Thanks

The SLart at the Cannery exhibit is over, though I hope that it's not the last such exhibit and that even more amazing art is to come.

Thank you to Shoshana Epsilon and Vint Falken; I'm still amazed that you saw something worthy of display in one of my photos. Thanks to all who went to see the exhibit, and thanks to the artists whose incredible work was on display.

UPDATE: I spoke too soon! It's open until next Wednesday. If you haven't seen it, please do. It's a wonderful collection of art.

UPDATE #2: The first exhibit is over, but the call is out for images for the next one... yay! Keep an eye out for more news.

Not a happy camper

As I write, traffic is still taken into consideration as a measure of popularity or relevance in SL. Unfortunately, this has given rise to attempts to drive up one's traffic rating by means other than offering compelling content and goods.

They do this by setting up poseballs so that whoever sits on them is paid a pittance to just sit there (or in a few cases to be animated to scrub the floor, wash a window, or play a guitar). As you know if you've spent much time at all in SL, this is called "camping," and chairs equipped with such poseballs are called "camping chairs."

Camping is a blight on SL; campers consume server resources and increase lag for those who are actually trying to do something.

I've just discovered camping has been set up in a place I visit fairly often. I'm surprised, because it's near a store whose owner is making major advances in the state of the art in the products he sells. A hair vendor whose products I love and buy more of than I really should has also set up camping chairs--those who sit there long enough can get hair... to be fair, I think the equivalent L$/minute is considerably better than the average camping chair.

So... I'm driven to the point of announcing that I will stop doing business with establishments that have camping. It will take many people doing so to be noticed, and even then I think it will really take LL's abandoning traffic as a measure of popularity or relevance to put a stop to it... but I can't implicitly condone camping by rewarding those who cause it.

P.S. I just noticed that this is post #300. Good heavens! Thanks to all of you who've read my meanderings.

What did you learn today?

As one who lived through the 1980s, I of course read Leo Buscaglia's Love, saw tapes of his lectures, and read his wonderful tribute to his father... and hence I remember the story about his father's asking him every day "Felice, what did you learn today?" which could prompt a frantic scan of the encyclopedia if nothing came to mind before supper.

Today I read Penance Sauterau's article in the Second Life Herald on "identity hunting" (well, at least the part where you find clothes suited to your identity), and she mentioned the place to find neko ears: Jungle Voodoo on Temenos Island.

I did a double take--"temenos" looked to me like Reverend Spooner in first year Spanish--but then, unable to let it slide, I looked temenos up, and was happy to have learned something very interesting!

Thank you, Ms. Sauterau, and thank you Dr. Buscaglia, wherever you are, for reinforcing that urge to find out.

(Second) Life is but a dream...

...at least it is for me these days. More specifically, a dream I had long ago in which I could fly, but had minimal control over my position and couldn't land.

Yesterday and on into this morning, I've been stuck in the air in the "falling" animation, arms and legs flailing. Sitting down works, but stand up again, and away I go. This has happened to me once before, and similarly nothing I tried had any effect: teleporting, flushing cache, using the RC client or the "official" client. Beta works, but has its own problems... the biggest being that my friends aren't there.

Nothing to do but wait it out and go looking for similar bug reports, I guess.

UPDATE: putting on a saved shape somehow stopped the problems. I'll remember for next time, but should still go looking for similar reported bugs.

Gutsy Gibbon now running...

As I type, my computer is now running Ubuntu 7.10 aka "Gutsy Gibbon". It at least seems perkier (ick, my computer is like Katie Couric?) than before. Even with trackerd chugging along and cataloging my files, things are snappy. So did SL, but it's the dead of night, and conditions vary so much that I wouldn't take that as much evidence.

Disappointed Goreans

I was at a store this morning. It's fall in the US (and autumn elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere :)), and the harvest decorations were out in force... as you'd expect in Iowa. Pumpkins, squash of all colors, and dried out stalks of corn. Very festive...

...and then I looked more closely and saw a little sign attached to a stalk. "Silks available in the Floral Department." I burst out laughing at the image of a kajira heading for the Floral Department, only to be handed a dried out cornstalk.

CSI:NY

Well... last night's episode wasn't bad; SL residents weren't all painted as perverts, and they didn't take very many liberties. (Would that SL were as lag-free as on the show, and teleports as quick.)

(Sigh... kind of sad when one is relieved that all they did was portray one resident as a hired assassin.)

I was online in the dead of night US time, and visited one of the CSI:NY sims. I didn't spend much time there, and as a Linux user I couldn't try the special version of the client. I wasn't able to hear the audio clips for some reason (though in a very nice accomodation of deaf users, you can click on a spot on the CSI HUD and see text). There did seem to be a respectable number of people there for the time--an insanely early hour on a weekday.

How many will come to SL, and how many will stay? I don't know. Some are rather eagerly predicting a flop. I won't predict one way or another, save that I suspect that those who stay will not be sheep herded by their version of the client. People are more resourceful than that.

"You woman!"

Long ago, Des Moines had a wonderful radio station that you could only hear if you had cable TV. At the time, the local cable TV franchise offered an FM hookup that not only gave you a good signal for local stations, but also brought in other stations as well, like Chicago's magnificent WFMT, and inserted a signal that never hit the actual airwaves, but went by the made-up "callsign" KBLE.

KBLE eventually made the move to actual radio with the call letters KMFG, and all was well in Des Moines radio until, shortly after the flood of 1993, one morning KFMG listeners discovered that the station had been sold and switched to a format featuring nothing but metal. It was the death of worthwhile commercial radio in Des Moines, and the corpse is still rotting.

All that is to explain how it was that I came to listen to "Mancow's Morning Madhouse." I didn't listen to it for very long, or perhaps very long at a time is the better term; I tended to cycle among the alternatives until I remembered why I despised them. In the case of Mancow, it was his being of the sick David Letterman school of "humor" in which the perpetrator features someone who is made to look stupid so that the audience and the emcee can feel smugly hip.

One thing stands out in my memory, though. Sometimes Mancow would include a person he at least said was his grandfather, and in one taped bit, this old man was berating someone, calling him names, leading up to his ultimate insult: "You woman!"

What kind of person must he have been, what kind of upbringing did he have to give him that sort of view of the world?

I'm reminded of it after seeing similar put-downs from a male avatar in SL. If the human behind the avatar is a man, I have to wonder the same thing, perhaps more so if he's younger than Mancow's grandfather--isn't this supposedly a more enlightened age? OTOH, if the human behind the avatar is a woman, I suppose it could be an attempt at verisimilitude by affecting the worst stereotypes of men, but if it isn't, what does that say?

UPDATE: KFMG has made a reappearance on MySpace--they have reincarnated yet again, this time as an Internet station!

Women In Art

A beautiful bit of video... would that they had added at least one CGI image at the end. Isn't SL an interactive art form?

P.S./ObSL: Now there's a source of shapes I'd buy! Wouldn't you like to have a Mona Lisa avatar, or Lady with an Ermine, or...? (Hmmm... probably not many takers for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.)

Le Ubuntu Nouveau est Arrivé

The day has arrived. You can now retrieve and install Ubuntu 7.10, code name "Gutsy Gibbon," or if you already have Feisty Fawn, make sure you have the latest update-manager package, and it will offer to upgrade you to 7.10. It is very likely to be a slow process for the next few days, though, which is why many recommended downloading the RC (Release Candidate) CD beforehand, and installing/upgrading from it.

I will be upgrading when I can...after backing up my data, of course! I will also report on how things go.

medieval/Renaissance clothing

I've seen the occasional ad in SL for a "medieval" or "Renaissance" gown. The items have often been beautifully done, but it's not clear to me that they're really based on clothing of that time.

I want to wear a houppelande in SL, or a cotehardie. Is that possible?

UPDATE: Mordecai Scaggs, whose blog you really should read, has graciously sent me a landmark for Avalance, Lightfoot, and Sputnik as a possible source. I went there last night when I woke up at a ridiculous hour. I looked for the outfit he specified, i really did... but spent so long admiring the other lovely clothing there that I had to reluctantly leave before I found it. I will return.

The "Sputnik" part of the name perhaps refers to the presence of some items of popular culture and SF. I couldn't help but notice the aliens from that classic Dr. Who episode, "The Loch Ness Monster," which has my very favorite Dr. Who line of all time, spoken by one of said aliens about the Doctor:

He was a formidable opponent, but he underestimated the power of organic crystallography.

UPDATE: Oops... evidently it's "Terror of the Zygons." Sorry.

Stage whisper

What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks one language? American.
--old and inaccurate joke

I was window shopping for hair a while back, looking at the lucky chairs along with some other folks. Not much conversation going on, or perhaps it was all in voice; voice has yet to appear in the Linux SL client.. and then the occasional remarks started:

"mostro"
"disgustoso"

If it really didn't bother me, I wouldn't feel the urge to write about it, so congratulations, whoever said that.

Second Life Herald features prim breasts

An article titled "Second Life Inflationists Filling Up Fast" features an inflationist who uses a pair of "Implant Nation" prim breasts. Nice to see the topic under discussion--the last time I've seen mention of it in a mainstream SL publication is the interview that the SL Newpaper very kindly did. I hope it will bring the matter to more residents' attention.

When you're on network TV...

...then I guess you've arrived in the general public's consciousness. The only problem is whether the portrayal is misleading, as the CSI "Fur and Loathing" episode, and the Law and Order hatchet job done on SL, were, or not. I have hope for the upcoming CSI:NY Second Life "story arc" (gosh, I hate that term).

All I can say is, the grid had better be ready for the influx.

T-4 and counting...

I've been remiss in explaining the little graphic that I've added to the blog.

At the time of this writing, at least, it shows the number of days until the release of Ubuntu Linux version 7.10, or as it's popularly called, "Gutsy Gibbon."

If you don't know what Linux is: briefly, it is an Open Source operating system, largely compatible with Unix, that runs on a wide variety of processor architectures and systems. Follow the links for more details... I want to list some of the reasons to switch to Linux.

• Performance: Windows Vista is a notorious resource hog. The "Aero" UI effects take vastly more graphics horsepower to give the same kinds of effects that Compiz provides under X.org on Linux. Big box office supply and electronics stores are heavily pushing huge USB flash drives to support the so-called "Ready Boost." Vista is memory hungry enough that it wants a cache faster than a hard drive with mechanical parts.
• Choice: Henry Ford said of the Model T, "You can have any color you want as long as it's black." Similarly, Windows gives you a UI, and you had better like it. Linux doesn't depend on one specific GUI; indeed, you can get along without one--as many embedded systems running Linux do. (If you have a networked hard drive system, chances are it runs Linux.) With Linux and X.org, you have a wide choice of windowing environments, some simple and lean, some with lots of eye candy and hand-holding. Pick the one best for your situation.
• Owning your own data: If you enter your data into a program that stores it in a proprietary format, in a very important sense your data is held hostage. You are at the mercy of the owners of the software that understands that format. The most obvious case is of software that one rents--a model that Microsoft would like very much to move to--but there are other examples as well, such as mistakes in software that checks whether you own a legitimate copy of the software that understands the proprietary format.
• Security: If you use Windows, I need say no more.
  

Friends who have tried both Windows and Linux on the same hardware tell me that the Linux SL client performs better. I've not looked at or profiled the client source code, so I can only guess at why this is.

So... I hope that you will try Linux. You can run it without affecting your computer setup, since it can be run from a "Live CD," a bootable CD version, though at some expense in performance. (Even better is to run it from a bootable flash drive, so that you can save your setup and configuration.) Even if you don't decide to install it, keep the Live CD around; some Linux Live CDs are stocked with tools useful for repairing scrambled hard drives.

(I must admit that a Live CD isn't the thing to try for running the SL client--to avoid touching your hard drive, the Live CD creates a "RAM disk" using much of your RAM, and SL is very RAM hungry...)

There are many Linux distributions; choice reigns supreme there as well as in windowing environments. However, I'd recommend Ubuntu to start with. The Ubuntu forums are friendly places. Women might also wish to look at the resources available at linuxchix.org.

UPDATE: Honesty compels me to admit that you can alter your Windows user interface, for a fee. Stardock offers software (that you pay for periodically if you wish to keep up to date) that permits such alteration.

Save the Megaprim

"Save the Texas Prairie Chicken." --Michael Nesmith

Prims were intended to have a limit on their size--in no dimension can they be more than ten meters across. However, people found a loophole that allowed the creation of larger prims. That loophole has been closed, but the megaprims that exist can be copied and distributed.

So far, Linden Labs has tolerated this--but there are concerns that griefers are using such prims for nefarious purposes. So, LL is soliciting comments.

Megaprims have legitimate uses: just for one example, walls, roofs, piazzas, any large space that would otherwise require a lot of smaller prims to laboriously build up--smaller prims that detract from the prim count that could otherwise be used for decoration or landscaping. Large hollow boxes can form a large part of a quick low prim count house.

Any builders and others who make use, or could make use, of megaprims for legitimate purposes, please make your opinions known to Linden Labs. The original LL blog posting is filled with comments; they've made a forum posting to allow more commentary.

Girls Gone Geek, and a minor rant

There's an interesting, fairly new podcast out: Girls Gone Geek. If your childhood heroines were people like

• Hypatia
  
• Sonia Kovalevsky
• Emmy Noether
• Augusta Ada Lovelace
• Grace Murray Hopper
• Adele Goldberg
• Jean Sammet
• Barbara Liskov

then it might not strike you as really geeky, but it's still very good, and fun, and they've had a pointer to alice.org, a neat way to introduce people to programming... and I hope they do more of that kind of thing in the future.

A bit of a rant... in the past, people have rightly taken the general public to task for its mathematical illiteracy, or, in a term coined by analogy with illiteracy, innumeracy. (See John Allen Paulos's fine book by that title, as well as that classic work on statistical fallacies and deception, Darrell Huff's How to Lie with Statistics.) Alas, it's not clear whether much has improved; people still fall for the Gambler's Fallacy, and misjudge the likelihood of various events horribly, with calamitous results in public policy. (Democracy, like the free market, gives even stupid people what they want... but I'll stick with them, thanks; the alternatives are far, far worse.)

These days, computer illiteracy should be added to the list. If you don't understand at least the basics of how computers function, or better yet know how to program in some language that won't inculcate bad habits, you might as well face up to not being able to participate fully in today's world.

I don't drive. I drove for a while, and then decided I'd be safer if i didn't. Because of that, I can't fully participate in RL. Do I rant about how RL is set up to favor the mobile? No. I face the consequences of my choice not to drive, and do the best I can.

So... if you're not a geek, I urge you to go out and learn about computers. There's been no better time to do so than now. Grab DrPython or DrScheme or Eclipse or Hugs, (or Alice!) and go to it. You'll be glad you did.

Actually... if you're reading this, most likely you are into Second Life. (Duh...) So, give some thought to learning C#. LSL is going to be retargeted to the bytecode that is used for C#, and I wouldn't be surprised if the language of Second Life becomes C# instead of LSL. I hate to suggest a language promoted by the Great Satan, but there is an implementation of it for Linux.

UPDATE: OK... that provoked me to visit linuxchix.org, and there I saw an item about an "(un)conference," She's Geeky. (It sounds like it will be very good.) The urge to do a Rick James filk was almost overwhelming...

Dankon, samideanoj!

In Esperanto, a samideano, literally "one with the same idea," is a fellow Esperantist... but a group of samideanoj in the literal sense that I've so far not written about are the dear friends I've made while exploring the world of prim breasts in SL... and I'm sorry that I haven't.

If I tried to name them all, I couldn't... women, some sweet, some mischievous, and all heartbreakingly beautiful, and men, some kind with a gruff exterior and some urbane and witty, some cute and some devilishly handsome. (And some furries ranging from cute to elegantly beautiful, or both at the same time.)

Among them are friends who have helped me through hard times in SL and indirectly in RL, and I am more grateful than I can say.

A New Skin...

I don't change my avatar often, aside from hair (and larger breasts when I can find or edit them... :)), but when I saw this skin I wanted it. I won't wear it all the time, but I like it a lot.

P.S. I swear I haven't chewed any gum.

Self-publishing

Long ago, when the world was new (well, to me it was), a fellow named Don Lancaster was writing about strange things called "TV Typewriters" (hey, it was like a TV—it was some time before many computers had any graphics, much less graphics that needed more bandwidth than TVs could provide—and what you typed was displayed on it). He also wrote about starting your own business...

...and about self-publishing with print-on-demand. Computing and advances in printers made it possible to avoid the "vanity presses" and their fees (and scams, as the SWFA points out). Instead, you printed the books yourself at the rate you needed; no need to keep a huge inventory.

Things have gone even further, now; there are companies that will do the printing and shipping for you, in the same way that cafepress.com prints and ships T-shirts, mugs, and the like. For example, the Cannery exhibit in SL can be seen in printed form via a book available on lulu.com.

So... just as computers have made it far less expensive for people to do many other things once limited to a select few, they've made it less expensive to publish a book, and I hope this will have the same effects...

...but on the other hand, Sturgeon's Law does apply. Self-publishing isn't new, just a lot cheaper, and I found what turned out to be one example of it long ago as an undergraduate.

While rummaging through the stacks in an obscure corner of the math section of the university library, I found a small book, published some time ago--I forget whether it was in the early 20th century or the late 19th. It grandiloquently proclaimed that its author, a 33rd degree Mason (ooooh....), had solved the problem that had defeated mathematicians for so long; he had squared the circle! Except that he hadn't, really...

Squaring the circle, for the non-math majors, is, or rather was, a problem, and it dates back to the ancient Greeks: how, using standard geometrical constructions in Euclidean geometry, can you draw a square with the same area as an arbitrary given circle? Standard geometrical constructions means all you get to use is a compass and an unmarked straightedge. Mathematicians beat their heads against it for ages until, in the 19th century, algebraists described what geometrical operations let you do in terms of finding zeros of polynomials... and proved that pi, which is a factor in figuring the area of a circle, is not just irrational, but "transcendental," meaning it's not the zero of any polynomial with integer coefficients, so all those earlier mathematicians were beating their heads against the wall for nothing... well, except for all the math that resulted from trying to do it.

The mere fact that you can't do it, though, didn't stop some, um, determined folks... including the wealthy man (and 33rd degree Mason!) who talked himself into thinking he'd solved it, wrote and printed a bunch of copies of a little book announcing his "triumph," and then sent them out to land-grant colleges and universities across the United States. There they were obligingly put into the stacks, a curiosity left to molder between occasional looks from curious folk like my younger self.

I have to wonder what, and how much, writing of this era will be read by people who will look at each other with a wild surmise... and then burst into howls of derisive laughter.

P.S. Why the constraint to integer coefficients? Well... if you allow arbitrary coefficients, trivially every real number r is a zero of the polynomial x - r... and WLOG (without loss of generality) you can always use integers instead of rationals--just multiply out by the product of the denominators, or their least common multiple if you're feeling miserly.

"I may be totally wrong, but I'm a..."

Last night, a friend gave me some wonderful bling: four particle generators that leave an ever-shifting trail of sparkles at your hands and feet.

Well... that clearly called for the pale green Empire dress and luna moth wings (and desperately calls for a new shape--I want to keep my (lack of?) proportions, but scale them down; a 7'2" fairy just doesn't work...), but what then? Just standing there kills the effect. So... that means I have to move. Walking is kind of dull, so that means either flying or dancing, and seriously looking at grabbing video from SL rather than stills (though a well-timed photo could be quite striking).

But then, dance animations tend to be loops (and require another participant, and I certainly don't want to bug someone at length for such a purpose). Hmm... one could hide the repetition some by changing camera position and angle, but ideally you'd want something like what (gulp) actual dancers have: a repertoire of movements that can be combined at will. (You mean I can't just sit on the poseball, lie back and think of England? Oh, dear... I'll be as clumsy as I am in real life! Not to mention that I can't do that and keep track of the camera at the same time.) There's more to this machinima stuff than meets the eye.

People do manage it, though; there is actually an SL ballet troupe!

That in turn makes me wonder--has anyone come up with animations for aerobatics? Not the standard maneuvers--or not just those--but ones that would be appropriate for a person, or a fairy. Aerial ballet, I guess.

No pictures or video yet, but I would love to have something worthy of putting on YouTube. (Hmmm... it would be wonderful to do something aerial to Iron and Wine's cover of "Such Great Heights".)

P.S. OK, OK... Vaughan Williams's "The Lark Ascending" would be even better.

VintFalken.com

VintFalken.com is a blog that I can't always get to, alas; for some reason my ISP sends me off to some default "I can't find that URL" page about half the time.

When I can get to it, though, it's well worth reading. She's quite a photographer (and skilled with postprocessing), and posts very useful links to web sites of use to residents of Second Life.

She recently posted a quote from a blog entry by Bejamin Duranske concerning Benjamin Duranske and Prokofy Neva. Google is said to have made changes a while back to try to combat "Google bombing." but I wouldn't say this is on that level.

UPDATE: [slaps forehead] Sorry, Vint! I fixed the link. Everyone, if you want to read about Benjamin Durankse and Prokofy Neva, then you can do so.

Nuova Sicilia

I had seen mention of it somewhere before, but yesterday I visited Nuova Sicilia, New Sicily, for the first time.

It's a beautiful place, all broad cobblestone streets and colorful buildings, with many shops selling lovely clothes, jewelry, and pottery, and a church featuring mosaics--I don't know enough to say that they are from Herculaneum, but I heard "Ercolano" in a conversation there.

Not to be missed in Nuova Sicilia: the beautiful and talented Manuela Collas's exhibition of RL photos of Sicilian sunsets, "Sicily in My Eyes."

So... why did I only go there yesterday? Well, I was looking around for places to explore with a friend. He's from Sicily in RL... so surely he's been here already, I thought, but it was so lovely I had to offer him a TP over. In fact, it turned out that he hadn't visited it before, so this Iowa girl introduced a Sicilian to Nuova Sicilia. Only in SL...

Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Woman

Some months ago, I bought child and adolescent avatars—not for ageplay, but to try to imagine what Melissa might have been like then.

Procrastinator that I am (or am I? Etymologically, to procrastinate is to leave things for tomorrow, in Latin pro cras, and unfortunately, I put things off far longer sometimes), I finally got around to taking a picture.


She looks wistful, perhaps contemplating her future. I hope that I've not disappointed her.

Watermelon--it's everywhere!

I went to a nearby Renaissance fair today. I saw a young girl in light green with a bright, saturated pink scarf... and had to imagine Torley Junior as a young girl.

A few minutes after, there was another girl in light green... wearing pink Crocs.

Is watermelon the new whatever, or am I just primed to notice the color combination from reading Torley's blog and watching Torley's video tutorials? I don't know... and they might both be true. I was just struck by the coincidence.

A user group?

I'm thinking of creating a group for those who use prim breasts. (After blowing one morning before work trying to find plural comparatives and plural ablatives, I decided against Latin, and will give it an English name...) I hope that as a group we can accomplish things we can't in isolation.

Lighting Followup

If you're interested in a more flexible personal lighting setup, by all means check out this post in Fashion Victim. (Fashion Victim is not your usual fashion blog...) The results you can get with it look very impressive.

"I'll be back..."

Sigh. RL is keeping me off the grid rather a lot; I've been out and unconnected the past two weekends, over and above working.

I look forward to finally being back for a significant stretch of time this weekend. I've missed many dear friends.

Ave et vale

Penso che una vita per la musica sia una vita spesa bene ed è a questo che mi sono dedicato. —Luciano Pavarotti

"I think that a life for music is a life well spent, and to this I am dedicated."

It is indeed, and you were, as music lovers worldwide will agree.

De gustibus

Ophelia Drowns is a blog well worth reading... and beautiful to look at, too. It would be darned near perfect if the sound clip defaulted to not playing.

(At this point you can just feel the "But..." coming. Why is it that we are so much more motivated to speak up to disagree or complain?)

I have to differ a bit with the recommendations in the entry "Picture Perfect," though. Yes, definitely turn on all the graphics knobs you can afford to turn on, and run those detail sliders all the way up... but facing full into the sunrise with a face light on makes your avatar look like a cutout paper doll, wiping out essentially all depth cues. Professional portraits aren't taken with the flash unit pointing directly at the subject for exactly that reason. That "full body 5 o'clock shadow" at least shows that the avatar isn't flat.

For example, this is taken on Apollo, full face into the sunrise... and darn, I wish I could remember whether I had the face light turned on.


Here, OTOH, the subject is facing north at sunrise. Now, whatever else one might say, the subject is clearly not a cutout... and SL being what it is, nasolabial folds and other wrinkles are of no concern to us!


Not to say face lights don't have a use; they are great as fill lighting. Silhouettes are great, but the only way I know of to get something like them in SL is a pseudo-silhouette you get if you ask the snapshot to show distance rather than color. Barring that, you need the face light for something like this photo, with the subject facing away from the sun:


...and often they're needed if you're shooting at midnight. (The face light is a special case of an invisible light source. If you're really into photography, you will want to roll your own and position them where you wish; Torley Linden has a great video with many photography hints, the easy creation of fill lights being just one of the techniques shown.)


Experiment, and choose what looks good to you. My preference for depth cues is just that, and your mileage may vary.

UPDATE: Duh! If I knew anything about art, then I'd have known that what I spent so much time talking around is chiaroscuro. Do you like yours subtle (Ms. Ophelia's "after" picture does have very slight shading indicating depth) or more blatant? Both have their places.

Back to Work

I will be employed once again, starting tomorrow.

This will mean less time in SL for me... though, OTOH, more than I'd have if I couldn't afford to connect. :)

One thing it will affect, though, is contact with friends in very different time zones. Spatial distance doesn't matter in SL, which is a wonderful thing. Thanks to SL I've "met" wonderful people I'd never have met otherwise. Temporal difference, though, still does matter.

So... time spent with friends will become all the more precious.

Return of the Revenge of the Attack of the Fifty-foot Melissa

It's been a long time since I posted a worm's eye view photo; I've tended towards forced perspective lately... but having found the joys of ctrl-[890] (thanks, Cheyenne, and also thanks to Torley Linden for the great video tutorials), I had to try again:


I'll have to try again standing on a ledge or step so I can get the POV down at shoe level.

Check it out

Please read Lillie Yifu's blog entry, "Triangle of Fire." It's eye-opening.

I guess I was extremely lucky when I came to SL, or perhaps I was/am blissfully ignorant of the extent to which I may have been fleeced.

So... how to stop the scams? It's going to require a trustworthy source of inforrmation—a way to ask whether a vendor provides reasonable value for L$, or a way to search for something and have the crooks filtered out of the search result.

User ratings leap to mind—but can those be gamed, with scammers buying good ratings or creating myriad alts to give good ratings? Another possibility would be an organization that functions like Underwriters Laboratories, but for SL. I don't have an answer, but one will need to be found.

The Cannery: Wow.

The Cannery has opened. I'm amazed, and inspired.

This exhibit is open until November. You'll want to take your time to see it; there's a lot to see. The photographs there are beautiful, clever, evocative... and show me that I have a lot to learn. (The learning will be fun, I suspect.)

My mouth is still hanging open.

P.S. At least some of the photographers featured have their work on flickr... but there's nothing like an art gallery, be it real or virtual, to display art as it should be seen. Go see it.

P.P.S. OK, barring a gallery, the next best thing is a big book... I bought one long ago with André Kertész's photos of models' reflections in fun house mirrors, and it was a glorious thing. Turns out there will be a book—not as big as the Kertész book, but not tiny either—of the art from the exhibit at the Cannery.

Averages

I wandered over to Google Analytics again, and looked over the map.

It's still amazing how many places look at this blog, though many for 0:00. Surely it takes at least a second for a person to look at a page, say to him or herself "To heck with this," and go somewhere else... but OTOH, are there that many places around the world with programs that go wandering about the web? (Maybe there are.)

Then there are the cities where the average time spent is half an hour or more. Do those represent people actually reading for that time, or "Hmmm.... it's lunchtime/time for my favorite TV show/time to take a {nap, shower, ...}; I'll look at this later"? (And Google can't tell the difference between someone there and actually enjoying reading and someone there and thinking "Good Lord, this is like a trainwreck you can't look away from!")

I'm glad that I'm not trying to make money from this blog, and hence having to try to infer things from the data.

IP Theft

I'm going to do something I never thought I'd do: recommend that you read an article in the Second Life Herald. It contains Enktan Gully's description of blatant IP theft and the (astonishing, to me at least) results of her pursuit of the matter.

I was involved with the anti-Copybot frenzy... but note that this theft was not done with Copybot, but was plain and simple reconstruction—with the notecards copied and rather carelessly edited.

I've done business at Enkythings, Enktan Gully's store, and have been quite pleased with what I bought there. I for one plan to continue to do business there, and to make a point of not doing business with establishments that sell stolen IP. I hope that others will do likewise.

Local lighting

I have a love-hate relationship with local lighting in SL.

Lighting in SL is weird, to an extent probably intentionally. Go in an enclosed room with no windows. Set the sun to noon. Surprise! Your camera is no longer obscura! I'm sure that's intentional, so that you don't have to put lighting everywhere.

Local lighting is treated differently somehow. My choices in SL mean that I do a lot of color matching... and local lighting makes that a pain. Colors that look identical in the SL noonday sun can look totally different at midnight with local lighting. It's enough to make one want to detach one's prim hair...

...but that different treatment can look so good! Take a look at the picture that appears at the top of my blog. Nice... but flat. Now, look at this:


That was taken at midnight in the Rainforest sim, lit by torchlight. It's incredibly flattering to the avatar, and definitely not flat... I mean, it shows depth... um, you know what I mean.

In RL, we see the harsh shadows that result from direct sunlight... and like extraneous background objects, we learn to ignore them--but can't ignore them in photographs, so photographers must take them into account. Similarly, we don't ignore them on the screen—which is no doubt another reason SL doesn't accurately depict sunlight. (Accuracy was one reason people kvetched about the initial versions of the SL client with Windlight; we adapt to the differences in lighting at dawn and sunset, too, but Windlight rubbed our noses in it.)

So, photographers, local lighting is your (fickle) friend... just like RL, come to think of it. (The fashion-minded have noticed this, too; I have heard of local lighting attachments that people wear.)

A lot can happen in a year...

Even in RL. In SL, where things seem to happen so quickly, how much more so.

Yesterday was my first rez day (the SL equivalent of birthday, the anniversary of the day one first goes on the grid). I've already posted about how my appearance has changed over time, but that's certainly not all that's changed.

When I first arrived in SL, and for a fair time thereafter, 20,000 users was a peak daily number. Nowadays, it's typically a daily minimum.

The average frame rate has gone up with time... of course, that might be partly because SL provoked me to get graphics hardware better than the nVidia 4000 and 4400 cards I'd been using. One reason I don't call SL a game is that I'm no gamer, and I like SL... but SL certainly uses graphics resources (and RAM, and CPU cycles) the way a game does.

When I was first in SL, I don't think that a million had signed up yet. That's certainly changed, and I've been told a time or two by new residents that I've been in SL a long time. Who, me? There are people who've been here from the start, years longer than I have!

A year ago, while I was happy that LL was enlightened enough to provide a Linux client, it couldn't display video, and LL hadn't taken advantage of the many eyes that Open Source status provides to software. That's changed now, and we have the open sourcing of the client to thank for bug fixes and enhancements, as LL has recently formally recognized.

I'm hoping that some major improvements will occur well before my second rez day... but all that aside, the most important thing about SL for me has been the friends I've made, people I'd never have otherwise met. *hugs* to you all.

The Cannery opens

This coming Wednesday, at 3:00 p.m. Second Life Time, a photography exhibit will open on the Rezzable Cannery sim, and will run until November. It will feature six artists in particular, plus forty photos, grouped into eight themes, by other SL photographers.

(I'm using the P-word, even though no photons are harmed when one takes a "snapshot" in SL, just as one says one's avatar "walks," even though the only muscular activity involved is pressing an arrow key. When you take a snapshot, you're doing (most of) what a photographer does in RL, and your concerns are the same.)

I mention this because, to my amazement, I am one of the other SL photographers. It's a humbling experience.

You've been in SL too long when, part N+1

Living in Iowa, one has the experience every four years of the coasts pretending to care about Iowa until the Iowa caucuses are over. (OK, not just the coasts; I remember the time I chatted a bit with a crew from RAI, Italian radio/TV, there for the caucuses.) Presidential candidates swarm the state like flies.

Tonight, there was a clip of John Edwards, he of the expensive haircuts, on TV... and I immediately thought, "Somebody get that boy some flexi prim hair!"... and caught myself, and had to laugh at myself.

You'd think they could afford another hard drive...

Well... I'd finally noticed www.simpsonizeme.com (warning: Flash-intensive site), and thought I'd post the results of "Simpsonizing" my picture, but after repeated tries at all times of the day and night, all I get is

SORRY

Whoa! As the world is going Simpsons it is getting crowded in here. Come back a little later and try again.

You'd think they would anticipate getting a large response. Ah, well... I never really got into The Simpsons anyway.

So that's why I like it so...

Lillie Yifu of the 2nd Sex blog can count dressmaking among her many talents. She gives away some of her work in the 22nd Century Yedo bargain basement, and I dearly love her "Jade Circles" dress.


(Note: I don't have on the bustle or hair ribbon that comes with it here, and the top is one for prim breasts that I adapted to work with the dress.)

I finally realized one reason I like it so much—it reminds me of this:


That's a polished sample of malachite, a mineral I find utterly gorgeous. Now I know.

"This time, fer shur!" --Bullwinkle Moose

OK... I think that I've finally rooted out the problem with the cable modem that has plagued me for weeks. We will have replaced every piece of coax and every splitter between the wall and the cable modem, but what the heck. The intermittent problem has been highly frustrating.

So... with luck I will be more consistent in my time online and on-grid. Whew.

UPDATE: I spoke too soon; the connection is still flaking out. Someone's coming in to look at it... again... today.

UPDATE: I have my fingers crossed (which makes typing difficult...). The fellow came back, and I have to admire his doing so that late in the nasty weather we're having, found a problem outside, and fixed it. So far, so good.

So, am I a sexy celebrity or just a sexy celebrity gossip?

I succumbed to temptation and went egosurfing. Most of the hits arise from my name appearing on each of my blog entries, and a lot of others from my posting comments in various places... but I was surprised by one entry, which purported to be my profile on "Sexy Celebrity Gossips"!

Huh?

It showed my blog for my web page... most of the items were unknown. I didn't think I'd signed up, but it claimed I'd registered early in March, and posted shortly thereafter (but not since). Well... maybe I had signed on to it, but I had no idea what password I'd chosen if I had--and when I gave it my email address after clicking on "Forgot password?" link, it said it had never heard of such an email address before.

My guess is that it's some kind of scam--maybe the whole thing is to lead people to enter that email address, thinking that maybe they had registered, to give some spammer a source of live email addresses. Goodness knows that there seems to be quite a few places that somehow generate pages with many common search terms on them and that direct you thence to whatever porn site they're pushing.

My answer to the question, then, is "none of the above."

She's no fun, she fell right over!

For the past few days, and for the next week, I'm doing some volunteer work. Twelve hours a day, outside in outrageous heat and humidity. When I get home, my main interest is in collapsing. Bertrand Russell once said that young men sometimes wrote to him that they found no pleasure in life, but that when he was their age, he would walk quite a few miles each day, and that he found immense pleasure in sitting down. I now know how he felt.

This is cutting back considerably on my time in the grid. My friends, I miss you all.

Do Patent Leather Prims Really Reflect Up?

One of the wonderful things about SL is that it gives us, visually anyway, that gift Robert Burns asked for... so when a friend recently IMed me that I was somewhat exposed, I was startled.

I double checked the edit I'd made to notecards controlling the items I wanted to be transparent. I commanded them to reset, which should have set them to their initial state, which the aforementioned edited notecards said should be transparent. Nonetheless, my friend could see them... and emailed me a photo as proof.

Other friends assured me I was observing the proprieties... and I trust that they tell me the truth, so what is different about the friend who IMed me? We compared client settings, and while I am far from thoroughly knowledgeable about that subject, we didn't see anything significant differing between us. My friend is investigating further on her own, as she has an item that to me looks proper, to her looks exposed. I am very curious about what is going on.

Fun with permissions

I found out that a problem I was having was fixed in the release version of an object I'd been editing an early version of. Oops. Time to do it over, with any luck better this time.

So... I made a working copy of it, and set to editing. I'd been told it helped to place the object on the ground/floor to work on it, so I did, and it did help.

After some work, it seemed to be in reasonable shape—putting it on and comparison with the previous version seemed to check out—so, it was time to make copies and paint them with alternative textures...but I couldn't! Looking in inventory, it was marked "no copy" and "no modify." "No modify"?! I'd just been editing it!

I resigned myself to starting over—practice makes perfect, right? This should get easier each time I do it—and suddenly the light came on. I created a working copy once again: it had the same permissions as the original. I set it on the floor: poof! It changed permission.

Now I know what sandboxes are for. :)

UPDATE: No, I don't. It happened to me again, and a friend told me that something similar happened to her. I have also looked closer--the inventory says the object is not modifiable, but if you edit it, the object itself says it is modifiable, and that appears to win in a fight between inventory and object. OTOH, inventory seems to be the one with the info on copyability, and its version of "modify" permission is all that's looked at to decide whether to let you rename. I am now wondering whether there was a change to fix the disappearing object problem that had this as a bad side effect. That's just as much as guess, though, so I'll search JIRA and then decide whether to submit a bug report.

Video

There's a new SL client out... it teases Linux users by dangling voice configuration before them, but Vivox still hasn't written the required code to support it. (One would hope this gives LL a hint about the advisability of counting on proprietary software, but... we'll see, I guess.)

One thing it does support for Linux is video... and ironically, after all the times I've found myself unable to watch the video that everyone else is watching and presumably enjoying, I was having a hard time finding something to test it on! (Well, I probably could have gone to all the places advertising X-rated video, but decided against it.) Cheyenne came to the rescue, and I was able to successfully watch a very educational video Torley Linden created showing photography tips and tricks for SL in world! Whee!

A Roseanne Roseannadanna Moment

Sigh. It looked like things were back to normal. I could see the map. I could teleport. I could see people's profiles. I could see my L$ balance.

But just now, I logged on, and decided that I'd had my fill of Victorian clothing for a while. Gee, the room looks bigger than usual... Oh, no--I was partially Ruthed! "OK...at least I can change clothes," I thought...no, I couldn't. I was stuck in the "loading appearance" limbo. Rebaking makes no difference. Relogging makes no difference.

It just goes to show, it's always something.

Nature red in stamen and pistil...

I was wandering through Apollo at midnight, taking portraits illuminated by the flowers that light up the Apollo night. I was standing by some huge blue flowers and enjoying the peaceful scene, with an insect flying about...


....and then something darted out from that huge flower's pistil, snatched the insect from the air, and returned so that huge peaceful flower could eat the insect.

I shuddered and headed on my way.

The Future

(We aren't interested in the Ugly...)

Prim breasts, like other non-standard avatars, are tributes to the ingenuity of SL builders, but they force you to choose between being well-dressed and being well-endowed.

(And then there are the IP issues. Adapting prim breast tops to a standard top, or prim breasts to a skin, will almost always involve replicating a texture or pattern, either by hand, by snapshot, or with a tool that captures textures on the way to the graphics card. Sometime around or before I first entered Second Life, there was a huge brouhaha over a skin which was bought, and then modified purely for the purchaser's personal use. I sincerely believe that falls under fair use, but I expect that any such fair use is something you will have to do yourself rather than commissioning.)

So, we have various factors that combine to make life with prim breasts a pain:

• They preclude access to much of the SL fashion world.
• Their custom nature makes it difficult to (financially) justify going into the business of making tops that work with them.
• Prim breast makers necessarily can't devote their efforts to really good clothing.
• To use them effectively, you have to do a lot of your own editing.
  

All this keeps the market small.

So, what lies in the future?

First, we're starting to see prim breasts made from sculpted prims. This makes it easier to paint them with top-as-texture as standard avatar tops are done. Prim breast makers are also looking into better user interfaces, which is nice.

Major advances, though, will have to come from, or as a side effect of, a change that improves the avatar in general; the "no new features" frenzy exemplified by the "Open Letter" will make it hard to get even a universally beneficial improvement. (For example, sculpted prims make many things possible in SL, not just improved prim breasts. Had LL been petitioned to add some specific new prim shape just of interest to breast makers, nothing would have happened.) I'm not sure what that will be; VWR-1258 comes closest of the proposed changes.

Several times, I've been asked a question that strikes me as the silliest possible question to ask in a virtual environment: "Are those real?" Come on... SL is Strawberry Fields, right? "Nothing is real." (Though come to think of it, there seems to be plenty that people get hung about... ) On the other hand, I've seen prim breasts called "implants," and in fact one prim breast maker calls his establishment "Implant Nation." They have the same connotations--and those connotations aren't good.

Perhaps "real" for SL body image is defined as "achievable with the sliders"... but I've never heard anyone in SL call prim hair a "wig" or "toupee." I think that's because nobody wants to think of herself as wearing a wig, or himself as wearing a toupee. Being revealed as wearing a wig or toupee is a standard comic turn in movies and TV, belittling the person exposed, so in SL you never hear the W-word.

[UPDATE: Looking at the Wikipedia page for "toupee", the discussion page indicates that the page once had a list of toupee-wearing famous people. The list was removed, and some of the discussion concerned possible libel suits over such a list, which indicates just how little people wish to be known as toupee wearers.]

I hope that prim breasts will become unnecessary, that we'll be able to make our figures as we wish and then go shopping, secure in the knowledge that we can buy and wear what we will. That day is not here yet, alas.

The Bad

OK... having covered the advantages, now for the disadvantages.

The big disadvantage: clothing. Or to give it its proper emphasis, CLOTHING.

After all the drawbacks of clothing-as-texture I cited, why is this a disadvantage?

Prim breasts are attachments, and SL assumes that all attachments are meant to go on top of clothing. That's fine for jewelry, but not so good for body parts. So far, prim breast makers haven't used textures for clothing; instead they build them from prims. Such clothing and breasts have to be built together in one attachment, because there can be at most one attachment at an attachment point. Thus if you want to be clothed sometimes and not clothed other times, you have three choices:

1. Do without them when undressed.
2. Have two versions of the breasts, one clothed and one not.
3. Script the breasts so that with a command the clothes can be made transparent. At least one breast maker does this.
   

UPDATE: Oh, yes... because prim breast clothing is made of prims rather than painted on, it shows up problems with SL's rendering:

• SL has a way of throwing away details as you move away from things. For tops built from prims, this has the startling effect of making holes appear in them when viewed from afar.
• Tops and breasts made in the pre-sculpted prim days have to be pieced together to get the desired shape. The places where the pieces join are just about impossible to make smooth, i.e. there's a slight corner where they meet. SL lighting makes this corner stand out. I would love to see Foxbean Laboratories' "Marie" model with laced top remade with sculpted prims to avoid this problem.
  

Because prim breasts are unique; clothing that works for one pair doesn't work for another. Prim breast makers must therefore divide their attention between the breasts and clothing, and clothing necessarily gets short shrift in comparison with standard clothing, which has a multitude of sources and levels of quality from basic to exquisitely detailed.

The mainstream clothing designers need "only" create one texture for a top, and it will work, more or less, on any standard avatar, no matter how the sliders are set. (Only in quotes because doing it well is not an easy task!) They understandably don't consider it worth their while to create over a dozen different versions for a relatively small market.

You should be sure of exactly what you're buying. If your prim breasts don't come with a specially-made top, you have three choices:

1. Go topless.
2. Commission a top.
3. Build one yourself.

The first is a bit impractical in most places. The second will be quite expensive, being custom work. The third is good if you have the time and skills involved.

All this means prim breast wearers are cut off from the vast majority of the cornucopia of mainstream SL fashion, because many tops won't match up with the specially-made tops. Tops typically require adaptation or editing to match up reasonably with those standard tops they can be made to work with. Sometimes you can't tell whether the standard top will work without putting it on--but by then, you've already bought it.

Other things you should keep in mind:

• SL treats all attachments the same way. If, as most residents do, you wear prim hair, you've had the experience of arriving bald and waiting for your hair to rez. Prim breasts and their tops are the same, so you'd bettter have on a standard top to avoid major embarrassment.
• You've also probably had the experience of attachments appearing between your legs when you arrive... yes, it happens for prim breasts, too.
  
• Adapting prim breast tops to standard tops requires modify permission--and as a practical matter, copy permission unless you like doing the same customizations over and over again and are perfect, never making mistakes you can't undo. Be sure to check the permissions on what you buy.
• Poses and animations assume particular body proportions, and prim breasts are pretty sure to violate those assumptions.
  
• Clothing isn't all you have to adapt prim breasts to; there's also your skin color.

P.S. JIRA entry VWR-1064 asks that attachments have an attribute to indicate whether clothing should be drawn on top of them.

The Good

About a month ago I wrote an overview of prim breasts intended to be put on a notecard to give out to people. That may yet happen, but in any case I shall post first a list of the advantages of prim breasts, and then a list of disadvantages, along with JIRA entries that might shift the balance. Here, the advantages:

1. Prim breasts bypass the limits on breast size in the standard female avatar, which don't come close to accommodating the natural variation that occurs in real life. (JIRA entry VWR-1258 requests that SL extend the size limits on body part sizes in the standard avatar, and I hope you'll all go vote for it, but one has to admit it's probably low on LL's priority list.)
2. The standard avatar shapes use relatively few polygons compared with other computer representations of the human figure, so that at the limits, breasts on the standard female avatar look blocky. Prim breasts are built of prims with curved shapes (or more recently, sculpted prims with curved shapes), avoiding that problem. (JIRA entry VWR-1258 also speaks to this issue.)
3. The standard avatar has no nipples; they are at best painted on with the skin one wears. Prim breasts have nipples.
4. The standard avatar cannot lactate. Prim breasts can include particle generators that allow lactation and scripts to control it.
5. Humans usually have two breasts, but there are mammals with more. Prim breasts can be found in sets of four and six for furry avatars.
6. Standard clothing, being a painted-on texture, shows its non-realism most severely with breasts. T-shirts look vacuum-sealed to your body, distorting art and text beyond recognition. Straps don't look like they're supporting anything. Clothing for prim breasts, on the other hand, is built from prims, and can act more like real clothing in those respects. (OTOH, JIRA entry VWR-1080 proposes a control to allow standard tops to span cleavage, and again, I hope you'll all go vote for it.)

There... Next--the Bad!

Plummeting

Perhaps people are taking the advice of the Bee Report and going out into First Life to enjoy the summer (or winter, depending on your hemisphere). Goodness knows with the problems that the Grid has been suffering, sheer frustration may be keeping people elsewhere.

Or perhaps it's just me.

For whatever reason, Google Analytics says that nobody at all looked at this blog yesterday. [Imagine chirping cricket sound effects...] I hope this is just a temporary state of affairs.

UPDATE: It's not just me; Google Analytics seems to be showing no traffic yesterday for many web sites. (Thanks to Jay Harper for the info.) I hope the problem is corrected soon.

STILL MORE NEWS: Google Analytics now shows that there were visitors yesterday. Whew!

Random Thoughts

I saw an announcement of a new SL-related podcast the other day, and was immediately reminded of Neal Boortz's explanation of the relative failure of leftist talk radio: that their hosts' assertions can't survive the feedback and questioning that comes from having callers, so they are reduced to either verbal abuse or filtering out callers who disagree--and hence they only succeed in one-way communications media. (I can't quite agree with Mr. Boortz, because that failing is not exclusive to the left.)

Speaking of podcasts... I have falled way behind on podcast listening, and was saddened to see that The Goddess and Banana Show is on hiatus. I hope all goes well with them in First and Second Life, and will be happy indeed should they return to the virtual air.

Dancing in Yedo

Lillie Yifu, author of the 2nd Sex blog, is a multi-talented lady. Today I went to see a ballroom she recently created and opened in 22nd Century Yedo.

It's an enormous, breathtaking place... not what you might expect from the name (that of the town that first became Edo as Japanese ditched the ye syllable, and later was renamed Tokyo), but more like a cathedral or the rotunda of a state or national capital.


The picture gives you some indication of the scale; I am dancing there with Susan Usher, who works at 22nd Century Yedo. (I arrived a bit early.) Her elegant hair and dress deserve to be seen, so...


Also deserving your view is the dome, which you only got a taste of in the first picture:


I had a lovely time... enough so that I went back later to dance some more; I was fortunate that my dear friend Foxbean Liebknecht was on the grid, and I got to dance with her.


I will return when I have time... at the very least I want to explore the dome, but I'm sure I will again meet delightful people and have a wonderful time.

"...and the click of high-heeled shoes...."

A week or so ago, I stumbled across a blog entry that mentioned some nice accessories, one being a click of high heels to replace the standard clump-clump of walking in SL. I left the page up, promising myself I'd return later, grab the location, and get the sound... but things happened, and I couldn't find that web page again!

So... once again I learn to bookmark things right away, and--if someone could point me at that sound, I'd be in your debt.

UPDATE: Many thanks to bcwhittle for his comment! The place to go is Jezebel's, Nyokoland at Baker (138, 148, 39), and it's in a free box that I guess was once labeled "slutty stuff" but is now labeled "sexy stuff". You attach one sound to each leg; beware of other things you might have attached there--I had to move a walk animation override....

...and that done, I proudly took my first walk with clicking heels--on sand, to visit a nearby friend, and clicking all the way... sigh. My friend suggests that Pele does something to the sand near her temple. :)

P.S. I was going to title this entry "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys," but decided on what I thought a more apt quote.

Idling?

I have a little system monitor applet running on the panel, and when the SL client is running, the CPU meter is always maxed out. I understand that the SL client is necessarily CPU-intensive, but OTOH, have you noticed this? When the client first starts up and is waiting for you to decide to either sign on, change where you will first appear, or quit, in theory, the SL client should be sitting there, doing nothing, queued up for either a mouse click or typed input--but at that moment, the CPU meter is still maxed out! What on earth is it doing to chew up all those CPU cycles while waiting on you?

Well, this morning, once logged on, I had to go away for a bit, so I clicked on the "show away"... and my avatar went limp. The CPU usage didn't budge... but then I minimized the SL window. Then CPU usage dropped to near zero.

So... that's what it takes. Minimize your SL client window to really idle the SL client.

"Starry, starry night..."

In a recent Linden blog entry, Torley Linden mentions and links to an amazing machinima by Robbie Dingo, Watch the World. Mr. Dingo's blog entry has several versions at different resolutions; the highest quality version is 97.6 MB, and worth every single byte.

Every once in a while, it's important to rise above the kvetching and remind yourself of what (second) life can be. I urge you to watch Mr. Dingo's work.

"You spin me right round, baby, right round..."

I tend to think of alt-mouse as being used to pan... but it's more than that. What it really does is fix your POV on an object, so that you track it if it moves. (You can't directly alt-mouse into the sky--there's nothing there to fix your gaze on, SL thinks.) Every once in a while I happen to fix my gaze on someone rather than something, and then I am startled when that person heads out the door. :)

I think I've learned better, and what finally drove the lesson home was a contest I went to a while back, for best masked costume. (I had to go get a mask, and I thought I looked pretty good in it with the luna moth wings and pale green Empire dress. I didn't win--pout--but I did come out ahead after a couple of fortunate iterations of the low-stakes sploder.)

The contest took place at a club with dancing... and with dancers. They were kind of off to one corner, so I didn't notice them until someone mentioned them. I was curious, so... alt-mouse to the rescue. "Ah, there they are," I thought, and admired their lovely costumes...until I noticed the room slowly churning in the background, and my RL dinner gently called for my attention from its location in my RL stomach. They were dancing on a rotating dance floor, and from my position off that dance floor, I got to see the room move at a varying rate of speed.

Since then, I'm a bit more careful with alt-mouse...

ECCE POTENTIA CASEI

One of the things Google Analytics tells you is how people get to your web site... if you're serious about such things, it can let you know perhaps what people who visit are interested in. In particular, Google Analytics can tell you what people who went to your site as a result of a search (on Google, presumably...) were looking for.

So... I can tell you how most people got here via Google, and the results are pretty consistent over time. You might think you know, given what I tend to go on about, but in fact, the big search phrase to get to my blog is this:

CHEESY PHRASES

Yes... I have the #2 and #3 Google hits for "cheesy phrases". (That's because I changed the blog title to use a real "curly quote" for "Livin'" rather than being lazy and leaving it as good old U+0027 APOSTROPHE, and Google thinks the old and new versions are different.)

I haven't returned to that subject... but with these results, maybe I should. We could cast our net farther afield: I am not among those who are perpetually griping about bugs in SL and what I see as LL's misguided priorities (OK, with one exception), so some might think me a Pollyanna; I could post something about "La deuxième vie en rose" (forgive me, Edith!).

Actually, the distribution at least starts out pretty flat, so it's not like you all just love me for my cheese *sob*, but I was still very surprised... and I had to take the following picture at the wonderful food and wine shop CAS:


UPDATE: Both "potentia" and "potestas" translate as "power" in online dictionaries I've seen; both, of course, come from potere (hence Spanish poder), only the abstract noun suffixes are changed to protect the innocent. Would love to hear from anyone more schooled in the classics which one Latin speakers would really use.

Close to the Edge

Things are grim for Internet radio. The courts have turned down an emergency stay of the July 15th imposition of crushing royalty rates that will destroy Internet radio.

If you are a US citizen, go to savenetradio.org and do what you can. If you aren't, pester all your friends who are to do so.

Sculptypaint

Thanks to Vint Falken and her blog for mentioning this, and above all thanks to Cel Edman for creating it: Sculptypaint, a Java-based package specifically for creating sculpted prims. I will try it out and report on my results--with luck, the specificity of the package will mean it's easier to use than more general 3D graphics programs like Wings 3D and Blender.

"Professional 3D modelers," indeed!

The Melissa Yeuxdoux Chair of Second Life

Sigh... would that I could fund a professorship to do something neat with virtual worlds.

What really is the case is this: I am once again seated on a real chair before my computer. Thank goodness! (Or, if you think I am normally too prolix, oh, no! :) But even so, recall the famous line of Blaise Pascal: "I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it short", and take hope.)

Cyberspace's True Predictor

Much will probably be made of William Gibson's visiting Second Life next month. New World Notes calls Mr. Gibson "the man who gave 'cyberspace' its name and its imaginative texture" and says SL probably wouldn't exist without him (though ironically, those even more forgetful of history typically refer to Snowcrash as an inspiration for SL).

I must respectfully disagree. The real creator of cyberspace, though not of the word, is Vernor Vinge, with his novella True Names, which predates Neuromancer by at least three years. The vagaries of SF publication were such that the first two publications of it sank quickly into oblivion--at least it seemed that way to me when I set out to replace copies that I would lend and never get back. The Wikipedia article points to an online transcription of the 1984 edition with illustrations. Go read it, and see if I'm not telling the truth. You'll be glad you did.

Some of the details show the realities of computing in 1981, but the ideas are there: what we call avatars existing in a created world in the Internet, and user-created content is all there is. At one point, the two main characters even assume canine form--gee, did Vinge predict furries? :)

In some ways we haven't made it to the world of True Names yet. I'd love to have displays of the sort that the inhabitants of the Other Plane scorn, and we're stuck with LSL for now rather than programming more directly in Other Plane terms. Go read True Names. Even now, it will change your life.

My being an aging programmer who isn't really a redhead does not influence my opinion in this matter at all.

Life Imitates Life

Over time in SL I've acquired a couple of pairs of glasses that I wear from time to time. I like to think they give me that "cute librarian" look, silly as that may seem.

In RL, I now have new glasses, too... and the other day it occurred to me that they (there was a deal for two pairs) look rather like my SL glasses. I suppose it's not surprising--in both cases, I'm the one selecting them--but I did get a smile out of it... and it's liable to be one of the few times RL imitates SL for me.

All the news, and background music, too...

I'm not sure whether it's what Second Life news would be if Bobby Short had decided to become a commentator, or whether it's the lounge lizard version of SL news, but... I really, really like The Bee Report.

It's news and commentary on SL, delivered with a seemingly endless improvised piano and organ background. Great fun; give it a listen.

RL wins in the end

One of the things that always amazes me about SL is the way one is immersed in the virtual environment. I once had an uncomfortable chair, but lying in a bed in SL, I'd forget about it.

Alas, there's a limit to that. My more comfortable chair gave up the ghost, and I sit at my computer now on a makeshift stool pending finding better seating... and, as the title says, RL wins in the end... so to speak.

I've not been in SL for too long at a time for a couple of days, and that's a big part of it.

Live Music

A while back I felt incredibly stupid when I confused the band "U2 in SL" with the band U2. So, when I saw the announcement that Tony Moore, once keyboardist for Cutting Crew, was performing live as part of the SL 4th birthday, I was a bit skeptical...

...but TPed to the site anyway, and was (and still am) very glad I did, wishing only that I'd been there for the entire performance. His solo acoustic performance was amazing, the crowd both in RL (whose reactions we could hear on the audio stream) and SL very enthusiastic. He acknowledged some people in SL... and if I wasn't the one whose name he wasn't sure how to pronounce, please don't tell me. I'd like to keep the illusion, thank you!

If you have the chance to hear him, do not pass it up.

How to change the UI?

Second Life Insider is just asking, how would you fix the SL client UI? One of the answers I very much agree with is: fix the inventory.

One thing I wish for may have to do with my cluttered inventory: I'd like to have two windows, perhaps like the old two-window file managers. It's a huge pain to have to scroll huge distances from where you've picked some items to the folder you want them in.

Another thing, though, would be great even for the well-organized. Inventory needs to get away from having each item in exactly one place. In Linux/Unix terms, it needs "symbolic links."

Huh?

It means that inventory isn't a tree; things can appear in more than one place.

Why do you want that? Because a major use of folders is for outfits, and if you mix and match, some items are part of more than one outfit. As inventory is now, you either copy them, or you don't copy them, in which case you have to track them down all the time.

With symbolic links, you're not copying the object--you're just providing more than one way to get to it.

UPDATE: Thanks to bcwhittle for pointing out that you can open two inventory windows! (See the comment.)

2nd Sex

You might have noticed that I recently added Lillie Yifu's blog 2nd Sex to the list of links. I seriously recommend that you give it a look. Ms. Yifu's prose is lyrical, her observations insightful. While the immediate topic is sex in SL, the observations go well beyond that.

A Day of Silence

Many, many sites in Second Life are augmented by audio streams; "Internet radio stations," as they're called.

If you're on the grid as I write this, you may have found some such streams inaudible. That's because most Internet radio sites have cut off their feeds today, in protest of an outrageous ruling that imposes royalties paid for each time anyone listens to a song... and imposes them retroactively to the beginning of 2006. They are due to take effect in mid-July 2007, unless something is done.

If you are a US citizen, I urge you to immediately call your Senators and Representative to urge their support and co-sponsoring of S. 1353 (for the Senate) and H.R. 2060 (for the House of Representatives), the "Internet Radio Equality Act." For more details, visit www.savenetradio.org.

Unless something is done, in not quite three weeks much of the Internet and much of SL will fall silent; nobody can afford the royalties that will go into effect. Act now.