[BLOG] second life at the haunt

[skinstealer]

BIG WARNING IN ADVANCE: this blog will have unspoilered eyestrain-inducing images, gifs, sex/kink discussion and images, and a large variety of heavy topics! second life is a very fucking weird game! beware!





[image description: a second life screencap of a picto person avatar, "messy", with a CYMK distorted checkerboard pattern, a fish tail, horns, a drippy halo, yellow fishnets, and a rainbow skirt and tank top. she is sitting at a writing desk in the middle of a grassy area, the desk placed against what appears to be an arcade.]

sal mortis

well. some things happened in our life. people either know or they don't and for the most part i'm not here to talk about that- i'm here to talk about second life. it's a game we have a lot of love and hate for after playing it on and off for ten years, with a couple very, Very dedicated periods of active play separated by life getting in the way. there is nothing like it, and that's a quality that can go in pretty much any way you can imagine. we have a good chunk of friends who play VRChat and Roblox who want us to try those games too, at some point- but for right now, second life is what our brain is drawn to, and i guess we're making this thread to capture Why. why is it so important to us that we play this game from the early 2000's, to immerse ourselves into it, to make it a part of our life in a way that really makes you think about the title of the game itself?

it's something we don't even really have all the answers too. but right now, when we're going through a lot of rough, heavy shit, we've been finding ways to be creative through this game that don't require a lot of spoons or physical strain. it's been extremely touch and go for the past few months, and being able to cobble together stuff has been a big deal. hell, our therapist actually got us started on this- they advised that we need to take on creative pursuits that ARENT projects, and while we are starting to try and rev up for project work again (hey this is an effort to get ourselves to write again for the first time in ages), this is just what we needed.

with that said- there's no real good way for us to just, Explain second life in a way that works for Everyone. the experience of introducing people to this game seems to be one where we hold their hands through it, and i have no idea how to ease an entire Vague Audience into something like that. our only real solution is that comments and questions are both allowed AND encouraged in this thread. just be chill and respectful. the only things that we will For Sure not be covering is any horny shit that goes beyond nude/horny avatars, pictures of sexual/kink environments and objects, talking about kink/sex culture on SL, and/or maybe the occasional ridiculous ad image. you can't really talk about SL without talking about the sexual side of it- and while we're not going to show you Actual On Screen Second Life Sex (or...slex, as apparently some people call it?), we're not going to censor stuff like showing off avatars that have important kink expression to us, or hold back from showing off a sim that happens to have a billiards table you can fuck on. if you don't like that shit, this isn't a thread for you.

also please don't make weird comments about our avatars/flirting with Us directly ok thank you

so: onto What I've Been Doing. we've been playing for...two weeks now? pretty much nonstop. there is so much stuff we've been doing that i genuinely would not be able to bring myself to write this blog post if i stopped to cover all of it. so instead: we will cover a small chunk.



[image description: messy standing proudly inside the arcade. with a better view, we can see that she has a dress-like torso and a large bust. her face has an emoji on it that combines yellow hearts and musical notes, and a white and yellow star collar sits on her neck. there's a heart hologram in front of the camera, and various emulator cabinets sitting in view.]

i said i wouldn't talk too much about The Active Situation, but...i will, a little. it's important to this contextually. i, salamander mortis, have not fronted like this in a long ass time. i don't know why i was the guy that bitmap (formerly rin, it's complicated, use that name now for him) was able to make contact with first in the mess that is us being homeless and stuck in an airbnb for months, but here i am. and i am fucking stressed. bmp was already struggling a good bit on his own and i did pretty solid at first...until the first hurdle popped up and i realized "ohhh so this is why he's been going insane.", lmao. but i still wanted to be out and start making time for myself, even if it's in a bad situation, so i made myself an avatar. bmp had already made me one before i took proper front, and trust me, i planning on showing her off too, but this one's been vibing with me the most right now.

i call her messy, and she's a custom job on the picto person avatar base that @vyn made. we've been extremely excited to be working on SL stuff with someone again, so the second this dropped, we started making texture layers to put on top of it and to be used for people who might not otherwise have the resources to make a design from scratch (or the upload cash, for that matter). you can find those layers here. but- once we were all said and done, it was time to test them. i made an avatar for bmp- which i will not be posting YET, because i want him to get over his shame and actually post it himself, lol- but when that went so well, i had to dive in and make my own. at the same time this was happening, vyn was making a clothing pack for the picto, getting it done just around when i could use those textures to enhance my avatar further.  it was the perfect storm, and after fussing around with gradients on top of gradients, snatching an emoji from emoji kitchen, and making use of the fact that our inventory was halfway sorted, i had something awesome.





[image description: messy sitting in on a round sofa with the slightest glimpse of a ball pit at her feet. she sits coyly, and text next to her reading:
"You act like you've never seen a living pictogram before...
Haha, you're missing out
[same emoji as her face]"

so...messy. similar to petz, we can't help but look at avatars as their own little characters half the time, but these are unique in that they act more as costumes than little guys we watch run around autonomously. i've only "had" messy for a few days, and i can already tell i'm insanely attached. she's confident, she's coy, she knows what she wants and she's gonna get it. i've taken an embarrassing amount of pinups in the past two days for my own admiration- but you know what, fuck it, she's my character and i think she's cute. flirtatious, definitely, so it suits her to have what's effectively a pile of transparent renders of her in ridiculous poses on our computer's hard drive. someday i want to take her to a furry club and see how people react- though i would have to shut down any hypothetical flirtation, and that would suck. main reason why we don't go to clubs that often anymore, but maybe some time with friends.

but...it helps, having a costume i can put on that feels more confident in herself. she's a fucking bad bitch. she doesn't give a shit. if things phase her, she cries it out and moves on, because she has Shit To Do. well adjusted? probably not, but she's got herself together more than i do right now and that'll be good enough. she also encompasses a lot of gender shit for me- i identify as somewhere between she/her-using transmasc and a nonbinary woman, and she's- well, she's literally a "female" (referred to simply as "dress" in the actual avatar files) bathroom sign pictogram. in a femme outfit, no less. but she's still not a woman in the traditional sense, even with everything about her being read by strangers as one at a glance.  she doesn't care! she owns it! she knows shes a weird...gender...guy, and she's having fun with that.

...it helps.



[image description: two "ModBody" avatars, both styled after beanie baby bears. the left, the "default", has an average build and lighter filler textures, while the right, a custom, has a warmer color scheme, a fatter build, red-pink accents, and a heart patch on the belly.]

we will talk more about the ModBody system in-depth in another blog post, probably- but the gist is that it's a freebie modular body kit we hand out to people visiting our personal parcel. it's meant to have mix and match parts and be easy to work with, and thanks to @vyn helping out with us getting back into it, we've been cranking out new stuff AND a proper little shop where people can pick the kits up. this thing is the first in our attempt to make easy-edit kits for a premade design- a beanie baby bear styled avatar where all the parts are already assembled, and all you have to do is download the texttures, edit, and upload. you've got a bear ready to go, and the customization is nice and easy.

while we have a ~secret~ project in mind for this premade kit style, this was a good place to start...after all, you know us. we fucking love beanie babies. combine that with the fact that one of the communities we're in, IHATEART/EggwareXYZ, has a bot that gives out little randomly colored toy PNGs for doing pacts (such as chores, hard tasks, making it through the day) and it seems like an obvious answer to use those bears for inspiration. something to do!



[image description: a collection of bows, all retextured by sal. there are a lot of different colors, but they feature cloud, galaxy, constellation, gingham, and cat fabric patterns.]

speaking of something to do... now that we're starting to put stuff on the marketplace again and make stuff for our friends, we set out to start using full perm shit from our inventory and retexture them. these bows are from Meli Imako, one of the most prolific artists for full-permission items for creators to use. their stuff is good as fuck and retextures easy, these bows included. we took textures that we had purchased for petz/grandma simulator reasons, ran them through grandma sim (but high res!), tweaked as needed, and made bow textures based on those. this was a somewhat soothing activity to do while i was having a grand scale meltdown last night, but i did end up making fucking 50 of them. and 10 hats, which we will go into another day. not looking forward to uploading textures for all of these and slapping them together- but it's a great suite of accessories, and we're looking forward to making more. 




[image description: a customized "party animals" avatar that resembles a tiny wolf pinata with a grayscale color scheme, one of the aforementioned hair bows in a dark palette, spider markings, and a black bandana tacked on with frankenstein bolts. he has a cute eye with eyelashes, though his expression is uncomfortable and suspicious.]

while hanging out with @cheet and @vyn last night, cheet had discovered some Cool Gacha Resale Avatars for cheap- and i remembered some of our favorites that we never actually got to really USE, the Party Animals avatar by Acid Rayne. i would link a listing for the avatar, but you'll have to get gacha voucher resales for the original line of skins....though! the base avatar, now with mix and match colors and some canine variations, is now available in the Acid Rayne mainstore.  in any case: it's a cartoony pinata avatar! i'd say we don't go for feral avatars often, but truth be told, we're just really uncomfortable with how prominent the sexual market is for them. i got to run around our arcade skybox in this thing for a bit last night, and he's fucking adorable and downright euphoric to use. sometimes you want to be a little guy. we'll make a proper "lookbook" or whatever once we make a finalized ref, but he's cute. i can see myself getting really attached to him- though i tried to make him nice and system neutral.

...also upon going to the AR store i realized they have a shitload more Marinimals stuff and man that is going to be a blog post in and of itself once we pick some of that stuff up. i don't care to go into our financial situation aside from we are doing Pretty Solidly Good/Safe- at the cost of my fucking sanity from juggling all of the things that make it stable in the first place. it has been a big reason for us being under so much pressure....so it'll be nice to sit back, exhale, and buy a cute cartoony tiger to run around in. a mark of things being safer. a victory tiger.


[image description: a customized "little smiley" stress toy, with the same distorted checkerboard texture featured on messy and one of the hair bows placed on its chest.]

finally, the last thing i did before buckling up to fucking write this. vyn released the Little Smiley stress toy- can you believe there wasn't anything like this on SL, at least not marketed as such? it's a little smiley thing that you can click on to squeeze, and it squeaks. i've seen plenty of stuff that squeaks on click, but this thing is fucking stimmy. i love it. it's a single linden dollar, go get it. i slapped on messy's texture just to see what it would look like, and yeah, i really like that! so i put a bow on it and called it good.

...things are really hard right now. like, it feels impossibly hard to a degree. but i want to try and keep going, and meet people, and figure out who i am as a system member. writing for a big project still feels really hard right now, but...i guess we have second life. and maybe we can write about that.

[Guest]

Okay this is huge so I don't have everything comprehended. Here's hoping things clear up soon and take the mental pressure off you, this whole situation is a mess and is probably going to need a few years of stability at least to settle towards healing...

I really like the sourcing style for talking about other creators, it's nice to give them a shout out when showing off the cool things you made with their works.

i've only "had" messy for a few days, and i can already tell i'm insanely attached. she's confident, she's coy, she knows what she wants and she's gonna get it. i've taken an embarrassing amount of pinups in the past two days for my own admiration- but you know what, fuck it, she's my character and i think she's cute. flirtatious, definitely, so it suits her to have what's effectively a pile of transparent renders of her in ridiculous poses on our computer's hard drive. someday i want to take her to a furry club and see how people react

it helps, having a costume i can put on that feels more confident in herself. she's a fucking bad bitch. she doesn't give a shit. if things phase her, she cries it out and moves on, because she has Shit To Do. well adjusted? probably not, but she's got herself together more than i do right now and that'll be good enough.

Your roleplaying history is showing, what's SL like with that, beyond the obvious cybersex stuff?

Also, since you mentioned you are up for questions, how about these two topics?

How do you meet people in second life?
Are there any important boundaries or events we should look out for?
In particular talking to others about their avatars would be useful since this platform is mostly about avatar customisation.

Something I've noticed is there's a few large popular avatar body systems people use, which ones do you have experience with and can talk about pros and cons of?
I know bento is the animation system used now, but the history and range for base avatars is somewhat difficult to find info on, especially with more niche designs like genderless avatars or component vendors.