Some people’s children, I swear.

So this chode on the SLX forums (and yes if you come across this post and you follow the SLX forums you are likely to recognize of whom I am speaking) is one of those people who want everything handed to them on a platter.  Last week he wanted a silver cross necklace but didn’t want to pay what people were asking.  I know as he approached Ella about building it and when she finally saw what he wanted and told him the price he came back with some drivel about having to camp for 2 weeks to get the amount needed to buy the necklace from her.  What a fucking maroon!  What a mook!

So today he posted something about wanting a script to copy protect clothing that he is making in order to open a store.  Wait . . . you are opening a clothing store yet don’t know that you can’t put a script in a clothing layer?  WTF.  In the same post he states he doesn’t want responses to his post in the forum but in world.  He doesn’t sell on SLX because they take 3% of each sale.  Well fucking duh!  They provide a service that requires a certain amount of upkeep!  People like that just totally rub me the wrong way.  Everything out of their mouth is “gimme gimme gimme”.

Ok, rant done.

On another note I am trying to find a scripter to help me build a custom vendor for my shop.  The one I have works alright but bugs out every now and then and the creator is why not accessible.  I am also concerned that the groovy display properties of this vendor make it easy for people to swipe my work.  I know it will happen anyway but why make it any easier.

I did finally learn the issue with my creating poses in poser6 and exporting for SL, P6 wasn’t compatible.  So issue fixed.  I did try a pose with avimator but missed something on the import as all the avatar did when the pose was run was to jump into the pose and then jump right out.  So I guess my learning curve would be better if I spent more than 10 min at a time on this pose process.

I have been focused on the Sci Fi stuff lately and as a result that texture set is now massive. I need to get back to the House of Dragons concept since the base work is done, it of course needs windows and doors, like most of the stuff I do.  I also have a big job to finish from one of my regular clients.  Oh wait and that RL work thing . . . sheesh!  Don’t they know I have a virtual addiction to feed?

braaaaiiiiiins!

All aboard the zombie express!

Man do I feel wiped the hell out. I was in bed before midnight, had a wicked head ache.  Slept like a stone, odd dreams, and woke up feeling half dead.  Won’t say which half.  Will not be in SL much this weekend as my mum is going to be in town to visit before she moves up to WA.  This is groovy but sucks as I want to be the moving up to WA.

I did get the new sci fi panels up on the vendor last night. The down side is that I did not have time to do the doors and windows of the set yesterday.  Although the grates and meshes sold in the same set will do in a pinch.

I am going to try out the SLPrims plugin for 3DS and see how it easy it is or is not to run with that program.  Would be nice to simply be able to import OBJ or 3DS files into SL.

Also, for you clothing and jewelry makers, I dropped a mess of different tiled/colored leather textures on one of the vendors.

Hopefully tonight is going to see me revamping the vendors for a more user freidnly interface.  We shall see.  Supposedly you can unlink them and mod them easily, re link them and they work just fine.  I have my doubts as the creator of the vendor has not answered IM, notecard or PM on SLX.

Added some things to the ‘ol vendor

Ok this is 1 of 6 types of leather I added to the vendor. Not only are there 6 different types but at least 5 color variations of each one.

This is one of the several new panels added to the sci fi set, suitable for floors, doors, walls and ceilings.

There is a tiny change to the shop for anyone who has been there before. It turns out the neighbor has all the social ability of a 12 year old so I turned the shop around to face the other direction. I haven’t updated the LM yet people are popping up near the dumpster in what is now the back of the shop.

mediocrity

Much building goodness was had by all this weekend.  Ella created this wicked cool little chain mail necklace deal (she is learning to make jewelry) and I managed to make one cottage which looks awesome but the roof line is killing me.  I took that back into my inventory till I could figure out a way to finish it off.  The only purpose the cottage served really was to test the texture set I was building for Ella in the first place.

 

Built a second cottage according to plans drawn up from a great little series of kids books.  The Usborne Cut and Create series is wicked fun and I have saved about a dozen or so over the years.  They are not architecturally correct or anything but they give a good spatial relation and let you keep your scale in check.  Granted I need to figure out door scripting and window privacy things and I want to include a radio tuner with the house as well as some basic lighting.  The main point of course being to build texture sets for the damn thing.

 

Business is good.  I finished a contract job last night and was paid last night.  Offered another contract job I need to respond to tonight.  If I started working nights I could probably realize greater profits as right now I tend to do contract work only on the weekends.

 

Still looking for a good horror project to get involved with.  My favorite fantasy RP sim did some rebuilding and the town is major boring now.  Every building looks exactly like every other building.  All the same textures were used on the buildings.  I may have to build a small fantasy RP town worth of buildings to illustrate how things could look with a little more variety.

Nothing terribly interesting

I seem to have picked up a squatter camper employee.  I don’t know how he does it but he runs through the entire allotted 40min, leaves the sim, pops back in and take up his position again.  I don’t think he at the key board but I don’t know if there are bots that do that stuff so it’s a little weird.  The dude could be in a different time zone too, who knows.  In any event, I decided to not run the camping spot while I am at work.  Ella spends the bulk of the day in the shop anyway.

 

I did manage to make my shop more searchable on the places search as well.  For some reason it hadn’t updated the land description so essentially it wasn’t popping up in the place search.  I am hoping for a lot more hits today.

 

Built this crazy little set of textures essentially at Ella’s request and I built a little shack with ‘em.  I really do like my own texture work.  Dunno if that is conceited but it is true.  I think I need to start varying the stuff o have got, building on the themes and creating more interesting variations.

 

In RL news, what happens when you meet a really interesting couple one of whom is so vastly intense that you can’t have a 15 min conversation without a little drama? The answer?  Nothing.  Unfortunate but true.

Land is Cheap

Ok, so all the hub bub in my brain seems to be revolving around land for my store/s.  Near the start of the weekend, which for me was Thursday evening since I took Friday off, I had a message from a fellow on the SLX regarding a post I had put in the want ads.  Basically I just expressed my desire to find a plot with a higher then normal prim allowance.  Granted I have since realized I am going to have to bite the bullet and just get a larger plot to get the number of prims I want.  I had no idea that giving one parcel a higher prim allowance was such a pain in the ass.  But I digress. 

 

So this fellow answers my message offering services as a marketer.  I didn’t laugh out loud nor respond in a flippant manner.  I was polite and gave a brief run down of my own marketing endeavors as an SL business owner.  I did not go into detail as I felt it would not benefit me to give someone else the answers that I had to look up.  Not only did I not here from the guy again but he got lambasted in the forums for offering a marketing/investment plan which just won’t fly in SL.

 

Ya see the thing is this; I work in marketing for a fairly successful small bank in CA.  It took me about two hours of reading to realize that a fairly small percentage of my day to day job duties were going to work in SL.  So I turned to the ever amazing, all mighty inter-webs.  Developed a brief marketing strategy based on tips given by a couple of fairly successful SL business types and the advice of a friend who is also a marketing specialist.  Not only is this guy trying to sell a pig in a poke, but he is pushing what is essentially a re-sell service.  From all that I read and from talking to people, re-sell doesn’t even pay tier 99% of the time.  However, it is a good scam to get traffic in the store, I am certain.  If you put a re-sell tattoo vendor in there then you can list tats on your classified.  Ok, 2 points for quick thinking but minus several million for style and ethics right?

 

Another person also contacted me about a parcel which at first sounded like exactly what I wanted.  When I checked the location, it blew giant space goats.  It looked like a yard sale with a mini-mall in the center of it.  I immediately asked Ella if it was wrong of me to desire a space with some taste built in.  I mean is a little cohesion too much to ask?  I have my eye on a couple of spots for mini-stores, or specialty shops and I will develop those if the spaces are still available when I get that far.  But those spots have building covenants and look good even if some are a little cheesy.  Does this make sense?  My shop has a traffic average of like 225.  The average for this spot was just a little over 400.  I really want to find a space where the area already has decent traffic of its own and is generally interesting in it’s own right.

 

So there is that.  Why, you may well ask, am I out wandering around looking for a new space for the store?  My building is 70 prims or so.  My vendor is 25 prims.  I just finished 2 sets of windows and dropped a second vendor.  There is 120 prims right there.  Add some decoration, the building foundation my camping spot and my dumpster (yes the diving sort) and I devoured my prim allowance.  So I talked it over with Ella and we agree that moving the store and getting a higher prim allowance is a groovy idea.  In an ideal world we will rent space on Orkney.  It is clean, low lag and tasteful and my virtual home is about a whisker away from the shopping area.  In an groovy world I will find a reasonable set up in a sim with a nice grungy dark horror theme.  Granted the two massive window sets I just added to my product line are pretty clean looking, my overall line is made up of more gritty materials.  So there you go, that is where my SL brain has been the last few days.

From yesterday

So I log into gmail this morning to get my visitors report for my store and said I had 3 people stop by. Neat so I pop over to second life dot com and check my transactions to see if anyone bought anything. Holy hell, I’m 3k closer to being in the black. Someone bought three entire sets and a few of the singles.

So that being an awesome way to start the day, I am going to be working on sets of windows and doors. Mostly pseudo modern to go with the factory style brick and stone construction textures I have the most of on the vendor. Someone asked for a garage door as well. I will not eschew the fantasy and medieval stuff, never fear. Also, look for some sci fi additions.

Along those same lines, Ella and I just happened to meet a groovy person setting up a new shopping area that is chock full of artsy goodness. 15 min into conversation and she offers to let us place a vendor and a LM giver in a little shop in her mini mall. Fucking cool as I have been meaning to start doing this. So now I have my first satellite store. I totally don’t have the LM at hand since I am at the day job right now but I will update that ASAP so all of you groovy cats can go check out the little artsy area.

Used the loft . . .

Ok so I have been hesitant to really lay down foundations for my store since the landlord told me the land will be in total flux.  The downside is I may have to move a bunch of stuff around, I may lose my prim count and I need to look for a better deal on land.  The up side is that the land is being moved around to make room for the SLovecraft sim exhibit.

 

So last night I was looking at my set up and after wandering around many sims recently I decided to polish my look a little more.  For those who liked my little shack like shop no worries I still have it in inventory and I may revamp it and drop it else where on a small plot as a satellite store.  I took the loft I had bought as an SL home and dropped that on my lot.  Move the décor into the garage as well as the vendor.  It looks good.  Needs a little more decoration and a desk for Ella to kick back at when she is there.

 

That is another interesting development.  Ella and I are an SL item.  Once more the emotional connectivity achieved in a virtual environment boggles my mind a little still but over the last few months she has become a pretty close friend and in the light of the separation in the D/s aspect of my SL I realized that I had not seen something that was in front of me.

 

So I am also working on some freebies as a give away for single prim vendor/ads to be placed around SL.  The plan is for the prim to give a freebie, a note card and an LM to the main store.  Once I get that done I will also revamp my little curiosity shop in Ithilien, which may be come the first outlet of yet another project.  One of the reasons for dragging out the loft building for the store is that I can turn the up stairs into a wooy wooy store.  For those who do not speak my crazy moon language, a wooy wooy store is a place to buy occult/new age goods.  Being Wiccan, I took a look around SL for good SL stuff relating to Wicca and the occult in general.  I can honestly say there are only 3 or 4 decent shops and only 2 really good shops that offer quality SL merchandise for this arena.

 

One of those shops is run by one of my favorite illustrators, Robin Wood.  I love that one of my favorite artists has such a strong presence in the 3D community and in SL.  So I want to start creating a line of educational and decorative Wicca/Occult related things to sell in SL.  The difference being that I want to offer totally original items.  I’m not going to offer posters made from images grabbed from the net, nor pass off existing freebies with a new coat of paint.  I also hope to offer something for everyone’s occult interests.

still friends

and that makes me truly happy.