It’s World Naked Gardening Day again on Saturday, -next Saturday- May 5th, a now regular event on the naturist calendar that we’ve covered before.

Ella

We’ve regularly written about the Burning Man festival on these pages, as well as its SL equivalent, Burn2.

We’re sorry to report the passing of its founder, Larry Harvey.

Ella

My friend Christine had a significant birthday recently. She decided that she wanted a nipple piercing to mark the event, and needed moral support, so I attended the tattoo/piercing parlour with her. I’ve written on these pages before how I only ever had an ear pierced once when I was a teenager and it became infected, putting me off the entire piercing thing for ever.

Christine, who is a bit more Mumsy than the model playing her in our photos, the sort of person you’d never imagine having a piercing, a pillar of our local community, school and Sunday school teacher, etc, became rather shy when she learned she’d have to get her boobs out for a male tattooist 🙂 While she knows I’m a naturist, even topless sunbathing would be beyond her comfort zone.

I’d never been in a tattooists before. I’m not sure what I was expecting, perhaps some sort of down-at-heel shop filled with goths, but this was all rather…clean, bright, airy and encouraging.

Christine finally got her boobs out, amidst great embarrassment to her. But the tattooist spoke rather matter of factly about how he has pierced and tattooed breasts, buttocks and the genital area of women and he’d more concentrated on getting the job done right than caring about boobs. So Christine relaxed.

The idea was to get one nipple pierced. It was slightly painful, she conceded, but tolerable, and so two weeks later we traipsed back to the shop during one of our regular coffee mornings, and she got the other nipple done because her husband, who is just as strait-laced as she is, on the face of it, liked it a lot. She got the other nipple pierced, and then her husband nipped into the same shop to get his done a few days after that!

Of course, Christine was rather proud of her first piercing to the point where she was showing it off to me a few days after it had been done, how it was all pain free. And so, gentle reader, on the trip to get her second piercing I, on a moment of impulse, whipped off my bra and…

…yep! I got mine done, there and then! Both of them.

I was a bit worried telling Jim, but thankfully he loved the idea of them too!

Of course, by now, Christine and I were on a roll!

I went back, on my own this time, and got a belly ring, hahaha, which I subsequently showed off to Christine. Her husband, in the meantime, had been suggesting to her that maybe an intimate piercing might also be fun.

Back we went again…

…by which point we knew the tattooist/piercer really well 🙂 and Christine was rather more relaxed about dropping her panties for him than she had been taking her bra off just a few weeks previously.

Jim and I had talked about something similar 🙂 and while I was uncertain about it all, I’d gone bare down there quite recently. Yes, I know I’d tried shaving my pubic hair last year, liked it (as did Jim, who has remained resolutely smooth ever since) but being a busy mum, I find that it adds time in the shower every day, so I’d become a lapsed smoothie over the winter months, lol. However, with summer and the naturist season approaching, I felt it was time to try it again. And if I didn’t like it, I’d have time to grow it out again in time for the summer holidays (well, a rather trimmed patch, certainly, but a natural look nonetheless. And so, while Christine was getting a clitoral piercing, and the fact that I was currently ‘smooth’, I thought ‘what the hell’…and did it!

As a result, my avatar has been altered slightly to reflect my real life 😉

Ella

Away back in 2012, we did a post on whether or not VW camper vans and naturism went together quite easily. Answer? They do. 🙂

It was a reader who pointed us at the site in question, and I’m delighted to learn from the original site’s owner that while the Tumblr site in question was previously deleted, it’s back!

Back since June 2017, apparently, but we welcome its return. There’s a ton of photographic evidence that, yes indeed, VWs and naturism do indeed go together very easily.

I won’t ‘borrow’ any photos from the site, go check it yourselves, but we have set up a VW hippy camper van at SLN HQ, and we’ve been making a small gallery of photos showing the VW and naturism going hand-in-hand as easily as they do in real life.

Ella

We’ve covered naked yoga before, and I’ve witnessed people doing it while on holiday before. I’ve even participated in (clothed) yoga classes here at home.

But naked yoga is in the news again!

Sadly, the article begins with some words that grind my gears…’female empowerment’ and ‘body issues’. Yes, a lot of people have body issues, and anything that helps them overcome them is to be welcomed. I’m not sure that the phrase ‘female empowerment’ has any traction any longer. It’s meaningless.

Model Prue tries naked yoga for herself in SL

What I will say that if we can kill of this nonsense about ‘female empowerment’, naked yoga sounds like a jolly good idea.

Ella

For a long time, as I would regularly mention on the blog, I loathed tattoos. I’ve come around to the idea in recent months that they can, if well done and imaginative, tell a person’s story very well.

This doesn’t mean I’m intending to get one myself in real life (or Second Life) just that they can be quite good in certain circumstances.

There’s also an awful lot of dumb ones out there!

I even had a go at creating some in SL myself, which was an interesting experiment. It’s not something I’ll be going into 🙂 but I enjoyed the act of creation within SL.

Down to business…

Howie, who bankrolls these pages, moved to Spain a couple of years ago. It’s with regret that I have to tell you that his partner, Linda, has recently been diagnosed with cancer. So I’m throwing the board open for Howie to give you some info…

Hi! Listen up folks. I retired and moved to Spain a couple of years ago, and the idea was that my partner, Linda, and I would see out our days here in the sun. I’m still hopeful that will be the case, but she’s recently been diagnosed with cervical cancer, and a (hopefully) brief back to the UK is required for her to receive treatment. (I should point out we could get treatment here in Spain, but the UK, in terms of speed, seems our best option right now).

Listen. If any of you have any abnormalities in life, health wise, I advise you get it attended to immediately. My partner, Linda, has had some issues recently which I’m delighted to say were treated with the utmost urgency by the Spanish health authorities. It looks like cervical cancer, and we’ll know better within the next couple of weeks, and it’s certainly survivable, but it’s no less a shock to realise how fragile life is.

I’ve added a cancer pink ribbon to my avi for now, to highlight the issue. Of course I hope my much loved partner (an SL user herself, on my encouragement) gets well again. But it’s still important to highlight and promote the dangers of various cancers in men and women.

I’ve handed ‘the bank account’ over to Ella in regards SL, and SLN, as my attentions will be elsewhere. I shall be out of SL for the foreseeable future.

I should add that SLN has, in the time it has been running, lost a valued team member, Harry, to cancer. We’ve also had another staff member, Marlene, endure (and happily survive) breast cancer. Please support, however you can, any cancer charities local to you. It’s important that, even if we can’t find a cure, we improve screening to ensure less people face the problem in future. In real life, and in Second Life, I’d ask you to continue to support cancer charities.

Marlene defiantly wears a post-breast cancer scar tattoo to underscore her real life experiences.

In a sense, the tattoo-free Marlene wore a ‘tattoo’ of sorts in her SL mastectomy scar, to highlight her real life travails. She survives, as far as we know, but is no longer active in SL, and last heard spent her time and energies working for cancer charities.

Howie.

After two weeks of frustration with my mesh body, a problem that had me tearing my hair out, I found a solution. It’s not perfect, but it’ll have to do.

The problem appears to be with the Firestorm viewer. I installed both the Alchemy viewer, and the official Linden Labs one, and both work perfectly. Firestorm has long been my viewer of choice, and it continues to work perfectly well with ‘classic’ avatars, but the instant I put the mesh body on, problems arise. The thing is, I’ve never liked the official viewer, right from the day I learned of third party viewers, and dumped the official one. I simply don’t like the controls layout on it, whereas Firestorm had a more natural ‘feel’ to the layout.

So I’m now on the official one, hating it 🙂 but at least back in SL looking complete. Now, if you’ll forgive me, there’s lost time to be made up 🙂 so I’m off to struggle with the controls, and shall abandon Firestorm until their next update and see if the mesh issue is resolved.

Ella

It rather looks as though the planned WNBR (World Naked Bike Ride) event planned for the English city of Canterbury will not take place this summer, after organisers failed to get insurance for it.

However, reading the article, all is not quite as simple as it might seem.

It looks as though there is an undercurrent of feeling that it ‘stinks of exhibitionism’ and voices saying that participants ‘aren’t regular cyclists’. So what? I don’t think you have to be a regular cyclist to participate such an event to highlight pollution and roads that are unsafe for cyclists.

Conservative councillor Neil Baker, who chairs the council’s community committee, has questioned how genuine the event is. He also argued some of the participants were too large in physical size to be regular cyclists.

“If they were actually regular cyclists making a protest about air pollution issues, they may have a point,” he said on the East Kent Civil Society Facebook page.

“But given the state of some of them, there is no way they are regular cyclists. You can spot a regular cyclist by their calves due to lactic acid build-up. There may be some who join in, but it stinks of exhibitionism to me.”

It rather smells of ‘agenda’ to me.

A previous WNBR event in Canterbury

Ella

Just a gallery in this post, as we’re working on a sizeable ‘vintage glamour’ post that will, in due course, be published alongside further numerous real life and SL photos. I’m currently hypnotised by the sweetest innocence in many historical photographs, although I guess they were very much the ‘porn’ of their day. Something about the way various photographers work suggests a kind of sweet freedom about the nude, and that’s not a characteristic we find in much modern day photography. And many historical nude photographs are posed in the context of what we’d call naturism…that is, on a beach or in calisthenic poses.

Those that aren’t nod towards a kind of tribute to past times, Greco-Roman or maybe Egyptian in how they portray their models, and in all cases frame the nude beautifully. We’re working on a long post to illustrate this in and out of SL, but as I’m still having ‘mesh body’ issues I’m trying to resolve that’s taking up some of my possible SL time. In the meantime, I thought it would be useful to simply publish some of the photos we’ve collected so far, just to let you know we’re still alive 🙂 and what we’re working on right now.
Ella

I’m having huge problems with my mesh avatar right now, and most of my SL-related time is being spent trying to find a solution, hence the current lack of posts. 😦

Ella