Interview with Ghanie Lane

BY CHIEF STAFF WRITER PAYPABAK WRITER

Ghanie Lane is a dear friend. Even though we rezzed a week apart from each other, she’s been like a mentor to me. She’s also my incredibly generous landlord! She even gave my sister Pay away at her wedding since Ghanie was partly responsible for bringing her into this virtual world. So I thought it would be nice to interview her and let others know what I already know: Ghanie Lane is one of SL’s treasures!

I have to tell you, though, that Ghanie is not much on interviews in terms of answering notecard queries! (A woman of few words … not a bad thing!) So while I will present them, I mostly have some conversations we had recently in preparation for the interview. SL hasn’t been very cooperative in letting me take the time to converse with her lately, so here is what I have:

I met Ghanie in 2007 on the sands of The Dune Project. She was handling costumes for pretty much the whole sim! She was working on the first of many acolyte outfits, this one based on the David Lynch version of Dune, and during our very first meeting, she gave me a copy of it! Fairly new to SL, this was an immense gesture to me and helped me bond to SL as well as Dune. When asked, You’ve been around awhile, what are some of your peak experiences in SL? Ghanie wrote on the notecard: “I have quite a few fond memories of hanging out at the earlier Dune sims and learning the ins and outs of Second Life through my friends there.” Yeah, this interview is heading south!

This is the acolyte outfit, inspird by the David Lynch version of Dune, that Ghanie gave me when we first met.

However, in person, we recalled an afternoon standing on the roof of my small house in Arrakeen when fireworks seemed to be exploding over the Atreides palace nearby. I have an awful screen cap of that, complete with our titles. Turns out there were some griefers who ran into the wrong guy and got themselves shot up and chased off the sim! The pic of Ghanie back then (above) shows exactly how she understood her role in Dune! As she said to me, “I was on a lot and RP took so long to get started …” so she took up costume making.

Ghanie has been an outfitter for numerous roleplaying sims, but now she spends the majority of her time creating sculpties, and giving workshops on making sculpties. As I understand them, sculpties take on the shape of specially created textures to make up for the lack of variety in regular prims. As Ghanie told me, “There are so many shapes that can’t be created well with regular prims, especially shapes that can shrink smaller than 0.01m. Also, builders enjoy the ability to texture sculpties using 3d programs which isn’t easly done with regular prims.”

Ghanie’s store is in the center of Lithe and is quite the hub of activity! (I live on one of the corners quite comfortably, thanks so much Ghanie!) It is there that I took the much better and recent pictures of her. Of course, a week later she completely redid the store, so it looks nothing like the picture but at least there’s an historical record of the old one!

When asked who her favorite builders were, Ghanie responded, “Alex Bader (whose main store is Skye Castles) has some of the most fantastic buildings in SL. I also enjoy Madison Winthorpe’s dresses.” That store is Madison’s Creations. We also share a favorite sim build, Omega Point, which I have mentioned numerous times here and in ROLE Magazine.

What are your best-selling products? “My Logs, Necklace Cords, Open Hearts, and Budget Gems have sold more than 1000 each.”

Ghanie stand in her store, wearing a dress designed by one of her favorite designers.

What is coming up? “I have some jewelry chain pieces, I’m finishing up an alphabet set, and I also have a long list of heart-type projects for Valentine’s Day.” Ghanie gave me a copy of the Alphabet set, which is like having letters with which to make monograms, whether as a sign on your house or billboard, or able to shrink down to jewelry size. Incredible!

Visit inworld: Ghanie’s Sculpty Store