Waiting for "Black Friday" ...

Ah, there's Eschatos, always the eager one ... sitting in the Avatrait Book Store over in "Book Island Publishing Village" (LINK), waiting for the turkey-besotted crowds to surge over the parapets with lust for literature (or at least picture books) gleaming in their eyes!



Obviously, he's a bit ahead of things, as the traffic by the store has been less than dramatic (and yes, he does look bored). However, he wanted me to specifically mention that if you're looking for that special gift for the Avatar in your life (first or Second), a copy of AVATRAIT: From Second Life^® to Florence could hardly be beat!

This full-color hardcover "coffee table" book features the works of 47 of the Avatrait Gallery artists, and has a Foreword by S.L. creator Philip Linden ... and is available for direct order from http://avatraitbooks.com now!

Speaking of the Avatrait Gallery artists ... here's a cloud-occluded sneak peek at the new Avatrait Island:



The Grand Opening of the the new sim will be on Saturday, 11/29, at 1pm SLT ... featuring a gallery show of all the artists from the book, and a party featuring music, fun, and fireworks. The new place (while still "under construction" to a certain extent) is quite impressive, so do drop by on Saturday!

More later ...

Another day, another in-world meeting ...

Eschatos has been very active in-world this week, and feels like he's done little else than sit in meetings, classes, and get-togethers! As wonderful as Second Life is for being able to do this sort of thing, some days there is SO MUCH going on that Eschatos wishes he could split his pixels and be two places (or more) at once!

This morning at the Non-Profit Commons meeting Eschatos had a last-minute chance to give a bit of a shout-out about the SL-BaSE conference that Simuality is doing (through the Metaverse Conference Management division) next June out in Portland, OR. Initially there'd been discussion of having a full 15 minute slot, but it turned out that there was just time today for Eschatos to rez and arrange his boards (seen here after I'd been up) and make a bit of a pitch. The "full presentation" has been re-scheduled, however for two weeks hence, and he will then hopefully have some more Track Chairs with him (Coughran Mayo, our Non-Profit track chair, had a conflict today and couldn't make it).




One fascinating thing at today's meeting was a demonstration of Virtual Guidedogs, a sculpted, scripted, assistant for blind users of Second Life! Needless to say, in a largely visual and text-based environment, there are huge challenges for the sight-impaired. These guidedogs provide info about things in the virtual environment in tandem with text readers that turn typed conversation into audio. I guess there are some significant problems still (like logging on ... the form is not audio-friendly) but this was a pretty amazing bit of virtualization!

Just in case you might have had some trouble picking Eschatos and the Virtual Guidedog out of the NPC overhead shot (had to get those SL-BaSE boards in frame, y'know), we've added handy arrows from insets of other pics taken at the meeting ... although I suspect that it might have just been a ploy by Eschatos to get a bigger image of him in the blog!

More later ...

A very proper gander ...

Yes, there is a long joke involved with the title, deal with it. Eschatos and I are very confused, however, as we thought we'd updated with the below picture on Friday, but here it is Monday and it's not there! We even remember somewhat how the title of that went, something like "A peek for all you lookie-loos!" ... how odd that it didn't "take".



Anyway, here's a picture of Eschatos, over by the soon-to-be-unveiled new Avatrait Gallery, eyeballing the "propaganda" that he set out right by the main entrance. That's a stack of in-world postcards that parallel the real-world postcards (promoting AVATRAIT: From Second Life To Florence, natch) that we're having printed pretty much as I type.

As you can sort of see, there has been some substantial progress in the Gallery sim, with three and a half new buildings (one building really feels more like being inside a sculpture) in arcane juxtapositions requiring nearly non-Euclidean geometries to explain them (we have Avatrait Board members designing the new sim, and I'm convinced that one or more of them are graduates of Miskatonic U.!). We're due for a Grand Opening a week from Saturday (yes, you will be hearing more about it in this space ... what, are ya new?) and Eschatos figured it was better to be early with the propaganda than late!

We're still scratching our heads about this not going up on Friday, but here it is ... a peek at the gallery, and yet another reminder to wander over to http://avatraitbooks.com to take a peek at (and order) the book!

More later ...

No, it's not déjà vu ...

Yes, the last three pics in here have looked remarkably similar! However, most of the recent "news" has dealt with stuff on the web ... so Eschatos has been doing nice shots with computer monitors in various locations.

Eschatos has looked approvingly on images of the http://avatrait.com site (which keeps getting better and better ... with a new update just today!), and the new http://avatraitbooks.com, which now features ordering directly through us (which should speed things up as opposed to everybody ordering the book having to wait 2-4 weeks!). Well, now he's sitting having some quality time with the Second Life web site! The book, AVATRAIT: From Second Life To Florence, just made it onto the "Recommendations" page, in (naturally enough) the "books" section.



So, it's not that Eschatos has done nothing but surf the web over the past few weeks, but most of the "news" has been coming from that front ... and, don't be fooled by Eschatos' dour expression here, he's understandably thrilled that Linden Lab has put us up on the site ... and he's fervently hoping that all and sundry will head on over to order a copy!

Oh, yeah ... hopefully Eschatos will have some Big News (with more interesting pictures) to report about the new Avatrait Gallery in just a few days!

More later ...

Oops ...

My, how time flies ... I can't believe that it's been TWO WEEKS since we last checked in on Eschatos! Frankly, in the wake of all the news around the Florence trip, there's been very little to report. Somehow something like "Eschatos went here, here, here, and here to pay his in-world rent" doesn't have the post-worthy ring to it that we're looking for in this space!

There has been one reasonably significant change to update y'all on ... we got blind-sided by Lulu (the print-on-demand place that we're using to do the Avatrait book), first with a fairly substantial price increase on the printing (after we got locked in to the $49.95 cover price), and then discovering that they only print the hard-cover books in the USA, which has been resulting in insane shipping charges being quoted to our European artists and friends ("insane" as in €71 ... well over $100! ... to ship book that weighs under two pounds).



Obviously, "that would NOT do!" ... and may have seriously cut into the potential orders that we would have had from the Festival della Creativita. So, we have opted to pull all orders in-house, and are hopefully setting up a system where we order the number of books that we guess we'll need over the next month, and have them on hand to send out, and then re-order (due to this being a print-on-demand, large-format, hard-cover, full-color book, the printing costs are very high, and we have a razor-thin margin) as the money comes in.

So, please go to http://avatraitbooks.com, and take a look ... there is now a little green "ORDER" button which takes you to a page with twenty payment options (19 via PayPal, and one via Lindens) in everything from Euros to Zlotys to Yen! Also, once "the system" gets rolling, it will be MUCH faster, as we'll be doing the 2-3 weeks of waiting up front, and will be able to just shoot the books out as you order them!

Everybody with an interest in Second Life, and Virtual World art should get a copy! It really IS a "landmark" in the field of "Digital Impressionism". You can also visit our in-world storefront (LINK) for previews of the art.

Oh, yeah ... one more thing. The Avatrait Gallery is temporarily closed at the moment allowing us to make a "clean move" between the long-running site on Simuality Island to its new home on Avatrait Island ... look for the Grand Opening announcement soon!

More later ...