Giant Mushrooms and an Alien Bike Ride

Aletheia

Out of the blue on Monday (I think it was Monday), the lovely Bunz IM'd me and invited me out on a date. Bunz and I met through a mutual friend, and we got chance to bond one afternoon at the bottom of the sea beneath my skybox when Party Cat went missing and Bunz volunteered to help find her. We didn't find her, but we did find a massive shark that you could ride on the back off around and around in circles. As you do.

First, Bunz took me to Aletheia, home of europa. Although I've shopped at europa before, I've never been to their in-world store, and it was pretty cool! Everything had a larger-than-life cartoon aesthetic, and the water was crystalline and beautiful. We bounced around on the enormous mushrooms, and tried to climb on top of the goblin statue you can see just on the edge of the picture above (but we couldn't - he was a hollow phantom and when I tried to stand on his head, I fell straight through him). I got the urge, too, to throw Kitti off the edge of the highest mushroom down into the water - so naturally, we gave in to my impulse. I tried to take a picture as we did it, but Bunz accidentally flew instead of jumping (non SL users: it's controlled by the same button), and thus all I managed to photograph was Kitti's hair de-rendering because I had zoomed too far out.

Bald Kitti and Non-Existent Bunz. Oops.

Next, Bunz took me on the most insane and hilarious joyride of my life...with ET.

Here we go

Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore, eat your heart out!

When you arrive, a bicycle for two plus a fruit crate containing a wrapped-up ET appears on the floor of the forest. As soon as you hop on, the race begins. We were chased through the trees by police vehicles with flashing lights before we zoomed up into the sky, and cycled passed the Moon to recreate the classic ET image. After that, though, the ride stopped resembling any Steven Spielberg film and just turned to the insane. We were bombarded by all kinds of aliens and weirdos perched on different levels in the sky (but unfortunately, we moved far too fast for me to snap any pictures of them). They were hideous, and looked like something out of Monty Python.

At the end, we landed and the bike vanished, and ET appeared in a stereotypical flying saucer and took to the sky in the wake of a pretty impressive firework display and light show. However, I obviously triggered the button for ET's ascendance a second time when I tried to leave the scene because it started up again and the ever-charming Bunz laughed her head off and said ET wanted to abduct me. 

Attempted abduction

You'll be relieved to know that I didn't get abducted. We managed to escape off the mud and out passed a whole wall of aliens-for-sale. If you're looking for some aliens to jazz up your house or whatever, I'd recommend seeing ET about them.

I had an absolutely fantastic time. Bunz is lovely and hilarious, and this was a fantastic and certainly original date. I laughed for the duration of the sky bike ride, and for a good ten minutes afterwards. It was brilliant. I'd recommend it to everyone and I am seriously going to be taking/sending everyone I know to experience it :P.

If you'd like to see it for yourself, click here - here! Likewise, you can visit Aletheia by clicking here - here! Thank you so much, Bunz, for a great time.  

If you'd like to take me out on a non-romantic date, whether you know me in-world or not, please don't hesitate to send me a message :). I'd love to hear from you.

Daredevil

As you may have noticed from my last few blog posts, my avatar has a new skin. It's a couple of shades darker than my usual, but I really like it, though it has meant I've had to darken her hair by a few shades, too. She's still ginger, though - to keep my anxieties at bay. What a new skin usually means is a whole new set of images - profile pictures, blog banners - and this time has been no exception, as you may have also noticed by the shiny new banner at the top of this page. But here it is again, because why not:

Oooo, shiny!

I'm quite pleased with my banner, not in the least because it proved itself to be so difficult to make. I did try to replicate the old one, going to the Blade Runner sim and using the fall poses, but it wasn't quite working out for me. So I went to one of my new favourite places, Hangars Liquides, and began throwing myself off buildings.

That isn't a joke. There are, at the present at least, no handily set-up falling poses in Hangars Liquides, and I wasn't sure how else to get a falling shot. I made Kitti fly - HL is one of the few sims that actually lets you fly! - up high above a road, then positioned the camera just above the road, looking upwards. Then I hit the 'stop flying' button, meaning that Kitti would plunge to her death. I think I get brownie points for the idea, but no matter what I did, I couldn't lie the camera up with Kitti and she would end up landing just behind where I'd positioned the camera. At the time, I didn't think of doing a blog post about it, so I didn't keep any of the out-take images. Sorry. 

After a few tries, I gave up, and went onto the marketplace to look for a set of falling animations. I found one, though the animations in the pack seemed to have more agency than simply 'falling'. They were all 'falling-on-purpose' or, like the one I ended up using for my banner, 'jumping off a ledge'. But I figured that, with a pretty cool sci-fi outfit and a pretty cool sci-fi city like Hangars Liquides, jumping off a ledge could be. Well. Pretty cool. 

There were a few hiccups. Positioning my avatar right on the edge of the bridge-thing proved difficult, and sometimes Kitti fell off. But then I realised that I could activate animations whilst flying, so I could fly up, position myself just off the ledge, and use the jumping animation to make it seem (hopefully) as if Kitti had just leapt off.

These were the shots I ended up with:

Looks like I'm virtually on the edge, right..?

...I wasn't. Oops.

An attempt to use a falling animation whilst flying...didn't quite look right, though the rain looks pretty cool!

Somehow, I seem to have positioned Kitti just on the outside edge of the rain, lol!

Getting somewhere!

The image I used for my banner :)

To become a fan girl, just for a moment: I really do love Hangars Liquides. Before I got my new laptop, there is no way I could have gone there and seen all this. It is a beautiful build, created with such attention to detail, and, in places, such a sense of humour. It's stunning, and this section with the rain is, at the moment, my favourite. The builder, Djehan Kidd, is incredibly talented, and incredibly nice, and the sim owner (I believe that's what he is!) Lawrence Celestalis is kind and charming and full of fun. 

Lawrence and I, best viewed on flickr

 He spied me whilst I was trying to position Kitti for these shots and was giggling at me and asking if I needed him to come and catch me. Hilarious. Once I'd finished, he offered me a teleport link to join him and Djehan in a different part of the sim where he had decided to rez a tank and take us for a ride. A tank, ladies and gentlemen.

I also asked Lawrence if I might take shots here for my Kit 49 comic, which has been suffering since I have run out of places in the original sim I was using to take shots. He said yes. Exciting!

Sexy Doesn't Run

I have a feeling that this might be a long post. I apologise in advance, and will do my best to break it up into digestible chunks. Stay with me here? I promise it's relevant...

SL offers three modes/method of propelling oneself into motion - walking, running, or flying. Most of the tutorial is meant to show you how to swap between the three (though swapping between them is the simple part), and then you are thrown into the SL realm and expected to not bump into things.

You cannot avoid bumping into things.

Walking

When I first began using SL, I felt a bit like I was beginning to walk again. It goes back to that idea in "The Matrix" when Neo turns to Morpheus and asks why his eyes hurt. He's never used them before, and now he's getting electric-light glare from the hacker's shiny head. You have unplugged your brain from one body and fastened it into another, only this time, you're not only relying upon your brain signals and your body muscles to make your legs move. You also have to factor in the middle man of computer keyboard, and Linden Lab's scripting skills. And Linden Lab's scripting skills mean that you waddle around like a duck, or like you've lost your horse, and you look as if you could topple over at any minute - and just when you've got the hang of it and believe that you've got the mouse-controlled camera and legs-controlled arrow keys working in symbiosis, a wall will appear where there wasn't one a minute ago and you'll be stuck like a spider in a bathtub.  

Once you've learned to walk again, running is pretty easy. All you have to do is turn the "run" function on. I find it harder not to bump into things when I'm moving more quickly, so...maybe it isn't so easy...but what I mean to say is that you don't have to learn a complete new set of controls to operate it. 

 Flying

Now that leaves the one everyone gets excited about - flight. Humans are obsessed with flight. We're always looking up at the sky, our deities are in the sky, and the ambitious Americans took the eagle, a king of the skies, as their national mascot. The English flag is predicated on the cross of a man who conquered a dragon (though if the dragon could fly, I don't know why it didn't just fly away from George the tin-can). Maybe I'm getting away from the point. We have all longed to be able to join Peter Pan in the sky, and now here is a programme offering us a new body with the ability to fly - no impractical wings, no jet engines, no magic!

Hovering in mid-air...not sure why I need to keep my arms out like that.

My laptop cannot cope with flying and high graphics, hence the grey-blue shapes. Sorry.

In most sims (platforms/places), flying is not allowed. The screenshots above were taken in a sandbox, which is a place meant for building and such, so I had a pretty free reign with what I did there. But in structured sims such as cities, towns, amusement and leisure parks, it departs from a norm, a reality, that is trying desperately to instill itself in that virtual world. It isn't just that other avatars hit "/frown" if you swoop down on their picnic in the park or divebomb them on their walk down the Champs Elysee, either - the owners of the sims can choose to physically "turn off" the flight mode on their platform, and then no matter how many times you hit the "page up" key, your avatar will not take flight. Mankind has long dreamed of this power and, once given it, has banned it for unconventionality. 

A round of applause for hypocrisy, ladies and gentlemen! Another for cutting your nose off to spite your face! And another, finally, for the fact that it isn't only the British who oppress themselves into muted formality. Once again, it would seem that the virtually limitless realm of the virtual is too limitless for us land-bound folks to be comfortable.

 Running

I've not seen many avatars running around SL either, and - as a small dig at the nature of gender in SL that will be referenced later in a dedicated blog post, if I remember to include it -, in my experience, you are far more lightly to see men run than women. I'm going to take a premature stab at the reason for this and say that it is to do with Animation Overrides.

Animation Overrides

The only way to get rid of the default duck-waddle walk is to buy and put on a little device called an Animation Override, or AO for short. You cannot see them in my screenshots (because I use the in-game screenie function which automatically hides such), but down the sides of my SL interface there are two sets of buttons that allow me to turn on the override for individual functions, as well as choose from about five different styles of movement. That is because my avatar is actually "wearing" (they are not visible on my body, they are just attached to it, if that makes sense) four different AO systems. You don't need four, but I kind of had them heaped on me by friends, and thus I cannot work out which one is overriding which animation exactly and I cannot seem to work it out by mixing and matching them. The only reason I know that they are doing anything is because I have been transformed from a unseated cowboy to a supermodel. I did not choose to walk like a supermodel - all five of the options were variations of supermodel, and whilst it is funny to walk like that, it is a generally accepted norm that I should. Thus, the SL realm has become my permanent catwalk. 

I suppose the other testament to their overriding success is that when I am standing still, my avatar will put her hands on her arse (meant to be her hips, I think, but it's not exactly well-scripted), or shift her weight to one leg and put her hand on her collarbone or fan her face or whatever it is she is doing. She also messes with her hair in a way I would personally never do.

Is this meant to be a flirtatious and girly pose? Fetch me a bucket.

What none of my four AOs seem to do, however, is override my run animation, so I run exactly like I did when I joined SL, and that just does not fit into the canon of sexy that the override is meant to imbue. In the AOs I have seen on male avatars, the emphasis is more on manliness and strength, and so they run like they are going to save someone's life in "Baywatch" - and apparently that is just fine.

I don't suppose people run around that much in the real world, though...and that's why we're all in a flap about obesity and Global Warming...