“Without my walking stick, I’d go insane…
I can’t look my best, I feel undressed without my cane.”
We shall see if the hobbling masses of Second Life beat a tottering path to my door to purchase one of 3 walking sticks.
If they don’t, I shall have to find something else to make and sell…
I created another Pacific Northwest Coast-style bracelet, photographed it, embellished the image with my gimpy GIMP skillz, added it to my otherwise empty XStreetSL inventory, and got the thing listed. #Completed
Kwakiutl-style Silver Bracelet... Eagle, or Raven?
I’m not sure if it depicts an Eagle or a Raven, but I think the Raven in PNW Indian art usually has a bluntly pointed beak, and this one looks more like a raptor’s hooked schnozz.
It’s for sale on XStreetSL, it’s in a box in my mostly-empty shop inworld, and it’s also in a vendor that I just got working, that was given out in an excellent “Sell What You Make” class at Caledon Oxbridge University.
I’m about to buy some things by other builders that will make it easier for me to actually Get Stuff Done and not witter about so much; I’ve been working on a few different items for sale (as has Dhughan) but I felt I had to stop and learn about the GIMP and also get over my frustration with Sculptypaint.
Effectively, I had blocked myself from making things, because although I was kept awake at night with ideas for chunky necklaces, antique art glass, and Indian artifacts and jewelry, I could not make myself settle down and complete something. It was always on to thinking up, starting, but not finishing something else. Meanwhile, my house remains rather primitively textured, it’s not really furnished, and it needs to be completely rebuilt because it’s clear that it’s much too small and cramped inside (not to mention, too high in prims).
I was well and truly stuck, and ironically it was Dhughan who carried on in his quiet way, making things that he found useful or that meant something to him, and he made a couple of sales on XStreetSL, the cheeky basstodd, while I couldn’t seem to get started. Today, however, I found myself motivated again, determined to knock some things off of my mental “To Do” list at last.
Ready To Vend
And knock them off I have. I created and boxed the bracelet (even made the sculpty for it, too). I figured out the second vendor (which was better than the first one I tried), built a sales counter from scratch and adapted the modern-industrial fireplace the building came with so as to be a bit more steampunkish. And then I put out more furniture, but now I need more prims… so I’m eyeing that land across from me with bad intent.
It’s all because I was so saddened and moved by this post from Ordinal Malaprop’s excellent blog, which I couldn’t easily link or quote before as I posted previously via aetheric telephonic intertubal gadgetry.
I felt that I should write a final entry here to clarify recent events and the current situation.
What have you done?
I have removed every building and item of mine from the Grid, most notably, Caledon and New Babbage. (At least, I think I have; there may be a few bits and pieces left scattered about.) Ordinal Enterprises is no longer a functioning operation. I have not abandoned my land – for the moment I will hold onto it. It just won’t contain anything of significance.
I also do not plan to write any more in this Journal for a considerable time, though I may change my mind there.
Does this mean you’ve left Second Life?
In practice, probably yes, unless I ever find some new form of inspiration – though I expect I will pop back occasionally, either in relation to work, or to feed the parcel meters.
My intention in doing these things was not to leave Second Life, but Ordinal Enterprises is (or was) such a significant part of my existence and day-to-day behaviour that without it, I find it hard to imagine what I would do now.
Why on earth would you do that?
This is quite a difficult question, and may not have a coherent answer at all, but I will do my best to produce one. It will, I expect, be very self-indulgent.
Of course it’s not self-indulgent to step back and assess whether one is actually enjoying an all-consuming pastime (whether it pays its way, or whether it’s a hobby). I’ve admired Ordinal’s work from a distance for a couple of years now, and I’m just glad I finally visited her shop recently (Dhugan did, too, and has his own story to tell on that score).
I only hope that Miss Malaprop will return someday soon and rediscover the enjoyment she once felt when she was creating amazing, clever things.
@Ordinal’s announcement has caused a stir of sympathy and dismay amongst the #SecondLife #Twitterati. It distresses yet comforts me to know that even the most accomplished and celebrated builders struggle with completion issues, ennui, and an overriding desire to chuck it all into the outer darkness and do something, ANYthing else for a while.
I wish Ordinal Malaprop a rejuvinating break, and hope for a very speedy return.
That said, I’ve now wasted about two months since my belated burst of builder’s mania, with a mostly finished house on bare land, plus an empty shop building on another plot of bare land in Tintafel. I haven’t completed anything for sale, although Dhughan sold two items ( but refunded one due to a perms issue).
It’s high time I complete one item for sale, upload it to XStreetsl (yes, I know, it’s a start), and blog about it. Also, Dhughan is going to have his own login here and possibly blog about his items for sale. I don’t know if he’ll have to have his own Twitter account; possibly, for narrative purposes.
I’m currently working out and will head home shortly, but I can now at least say “45 minutes on the reclined bike @70 rpm, done. Completed.”
Was it too easy to import and redirect my old Blogger blog to my new self-hosted WordPress blog? Yes, suspiciously so. I didn’t even have time to shout “Wish me luck, I’m off to crash the server,” because… well, it’s all done.
Weird how technology works how it’s supposed to work.
Tonight, I hung out watching the SOTU speech with friends at Cafe Wellstone, but then got a notice of a building class, so I tore off, built a cute little Asian cabinet (it looks vaguely retro 70’s, pix later), and then promptly lost the second project, a glass candy dish.
Actually, the class instructions were for a square one with kind of plain textures, but I had this rad Steampunk Glass texture (actually, violet pavement lights from someplace like Seattle or Portland, where they’re common). It was looking really pretty after I twisted the flared, square dish into something a little more interesting. I was all set to pull it into inventory when hey presto! it went elsewhere.
It’ll show up eventually, maybe I’ll leave out some candy. 😉
Thanks to my partner Rock, I naow has a domain of which I am Queen, Empress, and Chief Prim-Twister. As my chum Mist might well say, “fear teh wahine neko. FEAR HER.”
Now to avoid the temptation: a very large parcel has suddenly gone up for sale in front of my shabby little adobe dwelling, for about $150.00 real USD American ducats. Now I get to watch the neighbors move in (and I hope they’re nice and not naked all the time, because teh smexy should never be boring).
I used to have a view of the leftover furniture and the rather nice landscaping left behind by the former dance club that must have been there before the big move of adult businesses to Zindra.
Wanna buy some land? Not cheap?
And so, I have a view of blank green land, and no idea what I’ll be looking at, or when. It’s a weird region, Tintafel: it’s home to the Socrates Club, an Orthodox Christian church-museum, a store with flickering textures, and my randy but quiet neighbors. There’s just about something for everybody.
In “Lelani Finally Buys, Then Sells A Clue” news, I didn’t create anything today, but I did pick up some wonderful textures and even more invaluable tips at a class I attended today at K.I.E (Kokyoto Textures‘ tutorial arm). It was conducted in voice chat, which was interesting, but the really interesting part was when we all built gift bags, put stuff in them for free, and bought them from each other. The squeaky chocolate cookie I got from someone was the best part, as no one could resist sqeezing and squeaking each other’s cookies. And I managed to get mine made, textured, permissioned (as in “give contents,”) and with “Buy on click” correctly set, too. I got an A+ from the instructor on that one.
Joined their group, as it was a very useful session for all that we wandered a bit during an interruption staged by someone who dropped by, snagged the free textures, and left. It was tacky of them, to say the least…
So I have this snazzy new domain and self-hosted WordPress blog, and as I have some experience with WordPress already, I’m quite happy with this free theme right out of the box. Yes, I’ll probably swap out the header image… but I has a neat trick! Ooo! Yes! To set it up with a rotating set of images to be swapped, ho ho! Yes, I can do that later.
Previous words to be imported from the old Blogger blog eventually real soon probably. Just as soon as I finally build something and put it out for sale, and get the shop opened up.
Have RL errands in the morning but hope to get some serious stuff done tomorrow. Because I are mistress of my domain naow, dammits.
Okay, this is really, really… weird.
I was in a class at Caledon Oxbridge and realized that it was a little more basic than I needed (though it was about making them, it was actually about finding and wearing clothes and attachments). So on a whim, I whipped out my iPhone and tried to log in my alt to see what would happen (yes, I know it’s possible to log in with multiple computers and laptops, but this… this is an iPhone, people).
And… succeeded. But in a truly odd way.
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| From Northwest Indian Images |
He’s a wizened little boy in need of a shave and a haircut. 2 bits? Heh. There I am, standing behind my “child.” And if you really know me, you know how intensely creepy I find this idea.
I have no idea why he’s half-size, except that it may be because he’s logged in via the iPhone app (Touch Life). As he’s got an animation overrider loaded, he changes stands, and can move after a fashion, although I ended up teleporting to his location. Turns out I’d logged Dhughan out at the Caledon Oxbridge sandbox, and currently the viewer is set to log him in from at his last location, so there you are. Or there I are, and me too.
Good thing I don’t care about people knowing my “real” identity, along with both of my Second Life personae, or I wouldn’t be able to quickly share the bloggy goodness via Picasa’s “upload” feature.
And oh drat, Vista and Picasa Web Albums have conspired again to put the image on a new album page. That’s another reason I’ll be making a big change to this blog soon. Although it’s very convenient to use Picasa sometimes, because it can upload an image to a web album, it has its own ideas about naming folders, nesting folders within folders, and creating new web album pages based on the folder name unless carefully watched.
So: although I didn’t create anything new tonight, I did decide to get a domain name for the new venture, and I found some wonderful public domain images and inspiration today. Big plans afoot, though not anything as big as Natalia’s new sim for the store she’s rebuilding. This blog will soon be re-directed to the new domain, which will be a WordPress blog (yay! Categories! Widgets! CSS Drop shadows (don’t ask)!
I have so many ideas, but still learning how to make stuff, texture stuff, build stuff, and sculpt stuff. I end up talking to myself while trying to figure it out, kind of like talking to Dhughan here, except not as intellectually stimulating.
As in:
WTF?? GIMP whoooooooooooo? Sculptypaint whaaaaaaaaaaaa? WTF WTF… oh! ok.
Yeah, there’s been some swearing and banging and Googling and frankly wasting a lot of time reading posts on Second Life-type forums while looking for tutorials and how-to guides (and also getting a feel for the rough and tumble in the discussion boards, not to mention figuring out who not to piss off if possible).
However, I’ve actually succeeded in getting acceptable results for a “marketing” type image to use on XStreetSL (which the cool kids all hate now, of course, but it’s a place to start).
I still have to figure out some kind of “getting things done” workflow to help me stay on task with SL as far as getting an idea out of my head and on to the screen without losing interest halfway through and starting some other half-baked idea. So far I don’t get much done on weeknights other than chat with friends and attend classes; but I can’t always count on having uninterrupted time on weekends AND I tend to make new n00b friends easily that I meet in class, which also leads to more chatting and less creating.
Dhughan is going to have to be less of a social butterfly, that’s for sure.
My plan is for Dhughan to be self-supporting, and he’s made something saleable at least. It needs to be packaged for XStreetSL, too.
Maybe he’ll be able to get more done tomorrow… or else I’ll have another one of our little chats.
Pink has announced on the blog that there will be a Valentine’s hunt and is asking for people to provide full perms items for said hunt, the blog post can be read here.
Basically this is a promotional opportunity for those who provide items that are deemed worthy by the Linden panel of judges, including adult items. Although I’m very bah humbug about Valentine’s day, I recall people writing they had a lot of fun with this exercise last year.
This year, there’s a lot less love around for the commerce Lindens and of course we have the great freebie cull at Xstreet to come in the near future, allegedly, so love certainly isn’t in the air with Linden Lab but try and see the fun in an exercise like this and the promotion opportunities. Feel free to spread your love and your love of freebies around, before the big bad wolf appears to ruin all the fun.
Ginny
Woops, did a quick and dirty screenshot-crop, it included some chat and buttons.
Anyway, what is this for, and is it good, bad, or neutral? From the angle, you can see the trench that’s another garbage plot, and in fact this probe sits in a trench with another smaller garbage plot that’s bounded on 3 sides by a decent-sized 400m plot that’s currently overpriced for the prims it would bring.
I don’t know, it’s weird. It used to be that some ghost avatar would show up and do something in that plot, and now there’s a probe.
Fortunately not visible in the background: my neighbors, who are into kinky public antics.
::eyeroll::
It’s a beautiful day in the virtual world!
aioSimProbe is an advanced Simulator Statistics and Analysis Collector for Second Life. With aioSimProbe region-specific performance data can be easily tracked and analyzed, allowing a holistic view of Second Life region performance over time.
The initial release of aioSimProbe is available now, and with its release several key features will be available:
Just enjoyed a pleasant half hour listening to Flivelwitz Alsop’s first Musical Sculptures show at his undersea lair in Alsop.
I’d been missing the Sundays at his old show, but I received a group message last night that he was beginning again at a gallery location full of beautiful things to look at.
This happens to be in the undersea area, which is why everything is so dim, but there are several other levels to explore via teleports.
Lovely area, definitely worth a visit.
Side note: finally got around to playing withe freebie version of Mysti-Tool and discovered the very handy features it has, like pasting a Second Life URL (“SLURL”) into text.
Otherwise, not a very productive day so far; I was trying to teach myself how to use the free version of Ged Larsen’s LoopRez but wasn’t having much success this time, as I was trying for an ellipse rather than a mostly round choker.
Clearly, I need to spend more time learning how to make stuffs. Meantime, my alt Dhugan rented a cheap shop in Steelhead Shanghai, but really doesn’t have anything out yet. It’s just a place to call “home” for now. On the other hand, due to my own stupidity, I had left a large USD amount on the Secondlife.com website, thinking I would be using it for tier payments for the next 6 or 8 months. The funds are from a reloadable incentive gift card that I’ve blogged about before, because using it involves jumping through about 5 hoops as SL does not directly take American Express, but the shopping site XStreetSL does.
But my yearly payment went through the other day, and completely washed out my big credit, paid this month’s tier, and then took a few dollars more from my normal credit card.
Rather than be pissed off and demand Linden Labs change the form of payment on my yearly subscription to the normal card, and credit back the USD onto my account, I decided… well, the incentive paid for 2010, plus this month’s tier of $8.00USD, but as it was a planned expense, I’d go ahead and upgrade the alt account to Premium for the year, with the benefit of the weekly stipend. And I believe there’s still a $L1000 signing bonus, so that’s Dhughan financed for the year, although I expect him to make his own way in the world peddling pictures, frames, and silver trade bracelets.
Speaking of which, I really need to get cracking, making some. I also had an idea to have him make graniteware metal plates, bowls, and mugs – the sort of thing that people on the frontier used in mining and logging camps. Which would mean, of course, that I have to learn to make such stuffs.
My friend Mist had an idea the other day for stuffs, too, so will have to get geared up for that as well.