The Poise of a Princess

a type of religion

So, the Fit for a Princess event is on its second round, and I am still, by some miracle, on the list of bloggers, so here is my post.

Poses. You have to love poses. Poses can make or break a picture, and so far some of my favourite items from both rounds of this fair have been the poses. The ones pictured above are from nani ('whirlwind'), and I love how, in this set-up at least, Kitti appears to be appealing to the virtual gods - first in worship and then in annoyance. This kind of bargaining with deities you only half believe in was fairly standard when I was growing up, so much so that it has become a kind of trope. Church on a Sunday? No way. But want to win the lottery, or blame someone for everything that's going wrong in your life? Better Call Saul. Or God.

balletic

This second set is from positure, and is named 'Princess Roza'. Princess Roza is obviously a ballerina, and I love the simple elegance of these dance-like poses. They make for beautiful shadows too, which, combined with my super cool projector, made for some interesting layering.

There is much more at Fit for a Princess than poses. Click here to go and check it out - here! If you'd like to see the pictures from this post larger, please click here - here!

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!

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 ;)

F*cked and Sucking

Pose Balls. I've talked about them, but as before, I haven't really explained what they are. This is kind of another post for my readers who don't actually use SL (why are you reading my blog, then, weirdos?! No, wait, come back, I'm kidding...).

Put very simply, pose balls are coloured circles usually placed over objects that, when clicked, offer an animation override that will allow you to interact with said object. They are often colour-coded, so pink pose balls are for women, and blue for men. I have occasionally seen yellow pose balls, which I presume are intended to be gender neutral. They usually have text over them, too, suggesting what that specific pose is for, though sometimes their titles can be a little enigmatic. For example, if I walked passed a bench and it had above it a pink pose ball with the text "sit", I could click it and it would make my avatar sit on the bench in a pose it thinks suits my gender. It is not impossible, however, to click the pose balls intended for other genders. Often, I find, they are scripted with very, very stereotypical postures, and they usually make me laugh.

There are also some pose balls that have been scripted with moving animations - beyond the usual, attempt-at-natural fidgeting that most avatars do. Some allow you to carry out dance moves and, perhaps it goes without saying, but pose balls are how avatars in SL go through the motions of having sex.

The first pose balls that I encountered in Second Life were these wonderful pair. The pose balls themselves weren't visible, as they are in the crawl space beneath the floor grating, but make no mistake - those titles are the titles of pose balls. A flatmate of mine who tried SL (once, this time, and never loaded it ever again) clicked them and confirmed that they were fully functioning:

I should add that these actions are carried out by tentacles. I kid you not.

I was taken here by a friend who offered to show me the ropes. When I found these, my friend quickly explained that it had previously been a sim for tentacle porn/rape roleplay. Two questions went through my head at that moment. How popular is tentacle porn/rape that somebody designed a sim for it, and why did my friend think that this would be a good place to take me to?! 

Once you get passed the weird pose balls, the Necronom sim is actually a pretty good build, and the bar is one of the most interesting places I've been to. I've seen avatars in there that have been customised to have dragon-heads, and cat-heads, and I've seen robots and alsorts - such is the extent of the freedom of SL.

So here. Have some more screenshots showing my avatar doing things because I clicked on a pose ball:

Like lying awkwardly on a bunk bed in the Botany Bay Space Station

Or sitting in a deck chair on what is supposedly a great replica of Brighton Beach

Okay, so I'm not doing anything in this one. But look at the pose balls on that bath. Do I even what to know what they make you do?!

And finally mimicking Kate Winslet on board the Titantic. Oh, come on! You would have done it, too!

Pose balls have also allowed me to do what has become one of my favourite things to do in SL - sitting in big chairs! But they deserve a post of their own. Maybe I'll post those screenshots to follow this post...