I grew up pre internet, and I just thought I was the only person into that kind of stuff.
First of all, I think I have written hour long paragraphs on this type of thing back when I posted on "living Mannequin Circle", so I will keep this as brief as possible...however, even after four years, this still blows my mind.
I can remember the very day...(and at the risk of sounding like a total cheese-ball)...that I found out that I wasn't the only person into this kind of stuff. It was thanksgiving Day, 2003. Everybody was lying around in the living room at my parents house after the big meal, and my brother and I were looking at the insane price that musclecar parts were bringing on ebay. I didn't know anything about "aol", or how much it sucked...search bars, or even how to turn the thing on. I could have cared less about those types of things.
Once we got bored with searching around ebay, he showed me how to use the search bar, and then left the room. I had been on there for a couple hours digging around, and just for the hell of it...I typed in "mannequin modeling"....you can just imagine the surprise when dosman's site came up on the screen!!!
I honestly was in shock, or probably liken the experience to the very first time you ever got sloppy drunk as a teenager....I was in dreamland!
The thought that there was an entire community of people out there in the world into timestop, wind-up dolls, mannequinized women...or cryogenically frozen women absolutely never, ever crossed my mind!...I literally must have been on there for four or five hours, planted about two inches away from the monitor, whispering or mumbling to myself "HOLY SH#T!...I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS STUFF IS ACTUALLY ON HERE! " everytime something else appeared on the screen.
The very next day (black friday, mind you), I took some money out of the bank, and decided "today is the day I buy a PC" ... Luckily, I picked out the most expensive one that I could afford, so I wouldn't have to spend anytime disscussing what one to buy with any sales people....besides, I didn't know anything about them anyway, except for using the search bar.
Within a couple of hours, I had that thing unpacked, hooked up, and running off of one of those "free" aol trial cd's.
My only regrets, were 1) not buying a larger flat panel monitor. 2) I instantly turned into a recluse for the remainder of the weekend (and for a good portion of the following weeks), thus missing out on time that could have been spent with my younger brothers who had travelled 12 hours to new york state just to visit.
I can also remember pulling several all-nighters (on week nights) once I found the "Legacy of Timeless Beauty" site. I can remember guys joking about my newfound love of computers, saying "You look like you haven't slept for days...must have finally found out how to access the adult sites, eh?"
I would just wearily smile, and say ah yeah...something like that.
And yes, prior to my discovery of the outside world, I had about two or three dozen vhs tapes with snippets of obscure freezes, and a secret stash of pictures cut from sears catalogs, magazines, comic book covers etc. Hell, the release of the "California Girls" video took up a solid two years of my life alone...there was no youtube back in them days. If you wanted to see two rows of posed hotties frozen in bikini's, then you stayed up until 3 am waiting for MTV's rotation to circle through mister....
I even remember having a trapper keeper full of hand drawings, mostly of women covered with or frozen in blocks of ice. I also had some drawings where women were being attacked by giant spider's. Some stored away and hanging, cocooned from the roof of some remote cave...while others were entangled in webbing in restaurant chairs, locker rooms or at cheerleading practice.
Then one of my little brothers found them and decided to bring them all out for everybody to see one day. Those were all destroyed in the fireplace by my father of course.
Then "v" came along and I started from scratch all over again. This time around, my drawings changed to cryo-chambers. I must have had atleast a hundred of them (honestly, I had a shirt box packed to the top, with rubberbands holding both halves together)...fully colored by hand...brunettes, redheads, blondes, you name it.
I began taping the pages together to give the illusion that you were walking along the floor of the ship, viewing the victims, one after the other. It got to the point where it took too long to draw the chambers by hand, so I started going down to the local library and burning off copies a dozen at a time from one page pre-drawn with four chambers (including the small "air bubbles", as well as the "guide-rails that were mounted around them). That worked so well, I decided that I needed victims of varying ages and shapes...after all, If these guys were taking over the world, all of the women wouldn't be 18-25 and perfect ten's right? So that was when I started experimenting with the shrinking or size setting. I must have made a dozen trips or more down to the library, reducing or enlarging my pre-drawn nude figures, constantly looking over my shoulder thinking..."Man if I get caught, how am I going to explain this one?"
One time, I even left the original in the printer, and made it half way across the parking lot, when some considerate woman tracked me down and said "excuse me, but you left your...figure drawing assignment in the printer!" My face must have been fire engine red when she handed the paper to me. I did the best I could, and said "oh yeah..I need that for class."...I'm not so sure she was convinced, but then again...I was pretty damned good at it, and what other explanation could there be?
A few days later, I forked over $400 for a brand new printer...just so I would never have to go back to the library again. (yes, back in those days they were expensive, and huge)...I had to constantly hide the thing in my closet when company stopped by, in case somebody asked what I would actually need a printer for...
Pretty soon, I started adding little captions to the drawings (as if somebody were to read them...they would need to know how that girl ended up in stasis in the first place right?) However, the writing would take up to much space in the drawing, so eventually I started filling up little notebooks, then moved on to normal sized notebooks. I eventually had a trapper keeper full of written stories after fifteen years or so.
Once I saw the various photo manipulations, and eventually the poser renderings on the internet....everything I had ever hand-drawn, became outdated and in some way silly at that point. I dug out all of my old drawings and pre-drawn figures that I had locked in a office cabinet ( now hidden in the back of my own bedroom closet in my own home). As I ran every one of them through the shredder, I remember thinking "Man, I can't even imagine how much time I had involved in these!" Some of those drawings covered a period of fifteen to twenty years....
On the good side of all of this, I was lucky enough to go out with two different longterm girlfriends that both got a kick out of my obsession, and even lived out several asfr related fantasies with me.
So I guess as far as the internet changing anything, it has made it a lot more easier to find stuff. I can afford to throw more money at it these days...but I can also remember spending countless hours at the video store, reading every back cover of every tape in the store...looking for that one sentence that might contain the words fembot, mannequin, wind-up doll, quick-frozen or timestop. I tossed a lot of money away on that sort of thing, and I do miss the "thrill of the hunt" at finding that one possible freeze scene. But I would much prefer looking for it on my computer instead, these days....