I Drink Alone

5th and Oxford cocktail bar, Dot is wearing the "Little Miss" slip

Ros and CJ of 5th and Oxford have been busy at work not only on new skins, but clothes and home furnishings as well. For those of you who saw the pictures of my humble shack, you know that the joint could stand a little classing up so I have bought both the cocktail bar and bed they recently released. Now I'm a girl who loves her drinks and a cocktail bar adds a touch of elegance to any household. Not only is there a bar and stools which are color changeable, but clever drinks and garnishes to put on the bar, and soda siphons to spray at each other, which is generally how my cocktail parties end. Okay, okay, I'm thinking of the wet t-shirt contest at the all you can drink night at my local bar, but I have a rich fantasy life. My one quibble is that only martinis and highballs are provided, to which I ask, "What, no Champale?" I suppose I should be thankful that I have real drinks, and not the girly crap that is so often passed off as a cocktail these days. Take off the training wheels, sisters, and put some gin or whiskey in it!

Are my lips moving while I read?

After a few drinks, I like to settle into the Little Miss bed for some reading before I pass out, errr, go to sleep. The bed is beautifully textured and has cuddle animations, a reading animation, and even lets you bounce on it, although the low ceilings in my shack mean multiple concussions if I try to to do it too often.

Perhaps the most welcome development though, has been 5th and Oxford's foray into lingerie. Lingerie in SL is a paradox: I love having it, but never have occasion to wear it. In that respect it's very much like real life, where tucked away in my dresser drawer are a few very expensive, very fancy items I almost never wear, but I feel better knowing that I *could* if I wanted, and I really want to walk around SL clad in nothing but Little Miss lingerie. I'm wearing the Little Miss slip in the above pics, below you can see the lingerie set which is currently a group gift. Both are available in multiple colors to suit one's mood and the loving detail is evident in the close up of my butt, which makes me wonder when the GreenLife Emerald viewer is going to implement a subtle butt shake to go with the jiggly boobs. Hey, you know what they say, shake your moneymaker!

"Little Miss" fore

"Little Miss" aft

Baby Let's Play House

My new house, "Sea Shacks", in TwentyThirteen

With winter approaching, my nesting instincts have started to stir so I've made the plunge and rented a new place. Those of you who Plurk might remember my request a few weeks back for a sim which had a decrepit old port town feel to it, a look that proved difficult to find. For the life of me I can't understand why someone wouldn't want to build a replica town dominated by a cannery and warehouses. But one helpful soul mentioned Jori Watler, who suggested TwentyThirteen, an island with seven residences which met my requirements for privacy and abject despair. And what's not to like? I could have lived in an abandoned factory, an anarchist's warehouse, a bunker, or several other appropriately dingy buildings. I settled on the "Sea Shacks," however, which are hidden behind a hillock within view of a ship which has apparently hit shore and partially sunk. If my new home were getting an award in a high school yearbook, it would have been elected "House Most Likely To Have Someone Murdered In It", which is fine by me. I'm externally sunny and cheerful, but I also have vast unplumbed reservoirs of despair, and my new house reflects that bleakness.

Here I am, resting at home. The broken windows really don't keep the wind out and since the house is literally built on water the boots are necessary for high tide. I have tried to make the house a little more cheerful with my Bettie Page Voyager Mannequin Head lamp, Artilleri ashtray, and lamp from 120BPM. Can't you just hear the clock slowly ticking? If I actually had a wife and a servant girl, it would be modern update of Ethan Frome.

There are occasionally stunning views from the house. I solve this by quickly going into the GreenLife Emerrald viewer's handy menu of windlight settings and selecting "Foggy Morning".

It does get cold on the foggy mornings, so Hair OH's "oh my SnowMan" hair/hat combo along with the matching "Lovers Muffler" helps keep me warm. You'd think I'd have enough sense to not wear low rise jeans, but I don't.

For me, nothing says class like having a couch on your porch. After all, what could go wrong with a large piece of furniture made of absorbent material sitting out on an unprotected porch? Take a deep breath. Smell that? Hah! You now have anthrax or some other terrible airborne mold.

Because I live alone and am girlfriendless in SL, I decided a property with two houses was really what I needed. This is the second house on the property. I think it is haunted and I'd be happy to rent it to you to find out.

I'll be sharing more pictures and home decorating tips soon. Let me know if you want a tour!

In Which I Return, To The Sound Of Crickets Chirping

"oh my ramen"

So it appears that a few people have actually missed the blog enough to ask me when I was going to start writing it again. In all honesty, I figured "never" was the proper answer, since I hadn't been feeling particularly creative for a few months before I stopped blogging. Peer pressure being what it is though (and I'm looking at you Bella, and you, Sam B), it was either start blogging again or start smoking again, so true to my Puritan family roots I chose the less pleasurable activity.

Now I know what you're all saying. You're saying, "But Dot, you're charming and perfect and adorable so really how hard can it be for you to blog about your fabulous Second Life?" What? You think it's easy being Dot Lane? I should let you walk a mile in my shape and then you'd find out the truth. But now that I've actually committed to blogging again (I didn't say how *often* I would be blogging though, suckers!) you can look forward to more pointless commentary, more poorly taken pictures, and more bitching about prims which don't fit the shape I stubbornly refuse to change. In other words, be careful what you ask for since you just might get it.

I suppose at this point I should say a very public thank you to Whimsy and Sasy who hung out with me on my birthday and took me shopping with them. They showed me a new store, Hair OH, which, since they were on voice, I totally thought was going to be a replica of the Chicago airport--hey, they said "We're going to OH Hair". My disappointment soon vanished though when I saw how cute the hair was. Not only is the hair there perfect Dot hair, but the hats and bands and hair twists all have color and texture change, which make me very happy. More Hair OH hair:

"oh my snowman" which has an available matching scarf

"oh my honey"

Hair OH group gift

And, if you really must know, the skin is a Fleur Boutique Vanilla Parfait 2, the quilted vest is from E. Watkins and the t-shirt is just a t-shirt.

Walking Away

It's been a great ride everyone, but I am pulling back almost completely from SL. I will have more to say in a few days, but I just don't have the passion for it I once did. What I do have are wonderful memories of amazing, smart, and talented people which have made it all worthwhile. You'll see me in-world on occasion, but just for brief chats and to keep poor Dot from being buried by notices.

And Now For Something Completely Serious.....

Dear Readers:

In my previous post I indicated that I wouldn't be around for a week or so, in-world, on Plurk, blogging, what have you. Then, yesterday on Plurk, I read about a friend who is having some serious medical problems, and when I say serious, I mean life or death. I'm not going to outline them here, but please read this blog post, which gives the broad outlines of the issue, and this post which provides more details.

Shir Dryke is one of the most self-effacing and charming people I've met in SL, makes beautiful lingerie for sale at her Ornamental Life store, and is one of those people who enriches my SL experience. I say this because in this day and age we're gun shy when it comes to calls for help, especially through an anonymous medium. It's so easy to say "that can't possibly be real, that story seems flawed to me". It's almost as if people look for reasons not to help, that they need to convince themselves that a call for help might not be genuine to justify inaction. We need to understand that despite evidence to the contrary, people are basically good.

What can you do? First, and easiest, is to go take a little shopping trip to Ornamental Life. If you haven't shopped there before, you're in for a treat (you can see me wearing some Ornamental Life here). Second, a number of designers are making items specifically as a fundraiser for Shir. I will be blogging them as the appear. Third, you can make a straight cash donation through the heart collection box at Shir's store.

So here comes the hard sell: we've all gone through the pain of someone disappearing from SL and not knowing what happened to them. What would be the pain of someone disappearing from RL, knowing exactly what happened, and not helping?

Not long ago I read an essay from 1985 by the historian Thomas Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humantiarian Sensiblity". Follow that link, go to page 354, and read about "the case of the starving stranger". Haskell writes, "As I sit at my desk writing this essay, and as you, the reader, now sit reading it, both of us are aware that some people in Phnom Penh, Bombay, Rangoon, the Sahel, and elsewhere will die next week of starvation. They are strangers; all we know about them is that they will die. We also know that it would be possible for any one of us to sell a car or a house, buy and airline ticket, fly to Bombay or wherever, seek out at least one of those starving strangers, and save his life, or at the very least extend it. We could be there tomorrow, and we really could save him. Now to admit that we have it in our power to prevent this person's death by starvation is to admit that our inaction--our preference for sitting here, reading and writing about moral responsibility, going on with our daily routine--is a necessary condition for the stranger's death. But for our refusal to go to his aid, he would live." Of course, there are myriad reasons why we are unable to go save the starving stranger, and how much causation would be assigned to us by our inaction. Haskell observes, and rightly so, that "the limits of moral responsibility have to be drawn somewhere and that the 'somewhere' will always fall far short of the much pain and suffering that we could do something to alleviate."

But what really struck me about Haskell's analysis is his comment on what the future holds. After noting that the invention of the airplane has likely altered what we think of as being possible in aiding others around the world because of changing notions of time and distance, Haskell argues "This suggests that new technology--using that word broadly to refer to all means of accomplishing our ends, including new institutions and political organizations that enable us to attain ends otherwise out of reach--can change the moral universe in which we live. Technological innovation can perform this startling feat, because it supplies us with new ways of acting at a distance and new ways of influencing future events and thereby imposes on us new occasions for the attribution of responsibility and guilt. In short, new techniques, or ways of intervening in the course of events, can change the conventional limits within which we feel responsible enough to act. Imagine that we have at our disposal an as yet uninvented technology, more advanced than the airplane, that will enable us to save the starving stranger with minimal expenditure of time and energy, no disruption of our ordinary routine. If we could save him by just reaching out to press a button, then a failure to act would become indefensible."

I pressed a button and donated 10,000L to the cause yesterday. That's a pretty small down payment on hope.

No Fun

I'm on hiatus until the 2oth of January, at least.

Love,

Dot