Why I Read Your #SecondLife Blog (in the generic “you” sense)

Posted on by March 11, 2013
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I just unsubscribed to several Second Life-oriented blogs that have been in my feed reader for at least a year or more. There’s no specific reason or personal agita over why I’ve stopped reading those blogs, other than I’m not interested in self-generated drama, and I’m not interested in how many come-ons someone gets who makes a point of hanging out in the kinds of places where online come-ons are a given. I’m really not interested in reading yet another complaint about how generous you’ve been with your creations, yet people don’t appreciate you. Well, people do appreciate it when someone is generous, and maybe they should be more forthcoming, but not on daily or weekly basis.

Here’s why I read your blog, though you may find my blog utterly dull and uninteresting in return. And that’s perfectly fine.

You write well, and I get a good sense of the live person at the keyboard. If you write in character, I’m intrigued, especially if I get a lively sense of the good character you project.

You don’t use your blog/website as a Google Adsense spamfarm. If you did, it wouldn’t matter how useful or timely or insider-y your content is, I can tell when my eyeballs are being exploited for your personal gain.

You do use your blog or site to publicize events that I might like to attend inworld, especially if I get to talk to you “in virtual person.” You don’t use your blog to post nothing but ads for your latest products or land for sale. Now, as a person who does use her blog to publicize new products, I am sensitive to this; for that reason after an initial “WHEE! I, I HAVE MADE THIS NEW THING, HERE!” post, it cleverly gets moved to the Marketing tab (same with Dhughan’s stuff) so it’s not on the front page for long.

You have developed a “beat,” a niche topic that’s interesting to fellow Second Life residents. You keep track of current developments in viewers and upcoming enhancements, or you tell interesting little news stories about the Steamlands and other communities and cultures in Second Life. Or you’ve made a name for yourself as a Blender guru, or a bargain hunter of renown, or you are creative in both Second Life and real life, and your blog is the record of the wonderful things you’ve made. Whatever it is, you have a topic and a point of view, and that’s worth reading.

Your blog hasn’t become “famous on the Internets” for being a trainwreck. People don’t mock you in your own comments, or carry tales from one place to another just to egg you on. Conflict isn’t the be-all and end-all of what you blog about.

Every now and then, you post someting really useful, or I learn something new from reading about your latest build or creation and I think, “Huh! I could make that, too!” You’re generous with your time and talents, and you get excited about group ventures and charity events.

I don’t read your blog just to read between the lines to figure out just who you’re being snarky about on your latest post, which got picked up and retweeted on Twitter. I usually have a pretty good idea, but I’m more interested in hearing how your big event came off, or how excited you are that it’s Relay season/almost time for the SLnB build season/almost Burning Life.

Sometimes I read your blog and it’s not about Second Life at all, it’s a window into your First Life, but you are cool with mixing the two realities. Sure, I’ll read about your local politics, since you have a skewerrific sense of humor and made the local committeeman look like a drunken fool in your blog post.

I’d stop reading your blog if all it was was fights between you and other people, and I’d stop reading their blogs, too, if they wrote about nothing but their quarrels with you. It all depends on the signal-to-noise ratio; if it’s just an undercurrent, I’ll ignore it and keep reading everybody. But open war? That’s just teling me it’s time to unsubscribe…

Keep writing, I’ll keep reading. In return I’ll try to keep writing actual blog posts more often about Second Life, and not just product blurbs and recycled tweets. I lack focus, or a topic, or an overarching theme, so that’s why I like to read blogs like yours, because I admire anyone that can pick a topic and stick to it.

Tweekly Digest: 04-Mar – 10-Mar

Posted on by March 11, 2013
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Antique Grid Show Spring Hunt April 6 – April 21, I Am In You! #SecondLife

Posted on by March 10, 2013
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AGS SPRING HUNT

Thanks to Thaddeus Nadeau, I’ll be participating in the Antique Grid Show Spring Hunt, beginning April 6. I’m excited to be in that hunt, as I had passed on being in STEAM 8. For this one, the scope is limited to “antique” items – but that can mean anything from the 16th century onward, including the Edwardian and Victorian eras. It’s one where the hunt items cost $L10 to buy, but they’re really worth it.

Folding Mesh Room Screen Dancing Oiran – $L250

Posted on by March 10, 2013
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Whee!! Another new product listed. You have no idea how frustrating it can be to have tons of ideas and lots of great textures, but to be constantly flailing about. I spent hours, for instance, the other night goofing around with a truly dumb party hat.

But this is something different – it’s mesh, which I’ve never worked with before. It’s from a kit I read about on SLUniverse. If I can figure out the movie software, I’ll try to make a short “product clip” to put online.

AsianFoldingScreen700x525

Animated folding MESH room divider screen adds Asian style and modern flair to any room. Touch to fold screen to the side, touch again to open.

The screen panels are one retexturable face, as are the wood frames and the hinges. Keep a backup copy if you retexture remember to retexture the folded screen too.

I have included the screen panel image, “Oiran Dancers,” in case you retexture and wish to revert the original design. This is a photo shot several years ago at a dance event, which has been processed in an impressionistic style, with hand-colored “gold leaf” edging.

I hope you enjoy this product as much as I did in creating it, from an original kit by Sea Warcliffe and script by Tapple Gao

via Second Life Marketplace – @LC@ Folding Mesh Room Screen – Dancing Oiran m/c/nt

I’ve got lots of really pretty Asian textures to use, as well as some interesting things I can do with a big catalog of inworld screenshots and outworld photos. The screens really lend themselves to images that are about twice as wide as they are tall. So I’m really looking forward to making more of these, because they’re fun to use and add a lot of visual interest to a room.

As I get going, I’ll do a couple of screens for a Relay for Life Vendor – YAY!!!

Preview: Animated Mesh Folding Screen (ERMAGERD! SCRERPTED MERSH)

Posted on by March 9, 2013
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This is so cool – I read about a new product at SLUniverse – a builder’s kit for making folding mesh screens that can be scripted to open and close. All you have to do is add your own textures, and WA-LA:

FoldingMeshAsian_007

This image is based on a photo I took years ago at a geisha (actually an oiran) event. The dancers had a fog effect going and so I took lots of pictures. Now, years later on the better machine, I’ve used some GIMP tricks to make the image look like an artistic landscape sketch, with some gold splashes around the edges like an old Japanese screen. I spent an enjoyable hour or two playing around with listing a screen I built (23 prims) and texturing, linking, and script-dropping this one (LI 2 – the equivalent of 2 prims). Thank goodness for temp texture uploads, I was trying various versions of this image until I hit on the gold leaf/landscape sketch combo. I felt very arty when I was done, most uncharacteristic of me.

Here, the screen is open. Just touch it…

FoldingMeshAsian_010

And it folds up! Such a fun thing to play with, and so easy to texture. You can add any texture you like, and it displays on the main face(s) in landscape mode. The wood frame and hinges are separate faces, too.

I was going to try to make a short video demonstrating this, but I screwed up on the XFire download that St. Torley recommended, it’s not working. Bah, maybe tomorrow. But I should be able to get it listed then, with other texture variations to come. It would be nice to put a FEW alternate textures in, if that works with mesh. Then it would be artistic, historic, AND Chameleonic.

Antique Bronze Rococco Room Divider – $L50

Posted on by March 9, 2013
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Just listed at the Marketplace:

BronzeRococoScreen512

Simple antique room divider or boudoir screen. Semi-transparent, so best if placed in front of a solid textured wall. Works with many different styles of decor and eras.

It’s copy/mod/no transfer, so you can take the transparency to 0 and switch it from “phantom” to solid. Keep a backup copy if you edit, though.

This is pretty primmy – my next screens are going to exciting, animated MESH, as I cracked loose for a really nice builder’s kit. It’ll be fun texturing it, and I’m going to try to make a short video clip to demonstrate the folding action on the next one, too.

via Second Life Marketplace – @LC@ Bronze Hinged Rococco Screen Sheer c/m/nt

ERMAGERD! SCRIPTRERING! in my #OpenSim standalone

Posted on by March 1, 2013
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I got these nifty little texture/sculpty organizers working in my private grid, Haleakaloha, a few months back. The script is by Solo Mornington; download it and the README and the base textures at GitHub.

Open Sim Scripting Fun

Open Source Scripting Fun

The cool thing is that it builds itself. You basically lay out 22 box prims and link them. Then you put the textures from the Resources folder on Github in it and install the script, and WHAM, instant low-lag 20-pane texture organizer. It has texture mode and sculpty mode, it checks for perms and advises how many textures were not loaded due to perms issues so you can deal with them, it assigns access to all, owner, or group, and it can display sculpties.

That is, it displayed grey blobs that were vaguely sculptylike, but they were hard to see (the script has a “fullbright” setting that may make it hard for sculpts to show up). I had a vague wish for a way to add a texture to the display prims when they were in sculpty mode, like some of the organizers I have in Second Life (notably, the free ones by Zauber Exonar and Eridanis Boccara).

Short version: I figured out exactly which two places this code had to go:
PRIM_TEXTURE, ALL_SIDES, "78a705fd-c719-43b7-800c-b5eb6fa235bd",<1.0, 1.0, 0.0>, ZERO_VECTOR, 0.0,

Not only that, but I figured out from context how this line of code works based on other lines of code in the script and recombined bits. And it compiled and worked on the first attempt! I nearly fell out of my chair!

OSTOHaleakaloha_001
OSTOSculptMode_001
GinormousHat_001
GinormousHat_002

So now I can see what sculpties I’ve either made myself (with much swearing) or gotten out of Linda Kellie’s freebies included with some of her OARS. I like the ones I made myself, at some point last year I had progressed to the point of learning how to put an alpha mask on them that is an outline of the sculpt itself (or it could be a logo, but an outline is much more useful).

There’s regular gSculptMode, and there’s zoom gSculptMode, and now you can really see the sculpts. One oddity that I may or may not figure out is that if it’s in Texture Mode and it’s displaying sculpt maps as UV images, in Zoom Mode the texturing grid is what is displayed, on a double-sized prim so it can give the texture to the user. So I guess that’s not that big a deal, it gives the inventory without a problem.

One odd thing about this texture viewer is that the camera bounces around a lot – I think it’s taking camera focus and when the view changes from one mode to the other you have to deal with getting your camera recombobulated.

I managed to get them working in Second Life as well – there was some tinkering that I had to do and sometimes the script itself spontaneously decides it’s no copy/no mod (maybe it picks this up when a texture with those perms is loaded).  Again, quite handy for project or group work, but too light duty to act as a full-bore repository.

New World Studio May See Update To Latest Version of #OpenSim Please #donate

Posted on by February 28, 2013
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UPDATE: Olivier Battini updated the NWS Group page with this great news:

OK, here is the state of New World Studio :
• Principal features are implemented and working quite fine
• Updater system should work but needs testing
• Some bugs left to fix

In the last spurt of activity last year, my error has been to try implementing a whole bunch of features at once or at least in a short period of time, and as I became less available I could not manage the resulting load of work.

This time, I will concentrate on adding stuff step by step at the appropriate pace. Feature requests won’t be examined until I can provide a stable and working product.

So, a paid version will be made available. Some of you may disagree about that, but given that the project can’t rely exclusively on donations to be maintained, the paid version will be the only way to make New World Studio a viable and sustainable project. Of course, a free version will still be available.

I’ll be able to tell more about the next steps tomorrow or the coming days… 😉

Thanks everyone for your dedicated support !

I’ve recently gotten back into goofing around on my standalone Open Sim grid – which was originally created using the very easy New World Studio that I read about on Maria Korolov’s Hypergrid Business blog.

A discussion on the NWS Facebook group has shown developer Olivier Battini that there’s a LOT of interest in the New World Studio Open Sim package, even though the full-featured New World Grid announced an “evolution” recently. He’s busy with wrapping things up at New World Grid and arranging hosting, etc., but has agreed to work on updating to the latest version of Open Sim by the end of March. He mentions that a paid version may be coming out, but I think it’s not likely to be terribly expensive.

I had been wondering what to do about upgrading my installation down the line, and hoping not to have to get Sim on a Stick working better (I uninstalled it for now, too confusing to have both).

I’ve just donated $25.00 via the donation page – it’s fun figuring out the French on a Paypal page, but I managed. My typist posted a Pledge Break update on the group, and she hopes that others will also donate to NWS, so that Olivier can devote time to the project.

Ok I see that this is very important for you and may be for many other educators who don’t show up yet here. So I will take the time to update NWS to last OpenSim version with a paid version. I will update this page as I progress. Hopefully, I should have something before the end of march.

via New World Studio