Dear Diary,
Well, here I am on a Sunday morning with a headache. Mainly because I stayed up until after 3am this morning, working on something new and huge, and for some reason I woke up just five hours later.
Tomorrow is Skell’s sixth rezday (*balloons!* *party streamers!* *virtual booze!* *virtual hangover!*) and, usually, I treat myself to something special on that day. My first rezday gift to myself, way back in 2008, was a brand new skin. Back then, at about L$1500, that was a large outlay for me, but now? Pfft! That’s nothing ;-)
It’s getting harder and harder to find things that I want to buy or have room to rez. I’ve seen several beautiful homes, both inworld and on Marketplace, that I’d like, but we already have… several homes (it’s something of a giggle between us, just how many we have) and I don’t know what I’d do with anymore! (Having said that, every year Daros manages to find the absolute perfect thing for my rezday. In the past that has included a building which, after saying I don’t think I could want any more buildings, is so absolutely, achingly gorgeous, I have to rez and furnish it!)
So, the big ticket items for this year’s rezday will probably be something to build with. Maybe a pile of gorgeous texture sets, or a builders’ package of… something. I don’t know yet. I spent rather a lot on textures yesterday, but I’m sure I can find some more ;-)
The reason why I stayed up until after 3am is that, every couple of years I get a bit antsy about the mainstore and want to re-build it. As our stock of items for sale has expanded (along with our building skills) we’ve slowly increased the floorspace of what we’ve always called the GB Mall (it’s actually one big store with several departments, each one of which is owned by either Daros, me, or our dear friend Rannon). I looked back over past screenshots to see if I could find any with images of the stores we’ve had so far.
The first incarnation of it was a little sky mall, probably no bigger than about 30×30, featuring 10×10 stalls, into which we placed our ad boards. I found a few old shots of us at Halloween (with our pet dancing skeleton!) on my Flickr stream:
The second incarnation of the mainstore was a much bigger grungy building (which I later remade and stuck out for sale in both incarnations: with lava, and without lava – but not including the ‘work area’ shown in this image).
The most recent incarnation of the store is two of Lost Dawn’s fabulous old warehouses, rezzed one behind the other. It was the only way we could fit everything in, as back then the land we owned in Jindalrae was limited and the parcels slightly awkwardly-placed. Since we now own almost half the region, it’s time for a change.
Daros’s old Beggar’s Day grunge and skater clothing store. Now he can rez that all out again!
The new build is big. I mean really BIG. I ended up rezzing megaprims over all the land we own (on the ground) then sending them up into the air so I have a base to work on and can see where the ‘holes’ (parcels we don’t own) are. There are only three main ones, and I’ve blocked those out with tall trompe l’oeil buildings, so it looks as if you’re in a city. Then, with the aid of some fabulous new textures, and some (unbelievably cheap and free) modifiable buildings, I got to work.
Here’s a preview of what I got done in just a few hours:
Yes, this is a candy store in the second pic. I want this to be as much a photo op location as a store location. Hell, people could probably even roleplay there, if they wanted to. We might! And yes, there will be more stuff going up behind me in this shot.
I won’t be using all the mapped-out land (I’ll block it off with more trompe l’oeil) but it’s good to know that we can expand if we want to. The one thing I’m dreading is changing all the LMs, but I’ll get to that when it’s done.