Run Away Home

Now that I've bought my silly little plot of land in an unfashionable corner of Zindra, I've futzed around with putting freebie buildings on it, but have already screwed up the "tiki hut" I picked up somewhere. I'm working on building a more elegant islander house, though, so may soon be shopping for textures.

However, I spent too long at it; Today I have a "SLangover" from a poor night's sleep, which was not entirely due to "new builder's befuddlement."

My partner Rock Fall, who's inactive in SL, greeted me with bad news when I returned with takeout food. His mom's breast cancer has returned, and the topic is not something I can go into detail on my RL blog, since she's been known to read it (and ask adorably bewildered questions about the Internets).

I love her very much, and though any cancer diagnosis is bad, this is badder; the cancer is advanced and thought to be agressive. My husband is understandably upset and so is everyone else. And I have this intense need, while online, to re-create a childhood home of mine that I haven't seen since I was 4 years old.

Why? I saw a similar low-cost, low-prim home on Xstreet, and thought it might be an easier "my first house" than the tiki hut/ bure' one based on two tapered cylinders with teak floors I have in mind.

So what is it that I think will be so much easier? A simple "adobe" or pueblo styled house, with three levels, with exposed rafters. I think I might be able to do it all pretty easily with standard textures and white "stucco" walls.

Why? Because Christmas is coming, and I need to feel it this year more than most. I'll make luminarias, and strings of blue Christmas lights, and I'll build a piñon pine tree, too.

Again, why? Because I lost my own mom several years ago, and I don't want to lose another one so soon.

I'm building fortifications against sorrow, on a foundation of happy memories from long ago. And I'll invite friends "over," and have music, and give them gifts of luminarias and Southwestern pottery. And maybe I'll make myself the sterling silver squash-blossom necklace I've always wanted...

Who knows? Maybe I'll recreate things that I've lost or broken over the years, too. It's my Second Life, after all.

Landed Gentry

Now I've gone and done it, bought a cheap plot of land.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Indian Paintbrush

Taken at Olympic National Park

Skye Galaxy

I've been tinkering around with building stuffs and trying to figure out what I'd be interested in making, being, doing in Second Life (rather than continuing the highly scattershot and random existence I currently have) and also I've been keeping my eyes and ears open for inspiration.

Well, have a look and listen to this:



This kid is going places - it's clear from his voice and piano playing that he's going to be a major talent, maybe even break out of Second Life and into First Life. Yet the video appears at first to be amateurish screen-cap machinima - but watch and wait. It's one take, no edits as far as I can tell, and after the camera finally finds the performer after following a few awkward dancing Lego men and seated avatars all using the same "sit-low-priority" animation, the camera pulls away and up, up, up. You'll probably gasp at some point when you realize what locality the Second Life venue mimics - and it's pretty impressive. At that point, I realized that the machinima director actually got exactly the shot (and feeling) that was needed for the song.

I'll definitely have to look this Skye Galaxy up on Monday - that's 8pm for me, so I should be able to catch the show. Maybe see you there?

Monday 10/12

Skye galaxy 6PM - Skye Galaxy Live at Gwampa's Dance Kamp

If you listen to live music in SL by now you have probably heard the buzz about Skye Galaxy. This young man has a voice that is impressive and a following that is growing by the day. He plays keyboard and guitar which you can sample here. If you can't make this show, then do yourself a favor and make sure you catch him soon. Go early, Skye is filling sims. In Zeide Kamp. [SLurl teleport at this link]

I Builded Me Something!

If anyone is reading this, you'll know I haven't had much interest in actually making or building stuff, just shopping and socializing. Well, after the exertions of the STEAM hunt, and seeing how people have created amazing things, I was suddenly inspired.



I can barely rezz a box, but somehow I managed to make a primitive type of step tansu, with a texture I'd gotten from somewhere. I managed to box up stuff I'm not using, and then put those boxes into the tansu steps. I have a lot of clothes and "furniture" and funny party props that just take up space (and then my inventory takes longer to load). And I'm about to have a ton more, because I have about 100 boxes to unpack and sort from the hunt.

I got the idea from one of Torley Linden's helpful video tutorials, YouTube - How to manage your inventory. In it, he mentioned the simple idea of creating and decorating a gift box and putting stuff in it (or as the running joke on SL has it, "stuffs").

I had to struggle and fuss to figure out what is and is not possible (why can't there be folders to organize objects in boxes??) and had to figure out how to put hovertext labels on, but eventually I ended up with something that looks approximately like a step tansu. Yes, yes, sure, sure, I'm coming up on my 2nd year as a Second Life resident. Mock me, I don't care; it's the first thing I've built completely on my own was my idea. I know there are more advanced ways to do this - I actually HAD a freebie organizer at one time, but couldn't figure out what to do with it (should have kept the script, oh well). It was a stupid looking heart that I got in a hunt, and I can't find the shop now to go back and look at other examples.

Yes, I know I could do it in 1 big prim, or in 3, but I didn't know how to handle the sqaure texture that well, so I stayed with the plain square box. To be usable, the prims have to be unlinked, but they have to be linked to be moved in one piece. I may link them once I'm done putting stuffs in the boxes.

Steampunkery

Yes, yes. I've been hunting again and have nearly finished the STEAM hunt. Some recent experiences while online seem to be leading me in the direction of adopting a more steampunk-inspired persona, or at least to get out of my comfortable habits (and out more).

I enjoy light role-play and can crack on a bit in Victorian idioms, and the little puffs of steam coming from my hat amuse me no end.

I recently bought a car from the famous Curio Obscura shop and have been teaching myself to drive; this hasn't been terribly successful but it has been a lot of fun.



Here I am with my little car at the recent Cafe Wellstone Dancing Liberally event, where everyone came with (or as) their favorite guilty pleasures. I should have taken more pictures - my favorite costume spotted was the cute Hershey's Kiss one.



Actually, I spent quite a lot of time at Curio Obscura. It's a very entertaining place, especially when the trick posing stands (used to immobilize one's avatar so clothes and accessories can be tried on and adjusted) turn a person upside-down and dump them in the middle of the floor below.



This is what the shop looks like from outside - when I went there, the link I had takes you straight inside, and there are no windows, so you have no idea of what the structure looks like. But when browsing upstairs, I came on a kind of control panel with lots of knobs and buttons and stuff that looked like organ stops. The seat said "sit here" so I figured it might end up having me play a tune. No, what happens is it forces your perspective so that suddenly you seem to be outside, looking up at the shop, which is revealed as a rather scary self-motive prim-harvesting mechanical crustacean. At least, that's what I presumed from the look of the big sawblade and pincer. Anyway, the eyes glow and change colors, not sure why the effect shows the eye color in two places.

I'm close to hitting my limit on my Flickr account, and realized that some of my uploads to Blogger seemed to be hitting a free Picasa web album, so today I downloaded Picasa onto the new computer and struggled a bit with figuring out the file structure, organizing pictures taken inworld on the new machine, and so on.

It's not perfectly easy to use Picasa/Blogger, and I wish my image settings were "sticky" on the web album page, but I'm getting used to it.

Netroots in Second Life 2009 Builds

These are just a collection of shots from the recent Netroots in Second Life 2009 build, including some of the booths members of the Cafe Wellstone Democratic Club made to publicise different groups and causes that had a presence either at the real life convention in Philadelphia, or in Second Life itself.


The avatar created for Markos Moulitsas' appearance in Second Life.




The Books for Soldiers booth, a charity that donates reading material to active duty military personnel.



One of the booths.