Xeriko's Attic: A mixed virtuality - Xeriko's Attic

This year's Hair Fair 2009 is on. It started last Saturday at midnight, and will go on until the 4th of July. As most of you may already know, it's been full since then, so getting in is quite a pain in the virtual you-know-what. Most people are very anxious to visit the Candy Land thinking about getting a new hairdo to impress their typist, some friends or any passersby, but anyone visiting the sugary installation should have another thing in mind: pleasing your consumerist desires  will help someone else smile. Hair designers will be donating part of the profits (from 50% to 100%) to Locks of Love, a RL non-profit organization dedicated to help disadvantaged children suffering medical hair loss by providing hair prosthetics (more or less what they say in their website).

Four sims with a limited capacity of 50 or so avatars at one time (that is some 200 people in total) is a real threat to  anyone's sanity if you consider that hair is one of the best-selling items in SL (that is, everybody wants some novelty when they see it at hand). With 1.3 million people logging in regularly and concurrency reaching 70-80 thousand people at peak hours, it's more than logical to assume a great-great number of them could be trying to access the fair as you read this... and failing miserably. But then, paradise is not what you find at the end of a TP. Once you're in, other issues await you, mainly an insurmountable lag that makes walking or flying around almost unbearable.

Every time there is such an event, someone repeats the same sentence over and over again: Please, use the most simple outfit and avoid wearing prim-based stuff, since they are one of the primary sources of lag. So for this fair (I don't know if they have done it before), the organizers are offering a "free lag kit" (includes skin a clothes) to render visitors into an homogeneous blob (if there's only one texture running around it makes things easier for your client), while other people keep their Avatar Rendering Cost under control. Yet, some others claim this so-called lag is just a myth (read this post or this one, both written by Gwyneth Llewelyn, for more information). Though it may seem they fail to explain the mystery convincingly, the difference lies between what causes the server to lag and what lags the client (the SL viewer in your machine). In either case, I preferred to follow the "superstitious" rules, and wear this simple outfit to attempt sim admittance. If it helps even a little, I would feel better with myself.

Shirt: Reek - Baseball Tees - Classics (black)
Pants: Weird Monkey Design (WMD) - Sugoi Outfit, "Ronin" Grey (jeans only)
Shoes: ROT - Test Boots
Gloves: SiniStyle - Taped Fingers

Skin: The Abyss - Dave Gears [Light]
Eyes: MADesigns - Awake
Shape: my own

Avatar Rendering Cost:  40.

I have had this Reek Baseball Tees pack for a couple of weeks now, and haven't had the chance to wear any of them, but I think they're perfect for this Hair Fair. And to say the pack costs only 199L and comes in ten different colors (and each in jacket and shirt layers) is a real bargain. There's another similar pack with Baseball Colored Tees for the same price, so you can buy both for great savings.

ROT boots are also an excellent item to have in your inventory (in my opinion). There are few 2 prim shoes out there with this amount of texture detail.

The skin I'm wearing is the new Dave Gears line from The Abyss designer, Khai Sinister. Since I was going hairless (prim-wise), I chose the skin with the best hair scalp (for my taste of course) in my inventory. First, this one is nicely painted with a copperish shade I'm particularly very fond of, and secondly, it has a very natural looking off center hair swirl no other skin has used before (or not among the ones I own). Besides hair and hairless, this one is also available with or without freckles (pictured below, freckled version).

Dave Gears has a twin brother called Steve Law (must be from a different father, judging by the last name --dual insemination?). Steve, the first to be born, is dark haired and kind of soft in the lower eyelid. You can see this second skin in Tact Arida's blog (see the Links section), or head to The Abyss and get it.

Pictures shot in Harold sim [slurl].