Seraphim always enjoys the Japonica events for all the fabulous pose stands that are always there, not even selling poses, just there to be cool…

… the poses are always sometimes cheesy/conservative, but, more often, there are some truly beautiful poses, with exquisite hand gestures…

… and the backdrops are usually totally inscrutable.

Seraphim had to go to her apartment in Hangars Liquides, yesterday, and just sit on the balcony for a while. She’d spent most of the day learning new stuff, and it was a pretty exhausting experience…

… first, she’d demo’d, then bought, a gorgeous hairstyle with an animesh ponytail, this was not as simple as it sounds… at the store where she bought it, she just couldn’t understand the instructions or, really, what it was she needed to buy, she had to ask another customer who was trying the demo, to get some clarity. It turned out the hair was a collaboration between the hair creator and Vista animations, and that she needed to buy a new AO, that was specially created for the hair. While she was trying the demo, which also wasn’t that straight forward, being one of those ‘please give consent’ type ‘experience’ things, which she generally does not like, not liking the idea of giving away control of herself, while she was was trying the 10 minute demo that resulted, another confused customer asked her how to get the hair, so, it wasn’t just Seraphim who found the whole thing less-than-straightforward. She loves the hair, but is a bit sad she has to trade her favourite Vista AO, for a far less sophisticated one, with zero ease of control. The new AO has a nice walk, but most of the ‘stands’ are pretty crap, and the slightest turn left or right causes her to pirouette, making her ponytail fly out cutely… this IS cute the first few times, but when it seems to happen every 10 seconds, the cuteness dims. Still, it’s a first-gen product, so will hopefully improve… but the next new thing she learned yesterday was changing her body and head to BOM capability…

… she wouldn’t have known where to start if her sweet, little, plastic friend, Princess Angelica hadn’t explained the basics of BOM to her. Angelica was busy building a new castle on a huge chunk of coastal land she’d just bought, so Seraphim stopped bugging her, and left her to it, relying, instead, on a very helpful Catwa sales-person to walk her through some of the process. The whole thing took hours of frustrating setbacks… she seems to have lost the ability to use her Pink Fuel Catwa makeup applier, which is very sad, but she has gained the ability to add new tattoos, without losing the existing ones, which is, really, the main reason she went through all this. She’s also discovered that, yes, those pre-mesh, system-layer clothes really DO look like shit, compared to mesh clothes ):

Seraphim went to the gallery today, ostensibly to take the ‘Val Vain’ mannequin Pandume gave her, there… she just finds it too unsettling having it in her home. She started taking pictures, and was, again, struck by how suburban her neighbourhood is, these days… it’s actually very nice, there are mostly cookie-cutter, suburban homes there, these days. She got to thinking how much it’s all changed in her time, here… a year ago, there was an airport across the road. She started looking through her files for some images to illustrate these changes, and became instantly bogged down in the flood of memory… and she’d only gone back a few years…

… she found this image of when she had set up a mid-western, Wyeth-like set on the roof of her home, a few years ago. It started off as just this simple shack in an empty, dry field of grass…

… soon there was an old garage, and petrol tank…

… which needed a broken Mustang, of course… Seraphim had a lot of fun photographing this scene, using many different Windlight settings…

… eventually, there was an entire, apocalyptic scene, lighthouse and all. It’s all gone, now, of course, prim usage has a way of necessitating that such creations get torn down, to make way for others. What grabbed Seri, going through these images, and thinking about changes…

… was how mercurial her look is… she doesn’t physically change herself, never changes her ink, but she is always changing her hair/clothes, always rocking some variation of the style she likes…

… she’s predictably mercurial. These images are all from the last few years, but she also found these…

… really adorable images of her, gone full cyborg, back before mesh, before she’d ever heard of, let alone met, a gynoid…

… the images are pretty basic, but she really enjoyed finding them, and is so glad she still has them… images of some of the ch-ch-changes she’s gone through.

Seraphim noticed, today, that she is now ten years old, has been, for several days. Seri has always looked forward to being ten… one decade in SL! It’s actually quite a long time. One hell of a lot has happened to her in this time. She decided to visit Insilico for the images for this post… Insilico being somewhere she has visited for most of those ten years, and somewhere that has changed, yet remained the same, as much as she has… Seraphim is a solitary creature… she spent her first eight years in SL alone, always avoiding interaction with others, often actually running from others’ attempts to interact with her…

… this all changed when, two years ago, she met, and fell stupidly in love with, an extremely charismatic gynoid… a gynoid who turned out to be as dysfunctional as she was intelligent, and who, in a few short weeks, totally shattered Seraphim’s heart. But…

… Seraphim does not hate that gynoid, in fact, still quite likes her, because she was responsible for bringing Seri out of her shell. What followed wasn’t always pretty, but it was Seri learning to navigate relationships in SL…

… she has since learned that, yep, she is a solitary creature… the ones she has formed relationships with simply do not share Seri’s concepts of commitment, she’s not sure why this is, but it just is… she is basically better off alone…

… that being said, she has some good friends, even if they, too, are extremely erratic in their actual presence in SL. One of the things Seraphim is proud of is the fact she has actually served her ten years in SL, unlike many avi’s she has met, whose profiles say they are, say, 12 years old, yet they’ve actually only spent two or three years in SL… she finds this pretty common, and isn’t impressed with it. If you know Seri, you know she is an extremely consistent, totally reliable creature… she’s always the same, she never changes her look (apart from hair/clothes), doesn’t have an alt… what you see is what you get, she is 100% reliable and honest… she’s proud of that. That being said, Seri has grown/changed quite a lot, this last decade… she is, now, far more social, and confident, than she was, not scared to instigate conversation with strangers, something she often does, now, but never did, back in the day…

… she is happy within herself, these days… other avi’s do not, can not intimidate her, any more, which is lovely. She has lived in the same place for eight of those ten years, and it is so much home to her, she couldn’t imagine ever living anywhere else. She really looks forward to the next ten years, to the next developments as cool as mesh and animesh have been…

… but she’s given up on any form of serious relationship. Once a loner, always a loner.

Seri settled on cute & simple for her own xmas decorations… some silly snow-people, and a ‘Burton’ tree…

… she has already received some early prezzies… Veyot gave her this MINIMAL ‘Cuba Building.4 – Pink’, because she knows Seraphim loves pink…

… and Pandume gave her the whole set of the RO ‘Spook Show’ mannequins… Seraphim has always wanted ‘Val Vain’, the ‘Spook Show’ mannequin that takes it’s own face off…

… the first time she ever saw this mannequin, it was in a store, or somewhere, and when it took it’s face off, Seraphim literally jumped, it was so unexpected, and creepy… Pandume didn’t know Seraphim had always wanted this mannequin, just that Seri loves dolls…

… for xmas, Seri won herself…

… a particularly adorable gacha…

… a Black Bantam ‘Sleeping Holiday Sphynx’… she totally LOVES this cute little guy, who purrs, and dreams, and, occasionally, farts… he has adopted Seri’s ‘Pink Raccoon’ plushie as his own…

… the three of them share Seri’s couch, and think about another year gone in SL…

… and a new one on the way.