The grid being down forced me to do some ‘useful’ Second Life stuff, thus my portfolio is up. First client featured: Snow Designs.

Actually, it’s my only client. So if you are interested in hiring me - out of compassion or because you like my work - please contact me at info@vintfalken.com.

Tags: portfolio, snow designs, vintlabs
Categories: Building, Photoshop, Second Life, Vint Falken, Vintfalken.com, Work
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Lately I really felt the need to prove that I’m a good, god fearing girl without personality issues. Here goes one of my attempts:

Shot at the Abbey ‘Our Lady of SL’.

Tags: nude, selfportrait, vint falken
Categories: Photography, Portrait, Vint Falken
1 Comment »

Yesterday was a bit confusing: the whole thing about me having personality issue´s, trashing my camera view whilst experimenting with this and thus having to ask for help like a total n00b, mixing up people´s gender, etc. So I decided I´d better redraw myself into an abby for a while and contemplate about my sins. It was time for petinence, confession and snapshotting. I guess I´m not that a spiritual person as after taking some shots that will surely get me excommunicated from catholic church, I concluded that abby churches with only praying animations are rather boring. So I hopped over fence, and went to the Hauwai Zoo.

First life me does not really like zoo´s. She says it´s mean to lock up animals. No matter if they are just looked at or ment to become food. But I told her to shut up and go ride the zebra´s.

First stop was the zebra´s. It took me a while to figure out I should jump into the crawl, but once their I was pleasently suprised with the striped ones not being afraid of me and even coming up to me. If you pet them, you can make them hind their legs, run, walk or say Hi. If you´r not scared of mounting one and riding a bit, that is a neat option too. And ow, you can also ride the hay stacks, but believe me that I say that is a rather stupid sight.

I arrived just in time for feeding time for the Hauwai Zoo´s panda bear. He´s really adoring when he munches his daily portion of bamboo. I tried to draw his attention, but the food was probably more interesting. Leaving him to finish dinner in peace, I left for the penguins. Those penguins are very well taken care off. They have their own aquarium with ice rocks and spend their time swimming and just relaxing. Utter cuteness, though!

The lama´s look a lot like the zebra´s and have the same options. I tried to get one angry and spit at me for a snapshot, but it seems those at the Hauwai Zoo are rather cold blooded. You can see I´ve succeeded at capturing a monkey that broke free in the back of the photograph. The other monkeys dangle on something that looks like a gymnastics rack. One of the monkey´s even has a pink bowl in her hair!

From the monkeys you can easily walk by the parrots and go to the pond with the flamingo´s and ducks. Don’t forget to say ‘Hi’ to the koala bear on your way over there. Ever rode a flamingo or a duck? Well, now you can try that. Do not sit on the little duckings, though. They are still way to small to handle 50 kilo´s of virtual Avie.

The Hauwai Zoo also has a fishtank, but that was quickly abandoned when I noticed the turtle on a skateboard. Yes, indeed: a turtle on a skateboard. I told first-life me that this isn´t animal abuse, as the turtle looks so happy on his skateboard with the lettuce and with his cute little red cap. My personal favorite at this zoo. Together with the little bees that are hidden in the bushes. Search those for a little pink cone and press that and out the bees come and fly.

The Hauwai Zoo can be found at Hauwai 86, 88, 90 and it’s a PG area.

If I ever get kids in SL, I´m most certain to take them to the Hauwai Zoo. If not, I´ll just return there to have fun, buy a soda, eat some popcorn and walk around once in a while. ;)

Tags: exploring, second life
Categories: Exploring, Second Life
2 Comments »

I’ve added a new tutorial about using Photoshop or other imaging software to add a sense of depth / gaussian blur / partial blur / DOF / shallow depth (of field) / … or whatever you wish to call it to your Second Life Snapshots.

I hope you enjoy it.

Second Life Photography Tutorial: Using Gaussian Blur to add a sense of depth to you Second Life Snapshots

Tags: DoF, photography, tips and tricks, tutorial
Categories: Photography, Photoshop, Tutorial
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This is just way to crazy.

1. I never realized two misplaced letters could cause such a row.
2. Whatever the lady responds, I’m not going to respond anymore. I’ve spend more time on the matter than it deserves already.
3. Does anybody have any good ‘fuck you’ animations or modeling poses? :D

Tags: cheri horton, vint falken
Categories: Rant
No Comments »

Unfortunately, she has serious personality issues. As you could see, I stripped out about 98 percent of the text, along with the links to her site. Next possible step is deleting this post altogether.
Cheri Horton

Ow, no! I must be evil. Does someone know of a good Second Life psychotherapist?

Cheri, like I said before, I do did not want to pick a fight, and if you hadn’t overreacted in the first place, this post would have been about last night’s shopping spree and Mardi Gras beads. I doubt if I respond at - what used to be - my Photo Friday Finish you would leave the comment, although you’re rather willing to insult me there and on my own blog.

I’m not going to accuse you of having personality issues. I do think your reaction is rather childish and unprofessional. I did send you an email which you chose not to respond to. We could have had this discussion by mail in stead of out in the open.

You say I should be grateful for the exposure? Well, I did not ask for you to blog about my photographs. Your Second Life PixelPulse is a commercial blog/magazine that sells adspace. Did you ever consider sending me an email to ask me if I was OK with a nude me featured on PixelPulse’s front page? No. I just had to figure it out by the trackbacks and the comments on my photographs on Flickr. Well, I figured you would have to find out about the spelling mistake the hard way too.

Talking about trackbacks and comments linking back to your magazine/flickr stream, you leave them on my tutorial posts and photographs, but your site does not accept trackbacks. Doesn’t seem very fair to me. If you don’t accept trackbacks, don’t send them out either. This way it’s just link-whoring. (Before you overreact again, I’m not calling you an escort, just a link-whore!)

About taking down the photographs screenshots and the blogpost: I did never and shall never delete / change a blogpost, except if I made a flagrant mistake in the information I was providing. Not even if you would have asked to take them down. Which you didn’t. View rates on the two screenshots are 76 and 44 views so I hardly think the whole of Second Life knows you spelled my name wrong.

As for marking spelling mistakes in red, it’s not utterly tasteless, it’s just common practice in Belgium. I don’t remember if I ever accused my teachers that handed me back my papers with lots of red upon them of having personality issues. Probably I did.

I never did send someone into orbit. I try to help out if people have questions. I don’t laugh at people who don’t have a decent skin and I tend to be honest about what I think. Am I really such a horrible creature Avie?!

But look at it on the bright side: even bad exposure is exposure. So may I kindly ask you to link the ‘personality issues’ in your comment to vintfalken.com? :D

Tags: cheri horton, vint falken
Categories: Opinion, Second Life, Vint Falken
8 Comments »

The ‘Show your Avie Week’ starts today. It’s a great way to show us how hawt you are or to get an idea of the different looks of your friends. It’s a fun thing to participate in and an easy way to get to know some new avatars.

And if you don’t buy that, just believe me when I say any reason for snapshotting is a good reason! ;)

How do I show my Avie?

• Boot the Second Life client, find yourself a nice spot and take a snapshot (that brings out your best or worst features).
• Fire up Photoshop/PaintshopPro/Paint/Flash/Fireworks/… and add your full Second Life name to your selfportrait. If you don’t know how to do that, drop a comment here, I’ll try to help you out.
• Login to your Flickr account. / Create a (free) Flickr account.
• Upload the photograph, and make sure to add “*firstname* *lastname*” to the photograph’s tags. You can repeat your name in your selfportrait’s description too if you want to.
• If you’re not a member of the Flickr Second Life group, become one. Just press ‘Join this group’. Don’t worry, membership is free and they won’t send you annoying emails. ;)
• Go to the picture you have just uploaded and choose ’send to group’ and then ‘Second Life’ from the drop down menu.
• On the same picture page go to ‘all sizes’, click ‘thumbnail’ and copy the html code you get.
• Go to the Show your Avatar Week topic and paste the html code you just copied and press ‘post now’ to submit your reply. Feel free to add some text about your Avie if you want.

If you have multiple avatars, nobody will stop you from showing them all. Please do remember, the Second Life Group on Flickr is PG, which means you can’t post any full frontal nudity! (We could consider doing a ‘Show your Pr0n Avie’ Week @ the Second Life [Mature] group? ;))

This is mine:

Tags: avatar, flickr, portrait, snapshot
Categories: Flickr, Portrait, Second Life
No Comments »

I’m not a huge fan of video tutorials, but I guess some of the stuff inhere could be interesting for my younger SL-friends. The part of ‘how to break into somewhere in Second Life’ is handy when … let’s say a certain someone locks you in in her bedroom and you don’t feel like teleporting out.;)

The tutorial is made by NaturalSelectionStudios.com (visit their site for a better quality version of this tutorial) and is part of the ‘Noob Be Gone’ Series.

Ow, and the part about the fact that buttons are made to pressed is rather funny. *giggles*

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LMcryDCIYk]

Tags: link, tutorial
Categories: Links, Tutorial
1 Comment »

I guess if things continue like this, I will soon have to scale down the size of my avie’s neck a bit.

Again a photograph featuring the most lovely Second Life DJ evvah: Miss Angi. She’s even in it twice. I’m a bit ashamed about it, but I just can’t seem to get rid of the suspicion that - although she’s a great DJ - her looks helped her to the top/DJ-boot too. :d

It’s always nice to see that people actually use the SL-photographs I take. Even if they add an aweful font type in freaky colors. But I suppose the breasts make up for that. ;)

(The original photograph that became her tip pic and that has Angi actually wearing a top in it. When this snapshot was taken, we were at the Sisters arguing/discussing who has the best looking pair of breasts.)

And then there is the PixelPulse Magazine that featured my photographs in their ‘Friday Foto Finish’. They could have dropped me an email first though. I would have told them that my last name is ‘Falken’, not ‘Falkner’!

But still, it is a nice boost for mine and Vint Falkner’s egos. It’s good to know that I have some talents besides parading, shopping for silks and showing off the hawt butt. ^^

Tags: cheri horton, nude, portrait, vint falken
Categories: Photography, Second Life, Vint Falken, Vintfalken.com
5 Comments »

Today I started a quest finding out where our Second Life avatars can meet, if not in-world. There seem to be a lot of possibilities, especially if I count the services that were originally meant for first life people, but who are now also used by SL avatars. Each of them have their pro’s and there con’s, although some have a lot more con’s then pro’s.

If there are any other Second Life oriented Networking Sites that you know of and I don’t: pretty please, let me know. I’ll try to keep this overview up to date.

Make your pick:

Second Life Profiles: slprofiles.com (my profile there)

Second Life Profile titles itself ‘The fastest growing second life community’ and resembles MySpace a lot. What is most unique to this social networking site, is that it gives you a lot of options as it comes to sharing your first life information too. Not something I’m willing to do, but some of my fellow avatars seem very willing at that.

SLProfiles has expanded functionality as it comes to Second Life snapshots and First Life photographs and some blogging options too. For adding friends, commenting on profiles and the abilities to pimp your profile, they copycatted MySpace. That’s not really a drawback, as most people are used to the MySpace interface, so SLProfiles is easy to use for them.

When signing up, SLProfiles tells me I can later on add multiple Second Life accounts to my profile. Until now I haven’t found out how to do that. Not that I have multiple accounts, but for some this could be handy. As I don’t want to post stupid questions in their forums, I decided to read their FAQ, only to find that they don’t have any. Hmmm. Serious drawback!

• (-) Limited search functionality. (Users / 1sth Life Name / 2nd Life Name)
• (+) The ability to mail your snapshots directly to SLprofiles.
• (+) Blog functionality.
• (+) Event calendar where events can be added by the users.
• (+) The ability to rate user’s 1st and 2nd life pictures.
• (+) Second Life jobs with job offers.
• (+) Pimp your profile.
• (+) The Mini Profile option: you profile and profile pictures are automatically (and decently!) resized to fit the Second Life browser.
• (+) SL Gadget v1.9 that connects you to your SLprofiles account even if you are in-world. (The bookmark function is handy too.)
• (+) Unlimited(?) amount of photographs you can upload and the shots you upload are divided into 1st life/2th life. En plus you can create separate photo albums.
• (-) No FAQ file to be found!!! (When googling SLprofiles.com I only found a FAQ specifically about the usage of their forums.)

No user statistics to be found, but I am able to see all member profiles in search. That gives me 42 pages with 30 profiles/page, which makes 1260 members. If we assume you should have changed your profile at least once in the last 2 months to be counted as an active member, 1080 of them are active members.

Second Life Network - A place for AVies! : SecondLifeNetwork.com (my profile there)

SecondLifeNetwork.com is also an obvious MySpace clone, but with some great extra features. The most important one is that you need to activate your account by clicking an in-world box, so there’s no possibility to falsely claim someone else’s avatar.

There seems to be a lot to do around dating on this site. There are many options to be chosen from as it comes to your dating status: Do me now!, Confused, Hurt, Horny and ready, Desperate, Divorced, In love, … As I wasn’t sure if they mean my 1st or 2nd life dating status, I decided to go with ‘Unfaitful’. Also in the search functions, we see all the search options we normally see on first life dating sites: Sex, Dating Status, Smoke, Drink, Location, Occupation, Religion, State, ZipCode, City and keywords. So if your 2nd life avatar hasn’t found the love of it’s life yet, and you have trouble meeting that right one in-world, maybe secondlifenetwork.com isn’t a bad place to start looking. ;)

Again I search for a FAQ or something that tells me more about the possibilities on this second life social networking site, but - just as with SLProfiles.com - I can’t find any. Pressing ‘Help’ only brings up an overview of tags you can use on the site. This is getting frustrating.

My account type says ’standard’, but checking the FAQ for what the other options are, is no option. :d

• (-) No FAQ!
• (+) Good profile search functionality.
• (+) You need to register your avatar with secondlifenetworks.com in-world.
• (+) Picture functionality, although less then SLProfiles.com. Unlimited picture space, but max. 300kb and only accepts .jpg and .gif files. (Does allow converting to .bmp.)
• (+) Blog functionality
• (+) Pimp your profile.
• (+) Picture rating and battle system. Especially the battle system is original.
• (-) No ability to mail snapshots directly to secondlifenetworks.com
• (+) Event calendar.

Members: 133 pages with 12 members/page makes 1596 members.
Active members: I shall look into that later, the site’s a bit slow at the moment.

Flickr : flickr.com (my account there)

Most people that frequent the world wide web already know about Flickr. It’s a photo sharing site that allows you to easily share pictures with friends, groups and makes it easy to comment upon them. Now more and more Secondlivers start to use Flickr’s services too. Some of them with a paid for account, a whole lot of others are using a free account. The drawbacks of a free account are that only the latest 200 pictures you have posted are visible to others and that you have a monthly upload limit.

Lately Flickr is tagging all Second Life residents’ accounts (be it a paid or free account) as NIPSA (Not In Public Site Areas) because they look at Second Life snapshots as just ordinary screenshots. The drawbacks of that are that they don’t show up in group pools, in tag-search or on secondlife.com’s media page.

In an email CodeBastard RedGrave tells me she thinks it’s time someone starts a SecondLife Flickr clone, but I’d rather see Flickr looking at our avatars as real people too (especially if we pay for the account!) and starting to accept our snapshots as real photographs, or Flickr giving us our own SecondLife subdivision. They should realize that most of us spend real world money converted to Linden Dollars in-world, so we have credit cards and are willing to pay 25USD/year for a decent snapshot photo hosting service.

Despite this handicap, a steady Second Life community is developing on Flickr and groups like SecondLife, SecondLife [Mature] and Flickrites of Second Life are building a steady base of active members. I assume there must be a TeenGrid group too.

You can upload your snapshots directly from Second Life to your Flickr account by using the ’send a snapshot’ option. That and they have an impressive detailed FAQ. ;)

• (-) The focus is mainly on photographs, not on the person behind the photograph. (Which figures, as they are a photo hosting site after all. ;))
• (-) Limited profile editing options
• (-) Second Life snapshots are regarded ‘NIPSA’
• (+) Great photo functionality
• (+) Works well together with Wordpress and other blogging CMS and blogging services.
• (+) It’s possible to mail snapshots directly to you Flickr account.
• (-) Limited search function as it comes to persons.
• (+) Advanced search function for photographs using the photograph’s tags. (If you ignore the NIPSA-idiocy.)
• (——————————————) NIPSA

Numbers for the Second Life group:
Members: 1068
Total photographs: 16916
Total non-NIPSA-tagged photographs: 6724

Despite the stupid-NIPSA rules, I think Flickr has great things to offer to Secondlivers. You can for instance use a group to collect all the party pictures of a club (let’s call it the Paradise Lost) in one pool, despite which member took it. All the members just need to send their pictures to that pool. Example given: group Paradise Lost Club on Flickr. ;)

Second Life Universe / Snapzilla : SLUnivers.com/pics/ (my profile there)

Snapzilla is trying to be the Second Life’s Flickr. They are doing a good job at that, but not a great. They must realize that as they allow you to automatically send your snapshots to Flickr too, if you mail them to Snapzilla. But Snapzilla is still in beta faze - for how long is nowhere stated - so we’ll wait and see. It has some good potential, although I miss Flickr’s good looking and intuitive user interface, awesome group functionality and tagging system.

• (+) Just must send a snapshot from in-world to snapzilla to activate your account.
• (+) Mail snapshots directly to your Snapzilla and Flickr account using ’send a postcard’.
• (+/-) Pictures automatically become linked to the SIM they were taking in.
• …

A more decent review will follow when they realize that I did send that snapshot and that they don’t need to refer me to unlinked.aspx anymore. ;)

Just found out that they don’t allow you to upload snapshots that you saved to your hard drive first. Which makes me qualify them as non-interesting.

Snapzilla’s numbers:
Members: 2565 (1312 registered/linked)
Snapshots: 135 200

MySpace.com : MySpace.com (my profile there)

This is probably the most famous and most used first life social networking site. I don’t like it for first life, neither do I like it for Second Life. All the features it has - blogging, pimping your profile, adding photographs, adding video, etc. - won’t help me get over the fact that I have about 20 annoying ‘my band has a myspace profile and will now soon be rich and famous’ friend requests each day. Let alone the over-pimped profiles some have, the popularity contests ‘lookie, I have more friends then you do’, the stupid comments just to comment, etc.

Although I have an account of my own there, I strongly advise against using MySpace.com

Numbers: No way to find out which users are Second Life avatars and which users aren’t.

CherryTAP : CherryTAP.com

Someone suggested this, as it has a lot of users too. Well, beside that it’s just like MySpace but worse, they succeeded at tagging my profile photograph NSFW. So f*ck you, CherryTAP!

Local Second Life Fora/Forums

Mostly found at www dot SLforum dot ‘country extension’.

Examples: SLforum.be, SLforum.nl, SLforum.de, …

I don’t know who’s responsible for those local communities, but I can’t find any adds, so I assume it’s either a local Second Life adept, or local Linden folks. Each country/community differs in looks, functionality, … .

I think it can be interesting if you life in a country that has a thriving Second Life community. I shall be wise and not comment upon mine. :d

Tags: flickr, links, web resources
Categories: Opinion, Second Life
2 Comments »