Color Challenge: Week Twenty-Six: Tangerine

Woo! Tangerine Week! We're halfway through the challenge (can you believe it?) and still firmly in the middle of food. Yum.



I'm eating my fingers here, I'm so hungry.

I've been to Photon's Castle before - for yellow week - and if you saw those colors you might have noticed how I'd used windlight to oversaturate and make the yellow really bright, muting out most of the other colors. This time I really wanted to highlight the colors of the Castle's grounds themselves, in addition to the florid orange of my Avantmelon dress and Honey Hair. They were both found in the depths of my inventory; I don't even remember how I got the hair, for example, and looking at the profile of the creator - which just said "deleted" didn't help either. Avantmelon is similarly gone as a store, except for the store group which lingers. It was a fun, brightly colors store that I had been buying a lot of the contents of; I think I even have a tree from them, and some watermelon chairs.

Store seem to pass quickly sometimes, for one reason or another, and the creators deserve their privacy about the passing in truth. That doesn't stop me from wanting to know, but it does give me enough self-control to not ask. This got me thinking about how ephemeral Second Life - and really all life - is, though, and prompted me to go through my old landmarks folder, winnowing through old places once more. I was startled by the ones that had stayed the same, amused by the ones which had changed into something different but still lovely, and made deeply happy by one which left me falling in midair because I landed on, of all things, a giant whale that was "falling" next to a potted plant.


A quick note on the rest of my outfit before I wax lyrical on ephemera - both the hairpiece from Split Pea and the wings from TERHO are available at the I'm Only Happy When it Rains event (I also got a rainbow umbrella there, and some rainbow rain - I highly recommend a flit through). The wings in particular make me intensely happy, being rainbow, in the proper order, and glowy. I particularly like the fade to paler colors as the wings grow larger!

The stockings are from G Field, and I confess to owning them all. They come in a wide variety of shades, from over the knee to anklet in length, and all with a ruffle around the top - truly a must-have for any Lolita. The shoes are from another favorite store, Eclectica, and are the tangerine version of her Garden Party shoes (yes I bought them all - shush). The poses are all from Olive Juice, such a thorough mixing of free, inexpensive, and must-have-it paying at full price that I can't untangle them. Olive Juice is particularly good at poses which put forth a mood, though in a few cases I've used angle to circumvent mood, and I highly recommend them for people who want less "model"ly pictures.


I am a very late to the party avatar. Although I made an account in 2006, Deoridhe Starr, I tried to find things to do for a couple of days before utterly giving up, unable to do anything beyond fly around. I never actually met any people. I saw a couple, once. Landed near them. Spoke... and nothing.

So reading Lalo Tellings History of Second Life (and now starting to explore those "first sims" myself) was a real eye opener about what it must have been like in those early, claustrophobic days, when space was at a premium. I simply can't imagine it.

Instead, I know a Second Life where other people are at a premium, but many of the large crowds are intimidating or even hostile. Most of the time when I'm on Second Life, my avatar is "alone" in the sense that I don't hang out, in pixels, with other people very much. I usually have one or more group chats open (Falln's Angels chat, in particular, has long been a home), but I can spend hours exploring, taking pictures, stalking lucky chairs, etc... while only seeing other avatars in passing and rarely speaking to them.


Events in Second Life, as well, often have a rushed, hurried quality to them. Recent sale developments include one-day-only sales, or in several cases, sales of only fifty or a hundred items. I'm dealing with a hunt right now that I want to participate in, but the Second Life delivery of notecards is bugging so I'm not getting what I should be getting to progress, however the hunt will only go on for four days.

When I tried to photograph all of the Fashion for Life and Fantasy Faire sims, it often involved a lot of rushing around, and a lot of not dealing with things offline that needed to be done. Each had nine sims; each was only open a week - and other money raising things have similar expiration dates, sometimes several at once, which makes covering events something of a crapshoot and a life killer.

I am, increasingly, finding the pressure not only irritating but also feeling like it is directly impeding my enjoyment. Returning to a sim, like Photon's Castle, can be part of the joy of exploring. Often on a second look we see things we didn't see the first time around. Being able to return, being able to not look back but see again with older eyes, has an intrinsic value which the rushed pace people sometimes bring to Second Life seriously undermines and renders impossible.

( More pictures here. )

Credits:

Eyes: Tacky Star, Pride
Ears: Illusions, Mystic Ear - Fairy
Skin: MiaSnow, Rainbow tan 4
Wings: Terho, Elda Wings - Rainbow
Hair: Honey Hair, Bowtie Bella - Atomic Tangerine
Hairpiece: Split Pea, and with bees in her breath
Dress: Avantmelon, Kirei Dress
Socks: G Field, Ruffle Socks - cream
Shoes: Eclectica, Garden Pary shoes - tangerine

Pose: Olive Juice, Capslock Yell

Location: Photon's Castle
Light Settings: Default, Midday

Photographed by Deoridhe Quandry
Post processing: Cropping only