It Never Works That Way

“…she filled up my answering machine with the sounds of walking on rocks and breathing, THAT’S IT…  WHY CAN’T HE DATE A SMART GIRL?”

–Dragonia, on her son’s choice of companionship

sigh

Dragonia goes home tomorrow night.

See?

Someone landed here following the search term “best woman ever”.

It’s Dragonia!

Art Imitates Life II

Sweet ride…

How’s That Workin’ Out For You?

We arrived too late.

Har har har!  Of course we didn’t.  There was never anyone to save to begin with.  (And really:  if you feel you have time to write in blood on the walls during the Zombie Apocalypse, you have serious [probably terminal] resource-management issues.)  No, this is a WIP shot of the inside of a building Dragonia was building for a Second Life hunt.  (I believe it’s actually the Zombie Killers Hunt, although don’t hold me to that.)  I gave her a hand with some of the textures.

The finished version wound up looking even better than this.  Lots of fun.

Next!

Did I mention we moved the store?  We moved the store.  We teamed up with our friend Sarah from Uru and got a deal on New Kadath, a whole entire sim.  Much more space to build, and many more objects allowed.  So naturally we rebuilt everything:

As usual, it was a team effort, although the building was mostly D’s, and Luna Garden there was mostly mine.  And it was fairly exciting.  Only– [SL minutiae] nobody except me had full powers on the land, because I was listed as the sole owner.  Solving that required deeding the land to our Land Ownership group, and that process created an unintended side-effect.  I had parceled off the land into smaller sections for the store and the garden, so as to be able to create different landmarks for them, have different audio streams on them, and so forth.  When I did so, I never bothered to adjust the prim multiplier for each parcel.  As long as I was the owner of all the land, it didn’t matter;  an overflow of objects on one parcel was made up for by drawing resources from the other parcels.  But SL considers group-owned land as its own entity, with its own distinct ownership– even if the owner of a surrounding parcel is part of the group that controls the deeded land.  So when I deeded the largely unused portions of the sim to the group, the ones where all the free resources were, the parcels the store and the garden were on suddenly registered as massively over their prim count for their size, and SL automatically restored the balance by returning everyone else’s objects to inventory.  Like, um…  the store building.  Oops.

That’s not a total loss, of course, since being returned to inventory is not the same thing as being deleted.  You can just rezz it out again (in this case, all in one chunk, since it was linked.)  But it is a pain in the ass.  And in a related development, it turns out that D has been frustrated by her attempts to work on terraforming, because the in-world controls for doing so are fairly clunky.  So it looks like what’s going to happen now is, we’re going to purchase a RAW file–  a tweakable, pregenerated basic terrain sculpt made by someone else–  and apply that to the sim, then rework the location of the store and the other features to conform to the new terrain.  [end SL minutiae] So whatever the NEW new version winds up looking like in the end, it probably won’t look like that screen shot anymore.

I did manage to cobble together this picture out of 7 or 8 raw-stock shots I took in the garden:

Also, somewhere in that forest is an item I designed to Jack’s specifications and put there at his behest.  We think alike, him and me.  :)

Yeah, That’s Been Known to Happen

Dragonia returned to the bedroom spouting more expletives than usual, then slid open the bedroom curtain to reveal the last thing I expected to see:  a sea of thick white flakes swirling down over a beautiful snowy landscape.

“Look what you brought with you!” she shrieked.

Happy Valentines Day

“I like cheeeeeeeeeese.  And uniiiiicorns.  And baaaaaaaaaaacon…”

–Dragonia, after an extra-dirty vodka martini and half a bottle of Mumm Rosé Brut

In Other News

I’m flying out to see Dragonia for two weeks, tomorrow.  My laptop is long since blown up, so I may or may not being saying anything here for a while.  I’m sure she’ll allow me the use of her computer, but I’d rather take advantage of the opportunity for the two of us to get away from the screen for a while…

Dragon Magick Wares & Tiphareth Designs

So, D and I have a store now.  Or rather, an in-world store location.  It’s actually kind of two stores in one physical environment, as you can see:

 

Dragon Magick Wares, that’s her.  (Did you guess that?)  Tiphareth Designs, that’s me.  Originally we had planned to run everything under one name and banner, but we started out selling stuff on the SL Marketplace a few months ago, because that was easier and cheaper, and the structure of SL Marketplace currently requires everything associated with one storefront to be done through one avatar account.  Which would have been…  burdensome.  So instead she does her thing, and I do my thing, and I help her with whatever she needs, and she helps me likewise, and everyone goes home happy.  See?  Happy!

The store is in Sn@tch City, and has a teleport to a rezzing platform where you can whistle up any of D’s very cool houses and check ’em out before buying.  It also contains demos of some of my products and textures, most notably the Magic Circle and single-prim Reanimation Tome.  If you’re in SL, and have a hankerin’ to visit, you can find it HERE.

Do drop by.

UPDATE: As of 3/1/2011, the store is no longer located in the structure pictured above, nor on the Sn@tch City sim; we’ve moved it to the nearby New Kadath region. Details HERE…

It’s a Tradition

SL: Total Raving Geekfest

This is a shot of the lounge in the “Doctor Who Zone” at the New London sim, during the broadcast of the Davros radio play.  (You really have to click on the 1500 x 2000 version to appreciate it.)

Only…  wait a minute!  Who’s that over there in the corner?…

OHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!  Sooooooooooooo busted…

But She Fell Off the Music Box

D’s no slouch in the graphics department herself.  And she does better sepia tone than I do.

The key must be an upgrade.

Hot

Dragonia, as the floor manager of a prominent SL fashion store, gets previews of all the new items created by the designer who owns the place.  And she has a gazillion tattoos and skins and articles of clothing in her inventory to begin with.  So last night while we were at the Skybase she was trying out the preview items, and then she put them together with some of her existing items, and then I pulled out my camera and started shooting, and then Photoshop got involved, and the next thing you know…  well, you can see what happened.

The flames were added, obviously, and I had to do some work on the right arm to fix the penetration inherent in cross-armed avatar positions.  But other than that, yes, that really was what she looked like.

The fashion store has a poster contest every month, open for public submissions.  I did a copy with the store name superimposed in the upper left, and we threw it into the ring.  (Being a type-hound, of course, I actually like the version with the store name better.  But I don’t want to create the impression that it was commissioned or endorsed by the store owner, so I’m posting the textless version here.)  Given the tremendous amount of diverse visual art talent out there, it’s never gonna be a slam dunk, but I feel comfortable saying we’re at least in the running…

MOULa: Kadish Tolesa

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