On August 12th, 2008, I started a blog. This blog. Which means, it’s now the first anniversary of “Time Delay”. Whee!
It Doesn’t Seem Like a Year
Like the heading says: the whole anniversary thing kinda snuck up on me. It doesn’t seem like it’s been a whole 365 days since I started this thing.
There were two posts that first day. Then a couple more over the next couple of weeks. Then nothing for awhile. But then . . .
From mid-October through March I was posting like crazy. Three times a week for a lot of it. (And daily for a few stretches in December.) Three times a week might not seem like a lot to regular bloggers, but it’s a long walk to an internet connection from my web-less house. Plus the posts in question all tended to be longish. Usually in the neighborhood of 2000 to 6000 words apiece.
The blog was my purpose in life, and I was – for the most part – having a blast. And what they say is true: Time flies when you’re having fun.
Beyond that, the statement ‘it doesn’t feel like I’ve been blogging for a whole year’ is undoubtedly due in part to the fact that I’ve barely posted anything for the past four months. There’s been an awful lot of ‘dead air’ recently.
I don’t know if I’m back to three posts a week now, but I do know that there are three posts THIS week. After that, well, we’ll see what happens.
ZtC’s Ten Favorite “Time Delay” Posts
I decided to look back over the first year and pick out my ten favorite posts. Going over my catalog of posting activity, I was able to find about twenty or so contenders that I narrowed the list down from. I also found ten or fifteen posts that could easily fill up a list of Worst Posts Ever. (Not even just Worst ‘Time Delay’ Posts Ever, but actual Worst Posts in the History of Blogging.) But I’ve decided not to ‘brag’ about those, and just concentrate instead on the ones I really liked.
#10 on the list is a fairly recent post.
The Ghost of Sex Toys Present (Part Two of Three) continues the story of my relationship with sex toys. This time talking about my two most recent additions to my toy collection (bringing the current collection to a total of two toys from it’s previous count of zero). It was fun to write, and I couldn’t wait to move on to part three in the series. And yet curiously enough, I did wait. Hmm.
ZtC’s Wish List (for Ginger Leigh’s Fabulous Shopping Spree Contest) was also a fun little sex toy oriented post to put together, coming in at #9 on my list of favorites. Having to sort through a stack of saved webpages and put together a wishlist of $1000 worth of naughty toys wasn’t the hard part. Nor was talking about why I wanted each toy. No, the challenge for me was sticking to the rules and limiting myself to a single sentence for each toy. Long winded me didn’t like that. No, long winded me didn’t like that at all.
#8 was written at the last possible moment, when I couldn’t think of anything that I really wanted to write. Based on that origin, I’m surprised that
Reverse Day ended up on my list of favorites, but as I was skimming through blog entries the other day, I marked this as one of the posts to reread before writing the big anniversary post. Is it a little disjointed? Yes. Are the subtopics gathered and held together by a bare thread of commonality? Yes. Is that part of why I like it? I think so.
If I had done a top ten favorites list earlier in the year,
39 Things to Do in Year 39 would have been much higher than #7. The reason that it’s not higher now has nothing to do with the post itself, and everything to do with my failure (thus far, at least) to achieve the things on that list. But that gets talked about in more detail in a post later on this month.
#6 on the list is one of the Age Play posts.
Age Play (Part Four), to be exact. I had serious difficulty choosing between parts four and
five. I thought about including them both as a single unit, but that would be cheating. And as I knew that I’d be cheating later on in the list, I didn’t want to do it twice. So part four it was. This post deals with age play as it relates to me specifically – my views, the age play roles I want to play, and so on.
Masturbation cums in at number #5 on the list, and wow do I ever wish that I’d’ve been able to skip that oh-so-obvious pun back there. Alas, twas not to be. Moving on from that – the Masturbation post was the first one where I used subheadings, which went on to become a consistent device here in the blog.
Now we come to the post I’ve chosen for #4 on this list. Before I started writing it, I assumed that it would be a single post. Sure, it got a little out of hand during the creative process, but I don’t hold that against it. I posted it the first week in December, and for the purposes of this list, I’m going to pretend that was a slow week, with only the one post. Yeah, you guessed it. I’m talking about the “Sue, Rabbit, Penny, Dot, and CJ” post (actually series). Hey, it’s my blog, and I can cram a six post series into one ‘favorite’ slot if I want to. So that’s what I’m doing here. The
prelude, the post about
Sue and Rabbit, the posts about
Penny and
Dot and the two posts about CJ (Parts
One and
Two). The six posts about the first five girls/women I ever loved are number four on this little top ten favorites list.
Then, in at #3, is
BDSMI. I like the post, but even more than that, I like the subject matter. (I only wish that I’d been able to get more feedback on it.) As someone who – so far – hasn’t been able to get into a BDSM relationship or even get a lot of ‘play’ at the few parties I’ve attended, the subject of BDSM’s connection-to/separation-from sex is one that never fails to make my brain light up and take notice.
#2. Answering the question that has astounded the ages.
Yes, Brodie, There Is An Orange Rock Dork. Yes, I spent an entire lengthy post discussing the genitals of Ben Grimm, the Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing of the Fantastic Four. And while I was writing this masterpiece, the horny fanboy in me has never been happier.
And then we have the #1 spot, currently held by my event report for
Darklady’s 9th Annual Masturbate-a-Thon – The Solo Sex Circus. I’ve been writing up weird little event reports since 1995. Mainly concerts, science-fiction conventions, and the like. First for zines, then for blogs. This is the first one that I really felt came together like it should have. Rereading it takes me back to the party. (And makes me wish I’d seized a few opportunities and propositioned a few people I neglected to the first time around). But most importantly, I received a comment on this piece . . . from the Dark One herself! How cool is that?
The Mishaps
As mentioned earlier, the past four months have been ridiculously post-light. Ten posts in four months, and two of those were simply reposts of Sugasms. So really, only eight posts that I actually had to sit down and write. An average of two posts a month, compared to my old standard of three posts a week. Sad. Just sad.
But as sad as it might seem, at least there were posts in those months. At least one in each, at any rate. Not like September. September – for one reason or another – found itself getting skipped completely. It was four posts in August, then nothing in September. (I had excuses – health problems (CFIDS), misstepping off a curb and fucking up my ankle, actually writing three posts but suffering a hard drive crash before getting them to the internet to post, etc.) Yikes!
But a post-less month and several post-light months weren’t my only mishap during this past year.
December had a fair number of Christmas posts in it (starting with the weekly ‘Advent’ posts, but there were others dotted throughout the month as well.) Now that there’s some distance between me and having written them, I discover that I only like a grand total of none of them. They all sucked.
I don’t know if I simply shouldn’t have been writing about Christmas, or if I should have been writing about Christmas better. Differently. I just don’t know.
Now that I think about it, I’m not very fond of my Halloween posts, either. Maybe I should have just ignored the holidays as a source of post themes altogether. Hmm. Something to think about for year two, I guess.
But perhaps the biggest mishap of all was the KinkFest mishap. KinkFest is Oregon’s annual BDSM conference, held each March at an undisclosed location in Portland. I attended my first KinkFest in 2008, and had a great time! And knowing that I would be going again this year, I planned to write up and post an event report following KinkFest. I also wrote and posted a few posts under a “The Road to KinkFest – X Days and Counting” banner where the X in question started at 57 and worked it’s way down to 3 (with stops along the way at 43, 29, 14, and 3).
There were other posts in there – ‘Bed’ notable among them – that were also somewhat KinkFest-centric. Leading up to the event, ‘Time Delay’ was pretty much KinkFest, KinkFest, KinkFest!
During the event, I send a number of updates from my celphone to my Twitter account. But after the event was over, I got sick. Too much running around at the event had tired me out to the extent that I had a CFIDS flare-up, and that apparently left me susceptible to bronchitis. The bronchitis stayed for well over a month. During that time, I wrote nothing. Including, no KinkFest Report.
Before the event it was All KinkFest, All the Time. Afterwards, it was nothing. KinkFest? I Know Not of This KinkFest of Which You Speak.
To date, there still hasn’t been a KinkFest report, and given how woefully non-topical it would be at this late stage, I’m starting to sincerely doubt that there ever will be a report on KinkFest 09 here in the blog.
Unfinished Business
It seems like one of my most used phrases is “there’ll be an upcoming post on that topic in the near future”. I’ve noticed that these upcoming posts tend to remain ‘upcoming’. As in still not here yet.
I keep promising to do a post on Foot Fetishism. And another post on some of the less common I’ve got. I’ve also mentioned wanting to do a post about my fetishistic attraction to the classic Batgirl.
I’ve talked about writing a post (possibly series of posts) about paperboy/customer fantasies and things that happened (or in most cases almost happened) to me on my paper route way, way back in the day.
There’s an ‘upcoming’ post on trying to find fetishwear for a guy my size that I still haven’t started writing yet. And I promised another post about Santa Claus for July which I clearly missed the deadline on.
I’ve talked about doing BDSM posts on Limits (Soft, Hard, and Otherwise), as well as a very carefully written post about consensual rape-fantasy play.
If I were to actually sit down and reread my entire years worth of posts from day one to day 365(ish), I’d find more. I know I would.
I’ve also promised a lot of follow-ups to posts that I haven’t yet followed up on. Just off the top of my head I know that I mentioned upcoming sequels / continuations / follow-ups to
Yes, Brodie, There Is An Orange Rock Dork,
Inebriation Play,
The Clown Fetish, and
Misconceptions and Context. Again: If I were to go through all my posts from start to now, I’m sure that I’d find more.
Also of note – I recently published the first two posts in a three-part series about sex toys. Then I reposted the (then) current Sugasm. Then I posted things on Monday and today that still weren’t part three of that series. It hasn’t been forgotten. It’s actually finished, uploaded, and scheduled for autoposting on Friday.
The Traditional Gifts
On a whim, I looked into the ‘traditional’ anniversary gifts. (Wedding anniversary, but I think that’s the only type that there are traditional gifts for.) I knew that the 25th anniversary was silver, the 50th anniversary was gold, and that one of the first ten was paper. But that was the sum total of my anniversary gift knowledge.
So, I called up my sister, who turned out to know exactly as much as I did. The difference is that the computer where my sister is currently living is hooked up to the internet. So when she doesn’t know something, my comeback is, “Well, look it up on Wikipedia.”
As it turns out, the gift for the first anniversary is paper. Which I found funny. All those years I spent in the zine world, producing my work on photocopied sheets of paper, and now that I’ve gone all internet-delivered content, I’m eligible for a gift of paper? Weird.
The second anniversary is cotton, which makes me think that maybe next year I’ll get a t-shirt printed for the anniversary. “I Survived Two Years of Doing ‘Time Delay’”, or something. (Ideally, something more along the lines of “In My Second Year of Blogging, ‘Time Delay’ Is What Attracted My BDSM Slave To Me”.)
The one that really made me laugh was the third anniversary. Here I am, doing a sex and BDSM blog, and I’ve got to keep doing it for a whole three years before I’m eligible for leather? Seems like the gift of leather would be right up front.
Anyway, year four is either linen or silk. Silk sheets, maybe, assuming that I can find a woman to slide around on them with me? Year five is wood, which made me think, “Ooh, stocks!” (I’ve got a few women-in-stocks fantasies.)
I was just going to list off the first five year here, but my sister read me the list of the first ten years, and year six is iron. Chains, shackles, lock and key . . .
Cake and Ice Cream
What I’d really like, though, is the simple and classic cake and ice cream that goes along with the anniversary of a birth. The blog is a year old now, and the blog wants cake and ice cream. And dancing girls. Or strippers. Maybe prostitutes. (The blog isn’t very picky on that count.)
The blog wants dancing girls (or whatever), the blog writer wants an under-the-table blowjob while he’s eating his cake and ice cream.
Sigh.
Maybe next year.
