Otherworldly

We’ve passed the Winter Solstice, so it is getting lighter again, but so far you don’t notice much of it around here. Especially not when the weather is dark and dreary and there’s no snow on the ground to brighten things up. It is fortunate, then, that there are a lot of Christmas lights around. I haven’t gone quite so far as to wear them on myself IRL, but maybe I should to cheer myself up further? In SL, however, I am decked out like a Christmas tree, wearing lights from both deviousMind and Paper Moon. I’ve also redecorated the Christmas cottage a bit with some charming pieces from Paper Moon.

This weekend, Dutchie released four collar styles (plus a freebie leash handle that works with them), each packed with a carefully curated selection of bento animations. There’s 42 solo collar animations and 6 couple animations. The collars also include a bound walk, crawl walk, ankle lock and neck lock. Each style costs L$798. The best way to show the collars was with a video, so of course I brought Ran on to hold the leash and help me demonstrate the functionality of these collars. Hope you enjoy!

Sometimes, even virtual floors need a good scrubbing. Of course, when your scrub bucket is made by Dutchie, you may end up being distracted from your work and things are very likely to get dirty rather than clean! Though there are two actual scrubbing animations and if you’d like to keep your roleplay safe for work, there’s a PG version. This, however, is the adult version, which has 30 couple animations and 2 sequences.

For the September round of the Imaginarium, deviousMind has a new gacha out. This one definitely has a naughty flair and does justice to its name, Kinky. To show it off, I went back to the stage and stage lights by Dutchie that I first showed a while ago and combined it with the performer chair, also by Dutchie. For the backdrop, I rummaged around in my Libertine folder and found a set of decorative wall panels.

This is a bit of a departure for me. While I have gravitated towards more home & garden blogging the last years, it has usually been with avatars mixed in. But for this look at some recent Dutchie releases, I opted for a moody night-time scene of an empty café. It was nice to be able to play around with the windlight settings without being concerned about how it looked on an avatar, so this is something I need to experiment with more.

It is the first of September already and it feels like August went by entirely too quickly. The Hair Fair certainly did! It ends today and I have not had any time at all to blog it until now. Though, I did think it felt a bit smaller and had far fewer styles on offer than previous years. Event fatigue, the increasing complexity of hair or something else?

The hair in this post is from Wasabi, who did two styles for the fair, though both come with multiple options. The one I am showing here, Venere, has a regular option (shown in the first picture) and a windblown option (shown in the second picture—just imagine a fan off to the side!). These two options are actually separate hairs rather than HUD-controlled, but HUDs for sizing are still provided.

The latest release from Dutchie is a wooden stage, made to fit in a corner, with a vintage-style rig with lights. The stage and the lights are separate pieces, so you can adjust how high above the lights sit or even use the stage or the lights on their own. There are several colour presets for the lights via a menu and it is also possible to set each light to a separate preset or even to go in and make manual edits. That opens up a lot of options for how the lights look as long as you are comfortable with a bit of editing. Instructions are included in the information notecard.

After a bit of a break during the summer, it is time for a new vlog, this time to show off the fully furnished version of Dutchie’s New Amsterdam houseboat. This is a fantastic creation, inspired by an actual houseboat created in 1900 and still in use today. The houseboat is a full-featured house with bathroom, kitchen, living room and bedroom and the furnished version comes with a great collection of mid-century furnishings made to fit within the houseboat. But of course, if you get the furnished version, you can also use the furnishings in other houses as well. If you would rather have just the unfurnished houseboat, that is available too.

In the video below, I show a walk-through of the houseboat, fully setup with the furniture package. I have also included eight photos of different parts of the interior, to give a sense of both the style of the furnishings and of how much actually fits into the houseboat. It really is a full-fledged house! At the end, I have credits for what I am wearing during this video.

In my previous post, I mentioned having picked up the latest makeup release from Alaskametro, Summer Beauty. In this post, you’ll see a gradual addition of makeup from that set, matching a few of the animations available in Dutchie’s fantastic mid-century vanity. This stylish piece is such fun, with an excellent selection of animations. I had no idea there were so many animations for putting on makeup and brushing your hair available, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised when there are lifestyle/roleplay animations of so many other kinds available. I would have loved to do a video as well, but that doesn’t quite work when we’re not at home. As it is, I am really pleased with the photos, though I could easily have added twice as many because there were so many nice animations to pick from.

I love books. IRL, I have quite a few shelves full (okay, its a whole wall covered with shelves from top to bottom), but I do wish it looked a little more like a proper library—like this one, from Dutchie. The richly coloured wood, the rows upon rows of proper hardcovers, it all feels very classy and old-fashioned. A far cry from having your whole library in your Kindle, even if that admittedly is very practical! But one could always have a physical library AND a matching electronic one. That’d be my dream, actually—a dedicated library/workroom with the walls covered by books, and an electronic copy of each title as well.

For once, I decided on a touch of modesty. This top from Voluptas Virtualis has quite the plunging neckline, but I actually prefer it with something underneath. A nice, lacy bra would have worked well too, but the bodysuit from Luxuria gave it a feel of sexy yet cosy. As a result, curling up in front of a fire in a comfortable chair from Dutchie seemed like just the thing to do.

I know a lot of people have several alts that they use regularly in Second Life, often with each alt having a distinct look and personality. Since my main account does not have a set look but is quite the chameleon, I have never felt the need for an alt for that reason. I do have one alt that owns the Teegle Bento Horse Avatar, so that it can be in photos with my main avatar, but that’s about it.

Occasionally, however, something comes along that makes you wish you had an alt or two that actually owned something other than a starter avatar outfit. The Mid-Century Daybed from Dutchie is such an item. You see, it comes in three versions: PG, Femdom Fetish and Femdom Fetish + Cuckold. The last one, as the name suggests, requires three avatars, one female and two male. Unfortunately, that meant that a video was out of the question, even for the less explicit of the animations. Instead, I had to do multiple shots of each animation and combine the results. This also limited which animations I could use since I couldn’t have all three avatars touching at the same time.

So what you see in these four shots is just a small taste of what’s on offer in the daybed. The first one is taken with the PG version (which includes 10 male and 10 female solo animations), the next two use the Couples menu (which technically only requires two avatars) from the Fetish + Cuckold version and the final uses the actual Cuckold menu where all animations are for three avatars. There are 90 couple animations with an emphasis on foot or nylon fetishism and there are 70 threesome animations. All the versions of the daybed have the AVsitter experience enabled for auto attaching of props and all animations have bento hand poses, There are also bento facial animations for the adult animations and the adult versions are also Aeros compatible for automatic tilting.

Winter may largely be over (except on TV, of course, where it should be alive and well for roughly the next six weeks once Game of Thrones starts), but getting cosy in front of an open fire on a chilly spring evening is not bad either. And a big old castle can certainly get a bit drafty! That’s when some nice furs to curl up on are particularly nice. And if you have some company to help keep you warm, even better.

I hadn’t intended to do another video quite so soon, but Dutchie’s Cafe Table really deserved one and then I decided I might as well include a closer look at LOGO’s Jolie head and some Skin Fair items from alaskametro. I ramble on for quite a while, so I might as well leave off to the video right off!

To check out the credits for the featured items and the rest of what I am wearing, see the end of the post.

For today’s little scene, I browsed through my Dutchie folder and came across this writing desk and chair combination. It has some perfectly modest animations for various innocent activities at your desk, like reading a book, writing or working on your computer (or being in Second Life!), but then it also has a set labelled “Skype” which are a bit less modest. That seemed like the perfect match for the Giulia set from Voluptas Virtualis, which is out now at the current round of Kinky.