Building a Better Business Card

In preparation for the opportunities ahead in 2009, I decided to create a new business card. Actually, the word "new" sort of implies there was an "old," which there wasn't. So, I decided to create a business card...


Using the excellent Paint Shop Pro X software, I designed and uploaded a texture, squandering L$10 in the process.

Climbing to the roof of my house, I rezzed a box, turned it into a thin card, and added a notecard script. By the time I'd finished, I had freely distributable object that can hand out a notecard with my details. Cool, huh?

So I invited my friend, the extremely talented photographer Seikatsu Koba over to take a look. Dangerous, because Seik's as honest as she is cute - sorry, pretty! And after casting her newly bespectacled eyes over the card, she said, "Why didn't you do it landscape?"

Curses! I had no idea why I didn't, even thought in real life the world uses landscape orientation for business cards. Sometimes I really think my brain has serious holes in it somewhere.

Lucky for me, Seikatsu is somewhat sensitive to my fragile ego and she offered to take my "first draft" and work on it. And she did. Within 30 minutes she'd revamped, restyled, re cropped and reworked the whole thing. She still thought it looked a little more like an ad for a male model than a journalist - thanks to the outfit by Yelmer Pfeffer of Alphamale - but seeing as I write and get paid to cover men's fashion, I didn't want to look like Jimmy Olsen.


The final card is wonderful. It pays to have someone with a photographer's eye take a look at what you create. Thanks Seik!

Happy Rezday to Me

It's not my first Rezday until 1st November but I'm writing about it now just in case I forget. There's going to be no big party; no fanfare; no fireworks. On reflection, it's almost tragic that after a year of Second Life I don't appear to have a circle of friend with whom to celebrate! Sure I have people on my "Friends List" but unlike the regular notion of "friends," I don't believe any of them either know nor care about my Rezday.

Of course, the question is; do I know and care about other people's Rezdays? The only ones I would make an effort to say "Happy Rezday" to would be Mony and Merry and Willa. And even then, I think I've missed Willa's already.

So I shall have a quite Rezday, letting it slip past anonymously. Maybe this is not a bad thing. After a year of making no real friends, perhaps that can be an advantage for a journalist. Perhaps I can leverage the "splendid isolation" to become much more aggressive. Perhaps I don't need friends but do need to decide whether I want to be liked or appreciated. So what if I write a few stories that cause a fuss - what does that matter? What if I do go on the offensive and start openly criticising the SL Press as being, in the main, nothing but pretend journalism focused on trivia and advertising? How many friends will I lose? None!

Of course, I could find that no-one ever hires me to write a story ever again, but then I could just go ahead and do what other folks do - start my own paper: The Leominster Times. Provided I don't get kicked out of the Associated SL Press group, I could gather together a small (probably very small) group of disaffected writers who want to do something different.

Or maybe the Herald and SLentrepreneur will keep the faith and let me continue to write. I don't intend to become a miserable, nasty hack just for the sake of being that way; I just want to be able to be more critical. I know I offended Angelico Babii when I used the word "moribund" to describe the "My Metaverse" social network site two months ago but that wasn't intentional, simply an observation. And the last blog posting there no turns out to be by me on 9th October, preceded by Isadora Fiddlesticks announcing the launch of Avenue Magazine, another "ads and amigos" magazine. Incidentally - or not - Fiddlesticks previously edited HodgePodge magazine, a "lifestyle" magazine that folded after just under a year; possible because it drowned under the weight of Isadora's over-use of exclamation points! I swear, in one paragraph containing three sentences she used three exclamations. Hey, try a period or even a comma and give the !! a rest.

So if I actually get in-world on 1st November - and it's a Saturday so during the afternoon I have time - I'll go search for a sad-looking cake, a lonely bottle of cognac, set it on my empty table, and sing a flat "Happy Rezday to Me" before logging off and drinking myself stupid.

Bah, humbug!

Breaking Even

Although I will never be able to retire from Real Life and live on a sim island with palm trees and a fabulous house stacked to the rafters with extravagant, prim-loaded stuff, I am now officially breaking even in Second Life. By that, I mean that I have now accumulated enough real dollars to pay my annual subscription, monthly tier fees, and still have money over to buy clothes and gadgets, and the occasional CD from iTunes.

When I joined SL, I have no clue what I intended doing here. But over the first few weeks, it became clear that I wanted more than a free account and needed to get lindens to buy things. What I didn't want to do was use real life cash to do this. So my plan was to find a job that would pay me lindens that I could change into cash. And my choice of becoming a reporter paid off - literally.

As I approach my first Rez Day (1st November), I feel as if I am settling into a Second Lifestyle that suits me well. My house (bought and paid for) gives me a base of operations and a "Fortress of Solitude" where I can hide from the world; my art collection gives me great pleasure and I now have more paintings that I have room to show them, which means I have, like museums, to have rotating exhibitions; and my contacts and friends make sure I always have articles to write and people to talk to.

All in all, it's still working out for me. Still.