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31 December 2007

 
On the LL blog someone commented:

Masuyo Aabye Says:happy new year!

my new years resolution? 1280×1024 of course

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30 December 2007

 

Postcard from Second Life.
Originally uploaded by Vivian Oblivion

At the Combat Cards event Pinkie, Janey, and I made a team - the Slamazons - and fought the men - represented by Joh by himself until a little lad rode up on his bicycle after hearing the group chat taunts.




29 December 2007

 
Latest Predictions for '08

November
Azeroth, imaginary setting of the online fantasy game World of Warcraft, declares war on Second Life. "Bring it, dwarf," says Second Life's ambassador. "You think you all that, with your red beard and your Mithril Meat-hammer, but you ain't. We bad nasty."


 
Silliness

A: well .. I like spunk in a person.. but not rudeness..
C: ;)
M: "spunk" *giggles
Osprey: Not *that* kind of spunk, M ;DD
A: you can wiki that word :¬)
C: shes been to much in the Mature SL
C: ;P
M: lol Os
Osprey: Now we all know - M is in teh gutter :D
Osprey Therian jumps in there too.
M: lol
M: be my guest Os :D
M: Im waiting for you ;D



28 December 2007

 

Does this outfit make my head look big?


Wandering in Suffugium scouting locations for my team's 48 hour flick, I was cammed way out and didn't see what was going on to cause the repeated "Sorry about that," chat from the transporter. Not every day I hit ESC and discover something has eaten my head :D

The 48 hour film team is trying to forge a working relationship, which is a job in itself. Part of the team (I'm not quite sure how many are part of it) Dnali is the ringleader, AWM is filming.
I'm with Dnali on the set up, and explained early on that I wanted to be a kind of general problem-solver. I'm doing various things including scouting locations, making anims, brainstorming the film in general and specific terms.

Last night I IMed the builders of some of my favorite sims - to ask permission in case we want to film there. That was great - meeting new people as well as talking to those I already knew.
Until the Day we don't know the genre, character, and line that need to be incorporated, so we have limited things we can do, but somehow those things can use up a lot of energy.

The 48 hours start in the afternoon of the 11th.



27 December 2007

 
SJ rang - she and Michael got back from England on xmas eve, and SJ is quite sick and miserable, so won't be coming out to see me this week. The art exhibit in Manchester that she was taking down was by Lynn Hershman, who is known to me only by "Strange Culture," a recent movie I saw in Second Life. SJ had some pithy things to say and also described, somewhat hilariously, a jaunt into an old lead mine (Killhope, I reckon) following a bone-chilling ramble across the winter landscape.

HBA, they never made it to Liverpool.


 
Tiff is in Jamaica

Me: Merry Christmas. It is snowing here.

Tiff: Hi
I'm blitzed on banana milkshake daquiries while hanging out nude with my new friends.
Love You Mon
Tiff


A longer email:
WOW!!! Did I ever do it right at Runaway Bay. We are staying in the sweetest little one bedroom apartment ever right next to the notorious "Hedenism Hotel". The Hedonism is an all-inclusive ($2000) for 3 nights. Well, the guy that now runs it used to live at our apartments so he lets in people that stay here for $50 for a day pass (10 A.M. till 6 P.M.). We went today and got to go out to the reef to snorkel 2x, went sailing in the surf and kayaking and ate and drank all we wanted all day long--with no tipping or charges.

Needless to say we are going back tomorrow--but tomorrow we are meeting our new friends on the nude side so we have to go naked. There is a nude side and a prude side. We were on the prude side today but we got invaded by the nude people anyway because they kept going down the water slide on the prude side so anyway it got all mixed up.

Brad did join the nude people on the very high water slide. When not doing watersports, he drank pink, baby blue, and flourescent green rum stuff while floating on a yellow float mat. A Bob Marley shot is red, green, and yellow syrup stuff with rum (all tastes quite awful to me--like drinking a melted sucker.
One Love
Tiff/Brad



26 December 2007

 

Alonso Reviews "Helvetica"


 

Eartha Kitt in 1962


 
Snow yesterday, snow today, snow tomorrow. I was amazed to see that there is more snow on the ground in Olympia than out where I live - albeit a very small amount. I had thought it had melted almost as it fell, however there is a bit. From where I sit, as usual, the hills are dusted with snow (it's a bit colder up there), but there's nothing one the ground. Well, ice, I think, now.


 

Running around Madcow Cosmos's Installation



25 December 2007

 
Os's Xmas Present

Larry: SL is so much the better for you being in it :)
Os: Larry, that is the best Christmas present - thank you.

That was really a lovely thing to hear.


 

After an accidental lock-out, I gained entry to Motorati and spent some time shooting the mods in front of the dealership.


 



 
Snowing and quite windy :D It's a whiteout. I can't remember the last time it's snowed on Christmas where I was.

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24 December 2007

 

Contest 34: COLLECTION
Theme: Past contest themes - after Unnatural Hue comes down I will put up as many posters as I can cram into the gallery. Before then, you may use the lower section of this notecard - it has textures and things from the old contests.
USE A THEME ONLY ONCE. 3 ENTRIES = USE 3 THEMES
Cash prizes.

THEMES
The contest themes are the contest theme. Identify your entries with their name and the contest they are harking back to, i.e. Frizzled by Oso Mirage- Beach Blanket Tringo. Snape by Ibello Maunder - Circus

You may make something like an animated texture or other cool thing if you want. You don't have any tight limits. If you make something cool that doesn't seem to fit the "textures" requirement just enter it anyway.

Straight snaps or manipulated - it's all good.

DATES
Enter by: 1 February 2008
Exhibition: 3 February - 29 February 2008 in the Photography Studio upstairs gallery.

++++++++++++++++++++++++
We will have an awards ceremony - time TBA. I want to do something tricky with the awards but dunno what yet.
++++++++++++++++++++++++

TO ENTER
Enter 3 textures of Second Life screenshots. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<----------
Textures can be no bigger than 512x512 - rectangular photos saved as 512x512 regain their proportions once they are put on a prim.

Title entries with title + your name + the contest they are harking back to <---= so I don't lose it in my inventory
i.e. Frizzled by Oso Mirage- Beach Blanket Tringo. Snape by Ibello Maunder - Circus
Send them to Osprey Therian with MOD permission and COPY permission.
Give me an IM so I know to look for them.
>>>>>.Don't send them in a notecard - I say this as I look at textures every day but I rarely look at notecards. If I don't get your heads-up the entry gets buried under the billion spam notecards I get per week. I hate it when things get lost - the only entries to've been lost thus far were in notecards.



23 December 2007

 

Enj and I ran around to various winter build having fun with our Steamers skates (I♥Moopf).


 
Fun for children: "Make a Wildlife Film" on nationalgeographic.com One may select clips, music, sounds, add titles, and I don't know what else as I just played with it for a minute. Not as much fun for grown-ups as the Bollywood film maker, but excellent for the younger set.



22 December 2007

 
It feels like there's a wave of new people at the moment. I'm running into new people very often.

Had a storm and my power was out today until 4 minutes before an important meeting. Just managed to get in on time. Spent some time building for someone, and watched Shrek 2 (so-so but it's always fun to see the computer animation).



21 December 2007

 

The Nut
SL Ballet on IBM 10

Nice audience

Pretty costumes

Final bows

Fun!


 

Never mind the name - a possible new card.



20 December 2007

 

Dune Apocalypse
Read the rules and take them seriously.


 
Havok 4 has hit Agni for testing.



19 December 2007

 
Ha Ha!
I set my renderfarclip at 2400 yesterday, and my rendertreeLOD at something like 3* - I didn't change them back but as I logged off I thought, "Have to be sure to put them back as soon as I log on." Ha - of course I remembered after a few seconds of logging in, when things felt ungreased - but at least the system ran with it like that.
*For taking photographs.


 
Yesterday Candide said something he's said before, which was, "Maybe we're just too old" to get excited over 99.999% of the builds out there. I agree that while new people are going gah gah over something, often it's something I've seen before. Sometimes the "I've never seen anything like it before!" builds are just versions of old builds.

There's a lot that is fun, and I love exploring, but the extreme sense of wonder and amazement one has as a new person doesn't last forever. Enjoy it while you can! For all that, Second Life becomes more home to me every day. More useful as a tool. More an extension of my brain.



18 December 2007

 

Around Motorati









17 December 2007

 

Privateer Space



16 December 2007

 

I was trying to get some decent pictures of Drift or Die - but it's hard to drive and snap at the same time. I had the light set green, so when I went to help Doc we made this charming scene. I was a jackalope as I had being judging the Raglan Shire ice sculpty contest (and Luceh did too, w00t!0.


 
GBC roving robot Alonso reviews "We Are the Strange."




15 December 2007

 


 
ZOUNDS!
We’ve recovered a 463,000 inventory items that were lost and fixed 79,000 inventory folders. These belonged to a total of 143,000 Residents. They were not showing up in Residents’ inventories because they did not have a valid parent folder and many of them have been lost for quite some time. They have all been placed in the their owner’s top-level folder called “My Inventory" --Hamilton Linden

This is such an important announcement - inventory loss has caused problems in every aspect of SL, and the very fact that LL has been working to fix it is... huge.



14 December 2007

 
The wind is howling - it might take my power out.
/me prays to G'al.

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Compulsion Loops
Os Makes Up A Pile Of Crap
The Views Expressed Herein Are Personal
and In No Way Intended for General Use

I believe in variety, and despite the constant calls for "the best" to be named in everything, to me there is no "best," only many options suiting different people. I pop around to a few other virtual worlds periodically. When Kaneva did its beta I spent an hour there, and realized I was far from their intended audience. It held no interest for me, but it certainly would be fun for some. Metaverse is another place I have spent time. Croquet, too. These are at an early stage, so it's very interesting, to me, to clump about in them. There have been more - I can't remember the names of some of them.

Entropia Universe, formerly Project Entropia, is a place I go in every time MindArk sends me an email saying, "We are going to terminate your account if you don't log in." For an unknown reason I find the UI difficult, but theoretically at least, I am reserving the right to shoot monsters when I am glum, or simply run around attempting to remain alive whilst monsters and other players try to kill me. EU is a bit too good at training sociopaths for my taste, however.

I was a late beta-tester (in name only, really) for There, which I go and look at perhaps once a year or so. After reading how Coca-Cola had decided to leave SL and go There, I downloaded There, logged in, and found myself next to someone named "Therian." Woo, uncanny. I ran off, drove my dune buggy around for a bit (vehicles work well, as always, but there's no real customisation), realised that although I hadn't been in it for ages and ages I still knew exactly where I was and where everything else was. Played on my hoverboard for a bit. Wondered if the water could still be blue-painted concrete after all this time, and saw that, no, the water has been improved a bit. Logged off. Whew - that was a long 3 minutes (not including d/l). Glad to go home.

In a virtualworldsnews.com article about the Coke/There partnership, a Coke spokesman was quoted. "We see the youth market, the tween and sub-tween market thriving in browser-based worlds because they are sufficient to keep that type of user engaged as long as you build in compulsion loops to that experience," said Richardson. "But as you move up the spectrum to an older user, people have more requirements. They want more kinetic activities, to hop in a car and drive across the world or play cards or play paint ball and use voice or more sophisticated networking technology. That's something we've been doing from day one to provide the most sophisticated, but lowest barrier to entry experience."

Older, meaning starting at 13 and going up. Coke thinks to 34 - I think that's a bit of a stretch (at least I HOPE so). How old are people when they finally figure out they are being targeted by a corporation? How old are people when they stop drinking insanely sweet fizzy drinks? I have no clue as I grew up before children were targeted in that way, and the number of times I've imbibed fizzy soda is not great (I used to like Schweppe's Bitter Lemon, however). Water doesn't contribute to the onset of diabetes, I hear.... but I digress...

We can clearly see the compulsion loops in certain activities. Leveling, and so forth, would fit that description. So would adding addictive substances to cigarettes, I suppose. If you design something with no manipulative, self-serving Loops of Compulsion, you would lose out against a compulsion loop-heavy rival, presumably, if the potential users of your widgets were similarly unaware or uncaring that they are being treated like a herd of milk cows.

So - my question is: why don't people care that they are being offered a loop of compulsion in order to serve a corporation's bottom line? "The company is offering us what we want, so what's the problem?" I'm not sure... As part of marketing strategy I suppose it's a valid tool. But it seems dim to fall for it.

I think I don't understand it because I've always made my own fun. Back in the Age of Cavemen such official playthings as we had were stiff, breakable, unpleasant, and unnecessary, really. I never liked dollies much, and had only an old composition doll* bought at a white elephant sale. I drew and drew and drew. My father's shirt cardboard was a wonderful thing for making articulated puppety-type things. He always brought home pencils, which were engineers' pencils - hard and with a metal end (no eraser). I roamed about freely on the back of a horse every day from the age of about 8 or 9.

I had no upbringing, in a way, and nobody focused their advertising campaigns on me. Having someone try to create something I'd like seems abnormal, the wrong way round, like an artist trying to paint things that will sell in a gallery. Like money is the true reason for it all.

Got to run. I still don't understand this even enough to lay it out clearly, though.

*'''drat' that at some point I threw away the handsewn costumes I made, but oh, well.

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13 December 2007

 




 
I found some old sim travel labels in a thrift shop - I am going to stick them on my suitcase. Here's one:



12 December 2007

 
Attempting to snare my cousin and have her try Second Life:

It looks amazing - all the sites look fascinating -will have to sit down and study them further - am I adventurous? Do I have the brain power? I'm not sure! Not terribly computer literate but I waste a lot of time fiddling atround. You seem to be harnessing IT power to your advantage - I seem to get ruled by the thing and it gets a mind of its own.

Mum delighted to be thought of as aged 50 - doesn't reckon she is a good advert for being 94 - and is feeling a bit of 'a relic'- her description.

I had said that as I hadn't seen Auntie Anne in so many years that she's have to be satisfied with being 50 in my head. It hasn't been QUITE that long but why do things by halves?


 
'Struth
I made a few hasty remarks and unleashed the wrath of something-or-other onto my head. I've been unthinking lately - well, I keep saying things that, upon reflection, I see would mean to a reader something other than what I thought I was saying, or something 11 on the scale when I thought it was a 5.

I despair at times - I often say things that AT THE TIME I know are stupid and not at all representative of my thought processes, such as they are. At the Motorati meeting I told someone I need, in real life, the borked script icon to float over my head every once in a while, and indeed, such a thing would be a handy indicator.

/me shoots self


 
I came upon this description of a man in the book I'm reading: "...patchy beard that was going grey at the temples." That made me feel strange. As a woman I am not conversant with men's whisker parameters, yet, temples seems... rather out of the whisker zone to me.

Any men reading this please help.

Maybe the author meant that praying in the temples makes the man's beard turn grey.


 
I saw yesterday's news first in my feed aggregator, which is annoying crammed full of 8 million "I'm testing BLOGHUD to see if it works" entries from WorldofSL and 450,000,000 Massively snippets about MMORPGs I have no interest in. I petulantly went in and excised the two offenders, but I'm sure I'll go back and add them again today.

It's like a compulsive's abode full of boxes of useless old strawberry punnets and string-tied newspaper bundles. I tried the flamethrower approach, but it was not a precise enough tool.

Update: I use Google homepage atm, and have feed, Gmail, etc. on it. I was using a flamethrower spork on it because I wanted to subscribe to a feed based on labels and couldn't see a way to do it, but making a new tab and calling it Second Life resulted in something that might be useful.

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Get Well Soon

Enjah's computer has a failed drive :(
Please include her in your prayers to G'al.

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11 December 2007

 
Excerpted from
Collapsing Geography
Second Life, Innovation, and the Future
of National Power

by Cory Ondrejka

"Second Life has become a platform for collaboration and business that bypasses traditional geographic constraints, propelling several key shifts. First, Second Life demonstrates the power of using place within a communications medium, allowing distant participants to leverage real-world metaphors and habits to improve collaboration. Thus, participation no longer depends on a person being co-located with a project or other team members...

Second, virtual worlds lower the cost of learning, a critical driver of innovation. Both amateur-to-amateur and professional training have flourished in Second Life. The emergence of virtual worlds as places to acquire, share, and build knowledge dramatically impact the rate of innovation for all who use them...

A third shift involves the range of impact. Virtual worlds can change innovation everywhere. By creating a culture of experimentation, exploration, and collaboration, Second Life makes radically decentralized approaches, reduced costs, and collaboration across great geographic distance available to those with access. Instances of these powerfully transformative activities exist in both education and large corporations. As the Internet revolution has demonstrated, changing the substrate for innovation has the potential for greater impact than any localized
change.

Finally, virtual worlds will change the alignment of labor markets and the shapes of large organizations, including nation-states."

...and goes on to explain how, etc.


All true, and why Second Life is far beyond any similarly regarded programs.

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Jebus.
I'm shocked.


 


I just noticed that the 13th of December is the anniversary of Emily Carr's birth (she was born in 1871). It arose as Enjah was showing me her dream house - a modified and updated gypsy caravan. I thought of Emily Carr as she had wandered about British Columbia in a caravan, sometimes. There's a nice Vancouver Art Gallery site HERE.

She painted vegetation as if it were draped fabric - very interesting.

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My Great niece’s project this term was to create a narrative about the water cycle.
This is it.

THE ADVENTURES OF PLOP and DROP

THE RAINDROPS

One cloudy, Saturday morning there was a cloud with thousands of raindrops. Then the cloud became very big and full. Every single raindrop fell out of the cloud they lived in. Then they fell down into a big, long river. Luckily two of the raindrops found their mum and said,

"Can you think of names for us? PLEASE!" Their mum said, "How about, you can be Drop, and you can be Plop?"

Drop and Plop started to flow down the river, going faster and faster and faster! "I wonder where we are going next?" Plop said to Drop. "I think I know where we are going, "said Drop. "Where's that?" asked Plop. "Through some sort of strange pipe, "replied Drop" Maybe we are going through a tap, "said Plop. Yes, they were.

The next thing Drop and Plop did was to come out of the tap and into a small, pink cup. Plop thought she was in a huge waterfall. Drop didn't, because he realized that they were being poured out of the cup and into a girl's mouth. Then they went into her stomach. Then the girl sat down.

Drop and Plop did not know what they were doing inside someone that was sitting down. Plop then realized they were coming out of the girl's body and into something else. Now Drop and Plop were complaining because they had both turned yellow. "How did that happen?" they asked each other.

Drop and Plop didn't know how it happened but they were quickly flushed down into the sewage pipe. That was when there were lots of other yellow raindrops. After they went through lots of different pipes they became clean. Next they were washed down another river. Drop and Plop went down one more pipe that lead to the ocean.

"YIPPEEEEEEE!" Plop said, "We're not yellow anymore. "Then they rose UP UP UP high into the air. They were going back up into the clouds in the sky.

Drop and Plop were so glad they were back home. "I'm so, so glad we are home," said Plop. "ME TOO!" said Drop. The next thing they did was look for their mum. They did find her again and so they were even more glad. Drop and Plop then wondered what their next adventure would be like.
The end.

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Working on some new Combat Cards
Joh
Maxie
Akela

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10 December 2007

 
Motorati
I'm taking some pictures for Atomic.
Motorati looks great - lots of variety.



09 December 2007

 
Snow of the Day
It's very movie-like snow - biggish flakes falling straight down in a stately and unperturbed fashion, making the landscape attractive. Well, actually only the biggest ones seem like grandmas crocheting blithely as they float down -- the smaller ones are shouting, Wheeeeeeeeee!" /me mutes the snowflakes.


I used to make my students go HERE, make snowflakes, then use them as jumping off points for other things, like animated GIFs, tiles, cards, etc. I love that site :D



08 December 2007

 
Ha ha ha ha!
/me sharpens her sword*

Avatar: are you submissive?
Osprey Therian: no
Avatar: Hmm
Osprey Therian: No one has ever asked me that before.
Osprey Therian: It is decidedly not the case.
Avatar: will you be submissive to me?
Osprey Therian: no
Osprey Therian: Will you be submissive to me?
Avatar: not as your master
Avatar: but just helping me
Osprey Therian: Heh, I think you are looking for someone else.
Avatar: NO
Osprey Therian: :D
Osprey Therian: Good
Avatar: Hhehe
Osprey Therian: heh
Osprey Therian: I need to get back to my work, but good luck :D
Avatar: ok
Avatar: Do you know what i want?
Osprey Therian: I don't actually care., I think.
Avatar: Hmmm
Avatar: I think you could help me
Osprey Therian: I have a lot to do. I think you need to look elsewhere for help.
Avatar: maybe i do

*Unfortunately stabslock doesn't work in IM.

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07 December 2007

 
Tooling Around in teh Bloon
After a highly successful drill practise Lucy, Enj, and I toured briefly through Europa and Ganymede before being felled by a bad sim crossing. Oddly, we all made our way to the same spot which was marked by a lost wig. The area might be the site of unnatural activity.


 
Nice build on Merricks Landing 2






 
slurl-12x16.gifMotorati - I will miss you.
Motorati will be closing to the public at the end of December, and Pontiac will leave Second Life entirely at the end of January.

In their own words, "Motorati Island has been a huge success, due in large part to the hard work and love each of you put into the island. It has been an amazing year and together we’ve built what many people think is the coolest place in Second Life."





06 December 2007

 
YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Snapshots are fixed! Yay! That was a hard one to bear :D


 



 
Rehearsing so the Synchronised Knitters Precision Unicycle Drill Team act will be fabuloso when recorded. It was the original act - I dunno why, but it was the first thing that occurred to me. Enjah's costume and Ida's knitting and hat/scarf create a look that can't be beaten!

 

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I want to ask for thoughts about improving the world -- what do people need? How can things be organised?