The Challenge: SL photos

Hello everybody!

So here I am, a year later, posting again.

 I am guessing most or the world is under quarantine, at least in my country we are, so me and my SL/RL handsome husband decided to make all the pictures that we took in Second Life before meeting at the airport for the first time.....in Real Life! 😂
This is very challenging, we do not look like our avatars AND we have to stay at home so many of the pictures we took exploring Second Life lands will be interesting to remake in RL 🙊 but this is going to be FUN!

So here we go!

 17 April 2019

17 April 2020

Lets see how our poses go in RL 😂🙏🏻

The real deal

Uff! I've been away for quite a while! The reason? I got married in Real Life with my SL partner!

I wanted to take the time to post about it and share our experience, that to me is a bit of a closure for this blog.

It wasnt easy, not one bit. We lived almost 8000km apart.
We really really wanted to be together from day 1 but it was so painful sometimes to realize that we couldnt actually kiss, actually hug... and that the Skype calls werent enough even if sometimes it was 24/7.

So Tyler came to my country. From America to Argentina. He was supposed to stay for 3 weeks but we couldnt do it, we couldnt be apart and go back to our SL home after actually being together. "Never Skype again!" we said. So he stayed. He stayed here in Argentina. He quit his  job. We got married. My kids loved  him from day one, my whole family love him too.

We still dont know whats gonna happen, but we are sure of one thing: No matter what or who tried to get in our way, our relationship only has room for 2 people and we wont let this amazing thing that we builded just break.

Our love and all the time we had to live apart gives us the courage to finally DO. Not "plan and think and see what if....". NO!
LIVE!
DO!
LOVE!!!!

We feel more alive than we ever did in our lives.

Second Life was an escape.... but we found out together that Real Life is totally worth it when you have someone to share it with.

Was I scared when we met? Hell yeah! "What if he doesnt like me??" I asked a thousand times. But the moment we saw eachother for the first time at the airport, we just felt we were meant to be. It was just right.

Thank you to those that read me, I really hope you can find that touch of Reality in Second Life that is needed to actually LIVE to the fullest. SL is just the first step.
Are you ready to give the next step?

The Dark Side of SL

I recently heard about a blog that publishes explicit info about Second Life users. It is gossip....with pictures of people, screenshots of IMs, profiles of people with multiple alts, cheaters, liars, creators that copy products from other stores, and the list goes on and on.

When I started reading it I was crushed, because I always believed Second Life was a way of connecting people and give them the oportunity to live, to have a second chance that they might not have in Real Life. Seeing that so many users took this as a chance to screw people ruining entire families...well...it made me very sad.

Kid avatars going from family to family to flirt with parents, to take their money, to make their lives miserable to the point the family is broken. Serial cheaters that get married 10 times a year leaving broken hearts everywhere. Im not even gonna talk about incest.

But what caugh my attention was that many posts were just mean comments about random people, laughing at their pictures in Flickr or at their avatar shapes and style. It was bullying. A very VERY cruel way of bullying, totally unnecessary. Most of them screenshots showing their names saying something like "Who told you that outfit works with that ugly shape you have? Go work out, you probably are a fat looser in rl". Or "blablabla Resident why dont you tell all how you look like in rl huh?".

I wont even say the name of that website, I dont think it should keep spreading around with its toxic comments, I really really hope Linden Labs do something about it, it should be closed. Even if people are so shitty sometimes it is not up to us to judge their mistakes and make their lives a living her because of it.

I still believe Second Life can be a chance to do some good.

Positive!

After trying for what it seemend forever, we finally had the pregnancy test and it was POSITIVE!
We have been working a LOT on the house, buying tons of things for the babies (Tyler more than I did, for sure). We have been talking so much about it every single day, anxiety almost got us to fight a few times because we kept getting the negative tests and we didnt know what we were doing wrong, we almost gave up...well, I almost gave up... but here we are! Finally pregnant! The Mama Allpa HUD is amazing, VERY realistic, mostly with the struggling part O_O

We have been looking around so many clinics, talking with doctors, trying to decide which one would be the one to share with us this special moments in our lives. We finally chose Simply Babies Maternity, the whole building is so beautiful we didnt see anything like it in SL.

We laugh a lot because we never thought we would do this, but honestly, seeing Tyler as a parent really made me love him even more. I fall for him every single day, with everything he does. I can totally say we are a team. We are one. VERY messy, but one!


So now we are reading all this info about the Zoobie Babies and some notecards about roleplay kids.

So much to enjoy... have never been happier!

SL Kids & Babies

I ALWAYS laughed at people having fake prim  kids in Second Life, or adopting some crazy person that decided to have a child avatar. Never understood why they did that. In fact, everytime I ran into a kid in Second Life I walked away right away, it freaked me out, it is just too weird.

I mean, shall I pretend they are real kids and talk to them as if they were 5 or something? So ridiculous. Besides, I have my family in Real Life, I am a single mom of two, why would I want to log in to have more responsabilities when all I need is a break?

But then I met Tyler and as we do like roleplay a lot, we have a lot of fun not just being fools around sl bothering people with a thousand loud gestures.....but we also enjoy a lot  going to dinner in a fancy restaurant like Bella Bistro (we really really like this place) and sharing a romantic pixeled rp meal, tasting every bite together and talking about life, just as if we were right there in RL. Roleplay is so nice when you get to share those moments with the person you love.

With the wedding coming everything turned more and more rp because honestly it is the closer the can get to reality, unless until we meet in a few weeks in Real Life. 

He has been asking me for a while now to adopt, and obviously I freaked out. 

At this point of our relationship, this level of trust and our immesurable love, I will just say it felt right to say "yes, lets do it. Lets have a baby"

It was a LOT of information to read, lots of research, so many bellies and babies and zoobies...and we didnt even get to the looking for rp kids part! Some options are super realistic, the experience is just fabulous. Like this one.... just AMAZING! : https://vimeo.com/277891545

But I will be completely honest here: I have never been so excited about something in Second Life, not even with the wedding. Even when we talk on the phone during the day we keep talking about our SL family, how he decorated the house, the stuff he got for the babies. I am not even pregnant yet and look at us! All anxious! 

We wanted it to be "realistic", so the first step was getting the Mama Allpa HUD. Its a classic in SL apparently, there is a version for females and for males......guys can actually have sex and "pretend to use a condom cheating on his partner", it has super fun and interesting features. 

So here I am, counting the days of my SL cycle to know when im ovulating and try to get pregnant. If we get a Negative Pregnancy Test we will be crushed, but we will keep trying! 

Second Life has never been so real. 

It amaze me how you can never get bored in Second Life...how you can always experience things that you never thought you would be doing. Not even in Real Life. And suddenly you have the chance to try, to live, to feel. Second Life never gets old. 

Behind the wedding screen

How did we get to the Wedding Behind the Screen day...? (as you can see at the end of the post) Well...

Looking for a present for a friend I ended up wandering around Man Cave and running into Tyler, the man that I will marry in a few weeks.

We werent the kinda people that goes around Second Life looking for love and relationships, we were exactly the opposite: a love Grinch. 

I’ve been alone my whole SL life as Marya Bournewold. I never really wanted to partner anyone, and when i tried sharing a house with someone and it lasted just a few weeks, TOTAL FAIL! (Made me wonder if thats what love is in SL, because to be honest it was mediocre). I know there are many people out there that think the same I used to: why even bother? Its just SL. We had our moments of expectations and dreams and we invested on someone that broke our heart, so we decide to live alone and keep it that way for good.

Believe me, i tried to stay alone. But this is what happened..... I decided to live. And living makes you take risks. And risking.......is so scary.....but can change your life.

We started a big project together, actually we never really planned it, it just happened. Without even knowing we didnt just move together, but we also created a whole town around our house and opened it for people to come in and explore our world, our home at Les Eclaireurs Coast. And even if it is very hard and takes a lot of work and time, it is amazing to see that people come to our sim, the place that we started building when we decided to build a life together. Our story kinda begins there...at Les Eclaireurs.

And the day we opened Les Eclaireurs to the public...he risked. And I said Yes, lets spend the rest of our Second Lives together!

As the wedding date gets closer our relationship actually gets stronger. What does it mean? It means that for the wedding....we will actually be together behind the screen in RL. Same country, same city, same room. Same wifi too to make things more laggy. 

11 June, you have a very special wedding to attend! 

This is as real as it gets. 

💕

Under Pressure

When a baby starts walking for the first time she doesnt second guess herself and say "I dont know if i'm gonna be cool enough witht his walk, I dont think I will do it like them....". Nope, she just gets up and do it. And fall and try again. Because they dont have expectations, they arent adults.

Then why do we try to take a break from Real Life and even in Second Life....we second guess ourselves? Why do we tend to feel pressure? There is only one word for that: EXPECTATIONS.

We do have high expectations our whole lives, and the first thing that all these expectations cause to us is pressure. Pressure to fail or to just not fit in what people expect from us.

In Second Life it could be fitting in certain group of people (surfers community, bloggers, fashionists, people that make themselves look super cool...) or maybe landing in a place where we would like to have people attention, to have someone making us feel pretty, or wanted, or desired, or just worthy.

One day I felt ready to be myself. To go around in Second Life without the constant expectation of others approval... dressed as I wanted, not trying to fit, not trying to pretend, nor to like anyone other than myself. I gained confidence...and it helped me to step to Real Life...now I've been away from SL for a while and I took everything I learned there to get the same confidence into the Real World.

Without expectations people is nicer. Is real. Is beautiful.  Even if my situation is still the same, I now feel stronger and ready to take a step further.

So thanks to all those who been by my side all this time. The real ones, the fearless ones, the honest ones. Those that didnt expect anything in return for their kindess. Those that changed my world.

We arent our avatars. Thank god we arent....we are something much more amazing than that. So dont let that pressure hunt you.

If you can make it without all that fake glam in SL and you actually dare to find real friends that doesnt even look at your outfits and unfitted hairs.....you can make it in life being yourself. Ready for the challenge? I totally dare y'all.