I am miles behind with my coverage of Fantasy Faire 2014, Sonya Murmarek and the team are way ahead of me! For those who are not familiar with Fantasy Faire in Second Life, I advise you to take your time to make yourself familiar with it. On a scale of 1 – 10, with 1 being pretty damn rubbish and 10 being awesome, Fantasy Faire rates as an 11! My favourite Second Life event by a country mile.
So in the next few posts I’ll start catching up with the news so far, hopefully I’m not out of date with the news, from what I can see there are still openings for merchants who want to participate.
Episode 16 of The Drax Files finds Draxtor Despres speaking to Brique Topaz (Second Life name) who raises money for the Live and Learn in Kenya charity and their Feed A Smile programme. As usual I’ll embed the video at the end of the post. The video touches upon the variety of ways that the charity raises funds and also talks of how some folk weren’t that convinced about the prospects of raising money via a virtual world …. until they saw the money rolling in!
The charity have a club, The Lavender Field, where artists perform for free, with their tips going to the charity. We see artists from different parts of the world projecting themselves through their real self into their virtual self to perform at the club. There are a number of singers featured and unfortunately I don’t know their names.
Brique points out that 100 Linden Dollars will feed a child for a day, that works out to around 30 US cents. Some singers have better followings than others, Brique cites one popular singer who in an hour will generate tips that will pay for 800 meals. However Brique will welcome any singer, it all adds up.
The board of directors were not at all convinced about Second Life, indeed Brique says that “They are no longer against Second Life“, suggesting there were some doubts regarding the venture. This is why The Drax Files is such a good platform for Second Life and other virtual worlds, people do not realise quite how powerful virtual worlds can be. In this case, Brique explains that Second Life is raising around 1,000 Euros every month and paying for around a third of all meals via this venture, pretty impressive and heart warming stuff.
“Fantasy Faire is always a treat for everyone involved, but this year has been especially great. The artistry and pageantry has been mind blowing to behold, the people have been a joy and fun to be around, and the events have been great.
The Dwarfins team has been blown away by the generosity of the Dwarfins community members who have gone above & beyond in their donations to the cause of fighting cancer. We’ve been overjoyed to welcome many new members that the Faire brought to us, and have reveled in the community spirit brought to us by this great cause.” – Judy Chestnut Of Dwarfins.
All good things come to an end and I’ll pretty much wrap up my Fantasy Faire coverage with this post, although you should never say never as there may well be more news to post, but I’ll mostly wrap it up here. I apologise to those of you who read my blog and have no interest in this event, but I love this event, it’s an event that exemplifies oh so well some of the excellent use cases of Second Life and that most certainly should be highlighted.
One complaint regarding events like this, and that applies to the other fairs that take place during the year, is lag. Fantasy Faire this year wasn’t that bad, but there were some who experienced problems. The thing is, this is Fantasy Faire, if you take away the beautiful buildings, the weird and wonderful avatars and their scripted accessories, you take away some of the heart of the event.
Although Fantasy Faire 2013 is officially over, there are still a couple of Fantasy Faire related events to run. There’s a short story competition in association with Prim Perfect: Weave a tale of fantastic landscapes for the Fantasy Faire / Prim Perfect Short Story Competition. Your story should be between one and three thousand words and the best entries will be published in the summer edition of Prim Perfect Magazine. One of the good things about blogging Fantasy Faire is that I’ve now discovered the excellent Calameo system Prim Perfect use for their magazine, that’s a really impressive platform.
Sunday night saw Fantasy Faire 2013 pretty much winding up with the one of kind auction in The Valley Of IshNar. This is an event whereby creators offer unique items for auction to raise money for Relay For Life and the event proved very popular:
Sim performance during the auction was excellent, with auctioneer Cortez Brandriss proving to be an expert auctioneer, all that experience from doing auctions for Oceania Breedables certainly came in handy there, she was fantastic.
The auction saw the fundraising effort for Relay For Life cross the eight million Linden Dollars barrier for this year’s Fantasy Faire, I don’t yet know what the final total is.
Fantasy Faire 2013 may well be pretty much over, but I’ve still got a few posts on the event to post and I’ll start with an interview with Khyle Sion. Khyle is the person who built The Dragonspire sim and spent a lot of time working during the event, meaning I couldn’t catch up with him! At one point he told me he’d been awake for 36 hours! Khyle also displayed some wares from his store, Refined Wild at Fantasy Faire, naturally in The DragonSpire sim.
CL : How Many Years Have You Been Participating In Fantasy Faire for?
Khyle : This will be my 3rd year participating in the Relay for Life Fantasy Faire; however, this is my first year having built an entire sim for it.
CL : What have you enjoyed most about your participation in Fantasy Faire?
Khyle : I’m a professional artist in real life, as well as in Second Life. Unfortunately, due to illness and circumstances beyond my control, I currently do not have the ability to create many substantial works of art to participate in public shows. I’ve been showing in galleries for a long time — since I was 8 or 9 years old, in fact — up until after college. I deeply miss all of the interaction and hustle and bustle of putting together a show or installing a work of art for people to enjoy.
The Fantasy Faire has allowed me to create new sculptures and installations to be showcased and seen by a large-scale audience while also using the same work to help raise money for cancer. Whether it be a fountain like “Violet Rebirth”, an interactive work that requires audience participation, such as “Paper Boats in a Paper Sea” — or an entire sim, such as “DragonSpire” (which was built in multiple levels, with winding tunnels and secret spaces and even a secret pet to hatch!), I’ve taken great joy in discovering an outlet for me to return to my traditional, fine-art roots. I take the Faire as an opportunity to share something new and exciting with the world — to inspire, and touch the hearts of those who take the time to stop, take a breath, and really look around.
