Feb 9, 2015 | Chatter, Images
Taking important photos for blog.
This was a weekend of birthdays. Thursday was my main avatar’s 8th rezday, Friday would have been my late husband’s birthday. My rezday was quiet, I logged in, bought myself a couple of presents, and puttered around a bit. The birthday was a bit harder, and will probably always be a challenge, but I keep trying to move forward and be the confident person my husband always believed I was becoming. He is still my muse, silently encouraging me to push beyond my comfort zone, to do more things, follow my dreams, be more outgoing. Sometimes I listen, sometimes I still withdraw into a shell.
I think the Slelfie turned out well!
I’m trying to push beyond my comfort zone this month by taking part in Medici University at LEA23. I was on the fence about trying any new projects, but an IM from Vanessa Blaylock prompted me to go for it. I had such fun with her Avatar Blogger challenge a little over a year ago that I thought this would be fun as well, and so I set up my little studio space and decided to list myself under creative writing. I’m not sure if that’s the best classification for me right now, while I used to write stories all the time, and hope to do so again, for the past year I’ve mostly just done therapeutic writing to help myself get through the days. I’m still not sure I’m in the right headspace for creative writing, but for me writing in any form is good. Perhaps just being part of this will urge me to sit down and do it more often.
MU looking very colorful, with my gazebo in the lower right.
I still must explore the MU campus and meet some of my neighbors. While being around creative people might be good to get me back into a regular writing mood, just being around people might be as helpful. In my offline life I tend to be a bit introverted and shy, but I have no trouble being chatty and making small talk. Online, and in SL in particular, my social anxiety goes off the charts. I’ve never been sure why that is, but any time I have an opportunity to try to work on that I try to take it. Hey, being at a university is all about learning new things, right?
A room with a view.
Besides, how great is this little space? I’ve always wanted a little gazebo studio to write in. The entire sim is full of wonderful spaces, and from my front door I can look out over LEA22 and the colorful build that appeared recently. I’ll have to learn more about that too. 😀
Learn more at Medici University or visit the campus at LEA23
Jun 15, 2014 | Chatter, Images, Monday Memes
I’m still lost in memories.
Eight years ago tonight we were making the last preparations for our wedding. We were getting things ready, picking up my maid of honor from the bus station, and looking forward to the big day. I was a nervous wreck, but he was calm. He was always calm. Tuesday will be, or would have been, our eighth anniversary. Thinking about that has been extremely hard, and this is going to be one of the toughest days I’ll face, but I’ll try to make the day special, and maybe try to get out and do something we enjoyed. And maybe I’ll go in world for a bit, and tour some of the places we liked to visit together.
Now and then I entertain the idea of logging his avatar in and just sitting with him. I’ve logged his av in a few times to do some account maintenance and if I have need of his inventory, and a couple times I’ve logged Raven in to stand beside him, or cuddle on the couch for a few minutes. It’s one thing to do that with one of the alts, but when it is his own main avatar it’s a strange feeling. Strange and lonely and sad. It’s quite surreal to watch his av standing there, moving around on screen, while knowing that he will never be the person behind that avatar again. I still haven’t completely grasped that he won’t be a part of my real life again either. I still think I’ll hear him come in the door, and everything will be normal again. Full acceptance is a long and hard journey so far, I’ve still barely gone more than a few steps.
Amidst all my musing about love and memories, I noticed that the weekly blog challenge that went up this past Monday over at Strawberry Singh’s blog, is about love. It comes courtesy of Edie Sedgwick, who is keeping the lights on while Ms. Berry is vacationing. Edie asks us to grab an avatar we love, a friend, a partner, a colleague, and take a selfie. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m not terribly social in SL, I never have the courage to friend people and I rarely get friend requests, so any of the “grab a friend” memes have been a bit challenging.
(As an aside, I thought I had actually added a new person the other day, after a brief pleasant chat… I would swear to you that I clicked ‘accept’ on the friend request… but when I logged in there were no new names on my friends list. I don’t know if the other party thought better of it after I logged out and unfriended me, or if I just somehow manged to mess it up, and I’m too embarrassed to send an IM asking if it was my mistake. Oh well.)
There were actually a couple of people I could think of that I might have grabbed and photographed, but as always my thoughts go straight to my husband. You’d think that since I have another blog created just to work through this widow thing that posting there would be enough. Nope, I still must talk to anyone who will listen. He will always be the first person I think of when I hear the word “love” in any context. He was and will always be the love of my life, so I thought I’d answer the questions and gaze at his pictures.
- How did you and the person in the photo with you meet? • Via match.com. Sometimes the online dating things work. Or, at least they did several years ago when we tried them. I’d never have the courage to do it again.
- How long have you known each other? • Next week would have marked our 8th anniversary, and about 9 years together.
- What do you love about this person? • His creative spirit. His calm. His confidence. A million other things.
- What place in SL do you love? • I always seem to fall hardest for the scenic, natural landscape sims.
- What clothes or shoes in SL do you love? • L&B jeans, they just have such nice butts! Looking through my inventory, I probably have more clothes from Sn@tch than any other individual designer, especially when it comes to texture clothes. I also used to love Artilleri a lot. For mesh clothes I like Cold Logic, and I’m trying to branch out a bit and learn some new designers.
- What does love mean to you? A shared joy in each other’s company. Or a particular attachment to something, like nutella. No really, I love the stuff. 😀
- What is your biggest regret? The past seven and a half months have been filled with “What if?” moments. What if I’d done this differently? What if we’d been more in tune with our health? What if? What if? What if? It’s hard to shoo the what if’s away.
- Which is the one event that has had the biggest impact on you and your life? Meeting my husband.
- What do you love and hate the most about the human race? We have such capacity for compassion and joy and friendship. Sadly, it seems many also have a great capacity to be cruel.
- What color is your underwear? • Blue ^_^
Thanks to Edie for the meme! 🙂
Jun 5, 2014 | Chatter, Images
I’ve found that when, in RL, I start going through too many old photos I begin to get too depressed to function for a while. That’s been happening to me lately, and I suspect it’s worse because my RL wedding anniversary will be in a couple weeks. It would have been eight years this month, but on that day instead of eight years of marriage, I will have been looking at almost eight months of widowhood. I don’t want to think about that, so I dive into the old photos and try to relive happier times, but I think I just miss my husband more with every photo I see.
I sometimes find that it’s just as hard to look through my old SL shots of his avatar, or the two of us together. It may not be the RL us, but for each shot I can remember what we were doing, whether it was some fun little random moment at home, or out exploring. And for each shot we were together, a few feet apart, in RL. We were constantly looking over each other’s shoulders to see what was going on. I miss that terribly. Every time I go in world I miss him. I want to take him to fun new places, and watch him find spots I never thought of exploring.
Given that I’ve been feeling sad for the past few days you wouldn’t think I’d want to dive into nostalgic photos of our early days in Second Life, but I just felt like doing that today. Maybe it was the idea of “Throwback Thursday” that inspired me, I see people on blogs, or Facebook, or Twitter, posting with that theme every week. so I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon. So back I go to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when particle clouds floated in non-Windlit skies, and ad farms were cultivated all over the mainland.
The old home site. Looks a bit empty these days.
Every now and then I like to go back to the first parcel we ever owned, just to see what it looks like these days. I should have thought of this last month, as it was right around the first of May in 2007 that we decided we really needed to own land. Technically the first land program was still in effect when we joined, but it was never available so we went shopping for a suitable little 512 parcel and eventually found one that wasn’t too pricey, and was bordered on one side by what would eventually be a Linden road. These days there’s nothing there and it has been abandoned to Governor Linden, but back in May of 2007 it was a little green patch amid flashy nightclub supply places, resorts, and big stores.
Almost the same angle as the pic above…
Still, it was all ours and we loved our little patch of land. We happily rezzed a cottage from the library, moved it around a few times, eventually built a privacy screen at the sides and back, then finally moved up into the air, where my hub re-textured the cottage and built a turret, with a little library inside.
But the best part was the giant flexi earthworm hanging out under the platform
We kept the first plot for about five months before selling it off to the guy with the giant store across the road, and moved to a larger spot. At first I just rezzed the old house, then we began building our own hobbit hole, and I kept trying to set up garden spots with just Linden trees and freebie landscaping items. It may be a little cheesy by today’s standards, but at the time I was just excited to be building stuff and I didn’t care how bad it looked, it was all wonderful and fun.
In a hole in the ground lived two avatars
We spent tons of time in world in the early days, just building anything and everything we could think of, then deleting it and trying something else. Part of it was because the ability to make stuff was just so much fun we couldn’t resist it, part of it was we were super stingy. If I wanted something to decorate with we hated to spend money on it, at least in those early days, so we tried to make things ourselves. Some of the biggest joys of my second life were watching my husband get absorbed in creating something. As he started experimenting with making sculpts he decided to build a tree house. I actually quite miss the little tree house, I think if I had my own land I’d be tempted to fish around in his inventory and rez some of these things, just for nostalgia’s sake.
With fab particle clouds, and spinning ad signs too! Woot!
Much like the first, the area around our second land is mostly empty these days although a large build sits in about the middle point of where our land was. I looked around for a bit, but I didn’t want to loiter too long because there were people about on their own property and they were probably wondering what sort of trouble I might get up to, just standing around on the road, so I flew away.
A lot of the land around where we had the second home was up for sale, though some was at a steep price for a landlocked bit of mainland. Part of me considered the cheaper parcel for a little while, I’m not premium anymore but I’ve contemplated going premium again to get a little plot of my own. I’m not really sure I’d want to live on either of our old sims again, though. Too many memories of the things we built, and all the fun we had there. I have enough trouble wandering through my city in RL and finding spots that remind me of my husband, I’m not sure I want to have that be any more of a thing in SL than it already is.
Still, it was fun to look back, and remember how excited we were about everything in those early days. It was a nice little trip down memory lane.
If only First Life were as easy.
May 27, 2014 | Chatter, Monday Memes
Everybody loves questions! Well, I love questions. I used to love reblogging the “ask me” posts on Tumblr, where readers pick from the list and drop the question number in your inbox. I don’t see those as often anymore and I miss answering them, dorky as some of them tended to be. Tumblr hasn’t been much of a social space for me in quite a while, even though I have more followers than ever they are all very quiet. I really miss the interaction and community I used to see a couple of years ago.
At the same time I have noticed the SL Tumblr community seems to have really taken off. At the moment I only follow a handful of SLers and haven’t used the Tumblr counterpart to this blog in a good seven months, but it’s fun to see so many posts in the SL tag these days. I sometimes think I should make a new primary account to follow only SL blogs, because right now when I follow them they probably wonder why and assume I’m fishing for followers since I don’t post anything related to Second Life. On the other hand even if I make a new SL Tumblr I suspect I’d always forget to log into it, because that’s what always happens whenever I’ve tried to make an SL-specific account on any social network.
In the end I think I’ll just dust off the little neglected Tumblr mirror blog and see if I can pay more attention to the SL community. The Strawberry Singh Monday meme for this week asks Twenty SL Personal Questions, which seems like a good post to start with if I begin publishing back to the other blog again, right? 🙂
And once again: Yay! Questions! Jumping right in to the long list.
- When and how did you discover Second Life? • My husband saw tech blog articles about it, when it beginning to get a lot of attention in 2006 as a place to make money and create things. As an artist he thought that was pretty cool, and he was also intrigued by the idea of buying and selling land. But at the time we were too busy being newlyweds so we didn’t get around to thinking of signing up until January of the following year. Since we were both hopeless researchers we bought the Official Guide to Second Life, studied it cover to cover, read everything we could find, and were probably the most prepared newbies to hit the grid in early February of 2007. We were ready to create!
- Did you know about virtual worlds before or was this your first experience with them? • Although they were not shared virtual worlds I was hugely addicted to the Sims and Sims 2 games, so I was familiar with a 3D environment and was pretty instantly comfortable with SL. This also probably explains why I mostly just wanted to decorate houses and dress up my avatars when I joined. I was aware of online virtual communities well before I heard of SL, but because they were for social interaction they scared me off. I preferred a single player experience.
- Has Second Life met your expectations? • I didn’t have any expectations to start with, so I’d say it’s exceeded them and has made me very happy.
- If you could teleport back to the first ten minutes of your avatar’s slife, what would you tell yourself? • Can I go back to the first ten minutes of registration instead and head myself off before I create my first account? At that point I will be shouting in my ear, “No! No! Give the name more thought! You can’t change it, ever! Pick something you really like!”
- How long did it take you to master avatar flying and driving vehicles inworld? • Flying was pretty easy, I got that right away. I still can’t drive any manner of vehicle without looking like I’m drunk. You should’ve seen me trying to steer a bike around Frisland recently. xD
- Do you have a mystery alt? • I have several alts, but usually I only log them in if I want to take a pic with more than one av, or to take them shopping to spruce up their wardrobes. Most of them were created to make cute names, to be testing alts, or to see what was going on with the new user process.
- Is your SL avatar a reflection of you, or someone you wished you could be? • Actually just yesterday a friend commented that he thought I’ve done one of the best jobs he’s seen of matching my av’s looks to my human, lol. I feel he’s being pretty generous, but I have spent a lot of time trying to tweak my avatar’s features to be a reflection of me. Well, at least as much as one can do with sliders. I wish my RL self was as thin and pretty as Ravensong, she’s me, but definitely an idealized twenty years younger version of me. Personality wise she’s entirely me, I’ve never attempted to create a persona and unique avatar identity that is distinct from my RL identity.
Actually in some ways Ravensong is someone I wish to be, in that as I tweak her shape a bit I’m using her to visualize my fitness goal, as she’s right around what I aspire to reach ultimately, if I can stick to my plan for a year or so.
- Is there an individual you met in SL that inspired you in your RL? How? • Although I’ve never met them, a lot of the SL photographers I see on Flickr are amazing and inspire me creatively in SL and RL. 😀
- Do you feel it is easier to create stronger bonds/relationships with people you meet inworld as opposed to the real world? • I don’t think it’s any easier, actually I’ve found that my social anxiety is a little worse in SL than it is in RL. I’ve seen other people make a similar statement and I have no idea why this happens. Maybe it has to do with not being able to make eye contact, and read a person’s body language and hear their voice. Now once that social anxiety hurdle is crossed I think it’s as easy to make good friends in SL or elsewhere online as it is offline, and the closest friendships I have at the moment are with people I met in online communities.
- Did you ever imagine or believe people could fall in love with someone they never met before Second Life? • Sure, as Strawberry mentioned, you used to hear about people who fell in love as pen pals long before there was any such thing as the internet. I was never a bit surprised to hear about online romances.
- How has your perspective of dating changed (or not) since you started playing second life? • Not really.
- How has your perspective of employment changed (or not) since you started playing second life? • I don’t think so.
- Name three things in both your lives that overlap each other significantly. • I love photography in both worlds. I love to create things in both worlds, albeit with entirely different tools! I keep in touch with some friends in both SL and RL.
- If you could live your life more immersively in a virtual world, would you? ( Kind of like the Matrix) • I don’t particularly want to plug something into myself physically because ouch, I’ll just wait for the singularity and download my consciousness lol. Actually what I always wanted was my own personal Star Trek holodeck so I can make my wish fulfillment fantasies come true. Okay, yes I do want to live more immersively, at least sometimes. 😀
- How do you think behavior changes for people if they’re inworld vs in real world? Why do you think that is? • If somebody keeps their real life identity a complete secret then they can do whatever they want in world, whether it’s good or bad, because they are totally anonymous and there won’t be real life consequences.
- How has second life consumerism changed your perception of spending habits, the value of money, the need to be “bleeding edge” with fashion? • I budget a little fun money for SL each month, though not a lot, and I’m stingy with my Lindens when it comes to buying clothes and stuff. I don’t really care about how bleeding edge fashionable I am, I do like to read fashion blogs and pick up new things, but I also still like to wear my regular system layer clothes sometimes. (Horrors!) I am far more likely to buy clothes in SL, RL me is totally the opposite of fashion forward… I’m content to putter around the world in jeans and tee shirts, and when I do see something cute in a display at the mall the first thing I think sometimes is “I wonder if I can find something like that in SL?”
- Do you think virtual worlds like SL drive and redefine human interaction or do they narrow and limit it? • I think they present a fun, new dimension to human interaction.
- If technology progressed tomorrow to allow you to send emotions to people the way you’d send text or voice messages, would it enrich your SL experience or infringe on it? • I think you’d want to limit that to only receiving ‘feelings’ from people on a very restricted friends list. A sensation of loving emotions from your partner would be pretty cool, or sending someone a feeling of joy, or something uplifting. Not sure I’d want to be the recipient of an emotion sent by a friend who was mad at me though. And certainly not from random strangers, imagine an emotion IM from somebody who thinks your avatar is super hot and wants to let you know just how attracted and excited they are about you… *shudder* O.o
- Name three skills you attribute to having learned or honed in second life alone. • The only thing would be 3D building, because I never attempted that before SL. But everything else I’ve honed in SL has also been applicable to and practiced on real life hobbies, such as practicing on how to compose a nice photo, or becoming more comfortable with Photoshop.
- If your grand kids googled your Second Life Avatar’s name, would they be intrigued, disgusted, proud or something else? • If I ever had any I suspect they’d be amused.
🙂
May 16, 2014 | Chatter, Images
Linden Lab released new mesh starter avatars yesterday, giving new accounts a variety of choices of human or supernatural avatars, all using fitted mesh bodies over the basic avatar shape. They’ve also been added to the library, so I thought I’d try them on to see what new accounts will have to choose from, and to see just how much they could be tweaked.
This is the Sara av in her natural state. It seems that they are entirely no mod when you put them on, but you can swap out the shape for one of your own and then tweak the body a bit. You can’t modify the face, unfortunately, and they’re incapable of changing expression. I think she looks okay but she’s a bit thin, (although probably not when compared to most of the standard small and extra small avvies running around SL.)
I swapped her base shape for a standard medium shape, then outfitted her in a nice new Magika hairstyle and a mesh dress from Cracked Mirror, also in medium. Some of the mesh dresses I tried fit okay, others required a large size because it’s not possible to wear an alpha layer for the dress. Since I had her standing still in a pose I’m not sure how well she’d move with the dress, I suspect she’d have a bit of clipping here and there. Shoes are a lost cause, since nearly everything is designed for Slink feet these days I think our starter will have to stick with her boots or roam the grid barefoot.
She doesn’t look bad, although the skin on all of the avatars looks sort of splotchy up close. I can’t guess at what people entirely new to SL will think about these. I remember my first few minutes in SL, I wanted to start playing with avatar customization immediately, and didn’t even start exploring orientation island until I’d tweaked my shape and fiddled with my clothes. If I’d found it impossible to customize my look and thought my only option was to swap to another starter avatar I’d have been really disappointed. On the other hand I came into SL having already gotten used to highly customizable Sims characters, so I may have had a higher expectation for how much I could change my appearance than other new users.
I don’t know how much information LL will have available for brand new users to explain the difference between a basic avatar and a fitted mesh avatar, or if they even feel it’s necessary. If they don’t offer anything I suspect it will fall to merchants to explain why clothes don’t fit, or in the case of system layer clothes or new skins, why they don’t appear on the mesh avatars at all and require switching to the “classic” avatars. I would imagine most people will eventually want to change their appearance. especially after they see how nice an avatar can look with a good skin and nice clothes, so there will probably be some moments of frustration. I rather wish I could think of someone I know offline who might be persuaded to give SL a try so I could hear what they think of everything. I’m curious to see how this works out.
As for me, I was just really happy to put my own shape and skin back on.
May 6, 2014 | Chatter, Images, Monday Memes
The blog challenge this week over at Strawberry Singh’s blog is all about color! She asks us to blog a pic of our favorite color or colors, and we learn that if anyone is considering giving her a gift it probably shouldn’t be teal. 😀 I wasn’t sure if I’d try the challenge this week because I felt like it should have a fashion component, and I usually avoid fashion challenges because I’ve no idea how to style my avvies and talk about clothes like a fashion blogger. Eventually I realized that it’s useless to resist a meme so I began sifting through my inventories to see if I could find something colorful.
I always say my favorite color is blue, (and I’m pretty delighted by the skies in the pic above too) but I also am fond of pinks and earth tones, and I really like some shades of fuchsia and (sorry, Berry) teal, especially when paired as an accessory with black. In RL I’ve always tended towards wearing dark colors, in fact I have far too many dark colors. I definitely took to heart that old advice that dark is supposed to be slimming for a big girl and as a result I now have to stop myself when shopping because I instinctively reach for the black shirt first. I seem to be doing this in SL as well, although as standard mediums I don’t think either of my girls need to worry about looking thinner. I’m amused that I dress Ravensong like me rather often… sometimes just in the sort of clothes I’d love to wear if I were a bit slimmer or could afford the RL versions, but other times, as below, she’s totally me. Or I’m her… I haven’t quite determined which yet it is yet. 😀
Raven and her slightly flashier altsister do have the benefit of a better wardrobe selection than I, and there were some brighter colors lurking in inventory. I love the little pink jacket from Emery, and the pink Nairobi shirt from Cracked Mirror at the latest Fameshed needs to be in my RL closet.
At the end of the day, I realized I was more obsessed with finding pretty skies than finding colorful outfits. I may not wear a lot of vivid colors, but I love to have them surrounding me, whether it’s windlit SL skies, or colorful accessories in SL or RL, or the various bits of cobalt blue glass stuff i have a fondness for in RL. Color is wonderful, I could never last for long in a subdued, monochromatic home.
I think the next time I take Ravensong out shopping I’ll inject some brighter hues into her wardrobe. Since she’s pretty much mini-me perhaps she’ll inspire me to liven up my RL wardrobe too.
🙂
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