May Contain Nuts

Well. Second Life is acting up for me. I haven’t been able to log in for more than five minutes in the past few days before my computer has a seizure. Nothing I do to it makes any change. This is really, really annoying - especially since stuff happening in my RL will mean that I will probably be on leave for some time come March.

For the first time, I would be able to be in SL without having the nagging thought of “You really should be doing something else” in my head, and THIS happens. Gah.

So it seems I’m once again able to use my past experiences for SL: I’m getting back into web design. I once worked for two years in a PR company as head, and indeed only, webdesigner, and since then have been making pages for fun. Now I’m doing a page for the Conservatory, and with some luck maybe for other people as well. It’s still fun and a way to experiment with the images I have in my head.

Next project: Make and upload sounds. Because yes, for a bunch of years I worked in a music lab, and did my own radio shows.

OK, so I cannot build to save my life, clothes design others can do a lot better, and scripting, though interesting, is something I don’t have time to learn. But maybe I should write a CV and let people know of my other talents.

beauty

Originally uploaded by Ginger Shostakovich

Ents and tiny furs and mermaids aside, what do you think about this?

The other day, I bought a house  to sit on the land that D and Misty allow me to use (I’m not a land buyer and won’t be in the forseeable future, unless my RL hands me a winning lottery ticket). It’s a nice little two-storey house made of stone, with a distinctive medieval feel. The downstairs room has a fireplace, and I decorated it to fit the medieval theme - fur rugs on the floor, medieval wall hangings on the walls to keep out the draft, nice wood-carved furniture.

The upstairs room is a bit more modern, mixed with Japanese, with a  fouton bed  and Japanese wall hangings. There’s still the tree with the Edo bell in the garden, as well as my Buddha and meditation pillow.  I’m nothing if not eclectic.

I’m also starting to take my Conservatory Event Manager job a lot more seriously. The Conservatory idea is what got me hooked in the first place, and I want to try and really put it on the map of SL as a cultural arts and performing arts centre.  I know it can be done, all it needs is a bit of effort to get the ball rolling, making contacts, getting word out there.

Fun times.

… and then I found out that I can now listen to KONA Radio without being logged into SL. YAY! (yay!) I think next to the BBC, KONA is my favourite radio station. Seriously.

I was really out looking for a medieval dress. In the end, I shopped avatars - now I can be a raven, or a cute little raccoon, or a crab… There really is no limit here.

ETA: And why stick with animals? I quite like myself as a sycamore.

The second reading didn’t go as well as the first, mainly because I was distracted by a headache and stumbled over a lot of the words. But the audience was forgiving (and giving), so I seemed to have done alright. It was a first again: I read one of my own stories, “Beauty and the Truth”, and it seemed to go over well.

I think my next reading will be Science Fiction-themed, because I want to read one of my stories again, and most are SF.  Or I’ll do something supernatural and finally reveal the story behind one of the pictures hanging in the Library.

Oh, and I hope to find other authors who want to read… and I’m looking forward to reading what Eresieh will send me.

Continuing my adventures in the skin department, I had a look around various shops and free stuffs. The free skins were mostly not to my taste, except the Blade Runner make-up one and the pale Vampire one, so I kept these and removed the others from my inventory (which is getting too full anyway, I need to get rid of stuff I never wear… ). The skins I could buy, well, I didn’t see any that I would really spend Lindens on - looking at the models, I couldn’t imagine how the skin would look on my face. Also, the anatomically “correct” ones? That’s not what I’m in SL for, thank you very much.

And then, GoSpeed posted about good-looking, free skins, and I thought, what have I got to lose? Indeed, trying on these skins, I felt I found what I was looking for. Four different skin tones, with or without freckles. Also, the make-up variations are incredible - something for every occasion. And I love the way the different make-ups are called.
But wearing this skin, my face looked ummm… so I played around a bit with some sliders, and voilá! Result:

Quite different from the n00b I used to be, eh?

What I do like, however, is dressing extremely out of context occasionally. Like the other night, when I was at a dance. All the girls (women?) were wearing next-to-nothing; just enough to be decent, in fact. The dancefloor was awash with skin, thigh-high latex boots, fans, boobs… you get the picture.

I was there, dancing along with the skinniest and sexiest, in my usual small, slightly-too-much-bum shape, with Nora’s “Ice Contemporary” outfit, which said schoolmarm or old-school librarian to me when I first put it on - so, I wore a bun hairstyle, my horn-rimmed glasses, and pearl drop earrings (no bling), black stockings, and Mary Jane’s.

I definitely stood out in the crowd. And for some reason, seeing myself in that outfit, dancing, I felt as though I was the sexiest person there - because scantily-clad dancers are a dime a dozen, while a teacher doing the boogie is something you don’t see every day. In my opinion, it’s the unusual, the slightly surreal and absurd, that is interesting.