Enter Vince Plunkett, and I've mentioned his name before with good reason. He's created Avimator, an EASY PEASY FREESY way to make .BVH-format anims for SL, and upload them into the kit and kaboodle. He's not some external corporate-type, but an actual Resident of SL who understands the needs and gravity of the situation. And he's plugged a giant hole.

Content creation should be quick and easy to setup. You can rez a prim and quickly shape it, you can draw a squiggle or bark a yelp and upload it—but poses and animations are a different beast.

No greater testament than being in Midnight City the other day with Aimee Weber, Catherine Omega, and Dave Zeeman. Dave was playing in Avimator and happened to produce something within minutes that he brought into SL, which looked eerily like the spastic motions of a night terror. I suggested it reminded me of a Silent Hill monster, and so, attaching an appropriately-shaped red prim, he became Pyramid Head and had me laughing. The set was perfect too: Aimee's shaded science lab.

When I have a moment, I'm going to play with Avimator and see what I can come up with.

What we need to have are more very high-tech concepts that are very approachable. There's this word, "folksonomy", that I've never liked. It sounds like some kind of alien evisceration device, and if that sounds paranoid, let's just say I like "tagging" better. There's times when I'm dear to jargon, but I believe to use a tool properly, it's best to reduce the complexity of how to describe it to the most palatable common-denominator possible, and not even a lowest one. An example from my life is "techno", which I interpreted to mean "TECHNOlogy-based music". The "technical" definition is much narrower, and to this day, we still have a nightmare of electronic music substyles. It's verbose, it's a turnoff, and it prevents people from actually doing.

Sometimes, it's nice when you're thrown in the midst of an unexpected situation and you react. You may blurt out honest exclamations that wouldn't have come to fruition otherwise. Think too much and what comes out is too polished, too clean, too meaningless—I know I've been there before. It's like, throw someone in the middle of an alien landscape… "WHAT THE HECK?!?" The thrill!

At the turn of the century, I used to look at the website of the band, Psykosonik, for updates on their experiments. It's no longer at the original location, but as grace would have it, Archive.org have some temporal incarnations of it stored. Psykosonik had some virtual reality explorations open. I think one of the truely profound things I realized early on (and I'm glad I did) was the lonely hopelessness to be found in many of these "worlds". Myst, one of my favorite games of all time, initially took place on a deserted island.

One of the places I originally heard about Second Life was on CNET. Incidentally, this is also where I heard of Psykosonik's VR bits, albeit, further back, when I had a satellite dish that worked and watched more TV. I don't watch TV at the present. I have a lot of fond mid-90s memories, including surfing the Internet for the first time. This was before the rise of Googledom, and I was content to dream up queries of websearches at school and come home and plug them in. At the time, I used an array of search engines. I feel recluctant at present to go further than Google, but I know if I don't, I may miss out on something great. Now, in 2006 AD, I often do the same thing at home… think up queries to plug into Second Life's finder.

Which is unforgiving.

I'm not the best speller, much as I may attempt to be (which is not to be confused with being a bona fide literary champion), and FIND doesn't make allowances for mispellings. And searches are inclusive. Searching for "pet cats"—as a dear friend gave me an example of—looks for that exact string, not the separated words "pet" AND "cats". So "Earl's Pet Cats" would come up, but not "Cats and Pets and More Galore!". I often wonder how many queries are missed.

Here's another one to chew the cud over: ever see one of those Mafia peeps who has their SL family listed under Profile Picks? I know plenty. Picks is intended for places, not people or things, and yet… heck, even I use it to show a history of… me! 10 isn't enough; there's space for at least 15, barring scrolling. And, it's a one-way dead-end. Consider what it'd be like if we could store freebies and link to other people's profiles.

Think about that for a moment.

In our world, there are lots of "codes in the open" that can be deciphered by anyone willing to learn more. I fancy a lot of symbolism myself, not being a fan of impregnable secrets that discourage the curious. For example, when I laugh "RUR RUR RUR", this is done for several reasons (beside my trademark flair). One is a blunt reference to Rossum's Universal Robots. Why? In part, because of my technological fascination. Also in part, because as a child, my Dad dubbed me the "robot boy" due to my repetitive motions, which were later found to be because of Asperger's Syndrome, and which I eventually ended up putting to very good use as a pianist. It's not quite the equivalent of my own handkerchief code, but over time, it's amassed.

One reason why I wish I had a time machine is because I'd like to go back in time and view the early years of many people who've inspired me. It'd be kind of voyeuristic, but I always got a kick out of those TV show episodes showing the origins of a certain character. Highlander: The Series was full of those. "How did you come to be this way?" is the operative question. Mom always told me I'd have greater appreciation for my Dad if I had seen him working hard in the cafe. I don't think I understood quite what that meant, until recently.

Always a joy when I see SL on another site I frequent: in this case, Robin Harper's (Linden) recent talk mentioned on Cool Hunting. In some way, this is a sign to me SL's really getting bigger, when I see it more and more around me. And it doesn't just have to be "big news media" either.

O how much the world has grown. And when I started in SL, there were Resis from beta who said it'd already gotten quite large. I hear tales of when it was easy to fly from one end of the grid to another—now, teleportation must take care of such journeys. (If only we could TP offline!) I look at my ratings panel sometimes, and ratings have been in a passive state lately: there used to be forum brawls and much controversy over changing them, but here they rest, barely going up (and they can't go down anymore since negatives were removed). Most new emergants will see a rare sight at all if they even get a +1, or +2. But I remember when they were doled out en masse.

It was a familiar experience, when I close my eyes and really think about it, when I used to be able to find trivia easily in the Events and then sit down, at Stage 4 or whatever else was a nice setting (Baku "town square" was popular, lots of fireworks shows). I'd quickly see the blue boxes come up, "So-and-so has rated you positively". I'd continue conversation and smile, rating back in return. And that doesn't happen anymore. Things like "rating parties" are an alien antiquity to newcomers. But those are my memories.

Ratings were a seminal part of my early Second Life. They used to be L$1 a pop, were like sprinkles on cupcakes, and while the world today at large not knows what they were like, so I could say in turn, that I wasn't there for public land swoopings. Public land is on its way out, and I look at the Region Land Usage bar in the Mini-Map, almost always 100% and in red… falsely prescient of some unforeseen danger. I look back through the pictures I've taken, and they trigger memories.

Micala Lumiere's brought together some memories of her own—of a place she'd like to visit. Shakespeare and Company Bookshop @ Bucker (249, 119), which is based on a real build and makes me recall Amelie, not just because it's French, but because of the magic involved. One of those "mythic everyday" things, even a magical reality. So she gave me a tour:

I wasn't a "content creator" in both senses of the word before, but I sure am now! After learning to make my own clothes, I'm building more. And bare prims look bland, so I just had to spice 'em up with textures! Not just any textures, mind you, but THOSE OF MY OWN DOING… mostly.

So here's the deal: "Torley Texture Bundle 1", includes all of what you see below and more, for a total of 50. I labelled it "1" because that motivates me to do more, and I gave it my name not because I made the textures, but because… aye, it's from me to you. Putting my graphics tablet to good use, some of them I sketched+painted out in a surreal style, and texture genetics proggies took care of the rest.

All 100% seamless (as hard as it may be to believe) so they're perfectly tileable, and I did them with SL in mind. I think there is a shortage of painterly and organic schtuffs and I would like to see more Resis roll their own thang. Some of them are more "realistic" in common situations, but for the most part, I'm just being… me.

Cranking the speakers up and blaring the noise through the house as I hip-hopped to the proverbial beat, my Mom came downstairs—and I'll ever forget this—asked out loud where all the barking dogs were. I was blindsided for a sec, but then realized she was referring to scratch samples. There's a lot of room for interpretation.

This may not seem like it connects, but o, it does (as it always does in my world): Salazar Jack announced that the Nova Albion Infohub (for lack of a better name) is nearing completion. This fantastic shot of the city goes is his; ain't it a beaut?

Especially… in a temporal world where so much changes. Where you can live in a sim, especially one of the newer regions, and so much will go by. You may never know your neighbors, altho if you could, would you?

There are some older communities still in place, altho the villagers don't come 'round much anymore: the Welsh people are very friendly, Taber is notable, and there are institutions like the Kazenojin stronghold in Gray. Nova Albion is also very old, and cohesive cities in SL are rare. But what's even rarer is the old being revitalized, and Nova Albion's time is now.

What I love about working at Linden Lab (among many other things I'm sure, and by at I refer to LL's presence as SL) is motivation that comes with selecting your own projects that'll benefit the company and the community, making for an absolutely antiunilateral win. While there are priorities, things do not get bogged down in a mess of ugly politics… I hear the word "actionable" used a lot, I think it's a favorite of Philip Rosedale's. Being the CEO and Founder of Linden Lab, he wants things done. And when I went from Torley Torgeson —> Torley Linden, I immediately hopped on the Infohubs with the encouragement of Robin Harper, who heads Community Team which I'm on! And she's absolutely awesome!

So, things happened really quickly. And I think in the pulse of life, and Second Life, when everything moves so fast and your head's in a spin… you want to eventually go sit down in a corner and rebalance yourself so you can unwind and tell the tale, explain what went on. I often find this is the way when blogging, so I reference my Snapzilla roll, including captions written in the heat of the moment, to remember what I was doing.