Wings 3D

Wings 3D is one of the free (as in speech and beer) 3D graphics programs that has an exporter allowing the creation of sculpted prims. It runs on a wide variety of platforms, thanks to being written in Erlang, a functional programming language developed by Ericsson (so thank you to Sweden!).

Natalia Zelmanov has two parts (one, two) of a tutorial on using Wings 3D to create sculpted prims up on her excellent blog. I would amend her instructions slightly.

First, if you are using Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, then you have access to Wings 3D version 0.98.35, and the exporter, as far as I can tell, works with it quite nicely.

Second, just copying the files for the exporter into what appears to be the correct directory does not make sculpted prims visible in the Wings 3D menu as an export option, so I would do the following:

1. Install Wings 3D using your favorite method, be it Synaptic, whatever the KDE program is for managing packages (sorry, I don't use KDE that much), or just "sudo apt-get install wings3d".
2. Head over to the SL forum thread where Omei Turnbull announces his creation of the exporter (thank you Omei!) and download it.
3. At least in the version of Wings 3D in the Feisty Fawn repositories, the "install plugin" command only knows about gzipped tar files, so convert it from a .zip into a gzipped tar file using the archive twiddler of your choice.
4. Run Wings 3D, click File > Install Plugin, and point it at the gzipped tar version of the exporter.

Poof! Now, when it comes time to export, "Second Life Sculpty" will be on the list of export formats you can choose from.

Sculpted prims, version one, only come in one flavor, namely those that are topologically equivalent (homeomorphic, to be official) to a sphere. So, as Natalia says, the way to start is to create a sphere, or rather an approximation of a sphere that has vertices that correspond directly to the entries in the "texture" that defines the sculpted prim's shape. Those textures are 2ⁿ by 2ⁿ, so make your sphere have 2ⁿ "sections" (think longitude, or citrus fruit) and 2ⁿ - 1 "slices" (think latitude) for values of n that the exporter supports. According to Natalia, n can run from three to six, i.e. 8, 16, 32, or 64 sections. (SL supports 128 x 128, and I'm hoping the exporter will eventually allow that; I may need that resolution someday.)

(Why the different number of slices? Because they don't wrap around like the sections. If there were just one slice, there would be two rows (or columns, depending on how LL lays it out) in the texture, one at each pole, and adding a slice adds one row (or column) where you split one slice into two, so to get 2ⁿ rows (or columns) you only need 2ⁿ - 1 slices.)

(WARNING! There's a bug open related to this. Textures undergo JPEG compression, and JPEG compression is lossy; it throws away information. This isn't a big deal for textures used as textures were initially intended, i.e. for painting objects, but for defining sculpted prim shapes, it is disastrous. Please head over to the JIRA and vote for VWR-866, and until the bug is dealt with, go with at least 64 x 64 for serious sculpted prim work.)

Now... you have your sphere, what are you going to do with it? Of course, you have to wrangle it into the shape you want. Because of the way sculpted prims work, you can only use operations that don't change the number of vertices. This is the point I'm at now; I need to go through the Wings 3D docs, and determine which operations those are, and how to use them to get the shape I want. (Then comes texturing them, i.e. creating a texture that is really used to paint the sculpted prim. I have no idea how to do that, so I'm hoping for more installments of Natalia's tutorial!)

Ooh, heaven is a room in SL...

Yesterday I was invited to a lovely wooded place to dance. There were dance animations scattered all about, and rose particles floating through the air. I glanced at the location in the SL client window title bar, and found it was called "Heaven in SL."

The dancing was wonderful, as was the company, but Murphy struck; my dancing partner went *poof* and disappeared from the grid. I sighed and started exploring... and found, when I zoomed back, that I was in a very large building! It had a second floor of sorts, similarly set up to tromper one's oeil.

I have to admire the skill with which the illusion is set up, but kind of had higher hopes for heaven. :) It is well worth a visit in any case.


Here I am relaxing in "Heaven in SL." If you look really closely, you can see the doorway about two thirds of the way across (towards the right) at the top.

P.S. There are steps to the second floor, so in SL, there is at least a stairway from heaven...

Bunny-shaped Island

With all the brouhaha, I succumbed to curiosity, and headed for the new island set up in SL by Playboy.

From above you can see that it's in the shape of the well-known bunny head; I guess they had to do it.

Once there, what I initially saw was very nicely done, but felt kind of like a convention center. LOTS of ads for Playboy stuff for sale and Playboy services on their web site.

Further afield, out in the ears was a lot of sand, and palm and coconut trees. I had to stop and assume the kneeling position of what was labeled a "cybergirl photopose" and take a picture in the sand beside huge (mutant?) coconut halves. (cybergirl photopose? Are they serious?)


(Look at me! I'm a cybergirl!)

I looked again at the map, found the greatest concentration of people on the island, and teleported there. It turned out to be a gathering spot for residents applying for work with Playboy, a thatched bar (/cafe?) at the bunny's nose. I sat silently and unobtrusively (though I "overheard" a woman presiding over the interviews who typed "/me sprays her coffee"...) in a chair near the water's edge and watched the last bit of what I presume were preliminary interviews.

Oh, how I wish Hunter S. Thompson were still with us; only he could do justice to the twisted experience I had... even without any "heinous drugs."

OK, look: Playboy is a victim of its own success. The mainstream has moved past it, so that now Playboy bunnies are quaint. Not too far away in RL is the site, in a hotel in a western Des Moines suburb, where one of the last Playboy Clubs in the USA was until it closed in May 1988, two months before the very last one in Lansing, Michigan. A friend passed one of the bunnies one day as he headed through the hotel. Back in the 1950s, the encounter would have had a frisson of wickedness; in mid-1980s Iowa, the bunny was a pretty, wholesome girl next door in a cute costume, as if she were dressed up for trick or treat.

One can't argue with their taste in music; I saw a listing, and they've lined up some of the best folks performing in SL... but Playboy in SL is slick and sterile. I headed back this morning to make sure I had some details right. When I arrived, I was the only person in the whole sim. I checked Apollo on the map... 31 people there.

The Intruder Despite Herself

I was minding my own business, chatting with friends and acquaintances, when the world grayed out and I saw the dreaded popup saying that the sim is going down and I was being forcibly logged off.

I grumbled to myself, fired up the client once again, and without thinking left the "last location" choice enabled. I have no idea how long it takes Linden Labs to reset a server for a sim, and no doubt it varies, but I am sure I did not wait anywhere near long enough, and sure enough, I was told my last location was unavailable, so it was putting me somewhere else...

...and I rezzed in darkness. What ambient light there was showed an expanse of tiles in a checkered black and white pattern that I recalled seeing once. I zoomed out and found that I was inside the Rakehell, a truly impressive dirigible with glass windows essentially over its entire skin. That modification to the original dirigible construction, as well as the lovely interior decoration, were done by Mordecai Scaggs and his talented and lovely lady, Kacy Despres, and if you haven't had the pleasure of reading about it,. I hope you will do so now, at least to read the story of the making of its elegant nameplate and see a photograph thereof.

Zooming back, I saw my erstwhile conversational companions standing beside me, wondering what on earth (or perhaps I should say on the grid) had happened. Under these extraordinary (I hope!) conditions, put here by who knows what logic of the SL server, I felt extremely embarrassed, so I departed as quickly as I could gather my wits, and offered my fellow unwilling intruders a teleport following me to the first scenic location that came to my mind.

I have no idea what put it into SL's head to put me high into the air, much less why it should do so for the folks I'd been chatting with. I am just glad we did not pop into the middle of a gathering, and hope that such a thing never happens to me again.

JIRA, Part Two

I've created VWR-1258 as a JIRA entry with the same request as the old Proposition 125. I cannot vote for it myself, since I created it. If you are interested in extending the variety of avatars in SL (this isn't just about breasts!), I hope you will follow the link and consider voting for it.

Hair and G

I love watching commercials for Pantene shampoo. The long-haired models all let their hair fall, and it's always in slow motion. You sort of expect the announcer to say "Pantene, the shampoo that lowers the gravitational constant in a neighborhood of your head."

In SL, I'd just bought some lovely long hair, put it on, and turned... and it took a very long time indeed to settle down. I guess flexible prims must have a twistable knob for that... and wonder whether the designer watches Pantene commercials.

Natalia enters the history books--er, wiki

I was happy to see today that Natalia Zelmanov, mermaid, designer, explorer, and writer of many wonderful tutorials in her fine blog, has an entry in the SL History Wiki.

Yay, Natalia!

A new, and more important IMHO, Open Letter

United Protest has set up a web page to let people sign an Open Letter asking that Linden Labs remain consistent with their stated community standards and become a "common carrier." (Criminals use phones, email, and snail mail... why doesn't anyone sue the phone company or the USPS? Because they're common carriers; they don't get into the business of filtering messages based on content.)

I hope you'll consider signing it. (Yes, I've nudged them about the grammatical errors; with any luck they'll be corrected by the time you read the letter. :))

JIRA

LL has moved away from the old user proposal method to a Bugzilla-like system that subsumes both feature requests and bug reports.

A lot of people have grumbled about this, claiming it's too hard to use. I hope that you, Gentle Reader, will not let such kvetching keep you from using the SL JIRA.

The SL Wiki has a page that describes JIRA and how to use it. Even if you don't add items, you can look through those that others have submitted--a good thing to do even if you want to add an item, to see whether anyone's already done so--and vote for those you think particularly deserve attention.

Torley Linden has, if I understand rightly, made entries that correspond to those under the old proposal system. Once I find the item that corresponds to--you guessed it--Prop 125, I will give a link here. In the meantime, I hope you'll consider voting for these:

• VWR-1080, concerning the problems of tops (and pants) versus concavities
• VWR-1064, concerning allowing some attachments to go under clothing

More news as I can find it.

UPDATE: I misremembered; Torley's moved some of the proposals with a goodly number of votes in their favor. I will make a JIRA entry corresponding to Prop 125 and give a link ASAP.

Favorite music

I was at one of the weekly performances of Jaynine Scarborough at Bliss Basin this past Sunday and got in an IM conversation, during which I was asked what my favorite songs of the Renaissance and Middle Ages are.

That's about like asking my to list my favorite songs period... how can I cut it down? I will try, though, to keep this entry from growing insanely long. No particular order; I don't think I can rank them, and given the context of the discussion, just songs with lyrics.

• Adriaan Willaert, "O Dolce Vita Mia." By all means get the Early Music Consort of London album for which it is the title cut. It's worth it for this track alone, but they're all gorgeous. (Do also consider the King's Singers collaboration with Tragicomedia, La Dolce Vita, which also includes this song.)
• Adam de la Halle, "Tant Con Je Vivrai." (Francophones: honest, I looked it up, and that's the title.) A simple and beautiful trouvere song.
• Guillaume de Machaut, "Rose, liz, printemps." Take your pick of Gothic Voices' The Mirror of Narcissus (which is all-Machaut and all vocal) or the Waverly Consort's Douce Dame album (which is not all Machaut, and mixes voice and instruments); either is gorgeous.
• Martin Codax, "Quantas Sabedes." Owain Phyfe and the New World Renaissance Band make no claims of authenticity, but they touch modern audiences deeply with music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance using folk music performance practice. This song is the last track on their Odyssey album, and it will lull you into a relaxed (and as Phyfe says when introducing the song in performance, gently erotic) mood.
• Thomas Morley, "Nolo mortem peccatoris." This isn't a flighty madrigal or canzonet of the sort Morley is best known for, but a beautiful and heart-rending choral work.
• John Bennet, "Weep, O Mine Eyes." OK, I'm showing my tendency toward melancholy music here.
• John Dowland, "Lachrymae." OK, I'm really showing my tendency toward melancholy music now! Let's fix that...
• Thomas Weelkes, "Come, Sirrah Jack, Ho." This, along with Tobias Hume's "Tobacco," are sort of the druggie music of the English Renaissance, as the lyrics will show. (Nowadays people think the Ars Nova "fumeurs" weren't necessarily on anything.) If you ever saw Reefer Madness, you'll think of the "Faster, louder!" scene when you hear "Fill the pipe once more; my brains dance Trenchmore" ("Trenchmore" was a lively dance of the time).

I hope this helps!

Duh

Sigh... I noticed a friend online and decided to IM her. Click...click... "Hi!"

Just then I noticed the name on the new IM tab... one off from the one I thought I'd clicked. *blush*

A short and very apologetic conversation later, I looked again... and the friend whose name I meant to click on wasn't there. Was I careless, or did she sign off just as I moved to click, moving the next name up?

My money's on careless. Sigh. One more item to put on the IM checklist.

Hi, Chicago!

Looking at Google Analytics results... the new data display is nice, but the one thing that really stands out is how many people are reading in the Chicago area.

An amazing city, Chicago. I can't think of it without hearing Carl Sandburg's great poem in my head...

CHICAGO

HOG Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to
kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
faces of women and children I have seen the marks
of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who
sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on
job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the
little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning
as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with
white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young
man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has
never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse.
and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog
Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

(and please go to carl-sandburg.com for this and the other Chicago poems...)

The whole point of the poem is the speaker's clear-eyed love of Chicago. He sees its flaws... dare I say the ways in which it is "broadly offensive"?... and that it is great despite that.

Kind of like Second Life.

Protest Update

Search is now working on the grid, and "I am for a FREE Second Life", the group to join if you object to the new policy described in the LL blog entry "Keeping SL Safe, Together" exists.

ERRATUM: There is more than one group protesting the change in LL policy. (In a bizarre turn of events, there is even one such advocated by Prokofy Neva.)

The broad offensive against "broadly offensive"

Today I saw a poster outside a business, reading "Keeping SL Free, Together". Clearly it's inspired by the Orwellian "Keeping SL Safe, Together" entry on the Linden blog. Clicking on the poster gives you a notecard describing why the policies described in that entry are evil, and proposes a peaceful protest. (Alas, the group described in the notecard doesn't exist; I'll update when I can find it.)

[UPDATE: Aha! The poster and notecard are the work of Jazhara Keon. October Hush's blog has an entry with more info and the text of the notecard. According to the comments, it will take a bit longer to get the group going.]

As Tateru Nino points out, LL is incorrect in claiming that the new policies described there are consistent with the previous rules; before, "broadly offensive" content simply had to be kept to mature areas; now all it takes is a complaint, and "broadly offensive" content can get you banished from SL, your land lost and your content removed... and Earth to Lindens: "the community" doesn't say diddly. Individuals and organized groups do, and the new policy is just begging for sanctimonious vigilantes to start campaigns against their favorite "offensive" bugaboo, be it dancing, virtual alcoholic beverages, whatever they consider indecent clothing (anything not a burqa?), homosexuality, furries, religions they don't like... the list is endless.

I urge you to join this peaceful protest. At stake is Second Life as we know it.

[UPDATE: Do read Vint Falken's blog entry pointing out the hypocrisy of the SL promotion of Live Free or Die Hard, a movie featuring, as Daniel Linden might put it, "real-life images, avatar portrayals, and other depictions of extreme or graphic violence".]

[UPDATE: D'Oh! I forgot. United Protest's blog is now up and going.]

L3375P34K worldwide...

Abbreviations go back quite some way (SPQR, anyone?), but the current crop, I think, have their origin in hams using Morse code: BCNU (be seeing you), CUL (see you later), etc. Some have stayed with hams, e.g. YL (young lady) and XYL (ex-young lady, often someone's wife).

That made its way into hackish usage and thence into IRC and to text messages everywhere.

(OK.. maybe Prince had a hand in it.)

The international nature of SL means that one can see similar shortening in other languages. The one I have seen to date: Spanish speakers typing "k" (which isn't used in Spanish save for borrowings from other languages and foreign proper names, or things like radio station call letters) in place of "qu". Do they type ADM (ay, dios mío) where in English we'd type OMG? IDK. :)

I'll keep my eyes open for other instances.

SL or Pleasantville?

SL has taken a turn in a very scary direction.

Check out the cheerily-titled entry "Keeping Second Life Safe, Together" from the Linden blog. Here's the text in its entirety:

The diversity of things to see and do within Second Life is almost unimaginable, but our community has made it clear to us that certain types of content and activity are simply not acceptable in any form. Real-life images, avatar portrayals, and other depiction of sexual or lewd acts involving or appearing to involve children or minors; real-life images, avatar portrayals, and other depictions of sexual violence including rape, real-life images, avatar portrayals, and other depictions of extreme or graphic violence, and other broadly offensive content are never allowed or tolerated within Second Life.

Please help us to keep Second Life a safe and welcoming space by continuing to notify Linden Lab about locations in-world that are violating our Community Standards regarding broadly offensive and potentially illegal content. Our team monitors such notification 24-hours a day, seven-days a week. Individuals and groups promoting or providing such content and activities will be swiftly met with a variety of sanctions, including termination of accounts, closure of groups, removal of content, and loss of land. It’s up to all of us to make sure Second Life remains a safe and welcoming haven of creativity and social vision.

Just what is "broadly offensive"? And to whom? Potentially illegal where--in any country that has access to Second Life? That swift and brutal sanction is begging for abuse.

I hope I won't be having to keep burqas in my inventory.

Is it all that easy the old way?

Today Cheyenne told me about a two-prim dolphin made with a sculpted prim. (Why isn't it one prim? One prim determines the path the dolphin takes; I presume it's a disk with the dolphin attached to the edge.)

She has dolphins made the old-fashioned way; they're twenty prims each.

Any shape can be built up out of a bunch of tiny basic shapes... but that would be an even more insane use of prims, which are a precious resource in SL.There are some stock tricks, like building trees and bushes with intersecting planes that are transparent save for having the side view of the plant painted on them, but in general the task is figuring out how to get a good enough approximation to the shape with the fewest possible prims. That's not easy... and to be honest, it often isn't quite good enough. If, for example, you're approximating a curve by overlapping two prims, the place where the boundaries intersect is hard to get just right; lighting will show up a corner, however slight, in a cross section at right angles to said intersection.

It's easy to create some prims and glue them together... but it's not easy to get a good enough approximation of a shape while minimizing prim count.

So... old style prims are easy at first; the difficulty comes when you try to make something more complicated. Sculpted prims, on the other hand, are hard at first, because you have to learn to use blender or Wings 3D or whatever... but once you've done that, you can make just about anything topologically equivalent to a sphere (for now; later we'll get other sorts of sculpted prims).

So... is the making of quality objects in SL all that much more arcane a skill now than it was before sculpted prims? I think not.

"Sunrise, Sunset..."

There's now a First Look viewer that has the WindLight sky/weather display code!

I had to try it, of course. Cheyenne's land on Forsaken has a gorgeous view of sunrise and sunset. I headed for the coast, set the world to sunset, chose "Coastal Sunset" for the WindLight settings, and...

...saw a fuzzy cyan disk above the horizon.

Now, I've never actually watched the sunset from an island shore, but I'm pretty sure the sun remains a class G star, no matter where you watch it from. Time to ask about this one. Maybe I fiddled with the cloud cover?

One thing that definitely seems weird is that when I tried sunrise, the light seemed to still come from the west. It is a puzzlement.

I can say that the lighting on objects around me was great, and (aside from that direction question...) was much as I'd expect in real life.

I don't have a picture of sunrise or sunset. Yet. I do have a picture I took of myself in the light of sunrise, though. There was a contest (that I'll probably miss) for retro clothing, and I had to try for a hippie look, having missed the chance to really be a hippie by something over a decade. (That may be fortunate.) It's more faux hippie, to be honest; I should have gone for a long dress rather than tie-dyed T-shirt and jeans with a peace symbol. I still think it came out well, though... especially because I saw mention of the fact that the Linux client startup script by default turns off a bunch of OpenGL rendering features, and hence remembered to undo it.

UPDATE: Duh. The First Look client runs in its own directory, with its own shell script. I haven't run it with the OpenGL options enabled yet. More news as it happens.

"The beautiful, shiny button? The jolly, candy-like button? Will she hold out, folks? Can she hold out?"

NO, I CAN'T!

So, I read about Cheyenne's experiences at the "space station thingie" and of course, I had to try it out.

I got similar results. (The button's legend promised chaos... but repeated pressing didn't change very much.)

I saved my shape post-button push for later study, and headed back home. Once there, I noticed some things:

• My torso appeared about as tall as my whole body used to be
• Lag was awfully bad

Those two in combination reminded me of this entry in Electric Venus. The button must be scripted... could it be making some of the changes that the author in Electric Venus won't mention? I think I will ask the button's creator.

P.S. The effect goes away if you log off and log back in. It would also be interesting to know whether other people see the same thing you see after pushing the button.

UPDATE: Thanks to help from a friend, I can say that other people do see the change in your shape after you push the button; also, whatever it is that does the distortion is not saved as part of saving the shape. Whatever is happening, it doesn't affect the slider settings.

The Mysterious Peak

There was a very gratifying peak in blog visits when the interview in the SL Newspaper was published. That I understood.

Now, Google Analytics is making me wonder. On May 23rd there was a peak that exceeded even the post-interview peak... and I have no idea why!

Don't get me wrong; I am happy that so many people visited. I just don't know why it happened! :)

I worry too much, I guess.

Outside, nose (and breasts) pressed against the window of fashion...

Right now, there are two worlds of fashion in SL.

In one, vast numbers of people slave over textures and prims to reproduce the subtle details of the way light plays on the textures, folds, and wrinkles in different kinds of cloth to create amazing fashions. (OK... to the extent that's possible in a world where skirts are made up of a bunch of rectangular strips tied together at the top...)

Even the high end products are not all that expensive, because the makers can take full advantage of economy of scale and a huge market for their products, which all are made for the standard issue avatar form. Anyone using those avatars can wear any of that clothing... and there's so much of it! The list of SL fashion blogs, both those from designers announcing their own products and from reviewers who cover that portion of the cornucopia they can manage to keep track of and find worthy, is endless.

In the other, individuals piece together prims to cover avatars or body parts themselves built from prims. The need to do that makes it very difficult to do anything other than solid colors; very few patterns or textures here. No economies of scale here, either; these people are making clothing to cover the avatars or body parts they themselves have made, thus splitting the time and resources they have to devote to each, and they will at most sell as many copies of the clothes as they sell of the corresponding avatars or body parts they are designed to fit.... and the market for those is diminished by the nagging thought at the back of the shoppers' heads: Look at all I'd be giving up! All the dresses, uniforms, swimsuits...

Do I have a solution? Not really... but the makers of specialized avatars and body parts not supported by the stock avatar model really should try to come up with some way around it. Coming together as a group to work on the problem sounds like a good first step to me.

Couldn't say it better myself...

Caliburn Susanto, in his LiveJournal, describes the hell that is SL with voice enabled.

I don't think procrastination counts as a super power...

The other day in SL, I saw a friend in an amazingly detailed latex suit. She said she'd gotten it for only L$100, and took me shopping. I bought one.

That's something I'd never do in real life; at the very least, it would be horribly uncomfortable, and not particularly appealing to me. In SL, though, it's just a form-fitting suit, and in SL, one can always have a form worth fitting.

Suit on, in Calico Creation's Ember hair (in "fire" color) to match, I feel like I should be in a comic book. Where to take a picture of it? In a city, obviously. No superhero lives in a rural area...OK, Smallville maybe, but Superman headed for Metropolis when it was time to get serious about superheroing.

Where in SL to get that urban feel? Has to be Midnight City, at midnight. It worked for Sexy Tuxedo, it would work for this, and sure enough, it did:

Pele will remain where it/she is

Pele will be staying on Forsaken (and hence my abode will as well). I can understand the decision... I couldn't take apart the product of so much work... of so much of oneself put into a place.

Lo siento mucho...

Looking at Google Analytics, I see that a number of the views from countries where Spanish is spoken show a very short time spent reading.

I fear that it may be because the Spanish words in the title fake out searches done by Spanish speakers, who may feel cheated to find that they've only turned up the random ramblings of a Second Life resident that aren't even in Spanish!

That makes me feel bad, but OTOH, the title is kind of set now.

What can I say but... lo siento muchísimo; que Uds. me hagan el favor de perdonarme para haber gastado su tiempo.

Sooner than I thought...

The 1.16.0.4 beta, when it arrived, seems to work nicely, though I've not exercised it more than flying and walking around and examining various sculpted prims from various angles and distances...

...but I guess it's working well enough that LL is bringing sculpted prims to the main grid today after the day's downtime, with the 1.16.0 client.

I'm very happy about this; it means that a lot of shapes that are insane to try to assemble from the simple geometric shapes of traditional prims will become possible. Want an example? Check out the SL Wiki entry for "Sculpted Prims" and scroll on down to the head made by Chip Midnight. Note how many sculpted prims it took to make: ONE.

Actually, let's save you the trouble of following the link. Here's a closeup from a photo I took of an attempt at a human giantess avatar. It's rather doll-like; being at the very beginning of building myself, I can't say that it's the best one can do with old-style prims, but I bet it's not at all easy to create a realistic looking human head out of prims.


Compare that with Chip Midnight's head, made with exactly one prim:


(Sigh... blogger doesn't like .PNG files, so I had to convert it and upload it.)

Second Life is going to get a lot prettier and more realistic, just from this. Furry avatars are going to be revolutionized (and I hope I can finally get the giantess avatar I've been wanting...), and I'm sure the folks making prim genitalia are hard at work. :)

I think LL did a clever thing with this. SL doesn't have to get involved with how you create a sculpted prim; it need only generate the results based on the pseudo-texture that describes its shape. (Oh, yeah... I understand that one can use Wings 3D, another Open Source program, to create sculpted prims now, as well as Blender. At the time of this writing, the SL Wiki lists three free programs that can do the job, thus kicking the props out from underneath the argument that sculpted prims will be the province of what some would call the FI3DC.)

[UPDATE: Oops... make that four. I didn't notice POVRay the first time I looked.]

So... I'm doing a happy dance, and setting to the task of learning to use Wings 3D. (Second) life is good.

Back to normal

I'm happy to say that as I type this, I'm downloading version 1.16.0.4 of the beta client for Linux. Thanks to whoever at LL caused this to happen; I hope that the Linux client doesn't fall behind again in the future.

UPDATE: I appeared in an area covered with scattered objects, many made from sculpted prims. My flexi prim hair was just fine. Now to start creating sculpted prims...

Paradise for Sale

Second Life time is like dog years, only more so. So it seems to me as if Pele, the place my dear friend Cheyenne Palisades calls home in SL, has been around a long time... but it hasn't, really.

It's not been that long since she was learning about terraforming and building and positioning things... often the hard way. You can read about it in her blog.

Now Pele stands, a delightful and beautiful example of the designing skills (and whimsy) of Ms. Palisades, and of Exuberance LaFleur. (Did I mention that you can put Cheyenne's talents to work for you on the grid? She does have a design business in SL. As she says, life is too short for ugly design.) And now it's for sale.

I hope that the eventual buyer (or buyers) realizes and appreciates what he or she (or they) has (or have) acquired.

But seriously, folks...

If you live in the United States and you enjoy webcasters and the audio streams you listen to in SL, you need to get in touch with your Senators immediately.

The Copyright Royalty Board has decided to charge Internet webcasters and noncommercial broadcasters such as NPR per song streamed... and backdate the new charges for years to the beginning of 2006. This change will effectively kill Internet webcasting.

Ask your senators to co-sponsor the Internet Radio Equality Act, which overturns the decision so that the current percentage of revenue model is maintained, and the percentage set to the same level as that charged satellite radio broadcasters, 7.5%.

Go here to find out how to get in touch with your Senators. Call them and express your opinion. If you don't, you can kiss your audio streams goodbye.

For your amusement...

A little inspirational video.... :)

Back of the bus...

The grid's down for maintenance. Gee, it would be a great time to try out the beta client and check out those spiffy sculpted prims!

Well... the beta client I was able to download before immediately barfs when it tries to display my surroundings. "Take off your flexi prims," people said... but if you die immediately, how do you have the time to do that?

Good news! There's a new beta out, and it may solve that problem... but if you go looking for the Linux version, you can't find it.

What's going on here?

UPDATE: there is a beta version for download for Linux now. Alas, it's a version behind that available for Windows or Macintosh.

UPDATE: 1.16.0.2 is now available for Windows and Macintosh. The beta avaiable for Linux is still 1.16.0.0, three days after we were promised 1.16.0.1.

There's a thread about 1.16.0.2 saying that voice for Linux will have to wait until Vivox writes a client for Linux. I hope that the beta for Linux isn't being held up by the issue of voice; there are a LOT of other changes worth testing.

Ramblings about SL

Various people are commenting on Gwyneth Llewellyn's "Hotspots: Second Life's New Controversies." So, I figure I might as well join in. :)

The "Luddites"

She may have picked an unfortunate label, "Luddites," but she nailed the "Open Letter" issue. All enhancements, however far along they may be, are met with a chorus of short-sighted flamage. It's short-sighted, or perhaps I should say based in ignorance, for several reasons:

First, the law of diminishing returns, combined with Brooks' Law ("adding people to a late software project makes it later"), means that it's useless or perhaps even counterproductive to put many more people on bug fixes.

Second, big improvements in speed don't come from fiddling with code. Say you have a deck of cards, and you want it sorted. Here's one way to do it:

1. Shuffle the deck.
2. If it's not in order, start over again at step 1.
3. If it is in order, whee! You're done!

This will in fact sort the deck, barring problems with your random number generator.It will also be insanely slow, taking time proportional to n! where n is the number of cards in the deck (and n! is n * (n - 1) * (n - 2) * ... * 2 * 1). If you've written a sort routine that runs like that, you can tune the code all you want; rewrite it in the tightest assembly language you can churn out... and it will still be insanely slow.

Major improvements in speed come from improvements to algorithms, not doing what you should be leaving to the compiler's optimizer. There's no point in wasting time on the old, slow version... but of course, people will continue to complain because LL isn't doing just that while work on the new version is underway.

Third, LL can't afford to not work at least part of the time on improvements. Other similar (but far more restricted--perhaps leaving creation to those 3D specialists Gwyneth goes on about--and hence easier to precalculate and optimize) systems are or will be breathing down its neck, and then we'll hear the cries that SL needs more features.

Professional 3D modelers

Ms. Llewellyn says sculpted prims have many advantages, and here again she is absolutely correct. They will allow a wide variety of shapes to be created that would otherwise require many of the current prims to even crudely approximate them, if they can be practically made from current prims at all. Eventually everyone will want items made from sculpted prims, for that improved appearance and performance improvement over what one can build from the simple geometric shapes of today's prims.

The part I disagree with is the claim that sculpted prims will create an enormous barrier to entry for building things. Only a very few "professional 3D modelers," the argument goes, have the skill and arcane knowledge required to create sculpted prims.

"popular products like Poser, for instance, sell about 150 thousand copies..." but Blender is estimated to have 250,000 users. Blender is GPL software, open source (guess those open source "tekkie" [sic] types took a break from looting and pillaging... don't they read Prokofy?), and steadily being improved in features, user interface, and documentation.

LL initially only wrote an exporter for Maya, a very expensive (Maya Unlimited 8.5 is a "mere" $7K) and proprietary package... but a few days ago a method to create sculpted prims with Blender was posted to the Web.

It's true... making sculpted prims is more involved than gluing together balls and boxes in SL. Sorry. But it's not that hard, and people are working diligently to make it easier, or at least easier to learn how to do it.

Conflicting Arguments

The reporter from the SL Newspaper did make a good point. I point out that the SL avatars don't support even that variability in people that exists--if Robert Wadlow were alive, he couldn't make his SL avatar look like him--but what I personally want goes well beyond what exists in RL. ("What? Only 8'10"?!" :))

I just hope that whatever they do to impement the "acknowledged" Proposition 125 (or the JIRA entry that corresponds to it) will support both the existing variation in humans and what I'd like to do. :)

Entrepreneurship

Since a kind lady took me shopping one day early in my Second Life, I have made periodic efforts to pay it forward.

Sometimes I've taken others shopping... at least once I didn't have time to actually go shopping, and it proved to be a good thing. I recently heard from Annica Lisle, a lovely and kind young woman; she didn't shop, but instead turned her talents, efforts, and L$ to building and becoming an entrepreneur. She now has two stores that sell a wide variety of clothing and accessories at very reasonable prices. One is in the Clarksville Shopping Mall at Meari (203, 226, 138), and the other is in the Violet Club at Inare (27, 118, 421).

Here I have on my favorite of the things I've bought there so far. I hope you'll check her stores out.

Sculpted Prims via Blender

Yippee! Amanda Levitsky has posted a tutorial on creating sculpted prims using Blender. We don't have to buy an expensive proprietary package to take advantage of them.

I am interviewed!

I got an IM yesterday from Voodoo Buwan. He'd seen my flickr page and read my blog; would I like to be interviewed for the SL Newspaper?

Would I? You bet!

So... today he came by my humble (but charming; Cheyenne does wonderful work) abode and interviewed me. Based on what he told me, I hope the result will appear in the next day or so. I'm looking forward to seeing it!

UPDATE: Things move quickly in SL and on the Internet; the interview is up in the "Daily News" section of the SL Newspaper. I'm tempted not to give a direct link, to heavily encourage you to read the whole paper, but for posterity's sake, in case it should scroll off that section, the interview can be made to appear on a page by itself, along with comments, which so far have been positive (or have teased Mr. Buwan about the joys of interviewing large-breasted women).

UPDATE #2: Welcome, SL Newspaper readers! Google Analytics showed a gratifying rise in readership yesterday. I hope that you enjoy my meanderings.

"I see you shiver with antici......pation!"

Maybe I shouldn't have been quite so optimistic in my notion of when sculpted prims will be ready for prime time.

The 1.16.0 beta client, which supports said prims, is out. I've downloaded it, set up a launcher for it, run it... and watched it crash immediately when it started to actually display where I was.

There was an update, and I have grabbed it. It gets far enough that I can see the fade from the "where were you last time" image into wherever I am on the beta grid... and then it crashes.

I'm hoping such a blatant bug will be an obvious goof-up, and things will improve quickly.

World Tour

If you haven't set up your blog with Google Analytics or some other service that lets you keep track of who reads your blog like MyBlogLog, you should. Even if you aren't looking to maximize your sales or ad revenue, it's fun just to look at things like the Google Analytics "geo map overlay."

Sometimes I look at it and wish I had the time and money to visit all the places from which people read my blog. It would be quite a tour, even if I stuck only with the places that have looked at it more than once.

Then again, the thought makes me worry a little bit. People in Saudi Arabia have read this blog, and I can't help recalling the 2002 girls' school fire where the "mutaween" religious police made sure the schoolgirls who didn't take the time to put on their scarves and abayas couldn't get to safety. That differs from my notion of ethical behavior at such a fundamental level that I don't think there's much point to discussing it. I wonder what the beliefs of those readers in Saudi Arabia are, and what they think of my meanderings here...

...and then I wonder whether I'm getting a representative sample of what people there think. If others judge America by the religious nutcases that constitute the main shortwave broadcasters in the US other than the Voice of America, heaven help us.

Bugs

SL residents have been understandably frustrated by bugs in SL. The friends listings are flaky, people report losing things from inventory, teleporting is an iffy thing.

One result has been the notorious "Open Letter" that requests that certain of these problems be fixed in preference to the addition of new features. Unfortunately, despite LL's having devoted over two thirds of its development staff to bug fixes, there appear to be vocal people who object to any development of new features.

News flash: no large program is bug-free. If you insist that all SL bugs be fixed before any new development occurs, then no new development will ever occur. Such a demand is short-sighted. Those interested, and those complaining that 69% isn't enough people to dedicate to bug fixing, might also wish to learn about Brooks' law.

P.S. There's a certain irony in the fact that the majority of SL users, and hence probably the majority of the complainers, are running Microsoft Windows.

Woodshed

I got an announcement yesterday from RH Designs about their new Woodshed build, and had to go there.

It's a beautiful place, all rich, saturated colors, dark wood, potted plants, and ornate comfy furniture, with exquisite detail. You expect to see a group of dignified Caledonian gentlemen with brandy snifters and cigars, talking about their expeditions or military exploits.


The area outside is even more beautiful, with waterfalls, lush greenery, and wonderful bridges.


It straddles the boundary between Woodshed and Mobius. (I was amazed that I could cross that boundary without sinking into the ground as I'd always seen before; perhaps that's been fixed.) There are some pleasant and romantic poseballs for the furniture inside and out.

Like Creative Fantasy's builds in Shadow Brook and Serenity Falls, even if you don't intend to buy anything at the moment, it's so gorgeous you will want to go there.

Sculpted prims and (oh, geez, here she goes again...) prim breasts

OK... Anyone who's interested in building things in SL should go and check out Torley Linden's announcement of the coming of "sculpted prims."

What's a sculpted prim, you ask? I'm glad you asked that. It's one whose shape is determined by a "texture." Rather than being used to describe colors, the (R, G, B) values of the "texture" are interpreted as (X, Y, Z) displacements from a center point to a matching point on the surface of the prim. The idea is that you generate an arbitrary "genus 0" 3-D shape (i.e. one without any holes in it—it can have dents, but no holes, at least in the first version) with the program of your choice and then use something to convert it into the "texture" that the SL code interprets to generate that shape on the grid. A converter exists for Maya; more will follow for other programs ("hopefully exporters for 3ds Max, Blender, and ZBrush will be available soon").

Sculpted prims will greatly expand the available shapes for building. I'm expecting a great improvement in non-human avatars, and for that matter, the possibility of a fairly good-looking built human avatar—maybe I can finally be a giantess! XCite will have a field day with this, I'm sure, but of course (here it comes) the thing of most immediate interest to me is prim breasts.

Sculpted prims mean that a prim breast can be a single prim. This in turn implies that they can be "clothed" by being painted with a texture, just as basic clothing in SL is painted on. Right now, tops for prim breasts have to be built to match; a top that works with one maker's breasts can't be used with another. (They also have a detectable thickness, which shows up in some cases.) Textures, on the other hand, have a chance to be used in common, if a convention about orientation is established.

"Gee, you're bringing back the problem of straps," you say. Yes, I am, but I think the tradeoff is worth it. The big problem of prim breasts is that their wearers are essentially cut off from the enormous treasure of exquisite fashion developed by mainstream houses of haute couture. The ideal solution would be one that makes those tops immediately usable, but barring implementation of Prop 125 we won't get that. Next best is one that makes it so trivial to accommodate prim breast wearers that clothing manufacturers consider the effort worth it for the income gained. If prim breasts can be clothed by painting, and the same texture will work no matter whose prim breast one wears, then perhaps clothiers will consider it worth adding right and left textures for prim breasts to their products.

(OTOH, they may see that as something that simplifies the theft of their IP for minimal gain... sigh. But at least it makes it more feasible for someone to set up shop making tops for prim breasts than the current situation, which chops up an admittedly non-mainstream market into even smaller pieces.)

I note that some like the effect of bulging from too-small tops. Given an operation that composes two sculpted prim control textures (adding the corresponding displacements, along with normalization to avoid overflow), I think one could accomplish this. Along with a top you'd need a sculpted prim control texture that is (0, 0, 0) wherever the top is, and then nonzero where the top isn't, with values designed to give a realistic bulge effect. It would be nice if the composition could be done on the fly, but as long as it's possible, one could get the effect at the expense of growing one's inventory.

Sorry for going on at length... again... but sculpted prims open so many possibilities, and it's hard not to think about them. I hope that prim breast makers will consider getting together and seeing whether I'm just blowing smoke, or whether life can be made better for their customers.

I become a tenant

"Home is where you hang your hat! I feel so break up, I wanna go home!"

--Lord John Whorfin, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension

Being homeless in SL is not a difficult thing. Certainly it's nowhere near the problem it is in real life. In SL, the weather is always good. Food and drink and shelter in SL are even more ephemeral than childhood tea parties and doll houses, rather than desperate necessities. With a little thought, you can change clothes in an order that leaves you decent throughout.

That said, humans have a wired-in need for a home. It's a place to relax and to entertain and to be intimate (if one is so inclined), and even in SL, it's nice to have a place to change clothes.

At the moment, though, I can't afford the membership needed to own property in SL, much less property taxes.

In steps my dear friend, Cheyenne Palisades, who, as she describes in her blog, has decided to rent portions of the land she owns on the Forsaken sim. One of those places has proved wonderful for my limited needs (one can be a pack rat in SL with far fewer bad side effects!) and affordable, and thus I am now a tenant.

I'll be taking some pictures of it now that it's furnished (SL moves faster than me making blog entries!), but for now, here's a shot of it from outside, taken before the jukebox was moved to the top level.

Terms of Endearment

I've been fortunate to have mostly found kind and pleasant people in SL. Some of them, very dear friends, address me with terms of endearment. You know, "sweetie" and the like.

One such term, though, always makes me do a double take. I know that it's intended as short for "honey," and that it's just my own weirdness that makes me react so, but every time I see

[name]: thanks, hun

I hesitate and want to double check that my name hasn't been surreptitiously changed to Attila. Maybe this is an argument for voice in SL. :)

Ah... there we go. I will tell myself that my dear friends are Winnie the Pooh fans. After all, his beloved jars were labeled "hunny," so "hun" is a perfectly reasonable short form!

Gotta Dance...

Update Day (thanks to Mordecai Scaggs for that name!) does have at least one good point: it causes one to go places and meet people one wouldn't normally see or meet.

This latest time, it also had the advantage of letting one actually look as one wished. The asset database snapshot was relatively recent, and we weren't all Ruthed.

So, there I was in beta, and in Luna, wandering lonely as a cloud... and I came upon some people. One of them asked whether I run the Linux SL client. "Yes, I do," I answered, and was pulled into a delightful meeting with friendly people.

One of the delightful friendly people urged us all to touch her head... and after doing so, we were all dancing!


You have no doubt noticed the woman in front and to the left, and that gorgeous outfit. She is Kami Singh, and she in fact is a tailor and hairmaker and made that outfit, Sexy Tuxedo. United by dance and the admittedly minimal adversity of being out in the beta grid, we pledged friendship (which we had to renew upon return to the main grid; I'm glad I wrote down everyone's names!), and Ms. Singh kindly told me where she sells her wares.

A rather frustrating series of login attempts later, I was back on the main grid and upstairs in the alcove in Hooters 'n' Shooters where her creations can be bought.

It took a little adjustment to put the hat on my head (without hair poking through) and to keep the tails from magically disappearing into my, um, posterior with the gentle background motions of my body that take place even when I am standing "still". That done, I was a happy camper. Now, all I need is a cane and a Bob Fosse-inspired dance animation! (Jazz hands... must have jazz hands...)

Solidarity

I'm embarrassed to say that I'd not seen Tiessa Montgolfier's blog entry that lists all the reasons we should in fact envy Barbie before today. Do read it; it's fun and clever. (And while you're there, read all of Tiessa's blog and bookmark it or set up your aggregator for the RSS feed. It's a great blog and insightful... and the "Mistress Strangelove" series especially is not to be missed!)

She says "I'm glad Melissa is enjoying her time with massive breasts and has the guts to do it." Thank you, Tiessa. To me, it's sad that it should take guts.

I've made a point of wearing them in "everyday" contexts (whatever that means in SL :)), e.g. to musical performances, or just while going from place to place. I'm not a dancer or escort, and my tops are no more daring than many, if not most, in SL. I just happen to have large breasts. (In SL... sigh.) With some help? Yes, but OTOH, <announcer guy voice>in a world where LL implemented Proposition 125</announcer guy voice>, I would have cheerfully run the slider up on day one. Then I'd have the nearest equivalent of "natural" large breasts there is in SL, avoiding any of the connotations prim breasts might have by analogy with RL implants.

There are some women who manage in RL to avoid the Scylla of medical problems and the Charybdis of cruel peers and popular culture's stereotypes and single notion of beauty, and actually have large breasts. Should they not be able to make their avatars look like themselves? If they can have large breasts in SL, why then, oh why can't I? (Or anyone, and I promise I won't sing again...)

Please let me know if you take the plunge with prim breasts, Tiessa; I think a solidarity movement for the well-endowed would be a very good idea. (Maybe I'm a bit stuffy; I can't bring myself to type or say that other B-word. :))

(Whew... I promise I won't get carried away like this again. Unless the subject turns to Windows Vista, maybe... :))

Friends

LiveJournal, a blogging web site, lets one name some people as "friends." It's a bit of a misnomer; all it really means is that that person's LJ entries are gathered onto one page (along with those of any other "friends" you have) that you can look at for convenience. The connotations of "friend," though, lead to misunderstandings. When people cull their friends list, they are often apologetic, and people removed from one's "friend" list evidently are sometimes hurt ("Don't you like me any more?"). I think that it would be better renamed to avoid those connotations.

SL has a way to select some people as your friends. Unlike LJ, both parties have to agree; friendship in SL is a symmetric relation, and either party can break it off. Do I think it's a misnomer, like the LJ arrangement? Not as much. In SL, it's more directly about the other person, as opposed to "just" his or her writing.

Some people don't want friendships offered lightly, and that's certainly understandable. I am perhaps too quick to offer friendship; if I talk to someone and seem to get along well with him or her, I'm likely to do so. It's only bitten me once or twice, and thinking back I was a bit uncertain at the time and should've listened to my instincts.

OTOH, it may not be fair to the other person. I can think of one person I've become friends with, and have never seen since. What must they think of me? ("You never write, you never call..." :)) I hesitate to break off such friendships, lest I offend... and even worry that writing this will give my friends the impression that I don't hold their friendship in high regard. (I do; right now, a goodly number of my dearest friends are people I've only seen as their avatars, and very likely never will see in RL.)

I have become a little less ready to offer friendship as time goes on. Perhaps everyone goes through an initial stage of offering lots of people friendship... like wearing boxes. :)

Though I am trying not to be as shy in SL, it still strikes from time to time, as it did in the case that provoked me to write this blog entry. Recently I saw someone so magnificent in dress and in avatar that I was utterly intimidated. I probably never would have dared talk to her, much less offer friendship... but yesterday she struck up a conversation with me, and now we are friends. Thank you, dear lady.

The MMAC

Last night I attended a performance by Bill and Pam Havercamp, and had a wonderful time.

That, of course, is much the same sort of news as "Sun Rises in East in the Morning;" Bill and Pam are a joy to listen to and their enthusiasm is, as one often hears, infectious. What was new for me was the venue, the Multi-media Arts Center, or MMAC. The Center includes a variety of performance spaces as well as an art gallery and two theaters (one being a drive-in).

It's great to have all these places in one spot... but doesn't that lead to problems with the number of residents that can fit in one spot, you may ask? Well, I asked; you've probably already figured it out: MMAC is sited over the spot where the corners of four different sims lie, so they can either have multiple smaller performances going or one big one, and possibly other combinations as well (I haven't looked closely at the layout).

So, check it out. I look forward to attending more performances there.

Oh Lord, Stuck in First Life Again...

I'm most of the way through an upgrade, but I don't have the nVidia driver that gives reasonable 3D performance (which is thus a requirement for running the SL client) installed yet... so I'm stuck in First Life for a while.

I hope I'll get past this and see you all soon!

P.S. I'm really, really sorry, Mr. Fogerty...

[UPDATE] Thanks to the good folks on the Ubuntu Forums, I was able to install the newest nVidia driver,. and it now seems to be running reasonably. There's a little remaining work to do, but we're over the hump, I can return to SL... and Feisty Fawn is well worth the move.

Interesting panel at VW07

Check out this summary at 3pointD.com.

Thank you, Sofia!

Today I noticed that someone in Sofia, Bulgaria has read this blog. That set me thinking and made me remember something that happened some time back...

I, like many others, had fallen in love with Le Mystére des Voix Bulgares, an album of Bulgarian art song inspired by folk music, and most especially with Philip Koutev's "Polegnala e Todora." I could never find the sheet music for that song.

Well, today I saw Google Analytics, thought of that song, Googled "Philip Koutev" (which I should've spelled "Kutev"; the album, as one might guess from the title, transliterated in a way suitable for French speakers) and "sheet music" and ZOT! One of the links was to a Wikipedia page that in turn pointed to Vox Bulgarica, where one can purchase the sheet music for $1.50. They have a sample page, which shows that the lyrics have been transliterated for us nikulturniki who can't read Cyrillic, and also shows me why I never managed to transcribe the music. It's in 11/16 time! (Eek!)

Once I am again employed, off my order will go, for enough copies that I can track down other people and we can enjoy giving voice to this music. Thank you, whoever you are in Bulgaria, who happened across my blog.

SL restless leg syndrome

If you've ever been in a place thick with prims, you've probably seen it. At various places and times you stand still, and suddenly one leg sticks straight out, as if you decided to do a kick and then froze in mid-kick. If you move, the problem goes away, at least for a while... but back it comes, as long as your in a prim-heavy region.

Does anyone know why this happens?

UPDATE: a good friend tells me it's not the number of prims, it's whether you're standing on a level surface, or more accurately whether there's a discontinuity in the spot you're standing on. I guess that (1) the places I've been so far with uneven terrain happen to have been places with many prims and (2) unevenness smaller than I can (or do) notice suffices to produce the effect.

A New Profile Photo

In ten days I will have been in Second Life for eight months... and it's sort of like dog years. "Eight months... how much is that in people years?" Several, I think. Things seem to happen very quickly in SL.

I've written a few times about how I've changed phys--uh, in appearance, I mean!--in Second Life. (See "Experiments in (dis)proportion," "My (Second) Life and the Rush of Breasts," and "Melissa Evolving.") After one brief false step at the beginning, through all this I've kept a single profile picture here on Blogger. Surely that makes no sense! (OK, it makes sense if you know how lazy I can be, but aside from that, I mean.) Besides, it's spring. Yes, every woman needs a Little Black Dress, but it's spring! I don't want my blog to look like I'm mourning.

So, here's the new profile photo. I hope you like it as much as I do. (Somehow I feel like I should be offering you a glass of tranya.)

Another Brief Deviation into RL

You may have read about the problems of keeping old data accessible. Old hardware eventually gives out; tapes get old and lose data; programs that understand the layout and semantics of the data aren't ported, or aren't portable... all kinds of things can happen.

You may not realize it, but... data you create or receive are, in a sense, held hostage by the program or programs that understand that data. If your data are stored in a proprietary format, your data are not fully under your control.

Businesses may do as they will; for the most part, one can choose not to deal with a particular business. Government, however, has a monopoly on coercive force. If government decides to only provide data in a proprietary format, or to only accept data in a proprietary format, it forces us to patronize the company that provides software that handles that format. That is fundamentally wrong.

Therefore, some governments have passed or are considering laws requiring open, non-proprietary data formats for data files they create. That is not going over well with the companies with proprietary data formats, and is leading to things such as this (via Slashdot):

A legislative staff employee who would lose his job if he were quoted here by name said, "By the time those [Microsoft] lobbyists were done talking, it sounded like ODF (Open Document Format, the free and open format used by OpenOffice.org and other free software) was proprietary and the Microsoft format was the open and free one." Two other legislative employees (who must also remain anonymous) told Linux.com that the Microsoft lobbyists implied that elected representatives who voted against Microsoft's interests might have a little more trouble raising campaign funds than they would if they helped the IT giant achieve its Florida goals.

(I added the [Microsoft] to the quoted text.)

So, if you use Windows, and especially if you use Microsoft Word, that is what you are implicitly supporting via your purchase. Please give serious thought to switching to OpenOffice or another word processing package that supports Open Document Format if you use Microsoft Word, and consider switching to Linux if you use Windows.

For more information, check out Slashdot or Linux.com. Groklaw has lots of information about Microsoft and Linux (and about SCO's attempt, partially funded by Microsoft, to kill Linux via bogus claims of copyright violation), and I expect they will cover this issue shortly.

Piano Recital

I had the good fortune to be able to attend a piano recital by Catherine Moody, an excellent pianist. The varied program included Beethoven, Mozart, Debussy, Mussorgsky, Brahms, and other pieces I didn't recognize (her cute mobile cat/tip receiver/program distributor became hard to find as the audience grew to lag-inducing levels; next time I'll know better and get a program early!).

All I can say is, if you have a chance to hear her, by all means take advantage of it!

I am drawn

Recently I happened to meet beepvic Beaumont; we chatted for a while, and the topic turned to his art. He showed me some of his work, which I like very much, and he offered to draw me.

A few days ago, he took some pictures of me, and set to work. The result, which I like and am very flatttered by:

A Day Without Hair

Today is Hair Fair Bandana Day. (Or is it "Bandanna Day"? Had you asked me, I'd say there were three "n"s, but fashion blogs in SL only use two, and after looking at them long enough, they both look wrong to me!) This is a day to take off your hair and put on a bandana.

The point is to support a worthy organization: Locks of Love. They provide hairpieces for girls and young women who are without hair due to medical conditions.

If you buy any or all of the bandanas (with however many "n"s) on sale associated with the day, the proceeds will go to benefit Locks of Love. I am very late in writing this, alas, but there is still some time.

A while back there was some controversy about a suggestion that people switch to an African avatar for Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. I was among those who thought it a minimally useful gesture to make the politically correct feel good. Maybe I was wrong; I can say that spending today without the flexi-prim hair I normally wouldn't be seen without did a little to drive home how it must be to really not have hair.

Serenity (no, not the movie...)

Recently Cheyenne invited me over to ride on the Pele Light Rail. It's a great ride, even if I did shriek when I saw the giant squid and the octopus!

What was truly wonderful, though, was the Pele Garden.The photo above gives you a small idea of the wonderful place that Cheyenne and Exuberance have created, but can't do it justice. For that, you should be hearing the gentle wind chimes and birdsong in the background, and should have a panoramic view of the place. The entire area is a demonstration of their genius.

Now, if I can only persuade an SL publication to do an article on the region...

HUDs, Fine Music, and Disappearing Skirts

If you look at a profile in SL, you'll see a little button labeled "Rate". If you're in that person's presence, you can click on it and choose to rate him or her either positively or neutrally in the categories of behavior, appearance, and building skills, along with an optional comment that the person rated sees. Positive ratings cost L$25 per category... and I really hope that that money goes to the person rated, because I've tried to make a point of rating people positively when appropriate. (Judging by the comments on the below-linked blog entry, though, I appear to have been naive about that...)

LL has recently announced that the next Beta Test Grid will have an associated Beta client that removes the ratings system. Apparently it's not all that widely used, and eats enough resources that LL has decided to phase it out. There are a lot of third-party ratings systems for SL out there, which the linked SL blog entry lists, and I decided to check out RatePoint.

One goes through a process to register with RatePoint, and then goes to RatePoint Island to pick up a box with a HUD to let you rate nearby people (I think those who are also so registered), and with something you can wear to publicly display your rating if you are so inclined.

I did so... and saw a bunch of people inside the RatePoint Café. In I went, and when I clicked the audio stream on, there was some sweet jazz with, if I remember rightly, piano and flugelhorn. I listened, and then the light came on... and I typed

/me realizes that this is live music!

Fortunately, Kurt Jano, the excellent performer who was responsible for the music, was amused... and said so between songs. *blush*...

A bunch of people there had on their rating displays above their heads, so I figured what the heck and put mine on. The music was really good (if you ever have a chance to hear Kurt, by all means take it!), and I was into it... and suddenly I noticed that my skirt had disappeared! *blush* again, and thank goodness I wasn't, um, regimental.

Yup, that display attached to the pelvis, just like prim skirts do... so I'd better read up on how to make it attach elsewhere (is there any place left, I wonder?).

I guess we'll see which of the third-party ratings systems survive as time goes on, and I'll see how useful RatePoint proves to be. I am glad I tried it, if only for the really good music!

Kurt Vonnegut leaves First Life

I just heard the news... thanks, Mr. Vonnegut, for some fine books. (Something tells me that in all the TV and radio segments about his passing, no list of his works will include his short story for Harlan Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions anthology.)

Best Wishes

In about a day, two very dear SL friends will be meeting in RL: a joyous event, and I wish them both the very best.

Speaking of Goldie Locks...

I was headed out from there this morning, just before going out into the non-shopping region of Nantli Xolal, when someone appeared, walked right into me, and determinedly continued, pushing me along. "Hey, wait a minute!" I thought...

...and then realized that he'd just teleported in, and rezzing was slow. I'm sure he didn't even see me. Besides, there's a double bind for people teleporting to a popular place: wait for one's surroundings and other people to rez, or get out of the way of other people teleporting to the same spot?

I'm glad I didn't follow my initial impulse.

Nantli Xolal and the Rainforest

If you know me, you know I'm a sucker for hair, and especially for long hair. I therefore have been to Goldie Locks a few times... OK, more than a few times. It was only this morning, though, that I decided to head out the gap between stores and explore, and it was long overdue.

I hope you'll go exploring there if you haven't already. Nantli Xolal and the adjacent Rainforest are gorgeous, with giant flowers, a railroad, and Mesoamerican and South American buildings and lush plant life.

Back in the saddle again...

I'm back from a trip to see family, which was very good.

RL may keep me off the Grid as much as I've been, but it's for a good cause, namely potential, and with effort and luck, actual, employment.

Not much to say at the moment, save... thank you to all my friends. I can't adequately describe how grateful I am for your friendship.