We Are Made of Star-Stuff

We are made of star-stuff.
“The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution – weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

― Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
We are made of star-stuff.

Carl Sagan said we are all star-stuff and shooting these pictures for this post made me think of him. The keke glitter constellations and the anc. mist clouds made me think of galaxies and nebulae. The windswept magical dreaminess of the Papillon dress from Moon Amore only added to that. It comes with a color change hud that allows wearers to choose colors for the bodice, skirt and embellishments. This particulate texture has a field of clouds that inspired the direction I took with the shoot. The fluttering of butterflies are optional. You can wear the skirt with no butterflies, with just the butterflies on the skirt or with the long kite tail of butterflies. As you can see, I went for maximum butterfly. The outfit also comes with a gift of balloons, but left them out. The balloons come in a range of pastel colors to coordinate with the dress.
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Mini Vacation

My typist is going away for a few days so I told her that I would take a vacation too. I wanted to go somewhere unusual, and lucky for me Trompe Loeil has this new Outcrop Hut for a perfectly outdoorsy but restful few days away.  Continue reading

Because I Can

15 Aug 20_011I went to the beautiful The Trace Too to shoot some pictures. I love this sim so much. I wandered into the water even though I was wearing a long skirt, because I can. These colors don’t run.
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The Sea of Love

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Mami Jewell of AZUL probably designs more gowns than anyone for the Miss SL competitions. The Linette gown was designed for Miss Indonesia Mio Linette and it comes in twelve standard colors and two limited edition colors. When I walked in the gown the ebb and flow of the feathers at the bottom made me think of the gracefully flowing fins of a beta fish, so for fun I headed to Borinquin Zyn’s underwater tableau where there are underwater animations. Below the cut, you can see a video I made and see what I mean about this lovely gown.
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Wunderlist seems made for SL bloggers.

Wunderlist

I want to introduce you all to Wunderlist, a task managing app that seems made for Second Life® bloggers. It is probably great for all sorts of other tasks, but I love it for blogging for several reasons, the most important being that I do not have to recreate my to-do list every month. So, to start, you go to Wunderlist.com. You can run it on your browser as I do or download an app for your phone or tablet. It works on everything.

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Signing up is easy and you can link it to your Google, Facebook or Microsoft accounts. It syncs your stuff and does all sorts of wondrous sync-y stuff that I don’t care about because I don’t have a cell phone.

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Clicking on the down arrow by your name gives you all sorts of options for backgrounds and other settings. It also gives you this handy list of short cuts, allows you to turn off notifications and other goodies. You can also specify whether you want the date to show DD/MM/YY or MM/DD/YY and so on. There are prettier backgrounds for Pro users and you can get a Pro account for free by getting a friend to sign up. I suppose if I were clever, I would put some link in here so if you sign up I would get a pro account, but the free account gives me everything I want except those backgrounds, so I am  fine with free. But sure, if you want to click here, BONUS! Besides, I love this free background but there is a pretty floral one I lust after in the pro ones.  Now that you have your account and you have prettified it, let’s get to organizing your Blog Checklist.

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Hold Fast to Dreams

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Langston Hughes, one of America’s greatest poets, wrote that we must “hold fast to dreams” for if they die, life is like a bird who has broken wings and cannot fly. When dreams go, he wrote, “Life is a barren field frozen with snow.” I think this is an important truth that we must all hold onto. Dreams animate us. They keep us from drifting into a stagnant contentment. Chuck Palahniuk wrote “Let me never be content.”

Sometimes people stop seeking happiness, settling for contentment. I think contentment is a trap. It is a yield sign on life’s highway. That’s where dreams come in. Unlike goals, they need not be realistic, they can be far-fetched, but they can set a framework for realistic goals that guide us toward self-fulfillment and happiness.

It is more important to have dreams than to achieve them. Hope is more powerful than success and hope is what dreams are made of.
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On My Own

My typist seems to have remembered her place and has been more attentive in the past 24 hours. I appreciate it, as I’m a bit beholden to her to get very basic things done, like opening my inventory, going places, chatting with friends. She logs out and I’m trapped where she left me. There have been times that this wasn’t pretty. Continue reading

Symbiosis

Oxford English Dictionary definition of Symbiosis

Oxford English Dictionary definition of Symbiosis

The relationship between designers and bloggers has generated a lot of conversation lately — and that is certainly preferable to allowing anger, frustration and resentment to bubble beneath the surface. For me, though, many of these discussions spend too little time reflecting on the symbiotic relationship between blogger and designer and that leads to an unnecessary and misleading polarization of the issue. Bloggers and creators should not be polarized, because they need each other and their relationship is symbiotic, not parasitic.

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Don’t get me wrong. I roll my eyes when I see increasingly prescriptive demands from creators, but I understand where the motivation for these demands originate. There are more and more and more bloggers everyday. It is clear that several, though not most, people who decide to blog see it as an opportunity to get free stuff. There is plenty of evidence for this from Flickr posters soliciting “blog sponsors” without regard to their own aesthetic to the fact that I, a blogger who has made exactly two projectors for sale, get random notecards asking me to add people to my blogging team. Hah!

If you are sending me a notecard, you have not looked at what I make. If you have not looked at what I make, you don’t care about the quality or creativity or any of the other reasons someone would want to blog another’s items. You just want stuff.

I do not disapprove of a blogger contacting a designer. I have myself. However, I only do it when that designer speaks to me with their creations. When a designer’s work stands out from the crowd. When I have worn it and blogged it and know I love it.  When their work suits my taste and the way I think about clothing. Yes, then I will read their profile to learn how they recruit new bloggers and follow their instructions. I may be one of the “old guard”, but I still follow instructions. The key point though, is that I only ask if their work is something I would still wear and still buy, if and when I can afford it, whether they added me as a blogger or not.

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Come On Let’s Go !

Come on Pixel Gidge, Let’s go out.

“No,” she answers. “YOU LEFT ME HERE! YOU PROMISED WE WOULD GO OUT AND WE DIDN’T GO OUT YOU LEFT ME HERE ALL NIGHT.”

Hey, I changed your clothes and hair, and I did your nails. I even moved your bed in off the water, what’s wrong? Don’t you want to get out today? 

“You left me here,” she pouts. “YOU PROMISED TO COME BACK YESTERDAY!”

Her typist sighs, Yes I know but RL happened. But I’m here now. Don’t you want to go out and do something? Continue reading