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.

Midnight Reflections

The mood last night was mellow and we were looking for a quiet retreat rather than socializing or shopping. It was a nice coincidence, then, that we found Midnight Reflections.

The place is dark, moody and gorgeous. We found walking paths and waterfalls, lots of wooded areas and eventually, the secluded getaway in the picture here.

Midnight Reflections and a couple of neighboring sims seem to be largely uncommercial, save for one mall that I assume helps to defray the costs. But it is tucked away in one corner and easy to escape. There's a lot of room for romance, meditation or just being. Highly recommended.

Cross my palm with silver...

Due to a long list of RL and SL frustrations, I fell off the posting habit in a big way - taking pics and then not being able to access inventory being only one of them.

But this morning, following the lure of Linden Lab's post about Analise, I picked up the Relay for Life gypsy set, and promptly fell in love with what scuplties can do. They're going to kill my ability to make saleable items in SL, I think, but I can't help but say wow, anyway.

The RFL version is done in shades of purple, but there are other colors available and it was very difficult to decide which to get. Each comes with a prim skirt and a sashed overlay that is on the skirt clothing layer - I like this method, because it helps hide that butt-crack effect that happens when the prim meets the rear end on an item that isn't supposed to be skin tight. The set also includes two tops - one in white, and one in a lighter hue of the skirt.

The sleeves are where the scupltie goodness comes in. I don't even want to think how many times I've tried - and failed - to create sleeves that look like this with the regular prims. They are puffed and gathered layers all the way down, attached in two parts so that the bend at the elbow looks natural. It's terribly feminine and romantic and I expect to be hauling out these tops to wear with jeans just as often as I pair them with the skirt they came with.

Finally, the set comes with a lovely headscarf that I'm not really showing off to very good effect and some really good triple hoop earrings that I'll be putting on frequently.

To this set, I've added Shiny Things Gold Triple Drop Chain in Opal, which works very well with the style of the set, I think. It's long been one of my favorite accessories, but it's sometimes difficult to find looks that set it off to its best advantage.


The skin I'm wearing for these pictures is Pixel Deep, Light, Brunette with the mauve, gloss makeup. This is part of a skin set I bought early on in my SL adventures, and have only recently started wearing again. The make up coloring tends to be subtle instead of slathered on with a trowel (not that I don't enjoy that look just fine sometimes) and the eyebrows have a soft look to them that avoids the penciled on effect that I have come to regard as one of those unavoidable issues in SL.

The eyes are Tempus Heart Design's Natural Pale Brown and the hair is Jolie Femme's Timeless in Nearly Black. If you haven't seen this hair yet (and you aren't seeing it very well here, now) do go check it out. It manages to pull off lots of little fly away bits the way real thick hair does without looking horribly messy. This style is as close to the way my hair looked for years than anything I've seen in SL yet. (my current RL style is quite a bit shorter - but if I grew it out, this is what it would do.)

I don't think I've mentioned it here, but I do offer tarot readings in SL - by and large I don't go in for the 'dress like a gypsy to read the cards' bit - but with an outfit this cute, I might just change that policy.

Another new look for Mickey

This is Morgana and me at an event, me showing a new skin and body shape.

Second Life allows us to be malleable in appearance, but I tend to pick a basic shape and skin to use mostly consistently for a period of time. I seem to fall in the middle between those who are constantly changing the way they look and those who almost never do.

Still, while I change hair and clothes daily or even more often, and skins as called for to fit a mood or occasion (mostly for facial hair changes rather than radically different skin tones), I do tend to keep a basic shape in place unless I'm just moving to a non-human avatar altogether for a few hours.

Still, there comes a time to make a change. I've taken to calling my old new look "The Professor," and I still like it and can go back to it at any time ... but I'm liking the changes I've made.

The body shape I'm using is called Gerhardt, from Bodies by Oh! It's stockier and broader than the one I had been using, and after some judicious slider adjustments, looks nicely solid and well-proportioned.

The skin provides the finishing touch. This is Adam from Second Skin Labs. It's a wonderfully real-looking skin with a good range of facial hair options. The only drawback is it lacks a bald head option so I can't use very short prim hair pieces. But the hair on it looks good, and also works well with medium and long hair.

The skin is relatively new within SL, introduced just earlier this year. It has been well received as being one of the best male skins around, an opinion with which I agree.

Haemosu Park v.2 Phase Two - Done (for now)

We found a wonderful trampoline -- excuse me, Parabolic Trajectory Enhancer -- at Mr. Greggan's Land and put it on the opposite end of the park from the original playground location. But then we moved the playground equipment down there too.

We did a bit more over the next couple of weeks and now the project is essentially finished, for now (with just a few finishing touches yet to come). We will be planning a grand opening ceremony soon.

Although it's not located at the center, the real centerpiece of this project is a bandstand we created based on the idea of community parks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in America. I built the bandstand and Morgana provided the texturing expertise. We plan to use it to host events and games, and also to open it for community use. Even though we don't live on this land anymore, we still consider our neighbors to be actual neighbors, and we are trying to do what we can to create a space that brings beauty and some sense of theme to our small piece of the Second Life mainland.

Too much of the mainland has been given over to tacky malls, casinos and sprawl without purpose or plan. We're glad that Haemosu, after some growing pains earlier, has settled into some measure of stability as a residential area. The park will hopefully provide an anchor to help keep it that way.

To that end, we've added picnic tables and a cooking fire with some scripted food items. Come have a burger and talk with your friends around the tables... that's what they're there for.

This overhead shot shows the layout from end to end, not that you need a map to find your way around. Come visit.

Haemosu Park v.2 Phase One

The first phase is a small playground. Come by and try the swings, bring a friend and ride the see-saw.

More to come, but this is a good start.

Haemosu Park v 2.0 -- coming soon

As you may know, Morgana and I homesteaded for a short time on two plots of First Land in a region called Haemosu, and when we moved to our home in Winterfell, we kept them and turned them into a park.

For a long time, we just had the two plots, free of tier fees under the now-defunct First Land program. A couple of neighboring landowners liked the idea and joined us in the project, adding their land to the park and helping us landscape and equip it.



Since then, things have changed. One of the neighbors chose to sell his five 512-square-meter plots, and in the interest of keeping the park alive, we bought four of them.

We've decided the park as it was, developed haphazardly by multiple landscapers with no overall plan, had gotten to be too chaotic, so we've stripped our holdings down to bare grass rimmed in hedges and are beginning now to plan the rebirth.

We'll post pictures of our progress here.