Pangloss

One of the first things I noticed when returning to Second Life was that some of the mainland parcels around my home had changed hands. They seem to have put a lot of effort into their plots so I’m not complaining but there were uneven land boundaries between us now. It shouldn’t bug me, but it does, so I set about trying to smooth the transition between their land and mine. Smooth wasn’t doing what I hoped it would, so then I tried to flatten my land, but it still didn’t look right. I decided that I needed to raise the whole parcel and then work it down to match but I’m far too impatient for this one square at a time nonsense, so I pushed all the sliders to the max and started to bulldoze. This is when I learned ( confirmed?) that I don’t know what I’m doing.

As I stood there wondering if there is some sort of 911 emergency terraforming group I could call it became obvious that half of my objects and plants were now buried underground. It seemed logical to me that I’d should move them all first, then fix the land. No problem right? Just go to your land window and return all your objects. Brilliant, easy, one click and… oh my damn, what did I just do?

Well, at least I had the foresight to name my blog appropriately. Not that I was ever the most technically savvy of SL users, but over the last 6 months I apparently forgot all that I ever knew and am now truly renoobed. The solution, clearly, was to ignore the whole problem and go exploring. Procrastination, what would I do without you?

My exploring often starts in Flickr and from there to blogs and this was no exception. There are a lot of gorgeous photos out there, many of you got so good while I was gone, but everything is Halloween and fall themed which didn’t match my mood. I stumbled on one of the pinkest of the pink photos I’ve ever seen by Caitlin Tobias which led me to her blog post.

Now this is interesting, Honour wrote a thought provoking post about this place as well.  That’s enough for me, off to Pangloss I went.

I do fiddle with my pictures a bit in postprocessing, but the vast majority of what you are seeing here was done in Second Life. I did experiment with windlights, but Pangloss really is this pink.

I’m using Firestorm lately, although Catznip is still by far the best performing viewer for me, especially in crowded places, but the phototools in Firestorm intrigue me. As you can see, I’m teaching myself about depth of field and focal length.

As a large scale landscape, Pangloss is not just surreal, it’s magical, but I found myself captivated by the tiny details. I want to call them minutia, but that word has negative connotations and these details hidden around Pangloss are far, far from inconsequential. They are what kept me there and taking photographs for hours.

Unfortunate really, I like the word, it feels good in my mouth and deserves a better reputation than it has. If I ever make another roleplay character I’m going to name her Minutia. Although, I do like the play on words of separating a word to make a name, like Mala Justed, or Caris Matic…  See?  This is why I get nothing done.

One of the most striking features you’ll see if you go to Pangloss, well, other than the flying whale, are these turtles. They are suspended high above the pinkness with ladders to climb up to them. Being the clicker that I am, I had to go up there and much to my surprise, there is a couch atop one of the turtles.

Now that’s strange. Why would anyone put a couch on a flying turtle? We established in the past that I haven’t met a couch or chair that I didn’t want to sit on, and this was no exception. It occurred to me as I essentially sat on top of the world and let my camera roam around that this was no accident, no whim of silliness, it was one of those moments of creative genius. This is Second Life, where the more important question really is why wouldn’t you put a couch on a flying turtle.

Maybe that’s what I should do with my parcel. Forget the terraforming, forget that clump of no copy objects stuck together in my lost and found, I’ve got a magic couch to find.

Pangloss http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Banana%20Island/116/107/30

Get Unhinged With Me

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about Second Life, and really the internet in general, is the way people form connections, friendships and communities without ever really knowing the person on the other side.  Every now and again, you can witness the power of this phenomenon when people come together for a cause.  In the past few days a new, and instantly dear to me, cause has come to my attention.  Unhinged, a Fund Raiser for SL Resident and Creator Eku Zhong.

Her struggles started with MS. Then they found thyroid cancer, and through poor treatment it turned into bone cancer. Over the last seven years, literally countless surgeries, radiation therapies, bone replacements and marrow transplants later, the stress of repeated surgeries has left her skull fragile and yet more surgery is needed.

The area where her zygotic arch meets the temporal bone is severely compromised.
Literally there is a risk that her zygotic arch could lift off the temporal arch and push the temporal bone into her brain. Actions as simple as chewing hard food or yawning the wrong way could cause this.

There is hope. Another surgery could correct this issue, but it requires the purchase of a prosthesis to replace the damaged bone. This is where myself and a group of people who love her dearly come in, and you as well should you choose to help out.

From November 15th through December 15th, we will be running a festival in SL- a festival to celebrate Eku’s titanium spirit. The event is called Unhinged. It will be a great big gacha fair with a skull theme, lots of DJs and super fun party time, in honor of this spirited and sweet person who is such an inspiration.

Just reading that story makes you pause and appreciate your own situation for a moment doesn’t it?  It sure had that effect on me.  I know I can be prone to brief lapses of woe-is-me when the stresses of parenting, work, finances, relationships, health and just life in general seem to conspire to test how much you can bear, but the reality is I’ve been through nothing compared to Eku.

I’d like to count Eku as amongst my friends, I think I actually did a few time when drafting this post, but the truth is I’ve never met her.  I don’t mean I haven’t met her in RL, I haven’t met her in SL either.  So why has her situation touched me so much?  I guess it’s because we’re both regular members of the same online forum and have been since I joined it about a year and a half ago.  I can’t count the number of times that Eku’s quick wit and quirky sense of humour have brought a much needed smile to my face.  I’ve laughed aloud, more than once, at the perfectly appropriate and yet entirely random images she manages to find and post regardless of the topic.   Kind words of encouragement, down to earth advice and a heightened sense of compassion regularly pepper her writing.  A few months ago when one conversation revolved around describing how we are different today than we were 5 or 10 years ago, I got a glimpse at some of what was happening with Eku’s health, but I never guessed that the person who has steadily been a source of comfort and joy to the rest of us, was herself suffering to this degree.

I’m touched by the way those closest to her joined to organize this event (and shocked that they convinced her to allow them to) so I’m hoping to lend a hand in whatever way I can.  I can’t create content, I’m no performer or DJ, I’m not independently wealthy, but I have this little blog and so my contribution is to help spread the word.

This will be a gacha event, which I think is a great decision because gatchas are as fun as Eku.  Do you remember when you were a kid, the machines at the end of the check out aisle with bubblegum, decoder rings and baseball cards?  How you’d ask your mom for a quarter to play and hope you got the prize you wanted?  That’s very similar to a gatcha in Second Life.  Let’s say a creator puts shoes in the machine, same shoe in 6 different colors, one of which is rare.  The customer pays the machine and takes their chances, never knowing which color of shoes they might get.  If you wanted that rare color you might play over and over again to get them, might try to collect a whole set, or try to work a trade with someone to swap a color they want for the color you want which is why it works even better when the items in the gatcha are transfer.

Here is the list of the creators who have signed up to provide content for the gatcha machines. The split will be 75% to the fund to raise money for Eku’s prosthetic and medical needs, 25% to the vendor.  If you are a content creator and would like to participate, the link has all the contact information you need.

Not a creator?  No problem, Unhinged is not only a gatcha event, but in honor of Eku’s love of music and general nature, it’s going to start with a 24 hour long party.  If you are a DJ or hostess that would like to participate, the sign up information is here.

Are you a Blogger or Flickerite?  Perfect!  Those are others ways in which you can participate.  Elysium Hynes and Sonya Marmurek have set up a Flickr group and are taking applications for bloggers.  You can read more about it here.

Most of us are not DJ’s, Bloggers or Creators, but there are others ways we can help.  An indiegogo campaign has been started for those who prefer to donate outside of Second Life http://www.indiegogo.com/unhinged-SL

This brings us to the last, but most important group in this event.  The shoppers!  Hang on to those linden dollars because the event doesn’t start until November 15^th, although I’ll try to bring you updates and sneak previews of the items if I get the chance.  In the meantime, have a browse around Eku’s Zhong listing on Marketplace under Culprit and be sure to peek at the incredible Japanese inspired mesh furniture on there.

I’ve participated in community events and fundraisers before, from RFL to SL9B, OneVoice, Stand4Love and Burn2… but this feels different somehow.  This feels personal I guess.  I couldn’t be prouder to be part of a community that comes together like this and above all, a group that takes something this serious and brings only their combined lightness of spirit and quick of wit to create something fun for everyone.  From the skull theme to the name, Unhinged, I think you’re getting an idea about how special Eku and her friends are.

I’ve babbled long enough, join us from Nomber 15 through December 15th for the Unhinged Party and Gatcha Event and let’s get this lady a new jaw bone shall we?

My First Video

One of my favourite things to do in Second Life is dance.  I’m always dancing, and I don’t mean just at a club.  I dance in my house, I dance when I’m sorting inventory, I dance when I’m stalking lucky chairs… everywhere really.  Why stand when you can dance right?

In fact, when I’m having an off day or just want a little silly time in SL I often go hang out at Humanoid Motioncapture Animations.  They have these giant laptops set up each containing a different dance series and each key is a different dance component in that series.  I find my favorite music, skip along the keys dancing my butt off and before I know it everything is right in the world.  One of the coolest things about Humanoid is that they provide videos of the RL dancers they used to capture the animations.  I’ve never seen motion capture being done before, so to me it was pretty amazing.

I stopped over the other day and noticed that they have one of the animations for their new Ally series set to only 1L.  Yes, only 1L.  I couldn’t believe my luck.  I love love the dances from Humanoid but my budget has only allowed me to buy a few so adding another was like winning the lotto.  I was going to get it whether it suited me or not.  Luckily, I hopped on and guess what.  It’s totally me!  My new signature dance.  I just had to show you guys but how do you photograph a dance?  Well, you can’t and so begins my journey into learning video capturing and eventually, I hope, machinima.

I’ll never be one of those people who can say “Oh, I just whipped together a little video”.   Not even a little bit.  That one minute video took me two days to make!  Well, not a whole 48 hours or anything, but I worked on it over the course of two days.  Rather than baffle you with bull and make it sound like I was just born knowing how to do this I thought I’d share the struggles I had and the things I learned on the off chance there is someone else out there like me who would like to try and doesn’t know how.

I started by downloading Xfire because it’s free and I heard it has better recording quality than WeGame.   It looked pretty easy, there is just one thing you can do with it, record, and the command is ScrollLock + V.  I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve been typing for many many years and did not know what or where the Scroll Lock key was.  I finally had to ask someone.  That’s when I learned it’s the wheel on your mouse, you hold it down, that’s scroll lock.  Naturally, my next question was “Why didn’t they call it the mouse wheel?” to which I learned that there is also a Scroll Lock key up by the Print Screen Button.  Oh.  Look at that. So there is.

Now I was ready for sure.  Log into Xfire, Log into SL,  hold down the Scroll Lock and V and nothing happens.  Nothing.  An hour or more of googling and browsing their forums I finally stumbled on this blog post  with some instructions that put me on the right path.  Basically, Xfire does recognize Second Life but doesn’t recognize third party viewers so you have take a copy of the folder with your TPV in it, and in the copy rename the .exe to SecondLife.  Then make sure you log in with that copy!  I learned this the hard way.  Then you have go into the options panel of Xfire and manually set it to find and recognize the new Second Life exe you copied.  It’s all described with pictures in the blog post, far better than I could, so go have a look if you need to know more.

So I finally captured a few videos, just trying to get the hang of it, but I didn’t like that the SL interface was showing up, the header bar and such.  Again, I asked if there was a way to hide this with Xfire but learned that pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 in SL hides your interface.  Did you know this?  I didn’t know this.  I think I’m need to start a “Things I learned today” section in this blog.

I then played around with multiple lightings to get the effect I wanted.  I liked this one as it has that dancing at night feel, but also if you look at the ground there is a shadow of her dancing.  I’ll wait while you go watch it again, I knew wearing my physics layer for this would prove to be a distraction.

Once I had a video clip I liked, the hard part started, as if it hadn’t been trying enough already.  I’m using Windows Movie maker, which also is new to me and though it looks pretty simple it’s trickier than it sounds to edit the clips just right.  In the end, I gave up trying to piece together multiple clips and just stuck with a segment of one.

Then came music.  Trying to find the right piece of music to match the dance, and then chose the one minute of the song that I wanted and set the timing to the video.

At the end of the day, it’s not what I was hoping to create, it’s really just a screen shot clip with music but I’m really proud of myself.  Yes I do realize my alpha peeks out by my hip now and again, but I don’t even mind, I love this dance and these are my happy pants so a little alpha slip isn’t going to hurt anyone.  The video is no masterpiece, but it’s a lot further ahead than I was two days ago and I’m confidant that future attempts will be faster and smoother now that I’ve learned a few basics.

I think I’ll be doing some more experiments with Xfire and MovieMaker to see what I can come up with.  I’ve always been fascinated with machinima, and though I’ll never be an artist in this field, I think some of these tools will come in handy to capture some of the incredible places I visit in Second Life.

If you are looking for a new dance, or just something fun to do one night, stop by HUMANOID Motioncapture Animations and skip along the keys.  I dare you not to smile.

Dance:  Ally 31 only 1L at HUMANOID Motioncapture Animations  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/HUMANOID/124/114/22
Music:  Organismic – Unexpected Sky http://www.ektoplazm.com/free-music/uprising
Mesh Jeans:  Class Act Pants from [Aura]  (also known as my happy pants)
Shirt:  Pinstripe Cropped Top  from Waffle
Shoes:  Orange Mary Janes from Duh!
Tattoos:  Take Flight Makeup and Tattoo hunt gift from Yayo
Necklace and Ring VIP group gift from ::LEO-NT::
Hair:  Rhonda w/Roots – strawberry from >TRUTH<
Skin:  Giulia former Diamond Hunt prize from Al Vulo
Eyes:  Ellis-Lavender from [LeLutka]