Otherworldly

I have been buried under work the last week and I still haven’t dug myself out fully, but I have so many pretty things to share that I did have to make room for some Second Life as well. Both Enchantment and Redeux are going on right now (and Redeux has been extended to August 24th!) so I made a medieval mash-up of items from both events and created a small town and a somewhat overgrown village green (the sheep have not been doing their job lately) with an old well. Then I popped over to We Love Role-Play and found myself a new dress from Senzafine as well.

Last month, I featured Dutchie’s Red Brick Café. At the August round of FaMESHed, the café was joined by two more classic red brick buildings, one intended as a store and one as a residential building. Each (including the café) also received a terrace and a version without side windows, so that you can put them close together.

I took on the challenge of showing these buildings off and built a little mini-quarter with them, with the residential building in the middle and the café and the store flanking it. The store I turned into an used book store, using the bookcases from Dutchie. And I turned my avatar into the lucky girl living right between a café and a book store. ;)

Of course the heatwave hits a week after we return from our vacation right by the sea, making me wish I was some kind of mer-creature living in the actual ocean. Maybe not so nice in wintertime here in Sweden, but right now it would be glorious. If you too have a craving for the waves, you might also want to slip into the latest release from deviousMind, Meerilyn. I am also wearing Wasabi’s latest release, the pretty Sora hair, which is available at Anthem.

Thanks to the Second Life Destination Guide, I found Voodoo Land when looking for a spot to photo the Solitaire dress from Adam n Eve. The dress is out at the current round of the Liaison Collaborative which happens to have Viva Las Vegas as its theme. Voodoo Land isn’t quite Las Vegas, but it has a lot of great spots for city life photography.

We’re back home again after our vacation, which means we have two sad dogs missing the beach and having free run of the nearby woods. But it also means having a bit more time to kill in front of the computer. For the last few days, I have spent some time messing around with the Firestorm Beta with EEP. Its…interesting, but so far I am not seeing any great advantages and a few drawbacks. Anyway, this photo is taken with the beta, so its perfectly possible to use it for blogging.

I am actually wearing a new (for me, that is) body in this shot: the Legacy Perky body from The Shops. I do like the upper body a lot, but just like on the Maitreya Lara the hips need an awful lot of tweaking to look normal and not exaggerated. I absolutely love the body skins that come with it and wish there were matching head skins, but the neck fade system works pretty well for matching to other brands. In this case, a skin from Adam n Eve.

In a couple of days, on July 10th, the Anniversary Edition of La vie en pose opens. I’ll be trying to get a couple of sneak peeks out before we pack up and go on vacation at the end of this week. So what fits better than an early start to the vacation? Here in the shape of some beach fun with balloons, courtesy of Sweet Art. They will have a set of six poses with balloon props for each out at the event.

Do you have dreams of your own cosy little café? Then Dutchie’s latest release, the Red Brick Café, might just be the thing for you. To tease your imagination further, I’ve made a video looking at the interior of the building as well as showing off most of the furnishings that are included in the furnished version. You can dive right into it or read on for more details, including Marketplace links.

From Adam n Eve and Deep Static comes all the hugs & kisses you might need for your time on the beach in the shape of a swimsuit and a pair of cool sunglasses which have matching colours and metal textures. Both these new releases are available at the WIP event which runs from the 2nd to the 22nd of every month. Finishing off my beach look is a new hair from Wasabi with a texture-change scarf and my skin is Skin Within’s Zoe who looks just lovely as a redhead.

It is too bloody hot so my brain has melted (apart from the part worrying about global warming, which always works just fine) and this will be rather brief. I am having cravings for a swim again and as a result I keep doing beach/ocean photos in Second Life. This time I am out on a cute raft by Nomad for Fifty Linden Friday, lounging around in a gift skin from the Plastik/Petrichor for SL17B and a mermaid bikini from Aleutia, plus the latest hair style from Wasabi.

A somewhat eclectic mix today, with everything from decor to new eyes. We’ll start big, though, with another building from Del-ka Aedilis. This one is from their medieval series, so it seemed to fit well with wearing a Viking-inspired gown by the Muses. The kitchen garden on the side is a separate item from the same series and can be combined with most any of their houses. The jewellery is more fantastical, a fairy-delicate set from lassitude & ennui that comes in a range of beautiful, shimmering mixed metals.

The braids are the latest style from Wasabi, which comes in a straight and a slightly windblown version where both the bangs and the braids have swung to one side. And then we have the eyes, the Oculi from FATE. Damien Fate calls them spiritual successors to the FATEeyes and that is fair enough, though they are quite different in many ways. The HUD is sleek and easy and even with just the included textures they are highly versatile as they tint beautifully. The HUD also allows very easy positioning vertically, horizontally and depth-wise.

There is also a free developer kit for making your own textures, something I am eager to have a go at. Their biggest new feature is properly speaking the realistically dilating and contracting pupil; it is perhaps not what excites me the most, though I need to play around with how it can affect expressions in photos and how it looks on video. Either way, I like these eyes a lot. They may not be the ultimate mesh eyes (for that, I would like BoM as well as appliers, but because these use special textures that won’t work), but they get close in that they offer both excellent positioning and easy customisation.

More often than not my posts are firmly anchored in fantasy and/or history, but when it comes to roleplay and character creation in Second Life there are of course many more options. For example, the Cyber/Punk Fair is still open (until June 7th, in fact) and it showcases a very different realm of possibilities. To do justice to the Novianna set and Sinon visor from Petrichor, I headed over to one of the longest-running sims (or sim collections, rather) in Second Life: InSilico.

The latest releases from Voluptas Virtualis are both for the current round of the Fetish Fair, so it is no wonder that they paired very well with the Kivna Karcero Throne from Roawenwood which features both maledom and femdom animations, with more room given to the latter. The Angela outfit with the Duchess ballet heels definitely called for the poses from the femdom menues, so I called in Ran to be my boytoy.

Today is the final day of Fantasy Faire for this year, the final hours before the Fairelands disappear into the mists once more. But, they always return, in one form or another. For my final post, I thought it was fitting to commemorate this by incorporating some items from previous Fantasy Faires together with some key pieces from this year.

I ran out of a bit of steam after the first week of more intensive Fantasy Faire blogging, but now I am back to remind you that you have until May 10th to explore and shop at the 18 sims that make up the Fairelands. For this post, I decided to focus a lot on decor items, featuring pieces from Harshlands, the Looking Glass and Roawenwood, as well as a lovely dress from Belle Epoque which actually is a tie-in to the pieces from Harshland.

I’ll have to start off by admitting that I cheated. I really wanted to take this photo on the Zodiac sim at the Fantasy Faire, but the lingerie from Voluptas Virtualis is too revealing for that. So, I used my favourite new workaround—I wore a dress over it that I derendered! A bit cheeky, perhaps, but perfect for when you need to show a lot of skin, such as for a skin review. You see, I am wearing a brand new release from a returning brand that I am really excited about. Skim Within, by Ayesha Bisiani, used to offer some of the most unusual skins on the grid, covering a range of looks and ethnicities. They also included some of the more elaborate makeups for its time. And now Skin Within is back and I am wearing the brand’s first new release, Aaliyah.