Locked in the iso helmet

As I've mentioned before, for Mistress and myself, alternate weekends work different for us. Normally, for various RL reasons, one weekend out of two we get to spend a fair bit of time together, the other weekend we generally don't see each other. Because this weekend is a "not see each other" weekend Mistress decided that the special payment that was planned for this evening, which I mentioned yesterday, was to be postponed. She'd decided that it was be a terrible waste to do it when we're not seeing each other.

She wanted to benefit from it as much as possible.

So, instead, while we sat out on the back landing of the new house, she decided to use up a different payment instead...

Thankfully the timer only needed to be set for 3 hours so I'll get to build as much as I like when I do get in-world this weekend.

Mistress was also very explicit about how I should wear a latex catsuit with the helmet. Something about wanting to remind me what it's like to wear something other than a dress (I can't imagine why).

So this is me for a short while yet, enjoying a very spooky workshop...

...and under strict instructions to stay out of her wardrobe this weekend. ;-D

A trip out (and more payments)

Today was the end of the 3 days locked in the frock. It's been a fascinating 3 days in which I've actually got rather used to seeing myself dressed like this and, I think, have really started to understand and appreciate what Mistress finds attractive about it. I know I've gone from very hesitant to feeling very matter of fact about it. Originally I was very "yikes, I'm wearing a dress, what might people think?!?" and have ended up more "yeah, I'm wearing a dress, why's the big deal?"

So, just a little bit, I was almost disappointed that the 3 days was already up. I know Mistress was as she said so. Before Mistress unlocked the dress though she decided that we needed a trip out for an hour, to just go and wander somewhere pretty, sit and chat, have a dance. Relax.

So we headed over to Lost Eden.

As well as just sitting around and nattering (yes, mostly about how we'd both felt about the little turn of events this week) we also had a bit of an explore too, especially liking the underwater observatory.

After which we found a nice spot for a bit of a dance.

After that we found another spot to have a sit and we spent a little bit of time updating my allowance punishment list. It's a few months now since Mistress rewrote it to better suit her wishes and in the mean time we've found that there's a couple of things that didn't quite fit well and a couple that just didn't work well for us at all. Meanwhile I've bought or made new things that deserved being added to the list. And, yes, it was decided that the dresses that we bought earlier in the week should get a special mention.

After doing that we had one last dance...

...until Mistress crashed and I was left hanging around waiting for her to get back in.

When she got back in we headed home and she updated the book on her desk, and her misfortune cookies, with the new list. At which point I needed to ask for a top-up of my walk and TP allowance. That's when things went a little wrong.

Well, wrong for me. Mistress loved it.

The last week or so I've managed to make some real headway on the backlog of allowance payments. While it was unlikely I'd get it so it was empty, it wasn't a huge list either. That changed when I touched the book and got a "subbie wildcard". That's a payment where I get to pick what it is but I have to pick 3 more! And then on top of that I had to touch it one more time to pay for the walk allowance.

So I ended up adding 5 more items to the list.

One of them was to be blindfolded for an hour (in this case a blindfold that I've scripted to greatly reduce what I can see while removing things like hover text and avatar names) so Mistress unlocked my dress and locked on the blindfold.

At which point I decided that I couldn't see well enough to take the dress off just yet. ;)

So, this is me for now, still "stuck" in the dress while I'm wandering the region blindfolded.

This does mean that I'll be "free" of anything for the evening (once the blindfold unlocks on its timer). That'll feel kind of odd after this week so far.

But I likely don't need to worry too much. Mistress has a wildcard or two left and she's already promised that one of them is going to be.... very interesting (yes, I know what it is, but I don't want to spoil it -- especially if it doesn't quite work out). She's said that it'll happen tomorrow evening so I imagine I'll be facing a very interesting weekend.

Locked in a frock

I'll start off by being clear that everything I talk about in here is about my own personal taste. I'm pretty open-minded about all forms of consensual D/s and self-expression, etc, but I'm also very aware of where my own comfort zone is for what I want to do and experience. This is written from the point of view of my own comfort zone.

It started with yesterday's demo-trying session after our earlier visit to Collarbor88. As with almost every other visit to an event or fair Mistress had grabbed lots of demos and they all got a try on. Some are great but not her. Some are not-so-great on her. Some are "OMG I have to run back and get this right away!". It's a thing I really enjoy, watching Mistress try things on and giving my input and, generally, really enjoying watching her enjoy things she likes.

Yesterday, however, as we were talking (we're always talking on Skype when this happens), there was a very different excited response with one of the dresses she grabbed. She'd noticed in the demo pack that there was one called "male deformer". It was a dress, with all the usual standard sizes, and a fitted mesh version, and a fitted mesh version shaped for a male avatar!

While cross-dressing is obviously a thing in the Femdom world it's something that holds very little interest for me. I come at Femdom from a place where service and bondage is more my thing. However, I'm also always intrigued and excited by the idea of being dragged out of my comfort zone by something that makes Mistress happy and that she likes. So, given how excited she was by what she'd found, my interest was piqued.

Fast forward to today and...

...I now own three fitted mesh dresses that are designed to fit a male avatar. Moreover, because they are modify, I've also RLV-enabled them using the Z&A restraint code. This means that once I've worn one Mistress can lock it on (and optionally set a timer) and, in doing so, it also locks the alpha layer too. I'm also going to extend this so that she can optionally use the dress to lock other clothing layers so that any other items that go with the dress, like stockings...

...can also be locked.

The past 24 hours has been a really interesting time. This is, really, the first time since I was first introduced to pony play (by Mistress) that I've found myself both very excited and very hesitant about something I've done in-world. The idea of dressing up in women's clothing has never held any appeal to me whatsoever and, for the most part, Mistress hasn't really had too much interest because women's clothing in SL is almost never made to suit a male shape (even good old fabric layer clothing tends to be shaded wrong).

These mesh dresses that we've discovered (I now own 3) have made all the difference. Mistress really loves how they look on and I think she had a lot of fun marching me back to the shop to get an extra or two.

And the shop? Schadenfreude. The dress I'm wearing right now (and for the next 3 days -- Mistress decided to make this one of her "wildcard" allowance payments) is the Eala Black. Another I was told to buy was the Casati dress. And the third one I have is.... well, you need to pop over to C88 for that.

So, like I say, this is me for the next 3 days...

The more I look at myself, the more I can appreciate it. What matters is that Mistress really likes it and I think that's mostly what I'm seeing.

And it's different.

And it's a manageable push outside my comfort zone.

And I think it'll become a regular thing if Mistress' reaction so far is anything to go by...

Firestorm 4.6.7 Update

Following on from my previous post about Firestorm 4.6.7 things with the odd lighting issue that I wrote about have moved on. Thanks to the JIRA I filed I had it confirmed by one of the Firestorm support people that it was, indeed, a real issue and that I wasn't alone in seeing it. Since then it's been filed on the Lab's JIRA and, from what I've been told, has been internally acknowledged as an issue.

At this point I would have been tempted to give up and roll back to 4.6.5 -- especially given that I've stumbled on an issue with textures and I think I might have found an irritation relating to RLV (although I still need to test that out and write it up). But one thing has stopped me.

On Saturday Mistress and I dropped in on Collarbor88. Normally this can be a difficult time. It's not unusual for us to go there and for me to not have loaded all of the vendor boards or displays after 1/2 hour (an issue that isn't just a C88 thing). This time, however.... the difference was really stark. Within 5 minutes I had pretty much the whole of the event loaded!

That alone, for now at least, is enough to keep me on 4.6.7. Of course, avatars took a little longer to load, and there was the usual hilarious assortment of not-yet-rigged clothing and body parts...

...but I see that as a good thing. It provides entertainment while everything else loads up. I kind of hope that issue never gets fixed. ;)

(although I do have to wonder why some people who make body parts and clothing do have to make them so damn large)

C88 itself was a real success with Mistress brining back an awful lot of demos. A good few of those demos, earlier today, turned into actual purchases. And one of those demos turned into a.... interesting turn of events for me. I won't say more now because I'll doubtless be blogging the full impact of this in the next day or so. ;)

Visit, dance, demolish, hogtie

In-world, some days are slow and easy, others can be a little hectic. Not exactly hectic in a bad way, just.... lots of things fitted in in brief period of time. Today's in-world time with Mistress was kind of like that.

To start with we had a visit to an applicant to the hunt penned in so we did that first. While out and about we ran into a lovely avatar who got talking with Mistress and showing off a new release that we'd seen mentioned in the RLV Communities group. The product looks interesting enough in the vendor image, but seeing it working in-world was even more fascinating.

Sadly it seems like it's really designed for female-sized/shaped avatars...

...although Mistress did observe that, being very tight rubber, I could possibly pass it off as being really well squeezed in. There was also some talk about how I'll be needing something new for this year's Femdom Hunt (anyone reading my blog last year might recall how I spent the time it took us to complete the hunt). As it happens, I had started work on something I thought she'd like, just a couple of days earlier, but I fear she's far too smitten with the butterfly now. O_o

Anyway.... that done, we headed home and on to the next job. There's plans afoot that required that we demolish the walled garden on the Z&A plot. This is a pretty significant bit of Raven Park/Z&A/Mistress and I history and, at this point, was one of the oldest structures left on the region (possibly the oldest). It was originally the bottom end of the garden of Miss Vila's and my house when I last wore her collar (and remained part of the gardens when it became just my home).

It was also the location of a very significant every for the two of us.

So it's no surprise that demolishing the walled garden was kind of a big deal for us. While we had no hesitation in doing it, we felt it needed a moment's pause and a last dance...

...before braking out the hard hats and hammer and demolishing the whole thing:

It didn't take too long to finish the job and once the area was clear and the land flattened Mistress had a quick look at my allowance payment list and decided to knock off the payment I'd acquired yesterday, it being that I spend 2 days hogtied, having to shuffle around slowly on my belly.

A very quick snap of my cuffs later...

...and that was me set until Friday. Just in time for our usual dance costume shopping session.

Firestorm 4.6.7

For me, SL viewers are like text editors: I hardly ever switch and once I've made a choice I'm comfortable with it takes a lot to entice me away (which reminds me, I really must write about how I fell in love with Sumblime Text and how I almost never use the in-world editor any more). On top of that, I almost never early adopt. When a new version comes out I tend to hold back and see how things go in general and then I update my backup machine first.

Only when I'm happy with everything and there's no annoying or showstopper bugs do I finally make the move.

And yet, for reasons I still can't figure out, I dived right in and installed Firestorm 4.6.7 within 24 hours of it being announced. On my main machine!

So far though it's mostly okay. I'd say rezzing is a bit faster and things do appear to show up in-world in a more logical order, but I have run into a couple of annoyances.

The first and most obvious one is that it appears to be causing lighting to misbehave. In our home, shop and workshop we use automatic lighting. You know the sort of thing, it detects if the SL Sun is up or not (as dictated by the region's daylight cycle) and turns the lights on and off.

Nothing clever, but it works and has been working for a good couple of years in different incarnations. But, suddenly, with the move to 4.6.7, the lights appear to be misbehaving (emphasis on "appear"). Both Mistress and I have noticed that the lights are sometimes on when they should be off, or off when they should be on. At first I thought something had gone wrong with the scripts or someone had somehow gained access to the menus (they're coded so only we can interact with them) but a quick bit of testing suggested otherwise.

The lights are coded so that the menu offers three options: On (as in always on), Off (as in always off) or Auto (on when night, off when day). They're normally always in Auto mode. If the light looks wrong and I use the menu to set them to Auto again they show in the right state.

Except.... sometimes they show in the right state, I'll look away, look back and they're wrong again.

As best as I can tell, at the moment, what appears to be happening is that some (all?) of the object's prim properties appear to bounce back to whatever state they were in when I first "saw" the object in that login session. The only properties I've noticed this with so far are PRIM_GLOW, PRIM_FULLBRIGHT and PRIM_POINT_LIGHT.

Further evidence that this appears to be viewer-related is the fact that if I'm looking at lights that are wrong I can relog and they appear right. Or if I'm looking at them and they're wrong I can log one of my test avatars in on a different machine and come look at the same light and it'll appear right to them (while still appearing wrong to me).

I've tried, and so far failed, to create a setup that recreates the problem in a controlled way. I've also asked in the support group but nobody else has knowingly experienced the same issue. Given the nature of this release (which is, in part, about caching object details and the like) it was suggested that it'd be a good idea to JIRA it.

So I did.

Another niggle I've noticed is that, on my mini-map, avatars seem to turn up at 0,0 (or, in some cases, waaaaaay of the region) a lot. And they appear to stay there until I can actually see them in world.

In the above image I'm way up in the sky in my workshop and Zanda and Black (the two shop bots) appear to be at 0,0,0 on the region. If I pop down to the shop they both snap into place. While this issue isn't exactly new in that I've had this happen before if my connection has been rather dodgy this is happening all the time now and only started post-upgrade.

I've not bothered to ask about this or document it just yet as I don't see it as being such a big deal, although I probably should some point soon. Again, it has the feel of being related to the "Project Interesting" changes that have taken place.

Those niggles aside though 4.6.7 seems to perform fine. No better than 4.6.5 but no worse either.

Listing unique textures in a build

Mesh Studio is a fairly big part of how I make things these days and one of its features is the simple way that you specify mesh faces with it. Simply put, for anyone who hasn't used it before, you create a mesh face by having one or more prim faces be the same texture and tint. If two prim faces have the same texture UUID and the same colour then in the final mesh they'll be part of the same face. Nice and easy.

Only... recently I've been having some oddness happening. MS tells you, via hover text, how many mesh faces the build will result in. On occasion I've been finding that it's reporting too high. This caused me to pull out and polish up a script I first wrote about a year ago when I ran into a possibly related problem where I found that a prim that had been dimpled, and then the dimple was closed again, would confuse MS because the non-existent dimple would be reported at the LSL-level as a visible face (not MS' fault, of course, and the issue might have been fixed by now -- I should test again).

The recent situation I've run into is with very prim-heavy builds (well over 100 prims in the source linkset) where faces that don't really exist appear to have the plywood texture on them. Setting the whole prim 100% transparent (the way you tell MS to not generate a surface) and then unhiding the faces I want fixes it every time (which has me suspecting that it's possibly related to cuts and dimples). Finding the offending prim(s) is something not easily done by hand, hence the updating of the original script.

In case it's useful to anyone else, here it is. Drop it in the root of your object and touch it and it'll report every unique texture and tint combination it finds:

It's coded to ignore transparent faces, and to ease knowing what texture is what the texture is reported as a URL that shows you the texture (eg, plywood texture URL). For what I'd hope are obvious reasons all output is done with llOwnerSay.

MD's Pod Prison

After a weekend of relative "freedom", today, Mistress decided to collect on one of my Pod Prison sessions on my allowance payment list. In the past she's generally locked me in the Pod Prison on Raven Park but, this time, she decided I needed a trip out...

...to Mesmerize Dungeon (the maker of the Pod Prison).

It feels rather odd not being in the prison at home, and even odder seeing the hidden names come and go and having no clue whatsoever who it might be (when I'm locked up on Raven Park I can at least glance at the shop bot's console and have some idea who it might be that just landed).

So that's me for 3 hours...

And I've still got a 5 hour session left on the list. That'll be a rather long one for me.

Quadcopter and blindfold

Earlier today Mistress and I just hung out in-world without doing anything of significance to the new house, which was kind of nice in a way. We simply sat around on the side patio and chatted.

Until, that was, Mistress decided that she was going to collect on the new allowance payments I'd picked up a couple of days back. In no time she'd dived into my #RLV folder via my SubHUD and attached the Z&A Quadcopter (having decided that what I was (not) wearing was an outfit of her choice) and then locked it and set a timer.

Pretty quickly she then did the same with the blindfold I'd purchased/scripted a few days ago.

That left me in a very dark world without the ability to see avatar names or access my radar, amongst other things.

Once Mistress had left for bed I decided to fly over to the shop and then take the TP pad up to the workshop (I was, in effect, banned from the house while locked like this). That took a few attempts. It might come as a surprise given how big it is but I missed the shop on the first couple of tries.

Perhaps I need a bigger shop. ;)

Settling in

Work on the house is still ongoing. The best part at the moment is that I'll "wake up" in-world in a morning and find that stuff has changed. Mistress does love to tinker and the new house is a real must-tinker. So today I woke up and found most of the walls were a different colour and that quite a lot of furniture had moved around.

It's a great adventure, never knowing what I'll find. It's a surprise to find my bed was in the same place. ;)

Of course, by the time I next met up with Mistress, she was exhausted from all the decorating, so the least I could do was serve tea...

The abandoned slice of toast looked very tempting but I behaved and didn't steal it...

Before we logged out I needed to get a top-up for my TP and walk allowances. Those top-ups cost me the following payments:

• Wear a vehicle (and outfit) of your Domme’s choice for 3 hours.
• Be blindfolded for 1 hour.

Not the most terrible of payments, it has to be said. I feel I got off rather lightly this time.

New house progress

I thought I'd keep a small record of how the new house is progressing. Work is still ongoing with textures and colours inside, not to mention trying to decide furniture and artworks. Outside things are more or less done (although I think Mistress still needs to apply normal and specular maps for the new texture selections -- she needed to the last time we spoke about it and I'm not on a machine that really does them well right now).

Here's how it's looking outside at the moment:

It's really starting to feel like home now. Also, it's been out 3 days and I've managed to stay out of the cell!

(Mostly lack of) Outfit for the next week

Following on from yesterday's house swap Mistress and I spent a good couple or so hours shopping for bits and doing a fair bit of landscaping.

The original intention was go get to work on the textures for the outside of the house so, of course, we went shopping for trees and a new front gate. Yeah, I'm not sure how that actually ended up happening either. ;)

However, once that was done, we did make a start on the outdoor textures and the base of the house is now textured with a nice very dark brick. The walls should follow in the next day or so. We also tried a couple of options for wall colours in the house and I think we might have settled on the colour for Mistress' bedroom (so, of course, I fully expect to log in tomorrow and find it's totally different).

Before logging out so Mistress could head for bed she decided to knock off a couple more items from my allowance payment list. This time she decided to go with me being locked in an outfit of her choice for six days, and to lock on the punishment log for six hours.

When I say "outfit"....

Thing is, this is for six days. Which takes me to Saturday. Mistress and I tend not to see each other alternate weekends (the weekends when Raven Park dances aren't on). It's highly unlikely she'll unlock me from this a day early so that means.... I'll probably spend 7 or even 8 days like this.

So this is me for now. The log makes things tricky this evening in that I can't carry on working on a build I'd started earlier. Not that that's a huge issue in that there's no rush to get it finished. It just means I have to concentrate on things that I can do within 1.5m of myself, or in my inventory.

Which is no bad thing.

New house

About 10 months ago Mistress and I swapped our house for a cosy little cottage. We both really love the house but it has two issues that, over time, got to be a little annoying. The first was that the application of materials we just too heavy-handed. This is sort of understandable in that when we got this it was still early days for materials and I guess people were still trying to find the best way to do it (not that it really affects me -- my desktop machine crawls to a near-halt if I turn on advanced lighting, even with shadows off). The other problem is that the doorways are just too narrow and there's just enough physics glitches in the doors (and other parts of the house) to make navigating it feel a bit clumsy at times.

So, a month or so back, we started the process of looking for a new house. Two weeks ago we finally found one we really liked and bought it. Since then a copy of it has been rezzed up on the Z&A build platform, just outside the Z&A workshop, and we've been playing with textures and the like (while the building itself is really nicely textured it's not really very "us" so we'll be applying our own in a few places).

This also gave me a chance to make my own custom-fitted cell for it too (like I did for the last house).

Today we set aside some time to nuke the old house and start the process of putting the new one in place. First off we took a photo of the old house...

...and then we deleted it...

...and then rezzed out the new one...

What followed was a fun couple of hours of moving things roughly into the right room while, at the same time, deciding what should stay and what should go. We now mostly have all the right things in all the right rooms -- only Mistress' office remains a "dumping ground", that'll likely get sorted tomorrow some time.

The next few days (and likely weeks) will involve applying our chosen textures to both the outside and inside. And there's a good chance we'll be swapping some furniture so that it's a better fit. Meanwhile though what's really nice is that we have doors we can navigate through without too much fuss or bother. Having a bit more space is nice too.

Once all the initial moving was done we made sure my new cell was in place and that the new home setting in my SubHUD was sorted. The cell itself is rather simple, comprising of nothing more than one wall and a floor that is embedded inside the house's floor.

The texturing was done so that it closely matches the texture work in the room that it was built for:

With that in place and most of the rearranging done I made sure Mistress had a nice cup of tea before bed.

After I'd tucked her up in bed I did some landscaping and tidied up a couple of things in the house. Other than that though I'll be leaving it alone as it's Mistress who's the one with the eye for textures and colours.

I can't wait to see the final result.

A new blindfold

It should come as no surprise that, quite often, I'll hit the Marketplace, enter "RLV", hit search and then order by newest first. While I derive a lot of pleasure from making RLV products in Second Life I also get a lot of pleasure from using them (well, having them used on me....). So no surprises that I like to keep an eye out for anything that looks fun, or neat, or just plain nice, or any combination of those things.

Last week I noticed this blindfold from PixelFashion. Given the mixture of leather and lace I knew it was the sort of thing that Mistress would really like and, sure enough, when I showed it to her she strongly suggested that it was something I should own.

And now I do:

I'd noticed from the listings that there was a non-RLV version, which appeared to be no-modify, and an RLV version which was modify. The RLV version, according to the listing, was scripted with OpenCollar scripts. While I'm sure that'd be useful for some it didn't seem very "blindfoldy" to me and, besides, I already wear one set of OC scripts in my own collar which Mistress made for me. But that wasn't an issue. What we had here was a very affordable and very attractive mesh blindfold that had lots of colour/texture options and which was modify too.

Perfect for dropping my own code in. Even easier given that I've just recently made two other personal blindfolds using purchases I'd made elsewhere so I had all the code ready to drop in.

The blindfold itself seems very well made and really does look good. The colour/texture change HUD is straightforward and the resize system that's part of the HUD was very simple to use. The other nice thing about it is that, out of the box, it was a pretty good fit for me -- very unusual even for items aimed at male avatars. In fact, I had to size it down just a touch.

The really interesting part was that, a short while after I'd bought it, the creator IMd me to ask what I thought of it. I told them that I thought it was a very attractive build and that I'd removed all the scripts and replaced them with my own because I had a particular use for it. I was rather relieved when their reaction was to be delighted by that idea.

This... right here, this is SL at its best. A content creator who allows the object itself to be modified and who actively welcomes people making changes to suit their own needs.

That made me very happy.

And Mistress is happy too because I've got a blindfold in my #RLV folder that is very her.