Month: December 2021

UPDATED: A FREE Unisex Bento, Bakes on Mesh Elf Head and Skins from BeSpoke!

BeSpoke, a Second Life store which specializes in creating custom heads and avatars, has a lovely Christmas gift for you! They are giving away a fully-adjustable Bento, Bakes on Mesh-compatible elf head and five skins for it. This Yule Elf head is unisex, coming in three versions (male neck, female neck, and neckless) and with both male and female skin.

BeSpoke would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! You can pick up the Yule (Elf) Head for FREE, along with the 5 available skins. We are happy to celebrate with everyone this season, and we hope that we all enter the new year with great things to come!

Here’s what the male elf looks like, with the default Wood skin (I fiddled with the sliders a bit to give his face a less dour expression, and paired this head with the dollarbie Meshbody Classic male body, which is Bakes on Mesh compatible):

Here’s a full-body shot (I apologize for the boxer shorts; I have a disturbing lack of elfwear in my inventory, which I must address immediately!). And who knew that elves had such ripped abs? 😝 

This head is very adjustable, as you can see from these two looks from the female-necked head (the first is the default female shape, the second after I tweaked it to give her slightly bigger eyes, bigger ears, a squarer chin, and a less of a frown!).

Here’s a full head-to-toe picture of the female elf, using the L$1 Meshbody Classic female body:

Again, I apologize for the lack of female elvenwear!

The head comes with two sets of tintable tattoo-layer eyebrows, and 6 different pairs of system eyes, plus something called an “ear fix” which I couldn’t seem to get to work. There’s also an animation HUD in the package, but I had some trouble getting that to work, either. But for a free head, that’s just quibbling over small details. This is an AWESOME gift!

Of course, this avatar head would work just as well if you were roleplaying a Star Trek Vulcan or Romulan! The possibilities are literally endless! How about creating an elf-centaur hybrid? It’s your Second Life; you do you, boo!!! 🙂

You can pick up these gifts both from the SL Marketplace (here’s the link) and from BeSpoke’s in-world store (exact SLURL; just pay each of the vendors L$1 and it will automatically be refunded).

Here’s a Flickr video from the creator showing a very festive purple Christmas elf!

The creator adds a special request, a way to say “thank you” for this generous free Christmas gift, which I have reproduced in full below from the video caption:

🎄In the spirit of the season, we ask that you please take the time to visit the charity GoFundMe we have started for a very serious issue, and close to home for us. Any way that you are able to help, through donation or sharing the page with friends or family, we are incredibly grateful. 🎄 

>> gofund.me/aa121c57 << 

In Long Beach, California, property management companies will purchase up affordable housing and evict the tenants by any means necessary. They do this because for every $100 the rent is raised the property value goes up $30,000. A member of our team received multiple illegal eviction attempts during the eviction moratorium. The property developers tortured her with months of heavy construction when she would not leave. Her neighbors are immigrants and a family with a newborn child, who were treated the same. She is turning 67 this year, and we wish to celebrate Christmas and her birthday with this GoFundMe to get her neighborhood a good lawyer. Help us buy a sack of coal for some naughty landlords. Share this GoFundMe, please!

So, if you are in a financial position to help, please do so! Happy freebie shopping!

UPDATE Dec. 27th, 2021: Here’s a picture of another female avatar I used the BeSpoke gift Yule Elf head on, this time with a green Bakes on Mesh fantasy skin I had picked up earlier this year from 7 Deadly S[k]ins. Looking good!

Thank you to Dreamer from the Freebie Queens SL Discord for the tip!

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: Group Gifts of Male and Female Akeruka Bento, Bakes on Mesh Heads Until January 3rd, 2022!

I have decided to once again break my vow to take a monthlong vacation from blogging to report on two new group gifts by Akeruka! If you join the [AK} Heads News & Support group for only L$150, you can pick up one or both of the W34 women’s head and the M18 men’s head for free! (Remind me to have a little chat with the Akeruka people about the boring and utterly unimaginative names for their line of Bento, Bakes on Mesh-compatible mesh heads. They sound like automotive parts or motor oil!)

I always tell people to subscribe to the [AK} Heads News & Support group and stay subscribed, because Akeruka makes free group gifts available on a regular basis. In fact, if you had joined the Akeruka store group for L$150 four years ago, you would have been able to pick up no less than 14 male and female heads, which works out to only L$11 per head! Surely one of the greatest deals on the grid, in my opinion. So listen to Auntie Ryan: join the group and stay in the group! 😉

Here’s what the vendor panel looks like in the store; there are three delivery buttons located directly underneath it. Just hit a button and select Deliver in the blue pop-up menu which appears in the upper right-hand corner of your SL viewer screen.

I tested the W34 head (sigh—that NAME!) with the Elvira skin by 7 Deadly S[k]ins, in the fudge skin tone. This is the version with eyebrows; I did find that any skins I tested on these heads looked a little weird around the eyebrow area, but you can always play around with the eyebrow shape in your outfit to get a more pleasing result if you are using a BoM skin with eyebrows. In the image below, I used the eyebrow shape and head/body shape included in the package, without any adjustments to the sliders, pairing this head with the dollarbie Meshbody Classic female mesh body, which of course has a Bakes on Mesh option.

An interesting thing to note about both these heads is that they come in two versions: one using the standard Second Life UV map, and a second one using the LeLutka Evolution UV map, so that LeLutka Evolution skins look better! Akeruka got permission from LeLutka to do this, and I think it’s a very smart move. However, please note that you will not be able to use LeLutka Evo X skins on these heads.

Below I used the browless version of the Elvira skin, and added some high-definition eyebrows using the Akeruka HUD. I am rather dissatisfied with the built-in eyebrow options for the W34 head; the HUD appears to be identical between the male and female heads, and both of the two eyebrow options look a bit mannish to me. This problem is easily fixed by buying more feminine-looking eyebrows elsewhere. I am a big, big fan of the HUD options to blend, resize, and move these eyebrows, however!

In the men’s skin store, located directly across the street from the women’s skin store, just inside the entrance you can find the vendor panel for the Akeruka M18 Bento, Bakes on Mesh-compatible male mesh head. Here’s what the vendor panel looks like; it has three delivery buttons located underneath it.

Again, the M18 package does not include any skin, but you should be able to make this head work with most Bakes on Mesh male skins. As with the W34 head, there are two versions of this mesh head: one with the standard Second Life UV, and one with the LeLutka Evolution UV. These heads do not work with LeLutka Evolution X skins, however. The package includes rigged, unrigged, and system eyes, teeth, braces, piercings, tattoos, a facelight, and a high-definition beard option with its own separate HUD:

I tested out the M18 head with an eyebrow-less dollarbie skin from BROX, using the included eyebrow and head/body shape, and electing to use the high-definition eyebrows in the Akeruka HUD:

If you hit the FX button on the Akeruka HUD, you can select a feature which adds lines and wrinkles to whatever Bakes on Mesh skin you are wearing, for a more mature look (there are 8 different skin tones to match whatever skin you’re wearing). The high-definition eyebrows tab only offers blonde, brown and black as options, but hit the eyedropper button and you can tint the eyebrows grey—or any other colour you wish! In fact, you can tint just about everything on this head.

And since the HUDs appear to be identical between the male and female heads, you also get all the makeup options: eyelashes, eyeliner, and lipstick! So this is a great head to use for your metrosexual or drag queen avatar! Of course, supplemental trips to Dotty’s Secret drag queen makeup store in Second Life will be required—gotta keep that mug looking fresh, dahling!

The M18 and W34 heads will only be available until January 3rd, 2022, so don’t delay in picking up this fantastic deal for your avatar! Here’s your taxi to Akeruka.

Pandemic Diary, December 15th, 2021: Six Hundred and Forty Days Later

On March 16th, 2020, I began working from home for my full-time paying job as a science librarian at the University of Manitoba. A week later, my library colleagues were all sent home to work and the entire campus was shut down during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic.

Manitoba was lucky to have been spared the brunt of that first brutal and frightening wave; we were unfortunately not nearly so lucky on successive waves. At one time, in May 2021, Manitoba had the worst outbreak in all of North America (Canada, U.S.A., and Mexico), and had to airlift patients to neighbouring provinces and states as our hospital ICUs were overwhelmed.

The New York Times, May 27th, 2021

Today, December 15th , 2021, a full 640 days after I first started working at home, is officially my first day back on campus, the beginning of what is planned to be my permanent return to the office.

Note that I did come into my office on a few Mondays over the summer and autumn of 2021, but I am now expected to show up in person every day rather than work from home. I am the last of the librarians in my library to return to full-time work in the office; our returns have been staggered over the past few months. I asked to be the last librarian to return, because I have several underlying health conditions (obesity, type II diabetes, hypertension, and asthma) that put me at risk of a severe case of COVID-19 if I were to become infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Ever since news broke about the Omicron variant in southern Africa, I have been scouring the daily headlines, desperate to glean what updates the doctors and scientists could provide. The news is not encouraging. It would appear that cases of people infected by the highly-transmissible Omicron variant are doubling every two to three days in various countries, such as the U.K.

Even more worrisome, fully-vaccinated people are becoming infected; a triple-vaccinated Israeli cardiologist got Omicron at a British conference, and passed it on to another triple-vaccinated doctor! Even though most of the cases reported to date have been relatively mild, the fact that so many people are getting sick means an additional strain on an already overburdened healthcare system.

I will be receiving my third booster COVID vaccination at my local pharmacy next Monday, and this science librarian is profoundly grateful for the researchers whose pioneering work on mRNA vaccine technology made this possible. TIME magazine has named four of those vaccine scientists as its Heroes of the Year for 2021 (and quite frankly, they should have been named People of the Year instead of Elon Musk!).

Kizzmekia Corbett, Barney Graham, Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman

While my university has made plans for a full return to normal, on-campus classes and other activities starting in January 2022, I believe that COVID still has the possibility of upending those carefully-laid plans! Already I am reading news reports of Canadian and American university campuses with outbreaks (for example, over nine hundred cases at Cornell University), leading in some cases for in-person final exams to be abruptly cancelled, and switched to an online, virtual format. Yesterday, I tweeted:

So I am feeling particularly anxious. Between the recently-concluded faculty strike (which lasted a full five weeks and broke the record for the longest strike in the history of the University of Manitoba), and this rising new wave of the pandemic, I must confess that I am utterly exhausted. Stretched to the limit. Burned out.

Thankfully, my Christmas holidays start next Monday—the same day I get my third booster shot—and I am looking forward to two weeks of vacation. I still plan to continue my December vacation from blogging, even though all the metaverse news and announcements are coming fast and furious! Now more than ever, there is no shortage of things to write about. But I need to take a break.

Stay safe and stay healthy in these challenging and stressful times!

Get vaccinated—and if you are fully vaccinated, get your booster shot as soon as you are able!
(Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash)