Tried This?

Tried the new release candidate yet?

It's good, and (shock frickin' horror) remarkably stable. Go fetch.

Tip for Life

If anyone ever says to you "Here mate, ya wanna try some snake wine?", punch them in the mouth and run.

Cheers to The Hogan (see pic) for the interesting after-taste of death in my mouth for a good 20 minutes.

This weekend was The Gathering, the big UK LRP fest (pics on Facebook). A bit quiet this year, but always good for too much booze, hong, and a bit of Merde de Tete.

So remember. If you're asked. Punch and run.

October 15th

Sex, Lies, & Videotape...

YouTube, if you've not had a good browse, is a cracking source of Photoshop and other 'on-screen' tutorials. While looking for stuff on the Liquefy Tool I found this.



Okay, I worked as a camera assist in the glamour industry for a while, way back-in-the-day.

To start off with, the right angle can make even the likes of Posh Spices pathetic skinny arse look like a decent rounded piece of meat. There's stage make-up and plastic surgery, obviously, then nowdays the computer comes in to do it's magic. While extreme, and no 'Dove advert', this clip just shows how fake what we see really is. The camera does lie, and so many poor buggas out there aspire to be this retouched and unachievable image.

Us guys, especially, think the models are for real, and is it any wonder that young girls starve themselves and cry them selves to sleep because they'll never look like 'the girls in the magazines'? By the same token, I can't condemn the industry for doing this (just the way it's viewed). We'd touch up a shot of a plate of carrots for advertising purposes and in may ways it's just the same thing though to a fairly startling degree. It's a bit more usable than gouache and a scalpel blade..

Me, I like a cute girl with 'a bit of back'. Give me curves. Just for the record ;-)

Home Again, Home Again...

Well, when we arrived at Caswell the surf was excellent. Good foam, decent sized waves with a good strong wind blowing off the Atlantic. Skipping gleefully, I went to the cupboard where we thought I'd left my wetsuit and, horror or horrors, no wetsuit!

So, watching the beach eagerly, I dragged the last of my pennies together and next day bought myself a new one in Mumbles (after a tour round Swansea looking for an XL in my price range). Returning to the flat (I'm always amazed how much it looks like Tracy Island when the sun shines), and for the rest of our holiday, the sea was smooth as milk pond with not a single surfable wave in sight. I could have cried.

It's interesting (with the recent dredging and the new repairs to the sea wall at the flats) just how much the bay has changed in the last 12 months. Caswell is a bay eroded along two north-south faults in the local limestone, which appears to have been hit far more heavily by erosion in the last year.

It was sunny, I'll give it that. Hot even, and the beach was packed with desperate vitamin D hungry Brits. We did a bit of Geocaching, a lot of lounging and staring at the horizon from the patio, a spot of walking, got out in Sea Serpent (the 10 metre water jet propulsion R.H.I.B. we got out in last year) and spotted some Atlantic Grey Seals and stuff off Worms Head, went for dinner with the inlaws, played Shithead (Leeds Rules) and built sandcastles with Roz and Rhys, took photos of primmy looking things for replication at a later date, ate BBQ, wandered up and down looking for shiny stuff etc. But no fuckin' surf.

Before we left for Wales, the good lady wife made me promise not to take my laptop or my PDA. "It's just 5 days" she said casually. "Prove to me you can do 5 days without SL or the internet for just 5 days". We took a DVD player with us instead, and I managed it, sure, but without my connection (and there's not even a god-damn phone line or mobile signal at the flat any more) I was bored out of skull.

Frankly, I'm glad to be back.

...jiggerty, jig.

Off to Caswell

It's that time of year again.

Time to dig out the ill fitting wetsuit, grab the old wooden board, cram the house into the back of a Smart Car and to head for the flat at Caswell. Brace for DIY, inlaws and the 'yearly family boat trip'.

Jema has INSISTED I don't take a computer with me. This is a crime, I will be bored out of my god-damn gourd, but I better show willing or she's likely to actually leave me this time.

See you next weekend.

Gibson

I totally forgot about this Gibson 'Spook Country' thing that was on recently. I had an invite too :-(

Nice to see a load of AB's stuff in this vid as well, notably the SL TwitterWriter at Penguin Books UK [SLURL]. Also, a quick shot of Victoria City [SLURL] and a plug for Caledon/Steampunk which made me smile. Just the sort of thing JJ would run at the library :-)

"The Awful Cubes Meet Teraformal Duplicity"

If you have some time over your toast this morning, nip on over to Ars Nova at Linus [SLURL] and check out the installation there by Juria Yoshikawa.

Here the whole sim has been sculpted into a landscape housing shifting pastel geometry of almost cartoonish proportions, plus ambient spacial sound. Best viewed with the complimentary colours of sunrise, and looking as though it was torn from the base of the grid and placed there by the hand of some virtual ice age, my first thoughts were of The Monkeys movie, 'Head', and the scale of possibility in SL for art. I've never seen the likes of a whole sim used as a canvas in this manner.

The artist, Juria, commonly utilises the "elements that make up SL itself" and feels that "SL art is about freeing oneself up to create in ways impossible in RL". This she repeatedly archives.

I've been spending a lot of time investigation sculpture and art while chatting to artists in SL (for the new project - still hush hush). Of late it's opened my eyes, and I'm loving it. Pick a vantage point and enjoy the scale of this piece, then get in there and fly around it, be inside and enjoy.

Well worth a quick trip, 10 minutes over breakfast, while this exhibition is on.

Wanted. Virtual Kate Aide.

Here's a potentially interesting one.

Sky News is calling on Second Life residents to turn themselves into virtual news reporters and submit videos about our crazy little 3D world. They've joined forces with the video-sharing website SkyCast to launch an SL 'reporters' challenge'.

The idea is for SL residents to create video reports on things they think "...have news value and relevance to the virtual community". Finished reports will be hosted on skycast.com, with the best entries run on the Sky News website.

Potential vid-hacks can collect a Sky News microphone reporter package from the foyer of the Sky's virtual newsroom [SLURL] and then throw together a simple two-minute video piece. The closing date for entries is September 30 so there's bags of time.

Thanks to Patrick, from Hold The Front Page, for the heads-up on this one. I've been talking about shooting some SL docco for ages and this might well be the excuse I need. This could actually be a minor way to paint our little virtual world in a positive, non-sensationalist, sleaze-free light for once ;-)

So. Anyone gonna volunteer to be the feisty girlie voice reporter if I do the rest? I can do all the editing etc. piece of cake, but I look like a big gangly badly dressed beardy geek with a baritone and, well, lip gloss sells. Contact me (Nikk Huet) in-world if your curious. Also give me a shout if you have a cool story that might be worth covering and currently lack the resources to make it happen.

Fish Fag

Er...

...that'll be me pressing CANCEL then. I just shit my packet.

One Man in his Life...

...has many alts.

"What is an individual? We can make a new one with the greatest of ease - as many as we like." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

I went out for a coffee with a very dear friend tonight. We both grabbed a RL cuppa and found a coffee bar in SL (the sorta place we'd both normally hang). We turned on the voice, and sat there and talked.

Not unusual, but this time it was as us. We were both our corporate alts. We both looked like us, dressed like us (I was even wearing the same T-Shirt in RL), had our actual names, our actual voices, were actually drinking coffee etc. No tags over our heads saying 'Scientist' or 'Timelord'. Short of WiFi'ing in from a Starbucks this was probably the closest we'll ever get to actually sitting down and having a brew and just simply shooting the breeze.

We talked about stuff that friends would talk about in a coffee bar. About our spouses and going to the cinema, parties and mutual friends. About business, new media, psychology and SL sociology. It was half way through our 'break' that I realised I've never had such a feeling of SL paradox before. Sure it was flippant and probably a massive waste of resources and technology, yada, yada, but also cool to be so close to reality in SL (in that 'playing at William Gibson' kinda way) and I can't help but think this could well be a slice of the corporate future that Lindon Labs are working towards. Putting my LL scepticism to one side, if it is, this is a unparalleled, natural and surprising level of communication and I applaud their efforts.

My friend and I have never met in RL. She lives in the USA, me in the UK. But this evening we went out for a drink and sat in a coffee bar and talked like old pals. If I was telling someone in meatspace about going out for a coffee with her I wouldn't even mention SL in the conversation. Why would I need to? This was a (virtually) total social and business experience with sound, taste, visuals, etc., and just 2 corporate alts sat having a break from the hassles of the day before they went back to their offices and carried on being something their not.

Here is your social networking and communication of the future, right here. Come and get it. Mines a Grande Americano (with an extra shot).

Applying the RAW

So cool.

Here's Carricre and I floating over the new island (details soon, I promise) as I applied the RAW file from the model we've been working on. There was a brief pause, 2 minutes say, then the whole landscape changed. It made me think of the Genesis Device from Wrath of Khan.

We start work today. No time like the present.

Our New Island - 12 Minutes Old

Coolio.

Whoness

Some new Who series news if your interested...

...I still stand by my previous post on the whole Catherine Tate thing, and it still looks a fairly lame premise. Still won't be tuning in on purpose but the addition of Barbara Good has my passing interest...

...meh.

A Gentlemen's Duel on YT

Blur Studios, god love em, have done it again with the marvellously Caledonian A Gentlemen's Duel (I think I actaully know the Duchess in question). No embeddable link, but this SteamPunk romp it's wachable on YouTube and well worth the viewing.

Check it now, it might not be there for long.

7+ Blogs, 7+ Weeks

I've been a bit distracted of late and things might go a bit quiet (save for odd YouTube) for a bit.

I don't have a lot of time and I'm working all hours in SL right now, coordinating a couple of hush-hush projects. Also. I was recently asked to take part in bit of a writing exercise with some fellow Caladonins.

I'll be writing an ongoing story as Oolon, and several other folks will be it with me (and I with them). A collaborative tale, firmly tongue in cheek, in the mould of Dough McClure (Gnarli Hotep) movies of the '70's. We have glamorous nobility, pagan beauties, sinister barons, stowaways, the works. I could well be quite fun so check them out if you get the chance.

The "Journey to 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Mysterious Island" can be found at the following blogs:

• 500 Year Diary
• Caledon & Carntaigh au Courante
• Diary of a Caledonian Baroness
• In The Darkling Grove
• Red Rose of Caledon
• The Diverse Adventures of Mr. G. Abel
• The News from Bardhaven
  
• What the Mouse Saw

See ya soon.

Owned by The Smith

At the 2007 comic-con Kevin Smith (and I like the Smith, good man) is forced to put down a heckler. Everyones seen it, but SO funny :-)

In 1 Piece but Busy

I am back I've just been busy/lazy.

Spend a good week away, then away doing a hog roast last weekend.


Bit more free time now, but working in SL (cos of the time difference) is sucking up my free time and I've committed myself to some righting project of multiple SL blog as well.

Will try harder, blah, blah...

Remember this?

Statement! 1 nill.