Torley Lives

Second Life gets another Boing Boing sighting, courtesy of BuhBuhCuh Fairchild's upcoming Ed Wood film festival! This hit me out of nowhere (I just saw the announcement from the Alt-Zoom group inworld). Let's see what great garbage comes up!

I'm all about highlighting greatness in SL. And, to an extent, great things outside of SL which hook into it marvellously. One of these, without question, is Cristiano Midnight's Snapzilla, the picturesnugging resource. Snapzilla punched a hole in some of my frustrations, and it felt very cathartic?and still does?to snapz away my memories. Poor JPEG compression aside, I feel a great deal of energy emanating from all the sharing going on in here, and things continue to get better.

1. Snappier. Like a certain search engine, efficiency is the name of the game. Layout is bare-bones but no-frills is what's needed here for you to find the information you're looking for. Fast. While SL gets tied up in bogged database queries (which no doubt will improve someday, it just ain't there yet), ROAM is a cleansheeted website. It's that simple.

2. Snapzilla. Did I mention after you click on a sim, you can check out all the photos taken there and sent to Snapzilla? For example, try Ahern. See the "Snapshots" linkage? This is community connexions functionality you can't get within SL itself! It's so obvious that one day it'll undoubtedly be implemented in some form. Just not yet. But this is here NOW.

3. DEVIL IN THE DETAILS! Wanna know parcel size off the bat? Find Places won't show you that. But ROAM Regions will. How about landowner? Same deal! I used to waste time flying to a place to see who owns it. Well, if I wanna see what, say, Rathe Underthorn owns, I just look him up. (You'll also notice I get zero matches for obvious reasons.)

4. Easy copy-and-paste links. I have a lot of secondlife:// links here. From within SL, there is NO way to take the name of the place and automatically get it into the clipboard. So in the past, I've had to manually type out secondlife://simname/x/y. What a waste of time. Now, I just do a quick parcel lookup in ROAM Search, and it's mine. Right-click, copy the link, and Ctrl-V it back here. Indispensible for bloggers or the SL Forums or anyone who needs to reference SL material on the web.

5. Color Coded. I'm a big believer in using visual cues to help you sort and organize schtuff. ROAM Regions does this straightforwardly: the ol' SL Region listing showed everything in a monotone black. You couldn't tell for the sake of your secondary life what was on the mainland and what's a private island. Today, this very day, my fellow avatars, it's possible.
   
   
6. More. Rathe Underthorn promises me there's more exciting things to come. I trust him.

HOW'S THAT FOR ASYMMETRICAL GUERILLA WARFARE, BIZNATCHES?

It only took a few more seconds for me to break out in a supernova of praise. This is almost exactly what I envisioned. A big picture.

Contents of the 1.7 cereal box are still settling, so I'm going to share some recent happy memories from the world o' Second Life while everything rerezzes.

It can be peaceful to go away from the noise of the SL Forums for awhile and walk through the quiet parts of the world. Mustelid Carnot was so nice to make me this windchime?called "Fuurin- Melon Windchime". It reminds me of the great Japanese musician Kitaro, who's been travelling to 88 temples over the last few years to sample the sound of the bells in each one and weave it into his cosmic tapestry of music. Music, in that way, is like time travel. You can combine things that were said and played (and to imagine all that sonic energy dispersed out there), and bring cultures together. There's a great wonder for me in that. And there's great wonder for Mustelid in making more keepsake treasures.

I wonder what sorts of great beasts roamed Second Life before avatars settled in. Mythology as it exists is largely incomplete, with Magellan Linden making an appearance every now and then but with so much unestablished canon. We tale our own tales, spin our own stories?and maybe like Jesrad Seraph has done, bring beasts into the world which were previously thought extinct. In addition to arwinds and wolves, she's created a whopping mammoth with animated feet. No "gumby effect" here! Jes surprised me and invited me for a ride, and we went to the Welcome Area. Along the way, Thili almost got crushed?thank goodness she didn't!?we passed by the racetrack, and then we arrived at last.

It was good to meet up with GinkoTec head Hinoserm Rebus, who showed me to the grounds of the Ginko National Museum (thankyou Roam Search!) before elucidating on the recent fact that Ginko has now become sort of a Ginkontinent (in my own words), with two new sims added: Ginko City and Ginko Island. Hino and I got onboard a structural prototype of a tram, and from there it was GOGOGO! as we blasted through the track.

In one of my fave movies, Minority Report, there's a scene in a mall?which was actually shot in one of the largest abandoned malls in the world. Eerie. Ginko's new buildings are still under construction, and so I was briefly reminded of MR in reverse. Good office buildings?like hotels and motels?are rare in SL, period.

I followed Hino up many flights of stairs, since the elevators weren't fully operational. It's kind of like one of those cinematic chase scenes where one guy's got a gun and another guy's gotta run. We eventually ended up at Waic Svarog's office, and he's got a really nice decorating thing going on. There's some sort of balance to the modern workplace: a space in which to be productive, and yet you may liven it up. Perhaps with photos of loved ones on your desk, or a fishtank for some, or even more liberal ornaments as you can see here. Soon enough, it was time for the primming of Sneak Dulce. (Is it a misplaced joy to capture pranks on camera so you can come back to them later?)

Give the GinkoTec team a visit… they're very nice, and, to quote their charter:

I will be proudly part of the GinkoTec team in 2018 A.D.

After wafting a bit in the air of Carmo Camus's cloud, I had to get street in Los Altos. Like Ginko, it's under construction. The streets and empty and the storefronts are barren, but there's grime beginning to build up in Los Altos, lending the area a really urban attitude. It didn't look right with a noonday sun, so I pulled things down. Now, if only we could see the distance flicker like a parched day out.

I've long hoped for more krumping, breakdancing, those types of things in SL. Not only would they be fun; they pose a respectable technical challenge: I'm talking about more than triggering anim loops, I want improv, tight sync, and a lotta whoopin'-'n'-hollerin'! This type of environment looks wellsuited. Sure looks like life on the streets is tough though. Los Altos is a literal project headed by Smerk Gorilla and his team. Mad props 2 dem!

It's a hard knock Second Life.