I hate it when I wake up suddenly in a strange place. Sometimes I’m unsure where I am and it can be quite confusing. I had a good three days at the beach, relaxing while my typist was away but it would’ve been perfect had not storms blown in on day two. Continue reading
“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.”
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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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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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
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
Pixel Gidge’s typist has been stuck in the real life. That means that pixel Gidge is meandering around her house, left to her own devices, in a black hole of meaningless time, where no group notices or shopping adverts come through.
Can you imagine? Yesterday she brought up Seraphim AND Eloquence THREE times, each time getting ragey and annoyed with them, as there was NO Fifty Linden Friday listing. What was wrong with them? WHY WASN’T IT UP! When it wasn’t up at bedtime, that’s when pixel Gidge realized it might not be Friday. Continue reading
That shirt! You know the one I mean. We all have one. The shirt we have owned since forever, that repeated washings and years of wear have softened the fabric to a perfect level of comfort. It is the adult equivalent of a blankie. A shirt that ends up in every load of laundry because after a hard day, we put it on the minute we get home, as though putting on a hug. We have forgotten to turn it inside out a few hundred times and the fabric is pilling and snags are visible here and there, but we don’t care. It is our favorite shirt and we will keep it until it falls apart on our body.
Whatever sizing and substance the fabric once held is gone. It conforms to our body like a second skin, a cozy, comfy, second skin that says “You’re good enough. You’re smart enough. And doggone it, people like you.” We have that shirt in our first lives, but now we can have it in our second as well, thanks to Vinyl’s Little Toast (sukoshitosuto) and any doubts whether this distress and well-worn look was not deliberate can be dispelled with a look at some of the other options on the texture hud.
Yup, that’s deliberate.
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There is a lot of speculation about what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. They used to say it was our ability to use tools, but I had a dog who used a stick as a lever to snap the boards in the fence. There’s a marvelous video of a crow using tools to get food. Some used to say it was language, but the more we learn of animals, the more we learn about their languages and realize that we made assumptions because we did not speak their language. There are those who say it is our consciousness that we will die that makes us human, but can someone see animals mourning and presume they have no sense of their own mortality? Others say it is how well we cooperate, but will we ever cooperate as well as bees and ants? Anyone who thinks about the size of an elephant or whale brain knows it cannot be brain size. Scientists spend a lot of time on this question and are coming to the conclusion it’s not just one thing that makes us human, but it is all about how we think. One of the key differences is our ability to imagine multiple scenarios, to build complex imagined constructions. Daydreams are part of this – not dreams – but the conscious self-aware wonder of daydreams.
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But when I awoke I was drifting at sea, surrounded by little creatures, dancing through the air. Continue reading
I hadn’t ever heard of The Trace Too until Cajsa linked to Ziki Quest’s blog. I feel a bit sad that I’ve probably missed out on something all this time, and now it will be leaving us. I am sadder, however, that it seems another SLer is struggling with health issues.
I don’t know the person who’s sim this is, nor the people doing a little fundraiser. But what I do know is what it’s like to feel helpless while someone you care about is ill across the globe, to watch and worry about the worst, and how it feels when the worst happens. All of that I’ve got in spades. So I went over to shoot some pics and promote their effort to remember their friend.
In SL sometimes that’s the best we can do for our friends, and I’m glad to support that. Continue reading