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 ...

Ho, ho, ho ...

Eschatos was running around in-world today looking for just the right Xmas tree to serve as a background for a "festive" shot. Yes, that is Eschatos trying to look "festive".



Somebody should have suggested to him that he take off the SL-BaSE convention badge before posing!

Eschatos may or may not be much in circulation the next few days, as his typist is off on a road trip ... which always leaves open the question of internet access. So, if Eschatos doesn't have the chance before the end of the year, he wanted to make sure to wish everybody "Happy Holidays" and remind folks to get in those presentation proposals for SL-BaSE!

As there are a few hours left of shopping frenzy, Eschatos also wanted to suggest that the bestest gift ever for your favorite Second Life avatar would be a copy of AVATRAIT: From Second Life To Florence, and for their RL associates the very cool swag available here and here!

As always, lots of Big Secret Projects in the works ... hopefully Eschatos will have exciting news to report as soon as he resurfaces.

More later ...

Eschatos Speaks!

Well, not in here, of course ... but last night Eschatos was on a panel about "Business in SL" along with Aimee Weber and MadamG Zagato, on a program hosted by Shiger Seattle over at the "Bright Idea Lab" on Canada Post's "Maple Grove" sim (LINK).



As I understand it, there was a "podcast" being recorded, but I can't seem to track down the URL for that, just in case you really wanted to hear Eschatos speak!

Eschatos got to cover Avatrait, SL-BaSE, and a number of things that we have in development (you know, the Big Secret Projects), plus a bit of the history of Simuality. Eschatos was, however, mortified that he neglected to plug the Avatrait book during the panel (although he did bring it up right afterwards), but this was a relatively new experience for him, and he was working without notes!

More later ...

Busy, busy, busy ...

Eschatos has been bad about keeping up with posts here ... and he's very sorry about that. Unfortunately, part of the side effect of "big news" (like the new Avatrait Gallery opening, as noted in his previous post), is lots of work which even keeps his typist out of SL for days at a time!

However, Eschatos came into a few Lindens this afternoon (thanks, Track!) and ran around in-world paying his rent. After finally getting the rental box to rez over by his Maxwell Street pad, Eschatos took a bit of a walk-around, and had this snap taken in the lobby of the theater that had recently appeared on the ground floor of his tenement.



The past few days, Eschatos has been very busy creating real-world "swag" for various Avatrait projects ...



Right now there are just two stores up, one with Avatrait Logo stuff (as pictured) HERE, and one with Avatrait Books stuff HERE. Avatrait chief Track Hax has started a contest among the Gallery Artists to have a design for a promo for the gallery, and that will likely be the next of these "swag shops" going up. We are also planning a rather extensive series of "wearable art", possibly in connection with each month's Gallery shows, and are looking at how closely we can parallel the same items in-world!

Anyway, Eschatos didn't want to let this week slip completely by without checking in ... he was very miffed that he didn't end up with any pictures of his presentation to the Non-Profit Commons folks (about the SL-BaSE program) last Friday, but he really wasn't in much of a position to do any snapshots.

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 ...

We're getting press!

Here's Eschatos working late again at his desk ... he's not really feeling as grumpy as he looks, but he's tired and sure seems like he could use some virtual eyedrops! He's actually pretty excited, as the Metaverse Messenger he's reading there has a story about the SL-BaSE conference (LINK) on the front cover of its latest edition!

This was somewhat unexpected, as (aside from these missives) there's been no official promotion of the conference as yet, as there are still bits and pieces of the "registration backbone" of the web site yet to go live ... so he's been holding off on a lot of press releases and stuff waiting to have all that worked out.



Eschatos has been busy setting up in-world resources too ... aside from the Portland Connection sim "info desk" previously noted, there's now the beginnings of an SL-BaSE communications nexus right on Simuality Island (LINK).

All sorts of interesting and exciting stuff is just on the verge of being "announceable", and we should have at least some of it good-to-go by next week, so don't forget to check in!

More later ...

Finally ...

Yes, there is finally some news that can be let out of the bag! Here is Eschatos checking out the "Portland Connection" sim (LINK). Why, you might ask, would Eschatos be checking out that? Is he off sight-seeing around SL again? Well, no, not really ... he's actually working as Portland is the location of the first edition of the new SL-BaSE conference, the "Second Life Business and Social Expo", to be held June 4-7, 2009! This is a 3-part extravaganza, with a 2-day Business conference, a 2-day Social conference, and a concurrent 4-day Expo of products, innovations, and SL services.



As may have been mentioned previously, Simuality is not just a virtual world developer, but an "incubator" for other projects (such as Avatrait and SlippCat). This is our latest, with a new company called Metaverse Conference Management, and its initial product, SL-BaSE!



And, not only did Eschatos check out the environs there, he actually rented some space in their "downtown" area, and set up the beginnings of an info center for SL-BaSE. Feel free to "ooh!" and "aah!" over the spiffy desk he whipped up after having spent way too much time looking around in-world for one to buy ... if Eschatos keeps getting projects like this, they may make a builder of him yet!

In case you were wondering, this is just one of the many "news" items that we've not been able to tell you about before now ... hopefully we'll have others shaking loose over the next several days.

More later ...