BOM Toot

I'm not doing this just for y'all. I need to relearn this stuff again and again.

 

BOM makes all your old stuff (relatively) good again. And you can still wear new stuff made for whichever mesh body and/or head you have chosen. I will go over Maitreya and the LAQ and Genus heads. I have a Genus head because one day it was free. And I'm all about Free. It's my favorite color.

Here's all you really really need to know: for BOM, no body or head alpha, have the BOM relays handy or use the toggle on the HUD. Really, that's it. But I'll drag you through what my mom would call "A Shopmyer Story." Never ask my dad what time it was or he'd tell you how to build a watch.

So (I hate it when people start sentences with "so") I logged Annthrasite in on the Firestorm viewer (because I like it, the old fashioned pie menus and the handy perks like Area Search and calling outfits "Outfits" instead of "My Outfits" which confuses me because, whose outfits would they be but mine?). Annthrasite prefers to stick to non-BOM, but that's her decision. She has enabled BOM in case she needs to wear some system clothing she can't live without. Lludmila is all BOM all the time because she only wears the one skin and she's so happy to have it back. Lludmila has no trouble with this because you set it up once and you're done. She does include the relays in her basic outfit, just in case. Be glad Annthrasite goes back and forth because then I learn how to explain things.

The last we saw of Annthrasite, she must have been trying on some system clothing because when I logged on her basic outfit (no clothes, no BOM), this is what I got:

Oh nooooes! What happened?

She's wearing her whole body alpha! You can't do that with BOM, but you need it for the regular mesh body and head. All I have to do is apply the omega 7 Deadly Skins applier and she's back to normal. Note that my basic outfit has that as part of it: the relays (the one for the LAQ head is hiding behind the skin applier, but it's there) and the applier. And the Maitreya HUD. If I'm going from one outfit to another, the foot position might need to change or a different part alpha'd. Best to have everything on hand.

But now it's time to look at the BOM. I have another basic Outfit (or My Outfit, if you're on the LL viewer - but then it would be your outfit, wouldn't it?) that's for BOM.

Note how the applier modestly covers Annthrasite up.

The BOM outfit has the Maitreya HUD and the BOM Relays, but no body alpha. And you can see extra feet and head. Then all I have to do is click on the relays, first LAQ and then Maitreya.

Dress included for modesty.

Ahh, down to one head.

And extra feet are gone.

Now Annthrasite can wear an old system outfit, that includes the alpha for a mesh top, because the alphas in the package work again! Note that the alpha doesn't show up on the HUD.

The outfit also came with an alpha for the boots, but look! The toenails still show! What to do? What to do? Taking the nails off didn't work.

We have to resort to the HUD alpha and take off the feet. Might as well ditch the shoe alpha as well. You never know when you're going to need some extra alpha space. I have to remember to "add" system alphas instead of "wear" so they don't cancel out some important system layer. 

What is this? There seems to be a bit of stray alpha on the shoulder. It's not from the HUD.

Nor from the sweater's alpha. I think it's a strap of the shirt below the sweater (see previous photo).

Let's try another outfit. This came with system panties (even though it was a trouser outfit) and sandals that came with feet. Remember sandals that came with feet? You can still wear them! That is, if you really liked them. Just alpha the feet away with the HUD. Oh, and I can at least recolor the toenails, but not use the fancy toenail polishes - which no one probably looks at anyway. I'm coordinating nail polish with outfits all the time (and including their HUDs in the Outfit) and no one ever says anything.

Now I'm going to investigate BOM with the Genus head. I've pulled up the Maitreya BOM relay in case I need it because I'm starting from a regular mesh outfit. The BOM for Genus is on the Genetics tab. This was a slight problem until I figured out I had the wrong HUD up. For some reason I'd pulled up the Basic Animation HUD instead of the Setting Universal HUD. I just don't use this head enough. [Sorry about the white skin thing - I should redo the BOM outfit and wear something else, but this really points up that something's wrong.] 

Several minutes of bad words later and I get to the point I want to be at. In the process I seem to have changed my environment settings, so that's what the light aqua color is in the background. I also had to remember to remove the other head. See? Even I get confused. What a pain. 

Anyway, there's the BOM toggle next to the cheek. Now, we've got the red head again and what does that mean, class? Let's not see all the same hands. The head or whole body alpha is still on. It has to go. 

If her head looks weird, it's because she's wearing the shape for the LAQ head. But she's got on a system skin (also from 7 Deadlies) so her head and body match. Ahhhhh. 

And now it's Quiz time. I put the skimpy black lacy dress outfit back on and what happened? The body disappeared! 

Oh, nooooes! How to fix?

If you said "Just slap on the relays and the skin applier," you get full marks. 

Any questions? Then you may spend the rest of class reading until recess.

Magical Wall Decals

Do you have one of those d#%n Linden houses like I do and not sure what the heck to do with it? I tried putting artwork up, but I'd chosen one of the Japanese houses and ... well, it just wasn't working. So I changed the interiors (with the magic wallplate) - and half of the prims on my furniture disappeared. It all came back the next time I visited, but it made me say several naughty words.
Anyway, I think I've found the solution to the naked walls: Floral Wall Decals from the Wine and Roses Mainstore. You buy one decal and slap it on your wall (taking care to make sure you have it decal side towards you because it's invisible on the other side ... man, I've searched for lots of things like that ... and said naughty words. It would have been nice to know ahead the object would do that (maybe I should read the notecards more often).  And, Presto! you have a wall decoration you can copy over and over on all your walls, the floor, wherever. And, and, there are five patterns in the decal you can click on to change. Four are pictured in the photo above.
Neato!

Making It My Own

FEMA trailer.

The temptation to put something really (wonderfully) awful within sight of my neighbor/s sufficiently squelched, I set about making my little area something I would find interesting. I may have to change the area around every month or so just to keep from getting bored with it.


New free furniture for the downstairs. Previous furniture "damaged" in catastrophic terra-forming accident.

Photos of the landlord have now been removed from the living room (due to too many dart holes) and replaced with a nice antique-y wedding portrait of my grandparents (did I mention that I'm really, really old?). A shop kindly offered this lovely set of grotty furniture which coincidentally went well with that grotty carpet. Ooo, I love the serendipity of it all! Free bookcases take up the rest of the wallspace, making it look that much more like my RL house.
As for the yard, for that we have to thank an exhibit of photos I saw years ago in an outdoor venue. They had been hung by fishing line from the trees along the bank of a river during the spider lily blooming season. The photos as a group turning slowly in the breeze in the shade but glinting shards of sunlight made a more profound effect on me than the artistry of the individual photos themselves. It was almost magical.

Lludmila's backyard and exhibit of old family photos.
I don't have the trees to pull off the exact thing, but it was a happy challenge to my limited skills to have some of my favorite old family portraits to twirl slowly on skinny sticks. I'll leave them up for the month of June, in memory of my dad's birthday. He would have been 102.
Exhibit in Awen.

Happy Homemaker

Weeks and weeks later, I've finally decided on a house. I had a few ideas in mind: thatch, wattle and daub, Tudor, medieval ... something that would fit in with the community. I used all sorts of search terms: "rustic," "Tudor," "cottage" and ended up looking at castles and Tudor townhouses. Prices ranged from 150L to around 4,000L. Fortunately, there doesn't seem to be an architecture review committee, so when I chose the dilapidated hobo beach house, there was no picketing or mysterious returning to my inventory. Phew! Also, the pink flamingo lights can stay, which is a relief because I actually paid money (well, Linden dollars) for them.

My new house: Homedecked from Never You Mind.

I can see you looking at this in vain for any thatching, wattle, daub, or period touches earlier than the 1920s. Well, the best laid plans yadda-yaddah a-gley. I went to Never You Mind (people ask me, "Where did you get it?" and I, of course, say, "Never You Mind." So, there's even a nice joke built in by the creator!) and waited patiently on a rustic carousel for things to rez, not having high hopes for this place. I probably even made a pit stop in RL. When I got back and things had rezzed, I looked around in amazement. I wandered off and immediately found this totally cool two-story house with a waterwheel! It was even turning! Suddenly, I wanted the waterfall back. I'd find a place for it, or, by thunder, I'd stick that side into the ocean! Soon I was flying (literally, because I couldn't walk around fast enough to look at it all) all over looking at buildings. Then, near the watertower, I saw my One True Love: Homedecked. Sure, I went to look at other houses, but none of them spoke to me like this house. It had "A Zombie Lives Here" writ large all over it. The only thing it didn't have written ... on anything, were the dimensions. I popped a note into the proprietor's mailbox and hoped for a quick reply.

I was still dithering the next day and looking at the photos I've taken making notes on them when I realized that my heart was set on Homedecked. It had everything I wanted and I'd make it fit if I had to put some of it out over the water. Luckily, that wasn't necessary.

I recommend going to Never You Mind. It isn't laid out as a shop for buildings and rustic accessories. It's laid out like a community, a shabby community, granted, but a community. It's fun just to wander through.



Never You Mind
slurl.com/secondlife/Anders%20Port/134/230/23

Maybe I Shouldn't Be Allowed Back On

Sure, I have a place to live in SL now, and I've been looking for the perfect house to put there (to replace the one there now). I dithered and dithered, looking and evaluating, and then when I finally almost decided on one, when I went back to the store, they were gone. I tried sending a notecard to someone in charge, but they were busy cybering, apparently, and my notecard got bounced back with an IM about how busy he was. Right. How, (ahem) Dare he!

Anyway, although I hadn't decided on a house to fit in with the general "Welsh Village" appearance of the island, I had lucked into a free (free!) Balinese long house that I use as a skybox. Part of it is pictured above, having sprung some leak from a free (free!) shower I had unpacked to look at. When I deleted the shower, the water running on its floor did not go with it and I didn't notice for a couple of days. Fortunately, Bali is a humid place and their houses are built to stand a bit of moisture.

The open Asian-style house in the sky contrasts nicely with what I plan on being a small, thatched cottage on the ground. I can be all cosy on island level and then, when I need some space and what barely constitutes privacy in SL, spread out in the skybox. It also gives me an opportunity to exercise my delight in all things Asian that I inherited from my mother. I've got some Asian frills that go nicely with modern furniture: the paper lamp, the Tibetan prayer flags, the stone lanterns. I have more, but there's conflict with the alpha layers making the kimono stand pointless.

On island level I had been torn between a small, dark cottage and a mill. My land had a waterfall on it and a stream to the water surrounding my tiny peninsula. I worried that it would encroach too much on the neighboring land and had gone out to look at the property lines one more time ... when I noticed that the waterfall was gone. I also noted that I had an actual neighbor in an actual thatched cottage. I looked at where the waterfall was. I looked at my neighbor's build. There is a small waterfall there. I looked at where "my" waterfall used to be.

Having come back one day to find my house gone is all that keeps me from weeping. Perhaps this is just some temporary thing. Perhaps the waterfall is in the process of being moved, moved to accommodate this new home that is nowhere near where the waterfall was.

Regular readers (ha!) of this blog may know that I have a tendency to accidentally delete things.



Two years ago I deleted half of a sky-sandbox trying to put out a fire. Okay, I was trying to find the particle emitter. It didn't occur to me that I had the power to delete someone else's build. This did teach me a lesson: even if you do finally find the tiny prim you were looking for, you can't control it when you are hundreds of meters below on the ground. So, if you finally are able to click on it and still can't delete it, it must mean your avatar isn't where you thought it was.

And this happened to me this weekend. I was unpacking some boxes from the Albero hunt and one turned out to be not a box at all, but the actually necklace. I clicked on it and tried to "take" it - but apparently, I did not take the necklace. There was all my furniture hanging in space, and the necklace now much easier to see, and I was nowhere to be found. If only I had still been sitting in my chair!

I had to try twice to put up my Balinese skybox. It was a regular comedy of errors. I suspect that there is another one up there somewhere that I don't know about. I can't see it, but I'm thinking it's there, perhaps at 5,000 meters or something.

If that were the only dumb thing I'd done this past weekend, I wouldn't take it so hard. But I ran my motorcycle into the stream and had to delete it. Could I have deleted the waterfall at that time? Would I have even noticed? Deleting a nearby waterfall isn't as noticeable as deleting a platform in the sky you were nominally standing on (and chances are if you were looking intently at something else, it would be a while before you noticed that).

I'm still working up the nerve to mention this to the landlord.

Goddess of the Hunt for Lunch

Walking around the Albero Mall, I saw this great satellite shop for LOLO - and the fab hungry crocodile. OSSUM! I almost bought it, but then when I went to the main store I saw the ... Great White Shark! Can't decide now!




















Of course, Kathy had to try it out. Here she is being eaten while she's trying to claw away from the croc. Ohhhhh, I had her eaten several times. Husbob says the skirt needed to go (you can still see it after Kathy's been swallowed), but it looks so cool coming out of its mouth.

Goddess of the Hunt

All hail the Albero Mall Hunt! I saw a photo of a cute blouse on one of the freebie blogs and thought I'd go looking. (Note: still haven't found the clue box for that blouse - rats!) I'd never been to the Albero Mall, but it's an attractive space with many nice shops and very little empty space.

Even though the hunt has numbers, the prizes are not necessarily sequential, so if you can't find one, you aren't totally lost until you can wheedle a clue that makes sense from the hunt group IM. That's a plus! Also, the merchandise at this mall seems to be really great stuff! Avs who know me will go into shock when I say that I actually bought some items ... with real Lindens. But the hunt itself is a bit fiddly.

You walk around the mall (which is huge) and find the grey boxes with numbers on them which are supposed to be in front of stores, but some may have strayed. They may also be slightly embedded. These numbered boxes have a word floating over them. So, what I did is, I wrote down the number and the word next to it and created a big list. I didn't find all the boxes (prob-bo-lem number 1, but since it's not sequential, who cares?), but at least I had a list to go on.

Next, you find the grey landmark givers in front of particular stores. The landmark is to the main store of the satellite shop the LM giver sits in front of. Yeah, try saying that five times fast. You click on it, and, theoretically, you will be sent to the main store where you will have to hunt (in vain in some cases for me, but it's not sequential, so who cares?) down the numbered box. When you find it, you just say "/(number) (code word that goes with number)" near it and it gives you your prize. It took me two days to get the hang of this!

Lest you think I'm somewhat of a "thickie" - I was hindered in my searching by frequently being sent to the wrong location:



The above picture is of the map with the landmark (above, circled) that was given to me by the hunt LM giver. Along with it, the shop itself gave me a different landmark (below, circled). Note the difference. Using the hunt landmark, I often wound up in strange locations, causing me to tp back to the mall, relocate the shop and the giver, and trying again. Usually, the second time took me to the correct location. Usually. As far as I can tell. (This is prob-bo-lem number 2.) A good clue that something was terribly wrong was that instead of rezzing on solid ground, I would rez in midair and fall a considerable distance.

Eventually, (note on learning curve graph "over two days" for this maze rat) I tried the shop's landmark that was given at the same time. That landmark was accurate. Look where the hunt would have landed me on this next example (see orange arrow):



Can yew say: "Refreshing landing for Lludmila"? In another example, I would have been sent to coordinates that were similar to the ones from the shop, but on a totally different sim. I might have found that a tad confusing! (See below)





















Those two problems aside, it's still a fiddly hunt with much traveling back and forth even after you've found every single numbered box. And then there's more hunting at the main stores. If the quality of the shop merchandise hadn't been so good, I'd have given up long, long ago. Haven't had a chance to look at much of the hunt merchandise, but I have high hopes for it.

By the way, the mall map above, which is posted in several locations, is, as far as I can tell, utterly useless.

Goethe Institute

I recently visited the Goethe Institute in Second Life. Thanks to a friend of mine from NYC and even earlier from South Carolina, I can't stop myself from saying "Go-thee" in my head instead of "Gerteh" - which means I need some German Immersion now! Unfortunately, they don't seem to be doing this at a time I can join them. Sigh. Of course, I could go to some of the German sims in SL and just blunder my way through.
The Goethe Institute in SL has German language instruction, a museum, and some fascinating very, very short films on language made by people in India. The Goethe Institute has centers around the world. There was one not far from where I lived in New York City called Goethe House. They are there to promote Germany, German as a second language, and cultural exchange in general. Wow, what a concept! I especially liked the film on German HipHop. All of the exhibits have the capability of translating German to English for the rest o' youse what don't shpreck the lingo.