Lock down

I learned two things today.

Firstly I learned that you need to be careful what you have selected when you click delete. If you want to delete a rug, select the rug. Not the house the rug is in.


Secondly, I learned that you can lock stuff so that you can't delete it. Good info to have, but a smidgin after it would have been most useful. How I wish I'd been told that titbit sooner. But now I know. Thank you, Alicia.

Oh, and in other news, the stoopid chickens aren't feeding. They have a day. Otherwise the foolish feathered freaks will starve. Eejuts.

Home time

This is a blog about houses. At least it's starting about houses. Who knows where it'll end up? Certainly not me. Do you think I plan this nonsense or summat?

So yes, houses. See yesterday's post if you want to know more but basically I had new land and needed a new house. That's the bottom line. Oh, and yes, the chickens have been temporarily boxed up to get the place sorted. I can't be doing with another traumatic Pinky-like accident.

My first thoughts on a house involved this lighthouse that I came across of Xstreet or whatever it's called. It's really quite stylish, I think. But the little hut was a tad on the small side. Next....


Next up was a visit to Hydro. Sorry no SLurl but search for it under Hydro Prefabs. It'll turn up.

I ended up with a couple of places from there. I couldn't quite decide which I liked from the dozens they had so I got two. This one was probably too big in the end - heightwise, rather than footprint wise, and I wasn't convinced by the mesh at the windows in the end.


And this one ended up feeling like a big box. And the thick window frames meant hardly any light seemed to get through. A big criteria of mine was glass. I thought this had it, but it turns out there wasn't enough.


Next came a house from a places called Ace's something or other. There were some nice places there. My favourite was this one below, called Miari, I think. It really was lovely. It had a whole outdoor area and really flowed nicely. The only downside was that it was MASSIVE. Totally HUGE. It covered all my whole land area. And maybe even stuck off the edges. If I ever have more land though, and need 4 bedrooms, 3 balconies, 3 living areas, a lap pool and a partridge in a pear tree I have this all ready to go in my inventory.


A lot of searching and some useful pointers from some very helpful friends had sadly yielded nothing of use. I had narrowed down what I didn't want, which was useful in its self, but I hadn't found the one with the je ne sais quoi.

Further urging to go to Hydro sent me back there and I decided to look at a few with bigger footprints this time. I had restricted myself to small ones before, but looked up a notch. And there I came across The Hermit. One up, one down, with character and glass. Perfect. Oh, and stairs rather than a teleport. I needed a place with stairs. It felt right.


What's more, the place came with a garden base thing. It was perfect for me, I decided. Now just to place it. Which meant terraforming.

Welcome to a Marnix first - terraforming. It's not so easy, eh? My first effort ended with the reaction of "oops, I've got a pond". If I had ducks rather than chickens all well and good, but I don't. At this point my landlady took a copy of the sim terrain "just in case". Was I not filling her with confidence or summat?

A bit of trial and error later (mostly error, to be honest) and I had success. I could live with the results so time to rez the house. Et voila. All I need now is some furniture to go in it. I had my first guest come for a looksee and I had not so much as a beanbag for her. I felt such a bad host.


Also at Hydro there's an outdoor furniture and garden shop, which had some particularly desirable trees. As you can see here, the multipack thing comes with quite a wide range to choose from. At the moment I've gone for the 'freshly-rezzed-at-random' forest look, but I guess I'll add some order later.



So, the conclusion - what did I learn from my first Marnix-only hands-in-the-mixing-bowl dip into SL houses and stuff? I think the key thing is that buying prefab houses can be expensive. Especially when you buy without proper consideration. Oh, and whatever you do, buy from a place with a demo rezzer. Sometimes the images can be a little deceptive and not give you a true impression of a place. Check a house out 'in the flesh' so to speak before buying. It's much cheaper in the long run.

Next job - the chicken patch. And then furniture.

No-one thinks about the children...erm...chickens

The last few days have seen some changes in my SL. It's not something I'm going to talk about on here because it involves someone else and it wouldn't be fair on them. The bottom line though, is that I have moved again.

This time though, I wanted to do it differently. I wanted a little lump of mud to call my own.

And so, now it is done. I am renting a little spot on the corner of a sim big enough for me and los animales. Now I just have to decide what to do with it.


Obviously the first thing was to rez the coops and unpack my chickens. The poor things had been without food for what seemed like ages. I had to then figure out land groups and stuff in order to make the little buggers feed. No-one warned me about that sort of thing. I am sure I haven't gone about it the right way and that will of course lead to repercussions down the track. It probably makes sense to box them up and start all over again, you know. Bugger.

With the creatures comforted I now have to turn my attention to sourcing a place to rest my weary head. I've been given a few ideas of places to check out, prefab places, but I'll have a look around and see what I find.

I do have to learn to be careful though. One place I had in my inventory came with a 'garden'. Sounded interesting, I thought. So I rezzed it. Only it turned out bleedin' huge. So huge in fact that it covered the whole of my little mudmound. Including the chicken coops. The bad news was the collateral damage. Somehow Pinky was fired off somewhere and was returned to my inventory, and then promptly stabbed with sharp stuff and squished with heavy stuff. Poor unrevivable Pinky, the first casualty of landscaping. I do wish his legs and wings would stop waggling though. It freaks me out.


It's kinda weird having all these thoughts about houses and landscaping and terraforming and stuff. It's never been part of my SLife before. I need to learn a whole new vocabulary, I think.

Also, if I am going to get SL to pay for itself I think I need to start doing something more about looking into selling my art.

Oh, and most of my new neighbours on the sim are bloggers. Some of those people whose blogs I read when I first materialised in prim form. I feel like I'm looking over the fence at royalty. I hope they don't mind the riff-raff.

Congrats

Just a short post to wish my friend Tymmerie and her husband Jerremy congratulations on their one year anniversary. As many people commented at the party on Friday (it was Friday for me but Thursday for most everyone else - hokay?) a year in SLife is like twenty five years in RLife. So really they're pretty much an old married couple. Congrats, guys, I was so glad I could celebrate with you, and the old school dance in the gym theme was just tremendously executed.


One thing I loved about the party, other than the happy vibes and the DJ playing my request that is, was getting to meet some people I'd not met before. People I'd plurked with but never met in SL, I mean. When I first arrived in SL and decided a good way to meet people was through commenting on blogs, way before I started mooching around on here, I thought people who blogged about SLife must be like all celebrities and stuff and I stuck them all on a pedestal and spoke their names in hushed tones. If I was a girl it would definitely be fangirl territory. But I'm not, so it's not. Clearly.

But then, as I have over time met a few of them, one by one, I've discovered that they're maybe just nice people too who are fun to hang around with and do actually speak to the ordinary folk after all. At the party I met a couple of this sort of people for the first time and to be honest, they were all pretty darn lovely. It makes me glad to have a second life :)

Oh, and if anyone reading this is new to SL and putting me on a pedestal and whispering my name in hushed tones - please don't. I'm just a bloke, an ordinary bloke, who happens to write some stuff. If you want to say hi and meet for a virtual coffee sometime, just hit me up. I'm friendly and pretty darn lovely too.

Oh, but once, just once, I'd love to walk into a room and have someone I've never met before shout "OMG, it's the buttpic guy!" Is that too much to ask for?

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...