Month: January 2016

100th Follower Request Post (part 2) or The Million Dollar Question

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

ellaenchanting:

First part posted here. I’m kind of proud of it myself. :)

Request:the best posts are always about girls called nicole getting turned into bimbos called nikki :P if thats not the sort of thing you mean, a post about why hypnosis turns you on and why you think it turns others on also great :)- from @bimbonicolette

What about hypnosis turns me on?

Short answer: I’m not entirely sure!

Shorter answer: Everything!

Respectably long answer:

Truthfully, I’m still trying to figure out all of the ins and outs of my hypnofetish. It’s been buzzing around in the back of my brain for years, but I’ve only entirely consciously acknowledged and come to terms with hypnosis as a fetish for the last few months. (Origin story here.) Seriously- if you had asked me about hypnofetishism in May, I would have blushed and quickly changed the topic. This is after years of reading mcstories, obsessively watching fetishy TV show clips over and over, and hypnotizing people/being hypnotized by people. This is also despite the fact that I’ve always fantasized way more about hypnosis than about actual sex*. So, I may not be the most insightful person (on this or in general). Ask me next week and my answers may change.

Reasons I Like Hypnosis (in a sexy way):

1. Fear: Oddly.

     So, one of my formative experiences with hypnotism was seeing a stage hypnotist on Nickelodeon as a kid and FREAKING OUT about it. I took the show way too literally. That hypnotist was so obviously dangerous! Why was someone so powerful allowed to run around in public playing with people’s minds? I didn’t understand why everyone else was so calm about this being on TV. In fact, there’s a little part of me that still wonders why people who know nothing about hypnotism ever volunteer to be hypnotized. From the outside, it looks exactly like mind control and for a control freak like me that’s deeply scary (see below). Even today, knowing everything that I know about the safety of hypnosis, it still feels a little scary and dangerous. There’s a psychological theory called misattribution of arousal– the idea that fear and sexual arousal look very physiologically similar so people tend to mix them up in their heads. It’s why you should always take your date to a roller coaster or a horror movie. :) I remember being abnormally scared by hypnosis stuff when I was a kid, so there’s likely some misattribution of arousal that created an obsession and eventually a fetish. (Now, of course, I experience accurate attribution of arousal.)

2. Trust: I don’t normally play around with things I fear during sex- I’m not a traditional BDSMer and I don’t have the seemingly-ubiquitous lady rape fantasy. What makes the hypnosis fear sexy is the greater or equal amount of trust that balances out that fear. I know normal BDSM play has trust as an implicit component, but the trust in hypnosis is so much more explicit and stated. When I’m being hypnotized, I love that I’m doing something a little scary and that there’s someone there to protect and guide me and keep me safe. It’s a bit regressive, but in a very nice way. I have a hypnotist friend who will hold my hand and tell me he’s right there with me when I’m tranced and that is AMAZING. It feels incredibly right. When I’m the hypnotist, I really really enjoy the trust that is placed in me and become very protective. I love it when my subjects get that happy trancey glow and when they’re obviously having a good time. I love how much they’ve allowed themselves to trust me and themselves to let the good time happen. It’s a beautiful thing.

3. Intimacy/ Vulnerability: Following along with the trust, there is so much intimacy and vulnerability in hypnosis. Being hypnotized is in many ways the act of letting down your guard so much with another person that they may see sides of you that even you aren’t aware of. That’s the most intimate thing I can think of. It’s way more intimate than a naked body. The fact that you allow someone to play around with you on that level is letting yourself be very vulnerable. Sharing that vulnerability is profoundly bonding. Seeing someone else willing to give you that gift is also humbling and bonding. As a hypnotist, I love to use that intimacy to find strength and creativity in a subject that they weren’t aware of and bring it to their attention. It’s the process of letting a subject show him- or herself something personal and neat.

4. Control/ Power: This was the hardest part of my hypnofetish to accept. I really like the idea of having a lot of power over someone else (or them having power over me). Like many women, I was often discouraged from seeking power for myself as a child and was told that being anything but a doormat was morally wrong. Wanting power was always a negative thing.  In my real life, I still tend to be passive and quiet and sometimes feel guilty for asserting myself in even the most basic ways. It can make me miserable. I find that when I’m doing more hypnosis (especially as a hypnotist), it often helps me regain a sense of power in other areas of my life. It’s like nothing bad happens when I exercise power in these large theatrical ways so it’s safer for me to exercise it in smaller, day-to-day circumstances. I’m also practicing being powerful in hypnosis in fun, silly, and helpful ways so I’m breaking the idea in my brain that power=bad. Exercising power has not turned me into a bad person. When I allow some of that power to leak into my life I tend to get more done, get along better with people, and generally be happier. Even when I’m a subject, the ability and encouragement to assert what I want is a way of showing power- one that I can transfer to my real life. I also am a bit of a control freak in my passive aggressive way (I blame being raised Baptist) so hypnosis is a way to relax that control- or increase it!

5. Fun/Creativity/Intelligence: Hypnosis can be such a fun, creative thing to do. There are very few limits outside of your and your partner’s imaginations. As a hypnotist, it’s also a thrilling challenge to figure out what’s going to work for each particular subject. (This can also be part of the fun of being a subject- working out a partnership with your hypnotist to collectively work towards your responding more fully.) At it’s best, hypnosis can create a fun synchronicity that feels like magic for both parties involved. I’m a bit sapiosexual, so intelligence is always sexy in a hypnotist or subject (or both!)

6. Relaxation/Focus/Being Cared For/Gentleness: If it’s not obvious from my tumblr, my mind tends to run a million miles a minute in all different directions. I can also be sharply critical, which is a skill (when directed towards new ideas) and a detriment (when it’s directed towards myself). I have a history of both anxiety and depressive disorders and (while I’m doing a lot better now) my brain still has those tendencies. Being hypnotized allows me to relax and focus and enjoy the moment instead of frantically dissecting everything in my surroundings**. It’s like I’m frantically rubbing my hands together and someone holds them apart and loosens them and just lets me rest.  It’s a relief to know it’s OK to let go of that hyperawareness for a little while- that I’m safe and can just relax for a bit. I love being treated gently and being taken care of in general and especially when I’m being hypnotized. I’m historically not good at being gentle to myself (although I’m getting better) so it feels good to be guided to a gentler mindset. As a hypnotist, I really enjoy the hypnotist’s trance that makes me feel calm and focused and settled.

Most of all, I like how different combinations and gradients of these ideas can come together in a trance. In my head, hypnosis is very symbolic of a lot of big themes and experiences. It’s a way for me to play with some of these big themes and come out well and happy on the other side with a partner who is also well and happy. I don’t quite know how it came to have all this symbolic significance for me, but I’m very glad it does. I can’t think of any other single activity that leaves me so deeply satisfied on so many levels.

What about hypnosis turns you on? Can you relate to these ideas, or is it an entirely different set of factors for you?

*I like actual sex and have been proudly slutty at points in my life, but hypnosis is a true, classically Freudian fetish for me- it lives in that part of my brain where sex would normally reside for most people. I didn’t become interested in actual sex until well into my college years.

**I get similar benefits with meditation, but it’s nice to let myself be guided there.

“What about hypnosis turns you on? Can you relate to these ideas, or is it an entirely different set of factors for you?“

Well, while reading this post and trying to compare it to my own experience I kept thinking “Sort of…maybe…slightly…but…no?”. So that’s fun to sort out. Like, yes I was pretty scared of it as a kid, and I don’t even know how I feel about the intimacy aspect, and the control aspect has some appeal but not nearly as much as it did when I was younger because, in hindsight, I think it was always more of an instrumental means-to-an-end thing rather than a goal in itself…

…but those all seem like minor issues to me, to my own sexuality and my own understanding of it. The important thing, the core of it, is restfulness. There a reason one of my tags is “people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me”: to me, the two are all tangled up and blended together. Tiredness and sexual frustration are generally the same feeling, distinguished only by cause and whether spending a while unconscious will fix it.

I’ve never knowingly met anyone else like me. For me, the process of getting into the hypno-blogosphere hasn’t been about finding a community of like-minded people, people who truly get me, but rather finding successive groups of people with increasingly close resemblances to what my hypothetical community would look like, little glimpses here and there of “yes, I actually grok what you’re talking about”. Lately I’ve managed to even find people who are into consensual stuff*, but even with them…like, take all the hype about the “Hypnotic Amnesia” book. I don’t grok memory play at all: it feels like it’s completely missing the point. If I wanted to forget the good bits, I would go take a nap. To me, the point of hypnosis is that we don’t have to settle for that. We can take the enjoyable parts of sleep, the calm and the peacefulness and the wonderful feeling of dozing, the feelings I long for the same way that other people long for sex, without having to deal with the unconsciousness or the hypnagogic amnesia. Sometimes, if we play our cards right, we really can eat our cake and have it too.

*By “into consensual stuff”, I don’t just mean “finding ways of healthily acting out their non-con fantasies”, but “genuinely deep-down prefer consensual situations, even in fantasy”. Let me be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having non-con fantasies, but over the past couple years I’ve been increasingly realising that they’re just not really for me.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me

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Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

parhelioncomic:

Parhelion: Part 1, Page 7

Featuring Alison @sinesalvatorem as herself-in-roughly-a-century.

Previous

Beginning

Hey guys! I exist in comic form!

There are two things that are incredibly accurate about this comic:

  • In a century, I’m a space empress.
  • In a century, I’m still dropping Hamilton references.

…actually, now that you mention it, I could absolutely believe that century-old space empresses would make a habit of ancient pop-culture references, just in general. That particular reference is probably too obscure to communicate “Do not trifle with me, child. I was here long before your parents were born, and I have every intention of being here long after you are dust in the wind. You do not want to get in the way of that goal.”, but it could still serve as staying in practice for when it’s time to deal with other gerontocrats. (And there’s always personal amusement, of course.)

Tags:

#Parhelion #reply via reblog #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #it was interesting to listen to my brain attempt to synthesise what future!Alison would sound like #when I’m just reading her posts my brain gives up and just makes something up out of the stock voices #(though it’s worth noting that the thought-voice I read Alison’s posts in is both consistent over time and different from the default voice) #(but it has a very definite American accent because I tend to have trouble using thought-voices with accents different from mine) #(I did notice that after talking to her in-person and hearing her pronounce ”can’t” in the British manner) #(my brain started attempting to integrate that particular characteristic into her associated thought-voice) #(with limited success) #(anyway as I was saying:) #my brain actually made a proper attempt this time #and it’s always interesting to feel it scrambling to construct a thought-voice according to relatively precise specifications #even if it’s almost never as successful as I’d like #tag rambles

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

responsible-reanimation:

queenshulamit:

batmansymbol:

batmansymbol:

welp

here it is

the final damning evidence that i have no life whatsoever

lyrics at the original post here

so uh, by popular request, mp3 now downloadable here. second from the bottom

I think @davidsevera joined tumblr too late for the period where we were all reblogging this constantly (because everyone had agreed to “always reblog”) and that’s a real shame.

Anyway, let’s bring this song back for 2016.

I forgot about this masterpiece, let’s enjoy it again.

I remembered this masterpiece, but let’s enjoy it again anyway.

(Plus, this way I won’t have to dig back in my archive as far next time I feel like listening to it.)

Tags:

#philosophy #music #death tw

inquisitivefeminist asked: Rigel, Betelgeuse, Aldeberan, Casseiopeia, Wormhole

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

Have you ever gone on a rollercoaster?

Sort of, the last time I was in the UK! It was smol and low-quality, but since there are none in my home-country, it was still #amazing to me.

What’s something you can never forget about?

Um, as in as long as I live? Well, when I was very smol, I had a special interest in insects that let me remember all sorts of minutae about them. Once my mother asked me why my memory was so bad in some areas but so good in others. I tried to explain that it was all about interestingness. The specific example I gave was “I will never, ever forget that monarch butterflies migrate between Mexico and Canada every year”.

Eleven years later, I still remember that. However, the reason I remember it is not because of the special interest (which has since faded) but because I used it to illustrate something I can always remember. And, somehow, my brain has ensured that I will stick to my word.

What’s something you care desperately about?

OK, ‘saving the world’ is suuuper cliché, but it’s kinda that? Making everything Good and Correct Forever. Smolison literally broke down crying at times at the thought that she might not save everyone and would just have to settle for saving most people.

In primary school, they once made us do a personal-development-test-thingy (I don’t remember what they called it). Three of the questions were: “What is one thing you would give to your friends?”, “What is one thing you would give to everyone in the world?”, and “What is one thing you would give to yourself?” My answers were: “I don’t have friends”, “Everlasting joy”, and “Superpowers so I can make that happen”.

Favourite book?

…Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. *throws self in trash*

What’s something you wish would happen, but know won’t?

…Most possible answers are way too personal to put here. (Personal as in “contains other people’s info”. I am mostly an open book.) Um, I wish I had the emotional energy to support and take care of and protect a thousand people. At the moment, ten is more realistic (though I’m leveling up with time!).

Wait, let me get this straight. You wished for superpowers that would allow you to bring the world everlasting joy, and a few years later you turn up with borderline (for now! growth mindset!) mind-control abilities.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #at least it’s among the more pleasant apocalypse scenarios

Revolutionary Cooking Methods

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

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sinesalvatorem:

ilzolende:

sinesalvatorem:

Mum: …And then you have to move all the stakes around in the sauce so that the flavour gets distributed evenly.

Me: What’s with this talk of “even distribution”? That’s Communism! Do you want us to get invaded again?

Mum: Yeah, yeah. Just keep turning them. Move the ones on the bottom to the top.

Me: For how long? How long must we indulge these revolutionaries?

Mum: For as long as possible. The ideal would be permanent revolution, but I think 10 minutes should suffice.

Me: *takes an icepick out of the draw and brandishes it* You take that back, you Trotskyite!

Mum: *rolls eyes*

Me: Ugh. Why do I even care if the flavour is evenly distributed?

Mum: Because you never know which piece of meat you’re going to get.

Me: ….That is the sanest argument for economic leftism I’ve heard all year.

Mum: Alison, it’s the second of January.

Me: Well, yeah. It’s just that the leftists were hung over yesterday from celebrating the long-awaited overthrow of 2015.

…one wonders why a resident of [Redacted] has an icepick, and in the event that a different object was used, what said object was.

….We have icepicks for breaking ice. Like, I know we’re poor, but did you think we didn’t have freezers?

Oh, is that how people with one freezer get rid of condensation buildup? In my family, we eat enough of the frozen food that the remainder fits into the freezer not being de-iced, turn the freezer being de-iced off, put a bunch of towels in front of the open door to catch the water, and let it melt.

(Mind you, only our secondary freezer gets significant ice buildup. The primary freezer seems immune. If we only owned the primary, freezer ice buildup wouldn’t even occur to me.)

(Owning multiple freezers is a big help for anyone aiming to be on the good end of Vimes Boot Theory (specifically the “buying food in bulk” manifestation), and I recommend it to anyone who can pull it off.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #actually we own *three* freezers now #but we haven’t had Tertiary Freezer long enough to know if it gets ice buildup #(our friends’ new landlord foisted an old filthy freezer on them) #(and they were like ‘we’ll give it to you for free just please get rid of it it’s disgusting’) #((to be fair it *was* pretty disgusting)) #(my parents managed to clean it up and it’s pretty much fine now) #we’ve had very good fortune when it comes to freezers

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Revolutionary Cooking Methods

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

sinesalvatorem:

Mum: …And then you have to move all the stakes around in the sauce so that the flavour gets distributed evenly.

Me: What’s with this talk of “even distribution”? That’s Communism! Do you want us to get invaded again?

Mum: Yeah, yeah. Just keep turning them. Move the ones on the bottom to the top.

Me: For how long? How long must we indulge these revolutionaries?

Mum: For as long as possible. The ideal would be permanent revolution, but I think 10 minutes should suffice.

Me: *takes an icepick out of the draw and brandishes it* You take that back, you Trotskyite!

Mum: *rolls eyes*

Me: Ugh. Why do I even care if the flavour is evenly distributed?

Mum: Because you never know which piece of meat you’re going to get.

Me: ….That is the sanest argument for economic leftism I’ve heard all year.

Mum: Alison, it’s the second of January.

Me: Well, yeah. It’s just that the leftists were hung over yesterday from celebrating the long-awaited overthrow of 2015.

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #they just materialise #human nature will create its own icepicks

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Anonymous asked: What if Harry Potter, the chosen one, had turned out to be a squib, how do you think history would have turned out differently?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ink-splotch:

It was Mrs. Figg who suspected first.

She noticed many things, sitting on her side of her fence with her cats chasing butterflies and nuzzling her ankles, Mundungus and the other watchers dropping by for tea now and then.

Mrs. Figg noticed that Petunia was a nosy bit of work with insecurities hanging from her every harsh angle. She noticed when Dudley learned the word MINE– the whole neighborhood noticed that one. She noticed that Vernon glared at owls.

She noticed that when Petunia gave Harry a truly horrendous haircut one year, it grew back in at a normal rate. Harry was uneven and weird-looking for ages, hiding under beanies when he could.

When Mrs. Figg had Harry over for carefully miserable afternoons of babysitting, she noticed nothing moved that shouldn’t. He didn’t accidentally make flowers out of fallen leaves, or levitate anything during tantrums, or turn toys funny colors.

Mrs. Figg called up her mother, interrupting the wizarding bridge game she was winning against the nursing home staff, and asked her how she had known, decades back, that her youngest daughter was a squib.

When Albus Dumbledore received Mrs. Figg’s letter he wrote back a polite thank you and then went to talk with Minerva McGonagall, who inhaled sharply in horror when he told her the news.

Finally, McGonagall gave a gathered sigh. “I suppose we can ask one of the wizarding families to homeschool him,” she said. “We can’t have the Boy Who Lived not knowing about his own world.”  

“No, he’ll come to Hogwarts,” said Dumbledore.

“Hogwarts is not a place for–” Her voice fell. “–squibs, Albus.”

Dumbledore shook his head. “Harry must be taught.”

“Be taught what, Albus?”

But Dumbledore just sighed and offered her a lemon drop.

Years later, the owls and the letters came to 4 Privet Drive. The Dursleys ran, dragging Harry with them, and the letters and one stubborn gamekeeper followed– none of this would change with a magicless Harry.

When Hagrid asked Harry in that little cabin on that little rock in the middle of the sea if weird things always happened around him, Harry couldn’t tell him about vanishing glass and setting captive snakes free, about ending up somehow on the school roof, or growing his hair out overnight.  

“Strange things always happen around you, don’ they?”

“Um,” said Harry, racking his brain. “Well… I live in a cupboard under the stairs…”

Harry could tell him about how snakes sometimes talked back, because that had never been Harry’s magic, but when he did Hagrid just blanched and changed the subject.

Hagrid held out hope, even against Dumbledore’s quiet warning explanations, until they made it to Ollivander’s Wands. Harry marveled at Diagon Alley, got his hands shaken in the Leaky, pressed his nose up against shop windows. Hagrid watched the scant boy– looked at James’s messy hair, Lily’s eyes, Harry’s own wandering gaze– and he wondered how this boy could be anything but magical.

In the wand shop, Ollivander said, “James Potter, yes… mahogany, eleven inches. Pliable. A powerful wand for Transfiguration.” He said, “And your mother, Lily…  strong in Charms work, ten and… yes, ten and a quarter, willow, swishy.”

Harry picked up stick after wooden stick. They remained just that– wood with bits of feather or scale or hair. Harry wondered if the creatures who gave these offerings were still alive– if they were given or taken. What did it do to your wand when they died? He waved a maplewood wand (unicorn hair, eleven inches) and a gust from the door opening blew some receipts off the counter.

“Well, said Ollivander. “I think that’s as close as we’re likely to get.”

He sent them out with the maplewood. Hagrid bought Harry a snowy owl and a fudge sundae and tried not make it too obvious that these were condolence gifts. The next day the Prophet’s headlines read: The Boy Who Lived– A Squib? Various magical medical experts weighed in on how it might have happened. Fingers were pointed at childhood trauma, at his upbringing, at his family lineage.

Harry still met Ron on the train– Ron was still smudge-nosed and Harry still bought enough candy to share. When Molly had helped him through the platform entrance, her voice had been a little softer, a little more pitying– but it was still better than the laughter that had been in his aunt and uncle’s voices when they dropped him here to find a platform they didn’t think existed.

Hermione Granger dropped by their compartment, looking for Neville’s toad, but got distracted when she spotted Harry. “I’ve read about you! In my books, and in the paper,” she said. “You’re the Boy Who Lived, and you’re a squib.”

Harry sank down in his seat. Ron hid Scabbers under a candy wrapper.

“Squibs have never been allowed in Hogwarts,” Hermione announced. “According to Hogwarts, A History, squibs try to sneak in now and then– the furthest anyone’s ever gotten is to the Sorting Hat before they got found out.” At eleven, Hermione still believed in expulsion being worse than death. Her voice was thrumming with sympathetic horror.

“But they already found out about me,” Harry said, alarmed.

“It’s alright, mate,” said Ron. “You’re Harry Potter. Oy, Granger,” he added. “What’s this Hat? Fred and George were trying to sell me some story about having to fight a mountain troll to get your House…”

Harry sat back and watched the countryside rush by. Yes, he was Harry Potter– his aunt’s useless sister’s useless child, the boy in the lumpy hand-me-down sweaters who named the spiders who lived in his cupboard. And here, in new world, he was apparently useless too.

When they got to Hogwarts, Harry clenched his fists and stood in line with the other first years. He barely twitched at the ghosts or Peeves, just stared ahead and thought about how far he would get before they turned him around and sent him back to Vernon and Petunia.

They opened the Great Hall doors. They called the first years one by one. Harry clenched his teeth and walked up to the Hat when they called his name.

As he turned to sit down on the stool, he really caught sight of the Hall for the first time– the hovering candles, the big wooden tables, the black robes that swallowed the light. Translucent ghosts gossiped with the students beside them. The paintings on the far walls– were they moving?

Harry’s jaw had unclenched, falling open. His fists curled open, curving around the stool’s seat as he leaned forward to stare. If this was it, if this was as far as he’d get in this world, then he wanted to drink it all in. The candles were floating, in mid-air.

The Hat dropped down over his eyes and blocked out the light.

Well, said the dry voice that had been hollering House placements all night. What do we have here?

Ron had been begging for not-Slytherin. Draco from the robes shop had been scornful of Hufflepuff, desperate in his disdain. Neville had begged for Hufflepuff, sure he was not brave enough for Gryffindor.

Please, thought Harry. Don’t send me back.

Keep reading

Tags:

#Harry Potter #recs