I love the fab retro print in this great dress from Chantkare for Culture Shock. It makes me think of the fun prints that were such a hallmark of the late 60s and the 70s. It’s a dress that could be worn by characters in this season of Mad Men. I shot the dress at a brand new sim. How new you ask? It opened on Friday!
It’s called Neva River and I predict you will be seeing many photos shot there as there are many charming set pieces that are perfect for taking pictures.
There are nearly 1 billion people who are hungry at this moment. Not hungry like the hunger we experience when we start to think what we might fix for the next meal, but the kind of hunger that eats away at their insides, consuming muscle mass and making them susceptible to disease. Nearly 800 million people lack access to safe drinking water. Without food and safe water, illness and epidemics have free rein. Every year 10 million children under age 5 die from lack of basic healthcare. More than 6 million could be save from simple, inexpensive therapies such as antibiotics for pneumonia and rehydration for diarrhea. One of the most effective organizations in the battle to save lives is Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Border. For the second year, Chic Management’s Culture Shock event is raising funds to support this life-saving work around the world.
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Reader and blogger Isabelli Anatine asked for a tutorial on how to get a chiaroscuro effect in Second Life photos and so here goes. First I started out the making myself a projector as I already explained how to do in an earlier tutorial Lighting, Shadows and Projectors, Oh My!.
This gorgeous jacket from Swansong is called Serendipity. Serendipity is one of my favorite words as well as a lovely concept. While I don’t believe in fate or karma or other supernatural interventions in our lives, I do believe in serendipity. Serendipity is making desirable discoveries by accident, finding fortunate or agreeable things while you’re not looking for them, the happy coincidences of life. It’s that charming coincidence of deciding to wear a bright, colorful jacket like this one from Swansong and teleporting to Collbora88 and finding the fabulously florescent colored shoes from R2 that are a perfect complement, without even intending to look for them.
So I went looking for a lovely place to shoot and found Misali – a gorgeous water sim with small islands that hold lovely little set pieces perfect for the SL photographer. Since I was wearing the purple and sapphire dress and jacket outfit from Baiastice I decided to use the lovely Purple Moonlight windlight setting from Elysium Elide. I love the dress and the jacket and like them together, though this does highlight one of the reasons I have not become a 100% supporter of mesh. I would love to have them as separate pieces, but unlike system clothing, mesh separates can be difficult to fit together. Some strategies I have used to make mesh separates work is to wear a M under and an L on top, though that does not always work. That’s why designers like Baiastice’ Sissy Pessoa make the outfits in one unified mesh instead of separates. It makes them work together perfectly, adjusting to your poses and preventing all intersections, but it does reduce our opportunity to make individualist styling choices.
Or maybe we just have to dig a little deeper to come up with new ways to add our own quirks and options. Here, I added the collar and sleeve fur pieces from a Bliss Couture jacket. I decided to tie the jacket more directly to the dress, adding the accents in the sapphire color of the dress.
One of the most enigmatic songs of all time popped into my head while trying to conjure up a title for this post. I was sim-hopping through the many Linden Endowment for the Arts sims and stopped off at one (LEA17) that struck me as having a gorgeous, high desert atmosphere that might be fun for playing around with shadows. I used the Barcelona windlight setting though I fiddled around with the time of day and where east was relative to the sim just to arrange the lighting more conveniently. My outfit was great for trekking about – though that Maitreya top actually has a long, draping open back.
So, I hope you have headed over to the Wear Gray Market to check out the goodies. There’s tons of items in the stores, plus gachas and even a hunt. The fashion goodness rains down like a spring downpour over there. Go get wet! You can stay nice and cozy warm in this Comfy Top from IReN.
For fun, I went to check out the newest MadPea production – Sanity Falls, a multi-sim hunt for the ransom to rescue your kidnapped spouse. I only made it to the city limits, distracted by the memes of Second Life plurkerville. I am wearing a great mesh dress from Tukinowaguma. Why didn’t I know Tukinowaguma had mesh? At 150L per dress, that’s a great place to shop for quality mesh clothing – all in standard sizes.
There’s a quote from Charles Dickens’ Bleak House that came to mind when I put this dress on. “I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies!” This Crazy Butterflies for Life dress from Orage Creations got me thinking about freedom – and what it means. FDR talked about the Four Freedoms; freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear. He wasn’t thinking of cancer when he talking about those freedoms, but wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing to finally come to a time when the word cancer does not evoke fear, but instead a confidence that it can be treated and overcome? To that end and working for that day, the designers for Fashion For Life, such as Orage Creations Elettra Gausman, are supporting the American Cancer Society’s efforts to combat cancer and create a future where cancer is no longer causes fear.
Angelwing produced three Timeless Angel costumes for Fashion For Life and I loved how they work together. The Light one is all white, the Fallen shows the marks of struggle and the Dark is all black. What I particularly liked is that the white and black were not counter-poised as good and evil since they both wear the same religious symbols, even the Fallen Angel wears the same symbols and is dressed in a stained white dress. Normally I do not wear any religious icons or symbols out of respect for their meaning to the people who believe in those religions, but I liked that the designer did not fall into the white-black/good-evil trap so common in design and language. I thought it worth making an exception in order to highlight this great trio of dresses.
Martin Luther King, Jr. once wrote in “Where do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” that even language conspires with racism, noting that the synonyms for black were overwhelmingly negative and those for white were nearly all positive. So, too, are the expressions using those words. One of the ways, I work to undo the conditioning of a lifetime is to avoid using the words black and white as descriptors of anything except color in so far as is possible and reasonable. I don’t object when other people use black and dark in negative expressions or white and light in positive ones. That is our language, after all. This is just a personal challenge to consciously avoid that language trap – a way to resist cultural conditioning and struggle against my learned biases. It’s surprisingly difficult. I have been consciously using black and white purely as color descriptors and finding other ways to express phrases like blacklist (ban list or exclusion list) and white knight (rescuer) for over a decade and still catch myself falling into the language trap.
So I am in a foul mood, not a black mood. Bad guys use extortion, not blackmail. People tell harmless lies, not white lies. Of course, black holes remain black holes and white hot stars are white hot stars and the night sky is still black. Those are phrases using black and white as colors, not synonyms for good and bad. Just as an experiment, you could challenge yourself and try to go a week without using black/dark or white/light to express anything other than color. You might be surprised how difficult it is and how much our language is filled with subtext.