Littlest Things (Remix)

A few months ago, Bethy and her partner, Kafka Dinzeo (aka Mic Rocka in RL) asked me to make a video for them of one of Kafka’s songs. As has been apparent in my output, it took me a couple of months to have the time to finish editing it.

Remixing Lily Allen’s “Littlest Things”, Kafka overlaid it with a lovely, heartfelt rap which shows the enormous talent which has garnered him a loyal following in SL.

Roslin Petion of Fleur was so kind to allow us to film on her sim for most of the shots, and we did Kafka’s individual shots at one of his concerts at The Gentlemen’s Club and on a set I built on our sim.

I’m really proud of how this video turned out.

Technical info: Most of the tracking shots were made with the Filming Path HUD, but toward the end of the shoot I discovered Joystick Flycam, which is in my opinion the coolest hidden toy in SL at the moment; the extremely smooth shots of Kafka and the dance were shot this way. (I intend to write up a tutorial on using Flycam sometime soon.) I captured with FRAPS in Windows as usual, and edited in Final Cut Express on my iMac.

A typical evening

So last night, after Catero left me at Armidi in Bethy’s highly-qualified, yet Armidi-overwhelmed hands ;), Puma tp’ed Miko Omegamu, who was highly inebriated, and Miko proclaimed we had to have an “underpants” party.

So I made a careful investment in Armidi dainties (the latest release of which are positively gorgeous), in which we then danced in the middle of the store to the delight and/or annoyance of many, I’m sure.

Suddenly, the theme of the party changed to “what you looked like as a noob”. We all dug deep in our inventory to find our old shapes, hair, clothes and skins. Amazingly enough, I managed to recreate what I looked like at about week 2 of my SL experience, which I honestly found quite appalling to relive. Here, then, are never-before-seen pictures of Aenea v1, decked out in my old shape (named, appropriately enough, “new shape”), a CS Charmed skin (o.O the makeup!), old Lost Thereian hair, Mynx shoes, and my first non-freebie outfit from Nyte ‘n’ Day (back when she was still in the same sim as ETD). There is no better evidence than this of how much creators and quality have improved over the past 1.5 years.

Sidenote: If you weren’t meant to blog your moments of embarassment, what did God invent blogs for?

My regular 2am tp arrived to see something Spiral Walcher had built, a pose that replicated the look of a frog in his amazing (and still-under-construction) Rezzable build. Now that I think of it, that pose could also be easily mistaken for something of a more sexual nature.

And THEN. Then I realized that in the process of upgrading my Huddles this weekend, I’d not only lost all the no-copy AO poses I had from Outrider, but I’d also lost ALL of my no-copy Sine Wave dances. I cried and gnashed my teeth, opened and closed and reopened my inventory, inspected my old Huddles, but they’re all gone. That means I’m out about L$5000 in purchased dances, which is a huge bummer for a dance-a-holic like me. WHY OH WHY do creators insist on making no-copy, no-transfer items such as poses or animations (which are intangible and can easily disappear into the SLether)? Yes, I know, so that clubs can’t use make copies to use in multiple dance balls or whatever. But that is bad policy for regular people like myself.

So I wrote up a very nice notecard for the Sine Wave people, asking them if they could possibly serve a replacement, and gave all of the relevant transaction data. (Sidenote #2: ALWAYS download your transaction history every month!) Of course, after I’d sent it I read the tiny letters in the customer service person’s profile that said they won’t replace any items lost due to bugs or errors in third party software, which seems like a giant cop-out. So I’m not sure how it’ll work out.

I still haven’t received a response, so I don’t know what tack they’ll take on it. I hope it works out for the best, because otherwise I’m not buying anything else from them ever. I’ll just do the freebie rave dance everywhere I go, or bum off of others’ chimeras.

SO. Not in bed early, but through no fault of my own.

The last call

The fashionably-correct thing to say these days is that I finally got in to the Last Call sale. But more truthfully, I finally bothered to try to go, and at 9SLT on a Wednesday there were only 31 people in the sim, so I had no problem at all and shopped with relatively little lag.

I haven’t written about fashion on this blog for a while. I used to be deeply passionate about Ginny’s clothes, and I’d visit Last Call maybe once a week to pick up the new releases. It was a love-hate relationship — in my transaction stats, for the longest time Ginny was the largest recipient of my lindens, and the vast majority of my clothing inventory (and I assume, of many other women’s) was created by her. There was also always something about Ginny’s av which grated me (yes, I know, it’s a silly sensation, but Ginny’s face always looked so *smug* in her ads…).

That feeling never got in the way of the enjoyment which I got from her work. What truly was important was the amazing quality and the breadth of the creativity that she displayed week after week. Her output was truly amazing in design and quality, and unmatched in volume by any other designer in SL to date.

I was of course mentally conscious that Ginny has left us. Last night, though, as I browsed the racks, I was struck by a feeling of nostalgia and melancholy that I was totally unprepared for from actually being in the store looking at the posters one last time, and knowing that there will never be any more new releases. Seeing the incredible display of her craft in Photoshop and Lightwave which defined the bleeding edge of fashion in SL, and which in a sense expressed her personality as I knew her. It was also touching to interact with her once again, enjoying the last bit of art which she created in her life. To know that this was the last time I’d be grated by her av , even as I clicked on that Buy button just one more time, seemed somehow fitting.

I never met Ginny, but she always made Aenea look good. Visits to Last Call were a part of my slife — almost a rite of passage and of having grown up as an av: Last Call always meant dressing up in grown-up clothes.

There is something in that any artist will always be remembered by the oeuvre they leave behind. I was happy that Ginny’s partner decided to make these final sales transfer, for now I know that Ginny’s work will be passed from one person to another, enjoyed by many, perpetuating her legacy and impact on SL fashion.

Spiral’s Scarab

I’ve written several times about my love for the art that people make in SL, where there are no physical restrictions, and where the only limits (at least in theory) are what one can imagine. Previous recipients of my love have been Starax, the Greenies Home, and the ZeroG Skydancers, among others.

I was fortunate enough to have been invited to be a member of Not Possible In Real Life (NPIRL), a group that Bettina Tizzy founded for the appreciation of these kind artists and their work, in spite of my lack of apparent talent. The group discovers and is often the first to see some of the most amazing creations on the grid, and I have to say that it’s been one of the most enriching parts of my second life over the past few months.

Last week Bett invited the group (she is the consummate Connector ) to explore the Synaesthesia sim, I got to meet Spiral Walcher, about whom Bett has written extensively. Spi invited several of us to visit his newest build (the subject of the aforementioned article), and I was stunned by what I saw.

Spi has invented a new kind of art in SL, taking advantage of the Glow feature that has been introduced in the recent WindLight viewer. Using barely one prim, one texture, and one simple texture rotation script, Spi has created some beautiful, hypnotic pieces of art. His Electric Forest is merely a proof of concept compared to the much vaster work in production that he showed me.

Photo by Bettina Tizzy, npirl.blogspot.com.

In fangirlish awe, I begged sufficient hints to figure out some of his techniques, and the simplicity of the idea and its implementation is astounding. Spi’s late night (~4AM) IM’s over the past week set off storms of buzzing creativity in my poor, sleep-deprived head.

Spi showed me his latest piece a few days ago, a scarab bracelet and necklace which include one his glow figures as a jewel, which he was kind enough to gift me. To see it up close is mesmerizing:

The video can’t do the fine details justice — you’ll have to see it in person. Spi says that he hopes to offer these pieces for sale soon, a truly unique NPIRL piece of jewelry.

I’m so excited to see the final product of his work. In the meantime, I create my own figures based on Spi’s work, and buzz with the possibility.

PS - YAY!! WordPress.com now allows embedding Vimeo video!

Making cute

Nee Nee, originally uploaded by bethyheart.

Bethy was so kind as to help me update my profile pics last night. In my opinion there’s no one in SL who does portraits as well as she does — she always seems to bring out the best in me.

<3 you sis!

Sticking my head out into the new year

A/me dusts off this blog, looks around, and thinks it’s cozy enough to settle in for a stretch.

Hey there!! Happy New Year!!

SOOOO…

Most of my activity lately has been on Twitter, which is my new sideline obsession and which is excerpted in the sidebar of this blog (yeah, down there, around the posts from October?). Thanks to Gwyneth Llewelyn, who posted the wonderful link to a UK Telegraph writer’s predictions for 2008; Second Life figures prominently.

February: The population of Second Life passes that of the entire continent of Africa. An independence movement argues that control of the servers should be handed over to participants in the game. Mobs of angry avatars besiege in-game branches of Gap and American Apparel.

Linden Lab, owners of the game, denounce the “cyber-terrorists” and cancel their accounts, impounding their imaginary assets. They are sued for restraint of trade, theft of intellectual property, and human rights breaches. The accounts are reinstated, and Linden Lab signs over control of the game to the rebels.

Their leader declares himself President of Second Life, and promises to hold free elections. Asked at an online press conference about the timing of the elections, President Dude-Mom-Later’s avatar turns into a bee.

 Later in the year, we again come to bear on the world stage:

June: Based on its real-world GDP, its “soft power” and its popularity, Second Life is admitted to the G8, displacing Canada. The virtual world sends a purple woman with a narwhal horn, a leather basque and improbably large breasts to the summit.

Second Life joins the World Trade Organisation and Nato. “The EU is for pussies,” its ambassador says in a curiously floaty voice.

/me wonders if the “improbably large breasts” are perhaps *sculpty* breasts? (Unfortunately, I can’t find the link Catero passed me for actual humongous sculptie breasts on OnRez. They were rather impressive.)

And finally, the belligerent segment of the Second Life population finally takes on WoW:

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.”

Treaty obligations signed in the summer oblige Nato forces to launch a tactical strike on World of Warcraft’s Northern European servers. An estimated 100,000 people in Sweden are fatally irradiated. Azeroth is destroyed.

YAY!! And so Second Life’s plan for world domination comes to fruition at last.

Am I a geek because I laughed so much at that?

Eight random facts about me.

The Rules:
1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Eight random facts about me:

1. I’ve never been tagged before in one of these memes on my blog. I’m not excited by it, but I was sort of expecting/dreading it in a way, especially as it was a way to make me actually post.
2. I was going to be on the cover of a magazine here in Mexico, with a six-page photo-spread accompanied by an article that I wrote (the first time I would have had my writing published), but a) the magazine went belly-up the issue before mine, and b) the media’s euphoria with SL lapsed at the same time. I need to remember to post the proofs from that sometime here, just for old time’s sake.
3. I’ve never smoked in my life, and I only started drinking when I was 20 because I went to Europe, and I decided if you don’t drink in Europe you’re just totally dumb and uncool. Also, wine’s cheaper there.
4. I only learned how to SMS and what it was useful for this year. I normally consider myself ahead of the curve on technology, though.
5. I’ve lived in the same apartment for over ten years. Yes, I’m paying rent. Yes, my landlord loves me.
6. I want to move away from Monterrey, but I’m afraid to leave.
7. I am intensely critical of everything I do, which explains the wide variety of unfinished projects that I have lying around. It’s easier to not finish something than to endure the sharp edge of my self-critique.
8. I took a skills and aptitude test at work this year called the Birkman. My results came out heavily skewed toward creative (musical and artistic), scientific and entrepreneurial interests. I work in finance, though. The first thing the evaluator said to me when she saw my results was, “What are you *doing* working here?” I still ask myself that question everyday.

/me makes a mental note that “random” does not necessarily have to mean “boring”. I apologize to my readers, and proceed to tag Bethany Heart, Hillary Melville, Bettina Tizzy, Helix Rehula, and Ananke Kronos. That should round out every last blogger in SL.

Separated at Birth?

 

Finding myself

It’s been a tough couple of months for me… tons of work, tons of real life demands on my time, tons of travel. I miss writing here, but I also realize that with so little time spent in SL, I have little to contribute to this discussion, which was always supposed to be about my second life.

So going from a full-time SLer (4+ hours a night) to a *really* part-time SLer (logging in a couple of times a week at most) practically cold-turkey has taught me an important lesson:

SL is a harsh mistress.

There *is* no such thing as part-time SL. If you can’t make the time commitment, you can’t keep the relationships which make SL so valuable. As a part-timer, your scope of options becomes more limited. You can’t get involved in long-term projects or relationships because you’re only in for a bit; you can’t keep up with the topics or the conversation, even. It’s tough to engage with people who are full-timers, because you can’t relate as well to the minutia of everyday life in SL anymore — the relationships, the events, the bugs, the (face it) drama.

So, in isolation, you wander around… explore, shop, hang around with old friends for a bit. And then you get bored, and log out. It becomes a vicious cycle.

I don’t know how to half-live my second life. I know the good things it’s done for me, and the wonderful people I love so much who are still there, but I also just can’t find the will to engage anymore on that same level as before. I miss that feeling, but I also know that moderation is good for me, in this case.

It’s a complicated time for me at the moment. My son is at his most precious age ever and I don’t want to miss that. The season is obviously demanding in terms of commitments and errands; and spending Christmas vacation essentially offline (no Internet for two weeks? I’m going to die.) means that the outlook for SL time isn’t going to improve soon.

I don’t know if it’s a self-reinforcing filter, but it seems like SL is going through a tidal change at the moment. Not necessarily among my friends, but it seems like a renewal is happening. Oldbies (omg I’m one of them) are leaving, or disengaging, or reducing their involvement. Friends have sold land they had for years, or closed their SL businesses. Maybe it’s a natural trend in SL, and I’m only just noticing it in my old age. Or maybe something’s changed, that has changed the value of SL for many people who formerly got a great deal more from it. (the constant stream of problems posted daily on the official Linden blog surely wouldn’t be a motivator for that, would it?)

I promised Bethy I wasn’t leaving, and especially not suddenly (her exact words were, “pulling a Bombi”. You know who you are out there, folks. ), and I really don’t want to. But I need to resolve the dilemma of doing this on a part-time basis in a way that still has value to me and still feeds all that I used to get out of SL.

I’m not making threats; I’ve been accused of that before and it’s not my style. But this blog has always been an outlet for my feelings, and lately I’ve needed to be able to get these things off my chest.  Things will play out as they must, and I’ll most likely still be around in some fashion, as there is too much water under the bridge to just let it go like that.

encuérese

Ananké escribió un post super provocador en su “bló” buenísimo ayer:

La cosa es que [...] platíquenme ¿por qué les da tanto pudor mostrar sus perfectas skins en SL?

Digo e insisto, esas skins no tienen celulitis ni estrías ni cicatrices, lo hermoso de esas imperfecciones sólo está en RL, y si no me creen, pa’ los que están en el DF vayan a la exposición de Spencer Tunick y los casi 20mil encueratrices que anduvimos por allá en una fría mañana de mayo. ¡Ahí si pa’ que vean harta celulitis, estría, cicatriz, imperfección en su máximo esplendor! Nada de RaC ni Naughty, ahí éramos de todos colores, olores, tamaños, dimensiones, razas, credos e ideologías…despojándonos además de la ropa, de pudores y prejuicios…¿por qué en este mundo de SL no se puede?…Mi no comprender.

Ananké Kronos, Lo Inevitable Sucedería

Al empezar a dejarle comentario, se volvió un post hecho y derecho (últimamente me ha estado pasando mucho eso…):

Anky nos reta que porqué no somos capaces de encuerarnos libremente con nuestros perfectos cuerpos en SL. Para mi hay tres temas aquí, y todos difieren de los comentarios que hizo ella, o que dejaron en su blog:

1. Porque me identifico muchísimo con mi avi. Aunque a lo mejor esté mal, yo no hago gran distinción entre la que soy en RL, y la que soy en SL. Mi forma de comportarse es igual; si pudiera, en RL me vestiría como me visto en SL (uy, si los lindens fueran dólares, olvídate! ). Me identifico tanto con Aenea que tengo pudor por ella; mis modos en rl las traduzco directamente a ella. No puedo separarnos, y por eso no puedo hacer roleplay con Aenea, ni soy buena para tener un alt. Así como me ven, me leen y me oyen, así soy, entonces no me puedo portar de manera distinta cuando estoy vestida de Aenea que cuando estoy vestida de yo (osea, rl).

(Corrolaria chistosa: hb me comenta ayer que tenía rato de no ver a Aenea, que qué se había hecho. Así que le mostré esta foto del domingo:

… y me regañó, que eso no era la imagen que debiera proyectar Aenea… Claro que este look fue una cosa momentánea, un sentimiento que me despertó el increíble pelo de Armidi, pero como quiera lo adoro por el comentario.)

2. Como mujer en SL, te atienes a las embestidas y el acoso de los hombres; si vestida relativamente conservadoramente me lo hacen, imagínate si me vieran encuerada. Para las que no estamos buscando ese tipo de atención, es super molesto tener que estar siempre buscando evitar ese tipo de situaciones. No se si sea ventaja, pero muchas veces intimido por mi forma de hablar (palabrotas! ironía!), y generalmente ando con amigos en lugar de ir a sims donde me van a hacer sentir incómoda, pero es algo que concientemente busco evitar de ser posible…

3. Una gran motivante para mi en SL es la moda y la ropa. Claro que me encanta mi skin, y trato de tener los skins más bonitos, pero son como para que el perchero esté lo mejor posible para que luzca el look total, no para estar viéndome en cueros… Es más, yo creo que me tardé como dos o tres meses antes de haber conocido el hmmhmm de mi skin de güera de Lovey Darling… (a mi me dio un chorro de risa darme cuenta de eso ) Obviamente este es el punto menos importante, pero es signficativo que tengo miles de ropa y miles de pelos, y no voy a dejar de usarlos para andar en cueros.

Entonces por como me identifico con Aenea, el encuerarme para mi tiene un signficado especial, igual que lo tiene en RL. Llámalo pudor o algo más, pero es compartir una parte de mi, porque no puedo separar lo sensual de los pixeles. Esos pixeles engloban también el 100% de mi conciencia en ese momento que vivo de mi segunda vida, y lo que hacen esos pixeles es representación fidedigna de lo que siento y percibo en cada instante. Aenea no es muñeca, aunque lo parezca.

O como decía famosamente la Jessica Rabbit, “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.”

Second-to-last Radiohead post

To the two readers who still follow this Second Life-cum-Radiohead blog:

I got my download today, and I’m about to sync it to my iPod (in other words, I HAVE YET TO LISTEN TO IT. Am I weird?). But, as you may have picked up from previous music-related posts, I am extremely anal about what goes into my iPod. The fact that this album has no cover art has impeded me from actually syncing it.

So I made my own cover. There was no creativity involved, just freely sampling from the imagery on the In Rainbows site. But for the completists like me out there, this is a pleasant alternative to the slightly more gaudy image that was suggested here.

which is downloadable here.

And finally, people with *actual* talent posted some great alternatives here.

Why “second-to-last post”? I’ll undoubtedly have something to say when I actually get around to listening to the thing.

Postscript - Some of the covers at the Hicks Design link were so good that I ended up using different images on each song

To renew or not to renew

I got this email today:

Dear Aenea Nori,
We hope you’re enjoying your Second Life.  This is a reminder that your Second Life Premium Annual Plan will be renewed on October 23, 2007, at which time you’ll be charged $72.00(USD).  You don’t need to do anything; renewal and billing are automatic.
To review or modify your account details, or to change or cancel your Membership Plan, visit https://secondlife.com/account.

Best Wishes,
Linden Lab and the Second Life Team
http://www.secondlife.com

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. Yes, I love Second Life. But my initial motivation for becoming a Premium account was the First Land offer. That was my first and last relationship with the Mainland, tyvm, and I made a tidy profit on that little transaction at the time (gracias Nadir!!). Since then, my tier has been donated to the Bluffs to support the upkeep of ZeroOne’s project. So in essence, I gain very little from the 512m tier associated with the account. I now own land in Pinswang from the Otherland Group with which I’m very happy, and for which I don’t need tier.

The other benefit of the Premium account is the stipend. While not as lucky as others (as the stipend rate has declined over time), I managed to lock in a L$500 stipend level when I signed up. So on a purely financial level, on the Lindex US$72 will buy me L$19,000, while in stipends I will receive L$26,000. This one’s a no-brainer, although my real linden burn rate is much higher than that :/

So it comes down to this: Do I plan to stay another whole year here? Can I imagine myself having spent another year of my life devoting so much time (~20-30 hours a week) to this game? Can I continue to spend that much time here faced with the increasing demands on my RL time (I thought toddlerhood would demand less of me than babyhood, but boy, was I wrong )

I read recently that the net result of seriously playing games like SL is that we *make* time for them, one way or another, even when we claim we have no free time available. So that means there must be some 500,000 sleep-deprived SL users who take time out of sleep in order to invest it in their second lives. (There are also always the cautionary articles about those who choose instead to take it out of work or out of their real lives… I’m looking at *you*, Wired Magazine.)

I guess I can afford the 72 bucks (plus what I’m paying monthly for Pinswang). I can’t really foresee what I’ll be doing in a year, but I know that I still love the people, experiences and skills that I have here. I know that I’m sacrificing real time for this — time for my son; for my husband; for exercise; time for me, even. I understand that I *will* go through phases (like now), where it’s more or less important to me, or where I take time for other activities, or where I just choose to sleep for a while to stave off the feeling of accumulated exhaustion.

But this has become my hobby, and many of my ancillary interests revolve around it. It tweaks the receptors in my brain that savor social interaction, that crave the mental challenge of learning and dominating something new, that frolic in the new experiences and that rejoice in a good conversation with interesting people. I don’t get these stimuli in RL nearly as often as I’d like, so at the moment, I see no suitable substitute for this addiction.

Seventy-two dollars is cheap in that sense. /me antes up again.

you’ll hate me for this

Continuing Radiohead-obsession week: OMG WHAT A BRILLIANT WRITE-UP. Make for about an hour to read it, though.

I <3 good music journalism.

Pérdida de Inventario

De un comentario que dejé en el blog de Anky:

Yo he perdido chorromil cosas en el último mes (por ejemplo mis shapes). Generalmente son cosas que tengo rato (tipo unos tres meses) de no ponerme o usar, pero he perdido ropa, zapatos, pelos, ¡mis orejitas neko! y HUDs… No les pasa a todos los avis, pero una vez que empieza en tu inventario, parece que sigues perdiendo cosas gradualmente. Es muy frustrante y aparte caro estar perdiendo artículos por los que ya había pagado…

Envié mail a soporte Linden, pero me dicen que lo único que se puede hacer es Clear Cache, que no arregló nada. Ellos no se hacen responsables, ni te reponen los artículos perdidos.

El único consuelo es este: Como te queda el registro del artículo en tu inventario, haz click con botón derecho y selecciona Properties. Ahi puedes ver el nombre del creador, así como la fecha en la que compraste el artículo.

Mándale un IM al creador con la fecha en la que compraste el artículo (para que puedan confirmar en sus registros tu compra), y en general con gusto te envían un repuesto de lo que perdiste (solamente no he recibido respuesta acerca de un HUD que había comprado).

Lo que es una lata es tener que hacerlo tantas veces conforme vas encontrando las cosas desaparecidas, y que algunos creadores no guardan copias de sus artículos más viejos (como por ejemplo Elika, quien borra sus pelos antiguos para optimizar su inventario) pero es peor perder tus preciados lindens en artículos perdidos…

. . . . .

Por otro lado, les doy este tip:

Vale la pena por sanidad mental ir guardando tu historial de transacciones en Excel. Para los que no sepan, este archivo se puede bajar directamente en formato Excel de la siguiente liga: http://www.secondlife.com/account/transactions.php Se pueden bajar hasta 30 días de información, y yo los voy juntando en una tabla enorme en Excel que tiene mi historial desde principios de año (no se me ocurrió hacerlo antes :/).

Así, en caso de cualquier problema facilmente puedo encontrar el registro de compra del artículo. También me permite analizar cuanto estoy gastando (!!!) y en qué tiendas (mera curiosidad ), usando tablas dinámicas sencillas.

Blown away

I visited the wheat field this weekend, and had the opportunity to meet its creator, AM Radio. I’d been seeing beautifully desolate pics appear on Flickr for a couple of weeks, and then saw the link to its location on Bettina Tizzy’s profile.

Photo from Torley Linden’s Flickr stream

Bettina’s blog, NPIRL, has become one of my favorite SL reads recently, because it tackles a topic dear to my heart — the promotion of artists who use SL as a medium to create art and experiences that are only possible here in Second Life (i.e. Dancoyote Antonelli or Starax).

AM’s build is solemn and beautiful, and it reminds me of the feeling I used to have when I lived in the midwest as a girl and the thunderstorms rolled in over the plains (where I lived it was corn on the ground, but the sky still looked like distilled fury). There is a touch of whimsy in the table set for two, with a view to the fields or to the sea, which is tempered by the forlorn old locomotive waiting to rust apart in the field.

AM apparently built this on a whim on one of IBM’s private sims, and Bettina rescued it by donating her land for him to relocate. As a result of its sudden popularity, AM has started a campaign to raise money for Heifer International toward buying a cow for a family in poverty. Donors can purchase one of several replicas of the wheat field ranging from L$1000-3000 (from the base field, to the field with the locomotive or an old rusted Ford), and AM will contribute the money raised to Heifer.org.

I bought a wheat field which will be my new skybox. I already love the juxtaposition of the wheat field with my photosphere.

In Rainbows

I don’t think I’ve expressed here what a huge Radiohead fan I am. I have every album, almost all the imports, several live recordings, and the bootleg tracks from the mini-tour they did last year to test tracks from the new album. They are without question the most listened-to artist on my iPod, and I never tire of them.

Today, they announced the release of their first new album in four years, In Rainbows, on Oct. 10th as a digital download (this is probably all over the blogosphere already…). The coolest part is that the download is Choose-Your-Own-Price:

Click the question mark next to the blanks, and you get this:

Many many years ago I was completely convinced this was the way to go for artists in the music industry. Radiohead at the moment has no record label, but this will no doubt be a huge seller worldwide, and it will validate a fan-oriented model where the artist can control their own distribution and can disintermediate the middleman who adds little value to the equation.

It remains to be seen whether they’ll be able to withstand the download onslaught next week, as they’re currently not able to process the volume of transactions they’re receiving (I tried to buy the album three times today with no luck).

BTW, I’ve listened to four of the tracks off this album already, from the pre-release tour last year. They’re all kinds of awesome, a continuation from where the band left off after Hail to the Thief.

(Sorry for interrupting your regularly-scheduled SL-focused inanities, but Radiohead’s bigger than all that for me. )

The Nicholaz Edition

I think we’ve all suffered through the increasing instability of the SL viewer over the last year of releases. Mac-based users (like me) especially have to suffer a slow, laggy client which suffers from tremendous memory leakage, and will regularly crash two or three times in one four-hour SL session.

I’d been reading for some time about Nicholaz Beresford, a German programmer who has recompiled the viewer incorporating patches that he finds to correct the most nagging problems with the viewer. In particular, he’s recovered the old IM/friendslist/chat history windows, removing the new joint “Communicator” window. But more importantly, he’s devilishly good at rooting out the problems that make the viewer unstable. I hadn’t installed it because the process seemed technically complex, and also Windows-oriented (I only use the Windows client when I play on my laptop, and in Bootcamp on those rare occasions when I’m shooting machinima).

So lucky me, I was reading his blog last week when he posted that two people had compiled Mac builds incorporating Nicholaz’s patches. I chose Barney Boomslang’s “Bleeding Edge-q” version, just because I’ve met and know of Barney, but either version should be ok. Don’t be scared by the “bleeding edge” designation — it only means that it’s using the most recent version of the Linden Lab’s Release Candidate as its base, but I’ve had no problems with it at all.

I went whole hog this weekend. I installed these versions on both my laptop (Windows) and on my Mac, and used them all weekend. I think I’m in love.

Mac: The Mac install is a little weird, as the Release Candidate doesn’t have an installer — you have to drag the application from the mounted disk image into a folder on your hard drive (I put it into a folder on my desktop, but since there are no little files generated, you could just as easily place it directly on your desktop). Then you run Barney’s patcher, select the folder into which you copied the RC, and watch as it applies Nicholaz’s patches. You then run this version of SL by double-clicking on the Release Candidate icon, which will run the patched version.

Windows: The Windows install is a bit easier, although the instructions are slightly unclear. First you install the Release Candidate. Then you unzip Nicholaz’s patcher (an .exe and three .xml files) into the same directory as the Release Candidate (which by default should be c:\Program Files\SecondLifeReleaseCandidate). Create an alias for the Nicholaz.exe file and place it on your desktop (the alias’s icon is actually a different color, a nice touch to remind you of the differing version). Run the patched SL by double-clicking on the alias.

When you start up the patched RC client, it will say you’re running Second Life (Nicholaz Edition) with the version number. What you’ll notice is a huge leap in stability and speed (NO CRASHING YAY!!!), your av’s skin texture no longer re-rezzing three or four times after you change skin or clothes, less lagging and freezing, and most notably, a return to the old interface of separate chat history, IM and friends list windows (yay!! ctrl+t works correctly for the IM window again!). In a way, I’d grown accustomed to the new window and found ways to make it more friendly to my style of SLing, so I missed it a bit, but I wouldn’t sacrifice the stability I gained with this version.

If you can handle the process of the install, I have no qualms so far in recommending that you use this version instead of the official viewer. I like that I no longer have to think about the client while I’m playing, because it just seems to work.

Losing my self in SL :/

This was funny when I first got the message when I logged in, so I snapped a screenshot. I mean, I’d dealt with missing assets, and I thought it the epitome of irony that now I’d lose body parts — I mean, which parts can even be detached? I realized that it was only that the bald I was wearing had “disappeared” from the database.

It wasn’t so funny when I later realized that I’d lost *all* of my shapes except the one I was wearing (my skirt shape). NONE of them were in the database, and I was in full panic mode, fearing I’d lose my avatar because of the random inventory loss I was experiencing. I’d also lost my various balds (I make a bald for each skin, as the bald controls the shape of the eyebrows, and each skin has different eyebrow positioning).

Over the next couple of hours, I worked to make a “backup” of the shape I was wearing, the only ways I could think of: I gave a copy to my sis Bethy and to my alt, and I copied down all my sliders to an offline text file, so in case it was necessary, I could recreate myself (I’d deal with the distortion of the skirt shape if and when necessary).

I started compiling a list of missing assets (I’d previously noticed missing clothing, hair and jewelry over the past couple of weeks) with asset UUIDs to send to Linden support, in the hope that there was some way of recovering them.

Before I was able to send the complaint, and after two hours of being a total mess, I tried one last time to put on my basic shape, and I didn’t get the dreaded error message. Most of my shapes had come back somehow. I was still missing a few balds, and all of the real assets I was missing (the hair and jewelry), but I’d recovered the items that were most important to me.

This is the first time I’ve ever had problems with the asset server. I’ve watched others complain about this particular issue in the blog and on the forums. I now know the distress this can cause. People who know me would say that I’m fairly level-headed and not given to bursts of emotion, but this had me on the verge of crying. Ana Lutetia has told me that she’s had similar temporary shape disappearance, too, and has felt the anxiety that this provokes.

My shape is a fundamental part of me; I don’t mess with it other than for minor adjustments (my Lovey skins required major shape-surgery to not have taco-sized lips).

Losing assets is losing money. It happens in rl just as it can happen in sl. I can always get more money, and I can re-purchase the assets I’ve lost. Oh well.

But losing my shape is akin to losing my identity, losing a part of myself. Yeah, I could mostly recreate it, but it would never be exactly ME again. *That* is distressing, and a much more powerful and painful sensation than I would’ve imagined it to be.

I hope this never happens to you, and I hope that LL can finally fix this problem which has been dogging them for months.