oh hai.

Luth here bringing you a bright and shiny new column. I am your resident over worked, dyslexic, opinionated, snarky, cynical, bitchy, angsty, and blatantly honest animator. You may have heard of me. You may not.

Who cares about all that? What you want to know is what am I going to do for you. Fuck if I know. Weeks ago while riddled with insomnia and disgust at the current state of the fashion feed, I started a daily plurk showing what I thought were the worst pictures posted. As something that was just for humour value among friends, it snowballed into some odd form of criticism for which I just haven’t had the time for of late, especially as a daily thing. But now because the infinite wisdom of JellyBean and Rosie, you get to read me blather on.

What I can never understand is with advertisements that bad, how someone can make clothes with what seems like less Photoshop skillz than I have. Years ago, I looked at the clothing templates and stupidly went back to Poser immediately. I could have made a killing instead of living on the fringes of the sacred SL® fashion industry. ‘Eh who the fuck am I kidding…

As probably the most fashion challenged of The Rev bunch, I’m not going to be talking about the items. At least I shouldn’t. I never know what’s going to come out sometimes. It’s mostly going to be about the overall picture itself. Poses will more often than not be brought up since well…. I seem to know quite a bit about ‘em.

What I will never understand is how SLers® can be both anonymous and overly sensitive. Criticism in any form seems to translate into being personal attacks and the writer is in all forms a bitch. That anyone with enough balls to say what they think ends up with drama.* And of course should be only done with an unknown alt, behind closed doors, or anonymously through SL secrets. For some unknown reason, everyone expects to put out their work for all to see and only get positive and glowing feedback. And it’s mostly worked out that way since most are too frightened of the backlash. Is it that opinion gets lost in translation in text form then mutates into the end all of truth? Or are they for the most part overly sensitive?

Creating for SL® is the only art form I’ve ever heard of that is like this. No one ever thinks twice about bashing some RL film or song. As someone who’s spent quite a number of years in the film industry and married to a musician, I can guarantee you that every person involved in those endeavours spent more time and effort then you did making that picture. Art is subjective. I have just as much right to hate it and say it publicly as you have for actually making it. If you can’t handle the idea that someone else doesn’t love it just as much as you do, then perhaps you aren’t ready to show your work to the rest of the world. When all you get is positive feedback, how are you to better yourself artistically?

If you are looking for sugar coating, please look elsewhere. I do not poop or ejaculate rainbows. However, the chosen are not personal attacks. I rarely look at the name and even if I did, constant hiding under my primrock means I really have no idea who you are. If I don’t know you personally, how is it bloody possible that I’m attacking you personally? Thinking otherwise is illogical and borders on paranoia. Maybe you’ll actually get something out of this as long as you forget for a moment that the world doesn’t revolve around you and your brilliance.

Designers:
Perhaps it hasn’t been said enough, but don’t you understand that your ad sells your clothes just as much as the actual items do? Think about it for a minute. Clothing is the largest industry in SL® (you have far more competitors) and yet you can’t easily allow us to demo it. Taking badly lit, low rez screenshots is going to hurt far more than the time wasted in doing it right. And then compositing those in garish ways isn’t going to make me run to buy whatever you worked oh so hard on. Kind of difficult to shop with bleeding eyes isn’t it?

Please take a moment to read this post by Alaska Metropolitan on bad ad design. Memorize it. Then you might not end up in my column.

Bloggers:
Content creators look at your blog before giving you information and/or swag. At least the smart ones do. If your posted pictures look horrible to us, we won’t send you a thing. If you use poses that fuck the mesh, I’m pretty sure no one wants you to post pictures of them in public. Or I might be the only one who cares about that.

The first column will be posted eventually. The pictures are going to be a number of weeks old since I got distracted by work. Remember the over worked part? Yeah. That wasn’t a joke.

* And by “drama” I mean the spineless and rather childish way of dealing with conflict. Life is conflict and dealing with it in an immature way will just get me to tell you to piss off.