Lions and Tigers and BEARS!

Eschatos went off to the SLCN taping of a Metanomics show with Beyers Sellers interviewing the Non-Profit Commons' Glitteractica Cookie yesterday. Beyers is actually going to be out at the Simuality real-world offices later today to check out all the stuff we're working on ... so I figured showing up at his gig in-world was the polite thing to do!



Of course, one of the topics being discussed was Glitteractica's "five minutes of fame" courtesy John Stewart (see my April 10 posting for details), something that Beyers (who is a Cornell University economics professor in meatspace) was thinking could be usefully spun to bring in more "entertainment media" to Second Life. He was specifically thinking of "John Stewart's little brother", Stephen Colbert, and, to this end, suggested a "Bear" theme to the audience. As you can see here, many ursine avatars showed up on cue, and Eschatos did his best with wearing the "home team's" colors!



Frankly, I'm not sure exactly what Beyers was implying ... while offering Colbert a lifelike eagle avatar, his "Truthiness Encylopedia", Wikiality, defines bears as: "soulless, godless, rampaging killing machines ... they are Satans minions and the TRUE symbol of the devil and evil", which is not exactly putting out the welcome mat! Maybe Colbert is a Packers fan.

Anyway, this dove-tails with some news which I am likely going to be announcing next week, so watch this space!

Fascinating ...

The folks over at Clever Zebra have put together a very ambitious program called "vBusiness Expo" which is running 8 hours a day (from 7am to 3pm SLT) for four days, Thursday through Sunday. I attended two presentations yesterday and have been at two today. Last night at the Chicago Metaverse Meetup I spoke with Jeremy Hunsinger (one of the few who braved the rain) who is speaking on the program tomorrow (but I'm likely to be AFK at the time, so will be missing his presentation).



I've been in the meeting/conference business for a long time, and I'm impressed with what C.Z. has put together here, as much of the planning and logistics are the same as doing a "meatspace" conference, just minus the registration, travel, housing, etc. What I've found is very nice is that this allows one to "cherry pick" what presentations one wants to show up for ... like being at a conference but back at my desk for the stuff that I'm not immediately interested in!

Their main auditorium at C.Z. is on the juncture of four Second Life sims, which allows them to have a whole bunch of avatars around at once. If you click through on the pic to the full-size version you can see the light blue lines on the floor which indicates where the sim borders are ... the lay-out allowing them to pretty much have a quarter of the audience on each sim. In the pic here there was streaming media coming in from a real-world location, but the rest of the time they had the audio coming through on the music channel, which I guess is easier to make "seamless" across sim borders.

As you can probably tell, Eschatos (in the lower right corner here with the glowing steam wafting off of his coffee mug) is very envious of putting on such a great show!

More later ...

Whew ...

"Life is change, how it differs from the rocks" and all that, eh? We're in the process of turning the ground floor of what had been (and, I guess still is) the Simuality office over on our main island (LINK) into a SlippCat store, to sort of demo what that would be like once everything is up and running.

What we're initially doing is creating virtualized copies of everything in our Amazon "A-Store" and putting that on shelves. Eschatos and I have spent the better part of the past 3 days creating SL books of all the titles currently in our store ... here's Eschatos surveying all that work once we were finished:



Somebody else is going to be adding the SlippCat coding to these, but they're now all set up on shelves down in the "store" so that it at least looks like we've got some "stock".

Our next project is adding "stuff" to the store, which means another week of deep Amazon immersion. If you don't hear anything from Eschatos for a while, you'll at least know where he is!

More later ...

Media attention ...

Now, being the Minister of Propaganda Director of Communications for Simuality, I should be more excited about this, but I really didn't have anything to do with setting it up (aside from providing some key background info on Virtual Worlds, etc.), this being a project by Avatrait head honcho Track Hax.



We had a reporter and camera crew from the NBC "O&O" here in Chicago in our offices for hours today, shooting stuff about Second Life, and checking out the Avatrait gallery (as well as other live-person interviews). Very cool!

The avatar standing facing out in this shot is the one we did for the reporter lady, and it looks a good deal like her! I'm really looking forward to seeing the coverage, which is due to roll in about a week.

More later ...

More changes ...

Well, things have been hectic around Simuality Island (LINK) since we got back from New York, with getting both SlippCat rolling and setting up the even-more "brand new" project called RetailGenics! Things have been "complicated" as well, as we're still being "griefed" by disgruntled former associates, but that's only marginally slowing down our big re-visioning of our home island, and the major expansion being built around the Club Mannequin (LINK) sim.



This pic is Eschatos checking out one of the cool additions that suddenly appeared down the hill from his in-world office ... a hot speedboat in the Mannequin lagoon! When done, the expanded "fashion district" around the club will be six sims, with a roadway with under-water tunnels, a drag strip, hotels, beaches, surfing, and lots and lots of designer showrooms, featuring both real-world designers' virtualized styles and outlets for in-world designers.

Not much specific to blither about today, but I figured the shot of Eschatos down in the boat was too groovy not to share!

Eschatos goes to a public protest ...

O.K., so "protest" is sort of over-stating it ... this was, however, an organized response by the Non-Profit Commons to Jon Stewart's "Avatar Heros" piece, which aired a couple of days ago on the Daily Show.



This piece was nominally about a Congressional hearing about virtual worlds, and ended up focusing on TechSoup/NPC head Susan Tenby's testimony ... largely due to her adding into her "on the record" introduction that her avatar's name is Glitteractica Cookie (Susan and Glitteractica are shown above).

At this point the story veered off from the Congress and focused on the name, with Stewart claiming that he had to settle for "Glitteractica Cookie2" (a joke that continued into the next segment when Nathan Lane claimed that he was "Gitteractica Cookie3") ... ignoring, of course (as had CSI:NY with "Don Juan Two Three") that Second Life avatar names "don't work like that".



Anyway, here is your 'umble narrator in the teeming throng (and in a cameo shot since none of the crowd shots were particularly flattering of Eschatos) wearing a box on his head with a pic of Jon Stewart, up in the "alternative" NPC auditorium over in the new "aloft" (LINK) island expansion.

A couple of folks were shooting "machinima" of the event, which included SLNN.com's reporter Aldon Huffhines' avatar appearing as a dolphin (much like the Daily Show corespondent in the clip, but without the breasts ... just watch the clip), swimming back and forth in front of the crowd. I anticipate that this will be appearing on YouTube sometime soon, or, perhaps, on The Daily Show!

More later ...

I'm Baaaaaaaack ...

I am mortified that it's been nearly two weeks since I updated here, but things were a total buzzsaw around the office over that time and as 15-hour day rolled into 15-hour day, and the calendar ticked down to departure to New York, there just wasn't the opportunity to get this done.

And, it's not for lack of news. Several times I'd even made a point of grabbing in-world snapshots to post, but never got around to being able to write anything up.

Anyway, here's a virtual version of our booth at the Virtual Worlds conference ... with Eschatos manning the same side that I, your 'umble narrator, did at the Javits Center.



Now, this isn't quite exactly like the booth ... which was bigger, and had tables with schwag piled high (I need to share pics of our goodies ... we did coffee mugs, cool little LCD clocks {"time for SlippCat"}, mousepads {"a whole new cat & mouse game"}, post-it pads, and colorful imprinted pens), along with lots and lots of info kits.

Between the "teaser" SlippCat web site (which, unfortunately, still has the teaser up instead of the "proto site" which will be there later in the week) and our "Gold Sponsorship" of the conference, and our Big Huge Booth (almost everybody else was "pipe and drape"), we certainly achieved the attention that we were looking for at the convention!

Unfortunately while we were out of town, our former Head Builder (who had quit in a major hissy fit a month or so back) decided that she was going to "ruin our show" by attacking our island ... which caused us huge amounts of hassle, but little actual harm as we were doing only a few "live" things. I suspect that this little battle is going to get uglier before it gets settled, but when you start getting noticed, it brings out the trolls!

More later ...