A is for Aaaaugh! I haven’t blogged in 4 years!

A is for Aaaaugh! I haven’t blogged in 4 years!


I’ve missed blogging.  I’ve often thought about diving back into it and writing to my hearts content. I looked at it now and then, I contemplated, I moved on to do something else. The other day I ran into Vanessa Blaylock, whom I first met when she had a LEA installation back in 2013 and I signed up for her blogger crossfit challenge. Back then I was busy taking pics, and playing with a number of blogs, and I was having a blast. Then time passed, RL happened, I spent less and less time in SL, and less time writing. All my beloved little blogs fell by the wayside, but I never deleted them. There was always the hope that maybe I’d start writing again… maybe I’d have a sudden burst of inspiration.

We chatted a bit about blog challenges, and how they could be a lot of fun, and suddenly boom, here we are! Vanessa has issued a challenge to “Write a 26-line blog post creating your own “Alphabet of SL”  Of course I knew I had to do this, but my annoying need to have everything just right before has resulted in me spending almost all of my Saturday blowing the dust out of WordPress and building a new theme and then trying to figure out something for each letter of the alphabet. It’s been more fun than I’ve had in a long time 😀

So here we are, a brand new blog post to bring me some cheer, and to perhaps puzzle all the folks who once subscribed to this and now wonder why they are getting a notice for some random blog they’d forgotten about.  It’s just me, having fun getting back into the swing of things with my own ABC’s of Second Life!

A is for Alts. I am my own best friends.
B is for Bling that twinkles and shines!
C is for Calas Galadhon, such a beautiful place.
D is for Dancing the night away and not getting even a little tired
E is for Events to shop till you drop
F is for Flickr where SL photography thrives
G is for Gachas. I want to say no but they suck me in…
H is for Hunts to find fabulous things
I is for Inventory, that grows and grows and grows
J is for Jams, where performers and music fans in the SL live music community gather in real life.
K is for Kannonji, where I made wonderful friends early in my SL.
L is for Land Impact, which I am forever trying to reduce so I can fit as much as possible onto my land.
M is for Mesh, which has completely transformed SL.
N is for Notecards, filling up my inventory with sales notices that I forget to delete.
O is for Object– I have accumulated a lot of things named Object. I don’t know what 99% of them are.
P is for Profiles, what I l love to read whenever I’m in a crowded area
Q is for Quiet, which is me most of the time ’cause I just don’t know what to say to people
R is for Raglan Shire, filled with Tinies, fun, and waffles
S is for Shopping. I mean Duh, it’s like 90% of my Second Life.
T is for Teleporting. What I wish I could do in RL to save time.
U is for Ultra, what I usually run my graphics on and then wonder why I lag
V is for Vehicles. Almost 14 years in and I still can not keep my SL cars on the road.
W is for Wild Witch Glen, my own little shop, long gone but one of the most fun things I’ve done in SL
X is for xylophone. I couldn’t think of an X, but I’m sure there are xylophones in SL.
Y is for Yay – what I said when I saw a blog challenge 😀
Z is for Zazen. Taking a break from the day to sit in meditation with others in SL is a wonderful thing.

Thanks for the prompting, Vanessa!  And now my challenge to myself is to not let this be a one time thing…

 

Yearbook photos and random chatter

For Strawberry Singh’s 9th rezday she is doing a yearbook photo challenge!  Happy Rezday Berry!! She’s three months younger than me. Hard to believe I’ve been wandering around Second Life for nine years now, and despite my aging and increasingly grouchy laptop it’s still just as much fun as ever.  😀

yearbook_pic

Lately whenever I am logged in as Ravensong I have been sticking to tiny-ish avatars, most recently the unbelievably cute patchwork toy elephant from Abranimations, but I thought I’d be my old self for a few minutes to get a good pic. It was a bit odd to put the regular av form back on, lately I’ve felt a bit disconnected from Ravensong. I’m not sure what it is… though I suspect that part of my reluctance to be in world is that in recent months I’ve had the occasional mildly flirty guys begin to chat with me, and while they’ve all been unfailingly polite for some reason it freaks me out. I do occasionally enjoy having a nice chat, but it still makes me want to log off and hide (or I start talking nonstop about my late husband until my conversation partner finds a reason to dash off.) I’ve no idea why I am this way. Perhaps I associate this account so strongly with the time my hub and I spent in world that I can’t ever consider interacting with someone who might flirt, even in the most innocent fashion. A good friend once told me one of the reasons she chose to avoid human avatars in favor of being a full time tiny was because she had no interest in getting hit on. I suspect that’s what is driving my desire to find cute little avatars. I can log in, talk to my friends if they are on, tend to my landscapes, and all is peaceful.

On the other hand I can’t give up my shopping addiction, so I have been spending far more time in world with my alts, who have no friends beyond my RL connections, and who spend most of their time at shopping events, or standing around the house looking adorable, or trying out dances. 😀 They thought, since this was a yearbook meme, that they’d throw in their go at a fabulous shot, and said they were off to the prom. I hope they don’t stay out too late.

thenightout

Credits…

The yearbook pic

Hair: Dura Boys & Girls 48
Skin: League –  Erin Medium
Sweater: Purple Moon Creations
Eyeglasses: K_gs
Eyes: Ikon

The Couple:

Him:
Hair: Mina –  Gael
Suit: Deadwool – The Dandy
Skin: Nivaro –  Cunov Summertone
Eyes: Ikon

Her:
Hair: Magika – Honey Whiskey
Dress: Candy Doll Lara
Necklace: Maxi Gossamer Alexa black pearl choker
Body: Maitreya Lara
Hands: Slink
Skin: League Isla Medium
Eyes: Ikon

Me? Never! Ever!

*blows dust off neglected and nearly forgotten blog…*

Omg, I looked away from my blog feeds for a few days, come back and see that Strawberry Singh posted a Monday meme! ♥!!  You have no idea how much I missed those! And I missed this blog too, even though I have clearly neglected it for several months. Everything was turned upside down shortly after my last posts. The owners of my home sim had to let it go, then I found a new home and spent a couple months helping a friend by landscaping and decorating her meditation park and trying to make it a worthy successor to the old sim, and then I got a new (RL) job that has taken away all the excess free time I used to use hanging around SL. I still haven’t found my balance yet. And I really missed this blog, even if nobody but me looks at it!

I was really excited to see the new challenge, because it gives me a reason to come back here and write something! Yays! So here we are with Berry’s Never Have I Ever Challenge, and my take away from these questions is that I am an anti social recluse who would rather park my avvie in my house and try on different outfits for hours at a time, than go out and be sociable. Oh well. It’s all good! 😀

On to the questions…

  1. Never have I ever had sex, in Second Life. – A couple of times I had persuaded my hub to hop on poseballs to see what the animations would do, but we were never “equipped” so we just clicked through the different poses, got bored, and went back to building stuff. Sometimes I’ve logged a couple of accounts on simultaneously and I sit my avatars on racy furniture for giggles (and because my malt is darn cute and the perfect low maintenance boyfriend, lol) I suppose this is kind of like how you  can direct your Sims characters to make out and woohoo, and I suppose technically it counts, though I’m sure it’s not what people seem to mean if they talk about having sex in SL. If we mean an intentional encounter with another person, where you do text and emotes, then no, I have never done that.
  2. Never have I ever visited a sex sim, in Second Life. – Not that I’m aware of.
  3. Never have I ever been an escort or stripper, in Second Life. – Never to either.
  4. Never have I ever been in porn videos in Second Life. – Never lol.
  5. Never have I ever done things that may be illegal in the real world, in Second Life. – I have pushed friends off sky platforms and watched them plummet towards the ground. 😀  I suspect if I tried to do something similar in real life it might be frowned upon by law enforcement. I am absolutely certain that if I drove on a RL highway the way I drive when I get in an SL vehicle I would have my licence taken away lol.
  6. Never have I ever created an ALT for secret activities, in Second Life. – I have done this. The secret alt wasn’t for any underhanded purposes, though, it’s just to give me the option to shop or go sightseeing in peace and quiet and not have anybody know I’m online and IM me. Otherwise the majority of my alts are known to my friends and are for permission tests and to serve as models if I want to take posed pics with more than one avatar.
  7. Never have I ever had a one night stand, in Second Life.– Never ever. Geez, I experience enough social anxiety holding a mundane conversation about how bad the lag is on a given day. All you folks who have all this lively interaction with each other are about 1000x more outgoing than I will ever be.
  8. Never have I ever been part of a roleplay community, in Second Life. – So far I’ve never tried to RP in SL. I like the idea of storytelling but the thought of getting started is intimidating.
  9. Never have I ever discovered a new fetish, because of Second Life. – No, I haven’t.
  10. Never have I ever done things in Second Life that I wouldn’t admit to my friends or family. – Nah, I’ve never done anything that I’d be ashamed to admit, but I’ve given up trying to sell my friends on the idea of joining SL because they either don’t understand what it is or think it’s kind of silly for a grown up to be so into playing (what they perceive to be) a video game, so I rarely mention it anymore.

So there I am. What have you never ever done?

 

stuff

Hair: Dura – Boys&Girls*48
Sunglasses: Yummy – Miami Heat Shades
Ears: Mandala – Fantasy Elf Ears
Body: Maitreya Lara
Dress: Neve  – Laced Geo 
Skin: League Erin

Totally Immersed

He did appear to be quite immersed in the tour.

For the past day or two keeping up with the posts in the #immersivedrax tag on Twitter has  been fabulous! When Strawberry Singh gave us a FlatDraxtor meme challenge I had to take part. 😀  Here’s the problem though: where do you take a guy that is always up to date on the very best things that Second Life has to offer? It was quite a dilemma. In the end I thought I’d just give ImmersiveDrax a quick tour of my home platform.

Draxtor! Watch your step!

Of course one must never forget that sky platforms can be dangerous places, particularly if you are totally immersed. Always keep an eye on your immersed friends if they start to wander around. That first wrong step would be a doozy!

Don’t miss all the #immersiveDrax pics on Twitter. They are fantastic!

7 Random Thoughts, in No Particular Order


1. I miss SL Go. I wish I’d used it more often. But Bright Canopy sounds promising, especially when my insistence on cranking my graphics settings up as high as I can has been making my laptop cry.

2. Should I have really ordered that pizza tonight? I mean, really?

3. I really like the way mesh bodies look, but I still laugh every time I tp somewhere and find a whole bunch of mesh-bod wearing avatars who look like disembodied heads with a collection of nude body parts and stiff articles of clothing floating around them until everything finishes rezzing.

4. I need to make a list of sims I want to visit and start taking pics more often. WindWept was a good start! It’s a lovely, watery sim with lots of good places for photos, lots of places to sit and chat or cuddle with someone special, and a few fun hidden places to discover.

5. It was probably not the best of ideas to try to start a blog challenge when I’m stressed about job hunting and am having a hard time focusing on that.

6. I also need to make a list of real world places to go and start taking pics again. I really miss going out and snapping photos, and I know the primary reason that I stopped was because I miss my husband, he was my exploring partner and could always find cool things.

7. Who cares if the pizza was a bad diet choice! It was tasty. 😀

~

Visit WindWept!

Or find more from my trip at my Flickr 🙂

The 1-nce and Future Blogger

I’m the worst learner at Medici University. Seriously. I signed up, rezzed my little gazebo studio, wandered around for the first week to a couple of events, then I got distracted and wandered away.

Okay, some of it may have had to do with various aspects of RL distracting me so much that I couldn’t focus on SL. Some of it has to do with my laptop suddenly deciding that half of my favorite sims are going to send me into a downward spiral of lag that will seize control of my viewer and kick me out if I so much as dare to cam around looking for good camera angles.

But even with somewhat valid excuses for not logging in, I’m still the worst learner at MU. I signed up for creative writing, but I’m barely writing.  Well, I take that back, I’m writing a lot, but it’s mostly been journaling in notebooks, I’ve been bad about keeping up with blogging. To to remedy this I think I’ll make an attempt to do Ryan’s May 1-2-31 challenge. A blog post every day? Related to numbers? (Which I presume should be in sequence…) Ahahahahahaha! I’m completely insane. But hey, I’ll give it a shot. I want to be a good student who participates in something before the term is up.

Now, of course, I have a month worth of posts to consider and I haven’t the foggiest idea what I’ll talk about. I’ve read a lot of advice about finding your blogging niche, but I’m still adrift here. I think my biggest challenge when blogging about SL is trying to stick to SL topics. I often struggle with whether or not I should blog RL thoughts here because I still see so many people talk about keeping a strict divide between SL and RL, and I find that when I’m not sure what to say I just abandon my thoughts entirely. I really suck at splitting my interests up between different accounts so I have SL here, RL there, music to the left, crafts upstairs, and spirituality down the hall. On the one hand, I enjoy reading blogs that pull everything in, because it’s an extension of people watching for me, and I enjoy writing about whatever pops into my head. But, on the other hand, I know that not everyone wants to read about Every Single Interest you have.

As if trying to figure out what to write about isn’t enough, lately I struggle to figure out my place in Second Life. Sometimes I feel like I cling to SL because my late husband and I shared so many happy adventures there, and I’m not ready to let experiences like that go. I’m beginning to wonder if I keep this blog going because it anchors me to Second Life and gives me a reason to keep going back in world on a regular basis. I still love being in world, I still lose hours just wandering around, or trying on outfit after outfit, but occasionally I feel like I should be doing more, I should be having adventures, I should be taking advantage of all the fun and exciting things people can do in SL,

Maybe I need to stop trying to figure out the right way to do Second Life, and the right way to blog, and just go merrily forward being me, one step at a time.