New Release from Inga Wind - Naida

I know it's been a long time between posts but fun, family, friends and holidays have taken a front seat to bloggy posts. So nyah!! :P

Anyway,  Inga has released another of her wonderful fairy outfits -- this time with a water/dolphin theme. Naida in Blush (shown below) is the first in the series and has been followed by a version in silver. It's absolutely magical!!! Sort of a cross between harem silks and a filmy formal, Naida comes with matching shoes, tiara wings and an animated dolphin you can ride should you decide to get wet.

As usual, the detail is exquisite and the textures all line up perfectly from top to bottom. If I had one very small nitpick, it's that the dolphin detail above your belly button is a bit hard to discern. Regardless, it's a truly wonderful outfit that gets oohs and ahhs wherever you go. I'd love to see it in aqua and pale yellow!

For members of Inga's group, the outfit is $500L, regular price is $950L.

Second Life attachment points

New fashion release from Inga Wind shows limitations of SL avatar attachment points.

In case you haven't figured it out by now, Inga Wind is a friend and my fave designer. When I got her latest release, Cosette, I fell crazy in love with it simply based on the package photo!

When I put it on, I was blown away. How would you describe it? Professional? Yes. Perky? Very. German hofbrau? Kinda. Totally cute? Definitely!

The outfit includes everything you see in the photo. Skirt, top, glitch pants, belt, sleeve ruffles, shoes and a prim bow for the bodice. The total price is $350L or, $150L for her group members -- a total bargain!

However, in trying to do the photo shoot of the outfit for this blog post, I started going crazy because the belt would "dig" into the skirt with some of the fashion model poses that move your hips sideways. So, I started playing with the belt trying to see if I couldn't make it behave better with my hip-shifts!

After 15 minutes of fooling around, I moved the belt to the spine and the bow the "left pec". For my fashion shots, it all worked fine that way. In fact, I thought to myself, wow, this is how it should be.

So I went to see Inga in person to show her what I'd done. After turning on my AO and standing in front of her, she (very graciously) pointed out that now the bow was moving up and down the dress as I breathed! Ughh. Plus, when my AO switched to a different stand, the belt was now digging into my stomach which looked awful! I had solved one problem for my photo shoot but created two new ones that didn't work for normal wear. :P 

Bottom line, Inga HAD indeed picked the best attachment points in the first place. She has tried the different spots I had and what comes out of the box is the best you can do given the limitations of Second Life. Normally belts and skirts are linked together so they move as one. However, the outfit is designed so the belt rides higher, almost like a mini-corset. That means it can't be part of the skirt or it would move completely outside your body with any twisting or shifting motion. Sigh.

Anyway, it's a gorgeous outfit and only those terminally picky and slightly anal retentive people like me would ever notice this stuff. :P

What's in your SPAM folder??

This is sort of an off-the-wall topic. You see I actually bothered to look in my Gmail Spam folder today for my Second Life email account and for my throwaway real life account. I don't think I've checked either for maybe a month. I was surprised to find that, in both accounts, 90% of the ads were for male enhancement products with the remaining 10% for Canadian pharmacies.

Since Gmail does a pretty good job of filtering spam, I'm not as reluctant to give out my Gmail addys as I am with my professional personal email. So I'm not surprised that I end up with a fair amount of spam. I've read that spammers try to guess your email address on Gmail using names they find by searching on the net. So if you're "Snickers Snook", they try every variation including snickers_snook, snickerssnook, snickers.snook, snickers-snook, snook-snickers, etc. which in my case, happens to work for my SL account.

It doesn't quite work for my RL Gmail account although my name is part of the address. However, both accounts have clearly female names (well OK Snickers might be a little ambiguous). Yet, both accounts are mostly filled with ads designed for men with serious inferiority complexes, stupid streaks and / or excess money.

On the other hand (or body part), I can't recall ever seeing a spam for breast enlargement. Oh I get a few here and there for diets, wrinkle creams, random household products, African money schemes, lotteries and porn. But the ratio of male-oriented stuff drowns out everything else. Does that mean women are smarter than guys about this stuff so spams targeting females don't work as well? Or are there lots of women who buy online Viagra and penis enlargement pills for their BF's or husbands?? (Here honey, I got these pills for you for my birthday.)

Now spam in my RL professional account is very different from Gmail stuff. There I get mostly pitches for seminars, unreadable foreign language emails, African money schemes and lotteries with few, if any, male-oriented pitches. Weird that they're so different in content. Maybe it's a difference in filtering?

So I'm curious. What's in your spam folder?

More aDiva Stuffa

Just to show that I can still acknowledge a good outfit in spite of the mistreatment I may have received by its creator, I wore AnneJoy Paine's "Blood Red Bitch" outfit to a large Halloween party in SL the other night. I received several compliments on it but especially on the cape. To the one person who really wanted to know where I got it, I gave him a LM to her shop. :P

aDiva also aThiefa?

As a follow-up to my rant about my treatment at the hands or typing fingers of AnneJoy Paine (the owner / designer for "aDiva couture" in Second Life), an anonymous person pointed me to doing a Google search on her. Wowee! I found a number of references to AnneJoy as either an outright content thief or certainly, a blatant copier.

Both Nicky Ree and Blaze Columbia filed DMCA actions against AnneJoy. In Nicky Ree's case, Linden Lab forced the takedown of a number of outfits from the aDiva store. I don't know what happened with Blaze Columbia. Here are two linkies that compare the works.

Blaze Columbia vs. AnneJoy Paine

Nicky Ree vs. AnneJoy Paine

I wonder if her slavish minions know the history here? What makes it more interesting is that I own one of Blaze's gowns he says was copied, "Celestial" (and it's gorgeous), plus I'm pretty sure I have Nicky Ree's "Julia" dress somewhere in inventory.

DISCLAIMER - I'm not implying in any way that AnneJoy is engaged in any sort of copying now. I wouldn't know.

How not to treat a customer in Second Life

Warning -- this is a rant about something that happened to me in Second Life today.

Does "aDiva" mean arrogance or are you simply a Paine?

I don't like writing blog posts like this because it can come across as petty sniping. However, I'm soooo annoyed with how I was treated by well-known designer, AnneJoy Paine (aDiva couture), that I had to say something.

First, to be clear, AnneJoy is a very good designer. I have bought several of her outfits AND even paid the $250L to belong to her group. I also blogged about one of her outfits that I won last year during Halloween (read Blood Red Bitch). So this is in no way any dissing of her design skills. Rather, it's how she treats a customer who dares to question her in any way.

Today, AnneJoy sent out a group gift -- a cute mini-dress with matching garter stockings called "Virtue & Vice". Here's the outfit as it comes from the box. As you can see, the stockings end well above the ankle. Normally, when I see garter belts and stockings, I think stilettos or pumps. Which made me wonder, hmm, how should you wear this?

Running through my inventory, I tried almost every boot imaginable. All the ankle boots were too short and showed the skin. All the calf boots just looked clunky.

So, being curious, I went into the aDiva couture Grou Chat and asked a simple question...here it is from my chat log:

[2010/10/02 15:24]  Snickers Snook: Hi the new group gift is yummy but the stockings end above the ankle. Any suggestions for how to wear them? The outfit doesn't look right with boots. ^_^

A few suggestions popped up on boots which were fine when AnneJoy herself jumped into the conversation with a small wall of text about how boots would be great and that's what I should do. So then I said....

[2010/10/02 15:29]  Snickers Snook: ahh well when I see garter stockings, I always think and feel heels ;)

At this point, the conversation took a weird turn with Anne telling me I need to learn about the difficulties of SL and their "templates". Here's the rest of the chat log (for the record, I moved a couple of lines around that were chat delayed on my end).

[2010/10/02 15:30]  AnneJoy Paine: and learn about the difficulties of sl and their templates ;)))
[2010/10/02 15:31]  Snickers Snook: Well since a stocking layer wasn't included, you could combine the undie and stocking for one continuous set right?
[2010/10/02 15:30]  AnneJoy Paine: ;)
[2010/10/02 15:30]  AnneJoy Paine: i would suggest
[2010/10/02 15:30]  AnneJoy Paine: then
[2010/10/02 15:31]  AnneJoy Paine: and you can complain
[2010/10/02 15:31]  AnneJoy Paine: as you prefer
[2010/10/02 15:31]  AnneJoy Paine: yes
[2010/10/02 15:31]  AnneJoy Paine: ;)
[2010/10/02 15:31]  Snickers Snook: just a suggestion not a complaint Anne
[2010/10/02 15:31]  AnneJoy Paine: ;)))
[2010/10/02 15:32]  AnneJoy Paine: i thnk you should start design yourself
[2010/10/02 15:32]  AnneJoy Paine: to make things like you want them
[2010/10/02 15:32]  AnneJoy Paine: or pay for a gift
[2010/10/02 15:32]  Snickers Snook: and I also blog about fashion
[2010/10/02 15:32]  Snickers Snook: including your items now & then
[2010/10/02 15:32]  Snickers Snook: but I will find something that looks cute in my inventory :)
[2010/10/02 15:32]  Snickers Snook: and I've always been very favorable toward them
[2010/10/02 15:33]  Snickers Snook: (And yes Anne, I have designed fashion items too)
[2010/10/02 15:33]  AnneJoy Paine: i am pretty sure there are lots of designs which are better then mine ;) just try them
[2010/10/02 15:33]  Snickers Snook: sigh
[2010/10/02 15:33]  Snickers Snook: ok
[2010/10/02 15:33]  Snickers Snook: I know when I've hit a sore spot here
[2010/10/02 15:34]  AnneJoy Paine: ;)
[2010/10/02 15:36]  Snickers Snook: For crying out loud, I made one little comment suggestion -- I've bought many aDiva items full price.
[2010/10/02 15:36]  AnneJoy Paine: snickers
[2010/10/02 15:36]  AnneJoy Paine: ;)
[2010/10/02 15:36]  Snickers Snook: forget it
[2010/10/02 15:39]  AnneJoy Paine: yes and save some space for upgrowing designers like Snickers ;)))

Kicked out of the aDiva couture group

Right when I said "forget it", AnneJoy kicked me out her group but chat continued to run and I picked up the one last snarky line from her. In between all of this were comments from group members varying from "you're wonderful Anne" to a couple that told Anne to lighten up. I also got two private IMs both saying they thought Anne had gone over the top and one saying I was wrong to criticize a freebie. However, when I told them I had been booted from the group, all expressed outrage. Remember, you have to pay $250L to belong to aDiva couture in the first place.

So here's the real issue. Does a pixel clothing designer really believe she is so good that she can never take a customer comment without acting like she's been personally insulted? Or is it insecurity? I have dealt with many designers and yes, I design clothes too. Virtually ALL of them treat customer comments as valuable feedback -- in fact I can't remember EVER having a response like this from any other creator. They either take the time to explain why they did something the way they did or the tell me it was a good idea or suggestion. But not AnneJoy. Sad because her designs are generally quite good.

Now as to the stockings, YES, you can connect the garter portion to the foot by using the underwear layer and the socks layers together. I've done it myself and I have several pairs of pixel pantyhose. :) Even if my design was a freebie, I think I would still make it versatile enough to allow for boots OR heels.

Oh and I finally found some boots in my inventory that looked "right" with the outfit so to be 100% fair, here's the end result. Pretty cute huh?

P.S. If you think I was wrong here, let me know. I welcome honest criticism. :)

Transaction black hole at Second Life Marketplace

In the push to migrate everything out of XStreet SL to the Second Life Marketplace, some major problems have cropped up. One of the biggest is the lack of a clear trail between the customer's purchase, the delivery of the item and payment of the merchant.

A pJira has been opened on it. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-2920.

The problem is all transactions go through an intermediary account - Marketplace Linden. It's similar to how the XStreet SL system worked but the reporting is not right. The transaction ID the customer gets is NOT the same as what happens when the merchant is paid. If you look through the Jira issue, Sassy Romano has done a great job of showing where things get lost.

I know the Linden Lab programmers are working long and hard on SL Marketplace but seriously, it looks to me like the migration has been pushed too fast too soon. While I had the occasional delivery glitches with XStreet SL, I could solve them fairly easily because there was a clear trail between the transaction as reported via email and the Magic box delivery. Now it's sort of all muddled together.

Several merchants are reporting not even seeing the money going into their accounts -- which is very disturbing.

LL, you have to fix this before shutting off XStreet.