Covering a record twenty sims, and boasting 400 vendors, the Second Life 19th Birthday (SL19B) Shop and Hop is the biggest-ever such event in the history of SL! Here’s a handy guide, featuring an alphabetical list of all 400 stores participating. Almost every single store has a free gift for you, and all are offering sale prices on some of their merchandise!
This year, I am NOT going to cover the Shop and Hop event in detail here on the blog. Instead, I have compiled a notecard of my picks for the best and most fabulous freebies, free store credit offers, and gift cards, and posted it to the Second Life group I maintain, called the RyanSchultz.com Steals, Deals & Freebies group (the group costs L$50 to join; more information here).
I know some of you might feel a bit cheated that I am not listing all the items on this blogpost, as I have done in previous years, but there are so many high-quality gifts this year that it was impossible to select just a few to show you! The notecard lists dozens and dozens and dozens of my picks for the best fashion and home/garden decor.
Also, I do want to earn a little bit of in-world income, so I can call myself a professional Second Life freebie fashionista…and I hope you understand, thanks! If you don’t want to spend L$50 to join my group, you can use the other methods I have outlined in this blogpost to find the best gifts for yourself.
My notecard includes the exact SLURL for each freebie, for you to pop in, pick up your gift, and move on to the next score, for the most efficient freebie shopping experience! (Note that SL’s list of stores in the paragraph above has a lot of locations which stick you behind store walls!)
At the moment, this notecard is version 1.0, but I have no doubt there will be updates as I learn about more fabulous freebies! (UPDATE: THE FINAL VERSION 6.0 HAS BEEN POSTED TO THE GROUP! Please see the notice at the tail end of this blogpost.)
So please join the RyanSchultz.com Steals, Deals & Freebies group, and stay in the group for news about sales, giveaways, and events. The quite reasonable group join fee also helps feed Vanity Fair’s shopping addiction…thank you! 😉
I do apologize for not keeping my SL group as updated as I should have been over these past few months, and I promise to be more assiduous in posting the fabulous freebies I do find in my travels across the grid, from now on! In fact, I will be posting more and more such finds to the SL group instead of the RyanSchultz.com blog.
I will show you one free gift that absolutely tickled my fancy, from a store that was new to me, called Key Style. My favourite movie of all time is the 1964 musical My Fair Lady, with Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle, and this wonderful Mademoiselle historical ensemble looks like it leapt into SL straight from that classic movie!
The blouse and skirt are two separate pieces, and the outfit includes pink flats (not shown under the skirt), the gloriously over-the-top wide-brimmed floral hat, and even the delightful touch of the matching parasol! The Mademoiselle outfit comes in sizes to fit Maitreya Lara, Slink Physique, and Slink Hourglass mesh bodies, and you can find it in a gift box on the counter at the Key Style store at the SL19B Shop and Hop.
I’m not the only one who is overwhelmed by the bounty of gifts this year! It’s still so early, and there are so many gifts this year, that even the ever-reliable Naria Panthar has not yet done her usual thorough unpacking video yet! (Let’s face it; twenty sims is A LOT to get through!!!) Naria did take a quick first stab at it, though:
The only place that has pictures and descriptions of most of the SL19B Shop and Hop gifts at this early date is the little-known-about SL Free and Inexpensive Items Russian-language group on Vkontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, which often lists items I don’t see on other SL freebie blogs. Use the Russian-to-English translator in your Chrome web browser, or if that doesn’t load, then just open up Google Translate in a separate browser tab and copy and paste the text as needed.
Note that you do not need to have an account on VKontakte to use this resource! Whenever you are prompted to sign up/in, just click the little “x” to bypass it:
Just look for the posts tagged #SL19B (there’s one for each of the 20 sims), and click on the timestamp to see the enlarged images of each of the gifts:
Dreamer’s Virtual World blog is also working on posts of gifts from each of the sims—you can find them all here (she’s not done yet!).
Happy freebie shopping!
UPDATE 7:53 p.m.: I have updated my notecard to version 2.0, adding many new freebies which I think are the best gifts at the Shop and Hop—including many new gifts for male avatars! It would appear to be a conscious design choice, that all the male gifts are located on one sim (Lavendar), which should save you men from wandering around all 20 sims, aimlessly looking for freebies amidst the overwhelming majority of female gifts! Thank you, Linden Lab!
UPDATE July 17th, 2:50 p.m.: Naria Panthar has just posted her two-hour unpacking video to YouTube, for the first half (10) of the 20 SL19B Shop and Hop sims (pro tip: watch the video at 2 times regular speed, and keep a notepad and pen handy to take notes as to which stores have gifts you want to pick up!).
Stay tuned for a second video covering the second half of the 20 sims!
UPDATE July 17th, 4:03 p.m.: I have now posted version 3.0 of my notecard of my best picks for gifts, free store credit, and free giftcards available at the SL19B Shop and Hop event to the RyanSchultz.com Steals, Deals, and Freebies group! I have to say, that I have never seen such a bonanza of high-quality freebies at a single shopping event like this before! Again, my notecard includes the exact SLURLs to take you directly to the gift, and all Ryan’s recommended freebies are sorted by sim name.
UPDATE July 19th: My notecard is now up to version 5.0, with dozens more goodies for you! I have also double-checked all the SLURLs in the notecard, so they should take you directly to the freebie in each booth at the SL19B Shop and Hop event.
Please note that I have posted a separate notecard to my SL group, RyanSchultz.com Steals, Deals & Freebies, which outlines my picks for the best gifts from the Tapestry of Time Gift Area on the Second Life 19th Birthday fairgrounds, which is separate from the SL19B Shop and Hop event sims (and I’ve also included a link to it in the FINAL version 6.0 of my SL19B Shop and Hop gifts notecard).
There’s some really nice gifts there, too, so don’t skip it this year!
Also, Cat Pink has posted three new videos on YouTube, where she shows you many of the Shop and Hop gifts (again, watch them at 2 times speed, and take notes!).
And Naria Panthar has just posted her YouTube video where she unpacks and tries on gifts from the second half (10 sims) of the SL19B Shop and Hop! Watch it on twice the speed and take notes as to which stores have the freebies you want, then use the SL19B Shop and Hop Store Guide to teleport in and scoop them up!
Aaand, adding in a few more fabulous freebies from Naria’s second video, I have now posted VERSION 6.0 of my notecard with Ryan’s picks for the best gifts from the Second Life 19th Birthday Shop and Hop event! As somebody who has been diligently freebie shopping in SL for over 15 years, I can assure you that this is the single biggest haul of freebies at one event that I have ever encountered!
In the final version 6.0 of my notecard, I have also added one very generous gift which I had somehow forgotten to include in the previous versions! (Not surprising, since there’s so many gifts to keep track of!!!) It’s a long hairstyle by ADE, called Baby, which comes in a complete fatpack of colours and with a styling HUD. You can find it here:
The avatar in the following picture is wearing the Baby hair, swept back, along with another must-get SL19B Shop and Hop gift from the Belle Epoque booth: this cool, lovely Lara strapless minidress, which comes with a HUD with ten different, high-quality tropical textures (sizes: Maitreya/Petite, and Legacy/Perky):
So you owe it to yourself to head down here before it all closes on July 10th, 2022, and vacuum up some fabulous free fashion and home/garden decor for your avatars! Again, the easiest way to navigate would be to join the RyanSchultz.com Steals, Deals & Freebies group for only L$50 and pick up my notecards with the exact SLURL for each gift, but you can also use the VKontake group posts and Naria Panthar’s and Cat Pink’s YouTube videos if you don’t want to spend that L$50… 😉
Happy freebie shopping!
P.S. I have encountered some problems embedding the notecard for the Tapestry of Time Gift Area into the main notecard, and I have also noticed that some of the SLURLs I have put in the notecard will stubbornly refuse to load! So I have added information about how to get around those problems to version 6.1 of the notecard, and I do apologize. If all else fails, open up both versions 6.0 and 6.1 of that notecard, and if a SLURL refuses to load on one, try it on the other (for some bizarre reason, that seems to work!)
Now I am going to go collapse on the sofa.
