After my - highly amusing to some, highly frustrating to others - encounter with Miss/Mr Prokofy Neva yesterday, I am in dying need for positive things. Proof that there are residents that don’t just talk/troll, but that are doing constructive things that benefit the whole Second Life community rather than an old hag’s ego. Was I lucky, as I found out about Brazen Women’s ‘Mature Woman Skins’: “The Classic Lines skins were created from custom modifications to Eloh Eliot’s open source skin files. This line was designed to provide a range of ages for women, in a variety of skin tones, make-up colours, hair colours, and pubic hair styles.”

See, drawing wrinkles on any texture isn’t that easy as it seems! ;)

Beebo Brink, the creator of these ‘Mature Woman Skins’ stays loyal to Miss Eloh Eliot request to keep ‘derivatives’ of her Photoshop skin templates open for all to access & mod. Besides the ‘Mature Classic Line’ being available for purchase on OnRez and in-world, you can also find Beebo’s Photoshop files for your own further ‘modding’ pleasures at brazenwomen.com.

The Classic Lines Photoshop template contains:

1. Age Ranges
   Classic Lines I - The Skin has a hint of lines and creases on the face. / Classic Lines II - Deepens those lines for a slightly older woman. / Classic Lines III - A face of laugh lines and wrinkles, with salt-and-pepper eyebrows, and a body that is not as trim as her younger counterparts.
2. Make-up Options
   Basic Skin Pack / Lightly Skin Pack / Blue Ice Skin Pack / Smoke Skin Pack
3. Hair Colour Options
   Each Classic Lines skin pack includes 4 hair colours (black, brown, red, blond), in 2 pubic hair choices (natural & shaved) for a total of 8 skins. Classic Lines III skin pack also includes the salt & pepper hair color in natural and shaved versions.

Remember, these ‘free full perm skin files’ are NOT supplied in Photoshop format so you could import them in Second Life & resell them. They are donated to the community so you could create your own skins, based upon them and with proper attribution to Miss Eloh Eliot & Beebo Brink!

‘Open’ Second Life Skin Resources

Resources for the Mature Woman Skin Photoshop Templates:
Classic Lines Skins overview page at brazenwoman.com / Pale Skin Zip File / Tan Skin Zip File.

Eloh Eliot skins in general:
Eloh Eliot Skin Templates Overview / Strawberry Holiday’s Freckle Skins.

Sezmra Splendor:
Sezmra Splendor Skin Template.

Tags: beebo brink, eloh eliot, freebie, skin, template
Categories: Fashion, Freebies, SL Web Resources
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Whilst Miss Eloh Eliot is busy making her Pleiades skin’s .psd - already available in Second Life at the Gnubie Store and her parcel in Lippert - ready for public consumption by many, and postponing release of those .psd’s bit, hoping this will counter abuse in shape of the ‘business in a box’ concepts, Miss Strawberry Holiday - Jennifer Burlingame to the humans - released the ‘Freckle’ skins: “Eloh Eliot did Second Life a huge favor a while back by releasing some very high quality skins into the world of Second Life. I made a skin based on these publicly available skins.”

Whilst she lost some of the Photoshop work she has done on these - sorry to hear that, Miss Holiday - Strawberry still offers us tons of possible combinations and options in the face skin template: star decorations, different make up styles, skin tones (if you know how to handle opacity and/or colour overlays), ugly and pretty teeth options, and most important: cute freckles! There are two different types of freckles, but of course, you can change the effect they have by playing around with layer opacity and blend modes. Look at two totally unique - almost opposite - results created in a few minutes time.

I really like how the ‘black’ one turned out, that much, that I consider changing virtual ethnicity for a while. Not sure yet if I can cope with living the virtual life without spots, though.

I’ve searched for a ‘copyright policy’ to no avail, so for the ease of mind, I’m assuming these ‘Free Freckle Skins’ - being a derivative -fall under the same ’share alike’ policy as Eloh Eliot’s skins. Thus, ladies, mod them, wear them, hate them, love them, … but you better be armed if someone catches you selling these skins! ;)

The Free Freckle Skins for Second Life by Strawberry Holiday are available in-world at Marawa to be found at Bay City Tanelorn (TP new TP or as a direct download .zip file from StrawberryHoliday.com. Make sure to take a look at Strawberry’s portfolio as this lady can do more than just pretty body textures, eg. the ‘Disconnect’ installation I enjoyed a few weeks ago. For updates by Miss Holiday, check at blogspot, an overview of Eloh Eliot’s original ‘Open Source’ skins you can find here. And did you know Four Yip uses Eloh Eliot’s skins too?

Tags: eloh eliot, fashion, freckles, freebie, skin, strawberry holiday, update wednesday
Categories: Fashion, Freebies
4 Comments »

Sharing chat logs with others in-world is against Community Standards/ToS, right? But errr, if they get printed on your jacket layer, you can’t be held responsible, can you?

This did not happen to me for virtual ages (read: a few months), so I was very surprised, and even a bit nostalgic when suddenly, I was wearing my UI again. I decided to just leave it that way, and wear it proudly! ;) In the back you see the lovely Mister ArminasX and we were talking about the SL Bloggers Mix’n Match Aftermath and our survey (results soonish!).

As far as I know, wearing your UI is a ‘local client’ bug and others don’t see it, so not possible to really ‘violate’ chat privacy rules. Posted because of bug-nostalgia. :D In RL fashion everything seems to go in ‘circles’, bootleg, tight jeans, wide disco pants, they all seem to be ‘fashionable’ then terribly outdated only to return about 10 years later. Will the same happen to our clothing issues? In 10 years from now, will we revive ‘prim stuck in ass’ as being worn only by the fashionable avatars? ;) And who will be the first SL designer to officially incorporate our User Interface into a design?

Tags: client bugs, fashion, rant, texture
Categories: Fashion, Rant
12 Comments »

Be it a positive or a negative thing, participating in something ‘virtual world related’ (and probably even participating in _anything_) has the benefit that you constantly learn ‘new stuff’ or ‘how to do stuff better’. So it’s no surprise that the latest video in Rezzable’s 15fps series - as usual, shot by PG Broadbent - is even better than it predecessor fashion machinima Passions of Black Swan. *rolls drums* Featuring more ’swung’, better quality, speaking avatars, and - most important - more blood, Rezzable presents to you - from their 15fps of Fame series -, and shot for Fashion Inspired by Crimson Shadow: ‘Killer Designers’ …

(When viewing on YouTube, it is advised you press the watch in high quality button.)

Want to see this bloody vampires, mesmerizing cyber princesses, seducing virtual models and hear Miss Adaire Decuire & virtual hair designer Helena Stringer in even better quality, good enough to press ‘full screen’? The Blip.tv version is currently being screened on Rezzable’s machinima page together with the previous episodes of 15fps of Fame. And did you know you can subscribe to the ‘15FPS of Fame’ machinimas using iTunes (the small miracles I discover since owning an iPhone :D) or via RSS?

Tags: 15 FPS of fame, fashion, machinima, rezzable, second life, video
Categories: Fashion, Second Life
2 Comments »

Beautiful, isn’t it? Innocent but passionate, lovely but a bit macabre, fascinating and bewitching, cute but with a sick twist.. I don’t know how to exactly describe the avatar and matching accessories Four Yip created as a gift for Passions of Crimson Shadow, and named ‘Lune-atic Yipsie’. It’s quite a complete set which contains a skin - based on Eloh Eliot’s skins -, shape, horns with or without candles, astonishing detailed red hair which you can wear with bats and flowers as well as without, a body skinsuit and a scarf made of rats. Accessoires include the table, chair & teddy bear to pose, as well as a backdrop with moon and apple to kneel down for. Lune-atic Yipsie hides under the table and sings, in a state of sleepwalking. Four Yip suggest you rezz her nightmare, so it becomes yours. Mind that this proves that nightmares can be beauty.

This astonishing ensemble of avatar & accessories - as far as you can call a table, chair and moon accessories - is freely available starting October 18th, after the invite-only fashion show, at the Crimson Shadow sim. Update: Instructions how to get to this stunning Freebie on the Rezzable Blog. Passions of Crimson Shadow surely got to Four Yip! ;)

(For people who heard rumours about Vint naked artfully nude on top and under a table, this is it. Another photograph, taken by the wonderful - and Belgian - SL ‘photographess’ Kynne.)

Tags: avatar, crimson shadow, fashion, four yip, photography
Categories: Art, Fashion, Second Life
1 Comment »

Continuing the search for great machinima’s 2008 there’s ‘Carnival of Doom - Noobs Welcome’ filmed by PG Broadbent from Ididthisfilm.com. PG ((with some aid from his human Pier Giorgio Provenzano) shot this movie for Rezzable’s - which is, yes, my employee - ‘15 fps of Fame’ series. Regardless if they pay me or not - of course, I prefer that they do - this film definitely deserves a mention as notable Second Life machinima production 2008: Story line is fun, sound overlay is awesome - watch out for the cutting knife sound - and then there’s the exellent ‘noob’ performance by Miss Lokum Shilova. Starring more than 10 avatars in total, such as there are Griete Rasmuson, Vampires Bulloch and Pie Darkstone, and a whole lot of freaky carnival folks, puppets on strings and one innocent noob, this is definitely one to watch (over and over again)!

If you want to enjoy this one in better quality - and of course you do - click ‘watch in high quality’ on the youtube page, or (in) even better (quality) check the whole ‘15 FPS of Fame’ series out at rezzable.com/machinima.

Carnival of Doom is one of the Rezzable sims that make me really go ‘woooow!’ skilfully prim-tortured and assembled by Beatrix Newt, it’s a delicacy for the eye and snapshot function! And then I’m not even mentioning the fun carnival games, hell and the freaky but oh-so sexy (ok, except for the evil clowns maybe) fashion & costume possibilities you find there. Follow the TP to go there. Not convinced yet? See this:

Tags: 15 FPS of fame, carnival of doom, lokum shilova, machinima, PG broadbent, rezzable
Categories: Art, Fashion, Rezzable, Second Life
1 Comment »

It escaped my attention - until now ;) - that Miss Eloh Eliot made 3 new skins psd files available to the public: Cf1, an astonishing male skin, and two ‘ladies’ skins Rfº and SFº. I’ve added both to the list of previous skin releases by Eloh Eliot, as that is where people will be most likely to find them.

Skin repository for fashionistas

For all those interested in how a skin gets created, Eloh Eliot also made her repository and it’s contents available to the public. This means you can follow Eloh’s work on the ‘g generation’ skins, and take a peek into an SL skin genius’ mind (and in her .ai files too! ;)). For those that go there now, it also offers a more ‘clean base’ skin to work it, which might be interesting if you want to customise Miss Eloh’s skins more personal. As usual with Miss Eliot latest releases & works: ‘You are free to use these files to create items for any grid. You are free to _alter_ these files to create new items for resale. You are _not_ encouraged to resell these files or skins as is. Credit would be nice!‘

Feel free to take, but share alike!

Although Eloh continues working on the ‘g generation’ of skins, she is disappointed about how few people in turn release Eloh Eliot based skins as Open Source. Miss Eliot mentions this in Share alike!: ‘… this is what open source is about: it’s perfectly fine to take, it’s great to redistribute, and it’s still perfectly fine to make a profit off of it, but at the end of the day, it’s still better to give back.‘ One of the people who did share alike, is Mystical Serenity, check out her ‘Carnival’ skin here.

BIAB & ‘instant business, just add water

At least the above mentioned creators, even if they don’t share open source, added something of their own to the skins, and even possible have put lots of effort in those additions. Unlike the BIAB - business in a box - and ‘instant business, just add water’ schemes Eloh describes: ‘The problem isn’t more businesses–it’s the “instant…just add water” aspect of it–namely BIABs and freebie-sellers–these businesses are, in essence, the same as the zombies in camping chairs: they don’t really add anything of value back to the grid.‘ I second that. Some say it’s good to have those dubious businesses around, as else ‘newbs’ probably would never find the skin, but they for the ease of argument probably, forget to mention that this way n00bs - and even seasoned residents - pay (and charge others) for content that is supposed to be available to them for free.

Possible BIAB countermeasures

Any advise to offer to Miss Eloh Eliot to stop her skins being used for Business in a Box and plain reselling practises? Here’s my list:

• Make the free versions of your skins as ‘findable’ as possible for new residents. Make them in-world copy no transfers, but set up a vendor system for 0LS which people may rezz at their property (and is copy no trans too). That way Orientation Places, clubs, … can easily offer your skins for free. The vendor also distributes a notecard explaining your ideas about open source skins and a link to your website, telling them to look there if they wish starting to create their own skins. Make sure people can obtain the vendor from both onrez, slexchange & some inworld location. (For best easy, the vendor should be have an update system, supplying the owners of the vendor automatically with the latest edition… .
• Maintain a list/directory (comments or some way of contacting you enabled) where people can add a link to a blogpost, … where they make their own PSD’s or a .tga file of their version of the skin available. I’m sure most SLbloggers will happily help with ‘linkloving’ it so it is gets seen by many. That way the contributors will hopefully get something in return too: extra traffic. And people looking for free skins have a great starting point. Of course, you can also ‘outsource’ the maintenance of that list. (Work together with OpenSim peepz? They have some ‘here to find OS stuff for your worlds’ directories already.)
• Cross your mesh and keep hoping LL someday implements the possibility to easily add a CC license to inworld content.

Tags: BIAB, eloh eliot, fashion, skin, texture
Categories: Fashion, SL Web Resources, Second Life
3 Comments »

A first in Rezzable’s ‘15FPS of Fame’ machinima series: machinima footage from the ‘Passions of Black Swan‘ fashion show last week. Catchy tune, lovely models, large crowd, great designs, … what would one want more?

The blip.tv version is of a bit better quality, but YouTube is that handy for embedding. *lazy avie here* If you’re curious about the shots I took at the fashion show, take a look on Flickr.

Tags: black swan, fashion, machinima, rezzable
Categories: Fashion, Rezzable
2 Comments »

Imagine what flexible sculpties would do for the SL fashion industry (moving hoodies, bouncing leg warmers?), normal building (sculptie flags?) or even the SLex industry (non-static penises, breasts bouncing up and down as you run and bouncing sexgen beds?). Flexi sculpties, a dream of many - 357 votes, a lot for JIRA standards - and a real possibility as demonstrated in the videos below. The ‘hack’ that enables flex sculpts a viewer side patch, as shown in JIRA issue VWR-9203 Flexible Sculpted Prims.

Want to test? No problem, Chalica Yao compiled a Second Life client that implements these flexible sculpted prims patches. Available for download here (as Miss Chalice asked for Mirrors). You do not need to install this client, just unpack to a folder and run it.

Do mind that this is a large hack, so don’t expect prime performance and you do not want to leave sculpties like this all around the grid, so please, clean up after testing! Zwagoth Klaar, one of the ‘parents’ of this patch shares some good advice: ‘Appears that scale has to be applied using the method for normal prims, not the one for sculpts. This seems to fix things. It also brings up another issue with these. You lose half your resolution because things that are in the negative region of the flexible do not behave correctly, this caused me a large amount of confusion, it makes things warp and flip inside out, also causes distortions. So, for the moment, people wanting to create sculpts for this, should keep their exports above the 0,0,0 center of the sculpt frame, or it will not behave correctly. Objects flex along the Z axis, keep that in mind.‘

Once more, thanking Mr Malburns for pointing this out to me.

Tags: building, flexible, flexible sculpties, sculpted prims, SLinovation
Categories: Building, Fashion, Second Life
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When Eloh Eliot first released her skin’s .pdf files - how much more ‘full perm’ can you get? - ‘accusation hell’ broke loose in the Second Life Skin & Fashion industry: This would ruin business for any dedicated skin maker, chase their customers away and put them out of business. As today, there are is still a large amount of famous - and good skin makers in Second Life, charging over 1000 L$ for beautiful, well crafted skins. So the ’slash end skin business’ was probably something like all those people predicting the end of the world: probably they are right in the end, but they surely go the date wrong! On the contrary even, Eloh Eliot’s free skin psd files were an inspiration & knowledge source to many, teaching us great tricks and allowing people to build upon them. For instance: I used them often as an inspiration to shade clothing I made, pasting the free skin’s shadow layers and adjusting those to achieve exactly the effect I wanted. Thank you, Miss Eloh Eliot!

Splendor .psd skin files

Following in Eloh Eliot’s footsteps with a release of ‘free full perm female skins’ is Sezmra Svarog - or ‘Laurie Ellis’ for the humans - with her Splendor line. Sezmra introduces herself on sezmra.com: ‘I’m a pretty average girlgeek, and my SL name is Sezmra Svarog. I have spent over four years in Second Life as a skin designer. I owned and operated Nora BodySkins & Fashions from 2004 to 2008. Currently, I am now enjoying Second Life from a personal perspective.‘ Although Sezmra Svarog’s skins - opposed to Eloh Eliot’s free ones - are not ‘layered’ PSD’s, which means you can not as easily adjust them for your own purposes, they are still a lovely gift to the community: ‘The first skin resource I am making available here is a female skin called “Splendor“. This is probably the best skin I’ve ever created, and I am offering it to all of you Second Life, Open Sim, … whatever denizens to use as you see fit.‘

Miss Sezmra releases these .psd files - head, torso and legs - in three body shades accompanied by the following rules (suggestions):

1. You are free to use these files to create your own skins for your Second Life avatar, no matter what Grid you are using it on.
2. You are free to alter these files to create your own skins in order to resell them.
3. You are NOT encouraged to redistribute these files, commercially, as is.
4. Credit would be nice!

So as far as I can read, as long as you are no ass trying to make money of selling her .psd skin files off the shelve, you’ll be fine using them for whatever purpose you wish… . Nice from the lady, no? You can find the direct download link here, but I’m sure Miss Sezmra would love you to take a look around at her website, especially as she announces soon to come skin tutorials, accessories (tattoos? scars? bite marks?) and more Second Life skin resources. Yeey, I’m seriously looking forward to those, and I bet you are too!

Tags: freebie, photoshop, sezmra, skin, texture
Categories: Fashion, Photoshop, SL Web Resources
6 Comments »