All I’ve Got To Give To You Are These Five Words Tonight

Tonight, the girls and I headed to Prehistorica and met some dinosaurs!

It was a lot of fun! The dinosaurs are avatars, but most are bots. We happened to come across a T-Rex that was very obviously being run by a person and that T-Rex chased Abby and Birdy ALL over the place! It was so funny! My girls might have little legs, but they are FAST and at one point, the T-Rex went and laid down. It was super cute how he played with them.

A little while after the girls went to bed, Aldwyn came online and we got to spend some alone time together. It’s been a while, so it was really nice. 🙂

Some things have been going on lately, unpartnerings and unfriendings because of some serious serious stuff. As I was filling him in on what has been going on [he has been around the past few days but he’s been under the weather so hasn’t really stayed online long enough to understand], he stopped me and said, “Thank you for being you.” Awww. 🙂 No. He’ll never have to worry that suddenly I am going to tell him I’m a man or an alien or a cat. After over 4 years together, he knows who I am and what I have done in my SLife. We laughed about how we were in our very early SL days, too, when families were weird to us but being in the club every night or walking around wearing latex was normal. It’s funny how things change. It’s good that things change, especially when they change for the better. We are both just so happy with each other and our girls and the rest of our family. We don’t always have a lot of time to spend with everyone, or each other, but that just makes every moment precious.

bedtime!

Kagami

A few days ago, I read a NWN story on the game Kagami. NWN calls it a Japanese horror game, so while I was intrigued, no WAY was I going alone. No. WAY. I am probably one of the biggest ‘fraidy cats in the world. So I mentioned it to the family to see if they wanted to go, and of course they did since we love exploring new areas.

We had 2 thoughts about it going in. 1 – That it would be super scary. And 2 – it would be very anime in nature. Since that’s what we thought, some of us dressed up for the outing.

This reminds me of 2008 me so much. *laughs* Just updated 2008 me.

The anticipation of being scared made us scream a lot. The story was pretty decent, with cutaway scenes and being moved around with the HUD. But… it wasn’t really scary. It also wasn’t very anime either, but I still enjoyed my costume. It took us about 3 hours to complete the 2 parts of the game, and there were a lot of frustrated groans because we didn’t always understand the next step to take, but it was a nice thing to do with the family.

Also, my great-niece Sophie found her new dad. Now to get Bella to agree to marry him. *snickers*

He kept standing around me, so I had to take a picture. I’m not that super small. He was just really big.

All in all, I’d say if you don’t have much else to do with your SLife, head on out to Kagami to play. Be sure you keep your scripts low or you can’t get the HUD! It’s only open until August 31st, so less than a couple of weeks left to play.

Day 209 – The Inspiration

I headed out to Neva River today because my plurk timeline basically EXPLODED the day the sim was opened. The owner, Neva Crystall, only seems to keep her amazing sim open for a few days at a time, from my understanding. I didn’t go the last time when people were talking about it because I never had time, so I didn’t want to miss out this time.

And man… is it flippin’ amazing.

This picture? Totally doesn’t do it justice.

All the paths, the landscaping…flawless. The houses with furniture…fantastic. Every little detail that Neva put into this is ridiculously good. I’ll admit, I came home and stared at our parcel and almost hit Abandon Land! Okay, okay, I’m kidding. But I DID take umpteen pictures out there for inspiration on landscaping our parcel.

Head out to Neva River while you can. You will NOT be sorry.

Day 47 – Why I’ll never get bored of SL

I’ve been in SL a while, right? I’ve done a lot and seen a lot. At this point, I should be bored! I should not get excited about logging in EVERY time by now! I should be like some of my friends who complain that SL holds nothing for them and they’re bored with it. I don’t think that will ever be me, and that makes me happy because I always want this to be a place that I enjoy! If it ever gets to the point of me whining for weeks on end that I’m bored with SL, I hope someone slaps me with a reality stick and tells me to either shake my SLife up or just GTFO.

But honestly, I just do NOT see myself ever getting bored with SL because of things like what happened to me today. I was going to write an opinionated post again because those seem to get me the most new readers [Hi, new readers!] so I headed to mainland to find a picture of an ugly store. A lot of them on old mainland have been long since abandoned by their owners, but reside on land that I guess is old school “First Land” or something, since they never really seem to go away. I just opened the map, found an area on a road, and teleported in. And much to my surprise, THIS is what I teleported in next to!

How in the HELL do you ever ever ever get bored of a place that has giant robots from 1927 just sitting out in the middle of nothing?? I spent the next half hour or so just wandering down the road, looking at things until I was called away.

Despite all the flaws, I still love Second Life as much as I ever did, and my sincere wish is that everyone felt that way!!

Day 34 – Polly wanna give me money?

So first things first. Remember when I said I had newsssss? Well, guess what? I’m a SLuicide Girl! The blog is NSFW, btw. Most all the dirty pics are behind cuts but sometimes a stray boob pops out. My SLG character is Trixie Belle. No, you won’t be seeing Trixie having wild SLex with lots of men. Trixie is a married lady! 🙂 This is really exciting for me because most of my blog posts are not these well planned out things. Well, like I really have to tell YOU guys that. Posts like the Thanksgiving Eve post or even the day I babysat Emma were pulled out of my head in about 10 minutes. [Rylan and Sixx spent more time with their posts and pics than I did, which was pretty apparent. LOL] Even my fashion posts are usually “Oh I put this together today. HURRY! STAND SOMEWHERE AND TAKE A PICTURE.” To actually make a little story and find poses and plan everything out is different for me! And of course the subject matter is VERY different! But I think I’m going to really really enjoy it. And yep, I have Aldwyn’s full support! I would NOT be doing this sort of thing if he was uncomfortable with it. That’s what partnerships are about, ya know.

So earlier tonight I ended up at the Old Orientation Stations at Dore. There’s a section of the Destination Guide called Second Life Origins and there’s all these old places to visit, either again or for the first time. This place basically has the tutorials that the first residents of SL went through back in 2003. Most of the tutorials are basically still business as usual. But then I came across this parrot. And I remember this parrot from my own orientation [which actually happened a month after I joined SL since I was immediately teleported to a club within about 5 minutes of rezzing into SL].

Now this parrot said if I wanted some money, I just had to ask for a kiss. So I did.

No money.

Not that I was expecting any, of course. God knows that parrot is old as heck & the script inside is probably broken.

Oh, but if you go, don’t fly over to the Orientation Island Public. I made the mistake of doing that and as I got closer, I heard people talking on voice. None of the people sitting around appeared to be new since they had last names, and they were all basically calling each other names. I know most newbies start somewhere else now, and probably most of them don’t go to the public island, but if I were brand new and my first experience with SL was a bunch of people standing around using bad language and picking on each other, I’d probably leave and never come back!!

But that’s a post for another day.

“What is the difference between exploring and being lost?”

So Aldwyn and I were talking last night and I mentioned that a long time ago, there used to be a place in SL that did pizza deliveries. I know, right? But you’d IM whoever was on duty and then they’d show up at your door with a pizza. I was curious to see if the place was still in SL. I don’t think that it was, but I did find another pizza place and we went off to check it out and ended up on mainland. But not just mainland. It was like the mainland that someone forgot. I mean, look at this.

What the heck? LOL

Oh, and might I just add that HE pointed this shop out to me? I was busy looking at pizza and bears.

During this time, he mentioned that he’d never been to Da Boom, Second Life’s first sim. Well, no one should ever be in SL for years without having been to where it all started, so we went off to check it out. While we were running around, we wandered into a neighboring sim and into a marvelous dance club.

None of the dances in that dance machine were made after 2006. Hell, maybe even 2005. We did the classic noob dance. You know the one! You touch each opposite foot and then turn around in a circle kind of shaking your hands. Fab! I don’t know how this place wasn’t more crowded!!

It was really fun to get to explore these old old places with him. We didn’t meet until 2009, although both of us have been in SL for years, so it’s really kind of fun going back to these super old sims and places so that we can both be “noobs” together. I think next time we get a chance to go exploring, I’m going to take him to the big beanstalk and we’ll see who is the better jumper. I think it’ll be me!

Well that’s interesting!

So as I’ve mentioned before, I have chronic anxiety. It’s tolerable most of the time and I can “fix” myself with music or games if I choose not to go the medicine route, which is often since I hate pills. But when I can’t fix it…oh man. And it was sure sky high this past weekend. So high, I couldn’t really even talk to people, so I kept myself mostly offline.

Well, Aldwyn [who must be going for sainthood since he puts up with me] decided last night since I was feeling up to being in SL, that we should go exploring. And where better to go exploring than mainland, am I right? Okay, well, I don’t think he planned on us exploring mainland, but once we teleported to some … garden or something, and my xanax kicked in, we had to just keep going!

Because for real? Where else BUT mainland are you going to see this kind of beauty?

There’s a lot of pictures here, folks, so if you hate pictures, just move along. 🙂

So one thing that’s kind of cool about mainland is that there seems to be a lot of “old” there if you just walk around. Old buildings, old textures…just old. Like these prim animals!

They were on sale for free, so I bought them.

As we were walking, we came to a “rest stop.” You can get poutine on mainland! Who knew?

Also, on mainland, some of the shops have really OLD things for sale. Like couches that are made basically from prim blocks, not even the more cushiony toruses. [Oh, wikipedia says it’s “tori” when it’s plural. I’m learning!] And they’re EXPENSIVE. So either the person honestly thinks that they just made the most awesome prim couch ever, or they left SL and don’t remember that they have that junk there.

There’s also a ton of poseballs just hanging out. I can’t resist so we had to try a lot of them so I could see what they were.

Aldwyn: “How did you spend your Monday night? Oh you know. Hanging out with my girlfriend and chilling with a unicorn.”

Then we came across…well, this.

We’re pretty sure there was PROBABLY a store there once, but now there is not, and so it’s like a big floating marketplace of crap. Ugly does not begin to describe it.

But what is a trip to mainland without running into THIS guy?

No shirt. Asshole pose. Dante skin and OC hair from Naughty Designs. Oh baby, it’s 2006 all over again.

Upon meeting this guy, we somehow crossed from just mainland into Zindra, because we ended up at some place called Sexdreamz. You know putting a Z at the end makes it awesome. This girl was there dancing her ass off in the champagne glass. It said she was staff there, but she never spoke, so I’m assuming bot. Especially wearing that Shy Carmelle skin that should have died a sad death in 2007.

You can buy a lot of stuff at Sexdreamz, including this bed for only $5999L.

Love don’t come cheap.

Aldwyn: “It’s very rainbow.”
Me: “That’s how you know it’s for gay people.”

Because, you know. OBVIOUSLY if you’re gay, you only like big bright rainbow stuff.

You can also buy this couch for $999L.

I guess sitting doesn’t come cheap either.

I’m a huge sucker for tours in SL. I love love love when a place has some kind of tour thing to ride on. Sexdreamz has a hot air balloon, so naturally we had to take a ride!

But I guess whoever owns the balloon tour has never actually TAKEN the tour, because somewhere in this oh so lovely mall, the tour ended. Badly.

Our explorations ended soon after that because it was late and we were both yawning like crazy. [Well, after we sat on a giant naked lady and I ran the circuit at a puppygirl store.] It was a good night, and I laughed so much, which truly did more for my spirit than the xanax did. Of course, it always does. 🙂

Day 158 – That wall? It’s great!

Earlier today there was a very nice group gift sent out by Tuli, her new “Sayuri” skin. Well, with a name like Sayuri, you know it’s going to be more Asian based. 🙂 I’m a huge fan of Memoirs of a Geisha [the book more than the movie, but the movie is very beautiful] so I, of course, just love the name of this skin. But when I tried it on, it didn’t really look that awesome on my shape. Not because it’s a bad skin. In fact, I think it’s my favorite Tuli skin to date. But my shape just didn’t quite work with it. So…I started playing.

Is she Chinese, is she Japanese, is she Korean? I have no idea. But I think the face came out very cute. 🙂 I headed out to China Sichuan, which has a replica of The Great Wall Of China. It’s pretty cool!

[Pay no attention to the ugly water. Damn you, 2.0!!!!]

I LOVE going to replicas of physical world cities or countries in SL. If I’m going to explore, those are usually the kinds of places that I enjoy exploring the most. In fact, feel free to tell me more places like that to go!

Of course, I had to snap another pic of myself out there. I like this face!

No, I won’t be making the total switch to this avatar, but it’s fun to play. 🙂

I also hit up a plurk party this afternoon. Tymmerie took pictures of me because when I tried to take a picture, I crashed out. Oops!

The party was fun, but I only knew 3 or 4 people really, and there were a lot – A LOT – of gestures being played. If I had to hear ::::::: I ❤ THIS T U N E ! ! ! ::::::: HOoOoOUlalalala 🙂 one more time, I was going to go crazy. Gestures have their time and place, and 20 people doing them 5 times in a row… Well, you get the idea. 🙂

I think I want to have a park party this week. People can wear clothes that they’d wear to go play in the park and we’ll just dance and have fun. I’ll give more details later!

World Holidays 2009 Exhibit!

I headed over tonight to the opening of the World Holidays 2009 photo exhibit, which I was also a happy participant of. You can read all the details and who won what on the Musashi-Do blog. 🙂 I was just excited to see the photos!

There were just so many good ones. In my neck of the woods, we don’t normally have a “white Christmas” with snow and all of that. In fact, I don’t think I can remember a time that it’s ever snowed here for Christmas. Usually our big winter stuff happens in January or February and it just ices up and no one can leave the house because no one knows how to drive in the stuff. So for me, getting to see how other people do up Christmas was really really fun!

And of course, seeing my own pics in the exhibit was pretty darn cool, too.

You have to actually go to the exhibit if you want to see the rest of my pics. 🙂 Personally, I thought the others were better, but probably because they were just different.

You can still participate in it with photos if you want! There’s something out there that tells you how. 🙂

Of course, me being me, I got distracted by this pizza snowman while I was out there.

How does he keep the pizza from getting cold?!

Revisiting

Ok, I admit it. I’m running out of things to talk about. Big time. :-p Well, that’s not EXACTLY true. I have a couple of things in my mind, but they’re going to require actual research, so I’ve been putting them off for a bit. Luckily, my friends are pretty smart. Jerremy suggested that I revisit one of the first places I explored when I started blogging. That sounded pretty good to me, but then I discovered a problem. In my early early blogposts? I rarely put SLurls. Oops. Then I thought I’d just look at the earliest landmark I had. Well…at some point I’d boxed up a LOT of of my landmarks. Oops again!

But, I did have one to a place called Thursday’s Fictions. I remember it being SO cool the first time I stumbled across it. And it was still kind of cool, I guess. This sign made me laugh.

It’s still kind of fun to go through it, if you have a few minutes to kill.

So then I thought I’d go back to my old home from when I started this blog and the $5L A Day Project, the Isabel Infohub.

If you’re new to SL or you ever find yourself homeless, you can go to pretty much any of the Infohubs and set it to home, if you didn’t know this. The one at Isabel is kind of cool because there’s usually a bunch of people out there and I used to have some really good conversations out there. And some pretty dumb ones.

The usual types were out there. Like…

Newbie Guy with Beer

And Badly Dressed Girl Who Isn’t QUITE New But Maybe Just Has Bad Taste.

She was nice, though. She IMed me to tell me she liked my sweater. I almost offered to take her for a makeover, but I got scared when they started crowding around me.

Yeah, I totally ran.

I wish I could say I was productive in my little adventure, but I was not. But at least it got me off the wall. :-p

Ali’s Thanks of the Day: I’m thankful that I can see where I’ve been, because it makes me that much more grateful for where I am now.