Christmas Fun in Second Life December 21, 2013

In this post: I show my favorite holiday sims in the virtual world of Second Life.

Hello dear ones! I hope you are well. I know my December posts have been scattered. We will get back to normal in January, Lord willing. Meanwhile, I am still chugging along. I’ve had time to check out some neat holiday sims. I’ll start with the top:

• A Christmas Carol sim @ Visit Brigadoon Bay (70, 192, 21) This place is neat because you can listen to a radio drama of A Christmas Carol while exploring places from the book. You can actually go to Scrooge’s house.  The door knocker is interactive too and the Christmas ghosts!
• North Pole Sleigh Ride Adventure @ Visit Streeter (20, 5, 23) Top right pic of inside the chapel and middle pic on right of the sleigh ride. The title says it all. You hop in a sleigh and explore the Christmas village with all it’s neat scenery. I really liked the chapel.
• Christmas Town sim @ Visit Elizabeth Town (99, 45, 70) This was my favorite place because of the big ice castle. You ice skate through and travel back in time to different Christmas movies (It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, and National Lampoon’s Christmas). There are pics second row from the bottom too. There are a couple family friendly stores and I got a pic of a Christmas table. Not all the stores are safe though so take note. Another fun thing is the interactive Christmas parade. You get a free band uniform with instruments. I’m marching with my trumpet.
• More links below the pic…

• London City Christmas @ Visit London City (102, 113, 23) I can’t say London city is family friendly because I haven’t been there enough. I had a brief visit because of the amount of traffic and lag. The picture of the snowman and me holding hot chocolate is from there.  It is a pretty place to stroll around. Maybe I will check it out again on a quieter day.
• Yuki No Yume (A dream of snow) @ Visit Sand Bar Island (117, 155, 27) The beautiful snowy pic on the bottom right. This is a Japanese winter wonderland that’s perfect for photography.
• Winter Scenes @ Visit Dizza (204, 222, 22) The bottom left pic of me making a snowman. Winter Scenes is a quiet and lovely place to explore. I took more pictures but you can probably tell that I’ve been saving on space.  Anywho, there is a cozy cabin where you can read by the fire and stargaze through a telescope.

Lastly, I encourage you to check out the virtual ballet “The Nut”. It’s based on The Nutcracker and is a joy to see, granted you’ve got a good graphics card. It’s playing live on Wednesdays and Sundays. There’s more info at the link below. Also I’ll include a link to my blog coverage from last year.

https://secondlife.com/my/community/events/event.php?id=5779916&lang=en-US

Last year’s Virtual winter post:

https://amberdover.wordpress.com/2012/12/14/virtual-friday-christmas-ballets-and-such/

Well, that’s it for now. I have a bunch of posts to get to you and I’m sure I will before the new year.

God bless and remember the High King lives! ~Amber Dover

PS: If you can’t see the play in Second Life then go to Youtube and search “The Nut Ballet Pixelle”.

Virtual Friday: Autumn in Second Life October 26, 2012

Remember: You can click on the links to visit these virtual places! 🙂

Hello friends and welcome to Virtual Friday! Today I take you to the virtual world of Second Life. I’ve been searching for fun family friendly things to do this fall in SL. Autumn is tricky because most of the virtual world is focused on Halloween. Back in rl (real life) we don’t  celebrate Halloween. I enjoy fall festivals and dressing up but I don’t like spooky things and I don’t celebrate death.

I also believe that ghosts a.k.a familiar spirits are demons. Demons like to mimic humans. It’s a great deception Satan uses to make people think their loved ones wander the earth. Thankfully there are only two choices when someone dies…Heaven or Hell. I know which one I choose. So don’t expect me to haunt your neck of the woods. Sorry but I won’t be here ;).

Anywho, I have not been on SecondLife in weeks. I was very surprised to go out my door and find my neighbors houses all spooked. My blue house is on the right (completely unscary) and you can see the pumpkins and ghosts on my neighbors’ houses.
What?!

With a little bit of investigating, I figured it out. My neighborhood is having a Halloween contest.

Well, what am I to do? Decorate of course……..for Fall. I know I won’t win the contest but still it’s nice to have pumpkins everywhere. I went on a fall leaf hunt through SL and won a few freebies.  Still, most of my decor I had to buy. Voila!

This great kiddie sim has a fall festival. Get over there before it ends and scrounge up some great deals! I found my lovely fall decor at these vendors. Remember you can click on the pics to make them bigger.

Visit EverLasting Family (85, 73, 24)

For all of you adult avatars, check out the french shopping district, Rue D’Antibes. Most of the shops look classy and pretty modest. The streets have a nice atmosphere.

Visit Rue DAntibes (90, 85, 28)

Rawnie Lane has this lovely Fall art gallery. You can purchase her pics to decorate your own virtual home.

Visit Mellor (241, 80, 22)

Upstairs her gallery features artwork by Babydoll.

Lastly, I took some great pictures at Wondering Dew. Warning: this place is a bit creepy but thankfully it’s not terrifying.

Visit Wondering Dew (167, 60, 22)

I stuck around to listen to the radio theater. It’s supposed to be scary but it’s not. Old horror movies and radio shows don’t bother me because they are way too dramatic to bring fear. It’s all the gory horror movies these days that bother me and ones that are based on real things like demonic possession. That’s the kind of stuff I don’t want in my over-imaginative head!

When I acted with Family Theatre, I did a few “scary” plays but really they had more comedy than anything.

Arsenic & Old Lace- I played the fiance of a man whose elderly aunts were poisoning old bachelors to “help” them out of their miserable lonely lives. Then they buried the men in the basement and had funeral services. The creepy thing was that they thought they were good Christian women. It became funny when the nephew, Mortimer, found out and tried to thwart their plans. Throw in a brother who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt and another brother that’s an ex-con and it gets really crazy! The worst part for me was nearly being strangled.

I’m bottom left and second to top right.

Ten Little Indians a.k.a And Then There Were None– This play based on Agatha Christie’s book is not nearly as creepy as her book. It actually has a happy ending so to speak. I played the “sexy” secretary, Vera Claythorne, which in Family Theatre mean’t I had to wear very uncomfortable high heels. I actually tripped and skipped backwards over a couch in these high heels while stealing a “gun” from my character’s love interest.

I’m in the middle, the one with the painful heels of death.

Ten Little Indians is about a group of not so innocents that are invited to a mysterious island. Trapped on the island they are picked off one by one. Since they are the only ones on the island the murderer has to be one of them. It sounds like Clue doesn’t it? What makes it super creepy is that the murders are based upon the poem “Ten Little Indians” and every time someone dies an Indian figurine goes missing. I did a lot of screaming in this play. I also got slapped….not fun.

By golly, I think she’s dead. Now repeat this 8 more times.

Oh, and I almost got hanged by the “real” murderer.

We did this play the weekend of Halloween a couple of years ago. It truly was a strange play. We had several actors drop out…some by illness and some for other reasons. Our director was mugged the day of dress rehearsal. She was actually playing a part in the play because an actress was too ill to play it. Then she was mugged and hurt in the mugging. Thankfully she’s fine. Another actor’s wife had to step into the part last minute.

It was crazy. Some of us were thinking the play really was cursed with all the accidents etc. It was an emotional play for me because I had to shoot a fake gun. The noise from the gun was really loud and traumatizing. So they had to use different bullets to muffle the sound.

I’m really nice in real life 😉

I had to induce a panic attack to get into character for my scene with the murderer. Thankfully I knew the “murderer” very well and he’s really a sweet old man in real life. Also, try eating tuna fish on stage and trying to say your lines…not pretty.

He really is a sweet guy I promise 🙂

Anywho, I took this little tangent to say……..well nothing really. It was just nice to reminisce. Have a safe holiday however you spend it. Please be careful and put your animals indoors on Halloween (especially if you have a black cat..like us) because people do horrible things at this time. If you trick or treat I hope you know your neighbors well. There are usually great church Fall festivals as a safe alternative too. God bless & remember the High King lives! ~Amber Dover

Virtual Friday: Trendy Shops in SecondLife August 17, 2012

Hello friends :). I’m taking a break from visiting real world replicas in Secondlife. I’m sure I’ll revisit that but before I take you in a new direction I’d like to show you some great shops. Way back when, I shared that my avatar was once an adult but I changed her to a little girl. My main reason was modesty. It is hard to dress an adult avatar modestly.

Also I was tired of guys trying to talk to me. All of the child avatars are actually adults in real life. SecondLife doesn’t allow kids to come on. Still there is a big rule on how child avatars are treated and how they are portrayed. So it is a much safer virtual world for the child-like avatar. Am I living my second child hood? Maybe…..I already do that in the real world pretty well. Also I don’t have a daughter to dress up so instead I dress up my avatar. Even if I did have a daughter I still think I would keep my avatar because I enjoy exploring the virtual world and I love to shop.

Shopping in SecondLife is very different than real life. First off 1000 lindens is worth $4USD. Lindens are the money used in SecondLife. Secondlife has it’s own real economy. People have real virtual jobs. I’ve never had a virtual job but I spend very little on my virtual hobby. My hubby doesn’t mind. Virtual shopping satisfies my shopping urge and keeps me from spending out in the real world. My avatar dresses better than me for sure. I  couldn’t afford those clothes in the real world and it’s much more time consuming in real life lol.  Also I love taking beautiful pictures. It’s so easy to take gorgeous pictures in Secondlife. There are some really creative & beautiful sims out there. I like to have the perfect outfit for my pics.

Moving on….so today I’m going to share some of my favorite shops. You can shop in-world or you can shop on the website (SecondLife marketplace). I have several clothes to model so make sure you can see pics. Also there are a few sneak peak pics of places we will be visiting in a couple of weeks ;). The links to visit these shops will be under their names. Of course you have to have a SecondLife account to go to these places.

Inner Peace

Visit Sassafras (73, 112, 24)

I was wearing the shirt wrong in the above pic. Below is the way the outfit is supposed to look. By the way, this is now my favorite store. I just wish I could afford everything in it lol.

Note: I got the doll from Larnia. We will see that shop shortly. Here is another great outfit from Inner Peace.

Baby Pie

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/83722

I like to go to the marketplace for this store. I’ve visited it only a couple of time inworld.

I have several outfits from Baby Pie. They are very cute. Most of these outfits are only 50L (remember these are Lindens not dollars!). Their newer items will be 150L like most stores but just wait until the next season and they will be marked down. I just found out that the clothes I bought in the summer are already 5L to 25L! I really should’ve waited to buy. What a reduction!

BabyPie Iris outfit

BabyPie Valentine’s Outfit

BabyPie Untangled Outfit ~ you may remember this one. I believe I wore it when I visited the storybook land of “Where the Wild Things Are”.  I’m supposed to be Rapunzel from “Tangled”.

Baby Dolls Boutique~ this store if very similar to BabyPie . I only have one outfit from them. I really liked the inworld store. It had a very girly atmosphere. Everything sparkled :).

Visit Starlight Starbright (128, 109, 22)

Here is my one outfit: Alice in Wonderland. I do plan on visiting this store again.

Larnia~ I LOVE this place. They have some of the best priced and gorgeous princess gowns. I will be wearing some of their dresses in my upcoming adventures. Also I found my “Bebe” dolly right next to their store.

Visit Aquamarine Island (146, 179, 22)

Camp Cutie fall/winter outfit~ sorry the pic is so dark

Red Princess Dress ~ You will see more of this beauty later. It was perfect for pictures!

Green Evening Gown~ Guess where I am 😉

Vicarious Vitae ~ Had a lot of cheap but cute clothes.

Visit Somersley Shore (152, 156, 30)

I found a lovely Dorothy Costume here. Hmmmm…that makes me wonder if there’s an Oz replica in SL. I’ll have to look into that…

I rarely buy jewelry in SL but I do have a few pieces. I bought them at the marketplace online at two stores. My favorite is Undefined Lilies and I have visited their store inworld as well. The other was DooDads. I only like their jewelry.

Undefined Lilies – this place is so classy.

Visit Imogen (128, 146, 30)

My lovely nesting doll necklace called “Miss Matron’s Secret”

DooDads Jewelry

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/91934

Note: When shopping in the marketplace it is always cheaper to pay with Lindens than with paypal or credit card. You can  exchange Lindens for cash a lot cheaper inworld than in the marketplace.

Ice Cream Sundae Jewelry~ these are very child like.

Camera Necklace ~ great for me since I’m always a tourist 🙂 The outfit is from Inner Peace.

Darling Bear Earrings

Butterfly Jewelry

Aura’s ~ I didn’t get to shop here because I didn’t want to spend so much. But they had some really great clothes. I’ll have to save up 🙂 They had a good bit of costumes and ball gowns.

Visit Saone (176, 223, 54)

Slumberland~ has some nifty furniture. I’ve yet to buy anything but I got a great Hello Kitty table as a freebie. It’s pictured at the beginning of my post. I’m having tea with dolly at it lol.

Visit Slumber Land (132, 119, 49)

Lastly, another hint of things to come ;). Oh, and the dress came from Inner Peace.

Well, I’m excited about all the nifty places we will be exploring in the weeks to come.

God bless & remember the High King lives! ~Amber Dover

PS: If you are a fellow child avatar in SecondLife and you’d like to share your favorite shops…please leave them in the comments. Thanks for sharing! 🙂