The Art Connoisseur

Not only can I spell it but I believe I am it - a connoisseur. Defined by Mr. Webster as "one who enjoys with discrimination and appreciation of subtleties," I admit to having a love of fine art paintings. Admittedly there are certain styles and techniques I prefer to others but I do spend money on art books and art galleries. Whenever I travel in the world, I try to ensure a trip to a local museum. I boast that I have almost been thrown out of the Prado in Madrid and the Art Gallery of Southern Australia in Adelaide, on both occasions for taking photos.

Second Life allows me to indulge this little passion by providing me with the opportunity to create my own private collection of paintings that I no longer need to work out how to steal in Real Life. I already have one wall of my house dedicated to some of my favorite pieces, and there are more walls to cover. Each painting is one prim so I cannot have a viewable collection of more than about 150 items because my land has a finite number of allowable prims and I at least need walls -although in a surreal way I suppose I could just hang them in air and use ALL my prims for paintings.



My collection contains primarily J.W. Waterhouse and John Collier. In a sense, I would like to recreate in-world the entire contents of my favorite web site, ArtMagick. In fact, if I can convince the site owner to part with some cash, I would be happy to enter a joint project to build a spectacular Second Life museum of Art, which could house an awesome collection. I suspect that there would be some minor copyright issues (!!) but then I can dream, can't I?

Meanwhile I can sit in my favorite Cuddle Chair, turn in the radio, and sit back while looking at my art. Cool, huh?

The New House Is Up

After receiving my latest paycheck for an article in SLentrepreneur, I decided to wait no longer and buy my new house. The trickiest part was doing the math to find the center of my platform. For some peculiar reason, I kept adding 16 to 96 and getting 102. Despite adding it a few times, the same wrong answer kept coming up. Go figure! The good news is that although I did the calculation a few times and repeatedly got the wrong answer, an inner thought kept telling me something was wrong. And eventually I worked it out. 112, not 102.

Once my short-term dyscalculia had been cured, I dropped the rezzer at the middle of the platform, flew up in the sky, clicked the rez button, and watched the house build itself. Pretty cool.

Although the house takes up the space that was previously a large deck, their is now lots of patio space around it that takes its place. There's space for a small garden, a hot tub, chairs and tables, and even a rear patio for those quiet times.

The trick now is to find those low-prim furniture items that I can add to create the perfect habitat for the wild SL journalist and his supermodel girlfriend.