My wife and I have really been enjoying our new tiny cat avatars made by that magnificent :3 pirate, Achamo Paine. They're sculpted for maximum cuteness and even have different jacket colors — wouldaya thunk it, #5 is watermelon!

My weeks are so crowded full of… stuff… so on the weekends it's delicious to relax. Normally, I like to send postcards and document my travels live, but postcards significantly slow down simulator performance (SVC-2283). HOPE THAT GETS FIXED SOON. So I've been saving them to disk. Upside: better image quality. Downside: no auto-tagging via SLBuzz, which means I'll have to manually provide SLURLs, something I haven't really done in a long time.

Amongst other places, we visited TEMPSTAFF, which appears Japanese. Not sure why the name, but there seems to be a confectionary/sweets tie. Here's where we found the Orientation Island from HELL (I keed), because it had this really cool HUD you wear, then it sends you into what appears to be a cross between American Gladiators and Super Mario Bros. that makes the Linden Orientation Island look like baby's play. Not only is there a 10-min. timer counting down, obstacles in your way and the "learn how to fly" section of the course is a twisted tangle of transparent blue pipe. A challenge where your humility is at stake may rouse the games-minded yet!

After that, we went to REC, which has been getting a copious amount of buzz, like from Aleister Kronos and Natalia Zelmanov. Apparently it's a Japanese promo for a Spanish-made film — don't know the official story here — but it's incredible. One word: FollowCam. One of the most underused scripting features in Second Life. If you've played the first Resident Evil, you know how fixed camera angles add to the suspense? Same thing here. Wearing a HUD which is triggered as you enter different zones, the camera is controlled for you and on top of that, there's an uneasy blinking "REC" light in the upper left, along with letterbox cutoff…

… AND SOME SCARY NOISES WHICH STARTLE, WTF!!!!

Suspense, horror in Second Life is rare. Most stabs at this (heh, stabs) are more caricaturish/cartoonish than dripping with fear/anxiety. So REC is definitely badass, and we kitties are cute in the blood. But I'll repeat: enterprising scripters who want to dominate and own a valuable niche market which is horribly overlooked…

<ballmer> FOLLOWCAM, FOLLOWCAM, FOLLOWCAM! </ballmer>

(Mebbe I need to make videos to communicate that last point better.)

BTW, I incidentally was the first to suggest doing this kind of experience in Second Life, way back when Kyrah Abattoir ran some experiments. That was OVER TWO YEARS AGO. I'd love to see more, and don't forget that at my office in Grasmere, you can pick up a free FollowCam pack to get you started.

Ravie + I also moseyed over to Harajukubox Town which had some nice reminder of food, and Japanese-esque stuff (not made by actual Japanese, but inspired). I ate a baby octopus the other day, man, I'm dangerous!

And to cap it off, we used our new "Sketch!" Sky Pens which I bought off of SL Exchange (convenient shopping without having to teleport to a store) to leave a mark on the world… for minutes, anyway. I enthuse over these things because they're incredibly well-designed: the HUD and even touch dialogs (better than having no choices at all, despite how boring they can be) work well together.

Basically: you go into mouselook and hold the left mouse button down to start drawing. Glow adds to the neon vibrancy of it all, 'specially if you've ever seen a certain iPod ad. Resolution and width of lines can be customized, and just make sure you have plenty of prims if you're not going to use the temporary mode. This is an improvement over earlier particle-based variants on the same idea I saw, but were, ah, sketchy. But clearly, Random Person (that's his name, don't wear it out) has marketing thought out.