DHL has apparently discovered the secret to stopping facts you don’t want to hear. As originally attempted by Usagi in the Welcome Area, the time-honored use of the letter G to stop facts has become a #secondlife tradition.
Aimee Weber never fails to amaze me with the detail in her texturing, so it’s no accident that on most trips I take to Midnight City I make it a rule to invade whatever skybox project she’s got going.
The shadows baked into the textures of this laboratory build are, hands down, the best I’ve seen in Second Life. Aimee is truly a master of the medium. There are more pictures of this stunning room in the portfolio section of Aimee’s website, without the map of the upcoming Relay For Life grounds, posing stands, or assorted clutter in my picture.
I love Second Life. The sights. The sounds. The fashion. The fashion faux pas.
Exhibit A: This dapper gentleman I ran across in Midnight City. His pasty white ass, bared in his leather chaps and clearly visible from halfway across the sim, was what first drew my attention. I wish I’d left it at that, because orbiting the camera around to his front side revealed what could be the single worst fashion choice I’ve yet to see in Second Life.
Put that thing away before someone gets hurt.
An island I tried to teleport to last night was offline, so SL performed its magic and dropped me in a nearby sim. In this case, it was a happy accident, because I ended up in the Korean language welcome area, which is still under construction.
The focus of the Korean welcome area is an attractive glassed-over enclosure on the waterfront of an urban area. The detailing is superb, but not so much that the area’s frame rate suffers.
Read the rest of this entry »Time to jump on another Internet memetic bandwagon. I ran across the MyHeritage Find the Celebrity in You demo page on Torrid Midnight’s blog, A Work in Progress.
It works like this: you submit a headshot, and the clever algorithms at MyHeritage figure out which celebrities you most resemble.
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UPDATE: The technique described in this article is already obsolete with the coming of version 1.11.1; see Web browsing inside SL, redux for details about making this work in the more recent version.
Which may lead you to ask, “So how does SL display web pages inside the client?” It’s because the first part of Linden Lab’s work to integrate the Mozilla browser with the SL client is up and running now. The in-world help window is an embedded browser window.
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Back in the middle of March, a small assortment of ne’er-do-wells (including yours truly) descended upon Bedazzle Studios’ set for their film Silver Bells & Golden Spurs. The set was a remarkably-detailed build, and in true Bedazzle fashion, it comprised nearly all 15,000 prims permitted in the sim.
Though the lag was intense in spots because of the excess primmage, it made for some amazingly beautiful scenery. The texturing was superb, and the inclusion of scads of little details made for realism like I rarely see in any 3D environment, let alone Second Life.
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My favorite vehicle in SL got an extensive facelift. The newest Flying Tako is a sailboat powered by Second Life’s own wind, and it is both fun to sail and easy on the eyes.
The Tako 3.1 sails just as nicely as its predecessor, the 2 series. You have the option of propelling the Tako with SL’s native wind, a fixed “practice” wind, or “race” wind provided in official races. But this is all old news to anyone who’s sailed a Tako before.
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I was looking over the map on the Second Life home page, and a distinctive circular structure caught my eye in Georgean. Upon teleporting over to have a closer look, I found myself in the middle of a large event space for the 2ASE.
Searching through the forums, I ran across the 2ASE announcement, which doesn’t do much to describe what’s taking place. I expect to see lots of high geekery on display by this weekend, when the event officially takes place, some of which may or may not have something to do with satellites.
Kex Godel threw together a Second Life Random Release Notes Generator. This fabulous toy creates bogus release notes, some of which are uncanny in their plausibility.
One of my current favorites:
* Disabled building tools to reduce load.
** We may have to undo this in the next update.
Somewhat disturbing is the frequency with which notes have to do with either ponies or Torley Linden. I suppose I should be thankful that I have yet to encounter a note that features both.
