Monday, August 10, 2009

Beachin' It Up

I always thought I'd like to have a home on the beach at Bluebonnet for myself. In fact, one of the things I told Noel when we were discussing what I wanted my house to look like is that I wanted it to not just be a skybox, but also able to use it on the ground. But I like living in the sky. It's private and I feel safe up there. Plus, my home is just beautiful. It is my escape.

But sometimes I do tend to get lonely up there. And as I watched the people who rent on my island setting up their beach houses and running into each other [sometimes literally], I started to think more about setting up something small for me to hang out in on the beach. I have a treehouse and a mushroom house up on what I think of as Fantasy Hill. It's where I have my glowy grass and my Happy Mood bunnies. [The bunnies never did come back up into the sky with me. They said they preferred it down on the hill. It's a pretty place, so I can't say that I blame them.]

So a few days ago I started hunting down beach houses. I must have looked at 80,000. I toyed around with the idea of just building my own, but then that led to wanting to hunt down textures. Finally I just decided to pull out one of the beach cottages that Emerald & Sehra used to live in and setting it down. After all, I knew I liked it, I'd already modded it, and it matched the cute open beach cabin that Sophia had set down for me some time ago. The beach cottage is originally from Tres Blah, but as I said, I'd modded it before the girls moved in so long ago because the original is reeeeally small. After a quick glance at Xstreet for some trees, I think it looks perfect on the corner of the island.

Beach house



Naturally I'll want to do more landscaping, and I need to figure out how to decorate the inside, but I'm happy. I'll probably do what I always meant to do and fix the windows so they tint as well. I modded the house a bit yet again to make 2 more windows on the other side of the house so I have a view to the ocean, and I found a soft pink wall texture to do the inside with.

I have a couple of things inside the house, a table and a big oversized chair, but I am going through all my furniture to see what I really want in there. And if you see the hot pink in the window there, my new renter & friend Marnix left me some pretty tulips!

Speaking of gifts, last night a new friend of mine gave me a beta copy of a pool he's been working on. At his store, the pool was big, it totally fit up there. However, when I rezzed it out...


Huge pool


Yeah, it was bigger than my house. LOL! Not that I need a pool when I have the ocean, but...you never know.

Anyway, for the rest of the week, except for freebies and gifts, I'm on shopping hiatus. The main reason is because I've been shopping like crazy the past couple of weeks and now I have no idea what I have. LOL It's terribly sad. But right before I went on shopping hiatus, I ran to Kookie to get the limited time $50L Yuki heels. And let me go on a little fashion bitch here for a sec. Well, first, check out the invisiprims on these shoes.

Too much invisiprim


I'm standing like, a foot off the ground and they're just...covered in it. The shoe itself, although rather fetishy [c'mon, you'd never be able to walk on them!], is lovely. However, they follow what's becoming a growing trend in footwear. The shoe is attaching to the lower leg and the invisiprim is attaching to the foot. You know what happens then? You can't wear pants with PRIM CUFFS.

I have few fashion absolutes. I like prim toes but I'm not against plain avatar feet. I'll wear a system skirt because I'm slender enough to do it without needing a skirt shape very often. But I will not wear pants without prim cuffs. And these new shoes make it impossible!

So what's the deal? Why can't the invisiprim be attached TO the shoe? There's got to be a real reason, right? Please someone explain to me.

Back to landscaping and decorating. :)

8 comments:

Gahum Riptide said...

I don't get that either, about the invisiprims. All of the guy shoes I've ever seen that have them have the prim attached to the shoe. It's really not that hard.

Anonymous said...

I soo agree on the shoes! Exactly what I almost hate about them. But I hate myself more, because I liked the look of them so much, that I did not try the demo before I bought the fat-pack. *sighs*

Casandra Shilova said...

I hate to admit it, but it never even occurred to me that an invisiprim is why I am standing on air part of the time. big unhappy face :(

Heather said...

What I hate to admit is that I don't know what the invisiprim is for. Can someone shed some light?

Renee Harvy (Duh!) said...

Hey Alicia... big fan of your blog, and I can actually answer your question.

1) Foot shapers don't change the shape of an avatar foot very much. LL doesn't allow for much modification that way. Most of the "fitting" of a foot to an extreme shoe shape is done by hiding some or all of it with an invisible prim.
2) The poses in common AOs move your avatar feet around A LOT. There's a lot of tapping and swinging of feet through a wide range of motion. Don't even get me started on what dancing does.
3) By attaching the shoe to the bottom of your leg, instead of your foot, the shoe holds fairly still, regardless of the motion your ao/pose or dance is causing your avatar foot to make. Legs move a lot less than feet most the time. Sticking an oversized invisiprim on your foot means that you can't see that your foot is way outside that shoe at any given time.
It's an imperfect solution, and one I don't like either, but for some shoe shapes, it's the only thing that works at the moment.

Renee Harvy (Duh!) said...

Oh, and, when your shoe covers the ankle (like those adorable ones in your picture), you have another problem. The ankle "breaks" or bends very unnaturally on avatar feet, and it's almost impossible to keep a one piece shoe on both your foot and your ankle at the same time. This is why boots come in two pieces. To make a tall one piece shoe, you have to cover that "break" with an invisiprim, and attach the shoe to the leg, so you don't get shoes that come completely off your ankle and lower leg.

Ok, so that was really more confusing than I hoped it would be. :P Maybe it helped a little.
lol

Heather said...

Thanks Renee! Good to know! :)

Nykti said...

I'm a newbie to SL and its bugging me the amount of crazy image-shifting that is happening when I get with some shoes. :( Sometimes I think I should just go barefoot everywhere! (Of course, that is a no-no when you want to check out the latest clubs :P)