If you really must understand what it is you're getting into before you start reading, the author has prepared this FAQ...

The global village is both playground and prison, offering the security and privacy of the fishbowl. We live in a worldwide community shaped by the collision of the complete interconnectedness, rigid social structures and shame-based control mechanisms of our agrarian past, the anonimity, virtuality, and relativity of our technological future, and the freedom to love expansively, expressively and unconditionally that is promised by our current sexual and spiritual revolutions.

The author's earliest notions of sexuality as a category of human existence were formed by the December, 1971 issue of Playboy. While the author's experience and understanding have advanced somewhat since then, an astute reader may be able to spot the influences of that particular edition, the publication in general, and the nuances of the era.

The stories are about citizens of a sex-obsessed yet sexually ambivalent global village reacting to the attractions, relationships, social taboos, power struggles, lusts and fears that complicate their otherwise mundane lives and interrupt their endless and largely unsuccessful search for self-identity. The stories are mostly very short, and are written in a variety of literary and linguistic styles: realistic, fantastic, humorous, and moralistic; different tenses: past, present, and deliberately vague; and different viewpoints, first and third person, male, female, and ambiguous.

The thoughts and emotions of the characters, and the will they or won't they, and if so what will it be, are more important to the author than the sex itself, which can range in any story from non-existent to very explicit. If you don't like explicit sex or are reading explicitly for explicit sex you're in the wrong place. If you're into the psychological and the anthropological and you like reading about sex in experimental English, hopefully you'll enjoy the stories.

The author does not dwell on physical characteristics in describing characters, but be forewarned that the characters in these stories, like people in real life, have a wide variety of body types. If you require that everyone in your fantasies looks like they belong on Baywatch, this is probably not the place for you. However, in the author's opinion, almost all of the characters, unless otherwise noted, look downright spectacular.

The author believes gender, like the stories, is fiction with some unspecified basis in reality, and it is difficult to say how much the author's inherent queerness pervades the subtexts of the site. Most of the explicit sexual attractions and behaviors described in the stories are male-female, and the rest are female-female. If you are looking for same-gender stories, these may or may not do anything for you. If you have a problem with the notion of same-gender attraction, please go away.

All of the portrayed sexual acts are legally consensual, none are explicitly controlling, many are manipulative. You can safely assume that all characters are of legal age in most states, and that prior to Lawrence v. Texas very few of the portrayed acts were completely legal in North Carolina.

The author believes that there is no violence, sado-masochism or degradation in these stories, other than rare instances of bondage and spanking. You may disagree. While some of these stories are meant to be funny, the rest are meant to elicit an unpredictable array of emotions, both positive and negative, and you may be very bothered by the behavior of the characters.

You will not find any controlled substances in these stories. You may sometimes find a character who has had a little too much to drink.

In addition to, and limited by, all of the disclaimers above, in these stories you may find voyeurism, masturbation, cheating, oral sex, incest, religion, and/or creative uses of food. If the notion of fictional characters engaging in any of these behaviors disturbs you, please do not read any of the stories.

Reader reviews have been generally positive. On average, the hundred-twenty-plus readers who have filled out feedback forms rate both the concept and the execution slightly higher than "great." Most report leaving the site feeling "excited" and/or "turned on." People have also checked "happy," "cheerful," "enlightened," "hungry," "satiated," "disturbed," "perplexed," "uncertain", "annoyed," "confused," "sad," "amused," "intrigued," "sleepy," "empty," "nostalgic," "disconnected," "grumpy," "bored," "maniacal," "indifferent," "turned off," "abused," "angry" and/or "disgusted." Most people indicated they wanted to read more. As somewhere between 100 and 3,000 people a week have looked at the stories since the year 2000, it is impossible to judge whether those are typical reactions.

There's probably enough information in the stories to narrow the answer down to a couple of million people which, as far as the author is concerned, is close enough.

The author is a minimalist absurdist with an extremely limited attention span who believes that the images, memories, and fantasies you bring with you are just as important as the parts the author provides. If you prefer longer stories, you might like Foreshadow and Food for Thought .

The author has no inherent objection to story codes per se, but believes that on these stories, visible codes would simply serve as spoilers. There are invisible codes embedded in the HTML of each story, in compliance with ASSTR's standard header system, and are displayed by various ASSTR tools.

You can. Just start with Food for Thought and click [next] at the bottom of each story page. If you prefer reading backwards, start with the previews and click [previous] instead.

That's definitely a comment, and not a question, but the administrators of asstr-mirror.org, in order to control costs, limit the number of images served per day. Given the choice between no images and images that are sometimes broken, the staff chose images that are sometimes broken.

No. Sorry. The stories only exist in the mind of the author and in HTML on ASSTR. The staff does not have any copies in any other format that could be copied anywhere else.