I enjoy hunting, but I have always been all about making my avatar look a certain way. I try to go for handsome and dashing mostly, but I love to do any kind of theme/look/general silliness. I love to get a reaction. This is probably going back to the early hunting days where i was dared to wear a pink thong, and I looked so damn sexy in it, it became my regular outfit. Something tells me that look may be making an updated appearance in here soon, but I digress (as is my way lol) The point is, my own way of looking at Second Life is not always to get the most stuff for the cheapest price. I love to go on a mad shopping spree, depleting my own store of lindens until I have to do a recharge. I tend to get it into my head that I want to make a look, and then i go thru my not inconsiderable inventory until its done. I switch hairs, and shoes, and sometimes skins, until it all gels into one cohesive bundle of fun. It is my hope, that some of the guys out there may pick up a trick or two, and if you don't mind spending some lindens (and sometimes MAJOR lindens) you can be the sharpest thing on the dance floor. In the future, I will be posting a couple of my "looks" at a time, and giving our readers some clues at where I like to shop. Ok I have gone on far too long, so without further adieu, I will introduce the first of what i hope to be many posts...
The samurai look is one of my favorites. The kimono looks so comfortable, the silk so artfully done, and I always think of that Last Samurai movie, one of my favorites. This particular one comes from a store called Sweetaholic. I have several from there, and this one is probably my favorite. The katana was a hunt gift from a while back, from the Ancient Tree kimono shop. My wedding ring, which I will proudly display in all of my posts is my half of the Earthstones devotion set. My current favorite skins come from Akeruka, in the samurai picture it is the Liam Group gift skin, and in both pictures my eyes come from a store that was formerly known as Fashism, but i believe has since changed their name to Ikon. The hair comes from a shop we discovered on a recent hunt called Ayashi, and is called Kaname.
Sweetaholic : Men's Kimono #16 - 450L
The bulk of the second outfit is from one of my favorite stores, Utopia. Our readers may recognize the name from our wedding post. I have a LOT of stuff from this store. I love to rock a suit in SL (hate it with a passion in RL though) and this particular one is their newest outfit called Alexander in black. My skin, is again Akeruka but the Damien goatee version, which is my normal wear all the time skin. The ring spotlighted in the pic comes from Chop Zhuey, and my hair is from Uw.st and is called Bridge.
That about wraps up the inaugural post of my little chunk of blog here. I haven't decided what to call it yet, maybe some suggestions from the good folks out there would guide me down the path to clarity. Hopefully this won't tick off our core audience. We aren't doing away with the other stuff, look at is as an added feature, not a replacement for if that helps =))
~Thanos
Simply put: not interested. I come here for hunt item previews, not your personal style. I get very annoyed when Fab Free makes posts with no free items, and I will be annoyed with posts here that are irrelevant to hunts. I will be ignoring any future posts like this.
ReplyDeleteI agree totally with Sailor. 'slfreebiehunters' is the name of the blog, isn't it? Blogging personal style is useless to all of us. We don't care!
DeleteHence the wonder of the world wide web....there is always another site out there if what you are looking at isnt to your taste. =)
DeleteSailor - while you are certainly entitled to your opinion, bottom line is that you cant please everyone all the time. The blip at the top of the blog talks about hunts, SALES and gifts from designers. We have to this point been almost exclusively hunt oriented simply because that is where our attention was focused. If you have been keeping up with posts in the last few months, we are stretching out to include sales events such as Goth Fair and the various events hosted at The Wash, not to mention our own sponsored hunt events.
ReplyDeleteIt really annoys me, to borrow your term, when people complain about a blog providing a free service. No one pays us to do the hunts or post the items. It is something we voluntarily give up our evenings, our weekends, our free time to do. If we choose to expand the focus of the blog, its our choice. I hope our readers enjoy the occasional break from hunt stuff, but honestly - I would rather indulge the desire to throw in something different from time to time than burn out on the hunting and close the blog.
Cheers,
Shadow
Simply put: I don't care. We will do what we want, and if you find it annoying, it's a fart on a windy day to me. Momentarily unpleasant but it fades almost instantly.
ReplyDeleteI kinda agree with Sailor, maybe would help if you guys would do a poll just like you did about the type of hunts we would like to participate in and see if people are interested in it.
ReplyDeleteWhile I understand where you are coming from about a poll, I think you are misunderstanding why we are adding more to the blog than just hunts. There is only 1 of me. Either we add some non-me involved posts to the blog (such as Thanos' style posts) or the blog is going to be sitting with nothing new going up for stretches of time because my attention is needed elsewhere. I don't want to see the blog sitting inactive. I don't want to close the blog altogether. At the same time, I can't spend every minute hunting in SL like I was able to before. So...there ya have it. Having people vote that yes, they want to see just hunts isn't going to magically create more time for me to spend hunting. Personally, I am thrilled that Thanos agreed to do the posts, since he has definitely taken a more behind-the-scenes approach to the blog Its a huge help to me to know that he will post on occasion to keep things from sitting stagnant.
DeleteMaybe Thanos can do the hunting instead of the personal style posts :-) I am sure you will find volunteers to do the hunting and posting for you on this blog, at the end of the day, that's why we, the readers, are here, to see the gift previews....
DeleteWhile I am not averse to the occasional hunt, I am far too lazy to get all of the work that Shadowed does in SL done. My thoughts are that I work hard in RL, I don't want to get all stressed out on meeting deadlines, and all of that. Sounds too much like work to me. Like some great songwriter once said, I don't want to work, I want to bang on the drum all day.
DeleteI appreciate all of the feedback good and bad in this blog. I didnt really want to stir up any controversy (well maybe just a little, I'm wicked like that) and I alwas want things to go smoothly here. We try new stuff, we evolve, and we do what we hope is the right thing. Personally i have never understood the people who complain because they turn on a radio or tv show and find something that offends them. When that happens to me, i just turn the channel, and hope that I find something more suited to me. I'm big on free speech, but not big on the glass is half empty types, but thats just me. Anyway my beautiful love is waiting patiently for me, so to sum up. NFW will i be taking any hunts on by my lonesome...
You misunderstand. I appreciate when you show us hunt items, especially for free because it's such a time-intensive process. And I will continue to come to this blog for that. But it's a lot easier to ignore posts like this in the future than complain, which I intend to do. It's your blog, you're entitled to blog about whatever you want. But if you didn't want feedback, you wouldn't have a comments feature. I just thought that I would share my opinion as a reader and won't be bringing it up again.
ReplyDeleteI do like Thanos' sense of style and might be interested in buying some of the things he has shown us. But the posts would be much more helpful and interesting if he included the SLURLs to the shops he mentions.
ReplyDeleteAs I side note, I do sometimes do entire hunts myself, and often they are hunts that you decide not to cover. If I were to provide pictures of all the items from a particular hunt, would you consider posting them here? You have a huge readership that really wants to see hunt gifts and only hunt gifts.
Hi Geoffrey - Way back when, when the blog team consisted of me, Thanos and Tess, we tried adding another 3 people as another hunt team. It did not go well. =) Putting together that post with the other team was one of the hardest hunts we covered - the team themselves rocked, but getting the information we needed, pics done the way we wanted, etc, was insane. I follow a specific format for the hunts, from the way I hunt and track info about issues along the hunt path to how the pictures are taken and edited and how they get put into the blog itself. Thanos is a sweetheart and calls me "detail oriented"; I am more honest and call myself "obsessive".
DeleteThat said, I have been toying with the idea of adding another hunt team again. I am still weighing the pros and cons because I remember how it went last time. =)
Well I, for one, will continue to read your posts whatever they may be. I want you to know that not all your readers are quite so rude and selfish. Hunting for freebies is great fun and all but it's not all I ever do in SL, nor is it all I ever want to read about.
ReplyDelete<3!
DeleteI'm also going to comment... Thanos does outfits the same way I do in SL.
ReplyDeleteI do agree with the urls though.
And I have depended on your blog to do hunts, and hope that what is taking you away is nothing bad.
I've just muddled along on my own since then.
Hmm, maybe I'll start a hunt blog for guys... cause there's millions for women, and only this and Carson for guys.
Hi Shep - I completely agree with you: there are definitely NOT a lot of guy-centric hunt blogs out there. In addition to Carson's stuff, you might want to check Fashion + Freebies for Men (link is under the list of blogs we like to the right of the page) by Yves Firlan. That blog has several contributors and they do include a LOT of hunt items for the guys in their posts.
DeleteAs for what is taking me away - its just life...~L~...when the blog started, I was still in school and not working, which meant I had a lot more time on my hands. I am shifting priorities a bit, looking for a different (better) way to balance the things I need to do versus the things I want to do, you know? =)
Just tossing in there that 1) I want that Kimono, 2) Slurls and perhaps even $L costs would be awesome on these sorts of posts, and 3) If you do hire another hunt team (and had the time), you could try training them in your method. Giving them a spreadsheet to fill out is the easy part; your photography style might be harder.
ReplyDeleteThanks to you both for all the hard work you put into the hunts for us. <3
Sounds easy, right? That's what we thought when we tried it before, and omg..I still have nightmares about that photoshoot! It wasn't the people who made up the other team, but just trying to get through stuff that we, after working together for so long, were just doing automatically - plus the other team didn't want to use voice, which makes it a lot easier in terms of adjusting clothes, etc. I think we ended up spending 4 to 5 hours on the pics and everyone was exhausted and cranky by the end. We'd given them NCs with what we needed, some of it was done, some wasnt, etc...just different hunt styles, you know? Nothing wrong with what they did, but it created a ton of extra work to get everything we needed.
DeleteIf we were to do it again, most likely I would have the other team hunt and then model the gifts, but I think I would continue taking the pics myself - not only so the look and feel of them matches the rest of the blog, but so I have the original, full size images on my hard drive to edit into the posts.
As for the kimono and Slurl...next time I am logged into SL, I will grab it and post it here. I have several women's kimonos from the same place and they ran around the 800-900L mark, i think.
Kimono/Slurl info added to the post, since the comments are not set up to allow links =)
ReplyDeleteI for one loved to see Shadowed style there is really not a lot out there for men and was interesting
ReplyDeleteI also LOVED when you did the hunt poll and still hand out your web site to people.
I have an expression I love My house My rule !
thanks again for all your hard work and trust me just getting through the hunt is 1/2 the work you guys do then there is opening everything ( something a lot of us hunters are guilty of !) and taking the pictures making sure they are labeled correctly and probably a hundred other little details!
Maybe instead of Experienced hunters find some new people who have never really hunted and train them your way?
Thanks again
I love this site no matter if its got hunts, sales going on or blogs on how to style. ITS FREE PEOPLE move on if you dont like it. They are doing this because they choose to. =)
ReplyDelete