Celebrate endings – for they precede new beginnings.

And so we come to the end of another year. 🙂 We also come to the 8th anniversary of this blog. Hard to believe, huh? I started this blog out of desperation, honestly. So many things had changed in such a little time. I was so desperately trying to change my life – both first and second. I wanted to be someone better. Eight years later, I think I’ve achieved that. Or at least, I’m not as bad as I was then. I no longer feel useless, or sad, or like I’m a disappointment to anyone. Could I be better? Of course. We could all be better in some way. That’s just part of being human. But I feel good and I love this journey that I’m on. Yes, it’s a journey. We don’t reach the end. We just keep moving forward.

I spent the evening with my family and a few of our close friends. It was the 7th annual New Year’s Eve Eve party. It was a much more low key event this year, which is how I wanted it. Not that I don’t love big parties or anything but you know how it is. Sometimes you just want to be in your bubble. And it really was exactly what I wanted. Lots of music, laughter, and silly conversation. Perfect!

2015 has been a pretty great year for me in SL. I feel like my photo skills have gotten better. I definitely want to learn more on how to make things look better next year. Now that I have the new video card, I feel like if my pics aren’t good, I can’t blame the computer anymore. *laughs* Now it just is up to me getting better skills!

My family life has been amazing this past year. I really kind of feel bad that I didn’t blog as much in this blog because there were so many things that we did that I didn’t really talk about. So that’s definitely one of my SL resolutions for 2016. More blogging in here about my SL and definitely more pictures of the family. And of course, part of what made 2015 so great is that our Oleander side of the family moved to Bluebonnet! That really was one of the major highlights of my SL this year. I love that we are all together on the sim. Bluebonnet has always been my SL home, but it is even MORE of a home now that we are all together.

I hope that 2015 was good for all of you! Thank you so much for sticking with me in my very sporadic blogging over on this blog. I know that some of you enjoy my SLife stories more than my style blogging, so I do appreciate it that you still read me for whatever reason you have. 🙂 If 2015 wasn’t too hot for you, well, hey, the year is over! It’s time for a fresh start and 2016 can totally be your year! If you go out for New Year’s Eve, please be careful because I want to see every one of you in 2016! ❤

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.

Hello, new profiles!

So Linden Lab rolled out their new SL profiles pages today. I had been playing with the beta one for a bit and essentially it brings a little more social networking into our world. Naturally this is cause for much alarm from some people because they really don’t want to be social. Hey, I get it. I’m not always the most social person either! There are some privacy settings, but not as many as people would like. But maybe some of what I’m going to show here will help you out a little bit.

Okay. First, find your settings. It looks like a wrench.

That’s going to allow you to do pretty much everything you want to do to your profile anyway, so you need to know where to find it. As you can see, you can change your picture, edit your bio, all that good stuff that you used to have to log in world for. Now if you want to handle things while you’re out or at work or you don’t want to log in because someone you dislike is online, you can do it all from the web. I’m going to assume you know how to do all that, so we’ll move on.

Next, go into the Privacy tab.

These settings will allow you to lock things down to a friends list level, but no further than that at the moment. It could change later, but for now, it is what it is. As you can see by my settings, everyone in Second Life can see my wall and post on it, whether they’re on my friends list or not. I did change that to only letting my friends do that, once I thought about it a little more. I have it set that everyone can see the basics of my profile, whether they’re logged into Second Life/the SL website or not. You, of course, may only want friends to see your profile. Of course, if you’re a blogger or a creator, you might not want to have your profile locked that far down, as I expect it might get troublesome. And really, who is THAT flipping important that they have to lock their profile down that hard, am I right??

EDIT: There is a now a JIRA for allowing the option to not let anyone post to your profile.

EDIT AGAIN: It’s been handled! You can choose now to not let ANYONE post on your profile! Linden Lab DOES listen on occasion! 🙂

Now click on the notifications tab, because this is a biggie.

If you don’t want to be spammed to death with in world notifications of people posting on your profile or commenting on your posts TURN IT OFF. That’s right, just clicky click and turn that mess off. I have it set to email me when someone posts on my profile, but I think email notifications are broken anyway, since I haven’t gotten any emails.

I kind of dig the new profile set up. I can post things and comment to others without ever having to see them in world [that social thing, you know], and I can handle my friends list online, which is awesome!

But of course if you just hate this, you don’t want this, you can’t even believe that Linden Lab would want people to be social, you can always just turn off all your notifications, use a third party viewer that still shows old style profiles, and never think about it again. 🙂