If anyone has tried commenting on any of our recent entries, you will have found that the captchas did not work as intended. This should now be sorted out. Sorry for any inconvenience it may have caused.

Part three in my skin overview (here’s part one and part two) should be up sometime today, and possibly also some more book-based avatars. Though, there sure is a shortage of good Medieval and/or Renaissance outfits for men.

A blogger challenge that caught my eye this week finally got me to start on a project I’ve had in mind for ages, namely to (just as the challenge instructed) create avatars based on various book characters.

Ran and I are huge fantasy fans. We read tons of it, we play fantasy-based MUSHes (in fact, we even run one) and we run a big fansite and forum dedicated to George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. So, of course my first two entries in what may end up being a little series of character portraits will have to be from those books. They were a lot of fun to do, so I won’t be surprised if I do quite a few more Ice & Fire characters (there’s a lot to choose from, that’s for sure), though I don’t know if I dare branch out further because there are so many characters I would love to do from so many books.

I should note that unlike my review photos, where I don’t edit anything beyond removing the background, these photos have been edited.

The topic for today seems to be freebies. Are they the bane of SL? I commented on a couple of posts, but since I am long-winded and rambly, I figured I need a post of my own, too. ;)

Inspired by this thread on SLU.

We definitely expect demos for skins and hair, and many creators of prim-based accessories such as shoes and jewellery have also started offering them for their products. It does add extra work, and extra upload costs, but there are many things I would not ever consider buying without first trying on a demo and there are many things I have ended up buying because I could try on a demo. However, when it comes to clothing, the option to try on a demo is very rarely offered. This may be more or less fine in the case of lower-cost items and items without any prim parts, but what about expensive items, which often have prim parts? Why do we have to buy these unseen?

I only know of one place for certain that have demos for very item of clothing that they have available, and that’s Adam n Eve. The demos are a big reason for why my first big clothing purchase as a new player ended up being at Adam n Eve, and why I ended up working for sachi and Damen. Bare Rose also offers the occasional demo, for very prim heavy outfits. Considering that their items are no copy, I wish they’d do it for everything. However, with their very low prices (and very high output volume), I understand why it would be difficult to do. Ran also mentioned that he thinks Blaze does them, at least for some things, but I have not confirmed this.

To sum up, I really wish that more creators, whether their items are copy/mod or trans/mod, would consider doing demos. To me, it shows that a creator has real faith in their products. If a few start doing it, one can always hope it might establish itself as the thing to do. So far, though, it doesn’t seem to have taken off, but if anyone knows of more places that do clothing demos, I’d love to hear about them.

I am procrastinating, and that always gets me thinking about all sorts of things. Today’s random thoughts (actually, they’re not so much random as meandering little sidetracks sparked by a couple of things) concern some wishful thinking about skin selling approaches in SL and a little pet peeve about something resulting from the many recent virtual copyright cases (and no, its not no-mod hair this time, though I still dislike that).

By now, I guess most people have noticed that there’s a Skin Fair going on, hosted by Vanity Universe. However, as has been noted, publicity for the event in the weeks leading up to it could have been better. Still, the sim couldn’t really squeeze in more visitors most of the time, so it seems to be doing pretty well. What may be lacking at this stage, though, is some insight into which designers have launched new things at the fair, are having sales or even giving away freebies. With all the lag up there, its easy enough to miss a sign in someone’s booth. So, I am going to attempt to put together an overview. But I can’t precisely claim to know everything there is to know about skins and skinmakers in SL, so I’d love it if people want to submit information about any new launches, sales or freebies that I haven’t yet listed. I’ll keep updating the list as necessary, so keep checking back.

As some designers (and people, places, and groups with very short names) are discovering, the new Release Candidate—now required for those who want the Windlight experience or the First Look viewer’s greater stability over the regular client—no longer works with search terms less than three letters long. The search automatically tosses out those characters and tries to complete the search with the remaining terms. For some, like DE Designs, the results page will show them 10 or 15 down in the list for “designs”. For others, like House of Shai or Adam n Eve, the search simply returns nothing at all because it can’t match “House Shai” or “Adam Eve”.

If you think is a problem, please vote for VWR-5372.

I thought, perhaps foolishly, that no mod hairs using a resizing script was as bad (and, as far as I am concerned, that’s already pretty bad) as it was going to get. It appears I was wrong, as now there’s clothing using these scripts too. That, frankly, boggles my mind. Perhaps even more so than with hair, only having the option to resize clothing imposes serious limits on the types of avatars that can wear the clothes. Lets say you don’t like looking like two meter tall stick figure? Well, if you resize a prim skirt to fit your hips, you will likely make it way too long by the time it has the right width. With most skirts (especially shorter ones, where the lack of width is more obvious), I sometimes need to stretch it just one way (rather than stretching it symmetrically) and then do a lot of adjusting of individual prims.

Before I move on to some pretty pictures of the gorgeous Valentine’s special from Adam n Eve and the stunning Airen set from Alienbear, I feel I need to comment on another matter to keep people from potentially getting the wrong impression of us. Yesterday, Ran and I were taking part in the big Valentine’s hunt that has been all over the blogs these last few days. Everything went as expected until we got to to Style Your Destiny, where we found that we had been banned.

Now, since I don’t think either of us has actually been in the store before and since our only contact with the owner has been via this blog entry, we can only assume that the person in question banned us because a) she didn’t like being disagreed with, b) she didn’t like it that I was offended by some of her remarks and told her so, c) she thinks that I have plans to copy her whole store because I disagreed with her on the matter of making hair no modify or d) a combination of some or all of the previous reasons.

Of course, she has every right to ban whoever she wants and for whatever reasons, but in case someone takes a look at the ban list at her store we didn’t want anyone to think we had actually done something nefarious. Other than, you know, disagree with her. Personally, I think its a pretty unprofessional response from someone running a business, but that’s just my opinion. I will note that I have banned her from commenting on this blog, as I have no interest in engaging in further discussion about this matter with her.

Now, on to the pretties.

There’s a big firestorm right now over repeated, blatant theft and resale of skins by certain SL users. I’m sure you’ve seen it all over the aggregator feeds. I’ll note that this particular story first really broke last month when Sae Luan posted about these thieves in her blog. But it took several creators taking drastic action to really get the public involved: Emilia Redgrave has said she’s quit SL, and Minnu Palen, Popfuzz Bamboo, and perhaps others have decided to make no new skin releases until something is done to deal with the rampant skin theft. You can find discussions here, here, and elsewhere.

It’s been popular to point people to SVC-676, which calls on Linden Labs to do something to stop such skin thefts. It’s a reasonable idea to vote for this item, just to make it plain that there’s discontent out there. However, creators and users have several weapons at hand to try and deal with this issue, both directly and indirectly.

It appears that a bit of a worrying trend—to me, anyway—may be on its way among the hair-makers of Second Life. Namely to sell hair with a script for resizing it and selling it no modify. In some cases, also transfer instead of copy.

For me, this is a deal-breaker when it comes to buying hair. In most cases, just resizing simply won’t ensure a perfect fit for me. By the stage that I have resized enough to get the hair to cover the whole head, it is usually much too large, with prims that shouldn’t be seen showing up at the forehead. I almost always depend on doing some resizing, to get roughly the right size for my head, and then some editing of individual prims to get it to cover, in particular, the sides. Resizing will only work well if you have used proportionally similar settings for your head to those of the hair maker. In addition to problems caused by head shape, there’s also the issue of those who fit other things onto their head. Like ears. From what I understand, that usually takes editing the hair to get them to play nice together.

Its time to show some skin again. Today, you get a charming redhead and a fierce raven-haired beauty, all courtesy of Skin Within. I have previously reviewed her gorgeous Saba skin and now it is time for Anika and Ahawi. If you are in the market for a pale skin with beautiful red brows or a red-brown skin suited to a scantily clad warrior-woman, do read on. Oh, and there are naked pixels behind the cut.

We have been keeping blogs on a number of subjects for quite some time, so when we found ourselves hooked on Second Life, it seemed natural to add a blog for that too. Given that we have developed a liking for pretty things such as skins, clothing, etc as well as for in-world photography, a sort of fashion blog was what we decided to go for, though we also expect to occasionally comment on Second Life in general. Since I am notoriously bad about changing my mind, chances are the blog will mutate now and then, so don’ t be alarmed.