Chronicles of the Inflation Community

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Wed, 08/09/2006 - 11:01

deleted_20091014

For the sake of my own curiosity and also to share knowledge on where this all came from I wanted to initiate a discussion on the history of the inflation community, accounts of major events in the community in chronological order.

As I understand it there have been three main stages of development in the community:

Stage 1, the embryonic community where a small number of people with the same interest discovered each other and set up websites, shared drawings and stories etc.

Stage 2, a long period of consistency where websites such as this one (in its pink incarnation... oh the punnage) and Wrenspot existed to serve a small community, growing very slowly.

Stage 3, an explosion of the community, starting with Yahoo and Inflatality and spreading to DA where it became easier for people to share their own art and meet others and suddenly a community which we thought had fewer than a hundred members turned out to have thousands and a huge variety of different sub-communities.

I didn't appear till a couple of years from the end of stage 2 so I would appreciate it if one of the old timers (e.g. Luther, Sievert) could start us off by telling their story and we'll ask questions and discuss it before moving forward in the chronology.

I hope this plan works... I'd be interested in finding out and might compile it all into a definitive history afterwards.

Wed, 08/09/2006 - 14:11

Fukureru-Shogun

I came in near the middle of stage 2, which was also when I started contributing. ( Had the webmasters at the time had known my age, they probably would have killed me. Or at least banned me. ) I stopped shortly afterwords, I've never been a consistant contributer.

If I may make a suggestion, there should really be 4 stages. The transition from 2 too now was filled with skips and jumps. We adopted Deja Communites for a while, which died while we were there. The Yahoo era was a bit one, and there was Jessica Otaku's club which is where I think many of the current younger, Anime themed fanbase came from.

The jump to deviantart should be the 4th stage, because I think it not only was a big change for us, it brought our little kink into the open, going as far as throwing it in the face of the un-knowing.

Wed, 08/09/2006 - 17:54

dragon_6860

I agree with Fukereru, Stage 4 should deffently be the DA age, it was the first time that we had a huge community, and i think, save one link from somethingawful.com, the first time we had a lot of people who were anti-inflation. I came in around stage 2, near the end deffently. First website i remember was the old Inflate123, where he just had one vid on his main page at a time. If i remember, it was Ally McBeal BE scene :)

No, I would not want to live in a world without dragons, as I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith.

Wed, 08/09/2006 - 19:20

deleted_20091014

OK... well I wasn't really trying to break it down into distinct stages, there doesn't really need to be stages at all it has been more of a continious evolution, still though stages 3 and 4 are very similar, both part of a larger explosion, just in stage 3 we were starting to explode and in stage 4 we found DA and 'explosion' became a way of life ;)

Thu, 08/10/2006 - 02:27

DwarfPriest

DA would be a diferent stage, because it was there that the comunity became "mainstream". Before that, Yahoo/MSN groups were very small by comparison, and very closed places.

Thu, 08/10/2006 - 02:39

Fukureru-Shogun

I aplogize Carnatic, I was being Anal. ^_^;

But yeah, DA represents a very distinct change in the way our community works. If I can be honest, I was shocked when it did happen.

Thu, 08/10/2006 - 03:33

darth_clone19

Stop saying explosion! lol

Lets not dignify those ridiculous idiots by calling them "anti-inflation" people. If we make em into something concrete, we'll acknowledging them as being serious. Personally, I think is completely stupid, cuz theres nothing to be "anti" about.

Sorry, I dont want to change the subject.

- Read my stories: darth-clone19.deviantart.com

Thu, 08/10/2006 - 05:11

MaximillianZetoX

Ah yeah. The Jessica Otaku Yahoo club. Man, that brings back memories. I used to linger around the Stuffed! website before I met Jessica there and I saw her group. From then on...it's all history. Brings back memories.

Never let those who dislike what you enjoy get to you. If they won't bother to understand than it's not worth your time. Hold your head up high and be proud for what you like!

Thu, 08/10/2006 - 05:55

doubleintegral

I first stumbled upon Luther's web page in late 1997 when it was still on AOL. I actually recall that was around the last time the Celebrity Inflation Archive (or whatever it was called) was updated. Melissa Joan Hart was one of the people featured. I also think the pictures page had about 30-40 pictures/drawings on it at that time, many of which were by Champagne Chaste Moon.

I miss Wren Spot. The disclaimer reading "This is NOT a bird-watching site" still cracks me up. Between Luther's and Wren's sites, the inflation community was pretty well off in terms of story and art coverage.

Stories I have written

Thu, 08/10/2006 - 06:48

#10

CattyN

I followed the community through only about 2-3 websites for a long time. I came in early when LVKane's site started up and then flowed through to Inflate123's site and I remember checking back every so often to see if any NEW material was updated or not.

I remember the Video Vault was a big deal and that gave me even more reason to visit back again and again. Many of my favorite clips are still from those original downloads I did when I was in high-school @_@.

I've had a habbit of missing groups and communities or coming in too late. I remember being around the Wren Spot for only a short time before it dissapeared... And I distinctively remember being around the "Stuffed!" community right up to it's bitter end...

Oddly enough I was going to originally JOIN the communities as contributers to both Wren AND Stuffed and the thing that stopped me was that the sites dissapeared.

There was quite a lul for a while I remember and then I stumbled across the Yahoo groups which is where I finally ended up making my debute and becoming a contributer...

(flashback)

When I was a teenager I had a box under my bed. It was covered with all sorts of papers, books, and inside was filled with more papers and books and junk to help fend off the illusion that it was my inflation box. I use to sit up late at night and draw comics which had a wide range of cartoony stuff happen in it, but in a more sexual way. Of course my primary interest was BE and balloon boobs...

I use to record cartoons I liked and freeze frame it on certain scenes and use that as a reference to re-draw the characters. I made a big scrap book of female cartoon characters and used them as templates for when I made my OWN comics. Some of the girls morphed and become their own characters instead of who they originally were (an example would be the female cop from Disney's BONKERS series)

When I first found out that other people in the world liked inflation and BE, through LVKane and Inflate123's website, my comics became more talored to what I was reading. I even went so far as to re-create a Helia-Melonowskie story in comic book form (though it's really crappy and I'm emberessed to show it now).

Eventually the school life made it difficult for me to stay up so late writing these comics, and apparently other peopel were doing more detailed drawings and stuff anyway so it was easier to download rather than do anything. When I first got a CD-Burner my first thing was to burn all my inflation art I had leeched off the internet to a CD under the somewhat nostalgic and homage-ridden title of "123."

(ends flashback)

God... what other sites were there? I remember a chat area called the #BE Loft or something like that. I never figured out how it worked and I think I was just too nervous about actually going public at the time.

Then I had college to deal with and i kinda lost touch with the community for a while and it wasn't until I graduated and that first sense of "I'm free, I can do what the hell I please" hit me that I decided to come out and make my debute on a local Yahoo group.

I'm not going to go into the DA stuff. That's all pretty commonplace now and we all know it. But I hope I was able to give some glimps into my view of the inflation community and how i got into it in the first place. Mostly it's all just little fractions here and there.

I think I rambled too much. sorry.. @_@

Thu, 08/10/2006 - 08:20

#11

Inflate123

I can discuss Stage 1. :)

I moved into my own apartment in the summer of 1994 and almost immediately used my AOL account to search Usenet for any discussions of my fetish. I found two people who had posted on similar topics: Buster and Sievert. Buster had been seeking out inflatable fetishists via newspaper ads for ten years or so before he got online and was extremely nice and forthcoming about his interests; it really inspired me to be nice to everybody else who came looking for that same kind of cameraderie and understanding. Sievert posted looking for information about an inflatable corset he saw in an adult video which he could not remember the name of. I was stunned and thrilled when Buster wrote me back the next day and, due to the summer/college break, Sievert wrote back a few months later. To this day we don't know the name of that damn video. :)

With Buster's list of existing contacts, I put together a small mailing list of no more than 12 people who were, if not all of the same mind, close enough. This included a few people into balloons, some who were into pool toys, some body/BE inflation tendencies...kind of all over the map. This was literally just me collecting email addresses and saving them into my AOL account. I maintained that list for at least 18 months before it got unweildly and we realized there were some divergent interests. We amicably split into four groups when we hit around 200 people and different people volunteered to run the individual lists that were more on topic. (Buster still runs the Balloon Buddies for latex balloon fetishists.) Some of the earliest folks on that big monster list were Wren, Luther, Dr. Enlarge, and Pixel Prevert.

When I was no longer spending most of my online time adding addresses, I started collecting videos and grabbed a few of my own with a very old, very large video capture card I'd gotten through one of my part-time jobs at the time. People started sending me video tapes of scenes they'd found and I digitized whatever I could. The Vault went up around 1997 and the clips were hosted on whatever free servers and donated space I could find. At one point someone in France bought me the inflate123.com domain and gave me space, but a month later, it disappeared and I had to revert everything to the old links. It was a main in the ass to maintain, and when someone stepped forward with permanent space, I took it, but I didn't realize for two years that it was actually one of the content mods from the BEA who sort of offered something that wasn't his to give! Tyler (the BEA creator/sysop) supported it anyway for years until the bandwidth costs finally just made it no longer possible. If it wasn't for the BEA's help, the Vault would have closed a long time earlier.

(FWIW, the big content site that was there before mine or Luther's or Wren's was Anthony Cotto's BE FTP site. For a while, this was the only place to get BE stuff, and it was very active.)

Funny--I just looked at the Wikipedia entry for inflatable fetishism and my link has been removed. Cyndi Irresistible gets one, though, and the "anti-inflation" crowd at DA is somehow dignified with a mention. I really don't want our community to define itself by its detractors.

Twitter | DeviantArt

Thu, 08/10/2006 - 11:16

#12

deleted_20091014

Thanks, especially Infate123, I was worried for a bit that it might just be taken as a 'how did you come into inflation?' thread, good to hear some more detail about the formative years.

So it seems that the community as it exists today began when a few inflationists were bold enough to ask about their fetish on places like Usenet.Interesting to here about some things which were about before Luther and Dan's sites like this BE FTP, I wonder how they came to be, and I wonder how the BEA came to be. I remember when I joined there were links to balloon buddies, mellyloon and other fetishes which were related but not the same as body inflation. Those will have been dating back to when you all met up with your diverse interests then?

Interesting how the original community was diverse due to its small size and the current community is diverse due to places like DA, so in spite of its large size; but in the middle I remember a time when I didn't really come across such diverse related fetishes fratenising with body inflation.

let the chronicles continue

Thu, 08/10/2006 - 17:57

#13

Fairia

Looking at the stages descriptions, I say I'm inbetween stages 2 and 3. I've been around the Internet when Luther's site and WrenSpot were around and eventually found Yahoo groups and other websites dedicated to inflation.

Thu, 08/10/2006 - 21:29

#14

darth_clone19

I sure miss the Wrenspot, even to this day. There was so much stuff in there. At least I thought so...

- Read my stories: darth-clone19.deviantart.com

Fri, 08/11/2006 - 04:41

#15

dragon_6860

Heh, yah, I was looking at Wikipedia a while back, and I thought it was worthwhile to put up the fact that there were some rather vocal detractors, not much, jsut that there were some. As for the links, I seem to recall that someone removes all the links, if some are back up, that must be some new stuff.

No, I would not want to live in a world without dragons, as I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith.

Fri, 08/11/2006 - 14:10

#16

harrisonford08

And nobody mentioned sketchvg's old site :/ That was an old haunt of mine before it dissapeared forever ago. I think I started checking out the inflation community around the late 90's (when I was way too young to be legally around). I believe my first actual contributions were an animated gif of sketchvg's jessica rabbit pic and the roger rabbit video (which I think pixel prevert might have captured for me and is still circulating). I was on an Indiana Jones kick at the time and that's how I got my persona.

http://harrisonford08.deviantart.com/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ijartist/

Sat, 08/12/2006 - 01:55

#17

deleted_20091014

back on topic people :)

Sat, 08/12/2006 - 06:05

#18

CattyN

carnatic wrote:

back on topic people :)

hey man we're trying ^_^; but it's hard not to get into the reasons why we got into inflation or loved a specific website when reminicing. I'm personally enjoying all this cuz i'm learning more abuot other people than I would have otherwise ^_^;

ALso, I remember finding the BEarchve and the "Cup of Chili" site which entertained me quite a bit till it became a pay site. There's still some good content there, though it's not much about expansion anymore and more or less big boobs. Oh well ^_^

Sat, 08/12/2006 - 11:51

#19

harrisonford08

CattyN wrote:

hey man we're trying ^_^; but it's hard not to get into the reasons why we got into inflation

I agree :) Anyway, your overall concept of the stages seems pretty accurate. I'd separate yahoo/deviantart since it was such a change but otherwise pretty much right on.

http://harrisonford08.deviantart.com/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ijartist/

Sat, 08/12/2006 - 19:19

#20

dragon_6860

Yep, True that. It does make me wonder what phase 5 could have in store, heh :)

No, I would not want to live in a world without dragons, as I would not want to live in a world without magic, for that is a world without mystery, and that is a world without faith.

Sun, 08/13/2006 - 11:00

#21

deleted_20091014

CattyN wrote:

carnatic wrote:

back on topic people :)

hey man we're trying ^_^; but it's hard not to get into the reasons why we got into inflation or loved a specific website when reminicing. I'm personally enjoying all this cuz i'm learning more abuot other people than I would have otherwise ^_^;

ALso, I remember finding the BEarchve and the "Cup of Chili" site which entertained me quite a bit till it became a pay site. There's still some good content there, though it's not much about expansion anymore and more or less big boobs. Oh well ^_^

Sorry, I wasn't getiing at you and I hadn't noticed harrisonford's on topic post. I thought the thread had turned into a rant about the community's detractors.

Sun, 08/13/2006 - 17:29

#22

Inflate123

harrisonford08 wrote:

I believe my first actual contributions were an animated gif of sketchvg's jessica rabbit pic

I've still got this. I even broke down the three frames of your animation so I could watch them at my own speed. :)

Dr. Enlarge had already written several stories by the time I met him, and they were posted at ACotto's site as well. His stuff had a strong effect on me; very descriptive, lots of tension. I'd never read anything like it at the time, anyway.

SketchVG's site was a great one; I miss it. I miss him.

I'm sorry I can't offer more specific dates or events for what else happened because I wasn't writing it down. The folks who did it probably remember. Sievert's gotta be lurking around here somewhere, and perhaps he knows more. :)

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