D is for Dollhouse, the little place I build and furnish in the land of my imagination, and have begun to do so in real life as well.
A tiny home for a tiny man, it’s a place with miniature rooms, fixtures, bed, dressers, books, pots and pans; everything with a design faithful to the purpose of their comparably giant counterparts, but small enough so he can use them without my help.
This small house looks like a young girl’s toy, but it’s wired to provide him with a minuscule amount of electricity, and it’s connected to a water source as well, because a man needs to be able to shower and flush the toilet, no matter how reduced in size he’s become.
The doors and windows of this home are large enough to allow my hand entry when the time comes, and it always does, especially after kneeling on the floor to peek in, to spy on his little activities, especially those that relate to his need for water.
It’s also a home small enough that I can move from room to room, that I can lift with my hands and take with me wherever I go. If I never build one of my own in reality, if I never buy another miniature for it for the rest of my days, I’ll still have the one in my imagination to give to the little man that lives there.
* * *
P.S. I used to think the image above was a collage, but the little guy in the shower looks too much like a shrunken G.I. Joe, so I don’t know. Whether it’s something produced by one of us, or a publicity shot, I still like it!
Edit: Well, I found what seems to be the original image, so I’m inclined to think it’s (at least) partially a doll, given there’s a visible neck joint. It makes me wonder how effective it would be to use both doll body sections and images of real men to form a composite element for collages. Again, that’s something I’ll find out after I win the lottery, end world hunger and all wars, and enforce peace on Earth (or else).
B is for Brownies. I published this recipe at my old blog about eighteen months ago. I only have a few old ABC’s entries left to publish, and playing the game—even if only with myself—means I will be following the order of the letters of the alphabet from this point on, when I create new entries for this series.
I’d been planning to create a collage to accompany my brownie recipe for quite some time, but only after I found a suitable shrunken-man source image was I able to figure out the sort of photos I wanted to take of my brownies; so the image you see above is of my window, of a curtain I sewed years ago, and of brownies I baked. I think this is the first collage I’ve published that include raw images I created, instead of stealing downloading them from the Internet.
Underbrownies
7 T. butter
1 c. sugar
1 t. vanilla extract
2 eggs
1/2 c. unbleached all-purpose flour
1/3 c. cocoa
1/2 t. aluminum-free baking powder
1/4 t. sea salt
1/2 c. chopped, toasted walnuts
1. Heat oven to 350° degrees. If you have a toaster oven then you don’t have to heat up the entire kitchen to make these.
2. Grease and flour a small pan of any shape.
3. In food processor, combine butter and sugar until well mixed.
4. Add vanilla and mix until incorporated.
5. Add eggs and mix until well blended-
-Or add it all at the same time, for all I care. The result is the same when I blend it all lovingly and in order, than when I dump it all in the processor (I do recommend mixing the butter and sugar first), nuts last, and pour into pan.
6. Bake for about fifteen minutes. Don’t overbake, or you’ll end up making chocolate rock.
7. Cool, cut in sixteen pieces, and eat one with your sweetie before you kiss him/her. Brownie breath is a guaranteed shrinking potion. It only works on men, of course.
If I receive one single philistine comment about how baking is women’s work, I’ll crush ya like a twig and snap ya like a bug.
* * *
As I chose the elements for the collage above, a scene played in my head. Some will understand when I tell you that events between a shrunken man and a woman don’t always have to include sexual activities. Daily routine can become their prelude, and activities such as visiting, making friends, listening to music, cleaning the house, etc., can lay the foundation for an emotional state ripe with the right kind of tension.
In this case, the emotion I use to color interaction is a deep sense of trust combined with size-related frustration. A man that shrinks to a mere few inches in height will remember a time his wife might have baked him brownies, and he would have polished the entire plate as he watched TV, later burning those calories in the yard, or in the bedroom.
He will recall there was a time he could have closed his hand around his wife’s delicate wrist when the doorbell rang announcing relatively unwanted visitors, and he could have pulled her into his arms as he whispered, “Let’s pretend we are not home, and maybe they’ll go away….”
There is a weight pressing on him that has nothing to do with his wife’s finger or toe; a heavy feeling of helplessness as he watches his life shrink and be absorbed by his mate’s actions. The only thing that rescues him from despair is the absolute trust he feels in his beloved. It carries him as safely as her hand during moments when it seems even the air he breathes is something she allows him to have, and can take away if she so desired it; those times when his responses to disappointment regress to a child-like state; those instances when events slip away as he’s shown a shrunken man may control only that ever-changing sphere the woman that loves him declares his province; those times such as these….
“They are mine,” he said, his hips pressing possessively against the brownie closest to his hips, the one sandwiched in the middle of the stack. That tiny thrust was almost imperceptible given his size, and he seemed too angry to have meant it to be seductive, but his naked body was glued to those baked goods as though they were some sort of salvation; and that moist, warm brownie molded like clay to the shape of his body sent her thoughts adrift to other times he had moved similarly against her body.
“Honey, I can bake you more brownies after they leave, ” she said placatingly. She could see wet chocolate stains beginning to spread onto his torso and his delicious thighs, and forced herself to look away from his midriff, up to his chocolate-colored eyes. He looked good enough to eat, and he would probably taste delicious at the moment, but that sort of fun would have to wait until they were alone in the house again.
She looked over her shoulder at the bedroom door, and listened to her friends chatting in the living room. Again his voice, as diminished in volume as it now was, seemed to somehow get louder. She faced him again as he stood next to the brownies on the plate.
“I don’t want different brownies later; I want these, and I want them now!” his words ended with the whine of a child threatened by willpower much greater than his own. “You baked them for me. I’ve been waiting for you to bake me these brownies for weeks! You are going to have to give them something else to eat.” He stretched his arm along the edge of the top brownie, and his little fingers clasped it greedily. They hadn’t been out of the oven very long, but he didn’t seem to mind their warmth.
“Unfortunately I can’t help the whole house smelling like them, darling. If I had known they were coming I would have baked a double batch. Sweetie, be reasonable! You are too small to eat them all anyway! One of these little squares would last you a month- alright, a week, the way you eat sometimes.” She threw him a playful smile, but he didn’t return it.
“They should have called you first, before butting in and interrupting our weekend!”
Beginning to feel a touch of annoyance, she sighed, and watched his hair be blown back by gust of wind she had created. “Sweetie, this is the South. People don’t do that. They expect to be able to drop by casually and be served iced tea and comfort food in an impeccable home. They expect impromptu politeness, and hospitality at the drop of a hat.”
“But you are Hispanic. They can’t expect you to behave that way.” He realized immediately he had put his little foot in his mouth when her lips tightened, and when he spoke again, his voice was little more than a squeak.
“Tell them they can’t have-”
“What do you mean ‘they can’t expect me to behave that way’? And do you see me doing that? Do you really think I’m going to go back out there and tell them ‘Sorry ladies, my tiny shrunken husband is a greedy, selfish baby, and he refuses to yield even a single brownie square. We’ll have to scavenge the fridge for any leftover Chinese food that hasn’t turned, and whatever cheese we can slice away from mold we can put on Ritz crackers.”
His gaze, no longer blazing with anger, dropped for a moment.
“Well, er… um-” He shook his head softly, sinking his chin into the brownie corner the heat of his body had rounded out. His fingers dug into the still warm mass of chocolate like fish hooks, as though he could still prevent her from taking the plate away from him.
“I’m offering my friends these brownies, and there isn’t a thing you can do about it. They will stay in my house for as long as they wish, and they they will eat anything they want from my fridge. And after they leave I’ll come back here and we’ll have a long conversation about your manners, and your small place in the grand scheme of my things.”
She reached for the plate, and he barely had time to jump off it and onto the bedside table where the stack- his stack of brownies had been cooling off. His pressed lips turned into a pout as he watched her walk away with them in hand.
Only now did he begin to realize there might not be any sort of sweetness headed his way this Saturday night if he didn’t work his way to her good graces. He looked down at his body. Almost the entire front of it was painted brown with melted brownie marks. He thought they could be useful.
Careful not to accidentally wipe clean any of it, he sat on the lamp base. In the distance, in the living room that felt as though it was a town away, he could hear laughter and womanly conversation, interrupted by moans of culinary appreciation as his wife’s friends devoured his brownies.
Alone, he waited.
* * *
And here’s the example file, the way I initially composed the image. There isn’t that much difference between the former and the latter.
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)…
I think ultra giantesses get a bum rap. I’ve read arguments at the boards about interaction, and how it becomes increasingly difficult as the giantess rises in height. While such concern for realism is touching, I’m going to have to say that the very moment one begins to fantasize about beings of drastically different sizes, one should abandon all endeavors in trying to convey a penchant for realism.
Interaction is possible between all sizes. It doesn’t matter if the giantess wears Earth as a pendant that swings from her neck with every step she takes in space, or if the shrunken man is so small his ride is a microscopic mite that lives on his wife’s inner thigh; if the thought we are having makes us tingle, then whatever arguments against it, however logical and entertaining, stem from the naysayer’s inability to feel the same shiver of delight, and not from the imagined knowledge of physics, biology, chemistry, etc., regarding someone measuring an incredible height.
In other words, it is perfectly natural for me to enjoy the vision of growing thousands of miles until a single footprint is the size of a country, and at the same time being able to carry a conversation with the recipient of my attention and the target of my blatant display of size superiority. I understand many people don’t feel the same way; I comprehend the desire to discuss our various preferences and the reasons why we have them; and I will never get why anyone becomes agitated when a member of the community likes something they don’t.
But let’s forget those people! They aren’t here anyway. I love the thought of growing so tall this planet becomes my own pet rock. There’s no connection between that fantasy and destruction: I don’t inhale all of Earth’s atmosphere in a single breath, I don’t dent the planet’s layers or shift them with my weight when I move or lounge, I do nothing that causes the death of a single person. On the contrary, all I do is bring pleasure to one little man of normal size, and myself.
It’s the closest I get to weaving the “goddess” concept into my giantess fantasies. A being that size who is also omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent can very well be defined as a deity. If a man- if the man was to look out his window and see the sky overtaken by the shape of a face he knows well, blue gone and replaced by the deep pink of her lips as she blows kisses that melt every cloud in his direction, day transformed into a temporary night brightened by the playful glint in her eyes as large as moons… I bet he’d have worshipful thoughts, if he’s able to think at all.
I can imagine being in her place, all the way up here, looking down and seeing everything, but focusing my attention on that little window that frames his sweet little body and shows me he just dropped his pants. I’d have a hard time thinking coherently as well.
Long story short: Fire bad, ultra giantesses good.
This is a terrible song, but I can’t help liking it.
A is for Anchor, the very thing I need after a growth spurt.
At 203′5″ in height, my mirrors are glass-covered buildings, and the streets that divide them the narrow paths I tread carefully, gentle giantess that I am.
To feel so tall, to see it all from up here makes me giggle with delight, and I always forget what happens when I giggle: I grow!
By the time I’ve regained composure, I’ve grown a few dozen feet, and my slightly shredded blouse has lost its buttons, tabletop-sized projectiles that have pierced walls here, landed on a pizza delivery boy there. Oops.
I move quickly as I hold those tattered remnants together and make my way to the pier, where I spot my Little One’s boat bobbing gently in the water as he gets ready to drop what I need.
I smile at him as I pinch the boat’s tiny anchor by the shank, and I lift it to mend my blouse, hooking two loose ends with its curved arms. It works perfectly!
When this out-of-the-ordinary giantess comes to town…
…Q is for Questions. People arrive in droves to her side, some to gawk, others to report, and soon the rapid-fire questions begin, from the unoriginal, to the downright rude, or the insane:
“Wow, how tall are you?”
“Are you cruel, or gentle?”
“What do you do to little guys like us?”
“Can you step on me?”
“Will you eat me?”
The cacophony is the same everywhere she visits. She closes her eyes, almost wincing, and almost smiles to herself when she thinks of what would happen if she stood to full height and stomped her foot angrily, saying, “HELLO TO YOU TOO! NICE TO MEET YOU. SO, HOW ABOUT ASKING MY NAME FIRST?”
The questions would stop, and she would have some peace. Instead she remembers to be patient, to know that not often do people say the wisest thing when their minds and eyes are overwhelmed by an astounding sight. She knows that’s what she is. She smiles openly now and readies her first answer when she notices him.
Q is for Quiet, the silent man all the way in the back, the one that carries a single flower, a gift that shows her he likes to give and not to take. She forgets what she was going to say, enthralled as she is with his face and the way he holds that single bloom she knows will get lost between the pinch of her digits.
Q is for Quintuple, those shapes that now descend for him, crossing that chasm between them, over the crowd’s voices and street. Five amazonian fingers, all longer than he is tall, not grabbing, but respectfully draping like the thickest rug over the ground for him to climb, so she may lift him to her and leave the rest behind.
* * *
In the Gcode collage I picked for this entry there isn’t a crowd milling about staring at the giantess, but it’s one of my favorite ones by him, and it’s close to what I see in my heart as the visit of a giantess. In my mind she isn’t a mad creature that likes to stomp on people, or devour them. She likes to spend time with the little ones, to enjoy the visions they offer her with their infinitesimal life, and to go home leaving them unharmed.
No, it’s not. It’s not random at all. In fact, there are no more random Saturday collages and I’m officially sick and tired of that bit, so this will be the last time I use it. I began this collage back in October 2007. I found the background, and I thought it unusual (in a good way) because the woman’s hand was not exactly manicured in that way hands typically are when used in handheld collages.
I think that’s why I saved it. It reminded me of my hands. Because of what I do, it’s impossible for me to have beautifully manicured hands most of the time. My nails constantly break, and I keep them short, the length shown in this picture… although I like my more oblong nail plates a bit better.
Anybody that knows a thing or one about me, knows that while I like to picture in my mind all manner of shrunken-man sizes, I think the perfect height for a little guy is two inches. Despite- or maybe because of that fact, no dialogue between that little guy and the giant hand (hahah) came to mind as I worked on this collage.
Or maybe it’s because the very tall owner of that hand is asleep, and the shrunken man is enjoying a quiet, romantic moment with her thumb. Or he’s memorizing her thumbprint lines as he runs his perfect little fingertip along those giant grooves, or perhaps pressing his ear onto the pad and picking up the pulsating beat of her heart from that small place. I don’t know. Things like that render words unnecessary.
I created this collage for a Valentine’s Day image contest at the GDC, a contest I won, by the way. I’m always going to say I won every contest I entered, even though it’s a big fat lie. I’ll constantly claim other people are lying when they tell you “someone else” won it. I don’t rightly recall about whom those people are doing the untruthing in this case, but it might have been JR.
I really like the reds and brown in this image, and the interaction worked out very well for my imagination as well. Love between a woman and a little guy dressed as cupid (or the very god himself), love all the way down to the floor, love in their eyes as her face looms over his bitty body, love in their smiles, and love in that arrow as it pierces her heart… lovely.
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!
Another old entry from my defunct blog I found in my Jedi archives! And the same as with the fictitious “computer series“, Theth has never mentioned anywhere that the following collages are part of any set of images, much less that the shrunken men in them are bots. It just so happens that my mind classifies them that way, but either way they are wonderful images.
* * *
"mpbed_a" by Theth
Of all the images I have added to my collection, Theth has created over a couple of dozen, and I can see a story behind every single one of them. The tale behind the image above came to me partly because of Jar Jar Binks.
Unlike what seems like the majority of Star Wars fans, I love Jar Jar. I was never one of those people that claimed George Lucas had “raped their childhood” with the way A Phantom Menace and Attack Of The Clones developed the story of the earlier films. There are other things in life I choose to be upset about.
Before APM was released, I did my fair share of Star Wars-related shopping, and one item I had to have was this:
Muy muy, I like it!
He measures nearly twenty-four inches in length, says a great number of phrases when I squeeze his hand, and vibrates to wake me up. Or used to, before I got tired of being snatched from slumber thinking a wrestling raccoon had slipped between my sheets. The most important thing is that it makes me smile.
Theth’s image made me think of a woman and the life she shares with her little toy robot. It inspired a poll about robots at GDC, and the following scene.
Little One
Amanda woke up at once, and the dim light in the room told her it would still be another hour before she would hear music coming from her alarm clock. Her cheek rubbed the pillowcase’s soft fabric as she cast her gaze on the small shape that lay next to her. Wrapped in her arms and legs, he looked asleep, but was not. Robots did not sleep.
She stared at his back, and the way it rose and sank in a way that emulated slow human breathing. She knew he would stay in that exact position until she moved him, and would continue to act as though he slumbered until the alarm clock went off. She had programmed him that way seven years ago.
Pleasure models could do almost anything these days. Hers was not one of the latest versions, yet she could have fixed it so he would wake her up; but after the first few mornings of his inhuman-yet-human hands pressing on her shoulder and his lifeless voice whispering in her ear, she had gone back to her clock radio, which didn’t begin to pretend to behave as a human.
Is this how it feels to go insane? she wondered. To know that I’m functioning at a normal capacity, and then it all snaps into disarray when I start thinking about him? It. IT! Dammit. There I go again. Seven years with no repairs, not even one maintenance check, no oil changes for you, she though. No wonder you are malfunctioning. But I’m “malfunctioning” too. Who’s gonna fix me?
"kk-lax02a" by Theth
Little One had always malfunctioned, though. Pleasure models were never supposed to ask “why” or its derivative questions, neither as factory preset, nor after customizing downloads. Only Logic models could do that, and Amanda could have never afforded one of those, but when she brought Little One from the store and began to dress him, he looked at her with those deep dark eyes, and asked her why.
“Why are you dressing me?” he had asked. She had been squatting like a mother tending to her child when he spoke, and the shock caused her to fall backwards. She could have sworn she heard him giggle but when she straightened her body and looked at him, his face was calm. Then he started dressing himself.
Itself.
All those years ago Amanda had thought of taking him back to the store to get a replacement, as she was sure they had given her a Logic model by mistake, but in the end she kept him, and she always thought her feeling of guilt over keeping something she had not paid for prevented her from having his processor checked.
His brain, as she helplessly thought of it. His behavior had been startling since the beginning, and she had always thought she should feel more alarm than she did. She had tried to feel some kind of revulsion at his random displays of humanity, but maybe her loneliness and the fact that he had made her writhe with pleasure in bed as no fully sized human ever had, made her decide to put up with what must have been a bored assembler’s joke.
"as_6" by Theth
Now she looked at his neck, at the code imprinted on it, bars and dots that meant nothing to her. She was dozing off again when he rolled over into her, startling her into a scream.
“Aah! What are you doing? You are not supposed to move yet!”
“I’m sorry. Amanda. I woke up, and felt you were awake too. Good morning. Did you sleep well?”
Surprised, Amanda felt her mouth open in the shape of an ‘o’, but no noise came from it. When she thought of her morning breath and how it would bother him, she felt anger, and pushed him away, fighting with sheets that seemed to wrap around her legs like moving vines.
“Listen, Little One, you don’t move until the music comes on, alright? That’s what you are programmed for! And you don’t ‘feel’ anything. You are a thing, like the teddy bear my dad gave me on my eleventh birthday. I talked to it, but it was just a toy! It couldn’t smell my breath, and- STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT!”
Little One was rubbing his chest where she had shoved him, his face expressionless, but his eyes… was that pain? Was he hurt?
“I’m sorry, Amanda. I won’t do it again.”
“Will not.“
“I don’t understand.”
“‘I do not. I will not. I am‘. Why have you dropped your contractions? I never programmed you to do that.”
He was silent a second too long. She could have sworn he looked as though he had been caught lying. A very human response. But he was supposed to be silent when faced with input he had not been programmed to process, right? She slapped her forehead with frustration. He imitated her. It was so unexpected, to see him do that, to hear that little hand hit what felt and sounded like skin, she burst out laughing. She rolled onto her back and did not stop laughing until tears filled her eyes.
“Little One, you are driving me to madness.”
“Are you angry?”
She wiped her tears with the balls of her hands and stared at him for a moment. “Yes. No. I don’t know. You confuse me. None of my friends’ toys act the way you do. Not even the Logic models. Do you understand what I’m saying? You act in a way that’s completely unexpected.”
“Have I displeased you?”
“No. But sometimes you frighten me.”
“Will you send me away?”
"eh-hug054" by Theth
“Of course not! I would never! Why would you think a thing- See, this is what I mean. You aren’t afraid I’ll send you away. It doesn’t matter to you. You don’t have feelings.”
Little One said nothing, and Amanda hated to think she had hurt him, his heart, whatever part inside of him that made him behave in this way. She shook her head, disgusted with herself.
“I’m not going to send you away. I paid a fortune for you. You are mine forever. And you keep costing me a fortune with all the metal you eat! Man, what a thing to do, to design a toy that runs on metal. I suppose I should be thankful my energy bills are low, and that stainless steel is so cheap these days.”
A whisper from him.
“Because you love me.”
“What?”
Amanda stared at him, at his unmoving lips, and thought she had imagined what he said. Did she imagine it because it was true? She pushed away the thought. It would return.
“Fix me some breakfast, Little One. Oh, and I got you these handcuffs. They were on sale for five dollars a pair at the pawn shop. I got you enough food for a whole year. Here!”
She stretched over the side of the bed bed and picked up a pair from the floor, where it had fallen from a cardboard box filled with them, and tossed it in his direction. He caught it effortlessly, his hand moving in a blur common to hummingbirds.
Such speed. Of course he’s a robot.
She smiled to herself and tossed his little tuft of hair before she got up and walked to the bathroom.
She did not see the distant smile on his face as he examined the cuffs.
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.
