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Archive for the ‘shopping’ Category

A few awesome things I’ve done/felt today:

*walked through a quiet art gallery and had time to stroke an inlaid wood table decorated with shiny, randomly-inset little nailheads of different sizes and metals.

*bought some favorite usually-overpriced tomatillo salsa on sale which I’m eating right now. Thick green stews and salsas always feel like delicious magical potions to me.

*enjoyed Delia’s preview of some of the pics I shot of her recently for her Fall Flower Fairy gallery.

*woke up without a headache after having one for five solid days (don’t feel sorry for me; I made some bad choices with food, how I mishandled stress, and delayed getting my B vitamin shots).

*bought myself little foil star stickers. To reward myself for finishing items on my to-do lists. This is not as childish as it may sound, and I really love shiny little stars in red, blue, silver, green and gold.

*had two awesome poops

*am wearing my octopus necklace, handcrafted by a local artisan

*scoped out / walked through a really cool coffee shop. Even though I’m not a coffee shop kind of gal, I love knowing there’s one I might actually enjoy sitting in if I ever decide I want to. The kind where there’s plenty of space between plenty of armchairs and darkness and both good coffee-n-pastry aromas plus dank book smells. The kind where, I hope, no one would talk to me. Of course, that desire for solitude didn’t deter me from fantasizing VIVIDLY about seeing a hairy man I fancy and wordlessly tangling into each other and fucking in one of the fairy-lit corridors there.

*survived and almost enjoyed capturing & editing my masturbation video that I’ll post for members tonight: tidied and put away a multitude of things while each of four files were encoded. Enjoyed afore-mentioned tidying.

*Fondled silky lingerie in a little independent shop downtown.

*Picked out striking, large, dramatic pieces of jewelry I’d buy for Delia if I had money to.

*Looked in two shops for crock pots. Neither place had one.

*Didn’t really waste as much time as  you think doing all of these things because I was alone, undisturbed, and easily able to soak up and get my fill of each stimulating little experience.

The best part is I think we might fuck tonight. IT’S BEEN WAY TOO LONG. I need to write a little something about how much of our lives revolve around cum-rationing. And how someday we’ll fuck hairy men in fairy-lit corridors and never want for extra cum again.

I went on a little field trip by myself today, and happened across this fucktastic hillbilly head shop:

You can get almost anything there: firewood, dildos, giant bongs, blow-up sex dolls, gay wanker mags (I bought one as a thanks for letting me take these pics . . . and because I really enjoy gay wanker mags), swords, patriotic novelties, and old issues of Playboy that should be in protective sleeves, but instead are gathering dust in layers of MEASURABLE thickness (I *so* wanted to rescue the one with Dolly Parton on the cover).

Even though the place stank of mildew and old carpeting stained with Sheltie poop and pee, I seriously fucking loved it there especially when I heard, then spotted, the fucking police scanner:

I just have a thing for police scanners. Don’t know why I don’t have one. Anyway, there’s also a stuffed parrot of porn watching out for things along with a dude who worked there (he was kind of cute but I thought it would be asking a bit much to take his picture and post it here):

There was also a thin, grizzled hang-around guy there who got a little boisterous when I popped in. A couple good-looking, fresh-smelling locals also popped in to get some porn so the place is obviously doing business since I wasn’t there very long. After I left, the hang-around guy wearing the straw cowboy hat followed me back out to my car to say, “boy! You SURE are cute!” then captioned himself by mumbling with concentration, “little hat trick for ya . . .” as he tossed it into the air and juggled it around with a flourish as a special little show for me. Much appreciated, hang-around dude.

Here I am on the security camera, standing basically two inches from the counter. Obviously surveillance is a fetish at this place, which I *totally* understand (and is only one of 100 reasons why I didn’t visit the restroom there):

All the way home I scripted a movie in my head to shoot there and wished we had money to pay to shoot it (including paying not only to rent the place, but to have it professionally cleaned inside without losing ALL of the personality/flavor). Actually, whenever we make the trip to this particular loggerific town I always wind up using the time on the road to script porno movies. The last one was so funny I kept laughing out loud and confirming for Delia that her girlfriend is a crazy person. She didn’t go with me today, though, so I got to be crazy all by myself and go places she would rather avoid like the hillbilly head/sex shop and this geeky place.

Here are a couple more shots of the joint to give you a better idea of the scope of their patriotism and firewood-selling enterprise:

Instead of having the wood bundles stacked in one area, they’ve created a car maze & parking-lot border out of individual bundles arranged in lines, with each bundle labeled with a price and the name of the tree it came from (not name like “Tom” or “Cindy”, but Red Cedar, Douglas Fir, etc.):

I just enjoy seeing people making a modest and dirty living combining everything they love. Like, FUCK you! I’m going to let my dog come to work with me and rub it’s dirty ass all over the carpet while I get high in the back room and show off my ninja sword to my buddies!! Are you sure you don’t need a cord of wood to go with that? LET’S SPRAY PAINT THE SINGLE-WIDE RED, WHITE AND BLUE!!! GodDAMN I love this country!!

Yesterday I catalogued our inventory of sex toys in a spreadsheet to try to keep track of which ones we have (and haven’t) shot with.

This is the Tantus Sport which I got from their closeout section in a clearance color; I’ve gotten a lot of spectacular (and low-priced silicone toys) from them. In fact, my favorites are ones they don’t make anymore.

We have over fifty sex toys, which is pretty awesome. Really a dream come true, I have to say. There have been others over the years we’ve thrown away because they were cheap/dangerous jelly or broke/got used-to-death.

Crazily, we have barely shot photos or videos with more than a handful of them. We use a lot of them during our live webcam shows so it seems like we get/have gotten a lot of use from them, but there aren’t actually a ton of pics or masturbation-with-toys videos on our sites. Pretty dumb, eh? Hence the spreadsheet.

The Tantus Goddess vibrating dildo (a gift from FurryGirl’s Sensual Vegan):

Lately I’ve been CRAVING new toys in categories we don’t have. Example: we don’t have any big “realistic” toys in our collection which seems like a SERIOUS oversight, especially considering how few of my close webwhore colleagues seem into those types of things and how TOTALLY into them I am (so it seems like a good niche for me to “fill”, hardy har har). Sure, I like the way our “non-representational” dildos FEEL, but I fucking love seeing chicks spreading themselves out with big fat fake pricks and I love the way realistic “dongs” look especially when there are good contrasting colors between the head and the shaft (hello, Black Thunder). I totally want more DONGS.

One of two Head O State Obama dildos we bought:

I can’t allow myself to purchase any more sex toys, though, until we’ve shot more with the ones we already have. Even though I totally want a pussy pump, more stainless steel, DEFINITELY more artistic stuff like carved wooden dildos, art glass, & unique molded silicone insertables. AND BIG DIRTY DICK-SHAPED DILDOS, like I already mentioned. Just can’t let myself get them. I’m not sure why we never got on the bus that has sex toy manufacturers constantly sending us unsolicited samples, but that’s just never happened to us, I’m sad to say.

I did get a couple of toys to review from the nice folks at Pleasure Me Now, but I stalled out after the glass dildo when I couldn’t bring myself to properly review the smart balls I was super excited about trying but was then unsuccessful at enjoying. Not that they asked me to only write positive reviews — they didn’t — but I felt like I hadn’t given those GIGANTIC FUCKING BALLS a fair shake and kept procrastinating on setting aside time to really give them a good trial. Sometimes my anal retentiveness is an obstacle to getting freebies.

One of the problems with our sex toy collection (and pretty much everything we buy to wear or use in photo shoots) is the constant struggle to decide between buying A LOT of cheap and semi-generic things on our limited budget or buying A FEW unique and really marvelous things . . . and not being able to buy anything else for months. Usually I wind up buying more for less rather than investing a bunch of money in a very-few expensive and spectacular items. We buy most of our clothes second-hand or on sale and same goes for the toys, so I rarely spend more than $40 on a single toy. Which is why I have zero “realistic” dildos, since all the good ones are in the $60-$90 range (and are made of questionable, possibly-hazardous and hard-to-clean materials making the investment even LESS sound since Delia and I might not be able to share them or get very many miles out of them or they’ll stain if we get lipstick on them, etc.). It doesn’t really make sense, since even with these frugal choices designed to give us (and our members) more variety I’m not even using all of the stuff AND I *still* use certain things OVER and OVER again (like my Hitachi Magic Wand).

It’s the whole dilemma of “do I buy five crappy Frederick’s of Hollywood corsets or one REAL corset?” And then the ultimate challenge of making use of everything, which is where I actually fall down on the job(s). But who wouldn’t after exhausting all those brain cells on making these tough shopping decisions? Most members don’t give a fuck anyway as long as you’re regularly posting something new and hot — the mileage you can get on one slimline vibe, a little hard work and a cheap pair of pantyhose is pretty remarkable, but in terms of standing out in a crowd with your promo materials and really presenting something SPECIAL that continues to be personally exciting sometimes you want things that are fancy, different, stylish, etc. Well, almost all the time I want those things. And never quite succeed in getting them. Which leaves me with something average which is tiresome.

Even more tiresome? All of this is leading into yet another blog entry about shopping for sexy stuff which I’ll try to post soon but I had no idea I was going to spend an hour writing THIS one.

I went to the store for a colon cleanse kit (details to come in another entry) and some other goodies while Delia was at her meeting. The worker bees were doing their nightly cleanup routine where they’re totally in your way except for when you want to check out, and then they ignore you (and you know your irritation with them is totally reciprocated because you’re in THEIR way, too). I walked out happy with my purchases, but making my foul “I hate people!” frowny-face.

In the empty parking lot as I loaded my bag into our van I happened to glance out into the dark street just in time to see a car swishing by. It looked familiar . . . was it? YES! It was my girlfriend on her way home and she SAW me! You have no idea how big my grin was by the time Delia turned on her blinker and pulled in, rolling down her window just to give me a kiss.

I know it’s totally dorky and makes no sense that it would make me so happy to see her like that when we’re together 97% of the time. I can’t explain it, but it felt so good. Less than five minutes later we were both home together again, kissing in the driveway and talking about our colons.

I am the luckiest girl in the whole wide world.

While other women are out shopping for bargains today, we’re staying home to masturbate on cam. Yes, I planned it that way deliberately to target the men in the states who stay home jacking off to internet porn while the wimmin-folk are out in the malls blowing money.

I’m sure many of those women would call me evil, exploiting the Thanksgiving holiday for profit by appealing to people’s “base” instincts. Leading their men-folk astray and causing them to cyber-cheat while their loving wives are out dutifully blowing wads of dough.

Can you tell I think that’s all a crock of shit? The way the chaste and moral crowd points their fingers at whores like me while they’re out TRAMPLING PEOPLE TO DEATH for Black Friday bargains?

A worker died after being trampled and a woman miscarried when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart Friday morning, witnesses said.

The unidentified worker, employed as an overnight stock clerk, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.

Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.

As far as I know, no one has ever had a miscarriage watching porn, so take THAT family values!

I break out into a cold sweat whenever I hear about and imagine crowds-gone-wild; all of those sports arena horror stories and such make me crap my pants; I am deathly afraid of the mob, of our basest, wild-eyed instincts stomping the fuck out of each other. Of having the breath crushed out of me.

We were watching one of those MOST SHOCKING CRAZY-ASS THINGS CAUGHT ON VIDEO shows the other night showing a riot in Vancouver after a hockey game; people running amok, setting shit on fire, overturning cop cars, smashing into storefronts, etc. It’s just bizarre to me that people are so scared by PORN and do so much to try to censor it out of existence, but no one ever says we should stop allowing mass-attendance at sporting events, or we should ban sports all together. It’s a stupid proposal, I guess, but one that makes WAY MORE SENSE than getting rid of porn or continuing all the lame-ass crackdowns on sex work in general.

People are fucking insane, especially when they’re in large groups where they feel no personal responsibility for the damage that can be done by the mad power of the unstoppable horde.

On that note, I must now prepare myself for the unruly, anonymous crowds that might attend my webcam show in a couple of hours. But no matter how badly they behave, it couldn’t possibly be as unpleasant as SHOPPING today.

Thanks to Delia for the heads up on today’s trampling death.

This will be a very boring entry to read if you aren’t interested in health issues:

Today I *had* to cancel my shows because I woke up with a headache that developed into a full-fledged, obvious migraine. I’ve done shows before in spite of them and just kept the lights down low and abstained from masturbating to keep all that blood flow in and out of my head consistent, but that wasn’t an option today as I had diarrhea and was almost puking my brains out.

Of course, I thought I’d been very good lately about avoiding triggers like bananas, peanut butter, caffeine, etc. but then we realized that yesterday? I ate smoked salmon, bacon and avocados — all yummy things on the food trigger list. And for some reason I just thought turkey bacon would be exempt from what makes bacon be on that list, but I was SO wrong. On top of that the entire past week I’ve been very light sensitive with sun spots, etc. and have had a metal taste in my mouth often and other weird flavors on the roof of my mouth; I think I’ve been teetering on the brink. Today before I got nauseated I was standing in the bathroom and suddenly smelled an overpowering scent of bread mold for a few seconds and then it was gone; it was an olfactory hallucination which I do not think I’ve ever had before, but apparently is a less-common type of aura preceding migraines.

I was diagnosed with classic migraines as a kid but they were much worse back then with guaranteed puke-fests and a very distinct tunnel-vision and other weird feelings warning me they were coming. As an adult I’ve been sort of dismissive of them because they’re different and less severe than they were as a kid and teenager when they were absolutely incapacitating. The thing is, they were a lot more RARE when I was younger, too. They might not be as bad now and I might be able to avoid barfing my brains out, but they’re more frequent and last a lot longer (maybe because I’m not puking?) so I don’t know why I just keep trying to pretend they’re not a big giant deal.

Low and behold, I discovered today when frantically googling that migraines can also be caused by thyroid problems. It will be such a relief if that’s the reason for a bunch of symptoms on my mounting list of health complaints. I feel like I’m wasting so much time in my life trying to figure out what the fuck is wrong with me. I used to think I was the picture of health, not in an athletic way, but in an indestructible-nerd way. Quirks like attention deficit disorder weren’t things I saw as vulnerabilities or symptoms of poor construction, they were what made me SPECIAL and amazing! Now I feel like a whining puddle of annoying health problems from my lactose intolerance to my allergies to animals to my inability to conceive to my insane levels of PMS to my anxiety to my sensitivities to every little morsel of stimulation to my inability to hold conversations on cell phones. Yes, I still find it very hard to believe other people are able to separate the noises on the phone and the road from the voice and then actually piece the sounds together into words that are strung into sentences intended to convey meaning. If I were a character on a video game with a full life counter who had to talk (and listen) for three minutes on a cell phone, you would see my juice depleted to almost nothing in that amount of time.

Anyhoo, we’re getting up early tomorrow to trek to Tacoma for an appointment with my brilliant and wonderful psychiatrist. I haven’t seen him in at least five years and am looking forward to being re-assessed by him and getting a Ritalin scrip. I will definitely talk to him about my other brain stuff like the migraines, potential thyroid issues, etc. That is the benefit of going to a really good psychiatrist rather than just a psychologist; they are DOCTORS who know lots of interesting shit.

After that we’re meeting up with Delia’s ex-girlfriend and her partner for dinner, then spending the night with our friend Ron; all of these people are creative-thinkers so it’s fun to brainstorm with them, not boring “regular” socializing. On Tuesday we have to do some shopping (our threadbare flannel sheets bit the dust and are ripping on my side of the bed and my good hot water bottle is so thin it’s about to burst) and meet up with my mom to give her a birthday present (which I also have not picked out yet).

FYI: if you’ve gotten an email from me in the past three months, you are one of about a dozen people who can say that. I’m just mentioning it so everyone else will know that it’s not just YOU who hasn’t heard from me personally, I’m just having a hard time getting it all done. My computer time is prioritized to be eaten up doing stuff that’s meant to be consumed by more than one person at a time. It sucks, but there’s not a whole lot I can do about it unless I want to stop sleeping and give myself more migraines.

If you make porn these days, you really need a system for storing and backing up your photos and video files, even if you just run “amateur” sites with homemade content. We are going through growing pains ourselves, so I’m taking this opportunity to outline some storage suggestions for my fellow webwhores:

*Maintain copies of all of your raw, unedited, full-size photos IN ADDITION to duplicates that you have edited and resized (but NOT optimized/reduced in quality for the web or stamped with a domain name – those versions will be saved with your site). And have backups of all that (basically four copies of each photo).

*KEEP LOCAL COPIES OF YOUR ENTIRE WEBSITE(S), BLOGS, ETC. ON HARD DRIVE. Yes, your hosting company should have backups, but don’t rely on that. Everything you upload to your blog, website, etc. should also be saved offline with you on your machine or wherever. If you create content online (using wordpress, google docs, etc.) download backups to your hard drive. Guess what this means? You now should have at least six copies of each good photo you’ve taken and published.

*Shoot video on tape NOT digital or cd/dvd. Keep your original tapes safe. Like, IN a firesafe. Capture them as AVI’s and keep those, too (we burn ours to dvd).

*Keep your old emails and make backups of them. You are/should be a business-person and keep copies of all of your communications with customers, colleagues, service people, etc.

*Develop a backup schedule and log for recording each of your backups, what you backed up, where you put it, etc.

*Remember that anything you burn to dvd or cd will degrade with time. Don’t have your only copy of data stored on this type of media. Seriously, google it. Also, remember that hard drives fail. It does no good to make a backup copy of your email, for example, and save that backup on the same exact drive as the originals.

*Rent a safe deposit box to store your backups, your will (including what you want to be done with your website(s) and content when you die), and a small flash drive or something like that with backups of your will and all the login information needed to take carry out your wishes plus software licenses, etc. You might consider making private, clandestine arrangements to have this maintained out of the country if you live in a fucked up nation such as the United States of America where the feds can bust down your door and seize everything because you are guilty of making OBSCENITY. If you want to know what that would feel like, you should watch The Notorious Bettie Page for a dramatic recreation of purging your art-porn to try to save yourself from prison. And then recognize it happens still today. The feds ARE searching and seizing, and indie webwhores ARE madly deleting and trashing their archived homemade porn because someone called Child Protective Services or the local police complaining that someone in the neighborhood is having sex AND TAKING PICTURES OF IT AND SELLING THOSE PICTURES!!

Basically you should get twice as much storage as you need to house all of your most precious data once for your safe deposit box, then switch them out; let’s pretend you have 600 GB of photos you want to keep safe so ideally you’d buy TWO one terrabyte hard drives for your backups. Make your first backup and put it in your safe deposit box. In three months make another backup on your second 1TB backup drive with all your old and NEW pictures you’ve taken since then, take it to the bank (or send it to whoever) to replace the backup that’s already there, and bring that one home to use next quarter.

*Insurance. Insurance is tricky because if you’re working online from home and renting, but need to protect your BUSINESS assets (that are in a house that you rent where you’re not supposed to be operating a business). . . well. Yeah. TRICKY. Anyway, insurance money could never totally compensate you for losing photos/videos/original work, so while it’s good to have insurance to replace your cameras, computers, etc. if there was a fire or break-in, money can’t buy back the DATA on your computer so back that shit up.

Is that expensive and time consuming all to maintain archives you will never need if all goes well? Yes, it is. But this is your business and you don’t want to lose all of the work you’ve done, especially if you care about your work and are proud of it. If you don’t have the money, do the best you can, and save up so you can afford the security of having your work backed up and kept safe.

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Do I take my own advice in all of these matters? No, not yet, but I know that I should. Part of the problem is that I’m extremely reluctant to spend money on external hard drives; when you read the reviews it’s hard not to notice that HALF OF THEM ARE NEGATIVE. They fail, they are poorly designed, they’re loud, they overheat, THEY FAIL, etc.

This has some promise though: the Thermaltake Hard Drive Dock. Instead of buying a bunch of external drives (with their funky, clunky, fucked up designs and tendency to fail), installing a bunch of internal drives (which you don’t have infinite amounts of space to house) or setting up a server, you can hot swap naked hard drives which is cheaper, saves space, saves time and is really convenient for maintaining backups especially if you are putting them in a safe or if you don’t want to buy drives with lots of storage just because you feel like you NEED to since you only have so much room in your case. I haven’t bought one yet, but it’s a huge relief just to know it exists. There are loads of other benefits, like being able to access laptop-sized hard drives (I have one of those packed away with stuff I’d like to get at) and being able to switch out hard drives almost as casually as if they were game cartridges.

Yes, I enjoyed watching the dorky little geek porn video.

Any webwhores with further suggestions or people with special insight on this stuff, feel free to comment; I would love to read more advice from people who take porn and blog backups seriously.