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.

Back in the yoke

Mistress and I did a little bit of hunt business earlier today and then, afterwards, retired to the Raven Park Abbey for a sit down and a chat about bits and bobs.

As normally happens though, all too soon, it was time to head back to our RLs. Before we did though I needed a top-up for teleports (this hunt organising business really does eat up the teleport allowance, and it's only going to get worse). After getting that...

...Mistress decided that she'd knock one of the other items off my list. And so I'm spending 5 hours in-world without the ability to touch anything more than 1.5m away from me.

Thankfully most of the building that I was doing was either done or could wait, and as it happened I had a few admin things that needed doing so this was a great way of ensuring I didn't mess about with builds but instead got on with them.

And the payment I picked for the TP allowance top-up? "Wear the outfit of your dom(me)'s choice for 6 days." Given that I've also got two Mistress wildcards on the list, and given that Mistress loves the art of "stacking" payments when they align, I'm getting rather nervous now...

Kind of quiet and free (for now) and pondering events

The last few days on the blog have been kind of quiet. There's a couple of good reasons for this. First off, of course, not a lot was happening with the allowance diary given that I was locked up for 5 days. Secondly, over the weekend and into this week, I've been pretty busy with kicking off The Femdom Hunt V and also getting some new Z&A releases out into the shop. It's been a fun few days, especially doing all of this while in the rather restricted environment Mistress left me in (rearranging the shop to make way for the new releases was.... interesting).

Yesterday, however, it was time for Mistress to unlock me again. We met up on the Z&A build platform (where we're still experimenting with textures and the like for a house we bought and should be swapping over to soon) and, after Mistress had changed outfits...

...she reluctantly unlocked me. The switch to normal windlight settings was really jarring to start with. After 5 days of being in near-darkness it was quite a shock.

After I got changed we decided to pop over to My Slink Obsession to see what's what over there, especially given that Mistress is a big fan of her Slink hands and feet (me not so much as I could never get the feet to work for me, although other mesh feet did work out for me and I am a big fan of Slink on Mistress and I especially find it a great source of gifts for her).

We were pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn't so busy as to make getting in difficult (I think there were only a dozen people there at the time), that made a very nice change for a popular shopping venue. The build itself is very pretty (even if the stonework texture is a little unrelenting) and sensibly laid out. And, more importantly, it seemed to load pretty quickly (although I did find that client-side lag kept kicking in, something I mostly fixed by dropping the draw distance quite a way).

Sadly our visit coincided with a grid issue so no actual shopping took place (Mistress even had trouble "buying" a L$0 demo), but we did make notes of a couple or so must-have items so a return visit is a must.

Talking of events: given that I was (relatively) "free" for the evening, between working on a few things, I decided to go and check out TMD. I'm not one to visit events on my own (most shopping events I visit are ones that interest Mistress) so this was a bit of a first. It didn't go so well.

I managed to get in while there were 38 other avatars on the map, I landed fine, took a few steps away from the landing point and waited for the place to load. And waited. And waited. And waited.... After about 1/2 hour many of the displays and products still hadn't loaded so I gave up and went home. Meanwhile I'd spent much of my time blocking and derendering gesturebaters who seemed to think that everyone badly needed to hear their over-loud and oh-so-amusing sound clips.

It really wasn't a pleasant experience.

To be clear: I'm not blaming the venue, not in the least. I'm very clear on the fact that the lag in loading (or more to the point failing to load) the venue was client-side. I'm more than comfortable with the idea that my connection and my video card just weren't up to the job of dealing with almost 40 other avatars and all the products and the displays -- that's a lot of mesh and texture data to deal with. Quite simply my machine just wasn't up to the job.

And this is where I think these shopping events fail. The idea is fantastic but SL and people's machines really don't scale so well. I understand the attraction of having a centralised event -- it's a social thing, it feels like an actual event, like you'd have in RL, it makes things look even more impressive and you also get to see lots of green dots on the screen. The flipside of course is that you see lots of frustrated people elsewhere who can't get in (watch plurk and twitter when a new event opens), many of whom resort to TP-spamming devices in a desperate attempt to get there (I do wonder what sort of load those failed TP attempts put on the hosting server) as well as lots of (often misdirected) complaints about the lag.

It's great that these sorts of events have made in-world shopping a bit more of a thing again but I can't help but think that distributed events make a lot more sense in Second Life. In the time I spent failing to load TMD I could have teleported to, and shopped at, quite a number of stores. In doing so the load on my machine would have been less and, I imagine, the load on the grid would be better distributed too.

But, yeah, a shopping-oriented event that's distributed amongst all the participants so more people can take part at the same time and it's an easier and more pleasant experience for all involved... that'll never catch on. ;)

*wanders off to consider writing a "Distributed Shopping Events" manifesto*

Roller bane again

Today, after kicking off things with The Femdom Hunt V, Mistress and I got together for a little bit. First to look over some things with the new house that we're sorting and then to deal with my allowance list. The past few days, for various reasons, it's been neglected. Well, I say neglected.... I still had to pick items to go on it to get my allowance top-ups, it's just Mistress wasn't always about or in a position to collect.

She did a little today though.

She decided that I should spend the next 5 days as the "roller bane". This means I'm on my neat skates and locked in the isolation helmet all that time. While I am allowed IMs this time around (both outbound and inbound) given that I'm dealing with the hunt I am still locked in a very dark world, minus things like hover text, maps, names, etc...

Mistress then also locked a set of mittens on me and denied all touch for 5 hours of in-world time. All touch! Not just fartouch, as is normal. This time I can't touch or edit anything at all.

She then decided that I should also be dropped on a region of her choice and denied TP for a couple of hours. So Mistress headed off and pulled me over after her, dropping me in a very snowy looking area of the mainland.

During that time I had a little bit of an explore while also sending out lots of invites for the hunt. Here's a handful of photos from my wander:

Before this little adventure started I had to get another top-up off Mistress and that earned me another "Domme wildcard". So now there's two payments on my allowance list that are Mistress making up anything she wants. Now, of course, she can do that any time she wants to anyway, but there's something just a little extra scary knowing they're on there and I have no idea what she'll invent for me.

Meanwhile though, for now, I simply get to enjoy our region, but only outdoors. I can't get into the house or up to the workshop because of the lack of touch -- not without using up precious TP allowance anyway. The build I was working on will have to wait just a little longer.

At least the lack of touch and edit meant that I had to concentrate on hunt business. I should thank Mistress for the distraction-free evening, I guess. ;)