Friday 28 February 2014

001: Sitting on my deck

Rusty head_001

This is a selfie I took at my house this afternoon. Again, this is at the level of most of the snapshots I take -- I'll see if I can improve for the future.  Actually I'm sitting on the beach in front of my deck; you can barely see my house behind my head, but you can see the beautiful blue-flowered trees I picked up recently and which I enjoy so much.

One reason for posting this is that I wanted to get some practice in identifying items.  All links below are to Marketplace.

Hair:Dura, Dura-Boy 22
Facial hair:
Goat beard: Labyrinth
Beard: Fe Style 4ED
Eyebrows: Jaryth's Barber Shop
Body hair (shoulders): Jaryth's Barber Shop

Skin: RGDW, Alfred (Tone 3)
Eyes: KMADD Mesh Eyes, Soul: Brown 2
Tank Top: HUG'S (available for l'Uomo and non-l'Uomo)
Shape: Made by hand, not for sale
Mesh avatar: Animations Rising, Bruce

Of course, there are a couple of tricks up my sleeve that I'll keep to myself; I've put a lot of work into perfecting my shape.  I intend to talk about this at greater length in a future post, but you get the best results by making sure that your shape is tweaked until it shows off your specific skin to its best advantage.

Thursday 27 February 2014

000: Welcome to my blog!

dancing _002

Hi folks! My name is Rusty Redfield -- this is a shot I took of myself last night when I was out dancing at a club, the Grindery.

As you can see, I use the l'Uomo mesh body (mine is the "Bruce" type), which makes me a pretty big and muscular guy.  It also makes it pretty difficult for me to find clothes since they pretty much have to be specially made for my body type.  So that's one of the things I'll be talking about here.  There are a fair number of gay guys in SL who use l'Uomo mesh bodies ("meshies", as I've heard us called) and I hope this will be interesting to them.  There are some common problems with l'Uomo clothes and I'll talk about them and how I try to deal with them.  I'll also talk about the clothes themselves and try to put together outfits and stuff to show you.  (You may have noticed I have a big ol' black eye in the photo above.  I'm currently interested in damage -- how damage is represented on SL avs, and whether it is more interesting to look at than the usual perfect flawless av.  So I'm likely to be posting pictures of me with bruises, marks and scars.)

Like many SL residents, I'm also interested in taking pictures of myself, and the people and places that I encounter along the way.  And you know what?  I'm really bad at it.  So much so that I have kind of stopped taking a lot of pictures because I'm usually ashamed to show them to anyone.  But I've recently had some photographs taken by a really good photographer, Joe Nussbaum, and it's inspired me to see what I can do to learn how to take better pictures myself.

That's why I added the shot I took last night.  This is, pretty much, the average rubbishy snapshot that I usually take.  I'm not happy with the framing, especially unhappy with the lighting -- this, for me, is the zero point.  Some time in the future I think I may come back to this spot and take another picture and see how much better I can make it.

This blog will be rated X.  It's common in Second Life for avs of gay men to be nude and there will be plenty of nude photos, sometimes of highly sexual subjects.  I intend to make that clear to everyone before they arrive.

Your polite and non-commercial comments are welcome.