And it’s not me who added this word to the name!

It was doomed to come… there would be a day where I’d finally spot this place, and this day, well, had finally come. I set myself on my little trip to the Sci-Fi Geeks Museaum & Theater, in Indigo (64,192), and as was to be expected, took quite a good deal of pictures on my way in. It indeed is very nice to visit, even though I’m not sure I know all the references that are actually made in it, between posters, 3D displays and reconstitution of spaceships. Of course, I don’t like not knowing, so I made my own little research when there was something I couldn’t catch… and now I’m less ignorant (or more geeky, depending on how one will look at it).

The entry part of the Museum, as can easily be seen on the snapshots above, is a vast room filled with posters from various series; it leads to two holo-rooms, where one can easily activate a 3D-display of some known, various spacecrafts. I’m a sucker for Babylon 5, so it’s the one I added to my little galore here, but there are some others, of course. The central room also sports a StarGate ring transporter, and two small rooms that evidently urge one to shout “Beam me up Scotty!”.

So, what’s the next thing I did? Beaming up, of course. Warning, trek love inside. One of the teleporters (let’s cal them this way) leads to a reconstruction of the “Defiant”, the other to the Klingon”Bird of Prey”. Both pretty well-done, and it’s fun to roam one’s way in them, looking at how they’ve been built. I’m really not a Star Trek fan (free admittance here!), but I can’t deny that it’s really a nice building job that has been done on them.

Last but not least, the first floor of the Museum is actually a huge theatre, one with a very ncie cosy feeling. I suspect that it must be a place for events, as I do’nt see the interest of a constantly empty theatre room of this size, but whatever – iy has this nice touch of a room perfect for old 50’s sci-fi movies, and I’m certainly not one to complain about this.

And now, I think I can add this one to the list of places that are worth a look and visit.

After having tried my hand at clothing, building, selling, buying a plot of land and getting a store of my own, I finally did something I hadn’t done yet since I’ve settled in Second Life: going to an actual event. I know myself well enough, I tend to easily keep in my little corner while working on a new design or building a bit of house, or to pay a visit to one person only. For once, I thought it was time to mingle with more than just two people at a time! Thus, in the past days, I gave a more closer look to the Events list, to see if there was something nice going on at a suitable hour for me.

That was two events, actually. The first one was a black-themed one, held at the Aurora mall in Varney; I have a little stall there and had already chatted with Aurora Fairplay herself a bit, so I decided to drop by briefly. I got to see nice costumes and avatars (lots of goth ones, in fact), even though it didn’t last long, as the hostess had to log out earlier than planned. The second event, was in Fantasy Castle in Bolinas, and also pretty much goth-oriented, which fit well with the place (medieval castle-type, with tapestries on the wall).

Oddly enough, I didn’t know one single person at the second party, but I had much fun no matter what! For one there was a dance machine available, so I was at least assured to not look too lame compared to the other people already dancing there and using it (here you can say I’m a dance/party newbie!). Then I met nice people, exchanged a few IMs and cards, learnt about an Asian-themed club, and even stumbled upon my neighbour from Kafiri. Oh yes, and I won 8L$ at the random raffle, yayh, I’m rich now It was different from the other “virtual” parties I’ve been used to – I had gone to some of the GSP parties in AO, and the feeling of “closeness” was something that was always present there, as it was easy to quickly get to know the DJs and usual attendants – but all in all, this difference was what made it nice. Different worlds, different places, different people: that’s all good for me, as long as there’s fun along the road!

It made me a little nostalgic however… reminding me a bit of a night-club I used to go to as a student, and that closed two years ago. They had good gothic/metal-themed parties happening there, as well as a very nice dancefloor with stained glass and dark walls. I guess I sort of realized that I actually miss it, even though I had stopped going in its last year of existence due to combined work and school (and my partners in crime not being in town anymore). Maybe this can sound a bit pathetic, but after two years spent living in the country, with no clubs around and my old friends all gone abroad, well… a party in a virtual world is still better than nothing at all.

It also made me realize that aesthetically speaking, I’m still a half-goth. I’ve never followed the “spirit” of it, but when it comes to clothing, my, now this is something I’m at ease with. Way more than rave parties and stuff like that. I think I need to go to some more events of this type in the future. It was fun… I didn’t need to think or worry about anything… it was, all that simply, fun.

During this past week, I’ve released my first set of male clothing in my little Japanese style. It is a quite simple one (black and white, with red sash and collar), however, from the echoes I got so far, it made its buyers happy, so this keeps my spirits high about what I do. Here’s a fact I must admit… I had much, much fun in designing it, because it made me look up for some bit of information first, and this way I was able to learn a few interesting historical things. It reminded me of many good moments, a few years ago, and of countless hours spent on studying history. I had forgotten how good that felt, I think.

If I started with this one, it’s for a reason though: it seemed a good model to try my hand at male clothing, which I never had done yet, and also at something different than the usual kimono. Funnily enough, the outfit itself was actually of Chinese inspiration – I took example from a real outfit that was used during the Asuka era, and at that time it was indeed much inspired from Chinese clothing. I’m not sure about this yet, but given its style, I think it’s actually a Court type of clothing. I have no idea if the main color I used marks a high or low ranking though, and this bothers me a bit, but in all honesty, I think that most users in Second Life will probably not mind this little detail.

I plan on working on a female model from the Jomon era next, although, if I want to really stay in the historical fashion, I’ll have to craft a white only model (dyeing processes were bad at that time, so clothes were mostly white). The cut seems simple, but the sash can be lots of fun to work on, and I’m looking forward to it. I’ve also taken upon myself to add a little historical note to these outfits, not to play the know-it-all, but mainly because I have the feeling that most people (just like myself before I looked up to discover how these clothing models were exactly made!) will think of “Japanese clothing” as “simple kimono”, while in fact it can be extremely vast, depending on the era. I have wet dreams of crafting a junihito kimono (twelve layers of clothing!), but this seems pretty hard to do, unfortunately, so this will be for when I have more experience only, and more desire to play with prims. It sure looks so nice… I wonder if one day I’ll have enough skill to make one?

And thus it came to happen, that in this fair morning I had my first trip to the Red Dragon Street market in Tehama (75,200). Which is, I must say, a very lovely place, and one immediately gets the feeling of a small, almost Chinatown-like market, rather than of one of these huge shopping malls I’ve seen so far (not that I have anything against the shopping malls, but in this specific case, it’d just have been bad). Point made, and easy to notice, indeed.

Tehama in itself is a very Japanese-themed sim. It’d be an excellent thing to have a house there, although it likely won’t be possible for me, but thats another story. I travelled around a bit, but primarily focused on the market itself no matter what. From what I’ve understood so far, it has been created by Snakekiss Noir, and reserved for selling items of Asian-inspiration only; while getting a place in it is free, not any vendor can just put his or her camp there and sell anything, which is fine. Weapons, furniture, dressing panels with Chinese prints… there is way enough items of this kind to be found there to make a person like myself happy.

I haven’t fully decided yet whether I should try to get a little stall there, but that’s mainly because, for the moment, I only have my one and only yukata to sell, and I know it’s not a complete piece yet. Or is it? Perhaps I should consider making it in one or two other colors, and present this for a start? From what I could gather during our conversation yesterday, there’s likely more than one person who’d be interested in such clothing, so it’s anyway worth a try.

Or not… In any case, yesterday late in the evening, I did something I hadn’t seen myself doing… I bought a little plot of land to host a whole store of mine.

That came a surprise to me as well. Although I had been pondering the idea and browsing a little among the current sales to see what it was like, all these horror stories about land barons, as well as some insanities I had seen on the road (a 512m² plot for 20000L$... yeeeees), had kept me away from it so far. Yet the idea had been lingering in my head, for different reasons. Maybe because I’m already finding myself too limitated in my little Kafiri plot – heck, I couldn’t even rezz the katana Hiro gave me, because I didn’t have enough room left! -, maybe because it was a bit weird to sell my stuff in my “house”, maybe because I could afford it after all… maybe also because several times already, I’ve been asked if I have a place of mine that people can put a landmark on, instead of searching for my stuff in malls and other huge places (which I can understand: apart from the Red Dragon and Silk Water market, I myself more and more don’t feel like my Japanese clothing really belongs to a “mall” type of place…).

I cannot thank Hiro Pendragon enough, once again, for his valuable help regarding this, notably the advice he gave me on prices and “decent” land. Of course, one never exactly knows what can happen in a place… for instance, a sim can seem nice, but what if someone buys half the land six weeks after to build a huge mall? That was a chance to take… and the fact that once I did the conversion in my little Euro currency, it appeared that I could afford a 1024m² plot (not more, but 1024 is already way nicer than what I had!), also helped a lot, I admit.

In the end, past midnight (perhaps it played a role in making me acting that hastily, when usually it’s not really like me…), I finally found a nice plot in Ebisu (10,218). Decent enough sim, from what Hiro said, not much more futher from a telehub than some of the markets I often visit, near the water, and currently quiet enough. I’m hoping it will stay this way. Ironically enough, it’s just a hundred meters from the Events center, so it’s not like I don’t know the place. And, silly cherry on top, I like the name (it’s pretty nifty to sell Japanese clothes in a place named “Ebisu”, isn’t it). Yes, I know, I did say it was silly after all, and certainly not the reason that motivated me first, but it’s a nice feeling no matter what!

What now… not sure yet about where exactly this is going to lead me. It’s not more expensive than many other things I’ve done in games so far… if I don’t like it, I can give it up after a while and sell the land again… and I’ve just finished building this second place of mine (see image on the left), which gave me much fun and made me all glad. I know, the style is very similar to the one I used for my house in Anshin, but I like it, and even found a nice shoji door texture to use with it. So far it’s not very full, but at some later point, I plan on dividing it differently. Perhaps by putting my “modern” clothes – the ones I do to change my mind – on the second floor. Time will tell.

Second cherry on top… I also now have a little bit of water to park my black ‘thopter. Yes, I do have simple pleasures, in my second as well as in my first life.

In all honesty, I can’t say that I had a lot done these past three days, as I had much more work to do than usual, and ended up exhausted enough in the evenings to not do anything else than idle chatting when I was in world. However, I had the opportunity of stumbling (well, I should rather say “being invited to”, actually) upon the Silk Water’s Mountain area, in Orelle (42,88). Orelle is one of the snow sims, and even though I’m not usually fond of these sims, in this case I must admit that the whole place looks pretty well in context. The usually white landscape and ‘snow’ falling from the sky (I suspect these are manually-added effects) add a very specific charming side to the village.

“Village” I can say, indeed. Silk Water’s Mountain is a grouping of small, lovely houses built in a very Japanese style, separated by nice stone pathways and fountains. Some of them are “shops”, in which you can buy the exposed items… some others are simply a peaceful display of Asian, and more specifically Japanese furniture, plants and decoration. Not everyone though will want people to enter ‘their” house; even without this however, the place is very nice to visit. I found myself wandering in it aimlessly, simply carried by the beauty of each tiny detail I could notice, the pavement, the light effects above the fountains, the peaceful and almost eerie atmosphere… Charming, and very interesting.

A small but long wooden bridge also leads to a very nice little market, featuring dark wood stalls and carts where items are sold, all once again in a very Eastern fashion. Not only can one find cushions, clothes and accessories, but also even food, which adds a lot to the ambience. I have no idea of who would buy fish hanging from a stall’s ceiling, or a pan full of yakisoba, but these sure help in putting the wanderer even more in the small market mood. Here also, stone pathway and wood stairs to reach the second part of the market; it is a bit a shame that other buildings, further in the sim, ‘destroy’ the whole feeling a bit, but this is to be expected in any place I assume.

On another note, I also finally finished building my little house in Kafiri. Like the rest, I’ll very likely rebuild it at some point later on once I have more experience, but I really like the result now, even though I couldn’t place as much furniture and garden elements as I’d have liked. As for anything else anyway… I’ll live. I just hope now that I don’t suck too much at building, and won’t be a laugh for everyone.

A few more full days behind me. After the nightmare that was the servers move and the rollback that ensued, I went back on my search for a few new little places to expose my clothes in. I ended up in the Waterfall Mall and at Aurora’s in Varney, which are both nice places with plenty of light. This is going to be all for the moment though, as I don’t intend to spend hours and hours everyday running after dozens of vendor machines to update it all.

Of course, being who I am, I also took this as an opportunity to go shopping a bit. It’s not because I make my own clothes that I can’t enjoy what others are doing. I’ll also encourage any potential readers of this post to go have a look at Fey Brightwillow’s shop in Tehama, as not only are her designs very nice and well-done, but she’s also a kind and pleasant person to talk with.

Then, my other big chunk of activity was the building of my own little house. My neighbours having been left with the sight of a ground and two miserable walls for more than one week already, I gathered my building tools, a few of the textures kindly handed to me by Hiro and Snakekiss (yes I promise I’ll change them, but so far they looked nice and I needed something done!), and set myself to work. The result isn’t the greatest thing in SL, but for someone who had never touched any building tools before and who sucks at 3D generally speaking due to a slightly flawed perception, I think it’s not too bad. The prims limitation will slowly become a problem though… I’ve filled about a half of my land “only” so far, but that’s because I’m keeping room for a little garden, too. It’d look too narrow without one anyway.

Last but not least, I’ve also considered using part of said house to present my works too. I doubt I need a huge house for myself alone, I don’t intend on throwing parties in it, and I don’t intend on blowing real cash on bigger land plots, also. I’ll see how things turn out regarding this, but all in all it may not be a bad idea.

I went in world early this morning, before the scheduled downtime, with a few other clothes projects in mind, not necessarily Japanese-inspired this time. I know myself, I can be a very versatile person, and there are moments when I truly need to do “something else”, in order to be able to go back more easily and with more inspiration and efficiency to my primary domain of activity, so to say. And thus, I took back two suits I had started creating some time ago already, and improved them a bit.

It’s of course a very different kind of fashion. More classical maybe, closer to the “casual” type of clothing one can find in various shops in Second Life… I would have worked on these clothes for myself anyway – when a shirt or dress idea springs to mind, I don’t ask myself too many questions, I craft it, period – so it’s not like I was forcing myself into something I didn’t feel like doing. I’m not sure of where exactly I’ll be going with that. I don’t intend it to be “my” speciality, nor a very high-quality type of clothing; actually, I’m even very tempted to simply make it an affordable, entry-game line of clothes, for those who like nice and simple outfits.

Even though I didn’t have too much time for it, I looked for a few more places to sell my little things. I had been thinking of Centre Ville, which is a nice market, and I could find there a free spot for a little display. Then, incidentally – because it was one of the sims still available this morning, in fact! – I stumbled upon the Ebisu Galleria and Events Center, which also offer stalls to rent, and for a very affordable price. This will be all for the moment, I think, but it gives me even more to look forward to. I like this feeling! And I liked working offline on the display for my first ets of non-Japanese clothing.

I found a name for my oriental line of clothes too – “Aozora” (which means “blue sky”, is easy to remember, and can be written with a nice kanji I like). I may use it for all my clothes need, maybe, I’m not sure yet – it’s just that it’d make things easier for me to sort, one “unique” shop with two lines maybe. I’ll see. It’s still very new, thus it may still change a lot.

Since I had read the article about it in the New World Notes, I’ve wanted to go and have a look at it. Today it’s what I did, and flew to Sedig to go to the ‘schizophrene’ experiment by myself. The least I can say is that it was pretty troubling, not so much at first, but more so after a few minutes. I had to wear a badge – which was used to stream the ‘voices’, in fact – and even though they were all in English (of course), it was indeed pretty disturbing.

Voices keeping on telling how ‘evil’ I am, that ‘I’ am just a scumbag… whispers, highlighted words in the newspaper, underlying suggestions of death, troubled reflections in the mirror, changes of ground, and all of this in such a sudden manner usually that it really contributed to surprise me (in the “what the hell?!” meaning of the word, hum…). The clinical environment adds a lot, too, to the whole feeling of insecurity and of being ‘lost’. Of course, one has the opportunity to get out at will, yet I wanted to do it till the end, and stay a litttle longer after this, just to see how it was.

I’m not going to list everything in here, as to not spoil it for potential readers, nor post more images, but yes… it takes its full meaning only after some time. Maybe it’s just me (not being a native English speaker usually causes me to need more time to ‘understand’ spoken things, and the voices were part of this), or maybe it’s this way for everybody… I have no idea. I just know now that it’s extremely disturbing, and also, oddly enough, helped me in getting a better grasp of something I thought I knew before, yet without knowing that much about it.

Somehow, it reminded me of A Beautiful Mind a lot. A lot.

While taking a little break from moving prims in my garden this morning, my e-mail box chimed out as I was getting an offline IM from Snakekiss, to whom I had asked about a stall in the market yesterday night. Thus I came back online to chat with her bit about all of this, and it all turned out like a very busy end-of-morning and afternoon.

Not only did she give me a stall to sell my clothes on, but she was as kind as to explain me step by step how to pack them into prims, set a price on them, apply a texture on one side of a prim only, set permissions, and various other little tidbits of good advice, including giving me nice textures to use as prints for my works, and hair sticks to work with (with these, my little bun of black hair looks so much better than before). It turns out that indeed, nobody else makes kimono and other similar Japanese clothing in Second Life, save for a few people who have either stopped now or left a long time ago, and thus this is all pretty unique. It added more excitement to the already existing fun of working on something I like, and if things go well, it may evolve in a really nice way.

Of course I couldn’t stop on such a road, and I had this urge to go back in during the afternoon to try and set up a vendor. For this one I used Hiro’s script (which is excellent, really, and I’ll highly recommend it), and will try to use the version with arrows later on or tomorrow, to display several colors of the same model without cluttering the stall with the same images. It was a nice surprise to see that, not even two minutes after I had installed my first panel, another player had already bought one. Who said that there wasn’t any market with these articles, really! I’ve put up geta and tabi as well, for people to not go walking bare-footed in their shiny new yukata.

I’m glad I had this done today. I still lack a name and a logo for my creations, but this will have to come in time, as I’m certainly not going to slap some lame name just for the sake of it, or on the contrary, wait weeks until inspiration strikes. I’m too excited by this to wait anyway!