Daily Archives: May 31, 2014

200,000 views….thank you!

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Public domain image, royalty free stock photo from www.public-domain-image.com

 

We’ve just passed the 200,000 views mark, in around two and a half years of SLN existing.

Considering it’s a niche lifestyle blog related to a niche online game, it’s hard to fathom that a blog that began getting 5 or 10 views a week in its earliest days has, in recent months, averaged around 10,000 views a month!

Clearly these aren’t Gangnam Style youtube style figures, but if you’d said to me two and a half years ago that we’d have viewing figures of 20,000 I’d have been shocked and thrilled.

We can’t do it without you, the readers. I, and the rest of the staff, would like to thank each and every one of you for your continued support and just say that we’re committed to bringing you the best naturist news from around the SL grid in the future. It’s not a numbers game. We strive to bring you the best writing, photos and news related to the naturist lifestyle within Second Life.

We’ve achieved almost global coverage in that time. Iran, China and central Africa are the only locations on earth that there hasn’t been some sort or SLN presence.

My grateful thanks to all of you.

 

Ella.

Scout Willis and her topless protest against Instagram

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I don’t have time for social media. By that, of course, I mean I don’t have an appetite for it, not a lack of minutes.

I don’t do Facebook (and in fact actively loathe it), and I don’t do Twitter or Instagram or any of those other ones. One, because I don’t trust them in terms of data privacy concerns (there’s no such thing as a free lunch, remember?) and two, Facebook in particular is an example of no moral compass being applied. No? Some time back FB was permitting videos of beheadings, but refusing to permit nudity of any description, including breastfeeding photos. Now, I don’t know what your definition of ‘harmful content’ is, but in mine I think it’s more harmful that children, young adults, the over-sensitive and vulnerable can readily view graphic violence while a very natural part of the post-childbirth months is banned.

Don’t imagine I’m preaching a case for nudity here. I’m not clamouring for the opportunity to be faced with breasts every time I might open up Facebook. I understand why they might not wish to open up a legal can of worms by all manner of ‘revenge’ photos being uploaded to it. I quite understand that may be the thinking and policy. But do I want to entrust my data with someone who can’t differentiate between the morality of video beheadings and a proud mother feeding her new-born child?

And so I steer clear of them all, primarily on the ‘data privacy’ issue, as I say. Bare boobs are essentially neither here nor there. Besides, does anyone really want to know I’m having spinach for dinner? I don’t think that qualifies as ‘news’ even from interesting people.

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Scout Willis, daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, decided this week to protest against Instagram’s bar on nipples by taking to Twitter (I think I’ve got that the right way around…all of these social media outlets blur into one big mess of narcissism after a while) and wandering around the Lower East Side topless. ‘Legal in New York, but not on Instagram’, she said. Which is a silly state of affairs when you think about it.

Of course, the protest is, in itself, a bit silly, all a bit ‘First World problems’, aka ‘White Whine‘. If she’d been protesting about the oppression of women in other locations around the world, using the obvious magnet of bare boobs to draw in an audience to highlight rape, female genital mutilation, starvation or something else….fair enough. But to be protesting against, well, the well established policies of a social media outlet -however silly those policies may be- is silly in itself.

Ella.

 

 

The Citroen H Van and French chic

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In the town near where I live, there’s a very nice guy who has set up a mobile cafe from a van like this…a Citroen H van, apparently. I had to look that up, as I didn’t know the name, but it has been something that has been lodged in my head as being as quintessentially French as croissants or brie. In my mid teens, I was something of a Francophile, reading Sartre and hoovering up 1960s films by the nouvelle vague directors, films which almost invariably included a van like this. It all seemed so chic, so Parisian.

Later, I’d get to experience Paris first hand, and sit in Left Bank cafes still reading Sartre, drinking wine and, for a short time, smoking Gauloises or Gitanes cigarettes.

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I’ve visited Paris so many times now I’ve lost count, as well as visiting other parts of the country both as a ‘textile’ tourist and naturist holiday maker. J’adore France…as they say.

When I cycle into town I now invariably buy a cup of coffee from the man with the H van because of the van! It just summons up something familiar and warming, for me.

Imagine my delight, then, when Diane came back from a photoshoot that included photos of an SL H van . Excited? Yes, I am.

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Incidentally, the name of the town on the side of it, Frontignan, is a real world place that I’ve been to! It’s just along the coast from Cap D’Agde, and I’ve also stayed at a campsite called Camping le Sérignan-Plage Nature, visiting Frontignan on both occasions I’ve stayed nearby. So by some weird SL synchronicity, it’s perhaps appropriate that Diane, by chance, just happened to have undertaken the shoot that she did.

Ella