Me is Hating On Blogger Right Now

Note: I fixed the Blogger boo-boos referred to in the post that follows.

Written 19 March, 2011

Me is Hating on Blogger Right Now

Blogger has the annoying-- more than annoying-- habit of adding code. Looking at the HTML of any of my blogposts I see repetitive instances of setting fonts and alignment where fonts and alignments haven't been changed.

Another of Blogger's bad habits is adding blank lines. Grrr!

The previous post is a copy of the New tab at the head of the blog. I spent several hours tonight trying to reformat it after adding new information at the top. Every month I've been struggling.

And so the previous post is the contents of the new tab. Note the extra lines and font inconsistencies. They're not my doing. It's bad Blogger's fault.

Next time I report on something new on the Whimsy sims I'll start a new file over at New. It's just too much trouble modifying existing posts.

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What's New

Here I'll be highlighting a new or existing feature on our sims, or something Sweetie and I have created. I'll update the page every now and again. Readers can scroll down for earlier features.

The Temple of Doom

18 March, 2011

Beneath This Calm Surface ...

...

...And Through This Pipe ...

... Lies the Temple of Doooom!

We've been reworking the terrain on the western half of Whimcentricity to reroute the labyrinth. That's because the southwest corner is now part of the four-sim stage area set up by our neighbor to the south, Leaf Shermer.

The path for the new labyrinth is laid out, subject to a polishing by Sweetie in Backhoe, a Mac program that develops terrain maps. But the big news is an underwater temple or ruin. The top floor will host art exhibits, and the bottom floor...

Well, the bottom floor is pure Indiana Jones. Think snakes, piranha, giant mousetraps, dancing lobsters, and a giant tiki who throws smoulder rocks at passers-by-- with everything curtained in inky blackness (which is yet to be installed).

The build is far from complete, but open for walkthroughs.


Rockets and Such

3 February, 2011



Whimsy has had quite a few tweaks lately. There are new bridges and cuddle areas on Whimsy Kaboom, a new grass texture for the third level of terrain on Whimsy, and nice low-lag one-prim butterflies here and there. But the things that are the most fun make Whimsy more dangerous rather than more beautiful.

There's now a Don't Sit in the Geyser poseball on Whimcentricity. Avatars walking toward the renegade geyser Gary encounter a barricade and a warning sign. If they choose to disregard it and sit in the geyser anyway, all I can say is, I hope they're taken out Whimsurance-- and the rider!

I cannot fail to suggest you ride the V2 rocket here on Whimsy Kaboom.It will blast you realistically into space. Be sure to look down, as the ground dropping away is an awesome sight. The rocket is a teleporter (avatars will wind up anywhere in the sim, as set by the owner). And yes, it's for sale, $795 on the SL Marketplace and $750L in world.


A Whimsical Christmas

29 November, 2010

Whimsy had a freak Thanksgiving snowstorm, and now the land is white. I said what the heck and set out Christmas decorations. I had a talk with Leaf Shermer, and we decided to make Whimsical Mischief the source of all Christmas tackiness. I put out every stupid high-prim, full-bright, badly-textured Christmas hoohaw in my Inventory. See it here.






New Teleport Board

November, 2011

Tonight I replaced Whimsy's old teleport sign with this one:



The old board was designed to look like the signs used by the National Park Service here in the U.S. The new sign is brass, with engraved lettering. From the sign, visitors can visit ten of Whimsy's points of interest. The sign sits at the entry point to Whimsy, here. (Late Note: With Sweetie's help, I moved the sign; now it sits at the bottom of the entrance ramp.)


The Bob Saga

Late September, 2010 through Halloween

Ongoing coverage of the kidnapping of our bobbing bird is keeping me busy in this blog. Whimsy has a few Halloween decorations, but otherwise our sims are unchanged. Start reading The Bob Saga here.




Whimsical Mischief

16 October, 2010

Sweetie and I have been working on the new terrain for Whimsical Mischief. She has created a remarkable underwater landscape which will soon enough be filled with wildlife, caves, and a rail line. She's still smoothing out the edges before we put prims down.

3 October, 2010

We have a new sim on our little grid-- Whimsical Mischief. There's not much there yet, but do cruise by every now and again and watch it as it develops.We're in terraforming mode this weekend.


The Follow Virtual World Tour In a Day Concert

25 September, 2010

The Follow concert last night, spanning four sims on our bloc, was fabulous. Here's the writeup.


New Sims for Whimsy and Eccentricity

13 September, 2010

The big news around Whimsy and Eccentricity this week is the upcoming addition of two sims to our little bloc of four. Whimsical Mischief, which until now was positioned one grid square north of Whimsy Kaboom, will be moved south of Kaboom, and Leaf Shermer's new homestead sim Idiosyncrasy has already been delivered. It sits west of her sim Eccentricity.

Stay tuned for further developments


Swampland

7 September, 2010

One of Whimsy's newer features is a nice little swamp near its southeast corner. See if you can find it!










Whimsy, Beautiful and Dangerous!

Hidden Whimsy

31 August, 2010



The theme of Whimsy is Beautiful and Dangerous. For every breaktaking spot, there's a pirinha waiting to bite or a hot smoking lava rock about to fall on your head. Hey, don't blame us for living in a geothermally active area! It's why we give out hard hats!

To illustrate our theme, we've created two sets of teleportals. One leads folks to Whimsy's most beautiful spots...



... the other to its most dangerous.



To use the portals, click the door to open, then click the spiral to teleport. Near each landing point you'll find a door that will take you to your next destination. Eventually, you'll wind up back at the starting point.

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I Found it in the Sock Drawer

Written 18 March, 2011

I Found it in the Sock Drawer

I don't know about you, but I'm forever having entire folders vanish from their allotted location. One day Clothing > Chey's Things > Weapons > Edged Weapons > Swords > Scripted Swords > Japanese Swords > Katanas, and there it is, right where it's supposed to be. Two days later the entire Weapons folder is nowhere to be found.

OMG, it's gone! Gone forever!

No it's not. It's just in the sock drawer.

It's way easy to inadvertently move a folder into another folder. It happens all the time to me.

And so, I always look in my sock drawer. And there it is!

Actually, what I do is type the name of the missing folder, or, if I can't remember what I named it, something I know that's in the folder. When I locate the folder I drag it back into position and all is good.

I always check my trash before I empty it to be sure an important folder isn't in there. It's a good habit to get into.

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Extraordinary Derendition

Written 27 February - 14 March, 2011

Extraordinary Derendition

When I got home from a hard day of rocket building the last thing I expected to see was Sweetie in the throes of imagination overload.

It seems she had read my blogpost about the Phoenix Viewer's new permanent derendering feature and it had quite gone to her head.

"I've decided upon a business venture," she said with a sparkle in her eye.

"You're wearing that prim eye sparkle again, aren't you?" I asked.

"Only because it messes up the Lindens' avatar facial recognition algorthyms," she said.

"Or course it does," I said.

"At long last, I've hit upon a business strategy that will take full advantage of my espionage training."

"And what would that be?" I asked. "A double-naught dating service?"

"A service, yes! But double-naught, no!"

"Double-naught is soooo Sean Connery," I said. "So what kind of business will it be?"

"Ever since I read your post I've been thinking about deacquisiton theory," she said.

"Deacquisition..." I said.

Sweetie likes to theorize. Her work in donut string theory is legend. But what in the world was deacquisition theory?

"What are you reading?" I asked, thinking that might give me a club.

You might think I meant to type the word clue in the line above, and maybe I do, but sometimes I think stunning Sweetie's ideas might slow them down enough for me to follow her.

"Hamlet Au on the deacquisition of credibility," she said. "It's called The Unmaking of a Reputation: Notes From an Increasingly Irrelevant Blog."

"Ouch," I said. "And that second text?"

"M. Linden on the deaquisition of market share."

"Okay, I'll bite," I said. "What is deaquisition theory?"

"So much of Second Life is about acquisition," Sweetie said. "Getting freebies. Buying shoes. Skins. Hair. Gadgets. Friends. Vehicles. Lindens. Sex toys. But what about de-acquiring things?"

"Exactly what sorts of things would people want to de-acquire?" I asked.

"Oh, cheating lovers," Sweetie said. "Blingy shoes you bought your first week in world. Broken vehicles. All those one-prim flat plants.

"Your blog truly inspired me," she said, "and I've come to the realization that we need to start a deaquisiton service."

"To help people get rid of things?"

"Yes!" she said enthusiastically. "We'll derender it for them. Neighbors' prims that intrude into their parcels. Griefer objects.Ugly hair. All those textures they no longer use."

"That seems pretty tame to me," I said. "How will a derendering service take advantage of your super spy powers?"

"It's not just a derendering service, it's an Asset Blacklist Service."

"Okay, now it's starting to make sense," I said, "although maybe not in a good way."

"Here's our slogan: Let us perform extraordinary derendition on your prims and enemies!"

"Is that within the Terms of Service?" I asked.

"Perhaps," she said. "Perhaps not. We will, of course maintain plausible deniability," she said.

"Right," I said.

"Because if some Linden should ever come after us..." Her hand moved instinctively toward her katana. I've asked her for that gesture a thousand times, but she refuses to give it to me.

"Off with their heads?" I asked hopefully.

"Let's just say they'll have to be collateralized," she said.

"If we don't get busted we'll make a fortune," I said.

She ignored me. "We'll be engaging in Asset Blacklist operations," she said. "Above and beyond simple and obsolete black ops."

"You're scaring me," I said.

"Black ops are old-fashioned," she said. "But Blacklist Operations... that's a whole new game.

"You realize this is a game changer," she said. "No more 1000-yard sniper shots. No more acid baths. No more bags of lime. No more cutting avatars into tiny pieces and mixing them in with the sausage. We'll simply derender them."

"Think of what we'll save in ammunition costs alone," I said.

"Before long we'll have an immense list of UUIDs of derendered objects," she said. "Then we'll start an Asset Blacklist Reacquisiton Service."

"Get them to pay us to be able to see their friends and objects again?"

"Exactly," she said. "Think. Some guy pays us to derender his girlfriend's new hairdo because he hates it. Then a month later she asks him what he thinks about the new tint she gave it. Think what he'd pay us to re-render her hair."

"We could have a side business as an asset blacklist risk management consultancy," I said.

"Exactly," she said. "We'll recruit newbies as agents. Teach them to derender. Before long we'll have a derendition army."

"Maybe even a derendition sim!" I said. "Derendition Island. We can do derendition experiments."

"Exactly," she said. "Maybe it's better sometimes to bury an unwanted object in 72 levels of subfolders in your inventory than to derender it.

"And what if," she mused, "you overload the asset blacklist. Is there a UUID critical mass? If you overstuff the list, might it explode and create a black hole in the middle of Second Life? Might the derendered people in the list work together and make an escape?"

"Like Superman's criminals escaping from the Phantom Zone?" I asked.

"Just like that," she said. "We're messing with the very fabric of the Metaverse here!"

"Okay, I'm in," I said. "When do we start?"

"We, Kemo-Sabe? This was my idea."

"Well, it was my blog that gave you the idea."

"I've sent in my double-oh license for renewal," she said. "When it comes back I'll be licensed to derender."

"Use your superpower wisely," I cautioned.

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Meadows Become Possible

Written 9 March, 2011

Meadows Become Possible

I don't know who first came up with the idea, but my hat is off to him or her, for he or she made meadows and grasslands possible in Second Life..

Around 2008 (as far as I can tell) someone came up with a simple idea: hollow a cylinder, hollow it to 95%, and paste textures on the inside and outside, creating a ring of flowers. One prim.

A single circle of flowers or grass looks a little sparce,  especially when viewed from above...

...but dragging and dropping a few times will make for a beautiful field of flowers...

... unless you look directly from above:

The round plants made the creation of lush meadows and grasslands possible without breaking the prim bank.

The first such grasses and flowers Sweetie and I saw were at the gorgeous Forest Feast sim. The plants were low-prim and stunning, but were sold no-copy, which would have made even a small meadow prohibitively expensive-- unless you owned Forest Feast (the photo above the title was taken there). Fortunately, we soon found a Buddhist sim with Real Flowers, which were inexpensive, and copyable. They were modifiable, too, which allowed Sweetie to give subtle shadings to the plants she put on the ground.

The gardens at Whimsy take advantage of Real Flowers' flowers and grasses.:

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How to Make a Flat Prim Even Flatter (Or, How to Make a Flag)

Written 6 March, 2011

How to Make a Flat Prim Even Flatter

Or, How to Make a Flag

Here's a trick to make the thin edge of a flattened prim even thinner. It takes only a few seconds, and it's well worth the effort.

Flattening the prim works best for flexible objects like flags and clothing, but is handy for paper and the thin edges of three-prim plants.

Let's make a flag.

First, we rez a prim. Distinguished looking, isn't it?

Now, in the Edit menu, select the Object Tab, and, in the Path Cut fields type 0.375 and 0.875. You'll see this halves the thickness of the prim along the Y dimension.

Here's the prim from the same camera angle.

Here it is with an uncut prim beside it:

Now type .01 in the Y Size field of your prim. This sets the Y dimension to the smallest allowable, 0.01 meters.

Here are the two prims, side-by-side. You can see the prim we cut is much thinner.

Here I've rotated the prim to 0,90,0 and checked the Flexible Path box under the Features tab. I set Softness to 3.0, Gravity, Drag, Tension, Force X and Force Z to 0, Softness to 3.0, Wind to 1.0, and Force X to 1, and the prim is waving merrily in the wind.

Now I add a flag texture Sweetie gave me long ago, rotate the texture by 270 degrees on the front of the flag, and...

But uh-oh, what's this?

Cutting the prim created two surfaces where there was once one, so the texture is displayed twice at 1:1 density on each face. And not only that, it's upside-down! And yes, that's a sea monster swimming by. Ya gotta love Second Life.

To fix, I turn on Select Texture and select both faces. Then I go to the Texture tab and select both faces. I set rotation to 90 and set Repeats Per Face to 1 (H) and 0.5 (V).

This puts the texture in the correct proportion, but things still don't look right.

Still in the Texture tab, set the vertical offset of the top face to 0.25 and the bottom face to 0.75.

Now the textures on the two faces are properly aligned, and our flag is complete.

Except for the pole, of course. But you know how to make a flagpole, don't you?

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Plants

Three-Prim Plants Make the World A Better Place

Written 6 March, 2011

Plants

I love Second Life plants. They transform inhospitable landscapes into fields and forests, jungles and prairie, bogs and deserts.

When I first came to Second Life in 2006, plants were made of three linked flat prims offset sixty degrees from one another, like so:

Plant makers found photos of plants on the Internet or in books and altered them in Photoshop, replacing background with transparency, and then importing them into Second Life. The best plant makers drew their plants to avoid the uncanny valley effect.*

The imported textures were pasted onto the flat sides of the prims, and voila! A three-prim plant, like this freebie bird of paradise:

Most three-prim plants had problems. First, from many angles they looked exactly like what they were: textures pasted onto flat prims. Second, many creators didn't bother to set the thin sides of the prims to transparent,  causing unsightly lines when the plants were viewed from certain angles. Third, many creators didn't bother to cut the flat prims to make them as thin as possible, making them even more unsightly. And fourth, many plant textures showed white outlines around the visible plants, like so:

Note not only the white outlines around this two-prim amaranthus, but the holes in the leaves and floating specks caused by poor preparation.

Flexible prims arrived on the grid shortly before I did, and plant creators were quick to take advantage of them. With flexibility properly set, three-prim flowers and trees swayed gently in the wind, adding immersivitity to gardens and fields.

Some content creators were extraordinarily skillful in creating these early plants. I bought many from Julia Hathor and Lilith Heart, who were somehow to make their plants seem three-dimensional. Many of their plants are out on Whimsy today.

But most three-prim plants were then, and remain today, simply horrid. Fortunately, something better was about to come along.

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