Well, haven’t had much time for blogging this month, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t done anything. We’ve got several shows coming up in the near future so we’ve been working on a few new concepts for that. First, next month we will be doing a show at a student party in Groningen. They’re holding their annual ” Kinky Party” and one of the students got the idea to spice up the paty with a bondage act. The audience will be mainly vanilla, so I’m looking forward to the repsonses there. And then, of course, there is the London festival in early April, so we’re busy finding a place to stay, deciding which train to take, etcetera. And with thinking about the workshops and shows. I’m really looking forward to the festival, and finally meeting a lot of the English people from the bondage scene we haven’t met yet, and seeing Zamil again.

Finally, we’ve been working hard on the Dropje & Vode Photoshoot (part 1 now online) and I’ve been doing a photoshoot with Aurelia, that’s now ready for a future update.

Creative Commons

I’ve decided to shift the copyright policy for our bondage articles. To be honest, I’ve been annoyed with all the crap about bondage online for years. Recently I joined a fetlife group for shibari in one of the American states and I saw that group was being filled with articles that a) were copyrighted material and b) full of shit. Pointing out both of these characteristics got be banned from the group by the way :-). This set me thinking again. A lot of people just copy what’s there, or write what they know (or think they know) becasue there isn’t much available. I know only a handful of really good introductions to bondage safety, and these are more often than not pretty hard to find and copyrighted.

So, I’ve decided to license the articles on rope and bondage safety from Touwtjes.tk under a creative commons license (by-nc-nd). I’ve been considering such a move in the past – I’m a strong supporter of concepts like creative commons and open source, but up till now, I’ve always felt that I wanted to be able to change the articles, or add to them, as my own knowledge increased. But to be honest, they’ve been pretty stable over the last three years or so. So I’ve included a link (that may not be removed) pointing to a place on the net where I will continue to keep the most recent version, and from now on they may be copied and republished for non-commercial use as long as we’re credited and the articles are not changed. The most recent versions will be available from http://www.guiltied.com/cc. I intend to use this construction for future articles as well.

Rope Bondage for DM’s

Another big project I’ve been working on is an article that has been nagging at me for at least a year and a half: Rope bondage for DM’s: how to monitor a bondage scene when you can’t tie yourself. When we did our workshop “Rope bondage emergencies” at the Rope Bondage Camping Weekend 2008, we were asked by a friend who is also a DM at a TNG group what she could do in case of a suspension emergency. We incorporated some advise into that workshop and that went rather well. But it got me thinking. There’s a lot of DM’s in Netherlands that know little about rope bondage, sometimes with quite outdated safety knowledge, while advanced bondage and suspension is strongly on the rise. I felt that it would be good if there would be an article with bondage knowledge specifically for DM’s. And spent part of my Xmas-holiday writing it. I have a first draft ready, and publised it at http://www.guiltied.com/cc for people to read it, and scrutinise it. It’s a draft, and I haven’t yet released it under a Creative Commons license, but I will do so in the future, when I’m sure this is it – which will also be the time to translate the article into Dutch. Finally, someone has offered to shoot picture to illustrate the article. For now, you can read it, and if you think it’s useful, you can use it. And of course, you can comment on it (you will be credited if I use them!).