I’ve been off the air for nearly two weeks due to the recent severe rain in some parts of Australia, which flooded part of my building and drowned the NBN box. I’m hoping that the problem will be fixed shortly and I can find the time to get some posts up! See you all soon xxx
Stuff
Other bits and bobs
What a run
We’ve been publishing this blog since the 25th of September, 2015. Since then, until just recently, we hadn’t missed a day, a fact that I was very proud of. That’s 2150 days of posts, sometimes twice a day, if Aeon and I got our wires crossed about who was posting when.
Over the last two weeks, I’ve been under enormous pressure to get part of a major RL work project out the door, and to start planning for the next phase. It’s totally exhausted me, and the first day I managed to log back in to SL, the only thing people wanted to talk to me about were “can you organize this?” and “here’s info about what’s happening with such-and-such and can you help?” and so on. It totally stressed me out when all I wanted to do was log in, listen to some music, and relax for a couple of hours. So I ran away.
Sadly, that bought the run of continuous blog posts to an end. I’m writing this on my late Friday afternoon, just after I’ve done with yet another exhausting day with four hours worth of meetings. I sat down, logged in, and wondered if I could catch up the days I missed blogging. Aeon is also exceptionally busy, and hasn’t been able to post for a long time, considering the effort required for her photo artistry.
And I decided that no, the run is over.
The pressure at work does not look like letting up until perhaps the end of the year. So… if I miss a day (or a week), you know what’s going on.
German Newbie Center
My friend Kat showed me New Berlin today, specifically the German Newbie Center. I’m not much of a fan of the word “newbie”, I prefer “newcomer”, it sounds much more welcoming!
The reason Kat wanted me to visit is because the GNC has a stack of FREE clothes to help newcomers get started! Both guys and girls will find some great starter outfits here.
I grabbed a dress and some heels to show you at least one of the outfits you can easily create. The dress is sized for Lara, Venus, Physique, none of which I expect a newcomer to have. But it also comes with fitmesh versions for the five standard mesh sizes including an alpha, so that will fit a classic avatar right away. A good idea might be to include a notecard with a pointer to the standard body size information, and an explanation of the sizes.
The heels are called “Ribbon High Heels Black” which is super confusing, and they are really mids (at least they are on Maitreya). I prefer Slink as you probably know, but I use Lara’s mid feet because I only have a very small collection of mid high shoes. The shoes are in sizes for Maitreya, Slink, Belleza, and Ocacin. Again, a newcomer would hardly be expected to have any of these, so fortunately it comes in a size to fit Map feet too, which are FREE on marketplace. Again, a notecard would go a long way to helping someone new to SL.
The GNC is worth a visit if you’re a newcomer, or helping one out!
Dress and heels available for FREE at the GNC
Getting started
Do you know we have an article to help newcomers get started in Second Life? Well, we do! It was this blog’s first published post. Even though that’s quite some time ago, we still try and keep the article updated when things change. To that end, I’ve just reviewed and made some minor revisions to it.
If you run into me in-world, I also have a version of the article as a notecard, so feel free to ask me for it.
Check out the article, and please pass it on to new people that could benefit from it.
EEP
I’ve mentioned EEP fleetingly before. EEP, or the Environmental Enhancement Project, is available in Linden Lab’s Viewer, but is currently only available as a public beta in Firestorm, and is a replacement for the currently Windlight system. I’ve played around with it a little, but I’m waiting for an official version in Firestorm before I get serious with it (for example, defining a per-parcel day/night cycle).
However, while running it, I was at a friend’s place, and I was struck by how much better normals and lighting reflections look with EEP. Also, light falloff appears to be much more realistic. So I took a couple of photos. You can compare the two below. The only difference between these two photos was using the beta viewer with EEP, verses using the stable production viewer with Windlight. All camera settings, graphics card settings, resolution, and so on, remained the same. Oh, and I “froze” the fire so as not to be distracting 🙂
Take note of the reflections from the fire and the lamps on the floor and the wood to the left, and the more realistic falloff, particularly in the corners of the room. I’m looking forward to playing with this more when it’s officially merged into Firestorm.
Windlight
EEP
Lara 5.2
Just a quick note, so quick, not even a photo! I just wanted to mention that Maitreya have released version 5.2 of the Lara mesh body. There are only two changes, and the first is support for the new Petite Chest add-on from Maitreya, which I suspect won’t affect too many people reading this blog.
But the other change is of interest to nearly everyone that uses this body. For the first time, Lara has rigged feet, which means you can change the foot size via the slider while editing your shape.
For anyone that’s been around pre-mesh bodies, I’m willing to guess that all of you will have your foot size set to zero in your saved shapes. I know I did, as the system feet are so horrible, I wanted to hide them as much as possible!
So, with the new Lara, you might have a little chore to do. Wear each of your shapes and edit it and set the foot size to 25. This is the default size to match the prior version of Lara’s foot size. If you don’t do this, your feet will certainly look funny on your existing Lara-sized shoes 🙂
NY Skybox
I think this is a first for the blog, showing you a building that’s been languishing in my inventory for a couple of months. This 20 LI skybox is really well done, and I got it for FREE via the PocketShop HUD (which now seems to not be working, however the skybox creator has at least one other FREE building, so if you like this look of this one and the price, be sure to check them out!)
The building is done in mostly mesh with a couple of prims to do the scenery out the window. The textures are baked on, but everything is modify so you could easily repaint if brick is not to your liking. And being a skybox, there is no door, so you’ll need a teleporter.
Having said all that, it’s a great little skybox for a small shop or a secluded getaway spot!
Skybox: New York Skybox (FREE) by Infinite (marketplace link)
Introducing a new contributor to the blog: Jazaar!
Welina mai kākou! Hello, my friends! It’s my pleasure to introduce you to a new contributing blogger for Blues Fantasy! Jazaar Silvermoon is a dear friend of mine who is an artist in RL and a photographer in SL and she’s going to join us on the Blues Fantasy blog! She has a good eye for cute outfits, and I’m sure you’ll love to see what she brings to us here. Please help me in welcoming Jaz!
New store location
I’ve moved the store due to some exceedingly poor treatment from my previous estate managers at Azure Islands. I’d been a tenant there for 24 weeks and never been late with a payment. Having turned up to pay my rent with half a day to run on my meter, I was surprised to find that the meter was paid up for a month! After checking with Aeon to make sure she hadn’t topped it up, I assumed I had an angel looking after me.
About four hours later, my entire store was returned to me with no warning! Even though if someone hadn’t topped up the meter, it would have still had about eight hours to run (I know, I looked at the L$ transaction history to make sure).
I immediately TPed to discover Candy and Billing Azure there, and not only had they returned my store, but also a huge art gallery next to me! When I asked what was going on, after waiting nearly 30 minutes for them to respond to my repeated queries, I was told that “(resident name) had paid my meter with fraud [sic] lindens and we had to reclaim the land”. I didn’t know there was such a thing as “fraud lindens”. I can only assume that the named resident had participated in some form of phishing and dumped their profits on my meter and the art gallery’s next door.
Okay, so I can understand that they needed to reset the meter to wipe the credit, but couldn’t they have done it in a way that would have made everyone happy? For example, transferred the payment to the meter on an available parcel and cleared that? Failing that, why not be considerate and IM me, and tell me what’s going on? I was obviously online, there was an online indicator in the store! Then I could have come and picked up the store, they clear the meter, sell the land back to me for L$0, and I put the store back, and I remain a happy tenant. But no, just boom, return with no warning. Result, one extremely upset tenant.
After receiving basically only the information I’ve laid out above after repeatedly asking for further clarification and being ignored, I TPed back home very upset, sans land. Of course, I could have repurchased the parcel, but after treatment like that, I really didn’t want to deal with them any more, and I sure didn’t want to give them any more L$. So I moved.
After nearly two days of searching for a new place, I settled on a store right at the landing point of MyntBox, a supervised adult sandbox. This place is pretty cool, and I knew about it from some early builds I did there. Why don’t you come and visit, browse the store, and maybe stay awhile and build something of your own in the sandbox!
Darktable
After my post about my Wacom tablet and mediocre drawing skills, I thought I’d show you two more pics that I did just for my Flickr account. Both of them were intended to teach myself about a wonderful piece of freeware called Darktable. This is a photo processing program for Linux and Mac OS X (and vague Windows support), and it’s a rather marvelous piece of software. You can do all types of interesting post-processing with it. I’ve barely scratched the surface with the possibilities it opens up.
This first photo was taken when I got very interested with what you can do with point lights and the shadows that can be generated in SL with them. Now, of course, I use point lighting all the time in my photos. I even wrote up a very basic tutorial on how to set up lighting for a shoot. I used Darktables to play around with the contrast to get the shadows to pop more and to add even more light coming through the window that I got with the photo I took in SL.
In the second photo, I used Darktable to desaturate the image and add photo grain, and again played around with lighting curves to get the look that I wanted and to darken the shadows. I’m pretty proud of both results, even though they’re so different and similar at the same time (did someone mention “bum”)!
