From the...?: I like pleasure spiked with pain.

From the...?: I like pleasure spiked with pain.

Hey...

So like, Hi.

I Didn't think you folks came around any more, but after looking under the hood I found foot prints... And lots of them.

So how have you all been?

Oh cool, that's always a good way to pass the time.

Me?

Yah, well you know...

I ended up closing the in world gallery on Second Life. Hmmmm? Why? Oh geeze, well I just can be... I mean you all know.

Right?

Looks like I better start at the beginning...


I am self destructive. Be it through the various activities I engage in to my own mental behavior it seems I have the desire to see myself in a hole. I either can't handle the pressures of a life that is far to easy to even complain about or I have a strong masochistic desire to just twist in the wind. I would like to say I keep these bouts of self conflagration confined to just my person, but I don't live in a void. Because if you did there would be no oxygen to light the fire, but I would implode, which is what my intention is, but I have learned that there is fallout and victims other then myself. Normally here is where I would come completely clean and tell all of you how much of an idiot Mony can be, I would poke fun at myself for a bit and then I would push on. I can't really do that this time, because in this past 14 month period things have been pretty fxxked up. I would never be that one bitch who goes around talking smack. Well I can be but I am not gonna be that one that has to throw it up on a soap box. Mony knows that she can do dumb stuff for even dumber reasons and no one is ever the cause of an of it, just I am. Facilitated or not by third parties, I still have the reigns. Right? So in the short I had a rough patch in about every angle of the thing we called life and I crawled under a rock.

I want to thank anyone who has come to this blog in the mean time. Whether you are new to it, checking up to see if it's been updated, or if you are one of the ones who helped me start it. I owe you a lot and I can never repay you. But let me do SOMETHING...

The Gallery Lapideus: Mission statement
Ugh... damn... I have no clue what it is or going to be. Since the original concept was to cover the goings on of the Second Life area of the same name I use to run. Now I did expand really quick a couple years ago to try and cover a bunch of stuff in the related area for Second Life and a lot of the internet abroad as compared to my own tastes. When I started to revamp for the "Season 2" stuff I had a much broader idea. I had a lot of positive feed back on the reporting stuff I did so I started to put together a number of articles based around stuff in the A.S.F.R. community. This had lit a spark in me but I really collapsed around the time I was wrapping them up. I think somewhere in the external-drive I have the notes. BUT... I will get back to that in a moment. What I have to decide is what am I going to do with this space. Especially if I make good on dong stuff again. I would ask you all, but your telling me to do my thing, so I figure its about all I can do. In short I have no clue what I will be giving you all, but I promise I want to give you something worth you coming here for.

The State of the Genre
WTF happened? I mean seriously, take a fetish break and when you come back its a cataclysm. Now that isn't a fare assessment really. When I do dig out the before mentioned notes realize we all seen a lot of this coming. If you wonder what I am talking about, let me break it down into three segments,

The Past: Now I would like to say I was around in the good old days of IRC and all of that but really I arrived right at the end of that. If you can remember those days before then or even around that time you will have probably fond memories of those covert fetish searches. Oh it was so much fun, I remember it feeling like an adventure. I mean seriously. I would be up to the most awful wee hours of the morning following links or suggestions from chat rooms. Search engine algorithms weren't designed for our kind back then so we had to use our undeveloped claws to dig through the minutia. If you were looking for a statue of a beautiful woman, well its a good chance you'd have found tons of sites about some well known landmark or an obscure page somebody had made. It was usually a boring dig until you nailed that nugget of gold. I remember when I seen my first photo-manip. I am not to much a snob to say I was in love. I mean to see that others had tastes like that to and they were willing to just give it away to us. We all need to say a thanks to those ancestors because they made this internet for us. Then we got to see the rise of themed sites which would collect the work of those people and deposit it in a place where we could all gather to look and see. I remember being so paranoid over getting a virus I would copy and paste these works into other formats like Microsoft Paint and Word Pad to try and keep from getting them.. After all it was always said that it was from the porn sites where you got them, remember? What am a I rambling about? This has to be your question I bet, so I better get with it. What I am alluding to is that there was nothing for most of us to even grasp onto, we floated in the ether taking wild swipes and grabbing onto what ever. Sometimes it was a story, or a picture, or a friend over chat that we clutched onto. Out of this time a lot of what I call my idols of the genre came up.These titans gave us the terrafirma from which we could walk on to seek out others by looking in places where the goal of those searches were gathered. It was their creativity and foresight that we owe the past nearly twenty years to. I am no archivist and I am no scholar, philosopher yes but those others, no. So if I were to be spouting off names I bet I would have most wrong or out of order. I use to get mad when people would use Wikipedia to tell me facts from periods f my life I was in. Just because you read it on the site doesn't mean that is how it was on the ground. Though I have come to realize that when your on the ground, you have missed a huge chunk of the big picture. We were living it, yet there was way more going on then any one of us could have known. You could call this a "Golden Age" of A.S.F.R. where we got to know so much more about the different sub-genres as well as the definitions that would rise and fall. The sites, groups, cabals, clans, what ever would rise and fall and a number of minor and major conflicts and celebrations would come up. Again I wont try and list them because a lot of the time I stayed on the side lines through the majority of this and generally don't have anything to say even on the subjects where I was involved. Besides who am I to speak about others. If you remember those times when the great sites walked the land and we flocked to certain names because for the first time in our lives we seen those fetishes we loved so much rendered, then you can do what I am doing and look back with a smile. If you don't remember those time. I just wasted your time.

The Present: Now we hit the rough patch. Is hard to say where I can define the present. Because when I wrote this I was in the present but often the present follows a linear path backwards a little while before it hits The Past. I would possibly start the present at about 2009/2010. I think that's when a few of my friends in this life style started to talk about rumblings. Whether it was a site suddenly going offline or that definitions and sub-groups were fracturing the community. It was about then that the the hydra that is A.S.F.R. started to pull at its self. Over those previous decade and a half we had started with a simple kink devoted to robots and it burst into a number of other heads that we would either come to  love exclusively or favor over the others. I know I spent my hours caressing the mannequin head of the A.S.F.R. hydra all the while never paying much thought to he original robot head. I really think a lot of the first real tears began with the doll head. The doll community exploded and it charged ahead of the rest of the body until it pulled from the rest of the heads to form its own creature. No longer satisfied to be one of many it rose into the spotlight. Suddenly A.S.F.R. wasn't recognized by people who were interested in dolls. I can remember when I came to Second Life it was a term almost no one knew. Yet I was watching all of this A.S.F.R. stuff going on. I am not sure when money began to enter the picture, possibly about the height of the doll interest. I know have to say this, art is ALWAYS about money. Because we say its not, but you ever tried buying a canvas with artistic integrity? Art is only available to us as a species when there is just enough to survive and as soon as we are able to make it another day those of us with the artistic talent will use the left overs to create. A lot of those beloved sites and the work were done by people who just made art for the sake of making art. Meaning they did that stuff because the wanted to, not because it was their job to. I mean probably a graphic artist or three was doing it as a job but that's beside the point, what I am saying is, is that it was charity to us. And when stuff got tight all around lots of it was sacrificed for the age old human instinct of self preservation instead of being used for art. Someone somewhere with a good head on their shoulders must have seen this and stepped up and became a patron of art in the doll community. Whether through benevolence or shear greed is not for discussion here but it had the effect off sending a ripple through that community that was felt back in the rest of the hydra. Because suddenly Dolls where hot commodity and doll themed stuff that was suddenly no longer regulated to the niche of deviant fetish. The contrarians of the genre, myself one of the biggest, looked at this and would get upset. Suddenly you have people loving dolls? WTF, I actually loved dolls in an intimate way and now its like totally cool for anyone to be a doll lover. That's more of a personal problem but I think that was felt in the rest of the parts of A.S.F.R. When things began to upswing economically I think you suddenly seen either people looking to see what other little gems were out there that could be lifted up and re-polished for the wider audience to see or the holders of those gems beginning to polish them and hold them up. This made the entire hydra begin to pull in different directions as the ideas of mannequins, or statues, or robots began to be lifted from the regular place of sci-fi or fantasy one off episodes and entire ideas formed around them. Self publishing places like the venerable deviantART and ebooks started to churn out stuff that didn't have to go through the reams of "will people like this" where it would be trimmed to fit a huge variety. I can imagine if you look at the amount of commissions on dA, I bet you would see a huge increase in more then just the genre I am discussing here, Because suddenly there was money to be made.Which again brings out that contrarian, because we had people who had who bled for us by maintaining free sites where our favorite art and stories could be stored who seen the same people who relied on them to basically digitally publish their work try and make a buck somewhere else. That would burn anyone's ass, and you cant condemn anyone who decided that it wasn't worth the effort any longer. One could argue there was still thousands of readers and viewers out their that depended on those sites because simply paying for a website to show posed mannequins or ebooks on petrification was not an option. I would not be happy if I had done it for those years and now the chance that you can sell your stuff that trumps the community. So what do we do?

The Future: Seriously do not ask me. Remember I just ran off for over a year because little old Mony can't be expected to deal with a little pressure. Though if your still reading I can at least owe you a lay out of what I can see happening. I think it is time that we all or at least the ones who can pony up for this stuff. In the modern world its the only way to get new material. Or at least see it flow regularly. We can not expect people to drop money on programs, art supplies, web sites, or anything for that matter without making them feel like its worth it. I know a lot of artists will say they write because they love it and the people who say they love there work is the reward. I do believe in that, but when that person can't get stuff because they bust there rear and and money is tight we can't then bemoan the loss of their stuff. It is my belief, and I am simply hoping they will, they will take that money I pay and invest it into their craft. So when the next Photoshop comes out they can snatch it and improve their work. Maybe its a high minded concept but we all need to be patrons of the arts that we love if we want to see it flourish. The other side of this coin is, we need those artists to come through for us. They can't feed us garbage and expect us to pay. And they have to ensure the product they do give is consistent to expect to consistently be supported. Maybe in main stream commercial industry we can be expected to buy crap on name alone, but in this smaller new arena that will just kill us all. I mean that. Because its on the artists shoulders to ask us a fare price for what they do. This BS where sites ask over twenty bucks a month for thirty new pictures, where half are the same thing in different angles, or ebooks that are around seven dollars for a mere six thousand words is, excuse my language, a fxxking joke, You only mock yourself and hurt us all by asking those kind of prices. Know what you produce and ask for compensation, not profit. IF you show you constantly can put out quality material, then you can ask us for more money, and then use it to improve by investing your craft, and after you have done that can you be looking to turn a profit. You can't see it as if you has a twelve dollar book and sold two being the same thing as having a two dollar book and selling twelve. Because while both add to twenty four, because you may have the same the amount of money but only a fraction of the admirers of your work. Even if you expect word of mouth to carry from those people the ramifications are not the same as a dozen people taling about the awesome gynoid comic they got for a couple bucks. I know this is different then what we are use to. We are use to our Legacy of Timeless Beauty Archive or our Naga's Den fixes. But they are gone or at least not putting new stuff out. Times have changed and we need to change with it. We need to look at the future, because those other two parts I wrote about are not coming back. Never. I want to point out that this is only my opinion, because right now we need to decide all of us together is there a future for us as a community.

I really do love you all,
Monyca Medusa Meiyers

p.s.
Thank yous,

You, the person who read this far.

The others who kept coming back even though the blog jut sat there and sat there. You made me at least write this.

Thank you especially to Amber and Jenny, we might never have known by the way things turned out but I do cherish the time I sent with you girls. I hope you know that I do love you and am sorry for any thing I may have caused. Forgive this moron please. You gave me a soft landing after a couple falls.

And thank you Mistress, only a true masochist would allow this stinging insect back into her arms. My admiration is flattened by your majesty.

p.s.s.

ITS THE RETURN OF THE GREEN LADY!