MissDrag, wearing the Anatomy mesh body, looking good and feeling absolutely FABULOUS, darling! (And, to quote drag queen Mrs. Kasha Davis, “There’s always time for a cocktail!”)
WARNING! This is a super-long blogpost because, late yesterday evening, I received news about SeraPRIDE and their Ultimate Drag Superstar Contest, so instead of writing up a separate blogpost, I decided to add it to this one, which I was already writing. So go pour yourself a coffee (or some wine, or whatever your favourite beverage is!), settle in, and enjoy a little longform reading. 🙂
As my regular blog readers know, I have a drag queen avatar in Second Life, named MissDrag, and I have written about creating a look for her many times before on this blog (here, here, here, and here). I have spent many an enjoyable hour gallivanting around the grid as a drag queen, in search of sisters or a place to death drop. Alas, my search was always in vain (and searching for “drag” under Places in Search led me only to the countless drag car racing communities in Second Life).
Well, I am pleased to announce that I have taken my RuPaul’s Drag Race obsession a step further: I am now performing in drag shows in Second Life! Yes, I can now proudly add digital drag artist to my resume! I even earn money from it!!
The stage at Pal’z SL Premier Drag Club
Pal’z SL Premier Drag Club (SLURL) is operated by Pal Mally, and holds drag shows Thursdays and Fridays from 8:00-10:00 p.m. SL Time/Pacific Time. Pal is assisted on stage by a hostess, who is usually FrankOh, but at last night’s show drag queen Red Rioja filled in. (Please click on each picture in the gallery below to see it in its full-size glory; these are just one of multiple costume changes each queen did during their shows!)
Pal MallyFrankOhRed Rioja
As you can see from these pictures, you can do drag in EVERY body: classic system body or modern mesh body, male body or female body or something in-between (more on that in a moment). Pal Mally’s notecard with instructions for potential drag artists states: “No avatar will be refused (except child avatars), so the sky is the limit.”
Here’s a 25-second video clip of my very first drag performance last week, with Pal Mally and other drag queens! You can use the dance animations Pal provides, as we did here, or provide your own, as I did for my second show this week.
My first drag performance! (I’m in the red wig.)
Just as in real life, drag queens can receive tips from the audience during their performance! In the one-minute video below, you can see the drag queen Red Rioja set up her tip jar during her set, and receive a L$100 tip from me:
Red Rioja (a.k.a JackBeary) performs at Pal’s drag club, and receives a tip from me!
I actually earned over L$1,000 in tips from an appreciative audience each of the two times I stepped on stage at Pal’z drag club! It’s the best feeling in the world.
I donated some of my earnings back to support the club; there’s a donation box located at the rear of the dance floor.
At the end of the evening, Pal Mally invites everybody to dance on stage:
How I came across Pal’z drag club is quite a story in itself. At this year’s SL Skin Fair, Malediction announced a new male mesh body called Anatomy, which could work with both male and female heads, and could be shaped using the body sliders for a wide variety of masculine and feminine looks:
The body comes in two versions, Fit and Soft, and the package includes six base shapes which you can use as a starting point: Feminine Curvy, Feminine Slim, Masculine Chubby, Masculine Classic, Masculine Muscle, and Masculine Slim. The Anatomy body features 7 nail types and lengths, 5 feet types (flat, low, medium, high, and tiptoe), and something I hadn’t seen before in a mesh body, optional asymmetrical arms Bakes-on-Mesh (in other words, you can have different tattoos on each arm, if you wish).
In an April Fool’s joke, the Anatomy body creator, Adrien Absinthe, said they were going to release a “Bimbo Body”, and then instead released a free add-on to the Anatomy body, a ridiculously oversized set of breasts called Big Boobs which completely replace the regular male chest pecs on the Soft version of the body.
My first thought in seeing this was, “Wow, that would make a great drag queen breast plate!,” and I laughed so hard that I landed up buying the Anatomy body! So congratulations, Adrien, your April Fool’s joke made a sale. 😉 The Anatomy body retails for L$4,499 here in SL or L$4,949 on the Second Life Marketplace, so if you want to save some money, buy it in-world.
Below you see MissDrag, wearing the Anatomy body with the Big Boobs add-on, with a female LeLutka Evo X mesh head, Lilly, which I picked up as a free Christmas gift in a previous year (I alpha’ed out the feet completely and used a pair of older feet-in-high-heeled shoes I picked up at a freebie store several years ago):
And here’s three more MissDrag looks, all using the Anatomy body with the Quinn male mesh head, which was a LeLutka Holiday Special event gift from last December (please click on each image to see it in full size):
Anyway, to get to the point: I posted some of these photos on the Anatomy Discord server (where, by the way, they have a gallery featuring works by the many designers already creating clothing, footwear, and accessories for this body!), and somebody DM’ed me to ask where I got the wig in the third picture above, and he told me about Pal’z drag club! It’s funny how often that sort of thing happens in Second Life…the butterfly effect in full force.
Late last night, I got the following message via Discord:
Hi Ryan. I don’t know if you’d consider sharing this information with your blogging community, but I am wanting to spread the word as far as I can for the Rainbow Railroad project. This weekend is our final weekend to receive applications for contestants to sign up and participate in this year’s drag race. The winner will receive L$25,000 worth of gift cards, and they will be crowned this year’s Ultimate Drag Super Star.
The team of Seraphim has also been working very hard to reach out to creators and entertainers to ask for their time and/or donations for this event. The Second Life community has donated over 1 million Linden dollars’ worth of matching donations and prizes towards the SeraPRIDE event. We are hoping to bring in guests to join us in the celebration and help raise awareness and funds that go directly to the Rainbow Railroad project. If this is something that interests you, and you’d like to pass on this information to others, I am including some links and video clips to include in your publication.
PLEASE NOTE that the deadline for applying to perform at the SeraPRIDE Drag Race event is very soon! The contestant application will remain open until 11:59pm Second Life Time/Pacific Time on May 15th, 2023 (the day after tomorrow). Chosen contestants will be notified with more information by May 22nd, 2023.
Seraphim is always up for a great party, and what better reason to celebrate than PRIDE?! Seraphim is planning a full day of activities on the SeraSim, including giveaways, gifts, live music, parties, and a brand new, exclusive drag performance for 2023!
Rainbow Railroad works with LGBTQIA+ individuals facing persecution and violence simply because of their sexual identity by helping secure relocation, safety, and support. Since 2006, Rainbow Railroad has helped more than 7,621 persecuted individuals from over 38 countries.
So, what are you waiting for? Get your application in today! And be sure to tell ’em Miss Drag sent you… 😉
Fisk University, a private, historically Black university located in Nashville, Tennessee, will launch a virtual human cadaver lab for its pre-med and biology students this fall. The cadaver laboratory will use the social VR platform ENGAGE, in a partnership with Fisk University, HTC VIVE, T-Mobile, and VictoryXR (an educational content creator company using ENGAGE as a platform).
Inside the lab, students will examine the internal organs of various human systems, and the professor can even remove the organs from the body and pass them around for students to hold and open. Students will have the ability to enlarge the organ to a size large enough where they can even step inside to better learn how it works. In addition to organ systems, the cadavers will also include complete skeletal and muscle structures.
“With this cadaver lab, our pre-med students will no longer need to rely on other universities for advanced anatomy and biology classes,” said Dr. Shirley Brown, Dean of Fisk University. “Virtual reality technology takes our university to a level equal to the most advanced schools in the country.”
In the past, Fisk University has not purchased cadavers due to the high cost and maintenance. But with a virtual cadaver lab, the university can offer state-of-the-art scientific learning that’s affordable and easy to maintain. Virtual cadavers do not degrade, and over time additional specialties can be added to the software such as surgical procedures, comparative learning between human and animal as well as microbiology at the cellular level.
Here’s a two-minute promotional video for the project:
Tony Vitillo (a.k.a. SkarredGhost), an Italian man whose blog, The Ghost Howls, often has reviews of products and interesting news reports about the VR industry, paid a visit to the virtual laboratory and reported:
The…costs to own a cadaver lab is in the order of magnitude of millions of dollars. Not all universities can afford that. There is at the moment a slightly better alternative, that is using ultra-realistic synthetic cadavers, that are also able to simulate some motions of the human body (e.g. the heart pumping), but the cost of each one of them is $60-100,000. This means that to own them a university must invest much money anyway.
We all know that virtual reality can replicate real objects pretty well, so VictoryXR had the idea of trying to reproduce a cadaver lab in virtual reality: apart from the fixed cost for the 3D elements, this laboratory would scale pretty well with the number of students and would need almost no maintenance cost. This is a very smart solution to make education more accessible for medicine students. Thanks to this, many more universities would be able to afford to have a virtual cadaver lab, even in non-wealthy countries. We always talk about VR being able to democratize education, and this is one bright example of how it can do that.
Students assemble a skeleton puzzle in Fisk University’s virtual human cadaver lab
Tony came away from his brief demo favourably impressed:
I had just a short demo with the virtual lab, and I think that it is a good start for Fisk University and VictoryXR. I don’t think that at the moment it can replace the real experience with a cadaver because you miss all the tactile sensations, the weight, and also the creep of having a real organ in your hands. But it can be a good substitute to start learning about the human body, to observe the organs in detail, to start getting confidence with having a bone or a part of the body of someone else in your hands. It could be able to offer a good course, and after that, maybe the students can have just a few final lessons with real corpses in another location. It is a good way of giving value to many medicine universities not only in the U.S. but in the whole world, especially the ones that can’t afford to have real or synthetic cadavers for tests.
What impressed me the most is the potential that this solution can have in the future. There are things that VR can give to students that are hardly possible in real life. The fact that you can enter with your teacher inside an organ and examine it both at macro and micro level is one amazing thing for instance. The possibility of organizing minigames (like the puzzle) that are engaging and improve the learning efficiency via interactivity is something that VR enables and that would be too creepy to do in real life. The possibility of doing many simulated surgeries on the cadavers with the possibility of repeating every operation at no additional cost is another cool thing.
Studying the muscles of the human body in ENGAGE
Thanks to Chris Madsen/DeepRifter of ENGAGE for the heads up, and Tony Vitillo/SkarredGhost for his report and pictures! You can read Tony’s review in full here, and I strongly recommend you follow his blog as well as my own!
Yes, Vanity Fair is also in Sinespace! This is her default, “before” look.She is wearing the Tiredi dress by ELL (10 different colours, only 99 Gold each colour), plus Misty ballet slippers by BlakOpal Designs (5 different colours, also 99 Gold each). The golden Crescent Hoop Earrings are also by BlakOpal Designs, and they are only 39 Gold.
Not bad, but I wanted to see if I could make her look more like a fashion model today—really pull out all the stops!
Luckily, I was able to find a brand new content creator in Sinespace, named Gaby, whose brand is called Anatomy (website), that sells six different kinds of female mesh bodies: Classic and Curvy, both of which comes in three different bust shape options: classic, perky, and push-up:
The two types of Anatomy bodies: Curvy and ClassicThe three bust types of the Anatomy bodies: Classic, Perky, Push-UpAll told, there are six different Anatomy bodies
So, I bought the Curvy body with a Classic bust (499 Gold), the Emma head shape (699 Gold), and the Emma skin in vanilla (649 Gold), all from Anatomy. I also replaced Vanity’s hairstyle with the Dream Glory hair in brown by Newsea (only 99 Gold).
The vendor recommends that before (or after) you wear any of these new bodies, that you reset the body sliders so you get a clean canvas to start with your new body shape. To do this, just go to the avatar editor (click on the Outfit button), then click on the Body section and click on the Reset button up top:
Here is what Vanity Fair looks like after her complete model makeover! All I kept from her Before look were the dress and shoes. I kept all the default face and body slider settings after the above reset, only making her bust slightly larger and her hands smaller (for some reason, the default Sinespace avatars all have huge hands!).
The following poses are part of a single animated gesture you can buy on the Sinespace Shop, called Ladies Fashion Poses Gesture by De Landria Creations (only 75 Gold). It slowly and smoothly moves the avatar through a number of different model poses, allowing you time to take pictures. Here are just three of the poses included:
Looking good! Tools like this pose set are going to prove popular among the growing number of fashion bloggers in Sinespace, and I am very glad to see them make an appearance! Hopefully we will be getting more fashion bloggers in Sinespace to showcase the amazing work that so many talented designers are creating.
I also bought a Catwalk Linear 101 gesture from Trilo Byte Design (only 59 Gold), which is a simple model catwalk runway animation: walk to the front of the catwalk, pause, pose, and walk back. To demonstrate it, I had Vanity model a gown I had blogged about before on the official Sinespace blog, the beautiful, flowing Allegro gown in cream, created by BlakOpal Designs. This garment, which comes in 10 different colours, actually has full in-world cloth physics enabled!
Below is short promotional video from the creators, BlakOpal Designs, showing just how naturally this garment moves with the wearer (and it even includes a very useful tip on how to fix the skirt, if it should snag somewhere on your avatar).
So, Vanity Fair is finally a full-fledged model in Sinespace! Expect more reports on the ever-growing fashion market in Sinespace, for both male and female avatars.
This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here).
