I didn’t quite finish the week of posts for the Big Bad Blogger Challenge. Last Friday was kind of crazy doing other things and finishing up a few things here and there for Hair Fair 2009. The final prompt was just to talk about our experience doing the challenge, and I have to say that at the very least, posting more frequently showed me that I do want to keep my blog and that I should make that and taking photos more of a priority. I don’t know how many times I’ve said things like “I want to blog but I don’t know what” or “I miss taking tons of photos” lately, and I’m not sure why I’ve drifted away from doing that. I’m such a sentimental person that the blog and my Flickr stream really are a scrapbook of sorts for me, and I like creating that record. I guess it’s my way of saying I’m here.
Would I participate in this kind of challenge again? Yes, I definitely would. Do I think it’s going to change my future blogging? Maybe. I’m not sure about that. I think it did remind me that a blog post can be short and written without a ton of sweating over it, and for me, that’s a positive. I’ve tried before to just give myself 15 minutes to write and then to hit publish when that time is up, and that might be something I do more often. Looking back over my posts from the beginning of this blog, I also notice that I don’t explore new places nearly as often as I once did, so maybe I’ll try to do more travel entries in the future.
All of this also reminded me that I’ve had another site design on the back burner for over a year now. There’s still some pieces of that I think I’d like to try to salvage, so maybe I’ll do some sprucing up around here and settle back in for a while. It’s just time to figure out exactly what I want to get out of this place in more ways than one. Perhaps I’ll go sit on a star and ponder my place in the universe.
Today’s Big Bad Blogger Challenge prompt is choose your own, and with Hair Fair officially opening tomorrow, the only topic I can think about is hair. I’m part of the Hair Fair committee this year and worked on the Flickr contest as well as an auction that will be happening during the fair once things get set up, and it has really kept me busy. It’s funny how Hair Fair has been such a huge deal and really kept me on my toes considering I don’t even make hair.
Today I needed a bit of a break and squeezed in some shopping and setting up a photo scene. Even with that though I couldn’t get away from the hair. It just came naturally. I’m so excited to see what all the designers have been brewing up for us. I just had to do a mad scientist theme to play with that idea a bit.
I’m going back to yesterday’s prompt from the Big Bad Blogger Challenge for today’s entry since I didn’t feel up to the prompt yesterday.
You’ve been given a sim of your very own to use for free for one year. However, there are 3 rules. It cannot be residential, it cannot be commercial, and it has to be open to the public. What do you do with it?
As some of you know, I had a openspace sim for a few months at the end of last year, and I’d developed a certain story that I wanted visitors to the sim to be able to piece together from various notebooks and items scattered throughout the sim. I never really had the chance to bring that to life the way I wanted, so if I had a free sim for a year, I’d finally bring those ideas together. The sim would be almost entirely underwater with lots of nooks and crannies where curious visitors would find submerged wrecks, lost journals, and bits of buildings and sculptures that seem almost from another world with their twisted, elongated spirals faintly glowing in shades of blue and purple.
Discovering the secrets of the sim would not be a linear journey with a defined start and end. People could pick up the story wherever they first find a clue, and while the complete story would be the same for everyone, each person would have a different viewpoint until they had all the pieces. I kind of think of it like that story of the blind men describing the elephant based on what part they were touching.
And what’s the story? The short version is that certain people over hundreds of years have been drawn to this part of the sea. They have dreams they can only remember parts of, and they find themselves doing insane things like stealing submarines and hiring planes to get to this secluded area. Their tales differ slightly but they hear voices crying out for them to come to this space to discover a hidden part of their heritage. Long ago, a society of shapeshifters living as merfolk decided to go out and explore the world. Over the years, their true heritage was diluted and lost until suddenly the original society is facing its potential end. Some of the shapeshifters have psychic gifts, and with those, they’re bringing back the descendants to strengthen their home.
I’m skating in under the wire with my daily post for the week. There’s not a whole lot to say about today that’s worth getting into here, and it’s been a long day in SL in so many ways, so my brain just isn’t up for answering today’s suggested prompt though it’s a good one that maybe I’ll address tomorrow. I’ve had a few thoughts about what I’d do with a full sim that didn’t need to bring in money to support itself, so I’ll probably come back to that one.
So when SL is your escape and it gets you down, what is a girl to do? If you’re lucky like me, then you have a best friend who cracks jokes and threatens elephant stampedes to make it all better. And you know what? With the magic of SL, flying elephants and good friends really do make it all so much better. Don’t let SL get you down, and have some fun. Blow off some steam and do something silly for no other reason than it’s silly.
I bet my elephant can jump over more giant teddy bears than yours anyway! And right now, I’m letting Ellie fly me all the way to dreamland. Tomorrow is another day, and I’ll make it a good one.
Describe what your perfect Second Life day would be like.
I thought for a bit about the “not in the realm of possibility” things that might make for a truly perfect day like an automatically organized inventory with stray items deleted and never missed or learning that the tier on Covet was being waived for the rest of time because all of us who live on Covet are just too cool to have to pay. Then I decided to talk instead about what a regular “perfect” day would be like. It’s a day that actually happens every once in a while.
I sign in to SL and there are no urgent notecards waiting to greet me. No one pounces me in IMs while I still have group notices and other inventory pop-ups on my screen. Kavar stands across from me working on a project that makes me all grabby hands for it. Kere is working in the Covet sandbox below the workshop on some grand creation for Covet or Ivy Falls. A project of my own waits by my pose stand, and I know just how I want to finish it, and when I’m done, I feel happy and proud in my accomplishment.
I decide to treat myself to a bit of shopping, and I run across someone or something that makes me right-click and inspect, and then off I go on a little adventure from shop to shop, finding new places and having fun exploring. While I’m out and about, I take some photos to add to Flickr later and maybe even blog about them here. I send landmarks to my friends when I find places that make me think of them, and I happily chat away with them as we each do our own thing. We send snapshots back and forth from time to time as we keep each other up to date with whatever we’re doing. Maybe some of us will meet up to try out poses together at a new-to-us pose shop or to take photos together.
I end the day in SL feeling blessed to know such talented and kind people. No negative voices bounce around in my head. The last stop of the day is back in the workshop where I spend a few minutes telling everyone good night, and then I go off to my RL bed with a smile on my face.
And here I am on one of the sky islands enjoying a cup of coffee and a good book while wearing some of my purchases from Mischief’s 50% off sale, my new favorite heels from Periquita, and a brand new hairstyle from Exile. That looks like a pretty perfect day too.
I’ve decided to participate in the Big Bad Blogger Challenge this week to try to bring some life back to this blog. I want to blog, but I seem to keep putting it on the back burner or thinking too much about whether or not something is worth sharing. It’s my blog, so I should just write what I want. You’d think that would be an easy thing to do, but I’m the girl that can make anything harder than it needs to be. It’s my special talent.
This challenge of posting at least once a day every day this week also comes with optional daily prompts. I might not use all of those, but I thought today’s prompt was interesting.
How long have you been a blogger? How has it enriched your life?
In 1996, it wasn’t called blogging, but I did have an online journal that I updated 3-4 times a week. I’d just gotten married and moved across the country, and it was my way to document my life and share it with my friends and family. At first, I did it all manually by writing and formatting all my entries in notepad and then uploading to my own domain. The most tedious part was updating the previous entry each time I wrote a new entry to add the next button for the newest entry. After a while of that, I moved to a more automated system called Grey Matter, and from there I moved to the first version of Movable Type in late 2001. I loved Movable Type and became a much more active blogger at that point and made so many new friends, and that eventually led to a brief job as community support for another Six Apart product. Somewhere along the way though I fell into using Wordpress, and that’s still my favorite one to use.
To bring this back to SL, I began this blog on August 8, 2007, which was about 6 months after first creating my SL account and about 2.5 months after my first time actually signing in to SL. For a lot of reasons, there was this gap of about 3 months between finally getting an SL account and then going in world, and since I tend to research the heck out of things, I spent a lot of that time finding SL blogs. I signed up for the education and networking aspects and then ended up staying for the fashion, socialization, and general exploring. When I created this blog, I thought it would be a hodgepodge of whatever was on my mind related to SL with a slant toward discovering new places and documenting them. I was right about the hodgepodge at least.
Even though this blog gets less use than it once did, I’ve met some people through this medium that I probably would have never met otherwise. Or if I had met them in another way, the interaction wouldn’t have been as deep without the meeting through our blogs first. Blogging gives me a place to talk about the places I see or the things on my mind, and I’ve spent some great moments in SL planning a post or setting up photographs to go with a post.
And just because I have a rule for myself that I like to include an image with every post, I thought I’d share a look at me around the time I wrote my first post here and what I look like today.
This photo made me think about some things in my SL a little bit, and suddenly I realized I might actually have something I felt like blogging again. It’s nothing earth-shattering to be sure, but it’s a little lesson I keep having to learn again and again. First, let me give you a little background.
When I was a little girl, I loved dancing. I’d make up routines to music all the time and begged my mom for dance lessons. I finally got to go to a clogging class, and I was just head over heels from the very first moment, but I never went back for a second class. There were lots of reasons for that but one of them was the teacher commenting to my mom that maybe I wasn’t cut out for dancing. Mom didn’t tell me that then of course because why would you ever say that to a 4-year-old?
So I had no more official dance classes for a long time, but I still loved dance. The dance style didn’t even really matter to me. I fell in love with ballet the first time I saw Swan Lake on a school trip. Musicals made my feet move all on their own even if I was just watching them on TV while sitting on the couch. I danced my heart out every chance I had but it was kind of my secret thing most of the time. Then in college, I ended up with a group of people who did competitive western dancing from two-stepping to line dancing, and one guy needed a partner, and then suddenly there I was dancing and even winning small prizes sometimes. That’s when mom told me why I never had another dance class, and we both laughed at how wrong that teacher had been. Of course I was cut out for dancing. It was in my heart even if I’d never be the best in the room.
And there you have part of the lesson I keep having to learn. Do what you love and enjoy it and be the best you can be at it, and don’t worry that you’re not the best. It doesn’t matter. Does it make your heart happy? Does it give you a reason to get up in the morning? Then that’s more than enough. Let yourself enjoy it. Stop worrying about how you look to other people or being scared you’re not good enough. Enjoy being happy.
And now I guess I should try to tie that back to the photo that I claimed started this whole thought process, huh? I worry a lot. Anyone who’s close to me knows that. I’m my own worst enemy when it comes to shutting myself down before I ever even really get going on something. I have a knack for making the most enjoyable activity into arduous work because I get these perfectionist blockades built up in my mind very easily and quickly. It’s hard to knock those down and to just enjoy something for what it is.
Shine started with one series of 10 eyes a year ago, and now I’ve done so many series of eyes that I’ve actually retired my oldest ones. My two latest series – Covet and Lustrous – are popular enough that I sell multiple pairs of them daily. Then the jewelry came, and I loved learning to make my own sculpts and seeing myself improve, and the jewelry also sells well, and I get great constructive feedback about it. And most importantly, I enjoy doing all of that and seeing my little shop grow. One would think it’s a win-win situation, but I keep falling into this trap of negating every positive thing that happens. I became that critical teacher telling myself now “You might not be cut out for this” for no other reason than I’m a perfectionist, but the truth is still there that if you’re having fun, then keep doing it. Stop thinking so much!
Why make life so hard when it doesn’t have to be? I was in a bit of a funk when I saw that lovely freebie skirt set from idk by Chav Paderborn, and for once, when I got that urge to just find the fun in SL again, I did it, and that photo up there was the result. And I look at it, and I think about how dancing has been that thing I get to do without worrying about the need to be perfect or more than who I am. I need to find more of that spirit in SL, and I’m working on it. I want to dance through life and not worry my way through it, and while I won’t change overnight and will need to keep reminding myself of the lesson, SL seems like one of the perfect places to begin the change.
For this week’s SL Love Thursday, I want to take a minute to thank all the live musicians who are a part of SL. I had no idea there was such a wealth of music in SL until I stumbled across my first Keiko concert in August 2007, and I’ve been a Keiko fan ever since. She’s still my favorite even though I’ve gone on to find other great musicians in SL like Winston Ackland, and I wish I had more time to go to concerts and find new favorites as well.
There’s something very special about sharing a concert with some of the same people time after time. It’s almost like an extended family catching up with everyone. I always get a smile on my face when Keiko mentions me on the stream and when some of the old regulars show up at a concert after a long time away. Earlier this week, Keiko released her first full-length CD for purchase, and she’s celebrating with daily concerts in SL this week, which has been a real treat.
As part of the week-long concert series, Keiko will be playing at my home sim Covet on the dock specially created for the event by my good friend and fellow sim co-owner Kere Delcon. The concert begins at 6pm SLT on Friday, May 22, and we’re going to have so much fun! Come hang out with us and listen to some great music while maybe doing a little shopping at Exile, Shine, and Treads. I hope to see a bunch of you there.
Today is SL Love Thursday as you may have seen around other blogs and Flickr streams today. I haven’t blogged here in a couple of weeks, so I’m using this weekly meme to jump back in and just throw love all over the place. I don’t think it’s any secret that my best friend is Kavar Cleanslate. It might seem like overkill to focus a Love Thursday entry on him since I go on about him all the time anyway, so I’m including a few other love targets too. The main focus though is Kavar because I love him to pieces.
Kavar has been a huge impact on my SL from always being willing to dress up for my photo ideas to encouraging me to try my hand at building whatever my mind can imagine. I’m not sure I’d still be in SL at all without him being there. We’ve been friends over a year now, and I still marvel at how quickly he became a very important part of both lives. When I need to talk or cry or vent or rant or all of the above plus anything else I can think of, he’s always there for me however I need him.
I know Ingrid Michaelson’s “The Way I Am” is more about romantic love, which is most definitely not the kind of love I have for Kavar, but I love the song, and its core of “you take me the way I am” is exactly how I feel about him. I’m a fairly private person with most people, but he knows everything there is to know about me by now, and he takes it all in stride. I trust him with everything. The song is also great because of the line “I’d buy you Rogaine when you start losing all your hair.” A certain SL hair designer is very fond of his real life mane, so it just seems like the perfect teasing line. By the way, I love this video too.
In addition to being my best friend, Kavar is also one of the guys with whom I share the beautiful Covet sim, and I love the other co-owners Kere and Ju, and I love the sim itself. In the photo of Covet, you can see signs for my shop Shine and Kavar’s shop Exile, and I love both of those too. I fell in love with Exile long ago and haven’t worn any other hair in over a year now, I guess, and Shine might just be a glimmer in my eye still without Kavar’s nagging encouragement. It’s just a big ol’ love fest in this short little post today.
Kavar, even though I’ve tried to hit a few highlights in this post, I really don’t have the words to thank you for who you are in both lives or to tell you how much you mean to me, but I hope you know, and I figure you do since I babble on like this a lot, and you seem to always be able to read my mind anyway. You’re my best friend anywhere. It’s as simple and as complex as that.
I’ve been out of town the last week or so focusing on some RL family stuff. I managed to drag Mom back into SL to see our sim Covet in all its glory, and I finally convinced my brother to create an avatar. Thank you Linden Lab for having the Gearhead surname right now because I think that was the last little push he needed, or maybe I achieved a grandmaster rank in my nagging sister skills finally. I’m just happy they both got to see what I’ve been up to in SL for themselves. Dad will be a hard case, but I’ll eventually get him signed up too.
As you can tell from me bringing my family into SL, I’ve haven’t exactly been away from SL during this trip, but I’ve just been popping in to chat and see what other people are doing. The most active thing I’ve done myself is update my profile photo to something a little more spring-like. Can you tell I like purple?
I’ll be heading home tomorrow, and I’m excited to dive back into some projects for Shine. I miss playing around in ZBrush and trying to figure out more about sculpted prims. Thankfully I got to push out two sets at Shine before I left. Gothica is steel and big chain links as its name might suggest, and Gilded Lily is a little girlier and a nod to some vintage costume jewelry I own. The lily sculpt in Gilded Lily is probably my favorite piece I’ve created so far.
