November 2008 Archives

Now that Bone has been named one of the top ten hottest male avis of 2008, he's got women camping outside his skybox by the droves, beating down his door. So much so that he can allow himself to simply sit back and relax as they parade before him and try all sorts of tricks to get his attention.
 
If you cajole enough and flutter your long-lasting, lash-thickening, waterproof mascara-ed eyelashes at him, he might even take off his shirt for you, although flexing his abs might take a bit too much energy:
 
 

 
 
In fact, Bone has become so popular that he's now in the enviable position of having gorgeous female avis begging to be allowed to audition to get into his harem. Who minds being part of a harem if it means you get a piece of one of the hottest male avis of 2008, right? After all, sharing is caring, half a loaf is better than none, better a bird in hand than two in the bush, and all that kind of thing.
 
The harem dress code is black, skimpy attire not required but greatly encouraged. As I was already dressed appropriately, I attempted to join, but alas I faced stiff competition in the person of Sehra, who stole the show by arriving in black lingerie, thigh-high stockings and garters. Not only that, she left out one crucial item of clothing and, in her sitting position coupled with her provocative pose, offered Bone a really really superb view of her... uh... 'feminine assets'. I had to concede defeat.
 
 

 
 
Bone indicated that he could be bribed to disrobe further, so Nikki and I both pitched in to offer monetary 'inducement'. I figured, even if I couldn't get into his harem, at least I could drool over His Hotness for the short time I was allowed to bask in his presence, but then he played hard to get and claimed that he had difficulty finding his bits. o.O  He's such a tease! Unfortunately I didn't get to stay for any "unveiling" as I had to leave soon after, and so did Nikki. I wonder whether Sehra managed to successfully work her wiles on him and help him magically rediscover his bits!

I put on something two days ago and have not wanted to take it off ever since, so I decided to do a "Look of the day" post. Well, more like "the look for the past 3 days" :P  But since I've hardly seen anyone while wearing this ensemble (except for Merrick, who happened to drop by my place just after I took the picture below), I guess it doesn't matter that I haven't changed, lol.
 
I started off with the top, which is part of a freebie outfit from Sintimacy. After trying it on, I built the rest of the outfit around it. I even bought the leg strap specially to compliment and finish the whole look!
 
 

 
 
Pose: "Bruiser" by Long Awkward Pose
Skin: Eva Natural in D by Rockberry
Hair: Wisteria in Sand (by former partner of Calla, probably no longer available)
Glasses: Stilo from PrimOptic
Top: Black Heart from Sintimacy (part of outfit, free)
Skirt: Black Lace Pleated Tin Mini from Imperial Elegance (no longer available)
Boots: Melisande in Onyx from Jaywalk
Armband: Heart On My Sleeve Armbelt from Lazy Places
Leg strap: Studded Leg Strap in black from Eclectic Accessories
 
Picture taken using Gogolita's Windlight preset.

I was driving to work yesterday morning when the topic on radio was "What makes a guy sexy?" The DJs took a call from a lady who said, "When he's wearing a creaseless shirt."

"You mean a shirt all nicely ironed?"

"Yes, because most guys are slobs so if his shirt is creaseless it shows he's put effort into his appearance."

...or something like that.

The male DJ pointed out that some materials are non-crease anyway and the female DJ suggested that the guy's mother had ironed his shirt for him :P

But it got me thinking, what makes male avis sexy in SL? When all of them could look well turned out at the click of a mouse, surely it can't be based on great buns or a creaseless shirt or non-greasy hair. Another lady who called in to the show had said cologne but in SL you don't get to smell the guy either.

Here's what makes a male avi sexy to me:

1. Intelligence.
   Intelligence is a HUGE turn-on. Given that SL interaction is based on IMs and chat, being on the same mental wavelength will usually lead to interesting conversations. I like when I can banter and throw words about and have a guy totally get what I mean. I'm a bit of a nerd, I admit ;)


2. Kindness.
   Of course a guy will be kind to the woman he's got his eye on; I'm talking about a person who is inherently kind and treats everyone with the same respect, consideration and thoughtfulness. It shows the essence of the person's character and is very, very sexy.


3. A sense of humour.
   More specifically, it's the ability to laugh at yourself and not take yourself -- or anything else -- too seriously. There are times to be serious but when a person takes himself too seriously, it's a warning sign that his view of the world might be a very narrow one. A person has to see the situation from a different angle in order to get the humour in it. If he can't, that means he can only see the situation from his own POV. Nothing wrong with that, just narrow.

I suppose there could be more, but these are the three main things I could think of. Feel free to add other suggestions in the comments ;)

I've been baffled by the use of "hun" (or "hon") in SL for awhile now. I find a lot of people -- especially female avis -- tend to use it rather liberally. So I plurked today: Quaintly does not like people to call her 'hun' on SL... somehow feels patronising, especially since it's often used by random strangers!

Holy crap, I got 66 responses (including my own replies to others' responses). Apparently there are other people who feel the same way I do about the 'hun'! I had NO IDEA my plurk would spark off something of this magnitude. In fact, from the usual single-digit responses I get, I thought nobody was reading my plurks :P

Anyway, I'd figured 'hun' must be a cultural thing, and I was right: GoSpeed and Night both said it's common to a certain region of the USA. Maybe I've just been meeting many people from that area? Or maybe it's spread within SL and has begun to be adopted by people from other parts of America, as they hear the term being used?

I actually don't make a big deal of it -- I have friends who have called me 'hun' and I've not said anything. In the scheme of things, this is really pretty minor and not worth making a fuss about. The word itself might have a patronising or condescending ring to it in my ears, but I know my friends don't mean it that way :)

Maybe it just sounds extra strange to me because in Asian culture, you don't call a person by a nickname, diminutive or term of endearment unless you are very, very close to them. Come to think of it, my parents call me by my given name! I call my best friend "babe", used to call one long-term housemate "dear" and another "darling", call two or three good friends "woman", and one "gorgeous". They're all girls. The closest I've come to a term of affection with guy friends is "dude" :P

It would be extremely weird for someone I hardly know to come up to me in RL and call me by a term of endearment like "hun" or "honey". I would think one or more of the following: (1) They want something from me; (2) They are hitting on me; (3) They are trying to be funny; (4) They've mistaken me for someone else; (5) They've taken leave of their senses.

Of course SL is different, a mix of different cultures and people from different parts of the world. That's what makes it interesting. Plus even if I think some male avi is being a bit weird, I don't mind chatting with him because it's not dangerous in SL the same way it's dangerous in RL. Likewise, this 'hun' thing really isn't a big deal... just something that niggles at me a bit, but I can live with it. I hope I didn't make any of my friends feel bad by mentioning it >.<

A secret is something nobody else, or at least only a very very few people, know. It's something about yourself, something personal, something private.
 
I've been following the SL Secrets on Shopping Cart Disco since Day 1. Anyone can see that most of them are not secrets; they're more of an anonymous means of getting a message across. A marriage proposal, for example, is not a secret. Very sweet, and one of the most beautiful, positive things I've seen in the SL secret series, but still not a secret.
 
Every week I see so-called "secrets" aimed at certain people or attempting to send out certain messages. This is getting old. People are not getting the idea of what a 'secret' is, and perhaps SCD is letting these 'secrets' through because they would rather not be accused of censoring or being biased in which they choose to post. But the whole project is not staying true to the original Post Secret.
 
 

 
 
I'm also ambivalent about allowing people to comment on them, whether on SCD or on a separate blog set up for that very purpose. True secrets are secrets because one can't tell anyone about them, and Post Secret gives people the outlet to express what they couldn't before. It's the relief of being able to tell the truth to someone, even if you don't know who the person is; to be able to be yourself just this once and know that no one will judge or vilify you.
 
Allowing people to comment on the secrets makes those posters vulnerable. Instead of feeling the relief of just throwing my secret out there, now I know people might be picking my secret -- and me -- apart. Oh sure, they don't know I'm behind the secret, but I know, right? So I still feel it when I read the comments and see them talking about me. Sometimes the comments are encouraging and kind, other times not so much. I think this might be one of the reasons why the real secrets have been dwindling in recent weeks. (And yes, I have submitted a secret before. Much earlier, though.)
 
I said before that I didn't think the SL Secrets idea would work well because the SL community is small; well, actually it's the community that reads and comments on blogs, or the English-speaking fashionista community, which tends to be small. But because it's small, when a person posts a 'secret', they know exactly who is likely to be reading it. And that's the reason that people have been using the 'secrets' to send out messages and opinions about certain clubs, certain designers, the content of the fashion feed, so on so forth.
 
People need to learn that if they want to bitch or vent, that's what a blog is for. Bitching outright on your own blog is also a lot more cathartic than being passive-aggressive by sending anonymous 'secrets' to SL Secret :P

Although I'm very happy with my decorating efforts so far, yesterday when I was trying to figure out the position of the couch and decide which carpet would "go" better with it I asked myself, "What am I doing this for?"

You see, I almost never have visitors, so nobody gets to see the house, and even when I do, we often just sit outside on the lawn. Kinda how like when I visited Laleeta, we stood on her roof to chat! I myself hardly ever go inside the house -- most of the time I'm rezzing stuff on the lawn or sitting around somewhere outside, IMing friends.

It feels... empty somehow, like I have this house all done up but nobody to share it with. What is the point?

I've been in a funk over the past 4 to 5 days. Just feeling frustrated and lonely, RL lonely which is so much worse than SL lonely because you can't log out of RL :P  It affects my SL too, of course. Makes me want to turn to SL and look for a cure in there. But when you are just as single in SL, that only adds to things, and I'm sure being frustrated & lonely in both worlds is not good for health lol.

I think I may need some hugs...

I finally figured out what to do with the last corner of my house yesterday. I've been stumped because I have this HUGE hall space, and already had a living room set taking up the opposite corner:
 
 

 
 
So I couldn't figure out what to do with the other corner. The problem was that both sides face doors leading outside, so it wasn't like I could turn the other corner into a hot tub area or something... not unless I wanted visitors to enter the house and be greeted with a hot tub the very first thing :P
 
Then I went to MudHoney, who had announced they were putting some stuff on sale, and got a corner sofa (which was, most emphatically, not on sale). After rezzing it and positioning it, and trying to combine it with a lounger I got from the Barnesworth prefab 'hunt', I decided I needed two of these sofas instead. It was no-copy, so I had to go back and purchase another one, and prevailed upon Elora to help me decide upon a carpet colour... behold the results!
 
 

 
 
I've also gotten the piano corner all done up, with Penn's piano taking pride of place, of course ;)
 
 

 
 
Now I just need to finish making the fireplace for the middle area, and I'll be done \o/

My home sim turned snowy a few weeks ago, literally overnight, the same way most things in SL tend to happen ;)  I was shocked and a little disgruntled. Where did all my green grass go?? *mumbles*
 
Tiyuk said 12 tenants on the sim had voted for snow, a majority, so I promptly shut up. And, since I have snow, I decided to decorate for the season. I believe that's called making lemonade? :P
 
This is big because I've never, ever, ever had a Christmas tree. I rezzed Dec 17 last year (or rather the original Quaintly did, Quaintly Questi), so I had no home in SL at the time and no place to decorate. As for RL, let's just say my parents are very, um, practical people, much too practical to go through all the fuss and bother of seasonal decorations. They don't give Christmas presents either. Said it would teach us to be materialistic and to look forward to the season for all the wrong reasons... or something like that -_-"
 
So anyway! I still don't really have a decorated Christmas tree, but I have a few undecorated ones! lol
 
 

 
Isn't that glowy tree amazing? It's the snowglobe tree from Beloved Designs, by my friend Aisuru. You have to see it in person, the images swirl around so that the tree looks different all the time, it's incredibly unique and beautiful! I think for me, this is my real Christmas tree this year \o/
 
 

The snowman in this picture and the one above are both free from Catriana Ninetails. The two trees with yellow lights were from there too... they're two intersecting flat prims with a texture, not so pretty from some angles, but hey, the point is, they're free! ;)
 
 

 
The fir is from abies, they make some gorgeous sculpted trees. That fir is 8 prims only! The silver fir in the first picture is from there, too. I looooove their trees. They have an oak with 6 different seating animations... soooooo win!!! (Said oak is in the second picture above... lol)
 
Now I feel a little less "Bah, humbug!" :D

Jerremy's rezday party this morning was so fun! (I know it was 7pm SLT, but that was 11am my time lol, so it was this morning :P) There were some people I didn't know, but of course the Ch'know peeps were there, and GoSpeed was DJing with great tunes. The theme was Rock 'n Roll, witness the birthday boy himself, and his lovely wife:
 
 

 
 
I crashed taking pictures half-way through the party, so I didn't get everyone's picture, but of course I had to capture our DJ hard at work! (I need to figure out Windlight presets, the lighting in some of my pics is terrible... sorry GoSpeed >.<)
 
 

 
 
Here are some of the other guys who were there. Click on their faces to get the full picture -- I didn't want to overload this post with too many pictures lol... [pictures will open in a new window/tab]
 
 

 
 
And of course, I tried to dress in theme too, despite not having the first clue about what "rock 'n roll" might require ;)  I forgot to take pictures of myself at the party (was too busy dancing with a certain dashing gentleman) but I took one after:
 
 

 
 
HAPPY REZDAY, JERREMY! Woohoo! Hope you had a good one! ;)

A friend gave me the most amazing gift today. I was just saying how much I wanted the Aoharu ribbon high heel fatpack...
 
 

 
 
All of a sudden, BOOM! L$ landed in my account, and there my friend was, grinning at me. I was like, o.O
 
It's one of the kindest and most generous things anybody has ever done for me in SL. It totally made my day <3
 
I'm not used to people giving me things for the sake of giving... in either world. It's a rare occurrence indeed. I have parents who don't believe in spoiling their kids, so I learnt early on that the only person who's going to spoil me will have to be myself.
 
Oh, it's not as sad as it sounds ;)  My parents believe in tough love and making us take responsibility for ourselves. I remember buying my first (film) camera at the age of... I think it was 14? I paid half and my dad paid half. I was sooooo proud of myself :D
 
I sometimes think it would be nice to be spoiled by someone but not having a significant other greatly reduces the probability of that occurring *grins*  Plus, I'm not the kind of person who asks for things anyway. But I have wonderful friends who care for me and show their care in the most amazing ways <3

The funny thing about SL is that because it's a different world you get to recreate yourself. You get to start from scratch with no past hanging over your head, and you get to be the person you've always wanted to be, or the person you think you should have been. One of my friends has told me that her avatar looks the way she would want to look in RL, if she had the choice.
 
When I created my avi, I never tried to make her look like me. That never even entered my head. I suppose I created her around some idea of ideal beauty, because I did want her to be pretty and slim, but I didn't create her to be how I would want to be. Truthfully, there's nothing I want to change about the way I look in RL, except for losing a few pounds (which is something just about every other woman wants too, lol!).
 
There's been this challenge going around the blogs, started by Kristi Maurer, about trying to make your avi look like your RL self. I thought this was intriguing, and I tried it. Since I know some of my friends would rather not see RL pictures, I've put it behind the cut (hope that works, this is the first time I'm testing that function on this blog!).
 

Yesterday I attended my first ever SL wedding! I was there to see Pay Writer marry her sweetheart, Dreamsphere Zeimer. And to think I wasn't even invited!
 
Nooooo I didn't gatecrash the wedding lol. As it happens, I saw Tye online and sent him an IM. I know Tye from Plurk, he'd friended me inworld but this was the first time I'd seen him online at the same time, so I decided to say hi.
 
He said he was choosing his outfit for the wedding, and asked, "Do you know Pay?"
 
"We're friends on Plurk and she comments on my blog regularly, but we've never met inworld."
 
"You should come to the wedding!"
 
"I can't come, I wasn't invited!"
 
"My invite was for me 'and one other' -- you can come with me."
 
I was like o.O  And then I found out the wedding was at 10:30am SLT -- 2:30am my time. Eek!
 
As it happens, I went out for dinner and came back at midnight, still feeling wide awake. Since I was awake, I went inworld and tried to figure out what to wear. Here's what I came up with ;) [see picture at right]
 
The wedding was beautiful, the vows poetic and lovely. It was held in a rainforest clearing, with sounds of running water and birds chirping -- soothing and calm. Here's the happy couple -- congratulations, Pay and Dreams!!
 
 

After my brief SL relationship ended recently, I've come to the conclusion that if I ever have another, there are only two ways -- for me -- which it would work:
 
 

(1) SL-to-RL relationship
 
The ideal would be a relationship which will eventually cross over to RL. I don't think there's a high chance of this happening, though, for the simple reason that there are a huge amount of things to consider if one wants to bring an online relationship into the 'real world'. Once there is intention to meet face-to-face and try to make it work in the physical realm, things get a lot more serious and there is a lot more stuff on the line. I think folks who have met their partners in SL and are now together in RL are very, very lucky.
 
 
(2) SL-only relationship
 
I previously was not open to SL-only relationships but broke that rule for Tiyuk. And it was great for the short while it lasted :)  But the experience did teach me something. If I ever try an SL-only relationship again, because there is no chance of moving to RL, it has to be for companionship only, lighthearted, for fun, and cannot be taken too seriously. By this I don't mean that I should treat the relationship lightly or 'toy' with the other person; I mean that things like the words "I love you" shouldn't be spoken. To me, those words are extremely serious; they're a sign of commitment and deep feeling. The moment one says them... I feel a line has been crossed. That's my personal stand. And it's not just a meaningless embargo of the words themselves; if I ever find myself in the position of wanting to say them to my partner, I'll know I've gotten in too deep.

 
I sometimes feel like RL relationships are a bit of a minefield or a maze and SL relationships can be even more so. I think it's wise to know, going into a relationship (RL or SL), what you need, what you want and what you expect, and to talk about this with your partner. I mean, if your partner hopes to eventually end up with you in RL, and you want to keep it in SL only, obviously that's going to have difficulty working out, right? D'oh ;)

There's something about loneliness which gets all of us, RL or SL. But somehow it's so much worse in SL because in SL, we have a lot more control over our world. It feels wrong to be lonely in SL when the dynamics of the world are so different.
 
I don't often feel lonely in RL even though I don't have a significant other. But in SL sometimes I feel extremely lonely. It's weird, isn't it, to be in a world where you can go anywhere and do anything (within reason) and you sit on your front lawn and wonder what to do or where to go, and feel a bit "Meh."
 
 

 
At any time when I log in, I might have 3 to 15 friends online. And often I'm afraid to IM them because... what if they're all busy? I have to say that the Ch'know group is awesome in this respect. It's much less scary to poke the group chat and see what comes up, who responds. From there we get to talking about other stuff and then somebody mentions going somewhere and a bunch of others decide to tag along. It's like you get a 'feel' of who is free and who is not, without having to ask directly.
 
Maybe this is why some of us tend to look for, or hope to develop relationships in SL with someone special. At least if you have someone, you know that's one person who will always be happy to see you, or even better, will always be watching for you. It's nice to go inworld having something to look forward to, knowing you're going to meet a loved one. Nice to be welcomed and know that you make a difference to the person just by being there.
 
Companionship, as a friend said to me today. "No man is an island," John Donne wrote in the 17th century. What was true then still holds true now.
 
As far as that goes, I'm forever in the wrong time zone, it seems -- I meet many people from the US and Europe, and hardly any from my own part of the world (South-East Asia). I'm learning, though, that if I go inworld and feel lonely and can't find something to do or someone to hang out with, it's okay to log out and go back to RL. While I can't do much about feeling lonely in RL, I can stop myself from feeling lonely in SL by the simple expedient of logging out lol. So why not? I've never been a masochist ;)

Wow nearly 50 posts to read from the SL Bloggers Mix 'n Match challenge. I haven't finished going through all of them yet, I admit!

What interests me most when I read the posts (those that I have read) is how these posts reveal so much about the versatility of each blogger. You see, all of us -- except for Ari Blackthorne -- were assigned topics not of our own choosing. (As luck would have it, Ari had two submissions and one of them happened to fall back into his lap!)

It's one thing to write about something that's familiar or which we WANT to write about; it's another thing entirely to write about something completely alien, and possibly something we are completely disinterested in. That's where you get to see how versatile a writer the person is, because it's very, very hard to make a piece of writing interesting and engaging if you yourself aren't engaged in the subject. It will show in your writing, trust me ;)

That's why blogs are great; we get to write about the things that interest us the most, or that we're most passionate about, and that interest & passion shines through our words. It's what makes the readers come back again and again, because that kind of passion is very attractive. It reaches out through the words on the screen, grabs the reader, and draws him into your world. It enables the reader to see your world as you see it. It makes the reader want to inhabit the same world you inhabit. That's the power of passion, combined with the power of words. It's a fearsome combination.

So as I read through the blogs, I looked for flashes of passion. It's not enough to be erudite and articulate. You could write the most beautiful piece with the most eloquent descriptions, but it's going to feel flat and lifeless without that element of passion. The passion is crucial.

And passion was most apparent where bloggers used the topics to tell their own stories, like Skinkie who discussed the economics of freebies from her own perspective as a content creator, and Cat Magellan who shared with us her experiences of living and playing in SL with her RL significant other. Of course. Have you ever known anyone who didn't get animated when they started talking about themselves, their families, their life experiences? The people who don't are strange ones indeed... better be careful of them! lol

But Torley took it one step further in writing about living as a different gender in SL. Not only did he tell his story, he expanded on the topic and showed us that the issue at stake isn't one of RL or SL gender, but so much more. He took the topic, ran with it, made it work for him. When a person embraces a topic and makes it his own... that's the mark of a truly great writer. (He likely had an edge though, in the sense that this topic probably isn't new to him -- he said he's tried all kinds of avatars since he first rezzed in 2004, and he's probably thought a lot about how they have helped him express himself and discover more about his own identity as a person.)

Tymmerie's post was another that really struck me. I thought her extremely creative to have approached her subject by using Maslow's theory -- which I've never heard of, obviously there have been serious gaps in my education -- as a framework for her discussion. "What groups you can't live without and why" actually sounds, to me at least, like a really dry and plodding topic. EDIT: Let me explain: A lot of people would simply have listed out their groups and talked about what each one does or what each one is about. I was envisioning that kind of post but of course I should have known that Tymmerie would never be that predictable. In fact, I'm amazed that she managed to make it so interesting and funny and clever!

If you'd like to critique my post, it can be found at Brandy Rasmuson's blog ;)

Guest blog by Alphonsus Peck; topic submitted by Uccello Poultry. This is part of the SL Bloggers' Mix 'n Match challenge.
 
 
Spitting Out the Landscape
My Life and Explorations in the Virtual World
 
 

 
 
I, Alphonsus Peck, came into being on March 25, 2006 at approximately 4:30 pm, and I promptly crashed.
 
Virtual existence is very difficult when your every movement depends on a machine woefully inadequate to the Godly task of giving you life. The machine, which could handle documents and spreadsheets with only minor strain, exclaimed a loud WTF when my existence fell into its cybernetic hands. It tried valiantly, but, it was like giving the management of NASA over to the Pillsbury Dough Boy; it just wasn't equal to the job.
 
And thus I struggled. I waited whole minutes between footsteps. I flew to unoccupied areas to change my shape and appearance, and I could move with comparative ease there, but life is not really living unless one can experience its beauty at more than 4 frames a minute, so I struggled to get myself to a camping chair in a relatively unoccupied casino and sat there for the next 9 months. Life was simply too difficult, and I was thus almost aborted before I begun.
 
But an in-world library conference gave me a second chance at Second Life. Running on a machine that found my life somewhat less intimidating, I went to the first Library Conference held in a virtual world. I had the pleasure of meeting an actual Linden that night (who would later be "relocated" for doing too good a job) and I was hooked.
 
How one experiences life is very much dependent on one's perspective, and, in SL, one's perspective is very much dependent on the hardware one runs one's life on. In real life, Zen teaches us that to fully appreciate life one must fully experience the moment. In SL, how that moment can be experienced depends heavily on your processor speed, your graphics card, your RAM, the version of the client being run, and various other very un-Zen-like things. From familiarity, I can say that it is more pleasant to experience a bouncing-penis-griefer moment with windlight, reflection and shadow enabled with a decent draw distance then the same with low resolution, sound disabled, flat, and shadow-less. From a Zen perspective, one must appreciate that both moments are perfect, but I think even the Zen-est among us would agree that the former is perfecter than the latter.
 
My S-life is shared with my wife Princess Ivory. My wife insists that Princess is her first name but also insists that she is indeed a Princess. Some people make the mistake of calling her Ivory, as if that were her first name, just as Diana was the first name of Princess Diana. In actuality, since Ivory is her last name and Princess is her first, she should be properly referred to as Princess Princess.
 
Anyway, I digress. We started our lives wholly devoted to the library community, which translated to a life running a small plot called the Reader's Garden within the library community, which by way of complex convolutions somehow got our lives wholly devoted to Renaissance Island, a quite un-library like place which was to be devoted to be an accurate re-creation of life in Renaissance England. I set up a small furniture shop there and had a pleasant little business running until that went splat for various complicated reasons.
 
I worked for a while as a cleric in a place called Everwind, which went splat, and then went to as the head cleric of Triskele, which I dropped from with a splat, all the while having my home away from home in a place called Faeria, which, eventually, also went splat.
 
My Princess and I moved throughout SL trying to find a place to call our own, living on platforms 400 meters in the sky one day and the next day finding myself falling 400 meters because Princess Princess moved the platform over to some other land that she bought.
 
Thus did I explore much of Second Life, flailing downward at 9.8 meters per second squared and watching it rise up to splat me.
 
I became so used to exploration by way of out-of-control crashing that I finally realized my dream and invented a device that made flailing in panic a legitimate method of transportation: the Cataporter. The Cataporter was a dream method of transportation, being a catapult that one could program with precise coordinates and fling you gracelessly across the landscape to land you within reasonable distance of your destination. It was the cream of my shop until Havoc 4 came along, which crashed the brilliantly subtle but inexcusably undocumented code of its execution. Thus my business sales did splat along with it.
 
My life in SL and my exploration of its wonders can be characterized by a trip by the Cataporter. Often my trip to the place I thought I was going would be hampered by the placement of a tree or wall and I would splat prematurely. If my destination had been unexpectedly lowered, then I would flail well past it, crashing into some person's perfectly innocent sadomasochistic porn shop. As always I would stand up, brush myself off, and wonder where the hell exactly I was.
 
And that, I suppose, is what I guess the great lesson of SL is. Nothing is really what you expect it to be, and you are never really quite sure that how you got to a place one day will still work the next. Places change, the rules change, the laws of physics change, and every day you find yourself falling screaming into new places of beauty. Never knowing what to expect becomes the norm, and spitting out landscape after each splat is just a part of everyday S-life.
 
And is this place called Real Life really so much different? Unexpected Presidents, collapsing world economies, sickness, death; all of these are things designed to keep out RL from getting predictable.
 
Sometimes the landscape is a little harder to spit out in RL, but the beauty is still there, if one chooses to look for it.

I nearly killed myself writing my post for the SL Bloggers Mix-and-Match challenge, which is why you haven't heard from me. I finally unprocrastinated myself late Sunday night (it was due Sunday lol) and finished it at 4am Monday morning. Of course, I had to work Monday, so that made my Monday like this:  >.<

Somebody should stop me the next time I decide I want to try to live dangerously!

Anyway, it's done, and you'll be happy to know I even have four pictures for it. Yes, FOUR! Is that a record, or what?? *looks guiltily at all her pictureless posts on this here blog*

So tomorrow you'll get a reprieve from my ramblings. My epic piece (it's 1,300 words!) won't be here; you'll have to go to Brandy Rasmuson's blog for it. An eloquent piece of writing by Alphonsus Peck will greet you in place of my usual scintilating tales over here.

This is a list of all the topics, the blogs they'll appear on and who will be writing them. In case you're wondering, the topic I submitted was "Can SL and RL truly be kept separate from each other?" Stuart Warf drew that one; it's going to appear on The Poultry Report. Can hardly wait!

Remember what I said about living dangerously? Yeah, that. lol.

I've been assigned the topic "The lack of encouragement for new male residents to
stay in Second Life. Marketing and resources." My first thought: But I'm not male!!!

Then I vaguely remembered something Vint had said about a "well-researched" blogpost, and my journalistic/academic instincts kicked in. You see I was a journalist before and I'm now doing my Masters, so, um, yeah, there is no escape! Thus, here cometh The Survey...

I've had 8 responses so far, but the more the merrier. If you know any male residents, point them my way! I've only got 8 questions and will be able to drop a notecard on them inworld.

Now I have to go think about a photo... not only do I have to come up with a "well-researched, incredibly funny and kick-ass blogpost", it has to be between 500-1000 words and include a picture/graph! *shakes with performance anxiety*  Can't... get... it... up...

I was referring to the blogpost, you pervs!!! XD

Sorry! I was busy last week helping an RL friend to organise her wedding -- spent Tuesday afternoon with her, helping her to choose flowers, attended the wedding rehearsal Thursday night, was at her house Friday night for the mother of the bride's "send-off dinner", wedding ceremony Saturday morning, wedding banquet Saturday night. Whew.
 
Meanwhile, there were all the Halloween hunts. I only hit up certain stores to get the prizes. No time and no energy to go TPing all over the grid, lol. I missed the MudHoney hunt, though :(
 
Now I'm trying to get my beach done. Sai pointed me to these sculpted ground covers on XStreetSL (previously SLexchange) and I'm trying them out. Unfortunately they're all randomly contoured and can't be copied, also can't be stretched because they're already the maximum 10m x 10m.
 
As you can see, I am experiencing EPIC FAIL (and yes, that pink dot happens to be me, how kind of you to notice!):
 
 

 
 
*cries*
 
It's a good thing I'm not in SL that often, so cannot be too bothered by the beach or the lack of it thereof :P
 
In other news, Tiyuk and I are no longer a couple. But we're still good friends and I treasure his friendship a great deal. He's also assured me that I'm still welcome on Envision -- "You are officially not being kicked out" (this in reply to me saying that I'd only leave if I were kicked out) -- and that he still wants me acting as Envision estate manager. *grins evilly, rubs her hands together and renews earlier plans to cause trouble* XD