The Wizard, Creation, and More!

Karima Hoisan got some new hardware :) and has now started a grand project to document in video the 21 (twenty-one!) worlds that she has created on Kitely, a dozen or so of which I helped with to a greater or lesser degree, mostly by writing scripts to implement her ideas.

This is very cool!

Already you can take multi-part visual tours of two of our more recent worlds, The Wizard and Creation (links below); not only are they easier ways to get some of the experience of actually being virtually in the worlds, but they are lovely artistic videos in their own right.

Links to the current ones (each is a weblog entry pointing to a YouTube video, I think):

The Wizard, Part 1

The Wizard, Part 2

The Wizard, Part 3

Creation, Part 1

Creation, Part 2

These are all great, and they are coming out so fast! So keep an eye out on her weblog if you want to see more as they appear. A feast for the senses, and maybe they will get more people to come in and see, and get hooked on the whole Virtual World (not “metaverse”!) thing…

Upon playing too much Minecraft

Remember

Before leaving the secure area, always check your inventory and quick-access belt slots.

Your armor should be complete (except for a shield; like, you’re really going to block something?) and of iron or better. If you are wearing more than two Diamonds worth of Diamond armor, consult special Diamond Handling Instructions for extra precautions to take against carelessly losing it.

Regardless of mission, you should have the following slot assignments:

1. Sword, iron or diamond depending on your progression,
2. Pickaxe, iron (if you have been issued a diamond pickaxe for your mission, consult special Diamond Handling Instructions for care and usage; you should still have an iron pickaxe in slot 2 for ordinary mining),
3. Shovel, iron,
4. Axe, iron,
5. Hoe, stone, or iron if iron is sufficiently plentiful,
6. 32-64 torches,
7. Shears, or secondary mission-specific item, switched from inventory as needed,
8. Primary mission-specific item, switched from inventory as needed,
9. 32-64 loaves of bread.

Additionally, you should have in your inventory:

• A bow and one stack of arrows,
• Fishing rod,
• Compass,
• Clock,
• One stack each of cobblestone, iron, coal, and planks for ad hoc crafting,
• An additional stack of some visually-distinct block like Polished Diorite, for building and marking,
• At least one spare Iron Pickaxe, and optionally a number of Stone Pickaxes for security,
• Replacements for anything else in the build-out that is near breakage,
• Optionally, flint and steel for randomly setting fires.

If your mission is in a Lava-prone mine area, you should deposit your Compass and Clock and Fishing Rod and anything else that you are unlikely to need in the mine’s General Inventory Chest before entering the tunnels (don’t forget to pick them up again on your way back). You should also have at least two (2) buckets filled with water, at least one of which should be kept in Slot 7 and/or 8 while mining.

(I’ve never even seen Netherite; maybe someday!)

Klara Part Three by Dale Innis & Karima Hoisan

The Klara Trilogy is done! After months of my struggling to finish the story and images, my collaborator created the third video from it, with amazing narration and music and transitions, in like a day. :) Enjoy!

Digital Rabbit Hole

Drum Roll……….
Hi everybody,
announcing the arrival of Klara Part Three, hot off the YouTube presses.
This is the last part of The Klara Trilogy.
For those of you who have not seen Klara Part One or Klara Part Two, you can find them here: Klara Part One and Klara Part Two
Also, more information on my blog post with more details on the story Klara on WP
Please watch it, Fullscreen in 1080 HD and good sound.
It’s a relaxing 8 minute story and it ends here. Dale & I hope you will enjoy our efforts:)
If you did, likes and comments are much appreciated here or on YouTube.
Sit back and relax and watch Part Three, the end of the journey for our Klara:)
Enjoy!!

View original post

Inworld Review Nov. 6th- With Mal Burns. Featured Guests: Karima Hoisan & Dale Innis

Fame! :) Try not to listen to the parts where I talk, because I sound nervous and kind of doofy. Maybe I should claim I was using a voice Morpher!

But thanks as usual to Karima for making and posting this clip; enjoy!

Digital Rabbit Hole

Hi everyone,
I am excited to share with you a 30 minute version of Inworld Review that was filmed live yesterday. Inworld Review is made weekly and is the definitive media talk show for all that is virtual on The Open Simulator grid (which is basically all virtual worlds outside of Second Life.
The actual show, created and hosted by Mal Burns with co-host, Thirza Ember was two hours long.
I tried to show some highlights of our talk.. Both Dale and I were honored to be invited as special guests. I have included the clips of what we discussed and I hope you will enjoy watching snippets of the show.
Mal & Thirza are very well-known and loved in the virtual hypergrid community.
Thank you again for featuring our collaborations in this area. It was great fun to be on:)
Enjoy!!

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AI Dreams in Goth-Mini-Installation for Halloween

A very neat mini-experience based on my AI art (and I helped!).

Digital Rabbit Hole

A small guessing game.. What does the picture depict?
1. A large ottoman for couch watching videos?
2. A feathered cookie jar with a built in radio?
3. An entire Goth multi-media experience, wrapped up and ready for transport?
If you picked 3….you are right on the money!!

This is our contribution (AI artist Dale Innis) and yours truly to a fabulous, multi-media mini set of our AI Goth exhibit that I have been writing about a lot lately:)  This might be the last post on the subject and then…back to poetry:)
Here is our event poster to announce our participation..made by Dale.
This is a video I made last night, before Dale cleverly transported the whole
show and dropped it down, where it will form part of a big Virtual Party.
Fullscreen please and a good headset:) Music by Indus from”The Dead Can Dance”

The whole enclosed set finally…

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AI Dreams in Art is Here!!

I realize I haven’t posted here in like a million years :) mostly because I’ve been doing other things, and haven’t quite thought of anything to weblog about in the virtual worlds. But now I’m here to reblog this post from Karima Hoisan, who did me the great honor of curating some of my RL creations into the virtual, with a wonderful Kitely build. Go, read, visit, enjoy!

Digital Rabbit Hole

On August 1st, it all started with one prim, a texture and an idea for my 21st world On Kitely – Virtual Worlds, completely inspired by the enormous quantity of AI Art,
Dale Innis was producing.

Dale had been dabbling with AI Art programs for months and the results were interesting, at times creepy and unsettling… but this new program, *MidJourney, was absolutely amazing!! (more about the program at the end)
I was moved to create spaces and divide up his art into genres that could be enjoyed in immersive appropriate places. I am so happy he loved the idea and very much got into even building a few galleries, himself.
All paths lead to somewhere..Pick one and see where it takes you:)
Maybe hang out at a Hippie Campsite, see somePsychedelic Artand listen
to The Youngbloods.
*Disclaimer, an AI has never had a psychedelic experience….and its art…

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Shadowlands (WoW again)

Now I’m going to write things about the new Shadowlands expansion for World of Warcraft some more, and apologies yet again to the Second Life folks who are still reading here in hopes of someday getting Second Life content again. :)

(I have done some “virtual world creation, albeit not Second Life” stuff that I guess I haven’t mentioned here? Which is odd because it was really pretty cool; enough scripting that I nearly got out a source code control system and a bug tracker, in the service of a really remarkable world build. See Karima Hoisan’s post and teaser video on the subject.)

Anyway, Shadowlands! Somewhat contradictorily:

• I like it quite a bit (the strange systems, the quirkily-different places like the Maw and the Tower of Torghast, the fact that it doesn’t really take itself very seriously, as usual), and
• It makes not the tiniest particle of sense.

The latter point is (and I suppose in some sense there are spoilers for the expansion below, but really if you haven’t yet gotten at least as far as I have by now you probably aren’t someone who cares about that kind of thing) due to a number of factors, including:

• It’s supposed to be set in the Afterlife. This has some amusing side-effects, like encountering the occasional defeated ex-villain from prior expansions sweeping the floor to atone for their sins or whatever, but otherwise it’s pretty unconvincing, since:
• There’s basically no one there. I mean, it’s supposed to have been the place where everyone who dies on Azeroth and and least a couple of other worlds (and quite likely all worlds because why not) goes after they die. So there should be a really incredible number of NPCs around somewhere. But there is no hint of that; there’s like I dunno a few dozen or hundred or something.
• There’s no Shadowlands Archaeology, supposedly because the place has no history, but obviously the place does have history; Revendreth in particular is chock-full of ruins that would have any archaeologist drooling. And Bastion has that one hilltop devoted to that one hero from the past, and the entire Locus of Memory.
• Three of the five areas are full of stuff that gets left behind when one dies, and has no place in the Afterlife: bones and gristle and skulls and skeletons and funerary equipment and like that. That’s just silly; what is all that doing there? What are these the bones and coffins and so on of?
• Relatedly, since this is WoW, one is constantly killing (“defeating”) things. How exactly does that work, ontology-wise? When things die, do they go to an After-Afterlife? Do they just respawn after awhile? (Of course things just respawn after awhile everywhere else in WoW, so that’s a whole area of confusion to think about.)
  • There are a few references to “the True Death”, but if dying in the Shadowlands means that you cease to exist rather than spending eternity doing… something (more on that below) you’d think people would be really really careful to avoid it, at the very least. And the Shadowlands people are always calling us mortals “mortals”, which would seem to imply that they are not mortal, suggesting that there is no “True Death” in fact. Which is it??
  • Sometimes when you die in Shadowlands, a voice says “It is not yet your time, Child of Azeroth”. Not yet my time for what, exactly, voice?
• And why are there so many things? Why are there fish and plants and annoyingly-overhanging rock formations in the Afterlife? Are they the souls of fish and plants and annoyingly-overhanding rock formations that died in the mortal world? How would that work? (The fact that the areas of the Afterlife are all islands floating in a cloudy void, and if you fall off you… die, is a whole nother issue.)
• Before this big power imbalance and war that we’re involved in started, the Afterlife apparently sat around for untold ages not doing that. So what were all the (millions and billions, at least, of) souls doing? Considering this by area, we speculate:
  • In the Maw they were just suffering forever because they were so terrible, which is horrible but it’s basically just Hell so okay.
  • In Revendreth they were coming to terms with and admitting their sins so they could then go to some other area, or to the Maw if they ultimately failed (why this involves vampires I may or may not wonder about again below),
  • In Ardenweald they were taking care of the recharging souls of various Nature Demigods waiting for their Respawn Timers to count down, which is sort of nice, but you wouldn’t think it would require all that many people (they also put on plays, which is cool, although the theatre isn’t nearly big enough for the millions of… okay we’re tired of that complaint).
  • In Bastion they were having all of their memories of their lives removed and archived, being turned into overgrown humanoid Smurfs regardless of what shape or species they were in life (wut), and then trained in battle so they could go out and bring the souls of the dead to the Shadowlands for judgment. Except:
    • They don’t in fact do that; the souls just sort of flow down from the sky in a big river,
    • In the one example we see where they do do that, no battle skills of any kind are required since they’re just magical angels and who would they be fighting?
    • Also in the one example we see where they do do that, they need exercise no judgment whatever, so the excuse we see that they have to forget their past lives so that they can fetch souls “without judgment” makes no sense whatever.
  • In Maldraxxus they were apparently being made into bizarre amalgams of bone and gristle and other corpse-parts for no obvious reason, and then set to fighting each other in an endless round of melee, poisoning, plague, spying, and whatnot, ostensibly to defend the Shadowlands, although it’s not clear against what, and of course it’s eventually against each other, which is obviously perfect for a WoW realm, but otherwise makes not a lot of sense.

In the Bastion storyline, we get the impression that the Shadowlands has in the past been attacked by critters from the Void (just like the rest of the universe has), so maybe that’s what Maldraxxus is training against, but I don’t see a whole lot of evidence for that.

Okay, enough complaining for now. :) As I said, I’m certainly enjoying it, but I wanted to write this stuff down just because it’s fun to write down things that make so sense. As I mentioned, Blizzard themselves don’t take it all that seriously; I don’t know if the line “If this is truly the only way, then I shall find another” is intentionally satirical (I mean, strictly speaking and going by the meaning of “only”, you shall in that case not find another), but when the flavor text for a scroll that you find (when looking for a more important one) in the Locus of Memory is something like “In this weighty tome a Kyrian has recorded every one of the memories of their life. Every. Single. One.” you know that they’re having a good time with their lore and ontology.

(Also, one is constantly being carried around unceremoniously by Kyrians, which is pretty funny.)

Arranging llDialog buttons

Okay, back in Second Life! And/or OpenSim.

A purely Scripting-geekery post today, on a really niche topic.

When you get one of those blue dropdowns (or pop-ups, or drop-ins, depending on your viewer) with a number (up to twelve!) of buttons in them (when you touch a danceball for instance and it asks you what dance you want to do), the piece of LSL (Liden Scripting Language) that shows you that thing with those buttons is a built-in function called “llDialog“.

(All of the built-in functions start with “ll” which presumably stands for “Linden Lab”, but which has made many beginning LSL scripters, including Yers Truly, wonder how an identifier can start with eleven at all.)

One of the arguments to llDialog is, naturally enough, a list of the strings to put on the buttons. And the order in which the strings are copied from the list onto the buttons is… perhaps counterintuitive. For instance, if the list looks like:

[ "one", "two", "three", "four" ]

then the dialog as displayed will look like:

which might not be the first thing one would have guessed.

It basically starts at the bottom, filling rows upward as it goes, until it runs out of strings.

I have sometimes fiddled around to make things come out how I want them to manually, and more often have ignored the problem entirely and just not cared that the buttons were in a stupid order.

But for some reason today I got tired of it and decided to fix it; so here:

list arrange(list l) {
list outl = [];
integer n = llGetListLength(l);
do {
if (n<3) return outl + l;
n = n - 3;
outl = outl + llList2List(l, -3, -1);
if (n==0) return outl;
l = llList2List(l, 0, -4);
} while (TRUE);
return []; // UNREACHABLE
}

This will take a list in an order, and return a list in a different order such that if you pass the new list to llDialog, the labels on the buttons will be in the order that one might expect, left to right and up to down. As in for instance:

llDialog(avatar_id, prompt, arrange(button_list), channel);

It basically just divides the input list into pieces of size three, and then reverses them, with complications in case the input list isn’t equally divisible by three. And because if you ask LSL to copy the first through fourth-to-last (inclusive) elements of a three-element list, it silently copies the entire list rather than (as one might have expected) copying nothing. And because it doesn’t realize that a “do while(TRUE)” will never exit and without the unreachable line you get an error saying that not all code paths return a value. And because llGetListLength is said to be computationally expensive. And because LSL does let you use negative indices (roughly) on lists!

This works in both Second Life and OpenSim, because the scripting languages are extremely compatible for obvious reasons.

Many, many, implementations of this same algorithm no doubt exist all over the place :) but this is mine, for the moment and for what it’s worth!

Spennatrix is OP

I have been in Second Life a bit more in the last few months doing random things, as well as being in Kitely contributing to Karima Hoisan’s amazing builds (“worlds”, they call them in Kitely). But I’ve also been in World of Warcraft even more (hey, there’s a new expansion out!) so I’m going to talk about that here instead. Who knows, if I get used to writing in weblogs again, maybe it’ll occur to me to write some original words about SL again eventually!

(For instance maybe about how it was kind of fun figuring out Bakes on Mesh and having a full mesh head and body for Girl Dale, but that having done it all there doesn’t really seem to be any point outside of like better-looking joints in swimsuit photos.)

Spennix the Rogue has been max-level (which is 60 again now; shades of Classic!) for a little while now, and it’s been pretty fun. She’s rather squishy, as I’ve resigned myself to rogues being, with of course the somewhat compensating advantage of being very good at sneaking and vanishing and running away and stuff. So, good for exploration. She is in the Night Fae Covenant, mostly because I thought the “running around fast as a glowy animal” thing sounded like fun and more in-character than the other covenants. The damage ability seems to do a little extra damage, but nothing amazing.

For variety, I also leveled Spenax the Affliction Warlock a bit, up to 57 as of this writing. They have this nice mechanic where when your second and subsequent characters arrive at the main part of the expansion, you have a choice between going through all the introductory storylines introducing the covenants one at a time and all, or you can go straight to choosing one and then flitting around all the various areas levelling. I chose the latter for Spenax, and the Venthyr seemed aesthetically appropriate for a Warlock. The Door of Shadows ability is fun, and the damage ability, again, seems to do maybe a little extra damage.

Then I decided to focus and to some higher-stress stuff, so I’ve been leveling Spennatrix the Holy Priest, including actually healing instances, which is stressful because if you mess up the party dies, and if the tank messes up the party dies and blames you. (I’m sure tanks say the same thing about healers.) But it sure is quicker than just questing around, and the dungeon-queue wait times are like two minutes tops for a healer. So Spennatrix is 59 going on 60 as of this writing. She joined the Kryian Covenant because of course she did (they’re so pure and earnest that they are going to turn out to be bad guys, right?), and the non-combat “weird little owl guy with a baby voice brings you a potion” ability is amusing. But the combat ability? Well, holy shirtballs!

I mean, I may be pretty bad at party healing (or maybe I’m pretty good, I’m not sure; so much depends on the tank and how bad the DPS are about standing in pools of stuff), but for solo’ing around, a Kyrian Holy Priest is totally OP. (OverPowered, that is, not Original Post{er}.)

Long, long ago, in say Ashenvale, poor Spennatrix would wince at the site of, say, a bear, because they tended to do damage faster than she could heal, if she was going to get in any damage herself and therefore kill the bear before running out of mana.

But now! Need to do damage? We have Smite and Holy Fire. We also have Holy Word; Chastise, which is not only a nice chunk of damage but also a good interrupt and a decent stun, and it comes around so often on the guitar that we can just use it for a little extra damage without worrying about wasting the interrupt part, because it’ll be back soon. We also have miscellany like Holy Nova for an area effect, and that star thingie which does both damage and healing in a line out of front of one, and then again on the way back.

(All priests apparently also have Shadow Word: Pain and Shadow Word: Death. Spennatrix does not use these. Ever.)

Worried about taking damage? We have Power Word: Shield (which we didn’t for awhile, but now we do again) which makes the first N owches of damage just not count, and we can self-cast it every like 15 seconds. And if we do take damage, we have small fast heal, and big slow heal, and “heal that person and then jump to whoever else needs it the most”, and a Heal Over Time, and a “heal the whole party with pretty graphical effects”, and “heal this person and everyone near them”, and “heal this person an enormous amount if it’s available, and since its cooldown reduces with every small fast heal you cast, it probably is”, and… and… and…

And then there’s the Kyrian thing, Boon of the Ascended, which can be used every three minutes, and basically turns you into this unstoppable damage and healing vortex for ten seconds, with both direct and area damage, all kinds of healing as a side effect, and a big boom at the end that takes care of most of whatever difficulties survived until then.

Spennatrix is no longer worried about bears. Especially the first bear that’s tried to mess with her in the last three minutes.

(And then there are little perks like Levitate, which is an any-time “no worries about falling” thing, as long as you don’t need to steer, and Fade and/or Shadowmeld, which are not as good for sneaking as a rogue’s Stealth, but still very handy.)

None of this helps (enough) in a dungeon with a squishy headlong tank and DPSes that stand in boiling blood, but it’s definitely easier to solo around than I remember!

Update: Ding 60! :)

The River of Forgetting-Featuring Silas Merlin’s Funerary Ship for Slartist@UWA Machinima Challenge 2017 -Art of The Artists

Seems like I have mostly forgotten I have this here weblog. :) But I will again reblog one of Karima-and-Natascha’s amazing machinimas, to which I had the pleasure of contributing some scripting. Click “view original post”, watch and enjoy!

Digital Rabbit Hole

Where to begin?

I think I will begin by showing you our movie:) This is the 25th collaboration for Randt & Hoisan,also known as The Team:) Please enjoy it in HD and Fullscreen and then if you are interested in a bit of the history on making it.. keep  reading below.

I could write a book about the making of this movie..but I think I’m too lazy; nevertheless, there are things that need to be said about this one..for the record and just to look back on years from now and remember the trials and errors and breakthroughs and near breakdowns we all lived through while making it.

I have revisited some of my other posts about our entries for the UWA and it seems I am always saying..that this one or that one was the most complicated etc etc, but objectively, I think “The River of Forgetting” wins that…

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“The Changes Changes” A Randt & Hoisan Production

Yet another Randt and Hoisan production that I contributed to with some scripts and other small ways. I definitely recommend watching it; all of this team’s stuff is great, but this is great even by that standard.

Digital Rabbit Hole

This is our 20th collaboration!! It’s something we want to celebrate with all of you too!
(Clinks her glass against Natascha’s..Here’s to many more, my creative partner!!)

Only 5  years after we started thinking about  doing “The Changes Changes”  and 8 months spent in production (only;) we can finally say it’s finished and  send it out to the world today:) As I said to Natascha a few times during this process, “What were we thinking?  This poem was a very complicated,  and visually very hard, to turn into a film..We had to make sure we had the same vision, to even attempt it, and  as luck and  more than luck would have it,we did have the same vision.. for almost every scene. I guess that is why this one is #20!!. We have and are still garnering experience as collaborators and have many videos behind us now, to draw…

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A virtual museum done right

So there’s always been lots of talk (and perhaps somewhat less action :) ) about how virtual worlds are potentially great delivery vehicles for education, and schools, and museums, and all like that there.

There are a number of different ways to approach the idea, from wild “pretty much Not Possible In Real Life” things like that amazing and/or disturbing Virtual Schizophrenia build from the other year, to simple “upload my 2D art and put it on the walls of a virtual room” galleries, to novel interactive things that are about other things and that are yet to be built.

As an example of how to build a virtual museum about real-life artworks and artifacts, I can’t recommend highly enough the Peter Vos Museum in Second Life, as covered briefly in these two notes in NWN, and as covered most visually and memorably in this Yesikita Coppola machinima:

The machinima is very well done, and if for some reason you can’t get to the museum itself, by all means watch it.

But if you can get to the museum yourself, I’d suggest doing that first! Or at least second. :) I went the other day (and then got sick and almost forgot that I’d wanted to weblog about it), and am glad I did.

I knew nothing about Peter Vos before visiting the museum, and now I feel both fascinated and well-informed, as well as having come home with some nice souvenirs. The museum is a lovely build, perfectly fit to the purpose, and taking advantage of the SL environment in subtle but effective ways; the lighting is dark with focused lights, as a museum should be, the synchronized slide projectors are definitely synchronized slide projectors, making just the right soft sounds, the little peepholes that let you examine some of the smaller works close up are perfect little peepholes, that zoom your default camera position right in where it ought to be, while making your avatar bend in just the right “museum visitor peering into one of those little peepholes” pose.

About the art itself I won’t say much; it should be experienced. :) Nothing conventional, many many birds, and considerable surreality.

(The story behind the museum, the connections between the artist, the museum builder, and the machinimatographer, are quite a story in themselves, but I’ll let you discover that for yourself also!)

I would commend this both to anyone as a museum to be visited, and to anyone thinking of building a virtual museum (or gallery, or school, or…) as an example of one very effective way to do it. It’s just one point in the (big!) space of possible approaches, but it’s a very well done one, and definitely worth a visit.

“Unmindful” The Movie by Natascha Randt & Karima Hoisan

I will take a LITTLE credit for parts of this, mostly my expertise at not having any particular goal in mind :), and a nice “make a ball look like it’s rolling without risking actual physics” script that I did. It’s a great movie, and a great sim; experience both!

Digital Rabbit Hole

On July 16th, I posted here in my blog, about a new world that Dale Innis and I were beginning to build on Kitely – Virtual Worlds on Demand, called, “Unmindful” See post:
As I said in the post, it was an experiment, to prove or disprove something I had come to believe: “You don’t need an idea to create…ideas come…all you need to do is start.”
So we started off  with no ideas about what the world would be, just making sort of odd stone structures, with off-sim wind turbines, and a parade of wild animals standing on rugs moving in a figure-eight. That was our first part of the build, but then unmindful to how the focus even began changing, we shifted in a very different direction. I had the concept, but I promise you, if it weren’t for Dale, we would never have pulled this off. (Have…

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A poem, and a painting, come alive

It’s been my pleasure and privilege to be part of another of Karima Hoisan’s amazing Kitely sims, based this time on one of her lovely poems.  (See previously The Hudson Line, based on the Hudson line, and In Your Head, based on your head (well…).)

The poem is here, and the artist’s own posting on the sim is here; I urge you to follow both those links, and then experience the Kitely sim for yourself, if you do the Kitely thing at all. (And if you don’t, maybe you should; it turns out you’re still allowed to use SL, too! /grin ).

And in the meantime, here are a couple (more) pictures, as further incentive:

Doing the scripting for this sim was great fun, and I hope there is at least one thing that makes you scratch your head and think “How did they do that?”.  Most likely it is the result of Ms. Hoisan and I racking our brains for a few days trying to figure out how to get a particular effect, and then when it seemed impossible her saying “I don’t suppose we could…?” and me smacking my forehead.  :)

Rise Now, Glorious Fairelanders, Warriors All…RISE

Which is to say, FANTASY FAIRE TIME! :) The FF is one of those things that I love SL has, and that (especially when I’m enjoying one of those lingering RL “head cold” things) I’m glad lots of people besides me actually do. As always, v good friend Michele has extensive and unique reporting on the event, with lots of great pictures and links and things. Be more energetic than me, and experience it all! :)

Michele Hyacinth

Fantasy Faire 2016 Sims Open at 9 a.m. SLT 4/21…I’m so excited I posted a bit early!

A swirling glow morphs into a misty updraft.

“‘Tis time,” the Pale White Elf whispers.  She moves her ombre gray eyes slightly and looks into the rich amethyst eyes belonging to the svelte and Richly Chocolate Muse next to her.  “True this,” the gorgeous Muse replies and nods her forehead, softly fluttering the petals along her floral crown.  “‘Tis time,” she echoes, smiling deeply.  The Pale White Elf smiles in return and then together, they rise.

They sing a call to arms, a song cradled in urgent love. Their voices now raised passionately aloft.  Song at once seducing and trumpeting the Purple Mists, an irresistible appeal to all who dare to hear and dare to care:

Ye of Passion, Ye of Soul

Ye Gladiators of Commitment, Ye Warriors of Known

Intertwined.  Interbeing.  Melded…

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In Your Head

I did some of this! It is very cool! :D

Digital Rabbit Hole

So, wouldn’t it be fun (I thought) if someone could make a Giant Head that we could divide into Left Brain-Right Brain and take our visitors for a ride? Whenever I have odd sculpting requests, (like a horse’s rear-end:) I always call on my favorite weird sculptor, RAG Randt

Thanks RAG for this Awesome- Sim-Wide Mesh Head!

So you can get an idea of the size, that bothersome tiny mosquito about to land on the bridge of his nose, is really, yours truly. And here is another shot:

Then I asked my scripter friend, Dale Innis, a very much Left Brain kind of guy, if he would be interested in collaborating again on this, my newest and 9th world
on Kitely – Virtual Worlds on Demand. He said, “Sure!” and after a rather slow start (a year ago) today, we proudly present it to the public. Come visit and take…

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Happy New Year!

Despite the silly atomic body being busy fighting off some “cold germ” sort of replicators, I managed to make a New Year card! And this is it here!

(I decided not to spam it out to everyone on my friend’s list, ’cause that seems spammy; have I actually done that in the past?)

It’s been a nice low-key sort of year in SL (at least to the extent I’m willing to publicly divulge, mu-hahaha). Lots of things have happened in the world, and I have for the most part just sat (or flown or danced) in more or less my usual places, and smiled benignly at the thought that other people were doing them.

Also I have not written in my weblog much. :) But I am still here! And still infinitely appreciative of my SL friends, creators, people in AVs normal and lovely and ugly and wild, who make the world the amazing thing it is.

(And I will believe in Sansar / useful VR goggles / sustainable server-side rendering when I see them. I am so crotchety!)

Girl Dale notes that her hair actually looks much better than that, and the “capture depth” feature of the viewer camera works with limited success in the presence of alphas.

(Pretty background is the Neva River sim, somewhat the worse for my post-processing.)

WaterMoon Breeze: stuff and scenery!

I haven’t done one of these Neat Things I Found In SL posts for awhile, both because I have been just hanging around the Rise and other familiar places a lot, and because when I do find new neat things, I am too lazy to organize about a post about them.  :)

The other night, though, I followed the usual SL chain of nice pointers and coincidences to WaterMoon Breeze, the sim and build and inworld store and probably also home of MenuBar Memorial, who (among many other things) made the wonderful crazy 50s-style Lucid Dream Together poster for Chasing a Butterfly, the machinima we posted about here the other week.

Turns out this MenuBar feller has some Mad Skillz, and his stores (inworld and marketplace) contain some Really Neat Stuff.  It’s Old SL stuff in the best way (crazy, fun, creative, offbeat, brightly colored), but also extremely polished. Not only can he script and do amazing things with particles (more on that below), but he also does graphic design like a person who does graphic design, so the offbeat brightly colored things actually look good!

 

See?  How brightly colored and well-done?  And there is a smart umbrella, and a Breedable Pet Rock, and Weather Devices, and all sorts of things!  Here are more of them:

Bird-things, and water-things, and all kinds of things! And if you aren’t careful, some things that sort of, well, explode…

(Hint: something about putting things into Coke…)

Spot the Pun in this one!

Witty, brightly-colored, and useful…

There is also a long swaying bridge up to a mysterious floating island…

with interesting things up top which might include, say, a zipline to get back down…

and at the bottom, naturally, a Hieronymus-Bosch-based merry-go-round.

In terms of buying things so far I have mostly bought this amazing Orb

which I have installed at one end of the Park in the Rise (as pictured) where I can sit and alternate between zoning out and wondering how the heck he does it.  (Just when I think I have a pretty good feeling for how particles work in SL…)

So that is that!  Another example of craziness and creativity in SL, for your consideration.

(Oh, and I still have a marketplace store myself, come to think of it!  But I never add anything to it, and no one ever buys from it, so that works out…)

Canary Beck on Ambient Sound in SL

Although it is apparently based on a NWN article that I do not have the patience to read today (NWN is so often annoying; see prior satire), this piece by Canary Beck is well worth a read (and not long):

Ambient Sound in Second Life

and there is an optional pretty and instructive “Sights and Sounds of Basilique” video that you can watch / listen to.

I have a couple of “pretty nature sounds” objects that I tend to drop copies of onto parcels that I own, but I may be inspired this Canary Beck post to put a little more effort than that into it…  :)

UWA time again!

I know, all I ever weblog about these days is machinima.  That is because I have already weblogged about trying on clothes from Sn@tch, the other main thing I do in SL these days :), and I can’t imagine that you want to see more and more postings about that.

Anyway!  It is time for the annual University of Western Australia themed machinima and 3D art contest thing again, and as usual I will highlight the entry that I made some small contribution to!  It is of course by Karima and Nat, and is of course wonderful.  :)

I will not say anything about the premise, because it is so delightfully revealed in the film itself.  See also Karima’s post on the subject for more insight and background.

There are no doubt lots of other extremely worthy entries, which we should all attempt to find time to watch!  But right now I must rush off to continue the ongoing RL battle with entropy.

(There’s an interesting question: does SL, or the virtual worlds in general, have any inherent entropy, not counting what they inherit indirectly from RL?  Probably so; for instance empty land with rezzing turned on gradually accumulates trash.  Expand and generalize.  But first watch the machinima!  It is on the You-Tube, so you can even Like and Comment and generally social-media about it.)