Artist's Voice Protest

Artist's Voice had an idea: Create a protest by not buying ANYTHING in SL for two days and no blogging.

The idea is really simple. Get Linden Lab's attention by protesting for two days. Picketing won't work - but NOT buying anything will. Protests don't work in just an instant - movements take time to build up.

Content theft is serious stuff. Intellectual property rights are important to understand. Creators of things should get paid for what they create and not get ripped off and leave because they feel abandoned and can't trust. Content thieves are thieves - bleck.

Where can you find out more? Go to: http://theartistsvoice.org/

I am participating in the two day ban on buying anything in SL. My only exception to what they are recommending is that I'm posting this little note on the 5th.

My name is Fleur Cooperstone, and I approve this message.

Who am I?

Gogo on Juicy Bomb asked 'Who is reading my blog?' Ok - here's one answer.

My name is Fleur Cooperstone. Fleur is French for flower. I try hard to be beautiful - inside and out - to be representative of my name. My rezzday is Sept 22, 2008.

I love to learn and explore. SL has been great for many things. I never imagined SL would be so amazing. I have a few friends that I deeply care for - just the most wonderful friends. We've been through fun times like hunts and quiet times where we just sit and talk. On SL I'm a little chatterbox - so unlike me in RL.

I've tried a couple of very different avatars: a mermaid and even a butterfly.

I became a mermaid in June 2009 - it's so fun. I joined the safe water foundation group. We meet every week and lots of merfolk come together there. Last week we went on a field trip to check out a new sim. There are lots of great merfolks working on some wonderful things - more details will come up as they make progress.

I love photography - so I'm trying to learn how to take good photos in SL. There is lots to learn - windlight is so cool. I have to learn how to light scenes better yet. I've been in a couple of flickr photo contests for SL photos (Hair Fair 2009 and the Fashion Designers Contest - photo contest). I got involved with the FDC photo contest because I bought a dress - the Sam's Secret Boutique's Wild Jaguar Dress. Shortly after I bought it, I got a notecard from Samsara and that encouraged me to enter the photo contest. It was a lot of fun working on the photos with my friends. I learned a lot - from how to create a pose to even taking my first SL photo. I have lots to learn about photography and SL yet :-)

I'm a hair collector. I'm up to about 120 different styles now. The Hair Fair 2009 was fantastic - but I hesitate to say that I bought about 41 styles there. I made some flickr pictures to remember what they look like - not great pictures, and I didn't resize any of them (and forgot about sunset so the photos get darker and then lighter...) but these photos help me to remember what the various styles look like. I have to clean them up some more to make them all look as wonderful as they really are. I'm planning on having all of my hair styles online eventually.

I also collect shoes... I'm much too embararessed to talk much more about my shoe collection.

I started reading various SL fashion blogs - surprise - there are LOTS of them. But I find that there are some bloggers that I consistently read. I love their writing styles, the integrity in how they blog and their opinions about stuff. It's like hearing from friends about stuff all of the time. Gogo's blog is just one of blogs I follow - my blog roll has the rest of my current list. Just reading the various blogs is great fun - and the photos are so wonderful.

I find that my perspective and tastes in SL change over time - I really laugh at what I looked like just a few months ago. When I started, just figuring out how to walk and look around took a while. Now I'm getting pretty good at swimming as a mermaid. My first avatar looks so funny now that I just can't even bring myself to put on that shape and skin at all.

My favorite stores vary from Lemania Indigo to Elate! to Pout to Sasha's Designs to Stiletto Moody to PixelDolls to Serina to Truth to D to Digital Eyes to ... many others. The fashion blogs help me tremendously. They keep pointing in very interesting directions. Sometimes it gets very overwhelming - so occasionally I'll intentionally forget a few places. Too many wonderful designers? That's not it at all - I just don't have a huge budget and so finding the places where there is great quality and being intentional about what I buy has to limit where I go. I've been to so many wonderful designers places and - oh my - it's hard to not want to get something else when you are wondering around looking.

There are some amazingly creative designers out there and I'm just blown away by what they've created. The clothing, style, hair, shoes, everything - just wow. And then throw in the different sims and the builds that I'd seen (and I haven't seen all that much). There are some wonderful places - Quaddryll, Botanical Gardens - and so many, many others.

I know there are wonderful places all over just waiting to be found in SL. I also know there is a very dark side - since the whole of SL is created by designers. I try my best to stay in the wonderful places. For me, SL is safe place to escape and have fun and enjoy myself in creative ways.

I also love the Designers Showcase Network (DSN) - I've found the most amazing things just waiting for me everyday. The items that have quality to them end up taking me straight to the designers store to find out more about what they've created and I usually end up with more than I ever thought I would. I almost wish DSN would slow down so that I could just get things once a week - just to be able to keep up with the amazing designers that I'm learning about.

Little things sometimes that make a world of difference - like just knowing you can have two inventory windows open at the same time (open one, then in that window click the File -> New Window menu items). I just learned this little hint yesterday. Very handy - it's going to help me organize that mess of nearly 9,000 items.

I am a Christian - meaning that I'm a dedicated follower of Christ Jesus and He redeemed me and changed my life. I try very hard to stay very true to my faith. If you get to know me, this will eventually come up.

I love to explain as best I can - which is why my blog will probably end up with few posts about other things, but I suspect it'll mostly be explanations and tutorials. I could be very wrong... We'll have to see how it evolves...

I love flowers, sunny days, close friends, exploring, lighthouses, being a mermaid, learning, writing, dancing and just chatting.

So, who am I? I am Fleur.

Pose HUD

Kru's Boutique has a very cool gadget that works great for getting into poses to take a picture in SL. It's called an 'Animation Preview HUD' and it'll cost a whole 1L - well worth the trip (make sure to go into Kru's shop of poses and look around on the back wall to find this gadget). It'll also work great with any collection of animations - you can put up to 100 animations in one of these HUDs. Poses just happen to be animations which stop after the first frame of animation.

Why would you want an animation HUD? Because when you take a picture with the pose from a HUD, then you don't have to add anything to the picture itself - no pose stand or anything else. This is a really cool part of this gadget. The other part that is cool is the HUD itself...

What's a HUD? Basically, it's a graphical gadget that shows up on your screen only - where only you can see it - which is why it's called a heads up display. Here's what the 'Animation Preview HUD' looks like up close:

Lets try making one with just dances in it.

First - Duplicate the 'Anim Preview HUD 0.2' (via a copy and a paste) so that you won't be modifying the original one. Why? Because once you get done putting animations into it, you won't be able to modify it again (other than deleting things out of it).

Next step will be to rename the copy of the HUD to indicate what kinds of animations you'll have in it. For this example, I'll make one with a few dances in it.

Here's my inventory after I had duplicated the 'Anim Preview HUD 0.2' and renamed it to 'Dance HUD':

Next step is to create a collection of your animations. I'd recommend putting copies of them into a folder and renaming the folder to indicate what kind of animations they are. Why? I'm planning ahead - since I can't modify the HUD later - then I'll need to have a copy of the animations so that I can create a 'new' HUD later with the same animations and more... I should mention that I learned this the hard way by putting a 'no copy' dance into one of these HUDs and... all of a sudden the spiffy dance that I had just bought was only in this gadget.

Here's what my dance animations folder looks like:

Next step is to drag the new HUD from your inventory to the ground - you will need to be in a place where you can rez things to do this. Once you have the HUD on the ground, you probably want to reposition your camera to get a good view of it - because now you just drag your animations right on top of the HUD which on the ground. The HUD will just grab them and add them to itself. Here's what mine looked like after adding those three dance animations:

Last step - just right mouse click and take the new animation HUD :-) It'll show up right next to that copy you had made in your inventory. Except it'll be 'no modify'.

Now that we've built our own dance HUD, let's try it out. Here's what the bottom/middle of the screen looks like right after I right mouse clicked the 'Dance HUD' and selected 'Wear':

The buttons at the bottom are to control the HUD. The text above the buttons shows you the name and number of the animation. In this example the first dance was called caramel. The first little button will take you to the previous animation (it'll make sense in a sec). The little triangle is 'play' and gets the animation started. Once you get animated, then you probably want a way to stop - that's what the third button is for (pause or stop). The fourth button is to change to the next animation. And the last button will delete an animation from the HUD (I don't use this button much at all). I'd be very careful with that delete button - it doesn't take prisoners - and I've deleted that one dance animation that I couldn't copy - just by accident.

For taking pictures, having poses in the HUD is really handy because you don't have to do much more than wear it, push 'play' (that second button) and then quickly click through the poses until you find the one you want for the picture. This is MUCH easier than opening each pose file and clicking to start the animation button... and then closing it and opening the next one...

That's all for now - time to go take some pictures. :-)

Welcome to my SL life

Hi!

I have no idea what I'm doing with a blog - but I think having a place to write about my second life adventures will be great fun. Hopefully it'll be as interesting for you as it is for me :-)

- Fleur