This picture was completely inspired by the Del May pose, which has just recently been released. (Maybe partially by my skybox’s curved window, too.)

In the interests of full disclosure, I made the goggles, and will be selling them soon. I’m not sure if I should start a new blog for my prospective shop (which will be called Hello Spacegirl) or just post updates here – the volume of items won’t be high, so I’ll see how it goes.

Credits
Hair: Exile – Magda – Mercury (tinted) (current The Dressing Room Blue item)
Skin: Glam Affair – Linn – InMutatio 01 (Limited Couture item)
Lips: DAMNED – Kiss Me To Death pack 2 – Lipstick 6
Bodysuit: PixelDolls – Plugsuit – Armored (White, tinted) (Discontinued)
Goggles: Hello Spacegirl – Bubble Goggles (tinted) (unreleased)
Gun: Rapture – HP-26 Pistol
Pose: Del May – Flow

• It feels good to be back after some time away, and I’m enjoying SL even more with the Exodus viewer. It’s lightning fast and has some nice visual tweaks to try out.
• I’ve tried a lot of mesh hair, but it all sat too low on my head (and it’s difficult to just make your forehead bigger without changing the whole head shape). Elikatira just brought out a couple of styles, however, and they work really well for me.
• The Dead Apples lipstick (and all their makeup, actually) is a real bargain.
• Don’t miss the Mayfly mesh eyes – there’s a free copy there in blue-grey, another in bright blue as a group gift, and the third (which I’m wearing here) is their gift for the ZombiePopcorn hunt.

Credits
Hair: elikatira – Locked (White 04) (MESH)
Skin: Glam Affair – Linn – InMutatio 03 (Limited Couture item)
Eyes: Mayfly – Deep Sky Mesh Eye (Rose Blush) (current ZombiePopcorn hunt item) (MESH)
Eyeshadow: CheerNo Femme – Set 1 (Makeup 2)
Lips: Dead Apples – Candy Glosses (Strawberry Gloss)
Eyebrows: Nuuna’s Skins – Nuuna’s Eyebrows 13
Bodysuit: Epic – Radial Radar Bodysuit (Silver)
Legs: KARU KARU – Latex Underwear (transparent)
Boots: The Abyss – The Catalyst (Silver)

• The negaposi eyes are a great find – they come with prim versions, so you can tint them to match your outfit, or add glow if you wish. (Also, like all negaposi eyes, they’re very cheap – 30L$ cheap.)
• Ladies Who Lunch is having a sale on a number of discontinued items, among which is this jacket. The back is a bit fiddly to fit, and the collar piece was no-mod for some reason, but it’s smart and glittery (and cheap – there’s a theme developing here!).
• Anya Ohmai knows how to put together a really desirable product. A faux-fox stole isn’t exactly sci-fi, but I decided it would look good and bought it anyway. As a part of the current Collabor88 event, it’s only 88L$ for black, white, and fox-coloured versions.

Credits
Skin: Glam Affair – Amelie (Contessa) (old The Dressing Room item)
Hair: elikatira – Show (white 05)
Eyes: negaposi – Creepy eyes (Raven)
Eyeshadow: CheerNo Femme – Set 4 (Makeup 3)
Lips: CheerNo Femme – Felicia lipstick 08
Top: Ladies who Lunch – Long Jacket
Stole: Ohmai for Collabor88 – A Lil’ Foxy (Arctic Fox)
Gloves: NN Designs – Jyu Gatsu (grey)

I’ve been wanting to do a futuristic film noir set of pictures for a while, but the components were hard to find: a white latex 40s suit isn’t the most obvious of outfits, for one thing. Blinds, though – blinds seemed doable. There’s a classic bars-of-light chiaroscuro look that I was eager to capture.

Initially I thought I’d use projectors and shadows (i.e. use a texture of black bars on a light prim), but this method wasn’t very satisfactory, and didn’t work well with the alpha textures in my hair prims. I decided to see if I could make a rudimentary set of blinds in Blender. Reader, it took me ten minutes, including the different levels of detail. I baked a very quick and dirty texture, and tested it in the beta grid to make sure the prim equivalence was acceptable. Reader, the prim equivalence was one. This is why I like mesh: no faffing around with sculpted prims and their resulting bad quality UV textures. Resized to about 10x3x0.1, PE goes up to five, but that’s fine too.

This still isn’t the film noir shoot I’ve promised myself, but it does have something of the mood I wanted: searching lights and nowhere to hide. Imagine a helicopter outside the window, if you like. Or a flying car.

Credits
Skin: Curio – The Visitor – Irradiate 2 (Moonbeam light) + cleavage option 4
Hair: MINA Hair – Doortje (Light Blonde 2)
Eyes: Tokugawa Heavy Industries – Deus eyes v2
Eyebrows: Nuuna’s Skins – Nuuna’s Eyebrows
Lips: Glamorize – Smart Mouth Lips (Diva)
Jacket: DIRAM – Noa (white)
Top: erratic – bodysuit (old Platinum hunt item)
Trousers: Peqe – Kate Leather High Tights (Diamond)
Boots: SLink – Tall Leather Thigh boots (white) *Mesh
Poses: Del May – Swarm #2 / oOo Studio – Surface 3

• The new Deus eyes from Tokugawa are, frankly, excellent. 150L$, fully mod, a great HUD, and animated textures. I’ll do a review post soon.
• The Sn@tch Wired Latex top and trousers are great value: a 250L$ pack of seven colours. I found the included collar a little hard to fit on my shape, but it’s not as though I don’t have plenty of other collars.
• I continue my love affair with Kojima Industries and their glorious hardsuit set. Apologies for the lack of variety!

Credits
Skin: Glam Affair – Amelie (Contessa) (old The Dressing Room item)
Hair: elikatira – Again (White 05)
Eyes: Tokugawa Heavy Industries – Deus Eyes v2
Eyeshadow: Candy Doll @ Kozmetika – Smokey Eyes dollarbie (discontinued) under ROZENA – Platina eyeshadow (red)
Top: Sn@tch – Wired Latex Top (red)
Trousers: Sn@tch – Wired Latex Pants (black)
Collar: GRAVES – Jinx
Hands: Grollwerk – Cybernetic Arms
Arms/Boots: Kojima Industries – K-103 Hardsuit Stealth
Pose: Glitterati – Beauty 2 – 006

Recommended listening: Two Steps From Hell – Invincible

Notes:

• The spa at Insilico North is one of those rare places: a pale, clean(ish) sci-fi setting. Grunge is well and good, in its place, but sometimes I want something different.
• The best cornrow-style braids in Second Life are made by Discord Designs. The owner, Kallisti Burns, was very helpful and pleasant when I asked about buying a specific colour. Highly recommended.

Credits
Skin: Glam Affair – Amelie (Contessa) (old The Dressing Room item)
Eyes: Insufferable Dastard – Ghost eyes (old free gift)
Hair: Discord Designs – Aura (Pearl)
Eyeshadow: Candy Doll @ Kozmetika – Smokey Eyes dollarbie (discontinued)
Lipstick: PIDIDDLE – LipPastels (Cupcake Tin)
Catsuit: KARU KARU – Latex Suit Tanja (White)
Gloves: GRAVES – Jinx
Boots: Arbalest – Long Fall boots
Hands: Rublik – Legacy (women) (modified)
Eyepieces: Tokugawa Heavy Industries – Optical Shades
Poses: oOo Studio – Creature
Location: INSILICO NORTH

Recommended listening: Cursor Miner – Silicon Savage (Warning: brutal electronica.)

Some outfit notes:

• In an earlier post, I speculated about whether the made-for-men Fortress jacket by Defectiva would fit me. Disembodied Hand was kind enough to let me know that he’d seen female avatars make it work, so I bought it and am wearing it in the above pictures. The lower prim of the jacket is a bit tricky with wide hips, but otherwise it looks great.
• Glam Affair has a new skin out: Gio. I was ready to resist (I have a small selection of skins to which I always return, and tend to only buy new skins if they’re in a sale) but the vibrant blue mask-like eyeshadow won me over. It’s really gorgeous. I just wish GA made cleavage dehancers!
• The gloves that come with the Jinx outfit by GRAVES (there’s a white version too) are probably my favourites ever. Long and opera-length, with prim straps at the upper arm and along the glove, they’re incredibly versatile. I like the look of a long slim arm, entirely gloved.

I visited the very fun build at Xen for the last two photos – it’s made from lots of cubes, perfectly texture-baked and some of them glowing. For the first, I tried out shadows at Insilico again. Slightly trickier this time, as I was inside the (truly fantastic) power plant, but I lowered my draw distance and managed to get some light coming in from one side.

Credits
Skin: Glam Affair – Gio Light 08
Hair: Fashionably Dead – Shove It – Grayscale 1 (tinted)
Eyes: Insufferable Dastard – Jewel Eyes (Lasercut) in blue
Jacket: Defectiva – Fortress Jacket – Snow
Underneath jacket: Defectiva – Original Sin – Pride
Trousers: Peqe – Kate Leather High Tights
Gloves: GRAVES – Jinx
Boots: Kojima Industries – K-103 Hardsuit Stealth

Locations: INSILICO & Xen

Poses: oOo studio – angles freebie / Glitterati – Model pack 10 – 100 / Exposeur – Top Model All-Stars: Intros – Camille

After the paleness of recent posts, it’s time for something robust and menacing. I visited Insilico and did some exploring before I settled on the Medlab as the place to take my pictures. N.B. – Insilico is sky-domed, the bane of the shadow-lover, but if you lower your draw distance the dome is usually far enough away that it isn’t rendered, and you can enjoy shadows to your heart’s content.

I’m getting to the point where copy and mod privileges are mandatory with me in SL, unless the item is very specific, or it’s mesh. Here’s why:

• I love to go in and chop outfits to pieces, and that’s what I did with Bare Rose’s Hebitsukai Lady (original picture here). It had a lot of snakes and a flexi-cloak and flexi-skirt. I don’t like flexi-cloaks, so I deleted it and all the snakes, and resized the shoulder pads to be a little less overwhelming. (I know, they whelm you enough as they are, don’t they?) Bare Rose tends to almost always be mod/trans, so you do have to be careful when editing.
• The other thing I like to do is tint hair. I usually start with white, but if no white is available then pale blonde sometimes works. Here, I had a slight problem: the Baiastice hair is an attachment for use with a hairbase, but there was no orange hairbase in their pack, and their hairbases are no mod. Solution? The free Exile hairbase pack, where the hairbases are mod, so I simply edited the tattoo layer and tinted it the same orange as I’d used for the hair. Pretty good, I think.
• It’s worth nothing that two of the designers I’m wearing, Tokugawa and Kojima Industries, are a dream come true, because everything they make is copy/mod. ♥

Credits
Skin: Glam Affair – Amelie (Contessa) (old The Dressing Room item)
Hair: Baiastice – Meda hair attachment – white (tinted orange)
Hairbase: Exile – Basic Hairbase: Arctic (tinted orange)
Eyes: Insufferable Dastard – Tequila Sunrise 1 (old Grunge Soul item)
Eyeshadow: Cheap Makeup – Le Tigre 12 (from gatcha machine)
Outfit: Bare Rose – Hebitsukai Lady (heavily modified)
Eyepieces: Tokugawa Heavy Industries – Optical Shades
Arms & Legs: Kojima Industries – K-103 Hardsuit Stealth
Poses: Del May – Envious / Philosopher male

Location: INSILICO

Credits
Skin: Glam Affair – Amelie (Contessa) (old The Dressing Room item)
Hair: Lelutka – Pinned in Opal (Hair Fair ’11 gift, barrette tinted)
Eyes: negaposi – Glass eyes (Rust)
Lipstick: KOSH – Glossy Lips (natural)
Jumpsuit: Hucci – Cordial jumpsuit (frost)
Boots: SLink – Tall Leather Thigh boots (white) [MESH]

Desk with poses: UrbanizeD – Vogue Me desk [MESH]

Grey and yellow make one of my favourite colour pairings. I was delighted to find the suitably matching boots at Dilly Dolls (and they’re amazingly cheap at only 75L$) but I must question a delete scripts button that a) leaves all the scripts in the object and then b) pops up a scripted message saying the boota cannot be edited because the script have been deleted… Perhaps I’m quibbling, and I do like them very much. Don’t forget to drop by Grixdale very soon – the eyeshadow is a current freebie, and the whole shop is closing at the end of August, so there are plenty of bargains to be had.

Credits
Skin: Glam Affair – Amelie (Contessa) (current The Dressing Room item)
Hair: Sadistic Hacker – Nagi hair, long bangs (white, tinted)
Eyes: Ibanez – Signature eyes (goldenrod)
Lipstick: Glamorize – Summer lips (gilded)
Eyeshadow: Grixdale – Dynamic Shadow (eyesore) (freebie, discontinued on 31st August)
Top: PixelDolls – DoMoCo Shiny Shortsuit (yellow) (discontinued)
Jumpsuit: Hucci – Side Cut Unitard (white)
Harness: Kyoot – Addicted to Dopamine harness
Hip/Leg straps: Bare Rose – Phi Harness (black)
Boots: Dilly Dolls – Sonata Metallic boots (brass)
Poses: !bang – stand 148 & Glitterati – stand 092
Location: Prime 3D