Deviant Art for Deviant Days (or something like that)

Hello again! Less than a week since last time – blimey!Well, here we are, almost October and it's blazing here in London like a chubby teen's well-whipped backside. What a deviant, you are probably thinking, even applying spanking metaphors to meteorological phenomena. But the weather has been pretty deviant in recent years, so why not? And talking of deviance (a gossamer-thin link at best) having finished with the commissioned piece I was writing I have at last begun to turn my attention to exploring photo manipulation and computer art, albeit in the evenings as I am presently tied up earning a crust in the daylight hours.

All of which brings me to DeviantArt.com (there's a link in the sidebar somewhere I'm sure, listed under 'Useful Resources' ). It's a great vein of inspiration waiting to be explored. As a starting point try these examples drawn and produced by 'Jogbol' (not to worry, you legal minded types – I have the artist's permission). What I like about these images is the plethora of tales that pop into the imagination, partly because of the built-in uncertainty of the context, by which I mean the lack of background detail. By focusing on the subject and the more immediate surroundings greater scope is opened up for what I would call 'personalised imaginative embellishment' (Ok; fantasizing – if you must!). Anyway, if you like what you see just click on the artist's name to visit and then surf from there.

As for that commisioned work, in case you were wondering; I am pleased to be able to tell you that, from the feedback I have recieved thus far, the client seems happy – even delighted - and is apperently enjoying the piece, which is what it's all about! I have to say I was somewhat releived. It turned out to be not at all easy to avoid drifting into my own areas of interest and those other areas I have grown more accustomed to accomadating in my writing over the years. For the latter reason I had become a little concerned towards the end that I might not have placed sufficient emphasis on the client's more specific personal interests. All in all though, it turned out to be a rewarding and inspiring experience! Bye for now!

Spanked at Home and Veralsis Spanking Showcase: Two New Affiliate Sites Added

I've just added two new affiliate sites to this blog. Spanked at Home and Veralsis Spanking Showcase. The latter has a massive collection of Artwork, over 42,ooo drawings, including Eric Stanton and other classics. The former appealed to me as its magazine-cover style samples bring on an attack of terminal nostalgia, being reminiscent of the good old days of seeing Roue and Janus covers on the local newsagent's top shelf.

The origin of the top left offering is obvious, so you can probably safely hazard a guess that the pic on the right comes from the aforementioned artwork site. If it works for me (if you get my drift) it mostly likely will for most of you out there - that's the way I look at it.

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In addition, I have now extended the 'DropBox' albums to cover a few more of the deleted Picasaweb albums. The women's workwear and uniforms catalogue scans for: Hewat (an Edinburgh-based company) 1980s, Hewat 1960s and Garroulds of London. I have now removed all the links to the old defunct Picasaweb albums to save confusion. Longer term; I intend to create a series of standalone pages to hold the various collections I have stashed on my drives here, giving the blog - I hope - a look something more like a full-blown website than a conventional blog. I have to say, though, that I am a little pressed for time at present and the only reason I am messing around with the blog right now is that I have been away for the weekend and only got in a little while ago. As it is so late (early hours) it isn't worth getting in to any work on the book / books, but I am still a little too 'hyper' to sleep. Talking of affiliate sites:

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I just couldn't resist a quick trip to Bars and Stripes (it's that nurse /matron and cane thing) link in right hand sidebar. The two new sites I have added can be checked out by clicking on the relevant pic above or visiting the sidebar on right (as can the Dropbox albums). These affiliates will be the last commercial links I shall be adding as I want to avoid the trend, becoming increasingly prevalent, to fill up page-space almost entirely with banners and adverts; but at the same time, what with some sort of problem apparently afflicting Lulu sales, I need to do something to help fund my little hobby (I am mostly running on empty right now, financially speaking - but full of enthusiasm!!!). Tommorow will be entirely dedicated to editing the book - starting early!!! So bye for now - I'm off to bed.

Best Gymslip Design of all Time? You Tell Me

Is it just me that thinks so, or is this the finest design of gymslip ever produced or even conceived of when it comes to setting apart a young lady from her peers as an aid to developing the correct mindset to accept the imposition of strict and restrictive discipline - discuss. (I can’t say I entirely approve of the knickers though.) Yes I know you’ve seen pics from this set before on this site, but not this particular shot I think (I hope); I’ve just come upon it. Now for the real reason for this post (not that I am not serious about hearing your points of view / ideas / designs – yeah, why not designs?):

A couple of days ago I mentioned setting up a series of Dropbox albums to share various stuff I have downloaded off the web over the years and also that I have scanned from my various collections of spanking and domination orientated stuff and various materials that have informed the descriptions in my books. Part of the impetus for this was having the album containing my collection of the spanking and D/S art work of Hobbs / Thorn (there is some contention over the true artist’s identity) deleted by those well-meaning folk at PicasaWeb and my desire to circumvent future strife.

Well, as an experiment I have now created a folder of the Hobbs / Thorn artwork on Dropbox. I have created an entirely new listing category in the right-hand sidebar to hold links to future Dropbox albums if the trial works out. It may well be that I’ll have to cycle these albums from time to time to work through my collection due to limited storage space. Dropbox has a limit of 2 GB on their free subscription service and I am also using it to back-up my writing and book cover artwork. However one way of working around this to free up more space would be for me to set up another Dropbox account under my everyday name for backup purposes. I’m going to see how well this works out first and how popular - or otherwise - it proves to be, so I’ll be looking for feedback (hint, hint). Remember to check the Dropbox album list in the sidebar (just below the ‘Spanking Artwork Albums’ list) from time to time as I will be adding to it when I have time but I may not always have sufficient time to tell you in a blog entry. Remember too that much will be adult content, especially the Thorn / Hobbs stuff!

I forgot to put in links in my last posting to the two sites I spotlighted. This I have now rectified – sorry for any inconvenience / frustration caused. I have also added a link in the ‘Useful Resources’ list situated in the sidebar to a source of ‘forced exercise’ photos on Tribes.net for all those that appreciate such things (click to visit or see sidebar).

Toilet-Seat Spanking Humiliation, A Couple of Blogs to Explore and Some PicasaWeb Album Additions

You are probably wondering where I’ve been to again, it being close to a week since my last update. Well I had planned one for last Friday or Saturday but the best laid plans… well, more about that later, for those that are interested (see below). Harking back to that ‘Toilet Seats and Domestic Discipline’ thing I wrote up on Sunday 21st November, I remembered seeing a really nice suitable photo set somewhere out there in Web-Land once, featuring the absolutely edible Rosaleen young (I think – though I might be wrong). I think it realy sums up the posibilities inherent in the situation being discussed - think institutional-style discipline intorduced in the home environment. So on Friday I did a little trawling around and here it is (left). Of course while out hunting, as is often the case, I got sidetracked by a couple of interesting blogs.

The first isn’t actual strictly speaking a Blog at all as such, other than in name, as I can’t link to it via my blog listings and so you can find it listed under ‘Useful Resources’ in the right-hand sidebar or click on its name here (highlighted in blue). Entitled; Michael Masterson’s The Spanking Blog it is a spanking photo studio site with loads of free spanking galleries for you to investigate (I didn’t have time myself on my visit – but I’m going back later). The other I came across was Spanking Porn-blog which can be found in the sidebar blog listing in the conventional manner. You can also go see it for yourself directly from here, as above.

The other two pics are just gratuitous, yet stimulating, examples of spanking art I came across while reorganizing my files recently – I hope I haven’t posted them before; my apologies if I have. The first (right) is by ‘Walldo’, the other I don’t know – perhaps someone out there can tell me as I’d like to see some more!

Yesterday I got stuck working away from home, so could work on the book but had no WiFi access for the day. Today I’m hard at it once again and even I hope to do a little prelim work on the design of the book cover later – something that excites me greatly!

I was actually quite industrious yesterday – despite being away from home - and very nearly finished the last chapter of the new book, which I have now put in place in book form (although I shall have to do a little more to it shortly, when I finish this). Despite this and despite returning home late (near midnight) I managed to update my PicasaWeb albums (right-hand sidebar) adding more scanned catalogue pics to the 1960s – 1970s Alexandra workwear album and creating a whole new album entitled Prison Uniforms that concentrates on prison uniform dresses. The problem regarding PicasaWeb deleting certain spanking art folders from my assemblage some time ago – notably the work of Hobbs / Thorn I am working on circumventing by way of creating a public DropBox folder that I shall then post a link to here. If that works, and within the limitations of the storage space available, I shall create folders of all sorts of scanned and / or downloaded stuff that has inspired and fired me up over the years for you to explore and that I have archived.

It's bloody snowing here now, freezing - I thought global warming was supposed to take care of all that. The good news is that it helps put me off going to the pub for a while. I'm saving that up for closer to Christmas. Not Christmas itself, though, as my other half doesn't drink much and so I try to abstain and instead get my kicks by going for food that I would not ordinarily allow myself. We are going to be off to a nice (I hope) hotel in Ascot, where the famous Royal Ascot horse race course is and not far from Windsor and the Thames; might even try a little fishing on Boxing Day.

Or a more negative note: I have a chest infection that has gone on for weeks and that seems to gradually ease off only to worsen again after each visit to the gym. The upside (I suppose) is that, what with the inclement weather and my hacking cough, I am confined to the home today and so after a brief blog update will be hopefully getting a lot done towards getting this book thing finished.

On the subject of the blog: I went away for the weekend to the ‘Other Half's’ place - as always - and although it would be difficult to do much towards finishing the book while there I nevertheless intended to get a blog update posted. Accordingly I took all source materials I would need with me on a data stick.

I arrived to find a hysterical woman journalist / lecturer (namely 'The Other Half') and a computer that had fallen over and that now displayed unblinkingly the dreaded Windows blue screen, a hole batch of hexadecimal memory addresses and error codes and the information that it had ''performed a dump - mmm, nice! (a little too much information there, on all sorts of levels - taking a 'dump' can have a whole different meaning here in London). She had tried to transfer some work she had completed onto a data stick... and down it had gone - just like that. Further investigation showed the hard drive to be so full as to barely allow Windows to operate (she only has 512 Mb of RAM). I used the Windows disk cleanup utility, compressed some files and off it went again... only to fail to download and install a Windows update a few hours later. The cause? Insufficient disk space - the free space was down to a couple of hundred megabytes again. Interestingly, thinking back I seemed to recall that earlier in the year when last I had checked there had been about 15 Gb of free space on that drive, and she only deals in text , a few still pics and PowerPoint presentations, things like that and nothing flash either. Obviously I suspected a virus of some flavour. I trawled through the hard drive looking for some overly enormous usage some place - and found it! Symantic Norton antivirus: in the programs, common, directory a directory labeled Symantic was 15Gb in size! Closer inspection showed the culprit to be the virus signatures folder which was bulging at the seams with 12.8 Gb of signatures, temp files and the rest.

To cut a long story short; the thing seemed unstoppable. I would tell it to empty its temp cache, and it would - only to fill it up again almost immediately. I reduced the disc space allowed for Norton's temp files, but to no avail. Then, while still investigating the problem and having again freed up disc space by compressing old files, Norton proudly announced that it was trying to update and would I kindly make more disk space available to it on the hard drive as it was having a little difficulty (or words ti that effect)... Ahhhh! Poor thing!

That was it: I knew then it had to die... Die!... DIE!!!! ARRRGH! Not so easy to kill off though - it is an antivirus program after all! I had first to stop it loading on start up it turned out. So off I went to the registry and pulled out its plug. Then it was back to the Windows Add / Remove utility, a gun to its head BANG it was dispatched.

I'd always hated Norton, right from the start. It took up too much memory and would slow her ancient (2002) computer to a snail's pace. To be honest, though; originally her machine had run quite happily with 256 Mb RAM - even with Norton - until she'd had added the latest version of Norton, a few years back. Then it had ground practically to a standstill and a little investigation soon showed that Norton itself was taking up 128 Mb for its own use. Thus I upped the memory to 512 Mb for her (she didn't want to spend much - she's of Scottish ancestry; I'm sure you understand. Ha! Ha! No offence meant to any of you from the other side of The Wall, you must understand – that of Hadrian's constructing of course). I have now replaced Norton with Avast, which is the antivirus I run here, cleaned up the registry and optimized Windows - and of course defragged the hard drive (which is a tale in of itself - never bother with the Windows XP defragmenter tool is my advice; it's crap, deeply crap!). Now her antique machine is razor sharp (for its vintage). Of course it lacks the punch of my brace of 10,000 RPM Raptors configured in RAID 0 (though strictly speaking that shouldn't be called RAID at all as neither drive is redundant - far from it). Bye for now!

An Apology from the Central Department of Dodgy Links

What can I say? Flushed with the excitement of the moment - and a little too much ale - I neglected to put in the link from the illustration at the top right of my last posting to the artist's site. Suffice it to say that I have now remedied the problem and a click on the aforementioned pic will whizz you straight to his site. As a little compensation, here is an intriguing little number from that great doyen of spanking art, Paula Meadows (Lynne Paula Russel - a link to her site can be found over in the right hand sidebar, listed under 'Useful Resources'). The question is whether or not the young lady's outfit qualifies as a form of specialized punishment dress and thus part and parcel of her discipline. Is it intended to facilitate / augment corporal punishment or humiliate or is it just part of some rather edgy in-vogue fashion and worn by choice. If the latter, then the question becomes; should it be allowed or should the caning be closely followed by her being handed her new school uniform? By the way; for any who might be interested, despite the time of year it is sunny and bright here in London and I'm sitting out working in the garden - I wonder how long this will last? I am going to award myself one more day out in the pub next week, the proviso being that in that day I get the final outstanding part of the new book finished - the section wherein one luckless young thing receives a visit in the institution in which she has become incarcerated from her guardian and that formidable hellion woman's tame lawyer: there are some papers to be signed and the ever-present threat of the cane is there overshadowing events... Yum!

Art, Liberty Bodices, Discipline and Crashes

Hi peoples, init. I know, I know, yet another week gap. But I have been hard at it in the background, bashing away at the new book. There is so much written, one year in, that that I am considering rearranging the work into two distinct volumes – for clarity of storytelling rather than for any financial advantage; I get very little out of this financially anyway. Almost everything is now written to some degree or other, except for a couple of short scenes and one major scene that will likely take me a day. I could of course simplify by leaving out some of the descriptive scene-setting stuff. But as I have said before: the whole aim, when I first set out down this path, was to try and create some form of spanking literature - incorporating discipline / submission, humiliation, petty rules, restrictions and uniforms and multiple other disparate fetishes, as long as they could be fitted within the framework sensibly – having proper scene-setting, character development, dialog and all the rest, set out within some plausible premise, just as one would expect to find within any other genre one might come across on the high-street bookshelves. Wow! What a long sentence! Better wait to get your breath back.

In the interim I came upon a site run by an illustrator with some rather out of the ordinary imagery for the genre. I particularly liked the artist’s rendition of what appears to be a good old-fashioned liberty bodice on the girl in the first drawing (above) - very imaginative if set in the modern period… and a garment you will encounter a character being put in within the new book, as luck would have it. Little details such as the puff-sleeved blouses worn by the girls in the second illustration all add to the atmosphere of restriction and discipline, while the third is just perfect for all those that like the idea of drill impositions (bottom). The artist sells his work commercially - and I don’t ordinarily promote commercial sites outside of the couple that I am an affiliate of - but I urge you too check out his stuff. You can find his work on www.spankingcharm.wordpress.com (click the pic at top left or check out the blog listing in the right hand sidebar).

One other thing that has held me back was that on Monday – a day I had planed to set aside a little time to update the blog, I suffered a major computer crash that resulted in my having to reload Windows from scratch - with all that goes with that!!!! Luckily the book stuff is spread in duplicate between two computers and occasionally backed up on to CD. Also luckily I had backed up a lot of other stuff on to an independent drive on the same computer back in July – but I lost anything I had downloaded to my various illustration and inspirational collections throughout August. The worst hit potentially was the voice recognition software I use, as one has to train it to one’s voice – not too bad, as it only takes around 15 – 20 minutes – and it learns through experience and correction, improving in accuracy as one uses it. This latter aspect at first seemed disastrous, as I had been using it practically none-stop for two years and it had gone from being quite unreliable to being pretty good at interpreting my voice over that time… Then I discovered that I had backed-up its ‘user files’ a few months back and so was able to reinstate its vocabulary to a point when it had already become quite competent. In short I lost around a day and a half in total but am now up and running again – touch wood!!!

Institutional and Domestic Discipline: An Illustrated Collaboration 3 – Further Evolution

I have to rush out today – I am off to Eastbourne on the sunny Sussex coast where my mother is enjoying a few days in a guest house. I am going to be there later today and will probably (hopefully) spend the afternoon outside a bar at the end of Eastbourne pier writing in the sun - and it is blazingly sunny here in London at the moment, so I’m quite optimistic. This evening, I hope, will find me ensconced in the Eastbourne Wetherspoons pub; come and say hello if you are an Eastbourne type, appreciate a good ale and happen to be in the vicinity. Tomorrow I may visit Brighton or Hastings. I am taking my trusty bike and hope to tour around a bit up and down the south coast, visiting Wetherspoons branches and of course writing if and when inspired – I am taking my netbook computer with me. I next expect to be back home at my desk on Tuesday 8th June (next Tuesday) but WiFi internet connections willing, I may update the blog while on the move and hopefully I will still be able to view my emails – so don’t be shy, write today.

Talking off inspiration: if you remember the piece I posted recently regarding my collaboration with the Stateside computer artist, ‘Snooze’ and the evolution of a particular illustration I demonstrated as an example of the sort of thing we have been developing you will probably be interested with this, the latest incarnation of that art work - compare and contrast with the earlier renditions posted elsewhere. There are many more scenes we are working on – some far more complex and detailed - but it would spoil the fun to give any further inkling of these – you’ll just have to wait until the new book gets finished, or more specifically, the illustrated version of it.

In the present illustration the girl has just failed a written imposition set by the section psychiatrist – a most formidable, yet exceedingly clever - woman and has had her institutional pyjama bottoms taken of her in preparation for correction. The view through the door tells the viewer that this private little prison is in fact a tiny secure anteroom leading directly off of a more conventionally furnished consultation room - the regulation hospital bed provided for the inmate with its integral restraints is behind the view and so not in evidence. The white outer door beyond the bars both provides the psychiatrist’s office with the appearance one might expect, when closed, while also increasing the hapless girl’s isolation by removing from her the stimulation of the external view and providing for a high degree of soundproofing. The thick but supple leather belt carried, doubled-over, in the hospital sister’s hand, has a special relevance to the poor girl – it is something destined to make the up-coming correction all the more intolerable for the girl once the realisation sinks in! As always - all comments, ideas and what have you, will be gratefully received - bye for now!

A Quick (very) Blog Update

I have today removed the link to the Lynn Paula Russell site (Paula Meadows, as was ) from my sidebar's 'Useful Resources' list as during a routine check I found the link to be broken - yeah I do stuff like that: a bit anal isn't it? However I will shortly be adding a Picasaweb album with as much of her stuff as I have - I guess that broken link has finaly given me the impetus I needed. Keep an eye on the Spanking ArtWork Albums list in the sidebar on the right. I have also rearanged the resource list a bit so that all the artwork links are bunched together and I have just added a link to the blog list for an interesting spanking blog I have just come across called SPANKEDHORTIC (just click to visit - or see sidebar).

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Incidently, Flickr is sometimes worth a visit: For example I just found a nice collection of pics entitled Spanking Fun (click to view). If you try to download / save any, though, they come up as 'Spaceballs' which means the pics are protected. Why folks choose to do this I have no idea - I thought that the rationale behind Flickr was to share images. However it is quite easy to get around this limitation, or security measure or whatever it is: From 'File' in your browser window (in Explorer at any rate), choose 'Edit with Microsoft Word'. You then have a Word page with the image embedded and can then edit out all of the other stuff you don't want and work from there.