Yup! She will most probably be giving me a good run for my money this one…

Pumpkin Tripsa made these really beautiful sculpty avatar parts, from which you can create your own posed avatars. Unfortunately they do not come with texture maps – (which I honestly think they should have done, considering what I have had to pay for them you know?!?)…

Anyway… I want to make some nice old-fashioned, wholesome avatar soup of mixed up body parts, but before I can do that I need to texture the little critters don’t I? So, I made this – ahem – very efficient little grid thingy in photoshop which I mapped onto the lady’s torso and head and…

ouch!

I am old enough to know what calamity looks like when I see it coming people. And this right here is a calamity if ever there was one: Days, if not indeed weeks, of really hard graft!

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Well… One present anyway. And as for the other one?

Hmmm….

I would, of course, have to be a bit of a fool to consider what is presented in the following image as even remotely in the nature of a present:

Noob Philip Linden sculpty sculptures, arranged lovingly in a row by none other than Hack, gazing down upon us at alpha.tribe. So, are they placed there to keep us company during our lonely hours, toiling away on our little garment cottage industry over there? Or, are they in fact, what I very strongly suspect them to be? Stern mementos put in place to keep the tribe members on the straight and narrow? To ensure that we do not indulge in utterly objectionable behavior such as whipping off our underwear in front of all and sundry, as we are adjusting our clothes and skins? Reminding us that there could always be strangers present in front of whom such unseemly habits just simply will not do!?! (And that furthermore the Second Life camera is a most terrifyingly dangerous zoom gadget which these unknown entities could well be putting to good use from sims away, even as we speak!)…

True enough, they are all “away”, the Philip Lindens… But, as I know only too well from past experience, Hack has eyes in the back of his head. Extremely efficient ones at that. 20/20 vision!!! Indeed, a hawk is as blind as a bat by comparison… So, really – away shmaway…

Aaaah, well… Gift or sentry? In the end what does it matter? In these meager times one takes what one can get, in whichever package one gets it, I suppose: Obviously the guy gives enough of a damn to place relics that will remind us to behave ourselves at all times. No? Yes? hhh?

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Quite a different proposition here with this one though (I am very thankful to be able to proclaim!):

Now, this is what I call a gift! Unequivocally so, in fact!

wolfie has placed a particle screen made of these amazingly elegant black cubes which emit wonderful particles, all perfectly coordinated with our color scheme (which Xia has foisted upon us with her silly red flowers, I might add), between the tracks and the piano! This must have been around for a few days, however, we only really noticed it yesterday: We have all been working on the opposite end of the upper deck, taking an endless series of photographs of ourselves against a green screen (don’t even ask, it’s a terribly long story, involving an RL relative, our cousin Murat…), so we were never near enough to set the particles into operation. Although we did notice something was going on since these beauties also activate themselves whenever the subway goes by!

It is really wonderful this thing. And it is wonderful that wolfie gave it to me…

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But, again, as they say, never ever look a gift horse in the mouth: So, at the end of the day the sentries are as welcome as are the particles! ;-)

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I took photographs of the outfit, Natural Things, v.01, which Grapho has designed, to upload onto Flickr today. And I noticed something quite bewildering: Grapho looks like my father. Well, not my father, as I knew him, obviously. But, as he was as a young man, to judge by the many photographs of his youth that I have seen over the years.

What is bewildering is that I did not notice this during all these past days where I have been Grapho in SL, sometimes 6-7 hours a day, hammering away at the outfit. Maybe I was too busy working , maybe it is the light in there – but the truth of the matter is that I only noticed it when I opened the photos in photoshop to crop them.

Grapho has been working on his appearance quite a bit of late, so we have been popping open the appearance editor every so often. Another thing is that in order to be able to design garments for women, Grapho also had to create a female shape to try them on. This latest manifestation of his is largely the result of my switching back and forth between the sexes, with that radio button down there, trying to create a truly androgynous avatar for the sole purpose of photographing some of the clothes with that. I thought it might be nice to have that ambiguous look for the unisex outfits, as this latest one has turned out to be.  Anyway, at some point in all of that experimentation I sort of liked what happened to Grapho and decided to save the shape as the new Grapho shape.

So, what resistant part of my psyche did not notice that what I had saved was actually a fairly close representation of my own father?

And it is also somehow significant that this all happened while I was switching back and forth between male and female, since the shape that I started out with was the default Alpha shape (who is a more or less plausible lookalike of me in RL). The one that I saved for Grapho was not the immediate mutation that SL gave me of course – that one was rather hideous. I continued to play with that for a very long time, switched back and forth between the sexes with that one as well, even saved some of the interim stages. But, when all is said and done, this male shape is a vastly mutated and transformed regeneration of Alpha. Generations away – but still.

And… my father did look like me.

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