Computer cynicism

…or, maybe some adware ain’t so good yet.

I was off image-delving in the pre-dawn hours yesterday morning and found in this web tutorial by artist Roberto Campus on how to photoshop and paint a mad scientist.  It’s a good tutorial, Campus produces one good-looking madman, and I commend the link to your attention if you’re interested.

But what really caught my eye was an ad that popped up in the middle of the post, which redeployed my search term.  I couldn’t help but take a screenshot for posterity.

 

Seriously, is that what computers think of human family life?

Mermaids unlimited

So it began with a little bit of searching.  I was trying to find out a little bit about the provenance of this image, which really ought to have been featured in the teuthology series of about a week back, but didn’t make it in somehow:

Originally found at Janitor of Lunacy, but without too much other information.  Time to invoke TinEye, which certainly did it for provenance.

Cover art for the Marvel Comics magazine Epic Illustrated, June 1982, done by Frank Brunner.  I owe the information to a German-language site, which shows this re-purposing of the image:

“The  eight-armed death!”  Now that’s alarming.  Still it’s quite satisfying to know more about the image.

But more satisfying still was following through to find the image also used on a Russian-language site called Русалочья Лагуна (rusaloch’ya laguna — “Mermaid Lagoon”).  Believe me, if you get a kick out of rather frank depictions of mermaids and other related watery folk, you’ll get a huge kick out of this site even if you can’t read a word of Russian.

Of course, if you do have good Russian literacy skills, you can also enjoy exquisite poetry by Anna Akhmatova.  Who would have thought…

Shokoshu High School

Readers interested in the Gnosis College mad-science locus might enjoy a project with which it shares some affinities called Shokoshu High School, which showcases work done by creators Niceman and Stormbringer.  (I’ve followed the work of Niceman for some time at Renderotica and Deviantart for some time, and it’s a pleasure to see some work of vis out on the open web.)

Shokoshu High School is described as “…exclusive finishing school for girl students aged 18 and over is located…on a particularly pleasant semi-tropical island.”  Reassuring and agreeable!  And you can walk through the site, following scripts and encountering all sorts of curious goings on.  While the predominant tropes seem to be tentacle and monster sex, there is definitely some nifty mad science going on there as well.

Consider entering the science lab:

Just as you thought at first glance, within each cylindrical container floats the nude body of a young female. They all appear to be in their late teens, with well-formed bodies. Bubbles ascend through the fluid in the tanks and you realise that these girls are not dead. Rather they seem to be in some sort of suspended animation. Each face appears to have a rather sad expression and you find yourself wondering if active minds lie behind those blank eyes. You shiver and avert your eyes.

Well, excuse me Mr. Narrative Voice: perhaps you are averting your eyes.  Dr. Faustus is wondering where he put that academic curriculum vitae of all those years ago and wondering if there might not just be some faculty openings…

There are some fine examples of Niceman’s work, both in CG depicting a mad lab, complete with an instance of the tube girl meme:

And also an example of a live-action alter:

Doesn’t get more mad-sciencey than that, does it?

A bizarre instrument?

Image delving for sexy girl robots for a slightly different purpose from this post, I came across a number or articles on the machine depicted to the left.  It’s “Moaning Lisa,” a robot which you can manipulate to bring to a simulated orgasm.

Well, that might be mad science enough just on its own, but what really caught my eye was that one of the best articles on this innovative piece of technology was on Synthtopia, a site devoted to electronic music, under the headline “Moaning Lisa:  The Most Bizarre Electronic Music Instrument Ever.”

Quoth her inventor, Matt Ganucheau

The process leading to a female orgasm is a uniquely delicate challenge for both sexes leaving it a mystery to most men and women. Moaning Lisa is an instillation that examines this complex process by simplifying it into an almost game-like state. With Lisa, as in life, there are no instructions on display. This leaves each participant to discover how Lisa’s true sexual potential is unlocked.

Wow.  I would be remiss, of course, if I didn’t embed appropriate video.

Matt Bell reporting from 2007 Arse Electronica:

The presentation of Moaning Lisa:

One has to love an audience question like, “So when are you going to release Moan Moan Revolution?”

But what really motivated posting this (somewhat) old news is that I hadn’t seen it before, and it was yet another reminder of how other people are thinking what you’re thinking.  Do you remember Tanya Yip’s rather unusual experience of being taught to sing better by being played like an instrument?

Tanya whips off her sweatshirt and casts it aside, then reaches back and undoes her bra-strap. Her bra hangs loose.

TANYA

Locrian! Please…

And, following that, her subsequent fantasy of becoming an instrument?

Sometimes I wonder if there are any unexplored erotic ideas.

The blog of Rastakax added to rolls

A new addition to the blogroll for this weekend morning, the blog of Rastakax, who been working on 3D art and animations of a particularly kinky kind:  tentacle sex, girls & monsters, and interspecies impregnation, with hints of erotic mind control thrown in.   I first encountered vis work in the galleries of Renderotica, and am pleased to discover that ve is running vis own site.   The material isn’t quite in the realm of thaumatophilia — it’s more on the very kinky end of “chainmail bikini” fantasy — although there are clearly certain thematic overlaps between my thing and vis.  What strikes me more, though, is admiration for the individual artist (ve and any other) willing to use the tools technology makes available to create vis own erotic world — characters, kinks and all.  This latter subject I’ll write more on anon, but for now, salutations Rastakax.

Mad Science inessential — The Atomic Brain

An early and probably malign influence from my childhood UHF TV-watching days was a 1964 movie called either Monstrosity or The Atomic Brain.  It had mad science, brain swaps, three lovely girls in terrible peril, the mind of a cat in a woman’s body, and the unholy quest for immortality by one of the most unpleasant old-lady characters to grace the grade-Z screen.

Despite all these pluses it feels overlong even at 65 minutes.  But oh, it does have its moments.

Such as an early cinematic naked girl-in-a-tubeTwo of  them, within the first ten minutes.  The people who made this might not have been great writers, but they sure knew about getting sexploitative early.  Here is the second of them:

The poor naked thing is a corpse, stolen froma nearby graveyard.  The man in the radiation suit is our anti-heroic mad scientist, attempting to revive her tissues (by means of “atomic fission, produced in the cyclotron,” according to the narrator), so that he can then implant an animal’s brain (!) in her.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work so well, and she ends up merely as a zombie.

Maybe this movie isn’t quite so bad after all.  Is it available at the Internet Archive?  But of course!

Enjoy if you can. (And if you can’t just a little, why are you here?)

Death or victory

I’ve often wondered what might have lead to my writing something like this exchange in The Apsinthion Protocol.

MOIRA

It would be a one-way trip for whoever did it.

NANETTA

It would mean giving up everything in this world.

MOIRA

And possibly entering a far more wonderful one.

NANETTA

Or it might mean a few moments of ecstasy, and then annihilation.

MOIRA

And there is likely very little time to decide.

(In my bleak moments I often think that what Nanetta and Moira would eventually achieve — even if it was just blissful annihilation — would be superior to the alternative:  adulthood.)

One finds one’s erotic inspiration where one is.  Where I was for a lengthy stretch of young adulthood was Harvard’s Widener Library.  Had I had my druthers, the erotic inspiration would have taken the form of a studious-but-sultry meganekko but sadly there was a severe druthers shortage in Cambridge at the time and so I didn’t get mine.

There was, however, this mural executed by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925).

A doughboy embraces death and victory in the same moment.  (We know he’s victorious because there’s a defeated figure in a stahlhelm at his feet, presumably one of those nasty wicked Germans.)  At the time I would pass this mural daily (it’s on the library’s main entrance stairs) my conscious thoughts were that it was a singularly shameless bit of militaristic propaganda.

My subconscious thoughts, I conjecture, were on a different track entirely, thinking that maybe it’s cool — erotic even — to throw one’s life in like that.  It’s a natural interpretation — look at the soldier’s face, it’s expression and positioning under Victory’s bared breast.   It would explain a lot about the sort of things I’ve written.

Sargent didn’t do much in the more explicitly erotic line, although there is some, for example this study of a nude Egyptian girl.

Orientalist art — something I’ve found appealing before.