One of PG-13′s chief tragedies is the failure of its innovative updating system. When we started out, the system was set up to split the workload with the viewers: you send me a picture, I post one of my own as well. This idea might work a lot better in the Web 2.0 era, but working with plain HTML, I inevitably buckled under the tedious pressure of twice-weekly updates in such small chunks. Updates became basically quarterly for a while, and they became special events unto themselves– every update was a new artist’s coming-out party. Though the share-the-load tactic may not have panned out, its ultimate goal was achieved anyway. So many of the greatest artists and writers of this community are ‘graduates’ of PG-13– no other website besides DeviantArt has come close.
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It may be unwarranted, but I’m vain and have a huge ego. PG-13 is actually one of the things I’m pretty modest about, because I’ve always kept one thing in mind: if I hadn’t done it, someone else would have. Heck, someone else DID, and he even beat me to it. It was simply something that the time was right for. This being said, whatever it was I was doing, people must have liked it a whole lot for PG-13 to have gotten any fans at all in its first few months of existence.
Princess Annabelle was her name: much like Sleeping Beauty, she was cursed from birth by a jealous fairy, who prophesied that by her eighteenth year she would have “a heart as big as all outdoors… and a belly to match.” For fear that their daughter would crush their whole country, the king and queen had her shut up in a tower so that she would never see the outdoors… but at least she had an internet connection and could share her wonderful secret with anyone who wanted to be friends!
It’s strange to think that it was ten years ago that I launched a project that, for better or for worse, has been the axis of my life ever since. Whether you were there from the beginning or found the archived site too late for any updates, it’s still connected with me. It was never lucrative, never brought me fame, never even necessarily made me a better person or provided a valuable lesson; that’s OK. From the start it was about one thing– making friends and sharing something special that we didn’t get to celebrate anywhere else. That’s why I’m still proud to say I was the PG-13 guy.
Hey! Pop Quiz! Who am I? Whose website is this?
That’s right, I’m everyone’s favourite irrate midget, KB on KB’s Site of Wonders!
30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary; for thou has found favour with God.
31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS.
32 Then said Mary unto the angel, Blessed is my womb; long has the wish waxed in mine heart to become great with child.
33 And the angel said unto her, Hold thou still; and he did point his longest finger to the figure of Mary; and he did say unto her, pshoo!
34 And great Mary did swell, becoming she like the ball of many colors with which children of men do play in the surf.
35 Then did Joseph marvel to see his espoused wife thus; for there was joy in his trousers.
I often find myself saying to people “I don’t read.” Now this is a lie. I won reading challenges as a kid. But what I won’t read are most things written for our community. Occasionally I’ll skim something. Read the first paragraph to get a feel for the story. And most of those times I regret it.
So I decided to collect a few first paragraphs and conduct a poll. My two questions were.
‘Would you continue reading this?’ And ‘What are your thoughts?’
I don’t like to comment on the fetish* , but sometimes I think that taking a brief step back to look at ourselves is warranted. The question I want to pose in this article is “what kind of maieusiophile do you want to be”?
Hi!
Starting the sequel... NOW!
I ought to introduce myself if you’re new to this kind of thing. My name’s Ethan, but in this community people call me G’Tron. Much like most of the rest of the people you’ll meet on the Internet, I like to amuse myself by making stuff up. In my case, I make up stuff about pregnancy, simply because I like it: as a biological process, as a storytelling trope, as a metaphor, as an idiom. Admittedly, this is driven by a strong fetish, which in these parts is referred to as maieusiophilia. The fact remains that I like it on a nonsexual level too, and in my years on the internet I’ve made a lot of great friends who agree with me about that.
I used to have a website called PG-13. Well, technically, I still have it, I just haven’t updated it for so long that it was actually easier to start a new website than to update the old one. PG-13 has a lot of history and a lot of fans, but the truth is that it has a terminal case of the Web One-Point-Ohs. I recently started another blog with no connection to PG-13, and discovered something that I seemed to have forgotten since 2003 or so: making a website is fun. Everything I found obnoxious about the old way I did things– writing HTML by hand in SimpleText– has been streamlined for me to the point where not even laziness can excuse failure to produce an update.
That being said, if there’s one thing everyone’s learned during their time in the maieusiophilic community, it’s that you can always count on G’Tron to disappoint you. This is why I’m sharing the burden this time around. My co-administrator on this project is my new favorite person, KaileighBlue, best known for her awesome comic book Olympic Dames and for terrifying newbies. We’re also currently eyeing other upstanding community members, with the intention of adding copyeditors and so forth to the mix. (Don’t call us, we’ll call you.)
Among the exciting new features we intend to introduce:
- Pregnancy And…: Regular essays exploring the use of pregnancy in a given medium, ranging from broad sweeps (Pregnancy And… Superhero Comics) to very specific (Pregnancy And… Drew Barrymore Movies)
- The Lone Girl: KaileighBlue’s regular rant on the unbearable lightness of being the only female maeiusiogravidophile she or I have ever met.
- Weekend Challenge: To stimulate creativity on the parts of our resident artists and writers, every Friday we’ll post a creative challenge, again ranging from the general (Holiday scenes, any season) to the very specific (Write a limerick about pregnant women at Easter, starring an established media character).
- The Cool Kid’s Table: In which we choose a random artist or writer in the community and focus on their body of work, praising the best and hazing the rest.
- A Fanatical Devotion To The Pope– oh, bloody hell!
In theory, Relevant Content will be exactly what its name implies; a place to find things that are relevant to the interests of PG-13 fans. This means that there are certain things you’ll find here:
- Original artwork, fiction, and other “homemade” relevant content
- Links to notable examples of relevant content from offsite (like at DeviantArt, for example)
- Reviews of movies, comics, and other media featuring relevant content
- Editorials about the creation and interests going into relevant content
On the other hand, most of the things you wouldn’t find at PG-13, you won’t find here either:
- Pornography, most especially the photographic kind
- Links to people’s personal Flickr and Youtube accounts, or “girl on the street” photos
- News about celebrity / local newscaster pregnancies
- Leeching, art piracy, net.drama, and general internet fuckwaddery
In short, Relevant Content is the sequel to PG-13. It’ll have all the stuff you loved about the original, plus lots of new things you weren’t expecting but will hopefully become staples of future iterations and spinoffs. Of course, the original PG-13 is still around; it’s not going anywhere, but it’s not going to be updated either. The message board will still be around, although it will likely eventually be ruled by roleplayers.
Come along and join us, friends. Shake the paw of destiny once again.