When I grow up...

Hummingbird update from RL

When Hummingbirds Attack!

Feeling like Dr. Strangelove

It's weird. I click on something, and the usual stream of particles runs from my outstretched hand to the object... I choose an action, or I don't, clicking elsewhere to take my attention away from the object, and walk off.

Either way, my hand keeps pointing at it, and the particles flying, until I either sit down or teleport away. Like Dr. Strangelove, whose arm kept rising, unbidden, into a Nazi salute, my arm remains raised and pointing at the object.

It's very bothersome!

Nerd Girls

Brains are beautiful.
Geek is chic.
Smart is sexy.
Not either/or.

Whatever your age or gender, if you support girls and women entering science and engineering, check out Nerd Girls.

Boiling the frog... but in a good way.

You know the old story about how to boil a frog: raise the water temperature gradually, so the frog never notices the change until it's too late. It's typically used as a metaphor for the encroachment of some evil, often an intrusive government.

But sometimes, gradual change is good--but it has the side effect that we don't notice it. We do notice when things break, though. People are a lot more motivated to complain than to compliment.

For all the endless kvetching about Second Life, I strongly suspect that were people forced to use SL as it was a couple of years ago, they'd really have something to complain about.

An honor...

When I started putting up photos on flickr, they often got hundreds of views; one or two actually topped the thousand mark. Nowadays, though, I count myself lucky if the view count approaches one hundred.

Perhaps it's the categorization--one now tags one's photos as screenshots, "computer graphics", or photographs, and I have to wonder whether there are a lot of people who just want to see images where actual photons were involved at some point. Perhaps my pictures are boring and repetitive. (Perhaps I'm boring and repetitive...)

So, it's even more special when people I respect mark one of my photos as a favorite. The wonderful Vint Falken so honored the photo I took for Hair Fair 2008, and this morning I was astonished to find that Torley Linden had done so as well.

*blush*... Thank you!

It's not too late...

Alas, RL events kept me away from this past Saturday's Boobie Ball in Winterfell (or even being aware of it--*blush*), but it's not too late to participate in the 2008 Boobie-Thon, which is on through October 7th. It's for an important cause, the fight against breast cancer, and I hope you'll join the effort.

Hi, Susyn!

I took a look at Google Analytics just now, and "cheesy phrases" seems to be dropping in the search terms that bring people here. (Thank goodness!)

On the other hand, people are looking for "Susyn Stenvaag". I can understand; she's a fascinating and intelligent lady.

Return to Shadowbrook

Somehow, I've managed to not visit Shadowbrook, one of the two sims gorgeously landscaped and built upon by Creative Fantasy Home and Garden, for a long time. Goodness knows that I could use some of the peace and serenity those places induce, and they've always been among the most amazing places around.

I wasn't prepared for just how amazing they've become in the age of Windlight and sculpted prims, though. Here's just a small sample.


If I'd had a treehouse like that when I was little, I'd never have come out. (Even now, that's very tempting. Work? La, la, la, I'm not listening...)


A touching dragon family scene...wait, won't that put out their flame?


Time for me to be quiet and just let you look...


For heaven's sake, go there and relax. I won't take as long to return.

Linux? Hard to install?

Perhaps you should take inspiration (or maybe be shamed into trying) by the example of Bdale Garbee's daughter, Elizabeth, who installed Debian (with a little help) on a computer at the age of nine.

This past July, Elizabeth, now sixteen, gave a talk on Open Source animation at OSCON, and will speak at the Ohio Linux Fest 2008 on the topic "Through the Looking Glass: Open Source from a Teenage Perspective." (That's on October 10th and 11th, and gosh, I wish I could be there!)

Xaxoqual in the Garden of da Vinci

It's been some time since I've written about Xaxoqual Mandelbrot, so I should explain.

She's a beautiful dove, the sweetest bird you could ever meet. Her fashion sense is impeccable, and I appreciate her advice and commentary. When she came to visit, she had outdone herself, wearing a dress with amazing feathery texturing and subtle coloring. I had to photograph it. The Garden of da Vinci was the perfect backdrop.

Thank you, Xaxoqual.

P.S. No association with any novel or movie directed by Clint Eastwood is intended by the title.

Another photo of Mesha

I was in Chakryn Forest, and having a hard time finding the art I was looking for... kind of embarrassing, because I had asked a friend along to show it to her. We had fun exploring in any case, and I had to take this photo of her, because the background was so beautiful and seemed to suit her.

Thank you, Kittenstar!

I went looking for a skin today, and visited Mystical Demina's Xtreme Reality store. The skins there were lovely, and I noticed a model posing with one of the skins on.

I like to tip models, so I did, and thanked her.... but then, for the first time ever since I started tipping models, she spoke up, thanking me.

I took a chance... "Would you know if there's a skin here with freckles?"

She did, and offered to model it for me. It looked so good that I bought it, tipped her again, and IMed Ms. Demina complimenting her model for her helpfulness and courtesy.

So... as I promised, Kittenstar Vella, thank you! You're a wonderful representative of your store (and saleswoman, too, if I'm any indication).

Virtual monoculture?

So... in SL, where changing one's appearance is as simple as drag and drop (or slide), do we have that oppressive conformity that people used to warn about? Perhaps it's a matter of when I grew up; that was one of the bugaboos of the time, and I would have to admit to some fear of it as well.

And, to some extent, SL caters to that. At least until the lawyers come down on them, vendors offer packages of skin and shape to let one look like Brad, Angelina, J-Lo, etc.... but I've not knowingly seen them in use. (Admittedly, that might simply indicate my ignorance of popular culture.) What I've seen is more in line with those who point out that truly advanced technology allows for customization. In SL, I see a riot of different shapes, sizes, clothing, hair, shoes... and I'm very glad of it. Time to put away those antiquated fears.

(Many thanks to the lovely Misnomer, who inspired this brief rant.)

UPDATE: Ironically, this morning I realized who Misnomer reminds me of: Bernadette Peters. It's just a coincidence, though.

One advantage of a sheltered life...

...is that the most venial sins give one that frisson of wickedness that would otherwise require doing something really bad.

So, I confess! I wore white shoes after Labor Day!

UPDATE: The Manolo, he who loves the shoes, thinks it a silly rule that the white shoes they should not be worn after the Day of Labor.

Yet another lovely feature of the RC client

Actually, now that I think of it, this may have been present for a while, and I just didn't notice it until recently. I can at the very least vouch for its presence in the RC client, and I'm very happy to have found it, even if I am slow on the uptake.

There's a choice of "Save As" for saving your photos!

I have a tendency to save my SL photos under the name of the sim in which they're taken. Until such time as SL photos have some metadata stored with them (where were you? where was your POV? what time of day? etc.), it's a little reminder so that maybe I can get back there.

However, until I found "save as", if I went from one sim to another, I had to remember to rename my pictures later, because it would use the prefix I'd chosen the first time. "Save as" is a great timesaver.

So... I was able to save this picture as Apollo_[sequence number].png (remember, you can save an PNG now, non-lossy compression at last!) even though I'd taken another picture elsewhere. I had to make use of the lovely pose, and it had been a while since I'd done a forced perspective photo...


Just relaxing and enjoying a lovely sunset at Apollo... thank goodness they build so well here!

Art in Chakryn Forest

Chakryn Forest is a beautiful place in its own right, but now there's even more reason to visit there.

Glyph Graves's beautiful artwork is now on display there. Once again, my photos are inadequate to the task: this is only a sample of what is there to see, the art is animated, and you can't hear the sounds.

Be sure to see it at various times of day; it's pretty during the day, but breathtaking at night.

(Many thanks to Lanna's List at New World Notes.)

UPDATE: In my flickr photos, there's a shot taken at night, but some silly person stood in front of the photographer. Dang it.

I guess they're serious!

I was out exploring the other morning on the Lida sim, and came upon a little lavender house. I thought it was perhaps a playhouse, but when I came closer I saw T-shirts on display through a window. Still closer, and a sign: "Tinies ONLY!"

I didn't notice anything inside I could sit on to get past the door, so I guess they were serious!

P.S. Is it close enough to pink to count for John Mellencamp?

Guinness Record Holders Meet

I was surprised to hear of this event staged to publicize the 2009 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records... An article, along with an edited video can be found at the Telegraph's web site.

Mammatus Mall

It's been way too long since I've been there.

eCorp! has over a dozen new tops with prim breasts. I had to cringe at one (electrician's tape?! Maybe it's a Wendy O. Williams tribute...), but the others are very nice.

Remember the Dangerous Designs outfits with prim breasts I wrote about a while back? They have a shop in the mall featuring those.

Of course, while you're there, don't overlook Icon Allen's shop, the impressive custom work of Greyskin Labs, and last but far from least, Foxbean Laboratories.

UPDATE: As requested, a SLURL (this is for the center of the mall, lest I appear to play favorites): Mammatus Mall.

Don't resize that window!

I don't know whether it's purely a Linux thing or not, but... I've found that a sure way to drive your frame rate down into the pits is to resize the SL client window. When I do it--and you can bet that I never do it intentionally--my frame rate immediately drops to around 5 fps. Aaargh!

Brazen

Fashion Consolidated membership is a good way to receive copious announcements of fashion-related stores, sales, etc.

Last night I was surprised to receive such an announcement titled "CHRISTIAN DIOR RELEASES" (caps in original--if anyone's listening, please don't do that. You don't need to shout). When I went to the place in question, Volupté in the Diamond City sim, I was surprised to see blatant use of RL brands and logos: Dior, Anne Klein, Rocawear. I am not familiar enough with the products to say whether they ripped off the designs as well.

Do people really think they can get away with this?

UPDATE: Evidently so; I got an indignant reply to an IM I sent the person listed on the objects as owner. She rhetorically asked whether I thought the designers whose labels she attributes to the items she sells care that she is giving them "exposure" in SL.

I believe that they do care. Trademarks have to be defended if one is to retain the rights to them.

flaming/trolling = griefing

Something occurred to me the other day: flaming and trolling are the equivalent of griefing in the context of message boards, blogs, USENET groups, etc.

The objective of a message board is productive discussion of whatever the board's topic is. Flaming and trolling subvert that purpose by abuse of the "game mechanic", i.e. posting to the message board. If the victim replies, he or she is just contributing to the problem, lowering the signal to noise ratio further... and flaming and trolling "negatively impact the game play of another person".

I wonder whether anyone's compared flamers and trolls with griefers. Griefers rationalize their behavior: supposedly they're on a mission to keep people from taking themselves too seriously. Trolls are purely interested in destruction. Flamers, on the other hand, might see themselves as having a mission as well. One can certainly come up with examples of that.

Enchantment Island and the Museum of Amazing Illusions

Speaking of surrealism... one thing that gives me that same strange feeling is stage magic. Being presented with the seemingly impossible is an experience unlike any other. I grew up on Mark Wilson and Nani Darnell (sigh; showing my age again), and would watch amazed.

So... it was with great pleasure that I took advantage of a landmark that my dear friend Susyn Stenvaag gave me and headed to Enchantment Island, and thence took a flying carpet to the Museum of Amazing Illusions.

The museum replicates the effects of many such illusions; here is just a taste. I should repeat one bit of advice from the signs in the museum: just as a too well-endowed woman can't carry off the Zig-Zag Girl illusion, attachments can interfere with the effects, so it's best to detach them (and, I'd add, forgo extreme hair). Shame on me; I didn't follow that advice.


Hmmm; where did the rest of me go?


The "headless girl" illusion first came to the US in 1937, according to Sideshow World; it was featured in the New York World's Fair of 1939. (Say, why is it that they never seem to do this to men?)

The above is the merest sample of the wonders to be seen in the museum, and the museum itself is but one of the amazing things to see on Enchantment Island. Do yourself a favor and pay it a visit (and be generous when donating to the upkeep of the museum).

A side note: I was happy to find that a lady I know, BambiTwice Nitely, is responsible for this place, and among those she credits for help with the museum is a dear friend, kalosss Gausman. Ms. Nitely is as talented as she is beautiful, and kalosss makes amazing things (and is as talented as he is handsome).

Back to Chakryn Forest

A day or so ago I went looking for something in my inventory and found something else, namely some sparkly attachments for hands and feet that a friend gave me almost a year ago.

Still not being up to the aerobatic machinima I dreamed of making, I settled for still photography... but which pose to use? I went looking for the stereotypical "wizard casting spell" pose, but couldn't find one. A pose from a set for fairies was nice, though, and into the lovely Chakryn Forest I went.

The result reminds me a bit of some SF or fantasy cover artwork I've seen.

A question of pronunciation

The Drew Carey video reminds me of something. Why is it that when I hear people say "Second Life" they say "SEC-ond life", while when I say it, I say "SEC-ond LIFE"?

(Oh, dear; I'm in Andy Rooney mode. "Didja ever wonder why people say 'Second Life' the way they do?" I'd better stop now.)

Drew Carey on Second Life

In the past I've mentioned the marvelous Drew Carey Project, a series of videos from a libertarian point of view done in conjunction with Reason magazine.

In the latest episode, he visits Second Life, and the result is a refreshing video that reminds me of why this is such a wonderful place. Please give it a look.

9/11: a must-listen podcast

I must admit that I'm not totally enamored of the Podmafia podcast. Sometimes the audio is muffled, and like many podcasts, it tends to ramble and not always hold one's interest.

That said, you really must listen to their 9/11 tribute. Dean Madonia's song "Cannot Turn Away," the first music break in the show, is beautiful and heart-rending; when I finally remembered the lyrics following those explicitly quoted at the end of the song, I almost broke down in my cubicle at work.

The podcasters tour the New York sims, paying special attention to those which are set up in memory of the 9/11 attack. I'll be going there myself when I can.

The drip, drip, drip...

I have upgraded my computer, mostly because of SL, though to be honest I now wish I'd gone a bit closer to the edge and bought a socket AM2+ motherboard that supports PCI Express 2.0. (I look at the recent price cut for AMD three-core CPUs and sob to myself...)

Despite being well away from the bleeding edge, I run with the Windlight sliders cranked just about all the way, and still get reasonable frame rates. What does happen, though, is this:

1. I arrive.
2. The terrain slowly pops into view a piece at a time.
3. My surroundings slowly pop into view, again a piece at a time.
4. Avatars slowly appear as shimmering blobs of plasma, one at a time.
5. Avatars rez one at a time.

Sometimes I stand around for a minute or more, afraid to bump into someone and afraid that someone will TP in and land on top of me. (Sometimes the mini-map is helpful, sometimes not.)

Is this an issue of rendering, or of waiting for all the data for all the objects and people in the area to be shipped over? I tend to think it's the latter, and I hope that the bottleneck is being worked on.

P.S. Those of us who recognize the commercial alluded to in the title are, I fear, showing our age.

Ceci n'est pas un avatar...

I try to make everyone's day a little more surreal. --Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes

One of the shops in the Bricolage sim is WigWamBam. They sell clothing and shape sets, but at the back one finds two curious cabinets with a camera and lighting. I do believe that they were inspired by René Magritte, for when one stands in them...



I don't understand why surreal images have such a strange appeal and fascination, but they do for me at least.

Hair Fair 2008

It's a great idea, for a wonderful cause... but I wish I could find a directory so I can quickly get to a particular store.

Remember, today is Bandana Day.

UPDATE (already?): Bless you, Teagan Blackthorne! Here's a list of SLURLs of the various shops that she posted to the Hair Fair blog. (Google and ye shall find; silly me for not doing so long ago.)

I look like who?

It's been a while since I tried this, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't flattered. In any case, it's fun to do.

MyHeritage: Celebrity Collage - Vintage photos - Family tree chart

P.S. Shame on me for hastening the fall of the accusative case of the interrogative personal pronoun. It should be "I look like whom?"

Just another day

Slipping into stockings,
Stepping into shoes,
Dipping in the pocket of her raincoat, ah,
It's just another day. --Sir Paul McCartney

I read Cheyenne Palisades's blog just now, and realized: good heavens, my second rez day went by, and I didn't even notice.

It's probably because once you accumulate enough RL birthdays, you'd rather not think about them; it's just another reminder of one's eventual breakdown and death, as if we needed one. (So hurry up with the Singularity, already!) Besides, RL is pretty hectic these days.

So... no need for a celebration; just a pause to be thankful for the friends one has made, and to look back, first to 2006:


and then recently, in 2008:


If nothing else, it takes one above the fray and away from the endless cacophony of complaints and reminds one of just how far SL has come (thanks, Linden Lab), not to mention graphics cards (I think I still had an MX 4400 in 2006, and now I have a 8600).

RC client revisited

OK... one major annoyance. Why on earth does it feel the need to open up the inventory window whenever you receive a landmark or a notecard? I guess I'd settle for a way to turn it off, but IMHO if you want the inventory opened after you receive a landmark or notecard, the big button with "Inventory" on it in large, friendly letters is right there.

UPDATE: VWR-9027. Check it out.

UPDATE #2: There is an option to turn it off. Yay!

Imprudence

Add to death and taxes the certainty that Linden Lab will be criticized, no matter what they do. Everyone has his or her favorite issue (*cough* VWR-1258 *cough*), the user interface is a perennial target, there's the Open Letter contingent who criticize LL for working on anything other than stability, and SL has even accumulated at least one crackpot.

The folks behind the Imprudence Project argue that this and other factors impede progress in SL, and want to do something about it. Read their manifesto and consider helping.

Yet another must-read from Gwyneth Llewelyn

In "No More Limits," Ms. Llewelyn lists some constraints on SL that are purely artificial, or that had some justification in the past that no longer makes sense. In particular, after her description of LSL, I'm amazed that anything gets done in SL at all, and have even more respect for those who write scripts. (The characterization "a triumph of engineering over design" seems appropriate in this context.)

Read the whole thing, including the comments. If you're not pissed off, as the saying goes, you're not paying attention... and I have to wonder how long it will be before, say, OpenSim starts to get rid of some of the artificial limitations.

Height inflation revisited

I think that height inflation is becoming less common. These days I'm seeing more and more avatars of height closer to RL average. An example, only aided a bit by perspective:


If that's the case, is there a reason? Fitting in with the environment, perhaps. I still recall the time I was invited on a boat and couldn't walk into the cabin, discovering the virtual hard way that there's no way to bend over and walk--I ended up sitting down from a distance to get in and out. (SL will be interesting if/when prim breasts become "physical" objects.)

So, perhaps it will eventually just be people who are tall in RL who choose tall avatars... and people like me. I'm sorry, I just love being tall. So I will keep watching advances in giant(ess) avatars, keep pushing VWR-1258, and keep taking forced perspective photos:

I'm in ur grid... tryin ur RC client

...and so far, so good. It's very uneventful, and uneventful can be wonderful.

Actually, there's one feature that makes me ecstatic--you can save pictures in PNG format!

Some evening, I will have to sit down and write a shell script to convert all those SL photos kept in BMP format to PNG while preserving the timestamp. It will make my hard drive very happy and me happy come backup time, because in the hierarchy of "wee", "not so wee", and "FRIGGIN' HUGE!" SL BMP pictures are very definitely in the latter camp.

P.S. Also, PNG compression is lossless, unlike the lossy compression of JPEG.

Shocking realization

Me: "Hi... I'm Melissa, and I'm a fashion addict."
Off-key, out of sync chorus: "Hi, Melissa."

That hasn't happened... but it might as well. I've succumbed.

I knowingly bought a pair of pants that I expected to bear a visible insignia of the designer.

I was at Digital Darke's store, and they were there on display... a lovely violet with flowers, a perfect contrast to the incompetence-enforced simplicity of the tops I wear.

And there on them was the interlocked D insignia.

You have to understand how I grew up--in what is derisively called "flyover country" by those in the coastal megalopoloi. When "designer jeans" and the Izod shirts came out, we laughed. They should pay us money to wear their advertising, we said.

None of that mattered to me. I bought the pants.

When I put them on, the logo was nowhere to be seen. I was almost disappointed by the lack of evidence of my depravity.

But they're lovely, and I'll be going back. (I guess the sim the store is in is appropriately named: Addictive.)

UPDATE: My aim was bad or something; I wound up with a pair other than what I thought I was buying. I did go back, though, and get one with the logo. A picture with the first pair:

Templum ex Obscurum visited (revisited will come later...)

Just had time for a brief excursion, but Templum ex Obscurum is a dark and fascinating place. I very much want to go back and see what else there is to see; the above is a sample of what I've seen so far.

Moving away from artificial scarcity

In RL, land is a limited commodity. As the hoary old cliché goes, they aren't making any more. (That's not entirely true, of course; just ask the Dutch.)

Because of the limitations of the physical world and the differences between one place and another, land has value, and people buy and sell it. Some do that for a living.

SL is different. In SL, "land" is just CPU cycles and data, the work required to keep up the hardware that supports it, and the code that implements it--and those are more like Doritos than real land; they'll make more.

OpenSim will put an end to the artificial scarcity of virtual land. The only things sim owners will have to sell are services and the only thing left corresponding to proximity, i.e. access to a particular grid.

Now, the only remaining bottleneck is the asset server. I hope that work is underway to remove that limitation.

Persistence--virtual world/MMORPG convergence?

GameSetWatch has an interview in which the topic of "persistence" is brought up--i.e. that places in the game have a state that doesn't vanish and reset when you stop playing. "The village stays saved," to give the example used in the interview.

In Second Life, persistence is taken for granted; indeed, loss of persistence is a calamity (vide the disappearance of Zero Point, and the ongoing complaints about lost inventory in general--not to belittle those incidents; people put good effort and/or L$ into most things there). I wonder whether MMORPGs and virtual worlds will converge. What features of MMORPGs could be used to advantage here? It's not obvious to me, though I certainly don't want a game-imposed goal.

Touring the galaxy

A week or so ago, a friend introduced me to Galaxy Dreams and Shopping Mall on MoanaLani, asking me there to dance. It was a lovely place, all stars and sparkle in the night.

The other night, I went back and was pleasantly surprised to find that you can tour the region on a comfy pillow-strewn couch. (I'm not sure whether one can tour with a friend; the couch is not large, so it would need to be a very good friend indeed!) It takes you on a stately journey past planets, through meteor showers, and into an area that reminds me a bit of the tragically vanished Zero Point, Sabine Stonebender's magnificent build, before taking you back to the starting point--which is at one side of the dance floor if you wish to take part.

Take the tour; I think you'll enjoy it. Next time I'll play some music to go with it: Constance Demby, Neptune from Holst's The Planets, or perhaps David Arkenstone's "Far, Far Away."

NPIRL blog: Templum ex Obscurum

OK. I dabble in photography in SL. If you want to see the real deal, run, don't walk, to the NPIRL (Not Possible in Real Life) blog and check out the article on Templum ex Obscurum, or head for the flickr image pool.

Words fail me, save that I hope you're as inspired as I am.

Innocent

SL Fashion Police features an eye-opening sampling of the things avatars do to themselves. As you look over it, there are some recurring themes: indecent exposure; enough bling to make one single-handedly look like the flashbulbs of hundreds of photographers mobbing a celebrity at night; Sir Mix-a-lot-inspired slider settings, shall we say (though I think he'd decline the "honor")... and prim breasts.

I would respectfully submit that not all prim breast users are guilty of fashion offenses; indeed, some have great style. (I almost wrote "wear them with style," but that grates on me, as does the equation of prim breasts with breast implants. Attachments are forced on us by the limits of the SL avatar. Won't you consider voting for VWR-1258 if you haven't already?) Herewith, just some of the dear friends I would count in that number.

---

OK, I must admit the figure in whose palm I sit isn't Susyn Stenvaag. Yet. Give her time, though, to work out animation--and it does show her style. Here's a photo of her avatar as it is now:


Susyn typically dresses in a flowing gown with cape and tiara. She carries it off with great dignity and far better skill with textures than I have yet attained.

---

Mesha Sewell dresses so magnificently that I almost didn't dare speak to her. I'm happy that I did, and found the mischievous sprit behind that imposing appearance.

---

Foxbean Liebknecht makes and sells prim breasts and tops to accompany them. A mutual friend describes her as an angel, and I agree. Whether dressed as Little Bo Peep, a pirate, or in a simple sweater, she always looks wonderful.

Garden of da Vinci

I received a notice from the NPIRL (Not Possible in Real Life) group about the Garden of da Vinci. "Romance and adventure, da Vinci style" the subject line said, so I had to go take a look.


It's breathtaking, and I was immediately captivated, though at first I wondered whether I knew enough history; if there were specific references to the great Leonardo they sailed right over my head.

Towers in the distance caught my eye (ouch!), and I flew to explore them.


Climbing the staircase proved difficult. Recent changes to the SL client have brought occasional vertiginous camera point of view loops, and they were severe as I climbed, trying to maintain the constant turn required but failing. I ended up using the "teleport by zooming and sitting down" method.

The stomach flip-flops and frustration were more than made up for, with glorious artwork above and below me, and a wonderful view of the region.


Ah, that view was where I found an artifice worthy of Leonardo himself, for as I zoomed and panned to capture that wonderful view, I found my point of view doing the stately dance that comes with its binding to a slowly rotating object, and the towers that were distant seemed to zoom towards me as the dance progressed. Of course, video would be required to give the full effect, but here is a still, showing a building that had moments before seemed far away:


After marveling at this strangeness, I flew off to explore further, and found many wonders. I especially liked the tapestry from the famous "Lady and the Unicorn" set hung on a castle wall:


To fully list the marvels I saw would take a very long time, surely omit much else that is there, and worse still might dissuade some from going there in person, which would be a shame. Don't miss the Garden of da Vinci.

Glued to the TV

Like the vast majority of the rest of the population of Iowa, I was glued to the Olympics, waiting up far later than I should to see the women's all-round gymnastics competition, hoping for Shawn Johnson, the pride of West Des Moines, to win the gold.

It didn't happen, but it was wonderful to see all the athletes competing, and a joy to see Nastia Liukin and Shawn jointly take the gold and silver. The joy was contagious; the great Béla Károlyi was so excited and speaking so fast that I couldn't quite make out what he was saying through his beautiful accent, though I'd swear that at one point he exclaimed "You go, girlfriend!"

And so they both did.

UPDATE: Shawn Johnson won the gold medal for balance beam. Whee!

UPDATE: Math is her best subject in school. Yay!

Whimsy: where men are men...

...and hummingbirds are bullies.

No, really!

I set out from my home and headed up the stone path to the top of the hill, and there was a lovely area to look out over the beautiful Whimsy landscape. Seagulls wheeled overhead, and--oh, look, a ruby-throated hummingbird! It hovered, zipped about, hovered, wings a blur...

...and then it pushed me! Honest, it headed my way and shouldered me aside. I swear!

I stood there in disbelief, and then it happened again!

After I got over my astonishment, it started being funny. It's not like I was being hurt, and the incongruity of it made me giggle.

So--please come to Whimsy. It's breathtakingly beautiful, and the inventiveness of Cheyenne Palisades and Exuberance Lafleur, its creators, is endless.

But watch out for the hummingbirds!

"O say, can you see my eyes? If you can, then my hair's too short..."

I'd not realized there would be a third Hair Fair until I saw Vint Falken's post on it and on her entry in the Hair Fair 2008 photo contest. Hair Fair is a charity event that supports Locks of Love, an organization that donates wigs to children who have lost their hair due to chemotherapy, burns, and other conditions.

I've honored Bandana Day in a previous year, and I will do so again this year.

The submissions to the contest are delightful (especially Ms. Falken's), and I'm sure I'm out of my league, but it was so fun I had to try. Prevailing winds on the hills of Whimsy meant I could display an edited copy of Jordan (auburn) that I'd bought at Goldie Locks. Jordan is already very long... but I remembered photos I saw long ago of Diane Witt and how I so wanted to have such hair. I edited it to make it about three and a half meters long. The wonderful "Gelato" Windlight preset made for a yellow and green sky that reminded me of a lovely wallpaper for a recent Linux distribution, and after taking some pictures, this one seemed the best to me:


I fear the method I told GIMP to use for scaling did not work at all well, and I'm sure that will count against me in the contest. But that's not the important thing. What's important is that it made me pull out that edited hair (ouch!) and try to be creative. I'm happy with the results.

P.S. Really, without antialiasing there's not much one can do when scaling an image where nearly horizontal or nearly vertical lines prevail. I will experiment further with GIMP and let you know which scaling methods prove best.

Eek!

Whew!

I thought I was following instructions to correct a problem with stuttering sound in SL with Ubuntu thanks to the adoption of PulseAudio for Hardy Heron... and the result was that I couldn't log on to my computer as myself. (I think it was expecting to play the little log on sound, and couldn't.)

I'm back, thank goodness... but I fear that the sound in SL will still stutter for now.

Load balancing revisited

Gwyneth Llewelyn reports that LL's latest hire is responsible for getting things done to improve SL's scalability. In the past, I've said that I hope LL is looking into load balancing, getting rid of the immutable tying of one (possibly virtual) server to one sim.

It occurred to me today while in a large crowd at a musical performance (by the extremely talented Atheene Dodonpa; if you have any chance to hear her, take it) that load balancing would have its bad side--unless there's some way to deny CPU cycles to griefers and bots, it could be turned into a DDoS tool.

I still think that some kind of load balancing will be necessary, but it's not going to be easy to keep it from being abused.

Yet another must-read: in defense of unrealistic avatars

Sophrosyne Stenvaag posts a defense of "unrealistic" avatars that is well worth reading, and I have to say I agree.

Yes, body image and what people do to themselves in RL is a serious issue. Models who look like they went straight from the concentration camp to makeup to runway are neither beautiful nor healthy.

But... this is SL, where we can do better. [Insert sound clip from The Six Million Dollar Man here.] Why should we settle for our RL selves, products of genes selected for scarcity in a world of abundance, our telomeres shortening like that ominous fuse crawling across the Mission: Impossible intro?

Head over to Sophtopia and, as Glenn Reynolds says on Instapundit, read the whole thing. (And some other things, too, while you're there.)

Getting started with OpenSim

Wondering what the OpenSim thing is all about?

Maxx Monde has put up a blog with a simple intro to setting up and running your very own sim on your computer.

On the moove?

Dusan Writer tells of an interesting video that shows brief scenes in a plethora of virtual worlds, letting one compare and contrast. One caught my eye: moove.

I went there, expecting them to be yet another Windows-only, or Windows and Mac only ("We have both kinds o' music--country and western!") affair, thinking back to when, out of idle curiosity, I looked at "Red Light Center" and found in their FAQ list, for the question "Do you have a Mac or Unix version of the software?",

We recommend buying a PC for about $500 from Dell to run this software [under Windows] if you really want it.

at which I cheerfully wished them a fun time in hell.

To my surprise, they said the moove software would work under WINE, and after a download, it installed.

Alas, either there's something still not quite right or moove is insanely popular, because it seems to hang at "contacting moove online". I'll let you know if I manage to get any further along.

Speaking of computers...

...Siri Woodget's magnificent exhibit Augusta Ada Byron King – A Fairy in Your Corner is not to be missed.

Ada Byron King is recognized as the first programmer. She saw further into the capabilities of the "Analytical Engine" than its designer, Charles Babbage.

At the exhibit, ongoing through October 25th, you will learn a great deal about this amazing woman. I urge you to go to the Jack & Elaine Whitehorn Memorial Library, a suitably stately and beautiful place, to learn and be amazed.

Yet another "I'm a Mac." "I'm a PC." parody

This one I like, even if I think very little of Novell's dealings with Microsoft...

Gibson Girl hair

Another thing I've hoped to achieve is the "Gibson Girl" look. When I saw an announcement from Miriel Enfield that she has reopened Miriel, and that among the hair the store offers is one called "Gibson Girl", I had to investigate.

I'm very pleased. It's not quite the "big hair" of some of the illustrations and photos--I was surprised to discover that Charles Dana Gibson was from New England, not Texas :)--but it's very much in the proper style, and I'm very happy with it.

The above photo, taken in Caledon Brigadoon, shows the results. It may need a little editing to fit my head, but I'm quite pleased. Thank you, Miriel!

Wishful thinking

I may have mentioned a time or two that I'd love to have a good giantess avatar, where good means that I could make it resemble my current avatar aside from scale (I would want to be able to avoid having compromises forced on me, e.g. not to have to shorten torso length to get the leg length I want), and that animations and movement would work on it as they do on the stock avatar (just because you're a giantess doesn't mean you shouldn't have a sexy walk!), as would clothing. (Those last two would probably require that limits on the stock avatar be removed; Gentle Reader, please consider voting for VWR-1258.)

I kind of envy this cheerleader...


Sometimes, though, it would be nice to be larger still...


Then there are still other times... sigh.

SLWTF

New World Notes has posted a short piece asking what people think about the disappearance of "Popular Places". I, for one, am practicing my happy dance, in hopes that the death of "Popular Places" will mean the end of bot farms, the hordes of mindless clients that run and eat resources for the sole purpose of running up traffic counts.

I'm grateful to Hamlet Au for his mentioning a blog that I'd not heard of. In passing he refers to a post on SLWTF, one of several, in which Garth Goode, the blog's author, happens across some of those collections of bots. In the latest, he finds them standing around on a platform in the sky and, shall we say, brings them down to earth, where we find they were hovering above a place called "Porn Plaza". Porn Plaza proves to have one of the most hilariously inept signs I've seen in some time.

Garth Goode is a witty observer of SL, and SLWTF features many fascinating places. It's well worth your time.

O(n2)

It's why going to the next larger size monitor has more of an effect than you think. The size is given in terms of the diagonal, but moving that up 10% increases the area by 21%; 1.1 squared is 1.21.

I have an unfortunate tendency to run the display resolution up. (Still using a CRT. What can I say?) "Oooh.... 1800 x 1440...." After all, it means I can crank up the size of fonts to compensate and the result will look better.

Unfortunately, the graphics card's work load goes up proportionally to the area as well, poor thing. One of the reasons the Sabayon Linux Live DVD was flying at 50+ fps is that it didn't have the screen resolution cranked.

So, I've restrained myself and dropped back, and my SL experience should be better as a result. More evidence that I'm not a gamer; all the gamers out there who read this will probably respond "Well, duh..."

P.S. The other disadvantage is that graphics on web sites are sized based on a guess as to the viewer's probable resolution, so reading, say, Day by Day becomes an exercise in futility for aging eyes at high resolution. I think my eyes will thank me for this decision.

Visits from Iran

Looking over the Google Analytics statistics, I see that there have been two rather long visits to the blog from Ahwaz and Shiraz in the past month.

To whoever came here from there: thank you. You come from places with a long and fascinating history, and I would love to visit them someday.

To bloggers: Google Analytics is free, and even if, like me, you're not trying to have a huge readership or make money from your blog, it's fun to look through the map overlay and see just how far your words propagate. It reminds me of lazy afternoons spent long ago looking through a treasured gift of a World Almanac.

Must-reads

• "How to Make Money in Second Life Without Being an IP Maximalist," in his blog Rob Myers: Free Culture, Free Software, Free Society.
• "practical alternatives to 'copy protection'", in Adam Frisby's blog.
  

Ave et vale...

Alas, Linden Lifestyles is shutting down on August 5th. (NOTE: that means no new entries; existing ones will still be available.) It's sad to see one of the premier fashion blogs of SL cease, but I can certainly understand scarcity of time, and best to go out on a high note.

Many thanks and all happiness to Sabrina and Salome.

Senator fuses controversial IP bills into big, bad package

From Digg: "A bill introduced Thursday by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) would increase penalties for counterfeiting, empower federal prosecutors to bring civil suits against copyright infringers, create a federal copyright czar to coordinate IP enforcement, and provide for the seizure of property used to violate copyrights and trademarks. "

Yes, if you liked property seizure already, you'll love this!

read more | digg story

Foxconn deliberately sabotaging their BIOS to not work with Linux --or is it?

Foxconn, a company that makes, among other things, motherboards, makes and sells a motherboard that intentionally checks to see whether Linux is running on it and, if so, hands back broken ACPI (power management) information. This is especially interesting in view of a 1999 email from Bill Gates that turned up in anti-trust litigation, in which he proposes that ACPI be somehow made to work only on Windows.

read more | digg story

UPDATE: it turns out that several motherboard manufacturers have the AMI BIOS version that does this. Foxconn has released a test version that fixes all but a trivial error, and later will release a production version. I hope the others follow suit. Details on the Ubuntu forums.

Thank you, Second Life...

...for not being a game.

I have no interest in shooting monsters or people, or defeating the boss to get to the next level. If I'm going to fill my muscle memory with anything, it will be "Pavane pour une Infante Défunte," not how to get through a maze, thank you very much.

I like Second Life as it is; like Real Life, it's what you make of it. Any goals are your goals, not those someone else has decided to impose on you.

Srizonified Proprietary Drivers

One of the problems with Linux is actually a problem with hardware manufacturers--some of them don't provide the information needed to write full-featured Open Source drivers for their products, and thus one winds up in the situation I find myself in today.

Today there was an update to the Linux kernel. nVidia's refusal to allow full-featured Open Source drivers for their graphics cards means that I can't upgrade the kernel until the hackery needed to make nVidia's srizonified binary blob work with it is done and available in the Hardy Heron repositories.

ATI, perhaps with the prodding of their new owners, AMD, have finally started releasing information on at least some of their recent graphics hardware, and I'm hoping that there will be Open Source drivers for them with feature and speed parity with the Windows drivers. Once that is the case, nVidia can kiss my business goodbye.

Midnight City

When the smell of the rainwashed pavement
Comes up clean, and fresh, and cold
And the streetlamp light
Fills the gutter with gold...
— "My Time of Day," from Guys and Dolls

The dress seemed far more suited for night and the city, and it's been a while since I took a forced perspective photo, so I thought I'd combine the two.

Tour de force

In the past, when I've talked about introducing you to Linux, I've backed off on one thing that, for those of you who read here, would be of particular interest: the RAM requirements of SL and those of a Linux Live CD are such that I didn't think they'd work and play well with each other, and so I've hesitated to suggest it.

No longer.

Last night I tried out the Sabayon Linux 3.5 Live DVD. I was happy to see it come up with the proprietary nVidia driver (and that the more recent version that, as far as I can tell, fixes the spot problem!)... but I was astonished to see the familiar turquoise eye-in-hand icon, labeled "Second Life". I clicked it... and there it was. I signed on, and it was just like always (well, not quite, since I normally run the RC client, and this was the official client). I checked the frames/second rating... and it was flying, in the higher fifties! Admittedly, I didn't have the knobs all twisted to max, and the window size was smaller (in pixel dimensions) than I usually run, but even so...

Another caveat: this was done with a 2.8 GHz dual core Athlon 64 system with 4 GB of RAM, so your mileage may vary, but OTOH that's not all that outrageous a setup these days.

So... I no longer hesitate to suggest that you try Second Life with a Linux Live CD. OK, DVD... but get the Sabayon Linux 3.5 Live DVD and give it a try. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised; I certainly was.

Spot remover

I am happy to announce that the spot problem appears to be solved. Last night I installed version 173.14.09 of the nVidia driver (hint for Ubuntu users: enable the "hardy-proposed" repository, and install nvidia-glx-new-envy--unless you have an older nVidia card, of course), and this morning beneath the swaying palm trees of the Tampa Bay sim I took a picture, a crop of which you see here. With hopeful fingers on the trackball I opened it with GIMP and zoomed to 200%... and found no spots!

So... I can return to taking pictures untroubled by the fear that a lovely subject and what efforts I can muster to compose and light will be wrecked. Whee!

Traduttore, traditore

A dear friend who in RL is from Italy ran into a very unfortunate typo on an Italian-English bilingual dictionary web site. The site told him that the English word for cernia was "groper" instead of the correct translation, "grouper."

It makes me wonder just how many double takes I have induced by trusting such sites.

Land of Giants

In Hamlet Au's wonderful history The Making of Second Life, it's said that limits were imposed on the avatar to avoid a sort of arms race:

"Second Life is supposed to be about limitless opportunity," [Hunter] Walk remembers them thinking, "but you can't be a 10,000-foot dragon. We stood back and we said, 'Wow, this is Prisoner's Dilemma.' Like the first time somebody wants to be a 150-foot giant, then everybody's going to want to be a 150-foot giant, so all of a sudden you're in this out-of-whack world."

So they set what they thought were reasonable limits on the avatar (according to the book, there's an eight-foot limit on height), so that going beyond those limits requires attachments... which don't work and play well with some things, but perhaps LL thought that a good thing, to further discourage a height arms race.

Ironically, though, SL itself fosters height inflation. Unless things have changed drastically since I went through orientation, you're left to set your sliders with no feedback whatsoever about what those sliders mean. I'd love to see an indication of the equivalent in cm or inches of the slider settings for sliders that correspond to spatial dimensions, but even one of those textures laid out in squares that one could stand in front of at that point in orientation would give newcomers an idea of what they are getting.

I expect that very few people will choose the extremes if they know what they're getting--otherwise, there's an inclination to choose something in the middle--and I'm pretty sure that, for women's avatars at least, that's well over the 5'4" US average woman's height. (And ironically, the slider settings don't even encompass the variation in body part size in RL. Robert Wadlow and Zeng Jinlian, for example, couldn't have made their avatars resemble themselves.)

(May I take advantage of the chance to ask once again for you to consider voting for VWR-1258? Thank you.)

Web of Verisimilitude

Second Life kind of oozes out into the web.

It finally rose to conscious level when I read about Lively, and how people are upset that others have signed on and beat them to establishing a Lively avatar with their SL avatar's name, but it's been going on since well before my rez day... on which I immediately set up mel_yeuxdoux@yahoo.com as my email address.

SL snapshots populate flickr, despite the controversy over whether they're "screenshots" or not.

There are so many social web sites for SL avatars that I can't keep up with them; my homes on them have virtual cobwebs. (Many have a blog option, but I barely come up with enough to keep this blog--another leak from SL into the general web--from gathering dust.)

It makes sense; after all, LL has enough to do without setting up purely in-world email, much less something like playlist.com. For that matter, it spreads the word about SL. With any luck, people will happen across SL blogs and get the idea that no, it's not all about [pause to try to come up with all the media cliches, a la "You Never Even Called Me By My Name"] pedophiles griefing furry Nazis and Goreans from their mom's basements.

Sorry... I don't have any grand conclusion or thesis. It just occurred to me this morning. I wonder what future historians will make of it.

P.S. I guess this shows I'm an immersionist. An augmentationist would respond, "Well, duh!" (possibly more articulately); there's nothing unusual about people who just happen to use SL also having web pages and blogs and flickr/myspace/etc. pages.

DRM-related links

Since, alas, the topic of DRM is coming up in the context of Second Life, I want to post some links to related information and organizations in one spot for ready access:

• Defective by Design
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure
• Peter Gutmann's presentation on content protection in Windows Vista
• John Walker's "The Digital Imprimatur"
  

I urge you to inform yourself about the issues involved.

UPDATE: Better still would be to create a list of links that won't disappear as time goes on... so that's what I've done.

eCorp opens

eCorp is now selling a line of prim breasts with a variety of tops. Once I have some L$ to spare, I will have to give them a try.

What? Something worthwhile in the Second Life Herald?!

I'm not sure why I bother to read the Second Life Herald.

However, I can wholeheartedly recommend a hilarious recent post there: "Sweatsocks of Gor."

Must-read about Mitch Kapor's keynote

Marianne McCann is wise beyond her years.

Many thanks to Ittindi Gavaskar

Ittindi Gavaskar has been making lovely prim breasts for some time. I'm happy to say that the other day I saw an announcement that his work will have copy permission.

Why is this important? Because without copy permission, if you wish to customize something, you either have to be, like Mary Poppins, "practically perfect in every way," or be very sure to write down the exact sequence of operations you perform so you can undo them in case you change your mind.

So... a thousand thanks, Ittindi. There's a vendor for his work at Northstar Mall (and probably other places--I apologize for my faulty memory). Do check it out.

Jealousy

I've mentioned a few times that I'd love to have a giantess avatar.

I am now officially envious of CodeBastard Redgrave. Not because she's a wonderful photographer, nor because she's the most callipygous resident of SL... but because she's now a sim.

Visit Rouge. You'll be amazed.

Not bloody Lively

Google has come out with the initial version of its virtual world, Lively...

...and it's Windows-only. To hell with it.

UPDATE: Sigh... you'd think I could get the name right.

You can't take it with you?

The official SL blog announced that avatars have teleported from a Preview Grid sim to an OpenSim sim. As no inventory moved with the avatars, they appeared at the OpenSim side as Ruth.

Near the top of the comments was a demand that items be prohibited from moving from place to place without creator permission; another commenter even thought it should be forbidden outright.

I fear that we might be headed for the nightmare that currently exists for digital media, i.e. so-called "digital rights management." DRM schemes only impede honest people from doing reasonable things with their purchases; the real pirates get around them. They are also a drag on performance (see Peter Gutmann's analysis of content protection in Windows Vista. One of the aforementioned commenters pointed out that her demands involved moving essentially all of SL save rendering to the server--just what we need, putting all the work on an already overloaded performance bottleneck).

Imagine yourself in RL taking a vacation. At the border you're told "Sorry, but you can't take your clothing with you. Please strip, and then we'll let you pass... and of course, you must buy all new clothing and accessories that you can only wear while in our country. Have a nice day." Would you put up with that? That's the fate awaiting you in the metaverse if the DRM advocates get their way.

As an honest SL resident who does not steal content and who supports businesses whose work I like, here's my position: I will not do business with those who forbid me to take items that I legitimately buy with me wherever I go. I urge you, Gentle Reader, to take a similar stand.

P.S. Some DRM schemes allow hardware to be disabled remotely; the content providers think of it as damage control when security holes become known. So if you happen to have the same graphics card or monitor as a pirate who is found out, it will be remotely disabled, and you, despite having done nothing wrong, will have to go buy more hardware if you want to use DRM-ed content.

P.P.S. It may just be that you have to get new drivers, though OTOH, if it's discovered that a piece of hardware has a security hole inherent in its design, I wouldn't be surprised if the driver is disabled and no new driver made available, which would have the same effect.

P.P.P.S. On the third hand, as Lt. Arex from the animated Star Trek might say, the distinction between having to download and install a new driver and having to replace hardware might not matter to you if, say, you're in the middle of giving an important presentation that involves displaying high-resolution content.

New clothing with prim breasts

Dangerous Designs has come out with a new outfit in its "Shameless" line that comes with scripted prim breasts (the outfit can be worn without them). The prim breasts are scripted, and can grow or shrink on command.

I'm not quite shameless enough to wear this particular outfit, but it is just the first of their products to include prim breasts. I'm assured that there will be some that I can wear without embarrassment, and I very much look forward to seeing them.

Still seeing spots...

Sigh... 1.20 RC, version 12. Some snapshot-related problems are fixed, but not the spots that I see on sufficiently high-res photos. Darn it. (In case you want to vote, it's VWR-7071.)

Miss you all!

Sigh... I'm not getting much time on SL lately. I miss you all! *hugs*