Double Build

It's almost Golden Week in Japan, when they celebrate both heritage and the environment in a four day festival. After recent events, one can only imagine what a poignant occasion this year's Greenery Day will be. Many SL residents have contributed in a practical and a spiritual way to the long road to recovery. Alizarin Goldflake has made Requiem for Fukushima, a sort of sculptural haiku that helps us reflect on the awe-inspiring effects of nature unbalanced.
Alizarin Goldflake: This build is the beginning of the story post-ecological disaster, which is exactly what Fukushima is. This is my vision of what the radiation is doing to the nearby sea. It is awful and beautiful at the same time.

Enter the pyramid and you're surrounded by

The freakiest show

If you're curious about what war is good for, and would like to confirm your suspicions that it's absolutely nothing, then the place to be this weekend in SL is Four Bridges. 

Trill Zapatero has curated a wonderful, all-star show at

The weight of consequences

If you're dancing physics, you're dancing contact. 

If you're dancing chemistry, you're doing something else.

Steve Paxton

Push is the perfect name for a sim containing Oberon Onmura's work. He is a pushy artist - in the best possible sense of the word, not angling for publicity, but producing amazing physical effects of collision and collapse that are the hallmarks of his minimalist art. The five piece retrospective show at Push is a window into his thoughts on dance, music, nature; it's another opportunity to enjoy the themes and admire his genius for elegant lines, both in his scripts and his builds.
Primcounter extraordinare and handyman/ex superhero Dividni Shostakovich was at Push with us, he likes all that dance and art stuff, and (being ancient) knew all about the 70's dance movement  that inspired Oberon's build Contact Improvisation.

The men rattled on about all that for a while, naming names of

Private Eye

Sadly, you'll never see Photo of the Month; this is a PG blog. It's of Georg Janick, wandering about Caerleon with his penis out. Questions whir across your mind - Who was the lucky non-gender-specific lady? swiftly followed by - How can you eliminate every atom of that mental image from your mind? and then - Is she kidding? Idk, with difficulty, and no.
Then again, it was at Caerleon, so maybe it was Performance Art? An ironic acknowledgment of general opinion? No, he'd have to wear the attachment a lot higher up for that to make sense.
Which brings us to: What is proper SLettiquette when you see unexpected genitalia in a public place? (Snapping a discreet photo is a given.) A floating tag above your head saying 'WANG ALERT' might make the people around you check their fly, but that seems a bit too client-side. Any suggestions?
I miss the heyday of the SL Fashion Police, so much better than the halitosis pumped out by shut-ins like Prok, Saveme and Crap.
Non-gender-specific ladies is a misnomer, of course; any real woman will tell you that we can all specifically spot a shemale a mile away, but like the Happy in the Room, we choose to pretend we haven't noticed, mostly out of pity, sometimes out of friendship. It's not an anti-gay/bi curious thing, it's an anti-don't take me for a moron thing. Everything from word choice to wardrobe lets us know you're a hetero father of three, just like you know we're not 21, and imagining anyone has anyone fooled is beneath your intelligence.
But then that whole Avatar Identity stuff is arrant (and arrogant) nonsense. You don't 'become someone else' when you enter a virtual world - your talent, real life experience, morals, and education don't suddenly take a giant leap forward when you log into SL. *Gosh, imagine those dire poetry evenings and art openings if that were actually possible.* You just drop some of your inhibitions, that's all.
When you open your mouth and move, the real you is revealed, whether you're aware of it or not. For some, that's a wonderful revelation worth sharing with the world, but in many cases, well, let's just say it would be better if you kept it in your pants.

Invitation Theory

The worst way to advertise your art show is by sending a Primvitation. Firstly, they're not nearly as decorative or informative as the makers think they are. Secondly, people are not always home or in a place where they can rezz when your Special and oh-so-unsolicited Gift arrives, so we can't see what the hell it is you're sending us, and the stupid thing goes stinking up our already overflowing Recent Objects. Unlike an IM, which I can read in email, the 'invitation' bit of the primvitation is lost when you send a mystery 'Object' to my Inventory when I'm offline. This one, by Misprint Thursday, showed up when I was inworld and having a bit of a sit down. I've not been well.

It turned out to be an invite to the UTSA's latest show Visualizing Theorem.
Misprint has created the Primvitation from Hell,  an ugly perspex column thingy, crammed with 2 notecards, 2 scripts, a LM (the only useful item) and a HUD. Apparently the theory being visualized here is "more is... more".
The HUD is fussy and distracts from the art. Unintuitive to a tee, it makes TP balls rezz when you click on it, because yeah! that's what the sim is lacking! more busy crap floating about.

This is what the HUD looks like when you're in Douglas Story and co's installation, called Galileo something-or-other. 'Colonic irrigation meets Trip to the Planetarium' would be closer to the mark. The 3 page notecard  dumped on you upon arrival has 'excerpts' (whew) from Artist's Statements, a trite gushapalooza about dog friendships maybe? Not sure, they lost me. But I am sure that all the 'surprise particles' in the world aren't reward enough for being subjected to that much drivel. It's always amazing that people who work in close collaboration still end up with so little sense of proportion/absurdity in their work.

The nicest part, to be honest, was the cool clean sky above UTSA. 16 is too many exhibits, and many of them are too close together to really work, both visually and in terms of lag. But the worst part is still that Primvitation. Don't send me any more, I mean it.