This is Halloween?

I am revisiting the world of BitTorrent this morning, in an attempt to find music for our SL Halloween party.  I had BitTorrent on Heart Reborn way back when, and several years ago, I used it to get music for our Amber Horizons Holiday Party, so successfully that I haven’t really had to do much in the way of acquiring holiday music ever since.  Not sure whether or not I can achieve the same level of success this time around, but as long as all my virus shields are in place, it certainly doesn’t hurt to try.

These are the invitations I did for the party:

The latter of the two is actually the first one I did, but the bulk of its content consists of a mash-up between a cemetery photograph taken by a man named James Cowie, and a figure shoot done by a London student who goes by the single word tag of Elne, so I wasn’t terribly comfortable distributing it without those attributions.  And besides, D likes gore.  The top invite uses my own art, and that’s the one we sent out.  After Halloween has come and gone, I’ll probably strip the text off it and see if there’s something else I can do with it, like make it into a virtual t-shirt.

Speaking of which:  Dragonia and I have opened a storefront in the Second Life Marketplace (as opposed to an in-world store, a location where you can take your avatar and examine and purchase the merchandise directly.)  There were a few steps involved, but it was sufficiently straightforward as to make me wonder why we didn’t do it some time ago-  except of course, that we haven’t had anything to sell until now.  As of this writing, our inventory consists of a grand total of 2 items.  It cost us L$20 to upload the two Targa textures to make those items, and L$40 to upload the textures to make a stock shipping crate (a one-time expense, since we can copy the crate as much as we want, and use it to send everything to everyone;  it could have cost less, but I was having fun making it.)  We have made one sale, of the book, for $L50.  L$3 of that went to Linden Labs as commission since it was through the Marketplace, leaving us with L$47.  So for the moment, we’re L$13 in the hole.  Hooray for commerce!

Meanwhile, in the so-called “real” world:  the giant house flies here in my apartment have been replaced by minuscule fruit flies.  They’re sufficiently minuscule that they avoid my notice under most circumstances, but every couple of hours one will drift lazily between my face and a light source, such as the bathroom light, or the computer screen, making me toss my head.  (The effect is nearly identical to that created by the floaters inside my eyes, which would be disheartening, except that I can kill the flies, and I can’t kill the floaters.)  I have yet to find their source.  I’ve washed the dishes, taken out the garbage, taken out the recycling, checked for rancid veggies.  They appear with equal frequency in each room.  I wouldn’t be too concerned about it, except at some point, I’m going to want to make this year’s batch of hard cider, and even one fruit fly hanging around in here could conceivably bork the entire process, if it manages to lay eggs in the cider.

And Jack has entered the “Legend of the Boneknapper Dragon” Draw Your Own Dragon Contest.  And is busily redecorating his Club Penguin igloo to try to win the Club Penguin Halloween Igloo Decorating Contest.  Good luck to him, on both counts.

And, um…  I might have made some friends.  Like, off the computer.  People who live close to my actual physical, geographical location.  Worth mentioning, but I don’t want to say too much about that.  I don’t wanna screw it up…