it has been a year.
three years of living alone proved to rl!sian that she is not built for it.
consequently a lot of rl!sian’s actual intellectual [eating implements] have been used up irl in the successful incorporating of a co-operative — a non-profit social enterprise company — which has so far raised the capital to buy a house for rl!sian and some others, and hopes to house more queer disabled people in the area soon. it is a financial model which frankly more disabled queers need to get on, since we are in the most danger. we are the poorest. we are the most vulnerable. finally getting a place she can call home after three solid years of not having that has been in some ways a gamechanger. waking up in a place where the morning sound is birdsong is a healing thing.
meanwhile in secondlife: sian recently redecorated. it was inevitable. sian broke her green-only rule for pride this year, and then went to core and said, what colour now?
core told sian to wear red and gold from now on. so red and gold in some variation it is.
sian always goes all in with this. so her home at acéphale, which she largely blendered herself, is in a new process of redecorating. sian is considering turning the stonework terracotta. stay tuned.
as part of her changeup, sian has acquired a legacy body. now, the maitreya lara x body is the best body in sian’s opinion. no question, no notes. but the change from lara to lara x seems to have not worked out for maitreya, once the industry leader, now falling off. it seems to have had a similar effect that moving from the wii to the wii u did for nintendo. for the longest time, it was maitreya and all the other bodies. now, suddenly, less than half of new products have an option for the maitreya lara x.
a couple of years ago, legacy was a distant third after maitreya and the ebody reborn body (sian found a reddit post from 2023 predicting that reborn would soon be the only show in town), but legacy seems to have become the default after years of being an also-ran, without ever really changing much. this may have something to do with how as of this year, literally everyone in secondlife now gets two free scaled down legacy bodies, meaning that as mesh bodies go, it is the de facto standard.
it’s just not as good as the maitreya lara x. but there’s more clothes for it. so having a second body adds to sian’s options.
now, sian’s very first mesh body was the old tmp (the mesh project) body from the shops. it was the first mesh body available, and it was widely and vocally hated by the sl community, who quickly adopted the original slink body over it, and then the maitreya body over the slink body.
it was beautiful, but its interface was clunky as all hell: you had to buy things from the shops with an incredibly clunky shopping hud that a dear friend used to describe with absolute certainty as a “nickel and dime grift”, and its asset-server driven hud was slow, intrusive and counterintuitive. everything was proprietary, and appliers worked like apps, meaning that if the asset server stopped working, you lost all the appliers and you were stuck with a body that looked nice but was stuck with one skin forever. It was like an apple phone. you bought the media on the app, but you didn’t own it.
sian thought she’d see how her old tmp body and head was doing. it was… stuck like this. it’s dead.
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| (barber’s adagio for strings plays over the sim media stream) |
none of the huds work. they’re not supported anymore by the asset server, so they stopped working. even the alpha hud was broken. it’s useless.
this is relevant because the tmp body is the legacy body. in that the legacy body is what the shops/meshproject/whoever they are did after abandoning the tmp stuff. and even though the old, unlamented stylemode hud is broken forever, the asset server is still there. fully eight years after abandoning the tmp body, sian was hugely surprised to find that all the applier assets she ever bought for the tmp body… were preloaded in the legacy hud.
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| (remember graves? graves was sian’s r2 before r2 was a thing.) |
welp, that was a thing. sian honestly has no idea what to think about this. like, it’s not like she’s likely to use any of them. it’s just strange.
speaking of r2, a couple years ago, r2 did a thing where they moved from maitreya to legacy for a few months, before moving back to maitreya. sian didn’t buy any of those things because she didn’t have a legacy body. except now she does. so sian went and gave a load of lindens to rei2 aya to fill in her collection gaps. because of course she did.
featured outfit:
r2 r2l enten leg; r2l goku pasties and top; r2l kochi gloves
neokitsch sosumi temporal implant
sole bt belt miki; pauldron float sg1; headset ssr
also seen:
midwest lonny chair
ashes to ashes the really comfy sofa
isil cyberpunk japanese coffee table
model’s own house build; sian’s book about queer living in sl (send sian a nc if you want a copy)
