SKINTONE INDEPENDENT
STYLEMAKER AND WHATNOT

 
By Rick_Slick
 

As you may have noticed, I haven't written anything in a while.  At first, this may lead you to believe that I'm not very awesome.  I assure you that you are incorrect.  The only justification I can provide that clearly proves you wrong is that I am, in fact, awesome. 

The truth is that I have been hard at work acting, writing, and building sets for the upcoming There Film Festival.  So when Geea came to me and told me to write something or have fun being passed around in prison like a pack of cigarettes (one of the drawbacks to being so awesome is that everyone would want a piece of me!), I reluctantly took some time to fulfill my contractual obligations with The Voice which are mostly in place due to the massive amount of litigation costs I have caused this organization over the past year and a half.  As far as my last article, who knew there existed a People for the Ethical Treatment of Olives (PETO) lobbyist group?! 

So after everyone at The Voice office went home (I have to stay late because I don't come in until like 10am or sometimes even 2pm), I sat around for a few hours at Parker's desk removing and rearranging the keys on her keyboard into alphabetical order for her.  When I got bored with that, I stole Geea's mouse ball, walked back to my desk, brushed off the cobwebs, and then finally decided to try this new-fangled high-falutin' Skintone Independent Stylemaker beta. 

The Skintone Independent Stylemaker is designed to allow clothing designers to be all lazy and just submit one clothing design that will work with all of the various skintones such as Latte, Ginger, Butterscotch, Lemon, Blueberry, Cookie Dough, Cheddar, and whatever the other skintones are.  I don't have time for annoying research and looking up facts and whatnot, but RavenTresses says she thinks that Sausage and Pepperoni are some skintone names, too.  However, she also doesn't believe me when I try to explain to her that if vegetarians eat vegetables, then humanitarians must eat humans.  Anyway, using computer magic, particle physics, and witchcraft, designers will be able to adjust the opacity of shading effects and use transparencies to overlay the clothing texture onto whatever skintone the avatar is using. 

Unfortunately, I messed with the transparency setting a little too much and broke the whole darn thing, kind of like when I used my computer's CD tray as a cup holder.  As you can see, my adventures with control panel sliders I don't know anything about caused some fairly interesting consequences.  When I walked up to Cunundrum and HoNeY_NyC to show off my new skintone independent design, because they just happened to be hanging out at the water fountain waiting for people to show them new designs, they began laughing hysterically.  Now, I'm fairly used to women laughing hysterically at me, so I didn't really notice anything strange at first.  Then, Cunundrum pointed out that there was something horribly wrong.  She initially said that she could see right through me, but I mistook it to mean that I wasn't being very clever about disguising my ulterior motives.  It was only after I looked down that I noticed that I had set the transparency setting to maximum on my clothing textures, causing the areas upon which I was wearing my clothing textures to be completely see-through!  At this point, I would like to take time out to point out my awesome abs to my female readers.  I would also like to point out that luckily HoNeY_NyC happened to be wearing undergarments when I took that screenshot. 

After sneaking up behind some begging newbies in Karuna and then loudly proclaiming "You don't have any money?!  Well, I don't even have a torso!!!  SO BE HAPPY WITH WHAT YOU'VE GOT!" and then running off, I decided to get help from Mackie.  The only thing she could think of to do was to give me 'cutepoints, which in retrospect, really wouldn't have helped at all, but even her 'cutepoints passed clean through my transparent areas!  This means I no longer had a collision mesh either!  What had I done!??!  Nevermind that... where was the nearest paintball game?!  And while I'm busy asking questions, why is Elaur such a picky eater that she refuses to eat certain letters in her alphabet soup?!  Before I caused any more trouble, I logged off of There and went back into the Stylemaker thingy and changed all my transparencies back to normal, which ended up being much cheaper and easier than my initial plan of researching and developing a means by which to travel back in time to before I downloaded the Stylemaker beta. 

So in conclusion, I guess that the biggest lessons I learned this week were that Geea gets really mad when she goes to put the newspaper together and she has no mouse balls, the security people at airports become very uncomfortable when you make a special request for a cavity search every Friday night, and that I shouldn't play with beta developer applications that I really don't understand.  For the rest of you, once they've got the bugs all worked out, prepare for some exciting new clothing from your favorite designers without having to worry about whether they'll bother to make clothes for your Peanut Butter or Marshmallow skintones! 

[Disclaimer:  The Voice does not endorse trying to make yourself completely transparent so you can sneak into work late at the newspaper office without anyone noticing, which is clearly the intent of Mr. Slick's little project here.]