LutherVKane's blog

“Some enthusiasts favour inflation. It's cheap, simple and as near as your local filling station. But there's a very serious risk of being carried away, as many inflation writers have discovered. Many promising young ladies have exploded at the hands of the inflation addicts. That's if they haven't drifted away over the rooftops…”

     Research and Development newsletter, Issue #1

A shocking state of affairs, to be sure, but largely apocryphal. Best as I've been able to determine, this issue went out sometime around September, 1995. At the time, popping stories were pretty much non-existent. Certainly there was a lot of talk about it, and writers would often hint that an explosive outcome was a possibility, but it never actually happened. The first popping stories wouldn’t appear until 1997.

The most commonly used keyword to tag stories on this site is “floating”. Second is “helium”. So clearly there’s some interest in the subject. It’s fairly common for people in inflation stories to be filled with helium to the point of becoming airborne. How much helium this requires varies widely from story to story.

So today we address the question: How much helium would it really take to make someone float?

Short answer: a lot.

The long answer involves some math.

“Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.”
    Robert DeNiro as Neil McCauly, Heat (1995)

This quote has nothing to do with this blog post. I just like Heat.

Heat makes things expand. This occasionally gets used as a plot device in inflation stories. So today we’ll be taking a look at thermal expansion.

I’ve reached a milestone.

Roughly 20 years ago I released my first inflation story, The Pageant. I can’t really nail down the exact date. The modified date on the file is November 8, 1995. It first appeared in Issue 4 of the Research and Development newsletter.

Sometimes I’ll write a story almost entirely around a gag that I (and likely few other people) find really amusing. Conspiracy: Peer Pressure was built around the line “Tanks for the mammaries.” I’d wanted to work that one into a story for a long time. Gassing Up is all about “I’m up here.” It was inspired by a scene from Lost that has absolutely nothing to do with inflation, but my imagination took it there.

“The Net plays host to a range of formerly unimaginable erotic specialisms, but we know this one is a joke, if only because of its (compressed) air of innocence.”

- The Independent, referring to the Body Inflation Home Page, the predecessor to BodyInflation.org (March 4, 1997)

In a previous post, I looked into gender as it relates to inflation stories. This time around, I focus on the users.

There’s been much speculation about the gender ratio in the community. You can indicate gender in the current user profiles, but most haven’t. That’s not all that surprising; the feature’s only been there since 2011 and most accounts are older than that. But I do have about 1800 data points to deal with. That’s enough to have a bit of statistical fun.

First, the overall Gender breakdown:

Male: 79.6%
Female: 15.9%
Other: 4.5%

A long time ago, 12 years if the file timestamps are to be believed I was fiddling around a bit with making an inflation-themed text-based adventure game (or “interactive fiction” as it’s apparently called these days). I checked out the various development systems available at the time. I decided to see what I could do with TADS.

I recently noticed that the Library now has over a thousand stories in it. We actually hit that milestone back in January.

Congratulations to the community and thank you to all of the authors who have contributed over the years.

Of course I did what I usually due when presented with a large data set. I crunched some numbers.

Gender in Inflation Stories

One thing that completely blindsided me when I switched the site to Drupal was the spam problem. I never needed an anti-spam system when I used CPG-Nuke. It was rare enough that I could handle it manually.

Within a week of the site revamp, I was seeing about 50 fake user registrations per day. I installed the Mollom module for Drupal, and it's been a lifesaver. Yesterday it blocked over 700 spam attempts.