I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with a site called TripAdvisor. If you don’t travel much or you haven’t come across it before, it’s the Lonely Planet of the digital age, except they don’t editorialise… it’s all crowdsourced. I had such a bad experience at a restaurant in Bangkok a while back that I felt…
Category: Lifestyle/Community
BDSM is not science, it’s an art!
by Hermes Solenzol Borrowing from the name of a popular website, I fucking love science! I fell in love with science when I was a pre-teen and have studied it ever since. These days I make a living doing scientific research on the physiology of pain, which is kind of convenient for a sadomasochist. I…
Take a Moment
How’s life for you? I bet you’re busy. No… really. If life was a roulette wheel, I suspect it’d have 36 slots marked “busy” and one marked “totally nothing going on over here”. I think putting my money on you being busy is a fairly safe bet. I was thinking about my own back-log over…
Hey You, Get Off Of My Slide
I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of choices as a kind of pyramid that you move around. It’s a bit nascent, but I’ll try my best to explain. I MIGHT NOT HAVE RIPPLING ABS, BUT CHECK OUT MY DECISIONS We’ve all heard of the slippery slope, but how many of us consider the perils…
Blessed Are the Outlaws, the Rebels and the Kinksters
There must be a reason why people like to do something different once in awhile. We like to go for travel after a year of stressful work, and it feels refreshing. Each time we go for a trip, it feels like our mind and body regain some sense of clarity. For some of us who…
A (Very) Brief History of Modern BDSM Porn in the US
Porn is rich in history and all kinds of things for discussion, but today I just wanted to do a quick rollercoaster-ride through BDSM in America, where it’s come from and why it looks the way it does. BDSM images date back much further than modern history, in fact it can be traced back for…
The BDSM Community – If You Can’t See It or Touch It, Does It Exist?
We often use the term “BDSM community”, “kink community” or “lifestyle” for convenience, but the fact is that there is no BDSM community in the singular sense. We are a thousand separate tribes with different opinions, customs, ideals and beliefs. A united voice doesn’t exist, though we often pretend, for convenience, that it does. WHY…
How Japanese Rope Bondage Culture Developed Outside of Western BDSM
Santa left a Taiwanese rope bondage book by 小林绳雾 under the Christmas tree for Master. Amongst the step-by-step illustrations, the author spends some time to understand the subtle difference between Western BDSM culture and Asia’s SM Culture. The book is in Chinese, but it’s a very interesting look at that topic, so I thought it…
7 Tips For Healthy Poly Relationships That Won’t Help You Get A Decent Hotel Room
Around this time last year, yangpup, boydenon and I pulled in to Hoi Ann in Vietnam. We’d been on an overnight train from Hanoi so we were a little crumpled, but ready for new adventures. The leather tailors in Hoi Ann are fantastic by the way, should you ever get there. It was our first…
Dressing Up Isn’t Just For Children
My personal world of BDSM is coloured by gay leather traditions, and within that subculture there are lots of protocols relating role to appearance. Dominants and submissives don’t dress in the same way, and there are some items (caps and boots in particular) where it would be a faux-pas to be wearing the wrong thing….