Torley Lives

Sushi's one of those rare delicacies that looks as good on the packaging as it does the actual product — mind you, I've never seen Sushi-in-a-Box before, but I'm making a point: in the rawness of that seafood and vegetables, there's beauty waiting to be consumed. After all, we wouldn't have such cute variants as chocolate facsimiles and some rather feeshy USB keys without "the original sushi".

Fitting that cravings hit me the other day, moreso than my Mom longed for pears while pregnant with me. I knew what I had to do. I was on one of my rare trips out to pick up my shipment of The Great Good Place that Robin and Betsy Linden graciously sent me, and decided to do some shopping. It was fortunate that a day in advance, I ordered my Bento Nouveau sushi, specifically the "Platter - Deluxe (Kyoto)" which looks like this:

And in-the-flesh, made fresh and tagged with a barcode, it looks like this:

Yes, rather tasty. I ate it on my bed with some of a suitably fave drink of mine, grass jelly. As my lovely wife says and I've also adopted, "YomZ YomZ!" She wanted some too and I'd love to accompany her for multiple dishes, but sushi isn't Net-transportable yet.

While this isn't the bestest sushi I've ever had, it's been the first major dosage in a long time, and that's saying a lot. I like sucking on the raw fish bits with my tongue while chomping on rice with my back teeth.

If you're looking to make your own sushi, I can't think of a finer site — both in content and presentation — than Sushi Day.

Gracious thankyous go out to the nice people at the Canadian Superstore for taking my order, and for helping me get reacquainted with sushi.

Sometimes I get asked, how do I decide what I'm going to blog about? Oftentimes, I just don't, until I'm in the act of writing. I have what I call rippleshock, which is prolly pragmatically similar to what Malcolm Gladwell calls thin-slicing. However, I see my variety as more of a holistic fusion of intuition and instinct.

On occasion, I fall asleep on the keyboard, and as I wake, the first thing I think — that's exactly what I'll blog about.

In recent months, I've only had a trickle of Second Life inworld explorations I've been able to report on. That's largely because most of my work time in the present is spent on things "behind-the-scenes". And when I get off work, I indulge in storeyed other pursuits to broaden my horizons, and import back into SL. It makes sense, then, that I've been in the process of scheduling activities which do take place inworld, and give me an opportunity to quench my quests.

I like things to happen organically: I have this funny tendency, if I'm asked to write on a topic, I likely won't, unless I had it in mind already, and the request was a reminder.

So, a lack of something I used to manifest in plethoras… almost certainly isn't because I don't like it, and like the dip in an elliptically-curved rollercoaster, we'll find ourselves on the upswing in time.

There's rhyme, there's reason, but it isn't always what you or I'd expect.

And that keeps it refreshing!

My latest time-lapse video, A Day in the Second Life, is now fit for viewing. If you don't see the below movie player, you can view it here @ YouTube. What a doozy this turned out to be! Almost exactly 4,000 still frames captured over the course of 6+ hours, being technically closer to a "Day.5", but that doesn't sound as tidy. One frame was taken every 5 seconds by an automated macro whirring away with the Ctrl-` shortcut for takin' pictures. My hard drive literally grinded as my video editor endeavored to read each and every snapshot in sequential order and condense that span into under 3 minutes. On top of that, I added a light toasting of effects, straining my CPUs further.

Each time I do one of these films, I'm endowed with a little more experience. Added up, it allows me to provide a better incidental viewing experience for my viewers —€” hopefully you! —€” and inevitably has me exploring new possibilities.

This installment takes place in Second Life (as always), in the classic Welcome Area. (Same location as my earlier Welcome video.) It happened after I aspired to do an episode shot aboard a certain orange tram, the prematurely-halted results of which you can see the likes of, due to being tossed off ungraciously. It is pretty kewl to see so much in motion, with the vehicle remaining relatively steady in the shot, but given the unstability of said tram, I'll have to wait until I can record at night without getting dropped.

During A Day in the Second Life, I wanted to provide a sense of coziness yet unfamiliarity at the same time: hence the jerky, snowy TV static that begins the affair, and adapts into something smoother and more suitable, piece by piece, until the view is a naked one, as any Resi in Second Life might see —€” only much faster. I did my fave Ctrl-8 to zoom back in Mouselook, and was also careful to frame the shot to see the moon coming up beautifully. That's a direct tip-of-the-hat to Koyaanisqatsi's own lunar sequence, albeit with more benches and less skyscraper.

Aside from the obvious digital magic and little accents like transitions, the only other thing I added was a light touch of contrast and saturation: you see, video compression, with its inherent degradation of the source material, dulls the artifacted end output, so it's a great idea to add "a little something extra" upfront to compensate.

What really thrilled me is when I awoke and reviewed the captured footage, and witnessed so much vivacious activity just happening: from the swooping dragon to the bubbles floating in the air, to the scintillating particle effects at night to the assorted mix of avatars coming and going, it's such a thrill. Suitably, it was unscripted and the only I input I had into all of this was to sit, record, edit, and playback the unfolding excitement — everyday Second Life!

Having come this way…

I hope this will encourage accomplished machinimakers to produce far more ambitious time-lapse feature-lengths. And if that doesn't happen, I just may have to do it myself.

Thank you graciously in advance for watching this.