It's been a while!

 He was smiling, even with the duct tape!

 My last blog post was a  reflection on really how things are never as they seem!

 Expectations being too high (or for ones own personal  ego fragility...  too low) 

 My expectations are pretty much set on low as I am never expecting anything hugely excitingly life changing to happen  as a result of my music.

 THEN!

 amazingly!

I won the very competition I was  talking about in my last blog post

Talenthouse / DJ Andy Moor

 Much twittering and Facebook posting  happened in the days following the official announcement in March and a massive amount of support from  friends which I have to say  absolutely blew me away. The team at Talenthouse were fabulous and phone calls and emails followed which really made me feel special.

What hit me after around  a week, was that in all the years I have been supporting musicians  and hosting online events and performances, was how little time I  had been keeping up with my own marketing and promotion.  

So  here it is! the new and improved  shameless self promotion 

SlimGirlFat ( Official Website)

Twitter       

Facebook Music Page

 For those of you with gambling tendencies or  would love to invest  some virtual happiness in  my  possible  famousness,  then please  invest here :)

Empire Avenue

Dealing with management rather than directly with a producer/musician is a somewhat new experience for me as all collaborations I have  been involved with  before have been on a one to one basis.  Perhaps its a celeb thang 

"I'm not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can't play my stuff. It's too complicated." {James Brown}

 Having not really taken much notice of  celeb  DJ's,  it is a little startling to look objectively at 'their' world which for the most part I notice  how 'closed' it is.  How much of a 'boys club' it appears to be and more noticeably,  there are very few females , certainly on the electronica scene.
 I am talking about  those who dont  just 'remix' others work, but those who compose and release originals too.  Definitely a male dominated area so far, that and the young age of the majority! 

and  I'm just an old fogey ;) 

 Aside from that I have also been carrying on as usual and discovering new music / Musicians and DJs online!

One such brilliant discovery has been  actually from Twitter

Patrick and Chris, 2 absolutely charming guys who between them have been passionately bringing trance/dance DJ's and Musicians together

through their new website 

With a mega event in the planning for 2012 please help me in supporting these guys and also the artists they are connecting!  They are seriously awesome and genuinely cool guys.

Connect with them too and check out their webpage!

ATXTrance

' 

And please don't forget,  when it comes to music, that outdated idea of a songwriter/ singer/musician/producer  sitting up all night to write  that song, sing it, AND  get it right, is all nonsense.....

Night time is for sleeping !

Expectations and Reality

A few weeks ago I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Phaylen Fairchild for her podcast. 

I hadn't really spoken much with her before  so it was great to meet such a vibrant and well loved personality.   Although the podcast was around an hour or so we did chat for probably another hour afterwards   

Right  after our chat I then sat and  watched  

Divas 

which had me in hysterics  and feeling rather ashamed that  I hadn't seen any before and more in awe of Phaylen  who is so extremely talented and funny, and BTW if Hersheys Chocolate is reading this,  please send her more :)

Thats the reality of  being online and  how  thrilled I  am to  get to meet so many wonderful people.

to listen  in to  the podcast click here
 Phaylen and Slimmie

On  the 9th February
Soundcloud

 had a global meetup. Users of the website all gathered in Real life from all over the world in different locations to talk music, meet up and  collaborate. Due to  distance and  not being able to get to any of the meetings  I decided  to  hold  a meetup in SecondLife after also realising that Jana Kyomoon ( aka Jan Pulsford) was also unable to make the London  one.

 A few hours of frantic social media tweeting and facebooking and inworld notices went out and eventually at 8.30 pm we had a venue, a photographer and  film maker and  users of Soundcloud all gathering  in SL. We do plan to hold more in the future. 

 Chantal Harvey very kindly stepped in  and  agreed to film the event inworld and you can find that here:

Soundcloud Meetup in SecondLife

Pictures of the event can be found here courtesy of Speedmaster  Bing.

SecondLife Soundcloud Pics

and article here

Mirror World

 A good Virtual Reality time was had by all.

Also  talking about websites  this month I want to introduce you to  Talenthouse.

'Talenthouse is a platform providing opportunities to the world’s creative community – a place to participate in unique projects with artists and brands, collaborate, gain recognition and compensation'.

 I have been a member of the site for a while now and  at the beginning of this month   I entered a  Producer/Remix  competition with none other than DJ Andy Moor
 My personal marketing team ( ie Me) swung into action. I  twittered, facebooked,  emailed, messaged, begged and tried to get my  fanbase into action by clicking to support me and  to be in with a chance to  have a track of mine mixed by Andy.
Now I am realistic and  know that  the competition would be tough,  but I think what I totally failed to  realise is that asking fans to support you, is always a game of chance.
Ones expectations are high and  after all, I  do  love my fans and  appreciate the fact that  I do appear (well on a few music websites) to have many..

 or do I?



The harsh Reality  against my Expectations is  simple.
  Out of  900 or so connections on FB, 6000 "fans" or so on various music websites and 800 or so followers on  twitter I am not in any higher echelon of music makers and  generally am not so  egotistical to think that simply everyone likes the music that I make.
anyway out of that total
 I got 32 votes and don't get to make even the top 50

  Nothing like a hard dose of reality to  keep ones expectations to a more  reasonable level

Does Size Matter?

 Does Size Matter?

Well frankly yes it does.

 Over the last few weeks I have been trying various  Second Life  Browsers and on many  occasions I have noticed that avatar scaling seems to be very different.

  We all know that we can make our avatars  as tall as possible or as short as possible and my own avatar has pretty much remained at around  SL 6 foot 4  which of course in RL terms would make me very tall indeed.

 Now on scaling alongside other avatars that used to be pretty much an ok size in comparison to many other (human) avs.

What I have noticed recently is that  some of the newer avatars appear to be around 9 feet tall ie  HUGE compared to me. Is this a browser thing or  somehow has  the scaling that keep  most things in proportion disappeared?

  I dragged a friend of mine  for the pic above to try and show the difference. At that time I was using the Phoenix Viewer and  he was on Viewer 2.  We tried to line them up  equally and there is a distinct difference and no  not just because he has a male avatar!

 I had the same  using Imprudence Viewer and also on Viewer 2.

 Visiting a few shows it has been  rather odd to  see what I see as normal size avatars (scaling comparison)  and then a range of really oversized avs on my screen.

 Is it just me or is anyone else seeing this too?