(un)real life 5.5, “Elucidation,” is up. I’m particularly proud of this ep because of the photo montages and manipulation involved. The pomegranate superimposed on the fire isn’t that technically advanced, but the “snow” filter on Muriel with the ice sheet in the background looks cool.

I also really like Muriel. She comes across as bossy, pissy and snappy, but I think of her more sympathetically as Anneka’s counterpart 100 years earlier. She’s so sharp and frustrated because she had very little place to develop herself when she was alive, and, now that she’s dead, all she does is hang around. For a smart, adventurous, kinky person like Muriel, watching life, rather than participating in it, constitutes the worst sort of hell. Too bad she’s dead dead dead [as opposed to Anneka and Will, who are just dead dead]. I sort of want to bring her back and let her cross blades paths with Anneka and Will s’more.

P.S. The word of the day is asphyxiophilia, which means the sexual practice of inducing arousal through partial, threatened or full asphyxiation, either by one’s own hand [bonus phrase: autoerotic asphyxia] or by another’s.

P.P.S. Though we usually think of asphyxiation as stopping someone’s breath, the origin of the word actually means “stopping the pulse.” Check this out. “Asphyxia” comes from the Greek prefix “a-,” meaning “without,” and the Greek noun “sphuxis,” meaning “heartbeat.” Literally, it is “the state of being without a heartbeat.”

P.P.P.S. Do you think the word “asphyxiation” is onomatopoetic?