Weekly Tweets 2012-07-22

Posted on by July 22, 2012
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Oh, THIS: Bruce Boxleitner’s Lantern City Might Be Good

Posted on by July 17, 2012
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Link: Bruce Boxleitners Lantern City

This looks intriguing, especially with the audience engagement piece.

Also, it’s in glorious BROWN.

The new Steampunk show Lantern City, from executive producer Bruce Boxleitner, is an exciting foray into fan-inspired and fan-created television. It combines first-rate storytelling, innovative production design, and a rich world that fans will fall in love with. Even though it will blend great science fiction with dynamic storylines, at its heart the show asks two questions: how far would you go to be with the person you love and what lengths would you go to in order to survive?

Lantern City highlights the steampunk genre to create a one-of-a-kind television experience. Other properties have had Steampunk elements, but this is the first mainstream television show to proudly wear the label of Steampunk. Current fans of the subgenre will not be disappointed and it will attract a much wider audience to the long neglected world of Steampunk. The show is unique in that it allows viewers to be involved in the process – a first for any television show.

The typist has a long history of getting her fannish heart broken but her greatest joy in life came via her involvement with fandom, so she’ll pass this along to her DH Rock Fall in the hopes that we’ll have a new favorite show again soon.

So what do we get to see? When do we get to see it? And can we build it inworld or is the “interactive” part more like “buy our Steampunk stuff?”

GO Relay!! Steelhead Salmons Represent!

Posted on by July 16, 2012
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UPDATE PENDING for how this turned out to follow, with pictures20120713-113754.jpg

I haven’t been as active as I should have been for my team’s events, other than attending and donating items via vendors or last week’s awesome auction event.

At the Town Hall meeting Tuesday, the Platinum Award for raising more than $L500,000 sat on the podium. Team Captain Fuzzball Ortega looks forward to getting hitched this weekend (Miss Eugenie Burton, the blushing bride to be, says SQUEE!), and he’ll also be wearing THE HAIR for a lap and a dress too.

I should have made good on offering to help build. My fantasy was that building, creating, and immersing in the role of a shopkeeper would be a good distraction from worries about my MIL’s struggle with cancer. The reality was that I froze up when I was inworld, spending a lot of time listening to music and playing FreeCell.

Even now, RL appointments and gatherings may prevent me from participating in Relay Weekend. I hope not to miss the Luminarias Ceremony Saturday night and maybe walk the track at weird times.

But enough about me.

This is Relay Weekend, when dedicated volunteers celebrate months of effort with wonderful builds and music and events, all to fight a terrible enemy with love, courage, tenacity, and commitment.

GO RELAY. GO RELAY. GO RELAY!! STEELHEAD SALMONS REPRESENT!

It’s time to school up and swim as one.

When visiting the RFL track, make sure you head for the Welcome Center when you first arrive. Here you can obtain the Pedometer and the Walk and Talk attachments by touching the Track Tools sign. These will measure your progress around the track and allow you to socialize while automatically walking around the track.

Link: RFL: 2012 The Relay Weekend is upon us | Living in the Modem World

Weekly Tweets 2012-07-15

Posted on by July 15, 2012
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  • Adult medieval village in #SecondLife Shambles in Hornbeam opens with low cost/low prim shops and homes. http://t.co/Po5gdDTd #
  • Check the #SLurl map out, the $Lenis Gallery is on top of the Sacred Yoni. #ItsAZindraStateOfMind http://t.co/Po5gdDTd #
  • Arrrgh. Tried to buy a nice parcel last night, #SecondLife land purchase #FAIL #
  • Dhughan got all inspired by @torley 's tuTORial last night and thinks he'll get busy making stuffs again. #SL #
  • Actually, I did something fun with a projection light on one of my existing products. So thanks, @torley #
  • The St Nick's parish picnic starts now! Hawaiian shirts, lawn chairs, and a side dish to share… http://t.co/2bTP9BGO #

Firestorm Update-o-Rama and NEW shop news

Posted on by July 13, 2012
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Of course I have to check this out, I’ve been bouncing from one viewer to another recently and had been missing some of Firestorm features because I’d mostly been on Dolphin.

This Firestorm update is HUGE with regard to features, fixes and improvements, and it brings us to 99% feature completeness compared to Phoenix. Almost four months in the making it is easily one of our biggest updates to date. Not only that, but it’s thoroughly quality tested by our revitalized Quality Assurance team using new structured test procedures by more than 100 dedicated beta testers! They’ve been REALLY busy!

via Phoenix Viewer – Home

I’ve just done a clean install and I’m about to head in and see a woman about a parcel.

In the meantime, I’ve dipped a toe in the Firestorm-JIRA pool over something that had been bugging me about my previous version of Firestorm, which may be related to my new graphics card, settings, or finding the proper driver.

So far so good, no problems with the bright pink screen I’d been seeing, which looked like this on my normal, “High to Ultra” settings:

But just now, I crashed when I took a photo… eep! However, that was just the first time, have logged off several times. I’ve been on Ultra with shadows, no pink screen since the clean install/upgrade, still on the same nVidia driver. So, there’s that.

I’d been unable to purchase land for my marketing group dabbling; it may very well be that I’m not calculating the group discount right, I’m short on tier, and although I get the 3 green checkmarks for “OK, you have enough tier if you purchase for group,” it’s failing silently.

UPDATE: Yes, that’s what it was, a silent fail due to lack of tier. So Dhughan tiered up for $5, instead of me tiering up for $7.00 to the next level. So then he went shopping for land for two nights, since we had a lot more wiggle room. The typist did all the grunt work, though.

He missed several golden or nearly perfect opportunities, looked at a lot of ugly cut-lands and horrid primcruft, and then stumbled onto a plot that was roadside in a charming area of Tweddle. It’s the exact size we could get, 1686m. He’s even got his old vendor up, with some odds and ends to dress the place up.

The neighbors are a garish mall on one side, but some wonderful builds across the way. He’ll post more later, but hopes people will drop by for tea on the roof (look for the balloon).

100 Word Stories: Life Is Whacked Sometimes

Posted on by July 9, 2012
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This is my… very first attempt to record a 100 Word Story, but it’s in a good cause. So if you must mock me, remember that.

The reading takes place in Second Life on July 15, but the events in this little story took place in First Life at the end of May. The dialogue is taken from real texts, to and from various family members and friends, over a time period of about 2 weeks toward the end of my mom-in-law’s losing battle with cancer. I didn’t want to fictionalize it too much, but had to compress the “narrative” that emerged after doing some rummaging around in my text message history. This compression was in order to get it to fit the “100 Word Stories” format.

If I can figure it out, I’ll add the audio to this post. Wish me luck.

 

[audio:http://www.lelanicarver.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/LifeIsWhackedSometimes.mp3]

LifeIsWhackedSometimes

“Go in health, and come back in health,” she’d say. Then she got sick every time we traveled… so we stopped traveling.

We all texted updates compulsively that last week:

“Dad took Mom to hospice, but only until they deliver the bed.”

Later, “Dad says he might take her home tomorrow!”

But, “Your dad says she’s not going home. Bed delivery cancelled. Headed down.”

After the funeral: “Stopping off for raincoats.”

First shiva: “Your brother is creeping me out right now.”

Second shiva: “The smoked fish tray arrived. AWESOME. ETA?”

Next week: “I got the job! Life is whacked sometimes.”

Oh, wotthehell. You can hear the cat meowing, and I could have paced it better (pause for effect is good). But it’s a first effort, and it’s in the can, man. I’ve submitted it, it’s done.

And also? My voice is so nnnnnnasal since I moved to the Midwest. Must stop that immedjitly.

Weekly Tweets 2012-07-08

Posted on by July 8, 2012
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  • FINALLY listed something new at #SLMarketplace – a Red, White, and Blue Patriotic Lei for July 4th C/M/nt: http://t.co/isODchkk #
  • The nation mourns, and whistles the theme of "The Andy Griffith Show" sadly. #
  • @m_ethaniel Thanks for the RT. It's a start, anyway, though some of the other stuff on #SLMP is really good. #
  • All the photos from Wednesday's virtual fireworks extravaganza-apocalypse R up at Flickr. will tweak some later http://t.co/EvYno8tp #
  • RT @lizzwinstead And Joe Walsh is made of dumpster juice. #OKImReallyDone #
  • @lizzwinstead Thank you, @RepJoeWalsh is in office because people were "bored" with politics (and pale blue "1% Democrats"). #
  • @lancecorrimal Thank you. I enjoy using the Dolphin Viewer, though I miss the Firestorm lighting popup with the lighting slider… #
  • The Flickr set for Mistletoe Ethaniel's fireworks show is at http://t.co/Kbadn3Vk http://t.co/mS37DTNf #SL #

Antique Square Fireworks Display Ends In Virtual Disaster

Posted on by July 6, 2012
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“No pixels were harmed in the making of this apocalyptic evening of destruction.”

The photos have all been uploaded to Flickr, a longer narrative will have to wait until there’s more time. But it was an awfully good time, what with the fireworks, patriotic music, mayhem, fire, and massive pinballs of destruction.

A good time was had by all, who ended up dancing on the collapsed and burning wreckage (or trapped underneath it and forced to teleport out).

AntiqueMallApocalypse20, originally uploaded by Lelani Carver.

NEW: Patriotic Party Lei on #SLMarketplace (Too Garish, or Just Right For da Big Boom?)

Posted on by July 3, 2012
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It’s about time I actually made something new, photographed it, and listed it at the Marketplace!!

This creative block thing is for the birds. It’s so bad, that when I managed to actually finish something, I fought with 3 different Second Life Viewers to photograph it, wrestled with GIMP templates I haven’t touched in months, and repeatedly wondered “where the hell did I stash(the photos, my templates, my “patriotic” textures, my “builder’s skybox?”).

It’s horrid! It’s bright! Feel free to tone it down. It’s copy, modify, but no transfer.

Thanks to a customer inquiry, I got motivated to make something new in time for the US Independence Day holiday (which is Wednesday, a particularly wimpy day for a holiday).

Owing to the weird way the textures come into view as the camera angle changes, the colors tend to shift from one side all red to one side all blue as you face the wearer. It was totally accidental, but I’ll call it “chameleonic” and not a bug, but a feature.

Now that that little blockage has been blown from the chubes, I’m kind of getting interested in making or purchasing better flower sculpts, because I have many, many pictures of Hawaiian flowers and leaves to draw from for textures. It’s about time I got back to my virtual Hawaiian roots and tried a little traditional lei-making (since I know just a little bit about the real art of leimaking, it’ll be an enjoyable learning process).

Summertime is party time, and luau time too – wear this patriotic lei or give it as a gift to friends.

Colors appear to shift as the camera angle changes from more blue stars to more red strips. It’s certainly eye-catching… even a little garish! But the Fourth of July is all about the big bang boom, right? It’s like wearing bunting around your neck!

via Second Life Marketplace – @LC@ Patriotic Lei for July 4th C/M/nt

SL9B: The After Party, And The Trolleyman Cometh

Posted on by July 2, 2012
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I took some time on the last weekend day of SL9B to go around on my own and experience a few more exhibits. Strangely, I didn’t take pictures, I just… played.

I especially liked the ‘History of Second Life’ exhibit, and spent some time there reading notecards and making “bonk” noises going through. Then I spent a lot of time taking pictures of various stages. Unfortunately, the “mesh” Lake stage photo didn’t get saved properly – forgot to refresh the image. ARGH!

Here’s a small gallery of photos… mostly of stages and friends’ builds.

I ran into my friend Mistletoe one night toward the end of the big party, and batted some ideas around; I have a second parcel (well, Dhughan does) in Steelhead St Helens and I can’t seem to get started on it. So I offered it to her as a sublet after looking at some other possible “new homes” in the Steelhead Nevermoor area. She decided in the end to go condo (heh) in another Lionheart parcel:

Lelani made me an extremely generous offer. In SL– as in RL really– I tend to be very friendly to many indeed anyone who doesn’t outright prove they’re too much of an asshole to deserve it, but I tend to be close with few. Lelani, I count among the few. She’s got a place in Steelhead as does Thaddeus, actually and offered to sublet some of it to me. I thought it over and finally decided against it for a ridiculous reason, but still a valid one: I want to set my own TV and radio changer. Because when I can do that, I really feel like my territory is my own.So I ended up getting a small residential parcel back in Lionheart. I’m taking a different approach this time; instead of rezzing the farmhouse that I used to have before, I’m making multiple skyboxes. A play yard with a treehouse for Petal. A Japanese tea garden for guests. A big home theater where I put my big giant TV. A small wooded grove with a duck pond on the ground. It gives me something new to create, and thus, something to look forward to, instead of something to stress over.

via Packing up, moving on « Mistletoe Ethaniel's Blog

That’ll work well, though it would have been fun to be neighbors again. I do like the idea of having different living and playing spaces in the “overhead.” I’ve done something like that up to now; I’ve consolidated all my Mainland holdings in Pini now (finally dumped the last of my old Tintafel parcels) and I look forward to hanging out more at Cafe Wellstone, which is located below me at the bottom of the bluff.

I should have been inworld a lot more this week, but was still taking a break – kept up via reading blogs and forum posts, but that’s hardly an excuse! We did have some RL stuff to attend to (fun events, at last) and also I had some important (mumble, mumble, rhymes with ‘snapping’ ) to catch up on.

I did start building something, though, in my home grid. It’s a trolley car! I’m thinking of putting in a lunchbox diner on my new mainland plot, which is just across from the Pini station/sidetracks.

It’s just roughed into shape at the moment; I’ll have to relearn some things and also think about the proportions more.

My RL grandfather was a trolleyman in Colorado Springs; when that ended, he went with the latest technology of the day and started a business repainting and refurbishing cars for the well-to-do. But the heyday of the Colorado Springs trolley system is still remembered; it seems that they’re trying to re-create a system there, if they ever get through the wildfires of this summer.

It’s very basic at the moment, just a rough sketch. But it’s taking shape.

Rough draft of trolley with reference image