Tag Archives: Behavior Body

Oil & Water

Casa del Shai Tye-Die Bikini

When two people have a personality conflict that seems intractable, we say, “Like oil and water, they don’t mix.” That expression in one form or another is so old we don’t know its origins. However, its essential truth has become painfully obvious over the last two months since the Gulf spill began.  While one attempt after another fails, scientists and DIY inventors have made a cottage industry of uploading ideas to youtube to help the clean up. From clever to whimsical to crazy, those ideas are profoundly human. People are eager to do something because that’s what humans do.  For good or ill, it’s part of what makes us human.

Casa del Shai Capricciosa Dress

Not all of us can, or should, take a boat out on the Gulf and try to rescue birds and sea turtles. Still we want to do something. One thing we can do is help support cleanup efforts by established conservationist organizations with experience in ecological restoration.  Sadly, it’s been more difficult than usual to get support for those efforts because this disaster is man-made and has a villain who is expected to pay for the clean-up – assuming they don’t decide to file for bankruptcy reorganization. The idea that BP will pay for it all ignores that these groups are not waiting around for BP’s permission to begin wildlife rescue. They are already doing the work.

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Still There

The new Times Square Tribal dress from Shiki struck me as another that dress that would benefit from the wild, lonely setting of Marcus Inkpen’s build on Utopia 4, so I flew over to another corner of the sim for a few shots of this extraordinary dress and that extraordinary little island.

There’s something really haunting about how this island rises with the stairs to the house and how the island is anchored by that chain. There’s also a certain tension with the laws of physics suggesting its imminent collapse. Add to that how from this angle, the arching stairs seem almost like the island’s vertebrae leading to its head – in the form of the house and you can’t help but think that the chain is restraining the dragon that is the island.

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Water Baby

Astrologically, I am a fire sign – an Aries. But I have always been a water baby at heart – I grew up on a lake, spent untold hours canoeing miles of rivers in the NorthWoods and love the sounds of water. I have been blessed to hear the breaking up of the ice on the lake as the waves smash it into ever smaller shards on the shore – creating the sound of thousands of glass wind-chimes ringing as the shards clash against each other and the rocks on the shore. I love the sound of waves, the roaring of waterfalls and the lonely cries of loons resounding over the water. One of the joys of Second Life is replicating the sounds of my childhood – though I have yet to find anyone who has recorded the ice breaking up or the snap and growl of the ice in winter.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es9m18egkAY]

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Cross the Sea

One of my favorite artists in Second Life is elros tuominen whose kinetic sculptures are fascinating expressions of hope and joy. I have several of them rezzed on a transparent platform in the sky because I love shooting pictures with them and also enjoy seeing them resting in the clouds.  The particular sculpture in this set is called Cross the Sea – a series of moving blocks of shifting shades of blue to white. It’s hypnotically beautiful and a favorite of mine.

The Creone gown recently released by Monica Outlander of MiaMai is another beautiful expression of joy.

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When the World Has a Broken Heart

Offshore Oil Rig in the ANWR sim of Second Life.

I have found myself fast-forwarding or muting the coverage of the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico because if I see those pictures of dead fish, dying birds and a mortally wounded eco-system I start to cry.  I am not alone, many people are unable to watch without falling into despair. Usually in a disaster, people react with urgency and energy – full of things to do to help, but this time we are in over our heads – literally and metaphorically. We are dependent on the expertise and equipment of unreliable people – a company with a proven record of lying to us and to the government.  Even the best experts in the field don’t know how to fix it quickly and so we watch this strangling of our southern shores with helplessness and broken hearts. It is our helplessness that makes us despair and for our own spirits we must find things we can do to help. That’s why I am excited about Operation Squeegee.

In addition to changes to the regulations that govern off-shore drilling, stronger and more active oversight, development of clean-up and disaster expertise within the government and prioritizing alternative energy sources and conservation, we can support with the sisyphean efforts to cleanup and restore wetlands. Many SL merchants will be participating and events are being planned.  For more information, go to the Operation Squeegee website.

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Passionate for Passionnement

The most important people in the fashion industry are not the designers, the models, the magazine editors or the bloggers. They all have roles that play a part in the industry, but the industry would not exist without the customers whose passion for fashion is the foundation and sustenance for the entire industry. Friend and blog reader, XiuLan Quan is one of those with that passion for fashion – so much so that she contacted me last night to urge me to feature a dress from A la Folie that she fell in love with – even offering to gift me with it. Instead I had a better idea and asked her to pop over where I was shooting and let me shoot her and feature the dress with her as guest stylist. The dress, which you can see here, is Passionnement from A la Folie – the brainchild of Pixivor Allen.

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It's All About the Pants

This outfit is all about the pants – even though with the high boots you only see a bit of them, that bit is enough because these are Pants of Power.  Well, actually, I just made that part up. Still the new Graphic Skinny Pants from Modern Gypsy are cool enough and simultaneously hot enough to turn heads 360 degrees – so that makes them  Pants of Power in my book.

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La Marocain

When I saw the La Morocain dress from  Trés Jolie by Iota Ultsch, I immediately thought of the La Scherezade house from NotSoBad. I was sorely tempted by it when checking out the sale there the weekend before last, but ending up buying a different one. However, I could not resist running back to shoot the dress in the house anyway. This dress was made for this house – even though Iota had never seen it, she must have dreamed it.

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<3 Pistachio

I have a weakness for pistachios. My sister-in-law would make this deadly concoction called Glorified Rice that you could not pay me to eat. Then she mixed pistachio-flavored Jello Instant Pudding with the Cool-Whip and it became not only edible, but delicious – particularly after removing the canned fruit and sticky sweet maraschino cherries. I know, it sounds horrific – but it had pistachios!!! That infatuation with pistachio extends to the color – so this gorgeous Apres-Midi dress from Baiastice was as irresistible as pistachio ice cream. That it comes with its own hat and gloves is just pistachio icing on the cake.

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A Trip Around the World

Can I just say I love, love, love the themes of this year’s Relay for Life Clothing Fair? It was wonderful to travel round the world from New Delhi (shown here) to Paris to London and Tokyo and on to 8 of the world’s great cities. I also liked that the fashions more or less suited the locations. Lots of punk fashions in London, silks and saris in New Delhi, swimwear in Rio and so on. OF course, not all the clothes are location-specific – people often design a wide array within one clothing line. Nonetheless, the subtle changing fashions from sim to sim were wonderful to see.

My outfit came from different stores on different sims, but I thought New Delhi was the perfect place to wear it. It’s a mix of Indyra Originals and INDI Designs and in the folder of items I purchased at the Clothing Fair happened to sit next to each other alphabetically. How fated is that?

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