ONE OF MY DEAREST FRIENDS, Lucinda Obviate told me the other week that her RL and SL partner Haplo had been diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness and was struggling to keep on top of this serious health issues. But you know what really did it for me? She told me Haplo had been fired by his RL employers for having to go to the doctors too often!
And do you know who his employers are? A publicly funded graduate school for ... DOCTORS!!!!!
Can you believe that?! Makes you wonder if they teach 'humanity' there. Firing a man because he needed time off to save his life.
Now I watch as my lovely hard-working friend struggles to support them both in SL, now that she is the sole bread-winner.
"Right now, we are just trying to take it one day at a time," she told me, "waiting for news as it comes in, but without health insurance, the medical bills alone will bury us."
So, on top of serious health problems, the couple also have to deal with financial worries AND the vagaries of SL. Because Lucie shares a sim with a club that chokes the system with campers, making it impossible sometimes for Lucinda's customers to get in to her store, "Taming The Shrew".
"I am having troubles with the nightclub here, which has over 40 camp pads," she told me, when I asked her how her business was going. "Last night it was almost four hours before I could get to my store and workshop, because the sim was full of afk campers."
Now this is a problem I've heard about from many different areas in SL. People who have paid out lots of money to buy houses and businesses and then can't operate at all, because a neighbouring club chokes the sim with campers.
"The biggest motivation (for people to get campers in) is to get higher traffic numbers which gets you higher in the search results," explained Lucie. "Then the owner can boast 'high traffic' to vendors who then rent space in his mall. But then they eventually discover that the numbers have been inflated and aren't shoppers, but campers who don't spend any money."
Being a true artist, Lucinda's talents cover a broad spectrum of arenas - clothes, furniture, buildings, scripting, transformers, terraforming, design. She can work up to 14-20 hours a day to get things done making the range of Gorean, medieval, sci fi, goth clothing, as well as trying to fit in custom work.
"I am a perfectionist when it comes to certain things," she told me. "I go to great pains on things like seams. Heck, I see some big-name designers with sloppy seams and it drives me mad."
The opportunity to work and earn a living in SL is irresistible to Lucinda, who lives in America's mid-west, where as she says, "creativity is not overly valued".
Still, she has been working for over ten years in RL designing costumes for regional theatre companies, historical re-creation groups and performance theatre. These include Renaissance fairs, combat demos with steel swords and mounted combat demonstrations, jousting etc.
"I've won many awards with my costume works at larger conventions," she modestly admitted. (Lucinda is pathologically shy about her talents).
"I like lost arts. It's why I make clothes and spin my own yarn and weave my own cloth ... you learn the value of things if you do them for yourself."
At her latest "Taming The Shrew" store she has designed a "Lost City of Atlantis" entrance, with a stargate and all, and once carved a village out of a mountainside.
"When people tp in, they will actually be assigned a little guardian orb, that will light their way, until they leave the underwater part," she explained. "And that little car there, will take people on tours ..."
So, if you want to check out a designer who has unique talents - go and see my lovely friend Lucinda Obviate at "Taming The Shrew". And for those of you who like transformers - have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_beHhHm9x-Y for her entry in the recent Warner Brothers transformer competition.
