In the midst of the flexifire in the forums, Nikki Clayton released a truly extraordinary set of shoes named Vanity’s Child. It comes in three different strap configurations: there’s a studded t-strap, a plain t-strap and an ankle strap version available. It comes in all of the standard colors you can imagine — red, white, cognac (shown), and black to name just four, but also some exotic animal print versions too: leopard (of course), but also lioness and lynx. The shape on these shoes is just too perfect — it has a wider heel than most of Nikki’s other designs, and looks incredible with jeans, a skirt or even a flirty salsa number. Sometimes you don’t need to teeter on a pencil thin heel (but if you do — Minx is also the perfect shoe place for you!) Trust me, this is a shoe you will love having in your inventory! See all of the colors and strap configurations at Minx Shoe Designs in Shepherd.
Lash Xevious reworked the Angelina hair to use flexiprims — this style sports a long flexipony attachment. It comes in 15 textures, including the two new she just finished, Sephiroth a white/purple streaked texture (inspired by Final Fantasy VII bad guy, presumably, not the kabbalah — but who knows?) and Ribbon which features a light blue ribbon running through it. It also comes in the more standard Lash textures including her fabulous blonde. She also has a long waist length flexi style named Carlotta in the same texture set. Each hair is sold individually (no packs — yet.) Get them at Lashed in Butsu.
Selena Gateaux has finally had a chance to finish and release three new flexi style hairs, which come in 26 different textures. (Each one sold individually for L$150.) I had to highlight the flexipony, because I used to live in Selena’s pre-flexi Curly Pony style in her exceptionally fabulous brown with blonde highlight texture. Also released was a flexi-piggie style and a long “messy” style called whipped. Selena’s store is Goldilocks in in Sikkima.
Poor Six Kennedy! Tomorrow she’s going to delete the May limited edition hairstyle from her inventory forever. May is over — and June limited edition is already here. It’s fun, flexi and phenominal. Like May, it will be on sale just through the month of June, and once the month is gone, so is the hair — forever. Six can’t even give you one if you begged her. It simply won’t exist any more. The June hair is available at the Gurl 6 warehouse on Euphoria Island.
Update: Sparkle has re-released Entre Vous with a flexiprim baby doll flexiprim skirt. An upgrade for current Entre Vous owners is available. Contact Sparkle Skye in world for details.
Wow, this design was an eyecatcher this morning when I was cruising the forums. Sparkle posted this design in a rich purple, but I really prefer this excellent cream colored version at her blog. Entre Vous is the first release in a new line Sparkle calls Allure Debutante. She writes:
Hand painted satin with lace detailing This set includes a sleek bodice and non prim mini skirt that can be worn with or without the prim sleeves and ribbon choker. Or you can wear it as a babydoll dress for those less casual functions. Have a party and dancing to go to? Then try the layers of ruffled petticoats that make this dress a real show stopper.
Yes, the texturing of the fabric is just excellent. The way the light bounces back off the fabric is so appealing, and if big poofy prim skirts aren’t your thing, then there’s the sleek mesh skirt. Find Allure by Sparkle in ImagineNation. (P.S. In the ads, Sparkle’s wearing her own Princessa hair which goes great with this dress.)
Update: sachi Vixen released the soft gloss line of Sabrina Fair. (Of course my favorite makeup — Number 7 — isn’t one of the box ads sachi posted! D’oh!) But here’s number 8, of which I am also quite enamored.
I’ve been waiting and waiting — so patiently — to write about sachi Vixen’s new Sabrina Fair line of skins. If you meet me in world, you’ll usually find me in a Charmed skin by Starley Thereian or one of a set of custom GX series skins by Namssor Daguerre’s Second Skin Labs. But I have to admit I’ve been wearing Sabrina Fair skins for a solid week now and I’m hooked.
I’m not sure if sachi just loves Photoshop or if she’s lost her mind, but she’s created eight different makeup looks in three different makeup styles, with three different eyebrow choices (the carpet does match the drapes, if that sort of thing is important to you) in five different skin tones. 8 x 3 x 3 x 5 = 360 new skins (plus vendors, plus box ads!) I guess I’m choosing the latter possibility. Last week, she sent me a preview sampler of some of the makeup looks and different skin tones and I am so excited that she finally posted many of them were for sale.
The three makeup lines are “Birds of Paradise” which is a very colorful and dramatic line of lipsticks paired with exotic eye makeups. “Fantasy” which features adornments which are not “makeup” per se, but are objects difficult to display correctly with prim attachments — these could be forehead adornments, or bejweled headbands, or other fantasy inspired looks.
But my absolute favorite — the thing which has me addicted to these skins — and jonesing for more of them — is sachi’s “Soft Gloss” makeup line. Soft Gloss is a collection of more muted “natural” lipstick colors paired with shimmery neutral eyeshadows. I like these makeups so much I’ve been wearing the three Soft Gloss skins with the “wrong” hair colors — and the shimmer effect in these eyeshadows is so spot on that it has grabbed me and just won’t let go. The shimmer looks especially amazing with the new lighting in 1.10.
The Sabrina Fair skins are priced at L$1000 for a single makeup look, and L$5,000 for all 8 in a specific eyebrow color/makeup palette/skintone combination. When I checked this morning, my Soft Gloss favorites were not yet available for sale, but sachi thought they’d be finished later today or tomorrow. The Soft Gloss skins themselves are done — it’s making the box ads and packaging the skins into vendors that’s taking all the time now,but the Birds of Paradise and Fantasy makeups are mostly out for sale (some of the darker skin tones were still not out as of this morning), and demos are available for all of the new skins — so you can try them out before you buy.
Also brand new at Adam-n-Eve are two new flexihair designs, Jewel and Gem — so named because of the really pretty jeweled hair pin which is included in each design. Jewel is a blonde textured hair design (but tintable) in a mid-length look with flowing front bangs and back, while Gem is a bit longer (and comes in more colors) and has a slightly different bang configuration on the front. (More about these hair creations on sachi’s blog.)
You can take the girl out of Silicon Valley, but you can’t take Silicon Valley out of the girl. I found a really interesting post on “Good Morning Silicon Valley”, a tongue-firmly-in-cheek review of the latest headlines from the capital of computer dorkdom. But occasionally, there’s a really nice summary of some big ideas. I thought this was especially appropriate to a user content driven environment like Second Life:
Writing in GigaOM, Robert Young says, “Today’s social networks (along with other forms of social media, like blogging and online video-sharing) are just the tip of iceberg when it comes to the long-term potential of digital self-expression. … To some extent, self-expression should be viewed as a new industry, one that will co-exist alongside other traditional media industries like movies, TV, radio, newspapers and magazines.
Another interesting factoid about the people who create content and share it — most of it is original work — and the vast majority of those creators have broadband Internet access:
[T]he latest report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project … found that 48 million American adults — 35 percent of Internet users — have contributed some form of user-generated content to the Internet (that’s adults — you’ll have to factor in all the kids posting to MySpace and the like). Of those users, 36 million posted their own artwork, photos, stories and videos. Empowering this urge to share is broadband penetration — of those who contributed content to the Net, the report found, 73 percent had high-speed connections.
I think this struck a chord because I’ve been thinking about what happened to Lost Thereian’s skins, and numerous hair creator’s textures. A serious challenge for Linden Labs — it seems to me — is implementing more flexible and granular permission controls for content. I can envision the utility of taking that new permission system down to the individual prim and texture level, even — although I believe the cost in doing all that database work might be prohibitively expensive. (One example use case, as it applies to prim hair: this hair texture is licensed under the Creative Commons license so you can pull it out of a hair and re-use it, but that one is proprietary, so it’s isn’t available for modification or reuse.)
Leaving aside the volatility of the Linden Dollar itself for a moment, these kinds of trends should be heartening to content creators in Second Life. They are basically the first wave of content producers who specialize in digital self expression in a way that goes beyond snapshots of the family cat and links to “this cool new band I like.” (Not that there’s anything wrong with that kind of content!) And no doubt if writers like Hamlet Au and Walker Spaight are correct, there will be this kind of content in the 3D web too.
Were you as intrigued by this ad for a new line of skins as I was? Raquel Montagne of La Femme posted another ad today for a blonde “base hair” skin named Soleil.
Take a careful look at the second photo. On the one side is Lost’s skin, and on the other side is the City Girl skin. The resemblance is more than a little disturbing — it’s nearly a pixel for pixel copy. Clearly the face has been changed — but the rest, right down to the base hair Lost has had on his skins for a long time, look identical.
On discovery of this news and the subsequent confrontation, Raquel removed the vendors from her stores and tells me that she didn’t sell any of the skins. She also says that she herself is the victim of a scam — the skin work was outsourced, she tells me, and she refuses to name the party responsible. She told me she wanted to “confront the person myself first.” Lost and business partner Ambyance Anubis have involved Linden Labs into this issue — and presumably an investigation and its results are forthcoming.
In the meantime, without knowing the true person responsible for this theft, content creators are left wondering what steps they can take to protect themselves and their intellectual property. Depending on the actual method of theft, there might not be a good technical solution to this problem. Just like in the real world, intellectual property theft is going to have to carry some kind of broader societal punishment. In a world as new as Second Life, I think we’re still trying to figure that part out.
I’ve also been meaning to write about the new makeup releases by Tete a Pied — I was going to write about Fashionista last week when CJ Carnot posted it on the forums, but I couldn’t find an ad texture. When it comes to makeups, a picture really is worth a thousand words. I was hanging out with fellow Second Styler Roslin Petion when I asked if she’d consider creating a makeup with dark smoky eyeshadow. It’s funny, because of all the different makeup choices out there in Second Life I often find the simplest combinations remain among my very favorites and most attractive looks. She showed me a few prototype snapshots and then dropped the final product (shown top left) on me to my absolute delight. (The ad shows the makeup on the “Hollywood” skin tone.) This is such a realistic and natural evening look — definitely something I might want to recreate in real life. It looks so elegant on too, and I love the way the glossy lips shine. So forgive my late write up — this is another one of my recent skin favorites.
But there’s more new from Tete a Pied. As Roslin writes it:
While what seems like more than half of all Second Life content creators have been exploring the world of flex prims, CJ and I have been flexing ourselves in a very different direction. As I write this, CJ is busy setting up the vendors with our 3 new skin tones: Tokyo, Havana, and Nairobi. The skins were particularly challenging and we’ve been working on them for a little over 2 weeks.
Each of these new skin tones comes with the standard four makeup looks: natural, unique, day, and night. Check them out at Tete a Pied in Pyrina.
My primary SL computer since I started has been an Apple PowerBook G4. It did okay for me, gamely processing everything it could given a limited amount of RAM and a fairly old video card. With the arrival of 1.10, though, the G4 just wasn’t getting it done any more. Frame rates, especially with flexiprims, averaged somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-5 fps. Lag city.
On Saturday, I bought an Nvidia 7600 GT for my el-cheapo Windows system and all I can say is, “Wowza, why did I wait for so long?” It will be interesting to compare the performance of the $750 Windows desktop vs. my MacBook Pro when I finally order it in the fall.
Four fantastic jewelry releases: Raven by RH Engel, 3 Tier Beaded Necklace by Digital Dragon Designs, Asri Falcone’s stunning limited edition choker and earring set, and an intriguing necklace/earring set by Parallax View. Click for photos and commentary.
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Let’s talk lingerie now. Yeah, it’s another round up post — sorry — there’s just been too much new stuff posted to keep up in individual posts. Below the fold: LapGirl’s superb art deco Retro Polka, the super classy, haute chic of Bonita and Bella by Liquid Velvet Studios, feminine mystique defined: Intimé by Dazzle, flirty fun Bedroom Barbie by “S”, and shiny sexy Rebel Red by FooRoo.
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Today is Memorial Day in the United States, and although it’s mostly remembered as a three day weekend by many Americans, it’s really about remembering and honoring the memories of those loved ones who’ve passed. I want to take the opportunity to thank those who have served or are serving in the United States armed services: thank you.
Here are my three favorite flexiprim hair releases, so far, in no particular order: Elika Tiramisu’s Farfalla, Six Kennedy’s Celebrity (oh, you just knew I’d pick that one, didn’t ya?), and Sherona DeGroot’s Swooshie. Click for photos and commentary.
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