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1 min

Back to the fancy stuff

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

2 min

Dress-up Games

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

2 min

Finally – a smart phone

For years I had a Blackberry. Something like 15 years. And then in the end the battery gave out and because it is such an old model it could no longer be replaced. At least not here in Turkey where HRH has banned Blackberry phones because they refused to hand over the user data to the government. So, I have had no choice but to go out and purchase a new phone. Being a consummate hater of all things Apple, I went for a Samsung A50. Android, a google product – which makes it ha

2 min

The big alpha.tribe update

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.

3 min

Mesh Dramatics

One of my most cherished possessions in Second Life is a huge collection of dramatic poses created by Heidi Dahlseveen, which she very generously gave me many years ago. Heidi is a storyteller and her poses are unlike any other that I have ever seen in SL, in that they compress a huge amount expression into that one instance that the pose represents. And when one poses several avatars one ends up getting quite extraordinary mise-en-scenes. Which is something that I have done

1 min

Kokopelli

I love it when a software gives me ideas. And Sculptris does so. While I am playing around with the clay suddenly it looks like something and… So, here we have the trickster god Kokopelli, who had been on my mind before as a figure I might want to look into a bit more. But, I never knew exactly how. I even tried a few things in photoshop last year but they went nowhere. And I know why: I started out with that intention, and that never works for me. I need to go in round abou

2 min

Produsage

There is this, in my view terribly misplaced, myth that while using off the shelf software is an unavoidable evil, everything that gets built inside that software should be made by you. Painstakingly. Path by path. Or writing the code (that particular myth especially). Taking your own photos. Sculpting your own 3D models. Otherwise you are not really the “real thing” as a designer or an artist or whatever. I am not a big proponent of this idea that it is somehow more virtuou

1 min

So, as predicted…

I have had a whale of a time making things for the imaginary alpha.tribe RL store. No idea what this store is supposed to be all about at this at point – they seem to be selling everything. It is a bit like making things for a doll’s house, playing around with these mockups inside photoshop. And I am not even done yet – more stuff out there that I can slap my “identity” on to. Pathetic for a 65 year old woman, you would say? You may not be too far off, I am saying it quietly

1 min

Curio

Curio is playing into my ‘minimalist and yet narrative’ obsession in a way that the others aren’t. Here, the ‘tale’ is in the steampunk textures with which I clothed the basic prims – mostly cubes actually. And the avatar, of course. I am not sure I want to do it with lots of textures when it comes to this new thing rummaging around in my head. But still… Could something this elaborate be combined with dot arrays and nod and link abstractions? No idea. But then I usually get

1 min

Scrounging around for minimalist stuff

I am still preoccupied with my building stuff in SL. How to improve on it, how to bring myself up to scratch. The complex mesh stuff is really not for me. So, maybe taking the minimalist route I was talking about before is a good idea. But how? Same as before? I think not. Wandered off to one of my favorite hangouts, Vecteezy, to see what they have on offer that might inspire me. Do not let what they display on the homepage (Christmas paraphernalia right now) fool you for a

1 min

The Symmetry book

Thinking of things I could do next, I keep coming back to graphic design. I made these pages a year ago for a project that was later published as an insert in a Turkish art magazine. We did not use this set but something else entirely. But, I liked these. More so than what the curator actually decided to go with. So, I sometimes look at them. So, maybe I should do an imaginary picture book? But, no, somehow I do not think I want to do this. Too intellectualized. Too artsy som

1 min

So – what next?

During these past few years that I was away from virtual worlds, it wasn’t just making things in virtual worlds that I lost interest in. I lost interest in making things – period.* What has been happening recently however is that my appetite for making things has been coming back with a vengeance. The island is now done and I am scrounging around as to what to do next. And, probably also because of what I wrote about my lack of 3D modelling skills for present day SL, I keep g

2 min

Self Evaluation in SL

The new island is more or less done. It looks OK, but it is nothing like what I achieved with Fool’s Gold in 2015. The dark sky level is probably the best part visually speaking, and the ground level seems to work, if not entirely from a design point of view (lots of flaws that I see but can’t figure out how to fix), then in terms of being a weird little playground. However the thing that makes me write this is not really about my building skills. It is the way in which the

1 min

Midnight Wastes

I have gone back up to the towers that I had started to build a few weeks ago. But, like most of what I do, things did not go quite as planned and I ended up adding things that I had not thought of when I was first thinking about this level. There is a legendary builder in SL called Arcadia Asylum. She built many many different things, from avatars to whole cities. And she had this thing about giving it all away for free – to be used and redistributed as one saw fit. With on

1 min

The crazy cat lady parlor

A while ago Eupalinos Ugajin gave me the sofa as a gift. And I was so delighted that I immediately rushed out to get the matching arm chair and put together a special parlor for cat lovers on the island. And so, these were among the first things that I rezzed in this re-build. They are on a special platform that is actually above water. I did of course build a ramp to terra firma so that the cats can come down and wander around when no one is around. After all, everyone know

1 min

I have decided to build a playground

From the sky tower city, which I am leaving alone for now, I have moved to ground level to put together an amusement park of sorts. Ferris Wheel, carousel, bumper cars, some rides and a shooting gallery. Or rather a grab-a-duck gallery – no killing on my land – you just get to grab a duck and if you catch it the kiosk will give you a gift. So, I am back to “play” as a basal concept. We also have magic lantern show, a gym, and a Chemical lab. No gold – I am sticking to that.

1 min

But, it isn’t just the gold

I am finding it quite hard to rebuild the island. Nothing seems to work quite how I want it to. And the truth of the matter is that the island that I built 3 years ago is probably the best thing I have ever made in Second Life and it is quite hard to even try to get close to that. Gold or no gold, the place had a mood. And it told a tale. Which is quite a hard thing to pull off – as I am finding out, trying to set up another “mood” now. Which is probably why I put off rebuil

1 min

Too much gold…

When I built alpha.tribe in 2015 I even called the sim “fool’s gold” – there was so much of it. But it isn’t just that one sim. I also went completely overboard when I built “from here on there be dragons” for Dividni Shostakovich a couple of years later. Of course I have been around long enough as a designer to know to combine it with plenty of neutral colors so that it doesn’t get completely out of hand. But nevertheless, I cannot deny the obsession. Also here, for example,

6 min

Decapoda goes to the Forest

From the very first time that I heard it as a child I have had strong (almost gut) feelings concerning the tale of Little Red Riding Hood: I was horrified by the killing of the wolf. Inconsolable, in fact – to the point where my father had to invent a whole new ending to the story so that I would stop the tantrum that the actual tale had provoked. So, when storyteller Heidi Dahlsveen, with whom I have collaborated on wonderful projects before, asked me to work on “the other

1 min

Reasons for staying around

Animals are a good reason to stick around. And then I like walking in the streets and sitting in cafes, I guess. Watching the animal-loving population of my city, I really like to do that. Crossing the Bosporus is nice. Buying nice clothes is another good one. Making stuff, that’s probably one of the most important ones. And I guess, that’s it. Those are the reasons to still be sticking around, continuing to live. Other than that – forget it… I would bid my farewells tonight

ELIF AYITER