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...
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*
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.
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.
It's time for a radical rethink about the Arabian-style palace and gardens. As I see it, there are three fundamental problems with this area:
Having had a think about this, I am going to make the following proposals to my fellow prawns:
Ever wondered all houses built with wooden sidings have the planks laid horizontally? Never mind the RL fact that horizontal slats keep the rain out (thanks, Gabe!), in SL it's because it's much easier to line up textures with horizontal lines than textures with vertical lines. I'm currently remaking all of Gabe's walls, having been driven to distraction by the problem of aligning vertical stripes. Why oh why oh why didn't I just use horizontal lines from the start? Moron!
In other news, I bought a copy of Prim Docker for aligning my prims. I haven't had time to RTFM yet - I think I need to do that before I do anything else.
I will be selling copies of this house when it's done, on RJ's advice. Of course, this means having to master one of those rezzing gadgets...
I will say one thing though - his bathroom looks f-ing excellent. Just like a RL seaside home bathroom (except for the SexGen shower, ahem...)!
I meant to finish some work around Safe Harbor, but one way or another, I ended up spending a lot of the bank holiday weekend chatting to people. One of them was the lovely Linuxess, a member of Thinc, who was looking for a new skin. We went to Snowflake Skins, which have the most kawaii designs in SL, IMHO, and I'm delighted to say that she bought a very pretty anime-style pale skin with huge eyes and petal pink lips (you can see it on her blog which is listed on my links). She had been looking for a realistic skin, but I think I persuaded her that it is nice to be a little more cartoony sometimes, which brings me on to the subject of this post.
Aesthetics are a personal thing, of course, so what I'm going to give here is my personal opinion. SL is basically a cartoon environment at the moment - it's not sophisticated enough yet to handle "Final Fantasy" levels of detail - so when I'm designing, shopping or building in SL, I try to bear this fact in mind. For this reason, I avoid ultra-photorealistic textures at all times, prefering a more painterly effect. I don't mind how wiggy or off-the-wall buildings and clothes are - or how safe and boring they are - but I do think a photographic texture looks out of place in an animated cartoon world.
Particularly jarring are plants, but I also find textures representing bookcases, or cupboards full of food, etc. quite unpleasant to look at. I have been installing a kitchen in Gabe's refurbished house this morning, and have had a lot of trouble finding attractive fittings (I don't want him to have a kitchen that looks as if I've slapped a polaroid of a cooker over the top of a square block).
Of course the first thing I should do is to enrol on a building course and learn how to make my own textures. I'll look into this tonight.
Blew a couple of thousand Lindens on some wildlife for the pond: a croaking frog and a swimming mallard with ducklings by Kaikou Splash at Splash Aquatics, and two fishing game chairs-with-rods from the same place - great fun. Tried it out and landed a 22lb roach. Go me! The brilliant thing is, the fish you "catch" is a proper swimming fish which you can put in your inventory and make copies of, so I copied a dozen or so roach, and dotted them around in the reeds, where they're now circling slowly, looking pretty realistic. Cool! I think I'll make an angling trophy to award to the person who catches the biggest fish. We can display it in the boathouse...
I also scored some Adirondack chairs and some sound loops from Sid Fisher. The chairs are mod, so they can be retextured to suit the style of the pond. They don't have sitting anims, but that's fine, because I would prefer to use animated cushions from Pillow Talk, of which I have many copiable versions in my inventory. I'll give them home-style quilted covers this evening. Still to make/acquire: a beer cooler (for those long fishing trips), the footstool for the Adirondack bench (I ran out of money), and some suitable lamps. I should also put in a few more activity anims, like sitting, reading and maybe skinny dipping...
Well, I finally finished my first building, a New England-style gazebo in stained oak planking. It has nearly 300 prims, due largely to the fact that I couldn't find a decent crisp railing texture: I should probably put "making textures" on the top of my To Do list. I enlarged the pond behind it a little, and planted it up, without Gabe's permission (sorry Gabe!), and I will probably have to do a little pruning and landscaping before I'm happy with the whole area, but as for the gazebo itself, I'm quite pleased with it.
It needs some seating - I thought a circular bench might be fun, with some reading and snuggling poses. Alternatively, I guess an Adirondack chair or two. I'll need a similar style bench for seating near the pond, too. I'm currently using an Asian-style lantern, but I'll try and come up with something more appropriate.
Other ideas for the pond area: a bluebell patch, a reading area hidden in the bushes, my catnip bush for those neko moments, some fireflies, butterflies, a bench for sitting and admiring the view, some meadow and pond sounds, a fishing area, fish (!), and perhaps some wildlife such as frogs or toads.
I have already put down Craig Altman's Lovescene sequence in a secluded glade. I really like Lovescene - it's a simple sequence of 8 animations, moving from foreplay to missionary position sex. It's vanilla, but really nicely done, and very sweet. My only quibbles with it are the speed at which it moves from the first to the last pose, and the fact that you have to get off the balls for the essential post-coital cuddle (not always essential, I guess, but it is in this particular style of lovemaking).
In other news, I went a bit mental yesterday and bought a girl's Thai dancing outfit. The pants, belt and floaty cape-thing make me look like a rather expensive rent boy (or Lady boy, if you prefer). I love 'em! Definitely the gayest outfit I own, with the possible exception of my Christmas angel costume.
On 19 April, we had a short community meeting at Safe Harbor, during which I listed all my unfinished projects, feeling like a bit of a dilettante, and then we discussed having a beach party for our friends on the spa island. In order to do this, I will have to make a beach, which means mastering waves... aieeee!
For the record, my unfinished projects are:
* My own bathroom (missing a tiny section of the tiled floor)
* Gabe and Micah's bathroom extension
* The private Arabian sky palace (needs some texturing of the building and the furnishings, and relocation to 700 feet)
* The Arabian-style floating pleasure gardens (just needs some gates, some soft furnishings, lighting, and a little exotic planting)
