Monday Meme: Strike a Pose Challenge

The theme of the week is poses, and in that vein Strawberry asks us to do a pose challenge - where we talk about our favorite pose stores for a while. I actually keep my poses organized alphabetically in a HUD, so I'll be sharing my top movers and shakers in that order. I rarely use rezzing poses because I'm usually taking pictures in the field, so I'm going to focus on my most used and why I use them, focusing on stores which are still open. Like many people, my gateway store was Long Awkward Pose, and I have an extensive collecton of poses from her that I still use to this day, however I've branched out into a wide variety of pose stores, and keep collecting more all of the time.

Unlike many photographers, I do short "photoshoots" where I use a single pose store several times in a row in the same location. A lot of the structure of it is due to ease of recording exactly what I'm doing - jump location, windlight, and pose brand enough and you just get confused - but it's led to me categorizing a lot of stores by their general feel, and then selecting based on the mood I want to have for my images. I'll be discussing these impressions here, but keep in mind they're just one person's opinion - I highly recommend you check out the poses yourself to see hat you like best.

Adorkable Poses: Currently available on the marketplace; she closed her in world store a short while ago. What I love about Adorkable is how sweet, natural, and enthusiastic her poses are - they really aim to be cute and bouncy without the stiff, posed style of a more modelesque pose store. I also like the flowing nature - the head movements are interesting and the arms and legs are interesting. When I'm doing a cute, bouncy, "all around the sim" photo set, Adorkable is where I begin. ( All Adorkable Poses used here. )

!bang: With a wide selection of stands, one of my go to natural pose stores is !bang. I came to the store late, so it took a little while to build up my reserve, but now I have an astonishing range of poses to suit most occasions. I tend to think of !bang as my casual store - when I want something that seems breezy and effortless, I start here. Note in particular the delicate yet realistic placing of the feet above. ( All !bang poses used here. )

Don't Freak Out: I honestly don't remember where I ran across this store, but I know it was love at first demo.This store is one of the newcomers to my stable of choices, but they have quickly become a go to store when I want something moody and sly. Many of the poses have a playful vibe to them, and I love the attitude they have. ( All Don't Freak Out poses used here. )

Elephante: She is a bit of a dark horse and one I don't see as often, but I really like how dynamic and interesting her poses are. There are a lot of leaps, and arm reaches, and in general a sense of movement. I started picking up Elephante poses when they were largely prop-driven, but I've been really glad to see her show up more in just stand alone poses, and I hope she keeps expanding and creating her energetic poses. ( All Elephante poses used here. )

Exposeur: Is another dynamic pose creator, but what I adore the most is how well made her poses are, especially in the area of head-clipping. I have unusually long arms and a wide head for a Second Life Avatar, so I've resigned myself to a certain about of hand-in-face actions, but as you can see from the sheer amount of "hand next to face" poses in my images with Exposeur poses, not only do my hands not clip my head, but they also don't clip my hair. ( All Exposeur poses used here. )

Flowey: I found Flowey through Whiskey Monday's exclusive use of her, and what I like most about her poses are their expressiveness. Flowey poses are evocative of a wide variety of emotional states, from sadness to anger to grief to happiness, and that makes them compelling and fun to use for photoshoots. ( All Flowey poses used here. )

Glitterati: Closed in world, Glitterati also maintains a presence on the Marketplace, and was my go-to pose store from early on. I'll be entirely honest here and say a big part of it was her group sales; they meant that I could expand my collection of available poses without spending hundreds of thousands of Linden. Her poses are also wonderful, elegant, slightly modelesque without being stiff poses, and she would make categories of poses for specific purposes, like showing off jewelry, or to be worn with a wide skirt, which made difficult to pose outfits and images easier. I still return to her regularly, particularly when I have something refined to show off. ( All Glitterati poses used here. )

Grafica: Is a much smaller store than the ones I regularly use, but the poses are of such high quality and so dynamic and expressive that I simply can't resist. Grafica is particularly good at shoulders - SL Avatar shoulders and elbows are fraught things, but Grafica manages to bend them in awkward, unusual ways with panache. There is also a lot of leaping, leaning, falling, and floating, and all of it is awesome and fun. ( All Grafica poses used here. )

Hopscotch: I used Hopscotch early on in my blogging career, left it for a while to focus on other stores, and then was bitchslapped by awesome when I ran into her again. For a long time I had thought of her as largely a prop and rez pose store, but her stand alones have become completely off the hook and fun, and cover some rare areas of interest like stretching before a run. ( All Hopscotch poses used here. )

Olive Juice: She has only a tiny satellite store open now, but Olive Juice has long been a favorite for quirky and silly poses, and I still use them regularly when my mood is on the giggly and silly side. Her poses always seem slightly off kilter, and I particularly like the tripping and falling ones. ( All Olive Juice poses used here. )

I hope you enjoyed this short, pictoral travel through my pose collections. In a very real way, poses add the dynamic element of pictures of people, and I couldn't do what I do without them.

Genres - Trivial and Critical

The Genre Event always gets me thinking about genres; which ones I like and which I struggled with, which seem clear and which become confusing, my knee-jerk and longer term responses to people who can't seem to identify a genre and so put forth something more in line with their usual output than the theme of the event. In general terms, I like fantasy, I like science fiction, I like mysteries - especially cosy mysteries, but I dislike horror unless it's psychological suspense and even then I'm watching it during the day. I like romances but I'm picky, anything that ends up down Gender Essentialist Blvd will raise my ire. I like Rock & Roll and Pop, but not the sexist  bits and at inopportune times I'm prone to pointing out we stole most of it from Black people. I love philosophy, but I'm a post-modernist who became so not because of classes but because I thought it made the most sense, and then I met other post-modernists and became very sad; see also Libertarianism (though now I'm really a progressive socialist).

I know it may seem like political things don't fit under "genre", but if you really think about it, a genre is really just a collection of similar characteristics with which something or someone is identified; we focus on it in entertainment media, but sports varieties are really genres, and sports geeks are as geeky as Dr. Who geeks. The same with fashion; while everyone wears clothing, there are distinct stylistic genres people can become attached to, like my attraction to Renaissance-y  and Lolita style fashions. These days, it seems like the internet is ever more ready to divide us by our genres, sending the furry Lolitas one way and the sporty country lovers the other. I like the frisson when I run across something I might normally not like - like Westerns, I am neither a neutral nor a Country kind of girl - in such a way that I find things I can appreciate as a part of it. I'm wary of the ways in which the internet molds my world so it reflects back to me what I like - only more so. I want to see the world, not my own reflection.

All of the major features of my look come from the Genre Event, which has the theme of "Westerns." The pickings were much slimmer than for other themes, but a lot of what was released was very high quality. This dress from The Muses is a gorgeous Westerns style dress with an amazing belt and some truly gorgeous textures. The shape is amazing and nearly perfect - I just wish the inside of the sleeves had been capped so that I could more easily photograph straight down them; the immediate inside is textured, but a few inches beyond it becomes invisible, which can be a challenge to work around. I still adore this dress, though - the ruffles down the front (several different colored shirts are available, all of them gorgeous), the lace like pattern on the skirt, the soft cuffs and neckline - from stem to stern it is unique and a joy. My jewelry is something I actually own a version of offline - Squash Blossom jewelry from Sense-able Fashions. I have a set much more heavily festooned with turquoise, but the shape of the blossom is the same, and I particularly appreciated that Sense-able Fashions included a little note about the origin of the necklace.

"The Navajo (Dine) create beautiful jewelry of Silver and semi-precious stone...The Naja (crescent shape) came to the Americas via the earliest Spanish invaders. The crescent shape with its horns turned down was considered a means to ward off the 'evil eye'.  The 'blossoms' were based off pomegranate, another symbol from the invaders, incorporated by Native American Artisans."

 My shoes are a really fun release from Bliensen + MaiTai which I simply had to have when I saw them. The fringe is lovely, and the little beads just make it that much more cool. I could totally see my Country Marm strutting around in these... though the heels are probably a little high. The rest of my look is not from the Genre Event; the hair flower from Lode is being released at L'Accessories, and is a fun take on big flowers on your head. The ombre texturing is lovely, and I really like the ribbon touch down one side. My hair from Wasabi Pills is available at the Arcade Gatcha event and is a lot of fun; when I put it on, I thought the simplicity of the formality really fit the genre of Westerns, and this character of a prim lady with a wild side particularly well. I briefly considered pulling my poses form yet another event going on this month, but at the last minute swerved and landed neatly into Olive Juice's capable hands. While her store is largely closed, it does maintain an in-world presence, and hopefully when the creator has more time she'll be back to grace us with more of her fun and quirky poses.

( More pictures here. )

Credits: 

Skin: De La Soul, Candace Creamer
Hair: Wasabi Pills, Melissa (Arcade)
Hair Flower: Lode, Viora (L'Accessories)
Ears: Illusions, Seelie Ears
Eyes: De La Soul, Rainbow
Eyelashes 1: SLink, Mesh Lashes
Eyelashes 2: Flugeln Brise, 05-A
Wings: Deviance, Sidhe Wings
Hands: SLink, Rigged Mesh Hands
Nails: SLink, Default Nails
Jewelry: Sense-able Fashions, Squash Blossom Set (Genre)
Dress: The Muses, Susanna (Genre)
Shoes: Bliensen + MaiTai, Calamity Jane (Genre)

Poses: Olive Juice

Location: The Bayou
Light Settings: Nacon's Afternoon
Water Settings: Glassy

Photographed by Deoridhe Quandry
Post processing: Cropping, only

Color Challenge: Week Thirty-three - Mahogany

The color chip for Mahogany Week didn't look very mahogany to me, so I ended up deviating to a browner color based on a mahogany shade of hair from Ingenue. I picked this up ages ago, I think when Ingenue had a sale of old designs or something - not completely sure. Usually fatpacks of color are cheapies or gifts, though; when I'm paying full price I just pick up my blonds and call it a day.

One interesting thing about how I tend to play in second life is that my accounts - even across different mediums - have a coherent personality and appearance. When I'm Deoridhe, I'm almost always a blond; when I'm not, I tend to consider it more in line with me dying my hair than an actual change in color that will stick. In terms of identity, my online identity using Deoridhe is far more coherent and long-standing than anything connected with my offline identity - though the latter also exists in bits and pieces.


Other aspects of my appearance shift from platform to platform, though. On various blogs, I'm represented by a drawing made of me; on Gaia Online I often have a halo and mini-headwings which I managed to get through various means. On Second Life, I always have my wings and I usually have my ears. My eyes change now and then, but when they do it's a change from one kind of eye to the next. The only times I change my appearance otherwise are for pictures like these, or when I'm roleplaying and that demands a certain look.

In this case, I began with the hair and then found the flapper stockings from Sonatta Morales, which was a slightly different shade of brown - adding some complexity to finding a dress to bind them together. I love the little bows on the front, though; I'm a huge fan of combining system-layer clothing with prims to make something much more realistic. Sorting through my brown clothing folder, I happened to put on The Secret Store's, Maylee Oh's Cookie Rain, though, and found it had a mixing of browns which tied together the more reddish hair and the more yellow-orange stockings into a coherent whole.

The addition of teal to the color-scheme was a welcome one, especially after all of the other brown pictures I've taken, where I ended up more monochrome and neutral. I also loved the length - right above those bows on the stockings! - and the fact it was a more high-waisted dress. The fit was a bit of a challenge for my shape, though - since the skirt prims go higher than the belt, the curve of the body mesh is used to cut them off so they look skirt-like. This meant when I leaned forward I got a rather unattractive V of skirt prims hanging down, though, which made finding poses (from Olive Juice - as always, fantastic moods for them) more of a challenge. My guess is it';s pretty difficult to "top" a skirt without running the points inside of the body mesh, though; this is more something to work around than a complaint which can be fixed.


The next hard thing to place were the wings and shoes. I initially tried my usual Azarelle wings from Fancy Fairy, but the location I ended up in - AM Radio's gorgeous Surface art-sim - uses extensive amounts of transparent prims to make the translucent effect slightly captured in these pictures. What this meant is that whichever way I turned, the wings would vanish or look odd due to Second Life's Alpha Layer issues; it just looked horrible, to put it frankly. I discovered at that point that I had no brown wing on me, and very few color changing wings that weren't also alpha-using. I ended up settling on TERHO's Elda Wings in black; the brownish-orange of the top decorations matched, and I don't think it looks entirely bad, but part of me wants to try this look again with more time to individually tint wings to match; I think it would be truly impressive.

The shoes are from Duh!, and also involved some work since they were sold pre-alpha layer, and I've become an alpha-layer shoe snob. Luckily, Duh! shoes come modify-ok, which meant some time on a pose-stand, and a matching of alpha-foot types to the shoe led to make these glorious shoes catch up to the latest Second Life technology. This turned out to be a wonderful thing, because there are layers of alpha on the ground as well as in the sky, so if I hadn't been able to update the shoes the halo effect would have been hideous. As it is, these lovely shoes look their best!


The accessories were perhaps the easiest part - the pipe in particular. First I'll talk about the jewelry, a set including necklace, bracelets, and earrings from ME_gems (I've no idea the store name - since everything is prim-only, it comes up as no one made it under preferences; if anyone knows what this store is, that would be awesome). The pipe was a gift, though, from my friend Charlie who runs De La Soul. It's a fantastic pipe, with an accompanying hud which lets you change between tons of different colors. In this case I matched it up with the teal and brown over-theme, shifting it from side to side in my mouth to suit the different pictures. It can easily go from neutral, to flamboyantly colorful, to shiny white and gold, to dark and forboding with a few clicks on a hud. It also smokes, and the coals in the bowl glow and glint slightly, as if they were on fire. I'm not normally a pipe-smoker, but after she gave me this I kept it in through three different outfit changes; expect to see it more in the future, as well!


( More pictures here. )

Credits:

Eyes: De La Soul, RooMee Eyes - Rainbow
Skin: De La Soul, Charlie - Phoenix
Cosmetics: De La Soul, Charlie Makeup - Teal Tribal
Ears: Illusion, Mystic Ear
Wings: TERHO, Elda Wings - Black
Hair: Ingenue, Torch Song Updo - Mahogany
Pipe: De La Soul, Underwood Pipe
Jewelry: ME_gems, Driftwood
Dress: The Secret Store, Maylee Oh's Cookie Rain
Stockings: Sonatta Morales, Flapper Stockings - Mahogany
Shoes: Duh!, Espadrille - Teal Green

Location: Surface
Light Settings: Fairy blue (Paulina)

Photographed by Deoridhe Quandry
Post processing: Cropping only

Color Challenge: Week Twenty-Seven: Olive

Olive week!

I actually quite loathe olives offline. The taste, the texture - ick ick! The color is fantastic, though; earthy and warm and green. Olives make me think of secret agents and my cousins, who love them and devour them raw.

The outfit I ended up in was complete happenstance. I'd been fluttering about in the Angelwing full outfit the day before, then switched to olive with the intention of taking off the Angelwing pieces after putting on my G Field olive dress and shoes. Then I realized the leaves matched perfectly, and an outfit was born! 


The stockings balance out the red in the wings and hairpiece perfectly, and the green on the new Plastik skin I just got highlights the contrast of green and red beautifully without being too overstated. I think it manages the red/green line without becoming garish or Christmasy, which doesn't fit the mood of olive in my opinion. And, of course, I had to use Olive Juice Poses. I mean... DUH!

The place I went to I found through Honour's Post Menopausal View, which is a lovely blog for finding new areas to explore. I lit it using Torley's Gelatto lighting scheme, which I've used before. I really need to spend more time experimenting, though; I'd hoped to be able to mimic the red and green in the sky, but it didn't work out well.


Since my last big post, I've been doing thinking about getting review items (none of which are in this post) and covering events in Second Life. I'm friends with a number of store owners, and have begun talking to a few more in the wake of reviewing their items, and one issue which comes up is that of "false friends", that is, people who try to be friendly and ingratiate themselves simply in order to get free things.

One aspect of current US culture which I've been uncomfortable with for ages is that of "networking" - that is, using your social interactions with others as a means of getting ahead in business. I ran into it via my mother, whom I love dearly but who also kept chatting up my hopes and dreams and trying to hook me up with people to further those ends. It feels false to me, though; showing interest and sharing information not for the reason of wanting to become closer to someone, but rather out of a desire to further one's own ends. Like so many things, I had the discomfort long before I had the language for it - and even now I struggle with the language, since on the one hand this seems to often be a mutual thing, on the other hand it makes me profoundly uncomfortable.


I'll admit to the very human desire to have everything I want without paying for it. If I could have the entire G Field inventory, I'd do so cheerfully; I only don't due to financial considerations and a desire to own things form more than one store! The same with many other stores I'm fond of, including Angelwing, Falln Angel Creations, Blue Blood, katat0nik, Hal Hina, Silent Sparrow, etc...

Sometimes I feel guilty about not covering stores I love, too. During the challenge, I seem to keep coming back to the same stores even though I love items from other stores as well. I struggle with time, with focus, with a want to promote the stores of my friends and a want to subsume myself in pure style, ignoring all external and social considerations. It leaves me in a tangle in the end, unsure exactly how to act, what to chose, how to spend my time. It can be overwhelming, and sometimes dispiriting, this drive to connect combined with the greed I find within myself which I'm truly not so proud of.


I want attention. I want things. I want love. I also want them for my own sake, and not due to an exchange of skills or influences. I want to feel as if people would like me even if I were (more) annoying, (more) demanding, (more) entitled, (more) of a bitch.

And I want to be perfect - the best friend ever, that everyone would want to be near. I want recognition, only for my own talents, and yet to be recognized as somehow unique and fantastic when I don't believe - lets be honest here! - that I am.

I want to be judged worthy and wonderful without being judged.

I want to not be a commodity.

I'm not sure I have that choice in this world.

( All of the pictures here. )

Credits:

Eyes: Tacky Star, Pride
Ears: Illusions, Mystic Ear - Fairy
Skin: Plastik, Amber - Sacrilege
Wings and Flowers: Angelwing, The Spring Fairy in Blue
Hair: Exile, Liv - sand
Dress: G Field, Classic Dress "Clea" - olive
Stockings: G Field, Ruffle Socks - red
Shoes: G Field, Bow Strap Shoes "Kate" - olive

Location: Heart of Dragons
Light Settings: [TOR], Gelatto

Photographed by Deoridhe Quandry
Post processing: Cropping only

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