Firestorm is Officially Released!

Word came to me first from Juggernutz Ivanovic via IM, and then from a blog post by the inimitable Crap Mariner. Heading to the Phoenix/Firestorm web site turned up an announcement and a place to download it: the release version of the Firestorm client.

It includes changes made to avoid deprecated OpenGL calls, which makes Crap very happy and I'm sure will make many other people happy as well. (Problems with those deprecated routines drove some people to 1.x clients, which deprived them of some lovely rendering, which you can see examples of on Crap's blog, and other features.) 

If you've yet to try Firestorm, now would be the time to do it. I think you'll be pleased.

Zzzzz....

Back from a pleasant Thanksgiving with RL family. I hope you had a wonderful time in both lives. I think I'd better rest.

Reasons to be Cheerful

"Life without caring was a shadow; the great moments of exhilaration came amidst the battles that only a crusader could know. Yet so few people accepted the risks, and those who did not care came closest to caring only when telling the rare crusaders that they were fools." --Marc Stiegler, David's Sling

That passage (if you find David's Sling, by the way, read it, as well as Stiegler's Earthweb) makes me think of griefers. To quote myself (a bit vain, but I don't want to pretend it's new here): "[Trolls] just, for some reason, can’t stand the notion that there are other people out there who care about something, and are willing to cause those who have the audacity to care injury or bother so they don’t have to think about it." (In the context of the post my comment appeared with, "trolls" was being used to encompass griefers as well.)

A lot of the time I worry that the world has sunken into that sort of blasé attitude, the kind that vermin like David Letterman cater to: join me in feeling smugly superior to the day's target.

"And they call for the three great stimulants 

Of the exhausted ones:

Artifice, brutality and innocence 

Artifice and innocence..." --Joni Mitchell, "The Three Great Stimulants"

So I was delighted today to come across a Russian band, "Gogol Bordello", that defies that attitude. Here's some of their "mission statement" (sorry, I had to use the term; it's headed with "Artist's Statement", but the web page title is "Mission", so I compromised :)).

"Gogol Bordello's task is to provoke audiences out of post-modern aesthetic swamp onto a neo-optimistic communal movement towards new sources of authentic energy....

"We chose to work with gypsy, cabaret and punk traditions. It's what we know and feel. And many more are possible that can make the beloved statement of post-modernism 'everything has been done' sound as an intellectual error."

I'm glad there are people like these. They will win the future while the jaded sink into overwhelmingly-deserved oblivion, and I hope there are still some of them here in the US.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

UPDATE: Oops! Gogol Bordello is from the Lower East Side of Manhattan (though Eugene Hütz, the group's lead singer, was born in the Ukraine). My mistake! (OTOH, I got my wish...)

Back to the Butterfly

Caminante de Sueños recently showed some photos from a sim called Villefranche sur Mer. I had to go there, and was delighted to discover a group of trees with a sunbeam-lit path, and along the path monarch butterflies flitted about... so I had to take a picture.

After doing so, though, I realized I wasn't dressed appropriately for the occasion. I went through the inventory and found a famous classic dress designed by Vindi Vindaloo, "Azazello". After some adaptation (which included wearing the boa rather higher than the designer intended), I went back and, while not being able to reproduce the first photo, I think I got something worthwhile:

By all means, visit Villefranche sur Mer. It's a beautiful place.

Best in Black at H-Bomb Lounge

vString is once again sponsoring an event at the H-Bomb Lounge. It will take place on Friday, November 18th, from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. SLT. (That's Saturday, November 19th, 0200-0500 GMT/UTC.) Go through your inventory, find your best black outfit, be it LBD (whether "L" is "little" or "latex") or big black gown, debonair tux or black leather. As with the previous vString-sponsored event, the prize is a set of vStrings prim breasts to be given to the person of the winner's choice. Have fun!

Sic transit Alphaville Herald?

Just for the heck of it, I wandered over to the Alphaville Herald only to discover that the latest post there is sneaking up on a month and a half old.

The buzzword  is "blog fade". Burnout, finding another more appealing activity, having to give precedence to something else... for whatever reason, the articles slow and then stop. It happened to me with Pectoral Virtual Fashion; Maggie Bluxome did, and still does, far more than I was doing and did it far better, so why continue? I don't know whether that applies here. To know I'd have to know what the heck the Herald's purpose is, or was.

That said, though, it is a shame, unlike What the Fug. There for a while, the Herald had taken to writing interesting and worthwhile articles, a kind of last hurrah.

Please take RL action against the so-called "PROTECT-IP" and "SOPA" acts

I just emailed Congress to urge them to oppose the Internet Blacklist Legislation, known as the PROTECT-IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. This legislation seeks to give the executive branch power to conduct slash-and-burn campaigns against websites that allegedly host – or even link to – content that infringes on intellectual property rights. That would “disappear” whole domain names, fundamentally undermining Internet security, and/or choke off their financial support. The Internet Blacklist Legislation puts more sites than ever at risk, effectively upending the DMCA safe harbors that have been crucial to the growth of Internet innovation and creativity.

Sadly, these short-sighted and dangerous bills won’t do much to stop online infringement – but they will jeopardize our ability to speak and read online with the kind of freedom we cherish in the offline world. Deep-pocketed Hollywood lobbyists are aggressively pushing to control and censor the open Internet, willing to sacrifice free speech and our Internet culture in hopes of controlling how people view their movies and products.

We need to stop this bill before it goes any further. Will you contact your representatives in Congress and urge them to oppose the Internet Blacklist Legislation? Visit: https://eff.org/r.C8A

BUSTed magazine: help wanted!

BUSTed magazine has been around for nearly a year and a half, putting out an issue each and every month of its existence. It's the closest thing there is to mass media in Second Life targeting the prim breast community, both users and admirers. IMHO that makes it very important indeed, especially since it's being noticed outside that community. (Remember the wonderful article about BUSTed in Gwenwifer Parx's Portuguese-language blog?)

The magazine is now seeking people for positions with the magazine. The positions are honest-to-goodness jobs; if you take a position, people will be counting on you to do what that position requires, each month. The positions:

• advertising/accounting
• producer
• design and layout
• photographer editor

I urge you to read the announcement on Maggie's blog. It describes the duties for each position and gives more information, including how to apply for a position should it interest you.

A Hunt for Us!

A popular sort of event in Second Life is the "hunt". At various spots there are hidden tokens that one can retrieve and that bear gifts, or that lead one to a gift if one reaches the end. Often they're sponsored by stores--while you're looking for the next token/clue, you're acquainting yourself with their products, which you may not have seen before and which you may decide are worth your L$.

Well... soon there will be a hunt of great interest to us prim breast users. A great many of vendors of prim breast-related items have united to make possible a hunt that sounds really good, featuring new designs--so even if you've heard of all the participating stores, there will be things you've never seen before. (I'm both embarrassed and pleased that I haven't heard of them all before. Embarrassed because I'd like to think I keep up, and pleased because if I don't, then there are more of the wonderful people who make it possible for us to do what we do.)

The Winter 2011 PBCH  (prim breast clothing hunt?) will run from November 21st through December 15th.

I came across a poster advertising the hunt while shopping... I expect that all the participating stores will have such a poster.... and I urge you to make a space available to join the associated group, "PBCH"; you'll need to to participate in the hunt.

Here are the participating shops--but please don't IM the shop owners with questions about the hunt. Ask in group chat for the PBCH group, or ask Hellena Skytower or Ashtoreth Walpole.

(UPDATE: no, really, here they are! I must have been very distracted last night.)

S&S Design
Jinxed Fashion
Aqua Kisses
Sha Boutique
P.S. Design
THIRTEEN
Whimsy's Closet
Que Bella!
TAVWEAR
Tiny Things
Amazon Designs
BL Design
It Figures
Hyper Couture
G&S-TEAM
ICON
Busty Dreams
~ By Eve ~
Big Breasted Sluts
Designs by Shalenda
MF. Creation
Bimbos
Candy Cloud Clothing
" VOOH " Designs
Tw@ttyC@ke
Vixen Wear

Thank you to Ms. Skytower and Ms. Walpole, and to all the store owners!

H-Bomb 1st Anniversary!

Wow... has it been a whole year? If you'd asked me, I wouldn't have thought so, but there the evidence is... and it's an anniversary well worth celebrating. I hope to see you there!

(A reminder, in case you're as forgetful as I am: the US is back on standard time, so Second Life Time is GMT-8 again. In case it's easier to work from GMT/UTC to your local time, the celebration is Sunday November 13th from 0200-0500 GMT.)

Let the Wind Carry Me

With all the beloved sims that have vanished, it's a pleasure and a relief to visit one that is still around, such as Da Vinci Gardens.

You're offered a number of ways to tour this beautiful region--at least two are, appropriately enough, based on sketches of flying machines from da Vinci's notebooks, but I took one that struck my fancy, catching a ride on a giant dandelion seed.