Still a pony

Not a lot of new things to say here right now as the current business of being locked up in pony gear is ongoing. It's not stopping me working or building or anything, far from it, Mistress and I were planning some changes to the Raven Park Abbey earlier today (when I finally made it there, the boots still in training mode slowing me down).

As of the time of writing I'm 37% of my way through level 2 of 4. Nowhere near as impressive as the first time I trained these boots back in 2010, but slowly getting there.

And talking of 2010, it's possible the boots might end up rolling back the the start again. Mistress and I are really due a visit to MD to see about an upgrade. These boots are very old and suffer from a few issues, the most obvious of which is they still use invisiprims. Not only does that make them look a bit horrible by today's standards, they look even worse to Mistress because she generally runs with advanced lighting turned on so the invisis don't even work.

Given that an upgrade of the boots (and the gloves and tail too I'd imagine) is badly needed. Hopefully any upgrade does get rid of the invisiprims. If not it'll at least give me a moment where I can hack them off and knock together an alpha layer in the hope of making them look reasonable. But I guess it does mean that it's possible that I'll end up with a fresh pair that need training all over again.

Which I'm sure Mistress will love.

Meanwhile, this situation has had a knock-on effect on the Raven Park dance. Which isn't all terrible because a) it'll be a fun theme to build something for and b) it was a hoot taking the photo for the event blog post:

Pony rock is a thing, right?

A timely build

After Miss Vila's trouble with a barn/stable purchase the other day I decided that it was high time that I had a go at making a mesh building. An actual building. I would, of course, be using Mesh Studio for this and while it wouldn't be the first time I'd made something fairly big with it (I've made stairs and other components for buildings, and I've even made parts for a Z&A cell) it would be the first time I'd attempted a wholly-formed building.

I ended up with it comprising of 4 objects in total. There's the main body of the build:

which came in at a LI of just over 7. There's two copies of the door (which I wanted as a split stable door):

which came in at LI 0.5. I also did this so that it had a properly offset centre of rotation -- the door rotates around the middle of the hinges.

The final item is a simple prim floor. I chose to do it this way for two reasons. A minor one is that getting the physics for a floor to work so that people's feet sit right on the floor seems to be very tricky and never quite works out. The second and main reason is that rezzing objects onto mesh is fraught with problems and never ceases to annoy Mistress or me. Using a prim floor solves both those issues.

All linked together and with the doors scripted the whole thing comes in a LI 8 which, given the amount of detail I managed to add to it, is really great. Here's the finished item all textured up, in place and populated with other objects:

Miss Vila was really pleased with it and it's now my new home while I'm locked in my pony gear.

This also made it a very timely build too. As you might recall, I was locked in this gear for 8 days. Seeing as how I'll be putting in some training into the boots this weekend, and that it's unlikely that Mistress and I will be seeing each other due to RL commitments, I asked for extra top-up for my walk allowance so I knew I'd last until Monday. Mistress presented me with the Misfortune Cookies and I was handed a payment of.... 10 days locked in pony gear!

Mistress has decided that the best thing to do is simply extend my current time to 18 days and to keep the other allowances that are in the queue until the end of that period (or find a way of having me do them as her pony).

This is going to get more and more interesting....

Going pony again

When Miss Vila updated the contents of the punishment picker back in February one of the many additions she made to the list was time to be spent as her human pony. It has to be said that that's as much a treat for me as it is for her as it's something I do rather enjoy. It was one of the first things that was known to Mistress but an unknown to me, which then became a very firm favourite for me. Once she'd locked me as her pony once I fell in love with it and enjoy it very much.

The thing is, it's not something we get to do often. The last time I spent any significant time locked in pony gear was a year ago. Hence Mistress adding it as an item to the list of payments for allowance.

For the first time since it was added it came up a couple of days ago. Because other things needed to be done first the locking in gear was delayed until today. The payment was that I be locked in pony gear for 8 days straight. On top of this, while in the gear, I'm banned from the house. I have to "sleep" (in other words log out and in) in a stable. I'm also banned from the Raven Park Mansion or, for that matter, any other building on the region other than the Z&A main store and, of course, the workshop.

So, earlier today, Mistress and I contemplated where in the garden a stable should go.

It was also decided that, perhaps, a new stable was called for. We found what should have been the perfect one on the marketplace, something which would have a use later on (seems like the perfect thing to park the Z&A Carriage in). Sadly though it wasn't to be.

The doors are unlinked from the main building and, obviously, are scripted in a way that doesn't really take care of different rotations very well. The instructions that came with it were very clear though, and explained that once the build was in place you had to recompile the scripts (a new one on me -- it's not that unusual for scripts to need a reset, but a recompile?). That would have been great if it wasn't for the fact that the build, including the doors, was no-modify. You can't recompile the scripts in a no-mod object. So, as delivered, there's no way to make the doors work.

Away it went and the old faithful stable came out:

and then I was ordered to strip and my pony gear was locked on me.

It was also decided that my life as Mistress' pony should be made a little more interesting. See, the boots I wear are the sort that have a training mode. To start with you're slow and unsteady when walking in them and you keep falling on your backside. Walking is awkward and a little humiliating. This progresses through 4 levels, each about 10 hours worth of in-world walking. Back in 2010 I trained them up in just over a week and I've been able to walk just fine in them ever since.

It was decided to reset them. My training starts again.

This actually has some interesting implications. Back when I trained them last Z&A was in its infancy and, in effect, I took a week off from Z&A business and did nothing but train. This involved walking. Lots of walking. Lots and lots of walking. All I did, every time I was logged in, was walk.

These days I build a lot more and keep a lot more active with Z&A business. As such there'll be a lot less walking going on. I will do some walking (for example, because I'm banned from the house, the only TP pad I can use to get to the workshop is in the shop so I have to walk to the shop before I can get to the workshop), I will make an effort to train the boots up again, but it'll be a slower process. It'll likely span a few allowance payment "sessions".

On top of that there's another thing happening now that didn't happen back then: walking is an allowance. Every step I take has a cost. When I run out of walk allowance I have to select a payment from the punishment picker to be permitted to walk more. So to train up the boots is to invite even more allowance payments! And, of course, I'm already doing that because I have to log off in the stable so have to finish my evening off by making the slow walk back to the stable. Which involves falling down...

...lots...

...and lots...

This will be an interesting 8 days. And I imagine many of the forthcoming allowance payments won't be that compatible with being Miss Vila's human pony so they'll have to sit on a waiting list, which means that once I'm out of this I'll have a bunch more punishments to plough through.

*gulp*

At the beach

Today Miss Vila and I got some time to make a start on the final set of changes to the area of the Z&A plot that surrounds Zardia's house and which borders the side of the Raven Park Mansion. The changes we're making will also try and improve the back of the Mansion.

Most of the work involved landscaping, including some rather neat low mesh cliffs. There's still some tweaking to do, and some general dressing up, but most of the work got done today. So, having finished, we thought we'd relax a little and get a feel for how all the changes might work for others.

To start with, we changed into our bathing suits.

and then we went for a bit of a swim around the bay using the recently-installed swim system.

After we'd had a good swim Mistress wanted another look at the beach, thinking it needed something...

...and, after a bit of thought, she decided it needed some beach towels!

Eventually I was allowed up again and we decided to have a mess around in the sand. ;)

Finally, we headed over to the new dock and had a look at what might be needed there. We decided to install a romantic interlude kind of thing on the railing, which of course needed extensive testing.

The tricky part was deciding how best to communicate to people that there's something there without it being something that gets in the way. In the end we with with a subtle sign...

It's not ideal, but it's also the sort of thing that won't show up in most photographs and won't distract from an otherwise wonderful scene.

Eventually it was time to head home again, but before Mistress could head for bed I quickly needed a couple of allowance top-ups. As time was pressing I was given the top-ups and payment (which was selected) was held off until tomorrow. This will likely make for a blog post in its own right at some point tomorrow.

It's a pretty big one!

Bondage bunny

Yesterday's Raven Park dance theme was "Twisted Easter" so Miss Vila and I decided that we'd do our own takes on bunnies. Mistress was very her, of course:

and it was decided that I'd go fairly minimal, with a "bondage bunny" theme.

We did think about using one of the Z&A Bunny Hoods but Mistress decided she wanted to see some of my face so, instead, I picked up a fairly evil-looking bunny mask and tweaked it a little (got to love a merchant who provides items with modify permission). We also used the Z&A Arm Writing to make it look like Mistress had used her lipstick to write "bondage bunny" onto my arms.

With the addition of the Z&A Nipple Rings (using them for the leash, and with the daisy leash chosen, of course) I was all set. Oh, yeah, and round the back there's the RLV-lockable bunny tail that comes with the Z&A Bunny Hoods.

At the dance itself we had a few toys and props rezzed out. Night Wish Toys provided an Easter edition of their anti-grav cage and I put out a copy of our Chocolate Cell as well as a prototype "chocolate vac bed" that still sits around in my inventory doing nothing much. When it came time to head home after the dance Mistress decided that I should go to bed in the chocolate cell:

Now, because Z&A cells are multi-victim cells the timer on them counts down no matter how many people are inside -- even if the last person who was inside logs off. But, if trap mode is set, once the timer has run down and someone logs back in the door will close and the timer will start again. The main effect being that, for a single victim, once locked inside, if you need to log off you might as well do it sooner rather than later and serve your time when you next log in.

Which I chose to do.

This morning I logged in expecting to spend about an hour locked in the cell before I could clean up. However, I logged in to find that the door didn't close on me!

She'd forgotten to turn on "trap mode" so that the door would close on me.

Doubtless this'll somehow be my fault. ;)

Back in the dark

As I've mentioned a few times here Miss Vila and I are slowly revamping the part of the Z&A plot that runs down the side of the Raven Park mansion. We're almost done but, because of other commitments, time to finish the work has been in short supply. Today we were lucky enough to have some time together to plan the last few changes.

We spent a bit of time looking at the changes we wanted to make and then went out shopping, both window shopping (looking at possible purchases) and actual shopping. We've both now got items in our inventory that, all being well, will be used next week as we make the final changes (which'll include a little bit of scripting on my part -- always a bonus).

Of course, all of this teleporting about meant that my meagre very generous teleport allowance ran out by the time we were finished and so needed topping up. Payment for the top-up this time was that I spend three hours with the Z&A Contact Lenses locked in place, on their darkest non-blind setting and with all the main restrictions in place. So I said goodnight to Mistress in near-dark...

...and it's how I'm working in the workshop now.

Hopefully the timer will have run all the way down before I need to get to work on Saturday's dance build. ;)

Using Pushover from LSL

As much as possible I try and use all the tools I have to hand to keep on top of what's happening with SL, both in-world in my own little world, and also regarding the wider grid. I mentioned some of the tools back in a blog post in January and key to one of them was using Pushover to get push messages onto my (Android) phone and tablet. Earlier today I was thinking it could be handy to use their API to have in-world objects send me push notifications. One benefit of this would be that it'd bypass any of the false-positive spam-detection issues we've seen in the past with the likes of gmail. Another benefit is that it'd be fun and cool.

Here's what I came up with:

First off, to make use of all of this, you'll need an Android phone or tablet or an iPhone and a copy of the Pushover client app installed. As well as having an account you'll also need to create an application on their site so that you have an application key (it's free if you're going to be sending yourself fewer than 7,500 notifications in a month).

Once done all that's left is to make use of llHTTPRequest to POST a message. Here's the test script I wrote, with a dressed-up function for sending a message that could be useful in any number of scripts:

All this does is send a push notification to all my devices when someone touches the object it's inside of, telling me how far away they were at the time. The result on my phone is a push notification that looks like this:

(when you create an application on the Pushover site you get to assign an icon, hence the nifty Z&A logo) and when I select the notification it takes me to the Pushover app with the full details:

This is, of course, a really trivial example. But it could be handy for some less-trivial uses such as pinging you when your region has come back from a restart, or letting you know when its status has changed, or letting you know when someone's been booted out of your workshop, etc.

If there's one thing I like about Firestorm 4.6.1...

...it's this:

While it was in the previous beta I never really got to enjoy it because that FS version broke a fairly important (to me) part of RLV. Having it in my "use every day, lots" version really makes a difference.

Yoked and gagged

Mistress and I only got a short time together today, but we managed to fit a few things in. First off I wanted to show her some outfit demos I'd picked up to get her opinion on them; I also wanted to show her couple of new products I've being working on. We headed up to her studio to go over these things and, once we were done, we sat and had a chat. At this point I was reminded that I still owed 4 hours in a gag from last weekend.

I also needed a top-up for teleports too as I was very low. So, Mistress took me back to the house so I could use the book to pick payment.

That payment turned out to be 7 hours in-world locked in the Sunshine Technology yoke (sadly still not on general sale, this is the one from The Femdom Hunt IV). This means I get to spend the next 7 hours denied the ability to touch objects more than 1.5m away from me (something of a theme this week it seems).

Given the outfit I was wearing today Mistress also chose a gag that she thought was an excellent match:

Thanks to the safety pin gag I'll spend the next 4 hours in-world unable to send or reply to any instant messages. Once again I have to just watch the group chat and keep quiet if anyone is being wrong on the Internet. ;)

A great example of fitted mesh

The other day, in a group for builders, the usual anti-mesh brigade were doing their usual anti-mesh brigade thing (which, oddly, only ever seems to concentrate on mesh clothing, as if mesh is never used for anything else in-world, ever) and this time they were hating on fitted mesh and how it doesn't seem to make any difference at all. Of course, facts didn't seem to matter one jot to them.

Today, while trying on a demo for a mesh male catsuit (something that's very rare, very very rare, please, if you make mesh clothing, do consider helping make things like this not so very very rare), I sort of stumbled on a great illustration of the difference between plain rigged mesh and fitted mesh. While this isn't news and will come as no surprise to anyone who's being paying attention, and while I doubt it would convince anyone mentioned in the first paragraph, I thought it would be fun to grab some photos and post them on my blog for future reference.

So, here's me wearing the demo rigged but not fitted version (apparently sized "medium"):

Laughably useless, right? With the alpha on it's even more hilarious:

I mean, fine, perhaps it's very tight latex, but that tight.... I'd need to find a blue skin pretty quickly.

Now, this time, with the rigged fitted mesh version:

Suddenly it's looking more promising. While much of it is still inside my body it's outside my body at the important parts, and the parts that will be hidden by an alpha would be, in RL, the parts that are, you know, helped to look a little trimmer. With the alpha on it still looks like my shape:

Sure, it's pinched in at some points, but like I say above, that makes sense. It's a tight-fitting latex catsuit, you'd expect it to do that to some degree. This is also, for me, a good illustration of why I find it silly when people point out that fitted mesh still needs alphas as if that's a bad thing. This is a combination of mesh and alpha achieving an effect that normal "fabric layer" clothing could never manage, at least not without wearing a custom shape (which would be extra ironic given that shape-modifying is the #1 complaint made against rigged mesh clothing). Meanwhile I got to do all of the above without changing my shape one bit.

Of course, it's not all perfect, and I'm still trying to decide if I should go for this catsuit or not. My mesh feet clash a little with the bottom of the legs:

but then again the same issue is visible with my "normal" feet:

That said, my ankle cuffs (with I'm almost never without) more or less cover that issue up.

Also, I'm not 100% convinced by the backside. It seems a bit too angular in places:

On the whole though I think it's a real step in the right direction and it is, without a doubt, the best-fitting male mesh catsuit I've seen yet (come to think of it I've only seen one other and it looked all kinds of wrong on me).

PS: Bonus animated gifs. Non-fitted vs fitted without an alpha:

and non-fitted vs fitted with the alpha:

That second one might possibly be the silliest thing I've seen this week.

Back to my old self

After the last few days of looking like a clown I'm now back to my old self. I actually got unlocked yesterday although I didn't have time to mention it as I got caught up in Z&A business yesterday evening. After being allowed to dress normally Miss Vila and I had a wander around Raven Park and considered the next few things we'd like to do and we then sat and made a few plans.

I think this is very much my favourite spot on the region right now (well, second after "on my knees in front of Mistress regardless of where she is", obviously). If our chatting requires that we're also in-world (to look at and over things together) but don't need to be at a specific spot this one makes for a lovely backdrop.

It tends to be that, as you'd expect, Mistress its first and I follow. Amusingly that normally ends up with me on her lap to start with. I really must grab a photo of that before the next time she hits the swap button. ;)