Flirting with business

Recently I have decided that I need to venture into the world of business in SL. Just to see what it's like, you know. It was at this point in proceedings that I realised that a) I had no idea how to get into business and b) I had no idea what sort of business.

I ruled out creating stuff, because that's really not my thing. I'm crap at drawing so the idea of effectively having to draw stuff in three dimensions brings me out in a cold sweat.

Something I am interested in in RL that I thought would translate into SL was art. I like making pwiddy stuff that people like to look at, and particularly abstract art, or at least art where the subject is not immediately obvious, maybe from an unusual angle or only part of a familiar object or poncey stuff like that.

I wasn't sure about quite how to do that in SL so I decided to try my hand at creating some abstract art from outside of SL and importing it. I plurked a couple of demo images, to gauge interest, and when the feedback was positive I decided I had my business. But that still left point a) from above - namely I had no idea how to get into business.

Fortunately, I do have one or two friends who are successful business women in SL and while I swung on a tyre on a rope the other day I had a fruitful conversation with one particular lass who was particuarly helpful. (You know who you are, and thank you!) I tried to not let the bear behind me overhear, of course. I didn't want him nicking all my ideas and my friend's useful tips.


I have another friend who is an artist in SL and sells many wonderful pictures and ornaments adorned with her art. (Her shop is just round the corner from the bear incidentally.) She was also most helpful in advising me to forego the leaping-off-cliff notion of renting a shop right away and advised galleries would be the places to go - both in terms of selling my art as well as picking up ideas in terms of where's good to sell stuff, how much stuff costs, what else is out there etc etc.

So, I think I have a long way to go. It's clearly not just a case of saying "hey, I'm selling stuff" and expecting the cash to pile up at my door. I have a lot of research to do. But, I think I have taken the first step. In fact, for me, it's definitely not about the money. It's probably all about wanting to make stuff that others like. It'd be nice to brighten up people's day with my work. And also, a bit of approval and appreciation is always good for the self-image too, eh?

So, here we have it, the first taster of a few pieces of my work. There's plenty more where these came from too.


Wall art? Textures for photgraphers? Both? Mebbe.

Quick and painless

While Iss and I were still filled with the bloodlust we decided to rebalance the female to male ratio of our brood. Farewell, Sparky and McAlpine. A quick twist of the neck and it was done.

That left us with six roosters and eight hens. I was feeling a bit low though so to give myself a bit of a boost I made the unilateral decision to hatch the new wave egg I bought a few weeks ago filled with the resolve that would mean a long swim at the bottom of our pond should a baby rooster burst forth from the cracked shell in due course.

I retired to the house, made myself comfortable, rezzed the egg and waited.


And waited. And waited. And then Iss turned up and she joined the waiting.


Finally the egg split asunder and out popped a fluffy baby girl, McVittie. To help reduce lag we decided to keep her apart, for now, from the rest of the chickens. So we have a house fowl. After she recovered her energy after hatching she seemed to quite enjoy exploring, running down behind the sofa, messing around at the base of the cockatiel stand and gazing longingly out of the window towards the coops in the garden.


All this chicken slaughter has kept Iss and I a little preoccupied of late, but now that it was all over, we decided just to hang out for a while. A quick change into some smart clothes later and it seemed an opportune moment to dance a little on the deck as the moon hung low over the ocean.


You know, I guess I should explore a bit and write about that, or maybe blog some SLoul SLearching or something. I don't want to bore you all with chicken shit the whole time, do I?

A unanimous decision

I know some of you are on tenterhooks so I am passing on the info to you almost as soon as I received it myself.

I have just been informed that in the beak-to-beak slugfest the winner, by a knockout, was MacAlister. McLaren is no more. In the end age and experience told over youth and exuberance. There were NO witnesses.

We're back down to 15, so hopefully the lag will have improved.

Iss has move Skye in with MacAlister "as a champion's reward". I reckon this sort of thing is just how we ended up with a surfeit of chickens in the first place...

Sad news and survival of the fittest

After I posted the other day about our peep of chickens (no, really!) climbing in numbers to 15 and then a colour-experiment and radio-static fail resulting in another 3 being added to their number, Iss says she's noticed considerable lag in our little corner of the sim. And given it's a shared sim, it doesn't seem fair for us to induce lag.

As such we have to cull. It is not a happy day in the Malifozik household. Iss reckons the last three are the ones that caused the lag. As such, three little chickens have to go.

We have two green roosters - MacAlister and McLaren. Iss decided the fairest way was to let them decide themselves who should remain by pitting them in a pollo-e-pollo deathmatch. The survival of the fittest. A fight to the death with the victor gaining the spoils - that most valuable of commodities - life!


Only it's taking more time than we expected. There seems to be an occasional lunge and peck sort of gesture but mostly there is just posturing and a bit of pushing and shoving. I'm kinda neutral about the outcome. I just keep trying to encourage them both, trying to ensure they both remember that pain fades, chicks dig scars and glory lasts forever!

Then there's little chick McIntyre who is basically baby-crap yellow (or officially Saratago), or at least would have been when she grew up. Iss reckons she's ugly. I reckon she's being punished for the crimes (read: colours) of her parents but Iss's ruling stands. Her name is also down on the guest-list at the local abattoir.

Finally, our third to be sacrificed to the gods of lag is "saddle brown" McBain. Another deemed less than aesthetically worthy. All credit to him though, he was a tough little blighter. Iss sat on him, jumped on him, dropped him from a big height and even attacked him with her daggers but he clucked on. It took me logging on and squishing him in my inventory to do the deed. I felt quite unwell. Iss did offer to do it if I transferred the little fella to her, but I decided I needed to man up.

Goodbye, wee chickens. The squawking of the cletch will be more forlorn without you.

Talented laydee

I decided the other day, now I've been around here a while, to give the blog a little bit of a revamp. Now, don't get me wrong, I enjoy experimenting with Photoshop Elements but I am the first to admit that I am an amateur.

Fortunately for me though, I have a very good friend in Iss who has a bit of a photo studio business thing running and I knew she'd be able to help me out.

The results, the new banner, are shown above. The idea was to try and capture a bit of my SL in one image.

We had fun, I thought, with poses and stuff, once I'd decided on an outfit to wear, so I'm not sure why she was ready to strangle me by the time we'd finished...


I can highly recommend Iss's talents so if you need some photo work doing, hit her up. She'll be more than willing to assist you, I'm sure.

Being creative

I made my first outfit a couple of days ago. No, I don't mean I created an outfit. Don't be silly. I mean that I made an outfit, out of existing stuff I own.

I know most of you do this sort of thing all the time, but the places I mainly shop mainly have complete outfits. They're themed complete sets of clothes that in so many ways only work with the items they were designed to work with. As such, mixing-and-matching hasn't really existed for me before.

But I got to thinking, perhaps I do own some stuff that would work in that way. So I had a search and a play and a mess and came up with this little ensemble below. It's a little more casual that the usual stuff that can be seen adorning my frame but it's nice for a change.

Chicken contraception

Iss decided she wanted a white chicken so she bought an egg (officially the colour of the egg was 'Cloud') and hatched it. It was a little boy chicken and she named him McNally.

Fair's fair, everyone knows that, so to create some balance and harmony in the world I hatched an egg too. A little girl chicken who I named McGonigle.

We'd agreed to stop at 12. That was plenty. So now we're at 14 and we've really decided to stop. Only mother nature had other ideas and Iss logged in the other morning to find she'd left a little suprise for us. Meet McBain, the accident. The range of radiostatic thing obviously doesn't quite reach far enough.

Times are a-changing

Isn't it amazing how your life goes through changes and moves on without you really noticing?

One minute you're a noob of no-fixed-abode, tp-ing randomly around the place in your big shoes with bad hair seeing what you can find. And the next you're elegantly dressed, perfectly coiffeured and settled on a little island somewhere sharing a house, some chickens and some poseballs.

Just like RL, I guess.

I did manage to break the cycle and go on a train ride today though. In SL and RL.

Home to roost

Up until a short while ago our chickens had a very nice coop. It had outer rooms for each rooster and a central ring for the hens and baby chicks. It was a very nice coop and our chickens were very happy.

But, as with all things, very nice sometimes isn't quite enough. Especially when you think you might at some point want more chickens perhaps in the future as a middle-to-long term plan that's definitely not immediately now. And the old coop, although very nice, would not have room for any more roosters. And I couldn't in good conscience hatch an egg knowing that if it ended up being a boy he'd be cast into the swirling depths of the nearby pond.

So we needed a new coop. And the joy that is Xstreet assists in shopping while away from SL. Nay, not assists, but more demands. Or necessitates perhaps.

A deep and intensive search of the bowels of Xstreet yielded returns. Actually, the coop I ended up choosing was at the top of the list, a featured item, half-price too, but the comprehensive search that followed was necessary to make sure nothing better was hidden on page 17, for example.

So here it is, in its glory, lovingly modelled by the designer on an actual North Carolina hen house builded by her grandpa. It's not only nice, it's actually quite lovely. And I don't say that lightly.


And a bonus thing about it is the mini-coops you get with the big one. You can use them for your roosters to keep the randy buggers out of the hen house, so to speak. Well, literally. To literally keep them out of the hen house. Liberally scatter them around and suddenly it all feels quite rustic. Plus, because they're copiable, you can rez as many as you like when your squad of roosters happens sometime in the non-foreseeable future to acquire new recruits.


On a final note, I must just big up the designer, Ms Holly Klaxon. As well as designing a quite lovely little hen house she also is the model of perfect customer service. There was an issue with the rooster coops that I won't go into now, but she responded quickly and effectively, and provided a solution. Holly, I applaud you.

Distracted

I was looking for coops yesterday, and for one particular. But at the designer's store I discovered she had boats as well as coops. And I'd never been sailing in SL before.


It's not a jetski, sure. But there's a time and a place for sailing too, I think.

And no, I don't know what happened to the water in the pic.

Change of plans

If there's one thing I really love about SL it's how you can start out doing one thing, but then end up doing something completely different.

Take last night as as example. Iss had seen some pose cushions that we wanted to go check out so we beamed over so she could show me them. And my, there were quite a selection. But the thing with pose cushions is that you have to try them out - you don't want to buy without testing the merchandise do you? So we tried them. We tried them all.


Only some of them were quite...erm...graphic, and it's easy to get distracted. But there's a time and a place for that sort of thing, and it wasn't then and it wasn't there. So we composed ourselves and moved on.


And then sat a bit chatting. I like how relaxed we look.

So we tried out all the cushions. And then tried them all again as we couldn't remember which ones we liked. And Iss bought some.

But then I noticed that the shop didn't just have cushions. It had all sorts of other poses too. It was a positive pose warehouse. And to be honest, it would have been rude not to try them all.

This is me looking moody. "Bring me ma food, woman!" is of course, not the sort of thing you'd hear coming from my mouth.


There were trees to hang upside down in. (and no, Iss was not telling me to get the hell down from there)


And there were swans to ride. I wasn't so sure the swans were for riding, to be honest, but Iss insisted that's what they were there for. And insisted on going round and round in circles on one. So I just lay, watching.


But then all the fun came to an abrupt end when I lost a contact lens. I couldn't find it anywhere. And Iss didn't help. It was her turn to just sit, watching.

And then there were 12

I know. I'm addicted. I just can't help myself.

Although Iss and I have banned ourselves from hatching any more eggs. We have six roosters now, y'see, and the coop I purchased only has seven sections - one for each rooster and one for the laydee-hens. We can't risk another rooster. I'm not definitely not gonna drown any boy chick in our pond at birth and no-one seemed to liked my idea of raising roosters for cock-fighting, so hatching is off limits.

We will just have to make do with our female brood of Marmalade, Skye, Cupcake, McDonald, McKenzie & McLeod, and the boy-chicks of Duke, Pinky, Sparky, MacGregor, MacAlister & McLaren. It's enough to keep us busy.

Mellow times

I had another first in SL today. It's been a while since I had one, but today I had one.

My friend Chry invited me over to her venue, Idle Rogue. I know she has DJs and stuff there, but tonight I got to experience a live gig. My first ever SLive gig.


The artist was a lass called Starflower Orbit, and I have to say that I loved her stuff. Really mellow acoustic guitar and singing type stuff. Just my thing. Just what I needed on a Saturday afternoon.


I liked it so much that I invited my friend Quaintly over and we danced and listened and chatted. Lazy Saturday afternoons rock.

Frustration

Who can tell me what the link is between the following words - ryou, entropy, moonchild, dominion, cygene & wraith? Hands up. Anyone?

I'll put you out of your misery, they are all names of outfits designed by the admirable Hyasynth Tiramisu for ~silentsparrow~. And more than that, they are all outfits etc etc that I purchased the other day on a shopping splurge. Gothic Victorian Eclectic is how the clothes are described. Yes. I concur.

I love her stuff. It really is what kinda fits me and who I am in SL.


But I have a gripe. How is it that the best shops always have the worst lags? Even when they're empty. House of Rfyre is unfortunately another I'd put in the same category. Love the clothes. Hate the lag.

It really is the definition of frustration.

Oh, and yes, I really do need to improve my PS skills. I need lessons, I think.

Oh, and yes (squared), can anyone tell me how to set the direction I am looking when I'm trying to take photos. I look distracted in most photos, like there's something interesting going on just off-screen.