The Noob Chronicles – Step 2

My last post, I started a noob me… and during that post, I suggested that I think most people need at least 1kL to start with. For those who don’t know anything about Second Life ™, the platform has its own money.

These are called Lindens and the basic exchange rate at this every exact moment is 1kL costs $3.83 us. Once you sign up for an account and verify that through your email, you can also add a payment method. Since I’m from the US, I only really know how it works here. I put in my credit card or credit cards (you can also sign up for buying lindens via paypal but your paypal must be a bank verified account. You can also use something called Skrill but I’ve never tried that. The cashier on the site verifies you as being a valid card and so on and then you can set your payment method to work somewhat how you want it to.

For example, if you want to use one card only for premium account payments. – a premium account gives you a stipend per week of 3oo L and also the right to a linden home. A linden home is like a cheap place to stay which involves a house plus 124 prims to use how you see fit. (Prims are the basic object.. I think it’s called Land Impact now but it’s the same idea. Each bit of land is only allowed so many items on it.

For me at least, a linden home sort of look like a tract house as opposed to getting land, and doing your own thing. But for a lot of people, the $9.50 monthly charge in exchange for the approximately 1200 Lindens plus a free place to park your avatar to change and what not is not a bad deal.  For comparison purposes, that $9.50 us is equal to about 2500L so.. the 1200L you’re getting plus a house, you -might- be able to do better on your own, but that’s only about 250L a week for rental so then again you might not.

But originally, I thought you might have at least some few expenses even if you didn’t want to own land or spend a lot of L on your avatar. Some groups, like the group for Lumae charge a fee to join. The fee is only 1L but if you don’t have that one linden, that can be a problem. Also quite a number of items on marketplace are 1L rather than 0L. And it might be you end up wanting to spend a little more money on yourself.

For me, I have one card that pays for everything and I also have a budget for buying lindens. I buy lindens twice a month and my budget for lindens is pretty big.. it’s a lot but I justify that by saying SL is both my biggest hobby and also my biggest social outlet. I am sick irl and I’m mostly house bound/legally disabled. Without SL, I have no idea what I would do at 3 am when everyone I know in RL is asleep. With SL, I can go shopping, do a blog post, go have fun with friends like I did with Alicia Chenaux and another friend from Alicia’s social group, Mimi. It’s a huge thing for me but I feel everyone has to arrive at their own budget for hobbies or whatever else they do and nobody has a right to say anything about it. That’s why I’m trying to show as much as I can for the smallest amount possible 😀

See more after the jump.

The Noob Chronicles – Beginning

Recently, when watching one of Alicia Chenaux’ videos on dressing with a budget, a challenge response doing it with 5l only, I became intrigued by the idea of starting a new noob avatar.  When I started in SL everything was very different than it is now, gambling was still a thing, camping pads were a thing, linden trees were a thing and there was no mesh, and there were a lot more newbie friendly hangouts than there are now. Over the years, there’s only a few places that seem to still specialize in Free or very cheap gift items.

So here’s how I went from this – This is one of the newer avatars offered when you sign up for second life. You also can pull this avatar from your library to wear. This picture is a screen grab I took from the website so it’s not that great of a quality but she’s a cute avatar. Alicia also has a nice vid about the new starter avis which you can watch here.

To this – Now please note that I am not editing the snapshots at all other than to add a watermark and to sharpen it a little. There’s no retouching so you can really see how she would look. All the details after the jump.

Let’s Talk About Ears

I hope that this will become a regular feature here on The Twinkle, where I talk about a product that I really enjoy and think is special, something that’s a staple of my usual SL.

Today I’m going to talk about ears. Ear attachments like many other types of attachments are not particularly new but they have changed and improved over the years. For a long time, I wore ears made by Mandala. I really liked them and they made wearing mesh heads and mesh hair much easier because of course I could move them around etc.

But then I found these ears by ^^Swallow^^ . They were at Shiny Shabby some months ago.

You can click the above pic for a bigger size if you so desire and as you see on the caption, it comes with a hud that controls all facets of the ears. I think these ears are seriously snazzy and below the jump, I’ll show you pics of each part of the hud. These are not rigged, so you can move them around and I’m wearing just a hair base right now so you can really see how they look.

In The Corner

Today I’m using a mesh box that I got for a really tiny price from Focus Poses. I’m wearing a combination mix and match outfit which starts with these great mesh plaid pants. They were only 75L at the Indyra Flash Sale and they came with a fitmesh pair, which with the help of the alphas in my Maitreya body worked perfectly.

You can click the image for a direct trip to the full size picture. Or you can go to my flickr page.

 

Autumn Introductions

This is my first post at The Twinkle. I hope you all if you read, will enjoy.