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Sunday, May 29, 2011

Smack my bitch up


I don't know what's creepier — this cat or the ugly photosourced ground it's on.

Quit doing that!!

Scaring me. :(

If you get a chance, could you please go smack this MM board? I know it's not your style. Just do it for the karma. Do it for your country. Do it for world peace. Do it for the rights of decapitated cats everywhere!


It's at the store Lamp*Light. I stole this pic from the Lucky Kitty Crew blog, actually. Thief! I blame the exorcist cat!

Also, any man who sends me a picture of himself in this dress will get 15 minutes of blog fame here and a pony.

I'm just kidding — I don't have a pony. But I saw my friend Serenity Semple today and SHE'S A PONY! Or a unicorn. A PonyCorn!


I've been hearing people talk about these AVs in a group chat and now I kind of wish I would have been paying attention. Maybe I want to be a cartoon ponycorn.

Before I end this post, let's have a moment of silence for my Breedable Dodos. Beta testing ended today and they all vanished. I sat on my favorite one, Patrice, and screamed, "DON'T YOU TAKE HER!" . . . but then she poofed, leaving me crumpled in a heap on the ground, sobbing.


**sniff**

Supposedly the real deals will be out June 15. See you at the dodo racing tracks!

DON'T FORGET TO SMACK THIS BOARD:
Lamp*Light

posted 5/29/2011

Thursday, May 19, 2011

That's what I'm talkin' 'bout, Willis!


[20:56] KittyCats - Kitten: Type a new name for your Cat in local chat :)

[20:56] Emerald Wynn: BAD ASS COCO WHO DON'T TAKE NO CRAP FROM NOBODY

[20:56] KittyCats - BAD ASS COCO WHO DON'T TAKE NO CRAP FROM NOBODY: Aww, I love my name! It's purrfect!

Sunday, May 15, 2011

If you catch her, throw her back


(I'm excited to be the first person ever to wear this [LeLutka] Rykiel hair in a blog post.)

I have a young cousin in RL — her name is Katie — who hit the jackpot with all the good Irish genes in our family. She looks just like this picture: Like a wild and slightly dangerous mermaid who rose from a stormy sea and reluctantly threw on human clothing so she could hit a few beach bars to do tequila shots with sailors.

Katie has this exact same hair — like it wants to be curly but just sort of gave up and exploded into this come-hither mop instead. You can run your fingers through it but you may never see them again. She also has those same ice blue eyes and kiss-me lips too. And her body — women often ask her where she gets her "work done." The answer is nowhere. God did a really awesome job with her sliders.

I hate her.

Just kidding.

Sort of.

But yeah, when I got done dolling up my AV today, I looked at her and thought, "Oh hell, I just made Katie."

Katie grew up in Iowa but took off as soon as she got a driver's license. She hung out with me in Arizona for a while, but I got tired of bailing her out of jail (party crimes: public intoxication and "tipsy driving,"as she put it) and she got tired of the scorching heat, so she took off for California in her old beater Volvo.

It sounds like a stupid made-for-TV movie on Lifetime, huh?

She never really got a steady job and she lives this freewheelin' California lifestyle — just kind of wandering around, enchanting men everywhere, getting one beachy, no-stress job after another and extolling the virtues of freshly squeezed juice and yoga to anyone who'll listen. Ten years later and somehow she's living in Malibu like she owns it. Now at age 30, she still looks like an etherial mermaid with a permanent Cosmo buzz. She lives in the moment. Her head is thrown back in laughter in almost every picture I have of her. She never knows where her next dollar is coming from and frankly she doesn't really care. . . .  and HELL YES, I'm jealous of her looks and her life and her "everything'll turn out peachy" attitude. I can't even live like that for five minutes without worrying about a bill or a wrinkle or an interest rate or a client.

Maybe when you joyously cruise through life without fretting about the future, assuming without question that the Universe will take care of you, it does just that.

Or maybe stunningly beautiful women who look like party-girl mermaids pretty much get whatever they want and never have to worry about a damn thing. Cynically, I'm leaning toward this explanation.

Wow. It's amazing how one AV can trigger an ocean (pardon the pun) of repressed family angst, huh?


Whatever. I guess if the world didn't have worriers, no one would be around to get the non-worriers out of jail. You owe me about $700 in bail money, Katie.

(Hey, I finally figured out how to get my MacBook Pro to un-grey the shadows options in Rendering. Please don't ask me how because I just pushed buttons and slid things around and changed numbers until it finally worked. Now I just have to work on not blowing out the sky with too much sunlight.)

Katie would never be caught dead in a dress like this Alchemy dress by Bottle Bird. Her style is more "I just grabbed this thing out of a pile of clothes on my floor and threw it on and if it were up to me none of us would be wearing clothes anyway."

I'm digging it though. If you haven't checked out Bottle Bird, you should. I love the trippy vintage vibe and the attention to detail in the clothes there. Check the back:


This dress isn't available anymore, actually. God, I hate it when bloggers do that! All the work at that store is quality, though. Maybe later I'll come back and edit in the designer's actual name — sorry about that. (Update: designer Filthy Adored. Is Filthy a boy's name or a girl's name?)

Anyway. As you can tell, I'm stretching for material here. Bored. And broke. There are a million expos and fairs and what-have-yous this weekend and I can't go to any of them. Lindenless. And bored. I'm so bored that I took my last few lindens and rented a huge parcel of land with a 988 prim allowance for a couple of weeks, took out EVERY SINGLE BOX of not-that-exciting kittens in my inventory and birthed all of them.


Awwwwwwww, yeah! Welcome to Emerald's Ghetto Funland, kids!

There are 64. I didn't give them names - I just numbered all of them. They ran out of food in the middle of the night and I got 64 emails in the morning:

"The object 'KittyCats - 51' has sent you a message from Second Life:
Mewwwwww... I'm 30% hungry :( Please feed me and pay some attention to me... :/"

Sheeeeeesh.

They each get to procreate one time and then they get sent to kitten heaven.

I'm done running my mouth.

VISIT IN WORLD
Bottle Bird
Emerald's Ghetto Funland (visitors welcome!)
[LeLutka]
Le Papillion necklace by A:S:S
Tattoo makeup layer by elegant epiffany (Wait . . . can't find the store anymore. Wha?)
Boots: City Style Boots in Red by Les Petits Details
Skin: Kianna in Smokey by Mynerva. . . . There's some kind of drama going on with Mynerva and they closed the store. COME BACK. We know you wouldn't use ripped templates on purpose! (Shoot, is it OK for me to still wear this skin? I can't live without this skin.)
Pose in second picture by [croire]

Release the kraken.

Monday, May 9, 2011

Awwwwwww yeah!


If your KittyCats mainly throw Cocos like mine do, just buy a bunch of collars and embrace that sh*t.

There are six more I couldn't fit in the picture.

Sunday, May 8, 2011

In which Emerald unleashes her inner bitch and channels Emily Post


I noticed today that I have 100 followers, and I have to admit I got kind of teary for a few minutes. I realize 100 followers is nothing compared to many SL blogs, but the fact that 100 people occasionally care about anything I have to say, well, it kind of makes up for the fact that in real life I often feel like nobody cares about anything I have to say.  [insert the screechy violin here]

(Yeah sorry, I'm in a dark place again. If I grope you on accident, it's only because I'm reaching out blindly in search of the Exit door. I hang on to the words of Winston Churchill: "If you're going through hell, keep going." And I highly recommend the obscure song "Down in a Hole," by James Taylor for those times when you're in the Black too. Drink it up and chase it with some Wellbutrin.)

Anyway, thank you to all of you who read this ridiculous thing. I wish I were a creator so I could create something and give it to everyone as a thank-you gift.

OK, enough with the emo. It's time for a part of the blog I like to call . . .

                        LET'S GET ALL BITCHY AND PREACHY FOR A SECOND, YAWL!!

As long as we're on the topic of gratitude and creators, please allow me to share some feelings of frustration.

Some time ago — maybe way over a year ago, yikes — blogger Chic Aeon posted some helpful tips for other bloggers. One of them really resonated with me, which was, to paraphrase, "if you blog a creator's work, be sure to drop that creator a friendly note and let that person know it."

So for a while I tried to do that whenever I could. To me, using this blog to communicate just how much I love a dress, furniture, a house, etc., is the best way I can thank that creator for making my SL more fun and beautiful. Telling creators that I blogged their items is simply letting them know that I wrote them a public thank-you note, in case they care to read it. I don't drop these notecards because I expect effusive thank-yous in return from those designers. I don't do it to schmooze. I don't do it in the hopes of getting future review copies. I just do it to express my gratitude.

I will say that about 60 percent of those notecards are ignored (which is why I'm gun shy about doing it now). The classy creators at least IM and acknowledge the fact that they received it. A few write thank-you notes back. It's kind of an interesting "Whose mama raised them right?" test, actually.

A few weeks ago, I exchanged words with a designer that got under my skin so much, maybe the only way I can let it go is to write it down.

She made a dress I loved, so in a previous post I wrote a longer-than-usual paragraph about how much I loved it. Yeah, it was a little bit rambling and got off track for a few sentences and the picture was amateurish, but hey, that's how it is over here. People either like it or run away screaming. Anyway, my RL was hectic at the time, so it wasn't until probably more than a week later that I was able to drop my "Hi, I loved your [item] - just a heads up that I blogged about it [here], etc." note. She IM'ed back, "yeah I read that [post] a while ago thanks."

It felt like a brush-off. And I'm not going to lie — it hurt my feelings. I wasn't expecting a cookie or orgasmic screams of delight or anything, but I was kind of surprised that she read someone raving about her work and apparently just shrugged or whatever. I interpreted her IM as, "yeah whatever — your blog is no big deal." (I'll be the first person to agree with that sentiment, actually.)

So I guess I'm having a difficult time relating to that response — or to any creator, for that matter, who reads a flattering blog post about her or his work and doesn't take two seconds to acknowledge it. If I were a creator who worked hard to make beautiful things, and I stumbled across a blog that was praising it — even if it wasn't one of the big, exciting fashion blogs; even if it was goofy with bad pictures and not to my taste; even if it was written by a person with only two readers — I would express my sincere gratitude to that blogger. Hell, if I didn't have time to IM or write a note, I'd at least write a "thank you!' comment on the post.

Because you know what, Designer Who Doesn't Give a Damn? That person liked your work so much that she/he took the time to put it on, pose with it, take photos — no matter how crappy — and sit down at a keyboard and try to find the right words to tell other people how great it is.

In a blogger's world, that's the equivalent of poring over prims and textures in long, meticulous attempts to get them just right.

I can't even imagine how many SL blogs are out there, so I get that you don't have time to offer lengthy, eloquent and poetic thanks to every blogger who writes about you. But damn, if that blogger even reaches out to you in world and says, "I loved your dress/necklace/etc. so much I wrote about it" and gives you the link, at least have the decency to respond, "Thank you, that means a lot to me." (Especially if you, in fact, "read that a while ago.") That simple phrase works even if you can't stand the blog, cringed at the pictures or thought the post was horrible. Forget the writing — strip that post down to its bare bones: The admiration of your work and the gesture of wanting to share that admiration publicly with others.

Because here's the thing: At the end of the day, it's the little, insignificant people like me — the common folk, the ones who don't get your blogger review packs, the ones who like your work so much they spend precious lindens on it — who are going to keep your business alive. We're the ones who are actually spending the money.

Here's the point I really want to make, though:

Dear Designer Who Doesn't Doesn't Give a Damn,

I blogged your work. I let you know. I wanted you to know that I liked it so much, I gave it my time and I gave it my words, which for me are two of the most precious things I have to give. But you're busy. You're used to the oohs and aahs. You have a shiteload of notecards to read. For whatever reason, you shrugged it off. End of story. That's cool. I never expected you to throw a parade. I wasn't writing for your approval anyway.

But I'll bet you my teeny little linden balance that if I would have blogged your work and ripped on how ridiculous or unsightly it was, that response would have changed from a delayed "yeah I read that a while ago thanks" to an immediate uproar of outrage from not only you, but from other designers and all your friends, screeching about how hard you worked on it and how dare I have the audacity to criticize it. The Plurkers would get all up in that link. Ban lists would get longer. The drama llama would dance a happy dance. 

You can't spend a few moments of your time to acknowledge a blogger who likes your work, but I'm pretty sure you'd find the time to start a crusade if that blogger dared to publicly criticize it. I know because I've seen it happen too many times.

**kicks over the soap box and ends rant**

Happy Mother's Day! :D