My third and final contribution to this year’s hair fair is a style inspired by Amu from the anime/manga Shugo Chara! I love her sense of style – she always has the cutest hair and clothes. In fact it was this same style that made me pick up the manga to read to start with, and I’m glad I did. The series is a lot of fun! So here’s the style – it’s my favorite of any that I have ever done. ^_^ I hope you like it, and I’ll see you on Saturday at the Hair Fair!
Okay, this was my least favorite of the three styles I did for Hair Fair, but just because it doesn’t quite look right without the various stuff the character wears on her head – a maid headpiece at work, kitty ears when she’s transformed, etc. :P Anyway, this style was inspired by Ichigo from Tokyo Mew Mew (I’ve been told it came to the US under the name Mew Mew Power but that it was changed quite a bit.) Tokyo Mew Mew is definitely one of my favorite anime, being totally cute and appealing to a fairly wide audience – something kids could watch but you’d get even more out of as an adult, and having a bit of action, romance, world issues, loads of cuteness and some plain old good fun. :D Anyway, enough about the anime – here’s the hair! Remember, it will be available at the hair fair which starts this weekend (on the 20th) and won’t be in the store until it’s over! Enjoy. ^_^
No, not that kind.
I’m a really private person for the most part. I like to be left alone in quiet to do my work on SL, and work is what I log in to do. Every now and then I’ll hang out with my friend Akiko, but she (usually, haha) knows how to respect my space when I need it and let me get things done. As a shop owner, I’m sure I’m not alone in having met many chatty people when I’m in the store doing other things, and almost inevitably at the end of our talk, they want to be friends, and I’ll usually oblige. After that time, though, usually I never hear from them again. Not so with a small minority. If you’re up for reading a wall of text involving a minor drama regarding a Space Invader of the clingy stalker sort, please read on – I’m feeling kind of freaked and in need of perspective that isn’t that of the little social recluse that I am. (Sorry fashion planet, I see that apparently the More… break doesn’t work on the feed *sigh*)
Hair Fair is just a week away! I’m so thrilled that I was invited this year! :D I was so incredibly happy when it happened, I was bouncing all over the place for days. Hair was the reason I ever opened my store back in 2006, when flexis were brand new. I experimented and created a couple of hairstyles which were cute enough that I actually wanted to wear them, and thought maybe other people would, too! But I’d never been invited to hair fair and every year I wouldn’t know it was even coming until it was announced as being just around the corner – in other words, too late to beg an entry for myself, if that was even allowed in past years. So being thought of this year and sent an invite was the biggest honor and just made my whole year – a thousand thank yous to whoever thought of me. ^_^
Anyway, so I have made three hairstyles, each based on an anime/manga character, in trying to keep to Onigiri’s fandom roots. They’re adapted a bit, mostly in the bangs, so they’ll look better in SL, since generally the stringy pointed anime bangs look isn’t very flattering in SL (or RL, for that matter, haha) but I generally kept to the original character’s overall hairstyle. I will be sending out each of the three styles in the usual update group special color (a deep metallic purple called Poison) once the fair starts!
The first style is called Saber, and is based on the style worn by Saber in Fate Stay Night. This anime I haven’t actually seen, but I have had requests for it, so here it is. Enjoy. ^_^ Look for the unveiling of the next style in a few days!
I released a cute new microphone yesterday that works as a typing animation overrider. It is invisible until you type, and then you hold it up and “sing” (singing is silent) and dance like a pop star! Better than typing on the invisible air keyboard, right? ^_^ You can find it for $L100 in the New Products section at the store. Enjoy!
Shape: Custom, not available for sale
Skin: Elf*in Skin – No longer available
Hair: Magika – Curl – White A
Necklace: From the Starlust Motel lobby – {Violet Voltaire} Starlust Horny Necklace (CHEST)
Earrings: Available from Frop! as part of a gift outfit in the Keys to the VIP hunt – Frop! ducky Earrings
Bangles: .:TrOuBlEd ReBeL:. - CuPcAkE RaVeR BaNgLeS (May have been part of a hunt? I’m not sure.)
Hat: Humby Designs (a gift from the Keys to the VIP hunt) – [HD] Goffer Cap Black Tartan
Clothing: 4Eva Gutta (gift from the Keys to the VIP hunt) – .!:{904}:!. s!de.[]<ix
Yes, I really did like that VIP hunt! If you haven’t done it already – it is worth the 200L and then some!
Yesh this a rant. If you don’t want to hear it, go ahead and move on. ^_^
Today while hanging out with Aki at the store a guy walks in demanding freebie anime eyes. I do have one pair but they are part of a 1L freebie female anime avatar, so I thought, he’s a guy and can’t use the rest and he says he’s broke, so I will be nice and give him these for free.
Evidently today’s lesson is if you give someone an inch they want 10 miles. He proceeded to eat up over an hour more of my time ranting about how he can’t find anything in SL – when I suggested Xstreet he rambled about how it’s like searching a warehouse (um, okay) – and complaining about how the stuff he does get is not good enough. He was waving around some freebie weapons and sporting other freebie stuff, so I’m thinking, hm, no wonder. He claimed the only way to make money in the game was escorting. I told him he’s looking at a pair of people who make their living in SL designing, and he just got very argumentative with me, even when I suggested a number of other ways he can make money. It ended when, after half an hour of trying to help him make work for him a pair of wings I gave him, he demanded (not asked – I don’t think he knew how – evidently that I would bend over backwards for him by now was taken for granted) I modify them to suit the look he was going for, and ran off to find a picture, it hit me:
He came in demanding free stuff.
He got free stuff – four things, all of which cost me money and were available in the store for SALE (or at least for 1L) but I wanted to be helpful and gave – no, I don’t know why – and the promise of another thing he claimed he couldn’t find for less than 450L that would only take me two seconds to make, or would have before he piled on extra demands for it.
He did not thank me for a single thing I gave him.
He complained about every single thing I gave him.
He didn’t want to hear any positive suggestions I had for helping him.
He was unlikely ever to shop at my store again, since he was a guy and aside from my eyes and arguably, wings, nothing in the store could be considered unisex, much less for men.
And I hightailed it out of there.
Why can’t people just take a gift, or good advice, or being treated kindly in general, with good grace and say thank you? What is complaining when someone helps you going to do to benefit either of you? That sort of encounter just sours me on being kind to anyone.
But while everyone else is looking gift horses in the mouth, I’ll throw my hat in the ring and say, why is everybody using this strange sculpty “butterfly” in their creations lately – it has six wing nubby bits! Butterflies have four wing sections! This sculpty kind of looks like someone stuffed an unfolded cloth napkin in a napkin ring and called it a butterfly. I’ll make a free sculpty butterfly for you creators to use if you’re averse to making your own. I <3 butterflies, and I <3 your creations, minus the scary butterfly. Would you use it if I made it? O_O
I was in the mood to make something cute and fun the other day so I made a mood ring. ^_^ It responds to what you say, with dozens of key words and emoticons and five moods at present. When you trigger a mood change, it will shift gradually to the new color over several seconds, and if you trigger a new mood before it has finished its last shift, it will stop mid-shift and shift toward the new mood, just like a real ring! It has free automatic updates, so as I come up with more moods and words, it will grow even more. :D If I’ve missed any you think should be included, give me a shout!
I’m extremely sleep deprived and just got woken up, so I hope this post is still intelligible. :D
I released an update of sorts to my old mary janes in the store. The new pair has different highlighting and a distinct sole, and is scripted with 13 textures and menu-controlled tinting to a variety of presets or any color of your own making. If you preferred the old style, though, don’t worry – they’re not going away. :)
Last night I got the urge to make sculpted persocom (ie. Chii from Chobits) ears in SL :D Chobits was the first anime I ever sat all the way through and it’ll always be one of my favorites (the only one I’d seen before that was the badly-dubbed Fushigi Yuugi, which is much better in Japanese simply because half the time you want to shoot whoever did the voice acting for the American Miaka, and I only got about 5 episodes in even though I loved the manga to bits.) I love Chii – she is so adorable! And I haven’t been able to take these off since I made them. I’m going to be running around as a persocom for quite some time, I think :D Plus, I’m proud that the sculpts came out exactly as I wanted them. I don’t have a lot of experience with sculpties and it usually involves much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair, but I actually had a lot of fun with these. I hope people have as much fun wearing them. :D By the way: the pictured color is the only one offered at the moment, but I’m totally open to recoloring for no extra charge. Just let me know what you need!
Eep! I nearly forgot that I was planning to give credits for the stuff here. I was made more aware recently that pose artists in particular get left out, so I’m leaving credits here:
Shape + Eyes: Custom, not for sale
Skin: Laqroki – Tess #6
Hair: Cake – Brooklyn in Blonde
Clothes: BareRose – Black Mist and White Mist, respectively
Poses:
Left: Voflo Writer (no shop listed in picks? Couldn’t find it.) – cutieX))39
Right: Cake – cake.fp.stand.1450
I haven’t been on a skin binge in a long while (since Gala Phoenix put out those skins at the skin fair some time back that were all over the feed for months) and I guess it was just waiting to catch up with me. While I find myself falling in love with one skin after the next for the cute-yet-refined faces people have been coming up with, I find myself noticing that, once again, tan is back in style in SL. More and more designers are leaving their fair-skinned friends in the lurch and making many shades of tan, tan, more tan, or really tan. Is it because summer is coming?
They warned me my facelamp would do this to me...
It isn’t that I don’t like tan skin, although I’m more of a fan of pale skin with a smattering of cute little freckles myself (maybe a trace of narcissism since it’s how I look in real life.) I’d just like the choice. I’ve even “settled” for some of the darker tones (calling themselves “fair” or even *gasp* “pale” – harking back to the days where Naughty skins seemed to reign the feed) but I have a major problem: I’m a big, big hair whore and the vast majority of my hair is pale blonde. What isn’t pale blonde is pitch black. Neither of these look good on the tones of tan skin that are so popular in SL, unless I’m going for the “hey look, it’s Malibu Barb…uh, did she get a spray-on tan? No blonde is THAT dark.” look.
Please, oh pretty please skin designers – have mercy on us the melanin-challenged and offer us some lighter tones? ^_^ I know that, like I said above, some people have tried to offer what they consider “fair” or “pale”, but I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the Arizona sun already this spring and my skin doesn’t touch these “fair” skins :( My best suggestion would be trying out your lightest skin tone with platinum blondes from a variety of hair shops (most of mine are Magika’s platinum blondes before their blondes went dark and desaturated, but even ETD’s are sufficiently light for this test); if you look like you’ve spent too long in a tanning booth, try a little lighter!