Nothing specific ...

Hey, a guy can post just to foist a pic, right? This lovely shot of Eschatos languidly leaning on a lamppost in some louche locale was actually taken over at the Avatrait Gallery (LINK) in part of the new Corbett Howard Unwarranted Exposure exhibt.



The show's promo poster features Corbett in a similar pose in some dark alley somewhere in S.L. ... in the Gallery there's a place with the lamppost and a sufficiently seedy looking background, with the same poseball so that you can snap a pic of your av. The only problem is that I tend to keep my "environmental settings" at Midday, and this really needs to be set for Midnight ... which makes the post's shadow (which does not include the av's shadow - how vampiric!) less noticeable than it is here, and the "pool of light" from the lamp more evident.

Heck, I guess I screwed up ... but let this be a tip for you when you pop over there to take one of your av! By the way, instead of a freebie pic this show, Corbett's done a parasol and accompanying pose that you can take with you ... such a deal ... Unwarranted Exposure will be up for the rest of the month, so don't dawdle if you want to check it out.

More later ...

Wow ...

Well, I'm impressed. The Boss had decided that we should do donation pylons in-world to help raise money for the relief efforts in Burma ... and last Friday we whipped up these little units and started distributing them where we could ... here's one sitting outside the Simuality Island Welcome Center (LINK).



They can be "taken" and rezzed in other places (we were having a heck of a time with the script for that), so this should be spreading around in-world.

The folks at PR NewsWire had a very generous offer of putting out complimentary releases about relief efforts for the Myanmar Cyclone survivors, so I wrote up something and shot it out to them ... and I've just been blown away with the pick-up ... we've been in Forbes.com, FoxBusiness.com, Yahoo news, and dozens of others!

If you're wandering around Second Life, drop by Simuality and make a donation, or "take" one of the kiosks (right-click, more > take copy) and set it up in your corner of the metaverse to help out!

More later ...

Video ...

Eschatos spent much of the morning over at the Welcome Center on Simuality Island (LINK), working on putting in a display featuring our recent coverage by NBC5 Chicago (a story called "The New Reality" by reporter Kim Vatis which aired this past Monday). You may recall my having blogged about the TV crew being up here (and our creating an Avatar for her) a couple of weeks back. I was slightly miffed that they used maybe 15 seconds of the 45 minutes of so of raw machinima footage that I'd shot then, but I guess they decided to shoot their own scenes.

Eschatos set up a big screen TV that cycles through various screen caps that I'd snagged from the video, and then added a sign with link coding which goes out to a page where we have a copy of the video available.


I almost experimented with the "upload video" function on this blog, but figured I'd leave that for another day. One of our "still developing" plans is to be shooting a lot more machinima of events, etc., in-world and foisting them on the unsuspecting world via YouTube and these other outlets.

Gotta go write a press release about our next gallery opening at Avatrait ... more later!

New toys ...

So, I got caught up with the Second Life Blog this morning and downloaded the new Release Candidate that they were touting ... this has a fun feature that, when activated, shows the "rendering costs" of different avatars. This appears as a number, in green, yellow, or red, hovering over the head of the avatar. Eschatos here barely registers, with a score of 190 with his coffee cup (and its animation and steam effect), and a mere 142 without ... I was looking around Simuality Island (LINK) and saw other folks at 9180 (red) and 829 (yellow), so I guess I'm "treading lightly" on the servers!



This, by the way, is Eschatos in his current digs in the new offices on the second floor of the Simuality office ... the ground floor having being turned into a SlippCat demo store. So far we've been having to find our own furniture (we lost all our old desks, chairs, computers, etc. in the island re-boot), but I'm guessing that we'll eventually have a standardized look again ... but this stuff will do for now.

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 ...