Guardian at the Gate

As previously noted, I have a little stall at the Halloween Festival over in Mieville Shelley.  (The event as a whole is well worth a visit.  Particularly if you are into pumpkin orange, there's a lot of that about.  But I digress.)

Since I'm not around all the time, or anything like as much as I'd prefer to be, I have left the day-to-day running of the place in safe hands.  Or, I thought, in safe hands... those of a gadget of mine, the amazing Hieratic Skull.  This thing sits on the stall, and you can talk to it, and it will respond.

Oh, yes.  It will respond.  Here's an example.

[14:55] Hieratic Skull whispers: Speak, O perplexed one, and hear the wisdom of the Hieratic Skull.
[14:55] Glorf Bulmer: Anybody stopped by yet?
[14:55] Hieratic Skull: Thus the Hieratic Skull imparts the sage counsel of the aeons.
[14:55] Hieratic Skull: The wise one holds no money while the osprey is on the ground.
[14:55] Hieratic Skull: Such is my answer; give heed and comprehend!
[14:56] Glorf Bulmer: Oh, thanks.

So there we are.  It would be a safe pair of hands... if the Hieratic Skull (object description "It's incomprehensible, so it must be oracular!") actually had any hands.

Fantasy Faire - two more sims

When last we left our dim blonde protagonist, she was being impressed by the Hope's Horizon sim, sponsored by Dwarfins, and... well, basically, it's an attempt at Gondor.  And by no means a bad one, given the constraints of a single sim (full of vendor objects) in SL.  Not a bad one by any manner of means at all.

 I had to up my draw distance to "cause of death" levels to get that shot in.  Some of the textures are probably blurry.  Blame my connection.  Don't blame the designers.  This is impressive stuff.

Get past that gateway arch, and you're on the shopping streets and face to face with the Dwarfins main store.

The ground level features spacious boulevards, and shops, and, at a couple of points (like, next to Talevin's, there - that store gets a namecheck because I have tons of its stuff, mostly pillaged from Lucky Chairs and mini-mania boards, but tons of its stuff anyway)  there are stairs!  Which go up!

And up

And up

And, you guessed it, up.

 

Until you get to the top.

 

Which is, like, all Gondor-esque.  Complete with a White Tree, even, and - what?  That red and orange stuff?  It's... err... a JPEG compression artefact.  That's what it must be.  It is definitely not me putting on a bunch of particle poofers that make me burst into flames, and running off that promontory to re-enact the death of Denethor in The Return of the King.  Because that would be silly.

 

Moving on, we come to Medhir Woods, sponsored by Solarium, who, if I remember rightly, did a build last year that was very similar in tone.  Nice designs, peaceful summer-evening sky, all very calm and quiet and sedate.  Which is not necessarily a bad thing.  It just fails to grab me because I am a shallow silly person who wants bam and pizzazz and gosh-wow and spectacle.

So anyway, there's me on the mean streets of Medhir Woods, and there's Solarium's central store, and there's a shot of the streets with the ground fully rezzed (it is my connection's fault and not the designers', let me be quite clear about that).

 

Still, the build does have some nice little touches about it.  Like this seating area behind the arrival point, or the painter's gazebo on the bay.

And then I made my way to the next sim boundary, and saw the sign for NeoVictoria, and the giant airships, and many, many, oh so many cogs!  Something Steampunk is about to happen.  And I figured that if I tried walking across that boundary, something horrible would happen to my viewer, so I refrained.  Until next time!

 

 

Better Than Life

Just got an offline message from one of my groups telling me "The moons of Jupiter are now back in place."

And this, folks, is why I love SL.

Moonlighting?

Are times hard in Caledon?  Are they really so hard that the Guvnah has to get a part-time job in a Buckinghamshire pharmacy, just to make ends meet?

Progress(?)

I'm unlikely to be posting all that much in the near future...

The obvious reason is, I am just getting back into SL and will need to spend time catching up with stuff, and therefore actually doing said stuff rather than talking about it.

But the real reason is, as I look at the evening news and see soaring petrol prices, show trials of dissidents in Moscow, police gunning down miners in South Africa, and the search going on for the Moors Murderers' last victim... the real reason is clearly that somebody has wound the universe's clock back to about 1970, and therefore the Internet has not yet been invented.

If you are reading this, welcome to the temporal paradox.  Goodnight.

Blingons on the starboard bow!

One thing I missed, apparently, at SL9B was the sign at the Bay City exhibit telling its denizenscitizens to beware of the "Steam Menace".  An absurd suggestion!  As if the genteel and urbane inhabitants of Caledon presented any sort of menace to anyone.

But, of course, this means the people of Bay City are bound to be on their guard.  It would be almost impossible, then, to - as a random example - sneak steam grenades into the Bay City Municipal Airport.

Not much sneaking going on, in fact



And, what with the rigorous security checks in place, it'd be almost impossible for a Caledonian agent to infiltrate undetected.

Harmless though that would be - I mean, could anyone see any malign intent in this?

Indeed, you would need to be particularly subtle, sneaky, and generally non-obvious to penetrate the elaborate layers of Bay City security.

Almost undetectable

Yes, the people of Bay City can certainly rest easy in their beds, knowing how vigilantly their municipal authorities protect them from the "Steam Menace"!



Journey from Babel

So, yesterday, things took a turn for the worse.... frame rates back to the old-computer days, everything took forever to load, I was persistently ruthed, teleports kept failing....  "Damn you, SL," I said to myself, "damn you and your unreliable technology... why, it is even making the battery indicator on my laptop drop, now what have LL done to cause that?"

Turns out, in fact, the new laptop actually works a fair bit better if you plug it in.  Ahem.  Never mind.

One of the things I needed to plug it in for was the latest dev version of the official viewer, because I like to keep abreast of the latest developments.  In this case, the latest developments became apparent fairly swiftly, as soon as I started typing, in fact.  Jaggy red lines appeared underneath my typos!  Yes, folks, we have spellchecking.  In both local chat and IMs, yet.

A few tests and fiddles established that, in fact, I have the option of both US and UK English, so I can spell things like "colour" and "theatre" correctly without some post-colonial reproof occurring... and there is a supplementary library of SL-isms, which allows the checker to ignore some common SL words and phrases (though not, apparently, "rezzing").

There are a couple of non-English libraries, too, including Portuguese, which is undoubtedly a boon, given the number of Portuguese and Brazilian visitors I see... and given that they are no better at spelling their language than most English speakers are at ours.

This is, of course, a barrier to communication... because, like a lot of people, I tend to rely on machine translation systems (my French and German are up to snuff, I can get by in Esperanto with luck and a fair wind... but there is little call for Latin in SL).  And machine translators, balky, unreliable and dubiously effective at the best of times, fall utterly to pieces when they hit a word they can't recognize... which includes pretty much every typo that flows from one's unguarded fingers.

I have got to the point, now, where I can read Portuguese, even colloquial and badly spelled Portuguese, with some fluency...  but I'm not yet confident enough to try talking it myself!  So I depend on the translators, and watch my own output like a hawk to make sure they don't choke on any typos or grammatical solecisms.  Being an old-fashioned sort of person, I try to avoid these in any case... but I don't always succeed.  And many Portuguese speakers - the ones I run into, at least - take no more care with their language than the average English speaker.  So... a spellchecker, with non-English options, may be a small step forward in overcoming barriers to understanding.

Noises off

This NWN post made me laugh....

Reminded me of a Victoria Wood skit.  "Our new neighbours are such a nuisance!  They're sex counsellors.  They bang on the bedroom wall if you're not doing it."

Eye, eye!

It's not just me, is it?  That pagoda actually is cross-eyed, isn't it?

(It is, I hasten to add, one of the hint pagodas for Silk Road 3 - I am not giving away the location of one of the actual gift items in a public blog!)

Hitting the (Silk) Road

I have been good, honestly, I have.  I've been winnowing and purging my inventory - not, obviously, to the point of throwing away shoes or anything, but definitely removing duplicates and expired LMs and long-irrelevant notecards and such.  Why, I've been holding it down below 53,000 items for ever such a long time now....

... and all my good intentions have just gone to pot.  The Silk Road 3 Hunt started today.  On with the hunting gear, and off I go to bloat that inventory right back up again.  More than 130 top-notch stores, and mini-hunts and stuff to keep the appetite whetted.  Marketplace certainly hasn't killed this one yet.

(Feel like trying your hand at the hunt?  Go thou to http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mieville%20Dickens/93/60/26 and commence.)

Cheese and Whine

Long-time blogger and resident Botgirl Questi has, according to this NWN article , created a timeline of every controversy ever to afflict SL.

I'm sure it's a fascinating cyber-sociological document.  I'm also sure I can think of few things more depressing!

Just think.  Ms. Questi has assembled 123 incidents, and rising, so far.  And each one was enough to Bring About The Death Of The Grid and End SL As We Know It.  On that basis, SL has more lives than thirteen cats...

An idea bites the dust... or not

I had a thought for something I could do for SL9B - a spoof "Museum of Avatar Prehistory", with faux-archaeological commentary getting everything spectacularly wrong about old video games.

Unfortunately, SL9B's published policies mean, basically, I would have to get written permission from every copyright holder of every image I used - even though it would be totally "fair use" under the most rigorous standards of copyright law.  I really don't have time or energy to jump through all those pointless hoops.

However... I may wind up doing it anyway.  I have prims spare in Steam SkyCity, it's a fun idea, and not doing it for SL9B would mean it didn't have to vanish when the birthday-party sims close down.  And I wouldn't have to do it all in a bit of a rush, too.  So.  This is one I shall add to the background list of Stuff I Mean To Get On With.  More on this later, perhaps.

I love a challenge

But hunting is just getting too easy these days.... so, I'm doing this weekend's Paradise Landing sim hunt with one eye closed, just to give myself a handicap!

(If you're interested, it's the "Terror of the Skies" outfit from Jolbey & Jasper, worn with the big stompy boots I got on the Steam Hunt from Pop Tart & Urban Assault.  Those things take my height up to seven foot six - really, I don't actually need built-up boots!)

LL are so ahead of the curve

I was just reading this article on Cracked.... (I should probably put in a warning about NSFW and "adult language"... wait, I did say it was on Cracked already.)

Network issues due to mishandled demand?  TOS getting in the way of user experience?  Bland status messages that tell you nothing except that the problem is being worked on?  Service crashing because of something someone else did on a different server?  Problem's supposed to be fixed, when it's still going on?  Does any of this sound... vaguely familiar?

I read the whole thing, and all the while a little voice in my head was saying, "Welcome to our world.... sucker."

But then again...

128 meter tall tower?  Compared to Hugo Gernsback, I am just an amateur.

To the accompaniment of Jon and Vangelis...

Don't question I'm not alone,

Somehow I'll find my way home.

Notice that undistinguished plywood cylinder in the middle of the picture?  It turned up in my Lost and Found when I logged on... it is the one that vanished in the middle of editing a few days ago, the one that I went up to 57,000 meters high to look for.  It showed up as being auto-returned due to something Tali had set.  I don't know how she managed that, but I am glad it found its way back at last!


(ETA:  Tali says she saw it somewhere around the 800 meter mark while falling down from skybox level, and flew up to return it manually.  So why did the viewer talk about parcel auto return?  Probably because it is trying to confuse me.)

Don't judge a book by its cover

Before plunging into the technology required to create actual working books, I decided to have a bit of fun.

As you can plainly see from the title, this is a weighty and impossibly worthy tome, giving the impression that I am a serious and sensible person.

But, if we look at it from another angle....

... we see that first impressions are not always correct.

Birth of a Legend

Was amused to see this item on New World Notes about Kingdom of Loathing... I don't play it myself, but it's where my name comes from, as (bad) luck would have it.

What passes for my mind, you see, went blank when I realised I had to make up a name for my Second Life avatar; as it happened, an idiot friend of mine was around at the time, and he suggested... the name of his KoL character.  So that is how I came to be called Glorf.  (My friend has a long and silly explanation of why his character is called "Glorf Pwlg", but I really haven't the strength to get into all that right now, and anyway it is extremely distasteful.)

We had been leafing through the recently published (at the time) reprints of the "Steel Claw" comic strip that day, and when I paged through the last names, I chose one in honour of the creator of the Claw, hack SF writer and editor Ken Bulmer.  And that's how I became the Brady Bunch - wait, I'm not the Brady Bunch.  Pity.  That name would have been almost sensible.

After all, I thought, it didn't really matter, I would just poke about this whole SL thing for a little while, see what it was like, and probably just let it drop when I got bored with it....

Well, that was March 2010, and here I am, still not bored yet.

I'm not sure if there is any moral to this story, except maybe "think about your name, you may be stuck with it for longer than you think", and also "I need to start hanging out with a better class of people".  (He doesn't read this, don't worry.)

Linden Realms getting spicy?

A colleague who had better remain anonymous has described being complimented on (ahem) parts of his anatomy while visiting the Linden Realms game.

I've never been too enamoured of Linden Realms - it feels more like a technology demonstrator (for the teleportation and the temporary HUD attachments) than a serious effort at a game, or an SL environment.  In particular, I've never been too happy about the way it's touted as an introduction to SL.  Because it's not like SL at all.  You can't build in Linden Realms, you can't fly or point-to-point teleport - I, a mad scientist of some small standing in the community, am forced to run away from rampaging rock monsters like some ordinary prole who can't build death rays.  It's an outrage I tell you.

And, above all, there is this disembodied voice sending you on missions.  The thing that just about everybody asks when they get into SL is "So what do you actually do here?"  And finding a suitable (for you) answer to that question is one of the things you just have to do for yourself.  But not in Linden Realms, where you are told what you do in SL; you collect ten crystals, and you run up the mountain and then into the caves....

So.  No building, no flying, and clearly defined mission objectives.  Linden Realms is nothing like the real SL, and it's a mighty poor preparation for the real thing....

... or, at least, it was.  But if it's now full of robots telling people at random that they've got nice bums - ah, yes, that is more like the SL that I recognize.

What's New, Pussycat?

I'd like to see the Mainlander who could get past this.