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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1603 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 6, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I have been accused of posting sexual topics in this thread in order to satisfy a prurient interest. Let's lean into the accusation. >:-)

A cursory search for "skirt waist height" on Google* indicates that the waist of a skirt generally is supposed to be placed near the woman's natural waist/bellybutton. A cursory search for "skirt midriff standing" on Gelbooru indicates that this style is followed surprisingly often (with the skirt waist just barely below the bellybutton) even in erotic art, where the woman is skinny and there is no incentive to hide a bulging belly. I find this somewhat interesting in contrast with the normal practice for a man, who normally will put the pants waist way down at the hip bone, significantly below the bellybutton (at least in my personal experience), and will put it up at the waist/bellybutton only if his belly bulge is huge. (Or maybe I'm out of touch with men's fashion. But to me wearing the pants waist way above the hip bone seems rather uncomfortable.)

On a somewhat related topic, one item that has confused me for a long time in erotic art is the popularity of outfits (most prominently the iconic "bunny suit", but also many one-piece swimsuits and bikini bottoms) where the edge of the fabric rises from the crotch at a very steep angle (i. e., straight to a point lying above the hip bone), rather than a gentler, almost flat angle (to a point lying in the middle of the hip bone, or even below it) that to me seems much more alluring. But I guess it's just a case of differing tastes. (Also, I guess a predominantly-horizontal bikini bottom might have trouble actually staying up IRL, since a belt cannot be used with it.)

*Hilariously, most of the Reddit results of this search are from transgender and nonbinary subreddits, with only a few from sewing subreddits.

A few weeks ago, after dabbling with local LLMs, I tried my hand at (non-AI-assisted) pornographic fiction. The result was two of the most excruciatingly boring """erotic""" stories imaginable (1 2). However, it's somewhat interesting to compare these two stories from year 2026 to two significantly better stories that I was inspired to write back in 2018 and 2017 by prompts found on 4chan's /trash/ board. Probably, the entire difference can be explained by the hypothesis that my brain has been completely fried by depression since 2022.

[if you're reading this from the firehose feed, you probably don't want to]

A cursory search for "skirt waist height" on Google* indicates that the waist of a skirt generally is supposed to be placed near the woman's natural waist/bellybutton. A cursory search for "skirt midriff standing" on Gelbooru indicates that this style is followed surprisingly often (with the skirt waist just barely below the bellybutton) even in erotic art, where the woman is skinny and there is no incentive to hide a bulging belly.

Uh... at least to my knowledge, most modern skirts of that style use pretty stretchy elastic banding as a single point of contact, where pants are naturally stuck with a compromise between the waist and the crotch that limit how high they can go. The most comfortable location to wear that will naturally be where your figure is most narrow. For most women and a surprising number of men without pronounced guts, that's generally pretty close to the belly button, just because of hips. Anything lower will ride up as you walk, anything higher will feel like it's trying to escape.

((TMI : ... yes, that's from personal experience. I don't grok gender well enough for crossdress to do much if anything for me, but there's some fun 'ease of access' roleplay that's not really possible in anything else, even jockstraps.))

It's kinda interesting that it shows up that way in erotica? Guys are quite willing to imagine targets of lust without interest or awareness in their comfort, as evidenced by the prevalence of girl-on-girl smut with long fingernails. But a lot of focus on the abs and hip lines near the abdomen have always struck me as more androphillic an interest, and while it shows up sometimes there, it's far from universal, as would be expected by androphiles liking focus on the space in men's clothing too. (cw: no nudity, but really gay.)

I'd expect that for straight guys (and possibly lesbians?) this is one of those cultural things where you fixate on what you're exposed to, and what you're exposed to is more driven by what's realistic. Teenage guys can see a lot of women in skirts in the real world; they're not going to get invited to many non-porn girl-on-girl scenes where they can make any analysis of lesbian preferences re: fingernail length.

On a somewhat related topic, one item that has confused me for a long time in erotic art is the popularity of outfits (most prominently the iconic "bunny suit", but also many one-piece swimsuits and bikini bottoms) where the edge of the fabric rises from the crotch at a very steep angle (i. e., straight to a point lying above the hip bone), rather than a gentler, almost flat angle (to a point lying in the middle of the hip bone, or even below it) that to me seems much more alluring.(Also, I guess a predominantly-horizontal bikini bottom might have trouble actually staying up IRL, since a belt cannot be used with it.)

Yeah, this one confuses me a bit, too.

For bikinis, there's a physics explanation. Attaching any less-than-maximally-stretchy cloth from the groin to the outside of the thighs is going to Cause Problems for anyone walking, sitting, kneeling, anything other than legs straight. There's a porno trope about swimwear working its way loose, but I think a lot of that trope works off of 'surprisingly' being naked, so not gonna really function if it's completely unrealistic wear.

But on the other hand, there are very stretchy fabrics, and they’re pretty commonly used for bikini-like clothing. The counterintuitively-named boyshorts are sometimes designed with the near-flat crotch-to-hip angle and do work perfectly fine, even for women with very pronounced shapes (either hourglass or apple), even if they're still not quite comparable to a men's speedo. They can be pretty hot on women and are imo underutiltized (cw: women in underwear for once)... but then again, I'm looking for different things (cw: guy in women's underwear, kinda?) than straight guys are.

There's some fun options that only work with the steeper profiles ("underwear aside" has 18k submissions on e621) and is hilariously uncomfortable in boxers, and presumably the greater-if-only-in-theory 'proximity' of bathing-suit-areas to not-bathing-suit-coverage is part of things, but I doubt that's driving that much of it.

A few weeks ago, after dabbling with local LLMs...

I've had better success, even success with pretty weird kinks, using a script-like prompt format: give the characters, setting, conventions, and major plot points to ask for an outline, then have the LLM go through each scene one by one. Doesn't help with every LLM weirdness, but especially for kinks where it probably doesn't understand where the 'climax' isn't just because someone climaxed once, can avoid the problems that throwing negatives or indirection tends to get.

The result was two of the most excruciatingly boring """erotic""" stories imaginable (1 2)... Probably, the entire difference can be explained by the hypothesis that my brain has been completely fried by depression since 2022.

That's leaning pretty hard into the allegations. With the caveat that I don't grok a lot of the kinks, here...

Anhedonia definitely doesn't help writing, and especially writing erotic fiction, but I think some of what's going on reflects a difference in the expected forms and conventions of a story. You've got a lot of skill as a conversational writer, and given your professional background I assume you've done a lot of technical writing, but the expectations in genre fiction and especially erotic genre fiction are different enough that a lot of behaviors that are preferred elsewhere just don't work in normal storytelling, or are actively counterproductive. In technical writing you want to bring the priorities, plans, and details as far forward and early as possible with as much precision as possible knowing that readers will start skimming; in genre fiction, that’s going to get in the way.

Let's look at "A Brothel Visit" first. That's a pretty well-established set of story beats, but it's one that can work out reasonably well. Where it's failing to be erotic, it's not because of the author not wanting anything or the character not getting what they think they want -- if anything, it's a little direct there -- but because it's written like an epistolary story. You're telling people what happened, rather than giving them reason to want to know what's going to happen. In particular:

  • You need a grabber. For short stories, you've one to three sentences (for novellas, one to three paragraphs; novels might get a whole page). The ideal grabber has implications for what's going to be the central theme of the story, a motive or contradiction for the main character, and leaves some unanswered question. More realistic grabbers hit one of these three, hard. You've got that in your full story: the tension between sex and masturbation isn't very highbrow, but it's still a question; whether this visit to a prostitute means something deeper is literally a classic trope. You just don't get there until sentence five, where it feels like an afterthought, and it doesn't really drive whether the action here will happen so much as whether the protagonist will enjoy it.
  • When possible, add something that's a) uncertain and b) answered at the climax. That's a little tricky in smut, because 'x gets laid' isn't uncertain outside of cuckolding. But some form of rising tension is necessary, and that's the easy one.
  • When possible, give central characters a twist, usually something that only shows up more than a loose hint as you near the climax. Tomboys have a sensitive feminine side in bed, the most masc top can really want to cuddle, the sub starts getting pushy, yada. Not enough to override their normal character, maybe not even enough to put them at 'average' for whatever that trait is, but enough to add some complexity. If the protagonist here is supposed to be really fastidious and analytical, have him get increasingly figurative or approximate; if he's supposed to be cautious, throw a bit of spontaneity. This is a lazy way of just signaling to the reader that the character is getting worked up or emotionally vulnerable, but it's also a nice bit of realism. Short story characters are prone to becoming stereotypes, and this doesn’t solve matters alone, but worth using.
  • Smut is almost always written from either first-person or third-person limited perspective, and in the latter case, put a big emphasis on 'limited'. It's not just that the viewer isn't going to know things that the viewpoint character doesn't know. They aren't even going to think about things unless the viewpoint character would, or did, at that time. If you want a protagonist that practiced with condoms back at the hotel, you need a reason why that matters to them that very second : did their hands tremble for their first time doing so in front of an expert, or were they confident, or overconfident? If they notice that the prostitute is wet, they don't assume one option, they guess multiple possibilities and at best only one answer can be right.
  • The saying "great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people" is a little... out of its normal wheelhouse when talking about smut, but it's a good rule of thumb for writing, at least in terms of priorities. Specifically, the pneumatics are seldom going to be very interesting in vanilla sex, and even a lot of pretty deep kink. Anything plausible to write is going to make your male character(s) look like one-pump chumps, but leaving that aside you're just going to get more mileage from how people react, what they touch or respond, and how they sound or feel beyond just the holes and/or poles. This one's very genre-specific -- doesn't matter the gender of a sub in a breeding kink story, they're gonna notice when they get filled with wet heat because that's the point -- so you can excise too much. Unless you're into cherry popping, though, "X entered Y" isn't doing you any good. Unless you specifically want the sex to be awkward and mechanical (which can sometimes be a useful trick, I'll admit, as someone into orientation play!), put more emphasis on reactions, sounds, anything to keep the partner from seeming like a dead fish. Your reader is already able to stimulate themselves; you want to tell them what their sexual partner being stimulated does in return. That's a particularly valuable space here if you want the protagonist's analytical nature to err into paranoia or imposter syndrome (sure, the prostitute's having sex with him for money, but she's still an expert and will know if he's big or not, or good or not; even self-conscious and selfish considerations about how she seems him makes him come across as multifaceted and less schizoid).
  • Excise what's unnecessary, procrastinate what is necessary. There are a very few number of writers that can get away with highly-detailed ultra-realistic sex scenes, but you're almost always going to do better leaning into vague verisimilitude. (alternatives: comedy or drama). Not explaining what 'special service' acts as a good example, here, since readers could presume it's anything from anal to femdom to bareback, but you can do the same from currency conversion to background plans to specifying ages beyond decade-level bands or less direct hints. Procrastination is more subtle: think 'this woman is wearing a bikini and getting wet' starts with 'noticing a damp spot', then 'testing with a finger', then 'oh, this hole's self-lubricating and it slides in'. It's a cheap way to tie details and observations together, and a clever way to have the observing character seem focused on what he's doing.
  • Alternatively, if you really want to push hyperrealism, you gotta go the whole way. If your protagonist puts his underwear back on after a shower, either spell out something happening to them before he puts on a condom, or readers will assume he's using his fly like the world's least comfortable cock ring. If you're having a guy initiate PIV from the edge of a bed with a woman laying face-up, unless the guy's dick naturally stands at the exact right height, somebody's going to have to do some work to penetrate or be penetrated comfortably. If your main character is a virgin (and sober), he's nearly always going to have nerves and struggle for a little bit with his aim. To make it sexy, you take these things and make them relatable, like you did with the aside about labia. Given your themes, draw out how it's different from porn, sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better, and then fold the bits that are worse into opportunities to see something different.
  • Pacing absolutely drives smut, and pacing of descriptions are one of the easiest ways to tell readers what the protagonist is thinking about and focusing on. If your protagonist is faced with a choice of three women, the one that he describes in the most detail is the one he's going to read as most attracted toward; the parts of her he focused on will tell what his interests are. A short paragraph can have the viewpoint character's breath catch in their throat or dick twitching in their pants; a long one can mean he's introspective or deliberating or spiraling.
  • Avoid parentheticals and asides. Yes, I'm a hypocrite. They still fuck over pacing in genre fiction. Most publishing houses will just axe them, entirely. In fanfic or lj-style writing, you can get away with one a page, maybe.
  • The goal is rising tension. They're kinda stupid, but look up a Fap Hero video matching your preferences with your pants zipped up, and you'll notice how the pacing and speed is set to ebb and flow until it hits the climax, ideally around the same time the in-universe and reader money shots are happening. A lot of smut-writing's just higher-brow approaches to that.
  • Word choice matters a lot. Connotations can pull people entirely out of the right headspace: whether a vagina is 'slimy', 'moist', 'wet', and "dripping" is saying the same thing, but they imply 'gross', 'clammy', 'neutral' and 'aroused', respectively. Likewise, the complexity of the word matters. Just as you can increase tension and perceived speed of action by favoring shorter sentences and paragraphs, dropping down to simpler words will do the same. This part tends to be hardest for non-native speakers or for very specific kinks (both sadism and cherry-popping needs a little bit of blood and wincing that'd tell vanilla people they did something wrong; voraphiles have entirely different connotations to 'slimy', for example).
  • While there are a few genuine sensation-only links (eg silk, feet, some water sports), the overwhelming majority are bound more to social affiliation, often with multiple variations depending on the kinkster. As a writer, you want to id a possible social affiliation, and make it into a process, then tie it into the progression of the sex itself. Noncon can be about losing responsibility for doing and enjoying a ‘wrong’ thing; writing noncon stories in that facing benefits from having the victim character fighting as much with his or her growing enjoyment as with the assailant. Breeding can be about making or being made indelibly tied to another person; exploring that needs the top to make the bottom “forever mine” well before the cumshot. Dollification can be partly about being ‘made’ into an attractive and unglazed form; exploring that means noticing long-standing imperfections as they’re removed.
  • Barring some extremely specific kinks, you're generally going to want a viewpoint character to have a good, complete orgasm at least one 'scene' before the end of a work, before their 'twist', major change in perspective, or denouement happens. For short stories that's usually around 3/4s in; novellas and novels can have it get closer to the end. Porn usually runs on the tethercat principle, so if you end on someone getting fucked that can imply they're having an orgasm forever... but you can't have that transition period go forever. It needs to be a one-and-done, with enough separation that the character (or observers) can reflect and identify how much they've changed. For really dark works that can err on the side of bad end, mind break, permanent chastity finally getting to them, but 'corpse bride' isn't specific enough.

A lot of these aren't really 'written down' as rules. You can break them, once you know what you're doing. But they reflect an evolved equilibrium regarding what people expect, and what people are going to find most gratifying (uh, mostly men: women's erotic fiction and some chastity stuff tends to a more gradual pacing and can handle a number of sequential 'money shots' in ways most men don't). That's one of the reasons that erotic fiction can be either squicky or arousing to write -- successful works consider, whether at the level of awareness or not, what's the reader's doing with one hand.

[cw: very hard death-related kink]

And I don't think your 2018 piece avoids these problems. Having a strong core to your story's plot papers over a lot of habits incompatible with genre fiction, and having a strong core to a genre's style does even more, but it's still going to struggle to get third-party arousal.

Take the example of the "trapped soul" story. It has a strong grabber, and that grabber comes with some level of question driving readers about when or if the main character will be freed (uh, for people not actively repelled by death/snuff as a framing story, and dollification as the kink). That holds a lot more attention than "A Brothel Visit" info-dumping about the traits of the main character: had "trapped soul" started by listing the protagonist's breast size and economic class, it would have been stolid as well. And some of the time-weirdness and discomforting word choice is (presumably? dollification isn't my thing, and the furry version is drastically different) part of the kinks conventions, so I won't criticize that too much.

But the rising tension needs work. You've got opportunities -- both 'why aren't I getting out of here yet' and 'oh no, I'm getting trapped more and more' -- but the former is a static condition, and latter is only dropped in three quarters of the way through the story. Janice's body doesn't have reactions, but her spirit and brother is supposed to... and they're more emoting at each other rather than telling us how they're being driven to act or react. There's a lot of background detail being dropped, but it's given early enough that it feels disjointed rather than a genuine observation. Jason is rich and has criminal connections, but it's not introduced as something Janice finds out as he's able to have her corpse dollified, just because it's setting him up to be creepy and the dollification is a result of that. Too many parentheticals, characters being having screen time or being named that don't matter, and a main character that who doesn't really work up to the radical change in personality toward the end so much as dive into it wholesale.

Sorry, that came across as more harsh criticism than I'd intended, but it's important to see writing not as a state where your muse drops from the sky and everything comes out right, but a set of rules and habits that have to be cultivated to push you toward that flow state. Writing smut well is a hard skill, not one well-taught if it's taught at all, and one that's hard to evaluate yourself how it's going.

That comes with the gripping hand that it's something you can improve on, even when fighting with depression.

You're telling people what happened, rather than giving them reason to want to know what's going to happen.

In technical writing you want to bring the priorities, plans, and details as far forward and early as possible with as much precision as possible knowing that readers will start skimming; in genre fiction, that’s going to get in the way.

It's true that it probably would be more accurate to describe all four of these stories as "robotic narrations of erotic events" rather than "erotic stories". Maybe that's all that I was going for—I'm not sure myself. I often think to myself that my local-LLM-generated "erotic descriptions of young, skinny women in clothing X and/or location Y" are four times as long as what I would have been able to write on the same topic ("A young, skinny, black woman stands in a shopping mall. Her tight, low-waisted jeans shorts and midriff-baring top expose lots of shiny, dark-chocolate-colored skin. Her kinky hair is cut just long enough to avoid being mistaken for a man's fade. She's smoking hot! What more is there to say?"), and that the stories that I find on Archive Of Our Own are twice as long as what I would have been able to write.

Alternatively, if you really want to push hyperrealism, you gotta go the whole way…

This is a very interesting paragraph.

That comes with the gripping hand that it's something you can improve on, even when fighting with depression.

I'm not really seeking to improve. The 2026 stories are just idle dabblings as I wait (perhaps in vain) for my depression to disappear so that I can go back to the multi-hour video-game-playing and PDF-to-HTML-converting sessions that are my true calling in life. It's interesting to try to imagine what flowery details a more skilled writer would be able to add, though.

(

One upside is the somewhat hilarious local-LLM reviews to which these stories can give rise. For example:

Overall, "A Brothel Visit" is an engaging and realistic look at a first-time brothel experience. It offers a nuanced portrayal of its protagonist and a clear-eyed view of the sex industry. While it could be enhanced by more exploration of the perspectives of the sex workers, it remains a compelling read.

Star Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3 out of 5 stars)

 )

Fair, and apologies for the unsolicited advice. Hope you're feeling better soon.

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