I'm still here, still kicking. I've been working on my look recently, trying out different heads, skin combinations, and trying to find a 'new me'. However, I keep coming right back to my Catwa head, I'm not sure why. More options? More designers create for it? I've bought so many other heads, from LOGO, LAQ, Akeruka, and I've even spent a fortune at a Genesis gacha for a head. I dunno, but here we are. I do like this new-ish look I have going on now though.

I've collected so much makeup and head pieces (brows, freckles, blushes, eyeliners, lip glosses.... oh my gosh the list goes on forever) that I have yet to use. I've really been trying to experiment more, load some that I like into my HUD and attempt to use some of them. Recently, I went to check out the Skin Fair.... we aren't even going to talk about how much stuff I ended up from that event.

The day has finally come! I got my hands on the LOGO Quinn Bento head! When bento came out, I really, really didn't want to give up my LOGO Alex head. It was the head that I felt most comfortable in, and I had loved it so much. It was ME. I had hoped there would be a Bento LOGO that would come out soon, but it never really did.

A preview photo of a new head, Quinn came out on Flickr, and I drooled over this like crazy. I stalked the Flickr feed for weeks. And then someone asked me this morning: "Hey, did you get the new LOGO bento head?" My heart stopped, and the only thing that could come out of my mouth was.... "What?"

I acquired this head as soon as I could, and quickly set out to make Quinn my own. My favorite LOGO skin was applied, and it took me hours to get a shape that I semi-like. That's mainly because... I'm not a good shape maker. I've never made my own shapes, I really don't know anything about them. The only two things in SL that I can't do: making shapes, and scripting.

But all things considered, I think I did pretty good! Obviously, I'm still tweaking things (and don't mind my double ears, I didn't take off my Mandala ones before taking the photo), but it's a good start I think. Also, the head is in a closed beta, so it's still being heavily worked on. But, it's functioning, it just needs some bugs worked out of it! It's so great though, if I could get this head to feel like more like "Sai", it will likely become my daily head.


In case you're wondering, this Quinn head, still has such adorable expressions as my favorite Alex head. Not as many yet, but they are still very, very, cute. I love them! My absolute most favorite part of the expressions for me, are the big, wide, fun smiles. LOGO is the only head that I've found that has smiles that I could die for. So perfect!

It's getting closer and closer to Halloween! I've been working quite a bit on my store things, as I have a couple of events to participate in. A hunt, and I'm donating a prize to the Carver's End thing! So, I've been really working on those, and a release as well. I've been working on a couple of other things, as well!

I entered our home into the House to House Trick or Treating, and we've been decorating like crazy! It's a constant work in progress, as more and more things come out the closer we get to Halloween. I keep adding stuff! I'm wondering what is too much and where the line is between awesome and tacky. Haha!

This is about where our trick or treater families will land! I love it, it's so adorable! Gives a good view of the house, I think! And it reminds me just how much I love having a driveway! I am not a fan of Halloween, really, so I never really bought anything for decorating before. I tend to buy pumpkins that are uncarved, or hay bales, things that can also be used for Thanksgiving decor as well. I'm much more into Thanksgiving than I am into Halloween! But anyway, I hope I'm doing this holiday right!


And the entrance, all fancy decorated! I've been way from SL for a long time, mesh was really just beginning to come out when I left. So, coming back, I had *nothing* mesh to decorate with! I had to buy everything new to decorate this year with, and quite frankly, I have so many decorations now that I know what to do with! I'd be happy if I never see another pumpkin again at this point. LOL!

I've been really trying to learn how to learn mesh! I started with clothing and Blender, and I decided that I'm terrible at it. However, I still really want to learn. I've tried clothing, and while I love it - I'm really terrible at weight painting. I get frustrated and can never get a product I am happy with. I've given up on clothing, but I still want to learn other things, as well.

I've been really working in ZBrush as of late, trying to learn it, and get comfortable with the Wacom tablet I got for my RL birthday last month. I'm even looking into taking more 'professional' classes on this program at this point, in addition to the wonderful YouTube tutorials I've been following. I spent several days literally JUST working on some form of a plush toy that I can be happy with. The original thought was that I wanted to make a cat plushie. However, it didn't turn out like that. I got this... creature.

I saved the file as "demonic bear thing" originally, then someone on plurk said it looked like a cow. He kind of does, but I'm not really going to put a label on him. He is what he is, a little creation of my own. I'm calling him Herman. I have uploaded him, and different color versions of him. I had Jeffry script a hold animation that also switches between a child and adult hold animation, and a resize script as well! He will be put into a gacha for my store, .ennaline. in the next week or so!

As I was making the different colors for him, Jeffry says to me: "You're not really going to name him Herman, are you?" Of course I am! I like his name!


After Herman, I decided that I wanted to try my hand at making a pumpkin! I am SO happy with this pumpkin, it's gorgeous! I absolutely adore how the texture of this pumpkin came out, it's so pimple-y. And, only 1 land impact for it! I made a couple poses with this pumpkin, which will be a hunt gift for the store! Pumpkin will be included, of course!

I am really enjoying learning Zbrush, and already the things I've made from it are gorgeous, and fun! I hope that I can get better and better with things as I get more comfortable with it, and experiment around with it!

Today, I'm talking about mesh heads! I've bought two of them within the past week, and I'm becoming a bit of a head hoarder! I bought a head from TMP (I hate them so much that I'm not even going to put a link to their SLURL) a while ago, which I have blogged about previously. Long story short, I hated it. The Pink Fuel skin I wore was beautiful on it, but that was really the only thing it had going for it. TMP is brutally expensive for the features you get, mainly the lack of expressions. I think I purchased it, thinking (hoping) that something that expensive would have regular updates, maybe they would add expressions. WRONG. Their customer service is the absolute worst I've encountered (except maybe for 7 Deadly Skins, of which we won't go into). But, anyway, my main reason for looking for a new head was for one reason: I want to be able to look happy.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have a really wonderful family in SL, and I am incredibly happy, but sadly, my face in SL never shows it! I constantly have a really grumpy look, and seems like I always have somewhere better to be. But, I don't, really! I set out to look for another mesh head that was still "me", and had the ability to have expressions!

I demo'ed a Catwa head, and liked a skin from TheSkinnery with it. I bought the head, skin and appliers, was wearing it around to really see if it "grew" on me. As I was still in the 'I don't really know how I feel about this stage', Mochi, from Pink Fuel was plurking gorgeous skin photos of something she was working on for the Logo mesh head. My immediate thought: "But, I literally JUST bought a Catwa head!" Seriously! Why do these things always happen when I make a large purchase like this?!

The Pink Fuel skin was Omega compatible, and guess what! So was my Catwa! Just for kicks, I decided to see if it would apply to the head. And it did! I was so happy, and it even looked SO gorgeous, even on the Catwa. I decided to try a demo of the Logo head, just to look at it, but unfortunately, the Logo demo... is not Omega compatible. However! I absolutely fell in love with the expressions. The Logo head had such fun, beautiful expressions. And I loved them so much that... I bought the head. Without being able to demo the skin on it. Yep.


However, I have absolutely NO regrets. As soon as I was able to put the Pink Fuel skin on the Logo head, it was worth it, I had absolutely no buyer's remorse for this purchase, not being able to demo it first! It really feels like "me", as most Pink Fuel skins do. The smile is big, happy, and as silly as it sounds, I feel these expressions really even show it up to the eyes. They like, change the whole feel of a photo! I loved the expressions so much that I bought all the add-on packs of them!


My husband likes the Catwa head, and I much prefer the Logo one. I can't wait to see what other skins come out for the Catwa and Logo heads, and all the other Omega compatible stuff! I know that the Catwa head is still new, too - I really hope that the creator can make it so you don't have to use the included shape! I used my shape and had a neck gap, and couldn't quite get rid of it.

Notes on Catwa:

• Alpha mask eyelashes! YES!
• Able to alpha hair bases! Great for hair that can't fit, otherwise!
• Omega compatible!
• Able to save appliers into the HUD.
• Expressions! Expressions play like on a loop, but you're able to pause them for photos.
• Need to wear the included shape, otherwise you have a neck gap.
• Required to wear mesh eyes. And even then, I had a complete nightmare of a time fitting them *just* right. And I'm not a noob. 

Notes on Logo:

• Expressions, expressions, and more expressions! LOVE!
• Omega compatible! 
• Fits mesh bodies well!
• Unable to demo Omega skins before buying.
• Gives you like 15 folders when you unpack the box. 
• As for the other features, I'm not sure, as the HUD is too small for my laptop screen to even see! (And it's no modify, so I can't even stretch it to make it bigger)

Yesterday, I found some really low land impact photo frames for my house! I was really looking for a "family" orientated type of frame, or shelf, or something that I could use for displaying Yuna's Adoption Certificate, and the photo I took of when she first saw the question of us asking her to join the family. I didn't find one that looked how I wanted, so I made one! But anyway! I'm a huge fan of photos, in both RL and SL. Some memories, you just can't repeat, or get back, and I'm very forgetful! I take a lot of photos! I'm trying to fill my large amounts of frames with some photos of us as a family now, instead of just Jeffry and I.

I know that I referenced to our fall photo several times in the previous post, and it appeared a couple of times on our adoption day. I never really posted it here, as I wanted it to be a complete surprise! Now that the surprise is done and over with, I can post it! It turned out sooooo great, I'm in love with it!

Yuna and I were watching a movie, and I snapped this photo of us! It turned out super cute, and I love this pose/animation that I made for us. Yuna has officially been calling us mommy and daddy, and we've been calling her our daughter! Because it's official now, and I'm super-excited about it still!


I've been experimenting with different mesh heads! I now have several of them, from Genesis, TMP, Logo, and Catwa. I think I'm going to do a blog post REALLY soon about them! However, for now, I am in LOVE with the Logo mesh head, the expressions are soooo much fun! I think I'm going to stick with the Logo head for a while, and made it a little more official by updating my in-world profile with a new photo!


For real, don't I look SO happy? Well, I should be! My life in SL has never been better than it is right now! I have been so blessed in SL, and I have the best family, ever! I feel like I just want to keep this smile on my face all the time!

I've been getting increasingly more and more dissatisfied with the design of our sim. When I picked out the terrain file, I was trying to replicate the sim we used to have years ago. It worked well for us back then, it was only us two, and we didn't need many things. However now, we are still trying to adopt a child, and we need more things for a child to do, as well. We have games now, a outdoor cinema and a playground, that we did not have before. I've been trying to move things around.... but it just looks like a huge, hot mess on our sim, with no flow at all.

I went to The Arcade, and came back with a beautiful car. As silly as it sounds, this was the final nail in the coffin for our sim terrain. I wanted to rez my car in front of my house, but all I have is grass. I didn't want to look.... "trashy" by putting a car on the lawn... so obviously, I wanted a driveway. I went out and purchased the driveway and path add-on that matches our house... it was a fail. It didn't look right, I had to resize it smaller, and it was just totally out of place. I made the decision that I wanted to change the sim.

I contacted Lorena Chung, the person we rent the sim from. I hate dealing with them, because it will literally take hours for them to just do one simple thing. It drives me crazy, I have other things that I need to do, too, you know! Luckily, I don't need to deal with them that often.

Eventually, she got around to changing our terrain, and I think this will be perfect for us, as a family (one day?). I really wanted my house up higher, overlooking the sim, and I wanted plenty of room for a driveway. Also, I needed to have several different areas. We now have an area for a playground, dancing, games, the house, our cinema, and our pool AND I can have our house up high. Soon, I plan on getting these things, to really complete the sim. It's going to look fabulous!

Already, I definitely feel happier with the sim, and I feel like we have enough space to expand outwards in the future, as well.

It's been a little while, hasn't it? I haven't been online much at all the past two weeks, as Jeffry and I had some RL to take care of. Well, it's all good, and we are back again! I have been working quite a bit on my alt's little store, now that I've decided to start making poses again. I have made a bunch of them, and am in the process of testing them out now! When I had [ImpEle], I did all my poses in Qavimator. It's a very ugly program (and sadly, it has not changed at all these past several years), but it gets the job done. I have made it my personal mission to really learn more "professional" programs. So I've been playing quite a bit in DAZ Studio, and Poser Pro.

As if I needed something else to do, I've been playing with nail appliers! I feel like I want to try everything at least once. I've tried mesh clothing, clothing appliers, furniture and mesh prefabs by now, and hated all of it. I think everything I make lately is terrible. I really struggle with finding my "niche", I guess. I found myself the other day, halfway through making a nail applier. I don't know what spurred the thought on that I wanted to do it, I just did it. And oddly, I was quite pleased with the result! Nails are my "thing" in RL, as I am very proud of my RL nails, it took me many years to get my nails healthy after biting them for as long as I can remember. I think I'll do these as well as poses. Not to mention - they make great group gifts!


A extremely fun little outing Jeffry and I took last night - Alicia's birthday party! It has been SO LONG since we actually spent time with SL friends. There was once a whole band of us Ch'know friends who would just get together randomly and hang out... just because. I really enjoyed those days, and I wish to make them happen again! A whole bunch of awesome people gathered together for her birthday party in SL, We all danced and played laser tag. It was a really fun couple of hours! However, I now really, really want my own laser tag area... and I can't find one for myself!

So, with my alt's store, I have been dabbling a bit in mesh. It's been a process of learning several different programs, and I've come to to conclusion: I suck at it. I have decided I spend too may hours a week cursing and fighting with Blender, and the stupid weighting of mesh. Not to mention, everyone is making for different mesh bodies, and I am completely left in the dust, because I am not capable enough in Blender to know how to do these things. So, unfortunately, I think I'm giving up mesh.

I had gotten a Wacom tablet as an early birthday gift from my husband. I decided to use it and try my hand at creating appliers. Well, that went downhill quick as well. I am coming to the conclusion that... well, I suck at anything SL related. Then, suddenly... I found myself about to upload a pose.

I had a HUGE moment of "WTH am I doing right now?" I had told myself - no poses when I came back. However, there were a few things that got me somewhat excited for poses again. The mesh bodies now, make poses beautiful, and not as ugly with the standard SL avatar. I battled a lot with the lumpiness of the SL avatar for years when I made poses for [ImpEle].

There's also a variety of poses that I want to make. As my readers (and friends on plurk) know, Jeffry and I have been looking for a child avatar to adopt - I now want to make poses for our future family. I hate buying couple's/family poses, because of the differences in everyone's shapes, I can never edit them to look like they are supposed to. So, I like to make my own - that way, I have full control over how the pose fits.


I logged in my alt to make poses with me, who, ironically, started out her existence as a child avatar. I had all the Toddledoo stuff from ages ago, it was just a matter of dressing her in it again.So, yes - preview of a pose that will soon make it's way into .ennaline.!


Another reason why I'm so excited to make poses: AnyPose! While AnyPose isn't that great for single poses, I much prefer to do them manually in another program - this is FANTASTIC for couple's poses! And also family poses! I really wish I had known about this waaay back when I had [ImpEle] open. It would have cut down soooo much irritation and stress while working with two avatars. No longer will I have to have Jeffry and I log on the beta grid and me telling him to sit on the poseball, nope, stand back up, tweak an arm, and on and on and on. I can edit up to 9 avatars IN WORLD. The concept is incredible.

I'm also finding it really nice to use for more difficult-to-pose-for things. Like, making perfect poses for gowns, poses for toddledoo's, and mesh clothing. Things that aren't as standard as the normal SL shape is. Because, with AnyPose, really - what you see is what you get. I like making a pose for a toddledoo with this HUD, then taking it into my posing program and just perfecting a few things that you can't do with AnyPose (stuff like making the feet parallel to the ground and minor things like that)

Yay, my graphics drivers have been fixed on the upgrade to Windows 10! It was terrible, instant blue screen of the computer crashing as soon as it booted up. I only had about 15 seconds to end all AMD processes before it crashed, then I had to disable the graphics card. Luckily, updated graphics drivers fixed the issue and I was only complaining about it for about half a day before they were fixed. Woo! Apparently it was affecting my particular brand of laptop. Who cares, I'm not broken anymore!

Anyway, ages ago, I found myself in need of a prefab, and was wandering around looking at these huge, mansion homes. It was incredible. I kept thinking: Who really needs more than one bedroom? Who would pay over $4,000L for a house? Who really needs that much SPACE? I was boggled. I hunted down a post where I briefly touched on it. (Dang, I was really depressed back there in 2008, wasn't I?)

The funny thing is: I seem to have become exactly *that* person. With us wanting to adopt a child, I find that our current house is not as big as I wish it to be. Plus, the longer I have the house, I keep noticing a gap here, a bigger gap there. I like room to grow with, a room where my alt can do her thing, and large, spacious rooms. I have been actively looking for a house like this, and ironically - Could not find a house that I really liked that was big enough. With us wanting a family, obviously we wanted a dedicated kitchen, dining room, living space, bathroom and at least two bedrooms. I had other specifications that needed to be met as well. I wanted the mouldings to be mesh, and not just be a texture, tintable walls, an optional snow add-on, and baked shadows.

I hunted and looked until I came across a particular one from Roost. It was love at first sight for me, and met every prerequisite I had for a home. The downfall: the price, at $5,100L. I TP'ed Jeffry over who gave me the linden to buy it, and told me to just "get it if you like it".

Of course, I hunted around a little bit more, looked through over 75 pages of listings on the marketplace... I'm going to try to break my habit of changing homes so often, so I really needed to LOVE this house, and know that it's the one that I am going to stick with. I did not really want to spend so much $L on it just to find a home I like better in the next couple days.

I couldn't find another that I liked as much as this East Ives house. I bought it, and eventually plan on getting the matching guest house. I put it down on the land, and it was so much bigger than my house I had before, I had to terraform. I eventually just leveled the hill behind the house, so now the back porch has a great view as well.

I love it now even more than I did before I bought it. Right now, it's completely perfect for us, and hopefully, our family. I'm not going to complain about the price either, as it's a very beautifully done house. I have yet to come across any issues with it, unaligned textures, gaps, anything. It's got several different options with it (two attic rooms, vs. one giant attic room) - and... well, it's just freaking gorgeous.

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'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 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!

Let's talk about creating for a little bit. I run a little tiny store on my alt, and sometimes I consider giving it up because I seem to always run into one problem or another. Learning mesh is a difficult process! It's a complete nightmare, and there isn't very many tutorials, or information about how creators create. I've said it before... creating in SL is a VERY closely guarded secret. And that makes me sad. I've picked up the bits of programs that I know from various random tutorials and guides out there. I would really love to start doing informational posts on how to create things, but I really feel like I don't know enough to do it. One day, right?

Anyway, for my alt's little store, I have been working on a gacha item - a pouf. I struggled for days with this thing, got so upset with it at times that I found myself unable to sleep. I've decided to write this post, to kind of give insight into the creative process that is mesh. If you guys like these "creating" posts, please let me know in the comments! I will try to do more of them!

First, I start off designing in Marvelous Designer. It gives me the basic shapes I need to work with, a very solid foundation for the mesh. This step is usually one of the easiest, but this time it gave me so many fits, I don't know why! Every single change I made to this design, it took up to 45 minutes to sync the pattern, it was so frustrating! Anyway, the above photo is what my final design looked like in Marvelous Designer. It wasn't really how I envisioned it in my head, but it was okay.


Next step, I take it into ZBrush. This is how it looks before anything else happens to it. I originally started the ZBrush stage because I like the ZRemesher tool in it. Marvelous Designer exports as triangle mesh, and I want quadrangles. ZRemesher turns the tris into quads. Now I have Marvelous Designer 4, which has quads now, I still find that I like how ZRemesher lowers the amount of faces on the mesh. So I still use it.


After running ZRemesher, this is where I lose a lot of the Marvelous Designer folds and such. It's disappointing sometimes because they are very beautiful - but the geometry numbers on them is HUGE. Anyway! We lost a bit of detail here - but I'll still take it!


Next - Blender. My husband went to RL schooling to learn 3ds Max. He tried to teach me what he knew, but I was intimidated, and couldn't find many other tutorials on it. I got frustrated and gave up. Blender, however is a free resource, and I found has MUCH more information on it. Getting off track now... Blender is where the majority of the rest of the work is done. In here, I added the button in the middle, I clean the meshes up in here. Also, if I'm doing clothing, I'll size them and rig them, fit them to the Slink mesh body, and try to do my best at weighting. I'll also delete some faces that you won't see, like the bottom of the pouf, or the inside of clothing. To save on geometry.

After I took the above screenshot, I uploaded it to SL, the land impact of that was 26! No thanks! I used the "decimate" modifier to bring the geometry down a bit, uploaded it again to SL, it was down to 2.


Next, I upload to SL, see how it looks, check land impact. If I'm making clothing, I'll wear it, see what weights or modifications I need to do. Then take it back into Blender, fix things, and re-upload. The Beta grid is wonderful for this - you get to see exactly how it looks on the avatar, but not get broke by the cost of upload fees. Also, I check the ambient occlusion map, see if it looks okay!

After everything looks great, I go to Photoshop to texture the ambient  occlusion map,and smooth out any part of it that needs smoothing. In the pouf's case, there was some jagged looking edges on the map that needed a little blur. Finish texturing and upload to SL.


And here we have our finished pouf. It looks quite a bit different than when I started, but it still looks great!

Last post, I showed the blog the outside of my home, today, we'll explore the inside! Yay! Keep in mind that I have a small-ish prim budget, so I don't have as many decorations as I'd like, but really, who does? Anyway, on to the inside!

My living room. I'm slowly replacing things and adding new things constantly, my inventory is pretty outdated, from being out of SL for so long. But as I hit more sales, and events, the bigger it grows, and more possibilities I have. I LOVE the french doors leading into this room, they really do open like real french doors!

The wall has a bunch of pictures, detailing various bits of our SL journey together.


Next, we move into my dining room. I had a smallish set from LAQ to match the bookshelves, but when I went to the Trompe Loeil sale earlier in the week, I fell absolutely in love with this dining room. Honestly, I probably would have been fine with my old set, but once I saw the paisley tablecloth.... it was mine. There is never enough paisley in the world for me. And naturally, I had to get the matching chairs, right? Currently looking for a beautiful set of mesh flowers to finish this room out.


Kitchen. Yes, yes. It's small, sad and uneventful. However, why waste prims when I don't cook in the first place? It's functional for heating up leftover prim takeout, that's all I need! Again, another sale purchase.


The staircase that leads upstairs. Every girl needs a washer and dryer, right!? These are very old cube versions, I'm holding out until I find some fabulous mesh ones to replace these!


Upstairs is a series of 3 rooms. When I first rezzed the house, I gave Jeffry an option to pick a room. He is scripting in world now, and doesn't like to pick up his prims. No one like random plywood cubes scattered around their land! So, as long as he's in his room, I won't complain. And that's what he does. Rezzes prims. Soon, there will be so many boxes on the floor, I wont be able to open the door.


Across the hall from his mancave, is the bedroom. Lots of seating, for lots of photo taking. I like this room!


And as for the last room upstairs, another work in progress! This is the bathroom, still adding to this room as well!

My inventory has been a constant battle pretty much ever since I first rezzed in SL. It got worse and worse, until I started fashion blogging and creating poses. Then it completely exploded. There was a point when I tried to keep it under control, tried to organize. I realized that it was futile, and then completely gave up. There was one point where I remember it being over 60,000 items. That's a HUGE number!

Every time I tried to come back to SL, I'd sit and clear some stuff out, organize, try to get it manageable. It's sooo difficult, so time consuming. With the addition of mesh, I've put a really effort into my inventory lately. I've been looking at things differently, literally asking myself... "Will I ever wear this flexi skirt again?" If I think about it, it's moved to the trash. I did, however, have a REALLY hard time deleting my Last Call items (Last Call closed way back in 2008). I think because they were my first "real" clothes I purchased, they were so ahead of their time, and it was probably the first real sale that I experienced, and camped out on the edge of the sim for. But, I finally had the courage to delete them.

I can finally say that my inventory is 100% organized. I never thought I would say that. I have my items down to 17,380 items, most of which are full permissions textures that I have purchased over the years. I have no objects in my object folder, no stray categorized folders. Everything has a place now in my inventory, and there is nothing I don't want in there. I am so incredibly proud of myself for accomplishing this. It was a mountain of a feat, and so relieving to get done with it!

I've also been pretty good at keeping it managed as well. Rez something to unpack it? Delete the object from objects folder. Just buy something? Rename the folder and put it in it's category right away. Of course, this helps without fashion blogging anymore, I don't have to keep separate folders filled with the stuff that is waiting to be blogged. I can just put things right away now.

Now I find myself in my skybox, looking around and wondering what to do. LOL!