OK, I do way too much for me to dedicate this entire blog to fashion. I love fashion–don’t get me wrong–it’s just that if I were to do fashion-fashion-fashion all the time, I would get bored. I have to cycle between totally different–yet related–projects. I have to basically continue doing things or else I’d go crazy. I’m in seclusion, literally, locked up from physical contact from the outside world for over half a year long in my seclusion experiment. This SL stuff is what fills up my day 24/7.

Fashion & Skin releases will periodically be posted here or I might forget. Sometimes I might not post them here, especially if I am planning on releasing a full series of skin tones (Gaeae for ex). My flickr is usually up-to-date, but the inworld store is your best best. Sometimes I make something but never actually get to release it until a year later or more.

Not all of my projects are on my blog. Your best bet on my SL projects is to drop by with a flight feather and explore my 4 sims on Second Life. It’s really an undocumented experience, cutting edge research in its own way. o.O

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UPDATED
Contact: Ina Centaur
July 4 2008

RFL Grand Finale Vendor Fair & 4-Sim Fashion Show

Skin City, Second Life: The “RFL Grand Finale Vendor Fair” opening on July 1st, and running until the end of Relay of Life on July 19th, features some of RFL 2008’s best fashions. An invitational “RFL Grand Finale Fashion Show” showcasing these RFL fashions live on the runway will occur on the Sky Globe 4-sim stage on 7/6 @ 1 PM and 7/7 @ 7PM SL Time (GMT-7). All proceeds of the event will benefit the American Cancer Society through the Relay for Life venture on Second Life. But, most interestingly, every single component of each outfit — from skin, to hair, to shoes, to eyes, to clothing, of course — is an RFL item.

The following fashion brands will have their RFL fashions shown live on the Sky Globe 4-sim runway:

Alienbear Designs
_AR Another Realism
Bailers
Bewitched
Enchant 3D
Eros by Keth
~flirt~
french Kisses
Haute Style & Co
House of Heart
IC-Skins
Magika
Mirada
Nicky Ree
Nova
Opium
PrimPlay
Sam’s Secret
Shiny Things
Tesla
Topaz Square

All fashions can be purchased directly in the Vendor Fair adjacent to the fashion show venue at the Sky Globe, Skin City.

ABOUT THE SKY GLOBE:
550 meters above the SL Globe Theatre, the Sky Globe is a postmodern architectural building spanning the intersection of 4 island simulators, with the stage on its own sim adjacent to three audience seating venues in neighboring island simulators:
http://Slurl.com/secondlife/Skin%20City/245/33/632
http://Slurl.com/secondlife/sLiterary/31/24/632
http://Slurl.com/secondlife/Shakespeare/232/231/632

ABOUT SKIN CITY
Since August 2007, Skin City has been the one-stop place to see a wide selection of skins, shapes, eyes, and other avatar accessories on SL. The build is grayscale based on Frank Miller’s Sin City (theatrical version), and only the various shops give it color. Visitors are told: Turn the right corner in Skin City, and you can find anything. Merchants are told: We are noir until you!

Vendor Fair @ http://Slurl.com/secondlife/Skin%20City/220/85/555

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On behalf of RFL and fashion in Second Life, Skin City invites all
designers who have created items for RFL to participate in the RFL
Grand Finale 4-sim Fashion Show and Vendor Fair at Skin City and
vicinity.

The RFL Vendor Fair is open to the public from 7/1 to 7/14; designers
may start setting up in the metro region starting on 6/25. The RFL
Grand Finale Fashion Shows are on Sunday 7/6 @ 1 PM SL Time and Monday
7/7 @ 7 PM SL Time. Both events will have search parcels designated
shortly before they open. All designers are welcome to participate in
either or both events. Details below.

RFL Vendor Fair: The RFL Vendor Fair is meant to be a final display of
your RFL designs, and also as a small showcase of the non-RFL designs
you feel represent you the most. To participate in the vendor fair,
you must RSVP by 6/26 11:59 PM SL Time to Ina Minotaur by dropping off
a notecard named “RFL Vendor Fair: (Your Store / Name)” with ad photos
of all of your RFL items, and a rough minimum and maximum prim count
for your proposed store space. Space for the duration of the Fair is
donated by Skin City, and available on a first-come-first-serve-basis.

RFL Fashion Show on 4-Sims: This fashion show will be accessible to
the maximal amount of local audience members, and will be one last
chance for people to hype and rave about these RFL fashions live on
the runway. The only requirement is that each outfit must feature an
item on sale in an RFL vendor. To participate, please drop off a
notecard named “RFL Fashion Show: (Your Store / Name)” to Ina Minotaur
by 6/27 11:59 PM with:

1)       a specific outline of the exact outfit combination(s) you would
want the model(s) to wear—be sure to indicate which outfit item is an
RFL item, and also, if you don’t have preferences for non-RFL outfit
components, please state so. Do NOT drop outfit inventories on Ina
Minotaur.  You will be given more information after processing. You
must show a different RFL item on each model, but there is no explicit
limit on how many models you can clog up
2)      a brief biography about you/your store. LM’s, blog links, and other
information also welcome. Optionally, you may also include exact item
descriptions for the MC to announce.
3)      specify whether you would want to be included in the fashion show
machinima to be distributed for free inworld, and also on youtube,
blip.tv, google videos, and similar media.

The show is pro bono for RFL.

Here is a LM that gets you close to the event location. An exact parcel
will be segmented out when the fair and show open:
http://Slurl.com/secondlife/Skin%20City/225/16/563 

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I’m thinking of the RFL prom - the immersive virtual prom event on Second Life created by the passion of numerous designers, to benefit ACS through Relay for Life. I’m also thinking of data loss, oil paintings, and quantum mechanics… the ephemeralness of everything coherent.  

A younger me used to find it apalling and infuriating that great canvases of oil paintings would burn in a building fire. And be lost forever. I used to regard cases like that with the naive innocence of someone with too much pride in her own era’s distinction. I’d scoff and think — had they done that digitally, it would exist forever. And yet…

The great works of art from the ancient past will outlive the great works of this era. Modern art is relative, and in the eye of the beholder. Digital data is ephemeral. Hard drives fail, CD’s fail, DVD’s fail, flash drives get lost. Simulators on Second life get wiped because their maintenance fees are far too great.

It’s amazing the amount of passion and love people put into Second Life - and the beauty of some of the work is just wow… The insane amount of time and tendency to details the creator puts in… just defies good reason… especiallly when the details won’t survive after its creation - the creator, galvanized by more things to create would never look at it again… the detail, being to subtle and fine, would get overlooked by others, especially when there are a thousand others. (”The greater you are, the less of each of your works.”) And yet, I guess the only thing that really matters is the experience. There’s no gaurantee that the end product will survive or what sorts of freak accidents would prevent it from successfully reaching its destination. It is as Eshi says. It is all about the process of creating it. It is not about the end product, and yet the process of creating it is often unbearable in the horrible way - and while creating it you’re thinking about the end product. But, in the end, it is only about you. There’s a high chance no one will see it beyond you. And a high chance you’d never look at it after you’re done with it. It’s the process, and yet…

I guess that’s why in the middle of my personal life experiment in Second Life I start pursuing live theatre. I’d always strayed away from it after I “developed” my philosophy of life. Really, I studied physics thinking that knowing physics I would be able to understand everything else, and that really wasn’t it. Philosophy was more rhetoric and tenure politics than truth. And bioengineering was just unrigorous physics and luckiness. I used to pity people who spent their time doing art and that sort of stuff, since I thought they were so deep into their own niche they were “shallow” — savants, in a way… and yet, what I wanted to be was a savant too, actually a savant polymath, if that makes sense… Anyway though, live theatre is often not recorded not because of technical reasons but because of politics - recording rights and all. In Second Life, live theatre can’t always be recorded “live” because of lag and “ruthing” and gray-unrezzed-textures - they often render the view not as optimal, and a substantial amount of postwork becomes necessary. Thus, in Second Life, you’re lucky if you see things “in the eye of the creator,” textures rezzed and sculpties rezzed and everything as beautiful as intended.

The other element of a live event involving multiple people is that it isn’t always easy to get all of them together simultaneously. Some things only happen once in a lifetime - once in all of creation and existence. The extreme amount of anti-entropy required and butterfly effect and the mess that might precipitate an event. It’s a miracle it happened. And even if the medium has limited reach due to technological lackings… I guess I was lucky to have taken a part in it.

And then back to data. The loss of it. The capital necessary to maintain it. And even then there’s the possibility of these digital bytes succumbing to its own butterfly effect as random cables suffer random effects to sudden blow up a huge data center. I’m thinking about the no-cloning theorem in quantum computing. And I’m thinking of paintings, the massive oil canvases. They can’t really be cloned either - taking a photo just isn’t the same, and even so-called restorations where a lesser paints over the work of the master…

But I’m thinking about simulators on Second Life again, and the beautiful things created on them… and then destroyed on them because of the cost to maintain these simulators. It’s just such a pity when copying data is so easy in other digital mediums, and yet so hard in the infrastructure of Second Life. Why isn’t there an archive.org for Second Life?

I dunno, I guess I have a super-weak weak spot for beauty. If told that the only way I can immortalize beauty if only for the span of another’s lifetime were to lose my own, yet pass on what transpires of it, I would… You live and then you die.

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Everyone has a crush on me!

In other news:

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     Winia is a idealized realistic girl. The pack comes with freckles and different eyshadow and undershadow variations, and also a pale vampire-goth/tone. Also includes convenient necklace, which you can hang your logo on. Winia is a pack based on my latest skin releases in my store IC-Skins on Second Life.

Click To Play

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In RL, I turned 24 today, and although I’m still not done writing the bio of “Ina Centaur” (and far from finishing the full one) I guess you can read the bit of it here. I would request only that you not be ageist about my real-self – I didn’t mean to deceive you by not telling you straight ahead that I’m not the 50-year old “business maven” that you’ve somehow painted me as, nor do I want you to believe that because I am so young, I must necessarily be naive and cannot possibly understand you. I hope that actions speak louder than prejudices… And understand that few young people have the mental discipline and purpose to undergo a long period of seclusion; and that, although others may be less mature, I am different in my own way.  

I decided to take the day off from SL to read a story a friend (whom I thought never read) forwarded me. Eudeamon. I really wasn’t expecting much from the story, but the first three pages really — I mean really — pulled me into it. The structure of the story is formulaic, and the bildungsroman is really only notable because of a series of deux ex machinas… the protagonist suffers the usual syndrome of appearing “clueless” in spite of her heroic feats and leaps to danger… but yet, that’s somehow realistic (to me, at least) in that jumping into a burning building to save a baby really is just “something to do” when the scenario is encountered. But, really, the content and the ideas and the world of Eudeamon - Eudemonia - they’re simply transcendental.

Eudemonia is a planned city that enforces a new form of punishment — one that Banished criminals by forcing them to wear stark black anonymizing suits hooked up to their neurophysiology and body that deliver punishments automatically for each transgression. These “Banished” are allowed to walk through the city, but would be punished if they contact civilians or enter houses or handle cash or if they pursue a number of other “common luxuries”. The public is told to ignore their existence (and although you’d probably cite more optimistic authors’ fic in how the public can’t be told to do things, from experience and RL, you would know full well that it really is the other way around… in reality, the public believes in whatever the state-muddled media and mind-controlling PR tells them), and the Banes’ punishment is supposedly further enhanced by their being in medias reas, and yet ostracized from both “everyday luxuries” and also the normal flow of society.

But honestly though my description really does not do the story justice *at all.* There is just so much more to it. Reading it and savoring every word, letting the story carry you to its climax is really a transcendental experience.

…

In other news, we finally got divorced today. In hindsight, I guess the relationship had been doomed to failure from the beginning. There’s the fact that he would risk hurting me just to save his “reputation”; he’d wreck a chunk of a city just out of dumbness; he doesn’t get the idea of “talking things through”; he’d really rather involve everyone in the world with his own personal drama… He typically demands that I look at every miniscule thing he makes immediately, and would throw this most outrageous childish tantrum otherwise – even if I am busy multitasking some major conference. (It’s hardly true the other way around. I’ll make something and — whether I’m shamelessly-self-ad about it or in my typically lowkey way — he’d basically just ignore it because it’s something *I* did… I’m generally prolific, but I don’t really have the time to tell people about *everything* I do… just the occasional stuff I find interesting.) He’d start a project, get me involved to do the art part of it and also to publicize it… and then belittle my work, abandoning it after I’ve invested not only painstaking hours, but also thousands of dollars… saying things like he can’t work all the time without pay (what the heck am I doing then?). He knows full well that I really can’t afford to pay him, nor did he mention *anything* about pay prior to the project, not unless I break out of this independent artist phase.  

I keep on thinking of this character from my urban fantasy. Her father had warned her that if she married a paid goon, she’d eventually have to pay for sex. Quoting Alzarius: “The man doesn’t care about you. He cares only about your money–ahhh don’t interrupt me saying you’re not well-endowed like your cousins. He wants you for yourself. No, not that. I mean your intrinsic value. He sees you as a commodity to rip off one day, after he’s drained you of your talent, energy, and zeal for life. No, don’t turn away from me like that… The point is, eventually he will force you to pay for sex–you’re far more in love with him than he is with you… Stop it. Don’t you see? He’s impoverished out of will. He wants to constantly have to work for money–and if there’s something he does that won’t get him money, he’s going to eventually stop doing it. Yes, he will eventually stop loving you.”

But, honestly, for me it really doesn’t matter. He’s twelve years older than me, but I won’t get the chance to live to his age. As much as it pains me to think about it this way, I really can’t avoid it. More than anything else, I feel like a Bane — although I guess I’m stuck in Katrina (from Eudeamon)’s boat in that I wound up a Bane without actually commiting a major transgression. I’m divorced from the world, really, because unlike all its other denizens, I have the bittersweet lust for it, and making something out of it, but don’t have the luxury of time. I can’t have the external world define my value anymore. I have to find my eudeamon.

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Right now I’m eating a late breakfast of ?? - supposedly “limited edition” as made by the owner of a famous Taiwanese ?? store.  (Made once a year for Dragon Day.) I’m already in the mood for drawing day… and I can almost hear the sounds of the nostalgic beach from memory where I spent the precious hours of one summer doing beach-side sketches on-the-spot for the passer-by’s… as I ran away from the research I should have been doing for NSF/REU…

I’m thinking about Primtings and pieces I want to interpret in 3d. I woke up at 3 AM and one of the first sites I visited forced a popup of google.com’s homepage with:

This might just be the primting I’ll make.

Well, more importantly, I’m thinking about my vision for Primtings and defining a new art movement. So Duchamp launched the “readymade” art movement, and everyone on SL takes snapshots that blend their own figures and interpretation into a 3d piece… now what would it be like if people can obtain parts of a painting to do what they want with it and create their own interpretive extensions? That’s sort of the trend with the web nowadays - it’s all about mashup’s and what you create from the new interpretation of old information. There’s the old “open source” referring to source code, and then there’s “open (source) knowledge” (Wikipedia) and… might the new thing be “open (source) art”?

“If everyone contributes to something, then the piece belongs to everyone.”

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sLiterary is a proud supporter of “Drawing Day 2008.” This is an international event where everyone around the world takes the day to DRAW — and, if you’re a purist… you do nothing but draw for the entire day.  This year, the global effort hopes to reach the goal of 1 million drawings worldwide to art-in-lieu-of-shout: “art for the sake of art!”

On Drawing Day June 7 at midnight SL Time, I will be starting a 24 hour drawing vigil. I’ll have my Wacom pen in-place-of-a-lance as I draw non-stop (aside from bio-breaks). You can join me on this marathon by drawing and uploading your works for display inworld. We have setup a special gallery inworld where you may display your pieces drawn on this special day pro bono: http://SLurl.com/secondlife/sLiterary/116/30/25

Ina Centaur
“The Artist of sLiterary”

More INFO (from http://drawingday.org) :
When is Drawing Day?
Drawing Day this year is June 07, 2008. Unless otherwise noted, Drawing Day will be the first Saturday of June each year.

What is Drawing Day?
One day a year, the world stops to remember that joy we had when we first picked up a pencil and created our first piece of art - that’s what Drawing Day is all about. The goal for Drawing Day is simple - to create enough drawings to make some noise worldwide for the sake of art. 2008 is the first year of this initiative. Our goal is definitely a long-shot, but we’re aiming for 1 million drawings worldwide. We have no precise measure to know if we reach this goal. If we come close we will all definitely know. Even if we reach 10% of our goal in the first year of this initiative, it will be a great achievement but we will continue aiming for the magic million. Check out our press release. http://www.prweb.com/releases/drawingday/2008/prweb939464.htm

Why is Drawing Day important?
Illustrators and artists alike often go unappreciated. The creation of art and illustration captured our minds ever since we were children and our parents turned the pages of our first book. These stories came to life via the illustrations that took us to an imaginary world full of inspiration.

Whether you’re a professional illustrator or you just enjoy the occasional scribble, you can give back to the illustration community by drawing on this day. By injecting more and more illustration and art into our community, we are not only showing our appreciation to our fellow artists, but we are spreading awareness of the joy of drawing. It is important that you contribute - Drawing Day will only be a success if we all participate and make some noise. So, please tell your friends and spread the word.  http://www.drawingday.org/spread-the-word.php

How do I participate?
To join in on this event is simple - as simple as picking up a pencil and drawing. However, the most important part is sharing your art with the world.

In today’s age of technology, the ability to share your art with the world is easier than ever. We have compiled a huge list of ways to participate and share your art online.

Inworld, the sLiterary “Drawing Day” Gallery will host all drawings done on June 7 by participating Second Life artists. On June 7, we will also hold a 24 hour drawing marathon-vigil at the Gallery:  ????

Outside of SL, these are some of the of the best ways to reach a broad audience. http://www.drawingday.org/participate.php

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The data center where my servers are hosted at has had a major emergency fire this past weekend. Many features of my site are not available until they fix the resolvers - ETA this week.

Downtime affected (and still affects) quite a number of people. They got /. and dck’ed.

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