Chubby, Cheap and Cheerful

One thing you're sure to notice after being in Second Life for a while is the oddity of some of the body shapes people create for their avatars. Many of the weirder ones are enshrined at What the Fug, a blog with a fascination for 'watermelon ass,' and other indignities inflicted upon avatar mesh.
What you won't see much of is fuller-figured avatars - at least, fuller-figured avatars that aren't doing it for the lulz or trying to be grotesque. When people get to choose how they're going to look, I guess it's natural enough that the majority of them are going to go for 'slender' or 'muscular' rather than 'pleasantly plump.' That's what our society tells us again and again is attractive and desirable. People are frequently judged on their character (lazy! stupid!) if their bodies are overweight, and that really stinks. Of course obesity is dangerous, but it's possible to be both heavier than the ideal and healthy, and many intelligent and conscientious people are carrying extra weight for one reason or another and shouldn't be shamed for it.
IRL I am a bit overweight. I'm generally healthy and can usually find clothes in mainstream stores that fit and look good on me (although some fashionable styles will always be out of bounds - skinny jeans should only be worn on skinny legs). I'm definitely not stupid, and have the MA diploma to prove it. Physically, sure - I AM a bit lazy, I just don't enjoy sports or exercise for their own sake, but mentally I'm far from it. I'm okay with how I am, and I am a nice-looking woman with style.
But my SL shapes have always been skinny - I guess it's just wish-fulfilment? They're also more facially beautiful than I am, with very dainty and symmetrical features, and never have dark shadows under their eyes. I give Jane more manageable, glamorous hair, too! Not to mention the power of flight...
However, the other day, I was browsing round a little mall in FS City when I spotted a shape that immediately made me go 'Oh, cute!' This was in Rosy Mood - I'd link you to their main shop, but when I went there I couldn't find this shape, and the whole point is to send you where you can find it, right? The stall is easy to find, just walk to your right from the landing point and then look to your left.

The shape is called Momo and she is an adorable, plump girl, very like the 'peach' that the name means. She's L90, which I find very reasonable (especially as, if I'm honest, I could probably generate her myself with a little sliderplay - L90 seems like a fair price to pay for that work being done for me). She's fully modifiable too, which is great - I thought she was a bit too knock-kneed to begin with so I straightened her legs out a little.

Up above you can purchase a choice of three skins to compliment her features - only L120 each, or L250 for a fatpack. That is very cheap for skins, and they do have certain limitations - as the sign says, they don't have genital details. I can deal with that, though - and she also looks good in a variety of other skins. Be careful with the vendor - I got Momo Blue when I actually wanted Red, because I didn't read the instructions carefully enough.
One problem with using a full-figured avatar is that most AO creators assume you'll be skinny (fair enough, most avs are), and you'll be stuck with a lot of animations that make your hands pass through your hips. However, there's a solution and it's absolutely free. Imperial Elegance offers two excellent, natural, casual female AOs, one for a slim figure and one for 'chubby.' You can get them for L0 either in-world or from XStSL (link goes to the chubby one, for the other click 'View all by this merchant' and look for 'Casual Girl AO'). Isn't that awesome? I highly recommend them to any girl getting started in SL. Unless you want an AO for something really specialised, like wearing a kimono, being a fairy or a mermaid, or constantly smoking, you may never need to buy another. Full marks for generosity and practicality!

Here is Momo Jane, then. She's wearing a Pleiades Another Skin mod from the current Newbie Assistance pack from Peppermint Blue. Peppermint Blue is another LM and subscribo group absolutely everyone should have. Although the packs are called 'Newbie' there is no 'avatars under 30 days old' restriction on them - anyone of any age can grab them, and they contain wonderful goodies.

Her hair is the June group gift from Tekuteku (another group, although not subscribo, that's well worth joining) and her teeshirt's from Reek (you do have to buy the fatpack but it's cheap for a fatpack), her jeans and socks from Untone Quilt and her sneakers from the fabulous HoC Industries. Their shoes are SO good, and SO cheap, that again, apart from very specialised needs like thigh-high pirate boots or ballet slippers or whatever, you hardly need buy anything else. Oh - if you like cheap, cute ballet flats, definitely go to 50 Flats. The '50' means Lindens per pair, and there are always freebies too.
One thing to keep in mind - system skirts are extremely unkind to a figure like this. Momo is copy/mod, so you could make a skirt shape, but it could be tricky to do that without losing her intended curves. I would recommend only wearing dresses that use a prim skirt and glitch pants. Actually, I think glitch pants would be a good thing in real life too!

Dream Home dreams

I am far too cheap to buy land in Second Life for the foreseeable future, but I nevertheless have accumulated a lot of adorable furniture and an excellent Japanese-style prefab apartment from Cup of Crown. Much of the furniture comes from Bettiepage Voyager (whose shop is infuriatingly hard to find in Search), Grandma! and OverDrive, but it's all a miscellany and some of it was free, gathered over the past few years in SL. Thus, it's not going to be a highly organised 'where to buy' sort of post. So I sort of want to show you some pictures, just because I enjoyed setting all this up on a sandbox with a complete disregard for prim count. Shall we?


Here is the front door. I like my Welcome mat. Scale can be so dodgy in SL, can't it? Look at me, and look at that door.


Please do come in.


Now, because it's a Japanese-style apartment, there has to be a place to take off your shoes and put on slippers.


The first door on your right leads to the toilet, and as you can see, it's a toilet with everything, including spare paper, a book on the floor, and a creepy 70s Doctor Who poster.


The next door along opens on the bathroom.


The temple of Hygeia. I really need a nice showerhead-with-hose to go on the wall, don't I?


Here I am in the sort of intersection of the place. Horribly, I have not taken off my outdoor shoes! I love the TV.


Here is the compact little kitchen, complete with rice-cooker.


Here is the living room, extremely cosy.


If you want an orange, a tissue or a comic, I can help you.


My bedroom, finally, gives some hint of my occupation as a geisha. I've had my erikae now! Grown-up geisha!


Here you can see a traditional geisha's make-up table. Geisha are great collectors of kimonos.


And Johnny Depp, kimonos and Johnny Depp. The door to the left is a storage cupboard.


And so, although it makes my skirt look a bit peculiar, I lie down to sleep!

More of my thoughts about how SL should be

I know my point of view on these things isn't terribly valid, because it's not as if I know how to create anything in SL. The cleverest thing I ever did was turn a top hat into a wizard's hat by futzing around with the crown in a sandbox. Still, I have my ideas and here they are.
1. Someone should invent a thing, some kind of scripted dealie, that scans the contents of your inventory, detects duplicate items, and presents them so you can delete all the ones you don't want. For example, look at how many stores enclose an LM with their products - sometimes multiple LMs to all their locations. You only need one of each of those, and the rest are just taking up space and doing nobody any good.
2. It would be awesome if Inventory had a thumbnail viewing mode. Who knows what everything they own looks like? Why do I have an empty folder called PLAAKA? What about items whose names are in another language or just not descriptive, like all those hairstyles that have girls' names but no details like 'ponytail' or 'bun'? You see what I mean.
3. Like lots of people, I've been doing the grid-wide 'Ghost Busters' Hallowe'en hunt. Mostly I've been enjoying it. It's made me think about the ins and outs of placing items for hunts and quests. I think the secret is to be clever, but not TOO clever. You want it to be challenging enough that people get a sense of achievement from tracking the little squirt down, but not so hard that they become frustrated and bored and tell their friends your hunt sucks, or feel that you are just dicking with them. Things I've seen that I liked include placing the sculpted prim ghost in front of a vendor board and colouring him to match part of the picture, so you had to notice that he stuck out in 3D to see that he was there, making the ghost small and putting him on a shelf with ornaments, putting a script inside the ghost so that he actually moved slowly around the room, and placing the ghost inside an open-and-shut item that people had to click open to be able to see him. I haven't liked putting the ghost somewhere really hard to cam to in a big, multi-roomed store build, or making him so tiny it's pretty much a fluke if you DO see him. That didn't quite seem like fair play.
Anyway, soon I'll have finished the hunt (I'm in the 90s now) and will have a buttload of new inventory to sort through!

Fashioning a fairy - with freebies (well, some)

It's been a while! And I've been getting further into fairy fashion. Despite a regrettable tendency to call themselves 'fae,' a word with which I've never felt comfortable, Second Life fairies are rather nice people with pretty good taste in clothes. There are lots of fairies and fairy-tale-type people in Avilion, a very pretty and detailed fantasy role-play sim (or rather, set of sims - it's a big place). The pictures in this entry were taken there.

There are various freebie/newbie fairy outfits around, like that fugly pansy one you've probably seen if you've been in SL any length of time. Here you can see some dawg trying to sell it for L100 when it's a pretty widely distributed freebie. It's not at all hard to find boxes full of free wings of varying design and quality - try a quick search for Yadni's Junkyard, for example, and don't forget to check the freebies on SLX and Shop OnRez. If you want to look really pretty as a fairy, though, you will need to spend a little Linden cash. Isn't that always the way?
For example, an appropriate AO (animation overrider) is necessary to really look the part. I recommend the gorgeous Kami-Hitoe Dreaming Butterfly AO, which offers you a choice of walks and sitting poses and has lovely smooth stands. It costs 600L, which is pretty good for such a detailed doodah. K-H is also a great place to get mermaid costumes and AOs. I love the tropical clownfish mermaid set!

But not everything good is expensive! You can get a beautiful set of flexi wings from Fancy Fairy for nowt. They're called 'Teasel Mint' and they're a luscious green with a natural, insecty style, more like dragonfly wings than butterfly ones. (Um, well, I realise butterflies are insects too... but dragonflies are MORE insecty!)

(Purely by chance, the AO stand I was in made it look as if I was pulling my ponytail out of the way to give you a clearer view of the wings. Rokkin'.)
While you're there, look around and see some of the best fairy fashion I've seen in Second Life. I love the Dew Petal Dress in Lime, which also comes with a longer skirt version...

the Olde World Faery gown in Forest, inspired by the goblin and fairy art of Brian 'Labyrinth' Froud (omg I wish this creator would make Sarah's dress from the dream bubble scene!)...

and the Azarelle dress in Green, with a glorious leafy bodice.

Each of these comes with a co-ordinating set of wings, so they really are good value for money and allow you to change your look, as indeed fairies love to do. (I haven't worn the wings that come with Azarelle in these pictures.) Join the update group and you will sometimes get new wing designs for free, too. They also have gorgeous things like the Queen Bee fairy avatar, rose-petal lingerie, and special skins.

Another shop that I like very much is Caverna Obscura. They have some excellent shoes (I like the Leather Sandals that lace up your leg - I'm wearing them in all these photos) and the Brimstone dress, which appears to be made of cabbage leaves, is adorable. I always think fairy dresses should look a bit organic and ragged and as if they've been dragged through a hedge backwards at least once. Brimstone comes with lots of mix-and-match pieces, so you can put together looks different from the one I show here, including a more formal ballgown sort of style. I really love the flower belt and sleeve details.

My fresh-faced fairy look is created with the Innocence shape and BettiePage eyes blogged earlier, Tarali's Swertia skin in Pearl (L1400 - sorry), and the Jasmine hair in Copper currently available for 1L at Frangipani Designs.

The butterflies in my hair came with the free YIPs 'anouska' set at the GNUbie Store, repositioned from their original spot on the belly. Being a freebie hound often means you have half a squillion things in your inventory that you can use for other purposes.

One last thought... I can understand why people like to RP as childlike or actually juvenile fairies or pixies. It's pretty, playful, youthful, sure. But I don't understand why so many of them play with a typed speech impediment - especially the one I can only describe as 'Elmer Fudd.' 'Hewwo, I'm a wittwe faiwy.' I find it grating rather than cute - it makes the chat harder to read, sometimes almost unintelligible. When a real child speaks indistinctly, it's not annoying because you know they're learning and doing their best, and you just try to model clear speech and give them lots of props when they improve. When a presumably grown-up Second Life player laboriously types out a lot of cutesy-poo tosh (they usually don't say anything interesting in itself, because they are working so hard to project this performance of cuteness), it's jolly irritating to me. I'm not about to pick any fights over this, but it strikes me as extremely unnecessary. Surely it's possible to 'talk' with a childlike vocabulary and syntax without resorting to Fudd-speak? I don't know if anyone who does this will read this blog, but if they do, please take on board that it may not be having the endearing effect you intend, and consider at least cutting down a bit.

Shop review - Grandma!

One of the endearing things about the Japanese, of course, is the way they adopt English vocabulary and use it in their own quixotic way. There are websites devoted to the 'Engrish' that results. Often it's not quite clear why they choose the words they do, or whether they realise what they evoke to a native speaker of English. I would not expect to find cute clothes for young women and girls in a shop called Grandma!, but there you go. (In fact, at first I misread the name as 'Grand mal,' as in epileptic fit!) On consideration, I think the name is meant to indicate that the clothing is vintage-styled, but don't worry, it will not make you look like a nanna, unless you mean your nanna when she was young and foxy and turning heads at the Saturday night social.

The Grandma! main store is in Broadmead, a Japanese-built sim based on London. As you walk around, it really does look and feel like a relatively affluent part of London - maybe Knightsbridge? I need to spend more time in London to be certain.
The concept of the shop is what's so adorable: according to the Picks in creator Hanae Nishi's profile, 'This shop imitates a vintage bookstore. You are a cute girl, who lives in the bookstore...' Well, I LOVE vintage bookstores, and I LOVE to be told I'm a cute girl, so this was clearly right up my alley.
So I dressed myself, cutely enough I hope, in a blouse and capris from GiGi Couture, and went! Click on the pictures to see the full versions.

You can see an authentic London Underground sign in the background - there is an entrance to a Tube station near Grandma!, but it's currently blocked off with warning tape, and a cautious peep suggests that it's under construction. In any case, what need have I of public transport? I live in the shop. I'm like Bernard Black, but a cute girl.

Unlike Bernard, though, I keep a clean shop. When you enter Grandma!, you'll find a cash desk to your right. If you click on the till, you'll get an LM for the shop, and if you click on the little pink bag speckled with butterflies, you'll receive a free pack containing the floral apron (on jacket and skirt layers), armful of books and duster shown here. You'll have to turn off any AO you wear to carry these correctly. And you'll be all set!

You can sit yourself down behind the desk (the stool has an embedded pose) and await customers.
'Are they real leather?'
'Dey're real Dickens.'

Grandma, whoever she may be, likes to leave little notes. That refers to the SL goods - I can't imagine a second-hand bookstore lasting long without occasionally buying books back, or at least allowing trade-ins.

After sitting at the desk for a while, you may begin to wonder, is there a staff loo?

Of course there is. Notice the cute pink bow on the back of the staff apron! I can see now that I should have waited a little bit longer before snapping this, because the peeling paint texture on the wall hadn't quite loaded.

Don't worry, I have my pants on, I'm just demonstrating the dunny pose. Grandma's left another of her little notes.
This, likewise, didn't seem to want to load completely, but if you squint you can read 'Don't bring the stuff in. Please.'
Grandma evidently knows me well; if I am not expressly forbidden to vanish into the loo with a slightly foxed novel, it will be hard to get me out of there.
One flaw in the otherwise delightful attention to detail is that there's nowhere to wash your hands, so it's a good thing I didn't really pee.
Incidentally, while I write this up I'm watching the BBC's new Robin Hood, and while I love the continuing tribute to Tim Curry that is the Sheriff, the anachronistic costumes are constantly bugging me. Why does Sir Guy of Gisbourne constantly wear an Old West duster coat? Such coat technology simply did not exist in mediaeval Europe! Let alone the obviously machine-sewn seams on Robin's shirts. Oh well.

The bookshop's heater doubles as a little stove, so I can make a hot drink or cook a pot of something bubbling. Num! Hanging on the rail over the heater you can see the first samples of the vintage clothes on offer - some very sweet little coats. I like the blue one at far right! Now, where does that ladder go? There are no more shelves up there.

That's where the shop-girl's little bed is! All right, it's a bit minimal, a mattress with an afghan and two cushions, but I look comfortable enough, don't I? I absolutely love this, I've always ALWAYS loved bunks and high platforms and tree-houses and anything that lets me climb up and peep down at people. Perhaps in a previous life I was one of those cats that like to get up on the top edge of doors and pounce on people's heads as they enter a room.

I've been seeing this method of displaying clothes for sale more and more recently, but only in Japanese or Japanese-influenced shops. Why don't more people do it? It's so cute! What, you may wonder, is beyond that curtained doorway? Why is the floor tiled?

Why, it's the shopgirl's little bathroom! I had to put up the CLOSED sign before undressing and hopping into the water, though. Don't want customers popping in while I'm in the altogether.

Washed and refreshed, I'm back on the job and on the lookout for customers. Come on, ladies and gents, who wants a 1958 Bunty annual in fair condition?

Sim review: JAPAN DREAM KENJIN

I've thought of something else I'd like to do with this blog - review sims that I've found interesting, fun, impressive or odd. I'm beginning with JAPAN DREAM KENJIN, which I found by chance by clicking on a brightly coloured poster in a store in Broadmead.
On beaming in, you find yourself standing by the sea wall of a colourful, cheerfully tatty Japanese small town. There's a bus shelter, some junk like broken down bicycles and wooden crates, a small shop selling stuff like inflatable swim rings... and four unlabelled magenta poseballs.
If you sit on any of these poseballs, your avatar will promptly squat behind the sea wall and pee.
A short distance away is a yellow ball actually marked 'pee' (which causes you to pee in the upright, masculine manner) but those magenta balls really took me by surprise, and made me wonder what sort of place I had wandered into. I noticed that I had a little heart-shaped health monitor in my menu bar - do people fight here? Do they pee fight here?
There's an unusual atmosphere of bright and cheerful grunginess, as if this sim was designed with a lot of nostalgia for somebody's crappy hometown. It's like being in a somewhat run-down Miyazaki movie. You can wander past backyards nodding with sunflowers and into houses filled with shabby, lived-in furniture. Nothing appears to be for sale, even the stock in the liquor store/tobacconist's. Old advertising posters, cracked concrete and rusty corrugated iron are everywhere, yet all the colours are super-saturated and cheerful. The purpose of all the structures wasn't immediately obvious to me, but then, I'm not Japanese.
It's a strangely immersive environment. The only sounds are of the wind and the lapping sea. I was able to figure out that the place was made by someone called clubkenjin Loon, who unfortunately speaks only Japanese. Who knows what's going on there? It's quite fun to poke about. Various shops and stalls offer poseballs allowing you to mind the counter. In one place is a dustbin labelled 'DON'T touch me' - if you click it it will explode, noisily, and take about 10% off your health (though this will come back within seconds). And that's about it!
No pee fighting.

A skin bargain which impresses me

I just discovered a lovely little pop-Japanese-influenced shopping sim called Cherry Buttons (I don't know whether that is meant to evoke Apple Bottoms...). I certainly recommend it, and right now I want to particularly big-note a shop therein called GiGi Couture (that link goes to the main shop in Broadmead; the Cherry Buttons outlet is easily found thanks to a teleport-links signboard at the sim's beam-in point). The clothes are gorgeous, with highly realistic textures, and quite reasonably priced (most things are L150 or under). The thing that really got my attention was upstairs - the skins.

You see, outside the store when I first visited was a signboard for a model search, and one of the conditions was that you must be wearing a GiGi Couture skin in your entry shots. 'Rip-off,' I thought, 'this is an attempt to trick us into spending L1k+ on a skin.' I went upstairs and to my joy and surprise found totally good-looking skins for L50 or L25 each. They have palm prints and at least a suggestion of genitals and everything, and really interesting makeup. The reason for their cheapitude is that they're mods of Eloh Eliot's 'another skin,' which you can get for free from Another Shop. Yes, completely free, and they are really lovely skins with pretty makeup, available in dark brown, tan, fair and pale shades. And each one comes with multiple makeup options, and the choice of freckles, and omg they will be another entry all to themselves. Does everyone in the world know about these already? Seems like they should!
But right now, the GiGi Couture skins. In these shots, I'm wearing Charmy Gray eyes from Annerose, okappa hair from *BP, and the Innocence shape mentioned in my first post.

This is the Ganguro Girl skin, for loitering in Shibuya texting on your keitai, crouching in the middle of the street laughing loudly with your mates, trying all the free samples in the 109 department store and picking fights with Kotobuki Ran. The hair is completely and utterly wrong for it (ganguro gals bleach their hair as light as they can get it and then add funky colours like candy pink and baby blue) but I couldn't be bothered to change.

This is 'Dramatic Eye,' which I love for its lashings of smoky eyeshadow and faint freckles. It's a good skin for an early 60s Priscilla Beaulieu kind of look.

This one is sort of equal parts Gothic Lolita and Venice Carnivale, and it's based on the GiGi Couture logo. There is also a symmetrical version, with 'lace' over both eyes in a kind of butterfly shape, which is totally spooky/sexy and you should wear it if you want to score with Batman or Gomez Addams.

And this one is called Marylin, which I think must be a typo for Marilyn, as it's a classic 50s glamorous makeup style. Wear it with a big skirt and pearls. As you can see, with the right haircut it can also pass for flapper style. I shall wear this combination if I ever wish to pass for Catherine Zeta Jones in Chicago.
So those are the delightful and cheap skins of GiGi Couture, and tomorrow, if I get my act together, I'll show you the Another Skin freebs.