Monday, June 15, 2009

Creating Callisto

After RL interrupted my two days planned toward building my SL6B project, I'm doggedly working on and offline toward its completion.

When we were given "The future of virtual worlds" for a premise, I had understood it to mean a RL relating to SL kinda thing. I had made a detailed proposal as expected of me, and hoped I'd get the land and prims needed to do all I had promised. When the lands were rewarded, the premise slightly changed. It was the 25th century and we were on an asteroid hurtling through space with the remnants of our civilization. Our hopes would be to find a new home on a distant planet.

As mentioned, the barren rock and perpetual darkness sent most applicants into a tailspin. Heavy use of glow & particles ensued; whatever they proposed must have flown out the window.

I remain the calm within my region's storm: no post-apocalyptic drek, no undulating blobs of light or showering sparks. My proposal applies now just as it had then. The difference being a question of whether to fullbright interiors and "paint shadow" with material and textures, or just use alpha lightsources.

Tonight the layout and basic builds should be completed (still need to make some livingroom furniture and maybe some framed art for the "bedroom" wall). Then I'll need to map out the layout from above and prepare terrain details on graph paper. I've got a diner parking lot, a pebble path, a residential lawn, and other somesuch things. I'd like to have a pool but I don't want to impose on the exhibitor assistants more than I have (there's something amusingly ironic on the livingroom TV). They've lowered the land so my fake terrain can be flush with the region, added media including an awesome Space Age Lounge station, and will be assisting me media changes for a party planned with DJ GoSpeed Racer.

Stay tuned; maybe next entry about SL6B will include screenshots!

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Response to Torley's video re Guilty Pleasure

Torley:

I didnt have room on YouTube, but I wanted to comment properly about your latest videoblog. I tried to delete and repost since I typo rabidly, but it wouldn't take subsequent attempts to repost, so I undeleted the one I had. Anyway, here's the full response:

As you most likely know, in Japanese a Kanji ideogram alone may mean something totally different than grouped with others. I think the term "Guilty Pleasure" works similarly, as do many other terms we have in English.

I know why I use the phrase and it's to say I have a fondness for something which reminds me of a time or place I'm no longer associated with. For that I think it's perfect & serves a purpose.

Consider this for a comparison: In cinema there's high comedy & low comedy. In the first half of last century, slapstick and physical humor was seen as the commoner's form of entertainment, & someone telling bad jokes with pretty girls dancing around them was seen as high class. By the last half of the century, low comedy by the likes of Lloyd Keaton and Chaplin (among several others) was recognized as genius. Even those still seen as less sophisticated and more formulaic such as The 3 Stooges or Laurel & Hardy were admired for having entertained the masses and taking us through the harder times of our history in America.

I dont mind "guilty pleasure." In context of music it usually means that I enjoy something or someone from a genre I normally don't favor, or more commonly a song targeted for teens at a time when the music was considered frivolous and the artists exploited to the point of embarrassment. For example my last.fm library includes The Partridge Family, Tommy Roe, Bobby Sherman, and other such acts. They were in Tigerbeat & 16 and not Stereo Review, their records made gold & platinum by armies teens who often screamed too loud to listen to their music. I never screamed LOL. And maybe I didn't see them at the time as special or their music as catchy and uplifting as I do. Maybe it was the time away from them. I consider listening to them today as a guilty pleasure. I'm not ashamed to listen to them - in some cases no longer ashamed :P - but they're certainly out of character for someone like me OR someone my age.

Just wanted to feed you a perspective from the other side.

Friday, June 5, 2009

Life in the 25th Century?

We got our parcel assignments yesterday for SLB6. Along with the landmark came our collective premise in greater detail. We are hurtling through space on a meteor (The Rock) in search of a new home. Apparently we were placed with others based on the similarities of our proposals. If that's true, I'll be in an interesting neighborhood for the next few weeks.