you to everyone who shares their hearts in this ethereal, fragile medium.

I want to toast Rori over at Between My Sheets for her hard work on her second annual list of Top 100 Sex Bloggers of 2009.  I was one of over half-a-dozen people who helped judge the entrants, so I have a glimpse into how much effort must have gone into organizing the whole undertaking.  I also was lucky enough to show up on the list, which I swear has nothing to do with any attempt I may or may not have made at padding my own score in the tallying process.  Ahem.

In any case, the real virtue of Rori’s list–and of blogrolls, contests, e-zines, and so on–lies in introducing curious readers to good writing.  I hope people will find something that entertains, amuses, delights, moves, or touches them among this year’s offerings.

Top 100 Sex Bloggers of 2009:

1. Coquitten (website)
2. Alexa (website)
3. AAG (website)
4. Bad, Bad Girl (website)
5. TBK (website)
6. Mistress Matisse (website)
7. Miss Mia (website)
8. Thursday’s Child (website)
9. Roger (website)
10. Sinclair (website)
11. Sylvanus…
12. and Mina (website)
13. Natt Nightly (website)
14. Jake (website)
15. Lyn (website)
16. Adriana Ravenlust (website)
17. Sexy Sadie (website)
18. Shay (website)
19. Lilly (website)
20. Nadia (website)
21. Joan Price (website)
22. Madison (website)
23. Anal Amy (website)
24. Z (website)
25. Essin Em (website)
26. Easily Aroused (website)
27. Blacksilk (website)
28. Sleeping Dreamer (website)
29. Melen…
30. and rayne…
31. and Master KKT…
32. and cinnamon (website)
33. That Toy Chick (website)
34. Red (website)
35. Tom Allen (website)
36. Vix (website)
37. Coy Pink (website)
38. Lady Pandorah (website)
39. BackseatBoohoo (website)
40. Epiphora (website)
41. Aurore (website)
42. Miss KissThis (website)
43. Storm (website)
44. Ron Jazz (website)
45. Josie Jacobs (website)
46. Distracted (website)
47. Deviant Dyke (website)
48. Joanna Cake (website)
49. Sapphire Jay (website)
50. Sarah (website)
51. Kimberly (website)
52. Duchess (website)
53. Figleaf (website)
54. The Caged Songbird (website)
55. Kaya (website)
56. Ms. Justine (website)
57. Luka (website)
58. Ang (website)
59. Perverted Negress (website)
60. Harlot (website)
61. Vixen (website)
62. Anakan…
63. and Padme (website)
64. Wilhemina (website)
65. Axe (website)
66. Amber (website)
67. Lucy Vonne (website)
68. Rogue (website)
69. SSS (website)
70. Kyle (website)
71. Amorous Rocker (website)
72. Sera (website)
73. Lolita Wolf (website)
74. Elle (website)
75. Scarlet St Syr (website)
76. Charlotte Thorpe (website)
77. An Unassuming Girl (website)
78. Maymay (website)
79. True Pleasure (website)
80. Bad Influence Girl (website)
81. Diva (website)
82. Raven Quince (website)
83. Autumn (website)
84. Vanilla Impaired (website)
85. Wil (website)
86. Robin (website)
87. Panthera Pardus (website)
88. Ell (website)
89. Miss Communication…
90. and Captain Pants…
91. and A.E. (website)
92. Roxy (website)
93. Secretly Naughty (website)
94. Abby Williams (website)
95. Subheart (website)
96. Sequoia Redd (website)
97. Innocent Loveboy (website)
98. Liljgrrl…
99. and Nawa*G (website)
100. YOU! As always that last person on the list is you. Please, please, please leave a comment below promoting your own blog (or the blog of someone you love). Links are welcome, as long as they lead us to a sex-related blog, not a retail website or porn aggregation site.

The beautiful lady toasting the lucky bloggers is Marie Antoinette, about whom I have more to say quite soon.  The photograph is from Yoshio Itagaki’s series on urban myths; apparently, legend has it that champagne glasses were modeled on the French Queen’s breasts.  What a lovely thought.  (Although it does make me wonder what the model for champagne flutes was?)

From Italian design shop Itunube, little cuffs for your wrist–kind of like wrist collars, but better.  I do seem obsessed with this type of thing.  Robbie says he will get me all of it, and more, when he wins the lottery.  So basically any day now.

(Actually, neither of us is very big on conspicuous consumption–we just like to think we’d do it well if we ever needed to.)

Bracelaces, $25 through my beloved Lost at E Minor; more amazing jewelry and design items at the Itunube site.

I have so much to say here, and so very little time.  Work has me running crazy, and something is causing me to feel profoundly exhausted.

So this is just a post to say I am still alive, despite whatever demons are feeding on me at night.

Painting by Randis Albion, via Sex in Art.

I was noodling around Amazon.com tonight, looking for some new books to read, when my eye fell on the “active discussion in related forums” list at the bottom of my page.  (Seriously, I have no idea what this is.  The internet has so many weird features these days that I can’t keep up.  Who is using Amazon as a BBS, and why?)

Anyway, the title of the discussion was “Is spanking a lovable or harmful form of disipline?“, and according to the helpful statistics in the sidebar, during the half hour the discussion had been going on, it had garnered 6,000 replies.  My goodness! I thought.  First Amazon decides to sell sex toys, and the next thing you know, people are discussing Domestic Discipline on its forums.  What next?! I clicked on the discussion to discover as-yet-unimagined pros and cons of spanking.

Um.  More perceptive readers will probably have already guessed that the discussion was about whether or not to spank one’s children.  (I probably didn’t pick up on that debate because I take it for granted that the answer is no–at least, not unless one’s children are on the verge of swallowing a gallon of poison as a practical “joke”.)

I’d be tempted to say that that’s all you can find about kink at what the New York Times has called “the world’s general store” . . . but it wouldn’t be true.  You and I know better, don’t we?

Cartoon by the epically perverse Martin van Maele; work and other scant information here, here, here, and here.