My relationship with captions

After a couple of rather important, but relatively submission-free posts over the last week or so, a few words on the subject of captions, which seem to be very popular in certain dark corners of the internet.  Such as this one.

There's a whole side of captions that I don't explore in this post, the theoretical bit, but that will probably be better dealt with if I ever come to post about porn in general.  In the meantime, here's a long-winded ramble about my relationship with captioned images on the internet.  Let's go!



I like reading captions.  It's a good way to find some pretty amazing pictures, and also explore some of the fantasies that other people are having.  If I find a particularly good one, or a particularly good theme, it can shift my fantasy thinking and give me new things to dream of.  I masturbate.  Of course I masturbate.

I know several good places to go looking.  There's a Crossed Legs forum that's populated by Germans that sadly is not what it used to be, which had pages and pages of images, with and without captions, and a reasonably lively and responsive community of people.  I miss that site.  It made me want to learn German.

Because Germans

If you aren't familiar with Servitor and his prodigious captioning blog, Contemplating the Divine, then check him out at once.  The best place to start is probably with his Generic Contemplating the Divine post, which is a great introduction to his skill with words, the amazing pictures he finds, his sense of humour and also his completely justified Goddess-worship of Anne Hathaway.  Also, read the comments on that post.  It was Gill Sans all along, but I could have told you that, because of reasons that will become clear very soon.

Moving on.

Flickr is another haunt of mine, on and off, and has been for the past two or three years.  I first got majorly hooked when I found an active group exploring fantasies of extreme wealth inequality.  More Germans.  The account I used at that time was purged when I realised what was happening.  I was all over the discussions, following prolific captioners and even had a couple of private threads going on with people who purported to be 'arrogant madames' in FlickrMail.  As for me, I was purporting to be a maid, and several people twigged that I was really a guy.  Then I had to cut myself off from it.

Because I was starting to make my own captions.

When I went back a couple of months later, with a new account, I discovered that the deletion of my previous account had been noticed and commented upon with sadness in the group.  I was missed.

Because my captions are good.  I make really good captions.  I have high production values, and I know where to find good pictures, and I know enough about PowerPoint to make some really good-looking spreads.  I also have evil ideas and I can make words do things.  My command of the English language is such that I can create things like character and voice.  Case in point:

Click for bigness.  Picture credit: me

That image just there is my most popular captioned image from that account.  18 people have favourited it, and although I can't seem to find it anywhere now, I did see it reposted from another account with a different, arrogant-rich-bitch picture pasted over the left-hand panel.  That annoyed me in a weird way, but as I hadn't credited the original images that I stole to make the thing in the first place, I felt it churlish to complain.  Probably imagefap for both pictures.

But yes, I don't often make captions, but when I do, they're really good, and popular with the punters.  And it's fiendishly addictive...

I started out doing odd ones and twos here and there, but I quickly honed my technique to producing sets of captions with a distinct design based around a particular fantasy.  PowerPoint is perfect for this, as it makes it really easy to put text and pictures together in a way that looks nice.  The upside of using PowerPoint for my sexual fantasies is that I've got really good with it, and really fast in laying things out.  In about half an hour I can set up a slide template for my current fantasy and start churning out the panels.  I spend a little time thinking about the typeface (haven't used Gill Sans yet), and I like the layout to be balanced and visually pleasing.  It can take a while to find the pictures, and there's always some careful editing that needs to be done in order to fill the text boxes while not over-filling them, but after two or three evenings I can usually craft something like the following set:  New County Show

Again, more likes, and several positive comments.  I get a handful more followers, and even some very complimentary FlickrMail.  And that's where the addiction really starts to kick in.  Any kind of encouragement, particularly from people whose captioning work I hold in high regard, just makes me want to do more.

And now we're back here again...

So, at the expense of sleep, housework and time spent with my family, I did make more.  I started with some guy who left me some really nice feedback, who's also into medieval punishments for scolds and nags.  He appreciated the hard work I put into making my pictures, so I tried to find a fantasy in which I could use some of his images.  I remembered finding some wonderful, professional, unwatermarked wedding photography portfolios that were of a decent size and not password protected a couple of years ago (you have to go to the Ukraine for that sort of thing), so I incorporated those.  Once I had my fantasy in place, it was a simple matter of cranking out a set of 6, which can be found here:  Live dowries  Ironically, I only used one picture from the guy's photostream in the final set.  It was hard to match up the backgrounds of his pictures with the backgrounds of the brides.  I match backgrounds.  Context and cohesion is that important for me.

But it wasn't enjoyable.  It was addictive behaviours that I could see myself falling into, but couldn't find a way of extracting myself from.  I was frantically trying to get the set finished, and I got myself pretty worked up about it.  The easiest way out of it was to finish and post the set to Flickr and then go away for a weekend with Furiosa's family.  I'm still hovering around the edge of doing another set, based on this insanely good photoset, and I'm still getting really positive feedback about this latest set and the previous ones.  It's a dangerous thing, but thankfully, as we saw in the previous two posts, real life is offering up some pretty serious contenders for my time and attention.  I'm also blogging a lot.  Hi there.

This is something that I know I do really well.  If I could find a way to make money out of it, and find a way to get pictures that I'm actually allowed to use rather than just stealing them as I currently do, then I'd be tempted to take it up as a career.  Sadly, the internet is full of captions, and it would be very hard to explain it to my mother.  Also, long-term prospects and pensions.  Boring, I know.

So yes, I sometimes do captions, and they are good.  I feel bad about making them, because it's textbook addictive behaviours, but then I feel good when I get feedback from others who enjoy them.  I need to be more careful with that if I'm to get a handle on my behaviours.  Terrible pun to finish:

Cetacean needed

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