SL for Nowt

Mar’s just been over to Maitreya to grab their freebie fatpack of ‘Aimee’ hair. Alas, the slinky stiletto shoes that Maitreya had out for the longest time are now gone, but in their place is this great hair pack. Aimee comes in 21 colours, and also contains a useful notecard with Windlight Environment Editor settings for lighting so you can always look your best *g*

I’ve paired the hair with Desert Moon Clothiers (DMC) smoked low-rise jeans for women (tucked version) (free), PushButton Industries’ ‘The Bricolage’ shirt (1L$), Katat0nik’s ‘Axis Mundi’ sculpted boots (1L$), and Yak & Yeti’s Tibetan Dzi stone necklace (free). Details and SLurls below.

Maitreya - Aimee hair (free)

DMC - Smoked low-rise jeans (free)

Katat0nik - Axis Mundi sculpted boots (1L$)

PushButton Industries - The Bricolage shirt (1L$) [No longer available at this price]

Yak & Yeti - Tibetan Dzi stone necklace (free)

Hop behind the cut for close-ups of the hair, plus more of the freebies available at The Block, where the DMC jeans come from!

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Lads, I’m sorry it’s taken me so long. For a while I thought I might have to wind this blog down, but I have managed to put together this second part of the non-newbieness for boys guide.

Hop behind the cut.

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OK, it took a long time to put together, but here - at last! - is the boy’s version of my fast-track guide to non-newbieness.

In this first post, as with the girls’ series, we’re going on a whistlestop tour of the Second Life Grid, only this time it’s purely for the lads.

So, boys. You’ve finished wandering around Orientation Island. You have learned how to walk, fly, and squash medium-sized rodents under the wheels of a car or motorbike. And now you’ve found out how to get into Second Life proper; away from all that newbie learning stuff and into where all the other people are.

All the other beautiful people, that is. How come those guys have a slow, meandering walk when you’re stuttering forward like a toddler that’s only just found its feet? Where did the bloke in front of you get that awesome haircut? Hey, I want a pair of jeans like that, not these horrible newbie things. And argh! Get these flipflops off my feet!

Guys? Breathe. Go make a coffee or grab a beer, then hop behind the cut. In this post we’re going to grab some of the basic stuff you need in order to stop looking so newbish.

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In the first post of this series (here) I sent you whizzing around the grid to gather everything you needed to get rid of those newbie looks as quickly as you can. No doubt your inventory is absolutely heaving right now, because I’ll bet you didn’t limit yourself to just what I told you to grab, eh?

*grins* Thought not. You can sort through all that lot later. For now, I’m going to show you how I took Roxie from rough to rawr in less than an hour.

This way, if you please…

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OK, I’ve been away for a while, but I return with a humdinger of a posting series: the fast-track guide to non-newbieness. The first three of these posts will be for the girls, but guys you just have to hang on a couple of days and there’ll be posts for you, too.

So, girls. You’ve completed Orientation Island. You’ve done all the tutorials, you know how to fly and walk and buy stuff (even if you don’t have any money yet) and you finally teleport onto the mainland.

Oh. My. God. Everyone looks gorgeous! Why don’t you look like that? Slowly, you realise that eek! you look like a newbie! You really look like a newbie! Your hair’s AWFUL! Your shoes are crap! You wanna stop looking like that as fast as you can! So you frantically start searching for free stuff, only to find yourself in a load of horrible freebie malls filled with horrible clothes. Maybe you even get griefed at a telehub.

Never fear, Mar is here. Behind the cut is part one of my three-part ‘look good fast’ guide, and it will cost you not one single penny. Or Linden. Whatever. *g*

Follow me, girls. I’ll have you looking great in less than an hour.

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Further to my post yesterday about the April treasure hunt at Ohana Isle, here are a few screencaps I took today of some of the prizes. I focused mainly on the wearable stuff: the clothes, shoes, and jewellery. If I get time tomorrow, I’ll try to take some more caps of other items that I found.

Hop behind the cut for pictures!

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OK, boys. We’ve dealt with the more… sensitive areas of your anatomy. Now do you think we could have a word about shapes? Skins? Clothing? Footwear? Hair? And… all that other stuff some of you have such trouble finding.

Listen, you don’t have to pay a fortune to look reasonably decent. Yes, you’ll get a bloody good shape at KMADD - for about 1000L$. And yes, you’ll get probably the best male skin in-world (Dante) at Naughty - for about 1500L$. But when you’re new and not sure you want to invest that much? You probably have a bit of money gleaned from money trees and camping, but all the free stuff you’re finding is probably a bit, well… crap.

Not if you know where to look, and lads, I have been looking for ya. Behind the cut is a very small selection of shapes, skins, hair, clothing, shoes and other bits (together with landmarks, of course). They might not be perfectly to your taste, but for now - until you decide you’re gonna break open that wallet and set the moths free - they’ll stop you from looking like this:

Onward!

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I’ve been workin’ my butt off all day, putting together a newbie kit of my own. I’ve hoiked around some of the cheapest full-perm stores (Chromex is the best I’ve found) and snagged a ton of stuff very cheaply. One thing I’ve found, though:

Resell and full-perm stores are a heaven for blingtards. Seriously, WHY does every damn pair of boots and shoes there have to look like an explosion in a De Beers store? If it ain’t that, then they have eight-inch whore heels and are made from plastic, latex, or other fetish materials. I’ve found great everything-else, from jeans to dresses, eyes to skins and shapes. There are fewer nice tops around, but some of the tops of dresses (the ones with not-so-great skirts) will serve pretty well. But shoes? Gah. Bling, whore, bling, whore… Oh, and don’t even get me started on the clip-clop shoes that announce one’s arrival as though one is a bloody carthorse…

And yeah, I’ve had my eye on the guy’s stuff, and believe me that’s even worse. If you don’t aspire to be P. Diddy (or whatever it is he calls himself these days) you might as well forget it when it comes to resell/full perm. ‘Playa’ blingy belt buckles, Gangsta AOs, huge white fur jackets with Ming the Merciless collars, and knuckleduster rings with more sovereigns and diamond-encrusted words on them than the average male has knuckles. Mind you, the kind of guy that would wear that godawful stuff probably needs that many diamonds (nice, hard stones, those) on his knuckleduster rings, because all that dragging on the floor would erode any other material.

Okay, okay. Bitch mode off. *sigh*

There *is* a lot of great stuff out there for free. Hell, I blog about it here almost every day. But the thing about a newbie kit is that it’s designed to be opened there and then, everything tried on, and the n00b looks banished before you go whizzing around the grid. And while I can fill a notecard with LMs and advice to go to TESLA for their great Elise 2 shoes, or to Maitreya for their fab slinky stillettoes, the point is: the newbie wants to stop looking like a newbie as soon as possible!

Oh well, notecards and LMs it is. I have two good freebie shoes for the girls: the ones you see in almost every starter kit, plus some fun stuff like workboots and clogs. For the rest, I will put in a notecard with LMs and instructions on where to get the good freebies around the grid.

And there won’t be any bling in sight…

Got 19L to spare? How about getting some hair with it? How about getting a mind-boggling 2648 hairstyles for those 19L? No, I’m not kidding, no it’s not a scam, and most importantly, no they’re no crap. They are the dollarbies on offer at ETD. (Incidentally, I’m tagging this post as both dollarbie and freebie, because good grief, people, one dollar isn’t breaking the bank, even for a newbie…)

I swear, I counted them right. There are 16 style packs, each containing 161 colours each (yes, 161! You’ve got no excuses for saying your hair doesn’t match your outfit!) and three style packs, each containing 24 colours.

Also on the dollarbie wall are three fatpacks of clothing, each featuring eight colours: corduroy pants, multistripe dresses, and a cute sleep shorts and tank set. And as if that wasn’t enough, turn left a little to find some amazing shoes and ankle boots, all very reasonably priced at 25L each.

This is Mar’s current look:

It’s all ETD, save the jewellery. The choker is the Everyday Stone Choker (amber) by Opium, available in the jewellery section at The Free Dove. And the bracelet is the Copper Bracelet by Hellcat designs, available at the FabFree store. Both are freebies.

Behind the cut I’m going to show off just one colour of each of the ETD hairstyles, plus take a closer look at Mar’s new outfit. Come take a look, because if you can’t spare just 19L for these barnets, then there’s no hope for ya! *g*

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It’s Easter Bunny time on SL (perhaps that’s who my little bunny friend was of a week or so ago!) and Mar has been hunting eggs galore. This post comes nowhere near to detailing everything she’s found in the past week or so, from freebies at the RFL Fair, to various egg hunts. Even some St Patrick’s Day hunt stuff hasn’t yet been screencapped, and her inventory is still heaving despite my best efforts to try stuff on, take screencaps, then file and archive everything!

Anyway, behind the cut are just a few of the items that I have got around to doing.

Edited to add: My apologies, but WordPress seemed to eat half of this post, so if it looks a bit funky to you, that’s probably why.

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