SL9B: The After Party, And The Trolleyman Cometh

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

Linden Labs’ Server Side Heavy Lifting: Less Pink, More Shrink If First Hour Issues Not Addressed

Torley must not have written this LL blog post, he’s ALL about the pinkitude (hey! They remembered they had a blog, stop complaining).

Reports of hardware upgrades and colo consolidation and texture and object caching are good, except that it would seem to be positioning LL for making Second Life easier to access and display on lower-end machines… or the Web.

Their recent acquisition of some kind of shared-narrative company might might be part of it, again aimed more at potential customers in the “mobile and social game ecospheres.”

Less load on our machines is good, but they still need to focus on the first-hour experience. They’re still leaving too much to chance and random interactions with “kind strangers.”

If they can’t retain new people in the first hour, they may have more success by addicting people in lower-tech gameplay first. But I still think that giving better orientation experiences is the biggest obstacle to growth and attracting creatives and explorers (and not just people who “heard there was sex”).

I had an annoying encounter with an extremely new person during the recent SL9B celebrations, who clearly had been “dumped” at the party sim after a too-short orientation. Normally I have LOTS of patience and advice for new people, but this guy was repeatedly bumping people at the Cake stage (including the creator, Mikati Slade). It appeared to me that it was deliberate and not clueless n00bism, as he was mostly colliding incessantly with women, and coming on to them at the same time. I suspected that he was an alt of a more experienced player (but not a real griefer, just in disguise). But if he truly was new, he had no idea that bouncing off of people like a pinball was wrong or irritating, and that probably stems from an incomplete orientation process.

Less pink would be good, though; for some reason my new graphics card and Firestorm don’t play well, and I get a fuchsia-pink screen at log off. This doesn’t happen with other viewers (I currently use several, depending on the circumstance).

Currently, all client viewers are responsible for compositing their own Avatar textures, then sending the results back to the Sim for other viewers to access. This method can lead to slowdowns and errors. The actual calculations for compositing textures are straightforward and not particularly time-consuming. However, in order for the viewer to do the calculations it first has to download a lot of individual assets from the Sim, and must then upload large results back to the Sim. This pushes a lot of bits through the Sim / Viewer connection, which can be slow and unreliable.Depending on client hardware to do the compositing and uploading of the resulting baked textures can introduce erroneous results like way too much pink. In order to handle these errors, a number of retry and fallback mechanisms have been put in place. This adds further load and overhead to the whole system.

via Project Shining to Improve Avatar and Object Strea… – Second Life

Who wants pie? I WANT PIE at the end of the party #SL9B

At the end of an informative talk about the Steamlands at SL9B by Herr Baron Klaus von Wulfenbach, someone mentioned that punch and pie had been promised. And so someone set out a variety of virtual desserts.

Well, I don’t have punch, but here’s some family-recipe pie.

Long story about this pie: it’s strawberry-rhubarb, and in my family it’s called “Damn Sour Pie.” One of my adult cousins requested it be made several years ago for a big family gathering (it was a sad yet happy gathering; a memorial party for an elderly relative that was truly a party). It was his favorite, and he hadn’t had it for many years because nobody in the family remembered how to make it, EXCEPT for a distant female cousin who had come in for the memorial parky.

As he’s a photographer, he had to document the pie first, and this is the result. His brother’s first words as a young child were not “Ma-ma” or “milk” but “I WANT PIE.” The brother was apparently a “late talker” and refused to speak until a pretty advanced age, because he got everything he wanted by pointing and grunting.

This is all about… 50 or 60 years ago now. The story is, he pointed and grunted at the pies after Thanksgiving dinner, and his grandma or aunt had had enough and insisted that if “If you want pie, Patrick, you’ll have to say ‘I want pie’ or you won’t get any.”

Several slices disappeared, claimed by more verbal family members. He pointed and grunted furiously but everyone ignored him, taking their cue from the lady at the head of the table.

Finally, my cousin could stand it no longer. He stood on his chair and bellowed “I WANT PIE.” And he got it – eventually, he even learned to say “please” and “thank you.” He was about… 4 years old if the family story is to be believed.

My photographer cousin happily ate the damn sour pie after taking its picture, but I still have the plate. 😉

Weekly Tweets 2012-06-24

  • @LindaKellie Don't worry about it, more people are absurdly grateful to you for the work you do. #
  • @theguild "Pantsing Vork Scene" is a cover band waiting to be formed. #
  • I am technically "working from home" tomorrow. Suspect I will be "waiting for installers." #checkingSL9Bschedule #
  • Hey! My friend Dano is DJing… At 2am my time. Hmm. May need pencil in nap tomorrow. #checkingSL9Bschedule #
  • Have house phone in one pocket, cell phone in other. I'm the phoneslinger. #waitingforComcast #
  • It's an absurdist play: a woman, a cat, an empty room. #waitingforComcast #
  • Typically, the office furniture arrives first and will have to be moved when the data/cable installer gets here. #waitingforComcast #

Weekly Tweets 2012-06-10

  • Looking forward to #SL9B Had a peek at @m_ethaniel 's cute build. Now I have the song stuck in my head #
  • Who is paying for the dirty tricks robocalls in Wisconsin?? Walker has plausible deniability. #
  • RT @Salon: Dirty tricks in Wisconsin? Voters claim robocalls said they dont need to vote if they signed recall petition http://t.co/g6Nxd8Wp #
  • My #musicforlunchbreak Dog Days Are Over by Florence + The Machine. http://t.co/ydGcibVg #
  • More #musicallunchbreak Fitz And The Dizzyspells by Andrew Bird. http://t.co/CF6my7md #
  • Hey! #Shazam has LyricPlay on some songs. Karaoke anywhere! Singing "Valerie " by Steve Winwood. http://t.co/m286DZWx #
  • Time to get back. Had a long AM break, ate already. Then an early lunch… so I went to the park. My boring RL life! #
  • Well, there's your problem: GOP radio talker fears a Walker recall because "urban voters are bad voters." http://t.co/Pvvovr1h #
  • Bad urban voter! No! No! Never vote while brown! Joe Ashby fears you! #
  • @m_ethaniel I'm sure we could improve the lyrics. "In the good old Second Life, there was never grief or strife…" #newstalgia #
  • I just used #Shazam to tag Rumour Has It by Adele. http://t.co/eNAxLaqR #
  • Cool: Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Pt. 1 by The Flaming Lips. http://t.co/itnV7LZt #

Weekly Tweets 2012-06-03

Where My Head Has Been The Last Few Months

Because I don’t really bother to keep my First Life and Second Life separate, it seemed fair to offer the reason why I haven’t really had my head on straight inworld for a while now.

Leah gets lei’d at Maui Kahului Airport in September, 2007

Leah Sharron Gibbs, nee Green, age 70, beloved wife for 50 years and best friend of Sheldon. Loving mother of David (Virginia), Daniel, Mitchell (Gloria) Gibbs. Cherished grandmother of Melissa, Joshua, Jennifer and Naomi. Dear sister of the late Seymour Green. Devoted daughter of the late Abrasha and Udasha. Fond sister-in-law of Norma and Bill Brown. Loving aunt of many nieces and nephews. Long time teacher at Serena Hills School in Chicago Heights, IL. Member of B’nai Yehuda Beth Sholom. Services Thursday, 11 A M. at B’nai Yehuda Beth Sholom, 1424 183rd Street, Homewood. Interment Shalom.

In lieu of flowers, contributions in her name to the Cancer Support Center, 2028 Elm Road, Homewood, IL 60430 would be appreciated.

Leah was my second mom. Not my backup mom, or my spare mom, but my co-equal mom. When my own mother died several years ago, Leah was there for me. When her cancer recurred a couple of times in the last decade, we (me and my husband David, my Rock) were there for her. This last time, she announced she was done with doctors pushing her around and drugs making her feel worse than the disease did. She lost ground gradually starting at New Year’s, and it was a slow, terrible march to the borderlands of the Undiscovered Country.

This last week was both the fastest, and the slowest, in the history of human life. But for Leah it finally ended when she crossed the border yesterday, and for the rest of us our new, Leah-less life began.

The picture was taken in 2007, when Leah and my father-in-law Shelly joined us in Maui to help me celebrate a big, fat, round birthday. As she hated being photographed, I was overjoyed to find this one in my back-catalog of travel pictures.

Weekly Tweets 2012-05-27

  • @HolocluckHenly Wish I could be there. Play it loud for me. #
  • We're in the "holding our breath" stage, apparently. #
  • We're in the "holding our breath" stage, apparently. #
  • We rode the worlds most depressing elevator yesterday. #
  • Just now I said Yay! (yay) in response to something lame. /yay #SLgesturesinRL #
  • @adrianpaul1 LMAO! May I share this with HIGHLA-L? Its been active lately… #
  • In my original virtual life I was a #HIGHLANDER fan (in fact I created the old fan area there). Good virtual times. #
  • I should take pictures of all the #HIGHLANDER shirts I own. The "Methos & Silas take over the WORLD" one is the best. #pinkyandthebrain #
  • Oops, fan area was the one on AOL, not the really good one on COMPUSERVE. I feel old now. #HIGHLANDER #
  • @tsaijie /me pours warmup #coffee #
  • Have been visiting a particularly sad place the last 2 weeks, watching a shockingly fast decline. #
  • @Queen_UK Protocol demands at least 2 cases. #
  • @hbahimself hugs to you and the gazellings #