Gift, Exhibit, Orange

No of items found in inventory when search "pumpkin": lost count after 50 (bad); No of gifts: 1 (v. good); No. of free prims on Infolit iSchool: 526 (bad); No. of times neighbour's security orb attempted to eject me from own land: 18 in 3 minutes (bad)

Tis the season of mellow fruitfulness and halloween overdrive, so am stuffing inventory with floating candles, spooky houses, spooky greenhouses, tombstones, poisoned cauldrons, and some v. questionable items, namely a noose pose set and a burn-the-witch bonfire. Latter is great fun as you stand at the stake with flames licking round you, making unrealistic shrieking noises.

As usual have set up Halloween house on Infolit, this year in a shack on the hill. New items include aforementioned cauldron (dispenses apples which cause you to fall dead) and v. good ghost in form of flying pumpkin, from New Trails. Pancha has contributed an animated skeleton and some freebie candles that she created for a Day of The Dead project. Also had tombstone that dispensed ghost that followed you round saying she wanted her mummy. Spooky.
However, when visited tomb just now, the GHOST HAD DISAPPEARED, and was no longer to be seen in the Contents tab of the tombstone. That is even spookier, frankly, and also means product no longer works. Could ask for replacement, but on the whole that is just too much effort.
Meanwhile have a pumpkin for all purposes: pumpkin heads, pumpkin lights, pumpkin chairs, pumpkin to look like cats' heads; pumpkin soup; pumpkin pie; pumpkin gun; pumpkin earrings; pumpkins that come and hit you if you click them; static pumpkins of every size and hue; not to mention pumpkin-coloured boots, necklaces, shrugs etc. etc.
Am trying to show restraint, as it tempting to just pull everything out and Paint The Island Orange. Is easier since am fighting continual prim war. Students have been populating their mini islands, and I have been encouraging them to fill islands with stuff, but has now reached stage when really want to say DO YOU REALLY NEED YET ANOTHER PALM TREE but is easier to just keep zooming round trimming prims here and there.

Latest things to go were an old barbie (40 prims, see pic) and the cardboard house that was lurking under the Farradane Centre. Have fond memories of getting drunk with Pancha and Ishbel over that barbie, but is four years old, so postively vintage.
Autumnal colour added to by a) my final "52 weeks of colour" frock, which have selected from Caverna Obscura and b) v. pretty set of marigolds in vase on cute rustic stool which was unexpected gift from Hanaya's owner. Have got v. few blogger gifts to date, in fact think has only been 4 of which 1 (set of shoes) was v. useful, 1 (jewellery from Magpie) was pretty, and 2 were useless as were short dresses of kind do not wear.
At once opened box and tried to take pic to show gift-giver. Was thwarted for some time
1) Went to Fantasy Woods corner of Noyo. Was immediately bombarded with messages saying that was about to be ejected: neighbour must have set his security orb thoughtlessly wide. Loathe security orbs. IMed neighbour and await response.
2) Crashed
3) Logged in and went to autumn house and started to rez marigolds,
4) Crashed
5) Rezzed marigiolds
6) Crashed
7) Crashed again. Perhaps was Curse of the security Orb.
8) Tried logging into Infolit iSchool instead. Success!
9) Noticed Quilt was missing. retrieved her from under building. How DO they get down there.
10) Posed with Naomi. (see pic)
11) By this time had forgotten why had gone into SL in first place and started playing with Quilt.

Will use marigolds in final 52 weeks of colour post, as harmonises so well with dress. Am sad 52 weeks challenge is almost over. However, at approx 2 hrs per post x 52 weeks = 104 hrs, means have spent 3 working weeks on blogging virtual clothes for not many people to look at. Hmmm. Still, it was fun.

Way too old

Cats who are past it: 2 (bad)
Recently discovered distressing fact. Latest update of kittycats included v. cute new cat petting poses, including possibility of petting other people's cats. Immediately zoomed round grid seeking out cats to pet. Fired with new kittycat enthusiasm, clicked on Quilt and for first time selected Breeding option, toying with idea of finally opting for kitten boxes.

However was shocked when a message appeared in text chat telling me that "Quilt is way too old for breeding!" Not only does this seem like a super-truncated window of opportunity, but feel that language ("Way too old" indeed!) would score v. low in "diversity and age sensitivity" stakes. The poor thing is less than 200 days young!

Naomi is not much Quilt's junior, so turns out that both have descended into twilight years without me having given either of them the opportunity of fulfilling their destiny (i.e. making money for Kittycats by obliging me to buy more Kittycats food for all the new kittens).

Must be said that Naomi and Quilt do not seem overly bothered about this, indeed must have passed kittycat-menopause some weeks ago and thus had chance to reconcile themselves to their elder status.

Meanwhile Stone took to disappearing under the floor of the CILR office (see last pic), so have had to go hunting for him on the sea bed more than once. Perhaps is sulking because of lack of young frisky female kittycats. Whilst ponder kittycat future have removed him to adorn another of my homes.

Not even tempted

webuyanycat.com has valued my cats at £14.69.

The usual

Hours spent at Jewelry Fair: 1.5 (bad). Items bought at Jewelry Fair: have already forgotten (bad) but was certainly lot less than COULD have bought (good).

Since have not yet fixed proper laptop, one that started going clunk-clunk in April, am now rather restricted about access to SL when away from office. To begin with, new netbook allowed some access, although generally of slow grey lumpy kind. Still it meant could attend those kinds of educators meetings where all you do is find a seat and then throw in the odd bit of text chat to show you aren't just letting your avatar sit there while you go off and make coffee or check your facebook page.

Anyway, gaps mean that when do get back in have loads to catch up on. Cute items for Spruce Up Your Space or Super Bargain Saturday that might still be out and available! Paying rent for shop in Juicy! Feeding the cats! And of course have the weekly obligation of the 52 weeks of colour challenge, which now has ONLY SIX WEEKS LEFT, gosh what will I find to do with my time when that finishes.

Obviously a couple of things are - going on hunts and visiting fairs. Have tried to give up fairs as tend to be v. time consuming, somewhat laggy, and also inevitably feed shopaholic tendencies. However, when doing Brick Red outfit for current Week of Colour Challenge decided that hadn't got quite the right earrings, so a visit to the Jewelry Fair that just opened was the only logical solution. Results can be seen here and here. Found v. pretty peacock feather earrings, only prob being that if viewed from front they disappear into hair. Think this is something to with alpha textures. Anyway, easy solutions are to
a) wear updos so is no hair in immediate vicinity of lower ear and/or
b) take pictures from side, where feathers magically appear again.

Am accumulating vast store of lore of this sort. Not sure what will do with it all, but then probably don't apply most of stuff that have picked up outside SL either e.g. once restored and re-caned a chair but don't think have been once required to reapply this knowledge in intervening period. What find slightly puzzling is that researchers who have researched SL fashion scene have tended to pursue v.v. dull questions about identity inside and outside SL, yawn, rather than interesting stuff e.g. why you might prefer Truth hair to Lelutka hair (in my case answer is simple as Lelutka don't do blue hair).

1st pic shows particularly tempting booth, and 2nd pic shows one of the Jewelry Fair sims ("Fire") Interesting that last year's organisers seemed agonisingly concerned about exhibits only using small number of different textures, no animated items, no particles, layout designed so that people's computers only had to absorb limited no. of graphics at a time, strict instructions about de-primming yourself before visiting etc. etc. This year all that has been jettisoned, as may see from rather murky pic, sim was filleed with animations and textures, and one often found oneself having to plough through a lava chasm to try and get to the next booth.

Talking of lava, the 3rd pic shows part of a short and enjoyable Quest that BareRose had, where you had 4 skyglobes with scenes in them that you had to navigate. In this one you had to go across narrow bridge with giant swinging axes, at risk of boiling to death in the lava. At the end you got some cool armour and a beautiful flying dragon. In final pic can see me swooping over Cowell on my dragon. Wheeeee.

Catablog

Kittens bought: 1 (good); Kittens unupdateable: 1 (bad); Cats lost in the vasty deep: 1 (bad)

Seem to be continuing to use this as cat blog although will also mention in passing that have spent more hours than can shake stick at in styling new home by Nordari, then taking pics of new home, then photoshopping them lovingly into composite pic, then uploading all pics to Flickr and listing provenence of each item in each pic in tedious detail.

Whole process was interrupted because kept hitting the prim limit for the island, which bearing in mind that island has 15,000 prims is not good news. Have had small clear out which cleared 700 prims (well at one point 800 prims since inadvertantly demolished part of main office building and had to spend ages rezzing whole thing then extracting bit needed to replace missing part. hey ho had thought had locked the whole building to prevent just such an error, but no).

Still, will need to do better than that before students arrive. Could be bye bye Hobbit House but think can just do a systematic prim-trim through whole island. Will be rather like trying to reduce 9,000 word article to 6,000 words to meet ridiculous journal word limits: if go through it enough times taking out odd phrases and words on every page (rather than deleting whole section, thus ruining structure and main argument) is much better. In this case for odd words and phrases read prim-heavy ornamental carriage clocks, beavers which swim round and round, floating mini-islands which dispense ice cream etc etc.

To get back to house decoration, why o why, you may ask. Simple answer is that there is contest for best decoration of this particular house. But to be honest it really is more about taking part than winning in this case. By time winner announced will have probably forgotten even entered since attention/memory span not at optimum at present (this could be because stay up all night decorating virtual houses).

Anyway, moved Quilt the cat into new home, to make it feel cosier, and then to add cute factor to pics, since noticed that comments on 52-weeks-of-colour posts seemed to rise dramatically when included cute kitty in winsome pose (see above).

Then suddenly gave in to whim of wanting another kittycat. Had had a sort of hankering after a Siamese and last week, to put off reading yet more draft dissertation chapters from Masters students (just like now, in fact) went on impulse shopping trip. Snapping up siamese could scarcely have been easier, a quick search on "kittycats", a TP to some sim or other with rows and rows of kitten boxes, and there you were. Whereas in Kittycats early days you were lucky to see a siamese under L1000, now appear to go for 100 Linden (or possibly less, but couldn't be bothered to shop around).

TPed home, rezzed kitten box, clicked it, endured 30 minutes of coy messages about kitten opening its eyes and getting its strength up and then - woomph - a tiny kitty. A tiny kitty with "Update Me" over its head. A tiny kitty that stoutly resisted to be updated however many Updaters I rezzed and activated (see pic). Assume that kitten box had been born ages ago and it just needed too many updates. In the end filed a report, and practically at once a new kitty dropped softly into my inventory, admirably free of any red lettering above the head.

Had meant to buy yet another female cat. And indeed thought I had. However, it slowly dawned on me that the gender sign above new kitten's head was NOT THE SAME AS QUILT's so realised now had male cat after all. Had already named kitten Amane, after a schoolgirl in an anime series, but though Amane would sound pretty gender-neutral to most people (it even has the word "man" in the middle), thought it might give the cat a complex, so renamed him Stone. This is after the Nordari house which is called "May a stone guide your way". Stone seemed a masculine sort of name, and Stone (the cat) is sort of stone coloured.

Not sure whether Quilt resents new cat (she is probably thinking "how come you are too mean to keep Silky updated and rezzed, but are spending same amount on frivolous new kitten? we aren't just for Christmas you know!" No answer to this except "Stone cute, Stone new, who was Silky again?") At any rate Quilt has twice gone missing and turned up Mitsy-like in the sea underneath the house. Am particularly baffled since can't see at all how she got down there: there don't seem to be any holes in the floor and the gully she gets trapped in is entirely under the house. Perhaps she fears that she will be forced to have kitten boxes. And must admit, am rather tempted to unneuter them both and see what emerges. Whatever it is like, it will be cute.

Outdated, disabled

Kittycats disabled: three (v.bad)

Was going to blog something completely different, but when happened to go into common room today, discovered poor Naomi immobile with her face to the wall, with the words "OUTDATED! Disabled!" over her head. Clicking her just resulted in her ID being chatted out. TOOK her and went to common room where, as I feared, both Silky and Qulit were similarly affected.
They all just lay or sat there, and would not communicate, move, play or cuddle. Most distressing.

I googled around and discovered that there had been an update a few weeks ago, which evidently I had missed. However, normally, it just says "update me" above their heads, and you can interact with a menu to get them updated.
After some fruitless scanning of the Kittycats website forum, teleported to the Kittycats sim, where I discovered a customer support person, Straykitten, standing near the door by a display of kittycats scratching posts.

After some conversation, Straykitten lent me a kittycats 1.8 updater, which I took home and rezzed near the kittycats, but it was all to no avail, the updater couldn't detect the kittycats, and the kittycats couldn't detect the updater. I took the updater back to Straykitten and he said that the only option was to file a ticket on the kittycats website. This I duly did.

Only about 10 minutes later, I was delighted to have a new, Updated Naomi dropped on me by Kitten Longmeadow. I rezzed her next to the inert Naomi, so I could take a picture (you see the new Naomi on the right), and then moved Outdated Naomi quietly and with dignity into the Trash folder of my inventory.

Apparently Quilt was no-transfer, so for reasons that I'm sure were very sound, some other avatar was going to have to drop Quilt to me. I took a couple of snaps of me and Naomi reunited (similar to the last pic here) and sent one to Kitten (lol).

The question remains of what to do with Silky, who belongs to Dimitrova. Dimitrova could go through the same process, but, at the moment, feel rather large amount of apathy.

Was quite upset about losing all kittycats, but somehow saving two kittycats almost seems like enough, especially considering the ongoing cost of kittycats food (85 Linden per month per cat). Hmm. In black and white that seems rather callous, and Silky is very cute. On the other hand, Silky could just sit quiet on a plinth for all SL eternity without costing another linden, which does have its up side.

Multicoloured musings

Hunts toyed with: 2 (good); Papers on SL delivered in RL: 1 (excellent, Naturally); No. of people attending talk: 7 (4 more than one of the other speakers; so, good)

Seem to be writing blog posts here circa once a month. Have speculated before on sad fall-off in Adventuresofyoshikawa productivity. One factor is still 52 weeks of colour challenge which has reached week thirty-something, so might as well mention that have blogged clothes in mauve, electric blue (see 1st pic), celadon, lemon and patriarch since last post here.

Some of these are colours that didn't know existed before 52 Weeks challenge, so am engaging actively in lifelong learning. Other skills for 52 weeks challenge include shopping, buying more linden so can do more shopping, spending hours trying on different virtual clothes, playing with lighting so look more exquisite in photo shoots and fiddling with photoshop to add final touch to exquisiteness. However, most of these are skills had mastered already, esp. shopping.

Have also acquired numerous freebies from Hunts, including bed with cotton bunny draped nostalgically over rail (see 2nd pic), boat, and supercute house with shutters that make creaking sound when open and close (also in 2nd pic). Stash of not-free-but-cheap includes 2 starry night skydomes, zen massage platform with parrots and urban rooftop garden. Could now have whole islands themed with different types of building e.g. think have at least 3 different stables and 3 different spa/massage sets, so could already create either equine paradise or health/spa resort.

Meanwhile, am dazzling RL friends with news that am researching how to do research in SL. Actually for "dazzling" could substitute "inducing glazed eyes and sudden realisation that they have urgent appointment elsewhere".




Have got v. interested in research on documentary photography & its application to SL, and whole issue of documenting and presenting research about SL. This is what paper at RL conference was about, and am sure that after hearing topic of presentation, readers will be wondering why audience was not 20 deep and queuing down the corridor rather than being confined to 7 people, one of whom was chairing session.

However must be said were only about 40 people at conference and at that point were 4 parallel sessions, so did not feel too bad about it. Also had attended previous session where were just 2 of us plus chair, so felt relieved were as many as 7.
Presentation included numerous pics (e.g. "spot the difference" ones above) and 2 videos, one of which is on Youtube and is linked below. As predicted, acquiring fraps recording software has been ... come to think of it, yet another reason why am not blogging here.

Call in the Cats Protection League

Starving virtual cats: 1 (bad)

Had IM saying "The object 'KittyCats - Quilt' has sent you a message from Second Life:
Mewwwwww... I'm 30% hungry :( Please feed me and pay some attention to me"

TPed in expecting to see Quilt under a quilt, like when had forgotten to set catfood to "anyone can eat" and Silky (who is owned by Dimitrova) had retired to bed starved (see first pic). However when arrived, they were both sound asleep and didn't look particularly deprived. Anyhow, went and got some more food and Quilt deigned to show some interest (see 2nd pic).

Have been out of SL for nearly a week, having been at a RL conference. Have oodles of work to do, but inevitably once had gone inworld to feed cat was caught up in various essential activities like deciding what was going to wear for the next 52 weeks of colour (colour is mauve) and then somehow being sucked into a pursuit of strawberry-related objects, think it was because saw that there was a cool strawberry table set from Whats Next.

This led to creating strawberry nook in the Moonbeam Garden. This obviously required not just digging out anything strawberryish from inventory (e.g. strawberry picking set and strawberry flavoured shaved ice), but also purchasing new items, like strawberry shortcake from Feather, and a new china teaset.

In between saw that that was interesting new hair from D!va, but when got there turned out that they only do dull colours, and nothing remotely blue. Was huge number of people clustered round the lucky boards, so lingered a moment examining people's outfits, then crashed when tried to take a picture. You can see the lagginess in the one eventually took when logged back in, below.

In fact crashed several times, hope is not a trend. Perhaps is guilty subconscious trying to ease me out of SL frivolity.

I Thought I Was So Over Julia Hathor

Sparkly moon gardens bought: 1 (enchanting)

Although have dozens of houses in inventory, some unrezzed, was prepared to be captivated by some new residence at the Home and Gardens Expo. What had not expected was to be right-click-select-buy-ing on an item by Julia Hathor.
Now, Julia Hathor was designer of first treehouse on Infolit iSchool, in fact at one point island was positive shrine to Hathor, since also had Fairy Bridge, Magic Apple Tree Bridge and Magic Apple Tree. 2 apple tree items are still in situ, near hobbit home (even though pose on Magic Apple Tree went wonky, so you get swallowed by the tree), but tree house and bridge have gone way of all prims, i.e. deleted in favour of newer items.
Old tree house had a waterfall grove at the bottom, spiral staircases (impossible to negotiate, one of the reasons it went), elegant viewing terraces, a splashy pool halfway up the tree, and a nice patio nook with cushions at the top, plus lanterns, nature sounds and some sort of bird of prey. Have numerous pics (e.g. here) of Ishbel and I floating in the pool, Marilena posing elegantly at the poolside, teaching meetings in the top treehouse room etc. Feel quite nostalgic just writing about it.
However don't think was just nostalgia that prompted the click-buy. Products definitely seem improved, but basically as soon as entered moon garden, all with moonbeam twinkles and lush grass and meditation pads and a waterfall and a cool tree-climbing animation - it is is all just SO PRETTY and so SL that I thought - blow realistic baked-in shadows and artfuly distressed concrete - this is Magic.

Was going to replace greenhouse with moon garden, but as noted yesterday, have decided greenhouse is too cute to delete, so it was summery coast house that went. Did a fraps of the house before deleting.
With 600 prims at disposal, rezzed moon garden and set about decorating. The thing about a Hathor garden is that it is pretty much loaded with stuff already, but think sometimes you just have to go over the top, so piled on some more plants, a bird bath, a bird feeder, birds, beer, knitting, more birds, buterflies, more plants, more butterflies and a cute rabbit. I put on my fairy crown and rode my fairy steed around, for added effect.

Yesterday got Pancha to come along and lounge with me by the waterfall. Think this makes the cuteness complete.

Bye-bye Screenr, hello fraps

No. of videos which failed to publish on Screenr: 5 (bad); No. of minutes it took to to buy fraps and download it: 10 (good); No. of minutes it took to work out how to record a video in fraps: 5 (v. good); No. of minutes it took to work out how to edit and save a video use Windows Movie Maker: about 60 (bad)
Relationship with Screenr somewhat under strain. Had been using it happily to record video in SL. Can only do 5 minutes, but in some ways that is opportunity rather than constraint, as they say.

However, had something of a SL-fest on Saturday (after 9 days away from SL) looking round Homes and Gardens expo, doing some dancing to virtual Albannach, and fitting in some photo shooting for the 52 weeks of colour. Attempted to capture some of this for posterity, and was successful with Albannach vid, but film of Homes expo persistently failed to publish, so had to rerecord it (see above, it ends with me purchasing the Julia Hathor enchanted moon grotto, but that's another story).
After this was downhill all the way, as tried to record one vid of the Spring Home that am about to delete on Infolit iSchool, and another of the greenhouse on Noyo (which was going to dismantle, but doing the tour reminded me how much I like it, so it stays). In end recorded tour of greenhouse 3 times, each time attempting to publish it endless (well, not literally) times, v. frustrating.
Thus purchase of fraps today. Downside is that it captures the whole screen, rather than allowing you to frame the part you want. Upside is that it records inworld sounds and is simply toggled on and off with the F9 key.

In heady rapture proceeded to record 3 tours had failed with before: the 2 mentioned above plus a broomstick tour round Infolit (since am just clearing out the cherry trees and installing summer), which had tried to record on Thursday. Also recorded art installation by Pixels Sideways and a brief cherry blossom idyll. Files run beautifully on my computer, but are huge, and as want to share some of these with world have to fiddle around with them in Windows Movie Maker. This is in fact why have never bought fraps until now, as see this is dreadful slippery slope towards yet more late nights playing with pixelated technology. Edited 2 videos and uploaded them to Youtube (where resolution seems pretty low grade, or could be way Movie Maker Saved the project, the saving options seem somewhat obscure to me, having been user-friendly-fied to point where not clear what is actually going on).
Anyway, above you should see the greenhouse tour.
My, I do sound twee.