Product Review: Warm Animations’ Stories Sex Rug

We’ve known Warm Animations as a maker of good but unexceptional sex animations for some time, but with the release of their new Stories Sex Rug, Warm has propelled itself into the very first rank of SL sexual animators, and seems to be signaling a new and inventive direction for the company and its products. In the sheer number of animations, their quality, and in Warm’s innovative approach to organizing these animations into extended Scenes, the Stories Rug virtually reinvents scripted sex furniture and puts itself into a class of its own. This is not just another sex rug. This is something new.

What makes the Stories Rug so unique is not just the number of quality animations—certainly more than any comparable product on the market—but the way Warm has organized these animations into Scenes and the quality of the Scenes themselves.  A Scene is a pre-set sequence of single animations that plays like one, extended-length animation. Scenes are nothing new and most manufacturers of scripted furniture offer some version of them, but Warm’s are something special: graceful and even impassioned variations on erotic activities that blend into seamless little tales of lust. We’ve never seen Scenes used to such erotic effect as they are here, and the sheer number of scenes and variations as well as their placement throughout the menu system create a rug that in some respects is almost automated, while still being fully capable of operation in the usual, single-animation way.  The Scenes system is easy to override,  but missing the Scenes deprives you of much of the Stories Rug’s power and enchantment, which would be a shame.

The Stories Rug covers the more affectionate parts of the sexual spectrum with a very generous selection of romantic preliminaries like dancing, cuddling, and kissing, and continuing on through things like foreplay, oral, and conventional sex, all of which are supplied with an extraordinary number of animations. You won’t find much BDSM or rough sex, but that doesn’t mean that what’s here isn’t intensely hot and emotionally expressive. And actually, there’s been a need for an animation suite that covers the more affectionate aspects of love-making and does it with an adequate choice of animations, from first caress up through various forms of foreplay, penetration, and on to aftercare.

The Sories Rug’s Main Menu offers the choice of Map>, Dances>, Relax>, Undress>, Boy-Girl>, Girl-Girl>, 3Somes>, (as well as the usual service buttons for Extras, Stop, and Options), and beneath these Main Categories are sub, sub-sub, and even sub-sub-sub menus, providing a wealth of animations. Choosing any of these categories except Map> takes you to a choice of multiple Scenes for that category. Click on the Map> button on the Main Menu if you want to avoid the Scenes and access the individual animations directly. Many of the Scenes have their own Map button themselves that let you access the single animations within the Scene, giving the user total control.

As an example of how this all works, clicking on Dances> on the main Menu will take you to a submenu offering two dance Scenes: Moonlight (a sequence of 5 animations), and Soul Mate (10 animations). Select Moonlight and up comes a typical Scene HUD with arrow buttons to Start the Scene, to Pause it, to Advance to the next animation, or to Go Back to the previous. There’s also a Map button that gives instant access to all the animations in the Scene and a Kiss button. The Kiss button is an example of an action button, which will play an action without upsetting the flow of the Scene.

More examples: Hitting Relax> on the main Menu gives you a choice of 5 different cuddling and kissing Scenes: Relaxing, Star Gaze, Gaze, Closer, and Adored, which go from casual to impassioned in a natural progression. 

 Selecting Boy-Girl> will take you to a submenu featuring 9 Scenes, 6 of which are activity-based— CumPlay (cunnilingus), CockSucker (fellatio), Boy on Top, Ride, Rev Ride, and Doggy—and an additional three Scenes called FallingInLove I, II, and III, that are beautiful and sexy little seduction scenes that really showcase Warm‘s ability to sequence animations into seamless, arousing  mini-tales of love and desire: kisses blend into breast-play or fondling, oral, and penetration. They’re works of erotic beauty and even come with various action buttons for bursts of emotion and sexual heat.

We should point out that the Scenes on the Stories Rug are not the typical scene you might be used to from other manufacturers, where the lover vault and jerk from one animation to another. The Stories Rug Scenes all have specific themes, and the animations are seamlessly blended. Even when choosing individual, unrelated animations, the transitions  are remarkably smooth and graceful.

Scenes aside, to give you a feel for the sheer wealth of animations in the Stories Rug, we might mention that there are 14 different animations for Boy-On-Top missionary; 25 for Girl-On-Top; 32 different cuddles and kiss animations; and 57 animations for Girl-On-Girl. And this is hardly the half of it.

The Stories Rug also gives you some unique and unusual features. On the main menu is an Undress button, which gives you some nice undressing animations. If she’s wearing a RLV relay, you can strip her clothes right off her.  There’s also a Pose button that acts like a pose stand for quick fitting of items from an #RLV folder. The rug is Xcite compatible and will supply a Dominatech RLV relay, as well as a strap on as part of its extras. And the rug is quite customizable. We found it a bit large right out of the box, but  the size was easily adjustable through normal editing techniques.

The animations are all original and well done, although the fact that most of them are variations on a few basic positions means that the differences in some cases can be subtle. But the quality is good, and, as mentioned, the transitions between positions are exceptionally smooth and natural.

Admittedly, the unusual menu organization takes some getting used to, but the upside of that is that there’s some delightful surprises around each corner, and after three weeks of use, we’re still finding new gems.

We would have liked to have seen more descriptive titles for the animations, a pet peeve of ours, and given the number of animations supplied, that might have been quite a challenge. In any case, the animations are pretty much arranged by increasing passion an excitement within a category, so it’s not hard to tell that “missionary 1″ will be a lot more sedate than “missionary 8″ or “missionary 23.”

The menu organization also makes coming up with an exact total number of animations kind of tricky, since some sub menus are re-used in different scenes and a strict bookkeeping is beyond us. But believe us, there are plenty. In fact, we’re fairly confident that the Stories Rug contains more animations than any other commercially available piece of sex furniture we’ve ever encountered in Second Life.

At L$4500, Warm Animation’s Stories Rug isn’t cheap, and you’ll certainly want to try it before you buy. But even if you’re not thinking of buying, you should go check it out just to get a feel for what an extraordinary thing Warm has done here, which is to change the fundamental way a piece of scripted sex furniture is used. They’ve integrated a huge number of animations into a series of beautiful and affecting scenes and created a scripted rug that can be enjoyed both actively and passively, which returns to the act of love some of its overwhelming and compelling beauty. The result is a kind of roller-coaster ride of affection and sexual excitement, which to our minds comes pretty close to the real thing.

Penises On Parade: A Review of Some SL Cocks

Reviewed (Grade): Aeros Original (A) ,   Realasm Gold (C),   Royal T3K Blizzard (C+),   Xcite Wildcat (A-)

Today we’re going to talk seriously about Second Life penises: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Now I know this is going to be a Hard and even Hairy subject, so let’s get all our dick jokes out of the way right now and plunge right in…

You don’t have to have a willie to survive in SL, but if you’re going to be at all sexually active, the day will come when you’ll want one. And given the insanely obsessive relationship men have with their penises, you’re going to want the best you can get. That immediately rules out most of the freebies and cheapies, and means you’re going to be shelling out between L$800 to L$1200 or more. But which are the best, and which ones should you consider? Unlike hair, shapes, and skins, penis manufacturers don’t allow you to try out a demo, so in this article I’m  going to review a few of the cocks I have known, and tell you what I think.

Dicks are expensive–or at least the quality ones are–and we couldn’t try them all, so our review draws on our own personal experience. We’re not going to deal with the cheapies since you can try them yourself for minimal cost. We want to stick to the popular and more expensive.

Before we get into it, I should state my own biases and prejudices:

I’m a purist. I believe an SL cock should provide you with functionality, by which I mean, a penis — even a fantasy penis — should concentrate on doing penis things, like getting hard, looking good, cumming, and whatever else you might dream of your fantasy dick doing. It shouldn’t waste its time doing non-penis things, like playing animations, saying things in chat, communicating with other people, or peddling more goods and services. All those bells and whistles or extra-penile functions only slow you down and create lag, make a cock glitchy and weird, and complicate use of what should be a very simple thing. If you’re serious about SL sex, you buy your own animations, you communicate using your own words, and you don’t let your dick try to sell you things.

Basically, in our opinion an SL penis only has to do a very few simple things. It should:

1. Be easy to use
2. Get hard
3. Ejaculate
4. Look good, which means it should  look fairly realistic and be customizable regarding color and size.
5. Be easily adjustable regarding ANGLE!!

This last feature is in italics because (1) angle adjustment during use is an absolute necessity for Second Life penises — in fact, angle adjustment is probably more important for SL sex than size — and (2) it’s amazing how many manufacturers don’t offer it.

Avatars don’t bend and flex like human beings do, and unless you can adjust the angle of your dick on the fly, you’re going to find it waving ludicrously in the air, or poking through your partner’s stomach, or otherwise embarrassing you in some other way during your torrid love-making session. Of all the items in the list above, on-the-fly angle adjustment is the one property that most separates a quality tool from some grotesque freebie and a quality sexual experience from animated farce.

Realasm Gold Edition:  The first decent penis I had in SL was a Realasm Gold Edition, a L$700 unit which I thought was quite the thing 3-4 years ago. The Realasm remains popular as a mid-range penis, mainly for its looks, though by now it’s pretty obsolete and the unit hasn’t been upgraded in years. The animations it comes with are terribly crude by today’s standards, and I would say unusable.

The Realasm is very easy to use, though, mostly because it doesn’t do much. Erection state is controlled by clicking on the letters of the name REALASM in the simple HUD, and it pees or cums when you click on the appropriate button. Angle can only be controlled by changing the degree of erection, so reducing the angle (i.e. making the dick  less vertical) also makes it smaller and more flaccid. But it’s either that or attempt the very tricky maneuver of editing your cock while in the middle of some hot sex, and believe me, it’s not easy to click on a moving pud in all that tangle of legs and weirdness. My pride in my Realasm eventually turned to frustration.

Xcite Wildcat: For my next choice I decided to follow friends’ advice and go with an Xcite, which was generally considered top-of-the-line at the time. Xcite has a long and deserved reputation as the 900-lb gorilla of SL cocks and other sexual parts, and they offer a wide range of add-ons and accessories to enhance the sexual experience. The dick itself cost L$1,050 minus the balls, which were extra. You buy your Xcite penis in a cafeteria-like setting where load your tray with whatever accessories you want. With the nuts and a tattoo or two, my bill came to about L$1,200.

I have a lot of respect for Xcite and all they’ve accomplished, and the cock did look good and had full angular adjustment, though not exactly the easiest. But when you buy an Xcite cock, you’re kind of buying into the whole Xcite sexual empire and the Xcite concept of SL sex, which wasn’t exactly my concept or what I wanted.

Xcite is famous for the Xcite System, which is basically a way for other people to control your state of arousal. That means that by default, when someone clicks on your Xcite body part, a pre-programmed message pops up in local chat telling them how hot it makes you. Like, “Abe Avatar starts breathing heavy.” Or “Andy Avatar starts shaking uncontrollably when you kiss their thighs.”  Not only did the pronoun mismatch bother me, but the whole idea of canned responses and being controlled was annoying and inane.

Also, touching my Xcite penis automatically increased my level of arousal, until I reached the point where I was told I was having an Xcite orgasm, whether I wanted to or not.  Yes: other people can make you cum just by repeated clicking on your dick, which in effect makes you a spectator rather than a participant to whatever sex you’re engaged in. And to add insult to injury, once a man orgasms with an Xcite penis, he automatically shrinks to flaccidity and stays there a few minutes, so sex is temporarily over.

To be fair, the whole Auto-arouse business can be overridden &/or customized once you plow through the rather lengthy and involved user’s manual, (although I myself never figured out how to disable the automated post-orgasmic flaccidity function, nor had anyone else I asked.)  But why anyone would want to have their sexual responses determined by a pre-programmed script is just beyond me.

Presumably, the idea behind Auto-arouse was to automate the whole sexual experience  in order to leave your RL hands free to masturbate. But really, the only thing that makes SL sex more exciting and enjoyable than just solo beating off to bad cartoon porn is the human connection that comes through emoting, which is exactly what Auto-arouse discourages.

The Xcite penis is capable of all sorts of things besides this, though, and through a complicated HUD it allows you to connect to your own special Xcite penis webpage where the settings for your dick color and other data is stored, or import animations and sound clips, or control who can arouse you or not, or communicate with and even purchase more Xcite add-ons.  But the cost of all this power is a multi-page and oversized HUD that’s involved and long on bells and whistles and strangely short on some very basic and important functions.

There’s no obvious button for orgasm, for instance. If Auto-Arouse is off, the only way to cum is to click squarely on the microscopically tiny white square at the top of the erection-size slider, which is very easy to miss in the heat of sexual excitement, resulting in a frustrating inability to climax when desired. Also, the ejaculation animations in my Xcite were surprisingly crude and unappealing. Either monstrous globs of white haze come out, or a pitifully feeble white spray of particles. My old Realasm was much better at ejaculating than this.  Force and quantity of ejaculate are not adjustable in the Xcite.

In Xcite’s favor, both the size and angle of the penis are infinitely variable, using sliders rather than discrete steps. But the size slider really had no effect I could see after 25%, and a lot of attention seemed to have been spent on allowing your dick to hang vertically to one side or the other when you were flaccid and lying on your side. Personally, I never used that ability in all the time I had an Xcite penis.

The point is, SL is my fantasy place, and in SL I want my penis to do what I want it to do, not what Xcite dictates. I want to be able to get aroused or stay limp as I want, cum whenever and as much as I desire, and stay hard before, during, and after my orgasms, as I do in my fantasies.

Don’t get me wrong. Xcite makes an excellent penis and they’re definitely one of the handful of top-choice models. They just do way more than I want from a cock, I don’t want a penis that’s smarter than me and makes me feel dumb. I want something simpler and easier to use.

Aeros Original: So I went on marketplace and bought an Aeros, and it’s become my new penis-of-choice. The Aeros Original I have cost L$1,000 (they make others costing L$1,200), and doesn’t have all that extra-penile programming of the Xcite. Instead it concentrates on looks, usability, and function, and incorporates some unique and welcome features I always wished for: it drips, it throbs, the quantity and appearance of ejaculate are customizable on the fly, and the HUD is easy to use, fast, powerful, and responsive. I’ve yet to notice any lag in my Aeros scripts.

Aeros prides itself on its realistic appearance, and it is very good. Head, shaft, balls, and public hair are all independently adjustable in size and appearance. There are several choices of skin texture for each, and color may be selected from pre-sets or custom-designed by color field. The sliders controlling size are a little balky and insensitive on mine, but since I’ve never been one for grotesquely ill-proportioned cocks, I really don’t mind.

The Aeros comes with a unique and compact HUD that admittedly, takes a bit of getting used to. But once it’s mastered (which isn’t that difficult if a doofus like me can do it), it’s fast, responsive, and has all the functions right there, no more than two clicks away. The HUD is shaped like a little steam punk gear or wheel that folds up when not in use to about the size of a dime.  Click on the center to turn your dick on, and click on the edge to expand the HUD to expand it to about the size of a quarter, with full functionality: size (head, shaft, balls, pubic hair, all independently adjustable), appearance (same), amount and type of ejaculate, animations, auto-response (optional, thankfully).

The all-important penis angle is infinitely variable though a full 155 degrees by moving a dial-like slider around the edge of the wheel, so the dick can point almost straight up or straight down and anywhere in between. Cock size is controlled by clicking closer or farther to the center of the wheel, so size and angle are independent too. There are 3 sizes and a super-size override, and that’s pretty much all you need.

The cum, pee, and drip functions are controlled by 3 little buttons on the face of the wheel, and the amount, type (drop, stream,  spray, etc), and force can be set on a little sub menu you get by clicking on the bottom. You can also make your cock drip or cum from the shaft or balls, a very clever feature that allows for deliciously dripping blowjobs and lewd overflowing cream pies when you’re in your partner. The cock also bleeds if you’re into that.

The Aeros comes with several nice masturbation animations, and more animations may be added. It also has Xcite-like sharing capabilities, but since I’m not much interested in that, I never explored them. The  Aeros comes with a handsome little instruction booklet that uses pictures and diagrams, so there’s no wading through notecards and pages of text.

The cock comes with free updates for life too, which is also a nice feature, and they really do follow through, sending you an entirely new package rather than just some patch. In the 6 months or so I’ve had mine, I’ve received two updates. As I recall, one was to fix some glitch in the animation controls, and one to add a new spray function to the ejaculation types.

If I sound biased it’s because I am. I know we men get very involved and defensive in our penis choices, but in this case I think it’s justified. The Aeros is powerful, responsive, good-looking, and easy to use. What else is there?

Royal T3K Blizzard :  Another line of high-end cocks recently on the market is made by Royal. I purchased their Royal T3K Blizzard for L$999, which is near bottom-of-line. The Tayfun is cheaper at  L$799, but after that the prices go up to around L$1300. They also make a couple of mesh dicks for L$1300 or L$2200, but I have to say I’m not certain what the advantages of a mesh penis would be.

The comments in Marketplace rave about the Royal line, but after using mine for several weeks, I have some serious reservations. Royal, like Xcite, seems big on bells and whistles that I find secondary to using a cock, and for the price, I found my Blizzard underpowered and rather average in performance. Maybe the more expensive models have more capability, but for L$1000, I expected more than a dick that basically just changes sizes.

Marketplace comments specifically praise the Royal line for it natural appearance and customizability, and Royal promotes itself as making the most realistic sexual parts in SL. But I found the Blizzard mediocre in appearance and unusually difficult to customize.  Shaft, glans, and balls are all the same color and not individually customizable, so your junk looks anything but realistic. Instead your package resembles one of those rubber cock-and-ball sets from an X-rated toy store, or like your whole unit’s been dipped in a can of paint.

Choosing a color doesn’t involve the usual what-you-see-is-what-you-get color chart, but first selecting one of eight a skin types, and then selecting a color by clicking through a slew of numbers looking for what you want. With a 102 choices in 14 menus, finding your match is an exercise in trial-and-error, and if you’re particular about color, can be a very long and tedious process.

The inadequate Help menu says there’s some way to create your own color by attaching a color-picking HUD, but I wasn’t supplied with any color-picking HUD. Maybe my model didn’t include it?

Size in the T3K Blizzard is selected by a click-scroll button, which takes you from small to grotesquely elephantine in 12 steps. The whole unit resizes together. There’s no way to adjust the parts individually. Degree of erection is controlled by clicking one of six buttons, from 1 (down and flaccid), up to 6 (nearly vertical). State 3 is horizontal, so there are only 3 real erection states.

Despite this, the Blizzard achieves the difficult task of fitting into a partner amazingly well and in a remarkably sexy way. The designers managed to nail penile geometry so well that the fit is tight and realistic and the motion is fluid and smooth, and very salacious. If you like watching it go in and out, this might be your dream dick.

The HUD for the cock itself is rather large, taking up about 1x 5 1/2″ ( ~2.5×14 cm) of screen space when deployed, and I found it a bit glitchy, slow to respond both in turning functions on and off.  It jumped around the screen when certain buttons were pushed, and sub menus came up that didn’t respond and couldn’t be closed, but just shoved off the screen. Aside from the aforementioned size and skin color, not much is customizable. You can’t choose type, color, or force of ejaculation, and my Blizzard seemed to drip rather than squirt. It comes and pees and that’s about it functionwise.

Royal seems to have put most of their effort into a lot of extra-penile functions that really don’t interest me, and aside from the usual function and appearance buttons, the HUD gives prime space to buttons for News (about new Royal products), Sounds, Hot (supposedly a list of hot sex spots in SL, but as far as I could tell was a space for third-party ads), Target (applies 6 non-sexual poses to a targeted partner), another Target (to turn the first one off), Lock (which put a cage-like device on my junk) and Emote, which brings down a multi page menu of common emote gestures that have nothing to do with the business of sex. Unless your idea of a good pick-up line is a clip of Austin Powers saying, “Yeah, baby!” These are not the kinds of things I want from my penis.

Given all this, I’m at a loss to explain the praise I saw on Marketplace. I can only think that these happy users are stepping up to their first expensive cock and are impressed by all the bells and whistles. For my money, the Blizzard is not even in the same class as the Xcite or Aeros.

Review: Stand-Alone Erotic Animations in SL

At their worst, bad animations can turn The Second Life sexual experience into a crude and laughable farce, a parody of what real sex is like. The avatars’ motions are so stiff and repetitious and devoid of emotion that it’s no wonder so many people — especially women, it seems — hate them and don’t want anything to do with “poseball sex.” But at their best, when animations are well thought out and executed, they can be quite powerful expressions of emotion and a joy to watch, not to mention arousing as hell. At their best, good animations approach the level of art.

In a previous article, we began our ongoing review of sex-scripted furniture such as beds, desks, bath tubs, sofas, hammocks, and the like, but left the whole field of “stand-alone” animations untouched. Yet stand-alone animations—whether a simple set of poseballs or a complete animations engine, a take-along HUD or a specialized device—present some of the most innovative and exciting erotic animation currently being done in SL both in terms of content and style, and sorely deserve a review of their own.

So in this piece, we begin our review of Second Life stand-alone erotic animations. The purpose of the list, as with all our reviews, is to help you find the kind of animations you’re looking for without having to visit vendor after vendor or rely on the dubious reviews in SL Marketplace, and to highlight sources that might be a bit obscure or hard to find, but whose we feel deserve more recognition.

Given the number of animation manufacturers in SL, this will be an ongoing list with constant updates, and even so, the only way this will ever approach any sort of comprehensiveness is with the input of our readers. So we’re counting on you to e-mail us ( Humm.magazine@gmail).com, or send an in-world notecard or IM to Aiden Swain with comments, responses, or mention of their own favorites or duds. We take your opinions as seriously as you do, and Humm’s role is not just to be a source of information, but a forum for discussion and opinion too. We want to be the Wiki for SL sex and love.

So to start the list off, we present a handful of animation sources that we find particularly noteworthy, with the understanding that there’ll be many more to follow. And in a separate piece to be published shortly (we hope), we’ll discuss our own particular biases and ideas regarding erotic animations overall~~~~~~

Notable Stand-Alone Erotic Animation Sources in SL

Bits & Bob’s (http://slurl.com/secondlife//235/129/22/) — Bits and Bob’s does very high quality work and are probably best known for their elegant and sophisticated ballroom dances, which are widely used at most of the best SL ballrooms SL. (They’re the ones who produce the numbered dances: dance 3, dance 4… Up to dance 13 last time we checked). Their work provides some of the best examples in Second Life of avatar animation as Art, and the dances are all graceful, romantic, and highly nuanced and emotionally expressive, even down to the way the avatars hold their fingers. The claim the animations are made on Poser, but it’s hard to believe they’re not motion-capture. But then, maybe they’re better than MoCap

Along with a large inventory of everyday-life animations, Bits & Bob’s also produces some very fine erotica. The elegance, expressiveness, and romantic spirit that infuses their dances shows in their sex animations too, and the sex portrayed is especially loving and tender. They have a wonderful selection of sexy and loving kisses, cuddles, and sex acts, and the loving regard of the avatars clearly comes through. Their well-known Resolution serious comprises 3 generous, looped animations that take the couple from initial kiss to consummation on the floor, and are beautiful and almost hypnotic to watch. We’re not rating animations in this review, but in terms of quality, there’s no doubt that Bits & Bob’s would come out near the top in any list.

On the down side, Bits & Bob’s work is on the high end of the price scale, and as of this writing, they don’t feature any packaged or bundled, HUD-controlled animations. Each animation is basically stand-alone and must be purchased separately, so that if you like their work, in time your home can take on the look of a bowling alley, with pink and blue poseballs everywhere. Nor do they make it especially easy to transfer their animations to a HUD or other mass-storage device. Each ball-set comes with its own set of notecards containing special data, and transferring these contents is not for beginners. The balls are hideable through a simple command, but they’ll all appear and disappear at once.

Naughty Angel & BH Animations  (http://slurl.com/secondlife//201/60/3459/) NABH is making some of the most dramatic and exciting BDSM animations around, selling beds, racks, tables, and other device-based packages. Their animations have a wonderful fluidity and expressiveness you don’t usually see in BDSM work. Their damsels don’t just hang passively from the ropes, they writhe and twist and kick in generously-lengthed loops. Spanks look like spanks, whippings like whippings. The avatars interact to an amazing degree.

Their stuff is heavily RLV-enabled and comes with a special relay distributor. Undressing is accopanied by an animation of the dom actually pulling her clothes off and her alarmed reaction.

We’d purchased a NA&BH and were impressed with the creativity of the poses, but they seemed a little crude and maybe even outlandish, and the names of the individual animations didn’t make a lot of sense, but all that seems to have changed. The bamboo frame we bought is a beautifully expressive and exciting piece of equipment, and the best we’ve yet seen in SL.

Nihil  (http://slurl.com/secondlife//209/181/908/) — As their name suggests, Nihil produces some of the darkest sex animations in SL, featuring rough BDSM and forced sex, violence, capture, and abuse. Their animations are fairly crude and are sometimes no more than a crude back-and-forth. But what they lack in subtlety they make up for in sheer animal energy and raw lust.

Nihil offers single animations and a good number of multi-animation devices, such as prison beds, BDSM gear (crosses, spanking horses, whipping posts, thrones, racks, etc.), and the like, and these are noteworthy because some of them allow for accelerating moods. That is, one device might have a fuck, fast fuck, and deep fuck animations that let you express increasing excitement and passion. We at HUMM firmly believe that the primary function of sex animations is the communication of feeling, and accelerating-mood animations in a single package is one of the best ways of doing this.

Nihil’s packages are easily and extensively modifiable to accommodate different facial features, new animations, sounds, etc. and are quite robust. They also make portable carpets that can be put down away from home for rough sex play.

Sweet Slow Animations — As of this writing, Sweet Slow has apparently closed. We’re listing them anyway in the hopes that the closing is temporary or that someone will take over because their work, especially their dances, are wonderful  In fact we first came across Sweet Slow’s work through their dances at the Intimate Romance Garden, which, for our money, has the best romantic dancing menu in SL, bar none. Working our way through their dance card, we found ourselves doing a series of numbered dances of such increasing heat and eroticism that by the time we got to number 7, we had to leave and head for home: pure hip-grinding, thigh-rubbing, incandescent heat. When we recovered, we had to find the ballroom’s owner and find out who made these dances!

Sweet Slow is (was, regrettably) a small operation and didn’t have a lot of animations — 7 dances, some kissing and foreplay and cuddling and a bit of BDSM — but what they did have is just wonderful. We can only hope that they’ll rise again.

Sylva’s Animation Factory (http://slurl.com/secondlife//132/129/501/)– Sylva’s supplier a lot of animations to some of SL’s best erotic builders but also sells retail, and they maintain a huge selection of material, all of it of the highest quality. Their selection of erotic animations is vast and covers most sexual genres, from vanilla to gay, BDSM, Gor, groups, etc. They also sell device-based packages like beds and other sex furniture, and in keeping with their image as a full-service supplier and clearinghouse, they also sell the work of other animators (Raymations, for example), and feature all sorts of aids and freebies and information. Their freebie AO’s should not be overlooked.

Their animations are superb in both content and execution, and if they’re just a shade below Bits & Bob’s in terms of nuance and elegance, Sylva’s makes up for it by imbuing their animations with more raw energy and edginess, which gives their work more passion and excitement and sheer erotic heat. Sylva’s also offer a wide variety of different animation packages for different genres, and go out of their way to make transfer of their stuff to mass organizers easy and straightforward. You can even just buy one of their engines and drop it into any script-enabled piece of furniture or object you want, and so make a sex rug or shoe or sex flowerpot or sex anything. Their technical support is excellent, and they do all they can to help their customers as quickly and attentively as possible.

If Bits & Bob’s has the feel of an art studio, Sylva’s feels more like what they claim to be: a big, efficient, service-oriented factory of the highest quality. Their sim even has the look of a big, maze-like factory, and is most definitely worth exploring.

TenderLove   http://slurl.com/secondlife//177/232/22/    You can’t discuss creativity in erotic animations and not mention TenderLove, who make the TenderLove system, which is radically different from any other animation system and in a class by itself. TenderLove’s goal was to make a system in which both lovers could control the action through their own HUDs, and thereby respond and react to each other. The way they accomplish this technically is beyond us, but it works wonderfully, and the results are fantastic. TenderLove is able to convey both the tenderness of love-making as well as its accelerating passion and the union of climax in a most impressive way.

There’s a price to pay for this kind of control, though. Set up seems strange and fussy at first, especially with a partner unfamiliar with it who just expects to jump on a poseball and go at it. First the man (traditionally. It could be the woman too. We’ll call it ‘he’ here for clarity) rezzes a poseball to a bed or the floor. He sits on the ball and is immediately given a HUD, which he wears and which appears in the upper left corner of the screen. At that point the woman’s  poseball appears, and when she climbs on, she’s given her own HUD as well. Now, either partner can initiate or control the action by using their own HUD, while their partner responds appropriately.

The animations themselves are wonderful, caring yet passionate, and span the whole drama of lovemaking, from initial embrace though kissing and holding, touching, oral, missionary and variations, and rear-entry and woman-on-top. And what’s almost as remarkable as the dual control is the grace and fluidity or the transitions from one animation to another. The lovers actually get to their knees before they lie down. The man gets between the woman’s legs before he enters her. They turn themselves over so she can get on top, He slides down her body prior to oral. It’s a beautiful and mesmerizing display.

TenderLove is especially popular with couples seeking a more natural-seeming and intimate expression of love, which can appeal to people who don’t care for traditional animations. The initial offering had some problems with robustness (the odd set-up sequence led to difficulties), and avatar positioning was slow and awkward. But the newest version seems to have overcome all that, and TenderLove provides free updates for life. TenderLove is an impressive accomplishment, and we hope to see more use of this concept of shared control.

VAW –  (http://slurl.com/secondlife//85/220/35/) Visual Art Works sells erotic furniture and devices, single animations, and even offers a line of body parts. But what we like best is their packaging. They specialize in what they call multi-speed animations which allow you to stay on the same set of poseballs yet express increasing levels of excitement just by clicking on your keyboard. Other vendors make multi-speeds but VAW’s seem to be the best. They don’t change merely the speed, but the animations themselves, and so we see the avatars get more carried away and passionate as we go up, or less so as we go down, making VAW’s multi-speeds more than just something you watch. They’re a powerful way of communicating desire and emotion in the most immediate and graphic terms, and since at Humm we believe the prime use of erotic animations is for communication, we wish more animators would adopt this technology. The results can be amazingly hot and affecting.

VAW has a has a fairly wide selection of kisses and cuddles, but their multi-speed sets definitely concentrate on forced and aggressive sex. They’re not as dark and purely S/M as Nihil, but they’re definitely not for the moonlight-and-roses crowd. Sex against a wall, pushing and groping, dominance and submission are the rule.

VAW offers several HUD-controlled bundles of their multi-speeds, including a take-along device called the Animtron. The Animtron is a free-floating HUD represented by an icon on your screen, and it will rez poseballs for any of the included animations anywhere scripts are allowed, making it entirely portable and useable almost anywhere. The version we tested (SX4) had some quirks, but they were more than made up for by the power and capability of the device.

VAW also makes an interesting unit called the Predator, which supposedly makes it possible to grab another avatar without him or her complying by wearing any enabling device or relay. In other words, you can assault anyone. In practice though, we had major positioning problems with the Predator, and often ending up kissing the back of our target’s head or hugging empty air.

Packaging aside, VAW animations are very good and some of the sexiest we’ve seen, multi-speed or plain. Even vanilla lovers should profit by visiting their showroom.

To Be Continued…

Introduction –Welcome to HUMM Magazine

Welcome to HUMM – The Journal of Second Life Love and Sex.

HUMM is the magazine that deals with those subjects that most concern us all in the virtual world —  Relationships, Love, and Sex. At HUMM we take these things seriously. We know our  avatars are pixels and the things we do no more than cartoons, but we believe the feelings and emotions we take from Second Life are real. Not the same as REAL LIFE, but REAL  just the same.  At HUMM Magazine, our aim is to give people and avatars the ability, understanding, and opportunity to maximize their sexual and affectional Second Life experiences, no matter what they may be. If it has to do with love, sex, and relationships, HUMM will cover it. This is what we’re all about.

Note that HUMM is NOT just another Second Life beef- and cheesecake mag. We’re NOT going to be a collection of fashion-spread photos and insipid filler articles. We focus on issues of sex and love —  what it is, what it means, how it works, why it happens, where you find it, how you do it. how it goes wrong. We examine the emotions involved, the psychology, the techniques and trends, as well as providing nuts-and-bolts how-to information and reviews of Second Life products relevant to our cause. We’re starting small, but our goal is nothing less than to become the complete and indispensible Handbook, Guide, Instruction Manual, and Journal of Record regarding the adult side of Second Life.

And ALL THIS without the hassle and limitations of the usual SL magazine format. No need to sign up for anything or lay out any L$’s. No waiting for an issue to come out, or for deliveries, or for low-content pages to rez. HUMM is a WEBSITE, all content accessible at any time, any place, and absolutely free to all.

Right now in our current version you can read a review of the most popular sex beds and how they differ in quality and value in our SEX BED REVIEW. There’s an examination of what cyber love is in terms of the real world in Part I of LOVE & SEX IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD. There’s sizzling SL-themed erotic fiction concerning a strange sexual encounter with an alt in ILLANA: A SECOND LIFE LOVE STORY. In our INTERVIEW WITH A GENDER-SWITCHER, we talk to a RL man who presents as an SL woman and find  out why he does it (you’d be surprised), and get his advice on how to keep from getting fooled yourself. You can read true stories of the bizarre things people do to get their needs met in our regular occurring TALES FROM THE FRONT. And you can pick up some good cautionary information in HOW TO BE A SL TERRIBLE LOVER. And that’s just a start.

HUMM is constandly updating, and currently looking to increase staff — writers, web-designers, content creators, graphic designers…. If you’re interested, send an IM or NC to Aiden Swain in Second Life. Lets explore together…

How To Be A Terrible SL Lover

How to be a Terrible SL Cyberlover

©Humm Magazine March 3, 2011

Okay. Let’s say you’ve already taken care of the preliminaries. You’ve got your stock SL body adjusted for maximum sexiness: for women, boobs and legs at 100%, the rest of you as skinny as you can make her. For men: shoulders and muscularity likewise maxed out , over a tiny wasp waist with no ass, and your Av as big as you can possibly make him, because you know women find that lummox-on-steroids look absolutely irresistible. You’ve got on your found-in-the-gutter  freebie hair–for women, that shapeless Lego-like blob, preferably in red; for men, either He-Man shoulder-length locks or the newer, urban-hip, close-to-the-skull brown fuzz that makes you look like your head’s been flocked. You’re wearing your new sexy threads that look like they’re painted on because they are, and you’ve got that Super-Noobie spastic-bird-walking-into-the-wind gait down pat. You’re ready. It’s time for some hot, bad SL cybersex.

Wait! Not so fast there, Mr. Resident! Men–do you have one of those enormous, 18-inch erections that stands straight out and looks like a Pringle’s can with a Bermuda onion jammed on the end? You’ll need one, and you can usually get them free at the kind of place you’re headed for. They come in a range of colors, from Cadaver Gray to Inflammation Red.

Women, you’re luckier. You’ve already got boobs, and you really don’t need a vagina. No one’s really sure just where that Pringle’s can thing goes anyhow, and close is good enough.

Okay! Preload your chat translator with, “How r u? Want have sex w/ me?”  and let’s teleport over to Sleazy Sex Land and get it on!

But before we do, let’s take a moment to go over a few simple items that will help guarantee that the SL sexual experience we’re about to have will be as shallow, dull, silly, and meaningless as we can possibly make it. Let’s take a moment to read Humm Magazine’s own:

How to be a Terrible SL Cyberlover

Tip #1: It’s All About the Animations, Stupid! Terrible cyberlovers all agree: once you’ve maneuvered your partner onto a pose ball, your duties as a lover are pretty much over. You can just sit back and watch those Avi’s go at it for minutes, hours, days, even, because the real pleasure in SL sex comes not from sharing any real human feelings or emotions with the person behind the other Av, but from silently watching badly-rendered cartoon images engage in cheap, repetitious dumb-show animations meant to resemble various forms of human sexual activity. Women especially enjoy these crude simulations, since it’s well known that women much prefer their sex to be visual and mechanical and devoid of any distracting expressions of emotion or affection.

Remember too that the quality of the animations hardly matters. The worst animations will have the same semblance to real sex as Navy semaphore has to Romantic poetry, but so what? The better animations will be more nuanced and detailed and provide a much more enhanced feeling of emotional connection and intimacy with your partner if you’re not careful, but don’t be fooled. If what we wanted was connection and intimacy, we’d be doing Real Life sex and not sitting alone with some stranger who was untold miles away, silently masturbating to cartoon sex.

Tip # 2: Avoid Showing Any Emotion. Remember that you’re just there to watch your avatar rub his or her gonads with those of your partner and not to share any sort of emotion or feelings of closeness.  So be careful to avoid saying or doing anything that might be seen as showing any sort of awareness or recognition of the human being behind the other Av.  This could ruin the purity of the cybersexual experience and possibly even result in your making emotional contact with another person!  Ick!

And once again, remember that if we wanted actual emotional involvement, we’d be playing Zynngo and not doing SL sex, right? So you want to just shut up and let your avatar’s gonads do the talking.

Tip #3: If You Have To Say Something, Keep It Bland. If the urge to communicate is just too strong to resist, make sure you keep all feeling out of it. You don’t want to say or do anything that might result in actual connection with your partner, or that even acknowledges the fact that you’re having sex with them. Keep things bland, unemotional, objective, and general.  You don’t want them to feel like they’re anything special.

Something like, “Im fucking u so hard!” is good, because it describes only what anyone can already see.  ”Ur pussy feels good” is also a good choice, because most pussies feel good so you’re not telling her anything new, and because most women are deeply concerned as to whether their pussies feel bad during sex. Many women, in fact, have sex solely to find out how their pussies feel.

For women, the easiest way to achieve Bad Cyberloverhhood is to just not say or do anything at all. Nada. Just go limp. Let the animations do the work. Go to the kitchen and get a diet coke and some Fritos or search your inventory for that gown you lost. Cam around and do some shopping or IM some friends. Bad Cyberlovers everywhere admire a partner who doesn’t move or respond or even acknowledge that he or she is having sex, and women are especially suited for this, having been blessed by the gods of Gender Stereotyping with a natural passivity and the ability to lapse into a minor coma during sex.

If you just have to respond, girls, try repeating, “Mmmm” or “Oooo” to everything he does. Even better, take it into Third Person and describe those meaningless vocalizations by emoting, as in, “[Your Avatar's Name Here] moans softly…” Do this enough times and he might just get bored with you and leave, and bad SL sex doesn’t get much badder than that!

Tip #4: Make Sure You Use All The Animations Available. Bad cyberlovers know that it’s the quantity, not the quality, that matters. Boob size, penis length, number of orgasms, sure– we all know those are about quantity. But let’s not forget the number of animations in our sex beds and furniture! You want as many as possible, and you want to make sure you use them all every time you have sex. You don’t want to sell your partner short!

The recommended procedure is to just “run the menu.” Just start with whatever animations seems closest to your idea of foreplay and click them all just as they appear on the HUD menu, one right after another.  Those manufacturers have given a lot of thought to their menu layouts to make sure all the activates and positions are laid out in a logical, orderly fashion, and even if going from a tender cuddle to anal rape doesn’t make much sense to you, trust them and their extensive market research!

One or two seconds of each animation is all you need to get the general message before you move on to the next one, so keep it moving and keep it lively!

Tip #5: Ignore Your Partner’s Responses. Occasionally you’ll get a partner who doesn’t know the basics of bad cybersex and will try to tell you what he or she likes or doesn’t like as you’re flipping through your animations. Ignore these buttinskys and their pesky interruptions! If they really knew what was good, they wouldn’t be in bed with you in the first place, would they?  So don’t pay any attention to them.

Remember: bad cybersex is all about pleasing yourself, not your partner, so don’t let yourself get distracted. In fact, if you don’t mind fucking a gray outline, just put them on Mute! No awkward goodbyes afterward!

Tip #6: Monopolize the Lovemaking. Nothing impresses a partner with what a great lover you are like taking charge of the lovemaking from the beginning and just bombarding them with non-stop action, from start to finish. Show off your sexual athleticism, creativity, and incredible sensitivity by totally monopolizing the sex  and turning your partner into nothing more than a passive audience for your awe-inspiring display of erotic know-how!

You’ll need some nimble typing fingers for this, but if you’re at least decent and if you follow Tip #5 (above) about ignoring your partner’s responses, you should be able to smother them pretty handily under a no-letup barrage of your own attentiveness and concern, never letting them get a word or action in edgewise and  thus making them totally irrelevant to your own display of cybersexual  fireworks.

Tip #7: Insist on Orgasm! To paraphrase coaching great Vance Lambruski (or whoever it was), “Orgasm isn’t the most important thing, it’s the only thing!” Bad SL lovers take note! Nothing else matters if you don’t make your lover cum. Nothing! It’s all about the O’s! No one cares about the X’s.

This is one spot where we bad cyberlovers don’t want to put ourselves first. Of course we’re going to get ours, no question about it, but it’s her (or him) we’re talking about now. It doesn’t matter if she says she doesn’t need to orgasm, or that it was beautiful as it was, or that she’s more than satisfied, or that her RL husband’s coming home or her kids need the computer or anything else. She’s lying! She really wants that Screamer!  And unless you give it to her, you’ll always be nothing but a two-minute man.

So how do you do it? Easy: just keep doing her: screwing her,  eating her, or whatever else you were doing, and don’t stop till she screams Uncle!!! or something else with a hell of a lot of exclamation points. It doesn’t matter how long it takes or whether she objects, has to go, or even logs off. Just keep going, full out, fast as you can.

Remember: no one likes a quitter!

Tip #8: Keep Your Descriptions Detailed and Impersonal. Men and women both love highly detailed and dispassionate descriptions of what you’re doing to then. For instance, men need to know exactly just how many times, how fast, and in what direction you swirl your tongue on the head of their cocks during oral sex. It’s critical to them! And women are the same way when it comes to cunnilingus. They want a dry, detailed, very clinical anatomical explanation of just what their lover’s doing to them, and the longer the better; 3 or 4 lines, at least. If you don’t include details on your treatment of both the labia majora and minora as well as your plans for her Skene’s Glands and clittoral fundus, then she’s just not going to get aroused.

And keep it clinical! Keep it objective and keep emotion out of it! He’s more interested in knowing the exact frequency and part of your tongue with which you stimulate his frenulum than he is in knowing how it excites you having him in your mouth.

We all know there’s nothing quite as sexually exciting as a medical textbook, so take a tip from them and brush up on your anatomy.

Tip #9: Go Omniscient! If your partner’s not quite holding up his or her end, don’t hesitate to step in and tell them what they’re feeling  or doing as you see it. “U cant stop cumming as I fuck you again and again” will sometimes jump-start their appreciation for what’s going on.  ”U gasp and fall to ur knees as u c my big dick!!!” is another way to gently nudge the clueless beginner into what her proper behavior should be, in your opinion.

Woman can profit from this tip every bit as much as men, too, and maybe even more, given that they don’t often get to control the action and so are usually reduced to just talking about it. “U lunge at me and miss as I dance away like a beautiful fairy, laughing in ur stupid face!” will sometimes work to awaken the oblivious dullard to the charms of the coy and elusive minx he’s dealing with.

Economy Lo-Prim Sex Bed

Economy Lo-Prim Sex Bed

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Verbier/18/24/121/?title=Stonehenge/Prim%20Economy

Forget the modest and unassuming name of this sex bed. Forget that it’s made by an obscure, off-the-map manufacturer. In our opinion, the  Economy Lo-Prim Sex Bed  is far and away the best sex bed we’ve yet run across in Second Life, and at L$4000, is one terrific deal.

In terms of sheer number of animations, range and creativity of activities, overall animation quality, and value for the money, the Economy Lo-Prim Sex Bed is in a class by itself. If you look at a sex bed as an instruments for achieving erotic effect, then the Economy Lo-Prim Sex Bed is a veritable symphony orchestra at your fingertips. After over a year of heavy and regular use, we’re still discovering features and animations that surprise us, and still enjoying it just as much as when we first bought it.

What makes this bed so great? First of all, it’s got a huge number of animations. So many, in fact, that we’re not even going to try to count them all as we usually do in these reviews. There’s just too many  to cover in a reasonable amount of time; menus within menus within menus of stuff. We’ll give you an overview and let you take it from there. We’ll just say there are lots and lots of animations.

Secondly, these are not cheesy, throw-away animations of the common back-and-forth variety. For the most part, these are first-quality, state-of-the-art  animations from studios like Sylva and Raymaker, animations that sell individually for L$160 – L$300. To those in the know, Sylva and Raymaker are recognized as two of the finest animators in all of Second Life. Their work is smooth, subtle, sophisticated, and erotic, and complete with facial animations.

As for range of activity, the Economy Lo-Prim Sex Bed has it all and then some. Regular lovemaking is covered from initial romantic dance and first kiss up through foreplay, sex, and final cuddles and sleep. The Main Menu also provides access to submenus for Solo, MF, FF, MM, Group, Fetish, Massage, Fun, and (non-animated) Textures. But that simple list gives no hint of the richness and depth that lies within.

You expect a lot of sex in MF and you get it (see below), but choose FF, say , an activity that usually isn’t that well-represented in most beds, and you don’t just get a typical menu of 6-8 lesbian animations, but a subsubmenu with buttons for  FFCuddles (9 animations), Dance (4), FF69 (4), FFOral (11), Spank (4), FFsex (5), and Ladyfingers (6 animations). Granted, some of these animations (notably Dance and Spank) are duplicates  of actions accessible through other menus, but most are original for FF. The repertoire for MM is just as rich.

Let’s concentrate on MF: Click on that and you bring up a subMenu with choices for Cuddles, Dance, Foreplay, Oral, MF Sex, Breakfast, Spank, and MF Sequences. This last MF Sequences Button gives access to 9 long-duration linked animation scenes, each of them beautifully realized. Dance, Foreplay, and Breakfast lead to single submenus with multiple animations, but under Cuddles you’ll find 50 animations in 5 submenus arranged according to position, Standing, Sitting, Kneeling, Lying, and Sleepy for 2, more cuddles than anyone could reasonably use in the course of a relationship. Clicking on MF Sex, gives access to 7 submenus containing 48 beautiful sex animations, again arranged by position:  Horizontal, Kneel Sex, Sit Sex, FromBehind, F on Top, StandSex and Hand.  Included in the Kneel Sex submenu is one animation that’s multi-speed, controlled by user. This unusual feature shows up in several other menus too.

Mere lists of menus can’t really describe the delights and surprises this bed affords, though. I have a top-line “BDSM bed” by another manufacturer. It has 12 BDSM animations, mostly of the back-and-forth kind.

But choose BDSM from the Fetish menu on the Economy Lo-Prim Sex Bed, and you get 3 subMenus, Bound, Dom, and Domme. Dom and Domme contain 9 and 7 animations respectively, but Bound takes you to a subsubmenu comprising eight more 3^rd level menus in which your sub is tied, stretched, spanked, whipped, fucked, violated, and loved in a chair, on a table, against a wall, or on a post : ChairBoundSolo (2 animations), ChairBoundSex (5 animations), PostBoundSolo (3), PostBoundSex (9), SoloWallBound (14), WallBoundSex (3), SoloTableBound (2), and TableBoundSex (6).

Altogether, and not counting the buttons for obtaining a free set of Bright Cuffs, a whip, paddle, and vibrator, that’s 60 BDSM animations! And the chair, wall, post, and table that rez as props with these animations are impressive in their own right, creating an instant dungeon space in your bedroom. And all this from a bed comprising 3 prims!

We should also mention the other choices available under Fetish on the main menu. The choices are BDSM, Medical, Foot, Vampire, Spank, and Tickle, not your everyday fetishes. The Vampire menu especially is quite rich and multi-level.

We could go on, but really, a word to the wise should be sufficient. This is a fantastic bed, and can take the place of thousands of L$’s of specializ equipment.

We should mention that the bed runs on the robust and easy-to-use Xpose V.8 engine, is 100% Xcite compatible, and comes in three models: a low-prim king size, a canopied Steampunk, and as part of a bedroom set.

This is one bed you really should check out. We don’t hand out ratings or stars here at Humm, but if we did…

Illana: A Second Life Love Story

There’s nothing like the breakup of a relationship to make you do a little soul searching and reconsider your approach to love and sex, and that’s pretty much what I was doing the night I met Illana. I mean, I’m not trying to make excuses for what happened or sweep it under the rug, but I do want you to have some understanding of my state of mind and where I was at the night we met.  Yet another SL love affair had crashed, rolled, and burned on me, and this one quite painfully, and I didn’t know what I was going to do: give up on SL lover, leave Second Life altogether, or somehow try to reinvent myself with a new Av and a new approach to the whole thing. I didn’t know, but I had to do something radical. These failed relationships had become a regular habit and I was sick of it. In the world of imagination that was Second Life, there had to be a better way, and meanwhile I was putting the whole relationship thing on hold until I found it.

That’s what I was doing that night at Frank’s, thinking about SL and what it all meant, standing back by  the meet-rack with the other wallflowers and just observing, reading profiles and idly camming the crowd, not really looking for anyone at all. All the women were beautiful; all the women were sexy, but how do you tell who might be right for you? The profiles tell you next to nothing, except that no one seems to want any drama, which generally means they don’t want any of your drama but they expect you to put up with theirs.  I was just thinking how it’s better to not get involved when I saw her standing there and she took my breath away: Illana Doubledare. The name suited her.

She was beautiful and she knew it, but it wasn’t the studied, self-conscious beauty of a model  and she wasn’t flaunting it the way SL models do.  (Not that I have anything against SL models. It’s just that I prefer women who are as interested in me as they are in themselves.) She just seemed quite aware of what she offered to men and not ashamed of it.

She was, in other words, desirable, that indefinable mix of beauty and sexuality that makes you want her and want her badly, that tells you know she’d be an unforgettable lover, maybe even a once-in-a-lifetime thing. She stood out from the rest of the women like a tiger lily in a violet patch– long, wild, honey-blonde hair cascading over an angel’s face, its innocence belied by a pair of knowing, smoldering womanly eyes and a mouth made for sin. She was wearing a simple but elegant long black gown with a daringly low back that showed off her figure amazingly well, and all the curves and protuberances of divine womanhood were abundantly clear. Around her neck was  a simple blue stone that matched her earrings and drew attention to the real adornment of the dress: a bodice cut so low that just the barest sliver of nipple was visible, and when she moved a certain way, her skirt would part just enough to reveal a long, lethal, leg clad in a smoky black stocking, all the way up to the black garters stretched tight against her creamy white thigh.

I was amazed, but then, it never ceases to amaze me. You know they’re just pixels, just numbers and patterns and textures, but somehow certain avatars seem to take on a soul and a character of their own, and you can read their personalities right on their faces, right through the pixels and the AO’s and everything else. You can almost see their thoughts and feel their desires, sometimes even feel the yielding softness and warmth of their lips and bodies. That’s how Illana Doubledare was for me, like a spell I couldn’t escape.

But I wasn’t going to get involved, I reminded myself. No relationships, no sex, no nothing till I figured all this out and felt in control of things again. That’s what my rational self said, the sensible little angel on my right shoulder.  But the not-sensible one, the little devil on my left shoulder, started jabbing me with his pitchfork and telling me not to be an idiot. The woman was hot and amazing and I might never get a chance like this again. Go for it. Take a chance. Stop trying to figure everything out.

He had a point. Maybe I’d been too analytical and rational in my approach to women. Maybe what I needed was to throw caution to the wind and jump right in, live for the moment and take a chance.

Still, I held back, thinking she might just be too much for me.  I was actually afraid to talk to her, intimidated by such aggressive femininity, and apparently I wasn’t the only one. There was a little dead space around her, a little buffer zone devoid of anyone where Illana stood posing and preening with one of the sexiest AO’s I’d ever seen, thrusting out her tits like a cat in heat looking for something to rub against. The men all stood some ways back, the twitchings and jerkings of their AO’s making them look awkward and uncertain, and though I stood some distance away, I was no better.

But then when I went to read her profile, my Av automatically turned to face her directly, and she either noticed it, or she had Look-see on. In any case, I was busted.

“Aren’t you dancing, Mr. Nightwatch?” she IM’d. ” It might help your broken heart.”

I’d forgotten: I’d put the pain of my breakup in my profile where it was there for everyone to see. I don’t know why; it was a self-indulgent, idiotic move, but she’d apparently read it, and now this impossibly gorgeous woman was IMing me, deliberately opening a conversation.

I frantically called up her profile to try and get a feel for what I was dealing with, cursing the lag. She seemed normal enough: young, maybe three months old, so obviously someone had helped her get fitted out for her to have an Av like that. Her SL said, “I’m wild and free and ready for adventure. Seek to meet well-mannered, intelligent gentlemen who appreciate a woman’s sensuality. No noobs or boobs or walking penises please.”

Nothing about a boyfriend, nothing about looking for the love of her life or a long-term partner. Not even anything about shopping and dancing and not wanting drama. The groups she had listed were the usual girly lot: clothes stores, ballrooms, jazz clubs, hair places, a few promising X-rated sims, but nothing really kinky or anything to suggest she was an escort on the prowl.

“I’d love to dance, but only if you’ll dance with me,” I IMed back. “Would you? Feel free to choose the dance.”

“I’d like that,” she said. “But you choose, please. I like for the man to choose. I like a man who takes charge. *smile*”

Alright.

Indeed!

The little devil jumped up and down for joy and the little angel slinked away as I awkwardly threaded my way out onto the busy dance floor, looking for a decent set of pose balls because I knew the Intan would take forever to deliver with this crowd and I dreaded standing there awkwardly while we waited. I passed up a #3 and a #13. The 3′s just too intimate,  and the 13 is that uncomfortable dance where you press your asses together–not what I wanted to expose her to. I found a #6–just the right blend of grace and cautious seduction. A good getting-to-know-you dance with some sexual overtones, it was just what I wanted. I turned and waited for her to walk out onto the dance floor–Frank’s famous checkerboard where so many games are played out.

“Wonderful,” she said when I took her in my arms. “You can tell a lot about a man by the dance he chooses.”

“Oh? And what does this one say about me?”

I was holding her close so I could feel her thighs moving against mine. My cam was placed so that, when we dipped, I could see right down her body to the two aggressive mounds of her tits straining against the bodice of her gown. They cried out for my hands, my mouth, my teeth.

“Passionate,” she said. “But sensitive to the needs of a lady. The best kind of lover.”

I would have blushed had I been capable of it. Instead I just smiled. “And you can tell all that from the dance I picked? “

“I cheated, Mr. Nightwatch. I read your profile. I studied your avatar. You can tell a lot by a man’s style, and I’m an excellent observer, and I get to do a lot of it.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“I’m not sure,” she replied. “I suppose I’m just not that popular. I don’t get asked to dance that much, though I’m not sure why.”

I smiled at her. “Perhaps you intimidate men. That often happens with unusually beautiful women.”

She looked at me with those glowing cat eyes. “Why, thank you Mr. Nightwatch,” she said.

“Archie, please.”

“Alright–Archie. Then you must call me Illana.”

“Your profile says three weeks old. You seem a lot more experienced than that.”

“Do I?” she smiled. “Well, I was here before, but that was some time ago, Everything’s changed.”

I nodded.  “Unhappy love affair? Or did real life get too busy?”

“Let’s just call it an unhappy affair and leave it at that, please. We’re here together now and that’s what’s important. Let’s just say I learned my lesson about love and commitment in Second Life.”

I was cautious about pressing her, but she seemed to be expecting it. “And what was that?”

She stared at me a moment, then said, “You’ve got to go for what you while the desire is fresh. Whatever it is. No excuses, no apologies. SL is where we come to live our dreams, and dreams don’t need excuses.  They don’t need apologies.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “And what are your dreams, Illana?”

She smiled. “Why are most of us here? To get what we don’t get in Real Life.”

Her beauty, her desirability, made me bold. “And what is that for you?”

She was silent for a while, and then her text appeared on my screen.  “Love,” she said. “Romance. Passion.  I don’t get to come here much, so when I do, I want to make the most of it. I get impatient with extended courtships and long dances. As I said, I don’t get asked to dance that much. I don’t have as many chances for love as you might think.”

The way she said it, I could just hear the italics.

“Oh?” I replied. My heart was racing. “Well, that’s a shame.”

“Yes. Isn’t it?” She grinned knowingly at me.

The emote said she was stroking the back of my neck with her long, manicured fingers, and I could just about feel it in real life too. This woman was incredibly sexy and was clearly coming on to me. My owner’s cock began to harden along with mine.

We danced for a bit longer while I tried to think of something to say. Some Nat King Cole was playing, I think. I’m not really sure. But this was when almost all you heard at Frank’s was Nat King Cole.

“Illana Doubledare presses her body against you and looks deep into your eyes,” she emoted. “Illana Doubledare leans her head against your hard chest.”

I had to take a chance. She was wearing a backless gown that scooped down so low you could see the top of her crack.

“Archie Nightwatch lowers his hand to the small of your back,” I wrote. “Then lower…lower… Till his fingers slide teasingly into the crease of your buttocks.”

I’d made a few typos because my owner’s hands were shaking  a little, but the gist of the message was clear. It seemed like an eternity as I waited for her response.

“Illana Doubledare moans softly,” I read. ” Illana Doubledare presses her hips against yours and grinds softly, wanting more of you.”

Bingo!

“Archie Nightwatch lets you feel his growing erection.”

“Illana Doubledare sighs and presses her hard nipples into your chest.”

Whew! I was getting dizzy. This girl was hot!

“Do you have a place here?” I asked casually. “A home in Second Life?”

Illana pouted. “No. I used to, but I let it go when I left. I was gone for quite a bit. Do you? “

“Oh yes. I have a nice little beach house in the sky. Very private, with dances and some very nice pose balls, everything we might want. My bachelor pad.” I smiled.

“Mmm, that sounds lovely,” she purred. “Maybe someday you could show it to me?”

“I’d love to. In fact, maybe you’d like to see it now, Illana. We could dance there in private.”

“That would be nice, Archie. The lag in Frank’s is so bad…”

“You know, you’re right.” I said, acting as if I’d never noticed it before. “This is terrible. Like trying to dance in molasses. And every two seconds we go out of synch. Let’s go to my place. I’ll TP you.”

“Alright Archie. I’d like that.”

“Good. Standing up…”

I tried to warn her, but in usual SL fashion my attempts at a graceful exit proved futile and instead I leaped into the air and landed on her head, totally blowing my attempt to be cool. But I was already banging on Control Shift H, hoping it would work and dreading the Sinatra Time Warp that so often left avatars stranded there or stuck halfway through the floor. The screen blanked and I was headed somewhere.

It wasn’t home, though. I was lost in teleport space, black as pitch, anxiously watching the white progress bar creep millimeter by millimeter from left to right. I prayed to the Linden gods for them to contact my new region before I crashed, but I could see things weren’t going to go my way. Sure enough, that old familiar “Unable to teleport” notice came up, and I ended up in Frank’s basement. Floating in the air and waving my arms.

Two more tries and a restart later, I finally arrived at my place, worried I might have lost her.

“Crashed,” I told her, and nervously sent her the TP. I counted the seconds, holding my breath, but then  her cloud of light appeared near my ceiling, followed by those fantastic legs, and then she was there, standing with her back to me, rezzing. As she was rezzing, I was doing my best to set all my furniture back to decent animations. There’s nothing worse than inviting a woman to join you on a soda or loveseat only to find you’d left it in the middle of some horribly perverse sexual act, so she starts humping away or sucking as soon as she lands on it.

“Come here, Illana. The dances are on the patio.”

She followed me out and I took her in my arms and felt those soft, ripe tits press against my chest and she hummed with pleasure. I wasted no time, going straight to the #3, and I took every opportunity to press my lips against the side of her neck as we danced, feeling the warmth of her skin and the gentle throb of her pulse. She was delicious and responsive, moaning and letting me feel her hot breath in my ear, melting into my embrace.

Her arms were around my neck and she was clinging to me as if she could hardly stand. When I turned my face to hers I found her mouth waiting, willing, and open. She didn’t object when my tongue slid between her lips, just sighed into my mouth and opened them wider, letting me have anything I wanted. My hand went to one firm and heavy breast and caressed it, and Illana pressed it into my hand and met my tongue with hers. I put my hands on her buttocks and pressed her into me so she could feel what she was doing to me.

“Ohhh, yes…” She moaned hotly into my mouth and ground her pelvis right back against me, sucking on my tongue as if showing me what her pussy was going to do to my cock. The dance was forgotten. The music was forgotten. We just stood there and ground against each other as if we were going to fuck right through our clothes.

“Come on,” I said. “Come on. Let’s get into bed.”

Illana unzipped and let the gown slide to her feet. She kept her shoes and stockings and underwear on, which gave her a wanton, whorish look that made my blood pound. The contrast between that gorgeous angel face and that ripe, fecund body now so blatantly dressed for sex was almost more than I could handle, and she knew exactly what effect she was having on me. Before I could get her into the bedroom she sank down on her knees and rubbed her hand over the all-too obvious bulge in my pants as if it was something sacred, a miracle she wanted to worship. Her lips parted expectantly and she looked up at me in willing submission, begging for me to slide my prick into her mouth.

“God baby! Not here, not yet. Come on, let’s get in bed!”

She got to her feet and walked past me, and she was already on the pink poseball while I was still getting my tux off. I’d set the bed so the first position would be a cuddle–a nice way to start, I’d thought–but Illana was on fire and apparently had no patience for that, and when I climbed on my poseball and clicked on the mattress to change animations, I found she’d taken control of the bed.

What the hell, I thought. Let her have her fun. If she’s hungry enough that she wants to control the bed and what I do to her, that’s fine with me. I love women who know what they want, and Illana seemed to know exactly what she wanted. By the time I settled into my poseball, she was all over me, sucking and slurping at where my dick should be but wasn’t yet because I hadn’t had time to put it on. I was clicking frantically at the penis HUD trying to get my erection going, while she was on her belly, her head and hands bobbing up and down over the place my dick should have been, too excited to wait.

Finally my cock appeared and grew to respectable length and Illana hummed in pleasure as it filled her mouth. She sucked me wildly, like she had a tornado inside that would sweep up everything in its path, slaving and slavering over me till the saliva dripped down my shaft from the corners of those gorgeous lips and the wet sucking sounds and her frenzied moans filled the room.

I’d never seen a woman turn on so fast, and every time I tried to take control of the bed I found she was already there ahead of me, putting us into one blow job position after another as if she just couldn’t get enough.

“Hey! Easy, easy!” I complained. “Make it last, Illana. We’ve got time.”

“Oh God! Sorry! Sorry! I just love to suck your cock. You just taste so good, baby! Please let me!”

“Sure, baby! If that’s what you want…”

I hit the HUD for MOUTHFCK and she flipped over on her back. I landed on her chest, knees on the bed, laced my hands in her long blonde hair and started punching that big dick into her mouth, pushing it in deep and aiming for her the back of her throat. She started to choke and gag but never stopped moaning in pleasure as my big choad plowed into her, in and out, in and out.

“Mmmmph!! Nnnngh!! Schluuuurrpp!! Come, baby! Come! Give it to me! Let me taste you!”

Her wildness was contagious and I gave myself over to it, fucking her hard and deep like she seemed to want. I’d always thought of myself as a kind and considerate lover, concerned about my partner’s comfort and pleasure, but now I was like a lust-crazed  animal, digging my hands into her hair and pumping her head up and back on my thick, steely shaft. She loved it. She loved it like this, and her surrender enjoyment only seemed to make me rougher and more violent.

“Oh, fuck, baby!” I groaned. “You want it? You want it, baby? Get ready for it. Get ready for a nice hot mouthful, Illana, ’cause here it comes…”

That seemed to set her off even more, and she sucked and vacuumed me with reckless abandon, cheeks hollowing, tongue swirling around my dick, begging me to dump it in her mouth.

“Oh yeah, baby! Oh yeah! Here it comes, Illana! Here comes that nice wad of jizz you wanted!”

I pushed my dick deep so that the head lodged against the back of her throat and I felt her glottis close on me as she choked, then chills skated down my spine as I imagined how it would be–that holy explosion, that gushing eruption, the hot, thick, man-gravy blowing down the length of my tube and jetting into the warm, dark, cave of her esophagus as she gulped and groaned, shivered and swallowed, the white sauce spilling out the corners of her mouth.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” I chanted as I imagined emptying my balls into her. On screen the arc of my semen blew out the back of her head and came raining down like pearlescent droplets.

In real life I pushed down my pants and underwear in one tangled ball, spread my legs and leaned back in the chair, slipping my hand between my legs. God, she was gorgeous, and hot as hell. No way I was going to lose the chance for a real life orgasm.

“Doing it!” I typed. “Doing it in RL. Beating off for you, baby! Fisting that big cock!”

“Oh yes!” she moaned. “Do it for me, Archie! God! Yes! I’m doing it for you too, baby! Hand between my legs, down my panties, playing with that wet pussy!”

I used the technique I’d developed in Second Life, using my left hand to pleasure myself, and saving my right for some one-handed typing.

I needed a better visual than the one of her bobbing her head over me, though, so I clicked back to the main screen and chose INTIMATE–>SEX–>MAN ON TOP –> MISSIONARY and watched as we disengaged and rearranged ourselves on the bed, her on her back with her knees up and me lying on top of her, feeding it to her, pumping it away. Her bra and panties came off, just disappeared, and his big tits sloshed on her chest as I pounded into her.

“Ohhhhh…” she moaned. “Yessss…!”

I could just feel that wet pussy grabbing me, resisting me as I pushed my hard dick inside her. Her tissues parted before me like butter before a warm knife as I worked that big cock into her.

She was delicious. She was exquisite, and I couldn’t get enough of her, taking her through one animation after another, starting with missionary position and then going up the scale to holding her ankles in the air, having her wrap her legs around me, flipping her over for some rear entry, then putting her on her back again and pressing her knees up against those big, juicy tits and plunging my big, thick dick deep int her waiting hole.  Everything I did, she loved, the harder the better. And all the time I was doing that on screen, I was masturbating in real life, using my left hand to play with myself, typing the occasional oath or moan with my right.

“Fuck me, baby! Fuck me!” Illana cried as my big dick sluiced in and out of her dripping cunt. “Harder! Faster! Harder! Make me come, baby! I’m close! Close! Fuck me and make me your bitch!”

The things she was saying were driving me crazy and I really wanted to pound it into her harder and faster, but the damned bed I have doesn’t have any speed controls, and all the poses proceeded at the same maddeningly leisurely pace. I suppose the animators thought this made them appear sensitive and sensual, but all it really did was make it frustrating as hell as we watched my ass rocking lazily up and back like a porch glider between the open saddle of her spread legs. What we both wanted was some raw and violent full-body cunt-busting slam-fucking, but there was nothing I could do. To rezz some new pose balls and climb aboard would have ruined the mood, and as it was, I was close in real life.

“Let me fuck you, baby! Let me!” she moaned, and she took the bed again and flipped us over into a woman-on-top position. Her knees were up, her tits bare as she bounced on top of me, taking it deep, deep, not caring how slutty she looked or how loud the obscene, wet,  slapping sounds of flesh against flesh were. She was mad to fuck and I was mad to fuck her.

“Cum baby cum” I typed as I masturbated. “Cum all over me. I’m close, close. Cum w me cum w me cumjkjlllll…..”

And I felt it start, the real one, the real life orgasm, the one that crashed down on me like a big wave and took my breath away and made me shake. I just had time to center the cursor on the CUM button on my cock’s HUD and then it hit.

I slammed my hand down on the keyboard and threw my head back and managed to type, “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” just as I felt that delicious orgasm start to course through my body, making me writhe in pleasure.

I closed my eyes and fell back into the embrace of rhat pleasure, feeling the whole world go dim around me and picturing hot cum spurting out of Archie’s cock and deep into Illana’s lush body, igniting her own raupturous orgasm.

She didn’t disappoint me.

“OOOOOOOOOOO! OOOOOOOOOO! OOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” she typed. There was a pause, and then a crazy hash of letters as she lost control of her body in the throes of an intense female release. I could just imagine Illana’s pussy spasming with pleasure and shooting out her hot, watery girl-cum all over Archie’s big balls till he was dripping with the stuff.

“omg,” I typed when my hands had stopped shaking. “omg omg omg that was so good baby so goooooood!  Was it good baby? Did you cum good?”

“oh wow wiow woqw,” she typed back. “fuck! Wow! came so much! All ovr my balls!”

In my pleasure-numbed state, my brain took a moment to register the words on the screen.

“Balls?”

The pleasure began to drain out of me like an icy tide going out. It was replaced with a cold, empty, sick feeling.

“balls???” I typed again. “BALLS??? WTF???”

Silence from the other keyboard. On the screen, our Av’s still humped away at their calm and leisurely pace.

“WTF??” I typed again. “Why’d you say balls???”

As if I had to ask.

“Are you a dude???”  My hands were still shaking from my orgasm so it came out, “dujde,” but the point was made. “Are you a guy???”

I waited for an answer. If she bolted and ran, I’d know it was true.

“No way!” she shot back. “ur crazy! Do I look like a guy?”

“Why did you say you came all over your balls? Why did you say that?”

“LOL.  Joking! LOL. LOLOL!!!!! Joke!!!”"

I sat there staring at the screen, feeling kind of numb.

“typo,” she said. “my =YOUR* I came all ovr UR balls!!!”

I hit STAND UP and my Av leaped to his feet and hung naked in the air above the bed, his big erection still standing out. With his AO off, he put his arms back stiffly and gawked around in that pitiful newbie way, like a bewildered chicken. She was still on her back with her legs open, humping the empty air. I took a good look at her.

Had I just been fucked by a man running a female Av? The thought made my flesh crawl.

“Go to voice,” I typed. “Just say something, anything.  Go to voice.”

“Can’t,” she wrote back. “No mike. Sorry.”

“How convenient,” I said.

“Hey, I’m a woman. I promise!”

“Yeah. Illana is. But what about the person I’m talking to now?”

Illana jumped off the pose ball but quickly hit her AO so she stood there in her stockings and shoes preening and posing. “I’m a woman. Honest. I’m 29 years old and I live in California.”

“Yeah? What’s the state capital?”

No answer.

” What year were you born in?”

There was a pause, a long pause. Even I could subtract 29 from 2010 faster than Illana could.

“Fuck this,” she said. “This is really insulting. I don’t have to put up with this shit!”

Now that she was standing up, I took a good look at her, something I hadn’t done during the excitement of sex. Her tits were awfully big. Bigger than a woman who actually knew what it was like carrying boobs around would probably have made them, but just the size a man would like.

She was wearing a pussy, and the skin tone didn’t seem quite right. But that wasn’t all.

“Your pussy,” I said. “Doesn’t that seem a little high? And your shoes! I don’t think there’s a woman alive who would wear cheap crummy shoes like that!”

“Oh yeah? Like you’d know anything about that! What do you know about women anyhow?”

“You’d be surprised,” I said. “What kind of BC you use in RL?”

“What the fuck is BC?”

“Birth control. If you’re a 29 year-old woman from  California, you’ve got to be using BC. What do you use?”

“I’m on the pill, of course. Not that it’s any of your business!”

“Yeah? What brand?”

Smiley face.

“What are your fertile days?” I asked. “How many days after ovulation?”

“Oh fuck you!” she said. “Fuck off!”

And with that she disappeared in a little swirl of twinkles, but I pursued her in IM, sick and furious.

“You’re a man, aren’t you? You’re a man posing as a woman! That’s why you were so hot to fuck. And why you wanted to blow me. You’re a fucking man in drag! You son of a bitch!”

There was no answer and I sat there in a fog of shock and outrage, trying to figure out what this all meant.

She’d been hot. She’d gotten me off in RL. I came for her. But there hadn’t been any her. No long blonde hair, no beautiful face. No big ripe tits or juicy pussy. Instead I’d probably been rolling around with some sad, fat, fifty year-old accountant who never had the nerve to come out of the closet in real life and had to get his rocks off here. I wanted to puke.

But then I started to think… Had I really fucked a man? The image I’d been with had been completely female. In my mind, Illana was a woman and she’d been a woman when I was fucking her. What if her puppet master was a man? He intended for Illana to be female as well, as if she were a daughter of his, his own flesh and blood. He experienced me as a woman experiences a man, so was that so wrong?

I sat back and stared at the ceiling for a while, waiting for her to come back or say something, but Illana was gone and I wasn’t about to go after her. What was I going to do, anyhow? Track her down and report her? Call her names? Stalk her? It had been sex, and what was sex but a special kind of intimacy that can happen between any two genders, a kind of intimacy that’s expressed through the give and take of bodily pleasure and the sharing of emotion. Hadn’t that been what I was really after anyhow? And in Second Life, are any of us really sure of who’s running that Av?

I didn’t know. I’m not much of a deep thinker.

I said goodnight to poor, bewildered Archie and logged off, then stood up and got some tissues from the bedside table. I dropped my jeans and panties and wiped my pussy, which was still awfully wet from all the excitement and from that wonderful cum,  so wet I’d really soaked my panties. I’d have to change.

I guess that when you got down to it, I really had no reason to complain. Not many other lezzies in SL were getting  half the straight snatch I was with this Archie angle, so if Illana had burned me, maybe it was only fair.

On the other hand, I really would have liked to show “her” who “she’d” really been fucking.  That would have blown his mind. That would have been very cool.

I opened by viewer and logged back on, but as my primary this time, not as Archie, and started going through my inventory looking for something hot to wear. It was Friday night and I wanted to look good for the girls at the clubs, because things would be jumping about now.

[Images by Beatrice Serendipity of Simply Bea photography]

Sex Beds: Nuts and Bolts Tortuga Bed

Nuts and Bolts Tortuga Bed “103 menu options – 200 positions”  L$ 3800 (Search: Nuts and Bolts)

This one’s a little gem, just the kind of thing we were looking for when we started our series of reviews: a little bed made by a specialty manufacturer with original animations and a lot of attitude. The manufacturer is Nuts and Bolts and the attitude is one of flat-out, take-no-prisoners fucking, almost savage in its intensity. That attitude may not be what everyone wants in a sex bed, but for couples who find most animations too slow and sedate to express what they feel, the Tortuga Bed is a very welcome antidote. With this bed, if she asks for harder, you’ll be able to deliver. In fact, you might be able to take her breath away.

Nuts and Bolts specializes in BDSM animations and rough sex, and the sex in here gets pretty enthusiastic, but it’s not BDSM. There is a wonderful submenu of spanking animations–one of the best we’ve ever seen–but there’s no tying and no whips or ropes.  What it does feature is two avatars who love to fuck: a woman who’s mostly passive but more than willing, and a man who just can’t seem to get enough. It’s such a welcome relief from the usual sex-bed attitude of polite and seeming self-absorbed pleasuring.

The animations are remarkable in that they’re not high-quality, state-of-the-art mo-cap–in fact, some of them are quite crude– and yet they manage to convey more emotion and wild eroticism than most animations we’ve seen, largely due to their context and their place in the hierarchy of actions.  The key is in the approach the artists at Nuts and Bolts took to the idea of a sex bed. Rather than give us a smorgasbord of as many different and unrelated animations as they could, the designers focused on a handful of fairly standard love-making positions and provided each with a submenu that allows you to control the speed and passion of the action. Thus you can go from the relative tenderness of initial contact to the hard and bone-jarring excitement of impending orgasm all without leaving a given position. This gives the operator a powerful means of communicating emotion through action, which, to our mind, is what a sex bed is all about.

Controllable multi-speed animations have always appealed to us, and several companies offer poseballs that provide this option (Happy Dispatches, VAW, and Nihil come to mind, and of course, Nuts and Bolts themselves, which we suppose is why they took this approach to their bed), but we don’t find it often in beds. These animations aren’t true multi-speeds in that each one is a separate animation, not one animation run at different speeds, but the effect is the same:  control of your avi. The fact that they’re all different also allows each to have different detail and expression, so it’s not just a matter of increasing the oscillatory speed of the avatars. There’s subtlety here, and meaning.

Because the approach this bed takes is so unique, we’ll abandon our usual method of analyzing Animation range, Quality, and Ease of Use in order to focus on the experience of using the bed.

Menu Organization

The Main menu features the following buttons: Cuddles, Together, Girl-Boy, Girl-Girl, Group, Oral, Nuts and Bolts, and the admin buttons Stop and Options.

Cuddles comprises 9 animations, at least 4 of which are the close, full body contact we like for after-care. Girl-Girl gives you 3 animations, Oral contains 9.

Together is non-sexual and includes 9 animations of things like sleeping, eating popcorn/watching a movie, chatting, plus–inexplicably–floating in zero gravity, playing air guitar, and exercising.

The Nuts and Bolts submenu contains 5 animations, 4 of which continue the non-sexual cavorting-in-bed theme of the Together menu, including jumping on the mattress and swinging and balancing–and one button that leads to sub-submenu  containing 3 N&B Sex animations, which are just bizarre and feature the couple hanging from the bed frame and fucking like orangutans.

Sex beds have contained non-sexual animations for a while now, and why not?  You do more on a bed than just screw. But lately we’ve been seeing animations we just don’t understand–swatting at bugs, stomping on worms,  folk-dancing–or like here: playing air guitar or trying to fuck while hanging from the bed’s crossbar; jumping up and down on the mattress or balancing on one foot on the foot board.

Is there some fetish here we don’t understand? Some weird kind of courtship behavior? Is screwing while hanging from a bar a turn-on for some people? If not, why are these animations here? Is this what you want to spend your money on?

Animations are difficult to create and make up most of a bed’s cost, and presumably it’s no easier to make an animation of people playing air guitar than it is to make one of them engaged in some romantic pursuit. Wouldn’t the effort be better spent less on frolicking and horse-play and more on romantic and affectionate animations? What are we missing here?

Under Group you’ll find sub-submenus for MMF (6 animations. Actually 3 animations with 3 position swaps), MMFF (6 animations, or 3 with 3 swaps), and FFM (3 animations).

The payoff is in Girl-Boy. Here you’ll find some innovative approaches to animation selection and organization. The choices are: misc, get laid, edge, standing, spankme, doggie and cumshots.

Get laid gives you 3 animations of the same girl-on-back/man-standing-on-floor sex position, each increasing in speed and hardness. It starts out fairly fast already, and evolves into some really frenzied fucking. Edge does pretty much the same but uses 4 animations, and here the woman’s prone on the bed and the man standing, with the delightful difference that in the first couple of animations she’s working herself off against him, and in the last two he’s pretty much taken over and is slamming into her. Standing takes the same approach, but with the couple standing, her leaning against one of the foot posts.

Spankme is an ingenious  little tale of male lust and desire, and starts with the woman leaning on the mattress and the man standing behind her, hand ready. There are 4 various strengths of spank to deliver, and by clicking on one and then the other, you can exactly control the rate of the spanking–slow and controlled, or wild and passionate.

But the genius of Spankme is that it also includes 5 sex animations in which the man takes the woman from behind with various levels of hardness and roughness as she lies across the bed. The result is, you can spank away, and then suddenly grab her and enter her, fuck her as hard as you want, and then jump back out for more spanking, allowing you to tell a little tale of unbridled lust and the mixing of pain and pleasure, punishment and reward, that’s quite compelling and involving. A final button puts the woman on her knees while the man masturbates in her face.  Okay–not for everyone, but for those of us who like our sex hot and wild, this is hard to beat (no pun intended) and wonderfully satisfying.

In a similar way, misc tells a sexual story that starts with a slow and tender missionary, then evolves into some hard & rough face-to-face before the man flips her over and starts giving it to her from behind with bone-jarring thrusts, hot, hungry, and possessive. There are a couple more animations here we won’t even attempt to describe, except to mention that Payback, a woman-on-top animation, shows that the women who use this bed can be every bit as rough and frenzied as the men.

The Doggie menu contains 5 animations of just that one position–woman on hands and knees, man on knees behind her– of differing degrees of speed, intensity, and roughness, and includes some of the hardest and fastest all-out banging to be found in all of SL–almost breathtaking.

And when you’re ready, you go up a level and click on cumshots, where you’ll have the choice of cumming in her in doggie style, or of pulling out and doing it on her tits or face.  A stunning climax to some wild and frenzied love-making.

Conclusion

This isn’t a perfect bed. We’re especially not happy with the cavorting animations and wish that space had been given over to more affection and eroticism.  But as an instrument of emotional expression, as a piece of interactive art that allows the operator to communicate what he or she’s feeling, this bed is superb.

As we said, the hardness and intensity of the sex here may not be what everyone’s looking for, but the control this bed gives the operator and the level of involvement that control produces are things all bed-makers might learn from.

Sex Beds: Abranimations Mo-Cap Sex Bed Gold Edition

Abranimations Mo-Cap Sex Bed Gold edition “100 animations”,  L$4950

Here it is at last: a real, 100% motion-capture sex bed by Abranimations, one of the foremost names in SL mo-cap animation. When we first saw this bed, we were so excited that we dug deep with trembling hand and plunked down our money almost sight unseen, rushed back to our place and prepared ourselves to be amazed. I mean, it’s a Motion-Capture sex bed by Abranimations! How could it possibly by bad?

Well, here’s how: (a) Weird selection of sexual positions, (b) bad menu layout and animation naming, and (c) the fact that avatars are not human beings and don’t bend that way, so you get a lot of very disconcerting alignment problems, with cock totally missing pussy or coming through the woman’s stomach or thigh. It pretty much distracts from the erotic impact of the animations.

Now, alignment problems are nothing new to sex beds, and all beds require some adjustment to make the avatars line up. But here the problem is endemic, and the impressive realism of the motion-capture technology only serves to highlight these misalignments, making them noticeable to the point of embarrassment. Some of the air-fucking or dick-through-the-belly sex makes you want to laugh or just stare, which pretty much ruins the mood. Plus, the animations defy adjustment. They simply cannot be fixed. The human subjects who served as models for the mo-cap apparently just moved around too much to allow an avatar’s rigidly fixed dick to stay where it should be. And we’re not talking a little 2-D misalignment. We’re talking about willies waving in the wind.

The bed is built on the Xpose 3.6 ul engine and comes in a wide variety of styles. We purchased the Prison bedstead model, which was a mistake, because it’s 62 (!) prims. Most beds are much less. (As I said, we were kind of excited.) Abranimations claims “over 100 animations” which is pretty close to the 96 we counted, and they should be applauded for their honesty. They didn’t count swapped positions twice.

Animation Quality

The animations themselves are beautiful.  They are indeed genuine motion capture and they’re very well done. The movements are fluid and natural, very detailed, and, best of all, quite erotic. There aren’t any facial expressions, but the avatars’ body language–the way they thrust and react and writhe or shudder in erotic bliss–are expressive enough. These are really some of the loveliest and most realistic animations of people having sex we’ve found in SL. If only the poor guy could somehow keep dick in her pussy!

The problem is, paradoxically enough, that realism is not necessarily eroticism and avatars aren’t real human beings. Things that work when done by real people don’t always translate to the cartoon world of avatars, with their fixed anatomies and inflexible penises. It is possible to work around this and incorporate mo-cap elements into standard animations (the TenderMoments system is a nice example of this), but that’s not done here. Abranimations stays true to their claim of all mo-cap, which turns out to be a weakness. The minor misalignments which don’t really show up in the more forgiving mo-cap animations of things like couples’ dances are very obvious here.

So the bed is frustrating. You want it to work, you need it to work. You need these avatars to connect and satisfy their desires in deep, intimate, fusion. Instead, the illusion is ruined and it’s all for naught. Yet they come so close!

The situation isn’t helped by the bed’s choice of sexual positions to animate, a number of which are quite unusual, if not downright bizarre. There’s an animation in which the man is on his back while the woman is on top of him, also on her back, with her head at his feet. Presumably his cock is inside her, which is more than we can say for our avatar when we tried it. In the “OppMiss” position, the woman is on her back on the bed with legs spread, and the man is on top of her facing her feet with his legs straddling her body.  Apparently he’s inside her too, but why? What’s the point? (It finally dawned on us that “OppMiss” stands for “Opposite Missionary,” a position we never would have thought of and one that struck us as quite strange.)

Maybe it’s possible to achieve penetration in these odd positions in real life (though I have no idea why you’d want to), but given the fixed and rigid cocks most avatars have, there’s no way to do this without major editing and repositioning. In all of these exotic  positions, the man’s jalona is left waving haplessly in the air as they grind away in ecstatic transport.

One gets the feeling that the bed is showing off, giving you stranger positions than you ever would have come up with yourself. The problem is, sexual acrobatics aren’t the same as erotic heat, and the bed would have been better off with less contortionism and more good, simple and soulful fucking.

Animation Range

The big thing we’re missing here is foreplay. There’s a Masturbation menu with 4 choices, but that’s not quite foreplay to us, and the positions available in the Cuddle sub-submenu (which can often stand in for foreplay on other beds) really aren’t suitable here.  We couldn’t really find any animations expressing the post-sex closeness and coziness we enjoy, and we wondered if this was maybe because those kinds of static positions don’t provide much opportunity for mo-cap magic. The 3 animations marked Cuddles 1-3 are all virtually identical, and consist of the man and woman sitting against the head board with the man’s arm draped amiably across the woman’s shoulders.

There are 9 oral animations, 13 Cuddles, and there’s a BDSM section with 9 animations, including a couple spanks and some rope bondage. The rope is some of the thickest we’ve ever seen in SL, and looks like anchor hawser.

Menu Layout and Ease of Use

At first glance, menu layout seems straightforward enough. The initial Menu gives you: MMF, MFF (5 animations each), Sex Positions (61 animations), Oral (9 animations), and Affection (13 animations, including the Cuddles sub-sub-submenu), then Masturbate (4) and BDSM (9). Plus the usual administrative buttons: Options, Swap, Stop, and Help.) Altogether, 96 animations.

The sex is in the Sex Positions button, of course, and clicking on it opens a submenu with buttons for:  Front 1, Front 2, Rear 1, Rear 2 (each has 10 animations), Sit/Kneel (7 animations), Standing (6 animatioons), and Extreme (8 animations).

So far it seems fine. The Fronts contain positions where the couple is facing each other, topologically speaking at least, and the Rears contain the positions where the man and women are facing the same way.

The problem is, facing or not-facing is not a good way to organize sex animations. We’re not used to thinking of them in those terms, and within a given category, some of the positions are intimate, some of them are rather casual, and some of them are just plain weird, as we mentioned above. The more common Man on top/Woman on top method of organization is much more informative, because it actually tells us something about the emotions conveyed by the various animations. The party on top is the one showing the initiative, usually.

This might not be such a problem were the animations names more descriptive or easy to decipher, but they’re not. ArchedKnee is a missionary position with the man on top. Archedface, on the other hand, is a cowgirl position with the woman on top. The two animations are next to each other in the Front 1 menu, since the couple is facing each other in both.

The oddness of some of the positions no doubt made naming them difficult. What do you call it when the man sits on the bed Indian-style while the woman lies face down with her loins pressed against his, supporting herself on her arms? Here it’s called Accordian.

In any case, in the several months we’ve had this bed, we haven’t grown comfortable with the menu system yet. We can find an initial missionary position to start things off (it’s called ArchedKnee, as we mentioned, and is the first animation Sex Positions submenu), but after that, trying to find another good man-on-top animation that maintains not only the continuity of the love-making but penile contact with the woman’s vagina as well, is pure hit-and-miss. And usually miss.

Conclusion:

Beautiful animations but the eroticism is ruined by the fact that avatars don’t line up like real people, so motion capture–at least this kind of motion capture–just doesn’t work. The misalignment problem is further exacerbated by the weirdness of some of the positions, which seem to have been chosen more for their novelty value than for any erotic heat or emotional expressiveness.

We love Abranimations and admire their work, but this bed is an instructive failure. It demonstrates perfectly that realism, which is a science, is not at all the same as eroticism, which is an art. It drives home the amount of skill and artistry involved in making a sex bed capable of expressing the beauty of sexual love and passion.

–Aiden Swain, 7/3/2010

P.S. As we neared the end of writing this review, it occurred to us that maybe the people at Abranimations intended this bed to be used by avatars without genitals. It does, in fact, work better that way, and if that’s what you’re looking for, then this might be the bed to try.

Cheating on a Spouse with that Spouse: Celia F. and Mark T.

Using alts to spy on your partner is certainly nothing new in SL. It can be as blatant as using an alt to try and seduce one’s lover or a bit more refined, as when the jealous party makes an opposite-sexed alt in order to befriend their lover and try and ferret out dirt, or infiltrate the circle of his or her friends, ears alert for gossip.

We find such use of alts pretty underhanded and reprehensible, and any relationship is which one partner has resorted to these kinds of tactics is already in big trouble, because trust is already gone. We kind of feel that any dirt one gets under these pretexts is no more than one deserves, because the truth is, if you go in looking for dirt, you’re probably going to find it.

One especially interesting case was that of Celia F. and Mark T. Celia told me this story one night as we sat on her porch.

Celia was a free spirit, sexually active and unattached and thoroughly enjoying her freedom on SL. She liked dating different men and keeping things light, coming and going as she pleased, so when she met Mark, she found his attention and persistence kind of refreshing. No matter how casual we try to keep our sex, we all like being admired, complimented, even adored, and Mark seemed to give her that. He was very attentive and romantic, constantly sending her flowers and cards and little gifts, and always anxious to know where she was going and whom she might be seeing, information Celia politely declined to give him. Mark made no secret of his desire to have an exclusive relationship with her, and for them to move in together.

The thought of losing her freedom was a bit alarming, but in reality, she rather liked his constancy and concern for her. It was a nice change from the kind of casual friends-with-benefits relationships Celia was used to, and in time Mark’s aggressive pursuit had its effect. Celia’s conscience started bothering her whenever she went out with another man, and Mark seemed to genuinely love her. What could she do? She finally agreed to share a home with him though not without some reservations, which she made clear to him by insisting the relationship be an open one and that she still be allowed her occasional fling.

Mark had no problem with this, and they even worked out a sort of code so she could signal him when she was with someone else and couldn’t see him or IM. She didn’t have much occasion to use it, though, because now that she was semi-partnered, she found her other affairs tinged with the feeling of betrayal, and the fun went out of them. And Mark, despite his assurances, was clearly hurt and upset whenever she tried to exercise her privileges under their agreement. He continued to pester her with requests that they make the relationship more exclusive, and even binding. If they were married, he told her, then at last he could rest easy, knowing that if she wanted to fool around, he at least wouldn’t have to worry about losing her.

There were some danger signs at this point, but Celia chose to ignore them. She was pretty sure that Mark had adopted an alt or two and was spying on her, and was really not very good at it. Several times he let slip details of her outside dates the she’d never told him about and he had no way of knowing unless he’d been there. And though he still professed his love for her and his total trust, he became moody and secretive. Despite all this, Celia finally agreed to marry him, and marry him in a full, all-out, rice-and-roses ceremony with all the trimmings. She thought that maybe marriage would calm him down and allay his insecurities. Mark insisted that the marriage be “open”.

If anything, though, things only got worse after they were married, much worse. Celia had given up her casual affairs and was beset by feelings of paranoia and control. At night Mark would often have her go through lists of all the men she’d known and make her tell him what she’d liked about them and what they’d done together, and that list soon expanded to include friends and men they both knew she’d had no romantic contact with. Mark wanted to know exactly how she felt about these men and how she’d go about having an affair with them. If she denied feelings for them, he’d call her a liar. If she admitted feelings, he let her know without actually saying it that he considered her a whore.

She soon discovered that what she’d seen as Mark’s love and devotion were really just signs of a hysteric  personality with deep dependence and control issues. He was convinced she was a whore, convinced she was cheating on him, and apparently determined to prove it. Out of anger and a desire to assert her old independence, Celia began going out alone or with girl friends to dance and mingle and perhaps even flirt a little, though she still had no intention of cheating on Mark.

Mark’s first approach was the old one of testing her, trying to seduce her as an alt. When that didn’t seem to work, he sent his alts to her female friends (so she figured out later), pretending to be someone who’d noticed her at some club and was seeking their opinion on Celia’s availability and general loyalty to her husband.

He got nowhere with this, but apparently his skills as an alt were improving, and his next step was to create a female avatar who could insinuate herself into Celia’s circle and schmooze and gossip with her friends, trying to ferret out information, even bating them with suggestions that “she” (the alt) and Celia had participated in group sex with various men. The friends who heard this were too shocked and embarrassed to mention this to Celia, but it was obvious that something strange was going on.

Celia started going out more, spending less and less time with Mark, because things were just unbearable at home, even though Mark seemed to be there less and less, no doubt busy with one or more of his spy avatars, trying to dig up dirt on her. Celia began to experience anxiety and fear that spilled over into her Real Life and began to affect her work. She decided she wanted out but she didn’t have the funds and by now she was rather frightened of Mark. When she came to SL, men pursued her,  but she no longer knew which were real and which were alts of Mark. In the end she stopped caring.

A handsome avatar told her he’d pay her if she’d have sex with him. L$10,000 just to go to bed with him.

Celia refused.

L$15,000. L$20,000, L$25,000. How much did she want? Everyone has a price. How much did she want?

Thirty thousand Lindens, she told him, and he agreed.

They met three times in two weeks and carried out their agreement, and at the end of that time, Celia had L$90,000 in her account, or about  $320 US. After the third time, she said she was through and de-friended the man.

The next time she saw Mark, he was livid. How dare she de-friend that man she was seeing? Who did she think she was?

Celia’s jaw dropped. No one else knew anything about her assignations with this man. The only way Mark could have known was if the man was an alt of his, and he obviously was. And yet how could Mark be so stupid as to come out and admit that to her? Was he just not thinking rationally anymore? Had he become totally unhinged?

It didn’t matter. Celia was through, and Mark was through too. With her new wealth, she moved into a beachfront condo and started putting her Second Life back together. About a week later she looked at Mark’s profile to find that he’d partnered with an old flame of his, and both of their profiles were filled with their avowals of true and undying love. She could only wonder what was in store for the girl.

In the end, Celia was quite hurt by what had happened, and was having a hard time trying to understand why. Had she known that this benefactor was really Mark?  She told me that at that point she suspected it strongly, but she no longer even cared.

The break-up of any relationship is always accompanied by feelings of sadness and regret, but the only thing Celia was guilty of was cheating on her husband with her husband, and that just somehow didn’t seem to be right.