I blame Banana. If she hadn't IMed me I would have been in and out in no time at all. So to speak. But she'd IMed me, so I replied. And then found she was online. She IMed back "Have you ever been hang-gliding?" I replied in the negative and before I knew it I was tp-ing over to her friend's place (Loka, I think it was called).
She climbed aboard a hang-glider and soared off into the sky. Woh, thinks me. That looks like fun. I jump aboard the newly rezzed hang-glider and press go, ready to follow Nana off into the sunlit sky. Except I don't. I nosedive into the turf.
"Press fly" says Nana. Now there's an idea. Thanks, chick. And here's me scrabbling around in the dirt looking for thermals.
So eventually I get airborne. And I think I get the hang of it. And then a tree decides that I'm flying too close to it. So it reaches out and grabs me and deposits me in a chair suspended from its bough.
At this point I gave up. As you can see from the shot below, there was no way I was ever getting out of that predicament. And Nana's guffaws were so not helping.
I was knackered by then, after all that panting and struggling to free myself from the evil swing chair's clutches. So we went for a sit down. It a cat basket. It turns out Nana's friend is neko. So there's a lot of cat paraphernalia around the place. Comfy though.
So then I was logging off and going to bed. For real this time. Only it wasn't quite midnight and I'd set myself a midnight limit so I thought I'd just try out a landmark someone gave me weeks ago that I'd not had chance to visit yet. Next stop, Crimson Shadow. (You'll have to forgive my lack of SLurls but I don't presently have the requisite facility available).
I have to say, as I wandered round the place, marvelling at the intricate detail, I was struck by how amazing some of this vampire/gothic clothing can be. I wish I had the vocabularly to express just how exquisite the pixel needlecraft is. Sometimes I think it's easy to fall into the habit of settling for second best in terms of clothing, and maybe more so being a bloke, with relatively little choice. Add to that the fact that I struggle to be captivated with the more 'modern' clothing and jeans and t-shirt type stuff and you can see why I haven't been enthused with shopping recently. I've been happy with the few 'sharp' outfits I have, am liking the way my look has developed, and perhaps have gotten lazy. Already.
With that in mind, it was perhaps fate that I ended up in Crimson Shadow. And the SL gods were smiling on me when they brought a little green dot onto my radar screen. Enter one lass. Soon to be my vampiric fashionista tour guide for the evening.
It seemed rude not to say hello, given we were the only two around. And as the conversation developed her interest in all things fashion became evident. I expressed my recent-found lethargy for shopping and she boldly took up the challenge and proposed to introduce me to her favourite shopping haunts.
What followed was a whistle-stop tour of Avid, Gothicatz, Footfetish and Haute Couture with passing reference to Redgrave I got plus marks for wearing Redgrave shoes when our conversation began. I learned a lot from our time together last night and certainly have some places to go back and visit with a little money in my wallet. Some of the stuff was perhaps a bit too RP for me, but some of the stuff was right up my alley. My enthusiasm for shopping has thusly returned. But I have learned I have expensive tastes. Quality does not often come cheap.
It was interesting meeting a vampire last night too. My only previous encounter with a pointy-toothed one was in my first couple of days of SLife, possibly on one of those Orientation Island places, when I had no idea what I was doing or what was happening and ended up getting bit. (Supposedly my soul's in limbo now, it seems). This sort of thing gives vampires a bad name, I think. I've read in a few places that they're not always flavour of the month, what with the randomly biting naive and innocent noobs who don't know better stuff. But last night I have to say, I found all that bad press is unfounded. This vampiress didn't even get her fangs out. Sure some vampires might grief and stuff. But equally not all griefers are vampires. I learned last night that it's like a Venn diagram with a set of griefers and a set of vampires. There is an overlap of the two sets but one set is not entirely enclosed within the other. (Sorry, non-maths people!)
So, in terms of vampires I've met, it's a 1-1 draw. But the nice vampire's goal was a screamer as opposed to the scrambled mess and miskick the griefing one scored he says, taking the analogy way too far.
So another 2am good night yawn!. I had such high hopes for myself too. Maybe tonight I won't log on. Mebbe.
On the positive side, I love the way that SL is like that. A forgotten LM, a chance meeting, and then I spend two hours hanging and chatting with a vampire from California who I never knew existed up to that point.
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