Peacock in the Aviary

One of the fantastic things about Second Life is how theatrical the clothing can become - how unreal and non-normal. I was instantly struck by this new dress from Inga Wind - enough to overlook the alpha issues which are inherent in an outfit like this. At the wrong angle, this looks like mush, but at the right angle it's absolute magic. I adore the colors, too; I was tempted by the golden peacock, but the natural colors are so striking that I couldn't resist. When I found the albino peacock at Tropical Paradise Designs, it seemed too perfect to resist. My long, slick black legs come courtesy of SLink and are mesh - so for more than half the grid you'll look legless with a ball attached to one thigh. The peacock necklace from TERHO rounded it out, and I was able to match the coloring of the peacock with the shiny Wasabi Pills hair on my head - a newer release. I was also able to match the colors on my Eclectica gloves as well - the feathers version this time instead of the roses I was rocking before. There are pearls as well - have I mentioned lately I adore these gloves?

There is something alluring about how easy it is to look fantastic in Second Life - without the dust, grime, laundry, and mess of the offline world. There's no need to cook, no need to clean, dust never accumulates, and looking gorgeous is a matter of attaching a folder.

( More pictures here. )

Credits: 

Skin: De La Soul, Aestali - Cream Rose
Eyes: De La Soul, RooMee Eyes - Rainbow
Eyelashes: Flugeln Brise, Eyelash 5-A
Hair: Wasabi Pills, Kimmy Hair - Golden (promotional item)
Ears: Illusions, Mystic Ears
Necklace: TERHO, peaCOCKED Necklace
Dress: Inga Wind, Pavonine
Gloves: Eclectica, Little Black Pillbox Hat & Gloves - Feathers (Vintage Faire - promotional item)
Ring 1: Alchemy Immortalis, Nestling Finger
Ring 2: Earthstones, Eternal Blossom Ring - Bouquet
Shoes: SLink, Tall Leather Boots

Poses: Long Awkward Pose

Location: Tropical Paradise Designs
Light Settings: Midday

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-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