First of all – HELLO GUYS, my First Life got… not exactly busier, but more stuff engaging my limited attentions spanz.
Second of all, I am happy that this exists:
Why? Because it combines two things that make me furiously happy: whimsical Second Life-style creativity, and that crazy Psy guy, Gangnam Style.
OPP! OPP! OPP! OPPA GANGNAM STYLE.
Third of all, I’ve been neglecting my friends. Bad Lela, no! No!
Fourth of all, I’ve been ignoring my shop. I did participate in STEAM 7, but the month of September flew by as in Real Life(tm) I started working from home (same job as before, just not in a cube/carrel farm). I’ve been inworld to pay rent, and that’s about it. I have to make some decisions about what it is I really want to do as a business owner; I’ve literally been dabbling half-assedly in it. And I’ve been stressing out about the tremendous lot of Stuff I Should Do, so instead I play hours of Free Cell (because that is a guaranteed win every time, my friend).
Yet on the other hand, when I’ve actually put the time in to make some little trivial thing, I’ve enjoyed myself. More on that later. But soon, a new product will go up on the Marketplace.
Fifth, last night I stayed up until 3am playing around with Linden Labs’ new little alpha game, Patterns (available via Steam, currently for $9.95). Why? It’s oddly engaging, it’s relaxing, and there’s no stress. You figure out the rules, you bust stuff, you make stuff, you test materials for tensile strength, you die a lot and figure out how to make bridges and complex shapes to get you where you want to go.
Daniel Voyager has a lot more First Look videos at his site – check them out. It’s been an interesting experience and I look forward to relaxing, finding new shapes, and playing with some of the ideas I have. For instance, just now I made a weird balancing thing out of clay, which wasn’t up to the stress, so I pushed it off a cliff. Bye-bye, bad art! Next time, I’ll use one of the stronger materials. There’s this “Nak” stuff that grows on trees and is quite musical. There’s a possibility in there for some kind of wobbly balanced upside-down pyramid thing that place music when it falls over.
The graphics are primitive in a way, but it’s supposed to be simple building blocks. It’s oddly soothing. I wonder if the very retro-style control graphics mean they’re planning a tablet or smartphone version of the game – it would be a good timewaster on the right size tablet, but movement is easier with a mouse.
I haven’t been inworld as much as I’d like myself. I missed the Steam Hunt completely this time, for the first time since I discovered it. And I’ve had a couple of outfits sitting on my hard drive for months, that I need to upload and package.
Not to mention shifting my Marketplace offerings to Direct Delivery! I’m glad they extended the deadline on that – it was going to be Sept 30, but they’ve apparently extended it indefinitely. I’ve done a dozen or so items, but I’ve still got a lot to do there.
Once I got started, Direct Delivery conversions got easier because I reorganized my Products folders as I went – the top DD folder has the Thank You note and the shop landmark(s).
I pretty much followed Torley’s videos but did have some bobbles when doing the “edit associated object” but got the hang of it.
I unboxed, created new product folders in the DD folder, added whatever items (About, demos, alternate sizes) to the folder, then dragged the folder into the outbox. Add the Thank You and the LM, so there’s just ONE of each to update. Send, repeat steps. Then I went back and deleted unnecessary stuff before deleting all the Magic Boxes.
But oh, how long I procrastinated before getting it done.
Updates seem easy, too. As far as I know I haven’t been bitten by any of the Marketplace bugs, but I don’t have much stuff.
I had 2 products sitting unlisted on the Marketplace because I hadn’t finished doing the product images. D’oh!