Chant has asked me to prep and finish my builds for packing and selling, so I thought this would be a good time to make a list of them. In chronological order, then...
I've also made a few accessories which I guess I could sell - small pieces of furniture, furnishings, etc. I'm not really sure how to go about this...
And then, of course, there is the question of my inventory. There's loads of stuff in that which should either be used or given away.
Lastly, I am starting to get a bit more confident about making stuff for myself. I think the crunch came when I found I had paid 450 linden for what is basically a 6 prim wooden cube from Corn just because it matched some other furniture. I got it home and it looked... wrong somehow. Sometimes, I get so into shopping I lose my (tentative) grip on reality.
Cheered myself up by getting some angel wings from Illusions, and an awesome skin, of which more later.
I'm finally getting round to doing up my own house. I've gone back to the first house I ever had - the Neo by Fade Languish at Cult Living. I've never found a better one for my needs, so thanks, Fade :) One day I might build my own from scratch but until then this is perfect. The only thing it's missing is a bathroom, so I added a small shower room. It's still a work in progress though...
The grid is down so here I am, sorting stuff out and twiddling my thumbs. A lot has been going on, particularly on the building front, and I now have the start of a portfolio, amazingly enough. A lot has been going on for CNDG too, of which more in another post. An I have a new PC - a brand spanking new 24" iMac. Actually, that's something I could be doing - installing the 4GB memory I bought for it. Back in a sec...
A strange woman appeared next to me today as I was putting windows in Gabe's house. After being slow to acknowledge my presence (she was obviously checking mine and Gabe's profiles), and despite numerous friendly hellos, she finally said hi, and claimed to have appeared in Gabe's kitchen because she had logged off from there a few weeks back, after having had sex with him ("Gabe, yeah, I remember him lol"). I said I doubted that, as he's gay, and after a pause she said she was just messing with me. She then said her favourite pastime was tracking down people being unfaithful to their SL partners, catching them having sex, and giving them grief for it.
Simon has been away for a few days so I've been working on a building project. I've made a moderately faithful reproduction of German architect Mies van der Rohe's iconic "Barcelona Pavillion", which he completed in 1929. I extended the smaller block at the end of the building to make a sleeping chamber which has a nice view of the back of the building; otherwise, the layout is unchanged from the original.
The finished building, which I've named the "Aoyama", after a district of Tokyo, can either be used as an exhibition space, a shop or a residence, and any member of the Chant Newall Development Group can have a copy for free, although I will be putting it up for sale eventually, under the Yorimasa Network FOC.
I am really satisfied with the way it has turned out. The textures by LFox look great; my main problem was finding a suitable statue (I used the one that came with my Japanese builder's set by Miko for these pictures). I also had a little trouble finding a suitable double-sliding door script, but RJ Kikuchiyo and Aprikat helped me out :-) Thanks, guys! The tree and fallen leaves are by Heart, who are always my first choice for horticultural supplies.
Things I learned how to do on this build: make drapes (the ones I am sitting in front of in the second picture); make lights; fit sliding doors.
I have to say, I am very pleased with this build. I think it has an elegant, modern Eurasian look, and would look equally fantastic in an urban, coastal or rural setting. *beams with pride*
In between farting around with various builds, I have been wasting time looking for a new skin, or at least a more Asian-looking one. Anyone who has ever gone looking for an Asian skin for a man on SL will know what a tough job it is: there are loads for women and hardly any for men.
The one I have now is a generic medium tan Caucasian; I wanted something with a yellower tint, preferably with eyebrows more like my own, and not too muscly. After a couple of hours of trying on demos (and accidentally buying the full version of one - aieee!) these were the best Asian skins I found (all skins are worn over my existing shape):
It's called Redgrave, and you can find it at http://slurl.com/secondlife/SANDS%20Island%201/172/98/24
Endless pop-up messages saying there's some sort of automatic rule being created by Norton, inability to tp in SL without crashing, loss of signal from wireless modem and crashing and I can't connect to Yahoo again, although I managed it yesterday. And I can't post this fucking post either!!!! What the fuck! *tears out hair*
Me and Simon are building a home together on Safe Harbor, using a prefab from Dharma, which we are modding. In the meantime, I have suspended a den-cum-office-cum-temporary bedroom 300m above the new house.
The skybox is a New York loft; I removed the New York skyline and inserted a London view instead. Simon wants to use his furniture in the new place, which is fine with me, of course, but I have a soft spot for this sofa etc. so I will keep it up here.
One of the problems I had with the wraparound panorama is that the image was reversed by the interior wall of the curve on the right hand side, if that makes sense. In the end, I simply uploaded another version of the same panel, which I had reversed in Photoshop using the mirror command, and that worked quite well.
The quality of this is a bit dodgy as I am using my less than fancy work pc while I wait for broadband to be installed in my new flat, but here I am "modelling" my new haircut (from GL) and more mobile neko ears (Hybrid Kitty). I think they look pretty cool.
I haven't gone clothes shopping for ages, so it was fun blowing a few hundred Linden on personal adornment rather than buying textures and sofas. I have so much stuff in my inventory, I have no idea how to organize it all. I usually wear the same thing for a week at a time anyway (just like RL, heh heh).
Maybe I'm not hanging around with the right people, but when I read articles about SL like this one in the New York Times, I get really pissed off. Some of us like building because we LIKE BUILDING not because we're keeping up with the Joneses. Real Estate might be abundant in the USA, but here in London, I can't even afford to buy a studio flat. It's no mystery that in SL I live in a huge modern swanky pad, and in my free time, spend literally hours buying or building homes, putting them up, landscaping them, modding them and filling them with cool stuff, but does that make me a craven consumerist? No it bloody well doesn't. What on earth is wrong with wanting to look hot, live in a lovely environment and have tons of funky clothes? It doesn't mean I can't also read books, hold a conversation about deep stuff, care about world issues and do whetever else people do to prove they are educated and worldly wise.
And Homeless Hermes shoots himself in the foot rather by railing against the consumerist tendencies of some residents one moment, and then saying he makes all his money buying and selling real estate the next.
And another thing: sex and love. It's as real as the person you're making it with, and lots of people enjoy it on SL. You can't have much of a sex life if you have a wiggy avatar which looks like "a fruit salad encased in gelatin" - this isn't American Pie. Naturally, people want to be beautiful - I personally think my av is pretty hot - and for some people, having a sexy av takes away the fear of being rejected for their less-than-perfect RL looks, and allows them to express themselves sexually in an uninhibited way. It's a GOOD thing to be uninhibited, you morons! You can't deny physical attraction - it's an integral part of sex. Political correctness might not like the concept of physical beauty being valued but it's a natural human urge.
Anyway, in SL, where people can be as beautiful as they like, I find that how good the person is as a virtual lover is much more important than what they look like, a fact which seems to have passed by the writer of this article.
Regarding looking businesslike, our beloved leader, Chant Newell, has a basic skin and a friendly old man av - bald with a little grey beard - and I've never seen him wear anything other than a green shirt and a pair of jeans. Looks count for less than this article implies - it's your interpersonal skills and your business acumen that swings the deal. What this dork fails to realize that when anyone can look as impressive as they like, in SL more than in RL it's the fact that you can walk the walk and talk the talk that gets you taken seriously as a resident, not your big fuck-off glass office floating sky palace. If anything, SL is teaching people that appearances ARE DECEPTIVE, and that's a good lesson for the Real World as well as the Virtual one.
End of rant...
At a meeting of the CNDG last week, I was caught short (ahem!) and when Chant asked people for ideas about a new sim, I completely forgot about an idea I had back in April, which I actually did quite a lot of work on. I am going to put it forward this at the next meeting of the CNDG as a serious proposal to see if they like the look of it, and so that we all know what I'm talking about, I'll put the details in this blog and pass on the link. Here we go then.
