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31 July 2009

 
Ordered a 275.



30 July 2009

 
==============:O

Ughhhhhhh - no wonder I thought it was so hot yesterday. The weather station that's a mile away recorded 105° F as the high. I was going by the radio in Seattle when I said 103° F. On Tuesday it was 104° F.


 


Red Road
In Living Borkoscope with lots of lines
running through it. *shakes fist*


Frozen into a state of isolation by grief, the main character of this film comes face to face with the one person she finds it hardest to forgive. Including Oasis, The Monkees, and a Joy Division cover, it has an eccentric soundtrack. I liked it a lot.

The surveillance cameras are chilling; the trend of gathering information is uneasy-making - or at least it should be. John told me recently that his place of employment, which is a little brew pub* in Olympia (across the street from where Frank was until last week), was sold to a still-not-very-big company that owns a couple of wineries in Eastern Washington. They immediately told workers a palm scanner would be installed (a palm scanner! in a freaking brew pub! in puny Olympia!), and John and a few other said they were not comfortable with that. It's going to be installed; "old" employees may be grandfathered in if they refuse to use it (they have asked for options in hopes of meeting the company halfway) and that will be the "phasing in period" that won't be complete until the refuseniks are out the door :/

* The brewery makes decent beer but I have only been in the pub once or twice as Something Happened to make me turn up my nose at it (have drunk lots of the brewery's products from kegs, though).

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Spoke too soon.

I need a new video card.

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Close Call

John brought my puter in from the car for me, and asked me if I wanted him to close the doors and I said Yes, thank you. I was propelled out into the garage just now because I wanted to make sure the big garage door had been closed (it had). The car door, however, was open, so it was a good thing I decided to look.


 
AH IS BAK!!! Just got empluggerated.

This week has been an ordeal because of the heat - yesterday broke all-time records in Seattle by three degrees - it was 103°F and the record was broken, too, for the low temperature (it was two degrees hotter than had been recorded before). Heat affects neurological diseases in an unpleasant way - more or less it's like previews of coming attractions, which in my case is not pretty. It takes time after the heat subsides for the ill-effects to lessen or go away (go away, I hope). If it stops being hot tomorrow I may be back to a manageable level of decrepitude by Monday.

The problem with the computer was just that the video card needed reseating - don't ask me why it waddled away from its proper position. It took them a while to figure that out, and meanwhile ran tests all over the place which turned up nothing. I'm fond of them - I think most of their work is dealing with business hardware, so they take a bit of interest in mine as it's not as boring. I can never remember the behind-the-counter man's name, though, for some reason, even though he says it every time. I was thinking... "Starts with a C, I'm sure... is it one of those ordinary word-type names like cliff or curt?" It's actually Craig, which I may remember now as I've made a point of bloggifying it.

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27 July 2009

 
/me waves

Pulling the plug



26 July 2009

 
]

I just watched Watchmen (in screwy-vision, courtesyof my busticated puter) which was ok-ish but boring-ish and ultimately unfulfilling. However, the single scene where the big groovy twirling thing on Mars is behind the blue man reminded me of my Future of Virtual Reality machinima. It's funny how certain things seem to echo - no, I'd never seen any trailers or anything. The machinima future man (my alt Oz) is only blue because I had a (partial) skin I'd been playing around with and made blue - I used it on him as it was kicking around when I wanted something odd-looking.

A billion years ago I missed a chance to see Satyagraha in Seattle, and it remains an opera I've never seen.

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25 July 2009

 
Dear Derek

I'm thinking this will be an in-shop type problem, but if you have any things I should try first let me know.

Yesterday:

Screen flickered and computer froze in Second Life.
I restarted it.
Screen flickered and computer froze on an ordinary webpage.
I decided to try a System Restore.
The System Restore didn't complete, and when I restarted the computer the display was corrupted.
I ran System Restore to a different restore point and it completed, display still corrupted.
The video card has a yellow ! and a Code 10.
I tried uninstalling/reinstalling drivers but no joy.
The display is just running the default display stuff, so if it were a problem with the video card you'd reason that the display wouldn't be corrupted (just crappy).
The computer is running, but not exactly well.
(I'm assuming it's not just a dead video card - since the display is corrupted without it - is that assumption reasonable to make?)


Are you guys busy this week or can you get it taken care of? Does my description make you think of any particular problem?
-----------------------------------------

I'm just a know-nothing, so this is beyond me, but I like tinkering with things, so am always frustrated by not being able to operate in meatspace. It's a device purely for my amusement, so in some ways I like problems because then I can fool around and try to fix them (sadly limited now to non-meatspace fooling around, however). One might reason this same fooling around also causes a certain amount of problems :-D Even though I don't know anything, I still like reading about components and especially comparisons, which can occupy me quite happily for a long time.

A thousand years ago when I had a box with Win98* I had to poke and prod it every day to get it to function (as I remember it) - Win2k was a relief in its stalwart, chest-out, functioning (although it busticated a number of third-party Photoshop filters). I went from 32bit single processor to dual processor to dual core, and am looking at a 64bit quad core for next time around. Things have improved rapidly.

* I started on Macs (I never owned one but work always just bought me** any number of computers at a time, which were by far the herkiest in the place***), really, but they did just work to their capacity. The memory of Windows machines prior to Win98 has deliberately been thrown down the oubliette of my memory as I don't wish to discuss them.
** They spoiled me (yay).
*** The techie**** became anti-Mac though and made my life a living hell for about 5 years until I waved a white flag.
**** Who went to high school with The Sonics.


 
The Springtime of Fail
However since then
(i.e. staying home below 80m and having recompiled to LSL, etc.)

the show has been full of win.

Back in the spring we had two shows one after the other that were absolutely chock full of fail because lag prevented everything from working. They just about killed me, I have to say. One was at Ragland Shire and the other was at Earpoint. Both were very high in the air. Before we began performing for the year I had recompiled everything to Mono, and used the same compilation for duplicated scripts (like the flames Phoebus sets off). For both those shows (I think) Enj was using the megaprim hack for avatar invisibility. I distinctly remember Zayn saying, "Take off all your scripted attachments," and one Tiny wag saying, "Zayn, I'm ALREADY COMPLETELY NUDE."

After those bad experiences I thunked a bit, recompiled everything back to LSL :( and lowered the Airship Theatre to be within the group-only-scripts limit and stopped touring (again). The megaprim hack was on its way out anyway, and since I was using an RC viewer and could see the avatars who thought they were invisible, Enj changed back to invisiprims (somewhat hastily and with one performance at least where it was one crude giganto-invisiprim).

There are a number of issues, I suppose, and I don't have my finger on the pulse of anything, however from the perspective of a non-coder trying to direct live performance in SL it seemed to boil down to:
  • There are possible issues with rezzing/derezzing objects with Mono-compiled scripts.
  • There are issues with people TPing in/out of a region that have to do with more than just scripted attachments.
  • People wear too many scripted attachments, resources are finite, and runtime permissions are the debil (in this case only) - especially when detaching the attachments may cause a lag spike (i.e. TD will drop to near-nothing for a short time), however only a few (including me for all the show effects) would've been rezzing/derezzing Mono scripted objects.
  • Performing high in the air mucks around with sit targeting, should help a certain amount by removing a lot of unnecessary textures and geometry from within the draw distance, places the audience outside any "group-only scripts zone - a mixed bag, in other words.
  • The mega-prim hack always made me uneasy, and even though it may not've been a problem, I'm glad it's gone.
  • The group-scripts-only setting works below... uh... I think 80m only, and only works on a very, very few things now, but it's still worth it because every little bit helps.
  • There have been ghost script reports that indicate that the scripts in deleted objects sometimes continue to use memory - but I don't know if that's (or still) a valid issue, or what the details are. It was purportedly something like this (made up example): "ZOMG I fired 800 bullets and now the bullets are gone but 800 bullet scripts are driving the sim to its knees and only a restart can save it." I'm ignoring this since even if it's true I have no way to either check it or fix it.
  • I did try asking people to remove things, ages back, but stopped wanting that, which may've been a good thing if removing the attachments also spiked lag by temporarily lowering TD.
  • There is no way of knowing what the other sims on the core are doing, so results will vary greatly, I would imagine.
  • I was reading something recently that talked about LSL scripts "It should also be noted that Mono scripts, to my knowledge, require internal recompilation from the assembly code every time the script gets moved to a new sim, unlike LSL which I think simply gets serialized and run. Also, LSL gets serialized in one chunk, while I believe Mono scripts, due to the possible size, require several"* and there was another bit too, but it's too hard to find it using a crippled computer so I'll leave it for now.
* I have no way of knowing how accurate that statement is.

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24 July 2009

 
I suddenly developed big computer problems, so if you don't see me for a while that's the reason.

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23 July 2009

 
It went from 54 to 70 degrees today, which was a switch from a few days ago when it was 90-something. It's going to be mid to upper 90s they say, this weekend. These huge temperature spreads in short time periods are a bit wearing, but not worse than sustained heat, by any means.


 
Long ago in the early seventies, when the shadow of Richard Nixon fell across the land of cheeseburgers, an extremely common bumper sticker read, "Lee Harvey Oswald, where are you when we need you?" *

If you come across someone claiming he invented that witticism recently, pleased be advised that he did not.

* Which slogan, had it been resurrected for the GWBush years, would've caused the impounding of the car and waterboarding of the driver, I suspect.


 
I love the SL UI and its bazillions of useful features. Tons of them are available in the standard viewer with no debug menu. Many others are not really things LL originally deemed necessary for customers, but (as far as I remember) are advanced capabilities allowed us due to a bit of hand-forcing by a partial-godmode viewer hack. Lately it feels like a chill breeze is freshening the air, however, and although I hope I'm wrong it may become a bitter wind that sweeps away much of the functionality I am accustomed to.

What I'm noticing, as well as smallish changes, is a kind of preparatory language that reminds us that debug functions may be removed at any time, and also a celebration of liberating simplification as though the useful complexity contained within the UI as a whole is akin to shackles. Maybe I'm wrong. Hope so. It's easy to be a bit paranoid when it's the very landscape of one's interaction and has pathways worn deep into the muscle memory. Any change is like rearranging the furniture in a blind man's house - might outwardly make sense yet the blind man is going to spend hours banging his shins whilst trying to adapt (as in changes to the pie menu).

Machinima side note: it was very nice when it was easy to change window size accurately for machinima; that went away ages ago in favour of a less accessible-and-wrongly-sized Preferences option. I did the trial-and-error thing to find the correct sizes (and in any case I started shooting in larger windows than the original menu allowed for), then used Sizer to set up the window size every time (rather than spending time fiddling with it over and over).


 

How to Make a Baby in 30 Seconds


 

I accidentally made the acquaintance of a robot designer, Kidnaplism Freschi, whose freebie cube robot is pictured here. I haven't had time to look at all his others, but he tells me they are original and come with a combat system. At his place of operation, Robot Academy in Mino Volcan, he's hosting robot fights - which I haven't tried yet, but will at some point.

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22 July 2009

 
I was in Grendel's checking the creator of an avatar when Siofra strode by on her digigrade legs. I alt-cammed onto her and asked her to pose at a time convenient to her. "Now." OK! I ran to Europa and teleported her; she danced on the green background for ten minutes then I told her that I didn't want to take up all her time (she was short of time), but that I'd call her if I needed more shots. This is a composite (well, most CC shots are to a greater or lesser degree) - I think it looks great. She had skillfully assembled various parts into a unique avatar, and was a very good model.


 
Candide pointed out this nice vid:


Just Colour from Jesper Kirkeby Brevik on Vimeo.



 
Perhaps this image of Monty will become a Combat Card.

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I missed the Tuesday gathering as I logged in almost an hour late, but it was held in Salazar's treehouse :-D Nice shadows!

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21 July 2009

 
Update: Changed his mind.
-----------------------------------------
RightasRain Rimbaud says he is poised to release a sim-copying tool that doesn't check permissions at all. This seems to be a rather unfortunate nose-thumbing on his way out the door that affects a great many people directly, and everyone indirectly. Of course it would be useful in some ways* - but although people claim that to circumvent any permission-checking code would not be hard to accomplish, and that copybot already exists, the idea of someone deliberately releasing a tool capable of copying whole sims at a gulp without making any effort to safeguard people's IP is... not nice.

For Me Personally
I was copybotted and GLIntercepted years ago, which caused me to think carefully about expending a lot of effort on things that are unprotectable. It wasn't that I railed against it, really, more that I could see the landscape and knew what the ground rules were, and decided to build things A) full perm for Combat Cards, B) anything I wanted to make but not holding any feeling that the permissions would stay as I set them. Of course, because of my health it's a moot point now, anyway, and no one would copybot my Giant Potato on a Railway Flatcar - I just build weird things.

For Others
Hard to know how this will turn out. If someone (it could be a "builder" showing a client a structure) copies the build and recreates it behind a firewall, selling someone else's work as his own, the client would probably have no clue about the history. There may wind up being no way of knowing if any work is actually accomplished by the seller, and if you want something original you would choose to build it yourself, go with someone you trust, or watch as it's built. I don't know.

The permissions system even within SL is far from robust and has devastatingly glitchy episodes; there is no general grid to grid permissions system at all. It isn't, truthfully, just a matter of commerce; as a creator one of the very worst things is seeing something you've made listed under another's name. That's where this really hurts: creators rights - rights which should belong to the creators alone - will be put into jeopardy, if this goes forward, by someone who doesn't care (or is spiteful enough to want to do damage) and yet has benefitted from the creative work of dozens of people.

* Corporations and education entities will like it, presumably. Also, about 100 people immediately said, "I've always wanted my own Black Swan!"


 
Candide: overclocks you
me: It's nice that I've been getting machinima jobs, but it means I have no energy left over to do anything much else - but iz teh bux.
zomg I wish
/me thinks of all the parts she'd replace...
Candide: it would increase your temperature though
me: /me turns on a fan
I think replacing my parts would probably cost more than just getting a new human.



20 July 2009

 

Immortal

At least 99.9% of the interest is visual, but I'm very visual so I forgive it :-D Fun to watch - it mixes Poser-ish 3d characters with human actors. This French film from 2004 is set in a cyberpunk distopia - the future New York - with styling that seems based on the Chrysler Building.

At the end she is reading Les fleur du Mal, which is always a pleasure to thumb through (in a surfing kind of thumbing).

Spleen

I have more memories than if I'd lived a thousand years.

A heavy chest of drawers cluttered with balance-sheets,
Processes, love-letters, verses, ballads,
And heavy locks of hair enveloped in receipts,
Hides fewer secrets than my gloomy brain.
It is a pyramid, a vast burial vault
Which contains more corpses than potter's field.
— I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon,
In which long worms crawl like remorse
And constantly harass my dearest dead.
I am an old boudoir full of withered roses,
Where lies a whole litter of old-fashioned dresses,
Where the plaintive pastels and the pale Bouchers,
Alone, breathe in the fragrance from an opened phial.

Nothing is so long as those limping days,
When under the heavy flakes of snowy years
Ennui, the fruit of dismal apathy,
Becomes as large as immortality.
— Henceforth you are no more, O living matter!
Than a block of granite surrounded by vague terrors,
Dozing in the depths of a hazy Sahara
An old sphinx ignored by a heedless world,
Omitted from the map, whose savage nature
Sings only in the rays of a setting sun.

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I was trying to give something to someone who was having trouble downloading it as it was chugging along a 7mb/second =======:O due to peak-time ISP BW strangulation. We have all this nice technology but we are moonwalking backwards due to the global economy having been run into the ground by the greedy. HBA* said it sounded like 1996. Truly a blast from the past that is less like a boogie-down and more like an icy wind.

We waxed nostalgic (well, a tiny bit) talking about the olden days, however. I taught myself to upload using a command window, and to build websites (I taught myself so it's no wonder I have rather spotty knowledge), and HBA said DOS was FUN - agreed with by me. It was a James Bond-y jamboree figuring out secret coded things and as HBA said, led to a real feeling of accomplishment. Not that my achievements were large, by any means, but just realising I could upload things puts me far ahead of most people I know who still don't get it. After I realised everyone with an ISP got server space I told all my friends I'd build them sites for fun.

* With whom I was talking at the time, but not his d/l problem.



19 July 2009

 
Trying to get Thursday's machinima job finished fast as the finished piece was suddenly needed for Tuesday. Also finishing off twelve new Combat Cards images (mostly finished but in need of polish), CC event, new Tiny anims (I met Bloodsong on Aditi yesterday and okayed them), the Berlin performance, a request for the resubmission for a machinima piece in H264, Spaceport, two more machinima jobs starting any minute, and other things. It wouldn't be a lot for most people but I don't have much get-up-and-go.

W00ty - Frank is in his new place now, so that's where I'll go tomorrow (7:30am) unless I forget and drive to Olympia ========:O



18 July 2009

 
Yaks dancing on the tiny 1920s Berlin stage.

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17 July 2009

 

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Sunset, June 2005

Daybreak, 5280 AD

ZOMG remember the sun reflection?


 
Certainly it's understandable (but pointless) to lament the inevitable loss of the old SL spirit of years ago, but lest anyone feel nostagic about the graphics quality I have a few 2004-2005 photos on KoinUp HERE.

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May 2005

Enjah has made a lion's head and Osprey has put her own in the lion's mouth.

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16 July 2009

 
Rest in Peace (I suppose)

I found this old clip of Frank Bot from May - and rather than chuck it out I'm sticking it here just in case Frank is destined for the junk heap. He doesn't seem like he's going anywhere.

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Ugh. I can't function in heat and it's about 90° F.

I was up at 5 am for a filming job, and finally ran out of steam at 5:45 pm. I decided to go to sleep. I did, and awoke at 6:15 pm. Bummer.

It's too bad I never blogged about joining Just Leap In (I rarely blog about joining things anyway or that's all I'd do) as now I don't know how long I've been there. There weren't any avatars, then. It was just moving cameras. I did that picture story after a while, and that zombie Hallowe'en movie, but have no clue how long I'd been in there before that.

That reminds me of joining Project Entropia when the avatars were strange hulking creatures. One made an account, and an avatar, which then couldn't be changed (until they had an overhaul and there was one shot at a new one a long time later). I chose green hair that stood straight up, which I regretted as it got in the way when I was shooting. I changed it when avatars became less ugly (although faces are less of a problem in EU as I, at least, always wear armour) to something more ordinary and less intrusive.

There's avatars solved the interaction problem by making all females one size and all males another. They used to be fanatical about not allowing anything that might intersect. SL was the other way entirely, and before floopy prims the rigid and knife-like tresses and bell-like skirts were sort of horrifying, although it was a better and more relaxed way to be.

Faints from heat stroke.

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15 July 2009

 
The Syrian Bride



An arranged marriage between a Syrian man and a woman of "undetermined" nationality - that is, Syrian from the Golan Heights - will result in the bride leaving her family forever as once she steps across the border she can never go back. The characters are all complicated real-seeming people in this compassionate look at borders and barriers - both physical and mental.

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14 July 2009

 
The Taste of Tea



I enjoyed this movie a great deal. Each member of the family is fully realised in this gentle film directed by Katsuhito Ishii.

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NZ_Walk_336
Originally uploaded by Night Zero

Awesome Flikr set for Fremont's Night Zero zombie walk (a thousand zombies, I heard).



 

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13 July 2009

 

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12 July 2009

 
Resident Evil
This is about what one would think would happen - but is an interesting experiment nonetheless. We are the creators, in many cases, of our own bad experiences, and LL has to deal with the fallout from Resident Evil as well as any SL bugs and glitches.

DancesWithRobots Soyer posted this on the forum:
"This morning, I got curious about how much stress I was putting on the grid, took off all my scripted objects and prim clothing, and set my graphics settings down to the lowest levels.

Where I WAS floating right across I sim, suddenly I was moving back and forth without a hiccup.

So, I tried driving a car I built. The border crossings, while not exactly smooth as silk, were typically quick and fairly well controlled. I did experience one issue where I froze in place next to a club and had to lower my bandwidth in order to move on, and I DID finally go offworld, but I spent a long time driving around.

So, I bumped up my graphics to reccomemnded levels, got properly dressed, (ARC of about 250 or so if you must know.) and tried again.

The hiccups were a little more severe with more frequent and longer trips to the twilight zone. But things were still working well.

Then I started putting on my huds one by one and one at a time. And as you would expect, things got incrementally worse. By now, I was beginning to notice that I'd have the same sorts of issues in the same places.

Then, hudless again. I invited a friend to drive with me. She didn't have much in the way of attachments--a mystitool and ao. But she had on scripted blingy shoes that once removed, dropped her ARC from 1900 to 500.

We had a nice drive with a few bumps, but generally recovered without much trouble.

Then, I asked her to put on her blingy scripted shoes again and we crashed at the next sim border.

No I'm not blaming the shoes. Or the huds or anything other than my own practices. I'm not about to give up all my custom viewer settings, or my huds and gadgets. But I WILL be giving a lot of thought to what I really need."

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Holy moley - thundering a lot again. My 'net cut out earlier and who knows what will happen now. It's a balmy 57° 56° F now :-D


 
Strange Weather
Rumbling thunder* woke me up - long waves of it 10 seconds long at least. The sky was brownish, and when the sun poked above the hills it gave a greenish light. The heavy blanket of clouds allowed the sun to be seen only in the small band above the hills. The long rumbling waves continued for hours, getting closer then moving away, and has finally stopped or gone out of earshot. It's 56° F and not very light - odd for mid July.

* This is not a thundery area.



11 July 2009

 


If you can't see my embedded window but want to see Just Leap In (which is what it is) try going to their demo page and downloading the JLI plugin: HERE.

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10 July 2009

 

The Big Picture: 2009 Venice Biennale

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08 July 2009

 

HBA found this wonderful website - Plan 59


 
From Candide:

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

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07 July 2009

 
Just Leap In on Tuesdays

I don't usually care about weekly get-togethers for things, but for some reason I like JLI enough that the weekly thing gets me thinking in a good way. I'm usually not very blabby but for some reason - maybe just because the devs don't say a lot (they are always very laid back and seem to be smiling in a mild way, and listening). I wind up talking a lot - actually today I was embarrassed to be on such an extended blabbathon, and ducked out. It was... like I was writing a blogpost or something =======:O

I'm decking out one of my spaces with clickable links to my yootoob vids, and made a "click to view video in browser" texture since I'd been wandering Sean's space looking for links and either couldn't find them or there were none. I'm just fiddling about trying to decide what I want to use it for. I can see using it to hang out with friends/family as it's a much lower threshold to enter than SL. I'll see if I can drag some people in.


 

11th July Performances

Two shows: 2pm and 2:50pm.
As is usual, admission is free!
Thrill to the daring antics of Professor Anfarmoffski's marvelous trained fleas! Show includes songstress Kitty Zimmer, comedy duo Tornado and Sands, dancer Alazi Sautereau, and the Sir Thomas Beecham New Dance Company.
EVENT LISTING
Join us on the Airship Theatre parked above the Eleanor Theatre in Phobos!
Blog

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And tonight's offering for the
Inadvertent
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Film Festival
is
Almost Famous

This happy little film is Cameron Crowe's semi-to three-quarters-autobiographical coming-of-age flick, which I didn't know had PSH in it until I started playing it. Is he in EVERYTHING?



06 July 2009

 
Another CLUE?


 
do i have to buy a baby to get pregnant??

"i got a note card saying i was pregnant i after i.... but i took a pregnancy test and it said i wasnt pregnant

wheres the clinic???"

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Five! :-D

I went to Iris and flew around in my usual rezday ritual.


 
Hmmm... 42° F last night, and overcast today.



05 July 2009

 
Kicked in the Balls*

I was at Combat Cards and my vision went kablooey. I was going to try to tough it out but Doc arrived and I logged off and went to lie down with my eyes closed and have a think. It could be the m.s., as vision problems are common. I didn't think it was an eyeball problem. It might well be a migraine caused by all the intense flashes, lack of sleep, etc. I've had just one that affected my vision, but my brother suffered enormously from migraines that affected his vision, sometimes brought on by the intense light/shadow/light/shadow of driving down a treed Aussie road in bright sun (but he has suffered less as he has grown older).

Dunno yet if I'll go to the doctor as I wouldn't be able to afford the tests he'd want, let alone any treatment (which there probably is none of anyway). When I first got m.s. my vision went double for a month or two, and I had all kinds of neurologists then and they did nothing. It was a very hard time, and I said if it ever happened again it would be game over.

Update: I think it was just a migraine effect, and I'm nearly back to (ab)normal.

* eyeballs

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I think it's stopped for the night. My ears hurt.

Update 1am: Nope, that was wrongo.



04 July 2009

 
Ugh Zostipated Again :[

My ears hurt from the fire crackers and I'm hot and headachey. And my neck hurts. And I tried to rest just now but it didn't work.

I suppose I'll work some more :((


 

Kat Victorious at Spaceport

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I tried to video during a performance and forgot stupid Avatar Imposters :(
Ah, well - will need to redo, but meanwhile join us at the Airship Theatre in Phobos for live variety from The Show Must Go on!

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Subz
Once at work the transportation manager was complaining about needing to get a sub driver, and I said, "No one ever tells me anything." Pause. "I didn't even know we HAD a submarine." Transportation manager, "HAHAHA!" In Second Life we normal cantankerous and independent people rub elbows with subs - not substitutes or submarines, but submissives, who have a kind of control-based sexual role play going on. It used to bother me greatly (it went over really big when I offered to help one escape - haha!) but now I just see it as part of the shifting pattern of SL that reveals more layers of the human psyche than are dreamt of in my philosophy, so to speak.

Two of our yaks are submissives (actually one is on an alt), which means nothing much except that since subs want to wear special attachments for role play (so their dom can control them) and since the yak avatars are composed of attachments, the subs need to be careful as they don't want to mess up their role play by inadvertently replacing their sub accoutrements with a yak head and hooves. This is all voluntary and although it doesn't appeal to me one bit, it's what they like to do.

I blogged ages ago about some Christian dude asking me if I'd be submissive to him. I said, "No. Would you be submissive to me?" That caused him to splutter and shout - haha!


 
Batten the Hatches
Oh, the local yokels are having a Fourth of July parade on the water. Here comes an Uncle Sam blow-up doll. Flags, bunting, balloons. Motorboats and jetskis in a line. I've always considered the locals to be enemies, but one can't reasonably fault them today for being jingoistic 2 da max, I suppose. I don't think they had one last year - or I might've been in the shower or something.

Oh, a boat dressed as a pink car with fins. A huge "God Bless America" sign. A, um... huge Uncle Sam bobblehead doll or something? Screaming and yelling and car-horn honking.

The house next door has been sanded and spiffed up for the annual gathering of a clan John refers to as "hillbillies." It will be about 90° F and sunny, and very noisy all day. I'm sure it will be the same tomorrow. I get very sick from people's evil barbecue smoke, which pools up in here, so I'm just closing the house off and will put on a/c if needed (may be on for half an hour or so at about 5 or 6 but usually isn't needed).


 
Sorting, sorting, over the bounding main...

I'm sorting and processing, and trying to do it all in a highly organised fashion as the raw clips are just too numerous and too similar to do otherwise. I broke it down into times/areas and I'm doing the manageable ones first. If I leave the biggest until last I'll be carried along on a wave of "nearly there."

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03 July 2009

 
Zosted.

I filmed from 12:30 am to 9 am, then went to bed at 9:15 and got up at 9:46. Thank god it wasn't 9:45 or I'd be tired. I started sorting through 100 gigs-worth of mostly uninteresting footage, renaming/assessing/sorting. Fun times. Actually, for staying up all night working like a fiend it was not bad - congenial workmates helped.

The sorting part is tedius but it's important not to get too jiggy as a piece with a crap beginning might well have a fab middle, and it's just not possible to remember individual clips. Usually I wind up getting sick of it and racing through, but I just can't this time as it isn't my project.

It's Quite Hot here today.

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02 July 2009

 
I have to stay up all night for a job. It doesn't start for a couple of hours.

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I like the visual part of fireworks, and the smell, but there are (common) illegal kinds that have no visuals at all and just make an eardrum-shattering boom for no reason I understand. New (at least to me) this year: fireworks that sound like machine guns :( This poor (drinking water) lake will be filled with toxic (presumably) debris by Monday.

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Geezer Grid Expansion
(or maybe it's contraction)

Today I chimed in a thread about infohubs, first saying young people like hanging around on street corners irritating their elders, and that's fine, then:

"We need some geezer infohubs. They could have a lout-repulsing code name like "educational."

I never lose an opportunity to promote my geezer scheme, however it has yet to reach the tipping point."

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01 July 2009

 
And while we are on the subject of Bach...



THIS is an interesting video.

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I waited ages for the animated documentary Waltz with Bashir to come out on dvd, and now it's here - w00t! I'm in the middle of this excellent film.

DG Design Network:
"Contrary to industry rumours, the animation in Waltz with Bashir was not achieved through rotoscoping techniques and Goodman actively fights this misconception whenever he can.
‘I’d like to state that the movie has absolutely zero percent rotoscope. Every time one of my animators hears or reads about someone on the other side of the planet saying the movie was in rotoscope, I get a phone call, regardless of the hours.’

‘Every movement in this movie was created and invented in the animator’s head, and not copied over live footage. Sometimes we watched the interviews for reference, but we never drew over them. Instead we tried to stylise and re-create them.’

It's a significant achievement - the film's animation is gorgeous.

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