Garden of the Seven Shamans

I started writing this post almost a month ago when I signed up for the garden contest of "Filling the Cauldron" event to help raise funds for Elicio Ember's family.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I bought half the store again, as I did six years ago. Since I don't have land for my Mer Betta store anymore, I figured I could at least use my new acquisitions in the garden contest.

My goal was to preserve the mystery and the magic of his work. I didn't want a manicured garden. I wanted something untamed, natural, and spiritual. I scrapped a couple of ideas. The water, the skull, and the swamp tree in the back were the easiest decisions. The rest were a bit more difficult to decide, but I felt pushed to work on it every night. So I got done about a couple of weeks before the deadline with positioning scripts. Yeah, that's unusual for a procrastinator of procrastinating, like me. (Don't ask about my taxes which are due for filing on Apr 15. I'm procrastinating about filing the extension. :) )

The only thing that wasn't created by Elicio is the fog. I was looking for rain and found the fog. Happy accidents. :)

I took pictures of the result, of course. This is the best one, I think.

And I made a machinima that makes me very sleepy, to be honest. But I've been short on sleep lately. I found the perfect music, which I would love to reuse in another project someday.

Hopefully, it calms you down too. Or maybe it takes you to that mysterious magical world that Elicio's work takes me to.

Come and experience my garden here and vote here. The event ends tomorrow April 9, 2017.

To revive or not to revive

Three years ago, I created the first episode of a machinima series.

Three years ago, I created the last episode of a machinima series.

It was the same episode. LOL



This month, I submitted the poster for that machinima to the SL Machinima Poster Archive for a contest.

Today, I received a notecard saying that it's on display inworld with the other submissions. The exhibit officially starts on May 30, but it looks like it's already set up.

I've been toying with the idea of reviving a few projects lately, including one that I stopped 12 years ago. I've thought of continuing the Cabaret du Crane in the past, but I dedicated the series to Wolfgang, and I really am not inspired to do anything for him anymore.

But I do want to do machinima again. Something more meaningful.

My muse has been dropping hints. Nothing fully formed. Just flashes, like disjointed scenes from a dream. From many different dreams....


We'll see.  :)

Six

Six years in Second Life

60,000+ items in my inventory (And lots of them are boxed!)

336 avatars in my friends list

36,000+ in my L$ balance

The past six years have certainly been the most intense and most interesting part of my life.  The past six years have changed my life.  My world has expanded exponentially in more ways than one.

I've hidden my virtual life from the public during the first four years or so for fear of being judged.  But now, I stand vulnerable and exposed to the world through my book.

Where I'll be another six years from now, who knows.  But I'm pretty sure I'll still be living in a virtual world somewhere.



In other news, ...

I just released the first episode of the new talk show "Talk, Like Dim Sum" which is based on the book.

It felt like I have been guided throughout this project.  Even though it wasn't easy, it felt as though there were an unseen hand helping me get this done in such a short time, from conception of the idea to the release of the first episode.

My brain is too tired now, but soon I'll have time to sit down and examine how things just fell into place.



Meanwhile, ...

Wolfgang has been on vacation for a few weeks now, so I haven't seen him inworld.  His internet connection is so bad, that even Radegast crashes.  He emails me when he can.  And I'm experiencing a different side of him.  He's more lighthearted than I originally thought.  He makes more jokes.  He is more playful.

Maybe it's because, when I usually meet with him, he's at work so he is distracted and more serious.  Now that he's on vacation, he's more relaxed and that affects his interactions with me.

Because he's gone, I get more work done during the early morning hours which is when I usually meet with him.

And I also get more time to spend with Rapido, who is usually in during the early mornings.  Although, he is usually already dancing with someone else by the time I log in.

We have new alts but we've never really spent time to fix them up.  Mine has one outfit.  The same one she was born with.  :D  But he wants her to be chubby so I have to figure out what outfits work with a chubby shape.  (I already have that problem in real life, why do I have to have the same problem in SL?!?)

Meanwhile, Impy and I have a little crisis.  His RL leaves him with no time to come into SL anymore.  Even his emails are a lot fewer than usual.  I thought I was losing him.  I was panicking.  Lack of time is the most common reason my lovers leave SL.  I saw the same thing happening again.  But he assures me it's not the case.  He thinks that the crisis will pass and that he'll be able to come in more often again.

To be honest, I don't know.  I've seen this happen too many times.  When push comes to shove, I fall off my lovers' priority lists.  And I understand.  On the other hand, the circumstances of how I met Impy was strangely synchronous that it feels like this relationship is meant to be something more than a passing romance.  That's why I don't know.  Meanwhile, I am grateful for each day.  Each email.  Each typed kiss.  Each imagined touch.

I've been through this many times before.  It still isn't easy.

97 exclamation points

Three "I love it"'s.  Four OMG's.  Ninety-seven exclamation points.

I love how expressive the man is.  :D  Every woman should have a big fan like him.


 I had sent him a video I filmed a couple of weeks ago (but processed only last night) with Alt#24 doing a belly dance using one of Torley's Big Sun windlight settings.

It's a private video because it's a gift for him. (No, Alt#24 was not naked.)  But I'll ask him if he's okay with me re-posting it here.

(He said yes, I can re-post it here, but I have to find music that works well with it, without using YouTube's music.)

A holiday greeting

Every year, it's a challenge to think of a new way to send a holiday greeting.

• I've done the generic buy-from-the-Hallmark-store packs of cards with handwritten signatures.
• I've done the cards with your name already preprinted, so you don't have to strain your hand signing all of them.
• I've done the personally designed handmade cards.
• I've done the Plaxo e-cards.
• I've done the email greetings.
• I've done the scrapblog.com greetings.
• I've done the create-a-website greetings.
• I've done the stereoscopy greetings.

This year, I did a machinima.



There's still a very personal homemade feel to it.  That's me singing into my Logitech headset mic.  Complete with pops, scratchy voice, and sniffly inhales.  While searching for podsafe music, I found a website called ujam.com that generates an accompaniment for you in different styles and lets you add effects to your voice as well.  They were having a contest for Christmas songs and, since I was planning to do this song for the machinima anyway, I thought I'd shoot two birds with one song.  ;)

That took me a whole night.  It's HARD to sing karaoke.  You have to sing it in their style at their speed and you can't make any changes at all.  Anyway, after a gazillion tries, I decided it was good enough for what I need and I set it aside.

I've been having problems with my machine so I reinstalled the OS from scratch, and, after reinstalling the Second Life Viewer 3, it said that I didn't have an up-to-date driver or my equipment wasn't compatible with SL.  What on earth?!?  Phoenix gave me the same error.  Then I realized that Windows 7 thinks that all I have is a standard VGA graphics adapter.

Reinstalling new drivers from the amd.com website didn't fix it.  Nor did drivers from the Dell website.  I had to call Dell again yesterday to get their help for US$89.  (My warranty had expired.)  But the tech fixed it and it sees both my graphics cards again!  I can even do shadows now!  The shadows are pixelated, but they're there!  Geez, have I been missing out all this time just because Windows didn't recognize my graphics cards?!?

Anyway, I decided to film the shadows and I remembered I had to do my holiday greetings yet.  And I realized that if I don't finish it now, I won't have time until the new year.  So I spent last night doing the machinima portion of it.

I started filming my avatars, but it didn't quite fit the theme of the music.  I originally wanted to do a creche made up of my alts, but I don't have the time to do the animations and the costumes.  So I bought a creche in the Second Life Marketplace instead.  I set up a floating island in the sky above the Mer Betta store, added some rocks and palm trees (yes, I'm well aware these are the wrong type of palm trees but it's all I have), and chose the Midnight windlight and darkened it even more.  A little adjustment of the East direction to get the moon in the right spot, and I was taping.

I don't think I had enough footage to work with, so there's a lot of stops and starts if you look closely enough.  Next year, I'll start planning earlier.  And I'll have more experience with machinimas by then.


And for the first time in five years, it's the same greeting "card" for friends in both real life and Second Life.  And I'm not going back to static paper cards again.  See, I'm saving trees!

Happy holidays!

Virtual violence

When I first joined the fashion industry as a model, I added a "Limits" section to my portfolio, very much like RP limits. I specified that I would not allow myself to be in a photo that depicts violence against women or denigration of women.

Today, I inadvertently broke that rule.

I was responding to a call for stand-ins in the MaMachinima group. The group notice didn't describe what the machinima would be about. Well, I thought it would be benign like the ones I've volunteered for in the past.

When I tp'd over, the first people I noticed were two naked women who were dancing in the air. The film maker asked me to stand by a "rack". And one of the naked dancers started chatting with me after reading my profile.

I was distracted by the chat, the lag, and my camera wiggling because of alphas all over the place.

Then I noticed that another female avie was near the film maker, and she was tied upside down from the triangular rack. Well, the film maker and I were both wearing gowns from Violator with lots of "tentacles", so I didn't notice that she had a whip in her hand. I had mistaken it as a "tentacle".

But even after I realized it was a whip, my mind zoomed in on how realistic the animation was that made the tied woman's body writhe. It didn't occur to me how violent the scene was.

If it were a man who was whipping her, it probably would have bothered me more. But because it was a woman whipping another woman (I later found out it was the film maker's own alt), it wasn't an issue about gender anymore, and somehow it felt more tolerable.

I had read "The Book of O" years ago and didn't quite understand a big part of it. But now that I've chatted with a lot of people in the BDSM community, I understood a lot more when I rediscovered the book recently and reread it. The odd thing was that the book mentioned that women actually can be more cruel against other women than men are.

What really troubles me is that I wasn't disturbed at all by the scene today. Is it because it's violence from one woman to another? Is it because I know that it's only virtual and she's not really being hurt? Or have I become immune to violence? Have I lost my empathy? Or is it something else?