The Day I Played Fixer Upper

Most of the non-blogger men that I know in Second Life don’t change their look too often. They don’t really have to. They can put together a couple of casual looks, a formal look, and that can get them through most things. The funny part is that some of them didn’t even really put those looks together themselves – they had a partner to do it!

My own SL husband is not really an exception to this. Oh, he loves to shop. When we first met, he had a lot of outfits and costumes and even did some modeling here and there. But when mesh came out, and mesh bodies in particular, things got a little harder. It was like that for a ton of people, by the way. Go to any live show or older club in SL and you’ll find a lot of people who simply can’t get down with mesh and utterly refuse to even entertain the possibility. To them, mesh is still a passing phase, despite the fact that we’ve had it since 2011. Luckily, Aldwyn doesn’t go THAT far! I’d never stand for it! But since January 2016, he’s looked like this.

Now don’t get me wrong. This is a good look! He wore the Catwa Jackson head with the Hugh skin applier from The Skinnery. And I’m a fan of older men, so you know I was totally into it!

But there are some problems with looking older in Second Life that we didn’t anticipate when putting together this look. The main one being…it’s freaking hard to dress an older guy!! Seriously, go take a look at basically every men’s store in SL. The clothes are generally geared towards guys who are under 35 years old. Unless he wanted to wear a suit all of the time (which I wasn’t against, tbh) there were very few options for someone who looks 50+. And add that to the fact that the more “trendy” pieces like the ugly dropped crotch diaper pants and oversized tank tops that reach the knees were/are at every event and we hate that look… well, dressing was not all that fun.

When LeLutka came out with the Andrea head for men, I was into it. I knew I wanted to take Aldwyn younger again, because I tend to look a bit younger in SL and while I’m still into older men, I thought maybe it was time for both of us to look near the same age again. Plus, his head was not bento, and if I’m going to be bento, he’s going to be bento because that’s just the way it works. Not to mention, I adore the LeLutka HUD so so so much more than the Catwa HUDs for their heads, and I knew he would like it, too.

If you watched my vlog from yesterday (I’ll link it at the bottom of this post), you know that he gave me carte blanche to play Fixer Upper on his avatar yesterday! So I took him to…

LeLutka… To get the Andrea head. (5000L)

Stray Dog… To get the Breno head applier, plus a skin applier for his body. He uses the Slink Physique body and Stray Dog does not make a skin applier specifically for Slink, only for Signature and Belleza. However, the Signature body applier can be used on Slink if you have the Slink omega relay. So that’s what I did. (590L for the head applier, 490L for the body applier.)

Stealthic… To get the Like Lust hair. (300L)

I created his shape myself based off of what he already had, but just made adjustments to his head to keep the bento head from looking like the mouth had collapsed in on itself. I’ve found that this is the case with most bento heads.

So the grand total for everything… 6380L, or about $27 USD.

Totally. Worth. Every. Penny.

I did take him to get a few clothing items, too, and oh my gosh. It’s so much easier to dress him with a younger face.

Well, except for the fact that people are starting to only create for the Signature and Belleza bodies, and not for Slink.

But that’s a struggle for another day.

If you didn’t know, I’m doing Vlogmas! If you want to see me taking Aldwyn’s avatar to get his makeover, along with looking at a couple of Advent gifts and dealing with some Christmas “decorations” that Groves left for us, feel free to watch!

We Could Be Related

One of the things I said I wouldn’t do for a LONG time, if ever, was get a mesh head. I know, I know. If you’ve known me for any length of time, you know that I was one of the first to hop all aboard the mesh train when it came out in 2011. In fact, the day it rolled live, I blogged one of the first mesh dresses that came out that day. If you joined SL after 2012, you don’t know how crazy the mesh revolution was. How nothing fit properly, how standard sizing changed a lot of how we looked, how a simple couch could have eaten up 100 prims of your parcel allotment, or why we still refer to things as mesh, rather than just calling it what it is, or just how many designers we lost when mesh came out because they were unable – or unwilling – to keep up and learn how to make it.

I don’t think we quite realized the impact mesh would make on Second Life. In fact, in that blog post, I’m quoted as saying, “Yes, mesh gives us some great things, but there will always ALWAYS be the need for regular prims, textures and sculpties.”

Hahahahaha! Oh.

I was thrilled to wear mesh clothing. I was even more thrilled to get new mesh furniture that wasn’t 12 prims [or Land Impact for you newbies] for a simple pillow. I danced with joy to dump my sculpted feet and put on mesh ones. I waved my sad system hands in the air for the last time and slipped on pretty mesh ones. I loved the way I no longer had to Photoshop my pointed calves and square butt once I got a mesh body.

But heads? OH HECK NO.

I loved my avatar’s face. I am one of those rare bloggers in SL who has never changed skins too often just because once I look like “me,” that’s kind of it for me for a while. I like to look and feel like myself. I’ve always demoed a lot of skins for fun, but when it comes to day to day SLiving, I like being me. So the thought of covering my face with a head that didn’t really look like ME? Pfft. No, thank you. I did demo some but none felt right to me. I liked the way I looked and that’s that.

While we were on our last vacation, Aldwyn [who was WAY quicker to get into a mesh head than I would have expected] decided that I needed a mesh head. I believe the conversation went something like this:

Aldwyn: You need one.

Me: But whyyyyyyyyyy?????

Aldwyn: Because.

Me: I don’t want it.

Aldwyn: I don’t care.

* You have received a gift! *

Me: …this isn’t the one I wanted.

So he bought me two heads that night, LOGO’s Alex and Chloe. And, being me, I decided that if he was going to spend the money on me, I was certainly not going to let it go to waste. So I put on the Chloe head and told myself not to take it off for at least a week.

It’s been over a week. *laughs*

Surprisingly enough, I fell in love with the thing. I wear no appliers because the base skin is perfect for how I want to look. I hadn’t really seen my system face in months. But I decided to give it a look last night, and then couldn’t resist taking a side by side picture with myself. [It’s not perfect. I’m not great at the cloning thing.]

I still like my system face. But… goodness, I look SO much younger! I feel like my mesh head looks polished and older, while the system face is someone you’d find hanging out at the beach on spring break. Or like my system headed self is my younger sister who was trying to hit on my husband. LOL! My plurk friends say that both are similar, and they are in some ways, I guess. I think I can tell more of a difference just because I’ve spent the past however many years staring at myself.

Have you switched to a mesh head yet? Which ones do you like? If you haven’t done it, why not? Do you plan on it? I have questions! 🙂

Caught Off Guard

Last night was a “free” vacation night, so I decided to take advantage of that and get our official spring family photo done. We usually do an official picture twice a year – spring and fall. Well, and our winter/Christmas photo. I have all our official photos on a wall in our house, starting with Aldwyn’s and my wedding photo. I love that particular wall of photos since I get to see our transition from it just being him and me to …. Well, this!

If you think it’s easy finding decent poses for 2 parents and 4 kids, you’d be wrong. *laughs* Luckily this gem was at the Pose Fair and I’ve been saving it for our spring photo. I think it came out pretty well, and I was happy that we did it on vacation so that along with being our first “real” photo as a family of 6, we also have a great memory attached to it.

So while I was working on the picture, Aldwyn and I were talking and he mentioned what some others have mentioned – It’s weird that he has a mesh head and I don’t. *laughs* Because as a blogger, you know. I’m supposed to be all on top of that stuff. But I’m a strange blogger because I will find a skin I like and just stick with it. For ages. For a longggg time. I just like being me, I guess. I do have a few heads from Genesis that I got from blogging for events or from a gacha, but it was just for blogging really. I mean, yeah, a lot of skin makers are only doing appliers for heads now, or at least doing them more often than a full skin. But I never could justify buying a head when I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to wear it full time. But then before I knew it, I was caught off guard as a head ended up in my inventory, courtesy of my husband who says he never gets to buy me anything.

Only…it wasn’t really the one I wanted. *laughs* I mean, I can use it for blogging! Believe me. It’s the Alex head from LOGO and tons of skin makers are making things just for that head. But I liked the Chloe one better because just with the base skin, it felt more like me. And … then Chloe ended up in my inventory, too. Welp.

So now I have a mesh head! I’m still not used to it. I went down to the store and picked up the other two expression packs for it, and a pack of lipsticks. I have spent a ton of time just staring at it. I think I like it. I don’t know really. I’m sure I’ll get used to it in time.

But Birdy made us all laugh last night after I got the head. “Did we really just take our picture and now she changed her face?!”

Blame your dad!!

I wouldn’t sign up for this!

So it’s no secret that a lot of us have covered up the parts of our avatars that we don’t like with mesh parts. I haven’t really seen my regular system hands in forever, and if I’m not wearing Slink feet, it’s probably because I’m wearing boots. Now personally, I don’t go for the whole thing – the mesh jutting butt, the aggressively huge mesh breasts, the mesh heads, etc. But a lot of people do like that stuff, and most of the kids in SL that I know have the Toddleedoo mesh body.

When Linden Lab said “Hey, guess what? We have new mesh starter avs!” I was intrigued right up until I saw some photos. Yikes.

Last night, Brianna and I were hanging out before bed and I was looking for a dress to wear tonight [we’re having a double birthday party tonight for my sister and my niece!], I stumbled into the Library. Imagine my surprise when I saw that one of the new mesh starter avatars was named Alicia!! I almost never have anything with my name in SL! It couldn’t be TOO bad, right?

Wrong!

Good LORD, what is this mess?! That IS a mesh body but it doesn’t look smooth and well formed like you can get your body to look with other mesh pieces. The hair looks like burnt noodles, and the FACE. The face, y’all! I look like I’ve been in some kind of accident. I don’t WANT this avatar to be named Alicia!

Brianna was also equally as horrified.

The other human avatars in the collection are about as equally as bad. But you know what’s not bad? The zombies! I don’t know if they just had different people working on these things or what, but the zombies are lightyears better than the humans. I really like the expression on the zombie guy’s face.

To make matters even crazier, if you’re signing up for SL, the zombie and other non-human avatars are all under the heading of “Vampires.” They should change that to “Fantasy” or something. But the girl on the very front page of the website is gorgeous, and I think if I were signing up, my first question would be, “How can I look like HER?”

I just don’t understand why Linden Lab would allow the human avatars to be so so ugly when they could have hired any number of amazing meshmakers to make something wonderful for the new residents. I don’t know how many non-human avatars are out there in Second Life, but just from my limited view, I see mostly all humans. To put a newbie in a mesh avatar that they cannot change [these bodies are not modifiable] and then thrust them into a world where there are some really gorgeous avatars seems like bad business to me. Don’t get me wrong, the default avatar is not the best either, but at least seasoned Second Lifers can help someone look a lot better in really a short amount of time. These are so ugly, all we’ll be able to tell a new person is “Take EVERYTHING off. It’s hopeless.”

But, if you want to be a zombie and get your thriller dance on, at least that looks good.

Day 312 – Learn Something New Every Day!

Happy new year, dear ones! I hope you all have had a great start to the new year!

So, I’m not a mesh maker. At all. Seriously. I’ve dabbled in Blender and made a mess. Aldwyn bought me Hexagon for my birthday and I promptly made a mesh penis that looked okay in the program, but was totally sad when I uploaded it into SL. [And trust me, not many things are much worse than a sad penis.] I’ve wanted to learn how to do my own mesh items but my brain doesn’t quite understand it all.

But! I’m making it one of my 2014 goals to learn new things. Some time in the past week, I saw someone on plurk mention that you could export your prim builds [full perm ones that you made] as a .dae file. [If you’re less of a mesh maker than I am, .dae is the extension of a mesh model file that you upload to SL.] I didn’t have a chance to read the whole conversation but I filed that tidbit away in my brain under “Ask about this later.” I thought that maybe it would be of interest to Ulaa and Abby since they both are pretty good builders with prims, but haven’t quite made the transition to mesh yet.

Today I asked on plurk about it and was given two links to read. One about how to do it with Firestorm and one about how to do it with Singularity. I use Firestorm, but you don’t get to keep your textures with it the way you seem to be able to with Singularity.

And before anyone starts screaming about copybotting, you can only do this with things YOU made. Although, I think if you use sculpts like from sculpt kits, you have to have the full perm sculpt map still in your inventory.

I wanted to play with this to see if it worked, so I pulled out the AFK House I made several years ago to put on someone. It’s just made from 6 plain prims, and not very well, but it’s 100% mine. Left click, Save As, Collada, and even though it said PNG, when I went to save, it saved as a dae. I imported that dae file into Blender, and holy cow. There was my dumb little house. If I wanted to edit it in Blender, I could have, but since I suck at that and I just wanted to see what would happen, I just exported it as a dae again, and then uploaded it into SL.

AND IT WORKED.

My dumb little house was 3 land impact now and considered mesh.

So then I got fancy. I opened up the file in Blender, this time saved it as an OBJ file, opened the OBJ file into Hexagon, got crazy on it, saved it, put it back in Blender, saved it as a DAE, uploaded it into SL and….

Well. That happened.

But, I learned something, and I taught a few people something on Plurk, so all in all, it was a good day.

Day 143 – Hi Cows!

There was a time, a long long time ago, that I used to adore wearing costumes in SL. Oh, I had TONS. But these days, I prefer to just dress up for blog posts, and wear jeans or shorts any other time. But once in a while, I put on a costume, like the little hamster avatars from The Arcade. Tooooo cute!

If anyone gets an extra Platinum or Fairy Popsicle colored hamster, I will buy it off of you!

There are still so many things I want from The Arcade but it was like “buy…crash…buy…crash” all night for me, and I even ended up losing stuff. 😦 I guess I will just wait and go later this week. It’s hard to not want to get in there immediately since everyone is trading and giving away items already, but it’s just not happening for me right now!

Day 13 – Once Upon A Time

I was going to show you guys a picture of me building this really horrible house that I keep telling Ulaa I’m going to sell in her store [she threatened to cut me if I did], but instead a fairy showed up in my house!

Awww, adorable! That’s my friend Wilma in her new form. Tooooo cute!! I really really think that I’m going to need one of these avatars [which are mesh, btw] because I don’t dress up in costumes nearly enough anymore!! And who could resist such a sweet avatar?

I’m heading out to the Petite Avatar Kingdom very very soon!!