I upgraded to Windows 10 this afternoon, and now my AMD graphics card doesn't work. Ugh. I am waiting for a working driver, or some kind of fix for it. What a pain. However, I am SO glad that I snapped today's photo yesterday, before I upgraded, because I don't know exactly when my card will work again. I heard the latest AMD drivers doesn't help the issue I'm experiencing, so I will continue to wait.

Anyway, my husband bought me an early birthday gift a couple days ago - a Wacom tablet! I've been wanting one for ages, and am over the moon that he got me one. Lolita's Sun is Shining in SL project was the absolute perfect opportunity for me to try it out! I spent a good portion of yesterday finding the perfect location on our sim and sky setting to snap this photo. The photo itself turned out great! However, I spent a good portion of last night playing with my Wacom tablet, editing it. I love how it came out, it's really fabulous. It really shows off the fashion in today's SL, and the beauty of our sim.

I am still trying to get the hang of the Wacom tablet, it's completely different than anything I have ever played with before, but I hope it will make editing photos better for me! We'll see, I still have lots of practice to do with this thing - of course it doesn't help that I have NO artistic ability whatsoever. Haha!

So, we've been working quite a bit on the sim recently. Jeffry is really into making our sim child-friendly, and providing many things for our child to do, when we find a girl that meshes well with us. He's purchased us a couple of games, like Simopolis, LifeStyle, and Greedy Greedy. He also got a playground, a outdoor cinema complete with popcorn machine, and lemonade.

For appearances, we also changed the sim from the palm tree, sand and grass mix I had going on. Jeffry saw this beautiful photo from Alicia, and he asked me - "How does she get photos so realistic?" I explained the process of taking photos to him, and the only thing he got out of our conversation, was the mountain sim surround thing in the background. He wanted one. I found where they sold them, and he fell in love with one particular set, only because it had a huge waterfall. So, we bought it, and sadly, it was complete with fir trees and all - I had to get rid of my half beach and palm trees.

I hunted down some fir's to replace my palms, and found some beautiful ones from LAQ. They are animated, and also came with winter versions, that look snowy! We love to change things for the seasons, and we completely plan to switch things to snow in the winter, so it's fabulous that a lot of the things we got on the sim, have snow versions! The house came with roof snow and Christmas lights, the pool I bought from The Loft has a covered snow version as well. It's really great, that designers are doing this - it used to be really difficult to find snow things in SL! Everyone loves beaches and stuff, it was kind of hard to find anything else.

Mesh is incredible. It's amazing that we have most of our sim filled up, all this grass, trees, incredible prefabs, a house filled with furniture, yet, we have still over 1,500 prims left on our Homestead sim. It's amazing what you can do with only 1 land impact now!

I love to build buildings and stuff using regular prims. The disappointing part of that, is that prims are becoming obsolete now that mesh is taking over everything. I know a bit about clothing and Blender, but when it comes to making furniture and builds, I have no idea what's going on. I decided to make the purchase, and get myself The Mesh Studio. A long time ago, I purchased the Sculpt Studio, and had no idea what to do with it. I went to a couple of classes, and still never utilized it.

So, I took the chance and purchased the Mesh Studio, and before I even opened the box, I decided to find a class on it. This way, I'm not overwhelmed before I even begin. I found a class at the Builder's Brewery, and I've really forgotten how much I enjoy going to classes in SL! I love learning how to create all kinds of things, so I think I might make it my own personal mission to go to more classes, and build up my skills. I hear they have Blender/Mesh classes, I'm going to try to get in on some of them.

From the class, it seems the Mesh Studio is so much easier to pick up and learn than the Sculpt Studio was! It seems to be just build what you want, drop a script in it, download from the link it spits out at you, then upload to SL. Of course there's other, minor things to do in all of that as well, but it's not at all complicated like the Sculpt Studio is/was.

Some things in SL just amuse me. I saw a photo on a particular video, and the photo had a butler in it. I instantly wanted one for my house. I showed the same video to Jeffry, and he picked up on the butler too. So, it became our mission to find this particular object. Turned out, it was a gacha item. This was bad news, as I knew how crazy Jeffry gets with gachas. He's worse with them than I am!

But still, we went to the gacha and as expected, he went insane with it. We got a whole bunch of them, until he stopped when he got the one he finally wanted. We kept a couple, and I listed all the others on the marketplace.

I love this guy. He's one of the most comical things I have encountered in a long time. I don't even know why, nor can I figure out what the appeal of him is to me.We totally have all different versions of him around our sim. We have this guy inside the front door, one roasting marshmallows over a fire pit outside, and another one with a boombox over by Jeffry's little DJ table he has set up. Ribald the butler, is fun!

I'm just going to come out and say it: Jeffry and I had decided to adopt a SL child! I suppose I'll do a little background. We moved in together in RL several years ago, and we decided a couple years ago to start trying to have a child in real life. That was over two and a half years ago now. It's been difficult, the hole that still occupies my heart. We made the decision to get a dog last year, and I've chronicled Amelia's life with us so far through my RL blog.  From videos, to our breeder visits, updates on how big she is.... she's been the love of my RL. I complain a lot about her, but she really is a beautiful, smart, incredible dog. Anyway! Even with her, there's still... something missing.

The more I looked into SL adoptions, the more it appealed to me. If I can't have children in my RL, I need to pour my love into a child in SL. So, after talking with Jeffry about it, he agreed, and wanted to go pick out a panel... right then. I, however still had questions. I bombarded the lovely Alicia with questions about their family, the role play involved, and all that. I am still a little nervous about the role play aspect - I would love to do it, but I am not entirely sure what that entails. So, I'm hoping get matched with a lenient child, who is willing to teach us the role play part. Or give us hints on what we need to do. Parenting is not a exact science, right? All parents learn as they go, even adoptive parents.

We took this photo together, before we listed our panel at Heritage Adoptions. This was part of our little "photo shoot" to get a photo of the both of us for our Parent panel. I liked it, and kept this one. We're hoping to find a good match for us, so we can shower our SL child with all the love we can't give in our RL.

I've mentioned my alt's little store on my blog already. I have also mentioned that Sai will not be creating anything anymore, all my work will be done on my alt. Sai retired from creating, and her job now is to simply enjoy SL. It's been a fun little outlet for me, without any pressure, and I can be as creative as I want, without worrying about deadlines. I like it, it's fun to play with mesh, and everyday I learn new things in Blender! I have picked up a few things here and there while working with mesh, and since my alt first set up her store, I've gotten better with it!

Now that we have our own homestead sim, the huge majority of it is our home, but I set up a little corner off of our sim to set up my alt's store. I've been quickly running out of prims on the land it is housed at now, so it's great that I can put it on my homestead and expand it as I need to. I definitely to not expect it to grow popular enough to worry about lag on my sim - I just really want to be able to have extra prims when needed. Because, I do this for fun, it's not really a "business" like [ImpEle] turned out to be. However, isn't this the exact same thing I said about [ImpEle] when I first started? Haha!

Anyway, I have been working on setting it all up. I purchased a new store build, one that has just a little bit less wall space, so the store doesn't look too empty. And, I've been really re-vamping everything. I've changed all the mesh text I had around the store, added a whole new "informational bar" as I'm calling it - has a join group script, has all the links to the blog, marketplace, flickr.... all that kind of stuff. Another big thing I did was I switched all the vendors over to the CasperVend system, which seems to be ever popular with stores lately. I set all that up, got the redelivery options working... It's been an adventure, frustrating at times, and extremely expensive in upload fees to do all that - but in the end, I feel like it is worth it. The store reflects more of my mesh skills now, and doesn't look so bad anymore. It actually looks like a store I, myself, might shop at. Whew!

I snapped this photo last night before officially calling it a night. Since then, I added the soon-to-be new group gift, updated the remaining vendor display photos, finished listing everything on CasperVend, set up the new release (also got the demo ready), and foldered all the stuffs to be sent to bloggers. All I have left is to update my alt's picks, classified, write the notecards about the newest releases for my dear bloggers, and drop them off to who needs them! I'm excited to be at the home stretch with this, and even more excited that I won't have to deal with any more upload fees for right now! Now, I can get back to Blender and work on the shorts I have started.

We are talking boats today! I have always loved having a boat on my land, even if it's really a waste of prims. I don't care about driving it, I really just love the look of having a boat. Purely for display, and they make fabulous props to take photos on, or around. Boats in SL are really beautiful, and SecondLife is all about what makes you happy, right?

A long, long time ago, I first decided that I wanted a boat. I searched, and came across this beauty. At the time, it was top of the line, and one of the best. It has made several appearances on this blog, one even dating back to July, 2008.  I paid a lot of $L for it at the time, though I can not remember how much exactly anymore. I still think it's gorgeous... even now. I'd be happy to keep it out, and continue to enjoy it... however, this boat is 205 prims. It's made mostly of actual primitives, and it looks like the only sculpty parts in this boat are the seats. You really have to appreciate the beauty of a creation like this, how creative people can get with just the tools they have available to them at the time. This boat, I feel is a fantastic example of that.

Because of the high prim count, I decided to look into getting a new boat, and doing a little "updating." The first place that I wanted to look at, was obviously where I originally purchased this boat, MaxMarine. I looked up the creator in-world, hoping that he was still around and making boats. Unfortunately, I don't think he is. A little disappointed, but that's okay, there are many more boats in SL!


I started just flying around some of the popular boating sims, with the intention of looking at the variety of different boats out there. However, the first sim I visited, I came across a boat, docked on someone's land. Intsa-love. I felt like this was a really close version to the MaxMarine boat I came to adore. So, I inspected it, found who created it, and off I teleported to their store. Bonus was that it's only 50 land impact!

I found myself at A.E. Worx.  I ran around, searching for this boat, got hit by 2 automated forklifts in the process, but I found it. And it looked even more gorgeous than it did on the boating sim. The price was $2,250L. There was a point in SL, when I wouldn't have cared, I had a very reasonable linden income from running ImpEle, but now - the RL Jeffry buys $L's for us, and I have to make my little "allowance" that he gives me last for a couple of weeks. But even still, I decided to purchase it. Imagine my glee, when I go to pay the boat vendor, and it comes up saying $899L! Sold! I couldn't pay it fast enough.

I rezzed it once back on my sim, and realized just how spectacular it is. It's tintable to literally any color, it's got a really fabulous control panel, and drives beautifully. It's even got particle waves that splash out when you start driving it. I don't really intend on driving it, but it's still cool that I can if I want to.


While I was tinting it, and getting it ready to drive... Jeffry started playing the "I'm on a boat!" song. So, I had to find the most ridiculous dance I had, to go with that music. Needless to say, we both ended up changing into our swimwear, and dancing on the boat to that song. I totally took a video on it. Was definitely one of the silliest things I have done in SL for a while. It was totally worth it though, I was practically rolling on the floor laughing.

I wanted a mesh head. Yep. I set out to find some. I am okay with changing my look, so long as I still think I'm beautiful. I've had my shape since the first week I joined SL, it was literally the first thing I bought once I purchased linden dollars. After 8 years, yes, I have grown attached to it, but in the changing world of SecondLife, I really started to long for a change. I hunted down every mesh head I could find, from the Snow Rabbit one, TheMeshProject (TMP), Lelutka's many heads, Logo, Slink... I've probably tried them all! I grabbed every demo I could find as appliers for these heads. Each one had it's pros, and every one had cons to it. I like the teeth on TMP head, I liked the expressions of Slink, I like the lips on Letluka. But, I don't like the cost of TMP (for what you receive), I didn't like the eye shape of Slink, and I could not, for the life of me, find a skin that looked at all good with Letlutka. Keep in mind, all this is my opinion.

I quickly trashed all but TMP head. I had huge issues with this head, but I still kept it, because it was the most appealing one to me, out of all that I tried. Combined with a Pink Fuel demo applier that I tried, it really felt more like "Sai". A more squint-eyed, grumpy looking Sai, but still had a feel that I could live with.


This is a picture I snapped while trying TMP mesh head demo. It is a HORRIBLE demo!! The huge spinning text takes away any focus I had in trying to look at the skin. And what the heck, no back of the head? No neck? No eyelashes? No ears? I can't see how it looks with my Maitreya body? I had actually messaged the help avatar they suggested in their notecard - because not being able to see the most important parts of the head, how am I supposed to make a decision? I thought I was doing something wrong! (The picture I am posting here is the exact one I sent to them, too) Well, I'm STILL waiting to hear back from their shoddy support! Is it so hard to message me back with a simple - "Working as intended"? This alone should have forced me to run away. Their terrible "shopping experience", the terrible matching support... But nope, I allowed it to sit in my inventory and I continued to think about it.


In the end, I decided to to take the gamble and purchase it. Yep. L$5,000 for the head, and then L$2,000 for the skin from Pink Fuel. At this point, better to go all out, right? The skin from Pink Fuel, however, came with the actual system skin, Maitreya appliers, Slink appliers - and every other applier I can possibly think of. It has several makeup options, lip glosses... and so much more. The skin pack, was actually a rather good deal, all things aside! The Maitreya appliers were actually a nice surprise in the pack as well, because the vendors didn't list them! I was actually walking over to buy the Maitreya appliers when I noticed they were included.

So, I'm going to list out my feelings on this mesh head.

• Very expensive for what you get! L$5000 for the animated head, which isn't really very animated. It blinks, you can close the eyes, and the mouth can be opened or closed. Worth the extra L$2,000? You decide.
• The demo! Why can't I view the ENTIRE head? 
• My existing hair doesn't fit! All my favorite Truth, Letlutka, or little bones hair does not fit! Which, unfortunately, I did not know until after I purchased - because the demo does not have the back of the head! Another reason the demo sucks. I had to go out and find new hair that fits it. I've had really good luck with hairs from Tableau Vivant, and Exile fitting it well. I'm going to have to change favorite hair stores now.
• A took a lot of figuring out how to make it look good with my Maitreya body. Have to wear the Retrofit head, with no neck blending... have to fiddle with the "fit" to get no seam gaps. It's a disaster.
• Absolutely no expressions. For the less linden, I could have gotten a head that has expressions, and does A LOT more.
• The shopping HUD. I hate it. I've done a lot of shopping in my day, and this was - without a doubt, the worst I have encountered.
• You also do not get to demo the eyelashes. It's hard for me to look at a skin, and enjoy it without eyelashes. I feel like eyelashes really complete the skin and make it easier to envision myself in it. That being said, once purchased, the perfectionist in me took over, and made it just as difficult to fit these as it is to fit prim ones. Which is rather unbelievable on a static, mesh head. Why are they not connected to the head in the first place?
• Perhaps it's from my previous experiences with running a store in SL, that I feel like customer service inquires need to be handled with a little more importance. 
• I feel like there should be some kind of alpha system for the head. The FAQ on TMP website says to contact the hair creators to make hair for the head. Probably not possible, but would it hurt to even put a different version in the folder with no scalp? Maybe a way to hide it? *Sigh*
• There are many heads to choose from, however. There's several different face styles to decide on with this series of heads. Which is really a good thing, I hear a lot of people saying that mesh heads take away your individuality, that everyone looks the same. But there's different heads, and different skins make them all different! 
• It appears more and more skin designers are making for these heads, which will make it better with time. I was filled with glee when I saw the logo on a vendor in Pink Fuel's store. It made me so happy, my favorite skin creator, embracing mesh heads!

Do I regret my purchase? I did at first, yes. I purchased it, and went into a complete panic mode when I couldn't match it up with my body as easily as I thought. Once I got that situated, a huge, much larger panic set in when I put my hair on and found my scalp coming through the top and back of my hair. I went through all the hair in my inventory, trying it all on, while muttering obscenities in my RL. All of this, could have been avoided with a proper demo, instead of some freaky, floating mask.

However, I am much happier now that I found a couple great hair shops that fit this head, and my head and body match well! I will definitely not be purchasing another one, however!

I've been following the adorable Alica's blog since as long as I can remember! And lately, I have been noticing that she's accumulated the sweetest smile in her photos! It made me bring out my emoter. And I quickly found out that my smile looks squinty, and just... all around derpy. Come to find out, Alicia previously did a tutorial on how she got her cute little smile! I totally had to try it.

It was a colossal pain the in the rear to do, as I have issues with my eyelashes. I do not wear normal alpha eyelashes - each eyelash I wear is an individual prim, and when I first got them, I spent hours to fit each one to where it was supposed to be. I never messed with them after that. However, this required me to get out my editing skills out and modify them once more. But anyway! Most people likely won't face this struggle like I had to!

I think my smile shape turned somewhat cute! I think this might be a normal thing for me to have in my photos now, as the idea for smiling for photos, seems so natural... yet, never really done in SL. All those emoter smiles seemed so ridiculous, and I'm glad someone finally found a way to make smiling not so creepy in SL! Yay!

I've finally finished decorating my sim! Wow, what a huge different mesh makes in prim counts! I mean, we have like 3,750 prims to play with on our homestead, and I finished putting all my furniture, horses and landscaping out with over 2,800 to spare! It's incredible! I don't even know how I lived with sculpted prims, let alone regular prims now.

So much space! Seriously, what do people put on homestead sims? I have a house and some landscaping, and a pavilion, not sure what else I need? I have a ton of prims, and a ton of empty space!


I wandered around from store to store, looking at prefabs. I wanted one bigger than the Vicious Decay house I currently had, and it had to be affordable. Unfortunately, I failed. I fell in love with one from Barnesworth, but it didn't have baked ambient occlusion textures. I was even looking at one from Scarlet Creative, but I wasn't sure about all the white. Particularly the white roof. I loved another one from Trompe Loeil, but it was small and I wasn't a fan of the layout. I know I'm really picky about my prefabs. I came across this one. I wasn't love at first sight for me, as many of my prefabs are. It was sized waaaay small for my camera settings, as I prefer my houses unproportional to the avatar. This one was realistic sized.

But it was able to be modified, so I bought it and scaled it larger. Once I had it all rezzed out. the result is much better, I think. Of course it required more land impact than the original, but I didn't mind that! One of the really cool selling points of this house is that all the walls are tintable. In my experience, tintable walls look terrible, but these - actually look beautiful while tinted. The house came with white walls, but I made mine a light grey, and it really looks like the house came that way!

So, I've been doing my hosting job, and I actually really like it! I feel like this is really what I needed to get back into SL. It was depressing logging on everyday, with nothing to do besides staring at my land. I've been blogging more - and actually, I have so many pictures that still need to be blogged, there's not enough time in the day to do them!

I really enjoy hosting. It forces me to come out of my shell, talk to strangers. Before I was kind of awkward with it, I didn't know anyone, and everyone seemed to be friendly and know everyone else. I didn't, so it was hard trying to be part of the conversations. However, I'm starting to know the regulars now, even becoming more familiar with the DJ's, and rest of the staff. It's getting easier, and much more fun.

Now, to be honest, I feel like the only thing missing for me is a good group of friends (as depressing as it sounds). I'm really hoping that this interesting group of people will become those much-needed friends to me.

I host here at Club Zero Fridays through Mondays (and again on Wednesday!) from 10-12PM SLT. If you're interested in coming to dance with me be sure to come on by!

Remember that post I did last week? About my new skydome, and house? Well, forget it, because... We rented ourselves a Homestead sim! One of my fondest memories of SL was when we owned Chey's Cove, our previous homestead. I adored it, and a lot of my best memories are on that sim.

I was kind of joking to Jeffry, saying I wanted my own sim, and he told me to start looking for one. So I did! I went to several, and decided on one that I wanted. The sim owner came, added me as an estate manager. I was excited, I started terraforming and changing the land textures. Things went downhill from there.

Once I got dressed for my hosting job, and TP'ed away, suddenly I get a message from someone, asking me if I had bought that particular sim, and I told him I did. Apparently, the night before, the sim owner had agreed to hold the sim I bought for him to buy that night. And just like that, I had become the bad guy in all of this. It wasn't long before the sim owner was asking me to give up the sim. Reluctantly, I agreed, and she offered me 3 days free on whatever other sim I chose. While I was working, she set the land up for sale for me. But no, it really doesn't end there.

Once my shift at the club was over, I quickly teleported to the sim that she set for sale for me. I bought it, and she soon came to change the terrain to the file that I requested. Well... I'm not kidding, it took forever for her to do.


I was looking at this for about an hour and a half. During that time, she had told me she was "still looking" for the terrain I requested, and had asked if there was another one I wanted instead. I gave her a couple other options, but let her know that I really wanted my first choice. Eventually, she found it, and TP'ed away. But, here I go to change the land textures to my beach/grass favorite combination. And hey...... no estate manager rights. My this time, my mood shifted from "YAY! We have a sim!!!" to "..... Really?"

She came back eventually and added me as estate manager By this time, it was past 4am for me, and all I wanted was to go to bed.


By the end of the night, I had finally gotten my terrain the way I wanted, and the textures set up. This was how it looked when I logged off last night!

I feel like this fiasco has scarred me from being willing to rent a sim from this land baron again. Apparently, she doesn't keep promises to other customers, and can't keep track of what she has already done and/or still needs to do. Maybe I'm just an obsessive double checker, I don't know. However, I do know that I'll be working on beautify-ing up my new homestead the next week!