They're growing!

Just a few short days on from when we first got them and Mal and Catastrophe are getting much bigger:

As a builder, programmer and a (RL) cat-lover I'm really impressed with how these are put together. The people behind this really seem to know cats and, of course, know what speaks to those who adore cats.

The stuff you find...

...just laying around the region sometimes. ;)

(this blog post over on the Z&A blog might help make more sense of what you're seeing here -- someone logged back in to find that the bridge of The Enterprise had been cleaned up after the dance)

Not keeping up with blogs and stuff

Dammit.

Less than a month after finally settling on a new feed reader, they're closing down. Or, more to the point, scaling back and kicking most of the recent converts off. That's annoying.

On the one hand I can't blame them. The influx they must have had once Google announced the closure of Reader must have been shockingly huge. On the other hand... how could they have not seen this coming?

Not to worry. I wish them well and hope they find some balance in their lives again. Now to go looking for another option. I guess feedly is the next obvious choice. At least until they collapse under the strain.

Only in SL...

Well, okay, technically not only in SL. I'm sure there's plenty of cosplaying cat-owners out there in the real world. But, only in SL, for me... After a few hours solid scripting in the Z&A workshop I get changed ready for the Z&A Star Trek dance and relax by playing with my new pet kitten:

All set for tonight

This afternoon Miss Vila and I did a little bit of shopping for costumes for tonight's Raven Park dance. This is the result:

Ignoring for a moment that we've had to mix old-old with new-old, I think we've come up with a good pair of costumes. All I have to worry about now is the fact that I'm the one with the red shirt...

Mad scientist

Yesterday Z&A sponsored a dance at The Velvet Thorn. Because of this it was one of those very rare events where I venture out to a dance or something on my own. Being a themed dance I, of course, had to come up with a costume. I decided that I'd channel Doctor Horrible. I think it turned out okay:

The lab coat I got off the marketplace and, because it was mod, I could easily tint it to the colour I wanted. The boots also came off the marketplace. They took a bit more faffing about to get to fit and I went with the non-rigged version in the end (because, obviously, there's no way to resize rigged to better fit me).

Try as I might I couldn't find the sorts of goggles I was after so, in the end, I quickly cobbled some together. Of course, I made sure that Doctor Horrible's arch enemy was in the reflection. ;)

If you look really carefully you'll see a faint reflection in the glass of the goggles.

I think the final result turned out okay. And the dance was a hoot too.

Meet Catastrophe and Mal

We've spoken about this on and off for quite some time, at least since the start of the year. In part Miss Eve is to blame. Yesterday, we finally cracked and went kitten shopping. The idea is that we'll have one for the house and one for the shop.

So... meet Catastrophe and Mal:

Catastrophe, the black cat, is Miss Vila's. He joins the ranks of her other pets (Fatal the horse and Lethal the crow). The white one is Mal and he's mine. Once they're fully-grown (it takes 7 days, from what we've read) the plan is that Catastrophe will live in the house and Mal will live in the shop, greeting and entertaining customers.

Assuming, that is, they ever wake up. They seem to sleep more than I do!

And, no, don't worry, we've not gone soft on Raven Park's "no breedables" rule. Both of these are already configured as pets and as soon as they're 7 days old we'll be purchasing the "perma-pet" kit for them.

Back on my knees

Anyone following this blog will have noticed that it's been a good couple of months since I spent any real time in any sort of restraint, and even longer since I've had any serious restrictions. It would be easy to think, of course, that this is because I'm simply well-behaved, a model submissive, and not in need of that sort of control any more.

However, Miss Vila does keep reminding me now and again that rather than this being the case it's really down to the fact that her RL is pretty busy. Last night that reminder was more than just words.

Recent Raven Park dances have tended to be in a custom-made skybox, built for the theme of the week. Because of this I generally place a TP pad at the Raven Park landing point, with a sign, to help people find the venue (I use a CasperTech transporter pad). When the dance is over I always make a point of deleting the pad on the ground.

After last night's dance Miss and I headed home and it was only when we got home that I realised that I'd left the pad on the ground out. Given that I was still leashed, and given that I couldn't cam over to it and delete it thanks to the anti-cam component of my Sub-Focus, I asked Miss Vila if she'd mind walking us back over to the landing point so I could delete it.

She dragged me onto the balcony of the house and then cuffed my hands behind my back, forced me on my knees and cuffed my hands to my ankles, forcing me to shuffle about on my knees. After that she unleashed me and had me shuffle all the way back to the landing point to clean up.

I'm now locked and left like this, as a reminder that I should pay more attention to my duties. Thanks to the cuffs I'm denied fly and sittp. Because my movement is now controlled by my Sub-Allowance the sittp restriction becomes more of a big deal because I can't chair-hop around the place, and so my movement allowance gets used up quicker.

Possibly the worst part is that I can't use the kneel I made just for my Mistress.

I survived the great SSA rollout of 2013

Today's run to my restart retreat was a little more special than usual because, of course, today was a pretty significant day in Second Life (well, for those of us who live on or hang out on LeTigre regions). For the first time since the rollout of mesh and bigger prims I was sat waiting for a big and important new thing to show up, along with most of the rest of the grid.

So, I sat there watching the kettle, waiting for it to boil...

...wondering how well it was going to go. When the region came back I TPd home. When I landed home I turned grey all over for a couple of seconds and then.... there I was, textured as I should be. No drama at all.

So far, other than the fact that an outfit change is very fast, there's no real obvious difference. Which is a good thing. I did notice one small niggle though: when I logged in this evening my face was a little fuzzy but, of course, rebaking my avatar no longer does anything. I had to change outfits to fix that. Perhaps there's a better way that I'm not aware of yet.

There's one very curious thing about the move to SSA though. Zanda, the Z&A shop bot, is running on a rather old bot client. I'd fully expected it to run into problems, with Zanda not showing correctly. Thing is, so far, he's fine. He's textured all nice, as he should be. I've had others look at him and he looks fine to them too. I've even cleared my texture cache just in case his texture was cached locally, or something -- no difference. There's no way the bot application is SSA-compatible, the code hasn't been touched since late 2010, so I'm unsure how or why he's working (could it be there's some sort of hand-over period and the doom and gloom about older viewers wasn't totally correct?).

My plan was to move him over to METAbolt. I've already got the script working so he can carry out doing his duties (handling group invites) but I think I'll hold off until I actually see him fail.

Keeping up with blogs and stuff

After the death of Google Reader was announced I started to have a look around for alternatives. In doing so I decided that it was high time I had a cleanup of which blogs and feeds I was following (many had long since gone silent) and to look out for good sources of SL news (not to mention SL kink news and RL kink stuff that's relevant to my interests).

I finally settled on The Old Reader. So far it's been working out well. While there's no direct mobile device support (as in, they don't have an app) I believe they have an API that some mobile reader apps can work against. It's a bit of a moot point for me anyway because I'm only interested in checking blogs in my development machine's browser.

Having got comfy with it I finally cracked today and even started to sort all the feeds!

Ahh. Nice and tidy. :)

Coding playground

This weekend I've been scripting away on something that might, at some point, become a new Z&A product. As I was going along I needed a few props to help me test the code. Here's what the platform outside the workshop looks like right now:

Best part is, it all makes sense.

To me. :D

A nice surprise

I'm a couple of days late posting this because bits and bobs in-world have sort of got in the way.

Back on the 2nd Miss Eve celebrated Evelock's second anniversary of her first in-world presence for Evelock. Sadly the party was far too early in the morning (her time) for Miss Vila to stand a chance of attending. That meant that I'd have to go alone.

I'm really not one for going to dances and parties on my own (unless I can get a fun build into the mix), I much prefer to go in Miss Vila's company, but there's no way I could miss this one.

So off I went. Missing Miss Vila while there.

Thankfully though the party ran on a little longer than was planned, and Miss happened to be around a little earlier than she'd planned, so for the last few songs I got to dance with her. :)

That made my night.

Happy birthday Evelock. I hope there's more years of builds to come.