OMG over a year delayed

I might actually finish chapter 9 of Epidemic.

Here's the first page to get you excited ;)

Contest almost over

Well, with this thing almost over I've been thinking on how to judge it.

Since some people have put in multiple entries, and even a short story, I didn't think it fair to do it just entirely on a single entry.  However, just giving bonus points would obviously give a victory to whoever entered the most.

Sooo, here's what I'm thinking.

Each entrant get's scored on Heat, Story, Image and Humour.  Each entry gets rated, with the best score for each category getting counted.

Sound good?

I'm still hoping for a few more before the end of the month ;)

And because this was a pretty boring post.  Pics!

Stage 2

Ok, as promised, despite me having trouble typing today.

Well we had some early conflicts with our sudden competitor, for obvious reasons.  But actually things went pretty well.  We had a lot of steady customers, and really things sold way better than I thought they would.

We launched with just the one product line, machines and scripts, and I scrambled trying to keep up to reviews and demands.

We went to a whole new design within months, and a year later to a 3.0.  Also I started making collar devices that were intended for RP purposes.  They would parrot triggers and commands, allow a dominant partner to lock behaviours, send subliminal messages, and force the wearer to move around in certain ways.

I eventually scrapped much of that line as the collar business is a much bigger one than the mind control fetish.  The D/S community in SL is huge, and customers wanted crazy feature sets, compatibility with dozens of systems, and all kinds of things that I couldn't keep up with at such a low price point.

Our biggest problem actually came in the form of our third partner.

We kept growing, and selling more and more.  We had 5 people hanging around the shop most of the time, much like we do now, but we had no place to put them.  The shop at the time was very small in space, and had a small prim limit (the number of things we could have inside)  We could only actually have 2 or 3 machines in place without exceeding our limit, and the rent was rather high for that need.

When we broached the topic with our partner/landlord, she was unhappy.  Her solution was to move us to a place with twice the limit and floor space, still too small, and double our rent.

Instead we found another place which charged less, and had ten times the space and limit (you can see just how terrible a deal we were getting from our partner).  She responded with a lot of yelling, and by cutting off all communication with us.. You get a lot of drama in SL sadly.  Same as with the rest of the internet, anonymity breeds crazy.


Anyhow, things took off.  From the start I had opened the system up to third party writers.  I gave out API docs so others could write things that would work for our system, and let them sell through us for a share of the profits.  Pretty soon we couldn't keep up properly, and many scripts just didn't get converted for sale.

I couldn't implement other ideas people had for improvements fast enough, and soon enough other places opened up using some of those ideas.  By the way, I love innovation, and didn't have any issue with any of those other places (except Hypnotic Magic)

I still have a long list of things that I am supposed to be making "one of these days" from the simple add on, to new toy, to complete redesign.

We launched new lines, revamped old ones, and relocated yet again to a smaller space (turned out the one we moved in to had way too much floor space for us, but we still needed the prim limit).  We were doing very well in sales.  Not enough to quit my day job.  Not even enough to switch to a part time job.  But enough to pay my grocery bills, so that was nice.

But more and more the place needed customer service.  No one had problems with our products, but the vendors would break, or someone wouldn't get delivery due to a server error, or etc.  And I'd need to step in to fix it.  More and more of my time was spent fixing, and less and less was spent creating.

I started to burn out, and stop making new things for sale.  And at the same time, I had less and less spare time to spend in SL.

Finally last year, when we re-located yet again.  I asked Winter to buy me out, and let him take over running everything himself.

Since then there haven't really been any new products put up for sale, and he's had many problems just maintaining the code base.

But, now I seem to have a wealth of free time, for a while at least, so I'm considering working up new things for sale.

The challenge seems to be once again, getting winter to draw up signs so we can get them for sale =)

I do hope anyone who hasn't will drop by and take a look around.  It's free to browse, and I guarantee it will be interesting at least, even if you don't decide to stay ;)

Tomorrow.. I have no idea what I'm going to post tomorrow.

How we got here

So the real question now is, how did we get here?

Where did this mind control industry in Second life come from?

Well as I said before, I like to think it's my fault.  You may think that is just vanity, and that's a fair assumption, but I feel I have a solid case.  I'll lay out the history for you and you can arrive at your own conclusions.

When I arrived in second life, I'm not sure what I was looking for.  I dabbled in a lot of things.  I made toys, played with scripting (coding in the lsl language) tried to make my avatar look pretty, and also dabbled in escorting (surprisingly fun).

While doing that, I was also an avid reader of MCstories, and frequented the collective.

In my exploring I found a few interesting things.  And I started to custom make scripts for money.  I made a skydiving point scoring system, with giant floating rings to fall through and such.  I made a custom elevator that turned out to be a physical impossibility in SL ( I should have been tipped off by the fact that no one had made such an obvious thing before )

I made some friends and dabbled mainly.

And then someone asked me to make an addon for his wand.

I was confused, until I explored and found a sub culture of games within SL, that played with harry potter style magic wands with various "spell" add ons.  The end result of which was a sort of capture and combat roleplay.

I explored that avenue and found more, and most importantly was a sort of mind control plug in for that wand.

It was teeeeerrible.  But it got me thinking, where was our fetish in SL?

I went looking, and found that the purveyor of a very old MC site actually had a little store where he sold some trinkets.  None of which I was a big fan of, but it got me thinking, and showed me how underrepresented we were.

*EDIT* I finally tracked it down, http://www.deep-trances.com/PEPSL.htm This is the site I referred to here.

I wondered if I could do better.

At around that point I had made some sort of messaging and tracking toys for friends, and tinkered about using them as role play "suggestion" devices.  So you could send quite messages to people, coded as if they were said by them, or "thoughts" implanted in there heads.  Just toys, simple little communication tricks, but lots of fun for MC roleplay.

And then I made a spiral.  For fun.

And layed some words over it, for fun.

And then someone said that I could sell it.  In fact, they knew some people who wanted it right now.  As it was, with no ability to even change the words, stuck repeating in a loop as a simple spiral.

I was staggered that people would pay for it, and being a perfectionist I said hell no.  I can do better than that.

At which point I set up a workshop and started really getting into it.  I played around, seeing how notecard communications and all sorts of things actually worked in LSL, which is notoriously poorly documented, and missing all sorts of basic things that a programming language needs.

As I worked, I tested.  I got a lot of user feedback, and had dozens of people through my lab seeing what I was working on every day.  I would explain why i did things the way I did them, what was possible, what wasn't. Get their ideas for improvements and do what I could.

This was a huge mistake.  One which sadly means I have to be a lot more private with what I work on now.

Finally, I was ready to launch.  I had a working product, what we cheesily called the Hypnotron, and opened a store in a friends sim called Hypnodolls.  I believe Winter named both of those, so blame him ;)
It was owned by me, Winter, and the third person who owned the sim (region in SL).

But strangely, pretty much the day before, or the day of the opening, I don't recall.

Another store opened.

Called Hypnotic Magic, and selling items that were strangely nearly identical to what we had.  Down to the build design, names, and even the scripts that I had written for launch.

The store was opened by someone who had spend nearly an hour a day in my workshop asking questions and poking about, which is why these days I am much more private about my ideas until they are ready for sale.

That's good to start with I think.  Tomorrow I'll tell you about the initial success and problems we had, and how everything started to snowball.

Competition

So, the hypnosis fetish has become pretty big in Second Life.  Several competing stores have sprung up, a few other related places, and a number of prostitutes who claim to specialize in these things.

It wasn't always that way.

In fact when I started, there was none.

Currently there are a number of major locations..

This is hypnomist.  They don't make much.  Some standalone trances is all I can see.  

Skara Brae :  It's a transformation sim, that has a whole pile of levels and areas dedicated to all sorts of transformation.  A whole wing dedicated to hypnosis and mind control, as well as Doll, cow, and a number of other areas.  An awesome place.

Kero's toybox, while she hasn't really made many scripts, the girl is a genius at scripting.  She's made a new system rather like mine (though I must admit rather better), but due to a lack of scripts available for it it doesn't sell near as well.

More exciting for me, is all the other toys she has made.  Some very nifty ideas.

And lastly.  Hypnotic magic.

There's a big history here, which I will go into tomorrow, but suffice to say for now, they have a shockingly similar selection to my store =P  Amazingly similar, and always released just a week or so behind.  Isn't that fascinating =P

There are also numerous smaller places, gathering areas, and dozens of groups dedicated to this subject.  Catering to all tastes.

Allready?

Now, the problem with trying to post more often, is that I have absolutely no idea on what to post about.

Of course, I could just keep posting images, but that's really not what this was supposed to be about now was it?

One thing I thought might be of interest to anyone that hasn't taken a look at second life.  Is a quick run around of what's happening there.

Where to start.

Well, easiest would be my store.  Technically now it's Winter's store.  We opened it together with a third person who quickly became uninvolved, and Winter will back me up in saying that pretty much all the ideas, scripts, and code for things we sell have been mine.  Winter's responsibilities have been in the texturing, modeling, and building the locations.

So here's a look at our current store and stuff.

Here's our current store.  Winter's latest build.  Very shiny =)

We hace a nice area where people congregate.  We actually tend to have 5 or 6 most afternoons, sometimes 10 or more people hanging out.  

Here's a look from a distance.  It used to be more of a steampunk feel, and it's still located in coghaven, an awesome steampunk sim.

Here's one of the machines we sell.  We have a bunch of different models, but they all work pretty much the same.  You sit down, and you get a visual with a script running.  I'm rather proud of the system used to run it.  I pretty much built a programmable computer in lsl (the scripting language).  Well, I was proud of it when I wrote it.  Now it feels clunky as hell, and I know a dozen ways I could improve it, but it would mean scrapping everything and making the old ones obsolete.

Some of the vendors.  The scripts work by just dropping them into the machines, they get added, then you can run them through a menu system.  Winter outdid himself with this image I think.

Speaking of re-doing everything, I'm experimenting with different ways to handle textures, considering starting again from scratch.

Tomorrow, I'll show ya some of the other Mind Control themed things that abound in Second Life, and later this week I'll tell ya how it all started, how the fetish exploded into the landscape, and how many businesses started competing in an expanding market.

Short version.  My fault =P

Burnout?

Not sure exactly what's going on.  I think maybe I burnt out the dark part of my brain on that set for Nikki. I haven't posted it all yet, but since she asked for it, it's pretty much the darkest stuff I've done barring one or two exceptions, and 20 all at once.

So I went to do this short series that I had pending for a few weeks, and I just couldn't make it work how I'd originally intended.  Tried a few times, then ended up with a way more goofy story than I had wanted.

What ya think? =/

Not really happy with it.  But the problem is, when I get all obsessive and keep working on something, not happy with the result, I just can't move past it.  I end up re-doing it again and again and again, and then I get frustrated and stop making images for a while until I can finally get it where I want it.

It's a problem =P


We've got 3 entries in the contest so far!  2 from December005 and 1 from Benbedlam.  I'm happy to see some responses and totally excited to see what else people come up with in the next 2 weeks ;)

Preview of Nikki's Prize

She requested dark, hot, and with girls on their knees behaving like sluts.

So you might notice a common thread ;)

Not everyone's preference, but I hope Nikki enjoys.  These are 2 of the 20 that I sent her picked at random.

Contest!

So I had two posts after this, which disappeared, then re-appeared, and now are gone again.  I presume that somehow during the blogger outage they vamoosed.

In any case, one was un-important, merely posting a preview of Nikki's prize, but that will be up in full shortly anyway so no matter.  But the other was details of a contest.

Here's the idea.

I want everyone who is interested to send me pictures, stories, or really anything creative at all, with the criteria that I have to be in it ;)

Any version of this persona is good, be it temptress, scientist, or just something really dorky and humorous.

Feel free to enter as many times as you want, and at the end of the month I'll pick a winner, and they will get a picture set or series done for them.  Or if they have some other idea they can feel free to make the suggestion.

Send links or content to lirielsaarinen@gmail.com, or post links here or on the forum threads at the collective or mc stories.

Hope we can get some interest ;)  Should be fun.

PS . Yes I realize this makes me horribly vain =P

Been a while, starting slow

The first question is, does anyone still read/notice this?

So, to prompt interest, Pics!

I think I might try and hold another contest, but first I need to finish Nikki's prize.  Sadly the one she picked just isn't going to happen.  I don't have the spare time to make a game =/

Also, I've been working on creating new toys in SL, so if you like, stop by and take a look see.