Chameleonic Possessions

Wow! Something went wrong with the permissions on this sales item on XStreet.sl – thanks to the kind customer who gave me a heads up. #secondlife

http://tinyurl.com/294l5jg

The only thing missing is a trio of matching vuvuzelas (and don’t think somebody hasn’t already thought of that, I’ve been getting freebies in my group gifts all week)

Yeah, finally got something made AND imaged AND textured for marketing online AND uploaded. XstreetSL is changing over to this new “Marketplace” format, so now is a good time to be refreshing old stock and adding new, because there’s a couple of weeks of commission-free sales.

Here’s some of the other images I came up with.

I’m not great at this fashion model stuff, but I’ve noticed that the necklaces that I already have up for sale sell better if they’re backed up by bewbs. So Access Denied seemed like a fine choice for the shoot, hey?

Here’s a sneak peak at the other version I was working on – it’s not ready for uploading yet because I messed up the sizing (curse you, tiny crusher!) but I had the images ready to pop into the GIMP template I struggled to make all that while ago, and what the hell.

The blurb says “It’s almost Independence Day in the US, it’ll soon be Bastille Day in France, and the Netherlands are in the World Cup quarterfinals – show your spirit with red, white, and blue!”

Struggled with GIMP on these but the second one was easier because I managed to remove the plain white background I shot it against more cleanly with the “magic wand” tool than I did with the first one… forgot to set the edges to feather on the first one, and I “grew” the selection by 2 pixels around my kitty avatar, so I didn’t have a messy white halo to clean up using a layer mask.

Tried playing with the gradient tool and with it set to “spiral” and a “Caribbean” pattern chosen at random, it kind of “popped” for me on the first try. I like it, actually… I don’t really have any mad skillz AT ALL but I’m feeling less lost in GIMP.

Here’s some more photos that didn’t make the “xstreetSL/Marketplace” cut… heh. I went by my friend BookemJackson Streeter’s “Lacamas Reading Hall” in Pini, since I knew she had some nice chairs with poses in them.

I love this sweet little muumuu (which was a freebie from Raglan Shire’s build at a previous SL*B celebration but the necklace was getting lost in the pattern. I was shooting against a plain white backdrop for easier background-cutting in GIMP.

Heh. Yes, that’s “JUMP You Fuckers!!” behind my head. It must date from the financial meltdown, Bookem is bringing an author in for a talk on the subject and had this graphic out in front as an advertisement. I might go back and crop this a little better so you can’t see the building it screens peeking out in the upper corners.

Not crazy about this hair, it’s a freebie I happened to have on while I was working. I’ve been mostly wearing steampunk stuff lately and my “normal clothes” wardrobe is totally neglected.

Dhughan has been busy! He’s working on improving his little walking sticks – in fact he’s hoping to add better animations so that they work well without an outside animation overrider. He was just about to pay $L5000!!!!111!!! to buy a “builder’s full perm cane-AO pack” but stepped back from the brink in time…  and then he found a free, full perm script in his inventory (he opens a lot of freebie builder’s boxes) that seems to be a simple wearable-object AO script.

So he was fooling around with one of the new, unanimated canes looking for decent male full-perm walks (sigh…) that don’t look like constipated gorillas in search of the little primates’ room.  He actually has a decent collection of free animations, so I’m confident he’ll pull something together. He also contacted a couple of makers to inquire about a better deal on a much simpler cane-AO option. We’ll see.

He’s thinking about renting the funky Chinese railcar in front of his current place in Steelhead Shanghai, and turning it into a sort of barber shop, since it’s completely open on one side (looks like a trolley, actually.

As it happens… I did not step back from the brink recently and ended up buying a bunch more land that became available in my home sim, Tintafel.

It started with one parcel. It’s always just one – an ordinary, cheap little parcel in a Mainland sim called Tintafel. And then it was another parcel right next to it that was almost as cheap, but not the really expensive one on the other side. After several months, after learning to build my first house and going through the second STEAM hunt, I had all this nice furniture and stuff that I couldn’t put out because of not having enough land to support the high-prim items.

Well, and then another 512 parcel came open, about when I lost my “view” of the sunset when someone put up a large building in front. I was in a canyon, by then – my parcels backed up to the sim boundary and there was a HUGE building right behind me.

So I bought the third parcel, which came with a nice building and furniture, and that became the “store” (which has never been officially “opened” or put in search, because I’ve mostly been dabbling (and learning) all this time. Still, it’s kind of decorated as a steampunk cafe. I had hoped to learn how to make sculpties that look like antique glass knicknacks, but it’s a slow process.

And then there was a fourth parcel, not quite contiguous with the third one, but kitty-korner. And then a 1024 parcel popped open that adjoined the fourth one… So it goes. I just wanted the prims, and I’ve got funding figured out that covers costs.

Then a neighbor put up ban lines right across my “shop stoop.” Not sure if I’d offended by crossing her land to get to the one I call “Chameleonic Greenhouse,” or by having lots of scrips running… so I pulled back a bit and sat tight. And another neighbor wanted to know if I wanted to sell the back two parcels, my original “home” and the “Posada party” land. No… but maybe.

That’s how it stood for a few months, and then just before leaving to go to a RL event last week, and while standing on the brink of what would have been a stupid land purchase, that biggest parcel that was between the “shop” and the “greenhouse” and the other big empty field went up for sale. It pretty much doubled my holdings… all group land, all discounted, mind you. So I agonized, looked at my tier funding sources, increased to the next level of tier, increased my group donation, and bought it.

And then yet another parcel… I still had enough tier for that, bought it, then swapped one of the back lots with the neighbor. Whew.

The gold circle is me, looking toward the east (that’s the highlighted spotlight thing) and the red circle is approximately where the greenhouse is. The two grey rectangles to the west are mine,

So I have plenty of land for building and making stuff now, at least! Spent some time over the weekend making “footprints” of all the parcels at ground level and sending them up into the sky – may have to move everything (carefully) higher up to give another neighbor more privacy. All my building crap is just out there, although I did put down some grass textures and a tree and stuff around my Asian teahouse that I used as a skybox.

Thought I was being careful and accurate, but ended up with kind of a big gap (probably due to leaving plenty of room for “easement” on the east side of my land), and never did get the “greenhouse” parcel footprinted, so Dhughan built a little bridge over the gap and was messing about on “his” 1024 parcel with various free steampunk buildings. He may end up building a little cabin up there, then move it “downstairs” when it’s done.

Meanwhile, I have to go around and “lock” all the platforms so that I don’t accidentally delete them while editing something, as it would be inconvenient to fall 300 virtual meters, right? Right.

Because I sure haven’t done that before when I’d build stuff in my teahouse/skybox. Never mind that tme when I was moving the little adobe house and it hit the sim boundary and bounced into space somewhere over the Socrates club. ::whistles innocently::

UPDATE oh boy… something must have gone wrong when I uploaded this item to XstreetSL, because the perms went all wacky and my customer, Zane Refenoir, couldn’t modify it or copy it. That’s just wrong and bad.

Fortunately, I was able to get inworld quickly after getting back to Zane during the RL workday via the trusty iPhone app, Pocket Metaverse. What a lifesaver that app is!

So far, I’ve just updated the one product – I think it may have been because there was a bug somewhere… Thought I had changed that long ago, but clearly I’m going to have to go through my products carefully, and delete the versions that have the wrong perms. I don’t know how the “big” virtual retailers like BlakOpal handle it when all the perms get set wrong (I’ve heard of problems like that lately) – but then maybe it’s my own rather chaotic workflow that’s compounding the problem.

Yes, another silly virtual item, this one sized for Wynx-type tinies (more or less). If it doesn’t fit right, contact me inworld! I don’t have access to many tiny avatars for fitting… #secondlife

@LC@ Tinies Red White and Blue Necklace c/m/t (boxed) by Lelani Carver – Second Life XStreet SL Marketplace

Red, white and blue tricolor necklace for TINIES. It’s Independence Day Weekend in the US, it’s almost Bastille Day in France, and the Netherlands are in the SEMIFINALS in the World Cup! Celebrate with this fun necklace – you may pass it along to friends, too. It’s modify so you can adjust the size manually (sorry, no resizer at the moment).

PS EVERYBODY MUST GO DUTCH! It’s because of a Dutch woman that I have my RL career, it’s partly because of a Dutch man that I have my current position, and two different Dutch people make tutorials or products that I use for doing stuff in Second Life. So go you Dutch footballers!