Escaping (Literal) Painful Reality at Raven Fairelander’s Labyrinth Masquerade Ball in Second Life – Ryan Schultz

I am still working while on half-time sick time for treatment of job burnout, and (as it so happens) we have along weekend up here in Manitoba, since Monday is Louis Riel Day. I should be happy, but unfortunately, I am also nursing a decaying back molar. My regular dentist was able to only do a partial root canal (one nerve) before he encountered complications which he felt were beyond his experience and expertise, and he is referring me to an endodontist’s office. My appointment is in six weeks, but my tooth has still been giving me trouble, and I will have to contact my dentist on Tuesday (after the long weekend) to discuss options.

So at the moment, I am popping extra strength Advil, and focusing on Second Life—which, as I have said before, is my preferred escape from nasty, messy, and (in this instance, literally) painful reality. By the time all this is over, I will have dropped over CA$3,000 on my tooth, so it looks like I will be leaning quite heavily into my expertise as the uncrowned Freebie Fashionista Queen of Second Life! No more SL shopping sprees for the rest of this year for Vanity Fair and her small army of alts; my health has to come first!! (I’m also grateful that I have dental insurance through my employer, which should repay part of the cost afterwards. However, the endodontist’s office wants full payment, up front.)

So, in these current circumstances, yesterday I stumbled across an announcement on the only social media I still use, Primfeed (which is sort of a cross between Twitter and Flickr, but it’s exclusively for Second Life users to post about Second Life):

And, of course, Vanity Fair loves herself a good masquerade ball! As it so happens, one of the things that I have been doing to help me relax and escape my chaotic real life is cleaning through and reorganizing Vanity Fair’s voluminous inventory, focusing on the oldest items. And, in doing so, I discovered this glorious, systems-layers-and-flexiprims Ariel ballgown from Kouse Singh, which I picked up back in 2012. I have thrown out at LOT of my oldest apparel, but there are still a few items that I cannot bear to part with. This Ariel ballgown by Kouse Singh still holds up well, thirteen years later! (I did add a couple of modern mesh touches: a black lace bolero from United Colors the Meritus crown, necklace, and earrings from Petrichor.)

However, I still needed to pick out a mask; what’s a masquerade ball without a mask? Raven Faireland used the 1986 David Bowie movie Labyrinth as the inspiration for her masquerade ball (in fact, she had video screens located throughout the impressive ballroom she designed herself, playing the famous masquerade ball scene from that film on a loop). So I didn’t want just any old mask; it had to be something special to fit the theme!

Luckily, last Hallowe’en I picked up a special maze hunt prize from Queenz, this shimmering Luciferix mask. It is completely resizable on any combination of the X, Y, and Z axes, and comes with a HUD to select one of eight mask colours and two metal textures. I picked the black mask with gold metallic accents as shown below:

NOW, I was all set for the ball! I teleported into the beautiful ballroom which Raven Fairelander had created, and I had a wonderful evening! At times there were over 100 avatars in one region, chatting, flirting, and dancing to the DJs’ music stream (there were three DJs that evening). Everyone went all out and over-the-top with their masquerade outfits!

I did take some pictures to share with my friends and followers on Primfeed, but I also wanted to share them here, too. Please click on each thumbnail in the picture gallery below to see the image in full size:

You can see our gracious hostess and ballroom designer, Raven Fairelander, being dipped by her partner in picture 4! You can also catch a coupe of glimpses of me dancing with my champagne in hand. It was also Raven’s birthday celebration, so everybody wished her a happy birthday as well.

I’d like to thank Raven Fairelander for letting me come to her fabulous birthday masquerade ball. (I do need to ask her where she acquired her beautiful blue butterfly mask, which you can also see on a few other partygoers! I had done a right-click/inspect on it, and then I logged out and forgot to save the name of the creator and the store!!!)

Anyways, that’s it for me. I will still post from time to time, as I feel up to it; I am still feeling exhausted and worn out lately, and my root canal situation is not helping. I still haven’t made any firm, final decision about what I want to do with this blog. I will keep you posted.

P.S. For the sake of own mental and emotional health, I have had to avoid all social media (except Primfeed) and all news media (except checking the Globe and Mail newspaper only once per workday, through a newspaper database my university library system subscribes to). Even then, the upsetting, batshit crazy news headlines from the United States—and Canada, too!—still manage to filter through. Right now, I need to focus on myself, my health, and things that I can change in my life, and avoid as much as possible all the batshit craziness going on, since I have zero control over it.

As I joked last week to both my family doctor and my psychiatrist, “I don’t think I have enough Clonazepam to get through four more years of a Trump presidency.” 🤪

UPDATE 1:01 p.m.: I found the blue butterfly Mardi Gras mask! It’s one of the prizes from a new gacha machine at the MeadowWorks booth at the Valentine’s Shop and Hop event, on now until February 18th, 2025. Here’s your taxi! It’s L$60 per pull. I was very lucky and got mine after only four pulls! The mask is no copy, PBR enabled, and resizable via HUD. (Please click on each image below, to see it in full size.)