Almost like old times ...

Back in the day when we were doing more in-world "development" we had lots of "team meetings", but these has fallen off as more of the company's focus has moved to the out-world aspects. Needless to say, this leaves Eschatos in the lurch a lot, and he gets cranky at being "unrezzed" (hence his recent building outbursts!).

However, yesterday we had the first of an on-going regular Team Meeting for the Avatrait managers, up in the new boardroom on the Avatrait Gallery sim.



Around the table are Avatrait artists/managers Shoshana Epsion, Stephen Venkman, our new CEO Dash Panthar, Eschatos, and the legendary Track Hax.

Eschatos's typist has been spending a lot of 12-hour days cranking code to get the e-commerce parts of the Avatrait web site up and functioning, and this meeting was discussing ways we need to move the Gallery and the Web into closer cooperation.

Thought that this would be a bit of a change of pace over Eschatos' "solitary confinement" over on the old island!

More later ...

There he goes ...

Well, you can't say you weren't warned. Eschatos was needing to work out his "building" muscles, and had a monomaniacal itch to scratch, so he built himself a peristyle suitable for Speer's Germania, all around one end of the island!



Rumor has it that he's contemplating installing search lights, some additional banners and maybe 8m braziers on the top.

Hopefully something more useful will draw his attention next week.

More later ...

So what do you do when there's nothing to do?

OK, that's a totally unfair question, as Eschatos' typist has been racking up a long string of 12-hour days, which leaves Eschatos "unRezzed" most of the time. Admittedly, there isn't very much happening on the island these days, and whatever amusement there was with having the Pattern9 sims next door has gone away.



So, Eschatos has been up to no good ... he'd gotten that groovy "socialist leader" image done a few weeks back, and was trying to think about how to add it into his environmnent ... somehow having it right over his desk was too cliché ... but then he recalled having all those huge prims! So now there's a 32x48m poster of it hanging over the island, all nice and Big Brother-ish!

You can tell Eschatos is pretty proud of himself, and figures that as long as nobody's coming to see him over there, he might as well be the megalomaniac ruler of his little corner of Second Life ... heck, he might even get all Albert Speer over there and start building columns!

More later ...

All alone ...

Well, Eschatos went up on the roof today to take a look around ... things are very quiet on our island, but are tidied up, waiting for the next big (can't talk about it yet) change.



However, we're suddenly all by ourselves. The whole "Pattern9" complex, six sims worth, has gone away. I understand that a couple of those sims got moved elsewhere, and the rest, well ... it looks like they just sank beneath the waves.



We'd been the initial developer on the Club Mannequin and Pattern9 project, but the client decided that he could "do it himself" and hired some in-world day labor to get it set up ... and never ever had any traffic (except for the pitiful camping mall) after we weren't managing things. Pretty sad, actually, as it was a great initial concept.

Eschatos is sad that his buddy ChooChoo ended up disappearing with the rest of that ... her store (full of really cool sculpty prim furniture) did end up moving with the remaining 2 sims, but now they can't just yell across the lagoon at each other!

Not generally one for making "mix tapes", Eschatos is considering piping through the Gilligan's Island theme through the media feed, maybe broken up with and occasional playing of "So Ronery" from Team America.

More later ...

Hi ...

Just a brief note today ...

Eschatos has been very busy managing aspects of the new
Avatrait Web site, which has grown out of the Avatrait Gallery (LINK), which he's visiting in this shot:



One of the things that Eschatos has been doing is keeping track of the sign-ups over there, and he was very impressed at what a "global" community we're building! He wanted to share the country list of the most recent 30 new members:
                    Brazil (2)
                    France (3)
                    Germany (2)
                    Greece
                    Iceland
                    Ireland
                    Italy
                    Japan
                    Mexico
                    New Zealand
                    Peru
                    Portugal (3)
                    UK (2)
                    Uruguay
                    USA (7)
                    Venezuela (2)

Anyway, Eschatos thought it was so cool that Second Life art fans from all over the "real world" were coming together on Avatrait.com to see, share, and discuss images of his pixellated home! He'd be much obliged if you'd come on over and sign up for a free membership there too!

More later ...

"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 ...