Rear Window Redux - Love Our Lurkers Day 8

Welcome, everyone, to LOL 8 - organised, as ever, by Bonnie at My Bottom Smarts (where you'll also find Bonnie's own LOL post, together with a list of all the participating blogs).

Those of you who've done this before - it's the fourth time that Underling's Humblings has had the pleasure - will know the score by now. For those who haven't, it goes a little like this:

Today's the day when we celebrate our 'lurkers' - the very many visitors who tiptoe through our sites and rarely, if ever, type stuff into the comment box that's tucked away under each post (look, look, there it is - down a bit, down a bit... there you go!)

Now, I really do appreciate every single person who stops by, enjoys the pictures and animations and stories and occasional ramblings, and keeps the hit counter ticking over. But what I really, really love is to hear from you lot - even if it's only to say hello. After all a hit count is just a number, but a comment is a person is a human connection in the vast and sometimes impersonal world of online kinkery.

So whether you're a regular chatterbox here or you've never commented before, it'd be wonderful if you chose today to pop up and say hello. You can say as much or as little as you like, and if you want you can be totally anonymous - no registration required! Tell me a little about yourself, what you do and (grits teeth) don't like about the blog, what your cat's name is, what you had for breakfast.

And while you're thinking what to write, enjoy 'Rear Window Redux' - the revisited and revised version of the nosy neighbour simulator I posted about this time last year. For the traditionalists among you, it now features actual spanking, prolonged but oh-so-tastefully silhouetted nudity and, um, completion of the domestic chores whose neglect got our hero in trouble in the first place.

Happy lurking... and if you feel like de-lurking, don't forget to say hi. It really will make my day. :)

All Lurk/ No Play

It's almost that time of year again when - thanks to the lovely Bonnie at My Bottom Smarts - we celebrate and salute the bystanders, the passers-through, the wallflowers... the 'lurkers'.

Every day hundreds of you brave souls click on that scary big red button - the one that says 'I UNDERSTAND AND I WISH TO CONTINUE' - but most of you are less inspired by the altogether more benign blue one under the comment box marked 'Publish'.

Love Our Lurkers Day - it's on Tuesday 12th November - is your chance to try out that blue button for size and say hello. Actually, whether you're a first-time commenter or an old hand, it'd be lovely to hear from you on that day - and all the other bloggers taking part would welcome your participation too.

If this is all new to you and you want to get a bit of a flavour, feel free to check out Bonnie's post, or my LOL post from last year, or this post from the year before, or this post from the year before that!

What do you mean, I'm just trying to boost my hit count?!

Well, maybe a little... :)

Look forward to seeing you on the 12th.

Remote Control

Most anyone who's been married, or lived with a partner or a housemate or a sibling, is familiar with the war that can develop over possession of the TV remote.

Of course, in a female-led household the conflict is pretty short-lived and the outcome a foregone conclusion. The question isn't whether you'll be watching her choice of programme - it's whether or not you'll be sitting comfortably to do it, or indeed standing up and making yourself useful while she does.

Today's drawing illustrates the result of one such domestic skirmish. It also happens to be blog visitor Elbo's prize for coming first in the Word Search competition back at the end of July. He came up with the scenario, too.

Nice work, Elbo - hope you like it!

Excuses, Excuses...

Well, it's that time of the month (i.e the final hours of the final day), and I've nothing concrete ready to post - no story, no drawing, no animation - which is pretty slack, and for which I apologise profusely. Things have been super busy on both work and home fronts, but I've several blog-related projects on the go so I'm hoping there's going to be a flurry of activity in the near future.

Luckily I'm far from the only person out there producing all kinds of spanko goodness, so I can use this opportunity instead to recommend someone else's work - a pair of eBooks by Lucy Appleby (who you may also know as flopsybunny, one of the organisers of the rather wonderful and formidably stocked Spanking Library).

First up of Lucy's recent books is The Bad Boy Story Book 2, a collection of F/M tales featuring all kinds of no-nonsense disciplinarians and their (un)fortunate charges. Any fan of my fiction should find plenty to entertain them in there. Did I mention that its cover also features artwork by the remarkable RedRump? What's not to like?

Second on the list, also by Lucy, is Horrible Aunt Harriet & her Nephew, a comedic (but nonetheless erotic!) story featuring the titular tanner and her brother's grown-up but irresponsible son. Expect paddlings aplenty from a guardian of the old school.

Enjoy, and I promise I'll be back before too long with something of my own.

More Than Words

Ever noticed how much we spanking enthusiasts seem to have in common? Sure, we each have our own predilections for certain gender pairings, relationship dynamics, positions, implements... but for me these are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. I still think it surprising that, spread across generations and cultures and continents as we are, we nevertheless seem to share so many touchstones. It's almost as though the spanking gene - if such a thing exists - carries with it a kind of species memory. I have like-minded friends in their early twenties who have grown up with barely any reference points for real-world corporal punishment, and yet whose fantasies are the same as mine. We share the same 'triggers' too - images, and especially words, that bypass the 'vanilla' brain entirely but set our spanko senses tingling.

Mention to another spanking-lover that your early interest had you poring over punishment-themed words in the dictionary, and you'll almost certainly get a flash of (possibly guilty) recognition - perhaps even an 'I thought I was the only one who did that!' - in response.

Words are powerful things, aren't they?

Which brings me on to the topic of today's post, in which once again I try to inject a little kinky goodness where by rights it shouldn't belong. Today we turn our attention to the Word Search, a staple feature of wholesome magazines everywhere. My version, at the top of this post (you'll need to be running Flash to see it) works pretty much as they all do - words are hidden, going across or down, in a grid of otherwise random letters. The only difference is the words themselves, which are all related to the Underling universe and hopefully have a special place in your hearts. To make things a little more challenging I won't tell you what they are, but I will tell you:
1) There are nine words altogether, six of them the names of implements.
2) All the words are labels used for posts on this blog. You can see the complete set of labels listed under 'LOOKING FOR SOMETHING?' at the top-right of the page.
3) Some words may intersect with other words.

It's easy to play (I hope!)

When you think you've spotted a word, click on each of its letters to light them up in a nice, healthy, just-spanked pink. If you click on a letter by mistake, just click on it again to deselect it. If you want to deselect everything and start again, hit the 'RESET SELECTIONS' button.

When you think you have all nine words highlighted, click on 'SUBMIT SELECTIONS'. Be warned that you're in for a stern look if you've made any mistakes or if you haven't highlighted all the words - the adjudicator doesn't like having her time wasted!

Now here's the fun part - there's a prize. As soon as you've correctly identified all the words, the adjudicator will give you a password as a reward. The first person to include that password in a comment on this post wins the prize. What's the prize? Well, I'm not sure yet - but 'custom drawing' comes to mind, and it's pretty much all I have to give. :)

Out Of Bounds

An interesting phenomenon happens around this time every year. With the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in full flow, London's public parks - not to mention those across the rest of the country, and presumably the world - begin to echo with the rhythmic thwock thwock thwock of people at play. And that's not just couples taking advantage of the summer sun to indulge in a little outdoor discipline - it's friendly rivals swinging racquets on the municipal courts, too, inspired by the prowess of their televised idols.

Now, if I'm honest my interest in tennis is limited to the sexiness of it - the toned limbs, the athletic grace, and yes, alright, those wonderful panty-revealing little skirts and dresses. My interest in al fresco spanking, on the other hand, is a whole lot more hands-on. I've only spanked outside on a handful of occasions, but those of you 'in the club' will know what I mean when I say it's quite a unique experience - a heady mix of giggly pleasure, excitement and the fear of discovery by unwitting passers-by. My lovely naughty girl and I go to great lengths to avoid being stumbled upon - neither of us wants to subject other people to our kinky shenanigans - but I daresay there are situations where one or both of the participants is not so shy. I'm sure there's the odd strict lady who regularly warms up her boyfriend's bottom and doesn't care who sees it - especially when his humiliation will be at the hands of the lithe young woman she'd caught him ogling a few minutes earlier!

How about you lot? Are you into the tennis, and if so is it for more noble reasons than mine?

And does anyone have a true tale of denuded derrieres in the great outdoors?

The Games People Play

The new picture I'd hoped to publish this week is sadly still on the drawing board - so here's a small substitute post to avoid an ugly little gap for the month of May.

And since my not-quite-finished drawing has a game-related theme, I thought it might be fun to ask you this - how many of you spice up traditionally 'vanilla' leisure activities at home by giving them a spanky twist?

An example: keen-eyed visitors may know that some while back I met a very special lady whose deliciously kinky tastes are easily a match for mine. And since we both liked Scrabble as well as spanking, it wasn't long before we came up with our own version of the rules for the former so that we could combine the two. In our adaptation, a player has to lay words that are in some way related to the smacking of bottoms. 'Slap' would qualify. So would 'ouch', 'implement', 'redden', 'bending', 'discipline' and... well, you get the picture. If the player can't make a demonstrable connection and has to use an unrelated word instead, then there's a penalty - a number of swats equal to the total score from the offending turn.

Now, as you might imagine it's not always easy to come up with a word that fits the theme (and indeed it wouldn't be half as much fun if it was). As a result there is usually plenty of defaulting to be dealt with - and this generates a lot more physical activity than the basic rules of Scrabble normally allow. High-scoring matches can make for quite a workout!

Other board games seem to lend themselves even better to the concept of alternative forfeits. Take Monopoly - what if, rather than pay rent when alighting on owned property, a player could opt to take a spanking instead? And what if some of the Chance and Community Chest cards were altered to indicate panties rather than share prices coming down? And wouldn't it be more exciting if you could only get out of jail free by taking a paddling in lieu of a prison term?

Even if we leave the games cupboard alone, communal TV offers many options. In my youth my friends would warm up for a night out by watching soap operas and downing a measure of Tequila every time one of the characters performed a particular action. I see no reason that drinking games couldn't be modified into spanking ones - you'd only have to trade swats for shots.

I'm convinced that lots of you have this sort of fun at home. If you do, I'd love to hear about it!