Lysistrata Szapira

After sticking with Avalon since its release, I think I've found her replacement in Noel. After going through every skin gift for this event, I settled on Boataom's gift skin in Diamond 5. Other gifts in the photo are Rama's hair, Top1's lips, Wren's Nest Petite face shape with my own body shape, Jack Spoon's and WarPaint's eyeshadows, Avi-Glam's eyes, and Swallow's and E.Marie's earrings (some hidden). Outfit is from Pink Cream Pie's and Meva's advent calendars.

Moles will be around shortly to clean up the derail since this is a thread about LaraX, not BOM vs applier.

You're not reading thoroughly. It's not about preferences. It's about me being able to shop and buy all the BOM skin and makeup I could possibly desire. BOM skins and appliers are available in large quantities.

Bingo! So much of what Addams and BumbleBee do seems to mirror each other. Even the ads are similar. Even their Shop & Hop promotions are similar. I think there are shared people behind the names.

Nope. I don't use appliers at all. My skins and makeup are 95% BOM. I have not suffered from a lack of shopping options for BOM skins and makeup. I can't remember the last time I bought appliers. I'm one of those firmly entrenched Avalon-wearers too.

Belleza Jake is NOT a muscle head and has quite a lot of clothing available for it. Legacy's main male body is also not a muscle head and has clothing support (although I despise the HUD system).

I used the FabFree Shop & Hop spreadsheet this year. A link can be found here: https://fabfree.wordpress.com/2023/11/30/woah-the-fabfree-holiday-shop-hop-guide-is-here/ . It contains links to photos of each item and a link to the store at Shop & Hop. Woo, it saves so much time. I know which stores are always guaranteed to put out gifts I actually want, and generally, I find something to purchase at those stores. The rest I can ignore. Usually every year before Advent season starts, I will go in and do a purge from last year's Christmas/advent gifts. I'll try on all the clothing items or look at the photos and dump things that I wouldn't consider wearing again. So now I have to pick over my 2022 Advent clothing and decor. I try to be pickier about what I do grab. I will usually click on the gift box and select edit, and actually look at what it contains if there are no photos on the gift box. That way I'll know if it's a type of gift I have no interest in (I do not need any more chokers, for example. If anything is named with "sexy" in the name, I know I don't want it. Most of the time I don't want gift tattoos either.). I also don't go to events where the styles are not my type, as I prefer original mesh over templates. With Advent gifts, again, after years of being in SL, I know which stores are going to offer things I can use. I know which stores have things I will never wear because it's not my style. Sometimes I will give a new (to me) store a chance, but more often than not, it's not my style. Maitreya LaraX threw a monkey wrench into the mix a bit. While I have the Legacy body, I don't use it, but now I'm saving Legacy clothing in case a store gift doesn't come in a LaraX rigging (it seems that Legacy fits LaraX more often than it doesn't). Like some of the others above, I will be working on the item preview feature now that Firestorm has it. It will be time consuming.

I picked up the Premium gifts just a little while ago.

I usually decorate my Belli house inside and outside to extremes, but I will be lucky if I even put a tree up this year. After my heart surgery, I just don't have the energy. I didn't decorate for Halloween either.

I finally got around to checking out LaraX naked. I can live with it, especially since I don't normally wear things that would show those golf divots/dimples. I use Amara Beauty's free body skins, and it looks ok (I don't need HD nips because again, I don't show my nips.). I just don't like Velour's tones. None of them seem to match what I want to wear, and I've tried them all.

The "love juice" thing reminded me of something I wish would be banned. People getting spanked and making orgasmic sounds in shopping areas, especially the ones that sound like they're children. Now if they do it once or twice, fine. But it seems like these people have them on auto-repeat. Nobody wants to listen to that while shopping. I have muted/blocked so many people for doing this. I also tend to get annoyed with the cigarette lighter sound. As often as it repeats, these people must be chain-smoking so much they'll be dead next week if they were in RL.

Oh, and for anyone annoyed by the auto-alpha scripts in some clothes, I found a quicker solution. Let the auto-alpha happen and then just click "show all" in the alpha hud for the body and redo the alphas manually. Ison's clothes have the auto-alpha script so I just erased what the script did and did them manually.

I ran over to the Dubai event to buy Ison's (of course) new release. The photos show my avi wearing the Legacy fit for both pieces, and oddly enough that works fine with the LaraX body with some careful use of the alpha hud. This outfit does not contain rigs for LaraX, but I found I could also use the Lara rig with careful hud usage. My avi's butt, thighs, and boobs are slightly larger, but that's kind of the look I was going for, slightly rounder than old Maitreya but less round then Reborn. I should also note I do not care what my body looks like naked so I haven't thoroughly examined the boobs and butt whilst naked as a jaybird.

Just wait until the template stores get ahold of this body too. LOL We'll be overrun with X options soon enough.

I'm pleased with LaraX thus far. I don't tend to wear a lot of skimpy clothing, so I just left on the outfit I had on from over the weekend (Ison's FLF sweater and boots and a Neve skirt). Yes, it required having to manually alpha some of the body, but that's no big deal. I don't feel like I need to change my shape at all. I'm fine with slightly rounder proportions. Using my existing shape with X did not result in anything near Reborn's butt and boobs, so I do not need a deformer.

Yeah, the stores that have clothes for virtually all mesh bodies are buying full perm template mesh and just texturing it. I refuse to buy most template clothing. Some stores have an entire staff behind the scenes doing different stages of clothing creation. I know of some stores where the store owner does nothing in the process other than creating the vendor ads and putting them up for sale. The designers who actually create and rig their own mesh by themselves often have to choose a limited number of bodies to rig for because they don't have time to do it for all the bodies. You should ask a designer sometime how long it takes to create, texture, and rig an outfit. It's NOT easy. If they can rig for Maitreya or Reborn and sell 2000 copies of a dress but that same dress for Belleza will only sell 500 copies, it's not worth their time and effort.

FWIW, Spectacledchic is having a 50% off sale right now. They are definitely a good option. I think Pixicat has some modest clothing as well. I'd hold off on shopping now just in case stores participate in Black Friday sales. As someone who also whines about the predominance of overtly sexy clothing in SL (I do not want my nips and crotch on display), my go-tos are Ison, Coco, Neve, and PurpleMoon. Siss Boom also has some nice outfits, especially if you like patterns (their Advent calendar always has some neat stuff that you won't find anywhere else). There are also a few stores that specialize in era-specific clothing, like the 1940s/50s or even further back, but I don't remember any names off the top of my head. Wait, there's Valentina E who does vintage clothing. Their color palette is pretty limited though (few prints and a lot of dark/jewel tones). I'd buy a lot more clothing there if they offered more prints and pastels.

The jeans in the S-Club ad appear to be shorts (I can see a cuff on the left leg looking at the photo). Ison has jeans/shorts with similar belts/buckles, but none of them have that looped under bit.

I have hair from a certain very expensive store on my to-buy list if they do a BF sale. They never participate in weekend sales, so the only way I can afford to buy all the ones I want is if they participate in BF (crossing my fingers for 50% off). I'm pretty sure I'd go on a rampage through Ison and Kunglers if they do a sale too.

I've been in SL since 2008. I know multiple people who have passed away in that time frame. I know a few more I suspect have passed but do not have confirmation of it. It always comes as a bit of a shock, but we have to remember that SL has been around 20 years, so people who were older when it started are getting up in years.

The first one looks similar to one from Enfer Sombre: "Messy" hairbase. It doesn't have the longer pieces though.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Caduceus/70/154/34 A Mole popped in this topic to advise that there were more than 800 buckets. They usually will not give specific numbers. We really don't need a percentage of 800/XXXX. Last year there were around 900-1000 buckets, I think (I finished in the top 10 with just over 900 candies). If you're struggling and not set on the idea of finding buckets without help, use the lists provided by the Belli group (in notices). There are over 500 listed in one of them and over 300 in the other. There are some dups unfortunately, but hitting 800 should still be doable. I added over 200 candies to my total yesterday alone.

I hate the idea. Why? I don't need quantifiable validation which is what this appears to be. Ignore a f**kboi? Get a down vote. Bump into people parked on the landing point at an event? Get a down vote. Bad bad bad. I remember some sort of point system on Plurk years ago (back in the dinosaur era when a lot of avatars and store creators had Plurk accounts). I don't remember much about the system, but I thought it was also pointless.

Since we're coming up on that season, I'd say LL manipulates many of us to play the Great Halloween Pumpkin Candy Bucket Search (tm) game every year. They dangle lovely, limited addition carro...er...Halloween bears so that we spend hours upon hours hunting down those pesky buckets, getting kicked out by 1 second security orbs (or worse, getting kicked out by 20 second orbs on parcels where the bucket has been placed so far away from the parcel edge that it's impossible to grab), etc. LL is really good at playing on FOMO. I've enjoyed playing the game, but I'm having major surgery next week, and I simply don't know if I will recover enough to hunt pumpkins when/if the Game of Buckets begins again.

I dragged my fiance's VERY old account out of mothballs (he hasn't been in world since 2013) and kitted him up with Senra Blake. The only new paid item is the hair. The rest is new free stuff and existing old stuff. Credits: Skin--oldoldold Belleza Jonas. The old Belleza skins definitely put the eyebrows in a better position than LL's eternally surprised Senra avatars. Eyes--oldoldold Fashism eyes (predecessor to Ikon purchased in 2011 and are still quite nice) Shape: Modded from the old beginner shape for Leonard (the gray-haired dude). I hated all the Blake shapes that came with it. Hair: Modulus Mendes hair (paid) Outfit: Emerald Man Liam outfit (freebie at Palomma Plaza) It took using the Blake dress alpha on top of the Emerald Man alpha for the outfit to make this work though, so if you're having trouble getting your Blake's midsection covered try the dress alpha, try that one). I used the Belleza fit. Shoes: Blake loafers straight out of the package. And a pair of black socks out of the library. I think he looks pretty good.