Tuesday, May 29, 2012

RIP, Matty

RIP, Matt.

Archean and the staff at Kink Engineering are sad to report that Mad_Scientist (Matt) passed away on May 23rd, 2012, at the age of 35. His death was accidental. He was a great friend, a brilliant mind, and an exceptional lover.

Matt was awesomely creative and scientifically curious. His first focus for his customers was always safety. Many of you will remember Matt commenting in the vac bed groups and taking a strong stand against the idea that a person could safely do vac bed bondage whilst alone.

Kink Engineering's philosophy continues to be safety first; therefore, even though it hurts to say it, we have a duty and responsibility to the community and to our past and future customers to be completely honest here.

Matt died, because he made a stupid decision to go into a vac bed alone, while Archean was out of town. He thought he had figured out the safety issues and created another layer of safety; he was wrong and it cost him his life.

There is no way that we at Kink Engineering could ever cover up the real cause of death and pretend it happened any other way, to do so would be a disservice to our customers, the community, and to Matt, who was adamant that vac beds be used responsibly and safely.

Matt's death was a direct result of prolonged neck compression from the neck gasket. The bed he chose to go in had been custom fitted to Archean, who has a much smaller neck. The baro receptors in his internal carotid arteries signaled to his body that his blood pressure was dangerously high, and this sent off a vagal response to slow the heart. Since the signal of high blood pressure could not be relieved, Matt lost consciousness and the vagal response caused his heart to stop completely.

Had there been a person to assist outside the vac bed, they would have been able to get him out at the first sign of trouble or non-responsiveness. All Matt's safety contingency plans relied on him still being conscious enough to implement them, and thus, they were useless.

Never, ever get into a vac bed alone. There is no safe way to do so. The man who understood vac beds the best, in the whole world, wasn't able to do it safely. Please do not allow this scene to replay with another person's death.

We will miss you and love you forever, Matty.

This is a terrible tragedy. My condolences go out to Marika and all of Matt's friends and family. NEVER play alone.

Monday, May 28, 2012

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Break the Bank

Oh dear....two of my favorite male rubber shops, Skintightrubber and Invincible Rubber are both having 25% off sales. I wasn't planning on buying anything, but....

A Rubber Movie

Who is this guy?

Bubbles

This is all kinds of artistic fucking hot

Mr. L.A. Eagle Rubber 2012

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Too awesome not to re-share....

Oh AJRubb, you hot Aussie...is there any photo you take that doesn't make us hard???

Preparation

I have two days of cleaning in the old apartment and then I'm outta there. I figured since my days are limited in my old place, so are my opportunities for rubber perv-out and masturbation sessions. What better way to combine everything than clean in rubber and finish with a big finish!?!?!

I figured it was appropriate to wear rubber gloves to clean, so why not full rubber coverage, just to be safe?

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Rubber Agenda

I have a feeling I'm going to really regret not going to IML this year :(

Monday, May 21, 2012

Friday, May 18, 2012

Lucha Libre!

Elastica/Kink Engineering has developed a cool new design (something I was wondering someone would make eventually) -- Luchadore wrestling masks!

Masks (máscaras) have been used dating back to the beginnings of lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) in the early part of the 20th century and have a historical significance to Mexico in general, dating to the days of the Aztecs. Early masks were very simple with basic colors to distinguish the wrestler. In modern lucha libre, masks are colorfully designed to evoke the images of animals, gods, ancient heroes, and other archetypes, whose identity the luchador takes on during a performance.

Marika, from Elastica Engineering told me how they came up with the idea. “We wanted to do something fun and also explore a new niche in the fetish market.” she continues “To date, we’ve yet to see any large companies make latex luchadore masks, and since we supply our own sheeting (giving us a huge range of colors to play with) and have a laser cutter (allowing us to make whatever overlays our imaginations dream up) it seemed like the perfect fit!”

Check out the wonderful photos at Elastica Engineering’s Lucha Gallery or browse the whole range of masks and options available at the Lucha Latex web shop!

Nacho Canucko returns!
Information taken from Lust Love Latex.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Claustrophilia

Did Claustrophilia Kill U.K. Spy Gareth Williams? Did a fetish for total confinement, known as claustrophilia, play a role in the mysterious death of ‘the spy in the bag’? As an inquest is held on Gareth Williams’s 2010 demise, Anneli Rufus reports on this extreme form of bondage.

by Anneli Rufus, The Daily Beast | April 30, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

Young superspy Gareth Williams was found dead in his London apartment in August 2010, his nude body padlocked inside a North Face duffel bag. An inquest this week seeks to determine whether the British math wizard/code expert/counterterrorism hotshot was murdered or died of sexual misadventure. His computer revealed visits to websites about claustrophilia, a fetish for confinement in very tight spaces.

Helpless immobility is hot, yes?

It is for adherents of this extreme form of bondage, who happily climb into bags, boxes, cages, caskets, car trunks, airless latex envelopes, and skintight full-body getups complete with zippered eyes and mouths.

“Gas masks and hoods could be considered related, I think,” says Carol Queen, co-founder of San Francisco’s Center for Sex and Culture and author of Exhibitionism for the Shy. “I once attended a fetish party in the Hollywood Hills at which a dominatrix put her client into a full-body cast, clearly a variant of claustrophilia.”

What makes encasement so enticing?

“There’s helplessness: the neurological turn-on is probably related to proprioception, the body’s experience of itself in space,” says Queen. “And there is likely a rush from doing it because it’s extreme. It would also powerfully alter the breath, which would give a feeling like being high.”

The Seattle-based bondage-wear company Winter Fetish produces straitjackets, vinyl hobble dresses, and Spandex “sleepsacks,” sock-like skintight enclosures that zip up in back from the shins to the top of the head. Looking like sleek black caterpillars, wearers cannot separate their legs or move their arms from their sides.

“The sleepsacks have internal sleeves so that the captive cannot protect or pleasure themselves,” says Winter Fetish designer Tonya Winter. “There are also access zippers that make the captive’s most sensitive areas available, should the captor desire.”

Sleepsacks provide a feeling of helplessness, a staple of BDSM (bondage, discipline, submission, masochism). But for other sleepsackers the appeal is entirely different, Winter explains, as “the tight fit can cause some people to experience a sense of calm.”

Claustrophilia is the diametric opposite of claustrophobia. Whereas for most people the idea of being completely confined spurs fearful ideas of slavery and suffocation, for some it brings an ecstatic sense of comfort—sexual or otherwise.

This might be especially true for those who feel discomfited by human touch. To relieve anxiety among people with autism, Temple Grandin invented the “hug machine,” a V-shaped device whose users squat or lie between two vertical mattresses that are gradually brought together for an ever-tighter squeeze. Studies show that the full-body pressure hug machines exert induces deep calm in people with autism.

Getting into tight spaces from which escape is difficult or even impossible is the goal for claustrophiles. The choice of space may vary. One option is the vacuum bed or “vacbed,” a platform topped with a latex sheet. A user slips beneath the sheet, head and all; a pump sucks all air from between the latex and the board, shrink-wrapping the user, who breathes through a tiny hole or tube.

“Trunk Stories,” a Yahoo group for one type of claustrophile, features pictures of smiling people curled up in car trunks, waiting eagerly to be locked inside. The “Locker Fun” group asks potential members: “Were you ever locked in a locker at school? Or did you think it fun to lock others inside lockers?...Would you like to relive those fun school locker pranks?” The “Bagged” group beckons fans of “the romance, escape artistry, or kidnap fantisy [sic] of being put into a burlap or canvas sack. Perhaps bound and gagged and spirited off to some hideaway.”

Or perhaps dying, as Williams did. Not that we know claustrophilia killed him.

“Provided this was not a clever KGB hit,” Queen muses, the spy’s death might have involved a partner who fled when things went pear-shaped, a possibility the inquest is investigating.
“It’s even possible that part of the thrill was being left by that other person and then the idea would be that they’d return to let him out. Clearly this could go wrong,” Queen says.

For safe and sane erotic encasement, “having someone to monitor you would be imperative,” she says. “As with autoerotic asphyxiation, there’s a level of altered state with this kind of play, as well as physical stress, that could leave a participant doing it alone unable to save him- or herself if necessary.”

A trustworthy partner, while “never leaving the room,” should conduct all proceedings “in great quiet so that changes in breathing would be apparent,” Queen says. “Prior discussion about how to communicate if the claustrophilic individual couldn’t speak would also be very important.”

Latex and Spandex are just the latest features of a fetish that dates back more than a thousand years, says Cary Howie, associate professor of romance studies at Cornell University and the author of Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature, which examines claustrophilic aspects of cathedral architecture, poetic diction, and the lives of hermit saints.

“As with autoerotic asphyxiation, there’s a level of altered state with this kind of play, as well as physical stress, that could leave a participant doing it alone unable to save him- or herself if necessary.”

The element they have in common, Howie tells The Daily Beast, is “the use of spatial limits to intensify desire.”

“Imagine all the ways in which limitation produces or heightens sensation, from tight clothes to the formal constraints of certain kinds of writing, and then imagine how this works in space,” he says.

A very tight space makes you “more aware of how much space your body takes up; it makes it more difficult, I think, to forget that you have a body,” he adds. “So, among other things, claustrophilia might be a name for wanting to be reminded of the body through spatial constraints.”

Postmodern fetishism includes many “ways of using space to make the body feel itself more intensely, to feel itself as more intensely related to other bodies. There are probably also ways in which space could be used to make the body feel more isolated, more alone. That is, there are practices that shut the body down and practices that open the body up.”

Sensory deprivation, isolation, altered breathing, and fear expanding into a sense of surrender: claustrophilic kicks might be just as spiritual as they are sexual.

“There are people who love the meditative state that they can achieve from the deep pressure that tight confinement can cause,” says Winter Fetish project manager Jake Markow. “Others love the thrill of putting themselves in the trusted hands of another.”

In Williams’s case, we might never know.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Vacuum Packed

Oh..my...god how awesome is this?

Remembering Cipollini's fashion sense

Mario Cipollini has been heralded as one of the greatest road cyclists of all time. He certainly was a showman. He retired from professional racing in 2005 with a minor return in 2008. He was definitely one of the most colorful men in the peloton of his generation, and in addition to his reputation as a womanizer, he was also had a very bold sense of fashion. He made lots of money modelling for many of the Italian fashion houses in the late 90s and early Noughts.

I remember Cipollini because of his amazing cycling fashion. It seemed every year he would bring out a new full-body skinsuit for the Prologue of the Giro d'Italia and I would anxiously wait to find out what it was.

One year he was a zebra. Another year he was white adorned with gold. One year was particularly cool, the "muscle suit".
It appears there is a manufacturer in Poland of a similar suit now, very very cool.
If you're wondering where some of those magnificent skinsuits went, here's an idea:
There are still showmen in the peloton today, but none as garish and distinctively Italian as Cipo.

Regulation

Well done, Regulation!

Hooded Freak

Sketchy pics...I don't have a lot of facility to take good pics these days in a chaotic apartment, but I was really horny this day and wanted to capture some evidence of it. I would love to go out like this some dark night in the park...hot.

Friday, May 4, 2012

The Blue Wrestler

Alexis LeKat: this is artistic on many levels!

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Wrap it up

Packing and moving is stressful enough, but there's another layer of anxiety added when you're packing up your rubber for storage in an offsite storage locker. Do I have enough packing paper and gauze in between layers? Do I have it too compacted or is the weight of the rubber at the top of the box going to compact the items at the bottom? More importantly, what will I do if some cute man comes through town that wants to have a rubber play session?

As things stand, I will have one modest-sized locker offsite for longer term storage of furniture, crap that I don't regularly use, etc. and another one in the basement of Mr. Ps condo building, much smaller but exclusively for clothes, short-term holdings where I hope to put the rubber but that will depend on space. It is so strange....this is the first time in my life that my possessions are going to be stored away and not readily accessible.

Oh well, its a sacrifice in order to reduce living expenses drastically while I'm not working...as much as societal pressure is making me think I should be looking for new work right away, my sane side is convincing me to take the summer off, smell the roses and soak up the sun on the beach as long as possible.  Why not? I have funds to live simply for the summer, stay close to home, get back into shape and maybe discover more about myself. Who knows what will happen? All I know is that I'm getting the hang of not being in a big hurry to get back into the fucking rat race.

Once the stress of the move is behind me in a couple weeks and I'm able to focus more on the career counselling program, work on Mr. Ps bookkeeping and help him out with some of his work, summer in my opinion will finally be here!

Vacuum Angel

It's interesting to watch Angels For Machines product and art development. Even if it's a strange design, at least it's original!!! :)

Latexbreath






Happy 3rd Birthday!

The Manchester Rubbermen group celebrated their 3rd birthday last weekend. Si Hands was able to capture some of the action. It looks like a good time was had by all; kudos to Si and the guys that started the group, things look like they can only get better!