Latex Station Hunt

Recently, a place called Latex Station, makers of latex outfits among other things, decided to sponsor Alobar's House of the Rising Sun club. So on Friday night we had a huge party which lasted four hours. I DJ'd for the first half and Alo for the 2nd half. During the first half, we had a "sexiest avatar" contest. My scrumptious and tasty cat won of course. I'm so damned proud of her! I'll have to explain it to you all one of these days. Anyway, cat won and I had a great time playing a few requests and some blues and rock.

During the event, I would frequently announce between songs that there was a hunt going on sponsored by Latex Station and the click on the sign they had provided in the corner of the dance floor for details. A hunt is a event where you start at a location, read and decipher a clue and find a hidden prize, which will contain a clue for the next hidden prize, etc. until you have found all of the prizes, then it's like Christmas morning as you open them up and rezz them. In this case, it's all latex outfits donated by Latex Station. So it's kind of pointless for a man to go on the hunt as it's not often I'll be wanting to wear see-through form-fitting latex. But I did logon as one of my wife's avis and did the hunt. The clues were good and made sense, unlike most other hunts I've been on. After a short while and some looking around, it was likely you would find the prize. There were 25 of them in all and most of them that I looked at were quite well made outfits. This hunt is definitely worth the effort and time. Be sure to go to House of the Rising Sun for the starting landmark. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Eagle Grove/73/161/23

Hanging Out At Deranged Rock Club

This hunt will take you to some exciting places: House of V, House of the Rising Sun, etc. But one of the places was certainly different from anything I have ever been to before. There is a place called Deranged. They have a great setup. It's a rock club with some clever decorations. I intend to check the place out better once I have some free time. The hunt continues half way into next month (June) so be sure and check it out soon.

DJing

Way back when I started my first nightclub in SL, I used to select streaming music radio stations to play music at our club events. We'd have pole dancing girls and some escorts too. So people would come in and dance and chat. The guys would tip the dancers and sometimes an escort might find a customer and go off to do what she does. The winner of the contest selected and a payout from the contest board would occur. The whole event would be over with in about one hour.

We never really did get a lot of people in to party with us though. Jojo would often go out and pick up guys to come and party but for the most part, there were not a lot of people attracted to our club, The Golden Nugget. Every so often, I would run across a DJ. Sometimes I would pay them, most times they worked for tips. Those events would tend to bring in a lot more guests than the ones without a live DJ. So I decided to learn to DJ primarily to save myself money. As it turns out, DJing is very expensive. The software of choice for me was SAMs Broadcaster. Hundreds of dollars later I'm finding that I have to pay a monthly service fee to ServerRoom to stream my SAMs output to. ServerRoom in turn streams it back into SL. So after getting this all setup, I find that I can finally stream my music with voice over into SL. But there's a problem. It seems the stream was coming in too fast and with too much data for SL. So I had to turn down the quality of the stream just to get it to keep from cutting out. An important lesson here: The laggier a location, the less quality of stream you will want to try to force SL to accept. If your music stream tends to cut out, then chances are you are pushing too high of a bit rate. I have found over the years that 48kBit per second with 24,000 Hz stereo works the best under a wide range of lag conditions.

After a while, I got out of the nightclub business. Too much drama from the girls and too much stress from the lack of attendees and too expensive. But I maintained my subscription to ServerRoom because it was very very handy to be able to stream music in SL during parties and stuff. Also, the occasional scheduled DJ would fail to show up at friend's clubs and getting paid good money to take their place at the last moment's notice was nice too. Still, no matter what I made DJing in SL came nowhere near compensating for the expense of maintaining a readily available streaming music source. This final effort of mine to make Cherry Street a busy place pretty much failed. I've discovered that it's the number of group members your club has that makes all the difference and the only way to get a lot of group members is through hard work and a lot of time and expense. But it does eventually start to pay off. Just ask my buddy Alobar. He and sami have built a successful night club and BDSM hangout over the years. As I mentioned in a recent post, their club was even chosen as a top destination by Linden Labs for a week or more. And what a busy week that was. But the main thing was that during that week or so, hundreds of people were asked to join their group via an automatic joiner, and it worked. They now have almost 2000 members and that's when efforts start to pay off. In contrast, my group only had 300 members. If I sent out a notice, I was lucky to get 1% of that number to attend. 1% of 2000 is a very good sized party!

So now, once per week, I DJ at Alo and sami's club. Sometimes I break even in tips, but most of the times the tips are good and I do well. The house does not take a cut so I usually tip back about 10%. I will never get rich DJing at the rate I am now, but offsetting my modest expenses here in SL is really all I'm after. But it is conceivable that one could make a very decent living in SL as a DJ. DJing in SL has changed a bit from the first times I did it at my first club. First of all, the events are at least 2 hours if not longer. I was considering applying at a very busy and popular place in SL, but they wanted a 3 hour commitment. Hell, I can barely commit to 2 hours as it is, so I'll have to think about that one for a while. Secondly, most places will want you to stick with a certain style of music, which is okay, but just because a song is popular, does not mean it will fit in with the local nightclub's theme. At Rising Sun, I blend their genre of blues with some rock, pop and oldies too. It works out pretty good.

So I might look into taking on a 2nd night of the week DJing at either Rising Sun or some other place to help offset my expenses, but keeping in mind that a group with members of 2000 or more will make it worth the effort.

Goings On

Yes, that's a tail on Nezzy. I have no idea why.

Ever since I stopped promoting Cherry Street Nightclub and Shopping Mall, I've had lots of free time to catch up with old friends, make new ones and party. As I mentioned earlier, I'm also DJ-ing. It's been a fun ride and I intend to keep on going along just like this.

Lately, my dear long-time friend Nezzy has returned to SL. She's still not what would be considered regular, but she has been logging on frequently. So frequently that she has somehow had a baby named Lizzy. I'm not really sure how this happens in SL but I for sure know how it occurs in RL and I have a feeling they are far from the same. In other words, I'm sure the delivery went off without any discomfort whatsoever except for maybe some surgical removal of linden$ from her wallet. Anyway, I got to go and check out her new place and her baby. Mother appears to be in very very good shape considering her recent (and quick) labor. It's so good having her back in SL again! Yes, I know there are probably better ways for friends to keep in touch. We are in each others Facebook for example, but living the SL life with a friend has a very special meaning. It just seems closer and more intimate to me.

IKR Me playing pocket pool.

Speaking of intimate, cat and I have been having a wonderful time since I quit my SL job! We are still restricted for time due to our real lives but when we are able to get together, we are learning quickly how to take full advantage of it. I still cannot believe what that woman will let me do to her! We were made for each other. I love taking her out and showing her off. She's been helping me with little projects such as shopping for clothes, decorating and building a new mountain getaway setting. Friday night she was able to logon and be with me at my event at Rising Sun. It's coming up on one year since she and I met and at that time, I'll post the story here.

My daughter Neva has brought so much joy and happiness to me and cat lately. She's so much fun to be around. Such a happy young woman. We're both very proud of her. Recently she suggested we pool our resources and share a parcel of land together. I looked at the proposal objectively and measured the lag rating on my sim and hers along with pricing and prim counts. These are all important factors in choosing virtual land to live on. I will go into more detail about land purchases in a future post but for now suffice to say, Neva and myself and cat are each getting the best deals for what we want on our current parcels. Yes, I have land and so does cat and Neva, and we keep them all separate. Why? Well, in Neva's case, her virtual land comes with a large castle and a very well designed back yard entertainment area. While the castle could exist in the sky, the back yard cannot. So for her, the surface of the parcel is required. In my case, I have always craved living on a tropical island. So I too need the surface land and water to accomplish this. One could argue that a very nice tropical setting could be constructed without having to use the surface land and water, but you would have to argue that the water in the skybox simply would not have the same physics as surface water. In cat's case, we talked about her letting her land go and at the time I argued that it's always good to have a backup parcel to call home. If my sim were offline, chances are hers would be up. If hers were down, then mine should be online. But lately I've been thinking that maybe we could let her parcel go. While it is a tropical setting just like mine, her's has no surface water on it, so a skybox or platform would work fine for her needs. We'll see.

My other daughter Chica just hooked up with her man Nils. They purchased a nice skybox and home with lots of great and fun furnishings and games to play. It's a wonderful place to hang out and I will be returning soon to see how she has decorated it. She and Nils seem like the perfect couple and I'm very happy for them and proud of her. She and I often go out dancing or playing Greedy Greedy while cat and Nils are not online.

And Ambriel has returned at least temporarily to SL while she recovers from a RL illness. It's very nice having her back. But just ask Nezzy: If you don't logon regularly, you are going to have problems with your SL viewer and your avatar's inventory. Not quite sure why that is but it's been a huge problem lately for my less-than-frequent-logon friends. So Amb's clothes would not load for her. So what? She rezzes in next to my nude beach so we are all set. Clothes create too much lag anyway. So I spent a wonderful evening dancing with her. We had lots of catching up to do.