Fixed Comments (again, again)

Multiple readers have reported problems in leaving comments on posts. I have now fixed that issue, and all comments should go through OK. Many apologies for any frustration caused and please  email me if you have any problems in future. I very much appreciate getting comments and it drives me nuts to hear that people tried to leave them and couldn’t.

This isn’t the first time this issue has cropped up. It’s caused by a really, really stupid security module that fancies itself as a censor. Some of its rules block comments featuring ‘naughty’ words like femdom, porn or sex. Obviously on a blog like this one, that presents a problem. I want the security features it offers, but not its morality policing. Anytime they do an upgrade I have to dig back into the guts of it to figure out what I need to keep and what I need to pull out.

For any bloggers interested in the technical details I’ve put them at the end of the post. In the meantime I’ll leave you with a picture of Mistress Evilyne about to do to a submissive what I’d like to do to whoever thought of adding porn filtering rules to a low level security module.

For anyone interesting, the module in question is called ModSecurity. If you login to WHM and then go to the ModSecurity Tools panel, you can see what rules are triggering. So if you post a ‘bad’ comment you’ll see what rule is triggering that you need to remove. Then go to the ‘Rules List’ and hit ‘Edit Rules’. That’ll give you an xml type file to edit. You need to add a section that blocks the specific rules you want to kill. For example, what I just added is shown below. That removes the specific problem rules  from Atomicorp for the wordpress comments page.

<LocationMatch /wp-comments-post.php>
SecRuleRemoveById 300065
SecRuleRemoveById 300074
</LocationMatch>

Another One Bites the Dust

I was sad to see that Dungeon West in Los Angeles will be closing down in October. Justine Cross has been forced to shutter it as the COVID crisis claims another playspace. I visited it a few times over recent years and always enjoyed the space and the equipment it had.

It’s events like this that make me think it’s going to take many years to recover from the disaster that is 2020. Even a city as populous and wealthy as LA only has a very limited number of playspaces at the best of times. What we lose today will not be quickly recovered. If you have the opportunity to rent local spaces right now, or contribute to their survival in some way, then I’d urge you to do so. It’s a lot easier and more cost effective to keep an existing space going than to try and create new ones.

This is Justine Cross, the owner of both Dungeon West and East in Los Angeles. If you’d like to rent the former, then it’s available till 10/15. In the meantime Dungeon East continues to remain open for rentals.

Blogroll Updated

I’ve done some long overdue blogroll housekeeping. Dead links have been purged and I’ve added a few new sites. Additions to the front page’s dynamic blogroll and my links page include:

Hopefully there’s something of interest in there for all my readers. Thanks to social media there are a lot less kinky bloggers around than there used to be, so I always appreciate those that do write and post. If anyone knows of established femdom or kinky blogs that are regularly updated then feel free to point me in there direction via comment or  email.

This playful image is from one of the new links – Bastienne Cross. She’s a Toronto based pro-domme. I like the fact that her galleries include a mixture of styles, including a lot of her laughing. It’s not all latex, leather and snarls.

Caught in her Gaze

Because I’m a man who loves symmetry, here’s the flip-side to yesterday’s post. Rather than the the averted look, it’s the highly focused stare. The helpless prey caught in the glare of the predator. I particularly like the hand to the face – forcing his gaze where she wants it.

This is Miss Velour – a London based pro-domme – shooting for Femme Fatale Films in  a scene called ‘Caught in the Act‘.

Horny

It’s inevitable that when I have a handful of posts bouncing around in my head, I’ll start several of them and finish none of them. Too many ideas is almost as bad as no ideas.

By way of apology for my failure to complete my thoughts, here’s a horny lady with a big weapon. I’ve no idea who she is, why she’s got a sword or what the deal with the helmet it. I’ll just say that I’m a fan of the entire look. If Halloween had more of these outfits and less of the sexy <insert profession here> costumes, I’d be far less of a grouch about the whole thing.

Updated: Thanks to my super helpful readers I can attribute this image to Mistress Verushka who was active in San Francisco scene through the 70’s and 80s’s. I actually featured her in a post last year.

The Chicago Studio

I’ve previously covered the difficulties playspaces are having right now with Covid-19. The latest example to reach out for help is The Chicago Studio owned by Mistress Simone. They’ve set up a GoFundMe to help it survive here.

I’ve unfortunately never played with Mistress Simone, but I have been lucky enough to use that space multiple times with Mistress Mara Mayhem. It’s a great space with some excellent equipment. I particularly like this padded table with its sturdy metal frame and a cut out section. That combination allows for all sorts of fun bondage set-ups while leaving the body of the submissive very much available for tease or torture.

If you can afford to make a donation, then I’m sure all the Mistresses who use the space would very much appreciate it. I personally just donated. I’m very much looking forward to playing more when the virus is finally under control, and it’ll be very depressing if there’s nowhere left to do so by then.

This is Mistress Simone in a photograph from her web site.

The Parthenon Studio

I think one of the biggest challenges of the coronavirus for the kinky community is going to be keeping playspaces alive. Individuals have a flexibility that bricks and mortar doesn’t possess. With people either not playing at all, or being very wary of shared spaces, there’s a grave danger that we’ll emerge on the far side of this with no quality spaces left. That’d be a terrible loss. Rising real estate prices in the last decade have pushed a lot of great spaces out of existence. Let’s not let coronavirus finish the remaining ones off.

If you have the means to do so, I would therefore urge you to support fundraisers like this one for the Parthenon Studios in NYC.  I just chipped in £50 and it was a very easy and quick process. You can also do it anonymously. I played there with Empress Wu last year and I loved the chance to visit a space I’d heard so much about. The owner is Queen Ariana Chevalier, who is one of the great dommes of NYC. Donate to the fundraiser and you’ll be supporting a black female owned business that brings joy to a huge number of kinky people. What’s not to love about that?

This rather fabulous image is of Queen Ariana Chevalier, owner of the studios. I found it via her twitter feed.

History Repeats Itself

Mainstream tech companies being hostile to kink and sex – as I mentioned in  my last post – is nothing new. Some start off friendly and become hostile over time (like tumblr), some are hostile right out of the gate (like Apple). Whatever the route, the end result has been the same for many years.

What I have found surprising is the recent negative feedback on a site created explicitly for adult content –  OnlyFans.  Like Zoom, they’ve been another winner out of the Coronavirus, with a lot of sex workers moving to offering content online. At the same time there have been a lot of threads like this and this highlighting problems content creators have had with it. Rolling Stone followed up on that feedback with an article on the problems here. Apparently this is one of those things baked into the universe like the laws of thermodynamics or planck’s constant. Online platform’s hostility to sex and sex workers grows in proportion to their mainstream success and their corresponding access to conventional funding sources.

Having said all that, I certainly wouldn’t want to discourage people from subscribing. There are a lot of awesome dommes making content on OnlyFans. So if someone you like is publishing on it, then go for it. The majority of the issues seem to be on the creator side, not the consumer side.

On the flipside, if you’re thinking of setting up an OnlyFans site, then it might be worth looking at all the options. I’ve recently seen a significant movement towards the AVN Stars site. I’ve no personal experience of that, but anecdotally there seem to be less complaints from content creators.

This is a shot from the always amazing Domina Yuki. She’s a domme with great content published on both an OnlyFans account and an AVN Stars account. Based on this tweet it seems like her bias is toward AVN Stars.

Telling Tales

This is one of those images that instantly makes me start spinning story lines in my head. Is she the daughter of the house, humiliating but maybe also secretly delighting one of their older servants? Is it a newly married couple? He’s the the foolish older man who has been ensnared by his lust for a young attractive bride. Or is she perhaps a college friend of the man’s daughter? She spotted his sidelong glances during a visit over the summer break, and now she’s returned to wreck havoc in his life and take everything from him. It’s a real choose your own adventure of an image.

I believe that is Lady Fatale, a pro-domme based out of Amsterdam. You can find her professional site here and twitter feed here.

Online Skills

Yesterday’s post had me angsty with not having played recently. For me it’s mainly a sense of frustration. For sex workers the current situation is obviously a much more serious one. Daddy An Li was featured in a KQED recent article talking about how she’s been dealing with it. I was kind of surprised to read this comment…

Also, An Li said many of her clients are older men. “They’re a little bit more reticent to learning online skills,” she said. “Which is fine. At some point, they’re going to have to learn depending on how long this quarantine situation goes on for.”

That a lot of her clients are older men isn’t surprising, but the lack of online skills certainly is. Isn’t everyone savvy with skyping, zooming and messaging these days? Even my parents – both in their mid-70’s – can set-up video conferencing now, and that’s just to chat about gardening and the weather. I’d assume the idea of a kinky online session with An Li would be far more motivating to a frustrated older gentleman client.

This image is from this blog post where An Li talks about some of the options she offers during the present coronavirus crisis. You can also follow her on twitter.