The new Vent du Sud! Never ever have I had this much fun. So, photos before we get all the stuff in. It should be completely ready by this coming weekend but a few things are there aleady (slurl below).

The challenge: never enough prims. Getting a mix between 'pretty' and 'prims that will bring in income'. Have to say that the pretty is winning (look, I needed the rocks, the spray and the primmy trees just like I needed little corners for me - and others - to sit and relax). Oh, and to dance on the square in sunny, peaceful Provence.

The idea: if I make ends meet, great. If I don't, then fine. I did my sums (I didn't marry a finance guy in RL for nothing. Think 'budget'). I never want to get 'bigger' than this, spacewise (although another few thousand prims wouldn't go amiss).

The purpose: As I said before - somewhere to have fun and buy amazing decor or classy clothes if you feel like it. And apart from the rocks and spray and stuff, it'll be a case of 'if it's there, you can buy it' - with a quite a bit there for free or almost. More on that later but there's already a great 1L (3-prim) cuddle rug under the tree... go pick it up (slurl below).

Two insanely talented builder friends are around too, and there for your building and scripting projects. Seriously - two guys who take the same approach as me, as in 'we want to have fun' as opposed to making money.

And a great friend who makes classy clothes is moving in too. Again, a few things to check out already!

Also: the lighthouse (which you can buy, of course) will be available for romantic moments à deux (wink wink - need to put the tp in to the first floor still). There will be a dance system. And more places to chill and watch the sunset or the sea.

My old store, btw, will be open for another 4 weeks and has LOTS of items marked down to way below half price: see the sidebar.

And for a sneak peak of my bit of Provence (where I live in RL), bearing in mind we're just starting to put the merchandise in...

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Graces/128/198/22

Flouncing, mawkishness and a pretty bad photo

Back to mundanity after a highly utopian and self-indulgent post about ideal days on SL. Still into this idea of more blogging, however.

Scroll warning: I am going to be somewhat mawkish (good Scrabble word that, by the way) and talk about leaving, and why I'm... not.

Like a lot of people on SL, I've threatened to leave. I even did so, I'm ashamed to say, on my blog.

I understand the pull to leave. I understand people leaving. I understand people saying they're leaving so they can goodbye to friends. And yes I even understand that it's probably a very good thing to leave for some people, at some points in time, either permanently or for a while.

It's a bit like television in the old days ,no? People insisting that the 'off' button should be used more because it was BAD. They didn't succeed, mostly, eh?

I rarely watch it because... I prefer SL . I don't want to get rid of it, though. Mind, if you had French television, you would probably be on SL (even) more too, although we have fewer commercials (and fewer channnels). Mind, the dubbing in Stargate, as an example, is unspeakably bad. And the woman who 'does' Meryl Street sounds like a constipated duck.

Ooops, digressing.

So, back to leaving.

I get highly irritated with some people who threaten to leave places - SL, forums, groups - but only when they do it with a FLOUNCE because something's irritated them and they clearly want to do the 'poor little me' thing and get sympathy. And they're usually back pretty damned fast.

(And yes, I probably wanted sympathy but I'd like to think it was also because I was overtired (thanks, RL work) and feeling a bit lost - it wasn't even as interesting as a Big Argument or a Love Affair Gone Wrong).

I don't get irritated at all when people need to leave for their own personal reasons and I appreciate them telling me (and the world, if they want). And I'm happy to say I've kept in touch with a few who did wipe SL off their computers.

I just hate the flouncing-to-get-sympathy, you know? Mind, when you're brought up by parents who felt that flouncing was even worse than wearing those awful things called jeans or slurping your soup in the list of terrible social sins no young lady should commit, it sort of figures.

I suppose a good flounce can be fairly cathartic, but do it in front of your cat, or write it and then leave it as a draft until you've slept on it.

(Should I leave this as a draft? Probably).

And no, I'm not targeting anybody here. I've seen a whole lot of non-flouncy 'I'm leaving' or 'I'm cutting down' posts that have brought tears of sympathy and understanding to my eyes recently - even if 'weeping in public' wasn't approved of in my family either. Mind, my cats were sympathetic. They're great public.

To them, I'd say do what you have to do. I understand. And personally, selfishly maybe, I'd add 'please leave the door open'.

To those who try and put the entire blame on others for quitting, I'm less sympathetic (you're so MEAN, you have RUINED MY LIFE). Personally, one person who made my SL a misery tempted me to disappear a couple of times in the past, but the good friends I have were more than worth staying for (this is the mawkish bit here, and coming up).

When things go wrong, blame is never really 100% on one side (although in that particular case I'm not prepared to accept more than 20% and I consider that to be generous, so there).

So, I'm grateful - hugely so - to people who've said to me, when I've whined that I should leave: 'do what you have to', and even more so because they were around to prop me up when I didn't... but went around whining even more.


OK, enough of the mawkish.

Ah.

Rumour has it this blog is on a homes and gardens feed, from which I could justifiably be kicked off, and I wouldn't blame them as I did say I was (mainly) on topic. Really, I won't mind.

But... look.



It's free in my subscribo. The table anyway. It does actually have four legs but at least the entire table is on the photograph.

Ari's ideal day

OK, blame she of the fish tank for this (and if you haven't read the woman's blog, go now, immediately, without stopping to peruse feeds, XStreet or other such SL-related things: http://www.emeraldwynn2.blogspot.com/


And yes, I know I intended this blog to be about my stuff (as in an AMAZING MARKETING TOOL) but I appear to be crap about keeping up with that. And no, I don't know how to make cuts. So feel free to scroll. I just felt this need to do one of the blogging challenges.

It's called work avoidance.


Ari's ideal SL day
(why can't you do underline in Blogger? Underlining is a Good Thing)


It starts with the fashion feed over coffee. Since the fashion feed is getting longer, a girl has to check regularly. Or drink a lot of coffee. And as it's an ideal day (italics are handy too), actually LOG IN (so are capitals) while browsing rather than jotting down addresses on a bit of paper or more recently on a Special File that I keep losing in the jungle that is my PC.


Then, I shall buy clothes and shoes and hair, with the zillions of Lindens that have flowed in from my massive customer base all desperate to buy my amazing products. The colours will be those I want, and things will be modifiable. No frustrations like finding the perfect hairstyle but realising it's no-modify and no dark red in sight (and my current favourite is called... Stan. What sort of a name is that? But at least I remember it - Tekuteku and cute but... brown).

Don't ask for SLURLS, I'm not logged in. Use Search. I'm not a fashion blogger (yes, you may add 'thank God') at this point.


Next: I would suddenly learn to be a respectable SL photographer. Meet me, and Stan. And yes I know everything is wrong... with this photograph. However, it is the only one I have of my New Land before I started strewing stuff all over it. More on that, no doubt, in future.

(and why does Blogger shove the photos at the beginning of a post and you have to drag them down and then they get stuck in the middle of a paragraph? I am clearly blogger-challenged, so in an ideal world that would improve too).


So, with my amazing new photography skillz I would then be able to promote my utterly amazing stuff and gain even more zillions of Lindens to spend on clothes, shoes, textures and gizmos.

No, mustn't talk about textures. It makes me drool.


Back to photography.


Sadly, most of my efforts look like this. Nice fountain, shame about the picture.

Anyway, on to the best bit of SL for me. Well, one of them. Building.


My alignments would be perfect, I wouldn't lose prims (I don't DO figures, so typing coordinates into boxes occasionally leads to shooting megaprims into the ionosphere), and I would remember which version of which texture organiser I had put that wood texture with shaded bits in. But hey, at least I have texture organisers. Wonderful things. Can't remember the name but it's something like Contrex, which is a French mineral water.


Oh, and RL man wouldn't sudenly remember he needed feeding when I was just in the middle of trying to calculate texture repeats on my fingers.

So, building completed and item immediately greeted by breathless admiration from my well-loved subscribo group (waves to all 29 of them in the remote chance one of them finds this blog), I would move on to EXPLORING.


And not get lost, if accompanied. My flying skills suck. My sense of direction sucks more. Many a would-be companion has got totally irritated with my IMs saying 'where are you' and having to tp me over and over, so I tend to explore alone.


I don't explore enough, but in an ideal day I would fine explore-worthy places and remember to take landmarks, in a file of landmarks that is currently worse than the chaos in RL offspring's apartment. Which means... well, you get the point.


To round off this perfect day? Well, a romantic evening, of course. Wearing the perfect clothes, and being able to actually use my speakers (I have an SL-hostile RL man who requires my physical presence while he watches television - but it's the price I pay to avoid Marital Strife with big fat capital letters).


Pretty setting where at least half of the people and sculpties are not grey / clouds or big blobs (respectively, although I am tolerant of big-blob avatars, honestly). Dances that synchronise without bouncing me onto beloved partner's head (SL man is extraordinarily patient, but he does find this disconcerting).


All finished off with... well... better not go into that. But, as his cat and other odds and ends are seriously threatening my miserably low prim allowance, my little mainland plot would have magically turned into a rambling rustic-type sim full of flowers and birdsong and massive trees with shade. You know, the ones with about 60 prims a throw.


And I would not detach my hair by mistake when aiming to detach... other things. Nor forget I made a wall phantom when building and falling out of my place, down a cliff, at a most inopportune moment.


Having said all this, though, my SL is fun anyway. Mostly. Maybe not the phantom walls but the PEOPLE. I have met some amazing ones.

In fact, I have just had an idea. As in writing about... people I know and love on SL. I may even try to photograph them. After warning them how this could turn out.


Oh dear. Blame Emerald for everything, OK? But read the blog. Really.

(And yes, no doubt I shall attempt to promote my little-known but amazingly classy stuff and amazing new land too. So I can go buy more clothes and hair and bribe the maker of Stan to make it in dark red).

OK, I have the deep blue blues. Long story. You don't need to know.

Second Life is damned HARD in so many ways (well you do know that, right?).

So I need to kick-start or go. And if I go, I won't flounce, promise.

However, in a rather pathetic attempt to kick-start, if anybody has the strength / urge / energy to go look at my stuff (decor, from gazebos to lighthouse and from couches to sunflowers and parasols and fountains and fireplaces), feel free to go look.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Napoleons%20Empire/91/209/27

I will refund 50% to 75% of ANYTHING (promise, cross my heart) if you mention - by IM (I get them on mail) or notecard - that you came via the blog. Including the lighthouse, the gazebo or even a stone jar with lavender or some pretty pottery. Really. 50% on anything, 75% if you spend more than 250L.