Friday, July 20, 2007

Ivories


I was busy working on the new castle tonight when a friend IM'd to invite me to a live piano concert at Oyster Bay.

The pianst, Origin Rang, was just magnificent. I haven't attended a lot of live music events, but all the ones I've been to have been well worth the time, and this was no exception.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Home Improvement


Some time ago, we set our big gothic castle on our land in Winterfell facing the river, with its back to the main Winterfell island. Since then, Serra Anansi has made a lot of improvements, building a village and shopping/communal area, with the arrival of the new island Winterfell Ebonshire just the latest advance.

So we decided to turn our house around, to face inward, making us more a part of the community. It occurred to us that we might seem a little stand-offish facing away. We spent a few minutes picking up all the furniture, poseballs and other items and then repositioned it all. It went smoothly enough. The castle's self-aligning script worked as it should and everything came back together as we'd hoped.

But then, we started to talk about something we'd discussed in the past ... designing and building our own. The last time we talked about it, we were too new to SL and didn't have enough confidence in our building skills to tackle it. Then the pre-fab we'd bought served our needs and there was neither a need to change nor the free prim space to experiment.

But with the old one empty and our building skills much improved in past seven or eight months, this seemed like the time to try it. we talked over what we'd like to have, then built the scale model you can see in the top picture here, and then started the actual work.

We are limited by the oblong shape of our lot, so the one idea I've wanted to try for a while -- four wings enclosing a courtyard -- isn't really feasible. It would take a square lot of about the same area that we have to make it work well. So the new one will have the same general shape and exterior dimension as the one we've had. But we're bulding this one with an atrium between the two main wings, a ballroom that can be entered directly from outside so we can host social events without opening up the more private areas to visitors, and a second-floor balcony overlooking the ballroom.

Morgana or I will post more as we get closer to completion.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Ghostly Sighting

Winterfell has seen a bit of upheaval over the last day (or night, as the sun never rises on on Winterfell). A new land mass has risen out of the sea to our north, bringing with it rolling clouds of fog and, it appears, causing the destruction of a passing pirate ship.

All hands are lost, I fear, save for one babbling seaman who told a tale of a ghostly woman on shore that led them to the rocks and their watery graves. But he was clearly not in his right mind, and after a final hysterical cry he ran off into the woods.

I fear he may find the darker denizens of Winterfell even more frightening than the ghostly vision he blames for the demise of his unsavory colleagues. I do not expect to see any more of him but we will leave the remains of his ship behind as a warning to other pirates and invaders who are foolish enough to disturb the peace of our shores.

The new region of Winterfell will be called Winterfell Ebonshire and promises to be a dark, rural area, more remote than the township that surrounds Winterfell Castle and the beautiful estate lands of the other three regions that have been developed this past year. At present, it is empty but I have seen our Queen Serra at work before and eagerly await the new view beyond our borders.

Dress: Greta - Last Call
Headpiece: White Bridal Chaplet with Ribbons - Vandeverre's Emporium
Shoes: Egyptian/Mayan Sandals (Silver) - Aries Celestial Designs
Skin: Gala (Medium - Earth) - Empyrean Emporium
Hair: Ember II (Dirty Blonde) - Calico Creations
Other: DE ACLS Lighting (Blue) - DE Designs - good for luring pirates to their watery death

Tuesday, July 10, 2007


Real Life has been breathing down my neck lately - a new job with a schedule that has collapsed most of my routine SL social life. But today is my first full day off in over a week, and I thought I'd take some time to sort through inventory and file away a few recent purchases.

As a result, I found myself wearing this ensemble and was so charmed by the effeft that I decided it was time for yet another very rare blog entry.

Most of the outfit is part of Bare Rose's Rosarium set, which comes with the top, the gloves, the silk flower neck adornment and more hats than I can believe - a large and medium version in black, purple and red, all with matching black net and silk flower decorations. The set also comes with a long system skirt which was the only part of this that I wasn't entirely excited about - like so many system skirts, the legs tend to break through the fabric and there are no glitch pants to go along with this set. Even so, Bare Rose's prices are so reasonable that I'm really happy I bought this.

Instead of using the system skirt, I am wearing iki's Bell Skirt with the Net Overlay, and it creates an entirely different effect than the long system skirt did - I think there's a happy little Audrey Hepburn era thing happening here now that is sophisticated and very sexy. Paired with less dressy items, this skirt takes on the personality of whatever it's paired with and promises to get a lot of wear time from me. The bell shape really sets it apart from most SL standard prim skirts. Iki also makes a bell skirt with a pleated overlay, and I think they are essential basic requirements to any SL wardrobe.

These shoes are Tete a Pied's Maryjanes in red to add a dash of color to the outfit and we just won't talk about how hard it was not to want to buy them in every color offered.

The earrings are part of Random Calliope's Eboness set and oh my! If you haven't made it out to Random's newly redesigned gallery (appropriately named Worthwhile), get out there! He's rolled back prices and now all sorts of his stunning jewelry art are available for as low as 25L (yes, that is not a typo). Bring lots of Ls anyway though - with so much wonderful goodies available for so little, you're going to want them all.

Jewelry: The Eboness - Worthwhile by Random Calliope
Skirt - Bell Skirt, Net Overlay -iki
Outfit - Rosarium - Bare Rose
Shoes - Red Maryjanes - Tete a Pied
Skin - Tone 3 - 01 - Au Naturel
Hair - Jennifer (Simmer) - Celestial Studios

Thursday, July 5, 2007

July Fourth in the Park


Yesterday, July 4, We had our first planned event in the park. We set up a cookout atmosphere with a borrowed dunking tank added to our other play equipment, listed events for best-dressed in red, white and blue (three contests, one color each) and I wrote and hosted two rounds of trivia.

We were quite pleased with the turnout. We never had a huge crowd, but over the course of the day we had maybe 20 or 25 people come through. Some were from groups we're part of, but a good number came through the listings.

We tried to avoid making it too All-American, though we could not resist the temptation to dress in traditional colors ourselves. We were a little unsure many people would be around -- a lot of Americans would be doing things offline, and it wasn't a holiday for the rest of the world. We're thinking that if we do it again, not tied to a holiday, it might be even better attended.

The fireworks display at the end was magnificent. Morgana located a really well designed, 25-minute display made by Feras Nolan. This is a little expensive (L$400) and is one-use only, but if you want an event capper that will leave people happily stunned, you can't find better.

As the smoke cleared and people drifted away, we were surprised that we'd been at it for seven hours and it had flown by. We're looking forward to doing something else soon.