Quote o’ the Day

Much of atomic-world culture is based on the notion that suffering is good and necessary, that life properly consists of doing something pointless and/or wretched for most of one’s life in order to have a few hours of pleasure every week. This is a stupid and evil notion.

That’s the very wise Soph.

It may in some circumstances be sadly necessary to do something pointless and/or wretched for most of one’s life in order to have a few hours of pleasure every week, but we shouldn’t overestimate how often that’s necessary, or consider it The Way Things Ought To Be rather than, as it ought to be considered, as a problem to be fixed.

Here’s to the end of the Scarcity Economy! :)

Wedding, yay!

A few weeks ago, v good faerie friend Adri sent me an invitation to her wedding to other nice friend Sin, and I said “I can’t remember something that’s all the way at the end of June!”, and she said she’d remind me and on like Thursday she reminded me, and then on Friday I logged in in a panic about 30 minutes after the start time of the wedding, and was just about to IM her to apologize when I realized that it was Friday and the wedding was Saturday. Whew!

On Saturday I managed to be only about 10 minutes late for the wedding (thanks to a v kind RL person doing something for me in busy RL so I could be there at all), and I sat quietly on a mushroom (tx to other v kind friend Noe for telling me one that wasn’t occupied while I was still rezzing ppl) and watched the ceremony an’ didn’t woot inappropriately or anything!

Here is me dressed for the wedding:

an’ here is the kissing part of the wedding (yay, kissing!), where the brides kiss:

(Click through to flickr for other stuffs, as always.)

One of the few things I’ve managed to get inworld for at all recently, an’ I’m glad I made it! A good time was had by all at th’ after-party, w/ dancing an’ chatting an’ stuff.

I might or might not comment about SL marriages in some other post sometime, but SL weddings can be lovely an’ fun an’ all… :)

Ducking in for a sail

So as previously announced, this week is being RL-crazy and I haven’t been able to spend my usual few hours a day inworld. On the other hand it turns out that SL is very nice in an entirely different mode, consisting of slipping in between crazinesses and just sort of exploring and bumming around.

I mentioned on Twitter or somewhere that I’d travelled by motorcycle randomly from the Manitoba region somewhere (where I’d gotten to by following a LM to the Alice Free Library or something as I vaguely recall), eventually ending up in Mare at the old Elbow Room (entirely by accident). That was in a lull between meetings yesterday or so.

Today in another lull, feeling a bit stressed and without time to do anything really significant between two other things, I ducked inworld again, and having noticed a nice-looking little seaside town in Mowry along the road from Manitoba to Mare, I TPd to somewhere near there and then took my seedpod ship into Mowry.

Turns out there’s a nice little community around the bay in Mowry and adjoining sims (including some very nice-looking treehouse rentals that turn out to be owned by someone that I know in another context entirely, which was funny to see; small second world!). I landed my seedpod ship in the marina, rezzed my current favorite sailboat, and boated about for awhile:

That’s the Good Ship Indolence in Mowry Bay; click through to flickr for some more random details.

All in all it was a very fun quick visit; it reminded me of how things used to be when I didn’t have as much going on inworld, socially and artistically and professionally, and would just sort of bum around randomly and find stuff. Have to do more of that!

Do I *have* to like podcasts an’ videos an’ all?

A rant! Curmudgeon mode on! Whiners engaged! :)

Do I have to like podcasts an’ videos an’ all? ’cause, well, I don’t.

People…. talk…. really…. really… slowly.

Not only that, but listening to a voice means either disturbing the people around me (and there usually are people around me), or finding some annoying ear-things with wires and all. Watching a video means spending the bandwidth to download it, hoping it will be compatible with whatever the heck the web browser decides to give it to to play, and then listening to the voice that goes along with it (see above).

I watched the little video about someone’s impression of SL’s Fifth Birthday here, and it was not a content-dense experience. It look a perceptible amount of time to start playing, and it ran long enough that I got interrupted once by someone popping in to ask me about an email. In actual content it had maybe two short paragraphs of text, that I could have read in maybe ten or fifteen seconds; the titles and background music and cute flythrough zooms of various SL5B builds and closeups of the author’s AV face added nothing whatever to the information content (intellectual, emotional, or aesthetic) of the piece.

Not to pick on this particular video; they’re pretty much all like that, where “they” is podcasts and videos that are delivering what’s essentially a narrative verbal linear message of some kind. Not content-dense, not efficient users of my time.

I almost never listen to podcasts. The people talk too slowly, they stop to chuckle at themselves or fiddle with the microphone, they in general exude a “you have all the time in the world to sit there listening to me” attitude that, I have to admit, annoys me. Sometimes people post “utterz” to twitter; I started to listen to one once, and decided after fifteen seconds that it wasn’t a good use of time.

I’m perfectly happy to take my time one-on-one with a friend, or many-on-many at an interesting party or gathering. Dunno why; likely because it’s interactive, and mutual. But listen passively to someone talking at the terribly slow speed of speech, or spend five precious never-to-be-recaptured seconds watching someone’s cute title-fade before the possibly-interesting part of their video starts?

No fanks.

Okay okay end rant. :) Was fun, tho!

Indolence logo

In the interest of putting all sorts of content all over the place, here is the logo of the pretend dance-club Indolence, as pictured in a recent weblog entry:

The logo is John White Alexander’s “Repose”, plus about ten minutes in PhotoShop. :) As usual click through to flickr for more context.

As well as the club, I’ve also stuck this logo on the back of my favorite sailboat; I’ll have to post a picture of that sometime too…

My probability density

Due to Stuff going on in RL (not bad stuff, just Stuff) over the next few days, I may (or may not, but I’m mentioning it just in case) be less visible in the digital words (RL, Twitter, weblogs, etc) between oh say today and oh say July 1st. Just so y’ know… :)

Indolence

Another build that I’m extremely fond of is Indolence, a dance club that I built once just because I’d never really built a conventional structure before, and I (hem hem) had significant experience with dance clubs. Here’s a not really very good shot of it (the only thing I’ve ever posted to Snapzilla) from some time back:

The lovely reading-lillies are from Rhea Newall of Ribbons & Roses, one of my favorite people evar; the pictures of ladies’ bottoms dimly visible above the stage are by Callipygian Christensen (another favorite person), etc, etc.

Despite being a dance club in form (right down the the box that gives out free logo T-shirts), I’ve never actually had a party or a dance or an event there. In fact there may never have been more than three people there at once.

I really ought to do something about that…

The floating rocks (tx to Roger Dean)

One easy thing to stick in a weblog is like pictures an’ stuff of my various builds. Here’s the Floating Rocks build:

It’s Roger Dean inspired, clearly; click through to the Flickr page for details.

It’s also right above my park (see previous posting). I was down in the park the other day and noticed a green up-arrow nearby on the minimap, but there was nothing in my AV-radar (really need to make that device that sends probes up and down to be able to radar more of the vertical column). I figured they must be up in the rocks, so I used the little TP arrows to go up, and there were an Elfish Lord and Lady type lounging around. I said Hi and Welcome and they said nice things about the build, and I forgot to ask them how they happened to run across it, then I stepped off the edge (wheeee!) and returned to ground level.

That was fun. :)

It’s Second Life’s Fifth Birthday!

And I’m paying basically no attention to it. I’m not sure why I’m generally so uninterested in highly advertised Big Events, but I certainly seem to be (I barely got to any of the NPIRL Gardens at all, for instance, and I vaguely noticed that they’re being taken away today or tomorrow or something).

I guess I like little abandoned and forgotten things that not so many people know about, and that I stumble on by accident, or because a friend recommended, or because I overhead the URL in some obscure club. Not only are they interesting and quirky, but they usually aren’t horribly lagged-out! :)

The Park at Hughes Rise

Here is a picture that I put up on Flickr. It’s set in Second Life! Whoa.

That’s boy-me, sitting in my then-new (still new, really) park in Hughes Rise. Click through to the Flickr page for details.

First WordPress Post Ever

Thought it was about time I actually played with some of these hosted weblogging things, after so many years of writing HTML in a text editor and uploading via FTP. Woot!