R.I.P. Vanya

My Mac  that I had named Vanya (I name my Macs), is dead. No more posts until he’s replaced.

(I wish this was an April’s Fools’ joke, but it’s not.)

I had the Audacity to change my gender…

…and it only took a few seconds. I was at one of my favorite blogs looking at fun stuff to use later on for various purposes that don’t only involve collaging, when I spotted a video of Andrew Cooper. You probably don’t know who he is and that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that near the end of the video I found out that the fun tune that had been playing during it was sung by a woman (Kelly Clarkson), and not a man. The creator of the video had used Audacity to change the pitch of her voice, and make her sound like a man.

I’d heard of such things before, but in the opposite context of men making themselves sound like women. This was the first time I’d heard an example of the results (that I know of), and I was surprised at how convincing it sounded. I’d downloaded Audacity years ago, so obviously I had to try this! I sound awesome as a man. I’d totally call me on the phone all the time, just to hear my voice… unfortunately my tweaked voice sounds just like one of my younger brother’s, which is a tremendous turnoff.

No wonder some of you ask themselves if the people you deal with are truly who they say they are. If I had “dealings” with anyone online and it turned out he was a she, I’d not be insanely happy about the deceit. That sort of thing will never happen to me though. I’m fairly sure most of you have penises.

I now introduce to you Andrew Cooper, insanely hot man that should be collaged more often (which is why he’s my next Shrunken Man of the Week):

Just the two of us!

And I would walk 2,642 miles, and I would walk 2,642 more

Is there any reason whatsoever I should be this happy someone from the city where I was born should make it to my blog? Maybe not, but it still makes my heart pound with glee that it happened.

See, what typically happens when I spot my birth flag in my site stats is that the visitor somehow ended up at my blog while apparently looking for something else, the evidence of that being that they never stay for longer than one “click” (as in, the first page they see is the page from which they flee).

But you can see that this person lingered for a while, and checked out several pages; s/he didn’t run, s/he didn’t cower in fear. I’m not the only one! Now I can honestly say there are at least two people from my country that have these fantasies. So, paisan@, I dedicate this song to you.

Hello, 100,000th visitor!

Last night, at around 8:30 PM, I received my 100,000 visitor. I was too tired to compose anything pertinent, but here’s what I want to say on the matter:

My 100,000th visitor is a vore fan. If you see his (I assume he is a male visitor, though there’s a very tiny chance I’m wrong) info below, you can see the entry page is my collage Red Lips.

While looking at stat data in my admin area I was able to ascertain that he arrived here after searching for “little man in the mouth of the giantess”. If that’s not a great big red vore flag, I don’t know what is. My visitor is also from Netherlands, home of one of my favorite football teams. Go Netherlands! (Tomorrow!)

Here are some stats:

Top referrer – gts2.net/links/index.php

Top post – Fake movie posters

Top search terms – 1. giantess, 2. giantess vore (those sickos!), 3. shrunken man, with less than one third of the clicks the term “giantess” gets, but hey, it used to be much less two years ago.

Top clicks -

trinket999.blogspot.com

flickr.com/photos/theshrinkee

http://undersquid.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/honey_i_shrunk_you.jpg

Hmm… OK. The second most clicked collage is another image with Orlando Bloom in it. Now that’s not a surprise.

Thank you all for visiting my blog!

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.

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.

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!

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.