(Virtual) Prostheses!!!

Posted by Alpha Auer ;-)...

Despair not, all ye elderly avatars! At the point where virtual muscle gives over to flab the resourceful amongst us turn to prostheses! And what a selection there is to be found in our oh so eternally youthful virtual world! I maintain that even the most fastidious of cyborgs will have very little to moan about in this department...
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Primtronics, the joint venture of Skalli McMillan and CJoke Oh is an emporium on which I have previously posted voraciously, so brilliant do I find their output. And when it comes to spare body parts Primtronics is an establishment not too easily outdone, as these chrome arm and leg attachments with built in machinery will easily attest to.
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I am told that incubating mothers need to be particularly vigilant against griefers. The Grim Bros incubator can be combined with watchful eye attachments by Primtronics for a maternal while yet stylish look!
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And when one's own skinny arms are no longer up to the task of hefting heavy objects one simply puts on these power limbs: These robotic (animated) cyberarms, again by Primtronics, come in both an industrial as well as a chrome finish for a variety of occasions from casual to dressy.
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Lucia Cyr's arm and leg prostheses can be found at her store Losthaven and these are certainly amongst some of the finest in Second Life®. However... And yes, I have already mentioned this little drawback on my Flickr ages ago, but one can never really overdo it with precautionary advice whilst dishing out shopping tips: Do not even think that these will get you out of exercising; if anything you will need to spend more time on that odious contraption known as the treadmill: Prolonged periods of inactivity tend to bring on a most unsightly accumulation of rust!!!
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Always a favorite, the Prosthetic Spine, for that extra little bit of support for severe cases of virtual sciatica and lumbago - this one comes from cutea Benelli at Grim Bros., combined with yet another most useful head appendage from the same establishment. Could be my imagination entirely I suppose, but the external neural transmitters really do seem to convey the brain juices most efficiently - far better than my built in ones anyway...
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Finally! A garment which does my clockwork brain justice, designed by none other than cutea Benelli comes from Grim Bros.: The automatic peacock dress. Quite needless to add, the brain is the "brainchild" of Pandora Wrigglesworth.
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And speaking of brains, The Cortech Brain Jar by Total Chastity is the essential accessory of all avatars that like to air out the gray matter from time to time. Works even better than Gingko Biloba, I find: Simply wear for an hour a week, preferably outdoors... Sudoku is all very well and good in its way, but not a patch on a nice northerly breeze blowing through all of those dust ridden crevices!
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Failing eyesight... It does come to us all in the end, doesn't it? And while in Real Life there are of course the wonders of Laser interventions, virtual ophthalmology offers a far more elegant solution: Goggles!

Top left, Thomus Keen (Steampowered Nuts); top right, Disembodied Hand (Defectiva); bottom left, my favorite ones by Torus Heliosense, these are scripted to set your hair on fire should you desire to do so! (Unfortunately no location seems to be available for Torus Heliosense at this time). And finally bottom right, Primtronics strikes yet again!
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And in the end, when hearing loss finally creeps up, one can always find solace in cutea Benelli's hearing aid, available at Grim Bros., enhanced with bells, trumpets, car horns, gauges and whistles. And if that doesn't work - trust me, nothing ever will!
;-)
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Credit also goes to Laynie Link, whose helicopter and tower hair I have worn for some of these shots. These were pieces which Ms. Link was distributing as freebies during the hair fair. Her store at Hairspray however, carries a far more conservative, Real Life-like line these days. Maybe we can entreat her to design some more towers and helicopters?
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May you all have many healthy days ahead of you in your long virtual lives! The amazing cyborg paraphernalia to be found in Second Life, of which I have shown only a very very small personal selection can of course be enjoyed by all avatars of all sizes, shapes, descriptions and age groups. So, enjoy my friends, enjoy...

Paw Boots...

Posted by Alpha Auer... ;-)

Only the other day I was talking about the lamentable absence of paw boots in Real Life, right? In the meantime I have been informed that apparently some enterprising Real Life designer out there seems to have made something along these lines but in my humble view it wouldn't really add up to much beyond being a sad substitute to the "real" thing...

So, here they are - all of my lovely little beauties...


My Ninja Cat boots are somewhat on the cruel side but, I give you my most solemn assurance that I try not to use those nasty little sticks too excessively and then only on the most objectionable avatars!


Admittedly the Grunge Camp Paw kickers are ever so slightly butch but nonetheless a great favorite whenever I need to climb the Black Mountain at Syncretia to check on all those leaky water pipes...


These Hobo Paw boots have a slight flaw around the ankles so I conceal them with some very lovely, not to mention thoroughly elegant, barbed wire neko leg warmers! They really do think of every little eventuality these neko designers don't they? I imagine the barbed wire would come in very handy at keeping those bothersome rodents trying to climb up ones calves at bay! No?


Yeti paw boots! We pose for these together with my furry sister: Two silly school girls in black and white outfits. Mine is a sailor's costume and she is a striped bunny! Teeeee heeeee....


For the more demanding neko, these jewel studded boots come in a range of fur options for toes, all in the same box. A must have for all of those dressier occasions!


Sakuradawn Lei's name is a byword for high quality paw boots in the metaverse, most of them leaving paw prints as you walk! Unfortunately the loveliest ones are designed for feral furries and thus one needs to have the appropriate leg shape to really be able to wear them - which we, vain, silly, fashion victim women obviously do not have. However, necessity is indeed the mother of all invention, so my furry sister was certainly not going to be put off by a minor little hindrance such as a leg shape! She merely replaced the upper part of the Myth boots with another boot part - and Bob's your uncle! My Trailmix ones are actually designed for human legs so all I had to do was walk around leaving some wonderful feline paw prints. Never one to be outdone, Furry Incognita follows suit with her own - and oh what an utterly lovely mess we have made!

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Credits:
Ninja Cat Boots: Emily Lelouch
Grunge Camp Paw Kickers: Thomus Keen
Barbed wire leg warmers: Minde Mills
Hobo Paw Boots: Blume Boucher
LouRoo Yeti Paw Boots: LouRoo Rau
Jewel Neko Boots: 7ommy Gunes
Trailmix and Myth boots: Sakuradawn Lei
(Please click on the names to obtain teleport locations!)

Les oreils très NPIRL...

Posted by Alpha Auer ;-)

Today, dear aficionado of all things great and small that are NPIRL, we shall be considering ears that could not possibly happen in Real Life. And who better than me, a full fledged, card carrying neko, to lead you down this intricate lane of Second Life® body parts?
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aoimizuno Meili's output is certainly no stranger to this blog. Not only were her NPIRL eyes featured in a post dedicated to eyes alone, but we have also looked at a small selection of her truly magnificent avatar attachments here. So, here are some wonderful lightbulb neko ears (above) and the octopus ears (below). Both can be seen in-world at her shop LPP, to where you can teleport directly from here.
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Again, a big favorite of mine, on whom I have posted only recently, Thomus Keen has such a magnificent pair of mechanical steampunk neko ears that I truly could not resist in adding them in here as well: These have the most naturalistic cat ear twitch that you can possibly imagine and furthermore come with a texture menu which lets you choose between various industrial textures - the badlands texture shown here being my favorite. These beauties can be admired at Keen's wonder shop Steam Powered Nuts, to where you can teleport directly from here.
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Jamie Clementine's Hybrid Elite ears are not neko ears in the absolute truest sense of the word, being much too large and too rounded to be true cat ears - thus, a true hybrid indeed. Umm? Rabbit, donkey and just a sprinkling of feline maybe? Wonderful! And you can get them by teleporting directly from here.
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Sinthoras Braveheart is a delightful person who basically got fed up with paying exorbitant prices for all of his neko needs (I know just how he feels) and proceeded to create his own. These great puffy neko ears with earrings come in many different colors. And as for the price? Well, you will just have to find out by clicking right here.
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And finally, let it never be said that, while we are on the subject of ears, the NPIRL blog is going to refrain from making mention of the inherent attribute of the Second Life appearance palette which will let you create your own completely impossible in Real Life ears with just a few dab handed flips of its sliders. Here I have just conjured my very own Dr. Spock elf ears which I have suplemented with a freebie elven ear attachment by Terry Toland, available from here.
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Industrial Steampunk =Thomus Keen

Posted by Alpha Auer


"The Spine Jetpack". The mechanical neko ears and tail, the steampunk clock bracelets and the boots are designed by Thomus Keen as well.

I cannot possibly have one favorite designer in Second Life®. Indeed I cannot have 10, or 50 or even a hundred - there are that many talented, imaginative people out there, all of whose output never ceases to delight me - not to mention of course, totally bankrupt me ;-)... However, if someone were to push me up against a prim wall and hold a virtual gun to my head - under such dire circumstances of duress, I might conceivably divulge the name of Thomus Keen as being on the very very top of my list.




"The Steampunk Glider"

Being the builder of Steam Forge and Steam Isle, one of which also houses his design enterprise Steam Powered Nuts; as well as the quite recently rezed Role Play environment called Apocolyptica (intentionally mis-spelt ;-), Thomus Keen's prowess as a virtual architect will definitely need to get covered in a separate future post. Today I will focus on objects and vehicles designed by Keen. I have not been able to interview Thomus Keen at such a length as I would have liked to have done, however looking at his Renderosity homepage I am inclined to think that the artist T.King, who is Thomus Keen's Real Life manifestation, is a professional game environment designer who has worked on the likes of Everquest, World of Warcraft, and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.




"The Airship Davintus"

In the one brief conversation that he and I had some time ago, I did manage to gain some insight into the working processes behind his fine output when Keen told me that he "fuss(es) a lot over details and quality, so sometimes it can take a month or more for a single release", after which point he changes very little of the original design, adding that like all Second Life designers worth their mettle he too has his ongoing battle with prim counts, particularly in attached objects, with regards to avatar render cost. Thus a very long time is also spent in prim reduction processes; a good example to which would be a Katana which started out at 130 prims, and when it was finally done, was down to 49 prims, thanks to numerous custom made sculpties.




"The Gearwing Raptor"

In Second Life, Keen describes his area of design expertise as "Industrialized Steampunk". Now, the gentle reader of this blog will probably have surmised by now that my personal preferences definitely lean towards the man made. Not to put too fine a point on it, I am not really much of a "nature girl" at all. Hardly surprising then that the mechanical, the industrial interests me and holds my imagination. And Second Life certainly proliferates in the type of output that captures me, over and over again. Even so, Thomus Keen's design work I find particularly fascinating: These absolutely Impossible in Real Life gadgets, flight equipment, jet packs and gigantic airborne vessels seem to me to hold a mechanical precision that is such that were they to be constructed in Real Life there would be no question that they would be fully operational. Structures like the Airship Davintus or the Gearwing Raptor, are such that every nut and bold, every joint, seems to adhere to an impeccable design logic which culminates in a Gestalt utterly convincing in its functionality. Keen also manages to convey this functionality in his textures which to me are probably the most convincing ones that I have ever seen in Second Life. Thus, the webs that join the mechanic/metallic poles of the flight attachment called the Steampunk Glider are textured in such a way that that we visually sense that these webs are of a far lighter material - possibly canvas or maybe even some kind of light durable parchment - than the dark poles and central flight mechanism that tie the whole thing into one cohesive structure - one fully capable of flying, one which conveys the very logic of being airborne.


"The Stephenson Rocket", 1829. Collection of the National Museum of Science and Industry in London.


"The Apollo 10 Space Capsule", 1969. Collection of the National Museum of Science and Industry in London.

However, it is not only the precision of the design but also the way in which Keen's work seems to reside upon very firm historic design references, which for me, ultimately sets him in a class apart. This strikes me to be very much the case throughout Keen's output, but becomes especially apparent in the way in which he endows wooden objects with mechanical usage, as was indeed very much the practice during the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Although not too overly fond of museums as a rule, I do make an exception when it comes to Science Museums, and particularly the one in London, where I have most probably spent entire weeks pondering upon the mechanical object throughout its history, but particularly during the 19th century, the age of the Industrial Revolution. But not only that period either: Gazing at the Apollo 10 Space Capsule in close proximity to Stephenson's Rocket one becomes aware of the unique aesthetics residing within the functionality of the mechanical object and how this provides a continuity of a visual language of design from spacecraft and early day steam engines to astrolabes, cannons and armillary spheres. It is this aesthetics of functionality that Thomus Keen seems to be tapping into and which he displays in his many gadgets and vehicles at Steam Powered Nuts, where incidentally you can also find wonderful industrial jewelry, mechanical neko attachments and various other avatar apparel such as boots and weapons, all crafted by the extraordinary Thomus Keen.

It should be added here that Steam Powered Nuts also carries a wonderful fashion line specialized in Victorian Steampunk and Badlands apparel, designed by Thomus Keen's talented business associate Destany Laval, who in all likelihood will provide material for a future blog post before too long.

You can teleport to Steam Powered Nuts directly from here. You can also see larger, more detailed images of Keen's flight objects and vehicles here.