Here comes 2022! What are your new year’s resolutions? Can Rope365 help you reach your rope goal? It’s time for an update! 

  • More content on rope365.com 
  • New partnership to create more content. 
  • Supporting by helping with content review and website translation.
  • And some general updates on the writing process

New content!!

It’s been difficult to do the necessary photography during the pandemic so a lot of the new content is incomplete and focuses on text, resources and structure. I look forward to filling the gaps when things get safer again.

Also, I did this interview for RopePodcast and I talk about Rope365 at the end https://fetlife.com/users/7370142/posts/6984424 

Teaming up with Tension Montreal

Tension is an amazing rope space in the heart of Montreal. Even if you are not local, they stream their monthly performance night and sell high-quality rope and equipment on their website. They have been referencing rope365 in their classes for a while and share my passion for accessibility in rope with free resources.

For 2022 we would like to team up to create more content for rope enthusiasts around the world. Tension is supporting to make rope365 financially sustainable project but that’s only a start. The Tension team has a video setup and amazing people that want to contribute to the creation of new educational resources.

Stay tuned for more in the next year!

Helping Rope365

I often get asked how people can help rope365. If you’re already on the mailing list, that’s a great first step. Here are a few more:

  • Try the exercises, comment on your experience in the comment section at the bottom of each page or on social media. Show your own creations and link to the site so others can try it too. Tag #rope365 and/or @ebimcknotty so I don’t miss it!
  • Share the love, try the exercises with your local group, send the link to your friends.
  • Review the website: see a link that is broken? A piece of information that is incorrect? Some spelling mistakes? Wanna suggest tips or interesting links? You can use the comment function at the bottom of each page or the contact page to signal issues.
  • Seeking rope educators to review unpublished content: I’ve put together a guide to review the draft that includes more references and peer feedback than the website. If you’re on the mailing list I can also promote you to a group where I notify everyone when I seek specific feedback or information. Contact me to show interest!
  • Translating rope365: do you speak another language and wish to bring the content to your community? Some of the content is ready for translation and has already been translated to French. It would also be great to have feedback on the French translation so far. Contact me if you’re interested.
  • Contribute writings: are you knowledgeable about one or many of the topics on the website. We’re looking for short writing to include your wisdom. The writings we’ve received so far really give more depth to the content. Contact me if you’d like to contribute some bottoming tips, pro tips, personal stories, etc.
  • Hosting posts: do you have a rope educational writing on fetlife that you wish people could be accessed without having to create an account? Are you looking for a place to post your rope knowledge without having to build a whole website? I’ll be happy to host your writing and give you access to update it via the WordPress interface.
  • Improving search results: are you a knowledgeable person that knows how to make a custom WordPress show up more in google. I could use help with that too.
  • Do you have a specific skill you’d like to contribute to make rope365 a book? Like legal advice, publishing advice, etc. Contact me !!! 

Thanks to all who have been helping so far. Your support is precious and the very fuel that keeps the project moving.

Update on the journey

I was hoping that after so many years of writing, things would get easier… The structure was there, all I had to do was to fill in the blanks… The reality is that after taking a long enough break, I started seeing how things could be improved, and not just small details, fundamental changes. I spent most of February and March revisiting Fall, the list of activities, the order of things. It got pretty obsessive, and I was spending all my mornings writing and all my free time thinking. At some point, I thought I was done and started asking for feedback to reassure myself, and that got me into another round of mental spinning. 

One feedback I got was that “history” as a topic was taking too little space and that I should expand on this. It was an interesting coincidence because I was already building a presentation for my local community and was already full-on research mode on that topic. I teamed up with Aguacate, a long-time friend, who is also very passionate about the subject and we had two iterations of this presentation for the French community. There has been a renewing interest in the broader community to study history following the event at the Kyoto University, and the impact of the protests against racist violence toward Asians. Getting a proper understanding of where it comes from is essential to the respect of our craft and the people that came before us. It’s a challenging topic to tackle, maybe it’s why it had such a small place so far, maybe I was afraid. I don’t want to get into the colossal work of writing the complete history of rope, I am not a historian. I want to create activities that will enable others to make their own discoveries. I also want to do this with the care and respect it deserves. Rope bondage is born out of a dark history of slavery and violence, it is important to reflect on that, and how it informs how what we do. I also need to continue my personal journey to learn more on this important topic. So I combined the two Hojo Jutsu chapters and created a new space for History, there is no shortage of ideas to make this a fun chapter, it just needs more time to mature.

Another big feedback was that Fall is very geeky in nature and may not appeal to a lot of people. And if I was already conscious of this before, that doesn’t make it less valid or impactful. I made the decision from the very beginning to write what I wanted to read, write about what I’m passionate about. Rope365 is not the “getting started and follow along” guide that most people are looking for.  I had made prototypes of more standard tutorials before that, and it felt like a job. I’m glad others are making that kind of product now. My work is just something different, I’m a game designer, I wanna create something to help people craft their own adventure. No matter how confident and proud I am about that direction, it is incredibly hard to accept that what I write is for the fringe. 

I’ve put Fall and Winter on pause for a little bit. I feel Fall is in a good place with some space for improvement, I just need to transfer the revised structure on the website. Winter is still a little rough. I’m hoping that when I get back to it in a few months that I’ll feel better about them and then I can start bringing that content to the website. But I’m afraid… I’m afraid I’ll see it’s bad and needs more work. I’m tired, that doesn’t stop me from continuing forward.

I needed a break from this and apparently, one obsession replace the other. Someone asked if they could translate the website. I don’t know if they ever will, but it was enough to kick my ass into doing the French version. I had bought corde365.com and had tried to install a localization plug-in before, and it didn’t work right away so I moved on. This time I pushed through and managed to get the website set up correctly. This opened another pandora box of brain spinning: which word to use in French for some of the core components. I ordered a French copy of the Ashley Book of Knot and another rope book in French. More learning to do to complete this part of the project.

Moving in with the rest, I’m pretty happy with the updates I’ve made to the website structure. I ended up learning how to use CSS which allowed me to create a better template for summaries and will make website maintenance easier. The new navigation flow feels much more instinctive and the summaries have more meat with the pictures and the links. Hopefully, it get people to explore the site beyond Day 1!

To update the summary for Spring I have to review the whole content and move forward with some of the writings. It’s hard to write a summary of something that has not been written yet. Summer was a bit easier as I already had done a good pass last year, it was still incredibly time-consuming to look at all the references and add the links. I hope these are going to help people through the challenges and bring inspiration from a diversity of sources.

My biggest challenge right now remains the pandemic. We spent most of the winter in lockdown. My capacity to take pictures and test ideas were incredibly limited. I’m still pretty proud of myself for continuing to write in this context, even if I had to take long breaks.

I’ve been practicing every week since the beginning of the year, mostly on my mannequin or myself. Attending the weekly Kannawakai salon has helped me stay in touch with rope and keep the creative brain active. I also kept on organizing the local rope gathering over zoom until we got back to in-person gathering in the summer. There has been the major motivation to move forward with writing Week 8: The Body. The local students wanted to learn more about these topics, and assembling the class material got me in the flow I needed to resume the writing of this chapter. I wanted to finish the picture part but since it’s not happening right away with a new lockdown, I’m glad I found the strength to publish my WIP without this. It’s going to be easier to understand the content with the pictures, but the text and the references are already of a lot of value.

Writing the chapters about breathing and neck anatomy required a lot of courage. Information about these topics is hard to come by. The subject is quite taboo, even in the kink world. Many believe that making this information available is going to increase the number of people doing high-risk activities. My take on it is that people are going to do it anyway, and providing anatomy knowledge can prevent accidents and injury. I know I’m walking a fine line and try my best to keep things informative and reasonably safe. But rope is never safe….

When things started opening up, I resumed teaching in person for my local community and started travelling again to continue learning. I’ve been using these travels to shoot content for rope365, so now I’m sitting on a giant pile of pictures to edit. More on this soon. 

And now we’re going into another lockdown. This whole situation is incredibly stressful and I want to be gentle with myself. I’ve been pushing myself to finish some sections of the website and it negatively affected my motivation. For 2022 I want to be gentle with myself and find ways to write in a state of flow. This may mean that I’m not writing what is the most important. This may impact when rope365 can become a book. I may take breaks for an extended period of time But the website is good enough now that it can be used to learn and grow indefinitely. This is a hobby and not a job. The feedback I receive is one of the main drivers to continue updating the content so keep it coming!

Coming up next: I have to import the new structure of Fall and Winter to the website, review the Box Tie and Hog Tie chapter. Finish writing and adding pictures to The Rope and The Body. Under the hood, I have to continue writing Week 9-13 to get closer to the book milestone. Maybe I’ll translate even more stuff. Work with Tension on making videos. Or maybe I’ll write something completely different because I feel like it. We’ll see!

Happy new year!!!

page count: 1004 (Made it to a thousand!!!)

  • Spring: 485
  • Summer: 224
  • Fall: 141
  • Winter: 154