It feels SO good to be back and I am SOOOO glad I am out of the hospital, but this week has made me realize that I am far from 100%  There are SOOOO many things that I would love to blog right now, but it seems like I just cannot get things moving as quickly as I would like.  I started these pics a couple of weeks ago and am just now getting them posted.  I had THREE looks put together and ready to shoot and just did NOT feel well enough to take a picture. . . . :/  So now I am left wondering if I should just scrap these three looks and move on with new things?  SOOO many posts    . . .so little time.

My time spent on the grid was not totally worthless however.  I was “gently” reminded by one of the creators that I used to blog for, that I need to blog for fun.  I used to take blogging really seriously. . .and I still fight the urge.  When I started blogging in earnest, I stopped wearing things (for the most part) from stores that were no longer up and running, simply because I felt that there were so many creators that were struggling to make a living in SL for me to be able to wear something from them. . .advertising THEIR creations because they “needed” me.  I remember contacting an, at the time “new” creator to ask her if she would like for me to blog for her.  I LOVED her stuff, she was EXTREMELY talented and I WANTED to help her get her shop up and running and I thought she “needed” me to help her.  I WANTED to blog to help creators.  A LOT of their creations I bought, some were given to me as review copies and some I (gasps) yes. . .asked for.

But one thing I have learned and have had stressed to me over and over. . .I am NOT needed.  In fact, in many cases I am not even really wanted and I have had some creators TOLERATE me, at best.  So I have had to learn to respond to those creators that really DO want me to blog. . .and guess what . . .BLOG THEIR STUFF!   And enjoy myself while I do it!

So I am going to start that by modeling this beautiful evening “lounge wear” from PurpleMoon.  PurpleMoon has ALWAYS impressed me and I have seen BEAUTIFUL creations come out WEEKLY, whether it be hair, accessories, boho, evening wear or nails.  I can always find something beautiful to buy from PurpleMoon.  Their group gifts are amazing and you can always find items on sale, allowing you to build up a really NICE inventory of beautiful clothes!

This LOVELY skin is from Izzie Button.  It is one of her relatively newer skins (I think there have been 3-4put out since this one).  But it is REALLY lovely, comes in bunches of skin tones and I am working on a new post to really showcase it.  Thank you, Izzie for your kindness and patience. . . :)

I am truly grateful for the TONS of friends and SL creators that ARE wonderful and gracious, kind and patient.  Thank you so much for treating me like a real person, even when you’ve had a bad day!  Hugs and kisses to you.  I am looking forward to working with all of you. . . .until later. . .

STYLING NOTES

*Dress: :: PurpleMoon ::- Bed of Roses Mesh Dress in Purple/Teal Size A
*Skin and Makeup: Izzie’s - Cassandra Skin sunkissed DB, Cassandra Eyeshadow purple,Lipgloss rose (p+sk)
*Hair:  Alli & Ali- April Hair Brown-Blonde
Eyelashes: *REDGRAVE* -38- Classy
*Jewelry and Nails: Finesmith Designs  NailsL 20 Rave Indigo, Organic necklace, earrings and ring -Turquoise
Shoes: R2 Fashion- “mele” Turquoise blue
*Eyes: IKON- Utopia Eyes – Light Bahama Green (L)
*Poses: Purple Poses

I’ve still got one Midnight Rant on my HD from… weeks ago, where I talk about copyright, and I’ll hopefully get to upload that soon as well, but there’s some more I want to talk about it that I didn’t touch on in the video. You see, I’m a bailiff (and I’m following Key Gruin’s recent move to more disclosure here) which, for people from the other side of the world (i.e. the Americas) is a mixture of Sheriff and Repo Man. In my line of work I’m dealing with questions of money and debt each and every day, and there’s a few thoughts I have that deal with both money and copyright, and this strange new world we all find ourselves in.

Because the thing with money is, it’s not just about how we earn it, but also, and maybe even more importantly, how we spend it. Or rather – for whom. While many times the product itself decides what we buy – after all, I go to Burger King because I like them better than McDonald’s – in other cases a lot of factors are coming into play. Car mechanics, for example: I don’t just want my car fixed; any mechanic probably can do that. I want it fixed without getting screwed over, without having to pay more than it’s worth, without the mechanic taking the easy route and just throwing the whole module out that’s malfunctioning and buying a new one, but employing some kind of understanding, fairness and imagination that allows them to get the job done as inexpensive and straightforward as possible. It takes a long, long time to find a mechanic like that, just as it takes a long time to find an attorney who actually shows some commitment, or a doctor who listens to what really ails you. If you find them, hold on tight and treat them good, they’re all worth more than you could ever pay them.

A similar situation appears when it comes to copyright and entertainment. Most of the money you pay for movies, music, games, books, news, etc. go to the publisher, and not the author (up to a point where many authors can’t really live off what little they get from sales, or where musicians actually end up owing the publisher, even though their albums went gold or platinum). But in the past, you had to pay the publisher, because there just wasn’t any other way to get what you wanted (and it was also the only way the artists would get any pay at all). Thankfully, today we have alternatives, which is why, after this long introduction, this little column talks about things that are worth spending money on – at least for me.

1. I’m a member of Kickstarter for just 2 months now, having joined for the notorious Double Fine Adventure fest, but I’m falling more and more in love with the concept, and the awesome projects that have come, and continue to come, out of it. Which is why this list is full of them, and on top of my list is the awesome movie project Tube. Not just because it’s going to be licensed under creative commons, adding to the ever growing repertoire of great public films, but because they’re taking the “open” concept even further by releasing all 3D assets under the same license, just as they did with their previous project Elephants Dream! This is especially interesting for OpenSim users, as it creates a pool of professional and potentially useful mesh objects that can be used in OpenSim with a little tweaking.

2. Speaking of films, the creators of the awesome series Pioneer One (which in itself is worth every penny of founding you can spare for their second season) are trying to fund Control, an exclusive pilot film which will only be available to the funders themselves!

3. And while we’re on series, have a look at Fallout: Nuka Break, which is a brilliantly made little series set in the Fallout universe. They’re also trying to fund the second season, and since I enjoyed their series almost more than the games themselves, I think it’s well worth funding.

4. Too many movies? What about this: Chris-fucking-Hülsbeck is producing the Turrican Anthology! If you don’t know who Chris or Turrican are: Chris Hülsbeck is one of the best composers of computer game soundtracks, starting at the time when C-64 was at its peak and pushing its Sound Interface Device to its limits. He wrote the scores to such classics as The Great Giana Sisters, To Be On Top and, of course, the legendary Turrican series. The antholgy is planned to be 3 CDs long, with the odd bonus track played by full orchestra thrown in!

5.  And finally, games! While I’ve founded several games already, there’s just one running at the moment, but what a game it is: If you’re like me and can’t get enough of the Zombie Apocalypse (that is, after having both read and watched The Walking Dead, played Left 4 Dead 1 & 2 and Dead Island and of course watched and played Resident Evil) you might want to shift your gaze towards The Dead Linger. If what they promise holds just a little bit of water, this might well be the most amazing zombie game in the history of ever. I’ve loved the concept of the likes of Project Zomboid, where the world is just a big huge sandbox and you’re pretty much left alone with whatever tools the game gives you to fend off the hordes of shambling undead, but TDL takes it to a whole new level, by making it not only fully 3D and multiplayer, but also fucking HUGE! They promise a procedurally generated game world the size of a small planet, where you can explore pretty much anything. If that’s not awesome, I don’t know what is.

I’m 32 years old, so it feels pretentious if I start writing about my Deep Insights Into Life ‘N Things™, but lately, things have gotten to a point at which I have to just stop and think about what I’m really doing. Because honestly, life is really bloody hard, and I’m in a funny state of mind that I can’t make much heads or tails of.

The one thing I can probably really definitely say is, I’m stressed. I’m stressed a lot. I have to provide for 6 people, and I’m really the only one earning any kind of money, and while I love being creative and “artistic”, I never imagined I would ever generate any significant amount of income from that, so I picked a job that’s safe enough to live off and convenient enough to allow me to work from home and have time and opportunity to do the things I really love. I’m a court enforcement officer, a bailiff. (Those not from the European Union might want to have a look at wikipedia, since it’s quite different on other parts of the world.) Unfortunately it’s also a very high stress job, which I really didn’t realize at first. I’m an intuitive thinker, which means that my emotions and perceptions are unconscious, and thus mostly unknown to me. I simply cannot tell when something affects me emotionally, until it becomes unbearable, so for a long time I can just go along as if everything is fine, until being overwhelmed by my own emotions. Thus, it took me 32 years to realize there is actually something like emotional stress, and that it’s a bitch.

Dealing with negative things on a daily basis, and never being welcome is a bad way to start on a job. On top of that, there’s the fact of receiving no gratification ever, since nobody’s really ever happy with what I’m doing, by definition. People don’t like being pressed to pay their bills (especially since they mostly can’t pay their bills, otherwise I wouldn’t get involved), and creditors aren’t happy that their bills aren’t paid from the offset, so I’m in a position where I can make nobody happy. Also, since I’m not privately employed, I can’t choose which work to do and which not to do; I have to take every job, as long as it meets the legal requirements, even though there’s certain institutions I really don’t want to do dirty business for (banks, I’m looking at you). Finally, there’s no support from the administrative side that oversees us; they usually get involved when something goes wrong (to which the sanction of choice is the instruction to remedy the error) and other times very happily ignores us. And while this seems like the perfect breeding ground for burnout, I’m actually not burnt out.

I sleep very well (actually somewhat more than usually, but that may just be because I allow myself to get 10 hours of sleep a day now), I don’t drink, smoke, or take drugs, I don’t detach from my loved ones or my pastimes of choice, and my sexual libido is just fine. Rather, I’m avoiding anything work-related, I’m way behind on things I need to do, which makes everything on my desk pretty urgent at this point. Still, I’m writing this, for example. I’m not really anxious either, or  depressed. I do get moments of depression when I think about the things I have to do, but mostly, I’m just fine. All I have is this job I absolutely don’t want to do right now.

And so I’m thinking, reflecting and analyzing, because that’s my natural way to deal with things like that, and I’m just not getting to any conclusion. It might just be that this is midlife crisis come early. Or it might be I’ve just found the one job in all the world I absolutely shouldn’t do. Or I’m just a lazy bum. And as I fail to come to any conclusion about this, I also can’t think of any solution either, which is actually the part that’s worst, since I’m all about practical solutions. “Get a different job” would be the most obvious one, but that’s really out of the question. I’ve got a highly specialized field of expertise that’s bloody useless in any other environment, and things are hard enough for real good creatives, so there’s no way I can earn anything from my amateurish shenanigans. Also, it’s pretty late in the game for a career change, with mortgages to pay and mouths to feed. All of this wouldn’t account for much, though, if only I could think of a job that I’d rather do, which has been a problem for all of my life – there just isn’t anything that sounds appealing to me.

And so, I’m pretty stuck with my useless thoughts and analytics. It’s at times like these when my partner is at her best, with her absolute devotion and wisdom. If you have never experienced it, you won’t really understand, but there’s simply nothing like the one person that understands you at your deepest level. Just like negative emotions, I experience love only when it’s become unbearable, and I can definitely say: I love you, El.

Happy Valentine’s everyone.

STYLING NOTES

OUTFIT: R.icielli – PIETRA bodysuit /beige, BEATRIZ sequined miniskirt /gold
SHOES: R.icielli – CARMELIA pumps base
*HAIRBASE:  A&A Tattoo Layer Hairbase Darkblonde
*HAIR: A&A Marcella Hair Darkblonde
LASHES: *REDGRAVE*  -38- Classy
NAILS: Finesmith Designs – METALLIC
EARRINGS: R.icielli - BRIGITTE earrings /quartz L
SHOES: R.icielli – CARMELIA pumps/Crema
SKIN: Ricielli – ESMEE medium_DB/makeup4
*EYES:  IKON ‘Sunrise’ Eyes – Deep Lagoon (L)
*POSES: PurplePoses

Now the new explanation includes not only the level of realism of the visual elements, but also the relation to the narrative, and with all due respect, I don’t think that’s helpful either. Thing is: I wasn’t creeped out by The Polar Express, or any other animated movie ever, and I really don’t think Polar Express (or the newly featured Tintin movie) look particularly realistic either. I recently played L.A. Noire, which looks and feels much more realistic than any animated movie I’ve ever watched (or many other recent 3D titles, such as GTA 4, The Witcher 2, Skyrim, etc.) and that’s not because I’m controlling the action, but because they are more realistic. Heck, Tintin or Polar Express don’t even aim at being super-realistic, they’re fictional fantasy stories, one even based on a comic book series. If anything, they aim to be modern comic book movies.

In a talk that we recently featured here, Prof. Jeremy Bailenson discusses the uncanny valley shortly (at ca. 1 hours 7 minutes in) and describes it as a “mismatch between how realistic it looks, and how realistic it behaves”, which, in my book, is a much better explanation than “narrative” or just “magic”. As long as we don’t expect things to be realistic, there’s really nothing uncanny about them; or rather: As long as The Polar Express is a fictional story about a kid riding to the north pole in search of Santa, and acts like a kid in a fictional story riding to the north pole in search of Santa, and on top of that looks like a fictional character in a 3d animated movie, there’s really no mismatch there.

And while I was at it, I finally played a little more with Viewer 3 and took a look at what all that fuzz with Mesh is about, and fell down a rabbit hole and haven’t found my way back yet. I knew before that mesh would be a game changer. That is, I knew it conceptually, like you know that a federated network of interconnected grids (the hypergrid) will be a game changer. But after I uploaded my first mesh, it already changed the game for me:

Not only are meshes much more detailed and diverse than anything you could do with sculpts and prims, they are also much more ubiquitous, since we can start drawing from the non-SL 3D-community as well. There’s tons of resources of free 3D meshes on the web, which can easily converted to collada for use in OpenSim, and in addition to that, meshes can also be created more easily once you get the hang of some basic 3D software. So really, the metaverse of the coming years will look very different from the metaverse we know today.

STYLE NOTES

*Dress: ::VMC:: -  Sibelle – Blue
Shoes: [ glow ] studio -  Nite Nite Pumps silver
*Nails:  +:+WTG+:+  - **French** nail
*Hair: A&A - Melrosa Hair Blackberry
*Jewelry: Addiction – Rejoice Diamond Bracelet, Earrings, Necklace
Eyelashes: *REDGRAVE* -31- ExtraLong
Skin: Style by Kira - Emma Skin 01J
*Eyes: FASHISM -  ‘Sunrise’ Eyes – Azure (L)
*Poses: Purple Poses

We buried you in tiredness
Within the glassy water hall
Where you, forever yesterday
Shall wave at our daily stress.

We soldier on, from time to time
For nothing more, and even less
You dwell within our mind enshrined
While we, eternally, progress.

And rest, and what we’ll never find
We all have long since left behind
And all we see is from afar
How long you’ve been, how tired we are.

This video is licensed under a creative commons non-commercial share-alike license. (Download)

Credits, as promised:

Years of Rice and Salt (cc-by-sa)
Yunus (cc-by-sa)
ТЕЛЬНЮК: Сестри (cc-by-nc-sa)
trustno1 (cc-by-nc-sa)

OpenSim
Linden Lab
Creative Commons
Hypergrid Business
AM Radio
Ina Centaur

Silk Dreams
WTG
Style by Kira
Purrfect 10
Fashism
Calico Ingman Creations
Alli & Ali
aDiva Couture
Finesmith Designs
Rockberry
siss boom
Logo & Kin
Earthstones
Vero Modero
Purple Moon
R.icielli
Essences
YS&YS
Fallen Gods
Barerose
Redgrave’s
Akeruka
Kalnins Footwear
Somnia
Addiction

Oglaf

STYLING NOTES

Gown: Elemiah Design – Moon – bodice, skirt, handbag
*Hair: A&A -  Mae Hair Lightbrown
Eyelashes: *REDGRAVE* -39- Luscious
*Jewelry and nails (including rings): FINESMITH – Isabella earrings, Necklace, Finesmith Metallic Nails
*Skin: Akeruka -  Kia 16 Tan
*Eyes: FASHISM – ‘Sunrise’ Eyes – Egyptian Blue (L)
*Poses: Purple Poses

(Background images for the pictures provided by: ecathe and Cybrea respectively…courtesy of Deviant Art.)