yellowjester

After many attempts, I actually made it onto the grid yesterday and was able to take care of some business. The 'Macabre Hunt' Apple, now holds the gift from me, rather than an apologetic notecard explaining that the Yellow Jester can't get online and the landmark to the next store. It now contains the Bone Armlet that I mentioned in this blog many months ago, as my gift. Try as I might, I just can't stay connected for long enough to sit down and comfortably build in SL, and that's putting it mildly. In truth I can't stay connected long enough to reply to the "Hi's and WOW you are backs!" that fly my way when one of my digital feet enter the meta-verse for a brief fraction of a second. (and I'm having trouble even posting this blog)
For those of you who didn't take advantage of the extended sale of bone items in the main store, well, now it's too late, because I actually managed to put the prices back up to what they should be, instead of 25% off, as they have been since March. And most importantly, for my piece of mind, I paid some rent! So my store won't be closing this month. :)

While I was gone, two of my stores did close, my little shack in Slaughter City is no more, due to the closure of the sim, which was sad as SC was a nice (creepy) place and I have some good memories there. Good luck to Putrid on her travels. I also had a store in the mall of a CCS sim, which suffered from that bane of merchants - the rearrangement of space and the stores within it. This happened to me once before at a very popular industrial club, they decided to update the Mall space and it was a case of "Oh dear, I haven't made a sale since". If I had been able to get online, I would have written the owner a nice note explaining how the changes have impacted my business, and that I wouldn't be renewing my rent, but unfortunately I wasn't able to...I did ask my assistant to write one for me though, but I prefer to do these sorts of things myself.

I've been keeping myself busy in the real world since moving back to the city, well busy might be an overstatement, I've renewed my writing partnership with a long time friend and collaborator and have been composing music again. We've been working on some new writing techniques and as soon as we're finished I'll post a link here (we're planning on making a short video for the tune once it's completed). We're not in much of a rush, mind you, so don't be holding your breath, it may be the end of summer, possibly autumn (fall) before we're done. But it will be cool, and the quality will be high :)

In other news my mental health is still a problem, money is exceptionally tight, and I've yet to let the rest of my real life friends know I am back in the city. I've bumped into a couple of people while out and about and have been met with wide eyed stares and actually pretty similar reactions to me being back in SL heh. As I've spent the better part of a year in solitude of one form or another it's hard to know what to say to people. Do I lie and make some shit up, or do I tell people the truth, which is always grim and causes peoples faces to drop, as they want me to be the sociable, cheerful person that they used to know, rather than the withdrawn, frequently suicidal person I have always hidden from most of them.

...I think I will have to make some shit up so I have stuff to talk about, it's kinder to them; or I could just continue to remain in isolation a bit longer and do neither, heh.

Current Mood: okay

Thanks to Supra Shoes for the comment, it's rare for anyone to leave one on here, so it's nice to know that someone did actually read it, heh. The last time someone left a comment it was to tell me I was "...not the real Yellow Jester" which was a funny one, and not only funny ha-ha. I think that comment got deleted by the IJ staff, I guess he must have trolled a few other blogs more than he did mine, and upset someone.

I've been taking a much needed break from Second Life as I overdid it in January and February, and I also moved again in Real life at the end of March and my internet connection has been rather intermittent. I deliberately didn't sign up for any hunts in April as I knew I needed a break...I just didn't know it would become such an extended one.

Speaking of hunts I have a new one coming up in May, the Macabre Hunt, which is themed around the works of Edgar Allen Poe. I'm not entirely sure what I'll be creating for it, but one thing is for certain, I wont be working 12 hour days in preperation for it like the last one.

So expect more from me shortly, as I'll be back.

Current Location: my new place
Current Mood: depressed
Current Music: ealy morning traffic

I've been silent not because I've been mired in misery, but rather because I've been so damn busy this month. The Tainted Love hunt has been a roaring success, with people comparing it to the Twisted Hunt (high praise), others saying it's the most fun hunt they've ever done, as well as other nice things. :)The hunt is pretty much running itself, we have a website with hints on it and we have some helpers who are friends of Samantha Zwickel (my assistant and the main organisational force behind the hunt) and myself, but also regular hunters have been helping each other in the group chat, providing clues or helping each other to find the heart in different stores.

It's actually next months hunts that have been keeping me busy! March and September are both busy months, with the STEAM hunt and Twisted Hunt taking place at the same time. This time around I've decided to not use the same location for both hunts, which should cut down on the amount of lag caused, and also I am expecting slightly higher than usual traffic from the Twisted hunt as this time around I am a featured sponsor!



This means I'll not only have my store name on all the posters and other promotional artwork, I also get my lowest placement yet in a twisted hunt at stop number 10. This means the people who lack the stamina to keep going onto stores placed later in the hunt will be more likely to make their way to my place. I also got mentioned in the twisted website for my work on the first twisted hunt, (march 09) for the clue trail I put on for hunters, as an example of the kind of thing store owners are encouraged to do. And an unnamed tip of the hat went in my direction as this time the organisers are encouraging shop owners to give helpers gifts as a thank you for making the hunt what it is - which is something I have been the only person to have courtesy to do for the 2 previous hunts. Which also incidentally is how I met my assistant Samantha, as she was the helper who seemed the most organised last time and I asked her for a list of all the helpers, so I would know who to thank.

So this time I am using my main store in Dunwich for the twisted hunt, and my secondary location in Samantha's parcel in the sim Cheboygan for the steam hunt. This means one group of hunters wont stumble across the other hunts gift, and those that do both hunts will wind up seeing my stuff twice and hopefully giving into the powerful urge to buy some stuff hehe. And it will be less of a strain on the Dunwich sim, of which I'm sure my neighbours will be thankful.

I'm a victim to my own increasingly high bench mark for the quality of my hunt gifts, and to the mean desire to show-up other peoples poor efforts. I've never said I was a saint hehe. I have a philosophy to making hunt gifts in that to keep quality high I treat each hunt item as something I will sell afterwards in my store, so I take great care in the items I create. I use hunts as a method to draw people to my store and my gifts are of higher than usual quality in these hunts so Yellow Jester stands out when they come to unpack all the gifts. This also works for months where my depression prevents me from creating for fun and only out of a sense of obligation - so at least my range of items increases by one new thing each month. So far only my Crown of Swords, the gift I made for the Tarot Hunt has not been purchased afterwards, which I can understand as it is a pretty unusual item, and I'm pretty sure it's not a reflection on the quality of the item, which is as high as anything else I make.

So for the Steam hunt I've made a mechanical hand - which is something I have wanted to do for a long time. When the short lived SL magazine Grim Couture interviewed me last April I said I planned on making a range of prosthetic limbs for avatars in SL, which is something I would still like to do. The fact that it's hard to make an avatars limb invisible in second life has deterred me up until now. But with Samantha in my corner anything feels possible as she is Geek extraordinaire with a can-do attitude, so I ran with it and created this mechanical left hand



It's not quite finished yet, as I still want to add some sort of leather saddle for the wrist and some straps, to hold it in place; but with two hunts to prepare for I had to down tools on that one and start work on my twisted gift. And twisted it is...

The theme for the Twisted Hunt this time around is 'Strange Brew' and again that competitive desire to show people up surfaces and makes me determined to make something 'in theme'. I headed to wikipedia and read about poisons and other hazardous liquids looking for inspiration and eventually remembered an image I saw for one of the blood drives the makers of the Saw movies put on each time a new film is released, a nurse wearing a dress made of syringes. In the image the needles don't actually puncture her skin, instead they all point upwards. My idea was to have the needles sticking out of the wearers skin, with the weight of the syringe pulling the body of it down, so it would be layered, like scale armour. This would require the use of multiple attach points as you can only link 250 prims together and I would want it to move with some notion of realism when the avatar moved. But then I thought of another interpretation of 'strange brew' and incidentally have had that Cream song in my head quite a few times this month, pushing Tainted love out for a while, thankfully. So my new take on the theme is that of cannibalism, something much closer to the core of Yellow Jester's product range than a dress of needles. So I have been spending my time creating a 'Cannibal's Kitchen'.



Above is a shot of the centrepiece of the kitchen table - each candle is scripted so it can be 'blown out' and wisps of smoke rise from it, and relit with a click of the mouse, and each candle gives out a small amount of light. The background in that picture looks quite different now, with more details added. I'm doing my best to avoid many of the cliches people fall into when doing horror stuff in SL, such as having fresh, bright red blood everywhere, this is someone's kitchen, they live and eat in this room, they don't kill someone and eat them raw. So any bloodstains that missed the last round of cleaning are dark and old. The kitchen sink will have some fresh blood in it, but hey, it's the sink. And there will be plenty of blood, just not all over the floors and walls.



But not everything is about food in this kitchen... Sam had the great idea of what if amidst all this grotesquerie the Yellow Jester had the patience and green fingers to keep an orchid alive and well, something which requires considerable skill. I also like the idea of the jester being a nomad who set up shop in other people's homes, so found items are a must, hence the plates on the walls and the doily.



There's nothing like roasted baby hands with a creamy sauce.

I usually make avatar attachments as hunt gifts, so I've stepped out of the norm here, but I'm pleased with how things are progressing. I plan on making something wearable for hunters who don't own land in SL and also plan on making the kitchen modular so people don't have that many prims don't find my gift completely useless. Or if not modular than I'll atleast do a low prim version, with cupboards that don't open and less detailing here and there.

Anyway time to get back to work.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Jean-michelle jarre - equinox, julian cope - safe surfer, a crack in the clouds,

Preparations are still underway for the Hunt to start on the 1st of Feb; with this in mind I'll be pulling off my valentine heart and replacing it with an ad, as it uses the same human heart sculpt that we'll be using as the hunt item to find in each store, and I don't want to confuse people hehe or have to deal with people inadvertently buying it by mistake and having to go through the rigmarole that involves hehe.



Another part of the preparations is finishing off my in progress builds so people returning to the store can go "Oh Pretties!!!" or more likely "Eew Nasties!!!" as my work of late has been darker than usual hehe.

So one of these builds is a customer commission I did for a role playing new friend of mine who's character she's brought over from text based role play, she's always described her character as wearing a necklace with 7 fingers hanging from it from people who've failed 'contracts' with her - and she asked me to build it for her after seeing my store and the gift I made for the Death Becomes Her Hunt. Below is a picture of my first attempt, which she was happy with, but I wasn't.



and a detail of the ruby setting in the midst of all those fingers...



I thought the idea was good, I liked the ruby and it's silver setting, but I wasn't happy with the fingers, the scale wasn't right on them, the were too short, and the sculpts look like boney sausages, so I didn't put it out on a general release in the stores. Then I got some proper finger bone sculpts from a friend I made through flickr, Kras Alter and have reworked it. Below is the ad I made for the male version yesterday -



I'm happy with it now, and hopefully it'll prove a success with the growing lovers of bones in SL. On the cards today is making the female ad for this necklace and I want to finally finish 'Damn Your Eyes' something I gave away as my twisted hunt bonus back in September.

Here are some pictures of my builds from other people on Flickr in my Yellow JesteR group -







Click on the above images to see credits :)

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Alice in Chains - Black gives way to Blue

So yeah, I'm one of the worst bloggers, it's true. I get out of the habit pretty damn easily and then months can go passed and you won't hear from me. But today I'm going to bring you upto speed on what's been happening and going to happen in the world of Yellow Jester.

I've been struggling with my depression, as usual it's true, but lately I've been feeling more creative again and have been making some things that were not just me ticking over and making the odd hunt gift once a month to keep things going in second life. And speaking of hunts, I'm actually hosting my first next month, which is the main impetus for this post today, as this is the last day we are accepting applications.

I'm not under the illusion that many people read this blog, (mainly due to my long periods of inactivity) but I know I have one or two people who do check it every now and then, so, this is for you.


"The Tainted Love Hunt is a grid-wide treasure hunt whose theme is everything but the nice romantic love St. Valentines Day celebrates; obsessional love, love of pain, loving someone to death, the love of the suicide pact, these are the types of themes this hunt will explore. Featuring great prizes from some of most troubled, twisted, and talented designers and builders in Second Life, it will run from February 1st to February 28th."

Online Application - http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/55TPW3C

So at the end of last year I did a little experiment in November to see how the business was doing in terms of exposure and didn't do a hunt, to see if I was at a point yet where traffic (people visiting my stores) and sales of my creations were self sustainable and if I still needed to do these publicity garnering exercises each month. For those who don't know what I mean by Hunts, they are Grid wide treasure hunts, where different stores in second life hide a gift in their shop, with that gift is a landmark to the next store in a chain and people go from store to store collecting freebies, with the idea that they discover places they never would have otherwise. So back to my experiment...basically I still do need to do these, as november was a hungry month, tumble weeds were blowing across my virtual plot of land and the crickets were singing loudly. So December saw me returning to doing regular hunts.

A customer and now friend of mine Red Pralou was organising her own hunt with a friend and invited me to participate. It was called the Tarot Hunt, with the guideline of this regarding our creations - "
This hunt is well.... mysterious.... your item can be macabre, carnival, gothic, gypsy etc etc..." So I sat there pouring over images of tarot cards, looking for inspiration and thought the only thing that might be fun would be to make a crown...I went away, then came back a second time to google images of tarot cards and again the only thing sticking out to me were crowns. I thought I would make something a bit different, an evil crown. It wasn't until I had pretty much finished the build that the title, Crown of Swords occurred to me, swords is one of the deck of cards in a tarot deck, along with cups, a bit like spades and hearts in a standard deck.



Instead of doing the obvious and decking the thing out with skulls and other bones I thought it might be more interesting to draw some influence from the looks of Sauron and the Witch King from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, so I wanted to make it look like it was a dangerous item to wear for a mere mortal, so I covered the thing in sharp looking sickle blades...






I'm quite pleased with the result, though it's application is limited and sales since the hunt have been non-existent. But if I just wanted to make things that sell I'd stick bones over everything I make, and well I'd soon be bored and you'd never hear from me again heh.

Also in December the organisers of the Twisted Hunt put together a promotion to allow people to buy each other reasonably priced xmas presents, so Twisted Krismus was born. I made some watches, 3 in all, two for ladies and one for gents, as well as some earrings based on my 3 kings/3 Queens necklaces. The watches do actually tell the time, and can be set to display the time in peoples own time zones via an easy to use menu.



So after the deathly quiet november, December was a much more interesting month with lots of people passing through Dunwich, either hunting for the tarot gift or checking out the items on sale in the TK promotion....and business was again good.
Next up was the 'Death Becomes her Hunt' starting on the 1st of January. I finished an item I had been tinkering with for several months since the Hot For Zombies event 'ZombieFest 2009' in October where I had made some hooks to go on my face which worked with this skin I had that lacked lips. I had been wanting to make a version that would work with any skin, by animating the face into a grimace.

Here's the original build, I'm also wearing my still unreleased "Damn Your Eyes" empty eye socket build in this pic...



and here is a shot of my assistant Samantha's avatar wearing the facial animating version, which I've called the 'Forced Smile' -



I thought it would be pretty easy to just finish this build and have it as the hunt gift, of course I didn't realise at first that of course, everyone's face would be different, so I had to make 6 different versions based on 3 different face shapes, 3 male, 3 female so that most people had atleast a chance of having one that was a relatively good fit straight off the bat. And that was not a quick job, and I spent something like 6 hours doing what I thought would be an hour, an hour and a half job. It might have been quicker if I hadn't decided to include extra versions with bloody eyes and top row of teeth, but sometimes I can't help myself, not if I get into doing something and have an idea. hehe.

Ok so now we're upto January, and this update is almost done and I've only a few builds left to show you.

A customer who was impressed with my forced smile asked me to make her a necklace for her role play character, which was a necklace with seven fingers hanging from it. I'm not happy with the finger sculpts I used so I've not released this as a shop item yet, but I will once I get my hands on some proper finger bones...



It's looks good, and I'm pleased with the setting I made for the Ruby, but I'll be happier once those sausages actually look like finger bones stripped of flesh.
Here's a detail of the Ruby setting, which I think is pretty nice.



After 'finishing' that build I went on to construct another necklace, this time I was inspired by a sculpt I found of a centipede that looked particularly realistic, and thought it would be something to get people talking if not making them feel a little nauseous.



Again inspired by a sculpt I spotted, I thought I would make a piece of virtual taxidermy and while I was trying to indentify the particular breed of penguin I came across a picture of a two-headed calf, and quickly gave up looking for the right penguin breed and decided to go with a more freakish theme and this is how it came out...



Certainly something else to get tongues wagging at the very least, if not to set the cash register alight.

It's been a concern of mine for a while now that I don't want to be known simply as 'that guy that makes jewelry' so I've been making a concerted effort to make some other things lately, the penguin was a departure in that it's the first non attachment I've made in a long time. With that in mind I made the next and last piece in this update, The Bloody Bucket of Body Parts. This build saw me doing another first, and that was making a custom texture for a sculpt. Using a colour map on the bucket sculpt I combined the supplied shade map with a metal texture that I dirtied up and covered in various blood splatters. It literally took me all day to do as I was unfamiliar with the technique, and had to make an alteration, then upload the new texture, apply it to the sculpt, then go back, modify it again, upload it...and so on and so on for many hours until I was happy with the final result. I'm happy with it. It looks gross hehe which was the effect I was going for :D



And so that's what I've been upto when I haven't been cradling my head wishing I was dead. Next month looks to be an exciting month as far as virtual things go, so I have something to look forward to :)

Current Mood: cold
Current Music: damn I've been sat here in silence the whole time ...

A quote...

“I hate people who own dogs,” the playwright and painter August Strindberg once said. “They should have the courage to bite people themselves.”

It's been a while, nothing like a dose of flu to get me out of the habit of updating my blog. I was still sick for Halloween so didn't do anything for it in RL, unlike last year where I had a gig with my band and made a costume (I played the gig sat on a child's tricycle in a black suit with a paper-mache mask like the puppet 'Billy' from the Saw movies ). So seeing as I couldn't do anything due to feeling like death warmed up, I made what effort I could and put together a hunt in Second Life.

At the end of September, when I was making the rosary necklace for the vampire hunt, I made an 'unholy rosary' too, made of bones with an inverted cross on it that I thought I would give away as some kind of bonus, like I had for the twisted hunt in the month before. Truth be told, the vampire hunt was very disappointing for me, the turn out was really small, with just a hand full of people trickling through the store each day, which considering how popular 'Vampirism' is in Second Life it's boggling that so few people were participating. There is this vampire role-play game called Bloodlines, which is really part role-play part viral-stroke-of-genius where players have to bite new people to gain their souls and thus bring new players into the game, creating a chain letter effect. And of course it's all run by a shop that sells merchandise like blood and vampire accessories like glowing eyes and teeth and it's all quite clever and people can quite happily spend lots of money on all these gadgets in the name of role-play. To be honest, it was this knowledge that made me think 'Cha-Ching' great idea for a hunt! The bloodlines lot should like my store and the items I sell, and it'll be good for business. But! The organisor failed to tap into this undead market due to poor advertising, organisation, not making the correct sacrifices to the Antediluvians in order to bring in their childer en-masse...shame really. So when Halloween came I was glad, as it was the last day of this particular hunt and I could pull down all the ugly advertising posters and group joiner and the sculpty 'coffin' which was little more than a rectangular blob that looked as much like a coffin as a blob can. The turn out from day 1 was so poor that I quickly looked for another hunt to enter Yellow Jester into, and that's how I came to be part of the Make Him Over Hunt 2. I think more MHOH hunters got my vamp gift than did actual vampire hunters...so I was very pleased to pull all that stuff down.
So a couple of days before Halloween I started piecing together 'clues' for my personal hunt, making textures and adding an extra tunnel entrance in the basement complex under the store.



The image above is a 'loose page from the necronomicon' I made and placed on a desk in 'my office' in the basement. It's design is based more along the lines of the necronomicon from the Evil Dead movies rather than being accurate to the 'book' as described in HP Lovecraft's writings, which is described as being written in Latin, Greek or English, depending on which edition you find, where as I went with one written in demonic languages and ancient unintelligible texts. On the desk next to this page was...



a translation which adds some faux history to the necklace 'The Unholy Rosary' and allowed me to tip a nod to Lovecraft by mentioning the creator being a 'Mad Arab' which Lovecraft described the necronomicon's fictional author as the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred. Along with both these pages I added another Yellow Jester's journal entry...



a journal entry to lead hunters to the tunnels under the store. Due to space restrictions I didn't actually have room to build the complex series of tunnels I wanted hunters to have to explore, and get lost in, before finding the final room and getting their hands on the gift. So I put in a fake tunnel entrance as I mentioned already, and had that entrance teleport hunters 500m into the sky to a replica tunnel system, where I had the room to make it the complex maze of dark and creepy tunnels befitting the home of a piece of jewelry mentioned in the fabled Necronomicon.



The noose hanging from the ceiling at the maze entrance was to encourage people who got tired of wandering around in circles to quit, and it would teleport them back to the ground to a set of gallows underground beneath the empty house next to the shop.



Why encourage people to give up? Well aside from having a perverse sense of humour, I also wanted those who stuck with it and found the final room to have a greater sense of achievement, and how better to make the winners feel good than by having a few losers around hehe.

I rather got into making the maze of tunnels as it was nice to have a project again after being so sick and unable to concentrate. I had a stroke of devious cunning in the placement of a pit-trap, covered with a *phantom floor that sent explorers plumeting down a vertical tunnel. The idea being that they would think this was indeed a trap, when actually it was a short cut, as there was a curtain textured to look like a wall at the bottom of the pit that they could walk through and after turning a few corners it would take them to the final room and the gift and the exit from the maze.






The chalice on top of the steps held the prize and the closed book was another teleporter which took people down to the empty house in my parcel next to the shop...amusingly enough quite a few hapless hunters fell foul of the 'teleport on click' script in the book and found themselves at the finish-point before claiming their prize from the chalice.



Quite a few people turned up at the store over the Halloween weekend, over 200, but the final count of people who navigated the maze to find the gift was 32. I got back a fair amount of positive feedback from people who found it, with one telling me I found my 'calling' as not only a builder of items but of mazes and secret entrances hehe (thanks Tali). In a way I'm a little sad so many gave up in a matter of minutes considering the time I spent on preparations equalled probably 8+ hours, but those 32 'winners' went away with a smile on their faces and a few nice things to say to their friends about the store, though I won't be surprised if the greatest achievement of the hunt was to enhance my reputation for making hunts really difficult. But most of all it made my Halloween fun, gave me that often sought sense of purpose and brought many a smile and mischievous laugh from my lips. *sigh* I miss Halloween already.

*Phatom is an option within second life to allow a prim (building block) to be a non physical object that allows avatars to pass through it freely.

I know what it's like to listen to someone piss and moan about being ill, so I try my hardest not to do it, but for fucks sake I am tired of being sick. I've got flu, swine flu if my old dear has any say about it, and a nice unhealthy dose of chest infection to go with it.
When I lie down, I can't sleep because the fluid in my lungs gathers and makes me feel like I am drowning in my own phlegm, and the noise...it sounds like there is a fire in the room with all the crackling and popping going on with each breath.
I am sick of it, sick of being sick and not venting my ire. So seeing as I am feeling so terribly terrible this morning, so utterly desperate to throttle the life out of someone I have something to share...I have a big FUCK YOU to all the people who've pissed me off over the last few days; that may morph into an apology later on, but for now you can suck my cock, eat shit and die, and then rot.

Current Location: my sick bed
Current Mood: BAD
Current Music: wheeze, crackle, fizzle, pop, wheeze, crackle, fizz...

Today is the third anniversary of my making Mefo Elcar, my avatar in second life. I actually made mefo and then ran back to the MMO I was playing at the time, 'star wars galaxies' and didn't log in to SL for a long time as I was so disgusted at how ugly my avatar was. About 6 months later a member of the guild I ran in swg invited me to visit her in SL and check out this roleplaying she did in a land called Gor. I came, I yawned and grumbled at having to sit quietly while the people around me said words like "Nay" and "Verily" and "Hail". I never did understand the attraction Gor has for people, although I do remember quite liking the scantily clad slave girls...maybe that's it, the slave girls! *shrugs*



So this ugly looking bugger is me when I came back and tweaked myself a bit...as I'm sure you can imagine, I looked a hell of alot worse before. The pic on the left is moments after I performed my first piece of object editing in second life. I was at 'Inspire Space Park' and I guess this girl heard the SL camera sound as I was taking pics of myself and IM'd me to say "Your necklace needs adjusting, it's poking you in the neck!" her name was Genevieve Harrop, and now she is in my shop group hehe, funny. I haven't spoken to her in a long time...The pic on the right was taken at this porno theatre I used to camp at to earn my first few lindens. I so don't miss camping.

I'm sick at the moment, typical on my rezday. So that's your lot really, nothing more to see here.

Current Mood: sick

In my last blog entry I showed you a screen shot taken in world of the note I received from Nancy Linden saying they were going to be using several of my 'halloween themed items' in the Linden Labs Halloween spotlight 2009. Unfortunately it appears that was a generic note sent to everyone, as they only used the one item I submitted; the typo in the note-card title DID suggest to me that it might have been a generic note (if they can't be bothered to type Congratulations correctly, I doubt they could be bothered to browse through my 90 or so items on slx to see what other things I have made). So anyway, it's not like it's a big deal, it's nice that they chose an item, and free publicity is free. But they never did send me a link to it, well unless you count the link they put up on the logging in screen as sending it to me...it's very hard for me not to be a whiny bitch sometimes lol, I am lucky they chose one of my items at all as apparently they didn't choose everything that was submitted, although looking at my company in the spotlight you would never know. And I have a voice in my head saying "You didn't really expect them to do as they said they would, do you?" I guess that's the bitter voice of experience of 3 years in Second Life talking.



Anyway, enough of my very-restrained and much edited ranting for this hour, I will shortly be logging in SL to continue working on my current projects, and may even be back here later to post some pics of the works in progress.

Current Mood: cranky
Current Music: Gong - Angels Egg

If you've been following my blog you may remember me writing about entering my clown helm in for the XstreetSL Halloween 2009 Spotlight, they said they would tell entrants by the 12th of October if they had been successful. The 12th came and went and I heard nothing, then last night in the small hours (in between crashes) I got an offline msg from Nancy Linden saying they were going to be featuring several of my items in the spotlight, several :)
So I'm understandable feeling quite pleased with myself at the moment for having my work recognised and it was all I could do to stop myself sending out a msg in my shop group saying "Yeah! GO ME!" hehe, but I did manage to stop myself hehe. Though I couldn't help posting that picture above on my flickr page.

Current Mood: pleased

So I was a busy bee yesterday, slaving away on making a female version of my "Three Kings" necklace so I can continue to smuggly call other merchants lazy when they only do a female gift for hunts hehe.



Above is a pic of yours truly working away...well actually I think I spent a good hour taking sinister snaps of myself hehe...on arranging the 136 prims I used making this female version. I'm sorry girls (not really) but you have your work cut out for you to find this necklace, but hey, you have a whole month to do it in, so you have plenty of time. As I have done before on hunts, look for visual clues leading you to it's hiding place. Good Luck!

Oh and before I go here is a pic of the finished item

Current Mood: mischievous

It's all over, my items have been returned to me from the ZombieFest Sim (graciously donated by the NOR people) and I have a final figure for my sales generated for the International Red Cross.



I sold 42 items which totalled to $10,634Ls, which works out at roughly $38.00 USD plus I paid $2,500Ls for DJ Iris Seale in the Zombie Auction (for 3 hours of DJ action - see above pic) so $13,134Ls which roughly equates to $50 USD Yay! :) Now please don't ask me what that is in pounds, as these numbers are already giving me a headache, nah not really, but if I had to guess I'd say it was probably something in the region of £30-35 pounds. Which is damn awesome :)

Now I just have to make some plans to celebrate my rezday which is coming up soon, on the 20th of October I think or somewhere around that date, and I can put DJ Iris to good use :)

Curiously enough this is the 2nd time 42 has been a significant number this month, with my store being #42 on the vampire hunt, and we all know (or those of us who've seen Hitchhikers Guide to the galaxy) that 42 is the meaning of life the universe and everything! I'm so gonna find myself looking for 42 for the rest of the month to make it three...

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: where I'm coming from - Stevie Wonder

Well I had a full weekend of zombie antics and lag, actually mostly lag but it was fun all the same. It's big events like Zombiefest that make me crave a better computer, as I could barely move and had to wait patiently for all the pussy, rotten reanimated textures to load. (yes I said pussy as in full of puss not female genetalia hehe). ZombieFest was a huge success, with over $475,000Ls collected for the red cross, but with a few hours left the figure may rise to 500k.



My stall generated plenty of sales, with 100% of the Ls going to charity, and it was nice to spot people in the crowd wearing my bone items. Sadly I didn't get any pics as people tended to move before my slow arse computer could grab a screenshot.

In other news...I finished a new build yesterday, which I will be giving away for my Make Him Over hunt gift.




...and in case you are confused, it's the necklace not the rusty hooks stuck in my face.

Current Mood: Irritated by LAG!!!
Current Music: the sound of me cursing

Yesterday when I was signing into SL there was a notice on the logging in screen about entering items for the Linden Labs Halloween Spotlight; the criteria you had to follow to enter an item seemed ridiculously restrictive, but hey, that's LL for you, they don't make things easy and seem to enjoy hoop jumping...so the notice said I had 6 or 7 hours left to enter an item, "No sweat" I thought. So I made an advert for my shop for the 'Barbarian Clown Helm' I gave away as the main Yellow Jester Twisted gift, on a nice big resolution (which is what I had meant to do the day before).



Then after that I went about making an ad to go on XStreet to enter the spotlight. All images had to be portrait ratio and 570x430 pixels, and vaguely they stated all description boxes had to have the words "As entered for the Halloween Spotlight" or something similar. So I think I managed it ok...time will tell as I will find out if I'll be getting some free publicity on the 12th October. I'm not holding my breath, but the chance at the exposure is too good to waste.



I spent the rest of the day setting up vendors for this weekend's ZombieFest! which is a charity event for the International Red Cross, held in conjunction with World Zombie Day. I have a little area where I've set up some vendors selling my Zombie poses, and some of my Bone Items where 100% of the proceeds go to the red cross. The sim it is being held in is looking awesome and I am looking forward to it opening properly tomorrow on Friday, and events are being held over Saturday and Sunday, such as a zombie date auction, kissing booths, a carnival and other things...it's going to be fun :D

Current Mood: lethargic

I know I said I would talk about the clues I set up for my Twisted Hunt bonus a week or so ago, time really does fly. Today is still not the day I'm going to go into that, hehe, I will wait a bit longer - probably until I have got all the stuff I feel I need to get done out of the way and I can relax a bit more, take stock of what I have achieved since returning to SL and productivity.
I've been busy making adverts over the weekend and yesterday, something I'll probably do today as well, as I have a new hunt coming (besides the Vampire Hunt) on the 15th of October, that is a hunt for Men only, the 'Make Him Over Hunt' and seeing as this is a business, I'll want to have as many new builds out on sale as I can muster hehe.
This will be my first gender specific hunt, and it'll be nice not to have to make both male and female versions of the prize, which unlike a lot of merchants who participate in hunts, I stubbornly do every time; if of course my gift is not unisex.
I think I will have to thank Vasha Martinek and Dysturbed Sin for organising the Twisted Hunts, they do a wonderful job of gathering the freaks, creepers, and wierdo's of SL and sending them through my store, I have such a good time watching them all wander about, exploring the house and the grounds around it, and it's easy to think "Oh aren't Grid-Wide Hunts awesome!" and they are, but not all Hunts are equal. I am honestly surprised at how few vampires I have visiting my store on the Vampire Hunt, considering how many there must be on the Grid, with the numerous Dark RP sims, and Bloodlines, and just random bloodsuckers who enjoy dressing like louis the 14th or Jack the Ripper, I find myself wondering where they are. I can imagine that there are alot of people who are pretty much hunted out at the moment, as I myself am (I also participated on the twisted hunt as a hunter - something I don't do for other hunts - again not all hunts are equal) So maybe later in the month more dusty pale people will perk up and visit my neck of the woods *Rimshot-Baddum Tish - Thank you I'm here all week, please tip your waitress*

Anyway enough waffling, here are the ads I've been working on over the past few days.




I was invited to become a 'Dead Dolls of SL' designer a week or so back by group owner Zombina Gunawan, this is a fashion group for those with female avatars (we all know that a few of them are going to really be fat sweaty men who prefer looking at pretty pixels than masculine ones) who are into alternative fashion, creepiness and other dark designs. And as a designer for them I was requested to provide a freebie to the group. I had no idea what this was going to be until I saw a 'recently made friend' wearing some skulls on her head in an approximation of a pair of hair grips or barrettes as the Americans call them...and I remembered where I had seen those before! Earlier in the year a customer came to me wearing the exact same skulls and asked me if I could make a better set, more detail, more realistic textures, which I did, with some success :) but then my PC died and well, you know the rest (if not, then read the rest of my blog and you will see how I floundered and lost interest in SL). I couldn't have thought of a better group gift if I had tried.





And being a hobby capitalist, I made an advert to go in my store, where those who are not 'in-the-know' can pay for them and give me some satisfaction and security in the knowledge that I will be able to pay the rent this month.

And then I made an ad for last months Steam Punk Hunt's gift 'The Night-Vision Spectacles'. Actually it would be more accurate to say I remade the ad I made for the spectacles as this is attempt x2, I wasn't happy with the composition of ad x1 so felt the need to redo it. I seemed to do something right this time, as it's been favourite'd twice on flickr in the couple of days it's been on there.




I'm still not completely happy with it, but the lines are better, and I think I managed to make the build look a bit sexy hehe. I think today I'll work on the Twisted Gifts Ads, the barbarian clown helm and Damn your Eyes, and maybe try an ad for the cybernetic hatch I built back in the spring and gave away as the gift for the spring is in the air hunt I did in Easter.

Current Mood: relaxed
Current Music: whirring of fans and the sound of traffic

Yesterday I had new assistant Sam write me up a to-do list, and as usual with my to-do lists I didn't get it all done hehe. I did however do most of it, but there are not enough hours in the day to do everything, nor do I have powers of concentration large enough to keep going for what hours there are, hehe.
I did work on an ad for recent steampunk gift 'Night-Vision Spectacles' one that I ultimately wasn't happy with lol, so I will be reworking that today. I should have been doing an ad for my 'Dead Dolls of SL' freebie, which are some Boney Hairgrips or Barrettes as the americans call them, which were made for a customer at the begining of the year and then completely forgotten about until I saw a friend wearing something similar last week. But I wanted some more practise getting back into making ads as I am very rusty, having only made the Antique Silver Choker ads in recent months.
I also applied and got accepted into a new hunt, one called the "Make Him Over Hunt" which although being rather on the mainstream side, I am hoping it will introduce Yellow JesteR to a new audience...consider it an experiment to see if I can broaden my customer base without actually having to tone down my creations to be more 'normal'. It will be a good exercise for me as lately I have found it easier to make items for women than I have men. This is not because I am becoming gender confused or anything hehe just that I usually make my male items for myself, but have not found myself wanting anything much lately, except some nice new suits (which aren't really my forte.)
Anyway enough procrastinating.

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: wind blowing through the trees, and birds tweeting

I've been building most of the day, and apart from some minor drama involving me and an unreasonable ex landlord, it's been going well.



I have a new hunt starting tomorrow morning at 8am (midnightSLT) and after much deliberating and head scratching decided on making two gift...




With two separate clue trails, one good, one bad. Tomorrow I will post some pics showing how I set up the clues for the Twisted Hunt Bonus.




Nice this one isn't it hehe, now if you can just tear your eyes away from her breasts you might notice my jewelry hehe

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Gehenna's Bloody Piano

It's been several months since I last updated here, but I do finally seem to be out of my dark depressing burnt out pit of despair ...at least for now hehe. Oh Yes! I've been busy, I've been creative, I've even been called a genius a handful of times by some of the good people of the metaverse.
So a brief recap of the past months is in order. What have I been doing? well up until the end of august I was spending most of my time battling with my mental health issues, so we can ignore those months lol. But! August saw me committing myself to participating in two grid wide hunts this month (september) Steam: The Hunt, Second Life's first steampunk hunt, and The Twisted Hunt : Nightmares (the second twisted hunt).
The gift making for these hunts was a last minute affair, not to say I didn't spend alot of time on them, which isn't true, I spent several hours on both builds...but I didn't get much sleep lol. I didn't have much trouble at all coming up with a Twisted Gift, considering this was my first piece of building since May I think I did quite well. I started building it during the last week in august and it took up quite alot of my allocated build time, but that was ok as I still didn't know what to make for the steam gift.

So the theme for the 2nd twisted hunt is Nightmares, and what's more scary than a clown? Well wearing someone else's skull on your head is a good place to start...While I was off recovering from my SL burnout I played alot of Fallout3 so I think the design of that game inspired this helmet.


It's been so long since I've posted here I forgot how to get images in here for a moment...

...Anyway for the steam hunt prize I was racking my brain "What can I make?" "Steam-Punk, Steam-Punk...what can I make that's Steam-Punk" All I could think of was horrible nasty nightmare stuff hehe, but then I remembered an old build I abandoned early this year or perhaps last year, a bowler hat with a lamp attached to it...I had wanted to have a beam of light coming out of it, so I made a transparent prim that was textured and cone shaped and had it attached to this hat, but I never got around to figuring out how to make it 'turn on and off' so it went back in my inv never to see the light of day until now. So off went the bowler hat, off came the animated amp meter hehe, and the lens and light beams became the basis of my 'Night Vision Spectacles'. So I made some delicate frames using some nano sculpts I had and made two versions, one with beams and one without.

Current Mood: optimistic
Current Music: the sound of distant tap tap tapping

I know it's been a while since I last blogged, this is mainly due to me being ill and not really having much to say here except for the groans and the moans that I would rather not record for posterity.
But today I have some things I feel like sharing.

I don't know if any of you are particularly familiar with the composer Beethoven, but I just watched a film that put the 2nd movement of his 7th symphony to very good use. I first heard this especialy sad, yet beautiful piece many years ago when I was a child and watched the science fiction film Zardoz. The plot of the film is unimportant right now (but it is a film well worth checking out, it has Sean Connery in it for one) but it was the music, the epic, sweeping liberating sadness that touched me and burnt that piece of film into my mind and opened my ears to orchestral music in general more than even star wars did.
The film I watched this morning was called Knowing, and sadly it starred Nick Cage. Although he has his unique charms, and was great in wild at heart, for me, he often ruins more films by his presence, than improving them. The film raises questions about determinism verses chaos, which in itself usually guarantees a good watch...and the way they used the beethoven piece was inspired. I don't really want to get too into details as maybe someone reading this might watch it and be pleasantly surprised by it if they do watch it. I know I was.

Current Mood: calm