Deeker's Message of the Week

February 24, 2002

Deeker's Message of the Week is a new feature for this site. Its purpose is to keep readers up to date on various matters related to this site as well as other things that I observe going on in the DL community. The intent here is to give you, the reader, a better idea of my personal feelings on these things. I feel that this will allow readers to get to know me better personally as an individual. I may also share a few off-topic matters which may still be of interest to you. After all, there is more to life than diapers.

Since this is my first Message of the Week, it will likely be one of the longest as it will cover several weeks worth of recent material. Most of these entries should be shorter than this one, but only time can tell.

I am very pleased with the responses that I have been getting from the Surveys, both for the diaper boys and for the Sisters of Diaper Boys (29 responses just this past week alone, and 32 in the previous week!) . I recently cleared the 300 mark on the number of Diaper Boys survey responses received. Thanks, guys, and keep them coming. I decided to zip the oldest responses (the first 200) to save space and because most of you who are interested in them will probably appreciate having them available to read offline at your own leisure.

I'm actually surprised that so many of you out there have brought the sister survey to the attention of your sisters and that they are willing to take the time to fill it out and share their feelings and their perceptions of you being their diaper-donning brothers. The response has far exceeded my expectations. I am also further pleased to see that many of the responses indicate that girls who have diaper-wearing brothers have similar feelings and perceptions as the sisters of the diapred boys that I write about in my stories. This is the very purpose of this survey, to get a better idea on how girls in general feel about their brothers and other boys who wear diapers when they don't wear diapers themselves. The responses have proven to me that there are lots of families out there whose situations are similar to, if not to much greater degrees than what I experienced in my own family as a child, having grown up with two older sisters who were well aware of my accidents and how they were dealt with. I would like to thank all of you who have asked your sisters to answer this survey. I look forward to seeing more of them.

I started the Diaper Boys Survey about 5 months ago and have since added a couple more surveys. For all surveys I plan to include summary tables along with colorful and easy-to-interpret charts and graphs. It has taken me awhile to get this final stage of the survey project completed, much longer than I was hoping for, actually. I have been working on this stage of the project as my time has permitted, but it has been a process of trial and error. I have large amounts of data to process through my spreadsheets in order to produce this information in a concise form. I am also writing the HTML code for the tables manually in Excel (I know Excel can export to HTML, but the resulting files are so huge and contain a lot of extraneous code.) This manual HTML-coding method is also how I create the individual response forms. Please be assured that this final stage of developing the survey will be done eventually.

Someone recently suggested that I do a survey for Brothers of Diaper Boys. I gave it some thought and agreed that it was a good idea and decided to proceed with it. This survey is now online. It is similar to the Sister Survey with a few modifications made so that the questions are geared more appropriately for another boy. For example, since there obviously wouldn't be a gender difference perception between a boy who wears diapers and his brother who doesn't, the overall impression that this would make on the brother may be less significant.

I am pleased with the responses received on this survey as well, 27 in the first week. I wasn't sure how many boys who have brothers would be willing to fill it out. Just as my expectations on the sister survey were surpassed, so were my expectations for the brother survey.

Because of the time I have been spending on the surveys lately, I have lagged behind on updating the charts and graphs for the Guestbook (which is actually a mini-survey when you think about it.) In fact, September was when I last updated them (about the time I started the survey project). If time permits today or over the week I will update these charts.

Another section of this site that went by the wayside at around the same time the surveys were started was the story statistics page. I felt that these statistics were probably of interest only to the people who write stories for this page to check and see how their stories were performing. I also considered the fact that perhaps a contributing author would be disappointed if his story wasn't getting as many hits as he was hoping for and it may discourage him from continuing it. I am now thinking that perhaps the statistics charts were more motivational since it seems that I have received fewer new stories and updates since I stopped tracking the weekly downloads. Another reason I discontinued the statistics is I felt that the tables and charts for each story's average number of hits was meaningless for new stories that carry, say, an "average" of 800 hits, just because it has only been posted for one week, and that new stories always get significantly higher hits in a week than do the stories which have been on the page for several weeks.

I have considered resurrecting this section in spite of the reasons I cited above for taking it down. It appears, though, that few people miss it enough to warrant telling me that they do. In fact, only two people so far have indicated to me that they'd like me to bring the statistics page back. If I do bring it back I will only feature the top ten stories for each week in each category. If you'd like to share your thoughts about the statistics pages, please contact me at [email protected].

A few weeks ago I took down one of my own stories for the first time, and hopefully the only time I ever do this. The story was called "All Boys Shall Forever Remain in Diapers." The story was based on my email exchanges with a 14-year-old girl who told me about how she treats her boy cousins, all of whom wear diapers. She was much like the girls I have used in my stories as sisters who diaper their brothers very thickly and are constantly pointing out all the things they feel about boys being in diapers versus girls not needing or wanting to wear diapers. Without going into a lot of detail, I basically got carried away with what I wrote and I pulled out all the stops, taking my strongest feelings about diapers and boys and how they are perceived by their sisters and other girls, and taking this to the extreme. A couple people commented negatively on the story in some discussion groups, including one who said that the story was "an insult to the AB/DL community." While nobody complained to me directly about the story, nobody said that they really liked it, either, not even my closest and most trusted colleagues. I knew that I was going out on a limb and that the ideas in the story would not be well-received by everyone who read it. After a couple weeks I was getting bad vibes about the story, so I swallowed by pride and removed it. From this incident I learned where the boundaries lie in how much I can appropriately express my preference for boys over girls when it comes to wearing diapers. I still have the story on file for anyone who wants to see it. Just send me an email to request it.

I have been doing some drawings of diapered boys. Currently I have over 400 of these ../Images (I am always working on them, usually while talking to people on the phone). Some of you may know that I am not an artist. If I were, I'd do illustrations for my stories. I rely on others to volunteer their time and effort for this objective. I'll admit that I cheat somewhat when I do these drawings. Using Photoshop, I take an existing picture of a boy and I trace the outlines of the original photo onto a separate layer, or overlay. I then transfer this layer to a blank white page. To get a better idea for how this works, imagine laying a transparency or a sheet of acetate over a photo and then tracing the outlines with a black marker pen, then lifting this sheet off and laying it on a blank white sheet. Electronically, the process I use through Photoshop is similar to this. After I have the outline image on the white background I add in the colors. I have experimented with various methods for producing backgrounds, so the quality on some of them is better than on others.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with this web site that only boys are shown as wearing diapers in any of these drawings. Many of them also have girls in them, but they are shown wearing full clothing or swimwear at the very least. The girls shown in these drawings are intended to be portrayed as the sisters to the boys, much like what I write about in my stories. Some of the girls were in the original photos, while others were "composited" in with the boy(s) from a different photo. I don't intend to offend anyone who disagrees with only the boys being portrayed in diapers, nor am I suggesting through these photos (or my stories) that I don't recognize that some girls also wear diapers. It's just a matter of my own personal preferences that is reflected in these drawings, as well as my stories.

I have not posted any of these drawings to my site, but I have posted some of them to one of the Yahoo diaper groups so that they can get out into public distribution. Because of the volume of drawings I have as well as the space they would occupy, I am not putting them on my site at this time. I will email zips of these drawings to anyone who would like to see them. If you want to see them, just send me an email. Please feel free to share them with all your friends or post them to other sites.

If any of you out there have Photoshop or any other paint/photo software which supports the use of layers I encourage you to experiment with this technique. If you'd like to share your creations with me please feel free to do so. Or, if you have a photo of a boy you think would look cute in diapers, send these to me as well and I will see what I can do with it. For best results, use pictures of boys in shorts as this makes the shape of the legs easier to trace. Unfortunately, with today's boys shorts not being so short anymore, it's hard to find anything new that is workable, such as from the Sunday newspaper ads. Pictures from old Sears catalogs would be a better source. For best results, use the GIF format when saving these ../Images. In most cases they only map a few colors to the pallette, the colors are solid (JPEG distorts solid colors around the lines and in other high-contrast areas) and the files are usually quite small, about 20K or so.

Here is where I will share with you the little mundane little details about the latest happenings in my life for those of you who care to read them.

I have a birthday tomorrow (2/25), hooray! I'll be 32, but the way I look at it is that I will be 8 for the fourth time, since that's how old I like to think I am when I am in diapers. My family's not getting together to celebrate it until next Sunday, however, so I can't tell you what all I got until then. At least I get to go to a movie today, and tomorrow night my Mom will make me my favorite food like she does for me every year-- spaghetti!

Well, Valentine's Day has come and gone once again. Ever since 1991 I have had absolutely NO reason to (ahem) celebrate this puke-worthy occasion. While I did take a girl out on Valentine's Day in 1996, it was only a platonic friendship that wasn't about to get anywhere beyond that and we mutually agreed that we would never be more than friends, so no hard feelings there. Aside from that, I have never had any obligation to take a girlfriend out for dinner at a nice restaurant and to a movie. Considering that I was a lowly Burger King employee at the time still having to live with my parents, money was tight then. It wasn't so much the money that bothered me as it was the mere principle that I felt that I had to do something special for my girlfriend on this particular day, and if I failed to meet her expectations the relationship may be jeopardized. Well, it wasn't that good of a relationship anyway, but that's another story.

Nope, once again, none of the greeting card companies or any of the candy companies made any money off of me for Valentine's day. Over the years this has saved me quite a bit of money, not to mention all the money I haven't spent on dating altogether. Once again, I wasn't there amid the throngs of couples dining out, who were very likely there only because the boyfriend or husband felt that he HAD to do it or risk jeopardizing his relationship or his marriage. While I do attend movies every now and then, I certainly did not go see one on Valentine's Day on the sheer principle that everyone else is there with their "sweetie." Thank God I wasn't stuck sitting there watching some sappy, syrupy chick-flick tear-jerker, hoping desperately for the credits to roll and for the torture to end soon.

As much as I tried to ignore the day altogether as scrooge would ignore Christmas, I couldn't help but notice all the red balloons that the people at work had floating up above their cubicle walls. One person even had streamers and her whole damn cubicle was decorated like it was Christmas, for God's sake! I mean, talk about overkill! And yes, there was an unusually high proportion of people (mostly women) wearing RED! I, on the other hand, wore BLACK to show my extreme distaste for this horriday ("horrid-day", not holiday). I was disappointed to see that not more people were also decked out in solid black attire. Even this one girl who works in the cafeteria of whom I have been a secret admirer wasn't in all black like she was last year. This year she was wearing black pants and a gray shirt. At least it wasn't RED!

If there was any consolation for having to endure another Valentine's Day and be reminded of my eternal singledom, at least this year it was on this day that I acquired a new kitten. His name is Patches and you can look at his photo here. He's about six months old and he craves attention. He often hops up on my lap and walks right in front of my keyboard while I am trying to type something. He purrs a lot and he's just a sweet, adorable little guy. He joins my eight-year-old cat Hobbes, who has been my faithful kitty companion since November of 1994. Hobbes has gotten used to the presence of his "little brother" and for the most part they get along,

Well, I've rambled on long enough here. I don't expect every Message of the Week to be as long as this one is. I invite you to check this section each week. Feel free to share your comments, as long as they're nice and friendly. Have a great week everyone, and stay happy and thickly diapered!

--Deeker