Red Red Rose Dress Set

I've wanted to create a black dress with red roses for a while now, my skills are finally up to it.

Available at Nomine and the Material Squirrel Store on Winged Isle.

also on

SL Boutique

SL Exchange

Demon Wings - New!

The first is the Thethra Demon Wing in Black
On SL Exchange
On SL Boutique

The second set is the Volkh Demon Wings. I've listed them on the websites in packs (great deal if you want them all) but you can get them separately at Winged Isle (Material Squirrel) in world.
On SL Exchange
On SL Boutique

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I can't seem to send any notices to my group. I think it's the huge amount of people on SL, but it's a bummer. I got a couple of group notices today, but the groups are way smaller than mine.

PS - I've gotten several freebies from SilentSparrow's group. I love her clothes, so getting extra freebies is just wonderful :)

News & Info & Rants

New Monster Truck Wing Version
We have a new version of our Monster Truck wings that should fix a bug that a few people have experienced. I tested it and it definitely fixes the problem. So if you have any 4.0 Monster Truck wings, give them back to me for a wing upgrade to the 4.1 version. The full upgrade instructions are in my store, but the gist is that you need to put your name in the folder name, with the number of wings to upgrade also. (Example - 10 Wings to upgrade, YourName) or in a notecard.

SL Website Woes
Anyone else having a problem not seeing any of your transactions? Last week they started being very slow to update, then on Saturday, they wouldn't show any of the current day's transactions. On Sunday, I noticed that it only showed 1/2 a day. Today, it's showing nothing for Monday's transactions. I don't know if this qualifies as bug, so I haven't reported it (plus I can never find the place to report a bug on the website). It irks me cause I use that info on a daily basis. Mostly just for my own personal tallying, but it really does help me know what is selling, what locations are selling. Sure, I could use the numbers in world, but the website is sooo much easier.

It's also far easier to find a transaction from someone (say they accidentally bought something twice) on the web page cause you can do a "find" and look for a name.

Actual Wing Info
I am working on some new wing designs, but due to RL stuff, I'm a bit slow. I hope to speed things up and get some wings out for everyone soon.

New Wings

I released many new wing designs on Friday - this is a very small sample. The Twinkle wings (first ones) come in pink, lavender, and lemon. And the mech ones come in

Skirts!!!

My SL fashion sense is usually geared to mixing and matching. While I love full outfits, I tend to wear them as the complete outfit once and then later just borrow elements and create a new outfit.

In my experience, designers create a lot of mix and match tops and separate pants. Which is fine if you like pants, but lately with that pant bug that makes it appear like my av is wearing ill-advised stretch pants . . . I prefer skirts. Well, I usually prefer skirts in SL anyway, that way I can show off my funky tights collection. But as far my shopping knowledge goes, very few designers make skirt separates, except for some mini skirts. (Ok, so Starley released some skirt separates today, great minds, ya know?)

So I created some skirt separates. Each set has 3 different flexi prim skirts, so you have some choice on shape. They are mod/copy (no trans) so you can edit them to fit your own personal bum shape.

And these are only 100L each skirt design.

And what kind of fashionista would I be if I didn't include some whole outfits in this blog post so you can see what you can do with these. Skirt: Armide Skirt - Layered Version
Shirt: Sequin Orange Wrap by Nylon Outfitters
Tights: Polka Dots by Starley Thereian (Celestial City)
Hair: Rita Groshomme (Empyerean Emporium)

Skirt: La Belle Skirt - Single Version
Shirt: Dainty Blouse by Arbel Vogel (Winter Moon)
Tights: Striped Grey Socks by Starley Thereian (Celestial City)
Hair: ETD
Skirt: Patch Skirt - Single Version
Shirt: from Emma Ash set by SilentSparrow
Hair: Mau's & Mej's

Skirt: Fifi Skirt - Full Prim Version
Shirt: Nylon Outfitters
Hair: Kin Keiko

In all pics -
Skin: Munchflower Zaius (Nomine)
Shoes: T-strap shoes by Shiny Things

Skirts are available
SLExchange
SLBoutique

In world, at that Material Squirrel store on Winged Isle

Free Wings

Who doesn't love free stuff? If you join my group, you get that pretty pair of winter wings. All you need to do is go to my island (Winged Isle or search for Material Squirrel) and find this box and click on it - after you join the group.

Another new set of wings up at my store - not free, but still for sale.

Both skins pictured are by Munchflower Zaius - Nomine. This is her new Aether line of very colorful pretty skins - they are so much fun to play with and cheap at only 700L. You know you've always wanted to be RED.

Hair by Kin Keiko.

Angel Wings

New angel wings - in both black and white. The black has more detail than it shows in this little picture.

Secondlife . . . the blog-o-sphere, it's all so quiet.

Stella never listens when you are being morbid

Blanche wouldn't approve and Stanley would never get it, but this Stella Lolita dress by Draconic Kiss is my new favorite wardrobe item.

The fashion blogs largely missed the release of this line of Gothic Lolita dresses by Draconic Kiss, which is unfortunate, so I'm giving it some press here.

Many Gothic Lolita dresses lean a bit too much on the Lolita bit and have too many bows for my tastes, but this one blends the rufffles with the Goth and the result is a stunning addition black dress.

My only issue is that my arms get lost in the ruffles. I'd love to find some standing animations that didn't conflict with the dress, but currently, SL lets me play about 3 animations before it crashes. I had to restart my computer twice and SL went *poof* about 7 times while I tried to get this model pic. Is ANYONE else having this problem? Is it something on my end or does it warrant a bug report.

Credits:
Dress: Draconic Kiss
Skin & Gloves: Munchflower Zaius (Nomine)
Hair: Kin Keiko
Necklace: Shiny Things
Shoes: Fatal Raine (Legend)
Tights (under shoe base, the pink): Canimal

Winged Isle Open!

We're finally open at our new island sim - Winged Isle. Our builder (the very talented Alexis Stapovic) is still putting the finishing touches on the store, but I am very pleased with how it turned out.

Go visit us Here

Our new wing version is out too. This version has real open & close (meaning the prims actually re-size and hide, not just go transparent, so you will not accidentally click on your wings when they are closed.) Another popular feature is droop, which well, it droops. But it looks like the wings are inactive. Lots more features too.

I offer free updates on wings, as long as you trade in your old wings and I am still selling the wing version/type. (I have discontinued several older wings.) To get the upgrade, please put all your wings in a folder with your name in the folder title or in a notecard. Also in the folder title, please indicate how many wings are in the folder. Example - Kala Bijoux's wing upgrades 10 - or something. I am getting hit with the missing inventory bug so if I see that a folder should have 10 wings, but I only see one, I'll relog. And please be patient, so far I have kept up, but whew, hard to say what will happen in the next week.

I also managed to get a few new wings out.

These are wings designed for furry avatars. But they look striking on people avs too.

I also designed a new fairy wing.

Nothing is on SL boutique or Sl exchange yet - but I hope to get those updated today or tomorrow. And then on to more wings.

Where Has Kala Been?

First, I've been busy with our new island. We actually hired a builder this time and it's turning out very cool. Still lots of work left to do.

And then, just because I am apparently insane, we created a new version of our wings. These are really wonderful and do a ton of things the old wings didn't. I'm really really excited about these and can't wait to get them out. Ziggy (scripter, husband) is much more patient and wants to be sure we are ready to launch the new wings. We'll come to some sort of compromise.

I'm hoping to have the new island open sometime during next week. Hopefully there won't be any horrendous updates to screw this plan up. I had hope by this weekend, but since it's Thursday . . . chances are slim that it will happen.

In the meantime, this is my honktonk playlist that I am listening to while I push the pixels.

• Balls" - Amy Rigby
• "Westby" - Kathleen Edwards
• "Neighborhood" - Tift Merritt
• "Life Is Bad" - Shelby Lynne
• "I Know" - Kim Richey
• "Ridin' The Red Line" - Rhonda Vincent
• "Here In The Blue" - Serena Matthews
• "Sweet Side" - Lucinda Williams
• "Gotta Be Better" - Shelby Lynne
• "Upside Down" - Freakwater
• "This Perfect Dress" - Maria Mckee
• "London Rain (Nothing Heals Me Like You Do)" - Heather Nova
• "Everything is Free" - Gillian Welch
• "Crackers Rule" - Kelly Hogan & The Pine Valley Cosmonautsy
• "Something Less Than Something More" - Caitlin Cary and Thad Cockrell
• "At Last" - Neko Case
• "Back to Me" - Kathleen Edwards
• "Next Door Down" - Stacey Earle
• "When I Dream" - Nanci Griffith

Thoughts on RL companies

Have you visited any of these RL companies in SL?

I've visited the American Apparel store and one of the car sims. Clearly, the car sim was not successful since I don't even remember the name of the car or the maker. As for AA, I was familiar with them before, so I didn't really come away with anything. I might wear their clothes IRL, but my clothes in SL are pretty much whatever I can mash together. I visited them cause they were at the front of the line in building their store.

Now maybe if someone started making RL versions of Silent Sparrow clothes . . .?

People are certainly making money off RL companies coming to SL (if those prices are to be belived). The RL companies are also adding much needed capital to Linden Labs. But I haven't seen any company really ADD anything to SL that enriches MY experience yet. So far, that's all done by us pleebs.

I feel like SL is the web circa 1997 or 98 - when you'd wonder if the counter at the bottom of the webpage was just corporate employees visiting, cause there was nothing to see there.

Did RL companies ruin the web? They certainly changed it and took over some of the little guy's work. But, the content I spend the most time looking at (web wise) is still produced by the little guys. Blogs, Flickr, Youtube . . . that's not content produced by Yahoo or Google, even if they host the sites.

I predict that user driven content will continue to drive SL. Maybe I'll be wrong and we'll all be working for Microsoft or Acme Products R Us.

Sale!

50% off wings that I am discontinuing! These will NOT be supported for new versions/updates. Or xcite features.

Male Angel of Destruction

I feel like I've been working on this outfit forever. I released the female version at the beginning of November, so it's taken me literally weeks to get this together. I was very blocked with this one - I hate to revisit old work and since I'd already done the female half, this felt very much like revision.

But it's done finally.

Available at my store in Eunpyung
and also
SL Boutique

SL Exchange

Tattered Wings in Black & White

New wings - available in world at Material Squirrel
Available in Black & White (off white a bit) in large and small sizes and also with xcite! features.

On SL Boutique
On SL Exchange

Steps Taken

Well, I've done what I can (which isn't much) to avoid the copybot.

1) Put up the a !quit script yesterday that did not spam people constantly. Took this down at midnight after I learned that most versions of the copybot now ignore this command. And most of my neighbors finally seemed to have changed and removed their scripts as well, so my store is no longer being spammed with other people's copybot protectors.

2) Turned build off on my land. Frankly, I hate this step. It feels like turning off right click on websites - fairly useless for stealing images and punishes people on your website. This is only a temporary measure for me right now. I will be turning build back on.

3) I plan to spend time in my shop, instead of my skybox. Except for modeling, where I need to use my skybox. This is probably something I should more of anyway, to get an idea of customer issues and concerns. (People can always IM me to talk me about business stuff, but not everyone does.)

4) A large anti-copybot sign warning anyone who uses it or attempts to use it that they will be banned from my store.

I also took the opportunity to take my store down time to put up new pose stands where you can buy the wings directly from the pose stand. This was a customer request given to Ziggy (my scripter & husband) who thought it was a great idea. I've wanted this for a long time but didn't think it was possible. So now it is done.

I hope to release some new wings soon. It has been FAR too long since I've put out new stuff.

Public Enemy #1 - Copybot

I am not even sure where to begin to communicate my thoughts on this matter. My real life has been hectic lately and throw this into the pile and yesterday I just could not deal with SL and resulting issues. So I did nothing. Inlcuding not releasing new items.

Today I am faced with the choice to close store and join the ranks of shops that have closed, even tho I am not in 100% agreement with this decision. If I do not, I look like I am clueless or careless. If I do, I then risk losing income, customers, a creative outlet, and more. And this is not to say that I disrespect the people who have closed, they have done so out of their own convictions and that's fine.

Currently, I am thinking of closing my store to my group members only and cleaning up my shop. I need to decide if I am going to temporarily remove pose stands. And I plan to put up a sign regarding the ban of anyone caught using the copybot in my store.

I have seen similiar signs concerning banning members of the group who created the bot, but I do not agree with this. On the face of this, they may seem like an irresponsible group of hackers - Linden sanctioned hackers at that. But after talking with my husband Ziggy, I've come to better understand what they do. Frankly, finding the holes in SecondLife is a good thing. Cause if this group that has Linden members doesn't, someone else will. And they certainly won't alert LL to the problems until much more damage has been done. The group has found several serious holes in the code which LL fixed.

Which brings me back to Linden Labs. Frankly, they should have taken these steps prior to this. They knew they had issues with the texture ripper over the summer, yet they utterly refused to do anything about it. Now they seem to be stepping up to the plate, but their slow awareness is frustrating. The possible fix that Robin Linden brought up to bake the textures to objects WILL really help with the texture theft issue - but does not address the copybot problem at all.

The copybot may copy the texture onto the object, but it can't save that item as a skin or shirt. Each texture isn't copied over and over again, unlike objects. When you buy a shirt, you don't get the shirt texture, rather your inventory gets a pointer the UUID (identifier#) of the shirt texture. It's only the server once.

What the copybot CAN do is completely copy objects like shoes and hair AND their textures. And wings. It can copy the textures, because the object has that tag to the UUID texture.

It cannot copy scripts or (at last word) flexi parameters. But flexi parameters are sent to the client side, so with some tweaking, they could be copied.

And the current copybot "protector" does nothing more than spam people. And even if you decide that your customers need to put up with the spam, it's a temporary fix at best and it wouldn't take much to change the scripts in the copybot to get around that.

So. . . back to square 1.

And also . . .

It appears that when I upgraded to the new version of blogger, it reposted a bunch of my posts on several feeds. I had no control over that, but I do apologize for spamming you all with old posts.

Red Head Love

I just had to blog this outfit before I had to change to do some modeling for my adboxes. Frankly, I don't usually go the red head route. I don't know why - maybe cause it feels like an exclusive club - red heads tend to be passionate about their hair and coloring.

Or maybe I just never had a good red head skin? Munchflower Zaius dropped a bunch of redhead skins on me the other day to try out and wowser, they are cool. They are SO well done and so cute - how can you resist freckles??

Here's a closeup:

Isn't that so sweet?

Credits:
Skin: Munchflower Zaius (Nomine) - new line of redhead skins
Hair : Kin Keiko
Shoes: Shiny Things
Top: Nomine & Silent Sparrow
Skirt: A work in progress by yours truly. I probably shouldn't be featuring stuff I'm still working on it, but I love the skirt with this. Yes. I need to make the top and few extras for it, maybe today, maybe tomorrow.

Angel of Destruction - Fear Her!

Maybe she's just mad about Xmas commercials on the TV before Halloween. Or maybe it's one of those days. But this angel is NOT nice.

You get 2 version of the outfit and wings. One pre-destruction (without the blood/gore) and one post (full of gore). And of course the skirts are flexi. And the wings do everything our wings do ( Flapping, Unfurl, Hover Flap & More with HUD).

And I'm working on a male outfit for this as well. Don't worry, I'm not going the male toga route (scary!).

If you were in my update group - this was the Halloween treat you received. Everyone else has to buy it. So . . . if you want to join my group, just go to groups and search for Material Squirrel and join. If you need more detailed instructions, go to my store and there is a adbox to click on and get a notecard with precise instructions. I will be giving my update group more free wings for holidays and just in general.

And also, I did it - bought an island. I expect it to be at least a few weeks until I get it - possibly longer. But soon, I'll be pulling out the pixel mixed drinks and living the island life.

Linden Labs Killed my Pony

Ok, not really.

But they certainly have made me blue today.

This news about the large increase in island fees had to happen just when I was contemplating buying an island.

I know, I've talked about the land thing before in my blog and it sounded like I was going to put off the island thing.

But around the beginning of last week, I noticed that the number of scripts that the mainland sim I'm on was running around the max (6,000). Of course, there is no limit on scripts, but scripters have discovered that about 6,000 or more scripts on a sim greatly affects performance and LL has quietly admitted this is true. On Wednesday, I started to toy again with the island idea. On Thursday, I was almost ready to buy (and no, I had no insider knowledge), but I decided that I had nothing to lose by thinking about this big decision over the weekend.

Of course, now I am screwed.

If I don't get one of the 150 islands, then I think I will still have to move to another sim. I just cannot let my customers suffer because I happen to be on a sim with 2 casinos using a lot of scripts. But on the same hand, I can't justify the new tier cost and initial island cost. So I will be forced to find new land which will be outrageously priced to begin with and try to buy up a lot of the sim. And then just hope that no casinos/high scripter users or much worse, a high traffic camping chair set up moves in.

So . . . I still plan to release one more free set of wings to members of my Material Squirrel group tomorrow. I am just hoping to muster up some creativity out of my blues to complete that project.