Some time in the Pod Prison

One of the things with the allowance system is that Mistress has to find a balance that works for her and everyone else. It's one thing to make my life very difficult for her amusement, it's another when I need to be working on things that will benefit her and others. This does mean that some of the harsher or longer-term items need to be fitted in around doing things like building for Raven Park dances, and even around more practical things like rolling restarts (you don't want to be locked in or on something when a restart comes rolling).

I met up with Mistress yesterday, after cleaning up the set from Saturday's dance, and she had a good long look at what's currently on the list of payments I need to deliver on.

Finally she decided that it was high time we knocked off at least one of the stints inside the Raven Park Pod Prison. I've been dreading this. The Pod Prison is an odd thing. Back in the days when I used to hang out at Stonehaven the Pod Prison there was my first introduction to RLV-based heavy isolation and I was constantly fascinated by it. It, in turn, through a friend at the time, got be interested in banishment too. So when Mistress leashed me and dragged me into the prison room in the Raven Park Mansion I was both excited and nervous.

I was ordered into my prison suit and helmet and then I was permitted a goodbye hug.

Accepting my fate, for the next 3 hours anyway, I walked onto the platform while Mistress fired up the console.

This is the part I really like about the Pod Prison. The sounds are so well done as you use it. The voice that was chosen as the voice of the computer is spot on. It's soft, soothing, almost cheerful. This makes it seem all the more sinister, it makes it feel like your time in the prison is all the more inevitable.

A pod was called from the lower prison....

...and I was encased and transported back to its location.

Eventually, after 3 hours of being completely isolated from the outside world (no IMs, no chat, no maps, no ability to see names, the works) I was released and could head back home.

...and could change back into something more comfortable.

Worryingly I still have another 2 sessions in the Pod Prison in my allowance list. The 5 hour session will be quite a test of my endurance. I imagine that I'll have to log off from that at some point and deal with the consequences of the probation period (this is calculated based on your offline time during your sentence -- you're set free from the prison itself but you remain locked in the suit and isolated).

Velvet Thorn Goth dance

Because of our timezone differences, and because the times that many events in SL happen at, Mistress and I don't get to attend that many dances and the like. Normally all we tend to manage is the fortnightly Raven Park dances (obviously). But when we realised that Miss Eve was DJing a Goth-themed dance at VT yesterday we just had to arrange things so we could both make it.

I mean, really, it was an excuse for Mistress to go shopping for a new dress! ;)

And make it we did. I took a few photos during the dance, which you can see over on imgur. Here's a handful of Mistress and me having some fun:

It was a lovely couple of hours and was really nice to have some time to get out and about. Sadly, however, this seems to have jinxed it for the following night. RL is now going to claim Mistress so I'll be without her for today's Raven Park dance. Although RL claimed her for part of one dance, and a machine crash took a large chunk out of another, this will be the first one ever where I'll be there without her.

It'll feel very strange.

SL2: Some thoughts about moving

I'll start off by pointing out what I hope is the obvious: what follows is based on almost zero facts -- nobody who's saying anything has any hard facts about what the Lab is doing and plans when it comes to "Second Life 2" and what little I've seen in terms of timescales appears to be little more than speculation or not-quite-attributed reporting. What this is, like I said in my first post about this subject, is me jotting down the thoughts that occur to me as I think about how this'll develop and evolve. Please read it as that and only that.

Following on from my first post about my personal reaction to the news of the Lab's work to create a new virtual world (I keep wanting to say "grid" but that might really not be the right term for it) I've been thinking more about how and when I'd personally be likely to make the move and why I'd make the move, or not. Here's what I've thought about so far:

It's about who is "me": I'll happily admit that I'm heavily invested in me as Antony. The name Antony Fairport exists on a couple of other grids, where I've gone and had a look at what's there over the years, but I've never viewed either of them as me. I also have an original account in Second Life itself and, while he's another aspect of me (albeit one who's seldom logged in when compared to Antony) I very much feel that, when in a virtual world, I'm Antony. Antony is me. There's no difference.

I feel that I can only really support one world, one grid, as being "my" home. I don't mean that in a financial sense (although that's obviously an issue), I mean that in an emotional sense. When I log into Second Life, as Antony, and rez on Raven Park, I feel like I'm (virtually) home. A move to another grid/world would be like a grand house move, like emigrating, like leaving behind an old world and old possessions and starting, as me, with a fairly clean slate.

It's about who I want to be with: Just as important as the above is what happens to the relationships that are important to me. It should go without saying that the most important person in my virtual life is Zardia/Miss Vila (ditto in my real life too but that transcends any virtual worlds). Any move, any "emigration", could and would only happen together. I can't even begin to imagine doing it any other way. That's not to say I wouldn't create an account at the earliest possible opportunity to explore -- given the chance to have early access to something and potentially help test it I'd jump at the chance -- but that'd be done as a purely technical exercise. It wouldn't be me there yet.

Another factor would be where my close friends are too. I'm not the sort of person who has a huge circle of friends that I hang out with all the time -- I have a very small circle of friends who I seldom see in person but who I chat with lots in IM and/or get together with for music and laughs every couple of weeks. A new world would seem a little too empty without them.

It's about who we all want to be with: Building on top of the two issues above there's the whole business of the wider communities we're part of. I'd say I identify with and feel part of at least three different (and somewhat overlapping) communities in Second Life. In no particular order:

• The RLV-using BDSM community
• The Femdom community
• The content creator community

A new world would need to be fairly well populated with those communities before I could really feel like it's home (I'm going to ignore for a moment the issue of the availably of a technology akin to RLV in any new world). Again, any inertia in any of those communities moving wouldn't stop me from exploring a new world, but it would temper and inform my willingness to finally say "this is where I virtually live".

Something that's fascinating me at the moment is what process would be involved in such communities moving. It goes without saying that the first two I mention above would heavily depend on how welcome adult content is in any new world (you'd really hope it would be welcome -- adults like to have fun and explore adult themes and Second Life seems to have done okay off the back of that fact). The last would naturally happen anyway, at least for content creators who are curious and get a thrill out of exploring new things and developing new skills (I can't even begin to convey just how excited I am at the prospect of seeing and learning any new scripting language).

The part that fascinates me, and I'm genuinely intrigued to see how it plays out, is how the first two communities would migrate. It's obvious that they wouldn't just up and move as a group, they're not communities in that sense, but I'd imagine that something would happen to create a tipping point where a real migration begins. I'm kind of looking forward to seeing what happens there.

There's a side issue to this too: many communities in Second Life are made up of sub-groups that relate to and are based on strongly-themed regions. I guess it could be said that a region is the most basic sub-division of community on the grid (okay, sure, would could divide up at the parcel level, or the Second Life group level, but my experience is that themed regions tend to be the strongest basic level). I'm really intrigued to find out if the new world that the Lab is working on has anything akin to the concept of a region. I imagine that that decision alone would have a huge impact on how people organise themselves.

Conclusion: Well, really, there's no conclusion to this. Like I said at the start, this is simply me thinking out loud, documenting my thoughts as I process the news and read the facts, gossip and rumour. One thing I do know is that all of the above would be trumped by events on the Second Life grid itself. If the economy tanked because of Ebbe's "announcement", or if our landlords pulled out because of it (with no affordable way of us taking on our region), or the end date of the grid were finally announced, that'd change everything.

But, assuming the best (which I am at the moment -- I fail to see how the Lab could successfully develop anything new without the support of the income from what they have right now), the above is playing a large part in how I'm looking to the future.

Another three days

Today marked the end of the week of being denied any form of clothing (other than the chastity belt) so I was understandably looking forward to having some freedom to pick my outfits again. After a perm and pack session on some new Z&A products I met up with Mistress in our house.

She unlocked my belt and was about to remove the "no wearing any clothing" restriction in the SubHUD when she said something along the lines of "oh, wait a moment..." and the belt was locked again. Somewhat confused I asked what was going on and she pointed out that there was an item on the allowance list to the effect of "Wear an outfit of your Domme's choice for 3 days". She noted that she liked me (un)dressed like this and that 3 days would take us to Friday -- our usual "shop for a dance outfit" day. So that was it, I had my belt unlocked for all of 30 seconds before I was locked back in it for another 3 days.

Mistress then decided that it'd be a good idea to knock a couple of items off the list so along came "Be locked in the Punishment Log for 5 hours".

This makes for an interesting 5 hours. Like last week it means I'm denied far touch but, unlike last week, it also means (given how Mistress locked it) that I'm also denied fly too. This means that last week's rather creative attempts to put out the extra vendor boards in the shop doesn't work this time -- this really means that various jobs I want to do this evening have to wait until my 5 hours is up, that I have to find other things to do meanwhile.

On the future of Second Life

The news about Ebbe's mention of the Lab's next development was just starting to surface as I was heading for bed on Friday night and, having had a fairly busy weekend in RL, I've not had much time to spend really taking it in. It has, however, been sat in the back of my mind, brewing, nagging, not going away. While I have no reason or interest in going into any kind of panic mode, there are what I believe to be understandable concerns.

In an effort to get them straight, and recorded, I'm going to write them here. This won't necessarily be a coherent post; think of it more as a quick jotting to get things down on (virtual) paper.

What follows is based on the following facts that seem to be known:

• The Lab is working on a new virtual world.
• The majority of their resources are working on it.
• It's not complete.
• It isn't intended to be in any way backward-compatible with Second Life.
• It won't be Open Source.

While there seems to be a few other bits and bobs known these seem to be the main facts. Here's my thoughts and reactions based on what's happened so far:

The way it was announced: The way it was announced seems fairly curious. I'd have thought that something a little more formal would have been released but, instead, it almost seems to have been let slip in an incidental way. This was either a bit of a mistake (needing a bit of quick fire-fighting) or a genius move to create the maximum rumour mill effect, causing as much panic as possible, thus ensuring that any further news would always be news that seemed better than what was originally "leaked".

That this development is taking place at all: Well dur! It seems fairly obvious that the Lab had to do something to stay competitive (or to have an exit strategy?) now that there seems to be a bit of a second summer of virtual worlds. It seems clear that Facebook are working on something that's bound to be hugely popular, High Fidelity is making a buzz, etc... Nothing about this bit of news comes as a surprise.

Lack of backward-compatibility: This seems sensible and inevitable. I don't know the internals of Second Life very well (well, at all) but I can imagine that there's a lot of very old design (the origins of SL stem from the late 1990s, right?) that has served the grid well but which would hold back anything seeking to be very new. I'm a software developer by trade. I've been an employed developer since the late 1980s. I've created systems that have become legacy systems. I've maintained other people's legacy systems. I've reimplemented the "next generation" of a system more than once (my RL is taken up by doing just such a thing right now), often sacrificing backward-compatibility. This I get.

The lack of Open Source: This is the part that really concerns me. While I've long been a supporter of (and involved in) Open Source and associated movements I don't as a rule believe that everything should and must be Open Source. I wouldn't and don't expect the Lab to make the server side available. I don't even expect the Lab to make the client side available either. But... I can't help but think that the opening of the client side, and the creation of the TPV "market", was and continues to be a huge plus for Second Life.

I do, of course, have a very particular interest in this latter point. While I really enjoy Second Life for the chance to be part of like-minded communities (cf Raven Park dances and The Femdom Hunt), and while the most important parts of my Second Life are people that are very important to me, there's at least one add-on technology that I really enjoy working with: RLV. I have had, and continue to have, so much fun with RLV (and RLVa, of course), both as a programmer who loves making stuff with RLV and as someone who spends time on the receiving end of RLV being used by a wonderfully smart and deliciously twisted woman.

The point here being: how could something like RLV have ever happened without the viewer source been made available?

Moreover, isn't it the case that RLV is just one example of lots of community-created and community-supported enhancements that allow all sorts of cultures and interests to thrive in Second Life? Just the other week I was reading about how text viewers are important to visually-impaired users -- another example.

This part is the big concern I have about any new virtual world from the Lab: that something as clever and as widely-used as RLV won't be possible.

The impact of the announcement: My other big concern is the impact of the announcement. While it's been said that Second Life as we know it will continue for the foreseeable future I'm already seeing mutterings from some people (albeit from the sorts who are always looking for a reason to panic and declare The End Of Second Life) about how there's less reason to spend money in-world, etc. And this does seem like a legitimate concern. While nobody in their right mind would ever have assumed that the grid would exist forever, Friday's "leak" makes the last day of the grid a tangible reality. Given that, it's not completely nuts to imagine that people would start to second-guess what would have normally been a fun impulse purchase.

Personally I'm not stopping enjoying my Second Life any time soon. I'll still build and script. Z&A isn't going anywhere. Raven Park isn't going anywhere either. I'll still spend money on fun toys and clothing and the like.

I enjoy my Second Life and nothing's going to change that any time soon.

But...

Things like Z&A and Raven Park exist on top of a thriving virtual economy, which requires that people share my view, that they want to carry on having a virtual home that they fill with virtual furniture and that they carry on buying what I produce to virtually explore themselves. Friday's "leak" and the way it's been handled since really doesn't seem to me to be the right way to ensure that the Second Life economy stays healthy for a good time to come. Friday's "leak" seemed like the best way to make as many people as possible nervous and defensive.

The next few weeks are going to be very interesting.

Denied clothing for a week

Today, after a bit of a mammoth perming and packing session of some new Z&A products, Mistress dealt with some more of my allowance list. Given that I obviously needed to be able to work on things for the next day or so she decided that now would be a good time to knock off the payment of being locked in just a chastity belt for 7 days. And so I was ordered out of all my clothing, her favourite belt was locked on and all clothing was denied using my Sub HUD.

Mistress then decided that she'd knock off the payment of being locked in the Sunshine Technologies yoke for 10 hours too -- this means 10 hours, in-world time, denied the ability to touch or edit anything more than 1.5m away from me.

That makes for a challenging 10 hours given that, today and tomorrow, I'm putting out 10 new products and also rearranging some of the shop. That means that I have to wander around the shop like this...

...and rezzing out and reaching some vendor boards for editing requires a little bit of creativity. ;)

It also means that one of the longer-term projects I'm working on will have to wait for a day or so given that I generally have to be more than 1.5m away from it to work on it. Same goes for a product I've started working on with an eye on releasing it next week.

Anyone would think that 2 weeks of me releasing 10 products each week has influenced Mistress' choice of punishments. ;)

The list is growing again

Late on last week things were starting to look up for my allowance payment list. While it wasn't anywhere near empty, and while some of the longer-term items were still on it, it was shrinking.

Until Saturday evening.

After the Raven Park dance, where at the very end I ran out of chat allowance, I asked Mistress for a top-up (as well as a top-up of fly). She was more than happy to grant my wish, for the usual cost.

That didn't go well at all. I received another instance of the "Subby Wildcard". That means that I get to pick the punishment (so really it's always going to be a bit of a treat for me, as long as Mistress approves it) but I also have to pick another 3! Which I did. And then I had to pick another to pay for fly. All of this meant that the list got quite a bit longer.

Fast forward to today (although we did meet up again on Sunday it was only briefly so Mistress wasn't able to collect on any punishments) and, after we'd been busy working on a build, just before she headed for bed, Mistress decided that she'd collect on me being locked in an Isolation Helmet for 3 hours as well as being leashed (to the spot, in this case) on a region of her choice for 1 hour.

I was ordered to put on the helmet and change into a latex catsuit. She locked the helmet and TPd away. Moments later I was pulled after her.

It became apparent pretty quickly that I'd been dropped at the Bondage Ranch. A pretty harsh move on Mistress' part. While this might not seem like such a big thing to most people, I'm really not a casually-sociable person (there's a reason I'm at my most comfortable, beavering away in the Z&A workshop) so this does make for a fairly uncomfortable situation for me. On the other hand I'm locked in the isolation helmet so can't talk to anyone (in local), can't see names and can't see very far either. I also can't start an IM conversation, but can talk in IM if someone starts the session.

It's an interesting experience, being left in what's obviously a safe environment but in a situation that's a little bit out of my comfort zone.

Mistress knows me well and knows how to push me. ;)

Three years on

Today this blog turns three years old.

It's been a pretty busy year since the last anniversary post. The project to build new mesh products with the new Z&A device engine is ongoing, and I'm now in the final phases of replacing some of our very early builds, so finally retiring any remnant of the original builds.

In the last year I've also written a brand new restraint system for Z&A, the launch of which happened in February and which we're using to release the odd restraint product here and there. I've also replaced all of our original restraints and most of our HUD-based gadgets with this too.

One of the biggest things for me in the past year was the creation of the Z&A Sub HUD. This is something that was written from the ground up to satisfy Miss Vila's desires for a RLV control HUD, and also to satisfy my desire to write my most comprehensive RLV-based product yet. I think it's safe to say that it's the body of code I'm most proud of. It formed our main sub's gift for The Femdom Hunt IV and we got a lot of positive feedback about it.

The biggest change on the blog in the past year has been that, in part, it's become a diary of my exploits with the allowance/payment system Mistress put in place. This doesn't look like it'll stop any time soon so it should carry on playing a large part in the content of this blog.

I hope the next 12 months are as busy and fascinating as the last. I'm already working on a new project that'll take a while to mature and which should start a whole new round of building in the near future. It should be a a fun time.

The new transaction history

Edit 2014-06-13: Got to my desk this morning to find that the two big issues mentioned here are now fixed. That's a real relief and, suddenly, the transaction history is working sweetly, makes sense and adds utility. Nice job Lab web/JS/AngularJS person.

I missed most of the fun the first time the new transaction history was launched. It was launched unannounced. It appeared to annoy pretty much everyone who saw it. It appeared to be pulled again pretty quickly. I get the impression that it wasn't so much launched as it escaped.

But, now, we have it and we've being living with it for a week or so. And it's terrible. Really terrible.

Let me be clear: I generally do my best to not be one of those people who abhors change. If something changes I'll try my best to understand where the motivation for that change came from and, as much as possible, I'll try and adapt.

No, the reason why I say the new transaction history is terrible isn't because I dislike change. What I dislike is change that removes utility and makes life harder for little or no obvious benefit. From where I'm sat right now the new transaction history appears to do that, it appears to have been developed by people who don't actually use the transaction history or realise how it's used.

First off, there's the problem that I've seen most people mention: you can't easily select a single day to view. As I write this it's 2014-06-11 here (I'm in the UK). It's also 2014-06-11 in SL too. I want to view all of my transaction history for today so far so the obvious selection would be to set the start and end date to 2014-06-11. That's how the old transaction history worked. It worked. Not now though, if I do that now I get:

Please specify a correct date format of YYYY/mm/dd and ensure the start date occurs prior to the end date.

Why? Why would I want the start date to be before the end date? Why doesn't it make sense to select a single day range by starting and ending on the same day? Such a simple thing to want to do and already the new history interface is breaking the rule of least astonishment.

Okay, fine. So to view the history for today I have to set today as my start date and tomorrow (which is in the future as of the time of writing) as my end date. Apparently I have to work for the system, not the other way round. Apparently the system is coded such that it can't do a sensible comparison when validating my input (and, presumably, no longer does a sensible comparison when selecting the data).

Anyway, I set my start date to today and my end date to tomorrow and, sure enough, I get today's transactions (sort of, more on that a little later).

But what if I want to view the transactions for a single day from a few days ago? Based on what I'm seeing above the idea is that I should make the day I'm interested in the start date and the following day the end date. If I'm to follow the above then it would seem that the range is inclusive of the start date but exclusive of the end date. So, I do that, and I get....

...two days worth of data! Data from the start date and data from the end date. So it seems that it's inclusive of the start date and end date but the end date always has to be greater than the start date so the only way you can get data for a single day is if the following day has no data -- or the following day hasn't happened yet.

Yeah, you could say I'm astonished.

And the thing to remember is this: before the changes this worked just fine. I could select a single day and I'd get data for that single day. I was not in the least bit astonished by that.

But it gets even better. Starting today (I think it started today) the transaction history is now showing me transaction times in my local timezone. On the surface that might actually seem useful. But, really, it isn't. Not for me it isn't. Here's why:

Second Life is a global environment. People from all over the world, at all longitudes and latitudes, interact with each other, work together, build together, play together, run and attend events together. The thing that makes all of this work is a common understanding of time. Second Life, as we all know, uses a timezone that is the same as the Lab's office. Personally I think that's a bad choice; personally, if it had been me, I'd have gone with UTC. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that, no matter where you are in the RL world, the SL world has a common time.

This makes organising everything so much easier (well, apart from when they break the code or, as happened earlier this year, forget to take DST into account).

Miss Vila is also my business partner. One of us is in the UK, the other in Australia. We have customers from all over the world, in all sorts of timezones. I keep and update our sales records based off what she sends to me; we both support our customers based off what they tell us. It serves no useful purpose whatsoever for her to see those sales in her local timezone. It especially serves no useful purpose when she emails those sales to me and they're in her local timezone which isn't my local timezone which isn't SL's timezone.

Even better: the transaction history, as it appears right now, doesn't even match what you see in a) the marketplace sale notification emails or b) the marketplace order history report. From the point of view of a Second Life merchant the SL merchant tools are not internally consistent. (from what I can see it is actually internally consistent¹, it's just presented in a way that makes it look otherwise).

It's a mess.

And then there's the fact that it doesn't remember my preference for how many items I'd like to view....

And then there's the fact that one date format is used to display times (a form of ISO 8601, an excellent choice) and yet in the date input/picker they use a slightly different format.

Really, it's a mess.

The thing is, I get what they're trying to do. The ability to better control what you see, especially the filter, makes so much sense. I really like that as an idea. But how the heck did what we see now make it past any kind of quality control? There's no need whatsoever to break how things used to work just to add this feature.

There just isn't.

What I find so utterly frustrating about this is that timezones and time are a really difficult problem. Really, for a programmer, they are:


And the nice thing is that the Lab had it sorted. They gave the grid a single timezone and used it everywhere. And now they've broken that.

I hope this isn't on purpose.

---

¹ If you're comfortable using your browser's console you can see that, internally, the model object that holds the current data has the time of the transaction as a JavaScript time object and that the time is correct. Try:

angular.element("#history-table").scope().history.historyDataMod[0]

and inspect the result to see (assuming you've got at least one row of history showing).

Going naked until Friday

After working on getting a few new Z&A releases out of the workshop (they'll be fully announced tomorrow) Mistress looked over the allowance list to see what else could be knocked off. As much as she'd love to do the Pod Prison ones today (and tomorrow) aren't good days -- both personally and also because of work on the grid (being in a Pod Prison when a region needs to restart sort of defeats the object a little).

So I offered to pick something for one of my "subby wildcards". My offer being that Mistress lock me naked for a number of days of her choice.

Given that we've got a Raven Park dance this weekend and we'll need to sort costumes Mistress decided that three days would be a good number of days.

At that point I noticed that I was getting low on TPs and so needed that topping up. So down to Mistress' office we went...

...and I came away a few TPs better off and with the addition of "Be a roller bane for 5 days" to my allowance list.

So I knocked an item off the list and got one added, in the space of 5 minutes.

This isn't making the list any shorter.

Evil League of Evil RLV Scripters

A short while ago, in RLV Communities:

[13:53] Antony Fairport: No-kink RLV? Isn't that the sort of thing that gets you kicked out of the Evil League of Evil RLV Scripters?!?
[13:53] Wilhelmina Hinchcliffe creates that group RIGHT NOW

So, yeah, that's a thing now. ;)

Caged again

After a weekend of not seeing each other Mistress and I got together in-world for a couple of hours today. We spent some time with her looking over a background project I'm working on and then we spent some more time on the Abbey project that we've also got going on. Eventually though, as always happens, it was time for bed for her.

Before she went though there was the small matter of what happened with my cell time on Friday. Mistress understood and appreciated that it was nothing that I'd done, but there was still about 4 hours that I owed her. Given that I've yet to find what caused the problem (it's not one of my builds), and given that Mistress didn't want it happening again, it was decided that a more flexible definition of "cell" would be used. So I was marched over to the Abbey again and...

...locked in the glass display case with a 4 hour timer.

Mistress did unlock my cuffs (and lock them again in their normal state, of course) and also allow changing of clothing again. This means that I can finish off photographing some products that will go on release this week. But not yet. For now I have to spend the next 4 hours enjoying my view of the Abbey.

Once I've served my time then I can get on with things.

Caged and gagged, sort of

This weekend is one of those weekends where Mistress and I don't get to see each other. However, before we had to say our final goodnights of the week, we spent a bit more time working on the Raven Park project I mentioned in the previous post. Once done Mistress mentioned that it was a good time to knock one of the "bigger" items off my allowance payment list. Five minutes later we were down in the Abbey setting that up.

This payment was to spend 5 hours in-world time in a cell of Mistress' choice, and also 2 hours gagged. The gag of choice this time was the Z&A Hair Sticks gag. Once they were locked in place Mistress decided that it didn't look right if my hands were free as I'd obviously be able to fiddle with the gag, so my hands were locked behind my back. She then decided that if my hands were locked behind my back I wouldn't be able to get changed, so then she used my Sub HUD to lock my outfit in place too. The cuffing and outfit lock is in place until I next see her (so likely Monday).

Once I was all set it was time for us both to log out and say goodnight in RL. My RL was then busy for the next few hours and, as I went about my business, I was constantly thinking about how I'd have to spend 5 hours in the cell. While that might not seem like such a big deal for some it's quite a thing for me. I'm so used to hiding away in my workshop, working on code, having fun building things. Being down on the ground and locked in public is quite a thing for me.

Oddly though, as much as I was mentally resisting it as Mistress walked me over to the Abbey, once I was in the cell and the door was locked I relaxed. Once it was inevitable, once the timer had started and I knew I had no choice, I started to grow to look forward to spending that time for Mistress.

So you can imagine how horrified I was about 3 hours later when I got an offline message from the cell to say that it thought I'd safeworded and that I was being released! Sure enough, when I logged in a little later, I found an open door and no RLV restrictions.

I can't even begin to describe how disappointed I was. While it did mean I could fill my evening with getting on with working on some projects I have on the go it meant that the cell time I'd prepared myself for had just fizzled away. On top of that I feel like I've kind of cheated Mistress out of a payment.

I know she'll understand, and I imagine she'll "collect" on the missing time at some point next week, but it really wasn't fun to find that the cell itself had messed things up for me.

Still, I spent the next couple of hours gagged...

...and the cuffing and locked outfit until I see Miss Vila again means I can't do a couple of things I'd otherwise be doing.

In the punishment log

As I've mentioned before, Mistress and I have a slow ongoing project to improve and update things around Raven Park. One of the big changes at the start of the year was to replace the old Femdom Cafe with the Raven Park Abbey. There's still a few tweaks we want to make to that and we're currently in the middle of the last bit of work to make that happen.

Last night, for an hour before it was my bedtime, we got together to work on this. Before we did though I invited Mistress over to the workshop to see some new builds I'd worked on that evening (set to be released next week). After she'd looked them over and given her approval (that's always important to me -- if Mistress isn't happy with them then I won't release them) she mentioned that my allowance list needed some more work.

The next thing I know we're back at Mistress' studio, working on the Abbey project, and I'm locked in the Z&A Punishment Log.

As far as the "payments" in the list go this isn't the worst. I'm denied fly, touching or editing objects more than 1.5m away and sitting on objects more than 1.5m away for a couple of hours. This doesn't stop me doing most things I need to do but it does make them more awkward.

And apparently Mistress likes the look of the log. Although I get the feeling it's also something to do with the lack of shirt.... ;)

The SciFi Convention

This might come as a surprise to some but I'm partial to a bit of science fiction. As a child I grew up reading Wells, Verne, Clarke, Christopher and the like, and lots of my TV watching was filled with science fiction too. And, really, nothing has changed. I don't really read much any more (blame the Internet for that -- something I really need to fix) but I still have my TV and film addictions. I'm an avid Firefly fan (no kidding, the weekend before last I watched Serenity while working in SL two nights in a row) and I'm currently in the middle of rewatching the reboot of Battlestar Galactica (the original being a big part of my childhood too).

So you can imagine that I've been nagging Mistress about dropping in on the Science Fiction Convention. Today we did, for an hour or so before she had to head for bed. I've got an album full of photos I took and what follows is a few highlights.

While Mistress likes plenty of science fiction too there's no question that it's more of a passion for me, so I think it was fascinating for her to hear me getting childishly excited about finding Vipers.

Lots of Vipers.

Vipers that I just didn't want to get out of (so Mistress ended up taking a seat and patiently waiting...).

To be fair, it wasn't all Vipers. I rather like the Raptor too...

Possibly my most favourite build in the whole convention is the recreation of a Battlestar C&C. The detail in it is incredible.

I was thinking that the call sign "Raven Actual" might be a good one, until I remembered who the commander actually would be...

After wandering for a while we stumbled on a fair, and Mistress just had to ride the sperm whale...

The lack of motion blur in a SL photo means that this really doesn't do the ride justice.

We also found a time tunnel house sort of thing which was.... disorienting.

Finally, after a ride on the train...

...it was time to head home as it was past Mistress' bedtime.

Just before she went it was decided that another item should be knocked off my allowance payment list. Looking at the options Mistress decided that being denied all forms of TP for 2 hours after being dropped on a region of her choice was the way to go. Given that I was going to be releasing products later in the day I got to wondering where I'd be stuck until I could work on that. Mistress disappeared again and then I got TPd after her...

...back to the convention. She'd decided that, after the last few "payments", I should make a point of having some fun, staying away from the shop and the workshop for a couple of hours and indulging one of my other passions.

Yeah, I am lucky. ;)

So, for the next couple of hours, I wandered around the rest of the convention.

I found a really cool model of Babylon 5 (which also dispenses a copy of itself!).

Sadly this was the only evidence of Firefly I could find.

I really expected something significantly Firefly-based on the region called Wheadon at the very least. If there was something I didn't find it.

I did find the Doctor's old car Bessie. I actually have a similar RL photo of myself with the RL version.

Eventually I made it to the exhibit built by my second favourite drow. So that called for a drink...

As luck would have it Miss Eve wasn't far away either so we both sat and had a natter for a bit and had a good helping booze. ;)

Later, after Miss Eve had headed off, I took the air taxi up to the Drow Science airship and had a good look at it...

Finally though my 2 hours were up and I needed to head back home to get on with things.

I'm immensely grateful to Mistress for what she did. There's no question that it was more of a reward than a punishment. I don't know what I did right, but I need to keep doing it. ;)