Beer Barrel Goth

I was in one of those moods, trying to figure out what I wanted to wear next....I was actually wearing trousers, a simple shirt and short hair at the time, believe it or not. Donna Upshaw-Bouscario of FE made a suggestof jeans or goth...said I had to get past the "Ice Princess" That made me laugh, because Grace Kelly is one of my style icons.

So I headed into inventory, and remembered I had a recent dress from Silentsparrow, Selador, I first saw it on retro-fashionista Ceejay Writer in Seraph City. It comes with 3 skirt options.
:
The more gothy victoriany steampunky Woofy version. (Thats what it's actually called in inventory, Woofy!) Nice layering effect on the skirt and underskirt.



Circle, your basic circle skirt:



And pencil, which is what Miss Ceejay was wearing when I first saw it and NEEDED it. I so love a good pencil skirt:



You probably noticed there's a pastie option, which is on the undershirt layer, along with the regular low cut pretty bodice. Boobie shot!



I had these antique embossed tall laced boots from Arwen's Creations. Sort of Victoriany sort of steampunky, with a high, but sturdy heel. They are VERY nice and I want them in RL. I have 3 pairs of these and keep intending to go back and the other colors.



With Truth Andrea Hair, which I think of as Counselor Troi hair, and a 5th and Oxford "Fair NightFall 1" skin heavy on the dark eyshadow with fuchsia lips.



When Mrs. Upshaw-Bouscario saw my pictures, she described them as "Beer Barrel Goth", explaining the post title.

SLURL to SilentSparrow

SLURL to Arwen's Creations

SLURL to Truth Hair

SLURL to 5th & Oxford

Friend Clare!

Clare Sorbet is one of my best friends in SL...redhead, fashionista, and quite honestly nice. Herself and a few other retro-fashionistas (and redheads) of my acquaintance are a sort of a family. We share shopping finds, hang out with each other, etc.


Today Clare was wearing an adorable floral print dress from Toki Doki, very cute and sort of housedress-y looking.



Her hair today is Truth Evelyn, which I also have, in the Cherry color (I wear Truth hair in Blood). She says her skin is from Pink Fuel, "Ember" The Pink Fuel skins that I've seen tend towards the girly cute youtfulness side of the spectrum, and this one is quite adorable on Clare.




The shoes are Mary Jane Courts from GOS. A simple mary jane pump with a moderately high, but sturdy heel, and rounded point toe, that resembles a "Character shoe" that dancers use but with a higher heel.

Gender juxtaposition, and what it says about us.

I was talking on FE about mesh hair, which is a whole 'nother topic I'm not going to get into at this time, and it was suggested I check out a hair store I'd never been to. Now I'd seen prim hair from this place on other people and it looked fine to me, I had been meaning to go there anyway sometime.

I did the usual thing, checking out demos and whatnot, hobnobbing with fashionfolk, but as I was looking around I realized the hair display vendors bothered me for a reason.

This is the guy hair. This place has some VERY nice guy hair and if you're a guy avatar, GO now! You won't be disappointed.



Those are attractive guy avatars in my opinion. They look like adults, old enough to buy alcohol and even old enough to have graduated college and have jobs.

These are some of the female hair displays:





Putting it bluntly, those avatars look a LOT younger than the male displays. The bodies may have boobs, but the faces look to my eyes chubby cheeked young girls wearing a lot of makeup, not even old enough for high school. And most certainly not as mature looking as the males.

That bothered me...to me it was a sort of "Toddlers and Tiaras" effect. Now I know that in certain SL communities there's a trend of dressing and looking like a part Japanese cutesy anime inspired girl, and there's nothing wrong of that. It was the juxtaposition of the two, manly adult and cutesy girl face with knockers that bothered me and what it said about the fashion community of SL. I think that if the guys has been your standard slender Bishonen anime-inspired guy/young Bieber type, essentially the male version of the female displays, it wouldn't have bothered me so much.

But it did. But it's not like I didn't think the hair wasn't nice hair, it was...sigh.

Alaskametro Basix lingerie

I've known Alaska Metropolitan for aaaages. She was probably my first designer friend. She recently dropped me some lingerie sets and lace dress sets. Now the dresses aren't really me...but the lingerie...is well...well lets just say I REALLY like the lingerie, even though it is as the name says:

Basix. Every femmy person out there has some basic "nice" lingerie. We're all searching for our perfect combination of fit and style.






Yes, I went a touch artistic with the pics, but Alaska always does good display ads (she pretty much wrote the book on designing a good display) so it's not a big deal.

Nice isn't it...only comes in basic muted nudey colors even the black is a sort of soft grey. You get sheer, opaque and sheer lace version with choice between straps or strapless in each set. Anyway when I first put them on I was like HOLY CRAP, that has got to be inspired by the old style Body by Victoria or the old iPex. (Though in RL I wear the Cacique stuff. made by the same company, same stuff, only sold at Lane Bryant rather than Victoria's Secret) The biofit 7-way is probably closest to it these days.

Anyway it's a very nice everyday bra that I want in a LOT more colors and patterns. If you look at the clasp in back which I don't show, you'll see that it's a 3 hook bra, which it would be in RL. It's also inexpensive.

As far as I know Alaska doesn't have a in-world store these days, only her alaskametro Store on the Marketplace

She also does makeups, nail tattoos, brows and whatnot, she's a makeupista in RL.

Ruminations on a dress.

This post is not really about this dress, but more about what came to my mind as I was wearing this dress today:



A simple black sweaterdress from Salt. I have accessorized it with a Truth Hair called "Jean", one of my go-to 5th & Oxford skins, Shiny Things Kelseys, and the Carmen hosiery from Insolence.

I was wearing this dress while socializing. For my sake I usually don't wear cocktail or evening dresses in the daytime (unless the event or venue is formal), so I have a bunch of go-to daytime wear. Simple dresses, suits, blouses, sweaters and skirts that I wear during the day. I want to look "nice" and most of my daytime wear would be considered appropriate in a dressy office. The thing is, I am often the dressiest dressed person at social places...and often the most covered up. I like my style, I mean after all, I have Audrey Hepburn as a Fashion Icon, but I don't want to be perceived as a "haughty fashionista", and I'm worried my look does that. And I must admit...I was wearing that dress at a lesbian venue, I know what you're thinking now and THAT is another story. Yes I suppose I could wear jeans and t-shirts when socializing, but that is not "me". It's hard to explain.

Is there anyone else out there who feels similarly?

SLURL to Salt

Her name is Amaris (Adam n Eve's new Amaris skin)

She was sitting in the University Library, she looked as if she was waiting for someone, she was a little bit dressed up for a coed, she told me she preferred dressing nicely. She was the girl next door, sweet, in the full bloom of young womanhood...her name was Amaris."

CC wears 5th & Oxford skins, everyone knows this. I am VERY skin picky, and while I freely acknowledge that there's a lot of great skin out there....I don't often wear it because it's not "CC". I have some very specific needs in a skin and it's hard to find my perfect skin. There are many who don't know this...but if all of my Roslin-made 5th & Oxford skin disappeared from my inventory and the entire grid, I would scream and tear my hair out in agony...and then I would head to Adam n Eve. Because even though I wear my Roslin-made skins almost all of the time, I DO wear other skins..and if you do see me in another skin these days, it's probably an Adam n Eve. Which is kind of funny, because I jumped from Adam n Eve to the TaP Deux's back in 2006. I have always considered Sachi-skin as I call it, to be among the nicest in SL. Well worth a trip to check them out.

Amaris is not my perfect skin...its a little young for me, but it is a VERY nice sweet and youthful skin and well worth blogging. (I almost blogged her previous Harper release, it made me look like Harper Beresford who did a nice job of blogging it, since it was inspired by her.)



Okay look at this squeezable tush. Isn't it adorable.



Goes back to ogling the tush again.



Nice face isn't it. Smudged eyeliner, soft neutral eyeshadow, simple makeup suitable for a college coed. Very pretty and youtful as I said.

The outfit itself is from Adam n Eve, mostly. The Sweater is the CC Sweater...and yes it's named for me. Look, it's no real big thing unless you have hair, a skin or a gown after you, those are the real prizes for fashionista bragging rights. :-) Ha ha ha. It's a nice simple little cropped cardigan..it comes in other colors as well.

The shirt is the Billie Linen shirt...which has my favorite white shirt collar in SL, while cleavagey it is classic.

The skirt is the shorter skirt from the Cora set (which comes with a very nice ruffly cleavagey poet shirt itself.

Tights are from Mon Tissu

Boots are the Madison Alpha Boots from Deco.

Glasses from Insolence

You simply can't get the jewelry and eyes anymore...I miss you Miriel Enfield.

Adam n Eve is in Genesis, of course. Go...NOW! Maybe you'll be "having Sachi's baby!" (an old reference to her old group title for her fans)

Undercover Tableau Girl

You've seen them, we all have. At Mon Tissu and Tres Blah in Lula, FD, and Clawtooth in Tableau. I've always called them "Tableau Girls"







Where did they come from?

The shapes of the original "Tableau Girl" designers, that's what. Google search for Nylon Pinckney and Elka Lahane for example. The shoppers saw the shapes in the displays and pretty much adopted them themselves. Originally it was somewhat honest smart-alecky reaction to the more traditional barbie-ish glamour girl avatars and styles, a la Dazzle and other cocktail/party/formal designers, since the Tableau crowd did mostly hand drawn casuals at that time.

But now.....lets admit it, it's become something of a parody of itself and has somewhat taken over. I was there at Tres Blah last week during a sale....and I overdosed on Oracul Maidenly, sourpuss faces, and thighs so far apart you can drive a truck through. Avatars that don't look "pretty" but like nicotine addicted 12 year olds wearing their 22 year old sisters clothes and makeup.

Yes, I know I shouldn't judge, but I like seeing pretty, and seeing some Tableau girls overly photoshopped, gaussian blurred and shadowed pics makes it hard to see the actual quality of the stuff! And the exaggerated bodies means the stuff will look somewhat different. But they have great stuff, sure they tend to over accesorize, but damn do they have some nice stuff...I think...but I can't tell. Yes I know there are not many review blogs anymore that's part of the problem.

I'm not saying that avatars shouldn't be curvy or have junk in the trunk...but there's good variety and bad variety. To much exaggeration in anything, height, boobehs, or hips makes for a bad shape for showing off fashion in a pleasing way.

I also can't tell Tableau Girl hair apart,has a sort of sameness to it, at least to my eyes.

Former Boss Salome also makes a slight of a reference to this issue in this post but she's not really commenting on the girls themselves.

I'm not going to SLURL The stuff, though that bag and skirt are Mon Tissu and nice. Shoes are G Field "Alex" First picture was taken using standard Caliah style Windlight settings, 2 and 3 were taken with shadows and whatnot on.

Donna Flora Bon Bon

Donna Flora just released "Bon Bon" A cute cocktail dress with a lovely bubble skirt meets 18th century sort of look to it. L$350, four colors, this black that I have, a sort of cream, a pale lavender and a sort of fuchsia pink.



Yes, the skirt is a rigid sculpty, which means it's not the prettiest skirt to sit in or do the more athletic dances in, but it really can't be helped with a bubble skirt.

SLURL to Donna Flora in Bonin

The hair is an Amacci, Jessica, a nice sweet lil updo with a sort of side swept short bang thing
going on.



SLURL to Amacci

Shoes are G Field "Eve"

SLURL to G Field

Jewellery is a "Princess Christina set, from a merchant I found via marketplace Rhiannon Nitely:

Link to her store on Marketplace

Skin is, of course, a 5th & Oxford:

SLURL to 5th & Oxford in Nouveau

And yes, I have my GT220 back in my box, I have a new power supply, Yay!

Going to be RL busy

So you won't see me so much in SL....an upcoming RL move so packing and stuff.

Tier costs, the sim deathwatch: Why I don't think it's a big problem.

ADDENDUM added at bottom.

Every so often on New World Notes or other SL related forums, you get some oldbie crank complaining about Tier. I usually want to be an oldbie crank myself and tell them off. Why?

1. The majority of the people complaining about tier prices are mostly members of what I call the "furry builder and scripter gang". (Yes, I know they're not all furries, it just seems like furrydom seems to go with being a hardcore builder/scripter) All they want is a cheap vanity sim to basically be their own personal sandbox. If they get one, all they'll do is spend time there building and puttering around and not really doing anything with it with other people (other than projects with other furry builder and scripters} involved.

2. The other group that complains about tier are the RPers. Almost all RP sims are vanity projects that survive on donations or a well heeled Angel or groups of Angels, which really isn't practical, long term. These folks, I understand.

But I doubt tier prices will go down soon, and in fact, think it might be a bad idea if they did so at the current time. Now you're thinking: "But CC, don't you want the furry scripters to have their sims, and the RPers to be able to keep their RP sims going" Yes, but:


1. There's a content glut on the grid. one of the reasons some regions aren't making it financialy is that there's too much stuff out there so the money is spread around. More stuff, with the same amount of people spending means the money gets spread thinner like too little butter over too much bread. Cheap sims would lead to a land glut and encourage even more newbie designers to flood the grid with 2006-era quality level stuffs. That would be a bad thing and LL knows it. LL wants to reduce content glut so every store sim that's selling low quality crappe that gets shut down is a good thing.

2. LL doesn't want to deal with the "Waaaaah...whining". I personally believe that sims are priced the way they are with the setup fees to help keep the "riff raff" out of sim ownership. LL doesn't want people who can barely afford it to get a region, then have them cancel two months later when their car needs fixed, and then beg LL to restore their sim as it was when they have a bit more money again. They want people with stable incomes who can keep paying even if their cat needs to go to the vet, or they have doctor bills or need to replace their furnace. In other words they want the upper class to own sims, but the rest of us to rent what space we can afford. Think about it, in RL, not everyone owns a big mansion with thousands of acres of property. You got a few people who do, and then more people who own a 1200sq ft home, and some who live in a cramped 500sq ft apartment. I know, everyone wants a mansion and a sim of their own, but LL is encouraging people to live within their SL means. Personally, I really wouldn't need anything bigger than a double prim 1024, really. Even if I had a sim...I wouldn't be doing much with it, it would lead to empty space which leads to:

3. One of the big things the masses and newbies complain about is how empty SL feels. LL knows it's an issue and probably likes that there's less of a sim glut so that SL feels less empty. If LL dropped tier, a bunch of people would buy their own sim and sit idle in it while they IM. Thus increasing the problem.

You want tier prices to drop? Probably not going to happen, but if you REALLY want it to happen. Get the masses spending money...including the second worlders. SL is a trickle up economy, more people shopping means more people with money for regions.

ADDENDUM:

Hey! I just had an idea...what might work is if LL priced tier based on purpose of the region, Commercial one-owner sims one rate, residential single owned vanity puttering sim another, RP group sims another. sims for commercial rentals another. They could then enable and disable various features and capabilities, like say..transactions...based on that. Might not work or be feasible but it is an idea to throw out there.

#define Fashionista

To me, I define it thusly (I'm going to use female pronouns but there are male avatar fashionistas in SL):

A fashionista doesn't need to spend a lot of money...she doesn't even have to have the latest and greatest...but what she does have...she pulls together. She gets the little details right and everything just "works". She has her style defined...but can play around with it. She has stuff for practically any occasion, from casual to ball gowns. In other words, she always looks "nice", like she made an effort. She may even be a fashionista in RL, with an interest in makeup and fashion, or she just may read a LOT of magazines....but she knows her stuff.

But there's one other thing I want to say, In my view the term should be INclusive, not EXclusive.

How do YOU define fashionista?

Twins, ICING Shimmy and a hair Lament...also starring LaDonna Upshaw!

Fashionistas are insane...I've said that before...or maybe it's just me...anyway it goes with the territory.

It all started with someone looking for a veiled hat...and then mentioning Icing Joan which has a VERY nice hat..and Icing Shimmy which is also nice and matches the Joan colors. So I ended up at Icing hoping to run into other fashionistas and hang out and ran into LaDonna Upshaw. She wore Joan, I wore Joan. Which has been seen on this blog before...I love it so. LaDonna makes VERY nice furniture...her dining room sets are to die for so check out her store Sweet Romance Furniture on South Sea Isle! (and yes, she knows I'm blogging pictures with her)



Twins we were...after I decided to go tan and put on ETD Tyra...which leads to our hair lament.

Neither LaDonna or I have found a good replacement for ETD Tyra in the "low sophisticated updo you can wear with a hat" niche. Not Truth, not Damselfly, not Analog Dog, not even Elikatira has one and I expected her to redo it!

That opinion was shared by both of us, but the following opinion is mine alone. It gets worse....I was wearing Tyra in Mahogany....which Elikatira does not have a replacement color for. None of the Elikatira reds are that dark, and they're all dusty and muddy like her browns as well. and not...shiny. I like shiny clean hair! The only reason I haven't returned to Elika as my hair crack dealer of choice is that her reds are sub par. There, I said it, and I've been wanting to say it for ages. I cannot buy several Elikatira styles that I LOVE the styles of, because of that. I want Elikatira Rhythm soooooo bad. If you like blondes or black's or blues or pinks or a few other colors you're good...and I do recommend ETD (I mean Elikatira) to people. But for me..I can't buy her hair.




This is the new Icing Shimmy, square neck, puff sleeves (which might need adjusting depending on shoulders, slim skirt. You can take it cocktail, or you can wear it as vampy office wear with a pen necklace and updo. It nicely shows off teh boobehs without being slutty. The Joan hats work well with it. LaDonna and I look sooooo goood in it. And Yes, I have the fatpack. Miko owns me and my L$ balance.

Shimmy dress is available at ICING

My skin was a A 5th & Oxford Tan Kitty skin

Shoes were G Field Eve Pumps,

1-800-Betties, Shimmer Sequins

I think I first mentioned "Betties" back in 2006. they're still around and recently had a VERY large sale...everything in the store was 10L$. So you know what I did..... One of the dresses I found was the one called Shimmer Sequins which is a very nice strapless dress with included choker and earrings. I saw a friend, Kelsi Ember, wearing it at one of my favorite hangouts and put on a contrasting color of it and we danced together...and I took pictures with her permission.





I'm in the Red, Kelsi is in the green. It's a lovely dress ans swirls quite prettily. it comes in several other colors as well. Kelsi is a curvy what some might call "plus size" avatar and it flatters her VERY well. The gloves are included and it really is very pretty and shimmery and lacey...Just a simply pretty cocktail dress.

Shimmer Sequins Cocktail dress from 1-800-Bettie's

Hair on Both of us is from Truth, Seraphina on Kelsi and Amelie on me.

The skin on myself is a 5th & Oxford

Kelsi's skin is a lovely Alyson from Belleza

My shoes are "Eve's" from G Field

Kelsi's shoes are the Tribute pumps from N-Core.

Snooki-ized CC

I was in a group chat and someone mentioned an internet meme showing Carl Sagan and Snooki (yes that snooki from Jersey Shore), where if you didn't know who Carl is, you are what's wrong with the world.

So I got the harebrained idea to Snooki-ize myself a bit:



That's a Vero Modero Dream dress. They have a ton of cute n' sexay dresses like this...in their casuals section...it's quality stuffs in my opinion.

Shoes are G Field Eve's of course.

Hair is Truth Bonnie, for that poofed up big hair snooki- look.



The skin is a 5th & Oxford Tan Rebel Rebel 1 with M.O.C.K Cosmetics L'Eau lip gloss Alchemist and Mile High Eyeliner layered over it.

I have an alt

I finally created my first alt, to test out Firestorm and for utility/group purposes if ever necessary. And of course one of the first things I did was make her look properly like me:



My alt is the one on the left. :-)

From top to bottom:

That's Amacci Adena hair, a freebie

A 5th & Oxford Fair Kitty 6 skin, L$50

ICING Black Princess Pearls, L$195

ICING Night Mist dress, a freebie

Insolence Carmen grey collection pantyhose, L$299

G Field Eve Pumps, L$220

Oracul Math Teacher AO, which is off, L$150

And of course, my own shapes.

The one thing I really miss are my Miriel Enfield Eyes...sigh...I know they're old and that there are plenty of good eyes on the grid, it's just don't look like me without them.

I freely acknowledge my alt's name, since she's just for utility purposes: CeciliaCreeggan. Makes it easier for folks to realize it's me if I'm puttering in it. Don't intend to shop for it....I just needed a pretty outfit for it because no ALT of mine is NOT going to look properly like me and duck waddle.

The Viewer Drama, or why CC recommends Snowstorm.

I use Viewer 3, there, I said it. Specifically the Snowstorm releases Wouldn't use anything else as my primary viewer. Readers are probably thinking...."But CC, you're a 64-bit Linux using nerd, I expected you to use Imprudence!". I don't. There's reasons for that, I NEED the outfits feature and multiple items on one point...Imprudence doesn't do that, and Firestorm doesn't have the "outfits" feature.

Personally I think viewer 2/3 gets "some" unfair vitriol aimed at it, for several reasons. And you'll notice I said "some"

1. Viewer 2 was developed mostly in secret, while viewer 1.xx languished. Because 1.xx wasn't getting new features, some power-users jumped to third party viewers. That was a bad thing, because it fragmented the SL userbase. It also meant that:

2. Viewer 2's UI was obviously developed to resemble other "normal" applications. It resembles web browsers the most, specifically it resembles Firefox on Linux, at least to me it does. Thusly it was intended to ease newbies into SL. However to oldbies familiar with the old "strange" UI, it was totally different and worked in unexpected ways.

3. If LL had gradually introduced the UI changes over time into the 1.xx viewer branch there might not have been as much resistance....but they had to dump that old creaky codebase so it was a big jump or nothing.

4. LL also overestimated the users wilingness to experiment and play with UI. They also reduced the viewers "discoverability"...some users take a while to realize that those "plus sign" and "gear" things in the inventory window are UI! Using those (and putting them at the bottoms) was a bad design decision I think. But let me tell you something that's been publicized in the geek press: Most of the requests for features for Microsoft Word are for features that are already in it. Most people aren't nerds and don't "play" with UI, so if they don't see a feature right off, it might as well be absent to them..and they often think that the feature isn't there. That applies especially to Viewer 2! And because they UI is so different, people often assume "everything" is different, and don't even try to explore/play with the UI.

I had a conversation recently:

Them: "How do you take screenshots in Viewer 2"

Me: "The same way as you do in Viewer 1"

Them: "Where is it in the menus"

Me: "You don't need the menus, the shorcuts are the same, Shift+Ctrl+S and Ctrl+~"

Them: "I use the shortcuts"...

The next thought on my mind was, if you use the shortcuts then what's the problem, it works the exact same way! I suspect that they told a fib and don't use the shortcuts and use the screenshot widget and didn't want to admit it. By the way, it's in "World>Snapshot"

I've also seen:

"How do you pay someone L$ in Viewer 2?"

"the same way you do in viewer 1? Right click and pay?"

"Oh, it's so different I figured they changed it."

People also don't realize that many UI elements in Viewer 2/3 are right clickable! The bar at the bottom, you can right-click and add buttons. the favorites bar, you can make go away. the address bar, you can right click and add info to it. Alls sorts of things that aren't immediately obvious unless one "plays" with the UI.

5. UI decisions:

I freely admit that early viewer 2 was a mess that wasn't ready for prime time. They rushed it to compete with TPV's I think. I only seriously began using 2.x with the 2.1 releases. Here's why I think they released it when it wasn't ready.....profiles.

You remember how in early Viewer 2 when you opened a profile it opened in the sidebar, like groups continue to do? And the UI was vertical and not horizontal tabs, and you could only have one profile open at once? Which as we know, sucked. Then they made a web profile which was weirdly sized for the default profile window and took up too much screen space. Then later on ( came web profiles with social features...with horizontal tabs, that take up less space (but still more than 1.foo style profiles did.) When it comes to profiles...only recently has viewer 2/3 become tolerable by my standards, and I'm pretty darn tolerant of UI quirks, being nerdy.

There are also notifications....which is the ONE thing I truly and dearly hate about viewer 2/3....they don't show enough text and are in the WRONG PLACE. Look I wouldn't mind them so much if I could configure them to show more text...like 1.xx notifications..and if I could have them in the upper right...and if I could make them a nice cheery shade of dark blue with black text on white background within the blue frame...but keep the other viewer 2/3 UI colors the default.

You'll notice how I mentioned screen space? Well to me it seems that Viewer 2/3 UI was designed with high resolution widescreen monitors in mind, but LL forgot about the hardware issues I'll talk bout later. but for now it seems there's still plenty of people not running widescreen or running lower resolution widescreen like me. (1440x900 ) Early Viewer 2 did a sort of strange view shift thing with the sidebar in early 2.foo...which drove many people batty and they refused to use Viewer 2 because of that. Now they did fix it...reasonably soon, but I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't people who don't know they fixed it.

6. Hardware:

One of the little secrets of SL is that a LOT of people are running SL on very low end hardware that LL would probably recommend not running SL on. Now that's low end hardware by "My" standards. Let me explain, further.

I was chided recently in a group chat when I said that inventory size doesn't seem to affect viewer stability and responsiveness at all....and it doesn't...for me. The person who chided me suggested that for people on low end hardware it could happen. Then I mentioned my hardware, which I consider low end:

2.8GHz dual-core CPU, 3GB of RAM, integrated Nvidia 6150SE running Snowstorm 3.0.6 under Fedora Linux 15 64-bit (I had to go back to it because my upgraded power supply died so no GT220).

Someone then said that they would love to have such high end hardware which would have made me spit a drink....because I consider my machine to be low end crap for SL, affordable crap, but crap nonetheless. Admittedly with that GT220 it's better crap, but the GT220 is still a VERY low end card. Now if I didn't run SL, it would be plenty of hardware for my needs, but I do run SL.

And scuttlebutt says Viewer 2/3 runs worse on low end hardware....it doesn't for me, it's always been better than Viewer 1 and it seems to look nicer. But some people have issues getting it to run at all. If that happens to you, try renaming your settings.xml so that the viewer starts with the defaults then manually change them back to what you use....that seems to work. Or it did for me in the late 3.0.2 -3.0.3 builds that I was having trouble with.

So, personally I like Viewer 3...for the most part...I can tolerate the things I don't like, easily enough, but I am a nerd. I also heartily recommend running Viewer 3 over any TPV, which have their own quirks and hardware issues. I also trust LL builds more than I do the TPV's. But IMHO if you want to run a TPV, it should be the Firestorm Mesh builds, though they don't do a 64-bit Linux build...course neither does Linden Lab...which I constantly complain about.

Mrs. Lanley portrait

I was watching the ISC group chat and reading Mrs. Lanley's words and decided to take a visit. Like most oldbies I know how to find people, figured she was on her home region puttering around and she was. (I've been there before). She welcomed the company and we chatted as she showed me some of her favorite bits like the new dock she put in, which was nice. Well anyway she was just standing there, and there was somthing about her that made me want to take a photo. (I asked Mrs. Lanley's permission to blog and post photos) So I did my thing and got a few nice ones


This was the first, she was just standing there and I thought the water would make a good picture. I did a quick change to sunrise:



The next is of us together. After I showed it to her she laughed about how much taller she was than me. (We also played around with shape settings a bit later, which was fun.)



Now I wanted to get a photo of myself on the dock, so I turned up the settings, this has shadows and depth of field turned on:



And since I know Mrs. Lanley doesn't have good hardware I wanted a lovely portrait style photo to give her so I did this one with the Paris 2 windlight setting, shadows and depth of field on. Very lovely:



And yes, that's the Icing Joan I'm wearing. And yes, I have it in ALL the colors. It's Icing...It references Joan Holloway...what do you expect.

Shopping partner fun.

There was someone in one of the fashion groups that was looking for shopping advice. What she wanted was "French Chic/conservative/Ann Taylor" stuff. So of course I chimed in, considering I've mentioned Ann Taylor in regards to SL Fashion before on this very blog. After she had got some great advice from the group, I met up with her after tossing her some LM's asking if she'd like some shopping company. She eventually gave me a link to the sort of thing she was looking for:

Armani Side stiched Jacket and dress on Saks Website

An image from the Saks site is below.



I laughed in IM, and she wondered why I was laughing and I told her I had given TWO people that very link in the past 24 hours to show them the sort of tailored elegant look I like to portray in SL, when I can find it. Most of the time I have to settle for retro...perhaps with mesh we'll see jackets like that.

So anyway I took her to the usual haunts for classic tailored things. We all know the drill. We hit up Lo Lo sim (Caroline Apollo) for jewellery, good place to hit if you need quality basics at good prices, and saw Caroline there.

I also took her to SF designs, where I had been a few hours before to pick up THIS on recommendation of Cousin Savannah Blindside of Caledon:



It's your typical ladies who lunch suit, though I'm wearing the short skirt which makes it more "20-something little miss junior league junior socialite who likes her skirts a touch shorter and heels a touch higher" (I actually knew of someone like that in USENET alt.fashion), but there's a longer skirt option if you want to go for the mature charity luncheon look. The outfit, with the short skirt anyway, actually reminded me of this dress from Donna Rico:



It really is lovely, comes in three colors too. However, the fabric looks fall-y and "heavy" like a nice thick dressy wool.

Mimi is available at the SF Designs for Women

The lady and myself had fun, we both discovered we had been fans of Ally McBeal and she commented on how some of the tailored skirts she had seen were Ally-short. And she swooned over Donna Flora's version of Audrey's famous Breakfast at Tiffany's dress. I helped her a bit in creating a skirt shape, and wanted her hair. She was wearing Elika's Rhythm style, which resembles the old ETD Roslin...but doesn't come in the dark reds Elika used to have...sigh.

Why Second Life is like tabletop gaming...or "Why certain virtual world pundits don't get it."

Ah, those Virtual World Pundits. They make CC laugh. They say things like "zOMG, SL isn't popular and Facebook is so SL should be more like Facebook because unless it has double digit growth every month it's a failure". And then you discover that they spend 12 hours or less in-world...a month. No wonder they don't appreciate the in-world communication tools...they're not in-world enough to use them. And as for 12 hours, I can easily exceed that...in less than a week.

See, what those pundits don't understand is that SL...is like D&D. Not D&D Online the MMORPG....but D&D the tabletop experience. Let me explain.

D&D requires a TON of time if you want to do it right. A single encounter with multiple enemies can take up the entirety of a single session. That's not counting the paperwork and record keeping involed. Not only that, but the Dungeon Master's workload is even worse, creating a world, creating adventures, it's a major time sink. It's why there's never enough DM's. And there's the scheduling issues...can you find a time that matches a DM's plus other players? That is VERY difficult

Only a small majority of nerds want to go through that hassle these days...and some can't because of time constraints...so what do the others do? They play WoW, which although grindy, is no where near as complex as D&D. And you can play on your own schedule and STILL play with other people.

D&D is also expensive...you need your supplements and books.

D&D is not exactly the most newbie friendly game in the world, it's "UI" as it were is very complex and it has it's own vocabulary and a community that has it's own ideas about things.

Not only that, but that community complains every time some new sourcebook with additions is made or when a new version of the "UI" aka the rules is released.

So what does all that remind you of? SL. Like D&D, SL is a niche, it doesn't have to be Facebook. Those people who only log in for three hours or even a dozen hours a month...they're not SL's market. It's the people who spend a hundred hours a month in-world that are. Even if you're a content consumer like me, you still have to "work" for your fun in SL in a way that you don't in other social things. Most people don't want to do that....they want to start their crops, let the cows do whatever...while they're watching American Idol. SL requires immersion in a way that Facebook doesn't.

Here's an anecdote....my sister does her Farmville, while she watches TV. I wouldn't dare do SL while watching TV. There's people in SL who get in a little bit of a tizzy if they even think you're alt tabbed out in a web browser or in multiple IM/group chat sessions. SL requires attention in ways that Facebook doesn't....so the Facebook crowd isn't SL's audience and it's useless to pursue them in an obession for "Growth".

SL doesn't need rebranding. What it needs is for the pundits to figure out that being a niche product for a niche market is a fine and good thing in and of itself.

M.O.C.K. Cosmetics

I've not mentioned the new "makeup layers" in Viewer 2 very much since I don't use them very often, relying on my trusty classic 5th & Oxfords....but....if you you to ask me: "Hey CC, where would you go to buy makeup layers?", my first answer would be Mocksoup Graves"MOCK"

Why MOCK?

Mocksoup, like Roslin Petion of 5th & Oxford, is a makeupista in RL, and it shows in her makeup. And she understands makeupista talk, so when I tell her, "I'm an NC20 and I need a gloss like the Juicy Tubes" she knows EXACTLY what I'm referring to. She also makes a ton of colors in her eyeshadows, lippie formulations and whatnot.



That's the L'Eau Russian Red Lipgloss combined with the Tonal Gold Complements eyeshadow over a 5th & Oxford Fair subtle 1 skin. That's one of the best lip glosses in SL, it really looks like one.

The M.O.C.K Cosmetics flagship store is at Rockhopper City 2 (38, 218, 23)

Low ARC Pretty

Was working on an outfit for "Fairs" even though I don't often go to them since I find most of them annoying. For low-arc I go with system outfits, minimal prims and static non-flexy non-alpha things. It also means no-jewellery either. This is what I have today, though I've used similar outfits in the past:



Hair is an old ETD, Roslin in ETD Mahogany that Elikatira doesn't have an equivalent to. The ensemble are Cinzia jacket and Sonia skirt separates from L'Abel, which is having a sale at the moment.. Pnatyhose are from Insolence, the "Carmen's", and those are the Fri.Day Basic flats.

What's my shape digits?

Strawberry Singh started up a challenge/meme/discussion on her blog about the numbers behind our Second Life shapes. Here's mine:

Interesting post by Kanomi Pikajuna

Kanomi is the nice girl who is friend to all and she offers a VERY interesting solution (saw it via New World Notes) to SL's woes....sell it to the Users al la the Green Bay Packers.

Do I agree? I don't know, but it is interesting. Personally I think the real problem is the freebie culture....but that...is another story and another post some other time.

Sax Shepherd Bunny Ears

I logged in today to see an IM from someone who was told to do so by former boss Salome Strangelove of the Late Lamented Linden Lifestyles, currently of Salome Says. Sure surprised me, thank you Salome, your piggie bunned greatness.

So this is a new creator...that made Bunny Ears...color changeable animated scripted bunny ears. Considering I was thinking about looking for some nice bunneh ears just 3 days ago, it was rather fortuitous.



You can change color, animation interval, set them to fixed position, set who can touch them, resize them, all useful things. Slightly less than 250L$ too. Now this is a new creator and this is their first item, but it's very nicely done. and worth picking up for easter fun, or if you want to do the playboy bunny look like I did. They're easily the best playboy bunny style ears in my inventory.

SLURL to Sax Shepherd in Seven Veils

Simone vintage bunny outfit, Truth Gabby hair, 5th and Oxford skin

Dear Shoe Designers with Love from CC!

Hello Shoe makers! CC loves shoes! CC Loves shoes in RL! CC Loves shoes in SL. CC bought a shoe tipjar....just because! Look at Awesome tipjar that CC has that CC never actually uses:



Tipjar from Khango

You make shoes...CC happy. But sometimes you not make CC Happy. :-( [frowns]

CC uses viewer 2.+ ...CC no likes invisiprims, CC wants viewer 2.+ viewer alpha shoes! CC no buy non-alpha shoes, though flats without alpha are okay.

CC wants designers to update older shoes....CC wants them to release update kits for the already existing shoes in inventory. It would be good if such packs were available to group members or free..but CC is willing to pay, oh say around 50L$....but not pay full price by buying same shoes all over again.

CC also wants to know when you DO release 2.+ updated shoes and not find out by accident...use your groups! Do some marketing so that CC knows of Happy Thing you have done to make CC Happy!

So please listen to shoe loving CC....please make CC more happy!

Luv, CC

Image, style and compliments

I've been socializing more, and experimenting with image and appearance in SL. I've also been getting a ton of compliments ever since I've been doing my social thing. I like Salome's take on compliments:

Also, how do you respond to compliments about an avatar being “sexy” or “hot?” I mean, I didn’t work out for this bod or spend hours on my hair and make-up. Do I think my avatar is cute and nummy? Yes — she fits my personal tastes. Do I appreciate other people may or may not feel the same? Of course. Would I take any feedback negative or positive personally? Um. How?

Don’t get me wrong — I appreciate it when someone says they like the sort of style I project, or when they squee over an outfit I put together. To me, that reflects a symbiotic pixel vanity and I do allow a smile here and there when someone compliments my aesthetic choices. But the “sexiness” thing always leaves me wanting to smirk and reply “thanks, your slider settings get me really hot, too.” But, you just know the sarcasm would be lost. To be fair, I don’t handle these sorts of compliments well IRL, either. Basically what someone is saying is they like the lot you drew in the genetic lottery. I suppose, comparing the two, at least I picked my own slider settings.

I often tell people that the content makers deserve all the credit...all I do is shop. I also say that I take the easy way out and keep it simple, classic and mostly real world inspired. Someone said to me that she thought me saying once that if Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn wouldn't wear something in SL...I wouldn't either. That's pretty close to the mark though I'd add a few more names to the list these days.

What do these images say to you:



That one got a compliment of "You remind me of that Black Swan movie", and that I thought of as well. Kind of princessy-ballerina-y. That's a L'Abel dress IIRC, Truth Tanya hair.



That one I nicknamed Zindra Hub CC. Your usual tanned, tattooed and shmexy SL Avatar look.



Tableau Girl, of course. :-) Makes me look like a 12 year old playing dress-up with mommy's clothes and makeup though.



Retro in ICING's Peggy, Clawtooth hair and Shiny thing's shoes. Got asked several times if I was a Joan on Mad Men fan while I was wearing it....which of course...I am.



Yes, that's the pen necklace. Was told I look sexy in that. Which is very funny considering how simple the look is.



Someone asked me if I was a fan of Desperate Housewives Bree when I wore that. Got a tonne of compliments with that. Mostly about how all the little details worked together. I like Bree's style , but that's not Bree inspired but Laura Bennett from the Third Season of Project Runway I have some similar white blouses of varying cleavagey styles that I wear with varying skirts a la Carolina Herrera. I call those my "uniforms".

That's the Coco Broadcloth blouse with the ingenue pencil skirt. Hair is an old ETD, Tyra that I haven't found a more recent replacement for. Sunglasses are the Heiress frames from Paper Couture and the jewellery is also from Paper Couture. That's the old Tete a Pied Heiress handbag. The Belt is from Fri.day, the shoes from Shiny Things, hosiery from Insolence.

My "issues" with New World Notes

New World Notes is one of the oldest and well respected SL blogs. It's founder, Hamlet Au, was once Hamlet Linden, Linden Lab's own embedded reporter in SL. I heartily recommend it to people and read it myself daily.

However...I have issues with NWN and have apparently have been blocked from commenting there. That disappoints me, though I can understand why.

I probably mentioned Hamlet's indirect financial relationship with Facebook a few too many times when Hamlet kept flogging Facebook as the be all of what SL should be more like. He consults for a company that uses Facebook for game logins and thusly, indirectly financially benefits from it. I was a bit perturbed that he did not mention that connection earlier in his promotion of SL becoming more like Faceook, unlike his Blue Mars thing, which he was quite open about.

My issues with NWN are as follows:

1. Hamlet lives in the tech journalist bubble in California and is thusly disconnected from "average people". This in part led to my disagreement with him about the future of Blue Mars, because while he probably knows people who upgrade their computers often and buy a new iPhone whenever it comes out, that's not the case amongst the SL userbase. He simply didn't understand that Blue Mars had no future as a desktop virtual world with it's Cryengine based graphics when the mass market "Marts" of the US have machines on their shelves with integrated Nvidia 6150SE's in them.

2. Hamlet talks to much to the people behind virtual worlds, when it's the USERS who are the important people...without users, the worlds cannot survive. That also leads to him being a sucker for buzzwords like "the cloud" He thought that "the cloud" would save blue mars, that it wouldn't matter that all those housewives in SL had low end integrated chipsets on their PC's, that BM would be rendered in the cloud and displayed locally.....dumbest thing I ever heard. They didn't have the money! or the number of users to justify doing it. They'd have needed to start on that years ago, and they ran out of time.

3. Hamlet is guilty of the "if it's popular it must be good and anything that wants to become popular should be more like that" fallacy. That's the Facebook thing. Facebook sucks...it truly does. It's interface, it's privacy tools, the requests for "facebook aps" to do things to your info. But Hamlet thinks that because it's popular SL should be more like it, or become connected to it. That's kind of like the people who say smartphones should be like the iPhone, when the iPhone might not be the best device for someones needs. Facebook is all about real world identities and SL...is not. Hamlet says that SL users could use facebook to learn about events in world which tells me that:

4. Hamlet doesn't spend enough time in world talking to "the masses" in world. If he did, he wouldn't say half the stuff he does about SL users. Why use facebook for event listings when there's google calendar and SL's own group system....that he doesn't use effectively. Go on, check the NWN group...no notices...and the group is assigned land that is not covered by Tier:

More Land Credits are needed to support the Land in use."

That picture above was taken at the NWN headquarters location in Waterhead...his building is gone and his furniture and pot plants are just floating in mid air. The man really needs to spend more time in world doing the things that other SL users do, like maintain their land and socialize and stuff. You may not believe it, but in the old days, NWN actually sponsored events in-world!

Another thing that leads me to believe that Hamlet isn't as connected to the masses of SL users as he ought to be is his avatar appearance. Most avatars, even male ones that don't shop much...update their appearance quite a bit. Could you imagine a female SL blogger looking like she just stepped out of 2006? No. Sure, Hamlet's a guy, and a tech journalist and doesn't himself cover SL fashion, leaving that to Iris, but still. DJ's shop, Land Baron's shop, content makers shop. Shopping, especially of things related to avatar appearance, drives the SL economy.

5. He doesn't talk about the SL economy as much as he did in the past. That's hurting SL more than anything. It isn't sim crossings or group chat problems that really hurts SL, but people NOT spending L$.

6. Hamlet doesn't get that SL is a niche product, like hex based strategy games and roguelikes are. The same applies to Minecraft. Sure it's a lot of buzz, but it's coming from hard core nerds who love that sort of crazy complex stuff.

7. The core SL user is probably a 30-50 year old woman...but Hamlet rarely talks to them and would rather talk with Ex-Lindens starting up micro-worlds based on SL code that are going to go nowhere without content that will attract those 30-50 year old women. No pretty shoes, big hair, sexy dresses to make their avatar look kardashiany? They aren't going to be there.

8. Hamlet doesn't realize that NWN is a bubble itself. He's not getting true feedback on
how the masses see and feel about SL via the comments on NWN because NWN's readers are oldbies, FIC and near FIC. Almost all a part of what calls the 100000 That's a problem because the things they care about sometimes don't matter to the "masses" of SL. There's folks in SL who don't give a damn about group chat...and there's plenty of people who simply don't cross sim borders...they d on't need to. In fact, I tend to only cross borders in the steamlands! Everywhere else, I TP.

So that's pretty much it. It's not that I dislike Hamlet or NWN, since it's still a great source of information, it's just that Hamlet needs to be more "grounded" like he used to be.

SL Client 2.6.4 and the bouncy boobeh physics

I was using the development series builds anyway, because they're the only Linden Lab viewers that have the c-ares glitch on Linux fixed (starting with late 2.6.3) so I've been using those builds and moved to along to 2.6.4 and the bouncy came with it. Here's a video demonstration I did:



The physics for breasts, belly and butt are implemented as a wearable physics layer. If you're running 2.6.4, go to My Appearance and Add Clothing> New Physics. That will give you the layer to play with. Here are the settings I use:

breast bounce max effect: 100 spring: 25 Gain: 15 Damping: 50
breast cleavage, max effect: 20, spring: 10, Gain: 9, Damping: 50
Breast Sway, max effect: 20, spring: 10, gain: 9 Damping: 50

And under Advanced Parameters:
Breast Mass: 10, Breast Gravity: 10 (in the video though I have it at 0 now), Breast Drag: 30

The other settings related to Butt, and Belly are at the defaults. To me, it looks best subtle.

Here's the caveats:

You need a 2.6.4 viewer to see or use it. If you have a 2.6.4 viewer you will see bounce on anyone who uses the physics layer, even if you don't use the layer yourself. Likewise, if you use the layer, anyone running 2.6.4 will see it no matter what. Prim attachments don't move with the body parts, they stay where they're attached. so if you were wearing prim pasties and have bouncy...your boobehs would probably bouncy beyond the pastie.

Go to the Snowstorm Development wiki page to download the 2.6.4 builds. Even if you don't use the feature, testing out the viewers by as many people as possible with different hardware and whatnot is a good idea.