I'm not sure how long most of the people on here have been into inflating,bloating,ect... but I didn't get into it as a fetish until 2006 because of youtube. Witch in my opinion was the greatest year for inflation. So, I wanted to know some of the old videos you guys used to love back in the day that are now gone from the internet forever (or are hidden very very well). For instantce, about six years ago their was a uk girl who did water bloats on youtube and WHOA did she get big, but sadly I don't even remember her profile name. But anyways, yeah, let me know, would love to take that trip down memory lane haha
The good old days
That's funny. I grew up with a Commodore 64 at the earliest, and don't remember any crank starter :P
It was on the audio cassette unit. The crank was needed whenever you accidentally put one of the cassettes from your Fisher Price PXL-2000 into the Commodore 64 "dataset" unit. :)
Oh, man. That reminds me of the time I lost my whole inflation porn collection because the punch-cards got shuffled out of order.
You might want to take off the rose tinted spectacles there as I don't know what good old days you're talking about. There's some much more inflation related content around now than there ever was 10 (or even 5) years ago. Let alone going back to the days pre Youtube when it was all random Geocities sites and Yahoo groups.
Yeh I think the good old days is a bit of a broad term to use on here. Members here are from all different age groups. I myself am lucky enough to find I have this fetish in a time of the internet and file sharing. Many other members my have had to record scenes from the TV on a VHS, or rent the movies from a video shop, video store for you yanks ;) I remember when I first found out about my fetish the internet wasnt as vibrant as it is now. I watched the wonka scene on vhs, and had to rewind it to watch it again. I then upgraded to dvd and eventually bluray, where I could set up a playback of the scene.
I discovered my fetish in 1976. This was before video recorders were popular and when black and white tellies were still more common than colour. I already knew about it when I saw Willy Wonka on TV, no recording possible, on one of those black and white televisions. That year or the next, there was a cartoon called 'Noah and Nelly'. At the end of one of the episodes, Nelly blew up a balloon and it blew back into her and inflated her. That was fun. I've never seen that clip since anywhere. I finally got to see Willy Wonka in colour on Christmas 1980 and felt really embarrassed and self-conscious because I was watching it with my family. There was also a Tom & Jerry cartoon where Tom inflated due to blood pressure and floated around. Never seen that again either. Come to think of it there must be loads of inflation scenes which are not well-known.
All of these things, unless you saw them on TV or at the cinema, you just wouldn't see them, wouldn't find out about them and wouldn't expect to see them again if you did. No recording at all. The best you could hope for would be to record the audio off the television with a tape recorder, and even then you'd have to have it set up on the offchance.
Most of the videos I used to love are still very much around, back then they were hosted on Inflate123's Video Vault. I think that for those who are into real-life inflation, videos they liked no longer being around is more of a thing, as it's more effort to download a clip from Youtube and real-life inflatees can always take the videos back down.
Images were hosted here, and a few other similar sites, and you would have to e-mail them to Luther for him to put them up, there weren't that many, though for me at the time, there seemed to be plenty, although now each day brings more new images to the community that was the sum-total of everything we had back then, they aren't all of the same quality and also that now includes a lot of things that I'm not into, where back then it seemed like the inflation community was just those of us into one very particular thing. A lot of mergeing of communities seems to have gone on since.
I do feel that there is a lot less discussion that there was a few years ago though. Back then this site had to forum, but after it was relaunched with a forum it always seemed quite busy, and there were a lot more threads similar to this one. I don't know if it's because the community now is too big, and therefore people who come to this site feel less like they're in a community and more like just this is a place to download stuff from.
I actually tend to think that the mid-2000s, for the most part, represented a lull in inflation community activity. I think the late 90s and early 2000s represented a high point as inflationists increasingly got on the Internet and discovered each other. Then things died down for a while starting around 2004 or so, and then it started roaring back toward a high point starting in the late 2000s and continuing through present day. I know that probably 90-95% of my favorite inflation content was created either before 2004 or after 2008-2009 or so. Slither and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are the only notable things that readily come to mind from the 2004-2009ish time period.
I joined in 1994, I think, which makes this summer my 20th anniversary. The community shrinks and expands every so often; it's just cyclical. And I think the powerful personal excitement of finding other people who are into this as much as you are ultimately makes whenever each of us joined feel like a golden age of activity.
Except for 1994, when there were 12 of us. :)
Funny, but about 95% things in life I prefer back in the "good ol' days" but the inflation community is in the 5% that I prefer in the present time. It just seems more lively, booming, and easier to hunt down inflation scenes with more people aboard/ better technology at hand to do so.
I think the stories were better "back in the day", but the art is definitely better now.
Is it because you've seen all the plots now? I sometimes wonder about that; I keep writing and rewriting a handful of scenarios (magic! science! revenge!) and as a result it's harder to be surprised by a story now.
Probably that, and the fact that exposure to the genre itself was so new and encouraging made those stories more than the sum of their parts. Back then it was exciting to have any content at all that I (we?) would overlook bad grammar, bad spelling, and contrived plots because it was either that or nothing. Nowadays, there are more stories to choose from and not as many plots that haven't been used, so the bar is higher and many stories fall short.
It's probably a bit of the phenomenon of "old music sounds better." The old stuff, and thus the old days, is better because we've filtered out the old bad stuff and only focus on the classics. There were stinkers back then, as well as dry periods, just like now, but we ignore the stinkers and forget the dry periods since we have all this old, good stuff we can look at right this very moment.
I think he's right. Writing was, largely better back in the day. But there were also fewer people doing it. I'm glad there are more people feeling like they can contribute. I just wish they'd spend a little more time before actually contributing.
Not that I've written anything in, oh, five years. But then again, I'm no writer. ;)
Ah, 2006, back when the Internet was still black-and-white and one had to crank start the computer.