Alien Takeover?

Tonight I noticed a glowing green spike coming out of the back of my head. It comes and goes, but I cammed around to look at the inside of my head and found a green thing had taken over my brain.

Any idea what this is?

Edit: I figured it out. It's part of a dragon avatar I'd had on earlier.

Dressing for the Weather, Pt I

I don't know how it is where you are are, but here where my typist lives, we're in that transitional weather season where it's 20F one day and 65F the next and if it's warm it's raining and if it's sunny the wind is gusting. Ahhh, late Fall, you make it hard to sort my wardrobe.

Now, while SL hasn't added a new feature where our little avatars shiver and turn blue when weather grows cold (and after WindLight, weather seems the next logical step - think WindLight makes your avatars face looks sallow? Just wait till drizzle's running your makeup and frizzing your hair!), I still like to dress seasonally - so this week, that means coats and sweaters and all things that go well with a steaming cup of hot chocolate.

First up is this adorable coat that isn't exactly rain gear but the cheery color reminds me of rubber ducky yellow slicker and boots. Made by Arimidi Gisaci, the Francia Woven Coat comes in a variety of colors. I rarely wear yellow in RL or SL, so it was with some serious nailbiting and hesitation that I chose this one - in the end it was the bright cheerfulness that made me smile on an otherwise grey day.

The Tights are by Lotta, labeled "nep knit socks - caki' in my inventory. They are a thick wooly green, guaranteed to keep your legs warm when the wind is gusting. Keeping my head warm is the Danielle beret by Tesla - a wonderful addition to anyone's wardrobe because it's color-changing. I've finished off the outfit with Adam n Eve's Stompi Boots in Apricot. Like most 1 piece ankle boots, you can see that they cut into my ankles a bit in an extreme pose like this one, but I saw very little problems actually moving around normally. And they are a ridiculously low price, so I don't care if my ankles suffer a bit.

The hair I'm wearing is 0 Style's "Now Seeker" in Brunet and the skin is one of two sets I've been wearing almost exclusively this past month - PixelSpa's Stella di Roccia in Almond. This make-up set is Chanteuse, the cat's eye version. Each make-up comes with a cat's eye version and a regular eyeliner version, and the make-up combinations are all lovely. The eyes are Tuli silver eyes and look just like the sky outside my RL window.

Skin: PixelSpa / Stella di Roccia - Almond Chanteuse (cateye liner)
Hair: 0 Style / *now Seeker* Brunet
Eyes: Tuli / Silver
Hat: Tesla / Danielle (color changing)
Coat: Armidi Gisaci / Francia Woven Coat - Yellow
Tights: Lotta / nep knit socks - caki
Boots: Adam n Eve / Stompi boots - Apricot

Happy Thanksgiving!

For those in the US, Happy Thanksgiving!

For those everywhere, thank you for sharing your lives with ours in Second Life.

And to all of you - have some turkey and stuffing! Your avatars look half starved!

Skin: Stella di Roccia - Almond, Nude, PixelSpa
Dress, Hair/Hat: Plain Dress - Blue. Ghanie Lane@Garda - Plain and Modest
Turkey: Love, Aly, 1L


(I can't tell you about Mickey's - he patched together an outfit and I made him a quickie hat to match!)

Home Again

After a lengthy hiatus caused by the real world, we finally got back to work on our new house. (Good grief, we started in July!)

It's now finished and nestled snugly into the Winterfell forest. We've begun furnishing it and in another day or so we're going to call it done.

Here are a few pictures.

We both worked on the build and I have a new respect for Second Life housebuilders. The basic shapes are easy enough, but getting all the seams to line up and the pieces to fit together is harder than I ever appreciated.

Morgana did all the textures and did a marvelous job. That's also a harder task than it looks, especially when trying to align edges.

The basic design is two main sections separated by an arched passthrough. One end is the bedroom and living room. On the other end is a ballroom and a gallery overlooking it. The second-level room above the archway houses a bath.

The turret at the top was a late addition Morgana built, with some usable space inside. It tops off the main structure perfectly, without overwhelming it or getting swallowed up by the size of the building under it.

So it took some doing but it's done. We have a home again, a one-of-a-kind that we're really proud of. It was a fun project, and we collaborated on it well without any real disagreements over what was needed. Having done it once, we'll avoid some mistakes next time -- if there is a next time, as I think we'll be happy in this for quite a while.

She's creepy and she's spooky...

Time for a bit of catch up - I've got a few pictures I've taken the last couple of weeks that I want to get posted. (Sadly, I'm so scatterbrained that I didn't take note of what it was I was wearing, so it's going to take a bit of hunting through my inventory.

This outfit, I loved so much that I wore it for three days straight and fully expect I'll be wearing it a lot more.

The hair makes it - I picked this up at the Hair Fair awhile back, sure that I'd find some use for it eventually, but it wasn't until now that I put together just the right outfit to set it all. It's called, appropriately enough, Creepy Bun by Curio - and you know? I'm not at all sure it is still available or if it was just part of Hair Fair. If not, they totally need to bring it back out for the month of October, because how perfect is this?

The outfit is a combination of the jacket/blouse portion of Last Call's Catwalk Collection: Virginie and the Comfort Skirt from PixelDolls. Separately, they are elegant and classic - together, they somehow come together in a sweetly gothic way that turns into Wednesday Addams.

I actually went hunting for the right shoes to go with this, and found them in adam n eve's Bronte Slipper. The added bonus here is that these are totally going to work with most of my Regency and Victorian dresses as well.

Completing the look is the skin by Mami in Milk. Not entirely white, this skin has the barest pink tint to it so that it properly looks like I've not out before moonrise in the last few years.

Jacket and Blouse: Catwalk Collection: Virginie - Last Call
Skirt: Comfort Skirt - PixelDolls
Shoes: Bronte Slipper, Black Velvet - Adam n Eve
Hair: Creepy Bun, Black - Curio
Skin: Mami, Milk, Pink Shadow, Dark Lips - Tiny Seadog

Skins Off My Back

The entry below shows most of the normal realistic skins I use in Second Life. This one is about novelty skins, imaginative creations that I can't use often but like to have on hand now and then.

The best of these is the one to the right. It's toned specifically to reflect the skin shading in black-and-white movies. Matched up with the right hair, clothes and eyes, it makes me look like I stepped out of a Bogart film ... a very cool effect.

CJ Carnot is the skin's maker, and it comes with one good set of matching eyes. It was available at Tete a Pied, but it was created as a fund-raising item for Relay For Life and is no longer there. However, the creator tells me a new version and a whole new line of skins will be available shortly.

I had put some thought toward trying to make a a skin like this myself, but I was inhibited a bit by, well, knowing absolutely nothing about making skin and also, having little in the way of artistic talent.

The one skin I have made was simply a matter of taking one of the stock SL newbie skins and coloring it for a weird alien shape I'd made. It's amusing, but hardly anything to brag about.

Possibly my next favorite novelty skin, even though it really serves no purpose but to freak people out, is the anatomical muscle skin. Bizarre Berry, who also leads the Second Life Unitarian Universalist group, made this one. What I like about it is the level of detail and also the fact that, when worn where nobody is execting such a thing, it really does freak people out.

Bizarre Berry has a few other skins available, all of them, well, bizarre. I have a couple of others but use them so rarely there's no need to picture them here. They're all available in Modesta

I have a friend in-world with a skeleton avatar (I actually have one too, but he created it.) We should work up some kind of comedy duo bit with the bones and muscles.

The Demon Skin can be used with a normal human shape, but the most effective use I've found for it is as part of the Unicorna from 6ixth. This really incredibly detailed avatar has a unicorn torso and head, but with a simple command that disappears to reveal the human torso underneath, including the skin and hair of choice. The demon, from InsideOut, is the perfect complement.

Like many newcomers to SL, it took me a little bit of time to figure out how much difference good skins make to the avatar look. As you can see from these two entries, I still don't have a big collection of them. But they really are important for anyone who doesn't want to forever look like they just stepped off of Orientation Island.

The Skins I'm In

After yet another skin purchase tonight, I took stock of those I've accumulated in my inventory over the past few months. I've noticed that I tend to wear a new skin set until I get something new, and then the older one gets "retired" and not used much or at all afterward.

Since well-made skins can cost a lot, that probably isn't the best approach. Running through what I have may help with making better use of the older ones.

Second Life starts you out with a very basic newbie skin that almost no features to it at all. I am not sure how long it took me to buy my first improvement to it, but the earliest one I recall buying is this one from PixelDolls, and the file properties tell me I acquired it about two months after first signing up.

This is a decent skin, though not outstanding. After my early days, I began trying to stay away from the body-builder look -- the skins with tightly cut abs and bulging pecs look too action-movie cliche, and far too common in Second Life. Here you set yourself apart by being a little less than ideal. This one has subtle muscle definition, but the level of feature detail is not what it could be. I have two versions of this skin, this one and one with sideburns in addition to the goatee.

(The goatee is another look I've largely shied away from, this one skin excepted. Not because I don't like it, but because for a while it seemed every skin I looked at that had facial hair had a trendy goatee, or soul patch. Finding skins with a full beard took some searching, although they seem to be more available now.)

I also have three skins from Dragonfly Designs. The one pictured here, with the beard, was the one I used for my "Professor" look, although I had a slimmer body shape to go with that. I have the same skin clean-shaven, and also clean-shaven with red eyebrows.

The muscle definition on these is about as far as I prefer to go toward the body-builder look. The nipple detail is nice, and the area around the neck and collarbones is well done. The only real drawback is the tone, compared to some other skins, looks a little yellowish to me. I don't know if it really is or was just some trick of the light the one time I noticed it, but these served me well for a good long while.

Dragonfly also offers a good range of facial hair. They were the first place I found to offer a good full beard, and the eyebrows are not as overbearing as those I've seen on some other designs.

I used these up until a couple of months ago, when I decided I wanted an image change. The Professor look I liked (and still do), but the slender body shape was starting to seem limiting. In real life I am not so slightly built, and Morgana and I have been trying to keep our most frequent SL look somewhere in the ballpark of our real selves. So I ended up getting a new shape, and tweaking it carefully, and that of course called for a new skin.

I hesitated for a couple of weeks before spending the money for Second Skin Labs' Adam. I plan to get a lot more use out of these, even with tonight's new acquisitions. They are very detailed, including a great amount of attention to the back -- shoulder blades and spine -- that many skin makers simply gloss over. And the body and facial hair is the most realistic I've seen. The designer photo sources at least some of the layers in these skins, and while that technique does not always work well, here it does.

Morgana showed me the ones I picked up tonight. They are part of the new Hunter line from Nora Entice. The particular trio I picked up are designed for the older man, with crow's feet around the eyes and wrinkles in the forehead. The same skin comes in a more youthful version and I may pick that up soon too, but the older look appealed to me -- partly because it's rare and partly because these are well done.

The one pictured is called "Grizzled," with the five o'clock shadow. The set also includes a clean-shaven version called "Aged," and another clean-shaven one with less pronounced wrinkles, called "Mature." The three of them give a good range of ages, and I can further enhance the effect with a good choice of hair.

Skin choice in Second Life is about trade-offs. I love the richness of Adam's skin tones, for example, but it doesn't have a bald head option, so any hair I choose has to either completely cover or blend into the hair it comes with. The Hunter line offers a less callow look than many skins, but it lacks body hair altogether, except for pubic hair, so the body looks a little sterile. The Dragonfly skin gives me a good full beard option, but also has abs that I'd prefer to be more subtle. Having a range of options, even though it can be costly, is the only way I know to deal with the inability to find the one perfect skin set.

I am sure women have it as bad, or even worse, as makeup options are hardwired into female skins the way facial hair choices are for men.

Along the way, I've picked up a few novelty skins, things I can't wear often but have been glad to have on hand when they're needed. I'll post another entry soon about those.