Blue (a kind of creative response)

Above Hangars Liquides South

"You know what coming to the city taught me?" 

She crushed the cigarette she hadn't been smoking into the windowsill. The paper tore, and the unburned tobacco spilled on to the floor. Beyond the window, the city stretched as far as the naked eye could see, but, somehow, the warmth of all those bright lights twinkling in almost every window could not reach us here. The ice blue of her eyes and the hard line of her mouth kept it at bay, perhaps, and I wondered if, were I to reach out and wipe her silver lipstick where it had smudged, I would find her skin cold. I shivered. 

She didn't notice.

"It taught me just how little a fuck people really give. I mean, really. They're all bastard sons of bitches and they're all the fucking same."

If she hadn't sounded so serious, I might have laughed. I didn't think she was the type of woman that would take too kindly to being laughed at, though, and I didn't want to offend her. I wanted to know what silver lipstick tasted like. 

"Do you hate us all so much?" I asked instead.

She sighed heavily. "I wouldn't be helping you if I did. Trying to help you, anyway."

Dead Woman Walking

Last week, I managed to get myself involved in a roleplay scene that required me to play a role I have never really played before: the bad guy. More often than not, my characters are either down-and-outs who are forced to do distasteful and hideously unpleasant things for the greater good, or mercenaries-with-a-conscience that are forced to do really distasteful and traumatically unpleasant things for what they hope is the greater good. Whilst that might seem to be a pretty narrow field, it is, actually, inexhaustible, and I enjoy the infinite possibilities for variety that come with it.

But there I was, being a baddie. And looking like a complete bitch. Sian and I put our roleplay outfits together, well, together, and it was under her influence that Kitti ended up looking like the secretary from a science fiction film noir.

Space Noir

I am not a fan of planned roleplay (in fact, it makes me want to run away very very quickly), but having a character and knowing what it is that they want is endlessly helpful. That want doesn't, necessarily, have to be something that can happen immediately, nor does it have to be something terribly specific. This was actually one of the only times for me in SL roleplay where what my character wanted was very specific: to retrieve the errant agent P, and re-format her. This was made more complicated by the presence of Norah, a friend of the runaway who, let me tell you now, packs a punch.

What is it about roleplays involving Sian during which I get punched?! This isn't on. Back in the old days, when I first started doing roleplay via MSN Messenger, my first writing partner used to smack me over the head with a crowbar every time he wanted to change the locale. This did not amuse me.

Last week's roleplay scenario was interesting not only because I was a baddie, but because that baddie character I was playing could easily be an extension of the character I have previously roleplayed with Sian in the past. Little fresh-faced Kitti was offered a job by Sian in the very first roleplay we wrote together, and though the terms of that position were never formally laid out, it was abundantly clear that it would be in the sex industry. What became clear from this roleplay was that the world I had thrust my poor little down-and-out into was one that had expectations of her pretty face and young body, and for somebody like Kitti who had nowhere else to go, it was difficult not the see the security such an institution might provide. Are you repulsed yet? If not, I'm writing it incorrectly.

Those boots were so made for stamping on hopes and dreams...:P

 So this new, harder Kitti, made cruel by those harsh crescent moons of make-up and that brash red lipstick (not to mention the ponytail - that's gotta hurt when you take the band out!), is now on the other side of the sex industry system. To avoid joining the ranks of the pleasure dolls, she has joined those who look after them and keep them in line. And that is a wonderfully dark playground of possibilities and opportunities and complexities that I am rather excited to play out, and which give more depth and scope to my character than just labelling her a "baddie". Hopefully, I'll be able to deliver a few (emotional) punches myself before this story is exhausted. If not...I've got a really, really big gun to wave around. That should do the trick.

The scariest thing about being the villain of this piece is that I am, for the moment at least, the only one. Our roleplay scene took place at Hangars Liquides, home of the Crimson Merchants who had taken the errant agent in and made of her a friend. Now they've found out what went down in the Rainbow Bar (and if you want to know, too, I'll provide a link to Sian's posting of our log at the end of this post), they've declared that Kitti is a "dead woman walking". This is hilarious, of course, but still...scary. Sooner or later, I am going to end up in a room surrounded by people pointing guns at me, and I'm going to have to do some very quick talking to get my way out of that one. Hopefully, though, I've put a good word in about the choice of venue for this little showdown, so I'll at least get to meet them on my own terms. 

Fingers crossed, anyway.

If I get punched again, however, I might just rage-quit :P.

Click here - here! - to read a neatened up version of our roleplay chat log, as posted by Sian Pearl on her blog.

A Love Letter to Hangars Liquides

My favourite sim - aside from the one that houses my lovely skybox garden, of course - is Hangars Liquides. If you hadn't worked this out already...where have you been?! What I love about Hangars is...pretty much everything. It is a beautifully built science-fiction sim, and though it is dark and mysterious, and it is often raining, it is not without a sense of humour. 

Its builder, Djehan Kidd, is probably a genius. She pays so much attention to detail that there is even graffiti on the walls, and, in one apartment, there is a smoking cigarette resting in an ashtray. The sim features almost every kind of setting you could require from a science-fiction sim (at least in my limited experience of sci-fi, anyway) and probably some settings that had never occurred to you before: including busy streets, a market, a nightclub, a sky garden, a temple, public baths, holding cells, scanning machines, offices, junkie apartments, a taxi system and the most beautiful virtual beach I have ever seen...and the list goes on. 

It is presided over, too, by Lawrence Celestalis, who is a wonderful and charming gentleman who was totally cool with me repeatedly throwing my avatar off high objects and attempting to photograph her mid-fall. That was one of our first encounters, actually, when he caught me doing that, and do you know what he did? He laughed.

The one thing I hate about Hangars Liquides is that, no matter how many times I have tried (and I have tried many times), I cannot take good photographs of the sim when my intention is to take good photographs of the sim. In other words, I only seem to be able to capture the beauty and the intricacy of Hangars Liquides when I'm trying to photograph Kitti in that setting. My general landscape-type photos fall utterly flat, and do the sim absolutely no justice whatsoever. 

So here. Instead of posting a whole bunch of flat, useless, unflattering landscape-type pictures of Hangars Liquides, I am going to post utterly un-new pictures of the sim, some of which may have appeared on my Flickr before if not on here, and hope that these give you a sense of what an utterly wonderful place it is. If you want some more, please click the links at the end of this post - or visit! 

Scanning

Le Jardin Electric

The Beach

In the street - the streetlights make me want to be a saint

Apartments for rent

Apartments for rent - with the wonderful Mr.Celestalis

For more: Hangars Liquides in my Flickr stream / Hangars Liquides on the whole of Flickr.

Want to visit Hangars Liquides? Taxi!

Le Jardin Electric

Le Jardin Electric, Hangars Liquides

On Thursday, I went to my first virtual poetry reading. Sian Pearl performed 'l'objet petit a' at le Jardin Electric in Hangars Liquides. It lasted for half an hour, and more avatars turned up than my laptop would render. There was a great, friendly atmosphere, and reading poetry is what Sian does for a living, so everything went pretty smoothly. Including the audience seating, which, at le Jardin Electric, spins.

Occasionally - and, judging by what others were typing in the local chat, this happened to most people at some point -, the voice feed would cut out, and then cut back in, either at the point it broke out (suggesting I was now listening at a delay), or with some of the cast missing, creating something slightly more disjointed than Sian originally anticipated. But since such is based heavily on our individual connection, the performance each of us heard must have been slightly different, individual. The technology involved in making a live virtual performance pushes the idea of individual reception and experience. 

And, somehow (I'm not sure how, my sound cut out at this moment), Sian managed to work two of my favourite of her poems into the performance, and even read one she says was inspired by me/Kitti - and told everybody that is was so, so we had a little blush is-everyone-looking-at-me moment (they weren't).

Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures at the event, so I don't have one of Sian in her outfit, or Hangars Liquides' own Lawrence Celestalis, who looks awesome in a suit, or any of the other lovely (and wonderfully dressed) people that turned up. I went back after to get these shots, which I would advise to any SL users because le Jardin Electric really is a wonderful space. But I'll save my ode to Hangars Liquides for another post.

Inside the space

Daredevil

As you may have noticed from my last few blog posts, my avatar has a new skin. It's a couple of shades darker than my usual, but I really like it, though it has meant I've had to darken her hair by a few shades, too. She's still ginger, though - to keep my anxieties at bay. What a new skin usually means is a whole new set of images - profile pictures, blog banners - and this time has been no exception, as you may have also noticed by the shiny new banner at the top of this page. But here it is again, because why not:

Oooo, shiny!

I'm quite pleased with my banner, not in the least because it proved itself to be so difficult to make. I did try to replicate the old one, going to the Blade Runner sim and using the fall poses, but it wasn't quite working out for me. So I went to one of my new favourite places, Hangars Liquides, and began throwing myself off buildings.

That isn't a joke. There are, at the present at least, no handily set-up falling poses in Hangars Liquides, and I wasn't sure how else to get a falling shot. I made Kitti fly - HL is one of the few sims that actually lets you fly! - up high above a road, then positioned the camera just above the road, looking upwards. Then I hit the 'stop flying' button, meaning that Kitti would plunge to her death. I think I get brownie points for the idea, but no matter what I did, I couldn't lie the camera up with Kitti and she would end up landing just behind where I'd positioned the camera. At the time, I didn't think of doing a blog post about it, so I didn't keep any of the out-take images. Sorry. 

After a few tries, I gave up, and went onto the marketplace to look for a set of falling animations. I found one, though the animations in the pack seemed to have more agency than simply 'falling'. They were all 'falling-on-purpose' or, like the one I ended up using for my banner, 'jumping off a ledge'. But I figured that, with a pretty cool sci-fi outfit and a pretty cool sci-fi city like Hangars Liquides, jumping off a ledge could be. Well. Pretty cool. 

There were a few hiccups. Positioning my avatar right on the edge of the bridge-thing proved difficult, and sometimes Kitti fell off. But then I realised that I could activate animations whilst flying, so I could fly up, position myself just off the ledge, and use the jumping animation to make it seem (hopefully) as if Kitti had just leapt off.

These were the shots I ended up with:

Looks like I'm virtually on the edge, right..?

...I wasn't. Oops.

An attempt to use a falling animation whilst flying...didn't quite look right, though the rain looks pretty cool!

Somehow, I seem to have positioned Kitti just on the outside edge of the rain, lol!

Getting somewhere!

The image I used for my banner :)

To become a fan girl, just for a moment: I really do love Hangars Liquides. Before I got my new laptop, there is no way I could have gone there and seen all this. It is a beautiful build, created with such attention to detail, and, in places, such a sense of humour. It's stunning, and this section with the rain is, at the moment, my favourite. The builder, Djehan Kidd, is incredibly talented, and incredibly nice, and the sim owner (I believe that's what he is!) Lawrence Celestalis is kind and charming and full of fun. 

Lawrence and I, best viewed on flickr

 He spied me whilst I was trying to position Kitti for these shots and was giggling at me and asking if I needed him to come and catch me. Hilarious. Once I'd finished, he offered me a teleport link to join him and Djehan in a different part of the sim where he had decided to rez a tank and take us for a ride. A tank, ladies and gentlemen.

I also asked Lawrence if I might take shots here for my Kit 49 comic, which has been suffering since I have run out of places in the original sim I was using to take shots. He said yes. Exciting!