Airy Tales

Posted By Inflate123 on May 3, 2010

One of the things I have guarded most jealously over the years is my real identity. I just don’t think the people in my real life would understand, let alone accept, my fantasy life online. I’m not ashamed of it — I think it’s pretty funny, and I like talking about it — but as we all know, it’s not about what I think of myself. It’s about what other people think of me as a co-worker, a family member, a friend, a community member, and what conclusions this would lead them to jump to. As porn goes, this interest is mostly harmless and often downright ridiculous — but it is so very, very easy to have someone use against me. So I have been adamant about keeping my lives seperate.

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.

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Posted By Inflate123 on March 21, 2010

Sorry, not talking about cup sizes, but prices of commissions.

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.

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Posted By Inflate123 on February 7, 2010

Helia comes and goes in various blog posts, but she’s still around. Meanwhile, folks have contacted me looking for her old stories, which I used to host on my AOL site. That site was deleted without warning by AOL last year, along with all the rest of the user pages AOL used to host.

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.

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Posted By Inflate123 on January 10, 2010

Lately I have quietly edited a few stories-in-progress for different writers in the community. I have done this on and off for years, because my day job is in an editorial capacity, and this is arguably more fun to edit than my “real” work. But there’s been a run of them lately, and I’m still quite happy to help, but I wanted to suggest a few things if you are one such writer thinking of having me do a pass on your porn:

- 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.

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