Styling your Secondlife with Firehorse

This week I styled a male av for L$500 from www.SLexchange.com.
Now the process of signing up is basically similar to last weeks signing up at www.onrez.com, go to the website, fill in the details, go to the email address you registered with to get your activation code, find a terminal in world (easier because the site has a massive list of terminals for you to tp to), activate your account and pay the terminal – now the money you deposited is available for use on the SLexchange site.
Personally I didn’t find SLexchange particularly easy to use, the search doesn’t seem very refined, and the site feel didn’t suit me. In the past I have had problems with SLexchange – or to be accurate, the people who sell on there – because of the ability to sell second hand goods I have seen freebies being sold for quite large amounts of money and I have, in the past been ripped off – the item I’ve bought being nothing like the description. To be fair this can happen even in world or on any other out of world shopping site and there are thousands of users who use SLexchange who have never had a problem. My other small niggle is that for some reason SLexchange doesn’t allow you to gift freebies. Right – on to the styling.

The first purchase was a Redford skin from Sane Krasins for L$40. Now this was a most pleasant surprise – this is actually a good skin, it has good facial detail and on the whole good body detail – the back of the skin looks a little odd and the hands lace any refinement. But having said that my guinea pig commented that this skin was at least as good if not better than the skin he regularly wears.
The next thing was the JPC Animation Overrider for men, sold by Jhary Priestly for L$49. If I were kind I’d say nothing – after all – you can’t have high expectations of an L$49 AO – but I am not kind and seeing how many wonderful cheap (and free) AO’s are available for women I had hoped that this would at least be an improvement on the duck walk. It wasn’t – not unless you want to look like a Thunder Birds puppet. It was so bad that my guinea pig was reluctant to put it on even to show me – he’d tried it at home and caused an outbreak of rather unkind laughter.
The next item was hair – and searching for cheap mens hair on SLexchange made my eyes bleed – I was a dozen pages in before I got past the various free demos – but for you dear reader, I persisted. As a fashion addict I know how much bad hair there is out there, as a mens stylist I know how rare good mens hair can seem so imagine my delight when low expectations were more then surpassed. I bought Cabelo Renegade from Lasher Oh for L$39. This is a lovely hair, well textured, well coloured and with a refreshing, young, devil-may-care feel. A bargain indeed – I have seen much, much worse mens hair for a lot more money – my only caveat is that it may need resizing to fit you properly – if this hair came in a choice of sized it would be perfect.
On to the clothes, and if clothes maketh the man, then we might be struggling but – hey – I love a challenge.
My first purchase was “man belted pants in brown” For L$100 from Patoula Yao.
They have some nice details, they aren’t outstanding but they are reasonable and for everyday wear they fit the bill.
Next was the Empire Dark Collar Shirt from Arron Dreadlow for L$30. This shirt is a bit of a must have for the price. The only flaw is it is too short if it isn’t changed so you walk around with a bare belly button – not wonderful.
My next purchase was a pair of Urban Shoes from Slworld Boa for L$10 – these are unlaced. Very well made, very well textured and a real bargain if the style suits you (the mother in me wanted to shout at my poor guinea pig to do his laces up and put his shoes on properly – I am just not hip and trendy!).
The next purchase was the *Karizma* Black Tuxedo, by Karmen Harris for L$125. This was a disappointment. The front of the jacket is beautifully detailed, but the back has an unfinished look and the trousers have no detail.
To go with the tuxedo I bought a pair of **MQ sculpted Men shoe black by Mira Questi for L$51. These were a reasonable attempt, sculpted shoes aren’t easy to make and although a brave attempt I couldn’t recommend these.
Next I ventured into swimwear. I bought a pair of FD Swim Trunks from Frisco Laguna for L$30. These were great – a good design that most men would be more than happy to wear on the beach – an unqualified success.
To finish the look I opted for a pair of sunglasses with a black frame from Zoltan Beck for L$10. These are well made and my only gripe is the lens are clear but never the less quite fetching, if a little bookish.
To conclude, this experiment was not a total success and I couldn’t, in good faith recommend anyone tries this for themselves. If you know what you want, or want to get ideas to shop for in world then SLexchange is a great tool, and I dare say we would have been more successful if we’d been doing the same experiment for a female avatar, but good menswear is hard to find at the best of times, and SLexchange (or any off world shopping site) probably isn’t the best place to try to get your look together.
Much thanks to Mr Neuron Bandit, my guinea pig for this article who was a good sport and didn’t object to anything I made him wear (except the AO).

Styling your Secondlife with Firehorse

This week we are going to explore something a little different. We are going to make a female avatar, with skin, AO and wardrobe, for L$500. But to make life a little more interesting we are going to get everything we need from www.onrez.com – just to see if it can be done.
First you will need to register, so go to the site and follow the sign up instructions, then hop inworld, go to onrez island and touch one of their boards so it knows who you are, here you will be give an onrez wallet which you put your lindens into – those lindens are now only available to you for use on the onrez site.
Now shopping this way has obvious advantages, not least of which being some designers sell of special items and clearance items either very cheaply or free. You can also get things which aren’t available inworld.
BUT – and here are the downsides, it can be very hard to tell exactly what you are buying, not every designer bothers putting a picture up and as we all know, with the aid of photoshop, the camera can lie.
First I started with the skin, it was tempting to go for the pixels spa skins that are on special offer – L$50 for a two option skin pack with a beautifully detailed face and skin tone, has got to be good, even if the body detail is a little lacking, but I felt this would be almost cheating, I know what I’d be getting, I have some pixel spa skins – so – I reluctantly passed those by and kept browsing. In the end I went for a Frick retro skin – a bargain for only L$10!
Next for the AO, this was slightly more difficult, because lets face it, a new walk is great but we spend a lot of time standing around and it’s nice to have a ladylike standing pose. The AO choices for L$100 or less was somewhat limited and I decided that really, a submissive AO isn’t for me, no matter how cheap it is so I opted for a *SHJL* AO for L$100.
Next hair..now hair is not something I would usually risk buying without demoing first, at least not without knowing the designer, and it has to be said on onrez there is a collection of ETD hair for under L$100 which are lovely and reliable, but this is an exercise in risk taking so, I jumped in blind and bought a fancy bun in blood red from Mae Best, it was L$10 so not a huge risk.
Now the body is sorted, and yes, I didn’t buy a shape, because my own shape is based on a readily available freebie that has had a certain amount of tweaking, yes I had a friend to help with that (great fun – standing naked with her shouting “Up a bit, no too far, down a bit”) but if I can do it anyone can.
Time for the fun stuff, I decided that a lady should have one casual out fit and one formal and of course SHOES! Have I mentioned I am a bit of a shoe addict??
No shortage of choice, in fact choice is a bit overwhelming but in the end I opted for an evening gown called 39 Goddess by Lovely Ackman for L$20 and GsBB system dress February by Gumi Yao (this series of outfits is designed to be mixed with each other) for L$75.
Shoe wise I played relatively safe – for most of this article I’ve tried to go for lesser known names but after over 100 pages of shoes which looked to be of very varying quality I opted for the simply sexy heels by Simone! L$150 with and without walk.
Now for the results, the Frick skin is excellent, one heavy-ish make up (unfortunately for me this was the only option with freckles) and one more elegant make up – body detail is acceptable – but that depends on how important it is to you – if you want to look stunning naked this may not be the skin for you but it is perfectly acceptable for a low cut dress and the skin has an almost china doll like translucence . Added bonus with the skin, which I didn’t realise when I bought it, it comes with a shape – so bouquets all around for the Frick skin.
The hair was slightly disappointing but for the price it is more than acceptable and the basic design is good.
The AO is fine , I have paid a lot more money for worse AO’s and this has some nice poses.
The formal evening dress has lovely textures (and gained me compliments when I wore it out and about). It also comes with earrings and armbands – the only thing I didn’t like was the scarf which looked big and bulky on the neck.
The GsBB dress is lovely – not only is it already a new favourite for me but I will be investing in the others in the series, it’s well made and sits well on the body.
The shoes are, of course, lovely, very classy and surprisingly high quality for the price.
So for a total spend of L$365 you can be all set to venture into SL – and lets face it a good week collecting from the money trees for the newbies or a good week camping or earning tips for the rest of us and you are all set . With the added advantage you can do it all without having to tp across the grid, worrying about being Ruthed or losing landmarks.

Style your Secondife with Firehorse

Todays article is late – for which I apologise – blame a certain SL wedding and a certain RL child deleting all my word documents by accident…Children – aren’t they just darling?
Anyway – today will be brief – mens freebies are harder to find than ladies – a lot of mens stores do special one off free gifts for men – join a good freebie group for more updates.
As mentioned last week Free Dove have mens stuff as well as womens items, also you should check out Sarah Nerd’s freebie paradise has some good items for all sorts of avs – more of this place next week.
IZUMIYA ,at MoonCat Ringo has freebies upstairs for men and women - good quality cheap stuff down stairs
Calla has free hair for newbies and a "jack" and "Jill"boxes which are complete avs for new people.
Also pick up a freebie box for male and female at the G spot cafe
and also the huge freebie boxees for men at SL- newspapers head office – the style your sl box there is all mens stuff and has a lot of full perm shapes as well as a choice of skins. I put it together myself – a lot of the items in this box are sold but as I got ‘em for free I’m willing to forgo profit for the joy of seeing SL a prettier place one male av at a time.
Also pick up a freebie box for male and female at the G spot café.
Freebie street is well worth a visit, not only are there bags of clothing for both male and female but lots of fun gadgets and toys (and boys love their toys – right?)
Hair is probably one of the hardest things for male avs to find – but as well as calla, ETD has very good quality almost free (ONE LINDEN guys – give me a break!).
Right – that’s it for now – more info in the note card at the newspaper head office.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ian%20Bernard/90/169/37

Styling your Second Life with Firehorse

Styling an avatar for free is easy – and something we have probably all done at one time or another.
Probably we all had a trawl around freebie warehouse and other such giant outlets when we were newbies, and, chances are we ended up with some sad fashion disasters.
Fellow residents, it does not have to be that way!
With a little help, a little inside knowledge and membership of just one group (just one of your oh so valuable group slots), you can save a fortune, try new things and have a huge amount of fun.
Today I am focusing on female avatars – but a lot of the knowledge is transferable to other genders/styles of av.
By no means is this a complete guide but it’s intended to be a good starting point, so if you are new or if you just need an outfit for a fancy dress party join me.
Ladies, your first stop in world should be to Pixel Dolls, find their subscribe-o-matic join, then touch again for history – there is a VIP group gift, crammed full of lovely lovely things, boots, outfits and an absolutely divine, high quality skin in many shades.
Your next move should be to find somewhere quiet and decide which group for freebie hunters you are going to join – personally I love Creamy Cooljokes Freestyle group – as with any freebie group you will get a LOT of notices most days – don’t worry though soon you will be as addicted as I am to just going to look…I don’t care what anyone says – you can NOT have too many clothes.
Once you have done that you need to get yourself down to Free Dove – much respect to the owners – what they have done is just amazing, here you will find freebies gathered from some of the top designers in second life, all under one roof – YES you will have to fight the lag, yes, if you go at one of the peak rush hours you will probably crash and/or freeze but it IS worth it. Here you can find everything from jeans and lovely girly sneakers to elegant Victorian dresses and delicate stiletto shoes. Plenty of jewelry, sexy underwear, skins and a host of shapes too – if you don’t follow any other advice from this article, even if you haven’t picked up a freebie since you were more than a week old, get down to Free Dove and be amazed. Free Dove also have their own group too – if I had more room I’d join (PLEASE LL, more groups, PLEASE).
As you have just crashed from ALL the loveliness you have found at Free Dove open up a web browser or two.
The best way to get a full picture is to jump on the interweb.
First of all if you aren’t already registered at http://www.onrez.com/ then you should be – here you can send yourself (and others) freebies, you can search by price, and there are some great bargains to be had – after all – you can’t get much cheaper than free.
Your next stop should be http://fabfree.wordpress.com/freebie-break-down/ a fantastic list of outlets which carry free stuff, many of whom are my favourite stores (if you haven’t been to http://slfreestyle.blogspot.com/ where Creamy and friends will not only be alerting you to todays best (and usually transient) freebies there are pictures too!
This article was supposed to be a short one – but that isn’t possible – here I have just managed to scratch the surface of what you can get. So if you have something you desperately need but can’t afford to pay for, or can’t find, drop me a notecard, if I can help I will – but seriously – if you follow the advice in this article you will be turned from Cinderella to a princess in just a few tps.

Do You love the Skin You're in?

I found myself looking around at all the avs around me about two weeks ago, thinking just how beautiful they all looked and how plain I did. Wasn't sl created to make us feel better about ourselves? To let us be more than what we could in rl?
So I started to look for makeup, still too new to know that you need a full skin in most cases. I did find one look that was just perfect, dark smoky eyes and pale lipstick. It looked fabulous on the model. Perfect I thought and was off.
A few hours later while in a meeting with my editor, she asked if I needed some help. I looked well, see-through. Back to the drawing board. Finding a skin that I liked all of was a time consuming job. I ended up spending a full week shopping and trying on demos from every sl store that carried skins. When considering a skin, you must take into account: 1) How fitting is it for day to day -especially if you have a job in sl. 2) Does it flatter your favourite shape that you wear all the time? 3)Will it go with most hair styles in sl? and 4) How does it look in all the lighting settings? The last one was my biggest mistake. I had tried it on in "noon" mode and hadn't thought about how it would look in "midnight" or sunrise/sunset mode.
My choice was a goth skin that was meant to make you look like a zombie. In the end, not what I was going for. Also, I have to admit that when I tried on the demo, I did so bald and the skin just didn't seem to work with any of the hairdos.
What I did find in the end, was a skin that was not really a "normal skin" and not really a goth skin. Most cases the goth skins were too over the top in makeup for my style, and the normal skins were too ordinary for my style. The so called "light" skins still had a tan, and all the "pale" skins had crazy make up.
When I did find one, it was at Digital Dragon Designs.

Reporter Dashwood Dayafter

Who is that gorgeous av?

The changing face of SL-newspapers CEO JamesT Juno
The early face of JamesT, yes we have all been there the bad newbie hair the sunglasses etc.......

This is the av that most people will recognise instantly, a few minor changes over the months, occasional hair changes different sunglasses but very upright and stern this was the JamesT most of us would think of if we heard his name.
Introducing the NEW JamesT Juno

A makeover was well overdue with his 1 year SL birthday looming.

First on the list a new skin, with a recommendation from Carter, we headed to Dante - by naughty designs and had fun trying on different looks. Skin shopping is time consuming every skin must be tried and tested but its not something to be rushed, at any time, your skin is the most important purchase you will ever make ( I have kept the same one almost since the beginning, it was the first skin I bought and with the exception of a few makeup changes I am still happy with it almost a year later, also bought from naughty designs) (picture by Dixie Barbosa)

The skin comes with a few different beard and moustache/ stubble options plus hair styles.

James was quite happy to stay with the hair rather than search for one that probably would not match as well.

A few new suits from Styles of Edo completed his new look.

So if you see me out and about with this gorgeous looking av - yes I have found a new man, but not a new love its still JamesT Juno!

(pictured here at IntLibber Brautigans wedding)