I am here to remind all you Second Life freebie fashionistas that it is the perfect weekend to pop down to the sixth anniversary round of the monthly Uber shopping event, which ends on Sept. 22nd, 2020 (here is my original blogpost with pictures of many of the gifts). It’s no longer crowded, you can shop in peace, and you can pick up scores and scores of free gifts (you don’t need to join any group).
Everything my goth girl avatar Nada Nix is wearing in this picture (except for the body, head, and hair) is a free group gift from Uber! The T-shirt from Miss Chelsea succinctly sums up 2020 with a one-star review: Total crap. Would not recommend.
My feelings exactly!
Nada is wearing:
Choker: Reckless studded choker by AVEC TOI (comes with a fatpack HUD)
T-Shirt: the Brin 2020 T-shirt by Miss Chelsea
Skirt: the Mara jersey skirt in red by Jeune
Combat boots: Rev boots by Memoire; these come in sizes to fit both male (Legacy, Belleza Jake) and female (Legacy, Belleza Freya, Maitreya Lara, Slink Hourglass) feet.
Here’s your taxi to Uber. I will leave you with a video by SL vlogger Cat Pink, showing you a selection of some of the other gifts available:
I just stumbled across a fabulous fashion freebie for female avatars, and I decided to use it as an excuse to write up an entire blogpost about all the places in Second Life you can pick up a full-length mesh ballgown, for free! Clip and save for when you need something for a formal, black-tie event (or even if you just feel like swanning around SL in a full-blown battleship ballgown; hey, it’s your Second Life, express yourself any way you want!)
The freebie is from the newly-rebranded store, Dead Doll (formerly known as Dead Dollz), which has set up in a brand new location and is offering a gift to celebrate. If you join the SeraphimSL.com group for free and click the panel shown below, you can pick up the simple, elegant Etta strapless gown for free:
The Etta gown comes in a fatpack of sixteen colours as shown. Here, Vanity Fair models it with a black lace bolero from United Colors (not free; I purchased the fatpack of this bolero, waiting for the perfect gown to pair it with). Sheer perfection!
Another place where you can pick up some free gowns is the excellent freebie store at Ajuda SL Brasil. Up on the third floor is a large display by VIPs Creations, where in the top row of panels are three different styles of full-length gowns:
This lovely strapless gown with a subtle pattern is by VIPs Creations, and comes in four colours as shown, and even includes the shoes:
Another place to pick up a simple, classic ballgown is the generous freebie store at Hilly Haalan, where you can find this Nadia gown in fifteen colours (you will need to join the Hilly Haalan store group for free to pick up all the freebies here).
While some gowns are the right length for high heels, the Nadia gown works best with flats. Fortunately, at Hilly Haalan you can also pick up a free set of Amy flats which come in a variety of colours to match this ballgown perfectly!
Another little-known spot where you can pick up ballgowns in orange, red, and blue is !Soul, a store which has set up shop in a skybox high above the newbie orientation centre called New Resident Island (here’s the exact SLURL). If you join the !Soul group for free, you can pick up dozens of free gifts of women’s clothing, hair, footwear, and system/Bakes on Mesh skins. Everything in the store is free!
The apparel at !Soul comes in standard sizes, but ballgowns are the kind of clothing that you can easily alpha out your pelvic area and legs anyway, so they will always fit! (You might have to adjust your bust size slightly, though.)
Here is the blue ballgown from !Soul, with the optional fur stole. Looking elegant for zero Linden dollars!
Of course, you can sometimes pick up free ballgowns at the entrances to many of the finer dance establishments in Second Life, such as this gown from the newly-reopened Frank’s Jazz Club (which appears to have started up again just to try and wrench business away from the upstart Frank’s (more information here):
And, of course, there are several beautiful ballgowns to be had at The Free Dove (remember that you have to join The Free Dove group for free in order to get these freebies). Palomma Casanova, the owner of The Free Dove, has reorganized her venerable freebie store by designer, so you will have to wander around a bit to find all the ballgowns. However, there is still a small women’s formalwear section near the back entrance (SLURL):
Nearby is a display by Lurve, which features two very different gowns:
And close by, the Tiffany Designs display at The Free Dove has a couple of lovely full-length ballgowns, perfect for your next swanky soirée:
In fact, you can also pick up a couple of free ballgowns at Tiffany’s main store location (one is mesh and the other is an applier gown; no group is needed):
Take a look at the shimmering, daringly low-cut Nia ballgown in champagne, one of the free gown gifts at Tiffany Designs!
So there you have it—elegance on (less than) a dime!
Remember that the Etta ballgown fatpack gift at Dead Doll is likely a time-limited offer, and that Palomma Casanova frequently rotates the stock at The Free Dove, so please don’t delay picking up these gowns and stashing them in your inventory for your next major event. Happy freebie shopping!
I’m writing this blogpost lying on my sofa, using the WordPress app on my iPad. It’s been a long, long, long workweek, and I am exhausted. If I am not working, I have been sleeping (and vice versa). And tonight, I have made a decision.
I will be avoiding ALL social media and news media until after the U.S. federal election is over. I have already successfully broken my Facebook addiction, but I am also going to stay off Twitter and Reddit as well. I will be taking an extended break from the news media as well. No more popping into Google News every few hours. And, of course, my TV set is busted, so no TV news, either!
I will instead narrow my focus to those matters that I actually have some control over: my full-time paying job with my university library system, and my blogging. My blogposts are automatically set up to be posted to my Twitter feed, but I’m going to see if I can step away from checking my Twitter feed every few hours (and stay off Reddit, too).
I’ll still be on Discord, of course. And I will still be writing about social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse on this blog. So I’ll still be around.
I just feel I need to take this break to focus on what’s really important, rather than fret and worry about all the things going on in the outside world that I have absolutely zero control over. It’s time to hit the pause button and look after my own mental health and well-being.
UPDATE Sept. 19th, 2020: After sleeping on it, I had a few more thoughts.
Making a resolution is one thing; keeping it is another. I may find myself falling back into checking the newsfeeds, or I might be able to replace some old, bad habits with new, healthier ones.
All I know is that I feel an urge to make some changes in my life in pursuit of wholeness and healing, and one of them is to spend less time obsessively scrolling through a “doomfeed” of bad news.
And another change is to spend less time hanging out in the echo chamber of social media. I am aware of FOMO: the Fear Of Missing Out on something that’s happening. But sometimes, you just need to take a break, and hit the pause button. That’s what I am going to do (or, at least, attempt to do) over the next two months.
Obviously, I may have surprised some observers who expected me, after my self-imposed vacation from blogging this summer, to come busting out of the gate with a flurry of new blogposts. Frankly, I have surprised myself as well.
Oh, Auntie Ryan still has opinions, child. And you all know from past experience that I am certainly not shy about sharing said opinions here. But, this time around, I am biding my time before I set pen to paper (or, in this case, finger to keyboard).
For example, I have lots of feelings about Facebook (none very positive), but rather than just post another rant, I feel like doing a bit more reading, reflection, and investigation, and craft a better-worded argument than I usually do. Perhaps it’s a by-product of teaching university students about the proper way to approach the published scholarly literature while searching for the answer to a research question, something that has been on my mind a lot over the past few weeks.
I think such reflection is a good and necessary thing, particularly in this age of divisiveness, conspiracy theories, and highly partisan politics. Throw in a deadly pandemic and a global climate crisis (with out-of-control wildfires in Australia and California just being the most recent evidence of the emergency), and it’s enough to overwhelm and depress anyone. In many ways, 2020 has been a dumpster-fire year.
So it seems like a good time for me to percolate, ruminate…and perhaps spend a bit more time reading and reflecting, rather than just jump right into the fracas like I usually have done. Kent Bye once told me that he appreciates my in-the-moment, “hot take” reporting, but there’s also a lot to be said for a more considered, more informed, more reflective approach to social VR, virtual worlds, and the ever-evolving (and percolating!) metaverse.
For all of its hype and drama—the launch and shut-down of devices, products, and platforms—the metaverse is not going anywhere in a hurry, and neither am I.
Some people may also be surprised that I am still writing about Second Life, which many observers see as quaint and outdated. As I have written before, I consider SL to be the perfect model of a mature, fully-evolved metaverse, one where we can already see many of the features which will appear in newer platforms.
For example, it is no accident that Facebook Horizon has implemented easy-to-use in-world building tools, an echo of the rudimentary “prim building” that Second Life launched with over seventeen years ago. Many experienced metaverse content creators got their start building and selling simple, prim-built objects, expressing their creativity in new and wonderful ways, and making money off their efforts. And we can expect to see more and more platforms move towards the implementation of an in-world marketplace for the buying and selling of user-created content. In this and many other ways, Second Life set the model for other virtual worlds to follow and improve upon.
Regardless of the ultimate success or failure of Facebook Horizon, it will doubtless inspire a new crop of content creators, much like Second Life has done. Those content creators might not stay with Horizon (as many have since left SL, forming a vast diaspora), but their work often continues on other platforms. Each new platform offers a brand new canvas for artists to build and create new visions of virtual worlds. If one world should shut down, there will be a ripple effect, benefiting other worlds.
So, yes, I will still be writing about Second Life, my first love. My endless fascination with SL continues to this day. Over time, I do expect that one or more metaverse platforms will eventually overtake it in terms of sheer popularity and economic success. But for now, at over 17 years of age, it still remains the perfect laboratory for seeing what is possible.
Stay tuned, folks! The ride is just starting to get interesting!
