And now I need to widen the template again. I did that once before, but lost the changes I made. Fortunately, someone has clearly explained how to do it. I’ve already saved the background images, need to upload them to the web after widening them.
As it happens, I had to sing a piece called “We’ll Dress The House” at my real-life church this morning, for a Pointy-Hatted Person. And now my virtual home is dressed, or mostly dressed, and ready to receive visitors at the party in just a couple of hours.
There are still a couple of details to work out – such as how exactly does the streaming music work for my DJ (I have a pretty good idea that I just paste a URL in my “parcel music” boxen, as I have 2 adjoining parcels). A friend took a look at the scripts I cobbled together for my “white elephant” gift giver object, which is going to end up looking like a pinata and NOT like a pachyderm at all. And another friend noted that it’s somebody’s birthday today, but scripted cake she gave me is apparently A LOT OF PRIMS and I can’t even rezz it with 40 prims free…
But this morning I managed to throw together a fairly attractive food table with 2 prims, using a freebie sculpty shape and some texture I happened to have that makes it look like inlaid wood. I have some food and drink that I can set out, anyway. And I put away the high-prim, nice quality furniture I picked up somewhere in favor of some extreme low-prim beanbags and things. I even have an eye-popping Kokopelli dance floor and dance ball, also using stuff I either already had, or actually finding a texture on Flickr with Creative Commons licensing and uploading it. So the dance ball I was given as a gift is now transformed and in keeping with the Southwestern theme.
Found myself thinking about buying another cheap parcel of land just to have the prims, but that would increase my monthly tier to $10.00USD, and I have a self-imposed budget that would be busted. Heh, joke: it’s a sort of incentive card I have from Budget Rental Car, and whatever amount I have on it would be used for tier payments. I have $45.00USD on it, which is enough for 9 months’ worth of tier, or more if I follow my friend Pb Recreant’s advice about groups.
UPDATE:
The party was a success!! So fun, and there were lots of people there. So many that I was busy typing welcomes and IMs to people, and not taking pictures, especially when the crazy particle and emitter action was happening. The “random gift pinata” worked, too – my friend Redwood looked over the scripts before hand, because I really didn’t know what I was doing. She thought it would work the way it seemed to when I was testing it, so up it went. With my lack of skill, building an elephant from scratch didn’t happen (although I considered taking apart one of my elephant tinies to see if I could use it as a kind of mannequin). But in reading up on traditional Mexican and Southwestern US Posada celebrations, there were several images of old-style pinatas with pointy cones radiating from a spherical core, something that I COULD in fact build and texture well enough.
It’s over there on the extreme margin of this picture, taken late in the party after about two-thirds of the guests had left. Most stayed for the whole two hours, though, and a few diehards partied on. It’s a good sign when people from different groups enjoy meeting each other, and my friend Bobbo even showed up in his ludicrous pants!! I was so happy.
 |
| From SecondLife |
It’s over there on the extreme margin of this picture, taken late in the party after about two-thirds of the guests had left. Most stayed for the whole two hours, though, and a few diehards partied on. It’s a good sign when people from different groups enjoy meeting each other, and my friend Bobbo even showed up in his ludicrous pants!! I laughed so hard when someone pledged allegiance to his pants, as he’s come a long way, Baby Ruth!. It was epic.
Mary and Joseph were handed on to me by another parishioner of the Second Life Anglican Cathedral, in a pleasant little home ceremony where she dropped the inventory in my profile (as things are done in SL) and then we said a few words about taking Mary and Joseph into our homes.
Rather than try to create a stable and donkey from scratch (no loaner donkey was available from the Donkey Club, strangely enough) I settled for creating a simple wooden shell using a default “old wood” texture, and repurposed a scuplted gear that was part of an artistic panel that I got in the STEAM hunt. It’s much too primmy to put on display, but I’ve been cannibalizing it for parts… the result, after resizing the most star-like of the cogs, was this:
 |
| From SecondLife |
It looked very nice, very quiet, and was unobtrusive.
I was happy when people wandered into the house to snoop around, I left a little joke for them to find in the fireplace, and at least one person got it:
Those are standard prims, with a “bark” surface and texture on some faces, and the plain plywood texture on others. That’s a bog-standard 0.5M box in the back. And yes, it’s an indoor-outdoor fireplace just because you wouldn’t do that in real life.
I’m over the moon that the party was a success, cleanup was a snap, and now I have the fun of sorting through the crazy stuff in my inventory that came from the pinata. And also tonight, I built a kitchen counter and re-used the Nativity shelter… turned it into a wooden bread bowl like the one that used to belong to my grandmother. So that’s one lost thing recreated…
But in the background, in the building you can see through the “window,” the neighbors are having a sex party. Other than that, they seem nice enough and are quiet, which is more than I can say for myself what with all the building and tearing down and moving and deleting and partying that’s been going on here.
Welcome to Mainland home ownership, Lelani!
So I’ll be hosting Mary and Joseph, and the way it will work is that Petronella Piers will hand the figures off to me, and then I will probably be handing them off after my event to another virtual parishioner, Harper Ganesvoort. The house is in the late stages of the third rebuild, and I think I’ll be ready by the 6th to have friends over who can help me warm it up.
All are welcome to come December 6th at 3pm SLT at my home in Tintafel.
There is an old Mexican tradition called Posada in which the young people of the community would dress up as Mary and Joseph and go from house to house in the village. They asked for a room for the night and announced to the people that Jesus was soon to be born. A full scale nativity play was then acted out on Christmas Eve at their church and the stable scene was completed with Mary and Joseph.
This tradition is celebrated nowadays with figures of Mary and Joseph being hosted in different places each night of Advent. When they stay in a place it offers a chance for a party for friends and family of the host. The form this takes varies but may include worship and carols and a telling of the message of Christmas and perhaps food and drink. It’s more important that it’s a time of gathering together than that it is something elaborate.
The building project took a turn for the better today, I hope; although my friend Mistletoe was dubious, I tried using a type of prim called a “sculptie” today to replace a wall or two, and liked the result well enough that I ended up replacing almost everything except the kiva-like circular room and the floors/ceilings.
Sculpties are pretty weird – they are apparently “stitched” toward a center point to pull the edges in different directions. At least, that was the term used on one of my edit/build screens. So I pushed and pulled and cloned one little 0.5 cubic meter “rounded cube” into what you see here.
I’m still learning how to manipulate the shapes and there’s a ton yet more to learn about how to do things more accurately and with less “hands-on” dragging and stretching. But I’m pretty happy with the result, and I’m reaching the point where I need to make sure that everything is linked up and “stored” safely in my inventory. I will probably pull back on some of the extra prims (decorative beams, etc.) if necessary because some of the “STEAM hunt” furniture that I like so much is pretty intense on prims. So far I haven’t had to buy any textures (or learn how to make them and upload them) but the ladders are kind of thrown together anyhow at the moment.
And I still need to get a colorful awning up on the second floor terrace, because the Albuquerque house had a patio awning, and it’s pretty much required (there’s a funny memory associated with it). It’s all to do with memories of home (although some of the memories are actually details from my later childhood in Utah; little things left around the house as if momentarily forgotten).
Invitations for the party should go out by tomorrow, I have some time between RL events. And then I’ll need to figure out how to do the “random gift giver” thing (saw a script somewhere) and get some furniture made or pulled out of inventory.
This is the pueblo project I’m working on; last night I was enjoying building so much, I was up until 2:30am… although I was actually only enjoying it up until about 2:00, when I had a catastrophic fail of some kind. I messed up part of it because I should have knocked off a couple of hours earlier, and had to spend a lot of time re-aligning the perfectly aligned corners I’d been so careful to make, that got ruined when I inadvertently dragged part (but not all) of the building out of alignment.
Sigh.
So then I started trying to make a little luminaria (a paper bag lantern) and fussed over it for more than an hour. I’d just gotten it looking the way I wanted and had placed it up on one of the unfinished walls, where it glowed beautifully, the way I envisioned it. But I had struggled to put the “candle wick” with flame effect script in to the shapes I was using, and apparently there was a problem with the script I used (it was probably an older one that was given away in a tutorial).
I realized I had two candle flames, because I’d tried two different ways (and two different scripts) to get the effect I wanted. The second one was suspended in mid-air below the lantern, which I had discovered when I lifted it up to place on the wall.
Fuss, fuss. I tried to edit it, tried to delete the second script, and then the weirdest thing happened; the “paper bag” suddenly rose, on its own, slowly in the air… turned inky black… and disappeared. It seemed like all the light had been sucked out of my entire parcel.
And then I realized that my whole building – everything colored with the default_blank texture that renders a pure white – had become an angular Black Hole of Suck. When I went to reset the default texture, it was black instead of white.
I had turned it black, just like that old Stones song. And I didn’t even have my luminaria any more, I’ll have to remake it.
Horrified, I logged off and went to bed and tried not to think about what could have happened, but did find something about this texture issue thing. I had also been messing with putting something called “play parcel media” in the luminaria, and I think it may have been related to this error report:
When using the new TEXTURE_… features
TEXTURE_DEFAULT
TEXTURE_PLYWOOD
TEXTURE_TRANSPARENT
TEXTURE_BLANK
everything works fine where you use llSetText and when you type one in it turns a light blue color. All except TEXTURE_MEDIA, it will still work where the object will turn a grayish color like in the picture but the color of the argument in the script is still the plain black color and not the light blue color of the other TEXTURE_… features.
Yep, that was it, although there also may have been something about one of the older scripts breaking builds in the latest version of the Second Life viewer.
Here’s how it looked after the texture got corrected,but before I tinkered, fixed some things, and screwed some other things up for a while:
I kept accidentally moving stuff out of alignment, even though I’d worked carefully to link everything and lay it out on the hidden “grid” that is the basis for everything in Second Life. But there was always one or two that I forgot, and I occasionally shifted the whole mess accidentally.
The method I’m using is kind of like a “stick house” except with virtual adobe – thick walls with a texture and a rough surface. Rather than simply hollowing out boxes of different shapes, oh no, I wanted windows, but the only way to get an opening is with something called “hollow.” And this renders a fairly crude opening – it can be square, round, or triangular, but it’s always centered in the flat section of wall (really, flattened boxes) I’m using. I could hollow out a box, but there would only be a window at the flat end.
Later on it had gotten to this point:
Not that happy with the textures – they don’t render well on the massive wall sections I used.
And here’s the goofy outfit I wore to Science Fiction night at Grizzy’s Cafe, before heading home to mess with it:
Sure, I build wearing whatever I had on. This old thing?
Grizzy’s is ALWAYS a fun place to hang out and listen to music, dance, or hop around the room as an exuberant Dalek:
That’s Grizzy up in the air; she was using a crazy looping dance animation that had her whizzing around the room like she was on a merry-go-round. Some time, I’ll have to do a “blog dump” and display the ton of photos I’ve taken at various incarnations of Grizzy’s place; it was the first place in Second Life that I went to dance.
My friend Cady Enoch took me there after one of my very first visit’s to Epiphany Anglican Cathedral; I’m so lucky that my first experience was at such a fun, friendly, and welcoming place (and also one that’s nicely designed). If you’re new to Second Life, there’s no better place to start checking out music venues and gathering places. Cady came over yesterday to look at my progress and have a nice long chat – after which we went over to where she’s redesigning the parish house (a community meeting building). It was interesting and pretty humbling to see how her process for setting up a Tudor-style building was laid out on a big builder’s grid. Where there was a floor down upstairs, she had opened opened up a “window” through the floor to the grid below, so she could always visually check her alignments on the interiors.
This was a revelation to me, and my current method for the same seems pretty slack and haphazard, for all I’ve been carefully “snapping to grid” and dragging copies in a straight line. While we were talking, I realized, yet again, that there was a better way to accomplish the rounded-corner “pueblo” style I’m aiming for. Uh oh, need to finish this house before completely starting over from scratch…
But after playing around with it today I found it wouldn’t work, at least not until I learn more about how to torture prims. I’m a bit disappointed that it’s not coming out to be the low-prim masterpiece I’d imagined, but I’ll get there.
|
| From A Former N00b’s Progress |
That’s okay. It’s starting to come together. I have RL commitments tomorrow, and managed to get some chores done today too. So tomorrow I take a break from building… and I hope also a break from lying awake redesigning those damn rounded-over corners. I had some wild dreams last night, complete with a great soundtrack, as if my overloaded brain was dumping shapes and colors and snatches of music into my “dream buffer.” I kept waking up, they were so wacky, noisy, and colorful; not at ALL my normal boring confused dream that starts out one way and turns into something else.
Oh… hell. I just thought of yet another way to redesign this virtual house, for lower prims, from scratch. It’s based on the way I added the rounded “kiva” section on one side, which was really to deal with a problem I had with the way an outside corner looked right next to a working swinging door (no, I don’t have locking scripts in it yet).
This damn virtual house.
Heh, I have to laugh. I’ve spent most of my time in SL changing clothes in a dark little abbey room (or in a dark but somewhat larger room above a medieval tavern).
 |
| From A Former N00b’s Progress |
Yeah, I spent a lot of time OPENING and then deleting boxes, never stopping to wonder at the work that went into making the stuff inside, or the highly creative boxes it came in. And a lot of time going to events with friends and wondering where they got the crazy things they were wearing, or how they made their nightclub/zeppelin/Fortress of Pinkitude
Only now do I get the fascination with making stuff. Even cleaning my RL house today, I was dusting things off (not the greatest or most conscientious housekeeper here) and thinking “hey, that would be fun to try to replicate.” Things like Japanese wooden charm dolls, glass vases, that sort of thing. And I’ve been quite fixated thinking about all the “lost” things I could recreate: stuff that got broken, bits of antique glass that my mom had to sell to help a family member, silver jewelry that she tried to make, and things I regret losing out of neglect, inattention, or the passage of time.
Okay, not going to use the Picasa web album link for images, I don’t like the way they format them. Grr. Picasa’s file structure is so hard to deal with, and when you change an image and save it, it just makes a “backup” copy, so you end up with tons of duplicates. This is a relatively new computer; I”ll have to go through and clear stuff out this winter.
Anyway, here’s where I ended up before we started the big cleaning project in RL:
And this is what I was able to accomplish after dinner.
As with other light effects, the light sources aren’t aligned with the lanterns they’re attached to, drat it, but it looks pretty cool inworld just after sunset. I made the floors lower and raised the ceilings, guess even in a virtual world headroom is important. I’ll figure out the ladders and finish the final tinkering later this week, but this is pretty good progress.
I can’t describe to you the feeling I get when I see a Southwestern house decorated with luminarias. I was a small, a very small child when we lived in Albuquerque and I can barely remember one Christmas there – but I’ll never forget the sighte of all the houses on our street lit up softly with paper bag lanterns, and only blue and white Christmas lights in addition to that. The neighbor kids, the Riveras, came over and there was a Las Posadas party at their house, I think… I was pretty little. Our house was a little boxy thing, one story, with a walled garden out back, and a clothesline and zinnias along the back wall. I was very happy there.
Time now to knock off and go to bed.
Now that I’ve bought my silly little plot of land in an unfashionable corner of Zindra The Unnamed Continent, I’ve futzed around with putting freebie buildings on it, but have already screwed up the “tiki hut” I picked up somewhere. I’m working on building a more elegant islander house, though, so may soon be shopping for textures.
However, I spent too long at it; Today I have a “SLangover” from a poor night’s sleep, which was not entirely due to “new builder’s befuddlement.”
My partner Rock Fall, who’s inactive in SL, greeted me with bad news when I returned with takeout food. His mom’s breast cancer has returned, and the topic is not something I can go into detail on my RL blog, since she’s been known to read it (and ask adorably bewildered questions about the Internets).
I love her very much, and though any cancer diagnosis is bad, this is badder; the cancer is advanced and thought to be agressive. My husband is understandably upset and so is everyone else. And I have this intense need, while online, to re-create a childhood home of mine that I haven’t seen since I was 4 years old.
Why? I saw a similar low-cost, low-prim home on Xstreet, and thought it might be an easier “my first house” than the tiki hut/ bure’ one based on two tapered cylinders with teak floors I have in mind.
So what is it that I think will be so much easier? A simple “adobe” or pueblo styled house, with three levels, with exposed rafters. I think I might be able to do it all pretty easily with standard textures and white “stucco” walls.
Why? Because Christmas is coming, and I need to feel it this year more than most. I’ll make luminarias, and strings of blue Christmas lights, and I’ll build a piñon pine tree, too.
Again, why? Because I lost my own mom several years ago, and I don’t want to lose another one so soon.
I’m building fortifications against sorrow, on a foundation of happy memories from long ago. And I’ll invite friends “over,” and have music, and give them gifts of luminarias and Southwestern pottery. And maybe I’ll make myself the sterling silver squash-blossom necklace I’ve always wanted…
Who knows? Maybe I’ll recreate things that I’ve lost or broken over the years, too. It’s my Second Life, after all.
Now I’ve gone and done it, bought a cheap plot of land.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Taken at Olympic National Park
I’ve been tinkering around with building stuffs and trying to figure out what I’d be interested in making, being, doing in Second Life (rather than continuing the highly scattershot and random existence I currently have) and also I’ve been keeping my eyes and ears open for inspiration.
Well, have a look and listen to this:
This kid is going places – it’s clear from his voice and piano playing that he’s going to be a major talent, maybe even break out of Second Life and into First Life. Yet the video appears at first to be amateurish screen-cap machinima – but watch and wait. It’s one take, no edits as far as I can tell, and after the camera finally finds the performer after following a few awkward dancing Lego men and seated avatars all using the same “sit-low-priority” animation, the camera pulls away and up, up, up. You’ll probably gasp at some point when you realize what locality the Second Life venue mimics – and it’s pretty impressive. At that point, I realized that the machinima director actually got exactly the shot (and feeling) that was needed for the song.
I’ll definitely have to look this Skye Galaxy up on Monday – that’s 8pm for me, so I should be able to catch the show. Maybe see you there?
Monday 10/12
Skye galaxy 6PM – Skye Galaxy Live at Gwampa’s Dance Kamp
If you listen to live music in SL by now you have probably heard the buzz about Skye Galaxy. This young man has a voice that is impressive and a following that is growing by the day. He plays keyboard and guitar which you can sample here. If you can’t make this show, then do yourself a favor and make sure you catch him soon. Go early, Skye is filling sims. In Zeide Kamp. [SLurl teleport at this link]
I can barely rezz a box, but somehow I managed to make a primitive type of step tansu, with a texture I’d gotten from somewhere. I managed to box up stuff I’m not using, and then put those boxes into the tansu steps. I have a lot of clothes and “furniture” and funny party props that just take up space (and then my inventory takes longer to load). And I’m about to have a ton more, because I have about 100 boxes to unpack and sort from the hunt.
I got the idea from one of Torley Linden’s helpful video tutorials, YouTube – How to manage your inventory. In it, he mentioned the simple idea of creating and decorating a gift box and putting stuff in it (or as the running joke on SL has it, “stuffs”).
I had to struggle and fuss to figure out what is and is not possible (why can’t there be folders to organize objects in boxes??) and had to figure out how to put hovertext labels on, but eventually I ended up with something that looks approximately like a step tansu. Yes, yes, sure, sure, I’m coming up on my 2nd year as a Second Life resident. Mock me, I don’t care; it’s the first thing I’ve built completely on my own was my idea. I know there are more advanced ways to do this – I actually HAD a freebie organizer at one time, but couldn’t figure out what to do with it (should have kept the script, oh well). It was a stupid looking heart that I got in a hunt, and I can’t find the shop now to go back and look at other examples.
Yes, I know I could do it in 1 big prim, or in 3, but I didn’t know how to handle the sqaure texture that well, so I stayed with the plain square box. To be usable, the prims have to be unlinked, but they have to be linked to be moved in one piece. I may link them once I’m done putting stuffs in the boxes.
Yes, yes. I’ve been hunting again and have nearly finished the STEAM hunt. Some recent experiences while online seem to be leading me in the direction of adopting a more steampunk-inspired persona, or at least to get out of my comfortable habits (and out more).
I enjoy light role-play and can crack on a bit in Victorian idioms, and the little puffs of steam coming from my hat amuse me no end.
I recently bought a car from the famous Curio Obscura shop and have been teaching myself to drive; this hasn’t been terribly successful but it has been a lot of fun.
Here I am with my little car at the recent Cafe Wellstone Dancing Liberally event, where everyone came with (or as) their favorite guilty pleasures. I should have taken more pictures – my favorite costume spotted was the cute Hershey’s Kiss one.
Actually, I spent quite a lot of time at Curio Obscura. It’s a very entertaining place, especially when the trick posing stands (used to immobilize one’s avatar so clothes and accessories can be tried on and adjusted) turn a person upside-down and dump them in the middle of the floor below.
This is what the shop looks like from outside – when I went there, the link I had takes you straight inside, and there are no windows, so you have no idea of what the structure looks like. But when browsing upstairs, I came on a kind of control panel with lots of knobs and buttons and stuff that looked like organ stops. The seat said “sit here” so I figured it might end up having me play a tune. No, what happens is it forces your perspective so that suddenly you seem to be outside, looking up at the shop, which is revealed as a rather scary self-motive prim-harvesting mechanical crustacean. At least, that’s what I presumed from the look of the big sawblade and pincer. Anyway, the eyes glow and change colors, not sure why the effect shows the eye color in two places.
I’m close to hitting my limit on my Flickr account, and realized that some of my uploads to Blogger seemed to be hitting a free Picasa web album, so today I downloaded Picasa onto the new computer and struggled a bit with figuring out the file structure, organizing pictures taken inworld on the new machine, and so on.
It’s not perfectly easy to use Picasa/Blogger, and I wish my image settings were “sticky” on the web album page, but I’m getting used to it.