All is Vanity

This gorgeousness doesn’t take care of itself, y’know!

Well, actually it does, but this vanity (zebra ottoman and make-up clutter included) was in a D thing at Sn@tch, so I got it.

I have it up in my Unpacking Place high over the Rise, where I unpack stuff and try not to get to attached to it so that I can later derez it to make room for other stuff. I like it up there.

Sheer little top also by Sn@tch, house from me (available on the Marketplace I think!), other stuff pictured from other places I forget.

Love Donna Flora; fashion for a cause

SL peoples love shopping for a cause, as do RL peoples for that matter, and while it’s just as subject as RL causes to the usual “why do you put energy into THIS when there is also THAT?” sort of questioning, I still think it is a Great Thing.

The other day (was that just yesterday?) Michele passed me a notecard about Love Donna Flora, a sim-sized event to help with the medical expenses of one of our creators.

The Love Donna Flora event will open on July 25th @ 12:01 AM and close at midnight on August 11th. It will feature work from more than 100 creators with proceeds going to Squinternet Larnia of Donna Flora.

The arrival point point is in the center of the sim, which is a little confusing at first, but follow one of the nice cart-paths out toward the edge, and you’ll come to the main path, all around the sim, lined by picturesque carts selling all manner of things.

And it’s in a good cause!

(Look for the purple DNF logo signs on the signs; the contribution rate varies; many are 100%)

Okay, with all that out of the way :) here is the real reason for the post: a picture of me!

Wearing mostly random things, but at least I’m at the place. :)

Dress (actually from the event!): Klepsydra – Georgia – Black – Love Donna Flora.
Despite being mesh :) it sort of almost fits me; M, shown here, it just a tad small in a couple of spots; L makes me look curvier than I really am.

Hair: A&A Kaya, Dark Brown.
A 50L special in the Attic at VreMode.

Choker: Nizam Pearl Choker.
From Zaara

Tatt: Guanshiyin.
From CoLLisions

Leggings: Stripey Tights (Sheer) from Gauze

And speaking of Sn@tch!

I was exploring a store called “POST”, after seeing it mentioned positively over on The Train Wreck Love Life, and as I was camming about (more on that below) I saw a green dot appear near me on the minimap, and thinking it might be (say) the store owner come by to fiddle with things and I could gush about how great the place was, I pulled my camera back, and it turned out not to be the owner of POST, but instead…

it was Ivey “Murderdoll” Deschanel herself, owner of Sn@tch the store I was gushing about in my last post.

Zomg!

So I fanboy’d all over her in IM (well, I tried to be restrained), and she was humorous and friendly. I’ve spoken to a celebrity! :)

The store POST is very neat. Here’s the Marketplace version, but I really liked the inworld one. Both the store and the products are very well and subtly textured, as Emilly says, and there’s a sort of early-1800’s Europe / Russia feel to it all. Lots of good use of mesh in the objects, so they are low-prim, and many of them are art or book related in some way. Prices range from 0L for various random things lying around here and there, to multiple hundreds for more elaborate objects and structures.

Any store that sells (or gives away!) a copy of “Salome” left open face-down on the floor, a copy of Picasso’s “Ma Jolie” for the wall, and an open notebook with sketches from the Voynich Manuscript (as well as nicely worn rugs, sidetables…) is marvelous in my book.

(Tip for Firestorm and probably other viewer users: you can apply a filter and have the Area Object Search show you just things that are, for instance, for sale for between 0 and 50L, and sort them by nearness. Great way to look for bargains!)

Fishing, Shopping, and Art

I have been doing lots of things, just not weblogging about them. :) I did some tiny bit of the Twisted Hunt, and Steam Hunt 8, and I’ve been building some houses for fun. Might even put some of them up on the Marketplace or in a store or something. But that’s for another post. :)

This one is about fishing while shopping! And Art!

That is me fishing! While shopping! Or actually while waiting to see if any Ds will come up on the lucky boards. As it says under the picture on Flickr, Sn@tch is one of my favorite guilty pleasures in SL. It’s a big sprawling clothing store, not high couture in the slightest, a bit punky and trashy, but a huge variety, much of which I love (I have to ration my trips to the outlet annex for the sake of my clothing budget).

AND they have this great Game Room with lucky boards and mobvends and gatches, and a 7Seas fishing pool where you can catch not only the usual 7Seas fish and stuff, but also parts of special Sn@tch outfits. A great place to just veg out in consumer mode.

And where but SL could you fish casually while waiting for your letter to come up in a clothing store?

:)

Then less rabid-consumery, here is a great short film about Gracie Kendal and her RL self and their art: A Comfortable Skin. Definitely worth watching!
 

And that is all for now, off to fiddle with houses more.

More Pictures!

Okay, so the vehicle that I mentioned needs pictures.

(Some of the below don’t seem to have compressed wonderfully well; click through to flickr and press “L” or look at the larger sizes for perhaps better renders.)

That’s the Carmageddon Tank from L+N Signature Designs; I am standing smugly by it in the Hunt outfit from Cosmic Stream Designs and the Deconstructor part of The Machine from Radeon Automatic.

And then inside…

… and showing off the cannon, boom!

… and the machine guns (in the dark) pocketa-pocketa!

Of course it also flies…

… and rises up on its mechanical haunches for driving over lesser things in the twilight.

It also leaps up into the air (all of this controlled by buttons on a not overly huge HUD), but I’m not up to a video.

Okay, enough of that. :) Here are a couple of things from NS6 Engineering:

A cursed tower and a Cloudrider airship, both nice and free, and if they are a bit old-SL in style well that’s nice and nostalgic.

Relaxing in one of the plusher venues of the Hunt:

This one the Royal Thai Gallery (a lovely build, although I had some trouble figuring out just what they were selling, or displaying, where), but in general a delight of this hunt is the wide variety of places, all vaguely tied together by some variously fictionalized notions of Victoriana and technology and adventure.

Compare and contrast with, for instance, the Undertaker’s Parlor from Noctis:

(All 88 prims worth, not including the simple floor and wall prims that I threw up for photographing.)

Lots of things not directly in the Hunt, but still good finds. I’m always looking for more (cheap) bookcases in SL, and this Bookcase Loft from S&S Clockworks was a mere 4L!

(I don’t think I’ve opened the actual Hunt prize from there yet.)

Eventually I actually finished the Hunt! Still far from finishing opening all the packages, though…

Shortly after that, as I was vaguely considering trying to get back to the Rise cross-country from wherever I ended up, I noticed it was time for the Pre-release Party for 1000+ Avatars, Volume 2.

So I went and did that. :)

And a good time was had by all…

Sinister Steampunk

So hunts are Good Things because:

• It’s fun to hunt around for stuff,
• You find new stores to shop at,
• Some of the builds of the stores are really nice,
• Once in awhile you find some wonderful new thing that you’re actually going to wear, or use, or whatever, constantly for weeks.
• They are good for the SL economy.

And of course hunts are Bad Things because:

• You get tons and tons of stuff cluttering up inventory, sometimes unopened for weeks or years,
• You spend time when you could have been doing something more creative, and of course
• They are bad for the SL economy.

Because of this ambivalence :) I only occasionally weblogify about hunts that I hunt, but I thought I would weblogify about this one just because (a) I felt like it, (b) I’m a bit short on Lindenbucks, so I am probably not buying as much as usual as I hunt, so maybe I can contribute some publicity :) and (c) it’s a good hunt.

(Note: the reader may interpret the above remark about Lindenbucks as an opportunity to buy me expensive gifts, only if said reader has not bought me any expensive gifts in the last thirty (30) days.)

The hunt in question is The Sinister Steampunk Hunt, themed around stuff that your retrofuture villain, evil genius, etc, might be wearing or carrying or inventing or driving or using.

Here I am, for instance, with the Ether Rifle of the evil Dr. Calamari or something, as obtained by our hero Parrish Ahsbourne (#8):

The elvish green leather armor and cloak are from Destiny’s Designs (but come to think of it from a Lucky Chair rather than the hunt, oops!), and the monocle is from way back.)

The weblog has a list of shops, and hints for each one, which is useful.

(Back in my day, we didn’t have lists or hints! By dag, you started with #1, and the only way to know where #2 was was to find the landmark inside the prize in #1! Kids these days!)

Don’t get discouraged, by the way, if you can’t find the prize in #2; it’s hard for me to imagine anyone ever finding it without some sort of cheating. My own hint: it’s inside a box which as far as I can tell there is no way to open.

But anyway. :) I am up around shop #17 now, of 29, and have lots of very fun stuff. Here’s another shot:

The impressive telescopic monocle is from Sculptify (#3), and the backpack sprouting formidable medical / torture attachments is one of three equally impressive backpacks in the prize from Radeon Automatic (#15). The clothing is that elvish green leather armor again :) and the cigar I think I picked up in a bunker in the Wastelands the other year (so yeah, not directly relevant, but doesn’t it look appropriate?).

L+N Signature Designs (#7) has truly astounding stuff which is pretty much always out of my price range, but for this hunt they have a really quite astounding combat vehicle, which is right in my pricerange ’cause of it is free. No pictures of that, but I had fun driving it around in a combat sandbox shooting the canon and machine guns.

Pictures of the combat car, and various other prizes that I may or may not have found and/or unpacked yet, can be found in the hunt weblog too.

(Hunts didn’t have their own weblogs in my day, either! If you wanted to see what you might have gotten, you had to actually open the prizes. Kids these days don’t know how easy they’ got it.)

Anyway again! :) So that is being fun, and I will probably follow the hunt more in coming days. Unless I get distracted. Like I always do…

Murder at Skull Creek!

So y’all may have noticed, if y’all were paying Extremely Close Attention, that this is no fashion “blog”. But I do belong to a shopping group or two (wave wave!), and I’m on some subscribe-o-matics, and wildly unlike in RL I enjoy wandering around malls and exploring out-of-the-way shops, and even shopping. And sometimes I get notices of things.

And today, just when I seriously needed some light procrastination, I got a reminder about the Murder at Skull Creek event that WoE and Exodi are doing. It started a week ago, and I don’t know how long it lasts, so rush on over! :)

It involves wearing a nicely-scripted and textured HUD, and basically wandering around finding the scavenger-hunt things and the prim-people to click on, in a nice modern build full of baked-in shadows and a fine autumnal atmosphere, in a sort of creepy inbred too-small town from a slasher flick.

I eventually actually solved the murder by finding all the millions of things you need to click on (select-by-surrounding doesn’t count as cheating, right?), and confronted the murderer (after confronting only one non-murderer), and got the Golden Ticket which lets you get all the prizes.

And nice prizes they are!

(Like my inventory needs more things in it.)

But hey, it was fun!

And so I’m telling all my friends, like the prize boxes all told me to. :)