Category: Uncategorized

From A Former N00b’s Progress

Okay, I didn’t actually make anything marketable today, but I did:

1. attend a reading in Steelhead City Library of E. M. Forster’s novella, “The Machine Stops,” read by Miss Riven Homewood. It was an enjoyable way to pass an hour or so.
2. decide to delete the crap freebie house I had on the extra parcel, and rezzed the better freebie house (the one with rezzing instructions in French, alas). Once it stopped having some kind of Gallic tantrum, and I unburied the rezz box from 3 meters down so I could move it again, it was fine. It’ll probably end up being shop space.
3. Checked out a neighbor’s new shop; he has a bad case of the texture flickers.
4. Used a “sit-rez-gadget” I picked up at Builder’s Brewery to fix the sit poses on the corner window seat I made. Later on this week, I’ll do the same for the bench/sofa thing I made.
5. On a whim, while changing clothes, I got the window controller gadget working for upstairs. As the “window” is one hollow, path cut prim, it’s overkill, but what the hey.
6. Fixed the horrible case of texture flickers that my house picked up from the window prim. Ooops.
7. Attended the first Sunday Virtually Speaking event
8. Thought about fooling with some of the jewelry stuff, ended up reading about LinkRez some more.
9. Had spent yesterday in Steelhead thinking about renting a cheap shop space, had to get lined up with the right group tag for that today.
10. Went to Grizzy’s for a while, dressed up as a steampunk tart. Then went to an event that was announced in the Oxbridge Caledon channel, also a steampunk theme. Nice people, nice place – it was the Prop Spinners Pub.
11. Commiserated with a clothing designer who thought she’d lost ALL her inventory, but fortunately it was a temporary glitch.
12. Ended up at a friend’s “7 Seas Fishing” event where there was music and fishing. Interesting group, fishers. They don’t talk much, mostly they just fish. It was some kind of contest.
13. Decided it was high time that I cleaned out the crappy dances from my wearable dance gadget – I do a lot of dancing inworld, and frankly my best dances weren’t actually loaded in the thing. So I opened up all three dance gadget things and copied the best dances from all to the one wearable. Then I’ll need to put the good dances in the big party ball for when I have another event.
14. Updated my profile picture.
15. Tried to list all the productive stuff I did for this blog post.

Actually, yesterday I was more productive in my alt persona; I found a possible location for a small shop that I MIGHT rent, although I might just use the extra parcel. In the person of my alt, though, the shop rental would be part of the mild roleplay I have in mind for him; he’s a bit of a lost soul who had to leave everything he had behind in a hurry because he ended up on the wrong side of a range war. Also, I built an easel from scratch, and turned one of my real-life photos into an old-fashioned sepia print, which is now on display in my alt’s dorm room… which was really hard to find again, actually.

I have a feeling that if I do make stuff to sell, I’ll actually get it done with the alt, because I also found a nice sandbox to use for building, which also offers free textures.

Do need to take a look at the necklace-making script and see if I can make something with it, inspired by a RL piece I saw last week.

Time now to log my brain off and go to sleep… good night!

Bobbo's dog Polly sacked out on couch…

Heading to Newfie New Year party at Bobbo Lundquist's RL house

I don't know why the woman in the foreground was grimacing at the Odd
Ball a week ago. Her face was frozen in this expression. Is she
offering to perform a naughty service, or just smiling?

I'm the giant blue space neko floating behind her, an avatar I call
Cerulean.

Tuna Oddball dips his partner amidst an alien invasion force at a
recent Odd Ball.

His events are truly mind-blowing.

I learned in Textures class that I need to optimize this image better
to reduce lag. The original is huge and thus a smaller image may work.

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!