Come Over To The Dark Side...

You may have seen a mermaid dress inspired by Shiniez - a really amazing fetish and bdsm-themed artist - around Second Life.

You didn’t see the dress on this blog because the designers have trouble with the concept of evaluation copies.

Well Shiniez is still at it, creating awesome fetish and bdsm inspired art.

So when this latest creation came to my mailbox, I passed it on some, and thought, hey, you know who would like this? Everyone! ;) No, I mean you, esteemed readers.

So here’s the pic, the link to the pic, and the "making of" video. The author’s underpants are next ;)

Have a great weekend!

Deirdre and lelo

Server Side Baking Is Here, Yay!

If you’ve been following the important news, (no, not the Jeopardy kid and his typo!) you know that today is the big day.

Linden Labs has introduced Server Side Appearance - “baking” was too technical ;) - to the main grid.

Lelo and I visited a few busy hangouts to see if there were more grey people than usual.

Our very non-scientific first impression is that avatars rez a hair faster, and that’s all.

I’d say this is a total win for LL. A big change that doesn’t break things for most people using the recommended software is huge.

Good job, guys. Now get three-people private chat working, eh? ;)


So today, then, is the official last day of Phoenix. If you're still using it, everyone will be grey, and you will be grey to everyone.

This should not be a surprise to most, but as they say on the Firestorm blog, some 70,000 non-compatible users are still out there. Ok, change is bad, but dang!

Read the details here: http://www.firestormviewer.org/server-side-appearance-goes-grid-wide/

Twisted Orchid Renovates, Still Hanging In There

When we stopped by Jenniferever’s store yesterday, she mentioned that Twisted Orchid was under renovation, so we had a peek.

The place looks good, and we saw signs for tons of fun events, involving rubber, petplay, and assorted kinky goodness we all love.

Tonight seems to be evil kinky nurses night, and our old friend Vannesh Cannoli is DJ’ing. Long time readers will remember her awesome "IM’ing the Mistress" videos. 

So drop by Twisted Orchid and have fun!

Deirdre and lelo

The SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Pattaya%20Island/68/136/690

Deirdre and Lelo : Six Years Together

Six years ago today, lelo accepted my collar and became my slave.

Every day for the past six years, barring real life emergencies, we’ve been getting together in Second Life, early evening for me, fairly late and inconvenient time for her.

We’ve made friends, seen fun things, and as we told a friendly newb some years ago, we’re still not bored :)

The blog’s been a fun project that kept us busy and happy; my suggestion to anyone who wants to stay in Second Life a long time is to have some sort of project with someone - beaches and dance parties become boring, and being alone is no fun.

Deirdre and lelo

New Introduction Board at Rubber Room

First, the Rubber Room club is still around.
("Good news, everyone!") ;)

Durability in a fetish spot in Second Life - in any spot in SL, really - is a pretty admirable thing, so I thought I’d start by mentioning that.

RR has a nice little mall, and as we were doing our Sunday shopping, I peeked in the club and saw that Rubber Robonaught had put up an introduction board.

The price to put up an ad is nominal: 10L$ a week, utter peanuts.

To place an ad, you write a little bio notecard, drop in a full-perm picture, and Robert est ton oncle, as they say in France.

Those ads are only seen by local visitors, of course; but hangouts have a way of attracting like-minded people, so maybe it’s for the best.

So if you’re looking to meet someone who is likely to visit Rubber Room.. I’d say don’t wait :)

The Rubber Rooms SLURL:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Pine%20Woods/25/195/601

PS: Deirdre here - the board is gone but see this post for another one! 

Karu Karu Maxine and Firestorm 4.4.1

Deirdre:

I caught Chane Karu online this week and we had a fun yak - to me that’s the top perk of the blog, staying in touch with the makers and the shakers in SL.

We discussed Lolas! Tango implants, and how they seem to have won the race; I confirmed that we see do many designers creating appliers for them.

Chane got into them too, and this weekend’s 99L$ discount has the Tango appliers included.

Don’t wait!

---

The Firestorm installation was fairly painless, as I said recently. That’s a good thing, because the team just released version 4.4.1.

Sigh ;)

The good news is that it fixes a bunch of stuff.

Don’t forget to do a clean install, and do use the Backup feature to save your settings if you love them ;)

Your logs are not included in the settings backup - you'll want to backup those manually.

Be kind to the volunteers in the support group, they’re about to be swamped by tens of thousands of new users (as Phoenix becomes unusable soon) and upgraders (as old Firestorm versions suffer the same fate).

Read the full news here: http://www.firestormviewer.org/firestorm-4-4-1-34164-release/

and have a great weekend!

Deirdre and lelo

We Finally Moved To Firestorm

Deirdre:

After careful backups and not a little worry, I removed Phoenix from my pc and installed Firestorm today. Clean install, as recommended, with no trace of the previous software remaining.

To cut straight to the chase, the news is all good.

Everything’s working, and unexpectedly, Firestorm needs a lot less juice to run than Phoenix ever did.

I didn’t even use the Phoenix compatibility mode, just dove right in. The Starlight Silver Blue skin is a joy to see, and being able to set inactive windows at 100% opacity is a big thing for me. You’ll find that one in Colors, Floating Window Opacity, Inactive.

(Seriously, who sat there and thought “Let’s make the inactive window just transparent enough to be inconvenient to read but not transparent enough to see what’s behind” ?)

The “Add alpha” thing is probably going to be worth the price of admission, I’m looking forward to using that.

In the “bad things I was worrying about that didn’t materialize” series, repopulating my inv took a *lot* less time than it did in Phoenix.

One setting you’ll want to turn on if you’re like me is “Show toasts in front of other windows”, in Preferences, User Interface, Toasts.

“Toast” is apparently the name for a pop-up window; in the case that bothered me, one that has a yes-no-ignore set of buttons. It went behind my Inventory window, which is not the behavior I want from a popup ;) Lelo figured it out quickly, so all is well.

What else? I had to change Chat, General, Pressing letter keys: to “Affects movement” rather than “Starts local chat”, the default, which is not properly speaking an insane setting, but just not the one I’m used to.

I think I’m fairly representative of the hold-out fringe that was still running a V1 style viewer, so the smooth transition to Firestorm should be good news to the others.

The Firestorm blog reports some 60,000 of us still using Phoenix recently; a non-trivial figure which I had unconsciously assumed to be much, much lower.

lelo:
The end must be near, has anyone seen 4 old guys on horseback going by? Did it rain frogs? Locusts anyone?

It finally happened: Mistress waved goodbye to Phoenix and stepped over to Firestorm.

I was running Firestorm already on my notebook, couldn’t find a Phoenix installer after my last reinstall, i’m not a thrill seeker or beta tester when it comes to software.

And have done the move to Firestorm a week ago, and after i reported to Mistress that the water is fine, she jumped in with me. *winks*

Turns out Mistress is a lot more observant than me when it comes to software.

Where i mumble a bit about the stand button that has been moved to the movement controls, Mistress is noticing a more fisheye look to the world or a lower processor load.

Shows you who is the software connoisseur of the two of us. *smiles*

So all is well, even if we’ll be busy finding lost buttons and hidden pop ups for a few weeks to come, the simple fact that we can add alpha’s and that mesh is fully supported is well worth the move.

Next, server side baking, hopefully group chat and an end to lag (or is that too much to ask). *winks*

SL10B and the future

This year’s theme at SL10B is “Looking forward, looking back.” (It says so right here : http://slcommunitycelebration.com/theme/ )

One’s distinctly easier than the other, despite Lewis Carrol’s statement in Alice “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,”

Where SL came from is fascinating enough; historians can give us good details of names and numbers, and perhaps even explain current things in the light of past facts.

But where we’re going... ahh, that one is tricky. Will Second Life go on and grow? Will it close like City of Heroes? 

Will Second Life change? It seems to me the older I get, the more change is bad, change is difficult, and change hurts.

Oh, I’m lucky enough to be exposed to enough of it that I only scream a bit, then carry on. But I’m certainly sympathetic to the point of view that all change is not automatically progress.

Mesh, server-side baking, materials processing - those are technical advancements, and it’s hard not to call them progress. But I know more than one designer who is staunchly waiting for the advent of parametric deform before releasing mesh.

It’s entirely possible that they’re missing a very huge boat and risk being left behind; everyone’s releasing mesh items, which fit more or less well.. while people like Kat and Dari are pushing the limits and dragging everyone along.

I picked two exhibits at SL10B that seemed to me to mean that the artist projected SL in reality. They struck a chord with me - as I think good art will - and made me reflect.

I remembered the first time I went out in a crowd and wished for a way to throw my point of view up like the camera in SL - which requires a helicopter and a Louma crane in RL films, let alone normal vision.

SL will change, and SL is changing us. Mostly for the good, with any luck.

Have a great weekend!

Deirdre and lelo

PS : See Inara Pey’s SL10B picks of the day for “don’t miss” exhibits! http://modemworld.wordpress.com/tag/sl10bcc/

SL10B: No Adult Content Please, We're Virtual

Deirdre:

Call me nosy, snoopy, curious, whatever; I wanted to know where the decision to have no adult content at SLB came from.

It’s not like I don’t understand it. There are people in Second Life who are not adults, and restricting the celebration by age would be worse.

Saffia Widdershins and Doctor Gascoigne (both volunteers, Doc from way back) answered my questions patiently: the sims are G, and there it ends.

Doc made it clear that everyone is welcome at SL10B, as they aim to be inclusive. In fact, lelo and I, fetish fashion and BDSM bloggers, are in the press group.

Clearly, we’re expected to act in G-friendly manner when we visit; no hardship, “freaking the mundanes” was never my thing.

There were indications that other, adult celebrations would be pointed to; I’m trying to nail that down but without success so far.

I’ll keep you posted ;)

Glitterati Closes - SLFF Post 1200

Regular readers will have noticed that we use a lot of different poses for our daily pictures. For years we’ve been buying them by the hundreds at Glitterati.

Sadly, the popular pose shop is closing. Katey cites personal reasons in her note, and while it’s likely she’ll keep making things in the future, they’ll be sold exclusively on Marketplace.

If you enjoy the poses - and our blog is pretty much a Glitterati Model Poses catalog - the good news is that they’re on sale until the end of the month.

We just swung by and picked up every model pose pack we didn’t have, so look forward to seeing them in the blog soon.

Goodbye Katey, and best of luck in your new life.

The SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kateyland/89/129/29

Another milestone for our little endeavour, our 1200th post tonight, and we are still not bored of it. With it being a daily the numbers creep up steadily and the feedback we get from our readers keep us going. No big party this time around, we’ll just snuggle a bit longer after posting this one. Ohh, and when you see us in world, do say hi, we love hearing from our readers.

SLB10 A(dult!) - Adult Hub Will Celebrate Too

While SL10B will not have adult content, they will definitely point to adult celebration sites; I think that’s cool, and a decent way to handle things - we’ve been posting in a PG manner about adult content since the start of this blog, so I definitely understand the position of the SL10B organizers.

We heard today from Serjourn Daxter, the prime mover at the Freedom Continent: she’s setting a sim aside for adult content exhibitors, so if you would like to be an exhibitionist, give her or Lexi Lock a call to reserve a parcel.

Inara published the full details, so I’ll point you to her post: http://modemworld.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/your-gateway-to-an-adult-celebration-of-sls-10th-birthday/

This year, we won’t only report news, we’ll also be making them: lelo and I pounced and reserved a parcel.

I still intend to visit SL10B and report on it, so for your convenience, we’ll have two labels: SL10B for posts referring to the community celebration, and SLB10A for the adult ones.

Come see us at SLB10A, and show your support for adult content in Second Life. As I said before, fetish is a valid part of the world :)

Towel Day 2013 is Tomorrow!

We observe all the important holidays here at SLFF, and Towel Day is coming up, so we wanted to remind you.

Yeah, we’re that kind of hoopy froods ;)

Togetherness was pretty important to Douglas Adams.

I lost the original bio note, but here’s how the origin of the phrase goes:

Douglas was at a resort and kept mislaying his towel.

He remarked to one of his friends that he was "a really together guy", because he always knew where his towel was.

Later Douglas thought that this was funny and important enough to slip into The HitchHiker’s Guide, and the immortal towel quote was born.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towel_day

Have a great weekend and a great Towel Day!

Deirdre and lelo

Firestorm Team Makes Cool Tutorial Videos

First, if you’re smart, you’ll go straight to Inara’s post from which I’m cribbing, here : http://modemworld.wordpress.com/2013/04/19/firestorm-video-tutorials/

Still with me? You silly dear :)

The awesome people developing Firestorm put together some tutorial videos for us old fogeys still living in the dark ages of the metaverse - and how ironic is it to cling to the past in a futuristic environment? - who will be cast screaming into a new viewer when server-side avatar baking irrevocably breaks Phoenix.

Well not just for us, but, you know. The first video, in fact, is about the Phoenix mode in Firestorm. Now these are good, hard-working people trying to soften the blow. But I hated the look of Firestorm on sight, as I did the official v2 and its brothers.

One of the things I hate in particular is space wasted by the interface. See my snap for a gentle hint ;)

Seriously, the Mozilla interface team should be their inspiration here. If there’s a way to save two square centimeters the controls waste on the screen, they have an option to do just that.

Note that word, option. Every shiny new feature in Firefox is optional. Dead set on your menu bar, your single tab always visible? They say go in peace, dear friend. When you decide you want a discreet orange button at the top left, it will be there, waiting patiently.

So. Some time soon-ish, we’ll have to make the jump. We’ll bitch, moan, complain bitterly, ask friends where features are, eventually get used to where things are, forget what all the fuss was about.. and then a new circumstance will require a new change. AAAAAHHHhhhhh! ;)

The Phoenix team Youtube channel is here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/PhoenixViewerSL

Have a great weekend.

Deirdre and lelo

PS : Writing this addendum Saturday April 20th,  Elke Wylie, of the German Firestorm support team, (and of Needful Pixel - we featured them in the blog!) pointed out that the space-wasting vertical chat tabs I screamed about can be set to a sensible horizontal position - see how to do it right here.

Thanks Elke!

Latex Lady in Both Lives

Our dear friend and regular reader, LatexLady, has been posting some very neat adventures on her blog. 

Her readers must have been thrilled, as it had been a while since she had been heard from.

We mentioned her blog before, but just in case, here’s the link again:

http://latexlifestyle.blogspot.com/

She’s a regular at Darkadia - a castellana there if I’m not mistaken.

Anyone serious about long-term latex wear and full encasement should read her blog.

Have a great weekend!

Deirdre and lelo

Back From Exotic Distant Lands

Hello faithful readers!

I have returned from a fun, somewhat exhausting visit to Toronto, where I spent the weekend at Comicon!

There were amazing sights, tons of cool shops, and I’m pleased to say I’m nearly recovered ;)

We’ll just leave you with a yay we’re back post and a cool picture from my trip; awesome SL fetish fashion content resumes tomorrow.

Deirdre
(with lelo, always)

Weekend Options

Mistress is traveling this weekend so i’ll do our friday post and as i’ll be alone this weekend i thought it would be fun to have a look at what’s going on this weekend in SL.

Well in the parts of SL we tend to visit. *smiles*

On saturday (3-5 pm) the “DJ Evergreens Cum As You Are” party at Rubber Room sounds like fun, Ever “the Management” is always fun and a general all around nice guy.

On sunday from 10 to 12 am there is a “Deadly Sins: Vanity” party at Twisted Orchid, TO seems to be back to it’s old form, i just crashed there. *winks*

Next to that there should be the usual standing around at Mesmerized Dungeon and our newest people watch spot, Domme a Domme.

So have a great weekend, see you around SL.

lelo.

Ps. Pitty Mistresses luggage isn't big enough for the lolcat trick.

Marketplace Store Sells Copybotted Shapes Of Famous Residents

Thief : one that steals especially stealthily or secretly; also : one who commits theft or larceny

CelebrityRehab sells copybotted shapes of famous SL residents, under their own name - without permission, of course.

(Ironically, he sells them no copy, no mod, no trans.)

If you’re like me, you see all sorts of things wrong with this.

Not only is it using resident’s names without permission, which must be some sort of ToS infraction; but clearly the only way to have laid hands on people’s shapes is by copybotting.

Think about that one for a moment; he has 90 shapes for sale in his store. He had to stalk 90 famous people and stand next to them to copybot their shape; creepy!

There is of course the distinct possibility that they are not the SL-ebrities real shapes; in that case, Grotesque Lyric, an obvious unpaid account alt (all of 64 days old as of this writing) is simply engaging in fraud; well, plus using resident’s names without permission.

I was going to invite every one of you, dear readers, to make an abuse report about this insane usage of Marketplace, but I gave Inara Pey a call and she set me straight.

Oh, I made a support call to the Lab first, but the PFY - I’m mad, and I’m assuming, ok? ;) - immediately called this a “dispute between residents”.

I’m really glad the police don’t treat muggings and home invasions as “disputes between residents”, by the way.

Inara, then, gave me the facts. It’s a DMCA case, and what’s more, the victims (by which I mean the residents whose names and shapes are being abused) can't place a DMCA request; the shape designers are the only ones who can.

So conceivably, every victim must call the designer they got their shape from, get the designer to DMCA the Lindens.. who are then obligated to remove only that one shape per DMCA request, leaving the store open.

The Lab’s IP guidelines mention that celebrities have a “right of publicity”; but somehow I doubt that the fame level of a blogger or famous SL resident is enough to protect them.

A second PFY, when I insisted about resident’s rights to their own names under the Terms of Service, declined to “translate” them for me, as he put it.

Well, I’m mad at the thief, and I decided to shine a bit of light at him, causing him some shame and discomfort if nothing else. As a reminder, here's our 2009 post about intellectual property.

“Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.” John 3:20

Happy New Year - Our Plans for 2013

Hello again, everyone, and happy new year! We hope your holidays were long and restful like ours were.

We had time to plot and scheme and prepare the new year’s project list: it’s long and interesting.

First, the blog remains a daily, as it has been since 2008. It’s still the fun happy project it was when we started.

The Fetish Spot is starting up satisfactorily. We need to let all our designer friends know it’s there, a bit of a long process, but we’re hoping to fill those walls with cheapies for you soon!

Speaking of the Fetish Spot, it’s getting its own page at the right, here -> No, I kid. I mean it’s now in our list of pages at the top right of the blog.

And, we moved to a new spot ;) Our esteemed neighbors at Thunderbird Island asked us to scoot over to let them expand, and out of the kindness and generosity and humility that makes us famous ;) we agreed.

Here’s the new SLURL:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Thunderbird%20Island/217/166/22

We announced the SL Fetish Fashion Fan Club group a while back; well, it’s going into operation tonight!

We’ll post a daily notice about the day’s post, as well as assorted gossip - er, serious journalism - so our fans will be reminded to come peek at the blog, although our traffic says most of you are pretty darn good about that already.

As a reminder, information about new releases in fetish stores is always welcome.

Just IM lelo Recreant or Deirdre Young in-world, we receive it all in email.

Merry Christmas

We can hardly believe it, but another year comes to an end.

Good times, bad times, amazing times; we passed 1000 posts, made more new friends, started cool new projects.. 2012 was an awesome year, all in all.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all our friends and readers; our best wishes for your First and Second lives.

Deirdre and lelo

We’ll be taking a break until January 7th, except for Friday posts about the awesome new cheapies available at the Fetish Spot.

Thanks to Antony Fairport of Z and A Productions for his lovely sleigh, which you can find here : http://slurl.com/secondlife/Shackles/102/88/22 (it’s free for the rest of December!)

Deirdre and lelo’s Fetish Spot is Open!

We arranged, with a lot of help from our good friends, to secure some land in the middle of Freedom Continent for a new fetish hangout.

What’s more, another awesome friend came to us with a very neat suggestion:

"Put up cheapies from the best fetish designers as a draw, so visitors can chat, people-watch, and lay hands on cool inexpensive outfits all at the same time." 

It took time - we have busy first and second lives! - but we’re finally almost there.

In the coming weeks you’ll see the walls fill with items, all on sale at the same insanely low price of L$10.

We’ll announce new cheapies on the Friday post every week, so keep an eye on those even if you’re not a lolcat lover.

But that’s just a start! We’ll have events such as fashion shows and meet-and-greets with famous designers, and more, as soon as we think them up!

The theme will be fetish, of course.. and if I see someone wearing jeans, they better have a matching denim hood, is all I have to say on that subject ;)

Here’s the SLURL:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Thunderbird%20Island/217/166/22

See you there!

Deirdre and lelo