Did you know that Augustus Caesar commanded that an extra day be taken out of February and put into his month, so he would be equal to Julius? Petty. But not as petty as the university that has blocked access to this web site! To conserve bandwidth, is the explanation. Hmm - I expect you burn books to keep warm, right? I won't say which one it is, although I know. Really, I'm flattered. It means I'm doing well.
The big news, of course, was the announcement of Diana the Valkyrie's Sponsorships, for competing female bodybuilders, and the simultaneous announcement that the first sponsorship has been awarded to Nicole Bass. This means that part of your subscription to this web site will be going to the women who sacrifice so much to the sport. Each sponsorship is worth $1000 per month, and will help with buying food, vitamins, supplements, travel, and all the other things that they need in order to be competitive. You can read about the sponsorships in detail; I'm looking for more.
I made a Gallery for Joan Rhodes. There's only a dozen pictures in it, but I'm hoping that now it's there, people will dig out old stuff and send it to me.
More Gretchen Stipp kickboxing, an update to Coyote's galleries, and to the Bigger Women.
And a massive number of galleries for the pictures from the Women's Strength Extravaganza, including two from Boris Badenov.
I'm getting an increasing number of stories in German, Italian and other languages. And Diutch now. The internet is international!
Games! Yes!! Grimwulf has made three WAD files for DOOM II, and you'll also need to be able to unzip them. If all that is gibberish to you, then forget it. If it isn't, then you might like to see the Nicole Bass game, set in Space Force Bass. Can you survive? What's around the next corner?
I've reinstated the alt.sex.fetish.wrestling newsgroup on my web site. On the alt.amazon-women.admirers newsgroup, we're seeing a new class of posting, pin-up type poses of women standing next to exercise equipment that one suspects they've never used. Oh well, chaqu'un a son gout.
I've also added a couple of new newsgroups, alt.binaries.pictures.sports and rec.sport.basketball.women.
All clean and new, my shopping mall! You can see a link to it on the main page. You go to the lobby and pick up a shopping basket (carts [called trolleys in British] are for wimps). Then you visit whichever shops you're interested in, and you can look at what's for sale, and by clicking on things, find out more about what you might want to buy. I've got scanned images from the art and newsletters, stills from the videos - the intention is that you can have a really good look at whatever you're thinking of buying before you spend a penny. Then, when you've got what you want in your basket (you can ask to see what's in your basket any time, and you can start over with a new basket if you want), you go to the checkout, where you pay using credit card via my Secure Server. Andrah does the security, so it must be good.
At the Grand Opening, I have four shops, but I expect this will increase as word gets around.
A couple of guys posted abusive messages to Heather Fine. People, I go to a lot of trouble to persuade people like Nicole Bass, Heather Fine and Gretchen Stipp to chat with you, and I'm not prepared to see a few fools spoil the fun of the majority of people who are nice, sensible and polite.
So I changed things - the Valkyrie will protect her menfolk. On the Message Boards where you're in conversation with named bodybuilders or wrestlers, only Members will be allowed. And your Web Site user-id will be posted with each message, which will stop people from pretending to be someone else, and will stop people from being able to post anonymously (the refuge of cowardly abusers). And if anyone misbehaves and spoils other people's enjoyment, I'll ban them from the conversational Message Boards.
I've persuaded Nicole Bass to come back to her Message Board. And people had better behave properly!
There was a slight outbreak of ill manners on two of the message boards while I was away, but when I got back I administered the necessary spankings, and everyone is back to debating whose arms are biggest and whether it's better to lift of be lifted. Disagreement and debate is absolutely fine; abuse and name-calling is boring and unwanted. Thanks to everyone for acting in a sensible way.
A new Message Board - Ask Aunty Griselda. Aunty Griselda isn't as young as she used to be, but age brings experience and wisdom. She's not past it yet, just a bit less vigorous than she used to be (which is probably good news for the men in her life). And she's willing to pass on the benefit of her wisdom to any juicy young guys wanting advice on anything from how to meet a Valkyrie, to how to treat a Valkyrie, and what's the best way to recuperate from the encounter.
There's a second regular chat session scheduled. This will be with Nicole Bass, once per week on Wednesdays at 8pm EST (unless she's competing or something like that). You can ask her about her competing plans, about the wrestling sessions, about diet, training, whatever. This is one of the first benefits that the sponsorship gives to web site members. Nicole is very much part of the FBB scene; she knows everyone, and everyone knows her. She has a strong personality, in a strong body, six foot two inches of feminine muscle. Ask her what you always wanted to know.
As I write this, we've had a couple of sessions with Nicole already, and they really are great fun. One guy, it turns out, was at school with her, and she was surprised that he remembered her. Well, I guess there aren't that many 6'2" redheads around, even if she wasn't into bodybuilding until she was 19. So I'm not surprised that she kind of stuck in his mind.
In the latest session, Dr Otto returned, and we welcome him back with a big hug.
My chat is still at 3pm EST every Sunday, and that's a lot of fun also. You always wanted to meet a Valkyrie and ask her some questions - well, you can.
If you haven't seen the Andrulla Blanchette mpg, get it now. The full clip is 33mb, and a lot of people told me they thought it worth the download time. If you aren't sure, I've also put it up divided into 8 parts.
There's also a seventeen minute clip of Sonia Fernandez wrestling; 60mb, but people are downloading it. Either the have fast access, or else they have an ordinary modem (perhaps one of the new 2x modems) and this gives you a megabyte in three minutes. 60mb would take 3 hours, so maybe they just leave it downloading while the surf. Even if you have an ordingary 28.8 modem, 6 hours isn't out of the question if you leave it downloading all night. But I don't plan to do a great many of the huger files.
Most of the new movies are taken from the Women's Strength Extravaganza. We weren't allowed to do movies inside the event, but we could, and did, video outside. Dawn Whitham, Annie Rivieccio, Nicole Bass, Christa Bauch and many others were interviewed, and they also posed and displayed themselves for the web site.
I've put up thousands of pictures taken at the WSE. This is the first time we've done anything like this, the pictures were taken with a digital camera, especially for the web site. You'll be seeing lots more pictures via this route, because I provided Nicole Bass with a Canon 600 digital camera, plus a 260mb internal disk, so she can take lots of pictures at events (this is part of the Sponsorship arrangement).
The first 1600 pictures in the West Wing Galleries of the WSE were taken with a Canon Ion 260, which takes floppy disks as media, and you can get 50 pictures per floppy. Then you connect the camera to a PC, and digitise them one by one, a very tedious process, rotate them if necessary, put on the site logo and save them as JPG files. Then you build them into Galleries, and put them up on the web site for members to enjoy. One members said "It's like being there". Well, it isn't like being there, because you don't get the buzz, you don't get the social interaction, you don't get to see them in the flesh. If you're remotely serious about this stuff, I would urge you to a ttend one of the competitions that I'll be organising a web site delegation to; the Nationals or the Ms O. You can read the where and when in my list of events
The great thing about doing things digitally is that you don't pay for film and developing, those diskettes will be re-used again and again. I plan to send someone to the Dallas Nationals with the same cameras.
At the WSE, there were a lot of the big names that you'll have heard of; we simply stopped them, pointed the camera at them, and chatted with them a bit, asking them to show off for the camera. And they were very happy to do so. See Christa Bauch showing off those famous abdominal muscles and her hard biceps, not to mention her thighs. See Dawn Whitham talking about her Muscle Fantasy web site and showing some of that muscle. And so on.
We also shot some pictures and video of Nicole preparing for the Nationals. Three months before the contest, she's already training and dieting for it. Steamed shrimp, steamed chicken, steamed fish, boiled rice, baked potato and broccoli. And the same again, and again, and again. Hours on t he bicycle, to increase her metabolic rate. You might think that this is a tough life, and you'd be right. Top level bodybuilding isn't a hobby, it's a lifestyle. We'll be following Nicole, our Sponsored FBB, as she gets ready for competing, and we'll be there at the Nationals to cheer her to victory.
The most populat clip for a while, was Summer Kalish, the 19 year old ex-bodybuilder, now more into fitness, talking, posing and flexing.
There's a couple of channels on IRC that you might be interested in. If you don't have IRC, then download and install MIRC or some other IRC client. Then log on to any Undernet server, and /join #awa or /join #femuscle. There's usually a small crowd of guys there, and where there's a crowd of guys, that's where a Valkyrie likes to go. So I'm there sometimes. But don't expect to meet any big-name FBBs there. I persuaded Nicole to go on once, but they didn't believe it was really her, so they banned her. Then she came back under another name, and one of them phoned up her published number, and verified that it really was her. At which point she got banned again, go figure. Never mind, Nicole is now doing the weekly Wednesday chat at 8pm EST (1am UK time) in my chat room.
But if you don't mind being on a channel that's several guys and one Valkyrie, you can log on to IRC any time and look, and argue live about who's got the best knees in the FBB world. Or whatever.
If you have problems getting on to IRC, please don't ask me for help; I don't run the server, I don't run the channels, I can't help you. I'll help you if you have problems using my chat room, of course.
That's a big figure, but what does it mean? I don't know, actually. If the same person accessed that page every day, then thats going to rack up the hits. But, on the other hand, some people will have bookmarked pages inside the site, and might never go onto the main page (I hope people to visit it regularly, otherwise they might never find out about new areas, unless they read this newsletter, and I know people do read this newsletter). Still, a million is a big number.
She's doing great on her Message Board, and so are the other posters.
As I finished writing this, on August 31st, I was hearing the news of the death of Princess Diana. I remember the wedding celebrations, the revelatoin of her unhappiness in the marriage, the agony of the fight with Charles, and the subsequent divorce. Her workout pictures, taken without her consent, sold for more than all the training videos put together, and I can well understand why she was trying to avoid the photographers on that fateful day. Her independence of spirit, and care for the weak and helpless made her a true Valkyrie, and the world is a poorer place without her.