Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Yes, cheap louche wordplay, and for Christmas. Manifested in the playful and deeply carnal CGI artwork of Vadim Temkin, in his alphabet of gay sex, where the letter shapes are formed by men’s bodies and body parts, many engaged in a variety of intense sexual acts.

This material, chock-full of sex talk in street language, is massively unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest, even without the images rife with male genitalia (which are in a posting on AZBlogX, 12/21/19, “Surprise! Vadim’s gay alphabet”).

Then, though the alphabet began merely as a set of 26 images, it came to me as worked into another genre: these images on the faces of surprise cubes, a set of 8 cubes which arrived a few days ago as Vadim’s New Year’s 2020 gift.

But first, the images, especially the one for the letter X, “eXcited Xmas eXhibitionist”, showing a well-hung Santa, with a Christmas wreath hung on his thick, solid erection (fuzzed over for WordPress, but inspectable on AZBlogX), while Santa himself hangs on a St. Andrew’s Cross, welcoming restraint, abuse, and pain. It’s a complex message.

(#1) (Image from a surprise cube) St. Andrew’s Day was only a little while back, on November 30th, so you could think of this X image as memorializing the crucifixion of St. Andrew as well as the birth of the baby Jesus

The original alphabet image (with a red-curtained backdrop, and without the caption, but, for the sake of WordPress, dickless):

(#2) A note in passing: CGI Santa on the Cross is bound with not just any cords, but RGBY cords, for greater vividness

Three favorites. The complete alphabet — all about mansex, with at least one notable dick in 25 of the 26 letters, all but W), with men’s bodies or bodyparts forming the letter shapes — is shown in the AZBlogX posting as #1 (“GAY to ZED”) there, along with three favorites blown up: Z because that’s my letter (#2); X because it’s the Christmas season (#3); and P (#4) because the idea of getting fucked in mid-air moves me deeply, and the flying cowboy position (shown in P) is an achievable, though seriously acrobatic, realization of the fantasy.

A bit more detail on these three, from the XBlog text.

X, eXcited Xmas eXhibitionist:  [in the image before penectomy:] A remarkably thick erect cock, with a Christmas wreath hanging from it.

But mostly the composition is about the bdsm apparatus Santa is strapped to: the St. Andrew’s Cross, or X cross (vs. the Latin Cross, or T cross). More on the crosses below.

Z, Zany Zen Zionist:

(#3) The dickless version

That’s the flag of Israel tattooed on his left flank. Yes, I know, Israeli ≠ Zionist, but the caption needs a Z word.

Meanwhile, [in the image before penectomy,] the downcurve of his excellent cock fits nicely into the composition.

P, Powerful Pounding:

(#4) The dickess version

The flying cowboy fuck can be free-standing, as here, or, to make the act easier for the fucker to manage: with one of the partners braced against a vertical surface (a wall, usually), or with the fucker kneeling. It requires strength and balance on the part of the fucker, and agility on the part of the hole, so pretty much requires a larger stronger fucker and a smaller flexible-bodied hole. It looks amazing in gay porn and has huge fantasy value for both partners, but it’s more performance art than a practical sexual position. (My man Jacques was taller, more athletic, and much stronger than I was — he could throw me over his shoulder and carry me around easily — and we both enjoyed cowboy fucks enormously, but much as we admired the flying cowboy in gay porn, we never attempted it, appreciating vividly the opportunities it afforded for nasty falls and damage to the furniture.)

In Vadim’s image, the fucker has an upcurved cock, angled to nicely fit his boy’s asshole.

Digression: thematic alphabets. Learning to recognize the letters of the alphabet is the first step towards learning to read; in a literacy-intensive culture, recognizing and naming the letter shapes are enormously significant skills, drilled into children at as early an age as possible, so that they are not just learned but overlearned, becoming fully automatic associations.

Materials for teaching and reinforcing these associations include all manner of alphabet books, with themes that will engage kids’ attention — animal alphabets / ABCs being by far the most frequent (kids are into animals, and the domain of animal names is gigantic, so animal alphabets are a natural).

Indeed, there are kids’ animal alphabet books with almost every conceivable focus. The relatively generic Creature, by Andrew Zuckerman, for instance:

(#5) Wildlife photographer Zuckerman’s images of wild animals, from alligators to zebras

Or the much more specialized Surfing Animals alphabet book by Jonas Claesson:

(#6) For kids who are seriously into surfing: “tube riding tigers, power surfing mandrills, and longboarding wombats”

Of course, the animal alphabet genre is available for all sorts of audiences to play with, not just kids. So it was probably inevitable that, given the number of peniphiliacs in the world — I am one —  there would be at least one penis animal alphabet, as here:

(#7) Penis animal alphabet chart (a piece of framed art), by ItsMostlyPenises on the søciety6 shop site: each letter is, visually, both a penis and an animal whose English name is spelled with that letter as its initial

(For a defense of peniphilia, see my 5/3/18 posting “He said “prickles””.)

Note that in the typical animal alphabet book, the image for a letter is merely that of a letter referent, an animal whose English name is spelled with that letter as its initial, and the name is given in the accompanying text: a representation of an alligator, say, with the text A is for alligator or, with more elaboration, A is for Annie Alligator, who …

In such examples, neither the visual shape of the letter nor the visual shape of the name’s referent plays a role, but these shapes are exploited in another sort of animal alphabet, illustrated by this one from the Maisonette site (based on an original watercolor painting by Sally King McBride):

(#8) Pairings of letter shape and referent shape (a representation of an alligator paired with the shape of the letter A), with the referent name (alligator) evoked by the juxtaposition of the two; the referent name could be supplied by text, but doesn’t have to be

In still another sort of animal alphabet, representations of some animal serve merely as design elements for the letter shapes, and the referent shapes are irrelevant. The resulting alphabet then can serve as a font based on these design elements. That brings us this “dogs alphabet” (by Crazy Nook on the Creative Market site):

(#9) An alphabet made from dogs; a dog alphabet, usable as a dog font

And then, of course, since there’s a lot of peniphilia going around, there are a great many alphabets made from penises, usable as penis fonts. For example, ths one from the Behance site:

(#10) A penis font incorporating a variety of skin colors, veining, and balls, not just dickshafts and dickheads

Vadim Temkin’s gay alphabet is in fact a mansex alphabet, comparable to the dog alphabet in #9 or the penis alphabet in #10, and usable as a mansex font — but with much more intricate instances of mansex as the design elements: many naked bodies (with notable dicks) in various postures, or just the dicks on display; lots of jacking off, cocksucking, and assfucking; three instances of bdsm; and some gay bonding. The point is that the individual letters are extremely loosely associated with specific referent names, to the point where a cock used for the letter C is essentially an accident (as is the dog used for the letter D in #9).

Caption text has been associated with each of the letters in Vadim’s mansex alphabet, but this association is largely a matter of mildly raunchy alliterative wordplay, not of specific referent names. The full list of caption texts (with explications for some whose meaning might not be immediately clear):

Aces of Assfucking, Bondage & Blowjob, Curved Cock, Dildo in Delightful Derriere, Enormous Erection, Foreplay Fondling Foreskin (jacking a guy off), Greedy Gobbling Genitalia, Homosexuals’ Happy Hour (just a toast), Ignorant Idiot, Jumping Jock, Kinky Kids (bdsm + piss), Lasciviously Licking Leather, Mindless Masturbation, Notorious Naked Nymphomaniac (group sex with a spitroast as its centerpiece), Orgasmic Oral Orgy (a circle suck), Powerful Pounding (flying cowboy fuck), Queer Quarterback Quickie (cocksucking), Recreational Rectal Rumping, Sexy Siblings Slurping (one sucking ass, one sucking a dildo), Talented Twinks Training (acrobatic affection), Unhurried Union (sweet Daddy-Boy cowboy fuck), Vegetable + Vaseline = Victory (masturbator about to fuck himself with a cucumber), Wiry Wrestlers (clasping hands), eXcited Xmas eXhibitionist (see above), Yummy Yoga, Zany Zen Zionist (see above)

Notes on being abused on the cross, as in #1 (and its predecessor, #2). From Wikipedia:

The St. Andrew’s Cross, crux decussata, X-cross, X-frame or saltire cross is a common piece of equipment in BDSM dungeons. It typically provides restraining points for ankles, wrists, and waist. When secured to a saltire, the subject is restrained in a spreadeagle position.

The St. Andrew’s Cross and the spanking bench are the most common pieces of BDSM furniture. Saltires are versatile and easy to manufacture. They are usually firmly attached to a wall …

The submissive may be attached to the cross with either the back or front facing the cross. Being restrained facing the cross is the position often used for whipping. Being attached with one’s back to the cross is usually more of a sexual bondage position or used for sexual teasing.

… The name comes from the crux decussata (diagonal cross) that Saint Andrew is said to have been martyred on.

#6 in the AZBlogX posting shows a young man strapped to an X cross, held immobile at the wrists and ankles (as Santa is in #1 and #2).

The submissive in the photo is facing front, his body available for edging (bringing him to the edge of ejaculation by hand or mouth, but not allowing him to come) or torture (in particular, tit torture, cock and ball torture, or having his pecs flogged or punched).

Facing back, the submissive’s shoulders and ass are open for whipping, flogging, paddling, or slapping.

#7 in the AZBlogX posting shows another young man, similarly immobilized, on a Latin cross, or T cross. From Wikipedia:

A Latin cross or Crux immissa is a type of cross in which the vertical beam sticks above the crossbeam. This is the main representation of the cross by which Jesus Christ was crucified. The Latin cross began as a Roman Catholic emblem but later became a universal symbol of Christianity.

(This isn’t the place to explore the physical and emotional satisfactions of bdsm, in particular of serving as submissive in the practices illustrated here, but I was once given a briefing by a young friend who was looking forward with excited apprehension to long hours of service being whipped on his back, ass, and thighs on an X cross at a gay sex club.  He was quite analytical about the physiological effects of this whipping (waves of endorphins, intense increasingly consuming pain taking him to another state of consciousness, exhaustion compounding these effects) and the emotional satisfactions (heroically rising above the pain, then being taken past his limits and being broken by it, accepting the superior power of his tormentor and absorbing it to rise again).)

The surprise cubes. This has been a long and devious journey, but all of that was just the first leg. On to the cubes.

Background on Vadim’s presents to me:

— on 9/6/15 in “Birthday flowers”: #6 is a birthday card with a CGI Johnny Jockstrap hunk

— on 9/6/17 in “Birthday notes”: #4 is a birthday card with a CGI Slavic lad in his underwear

— on 2/23/19 in “Driving it home”:

a gift from Vadim Temkin: a 2019 calendar using his Gay Tarot of Eons materials … (Note: Vadim’s materials use computer-generated images. No human beings or animals were exploited in their creation.)

— on 9/8/19 in “Greetings”: #2 is a birthday card with a digitally created image of a hunk in a tank top

Vadim’s New Year’s 2020 gift was not just bits of CGI art, gratifying though those would have been, but this art as worked into another genre: these images on the faces of surprise cubes.

A surprise cube, or pop up cube, comes to you as a flat rectangular object with two square images on each side of it. When you pick it up, surprise!, the thing (driven by a rubber band mechanism inside it) pops up into a cube with four picture faces.

From the Red Paper Plane site, on their Surprise Slider:

(#11) “Slide out the panel and two hidden cubes spring from their well, unexpectedly popping out into full, dimensional shape.”

(Vadim’s panels came from a Chinese seller on eBay, not from RPP. The seller provided this entertaining string of descriptors: “DIY Creative Up Cubes Card Love Albums Diy Customisable Love Surprise Box”.)

Each panel has 4 faces for customization with images that the user provides. Vadim chose to use white-background versions of his mansex alphabet. The result is, well, cheery. And when you look more closely, sometimes touching, often funny, and very often arousing (if mansex is your thing, and it certainly is mine).

#5 in my AZBlogX posting has the full set of Vadim’s surprise cubes, all popped up, on display against sprays of greenish-yellow cymbidium orchids in my patio garden (where I live, we have winter-flowering plants), with a wall covered in dark green ivy behind that. It’s a really splendid photo, taken by Kim Darnell, but I can’t show it here, because two of the images (C labeled Curved Cock, Q labeled Queer Quarterback Quickie) are mostly taken up with really big hard dicks, no way they can be fuzzed over for modesty.

What I can show is a photo I took myself, showing the use of the cubes to spell messages, in this case F U ARNOLD — but the images on the faces are so small that you really can’t appreciate the dicks in them:

(#12) In my bedroom, between two mammoths

As it turns out, it’s no accident that I can spell things like this. I noted in my XBlog posting that 8 cubes have 32 faces for 26 letters, so there will be dupes: one dupe each of A, I, O, and T, two dupes of E. I should have recognized the echo of ETAOIN SHRDLU (one version of letter types by text frequency, starting with E, the most frequent). Vadim commented on LiveJournal:

The idea was that the cubes can be used to spell some words. In general case that could be an interesting combinatorics problem based on word frequency lists, or something like that. I looked up any solutions (or even the problem itself) for English and didn’t find anything. So I just used the frequency of letters in English, and used the names of people to whom I sent the gifts as test cases. One can spell ARNOLD (or VADIM) with this set. For Russian language there is even the whole method to teach small kids to read with a specially designed set of 10 (or 20 – I didn’t get all the details) 4-sided letter blocks: Chaplygin method (which has nothing to do with Cauchy problem for systems of differential equations – that’s a different Chaplygin). My letter blocks are definitely not appropriate for small kids (nor for solving differential equations).

So, yes, letter frequencies.

Alphabet blocks. When I was a child, I had a wonderful set of wooden alphabet blocks, which I kept until I was old enough to remember them later (long past when I would have needed them — I learned to read at some ridiculously early age, and entered 1st grade reading at the 6th or 7th grade level, which was something of a trial for my school). But I kept them for years because they were such a interesting challenge to create messages from. Each block had a separate upper-case letter on each of its 6 sides, and there were a fair number of them, maybe 8, maybe 10, when 5 would have been enough to cover the alphabet (each letter once, plus 4 dupes).

I have now looked for something similar on-line, and they’re clearly not at all common. What you do get in the way of alphabet blocks with upper-case letters is one block / one letter (on only one face, or the same letter on all six). You’d think that people would sell them in sets of more than 26 blocks, but apparently not — so they’re not much use for spelling things, only for recognizing and naming the letters.

It seems that the best you can do is a Montessori-oriented product, the Skoolzy ABC Wooden Blocks for toddlers, with 30 wood alphabet blocks :

(#13) I assume the 4 dupes are ETAO, or something close to that, but I don’t know for sure; but note that with the blocks above you can spell CHANGER, FLANGE(R), or PLANCHE

Alphabet magnets. Things are better in the world of alphabet magnets, where the individual letter elements can be fairly light and small. You can, for instance, get a mega bundle of the Pixel Premium ABC magnets, available on amazon.com:

(#14) 142 letter magnets: 90 lower case, 52 upper case; and note the animal alphabet on the package (P is for Penguin!)

(It would, of course, be ridiculously easy to compose a hardcore queerboy alphabet on the simple model of A is for Ant, B is for Beaver, C is for Cat, D is for Dog: A is for Assfucker, B is for Blowjob, C is for Cocksucker, D is for Dildo, etc. There’s no cleverness in that, though some ace artwork could pump things up.)

This entry was posted on December 24, 2019 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Alliteration, Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and plants, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, My life, Phallicity, Signs and symbols, Toys and games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.