What happened to my Second Life?
When I started Second Life back in 2004, it was a small unstable 3d world populated by people with diverse interests and skills. Now, in 2009 it’s a large unstable 3d world populated by people with diverse interests and skills, but it also bores me to snores. For a long time I would spend easily 6 hours a day or more in world, making things, talking to people and bopping around the grid. I embraced my avatar and registered all over the place with her name and likeness. I enjoyed the process of slapping blocks together to make stuff and I liked to hang out in pretty places with fun people.
Now I’m just – whatever. I can’t even muster up the interest to log in for 5 minutes. Messing around with blocks to make stuff, which was a time sink in the past, is now a tedious chore. I recall when I started it was totally overwhelming. Even then the help files were out of date and so much of my learning was cobbled together from forum posts and experimentation. For a while there, it was pretty much smooth. I wasn’t a famouse designer, but I was doing okay with teddy bears and various other random things I’d hack together for fun. Now? God it’s not even a world I know.
Drama wore me down of course, like it does most people who don’t thrive on it. Having opinions in world that differ from the mainstream is a surefire way to get yourself abused and harrassed. Yeah I reported them, but that became something I just couldn’t do for a while. Log in and hear how someone wanted to shit on my head or wanderoff and read a book? I’ll take the book thanks.
I also found that spending all my creative energy in a virtual world was sapping my will to be creative in the real world. Since I stopped logging in as much, I’m crocheting, sewing, writing, sketching. Making pretty messes and enjoying every second (even the stupid skirts that won’t hem. Bastards). I find the SL creative process incredibly frustrating. Partly because of the bugs and poor tools, partly because it’s dangerous to look outside your own back yard without getting discouraged. In the real world you can draw the worst thing ever, and it doesn’t matter so long as it was fun. The emphasis on money making in SL was tiring, and the feeling of never measuring up depressing.
I’m not saying I’ll quit SL. I have too many friends in world. I currently keep up with them on Plurk, and as Faery will tell you it’s about the ONLY way to get me anymore. I do think however it’s time to accept that I won’t be running a store/rentals/making/creating. Ziggy isn’t ready to die just yet, but she IS ready for a long nap. Saying I’ll be back to making things at any point is frankly a lie. I don’t enjoy the process anymore, and therefore it’s time to stop.
If you need me, I’ll be in at the sewing machine making tangible things to play with.
The Cheater Guide to Good Hems
I suck at hems. I really seriously do, I am terrible at them. I have two skirts currently shoved in a cupboard until I can be bothered trying again to make with the non droopy hemline. Which may explain why I prefer to hack other things to bits to make skirts out of.
Peek at the picture (you can click to see the full sized one, we have the technology). The waist “band” is an old pair of jeans, and the panels are made from the legs of several pairs of cords. I love how this came out, and I LOVE that I was able to cheat totally on the hemline and simply use the prehemmed bottoms of the cords legs.
The major tip I will pass on to you is if you ARE going to recycle the hems of an existing something, when you sew your panels together, sew from the bottom up. That way you can match your hems perfectly, even if you’ve been a bit slapdash with the measurements of your panels (which I always am). You can fix any unevenness in the topedge very easily when you sew your waist section on, it’s a lot harder to tidy up mismatched hems.
As for making the above skirt, it’s really just a gored skirt but with the top measurement for the gores taken from the width of the bottom of the jeans section, if that makes sense. I’ll try that again. Instead of measuring your waist and dividing by X number of panels, you cut the legs off the jeans and measure the width of the new hole, then divide that.
To find the maximum width of your gores, measure the bottoms of the legs of the cords, and pick the narrowest. These gores are cut on the seam to give me extra width, but if you like you can cut down the leg. Narrower gores, less of a seamed look. Up to you.
I’m not going to go into technical detail here, simply because when I made this thing I ended up with a spare gore, so I’m clearly not the person you should be seeking advice from. Apart from the hem tip, that’s awesome advice :nods:
Downsizing
This is my former handbag, as of today. It panders to two of my affections: Greyscale and stripes. Also, apparently, to my fondness for huge bags. It is a very excellent bag. They’re made from recycled canvas awnings, sturdy as hell and also very roomy. You can’t tell from this shot how big it is, but it’s just over laptop bag sized. They’re designed for cyclists, so there’s a reflective stripe on there. I haven’t had it long, but I love it. Sadly, there’s something not greart about this bag, something I… didn’t want to admit. Something I finally had to face today.
This bag is an enabler.
I don’t want to come over all “Clutter is the enemy of the soul” but shitfire, how much crap do I haul around on a daily basis??
What is in there: Smokes, several lighters, purse, phone, pager aaand brochures from my trip, minutes and agendas from 5 months worth of meetings, sewing patterns, pens, a ton of loose change and god only knows what else. I weighed it. 6 kilos. SIX kilos of crap I drag around with me all the time. Good lord.
So, because i am trying to improve myself in various small ways, not the least being spending less time digging around in my bag for keys, time card or lighter, I splashed out on a new bag today.
Apart from being red (YAY red! That’s my bed spread it’s on, so you can probably guess my favourite colour) and having kinda hippy flowers on it, it’s smaller. Not a massive amount of smaller, but it doesn’t expand as much as the old one. It also has handy pockets to stop me bagdialling people on my phone and to keep my timecard nice and handy so I can swipe in slightly closer to time. My only sadness about it is that the strap isn’t adjustable, so I can’t wear it the super daggy way over my chest, but I can live with that.
Here’s to dragging less than 6 kilos around with me in future!
Envelope Fail
“Hey mate, could you go and shove these 3000 envelopes under windscreen wipers in the carpark?”
“Sure no worries”
Someone should have been more specific.
Cell Phone Tango
I know a lot of people have raised this, but it shits me off too, so I’m raising it also. Before mobile phones became so vital to our lives, if you were having a conversation with someone on the street and someone else you knew came up to say hello, you would include them in the conversation. These days you’re more likely to answer your phone, ignore the person you were talking to and wander off.
And it pisses me right off. As a Customer Service person, there’s literally no horror like that of someone enslaved to their phone. They ask for help, the phone rings and they answer it and launch into a 10 minute conversation. What’s the service person to do? It’s actually a tough choice. You can wait for the conversation to finish, and possibly ignore anyone else who may be needing help. The other option is to walk away and come back when they hang up the phone (which, can I just add, is very rarely a vital or important conversation. When you hear as many full volume calls as I do, you know it’s almost always about curtains or meeting for lunch in three weeks).
That second option is the tricky one, because you never know how the person with the phone will react when you come back. Some are nice, understanding that they were at fault for answering a phone in the middle of the conversation. Others will rip shreds off you for daring to walk away from them. Hello?
Mobile phones are, without question, important tools these days. I hate leaving the house without one, not because I get a lot of calls but because if my car explodes it’s nice to know I can call someone and say “Um. Bugger”. At work I’m a slave to the phone, I can’t stand it ringing for more than5 rings. That’s more because the sound annoys me, to be honest, than any kind of excellence in customer service. However, my mobile phone is set to silent ring and loud SMS alert. I’m weird like that.
The other time mobile phones should be jumped at and pounced on is if you’re waiting for actual news (not what colour curtains so and so picked, but perhaps that someone’s had the baby). Being 100% contactable in the case of family or friend emergency is important, and mobiles are excellent in these cases. I would say vital.
While I’m on the subject (ooh this is getting long) what’s with the driving and talking? Can you really not stand to be in constant contact with someone? I love my car time, I can sing off key, pluck my eyebrows (not while moving) and basically just let the belly hang out and relax. I don’t want a phone clamped to my ear in my me time, thanks. Hang the thing up, concentrate on the road and call them when you get to where you’re going. Got a call you need to take? Pull over. People do it. Sane people do it. They find a spot to pull over and take the call or ring the person back. It’s really not complicated.
Finally, try this. You’re having a conversation, your phone rings. Try pulling it out of your pocket, answering it and saying “Hi, can I call you back?”.
A Meme already?
Yeah I know, I have the suck. But it interested me. The meme, or challenge or whatever I spotted on an unrelated blog today was to pull up your photos folder, find the 6th folder in the list, then post the 6th photo in the folder. So here you are:
It might look like a random shot of the garden, but if you peer into that you’ll see the back end of a bird (hint, it’s yellow and brown). This is one of a few dozen shots I took trying to capture a great shot of this bird that was nesting in the staghorn. I didn’t get one SINGLE clear shot of her, but I’ve since figured out how to shoot continuous mode, so that helps!
Hello Indeed.
Did you ever get the urge to just start over? I have, many times, and at least online it’s a simple process of walking away. In the past, I’ve not had a ton of luck with that, slipping back to the old blogs almost as soon as I leave them, not wanting to lose the 7 or 8 years worth of posts. There’s no reason to delete those, and they can stay where they are, on the same server as this one but seperated by a URL.
Oh lordy me how utterly utterly dramatical, no? I don’t mean to be. I enjoy blogging, but it’s much like the past weighing in on the present. Unlike a paper journal that you only keep to hand for as long as there’s pages to write on, an online blog seems to reach back into the forever. So I consider this my new book. Blank pages and good quality ink to play with (I prefer Noodlers).
This here is my place holder post, since I’m currently writing from work (naughty girl). I want to blog again, and more imp0rtantly I want to change who I feel I am. Does that even make sense? I mean, I wish to be the woman I wish to be, rather than the woman I am. So there’s that, perhaps a “journey” (god I hate that term splashed around. Weight loss journey, parenting journey, improvement journey… it’s such new age clap trap. I digress). Maybe later on tonight I will get into the who I am, but I also have a chapter to record for Librivox later (quiet house required, so it might not be until tomorrow anyways). I’m sure there’ll be time.
So hello. Welcome to blog number 78 bajillion on these here internets. Make yourself at home, comment your butts off, do a little dance, make a little lurve, clean up after your own damn selves. 