The Real Loser

Hamlet Au writes today in New World Notes about virtual world racism as discussed at this year's SXSW, and someone goes on in the comments about how such things are mostly fake, arising from him (or her) and people like him (or her) who get their pathetic jollies by saying whatever it takes to get a rise out of people.

In a perverse way. I appreciate that, and I hope that warning about such people is made a part of the information given to newcomers to Second Life. Also, I'd like to see his (or her) ilk become known as the real losers of virtual worlds... not the stereotypical guy in the basement, but those unable to think of any other form of diversion than being a jerk.

Earth Mother

A plea to hairmakers and jewelers

If you make items appropriate for the era of the Minoan civilization, please consider setting up vendors in the shopping area on the Minoan Empire sim. Hair especially; it would be nice to try on a demo while wearing clothing appropriate to the era, but that clothing is liable to get one at best a talking to, at worst banning from stores elsewhere. Thanks.

Conclusion jumping, streaming audio version

Well, I spoke too soon. I misunderstood what was going on with the music I was hearing; it wasn't streaming, it was just a really long sound effect.

So no, Firestorm does not play streaming audio on 64-bit Linux systems. Darn it.

Cover Art?

Two and a half years ago, I took a picture with some particle generator attachments in the depths of Chakryn Forest, and I was reminded of some of the cover art work done by the great Frank Kelly Freas. (Only reminded, to be sure; as the comment says, it's a humble nod to one of Freas's styles.)

The more recent photo I took brought the earlier one back to mind, and something else: I can visualize a title superimposed on it, can't you? I'm sure that the permission and IP issues some talked about in the past for Second Life photography in general would return with a vengeance here, but I wonder--has anyone used a Second Life photograph for cover art of a book that is not about Second Life or virtual worlds?

Bodice Ancient Clothing--has it disappeared, or just moved?

I'm looking to increase my wardrobe of Minoan clothing--wonderful as RFyre's Ondami dress is, variety is a good thing. In my search I came across some items from Bodice Ancient Clothing that looked promising. I peeked at the SLURL (I don't have my browser set up to deal with those yet), entered the coordinates... and teleported, as the song goes, "way up in the middle of the air". Thank goodness Firestorm has a one-button "TP me back!" function.

So... SL Marketplace data are at best old; at worst, the store's gone. If you know what happened to Bodice Ancient Clothing, I'd love to hear from you.

Minoan Empire a featured sim!

As I type, the Minoan Empire sim is a featured sim in the historical role-playing category. Congratulations and thanks to all those who have made it the beautiful and inviting place that it is.

Ancient Minoan Civilization ("Creep" by Radiohead)

You may have seen things on YouTube like rap versions of the intro to the Canterbury Tales... well, here's a quick look at Minoan civilization to the tune of Radiohead's "Creep".

For a rather more serious overview, don't miss the museum in the Minoan Empire sim.

I don't think I can do better than this...

So... I did let my fingers get a little pruny trying out Windlight settings, and I think I've done about as well as I can do for now. I've posted pictures taken from behind before, so we'll skip the break this time.

It's all too easy to forget where we came from. We get used to improvements, impatient, and always look at what we don't have. "Why's mesh taking so long?" and so forth. To remind myself of how far Second Life has come, here's the very first photo I took on the grid, about five and a half years ago:

I was so proud of it... then... and I remember how amazing the sim seemed, with railings and stairs and benches, and a little bar at which you could sit and watch the ship in the distance, and the art exhibit you could walk through.

must-read--er, view--at the Alphaville Herald

I'm not sure just what's going on at the Alphaville Herald. It seems that articles are getting to be few and far between, and somewhere around half of them are photo spreads of avatars in various stages of (un)dress, typically accompanied by a pile of catty comments. That said, I recommend strongly that you check out this article, which treats a subject with every iota of seriousness that it deserves. I hope you enjoy it as much as I. (Oops, that's tranya....)

Minoan and Second Life skirt construction

I'm amused by something I've just read. A web site about the famous Minoan "snake goddess" figurine describes the construction of the skirt as follows:

The skirt worn by the figure is comprised of seven overlapping flounces; a flounce being a strip of cloth gathered and sewed on by its upper edge only. The lower edge of the first six flounces overhang the upper edge of the one below. The bottom edge of the lowest touches the ground, concealing the figure's feet.

When I read this I had to smile; after all, what are prim skirts in Second Life but flounces just as this web site describes them? Coincidence? Perhaps, but I like it.

Looking for a tree

I'm looking for a tree in Second Life, and I'm having some difficulty, because while in the US, where I learned about it, it's called a "mimosa tree", it's not really a mimosa... and SL advertisements don't use Linnean names, alas.

What I want is Albizia julibrissin, a tree that flowers with countless little pink puffballs that smell heavenly. (Yes, I know SL doesn't have smell-o-vision yet--is there a JIRA entry for it? If I find the tree, though, I'll go looking for the essential oil and take a whiff while I stand under the virtual tree.)

If you know of such a tree available in Second Life, please let me know. Thanks.

Whew!

The other day I was scared; Firestorm suddenly had around 2.1 GB of RAM and climbing. I relogged, and things were back to normal, and they have been that way since. So, Firestorm isn't immune to the problem, it just doesn't seem to happen as often. What was different about that run? It is still a puzzlement. 

UPDATE: It's happened a time or two, but last night all was well. Not sure what I can do other than keep my fingers crossed, but that makes it awfully hard to type.

Spelling

There's been a spike in blog views the past few days. I suspect it has something to do with posting about something other than how SL clients are crashing on me right and left.

Search terms are a lot less varied than they used to be, and "cheesy phrases" is nowhere to be found. Strangely, the top one is now my name... but misspelled. By far the most people who came across the blog were searching for "melissa yeuxdeux". If you do that, Google will show the results for "melissa yeuxdoux", so you'll find what you're presumably after.

I wonder what would happen if you had to search for Μέλισσα Βαθυκόλπος instead. :)

Another, Admittedly Minor, Goal Reached

I finally got around to doing something I'd promised myself I'd do for a long while, I think since water reflections came to Second Life. Thank you to the people at Second Life who made Windlight happen and the various graphics settings that make the world look as good as it does, and thank you to the people working on the Firestorm SL client.

"So what was it, already?" you say? It's a photo, and NSFW, so it's behind the break.

(UPDATE: If I'm not careful, my fingers will get all pruney from staying in the water so long. So many Windlight settings to try, so little time...)

Sigh... I'd forgotten

There I was just offshore on the beach in the Minoan Empire sim, with striking Windlight sky and water settings, and I took the pictures... and tripped over VWR-7672 again.

I guess I was elated at having been in SL for more than an hour without crashing or bringing my computer to its knees, and I forgot. Next time, I'll pull back the resolution. Sigh. I can't ask you to vote for the JIRA entry any more, but could you please watch it? This bug basically kills serious SL photography.

UPDATE: the entry to watch is VWR-24178, which is apparently the real bug; it looks like they're well on the trail to fixing it. *crosses fingers* The workaround for now: if you have "global illumination" enabled, don't make the image size larger than the SL client window.

A bit more on Firestorm

Speaking of exercising in Crete, I had a strange experience that I hope will cease being strange. I heard the music! We decided that the gods had smiled on us, but later on... Hmmm...

$ file bin/do-not-directly-run-firestorm-bin

bin/do-not-directly-run-firestorm-bin: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.15, not stripped

Gee, so it is possible to hear streaming music on a 64-bit Linux system with a 32-bit SL client! I hope other SL client makers will pay attention. For now, it's all the more reason to switch to Firestorm.

Evening on the Beach in Crete

After such a long frustrating time with stays in Second Life tightly limited by crashing clients, it was a joy to spend a pleasant while on the beach in the Minoan Empire sim. I wandered out to the beach and was greeted by Myklos, who kindly invited me to join him in a pleasant evening's exercise on the beach. We chatted, and soon were joined by Chrissy, JackSparrow7, Stef, Titjana, Reine (who graciously played for us), and others. We chatted and exercised and meditated, and eventually were joined by the great architect of the sim, Aeneas Anthony.

It was the best time I've spent in SL for a while; thank you to all who were there and made it so thereby. I invite you, Dear Reader, to go to the Minoan Empire sim; you'll see the effort and the love put into its construction.

It's amazing how readily one can find someone to paint a fresco... :) I felt that the scene deserved to be preserved. Since we were dressed in Minoan style, I'll put it after the break. Caution: NSFW, in modern times at least.

Silly Me

Well, I thought I could make the masthead image wider and get rid of the strip down the right hand side... so I took a screenshot, opened it up in GIMP, selected the masthead image and the strip together, copied and pasted, and then redid a portion of the photo I started from, making sure it was that size, and replaced the old masthead image.

And the strip is still there.

Ah well, I tried.

POM Dependency?

There was a full moon last night. Maybe that's why Firestorm worked for me last night and this morning, delivering a consistent, if not astounding, 10 or so fps at ultra graphics settings without laying waste to available RAM.

I'll fight off the urge to not change anything lest things go to heck in a handbasket again, and try other clients. How could this happen if it's my computer?  OTOH, it's had to believe a server issue would make clients allocate huge amounts of memory. It is, as a fictionalized King of Siam would say, a puzzlement.

UPDATE: Cleared cache on, and started up, Kirsten's client's latest build. It took a while to pull down the textures and information on surrounding structures, after which I started walking around. It was reasonably responsive for a minute or two, and then it took the plunge. The system monitor showed it allocating RAM at a rate of about 100 MB every twenty seconds, 1.3 GB and climbing. I signed off.

UPDATE: Tried Firestorm again... and it worked. On for what seemed like forever compared to recent fiascos (which probably means it was maybe fifteen or twenty minutes), and the most RAM it took up was a bit over 800 MB. I even fired up the System Monitor and saw its RAM consumption decrease occasionally! Res miranda... oops, wrong civilization. This was with graphics cranked, including, once I found the knob on Firestorm, global illumination. I think I've made my choice.

The Road Goes Ever On

Donald Swann (of Flanders and Swann) set some songs based on the Lord of the Rings, published under the title The Road Goes Ever On. Someone once said to him that it must be hard to come up with tunes for the songs, since they already exist. "Where?" Swann asked. "In Middle-Earth," the fellow replied.

I'm continuing down my road to my goal, namely being able to stay in SL for more than a few minutes at a time. I detached an AO rather than just deactivating it, and I've purged a couple of thousand items from my inventory. I think that may have helped, but I'm not sure.  Clearing cache seems to help... peeking at ~/.kirstens s20/cache shows data.db2.x. running near 107 MB. Is that excessive?

UPDATE: Things were nice for a while this evening, nearly 30 fps. Then I moved, and down to 6 or 7 fps it went. Client RAM usage was up around 1.3 GB.  Anyone know of a good Linux 3D graphics benchmark program that I can fire up and let grind? (Yes, Phoronix does. I'll be running those this weekend. I could believe my graphics card may be throttling itself under load, but why would that cause clients to allocate RAM like there's no tomorrow?)

What the font?

So what's with the masthead font? That "A" looks downright uncial, very anachronistic.

Well, I didn't want to use one of those cheesy pseudo-Greek display fonts that use a capital sigma for E; that's tacky and disrespectful. If I wanted to match the Minoan Empire signage, I'd use Lithos bold--it would be appropriate, since Lithos's designer, Carol Twombly, was inspired by ancient Greek inscriptions. But I can't afford to spend money on fonts at the moment, and I certainly wouldn't steal it.

So, I went with a freely-copyable font that is simple and relatively plain. I think it works.

Where to go on Whimsy

I wish I had a Linden for every time I welcomed a friend to Whimsy and then fumbled around trying to find a particular wonder to show him or her. (That's the thing about Whimsy; there are so many. If there were just one, it would be easy to find.)

Fortunately, a new issue of the Whimsical Times is out, and it gives a landmark to a place with two doors, presenting you with a choice: beautiful or dangerous? (Beware; there are places on Whimsy that are both.) Now I'm prepared.

La lutte continue...

This morning, Phoenix was zipping right along. No shadows, but I'm starting to get frustrated, and a 1.x based client probably has the alpha textures versus shadows bug.

So, this afternoon I was going to use it again. The chariot races in the Minoan Empire are always a pleasure to attend, and I would be chatting, not taking pictures. Fire up Phoenix, sign back on at home, to change into appropriate Minoan clothing before teleporting... and Phoenix grabbed all available RAM, slowed to a crawl, and crashed, where it hadn't just hours ago. Kirsten's client? Ditto. 2.5? Ditto.

Once more on 2.5, and I was able to tell it to clear cache, and then sign off. On again, and things worked much better, but for how long? (After all, I'd only run Phoenix once; how quickly does it accumulate stuff?) We'll see.

UPDATE: I happened across a message on the Kirsten's client group about reducing the amount of graphics RAM used for textures. I thought I only had 512 MB of graphics RAM and Kirsten's client was using that much. so I pulled it back to about half that. Turns out I was wrong; the card has 1 GB of RAM. Did it help anyway? I'm not sure; I'd already cleared cache, so any improvement may have been due to that. I had the statistics bar and the system monitor resources graphs up to watch CPU usage. There were periodic swings from somewhere around 20 fps down to under 2 fps. One of the CPUs was pretty well maxed out, and the others fluctuated. A lot of RAM was in use, but not all of it, at least not by the time I called it quits for the night. I'm not sure what to try next.

Long overdue

I've finally done a couple of things that I should have done long ago:

• I've finally updated my profile image. (That's it above.)
  
• More importantly, and may King Minos forgive my oversight in not having done so until now, I've added the Empire to my picks. In his wisdom, he prefixed an exclamation point to the pick label, assuring its rightful position at the head. (Picks are sorted alphabetically.)
• Changed the blog--new template, new masthead.

OK, three things... and I don't have an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, so it won't go any further.

Minoan Culture... with some help from Mattel?

Wandering about googling "Minoan", one comes across a serious web site, The Role of Women in the Art of Ancient Greece, with a page titled "Minoan Culture and its Women". The discussions are interesting, and there are references at the end (though many of the links are broken, alas)... and then there are the photos of how various scenes from Minoan life might have appeared, re-enacted, so to speak, by dolls.

It's well-intentioned, but the results are surreal. (It didn't help that I read "In this courtyard processions and dances occurred. These are believed to have been line dances..." and immediately had a mental image of snake priestesses doing the Achy Breaky. Utterly unfair of me--line dances go way back--but it's what came to mind.)

So... read it in the spirit it was intended, and thank you to the site's author.

"Hello, I must be going..."

Lately I've been signing on and shortly afterward apologizing and signing off before I crash. Basically, KirstenLee Cinquetti's SL client is unusable, at least for me. It sucks down all available RAM like a Hoover and the frame rate plummets to around 1.5 fps. Minimizing and unminimizing the window, or moving it to another workspace, brings only short-lived relief to the frame rate.

It's a darned shame; that client can't be beat for graphics... but that doesn't do any good if I can't use it.

Imprudence is fast, and there's a 64-bit version of it, which means that streaming audio works! (Attention Linden Lab and some of the folks commenting in Kirsten's forum: ia32libs doesn't include 32-bit versions of every library.) Unfortunately, the current Imprudence still has an old bug with alpha textures and deferred rendering.

I'm now trying out the 2.5 beta. So far, it looks good.

UPDATE: It's looking even better. Found the knob to twist to turn on "global illumination", and nothing bad happened; still getting 20+fps on the beach in the Minoan Empire, and the client's only using a bit over 500 MB of RAM. (It's a sign of my age that I shudder at seeing "only 500 MB".)

UPDATE: It's not that simple. Started up the 2.5 beta, and it promptly sucked down 3 GB of RAM and crashed. Twice in a row. So, is it code common to both clients, or is it something about my computer? Perhaps it's time to fire up memtest86+ and let it run all day.

UPDATE: I did. Came home just as it was finishing pass #10 over all 4GB. Zero errors; it's not RAM problems.

UPDATE: OK, I tried a 32-bit Sabayon Linux Live CD (since it comes with the proprietary nVidia driver). It made no difference; Kirsten's client grabbed all available RAM, the frame rate slowed way down, and it crashed. So it's not something about running 64-bit Linux. Now, I do have an applet that shows the CPU frequency (at least one of them, anyway); it's set to slow down if it's not doing very much. Maybe that affects the frame rate, but no way would it cause the client to leak RAM like a sieve.

Sigh. If I run 2.5 beta over and over again until it crashes, do you suppose it will get the problem a little more attention?

Don't Do That!

My landlady, Cheyenne Palisades, IMed me. Alas, I wasn't online at the time, but fortunately, I wasn't anywhere near IMs being capped, and they got through.

Turns out that someone was rezzing nude prim breasts near the house I rent. Note: Whimsy and its environs (Greater Whimsy?) are G-rated. Says so right at the top of the SL client display. No public nudity is permitted. The person doing the rezzing was bounced, and rightly so.

Common sense... too bad it's not more common.

Must-read at Maggie Bluxome's blog

OK... like some other blogs, it's all must-read, but you should look at this post in particular. Please support the cause.

Μέλισσα Βαθυκόλπος λαχανιάζει (/me gasps)

The creators who make Second Life something more than open fields and seas never fail to amaze me... the second link Google turned up when handed "second life minoan hair" was to an SL Marketplace page for "Tiny ioumane Minoan female hair". Yes, hair for a tiny female Minoan avatar, and it is lovely and too cute for words. Follow the link so you can look and say whatever the Greek equivalent of "Awwwww...." is, and kudos to Noyl Boucher, creator of this delightful avatar and hair!

UPDATE: A friend who was also taken by the tiny Minoan avatar kindly let me take a picture... isn't she cute? (The site is very brightly lit; I don't really shine like one of the golden maidens Ἥφαιστος fashioned to aid him. Also, apologies yet again for the low resolution.)

Minoan Women's Hair

SkyShop HairResort has quite a variety of historical and fictional hair (that didn't sound quite right...), among which is the Posedaia Minoan hair. I have yet to edit the various sets of bangs into position and size, but even so, I really like the look.

Apologies for the really small image; that pesky SL snapshot bug ruined all the photos I took bigger than 800x600 (!), and the face was a small part thereof. If I'd zoomed in, I fear the results would be very distorted. (Try taking a RL photo zoomed in on someone's face. Better yet, shoot a mannequin's face, lest the subject see the result.)

UPDATE: The SL Marketplace won't let me write a review there, because I didn't buy the hair through the Marketplace, so here's my review: It's beautiful, the hair and the decorative beads are tintable, and the closest thing I have to a complaint is that the vendor shows two hair colors, so that my silly self had the mistaken notion that, like other hair vendors, you have to buy multiple items to get more than one color. One suffices! Wear the HUD to let you easily set things to your liking.

Once more, with thrift

Let's try for something less expensive but still plausible, shall we?

• BIOSTAR N68S3+ AM3 NVIDIA MCP68S Micro ATX AMD Motherboard and AMD Athlon II X2 245 Regor 2.9GHz Socket AM3 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor; a Shell Shocker at newegg.com today for $90, which is $30 off the usual price. It's no Phenom, or even a quad core, but reviews of the CPU are almost universally positive, some saying they've successfully overclocked to 3.5 GHz. The motherboard is low end (no gigabit ethernet, won't handle a CPU that takes more than 95W, PCI Express 1.0, DDR3 1333) but serviceable.
• HITACHI Deskstar H3IK10003272SP (0S02860) 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive for $80.
• Same DVD burner as before, for $20. They're pretty much a commodity nowadays.
• Same case as before... but this time the default power supply will do.
• Same RAM as before.
• Palit NE5S450SF1101 GeForce GTS 450 (Fermi) Sonic 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card for $130. Decent mid-range card, nice and short to fit in the cute little Micro ATX case, doesn't require more than the X-QPACK2 power supply can deliver.

So... ignoring shipping and handling, that's $480, I believe... or $510 if you don't get the Shell Shocker special. There's a motherboard that has gigabit ethernet and PCI Express 2.0 (allowing the graphics card to shovel data as fast as it's designed to), the BIOSTAR TA880GB+, for $80; with the Regor at its stock price, that replaces $90 with $140 and thus takes you up to $530--but since the Shell Shocker is almost done, it's fairer to compare it with the $510 price. If you're going that far, though, you might as well go ahead and get the Gigabyte GA-880GMA-UD2H for $100 and future-proof yourself with USB 3.0, eSATA, and 6 Gb/s SATA, so $550.

I feel a little better now.

And Now, for Something Completely Different

Hamlet Au at New World Notes kindly gave me a hat tip in his post on Egyptians from around the world meeting at the Egypt sim. (Thank you!)

This is an apology to any who followed the hat tip link here in hopes of finding more information about the matter. (*blush*) I write about things going on in the world, but only once in a very great while. For information about Second Life and current events in First Life, one should go elsewhere. I will attempt to find some places and link to them.

UPDATE: Alas, things have turned ugly, thanks to the pro-Mubarak forces, or should one say mercenaries? From commondreams.org:

Anonymous sources at a state hospital and at the Ministry of Petroleum said employees were told to join the regime supporters in demonstrations Wednesday.... Today, several protesters said they had been offered by ruling National Democratic Party members LE50 to join the pro-Mubarak group as they passed by the television building on the Corniche.

That's 50 Egyptian pounds, a bit over $8.50 US. I wonder whether anyone's being paid for pro-Mubarak signs at the Egypt sim?

UPDATE: A statistic I've seen repeatedly is that half of the population of Egypt lives on less than $2 per day... so $8.50 is enough for one of that half to live on for the better part of a week, if that's true.

Khaire Nymphe Thea ( Χαίρε Νύμφη Θεά )

I happened across this video today and thought I'd share. The hymn is from the 19^th century, but the author was, the poster says, "a dedicated scholar, well versed in the ancient texts and in the liturgy of the early Byzantine Church.... St. Nektarios was a scholar and an expert in both Byzantine liturgy and the pre-Christian sacred texts and would have been well aware of the original context when he composed this hymn."

The accompanying video features ruins of ancient buildings and dancers in clothing that you'll recognize from the reproductions of ancient artwork in the Minoan Empire sim if you've been there.

I've done it...

I've changed my display name. It's now "Μέλισσα Βαθυκόλπος", "deep-bosomed Melissa". (Spelling and grammar corrections are gratefully accepted.) I hope it will do well in the Minoan Empire, and we'll see if I now get asked "Do you know what that means?" by Greek speakers instead of Francophones. :)

Now to see if I can find that book of instruction in Homeric Greek...

Yet Another Computer Pricing Exercise

A few days ago the reviews started coming out for nVidia 560-based cards. They may be the new sweet spot for price/performance, as they're coming out at around $250, close to what 1 GB 460s initially cost.

It has been a while since I calculated how much a computer for running Second Life might cost, and hearing about the 560 made me look once again into the question.

I've definitely splurged this time around, made worse by buying a case with power supply and then having to buy another power supply to meet the requirements of the system. (Please, Apevia, consider selling the X-QPACK2 without a power supply!)

Here we go:

• EVGA 01G-P3-1561-AR GeForce GTX 560 Ti FPB (Fermi) 1GB graphics card for $250. For the same price, Gigabyte has a more overclocked version, but it has heatpipes that stick out of the top, and I was afraid it wouldn't fit in the case because of them.
• AMD Phenom II X4 970 Black Edition Deneb 3.5GHz Socket AM3 for $186. Can't really justify six cores yet.
• GIGABYTE GA-880GMA-UD2H AM3 AMD 880G SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 motherboard for $100. I doubt that a rotating hard drive can move 6 Gb/s, but SSDs will come down enough in price someday...
  
• G.SKILL ECO Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 for $75.
• Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB for $80. I feel guilty about the power consumption of the graphics card, OK? :)
• LG DVD±RW SuperMulti Drive Black SATA Model GH22NS50B for $16(!).
• APEVIA X-QPACK2-NW-BK/500 Black Aluminum Body/ Front Mask MicroATX Desktop Computer Case for $85. Anybody want the 500W power supply that comes with it? *sigh* I went to the Antec power supply calculator page, and the 560 is too new to have an entry there, so I said 570 to play it safe, and it recommended a 550W PS... and the Apevia PS with the case isn't modular, and... if I bat my eyelashes and say "pretty please", will Apevia consider selling just the case? *sigh* Probably not, but then, the other Micro ATX cases I looked at that didn't come with power supplies cost nearly as much or even more, and have their own issues.
  
• Antec TruePower New TP-550 550W for $90. It's (semi) modular, it is 80 plus bronze rated, and it suffices for our purposes.

Total damage, not including shipping, $882. (I've used rounded figures, so they may not quite add up.) Eep! That's more than I was hoping, but it should run SL very nicely.


UPDATE: The nVidia 560 was too new for the Antec Power Supply Calculator to know about it when I first did this, but now it's there, and I redid the calculations. Judging by it, the graphics card manual, and Apevia's description of the power supply that comes with the QPack-2, I don't think it's necessary to buy another power supply, if you can get away with one of those Molex-to-PCI Express adapters, since technically, the PCI Express power connector includes a voltage not available on the four-pin Molex connectors, though some cards using that connector don't use that particular voltage, so sometimes you can get away with it. If that's the case, that's $90 off the cost (and probably a significant hunk off the shipping, since power supplies are heavy).

Serendipity strikes

One of the very first things you do when you begin your Second Life is pick a name. At the time I did so, at least, you were presented with a list of last names to choose from, and could select any first name not already chosen. (That last may have given rise to the flock of names with digit strings at the end, since that's a common way of making a name for a login id unique. "OK, if I can't be Fred, I'll be Fred0123456.") "Yeuxdoux" appealed to me. It's French (and yes, I know what it means; faire les yeux doux à quelqu'un means to make eyes at someone, to look amorously at someone).

"Melissa"? I liked it, and nobody had chosen "Melissa Yeuxdoux", so there I was. Some in SL refer to those who share the same last name as "cousins"; I have few cousins in SL. A search for Yeuxdoux in names just now turned up only five of us, though some may well have left over the years, and I can understand a desire to avoid unwanted attention and hence not choose "Yeuxdoux" as a last name.

[Stock footage of pages falling off calendars and clocks spinning quickly...]

Years go by, and the Minoan Empire comes to Second Life. It's beautiful, and Minoan fashion is encouraged, a joy in the days before prim breasts with clothing layers. I fall in love with it, though my loyalty to a dear friend and wish to support the endless delight and inventiveness of Whimsy keep me renting there.

More time goes by, and the "display name" comes to Second Life, amid some controversy... hey, this is the situation display names are made for! I should have an appropriate name to go by in the Minoan Empire, but what to choose? We know that the Minoans spoke Greek, or at least there are surviving writings in Greek in the curious syllabary we call "Linear B", but Linear B tablets hold the words of the ancient counterparts of Adrian Monk, not of a Homer or Hesiod. "Three tripods, one with a broken leg... two amphoras of honey for the temple..." Not many clues there.

It turns out, though, that while "Yeuxdoux" is of course millennia too late, "Melissa" might be just the thing. (Pause to slap my forehead, since I should have recognized the Latin and Spanish cognates.) Now to see whether there were patronymics (or maybe matronymics for the Minoan culture?), or place names or occupational names. ("Then Joe said..." "Joe who?" "You know, Joe, Fred's son", or "You know, Joe from Hotzeplotz", or "You know, Joe the shoemaker"...)

P.S. The page linked from "Minoan fashion" curiously describes the Minoan woman we see in surviving art as similar to the Victorian ideal: "The figure of the Minoan woman, with large breasts, large hips, and tiny waist, was very similar to the female shape that came into fashion during the late 1800s C.E. , when women laced themselves into tight corsets to make their waists small and wore hoops under their skirts to increase the size of their bottom half."

P.P.S. If you have any interest in Greek names, by all means visit the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names.

P.P.P.S. Maybe I should think up an epithet. (If you followed the link, I mean the first meaning.) Μέλισσα Βαθυκόλπος?

Maggie Boots

Maggie Bluxome is beautiful and impeccably stylish... and the boots at Bad Kitty that bear her name share those properties. Check them out at Maggie's blog.

3D? You wouldn't think it.

Second Life is a 3D virtual world. Those of us who can, go out or online and spend what we can afford on graphics cards that will display SL as we would like. We all read the reviews and press our faces against the virtual windows of the storefronts with the cards we can't afford.

So why do some think the ideal SL photograph obliterates SL's 3Dness?

I posted about it when I first came across it. Alas, the excellent Ophelia Drowns is now invitation-only,. so you may not be able to see the images in the "Picture Perfect" post there... but you can see "GoGo's Lighting Tips" on the Juicy Bomb fashion blog. The goal: a photo that utterly flattens the image. The model looks like a dress-up paper doll in some Dover Press collection, without the hard-edged style.

Ah, but those posts are from years ago. Perhaps their authors' opinions have changed... but we've read Mariko Nightfire's more recent two posts (so far) on the desirability, or undesirability, of what she calls "walking with windlight" (a phrase that makes me hear Patsy Cline in my head).

If you look at the photos in the later post, again the photos labeled as better are flatter. I think that's partly because the skin, the face especially, has shading painted on, so that ironically, flat lighting makes the fake shading look better, though it also enhances the effect Galatea Gynoid points out in a comment in NWN: it looks like her head was Photoshopped into a flat drawing of the rest of her. (Not having "real" shadows causes that effect. If her head were really there, it would cast a shadow on her neck, and even if you can't point that out, it sets your mental teeth on edge. Alas, years after it first appeared, shadows are still not officially supported in LL's client, so that's LL's fault.)

Windlight gives us directional sunlight and moonlight like RL, rather than the uniform lighting of pre-windlight SL. Harsh shadows in RL don't distract you, any more than someone standing between you and a tree does. (After all, you're keeping an eye out for predators... or rather, your ancestors were.) Take a picture of it, though, and they're all you see. "Darn, those shadows are harsh. Oh... What's growing out of Billy's head? BWAHAHAHA...."

That's why photographers schlep flash and reflectors, and why photographers in SL keep transparent light sources in their inventories. I use a facelight, but only as fill lighting, and I do my best to take it off when I no longer need it. It's dim, and easy to forget.

So, is the Second Life client window more like RL, or a photograph? In a NWN comment, I claimed it was like the photograph, but I think I've changed my mind. I will never do without windlight unless I'm on a computer that can't support it, and the only times I recall lighting or shadows being a distraction are in stores so brightly lit that everything is washed out, or where someone steals the beacon from a lighthouse and points it at herself. (It's always herself, in my experience.)

So, like the vast majority of things in SL, it's up to you, the hardware you have available, your SL client, and what you want. I can't count on a "shared experience" with whoever's there, as far as the environment goes--who knows what they're running, or what their environment settings are? The sky and water's appearance and how I can use their effect on my surroundings are more important to me. Your mileage may vary.

P.S. Juicy Bomb is well worth reading... the author covers some really nice clothing, hair, and shoes.

Publicity

SL doesn't have mass media. If it did, people would probably complain about it. There are popular blogs, but what fraction of SL residents read them? A lot of SL podcasts have faded away, sad to say.

That leaves word of mouth, which is one reason I hope those of you who use prim breasts go out into the bigger world.

I had an idea this afternoon that is simple enough that I might even be able to do it myself: make a top that will point out a problem that prim breasts solve in a way that will encourage curiosity and conversation. The problem? Painted-on textures don't behave like clothes do, and the most severe example of it is the most visible concavity covered by clothing: cleavage.

There are people who sell and give away T-shirts with graphics or text on the front. If you're a woman and have the breast size slider up any significant amount, that graphic or text will be a distorted mess thanks to the way the texture is painted on rather than being a separate object.

So... I think a T-shirt that says

WITHOUT
PRIM BREASTS
YOU COULDN'T
READ THIS

on the front would point out the issue. Make it the way all tops for prim breast users are made: a regular T-shirt along with a texture for prim breast clothing layers and an applicator. The regular shirt should have the text as well, and the whole thing should be a freebie; give it away, so non-prim breast users can put the shirt on and see just how bad it looks.

P.S. I talked a bit about this with Maggie Bluxome recently, and I must admit... technically, the T-shirt text isn't quite accurate, since it will be legible with the breast size slider in the range of [0, n] for some value of n. Our goal will be to make n as small as possible.

Must-read from Dusan Writer

Check out "Second Life Next: 2011".

Iconafashion

Icon Allen has started a web site about her products and, as she says, "any other things of interest." Check it out, and don't make the mistake I made of thinking it's organized like a simple blog, with just a list of entries in chronological order. Click on the topic headings to explore.

UPDATE: You really do want to go there; she now has a post showing what mesh will do for skirts in SL... and heaven knows it's long overdue. (Lovely work, Icon!)

The good side of fidgeting

I have to admit that the Oracul AO makes me feel like a model; the fluid movements make for good photos. I feel like I should be playing some stereotypical photographer patter in the background. :)

"Look for the buxom label..."

This morning I saw something for the second time... in a store, there was a sign with a logo for items that are prim breast compatible, along with an explanation of just what that means.

I will have to go back and see whether the logo was the same in both places... and I will inquire with the shop owners about the possibility of making it, or something like it, a standard that can be placed on ads for prim breast friendly clothing or other items. Prim breast users: wouldn't you like to be able to tell at a glance what stores cater to you? Not just clothing; how about the ability to buy an animation and know before you buy that it won't send your arms or legs through your prim breasts?

January 2011 BUSTed

The new issue is out. Gorgeous photography, and don't miss the article by Allana Braveheart.

Gatherings

I was looking through the new messages at Buxom Life, saw Stacia Zabaleta's post on the "Introduction" thread, and was happy to find out that she has clothing for prim breast users at her store, Gatherings.

I went looking (accompanied by Foxbean, yay!), and sure enough, there it was. Some outfits are more daring than I'm comfortable with, but there's a variety of choices, and I bought some more modest items and some others that I might not normally buy, save that I've seen them worn, and they look very good.

So, makers of prim breasts and prim breast-related items (not just clothing--I have hopes that someone will start making prim breast-friendly animations), here's another example. When trying to get your name before the prim breast using public, come to Buxom Life and introduce yourself.

I, for one, welcome my new animation override

Elysia and Val kindly pointed me at Oracul when I complimented them on their wonderful standing animations, and now I have one of Oracul's AOs.

I'm still getting used to it. The animations are graceful and fluid (yet another reason to favor fps a bit more when I'm not taking pictures), but I feel a little fidgety.

UPDATE: Thinking about animations reminds me of a pet peeve from the past: a sitting animation for women that made one loop through a rapt contemplation of one's fingernails. Oh, how I hated it! Earth to whoever the animator was: there are intelligent women out there.

UPDATE: The fun part is going to be figuring out the documentation.

Time to hit the JIRA?

Sigh... I was in SL this morning and in a lot of IM conversations. RL came calling, and I am sure that I overlooked people in saying that I had to go.

Is there some way I can send an IM to everyone I'm chatting with at once?

The Coming Year

It's the time of year when people haul out their predictions for year (N+1). I won't hazard a guess in that regard; guessing is all it would be, and some of the things that have happened this year, such as the hefty LL layoffs, make my guesses fearful.

That said, I have hopes for 2011. Mesh import actually moved into public beta, and I hope it will become official. I hope that the rendering improvements that have been unsupported--shadows, and more recently depth of field settings--will become supported as well. Above all, I hope that Mr. Humble will lead Linden Lab and Second Life in the right direction.

More specifically, the beloved Mammatus sim went away in 2010; I hope that another place will become the gathering spot for prim breast users that Mammatus was. (Yes, I know I've urged us out into the bigger world, but we still need a place where, as the song goes, everybody knows your name.)

The proliferation of prim breast makers and clothiers who cater to them continues, and I hope 2011 will continue that proliferation. I'm hoping that with mesh clothing, everyone will have the problems that only prim breast users have now, so said problems can no longer be ignored and we'll see a solution that will work for everyone.

2010 brought us BUSTed Magazine and Maggie Bluxome's new blog. May they prosper and be ever more widely read.

2010 also brought us Buxom Life. If you're a prim breast maker, clothier who caters to prim breasts, prim breast user, or just considering or curious about prim breasts, I hope you'll head over, join up, and participate in the discussions.

Best wishes to you all for 2011. Guess we'll see what comes of it, or rather, what we make of it.

VWR-1186

There's a feature request that's been sitting around for not quite three and a half years that I really wish would be implemented: VWR-1186. It asks for a way to create and restore preferences with a simple dialog.

The obvious use for this is photography--until we all have infinitely fast graphics cards, you'll want to switch to a high-end but slow setting for still photos, and then return to a less fancy but higher fps setting for other activities. You may even have a bargain basement, fps über alles setting for gaming or racing.

I bring up the issue now because this morning I had switched clients because, for some reason I have yet to figure out, the computer I'm using over the holidays provokes the issue I used to trip over at home with Kirsten's client (though it's not unique to Kirsten's), in which the SL client would quickly consume all available RAM and bring the computer to its knees before crashing. I fiddled some with the graphics settings and was about to turn on deferred rendering when I noticed the frame rate in the low forties even at "ultra" setting, and decided 40 fps has an appeal of its own if I'm not taking pictures.

P.S. Many thanks to Elysia Snook and Val Suisei for a wonderful conversation.

Depth of Field

The "mesh upload" beta of the Second Life client now has depth of field options. The ever-diligent KirstenLee Cinquetti has put that code into the latest version of her SL client. I have yet to learn to control it, but clearly it is there, as you can see in this photo:


(You'll want to look at it full size to see the effect; shrinking a photo hides blur.)

Thanks to KirstenLee Cinquetti, and to the SL staff responsible for this feature; it's yet another option for creative expression in Second Life photography.

P.S. See the Second Life Wiki for details and knobs to twist.

Best Wishes to You All

It's that time of year, and I can't be sure how much time I'll have free to wander the grid. To you, dear readers, and to my virtual family in SL, I hope you are surrounded by loving family and friends in both lives. You mean a lot to me.

A Plea to Prim Breast Makers

(I seem to be pleading a lot lately.)

I hope that you'll seriously consider registering over at Buxom Life. I'm hoping that among the things that it will become is a way that prim breast users and those who are considering prim breasts can communicate with you, and vice versa. Communication is an issue--see the interview with Emeline Magic in Big Booby Girls in Second Life--and several things conspire to make that communication difficult:

• IMs get capped
• new residents may not know how to create and send notecards
• some prim breast makers don't have web sites; at least one exists but has sat in an unfinished state for months
• above all, there's no way I know of to spread the word among new SL residents
  

If prim breast users can see others' comments, they are encouraged to add their own, to agree with someone else's suggestion they'd not have thought of themselves, or to be inspired to come up with a better idea.

Finally, do you want to let people like those at What the Fug? be the ones that define you, your products, and their users? I certainly hope not.

Silent Night... and Day

It's been a while now that I've had 64-bit processors in my home computers. Of course, I moved to 64-bit Linux. I want to be able to get to all my RAM. I want the additional registers and instructions.

What I didn't want was to lose streaming audio in Second Life, but that's what happened. No more background music or lazy afternoons listening to Jaynine Scarborough's glorious alto voice and infectious laugh, or Xaxoqual Mandelbrot's excellent DJing.

Imprudence has a 64-bit version. I will try that again with an eye to testing streaming audio. Live music is a big part of SL, and I'm tired of doing without it.

UPDATE: Just tried out Imprudence 64-bit, and streaming audio works beautifully on it. Now, if only LL and Kirsten would come out with 64-bit versions, or Imprudence fixed some shadow/deferred rendering issues, I'd be a happy camper.

1000 Avatars

Gracie Kendal was sneaking up on 60% of the way through her 1000 Avatars Project when I went there today to get my picture taken. I first found out about it through NWN's post on the project, and having a bunch of free time this weekend, I went to take a look.

If you go, you'll be surrounded by walls with photos of avatars, with the empty spaces at the bottom. The avatars are all facing away from the camera's POV, providing anonymity of a sort... though on the other hand, one could argue that one's avatar reveals a lot about one.

Ms. Kendal is a wonderful person... and even the brief wait in line was fun; the people gathered to be photographed were very interesting and quite elegantly outfitted.

I urge you to go there, to be photographed if you wish, but if not, to look at the project as it develops and to see the amazing variety of avatars in Second Life.

Sigh

I must learn to turn off certain functionality that I managed to just invoke while trying to sit down on a bench. *blush* I guess there's nothing like embarrassment to drive a lesson home.

Be Prepared

If you're a prim breast user, people may ask you about your prim breasts. (I mean a serious question, not the silly stuff like "Are those real?" or "Doesn't your back hurt?") To be ready for such occasions, I hope you'll respond appropriately, and I hope that you'll create a notecard based on the text below to hand out to interested residents.

I release the following under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. Clothiers and prim breast makers: I doubt that anyone would charge people more for including this, so feel free to include it with products or put it in a device that hands out notecards.

A Very Quick Introduction to Prim Breasts
Melissa Yeuxdoux

This document is released under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. (See http://creativecommons.org/ for more information about Creative Commons licensing.)

The Second Life avatar is limited by design. The obvious limitation, where breasts are concerned, is size, but that's not all. For example:

• The number of polygons devoted to breasts on the female avatar is very limited. If you run your "breast size" slider towards the high end, you look like you stuffed your bra with cardboard boxes: your breasts have corners.
• Second Life clothing is mostly painted-on textures. That would be perfect... if we were beachballs. We're not. We have concavities, most notably cleavage. Real life clothing jumps across concavities, but painted-on textures are vacuum sealed to your body, distorting T-shirt artwork into unrecognizable junk. Painted-on straps in Second Life clothing look phony and unable to support anything.

So, long ago (In Second Life years, at least) someone invented prim breasts that attach to the chest. Current prim breasts use "sculpted" prims for better, more organic shapes, and when mesh is official in Second Life, I expect they will move to mesh. They have greatly improved user interfaces. They have many more options for matching your avatar's skin.

Most importantly, most prim breasts sold now have a "clothing layer" to paint with a texture. It approximates the shape a T-shirt would assume over your breasts if you put it on. ONLY women with prim breasts, therefore, can wear a T-shirt in Second Life and have it look right, at least until people start making mesh clothing.

That layer has given rise to a growing market of clothing for prim breasts. Such clothing includes a texture for the prim breast clothing layer and one or more applicators to apply that texture to certain brands/models of prim breast. Some sell packages with just applicators and textures intended to work with existing outfits or tops from "mainstream" clothiers.

If you are interested in prim breasts, I highly recommend the following as places to start:

http://wwww.maggiebluxome.com/
http://buxomlife.guildportal.com/

Feel free to contact me: mel_yeuxdoux@yahoo.com

Like an Ad for Sunglasses

Long ago, I read some advice in the context of SL fashion photography, though I believe it's generally applicable: take your photos in high resolution. I don't remember and never linked to the page recommending that, but here are some web pages of people who agree:

• Strawberry Singh, "Tutorial - Taking high-res blog snapshots for intermediate users"
• Dylan Rickenbacker, "Some Hints on Taking Pictures in Second Life"
• Luna Jubilee, "Boot Camp: Photography Preparation"

Unfortunately, following this good advice will now make you fall afoul of an SL client bug, VWR-7672... and here are the results:


The strange reverse silhouette is expected, an effect of the Windlight setting. The bug is the darkening of the top portion of the image. If the boundary were curved, it would be like a bad commercial for sunglasses, or a commercial for bad sunglasses.

It's not just horizontal:


And it's not just along one axis, or even just once along each axis:


Needless to say, this is highly frustrating, and is not doing at all well by SL photographers. I hope you'll consider voting for VWR-7672.

P.S. Especially now that it's been pointed out, you'll see it in photos I've put up in the relatively recent past.

UPDATE: Experimentation seems to show that the culprit is the "global illumination" setting, or more accurately, turning it on provokes the bug.


UPDATE: Even more accurately--the global illumination code seems to be written to work with the size of the SL client window. If you specify a photo larger than that, you see the effect on the photo. To check progress on this issue, take a look at VWR-24178.

Old Man of the Metaverse

Ziki Questi has a nice article on the statue "The Man", the oldest object in Second Life. It's over eight years old, as it was created on June 19, 2002. I had to go take a look, so off I headed to Natoma.

The Man is on a hill overlooking the Ivory Tower Library of Primitives. No commemorative plaque, just the statue itself, with a strange little construction sitting near its base. (No, not me... the strange little construction over at the right.)

I almost feel guilty about using Windlight for the photo; it seems too new for the purpose. But the statue itself is very Art Deco, and shows how art is influenced by the tools available at the time.

A great calligrapher, Oscar Ogg, wrote a book titled The 26 Letters. It's a wonderful history of the alphabet, and the theme throughout is how the letter forms are shaped by the technology of the time. In this blog, you can compare the Varosha Buddha with the "Sliced Lime Buddha"... and I should follow through by finding a sculpted prim Buddha and eventually a mesh Buddha. I don't think prims will go away; artists didn't all say "Hey, we can draw with computers now! Let's ditch this oil painting crap."

UPDATE: The "strange little construction" is a jug of sake, created by Aliasi Stonebender, as he kindly explained in a comment that I got a copy of in email but which for some reason doesn't show up here. Thank you, Aliasi.

/me slaps her forehead

Teny et al.: I wish I could say that I was thinking of both Big Trouble in Little China and Barton Fink, but I just got it wrong.

The Bathycolpian Ambassadress

[This is a revision of, and expansion on, a post in one of the forums in Buxom Life. If you are a prim breast user, or especially if you run a business that hires or caters to prim breast users, I hope you'll visit that site.]

How often do you see other prim breast users? I personally see other prim breast users when I go to places that cater to prim breast users or clubs that feature them, or when I go somewhere with friends who also use prim breasts.

There are several possible explanations:

1. Those are the places I spend most of my time in when I'm in SL.
2. SL is really big, and there aren't that many prim breast users.
3. Other prim breast users don't have the same non-prim breast interests I do.
4. Other prim breast users spend time in secluded or private places.

It's probably a mixture of them all, but I would like to urge prim breast users (including myself!) to cut down on (1) and (4).

Time for SL is limited, of course, and especially with the increase in clothiers who cater to us, the temptation to shop the night or day away is strong. Places that cater to us or where there are a lot of us are unlikely to be infested with those who are rude to us. (I think the technical term is "jerks".) The "OMG!"s, the comments to others made not caring if we hear--they get old, and they can hurt.

But this is Second Life. Jerks can be muted and abuse reported. There are, alas, some sims that forbid prim breasts. In any other public place, though, if you're dressed appropriately, you have a right to be there. Enjoy the architecture, the landscapes, the live music that everyone else in Second Life enjoys.

When you do that, you are an ambassadress for prim breasts. (Or should I say Primbreastistan, or Bathycolpia?) You're right; it's not fair to expect you to be a "credit to your bustline"... but you may be the only prim breast user the people you meet have seen. You can give the lie to the stereotypes. You can show them what is possible in Second Life. Some of the people you meet may wish to overcome the limitations of the stock female avatar, and not know it's even possible until they see you.

Don't force yourself or information on people, but be ready for honest, sincere questions. (Keep a notecard ready to hand out.) Be ready for the silly questions, too, with the best humor you can muster:

Q: "Are those real?" (Yes, somebody really asked me that.)
A: "You're asking that question in Second Life?"

Q: "Doesn't your back hurt?"
A: "No, I do back exercise animations."
A: "Fortunately, Second Life physics isn't that accurate."

You're as much a resident of Second Life as anyone; you just have larger breasts than most. Each time you go out into the world, you make it easier for your sisters, and for yourself, to do it the next time, and you may even help increase our number. Do us proud, OK?

P.S. "Jerk" really is a technical term, by the way.

P.P.S. I can't take credit for the first answer to "Doesn't your back hurt?" That belongs to someone who commented on an earlier blog entry. I'd credit her by name if only I could find that comment. I'll keep looking...

UPDATE: I was at Glitterati for their pose sale, and wandered past some people. A beautiful woman complimented me on my appearance, and asked me where I got my prim breasts--she'd looked for some, but wasn't happy with what she'd found. I gave her some advice, pointed her at Maggie's blog, and asked her to let me know how things turned out. My mitzvah for the day, and an example of why we should go out into the larger world.

Tikvah Island

Speaking of holidays... we're a bit past the midpoint of Hanukkah for this year. (If you have XM Radio, I hope you're listening to "Radio Hanukkah" on channel 28; the fare varies from the beautiful voices of cantors backed by choirs and orchestras to folk songs to fun mashups of traditional songs and modern styles--right now there's a traditional song as it might have been done by Carlos Santana.)

I went looking for places where Hanukkah might be celebrated in SL, and found Tikvah (hope; you'll recall Israel's anthem, "Hativkah", the hope) Island. I've come nowhere near exploring it all, but I think you'll agree with me that it's beautiful.

Approaching the place where the menorah is lit...


...and then we see it.


May you have a joyous Hanukkah.

Hyper Couture

Prim breast users aren't all human. Hyper Couture, at Rabbit Valley 144, 30, 22, is a store that caters to the well-endowed furry--but non-furries should check it out as well. They currently only support eCorp prim breasts, but since applicators for eCorp work with Foxbean's Nadine 1.5, I was in luck, and I bought two of the outfits. (UPDATE: Oops... I spoke too soon. The Liquid Metal only does eCorp. The "Pink Butterflies" sweater I bought supports Implant Nation.)

This is the "Liquid Metal" top--the skirt that comes with it is a bit short for my tastes, and would be even more so given my shape choices.

Talk about specialty stores...

I have just seen something delightful I'd never thought of... "Goth Mommy", a store selling maternity clothing for goths. Isn't the free market wonderful?

NOW We Can Start!

I really hate the way that pushing Christmas merchandise has moved so early in the year. Thanksgiving? What's that? Halloween? Who cares; got to deck those halls.

So, among the things I am thankful for is the restraint my landlady and friend, Cheyenne Palisades, takes in delaying the coming of snow and Christmas to Whimsy until a proper time of year. Now that Thanksgiving is over, we can really appreciate it.

It's happening again...

On a different computer for the holidays, and the behavior I thought had gone away is back. The client eats up all available RAM, and then crashes... so my SL time over the holidays is liable to be shorter than I'd like. *pout*

It's a bit early, but...

I, and I expect many others, will be in RL on Thanksgiving with family... OK, that's a weird way to put it; one only leaves RL once, unless you believe in reincarnation--or you hope for the Singularity, in which case one leaves RL at most once. You know what I mean, though.

Anyway! I can't say whether I will have any time for SL on that day, so, to all of you who are my virtual family: happy Thanksgiving. I will be thinking of you.

H-Bomb Lounge

The townhouses and EPIC Proportions are not all there is in the area where I explored a bit recently. A bit further on past EPIC Proportions (which, by the way, is now stocked with clothing for sale!) you will find the H-Bomb Lounge.

It's very much "shabby chic", or should I say rusty rococo? It's small and intimate, with friendly folks. Do check it out.

UPDATE: I should take my own advice, or take pictures to aid my memory. The rusted-out, ghost town look is only on the outside. Check out Maggie's great article on the lounge.

Nanami Veronique

I've taken off the uber platform heels, for a while at least, and finally tried on another of the Nanami outfits I bought. This one is Veronique. Like Queen of Darkness, it has an adjustable skirt, which is a joy for anyone whose legs aren't exactly the same length as those of the shape the designer used.

The eCorps applier worked beautifully for the Foxbean Laboratories Nadine 1.5 prim breasts, and I wandered around, ending up at Locus Amoenus by a store selling buildings of various ancient style and structure.

Given my, um, settings and the pose, you can't see the corset, but it's there. The dress works well with the building and Windlight settings, I'd say.


The next day I wound up at the Minoan Empire, but I will refrain from posting that photo here.

UPDATE: That has a very "painterly" look, doesn't it? I tried a GIMP "clothify" filter to make it look painted on canvas but didn't have much luck. sigh...

Buxom Life

Buxom Life was once the main site for EPIC. Now that EPIC is no more, it has taken on a new purpose. Check it out.

UPDATE: The name "Buxom Life" isn't necessarily the final choice of name.

UPDATE: The link is now updated.

REALLY Big Hair

Sigh. I've had 3.5 meter hair in Second Life, but SL prim hair, like SL prim breasts, is "non-physical", so it doesn't behave like this:



I'm as envious as I was of Susan Murphy/Ginormica in Monsters vs. Aliens.

Ahern Revisited

Home sick again, not to be confused with homesick again. After wandering about a bit, I said the heck with it and headed to Ahern.

I wasn't sure I should; welcome areas now have the reputation of being places for griefers to hang out and do their best to keep Second Life's attrition rate as high as possible by being jerks, but this time at least, it wasn't that way. I met a bunch of neat people, two of whom stood out especially.

If you want a DJ, I know of one who will make an unforgettable impression. Brian Mason, who's been in SL a good bit longer than I have, has many avatars, but I'm just glad my mouth didn't hang open in SL when I first saw him with this amazing avatar:


I also saw someone I hadn't seen for a long time. Ronen Parx is a perfect gentleman, impeccably dressed; somehow we'd lost touch until this afternoon:

Big Shoes to Fill

Nanami's "Queen of Darkness" gown has a scripted skirt, so I seized joyously the pair of Uberplatform heels I bought a while back at Curio Obscura and set to adjusting. Alas, walking kills the illusion; the non-physical strips of skirt go through the shoes... but I still love the feeling.


UPDATE: Many thanks to Laurana Newell for advice on adjusting the skirt. MUch as I love Foxbean's breasts, I can't make the Nadine 1.5 as large as I'd like at this height, so I tried the Implant Nation Multiclothing breasts. Not bad, but they have problems when really pushed, most notably wrinkles probably caused by slight errors in the shape "texture" visible at that scale. I'll stick with Foxbean's work.

UPDATE: A first attempt at using the BIGAVS "blue edition" avatar stretcher in combination with the uber platform heels didn't work out. Perhaps with some work...

From the Ashes

This has been a sad year for prim breast users in some ways. First Mammatus left. More recently Boobytropolis has gone, though I hope that Minka Pearl will return again even more triumphantly than she did before.

Now EPIC is no more. Maggie Bluxome has photos of the wreckage. By the time I arrived there this morning after receiving a message from Laurana Newell, the link to the old EPIC I found was this worn poster in a bus stop:


There are signs of things to come, though. First, what Laurana messaged about: Tenyene has built a lane of one-room townhouses for rent at very low rates. (This photo just shows one side of the street; the other has a similar row of townhouses.)


L$175 per week, and you have an allowance of 100 prims for decorating and furnishing. Were I not a happy resident of Whimsy, I'd give it serious thought. My housing needs are very simple.

The other thing I saw that gives me hope is a building, in the EPIC black and purple style, under construction.


Tenyene makes wonderful clothing, and I look forward to much happy shopping there.

Old Friends and Coming Photos

I had the enormous pleasure of visiting with Pandora Barzane, a dear friend I hadn't been in touch with for way too long. She mentioned having photos taken at Big'Uns, and I suggested she put them up on flickr, so that perhaps others might contribute such photos that they'd taken.

I'll provide a link as soon as I can, and perhaps I can feed the kitty with some old photos of my own. Now to see whether flickr will let one have an apostrophe in a tag...

A quote I had to share

I found this quoted on Minka Pearl's web site, and had to put it here to share it with you. Mr. Bright has a collection of his photos on flickr, and has exhibits in SL; I have started to look at the former, and will be going in search of the latter.

Much too often, very busty women are seen in a bad light. Some feel they are ugly, some make stupid jokes about them, some see them as a sexual attraction. I want to show them in an artistic way, and I hope that this exhibition will help show them with more respect.

—Shanti Bright

UPDATE: I've now seen the exhibit the quote refers to, and I think he succeeds admirably. Check it out at the Shanti Art Centre.