The White Warrior Witch of Petrichor – Scrimshaw Warrens

Each year Fantasy Faire presents a number of Blogger Challenges. This is my attempt at “My New Shiny”, finding a new shop/creator you love.

This one isn’t *entirely* new to me, it’s more a revelation of discovering how much more they create and its amazing!

I liked the look of the eyes and skins that were generously left in the blogger room so I thought I’d have to check out their store. There was a couple of things I didn’t realise however: 1. I’d been to the store on my marathon lap of the Faire on Blogger day and said I’d come back. 2. I already had some of their creations in my inventory.

The prefix of all their items “:[P] :” nagged at me seeming familiar so I searched my inventory and came up with this outfit. I was very surprised since I’d acquired it at Cyber Fair 2020 and hadn’t realised they did other fantasy genre stuff. These “Angelic” bracers also showed up, again another surprise.

So off to their Faire store I went and found some more lovely items this staff, spell book and beautiful skin.

I’d already decided I was going to go with a light look for this when I’d put on the armour and found it was set to white. This skin was just perfect match, since the outfit can be made sheer, I could show it off wonderfully.

This hair is also available at their Faire store, in association with TRAP (who I confess I don’t know of, so something else to check out!). It comes as a single rigged piece or multiple parts you can position yourself. It comes with multiple huds for colouring differed parts and metals.

Location: Scrimshaw Warrens

Credits:

Main Store Items:  

Faire Store Items:

  • Eyes: :[P]:- Eyes – Pauian
  • Skin::[P]: & []TRAP[] – Amatheia Skin (Femme):// Aleatrice (WHITE)
  • Hair::[P]: & Trap:// Kalari Hair [Rigged-Unisex]
  • Book: :[P]:- Sumoni Books [Blogpack FF 2021]
  • Horns: :[P]:- Verosh RFL
  • Staff: :[P]:- Yaize Staff

Fantasy Faire 2021 Masked Ball

The First of two Fantasy Faire Masked Balls that will be happening during the Faire. A great time was had by all I’m pretty sure! I captured a collection of some of the weird,wonderful and fantastic avatars that were in attendance.

My Solo boogying (outfit as credited)

Centaur family dancing:

Image from Gyazo

Mermaids Damcing:
Image from Gyazo

Stunning collection of characters you only see in SL and only ever at the time at Fantasy Faire!

Location:Paer Thura

Credits:

  • Earings: ~L/Fx~Animated Potion Earring – Electricity 4.6 – Faire Store
  • Necklace: ~L/Fx~Animated Potion Necklace – Electricity 4.6 – Faire Store
  • Tattoo: ArtToo’s Ryoko – Assassin White Bright – Artoos Faire Store
  • Hair: Raven Bell – Celeste Hair –Raven Bell Faire Store
  • Mask: Wicca’s Originals – Adeline Mask – Engine Room 2020
  • Dress: Blueberry – Breeanya Dresses – Black
  • Shoes: Marli Risque Style – Brii Underground
  • Body: Maitreya Lara
  • Head: Genus Project– Strong Face

Petting the Dragon – Interview with Fiona Fei – Ling Xaio Long

I attended the interview with Fiona Fei, creator of the Faire Region Ling Xaio Long, being interviewed by Zander Greene and what a fascinating story it was.

Fiona was born in China, but moved to the USA when very young. One lasting memory of her childhood in China was of lotus blossoms and this love of the flower stayed with her through school.

Comment from Fiona: My thesis was on charcoal shaders in graduate school, which inspired the art currently in Second Life. The lotus blossom imagery stayed with me till now, being featured in my ShuiMo art in SL.

Trained as a painter, she starts with sketches and translates them into the 3D environment. Many of the textures that make up the region she physically painted and scanned for use in the build.

Comment from Fiona: I sometimes use photography of my 3D art installations to play with the illusion of 2D paintings. I try to present them on traditional Chinese scrolls to add to that effect.

She likes to play with the transiton between 2D and 3D, not just making environments such as this one, but also then photographing them making 2D art of something that’s actualy 3D.

The idea of the region is based on a Chinese proverb:

“Painting a dragon and dotting it’s eyes”

The Chinese version of the proverb is Hua Long Dian Jing (画龙点腈)

This is the story of an artist that was so skilled at painting dragons he didn’t finish pictures, he always left the last brush-stroke unmade, for fear that the dragons would come to life.

She used the limited pallette of white, black and red partly because in this form of physical painting, dyes were originally scarce, but also because it focusses on the form. There are large areas of white because it’s how chinese artists show distance or space. The choice of red was deliberate because of being important in China. Red represents luck, good fortune and overall positivity.

She saw an advert for Second Life years ago that said it was a place where she could create or be anything. The draw was the ability to create in real-time, spending a lot of time in sandboxes, challenging herself and later others in building competitions.

In my pictures I took inspiration from the white background of the region and made my avatars body the canvas. I created a plain white skin on which to apply inks, in the form of tattoos.

Location: Líng xiāo lóng 灵霄龙

Credits:

Remembering The Fantasy Faire 2019

2019 was the first year I was able to attend any of the organised events at the Faire.

I decided that year that I’d like to try and follow the years organised Roleplay story. I thought today on the eve of the 2021 Roleplay starting would be a good day to rememberit.

That year told the story of The Bubbo Owls and their adventures around the Fairelands. I did write a blog post at the time, but remembering is such fun!

Purple in Paer Thura – Fantasy Faire

I am not a “pink” lady, anyone that knows me, or just a glance at my flickr or past posts will testify. However I’m not adverse to a bit of purple now and then.

This post was going to be called “Pretty in Purple” when I was putting the outfit together and I thought I’d find a suitable setting in the Faire. When I found myself in Paer Thura and felt this was the perfect place.

This ripped denim outfit from Dark Fairy Fashions seemed to hit the spot. Rough around the edges like me and in the right colours for when I’m not feeling so dark and inspired by the bizarrely beautiful location!

It leaves plenty of skin on show which just begged for the right tattoo. Fortunately Nefekalum has just the thing also at the Faire.

Credits:

Location : Paer Thura ~ Sponsored by Safe Waters Foundation

The Valkyrie Guardian

The Valkyrie stands guard at the portal to the Mortal Realm. Not the most exciting of jobs, since the chances of Mortals finding the path that their winged mounts take to bring the souls of dead warriors to Valhallah is pretty slim. But Mortals have now developed their airships, which at least making it a possibility to be guarded against.

Credits:

The Blogger Room..and what it means to me

Now this may be a very strange thing to be posting about, it’s not particularly glamorous, or something you can buy but it’s important in another way to me. (For those new to my blog, I post about stuff that happen to me in my SL not just things or places, this I think is one of those significant moments.)

 

I’m in the “Blogger Room” of Fantasy Faire 2021. It’s not located within the Faire regions (we have to keep out of there til the 21st) and its location is only known to the organisers, merchants and official bloggers. This is where merchants put review copies for the bloggers to use in their posts about the event.

This isn’t just special because it’s my first time in the Faire blogger room, it’s also the first time I’ve been an official Blogger for any event and therefore first time in any Blogger Room, so quite milestone I think!

 

Fantasy Faire is I think unique in the amount of freedom and flexibility it gives to its bloggers. We’re not given quotas of x items from x number of shops and so many posts like some events. Its not all about shopping like those events, although obviously that plays a large part with all the cool new stuff merchants release and to raise money for RFL. The fantastic landscapes and crazy environments the World builders create are what I love and the stories and adventures they inspire.

Combining what the generous merchants have left for us with the no-doubt beautiful lands, I hope to have some fun posts for you. I suspect I shall be making several trips here, since as you can see in the image above, there are still lots of unfilled boxes and another wall of them out of shot, the room is less than a quarter full, so I look forward to seeing what other delights we are offered!

Credits :

Featured on the Second Life Community Blog on 19 April 2021

A Faire Rez Day Wish

For those that don’t know (why not?) the annual Fantasy Faire of Second Life is fast approaching. This massive annual charity event that spans 21 regions,starts on 22nd April and runs until 9th May.

This year is going to be rather different for me though. On 31st March (Ava’s 8th Rez Day) I was invited to become one of the Official Faire Bloggers! I was and still am, very excited about this opportunity and was a fantastic Rez Day wish come true!

What’s the big deal you might ask. Well the official bloggers (Chroniclers) are allowed into the Faire 24 hours early. This may not sound like much, but given the number of avatars that descend on the Faire when it opens, things can get a little bit busy! If you’re trying to photograph the beautiful regions the talented creators have built, that can be very hard work when the region is crawling with people and slowing everything down.

Last year I saw the Faire from a different perspective as part of The NeoVictoria Project team. I was allowed backstage to donate an item at their store. This year as a Chronicler I have to wait to do my explorations until the 21st,which can not come fast enough.

Outfit:

Ava is wearing the NeoVictoria Medieval Hooded Robe. It will be one of the items available at the NeoVictoria Project booth at Fantasy Faire once it opens to the public on 22nd April.

Preview Vendor AD for NeoVictoria Robe

Avatars, Brands and Personas

 

My avatars online persona started with an email address.

This way I could separate SL related, avatar specific, mail from other day to day RL stuff. These days such things can be acquired in just a few minutes for free.

Then I thought it would be fun to tell people about my adventures in SL, so I bought a website domain for a blog, although I didn’t start using it for quite some time. When I actually started using that, a Twitter account to promote it followed  as well as a Flickr account for photos I took inworld.

I was gradually unintentionally building my avatar into a full online persona or psudonym, to the point they have more of an online presence than my RL identity.

But when does a persona become a “brand”? Is it based on the number of people that know of you? Number of “followers” or customer sales if you have an actual product.

To make things more confusing I discovered this term “brand-persona”, where a company creates a persona for their brand, without the actual person part. A fictional figurehead that doesn’t have a person behind it, but a marketing team. Sure we’re aware of these things, but I wasn’t aware there was an actual term for it.

An article I found on this suggested that individuals, while having or being an actual brand, don’t consider themselves as such. Whereas with business it’s completely the opposite,but that’s not surprising.

This lead me to think about these people known as “Social influencers”. Just the term makes me cringe, because it makes me think of “Reality TV” show participants that suddenly achieve “celebrity” by doing not a lot, certainly not anything worth being celebrated. But maybe that’s a misconception.

So what’s a social influencer?

The website Influence Markering Hub describes it as:  “People who have built a reputation for their knowledge and expertise on a specific topic. They make regular posts about that topic on their preferred social media channels and generate large followings of enthusiastic, engaged people who pay close attention to their views”.
They go so far as suggesting influcer types from “Mega”  down to “Nano”, based on their follower numbers.

However based on the definition above, I have friends in SL that are probaly influencers, but they don’t consider themselves as such. They’re not the ones that make me cringe, it’s those that identify themselves as such.

Maybe if we follow the suggested numbers, persona becomes brand when you reach a certain “type” of influencer, at X amount of followers. Since the definition of these characters changes frequently, presumably the answer to my query does too.

I really struggled with this idea though, it seemed very  wrong to base value of something or some achievement based on mere statisitcs. To help me try and figure some of this out I asked Draxtor Despres. Undoubtedly an avatar and he certainly influences people, however I’d never want to insult him by calling him a brand.

The questions do overlap but I couldn’t decide which one might get to the point of what I was trying to work out.

Q. At what point does and avatar persona become a brand?

Draxtor: A simple answer to that is if you are on an entrepreneurial path, if you have something to sell. Which is totally fine. The wonder of second life is that you can do a mum and pop type shop or create something and have complete power over how to market to sell it and that’s a wonderful way to do commerce. So I would say an avatar persona becomes a brand when there’s commerce involved.

Q. Is whether an avatar becomes a brand related to the number of followers they may have on social media platforms?

Draxtor: Follows has absolutely nothing to do with anything, the idea of followers to measure the importance of what you do in terms of success in a measurable binary sense is total bullshit. That’s the capitalist paradigm. The capitalist paradigm is trying to equate number of sales to the importance and to the validity and to the greatness of a product and that’s just total bullshit.

Q. Do you think using an avatar name outside Second Life as name of blog or social channel make it a brand?

Draxtor:  I would totally do that just for consistency. If you talked to somebody who studied marketing in college would probably say I’m talking about branding, probably I am but I just don’t like the word because the word to me is clouded and soiled frankly by the nefarious agenda to sell bullshit to people for monetary gain of a small elite.

So it would appear Draxtors thoughts on the subject, matched pretty well to my own. His assertion that quite a lot of it was bullshit resonates with my thoughts that it felt so wrong to place value or worth on something or someone based on popularity or how many people know or approve of them.

On the subject of influencers however he had this to say:

I do Linden Lab contracting work where I produce weekly videos highlighting destinations, creations and creative individuals in personal profile style videos. In that sense you could see me as influencer, since I am on the payroll of Linden Lab AND showcasing the best of the platform. I don’t have a problem with that classification (influencer)however I would like to add that with my specific contract I have tremendous freedom to choose topics and the way I visually present them.
It is maybe a bit like working for the local tourism agency of country XYZ where you LOVE all the stuff the locals do and you tell stories how they do it!

That now looks like a contradiction, since I said people that identify themselves as influencers make me cringe. The difference being here is that Drax hypes imagination and creativity in the virtual world, not things for sale.

But is it that simple? Throw in money and you go from a persona to a brand? I thought maybe I need some more input, a contrary view.
I asked someone that I thought fitted this description, that receives money via sponsored ads on their social media content. I asked if they felt they considered themselves a brand and if so, at what point they thought an avatar becomes a brand.

“I think our social media foot print is kind of like a brand. Any time you are blogging or vlogging you are branding your self, your image, etc”.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a reply to a follow up question for any clarification but thier response does match up with the finance argument Drax makes. Their money comes in through their social media postigs, because they charge for ad space, which therfore makes them a brand just by posting.

So maybe it is that simple after all.

Edit:
Coincedentally just hours after I posted this article Isabelle Cheren posted a spoof video called “That Cringe Social Influencer” which depicts very well the type of person I talk about above, give it a watch.

I’d love to hear any thoughts readers may have on this, so do please put your thoughts in the comments. (While you’re there, read the comment by Drax where he clarifies some points.)


This post was featured on the Second Life Community Blogon 7th April 2021.

Insilico – Buddha Bowl & Beyond

The arrival point looked a little confusing at first, just loads of hovering stuff everywhere. After accidentally clicking on one and ending up I don’t know where, I came back and took a proper look. It’s a rather cool map and with the place covering 4 Regions I think it’ll come in handy!

I clicked on the closest map point labelled “07 Buddah Bowl” and sure enough that’s where I arrived and found it’s a rather cool looking bar.

Buddah Bowl

This area is rather huge and empty feeling, so was good to have some compay on this exploration.

On this particular visit I’m accompanied by my dear friend Joyouous Destiny.

Not knowing where to go next, it seemed sensible to take the only direction sign in sight, which got us nowhere. However  I think this because it lead to a rental. There’s a number of these doors dotted about the place and some of them clearly residences.

We saw a couple of shops as we walked, but they weren’t interactive, just scenery.

Then we came to somewhere that did sound much more iteresting, a place called “Cyber Doc”.

In here was all kinds of intersting but rather creepy equipment.

Coming out the “Doctors” there’s a few intruiging places I will have to come back to explore, since Joy was tempted by a lift.

This brought us up onto an extensive network of suspended gangways to explore, that reminded me very much of those found in the Cyberpunk varieties of Drune.

From up here you can see a lot of the city and other spots to visit, as well as some unusual artwork.

Below one of the walkways is a small oasis of greenery among all the steel and glass. I just had to go down and explore.

At the bottom of another set of stairs I found a bar, with a very cool looking animated android serving the drinks.

This is just one small peek at Insilico, there’s lots more city to explore down below, I’ll have to go back and do that soon. Definitely a place any sci-fi fan should take a trip to visit.

Landing point: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/INSILICO/33/182/522

Website: https://www.insilico.online/

Credits: