I suspect the problem came from a malicious user, so I will be making some changes to the way users are approved. If I delete your account accidentally, don’t take it personally — just come back and sign up again.

When I was living with my parents growing up, it was tough to keep this stuff secret for all the obvious reasons. But the older I got, the more sexual it became, and the better I got at hiding things. It went from secret experiments with inflatable vinyl toys underneath clothing to naughty drawings and amateur comics of — gasp! — rounded bosoms. When I got my own place, I still kept the drawings and printouts and photocopies and downloads in a box; nothing was on display even though it was clearly MY space. As I met more people online, all I was willing to offer was a first name. The number of people in my real life who know about my online life can be counted on both hands, and I have fingers left over.

Now I am very much an adult (though “mature” is not the first word I’d use) and happily married to a woman who knows and accepts my fetish. But even now, the most external piece of evidence of my other life is a shortcut on my PC’s desktop. It shows a Jason Waltrip BE drawing (an old commission for Sievert) and it is labeled “Smut.” When anyone comes over to the house who might ask to use my machine, I remove the shortcut before they hit the front door.

When I go online, I use similar precautions. I love Google Chrome; I use it for everything…except inflation stuff. Instead, I picked Safari as my inflation browser; it’s the only reason I fire it up.  I will never accidentally send something inflatable to a coworker or a friend because the bookmarks, the interface, and the program icon all remind me who I am when I’m using it. Safari’s visual thumbnail interface shows me which smut sites are most recently updated; since there are so few places that really cater to this fetish, I’ve found 12 slots is enough anyway. When I go to Gmail in Safari, it has my inflate123 account password saved; so do all the other community forum sites and subscription services. (Similarly, when I Tweet as Inflate123 from my iPhone, I use a different app from my regular Twitter posts. No danger of being logged into the wrong account.) Everything about my inflation identity is set up automatically so I never have to think “who am I today?” And through tricks like exclusive use of Safari, I’ve trained myself to interact with the machine with one identity at a time. I am now more in control of my identities than I ever have been. I highly recommend isolating your entire inflation persona into one browser — pick one!

I have seen disaster when  people in the community willingly mix their two lives. Artists who draw pervy stuff, then try to go “legit” and can never shake their online identity. Writers who use the same handle for smut and non-smut works. People who want to mix their social media circles into one big happy YouFace profile. All I can say is never, ever do it. Sooner or later (often sooner) it comes back to bite you and things never end well. I know there is a thrill to flirting with danger, and many times I’ve wanted to say “Fuck it, this is who I am, take it or leave it” — but you can’t actually control the situations that would be affected by that kind of bold choice.

If you think that maybe some day in the far future, your privacy will suddenly be important to you — you are applying for a job, you are doing online dating, you are running for office — do not trap yourself by giving away more than you should today. Ask yourself if people in this community really need to know that much about you in the first place. Nobody has read one of my stories and said “That would have been so much better if I knew your last name.” I love playing online games, but I am not going to tell people my nicknames on Xbox or PS3. I am genuinely interested in seeing who people really are through Facebook, but it isn’t going to happen. Because soon enough, someone will come along and make connections. Then they will make assumptions. And then they will make trouble.

Instead of trying to validate your secret life with your real life, just make your secret life worth living. Give valuable critiques on people’s stories when they ask. Commission works from artists. Take part in discussions about our weird little culture. Actually build the community with your presence and interaction. Be the absolute best anonymous pervert with an untraceable nickname that you can be. A lot of good can come from that — and a lot of bad can come from oversharing in the real world.

I came to this thread on BodyInflation.org a little late — it had already flamed out and been locked. But in my opinion, it’s worth reading, for a few reasons.

I think inflation artists, by and large, have it rough. They are making something from nothing, and they are making it for a specialized, nitpicky community — and that is valuable, certainly worth paying someone to create. Unfortunately the internet culture suggests that because pieces of art can be easily copied and shared, then nothing is worth anything. So when an artist says “here’s my commission rate, does that seem of interest to you,” it’s easy to have an innocent question turn into a beatdown. (Fukereru Shogun is right — there was no need for such hostility.)

Now, “is it worth $50″ depends on something subjective, like “do I like OzKangaroo‘s style enough.” The posters in that thread hit on that in a rather rude way, but clearly, some folks didn’t think his work would be worth that price. Personally I like that guy’s style and I’d love to see what he did in a female human inflation context. So…is it worth $50?

For me…no, but that has nothing to do with the quality of the work. I’ve never paid that much for an inflation commission because it’s over my personal threshhold of spending money and this hobby– but it does not mean that his work is not WORTH $50 (though some would say a product is worth whatever the market deems it worth). And it’s worth noting that he’s in Australia, so the AU $50 is US $45…but nobody stopped to consider that one in the thread. I like Alien Desperardo‘s style too and asked him about commissions, but due to international exchange rates (he’s in the UK and I’m in the US, and the exchange rate is strongly in his favor), I realized I could not afford his asking price. I did not mean to lead him on, but I simply couldn’t justify that much cash, even if he was drawing exactly what I wanted to see. It had nothing to do with the quality of his work or my desire to commission him. I just couldn’t afford what he deserved.

Someone noted that a videogame costs around that same $50, and that investment would bring them more entertainment value for their money. Someone else suggested it was a poor analogy and called them hypocrites, but I think it’s a very smart point to consider: When your audience has a limited budget, what will they spend it on? It doesn’t mean you’re a lousy artist who is charging too much for your skill; it means they have other things competing for their luxury entertainment dollar and, regardless of your skill and effort, they might want something else more, and they can’t buy both for budget reasons. The person with the $50 is not thinking “Which artist can I support with this money?” but “What can I buy in all the world with this?” The artist, of course, may be seeing it the other way around.

The takeaways, as I see them? The community needs to be MUCH more polite when new people enter the conversation, and the artists need to consider their prices in relation to everything else on the entertainment market. A rejection of the artist’s price is not necessarily a rejection of the artist.

It should come as no surprise that I don’t throw a lot of smutty files away. Rather than go scraping through the wayback machine, I zipped up all the stories I had and threw them on my server here. Share and enjoy. It ain’t fancy but it works.

A sincere note of thanks to Helia, the original balloon girl online. Helia was the first female in the community who not only admitted she shared the fantasy but actively played along, with all of us. I always felt protective of her as a result of that — sort of like a big brother with a little sister who wasn’t little at all.

- I’d prefer a Microsoft Word document to a plain text document. If you’re using MS Word in any flavor from Word 97 to now, I prefer to offer my suggestions, edits, and comments with the Track Changes function. That lets me comment without being destructive, and you can overrule my edits or suggestions with ease. But if you send me a text file or an RTF file, I’m assuming you don’t have access to Word, so I don’t do Track Changes, which is messier for both of us. It takes me longer to add my stuff that way, and it takes you longer to remove it. (In those cases, you will get it back as an RTF file, which opens in TextEdit on Mac and WordPad on Windows, so I can add things like colored text to denote my changes.)

- If you have any specific questions or areas you would like feedback on, please note them somewhere in the document, preferably at the beginning or end.

- If I spend the time doing a deep edit, I will assume that you do actually want constructive critique and not just a pat on the back. I’m not cruel, but I am direct. I generally comment on everything from characterization to plot holes to awkward dialogue, but I will always do it with a suggested alternate approach. I will also point out things that I felt worked just as they were; editing is not simply a matter of finding the faults.

- Should go without saying, but everything is kept confidential, including the basic fact that I ever edited it at all. I do not require payment or public credit. Also, I only keep your draft until I see you release the final story yourself. Hard drives crash; I don’t want to have to re-edit it any more than you want to re-write it. Once I see the real story out there in the wild, I toss my edit and put your final in my smutty archive.

So if you have a story and you’d like an Edit123, hit me in email.

I should warn you about what this story is not. It’s not an Airy Tale; I have an idea for the next one, but the muse wanted this story finished first. It’s not played for laughs; I wouldn’t call it serious, but it’s not my usual “inflation with flirtation” setup. What’s more, it’s not about a female blowing up; it’s my first male inflation story.

Most importantly, it’s not as innocent as the ones I’ve written before. I’ve avoided getting hardcore in the prose in the past, partly just because I would rather write about inflation than sexual acts. But this time I made an exception, even if my word choice is on the clean side. While I love vulgarity in my everyday life, I think the more direct sexual slang words are jarring and break the flow while reading. You see these big COCKs and FUCKs in there and suddenly you feel like you’re reading Hustler, and I don’t want to write Hustler. But in these prurient times, make no mistake: This is an explicit story for an adult audience. The characters “do it” and everything.

Hope you enjoy it. I’d be interested to hear any feedback, especially considering it’s a departure for me. Guess this is just where my mind is at at the moment.

Oh, and I know the wife’s name, but I’m not telling.

The clip “I Feel Big and Sexy” over at TaylorMadeClips is not something I would normally check out — it’s a sort of hybrid weight gain/inflation clip, and while WG steers me away, inflation pulls me in. So I got pulled in and found many things I liked:

1. The star, Crash, is a decent actress; I liked hearing her ad-lib, even if the dialogue was WG-focused.
2. Crash is a cute redhead. This week, anyway. But just like I don’t care if boobs are real or fake, I don’t quibble about crimson hair; however it got that way, it’s a treat in my book.
3. The clip is more than 17 minutes long, only a fraction of which is the standard credit sequence. There is a buildup but it’s reasonable (especially if you are the target WG market that likes to see girls eat) and involves spandex leggings.
4. The inflatable props are obviously inflatable and you can hear some of the hissing and squeaking in the ambient soundtrack.
5. The resulting shapes are very pleasantly inflatably round.

That still is taken from the BE segment; the belly segment starts shortly thereafter and she gets pretty darn big.

Oh, and the cheeky use of “O Come All Ye Faithful” is there for anybody who doesn’t mind a little ribaldry with their carols.

I have heard Taylor say they don’t make a lot of money on inflation clips so they tend to do more WG; I can’t fault them for that. But as an inflation fan, those are the ones I am more likely to recommend — and this one’s recommended.