Belated Rezday

I've had a lot of RL issues come up recently, and my human was out of town for several days last week; so I was a bit shocked when I realized that I had missed my own rezday: Dec. 9! In the compressed world of SL, it seems much longer. So much has happened, and I've gone through a lot of changes.

The unbearable noobiness of being

My first house

A face to frighten small children

Older but perhaps not wiser

I Can Sing a Rainbow

Winlight has returned, in the form of a FirstLook client. The lighting is amazing, and the water is fantastic!


I suggest that anyone reading this should run, not walk, to secondlife.com, and download this viewer to try it out. Hopefully, they'll work out the remaining rough edges (if any) quickly and get it incorporated into the main release.

There goes the neighborhood

A neighbor two parcels over just put up a big skybox which blocks my view to the west.


The roof is covered with a huge "YARD SALE" sign, and the other end is open, so I guess that's what's going in there. I hope he or she has the decency to change the outside texture to something more inspiring: a Monet, perhaps?

Nerd Test

Took the Nerd Test at http://www.nerdtests.com/ft_nt2.php.



Apparently, I rate as a Dorky Nerd King. Well, no surprises there...

Will work for prims

I got a gig helping build a new sim, Beyond Eden. It's a lot of fun having 15,000 prims to play with, plus I get some RL income out of the deal as well. Now all I need is inspiration...

Sometimes I Just Can't Help Redecorating

I was getting tired of clouds drifting through my workshop, so I lashed everything down and moved the complex up to 300 meters. It was also time to tear down all of the buildings and rebuild with something different (always an ongoing project in my case). Taking inspiration* from SteamSkyCity, I jettisoned the noisy steampunk rocket engines underneath and put in a central tower with 30-meter-diameter counterrotating props to hold the complex in the air.

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* i.e. Ripping off their idea.

A Gentleman in Caledon

I've been fascinated by the Caledon sims and steampunk/Victorian lifestyle. But to explore the region further, I decided that one must dress like the natives. I found a nice suit at Phantasgorium (I believe that's the name), donned a bowler hat (a top hat seemed too dressy for everyday use), and readied myself for further explorations.

Gamba's Castle Update

My friend and business partner, Mare, is a part-time mermaid, so I thought it would be nice to have a pool, and move her lodgings from the separate skybox they were in down next to it. The pool and house are on the left side in the pictures.

SteamSkyCity

Made a visit to the new SteamSkyCity in Caledon. An impressive build, and pure steampunk. You can get an idea as to the scale from the two figures in the landing bay (I'm the one on the left).

New Neighbors

I decided to check on my ground-level terrace, and found that the Japanese-style building that had been next door was gone, and in its place was a rather large skyscraper. These things happen suddenly and unexpectedly in SL.


It rather blocks the view that I had; fortunately I have already moved everything to my platform just above the cloud layer.

Castle In the Air 2

I wasn't happy with the particle effect I had underneath the Castle grounds, so I decided to borrow some tech from the steampunk crowd. This makes the construction feel more dynamic, in my opinion.


The accompanying low sound effect of the engines adds ambiance to the Castle and grounds as well.

Castle in the Air

I've put my place in Sipiwesk through some changes in the past. Why settle for one design when it costs nothing (well, my time) to do something different?

I lately decided to get above the clutter of neighbors. At first, I built a 200-meter tower, which worked, but lacked a certain ambience, being done in a rather austere Faux Medieval style.

But if you're trying to get above the crowd, there are better ways. After all, SL doesn't limit you to mundane things like physical laws. The Law of Gravity is more like ... a guideline.

So I tore down the tower and rebuilt just above the cloud layer, at 230 meters. It's a work in progress (and probably always be), but I'm much more satisfied with the effect.

I added particles coming out of the base to maintain altitude and position. A local teleport system gets me around without having to waste prims on things like stairs and the like.

Unfortunately, it isn't as isolated up here as I would like. It seems everybody is building skyboxes these days, and there are floating constructions all the way up to 700 meters in the neighborhood. But they are reasonably distant enough that I feel like I have some privacy.

Speaking Out

I guess I should weigh in on the proposal to add voice to Second Life. When I first entered the virtual world, I had expected something like that, and was a bit surprised to find that it wasn't implemented.

That being said, I don't plan on using voice when/if it does get put in. My Otherworldly voice (as Ordinal Malaprop so quaintly puts it) doesn't sound right for my appearance in SL, and I like the opportunity to correct mistakes before I send the text. And wouldn't it spoil a beautiful female avatar's aesthetics if she spoke in a booming male voice (there are lots of those in SL: you know who you are!).

But voice will be ideal, as has been said, for lectures and presentations, and those who prefer speech over typing. It should prove interesting to see how this develops.

Spectacles

After some experimentation, I decided that adding some glasses make me look a little less, well, scary. I think it makes me look studious (as in student, not stud). Check out the new me over on the right side of the page.

Second Life: The Final Frontier

Other bloggers have mentioned Spaceport Alpha, so I thought I should have a look for myself, being a long-time space exploration fan and amateur astronomer. How long-time? Let's just say that I remember when Sputnik was launched: my Father recorded the beeps of its signal on his ham radio equipment.


This is one of the most amazing sims in SL. There is a lot of information to look at, and the roof of the main building has life sized models of nearly every NASA and Soviet rocket ever launched.

A model of Kennedy Space Center

The Vertical Assembly Building doesn't look so big after all...

The grandaddy of them all -- Robert Goddard's first liquid-fueled rocket , 1926

I wonder what old Robert would have thought of the Saturn V, only 40 years later?

The Business end of Atlantis

If you have any interest in spaceflight at all, this is a must-see.

This isn't in the script

I was unpleasantly surprised when I went to the LSL Wiki page that has been the backup ever since Second Life's website took it down "due to a pending upgrade". I'm still new enough to scripting that I have to constantly refer to it when writing scripts. What popped up was the dreaded

404 Not Found

error. I tried several times over a period of time and got the same result, so it wasn't just a temporary Web glitch.

An emergency Google found another backup here. [Big sigh of relief] But I liked the color scheme at the first backup site better. At least I can continue to try to figure out the llParticleSystem parameters.

Gaining Face

I'm not quite a nubie any more, so I've been working on my appearance. The first step was to get some better hair.

[rant] Do you know how hard it is to find decent male hair, especially for an older avatar? As in Real Life, 95% of the stores are geared for those of the female persuasion. Us Y-chromosome types are relegated to a couple of vendors in a back corner. Of the basement.

To be honest, there are a few good men's stores out there, but even they didn't have what I was looking for in hairstyle. [end rant]

I finally find something acceptable in SL Exchange, the Brits Brandon Varvatos style. It took (and is still taking) some restyling to get it to work right on my particular head, but copy and mod are enabled. I haven't quite gotten the appearance I want, but I could learn to like this look.


I do look rather grizzled, though -- I've noticed that AV children run away screaming whenever I TP in.

Explorations

The ruins at Relic are fascinating, in a creepy sort of way. Perched on the top of a huge pinnacle, this abandoned palace would be a good place for a goth party or moody machinima. Be careful of the dropoffs, though; that first step is a dilly!

Call me Minto

Here I am, a couple of weeks from my creation, an inhabitant of this reality called "Second Life". My skills are increasing slowly; I don't bump into walls or inadvertently wear boxes on my head as often as I first did.

My first experiences were as a "freebie", a landless Palidan wandering and wondering where I willed in the vast world, picking teleport destinations by the attraction of their names alone, encountering infinitely-varied creations and castles literally in the air around each corner.

Feeding the fish at Hypatia Park

Shortly later, now grubstaked by a paid account and a generous deposit of L$, I bought my first 512 sq. m. piece of land, in Varsity. This was enough to throw up a freebie house and a few items of furniture. There was something satisfying in having a place that I knew was my own, where I could TP when weary of the wider world.

The Old Homestead

Which brings us up to the present. I traded up to a 1024 sqm lot in Siriwesk, put the original lot up for sale, and began building my dream castle -- a work still very much in progress. The first lot sold just the other day -- at a satisfyingly-high margin of profit -- to a neighbor who wanted to expand. My ambition? To master the wizardry underlying the Metaverse (prims, textures, scripts, and animations), and take the coveted title of Technomage. I have a few ideas for SL products to develop for sale; maybe I can someday move in the same social circles as Anshe Chung. As if.

So, why the name "Minto" you ask? There is a web site which generates a "Hobbit name" for you: http://www.chriswetherell.com/hobbit/ . My RL self -- being a Tolkien fan since the late 1960's, long before it became fashionable -- once tried it and came up with the name "Minto Gamgee-Took". So when the time came to pick my name, the last name "Gamba" in the list of choices made it irresistible. I am not a hobbit, and don't yet know if there are any in SL (although I wouldn't be surprised in the least), but I'm rather taken with the name. It's mine, my own -- my Prec... *ahem* Excuse me.


The Japanese have a very civilized and beautiful tradition called the "Moon-watching party", where they gather to silently watch the Moon rise. I found a great spot for my own Moon-watching party in a rather nice Japanese garden at Ray's Studio and Gardens in Shawangunk.