The website Deep Focus by Dubnglas was online from January 1999 to March 2003. In March 2003, Tripod deleted it without explanation, and I didn't press to discover why. I used the deletion, instead, to reconsider the purpose of the site and whether I wanted to continue its presence online. I've decided not to reload the site and keep it current. Here's why.

The original purpose of the the site was to explore and broadcast my attraction, fascination and commitment to the dynamics of dominance and submission within my sexual life. From the beginning, the site had four principal divisions, and these divisions occurred in the following order within the site: (1) reviews of books that fit the theme of the site; (2) my thoughts on D/s as a sexual fantasy, as an occasional kinky diversion, and as a full-fledged lifestyle extending beyond the outwardly sexual, with an emphasis on my own preferred fantasy and goal of lifestyle D/s, which, of course, would in the meantime, as I searched for my ideal woman, include D/s as little more than an occasional diversion within my otherwise non-D/s life; (3) links to relevant essays at other sites; (4) and links to entire websites.

I never looked upon the site as a fantasy site, a place of make-believe, where visitors could feel they were in some alternate reality where all thought and attention gathered around the creation and portrayal of erotic desire and its ideal gratification. In fact, my intent was the opposite. I wanted to activate not your sexual passions but your rational mind. Lifestyle D/s cannot depend upon arousal, because arousal is contingent and occasional, and lifestyle D/s, by definition, is not. A fantasy site, like pornography, seeks to stimulate and influence your sexual imagination. My site, I hoped, would check your daydreams by stimulating your intellect. There's nothing patently wrong with recurrent daydreams or the temporary engulfment of the mind by sexual fantasy, but the perpetual absence of wide-awake rational clarity is a mark of the insane. It is easy to slip into the dreamworld of fantasy. This place, I conceived, would be for the rational inquiry and exploration of that dreamworld.

So the website was originally for the intellectual analysis of (1) the attitudes and acts of dominance and submission within the stimulation and gratification of sexual desire, (2) the fundamental limits logically implied by the notion of consent, and (3) the resulting sexual lifestyles, particularly my own, within the world of BDSM. I also hoped it'd impress the hell out of the women.

Alas, with human sexuality being so pervasive in our private and social lives, with sexually motivated crime being, by nature, an act of dominance coupled with the violent disregard for the limits of consent, and with dominance and submission being, even outside of crime, such core concepts in so much of human life, it wasn't long before the website expanded to include book reviews on psychoanalysis, sex crimes, and the relationship between freedom and law. The site was morphing into my-mind-online.

A transformation in my understanding came with my discovery of the brilliant and prolific law professor and appellate judge Richard Posner, who lead me to the philosophical investigation of law and to an ever growing interest in the complex relationships linking choice, freedom, ethics, government, law, and economics. This is a vast subject, and my belated and untutored interest in it means I've a long way to go before anything I say is worth proclaiming on a website. The subject itself arose through my inquiry into the fundamental limits logically implied by the notion of consent.

The site was more than four years old. The strata of those four years showed in the content. Not everything was worth keeping online. The site began with simple intentions, and I could not now contain it within those bounds. With my current interest in law, jurisprudence, and freedom, and my ongoing interest in the psychodynamics of fantasy, the site would expand to where it would no longer appear to be about D/s or BDSM. This is because I've expanded my explorations of D/s to include the network of structures in which it occurs. I cannot simply overhaul the site to fit my new insights because those insights are embryonic. They need time to mature.

What this means for the website that used to be here is that it's not coming back. As a replacement, I've selected the better articles from that site, 24 out of 111, and linked them through a table of contents. I have no plans for updates.