Coats, Cannery, Crash Me, and Hippotropolis

Been messing around with mixing prims and clothing textures, trying to make a trench coat. I'm experiencing a bit of a learning curve. *grin* Pose stands are wonderful things.

I stopped by at The Cannery for the opening party. Great abandoned urban atmosphere, and a fun way to show off a lot of 2D SL-based art. Makes a great neko hangout too.

Crash Me says on the sign to not cause physics-based crashes. This makes me sad. The terrain on that sim is great for rolling around as a hedgehog though.

I also stopped by to check out Hippotropolis, the sim home for Open Source. Not much there yet, but it looks like it'll be a good place for meetings. There's plots here for some of the Innovation Award winners, but they haven't rezzed anything there yet.

A sim named Crash Me

An interesting bit for those of you with forum access. Sky Eclipse's saga. Something about the avatar is causing sims to crash whenever Sky logs onto them. A rather hard super-power to live with.

Turns out there's a sim named Crash Me. So if you think you're bringing sims down, drop on by. I need to get a SLUrl for this place. If it has physics and scripting enabled, it sounds like the perfect place to try out those wild ideas I get that might crash a sim.

EDIT: Here.

Reflections.

Torley torments us with pictures of WindLight's water reflections.

Virtual Coke does still love us.

Particles & Prims

Part of why I haven't been in a hurry to release the particle spotlight is because of the particle leaks and related issues in the client viewer. When you've been on for several hours and TPing a lot, particles stutter and eventually stop appearing on your machine. :P

I was trying to help a friend find a lost prim. If only this had been published a day or two before!

Greenies

I finally got to the Greenies sim last night. Fun place! Full of interesting corners to explore and interactive objects. The flow of the place is great; you start in a tunnel, go thru a (scaled to avatars) dollhouse, then enter the giant-scale main space. The movement between the lower and upper parts of the sim was easy and fast. Here's some pics.

I'm fascinated by spontaneous games - the ones people make up for themselves outside of what seems planned. Almost everyone roaming around in the house part of the sim was racing around in vehicles sooner or later. I wonder if it is intentionally seeded; there's a free UFO available in the upper part of the sim, and one of the greenie displays has the aliens playing with a remote control vehicle. Was that display there before visitors started racing around?

Doings

Made a piece of clothing that I like.
Looked at some Neko places.
Did work on the spotlight. I think it is ready for testing. Dropping a note to D asking if they're interested.
Avoided working on the deer avatar. Alas, things at that almost done stage aren't nearly as exciting as new projects.
Paid vendor site rents.

Discovered that one of my huge prims does a very strange thing - as a visually hollow cube it isn't physically hollow, but as a cylinder it is. Must remember to add this and a link to Aimee's megaprim post to mine.

Fell asleep before the fireworks. :( I think next week is the last time. I will miss knowing they're happening.

luck dragon av

Here's a picture of that dragon avatar I got. Ain't I pretty?

Doings: Socializing, Avatars

I didn't build much this weekend. Spent most of it socializing. Hung out with friends, saw the fireworks again, did some shopping. Did a little more work on some stuffed toys and the deer avatar. Got a couple good pictures of giant avatars for Avatar Toolbox. Yes, that tiny pink poodle is about 6' (2M) tall.

Bought a gorgeous asian dragon avatar from Grendel's Children, I must get pics for the blog. The base avatar is laying on its stomach and the AO makes it slither like a snake, so the dragon moves constantly. The textures on it are all greys to make it easy to change the colors. The skull uses a couple sculpties, the rest is standard prims.

Philosophically I go back and forth on whether to use scripted movement or alternate invisibility myself. The invisibility has more prims, but is easier for people to modify poses themselves. It also takes more work to modify colors and textures. Same number of scripts with either option (unless you want to use the ugly delay-laden lsl link commands.)

Deer, sales, and updates

The last time I changed the avatar toolbox freebie box I forgot to update the entry on SLExchange, so people have been getting the old one from there. I found and fixed that this morning.

I'm looking over my sales for the summer... Almost half are from SLExchange. Most of the ones on the grid are from my main store. I'll give it to the end of September, but if that pattern continues, I think I'll pull out of most of my rental sites and replace my booths with teleport posters instead.

Did some polishing of the white-tailed deer avatar last night. I know I'm going to offer it in brown and black, still thinking about whether the third color will be white or piebald.

Somedays I can be such a brat

When I was doing research for the shapes page on Avatar Toolbox I made a child shape. That was one of the few kinds of avatar I didn't already have. I've decided to make her one of my personal avatars, so I bought her a nice skin (one of Robin Wood's) went thru my inventory for an outfit or two, and adjusted a copy of one of my favorite prim hair styles. I found a pair of poodle shaped barrettes (hair-slides) that I had to buy. No skipping animation though. *grin*



One of these days I'll have to redo the pic on the top of the blog. I've got a handful of other avatars I wear often that aren't there. The tiny blue hedgehog, my neko, one of the invisibles, the dalmation catyr... I should update my profile picture on the grid too.

How Not To Run A Public Venue

Ran into Marianne McCann interviewing Lynne Singh (of the band Keltish) about a rotten experience. Lynne's avatar looks very much like she does in RL, and she's not seven feet tall. She shows up at a club looking to find out who IMed her about a show, gets harassed for being short, called a child, mocked as a "mutie" because her mike wasn't working, and thrown out.

The avatar on the right doesn't look like a child to me. But even if she was one, there's more classy ways to let someone know their choice of avatar isn't appropriate or welcome. IM them. If you've got unusual "dress" requirements, offer them an appropriate freebie outfit or avatar. RL black tie restaurants always have a few jackets and ties available for loan.

If you're running a public venue and you have voice enabled, make sure you can hear how it is being used. Spare yourself the shame of being in charge and allowing your employees or guests to humiliate themselves.

Poodles, Panda Bears, and the SL Economy

The poodle avatars have finally been updated. I redid the legs, adjusted the muzzle, modified a little texturing, and stuffed them back in the vendors. If you've bought an older one and you want the new model, IM or email me.

Narsil made a cool panda bear avatar. Drop by my main shop and check it out!

I changed the tail in the Neko Add-on kit to one I like better.

Zee Linden blogged about the Second Life Economy.

Picture

Didn't spend much time in SL this weekend. I spent most of it in RL running amok in orchards or covered to the elbows in peach juice. Narsil had fun making a doll version of one of my avatars. Isn't my twin cute?

Big Finance, Little Grid

Login and sim down problems have been plaguing the grid. *grumbles*

Ginko's down. Doesn't hit me personally, but I know some people who used it. Including more than one who didn't realize Ginko was having serious problems - they thought the ATMs weren't working because of a tech problem. Apparently any money in it is being converted to bonds (promises of future money) which you can sell. The whole banking-in-SL concept seems crazy to me because of the lack of oversight and legal recourse. Their returns just didn't make sense.

It has me wondering whether there are any venture-capital funds in SL, and whether the people picking the ponies are any good at it. I suspect there aren't - just not enough money in it yet to draw them in. I know there's groups that do VC rounds for themselves (if I remember right Sarah Nerd's a good example.)

Stuff. And stuff.

Caught up with a friend and chatted. Still trying to catch up with Dalien. Worked a bit on the deer avatar. I like it and I think I'll end up selling it, but I need to catch up with Amad and see if he likes it and how he wants his custom version to look if he does. Organized and archived my 2D SL graphics files.

Too many ideas, not enough time. Elevators, Nekos, Skyboxes, Blacklight and spotlights, the Landmark HUD of wonderful-ness, updated poodles, and a bunch of socializing too. I have places and things I want to build for my own amusement, and some scripting experiments I want to do.

I think I'll blame it on the time of year. :D It is harvest season, back-to-school season is starting, the weather is horribly hot, and people get all frentic and full of energy and plans.

Gesturing at the weekend

I didn't get the market eval done, but I finished everything else. Sales did well this weekend too.

Marianne's fireworks are awesome.

The big secret to gestures seems to be "Don't edit an active gesture."

TODO

TODO by Monday:
Get Hittail tracking onto the Toolbox.
Prep financials for August
Do a neko market eval.
Go to (Sat 7pm) RCFM party
Go to Marianne's fireworks (Sat 8pm)

Empty bottles.

When you're feeling really down, drunk, and thinking about someone who's been dead for a couple years, don't customize avatars. Just. Don't.

The fingers are too long, and the expression isn't quite right, but the build is, and that's his nose. He'd never have worn those pants though.

Ghost? Memory? Avatar? Are they equally real? Unreal? Do they have any meaning beyond what we give them?

Fuck. This hurts.

I don't know whether to save or delete it.

Spotlighting the long tail of tecture moving?

Spent a little time yesterday working on my spotlight scripts. The interface is proving to be the hardest part; I may end up writing a notecard to go with it. I'm still trying to decide if I want to sell one spotlight with many features, or several different spotlights. I may also make one that doesn't track.

Hittail's results for the last day don't hold too many surprises. A lot of inquiries into mega prims, lsl and lsl functions, building avatars. The one for "japan boxes tecture moving" wins the wtf prize. My curiosity insisted I google that, but I still don't understand what they were looking for.

Speaking of textures, Robin Wood / Robin Sojourner has a script fix for some of the lsl animation offset troubles available free at her texture tutorial inworld.

Project ramblings.

Along with all the other things I've been messing with, I'm trying to decide between getting some sort of inworld group project going involving making avatars and doing a series on building skyboxes above the edit zone. Might do both.

Vint Falken found Hittail, it sounds neat. I must try it. If nothing else, it may make a good idea generator. Like I don't already have too many ideas and not enough time. *grin*

I've started prim-wrangling for the anthro deer avatar I was talking to Amad about. Kind of cartoony but I'm liking it. Trying to make matched reflected torii is a pain. I think I'll reuse most of the hoof from the catyrs. Still considering redoing the poodles when I'm done this - I want to redo their legs and add more detail to the skins.

Landmarks, webrings, and slurls... I know the basics of what I want to do with it, but I need to work out the details. I think I can work within an existing service like Gridmarker, but I want to be sure before I start hacking.

Vendor ramblings

I've been noticing some vendor migration patterns. Themed shopping zones are built, they're inhabited by 80-90% of the same vendors selling the same products. The zones have a rush of business for a few months, the same vendors move out as sales drop, then a new place appears with the same theme and the cycle repeats. There's some zones that aren't part of the cycle. They have strong events and/or have a purpose from outside of SL.

So with the short-time zones... how do I want to use them? As vending locations (and leaving a location when it isn't profitable?) As a form of marketing, and if so would I do better to get poster space instead? What about outright marketing - do I want to look for poster space in themed non-vendor areas, set up or work with events, etc? Do I want to set up something to count views (ie note whenever someone interacts with my stuff?)

A large portion of my grid sales are at my main shop, but many of those are via Search, and that puts me at the mercy of a functioning Search. I've been using the Store HUD, SLExchange, and including transferable pictures in my products and I suspect over time those decrease my reliance on Search.

And working more seriously with other vendors - do I want to look for partners to consolidate marketing efforts? If I do, would I rather go with the themed landmarks idea or would something like Luskwood's all-partners-at-one-site arrangement be more effective? How would I want to deal with the land and marketing sides of such a business arrangement? I know how badly a friends-to-housemate arrangement can go, and from the stories I've heard friends-to-business partner is much the same.

How much energy am I willing to put into it, and how much am I willing to commit long term to sustain it? What I've got right now is little effort - track transactions, pay a couple rental boxes, pay Chantal once a month, and take care of my tier. I get 10x more support conversations about my freebies than my products. They're usually about sound features (usually looking for a song player) that aren't in the Sound Prims package.