Dappling and Duplo

To become a celebrity in SL, you either need to be a blogger or a builder. In this virtual sandbox world, builders are deities and the bloggers are their prophets, sent among us to spread the newly-created word. I myself am a designated prophet of the shop MetaTheodora, and I prophestitute myself to spread the word of the work of builder sian who owns it (as you can see here - here! and here - here!). 

It makes sense. SL is set up much the same way as the first life in that everything you consume, so to speak, has been created by SL users - except for a handful of Linden-build homes, which I suppose are akin to council estates. Perhaps the deification of RL builders will happen when the Govt and the Environmentalists go to war against each other and it's left up to the architects, the brick-layers and the interior designs to make miracle houses that can spring up out of nothing.

When it comes to building in SL, I am what a five year old with a box of Duplo is to Christopher Wren. Nothing gives me a headache faster than attempting to align prims in SL using a grid that I swear to the builder-gods is wonky. People build some stunningly intricate things for Second Life, and I am still working out how to move boxes around.
 

For non-SLers: this is a humble prim in it's original state. All building done in-world originates from simple polygons like this that are then resized, hollowed out, twisted and distorted and textured however you please. Most SL builders use outside programmes like Blender to design and create things and then import them into SL. I am NOWHERE NEAR being at that level. Everything I make starts out as a virtual plywood cube or cylinder. Everything.

 Thing is, though, that I like my boxes. I like (for the first five minutes, anyway) building my own virtual home, and my latest attempt is, I think, by far my best and so I wanted to show it to you. If you click the "building" tag that will appear at the bottom of this post, you can take a look back through my various building attempts as logged here and judge for yourself whether or not I'm getting any better.

Here it is, floating in the sky - which, maybe, will be where we all live just as soon as we invent a RL teleport to match SL's teleport - my handmade virtual home:

View from the top

View from one corner -

- and the opposite corner

Obviously, I didn't build any of the furniture or the lights. I had help from my friend Osh with the roof, but it's been heavily edited since then, so please don't blame her for any shoddy alignment. The rooves, walls, windows, floors, skirting boards and floating rings were all created painfully by me. The textures are ones I downloaded from Google Images and uploaded to SL, purely to decorate my home. The courtyard area floor texture was given to me by Ruina - thank you Ruina :)

View into the courtyard

Courtyard

Steamy hottub

I wanted to make something beautiful that took into account my (lacking) skill level but also challenged me a little. I love to play with light, and building a home in which the main feature would be the light and shadows made me happy - so that's what I did. 

I used a windlight setting I had made myself to shoot these photos, but I built the skybox with the regional light settings in mind (that is, the default day-light cycle). I usually leave the default settings on, turn shadows on, and let the virtual Sun creep across the virtual sky and play with the windows and the roof. The different effects the regional light settings alone create are complex and beautiful. 

I love windows. Can you tell?

Somewhere to sit

If I can't be a god of building, perhaps I'll be a god of shadows, and all that is dappled shall be my dominion.

Everything in this image has been built by somebody, just the same as I built the skybox. Compare my skybox to my avatar's hair, her clothes, the chair she's sitting on, her eyes, and the little lambicorn floating next to her. Like I said, five year old with Duplo to Christopher Wren.

A Watery Grave

Home Sweet Home

Carmine Chris and I are rebuilding our skybox. We felt that it was time for a change, and anyway, all that prim grass played havoc with...well...pretty much everything. Our new build is simple and pretty, consisting of two floors. There is a square cut out of the middle of both to allow for a courtyard garden. On the bottom floor, the inner walls are made of glass, so that we can see in to it. Norah's been helping (massively) too, which only seems right since she spends as much time in the box as I do (and more than Carmine Chris), and has fantastic design sense.

Yesterday evening, Norah and I stood out in the garden trying to work out what to do with the little green space, when I accidentally deleted the floor. Norah, myself and Party Cat plummeted instantly, and were only saved from a very, very long fall and a watery grave because we can fly and Party Cat has developed some kind of magical floating powers she's been keeping to herself.

It's so easy to forget that our skybox is literally that - a box in the sky. Very, very high up in the sky. It sounds so stupid, but in real life, we take the floor for granted completely. Even when we are thankful for a roof over our head and food on our table and water coming out of our taps, we never doubt the floor beneath our feet.

And it is with a childish, impish glee that I instantly go into giggles whenever I accidentally delete the floor, as I am sure you can imagine happens fairly frequently. I imagine it is possibly a need-to-be-there situation, but I cannot say from where comes my guilty joy in this silly mistake.

I'm giggling just thinking about it.

The other childishly amusing thing that happened yesterday evening was Norah's transformation into a bunny rabbit. On a whim, I put my projector on the top floor of the house and pointed it at the inner walls (which are solid). The way the light hit Norah, who was standing just on the edge of the beams, combined with the hat she was wearing, made her look like Frank from Donnie Darko.

I've been      expecting      you

Maybe it's all in my head. Maybe I'd been logged in too long, and needed some fresh air.

A Love Letter to Hangars Liquides

My favourite sim - aside from the one that houses my lovely skybox garden, of course - is Hangars Liquides. If you hadn't worked this out already...where have you been?! What I love about Hangars is...pretty much everything. It is a beautifully built science-fiction sim, and though it is dark and mysterious, and it is often raining, it is not without a sense of humour. 

Its builder, Djehan Kidd, is probably a genius. She pays so much attention to detail that there is even graffiti on the walls, and, in one apartment, there is a smoking cigarette resting in an ashtray. The sim features almost every kind of setting you could require from a science-fiction sim (at least in my limited experience of sci-fi, anyway) and probably some settings that had never occurred to you before: including busy streets, a market, a nightclub, a sky garden, a temple, public baths, holding cells, scanning machines, offices, junkie apartments, a taxi system and the most beautiful virtual beach I have ever seen...and the list goes on. 

It is presided over, too, by Lawrence Celestalis, who is a wonderful and charming gentleman who was totally cool with me repeatedly throwing my avatar off high objects and attempting to photograph her mid-fall. That was one of our first encounters, actually, when he caught me doing that, and do you know what he did? He laughed.

The one thing I hate about Hangars Liquides is that, no matter how many times I have tried (and I have tried many times), I cannot take good photographs of the sim when my intention is to take good photographs of the sim. In other words, I only seem to be able to capture the beauty and the intricacy of Hangars Liquides when I'm trying to photograph Kitti in that setting. My general landscape-type photos fall utterly flat, and do the sim absolutely no justice whatsoever. 

So here. Instead of posting a whole bunch of flat, useless, unflattering landscape-type pictures of Hangars Liquides, I am going to post utterly un-new pictures of the sim, some of which may have appeared on my Flickr before if not on here, and hope that these give you a sense of what an utterly wonderful place it is. If you want some more, please click the links at the end of this post - or visit! 

Scanning

Le Jardin Electric

The Beach

In the street - the streetlights make me want to be a saint

Apartments for rent

Apartments for rent - with the wonderful Mr.Celestalis

For more: Hangars Liquides in my Flickr stream / Hangars Liquides on the whole of Flickr.

Want to visit Hangars Liquides? Taxi!

Loose Ends

As I wander through SL, I seem to gather a whole lot of screenshots that go into my screenie folder and never see the light of day again. And a thousand tiny incidents take place, and I find lots of really cool things to share, and I never write about them because they aren't, by themselves, worth a whole blog post. So I figured I'd pile them all into one blog post, and...well. Be done with them!

So first of all; remember my cat? (If you don't, click here - here!) I logged in a couple of weeks ago to find that my cat was nowhere to be seen. I searched the whole of my house, and my surrounding 'garden' - which is empty, apart from a tree and a very small patch of flowers. When I couldn't find her, I started to panic. How had I lost a cat - a virtual cat, no less, that was tethered to this patch of ground?! 

You can see her name there, over the hedge!

Because the damn thing was hiding in my hedge. In the hedge. The hedge I had assumed was solid. My friend Croon found her for me - but then I couldn't get her out. A whole lot of cursing later, she came out of her own volition. Damn cat. 

Other than that, she's doing fine. She grew some more, and after a software update, she now has more cuddle options, and my inventory doesn't get filled up with cat-toys everything I play with her. That's good - my inventory is full of all kinds of random things that would need a post of their own to explain, let alone catalogue!

Friends again <3

 After deciding that I needed to get out more, I went to Torley Island and found these really cool pieces of giant origami...

I know Kitti isn't tall in SL terms, but wow!

 ...and whilst I was there, I got to sit in another really big chair - and you know how I live for that!

Really big chair!

  ...and  I was then given a really cool add-on type thing that allows you to defy gravity and walk on the ceiling!

Look Ma, no hands! - and no strings!

The add-on was given to me by Laertes, with the intention that I could use it for roleplaying scenarios on his new shipyard at Botany Bay, but so far all I have done is walk around my ceiling a little bit. The funniest thing was that when I activated the add-on whilst still wearing my animation override, I spun around in circles. I have absolutely no idea why that happened, but it did make me giggle. Sadly, I didn't get a decent screenshot, but I do have some game capture software on my laptop, so maybe I'll utilise that.

I've also been doing some building - which, after my first post about building, I'm sure you cannot imagine. It took me so long last night, and I found the whole thing so fiddly...but I was getting pretty tired of having to throw up a wall everytime I wanted to make my own background for my screenshots, and the wall wasn't the prettiest thing in the world. So I tried to build something a little cooler, and a little more discrete. I'm not really sure what to say about them, so I'll just plonk them here.

By some miracle, I managed to put this together.

Applying textures :)

I couldn't work out why the walls were darker than the floor -

- and I could only fix it by making the walls glow XD

The end result!

After a little more playing around with the textures, I managed to make the outside of the build glass. So you can see in, but, as you can see from the above image, you cannot see out. Cool, huh? Well, I thought so.

Not the best screenie, but, I tried. I'm learning!

Well, that just about concludes my loose ends post. It's pretty much tied up, and I think I have sufficiently overloaded this post with images. There is one more thing, however. 

Does anybody remember a time when the girls' bathroom at Necronom VI wasn't out of order?!

>.<

Pretty Dangerous

On the advice of a friend, I visited a sim created by Bryn Oh called "Anna's Many Murders". I believe it is part of his Immersiva project, though I'm not one hundred percent sure that I have that the right way around. I confess, I had never heard of Bryn Oh, or Immersiva, until I clicked the landmark my friend had sent me, and teleported into what appeared to be a wooden box. 

I know that, ordinarily, I don't really like to use this blog as a kind of virtual Blue Planet Guide, but I do like to record the things that I come across that I find amazing or interesting, and this find certainly falls into both of those categories. I am not going to log here a walk-through - that would ruin it! - but there are a few things that I should like to mention and talk about.

Inside the wooden box with me was a giant bee holding some letters, and a statue of a girl, surrounded by plastic bags that looked as if they were caught in a breeze. On the wall behind her was a placard, and as I went in closer to read it, the plastic bags turned into butterflies, as if by magic. It was a beautiful illusion, and a very unexpected one. It appears to work on a timer, so that if you hang around, the butterflies will, eventually, turn back into plastic bags. It is repeated later on in the sim as you walk through it, to even greater effect, but I will let you find that one for yourselves.

I caught them as they began to transform; by the end, the bags were gone.

The placard on the wall was the beginning lines of a poem, and as you move through the sim and encounter each of the installations, you learn more and more lines of the poem. It's a wonderful mix of exploration and art, and it is beautifully done, both in the realisation, and the "ease of use", if you like - it is easy to work out which way to go, and the poem is in equal parts funny and disturbing. The title of the piece is not a brag; there are, indeed, many murders committed by our friend Anna.

A darker streak.

Sadly, I was not able to visit all of the sim with my avatar. At one point, there are steps which lead to a box in the sky, and Kitti's legs are apparently not long enough to make the crossing. Flying is disabled on the sim, and so is teleporting around it, so when Kitti fell off the step and down the side of the cliff, I received a notice that she had died and been returned to my home sim. I did manage to use the camera functions to look at what was in the box, but I was rather frustrated that I couldn't get Kitti up there to look at it properly!

I was also intrigued, and disturbed, by the faces on the models. It would appear that the artist has taken photographs of real life faces and pasted them onto the skulls of her characters. The effect is jarring, and eerie.

Don't mess with Anna! Behind her, the steps I could not climb.

I'm not sure, had I been the artist, that I would have done this, but I can't deny that it is certainly effective. I hope she knows the people these faces belong to...and what does it mean if she doesn't? I'm surprised that I haven't had nightmares about her!

Much of the build is really beautiful, however, and I was completely won over by this lightbulb tree. It seems like such a wonderful idea, and it was things like this, details like this, that I found really drew me into the artwork.

The Lightbulb Tree, and a steampunk-style horse behind.

Bryn Oh is not the first, I would imagine, to combine artistic and poetic elements with the explorative-game style. I have visited sims in the past that have been dedicated to this kind of game, though they are often themed by holidays or festivals or big sales, and seldom, I think, have I come across one so well-thought out, or so atmospheric, as this one. Had I been able to run my graphics any higher, and did I have any grasp of Windlight settings at all (for non SL users, Windlight is some kind of software to do with lighting in-world), I imagine it would be even better.

I also find it really exciting that Second Life can be used as a platform for not only showcasing art, but for creating it. We aren't viewing a facsimilie of the art; we are viewing the art itself, and there is something invigorating about the adaptation of new software for art's sake - especially in a day and age when funding for the arts and the future of the artists relying upon that funding has become so uncertain. 

A quick Google search turned up Bryn Oh's blogspot - here - and a quick in-world search for "Anna's Many Murders" turns up the landmark you need to visit. I got the impression that, as part of an on-going project, the sim would not be around for so long, and that I had already missed previous artworks by Oh. If there are any Bryn Oh fans reading this, please enlighten me? I am definitely interested in seeing more of his work.

Virtual Conscience

The Translucent Twin Towers

Here are some musings I figured I'd post. This isn't, necessarily, the most detailed or thought out of my posts. But I think that it is important to mention in terms of space and notions of responsibility, if nothing else. I loaded Second Life yesterday with the intention of looking for replicas of real-world cities - as research for another project I am involved in - but what I found instead was this: a World Trade Centre Memorial. The Memorial is a rebuild, but the buildings are translucent, ghost-like, and their floors are paved with concrete blocks bearing the names of hundreds, if not all, of the victims. Just beside the ghost towers is a steel cross labelled Ground Zero, and, nailed to it, a very small image of the all-too-familiar image from ground zero.

Ground Zero

In the rules for the sim, it says ‘no aircraft, no weapons’. My first thought was, is that necessary? and then I realised that it probably was.

Petit-esque?

On the top of the buildings, I felt like Philippe Petit. He remapped that space before it had even been finished, and then the events of September 11th remapped it all over again.

I’m not sure what to make of this place. I’m not sure what to make of the rebuild. I'm not sure what to make of the buildings’ translucency. I’m not sure what to make of the land beside it - the sprawling city one could easily imagine is a perfect replica of New York, but which, in truth, could probably be any modern city in the West. Any memorial/representation/recreation is problematic, of course, and I am certainly not condemning this one.

If nothing else, I guess, it suggests a kind of virtual conscience. Somebody somewhere built this, and it must have taken them a long time. And so the Towers exist in the virtual world, though not at all in the way in which they existed in the real world. The attacks upon the real Twin Towers shaped their design in the virtual. That's kind of obvious, since this is a Memorial, but it is interesting to note that they were not rebuilt virtually as if nothing had happened - which returns to the idea of the virtual conscience. At no point can we be allowed to forget (as if we could) what happened to those Towers and the people within them.

Names on the Floor 01

Names on the Floor 02

Brick Thick

I hate building. During my time in SL, I have avoided anything that required me to build anything like the plague. This time last year, Sian Pearl taught me how to doctor prims (using the same interface as the build-interface), and I was really pleased with myself that I could now pull bits off outfits that I didn't like. I cannot tell you how many hours have gone into making Kitti's collars fit. 

In my defence, I am running SL on the lowest graphic settings, and I lag like Hell most of the time. I bravely attempted to put my settings up to "medium" - daring, I know! - this morning, and I was doing just fine, but Kitti's face kept melting into a pink and white blur every twenty seconds or so, and I got bored having to rebake the textures. So back down to "low" I went.

But yes: I hate building! It's not, really, the most difficult thing in the world, but the SL camera is unforgiving, and it makes it look as if things are resting on the ground when they are actually floating, and I imagine that working on small things such as building the beautiful pieces of jewellery SL designers put together, or creating hair, must take forever. I found it hard enough to make my walls join in the corner properly, and it made me feel...well...as thick as a brick!

It took me, with the kind and patient help of Sian Pearl, two-three hours of sweat and blood and tears and God only knows what else, to build a window and encase it in wall. I kid you not. But I persevered, and now I have a really cool wall with a window, and (what I think is ) a pretty cool virtual stage-set for the adaptation I am writing for my upcoming Dramaturgy Exam Presentation.

It all begins with a cube. Damn. Cube.

I built a window - that you can see through!

Ta-dah!

I give you, my stage-set!

My Dramaturgy Exam Presentation is one of the biggies. This is my last year at uni, and I need to do well in this exam. The task is to create a (live, so, theatre rather than film) stage adaptation of, well, anything we like really, and present it to the class as if to a board of investors. I need them to be able to see my show perfectly, else they won't want to invest and I won't get the grades I need to graduate with the mark I want. I have written a pretty adjective-heavy description of the piece, but for the visual people in my class (including the lecturer), I needed to have something more concrete. And my drawing skills are...well. Let's not talk about those.

We were told to download Blender, a software package that allows you to build things, basically. It is used in game design and things like that. I tend to be quite good with technology, but I missed the Blender master-class because I had another lecture, and when I loaded Blender up, I died a little inside. So. Many. Buttons! 

Deciding I didn't feel brave enough to tackle the Blender interface, I turned to SL. Now, it is my understanding that SL uses a very similar, if not the same, building system as Blender does, but it has a much, much simpler interface. And I appreciate a simple interface.

I even costumed Kitti, and got hold of some poses so that I could place her in the scene the way I imagined my central character would be placed. I am quite pleased with the outcome, though my screenie isn't the best. What I really like about it is that I could load SL in my presentation and allow the class to walk around the set, as Kitti-in-character-costume, and see it for themselves. Maybe I'm just easily amused.

I'd better get a good mark for this!

(Thank you Sian for helping me. I really appreciate it)