When I first saw these new shoes by Second Life creator Hanna Lindberg, I had to lightly gasp. After she had told me how she made them, I had gasped several times more.
The first story of these shoes, you can discern by looking close. Among her first creations using PBR lighting, the detail in the shadowing and reflection, evident down to the fine texture of the leather, is amazing. Since Linden Lab launched physically based rendering to Second Life last Summer, content creators have been frantically working to update their product line with PBR to stay ahead of the competition. The market for avatar fashion is massive across numerous platforms, and dominates the Second Life economy in particular. (And not just clothing items like shoes: A creator of customized virtual feet, for instance, earns six figures a year.)
To modernize her mesh-making skills to create in PBR, Hanna watched tutorials like these. It took her 1-2 days to understand the basics.
"Starting to learn something new and unusual is always difficult and scary," as she puts it to me.
So that's one story about the Second Life shoes of Hanna Lindberg.
The second story is possibly more scary:
"The doors in our house opened from the blast wave and the clock fell off the wall," Hanna tells me matter-of-factly, in reference to the eight bombs which hit over the evening about a mile away from her workstation .
As it happens, her "office" is her mother's kitchen, which is in a small city of Ukraine.
"There is literally a line of fire here. So in addition to the stress of shelling, we often face power outages, which makes it impossible to work."
This also helps explain why her workstation is in the kitchen, and not, as you might assume, in the basement:
"We don't go down to the basement anymore. From the time the shell left until it landed, literally a couple of second pass, so you won't have time to hide. And during shelling you can't leave the room. We had cases of death from shrapnel."
Thousands of Second Life users are based in Ukraine, and when we last heard from Hanna, almost exactly two years ago, she was among the ones who had fled Putin's invasion to relative safety.
"[There's attacks] every day from everything possible: artillery, aerial bombs, mines and recently FPV drones... I do not encounter shellings as often as neighboring areas of the city. But if a transformer station was hit or shrapnel tore off the wires, then we will also be left without electricity. This happens almost every week for me." Fortunately, she's since bought a generator, so she can continue creating virtual fashion during wartime blackouts.
"We are very, very tired of constant stress. Even though we have become accustomed to combat operations to some extent -- after all, almost 3 years have passed -- but stress makes itself known in the form of insomnia, anxiety, headaches."
She sometimes thinks of leaving Ukraine with her small child, but her military-age husband cannot leave the country, and he in turn won't leave his ill father. ("I gave him an oath to be together in joy and sorrow.")
"I really want the war to end, so I wouldn't have to worry about my parents, and we could think about moving abroad," Hanna tells me. "For now my hands are tied by family circumstances, since I am literally the only one who supports everything financially."
Yes:
Hanna is selling shoes in Second Life to care for her real life family while trapped in a war.
In doing so, she is really just the latest in a long line of women across the span of centuries, selling digital renditions of shoes where others before her sold the fanciest remnants from their wardrobes amid the rubble of previously war-ravaged cities. She will likely not be the last. While those of us fortunate enough to witness this suffering at a far and sheltered distance once again gasp in tragic wonder.
The Second Life shoes of Hanna Lindberg, under her OSMIA brand, go on sale in the virtual world this weekend at the shopping event known as Kinky. Follow Hanna on Facebook and on Flickr for updates.
Update, 9/27: Shopping event details here on the OSMIA page -- available starting 9/28 at 1 pm SLT, click here to teleport.
Thanks for sharing Hanna’s story
Posted by: Tiffany | Sunday, September 29, 2024 at 07:04 AM