Otherworldly

I love the We Love Role-Play release from deviousMind, “Mistletoe”. Not only is it a sexy holiday dress, but the little scythe for harvesting mistletoe hanging from the belt is the icing on the cake. Perfect for the girl who wants to ensure that there’s mistletoe hung wherever it is convenient. Alternatively, if she has any Norse gods to slay and needs to fashion herself a few arrows. The set includes an unrigged piece of mistletoe as well, which you can spot in the background. The rest of the decor is from various holiday sets from Libertine, including the awesome decorateable tree.

The Fantasy Room is a new event focusing on fantasy-inspired items, from accessories to buildings and everything in-between. For the first round, I am showing one of two releases from Del-ka Aedilis. The baker’s table, part of their series of medieval kitchen furnishings, features a nice setup of ingredients for baking and an in-progress dough. There are no animations loaded into the table but I used one from another kitchen set to give the appearance of kneading the dough.

My dress is from Tres and I love the little details on this style, such as the wrinkling of the bodice at the clasps and the fine embroidery along the neckline and at the cuffs. It is both rustic and pretty, something for a reasonably well-off farmer or a merchant. The bodies supported are Kups, Legacy and Maitreya (including Petite), but with the right alphas it should work on Slink too.  The dress was available at the previous round of We Love Role-Play, but should hopefully be in the mainstore for Tres soon if it isn’t already there.

A new round of La vie en pose is opening tomorrow, on the 10th of January. This is the “naughty” edition, so expect some sexy poses and props. Like this sinfully red motel room backdrop from Lacrime dell’anima and the sultry “Welcome Back” poses by Nya.Gore. To go with it, I picked up the latest release from Salt & Pepper. The light setup (including the EEP setting) is handled via the PhotoPro attachment and HUD. Now that I have started using EEP I will definitely be setting up some more EEP & light combinations to have on hand.

Sometimes you discover frustrating information gaps. In this case, it was also accompanied by a surprising gap in my inventory, strange as that may seem with the size of it! You see, I tried to find either a sim or some decor to use for a photo of deviousMind’s distinctly steampunk-inspired Abigale outfit for the Engine Room. And I came up with nothing! Now, I probably could have gone shopping for something, but I was trying to mind my spending a bit.

In the end, that didn’t work out so well, because I suddenly had the idea of pairing the outfit with the skeleton horse if it could only be made a bit more mechanical-looking. Then I remembered the metallic skins from Mythril at the Shop & Hop. Perfect! Of course, I also needed some poses, because riding didn’t give quite the look I wanted. Back to the Shop & Hop I went to buy a pose pack from Mythril since they were discounted there.

The Halloween edition of LL’s Shop & Hop event is currently ongoing, with lots of deals and gifts to be had. One of the more spectacular releases for the event is the latest Teeglepet, Styx. He joins the unicorn and pegasus as yet another fantastical equine, and being a skeleton horse he certainly qualifies for that! Styx also has his very own Spooky Carriage, and right now you get a voucher for the carriage when you buy Styx, which is a fantastic deal. This deal is valid until November 1st, when the carriage will be put for sale on its own. Teegle is also offering a 25% discount on the other Teeglepets at the Shop & Hop, including on the upgrades from no-copy to copy.

Since animesh products are best shown on video, that’s what I opted for. It also gave me the opportunity to offer a sneak peek at some forthcoming landscaping from Fanatik.

The Lunara gacha from deviousMind is dreamy and magical, evoking moonlight on a dark night. I love everyhing about it; the fantastical headdresses, the beautiful modelling and texturing of the dress and of course the adorable owls. You’ll definitely feel like a moon goddess in this!

I used the ruins from Fanatik to evoke a temple-like atmosphere, and I love the effect of the dark sea in the background. The poses are from deviousMind/chanimations as well, from one of the Sourceress sets. I’d love to see more of those pose and prop sets one day, even if these full fantasy outfits are absolutely amazing too.

The animals (that’d be our two dogs and our horse) have kept us very busy the last two weeks, so I am sadly having very little time for Second Life. But I have had this one photo I have wanted to do for a while and yesterday I finally managed to get the setup done.

It all came down to this lovely, rustic bridge from Dutchie (and no, there isn’t an adult version!) which I have been trying to blog for, well, months. The problem has been that I have been too lazy to re-landscape a section of the sim to incorporate a large enough river. In the end, I decided that the river that runs under this bridge used to be wider, but has narrowed over time. Then it worked perfectly with the riverbed from Fanatik.

I may have managed to setup a lot of pretty photo locations on our own sim, but a proper beach is definitely still lacking. And the gorgeous Aegean Halter by Paper Moon for We Love Role-Play simply had to be shown in an appropriate location. So, I headed off to check out one of the recent releases from Studio Skye—the Pebble Beach building set—at one of their showcase sims, Skye Neist Point. It turned out to be the perfect place to show off the halter as well as some beachy poses from Ecru for La vie en pose.

Old Treasures is a fairly newly launched brand which already has released a small but very well-made collection of pieces inspired by history and/or fantasy. For this post, Ran and I selected three pieces to showcase; a wearable for each of us and a piece of furniture. The easiest choice was definitely the throne, released for the GoT-inspired round of Enchantment a while back. It is called the Archon of the Fourteen Flames Throne and well…the company we formed a couple of years ago happens to be called Fourteen Flames. We definitely appreciate it when someone makes pieces inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones but uses more subtle naming schemes like this.

It is the nature of the beast, but with so many events running all the time, you often end up focusing on an event just for a few days after it opens. But of course, if you want some lag free, pleasant shopping, you really want to go there after a week or so if it is a very popular event. For example, We Love Role-Play should be great to visit right now and Skin Fair is probably quite good too, especially since the script limits have been dropped.

Time to put the Adam back into Adam n Eve. Yes, sachi Vixen did not just make several female skins for the Skin Fair, she also made a new male face. This means Ran got to be both behind and in front of the camera for once, with me just providing a lot of opinions on poses. He also made his way over to Mina Hair to pick up a hair from her current 50% off sale.

The colourful Sonika gown from Apsara was a Fantasy Faire release, but since I did not have time to blog it during the Faire week, you’re getting a look at it now instead. We’ve done a little more work on the Dorne-inspired corner of our sim and I thought this dress would fit right in.

Tomorrow, May 1st, the new round of Enchantment opens. The format has been changed since previous rounds - instead of shopping at a central location, each of the participating designers will have new, Enchantment-specific releases available in their main stores. Each time you purchase one of the qualifying releases, you receive a stamp card and here’s were the added fun begins. You see, in addition to the main store releases, each designer has also made an Enchantment-specific prize and these are available at a central location. However, you cannot just go and buy these special prizes. This is where the stamp card comes into the picture. For each prize that you want, you will need a stamp card. Once you have all the stamp cards you want, you visit the main store of each designer to stamp the cards (you can wear all of them at once at this stage). When the cards are full, detach them and visit the prize location. There, you attach one card at a time and start claiming the prizes you want.

So now that you know how it works, what about this rounds theme? It is Sleeping Beauty, and for my first post, I decided to dig deep into the fairy-tale’s origins…

When I reviewed Astrali for the Skin Fair (which goes on for just a few days more!), I noted that there was also an in-store release at The Plastik, featuring a massive number of tones, including a wide variety of fantasy tones. I decided to play around with one of these tones for this photo and together with the armour from Bare Rose, we ended up with a lovely desert creature seducing an unsuspecting knight. The photo also uses the Nanda hair from Mina, available at this month’s We Love Role-Play, and the Jewelled Dragon’s Egg Necklace from Maxi Gossamer.