Our boy in Africa

Charity in Second Life is very much in the air today as we’re about to see the opening of the 2010 RFL Clothing Fair.  With all this activity I was reminded that I’m overdue an update on our own charity.  Here at DollyRock we’ve been sponsoring a child in Kenya via Plan International for almost 2 years.  Contributions are collected at the little Gratis store in the mall outside the main store and any shortfall at the end of the month is made up by DollyRock.  So even if you haven’t donated directly if you’ve ever bought anything at DollyRock you’re still sharing the love!

If you’ve never heard of Plan, it’s an international charity (M. Linden recently stated that over 60% of SL residents are not in the US so I feel its important to be aware of  our global community when we’re choosing charities).  It’s a humanitarian, child-focused development organisation with no religious, political or governmental affiliations.

We are paying £12 a month (approx. $24 USD or 6700L) to help fund projects in this impovrished community.

The child that we sponsor is Mark, who is 7 years old and lives in the Homabay region of Kenya which borders Tanzania. He lives with his Mum, Dad and older brother, Michael in a mud and sticks house with a corrugated metal roof. He attends preschool which is situated less than 30 minutes away but the nearest health facility is more than two hours away. The family obtain water from an open community well.  Plan does not encourage specific information or photographs of sponsored children to be shared on web pages but if you would like more information please don’t hesitate to contact me, Cherry Cheevers, inworld or email me at cherry@dollyrock.co.uk

I’ve put more information about Mark at the donation point.   Thank you so much for helping 

Hope

Hope is a variation of a design I created especially for the RFL Clothing Fair that starts on March 13th 2010.  The purple edition will be available at the Fair.  DollyRock will be on the London sim – more info during the week!

Sculpted plaid shirt/jacket with collar and matching trim and buttons.  Teeny tiny denim shorts.  Sleeveless tshirt with retro design and those boots.  Plaid latex!!   You know you want it!

Evangeline

Ruching and more ruching in this simple, cute spring dress. Banded with sparkly brocade the zuzzy (is that even a word?) skirt sits low on the hips. Complete with glitch pants and comes in coffee, cyan and scarlet.

Increasing detail on sculpted prims

Have you found that occasionally prims don’t look right?  Funny lines or parts not seeming the correct shape?  Well here’s a trick to increase the detail of your scultped prims with a simple setting change.

Go to the Advanced menu at the top of your Second Life viewer.  If it’s not showing make it visible with Ctrl+Alt+D (Windows) or Opt+Ctrl+D (Mac).

Near the bottom of this menu is an option called Debug Settings.

In the window type:  RenderVolumeLODFactor

In the window that appears change the default 1.25 to 4.  Close the window and that’s it.  Your sculpted prims will look LOTS better!

The new viewer and new life to our inventories.

I’ve spent the last couple of days playing with the new viewer.  So far, so good.  It’s a bit resource hungry for me right now but it does have some amazing features.  For example:

Ever since I started designing in 2006 my outfits have always been no copy/yes transfer (except for freebies).  The permission preferences seem to fluctuate, rather like fashion itself.    Personally,  I hate messing with gift cards if I want to give a gift.  I like to just pick something out and hand it over, it seems a lot more personal than a card.  I also think that if a customer buys an item from me they should be at liberty to pass it to an alt or a friend or even sell it at a yard sale.  Just my personal opinion and this argument is as old as SL itself.    Okay, okay…stick with me.  One of the criticisms I’ve heard of ‘no-copy’ is the inability to create folder of clothes and we all love to do the mix’n match thing.   With the release of the new viewer now we CAN create folders with no-copy clothes and objects appearing more than once in more than one folder.  It doesn’t contravene permissions…it’s just MAGIC!!

So if you have any ‘no-copy’ items and you’d like to create wearable folders with them please watch the video from Torley, below.   (He explains it soooo much better).  I hope you’re as excited as I am!!