What I've Discovered, What I've Been Up To - And Where I've Been!

So… you might have been wondering where I’ve been, since my posts have dropped of so much of late. Well I’ve been involved in taking a gym instructor / personal trainer course. I already hold a M.Sc in human nutrition - and spend a large percentage of my time in the gym, when not writing or preparing photo manips / artworks / captions for my various blogs, website and other outlets - so it kind of made sense, especially since I make so little from the books and affiliate banners and so on. 

Well, I’m glad to be able to report I’ve now passed all exams as well as the two appraised practical teaching assessments, so assuming that my written coursework case study is accepted and doesn’t require any further work, I have now finished and as from tomorrow will be back working on various art / writing projects.

I’ll obviously be working as a personal trainer / nutritionist under my real name and so will be setting up a website and blogs specifically around that facet of my life and kept separate from this, but the thing about that particular career path that appeals IS the ability to choose how much or how little work to take on and to schedule it to allow the continuation of the type of thing I do here and also my writing (I have no less than three part-completed books / novels on my hard drives) while generating (I hope) sufficient income to support myself before my savings finally give out! 

If anyone wants to know more about this new aspect to my life, email me and I’ll pass on the details of my new blog, website etc as soon as as I create them, as for obvious reasons I don’t want to link directly from here or any other of my outlets dedicated to my writing etc. So, to reiterate: I WILL be resuming updating this and my other sites, such as my Pinterest, Blogger and Deviant Art accounts on a regular to semi-regular basis from today onwards.

Many thanks for your patience in continuing to follow me while I've been out of the loop...  But look what I found (see top of this article) on Youtube in the meantime, when I took a break between finishing the level two gym instructor course and beginning the level three personal trainer course, and an old mate stood me a few pints down the pub to celebrate passing that first gym instructor part...and getting 100% in one of the two exam papers!!! (I got 92% in the other... Ok, Ok... I dropped six questions in four papers... But now I'm showing off!).

So how much like one of my plots is that vid, especially the opening moments???  It dates to 2002 apparently, so I can't claim any influence - nor has it influenced me, since I've literally only just come across it.  Ladytron seem to have a knack for writing the sort of kinkily suggestive lyrics that seem to gel with me and my writing - another of their tracks is called 'My Little Runnaway' and is sung in the sort of breathless manner which could imply almost anything one's imagination might dredge up; if that makes sense.  Google it and see / listen (the vid itself doesn't seem to say much - it's all in the lyrics and delivery!).

 

Now here's an example of how inspiration can arise from the oddest sources (immediately above).  This is an image from some of the course teaching material.  What it actually portrays is how NOT to perform an exercise known as 'The Plank' (a well-known technique for strengthening the so-called core muscles).  All VERY innocent and above board.  But just one glance was enough to get my blood all heated.  

That downward curve in the small of the back (lordosis, technically) and the rearward tilt of the pelvis and upward tilt of the bottom it produces may be contra-indicated for the exercise, but what a perfect disciplinary pose for a slow, systematic and long drawn-out thrashing of her backside, the bottom raised and perfectly presented to the cane or riding crop, especially if the intention is to land the majority of the strikes along that tender junction between her thighs and buttocks and the underside of her bottom, arcing the cane along the sweep of her thighs and then up and under.

Of course she's over dressed in THIS depiction.  I would imagine ultra-thin drum-tight satiny gym shorts or a skin-tight leotard, high-cut so that the majority of her bottom is left bare and defenseless with just the narrowest of gussets, little more than a tight strip of glossy fabric that all but disappears between a pair of nicely separated bottom cheeks.  

The wickedly pliant cane or switch will whistle through the air once every ten seconds for one minute - six strikes in all - then two minutes to recover, still holding the posture, then another six kisses of rattan, bamboo or plaited leather, followed by a further two minutes recovery before a final six strikes are awarded, giving eighteen strokes in all spread over seven to eight minutes, with the slightest loss of composure or posture rewarded by a repeat of the operation the following day.   

A floor-standing mirror will have been set up beforehand or the position taken up before a mirrored wall of the type encountered in a dance studio and the girl obliged to observe herself throughout as her features become more and more distorted by pain and anguish, with suitable penalties in place for closing her eyes or looking away. 

This latter approach is a 'must' if the experience is to become sufficiently deeply ingrained in her memory and psyche and is something which can be reinforced further later on during a one-to-one counseling or psychotherapy session during which she can be made to recall and recount how she felt under discipline, how the recollection makes her feel about herself, how she feels this treatment is changing her and the way she feels about exercise in general and her ambition in general.  All this may then be further backed up by way of her being obliged to write a reflective report or self-critical essay.

Medicalised Discipline and Control Within the Home

Yep!  Guess what?  Again - yep!  A Nurse Helena clip!  I found it on Tumblr, as always, while researching something else entirely... But I LOVE these Nurse Helena things - so I couldn't wait to share it with you!

Instituting a Régime of Strict Discipline Through Harnessing the Psychoacoustic Effects of Infrasound to Facilitate Behavioural Modification

Hi folks!  It’s been a while since I actually wrote anything as such specifically for this blog.  This is partly because for such a long time I have been tied up with the Roger Benson art project (of which the less said probably the better - along with Angela Fox) and partly, and more recently, because I have now become involved in a VERY intensive gym instructor / personal trainer course two days per week, and one of those days is one of the three days usually open to me when I can actually get any writing done.  The other reason is that nowadays, whenever I DO get the time to write I am trying to concentrated on finishing off the book I started last year (summer 2014) – it is the least I can do for those who have helped by supporting me financially through donations and those of you who have sent words of encouragement (equally valuable in their way). 

My reason for dragging myself away from the grindstone today is two fold. Firstly I have been away from home over the weekend and got home late today, limiting the time available to really get my teeth into the book anyway, and secondly I have had a very interesting and though-provoking comment posted to my last offering (Saturday) which needed replying to and which required a more detailed response than I could have managed over the weekend using my phone to access the internet as I might ordinarily have done.  So anyway, I set out on the reply and slowly began to realise two things:  1) It was going to require more than the word limit for comments would allow in one bite and  2) the subject is thought-provoking enough that I’d quite like more folk see it, think about it and perhaps give their take on it.  

The comment was posted by Frise (Hi, Frise! Many thanks for the link – and the idea!)  and I think it best to reproduce it here in its entirety - along with the link he kindly provided - followed by my reply.  So here goes….

Posted by Frise:

“I found this link about the effects of infrasound, how they cause uneasiness, anxiety, make you feel sick. I've suspected that for a number of years now. I was on a cruise with my wife and we went to see a movie on the ship. The cinema house was just over the engine room and my wife felt sick 30 minutes into the movie. The engine most likely emitted infrasound that we could only sense as vibrations. Imagine an institutional setting where the patient is subjected to this in order to break their self confidence, create anxiety... so many possibilities. Enjoy!

https://siobhanramos.wordpress.com/2013/04/27/subliminal-ghosts-the-psychoacoustics-of-infrasound-and-biological-horror/

My reply:

“Yep, I am aware of the infrasound phenomenon and its ability to induce feelings of unease, extreme sorrow, disorientation and fear as well as symptoms of actual physical illness such as vomiting and even induce pain at certain frequencies if the intensity is high enough.  But I have not (until now, that is - but that may WELL change) thought of infrasound and its effects on the human psyche in the context of the type of thing I write and the situations I describe, although I have used in my writings high-pitched sounds right on the edge of perception to cause irritation and disrupt sleep patterns and described the masking effects of white noise. 

Indeed there has been research into this field using what amount to giant organ pipes to generate infrasound as the basis of a non-lethal battlefield weapon system and also in the whelm of social control to disperse demonstrating and / or rioting crowds / mobs. The phenomenon has been invoked to explain so-called 'sick building' syndrome, wherein people working within a certain office - or sometimes an entire building - repeatedly report sick suffering from various unexplained and often quite vague symptoms and maladies, feeling 'heady' and so on. 

It is interesting that one of the instances reported here seems to have been isolated to a resonating air conditioning duct system as this has also often been mooted as the root cause of the aforementioned 'sick building' syndrome and of course is directly analogous to the military's experimentation with organ pipe / trumpet style infrasound generation technology. 

And therein lies the problem – the large dimensions of any device designed specifically to produce the requisite low frequencies in some controlled and tailored way.  In the above by ‘tailored’ I meant generating the specific frequency or band of frequencies required to produce the desired effect.  I.e. you may well want to induce disorientation and a feeling of unease, subtle effects, but maintained over long periods of time, rather than out and out symptoms of illness such as vomiting or voiding of the bowels.  But having said that, used short term, the latter effects could be a wonderful behaviour modifying tool if controllable on a fine enough scale. 

Imagine if you will our young subject stood stock upright, back ramrod straight and hands on her head in her mental hospital pyjamas, skimpy hospital examination gown or institution uniform in front of matron’s desk and being berated verbally over some suitably petty misdemeanour or other; then she is taken back to her room; and in the lonely desolation and apparently perfect silence within its bleak white walls she is almost immediately overcome with a bout of vomiting and uncontrolled voiding, the domineering woman’s comments still ringing in her ears! 

Or perhaps (see above) from time to time some sort of situation is engineered wherein through some sort of apparent ‘lapse’ she is able to get out from her room on to the corridor outside; for a while she is allowed to wander the passageways unchallenged as the feelings of fear and unease build within her, until the growing feelings of disorientation and dizziness get too great and she bangs on the nearest door in blind panic, to be greeted by a friendly smiling young woman in a nurse’s uniform who gently guides the sobbing and now grateful young thing – her symptoms now magically alleviated - back to her room where she enters without resistance, perhaps hurried along by a playful slap to her bottom, before the key is turned in the lock and she is again left alone with her thoughts and the nurse’s parting words reverberating around her skull: 

“You’ll feel safe in here, in your room – but only in here; it’s because of your mental state, dear, the problem you have with your mind; you mustn’t go and try and run away because it only makes you ill; you know that, don’t you!  You silly thing” And all the girl can remember doing in response is nodding in agreement and acquiescence and her own voice, simpering, a lisping near-whisper… “Yes, miss”.  Of course she knows the subject will be brought up again, and she’ll be made to relive this experience, in her next one-to-one psychotherapy session, and she’ll likely suffer a good dose of the psychotherapist’s cane across her bottom for trying to abscond, to reinforce the lesson she has just learned…

Or imagine something of the opposite, that hour after hour, day after day, night and day, she sits alone in her room, being eaten away by  a feeling of deep-seated near-phobic fear, self-doubt and dizzying spells of disorientation.  The smiling nurse arrives, or perhaps the psychotherapist, and suddenly all those dread sensations are swept away – until once again the key is turned in the lock and once again she is left alone.

In this scenario the idea is to induce a child-like – or even babyish – fear of abandonment. In the previous example the aim is to get her to the state where even if the door to her room is left wide open she will stay precisely where she has been placed.

But the problem in all this is that it does limit the scenario to the institutional – although I am rapidly coming to gain more and more enthusiasm even as I write, despite the fact that ordinarily I dislike the use of technology and overtly mind-altering drugs and so on in my stories (let alone nanobots ‘re-wiring’ the brain and so on – oh for God’s sake!  Why not just build a robot and be done with it?).  At home, though it is true if the ducting system is large enough you might just get lucky with an air-con system, the likelihood of the successful application of infrasound to aid gaining some sort of control over an individual is tiny; and NO, you can’t just use your HiFi system to generate frequencies of 17Hz or perhaps as low as 7 or 8Hz.  You’d need the kind of speaker system only available in big cinemas just to get below 20Hz with any real intensity - and even if you DID, there are two further problems; isolating the effect to a certain area (very low frequencies travel all too well through the structures of buildings – ask any sound-proofing engineer) and secondly the lowest frequency that can be experienced is related to the dimensions of the space in which it is being experienced, in terms of the sound’s wavelength (if that makes sense); it is the reason the main.. erhemm!...‘beneficiaries’ of huge speakers and sound systems in cars (automobiles) are those of us outside them going about our business and ‘lucky’ enough to be within earshot. 

BUT!  In an institution…  Ah well… with big heavy stone walls to isolate one section and another, it might be doable in an acceptably plausible manner, perhaps using the aforementioned tuned air duct / organ pipe method.

Incidentally, referring to the link, two things grabbed me.  One is that the author mentions two movies in which infrasound was used beneath the main soundtrack to dramatic effect by manipulating unease in the audience as to enhance their sense of horror at the drama unfolding on the screen.  Now, I don’t doubt this is true, given a big cinema with a sufficiently large auditorium and large sound producing apparatus (think also ‘Sensuround’ in the film Earthquake back in the 70s) but my point is, anybody buying either of those two movies on DVD is likely to be disappointed at the result on their home system – it just aint gonna work!  The second point is a technical one.  The author states, in regards his example of an air-con system and so on:

“…The reason for this is a phenomenon called Helmholtz resonance, which changes the frequency of a wave by constricting it in a cavity, in this case the long thin room.”

Err…No it don’t!  It can EMPHASIS one of a band of frequencies already present or within a harmonically-rich source over the others present (or indeed diminish it, as if placing a notch in the frequency response of a space or room) but it WONT change the frequency of the fundamental pitch.   Indeed Helmholtz resonators – suitably positioned - can be used to effectively cancel out and thus diminish sound reflections from certain areas of an auditorium thus modifying the auditorium’s acoustic ‘liveliness’.

By the way.  I just LOVE that there is an add for Nurofen tacked on at the bottom of the page!  Sooo apt somehow – don’t ya think!”

Well there you have it, folks.  Errr… folks… FOLKS… Is that snoring?

Oh well… Anyone wants to be bored with my thoughts on infrasound, acoustics, soundproofing, harmonic theory and Fourier analysis, electronic music synthesis (FM. Additive, subtractive – as long as it’s analogue I don’t mind), just let me know. LOL! 

Yeah, yeah… Guess what?  As well as having been an electronics engineer, biochemist, nutritionist and an interest in BSE / CJD I’ve also done a course or two in sound recording and studio design as well, back in the day, in addition to… oh never mind! Bye for now.  See you next time (if you’re still awake!)

The Heiress and the Correction Therapist - A Girl's Visit to a Profesional Chastisment Service

Yes, the heiress and the  correction therapist.  Believe it or not but apparently profesional chastisment services such as this  - often within a so called 'house of correction' - did actualy exist in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, and some say survived into a much later time too!  There is something about the concept of a chap being able to take a young lady to such a figure and being able to sit in on the session and watch, as somebody else punishes her, perhaps purely for his own gratification.  Obviously there is somewhat more to it going on here than just simple short-term gratification, and other agenda are afoot, but the principle's just the same - don't you think?.

Yeah YEAH!!! 500 Followers on Tumblr! And: The Governess / Strict Institutional Nurse Dress - And Now with Added Disciplinary Subject

I can't do any more tonight - the kids are in!  And THAT floor is a nightmare. Tiling is a KILLER when it comes to getting perspective right!  I chose the wrong subject / background here, I know, but I needed something I could get done relatively quickly as a demonstration coz time was running out on me - mostly because I'd spent far too long messing around with women's heads when I should have seen it was a non-starter from the beginning and gone for the cropped close-up / foreground from the start.  I also spent time removing a teddy the girl was holding  - I felt uneasy about that; it had to go!

And here is a fully cropped version for completeness - of course it needs a caption... perhaps later?

That Governess or Strict Nurse uniform Dress: Step 5: And Now She Has an Implement Worthy of Her Station!

And now she does indeed have an implement worthy of her station!  I decided on a paddle - what do you think?  We're getting there.  Now we need a subject or target on which to practise her disciplinary zeal and THAT depends on the type of scenario... hmm...let's see... I think I quite like the idea of that 'institutional care within the home' type of thing, as it does seem to have struck a chord with some...

Oh, and I've sorted out the slight white fringing that was around the legs!  The paddle and the wrist strap are two different objects from two different sources incidently.

That Governess or Strict Nurse uniform Dress: Step 4: Now She Has Legs!

Ok!  Yep!  And now She Has Legs!  AND stockings at that, although of course you, the viewer, can't see that, and OK there is a bit of fringing and I'm not sure I like the colour.  But after spending FAR too long trying, I've had to give up on the head.  Fitting a head empathised the squareness of the shoulders too much and ended up making the image look too 'cartoony', to such an extent that I don't even want to share it with you.  

But I never DID like the collar much and without the nurse's cap - which I would have felt obliged to have fitted her with - there is greater flexibility for the viewer to allocate the figures role in his or her own mind's eye, and her age group too.  So the answer seems to be to crop the image and then use it in a scene in which the uppermost parts are obscured in some manner, whether by perspective or some object in the foreground.  

Now for some props - and a bit of cleaning up around the legs.  But first - another snack break!!!