Chameleonic Possessions

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

His events are truly mind-blowing.

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!

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 I’ve gone and done it, bought a cheap plot of land.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone