Today I received my first notice of copyright infringement from the DMCA department, which is something I was never expecting to see. After I swallowed that "wtf!?" moment, it actually wasn't so bad. Apparently even Frank Sinatra's name is licensed, and so my naming a fedora after him was in violation of Warner Music's copyright. So from now on the "Sinatra" fedora is going to be the "Corleone" fedora, something I'm updating even as I type this.

It's no biggie, so I won't bother making a fuss. What's in a name, after all? But I wanted to make a notice here so that there was no confusion, and also satisfy curiosities (maybe serve as a little warning to anyone else wanting to dedicate anything to the Chairman of the Board).


Also, update on current projects... I'm working on a few things that are ending up bigger than I initially thought, which makes me think I should release another smaller project while I'm working on these. Unfortunately, that's exactly how a few of these started, so I don't want to place myself in the way of temptation and end up with even more enormous projects O.o

Blinders

I have had some big projects in the works lately, the ears took me forever with so many delays... my sim build has been in the works for six months, and I have a secret project which is taking longer than I was hoping too. So I felt the need to just finish something simple and interesting which I could just release without any complications.

I've been wanting to really make a blindfold for a while now, the one I have for sale for 20L was just something I made very quickly. I think they have a beautiful mystique about them though, and I've always wanted to do it more justice.

With the coaxing of Selos I managed to get the silk texture just perfect. It doesn't go all the way around the head, only to the ears, in order to make sure that its compatible with all hairs. This way it fits a wide variety of heads and is unisex. I'd like to do one that works with hair someday soon, but that certainly doesn't qualify as a quick and simple project!

It's scripted to change texture to twelve different jewel tones, so that you can match whatever outfit you like. It really seems to lend an ethereal and mystical air to your avatar, or maybe just a kinky one.

Along with that one though, I wanted to try a different kind of blindfold.

It could be one of those little masks you wear over your eyes when you go to sleep, or it could be used in the bedroom for "other purposes". Whatever you like you're welcome to try, personally I like this one because I made the trim able to be changed to a different color than the rest of the mask. I know some people have asked that I make a lack of eyes an option with some of my masks, and if you wanted to you could wear this one underneath in order to get that effect.


I won't be retiring my old satin blindfold, I think it still has its place as a bargain piece, but I'm lowering the price now to 10L :) These two new ones are now for sale in the main store for 95L each ^.^

Fantasy Faire! And Long Awaited Ear Updates!

The first annual Fantasy Faire is starting today, and despite my intense procrastination, some groveling and last minute scrabbling netted me a stall on the Elvencourt sim! I would offer a slurl, but no matter where it's made it always ends up at the landing point. I'm in stall 15 next to Evangeline Miles of Evie's Closet, and I couldn't have asked for a nicer neighbor (her latest dresses have only been getting more beautiful, wonderful job).

As a part of participating in the faire, we were asked to donate the full proceeds of two items to Relay for Life. My contributions are a limited edition recolor of Titania and Oberon.



They're only available at my stall at the expo, for 500L each. They'll be available until the 22nd, when the fair closes. Obviously I did a new color theme for them that's different from the soft blues, but I also changed the greenery around the crowns to new leaves that are a luscious natural green.


Aside from the masks, I also am proud to say I finally have completed my elfin ear update. After more mistakes, remakes, script edits, permission errors, hold ups, hang ups, pitfalls and near misses than I can count, they're out. The actual structure of the ears and earrings hasn't changed at all, but the scripts have. I've consolidated the TRAP, Drow, and Aether skins all into one mega pack of skin tones titled Fantasy, as well as added new tones from some of the more popular skin makers that I received tone requests for. The Naturals received a major, major tune up, and instead of a paltry twelve tones, they now have over seventy skin tones by designers such as Abyss, Nomine, Fleur and Curio.

With the new collections of skin tones, I've excused myself a slight price hike in the cost of a custom tone. I'm going to make it 100L, because when I first set my price I never anticipated it to be as much of a time sink and a chore as it has become. To those that currently have ear tone requests open with me, I will be giving you a new pair of the upgraded ears in hopes that one of the tones will suit your skin. If not, then you will still only be charged the original 50L price, but that's only for ear tone requests received before today.

Please let me know if you do find errors in the ears, or the vendors, despite my testing them as much as I can I still seem to miss things. The sooner I'm made aware of errors in permissions or scripts the faster I can fix them!

The upgraded ears are now out at both the fair and the store, I'll be sending a notice out to the group as well as updating the signage nearby but right now I'm just going to go collapse somewhere :)

Gemini

For being one of the most ubiquitous masks in Venice, the Volto certainly doesn't make many appearances in my store. This is something I long to change, because I love the mystique and appeal of completely changing your visage just by holding up an object. That must be one of the plethora of reasons I love masks.

The problem with the Volto is that they are very tricky and very technically difficult to craft well, and so I let them slide while I work on other challenges. But with my recent experimentation with torus masks (having a real hole be in them), basically this mask simply had to be made.

As a Gemini myself, I'm quite familiar with being multi-faceted, as is anyone who presents different sides of themselves to different people. But honestly, beyond the symbolic representations of the complexities of personality, a split down the center mask just looks cool. And so you can wear it with one half or the other, and change each side to any combination of the 11 colors included. You can do the same with the lips, and have them the same color on each side, or opposite, or maybe have a black and white mask with red lips or even no lips at all. The options are completely there for you to show whatever side of you your whimsy decides on.

The unfortunate part about my doing masks out of torii is that to do eye holes, there will always have to be two. I can't have the same silky unified look of any of the other masks, there will always be a seam or a seperation or an asymmetry. So though this is a big step forward for me, I don't think I can completely throw my other methods aside. It's good to have choices though :)

The sale is over now, and now I have to be all explanatory for my absence for the past few weeks. The longer I go without posting the harder it gets to just sit down and write an entry.

I've been feeling very stressed recently, and unfortunately that means that I lost my will to work for a while. I wanted to escape and watch movies and play games and basically goof off and try to get my head back around to a place where I could achieve something. It happens maybe twice a year, it seems.

Now that I'm starting to get my act together again, I do have a few half-finished projects that should be able to be completed without my taxing my creativity much. I've gotten abhorrently behind on my ear skin tone requests (if you have requested one, I'm so sorry!), and I'm planning on updating and clarifying the way my elven ears work. Right now the vendors are so confusing, I get more questions about how those work than anything else store related.

Anyway, sorry to have gone all clammed up on you. Nothing is really wrong, I'm just going through some RL tension which getting back to work and releasing things will fix.

Spring Cleaning 2009!

It's that time again, when my critical eye turns upon the walls of my store and I begin to feel the urge to cull things from the herd. I feel the need to dispose of things that I was never that proud of in the first place, things that don't sell well, or things that are just plain old.

The rose collection was one of the very first things I made with sculpts, and for two years they were a joy to me. But now I want to move on, I'm going back and scripting older items like my necklaces and I realized... I don't think these are worth scripting. I'd rather have new items to play with! Same for some of my early hats, like the Sabrina and Harajuku top hats. Oddly, even despite my new top hats the Victorian still sells well, and I think I can live with it sticking around, but the other two? No. I will, however, reduce the price on the Victorian to reflect its age and venerable standing.

The sculpted hair styles... well... they were a whim. The mustaches are still too much fun to get rid of and so they're sticking around, but styles like the Sweep and the Bowl are just plain not well made, and I can say that because I made them. They're probably the shoddiest, half-assed stuff I have in my store, made as a joke, and although the joke was funny, the joke is now old. I'd rather clear them out so that any future, serious attempt at hair that I make won't be tainted by those things. They have their place with costumes and they're certainly unique, but hopefully any other hair I make will be unique too.

Anyway, go check them out :) They'll be around until May 20th, at that time they'll be locked up in my inventory forever. Everything is laid out in front of the store, out on the lawn for the pickin's.

Khimar Wrap

I'm back! My connection is stable once more, and so I was able to finally log in and finish what I had started. I'm very excited to share this, it was a headache inducing experience but very well worth it.

Draping cloth is something that takes only a moment to create out in the real world, but is a challenge to artists who try to render it in any medium. I love covering myself in as much draping, flowing cloth as the temperature allows and I've always wanted my avatar to reflect that more.

"Khimar" means roughly a head scarf or veil in Arabic, and although it's more modernly associated with full body wraps and longer garments I felt I might still be able to get away with calling it this*. I went for a very middle eastern look for it, but that's entirely optional, as the head band/wrap or "agal" is a separate piece from the hood and can be worn with or without it. The mask is separate too, in case you just want a hood with the cowl. In fact, all the pieces can be worn alone or in any combination that you like!

*Anyone who might be better in the know is welcome to correct me, as I'm just a Westerner with access Google and Wikipedia :)~)

Every piece changes independantly, so if you want to experiment with having a black hood and a blue mask, or a black agal with a red hood, go for it! Create any random color scheme you like, but only on the purchased version; the demo combines the three head pieces so that you're not covered in little hovering demo boxes.

The hood is pretty incompatible with hair, but a lot of hair stores (such as ETD) sell just bangs as an add-on to their hair styles, and I think that would work well with this if you simply MUST have a few lingering locks. Speaking of, this is perfect for expositions or sales or fashion shows where you need to keep an eye on your prim limit, but still want to look fashionable. All in all, wearing all the pieces, it only adds up to eight prims! Aaaah the miracle of sculpts!

Here's where it was a pain in the ass though... for eight prims I needed to do seven unique textures, and do those seven unique textures in twelve different unique colors. Whereas normally I can be a bit of a cheapskate and use as few as two or three unique textures on an item, or creatively re-use textures on similar prims (like recently my hat bands) I ended up doing over a hundred uploads for this item's textures alone! And that's not counting troubleshooting sculpts! It was a devil getting all of the textures and colors to look right together, from 2d into 3d. But the good part of this is that everything looks deliciously silky. Looking at the results, I definitely feel like it was all worth it.

I also think I know what you're thinking... CLOAKS! The thought (obviously) occurred to me too, and I'm planning on it. I should even be able to re-use pieces of this wrap, but there's certainly going to be enough original material on any cloaks I make to make it worthwhile to buy both.

The wrap is currently available at the main store for 450L, and with this release, I've lowered the price of the old Assassin's Guise to only 175L as a sort of budget version. :)

For the past week and a half or so, I've been suffering from random and intermittent internet outages that effectively remove me from being in-world. I'm never sure when the internet is going to cut out, or for how long. The times that I've tried logging in, all I've ended up being able to do is lose IM's from people. More technicians are coming by tomorrow, they've already been around to restore our dial tone and to poke it with sticks, but we keep needing to call. You know that the internet has truly become an addiction and a habit when you lose connection and think "what's the phone number for my ISP? I should google it"


So now I'm on a sort of forced hiatus, and I'm spending it tidying my apartment, playing Sid Meir's Pirates, and watching Pushing Daisies on DVD. As much as I enjoy having a vacation, I don't enjoy the timing, as I was working on something really fabulous that I'm very excited about. Hopefully I'll be able to get back in action, but until then I guess I'll continue being the dashing scourge of the Spanish Main :p

Vendor Updates

I've been working on updating and scripting older items like a few of my jewelry sets or masks like Le Fleur. I was sitting on them, tucking them away into my inventory so that I could unveil them grandly in my new store on my rebuilt sim, but I realized that wasn't a good enough reason to delay such convenience. I'm also replacing older vendor scripts with a newer update from Miriel which passes folders, and eliminates the need for boxes as well as other handy features.

I've been consolidating fatpacks and deleting old color versions in my inventory, and good grief! Such progress in lowering my count, I must have deleted thousands of versions of my various items. It's also been a great chance to walk down memory lane and review pieces that I still feel good about, or pieces I can't stand looking at and wish to remove from the grid entirely.

I'm trying very hard not to remove or retire anything well-loved that I haven't remade already, which is why everything is still out. I do plan on doing a "Spring Cleaning" sale, which is starting to become an annual thing!

Work on the sim is still going slow but steady, the whole hat spree thing with the top hats and fedoras etc kept me busy and distracted, but it was a welcome break. I'm back to working and fiddling with my model, figuring out the layout for the residential towers and tweaking my textures.

This is a picture looking up at what will be the store, and the entrance to the Arab market. If you want to swing by the SW of Carnivale to check it out, you're welcome to :)

Fedoras!

The People cry out for fedora-ness, and who am I to argue with you guys? It certainly was a slightly different endeavor, and I had no idea when I started just how much a tiny crimp in a brim could add or subtract so much character. I actually slaved over these, giving them the proper sweep, swagger, fit, character and distinction. My fiance can attest, he says he "now knows the meaning of a perfectionist" because of the way I treated these hats!

So here are the fruits of my labor.


Sinatra was famous for wearing a "stingy brim" straw fedora set slightly back on his head, but I took a bit of liberty because I love felt... and didn't want to do a whole new set of straw textures for this. An honest to goodness Panama hat and a porkpie still might be in the works, but don't hold your breath (or hold me to it...).

One of the most famous and classic images that make me instantly think of a fedora, is Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. I only saw the film once, I'm not a big fan of romantic dramas, but I certainly had the image of him smoking a cigarette in a trenchcoat and a swanky hat full of savoir faire. But the reason for the brain stickiness was mostly the swanky hat... I can't resist a good costume accessory! But even Humphrey Bogart is not as famous or notorious or as well known for fedora-wearing as...

Indiana Jones! Man, this one was a challenge. The problem with having a hat so well known and so iconic is having to get it exactly right. But I feel I finally eliminated just the right kinks and flaws to make it really his. In any other color though? It's a versatile hat for the rough and tumble type in a gritty bar or maybe the erudite fashionista in New York. Speaking of...

From my childhood, not sure I'd even call this a fedora, but I would certainly call it a floppy hat full of win. Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? used to be one of my favorite shows as a kid. I would rush home to watch it and then yell at the kids who didn't know where Madagascar was. And I think the real reason everyone wanted to track her down was to ask her about fashion tips, 'cause that lady had style. I don't know how she could hide from people so thoroughly while wearing a bright red fabulous hat and trenchcoat, but I guess that's just how awesome she was. Obviously you're not limited to red, I just couldn't resist it for the picture!

Last but not least, I was running out of fedora icons and I wanted to have the more modern, trendy short brimmed fedora honored in my collection. "Timberlake" didn't seem like a very appetizing option, so after googling a bit I found that Vince Lombardi, the legendary American football coach was never seen without one just like this. Perfect! I hope I'm not tarnishing his memory by making it bright blue and wearing it with a purple mack.

All of these delicious and delightful pieces of millinery are available at my store now for 175L (due to their serious blows to my sanity through not behaving properly when I wanted them to just look done already)