Hi!

Shh...

How’s it going? Are you having a nice weekend? Good, that’s wonderful.

I wanted to bring something up.

When I became an adult I made the decision to never kiss and tell. Even before I was very unlikely to give details about my love life. It doesn’t matter who wants to know: my mom, my best cousin, a good friend, etc. I don’t tell.

Because every once in a while I prefer to treat others as I would like to be treated myself, if a person chooses to discuss their love life with me, I will treat that information with the utmost discretion, no matter what the means used to communicate it were used.

That means that my friends’ love / like / lust life is safe with me, that my family’s details about their relationships are safe with me, and even blog comments left here that contain details about roleplaying and some activities connected with giantess fantasies are safe with me.

A person that leaves such a comment might not care who knows what they do online, or in the bedroom, or at that public restroom, but if anything that relates to that makes its way to my blog, I will read it, smile at his good fortune, and delete the juicy parts.

I care about your privacy that much, whether you want me to or not.

A giant cat for a giant woman

When I found this image of a cat looking up at a flock of birds, I thought it was adorable, and I saved it. I thought it would make for a great lolz giantess image.

The perspective makes me imagine it’s a giant kitty, one that follows the earth-shattering footsteps of her owner everywhere she goes. She likes to savor the moment when she spots a delicious snack flying by, watching it until it seems out of reach as she licks her chops in anticipation of the feast, and then she swats its path with her huge claw.

I’m sure the giantess has trained her to capture her meals as gently as possible, so as to try to avoid hurting the little humans. And because lolcats material always tastes better with some ’80s French Euro Disco (I also could have placed a Flock song here)…

Desireless – Voyage Voyage

Adventures in collaging: example files

The two images that accompany this entry are extremely low-res, and for a reason. Back when I had the old blog at Giantess.com, there was a series of entries I began to develop titled, “Adventures in collaging”.

In the two that I was able to post I discussed a couple of collaging aspects: splashes (as in those produced by the feet of a massive giantess), and shadows, lighting and reflections. I thought I’d enjoy doing the same thing at this blog, and from time to time discussing different things about what I consider the incredible waste of time of my choice, collaging.

The reasons these two images are of such low quality and only of medium size is because they are “example” files. The first thing you do when you collage giantesses and shrunken men is acquire material. For the most part this material is saved from the Internet, which makes this first thing an extremely easy task.

What I do next is group material in folders that end up containing the layered Photoshop file, the raw materials, and the final jpg. There’s one last image that has become part of my standard operating procedure when collaging, and it’s the example file. When I’m pairing raw material, I do it with Photoshop, and not with the naked eye, and when I’m done pairing raw material, the resulting image is reduced in size, named Example, and saved.

It’s a very quick, rough version of what I imagine the final image will look like. There are pixels leftover, mismatched skin tones, wrong shadows, etc., but the purpose of the example file is to allow me to see the potential of the raw materials, and the amount of work I will have to do to get it to look good in the end.

It helps me, because sometimes I decide the end result is not worth the effort. Another thing it does is allow me to recall what the heck it is that I wanted to do with that raw material in the first place. I forget sometimes. In the past I’ve opened a folder months after saving it, and it’s happened a few times that I have no idea what I was thinking when I downloaded its contents.

Sure, it’s not really difficult to puzzle it out, but an example file makes for a time-saving template. Simple, and effective.

Ozzy Osbourne – Dreamer

W00t!

I never type or say “w00t”, but I’m kinda happy I finished a collage after all these weeks of not being able to go anywhere near Photoshop, and it simply erupted from within.

I want you to know I’m being very good and not posting it until I’m sure I’m done with it.

If you collage, then you also know that some of us are never truly “done” with an image, and if allowed free reign (and intravenous feeding and a catheter) we’d be tweaking them until the end of time.

But every once in a while I complete a collage and upload it right away, only to discover I forgot to create that one last shadow, or to blend some little corner; then I have to delete the image and correct the initial file, reupload, blah blah blah. It’s annoying.

So I’m gonna stare at it for a few days just to be sure it’s really as done as it’s gonna get.

What makes my heart pound about it is that I started it way back in November 2006, and it’s finally done. It’s so old my old signature was a layer:

Those little dots are stars, because the image is one of those unusual ultra giantesses I like to churn out every once in a blue moon.

Actually, what really makes my heart pound is what I’ve been imagining while collaging, about being that size.

Happy Semesteversary, Hug the Undersquid!

At this very moment, my blog is six months old. It feels like two or three. I’m asleep right now (this entry has been scheduled to be published hours from now), so I’ll return later for some fun-filled, blog-related facts.

Later…

Hi again,

I’ve been blogging for six months, and while that’s no big feat, I’m fond of what I’ve expressed through this blog, which is more than I’ve put up at any other blog of mine, even my old giantess blog.

Some fun-filled blog facts:

• Near the moment my blog turned six months old, I received my 9,418th visitor. While I know that other blogs out there get that many visitors a week (heck, they get that many a day, sometimes an hour), it still feels damn mighty peachy to receive visitors, plenty of whom actually stay and rifle through my entries.

• I love to look at my Sitemeter blog statistics and see all the people from different countries that come to visit, the times that they visit, and how they got here. My 9,418th visitor was from Mumbai, India. He or she searched for terms that showed the way to my Tiny Coworker entry. The search terms indicate they weren’t looking for bitty men exposed to office settings, but that only makes guessing their reaction more fun.

• The most popular entry at this point is Fake Movie Posters. Clicks to it outnumber any other entry by the hundreds, and it probably gets hits every day… perhaps because having giantess / shrunken man fantasies is not a requirement for enjoying such images.

• The most popular click (meaning an image or link that’s not a post or a page, but certainly found in a post or page) is trinket999’s Looking-Glass World blog. Seriously, c’mon! What a blow to my self-esteem as a blogger! My visitors CAN’T WAIT to leave me for another blog. Why? What does he give you that I don’t? Oh, but you’ll come back to me… just wait and see. Actually, trinket’s blog is my all-time top referrer. This back-and-forth clickety clicking of blog readers (or viewers) is the most awesome thing about having blog buddies.

• The most popular click at my blog, one that’s not an external link that sends you to another website, is this image:
  

  Who can blame you? It is a cool collage.

• The search engine term that sends me the most visitors is “undersquid”, followed by “giantess”. In fourth place is “shrunken men”, with not 1/4 the amount of searches the word “giantess” gets. Why? Why the little-guy dissing, Internets? Seriously, I see a wonderful increase from times before, which means more people are looking for little men.

• The most disappointed visitors are those that end up here after searching for “cricket crush” and “shrunken women”. Sorry, neither is going to be covered here. The ones I’m most sorry to disappoint are those lovely people looking for “male toes”. I understand you, I really do.

I’m done, though I’ll probably be back with another excuse to celebrate when I get my 10,000th visitor. Have a nice Valentine’s Day weekend!

Kool & The Gang – Celebration

10 things I hate about them

Grr.

The above trash is something I put together to illustrate my ten points. It’s meant to look terrible, and it doesn’t look much different from some of the things I’ve seen out there that try to pass for collages, but it’s far better than the worst I’ve witnessed.

Here’s some itemized vitriol aimed at those people, those collagers that are clearly not you. I’m just talking to you about them behind their back.

• I deeply dislike seeing a collage where the shrunken man’s outline has pixels leftover from his earlier background. It destroys the illusion of the collage just as effectively as a kick in the nards. Why? Why bother? If those people were here (which they are not), I’d say to them, “Stop defecating your material into the giantess community, divorce yourself from the lifesaver that you seem to believe the magic wand tool is, and learn to collage.

• I loathe seeing collage layers that have not been blended properly. Even after getting rid of all initial background, there are still going to be some leftover rough spots, and the Blur tool helps a lot in editing those away.

• Drop shadows used inappropriately. I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen a giantess out in town, strolling the streets, but oddly surrounded by a dark aura, as though the background behind her is a vertical surface that follows her everywhere.

• The same can be said of drop shadows created as a separate layer, but used to simply create a shadow, without taking care that it has anything to do with the ones already existing in the background image. A giant shadow that doesn’t match the building or mountain’s shadows around it looks terrible.

• Following the above two points comes a scowl directed at those collagers that refuse to match shadow intensity between layers. The background in the above image has shadows that aren’t quite as stark or as contrasting as the shadows present on the shrunken man’s body. It ain’t that complicated to soften that contrast and create a gradation on his skin that makes it seem as though he really is resting next to that giant sandal’s thong. Wow… typing that just gave me a yummy feeling. But back to the hatred!

• I spit in the general direction of collagers that ignore skin tones. I’m not talking about ethnicities. It would be stupid to try to make a black giantess lighter, or a shrunken man darker just for the sake of matching skin tones. I’m talking about consistency of color range. If there’s a lot of blue or red or green on an element’s skin, it’s easy to tell if another element—no matter ethnicity—has the same or different over / undertones. The same goes for textures and grain.

• I don’t really get angry at this (in fact, I hardly get angry at anything I’m discussing here… I’m using the word “hatred” facetiously), but it kinda looks funny to see a beautiful giantess with a man that’s… well, not beautiful. It hurts the illusion a bit, because I’m not thinking the guy is ugly, or fat, or just wrong for the collage. I’m thinking that collager didn’t spend the same time looking for a nice-looking tiny man as he spent searching for the right giantess. Women look at those images too, ya know? All three of us. And just to make sure I’m being clear, I’m not referring to those collagers that use themselves as image elements. They are awesome and brave and breathtakingly beautiful. As long as they blend and do shadows and stuff.

• I growl when those collagers then upload their pieces of garbage on which they only spent five minutes to a giantess board. I want to be very clear about this. There are many beginning collagers that do that and accept feedback and actually learn as they acquire experience, and I’m not talking about those guys. It’s the ones that have been doing this for some time, often years, and still excrete their “work”, and then they expect positive feedback because they lowered themselves to providing us with images to look at.

• And then they react negatively when they are told they suck, or threaten to leave the community if no one expounds on how much they rock, etc. Babies.

• Hmm. I’m out of points. So… OK, I also talk smack about the people that like Grape-Nuts.

On the other side of the coin I know we are only talking about collages, and terrible collages aren’t the harbingers of doom, and who cares, and all that jazz. We are only a blip in the Internet world, and in a hundred years no one will remember that way back then there was a bunch of men and women that lifted pictures off the Internet (or took them themselves) and used them to create images of people that don’t exist.

They’ll be too busy fighting Microsoft Hate Bots.

Even if someone does remember a century from now, that’s not what I care about. I do care about the story I can tell you right now, and about trying to tell it right.

Erasure – Chorus

Giantess Turkey Revenge

An explanation for this collage does not exist.

Except it does.

The above was my entry for a Giantess.com image contest titled “Holiday Giantess” that took place two years ago.

Yes, of course I’m joking.

But it is what I imagined back in 2006 is what happens when you give a turkey costume to a giantess that also happens to be an animal rights activist.

Why would I create such an image, you ask? I’m not sure. Mostly to amuse myself, and also because two years ago I was served tofurkey at a house I visited during Thanksgiving, and was told it was delicious before I had a taste. It isn’t delicious, and it has nothing to do with the collage above, so I’m going to stop trying to explain it.

Well, no, I’ll try again, mostly because I’m still trying to understand it myself. Here I am, with this hobby, this little past-the-time activity of creating collages as beautiful as I can possibly make them, and then I feel compelled to come up with this abomination.

For a moment it might have been a protest about those vegetarians and that horrible tofurkey, but I have nothing against being vegetarian. In fact, I was a vegetarian for an entire year myself, and loved every minute of it until a visit to Disney World threw me off the bandwagon, but that’s a story for no other time. My point is that tofurkey is just a foul, terrible thing to do to me.

But as I was saying, I got to thinking what it would be like if a giantess that was also vegetarian was invited to a Thanksgiving Day parade, and she decided it was time to make a statement about the birds she so dearly loves alive, and she was also deeply insane. Ya know, the kind of mad that destroys while saying it wants to create? The kind that prefers animals to people?

So this otherwise lovely and beautiful (you can’t see her gorgeous looks because she’s wearing that stupid costume) giantess goes on a rampage, and while she roasts herself a city, she asks the population, “How do you like it? Not nice to get crispy and juicy and melt-in-the-mouth delicious, is it now? Uh? Uh?”

But then she takes a break from all the killing, and gets hungry, and has a taste of roasted building, and starts getting into vore.

Ever seen a vegetarian fall off the wagon? It’s not pretty.

The end.

…is what I would say if this entry was over, but I do have something else to write. I’m going to be cutting back on the blogging here for a few weeks, not only because of the holidays, but also because I’m going to be knee deep in real life work. I’ll still post an entry here and there, but it’s not going to be a daily affair.

Also, I’m running out of my own collages, so the timing is perfect.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, y’all!

I don’t care if you are gay.

"G030" by angel

I had a disturbing conversation with a family member yesterday. It came to pass that the homosexuality of one of my brothers was unveiled (with an accompanying slur), and it was done in a way that made me think an adverse response was expected of me.

There wasn’t one.

In fact, the amount of brothers I have, has in the past provoked me to wonder if at least one of them is gay. I have many brothers. I need more than the fingers of one hand to count them all, and I love them all with a fierce sense of protectiveness, so it pisses me off that a relative of mine is inclined to negative feelings on that front.

Anyway, it didn’t come to blows, or even shouts. The subject was dropped as soon as my lack of homophobia was emphatically announced. I’m concerned about my brother’s emotional state, but he has my unconditional love and support.

"0_0" by mosquito

On a far less personal level… in fact not personal at all, I’m aware that giantess fans aren’t always attracted to women alone.

I don’t care.

I wasn’t raised to be tolerant of homosexuality / bisexuality, but it never dawned on me to absorb my parents’ inculcations on the matter.

If two women love each other, then I hope they will have all the sex and marriage and happiness they can possibly muster. If two men do the same, I wish the same for them.

That’s all I have to say.

NaNoWriMo 2008

i shur is

2005 was the first year I participated in the National Novel Writing Month, and I won. My prize was a bunch of pixels arranged in a way that showed I had written 50,000 words in a month. Twenty days, to be specific.

2006 I tried again, and failed, reaching only… what was it? About 35,000 words, I think. I blame my failure on getting a NaNoWriMo tee shirt and a coffee cup. Or that’s what I would say if I believed in jinxes.

In 2007 I did it again, but no oops. I succeeded in writing well over 50,000 words, and not only that, I actually finished my story, something naughty about giantesses and little men (actually, that’s what all my NaNo stories are about). Finishing stories hasn’t been something I’m proficient at. I’ve begun dozens, so reaching the middle and then the end felt pretty spectacular.

I never got around to editing it, but that’s another story.

The image above is my NaNo graph found in my profile, or the one I had all those years, because I haven’t gone back to the website to refresh my account. I’m not doing it this year, writing 50,000 words. I have no time. I’m working on building my first website and that means no time for anything else, not even this blog.

Yet I manage to post something here pretty much every day… for now, anyway.

Writing over 1,600 words every day doesn’t sound like very much, but I know how obsessed I get with the event, so that I seem possessed by whatever I’m writing and other things in my life run the risk of falling by the wayside.

Still, I feel a slight ache in my heart, and an itch in my brain, and both are telling me my fingers were waiting for November. Sorry, little digits. As Oogie Boogie said, you ain’t going nowhere.

Dear McCain Robo Caller,

Please stop dialing my number.

I hang up right away when you call.

I can tell by the little I catch of your annoying screeches that you run on paid-by-the-word hate fuel.

I’m not interested in anything you have to autosay.

I’m for the other guy.

Disassemble painfully under the crushing weight of a powerful female foot and go to hardware hell.

XXOOXX,

Undersquid

Stop.Calling.Me.