Tag: MMGraffiti’s

Ouchi-Ya House 6

A parcel that is no more

Today is the last day of my largest parcel (2912 sq.m.); tier will expire in a few hours (maybe even before I finish this post) and the land will revert to its pseudo-owner. From now on I’ll be trying to live in a smaller plot while I wait for a chance to get a decent waterfront parcel with direct access to the open seas in Nautilus… if ever that comes true. Anyway, here are a few shots of the soon-to-be former plot for the “family album”.

House

The house is #06 from Ouchi-Ya ++HY’s++, a small store and cafe based on Bay City. I’ve been a fan of their buildings for quite some time now since they design small structures with a low prim count. The buildings are mostly prim-based, though they have started to add mesh elements recently. In its original state, this one is basically a one-room, single floor house, but I modified it a little bit, and created four separate rooms to accommodate a living room, dining room, kitchen and full bathroom in the first floor, and a bedroom in an upper level.

Backyard

I wasn’t going to post these pictures since (1) they don’t include any new garden product, which is the main topic of this blog, (2) I’m hardly a decent interior decorator –not to be so rude with myself and say that I suck big time in that department–, and (3) I’ve been concentrating in other matters as to spend too much time on this subject, yet there are a few products worth pointing out, such as, in the picture above (from left to right):

  • Trompe L’oeil – Pallet chair (brown, with blanket)
  • Dysfunctional Designs – round garden bed with yellow flowers (group freebie)
  • PILOT – Potted plant shelves, Garden tools & Garden supplies
  • MudHoney – Standing pillows
  • Cheeky Pea – Sara picnic basket (spring)
  • Tatty Soup – Lowe rug (plum; Tatty Soup is no more, but you can find this designer’s stuff at her new store, Junk)
  • Alouette – Homemade tent (I think this was a Lazy Sunday release, but it’s on her store at regular price)

Bathroom

And here we have the most “unnatural” thing in SL: a bathroom (unless it’s for cybersex of course), but I love both that toilet and the shower, so why not put them out of my inventory? The toilet in particular, with all that decoration, is just 2 LI, so now you know why it’s a must show.

  • Dutchie – Vintage copper shower, bathrobe (white, modified to look blue-grey), classic medicine cabinet & bathroom mat
  • LAQ Decor ~ Toilet (white)
  • bitter vanilla – Disinfection bowl

Bedroom up

This is how the house interior looks like, with the improvised second level and bedroom.

LISP Summerhouse

And this is part of the”backyard”, with LISP’s Persimmon Summerhouse and Cheeky Pea’s Deconstructed chairs dominating the scene. Other elements:

  • Cheeky Pea – Bowl planter, Deconstructed side table, Ansel wall art frames & Ansel console table
  • MudHoney – Melissa drink tray
  • The Loft – Wagon table (bleached)
  • Culprit – Heirloom rug
  • Trompe L’oeil – Steampunk lamp (gacha)
  • M&M Deco – Calathea #3
  • 22769 ~ [bauwerk] – Fabric lamp (ceiling mounting)
  • what next – Vintage poster (Libraire) & Row of books
  • keke – Summer bottle
  • MonkeyWorks – Potted plant
  • Anaconda S – Pot plant #7
  • LISP – Ygritte reclaimed divider (natural mirror, modded to add transparency effect)
  • Tartessos Arts – Panorama telescope

If I were normal like most people, I would keep this house and plot for a long time. But no, I couldn’t stay in the same plot for more than three months… The hell!

Seaside Cottage

Erasure

Last week, while working on a parcel where I was to place Trompe L’Oeil’s new Seaside cottage I noticed the inventory folder where I used to keep all my furniture, houses, potted plants, prim food, walls and fences, pavers and boardwalks, gazebos and whatnot relatively well organized was missing. Initially I thought I had mistakenly moved it and placed it inside another folder (by accidentally dragging it to another location), as it has happened before, but a quick search proved me wrong. Then I thought SL was misbehaving, as usual, and the folder has gone temporarily unavailable due to some error (a friend of mine claims to have experienced that in the past). I logged off and then logged back in several times, even with three different viewers, to see if that would “unblock” the folder… but it didn’t show up either. I tried other tricks I found on the Internet, what other people in similar situations had tried before with or –more frequently– without success, and again, nothing happened. Several attempts later, and with no positive results, I just quit, resigned.

Almost two weeks after waking up to that nightmare, I stopped trying to figure out what erased six years of records of my virtual doings. It is clear the exercise is futile: what’s already lost, forever is gone.

Seaside Cottage and Heat's trees

When you think SL is purely a “computer” world, you can think of hundreds of fixes to this mishap, from tools to perform automatic backups of your inventory (even paying a fee to LL for storage) to methods to quickly recover deleted objects (again, maybe even paying LL a fee for the minuscule hassle). I have a vague idea of reading somewhere that’s actually the way copybotting was born, though, so that may well explain why such tools don’t exist or aren’t allowed in SL anymore. All that remains is to think of this misadventure as the virtual equivalent of a RL natural disaster of which you have no control at all, like a hurricane or a tornado that wipes out and sweeps away all your belongings in an instant. I even imagined all my furniture flying up and up a gruesome funnel accompanied by Dorothy and Toto, and landing several hundred sims away. A phenomenon like that doesn’t take inventory of your possessions to find out what’s more valuable to you and then skip it, nor selectively picks up miscellany only. It blows everything away and leaves you in limbo, not knowing what to do or where to go.

Seaside Cottage

Yet, I have to be grateful and express my sincerest thanks to Winter Thorn, of what next?, Kriss Lehmann, the Botanical guy, and Elle Kirshner, of Second Spaces, for helping me to recover some of the loses right after the accident. Winter uses a redelivery system in her store, so I was able to get back the things I have bought from what next? in the last two years without disturbing her at all. I had a problem with two products that wouldn’t deliver, though (they showed up on the list, but the redelivery didn’t come out), so I contacted Winter and told her what had happened and asked her if she could check the thingy out. She did that and went even further: she sent me a copy of every single product I have ever bought from what next?, both from the inworld store and the marketplace. Kriss was incredible too. When I contacted him I was hoping he could send me the products I bought from Botanical during the Summerfest 2013 event, a mere two weeks before (yes, those were gone too, and the items from The Garden event as well). Instead he sent me a notecard detailing everything I had bought from Botanical during the last year and then some, and asked me if I needed all of that back. And Elle, she even accepted a picture from this blog as a proof of purchase of one of my favorite Second Spaces products ever, because I didn’t have the proper transaction history details from SL website. You guys are awesome!!!

Heart's Wildwood oaks

I guess there’s always something positive to be learned even from a bad experience, so here are few things I’m now more aware of, for your consideration:

  • Consider buying from stores that have some redelivery system implemented (for copyable products only, obviously). In its absent, at least see if the store owner has a customer-friendly redelivery policy. Why? Because, in case of disaster the redelivery system will let you get a new copy of a previously bought item without disturbing the store owner, or in the case of existing a redelivery policy only, you could ask the shopkeeper for help with confidence. Of course, it doesn’t mean you should ignore the rest of the market, but stores with redelivery systems care more about their customers (that’s a guess).
  • If your favorite store has no redelivery system, encourage its owner(s) to implement one. You may need to give him/her some convincing reasons of why that’s a good idea, like having happier customers or a simpler/more effective customer service department, perhaps? It may be that they prefer if you buy the product again, not because that would be easier, but because that’s how they earn their living, you know. So you may encounter strong resistance that way.
  • In case of trouble, it may be reason enough to ask for help if the missing product costs 300L, 500L or 1000L, but hell, it’s faster if you simply buy that 25L or 50L item again, don’t you think?
  • Copy/Mod objects are the best. I always try to buy copyable objects because I’m always rebuilding things, and it’s easier to select all objects at once and click delete rather than going one by one and taking them back (I’m lazy, I know). Now there’s a more practical reason to keep buying copyable items: they are the only candidates for redelivery. Non-copyable but transferable objects are a one time buy, and you know that, so don’t be silly and ask a shopkeeper to redeliver trans products.
  • Every 30 days, make a backup of your Transaction History, from the Second Life’s website. Ages ago, we had access to a longer transaction record, but at some point LL decided we didn’t need that, and so now there’s only a month of data available at all times. If you need help, the store owner will ask you to prove you bought the object in the first place (logical, no?).

Seaside Cottage

There are a few questions that now I ask myself regarding SL stores and redelivery systems. Since I never thought about this before (being the first time I have had to use them), I wonder, for instance:

  • If some stores have redelivery systems, why is it that the rest do not? Is it something difficult to implement? Is it costly? Is it too much trouble?
  • Why is it that the Marketplace doesn’t have a redelivery component for copyable products? Again, is it something difficult to implement? Is it not worth it? Is it too much work for the computer to handle? Would that be too much to ask from LL?

Finally, here is a list of a few buildings and furniture stores with redelivery terminals (that I’m aware of). There are no landscaping/gardening stores in this list because I didn’t lose any of my greenies (they are safe in a different folder) but undoubtedly that’s something I will check as well.

  • what next?
  • cheeky pea
  • PILOT
  • Trompe L’Oeil
  • POST – though there’s no sign or mechanism in store
  • Breno
  • Kuro
  • Dysfunctional Designs
  • TIA
  • Barnesworth Anubis
  • Fanatik
  • Mudhoney
  • End of Daze

Seaside Cottage and Wildwoods

You’ll keep seeing their products showcased in this blog because, after this incident, they have won my gratitude and trust just for having that simple script active. To the rest, I would like to encourage you to emulate these nice fellows and use a redelivery system as part of your regular customer service. Maybe most clients won’t be using it, and that’s nice, but if it doesn’t hurt to have one, why not?

Seaside Cottage and Wildwoods

{ In the pictures } House: Trompe L’Oiel’s Seaside Cottage (available at Collabor88 right now). || Trees: Lilith Heart‘s Wildwood giant oaks forest and shrubs. You may have been seeing those big oaks for a long time now, being basically the Wild Oaks that have been in the market for two years now, but they have been reworked and arranged in mesh modules to create impressive forests, with roots, ferns, saplings and floor bases. If you already have the old oaks, maybe you can skip this release, but if you want lots of details, then this is an essential package.

Au coin de la rue

Lionheart Kiara is getting street names, and there’s already one labeled: Route 1, Atoll Coastal Road. This is the old pavement way that connects Kiara with adjacent Vitani and Kopa, to the east. Mine has no name yet, so I’m living au coin de la rue… The first one runs parallel to the north of Route 1 and ends at the sim’s emblematic Harry Potter-like Wizard’s Tower; the second one runs perpendicular to both and ends at the sim’s northern edge.

House in Kiara

The house is a modest structure that only has room for the basics. It’s the Little Getaway from Designer Prims. The only modifications I made were resizing and adding a second door to the back of the house, so I could access the backyard easily. Though it looks simple (and it is), it comes with several floor and wall texture options, door locks, and shutters that you can show or hide from view. I also added a car for the first time because I heard that LL worked on sim crossings recently, and that now it’s a little bit easier to travel from sim to sim without being sent to Mars on the try. I hope that’s true, and it seems so because I’ve seen several neighbors enjoying a ride lately.

{ Other items} Nature: 3D Trees: Banyan tree. Botanical: Mesh Mediterranean Cypress. Buddhabeats: Birch (2012). Frog’s Garden: Ivy. Heart’s Garden Center: Harmony grass (short). Organica: Bristlecone Pine (3). Yoneya: Poplar.  ||  Etc: Barnesworth Anubis: Garden fence (white). Haru Motors: HM VW BT M (Black). lame: Mia’s Pergola. PILOT: Larkin Set – Hanging Chair. we’re CLOSED: Awning white (painted red). Zacca: IshiDatami (Shadow).

Au coin de la rue 1Au coin de la rue 2

There’s not much about originality inside the house. I’ve used most of the items before –maybe with some rearrangement– except for Breno’s colorful Cardiff Petal chairs and Second Spaces‘ Eure Drafting Stool (in red) turned into a table, with Dutchie Glass vase with yellow flowers on top of it. Special mention goes to Trompe Loeil‘s Hanging Tri-Planter (yellow one, below), available at Collabor88 event. It looks nice with XED Designs Green phormium (significantly resized for a proportionate look), but I think any other hanging or small size plant will do; actually, adding any other items that may fit in will be more than ok, or even keeping the pots empty, as most people do.

Trompe Loiel hanging

{ Other items} Nature: Dutchie: Aloe vera. #NuLL: Koke bonsai. Tatty Soup: Tall lily vase (white). Xed Design: Potted dracaena (terracotta); Rubber plant (terracotta).  ||  Etc: Aria: Nina pendant light. [*Art Dummy!: For winter contemplation (silence in black); Idle (pompom flowers and vase). Bazar: Arizona – Black board. bitter vanilla:  Stepladder (red). Cheeky Pea: Hutton table (worn, resized and darkened; this item is from The Men’s Dept‘s May event). Culprit: Zen stone candles (from FaMESHed‘s first birthday event). floorplan: Pallet couch (burnt). lame, Kyle’s rug (Sunsplash). ililo (renamed +ilo+): Ind lamp (red). MMGraffiti’s: Wall decoration – Picture frames (blue). PILOT: Miller positive words A to C. POST: Afterburner occasional table (large). SFW Industries: Texture changing rug (Currents). Trompe Loeil: Bamboo ring lamp (from The Arcade gatcha Spring 2013 event); Pallet Lounger. what next: Flyaway wall art (dandelion, black). Zigana: Rug (Mahavra).

Au coin de la rue backyard

Hell, that was a lot of items! And I thought I had kept things homely. The backyard, fortunately, is definitely more simple. There’s only a couple of lame’s Angel’s Hanging Chairs (in white) “attached” to Botanical’s Wooden arbor with ivy. That’s the way they have them on display at the store, and I loved how they looked, so I’m just repeating the same concept at home. The wooden arbor were originally available at The Garden event, but now that it is over you can find them at Botanical inworld store, as well as in the marketplace.

Au coin de la rue pond

The parcel’s east side holds the main garden area. Again, it’s pretty simple: Studio Skye‘s Enchanted pond (available from the marketplace) surrounded by some vegetation. There’s also Cheeky Pea‘s Alice Pergola (another item from The Garden event).

Au coin de la rue side yard

{ Other items} Nature: 19 Motorcycle (EDO Japan): Willow tree. 3D Trees: Triple Beech. Botanical: Cattails; Pond style dragonflies. Culprit: Lotus plants. Garden World: Hosta Corfu Lily. Organica: Lotus leaves. Tiki Tattoo: Papaya tree.  ||  Etc: +ilo+: Garden set. Studio Skye: Wooden Bridge (old mossy).

Suddenly, I feel tired, lol. Furnishing a house isn’t easy for sure. Next time, I’ll rezz a canopy and a toilet, and that will be it. Or hire someone to do it for me, hehe.