Putative

The natural love of life gave me some inward motion of joy, 

and I was ready to entertain a hope that this adventure might, 
some way or other, 

help to deliver me from the desolate place and condition I was in.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels Part III

Beware of Draxtors bearing gifts. Oh, not the vid-spam of which he is such a generous purveyor, this is a more subtle kind of gift, the 'must see LM' variety. The first was to Laputa which has already been blogged to death, something I discovered after spending 15 minutes trying to understand how a pedestrian-looking bunch of shops could somehow be a fantasy japanese castle.

Turns out you go into the cinema, click on something, and then get tp'd up into the sky. 

Romancing the Stone

In a world where the 'moving picture' reigns - art expressed through machinima, scripted sculptures, particle shows, and interactive installations, to name just a few, nessuno Myoo's avatar is perhaps his only concession to the moving art form.

Robot angel, or a winged cyborg: over the past three years in Second Life nessuno has refined his look, but never changed it; he's that kind of guy, one with well-defined tastes, and the confidence to let others discover it without making a whole lot of crass fuss. His look has its roots in scifi - the Blade Runner end of the spectrum; of comic books - everything from Popeye to Dylan Dog; and of horror stories, a genre he discovered in those impressionable years just after high school: nineteenth century anglophone writers like Bram Stoker, Lovecraft, and Poe but also twentieth century masters like Stephen King.

To a crisp

We're deep into the burn today, but not nearly as laggy as you might think. Raven Haalan and the team, organizers and builders and bacon-purveyors alike -  have done a really great job! Raven was even nice enough to edit himself for this photo, when I couldn't get him to rezz quite right.

 I said he was a star for being so cooperative, when he must be multitasking like crazy, but he was quick to play down his role, and seemed sweetly positive when I broached the subject of - what else - doing it all again next year.

Raven Haalan: No, I'm just a helper bee! Next year? lol yah, of course! This is just a start, not the end, the team is good this year, and everyone is playin' nice, mostly, which makes for many smiles, if tired ones.

This was the scene at the Main Stage, lots of jugglers and people on stilts, I showed up in time to hear the excellent group ♫~D R U M~♫ Divine Rhythms of Universal Music, they're a seven-strong drum ensemble, including Lorin Tone, who puts the group's success down to the beneficial effects of bashing things.  If you've never heard them play, you can catch them tomorrow at noon for the opening of super spooky Halloween- themed The Unknown Country.

Looking in

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another’s view of the universe which is not the same as ours, and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us.

 Marcel Proust

It's a tough job but someone has to do it, and it turns out Phil Strang is far from cornering the 'Your Virtual Boobs Here' market. I ran into another version of the same game, this time with a classical twist. Pazzo Pestana has an atelier on Gabi Riel's sim New Toulouse where, for a fee, he will immortalize you in one of a number of poses and backgrounds borrowed from famous pictures, anything from Rubens to Botticelli. 

Pazzo Pestana: When one exposes one's creations to the public, one must expect all sorts of reactions...

Seems to me all the exposing was on the other side, but I took his point.  He has so many here, I didn't think he'd miss one.

When it sizzles

You know you were never really 'in' SL when an excitable Costa Rica resident launches into a chant of 'who told you that?' punctuated by a laundry list of alleged VIPs you've never met, with names like Harpic and Toxer, and it takes a good 15 minutes to remember that Mute has been renamed Block in 2.0.
In other more useful news, Mab MacMoragh has arranged for Oberon Onmura's meteorological instal Storm Cells to go on display again over at ::Soup:: it's really worth seeing.

Anyway, B2 opens tomorrow, as you  have already heard seen and smelt from everyone else.
It's the Pepsi to Burning Life's Coca Cola; smaller, essentially the same, but with more bacon taste.Traditions have been respected - sims have names such as Rabbit Hole and 12 Mile, big names rub shoulders with less well-crafted efforts, and there's plenty of lag to go around.
Plenty.

Sold

It's not Top Ten List evil, but it's definitely a nose-wrinkler, like Farmville and shoulder-pets, possibly Plurk. Having your portrait painted in SL, I mean. Not snapping photos while doing something interesting, I'm all for that, but just sort of sitting there, like the pigs in wigs you see on the walls of stately homes, or the women in Christower Dae's cattle-log, from which I got myself removed to the bemusement of every virtual signorina in Facebook. Why did it matter? Don't know. Where, how and why and where are the lines of acceptable admiration drawn? Having one's portrait done in SL seems to belong to the same family of demeaning and vacuous activities as beauty pageants which are even more eye-rollingly awful in the virtual world for all the reasons that have just crossed your mind.  So - Bleh - and it's a justified bleh; I'm certain because Voice of Reason and respected art historian Rowan Derryth says so too. Well, she nodded anyway.

And yet, and yet.

Numbers game

Inworldz Thirza is not a thing of beauty; the answer would be to ante up, but frankly, I don't know how many different grids I want to give my credit card number to. Or how many hours I want to spend dressing yet another dolly from scratch. But it was a trip worth making, to sim Taboo, to see a preview of Wizard Gynoid's Burning Life2 build. As you know, this year will be quite a departure from the vast acreage of the 2009 extravaganza; it's tiny by comparison, and independent of LL; but still no megaprims allowed, because of lag... nice to see some hidebound traditions have been respected.

There's newness though - all the prep and testing for Wizzy's burnt offering has been done over the past few months here in Inworldz, with help and suggestions from fellow builders soror Nishi, Artistide Despres, and scripter Nur Ophuls. The scripts to burn this down are rather complex, mainly because the temple will straddle a sim boundary. And all that jazz.

Machinimuwa

Making movies in SL is super fun, but ideally, if you're a beginner like me, or not very good (ditto), common decency should prevent you from inflicting your oeuvre on all but your most kind-hearted friends. Someone who makes trailers for a living, and knows what he is talking about, told me the other day that most machinima are way too long. "To be really effective, the length should be between thirty seconds and a minute and a half," he said. "That's enough to get the story across, and keep the viewer interested." That seemed way too short. I mean, most music videos last about three minutes, the length of a song. I dismissed him as a harsh know-it-all.

Turns out, he is quite right.