The Unofficial Second Life® Fashion and Shopping Blog

This year for my birthday, Gracie girl got me some toucans for the Freudian Slip to go along with the herons, pelicans, squids, and music monkeys that hold watch over the decks while no one’s dancing.

These toucans, like everything from Duggy Bing’s Cartoonimals, are drop-dead adorable. Their style is more exaggerated than realistic, which is an aesthetic I find I’m drawn to more and more within our virtual habitat.

The flying toucan model allows you to set a number of locations after rez so that you can program in a flight path for those who might want to give chase in hopes of fruit loops. The seated version remains perkily in place, opening its beak from time to time and giving a slight tilt of head.

There is a happy zoo at the Cartoonimals store, from door-scratching kitties to big ear-flapping elephants to small skittering turtles and even flying aliens in mini spaceships. I can’t speak for the entire inventory, but the selections I brought home were well adjusted to havok4 living and operated from low-lag scripts. This was a delightful change over some of the more lag-heavy wildlife I’d encountered in the past.

Unable to be contented by just toucans, I hurried over and begged another friend for some flamingos and treated myself to a hug-tastic monkey for the Slip. Then I discovered a few wearables lingering amid the funky critters, and it was all over but the shopping.

Yes, that’s right. Jammies. Could you die? These pjs come in kitty cat, skunk, elephant and monkey style sets that all include boy and girl friendly pjs in different color options. The tops and bottoms are nice, but pretty basic and uninspired. They’ll do the job for any pajama party you’ve got to crash, however, and no one’s really going to care once they catch sight of your slippers - which are just about the most squee-tastic novelty slippers in all SL. I am ALL about these tail-wagging, sweet-faced kitty slippers. The bottom prim is white and tintable so you have a little bit of leeway when it comes to matching ‘em up and THE EYES BLINK. Seriously. Can you live without a pair? No, I didn’t think so.

The next “oh my god, I have to have that!” is the Carmen Miranda hat. Over 350 prims in 2 pieces, this work of art is prim decadence. The minute you put it on, you get this flamboyant need for bright red tango dresses and feel the irresistible urge to wiggle a la Copacabana with Groucho Marx. I cannot defend how often you’ll have use for it or why it’s so damn necessary. It’s just…so damn necessary. From the pineapple crown to the dangling grapes and peeking monkey, I cannot imagine anything that has tickled my little-girl dress-up monster more than this hat. He gives you three sizes to choose from for the base and they all flawlessly work with the upper attachment.

I may have to beg for matching fruit themed jewelry, but I haven’t stopped squeeing yet.

Last, but so far from least, are these little pet carrier backpacks, complete with baby animals you can wear and adore. When I first got to tinkering with these, I was disappointed because the backpacks only came in a really large size that took me the better part of half an hour to fit - and even then, it wasn’t a good fit. After I explained to Duggy that most of us girls weren’t amazon women from the moon, however, he quickly obliged and made small and medium carrier straps that provide a much nicer fit with a lot less tinkering.

You know you gotta have one, and let’s face it - don’t we all sometimes crave a reason to shout “keep your damn hands off my monkey!”

Run over to Cartoonimals and you’re bound to find something that is your cuppa. If I’m wrong - I’ll eat my hat. *grin*

(Read More | Where to Buy)

For those people who occasionally ask me what the hell I’m doing with my SL that keeps me from blogging, I can finally answer you Over the past several months I’ve been working on a new project: Facade Furnishings is finally ready for prime time.

Today, at the Freudian Slip we’ll be having a “get Salome a drink already” launch party featuring over 8 hours of live music goodness from some of SL’s hottest talent with fun and freebies tossed into the mix. Are you enticed yet? You should definitely be feeling enticed. The concert party is open to one and all and I certainly hope you’ll feel inclined to attend.

The music line-up is just sublime.

When: Saturday, March 22, 2008
Where: The Freudian Slip

2pm - Tweety & The Tomcats: Funky bluesy trio of sax, bass, and guitar - we dare you to try and keep still.
3pm - Raspbury Rearwin: Alt-rock-pop singer/songwriter, cute-as-a-button and lover of bulldogs.
4pm - Montian Gilruth Mouth-watering Canadian vocalist and finger-pickin’ genius.
5pm - Tone Uriza: Big Daddy Bluesman crunhin’ the blues so hard they hurt in all the right ways.
6pm - Shadrack Band: Contemporary country and Americana trio of rockin’ bass and two wickedly delish guitarists combined with creamy, creamy harmonies.
7:30pm-ish - Grace McDunnough: She’s all mine and you can’t have her, but you can come listen to our beloved songbird croon her sultry siren song until you’re ready to sell your soul for more.

While I’m not even going to try and walk the unethical tightrope of reviewing my own items, I can tell you that Facade Furnishings is a low-prim furniture showroom geared toward proving that low-prim can still be faboo. Many items in the store are only 1 or 2 prims, and complete room sets start at 15 prims or less.

Facade item textures are almost entirely created “from scratch” starting with custom-created wood grains, wickers, and lacquers. This lets us provide textures with high resolution crispness and clarity for a realistic, but not photo-sourced feel. Primwork is at a minimum - it’s all about tricking the eye into lavish faux 3D (thus: Facade). I wanted to create items that helped foster atmospheres of immersion within the Second Life environment and I really feel that too much photo-sourcing distracts from our artificial paradise (setting the ethics aside).

I also wanted to offer an item that contributed to the multimedia aspect of SL, so I teamed with our newest little neko dynamo, Chastity Vandeverre, to offer visitors these freebie scripted radio media tuners. Each set comes with a master unit and three remote units in either Vintage, Retro, or Boom Box style. From the master unit, you can store radio stations for easy tuning on any parcel where you have media rights. The remote units can be placed on other parcels in the same SIM, or within shouting distance to permit you to change streams at multiple locations. Features include textures that change when you flip radio stations streams, hide/show and owner lock options. I think it’s a pretty nifty freebie, but then, I’m biased

Scripts are driven by a notecard that you can customize for your own stations and options. Full instructions are included and updates should be released when necessary.

At today’s party, we’ll also have fun freebies that are not nearly as impressive, but give us a giggle. Seeing as I’d like nothing more than to get completely blotto after the months of going blind in Photoshop, we have the One Too Many Lampshade Party Set, complete with lampshade hat and Uncle Feterish mouth bulb (touch on/off).

Where To Go:

Launch Party @ The Freudian Slip
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Seven%20Veils/20/19/23

Freebies & Shopping @ Facade Furnishings
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Seven%20Veils/121/50/23

Just a quicky because it’s a busy day here at Chez Doolittle, but I saw these and I couldn’t resist. Johan Durant of Motion Merchant has two totally cute typing overrride attachments for men and women. You wear them and instead of typing with the keyboard motion (or, God forbid, whipping out a laptop or PDA -ugh, bad geek, no!), your avatar actually, well, talks:

There are both male and female versions:

They are $200L each. They only come with one replacement animation, and I’d love to see more so that I do different things whilst typing. (I’d also like a pony, a winning lottery ticket, and for new players to back off and not stand in my personal space when talking to me, so I’m prepared to live without every little thing I want.) But the cool thing is that as well as animating your avatar’s gestures, the attachment also animates your avatar’s face. Your mouth moves, your eyes move - it’s very, very cool.

Even if it’s not the sort of toy you’ll wear all the time, I have to say that it’s worth it for even a few hours of amusement. Seeing your avatar’s mouth and face move is oddly fascinating. When you get a male and female version talking to each other in the same room, well… hours of fun for the whole family for less than the cost of two Cokes. Hard to beat that!

(Read More | Where to Buy)

Some days even I get tired of avatar paper dolls, as hard as that may be to believe. On those days I dig through my inventory for anything to blog that isn’t clothing, and on this occassion I came up trumps because in my inventory, I found Paris Hilton’s dog.

OK so it isn’t really poor little Tinkerbelle (and who the hell names their dog Tinkerbelle anyway?), but it is the SL equivilant of a handbag/teacup chihuahua:

These are the Zooby’s dogs from Carrie Tatsu, who also sells cats (I am so not a cat person) and, umm, apes and “mutant pets” which I can only imagine are the love child of Paris Hilton and Michael Jackson and the zoological equivilant of Grim Babies. At the moment, profiles, IMs and teleports are down, so I haven’t seen what else is in stock, nor do I know how much anything is, but I am quite content with the chihuahua and the maltese:

Each dog rests on your arm and comes with a petting animation so that you stroke Fido every few minutes. You can turn it off as well, but it’s not that annoying.

As prim animals go, these are exceedingly well-primmed. Usually with scripted pets you get great scripts, okay prims and craptacular texturing, but these are sort of reversed: fantastic texturing, nice prim work, and pretty limited scripts. The pets don’t do anything except sit there and be petted, know their name, and whisper what you tell them to say. Which also means they don’t pee, poop, run away, terrorise the neighbours, get lost, follow you around or bark constantly.

These are all pluses in my book. I spend enough time chasing my real life dog, thank you very much. Besides, I’m pretty certain Paris Hilton doesn’t pick up her own dog’s poop, and I’m quite happy to avoid that particular doggy duty in my Second Life.

(Read More | Where to Buy)