UPDATE: Apologies to the person who tried to buy an item from a non-working vendor. New vendor goes live tonight. /me whacks head with stick
Dhughan here, finally getting “on the stick” as it were. Rather embarassed to admit how little headway I’ve made with my products since this pompous and self-important post. However, the new shop in Tweddle is open. my parkland in Steelhead St Helens is soon to sport a wee cabin, and I’ve finally begun making new items and improving older ones.
There is now a free AO (men’s and women’s) in a box at the Tweddle shop (the landmark is in my Picks).
Must add it as a freebie to my Marketplace listing and also add it to existing walking stick listings. The gent’s version has been added to the Swirled Steampunk and Ivory-Headed walking sticks listings.
On my list of Things To Be Done:
Must retire the older Jade stick (unscripted) and replace it with a better jade one now in development. Perhaps put it out as a freebie in the AO box after updating it with the cane-control script, people could try as a demo.
Must continue to invite customers to my Further West Updates Group, in spite of near-fatal Shy Person Syndrome.
Must test another good cane AO and see if the cane configuration card can be adapted to work well with it.
Must photograph self in various poses with my free AO along with the infinitely more dapper poses offered by Posture is Everything’s GJ Cane and Gentle Jim AOs. And then add those to my cane listings.
Must make some more lamps, photograph and list them.
Must finish the new vendor(s) tonight, lost another sale due to my incompetence setting up that gorram 1-prim vendor currently in the shop.
Must gift all past purchasers of sticks with the AO. STEAM hunters got an older version, pity I was too shy to put out a spammy group inviter. Must photograph the Shanghai stick and list it on Marketplace. Current update group members will also find the Shanghai stick, which was the most STEAM 5 gift, in the group notices (BLATANT CLUE, SEARCH FOR THE GROUP AND JOIN, my minions).
Floating Earth Goddess Fountain with scripted sounds on/off and volume controls.You can reduce the sounds to 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 volume as well as mute by touching the fountain. Make a copy, take it apart, and learn how it works!If you have questions on this product, please IM me, I receive them all via email.
It’s good to be building again and not stressing out about “what I should be doing.” It’s especially relaxing to fool around with these fountains because the sound they make is pretty soothing.
Actually, this new fountain is an older student project that I started playing around with the other night. I’d always liked it, because it came with quite a nice sounds/volume menu that I’ve used before. It just was never quite ready for prime time. I added some nice “ruined Asian temple” textures I got in a hunt, and spent a happy few hours fooling with a water animation tutorial I picked up at Builder’s Brewery by Auryn Beorn. I’ve taken a lot of her classes, and her paid tuts are well worth the time and $L to hunt down.
So after getting it mostly done last night, I started another wall fountain that is based on what looks like a Marc Chagall window. I’ve got other stained glass textures that are pretty nice, and hope to do something with those and with the projection lighting trick soon.
Additionally the Creators’ Village at Builder’s Brewery has some really, really nice little shops with good quality builders’ kits. There truly are a bunch of creative types there, and I had fun hanging out there in an animation store with my friend Mistletoe Ethaniel. She’s been getting into machinimas and cute little movie trailers lately, look for more from her soon.
Last night I also updated an older product to add projection lighting. Torley describes how to do it in his most recent video:
It’s a colorful wall fountain – I should redo the product image for it, but it looks like this now with the projection lighting on. It’s just a flat panel, hanging on my photo background at the moment.
Dhughan has been having fun with this trick too, and will shortly be doing a lot more of his One Prim Lamps. He’s got a few items out for sale in his outlet shop, and is in the midst of setting up vendors. So am I, actually.
Part of what stopped me in my tracks as far as motivation or productivity for making stuffs is the difficulty I had setting up a “simple” one prim vendor. It looked great, and used texture offsets to show the products, with a big display area.
The vendor script works really well, and the first part of setting it up is pretty magical – it automatically resizes and sets up a path-cut box with 2 faces. But the hard part is having to edit the notecard the scriptor provides – lots of editing, lots of places to make a mistake, and you have to use UUIDs instead of, say, a simple list in an array. It detects inventory changes, but it’s really complex editing it. Another product I have reads a simple list in a notecard, but this vendor… what a headache. What can I say? It was free.
I had set up 1 vendor for myself, and, er, Dhughan set up 1 vendor. Editing the image files to get up to 9 product images placed just right was a huge pain… and then the scriptor released a required major update, completely re-writing the scripts and notecards. AUGH! Not only had the image offsets changed, but there was no documentation as to how big to make the images – he provided a template that wouldn’t open in GIMP, either. So it could be used as a background image with a grid, but it wasn’t all that helpful.
So a third vendor sat in my workshop for literally MONTHS, plopped in the middle of my workspace in an accusatory manner. It had objects in it, and I had gotten it mostly set up. But then I started struggling with the texture template. And then RL issues came to the fore, and the better part of a year went by.
Then Mistletoe recommended the free Hippovend system, and I set up a vendor fairly easily with that over a couple of days. But I was still all “meh” on vendors.
But something I saw in my GReader/Feeddler newsfeed for SL had me looking at Caspervend’s product – I’ve set up Dhughan’s vendor up (and will have more to set up) and I’ve set a couple up for myself. It’s pretty cool how you update: you dump an object in a “magic box” like thing, then go to a website and fill some stuff in, similar to Hippovend. But if you set a “default” profile with a marketing image, ALL your vendors instantly show that image. Updates are a snap. I’ll be putting more of them out and eventually will dump the one-prim ones entirely. Caspervend announced recently that they’ll accept affiliate vendors with products in them at their showroom. Sheesh, I gotta do that with my best 2 or 3 items.
Meanwhile, I’ve got stuffs in my inventory that are starting to look pretty marketable, that I’d just made for myself (hats and whatnot).
And for the “Dry Goods” side of things, I’ll be putting together a little medicine cabinet, full of bottles and boxes of products from the “1880s-ish Gaslight Steampunk” era that I’ve collected. The medicine cabinet will be based off of a real example that’s now owned by a family member. That’ll be something to get started on – time to actually make some stuffs that frontier Steampunks and werewolves and moon elves would need in Steelhead, I guess. Some will be in vendors, some will be displayed as “staging.”
Dhughan’s shop is coming together – he’ll have more to say about that later, but here’s a peek.
He’s actually got people in his update group (Further West Updates Group, derp!) AND a group gift! I’ll have to… get on the stick. Heh.
Final rambling notes: I literally dropped in on tonight’s music and dancing at Cafe Wellstone after my friend Bookemjackson Streeter IMed me to ask if I still made hats, as she wears the one I gave her all the time. Next thing I know, everyone wanted landmarks, group invites, and all that… I’m not that skilled a builder, but it sure was motivating to be complimented for my stuffs.
So… I guess I’ll get some stuffs done this week. I’m even considering signing up for STEAM 7 again, after skipping the last one. It seems as if I’m… back after just marking time listening to music, playing Free Cell, and worrying about family.
Vacation in early August, so whatever doesn’t get done by then will get done after the 20th.
Here we go, then: CREATE, damn you Lela! You’re not that half-assed a builder!
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?”
UPDATE PENDING for how this turned out to follow, with pictures
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.
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!
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).
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.
“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.
“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).
