Rolling Flashback

As you may or may not recall, I spent five weeks last Summer in SoCal, staying with my mum in a little 'city' not far out of LA. On a couple of days, tired of the heat, we retreated to Westfield, Santa Anita, and spent the day wandering through beautiful air-conditioned shops. When we had to venture outside, either to go into another shop or to rush back to the car - hiss! sizzle! -, we passed by these utterly charming wicker chairs and tables, arranged beneath parasols. I'm sure these arrangements much exist in the UK, but I've never seen them. I've never seen a long enough period of good weather to warrant their existence! I thought they were great. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that I took a photograph. 

In SL today, I found them! Their virtual twins. I know it sounds silly, but I've spent the last however many months being haunted by California (in a good way). It seems so strange and alien to me that I was ever there, and that has been made more strange, now, since the next time I go out to visit my family State-side, it will be in an entirely different location (they moved house - to Arkansas!). It would be so easy to think that the Summer was a dream. A very hot, unusually humid, dream. 

So yes. I got quite excited. And it presented an opportunity to show off my new buys today, which are special because I got them from the Arcade and I've never been to the Arcade before. It was an interesting experience.

Look at them! So inviting! Wicker chairs!

The Arcade - for the uninitiated - is basically a kind of pretty warehouse space that is...well. An arcade! Shops in SL make items specifically for the event and put them into machines called gachas, which are basically those domed things filled with toys. You put a penny in, and out pops a toy at random. It took me longer to get into the sim that I actually spend there (the sim was full!). I didn't stay there long. I wanted some skates, and one of those cute animal backpacks, and then I left.

I'm going to stop with the rambly anecdotes now. Just. Wicker chairs! Westfield! Santa Anita! SoCal! Summer! Me! Roller skates!

Loose Ends

As I wander through SL, I seem to gather a whole lot of screenshots that go into my screenie folder and never see the light of day again. And a thousand tiny incidents take place, and I find lots of really cool things to share, and I never write about them because they aren't, by themselves, worth a whole blog post. So I figured I'd pile them all into one blog post, and...well. Be done with them!

So first of all; remember my cat? (If you don't, click here - here!) I logged in a couple of weeks ago to find that my cat was nowhere to be seen. I searched the whole of my house, and my surrounding 'garden' - which is empty, apart from a tree and a very small patch of flowers. When I couldn't find her, I started to panic. How had I lost a cat - a virtual cat, no less, that was tethered to this patch of ground?! 

You can see her name there, over the hedge!

Because the damn thing was hiding in my hedge. In the hedge. The hedge I had assumed was solid. My friend Croon found her for me - but then I couldn't get her out. A whole lot of cursing later, she came out of her own volition. Damn cat. 

Other than that, she's doing fine. She grew some more, and after a software update, she now has more cuddle options, and my inventory doesn't get filled up with cat-toys everything I play with her. That's good - my inventory is full of all kinds of random things that would need a post of their own to explain, let alone catalogue!

Friends again <3

 After deciding that I needed to get out more, I went to Torley Island and found these really cool pieces of giant origami...

I know Kitti isn't tall in SL terms, but wow!

 ...and whilst I was there, I got to sit in another really big chair - and you know how I live for that!

Really big chair!

  ...and  I was then given a really cool add-on type thing that allows you to defy gravity and walk on the ceiling!

Look Ma, no hands! - and no strings!

The add-on was given to me by Laertes, with the intention that I could use it for roleplaying scenarios on his new shipyard at Botany Bay, but so far all I have done is walk around my ceiling a little bit. The funniest thing was that when I activated the add-on whilst still wearing my animation override, I spun around in circles. I have absolutely no idea why that happened, but it did make me giggle. Sadly, I didn't get a decent screenshot, but I do have some game capture software on my laptop, so maybe I'll utilise that.

I've also been doing some building - which, after my first post about building, I'm sure you cannot imagine. It took me so long last night, and I found the whole thing so fiddly...but I was getting pretty tired of having to throw up a wall everytime I wanted to make my own background for my screenshots, and the wall wasn't the prettiest thing in the world. So I tried to build something a little cooler, and a little more discrete. I'm not really sure what to say about them, so I'll just plonk them here.

By some miracle, I managed to put this together.

Applying textures :)

I couldn't work out why the walls were darker than the floor -

- and I could only fix it by making the walls glow XD

The end result!

After a little more playing around with the textures, I managed to make the outside of the build glass. So you can see in, but, as you can see from the above image, you cannot see out. Cool, huh? Well, I thought so.

Not the best screenie, but, I tried. I'm learning!

Well, that just about concludes my loose ends post. It's pretty much tied up, and I think I have sufficiently overloaded this post with images. There is one more thing, however. 

Does anybody remember a time when the girls' bathroom at Necronom VI wasn't out of order?!

>.<

Sitting in the Big Chair...

I promise that there are some technical, intellectual, philosophical and ethical issues I want to talk about in relation to Second Life here in this blog...but I want to post this too so...."nurrr!", I guess.

In the previous post (posted seconds ago!), I said I wanted to post the screenies I have taken of myself thus far sitting in big chairs. I consider it an SL hobby of mine.What can I say? I've been taken to a lot of sci-fi sims and been aboard many spaceships, and thus I have seen a lot of important, executive-type chairs, and the child in me runs (and by "runs", I mean, "walks seductively towards as if modelling a new dress by Gucci") towards them, clicks the pose ball, and grins maniacally. Okay - so the maniacal grinning happens in real life, not in SL. Don't ruin my fun.

Without further ado, I give you Kitti in the Big Chair:

This was on a kind of Star Wars show ship. The whole place was a shop.

See chat bottom left in screenie. Eeeee! :D

This last screenshot (below) isn't of a big chair specifically, but it was, for a short time, my chair. Laertes told me that I could sit here and take a register of people going on and off the ship, and...do other important things on the computer you can see there. So there I sat. Looking important. Doing nothing because only he and  were on the ship in the first place, and he was the owner and captain of it. The pose ball attached to this chair seemed to think that the arms of the chair were a whole lot higher than they really were...hmm.

Check out my sci-fi outfit. O simulated latex, you have so much to answer for.

 I'll keep you posted on the big chairs front ;)