Billy Beaverhausen
What's this? What's happening? What's going on?
David’s Renaissance
When I first tested the NX-Nardcotix “David” mesh body I wasn’t quite sold on it. Partly it was the rushed marketing that rubbed me the wrong way. I couldn’t understand why a brand which already had lingerie for female avatars in their product range, hadn’t come up with a nice pair of undies to go with the release of their new male mesh body. While I appreciated the overall look of the body, I was also slightly disappointed that this was yet another mesh body without its own head. SL is so Sleepy Hollow!
Not long after the launch, NX-Nardcotix showcased the next release of David at Men Only Monthly and lo and behold, this time a nice pair of black swim trunks were thrown in to sweeten the deal. Also encouraging was the skin applier made for this body by VYC shown at MOM at the same time. For my personal taste the Catwa applier from VYC that matches this skin, is a little bit to slick and chiselled. I prefer something friendlier looking for every-day use, but from a creative point of view it’s a good thing to step out of that particular comfort zone.
This brings me to one of my pet peeves that is part and parcel of using a mesh body in SL: the neck seam. If you are already using a Catwa head, then you know that it has its own set of neck fixes for several brands of mesh bodies, but not yet for NX-Nardcotix. The body does come with its own neck fix which goes a long way to blur that very sharp seam, but this solution is far from perfect. Viewed from some angles, it visibly stands away from the body, because that is how these things work. From time to time it will appear as if you are wearing a collar, whenever you land at a sim with a particular windlight that makes the neck fix stand out instead of blend in. I also looked at this body in combination with my system head and found that using the neck tattoo that should have been matching, did not work at all. You will be better off using the neck fix even in that situation.
But enough with the negativity! Let us focus on the overall well defined musculature of this body and the wrists, knees and ankles which were clearly created with an eye for detail. The pectorals can be made large without becoming droopy and the shoulders are nicely rounded. Those of you that appreciate an ample posterior will be pleased to find that this body more than provides that. As a matter of fact, the derriere was toned down a little bit in the latest version because with the first one I demoed, I could have given any of the Kardashian girls a run for their money. With the butt size on 100%, my ass would have arrived at a sim 5 minutes later than the rest of me. Well I suppose that would have made it fashionably late.
Speaking of being fashionable, let us look at the wardrobe options for this body. If you have read my previous post about July’s Men Only Monthly, you will know that this body made the shopping experience rather challenging. But I went through my inventory and found some things that work.
Left: This knitted cardigan with leather collar by Gild rather tones down the muscular arms of my shape but doesn’t leave them looking entirely scrawny. It is well worth this small sacrifice in my opinion. The jeans by Body Factory featured at Men Only Monthly, are a near perfect fit and of course putting on Deadwool’s “Chase” sneakers was no problem at all, because I can simply hide my feet completely with the alpha hud.
Right: This oversized high collar coat by Gabriel is still available as a gift if you wear the L’Homme Magazine group tag and if you have a look around in the store you’ll find a black version of it available for sale. I’ve pared it with jeans by L&B Swear and boots from a gacha also at Gabriel.
Left: These dark khaki chinos from Gabriel slim my legs down somewhat (I guess I have been skipping legs-day at the gym), but the effect isn’t too severe. They go well with the very sharp looking “sneakers” from David Heather.
Right: It took some serious compromising of my shape to make this t-shirt and shorts combination from Deadwool work, because even though these two items were made to be worn together, if your butt is too big, the shorts’ fabric will poke through the hem of the t-shirt. I’m wearing the “Two-Plat” Sneakers from Semler in Signature size, which work fine with the feet alphad out.
Left: The Deadwool Peak Suit works very nicely with this body (and the Catwa head). Obviously most of your body will be alphad out when you wear a suit like this, but it is still a small blessing that my neck isn’t poking through the shirt collar. As this suit grows and shrinks with your body size, you can always increase the muscle mass to make your arms look more impressive once they’ve been hidden by the sleeves. The shoes are from Deadwool as well and work fine as long as you wear them with socks to bridge the gap where your ankle should be.
Right: This is what happens when you’ve been hanging out at home all day in just your L&B Swear jeans and make the last-minute decision to head out and grab your tweed vest and jacked from Hoorenbeek cause all your shirts are dirty. With the impressive collection of Deadwool’s “Chase” sneakers (well okay it’s a hud) you’ll always have a pair that matches your spontaneous outfits.
When it comes to underwear there isn’t what I would call an embarrassment of riches. There is very little room for error with these things so they pretty much need to be rigged for each specific body and none of the underwear creators seem to have picked up David yet. You can try altering your shape till something fits if you are willing to make that compromise. Another route you can take is to find unrigged mesh items which you then can move and stretch into place. Here are some examples of what you can use to keep David’s eggs in a basket to speak.
Left: A very daring colourful thong from Mat Kungler Atelier with tons of texture options and a somewhat mind boggling hud. This one is unrigged so I pulled and stretched till it fitted.
Middle: A modest pair of classic boxers with a little cat paw pattern from Vitamen which I was able to squeeze into with some shape alterations.
Right: A simple but fun pair of briefs by Baxter Colman, unrigged so you can freely resize and move them till they fit. If there would be more underwear available for this body, this one probably wouldn’t make the cut, but for now it’ll do.
A kinkier option is this sexy little unrigged number by Mat Kungler Atelier, with an exposed schlong and of course an explosion of textures and options. With the same hud that allows you to change the texture, you can also hide the penis which is actually included with this jock, but that just leaves an awkward gap. If you don’t like the included appendage, you can get creative with your own wiener, as I have done here. I would recommend you take a copy of your pecker first or you may find yourself perpetually pissing in your pretty face. You can make it a little more tame by wrapping a hoodie around your waist, which is also available at Mat Kungler Atelier.
That’s it for now with “David”, but I do have the vague intention to maybe try out some different skins at a later date. You can find some more technical information about the body on NX-Nardcotix website.
Men Only Monthly – July Round
It’s raining men – and women too for that matter – at the start of theJuly round of Men Only Monthly, which commenced the 21th July and will end on August 15th, giving those hard working creators an organisers some days to regroup, reset and reinvent so it can start all over again on the 21th of August. MOM showcases 46 items exclusive to the event, but don’t worry too much if you haven’t managed to drag your tardy ass over to the Men Only District before this round closes, because in most cases if not all, the items will eventually end up at the creators’ own shops anyway. As is the case with many of these events, the first couple of days the lag is so dense it often feels like you’re wading through a lake of custard (yum!) but for once I wanted to be somewhat timely so I pushed on.
Not one to easily cower away from a little challenge in SL, I thought it would be fun to go shopping with the NX-Nardcotix “David” mesh body, wearing nothing but his little swim trunks. This body doesn’t seem to gain much momentum and judging by what I tried on at MOM, clothing options are still limited at the moment. Most cute tank tops were a big no-no, tight fitting t-shirts a no-go, and I started thinking I should not have come so-lo. In the end I settled on a muscle tank top by Etham which was the only brand that had a specific size for the NX-Nardcotix body.
After taking a closer look at everything and trying out many of the pieces, I finally found a pair of faded black jeans (really? I needed another pair of jeans?) by Body Factory that fitted snugly after some minor shape tweaking. A pose from K&S Creations, also available at MOM, made it easier to show the jeans off. Finally, to finish off this simple shirtless look I didn’t have to dig very deep in my inventory to find the pair of “Chaise” sneakers from Deadwool. There was a minimal clipping with the jeans, but not enough to be a deal breaker.
I will most probably return with one my other bodies before this round of MOM has ended, but for now I’m out off here to store everything neatly in my inventory and be really busy doing tons of stuff.
Life’s too short(s)
If you scroll further down the page or jump straight down, you will see the post in which I introduced the free TMP mesh body. Okay, “introduced” probably isn’t the right word, seeing how it has been around for a while now. On the other hand, I did get more than one reaction from people who weren’t aware you could achieve that look without paying full price for a mesh body. Here’s a little follow up to show some shorts and shirtless options, because it’s summer where I live and though nobody told the weather gods about it, I know that a bad summer passes almost as fast as a good one. Carpe diem and show off the goods.
Left: running shorts by Noche (L$300). Right: knee length shorts by TMP (L$325).
Left: running shorts by Dufaux @ Fameshed (L$250). Right: sport shorts by [SM]art (L$249). Free flip flops from Dufaux worn in all four pictures.
When it comes to shorts all of the creators shown here manage to rig them in such a way that no alpha is needed. Apart from with TMP’s own shorts you might see the occasional bit of cheeky skin poke through the fabric when you’re for example shaking your booty at a hot beach party, but they look fine most of the time. When it comes to a shirtless look with jeans, (baggy) trousers or sweatpants, your choices are limited to TMP items as shown below.
Left: coloured jeans by TMP (L$395), sneakers by Deadwool (L$300 for single colour version, L$2190 for fatpack version).
Right: faded pink sweatpants by TMP (L$300), sneakers by Valekoer (group gift)
Left: Very cheeky low-riding baggy trousers by TMP (L$475), studded denim sneakers (L$475) by TMP. Oh, and you get a pulled up version with those trousers too, in case you’re worried about catching a cold or something.
Right: classic pair of blue jeans by TMP (L$300), cropped tank top by Eximia (L$250), technically you’re not entirely shirtless with this one, but there isn’t a whole lot of fabric to it and it’s one of the few non-TMP items you can wear with this free mesh body.
Conclusion Okay so you won’t always be the it-boy of the crowd, but at least you’ll be well put together and after all that hard work in the gym (with those sliders) you want to show off that chest!
Beached Bunny Hunt
Evil Bunny Productions launched a hunt on 3 July and it’s one of those things I’m finally getting round to about two weeks later. The good news is that we have until 31 July to finish it. I think it’s the first time that I have come across a hunt that uses a story line but isn’t part of some game. Apparently this bunny has been eating one too many Easter peeps and got his big butt stuck in the sand. It’s up to us to dig him out, which sounds very unlikely because rabbits are excellent diggers, even the fat ones. To help him escape his sandy trap, and prevent a bad sunburn, we need to collect all of the buckets. There are 71 stops and you can find the hints and slurls on Evil Bunny’s blog.
The list with slurls could do with another proofreading, because several of the links point to the same location as the one above it. There’s also an accidental link to a Marketplace shop and one link is dead altogether. On the positive site, the buckets weren’t hard to find. Here’s the loot I will be keeping, or at least haven’t trashed immediately after unpacking. To create some order in my chaos, the numbering I’m using below corresponds with the Evil Bunny blog.
49. Beach lounger, umbrella, side table and ice bucket with beer bottles by Kitty Creations. These probably weren’t made with the sharpest tools in the box, but I’ve seen worse.
50. Blue eyes (system and mesh versions) from Inkheart.
52. Pose with pig and phone from Frimon Store, which was marked as a female product.
63. Applier boxer shorts (Belleza, Slink and Omega) in five patters from Firelight Creations & MAN STUFF. I don’t really like applier clothing, but I might use these boxer shorts in combination with low rider jeans, especially for photography.
55. Voley ball pose from Defiant Pixels
41. White boxer shorts with black print on one leg and cheeky lipstick marks on the crotch by GL.
11. Beach hut texture (pack of 12) from Virtual Textures.
22. Drift wood sign “Seas the day” from The Artist Shed.
That’s all folks! I skipped plenty of stores because I haven’t got the bosoms to fill out a dress and trashed some of the items I collected because they just weren’t shouting “keep me” loud enough.
The underwear model
If you are familiar with mesh bodies, than this post probably won’t be very interesting to you, but for anybody who’s been reluctant about meshing-up or anybody who’s still quite new to Second Life, I hope it will be informative. Those of you that wanted to know more about the TMP male mesh body are particularly in luck, because this happens to be the main subject of this post. For the rest of you, I’ll try to keep it mildly entertaining. There’s nudity and oh, the mesh body discussed is FREE!
After I made it through the SL boot camp I soon discovered how to edit my shape and started having a lot of fun moving those sliders about, attempting to create something pleasing to the eye. Oh, and I did manage to get a nice tallywacker on day two, cause ain’t nobody got time for being a Ken doll.
But you know how it goes, things always look fine till you are confronted with a much better version of them. I started wondering why some of the bodies looked so damn smooth. I mean, they could be bears, cubs, otters, seals – that last one probably isn’t officially acknowledged as a term to refer to a hairy man – but their “lines” were so smooth even Nigel Lythgoe would be all of a flutter. They didn’t have those jagged edges around the joints and curves I was seeing on my own avi. Buying a nicer skin improved things, but it still didn’t smooth me out. I wondered for some days if perhaps I simply hadn’t figured out yet how to achieve that smooth finish and if there was a special trick to creating your shape that was eluding me. This notion quickly got dispelled when someone introduced me to mesh bodies. It turned out that the only way to get that smooth look was by covering up your so called system body with a sharper mesh body. Shortly thereafter I discovered the FREE male mesh body from The Mesh Project, a.k.a. TMP.
TMP named their store The Shops and as long as I have known it, the place has always been an austere white box high in the sky. It’s important to accept the shopping hud you are offered when you arrive at The Shops, because you will need it as soon as you want to get anything at this place, including the free body. At this point you also receive the styling hud, which you will use later for choosing a skin tone and for styling any TMP clothing you may decide to get. With this we have arrived at the rather big negative side about this free body. If you have been wearing system applier clothes, meaning anything that is “painted” on your skin, you can kiss those goodbye. You need to wear mesh clothes with this body and as most of you will already know, when you are wearing a mesh sweater for example, you usually need to wear an alpha layer which blanks out the parts of your body that are covered by this sweater and prevents skin from poking trough the fabric. These alpha layers don’t work on mesh bodies, instead mesh bodies come with a hud that allows you to hide parts of the body. Sadly, and probably understandably, this is something you don’t get with the free body. As a matter of fact, you only get it with the most expensive version of the TMP body. Oh and if you like tattoos, forget about it! The situation isn’t completely hopeless though and I will show you some clothing options later on, but I wanted to mention this before I got you all excited about the look of this body, to prevent the whole “NOW a warning?” situation from Death Becomes Her.
The first thing you need to do is hide your system body. The package with the free TMP body includes three alphas. There is one that will hide your body, hands and feet, which I will be using now and there is another one that also covers your head in case you want to use a mesh head with this body. The third alpha even hides your system eyes, so there is nothing left of you. This one you would use if you chose to wear mesh eyes as well. Simply right-click and “add” the Body/Hands/Feet alpha and you will become a floating head, which can be an interesting look.
Next you right-click the Body, Feet and Hands and add them. It is important to add these items and not “wear” them, because often when you click the wear button for one of them, you will knock off another one. You could be there for ages! At this point you may notice that the shape you liked for your system body will not work very well with this mesh body and even if it doesn’t look weird, it might not be to your liking. Don’t worry though, you can use the shape editor exactly as you did with your system body. The mesh body will react differently to your input, but you will still have plenty of customisation capability. I advise you make a copy of the shape you have been using before you start working on it, that way you can easily return to your former self.
The body will be a greyish white at first and there will be a pink banner circling around it. This is where the styling hud comes in. As mentioned before, you will have received this hud together with the shopping hud. Simply right-click and add “StyleMode” to make it appear in the right bottom corner of your screen. It will be a button that says “Click to begin”, which then opens up as three icons at the bottom of your screen. Next you intuitively click on the icon that shows the body to open up a larger section of the hud. In that screen you will click on “STYLES” to finally get where you need to be. You can now click on the circle that says “Skintone”, to get an overview of 36 dots representing the available skin tones. Chose one that is closest to the skin tone of your head by clicking the dot. Next you will be given the option to chose a skin style, but as this is the free body, you will only have one style available, which is a kind of athletic swimmers body. You click that image to apply the skin to your body.
Next you will be fixing your neck. Make sure your body fat is at 0% because otherwise you’ll have a gap. This would probably kill you in real life, but if you want realism go sweat at some community gym and leave me alone! If the neck of the mesh body isn’t flush with your system neck, you need to click on “MODIFY” and then on “Retrofit” and you will see that it will snap into place rather satisfyingly.
It’s starting to look good but we’re not quite there yet. Go look in the TMP folder in your inventory again and you will see that there is an object named “Optional Retrofit Neckfaders”. Right-click-add this, accept the automatic unpacking and detach again. Then go look for the folder with the neck faders and perhaps you can drag it into the TMP folder to keep your inventory nice and tidy, you messy little so and so. Yes I’m talking to you! If you want to claim back some of your screen space, you can click the StyleMode button in the bottom right corner of your screen again to minimise the hud. Look for the neck fader that matches the number of the skin tone you are using and right-click-add it. Give it a second to appear and you will notice that the sharp neck seam has been nicely faded in.
After that, if you wish to be anatomically correct, you can look around for a freebie penis but so far I haven’t seen any of those that didn’t look ever so slightly diseased. If you are more particular about your bits and bobs you will want to go to a store like Aeros, which is where I got my “Magnus” penis (oh, is he Swedish?) which will set you back 1500 L$. The skin I am using, of which now of course only the face is visible, is Rufus in the Highlands tone by Birth (1000 L$). In the next picture I’m wearing the free group gift hair “Minato” from Argrace which comes in a generous 34 shades. I’d say the complete package is looking pretty damn fine for 2500 L$.
Now for some clothing options. TMP generously supplies you with a pair of basic boxer shorts and as soon as you put these on you will see them appear as an icon in the StyleMode hud. Just as with the body, you click on this icon, then click on “STYLES” and next you will see options for the fabric and button. You’ll also find that there are a lot of underwear and swimwear creators making items for the TMP body which you will be able to wear without any of your skin poking through. Some examples of these are Noche, 4BIDDEN, Dufaux and Mat Kungler Atelier to name but(t) a few.
You can also head back to The Shops for some retail therapy. TMP’s own range of clothes is rather limited and somewhat pricey, but it has built-in alphas which means the clothing will automatically hide the part of your body it covers so you can even wear these items with the free body. You get the mesh clothing for free but they charge you for the texturing. This means that you will for example pay for each individual colour of jeans you would like to get. For some items, like their studded sneakers, you can pay separately for various parts of the shoes, giving you the option to mix and match. Once you have purchased a texture it will be added to your StyleMode hud so you can apply it to your clothing. Let’s look at some TMP outfits and prices.
- ombre sweatshirt L$325, classic jeans L$425, black studded canvas sneakers L$400
- blue tank top L$250, grey sweatpants L$300, white leather and gold studded sneakers L$550
- red t-shirt L$250, dark blue leather baggy pants L$475, union jack studded canvas sneakers L$400
Keep in mind that if most of your body is going to be covered up with an outfit, you don’t really need the mesh body at that moment. Just because you have one in your inventory, it doesn’t mean you need to wear it at all times. A popular option is to combine the system body with the much appreciated mesh hands and feet from Slink instead of going for a full mesh body. You saw earlier that the TMP body comes with separate mesh hands and feet too, but these were not designed to wear without the mesh body. However, if you are going to be wearing long sleeves and trousers, you can try using the alphas of gloves and shoes to hide your system hands and feet and use the TMP hands and feet that way. Below are some examples of that and none of the clothes shown here are from TMP.
In conclusion, the free TMP male mesh body is ideal for anybody who plans to spend a lot of their time in Second Life on nude beaches or hanging about the house in their underwear. The body has not yet been updated to work with the bento skeleton so your hands will not move and there is also no clear indication that it will be updated very soon. Having said that, anybody who likes to carry some junk in da trunk will enjoy this body’s nice round butt and while the TMP clothing line is expensive, it does look good and the last pictures clearly show that you also can get some good use out of the hands and feet if the rest of you is mostly covered up.
Arguing with myself… among others
I have abandoned the A-frame Linden Home I was occupying with my alt and started the game of picking a new Linden Home, checking it out and dropping it again, when I feel the area is too crowded. This is something I can repeat up to five times within 24 hours till I have found something that satisfies me. Alternatively, I’m contemplating to get a dirt cheap 512 sqm plot of mainland and rez a skybox very high up which I would use to create a constantly changing living space.
As all of the furniture came from my inventory, me, myself and I, meaning Billy, emptied the house. Later on this had the somewhat forlorn looking effect of my alt standing in an empty house, ready to give it up.
Billy: Oy Wyatt! Pull up your pants
Wyatt: Look who’s talking?
Billy: Why sir, whatever might you mean by that
Wyatt: Ha! Don’t you try the butter-wouldn’t-melt approach with me, I know you too well.
All of the houses I looked at were less attractively situated than the one I had before, so naturally I reached my daily quota quit quickly. At one of the houses there was someone standing around and as they made no immediate effort to say hi, I thought I’d take advantage of the situation to see what happens to someone when you turn on the security measures. I have been at the receiving end of that experience but never witnessed if something physically funny happens to someone who’s yanked away from a house. Sure enough I saw the poor lass being pulled from the house and smacked down on the ground just a few yards away between the other houses. After that I couldn’t blame her for not being forthcoming to start a conversation, so I made the effort myself.
Wyatt: So that’s what happens when I activate the privacy settings while someone is standing in the house. That sure sent you flying out of here. The landing looked a bit rough too. SL can be so rude 🙂 And now I’m abandoning this house again, cause it’s not quite right. You’ll be able to walk back in.
Resident X: wow and it’s people like you that makes people think sl sucks.
Wyatt: Naaah, that’s what the trolls and begging bots are for and even with those I still don’t think it sucks. I’m enjoying it for most of the time. I admit it was a wee bit rude, but I’m also honest enough to say that it was kinda funny to see you fly off like that.
Resident X: smh childish.
Wyatt: That must be the childish side of my sense of humour that sometimes likes things like America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Resident X: damn Americans
Wyatt: There, I was in the middle of admitting that it was indeed childish before I could finish. Damn assuming people. I’m not American.
Resident X: no am I. I figured you had to be American or from UK. lol.
Wyatt: Neither.
Resident X: well I know your not Canadian.
Wyatt: Technically that would have made me American.
Resident X: pffft nope.
Wyatt: It’s a continent not a country. Mexicans are American too.
Resident X: pfft nope.
Wyatt: So there’s no such thing as European?
And that’s where the conversation stopped, I got no further reply and I don’t go off in a ranting monologue… but I do argue with my alt? I’m such a weirdo. It’s a pity, cause I thought we could have become besties.
Masters Of Style Hunt 2017
The Masters of Style Hunt is another one of those rather rare hunts full of male or unisex items. The hunt started on 17 June and runs till 31 July. There is no HUD, so you simply use the links on the web page. The list shows 31 locations and quite a few of these have been marked as “skip this store for now”, which all in all made this a quick and easy little hunt. Each item costs 1 L$ and here are some of the items I found and wanted to show.
From Fearsum I got a red t-shirt with interesting chain detail, including versions for TMP, Signature, Belleza, Adam, Slink and Aesthetic mesh bodies as well as the classic avatar.
At Inkheart I found a pair of what they call “Magical Eyes” which came in a chocolate brown and forest green, both as system eyes and mesh eyes.
FE Style was hiding a camouflage sweater in standard sizes only, which more or less works with the TMP body which I am using for this blog post.
What definitely fits very snugly on the TMP body is the grey and black tank top you can find at HORR Menswear. It’s not exactly my style, but it does look well made and will work with TMP, Signature, Adam, Aesthetic, Slink and Belleza mesh bodies and classic avatars.
Amazing Creations attempts to… amaze us with a shirt and t-shirt combo, available in standard sizes only. While I really appreciate the colour choice, I find the overall design lacking in refinement compared to new similar shirts that are being created today.
Dark Water Designs tries to keep things simple by offering a complete outfit. The jeans and shoes are one piece, which means you can pop off your mesh feet and travel a little bit lighter. TMP and standard sizing versions were included for the layered t-shirt and I will probably use it with other trousers, because the included jeans make my legs look a little bit too thin for my liking.
Robbie Roo’s Whatchamagoos went a bit crazy with a red, white and blue nautical theme for an assortment of accessories, a blazer, a shirt, a pair of shorts and shoes. Of the clothes I think I would only wear the shorts but it took some shape editing to make them fit for the TMP body and now my legs look too skinny again.
Angel DELUXE hid 4 items in and around their store, but I only found three and I’ll be showing just two, cause one triggered an instant “I don’t think so” reaction. Again, these items are not ideal for the TMP body, nevertheless I squeezed my butt in the jeans as best I could, because I rather fancied the faded camouflage pattern. I also liked the zombie t-shirt, but it was clipping badly on my neck. Possibly this shirt would work better with the Signature body, which in general is less of a pain in the neck with t-shirts.
KingbalStores threw in a simple open leather jacket perfect for showing of those abs, but I had to severely tone down the muscle mass on my TMP body to stop my neck from pocking through the back of the jacket (always that darn neck!)
That’s all folks! Conclusion: I’ve been on hunts with better quality items but there certainly was some salvageable stuff. Also, if there’s no TMP version included, it can be a real pain to try and make it work.
Over and out! *slumps over keyboard with nose on ZzzzzzzzzZzzzzzZzzz.
Fabulous Freebies VII
The MadPea Summer Hunt feverishly continuous and my total score has just gone over 20.000, which puts me a long way down from the top score, I’m sure. I’m not really that much bothered with that. I won’t even check my place on the scoreboard… #129 *harrumph*
Meanwhile it kept raining cute prizes along the way, like for example this beach screen from Serenity to maintain my modesty while I’m changing into my swim trunks. They complemented the screen witha little crafty frame to mount on the wall of your beach hut (or your bathroom, if you roll that way) and a rustic wooden box containing a towel and starfish . Chez Moi charmed me with a whimsically dysfunctional clock while Plastik showered me with a bunch of summery nail varnish options. They also threw in a sand castle as a bonus prize just in case you prefer to keep your nails au naturelle. Last but not least I found a couple of brightly coloured wall drapes at Merak, which will come in handy to give my SL dwelling that touch of summer.
Avatar credits:
Mesh body and head: Signature
Skin: Stray Dog
Pubic hair: Nearly Tactile
Shape: own work
Hair: Stealthic
Fabulous Freebies VI
The SmartPea Summer Hunt is starting to bare fruits. So far I have collected over 10.000 points without paying much attention to the prizes I can get with these, because I’m simply too focused on finding those darn shells! Apart from that, I’m also enjoying the many interesting places this hunt is taking me to. Meanwhile I have picked up a handful of the direct prizes and though the Summer Hunt hud actually costs 100 L$, I still more or less consider these to be freebies.
First up, a quirky pair of shades from Mulloy with a colour hud of course, which came in handy to keep my Team Blue outfit colour-coordinated.
Next is a collection of three prizes: two chunky candles in a glass box from Bigbully, a more modest romantic candle in a shell from Zerkalo and what looks like some casually picked flowers in a couple of small ornate vases from Keke.
RIGHT! I’ve got today’s Team Blue outfit together and I’m ready for some more MadPea shell hunting, with gritted teeth and a healthy helping of determination.
Body and Skin: Belleza “Jake”
Head: Catwa “Stanley”
Hair: Lock&Tuft “Ames”
Jeans with boxer shorts: NotSoBad “Keanu”
Sneakers: come with the Belleza jake body
Necklace: Mandala “Kotowari”
She Sells Sea Shells By The Seashore
In 1799 a girl was born who later on in life was going to change how we understand our planet’s history. Her name was Mary Anning and she was the eldest daughter of a family which had its fair share of economic worriment (*whispers*: hey, psssst… that means they were poor). They supplemented their income by digging up fossils so they could sell these to tourists by the shore. Mary grew up to become a well known name in geology circles and I urge you to google her. She passed away in 1847 and finally in 1908 the famous tongue twister “She sells seashells by the seashore” came into being to commemorate Anning, but sadly its origin mostly got lost in time, unless you go looking for it.
Meanwhile in SL, MadPea has organised a Summer Hunt that has us all running around with buckets, collecting well hidden colourful shells. Those of you who participated in the Easter Egg Hunt will remember that some of the eggs contained prizes. This is again the case with the sea shells, but with most of them you will earn points which you can use as currency to buy the prizes currently on display at MadPea.
This hunt is driven by a hud costing 100 L$, which is pretty darn cheap when you see just how much fun it is to go hunting for those shells. You can also make your own home or sim into a hiding place, simply by purchasing a set of shells and sticking them under bushes (oh hello Sean, fancy meeting you here) or in closets (Tom, come out now!), heck hang them in the chandelier (give it a rest already Sia). Go nuts! Or rather, make the hunters go nuts. Clearly this hunter is already on the edge.
The first time you attach the hud you will be assigned to a team. There’s the sunny Yellows, the steadfast Blues and the flamboyant Reds. Well actually it’s just yellow, blue and red, you can use whatever adjectives you want. I’m blue (daba dee daba die) and that means coming up with another blue outfit every day. Oy vey! This fun has been going on for about a week now and it continues till 9th July so you better hurry and get your bucket out! (no that’s not an euphemism)
