We Upgraded To The Latest Firestorm

June 2013 saw us move from Phoenix to Firestorm as the new Server Side Baking made Phoenix unusable.

Adventurous early adopters (whom I privately refer to as “unpaid beta testers”) have since then jumped on the Firestorm Beta for the lovely materials and assorted new features. Good for them, but we left that one alone.

The Firestorm team released (to the wild!) the new version, 4.6.1.40478, on March 12th and we installed it on March 15th - nobody can say we’re lagging behind this time!

So for the last three days lelo and I have been enjoying the new Firestorm. In for a penny, in for a pound, we went for the 64bit version.

Once again, the word is all good. Very fast everything: rezzing, teleports, inventory - this may be the HTTP network improvements mentioned on the Firestorm viewer blog .

Materials, of course, was the one big thing we were waiting for. All I can say is “ooo, shiny!” ;) Steph gave a gentle chuckle as I was finally able to see DeVicious leather glisten properly.

The lighting issue also seems to be gone. Facelights had turned into 500-watt flood lamps in the previous FS, but that resolved itself with this upgrade.

Backing up settings, removing everything and doing a clean install, then restoring settings meant I didn’t wrestle with the same configuration questions I hit in June.

The new FS did poke me to get the latest NVIDIA driver - I’m a late adopter there too. So, all good - call it spring cleaning.

Liquid mesh is also included in this release, and we already have designers calling us privately with liquid mesh items.

We’re guessing this version will spread fast (although not quite the way the sudden death of Phoenix forced everyone to migrate) but with its great new features (and some terrific UI cleanup I won’t itemize to avoid boring you) we’ll certainly encourage anyone to upgrade.

New Community Dolls Blog

Lelo received a group notice from the Community Dolls, whom we featured a while back.

They launched a new blog, and I think the smartest thing I can do is quote them:

This Blog is part of a new phase for the Community Dolls. We have a new home and what I like to think of as a "new mission."

I'd like to bring all doll players in SL into one larger community where we celebrate what it is to be or be with dolls.

To that end Community Dolls will be hosting at our new home a regular series of open forms/group discussions on a variety of topics related to doll play.

Specifics are not all in place yet but it is my intention that the transcripts of the discussions will be posted here for those who cannot attend live and in person.

This blog will also be used by some dolls as a journal to write down her thoughts on being a doll.

If you like dolls, give it a look.

The URL : http://communitydolls.blogspot.com

Have a great weekend!

Deirdre and lelo

Kat Clears Up Tax Matters

Kat Fetisov spent a ton of effort getting the correct info regarding the new IRS regulations on taxes for Second Life income.

She kept her blog readers posted on the developments as she went, and summed up her findings in her latest blog post.

This is absolutely essential reading for any non-US resident with a good volume of Second Life sales.

Send that link to all your friends. Oh and go buy tons of Kcreations stuff to thank her for all her work ;)

Have a great weekend!

Deirdre and lelo

The SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Lineside/130/238/597

Latex Lady Blog Awesome, Deirdre and lelo Say

Slow news week as many people are away on vacation and SL traffic numbers dip.

If you want to read some awesome fetish material by a beloved resident, I invite you to have a peek at LatexLadyLL Galicia’s amazing blog, http://latexlifestyle.blogspot.com/

Lady’s a dear friend of ours, and we’ve featured her as a model more than once. She lives in RL the life most latex bondage bunnies come to SL to experience.

She’s also a gracious, cultivated lady and meeting her in SL was a real pleasure.

I hope you meet wonderful people like her in your own Second Life this summer.

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 : It Has Begun!

I can’t hear that without thinking of Mortal Kombat  (yes, I’m a child of the eighties).

Fortunately, SL10B is a little more peaceful, no spandex-clad ninjas will pounce on you, and there is a lot of really amazing stuff to see.

We were there yesterday for the opening, which was a bit more quiet than last year's. No keynote address, just a simple raising of the flags - in multiple locations, a smart move to spread the lag.

The exhibit lelo and I like best so far is the History Walk. Some excellent research and summarizing went into it, and it still works out to some twenty “slides”, set on large posters and surrounded with period items. It's here : http://slurl.com/secondlife/SL10B%20Beguile/157/106/22

And a good link I want to give you is about the pod system. If you want to sit and watch the fairgrounds go by, these cool little automatic gliding chairs are for you.

Linsey Carter covered them on her blog : http://inspiredcreativitystudio.blogspot.com/2013/06/want-to-see-sl10b-hop-on-pod.html

Normal fetish content resumes soon ;)

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!

Materials and stuff

This is a name-drop post, ok? ;)

If you follow Inara’s blog, a) you have a lot of free time cause she writes a lot, and b) you’re well informed and you already know that...

Materials processing is coming,
and it will make objects in SL look pretty darn amazing.

Our friend Kat Fetisov (of Kcreations!) just posted a pretty awesome preview of her experiments with this feature on her blog.

Our other friend and fellow blogger Aria Warden tipped us to it.

How’s that for putting you on the trail of more good reading? ;)

Have a great weekend!

Deirdre and lelo

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

TG it’s Fetish Friday

While we at SLFF take Fridays semi-off (well, aside from gossip, round-peg content and awesome lolcats), our friend Lingerie Clip, aka Lady Ling, does Fetish Fridays.

We mentioned her blog in December, but here’s a link directly to her Fetish Friday label - yeah, we spoil you, what can I say? ;)

So don’t pine for fetish suggestions all weekend, just give her a visit :)

http://kirstentacular.blogspot.ca/search/label/Fetish%20Friday

Have a great weekend,

Deirdre & lelo

Womenstuff Hunt

We heard about the Womenstuff hunt from our friend Canary Twine, of Ponybound.

It’s not only fetish, I’ll warn you right away, but looking at the designer list on their Web site, I was slightly envious: 253 clothing stores, 133 shoe stores? Dang! :)

The current hunt has 200 stores participating, and started on November 2nd. If you don’t know what to do this weekend, that’s our suggestion.

Have fun!

Deirdre and lelo

The URL : http://womenstuff.stuff-sl.com/hunters/

KDC Lorelei Hoods and Saint Torley Day

What would I do without Inara?

While I’m trying on sexy boots and sticking lelo in bondage hoods, she keeps an eye on the world and points out the important stuff I would miss.

Seriously, subscribe to her blog. I have her last 451 posts in my Thunderbird (best RSS reader ever!) and I would be a poorer leather goddess without them.

So what does she have to tell us about today? Why, the fifth annual feast of Saint Torley! It’s just two days from now, this Sunday. See the press release for details.

Like most residents I’m sure, Torley’s cheerful “Friendly Greetings!” accompanied the videos that taught lelo and me how to get our bearings, do cool stuff, and celebrate our creativity in Second Life.

It says the event is not endorsed by LL or Torley. I’m betting he’ll be too busy blushing furiously to endorse anything ;)

---

We nearly let the KDC transparent hoods go with the quickie mention you saw last Friday, but Kyrah called, and asked if we wanted to feature them.

The trouble for me was, I was concerned they might be seen as just another color of the same thing. 

I mentioned mesh colorable items like the cool Elegance boots as a coming thing - residents may not be mad about buying colors of an outfit if too many one-click-to-infinite-color items came out.

Kyrah listened closely. It’s gratifying to talk to someone who’s actually interested and not just looking to refute an argument. She pointed out an important difference between a tinted item and an original-color texture: the white highlights get tinted.

This makes a muted, much less interesting colored item. It’s fine for a quickie, color-coordination thing, but a good quality colored item will always look better. Even though the untrained eye may not consciously realize the difference, there will be the feeling that it’s “nicer” somehow.

So I agree with Kyrah: the Lorelei hoods are a different item, one that required a lot of work, and is worth sharing with you.

But since we ran the Lycia hoods barely three weeks back and already gave you a peek at Lorelei’s face last week, let's just say, it's out, it's cool, and it's worth seeing.

New Page - Blogs We Featured

We’ve featured a lot of Second Life store blogs and assorted coolness over the years.

One of the little projects I had sitting on the back burner for a long time - if my mind was a stove, there would be twelve back burners and one small front one for actual cooking - was to assemble all of them in one place for ease of perusal.

Ta-da! Note the brand-spanking-new link at the top of our right column, go visit it, tell your friends (heck, tell your enemies, tell people on the street!), and mostly, tell us if we missed one.

The sole criterion to be included in that list is that we featured the store or the blog itself. Therefore, Bax Coen yes, Stiletto Moody no. Iz pretty simple, akshually.

Have a great weekend, faithful readers, and enjoy the cool new blog list.

Other Blogs : The Maurers

One surprise we never tire of is finding new sites pointing to us.

Not all blogs have to do with commercial activity.

The Maurers, Diomita and Jenny, share their adventures in SL with the world.

New subs, rubber mares... I’m not going to sum up, I’m going to link to it and let you discover it for yourself :)

The URL : http://themaurers.wordpress.com

List of blogs is no go

Well, the poll results are in: 73 in favor, 10 against.

I think the list of SL blogs will go in that huge bin of cool-but-not-quite-enough projects.

But all is not lost! Kitty Lalonde was kind enough to point us to an existing - and quite big and comprehensive - SL blog list : Blogging Second Life

The blogs are separated in lists by topics, with a large sub-section of stores and creator lists.

This is a huge undertaking, as I had imagined, and quite a few people are working on it.

I was lucky enough to catch Cajsa Lilliehook and Evelyn Hartshon, two of the prime movers of Blogging SL in-world, and bounced some of my ideas (searching and sorting and so on) off of them (bonk!).

To sum up, yeah it might be cool, but there hasn’t been a lot of demand.

Also, we learned something interesting. Many fashion blogs don’t directly highlight one outfit as we do, but rather build whole looks from varied items - “look of the day”, Cajsa called it.

Well, I say “learned” and I should really say “were reminded”. When we were on the fashion feeds, I did notice that many posts were of that kind.

So. A difficult project, low demand.. while I agree with the people who think it would be a cool thing to have, I think it would be too much work to make.

We’ll find something else cool and interesting to fill our second lives.. stay tuned ;)

New Project - List of all SL Blogs

There are lots of blogs about Second Life. They cover all subjects, from the highly technical to the simplest.

And if you want to find them, good luck.

You found us. We work hard for that, putting up url-givers in world, making sure we’re well-indexed in Google, sending notices in SL Groups, and so on.

But the fact is, if you wanted to find a bunch of footwear-related SL blogs, for example, you’d have something of an uphill battle ahead of you.

Bloggers are movers and shakers, just like designers. Some have serious pull at Linden Labs.

So I’m thinking of starting a new project : a list of SL blogs. I’m picturing it as a detailed catalog, with categories and so on. Good useful info, not just a static list of links.

Lelo quite correctly points out that this is a fair bit of work. We’re not sure how much interest there is in such a project.

So we’re putting up a poll for a week : it’s big and ugly and impossible to miss, up here on the right side.

Would you consult a list of SL blogs? Would it be a cool reference to have? Have you sometimes wished there were such a thing?

We’ll close the poll next Saturday, and the result will definitely be weighed in our decision to go ahead or not.

Know any existing lists or groups? Please tell us in comments.

Deirdre and lelo

Other Blogs - Restrained Reviews

Dari tipped us to this one : Aria Warden has a great blog where she reviews bondage toys in excellent depth.

We know we sometimes gloss over details, to the despair of some designers.

They’ll go “And if you look in the third menu level, there’s this awesome option that does” and my eyes glaze over a bit.

Well ;)

Aria’s your girl if this is the kind of review you want.

She posts with very respectable frequency, too. This is not your one-post-a-month blog.

If you love some of our features like the detailed list of labels and the scores on 10 on all aspects of the items, you’ll be right at home on Restrained Reviews.

The URL: http://restrainedreviews.blogspot.com/

MdC - Latex Longsleeved Catsuit

Deirdre
The Latex Longsleeved Catsuit by MdC is a nice, inexpensive basic catsuit with deep cleavage and good reflections.

There’s a bit of black on black effect, but short of making your blacks grey, it’s difficult to avoid.

The vendor pic has apparently been lightly photoshopped to show the excellent details, but our pics are shot with bright lights and mid-day light setting - it ain’t getting much brighter than that without extraordinary measures, let’s say.

The cleavage is deep and daring.. you should turn a few heads with this outfit :)

Another fun Pet tip: Sian Pearl is a blogger and a really creative dresser. This post on her blog shows how she mixed and matched (an admittedly large number of) Graves outfits into some unique combinations. She even has a Flickr collection of her outfit pictures - scroll to the end of her post for the link. Go have a look, and tell her Deirdre (and Pet!) sent you ;)

lelo
Ok back to basics tonight, the fundamental black catsuit, this time by MdC.

In the package you get 4 parts, jacket, pants, shirt and underpants.

Where the tops match, the underpants are a shorter version of the pants.

The zipper on the back is well made and stops just above the tush.

In the front you get a nice cleavage making this more a party catsuit than a strictly fetish one.

Bondage bunnies will notice the lack of gloves and a high collar, so this one will work better with some good heels to party the night away.

So if you want to become one of Charlie's girls, you better get this one double quick.

Name : MDC Vanilla Pleasures
Owner : Madame Couturier
The SLURL : http://slurl.com/secondlife/DANIKA/41/199/23

	Deirdre	lelo
Quality	7	7
Price	8	7
Service	-	-
Store	8	7

Places - Doll Island

Doll Island is an old, well-established doll play sim, with a detailed backstory, although they emphasize that it is not necessary to know the whole thing to have fun there.

And while we were aware of the existence of the island, a friend from Rubber Room, karazorella Kytori, tipped us to a recent surge of activity, so we just had to go visit. Thanks for the tip, kara!

A good sign of age and activity is the size of the member group : over 1600 members at the time we write this.

Doll play is a huge interest in Second Life... but dolls are pretty quiet types, so you may not have heard about it ;)

When you land in the courtyard, make sure you pick up the information notecards - they’re quite detailed, and answer any questions you may have about the island, the roleplay, and where to get good doll hair. (I’m not even kidding.)

Your doll transformation can be a serious roleplay event - it’s probably a lot more interesting that way - but if you’re a Type A person who want to get there in a hurry, a free doll avatar and Dari’s “box of junk” (all her work in open source, you may remember - the box is anything but junk) are available at the info shop.

While visiting, we even ran into our old friend Asudem Kasei, encased in a magical jewel for the last two months, and no doubt pretty happy there. She mentions her predicament in her blog.

Next to the doll castle is a large mall, with many stores to help you with your dollification endeavours. I’ll just mention Hybridz and Bootgasm, but there’s much more to see, and still a bit of room for doll-related content (that’s a hint, designers!).

To sum up : if you love dolls and want to own or be one, you should visit Doll Island. I have my own rubber doll I play with, and I’m not lending her to you ;)

The SLURL : http://slurl.com/secondlife/DOLL/126/169/29

Squeaky Rubber - FruitLine MultiColor

Deirdre:
Another cool and wet item from Squeaky, this is Fruitline Multicolor, shown here in pink and black.

There's a good variety of other color combos, with black on the outside (as shown here) or the color outside, plus a few with dark red instead of black - all quite lovely.

Visit the store and there's a little surprise near the landing zone : one of the colors (not saying which!) at nearly half-price ;)

There are many Second Life fashion blogs, and we only point to the best ones - the ones that point to us ;) We discovered Shayariel's blog when we noticed a sizeable amount of traffic coming from a link to our post about Dari's Haus closing. A quick visit showed us a really active blog, with a long list of contributors, and a wide variety of topics, freebies in particular. Give them a visit and a holler from us ;) The link : http://shayariels-world-of-sl-fashion.blogspot.com/

lelo:
As with the DOT you get 4 underwear layer parts making up the outfit.

The colored part in the middle of the catsuit makes you stand out in the crowd of mono colored catsuits.

The reflections on in the texture are in all the right places.

The water droplets on the catsuit are a fun feature, there is of course also a dry version of this catsuit.

As before, Elisa does make special orders, contact her before buying though.

Name : Squeaky Rubber
Owner : Elisa Kumaki
The SLURL :
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sikkima/44/83/563

	Deirdre	lelo
Quality	8	8
Price	8	8
Service	8	7
Store	8	7