Around the SLogosphere

Before we begin, a clarification: I *hate* that word.

Animation Overriders

Lisa wrote a good post on a relatively obscure, but important, topic yesterday: the importance of poses and and how to set up your animation overrider, or AOs. I actually don’t remember seeing a tutorial on AOs around the net, and I remember that my first (and second and, quite possibly, third) AO was a real pain in the ass to set up, especially as a noob. Now, rather than trying to explain how to edit in chat, I just take my noob friends shopping and just set the AO up for them — it’s so much easier than trying to explain the editing of items in the content tab.

I used the ZHAO animation overrider until I bought my Huddles (which I am deeply in love with and cannot live without). The actual operation of the Huddles is exactly the same as ZHAO (it’s the same AO engine), but I like having it all contained in one well-designed interface, as well as having a dance ball and chimera (which allows me to share dances with friends) for all my Sine Wave dances.

Lisa Tiana asks about the possibility of having more than 5 stands at once in the ZHAO. This was a limitation in the software and a particular point of pain for me, but my fantastic über-scripter friend Neb Voom was able to hack the (open-source) ZHAO script to allow up to 20 stands; we haven’t released that script into the wild yet (because I read Huddles was about to get a new release; of course, that was last March :/).

Girls and Girls

Interesting discussion on several blogs prompted by a question Loki asked in his blog:

What also puzzles me is why so many woman in SL seem to start relationships with other woman.

I particularly liked and agreed with Tiana Meriman’s response (the comments are interesting as well), although I would add one other thing to her hypothetical conversation with a stereotypical male (again, italics represent my thoughts):

him: hey sexy! (aww crap not another one)
me: hi
him: you’re beautiful
me: ummm thanks.
him: what are you doing here?
me: listening to live music/dancing (duhhh!!!)
him: cool cool (ummm yeah)
me: yeah
him: [friends me]
me: … (ARGH!! Now what do I do? I don’t want to hurt his feelings and then deal with the inevitable argument by declining, but I also hate putting more crap in my friends list. Oh heck, another one that I’ll accept, and then later on tonight remove permission to see my online status, and then in a week or so I’ll defriend and he’ll never notice. What a pain in the ass.)
me: …. [ignores him or makes really unwilling small talk till he wanders away]

.. (time passes)

me: [forgets to defriend them]

I guess you could say I’m picky, but I really look for engaging conversation and intellectual push-back from *anyone* I’m going to spend SL time with — what’s the point otherwise?

~ by Aenea on May 16, 2007.