Into the Wilds

Made up of a mixture of wild and mechanical, Into the Wilds is a smooth combination of internal and external spaces, perfect for exploration and spending time with other people. Natural props like a variety of trees and a lovely river system, and human additions, like cars and buildings, meld together in a lovely manner with poses and dance balls scattered for you to find. The color scheme is shades of brown and green with gold and silver highlights, and there's some height in the form of a mountainous region to contrast with the lowlands which predominate. Small buildings dot the landscape, from furnished houses to ruins left fallow in the grass, and include a number of cute, bare buildings on the beach and throughout the woods.

There's life here, too - bears, horses, deer, sheep, and even birds that make their home on a boat waiting at the docks. The creator also made clever use of soundscapes to sell the natural nature, and the added surround for the sim gives the illusion of this being a river-soaked area in a mountainous region rather than the seascape standard to all individual sims. The sheer variety of items means you have significant flexibility in many themes, whether you use the warm sunset windlight set for the sim, or substitute in your own as I did by indulging in my penchant for golds and greens. A note of warning - the sim is set to adult, so adjust your settings accordingly and remember Adult means adult avatars only. I didn't get dropped a notecard of rules when I landed, but there is a group you can join if you want to rez things (small things only, please pick up after yourself) and I'd assume the usual rules of being polite to others and taking responsibility for yourself hold even without explicit rules.

Sunday Squee: Fallen Gods Anniversary Parties

The Sunday Squee is about things that make me happy and excited. From books to movies to television shows to podcasts, I'll highlight less commonly known things as a way to share what I love. If you want to join in the Sunday Squee, please link back to me, magnifying both of our joy.

Every year, Fallen Gods has a party. It's really the lastish leg in an ongoing event to celebrate another year of the store being open following a massive photo contest (I totally intended to make a whole post about my image in the vain hope of maybe winning something, but ah well! I missed my chance!) and this year a clever grid-wide hunt via HUD. One of the things I've done for a few years now is take photographs of the dancers, trying to swim through lag to take images of each guest as they arrive and some of the highlights of the event. This year, may I say, I outdid myself - I took almost 100 pictures covering three different events, and I even now and then managed to take something almost artistic.

Dance images are always a challenge to take. First of all there's the impossibility of getting a clean image - an image without a ton of background or with the right amount of background. Secondly, there's catching a clean pose. Dances are notoriously skeleton bending and uneven, and capturing something that changes in seconds is incredibly difficult. It also becomes a really fun challenge to manage something artistic - it flexes a different sort of sense; a different source of inspiration. I'm sharing a few of my favorites out of the hundred here, and I look forward to my next change to capture the moment in such an exciting and dynamic manner.

( Other Sunday Squees. )

( More Images form the Dance Party here. )

Watercolors in the Rain on LEA 29

Based on a novel by David Lavigne, Watercolors in the Rain is a dreamy sim with a chocolate sky wall blocking off it's sister sims. The welcome area is a low-walled garden with fountains and a lot of information about various topics, some clearly part of the story-theme of the sim while others are more confusing. The largest signs are about the White Raven Hunt Quest; one flat gives a sample of the prizes available, but the details and how this hunt fits into the story (the white and black ravens are companions of Moxxie and Crud) only is shared once you go through the pink gate. The prize images for this hunt are flanked by two Evo*Mystic Faeries, and their inclusion here and later is also confusing, as otherwise there is no indication of fairies in the story - though one of the fairies is named "Moxxie". The colored obelisks off to one side offer teleportation offers - the first menu based, the second to the first flat, and the third to the beginning of the hunt.

The stated purpose is to bring to life the world of this story, Watercolors in the Rain, through the use of three dimensional building and interactive activities like quests and musical events. I found the builds overall lovely but the structure and purpose confusing; many of the transitions are lovely and well done - I'll note the transition from autumn to winter in particular, between The London Street and The Mountain Top Saloon (The Farm is not in between them; it is in a different direction) - but the flats are in a strange order, there are gaps between them which affect immersion, and the actual written content is bare of most interesting details while also often not matching up with the builds themselves. As a form of marketing it is confusing and left me annoyed rather than curious. As a form of art there were moments of beauty but no real emotional content besides the most perfunctory - scary wolf for fear, snowy scene for isolated, dead bodies for horror. However, if you want to find some lovely spots for sitting or spending time with friends, this is a perfect choice and others than I might be less thrown by the apparent plot.

Events: Burn2 - Carnival of Mirrors

Burn2 in Second Life is going on through the 25th of October. There are six sims - Deep Hole, Looking Glass, Limbo, Jade, Black Rock, and Frog Pond - all of them broken up into smaller camps created by individuals or small groups around the themes of Carnival and Mirrors. Each small area is a "camp" like on the actual Playa, but within Second Life - of course - people can come and go much more easily than offline, and so there are many fewer people to run across outside of scheduled events. There seem to always be a few knots of green on the mini-map, though, marking out places where people are gathering. Bits of road mark paths here and there, but you can make your own way between the camps spotting brilliance and bright lights alike.

Sunday Squee: Royal Story

The Sunday Squee is about things that make me happy and excited. From books to movies to television shows to podcasts, I'll highlight less commonly known things as a way to share what I love. If you want to join in the Sunday Squee, please link back to me, magnifying both of our joy.

Royal Story is an opportunity to build your own fantastic world, organize it the way you want to, and save your kingdom and everyone associated with it. I can't tell you how reassuring and lovely I found it - beginning with a small island and a few trees, one can create a diverse, moving world full of color and cheer. You begin with a tiny castle and a single ally - but I've been at this a while, and my castle has grown and diversified greatly! I try to keep echos of my early days handy, though, like the little Royal Vineyards on either side of my castle, the first things I actually built! Once something is built you can often upgrade it, adding to it's image and making room to mix and match different stages of each - like my many towers with their different aspects. Most things are harvest-able, either for valuable coin or for the variety of items you need in order to save heroes, reform monsters, and save the world.

Genre: Rose Fairy in the Club

This Genre is Urban, and so I started my descent into the night by making up a neko club girl! I actually love the combination of ears, tail, and hair enough that I'm setting my neko alt up with them - I'm a calico with attitude!

Quickie Tutorial: Ratio Photography in Firestorm's Second Life

The easiest way to make an image fit a ratio is to crop it in a graphics program, like Gimp, but if you want to take the picture within Second Life itself, this is the tutorial for you!

This guide is for taking these pictures in Firestorm, but the default browser likely has similar functionality.

In Firestorm, "Snapshot" can be viewed either large, as below, or small. The important part is to the left under DISK, though.

Up close, you can see that it is set to save to disk. Under that is a drop-down menu with a number of options, the bottom of which is "custom", which allows you to manually change the width and height. Then make sure the "constrain proportions" box is unclicked, as below, so that the numbers won't snap to the aspect ratio of your screen.

Finally, type in your numbers. If you find math challenging, using the Ratio Calculator at tutorvista.

Hope this helps!

Sunday Squee: The Chromatic Life

The Sunday Squee is when I can talk about things that make me happy and excited. The main focus will be on different things people created, from books to movies to television shows to podcasts, and my effort will be to highlight less commonly known things as a way to share what I love. If you want to join in the Sunday Squee, please link back to me so I can enjoy what you love!

The Chromatic Life is a podcast about diversity in all of it's forms in the context of all forms of media - from television shows, to conventions, to the news. Hosted by Javier Payano, Tanya DePass, and Matt Lancaster, the podcast hit the ground running, covering such diverse topics as the recent Confederate Flag controversy, the video game Splatoon, the Pixel's Movie, Internet "Fame", a televised shooting in Virginia and the ramifications of the images being shown, and Janae Marie Kroc going public with being gender-fluid and the effect on her weight lifting career. At times moving, enraging, inspiring, and comforting - The Chromatic Life offers many opportunities for learning about all of the intersecting social justice movements and how they play out in a decidedly unjust world. Additionally, the hosts are simply fun - maintaining that difficult balance of loving problematic things and keeping a sense of humor about the world. With only six episodes under their belt, it's amazing how much they've already accomplished and I'm excited to see what will come of them in the future!

 

( More Sunday Squee here. ) 

Drop of Sky on the Earth

My world has been full of changes in the past month. Within the span of three weeks - literally three weeks - I moved my house and my office, and everything is still up in the air and very much in flux. I keep losing things, dropping things, forgetting things - even more than usual. I've also been doing a lot of thinking about priorities and desires - sparked in part with spending more time roleplaying. My world is a very full one, these days, and I am very blessed. I'm not sure what roll the "type about things" part of my blog will retain, though. Although a lot of designers have said in other contexts that they value fashion bloggers who write about their creations, my experience has been that it is significantly less important - and also that it often doesn't add real value to the pictures unless it's the sort of in depth review I'm disinclined to make. I've enjoyed looking up and talking about different styles and suchlike, but the sort of breathless 'I love this' post may well be a thing of the past.

Genre: The Rainbow Zone

Any world can be created in Second Life, even a rainbow version of the Twilight Zone, and the furniture and sets available at Genre this month make creating your own land of improbable geometry both easy and fun. Personally, I started with an amazing chess-and-clocks base from Black Tulip, which is stuffed full of poses as well as personality. The combo of lines and curves make taking pictures from every angle a blast, and I adore the tip-toeing across the top edges of things in particular - it really makes it charming and fun. It comes in black and white but can be tinted to many colors and is easy to dress up if you want a less minimalist style. I'd love to see it with chess pieces in particular, or perhaps some giant clocks. The details I added were similarly surreal, though - 22769 ~ [bauwerk] has both a ladder to nowhere and a stack of chairs to nowhere in their offerings this Genre, and each have a ton of thoughtful, reflective, and silly poses.