TastyTrixie.com

Archive for August, 2008

We have a wedding to attend today, so we had to cancel our usual Sunday shows. As a consolation prize, last night I posted a new gallery and a couple of archived webcam shows from a year ago in my members-only area, including one where I played in one of my favorite things, GLOVES, specifically short red leather gloves:

I covet gloves that are small enough to fit me and tight enough to STRETCH across my knuckles. These ones are old and stained from a vintage clothing store, but I fucking adore them. I would love to have fresh, duplicate pairs in white, red, pink, brown, green, and black. That would make me squeal with leathery happiness! I want to slap others and myself with them and appreciate my freckled arms stemming from their sassy short lengths.

In the other show I posted I wore black nylon stockings and stuck my feet in the camera/viewers’ virtual faces a lot:

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Next month when my insurance waiting period for pre-existing conditions ends I am going to go see an endocrinologist as suggested by oogoddess awhile back; even if they don’t find any explanation for my infertility, weight gain, etc. it will be good to rule out a thyroid problem and other things. My period finally started SIX WEEKS after my last one and I’m pretty much at my wits end dealing with wacky hormones and seeing very little results from exercising and eating more moderately (which is really really fucking hard when having wacky hormones makes me want comfort food for medication). I know I’m getting older and my metabolism is slowing down — I can accept that — but I still want to rule out the thyroid thing completely. Thyroid problems seem to be pretty common and frequently undiagnosed for years; there’s no reason to suffer needlessly if that’s my problem.

We only brought our new camera out while Julia and her photographer were here visiting just to show off our tool, but I did snap a couple of pics of her bare foot:

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Right now I’m working on an update for members, editing pictures we shot last night. I am so bloated and puffy it’s hard to look at a lot of pictures of myself lately, but there are always a few redeeming images that can even make the puff look magical.

We really need to install the rest of our new hard drives so that I have enough space to download and edit videos. In the meantime, I have puffy pictures for you.

I’m afraid my previous post made it sound like I don’t give a fuck about people’s problems and that as soon as people complain about anything I just plug my ears and run for the hills; that’s totally not true and I feel bad if I made anyone think I am not receptive to hearing about or reading about the shit people are dealing with. I was just afraid that I was coming off as one of those livejournal types where every single post is about how their processed cheese became grainy for some reason and their medication ran out and they didn’t win the ebay auction for that great limited edition Jack Skellington figurine and maybe it was for the best since they lost their job at the espresso stand and had to drop two out of three classes at community college because their teachers were mean and why do their boyfriends want to lick them down there when obviously that’s so gross and they don’t know what to do because they found out their boyfriends looked at porn once. I don’t want to be one of those people and that remark was made out of self-consciousness, not criticism of others (except those annoying livejournal types I described). I was NOT referring to any of my friends or blogs I regularly read on purpose whose troubles I WANT to hear/read about. Not that I want them to have troubles, but I am interested in and care about whatever is going on with them. Fuck, sometimes I actually do care about those LJ folks, too, and am bizarrely interested in their ebay problems.

I have $150 of my own spending money and am trying to decide which of these things at the top of my personal wants list are most worthy of it:

*a new microphone perfect for podcasting

*hiring a guy to make a logo for WebWhoreBucks.com so I can give the whole thing a facelift and a proud capitalist woman vibe

*use it all on massage and maybe exercise classes

I’m leaning towards massage (and maybe mental health care) because even though I *yearn* for those other things, taking care of my body fulfills my basic needs (and IS mental health care) better than those other things do which require follow-up effort to be truly useful. Buying massage is one of the few things I can do for myself that is really good for me, requires no effort on my part, and on top of all that is PLEASURABLE.

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Mildly put, I’m having a really difficult time today. A lot of it is hormonal/PMS, a lot of it is just the normal difficulty I have as an ADD person in prioritizing overwhelming sets of to-do’s, but some of it is specific stress over a few different circumstances that I overall feel hopeful about, but have been emotionally exhausting. My emotional resources are tapped out and my brain’s really loud and jumbly.

To make part of a long story short, Delia’s going Alcoholics Anonymous meetings now and I’m going to Alanon. It’s a huge relief to me and I feel really positive about it. I feel like a lot of weight and isolation is being lifted from me. Still, there are residual effects of the stress I’ve/we’ve accumulated getting to this point and being in a number of transitions; I’ve cried a lot more than usual in the past week, which is awesome in some ways but just really fucking exhausting.

On top of that, we continue to be plagued by problems with our neighbors. Fortunately, the guy got thrown back into jail yesterday so we’ll have a bit of a break from him, but the woman is probably more of a menace to us than he is. And the daughter? I just feel so fucking bad for her that she’s one of the pains that I cried over recently.

Our main ISP where we have a business account tightened its spam filters and pretty much blocked us from sending any email from or referencing our porn domains through their outgoing mail servers; they were very helpful, professional, and non-accusatory, but ultimately I had to spend a lot of time on the phone for a couple of days to find a solution and get it working again. That time-suck piled on top of others makes me feel totally burned-out, like I can’t get ahead. I know that’s not true, I’m just feeling that way this week. It hasn’t all been bad, and most of the time I feel happy, but my mood swings are extreme and the lows are really pathetic. I tried to get ahold of my psychiatrist that I haven’t seen in five years or so, but he hasn’t returned my messages. It would be a big help to get back on Ritalin so I could at least concentrate and get some work done without being totally scatterbrained, distracted, and wanting to rip out my overactive, inefficient brain. Just being able to sit down and work without little sounds like frogs croaking (which should be PLEASANT!) driving me to insanity would be a really huge help.

I can’t stand hearing people go on and on all the time about all their problems that they always seem to be having, so I just hope that if you’re reading this that you have enough context for my complaining to know I’m not defeated or just a pitiful slug of depression with no hope for the future, I’m just in a bumpy spot. I know it’s nowhere near what other people have to deal with, and I wouldn’t trade in my problems for other people’s, but that doesn’t mean I can pretend everything’s totally smooth sailing for me right now. It’s not the big things that are bothering me today — I feel pretty excited (in good ways) about the big things — it’s the little things that are wearing me down. Like my mom calling to say that even though Grandma appreciates my letters, she’d rather I called. And that making me feel like I was smothering in a lead blanket of guilt that I will never have enough energy, time or detachment to throw off (it’s impossible to talk to my grandma without the first thing out of her mouth being a passive-aggressive guilt trip; I thought I was fulfilling more than I’m capable of just to talk to my MOM on the phone four times in two days but I’m supposed to interrupt work to do more? YES!!!).

Then there’s the world-is-out-to-get-me crap where you think everything is being aligned to stymie your efforts, like the library being closed for staff training the one day of the month you go out of your way to visit it, or water aerobics being canceled this week (JUST *this* week, they say!) when you made what felt like a herculean effort to go to the pool for the first time in fifteen years specifically for that because you really fucking need the exercise. And you know the whole modern cult-of-magnetization thinks you brought this shit on yourself . . . there ARE no coincidences and the world isn’t out to sabotage you, YOU ARE DOING IT YOURSELF, but I have to calm down and remember that’s both notions are a total fucking crock of shit and I just have to keep trying in spite of being annoyed that both facilities’ online schedules were totally misleading!

I made the best of both situations. I’m a fucking winner. And I know it will get better. Probably when my period starts. And my girlfriend is making me eggs and bacon right now to remind me that my life is charmed, sweet, and I’m not in this all by myself. I get taken care of.

Our friend AmberLily is a big Dexter fan, so her blog and tweets reminded us to check it out. I figured I would love it and looked forward to getting it through Netflix and starting from the beginning.

We only made it through one and a half episodes before we sent it back. In some ways it was just my style; I *DELIGHT* in movies like Gacy, Ed Gein, May and American Psycho. Dexter is stylish, a little campy, witty, etc. I appreciated many aspects of what I saw, but I totally didn’t want to spend any more time watching it. Part of the problem was that I loathed the female characters. Another problem is that we watch our netflixed tv shows at night before bed, and Dexter is just too dark and ludicrously violent to be relaxing then.

I’m also hypercritical of stories of vigilantism when the vigilante is a MAN, meting out “justice” for crimes perpetrated against women and/or children. REALLY annoys me (except in the movie Buster and Billie which I *love*).

And it was just too far-fetched. I know, it’s in a way that’s probably cool to other people but for me was just annoying. I’m pretty hard to please in the crime drama department, preferring/loving the stuff that’s openly based on real crimes or is documentary style (almost all the crap on “Tru” tv). Also, since we’ve been part of shooting a few low-budget movies I have a harder time suspending disbelief when we watch other people’s acting; I feel awkward for the actors and wonder how much time went into crafting certain scenes – the veil has been lifted even with the small-scale stuff we done and everything seems so transparent. I felt that way (embarrassed) a lot watching Michael C. Hall in his “action” scenes where he’s confronting his victims.

We prefer to watch Star Trek: Deep Space Nine before bed. I know it doesn’t make sense when I criticized Dexter for being too far-fetched, but whatever. It makes me feel good to totally escape into a positive, optimistic vision of the future. I like going to sleep with messages of hope. Watching shows like Next Gen, Deep Space Nine, and Northern Exposure is like going to an ideal version of church for me where nobody expects you to believe in God and everyone at least TRIES to treat everybody else with kindness. People express enthusiasm, wonder and awe at the mystery of it all and the boundlessness of possibilities is depicted as something people can experience while they’re still alive.

So Deep Space Nine (with help from Weeds, Entourage, Spaced and Big Love) beat Dexter off our queue.

Note to AmberLily: I just want you to know that I started writing this BEFORE you tweeted that you hate Seattle. And I don’t hate Dexter as much as you hate Seattle — I was so close to loving it! Some of the images were so beautiful . . .

Here’s a great post from Mia:

WHY I DID PORN, AND WHY I’M GLAD I DON’T ANYMORE

And no, I don’t think it’s great JUST because I’m profiled in such a warm, fuzzy way in it; it’s great because she tells you about a lot of the behind-the-scenes unsexy stuff that get in the way of indie porn being fun. Billing stuff, legal stuff, branding stuff, asshole stuff, relationship stuff, gender stuff, multi-tasking stuff, etc.

Here’s a little insight into part of our work for those of you interested in how we get our photos from the camera to our porn site members and blogs:

Every time I post a tweet letting members/voyeurs know they’re watching me at the computer “editing pics”, I wonder if people are thinking, “what does that entail, anyway?” So here’s the process (Delia does hers a little differently than I do, so I’m just saying what I do):

1) We transfer the image files from our camera to a computer where we store all of our full size, unedited image files. We use a usb cable rather than removing the card every time and using a card reader, which seems to be the more popular way that most people do it. Not us, though. I’ve always used the cable because a) it came with our cameras, but card readers did not, and b) I prefer to avoid handling our memory cards that often; I think it’s better not to touch them and expose them to dust, etc. so the only time we remove our memory cards is if we’re shooting away from home, fill up a card, and need to put in a new card to take pictures. Estimated time: 5-30 minutes depending on how many pics we took (usually 75-200 per set, and we often shoot multiple sets on one card); it definitely takes longer with our new camera since each pic is 4288×2848 pixels and around five to nine megabytes.

2) At this point we often take a look through the pictures to assess how we did and talk about why the look good or don’t. You’ll see us doing this with our heads tilting back and forth since pics we took as portraits are laying on their sides in landscape. Estimated time: varies between 2 and 30 minutes

3) We make COPIES of the original files and put them on our working machines. Estimated time: virtually none as long as we aren’t having annoying network problems

4) I go through the photos and delete duplicates, ugly pics, pics with bad lighting, etc. Because our sites are homemade with an amateur appeal, I leave in a lot of “bad” pics because even the blurry ones and ones I think are unflattering usually have some redeeming quality (ex. my face looks bad, but my butt looks great, or the light is not technically excellent and the picture’s not print-ready, but it still evokes a mood and helps tie the images together so there’s some movement from one image to the next). Sometimes I do leave in poses that are nearly identical; the standards for porn sites are very different from artistic photography sites because we aren’t trying to exhibit our very best PHOTOGRAPHY, we’re trying to give people pictures to arouse them AND meet the quantity expectations porn review sites look for.

Very subtle differences in two like photos can make one jack-worthy to one person while the other is not. Let’s say there’s an image where I have an enticing expression on my face, but my feet are cut out of the frame. Then there’s another nearly identical picture where I my double chin is highlighted, but my feet are all there and looking great. One guy who loves feet will be happy I included the ugly-face, feet-included pic, while another who doesn’t care about feet will only be interested in my come-hither look in the other photo. That’s why I leave in a lot of less-than-perfect and repetitious images. Still, I sometimes take a lot of time deciding whether or not to keep or toss pictures. Estimated time: 5-20 minutes

5) I open three photos at a time in Photoshop. I use a hotkey I’ve set up to rotate the image (if necessary) and another hotkey to resize the photo to my specifications. I look at each image more closely than before, adjusting levels to brighten them up if necessary, add more contrast, and adjust the color balance as needed; because we don’t use a flash or tons of lights and we often rely on natural light or a combination, there’s often a lot of variation in our photos even when we’ve taken all of them in one location. We might move in and out of different colors and levels of light so it does NOT work to apply a process on a whole batch of photos, I have to look at and edit each image individually.

I also use the bandaid tool to cover up zits or ingrown hairs sometimes. Sometimes I crop and size pictures more creatively if I need more close-ups or really need to get rid of some distraction in the picture to salvage something good about it. Very rarely I will apply filters (soft blur, etc.) to images or just fuck around seeing what those look like without committing to them. We *do not* change color photos into black and white using Photoshop, Well, hardly ever. Almost all of the black and white pictures on our sites were SHOT in black and white.

6) I save each picture WITHOUT optimizing them (making the file size smaller for web suitability) because I want to keep a copies of high quality edited versions of each photo since one picture might be used in a number of places in a number of ways. Sometimes I save duplicates of images I especially like in a “promo” folder at a different size with a border added that I use for posting in our blogs. I have a promo folder inside each edited gallery folder. Estimated time for steps five and six: 30-120 minutes

7) I go through the pictures again to see if there are more I want to delete.

Sometimes I rename files so that they will be presented in an order that makes better sense (move pictures we took in the middle to the beginning, etc.). Estimated time for steps seven and eight: 0-10 minutes

After all of that, I build the gallery which is another process entirely.

ESTIMATED TOTAL TIME SPENT ON THIS PROCESS FOR EACH GALLERY: 45 minutes to three and a half hours

I enjoy this process quite a bit (especially if I look halfway decent in the pictures) and appreciate taking the time to really SEE what were making. It’s pleasurable, meditative, hot and it makes me feel productive. I also think it’s important we do this work (and do it ourselves) because it teaches us what does and doesn’t work with posing, lighting, camera settings, framing, etc.

Want to know more behind-the-scenes info regarding our pics? Check out this entry on how much one shoot cost: ARE OUR SHOOTS WORTH IT?