Hairspray is having a special blowout sale to help sweet Sinnocent Mirabeau to raise funds for an emergency operation on her puppy. Just go there and buy stuff, she promises 2 for 1 on everything. Also, donate a few lindens for her to rise it quickly, since the fees are hefty. A few people blogged it but I’m just spreading the word a bit more.

You can go to her store direct here: Hairspray SLURL

Here is a copy pasta of a notecard that was passed to me (removed image and landmark, use SLURL up here).

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Hi everyone.

It is with a heavy heart that I write this, but I figure my crisis and personal heartache can maybe have something good come out of it.  Hopefully for myself and for all the people in SL who like my hair or skins and want to get 2 for the price of one.

Anyways, here’s the deal.  I normally hold sales like this every few months just for kicks and as a fun way to get people even more hair than they’d normally be able to purchase on their own.  However, this sale is of great importance to me for other reasons.

A week ago my 9 month old baby puppy, Eris, (even tho she’s not so little anymore) started to have a mass growing in her ear.  I thought she had just gotten bitten by something outside and it would clear up in a few days.  Well that didn’t happen.  In fact, the mass got about 8x bigger.  So I took her to the vet yesterday and got the worst possible news

She didnt get bit.. she has a tumor and a hematoma forming in her ear and she needs surgery to remove it.  Otherwise it will just get bigger and bigger and will either.. rupture… get badly infected…. and most likely both will happen.. and the infection the doc said will eventually kill her.. sooner rather than later.

The even worse news is exactly how much it’s going to cost to save her…  Which is $1447.00 US.  I was in shock when given that figure because it is just not a price I can even close to afford.  I’m getting married in RL in September to my SL hubby and I’ve had to put most of my money towards that for deposits and all the other wedding junk that I need.

The irony is that she was my engagement present, and now… my wedding is the thing that has taken up all my money and put me in this spot.  Blah…

So at any rate I’ll get right to the point.. I have a very little window of time in order to raise the money to save her.. so I decided I would do a buy one get one free sale in order to try and help to get some of the money for her surgery.

Everything in my shop is eligible for the sale, nothing at all is excluded.  The basic idea is whatever you buy.. you get something of equal or lesser value.. free.

So if you buy a skin you can get a skin free or a couple hairs, doesnt matter.  Anything goes.

All you have to do is purchase what you want, then send me a notecard with what you purchased and which items you would like to receive free.  I will send them on out to you after that

But, I thank you all for your time and for the long read.  I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their week/weekend.

Thanks again,
SInnocent Mirabeau.. and Eris

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Good luck Sinnocent and Eris, I’m sure you will make it! Much ♥♥♥.

Yes, bloggers won round one. Not a huge victory but we got the much needed clarifications. As someone with a lifelong tradition of activism, having gone on several strikes (especially student ones), small victories are big victories when it comes to support our troops. Yes, we may not be happy about the content of those clarifications, but that’s what we asked for, and we got it. We can only congratulate ourselves, we did the impossible: make the Lindens listen to us. Now, forward to the next step in the battle.
As much as I’m a Linden fangirl, I’m also a very active SL socialite. I can see popular support for Linden Lab declining, following a few of their legal decisions in the last year.

I am still not going to comply to that policy until I get a letter from the Lindens. I’m not that much affected by the policy itself. But I still feel much for bloggers that must make their domain name comply.

One of the best roundup about the case IMOHO is by lurvely Cuddlefish Jacek Antonelli, speaking about it here. Many bloggers are rightfully angry about the Linden’s vague threat of banhammer for those who would ultimately not comply. As Jacek stated tho, they cannot substitute to the law.

I think to add to the ambient climate of anger is that since about 2 months, the grid is down not only everyday, but several times a day. We now have 3 waves of peak concurrency a day instead of 1, and the poor asset servers are suffering much strain.
Lindens, I ♥♥♥ you guys. But you seriously need to get your game together, get better legal counseling and maybe stabilize this grid we ♥♥♥ so much. You may be calling yourself a gaming company, but as Phil said, you guys are building a country. You are no ordinary service provider, despite what some thinks about it.

We create this world. We populate it. We are no ordinary customers, we are residents. More than that, we are citizens. We support you for making this world possible. But remember who makes you grow, and don’t bite the hands that feeds you. That means, us all.

For the next 3 days I won’t be publishing any blog post, in protest to the lack of clarity of new Linden Lab trademark enforcement policy (that is despite their actual last round of “clarifications”), and their reversal of decision toward their trademark policy in general, after promoting fan art and fair use of their trademarks for years. Enough has already be said on the subject. This strike is symbolic and there to raise awareness about how it would be without the same people that gave Linden Lab free promotion of Second Life through this huge network of fan websites.

I will not be hiding my actual content, but I will hold my breath until at least friday. Until then, write to Linden Lab asking them more clarification about their policies. Maybe if they get a couple thousand emails, their PR department may wake up and realize that this is another resident communication fiasco.

Read up their FAQ here for more info about their trademark policy and contact information.

Until then, ♥♥♥ you sweeties, and sayonara!

Therese Carfagno interviewed me and wrote this lovely article on SLNN. I was interviewed at the Chouchou sim, then we took a ride to Code Red for a few picture. Thank you Therese, that is an awesome job, and you never misquoted me once. Much ♥♥♥!

You read well. According to the latest issue of The Avastar, matching with International Women’s Day on the 8th of March, I am SecondLife’s Top Sweetie, at least according to the ordering. In any order, I am named in the Top 10 most influential girl in SecondLife. A quite flattering denomination really, being sided in that Top 10 with people like Tateru Nino, Callie Cline, Nebulosus Severine and even Anshe Chung. ♥♥♥ or hate her she is still the biggest businesswomen in SL. Again, very honored, and very flattered, even if I don’t think I’m all that sugarcoated.

But as I read the article, something slightly shocked me. I hate pointing fingers or doing personal attacks, it’s not my style. And anyways, it acted as a wake up call because she’s probably not the only one to think like that. Again maybe it’s me that is retrograde but I jumped 3 feet high. Again I won’t name anyone, just read the article and see for yourself.

Here is a citation:

“I think a man is better in a powerful position like boss of a company or in politics. I think a great woman knows how to stand behind her man and raise him up when needed.”

Sorry. Whuuuuuuut? She didn’t say what I think she did, did she? Am I stuck in the 70s or is she stuck in the 40s? Believe me I’m no radical feminist, but I have been raised by a moderate feminist, and one thing my mom made me aspire to was gender equality. And, just a thought like that, does a gay women need to follow her man too?

I mean…Is it just me, or does anyone else finds that idea morally wrong and objectionable? Did the women fought that hard for equal rights (which we all know is far from the case) so that some women today take all of this for granted and decides to live in the past? Is it somewhat normal that I can’t seem to agree with that statement?

Discuss.

Well, way to go. I’m a long time user of SculptyPaint, one of the nicest free software around to make sculpties in a quick and dirty way. Of course as most free software developers, Cel Edman needs to sell other products, mainly sculpty packs. Well sounds like he’s getting ripped off pretty hard and he cites a few reasons on the SculptyPaint page showing his outrage. Indeed, if all of that is true, it is outrageous. Especially the bits about physical threats, and alledgely getting ripped by a big mentoring group. Of course, I have no proof of that happening, yet, but the notice on the Mental Mentor page says a lot. (removed)
I didn’t ask for permissions, lacking contact info, but here is the integral message on SculptyPaint webpage.
(— CUT HERE —)

The morality? Well respect the content creators TOS, or wave them goodbye. Freebies are great, but mentoring groups must preach by the example. Violating someone’s right to distribute his content like he wants to can bite back on your ass. Now, nobody can download SculptyPaint and use this awesome tool, which deprives every content creators on the grid from using it. Which is quite the opposite of what a mentoring group is supposed to do.

I just hope all of this is a misunderstanding. Time for more dialog and diplomacy, and maybe time for the Lindens to get a rapid response team for dealing with DMCA since this kind of problem will get reported more and more often.

EDIT: Ordinal Malaprop also blogs it.

Massively talks about it too.

ADDENDUM:

A few feedbacks are suggesting, like I thought it could be, a big ass misunderstanding. Let’s hope the concerned parties clears it out in a civil manner. While then, nothing keeps us to talk about it and maybe tell the Lindens we need better DMCA provisions.

I started the Boudoir Rouge series with only one great cause in mind: honor the women of Second Life.

I had no intent to sell this series for a charity because I have no time to organize a fundraiser and also because I never really sold my art.

I had this talk with Gwyneth and realized it could be a good way, with all the time I spent and will spend on this series, to at least make it useful. Thing is, if I do that, I will need some help and it will take some time to put that on the rails.

I need to shop around different printing services and see what could be produced and mass sold. The idea I have in head is a printed booklet with all pictures in it. Maybe other articles like posters too. Also Moo Money gave me that idea I could also do a limited framed series, that would be numbered and sold to the highest bidders. I must discuss this with Greg from Avatrait since they can offer such service and their prints/frames are high quality enough for the purpose. In brief this must be discussed and thought about in a more concise way.

Another thing is I intend the Boudoir Rouge series to be exposed exclusively at Code Red Lounge/Gallery and all the art sold inworld would be accounted for charities too.

So here’s the deal. I spent already about 72h on the actual series, and will spend much much more. I would be happy if I could make a few meager bucks for all the time spent, and would gladly donate the rest to charities. I am ready to give up to 90% of the proceedings to some good causes. That means for example if 5000$US is gathered, I would get 500$ and 4500$ would be donated. This still needs to be thought about and confirmed but that is what I have in mind.

I have two underlying causes I would like to donate to: AIDS research and cancer research. So I would split the proceedings half/half. One half would probably go to the AMFAR or ARA (AIDS research) and the other half probably to Relay for Life, or the AACR (cancer research). EDIT: I am NOT currently campaigning for R4L or any other organization at the moment because the project is still at evaluation stage and no campaign is going on until there is goods to deliver, this is my primary focus. Tho, I would encourage anyone of you to give their Lindens to R4L, since it is an awesome cause. All donations to any organization would be a personal donation.
I have a lot of concern about children living in Eastern Europe around the decrepit Chernobyl reactor and around many other foreign country sponsored world-class nuclear stockpiles located in Eastern European countries. Those kids gets cancer at infancy stage because of nuclear proliferation and gross negligence of both the russian government and our industrialized countries that buys this nuclear storage space for peanuts. But one of the problems is local authorities are so corrupt there’s very little chance the money would make it through there. Hence the reason I chose to donate to America based cancer research organizations instead, because in the long term research may be more beneficial to them.

I hope I can get this working with some help, since those are two causes that are really important to me. At least I can hope it will spread awareness about those problems that touches everyone of us, be it ourselves or someone we know closely, and how important it is to encourage research.

Sometimes I’m just sorry that it’s us, the little people, that must support research when fat corporations pulls profit from medication sales for AIDS and block generic medication sales, and causes most of the environmental damage that leads to the proliferation of all types of cancer.

But if we do not take the matter in our own hands, it is certainly not us that will profit the most from the newly found cures. Let’s fight sickness for the future of our own children, when the time comes, the people responsible for exacerbating the effects of those terrible diseases will find their own doom.