Copying is Nyet!
There's a rather large flurry of attention being paid to content theft lately; I'm sure anyone reading SL feeds are going to be well aware of this by now.
Anyways, screwing around in Photoshop this afternoon I banged out this poster. It's supposed to be roughly based on those soviet-style posters promising some utopian ideal. I'm letting anyone grab this and put it up in their own store to kind of get the word out. Enjoy 
Coming Soon: The Downtowner Collection from Grid.Living
Combining my love of quaint American downtowns, photography, and Second Life, the Downtowner collection is meant to make it dead-simple to sprout your very own downtown shopping district. Single-link brick and stone buildings designed to be packed tightly together along wide boulevards and sidewalks, these buildings are great for shops, offices, living spaces, or all three at once. Using original photo-sourced textures of my own local city.
Coming very soon. In the mean time, get your groove on with Swedish banjo swing music.
1000 avatars project update – halfway there!
Some of you might remember, about 2 years ago, that I was embarking on an art project to document the uniqueness of all the individual avatars out there in Second Life. (links here and here) . While I was no doubt daunted by the large number of pictures I'd have to take (in a shaky platform, no less), I sallied forth.
Time passed. Projects came and went, real life ebbed and flowed (including university graduation and marriage), ennui conquered and retreated. Last night I got inspired and took over 300 pictures of avatars all around the grid. Along the way I stumbled into:
- a gay furry club
- A dance party for hermaphrodites
- An Italian coffee shop having a meeting over something (don't ask me, I don't speak the Romance languages)
- An educator's meeting on using Second Life for K-12 education
- A live music event with Skye Galaxy (highly recommended)
Not bad for someone who rarely goes out of his builder's box.
Anyways, to celebrate passing the 500 picture mark, I released a machinima showing what I have so far.
Of course the project is only halfway done, but I will continue to work on it. With luck, it will take significantly less than 2 years to complete this half.
When I'm finished with the project, I'll probably try to release a photo book of all the pictures, as well as release the entire pile as an open source contribution to the community.
Enjoy.
Introducing Palette Point: A painted lighthouse prefab
The second entry in my painted series, Palette Point is a lighthouse using hand-made painted textures (rendered in ArtRage 2). Every texture is uniquely made for this design, which takes it's inspirations from lighthouses dotting around the Great Lakes, as well as the eastern seaboard. It comes with a smoking potbelly stove and a working searchlight.
Weighing in at 439 prims, the Lighthouse is contained in an easy-to-use rezzer box. Simply take the box out of your inventory, and left-click the box, and select "build". Position the box until the lighthouse is in the correct position, and then click it once more to select "done". And voila! Your new lighthouse is ready to use
The lighthouse is a bit primmy at 439 prims (and 5 separate links), but I think it's well worth it. It just feels so warm and cozy, you can almost feel the cold of the sea creeping in and you needing to be by the potbelly.
The lighthouse went through many, many revisions, starting initially to look almost Roman in it's design. Amazing what a few texture changes will do.
You can buy Palette Point at my store in Lalique or on Xstreet.
Introducing the Agora Commercial Prefabs
It's hard enough to start a business in SL. You gotta find your niche, then you have to develop your craft, become an expert in the tools of the trade... and then you've gotta find a good landlord, someone stable enough to not toss you out on your butt when their partner dumps them. And let's not even start with designing a good store...
...well, actually, yes, let's start with that.
It can be daunting, and not everyone has the right frame of mind to design a good store. To some, a "good store" is a big glowing box with your products tossed on the walls. It works... if you're insane. For your shoppers, it's retail suicide. Where are the men's hair? Where's the sextoys that were on the classifieds? WHERE ARE MY FRIENDS?
It helps to start small, start simple. That's where the Agora Prefabs come in.
Agora is a series of commercially-oriented prefabs that are designed for the budding, up-and-coming entrepreneur. Each one is the size of a typical new designer's store - generally a 16m by 16m footprint. The insides are simple, elegant, and empty for you to fill with your wonderful products. The colors out of the box are completely neutral - greys and whites, in fact. While this may sound drab, it actually is a boon - it lets you come up with your own design and branding ideas. Think of it as a blank canvas, yours to paint on.
Each design is a single-linked building, easy to place. The six designs range in primminess from 75 prims to 134. The permissions are, as always, mod/copy, letting you experiment, design, redesign, blow up, whatever. And, as an added bonus, the textures used in the builds are included, just in case you didn't really want plaid on that back wall.
The Agora prefabs are $L750 each, and are immediately available in my Lalique store as well as on XStreet. A fatpack is also available, just in case you wanted to think big and start your own shopping district. The Fatpack contains all six designs, and come at a 20% discount!
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