When I write, I write what I would write, not someone else would. This may sound silly, as a matter of fact—and I don't do it consciously, but there often comes a time when someone is taken aback by the way I write. And so, I explain. I've told the stories many times, and in that, I don't tire of it, but I wish more people would ask me before jumping to conclusions. But maybe they don't know I'm friendly just yet. Maybe they've been worn down by previous life encounters, kind of like the odds of dropping a glass on the floor and seeing it shatterform into the face of your mother.
To me, this is the magic.
I think of many things. I take many pictures to help me remember some of those things. My memory is not a photograph, so I appreciate the visual cues. Resi Henpecker Nelson is a member of a rock group in Second Life called The Pipestons. I usually have my sound low or muted in SL, but I heard some strange looped chugging coming from the distance in Sandbox Island, where creativity can sputter in spurts just as well as it flows. Drawing nearer to the particle burstage brought me to this troupe of performing musicians. And, I found out Henpecker has a wickedly funny blog: Secondsight - Misadventures in the metaverse. Lots of great widescreen photos—some adult content—and more to come, I hope.
Over time, I've done my entries in different ways. You may have noticed the patterns. Or at times, lack of them. Some days, I'll want to align my images all to the right, the next, I prefer to dice it up, checkerboard stylee. That's how I'm feeling today, right now.
When I look at the thumbnail to the left, I think of an oyster. The shiny insides, reflecting a pastel spectrum across a gossamer service that would be ideal for ants to inline skate on. This is, in fact, Jopsy Pendragon's new Cloud Chateau @ Hina (29, 24, 53)—yayzerama 3D coords, but flyyy up, 'cuz it's a relaxing castle in the sky (literally) that Toy LaFollette told me about. She IMed me, said I'd like it, and so I do. Jopsy Pendragon is known for his masterful edits of Ama Omega's particle script—if you don't know particles, know that Jopsy does! If you've ever seen smoke, fire, rainbows, snow, or other environmental effects, they're prolly done with PARTICLE SYSTEMS. Learn all about 'em at Jopsy's Particle Laboratory @ Teal (199, 49, 301).
Speaking of particles, it's long frustrated me that there isn't an easier way to control them. Some Resis have made consoles with controls, but compared to clicking on buttons and sliders in the native UI, it's still slow. Not as slow as editing numbers in a script and saving over and over, but still slugworthy. 
I think of my longgone days in audio synthesis, where I would often work with what I can now call "audio particles" (like granular synthesis), and modify parameters in realtime by jiggling sliders back and forth, listening to sounds change before my very ears.
This actually gets me thinking, since this is a 3D world, why limit ourselves to one axis with a slider, or even two with a mouse's XY movement? Consider something like a Wacom tablet, which is pressure sensitive. Imagine hooking up one of those to your USB port. I'm not sure if Wacom tablets can do this out of the box with their drivers—if anyone's done experiments, canya please let me know? This has been possible with Kyma for some time.
Take the Nine Inch Nails lyrics to "Burn" and totally take them out of context:
Something inside of me has opened up it’s eyes
Why did you put it there did you not realize
This thing inside of me it screams the loudest sound
Sometimes I think I could
That's the sort of expression I'm reaching for. Sometimes I close my eyes, and find myself almost feeling as I'm in an aquaish gel suspension, denser than water, lighter than Jello, but there are these fish that are meant to be caught. Each one contains an idea; in the event of a two-headed fish (which is not all that rare), then a couple ideas.
After all, if we're going to languish, we might as well do it in style. Smith Peel showed me his Newbie Zoo @ Gemmed (144, 219), a cheeky take on the popular camping and money chair phenomenon. I felt a queer companionship with the bars of my cage.
In controlling my avatar's movement through the online environment, I feel I've become increasingly intuitive as to how to go about it. I'm lacking some of the technical terminology used to describe what comes very naturally to me, but hope I will pick it up in time. Right now, I'm wondering about using a mouse with a smooth scroll wheel in SL. Something that has long thrilled me are silky transitions between magnitudes of zoom. Currently, when I'm navigating my way through SL and have to zoom the cam in and out, the clicky mouse wheel simply doesn't do the motion justice. You wouldn't expect that level of choppiness with a video camera's zoom controls—even if it was digital—would you?
My name is Torley Torgeson, Jr.