Men's Second Style

Belial was one of the four crown princes of the Underworld—or was it seven?  He could never keep track—and his pride knew no bounds.  He was especially proud of his own appearance, metaphysical though it might be.  He was constantly tweaking and re-working his more fluid aspects, looking for he knew not what, at least not quite, but he was confident he would know it when he found it.  This fascination set him distinctly at odds with all the rest of the legions of Hell, who rarely if ever made changes to their settled appearance.  Even the Morning Star, Lucifer himself, seemed to have grown tired and jaded.  It had easily been a thousand years since he had last been seeing wearing the shining, supernaturally beautiful face that had made him so famous in Heaven, before the Fall.  And that, Belial was pretty sure, had been for a Samhain party or some other costume thing Persephone had put on. Read the rest of this entry »

O SING THE BODY CYBERNETIC; to celebrate the electron winds that blow us into being. Spirit is wind, is wind not spirit? These packets of information slipping and zipping down cables to reassemble before my eyes, are they the body only? Or contain they the soul?

LeeZu Baxter has been creating beautiful and clever clothes for women, and a few for men, for a long time. When friend Harper Beresford blogged about LeeZu‘s new cybersuit, Bon Voyage, I rushed over the store to see if I could possibly wear it. The good news is that a men’s version was on the way. Read the rest of this entry »

But hey, doesn’t everybody?  So I figure I’m not alone in that, not hardly.  Surely you yourself are fond of getting a good deal.  Here’s the thing:  there are any number of other great blogs that focus on the great freebies, dollarbies and other bargains you can find in SL.  As much as I like me a good bargain, bargains aren’t my main emphasis here.  That said, if as you’re reading this you’re thinking, “Well, I love bargains, I’m killer at finding them, and I wouldn’t mind writing about the ones I find”…hey, give me a shout.  We can do a deal, Mr. Bond!  Today, though, I’ve got some great (I think they’re great) all-but-freebie items to show off.  I’m hoping at least one or two of them will entice you do a little low-budget, high-value shopping.

The items making up my various outfits are all (with some few exceptions) from Slanted Fox.  I’m sure I had visited Slanted Fox at some point in the past, but if I took anything home with me I’ve lost track of it somehow since then.  I forget exactly what I was searching for the other day, when I ended up visiting again, but I think the phrase “3L$ Store” jumped out at me from the search listings.  Apparently I must have clicked the link because there was a telltale whoosh, and next thing I knew I was in Harajukubox Town.  You know, sometimes stuff just happens, and all you can do is roll with it. Read the rest of this entry »

see through our eyes, nor are they the window to our souls. Our Second Life vision cannot be brought into focus by interposing precision-ground prims between eyes and environment. Nor can Second Life’s blinding glare be tamed with tint or texture. We see, and are seen, as images adorned with objects that only change our view as much as they change our mood — expressions of my taste or of my familiarity or of my wishful thinking. I wear glasses not so I can recognize you, but so that we can recognize me.

When I surveyed some Second Life residents to find out why their avatars wore glasses, almost all of them said it was because they wore glasses in RL. When I asked, however, whether they were therefore looking for SL glasses that matched their RL ones, there was a lot more variety. Rozoregalia Braveheart created a series of 7 pairs of glasses called “Formica” that are not like your RL glasses. They’re sold in a shop of jewelry. And perhaps that’s how it should be. Most sets come in polished carbonfibre black and burnished chrome; these are finely crafted prims. They look great from a distance and even better when you zoom in. Read the rest of this entry »

You may have thought you’d seen it all.  Or, at least, everything I’d ever actually wear in public.  After my initial foray into latex (with a Christmas theme, no less!), you may well have been wondering, “What next?”  I wondered myself.  What would be my next adventure, my final frontier, my undiscovered country?  It occurred to me, and not for the first time, that I had not yet explored the adventurous territory of silks.  Now, I’ve seen a lot of silks, more than you might expect in fact, and tried on perhaps more than my share.  But, while I make no claim to have made an exhaustive survey of the genre, I had never come across any that spoke to me on any level.  Silks are by their very nature simple in design, and while I’ve certainly seen many examples that were well done, often they simply weren’t very interesting. Read the rest of this entry »

OLOURED PIXELS MAPPED in deliberate patterns rush down optical cable to my computer, then somehow leap across the short distance from the screen through curved lenses and into my eyes. Rods and cones fire synapses along optic nerves to parts of this wetware brain that I don’t understand. I smile.

And somehow, art has happened.

It was my friend Chris who sent me the landmark to Charles2 McCaw’s “NY Couture.” And when I looked through the shop, there were a few things that caught my eye, things I’d not seen in other shops, things of colour – complex things that were simple things: things of artistry. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dandy

His grandfather, Eustacio Babbage, had founded the great steamworks that had first allowed the great city of New Babbage to rise like a phoenix from the squalor of the grubby hamlet most now dismissed with no small contempt as Old Babbage, but which had then been simply Babbage.  He himself now ran that steamworks, greatly expanded since its initial construction, and was immensely proud of the fact that it provided the power that drove most of New Babbage.  Indeed, it was the steamworks that drove Industry itself and made life possible at their current impressive level of technological advancement, with all the accompanying creature comforts that the citizenry enjoyed so thoroughly. Read the rest of this entry »

The Ruffian

The kid had earned something of a bad reputation for himself in New Babbage.  He supposed that was due in no small part to his tendency to, shall we say, not always pay for everything he put into his pockets on Market Day.  Also, quite possibly, the fact that, when he did make payment  in actual coin, that coin had not necessarily been earned by way of actual honest labor.  He rolled his eyes and sighed; such distinctions were boring and tedious, and they made him feel tired.  And they were pointless as well, when there was such fun to be had! Read the rest of this entry »