Newbie Makeover: Drae Starek

So very very late Tuesday night, my real life best friend brought his new gaming laptop over to get a few Vista issues straightened out, to have a better wireless connection for a while, and to get into a couple of online games and such. I'm really excited that he's going to start gaming, because since we stopped working together, I only get to see him about once a week though sometimes he'll stay over a night or two. Still, going from seeing him practically every day to just once a week has left me kinda down, and its not like I can just pick up and go see him whenever I want because he lives almost two hours from me and gas is hideously expensive. So being able to hang out online and have stuff to do is a good way of settling.


Now, this time while Drae was here, I didn't get much done if it wasn't something we could do together mostly because he didn't really fall asleep until around when I did. Generally he falls asleep earlier than me out of habit, and I'll do whatever it is I want to do while he's passed out and then go to bed myself. A lot of the times he used to have to wake up early to go to work, however this week he's had off because he's changing companies to get a better hourly wage, so he could be a bit of a night owl as well.



Of course, The Man's platform was a definate requirement. He'd seen me working on a few things a while back, and asked about it, so Drae was completely into joining. Unfortunately, the current last name set was kind of dull compared to when I joined, and after many refreshes of the list, he settled on Starek though we considered Atlas, Staryk (which we never got back, sadly), and Byk.



First thing first was to define a new shape for Drae. Since he was actually here, I didn't have to go through the weirdness of flipping into a man's shape and building it. I just built it directly on his new little resident; his facial structure was designed after the actor Chris Evans, though the avatar nose does not conform the ways it needed to shape for an exact replica. I long for models with as many options and flexability as the Victoria 4.2 model for Poser and various other 3D programs were available to us in-world.



The next order of business was to get a skin for him. I had a freebie mens skin for him, however it had next to no shading on it, as well as caterpillers for eyebrows and a fairly hairy chest. Some women find it crazy, but I'm not a big fan of chest hair and neither is Drae - probably just because he lacks having any despite being a Marine. Though I did add muscle to his shape, it wasn't very well defined and clear on him with the skin, and he wanted to look cut in ways he can't be in RL because he has such lean muscles. Don't get me wrong, he's a strong man, he's just wiry instead of bulky.



Now, if I can gather up the 2000 needed, I prefer to get any man starting out a skin from The Abyss. The quality of the work there is phenominal, and there are quite a number of options for each skin tone. Unlike most of the people I know, Drae is very much so into having nicely tanned skin, though he wasn't quite so for some time due to working inside all the time. Now that he's back into construction again, I won't be surprised if he ends up as tan in RL as his avatar is. His skin is from the Osiris line, version D4 which gives him a definate Egyptian flair; I always did say I like my men in eyeliner...



Even bald, Drae was looking good, and I won't be surprised if he occassionally goes without hair to totally rock the Egyptian look. But everyone needs hair, especially since the majority of the Cyrians seem to be hair connosuires, so we traveled several places in the search of a cut Drae liked. He's weird, and likes short and closely cropped hair, or any type of buzz cut like most military men have. In the end, we spent a lot of time at Naughty's hair shop, since there were a number of shorter styles with more colours than most of the ones elsewhere. Sadly, the hairstyle that we both liked didn't come in the Sable colour he needed, so I begrudgingly got him the Deception style instead.



Is it just me, or does it not scream "Zell" from FFVIII?



Everyone has a distinct hatred for the newbie clothes, so it was off to Bare Rose to pick up a free AO to hold Drae over while I built him a custom AO and to shed the last visible vestments of newbness. He selected four sets that provided a mixture of gothic, preppy and grunge - the Short Vest, Leon, Eric and Block outfits; without any promting, he began mixing and matching them into several different outfits that were quite fitting for both his real life tastes and the styles used for Cyrian role play.



Next, it was off to Fairy Grove Creations to get Drae set up with an appropriate Passion Crystal Hunter outfit. Here is where I began to wonder if he and I have some sort of telepathic link - the male version of the White Celtic Sentry costume was at the top of his short list of likes. After a good bit of laughing, he purchased that outfit, so now Drae and I have matching costumes even though its not my main hunter garb.



Since I wanted to match Drae for pictures, I wore the freebie Bare Rose Drow skin instead of my Onigiri Drow skin, however the Celtic Sentry Outfit looks just as good with that skin. I think I might even try this really dark mocha skin I got a while back at some point, but I couldn't remember which one it was. I still haven't gotten around to really looking into some white and lighter hair colours, so I faked it using ETD's Phoebe hair since I had an all-colour pack. I don't like the shape of the boots, however, so I used my trusty Shoe Fly Gladiator Heels in black. Now I have to find men and women's white boots to match these outfits, as the whole pointy toe thing just doesn't work for either of us...oi!



Later on, Beetle gave me one of the most awesome presents ever. She and Aradia had found a mehndi tattoo set at Gardens of Ku that was just perfect! The patterns chosen are just amazing, though I kind of wish that it came in black and the natural henna colours, but the pack is truly beautiful all on its own. I may find a coloured tattoo to wear with it, but for now its all on its own and on paler skin, it stands out. My prior tattoo looks super good on Drow skins, so I will be using it for that from now on.



I didn't want to diminish the quality of the patterns by make them as small as I normally do for my blog images, so these are a bit longer than usual. The first one here is of the front of the tattoos, and the second one is largely of the back. Both sides dip down below the hips, though I try to keep things as work-appropriate as possible as some people like to look at stuff from work.



So they're going to bleed into the next little part of the blog, but its about real life, so I don't have to worry about pushing any other images out of their right place, which is why I saved the story for last.



Now for a minor RL shopping story. My aunt had bought some dresses for my grandmother for Easter, however the crazy old woman claims they're not her size, when we're all quite sure they are. So something else was found to give as a present, and my aunt gave me the store credit from the dresses to get clothing for work.



Well, after finishing up in that store, we went and purchased a few more things at another clothing store and the book store (the only place I'd spend more than I do at a clothing store is at a book store, btw) my mother was going to pay in cash. She could have sworn she had more on her, when I pointed out that my aunt had given her 65.00 so we could stop buy the store and get my aunt a carton of cigarettes and some green tea.



It appeared that my mother had accidentally spent my aunt's cash on our other purchases. The Borders bookstore manager seemed pretty amused by it all, and we were laughing as well; my mother could easily go to the ATM and replace it, but it was rather hilarious that she'd done it in the first place.



After sorting through things in the car, it turns out she didn't spend the money we were supposed to use to get my aunt her stuff, however it was still hilarious until we were able to find the other cash. Only in my family, hah.

Second Life® Bloggers Require Clarification

Note: This was posted on AnnaH's blog, and I think it needs to get out to as many bloggers - well know, moderately known and even new bloggers - as possible, and perhaps a sudden shutdown of many, many blogs and fansites would be a wake up call to The Man about the new trademarke issue. Until they clarify what bloggers can and can't use in their posts, I will be calling the company and its general overall presence "The Man".


Dear Linden Lab®,

Your recent change of policy regarding the usage of your trademarks — Second Life®, Linden Lab®, and others registered by Linden Research Inc. — will effectively prevent the operation of the very vibrant community of bloggers, forum posters, websites, community portals, and even 3rd party services, that have provided Linden Lab® with links and driving traffic to your blog, and raising brand awareness for free for your product Second Life®.

Probably thousands — if not dozens of thousands — of sites include (now illegitimately) the name “Second Life®” or “SL®” somewhere in their names. From sites like Reuters (which has a Second Life® channel) to whole companies that have a “Second Life® Division” (and promotes your product by the explicit naming of it), a plethora of online communities, products, and services — some free, other commercial, many in the limbo between both extremes — include, in some way, your registered trademarks.

Your previous policy, established in May 2004 (”Second Life® Fansite Tolkit”), and later reinforced with referral programmes like “Viva La Evolution”, positively encouraged the widespread use of your trademarks, so long as it was quite clearly displayed that no infringement was intended. To requote your own terms of agreement for the usage of your trademarks:

USE OF SECOND LIFE MARKS

While you are in full compliance with the usage guidelines described here, you may use the “Second Life” name on your website, as well as the related logos and graphics available at Toolkit, solely in the form described there. Additionally, you may use screenshots from Second Life to the extent that Linden Lab has the right to authorize use of the content within such screenshot, including screenshots of Linden in-world objects and Linden avatars, subject to these usage guidelines.

Under those very friendly terms, a plethora of fansites of all sorts popped up, driving traffic to Second Life®’s main website, its blogs, forums, and other related sites — making SL®’s own ranking quite high on Google, Alexa, and other systems — while at the same time, in a period of a little less than four years, allowing the number of registered users to skyrocket from 10,000 to 13 million.

Fansites, blogs, 3rd party sites, Second Life®-related online communities, 3rd party sites that create products and services related to Second Life® are the “off-world” counterpart of the dynamic and enthusiastic community that made Second Life®, as a brand, get world-wide recognition — without the need for Linden Lab® to spend millions in advertising and campaigns on the media. We worked for free on the promotion, brand awareness, and market recognition of your products — while, at the same time, we also worked for free creating the fantastic content of the 3D environment that makes Second Life® a place worth to visit, to enjoy, to chat, to socially connect, to do business, and launch the pillars of the upcoming metaverse — fulfilling Philip ‘Linden®’ Rosedale’s dream of having more users in Second Life® than on the Web.

We’ve been the ones ultimately promoting that vision, spreading it around, and making sure that the world noticed your product and your brand. We were very successful — thanks to your gentle and encouraging former policies.

And for four years, you have been thankful enough to allow us to do that promotion, by establishing very reasonable and clear guidelines of the terms of usage of your trademarks.

Your sudden reversal of position — effectively limiting the display of the name “Second Life®” on most sites, domain names, products, and services, through a mechanism of explicit approval that you fully admit “can take long and might never finish” and will only be available to a very limited number of sites — means that suddenly all the off-world promotion of Second Life® will necessarily have to stop; or face a lawsuit in court; or, at the very least, receive a Cease & Desist letter from your lawyers and be forced to shut down.

The current terms can be aggressively enforced or not. According to your blog, we are supposed to have a 90-day grace period to remove all mentioning of Second Life® and its logo from our fansites, blogs, forums, or 3rd party sites offering products and services related to Second Life®. In fact, what this means is that we are forced not to talk about Second Life® any more — or, if we do, we cannot explicitly name the product at all.

This is, obviously, absurd.

The compromise between Linden Research Inc. (owners of the registered trademarks) and the community of volunteers that have so faithfully promoted your product, Second Life®, was quite clear for the past four years. We had clear guidelines of what we could do and what we couldn’t. Abuses could still be effectively dealt with by your legal department; to the world’s knowledge, these cases were few and scattered, if any. They were not significative to prevent a vast number of dozens of thousands of sites of all sorts to draw traffic to your own site; to reach out the huge audience on the Internet; and to drive new users to register. The numbers fortunately speak for themselves: with almost zero promotional costs, you managed to grow a thousand times in four years, thanks to crowdsourcing the promotion of Second Life®.

The “inSL” programme is definitely interesting, but a small new logo, worthless to an audience of hundreds of millions of users that are familiar with the eye-on-hand logo, without a massive campaign of promotion behind it to reflect the logo change, is not enough. “inSL” doesn’t say much, and it cannot be expanded to talk and promote Second Life® directly. And, anyway, the same restrictions apply to the usage of “inSL” as with all your other trademarks. We appreciate the grant to use that new logo, but we also feel it will be unable to gather the same support and promotional effort as the old logo and the product name did in the past four years.We would thus kindly request that you clarify your position regarding the usage of the trademarks Second Life® and the logo on all fansites, blogs, forums, or other 3rd party websites offering products and services related to Second Life®. This clarification should be as easy to follow as your previous policies on the usage of those trademarks. They should make clear that all people intending to promote your product and raise your brand awareness are not facing lawsuits because they have faithfully used your trademarks using the old policy, and wish to continue to do so in the future.

We consider that an appropriate response should be forthcoming in the next few days, or we will be forced to shut down our own blogs, websites, forums, community portals, and other 3rd party sites to avoid litigation — and thus deprieving Linden Lab® from the traffic generated by millions of direct links and millions of viewers that learn first about Second Life® through all those sites.

Personal note: This blog will enter on strike on April 15th, 2008, for a period of 3 days, if no clarification by Linden Lab is published before that date.

By: Gwyneth Llewelyn


I'll be shutting down my blog on the same dates as well, as well as the this fashion group I manage here on Facebook. Hopefully, they'll get the hit from the Klew-By-Four.