Category: Blog

  • STEAM Hunt XX: The Sorting and The Culling

    STEAM Hunt XX: The Sorting and The Culling

    Second Life screenshot of a walled garden wirh a steampunk dance floor with robotic penguins

    The #SecondLife STEAM hunt is on, alongside a bunch of other springtime hunts. So after about a week, I started my speedrun.

    One of the first gifts I found was this cute robot-penguin dance floor that rotates. It looks nice up in the Secret Garden platform for now.

    I used to stress out about participating in the grid-wide STEAM Hunt years ago, but I did enjoy it. The organizers announced that applications were open for Steam XX, “The Waltz of the Automatons,” and I really was tempted, but didn’t have any great ideas. Recently, I’ve been taking a really good Blender course at Builder’s Brewery (calendar) and feel like I could make it stick this time. The class notes are thorough and so far I’m still on familiar, if poorly remembered, ground.

    Steampunk robots dancing cheek to cheek

    Here’s the poster – the theme looked good, and I managed to complete the hunt in an afternoon. Some well known stores are represented, but almost none of the big extravaganza ones are still participating.

    I”m almost done unpacking boxes (or in many cases, unpacker HUDS) and most of the things will not stay in my overstuffed inventory. But there are some nice finds and I’m quite excited about some of the new-to-me shops with builder’s perm items.

    Victorian suit-dress with shamrock vest and goggled hat

    This Victorian suit-dress by CIL Boutique is a really nice Meli Imako kit, with a timely shamrock/Irish theme. I’m saving it as a quick change outfit. Incidentally, a class I took today was about a scripted tool to make texturing full-perm kits less tedious, and I have several kits in inventory that I’ve never done anything with. Plus there were some nice textures back in the Mieville merchants village, too, so I’ll have to go back and drop some $L before it disappears.

    A welcome change is how mny options there are for Dinkie (cute animal) avatars. However, I may need to get an updated Dinkie AVĀ  with the “supertail” option. Eh, maybe later.

    But I tell you what, this bookshelf is a keeper! 7 LI. due to all the tiny details in their attire. That will go in my little wee farmhouse for sure.

    Detailed fantasy bookshelf with male and female cats in whimsical Victorian attire

    It’s from Kaleb’s House of Cats (SLurl)

    There’s even a gift from Prokovy Neva, a little assemblage like a Faberge’ egg with a Chinese fire horse inside. Keeper.

    Prokovy Neva's Fire Horse gift

    Prokovy had a Winter Shop in her Ravenglass Rentals area, which was tucked into a roadside area with nice landscaping and some quality gacha tchochkes.

    I’ve nearly made it to the end….

    This is a keeper – an automaton cocktail dress, with a robotic half mask likeĀ Phantom (or a really obscure Farscape character).

    Blue Satin Automaton

    From Simply Sebastian (SLurl), it was packed in that nice rose vase… which is also a keeper. There’s a men’s version, a Dinkie one, and something for kid/Toodledoo avatars. I don’t usually do fashion shoots for myself, but it semed like a fun way to end.

    I’ll keep most of the gifts, some don’t fit my style, and cull the sizes I don’t need. It’s always tricky with the Star Mesh Body – it’s apparently easy to design for, but most creators don’t make for it. Fortunately, it’s usually fine with a Legacy, Maitreya, or Lara rigged avatar.

    Time to go feed the Damn Farming Serfdom livestock in my new outfit…

  • New #SecondLife #FirestormViewer Download

    New #SecondLife #FirestormViewer Download

    I’ve downloaded the latest Firestorm Viewer for Second Life and I’m headed in to take it for a spin.

  • Testing The Untested Plugin

    Let’s turn it on and see if anything blows up – trying a very old plugin for crossposting. Hope it doesn’t start a timey-wimey thing.

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-crosspost/

  • Reverted back to the old #WordPress theme because I am An OLD.

    Also, no thank you, Herr #Gutenberg. I’m reverting back to the Classic Editor. The CLASSIC Classic editor, not your faux-classic sneaky actually a block editor. Nyah.

    A couple of days ago I was unable to sleep and, as making major website changes is not recommended at 3 in the morning, I certainly did make them. I didn’t back up my site here, and I applied a “modern, clean, not crusty” theme called “Free Writer” from Elegant Themes. It seemed to have nice features for adding header images, etc, but when I tried to get a yes, old-fashioned 3-column layout done on the Appearances/Widgets page, I could not figure out how the “blocks” were supposed to be set up so that there was a sidebar on either side of my woefully inadequate content. Nope, nope nope, I thought it was because I was doing it on my iPhone. At 3am, remember.

    So yesterday and up until about 30 minutes ago, I futzed around off and on trying to get sidebar/content/sidebar, and the elements that I was trying to put in sidebards were stubbornly going above the content.

    Eh. So I installed a plugin called Classic Widgets, which as draggable objects instead of the whiffty blocks that weren’t going where I wanted. And then I got annoyed with the whole block post interface and turned off Automattic’s in-house “classic editor” and enabled the Really Classic Editor.

    I am an Old. I qualify by chronology and temperament.

    Now to figure out how to get the new-cool-kids social media links for Mastodon working. There’s a Twitter widget over there whose days are numbered, and I’m hoping for some kind of nice embed of my Mastodon posts.

    And then there’s my backup SL Marketplace blog, which is at WordPress.com – it’s no longer getting crossposted from here due to some changes that WordPress/Automattic made, so it’s even more outdated. Le sigh.

    I’m not going to touch the latest and greatest #Fediverse development on ActivityPub or Hub or whatever until I’m sure I’ve got things sorted here.