Mel Thompsons Blog

I was wandering in SecondLife recently like usual. And I ran into some kiosks that allowed you to click a link or to buy an in-world copy of a magazine. I also noticed that most of the magazines look for a public towards clothing and their trends. And often consists of a 50/50 mix of advertisements and articles. So in the end I was pondering and building the spark of an idea I had, and I started experimenting. Now let's first tackle the idea.  Let's imagine a magazine that although general, is a part directed towards the photographers in SecondLife. But on the other side it should also opens another view on places in SecondLife. The content I had for my eyes was more a mix of sim explorations that are photo attractive, model portfolio presentations, tips and tricks, and so on. I did experiment a bit with the software I had to see if I could come to a "blueprint", "draft", "sketch" of how I would see it. I spend some hours on it, and one of my first...

When you ask a SecondLife photographer which tool he or she uses to work on his snapshots, the most standard answers are either GiMP, or Adobe PhotoShop. So when I started I tried these also. And yes, I know, Adobe PhotoShop is very good, except what struck me the most whas the price for it on a monthly base. GiMP is also good, except I had too much trouble to find my way in it, and get a decent result. I would say GiMP is build for the geeks by the geeks. And I am not a geek... So I looked further, and finally dropped in my google search on the application suite of Affinity , a U.K. company, and decided to give them a try as they had what I needed. Their price looks decent, and I downloaded their software for the trial of 90 days. And to be honest, they have a good structured approach in their way of working. You get the applications quickly in your hand (fingers), and the results are there quickly. And most of all, they exist on Windows PC and macOS. The only thing I missed, was an a...

OK, first my "blonde moment". I just noticed that I forgot in a lot of my previous blog articles that Blogger has a field named title. And I just forgot to fill it in. And I was even so stupid to complain about it towards the template creator. Duh. And then my OMG moment this week. I just wanted to check if I even popped up when I did a search in Google on my name. And of course, my blog doesn't show up. So I need to work on this I suspect. But 2 other links showed up. And to be honest, seeing these 2 links made me want to open a bottle of champagne. It seems that 2 of my blog articles have been published as links also on the SecondLife community website, woohoo. The links to these articles are: https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/6902-mel-thompsons-blog-gadgets-i-use-in-secondlife/ and https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/7027-mel-thompsons-blog-gadgets-i-use-in-secondlife-part-2-studio/

As English is for me a learned language and not my mother tongue, I know that the way I write is not always the best way. I seem to have a tendency to write to difficult and with too much influence from my classic studies. I had in the past many complaints about it, so I needed to work on it. And then I found me a website, which had even an offline application to help me. The website is https://hemingwayapp.com , and gives you a good aid when you redact a text. It flags very clear where your structure fails, and most of the times overs you a solution for it. It also grades your text in readability, the lower the better. And in this way it makes sure that your text is understandable in an easy way by everybody. It looks as an extra task to do, but the result is there.  Your blog, or any text is better for its reader, and they appreciate this. On my desktop PC, I use the editor provided on the website. But when I am travelling, I invested in the application on my laptop. In that way ...

 Just a draft of an idea... World Insights - February 2021

Enjoying my Monday morning on the island of Bumrose... Some quickshots taken, well quick... I did spend some time to tweak poses. But was a short fun moment.

About a bit more than 2 weeks ago, I wrote an article on the gadgets I use in SecondLife while taking pictures. And in the end I want to extend that list a bit with some additional useful tools I also use. The first one I want to bring up is for Studio Work. I know you can buy for thousands of L$ the promoted studio with all the bells and whistles and in the end you will always find a missing factor. So I shopped a bit around, listening to my mentor what he advised, looking at my small landplot of my gallery in number of prims allowed, and with my wishlist on it what I thought could be helpful. As displayed on Marketplace As building for my studio, I got me the Tulla Phoptography Studio ( https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Tulla-Photography-Studio/4418924 ). A simple modern M/C building which has the advantage to have 3 stage rooms in it, one bright white, one black and one more general. I cleaned up the building a bit by resizing a part of it, removing unwanted picture frames, and I...