Otherworldly

Because August flew by so quickly between various trips, I did not manage to make more than one post for Enchantment’s King Arthur round. However, I do have more things to show you, you will just have to hunt them down in the various mainstores now. That is always a good reason to have a browse around other releases from those brand—with everything being so event-focused, that gets done far too rarely these days. This post isn’t just about Enchantment, however, as I also have a couple of brand-new releases from the Dreaming Thicket and Adam n Eve, the latter for the round of We Love Role-Play that just opened.

I could not think of where to photo the lovely Midsummer outfit from deviousMind. It deserved some place magical and fanciful and I did not have the energy to put something like that together right now. And then Searlait Nitschke announced that she was done with her rebuild of the Roawenwood sim. It sounded fantastic from her description and once I got there, it did not disappoint. It is like a permanent Fantasy Faire sim, with plenty of beautiful spots to discover, and I found just what I needed to photo the elaborate Midsummer gacha where swarms of butterflies cover up the essentials and carry ribbons of fabric and an elaborate bustle that further add to the outfit. It is available at Whimsical which is open until the 12th of September.

It is the first of September already and it feels like August went by entirely too quickly. The Hair Fair certainly did! It ends today and I have not had any time at all to blog it until now. Though, I did think it felt a bit smaller and had far fewer styles on offer than previous years. Event fatigue, the increasing complexity of hair or something else?

The hair in this post is from Wasabi, who did two styles for the fair, though both come with multiple options. The one I am showing here, Venere, has a regular option (shown in the first picture) and a windblown option (shown in the second picture—just imagine a fan off to the side!). These two options are actually separate hairs rather than HUD-controlled, but HUDs for sizing are still provided.

This started as an entry for Enchantment’s photo contest for their King Arthur-inspired round. Together with the Homeric epics, the Arthurian legends were among the first stories I fell in love with in the form of retellings for children and the wonderful Classics Illustrated before I got to the “real” versions of the legends—which of course with the Matter of Britain is a very nebulous thing given how many different versions there are! In any case, of course I had to attempt an entry for the contest given my love for the legend, it was just a matter of picking ONE favourite scene/element. Fortunately, it also had to be one that could be portrayed in SL, which narrowed the field somewhat. In the end, I settled for Arthur’s body being taken away to Avalon. Yes, there should be three queens—I guess the other two are hiding in the back (or front, rather)—and Excalibur is generally back with the Lady of the Lake rather than in Morgan le Fay’s hands, but we are allowed some liberties and personal tweaks. Like I said, there are so many versions anyway.

I am taking a brief break from packing for our trip to the WorldCon in Dublin and I couldn’t resist putting together a little scene with the vintage kyodai gacha from kisetsu for the Gacha Garden. At first, I couldn’t think of an outfit that would work with the poses, but then I decided that the only outfit needed were these pretty thigh highs from Luxuria.

The latest release from Dutchie is a wooden stage, made to fit in a corner, with a vintage-style rig with lights. The stage and the lights are separate pieces, so you can adjust how high above the lights sit or even use the stage or the lights on their own. There are several colour presets for the lights via a menu and it is also possible to set each light to a separate preset or even to go in and make manual edits. That opens up a lot of options for how the lights look as long as you are comfortable with a bit of editing. Instructions are included in the information notecard.

Butterflies are growing rarer in real life, but in Second Life they seem to be thriving. This beautiful, whimsical outfit is another creation from the talented Chandra Meehan of deviousMind. I love how the black outlines create something of a line-drawing effect, which looks really interesting in the light I picked for these shots. To go with the outfit, I picked up a brand-new hair from Analog Dog, an updo featuring the brand’s fabulous curls. After the latest update, there is now a mix pack available, which I really like! The hair also comes with a few style options, making the bangs as well as the pony tail optional.

To take in that beautiful evening sun, I am heading out to sea on Neptune’s Revenge by Rustica and wearing the brand-new Sola set from Adam n Eve for the Gacha Garden. Isn’t it pretty with the beaded strings on the top and the panty as well as the cute little sarong tied off to one side? The Sola gacha includes 10 commons (3 footbead sets, 4 sarongs, 3 slushies with holding animation), 5 uncommons (1 pair of sunglasses with steel rims, 4 bikini sets), 4 rares (colour-coordinated fatpacks that include footbeads, sarong, bikini and sunglasses with gold rims) and finally an ultrarare that includes everything plus the sunglasses with rose-gold rims. The Seed of Inspiration is a matching beaded bracelet. The available fits are Maitreya Lara and Slink Hourglass.

Nephilaine of the Muses has been on fire lately, releasing a string of fantasy/roleplay outfits, some for women and quite a few for men! She sent me a selection of these and of course I had to tell Ran to pick some up as well, so that we could do a photo together and show off a pair of the new releases. Since I don’t have a separate male alt, that meant changing myself into ManFreyja, which is always a bit weird since I’ve just got a female AO. ;) I am not sure what I dislike the most, standing around with the female AO on when I am dressed as a male or standing around with the AO off and looking like a noob. That may actually be more painful.

Anyway, back to business of showing off these outfits! We headed off to our tavern by Fanatik to play some nice, in the form of a working dice game by the Dreaming Thicket.

After a bit of a break during the summer, it is time for a new vlog, this time to show off the fully furnished version of Dutchie’s New Amsterdam houseboat. This is a fantastic creation, inspired by an actual houseboat created in 1900 and still in use today. The houseboat is a full-featured house with bathroom, kitchen, living room and bedroom and the furnished version comes with a great collection of mid-century furnishings made to fit within the houseboat. But of course, if you get the furnished version, you can also use the furnishings in other houses as well. If you would rather have just the unfurnished houseboat, that is available too.

In the video below, I show a walk-through of the houseboat, fully setup with the furniture package. I have also included eight photos of different parts of the interior, to give a sense of both the style of the furnishings and of how much actually fits into the houseboat. It really is a full-fledged house! At the end, I have credits for what I am wearing during this video.

Its amazing how busy you can be kept by a vacation and by the transition back to normal life after a vacation. The last week has just disappeared in a blur and there hasn’t been much time left for a Second Life. At least the insane heat has disappeared for a bit, so today I was actually able to sit at the computer for a while without melting. The result were some boudoir-style photos of the latest Voluptas Virtualis release together with a brand-new Wasabi hair, a tattoo from Fallen Gods and poses from Serendipity.

I do love animesh critters and I was absolutely thrilled when I managed to win two of the rares from Jian’s Warrior Wolves gacha for the Epiphany. One of them, the animesh companion wolf, is featured in this post and you’ll probably see the wolf mount soon as well. And I may have to go back to try and win the wandering animesh wolf too, it’d be fantastic together with my Teeglepet horses. But I can’t imagine I’d be that lucky! I absolutely love how well these animesh wolves move and of course how good they look.

To show off the giant wolf I decided to make use of the Pinnacles from Spyralle for La vie en pose, the first set of air platforms for photography with an uncluttered background where you mainly want to show off the environment settings. Myself I dressed in a brand new gown from Faida for a brand new event, Spellbound. Spellbound, run by Juno Mantel of Junbug, features a very nice selection of creators and a magical/fantastical feel just as the name suggests. The Fate gown is sleek and elegant, with the belt being the perfect accent to the clean lines of the gown.

The latest set from the Plastik is called the Valin Fantasy Kini, which of course called for a beachy setting yet again. However, the set also has a bit of a eastern fantasy vibe, so I decided to setup a little Arabian Nights-inspired shelter made from a few different Paper Moon releases to give it the right surroundings. I quite like how it turned out, I need to experiment further with using the fabric fences and market stalls for another photo idea I have.

This post also features a new hair from Wasabi (from the Epiphany, just like the set from the Plastik) and more poses from La vie en pose.

In my previous post, I mentioned having picked up the latest makeup release from Alaskametro, Summer Beauty. In this post, you’ll see a gradual addition of makeup from that set, matching a few of the animations available in Dutchie’s fantastic mid-century vanity. This stylish piece is such fun, with an excellent selection of animations. I had no idea there were so many animations for putting on makeup and brushing your hair available, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised when there are lifestyle/roleplay animations of so many other kinds available. I would have loved to do a video as well, but that doesn’t quite work when we’re not at home. As it is, I am really pleased with the photos, though I could easily have added twice as many because there were so many nice animations to pick from.

I may have managed to setup a lot of pretty photo locations on our own sim, but a proper beach is definitely still lacking. And the gorgeous Aegean Halter by Paper Moon for We Love Role-Play simply had to be shown in an appropriate location. So, I headed off to check out one of the recent releases from Studio Skye—the Pebble Beach building set—at one of their showcase sims, Skye Neist Point. It turned out to be the perfect place to show off the halter as well as some beachy poses from Ecru for La vie en pose.