Happy holidays

Have a great holiday season!
I'm still around, just haven't been blogging much.

Permissions hell may soon become a thing of the past.

For those of you who are content creators, there's a shiny new feature coming our way! Bulk permissions setting!

A laugh

You have two cows... done SL style.

Three tiers of sim

Now in three flavors...

Three tiers of product, with new restrictions on number of avatars present. The base model (opensim) has 750 prims ,allows 10 avatars, and costs what the opensim used to cost. The midrange model (Homestead) allows 3750 prims and 20 avatars, and will cost $95USD a month moving to what was proposed each month starting in July. Education discounts are back for homesteads but not opensims. Everyone's getting less, but *shrug* what we had was generating horrible performance problems.

If you have an opensim and want it to not be converted to a homestead sim, follow the link to the knowledge base article. You've got some work to do.

Making Tiny poses

Why haven't I seen this before? *cries*

Making A Tiny Pose in QAvimator

Cartoon Livin'

Saw this while cruising the mainland and had to grin.

Change. It happens.

I could talk about the openspace sims price change, but eh. There's plenty of that already.

LSL and HTTP Server are on the beta grid

The first public tests of the new http server functionality are on the beta grid! Info here.

and look at this hidden surprise...
changed() event, new flag CHANGED_REGION_RESTART

Text to Speech web app

Nifty text-to-speech web demo. Generates wav files too.

huzzah!

That big project I've been working on that I can't talk about? Done today.
*shoots off fireworks*

SLExchange => XStreet SL

Heads up if you're a SLExchange merchant. They're changing their name, and there will be updates.

Beta grid woes

So I went onto the beta grid to check something. Used -grid aditi as part of my command line. Later, when I went to go on the main grid, I was put on the beta grid instead. No clear way to change it.

I just added -grid agni to my command line to get back to the main grid. But there's a secret grid chooser available. Press Ctrl-Shift-G on the login screen, and select agni.

SL and Lag guide

Massively has a good article about things you can do if you're experiencing lag when running SL.

More skin PSD files to tinker with!

Sezmra Svarog is releasing a set of free skin .psd files and starting up a website offering them and future tutorials. (Spotted from Vint Falken's blog.)

A different sort of vacation...

Anybody ever tell you to go to hell?





Make sure your speakers are on. Victims run wildly, the demons smash and stomp, and flying rocks come crashing from the sky. The sim is damage enabled, so be alert.

Frustration again.

Half my attempts to teleport today failed. Long periods where I couldn't log in, or where I couldn't teleport anywhere. Long rezzing delays, and objects that kept moving back after I edited them.

On a more cheerful note, Torley says there's a new feature coming that lets you turn off other peoples' facelights.

Something for cooler weather

I finally went back and worked on that outfit that I'd given up on in frustration. Some things you just can't do well with prims and the way the avatar animates the shoulders. I think I'm going to do a second version of this before I box it up. If you want a copy of the hat, IM me before I get around to boxing it and I'll give you one.

I picked up a pose pack that works well with long skirts. I enjoy the way Striking Poses shows off their product - they're made using pictures of celebs as reference.

Better pictures

Messing with the viewer to create better screen shot pictures.

Go into the world editor,
set it to noon,
Sun-Moon position to zero,
then raise ambient lighting and scene gamma until things look good.

Skins

Finished up a custom skin. White with graduated black points, and a soft fur texture over it all. Came out gorgeous. I'm planning to box it up for the shop when I figure out how to photograph it. I'm tempted to do a series of new skins. I've learned a bunch since the last set.

New LSL calls - Touch Detection

The new LSL functions to determine where on a prim a touch happened should be available sometime this week.

Click here to read about it.

Sculpted prim tricks

So you want to be able to make two prims using one sculpt map?

Mono Cometh

Mono's hitting the grid this week. A new version of the client's due later this week so script makers can take advantage of it.

Touring

Went with some friends to check out Bettina Tizzy's Forest of Chakryn. Gorgeous fae and nature sim, well worth a visit. It has a couple of little quests of the "find stuff and bring it here" variety. To complete them you might want to set your browser to only select your prims.





And we can't forget Mal. He's such a ... unique fellow.

Graphics glitch :P

So I was getting this odd graphics glitch in Second Life. Gray boxes appearing in textures now and again. Here's a pic showing it.



It wasn't happening on other systems, just my main one. I'm on a Windows XP box, so I tried the usual uninstalling and reinstalling to no avail. Updated grapics drivers too.

Turns out it was happening because I have an overly fancy ATI graphics card. It and Second Life were both trying to pretty up the screen, and they were tripping over one another.

Here's what fixed it.

Catalyst Control Center, Graphics Settings, 3D, All Settings:
Set Catalyst AI to Standard,
Set Adaptive Anti-Aliasing to Performance.

Zoning on the Mainland?

Zoning? On the Mainland? Woah.

Clothing meshes

Clothing meshes giving you trouble?

http://www.ccccybernetics.com/avatar_databank/

New flags for sculpted prims coming

New flags for llSetPrimitiveParams are in the works for sculpted prims. No more having to load a second map for the other shoe!

PRIM_SCULPT_FLAG_INVERT
PRIM_SCULPT_FLAG_MIRROR
PRIM_SCULPT_TYPE_MASK

A quick look at Lively

So like everyone else today who isn't on a Mac or Linux, I decided to try Google's Lively. There's a download, but it goes pretty quick.

There's no building, although the press says there will be options to create content. You can add music to a room, or link to youtube videos.

The emote system is delightfully simple; just right click on your avatar or someone else's to animate. No consent needed. So go ahead and body slam that fellow standing next to you!

The avatars are all prefab. I don't like that I can't edit my avatar by itself. Have to be in a room to do that.

Yadda yadda

I've been doing a lot, just not blogging much. Clothes, messing with physics and schooling code, a little exploring. Sometime soon I'll take more pics.

Tired. Vending errands are a pain.

Finished up my first mens' outfit for The Brass Needle, and I put a bunch of things I sell there up on SLExchange. I still haven't decided if I want to list my pet miniature squids / kraken or not.

Kraken!

Made a kraken (giant squid) avatar today. That's a picture of it cruising around New Babbage. I don't think I'll sell this one - it'd be too easy to grief people while wearing a 50M long avatar.

Dynamic shadows coming soon?

Torley's showing off dynamic shadows.

HOORAY

I HAVE INTERNET AGAIN!!!!!!

Been down since Friday evening.

Poodle Madness

The first avatar I sold in SL was a furry poodle avatar. Got sent some links today on RL "creative grooming" for poodles. You have to see to believe it.

Think you can do better?

There's a new Viewer Interface Contest in town. Design an interface for the Second Life client that would improve the experience of a new or inexperienced user. Top prize is 500K lindens.

Builds, biceps, and birthdays.

Rocket City's moving their vending room, so I decided to have a little fun rebuilding my "booth" this time. The tail moves a little bit. I'm kind of dissapointed at how choppy curves get in the current viewer.



Experimenting making men's clothes. Pants have been easy, but I had some trouble with clothes on the torso. There's a diagonal around the shoulder on the front that does horrible things when the arms move. I may resort to prims.



Still having fun in New Babbage. I finally got around to making a sign for my building. Picked up some furniture for it, threw some rugs down. Blimp and airship rides!

Working (at least in theory) with the SL kids birthday bash planners. They've got a pair of sims already.

Bleached SL Birthday Bash

Hey LL? Sell to your strengths.

The SL birthday celebrations are often a source of blogging drama, but this year LL has gone to new lengths. Now offerings from SL kids, and "adult themed" communities like the Gorean ones aren't welcome. Purely aside from the community effects, this is just plain stupid on the Lab's part. SL's biggest selling point is that you can make pretty much anything - no "vetting" process, no waiting months for someone to approve your content. To deliberately hide that makes SL no more interesting than Sony's Home. There's plenty of bleached pre-fab corporately cleansed worlds out there for people who want them. Not so many where you can make and share almost anything you can dream up.

And... you've got all sorts of nice shiny new "safe" areas to send reporters. How many more of these do you need to keep recreating? Has it occured to you to look and see how many older Linden builds are falling apart? Doing the same thing over and over when you don't like the results isn't smart.

Readbag, making stuff in NB, and a Giant Eye.

Torley's impacted my activity-flow by pointing out Readbag. It took me a couple moments to realize that i can just drag the "bookmarks" button on Readbag's interface to my browser toolbar and use it from there. Since I'm normally logged into Google and Readbag uses a Google login, this blends in super-easily for me.

I finally made a door texture I like for my New Babbage build. I'll grab some pics of the building later today. I still want to find or make a chaise lounge and an old fashioned sewing machine for the build.

Made a tophat sculptie with Rokuro and I've been having fun decorating it in different ways. I really need some good gear prim shapes.

I've made a couple of late 1800s themed clothes. All for women so far, although I have plans for some stuff for the guys. I need to grab some pictures, and put some of it up on SLExchange.



Met someone I'd been chatting with in the forums last night, and went biking for a bit. Came across a giant eyeball. I just had to share it!

TO THE MOON!

Guess what? I'm going to the MOON!

Still collecting the new wave of megaprims?

More megaprim packages on SLX.

Megaprim Creation Time Limited

Make those new megaprim sizes while you can! Andrew Linden confirmed today in his office hours that the ability to create megaprims will be disabled again in the next server update.

Textures and the Iron Man

Picked up an Iron Man avatar from the silverscreen sim. They're full perms, so have fun!

I've been making clothes made of patterned cloth. The IWarp function in GIMP is proving to be a useful way to narrow and widen the patterns so they look more realistic.

Musing about buying a graphics tablet. They're pricey, but I keep hearing great things about them, especially the Wacom Intuos line.

Still enjoying New Babbage.

Making Textures - thumbnail viewer for windows

Working in Windows?

Wishing that the thumbnails feature when viewing files worked with TGA or PSD files?

There's a little application here that does that. http://www.uproar-interactive.com/tools.html

Huge Giant Megaprims Are Back

NEW MEGAPRIM HAPPY OMG !!!11!!1

THX TATERU!!

On SLX here
and on SLX here

Prettying up the Grid

The success of Second Life requires convincing more people to try it, persuading them to stick around, and persuading them to invest in the grid.

Showcase

While positive and negative press both mean more newcomers to the grid, negative PR brings with it real world complications. Terrorism, sexual ageplay and age verification, banking, gambling, money laundering, copyright issues... it has all flowed through the mainstream media and gathered political attentions, as such things are wont to do.

If newcomers stick through orientation, they arrive on the mainland with a burning question. "What's there to do here?" That's what the new Showcase tab does; gives the tourists somewhere to go. Well, that and keep journalists from finding dens of perversion within half an hour of downloading the client.

The traffic metric was originally intended as an automated way to do this. Human nature being what it is, the metric is gamed (campers, bots) and often leads to places you wouldn't want to take the general public. A number of places benefit from the way traffic currently works - newbies brings $L, and those translate into real world money. Moving the newbie stream risks hitting the current beneficiaries in the wallet. Accusations of favoritism have plagued the Lab for years, and stating that the places appearing in the Showcase are going to be handpicked hasn't helped. If you want to benefit directly from the newbie stream, I suggest you look into advertising at places that'll be featured regularly. I think this will prove to be a far more effective way to encourage entertaining non-commercial builds than paying dwell ever did, with the side benefit of increasing retention. More money flowing, more content (both static and live). It'll also be good for Linden Lab's bottom line, in $L fees, land, and possibly memberships.

The Mainland

There's a growing effort to clean up the image of the mainland. The ability to own mainland parcels is one of the few benefits of membership, and with the percentage and number of residents with membership declining it makes sense to look at the reasons people give for not wanting to own a piece of Linden Lab's continents.

The new rules surrounding adfarms, and the creation of the LDPW look to be direct action relating to this. Individual residents have been interested in the overall feel of the mainland for a long time. Ask Marianne McCann about getting some of the public Linden builds back in good repair. There's been regular talk by vehicle fans in the forums about improving the road system on the mainland.

Many sim owners who rent space on their sims use the lack of things like laggy clubs and ad farms to attract business. Themed builds and active communities are also draws. Adding roads and other features to the mainland doesn't offer them much competition, but themed residential areas like the new Bay City might.

Personally I suspect they don't have much to worry about, unless LL decides to outsource the oversight of their planned communities. Successful themed sims require human oversight, and Linden Lab has shown a very strong preference for automation, conflict avoidance, and a hands-off approach. I expect that they're planning to use peer pressure and the AR system to enforce Bay City's theme, a combination that hasn't been particularly effective in the past. Building and maintaining communities takes time and effort, as anyone who's tried running a venue in SL can vouch for. Once a community has reached its critical mass it sustains itself, but organizing events and solving conflicts takes time and effort.

Snapshots to Pics

Torley's built up a rather impressive snapshot-tips page.

Building with the Alpha glitch in mind.

Chosen has a really good explanation of how alpha glitching works. The camera's position relative to the center points of the prims is how the viewer decides what texture is in front, not the plane of the surface the alpha textures are on. It may not always be the case, but it explains why some houses and hair are almost always glitchy where others aren't.

Navel Lint.

I was blog surfing. Realized that LL has been "evaluating" the traffic metric since I've been in SL. My second rez-day is later this month. Makes me feel old. I've got a lot of cards to people who haven't been on in ages.

I've been working on my new space in New Babbage. Learning a lot, meeting the neighbors. NB has a lot of builders of one flavor or another, and the people are friendly. I'm still undecided on the elevator vs stairs debate.

You know how people who're in SL for the long term go through cycles of enthusiasm? This one's strange. I'm enjoying my new neighborhood and build a lot, but my interest in things of a general Grid nature is very low.

I need to go through and adjust my blog reading lists - they're badly out of date. Thinking about trying Google Reader - I've been hearing really good things about it. I wonder if I can link up a reading list from that to the blog here.

I think I want to go through some of the vid tuts and articles and such... I have RL friends every so often who're interested in SL and I want to gather good beginner things in one place in a way that it isn't overwhelming. May take some thought. Or maybe I should whip up a couple alts and go through some of the orientation portals with better reputations and see if there's one I'd recommend.

Might refresh my plushie toys scripts to retrigger the holding animation every so often. I'm not sure if that would be better or worse. I also want to play more with the motorcycle, add customizing scripts to the boots, and a dozen other things I haven't gotten to.

Grid Storms

The reality of the grid bleeds thru...

Building and texturing with the current release can be a little challenging at times.

Our New Fab CEO needs help!

M Linden has been spotted on the grid and it struck me that he needs a little help customizing his avatar. As residents of The Grid(TM) we NEED ... DEMAND ... CRY OUT FOR (yeah that's it!) our Linden Lab CEOs to look distinctive.

So... If you make wearable things, have a serious sense of style and a bunch of transferrable outfits, or just have some cool transferrable avatars or hair around... let's send them his way. Don't send him junk. Send him stuff you'd send to a RL friend you've just talked into signing up.

And for the grid's sake, box it if you're sending more than a single item.

Change: Fairies, Steampunk, and CEOs

Found a lovely skybox while flying around.

I bought some land in New Babbage to build on. I've got ideas, so many ideas! And I've been feeling the urge to put down virtual roots. Surprises me a bit, I've been here almost two years without that. Somewhere for my steam powered motorcycles, a comfy couch, and an assortment of shiny things...

And for anyone who's been living under a rock *grin* LL has a new CEO, Mark Kingdon aka M Linden.

Met another pair of avatar crazed people - we had fun showing off to each other. :D Ended up at Grendel's of course.

Katt Linden is now officially live

Raise a drink to your hopes and fears, Katt Linden is now officially live! Yes, the new communications manager has officially broken silence.

Seeing colored clouds or smoke?

Ava Glasgow made a great "help" graphic for a rare but confusing problem. The Show Updates feature has a hotkey combination and every now and then some poor unfortunate hits it by mistake.

Party, building.

Hung out with the bloggers group at the monthly party. Good music, good conversation.

Been making clothes and trying to build boots with prims. I have much more respect for shoe builders than I did before starting this. ;) Thinking about checking out the rest of the rokuro family of sculpted prim tools.

Parody contest

Vint Falken's less than pleased about the whole trademark issue and she's offering a L$10K prize to whoever makes her laugh the most! Images, sound, video, written words - pick your media and have a good time!

Wings festival!

A wings festival!
All next week, lots of popular vendors, all in one place.

New! Longer Links!

Somehow I'd missed that with Havok 4 comes longer link limits! Now we go to 54! Here's the wiki list of things changed with Havok 4.

Exploring

The grid has been having serious problems the last couple days. I've been lucky though; whenever I've wanted to be on it, it has been working.

I spent some time exploring Caledon again, and I visited New Babbage for the first time. I'm tempted to see if I can get some land in New Babbage. Made some clothes to fit the Victorian Steampunk theme, did more with the new glow feature, met several people, and generally had a good time.

New lag detection feature!

Want to know who's wearing the laggy prims? Now you can!

Changes and exploring those changes

Long read about decision making in the Havok 4 deployment by Sidewinder Linden, but well worth it.

I completed my land sale, downloaded the new viewer, and looked over my offerings under the official release of windlight.Dumped the old railing on my workspace and replaced it with a hollowed megaprim. My habit of keeping step depths 0.5M or less worked to my advantage. Steps won't be a problem long, according to Sidewinder (see above) they're going to reset step height to its old value within a week.

While messing around with new store design ideas, I played around with the new glow feature. I think I'll make a couple packs of crystals for 10$L. Throwing in a little glow with what I've done before makes them gorgeous. Might drop in a touch-control script for light and cute tinkly noises.

Things to do

Got a fairly long todo list tonight. CoLA land sale, downloads, some windlight checks... I think I'm going to rebuild the shop. With the new stairs height issue with Havok 4 and the fact that megaprims now act like they appear, I think that'll be the best solution.

Megaprims

I've heard that Havok 4 likes megaprims. I'm excited - I'll have to experiment! They now act like normal prims as far as collisions go.

But today it may not seem that way. There's a hollow prim bug with a fix pending.

Must have been a rough couple days at the Lab.

This was a good weekend to have lots to do in RL.

Um

So here's the clarification on SL trademark policy we were waiting for.

On The Care and Feeding of Communities

Word is that there'll be an official blog entry sometime soon about how the new TM rules affect bloggers.

Gamasutra has an article up about online community management. I'm glad that it points out both the age of the field and the high human cost - I've seen more than one community caretaker have a meltdown or require an extended vacation.

Relationships between a legal team and their video game company clients

In an oddly timely coincidence, Gamasutra has an amusingly written essay on the interaction between video game companies and their lawyers. The basic message is good; learn to work with your legal team instead of seeing them as an obstacle or something to point at instead of facing difficult decisions.

Bring the scripting email list back!

Vote to bring the scripter's email list back!
MISC-1048

EDIT April 01: The list is back! Periapse has accepted ownership.

Unicorns, Trademarks, and other ramblings

As some denizens of the grid have already discovered, I've got some new unicorn ( or horse or pegasus ) avatars up for sale. They're the first quad I've ever made. I used them in another "making an avatar" article for Avatar Toolbox. I have to go through AT and check it for trademark stuff, and I want to update it with some new links (and some links to a couple of Torley's new videos, especially the advanced attachments video.)

Still fussing around with the motorcycle. Did some clothes shopping. Visited a couple people I hadn't seen in a while. Had to go to sleep before Veyron's party, but I gave her a party favor the day before. Timezones suck. :P

I'm wondering why Linden Lab doesn't have some sort of official contact for the blogging community, and one for businesses on the grid. The concierge group just doesn't cut it - some issues overlap but many don't. It would have been a simple thing to have a channel (blog, forum, mailing list) where they could put up a discussion about "How the new trademark rules affect you" and clear up all the confusion and upset. A wee comment buried in a long blog post is not good communication.

And I'm very curious to see how they're going to handle domain and business name cases like SLExchange or the Second Life Herald. The old trademarks page said "You agree to refrain from using any domain name that closely mimics our proprietary domains, including secondlife.com and lindenlab.com." I don't know if that would have had additional meaning in lawyer's english, but in typical usage it didn't suggest that you needed two nouns in your name if you included SL as a reference to Second Life.

The new inSL logo makes me wonder what was being smoked in the Lab - when the eye-hand image has such recognition, why would you rip it out and replace it with something that no one recognizes and (I know I'm being catty) is so unappealing? Were they playing off of the SLGrid icon, or thinking of your basic plywood cube? If you're going to dump the recognizable, at least give us something with style!

Trademark and term changes

There's now a new set of rules for using SL related terms. Here's links to the Official Linden Blog entry and the website information. We've got 90 days to adapt.

Logos, including their green eye in the hand one, are no longer okay. They have a new inSL logo that we're welcome to use under certain conditions. The logo can't be shown on a page with anything that might not be considered PG. (Interestingly, the example they use involves skins, which we've been told are acceptable to show in their entirety for sale in a PG sim, although not to run around wearing without clothes.)

Bloggers, forum posters, and people chatting are (more or less) in the clear. We are expected to use the standardized terms now. The company is Linden Lab, not Linden Labs. LindeX, not Lindex or lindex. SLurl, not slurl. Second Life is always two words and both words are capitalized. You can also refer to it as SL. Not 2ndLife, sl, or secondlife.

Looking for a new CEO

Word from Reuters is that Philip's planning to leave the CEO position and move to CofB. Wonder if they have a CEO in mind or if they're just starting the search?

Sculpted prim bug?

If you're working on delicate or finework with sculpties (jewelry, shoes, etc) look over this jira entry. There's a positioning issue that's affecting sculpted prims.

Missing From Database has struck me

Dear SL,

Please bring back my unicorn's tail. Finding that something your avatar was wearing last time you logged on is now "Missing From Database" is a very sad thing.

HTML on a prim

The first stage of HTML on a prim has arrived. Here.

Mishmash

Swapped comments here to use a captcha - I'm hoping that stops the spam comments. I hate the idea of moderating everything. :P

Still working on the motorcycle - Sometimes it does a head-dive and I'm learning how to smooth that out with the vehicles page.

Making a unicorn avatar. It's going beautifully. The galloping animation is a pleasure to see. I'm taking pics as I go for Avatar Toolbox.

I've developed a sudden fascination with victorian dress - the evolution of the bustle and the changes of fashion are bizarre.

Went to a couple parties, had a good time.

I need to go ahead and start selling the tracking spotlight.

POCKY

There is a sim for Pocky!

Touring sandboxes on a motorcycle

When I was on the beta grid the other day, I tried out a vehicle and had a lot of fun with it. That and a comment about Caledon having a steampunk motorcycle gang got me started...

While I was working on the motorcycle I came across someone making a giant woman avatar. She's an impressive Mega. So I had to tell the maker about Avatar Toolbox and invite them to make an article. :D She walks stiff-legged like a lot of Megas, but she's a very impressive sight.




I finished up a customized skin for someone, met a doll maker who's a lot of fun to talk builder with, and probably amused more than a few people as I tested out my motorcycle.

I also made a couple of flower chairs (for a friend's hang-out.) Copies are in my shop. They remind me of Black-eye Susan flowers.

LL getting hands-on?

What'll happen to ad farms and view blackmail?

Edit: Damn. Things are happening!

Edit 2: KB ID 5089

When filing the abuse report, please stand beside the offending content before choosing Report Abuse from the Help menu. Use the Harassment category and include the phrase "Ad Farm" in the summary line. If the owner is clear, enter their name. If it is a group-owned parcel or object, then either enter the owner or officer of the group if you can find it or enter "Governor Linden" (yes, we're asking you to abuse report the Gov, it's okay, she won't mind...) and put as much supporting detail in as you can.

Hearts and flying prims

If you check my freebies section of the shop, there's a new outfit up for the next couple days. Or you can grab it for 10L at SLX or OnRez. Camo and hearts, who'd have thought that would ever work?

I also updated the blog's look a little.

I picked up a bouncy castle - it is rezzed and available to play with at ground level below the shop. BOING! BOING! Fun toy.

Spent some time on the beta grid. I didn't crash the havok 4 sandbox flinging 1000 physics-enabled prims around, but it slowed things down a little. The prims also did some very odd things - flying out of the sim, embedding themselves under the ground, and hanging in the air motionless. Had fun riding around on a motorcycle I found there. Turning a moving vehicle slows it dramatically. I also noticed the mini-map either didn't update in a reasonable amount of time, or the prims on my screen weren't being drawn in their locations.

Teuthologista Gown!

For those of you who like unusual outfits, I offer the new Teuthologista gown! The jewelry that comes with it is really cute - tiny cephalopod earings with pearl eyes and a nautilus pendant. The tentacle movement is very much like that of the octopus avatar I make. All six colors are up at my shop inworld, and they're available from SLX and OnRez.

Object name/desc field rules changing

Heads up if you're storing information in object names or descriptions.

SVC-674
LL will be truncating all object names to 63 characters and descriptions to 127 characters when 1.19 server code is released (originally scheduled for 1/23/2008)

Shirts and bumming around

I've been around, just haven't done much. Played tourist. Worked on my own avatars. Made some long sleeve shirts for female avatars, fussed around with some prim wrangling (some swords, a long coat,) and a little light scripting.

Mono is now on parts of the beta grid, so I may take a bunch of my scripted things over there and see how it goes. Hmm... I think I will wait a few days. Sounds aren't working right.

Lab-In-A-Box

The laboratory in a box set is now available at my shop and on SLX.

Fan Service!

According to Hittail.com, the denizens of the internet are very interested in pinup girls.

So I took some screenshots of my navy pinup girl avatar, used Vint's tutorial as guidance, and had a little fun with the GIMP.

Enjoy! (Click on her to see her full size.)

Mad Science?

I've been having fun wrangling prims. I'm making a laboratory set. Made some sculpted prim flasks, a scripted bunsen burner, and a bunch of related things.

So I've got yet another avatar...

Crap Mariner! This is all your fault!

Avatar Toolbox Updated.

The Avatar Toolbox has been updated (both the website and the freebies.)

Some animation and AO information from Bloodsong Termagant, an updated Tiny AO, and a few odds and ends.

Making trinkets

I've made some scripted candles and a bunsen burner, a freebie 2 prim upholstered chair, little things like that. Working on tiny objects gets tricky. I also need to learn what the particle size limit is - I think I bumped into it at one point. I also was gifted with an updated Tiny AO that I have to add to the Toolbox. But now it is bedtime.

Wanna be a bank?

Crap Mariner pointed out a spectacular comment on SL banking.

Banks Begone!

Very interesting. No Banks as of the 22nd. I'm very pleased to see a policy decision like this being publicized before it is enacted.

Sunday morning

The grid is closed right now *sob* so I'm making some animations. AT's skin page has been updated, I saw that Vint Falken knows about Eloh's skins (so I expect the Open Sim crowd does also.) Ooh, wait! Login's are supposed to be open now...

Making Animations, Making Skins

QAvimator is working for me again. Turns out the windows uninstaller doesn't remove the program's related registry settings. Once they were removed a new install worked fine.

For those of you interested in making skins, Eloh Eliot has put up yet another free skin and the related *.psd files.

TODO list: I need to remember to link Avatar Toolbox to EE's skins. And to send a note to the Open Sim crowd to make sure they've seen them. Drop a note to the QAvimator maker about the reg settings.

Back, and rambling

I'm back, and I brought a nasty cold with me. *sniffle* Spent some time building, and messing around with making weapons. My version of QAvimator stopped working, so I either need to fix it or find another way to make animations. Vending went well, profits and sales were higher than they've ever been. Why did someone think putting a captcha on the login page was a good idea?