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ORIGINAL: allthatjaz

Be interesting to know if any of you have been through a similar change because of your environment?
How important or unimportant are tools of the trade?

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ORIGINAL: allthatjaz
From living in a city center within a short distance from some of London's best clubs and constant access to the scene, we suddenly find ourselves living amongst fields of corn with nobody around for miles.

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We have no conventional play spaces, nothing familiar apart from an unopened suitcase of BDSM tools.
Suddenly all those conventional things seem unimportant and yet the lifestyle goes on stronger and much more intense. A switch from a tree seems far more attractive than a purpose made cane. Being chased across the fields is far more fun than being chased around a dungeon.

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ORIGINAL: allthatjaz

Be interesting to know if any of you have been through a similar change because of your environment?
How important or unimportant are tools of the trade?

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ORIGINAL: Padriag

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ORIGINAL: allthatjaz

Be interesting to know if any of you have been through a similar change because of your environment?
How important or unimportant are tools of the trade?

I've had more or less the exact opposite experience, but with a similar outcome.  I've never lived near major clubs or that sort of thing.  For me, going to a club or even a munch group meant a drive of usually an hour or more... it was very inconvenient and for the most part I ignored it.  Almost all my early experiences were done with homemade items contrived from my own imagination and crafted with my own hands.  Or else I used impromptu things... a wooden spoon from the kitchen, a bit of rope from the shop, an old worn belt, and so forth.  Sometimes I used nothing at all, except my barehand, my voice, my own disposition.

So when I did finally venture forth to explore what limited "clubs" there were, I entered quietly enough and dressed in my normal street clothes... and found myself amid what seemed like either a leather convention or goth convention.  Everyone else either had their best "I've done this forever" attitude on, or else was oohing and aahing over all the fancy equipment and how much it must have cost.  Me, I was thinking how overpriced most of the stuff was an how easy most of it would be to build myself in my own shop, a fact I soon discovered some didn't appreciate my mentioning.  I found myself very much a fish out of water.  To me, all those props didn't matter... to them, they weren't props, they were badges of status.  We just didn't see eye to eye.  I left and I've never been back to a club or event since.

Ironically enough, a few years later I was hired to design and build a private dungeon for a club someone intended to open.  Although I never got to build it (their financing fell through I was told), the design was to have faux stone walls, electric torch lights, an assortment of chains and such attached to the walls, rough hewn wooden beams on the ceiling with heavy eye bolts (blacked) for suspending various things and so forth.  So a guy who doesn't much care for all that stuff, ends up designing a very elaborate dungeon.  An most of all that "fancy" stuff, would have come from Lowes and Sherwin Williams.

Life's funny.

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Be interesting to know if any of you have been through a similar change because of your environment?
How important or unimportant are tools of the trade?