Get to the point…. The Starting Point!

Just to update – Everything in my store has been marked down pretty cheap. Prices are random, but I don’t think anything’s over $25L at this point. Sale goes until the 25th when I close the store and sell the land.

Now, guess where I’m posing today?

Why, it’s none other than the best place for new residents to make their entrance into SLociety! 🙂

The Starting Point is the brainchild of blogger Tymmerie Thorne and her husband, Jerremy Darwin. They’re providing FREE dorm rooms for residents under 90 days old. Their notecard will explain better than I can. 🙂

“The Starting Point New Resident Dormitory is a free living space for residents under 90 days old.

Residents can live in their own private room for up to 8 weeks rent free. There are ten rooms, each furnished with a bed, pose stand, couch and chairs. Each resident may use up to 50 prims to personalize their space.

Please note that Starting Point is owned by private citizens and is not connected to Linden Labs. We pay the tier for this land. Additionally, members of the Starting Point Helper group are participating on a volunteer basis. We have all decided to do this as a way to give back to the greater Second Life community.

RULES:
We do have some guidelines that residents must follow in order to live in the community:
* All residents are expected to abide by the Second Life Community Standards. They can be found here: http://secondlife.com/corporate/cs.php.
* We expect that all residents will treat each other and their neighbors in the sim with respect.
* We reserve the right to ban anyone for mistreatment of fellow SL residents, begging, sexual activity or nudity in a common area, spamming the group, or non-compliance with the Community Standards.
* No business or individual may advertise or sell items on any Starting Point land without our approval.

Starting Point has a variety of common areas where residents can mingle and invite guests, including a pool, outdoor fireplace, TV area, various seating areas and Moodle Arena, which we hope to use for educational and entertainment purposes. On Starting Point Island residents will find a tent, hammock and camp fire. The Starting Point Dock will allow residents to rez an air or water craft so that they may explore the surrounding sims. The dock is situated on open Linden waterways. Moodle Freebie Hill has a small selection of free objects that residents may find of use.

All common areas are open to the general Second Life population.

Residents of Starting Point will be a members of the Starting Point Group. They may IM the group to ask questions and get help and assistance. (SPAM will not be tolerated.) However, the timeliness of an answer will depend on which group members are online and their availability to answer.

At the end of 60 days, residents in good standing may move into a vacant Darwin Condo (our rental properties) and receive half-off the first month’s rent. (Note: We cannot guarantee that there will be a vacancy at any particular time.)

IM us anytime with questions or to refer potential residents!
Yours,
Jerremy Darwin & Tymmerie Thorne”

Pretty awesome, huh? I’m part of the Starting Point group and I’ve already gotten to help a bit! I got to talk to a new girl while I was out there today taking pictures. She was totally doing it right – she’s been reading blogs to learn about SL! 🙂

It’s a really great place, I’ve been having a blast running around out there [although I do seem to be falling in the water a lot…but I think that’s just my fault. LOL!]

I think this is really going to be fun!!

Closing

I don’t really feel like talking about something, so I’m going to talk about something else.

I’ve decided to close my store at the end of the month, whenever the rent on the land is up. No, not forever. lol I am hoping to build on my skills a little more, maybe dabble into other areas – clothing, poses, etc. I’m unhappy with probably 95% of the products in the store at the moment. Well. Maybe 90%. With the pancakes belt, I found myself learning a little more about building and texturing, and I want to strengthen my skills in that area. The plan is to reopen on November 1st in a new location with mostly new items, but still some of the old ones that I’ve gotten the most compliments on – such as the pool sets. I’ll probably mark everything down next week, since I *think* that’s when the rent is up. Not that I have a huge selection of things, and most of what’s up is very much my beginner work, but it may help someone learn what not to do if they want to buy it to tear it apart. lol

And my decision to close the store temporarily really has nothing to do with anything going on in my life right now. It’s actually been something I’ve been thinking about ever since the pancakes belt went out for sale, which was more than a month ago. Since I need the distraction, I figured this would be a good way to occupy my time, especially during the day when most people are at work or busy…or in the evenings when people are too busy to talk to me. lol [Was that a little too woe-is-me? Probably. Sorry about that.]

Anyway, more details later on that. I’m starting to feel a bit sad so I think I’m going to go shopping.

What? Sometimes I don’t blog. :-p

Ok ok, I know. LOL I think it’s so funny when I get IMs asking “WHERE’S THE NEW POSTS?!” Maybe not all in caps, but you get the idea. 😉 It actually makes me feel good, too, to know that people read still. 🙂

So where have I been? In SL, but there has been a LOT of stuff going on in the past few days. And I do mean a LOT.

Most of you know now that the Viper Pit is officially closing. But we will most definitely have a new place soon!! I already have a new place for my store, but it looks exactly the same as what I had. So if you’ve already seen it…well…there it is. LMAO

And as I’ve mentioned before, our lovely home on Orcas Island is going away. It was a wonderful time living there and I am sorry to see it go. I’ve been there since February and Levi moved in with me in April, so we’ve had many good months there. 🙂 The funniest part was probably how we ended up leaving. I thought we still had the weekend, even though I knew that things would start disappearing soon. So we were chilling on one of our pillows, locked into a very intense discussion, when…poof. LMAO No more skybox. It was the funniest thing!!! I don’t think I can show the picture here, but if you go to Levi’s Snapzilla and scroll down to the 3rd pic from the top, you’ll see how it looked. LOL It’s the one titled “I guess we should take the hint.” Sooooo funny.

But, no worries, we are not homeless. In fact…we have an abundance of home now. LOL I’m actually itching to go in world right now and start working and playing with our new land, but I know if I do now, I’ll never finish this post. Or eat anything, and I do need food. LOL Stupid RL body…always expecting food & water & diet coke.

And in between all the moving, there’s been other things going on, too. But I think everything has worked out for the best, most definitely. I’m starting September with a lighter heart. I hope to only build on that. 🙂

Store Business

The Ch’Know main store is closed until next week for renovations.

If for some reason you just can’t LIVE without something I’ve made [LMFAO], feel free to IM me and ask for it. 🙂

*cough* Goo*cough*d Mor*cough*ning. *cough*

I woke up this morning with a terrible cough. I’m not sure why, unless I picked something up from having dinner with a couple of people who always seem to be carrying some class of disease.

I took pictures of the pancakes belt so I can work on the poster. I’m thinking $50L for this one. Maybe $75L. It didn’t really take me that much time and I only uploaded a few textures and it doesn’t do anything. lol I need to go into each box and update the landmark in the thank you note. THAT is actually going to be a pain in my butt. But I think I might take that time to move everything from being boxed to just being in the poster so people can automatically wear stuff without having to be bothered with opening boxes. I don’t remember why I started boxing stuff up in the first place. When I send someone a gift version, of course it’s boxed, but if someone’s just buying, what’s the point? I also put a couple of my old old belts up on a dollarbie wall upstairs, along with those crazy platform sandals I made and the globe lamp thing. All that’s left to do, really, is fix a sign for the front, play with the awning thing, and retexture the columns. Maybe I’ll look on SLX for an awning. A nice low prim one.

Willis shared this link earlier and I thought I’d share with all of you: Universal Truths. Not all of them were true for me, but I did enter 55378008 many times into my calculators. Along with 5318008, 58008, and 07734. If you never have…try it and turn your calculator upside down. The very very early stages of l33t speak. lol

Does anyone know of a good Alice In Wonderland build in SL? I wanted to take some pics in the new outfit Levi bought me, but the only place I could think of was going over to Catnip in the Wonderland room.

I’m starting to get a headache, so I think I’m gonna take some cough meds and go lay down and watch movies and read. Levi and I were talking about Back To The Future last night and now I want to watch it. Plus I need to get back into reading Snow Crash, since we refuse to let this book beat us.

Belt, Revamped

I think I finished up the pancakes belt tonight, but I’m still iffy on the textures. Probably just being overly picky. I redid the spatula and I’m tons happier with it now than I was before. I sent it out to the group tonight for final testing [they are my guinea pigs most of the time] but no one has said yay or nay to it going for sale, so I’m wondering if they got the notice at all with all the SL issues tonight. I need to also finish texturing a couple of things at my store so I can take down the construction barricades. lol

I’m kind of down tonight [probably that ‘day after christmas’ syndrome] so I’ll leave you all with an old song, but one that’s been in my head the past few days. I’m off to bed now.

Mmmm pancakes!

I’m blessed to be friends with some amazingly talented people in SL. Designers, builders, sculptors, pose makers. They are much more talented than I am at so many things. 🙂 So it’s really awesome for me to go in to a store and see someone wearing one of their designs. I TPed in to a store this morning and a woman was wearing one of Sai’s skully mini skirts. I wanted to tell her “Hey! I know who made your skirt!” But I figured she wouldn’t care. And then I wanted to tell her “Hey! Your butt is sticking WAY out of that skirt!” LOL

So I woke up this morning prepared to finish my belt…which I did, but I am still kind of unhappy with the spatula.

It probably just needs a better texture. That’s all that really turns a prim into something marvelous anyway. A good texture.

Speaking of textures, I still need to texture my store so I can take down the “Under Construction” barricades. LOL I just hate doing it so much! I’m never satisfied with what I put up. Maybe I’ll go actually BUY the textures I want. I love Lauren Fox’s texture store, but I never buy anything. I have about a billion free textures, including some wonderful ones I found for free at SecondWave Apparel, but I’m not sure they’re quite what I want. Of course, if I knew what I wanted… LOL

LOL, oops. I started this post way early in the morning, but I got distracted with YouTube, looking at myself, and Chinese food.

This is my mad face. >:-|

Not much work done for Tuesday. I can get very into building but the moment I’m out of it, I’m out for days.

Right now I’m in a terrible mood. Started when I woke up from my nap, and it was getting better as I got to spend some time with Levi. But the other human in my house decided he needed “5 minutes” to switch out the routers. 5 minutes turned into almost 30 and by the time I was able to log back in, Levi had gone to bed. Sorry, baby. If I’d known it was going to take so long, I wouldn’t have logged out in the first place.

I picked out the new building for my store tonight. It’s big and airy. Cen & Rick spent hours tonight tearing the pit up. I’m actually in the middle now of trying to move my items over to the new store so I can reset the classifed, but SL is not cooperating.

I have my Crankypants on tonight. Big time.

Good morning everyone!

Levi asked me this morning what was new in SL, and then mentioned I hadn’t posted a new blog in HOURS. I told him that I’m simply boring when I get to working on something. LOL More boring than usual!! I get involved in moving prims around and writing takes a backseat. So what am I working on?

A pancakes belt!

But this belt isn’t what some people think it is, so I’m going to have to make 2 belts. The one I’m working on right now is more of a … pancake making belt. Complete with griddle. Once I finish the spatula, I think it’ll be done. I’m VERY pleased with the actual belt part of it. It may be my best and cleanest looking one to date. I so wish I were a better builder, though. Like one of those who uses math and sketches out plans. My builds are happy accidents. LOL But after this one is completed, I’m going to build a different pancakes belt.

And yes, for those of you who didn’t see it, I did make it into New World Notes again. LOL It’s funny when people IM me “Did you see?!” One day I hope to make it in there for doing something amazing. Not that I haven’t loved each time that I’ve been in there!! But there is a difference between me being in there because I wrote about sex and someone like Eshi Otawara being in there because she builds amazing sims at the drop of a hat. LOL

It’s almost 8am and still semi-cool here so I think I’ll go take a walk and then settle in to complete my belt. I’d like to have it done and ready for the store by tonight. I haven’t had an update in weeks with all the RL junk going on.

One more thing.

Oh, btw. If you were going to come out and take pictures or dance or anything on the Greedy Shop sign outside of my store, you have until the end of today to do it because then I’m sending it back. Not that I don’t think it’s still funny as hell, but I’m getting bored with it now.

I’m gonna put up a slideshow of pictures that I have with people and the sign in my store tomorrow, just for posterity. 🙂