Makara Yorimasa

RL intervened in June and July. What a shitty couple of months. My fellow prawns have been having a few problems too. For a while, I thought Safe Harbor had been cursed by some sort of powerful mage.

Three things I must rectify immediately now I have returned:

1. Catching up with Linx, who has been wonderfully patient with me
2. Catching up with Aprikat!
3. Finishing my various projects

I started work on number 3 this morning: I finished the treehouse. It has a vaguely neko theme, with a few cat toys and snuggles, and a cat loo, but it can be used by anyone. It's just an ambient place to hang out. However this still leaves the following projects to finish: Little Nara, the Blossom Tree Island, the floating palaces (might get rid of them altogether), the beach on the spa island, and the gazebo in my back yard.

I also have to sort my inventory, which has nearly 10,000 items in it. Aieee!

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:

1. It's incompatible with the Cape Cod theme!
2. It's positioned right over the pond in the middle of the sim, so the same music plays at the duck pond on the ground as well as up in the palace. The ullulating exotic stylings of Iranian Radio don't sit well with quacking ducks, Adirondack chairs and lemonade.
3. It's not exotic ENOUGH. I toned down the Arabian-ness of the gardens in order to try to segue between the pond, the gardens and the palace, but as a result, the gardens ended up looking like an homage to Barbara Cartland. The Japanese style bathhouse island was easier to match to the Cape Cod theme, perhaps because both are simple, low-rise, wood- and stone-based architectures originating in warm temperate climates.

Having had a think about this, I am going to make the following proposals to my fellow prawns:

1. I think we still have three island spaces left (I hope...), and I could move the garden to ground level on one of these islands, make the garden smaller and more authentic, and spice it up a lot, and then float the palace about 500 metres above it, with a teleport to the palace from a hidden place on the ground.
2. I could try making an underground secret cave somewhere else on the island and move all the naughty stuff down into it, and store the palace again.
3. I could just scrap it and bung it all into an inventory store box!

I have rezzed a guest house on the Temple of the Groaning Wood for Es and his kitten, who are in dire need of somewhere to fool around and chill out. The land is still up for sale, of course, so it's only a temporary arrangment; I've changed the name to "Yorimasa Network".

Well, I posted Dazzle's comment, as you will see if you scroll down. A few corrections:

a) When I posted my original rant, I'd heard more than one side of the story: I'd had a conversation with Masa about the whole affair, I'd seen copy and pasted chunks of his and Dazzle's argument, and I'd had an hour-long argument with Dazzle. I'd based my opinion of Dazzle's behaviour on all three/four.
b) Market price: well, we can agree to disagree here. I paid 14,000L$ for my own plot in Sept 2006. Three plots surrounding Masa and Dazzle's land are currently on the market for 25,000L$. And the plot Masa wanted to buy cost 16,000 L$, which is why he was selling at that price. I do think it's strange that a buyer should expect a seller to drop his price to whatever suits the buyer.
c) The noob is the guy on the other side of Masa's land! Read it again! And I most certainly am not making fun of noobs - I am very noob friendly.
d) The word uppity was my own; if it had been a direct quote, I would have used quotation marks as I did when I quoted Dazzle as saying Masa's use of his own land was "boring". BTW, he didn't mention his good gay friend in our original 1 hour chat, when I accused him of homophobia, which would have been an excellent place to drop it into the conversation we were having about how gays were "taking over" Seattle. Lastly, I find it hard to believe Dazzle would need Masa's full name from me (I don't remember him asking for it) given that he had spent the previous week IM-ing him constantly, and had also met him face to face several times.

Other comments:
Yes, only 2 communications, but totalling about one and a half hours. The "security fences": I didn't feel threatened by them - I said they had cut off access to anyone who didn't teleport in, they had spoiled Masa's view and they'd made his land less attractive to potential buyers. I would love to say my penis statues had the ability to hurt people, but alas, they are just inert statues. And Godzilla never made an appearance in the end as I had run out of prims!

Since then, Dazzle has written an apology to Masahiro, which I hereby reproduce in full. Of course, I'm certain that this apology owes more to the fact that he wants me to drop the land to its original price of 16,000L$ again than to any genuine regret about his bullying tactics and un-SL-like attitudes, but I will take him at face value, because believe it or not, I am a nice guy. If he buys, that's up to him. If he doesn't, I have a tenant who only ever uses teleport to access his skypod ready to move onto the land.

"masa,
I have heard my converstation with you did not make you feel good.
I would like to apologize for my comments, that you found offensive.
i have posted a blog with maka and if you need more clarifcation feel free to im me.
I did/do not mean any bad will or any such thing to yourself.
daz"

One more thing: I will not allow any more comments from Dazzle on my blog (it is my blog, after all!). I think I've wasted enough space on this subject now. There are far more interesting things to think about, like Gabe's almost completed house!

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.

gabe semyorka: mak - did you ever smell moth balls?
Makara Yorimasa: Yes, baby, why?
gabe semyorka: how did you pry their little legs apart?

I record this terrible joke for posterity...

Masahiro called me over to the new home he is sharing with Johnny Sumbula, his partner, yesterday: he had just escaped from a conversation with Dazzle Gastel, his neighbour, who owns every plot of land surrounding Masa's except for one plot, which boasts an ugly building erected by a newbie who hasn't been onworld for months. Masa had put his plot up for sale at 16000$L which is slightly above the market price - only slightly, mind you: it is comparable to the price I paid for my 512sqm plot 6 months ago - and the neighbour was trying to negotiate a lower price, hoping to buy Masa's land and join all his plots together. Masa showed me the conversation he had had with the guy, which he saved, so what I say next comes from first hand evidence.

Having failed to beat Masa down in the first volley, Gastel proceeded to insult: a) the Japanese (for not having the business sense of other Asian people), b) gays (for being uppity) and c) Masa's "boring" house (which he built himself and is a nice, clean modern style). He also commented on how ugly the plot was due to all his own No Entry signs, and how Masa had no hope of selling it to anyone else because of these signs and its inaccessibility. Needless to say, Masa was highly annoyed by the guy's attitude and refused to sell to him for less than 16,000$L.

Being a straight man in RL, I was pissed off at this. Masahiro is a very, very nice guy and one of my closest friends, and after the fiasco with Kevin on Friday morning, I was feeling a little oversensitive to this sort of thing. I bought Masa's land from him, renamed it Temple of the Groaning Wood - the home of the Japanese Penis Festival, and am now in the process of building a temple dedicated to cock on it. I envisage cock fountains squirting frothy white cum, cocks rampant over the temple building, and a lake of semen.

On the advice of RJ, designer and builder extraordinaire, I am also installing so many particle effects and sounds that it causes a huge amount of lag for the unpleasant Mr Gastel. RJ is another straight man who hates hate; he was happy to spend an hour with me on the land this morning creating huge one-prim spinning blocks with so many effects built in that when Aprikat visited, the lag caused her to crash immediately. In addition, Aprikat has promised me a free-roaming Godzilla which spews 600-particle flames, bumping up the lag still further (I can't wait!).

Lastly, I will leave the land up for sale at twice the price Masahiro asked for it. I don't need the money, so it's no skin off my nose. If the guy wants it, he can just go in there and buy it. If he doesn't, well, the temple can stay there indefinitely as far as I'm concerned.

PS: Of course, if he writes a full apology to Masahiro, he can have it at the original asking price of 16,000$L. I'm a reasonable guy.

Kevin likes sex. He likes sex a lot. Even in my most rampant days I had trouble keeping up with him. He can keep going for hours, and take on any number of partners without breaking a sweat. He describes himself as "trysexual" on his profile, with the tagline "You wheel it in, I will consider it". I've been with him, and so has nearly everyone I know.

He's also very generous and will often hand out sympathy shags to desperate men and women, and first time shags to newbies. One such noob approached Kevin on Friday, saying he was about to go into the Marines and wanted to try gay sex - and of course, Kevin agreed to show him the ropes. Having shot his load, the jerk proceeded to call Kevin a filthy fag and tell him he would burn in hell for being an unChristian pervert.

Needless to say, Kevin was pretty upset by this, and called me over for a chat and a cuddle. I did my best to cheer him up, inwardly seething. I don't know how gay men put up with this in the real world. I have experienced racial abuse in RL (try being the only Asian-looking guy at your school), but it was never so direct or so aggressive. I was ashamed to be straight. So for the record, can I say that we're not all like that, Kev, and you keep on doing what you love best - shag your heart out, baby. We love you, Kevin Dumont!

Lovely Gabe wants a bathroom in his house, so I have offered to build an extension. When I realized I couldn't get hold of the textures used by the original builder, and that in order to build the extension, I would have to kick Gabe out of his house while I ripped out walls and moved stuff around, I bought a copy of his house, rezzed it on some spare land, and set about cannibalizing it to make the extension. It's a very sweet country-style cottage, with nice layout, but it's a bit pokey, and because it was designed to be low-prim, the creator (Sandy Clymer) had to sacrifice prettiness for prims.

Happily, Gabe agreed to let me tweak the textures and clean up the design a bit during the rebuild. I put in a simple white wooden staircase (replacing the one-prim ramp), added an extra wing at the back of the house for the upstairs bathroom and a downstairs family den, and changed the roof tiles to a dark slate pattern which is classic New England, but which ties in his house to the colour scheme of my modern house, giving Safe Harbor a little more unity.

I ripped out the old fireplace, which was just a one-prim illustration, and installed a new one, complete with crackling, smoking flames, glowing logs and a chimney with smoke coming out of it. I'm also tarting up the interior walls, giving him smart Cape Cod-style whitewashed oak woodwork and wainscoting, and plaster walls in pale sky blue, pale lavender and a rich cornflower blue. "Real" windows with shutters will be installed, and curtains will be hung on the inside. Other plans (apart from the bathroom and den): a new kitchen with a working fridge and washing machine, a proper dining room, a new front door and a working doorbell, and a small back yard leading off from the den, where Gabe can hang his washing on the line and store logs for his log fire.

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...

Just realized I never activated the Comments function, so no-one could leave comments. *smacks self on head* Okay, Comments are on now, for anyone...

Simon told me over breakfast this morning that Masahiro Piranha, a good friend of ours, has a new T-shirt. It's a joke one, and reads something like, "A man walks into a bar... and keeps on walking. He was in Second Life. Sort out the lag!"

I want one!

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.