Thursday, September 25, 2008

Caledon the Musical

Caledon the Musical, in aid of Relay for Life '08, from the Independent State of Caledon and Caledon Studios, Second Life. Raising over L$100,000 in the fight against cancer, the good people of Caledon donated money to be in this machinima.



In total, in '08, the fine folks of Caledon raised L$3,000,000 for Relay for Life.

Hopefully this film showcases some of the amazing sims in Caledon and the amazing variety of smashing people. This is filmed at peoples properties and at assorted locations around the steampunk Victorian sims.

May I just tip my hat, one more time, to the good peoples of Caledon and the Caledon RFL Team '08, without whom this wouldn't have been possible.

Yes, apologies, some parts of this are a bit rough and ready. When shooting so many shots with so many avatars one has to take the frame rate that's available at the time. As this was for charity, at least one shot of each group made it into the final edit. Also, being machinima, it has suffered somewhat from recompression issues during upload to YouTube so I'm displaying it above at the 320x240 (4:3) that YT likes best.


Wednesday, September 17, 2008

New Features on LT Site

New features have been launched today on Lasting Tribute (the site that sponsors one of the the sims I run, Tribute Island [SLURL]), an' I gotta say "hat's off" to @DigitalPulse, AR, Hoony, AndyF, Wheelwright, and the boys and girls at AND for this one. Spot on!

Nice navigable tabbed browsing to all the content already on the site and, for the first time, you can add links to videos on You Tube (oh hell yeah, I'll be spammin' the strides off that tomorrow).

From small acorns, as they say. It's incredible that there's now memories and images been added to more than a million tributes on our site. It was getting big, and a redesign has created space for expansion and separate sections for memories, images and now videos.

Some examples of tributes with video already added today include:
Leading Aircraftman Martin Beard; rally driver Colin McRae; Pink Floyd members Richard Wright and Syd Barrett and footballer George Best.

The breath of content out there on YouTube for this kind of tribute/slideshow/montage is massive, and having somewhere for it to have a collective home is a damn nice touch.

"Hat's off" again folks, nice damn release ;-)

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

LIVE Paisley Beebe Tribute to Ella Fitzgerald

A Tribute to Ella Fitzgerald: Friday 19th September - 2PM SLT.

This week, at the island [SLURL], the one-and-only Paisley Beebe pays homage to "Lady Ella" and the "First Lady of Song", one of the most influential jazz vocalists of the 20th century. This is a lady who, over a recording career that lasted 57 years, won 13 Grammy Awards and was awarded the National Medal of Art by Ronald Reagan and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush. With a vocal range spanning three octaves, her purity of tone, phrasing and intonation, was undeniably awesome. Ella is widely considered to have been one of the supreme interpreters of the Great American Songbook. Only Paisley could do her justice.

SL has few real divas, usually wannabe divas that are all mouth and mediocre talent, but not Paisley. Paisley is the real thing. Pailsey is what SL divas should inspire to be.

Paisley Beebe is the alter ego on Second Life of the beautiful Leonie Smith, an Australian jazz vocalist, and radio host. Leonie has released multiple albums and is a professional jazz vocalist of over 15 years standing. Paisley is also CEO of "In A Perfect World" which produces "Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe", Second Life's first, and best weekly TV talk show; for which I can always be available on the couch at a moments notice Paisley, you only have to ask ;-) This is filmed live in front of a studio audience in SL every Sunday at 6PM SLT.

All this,
Paisley Beebe paying live musical homage to Ella Fitzgerald, plus 2hrs of tribute tunes from our good friends the DJ's of Radio Riel, all in honor of Ella.

This is part of our ongoing live events season at Tribute Island, not many left to go now, sponsored by the good folks at Lasting Tribute, and in association with Prim Perfect Magazine (and my good friend Saffia Widdershins) and Radio Riel (and my good friend Gabi Riel), loverly ladies and talented divas in their own right ;-)

Being Friday, I may have to lay off on the voice chat out of respect (it being Talk Like a Pirate day) an' all.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Up For Virtual Worlds London?


Early Registration ends this coming Friday, 19 September 2008, for Virtual Worlds London. Go sort it now, ya save ya'self 400 notes.

Billed as "
the leading European event for businesses seeking to understand and maximize business strategies within virtual worlds". Virtual Worlds London is the 5th such world event by Virtual Worlds News, and takes place at The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre (a cheery '70s abomination right across the street from Westminster Abbey) from the 20th to the 21st of October.

In my capacity as a business alt, I'll be propping up the bar and checking out a good cross section of the keynotes and presentations on both days (probably blogging it etc. as I go). If you do go, drop me a line or a twitter when you get there and we'll do booze and RL. An evening meet-up in The Greyhound in Kensington (that strange SL/RL crossing point of metaversal paradox in the centre of the city) is invariably a must :-)


Friday, September 05, 2008

Night of the Starlets at Tribute Island!

Slight change of plans this evening.

It’s now Night of the Starlets at
Tribute Island in Second Life.

Unfortunately, Penelope Fullstop of
Atomic Blondie was in touch with us yesterday to say Geoff (their lead guitarist) has health problems and can’t do the Marilyn Monroe gig tonight, which Pen was particularly looking forward. They'd gone to the trouble of sorting loads of new stuff for this special show so alas it's impossible to do it without him and Saffia and I (thanks Saffia) started fishing around to find other arrangements.

So, in steps our good friend "The Duchess" and the outstanding folks at Radio Riel with a tribute of their own. Night of the starlets, 3 hours of DJ'd Hollywood music, at the backstage sets at Tribute Island [SLURL] from 1PM SLT, NOT at the bar as usual.

Come dress to impress directors and join us to celebrate those loverly ladies of Tinsel Town. Have an evening in that Oscar frock, wear those Anna Sten eyes, that Ida Lupino hat, fiddle with those sliders for those Doris Day curves, from Rita Hayworth to Marilyn Monroe, you get the gist.

Also, we have professional Second Life Marilyn, the loverly Miss. Sasha00 Laryukov of The Gauskov Entertainment Agency to pose for pics etc. These people do the most amazing one-off shapes, skins, costumes, looks and attitudes you'll see this side of Hollywood.

Gentleman, dress to dance with the ladies tonight we’re nought but accessories to the likes of Jane Russell, Audrey Hepburn
, Jane Mansfield and (with any luck) Louise Brooks.

I'm off into Second Life to 'doll-up' the backstage area for some serious dancing. See you there.

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Google Chrome First Impressions

Today is fracking about with Google Chrome day. Check it if you can.

The download was quick and after 2 mins I was flying along with it. 

The rendering speed rocks, though it's not filled up with my add-on crap yet and it'll probably slow down as that open source gets chipped add by 'indispensible' add-ons. I miss my spell checker in Blogger as I write, but I'll live. Loved the quick, if a bit scary, import functionality. Up and running in seconds.

I like the 'tear off' tabs (especailly as a duel screen user), and instead of traditional tabs like those in Firefox Chrome puts the buttons on the top of the window, not below the address bar. Thank god for the standard FF short cut keys and an address bar with auto-complete. 

The default homepage gives you an intuitive kind of “speed dial” feature, part of it's visual bookmark system, similar to the one with Opera. I like the idea of the Chrome privacy mode; you can create an “incognito” window “and nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged on your computer” specifically for 'left handed surfing time' (well, what else is it for, really). Like Prism, it seems apps can be launched in their own browser window without address bar and toolbar. 

I'm an old school Firefox die-hard, and I'll have to spend some time tinkering to see if the multi-threaded architecture is really that robust and how the Gears can be cobbled to 'enliven my browsing experience'. I see it has it's own JavaScript Virtual Machine (called V8) which also open source and seems fine so far ('cept for a few niggly bits with upload in Flickr). I appreciate them adding the task manger too, which lets you see which processes inside Chrome are running, taking up how much memory, network resource and CPU. 

Editing my Blogger posts is a bit weird in it. Oh, and Lively doesn't seem to be supported (like anyone gives a shit anymore). Ironically, Google Analytics shows Google Chrome visitors as being from Firefox which strikes me as a bit of an oversight. I know it's a beta, but way to coordinate a product launch there folks. 

First impressions? Yup, I like it, I’ll be fiddling all day.