Tag: Hallowe’en

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: The COCO Designs Ball-Jointed Doll Mesh Avatar—And Two Free Alice in Wonderland Avatars!

One of my Second Life avatars is a ball-joined doll (BJD) made many years ago by COCO Designs. It’s a fully mesh avatar that looks like a china doll! The Bavarian dirndl outfit and brown boots I bought at the original COCO Doll Store, which is long gone. I had just assumed that COCO shut down that original store due to poor sales.

The hair came from a store that has since closed down, called Bewitched Hair, and although it is an older flexiprims style, I love it because it reminds me of a doll’s yarn hair!

Well, guess what? Today I discovered by accident that COCO Designs still has a BJD doll store (at this exact SLURL)! And the best part is, everything is at a discount! You can pick up a boy doll or a girl doll body for only L$99 each! Here’s where you buy the girl doll body:

And the best part is, you can pick up a collection of nine heads to match that body, for free, as part of an extensive freebie section for BJD dolls!

So let’s take a look at what we can put together using the L$99 body and several freebies from the free gift area:

This avatar is wearing:

  • Avatar Body: BJD Doll body by COCO Designs (L$99)
  • Avatar Head: Emily (one of nine different doll heads available free from COCO Designs; comes in both open and closed-eye versions)
  • Hair: Bounce hair in candy apple red by Bewitched Hair with matching Willis bangs (this store is no longer on the grid, but you can buy several styles of rigged mesh wigs to fit this doll for only L$99 each)
  • Dress: Slip Dress in red (free from COCO Designs; it replaces the upper part of the body that came in the BJD Doll body package above )
  • Shoes: red ballet shoes (free from COCO Designs; they come with legs and feet to replace the default ones in the BJD Doll body)

TOTAL COST FOR THIS AVATAR: Only L$99!

If you like, you can add an ornate, animated doll key to her back—yet another free gift from the COCO BJD Doll store!

But wait, there’s more! In the freebies section, there are also two mesh avatars from Alice in Wonderland, the White Rabbit and Alice herself! Here’s what the Alice mesh avatar looks like:

There’s even a Toto attachment, where she holds the little dog in her arms! And here is the White Rabbit, who comes in two versions, in or out of costume:

So, if you are still looking for Halloween costume ideas, how about going out as a doll, or as a character from Alice in Wonderland?

Here’s the SLURL to take you directly to the COCO BJD Doll store.

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: The Best Freebies from SL’s Top Haunted Places Tour and Hunt

The tenth annual SL’s Top Haunted Places Tour and Hunt is on in Second Life, with no less than 118 stops, as of today! (The organizers keep adding new ones to the list.) At most stops, there is at least one free hunt gift to find, and many stops have more than one. And yes, I have visited every single one of them, just so I can tell you about the best freebies you can find on this year’s Tour and Hunt!

I’ve already shared a couple of prizes from stops on the Tour and Hunt previously on my blog:

The webbed sneakers are from the Oubliette booth at Trick or Treat Lane (each vendor booth has a free gift, some are hidden and some aren’t). The black printed T-shirt is from the Haunted Frolic maze (it comes in a variety of male and female sizes to fit most mesh bodies).

But I have a few more hunt freebies to share with you!

If you do the hunt at the Halloween Haunted House at Summit Nights, you can pick up several Halloween top hats adorned with skeletons:

The Boiling Points 8th Annual Haunted Hunt: The Demented Circus (set up by the Spider Productions store) beats all the other hunts by offering 36 different free hunt gifts! Just go to the store (here’s the SLURL) and click on the teleporter at the spawn point to get to the hunt area. Warning: I found that the teleporter was a bit finicky, so you might have to try it a few times to get it to work properly. Keep clicking!

Once you arrive at the hunt site, click on the large sign at the entrance to get two notecards, one with the hunt rules and a second with the hunt hints to find 36 poison candy apples. The first one is easy; it’s sitting right next to the sign! (The prize is some lovely abstract art for your home.)

I found this to be a very challenging but rewarding hunt! I spent at least an hour and half on this one hunt alone! Some of those candy apples are fiendishly well hidden! What I liked about this hunt is that some of the prizes were not your typical Halloween fare. For example, one prize was this lovely modern fireplace, which looks great in my new Linden Home:

Another prize was this cute, three-dimensional AFK (Away From Keyboard) thought bubble! You can read it from the front and the back! It’s perfect for when you need to step away from the keyboard for a few minutes (or hours, days, weeks…).

But I saved the very best for last! Complete the hunt at JTCrusher’s Haunted Slimy Lava Graveyard and click on the women’s gift box, and you get no less than eleven animated dance attachments with music! (The men’s hunt gift is a pair of gravedigger shorts in various sizes to fit most men’s mesh bodies. For some strange reason, the women’s hunt box also has three patio umbrellas.)

Here’s a sample dance, one that everybody knows well (and some of you might just be sick to death of before Halloween is over):

But it’s not just Michael Jackson’s Thriller! There are ten other dances, too! Here’s the full list of dance animations in the gift box:

  • Dark Horse by Katy Perry
  • Roar by Katy Perry
  • Dancing Queen by Abba
  • You Sexy Thing by Hot Chocolate
  • Booty Man by Tim Wilson (and it’s not just a clip—it’s the WHOLE. DAMN. SONG.)
  • Caribbean Queen by Billy Ocean
  • Macarena by Los Del Rio
  • It’s Raining Men by the Weather Girls (complete with “raining men” particle effects!)
  • Shake That by Eminem ft. Nate Dogg
  • This Is Halloween
  • Thriller by Michael Jackson

So get out there and start hunting! These are just five stops out of 118! SL’s Top Haunted Places Tour and Hunt ends on Oct. 31st, although some stops will run into early November. To get a complete list of stops, go to the starting point and click on the poster to get the first of six notecards describing each of the 118 stops on the Tour and Hunt:

There are links to notecards numbers two through six at the bottom of the first notecard. You can skip around and do the stops in any order.

Happy Halloween hunting!

Second Life Steals, Deals, and Freebies: A Free Halloween Hunt at AsteroidBox

If you are still casting around for ideas for your Second Life Halloween outfit, might I suggest a Halloween hunt on now at AsteroidBox? The hunt is completely free, and you don’t have to join any group! I will show you each of the nine bloody hunt prizes, so you can decide for yourself if you want to do this hunt.

The avatar used in the pictures in this blogpost is a Bakes on Mesh-enabled combination of an Akeruka Cleo mesh head and an Altamura Juliet mesh body. (Both were free group gifts earlier this year.) I have found that most clothing designed for the Maitreya Lara mesh body fits the Altamura mesh body with a minimum of fuss.

If you have a recent Akeruka Bento mesh head like Cleo, you can hit the redelivery terminal in the lobby of the Akeruka store to get an updated version, which includes a separate Bakes on Mesh head in the package. Altamura has released a relay for use with Bakes on Mesh (it’s available to Altamura group members for free at this exact SLURL; the Altamura Design/Mesh Avatars group costs L$50 to join). You do have to buy and install the Omega system kit on the Juliet body before you can use the Bakes on Mesh relay (it’s for sale for L$99 at this exact SLURL).

The skin I am using on this avatar is by Atmoic Bambi, and is called Noori Noir. Unfortunately, the store is also no longer on the grid. This is an older system skin, so the area around the fingernails doesn’t quite match the Altamura mesh nails. I found that my earlier solution, the free finger and foot fixes available from League which I mentioned in this earlier blogpost, didn’t work for grey skin. To fix the area around the fingernails to match this deathly grey pallor exactly, I used nail covers by SmitCoStudios, which you can edit and tint any colour you wish (they are available for L$25 on the SL Marketplace).

The hair is the Pulled Back Bun (black) from the Library / Accessories / Hair Design Options / Pulled Back Bun folder in your existing Second Lofe inventory—free, adjustable, tintable, uncomplicated. The bloody skin tattoos came from a past Bloody Mess hunt at Fallen Gods, and I picked them up several years ago. (The bright red bloody forehead tattoo came from a different past hunt, along with a bloody blonde wig.)

Now that we’ve got the preliminaries out of the way, let’s get to the hunt! Here is the Carina laced corset paired with the Canopus boots:

The next outfit consists of the Selene shirt and Malus pants (the black pumps are part of a free sample pack of Slink-compatible shoes from Garbaggio, available on the SL Marketplace; Altamura mesh bodies have Slink-compatible feet). The blood-splattered Notos umbrella is also an AsteroidBox hunt prize! It comes with the pose shown here.

Here we have the bloody Theia glasses and the Auriga sweater:

And finally, we have something a little different: a couple of minidresses in black and red! These both look so good, so you could probably wear them for a non-Halloween night out.

This is the Powehi dress, which comes with a HUD to change the metal textures:

And finally we have the sexy Eridani dress:

Happy Halloween hunting! You can obtain the first hunt hint by clicking on the board at the entrance to the AsteroidBox store, shown in the first picture above. Each hunt prize comes with a hint for the next prize.

Updated: The Perfect Jessica Rabbit Outfit in Second Life

I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.

—Jessica Rabbit, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

My regular blog readers already know that one of my favourite pastimes in Second Life is to pull together an entire avatar look based on a theme, from head to toe. Sometimes, I will even take older classic avatar looks I had created many years ago, and give them a completely modern, mesh-body makeover. Some recent examples are this nun, a vampire, an elf angel, Mary Poppins, even Santa Claus! It gives me a creative outlet, and I find my quirky little hobby deeply satisfying.

In December 2017 I wrote on this blog:

Some avatars lasted only a couple of days before I deleted them; others have been with me since the very beginning of my adventures in Second Life. Witches and wizards and wolves, pirates and painters, sergeants and satyrs, barbarians and ballerinas, harlequins and hippies, gladiators and geishas… my hobby has given me endless hours of pleasure and escape. Some were exclusively for role-play purposes; others were just a means to live inside somebody else’s skin for an hour while strolling the grid. Others were created specifically to evoke reactions from passers-by. I could be whatever I wanted, and I was: an angel, a fairy, a goth girl, Elvis, Queen Elizabeth the First, Lady Gaga, Santa Claus, a supermodel, a hobo, a spaceman, a Na’vi from the movie Avatar, a medieval minstrel.

Sometimes, a single article of clothing in Second Life will send me off on a wild goose chase across the grid, to search out and find individual items and use them to pull together an entire outfit. And today, my starting point was this free Jessica Rabbit dress from COCO Designs!

Jessica Rabbit, of course, is the wife of the title character in the popular 1988 cartoon movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which is one of my favourite movies. (What can I say? I’m a kid at heart.)

So I decided to build a whole look for my main avatar (and Second Life supermodel 😉 ) Vanity Fair avatar based on that dress!

It was so such fun to play with the body adjustment sliders on my Maitreya Lara body to see how close I get it to resemble Jessica Rabbit’s curvy figure! I think I came pretty close, although I couldn’t make her waist any smaller, without making the entire avatar look too thin overall. Please note that this is not Vanity’s usual shape; normally she has much more realistic proportions. Remember, I was going for a cartoon look here.

And I was very pleased with the results!

Vanity Fair is wearing:

  • Dress: Jessica Rabbit gown (free group gift by COCO Designs; the group is free to join)
  • Gloves: Formal gloves applier by my friend Jasmine Moonflower Gardner of Sweet Tea Couture (L$199 for an eight-colour HUD); Unfortunately, this particular gloves applier does not come in purple like Jessica Rabbit wore in the movie, but fuchsia is close enough, and it looks great too!
  • Shoes: Gigi pumps in crimson by Garbaggio (my favourite shoe!)
  • Hair: Jessica hair by Catwa (Rainbow pack 1, available on the SL Marketplace for L$360)

Vanity Fair is also wearing:

  • the Kimberly Catwa Bento mesh head
  • the Maitreya Lara mesh body
  • Daria skin by The Skinnery (which has a red brows option to match the Jessica hairstyle; normally Vanity wears brown)
  • and my favourite forest green Darcey eyes by Suicidal Unborn

UPDATE Oct. 15th: I noticed after I took the pictures I posted above that Jasmine Moonflower Gardner does indeed sell a purple pair and a lilac pair of Bento mesh formal gloves at her store Sweet Tea Couture for L$199 for each single colour. The mesh gloves have an auto-hide for Maitreya so you don’t need to alpha anything out! You could also use the free group gift of purple gloves from COCO Designs’ gift wall, but those gloves do not support Bento hands, and you will have to alpha out your hands completely if you decide to use those instead. Lots of options here!

Here’s another shot taken at Sweet Tea Couture, next to the mesh gloves display. I am wearing the lilac gloves (the purple ones looked a little too dark):

In my opinion, Jasmine makes the best gloves on the grid, whether they be mesh or appliers! She also sells some seriously cute stockings, socks, shoes and dresses. Be sure to check out her store! She just recently returned to Second Life after an absence due to her job, and she has a number of brand new items for sale. The texture work is superb! Everything is very high quality and I recommend Sweet Tea Couture highly.