Firefox

Narrow minded people definitely, is my worst pet hate. Like people who say "Oh, men wearing heels sucks" when they have never seen a man wearing heels apart from a drag queen or a comedy act or a pantomine. If you don't have the experience of what can be achieved, or the mental capacity to be a visionary, then it's best to keep your mouth shut

Oh that's a shame Jamie. I've been playing a lot of volleyball the last few years and am not wearing heels out as much as I used to. But I still like to see the site and other sites on the web. Shoe styles and types are timeless and fascinating for me.

I'm just trying to think of an occasion when a woman would wear pink shoes and it looks good. Not very often. Maybe with a pink or a white outfit? I don't think they go very well with the outfits here.

I reckon what matters is that one goes in the shop at all. With Tesco I'm in there 5 days a week to buy food and I guess most women are too. And once in there to buy food, who can resist trying a pair of shoes on or looking for the latest styles. They are also picking the trends very well now. For any shy ones among you, Tesco is also ideal for a stealth purchase. One can use the self scan checkouts and buy the shoes with food if you don't fancy using the normal checkouts. I always reckoned New Look and Faith were aimed at a slightly younger market so Baratts may still have a place if they restructure it. It's going to be very tough though.

I think Barratts may well be finished like Woolworths. The market is very competitive now. This is another area where Tescos and Asda have made big inroads. There is great choice in the bigger Tesco stores, and they have proper 4 inch plus heels on some of the styles. A far cry from the more mundane and conservative stuff that Tesco used to do.

Sorry I missed this one guys.

It's all as safe as houses out there. Mind you, stepping on landmines in stilettos can be somewhat fraught with danger! Sorry I haven't been around. Been doing Second Life on the net: 3-D virtual shoe construction etc. Very compelling stuff.

Sorry I missed this, otherwise I might have come. Yes, I went to one of these fetish fairs with the guys in Birmingham a few years back. There's probably a report here on the forums somewhere. To be honest I'd have probably suggested meeting up in a pub in Camden or something instead. I don't see the point of paying £5 for a few market stalls. Plenty of those in Camden for free and you can spend the money on beer or shoes instead If you want to have a look at the fetish scene I'd suggest Torture Garden. It's £25.00 but you get proper music laid on, bars, dungeon etc etc. And from 9.00pm till 5.00am the next morning so 8 hours of entertainment.

I've spent so much time building shoes in second life and messing around with creating things I haven't had time for HHP. Sorry about that! Basically Second life is the business when it comes to object creation and realistic shoes etc. No other system comes even close. IMVU, Sims, WOW are kicked into touch by this. If you want faff around in souped up chat rooms for teenagers do IMVU. If you want proper 3-D building tools do Second Life.

As one who drives late at night quite a bit I have been stopped by the police a few times while wearing heels. The shoes have never caused a raise eyebrow, they're more interested in if I have had a drink or not. I've never been told heels are dangerous when driving either. Most women drive in their 4 inch heels. I've seen it, they just get straight in the car and drive off. No time for them to change. There must be countless accidents involving women driving in heels and I've never ever seen one report in a newspaper about their insurance being invalidated because of that. I don't think this can happen unless there is a clause in the policy, and to my knowledge there isn't in policies. To be honest, since you drive with the soles of your feet on the pedals, it hardly makes any difference if you have heels on or not. The type of shoe I wouldn't drive in is big platforms.

I agree real friends are far more important and I do spend time with them too. They are not always available for a quick half hour at lunchtime or at 2.00m in the morning when I feel like a chat, so internet friends have their place too. And since like you I watch hardly any TV at all, the interent takes the place of my time when other people would be watching TV or movies.

I don't think there is lot to chose between Bluewater and Lakeside in terms of shopping. Bluewater has a Yo Sushi which I like, but noone else does. Lakeside has a nicer bar.

Yes, not only did I avoid paying the £15 late charge, but he also raised the barrier to let me out, and I didn't have to pay £2.50 for normal parking charge, which I was attmpting to pay, but all the machines where you could pay were locked up on the other side of the mall doors which closed at about 7.00pm. Highlight of the day; trying on shoes in New Look. If anyone wants lessons on how to try on shoes in New Look I'll be pleased to help

I can't speak for IMVU, but an account on Second Life costs 7$ a month of which you get 4$ back through 1$ a week of in game money salary. (Although you can participte for free with various limitations) I think it's good value compared to other forms of entertainment. One premier league soccer match in th UK costs over $100 to see, and only lasts 90 minutes. It could be boring goaless draw too! I don't think the idea of paying real money for virtual creations is any different to paying money for a TV channel subscription (eg Sky Sport) or tickets for a music concert. You're paying for the entertainment. After all, what you get for TV subscription is simply the facility to have pixels on your screen altered in various patterns over period of time. The action is not actually real at the point of consumption. In the case of clothes for a sim game then someone probably took many hours to design and produce realistic virtual clothes on a software package. Not much different to someone who spent many hours producing real clothing. In the final anaysis, their creations are bringing pleasure and they'd both like paying for their time. You'd rightly expect virtual clothes to be cheaper than RL ones, since you are only paying for the design and production costs, not the materials.

London & SE: everywhere It's better to list the exceptions rather than the safe places Exceptions: Near large football crowds, dodgy druggie run down housing estates, late at night in dark places, some pubs near chucking out time. Basically any place you wouldn't go near normally.

Yes, most of these "codes" are a waste of bandwidth and usually contain a fair mix of that particular author's personal gripes and preferences, whether it be text speak or swearing, smilies or Caps lock. You only need one rule: "Respect people as you would in real life." 50 pages of text are not needed to explain that

Virtual Universe. (Some say Visual User, but I think Virtual Universe is the official line)

I've been through the IMVU interface and it's OK. But Second Life is 1000 times more sophisticated. That said, I believe they are looking at expanding IMVU into new horizons, so watch this space!

For the pleasure of looking at them or collecting them, the same way people collect anything else.

Actually most women are much more supportive, on the whole, of the freestyling thing than men are. It is men who become more aggressive because they have this thing wired into them about the male sex being dominant and the status quo of the pack being maintained. So any perceived attempt to weaken the male sex is met with aggression. Women on the other hand empathise a lot more with the male's softer side. Also you have to remember that many people can't think for themselves. There are 50% of people with an IQ less than 100 and that's a lot people! When certain of these people have been brainwashed by society and can't break out of that loop it's pretty sad. You should be taking pity on them, not hating them for an inadequacy they can't help. Hopefully by gentle education a few of them will reach better conclusions eventually. Some are lost causes, but conversion of a few of the ignorant ones is better than non at all.

Why should it make you angry that they want to get paid. They put in some time making videos that others may want to see. And then they offer the material for a price that is determined by the market. It's no different to a film maker, photographer, actor, musician etc. If one doen't want to pay, there is usually similar free material avilable, though it may cost you in time searching for it.

Yes, there are few major virtual reality systems. Second Life's claim to fame is that you have intellectual property rights on objects you create within the game, and you can control how they are copied, transferred or modified. This leads to e-commerce. Say I create a pair of high heel shoes for people to wear on their avatars. I can sell those shoes in my shop (or someone else's shop, sharing the profit). Typical price for pair of shoes is anything from free up to about L$600 (300 Linden$, L$ = 1$US approx). Mind you, building complex objects and texturing them and scripting them is not easy, it's a real skill; you will earn your money! So if I can get someone to buy my shoes for 300, I have just earned $1. If I have a chain of shoe shops with lots of visitors, you can see how real money can be made. Some people actually do earn a living out of the game but most people end up net-spending or earning peanuts, just a few $ a week. Still, the opportunity is there for those who want to spend time on it. It's just another aspect of the simulation.

I played at Second Life a while back, and you do have the option of designing (re-designing) the shoes which are available, by choosing heels, and raising the height. Yes I did try some heels out on there and play with the height and style. I just got bored with it very quickly.

That playing with the height is just the basic 2-3" mode for beginners. The more advanced mode is wearing an avatar heel base and then buying "prim object" constructed shoes. These shoes have special invisble prim prisms to modify your foot shape and achieve 4-5" heels. Also you can get them with scripts to modify your walk and scripts to produce clicking heel sounds when you walk. Then there are special high heel posing scripts which modify your characters animation to produce cross ankle poses, heel rocking, feet shifting etc, just like the real thing. And if you are really advanced you can design and build your own shoes and write your own animation scripts.

I'd agree with the advanced machine comment. This thing eats mchine capacity to get it working properly as the graphical worlds and 3-D animations can be very realistic.

In spite of what they say, you need Pentium 4 2000+, 1 GB Ram, Modern Graphics card with at least 256MB on board, and very fast connection 1MB/s + to get near the potential. And the investment in time to learn the interface is large. (client downlowed/install is about 100mb too).

I still reckon it's worth it though, and the concept will improve. They have just introduced Beta testing on a headset which picks up brainwaves so you control your charcter by thought patterns, further improving the virtual reality concept.

Your English is very understandable. Well done after 23 years Well, your liking for a woman in heels is related for a liking for women probably. I don't care for the pedal pumping or crushing etc, but I kind of understand why. After all an attraction for those things is almost as irrational as attraction for a woman who just wears heels. Ask yourself if there is any rational reason why she should be "better" than one wearing flat shoes because it is the same woman. I think 4-5 inches is the optimum height on an average size woman's foot. Anything higher looks unbalanced. I like watching women wear them (candid, not deliberately posing). That can be sexy. And I prefer bare skin than hose like you. Getting personally closer to the person perhaps? I'm interested in men wearing them too. Not sexually, but just from a style point of view. It can look quite good with the right shoes. So, my views are quite close to yours, but there is no wrong or right. Every person is slightly different

The TV in bedroom shots seem quite popular though. But I agree I'd personally rather see heels in a real life outside setting, preferbly candid. However, if it's a TV or anyone else, I don't mind. Many TV's have pretty good legs anyway.