Three Poems

My RL self did National Poetry Writing Month in April; 30 poems in 30 days. I thought I’d post three (at least) of them here, because they have some Virtual World content.

This first one, from the 29th, is notable for having inspired a machinima as noted the other day.

Dactyls are Dharma, too

Here in the midst of the ten thousand thingummies
Hearing the voices of ten million throats,
Feeling compassion for those who have aching knees,
Those who build bridges and those who dig moats.

Sitting in zazen and counting the in-and-out
One and a one and a one and a one,
Mind somehow caught in this insistent rhythm, I
Tick like a clock sitting here in the sun.

Dharma is silent but Dharma is noises and
Dharma is stillness but Dharma is speed,
Why should I think that the circling second-hand
Isn’t precisely the sound that we need?

One commenter (commentor? commentator?) somewhere said they’d learned two new words from it; I’m guessing “dactyl” and “dharma”; both good words to know.

The second one, from the 9th, is very relevant to lil Spennix:

A long way from Kharanos

Well it’s a damn’ long way from Kharanos
To th’ Gate o’ th’ Settin’ Sun,
But the beer is good an’ the beds are soft
When th’ daily slaughter’s done.

I left a dagger in Thermaplugg,
All those long hard years ago,
Took a bit of his gear as a souvenir,
Of Gnomeregan below.

But that crazy old coot was nothin’,
‘gainst the things that they’ve got ‘ere,
Bugs an’ Mogu an’ lizard men,
And hungry ghosts o’ fear.

Someday I’ll go back t’ ol’ Col’ridge,
An’ sit on the porch with ‘em all,
But ’til then I’m out here in the Vale,
Killin’ bugs up on the wall.

Well it’s a damn’ long way from Kharanos
To th’ Gate o’ th’ Settin’ Sun,
But the beer is good and the beds are soft
When th’ daily slaughter’s done.

… and here is an Action Shot of “Killin’ bugs up on the wall”:

(Click through to the shockingly-redesigned flickr for the same picture larger, and in a confusing interface.)

And to close, this one from the 17th. Note that it’s not actually about Second Life, since that has real people in it, not just simulated ones. But still…

Walking Cross-Country

He says he’s writing a computer program
to simulate
walking cross-country
in an unknown place.

Where you might follow a brook upstream
and be surprised by
a forest lake
sparkling in the sun,

And follow a path around it
to a ramshackle house
at the end of a dirt road
where a woman with dark hair and soft eyes
opens the door
and smiles a welcome.

And I say that that sounds cool,
and I also say,
that the real world has surprises like that, too,
and even soft-eyed women,
and he should maybe go for real walks sometimes.

He turns to me,
like he’s about to say something,
but then he just shakes his head
and goes back to the keyboard.

Reflect On This: Dactyls Are Dharma,Too

Reblogged from Digital Rabbit Hole:

• 

Where to begin?
I will not make this post too long or long-winded..I really just invite you to scroll down and see the YouTube at the bottom hopefully in HD and Full screen.
I use this little creation as another perfect example of crazy creatives getting together to produce a few minutes of visual and vocal insanity. As those who read my blog regularly know, one of the things I most love about our Second Life, is the possibility to collaborate on artistic projects.

Read more… 205 more words

Y'all know how shy I am and reluctant to blow my own horn :) but I can't resist passing this along. I did National Poetry Writing Month in my RL weblog (maybe I should post them all here too!), and shared some of the results (one poem a day for a month) with a few SL friends. Karima Hoisan (see prior post) liked the rhythm in one of them, and to my enormous surprise she and her frequent collaborator Nat made this extremely neat machinima around it. From little nuts do mighty oak trees grow! :)

I sell houses!

Well, that is to say, I put the Beach shack, one of the houses I was talking about the other day, into my tiny and neglected Marketplace store.
 

 
Is that not exciting?

And I may box up the other three I’ve built lately (the Marketplace doesn’t actually require or even encourage boxing things anymore, but I’m used to it, and used to buying things that way, so I think I’ll keep doing that for now), and maybe even have a Combo Pack of all four at a discount, and even put a tiny vendor or store somewhere on my land, and take part in Hunts, and, and, and…

Or maybe I will just leave this on the Marketplace for a bit and see if anyone buys one. :)

Pricing is so odd in SL; some things of about this same quality are available as freebies, others would probably cost five times as much. I tried to price it so that I might consider buying it myself. Which means it’s at the cheaper end of the scale!

Fantasy Faire!

So I hardly ever go to Organized Events, at least not much; I’m not entirely sure why, maybe because there are so many more disorganized ones :) and I often like them better, and organized events tend to be crowded and/or laggy and/or drama-filled, and in general I have this self-image as being too eccentric and/or 133t to do anything that lots of other people are doing, or…

Whatever. :)

But v good friend Michele has been actively weblogging the 2013 Fantasy Faire this year, and I’ve now been there all of twice, and apparently it’s still going on at least for today (they are having a live auction of various parts of the Faire sims and builds, which seems really cool) and maybe for longer although I’m not sure, and I took a couple of pictures that I like, so here I am weblogging about it myself!

There is the left half (depending on exactly how you’re viewing this) of a picture of me standing looking out at the dragon in the Lotus Valley Dream harbor; click through to see the whole thing, bigger sizes, usw.

And here is a closer-up of the Dragon emself:

(or the left half, depending); enthusiastically friendly, no? Or maybe just hungry…

That’s just two shots from one gorgeous sim in a big collection of gorgeous sims in varying and wonderful styles. While I understand and sympathize with the tendency to use SL to make ourselves into our sort of RL ideals (90210-style, if you will), this is the kind of SL thing that really delights me: going beyond the RL-possible, into fantasy, and dream, and creativity, into worlds and realities beyond the ones that we happen to be born into. And the fact that it’s for a great cause, Relay For Life, just adds to that.

Also dragons are cool. :) Not to mention, shopping!

Here’s the group pool for the flickr group for the Faire, where you can see lots more. And assuming I post this in time, you can maybe still go yourself!

Paths through virtuality

So a bag-zillion years ago I weblogged (probably more than once) about an interconnected random adventure in SL, where a friend and I landed in some cool place after skydiving, looked up the picks of the creator of some neat object there, went to their store or something, and so on through various hours worth of fun randomness.

It’s been too long since I went nude skydiving :) but I still have these kinda small adventures all the time, I just don’t weblogify about them as much, because I don’t weblogify about anything as much, because I am lazy person.

But here’s one!

As extremely long-time readers will know, one of my very early living places in SL was a little shack on the PIER sim (which I found in turn from making friends with a bartender at The Elbow Room, which stretches the story back just about to my first months in SL I think), and when that sim shut down I started renting a room in Extropia.

Eventually the Extropians redesigned the sim and didn’t have those little rental rooms available anymore, but I stayed in the Extropians group because it was interesting, and after awhile I started to notice cross-posting in the Extropians group from the Dakini Land / Western Geisha / Companion’s Guild group, see for instance this probably-related video.

I visited the Dakini Land sim somewhere in there, but as I recall I was heavily RL-distracted at the time, and couldn’t really figure out what it was. Then I got a notice about (I think it was) some graduation ceremonies that were going on there, and there was going to be dancing and music and poetry-reading and stuff, so I went, and it was a good time, and the people were very friendly and interesting.

(I eventually did figure out a little of what was going on, which led me to start watching old episodes of “Firefly” on Netflix, where I was by coincidence already watching old episodes of Buffy; everything connects!)

Probably the performance that struck me most at that ceremony was a live on-voice reading of original poetry by Karima Hoisan. I took her picture and gave her a copy (as I am constantly doing, which is one reason my friends list is so absurdly large), and she looked at my profile and saw a Pick there from New Toulouse, which I had added to replace a Burn2 pick when Burn2 ended, and having connections with New Toulouse herself, she IMd, me and we talked, and continued talking now and then thereafter.

Eventually she and frequent collaborator Natascha Randt were working on this machinima about scripting, and I happened to have a script that fit into it nicely, with the result that some of my LSL code ended up in a machinima, which was extremely cool. (Note that it’s not a dry and geeky machinima, either; you must watch it if you haven’t, it is amazing.)

And then later on, looking around at random things on the web as I constantly do, I came across Karima’s machinima series “The Two”, and realized that I had randomly watched an episode from the middle of it somewhere many months before, but not had enough focus to figure out its context or anything.

Ms. Hoisan wisely suggested that if I wanted the full effect I should first read / listen to / experience her “Colored Dreams” pieces first, and then “The Two” in order.

So I did that, and now at the end of this particular branch of the chain of causality (rather than, say, the one that includes having a lovely tea ceremony on a satellite), I am highly recommending to you my readers that you experience both in that order also:

The Colored Dreams (page one page older to start at the start of Part One)

and

The Two (Also page back one to start at the start)

Don’t expect to consume them all in one sitting :) I found that I wanted to stop for hours or days in between just to sort of let it all sink in. It’s hard to describe or characterize; might be called fantasy or even SF, or a series or dreams, or meditations on the human condition and the nature of power and love and trust, or lots of other things. But really, like all good art, it tends to slip away from any words that you try to tie it up in.

And if you’d like to hear the artist live :) she will be doing another reading this very tomorrow, and I recommend that also, and so we tie the story up to the present day.

So! That’s my path through virtual space for today. Now I will go and find some more. Or maybe I will take a nap…

Tuesday

So! I have been not-in-world for a terrible number of days, due to being out traveling in RL to a place where not only is the cellphone service awful but also, if you can imagine it, the internet is so spotty that nothing at all demanding (like say WoW or SL) stays up for more than about two minutes before crashing and/or disconnecting.

It was horrible!

A few random links that I have saved up and might as well post here:

A video of a cool device made by one Frigid Cyrotank, that displays graphs on command inworld. (I ran into him in a sandbox the other week while playing with my maze generator, which I think is another thing I need to weblog about sometime, and meant to do a weblog posting just about him and his device, but have now forgotten most of the information but fortunately still have this link at least.)

The transcript of an Aether Salon session on favorite steampunk books, which I have been meaning to read (and most likely acquire books from) since like last November.

A posting on the Meta_Body project, including a like five-minute video that I’ve also been trying to find time to really appreciate, for months.

A forums post on multi-face sculpties, which do in fact seem to exist and work; I helped a friend make one following the instructions in the thread there. Potentially useful things! I think!

A very useful-looking, if a bit pricey, inworld mesh creation tool from the Marketplace, that I am thinking of buying. Then I could make mesh things! (Update: I just bought it! More later if I ever get a chance to try it!)

And finally and relatedly, a note in passing that DAZ 3D has some really amazing deals on 3D-type tools, including Bryce 7 Pro for US$19.95, and Daz Studio 4.5 Pro for US$0.00 (cheap at a trillion times the price!). I had a really old version of Bryce a really long time ago, and it was awesome; am eager to try out 7 (to make SL textures and/or terrains and/or just neat pictures) when I get some time.

Ha ha ha, “get some time”!

:)

And speaking of Sn@tch!

I was exploring a store called “POST”, after seeing it mentioned positively over on The Train Wreck Love Life, and as I was camming about (more on that below) I saw a green dot appear near me on the minimap, and thinking it might be (say) the store owner come by to fiddle with things and I could gush about how great the place was, I pulled my camera back, and it turned out not to be the owner of POST, but instead…

it was Ivey “Murderdoll” Deschanel herself, owner of Sn@tch the store I was gushing about in my last post.

Zomg!

So I fanboy’d all over her in IM (well, I tried to be restrained), and she was humorous and friendly. I’ve spoken to a celebrity! :)

The store POST is very neat. Here’s the Marketplace version, but I really liked the inworld one. Both the store and the products are very well and subtly textured, as Emilly says, and there’s a sort of early-1800′s Europe / Russia feel to it all. Lots of good use of mesh in the objects, so they are low-prim, and many of them are art or book related in some way. Prices range from 0L for various random things lying around here and there, to multiple hundreds for more elaborate objects and structures.

Any store that sells (or gives away!) a copy of “Salome” left open face-down on the floor, a copy of Picasso’s “Ma Jolie” for the wall, and an open notebook with sketches from the Voynich Manuscript (as well as nicely worn rugs, sidetables…) is marvelous in my book.

(Tip for Firestorm and probably other viewer users: you can apply a filter and have the Area Object Search show you just things that are, for instance, for sale for between 0 and 50L, and sort them by nearness. Great way to look for bargains!)

Fishing, Shopping, and Art

I have been doing lots of things, just not weblogging about them. :) I did some tiny bit of the Twisted Hunt, and Steam Hunt 8, and I’ve been building some houses for fun. Might even put some of them up on the Marketplace or in a store or something. But that’s for another post. :)

This one is about fishing while shopping! And Art!

That is me fishing! While shopping! Or actually while waiting to see if any Ds will come up on the lucky boards. As it says under the picture on Flickr, Sn@tch is one of my favorite guilty pleasures in SL. It’s a big sprawling clothing store, not high couture in the slightest, a bit punky and trashy, but a huge variety, much of which I love (I have to ration my trips to the outlet annex for the sake of my clothing budget).

AND they have this great Game Room with lucky boards and mobvends and gatches, and a 7Seas fishing pool where you can catch not only the usual 7Seas fish and stuff, but also parts of special Sn@tch outfits. A great place to just veg out in consumer mode.

And where but SL could you fish casually while waiting for your letter to come up in a clothing store?

:)

Then less rabid-consumery, here is a great short film about Gracie Kendal and her RL self and their art: A Comfortable Skin. Definitely worth watching!
 

And that is all for now, off to fiddle with houses more.

Block

There was something otherworldly about it….

(Submission to the Single Frame Stories thing, for the prompt “Block” announced here.)

And yeah, it’s a bit of a geeky in-joke. :)

Horns on the street in Costa Rica

So I still don’t use voice to speak of (haha!) in Second Life, for pretty much all of the reasons I gave so long ago; but that doesn’t mean it’s all bad, and when good things happen I do like to mention them.

The other night I was hanging about as usual, and some of us were on voice and some weren’t (which is always an interesting dynamic), and gradually noticed this sound of distant music.

“There’s someone playing a horn out in the street outside my window, can you hear that?” someone said; someone who happens to be physically RL-located in Costa Rica, which is a place far away from here.

“Yes!’ We could indeed.

And that was extremely neat.

I took a little online survey about SL the other day, and the first question was like “What do you primarily use Second Life for?”, and the possible answers were things like education and training and business networking, and buying and selling, building and scripting, and stuff like that. I had to check “other (specify)” just to write in “social interaction”.

If the second thing hadn’t happened before the first thing, maybe I would have written “listening to the horn from the street in Costa Rica”.

(This is why I’ve said in various places that virtual worlds will be important for business not primarily because they are directly useful for business, but because they will revolutionize the way we live, the ways we interact, and that means big changes to revenue streams, and that means business.)

But business aside, this is the kind of thing I love about SL; lying around writing scripts into parts of the world that didn’t used to do anything, watching fireworks on demand, sitting listening to live music and browsing the audience’s profiles, and talking to friends I’ve never met, hearing in the background of their voices the sound of horns on the street in Costa Rica…

Flowing Purple Light

These gloves and boots are amazing (there’s a corset and a neckpiece also, which I don’t have); a photo can’t really show it, because the amazingest thing is that the lights you see there as sort of purple highlights are flowing, moving across the item in eye-seducing ways. (And there are menus that let you control the rate and direction and color of flow, as well as other things like I think the color of the rest of the object, that I haven’t played with yet).

Also the boots and gloves are both mesh, but fit me and I like them anyway! I am very slowly becoming more of a mesh wearer than I used to be (i.e. not at all).

Boots
Gloves
Inworld store for those and lots of similar

And purple corset set from Rag Dollz sometime a long time ago so good luck finding it. :)

Good customer service: Chop Zuey

I don’t usually talk about stores and things here, ’cause this isn’t a stores and things sort of weblog (it’s more a “scripts and pictures of amusing weird things” sort of weblog), but I thought that in this case one good turn deserves some publicity…

I got an email about three things that were incoming from the Marketplace (“Items will be found in the Objects folder”), but in fact they were not found there, or anywhere else. I looked in Recent, and in Objects, and in my entire inventory by item name, and by suspected creator, all to no avail.

I waited overnight and searched again. I cleared cache and relogged and endured the wait while all (hem hem) 75,000 or so inventory items reloaded. And still there was no sign of them.

From the web page in Marketplace I found the owner’s name, and read the instructions in her profile about what to do in case of nondelivery (including clearing cache and relogging), and (per instructions if all else fails) I wrote a notecard with a copy of the email and dropped it to her.

And the next day I had an email saying that I had had three items redelivered from the Marketplace (“Items will be found in the Objects folder”), and lo and behold there they were, and there was also a now copy of my notecard with a brief note from the store owner saying that they had been redelivered and I should let her know if there was any problem.

And that was good!

The store in question is Chop Zuey, who makes Couture Jewelry, as in say:

(That is, needless to say, not me there.)

So if you are looking for some nice couture jewelry, especially of the big festive sparkling type, and you want to frequent a place that is nicely responsive to its customers’ problems when they have them, this is a place to put on your list.

(And as to why the Marketplace messes up deliveries so often that store owners have instructions on what to do prominently displayed in their profiles, well, that’s a whole nother thing…)

Stupid Signs!

Presented without comment…

Just fond amusement. :)

Dreaming of pixelated rock

I’ve tried to figure out Minecraft a couple of times in the past, playing with free demos or online versions or something, and it never quite made sense. I didn’t know what to click on to do things, or even what kinds of things were available to do.

Then for some reason I spent a little actual money on the Pocket Edition (i.e. the iPad app, in my case), and it clicked.

It is in some ways utterly awesome, and I think it will be replacing WoW for awhile as my thing to dork around in when I’m feeling too antisocial for Second Life (or, now, when I don’t want to bother with an actual computer, but have my iPad as always nearby).

(Executive summary for those interested in Minecraft vs. SL comparisons: Minecraft is (for me, so far) about using cleverness to build things (and survive) given a set of tricky constraints; whereas SL is about enabling people to build (and do, and be) the most amazing things that they can think of, with as few technical constraints as feasible.)

But now on to Our Story!

The famed Tower of Somewhat More Than Modest Height.

Again I started out unable to do anything at all, but this time I Googled around for tutorials enough to find the key difference between tapping on things and holding one’s finger down on them (completely different actions, typically), and then I was good to go.

Well, for awhile. :) I started out in Survival Mode just because it sounded like fun, and pretty much ignored crafting and dug in the sand and cut down some trees with my bare hands, and sort of threw together a wood-and-sand fort with a little moat around it for keeping away the monsters for the first night.

That did not go terribly well. I could probably have been fine just crouching inside the walls all night (and hoping nothing jumped over), but I wanted to see out, and with my minimal architecture I kept like falling into the moat and being greeted by a zombie who had also fallen in, or going too close to an Explodey Guy, and dying and things.

So I read the web a little more, discovered crafting, built my first Crafting Table, decided that carving out a secret underground base in the sand was more promising for now than building up, and I was off.

The Secret Underground Desert Base with its guard house, and a section of the old Roman Road, seen from the viewing dome atop the Tower.

The glass roof of the Secret Underground Base can be seen above there. The guardhouse nearby is one of the two main entrances (once I had a Crafting Table, the discovery of Wooden Doors was perhaps the next major technological milestone). The other entrance is in the tangle of sand and rocks beyond the glass roof, near the Weird Tall Thing That I Built For No Reason.

The Old Roman Road leads out toward my second base. Once I’d mastered the basics of base-building, I wandered about a day’s journey from the main base, and built a new smaller one in a hillside there to spend the night. Eventually I built that Road leading to it so I wouldn’t get lost. The road isn’t used much, since there’s also now a tunnel between the two bases.

(In fact my whole instance here is pretty much riddled with tunnels connecting everything to everything else, so I never have to go outside to get from one place to another unless I want to hunt or cut wood or tend the farm or something. Does everyone starting out in Minecraft build a spiderweb of underground tunnels, or is that just me?)

Nowadays the second base is mostly devoted to mining, in mostly a downwardish direction.

Looking upward from the current bottom of Deep Delving. The base area, with crafting table, furnace, etc, is ‘way out of sight up there somewhere.

Naturally, being a main mining center, the Delving area seems to produce little or no coal, iron ore, and so on, when compared to random little digs that I make while wandering around…

I still get jumped on by zombies and attacked by spiders and skeleton archers now and then, both because I go boldly out in the early morning and night sometimes, and because they tend to spawn down in the mines (the mine down the ladder from the tunnel near the Farm entrance is officially the Haunted Mine, although now that I’ve put in a few dozen extra torches it seems safer).

At first I was living off the flesh of innocent cows and piggies, and the occasional apple from a tree (as is the usual computer-game trope, eating heals one’s injuries), but when those ran low I went to the web again, and discovered farming!

The water-side farm, with rustic stone farmhouse in the background.

Basically the only crop is wheat, and basically all you do with it is make bread, but each unit (loaf?) of bread eaten recovers two-and-a-half hearts worth of health.

Farming is exponential; you discover your first few seeds while tilling the soil with your hoe, and after that you get something like two or three seeds on average for each seed planted (in addition to of course the wheat for bread). So eventually either the entire world will be wheat-fields, or I’ll just have an unbounded quantity of unused seeds.

Nature’s bounty!

And then I made the Tower of Somewhat More Than Moderate Height just for fun, and it does have great views at the top of the Very Long Spiral Staircase. (There’s currently a giant spider living on the roof at the very top; not sure if it’s stuck there forever or until I break the roof and it drops down on me and I kill it, or if it will expire eventually, but it’s a fun decoration in the meantime.)

There’s also a big basement under the tower (with crafting table and furnace and chest; I love how they look sort of like a washer and dryer and meat freezer all side-by-side in some suburban utility closet), and of course I’ve linked that basement into the tunnel system.

I need to make a map for myself now, of all the various bases (Main Base, the mines under it, Delving Base and Deep Delving, the Tower, the Farm, the Viewing Room, Snowland, the Hunting Lodge, Arboretum Outpost, and various little hillside doors I haven’t named), and how the tunnels connect them all. For instance to get to somewhere (I’ve forgotten just where at the moment) you go into an obscure tunnel in the corner of the mine under Main Base and then take a left just before the end and go down another tunnel, and…

Until just recently there was still one little burrow that you had to travel overland to get to, but then I dug back into the hill from it and eventually happened on an existing tunnel, so now that one is in the network also. Not that I could necessarily figure how to get there very quickly.

For closing, here are a couple of atmospheric shots, of the Tower seen from Arboretum Outpost at night, and vice-versa just at dawn:

The Tower seen from Arboretum Outpost at night. Note roving zombie on the left.

Arboretum Outpost, seen from the top of the Tower just at dawn. Note roving skeleton-archer.

Most recently I’ve added some fencing and planted some trees at the Arboretum, and it better lives up to its name.

So I’ve been seeing torches and pixelated stairs and long narrow hallways in my dreams, and on the insides of my eyelids when I close my eyes. Not, thankfully, the only things I see on those occasions :) but it’s been a common theme. (See also ol’ Headburro, who is doing cool stuff in I think the PC version, and like wearing diamond armor and all.)

If I don’t get into the more complex PC game and the whole modding thing (see for instance this video for a person talking about and doing Minecraft things of which I have no idea whatever what is going on with in), I suspect that the addiction will eventually wane, and I’ll go back to WoW when I’m not feeling SL-ish.

But time will well!

became a blur, because they moved so fast…

Here is a machinima (machinema?) of a poem by v talented friend Karima.
 

 
I am happy to brag :) that I contributed in a tiny way by providing scripted examples of ways to make papers sort of blow around, one of which ended up in the video. Yay me!

Nat (the videographer and cat) and Karima (the poet and voice) do all various neat things; you should “check them out”.

Happy New Year, an’ all!

Continuing the occasional tradition! :) I spammed this out to all 450+ people on my Friends list earlier today. (If you don’t get one and would have expected to, let me know; I’m not sure I entirely trust SL to have done that perfectly.)

Image uses the techniques (and the little HUD device) from Dale Meets Dale. Once I had two images that I liked (which took awhile!) it was easy.

Wow, I haven’t posted here much lately, have I? I have a somewhat more developed and usable version of the script from the automatic walking post, that lets you increase and decrease (and even reverse) the force that makes you walk, and it gets along okay with jumping and flying. So you can arrange for really Superman jumps, and you can fly along at whatever speed cross-country you want without having to hold down a key, and so on.

I’m still not entirely happy with the turning behavior; or maybe I’m just too lazy to make a Wiki page so far. :) But when I do I will post here about it. Or vice-versa.

Otherwise doing pretty much the usual stuff. Good SL friend and prominent photographer and DJ Calli had a Seventh Rezday party last night (with fireworks!). That was a lot of fun. Next year I’ll be turning seven myself; pretty neat! :)

SL Auction; Belle Harbor Yacht Club build fundraiser for Belle Harbor Victims of hurricane Sandy

Mostly a pointer to this item on friend RJ’s weblog:

It was just in April that I was building a new discovery, the lovely Belle Harbor Yacht Club (1914) is a quintessential example of a private yacht club during the golden age of sail’s twilight. Below is a picture of the yacht club in Second Life, and a gallery of the yacht club as it looks today. The trouble with Real Life is the real weather that came with the storm this October. Sandy has changed a lot of lives, including those close to me. You can see more pics on my facebook gallery. An auction of this never-sold item is raising funds for the victims of this storm. The auction will be taking place for three days, at this location, bids will be taken, all proceeds will go to victim relief in the Rockaways. Winning bid takes home the Yacht Club Build on Nov. 23, at 3pm ET. Thank you everyone for donating!

Pictures and stuff on original post. A good cause!

Bored with WoW again :)

So the periods during which I get interested enough in WoW to play it relatively regularly seem to be getting shorter, and less frequent.

The latest one, of course, happened when the Kung-Fu Pandas expansion came out. Spennix got to level 90 pretty quick:

At least I think she’s level 90 there; anyway, she is now! And she got to 90 without doing a single instance, or very many dailies, just questing about. More of the “everything in WoW up to but not including advanced raiding is now dead-easy” effect.

She also has maxed-out Engineering and stuff now, and is very fond of her Mechanical Dragonling pet:

One new thing I haven’t yet done in WoW is the “Pet Battle” stuff. ’cause, I mean, y’know, sheesh?

I also have a Pandaren Brewmaster, as seemed pretty much required, considering.

He’s level 50-odd now, and wow Brewmaster tanking is easy so far! :) But since after the first rather fun Pandaren start zone he’s just doing the same old levels, I find it hard to get really interested.

Spennatrix has also been Holy Priesting around the first few levels of Pandaria:

But again I find it hard to be fascinated, since Spennix just did all these areas not so long ago. Instance healing might be fun, but I dunno shrug.

Spennix has done some Golden Lotus and Tillers and insect-dudes dailies, and they can be diverting, but I always come away feeling like I’ve just wasted a big chunk of time.

Whereas in Second Life, when I look at the clock and discover it’s hours past bedtime, I almost never feel like it was a waste. :)

So expect to see me around the grid a bit more than I have been! (Except of course that this weekend is Thanksgiving so there are RL things going on, and then next week I’m out of town on business and may not have connectivity, and and and…)

Automatic walking (and the invisible stranger)

So very poetic friend Karima flatteringly chose my avatar following script as some context for a new poem of hers lauding scripters (she even used some of the code in the poem, and although this sounds like it couldn’t possibly work it certainly does, and you should go read it).

This reminded me of a related script that I have been too lazy to work on forever and ever, and I now have a rough draft. It may stay a rough draft for some time :) since LSL makes it hard to do in a really polished way, but in any meantime here it is. When you’re using it, once you start walking you keep walking, more or less forward unless you use the side-arrow keys to turn, until you tap backward or etc to stop. (Works best on or over flat ground; see the page for details!)

If I ever like it enough I’ll put it into the Library.

Here is a picture of me walking with the automatic walker. Note that this is a hard sort of picture to get in general, because you have to walk and cam around to looking at yourself from the front at the same time, but the walker makes it relatively simple!

(Well, okay, and without any special scripts you can also cheat by just playing a walking anim and not actually walking. :) But this would let you make a video of yourself walking! A bit, anyway…)

In other news, I noticed that for a long time (like, weeks) there had been a green dot over in an adjacent parcel on the Rise, and whenever I went over to look it was the same AV name in the title floating there, but with no visible person, and they never answered chat or IMs.

Feeling whimsical the other day, I’d nudged the invisible person (who turned out to be nudgeable) over into my land, and built a little protective envelope of colorful devices around them. I figured I’d keep them around as a decoration until my conscience got the better of me, and then send them home (since they were on my land, and I could now do Teleport Agent Home).

But then not long after that I logged into the Rise, and there they were again, standing invisible and unresponsive at the same place in the empty field next door. (And yeah I’ve checked high and low and Highlight Transparent; I suppose they are probably wearing a full-transparent body alpha, or something subtler.)

Most puzzling! What process moved them back there again, to stand again invisible and unresponsive?

But that’s why we love the mainland. :)

Update: the llSetForce() version of this seems to work just awesomely! I am now playing with a version where you stop by pressing Back, and each time you press Forward it speeds you up a bit. Enormous fun so far!

Objectification ain’t the half of it…

So there’s this Single Frame Stories thing, which has a weblog and a flickr group and everything, and once a week they post a Prompt, like “grave mistake” or “depth perception” or (this week) “objectification”, and everyone (well, not everyone, but…) either emails their pictures or posts them to the flickr group, and the picture is allowed to have One Standard Tweet’s Worth of text along with it, and they all go up on the weblog for everyone to admire, and there’s no lame “voting” or “winners” or anything (I don’t think), they are just there.

And I’d known this was going on because I admire botgirl and Whiskey Monday for (their hawt AVs, and) their enormous creativity, but I hadn’t been doing it myself because really it was good enough that other people were doing it, and I was busy leveling my DK’s Inscription skill and dancing in random Australian sims’ dance clubs, and similarly important things.

But then there was some popular demand from one of the very creative people who was doing it, and I am nothing if not a pushover, so…

My (first?) entry for this week, “Objectification ain’t the half of it”:

Best viewed larger, of course, and just what the heck is actually going on is left to the reader and/or viewer.

But there we are! I am pretty much pleased, and may do it again some decade. :)