So, this probably comes as no surprise, but there won't be any more updates here in future.
The intent of this blog was always to inform people of what a restraint could old, and if I felt it was well designed. I also wanted to get into communication with the creators/developers, be involved, etc.
Instead it did the opposite, making a wall between them and I, to the point certain creators started to majorly dislike me, even those I was already friends with. My attempts to stay unbiased only made that wall larger. I'm also more than a little fed up with the unpleasant messages sent my way in SL or on DA.
That's not to say its all been gloom, I've had fun writing, and apparently a lot of people liked it. Its just a shame they rarely spoke up unless I ran into them, and only the less than pleasant people bothered to give me any feedback. Messing with restraints was always fun, though self bondage was never my thing, it was good to really dig into them and find out what made them tick.
Naturally I'm not deleting this, my (badly typo'd) reviews will stay up, though no new ones will appear.
Hope you all enjoyed the reviews while they lasted.
Aria
RR highbinder
Well, I'm somewhat back, and going to try and get into the habit of writing again. The formatting may be a bit different to before, but.. eh. We'll go with it for now.
Anyway! New armbinder from RR, dubbed the highbinder due to its longer length, which of course allows more tightness.
Review info
Highbinder was purchased from own pocket
Reviewed after first update, which fixes some rigged straps issues
Whats in the box
Inside the box you'll find three attachments, The Highbinder itself, and two sets of straps, the Front X Straps and the Belly Strap. You'll also find 6 poses inside, allowing you to bend forwards at 45 or 90 degrees, with three different stances for the legs.. Together, Parted and Spread. These can be used freely with anything, and work well for Strapaddos. (Which are also good for spanking, or anything else you may wish to do to rear forced up and helpless by bondage!)
You'll also find four textures. These are included so that if you try to alter a texture, and mess up, you have a replacement you can drop back in to fix it back to normal. There is an alpha, as well as a maitreya autohider, so if you use that mesh body, you can just use this to adjust what parts of the arms are visible instead of having to do it manually. Otherwise you'll just find the usual, a Readme on hwo to use your new binder, and a landmark for the store.
Appearance
First and foremost, you should turn on advanced lighting system. Don't worry, you can disable shadows in most viewers via a dropdown menu. this kills most of the performance hits you may take, while retaining the materials effects.
Contrary to what certain people may think, this armbinder is quite the new product. Compared to the old RR one, its longer, smoother, includes far more variety in its appearance, more straps, the pattern system from the RR harness and Deluxe gag, and is, y'know, mesh. This of course allows for much easier fitting, albeit it still annoying at times.
It uses the same retexturing/appearance adjusting system that the recent RR devices do, allowing you to adjust specific sections and surfaces. Sections are entire areas, while surfaces are specific little bits, like the sides of straps. You can also add a verity of patterns, from things such as cowprint, to text, to symbols. There's four pages of these to choose from. And of course, you can adjust the tint.
You also have materials. There are nine included in the menu, specifically Rubber, PVC, Latex, Leather, Patent Leather, Rough Leather, Jeans (denim), Cordura (some military fabric) and Spandex. Without materials enabled (see above), you won't be able to appreciate these properly. All in all, they are all pretty nice. There's two pages of Presets included for good measure, handy if you have a specific look in mind, like classic black leather, and want to get the whole binder done up quickly.
There's two primary ways for the armbinder to be applied, with two higher settings one ach that add more straps. Plain, which is the (very) tightly laced up armbinder by itself, while tight slots in some built in straps to further secure it. From there you can apply Chest Straps, or escalate to strapping the entire torso to the binder. All of these of course use the RR anim hud, allowing you to angle your arms further or closer to your body.. and are key to the strappado poses mentioned earlier.
Perhaps one of the most handy things is a new plugin called Mirror. It effectively mirrors the straps on one side to the other.. So you can adjust just the left sides of the straps to fit perfectly, then use this plugin to automatically adjust the straps squeezing you on the right to match,, or vice versa.
Added in the first update, for those that bought before it was put up, adds a BreastSize plugin, which adjust the positions of some of the rigged straps that could be outright impossible to fit the rest of the straps to correctly without clipping beforehand, get the update if you have that issue.
Thoughts - I really like this binders looks, there's very few good armbinders in SL, I can name maybe two others off the top of my head, and one of them is also Marines. If I wanted to have stuff added? I think a style hud would be really good, rather than a menu.. And maybe add an even more severe strappado pose! Close enough to use a short leash to keep the head in place as well.
Function
As this is the first review in a long time for RR gear, I'll be going somewhat indepth into each menu.
You choose poses via the top six buttons of the primary menu. Theres no extras in the More.. menu this time. from there you get the usual Lock, Last Plug and Take/Return keys options you should be used to by now, if you've used any RR product, with the tools, plugins and more.. menu beneath that.
Tools contains Save and load. Hitting save will take your stats (best time, total time, etc) and save them for you, letting you put them into a notecard that you can then put into a replacement binder, say due to an update, were you then hit load ad get all your stats back. You'll also find the Reset button here, a sadly important one with the nature of SLs key grabbers at times. Further down you'll fine a toggle for Male settings, which adjusts some of the messages the armbinder sends, and verbose, which will turn on/off the binders ability to use local chat. The ever important Update button is here as well.
Next on the list is the Plugins menu. You'll find a lot of familiar ones in here, the Realkey of course (set the restraint password, get a key, set the key password to the same as your restraint, give the key to someone you trust, and you're home free. Unless they use it to bind you tighter, always a risk!). Then there's Outfit, which uses RLV folders to add, remove, or outright deny the use of certain things within them. It also has a devious unshare option, that doesn't allow the person to wear anything outside of the RLV folder. The RL time menu is here as well, useful when you want someone locked until a certain day, rather than setting a huge timelock and hoping they spent enough time logged in to get loose.
Control follows that, which lets you put a variety of RLV restrictions on people (No IM block though, which is good. And logical.) Give Keys allows you to hand them to someone, or throw them away altogether, which is quite risky, as it then restricts the plugins menu nearly completely, and no one else can access it without a realkey. Its entirely possibly to completely trap yourself in the restraint by disabling the Realkey plugin, then throwing away the keys. If you dot hat, and lock it.. its not coming off without a reset.
The Leash is as simple as ever, and also allows you to anchor it to other restraints, say the vixen ankle cuffs, to further hobble you, or even to ones worn by other captives. Make a slave train! You can also get a couple of tools, a leash holder, and a leash anywhere HUD object. With this, while holding the leash, you can focus on a prim (alt+ left click), then click the button on your hud to leash the sub to that prim, regardless of what it is. Bed frame? Drainpipe? A galloping horse? Go for it.
The next row starts with Anim which is effectively the RR anim hud in menu form, which your captor can use. It has one advantage over the anim hud, in that if you know the pose in advance, you can go straight to it without flicking through others, but I'd generally recommend you use the Hud instead. Allow follows that, which is a simple one. In here, you can set it so that if the captive is IM or TP blocked, you can bypass it.
The Autolock plugin is there of course, were you can set up macros to well, lock the restraint holder up tight after a period of time. You can do a lot of customisation here, as well as have it only countdown when the person is bound, or online.
The next two are already covered above, HighBinderTex and Mirror, as is BreastSize on the row below. After that is Vulnerable, a newer plugin. It lets your keyholder give permissions to people to do certain things, specifically strip, put on outfits (in RLV folders), leash and forcesit the captive. If the captive is already on a piece of furniture, the latter two are unavailable. The wearer has to agree to this of course, and can block people who push their luck.
Wear allows the locking of specific body areas for clothing. If an option is turned off, the person cannot use wear to put something on that slow. AutoAlpha finally appears, and has an extra use if you use the Maitreya body. if you put the autohider/alpha mentioned in the Box Contents section in an RLV folder, path the autoalpha plugin to it, and let it do its job, then when you get bound, you won't need to do a thing to stop your arms clipping. There's also unwear which does the same thing, except prevents you taking things off of the slots.
Sit is one of the last plugins in the menu. Its effectively forcesit, and can also disable standing back up. Touch is also a fun one. You can have it do a blanket touch lock over all the restraint options (plain, tight, etc), or specific ones, with each touch option its own thing. Marines gear tends to lack an expose option, Vulnerable is the closet thing, so for those that want to leave their keys hanging, but have no way to get at them, get the armbinder locked on, leave the keys, then turn off touchself via this menu, You won't be able to get at any of your gear this way though, so make sure you're careful.
Back in the main menu, we only have More left. In here you have the usual stuff like AutoRef (autorefresh, keeps the arm bound anim playing I believe), some quick timer options, and the Timer itself. Nothing to really go into here. You have the specific times (+1, +10, etc), the variable times (+30m-2h, 2h-6h, etc), the option to disable the timer, and also to hide it.
Thoughts - I don't have too much to say here, its standard RR. There's a few changes since my last review, like the vulnerable plugin, some updates to older ones, etc. My biggest gripes are the layout of the restraint options, but that's more for ones that exceed 6, a lot of people I encounter don't realise the pretty mummy and such have a couple extra options in the more menu, but that's irrelevant here, and the fact that you can't go back to the plugins menu itself from a plugin, you have to go back to the main menu first, but that's just a quality of life thing.
The thoughts of S
The latest release of the High Binder shows that Marine Kelly is still pushing the bar! The new binder is not simply an update or redesign of the previous RR Armbinder. It is a new design with new features. Being a lover of armbinders I was very pleased at this, and the added strap and binding options are very nice! The design is very well done mesh, but what really struck me is that this is the first large size Mesh restraint that really tries to takes into account the need to be able to adjust it to fit individual avatars, as opposed to a "one-size fits everyone poorly" approach we have seen until now, forcing players to alter their avatars to make the item fit. I'd love to see Marine step back and revisit some of her earlier releases, like the Pretty Mummy, applying this same design philosophy
I like the expanded selection of material textures in the high High Binder. The new binder to uses the same style menu system as her other products, so while still in need for a more user friendly design, people already familiar with RR products shouldn't have any problems.
In closing
Its 700 linden, its easy to fit now that we have the breastsize plugin, its well made.. Menus may seem a little clustered, but anyone whos used RR gear will be used to that layout by now I imagine. I can find little fault with it really, I mean, it does mostly everything I wanted it to, and does it well.
Would I buy it? - Yes
Can be bought in world from Marines store at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Pak/76/61/105 or from the little shop of kink at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Lineside/102/146/77
pictures used show black latex in the Bend_90_tight pose, with RR anim hud used to maximize the strappado, blue leather from behind, and red Spandex in Bend_45_spread, with all the straps on. Additional pics can be found at aria-warden.deviantart.com
Anyway! New armbinder from RR, dubbed the highbinder due to its longer length, which of course allows more tightness.
Review info
Highbinder was purchased from own pocket
Reviewed after first update, which fixes some rigged straps issues
Whats in the box
Inside the box you'll find three attachments, The Highbinder itself, and two sets of straps, the Front X Straps and the Belly Strap. You'll also find 6 poses inside, allowing you to bend forwards at 45 or 90 degrees, with three different stances for the legs.. Together, Parted and Spread. These can be used freely with anything, and work well for Strapaddos. (Which are also good for spanking, or anything else you may wish to do to rear forced up and helpless by bondage!)You'll also find four textures. These are included so that if you try to alter a texture, and mess up, you have a replacement you can drop back in to fix it back to normal. There is an alpha, as well as a maitreya autohider, so if you use that mesh body, you can just use this to adjust what parts of the arms are visible instead of having to do it manually. Otherwise you'll just find the usual, a Readme on hwo to use your new binder, and a landmark for the store.
Appearance
First and foremost, you should turn on advanced lighting system. Don't worry, you can disable shadows in most viewers via a dropdown menu. this kills most of the performance hits you may take, while retaining the materials effects.
Contrary to what certain people may think, this armbinder is quite the new product. Compared to the old RR one, its longer, smoother, includes far more variety in its appearance, more straps, the pattern system from the RR harness and Deluxe gag, and is, y'know, mesh. This of course allows for much easier fitting, albeit it still annoying at times.
It uses the same retexturing/appearance adjusting system that the recent RR devices do, allowing you to adjust specific sections and surfaces. Sections are entire areas, while surfaces are specific little bits, like the sides of straps. You can also add a verity of patterns, from things such as cowprint, to text, to symbols. There's four pages of these to choose from. And of course, you can adjust the tint.
You also have materials. There are nine included in the menu, specifically Rubber, PVC, Latex, Leather, Patent Leather, Rough Leather, Jeans (denim), Cordura (some military fabric) and Spandex. Without materials enabled (see above), you won't be able to appreciate these properly. All in all, they are all pretty nice. There's two pages of Presets included for good measure, handy if you have a specific look in mind, like classic black leather, and want to get the whole binder done up quickly.
There's two primary ways for the armbinder to be applied, with two higher settings one ach that add more straps. Plain, which is the (very) tightly laced up armbinder by itself, while tight slots in some built in straps to further secure it. From there you can apply Chest Straps, or escalate to strapping the entire torso to the binder. All of these of course use the RR anim hud, allowing you to angle your arms further or closer to your body.. and are key to the strappado poses mentioned earlier.
Perhaps one of the most handy things is a new plugin called Mirror. It effectively mirrors the straps on one side to the other.. So you can adjust just the left sides of the straps to fit perfectly, then use this plugin to automatically adjust the straps squeezing you on the right to match,, or vice versa.
Added in the first update, for those that bought before it was put up, adds a BreastSize plugin, which adjust the positions of some of the rigged straps that could be outright impossible to fit the rest of the straps to correctly without clipping beforehand, get the update if you have that issue.
Thoughts - I really like this binders looks, there's very few good armbinders in SL, I can name maybe two others off the top of my head, and one of them is also Marines. If I wanted to have stuff added? I think a style hud would be really good, rather than a menu.. And maybe add an even more severe strappado pose! Close enough to use a short leash to keep the head in place as well.
Function
As this is the first review in a long time for RR gear, I'll be going somewhat indepth into each menu.
You choose poses via the top six buttons of the primary menu. Theres no extras in the More.. menu this time. from there you get the usual Lock, Last Plug and Take/Return keys options you should be used to by now, if you've used any RR product, with the tools, plugins and more.. menu beneath that.
Tools contains Save and load. Hitting save will take your stats (best time, total time, etc) and save them for you, letting you put them into a notecard that you can then put into a replacement binder, say due to an update, were you then hit load ad get all your stats back. You'll also find the Reset button here, a sadly important one with the nature of SLs key grabbers at times. Further down you'll fine a toggle for Male settings, which adjusts some of the messages the armbinder sends, and verbose, which will turn on/off the binders ability to use local chat. The ever important Update button is here as well.
Next on the list is the Plugins menu. You'll find a lot of familiar ones in here, the Realkey of course (set the restraint password, get a key, set the key password to the same as your restraint, give the key to someone you trust, and you're home free. Unless they use it to bind you tighter, always a risk!). Then there's Outfit, which uses RLV folders to add, remove, or outright deny the use of certain things within them. It also has a devious unshare option, that doesn't allow the person to wear anything outside of the RLV folder. The RL time menu is here as well, useful when you want someone locked until a certain day, rather than setting a huge timelock and hoping they spent enough time logged in to get loose.Control follows that, which lets you put a variety of RLV restrictions on people (No IM block though, which is good. And logical.) Give Keys allows you to hand them to someone, or throw them away altogether, which is quite risky, as it then restricts the plugins menu nearly completely, and no one else can access it without a realkey. Its entirely possibly to completely trap yourself in the restraint by disabling the Realkey plugin, then throwing away the keys. If you dot hat, and lock it.. its not coming off without a reset.
The Leash is as simple as ever, and also allows you to anchor it to other restraints, say the vixen ankle cuffs, to further hobble you, or even to ones worn by other captives. Make a slave train! You can also get a couple of tools, a leash holder, and a leash anywhere HUD object. With this, while holding the leash, you can focus on a prim (alt+ left click), then click the button on your hud to leash the sub to that prim, regardless of what it is. Bed frame? Drainpipe? A galloping horse? Go for it.
The next row starts with Anim which is effectively the RR anim hud in menu form, which your captor can use. It has one advantage over the anim hud, in that if you know the pose in advance, you can go straight to it without flicking through others, but I'd generally recommend you use the Hud instead. Allow follows that, which is a simple one. In here, you can set it so that if the captive is IM or TP blocked, you can bypass it.
The Autolock plugin is there of course, were you can set up macros to well, lock the restraint holder up tight after a period of time. You can do a lot of customisation here, as well as have it only countdown when the person is bound, or online.
The next two are already covered above, HighBinderTex and Mirror, as is BreastSize on the row below. After that is Vulnerable, a newer plugin. It lets your keyholder give permissions to people to do certain things, specifically strip, put on outfits (in RLV folders), leash and forcesit the captive. If the captive is already on a piece of furniture, the latter two are unavailable. The wearer has to agree to this of course, and can block people who push their luck.
Wear allows the locking of specific body areas for clothing. If an option is turned off, the person cannot use wear to put something on that slow. AutoAlpha finally appears, and has an extra use if you use the Maitreya body. if you put the autohider/alpha mentioned in the Box Contents section in an RLV folder, path the autoalpha plugin to it, and let it do its job, then when you get bound, you won't need to do a thing to stop your arms clipping. There's also unwear which does the same thing, except prevents you taking things off of the slots.
Sit is one of the last plugins in the menu. Its effectively forcesit, and can also disable standing back up. Touch is also a fun one. You can have it do a blanket touch lock over all the restraint options (plain, tight, etc), or specific ones, with each touch option its own thing. Marines gear tends to lack an expose option, Vulnerable is the closet thing, so for those that want to leave their keys hanging, but have no way to get at them, get the armbinder locked on, leave the keys, then turn off touchself via this menu, You won't be able to get at any of your gear this way though, so make sure you're careful.Back in the main menu, we only have More left. In here you have the usual stuff like AutoRef (autorefresh, keeps the arm bound anim playing I believe), some quick timer options, and the Timer itself. Nothing to really go into here. You have the specific times (+1, +10, etc), the variable times (+30m-2h, 2h-6h, etc), the option to disable the timer, and also to hide it.
Thoughts - I don't have too much to say here, its standard RR. There's a few changes since my last review, like the vulnerable plugin, some updates to older ones, etc. My biggest gripes are the layout of the restraint options, but that's more for ones that exceed 6, a lot of people I encounter don't realise the pretty mummy and such have a couple extra options in the more menu, but that's irrelevant here, and the fact that you can't go back to the plugins menu itself from a plugin, you have to go back to the main menu first, but that's just a quality of life thing.
The thoughts of S
The latest release of the High Binder shows that Marine Kelly is still pushing the bar! The new binder is not simply an update or redesign of the previous RR Armbinder. It is a new design with new features. Being a lover of armbinders I was very pleased at this, and the added strap and binding options are very nice! The design is very well done mesh, but what really struck me is that this is the first large size Mesh restraint that really tries to takes into account the need to be able to adjust it to fit individual avatars, as opposed to a "one-size fits everyone poorly" approach we have seen until now, forcing players to alter their avatars to make the item fit. I'd love to see Marine step back and revisit some of her earlier releases, like the Pretty Mummy, applying this same design philosophy
I like the expanded selection of material textures in the high High Binder. The new binder to uses the same style menu system as her other products, so while still in need for a more user friendly design, people already familiar with RR products shouldn't have any problems.
In closing
Its 700 linden, its easy to fit now that we have the breastsize plugin, its well made.. Menus may seem a little clustered, but anyone whos used RR gear will be used to that layout by now I imagine. I can find little fault with it really, I mean, it does mostly everything I wanted it to, and does it well.
Would I buy it? - Yes
Can be bought in world from Marines store at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Pak/76/61/105 or from the little shop of kink at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Lineside/102/146/77
pictures used show black latex in the Bend_90_tight pose, with RR anim hud used to maximize the strappado, blue leather from behind, and red Spandex in Bend_45_spread, with all the straps on. Additional pics can be found at aria-warden.deviantart.com
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Sorry for the delay, RL has being rather hectic this past month and has made getting posts out rather difficult. So to start.. New Relea...
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