Otherworldly

A brand new skin store from a familiar creator, eep’s 001 skin is the focus of this review. Look inside for details, for naughty bits, and for a brief discussion of a brand new shape store in the Second Life Marketplace!

Time for another set of MUSH-meets-Second-Life photos, this time featuring my secondary Dornish characters. She’s a bit of a saucy thing, so I needed an outfit that had something of an eastern flair without being either too demure or too much like something you’d expect to see in a harem.

Fortunately, I remembered that I had an outfit from Silver Rose Designs that might just fit the bill. The Fatima outfit isn’t a robe, of course, but it is noted that women in Dorne do wear dresses as well. No doubt a lot of these dresses look more like your typical medieval gown, but here at least you get a touch of something different and exotic with the colour combinations, the hip-wrap and, of course, the bold neckline.

A few days ago, I received some review copies from Fleur du Mâle for their new ALIVE eyes and I was very intrigued after trying them on. Since the eyes were from the DRAKE series, which are various kinds of inhuman eyes, I had an excuse to break out this Etheria skin from the recent sale at Port Seraphine as well as the Reptilia hair from Wasabi Pills.

Yesterday, Ran and I spent a few hours going through The Flesh Game, this year’s Halloween adventure/puzzle from the Pulse sim. I can’t say I am big on horror in general, but we’ve both thoroughly enjoyed these games for several years now. The amount of work that goes into the story, the build and the scripting is quite amazing and on top of that there are free gifts from participating stores that you can find throughout the game.

In light of this, I wanted to feature some clothing from Sn@tch today, as a thank you for the great fun we had yesterday. I am also mixing in a few things from the 4.44.444 event for Free*Style’s 4th birthday. It ends on the 14th, so make sure to check it out if you haven’t.

I don’t have much in the way of mesh items so far—in part because, as usual, the huge women’s fashion market is getting a lot more attention—but two or three pieces have snuck into the wardrobe, and thanks to Adam n Eve and Wasabi Pills, I’ve a notion for just how to go about it…

I am definitely in a mood for mostly roleplay-related looks these days. Of course, it could be that this is helped along by the sort of new releases I’ve been running into, like the latest hairs from Calico Creations. I have been a fan of Calico’s hairs since I started in SL and the Emily hair was my favourite flexi-curl hair for a long time.

Previously, I’ve featured a mesh hair from Alice Project. Now, there’s another store with mesh hair as well, Wasabi Pills. This store first came to mine and Ran’s attention for being one of the few to offer long hairs for men and for a bit of a focus on styles suited to roleplay looks. The first mesh release fits very well into this pattern. In fact, it started out as Sebastian for the guys and then became Sebastianne for the girls as well.

Another bit of A Song of Ice and Fire-inspired photography, this time featuring my main character in Dorne. Rather than trying to represent the whole of Westeros on Blood of Dragons, we’ve built two very different cities: the royal capital of King’s Landing and Sunspear, which at the time we’re playing in basically is the capital of the independent realm of Dorne.

Fortunately, the gorgeous Kingdom of Sand roleplay sim offers a great place to shoot Dornish-inspired photos.

There are few things I enjoy as much in SL as a new skin. I love finding skins that fit my existing shapes and I love being inspired by a skin to create a new shape. Fortunately, working for Adam n Eve means that I get to try out a lot of new skins since sachi Vixen loves to make them.

This time, I’d like to introduce you all to Ariadne, who may just have the best body of any skin that sachi has made. I am also showing a variety of jewellery from Bewildebeest, a store full of very original jewellery designs.

While LL has disappointed (at least for the time being) those hoping for rigged mesh that conforms to our avatar shapes, mesh can be a pretty cool thing unrigged as well. The latest release from Tekeli-li, the Crystalism set, is a non-rigged mesh set which weighs in at ... very few prims indeed. The necklace is one prim, the top and the bottom three prims each.

One reason behind the redesign of our blog and the rest of the site was a closer integration between our two virtual pursuits: Second Life and MUSHing. We are still very much active MUSHers and have been running our own A Song of Ice and Fire-based game called Blood of Dragons for several years. Text-based gaming is hardly a booming hobby these days, but for some reason, this little TV show called Game of Thrones has resulted in a lot more interest in the game this year…

In any case, today’s little photography and post-processing exercise started out as an attempt at illustrating one of my characters from our game, Lady Aisling Ryswell.

The first mesh hairs are slowly cropping up and so far I am pretty thrilled. Its early days still and no doubt plenty of room for further evolution, but that hasn’t stopped myself and some others making a particular style wish on Plurk:

Really, really long mesh hair.

We’re talking hair that Lady Godiva could be proud of, perfect for those dressed-only-in-my-hair photoshoots as well as for various roleplaying purposes; no self-respecting medieval maiden would have less than knee-length hair, after all.

What I am thinking now is, why not make a design challenge out of it? Put forward some guidelines, try to reach as many hair designers as possible, and see what they come up with? Then feature the resulting hairs in a series of blog posts, perhaps in a dedicated Flickr group as well. I don’t know that it needs to involve any voting or scoring of the designs, but a constructive look at the pros and cons of each style might be a good resource for future mesh hair developments.

So…any thoughts? Any interest?

For today’s Moody Monday, Elysium Eilde of elymode dives into mesh with a mini skirt as an optional add-on to her Evolu set. You still have some hours left to head over there and try a demo before these limited colours disappear.

A final look at the Jewelry Fair (it ends today!) with a lovely set from Bliensen+MaiTai. I’ve paired it with a new partial mesh dress from PixelDolls, a skin from the massive sale at Dutch Touch and a pair of gorgeous new eyes from Poetic Colors.

Yesterday, Ran provided a guide to what you’ll find on each of the Jewelry Fair 2011 sims. Today, I thought I would pick out a favourite from each sim (in addition to the stores I’ve blogged earlier) to give a little more information about what they have to offer.

The stores in question will be CentoPallini from the Air sim, Ashira’s Aerie from the Earth sim, Studio Sidhe from the Fire sim and LOGO from the Water sim.