It’s the first of September, and once again, the Arcade is open in Second Life. It’s been five years now, and it’s still going strong!
I was in the first Arcade, and I’ve been in lots of them (but not all) since. I’m there again this time, with a bunch of Corn Dollies.
The Corn Dollies Key
It’s all Marianne McCann’s fault. She was the one who begged for them. I was going to do this set a long time ago, and then got distracted, and only did one. I put that one in an Arcade set called Grandma’s Attic, which was really a whole lot of things that I had sitting around in my workroom, but had never really finished, or finished and never put up for sale. I have a lot of things like that, at any time.
But Mari never forgets, especially when it’s something she really wants, and so she kept nudging until I got this set done. If you like them, thank her!
There are 12 in the set, plus the reward.
Many of them are scripted; for instance, there’s one with a quilt, which lets you swap between 3 different quilt patterns. There’s one with a parasol, that lets you choose from 12 different parasol designs. There’s one holding a bird, that plays birdsong when you touch her, until you touch her again. There’s one with a working lantern that has all kinds of different options. There’s one with a bubble wand, that lets you toggle the bubbles on and off. There’s one on a swing that can really swing.
All of them let you change the colors of their skin, hair, apron, dress, and kerchief (or hair bows) separately, so you can have them look just the way you want.
You can also use your own pictures for the one with the quilt, or the one who is painting, just by dragging them over the quilt or picture that’s there.
The Reward is only available during the Arcade, and is copy/mod, no transfer, so you won’t be able to pick her up at any of the sales or trades. This is your only chance to get her, and only by playing the machine 25 times. She’s holding a jack-o-lantern that’s really a light, with all the options (including changing the light color and brightness.) It’s a bit early for Halloween, but it won’t be by the time the Arcade closes on September 31.
The Reward you get for 25 plays!
So go ahead, and try your luck at my machine at The Arcade! All the dolls (except the Reward) are mod/transfer, and all of them are 1 LI at the size given. You can shrink them small enough to put in my dollhouse, or make them huge, although LI goes up as they get big (of course.)
While you are there, don’t forget to pick up the Birthday Presents! You’ll find them on the huge cake in the middle of the venue. Happy Birthday, Arcade!
It’s that time again, and The Arcade is open for the September round.
R(S)W Playful Pastimes 2 – Arcade Sept. 2016
Marianne McCann and I have collaborated on a set of Retro toys for this round. (I did the mesh, and she did most of the textures. Mari also did the animation in the plane. We both worked on the scripts.)
All of the items do something. The tops jump onto their tips and spin when you touch them. Touch them again, and they fall over. Or just wait, and they’ll fall over by themselves after a bit (because this isn’t a dream.)
When you touch the handheld pinball games, you hear the plunger, and the ball rolling, and then the ball appears in one of the slots. It’s exactly like really playing it! (Or as close as I could manage, in SL.)
The sliding puzzles scramble or solve themselves with a touch.
If you wear the plane, your avatar holds it up in the air. If you touch it, you get a really cute kid voice making a plane noise, so you can run around pretending the plane is flying.
The ray gun water pistol is the most fun! If you wear it and go into Mouse Look, you can shoot a cascade of water at your friends! The disks on the front of the gun also light up and spin when you’re in Mouselook, so everyone knows you are ready to douse them at a moment’s notice.
If you play the machine 25 times, you get a special Reward; a tin Police Box Bank.
There’s no other way to get it, and it’s only available during this round of the Arcade, so if you want one, you have until September 30. Unlike all the rest of the things in the machine, the bank is copy/mod, so you won’t be able to buy, beg, or borrow one from anyone.
When you touch the bank, you’ll be able to hear the coins dropping into it. There’s also a script in the Instructions (in the Object Contents) that lets you turn it into a tip jar, if you want to.
So that’s part of what I’ve been up to! Hope you enjoy it, and if you’re in Second Life, I hope to see you there!
Sorry for vanishing like that! I got sick, and the medicine the doctor put me on made it really hard to focus or do much of anything. But I’m better now!
I have been trying to get some stuff done while I was gone. First off, I got a citronella candle out for Second Life.
Citronella Candle for Second Life
I’m pretty pleased with it. Like the res of my candles and lamps, it works (either Local Lights or Fulbright.) I don’t really see the point of a light that doesn’t light!
It’s also color changing; there’s a script to change the color of the candle or the bucket, although since it’s copy/mod you can also just change it all manually, if you prefer.
I also released a stool to go with the café table and chairs. That was week before last, but I had a story that I blogged that day, so I was going to wait to talk about this, and then I got sick.
Speaking about SL, there are only two weeks left of The Arcade. As always, when it’s over you’ll be able to keep playing my machine on Livingtree; but you won’t be able to get the special Rewards for playing the machine 50 times ever again. So if you want those, you only have a couple of weeks to get them!
There won’t be a new item out in Second Life this weekend, because the thing I’m working on right now is going to take me longer than that to finish. I think it’ll be worth the wait though.
Test Render – Hammock for SL in Progress
It will come in three parts; the hammock itself (I still need to make the pillows but they’re coming,) the stand, and the shade canopy.
That’s so the hammock can swing. Swinging in the hammock is important! It also will mean that if you have trees, you don’t need to use the stand. And if you don’t want the canopy, you can save the LI and not have it.
It will probably wind up tweaked a bit from what you see in the picture, and it needs textures and things, of course. It is, after all, a work in progress. But I thought you might like to see what I’m cooking up.
On the writing front, I’m in the process of editing a book about Wicca that I wrote nearly 10 years ago now, but then Life happened and I forgot to do anything with it. Michael reminded me about it, so now it will see the light of day!
It’s for people who aren’t necessarily interested in joining the religion at all, but who want to know something about it because they have friends, neighbors, or clients that are Wiccan.
With any luck, that will be available in the next month or so.
The next Kip Andrews story will be published here on my blog on Saturday. I hope you like it.
If you liked the last one (Stormy Weather) I’d really appreciate it if you could review it on Amazon. If you want to read it again, you can read it for free if you happen to subscribe to KindleUnlimited. Otherwise, the book is only 99¢.
If you want to read my stories early, you can join my Patreon. I would really appreciate your support.
I’m also starting to work on the redesign of the site, in my copious free time. (Haha.) Since there’s not a whole lot of free time, it might be a while before you can see it, but I’m working on it.
So, that’s what I’m up to at the moment!
Thanks for reading, and if you have a question, comment or suggestion, please let me know.
This round, I have a pressed wood dollhouse, complete with all the furnishings!
All the prizes!
The furniture all comes in at under 1LI per piece. The dollhouse itself is 2 LI (because it has a working door, and all those windows have real glass – or perhaps it’s plastic – in them.)
All the furniture is very detailed, and some of it, like the kitchen table and chairs, is designed to be easy to tint whatever color you like! There’s even a dollhouse to go inside the dollhouse.
The dollhouse itself is carefully textured to show all the parts of the rooms that aren’t removable furniture; things like posters on the walls, a kitty clock in the kitchen, fireplaces, and kitchen cabinets. The outside has a richly landscaped texture, like a real pressed wood or metal dollhouse.
The Arcade has a new “thing” this round; if you play the machine more than 50 times, you’ll get a special Reward. It’s only available for this one month. It’s no-transfer, so you won’t be able to buy them anywhere, and we have all agreed not ever to sell them anywhere else.
My Reward is a mailbox and lamppost for the dollhouse.
Working Rewards
The lamppost lights up, of course, and you can also change the color of the light, make it auto (on at dusk, off at dawn) and all the other things you can do with my lights.
The mailbox has a toggle. The first time you touch it, the flag goes up. The next time, the flag goes down, and the door opens so you can see the tiny little pieces of mail. The third time, the door closes, and it’s back where you started.
As always, I’m pretty excited about The Arcade. There’s a lot of really good stuff in it! You can see all of it (not just mine) at The Arcade June 2016 Shopping Guide.
If you’re an SL Resident, it’s a lot of fun, and a great way to get amazing stuff for very few Lindens!
The stuff that I’ve been doing for the June round of the Arcade in Second Life is all modeled, textured, and scripted (in some cases,) the instructions have been written, the Permissions have been checked, and all the Keys and sneak peeks are ready to go. In other words, it’s all done!
The only thing remaining is to put it out at the Venue, and I’m ready to do that as soon as it opens. Well, the next morning, anyway. I’m not staying up until 3:00 am my time to put things in the machine.
Which means that my time is my own again. Which, of course, means that I’ll be able to blog once more. Of course, you probably figured that out already, because you’re reading this!
I’m planning a fairly serious blog post tomorrow, about Transgender issues. It might take me longer to get it all written, but I’m hoping not.
On Saturday, of course, there’ll be a new story! Yay!
I’m not planning to post much more about the Arcade here, but I’ll have new sneak peeks up every day on my Flickr stream, if you’d like to see more.
On other fronts, I’m mostly doing a lot of clean-up and maintenance work. (Did you know that it is possible to fill a 3 TB hard drive?) I’m also trying to pull all the things together to start my Patreon page.
So that’s what I’m up to! How about you?
Picture Attribution; Sneak Peek from the Arcade June 2016 in Second Life. Marianne McCann plays with Robin Sojourner’s Arcade set.
I was pretty sick over the weekend, so I’m late getting this out; but I have a new set of table and chairs for Second Life®.
Originally I made them for Marianne McCann’s in-world coffee shop, The Pen. The coffee shop is loosely based on a real one, and these are based on the real table and chairs from there!
You can learn more about them (and even buy them if you’re an SL™ resident) at The SL Marketplace.
Anyway, I’m doing better today, and with any luck, I’ll have a post that’s more than just a new product announcement tomorrow!
The Tannenbaum Holiday Market Event is a really remarkable shopping and gacha event for SL residents. It’s being hosted by some of the same people who do The Arcade, and has a lot of the same vendors; more than 100 creators, all told.
There’s a gacha full of machines that are selling ornaments for your Holiday tree at L$25 a pull. Botanical has a really amazing Christmas Tree there; the best I’ve ever seen in SL.
I have things there too, of course, or I wouldn’t have been working to get ready for it! Two new releases, and lots of older ones!
Holiday Ornament Box
The first new one is a box of ornaments.
Really, it’s all about the box. Marianne McCann wanted it. But when I was working on it, I decided it would be a bit disappointing to have the box, but not be able to hang any of the ornaments.
So I went ahead and put the same ornaments, but with hooks for hanging, inside the box.
You might recognize the ornament that’s not in the box as the one I made for the Texture Tutorials. It is, indeed. That’s what made Mari say she really needed to have them, in a box. 😀
Christmas Card Ro
The second thing I made just for this is a row of Christmas Cards, all ready to display.
It’s really a very simple piece; just seven Christmas cards, with vintage designs. Except the Chickadee on the end, which I made. I didn’t make all of them, because I didn’t want them to look like they were all made by the same person.
Well, it’s been a long and terribly busy month. It’s been hard to squeeze in time to eat and sleep, let alone post to my blog. But it’s all done now!
My stuff is all ready to go into The Arcade in Second Life. Here’s a key, with all the things listed.
Key for R(S)W Gacha Machine – The Arcade SL, Dec. 2015
There are only 11 this round, because I’m putting a gift in the Season of Giving, too, and needed to make 2 new things for The Tannenbaum Market. (More about both of those later. This post got too long.)
But nearly all of them do something, or at least are set up to be easily customizable.
The biggest piece is the Music Box. It’s pretty much a reconstruction of a Capital Cuff Music Box, Style A, made by F.G. Otto & Sons in Jersey City, NJ in the 1890s. I changed a few things, like the design on the cuff, and simplified it here and there. And I added a design on the top, which the original was lacking.
Design on Top of Music Box
I’d actually done the design before I found the music box, and was so taken with it that I just had to recreate it. But I didn’t want to pass up this design, which took hours and hours to make. (I did it in Adobe Illustrator. Those are all vectors!) So I decided to combine them!
The music box lid opens, of course, and the crank turns and makes a cranking noise. When you touch the base, the box plays one of the tunes from a real one, which the people at The Regina Music Box Center kindly gave me permission to include. (You can hear the tune at that page, too.) If you happen to know the name of the tune, please tell me in the comments!
As it plays, cuff rotates, animated textures make the gears inside appear to turn, and the fan fly spins so fast it disappears. Well, it does in the real one. In this one, it just disappears.
Finally, there’s a picture inside the lid. It’s one of the original lithographs that came with the box, but you can put any picture you like there, to make it truly yours. Since people might be leery of changing something about a Rare item, the owner of the box can get the original picture back at any time, by just touching it. (All the rest is set so anyone in the group the music box is set to can work it.)
So, that’s one of the two Rares in this set, and took more time to make than any of the rest, as you can probably guess. It clocks in at 3 LI, but you can reduce that if you want by removing the crank.
Victorian Trunk – Open
The other rare is the trunk. Once again, it opens, and creaks a bit when it does, but it doesn’t do anything else, really. There’s a lot of texture work in it, though!
The inside is lined in Newspaper, because that’s the way the trunk in my RL Granny’s attic was.
Between them on the key is the Owl Cookie Jar. When you touch it, it gives you a choice of cookies. Pick one, give permission to attach, and it flies into your hand. You eat it for a bit, and then it vanishes. Because, you know, can’t keep your cookie and eat it too!
Granny also had a simple brass candlestick in her attic, so that’s here, as well. It’s a working candle, of course, with a shadow that moves and a flame that flickers when it’s lit. There’s a script to tint the candle and the bobache (that glass ring around the base) but since it’s mod, you can also tint it any color you can imagine. The candle itself is a dripless hexagonal candle. You can set it to act as a Local Light or not, and to light automatically, or not.
The Fairy Door doesn’t do much except look really cute. But it’s in two pieces so you can adjust the light leak so it works properly wherever you put it.
The Propeller Beanie has a prop that spins in the SL Wind. (Marianne McCann is the person who wrote that very clever script.) If you don’t want it spinning, touch the middle of the propeller to stop it. You can also tint the prop whatever color you want!
The Retro Rocket is a picture frame, that’ll hold 3 pictures of your friends and family, taking a trip into Space!
The Vintage Coffee Cups let you choose the kind of coffee you want to display, or you can empty them, if you prefer. They’ll steam when they’re full, but not when they’re empty. You get two separate cups, so you can use ’em together or apart.
The Coffee Pot comes with the tray, but once again, it’s really two separate pieces. When you (or anyone else) touch the pot, you can get a cup of coffee to drink. Touch your cup to get the same coffee choices as the display cups. You can also have a separate saucer to hold in your left hand, if you want. These are temp attach pieces, which never go into your inventory at all. You’ll hold them for a while, slowly sipping your coffee, and then they’ll vanish.
The final pieces of the set are the Sugar and Creamer. You can empty the Creamer, or fill it, with a touch. All of it is set up to fit nicely on the tray, if you want to serve coffee to your guests!
Finally, for some reason, Granny had a corn dolly! She doesn’t really do anything but stand there and look cheerful; but you can tint her skin, hair, dress, kerchief and apron all separately, so you can really personalize her!
The Arcade opens at midnight on November 30, and runs until midnight December 31. If you’re a resident of SL, and you decide to go play the machines, have fun, and good luck!
As promised, here’s the image with all the things I have in the Arcade this round!
The 14 prizes in our Gacha machine for this round of the Arcade!
I did all the mesh for these, and about half the textures. Marianne McCann did the other half, as well as the scripting and animation in the Pinwheels.
The pinwheel animation lets you hold them, and wave them back and forth. They also spin or stop spinning when you touch them. So you can stick them in the ground, or anywhere else you like, and have them spin as well.
There are three different puzzles, with photographs by Mari on them. The box is a separate object, and the top slides open and closed with a touch. So you can close it and put it on a shelf if you like, or you can slide the lid forward so you can see it better while assembling the puzzle.
There’s also an empty white puzzle texture, full perm, so if you have extra puzzles and you want to modify one, you can put your own image on the puzzle. (There’s a top without a title, too, so you can put it there as well.) Instructions for all that are included, if you need them.
Mari did the covers for one pile of comics, and I did the other. Once again, if you have extra piles, you can replace the cover on the top with the cover of your favorite comic book or magazine.
Tint the clay to get whatever color animals you want.
The clay is really based on white, so you can tint it any color you like.
If you want a white kitty, or a purple and pink snake, or anything else at all, you can have it!
The top of the jar of clay is tintable too, so you can have piles of them, and pretend that you have all the colors of the rainbow!
The jacks are tintable too, because I always liked the colored jacks, when I was a kid.
In fact, the only prize in the machine you can’t do anything with is the bag of dice; but those are so much fun, I don’t think that’ll be a problem. 😀
Sneak Peek 2 – A puzzle featuring a photograph by Marianne McCann
Today’s Sneak Peek from The Arcade in Second Life® – A jigsaw puzzle, with a photograph of Archie by Marianne McCann.
There’s more to this one than you can see here, but you’ll have to wait until the image with the entire contents of the of the gacha machine is released to see the box with a cover that can open and close.. I mean, the rest of it! Yeah!
There are materials in this one, too. It has both Shine and Normals, so it looks very realistic, just like a puzzle in First Life!
