Belated videos and a picture

I meant to post this awhile back, but I have been (a) lazy and (b) under the weather.  But anyway, here is the actual video of the great SL/RL machinima I reblogged last time:

In case people didn’t click through on the last post and scroll down and therefore missed it.  :)

Here also is a “What does Second Life mean to me?” video from Natascha Randt (Nat!):

which is apparently part of a whole series of videos like that, related (or not) to <a href=”https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Your-Avatar/The-What-Second-Life-Means-to-Me-Video-Share-Project/td-p/2941693″>this thread on the SL Community Forums</a>, which might be of interest to anyone who reads the SL Community Forums, and/or watches videos.

And finally here is a picture of me at SL12B.  SL12B happened, hurrah!  I spent a total of not very much time at all there; as usual, I love that these things occur, but don’t generally get to them as much as I might, because they are crowded, and I’m doing other stuff.  But I did hang from the ceiling!

So that’s all those things that you probably knew about anyway.  :)  But still it’s nice to post here once in awhile!

How old are Dales and some gnomes?

So yeah, How Old dot Net is all the rage, and I’m sure I’m not the first person to point it at various digital-realm avatars, but here we go!

Girl Dale and Boy Dale both seem to be mid-20’s, which is plausible:

Even drowed-up for Fantasy Faire (see Michele H’s very nice coverage although given how late I always am it is probably over by when you read this):

On the other hand Spennix is, well…

as is her alternate-realm self, the Arcane Mage Tashalorum (now level 100 also with her own Castle; I think we may have seen her here or on Flickr before, at like level 12; leveling is sooo easy these days):

The human PNC architect there is handled more plausibly, so probably we just need a different version of How Old dot Net for each of the races of Azeroth. (But what of the half-gnomes??)

Amusingly, the male version of Tashalorum (two words: Transmorphic Tincture) is apparently an even harder problem:

Maybe facial hair isn’t supposed to be pink?

That’s all for now. :) All various things have been occurring as always, but I have been lazy and not weblogging them or anything. Which means they didn’t really happen yet at all!!

Rust

Great pictures of a neat place; you should go!

Michele Hyacinth

A funny thing happened on my way to a blank wordpress post…instead of writing, I logged inworld and looked up the New Destinations listing.  I’m really good at avoidance when it comes to writing.  And this time around, that’s lucky for me because I hopped the slurl to a build called “Rust” and found myself immersed in the creative expression of  C i c a Ghost.  Things move in “Rust.”  The ground cover undulates.  Giant chickens dance.  Metal mushrooms pop up when you sit on a tractor.  I love the build, the lighting, the playfulness, the surprise in just about every corner.  I took a few photos (see below) before logging off and returning to the WordPress screen (where I actually wrote some words, believe it or not, huzzah!).  Check them (the photos, that is) out.  Better yet, head over to Rust if you haven’t yet…

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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!

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. :)

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!

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. :)

Dale meets Dale

An age and an age ago, I made a picture with both Dales in it (or, strictly speaking, both Dale-bottoms), for some pictures (of bottoms) event that has since slipped my mind.

(Oh, right, looking at the text, it was one of them there weblog memes, notable for involving bottoms.)

It was comparatively easy, since I had the two of me almost entirely not touching, so there was just one tiny piece of foot to fiddle with carefully in Photoshop, and otherwise the only hard part was holding the camera absolutely still while I took one picture, stood up, changed shape and skin and hair, sat down again on the other sit-place, and took another picture.

For some reason the other day I wanted to take some more-overlapping Dale and Dale pictures, and eventually I did:

Nice but her face doesn’t show at all. (And there’s that little oops just under his near hand, oops.)

Quite nice, really. :)

This time I was working in gimp rather than Photoshop (for financial and sundry reasons), and it turns out that you can do this sort of thing pretty easily. I’m not going to do a detailed tutorial unless someone wants that, but basically you take two pictures from exactly the same place, layer one over the other, add a layer mask to the top one, and then draw on that layer mask in black or white, depending on which layer you want to show at any given point. It’s a nice forgiving process, doesn’t require an exceptionally steady hand, and so on.

This time I didn’t want to have to hold the camera absolutely still to take the pictures, so I wrote a script. Here it is!

integer SAVE_FACE = 0;
integer RESTORE_FACE = 1;
vector saved_camera_pos = ZERO_VECTOR;
rotation saved_camera_rot = ZERO_ROTATION;
integer have_saved = FALSE;

default {
    state_entry() {
        have_saved = FALSE;
    }
    attach(key id) {
        if (id!=NULL_KEY)
            llRequestPermissions(id,PERMISSION_CONTROL_CAMERA | 
                                    PERMISSION_TRACK_CAMERA);
    }
    run_time_permissions(integer p) {
        llOwnerSay("Touch that one face to save camera position,"+
                   " that other face to put it back.");
    }
    touch_start(integer total_number) {
        if (llDetectedTouchFace(0)==SAVE_FACE) {
            have_saved = TRUE;
            saved_camera_pos = llGetCameraPos();
            saved_camera_rot = llGetCameraRot();
            llOwnerSay("Camera position saved.");
        } else if (llDetectedTouchFace(0)==RESTORE_FACE) {
            if (have_saved) {
                llSetCameraParams([
                    CAMERA_ACTIVE,TRUE,
                    CAMERA_POSITION,saved_camera_pos,
                    CAMERA_POSITION_LOCKED,TRUE,
                    CAMERA_FOCUS,saved_camera_pos+*saved_camera_rot,
                    CAMERA_FOCUS_LOCKED,TRUE
                    ]);            
            } else {
                llOwnerSay("No position is saved yet.");
            }
        }
    }
}

So basically you put that into some prim, you color face 0 some color, color face 1 some other color, attach it to your HUD somewhere, fiddle it around so that you can see both of those faces, put your camera where you want it, touch face 0, take a picture, do whatever you want to, touch face 1, possibly press ESC to make sure you’re on the default camera, and now your camera is back where it was before for taking your second picture.

I could have added a third face case with like llReleaseCamera() or whatever it is on it, but it’s easiest to just take the HUD off when you’re done to free up your default camera. :)

Isn’t nature wonderful! I may get up the energy to put up a real page about it like my famous ExplodingObjects and AvatarFollower pages, but for now I am impressed with myself just for having slapped it up here.

Now I will go back to admiring my pictures; aren’t I a cute couple? :)

Alpha Point / Omega Point

I am not organized enough to have figured out the relationship between these two sims, but they are (currently) right next to each other, and both gorgeous. I’d read about Omega Point in various places, but it was Ava’s Omega Point Slideshow that got me to visit (see also her Alpha Point slideshow). See also the creators weblog (in Japanese), the Omega Point flickr group, the Alpha Point entry in the SL Destination Guide, Honour on Alpha Point, Honour on Omega Point, and so on and so on.

But mostly, I took some pictures there! Here are a few of them! Click through to flickr for some more, or for huger versions of these, or even watch the pretty slideshow!

It’s really astounding.

My Digits! (I am late to the meme.)

So here are Girl Dale’s vital stats, per the meme:

Height – 55 (5’9″ by some measure)
Head size – 45
Arm length – 45
Hand size – 42 (too huge?)
Torso length – 55
Leg length – 65
Foot size – 0 (as required by all shoes in the world)

T and A: :)

Body fat – 0 (lol vain)
Breast size – 51
Hip width – 55
Butt size – 50

Skin and eyes and fingernails and tube-socks and cami from Celestial Studios (slightly tanner version of my usual skin, now that I bought a whole bunch at the big clearance sale), camo thong apparently from Vasha’s Secret.

I don’t have anything particularly profound to say about my particular numbers, or the numbers meme in general. By and large, we are pretty healthy-looking. :)

(I should do Boy Dale, too, but right now I am a girl.)

Sightings

That is, a bunch of random recent pictures.

Wandering about near my place in Vallone, in wild and wooly Zindra, it turns out that the Liqueur Club, which vanished awhile back, has returned with a new name and motif, but I think the same owner:

Hope they prosper!

The plot between my place and the road was originally a pawnshop, then a strip club (that never actually opened, as far as I know), then a Naughty Hospital (woot!), and now is again for sale:

Come by and take a look!

(That is of course my platform in the background; and I don’t know why that species of Linden tree wasn’t rezzing just then. But the cherries are pretty!)

On the other side, further down the road, a neighbor has an art gallery featuring very attractive nude photographs (mostly of herself, I believe).

I do love Zindra. :)

Back home on the subadult mainland, there’s still considerable land for sale in the Rise. There was a big mafia mansion between the Park and the Narrow Gallery for a bit (complete with limos, pool, and machine-gun nests), now replaced by a big vampire-mafia castle (stone, coffins, helipad). Just up the road from the Park Welcome annex, someone was putting up a nice little house, and I said Hi and we chatted a little.

And then aways further along the road, there’s Azadi Donuts:

which is, and contains, various references to Iranian political movements, that I don’t know enough about to know whether it’s pro or con, straight-up or satire, or why there are all those vehicles like suspended in midair.

Speaking of not knowing things:

Look, d00d, I leave my land open and my furniture unlocked because I am a Nice Person, but please try to clean up after yourself!

What were you doing that resulted in having eight invisible male bits scattered around the Dreamliner, anyway?

On second thought, I don’t think I want to know…

:)

And finally, our burning question of the day: is the grid read for such beauty?

Just askin’… :)

(This skin, which is so amazing I’m sort of afraid to wear it, is from ROCKBERRY; I think it’s a Kalista. The gorgeous armband and hair jewels are from Nizam (they were gifts, thank you thank you!), and the bracelets from Dark Eden. The clothing is random mix an’ match; I think that’s a “Simone!” top.)

Quite many more Burn2 pictures!

I have been having a great time working on my Burn2 build, pedaling around the playa looking at other peoples’s ones, and like that. Also taking pictures!

Here I am on my bike, returning from a notional quick trip back to civilization for more chocolate and apparently stuffed animals:

Entering along the road from the notional last outpost of civilization, there’s some nice monumental stuff as one comes onto the Playa, including the DMV.

The DMV folks seem to be working on some cool vehicles; but I like my classic Arcadia Asylum Hobo bicycle.

The Rangers are the best dug-in people on the playa so far; they got here first, after all.

Their dome is quite a landmark. And they have bunches of buildings!

I just hope us builders are rambunctious enough to give them something to do. :)

Finally there’s my box in the middle distance!

It’s a longish pedal. (I wonder if that is another ranger dome on the horizon there.)

Home at last:

That day I hung some cloth from the wooden awning there to keep the sun off, and made flags of my own with the Burn2 logo (and mine are Free To Copy, unlike Some People’s!), and met one of my next-camp neighbors.

Also sometime recently, an adorable little stoat or vole or sloth or something waddled through curiously:

and I’ve now pretty much finished off the place! The first draft, anyway. :) And I thought of a name.

So here is Ten Thousand Things Camp:

The Blue truck and Red building in the background are not mine (although the shadow cast on the ground by the red building is, heehee). Nor is the wooden platform and stuff across the road.

Nor is the streetsign, that’s infrastructure. Apparently I am at the corner of Seoul and 6:00. Okay!

The Big Box and the Round Striped Tent-thing and the Awning and Old Car and Comfy Seats and Infoboxes and Fire Swirls and Random Junk are all mine, though. :) Many will be Free To Copy when the place opens and you come by!

The way that can be trodden is not the eternal way.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the Ten Thousand Things.

And now there’s less than a month left until Opening Day.

Plenty of time to fiddle with the build and peddle around nosing into other people’s. :)

Nowhereville to Piper Point

I am always gushing about how much I love the mainland for its chaos and randomness, and it’s very true.

On the other hand there’s also alot to be said for beauty and organization, and a place formed through a consistent vision or set of compatible visions. Mostly these are on estates, and mostly they get praised enough already :) which is why I usually spend more of my praise on the neglected mainland. But sometimes…

I was reading a Crap Mariner posting and thinking "whoa, that is a nice-looking place". So I went there and rezzed the Twenty and sailed around on the jib, admiring things.

Here’s the Bridge of Crap’s posting, connecting Nowhereville to Piper Point:

Under the bridge, into the bay:

The waterfalls from above:

And drifting into the bay, past the fishing and lounging area of (I think) the Lonely Yak Roadhouse:

A quiet and soothing place, and a lovely bunch of builds. Order can be just as lovely as chaos, when it’s done well. :)

Darn those sim-boundary crossings…

Sitting pensively on my favorite motorbike, askew in the surf after a bad (although non-fatal for a change!) crossing from one sim to another, yet again in the south-coast stretch of Route 7 that I wrote about the other day.

Was having a really hard time at sim edges; maybe because both me and the bike were pretty primmy, and scripted, maybe because of some gremlins in the Lab network that day.

But I got a nice picture out of it. :)

Random pictures of me doing things in places

Hanging around the big Falln store for no particular reason the other day, and camming around like I always do everywhere, I came upon a nice Asian / Oriental furnishings place, embedded in but quite different from Falln, called I think “Little Boy Blue”. The products were very nice, and some were very nicely priced :) and I bought some.

Then wanting to actually put some of them out somewhere rather than just leave them in inventory forever, I decided to redecorate the Extropia pod a bit. Here’s part of the result:

The tatami mats and the bamboo decoration in the corner and the little cabinet and the incense burner on the table and the Buddha and Ganesh on the wall are all from LBB. The table itself and the kneeling pads for it were a gift awhile back, and came from somewhere else. The table and lamp to the right are from RELIC I think. Other things are from other places. :)

Has kind of a nice open feeling to it I think…

Vaguely relatedly, a Zazen Coffee House:

Just a lovely tiny build (SLURL). Came across it through some complicated serendipitous path involving searching for the Philosophy House group to join it again after having to temporarily drop it ’cause I needed a group slot. Or something. :)

Later on, skating in the nice flat empty lot (empty except for skating devices :) ) out behind Snook’s Garden Centre in Caledon Morgaine:

(And yes, those are Christmas lights I’m wearing. :) A free gift from hoorenbeek.)

Then I flew my Barney Boomslang hoverpod up to the mysterious island that looms in the sky above Caledon Morgaine, and found an enigmatic fenced mushroom garden to relax in:

(The music stream was playing When You’re Evil; somehow it was just perfect…)

And then, sometimes it’s good to get down to ground level and just sit…

(Click through to flickr for mostly the same words, comment boxes, etc…)

Thingmaker!

I made an SL thing that makes other things! I call it “the Thingmaker”. ’cause it makes things.

Here is a picture of it:

(It doesn’t actually matter what it looks like, it could even be just a plywood box but then it would be hard to tell from all of the other plywood boxes.)

Here’s a picture of the first interesting thing that it made while I was working on it:

Here’s a picture of the Thingmaker making a thing:

(It rezzes the prims of the thing above it, one by one, links them, positions and colors them, and when it’s all done unlinks itself from them.)

Here’s (a picture of) the thing that the Thingmaker was making in the previous picture:

Thing-like, eh?

Here’s a picture of another thing it made:

Lower-prim! Shiny!

And also:

Higher-prim! Colorful!

An’ here you’re probably thinking, an’ you’d be right, that the Thingmaker can only make a pretty small set of things, mostly made of these shiny overlapping eggshaped prims. But! Now that the basic Thinkmaker is working, I’m gonna teach it to make a whole bunch other more kinds of things. If I don’t get distracted…

Oh look! Ants!

:)

Recent adventures: fun, wonder, and friendship

So this is just going to be a few words around a few pictures of me doing things with friends, because doing things with friends is good, and I like posting pictures of it. :) And maybe some of it might be inneresting and/or useful to you, even.

Here is a picture of me an’ Steph (you remember Steph) in a hilarious photo booth in a carnival that she found somewhere.

We are afraid of the dinosaurs!

(My nice top, by the way, is a dollarbie I think from Cat 5, that I got in a tiny shop somewhere on Shengri La I think. My bead choker is I’m pretty sure by Wednesday “Woo” Soon, who I haven’t seen in far too long, and who probably has a store somewhere where she sells it, but I think she gave it to me because she is nice.)

And here we are obviously having some sort of friendly disagreement:

“Harrumph,” Steph is saying, and I am saying “blehhhh!”

(You sit with a friend in the photo booth, and when you push up-arrow it changes your pose to the next one of the various funny built-in ones, and when you push down-arrow it changes the background. It also puts your camera somewhere vaguely useful for taking snapshots.)

Hanging out with Steph is always fun. :) We laugh alot.

And then v nice friend Michele, who took some great pictures of the Pteron sim that I admired the other day, v generously showed me around the place.

It is an absolutely amazing build; you really must go look at it. It’s lovely and enigmatic and intelligent and intriguing. I think there may be some Myst-like puzzle hidden among the amazingness, some secret to be guessed or mystery to be solved, or maybe that impression is just part of the overall ambiance of the place. The colorscheme, the prim shapes, the motion, the music, the textures, everything fits together seamlessly, in the service of a single fascinating effect. It is full of secrets; I’m sure we didn’t happen upon half of them, and I’m not even going to show you all the ones that we did find, so you can have the fun yourself.

You arrive at Pteron standing on empty air. You pass through a gateway, ride to the main complex on a graceful floating hemisphere, and you’re there. I had to go AFK for a bit shortly after we arrived (isn’t that always the way?), so I sat down on the roof. Here we are, Michele waiting very kindly for me to come back:

(I really ought to go look up and give credit for the pretty wings and stuff; maybe I’ll come back and do that next time I get inworld.)

Here and there around the build are various enigmatic objects, including subtle teleport buttons on the ground, floorstands emitting sparks, and these lovely orbs (purple thing is the end of one of my wings):

Some of them give you presents when you touch them; one of the presents is a Dream Dance, which Michele and I are demonstrating here:

I’m running out of laudatory adjectives for Pteron, and I still have more pictures :), so I’ll just show one more (there are a couple of others, including one of a graceful ridable boat we found, if you click through to flickr).

This is one of the flyable glowing pods that you’ll eventually find if you explore long enough (I had the advantage that Michele had been there before, so we knew roughly what to look for):

Isn’t that amazing? It seats at least two, and you can fly it around high up in the sim, where there are more secrets and mysteries and enigmas and beauty.

We found the pod on the way to the most amazing and lovely of the secrets that we found. But I’m not going to tell you anything about that one. :) You’ll have to find it for yourself.

So that’s one fun giggly silly time, and one amazing aesthetic being-impressed time.

Also, today is Ahuva’s birthday, and I gave her a present, to celebrate her tendency to be thrown (or throw herself) under buses, and emerge triumphant. She liked it (yay!), and Plurked a picture. And that made me happy too. :)

As I’ve said a hogshead of times before, I originally came to Second Life figuring that it’d be interesting to build things and program things and explore things. And it is! But the reason it’s so utterly wonderful is because of the people.

I have the best friends…

Fourth of July at the Odd Ball

After the dress-up fun on Friday, what I mostly did on the day itself was randomly TP around from Search / Events watching fireworks displays, and go to parties at PIER (the main sim is gone, but Carys has recreated the club in its old parcel location) and at the Odd Ball. Pictures from the latter are always worth posting. :) And really require no commentary…

(Click through for the larger sizes.)

Showing the colors

So I have this friend Steph, and ‘though we don’t see each other all that much, when she says “I’ve got an idea!” I know it’s going to be fun. :)

Seems that Twisted and Spoiled (isn’t that a great name? I don’t have an LM or URL any better that you can find yourself with Google or inworld search) had a nice Red White and Blue freebie outfit out for the Fourth, and she TPd me over and I got a copy, and we both put them on and they were deliciously over the top. And I remembered the “Capital Hill” builds that went up with some fanfare the other month / year / whatever, and we went over to take pictures.

Do I look a little dubious? :) Well, for one thing it looks like it’s about to rain; fortunately the storm passed over, though. (I also forgot to take off the bikini top I was wearing before, in most of the pictures. Fortunately it doesn’t show much.)

We had fun looking through inventory for poses, and looking around the island for Patriotic Imagery and so on. Here’s one of my favorites of the snaps we got (note that Steph is tall, an’ I am short!), posing in front of I think a big transparent Washington Monument and some patriotic symbology of some sort:

There’s the Spirit of America for ya! :)

Snapshots from the Great Migration

So the first wave of the Great Migration started at 10am sharp (SLT) yesterday! Or some other day recently! So now people with Adult Content on the mainland can apply for a free land swap with some land on Zindra, via a support ticket to the Lindens.

In the usual sort of casual wince-inducing move, the Lindens closed the weblog comment thread that alot of us had been using to talk about the whole Adult Content thing, and the Migration, and how it was going and all. I’m sure there’s still lots of discussion going on elsewhere, but I haven’t chased it down yet.

What little I’ve read suggests that things are going pretty well, or at least less disastrously then some of us had feared, so far. Here’s one account of someone saying in their ticket “I run BDSM classes, so please swap me into Zindra”, and the Lab saying “nope, not Adult enough”, and the person saying “say what??”, and the Lab saying “oh, all right then”.

I bounced briefly over to Zindra to see what was up with the migration (skipping the Mosh hub this time, and looking around further out). Kama city, at least, is still dominated by eyecandy Linden builds, but other things are starting to appear. I passed a big dark castle, over whose drawbridge some sort of grey-skinned barbarian was riding a horse. I waved at a woman in the midst of building a bar of some sort on a nice riverside plot.

I even took some pictures!

In the foreground; an art studio without much in it yet; I wonder if a photosurrealistic picture of Salvadore Dali grating his own hand off officially counts as Adult?

In the background, a large dark building containing various taboo-looking devices and poseballs. And, I’m glad to say, a courtyard where rezzing is allowed, so I could bring out my Terra Futura, and not have to *walk* everywhere…

Taking the Futura up high, I came upon one of the banes of those concerned with cleanliness and prim-count.

How do you go about letting Governor Linden know that he’s left a railroad tie or something floating nearly half a km above the new continent?