Therian Water: found! There Philippines: merged!

So, last night I finally found the There water. Not like it should be hard, right? I mean, There is a series of ISLANDS surrounded by *ahem* water. But it did take me a while, maybe because I'm lazy.

So, I found the water by teleporting to where, a few Christmases ago, there was this amazing snowflake maze on the cement water. Sure enough, I was knee deep in water. With a skirt on. (That's pic one up there.) I tried to find something in my now meager wardrobe to wear, but was having trouble with it actually loading in. (That's the middle pic.) I tried a little retail therapy and bought something a little more appropriate. (Pic three...oh my goodness, check out that cleavage!)

I was trying to find a bikini or other swimsuit but there just didn't seem to be many options. I am loving the new skintone independent items, but there are soooo many in the catalog that aren't skintone independent. I noticed this most strikingly when looking through Mercuria's stuff...I was actually at that point looking for something my bf could (or would want to) wear in There when he visits it, something he has indicated an interest in doing. I figured he could just use the male avatar I already have...but what I forgot is that all that avie has left in his wardrobe is a navy sailor outfit and some pink boxers. 'doh!

So, while looking through Merc's stuff, which I adore, I couldn't help looking for myself at the same time. Of course she has new skintone independent tops, but all the old caramel, caramel, caramel stuff is still there, too. Maybe I expected it to all magically change or something. I think her inventory is much like the whole catalog, sure there is some amazing stuff...but as old items are still listed in auctions over and over and over and over, a lot of sifting has to be done to find the new stuff. It's really too bad the skintone independent stuff isn't in a separate section. Like, if it has a trans map, approve it into a slightly different path.

Speaking of a slightly different path, I read that There Philippines just merged onto the regular There servers. Not sure what that meant, I had asked Sonny if your avatar would be able to get from There Philippines to regular There or original There or whatever...he said he didn't think so. Still it's a bit confusing that they now, if their name is already taken in original There, have to have "_ph" appended on to the end of their avie name. It's like some kind of code telling the world you're a clone or a copycat or something. How could they merge, though...isn't the exchange rate different there? I mean...There? I mean...There Philippines?

'''drat

This morning, for the first time in a VERY long time, I woke up and thought "I wonder if I have some approvals in There today????"

I used to wake up this way all the time...sometimes I didn't know what day stuff might be pushed into the There world, other times I DID know what day it was supposed to happen (of course SORD can ALWAYS break) but either way, it was always a feeling of Christmas morning. Or like, potential Christmas morning, like you forgot if today was REALLY Christmas or not, or you were kind of naughty during the year before so you weren't REALLY sure Santa was going to visit you. There were days where potential There approvals were pretty much the only thing that got me out of bed.

So this morning, I thought "hey, I might have some approvals!" Wheeee! I got up out of bed and I fired up Outlook on my Alienware laptop. The laptop is old (I think about a month older than my There avie - I think it was the last Hivemind that Alienware ever made, it was also the last laptop they ever let anyone pick up in person - I flew to Miami to get it - and they erroneously labeled it an Area-51 so if it were a postage stamp it would be worth a fortune instead of an old laptop that might maybe be worth $25 or might actually cost me $25 if I were trying to take it to a recycling center), that copy of Outlook has been installed on there forever, and the email addresses that get downloaded there are also old (literally 99.9% spam and other junk, and lots of it) so I waited for a while for Outlook to boot up and check for mail (like, the mail that goes into my there/submissions folder) but I was impatient so I logged in-world on my shiny new computer that has all new apps on it and does everything super fast.

'''drat. There is no new wallpaper. '''sad. Wait...I shouldn't say '''sad, that's a kind of ugly face, maybe just 'sad. I checked the There forums to see if anyone was in the Developer forum complaining about how they didn't get their item approved, and then checked the Advertisements forum to see if anyone was advertising freshly approved stuff and...nothing. Hmmm...aren't approvals on Monday, Wednesday and Friday now? Which is actually friggin' amazing...three days a week! How spoiled we all are now. Oh, except no wallpaper. Maybe because Sonny is on vacation and the approvers are a bit behind? I've seen Sonny approve while on vacation. I've seen him approving items on Christmas Day, seen him approving while pretty much everyone else at the There offices is off skiing in Tahoe or going to a There Gathering. But...this time, I think he is really, actually not approving things.

I don't have anything to go with the wallpaper right now anyway. I'm hoping to submit some more items today and to fire up 3ds Max, but my bf is coming over for lunch today so I may not be able to do anything until later.

........I am still waiting for Outlook to download mail. Thank goodness that's not the only way to check for approvals.......

Oh...I just bought my first transparency skin-independent top Monday. Soooo cool! I'm not much of a clothing painter, but if I get inspired or something maybe I'll try it out just for fun, especially since I downloaded the latest beta of Stylemaker. It's amazing what TheChaz has done with it.

I've had a lot of clothing envy over the years, since I refuse to use Caramel skin, now I am very tempted to go on a little shopping spree. Oooh...must save ThereBucks for submissions, though. Right now I have a TON of ThereBucks, but those are to SELL not to SHOP WITH!!!

Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls is my Hero

One of my guilty pleasures is watching movies. Morning, noon or night I love to just get away from life for a few hours and sit there with a good comedy, drama, documentary or whatever. I'm on the six-at-a-time plan on Netflix and I never fail to get a decadent rush out of taking some time out of my day to remove a dvd from its red envelope and pop it in my PS2.

Another guilty pleasure of mine is reading blogs. Not necessarily subscribing to them, I would rather just find one, read the entire thing from start to finish (or sometimes finish to start) and then move on to the next one.

My favorite kind of blog, and there are a lot of them out there, are blogs by people who weigh 300, 400, or 500 pounds and are trying to lose weight.

Does that sound kind of weird? The thing is, these are the BEST blogs. If you've EVER had issues with food, if you've been bulimic, anorexic, if you've hoarded food or binged, if you've ever had a parent or other family member suggest you might be getting fat, if you've ever been on a diet, had a job or coworkers you hated, had other people tease you or be mean to you, are bored with your life, depressed, or are in any way less than 100% normal or have issues about ANYTHING, you can probably find something to relate to in the best of these blogs. It's like the way we can relate to Woody Allen's neurosis...everyone is a little neurotic, we can laugh at him and with him because at least on some level, we are like him...we just don't show it as much.

We don't have to weigh 500 pounds, it's likely we have just as many issues...it just doesn't show as much, or maybe manifests in some other way.

I admire these (mostly) women who write these extremely personal blogs that let others out there know that they aren't the only ones who feel that way or who that happened to or who are pissed off about that (whatever "that" is). Of course they are mostly somewhat or totally anonymous, which gives it the feel of maybe finding and reading someone's personal journal on the subway (not that I would do that! Heh.) I sometimes feel like reading these blogs reveals the very essence of human nature to me, or like I'm on the verge of unlocking some secret of mankind.

That's why I like the blog of Amanda Palmer from the Dresden Dolls. Because she ISN'T anonymous. She is like "I am Amanda Palmer, and this is who I am and what I actually think and everything about me warts and all". No anonymity. I think that's great. (And that pic up there is her, she is not 500 pounds...although if she was I'm sure she'd write about that, too.)

I'd love to write a blog like that, but I doubt it will ever happen. I already walk the line between being open and speaking the truth and doing things like risking hurting my mother's feelings or violating my bf's privacy. Still, that's my ideal...to speak with such truth that I feel like people reading my blog can really KNOW WHO I AM. Of course I am also not a celebrity like Amanda Palmer is and my life is not so interesting nor do I have a gift with words the way she does BUT I still aspire to her level of candor. Or maybe I'm just talking crazy today.

Frappr is strangely cool

Yeah, I know...it's like I can't stop posting today. It's like I'm trying to make up for all the times I posted like, 3 times in one month. I just stumbled onto a Frappr map for Thereians and added myself to it and then I did a little search and I found there is a really extensive Frappr map for IMVU maintained by BoogiePanda not surprisingly!

I've never seen Frappr before, although it sounds vaguely familiar. I find it weirdly fascinating watching the different people go by with either their real or avatar photos.

Below is the There map (don't you love the way it ruins my page layout?) but I recommend you check out the IMVU one which has over six thousand people on it as I type this.

Oh, and Yoshitoshi put his full address in the There map...I so totally want to stalk him now.

I was searching for a map of my highschool on Frappr, too. Didn't find it, instead I found AdultBabyWorld. Scary. I dunno about you, but if I liked to dress up and act like an adult baby, I wouldn't put a clear picture of myself on a map that shows where I'm located. Or anywhere else, for that matter. I guess you have to decide how badly you want to connect with other people like youself, though.

A Glut of ThereBucks: Where is WikkeDiva?

I was looking at the books that ended up in the pic in my last post and I thought I would give you a closeup just because I think it's amusing that there is only ONE computer book in the whole pic, "Real World Scanning and Halftones".

You'd think I'd have a lot of computer books, and I DO, they are mostly in a big metal cabinet on the other side of the room and scattered in piles here and there waiting for me to buy another bookcase. Instead we end up with "A Passion for Potatoes", "The Complete Idiots Guide to Improving Your IQ", "Car Smarts" (I don't even own a car) and a book that looks like it says "Intercourse" but it really says "Intercourses" (see, it's actually a play on words) and is a cookbook with a bunch of recipes that contain ingredients said to have aphrodisiac properties. Personally I think the Passion for Potatoes book is enough for me...I effing love potatoes, but Intercourses does have a killer chocolate bundt cake recipe. I love to cook.

ANYWAY, that has nothing to do with a glut of ThereBucks, other than maybe the fact that I'm hungry and even though my ThereBucks sales are MOSTLY automated (that's why they're so fast unless there is a problem, which is why you should email me at jinx.tv@gmail.com if you don't recieve your ThereBucks in 30 minutes) I sometimes (like now) need to stick around to make sure sales are going okay so I can't go grocery shopping.

What is going on? I've had more people than normal selling ThereBucks to me lately. Is it because WikkeDiva closed her tbxbank.com? And why is that anyway? And if that means her sellers are seeking other places to sell ThereBucks, shouldn't her buyers be looking elsewhere as well so it would all even out? Where did WikkeDiva go? Is she coming back?

I love/hate a mystery.

It's great to have so many sellers selling to me, the only thing is it would have been great to have a little advance notice, ya know? It's like I've put all my discretionary income into purchasing them and I would have liked to be more prepared. I guess that's just life.

Please buy my ThereBucks! :) Oh yeah, and if anyone knows what happened to tbxbank.com, please, please, please won't you tell me?

Rollover Minutes...Or Not

Did I mention a few times how much I love my iPhone and hate the service (ATT) I am forced to use with it?

Okay but wait...check out the pic with this post. That's my new monitor that has a dock for the iPod. The iPhone doesn't work right with it, but it seems to recharge in the dock. Perhaps I'll eventually find some update or something that allows it to work properly, meanwhile it looks cool there except for the message that it doesn't work properly and do I want to turn on Airplane Mode. Also, when did the pedestal of my monitor get so dusty? It's totally awesome...it has four USB ports, a little speaker and a couple different memory card slots. Soooo convenient.

Yeah, so the monitor and having the computer mostly all set up finally makes me happy. AT&T...not so much. Yesterday, my bf was out of town and I sent him a couple text messages and I didn't hear from him all day. Usually he sends a bunch of texts and calls at least once, usually twice. I just thought that maybe he was too busy or something because of business or maybe he got out of town and realized how happy he was to be away from me and just decided to never talk to me again. Well? I don't know...it could happen...I mean, not even one text message? I went to bed all sad and stuff.

This morning I woke up at 6am, which trust me, is very early for me. I think I woke up because my cat Rodney threw up all over the catfood bowl AND the water dish and so both cats were rather hungry/thirsty and restless/jumping all over me, but anyway...I sat up in bed and went "did AT&T bill me this month??? What is the date today?" I checked online and sure enough I owed them money. I have the pay-as-you-go or prepaid minutes plan because when I signed up I was having a bit of a hassle with it and it was looking like I was going to have to go to some ATT/Cingular wireless store in person to get it taken care of when I found I could do the pay-as-you-go with no trouble. It costs about the same, I guess a little more, than the regular plan and you aren't locked into a two year contract. Actually, I would suppose the bit extra you pay would probably add up to about $200 over two years and so it's just about exactly the same as paying $200 to get out of a contract, but whatever...it was what I ended up with at the time.

So, I needed to pay money for this new month of service, but they didn't call me, didn't text me, and didn't even send me an email to let me know. And I was sending text messages and they LOOKED like they were actually going somewhere. If I hadn't checked, who knows how many days could have gone by where I didn't have any service while meanwhile I grew more and more depressed thinking nobody wanted to talk to me? I thought I was set up for automatic renewal every month, but um...I guess it wasn't working? Meantime, I lost what amounts to about 400 rollover minutes. This is the second month in a row I have lost my rollover minutes. I have to wonder if they do it on purpose or something...like, if you have at least X number of minutes left, then don't notify you of needing to pay because *mwahaha* then you'll lose them.

Oh well, it's mostly just irritating...it's likely the rollover minutes would have just gone to waste, otherwise I wouldn't have had so many to roll over. I just wanted to say again that AT&T sucks.

There is expensive!

It's been an embarrassingly long time since I've submitted anything to There. According to my submission page, almost exactly two years. That's not quite right, though, since I did a commission a little bit more recently than that.

Yeah, so imagine my STICKER SHOCK when I started submitting some stuff today!

I'm really excited because I FINALLY got my nice new computer connected to the Internet and up and running. I got it with Windows Vista because I wanted to play with all the shiny new buttons, and I was askeered because I heard there were tons of incompatibility issues and places not supporting drivers for Vista but SO FAR, even though I don't have my second monitor hooked up yet or gotten my second hard drive working in there, the using of Vista hasn't been a problem.

So, I'm submitting some stuff and I'm planning this BIG SET of coordinated items and then I remembered why I've never really submitted more than a few versions of anything...it's so expensive! To submit a little 128x128 wallpaper texture costs basically $3. You could submit oh...let me think...a whole um...crapload of IMVU items for that same price! I know There has a real human being approving stuff, but WALLPAPER? Now I just need about a zillion other items to go with all the wallpaper I submitted...floors, windows, ceilings, paneling...wait, maybe I don't need paneling, I'll have to think about that. I forgot how addicting this is. Too bad I'm not addicted to making sexy cleavage tops...I could make a lot more ThereBucks.