So despite my vows not to go to Skin Fair 2016, I did.  Only to discover that almost no vendor creates system avatar skins anymore.  They only skin mesh heads now and mesh parts.

This awful outcome is the result of two things...market exploitation and and ideology.

Market Exploitation

I suppose most avatar creators feel that mesh parts and mesh avatars are the end all and be all.  Little does it matter that Mesh bodies and parts are unalterable by their purchasers. If you buy a mesh body, it will deform a bit in correlation to the system avatar body, but not by much.  Mesh heads cannot be changed at all.  So a customer will look like every other customer who buys the same mesh head.  If they try to alter their look, they can buy the now legion offerings from various skin creators.  But that still doesn't stop them from looking like every other person who purchased the same skin.  I can also see why creators are clamoring to skin mesh avatars and parts, it's easier.  The bodies and heads don't change.  In fact all they really need to create are the heads.  The body skin can be the same across all lines since only the head will change.

Ideology

For many years now, there have been motivated howlers, mainly creators, screeching how the average SL user creates lag.  That all of us ruin SL by making our avatars too tall and many bodies are also out of proportion.  Their opposites would point to the "your world" ethos of SL and stated that people were allowed to design their own looks.  Now I can see both sides of the argument.  Yes, out of proportion avatars can make designing items harder in SL.  However telling people they can't design their own features in VR is just as awful.  Now I see that the Mesh avatar movement has done by stealth what the vocal restriction advocates wanted for years.  It prevents people from designing their own avatars.  We have in  proportion avatars that are cookie cutter boring.

The almost total abandonment of people who do still design their own avatars is heinous.  There are people in SL who do have a sense of proportion and enjoy playing with the body controls to create their look.  Why should these people (I am one) be forced into mesh body pieces?  Not only that why should I have to suffer the fetish peccadilloes of certain creators (Big Asses, Big Lips, Big Hips, Big Boobs etc) when I buy items for my avatar?  Why is it a crime that I want my avatar to share some of my own features?

What is even more disturbing is that the few creators who do still create system avatars put absolutely no enthusiasm into these items.  Almost all the creators at this year's skin fair, the few who did create system skins, used the same skin template.  Hence every system avatar looked the same no matter what creator stall you visited.  Now that is just miserly.  Unless it's a subtle dig at mesh resistors and meant to push them into the standardized clone economy of mesh.

So now it seems that I will be locked mainly into skins created in 2015 and before.

This is what I will be prevented from doing from now on.  I can't look myself with mesh heads:





Nor can I design Portrait Avatars such as these with Mesh heads:

If only I could get onto the Sim!

A few years back The Season's Story hunt was all the rage in SL.  I was one of its fans.  But due to time factors and other things, the group behind this hunt disbanded and the hunt ended.  A few people from that group created a new event in the spirit of Season's Story and called it Arcade Gacha.

Arcade Gacha or more like GOTCHA!  I love and loathe Gachas in SL.  Gachas are little quasi-gambling machines where you put money and hope to get a good prize.  Mainly a rare.  Which in the picture above the rare is a beautiful little cottage for your avatar.  Lately I haven't been doing much in SL but I do try to attend this event.  And I spend too much money at it.  But how can anyone resist?  Look at another vendor offering victorian treehouses!

If home items aren't your thing, there are plenty of vendors offering fashion items, clothing and avatar skins/hair.  Pets are very popular as well.  The popular pet to collect this fall are Shibu Inus.  But if you really want to be one with the animals, there is a gacha specializing in Raccoon Avatars.

There is so much more available.  So if you have time during September try to get on the sim and buy!  See the rest of the vendor offerings HERE.

Hamster Lovin

Second Life was the first program that got me into massive multi-player worlds. In fact, I think I found SL so easy to learn because I was not a gamer. So the arcane UI was not a hinderance. It did however make learning WoW's UI a torturous experience. Anyway games come and go but I always find time to wander a bit around SL. A lot of people find the place daunting and unfriendly but to people willing to stick out the learning curve it becomes more like "Cheers". Fall is the best time in Second Life. People are starting to gear up for the holidays and the major shopping events and hunts begin all over the grid. Right now the place for SL hipsters to be is The Arcade Gacha Event.

The Gacha events have taken up the slack of the much missed and very much loved Seasons Hunt event. Unlike treasure hunt events, Gacha events are a bit like going to Atlantic City. You put a bit of money into a slot machine and win various different prizes. It can be addictive. Especially for popular items. The Arcade Gacha Event is set up like an old Victorian, Atlantic City pavilion. It is filled with little slot machines which contain numerous variations of prizes that consist of furniture, clothing, knick knacks and avatars. The big hit of this event is Beetlebones' Hamster.

This adorable hamster is a mesh based avatar that a player can wear. It comes in various colors. The price to play and win a coveted color is 100L (around a $1 real money). So far, I have only 4 colors.

The Arcade event is extremely crowded and I haven't been able to get back after my first visit. But I will be heading back to bet on more hamsters and other fancies.

For those interested, Second Life will be coming to Steam soon. There are some changes being made to accomodate this new partnership. Perhaps it will even out the steep learning curve. Who knows? If it does, then you too can be a hamster.



The Hamster vid is from Larcoco's Flickr stream

Venison Arts

Good furniture is the basis of an SL home.  But it is art that makes it very personal.  I'm always on the look out for galleries.  There are galleries that specialize in reproduction prints.

And then there are original artists working inside SL that create prints from their own artwork.

Venison Arts is one of those places.  The art prints have dark fairy tale and nature themes showcased by lovely illustration work.  I now have a collection from the gallery and I'm always saving up for a few more prints.

The shop is located in a small skybox and decorated with a romantic victorian vibe.

You can visit and purchase your own original pieces here:
slurl.com/secondlife/bondar/242/27/3407/

Venison Arts also has a website in which an SL owner can order real prints for their physical homes too.
http://www.venisonarts.com/va/gallery/

Renew

One of the best elements and sometimes the worst elements of SL is that it is continually changing. People move in and move away from land plots.  Stores come and go.  Private sims appear and then disappear.  Many times it is the nicest parts that melt away with only screenshots left as reminders to SL fans.

But this isn't about sad change but happy change.  Tableau is one of my favorite destinations in SL.  It is a shopping sim with a shared design vision among the creators.  The only other sim to match it is Drowsy.

Tableau is constantly renewing itself.  When I first visited the sim, it's theme was the Louisiana bayou.  Then it changed to a New Orleans Mardi Gras look.  Now in it's newest incarnation, it has been turned into a small town that seems to have missed most of the 20th century.  Its stuck somewhere between 1920 to 1950.  Truthfully it looks like the film set from "The Night Of The Hunter".

Here are a few shots I took recently of the new design.

Visit Tableau via this link : http://slurl.com/secondlife/Tableau/128/128/0

Pink Lady

The outfit for the day.

Hair - Fri.day - Dylan

Cardigan - Nylon Outfitters - Pink Cheetah

Shirt - BLAND - Posh Red Shirt

Skirt - DeeTaleZ - Golden Wrinkled Skirt

Boots - Zero Number - Used Boots Ami

Green Vision

Saturday around the virtual house look.

Hair - Clawtooth by Clawtooth - Sweet Whispers

Cardigan - Kurotsubaki - Simple Knit

Shirt - BLAND - Stripey shirt

Jeans - Milk Motion - My Boyfriend's Jeans

Shoes - Magi - Take Chucker

Virtual Fall

An outfit for virtual fall.

Hair - Fri.day - Eloise
Shirt - BP - Bottan Shirt
Skirt - Huming - Wool Check Skirt
Tights - Twosome - Cozy tights
Boots - Zero Number (ON) - Wo Gomi

Headache Free

I'm all about easy fashion choices in SL.

Hair - BP - First Date
Shirt - Surf Couture - La Plage
Jeans - Decoy - Stevens Jeans

Rustica and Lagnmoor

The biggest and more successful shops in SL have their own sims.  Those sims can be quite beautiful.  A wonderful example is Rustica and Lagnmoor.

The Lagnmoor sim contains a village with prefab houses that customers can buy.  They are nicely made, low prim and contain beautiful textures.  The builds also come with a small amount of furniture included in the box.  So its ready for avatar living almost immediately.

In the above picture, is a view of one of the houses for sale.  Its a called the Crooked house and it has a very fairy tale feel to it.  It is one of the smaller builds, so it doesn't take up a lot of space.  Which is nice, especially if you have a small plot.

Lagnmoor is connected to the main sim, Rustica.  Rustica contains a huge castle which houses the furniture store.

The castle contains many labyrinthine rooms and halls which are fun to explore.

The castle store has many furniture collections for sale that will fit the style of a new Lagnmoor home.

You can visit both of these sims by following the links listed below.

Lagnmoor
http://slurl.com/secondlife/LagNmoor/128/128/0

Rustica
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rustica/128/128/0

Garden Fantasy

My favorite places in all of Second Life are gardens.  I love looking at how other residents set up their small plots of greenery, which makes Flickr's Second Life Gardens and Homes groups some of the regulars that I watch.

Getting land in SL is not cheap.  So that puts a limit on what a single landowner can do.  But the greenery merchants have the resources to create spectacular sims filled with dream gardens for every season.

The first of these gardens that I visited in SL was Creative Fantasy.  I believe on my first visit it was only two sims and shared a third with another merchant.  But now the garden has four sims dedicated to each season.  All of the sims are beautiful, but my favorite by far is Winter.

Winter at Creative Fantasy bucks the Americana/Britannia Victoriana vibe of other gardens and takes it's inspiration from Russia.  Which makes it very unique and a bit exotic for Second Life.

Hidden in the nooks and crannys of the Winter Garden, you can find animals frolicking in the snow. Bears and wolves are the main residents of the Winter Garden but there are deer and others.  Of course, Winter Garden has loads of Holiday decorations and greenery for all an SL resident's needs. Everything is for sale and its hard to exert some self control when wandering around the sim.

You can visit this wonderful area by clicking on this link:

slurl.com/secondlife/spellbound%20woods/145/143/41/