Twisting Around

Celebrating another year of not being devoured by Great Cthulhu!

Tis the season for TREASURE HUNTS. Quick treasure hunt tip number one: use wireframe view! (These pics are from a hunt that is now over, so I'm not revealing any seekrit locations *g*)

Can you spot the orange pumpkin treasure?


A quick flip over to wireframe view (Advanced > Rendering > Wireframe) shows the hidden goodness!

So I learned how to make writhing, pulsating tentacles. And of course, I now have to make them all the time. Here's some 5x5x100m megaprim tentacles about to consume Raeyn's island:


Can you spot teensy Helix?

Have a happy, tentacley Thanksgiving everyone! Cthulhu demands it!

Sometimes, when I'm standing next to certain wee women who shall remain nameless, I kinda feel like maybe I went a little crazy with the sliders. Made my boobs and butt too big and my height too tall. And then...

Then I go out into the wide world.

Friend Raeyn got a dragon avatar. A BIG dragon avatar. See if you can spot Helix talking to him:


White dress that Rosie sneakily stuck in my inventory. It makes me happy!


Standing in some tinted light beams I made. Just thought it looked pretty:


Larimar has an amazing hat:


Saying goodbye to the waterfall on Rae's island:


Playing a tune while the island falls around us:


Next pic is behind the cut for work-safeness. I got a new full body tattoo, and I love it. I just LOVE the image of writing on bodies. (Pic is set to 'moderate' on flickr, so you might have to allow something or other to look at it.)

Last night I ended up on a snow-capped mountain in a leopard print bikini surrounded by friends and friends-of-friends who were all checking out my ass. See, I needed a new skin. The one I've worn for most of my time in SL just wasn't doing it for me anymore. Largely because the butt shading was way too heavy. In a seriously ugly way. So if I never wore a bathing suit, or went naked, or bent over and stretched my legs, it'd have been okay. BUT I DO THOSE THINGS.

So a new skin with a non-ugly ass was in order. It needed two things: freckles and a decent butt. A non-hairless cooch would be a bonus, as I hate feeling like I'm twelve when I change clothes. My old skin had a prim-pube patch, but if I'd wanted to have to put on an attachment every time I got nekkid, I would've made myself a boy avatar.

After much skin swapping and discussion, and then some more nail-biting, I picked a new skin. Now do I need to change the blog header here....?

Old face:


New face:

Sometimes SL feels like junior high--he likes you, but you like her, but she likes someone else, and can you pass that other guy this note saying that she said that he said that that one girl likes him?--and sometimes it feels more like a... higher place of learning.

When I was in college, my little corner of the dorm got into a kind of prank war. It started small, just little embarrassing items pinned to people's doors... then moved on to things like secretly signing people up to get bed wetting literature in the mail. One of the biggest pranks happened when one girl went to take a shower. There were about ten of us sitting around in the hall chatting. In the space of time it took her to shower, we all ran down the hall and carted every single book in the dorm library up into her room, stacked them all over her bed, floor, desk, etc., and then all sat back down in our original positions just as she was getting out.

And this is what happened to my little patch of SL yesterday:


But that's not all. A CERTAIN SOMEONE created a little tableau of n00bs enjoying themselves... on my BED.


And then there was this guy, chained to the bed and forced to watch his love get it on with another. He brought a rose and everything! I *almost* took pity on him.


I suppose I should mention this attack was not entirely unprovoked. *ahem*

Wearing boy hair can be cute, I think.

Jared hair from ETD.

...when there are massive sales at ETD and Celestial Studios.

Okay, there's something.... off-putting? Scary? In my profile or just surrounding me. A giant "I'm a big meanie" sign or something. Maybe I'm always dancing and no one will tell me! An illustration: Tonight I went to the particle lab to read up on some stuff and nab a couple templates. There were a few other people there, looking around and using the sandbox. There was a guy, you know the guy, about two weeks old, he's got some new clothes and hair but still in the guy-next-door shape? He's going around and chatting up the female avis one by one. The machine-gun technique of picking up women, you know. Fire enough bullets, bound to hit one.

Anyway, he's boldly approaching and chatting them up--getting politely shut down each time--and finally makes his way around the path to me. He stands about ten meters away from me as I'm reading the notecard on push tricks. After about a minute, he flies away without a word. WTH? Even the n00bs stay away! I even had cute (small) hair on. Heh.

Facial expressions in SL can be weird. Avatar teeth for some reason just creep me out--maybe it was that time I accidentally cammed into my head and found nothing but eyes, teeth, and hair.... not a brain in sight.



Get a free HUD to play with facial expressions at the House of Curios. Lots of other cool and inexpensive stuff there too! I got Easter Island heads. Heh.

Here's an... outfit I got in the FallnAngel pumpkin hunt. As a side note, if you show even a little pixel skin in a pic you post to flickr, it automatically doubles your views. This got a handful of views before I was even done writing the description!


And here's a dress and tiara from the same hunt. I am the Queen of all things Autumnal!



Here's a couple of pictures taken using the windlight presets from Torley Linden here.






More in my flickr stream.

Here's some sculpty balloons.  At least, I hope they're sculpty balloons...



And here's something big and long and... okay, it's the Eiffel tower at the Paris 1900 build (which a new friend alerted me to!).  The red arrow is pointing to my avatar, to give you a sense of size.  I'm about to parachute off!

Standing in a shaft of light at Templum ex Obscurum:


Cutting the next pic for pixel representations of vague, Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction-esque nudity. *g* Messing around with windlight settings and wearing a ... skimpy spider web outfit.

I bought a new hairstyle (by the Stringer Mausoleum) at Crimson Shadow, and I think it looks kickass. I had to adjust it quite a bit because I believe it was intended for a man-head...

I paired it here with some outfits I hardly ever get to wear but love to pieces. The skin is one from freebie pack by Minnu (it looks good naked, too, but no pics of that...). There's a great man skin freebie pack at Minnu, too, but only for a little while!


This is my Black Swan dress from Haunted Zuzu, which I had to have the moment I saw it, even though I can't think of where to wear it!


This dress is the black butterfly dress also from Haunted Zuzu.


The hair comes with flails to wear in amongst the dreads! Silver or black. Unfortunately, they can't be flexi, but I think they look pretty cool anyway. Pay no attention to the bloody screen behind me...


That's my slexeh catsuit from Nicky Ree. Everyone looks hot in a catsuit, amirite?

Goofus sees a girl he finds attractive. "See my large and putty-like penis I found in a box of freebies?" he says, confident she will be swayed by his prowess.

Gallant sees the same girl, and takes a look at her profile. "I see you enjoy ballroom dancing," he says. "I know of a grand club that suffers from very little lag!"

Goofus frowns at Gallant, moving in on his girl. "Did you not see my enormous member? It matches my system skin and looks good with my gigantic pectorals."

Gallant swiftly changes into a tux, allowing a brief glimpse of his attractive skin and proportional body shape. "Those are some very nice shoes you're wearing," he says. "Do you mind if I ask where you got them?"

Goofus, growing more desperate, removes his penis and puts on some clothes. "I can dance, too," he says. "How long do we have to talk before we can have sex?"

Gallant, taking another peep at the girl's profile, says, "You're interested in building? Here, take some landmarks for good places to learn! Perhaps, after dancing, we can adjourn to my place to talk more about things you find interesting..."

Goofus, watching the teleport swirls as Gallant and the girl leave. "Bitch."




Really, guys, read the profile. And put something in yours! Nothing screams "Alt" or "I'm just here for the slex" louder than a blank profile.

So there's this club, see? And they had a 'gender-bender' theme night last night, see? And... uh... I went a little overboard.

Me, as I usually look (down to the clothes, as I can't seem to be arsed to change them much):


Now, here's how I looked last night:

Relaxing with a buddy after a long treasure hunt in the new Magic of Oz sim. The hunt's still going till Friday, I think.

Being a west-coaster, I have the dubious fortune of living in actual 'SL time'. I don't have to do any math to figure out when an event starts, but then most events start right at or before my dinner time. The east-coasters are usually going to bed around when I can normally log on, and the Europeans are waking up for work.

So I often explore a seemingly empty SL. It's nice, in that I can poke around and prod at things without interruption, but at the same time, it seems a little ... counter to the whole point of SL. Ha.


A field of flowers at Ode. Catch the butterflies and get pieces of jewelry.

The SL fashion blog Shopping Cart Disco has a regular feature on Sundays--SLsecret--modeled after PostSecret and it's many clones. A number of the secrets thus far have talked about loneliness and an inability to make friends in SL. As much as I'm enjoying playing in SL, I have found it rather difficult to make friends. Partly because of the time thing, I'm sure, but also because I have--in SL, as well as in RL--a very reserved manner. It usually takes me a couple of months to make friends in RL, and in SL a couple of months can feel like five years.


In a tree at La Reve.

I have a small circle of friends, and a slightly larger circle of acquaintances. I'd like to know more people (maybe even some in my own darned time zone! Where are all the Pacific coast SL-ers??), but I often feel stymied in this. One place I go to on occasion is friendly and fun, but also ... feels kind of insular and like a closed circle at times. Lots of places in SL feel like that, actually.

Also, I'm really enjoying building things and I need to balance social activity with that, all in the limited time I have to give to SL-related activities. Sometimes it feels like it's an either/or situation: do you want to play SL on the building track, or on the social activity track? If only I could gain XP by building that I could then spend on upping my charisma... or something equally nerdy. heh.


In the wheat field in the Refuge and Expansion.

Mellowing out at the Inspire Space Park. Everything kind of floats around as spacey, mellow music plays. There's meditation balls that will let you float freely amongst the space stuff. There's also dance balls and canoodling balls. If a date took me here, I would be impressed. That's all I'm sayin'.

A free--yes, free--blimpcycle! So fun to ride. Get one (and lots of other cool, well-done free stuff!) here.

Some pics so my rambling, talking out of my rear-end post isn't the top post. *g*

I run and I run but the scenery never changes.


Anyone have a carrot?


Um.... a little help here?

So I've been thinking a lot lately about how the SL-online experience is different from other online experiences, particularly the LJ-based fandom-esque online experience I've been a part of for most of the decade. A big part of SL is the... creating of identities other than your own. You can dress up as anything you want and play a role, in a way. And some people think of it as just that--a big RP playground. But not everyone thinks of it that way, so there's a lot of potential for crossed wires and hurt feelings.

For my part, I chose a gender-neutral name on purpose in case I should ever get the urge to try on a male shape. I'm too lazy to make a whole alt for that. I haven't done it yet (okay, once, so I could set a poseball, but I didn't change my clothes/skin/hair and I looked like the Elephant Man dressed up as Tim Curry in the Rocky Horror Picture Show), but I could.

And here's where I'm getting a bit stuck on the differences between my fannish/LJ online life and SL. In fandom (at least my little corner of it), there's a sort of semi-unwritten code of behavior. It's a huge breach of etiquette to 'out' another fan's RL identity, but at the same time you aren't supposed to lie (too much, at least!) about who you ARE. Especially in a journal-based environment, where people post about personal things as much or more than they do about fannish things. So you maintain your level of privacy and respect others privacy wishes, but you don't create an identity out of whole cloth and present it as YOU.

As an example, here's a scenario I was personally affected by: several years ago, I RPed for a while in an LJ-based game. There was a lot of OOC chat via IMs and I got to be friends with several of my fellow players, including a male player (which is unusual in the area of fandom I usually play in). After I left the game, I kept up chatting with my friends on a pretty much daily basis. The male player and I turned out to have very similar musical tastes, and we mostly chatted about that and traded tunes. After a time, we started talking about our personal lives and growing up (we were--supposedly--around the same age) and got to a point where--I thought--we were good friends.

Well, you can probably guess the rest: fast-forward a couple years and it comes out that this man was in fact a woman who had made up three or four LJ-indentities around the time the RP game started. None of the life history and anecdotes this man had told were true. The woman claimed to suffer from some sort of identity disorder. There was grumbling and anger and wank. For the most part, I just felt kind of sad that this person I thought I knew never even existed. And sadder still that the person behind my friend never trusted me enough to tell me. It was all a game. A separate compartment.

ANYWAY.

In SL, you kind of come in with the expectation that everyone you meet isn't exactly what they appear to be. It's dressup, it's costumes, it's theater! To a degree, at least. That big burly dude with the tats and the piercings might have an alt that's a blonde, double-D Gorean love-slave. Or the burly dude might be the love-slave's alt!

So I had to shift my perspective a bit when I joined SL. You really do have a better time if you just accept each AV as it appears. Don't waste time wondering who the AV 'really' is. Don't worry about gender.

Of course, that's easy enough to say. But SL isn't JUST playacting. People make real friends and connect on personal levels beyond the AV they present to the world. There's a kind of murky line that can grow between RL and SL once you start talking about RL things. What was a silly game, a distraction, can snowball into something larger than anyone ever expected.

You never know what will happen when you sit on a poseball. Sometimes you act out a scene from a romance novel:


Sometimes you just canoodle, until Cthulhu rises from the waters to eat you:


And sometimes you spend five minutes looking at the poseball name wondering if it's some sort of naughty euphemism:

I-- last night, I didn't build anything or explore any really interesting place. No, last night I put on a bunch of outfits from my inventory and took fashion show pictures of myself.

...lord, it is just Barbie in 3D, isn't it?





The rest are posted on flickr here.

So I made a building! It only took eleventy-billion tries, too. I had so many problems with the flickery seams thing, until I found prim docker. Thank goodness for prim docker. Did you know sometimes a prim will move just a teensy little bit when you click it to edit? I didn't, until I noticed the crappy seams and re-checked my position numbers. So. Frustrating.

Rear view:


Front view:


Inside, a loft (ooh, how completely uncommon! /me rolls her eyes):


Downstairs, workshoppy-area:


And the roof:


It's just a simple boxy-structure, but I think I learned a lot by building it.