LysanaGoesGlitter_001

Originally uploaded by lysana.mcmillan

There’s a war raging in Second Life. The battle is between the pro-and anti-unicorn sex fronts. I say, let the unicorns frolic! They need room to breed, and the results are so cute they’ll scare the griefers off for months. It’s win-win, really. Also, unicorns make great newbie detectors so long as said n00bs weren’t accosted on Help Island for some freenis-enabled nookie. Which means we’d find the cream of the crop that much faster. Any newbie who says no to freenis is a person with taste and discretion.

To put my avi where my mouth is, I assembled this little ensemble, mostly thanks to the freebies at the Lloyd sim.

Represented Warriors:
Schadenfreude: More Glitter T-Shirt
Sock Shop: Glitter Unicorn Sex Socks
Lazy Places: Hya Cloven Boots in Starlite (NOT FREE)
Silent Sparrow: Sparkle Sparkle Wings
All of the above are available at the Starlust Motel Freebie Shop

Offsite Ally:
Alien Underground: Pastel Skin C2
Unreleased skin by Helena Stringer (I got a giftie!)

Neutral Parties:
Simple Pleasures: Watermelon Tourmaline Unicorn Horn (no longer on grid)
Calico Ingmann: Mania hair in Cotton Candy (assumed sympathetic to Hya but has no presence on Lloyd)
DV8: Aura Skirt in Magenta
Shapes by Zada: EyeFidelity IdealEyes in Pale Hazel
Striking Poses: Drama Queen Pose 4: Betty Grable

I have spent the past week battling both a sinus infection and one of those “viruses that’s going around” that decided my lungs were a peachy place to set up housekeeping. This has given me loads more time to spend inworld than I usually have. It has also led to my making the acquaintance of one Mikalis Karas, who appears to be another in the odd world of SL bloggers who don’t focus on fashion so much as the SLife-as-we-see-it approach. I thought I was going to do a fashion blog here, but I’m more of a writer than a photographer. If nothing else, it’s good to see I’m not the only one. And we share a love of playing with words, which makes chatting fun. I opined to him the other day that while most of us are “hot” for sufficient definitions of same in SL, I’m regularly reminded that I am a Jane Russell in a sea of Reese Witherspoons and Victoria Beckhams. One of the ironies of looking like her inworld body-wise is that the designers who do clothing from her top period are designing for Reese and Victoria. I’m not suffering for clothes. I’m just underimpressed with how the “vintage” designers look on me. They look great otherwise.

I’ve also acquired a new habit, which led to my meeting Mikalis. Midnight Mania board trawling. It’s a sickness, really. Click a board, beg other people to do the same, and get a freebie at midnight. My inventory’s exploding in a way hunting hasn’t accomplished. Which means I’m probably going to stop paying attention to the group chat closer to midnight. Eventually. At least on weekdays.

The hunt front’s been its own insanity. I’m working my way through the Go Fly a Kite hunt a few at a time, and I’m glad I have the time to do it that way. I’m loving the HUD JustOneMore Loon put together for it and was sad to find out people were being such twits that he found it necessary to stop selling it. The HUD has reduced my need to go clue-begging. Interacting in a group chat’s fun, but sometimes I like to hunt by myself. No chat, just me and the target of my quest. Or else I can chat one-on-one with some of my inworld friends while hunting, giving me focused interaction instead of splayed group chat. I’m looking at the new gridwide that just started and twitching at the thought. I need to swear off the gridwides. Greatest Love to Twisted to GFAK with the FallnAngel multisim hunt wedged within those is too much hopping and too little anything else.

I am going to try to spend more time focusing on the entertainment side of SL. Like last night, when I went to the Drunken Drow in Elvenshire and spent time dancing with a handsome half-elven gent while listening to some sweet live acts. Granted, I also DJ there and said half-elf is my boss, but there are perks to that job you don’t get in First Life. Going back to check out the entertainment on my nights off isn’t like a busman’s holiday. And dancing with the boss isn’t what you’d call violating proper workplace protocols. Or I’ll go fishing. Mellow, can keep up on group chats that aren’t clue-begging parades, and I can chuck the fish afterward. And I have enough outfits in my inventory to last me a couple of months assuming I change twice a day.

Sure, I’ll still shop. But wouldn’t you?

I love a good plus-sized avi. Curves, wideness, and all. If I need to make it clearer, let me know and I will.

But for the love of humanity, will people STOP making the damned wide-load avs with saddlebags set to 100 and waists set to 20? To a one, these biznatches think it’s fair to then dress in shorts and as much bling as they can find. And I also find they tend to frequent one of the hair designers who really needs to get the frak off the grid and stop making people’s heads look bad. Worse, some of them do modeling or dance in clubs. WTF is it, some kind of rampant black booty joke gone horribly wrong? Even with the white chicks who do this, because they all seem to run around with some proof they think they’re gangstas.

I’m going to say it. I think those avs are a bigot’s idea of a wet dream. And I mean the bigotry of exoticizing the Other. “Ooh, black chicks have big butts, so I want a fantasy babe with the biggest ass possible, but she has to be blonde so I don’t look like I’m objectifying black chicks!” Barf-o-rama.

I saw three such sad sacks tonight. It was like someone opened the gates on the fugly reserve.

I just made this comment on Shopping Cart Disco’s latest SLSecret installment, but since it ties in to other things I’ve said here before, I’m repeating myself:

I now have this idle fantasy that someone someday will do a pregnancy simulator that includes an AO to make you waddle worse than a newbie, slow your base speed down, restrict you from running, and give you damage in enabled sims for pushing it too far. Never in reality will you see women within days of giving birth who walk like runway models.

Get to it, someone, please. I will only take these women seriously if they use something like this. Throw in a post-pregnancy AO that forces random emotional reactions and keeps you moving at 3/4 speed for the next week as well as private whispers about how much the wearer’s breasts hurt, and I will kiss your pixellated ass like it was a golden idol.

This is a notice to any skin designers who decide to produce fantasy skins and jump into the fairly large drow elf market with both size 0 feet:

Drow elves have white hair. It is always white. It is not black. If you sell a gray skin with black eyebrows, it is not drow, it is gray. Period. If you want to have fun with your drow skins, tinker with makeup and whether the gray is bluish or not. Tattoos are always popular in that group as well. But do not, I repeat, do not mess with the white hair on the eyebrows. And that goes double for the pubes.

I realize I’m not a fashion blogger by anyone’s definition. This is in part because I’m busy. In part because I’m lazy when I would have the time to put together a pic post. And then I also watch how so many blogs and bloggers wind up in complete lathers over the tiniest issues and realize that going too far into that zone would add to my drama load. If I’m going to argue about something for days, I’d rather it be about politics than pixel clothes.

That said, I agree with Sasy Scarborough completely. Not that anyone’s going to care; I get as many readers as an empty blog. But in case something starts up later for this diversion of mine, I figure it deserves mentioning. I want to practice constructive criticism. Avoid sniping. And if I must get something off my chest that could be interpreted as hateful, Shopping Cart Disco does have SLSecret. Even if my card gets rejected, I’ll have done something to burn off the tension.

While freebie-trawling at Milk Hall’s Fair, I was IMed by Yves Firian to ask if I knew where one of the two items in their store hunt was located. I hadn’t noticed the sign for the hunt, having just arrived, but when I’m presented with a puzzle that ends in a freebie, I have to give it a good try. After a few minutes, I found the solution. Now what the heck am I going to do with two pairs of coveralls?

And I am realizing that the animators of SL, love you all to death, are limited in their imaginations. There are four basic things you can do in SL thanks to the help of most producers of couples anims: flirt, dance, make out, and have sex. If what you want is a nice cuddle position that has nothing to do with sex but has you almost as close, you are SOL. And I am in that position as I type. I’ll either make my own damn set, settle for second best, or commission the sucker. I wind up in relationships that are off the beaten path, what can I say…

I have to give the proportion guide I received at New Year’s credit for one thing. It helped me figure out what was bugging me about my av all this time. My legs really were too long. Some would argue they still are, but I feel better now that I’ve tweaked them down to something more proportional to my torso length. So the avatar that went to 11 now goes to 9 or so. Makes me look a bit cuddlier, I think.

With some people in Second Life, dating is more like what you do in kindergarten. Problem with me is, I’m trying to be more adult about it. I really need a brain revamp. Or “Loser-B-Gone” spray.

A beta version of a guide to making “proportional” SL avatars was sent to me in a group notice on New Year’s Day. It was sent with the intention of helping people who knew their avs were off and weren’t sure why to tweak and twonk to get the issues fixed. The contents told a slightly different story.

Anyone who studied art for any length of time past what you get in the standard US public school curriculum soon finds out the basic rule of human proportions is that the entire person should be seven to eight heads tall as an adult. This was how they did it in ancient Greece, after all. So as the accompanying text file to the very useful tools seemed to say if not said outright, if folks in SL would just make sure their avs toed the line and reached that fine equilibrium, many problems would be resolved, from prim skirt fitting to pose ball placement. Not to mention the people who walk around in “normal” avs and get booted from sims because the tyrannical Amazonian herds of oppressively tall SL avatars think they’re ageplayers.

The Platonic ideal of the seven-to-eight-head avatar is not something I see happening, and here’s why.

1. Child avs can’t conform to it. Children’s bodies are six to seven heads high. And until the clothing choices for child avs are as varied as that for adults, you’re going to see some adult RPing a twelve-year-old in Armidi jeans and a Nomine T-shirt. The patterns aren’t designed to look right on shorter avs, so the balance on the child avs will remain off. This latter fact is a large part of why adult avs under 6′ are at risk of being kicked from a lot of places. Their avs are adult-proportioned except when they’re unable to do so. The body changes with time on that one.
2. If human SL avs are expected to conform to this artistic standard, what of the plus-sized avs? The notecard with the object stresses a desire for “common sense” when toying with body sliders. This is a good way to avoid looking like a stork with its knees the wrong way out, but I hardly think the larger-bodied avs are going away any time soon. And I can tell you as someone who’s wider than average but not plus-sized that I adjust prim skirts far more often to accommodate my butt than to get a too-short gown to hit the floor.
3. What are the correct proportions on a tiny av or a dragon? The Greeks never said.
4. The creators of the kit don’t seem to realize that some of us LIKE being this tall. They think we’re dutifully conforming to an ancient concept in SL that causes the sensible smaller ones to suffer untowardly.

Taking it back to the personal, I decided in a fit of insanity to check my av against the length of my skull. I came out to 11 heads in length. I knew I had three choices at that juncture. Ignore it, shrink the legs, or expand my head. The third was dispensed with immediately. Resizing prim hair is a rude thing to do to yourself. Shrinking the legs led me to look at what I’d created from the Naughty Designs shape I was given when but a newbie by a woman who was both being charitable and psyching me up for a job as a nude dancer. I’d left the height and legs alone but poked, slid, and tweaked until I found the body I wanted to see from behind as I moved inworld. I am curvy, sexy, and strong. It’s what I like to see and how I want to present myself. And dropping the leg height by three heads’ worth was not worth the change in me that would bring about.

So after I got past the initial body anxiety (av anxiety?) issue that news caused me, I thought it over again. It’s not that I’m malproportioned. My av goes up to 11. It rocks. And all the “normal-sized avatars” can go piss up a rope if they think I’m breaking things by being this big.

We the tall are not going away. We are happy to share space with the shorter avs. Just don’t expect me to conform. I am 5’7″ in real life. I do not have to be in SL. And considering the standard size range of prim hair, all adult women in SL would end up within six inches of that height normally. That’s not even the standard range of heights for first life humans. Why should SL be different?