We got Chita spayed on Friday. I had been nervous about it basically since we got her, though friends had reassured me-- most said oh you Do Not Want to Deal with a female cat in heat, but I still felt guilty about life-threatening surgery that is, in essence, entirely elective. Until another friend pointed out that she'd felt like me and had just kept her female cats indoors and not spayed them, and hadn't had much trouble dealing with them going into heat-- but then the 12-year-old one nearly died of pyrometria. Apparently female cats don't have self-cleaning uteruses the way humans do! So if they don't have the occasional pregnancy to clean things out, their uteruses can become infected! Years and years of accumulated infection nearly killed the older cat, and the 7-year-old also had an infection brewing.
So I felt much better.

We got Chita back yesterday. She was yowling and kicking up a racket in the back when we got there-- "Yes, that's her," the vet tech said, "she's the only cat here," but apparently she was just upset at being left alone, because the tech had been petting her and talking to her all morning. So we felt better.
Kenmore Animal Hospital, on Kenmore Ave nearish to Colvin-- they're really sweet people, and not real busy so you can usually get an appointment without waiting too long, and the vet himself, Dr. Malo, is a Zen-like, mellow dude, kinda looks like Steve Wozniak but hotter and younger-- just this big bear of a guy who talks quietly and says nice things. He's thrice-diagnosed Chita as being among the cutest of kittens ever.
And her stitches look good-- well, they're ugly, but you know what I mean.
And she's running around like an idiot. She was a little subdued yesterday, but not as much as I would be after an ovo-hysterectomy. Hell, she was less subdued than I was, and all I had was a bad case of menstrual cramps.

Anyway-- obligatory cat update. And here is a photo of the two of us sharing our Female Troubles in our new bed, which I don't know if Z has blogged, but we have a new Big Grown Up bed and Chita takes up most of it.

I know this is the same night as the e:strip Halloween party, but this is a really good way to get two uses out of one costume.
October 27th, the Queen City Rollergirls are hosting an open skate, Halloween-themed: Goths and Ghouls!
Come in costume, we'll have a bake sale and a merch sale, and we'll have a DJ and we'll be here in costume as well, on skates. This is your only chance to skate with the rollergirls!
And we'll go easy on you, because we won't be in our protective gear either and we may be hardcore, but we're not crazy-- we're just there to party. Open skate, bust a move if you got any, otherwise totter around in a circle and we promise we won't hit you.
(If anyone wants to borrow kneepads or wristguards I have extra, by the way.)
Skate rental is included with admission, I believe.

Please come support us and also if you come I'll feel less silly showing up late to the e:strip party in an undead-rollergirl costume.

One last plug: Tonight from 9 pm to midnight is the Goth N Ghouls open skate prom at Rainbow Rink in North Tonawanda. It's $7 to get in which includes skate rental. Come in a crazy costume, buy merch and bake sale items, skate around, ogle some rollergirls' tits, and then go to the e:strip Halloween bash-- it's a great way to get additional mileage (literally!) out of one costume, and also you can support Crisis Services, to whom we're donating part of the proceeds for the evening.
And now to your regularly-scheduled post:

Halloween is a very special holiday to me. As a possessor of a ginormous rack, and an appreciator of the human form in its many complexities especially the more rounded (or smooth, for that matter) ones, I love the fact that people, mostly women but also certain demographics of usually-pleasingly-shaped men, tend to use Halloween as an excuse to Release Their Inner Ho-Bag.
Last night we had a party at the Knockouts' team captain's house wherein we drank beer, swapped iron-on letters, and cleaned our skate bearings. (The bearings are the little thingies that make our wheels turn, and most of us have no more idea of how to maintain the things than we know how to fly a plane. One of our OCD teammates, who can be relied upon to know how to clean anything [and also is a teacher and thus can be relied upon to explain things clearly], gave a little seminar on cleaning them.)
At this party one particular teammate was talking about how she'd helped her friend with her costume. This other girl was going as Amy Winehouse, and my teammate was in charge of Sharpieing the tattoos on. My teammate took it upon herself to take over design of the costume. The wifebeater was too conservative, so she cut it. The bra was white-- no, that could not be, so she ransacked the girl's closet and chose another one. "That bra is really hoochie," said the costume-wearer. "And it shows now that the shirt is ripped."
"You have to commit to your character!" my teammate said. "What would Amy Winehouse do?"
"You're right," the girl said. "You're right! I have to commit to my character!"
Apparently the tattoos were spot-on by the end-- even smudged a little to mimic how awful Winehouse's real tattoos are. ("Why are you licking me?" the girl asked as my teammate used her dampened thumb to smudge the ink. "Commit to your character!" my teammate snapped back.)
She stood back and admired your handiwork. "Girl," said my teammate, "you are going to make out with somebody tonight."

I think this is the spirit of Halloween. You dress up as somebody else, expose parts of your body you normally wouldn't (but, hopefully, should), commit to a character and do your freaky thing.
I do sympathize with e:hodown's weariness with girls whose idea of "costuming" is to put "slutty" in front of any other word and run with it-- most of the girls who do this have no fucking imagination, so the end result winds up being alarmingly tedious. (I say alarming because it seems terrible to contemplate a situation in which a chick revealing most of her body is tedious, but then you remember that in essence, most humans are idiots, and idiots are tedious no matter what they're wearing.)

So I'm looking forward to tonight-- most of my roller derby leaguemates are anything but tedious, and all are more than moderately hot. Many of them have promised either boobs or ass tonight in their costumes. Given that my impression of the hotness of most of these people was formed during long sweaty baggy-shirt-wearing interludes of getting my ass handed to me, I am anticipating a great deal of awesome.
I'm not saying that this event is a gross ogle-fest, I'm just saying, I appreciate me some scenery and also I look forward to having my boobs ogled over. It will be fun. Also there will be roller skating.
And then I will come to the e:strip party and maybe I'll still be on roller skates! I cleaned my outdoor wheels' bearings so I can skate fast in them. :D

And now for something completely different:

This is Chita's favorite hang-out spot. This may become my new userpic. I love the Tits-N-Pussy theme.

Someone had questions about roller derby and now I don't remember who it was:
If you are interested in skating with us, either to be a referee or to skate on a team, come to one of our practices. They are from 8:30-10:30 on Tuesday and Thursday nights, and 8:30-10:30 Sunday mornings. It is best, if you have any protective gear, to wear it-we have some we can loan out, but it may or may not fit you or be any good.
To skate with us in drills, we do ask that you wear kneepads, elbow pads, wrist guards, and a helmet. Some drills also require a mouthguard but you probably will want to just observe those for your first couple of practices.
"But I'm a good skater," you may say-"I don't need kneepads."
Yes you do-a lot of our drills involve falling deliberately, and our style of skating is predicated on frequent falls, deliberate or otherwise. Even our refs wear kneepads at least. You'll just be happier in protective gear.

Also we wear quad skates, not inlines; quads are required, and you can rent them, though you could probably use your own inlines for the first few practices to get a feel for whether you're interested in joining us more permanently.

Do people get hurt doing roller derby?
Bruises are frequent, usually arm bruises from blocking, and leg bruises from falling not-quite-properly. Collisions happen, though they're fairly rare and usually minor. Falls are frequent, but we practice falling to ensure that these are rarely painful.
More rarely we do have muscle pulls and sprains. In a year we have had probably 5 relatively serious knee injuries-two girls had pre-existing knee conditions that worsened from skating, and three girls tore their meniscus or ACL in falls while skating- of these three, one required surgery to fix it, because she KEPT SKATING after she was injured, and fell twice more. One girl fractured her leg very badly in a freak incident during practice last year. We also had several other somewhat-serious injuries-concussions, sprains, twists, cracked tailbones-but nothing that incapacitated anyone permanently. One girl broke a rib, but not so badly that she could not skate later that month. (In fact she didn't stop skating that night, and skated another bout the week after heavily bandaged, though that was largely because she's a total badass.)
My point? For the most part, it is reasonable to assume that you will be sore the morning after many practices. There is a risk of something worse, but it's uncommon. People get hurt worse playing hockey, more often-collisions in hockey are often head-on, while in roller derby everyone's moving the same direction.
So we do require that you have primary health insurance in order to join the league.

We have open recruitment until December. November 11th is our draft-we may not have another draft this year, so to get onto a team you'd have to have joined the league by then and pass your skills assessment. But we will have places for skaters who are not on a team, so it's not that we're turning anyone away.

And most importantly: ROLLER DERBY IS FUN. It is the most fun it is legal to have. Also it's an entirely volunteer-run organization, involved in the community, by and for women. It's a great networking opportunity and also is way cool. At my tenth high school reunion no one cared about my crappy job and unimpressive life-they just all thought it was so cool that I skated on a roller derby league.

Oh-e:Vincent was asking about my wristguards:

I'll blog about the party later, I just wanted to write that up while I was still thinking of it. My obligatory roller derby pitch!!

Elsewhere I mentioned looking at vintage porn and e:vincent was like, 'Uh, from the 70s?' and I realized I haven't blogged about it here. I am totally considering going into porn to support my novel-writing habit. I initially considered big-breast-fetish porn because well duh (there is a touching story about how I first became inspired to not be self conscious and defensive all the time about my boobs and to actually figure out what size bra I should really be wearing after I saw a bunch of softcore porn shots of a 34F chick and realized I was bigger than her and there she was making a living off her boobs, holy shit).
But then I was like, no man, no. I should do reproduction vintage erotica. That would be so rad.
I should probably address the whole burlesque-is-geek-erotica thing. There is this motion lately to reclaim the erotica of less-jaded (theoretically) historical periods, and it's more intellectual than sexual for many-- burlesque and pinups are the province of nerds, and are done not only for getting one's rocks off but also out of notions of feminism and identity etc.
So anyway.
Bandwagon-- am I on it? Hell, I AM it-- roller derby is another version of this, reclamation of former exploitation as new empowerment.
Anyway.
This is a somewhat ill-considered rant. So instead I am going to post some images that are vintage erotica. [...]

...

Yeah, I've restarted Firefox several times and I can't post anything, can't upload any media.

e:paul, the Upload Media button, I can say pretty certainly, doesn't work in Firefox on the new release of Apple.

So I promised some of my collection of antique porn. I actually paid for a subscription to a site, a real porn site, made up entirely of vintage porn, and I have stolen most of these from that site. I justify my theft by the simple expedient that I doubt any of you were planning on signing up to this site but are more likely to because of my plug.
The site is called DeltaofVenus, deltaofvenus.com-- I'm not linking directly unless that autoformats into a link.

It's mostly images/videos of women, girl on girl, and straight sex, though in several of the films and a number of the photos, there's homosexual sex just thrown in there casually for good measure-- obviously the divide between straight and gay porn was narrower. Last week they uploaded a video that was of two chicks and a dude-- and the two chicks actually had more enthusiastic sex with each other than either of them did with the dude. (The film dates to the 1920s.

So obviously cultural norms were different. And a lot of the erotica was attempting to avoid censorship by categorizing itself as "references for painters"-- hence a lot of artistically-posed female nudes. On the whole the "tone" more often aspires to be higher, simply because any photographer had to have invested pretty significantly into the equipment-- but there isn't actually a whole lot of coyness. The fuck pictures are pretty straightforwardly shots of people fucking, etc. Some of the photos even look candid, which is amusing.
The standards of beauty are somewhat different, but one thing I have noticed: Nobody is fat. People are un-toned, sure; there's lots of pasty droopy flesh here and there. But the people are skinny. The obviously low-budget ones with amateurs mostly feature chicks with unexceptional, slender figures. It's only in the later sections of the archives that you start to see any kind of impressive breasts-- it's fair to guess that nobody working in porn before about 1935 had boobs over a C-cup.
People are bigger now. Taller, more muscled, and fatter.

I knew this already, and more than academically, because my parents are historical re-enactors. In his social group, my father was much sought-after for events because he has retained his 29-inch-waist, and so can fit into actual period garments. He is six feet tall and 140 pounds-- and so he can wear antique military uniforms.

But enough talking. This is enough text, I think, that nobody's going to get an eyeful of antique erotica that isn't prepared for it.

The photos get more explicit as you scroll down. They're not chronological, but I bet you can tell which ones are later just by looking-- the hair, the undergarments, the setting, and most tellingly of all, the actual shape of the people.

Sure, she's untoned, but she's not fat.


She's pretending to be an artist's reference. Maybe she really was.


There's no nudity in this one, but it's more explicitly erotica than the one above.


I love this woman's expression.


Whoa! Boobs! This one is obviously the 60s.


I just love the posed coyness.


This one is modern enough to have color. Shocking!


This is totally just for painters to use to pose the female form. Actually this woman is hella toned-- and shaved! I don't know what year this one is.


Aaaand.... sex! I think this is meant to be a Parisian cafe. It actually might be-- France was a hotbed of the early porno industry.


Another amusing thing is how damned *early* many of today's porn cliches started. Here, it's the delivery boy. I've also seen a movie dated to the 30s of a dude boning the hot secretary. And there's a great one of "nurses gone wild" that's probably pre-1940.


Threesome!!! Mostly I just love the chick's stockings. OMG. It's not a sock fetish if I just want them for myself, is it?


There are several in this photo shoot and I just crack up-- they're all, OK, now it's time to assfuck the man! There's a lot of that. He's like, Uh, ok?


Yes. This is two chicks. You're not just mis-led by the low resolution. That is two chicks, one dressed unconvincingly as a man.


Sacrilicious! Lesbian crucifixion! But what's really great is the seated woman's expression.


This one is so totally candid. Also, is the standing woman pregnant? At least she looks amused. Also I love the stockings in this one too.


Fucking! Most awesomely, the man is wearing sock garters, while the woman has removed her garters and is letting her stockings roll down. THe porno cliche of leaving your shoes on was well in force by the time photography was perfected.