Five Free from the Hair Fair

I'm sure you've braved the lag and muddled through the fair at least once. Aside from all the fabulous new hairstyles you can pick up there, there are some kick ass freebies. Here's a quick bit on 5 of my faves:

Kin goggleshairgirl: I love this hair. It's perfect for being a bit steampunk, or a bit cybergoth, and it is ubercute with little tails (and the other one in the pack is perfect for those days when you feel like being a bit of a flower child). (Worn with silentsparrow Sweeney in Sepia, and Schadenfreude Plain Buckle Platform boots)

Philotic Energy Gale: There are a few awesome fatpacks at the PE booth, including this one. PE hair is always cute, and this is no exception (and there's also a nice boy hair in there!) with spiky sticky out bits pulled back. (Worn with Schadenfreude Rose Webbeater, Hot Pink Stripe Pants, Flewksbriar, and Heortecaeg)

Eat Rice Puety: Supercute anime hair. There's a really great star barette at the side, and a strand of a different colour hair at it in many of the colours. (Worn with katat0nik Ghostfire boots and dress- the purple dress is in the Fortune chair, which is soooo awesome. It can be harder than a Lucky Chair, but it's _way_ more fun/social, standing around trying to find your dream lover!)

Ingenue Gidget: Do we sense a theme for hair of consummate cuteness? Little curly pigtails pulled back, in a few candy colours, from Ingenue, evoking, well, Gidget herself. (Worn with Ki2 Lady of the Pins in black, Violet Voltaire ganK, Schadenfreude Azure Webbeater, Pitch Stripe Pants, Koijini earrings)

Refuge Ana: Pulled back long flowing tails with colour change hairbands, a bit more rock and roll than just normal pulled back ponytails. (Worn with Ki2 Sacred Heart tee, Tres Blah Faded Juju Jeans, katat0nik Purple Ghostfire boots)

All pictures taking hanging out on the outside of the giant Happy Mood sphere. A lot of the poses are in the big peep-like stuffed bunnies around, all of which are poseballs. A pox on SL's reeeeally crappy horizons, even with my draw distance all the way up they are ugly.

Birthday Cakery

My RL birthday is almost upon me, so here you can see something a little more like the "real" me. I will admit I gave up on really trying to make a shape that looks like me the very first time I tried, years ago, but it is, I suppose, somewhat closeish.

But! I has cake(ry)! And presents!

Katat0nik, once again, has released a gorgeous detailed dress, this time with the cutest little cakes on it (I think I'm going into sugar shock just looking at them....and I would sooooo eat them until I got sick) and adorable sprinkly confetti. I'm trying not to be afraid of colour here (looking into my closet is a little like looking into a black hole, for the most part), so I have the Cakery in green (hey, I will probably get wear out of it for Allegory's rezday next year, if I don't forget it again!), and I'm wearing it with pink socks to match the big sugary cake. God, I want cake right now.

I've topped it off with a Birthday confection of less sugar, and more materialism, PUDGE's Birthday Girl. Because after all, who doesn't love presents! And that's one fine hairdresser, to secure those in place with hair instead of ribbons. The Birthday Girl is only available at her booth at the Hair Fair, until Sept. 3rd (or, thereabouts. I think that was the day).

I'm at the Avant Garden here, as I had my heart set on a tea party (and they are harder to find blind that one might assume), and it fit the bill rather nicely.

katat0nik Cakery dress (green)
PUDGE The Birthday Girl hair, purple
Violet Voltaire Glitterati necklace and earrings, black
miaSnow Sophia 2.0 Skin 3
Schadenfreude Pink Knit Stripey Socks, Lucent Bow Heels

Green Goddess

MiaSnow just released green skins. I'd already had the adorable green skin (which makes me feel a bit like a _very_ sexy She-Hulk) that she'd released ages ago...but these, these are something different.

Looking at them, brought to mind this Clive Barker play, Frankenstein in Love, or The Life of Death. It's a fairly early work, and has some amusingly bad puns ("Why did Cain kill his brother? Because he was Abel"), but it follows the good doctor to a Latin American country, where he continues on his dread experiments (he is most definitely not the good guy here- in fact he's far more of a monster than the monsters he has created). He is followed by his first monster, who becomes a revolutionary and calls himself El Coco.

But what I really see here is Veronique Flecker. (Note: if you have read the play, you will have to forgive my failing brain. I don't have my copy here, so I'm going by memory, and mine is far from infallible.)

(MiaSnow Green Goddess 1; Calico Hannah hair; Schadenfreude Wolsey jacket/capris/gloves, Mephisto bodice, Platform Buckle Boots; Miriel Grape Big Eyes tinted a little more purple)


Vero is one of the doctor's experiments, and one corner of the love triangle (you see, both Dr. Frankenstein, and the monster who is often called by his name, fall in love with her. She's a bit more willing to accept El Coco's advances, as the doctor has made her one of her experiments, and killed her husband, so, you know, she's not really that fond of him. Generally the dead guy(s) is way more charming, anyway).

"Do you want to see the part of me sprouting fur? Or feathers? Or scales?"

(MiaSnow Green Goddess 2; ~silentsparrow~ Toxine violet swimsuit, one of a bunch of fabulous colours that the hardcore fisher can now obtain at her dockside fishing. The ash, she eludes me, while I've gotten a half dozen or more of the violet)


Yeah...even if it is focusing on the skin, you aren't going to see me with my kit off. MiaSnow's skins are always soft, and glowing, and beautiful, it's a given that the body will be gorgeous. There are a beautiful variety of Toxine swimsuits, with all the extra cover up pieces that were also a part of the group gift suit, now available at silent sparrow, for those of you who like sitting around shooting the breeze while fishing on the docks. (No, it isn't easy, and you probably won't sit down and get one on your first catch. I've spent hours there and not gotten the ash yet, and it took about 45 minutes to get my very first suit. Fishing is a game for the patient, but you also get fun 7Seas things while trying to get your swimsuits. I finally got my Captain's Log!)

She's undergoing a transformation throughout the play- the doctor's works on her being of a more advanced and sophisticated manner than that of simply assembling a collection of dead men and giving them new life: she's becoming something else entirely, a new form of life. MiaSnow's skins are also a transformative process. 1 is green, spotted on the cheeks, beautiful, but skin. But then, then the scales begin to show, glittering from afar, sneaking across the face, from one side to the other, transforming the avatar into something...else.

(Green Goddess 3; Sn@tch Murder Ballet tutu; Schadenfreude Webbeater, Buckle Platform Boots)


The scales really do glitter, creating a complex variety of colours and shades that creates a unique and fabulous look from afar, as well as close up.

The play ends in a wedding, and a fire. After all, the monsters the world holds a place for are far more terrible than Vero and El Coco, but the world holds no place for that kind. I don't recall whether they take the doctor with them, I would like to think that they did, but as I said, it's been too long.

(Green Goddess 4, ~silentsparrow~ claire de lune corset and tattoo; Schadenfreude Mephisto sleeves and gloves, Revenant skirt; Miriel Grape Big Eyes tinted a little more purple in all shots, laziness has left it out a bit)

Dominion on Miriel

In the heat of
the night
in the heat of the day


There is a new silentsparrow set today. Dominion features beautiful black brocade pants with front pleats, a subtly patterned black shirt (and gloves) to match, and a long jacket in a selection of jewel tones (and of course, black!). As we've all come to know and love from silentsparrow, the jacket has a lovely brocade that positively glows throughout, and the most perfect buttons. hya has also been coming out with some fabulous belting for her long coats recently, this most recent in the series features a very delicate buckle of a lovely shape. This coat has a black interior regardless of the exterior tone, which gives quite a lovely effect.

Really, I don't know why I'm telling you this. It's all there to see! I feel like a car salesman. Except I'm not exaggerating the features, I'm leaving a bunch out.

I'm at the Miriel sim here, which perhaps isn't so new anymore, but, uh, newish? There's a "treasure hunt" as part of the sim itself, with clues to point you in the direction to look (it is, in some ways easy, and others quite hard- finding the spots you are referred to can be challenging, and then the jewelry boxes are quite small!), and which also tell you a story- so guys, even if the jewelry isn't your thing, you may enjoy the hunt!

The island itself is worth an exploratory visit regardless (the clues are built in part to encourage you to discover the features), as it is one of the more beautiful sims in SL. The build is highly reminiscent of Oblivion- and we're talking a game that has an engine far in advance of Second Life's here.


When I close my eyes
when I look your way

Once upon a time, I wore system eyes, and wasn't in any hurry to upgrade. I thought they were perfectly fine really, and they tinted to a nice vibrant green, so I didn't really pay much attention to eyes...until I saw Miriel's. Miriel eyes were the eyes I fell in love with, and have stayed with since- to me, they are the perfect eyes. And here, perhaps, you can get a bit more of a view of the subtle patterning throughout the shirt, that turns a fairly simple men's shirt into a work of art.

(And, while I've never met Miriel, she's to thank for me ever opening up shop. She ran the Jewelry Expo that led to me actually trying this whole selling thing, instead of just hording my Lindens for uploads for things for myself.)


Some day
Some day
Some day


There are versions of the shirt to wear alone, as well as with the jacket with and without a vest (and the jacket alone, as usual, it's a set that begs mixing with other items. And perfect for people like me who have a massive affection for long coats).

And, for those of you who have finished the hunt...am I the only one who wants to wait till midnight and jump off the cliffs? Too bad I think midnight never comes.


Some say prayers

Now
I say mine.


(You know me, I'm credits challenged. All the jewelry is found on the hunt, personal skin, hair that might see release if I play with it more and don't hate my black hair texture and actually do normal colours some day, my platform boots, lyrics by Sisters of Mercy.)

Halp! I've been Ruthed!

I've never thought Ruth was an ugly girl. In fact, the only thing that bothered me about the shape was the hips...or lack thereof. I have kept a Ruth shape for fitting for some time now, as she's a bit closer to "average" than Allegory. (I find her hands a reasonable size, though people prefer them dainty, as well as finding her legs quite long enough- most people overdo the leg length slider, myself included. But I have grown accustomed to my shape, it feels weird when I try to change that. I don't even find her shoulders all that broad....if she actually had some hips to balance that out.)

But! Imagine this is Ruth's skirt shape, and there you go! She's got a bit of a booty then, but hey, a little junk in the trunk is not really a horrible thing.

This does mean, time to plumb the inventory for system skirts. Easier said than done: not only have flexi skirts led to people making many more skirts without the system skirt as they can utilize different shapes, but the skirt bug that has only recently been squashed (cross fingers) has done some more damage as people have been avoiding it (myself included: I've got a number of things I'd been holding off on, although I did finally just go with it for Lurking, as it can work with with less of a wardrobe malfunction if it doesn't load).

Both taken in Tableau:

For look 1, I've set the time here to midday. I've set up a custom day, that jacks up the ambient light, and tones down the sun/moon. Softer lighting = not as harsh shadows that people wear supernova facelights for (not that I can wear a facelight anyway). Full day cycle = you actually get to have NIGHT. And sunrise. And sunset. Automatically.

To make your own day cycle: Go into World->Environment Settings->Environment Editor. Click Advanced Sky. Pull down the dropdown- see A-12AM at the top? As well as 12PM, 3AM/PM, 6AM/PM, and 9AM/PM? Pick one. Go to the Lighting tab, and move the sun slider down a bit, and the ambient slider up- you're going for a reasonable amount of light (probably similar to the same, although you may want to boost ambient in the night a little as it can be dark if you aren't in an environment that takes advantage of that), just less direct harsh light, more global light, to soften up those shadows a little. Click New (not Save, yes it is sort of counter intuitive), and name that something....like the time of day- ambient (i.e. 12am-ambient). Repeat for each of those numbered settings, so you have an entire day in 3 hour increments.

Click on Day Cycle Editor. Click on each key frame, and pick the new setting for that time in the dropdown. Currently you can only have the ability to have _one_ day setting, so this will override the default when you save- rebuild by setting it back to the old presets. Does mean there is the annoyance of having to switch it all if you want to switch between day cycles, but maybe eventually they'll get to that. Hit Save Test Day, and now you have a more ambient cycle! Revert to Region Default will now revert to the normal day cycle...but with less harshness.

And look 2 utilized...Sailor's Delight, I think.

See aforementioned finding skirts problem: this is a retired silentsparrow set, Rook. I'm sure I have things still obtainable with a system skirt...but I just kept finding more and more in my retired ss items folder, so, meh. There you go.

Both skins are an unreleased one I've been playing with- not my usual. My usual is a bit harsh for Ruth, especially around the eyes (I've got some odd eye settings, so my skin tends to be a little weird on others, although other skins work fairly well on it). Shoes in both: Lucent Heels. First picture: Geraldine, and a new hairstyle I've been working on a bit, as it's sort of spooky weird when I see my 'hawks on other shapes (well, when it's me. For some reason, it's not strange on other avatars entirely). Second picture: Violet Voltaire Glitterati necklace and earrings, Calico Ingmann Sylvia.