Complete with its priests, its acolytes, its zealots, evangelists and pious worshipers. And its symbols and attire. Namely, the mask. Its rituals, namely social distancing. The clapping at one point of course, although that one seems to no longer have quite the urgency that it had a few months ago. The incessant hand washing. But then other things as well. Magical objects. Such as the scrying mirror that all adherents are obliged to carry with them at all times. This photo is

So, I have spent most of last month playing around with casual wear for avatars. Which is all very well and good up to a certain point, but after a while boredom does set in. I usually wait to stumble upon something to give me an idea, and this time it was a big series of vectorized vintage flowers that I saw on vecteezy, one of my favorite resource haunts. So far I have ended up with 4 skin based outfits that are based upon these drawings. As is often the case with floral el

I have been in SL more of late. Finally managed to make the transition to the mesh body and the mesh head for Alpha. Wasn’t easy to do, I still miss the scurrilous little face that the classic avi used to have and that, for the life of me, I cannot seem to achieve with the mesh head. Far too perfect. Far too smooth. So, the problem now is that Alpha doesn’t have any clothes to wear with the new mesh body. I have made quite a bit of new stuff for the store but for some reason

Whenever I see a photo of myself taken by someone else I have a massive shock. This isn’t something new, or something that is age related. Obviously I no longer look as good as I used to, and I wouldn’t expect to come across as a glamour puss in photos. And like I said, it isn’t a new thing anyway, I have had this experience for decades. The shock has less to do with how I look in these snaps than it has to do with my expression. Really really sour. Bad tempered. A very nasty

I did not want to switch over to a mesh avatar for a very long time. I have had the Alpha shape and skin for years and I have really identified with Alpha, in that appearance. She looks like me. Or rather she looked like I looked 20 years ago. But, then a few weeks ago I decided that the switch had to be made if I wanted to keep up with SL as a fashion designer. I had to know how this stuff worked. It all had to do with what I have talked about on this blog from time to time.

As I wrote before I have used Arcadia Asylum’s prims for many builds. Fool’s Gold, the best sim I think I ever built was made almost entirely out of them, and this new one has quite a few as well. I am a big believer in remediation, in reworking and modifying things to make my own stuff. Not to make everything from scratch but to build upon the foundations that others have set for me. Which is actually called Produsage, and I have even written academic papers on it. That sai

Naxos gave me a wonderful gift. Just look at this little guy! And when I walk he walks right along with me. When I stop he immediately plops himself down and sometimes he swishes his tail. Not the upcoming animesh, the creator made the animations by using instances and transparencies. He truly is the hextraordinary cat. And I don’t just mean his movements, that face! The grumpiness. What a cat! #Cats #Appearance #SecondLife #Play #Emotions

Grapho is the one who created all the avatars for Burning Life. They really do fall into his domain of expertise: They are dark, textured, evocative of unconscious things. So, he has been spending a lot of time in-world lately. Now, there are some remarkable things to do with his prolonged presence. One is that no matter how often his name gets mentioned in all the note cards and no matter that his name appears on every single prim and inventory item, almost everyone he has e

Recently I have made two things. And I am realizing that with both of them I am actually confronting fears or in the case of one of them, if not fear itself a very strong repulsion. Jellyfish. I have loathed them for as long as I can remember. They have managed to totally sour up my childhood holidays by the sea. We used to have these huge deep blue ones along with the smaller white variety and basically whenever they were in evidence I would not go into the water. They neve

It is time to talk some more about alpha.tribe. I am spending a lot of time working on the output – to the extent where sometimes I have a hard time falling asleep because there is some new thingy floating around in my head and I get up in the middle of the night and fire up photoshop to do things. Wander into the shop in the early hours of the morning and start rezzing prims. It is a full fledged obsession. And not only the work but all of it. Sometimes a few days go by and

I have decided to embark on an absolutely dreaded task – yet again, I might add: Inventory cleanup! However, this time around not only cleanup but also organization and creating some kind of a system to easily identify what I have and where I may find it… A dire necessity at this stage since I am at the point where I am running around in the same pair of cruddy old jeans and t-shirt, not to mention the same old moth-eaten ears and tail, simply because I have so much stuff tha

I must say that I seem to have been remarkably reasonable in what I ended up accumulating on this trip: One reason for that is, of course, the fact that fitting into Chinese clothes would entail a lifetime of starvation and even then would probably not really work – the women here are absolutely tiny! Well yes, of course there are plenty of things for western monsters such as myself as well, but who needs those klutzy things? The outfits that I did like were diminutive… Two b

I took photographs of the outfit, Natural Things, v.01, which Grapho has designed, to upload onto Flickr today. And I noticed something quite bewildering: Grapho looks like my father. Well, not my father, as I knew him, obviously. But, as he was as a young man, to judge by the many photographs of his youth that I have seen over the years. What is bewildering is that I did not notice this during all these past days where I have been Grapho in SL, sometimes 6-7 hours a day, ham

I am now up to my eyeballs in designing outfits for alpha.tribe. And it is really not very easy. The skins are based upon a template, so thanks to the generosity of Eloh Eliot, that part has been OK up until now. (I do have a project in the works though, where I believe I will really be up against the wall with the skin layer as well :-\). The Eliot skins have beautifully detailed features as well as subtle shadows and highlights, onto which I have been superimposing my own t

And what a collaboration this promises to be folks! The good news is that I seem to be finally coming out of the creative slump – and about time too! The bad news is that Furry, Xia and Grapho are pissed off with me because I have sort of pushed them to the side and gone straight ahead with making my own stuff. We have agreed amongst ourselves that I will be designing “ominous” stuff, Grapho will be responsible for the men’s line (which may turn out to be somewhat ominous as

From an old blog of Alpha’s: “I did not use to have them – alts I mean. I was way too engrossed with my life and all of the countless events that would make everyday hilarious. I was having a riot and there really was not much time for introspection. And in the end, I think that alts are all about introspection, an inward journey. At least that is what they are to me. Something changed over the summer. I still do not know why, it is not something that I can understand or cha

I am not sure how I managed to get to Grapho in my convoluted thought patterns. Bett made a post on the neko gym on the NPIRL blog. From there I started to think about my avatar family, for whom I have in fact built that gym. Not that the lazy sods ever use it or anything like that, of course. Except for Xia… I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Xia was sleep walking me over to the computer and logging her in for some nocturnal ab flexes in there. But other than her, no one ever

In the last post I added something pretty much in the twelfth hour, at the very end. I said “your vanity” and then in parentheses I added “this one would be me, alas”. This kind of came out of me. I wrote it without really becoming aware of what I was uttering until I saw it on the page itself. Now that it is out, I think I do need to look at this confession a little bit. First the name: My Real Life name is Elif Ayiter. Elif is the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, the Ar

I have been spending quite a bit of time in RL lately. I am very familiar with the faces that surround me in everyday life. My family, my colleagues, I see their faces so often that I have stopped thinking about all this. What a face may actually mean. I mostly love the faces around me, at this point they are as familiar as my own face in the mirror. The Boss’s face, a conglomeration of emotions, expressions, a mobility that runs the gamut from total contempt to mad faced hil