Toybag Class

This weekend I got to present Building Your Basic Toybag: Without Breaking the Bank at my local kinky community center. This one's a fun, slightly shorter class where we talk about acquiring all the things for a starter toybag with general applications on a smaller budget. It's primarily aimed at newish folks, but we sneak in a lot for experienced folks by talking about more inventive ways to use things we already have.

Resource List for Essentials of Kink-Aware Care

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Scene Negotiation Checklists

There are a lot of scene negotiation checklists out there on the internet. None of them are perfect. All of them are starting points for improved, more in-depth negotiations. If you're an experienced kinkster planning a simple scene, they probably aren't really needed. 

But if you're newer to negotiating for yourself, they can be a great tool. Not just for the negotiation itself, but for preparing to negotiate. Going through some of these checklists while thinking about what you really want - and don't want - with your upcoming partner in your mind, can really help you understand yourself better. And the better you understand how you feel about different things, the better you can communicate that to your partner.

And for experienced kinksters or settled partners, using a negotiation checklist can help you open up your mind to kinds and modes of play beyond what you usually do. They can be an 'ideas menu' to work through together.

I've collected a few sample checklists for BDSM/Kink play here as negotiation tools. You may find that whole sections of them don't apply to you or your scene, while others may make you rethink what you thought you wanted to do. None of these belong to me; this is just a reference list. If you have a checklist that you like that's not on here, please let me know!

Updated Slidedecks and Upcoming Classes

This last month, I've been cleaning up and updating several of our classes, in preparation for some teaching opportunities we have scheduled in June!

I've dusted off and completely rewritten Essentials of Kink-Aware Care, which is a half-day class for healthcare providers. It's been a few years since we've had a chance to present to our care providers, and it's such an important topic to get information out there. In partnership with a local trans-care clinic, we'll be presenting that in early June.

I'll be presenting Building Your Basic Toybag at our local kink community center a few weeks after that. This is one of the presentations you can find here on this blog. For this one, though, the slide deck and the blog presentation look substantially different, but I couldn't just update one, so I did both. And that meant also updating the sample toybag Amazon wishlist that goes with it, too.

Next up is Dungeon Essentials, which I'll be headed out of town to teach. It was my first class that I taught back in 2010, but it's still evolving every time I teach it. This time, I updated some colors and formatting, and added one slide. The version on this blog doesn't have the updates; those who see it live will get those!

Other classes coming up in the fall include Making a Scene and Octopus Attack. Come see me if you get a chance!

We have a new class ready to teach!

Chaos Rope

Bondage Without a Pattern

A discussion of an unstructured style of free-form rope-topping suitable for tops at any level of experience. Instead of relying on patterns and planning, this unpredictable style of rope depends on communication between tying partners and an open attitude to go where the rope takes you. Basic safety and vocabulary knowledge are helpful.

available Live only

Now With QR Codes!

I attended a presentation by a fellow educator yesterday, and he did something that got me excited. On the very first slide of his presentation - the slide which sat there while everything was getting started - he had a QR code that would allow attendees to download his slide deck.

I thought this was brilliant. For people who weren't sitting up close and perhaps couldn't see the slides well and/or couldn't hear him well. For people who couldn't process as quickly as he talked and would like to go back to the slides later. For people who saw something on the slides they wanted to refer back to later and research on their own. For people who came in late or had to leave early. There are plenty of reasons why someone might benefit from having access to the slides on their own mobile device.

Shout Out - Hello!

I've had several interactions in the last few weeks where someone has told me that they were reading something on this blog and learned something. People who were either in my kink community, new to my kink community, or connected otherwise. I wanted to take a brief moment to say thank you to each of you for reading, and for letting me know that this is helpful to you. Sometimes writing something on the internet is like shouting into your own space, and you don't know that anyone else notices. So every time someone mentions reading something here, it just sends a huge jolt of happiness to this author's brain. Thank you!