Fit for a (once) Princess (of Dorne)

Another round of Fit for a Princess has begun, and the theme, I believe, is the modern princess. Normally, when I do the posts for these events, I like to integrate them with something I wanted to write about anyway, but today I just wanted to make something beautiful, and offer a post of calmness, if you like, in the tirade that is my blog. Here it is.

If you didn't know (and I am sure you might have guessed), I am a big fan of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones. Being in the UK, I had to wait for this week's show until last night. Even though I knew what was coming, it was still absolutely horrid. I put on this dress from Peqe and thought it was something Ellaria Sand might wear - probably in a brighter colour, but she doesn't have Kitti's ginger hair to co-ordinate with (Peqe have made it in lots of bright colours, so you can go for your life).

I don't think I am especially well-suited to being a fashion blogger, but I am trying my best to do these one-off fashion posts. Fit for a Princess is a really cool fair, and it's introduced me to some really great shops I hadn't heard of before - like Peqe, who are now a favourite, and an lar and Lalochezia and elephante who make the best poses. The pose used in my photos is one of Lalochezia's, and I believe from it's name, Cambridge, that it was inspired by our very own English Duchess of, who is a beautiful woman. Who wouldn't want her poise?

If you'd like to visit the Fit for a Princess fair, you can do so by clicking here - here! If not, come and stand by me, and think of Ellaria.

Quick credits: Dress by Peqe and pose by Lalochezia, both at Fit for a Princess. Flowers by zibska. Hair by Truth. Skin by Glam Affair. Nails by Orc Inc. Shoes by ieQED. Hands and feet by Slink.

(R)Evolve

'The Digital Revolution is Now'

For a couple of months now, I have been watching the organisers of FutureWave build their dream of a futuristic fashion fair, and all their hard work has accumulated in a great event that opens to the public today. A large number of Second Life creators have been drafted in to this transhuman 'revolution', including some real fashion giants who I wouldn't ordinarily associate with the science fiction genre (but who, from the looks of their billboards, have created some fantastic things). There are also a whole bunch of stores I have never heard of that I am now going to be paying a lot of attention too - and I think that's half the point of such a couture market kind of event as FutureWave.

sian (who, in the future, has massacred the Upper Case) got me a sneaky early pass into the sim before the hoards descend later today. Having heard so much about it and having posed for sian's shop's (MetaTheodora's) ads, I really wanted to get in and have a look at the place before it becomes overrun with lag.

This is about the closest to cloning I'm ever going to comfortably get. So many Kittis!

(In the future, we'll probably all move really bloody slowly. Even the speed of Virgin Media internet cannot combat sheer numbers of virtual bodies who, nostalgically, cling to heavy scripted prims - which, non-SL users, can be fantastic and beautifully made but which can also cause super lag.)

Incidentally, there is an item available in MetaTheodora's gacha inspired by a blogpost I wrote ages ago about the idea of a nostalgic and out-dated vision of the future. That post is titled 'Kicking the Chrome Bucket'. If you get sian's little booby prize, I would love to see your pictures of you wearing it.

Reaching Beyond

Looking Down

But then I felt a little bit guilty. I knew I was going to take lots of pictures of the sim and post them here, but sneaky passes are ordinarily meant for fashion bloggers who agree, in exchange for said sneaky pass and free copies of a lot of the items on sale, to provide a whole bunch of publicity for the event and the products on sale. By posting pictures of the sim only, I'm only really doing half of that job - but I am still being bombarded with free copies of everything.

A moral dilemma then, and I have solved it by only picking up the free blogger copies of items I have been told to pick up or sent directly. I'll be back to buy everything else that I might want like an ordinary Joe when the fair opens later today (about eight hours from now). I've also done my damnedest to photograph FutureWave in the best most honest way that I can.

Just opening the couple of boxes I have been given has been stressful. There are boxes upon boxes and items upon items and I want to try everything at once but there is just so much! I cannot imagine what it would be like to have a box to open from each vendor...for each fair running in SL. I'm afraid I've lost half of what I've opened already. No wonder so many fashion bloggers have such huge inventories and such incredible lag. They're dragging around wardrobes full of Narnia all the time! That is not a territory I really want to venture into.

Meeow

So whilst you're full of Valentine's chocolate (gifted or discounted - who cares? Chocolate is chocolate) and the weather outside is foul, check out FutureWave. Here is the link to their page, and I'm sure they'll post a link to the sim itself there just as soon as it opens - here!

Yesterday's post on avatars and souls here - here!

The Red Pill

Let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes

Because I'm as mad as a hatter, I logged onto Facebook, and then Tumblr, this morning and invited questions from non-SL users about Second Life. I thought I might get a little variety in the questions, maybe get asked how something worked, or if such-and-such was true, but the four - I know, I know, I need to sit down, it's so many - responses I received were all to the tune of one question: What is Second Life, and why would you ever 'go' there?

Deep breath. 'What is Second Life' has got to be up there with the great unexplainable mysteries of life. God, the Big Bang, dark matters, why washing machines make widows of socks, why toast always lands butter-side down: we may never know the answer to these, nor may we ever come up with a completely satisfactory answer to What Second Life Is, but - take another deep breath - I am going to try and answer it nonetheless. I am going to bravely go where a thousand pink-haired rabbits have probably gone before me (we are talking about the Internet, after all). 

We're going to take the red pill. Fasten your seatbelt, Dorothy.

What is Second Life?

Second Life is a virtual world that exists somewhere within the Internet. When you download SL, what you are really doing is downloading what we call a 'viewer' - software with which to open a portal to allow you to see into, and create an avatar within, Second Life. The language of this suggests the opening of a window - literally - to view something which is already in existence just, usually, beyond your line of sight. When you log out and the window closes, the world carries on without you.

The easiest thing to do is to liken SL to a game - preferably, an MMO like World of Warcraft, except with more possibilities when it comes to character creation and customisation. Whilst this analogy works to explain how SL exists in the first place, it doesn't take into account that SL has no predefined objectives, no scoring system, no health or experience bars. In WoW, you can create characters that all exist in the same world, from the same lore, and all learn and level-up based on the same markers for advancement. In SL, not only do you not 'level-up', but the people you are meeting and interacting with may be pulling ideas and information from entirely different worlds and lores from you. The basis for the creation of their characters might be wildly different from yours, and you cannot even rely on the idea that the person before you comes from the same society as you in the real world, because that person could be from a country on the other side of the world from you. 

It's impossible not to draw similarities between SL and The Matrix. A whole virtual simulated world, a replica of the real world, which you reach by plugging yourself into a computer. If you die in the Matrix, you die in the real world - not the case with SL, but then that's because you cannot really die in SL. If someone upsets you in the virtual world, however, it's not so easy to let that emotion go when you go back to the real world. Whether you like it or not, just as your mind travels into the Matrix, so your mind travels with you into SL. And as Morpheus says and as I have repeated here ad nauseam, 'the mind makes it real'.

It's not all nearly as scary as I have made it sound there. Most of the characters I have come across have been 'normal' humans, so to speak, and because of time differences, and because of the social circles I have fallen in with, most of the people I meet are British or American. Those contexts are not, exactly, worlds apart. The only people I have come close to offending with my foreign-lore-ways were the Tolkien elves, and they turned out to be more laid back than I had been warned they would be. Usually, if you say please and thank you, and know how to take turns in a conversation, you'll be just fine.

In fact, SL seems to thrive on a kind of honesty not found, at least in my social circles, in real life. Anonymity can be a great bolster to confidence, but people in SL are often very forthright and open about things as personal as mental health, and sex. Sometimes, they can be a little too forthright, and as such, a lot of 'drama' takes place. Drama is a major issue for SL, and it's something that has been known to drive people away from engaging with the virtual world. 

Because of the drama, and because there is no specific law (that I am aware of) for SL, SL is populated with vigilantes. On forums, personal blogs, and social media networks such as Plurk, vigilantes launch attacks, rightly or wrongly, against those they deem to be wrongdoers, accusing them of everything from copyright infringement to child pornography. Charity fundraisers that didn't give the money they raised to charity, people that think it's O.K. to sell clothes featuring swastikas or dressed inspired by the Columbine school shooting, insensitive remarks about rape - it's all happened in SL, and it's all been pointed out and dealt with by vigilantes. In terms of social and individual empowerment, it's fantastic; but, with any good vigilante film, there's always the fear that people see and accuse first, and ask questions later. Butchering one person doesn't change a general attitude.  

In terms of physicality, SL looks like...well...a whole lot of different things. There is no one aesthetic, and no rhyme or reason to how the virtual world is arranged. If you owned the land and the building skills, you could place Australia beside, say, Sweden, and have one foot in each replica-country, except SL is usually more diverse than that. Instead of building two countries next to each other, more often than not I find I could have one foot in a boxing ring a la Fight Club, and the other in a meadow which is home to a race of fairies with mermaid fins. 

Because there are so many individual creators and designers, the lands (sims) you can walk through can change as often and as quickly as the English weather. Since there is no are-you-any-good-at-this test, the quality of the builds can vary dramatically, too, and they will only exist as long as you keep paying for the land you are renting from Linden Labs. If you stop paying, you lose your right to build there. If you choose to rent land through a middle man, and someone offers you a better deal, you can move your building to another virtually-physical location. In that way, you can never wholly be sure that the place you are trying to visit is still going to be there. I tried to teleport (main method of transportation, after walking) to the World's End Garden earlier (see what that looks like here - here!), and instead ended up on a sim full of everyday-looking houses and great big palm trees.

Why Second Life? What is the point?
Second Life means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and what drives them to the virtual world in the first place is not necessarily what keeps them there. There's no way I can account for everyone's motives, but here are some thoughts.

SL is, potentially, a fantastic platform for design, creation, and money-making. Designing avatars and building houses in SL has the same appeal as designing avatars and building houses does on programmes such as the Sims. In SL, however, whilst you can get a limited about of clothes and items for free, things cost money, and land to build on costs money, and so many people turn to creating and selling their owns items or clothing in order to make SL pay for itself. For creatives, it's a great way to make a bit of pocket money, and also another forum for you to spread your artwork. I know of more than one real life artist who uses SL to sell artwork in various forms and to build up another fan-base. SL also offers access, thusly, to a wide range of other creatives with which you can bounce ideas and collaborate. That's exciting, no?

Some people with anxiety and/or depression also find solace in the virtual world. Being able to hide behind a different face can be a confidence booster, and it allows greater control over who you interact with, and when - especially since there are a thousand legitimate and familiar excuses you can employ to soften the I-don't-want-to-speak-to-you blow. There is one person I call friend who uses SL to get out and socialise because he is a full-time carer and cannot leave his house for personal time very often. 

It is also, alternatively, a place in which to hide - just as people hide from real life in books, games, and TV shows - , a place where the thing you are running from doesn't have to exist for a while. There's a danger there, in that a lot of expectation is made of what the virtual world is capable of, and sometimes it is all too easy to hide within its virtual boundaries and not to deal with the issues that originally drove us there. Alternatively, it offers a sanctuary in which to gather strength and support until you are ready to confront the real world. SL can't give you any answers that the real world can't, but perhaps the performance of life, the framing of it - and the performance and framing of yourself - can help lead you to the answers we can only get from ourselves.

Other people use SL as a place for self-experimentation, whether that be on a shall-I-dye-my-hair-purple level, or a am-I-into-BDSM-sex level. This ties (ha ha) into roleplay, but goes beyond just sexual roleplay - SL presents another medium in which to roleplay, listing itself beside the tabletop and forums. People in SL take RP very seriously, and the creation of collaborative stories like this is a wonderful thing in my opinion.

As I have written about here (- here!), there is no obligation to be the person you are in real life in your Second Life. If you want to log on and act like a chauvinist, off you go (it happens more than you might imagine). You can use your avatar to pretend to be confident, to pretend to be a rogue - to pretend to be whatever you like. As I've suggested, you don't even have to be human. You could be an animal, real or mythological, or a car, or an aeroplane, or a robot. The limits are the building skills of the virtual community.

The point, truly, is that Second Life has no point other than the point you give it, and many people stop engaging with Second Life when their original motive finds some real-life conclusion. If you get passed the difficult interface and utterly unintuitive avatar customisation, as well as the idiots that line up to flash their fake penises at newbies, there are some fantastic things to see in Second Life. Virtual coastlines, beautiful dream-worlds, spaceships, dragons, diners plucked straight out of the 1950s; if you can think of it, it probably exists, and if not, you can create it for yourself. 

Of course, there are an awful lot of fake penises kicking around, too.

Does that even begin to answer either question? There seems to be so much to say, but I think that is enough for now. I'm late for a very important date.

Bold

Yesterday morning, I logged onto Flickr and found someone had left a comment on a photo I had uploaded back in February. The comment was a request to do a pile-up, and it was the first such request I have ever received and, of course, I said yes. 

Often, people post their SL shots with a green background (like a green screen in film, I understand), and other people download that image and doctor it, usually by adding in a background. This is a pile-up. The wonderful thing about pile-ups is that your original picture could have been taken in a forest, but I could take it and put you, instead, on the Moon. Alternatively, I could just edit the colour of your hair a little, or crop it in. There are no real rules attached to the creation of the pile-up, and as I said, it's a pretty simple idea. In the end, you end up with a collaborative image that adds something new to your original concept. From all angles, it's cool.

When I posted my picture - with its green background - I didn't have a pile-up in mind. In all honestly, I'm not sure what I had in my mind when I posted my picture, except that I was having fun with the beautiful make-ups from chelle and I wanted to have lots of arms. And I realised that I could join in the SL naked party without revealing too much because my hair totally had it covered.

See this, my original image, full size on flickr - here!

I had no idea what to expect from my first pile-up, or from Crystal, especially since I don't actually know her. She began following my Flickr stream yesterday, I believe, and I am now following hers.

Thank you, Crystal, for taking the time to look at my pictures, and then for taking the time to make a pile-up of me!

What Crystal created is absolutely brilliant, and I love it. It is so vibrant that I wonder that I ever thought the green of my original image suggested anything of life at all. She added something utterly new to the picture, and linked it to a song that conspires with the new colouring to make Kitti into an LSD acolyte, as well as nymph of free love.

See on Crystal's image on Flickr - here! - and on her Tumblr - here!

And wouldn't you listen to every word she said? I think she makes a most persuasive disciple.

A Watery Grave

Home Sweet Home

Carmine Chris and I are rebuilding our skybox. We felt that it was time for a change, and anyway, all that prim grass played havoc with...well...pretty much everything. Our new build is simple and pretty, consisting of two floors. There is a square cut out of the middle of both to allow for a courtyard garden. On the bottom floor, the inner walls are made of glass, so that we can see in to it. Norah's been helping (massively) too, which only seems right since she spends as much time in the box as I do (and more than Carmine Chris), and has fantastic design sense.

Yesterday evening, Norah and I stood out in the garden trying to work out what to do with the little green space, when I accidentally deleted the floor. Norah, myself and Party Cat plummeted instantly, and were only saved from a very, very long fall and a watery grave because we can fly and Party Cat has developed some kind of magical floating powers she's been keeping to herself.

It's so easy to forget that our skybox is literally that - a box in the sky. Very, very high up in the sky. It sounds so stupid, but in real life, we take the floor for granted completely. Even when we are thankful for a roof over our head and food on our table and water coming out of our taps, we never doubt the floor beneath our feet.

And it is with a childish, impish glee that I instantly go into giggles whenever I accidentally delete the floor, as I am sure you can imagine happens fairly frequently. I imagine it is possibly a need-to-be-there situation, but I cannot say from where comes my guilty joy in this silly mistake.

I'm giggling just thinking about it.

The other childishly amusing thing that happened yesterday evening was Norah's transformation into a bunny rabbit. On a whim, I put my projector on the top floor of the house and pointed it at the inner walls (which are solid). The way the light hit Norah, who was standing just on the edge of the beams, combined with the hat she was wearing, made her look like Frank from Donnie Darko.

I've been      expecting      you

Maybe it's all in my head. Maybe I'd been logged in too long, and needed some fresh air.

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!

Cast a Shadow

Light and shadow

As Second Life advances, everything within it is taking on more of an air of realism. Okay, well, maybe not everything - but it is fair to say that everyone from skin creators to those who make grass and water are producing new levels of verisimilitude. Graphics are getting better. Cameras are getting better. Software for drawing is more sensitive. 

Part of that bid for realism, perhaps, Linden Labs introduced the concept of shadows. As I understand it, this was foreshadowed (I'm sorry, I had to - but even I am cringing) by content creators who had already begun giving their objects shadows by attaching a shadow texture to a very skinny prim they could slide beneath their object (non-SL users: imagine cutting out a circle of black paper and placing it beneath a tennis ball. Ta-dah, a D-I-Y shadow). 

This seems like a natural progression, but, when you break it down, it's a very bizarre thought, since we take shadows so much for granted in our everyday life. Why wouldn't we? They are part of the very fabric of our world and the way we understand it. That Linden Labs noticed this - did they have any help from SL users? I have no idea, and Google isn't telling me - and implemented them in a more dynamic method than the black-paper-beneath-a-ball effect is completely miraculous and cool. 

Shadows are dynamic. I can mess around with the Windlight settings and, depending on where I place the Sun in the sky, the shadows move. Let's have a teensy deus ex machina moment. 

Okay, I'm done with that. Here's the other side of the coin.

Meeow

What's strange (albeit, wonderful), about having shadows in SL is that they are adding a layer of reality to something that...well...is perhaps lacking in the realism department. Let me say upfront: I know nothing about software and game-building, and I'm not criticising those who are involved in this, at all. I have no idea how hard it must be, and I appreciate the effort that goes into creating things like SL - which, as I have already said, is awesome! 

Anyway. Check out Kitti's elbow in the above picture. The shadow on her forearm and her shoulder make me want to jump up and down and clap, but her elbow looks weird. The avatar mesh isn't good with bent elbows. It's also really, really rubbish in the foot department. Avatar system feet are weirdly shaped and all the toes are joined together. Now, this problem has been solved by the introduction of mesh feet, I know, but I just wanted to highlight (couldn't avoid that one, sorry) the juxtaposition present here. 

There's a kind of comment on reality here, too, though it's not one that Linden Labs went out to make, I don't think. They have made Second Life and the avatars within it more real by allowing them to cast shadows. Kitti, although it is lost in the first picture amongst the shadow of the tree, casts a shadow on the ground, and is therefore there, present, and (virtually) real. She is interacting with a (virtually) real environment, a (virtually) real Sun. She makes a mark on the world.

Isn't there a quote somewhere by someone famous about the cruelty of humanity that leaves a mark on the world? Food for idle musings only.

Happy Easter!

Pretty Dangerous

On the advice of a friend, I visited a sim created by Bryn Oh called "Anna's Many Murders". I believe it is part of his Immersiva project, though I'm not one hundred percent sure that I have that the right way around. I confess, I had never heard of Bryn Oh, or Immersiva, until I clicked the landmark my friend had sent me, and teleported into what appeared to be a wooden box. 

I know that, ordinarily, I don't really like to use this blog as a kind of virtual Blue Planet Guide, but I do like to record the things that I come across that I find amazing or interesting, and this find certainly falls into both of those categories. I am not going to log here a walk-through - that would ruin it! - but there are a few things that I should like to mention and talk about.

Inside the wooden box with me was a giant bee holding some letters, and a statue of a girl, surrounded by plastic bags that looked as if they were caught in a breeze. On the wall behind her was a placard, and as I went in closer to read it, the plastic bags turned into butterflies, as if by magic. It was a beautiful illusion, and a very unexpected one. It appears to work on a timer, so that if you hang around, the butterflies will, eventually, turn back into plastic bags. It is repeated later on in the sim as you walk through it, to even greater effect, but I will let you find that one for yourselves.

I caught them as they began to transform; by the end, the bags were gone.

The placard on the wall was the beginning lines of a poem, and as you move through the sim and encounter each of the installations, you learn more and more lines of the poem. It's a wonderful mix of exploration and art, and it is beautifully done, both in the realisation, and the "ease of use", if you like - it is easy to work out which way to go, and the poem is in equal parts funny and disturbing. The title of the piece is not a brag; there are, indeed, many murders committed by our friend Anna.

A darker streak.

Sadly, I was not able to visit all of the sim with my avatar. At one point, there are steps which lead to a box in the sky, and Kitti's legs are apparently not long enough to make the crossing. Flying is disabled on the sim, and so is teleporting around it, so when Kitti fell off the step and down the side of the cliff, I received a notice that she had died and been returned to my home sim. I did manage to use the camera functions to look at what was in the box, but I was rather frustrated that I couldn't get Kitti up there to look at it properly!

I was also intrigued, and disturbed, by the faces on the models. It would appear that the artist has taken photographs of real life faces and pasted them onto the skulls of her characters. The effect is jarring, and eerie.

Don't mess with Anna! Behind her, the steps I could not climb.

I'm not sure, had I been the artist, that I would have done this, but I can't deny that it is certainly effective. I hope she knows the people these faces belong to...and what does it mean if she doesn't? I'm surprised that I haven't had nightmares about her!

Much of the build is really beautiful, however, and I was completely won over by this lightbulb tree. It seems like such a wonderful idea, and it was things like this, details like this, that I found really drew me into the artwork.

The Lightbulb Tree, and a steampunk-style horse behind.

Bryn Oh is not the first, I would imagine, to combine artistic and poetic elements with the explorative-game style. I have visited sims in the past that have been dedicated to this kind of game, though they are often themed by holidays or festivals or big sales, and seldom, I think, have I come across one so well-thought out, or so atmospheric, as this one. Had I been able to run my graphics any higher, and did I have any grasp of Windlight settings at all (for non SL users, Windlight is some kind of software to do with lighting in-world), I imagine it would be even better.

I also find it really exciting that Second Life can be used as a platform for not only showcasing art, but for creating it. We aren't viewing a facsimilie of the art; we are viewing the art itself, and there is something invigorating about the adaptation of new software for art's sake - especially in a day and age when funding for the arts and the future of the artists relying upon that funding has become so uncertain. 

A quick Google search turned up Bryn Oh's blogspot - here - and a quick in-world search for "Anna's Many Murders" turns up the landmark you need to visit. I got the impression that, as part of an on-going project, the sim would not be around for so long, and that I had already missed previous artworks by Oh. If there are any Bryn Oh fans reading this, please enlighten me? I am definitely interested in seeing more of his work.

Neo Cassandra

During my time in SL, I have come across not only a wealth of interesting and creative avatars and in-world designers, but also a whole horde of creative SL bloggers. Now, admittedly, most of these bloggers are fashion bloggers, creating catalogues of inventive and often beautiful combinations of outfits, but it does not appear to be an uncommon phenomena for them to add amongst the screenshots and the "my avatar wears..." lists some kind of alternative creative response adding to the image or the atmosphere of the post. 

Amongst the blogs I follow, Sian Pearl does this most often, giving us not only great shots of herself, but also some kind of insight, poetic or prosiac, into the mind of the variation of character she has chosen to adopt today, or the thinking behind her creation. This evening, moments before coming over here to start this entry, I found an image in the flickr photo stream of Aida Ewing (who, I understand, runs the Glam Affair store in SL) which she has captioned with a link to a music video on Youtube. The picture can be found here - here! Similarly, over at Renoobed, a blog post appeared today featuring an amusing anecdote that then slipped into the lyrics of a song. The point I'm trying to make is that people aren't just straight-forwardly documenting their adventures (and their outfits) in SL - they're making art out of it, enjoying a little creative freedom.

And why shouldn't they? Avatars take time and effort and, unless you've a super computer that can handle SL's demanding graphics rendering systems and its tempestuous shadows that seem to cause EVERYONE to crash (I have never even been able to enable shadows, ha ha), they can take time and effort to photograph, too.

This evening, I logged in to find a group gift from the jewellery story Amorous, and decided, since I'd a little free time, that I would try to design an outfit to match it. I wanted to mix the mysticism of Matchbook Monday's jewellery with something edgy, cold, and maybe a little sci-fi, and when I trawled through my inventory, I realised that I was essentially recreating an image that I have been writing about beyond SL for several years now. It is an image that intrigues me, and I have been playing with it, writing poem after short scene after poem attempting to realise and build on that image. So why not use SL to help create another piece of original material to go with the rest of my work?

Why not indeed.

Daughter of Priam...

Over long lashes

Curled over yellow eyes, they fought

Ham-fisted, ham-hammered,

Caved in head after caved in head,

And it is done. Helen is

Returned, and all other women be

Damned

To rot alone

As their men fight another man's war.

But wait:

Neo Cassandra - Daughter of Priam - 

Clad in latex and steel - 

Saunters through the ruins of Troy

On Agamemnon's arm,

Headed west: Greece ahead

And there to make

A blood bath of another marriage bed.

...in the ruins of the city.

Please visit my flickr via this link - here! - to see these images in full size.

World's End

Bit of a different post for you today. Not so much sarcastic and analytical as..."ooh, look what I found". It kind of relates back to a post I made at the end of last month, "Deus ex Machina?", and it was in that spirit that I thought I'd share these screenies. They are of two places - one rather romantically called "World's End Garden", and the second "Crommhold" - that I found via the blog of Sophia Inkpen. I'm not the best at scenic shots in SL, but...yeah. I thought that they were quite pretty, and quite well-made, and there was enough interactivity in them to keep me entertained for a while.

World's End Garden:

First time my avatar has ever brushed her hair, lol

The island from above

Crommhold:

A waterfall of stone faces

A hidden temple

I liked the detail in the face of the Moon

The slurls (URLs used to teleport to places in SL) are available on Sophie Inkpen's blog, the link to which can be found in the opening paragraph of this post (or here, if you're too lazy to scroll back up).

Consider this a short reprieve from my usual wordiness :P

Deus Ex Machina?

It's been too long since I last posted to this blog - and for that, I apologise. I was swept off my feet for a fortnight, babysitting my younger brothers and looking after the house whilst Mum was visiting her other half in LA. Since I have no desire to turn this into a personal blog, however, I shall say no more on the subject other than that I was busy. As they say on the internet, TITS OR GTFO.

No, really - but I'm here now, and as my last post was kind of cynical, I decided I'd ease my way back into the subject with a softer, slightly more appreciative post. For all of the craziness (and trust me, there's plenty!) that goes on in SL, there are some absolutely fantastic things being created there, and I never cease to be amazed by how much attention has been paid to the smallest details. As I believe I have briefly mentioned, the crowd I fell in with, if you like, in SL almost seem to go out of their way to find interesting places to take me to. 

I logged in one day and was instantly messaged by Laertes. He'd found a sim to take me to that he thought I'd like, and once we got there, he asked "Anything look familiar?", like I was supposed to know where we were. If I hadn't realised that there was a sign proudly proclaiming our exact virtual location, I'd have been at a complete loss. 

Would you have recognised it?

In my defence, I've never been to Brighton Beach, but I still felt like I'd let him down by not recognising the scene. It was an amusing stereotype, however, that Laertes assumed that I, being English and living in England (and him being American, living in the US), would have been to Brighton; but the more I examine it, the more I feel ignorant about my own country, so I can't win that one, really.

Admittedly, the Brighton Beach sim isn't the most exemplary of sims when it comes to a discussion of intricacy and virtual art, but it was here that my understanding of the nature of SL and the things people create within it really began to take root. 

Take a moment to appreciate what you're looking at here. Somebody sat down one day and decided to re-create Brighton Beach. Somebody designed and built each one of those scooters, as well as the lamppost, the railing, the promenade, the pier. There are waves in the sea. There's a pattern in the asphalt, a texture to it, that somebody has taken the time to render. Stopping and taking note of these things can get you hysterical, and if you're not careful, you're going to end up in the front garden come dawn, marvelling at each blade of grass. The postman is going to see you in your pyjamas, staring at the grass all starry-eyed when he comes to deliver the latest batch of bills, and he'll call the nice men in the white jackets to come and pay you a visit. I don't want to be responsible for that.

But hold on a moment - we're not talking about muttering to a deity we cannot prove or disprove the existence of, here. We're not battling with Hawking and the Divine Plan. There's no belief, no faith, required. This Creator is human, and chances are, if they're spending their time recreating Brighton Beach, they're either unemployed or a real computer whizz. Maybe both.

Okay, so the cynicism is seeping back in. I'll get back to the positive. 

Whether the creator had too much time on their hands or not, the Brighton sim is pretty cool, and when I returned to show my mother (yes, I am that cool), I found out that you can even go for a donkey ride.

As if there weren't enough donkeys to go around...

Now that I've got you appreciating the miracle of individual asphalt particles, take a look at these. Bear in mind that my graphics settings are turned down low, as I run SL on my laptop, and that photos can be clicked to enlarge:

St Francis' Church

An underwater ballroom

"Labyrinth of Time"

An abandoned bus on "Hope"