"Look for what seems out of place ..."

Eschatos is having one of those weeks, and it's frustrating the virtual heck out of him. He really really wants to shoot some machinima to post here, but there's been NO TIME ... and the home computer (assuming his typist can go without sleep) is just not up to making movies. Bummer.

However, Eschatos did get a number of things taken care of in world. Here's a shot of him when he got done with the "biggest" of these projects ...



... do you notice anything different? Why ... didn't there used to be a big honking multi-unit gallery hovering over that plaza?

Yes, it was finally time to ship the old Avatrait Gallery buildings off to storage (as noted in a previous post) and possibly get the island ready for a total revisioning. The fact is, we had a BIG PROJECT come through today, and we have a scant few weeks to make stuff suddenly appear as part of that, so we could very well be handing over the island for a substantial make-over, or we might just do all this stuff up in the air above it.

Speaking of missing buildings ... one of the new Avatrait Island (LINK) buildings suddenly disappeared around new year's and we'd sort of been waiting for it to re-appear ... after several weeks, Eschatos figured that it was time to ring up the builder and ask him if he knew what was up (heh, heh, floating island humor!). As it turned out, he was as mystified as everybody else, but re-installed a copy of it ... just as well we hadn't moved anybody in there yet.

Speaking of moving folks into places ... WHY DON'T YOU GO OVER AND SIGN UP FOR THE NEW AVATRAIT WEB SITE???!!! It's going to be a veritable temple to Second Life art, and already has some very cool stuff, on its way to becoming totally awesome. We want everybody who has an interest in SL, and appreciates art from the virtual world, to come on over and sign up for a free membership ... don't make Eschatos hold his breath, purple is so not his color!

More later ...

A Long Week ...

Eschatos almost didn't manage to get an update in this week. Frankly, Eschatos has been MIA from SL quite a bit due to the grind at the RL Simuality offices, getting ready for several new things, as well as updating some old stuff.

One of the things that Eschatos' typist did was cranking out the HTML "templates" for the new Gallery section over at the new Avatrait site. Right now there's just one artist's stuff available for real-world sales, but another 50 have pages set up and it's just a matter of adding new art in there!

Even the thought of that coding is exhausting, and the prospect of finding a nice comfy chair like this sounds very appealing ...



... there's Eschatos with his "neighbor" (her store and his office are right across the Pattern 9 lagoon from each other) Choo Choo, in her store full of very cool furniture called "One Grid", checking out one of her new (and obviously very comfortable) Flower Chairs!

Eschatos had a disappointment today ... he'd gotten a notice that there was a new Chicago-themed sim, and he scooted right over to check it out. There used to be a couple of very cool Chicago sims (like the one that used to be around the Four Deuces poker hall), but most seem to have died when gambling got kicked out of SL. So, he was excited when he saw the pic on the Landmark that was sent out.



Unfortunately, it turns out that this is a "role play" sim, and you can't even get out of the upper levels of the Sears Tower without signing up to play some game. Eschatos is not a gamer, so he peeked around as much as he could using Ctrl-Alt zooming, and headed back home. Now he's doubly bummed due to this not being open, and it reminding him of the cool places that have disappeared!

Speaking of home, Eschatos' typist should be heading that way as well ... this week has been a long string of 12-hour days at the office, and it's beginning to tell on everybody involved. Eschatos had actually really hoped to have surprised everybody with a machinima post in here this week (well, he sort of wants to do it for another project, but it would work here too!), but there weren't enough hours to even shoot some scenes, let alone cut it, record and synch an audio track, and get it up on the web. Maybe next week!

More later ...

Strange days ...

Eschatos had a very frustrating day. His typist was working from home today, which meant that Eschatos had to deal with rezzing via a Celeron processor rather than the quad-core he gets at the Simuality offices. Eschatos does not like having to manifest through that home system ... he is OK if he stays in one place and doesn't look around too much, but if he has to walk, or fly, or even ctr-alt zoom, it's bad news. Heck, even making/editing things is hard as it takes the better part of a minute just for the edit screen to figure out what's in something!

Fortunately, just about all Eschatos had to do today was go to meetings. Starting off with the regular Friday meeting of the Non-Profit Commons. Now, at that point, Eschatos was already feeling frustrated, and actually timed how long it took for the NPC amphitheater to fully rez once he sat down ... ten minutes! He later had a voice conference with the Avatrait team over in the Simuality conference room, and then an IM conference with one of the track chairs for SL-BaSE ... but at least he was "parked" for both of those.

Eschatos had snapped a couple of pics today, but when he checked them out, there were a lot of "Ruths" and un-rezzed landscaping in them, so didn't feel like sharing. He did, however, take a recent pic of himself over to the ObamIcon site and made this very "Big Brother"-esque image!



Perhaps he could have come up with a cleverer saying, but having things rez was pretty much top-of-mind for Eschatos today! If you were a bunch of un-organized pixels and were being stared at by this poster, wouldn't you try your darnedest to resolve into whatever you were supposed to be? You betcha!

More later ...

New S.L. art site ... Go Sign Up!!!

Oh, dear ... it's another dreary picture of Eschatos standing by a computer monitor trying to express excessive excitement and enthusiasm across the electron stream. But, yes! He is very excited about the new Avatrait Web Site, which has opened its doors this week.



This is the long-awaited (yes, for those paying way too close attention to these scribblings, this is the third "new site" in a year) Avatrait "Second Life Art Site" that we had hoped to have been able to announce in tandem with either the debut of the Avatrait book or the opening of the new Avatrait island over the past few months. However, we wanted to get it right this time, so had to deal with a mountain of technical issues that took way longer to resolve than we had anticipated.

The new Avatrait.com is a special site, dedicated solely to the art of Second Life, that not only features the works of the Avatrait Gallery artists (available to order in real-world framed prints), but will also allow other users to store, show, and even sell their images on-line!

Being the SL-pixel kind of guy he is, Eschatos was an "early adopter" over at the Avatrait site ... and if you're real nice, he may even embarrass himself by posting some of his "snapshots" over there (amid all the awesome art that's on display). But do take a click over to sign up for a free account ... it would make Eschatos very happy to have all his readers on board with Avatrait!

More later ...

Another tease ...

Things have been insanely busy around the Simuality offices trying to get preliminary paperwork together for a HUGE project which will hopefully be coming to fruition in the next week or so ... frankly, Eschatos' typist is likely to be working most of the weekend on this!



Here's a bit of a tease, though, about what's coming up. Yeah, Eschatos is not exactly the "DJ type", but he's running the turntables up in a skybox garage club. He'd been busy shooting SL snapshots of various avs up there today to provide some illustrations for the documents we're working on. Hopefully we'll be able to say something more substantial in the next week!

More later ...

Always busy ...

Some days Eschatos has inexplicable gaps in his schedule ... times when specific things don't need to be done by particular deadlines ... and he looks around for stuff to do. The early parts of today (before he ended up scooting off to an unscheduled meeting with the developers of two multi-sim university builds) were one of these times.



Well, as you can tell from the pic, Eschatos is pretty proud of himself ... ever since the Avatrait Gallery moved to its new, dedicated sim (LINK) the old gallery building had been sitting empty, and looking rather desolate, over on our main island. While he'd put numerous signs up noting the move and offering the new SLURL, folks were still following old links there, and Eschatos would often have to go over and explain that Avatrait was not gone, but just in a new location.



So, Eschatos got out his tool kit (including some previously unused "mega prims" whee!) and set into boxing up the old gallery, and having it ready to send off to storage. There has been some talk about having a significant re-design of the island, and clearing the old Gallery space would be a good start on that. As you can see from the aerial view, these are big boxes ... and Eschatos has been chuckling that he may have given Disney an idea for a new building for their Pop Century Resort!

More later ...

New Year, eh?

Well, Eschatos thinks that he will have some Very Big and Very Good news to report in the next day or so ... which is, of course, a Good Thing! However, at the current point, the details have not filtered down to him, so he's waiting for his "being in the loop" before getting all excited about the second-hand report of a recent phone call.

Aside from all the other stuff that Eschatos has to keep him busy, he's done some "volunteer" work for a friend's group, having previously set up an info center in the same high-rise where he has an apartment. With the end of the year, there were some big changes in that group, and it looks like they might be getting a bit more involved in SL, so Eschatos went "house hunting" for them, looking for a good spot for them to have a "center" ...



... he found this swanky place right over on Broadway Live, with two floors so that they could have their info center and a shop downstairs and hold classes upstairs, and he's feeling quite pleased with himself! If he gets the go-ahead, he'll grab the place for a year, and start moving down the stuff from the high-rise location.

Eschatos has been doing a lot of "beating the bushes" to find some new business opportunities for Simuality, and has come up with a Very Good Idea, which he's hoping to get rolling in the next month or so ... once again, it's nothing he can talk about right at the moment, but another Big Secret Thing that he's dying to let you in on.

Oh, by the way ... do drop in over at the Avatrait Gallery (LINK) and check out the new show by Monroe Snook that just opened over the weekend!

More later ...