What a One Does When She's Out of Sorts
My One Who Thinks She Knows was out of sorts again. This happens most days, but My One was REALLY OUT OF SORTS.
She said: "Iyoba I want to get in trouble and have a fight." Of course, she wanted to fight with someone worth fighting. In other words, we
needed to find an idiot who really deserved it. Our first idea was to stage a home invasion and try to outwit a stupid security orb. We picked out a nice
Arab sim where we did not know any of the people. Arabs often make beautiful builds and we'd hope to find someone's private residence and take pictures of
me on the furniture. We went to Ksa Al5oBar. Ksa is "island" in Arabic.
We walked around. We met some avatarim, and they welcomed us and were nice to us. Arabs are hospitable even on private property. I went swimming and then I found
this nice haybail on which to lie.
We had to figure another way to have
a fight. Our next victims were the prejudiced idiots who run the Fermi Sandbox. They don't allow child avatarim. It's their sandbox, but it's prejudiced, and people who don't like
child avatarim don't like short adult avatarim either. Height prejudice is ugly. Our plan was to go the sandbox, make a new dress, get threatened, and give
the idiot who threatened us a piece of our minds. Actually, the One would be doing all the arguing. I'd be making myself vulnerable on a posing
stool...and, nothing happened. I got a new dress as you can see in the picture.
Of course My One Who Thinks She Knows was NOT going to give up.
She knew where she could find a whole nest of small minded idiots. We both remembered an
encounter with an idiot bouncer at
Phat's Jazz Club. We hadn't been back since, but
my new dress just might NOT meet some small minded fashonista's idea of formal. Here I am sitting on a couch at Phat's after a half hour of
dancing to rhythm and blues. I liked the music a lot, and the bouncer was nothing but polite and friendly.
We may even go back to Phat's again, but meanwhile
there was nothing for my poor One to do but go back to Stinky Stinky
and tend to our turtles. Here is Yael, our dark brown shelled scarlet bodied female, heading for some cheese, which is going to be a tastey snack.
Yes, my One has been making fake pictures with the GIMP again.
This is what our turtles really look like. This is Billie who has a gold body, a purple carapace, and a burgundy plastron.
She has eggs in her own time, but she has beautiful eggs. She is one of our oldest turtles, and yes she has a front and a back end.
And this is an egg parented by Billie and Tecumseh. It is unusual because eggs from this pair usually don't turn out this pretty shade of
light green. My One believes all eggs are precious, and she says this egg would breed quite well if we could find unrelated partners for it and had enough room.
While I took care of the eggs of course, My One started chatting with another One in one of her librarian groups. They started talking about
censorship, and switched to collection development. Soon the other One was complaining about something called a Board of Trustees. I am very emotional and if I did not have
turtle eggs to gather, I would have craked up with laughter. My One had found another One as out of sorts as she was. The two Ones comiserated, and
my One felt better...for a short while.
My One had another idea how to have a fight with someone or something that deserved it. We'd go to a shooting sim and
get in a fire fight. People in shooting facilities want to shoot and get shot so it's OK to fire at them. There are also targets if
we could not find any other avatarim and Ones to shoot. My One and I headed off to Velocity Weapons and
found ourselves on Octavia instead. This was a biker sim. We had a bike, but I could not ride it with a dress on.
We gave up on it and went looking for a place where residents were gathered. Hopefully this would be private property and we'd do battle with the security orb or ban lines.
If the security orb threw us out, we'd come back near by, fly up in the sky, and I could sail down on my parachute. If there were ban lines, I'd just land on the top ones and bounce on them.
This is actually a lot of fun. I was even psyched and....the people were nice to us! We only had to leave due to lag.
Of course I did need a new bike. Iyoba said she'd help me modify our "safety bicycle" so that I could ride it in a skirt, and
she'd lower the bar to make it a female bike with a thicker frame and a new paint job. You can seee it in the image.
We made the bike in the TTU Libraries 3 Sandbox home of the
modesty police. Of course running through a sandbox nude is just plain dumb, so we didn't do that. My One was in the mood to work on my
bicycle rather than any dresses.
Of course I did get to ride my
bicycle out of the sandbox on into TTU Libraries 4. It was a wearable
bicycle, so no one could stop me. I even rode my new bicycle up and down stairs, which amused my One no end. She said she couldn't do that in "real life."
I had a great time.
Of course my One still owed me a new dress, so she made this Denim Like This Dress at the
Sapporo Sandbox. Here I am modeling the
short version with the animation, my One got for me at Waseda.
My one Who Thinks She Knows really does have a good heart, and she has it even when she is Out of Sorts. Of course she is Out of Sorts again.
She is Out of Sorts even though we went dancing this morning at a new club called Sky Club. Here I am on the couch again.
My One loves fancy, mesh furniture. She said she still wants to pick a fight with a deserving victim. That means I'm not sure where we are
going next. We have done some bushwhacking. She knows of some biker sims where I can ride my new bike, in a dress, like a real lady.
And I'm not scaird of bikers, zombies, or even Ones That Think They Know. I guess if my One is going to have a fight with someone who deserves it,
we'll have that fight sooner or later.
Iyoba Bat Oni (who thinks for herself some of th etime) and Eileen H. Kramer (One Who Thinks She Knows) -- June 30, 2013
The Beautiful and the Badly Done
Let's face it I got curious. I also felt I should be fair minded and give Davis College a second chance. The sim, which is part of the Info Island Archipelago, even though Info Island itself has been gone a few weeks and really gone for several months before that, has been deserted for the past couple of years, just rolling meadows and forests, no signs of buildings or activity, nothing given back. Still one never knows when someone could be repurposing a place.
This time I was determined to find something and an ABOUT LAND indicated a fair amount of building. It was just up in the sky, and not even at 1,000 meters. At about two hundred meters, Iyoba bounced her head on a lecture platform. Here she is sitting on the couch. The PowerPoint projector was either unused or locked.
There appeared to be construction in a corner of the island, so we headed there and then up into the sky, this time above the cloudline. This time we got lucky again...well sort of. There was some kind of small, space station.
Now if you've read this blog bafore, you'll know that back in April I wrote a very long expose on one of the worst space stations in Second Life. Well, I think someone on the Davis College sim has just beaten the good folks at Huffman Prairie Omega for the title.
Now while the Ayn Rand Space Station on Huffman Prairie is huge and impressive, raw, crazy making, and smelly, the space station on the Davis College sim is small, dark, claustrophobic and utterly useless. There was not even a place for Iyoba to sit down. I had to lighten the image for you to see the details. The real space station is darker than this. What educational purpose this place is beyond me, but
then again nearly all of Davis College is on ice.
Now you may think I'm just "out of sorts" as Iyoba, my favorite avie says, but it is more than possible to build a space station right. Here is a view of one of the hallways on the station at Educatica. Yes, it is huge. Yes, it is austere, but take a second look. This tunnel actually leads somewhere other than an empty room (Take my word for that one), and look behind Iyoba. The surface on the floor has carpet. Those staying in space will not go crazy from miserable conditions.
And in the space station and the ground, research facility, there are plants. Cat tails are some of the hardest plants to photograph in Second Life. I hope I did these beauties justice. The plants on Educatica are both temperate and tropical, though each type grows in its own area.
To reach the ground, research area, or to just take a walk in the sand, avatarim can drive their very own honey of a shuttle, that stays parked and waits for them for ten minutes. They probably can even crash it, but who would want to do that?
And here is the Educatica Space Station's Vermin Control Specialist. She keeps herself groomed with spit, polish, and a raspy tongue. Of course the top of the old time radio is warm, but then again, the space station has to be hospitable for all its residents.
But best of all, the Educatica Space Station is full of content. Each two room suite off the main landing point and the ground installation below is full of content. This pod covers making clothing in Second Life, showing how the Educatica T-Shirt was made. The only draw back to the whole Educatica project is that it is written in Czech, but there are good ideas in any language, and if a picture really does speak a thousand words, imagine what a great immersive space station tells you.
Eileen H. Kramer (One Who Thinks She Knows) with help from Iyoba BatOni (Favorite avatar) -- June 28, 2013
Going, Gone, and Never There
Iyoba often complains that I am "out of sorts" which is true, and she also complained about how
unproductive our bushwhacking was last week. She was right, our luck in finding educational sites worth of the
Explore SL Spread Sheet was abysmal, but sometimes
the worst searching can have the most interesting results. Since we had found rich, immersive landscapes in
both Greece and
Second Life Israel, when the Ottoman
Istambul appeared at Grid Survey, I said "why not." As you
can see the sim looked both promising and fun. You could climb the ramparts.
You can also tour the tunnels. They don't lead to blind ends and there's storage area and a genuine jail cell in them.
The only problem with Osmanli Imparatorlugu as far as we could
tell was the lack of note card givers and the huge mall celling curiously, unTurkish merchandise and charging astronomical rents.
Fortunately, Iyoba and I met an avie in the grassy field below the ramparts and he asked our business and I asked him if this was an educational sim. He said it was a "raid place." As you can see there is even a scoreboard for the raids. Well, that was three visits down the tubes.
Then I needed to do some research on the location of pictures I was uploading to Flickr. I was not sure whether I had taken them on Zion or Zion Isle. It turned out they were from Zion Isle, and since Iyoba had had a rough time with rides that got stuck and dumped her in midair, I suggested we return to the amusement park and see if the rides were ready for prime timee. If the rides were now in working order, I would happily give out the link to newbies. Second Life needs more amusement parks. It just does.
Unfortunately, the
amusement park has vanished and in its place this castle floats on a megaprim. Fortunately, it is a public accomodation of
sorts, and a rather elegant one.
The only
good thing about this place was that it did not have a security orb. Iyoba and I left on our own, and if you notice, we are not
giving this island a free link. I'm all for free expression, but let them do their own advertising!
By the time Iyoba and I began exploring the
the HealthLink New York Archipelago to look for more sites, I was ready for disappointment. We had a few good days on
Western New York and
HealthLink New York, and then
it was off to the North Country. I had promised Iyoba she could go skiing. The map showed snowy mountains.
But before we climbed mountains or rode chairlifts, we stopped by the Erie Canal. This is a view from the train.
As you can see the buildings are photo perfect and wonderfully realistic. As a former Central New Yorker, I can attest that
this entire Archipelago is one of the most soothingly beautiful places in Second Life.
It also has a great ecological integrity. There are no plane trees, palm trees, anthuria, or birds of paradise. The climate might
support cannas, but not those plants. Someone cares about making the out of doors look and feel real. The Archipelago is also pleasantly
interactive. You can ride trains or packet boats. You probably can swim.
Here is what
we found on the ski slopes. These were lovely grassy trails without too many trees. Here Iyoba is relaxing on the moss green ground.
We did a lot of hiking after our failed ski trip. Much of it was through plots of land for rent and we saw many more
empty stores than full ones.
This store is typical of the vast majority of properties on most of the HealthLink Archipelago sims. The entire Archipelago is twenty sims.
This supports the wonderful build, some great educational sites, and plenty of recreational opportunities for avie and One Who Thinks They Know alike, but
I've been around Second Life long enough to know that this is not a sustainable business model. When the grant money evaporates, if the rentals don't
return enough...you know the rest. It's a sad story. I'm only surprised it is repeating itself so vividly in 2013 on an Archipelago with so much to offer.
You can and should visit the HealthLink Archipelago sims before they vanish. It is alas, only a matter of time.
Eileen H. Kramer (One Who Thinks She Knows) with help from Iyoba BatOni (my favorite avie) -- June 23, 2013
I Think This Made my One Happy
For those of you who read this blog frequently, and I don't think there are that many of
you, My One Who Thinks She Knows is perpetually out of sorts. I sometimes wonder about this. She says it is stress.
She says it is not my fault. Whether, it's my fault or not, it's not easy to live with, and for most of this week,
my One was her usual unhappy self, made many times less happy by the state of our bushwhacking. We found one city sim that
turned out to be a role play. We found a three sim academic area that was out of date and unfinished at the same time. We were spending a lot of
time exploring and had nothing to show for it.
Our luck changed abruptly when we
visited HealthLink
New York and Western New York. These islands are
part of the Southern Tier Health Link archipelago. It's a huge place, My One and I have not yet
explored all the islands. We found this basket of magazines on
HealthLink and the picture of me
enjoying a table for one was taken on Western New York.
We entered the hospital and found the first floor full of useless medical equipment, places to sit, an elevator, and of course empty rooms.
We even went up to the roof and told the bot standing by an empty stretcher to go downstairs and have a Coke if she could find one.
There's not one soda machine on three or four islands. You can get coffee or tea Northwestern New York, but the
barista does not give you an actual animated object. I had to take a big cup of tea out of my inventory.
On the second floor
of the hospital on HealthLink New York things were different.
The machines did not give notecards, but my One Who Thinks She Knows said they looked like she remembered them. Apparently, Ones in their
"real world" get tested on these things by their doctors. I've never been sick. I'm an avie remember, but My One. She warned me about the
mammogram machine. She said it squeezed your breasts and hurt like hell. I don't know. It only hurt a little.
This display of machines made it to the Explore SL Spread Sheet of course.
The mammogram machine was a lot less painful than the fiendish machines at the Autism Awareness Center on
Western New York. These
machines are right in the parlor of the exhibit looking like lovely, living room furniture. They are here to show how
badly doctors treated childen with autism and other mental illnesses. My One even says this was true. Fortunately, I did not have
to stay in the restraining crib very long.
I also really liked the Autism Awareness Center's sign. It's made of blocks like Baby Alex' Zooby Blocks, but it is custom work. It's the little touches that make a fantastic build, but even the simplest build can be fantastic if it gets its point across and says something. That is what my One thinks any way. I am not so sure about this.
My One really liked the Magic Paintbrush Gallery also on
Western New York because she felt it gave something back, art and awareness about helping the disabled. You
can read more about the Magic Paintbrush Project at the link.
I really liked the Tremolo Coffee Co. and Galleries on Western
New York a lot better than Magic Paintbrush. The gallery is on the Second Floor and the art is for sale, but my One says you
don't have to buy. Looks are after all free! These are two gorgeous ceramic vases.
Click on this thumbnail to see the Tremolo Gallery at full size or close to it. Those abstracts are bursting
with rainbow color. No, we can't afford one. No, I have no where to hang one. I'd rather have a tree or another
breedable. Paintings don't hop around like frogs, fly like Zwickies, or scurry like turtles, but these are
original. I hope someone does buy them to help the coffee shop downstairs pay its rent so the island can stay alive.
My One has a lot to the monetary side of the HealthLink Archipelago, but I don't have to write about that stuff,
because my One handles the money. That in some ways is a very big relief.
Iyoba BatOni (who thinks for herself some of the time, which is a lot more than most people do.) with help from Eileen H. Kramer (The One Who Thinks She Knows) -- June 21, 2013
Looking at our Old Friends
What am I to do! My One Who Thinks She Knows is going crazy with her GIMP because she is following the lessons in
The Book of GIMP: A Complete Guide to Nearly Everything. I'll tell you what that Book of GIMP is. It's a guide to lying. Yes, our Petable Turtles lay eggs but they don't look anything like the one in the picture. My One played with some of the selection tools and a bit of cut and paste, and a real Petable Turtle egg becomes a fake, but unless people reading this blog love Petable Turtles, how are they going to know this egg isn't real!
And this egg is real all right. It is Millicent and Tzuriel, two of our new Lily Frogs', eggs, and our first egg from the new group that isn't brown. The problem with this image is that our frogs lay their eggs at the Honey Hut NOT at Stinky Stinky. My One had to go crazy with the Quick Mask and copy and paste and the clone brush just to prove she was learning something.
Maybe it is just something to do with Ones in general. They can't leave reality alone when they find it, even if they have good hearts and act according to those hearts most of the time. Now, both the Zwicky and the Petable Turtle in this picture are real! My One put them on a strange background because she could. The turtle is Billie who lays beautiful tricolored eggs, and the male zwicky was a gift from Griderz Luv. My One named him Throckmorton. He was all white, but Griderz (I think it was Griderz' One because Ones think like this) gave her fifteen Colorizing kits. She painted poor Throckmorton's face brown so he could make prettier babies. Now even my One agrees that with colorized zwickies we won't know how any of them started out and which ones are their natural color.
At least my One is holding off on further face painting because she thinks it made Throckmorton sick. He fell asleep and refused to eat for more than a day. He's better now, but now she wants to wait until she sees what the face painting does for the offspring. She was really happy with this gorgeous baby Zwicky. She named her Iona and put her in inventory.
And sometimes all this GIMPing around serves a purpose. My One sees Second Life on two different monitors. Similar skies have different light. Here she adjusted the same picture of our Lily Frog, Pabla's, first egg to show how it looks on the other monitor. This is a two for one shot or a montage. I always see things the same way, but then again, I am an avie.
At least Second Life Israel is back. The original Second Life Israel disappeared June 6, 2012. Now it is back on a different sim with even more attractions evn though this new island isn't all finished. Second Life Israel was one of both my One's and my favorite sims. We'd go there to wander around the Old City and Tel Aviv and to swim on the beach even before I had a Swimmer Hud. The picture to your right shows tropical fish swimming in the waters of Eliat.
My One was even more impressed with the Kotel (the Wailing Wall which functions as a synagogue) than she was when we found it back in 2008. She has seen a lot since then, and a traditional synagogue in Second Life with a mechitzah, a barrier separating the women from the men, is hard to find. Well here it is, but it has a small problem. The mechitzah is too tall. Here you can see my feet sticking out underneath.
I know it wasn't respectful, but the only way I could see beyond the mechitzah was to look under it, just like a bathroom stall. I have to hand it to my One for using her GIMP skills to make me stand out against a much larger background. Maybe the Book of GIMP is good for something after all.
The other thing my One really loved about Second Life Israel is that it strikes a balance between the secular and religious. Yes, it has a Kotel wtih a mechitzah, but it also has beaches and Te Aviv. Here I am at the beach in Eliat trying out a jump animation that my One bought for me at Waseda. Yes, I can do a handstand on the sand, and my One had to clone in an extra beach umbrella. Oh well, let my poor One Who Thinks She Knows have her fun. Maybe some day GIMP and its Book will make her rich and famous. She can dream. I'm the one who gets to go places. Please don't go too crazy One. I have to live with you.
Iyoba BatOni and Eileen H. Kramer (The One Who Thinks She Knows) -- June 18, 2013
How do You Grow a Flower?
Plants in Second Life have always fascinated me. Actually, they have done more than fascinate me. They have always
been part of the flow of the virtual reality I create and a mainstay of my creative output. Some of this I kind of knew would happen
considering all the gardens and forests I planted in Active Worlds and the way I designed property in Aiden (No more links. Not sure any of this is
around and freely accessible any more. So it goes.) Plants tame virtual spaces. Well satisfied biophilia keeps an avie and her One (that's me) happy.
On a day to day basis, I find a bench or seat in a garden far more useful than a couch in a well appointed house. It does not matter if the
house is drop dead gorgeous or photorealistic. The garden seat is just a much nicer place to park the avie and she much prefers to be parked there
to watch the zwickies.
So it was no
surprise that when Iyoba met this little bear in a store on Akiba she wanted to
go see the "Main Store" for Flower Shop Usako on Tinder. I steeled myself
for disappointment. I remembered flowers for sale in the For-U mall (now defunct) and in a couple of other places run by Japanese and Koreans and remembered that
they usually looked like funeral arrangements.
Sorry, flowers and plants seem to carry a big load of cultural baggage. Often builders sell them in mass texture packs as afterthoughts. Often builders get the ecology all wrong. There are coconut palms all over Second Life to the point where one might consider them downright invasive. There are lots of potted green plants and formal topiary on many Arab sims when there are plants at all. The Germans plant lovely temperate forests. Don't ask me the meaning of any of this.
To tell the truth,
the flowers on Tinder were a lot nicer than I thought they would be, and I hope that is not faint praise.
There are lovely modern arrangements, potted morning glories, and these sunflowers. Yes, there are not enough leaves, but
you can buy arrangements made from branching sunflowers in many florist shops, and this is a pretty close
imitation of the arrangement you get,
except that USAKO has a way of hiding the stiff stems, and Proflowers shows them off.
Actually Flower Shop USAKO goes Proflowers one
better with some, huge, lovely and imaginative
Of course none of these lovely arrangements at Flower Shop USAKO is anything
like how I think of sunflowers. I've grown sunflowers in my gardens over the years, and it's the seed catalog and the overall size of
the plants, and their vibrant colors that impresses me. I think the second happiest person in the world is a sunflower geneticist/breeder. I think the
happiest person is a pointsettia geneticist/breeder. As far as I know I am one of two people in Second Life (and possibly the only one!) offering
a variant of teddy bear sunflowers (picture above). These are bit paler yellow than the real life version.
The pale yellow flower in the center of the picture is a close
approximation to my teddy bear style flowers, except mine are typical, giant, single branch specimens.
What does surprise me about the creator of Flower Shop USAKO's arrangements is that he or she has not embraced the sunflower's life cycle like that of the cherry or other fruit tree blossoms. First you have a huge plant, then one or more good size flowers, then in the right varieties (Those without too much genetic manipulation, the whole business goes to seed and feeds birds and insects. Alas my sunflowers are too genetically messed up to do the full lifecycle. I have used sunflower seed heads and wilted/withered sunflowers as an art motif, though not in Second Life.
And these sunflowers are
truly a one of a kind in Second Life. They are multibranching, created to make the garden pretty rather than to provide seeds for
snacking, wildlife, or oil, and yes, they really exist in "real life." Both are meant to look a bit rough and unkempt, because that is how sunflowers are.
Actually my goal with flowers is to always have them appear
a bit rough and scruffy, more precisely as if they just belonged in the garden, growing in seemingly disordered little clumps or big specimen plantings.
The aim is an accidental and wild looking garden full of flowers. It's not quite naturalization (Yes, there's a word for spreading flowers all over the
place willy nilly) but it is supposed to have a very natural look. These flowers are cockcomb celosia, which are very rare in Second Life, and not
easy to do at all. Here they are in real life.
And since I've given Park Seed a ton of free advertising. I'll put in a plug:
All my plants at the Honey Hut and
Stinky Stinky are free to copy. And yes, the temperate house is a fine jumble of joy waiting for you to explore.
And yes, all my plants ooze fecundity with fruits and flowers. I really do love those seed catalogs.
And here is a good view of a natural-look garden
at the the Honey Hut. Those big specimen plantings look like they sort of
have always belonged there, but they don't. The image shows yellow nigella (small plant) and flowering tobacco (Yes, it grows that high with
generous leaves!) in the foreground and a fence of golden amaranth in the rear. The plants mark off the property and make barren green space feel more
intimate. Goofy Kitty is there for Iyoba to take a rest. With good plants, she does not need a house, and of course there are bee hives to keep
the plants pollinated. There are mason bees at Stinky Stinky, because our plants are alive!
By the way, I remember from my Japanese Studies for Poets course in college and my Nonwestern Studies course in high school, that the Japanese have a whole aesthetic for gardening and arranging flowers. Iyoba and I just have a very different one.
Eileen H. Kramer (One Who Thinks I Know) and Iyoba BatOni (Favorite avie) -- June 17, 2013
The Hot Seat Comes to This Blog
Please click the above image to see it in full size. On the main part of this blog, when it had a functioning main part (This used to be a four part blog, but that was long ago.) there was a periodic feature called, The Hot Seat, in which I reviewed books as I more or less read them. Well, we have a candidate for a Second Life based hot seat since so much of my life in Second Life is graphics. It's the Book of GIMP: A Complete Guide to Nearly Everything by Oliveir LeCarme and Karine Delvare. GIMP is graphics freeware as powerful as Photoshop but without all the cookie-cutter tutorials that accompany PSP (Paint Shop Pro.). GIMP is my gateway to modifying photos for this blog and making clothes and to some degree hair for Iyoba, my favorite avie.
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Of course even an experienced GIMP user can learn a few new tricks. Above the first paragraph is a montage I made doing one of the exercises at the end of Chapter 1. I would do things a bit differently with my photos, but that is because I tend to work at smaller size and GIMP scales in a strange way, at least the unsharp mask does. On the other hand, I learned to better handle my screen and keep panels from being lost. I'm also impressed with all the keyboard short-cuts having suffered a sore trapezius muscle more than once from mouse drawing. The Book of GIMP's second chapter also got me to take a second look at the Perspective Tool, and using the Levels control for color. Normally I use the curves and a few of the other tools, but the Levels have always intimidated me. |
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Along with Select by Color they proved surprizingly easy to use. The top picture on the right is an original shot of Iyoba's and my planter at Stinky Stinky. The second picture shows the effects of brightening the planter using Select by Color followed by Levels. Note: I did have to do a bit of copy and paste to repair some damage when the temperate house behind the planter suffered distortion.
I had less success with the Perspective tool, but that one is tricky. A little cropping seemed to improve things, and turn a slanty shot of the planter at Stinky Stinky straight. I'm not sure I would use the effect I used in the third picture very often except to make objects for clothing textures. I usually angle my camera the way I want it. I am a fiend for composition as I am learning by seeing others' photos in Flickr. I am also learning that I am more of a journalistic photographer than one who takes glamour shots. Oh well, I think there is room for everybody.
And above this paragraph is my attempt to darken the light woods high above Tinder. I used Levels once again and extra layers to add a background-border, and "Before" and "After." One thing I found wanting was the Border and Bevel tools both are too square for my taste. I much prefer rounder and softer effects. I also think Paths is a far better way to create a border, and not all that difficult, but an author can not please everyone.
I'm not sure how much I would use the Clone tool to retouch photos. There are some ethics involved, though
this picture of Iyoba and her "twin" was just for fun and a bit crude. Usually if something is in a picture I tak
inworld, it belongs there. For other kinds of shots though, the Clone tool might be useful.
Yes, I cloned Iyoba and a bit of her background. You can use this tool to alter and add new items to images.
I do not have the CD that goes with The Book of GIMP so I have had to supply my own photos. You can
see what photos I'm using. Well, I had no photos to use with the red eye correction, but I did mess with Iyoba's eyes using
the Free Hand Draw Tool with Shift followed by colorize. No, Iyoba really looks better with brown eyes, but
we are both proud of that turquoise hair. There are things you can do with GIMP and in Second Life that just plain
are not easy in the "reality" of the "real world." Watch this space for more illusions, and don't worry
I'll get back to amateur sociology and bushwhacking soon.
Eileen H. Kramer (One Who Thinks I Know) and Iyoba BatOni (the favorite avie) -- June 15, 2013
Do the Right Thing
Thursday and Friday Iyoba, my favorite avie, and I visited Waseda and Waseda Sea South. Both are exceptionally beautiful sims that more than give something back in terms of conent. The sustainable paradise of Sausutenaen is particularly worthy of praise for its compact size, its realism, and those long note cards. Kudos to the sim managers.
That is why it hurts to write this blog entry. I found the
Voodoo Mart while inspecting the entire sim. The outside architecture intrigued me. This was a lovely wicker and straw building.
I had to see what was inside.
There were fresh herbs for sale along with mysterious boxes. I almost instantly remembered wandering into a supermarket just
outside one of the few housing projects in Columbus, Georgia in search of a cold soda. Hanging above the checkout line
were herbs for medicine. There were also good luck charms for sale and lucky candles. I was surprised to see such a store so far south and
west of the New York Metro area where I had grown up. Columbus, Georgia, Georgia's second largest city, is as far west as Detroit, Michigan.
Bodegas, botanicas, and similar stores are so much a part of the fabric of urban life in the New York Metro area that it is hard not to bump into one
while looking for other stores. I remember the botanica behind the Woolworth's on the street behind Mamaroneck Avenue in White Plains in
Westchester County.
Voudun, Santeria, Obé, Umbanda, etc...., Afro-Caribbean religion is very much a living faith and part of
the fabric of life in the Eastern United States, due to immigration from the Caribbean and also due to the
tenacity of West African slaves in the face of cultural genocide. And if that sounds politically correct, then so be it, but
it is up to an educational institution to treat other cultures and their faiths and customs with respect. The Voodoo doll was
not that offensive. It was too much a cliche to offend, though I did wonder what to do with the live chicken
I received as a gift. Someone had forgotten the knife.
The white chicken made me think about court cases involving Santeria and animal sacrifice in Florida. It also made me think about students I had known who were Santeros. You can tell if a student is a Santero/Santera by the elekes special plastic or wooden beads around their neck. Different color beads are for different Orishas or deities/demigods. For more on elekes see below. Suffice it to say, the chicken made me think of my students.
When I received the cursed tiki, I began to feel quesey. Tiki are Polynesian! They are not West African or
West Indian! Someone clearly did not know their Afro-Caribbean religion. Then came the coup de grace, the
shrunken head. The accusation of savagery/cannibalism was clear. Shrunken heads have no place in Afro-Caribbean religion!
Jamaica and Cuba are not Papaua New Guinea.
Of course making Voudun (Santeria etc...) a religion of cannibalism, savagery, and the deep, dark, jungle
instead of the sugar or cotton plantation, the street in White Plains, New York, or the housing project in Columbus, Georgia is
more fun, but it is fun gained through tearing others down. It is fun in the way of the minstrel show or black face.
I'm not sure this kind of fun has any place on an educational island, especially if the target audience has never
lived in a society where Afro-Caribbean religion is part of the social fabric. By the way, an honest and respectful exhibit
on Afro-Caribbean religion would be an excellent way to teach about American culture and the English language.
Perhaps those who built the sim should take a visit to a real botanica (bodega or herbal store, or even a supermarket in the right kind of neighborhood) to
see how some of the accoutrements of Afro-Caribbean religion are sold. Note: you won't see all of them. Santeria is an open secret, but it
still has secretive aspects. This drum and statue are for sale at Mutana Marketplace and Health Cafe in
Atlanta, Georgia. The drum has a playful sign on it restricting testing it to thirty seconds. I'm not sure what the statue represents.
If you click Shop on the website and choose Ifa you will be able to see elekes.
And here is the most common Santeria (Voudon, Obé etc...) equipment, colorful candles, often
dedicated to Catholic Saints, but really burned for the Orishas. You can see these for sale at
Mutana, but they are often available in the Hispanic food department
of any large supermarket in the right neighborhood. That is how much Afro-Caribbean religion is part of American life,
at least in New York and Georgia.
And if any one is curious, I am Caucasian and not a Santero, but as a member of a different religious minority, I am very sensitive to how educational institutions display other ethnic groups and religious practices. Also, as I said above, I have worked with students who followed Santeria. I would love to help those who created the Phonetics exhibit create a more culturally sensitive and truthful exhibit about Voudun/Santeria. I also hope those who built the Voodo Mart stop using it as an instructional tool. It is teaching the wrong lesson.
Eileen H. Kramer with help from Iyoba BatOni -- June 9, 2013
Understand Me!
I have a lot of Arab aquaintances in Second Life. One of the best parts of Second Life is meeting people from all over the "real world." That we wear masks and work with our avatarim probably makes the relationship better because we don't really accomodate the other person. We're too busy with our avatarim for that. I respect the way Arabs develop their sims. They have an aversion to crass commerce and one almost never finds a ban line or security orb. Like the Japanese and to some extent the Germans they build area for group use that is not just area that has to pay for itself. There are games. There is place to stand. There is a lot of open space. Quite a few of the sims are beautiful. Please click the thumbnail to see the lovely seating area on KSA HALA. KSA means island in Arabic.
I have several Arab friends. Two are Egyptians, builders, club owners, people who have vanished and about whom I worry. Axxo Erin is Saudi and is responsible for Arab Land, one of the most drop dead, beautiful builds in Secopnd Life. I admire Axxo's work. I had a complex and occasionally fraught relationship with Zizo at times.
Then two nights ago, I met Yazid. He walked into me. He was a short, fat avie. Iyoba is also short and plump. He spoke English that broke up between his accent and a bad mike in the worst way. Better to touch type. Iyoba was flattered and so was I. Even if we don't fit in and it goes nowhere, it was fun imaginging and thinking. Part of the fun of hanging out with Arabs is not really knowing who they are and really having to work at figuring it out. A language barrier always makes people seem more intelligent and of better character than they are, but with the Saudis especially, the mystery goes deeper.
If they are living in Saudi Arabia and not related or married, the women and men have a very hard time getting together to socialize. The women dress sometimes like models, but more often like high school students breaking dress code. Iyoba by contrast wears fashionable, conservative, and dressy clothes that I make for her. I enjoy putting her in a print "wash dress" because I can imagine actually wearing it. Also, my culture says that an avie is an extension of your self and a representative of yourself. If someone finds out about Iyoba in "real life" I answer for what she does. Halachic authorities have not weighed in on avatar modesty. In the Moslem world, the clerics say an avatar is separate from its One Who Thinks They Know. Therefore, the clothes a Saudi woman puts on her avie have a very different meaning than the clothes Iyoba wears.
Saudis, and maybe other Arabs, are different from me in other ways. Labor in the United States is expensive. Say that one three times fast. I have to know how to haul my own groceries, cook my own food, type my own papers, shorten my own clothes or find ones that don't need to be shortened, clean up the apartment when the spirit moves me or when I get disgusted. You get the idea. True, I use various productivity devices such as a wheeled cart and a backpack or a computer, but I still need to be able to do a lot for myself very productively. I don't think Saudis have as much of a do-it-yourself-or-automate-it culture.
That means my time out of work looks different from theirs.
Then we hit the issue of money two nights ago. Above the previous paragraph and kind of on the left is a Zingo machine. It's a single machine, and for ten (10) Lindens (4.5 cents. 250 Lindens equals one dollar. Keep that in mind because it helps you think about what things cost, and what things cost is very important.) you can play a twenty round game and win points and maybe money. Zingo is gambling similar to Bingo. Neither my culture nor the Arabs' have a problem with games of chance for entertainment.
And more importantly, neither the Arabs, nor I have any problem about paying for entertainment in Second Life. After all, one pays for other kinds of entertainment. If you can put $1.50 in the soda machine for a Cherry Coke, or purhcase a flavored coffee drink for $1.27 or a recession buster soda for .69, then what is wrong with spending .045 (that's four and a half cents!) to upload a texture or .09 for enough textures to make a dress, that will last a lot longer than the soft drink?
Ongoing expenses are another matter. I remember Iyoba's first days as we sat on the beach in Clemence and listened to one avie trying to sell another very expensive land. "It's not more than dinner at Ruth Christ's Steak House!" he said. I was along just to learn, and learn I did. A premium membership on Second Life paid for yearly is no more than the cost of a Subway sandwich once a month. I decided then and there to adopt the coffee shop rule. If I can't tell a stranger in a coffee shop what I spend on Second Life and why, I'm spending too much, and my Second Life habit has gotten the best of me in a very tangible way. Rent for my 2048 is $8.00 a month, two QuikTrip coffee drinks a week. Turtles cost $6.00 and change to feed every two weeks. Lily Frogs cost $2.00 to $4.00 to feed every month. Zwickies cost $3.00 every two weeks to feed. This is a very large number of breedables, but the money goes a very long way, even when the breedables don't have a huge social following. Watching zwickies or frogs late at night and gathering turtle eggs, is a quiet kind of pleasure.
It is easy for me to think of money in Second Life in terms of other entertainment and in terms of what it customarily buys inworld. That was why I was not afraid to pay for a card to play group Zingo until I learned that it cost 300L. Yes, that is $1.25 (One QuikTrip latte), but several of those games in an evening quickly add up. Put another way, 300L is half my week's land rent for Stinky Stinky. Put a third way, 300L is 1/4 of the cost of a bag of turtle food, or nearly the cost of a 840 serving platter of frog flies. "I can't afford this," I said.
I stayed and watched. It was not that I didn't have the $1.25 or couldn't have bought more Lindens. I just paid rent a few minutes before writing this blog, and I bought Lindens for that, but I live in fear of being addicted. I keep track of what activities Second Life displaces (opportunity cost!) and the money I spend. I constantly look over my shoulder at myself to see what craziness I am doing in world. I can never forget that there is this out of control state called addiction and I could find myself in it if I am not careful. I don't think the Saudis have such fears. Maybe for them Second Life is a true escape. I don't envy them that. I wouldn't like having to wear an abaya and worry about whether I could leave my apartment or house unescorted. I enjoy male company. I'd miss not being able to have male friends with whom to socialize. However, I don't think the Saudis would like my constant state of low grade paranoia about my reputation and my freedom.
One of my big justification for breedables in Second Life is that I know the expenses. Breeders seldom raise prices on consumables since owners are repeat customers. Breedables like my zwickies and turtles have to eat. I'm under no pressure to pull others in or to buy more than simple maintenance rations, or to hatch out new eggs or bring new zwicklets out of stasis. If there's no room, I can control my costs. I can look in the mirror and spit at the addiction beast and tell myself I'm still in control, but 300L for a game of Zingo multiplied by several or more games a night a couple of nights a week leaves me shivering with fear of perdition. No my Saudi friends, I am not as free as you suppose. I come and go as I please, but the prying eyes never go away because I own a pair of them.
Eileen H. Kramer with help from her favorite avie, Iyoba BatOni -- June 7, 2013
Hair Curls and Critters
What does My One Who Thinks She Knows do when she complains about "a building rut?" Well first she moans about it in the Builders' Brewery Group, and then she gets a suggestion for reveerse engineering a one hundred and twenty prim house. Finally, my One did something rather intelligent. She looked at all our sculpties, and discovered we had four whole boxes of demo hair curls. Well, we could always make hair. You can see a new hair piece. Tweety Saxondale, our friend, has hair with tips so my One wanted to try making some hair with tips. The number above my head is my draw weight. Multiply the old avatar rendering cost by ten and you get an idea. A green number is a good thing.
Yesterday, I got ten new hair pieces or at least it felt that way. This design came about....well you'll see. It has a hundred and forty-five prims and gives me my first yellow draw weight ever. Normally, Ones aren't proud of their avies' draw weights, but my One has never been able to build with large numbers of prims, so she beamed with pride and wondered how badly we would lag places with this hair. I know that is very anti-social, but that is my One sometimes. Remember, she does have a good heart most of the time.
Of course, the real challenge with hair curls is making something with them that is NOT hair. Repurposing sculpties is one of the most exciting things amateur builders can do, according to my One. Now my One is not a very good builder. She says if a build serves its purpose, beauty doesn't matter, and for that reason any One or avie can build. She does not feel this way about clothes. She loves textiles and hair textures, but she has her own ideas of beauty.
Also, I needed furniture and not a desk inside a big, old, house that I hardly use. I don't like houses. I know a lot of Ones and avies do, but neither my One nor I are that way. We almost gave up our land because we found houses so useless. Breedables, trees, and plants saved us, but I still need some furniture and I wanted something better than a mat on the grass. Enter, the hair curl bed. Yes, it is scripted. No, it does not include the pose ball. There is an adjustible sit script included in the mattress and the frame is two hair curls from Es0 Torok. Way to go Eso! Way to go One!
This is one of those pictures you have to click the thumbnail to see. We still needed a place for a radio and for our mason bee hive even though we tore down the seventeen prim house and put the six prim desk set back into inventory. My One thought that curls looked like sticks. She said that doing all building on the square was aesthetically ugly and that you don't need mesh for curves.
Enter the Curlgola (Think pergola, a trellis roof with poles, and you have the idea.) A Curlgola is a pergola made from hair curls. This Curlgola used only seven prims. With the three prim hair curl bed, I not only had useable outdoor furniture, which is much better than indoor furniture because I can sleep with my critters, but also saved thirteen prims. Is that not awesome! And scultpies with their curves and irregularity offer a lot of visual appeal that doesn't require tons of skill to make.
Of course not all my One Who Thinks She Knows hair curl ideas were as practical as the Curlgola and hair curl bed. My One made a hexagon out of hair curls. You can see the image of three curls in the upper left hand corner. We used hair curl #3. Then my One made a bullseye. You can think toward the center instead of on the square. She even put a sit script in the seat and I got to sit on it. The only problem was that the seat is forty-two prims big. That's too large for any of our properties. My One is stingy with prims and for good reason, unless I am wearing prims on my body.
Now if you think this is all going to be a happy blog, think again. My One, true to her sometimes ruthless ways, started off a new batch of Lily Frogs six days ago. This is Zepheniah one of the males. I have forgoten who his father is. My One thinks it was a frog named Mattathias and his mother was a frog named Yehudis. He is a Mississippi Gopher frog because that was all we had in those days. Breed always goes through the mother, and sometimes the alpha female frog as it did with the last round. Zepheniah was hatched from a one to two year old egg and is probably in need of an update. That is important and we will get to that.
The first frog we hatched out in the new brood was Tzuriel. His father is Yechiel and his mother is Tzipporah all from the last brood. He is the current version. He is very handsome since he has the best of both parents. Our boys are positively gorgeous this round.
Milo is another beauty. He too is from one of Yehudis' eggs which means the egg sat for over a year in inventory and missed three updates. I don't know if that matters. My One is worried. We had all forgotten how beautiful some of the old eggs' offspring are.
Millicent is not from old stock. Her mother is NOT Tzipporah either even though she has a Refuah Shelemah pattern. Tzipporah was born an adult and as a result had an effect on other frogs' offspring. Tamar, Millicent's mother, was a pickerel frog, but never expressed her pattern. All her offspring were Refuah Shelema. Millicent's father was Absalom, a drop dead, gorgeous, pickerel frog. It's a shame that the pickerel pattern did not transmit. Millicent by the way both shines and glows. Her color will sort and segregate in her offspring. This makes her what my One calls a blue hen, a good breeder who may not be so good looking herself.
And Pabla's father is Omri. Her mother is Yehudis. My One likes this color, but she also thinks it has great breeding potential. Also Mississippi Gopher frogs hold their own even when there are Refuah Shelema frogs living in the colony. This way the young will have two patterns....
If we have young. Currently both Pabla and Millicent are pregnant. Lily Frogs do not have amplexus and they lay single eggs. So far we don't have eggs, and my One worried. We have no crates. We probably need to update Pabla, Zepheniah, and Milo, or there aren't going to be any eggs. The problem is we are out of crates, and there still is no Lily Frogs store. We have six egg cups (not enough), enough food, but without crates or even without cups, our frogs still face a silent threat. Also sooner or later our food runs out. Both my One and I loathe pestering Dragoness Rage to get supplies. We need access to supplies very badly. My One thinks toward the future. She thinks that this colony has great breeding potential. I don't want to see her give up on our Lily Frogs. I guess my One knows what she has to do. She says Lily Frogs can be the best breedable in Second Life and maybe...she is right.
Iyoba BatOni with help from the One Who Thinks She Knows, Eileen H. Kramer -- June 5, 2013
Why Our Joint Birthday was a Total DISASTER!
It's no secret. My One Who Thinks She Knows and I share a joint birthday. She set it up that way.
She says I am exactly ten years younger than she is. That makes me forty-one years old even though I only
rezzed five years ago. I guess I didn't have a childhood. I don't really miss it. Avies are different from humans this way.
My One said she was supposed to be sad about her birthday. She wasn't. She said we should do something special. That meant I got
to wear a schmatah
Then we went off to tour the disaster site on Wisconsin Tecne II. I had seen it the day before and it scaird me. It scaird my One too. We were going back any way. The picture in the paragraph above was taken by my One in the diner in Titanville the town where the disaster happened, but before we got to the disaster we visted the Anita Andel Safety House.
Now Second Life is full of safety houses and labs that are less than safe. Some are downright scuzzy, but
this one was about to burn down. That's an oven not a fire place in the photo!
And doesn't that food look good enough to eat. That is what my One calls a rhetorical question. It's probably
out long enough on that counter to pick up a nice bunch of bacteria, guaranteed to make any One who eats it
sick to their poor, physical stomachs. Avies don't get food poisoning!
My One is curious and she peered into this bucket. She said she sometimes leaves water from mopping in the house
overnight, but she always takes hers down to the storm sewer or pours it down the toilet. She said that was what somebody had to do here.
This dirty water wasn't going to make floors any cleaner and someone who is clumsy could trip over the mop. Besides that it was time to
go to Wal-Mart and get a nice, new, plastic bucket that wouldn't get rusty.
Then it was time to move on to Titan Chemical. Quite frankly I was scaird and so was my One. This is not the most conventional way to
spend a joint birthday. Also we knew there were wounded, crazy, and dead bots on the other side of the fence. If we could even
get through the fence. Titanville, population 5000 or so, with its run down houses, sad and retro restaurants, coin laundry, broken
spinner in the schoolyard, and nonworking pinball machine, did not seem to have any chemical plant until we found this sign.
My One says this is one of her favorite photographs. We both peered through the slats in trepidation. We could see the flames.
My One says she could even smell the fumes from the burning chemicals and hear the bots shouting, but the fence was not phantom and flying over it
would somehow be cheating. We needed to find a gate.
Needless to say, we found one. There were screaming bots. There were hurt bots. There was fire. You can
see where the plane crashed into the warehouse and knocked over a fuel truck. The plane, the truck, and the stored
chemicals burned. There was only one police car in the parking lot. There were more on the other side of the plant for some reason.
There was one police car inside. There were no ambulances. My One told me to "call 911." Then we tried to tell the bots what to do.
The official exercise here was to triage them. My One and I gave up on that early. The hospital was only two blocks away and it looked like
there were plenty of rides available for those who could limp to the gate. Those who were able to walk could help others who couldn't.
My One and I decided we should get any one who could get there to the gate and from there it would be easy to get them medical attention.
I guess that was as good as triage got. Unfortunately, when we told the bots what to do, they didn't listen. Maybe triaging them would have been a better
idea. By the way, if you touched the bots they gave you information on how badly they were hurt.
Of course some bots weren't ever going to make it to the gate. We would have had to triage them as black which means
dead or too hurt. This bot was beyond help. In a way, playing dead is a good, easy job for a bot, but it is still awful to work in
such a sad and frightening place. Ones treat bots like garbage. Avies fare somewhat better, but there is no reason that bots should
listen to us. At least we did not have to tell this bot what to do. He or she could just lie there under his or her bloody, blanket. I still feel
sorry for this poor bot anyway.
My One was very impressed with the disaster site and she put it on the Explore SL spread sheet. She also added the Anita Andel Safety House as well too, but the disaster scene was special. It was genuinely awful and frightening. My One said she felt helpless even though we both acted, cool, calm, and collected. Actually, I wasn't so calm. I cussed out a bot who wouldn't listen. I guess the scene got to both of us, but that was what it was supposed to do. My One says she wonders how real nursing students react when they have to triage bots for a grade. She thinks that those best adjusted to Second Life will get the most emotional. I of course am very emotional, and I think My One Who Thinks She Knows is that way too.
Iyoba Bat Oni and Eileen H. Kramer, the One Who Thinks She Knows -- June 1, 2013
Keeping Trust, Keeping Faith
My One Who Thinks She Knows has a good heart most of the time. That is better than an awful lot of Ones and
an awful lot of avies for that matter. She had a very good heart about our Lily Frogs even though she is about
to turn ruthless. I'll get to the ruthless part. You can see an egg rack with four eggs in it. Since the Lily
Frog store disappeared, we could not clean up any eggs. If we put them in inventory they would die so they would never hatch.
We don't have room to hatch eggs as long as we have live frogs down, but well...let's just say Lily Frog eggs are in some ways
more precious than Petable Turtle eggs. We are as far as we know the only source of our own stock. Besides, killing creatures, even ones who may never be born,
just because we want to clean up the land is unspeakably ugly.
My One refused to give up. She kept leaving message to Dragoness Rage asking for egg cups. We had food for our frogs so they would not
starve, but we did not want to lose a single egg. There was no reply. My One came up with an idea. She put Goofy Kitty in inventory and
Goofy Kitty is my own cat couch and I sleep on him sometimes. My One made him for me so that I would not miss SBE (Sad Brown Eyed) Kitty or Kitty Friend so
badly. She understood, and that is what having a good heart is all about. Then my One made egg racks out of lattice sculpty.
She said we could hold twenty eggs if need be and the frogs could continue to reproduce while the eggs in their rack became an attractive
addition to the property.
Then on Thursday, Dragoness Rage left us a present, ten Lily Frog egg cups. This really is not enough (sorry!) One of the reasons
we found out so late about the store disappearing was that when my One found the island in disarray, she took three boxes of egg cups. They were
free, and there was no point in running out. We try to stay ahead of things, and remember, my One does have a good heart.
Well, it was time to put away the eggs.
Then we discovered another problem. My One had done the most humane thing she could to keep our Lily Frogs from laying eggs.
She crated and uncrated them. This "forces a miscarriage." My One even said she was the froggy abortionist, but it is better for
eggs not to be laid than for us to kill them because we have no room. Then we noticed our frogs were not getting "pregnant." They are all
over a hundred and twenty days old. Crating the frogs has retired them. It means they are sterile breedables, and as you can see from
the picture of Yatif (green and burgundy turtle on bottom who is female) and Uriel (male orange turtle on top) breedables exist to... Lily Frogs do
not have amplexus, but you get the idea I hope. My One is talking about "retiring" our current batch of frogs and starting with new stock.
It's been a long time, she says. Our frogs will not starve to death. We kept that from happening and we prevented all the eggs that were laid from being destroyed.
My One sometimes forgets her good heart and acts ruthless. She is going to act ruthless in the next three days. I hate when that happens!
And meanwhile, all our breedables continue to amaze and astound, even our "unsupported" Petable turtles, though every
Petable Turtle egg is special. We have too many to ever hatch out even one tenth of them, but we don't care. Meanwhile, Billie (who is an F2 turtle) and
Shais (who is F1) produced this egg. 60% glows are exceedingly rare. My One prefers tricolors, but this is still an event.
This is the way Petable Turtles are supposed to work, though my One says that tricolors are the true exemplars of what turtles should produce.
Then Saturday night we went searching for
baby zwickies and when we called them heard two voices. We found one zwicky we all ready knew about. She was a binary whom we named Ujaama, which
means either socialism or family working together. Our zwickies are after all family! Then the other two babies were nowhere to be found.
And why were we hearing a single baby crying twice. Well, it wasn't a single baby. Zwickies almost never have twins, but Nimrod and Subira produced
two offspring, fraternal female twins.
This is Fiorella. My One had names ready for a change and I can't tell you why. My One won't let me. Fiorella is luminescent.
Her magenta rough, legs, and skirt are inherited from both her parents. Her father's rough is purplish-magenta and her mother is a red starter.
She is a binary because all zwickies born in the next week or two will be binaries.
And this is Nasrin. She is not luminescent but she is the first and binary with an orange rough we have seen. And yes, the source for
her name is a secret as well. My One is very superstitious. She is also sentimental when it comes to naming our creatures which is why I wonder
why she can retire our frogs. She says that breedables exist to reproduce. She says that we have kept our frogs alive so that there are more frogs.
They laid four eggs while we were running out of food. Maybe if we have to retire the frogs, these are the ones we should hatch. My One is tempted to
hatch only pickerel frogs since poor Tamar and Absalom could not pass on their lovely patterning. I'm trying not to think about the
future with our Lily Frogs.
Iyoba BatOni with help from the One Who Thinks She Knows, Eileen H. Kramer -- May 27, 2013