Daily Archives: November 13, 2014

Wild, wet weather

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There’s been absolutely appalling amounts of rain where I am, with guttering barely able to cope with the amount of rain coming down outside, roads flooded thanks to a combination of the volume of water and a lot of leaves clogging up drains. I’d got up this morning to a reasonably mild and dry morning, walked the children to school and came home to do a bit of work from my desk in the study. If you’ve ever visited SLN’s offices at the Eden Naturist Estate, the real life version is remarkably similar, dominated by a huge and overflowing bookcase, a desk and the computer equipment.

My mother used to call these weeks ‘the dark days before Christmas’, and it was so true today, necessitating lights on by 2pm, just as I left to walk down to the school and collect the children. It was raining as I left, but they had their wet-weather coats on, hats, gloves, and it’s only a ten minute walk, so we don’t use the car. Oops! What a bad mother I am, as the heavens opened just as the school bell rang and we had to trudge uncomfortably back home in what seemed like monsoon type of rain. They managed to get home quite dry, but I was soaked right through to the skin. Having got them changed and into dry clothing, I settled them down with some glasses of milk before heading into the kitchen to try to peel off denim jeans soaked right through. Have you any idea what a difficult task that is?

Yep…wet right through to my undies…which I was in the process of taking off and throwing into the washing machine when I noticed that a couple of towels which I’d pegged out yesterday and forgot about had now slumped to the grass. So I’m in the kitchen, totally naked, and I make a decision that, rather than get more clothes wet, I should make a dash to the bottom of the garden to retrieve the towels wearing nothing but my birthday suit and my wellington boots 🙂

Being naked in the rain wasn’t a first for me; I’ve been on naturist beaches when there have been showers, and gone swimming in pools while rain bounced off the surface of the water -I mean, I’m going to be wet anyway, so tramping back to a naturist apartment in rain, or to the pool in a downpour is no big deal- so it seemed the rather more logical thing to do than get another set of clothes soaked in the time it took me to get down the garden and back.

 

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Still, as the summer fades to nothing more than a memory, and next year before I get some first-hand naturism in again, it was still fun to dash naked down the garden to retrieve some fallen washing. But that little, totally unexpected bit of naturism was fun.

 

Ella

‘Where the hell is SLN12?’

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‘Where the hell is SLN12?’, asks a reader via IM, coming straight to the point.

I’m glad you asked me that. Who am I kidding? I’ve been terrified of someone asking that for weeks!

SLN, ‘the magazine’, has had a couple of set-backs in its history. First, there was ‘the Politics issue’, which had two false starts before being abandoned. SL is largely politics free, and the more we attempted to examine politics, particularly naturist politics, around the globe the further we got away from achieving what we wanted to express.priyanka1_001b

SLN12 is intended to be an International edition, effectively examining attitudes to nudity and sexuality in different corners of the globe (and different attitudes from different corners of the grid -the attitudes to virtual sexuality will differ between, for example, a Gorean sim and a dance club, even if ‘bumping pixels’ -cybersex- is the common end result.priyanka2_001b

While much of it is written, done and dusted, all photographs taken, we’ve got bogged down with one particular element of it: India.priyanka3_001b

It’s easy to write about certain parts of the world and their attitudes. Others…it’s like catching the wind in the palm of your hand to get anything definitive down. And India is the sticking point, more than any other section of the intended finished SLN12, simply because there is no definitive Indian sexuality. The same may be true of other parts of the world too, but there’s a national/regional/religious stereotype in play that largely holds true and can be presented as a kind of definitive version of that region’s attitudes. For example, in respect of the Islamic world, we can say that public nudity is a definite no-no. It’s easy to write that bit in. We can say that Spain and France have a laissez-faire attitude to topless sunbathing. We can write that bit in, too.priyanka4_001b

But India…India is causing me all sorts of bother, largely because I’m UK based, and the diaspora who’ve settled here are, in many ways, westernised in attitude and have adopted a western attitude to sexuality and public nudity whereas people in India have a different attitude, there’s further diversification in attitude between urban and rural India, and there’s some cross-fertilisation between arranged marriage between western-raised partners in a marriage and Indian born and raised partners. And getting a handle on that is tough.priyanka5_001b

We’ve spoken to numerous Indian people, some running ‘Indian’ avatars in SL, some running western looking avatars, to try and make some sense of it all, but it’s proving to be exceptionally difficult. I’ve wrestled with just one paragraph for a couple of hours today, for example.priyanka7_001b

So I’ll ask you to be patient. Because I’m determined not to abandon another full issue of the mag.

The accompanying photos show avatar Priyanka -a UK born girl of Indian descent and who lives her SL as an Indian avatar- demonstrate the paradox between the two worlds. (All photos taken by Diane Toxx) On one hand there’s the acceptance of the traditional -her sari- and the western, a relaxed attitude to posing her avatar nude for us here, and an acknowledgement that her attitudes to sex and sexuality are very much the result of a UK upbringing. An interview with Priyanka will appear in SLN 12 if and when I get it finished. So I’d ask you to be patient. I’d like to get it right when it eventually hits the blog.

Ella

 

Please….no phat azzes (1)

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Phat azzes. They’re suddenly everywhere.

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I know the booty has somehow, inconceivably to me, become fashionable, both in real life and Second Life.

In Second Life there are a wide range of places where one can purchase ‘phat azz appliers’ and get that J-Lo

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Nicky Minaj

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or Kim Kardashian look.

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Some women will have a pear shaped figure, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You are how you are. But surgery to make your butt bigger? It’s stupid and it’s shallow. Well, it’s not shallow, actually, it’s a book shelf you could set a glass of champagne on 😉

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The image is nothing new, being a simple recreation of Jean-Paul Goude‘s 1976 photograph ‘Champagne Incident’ (see below) featuring Carolina Beaumont.

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Not SL’s phat azz appliers, but a shape tweaked to make a representation of real life ‘celebrities’ whose only assets are emphasised on the first syllable. 

Many SL bloggers seem to have adopted this ‘big booty’ look for their models, and I have to say there’s little that can make a blog post less appealing than a ridiculously shaped model whose function is theoretically an intent to make you buy a particular item. Fortunately, so far at least, the SL naturist community appear to have studiously avoided the wretched look.

The claim, I think, that these photos of Kim Kardashian will ‘break the internet’ is, of course, merely hype. It’s a dreadful set of photos of a dreadfully shallow ‘celebrity’ whose only talent appears to be for self-promotion. The world is a poorer place for giving this woman the oxygen of publicity, although I may be, judging by the extent to which people appear to be getting into a lather about the photo-set, in the minority there.

SL doesn’t have a celebrity culture. If our world did have one, I imagine there would be those who would model themselves on reality TV nonentities.

Pookes

The Wall App

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Here’s a fun and funky little online app that you might enjoy using even if you aren’t an SL player or a naturist, but are someone who likes photography and seeing your photographic art set in a different context.

Called The Wall App you can drag your own completed artwork onto the wall of someone’s house and get some concept of how it might looked sold, framed and hung.

Using one of the photos I took for the ‘Single Males’ post from the beginning of this week, here are two examples of the finished effect with my SL photography placed in RL surroundings.

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Diane