Alright, so this is going to be a bit of a different post. Over the last couple weeks, I decided I really wanted to fuck around with Genus's Morphtoon. Like, I have almost 0 experience with the entire Genus Morph system and while I've played with the free head I got during Christmas last year, I'm already really attached to my Lelutka head I use on my normal day-to-day avi.
At the same time, I had an unused alt, which previously belonged to a project I helped run a while ago. It already had reborn, some random skins, random freebie/cheapie heads, and a rather expensive AO. I didn't want this alt to go to waste, and I figured I could repurpose it. Enter: Dysnomia.
Dysnomia Diva
Dysnomia here originated from that alt account. I got her a name change to match her status as my alt (Dysnomia being the moon of Eris, as well as one of the Goddess's offspring). Making this avi was a TRIP.
First thing's first, Alt3 had recently released the Fae skin, which was designed for Morphtoon and came with a shape. So this was my basis. I also just generally really love Alt3's Waifu skins, because they're so versatile and pretty and a fatpack is pretty affordable at 2800 L$, considering all the tones and addons you get in the package.
Then, I fucked around with demo parts. So many demo parts. I tried with different ears, found out the extra long elf ears TOTALLY work with morphtoon even though Genus has them over by the normal morph parts (wtf lol). I messed around with the shape, bought the morph pieces, linked em together, and eventually ended up with the finished Dysnomia above.
One REALLY HUGE BENEFIT of Genus Morph and Morphtoon is it's entirely mod. While yes, you can wear all the pieces separately and use 7 attachment points if you really want to, you can also link them together into one big head, which works the same as other heads (though, other heads don't link the eyes/teeth so, at least three slots are used up by Lelutka heads).
If you're unfamiliar with linking stuff together, it's pretty easy. There's a nifty little linking item called "GENUS - LINK HELPER (REZZ)" which can help you make sure you have all your stuff.
Basically, rez everything on the ground in front of you or in the lil boxes. Then, enter edit mode and select any of the parts. Hold shift, and select the rest. Select the base head last. Then, click the lil "Link" button in the edit window.
All the parts'll be linked, with the head shape as the root prim. You can rename the whole linkset something you'll remember before taking it into your inventory.
And now I was in a conundrum. This random-ass throwaway alt, whose only job is to receive tips/donations for an upcoming sim I'm working on, or hold my boat in place while on the Blake, looks nicer than my normal Goblin.
My Goblin Form
I always say I'm always a goblin on the inside. Well, I haven't actually been spending a ton of time in my goblin form lately, preferring my high fae form (my normal form).
A quick recap of the gobbo's looks:
First, here's my goblin at her inception. I knew from the beginning I wanted a cute pink shortstack goblin. You don't really see pink goblins often, and pink and green are two of my fav colors. My main has green hair, so the goblin gets to be pink. Her original form actually used Velour Halloween (Hallowen? idk) skins, which was fine til my friend Hecate showed me Alt3.
After a while of rocking Pink Fairy as my goblin's main skin tone, I wanted to upgrade to 2k. My existing face skin didn't get the upgrade, so I decided it was the time to move to Alt3's Pynk tone:
Honestly, not much to say about this version. She's cute. I like this goblin. But, it's still basically my normal head with a slightly bigger nose and thiccer body, and Kreep's goblin ears (which are great, btw, and yes I whipped together that matching Pynk ear skin, kreep's stuff is very user-friendly to modify, and alt3 provides tone samples).
I've experimented with alternate heads for this goblin before, like a couple different bespoke and logo heads, Kreep's nymph head got into the mix at one point. I don't have screenshots of those experiments.
But yeah, then I redid Dysnomia, and knew my normal goblin needed a makeover. Here's what I came up with:
She's in the same outfit as my older goblins for the sake of consistency, but yeah.
Like Dysnomia, she uses Alt3's Fae skin and shape as a base. I then adjusted her shape to make her shorter and adjust her facial features quite a bit, kinda finessing her til I got to a point where her proportions made sense for her size and worked with animations and stuff. No shade on the OG shape, but I have different tastes and once I adjusted the height, everything else needed adjustment too.
Challenges and tips with Morph Toon
If you want to experiment with something similar, here's some tips:
- Don't fucking link your parts together til you're set on what you want.
- If you're like me, you'll experiment with different parts a ton, and there's no sense in linking them until you're sure with what you want. Yes, I linked like 3 different sets of teeth and eyes and ears before landing on my current configuration.
- Also, don't try to use the HUD if you're wearing a head and also have parts rezzed on the ground. Shit gets weird. Only have one head out at a time lol.
- The HUD is a bit confusing. You're probably going to want to use BOM eyes, and when you do, first make sure you "clear" your sclera, since those "sclera" options overlay your BOM eyeball.
- The sclera settings has two lines. the top is just reflections. If your BOM eye has reflections already, you're not gonna wanna put reflections OVER your reflections, so you can click the "clear" button and leave it be.
- If your eye doesn't have reflections, you might wanna mess with this, or don't, I don't care I'm not your mom.
- The actual sclera options below the reflections are weird. First two actually overlay a fake sclera on top of your BOM layer. It always looks weird. Second 3 are basically entire eye overlays.
- No, I don't know why these are here and not above with the applier eyes. It's a weird choice.
- You may also want to manually edit your eye and set its alpha mode to masking or none, since by default it's set to blending which can cause some weird glitching behind bangs and stuff.
- While you're doing this, if you wanna use furry eyes (which can be more stylized/cartoonish, which is nice for this head), those are typically rotated 90 degrees compared to human eyes. The HUD has no option for that, but you can do it manually by rotating your (BOM) diffuse texture 90 degrees:
- Changing any of the eye settings in your HUD will reset these customizations, so do these last.
- So many hairs just don't fit.
- Unrigged hairs are nice for being resizable. But for longer hairs, they'll probably need to be rigged.
- Rama Salon's XS size seems to work okay depending on my head shape.
- Genus's HUD has an option to hide some of your scalp in the settings popout. This is useful for some hairs and head shapes. A BOM scalp alpha works here too but yeah I don't have one for SLUV. I should probably just make one.
- For long ears, that settings pop-out has an ear angle setting too, which works for making sure your long-ass elf ears don't clip with your hair too badly.
- Sintiklia's small size is okayish, better with bangs
- Honestly, bangs fix most issues. Use bangs.
- Speaking of bangs, use BOM eyebrows and don't use appliers at all. You'll thank me later.
- PLEASE SEND ME HAIR RECOMMENDATIONS CUZ HOLY SHIT
- MorphToon comes with limited facial animations. It blinks if you turn them on. That's pretty much it.
- I've found that Vista's facial animation HUD works well though.
- Some OMY dances that close my eyes will sometimes cause my eyes to bust out of my eyelids, so YMMV. I am also using the Oni Eyes on my gobbo, and you might have better luck with other eye shapes or just, shapes in general.
- The INCREDIBLY CUTE Freya Foxtail of Freya's Stuff makes a HUD with some really cute facial expressions for pics and stuff. She also makes some teeth that work well as drop-in replacements for morphtoon's official teeth/gums/tongue combo.
- The SLUV makeup situation is bleak, but there are some options.
- Genus has a big "4k" button in the hud. Don't bother with it. Nobody releases new stuff for this UV, since 2k skins are a thing, and you can just use 2k SLUV instead.
- Void's Mirage Lashes are constantly getting updated for new eye morphs. Get a redelivery if it doesn't support whatever you're playing with, and it'll probably have an update. They are on top of their shit over at Void. Love em.
- Bottom lashes are a bit iffy on the Oni Eyemorph. It's due to my shape, for sure. I can get them to work, but easier to just hide them and use the built-in lashes for the bottom.
And that pretty much covers it.
Hoooo boy this was a long post. Hopefully it makes sense. Went on quite the journey here. As always, let me know what you think. I'm reachable in-world, by comment here, or by email.
Volunteering at SLB is a lot of work. It's basically 10 days of non-stop events. I put in about 23 hours of actual logged "volunteer" time, not counting the time spent helping out before and after my shifts. With that over, though, I've been able to spend some time really exploring SLB.
Ima be real, there's a ton of ugly-ass AI slop at SLB. But here's a few gems I've found. These aren't the only gems, just a few I've decided to bring awareness to because they deserve it.
Second Life Topography, by Erik Mondrian
Those of you who explored SLB last year might remember Erik's 3D models of Sansara and Heterocera. Well, this year, he's done a 3D terrain map of all of mainland. It's seriously impressive. The pic in the header of this post is a closeup of the snowy mountains of Sansara, but it's all there in all its 3D glory.
And he's got bigger models too! He could fill a region with these on a much larger scale and more detail. Maybe one day the Lindens can give him space for it, because he's done incredible work with these. Collecting the terrain data alone must have been a huge effort, for each and every region.
He's been talking about it at the User Groups, but seeing it in-person is a whole different story. And if you click on a continent, it'll tell you which continent it is, in case you haven't been attending SL geography classes. He's even mapped out where each Linden Home theme is on Belli, which is neat.
I'll be sad to see this go at the end of SLB. I hope Erik finds a permanent home for it! It belongs in a museum!
Also, if you go down the stairs, there's a neat little underwater reef, with some prim coral and plants, provided by the maker of the next parcel!
Primstar, by Snowlord
This thing is so fucking trippy. Go watch it for a while. It's weird. Love it! SO MANY PRIMS! I haven't met Snowlord in person yet, apparently they're friends with Erik. But this shit is nuts. Erik also showed me some of their previous builds and the stuff people can do with prims never ceases to amaze me.
Hope, by Raven Anton
This exhibit by Raven Anton of Morph Productions had the biggest emotional impact on me. Raven has actually done a few of my favorite builds, like the Kaleidoscope Monarch Education Project (which I fell in love with before I ever met her), and I'm always excited to see what she's got up her sleeves.
But this... Fuck. To be real, I'm transgender, and I've lost a lot of friends to suicide. Hell, I've been there myself. It's rough out there. Seeing this build brought me to tears.
Like real, ugly crying tears.
This is just three screenshots. They don't do it justice. Walk through it. Keep your music on. Read the signs, listen to the music, and just take it in. 💚
Over the Rainbow - Munchies Land, by Saucey Sinister
Alright, so it wouldn't be SLB without a cake build. And there are like, several dozen of them. A lot of them are kinda sloppy. Like the giant Philip cake for example, or a certain alice-in-wonderland themed cake that's just like... omg so confusing. This cute lil cupcake icecream kingdom on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air.
It's very very very cute. Makes sense since I guess the builder/mesher also owns Kawaii Couture. Check her primfeed!
A Small Measure of Peace, by Mitsuko Kytori and Akiko Kinoshi
I was actually done writing this post, then my good friend Dreamsphere invited me to an event at this parcel. Somehow, I had missed it in previous visits. It's such a cute little tranquil location, and very well-landscaped. Makes sense, since Mitsuko also works on Hayabusa Design, where she makes really cool animesh trees, and Akiko owns the Akipelago islands.
I'll warn you, there's a lot of alpha-blended grasses and leaves, so the frame rate isn't great. But, it's fucking gorgeous and worth a visit and some pics.
They held a lil event here today, with Nuvolino and TaccaExotic DJing, which was a good time. Some great tunes in a beautiful environment.
Anyway, there's so much cool stuff to see at SLB. People have put in a ton of effort, and I'd highly recommend roaming the regions, not just hitting the shop and hop and bailing. This thing goes til July 19, so you've only got a few more weeks, then all this stuff goes poof!
For the past week, my time in SL has been consumed by Second Life's 23rd Birthday. This is my second year volunteering on the Stage Crew team, which has just been a blast. I've met so many insanely talented live performers, DJs, tribute bands, and coming together with the rest of the team has been a nice little reunion.
The music portion of the festivities continues til Sunday night, with Rapa and DINO closing out the Salty Saddle Saloon stage. The full calendar is here.
I've also had some time to explore the grounds, and attend some of the Linden Talks, including with Philip Linden on Monday, and the Product Team today. These happen at 1PM SLT, at the Orpheum Theater. Tomorrow's the Engineering team (with Jerome), Thursday is Marketing, and Friday is SL Studios (The moles, I think?).
The talks have been alright overall so far. Philip was... Philip, but during the Product Q&A, I got two of my questions answered! You can see the full questions and responses in Pantera Północy's recording of the session (linked to my questions).
The first was if Grumpity Linden and the gang have considered moving away from the powers of two tier pricing, to simplify mainland pricing and make it more accessible. She said (paraphrasing) that of course they have considered it, and would love to make that change because the existing tier pricing scheme gives her migraines to think about. But, of course there's a lot of history there and she didn't give any indication of this changing anytime soon.
The second was trickier:
Talking with some of my creator friends, I'm seeing a growing sentiment of "is it even worth it to keep creating for this platform" specifically triggered by the growth of AI-generated meshes, textures, etc. And as a consumer, among the flood of low-quality AI mesh and AI-generated advertisements, it's getting harder to find well-made human-created stuff. Is this issue on your radar? What's your plan to keep existing creators and artists on this platform instead of jumping ship to other, growing platforms?
Grumpity's response (mostly verbatim, edited to remove fillers):
This is a great and complex question. If I were just to be facetious, I could say this is a problem that is faced by every platform. And the faster they grow, the more they're facing this problem. It's a problem I face in my daily life, outside of Second Life as well, and I think, you know, our little company alone can't solve it.
But we're definitely looking at what tools are available and more importantly effective outside of our ecosystem so we can learn from them and improve our ecosystem.
At the same time, the things that we do differently are honestly how much earnings you get to keep. We constantly try to make sure that the creators get to keep as much of their earnings as possible. And this is true yesterday and today, right?
Even with any changing of the Lindex fees that has happened over time, the amount that a creator gets to keep of their earnings is incomparable. You know something like Roblox gives you 40%.
But the other thing we're trying to do is obviously grow the customer base, right? So that there are more people coming into Second Life, engaging with Second Life, and engaging with your creations, right? And to be able to take advantage of them.
Part of that is discoverability. So yeah, we do want to find ways to help people find good, fun, interesting Second Life content without putting our foot on the scales too much to decide what that is.
And lastly, we are also looking to build out the toolset with LUA scripting being the most recent addition but not the only one. That is one I will gladly hand over to Jerome in the next session as well.
Looking back at this response now, in text after hearing it live, it's a lot better than I initially thought. Initially, I was like, "did she even answer my question?" but in a roundabout way, she did:
- They are aware of the flood of slop, and recognize it as a problem affecting other platforms.
- They are looking at ways to improve discoverability to help separate the good shit from the slop. But, they don't want to be the arbiter of "what is good".
- They recognize SL's strengths as the toolset available to make content (which is expanding) and the percentage of earnings creators get to keep.
- They're looking for more ways to grow SL (duh).
So that's all good? I think? That said, no concrete promises were made here, and I'd love to see more. I'm hoping the marketplace will at least get some filtering if you want to see AI-generated content or not, but that's been a request for ages and I'd encourage you to upvote it if you haven't already.
Last, I just want to say something important. There's been a lot of talk about AI Slop at SLB, and yes, it's highly discouraging. I've seen so much of it. My friend posted a brief overview over on Reddit, which sparked an excellent discussion. But there are so many amazing creations at the exhibition that didn't use AI, or hardly used it. There a ton of incredibly talented musicians and performers going all week. Even with the slop, there's still plenty of humans putting their hearts and souls into making this celebration special!
Don't let the generic slop overshadow their hard work.
Support human creators and artists.
Howdy! I'm Eris Ravenwood. Some of you might know me from real life, but most of you from Second Life. This is my new Second Life specific blog where I'll share tutorials, fun places and events I find, and any longer-form content I feel like writing.
What got me into Second Life?
Like a lot of people, I first tried out Second Life way back in 2007. I was in high school then, and signed up for a free account on the teen grid. I stuck around for a few hours, maybe a day at most, then bailed hard. I don't really remember my experience back then, since it was almost 20 years ago, but clearly I didn't like it.
Fast-forward to 2024. I was at home, chatting on Discord. A rando in a Discord server I'm on mentioned how they'd probably use SL, but they were frustrated that it was so expensive. I responded, "what? isn't it free?" and tried out my old email to see if I already had an SL account. That's when I re-discovered the 2007 account, which I quickly discarded because nothing was on it, and created a new account.
That sent me down the rabbit hole of making an avatar (which some older Reddit posts were a huge help with), which led me to discover that I really needed to spend like $20 to get my avi into a place I was happy with. Now, new users have the Welcome Pack, which gives a buuunch of really nice starter gear, but at the time I just had Senra and random freebies which really didn't cut it.
I think what made Second Life stick for me this time around is where I was in my RL when I signed up:
- I had recently lost my job.
- Most of my RL friends didn't have as much free time to do stuff as I did between job hunting.
- As an extrovert, I seek out social experiences, but without a job, I didn't have the necessary disposable income to go to RL events by myself.
- I did, however, have enough money to make a damn decent looking avi, and find a "job" in-world to earn money and shop sales and stuff.
- As an extrovert, SL is a really great social platform to meet people and scratch that extroverted itch.
So yeah, SL stuck. And yeah, I moved across the country, found a new RL job, improved my life, and now I can do more social activities in RL, but SL is still such an important place for me to socialize and express myself. Not to mention all the amazing music and events.
What do I like to do in Second Life?
Gods, I do so much in Second Life it's hard to keep track.
I love going to music clubs to listen to good DJs while chatting in-world or doing work in real life. Meeting people is important to me, so events I go to tend to be places with more social chatter. Or, I'll IM folks with interesting avatars and profiles, to start a conversation.
Exploring, especially with friends, is a lot of fun to me. Mainland is fucking huge and constantly changing, so it's nice to just kinda drive or Stargate around and see what's new, or find cool old builds to explore.
I go to a lot of events, and even volunteer sometimes! Like, Second Life's 23rd Birthday is coming up tomorrow and I'm volunteering on the stage crew, which is going to be a great time. Fantasy Faire was a bit over a month ago, and that's always a favorite of mine to attend.
I'm an official volunteer Second Life Mentor, and when I can, I mentor new residents so they're not as lost as I was when I joined.
I try to attend official User Groups when I can, dependent on my RL workload, to keep up-to-date with SL's dev team and open source community.
I go to a ton of random smaller events, art exhibitions, and shows (music or otherwise), that just kinda pop up from time to time.
And sometimes I just goof off with friends. You know how it is.
My plan for this blog
I plan to post ~weekly, maybe twice weekly.
I plan on writing an obligatory "Getting Started" tutorial, starting a new avi from zero in 2026, with a list of useful resources. With SL23B starting tomorrow, that guide might come a bit later, but it's coming.
I'll also post regularly about random shit I find exploring, events I've been to, or that are coming up, and of course, my thoughts on current events on the grid, or friends' blog posts, or reddit posts, etc. I have a lot of thoughts.
The main place for my pics will continue to be Primfeed, but I'll post some of those here too!
This is very much a work in progress, and I appreciate your support. Thanks for reading, and I hope you like my new site! :3
