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31 May 2009

 

Postcard from Second Life.
Originally uploaded by Vivian Oblivion

AvRepTheatre in San Diego
Alas I arrived for the final .4678 minute of an AvRepTheatre performance,
however I'll try to catch them another time.



 
"A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island,' but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man."
Philip K. Dick (The Dark-Haired Girl)


 

Postcard from Second Life.
Originally uploaded by Vivian Oblivion

Bye bye to The Refuge and the Expansion

AM Radio's installation had a musical send-off.



 
Waelya Tenk made a video at the show yesterday.



ELLiebob Bean: We raised $17,336L at the 1st 2 shows yesterday & the party
after:) (1000L of that goes towards the next show in June) Waeyla Tenk
made an awesome machinima too! Thanks everybody for making it such a
success!

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30 May 2009

 
Reading Part of the LL Website Today...

...specifically an employment page, I saw this:

Qualifications:

• blah blah
• blah blah
• blah blah
• blah blah
• blah blah.
• World Builder and SpeedTree skills are a bonus.

*faints*

Gets up and dusts herself off.

*faints*

Gets up and starts dancing around.


 
My lone snapshot taken today is not very good - too bad, however we had two shows and both went extremely well and were enjoyed to the max by the audience. Kudos to my performers who gave their all!

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Tomas Mankovsky Shorts

Sorry I'm Late

Little Big Love

Foam City

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29 May 2009

 
Happy Birthday, Miss Mysterio!

We had a sekret sprise potty after rehearsal on the airship theatre. Ida and Theo came, and Candide, and Salazar, and Kumi, and Tina, and others, and we danced and rezzed giant exploding eggs and things.


 
Russian Ark

ZOMG really good.

Gawd I love this film and guess what -
it stars Professor Antfarmoffski!

And it was shot in ONE TAKE ========:O

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Touch Wood, and Don't Step on Cracks
I was at the airship theatre just now and my fps were strangely low. I changed my settings to something lower and fps went up, then I switched back to higher and it felt like something had flushed through my settings - my fps were more than double (in other words back to normal). I dunno why but it made things work. Your mileage may vary.

(Undoubtedly something twisted up by my leapfrogging from viewer to viewer.)

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The SL Forums are going to be archived :(

While that's better than just being wiped, I will miss them. I'm not quite sure what will be put in their stead - and I'm trying to like the Answers thingummy, but probably I'll wander away from there as there's no upside. If there's a new fully-functioning (and the real forum was purposely rendered less than fully-functioning years ago) forum it might be a useful thing, but we shall see.

I've learned absolute TONS from the forums over the years. I lurked for six months before posting, and have seen loads of people come and go, and come back, in some cases. Second Life Forums, I salute thee. Thank you.


The only upper level person I've ever heard reassure us that the forum contents won't be dumped ("It's our history.") is Robin, and she is gone now.

Update: The LL comment about a new forum replacing the old was rescinded; the old will be archived but there won't be new. As far as I can make out SL Answers and possibly something else will supercede the Forums. LL hasn't liked the Forums since about 2003, and when things were switched off there (for years we've hobbled along on un-updated software with no links, no nothing - maybe three years) we were told they were to be revamped and updated within six months. /me looks at her wrist I think the time's up on that one.

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ZOMG - Someone familiar in the Three Wolf Moon tshirt!


 


Google Wave

There are a lot of nice things in the beginning ten minutes or so of this first peek at Wave - enough so I could see how useful it would be. I haven't watched the entire thing, though, as it's long and the hour is late... er.. or early, I suppose ;-D.

The drag and drop aspect is nice, as is the embedding function. Playback - maybe. Editing other peoples messages? I can see how it would be useful for, say, TSMGO! to arrange rehearsals.



28 May 2009

 
Concise explantion of sculpties by Abu Nasu:

"Sculpty in programming terms is rather easy.

XYZ = RGB

If you want a vertex at XYZ=(10,20,128), then RGB=(10,20,128)."

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I was stood on the airship deck yesterday talking to Enj who was channeling ELLiebob, when all of a sudden my SL graphics splintered into a million pieces. I logged off, then relogged - same, so I cleared cache, shut down the puter, felt around for temperature, did a bit of cleaning, turned it back on and it was ok. I wish I'd thought to check that the fan was running before I shut down. Come to think of it, though, when I had the borked gfx card ages ago everything splintered, not just SL, so this must've been corruption. Anyway, I won't tell Derek unless it happens again.

Update: Baron Grayson thinks the RC is not playing happily with 8800 cards, resulting in corrupted drivers. Dunno.

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27 May 2009

 
Watching CJ7, which is ET crossed with Willy Wonka. It's quite amusing for a children's film.*

*Although showing things coming back to life after dying is a cruel trick on little ones.

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Trees
Originally uploaded by Vivian Oblivion

Trees

If you are like me and enjoy the swaying trees in SL, you will need to set RenderAnimateTrees to True in Debug Settings now, as with 1.23 trees are static.

Presumably all those people complaining that someone's tree swayed into their house had their prayers answered, or perhaps it was done to lessen the strain of shadow rendering. Dunno. Had to put it back on, though, as it looked dead without it.



26 May 2009

 
After seeing Hamlet's story on NWN I popped in to the location he had SLurled, as David Hockney has always been one of my best-loved artists. These are little still lifes he painted on his iPhone and sent to friends, one of whom is an SLer.

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25 May 2009

 
Drat.

Was building a set and saw self-replicating cubes at about 10 to 10. Began writing an AR, then either the sim crashed and was rolled back about half an hour, or it was rolled back for something else and I lost a bit of work - not a lot, though. Strange as I hardly ever see a roll back, and for good reason.


 
Someone like my eggs, it seems.


 
Nice muscle!


Recommended by Candide for your viewing pleasure.


 

Yo recomended Blood Tea and Red String, which is a stop-action animation made over the course of thirteen years by artist Christiane Cegavske. The attention to detail - the hands and their expressive movements, the slight head movements that convey so much so clearly - is a marvel. Her website is full of things of interest.

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24 May 2009

 


 
Shadow Viewer

Nagi Noda's Catwalk

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23 May 2009

 


 


Charley Patton



Booker White

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22 May 2009

 
Knitting

Don't look, Ida.
(Btw I thought it was fun that the missing link is named Ida).

Candide sent me this link featuring Knitting for Psychopaths.


 
On a Clear Day

I have too many viewers. I have beellions of viewers. I could use a different viewer every day for weeks. I need to sort out a bit, but I'm not hanging on to old ones because of sentimentality or laziness - they all are slightly better/worse in every area, and since they all work at the moment (they won't, at some point), I suppose I should luxuriate in my viewer wealth instead of thinking, "ZOMG I have too many viewers."

For instance, Kirstenlee's early Shadow Draft still does a better job of alpha rendering than her later ones, Boy's Shadow Viewer, or LL's RC. Boy's takes snapshots, though, has implemented textured light, and gets better FPs. KLee's has the asset viewer. The Hippo viewer has logins for different organisations' grids. And there's RealXtend, too. The LL official release is stable with the best FPS and I think of it as what things "really look like." The robot I made yesterday looks totally different in the LL Release viewer than in the RC.

I will fire them all up today and ditch the ones that aren't performing - I swear. That will probably leave me with 7. Or so. SL has one or two niche viewers made by customers for specific purposes, so I could conceivably have even more than I have now, I suppose. There's a bondage viewer called "Restrained Life," and I think the Emerald Viewer comes under that category - I haven't used either so don't know for sure. Long ago I wanted LL to make several different viewers to fit different roles - to be put on for different purposes, with all the same tools but accessibility differences (a Builder Viewer would have easy access and enhanced (maybe) building tools, a Social Viewer might have a built in AO and easy access to social tools, there could be a Newbie Viewer with low-spec defaults). That's not really happened with third party viewers in the way I conceived of it, yet it has happened in a different way. /me throws confetti.



20 May 2009

 


Island

I liked this film very much. The bleak landscape of rocks scoured by the elements, icy water, lowering sky, dirt, boards, and coal, is a fitting place for this tale of repentence and forgiveness. Ragged, dark clothing flapping around his legs, Anatoly ceaselessly wheels coal to the furnace.

In common with The Man on the Train, this film's star is a former rock musician. Петр Мамонов (Pyotr Mamonov) has been living as a religious since the 90s, and his performance is incredible.

What other films star ex-rockers?

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Fun/No Fun

I logged in at about 11:53 to work on the robot, but had a group notice about an event starting at noon, so I teepeed over to listen to Richard Bartle. It was interesting because he's an interesting man, but the interviewer was embarrassing, with questions and comments that were just... a waste of time, really. The audience was late in arriving, the event began late - it was an ordeal in a minor way even for me, and I didn't have to do anything.

He remarked that SL's tangled complexity holds it back, and that generally speaking when something is being built, and it works, the process then is to rebuild it completely before releasing it. SL got too big too fast, so even had that been the original plan it would've been difficult to do. From the very beginning a crowd leapt aboard and began making things busily; losing momentum then would not've seemed a good idea, I'm sure, and every change in anything breaks tons of content, and the push never, ever lets up. Way back when, we always did believe that LL was letting the program run as it was, while deep in the bowels of the laboratory hundreds of employees were concocting Second Life 2.0, with updated physics and clean, logical code.

Anyway, it was quite a contrast with the event planned around Richard Bartle in 2005, held on an island in a large, airy build which had a dance floor, and with a large audience of highly engaged people ready to argue the value of graphics with Richard. I remember a Klein bottle, and I think the sim was so full Richard needed to be force teepeed to the event. It was fun and whacky and not like today's event.


 
The Rezzer's Edge
I'd forgotten about the new 1000-prim limit on coalesced objects, as it seemed like it was in the future and I had other things to think about. It's been in effect for a while, now, though, so I hope none of the builds I've done exceed that. If so would they be unrezzable or will they rez but just be unable to be taken again? A thousand prims isn't very much if you are thinking in whole sim terms.

Oh, well. I'm sure I'm ok, but I'm equally sure a lot of people are going to be rather startled. No one seems to (or I should say few seem to) know what's going on - even though topics may've been brought up initially in the LL blog and then discussed for months (for instance adult content* controls and Pornistan). I wonder what the percentage is of SL users who read the LL blog. Whatever it is it must far exceed the percentage who read the SL forum. I wonder what the percentage is of people who actually read the MOTD.** The other day I dragged Lisa to Linden Memorial Park so she could release a candle into the water. We'd been talking about dead friends and acquaintances, but she didn't know about the memorial park. And it was in the blog, on the MOTD, and probably in the forum somewhere, too.

Oh, well, I need to go back to building a robot.

PS Enj are you sure you can't rez coalesed objects from the DF rezzer? I do it in that rezzer HUD I made for Kitty, and you'd think that if my simple little thing can do it, the DF can do it - same thing, after all.

* Boycott that two letter acronym that is already in use for animation overriders.
** Message of the Day.



19 May 2009

 

Video de Rodrigo Rosenberg from elperiodicoguatemala on Vimeo.



"If you are reading this message, it means that I, Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano, was murdered by the President's Private Secretary Gustavo Alejos and his associate Gregorio Valdez, with the approval of mister Alvaro Colom and Sandra de Colom."

"I was a 47 year old Guatemalan, with 4 beautiful children, with the best brother one could ask of life, with wonderful friends, and with an overwhelming desire to live in my country, but I could not have lived with myself without rebelling, arming myself with valor and denouncing the real reasons for the deaths of Mister Khalil Musa and his daughter Marjorie Musa before all the Guatemalans who have principles and values, without regarding the consequences, and understanding that my life was in danger, I wanted to leave behind this testimony, should something come to happen to me, as it unfortunately did."


Then:
"Police in Guatemala have arrested a Twitter user and confiscated his computer for "inciting financial panic" after he urged people to remove funds from a state-owned bank.

Jean Anleu Fernandez, 37, was handcuffed, fingerprinted and jailed for posting the 96-character message on the micro-blogging site earlier this week. It is thought to be the first such case in central America." - The Guardian

And then:
"The Guatemalan Twitterer Jean Anleu (@Jeanfer) has finally been released.

Once able to log-in to his Twitter account, Jean changed his background and profile pictures, removed his name and other personal information, and protected his account.

He also removed most of the content on his Wordpress blog.

While Twitter has put a strain on the Guatemalan government (as posted on Spanish blog “Alt1040“) and many have called this an example of the Streisand Effect, it is possible that people in countries where freedom of speech is not encouraged will have to think twice about posting observations and/or opinions on Twitter and other social networks.

We can only hope that government officials seeking to create fear by silencing innocent citizens will realize the power of online real-time communication. The masses can no longer be silenced." - Social Nerdia


In countries ruled by the forces of corruption, brave souls speaking out and standing their ground will not have their sacrifices hidden from the public if immediate and powerful technological methods of communication such as this are used. The same techniques could be used for mob rule and are used for advertising and propaganda, of course. The difference between now and twenty years ago - and what amounts to a return to the days of broadsheets - is that information can flow swiftly both to the general populace and from them. More and more the way I see the internet not as a gateway to a new paradigm but a return to an old one, on a huge scale.



18 May 2009

 


Vanfarel Kupfer is the artist whose death prompted the creation of the Will Your Work movement.


 
I've been cleaning my windows since February - over and over again as they are not clean yet. I just cleaned the two glass sliding doors in front of me for about the fifth time. I think I'm starting to like it.


 
Lucy sent me a postcard just now (and it actually reached me, which is not usual; usually everything but the image itself arrives) of a Siberian tiger in a cag... of herself riding the Modern Crow's Nest up from the observation deck of the Airship Theatre.

Lucy clicks on crow's nest and opens, steps in and clicks again. Chooses Go Up...and ... it does!

Truthfully it isn't finished and will allow one to press "Up" over and over until the ground blips out of sight and an unnatural buzzing commences in one's ears. Note to self: must fix that.


 
Two New Products in Second Life

Ceiling Fan Fit for the Halls of Versailles
Scary tarantula genitalia sculpture

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17 May 2009

 

Postcard from Second Life.
Originally uploaded by Vivian Oblivion

Bay City had a fine parade, and although I had to forgo the party due to my own event, I'll bet it was fun.



 
Busted
"hey, how come you lost on purpose yesterday?"

/me resolves to be less obvious.


 
Zen and the Art of Machinima

DA: Except for you and a few others, most of us are apprenticing..
Osprey Therian: you flatter me by saying that
DA: I figure it will take me 2 more years to get even decent
Osprey Therian: I just flit around trying stuff
Osprey Therian: No one ever watches what I make anyway heh*
DA: I'm not trying to flatter you..
DA: sorry, I miss you and I subscribe to your YouTube...there is something very zen about you Osprey..

* This is true. If I get 200 YT views I'm doing well. I also stopped leaving threads in the Machinima forum because no one responded.


 
Roused to action by the death of a Second Life artist whose works, although given to someone close, will forever remain with limited permissions, Bettina Tizzy created Will Your Work. A movement to spread awareness about preparing for the disposition of one's artwork, Will Your Work has a day, 18 May, which may become an annual reminder, a string around every artist's finger, if Bettina has anything to say about it.



16 May 2009

 
FREE Arm Pit Hair at Freezepoop!

Lovely prim arm pit hair that has a built in AO. So you can raise your arms high and proud!

Go to the store to retrieve the free arm pit hair, landmark is attached.

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Films I Have Seen Recently

Future by Design - This enjoyable documentary focuses on futurist Jacque Fresco, and uses some of the footage he created of models of his building and vehicle designs in landscapes.
Apocalypto : Not sure what I was thinking* when I rented this as I can't even bear to look at Mayan relief carving, however it could've been really good. Alas, the opportunity was lost.
El Bola: A simple little film but with many graces, including the acting.
Moliere: An enjoyable romp.

* I was thinking along 10 Canoes and Quest For Fire terms, not hours of unrelieved violence - oh, dopey me.

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15 May 2009

 
Last Kind Words
Some years ago friends of mine had a good friend who became ill and died. She was not very old, and was, I think, a writer. My friends, a couple, helped the grieving family in practical ways, including disposing of a number of large bags. At the landfill, as they were about to jettison the cargo, they noticed that they could see what was inside the plastic bags. Papers, including a journal (as I remember this second-hand tale) kept by the dead woman, were inside a bag.

At the time I was told this story I asked, "What did you do?"
"We threw them away."

I've thought about this numerous times, although I'm not exactly sure why. This isn't about right or wrong, and I have no knowledge of the people in the story beyond my two friends. I've wondered what I would do, although that would depend upon a number of variables, I suppose. How much? How clear? I think it likely I'd've not thrown away the journal bag, and would've taken it home, stowed it, and not looked at it again, or at least stowed it until I'd had time to decide tossing it was the best thing. That could be one of those "it reveals more about you than about the situation" things, I'm not sure.

Amongst the famous the loss of papers due to family actions is regrettable; I always think of Sir R. Burton's widow burning his papers, although it's happened many times and frequently because the dearly departed revealed things the family wished kept unknown, and/or there was adultery. When the person is not well-known there's very little to show that saving things makes any difference in the long view (Confederacy of Dunces is one example of it making a difference; another is Henry Darger).

It isn't the greater view but the narrower one that would stop my hand, though. It's still an interesting thing to think about - in some ways like my two questions "Would you rather be a sniper or a bomber?"* and "If someone were to shoot you dead, would you rather be shot in the back or would you rather see who did it and know what was happening?"** If you were asked to throw something in a furnace and you saw it was the last evidence of concious thought and personality of a friend, would you throw it?


* Sniper (Lucia scandelised me by saying, "bomber.")
** See


 
Tragedy of the Commons
(as usual and yes one day there will be avatar/parcel script limits)

As we all know, it's common now (more than common - everyone does it) for scripters to add permission-taking into attachments and HUDs so the scripts will continue to run on no-script land. I didn't realise adding that into one script in the prim works for the whole thing even if the other scripts don't take control.

From a forum-poster:
"...I have about 40+ scripts in my HUD to handle text."
"there are a lot of HUDs with a lot more scripts than that in. It's what you get when you've got complex HUDs with many buttons and text and layout arrangements."
"Haha! That's amusing. I just did "Release Keys" and every single HUD of mine, except my own that I made, got detached. It would seem all of them take controls in some way, probably exactly for this reason."

That bothers me as resources are finite. And why isn't detected touch used more? I was looking forward to that because it seemed like there would be many new and streamlined products (for instance seating) using that function yet I haven't seen much. I suppose I need to do some dunce scripter experiments of my own.



14 May 2009

 
Ban the Bots
I hear LL has begun enforcing the traffic bot ban. I'm glad. I wonder if it will make any difference for TSMGO! as peak concurrency times has added up to show borkage time, and there's no knowing anymore which sims share cores.

Poster for the next show:
This show may wind up being a RFL benefit; if so I'll change the poster to reflect that.



13 May 2009

 

"London Bling"
Postcard from Candide



12 May 2009

 
Oh, OK

"Hello I have come writes construct can wish a poplem I no longer into the game purely it that it no verbinndung I that this poplem please reparit proprietor"

Must be about Combat Cards ("game"). I suppose.

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10 May 2009

 
Fair Warning: Bay City's parade for its first anniversary is coming up quickly. The parade is the 17th at 12:30; staging is beneath the airship mooring tower in Docklands.


 


Multiwinia

This is an appealing game.

"Welcome to Multiwinia: Survival of the Flattest – the ultimate retro-arcade multiplayer experience! Choose from a selection of six hilariously fun, action-packed game modes, set in one of the most beautiful game environs you will ever set eyes on."



09 May 2009

 


Awesome.

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Postcard from Second Life.
Originally uploaded by Vivian Oblivion

Os wins the custom tournament at Spaceport.

Longest fight ever as Mich used Skeleton Crew numerous times. I'd get him down to 6 health points and he'd use SCrew to add 15 on - and I just kept slogging away at him. We kept using discard attacks and were both reduced to no playable cards a couple of times. I had to draw five times in a row to get something to play, and just won by the skin of my teeth.

Mich is becoming interested in video and I'm encouraging him to do in depth card analysis. That would be very useful for difficult cards, as he could show a card as used in several matches and explain why it is effective at times and not others.


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"fat man with the baby!! you rules too"

Finally we had two good shows in a row, despite a plethora of last-minute and mid-show crises. The bow of the theatre was accidentally deleted, and though that's of almost no consequence in itself I wanted to mention it for this reason: after the show I donned my 1.23 RC viewer and hit "Return to Last Location" and boom, it was restored. I'd fiddled to get it nearly in the right spot when it happened as I was in the standard viewer, but this was fast and precise. Yay for 1.23!

Enjah was quite a trouper as she had to fill in for Lucy, who popped during a thunderstorm. Lucy got back in and did Preggers out of sequence, which was good. We did two shows back-to-back, with audience limits (not that we needed it since we weren't swamped).

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08 May 2009

 
Ambat, Beloved Infohub

Ambat Regular: There's a rumor that ambat infohub is being sold to vampire named Zeppo. Have you heard anything about it?
Osprey Therian: Hah - no - since it's Linden land I doubt it.
Osprey Therian: Where did you hear it?
Ambat Regular: we are forming a mob down in the sanbox below
Ambat Regular: in Mal's sandbox
Ambat Regular: and the rumor is that the whole sim is being sold
Osprey Therian: The sim is mainland owned by many people.
Osprey Therian: It's just an idle rumour prolly the vampires trying to get zombies worked up.
Osprey Therian: I need to make Vamp-X-pire
Ambat Regular: rofl
Osprey Therian: ;-D
Ambat Regular: I'll stake a few for you
Ambat Regular: it still the prettiest place around
Ambat Regular: you made a place different from the others
Ambat Regular: everyone is easy and friendly and not trying to make sport of anyone
Ambat Regular: is why we hang around

So I made Vamp-X-pire:
And Ambat Regular and her friend sprayed the infohub down :-D

It matches Zomb-Off* in its usefulness. It's from the maker of tried and true remedies Foot-Shado-B-Gon** and FYSYX*** Spray.

* Named after Doc.
** Relic of the olden days of very awful foot shadows.
*** A sim border crossing spray, basically. It was from the olden days before the upgrading of Havok, but is just as useful today.

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07 May 2009

 
^^What I see if I look up from the monitor^^
Fluffy clouds are nice. I took these a little while ago but things are a bit stormy-looking now.^^What I see if I look up and to the right^^


 
Human Age

Enj and I persist in our affection for the whacky little French game Human Age, which is plodding and dull compared to games where you actually do things, but which never fails to make me smile if not laugh at its sheer silliness. It seem to me that many of the players are in health care related jobs, and I think the very low stress and structured nature of the game make it a kind of relaxing brain massage.

I'm in the Egyptian Age and refuse to evolve yet although I could at any time. Enjah is in the Greek Age, as she likes to dash on ahead. She also has characters in Egyptian and Celtic Ages, and I have one in Celtic. Celtic Age is the one people seem to like least as progress is slow, so my old Celtic man may just remain there to give a leg up to Eggheads who are passing through. He mainly fights - almost 80 fights last month, and goes on Punitive Expeditions, and heals people in the hospital.

In the Egyptian Age I'm married to Enjah's alt Beldar, and we had a child (haha!). She wanted to call it Blammo, but I pointed out that Blammo is a girl's name, and thought that we should call a boy Snaskers de la Rue. The baby turned out to be a girl, though, and we took care of her until she left home and began sending scarabs home. Abruptly one day she sent us a rude message and disappeared - ingrate. Egyptian hunting consists of wandering around in a 2d landscape choosing to go after animals of various value. Hunters are alloted ten action points; each try uses a point and may or may not result in prey in the bag, and may or may not result in injury. I hunt hippos, rhinos, elephants, crocodiles, and once in a while a dog or a lunar shark.

Yesterday I got a PM purportedly from an admin that contained a link to a Russian viagra website, so even the funny little world of Human Age is assaulted by spammers. Email the game dev, though, and he immediately fixes problems that arise.



06 May 2009

 
From seasoned Combat Cards fighter Michalius Oppewall comes this link: Way Out Junk.

It is a repository for obscure children's record albums of times long past, as well as peculiar old comedy albums and possibly even more strange and way out junk, all available for download.

I never had any children's records as a child, although we children had a big stack of classical records that we played* over and over and over and over, so I missed that particular experience. My cousin Chris had things like that, though, and when I went to stay with him he'd play music like... oh... all I remember is something about a duck - possibly an ugly duckling song if there was such a thing.

I never had very many toys although that certainly didn't present any kind of problem. I drew all the time and made articulated figures from shirt cardboard, had access to bazillions of books, had tons of horses and bags of dogs and cats, and spent 99% of my time when not at school in the woods miles from home. I had one composition doll from, oh, the 1920s I would reckon, that came from a white elephant sale. I still have her (unless she's been eaten by something).

I was just thinking yesterday about the number of things I have that I seem to've had forever. I always count my rock as my oldest possesion, as I can remember finding it, and what I thought at the time, when we were mushrooming one fine day. However, I have my old doll, and also an interesting oak folding table that I (my parents would let us pick out things to have) found at a white elephant or rummage sale, and which I painted five or so years later with a paint called "Firefly Yellow."** And an ebony elephant that's really my sister's. And I keep my slides in my brother's old tuck box. Oh, weird old things.

It's difficult to winnow my possessions now, as I'm down to Things I Have Made (such as paintings), Things Given to Me (such as a birch veneer plywood and walnut flatfile made for me by a love interest***), Things I Inherited (such as a Georgian reading table), and oddball things like paintings from thrift shops, and so on. I'd do it, though, if I could handle the job.

* And danced both ballet and minuet to.
** It was painted cream or white originally; I want to have it stripped because otherwise it won't be seen as an interesting old table and who knows what its future may be once it leaves my care.
*** stab stab stab


 
And THEN will we get flying cars and silver spacesuits?

"NIF's 192 giant lasers, housed in a ten-story building the size of three football fields, will deliver at least 60 times more energy than any previous laser system. When all of its beams are fully operational, NIF will focus nearly two million joules of ultraviolet laser energy on a tiny target in the center of its target chamber – creating conditions similar to those that exist only in the cores of stars and giant planets and inside a nuclear weapon. The resulting fusion reaction will release many times more energy than the laser energy required to initiate the reaction."


* They are long, long overdue.

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05 May 2009

 
A Street With A View

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania made sure they made a splash on Google Street Views!

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Just Another Day in Virtual Reality

"my av is very young, and was perhaps 2 days old, when it was bitten by somebody *without my consent* using some kind of bug in a pose cushion.

Now my soul is apparently owned by some weird spanish guy and I want it back! The only way I can get it back is to pay liquid designs 1000L!!!! This is absolutely outrageous and is tantamount to extortion.

Does anyone know who I can contact to sort this out? I intend to raise a big stink about this, because it is obviously unacceptable."

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04 May 2009

 
Holy moley - huge storm ==:O

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I found this ages ago but didn't think to put up the url of this great collection of 78s. The amount of work this collector went through just recording the music must've been immense, let alone the cataloging.

There's old music, risque recordings, a few ads, and music that's not as old - quite a mixture. Here's Foot Pedal Boogie circa 1940 by PeteJohnson-AlbertAmmons, the granddaddies of boogie-woogie piano.


 
Lucy's Adventure

Just to see if it's possible, I hopped on my paper airplane at my place in Higgins to go to Davenport.
Headed NW, made it over some banlines, and then had clear sailing for a looooong time.
Got to some frigid snowy mountain areas after days and days, and was still a ways off.
Then suddenly over the horizon, the red line appeared!
Getting closer!
Couldn't believe it!
Then POW!!! What hit me! I went flying off, couldn't stand, couldn't stop, couldn't see myself.
Had to TP to home.
What was it?
I dunno but i did get this message at the time of the explosion:
[14:43] Second Life: Your object 'Tiny Paper Airplane' has been returned to your inventory lost and found folder by Osprey Therian from parcel 'Osprey Therian Fine Art' at Bodega 254, 120 because the parcel is full.

Next time!

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Universities, Schools, and Institutions in Second Life


 

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03 May 2009

 
Sitting on Freud's couch...

I am working on a video of Second Front's Therapy. Shown above is a rehearsal - from left Os, Bibbe, Fau, Liz. I filmed the performance and now I'm editing, but I spent about four hours on the first 18 seconds, so what I expect is that once I get the beginning right it will be a breeze doing the rest.

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Salazar and His New Friend

He says, "They like it when you scratch 'em right here. "


 
I took Enj for a drive in the Echidna* last night. Ha ha! I was doing fine, but wound up throwing us off the road and into the ice cold waters somewhere around the Rings of Saturn, I think. Enjah has pictures on her blob Elle Coyote.

* I have christened my 1891 Steam Vessel the Echidna as it looks like one.



02 May 2009

 
Big storm with whitecaps on the lake.

Earlier it was calm and misty:



 
Uh-oh
I filed a ticket.

Update: All is well now. Thank you very much, Amber.

"Thank you for contacting Second Life Support.

I have run a process which sometimes helps clear inventory item issues such as you are experiencing.

I would like you to also clear your Second Life cache (again please if you have already done this) using the following steps:

1. Go to Edit > Preferences on the menu bar.
2. Click the Network tab.
3. Click the Clear Cache button.
4. Exit Second Life.
5. Log back into Second Life to a quiet region such as Lime.
6. Wait in place for 5 minutes before opening your inventory; Second Life needs to reload much of your previously cached information

This ticket is marked as a final solution, however should this not resolve your problem please feel free to reopen it.

Many Thanks,

~ Amber"




01 May 2009

 
"Medieval princess to peon FASHION SHOW"

Well how rude of her. I hope the clothes are washable.

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