Virtually Charitable

Bag Lady Design Thrifty Store

Our Kathy loves a bargain as much as Lludmila and eagerly goes over the 60 Linden Weekend list photos to see what's up.  We often end up at Bag Lady Design but this was the first time we noticed the Thrifty Store sign.  What the heck?  We thought we'd check it out.  What a great place to pick up some trifles!  And there are many items 20L or 10L that go towards Relay For Life!  Kathy picked up a windmill!  She's thrilled.  Other items, 10L or less are available as well as some old hunt items as dollarbies.

But, back to Bag Lady Design ...

60L Weekend item

This weekend's theme seems to be music.  There are two pianos and a floor sit with a guitar.  The upright piano has many poses, but the grand has a playing animation.  The floor sit provides you with a guitar to play and if you click on it, it has sound.

Another 60L Weekend item

Liven up your area with some music!

"Cumbaya, my lord, cumbayaaaa ..."

No teensy weensy windmill this.  

Check out that windmill.  It's a 71 prim house with functioning sails and a door that goes "ding-dong!" when opened.  It has a hanging basket out front and a crow.  All this for 20L.

Virtually Lost

Memorial Chapel

It seems that it hurts just as much to lose a friend in the virtual world as it does in RL(tm).  Lludmila has only been in existence five years and has already lost four friends.  Oh, there are the naysayers who say, "Nay, they weren't real friends," but they were real people with real lives - not just that RL(tm) thing people talk about.  And they are now dead.  What's more, they will never rez again.  Our own lives are richer for having known them - not poorer because we weren't able to physically touch them or call on them to help us move - again.

There are several places in the virtual world to memorialize these friends.  Memorials seem to be very popular, in fact.  There is even a special Rainbow Gardens for beloved pets ... pets whose only contribution to the virtual world was barking in the background or chewing on the cables (stop that, Collage!).

The loss we feel for these friends, even ones we didn't know all that well or hadn't marked as "Friends" officially, is magnified by all the other losses in our lives.  It reminds us of our bigger losses, our saddest times, and we can weep for those again as well, hopefully washing away that pain bit by bit but never entirely losing sight of it.  The sadness we feel can also remind us of the happiness we shared.  The dancing, the jokes, the mere sharing of time and virtual space.

So don't try to tell us our virtual friends aren't real.

The Magic of the 60L Weekend

Lovely hanging basket with hanger.

 The 60L Weekend specials are what Lludmila lives all the week for.  Bored with clothes, she now collects houses, skyboxes, furniture, and tchotchkes.  She might have all she wants from Angelic Designs (even though she won a huge gift card in the photo competition, she has no idea where she'd put the Romantic Island. Darn.) and almost everything from Altya's, but there are still things from Bag Lady and some new places that might pique her interest.  Today it was the hanging basket.  It was reputed to be low prim and color (or, rather, flower) change at Luna Bliss.  There were only three items on the 60L list, but when she arrived ... Oh Em Gee, there was just so much more.

The Spring Skydome

For only 50L you can have a taste of the Luna skydomes.  They come with a transporter (in the form of a gigantic orchid) that you add the skydome to and then when you sit on the transporter, you can choose which altitude you want your dome.  It has security features (to prevent strays from visiting unannounced) and the patio rezzes props (food, beverages, candles, a little fire pit, various kinds of particle weather) and seats that rez as needed.

A little romantic fire pitkin or perhaps the candles instead?

It's a small skydome and has only one background scene; the more changeable ones run for as much as 2000L.  The skydome is adaptable - you can remove set pieces or add your own.  The transport orchid will change to a glowing moon when not sat upon.

"Come swing with me!"

Lludmila enjoyed the skydome so much, she went back and got another 60L item (that was not on the published list), the two-seater swing.  It certainly raised a breeze on that Paris Metro hunt item.  [Note the gigantic orchid/transporter to the right.]  The swing's cushions change color as well as the wood.

Little things like this make Lludmila happy.  It's that quest for novelty that seems to be innate in hoomans and their avatars ... and make their inventories soar to over 40K.

This And That

Also after noodling around on the Marketplace, we wandered inworld to see some things up close to see how they worked and ended up at XD Fusion.  One of the dollarbies came in a box that opened itself and I wondered who had made the puppeteer engine that ran it.  This is almost as bad as when I was a kid and I'd look a word up in the dictionary, which would lead to me looking up another word, and eventually I was reading every entry on the page. [You'd think my spelling and vocab would be better.]

You only have to walk in the shop and pieces of the floor light up when you step on them.  Oh, we have to have that!  

Trip trap, trip trap!

Apparently, Lludmila is the last avatar on earth to have heard about the Famous Dancing Frog.

"Hello my honey, hello my baby, hello my ragtime gal!"

"Now do Putting on the Ritz."

A Little Traveling Music, Please!

 As promised in a post from another one of my blogs, here is a whole slew of vehicles that are free or dollarbies and available from the Marketplace.

Kathy had been on a visit to Virtual Montmartre when she noticed the stairs.  Recalling that wonderful scene from "The Great Race" with Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, and Jack Lemmon, we immediately thought of the fun of riding a vintage auto down those steps.  Then I kept my husband up all night as we thought about an entire sim dedicated to the vehicles, scenes, and costumes from that movie.  Ohhh, what a mine of pure fun it is!

Anyway, we went looking for a vintage auto and found one immediately - and it just strikes me that the company in the movie that makes the Leslie Special au-to-mo-bile (which they pronounce as an unfamiliar word) is the Webber Company.

Fab Model A from Aimee Weber

We had only gone into the Marketplace to pick up this car, the SZYM Metro, originally ... but it's like being sucked over the event horizon.  We didn't get out until dinner was declared.

Lludmila is Volk auch.

 Whatever you do, don't ride in a car with Lludmila.  She won't try to eat you or anything, she just can't drive  worth anything.

This is what always happens when Lludmila is behind the wheel.

  Concolor moped is not only free and rides beautifully, but the main parts are colorchange.

Dawww, brilliant moped!

We thought this was just hilarious: the !Rickshaw+ for just 1L!  It has room for two and the charming asian noob's legs move.  Definitely worth the price although it's non-copy.

The absolutely, positively only way to ride.

 Also in the Nekka online store is this absolutely gorgeous sailboat for yet another 1L.  It's just so gorgeous a person could cry!  Room for pilot and one passenger.  It sails beautifully!

Lludmila will fall in love with sailing all over again.

The perfect accessory! Doesn't it look great on her?

Time for a Change

Spring comes to Awen.

Lludmila spends so much of her time in the skybox and tp'ing to the Pub for her discussions, that she was unaware that spring had come to Awen and new neighbors.  She looked at her little red vardo, which was just a launching pied-á-terre for the skybox, and the redness of it seemed to clash with her neighbor's house and all the greenery springing up.  We scoured her inventory for something small and suitable.

Cute little one-room cottage. Be sure to ring the bell!

 This little house seemed perfect.  We had trouble deciding on orientation.  Lludmila likes a view of the ocean, but a cottage of this size does not have a lot of room for windows.  We wrestled with it, but in the end decided to put the more interesting side towards the public area.

View of cottage from south and then north. See the problem?

 I would not live in a house like the above in RL(tm).  Air and light are critical to my well-being.  Then I remembered the portable window that was getting dusty in the inventory.  I pulled it out and deployed it.  It was a forest scene with a window frame overlay.  I ran through some photos I'd uploaded and while the view of the Great Wall of China sim made for an interesting view, it wasn't satisfactory.  So, I sent Lludmila outside, pulled out the sailboat and Lludmila pushed it into position.  I took a series of photos of different "times of day" and uploaded them.  Now Lludmila has a legitimate view of her ocean and the little house is not so claustrophobic.

The solution!

Viewer Mania

Lludmila visits Kenjin.

Lludmila and I have been around the virtual world and "entertained"* many a viewer .  Among the third party viewers, I have used Emerald, Phoenix, Firestorm, Cool VLViewer, and the non-graphic interface Metabolt**.  I enjoyed all of them.  The killer was mesh.  I'm sure mesh is a lovely idea and all (I don't build, I don't understand the mechanics behind building or scripting, I just use stuff), but one day my two favorite viewers (I was actually getting used to V3 and relying on it as an alternative to Firestorm) stopped working.  And I blame mesh, although it used to work on both before the final update they made.  I log on to the V3 or Firestorm and crash.  I can't last more than a couple of seconds.  I have expunged them from my harddrive and done clean downloads and it doesn't change.  I was crestfallen until I found the Cool VL Viewer (thanks to the Virtual Vagabond blog).

Something is always happening that makes me think I will be stuck in RL(tm) forever, but somehow there's always a work-around, and Cool VL Viewer was it.  It has mesh and it doesn't turn me into Crashie Crashwell McCrashypants.  It's like Snowglobe (or "Showglove" as I seem to be trying to type instead), so I'm familiar with the format.  It's been wonderfully stable.

Ducky is rather small and can be set to wander.

But yesterday I put on my frowny face because I was trying to find a hunt item at Artizan (yeah, so I don't understand scripts - but I can find people who do!).  I was there to buy a script to help me find objects.  This is because, as referenced in a different blog, I had lost my rubber ducky.  For some reason, I was not tasked in group membership with locating objects from the land menu (and even if I were, I couldn't remember the name of ducky to search for it).  Cool VL Viewer doesn't have the cool Phoenix/Firestorm area search.  I had exhausted myself with wireframe, first trying to find my ducky and then at Artizan trying to find the hunt gift.  I eventually found ducky when I saw something moving on the minimap.  What the heck could that be? I wondered.  Five more minutes of camera zooming and then wireframe and I found ducky wandering under the prim beneath my house and down in the water.  But by then I'd just had it.

The red postbox.

I was at Artizan because I knew they sold an object search script - I'd seen it there when I was buying other things. [I love my red postbox!]  But I wasn't going to buy it until after I found the hunt objects (I mean, it was unlikely, but what if that were the hunt gift?!  Wouldn't I feel the silly-billy!).  I was in a quandary.  I went to my back-up files (on one of those back-up towers my husband bought me before the Great Harddrive Wipe) to see if there was some long, lost viewer I could use - but I had been too thorough.  I tried Firestorm three more times and then deleted it and its little dog Toto again.  I went to the website to try one last time to download it and I saw you could still download Phoenix.

I did.  It worked.  It has mesh.  I went back to Artizan, picked up the hunt items and I'm a happy camper again.  Now, if ducky gets lost again (first of all, I made sure he was labeled "ducky"), I can find him with area search.  Or, I can do what I had intended in the beginning, which was to find it in my inventory, get the commands from the notecard, and use those. ***





* This is a paraphrase of a friend from grad school who had "been around the world and [ahem] effed him a lot of women" - which he used as credentials to opine on something that had to do with neither.  I thought it was hilarious at the time.

** Metabolt is great if you want to run your alt at the same time and don't want to fry a fourth graphics driver.

*** 4Kittens of the Apocalypse has a prim retriever HUD that has my name written all over it.