Torley Lives

Obsessions in isolation are a weakness. Sharing your gladdictions together = strength! (Otaku an' ramen.) There is almost always greater context to what I say — throughout my lives, I have chronopoints, "time anchors" I can revisit in my memory palace. You don't see it, but my left hand scrunches up like I'm knitting, and I can so very lucidly super-clearly ahhh-h-h-h-h recall clips of existence I've experienced before.

Two fave video games: Dreamfall: The Longest Journey and Deus Ex: Invisible War. Colons aside, what these have in common is evocative, rich atmospheres which I could basely say "great level design" to! HURR. The lighting in both is pretty gorgeous — hello bloom! — and I'm pleased as punch that with RenderGlow, la, we're seeing Second Life unflat and look more like games on the market.

This isn't confined to me; Mullers on Flickr even noticed:

It's amazing to see the grid looking this good!
It reminds me a bit of the game Dreamfall: The Longest Journey.

Heck yeah! GMTA and all that.

So then I went forth and used RenderGlow on the dense neon city of Midian:

Opportunity gets knocked up again!

Thus, the following is a mixture — some uses RenderGlow, some doesn't.

Macaroni Kidd told me about his Video Clip Arcade, which led me to a few observations…

• I'd never looked at all the video tutorials I made lined up in a matrix. That's nice!
   
• This makes me crave playing Flash in SL even more, so you don't have to go to an external website to play YouTube videos or whatever. I remember an arcade (of the game sort) awhile back where it sent you to a webpage with an emulator to play classic titles, and to have the actual gameplay framed within SL would've been a lot nicer (if arguably slower).
   
• Macaroni has a lot of newsboxes. Anyone have a bigger collection? This is a fun overview of publications cross tha Grid. (I've been so meta lately, compiling resources in single easy spots.)

What's right about this picture?

Must be the smallest L$ disparity I've ever seen between a demo and the real deal. This HUD functions as a simple back button: teleport to a location and it'll store it, and you can click the red arrows, then the name of the place to TP and retrace your steps.

OHHHH MY EYES!

Sun is bigger in 1.15. Ctrl-Alt-M then go into Mouselook and have it dance around for you.

This is supposed to be "Texas State Technical College", but I kept thinking what the aftermath would look like, aka future NYC in Heroes. (BTW, I just watched my first ep of the show, and it's great. I hardly have any time to watch TV, but Masi Oka rulez.)

Last one there is glowy. This city has a video arcade and, again, I can't help think thoughts of a city that's grungy and bombed-out on one side but pristine on the other, authoritan peacekeepers clad in uniform beating down the poor and defenseless. Kinda like the Seattle divide in DX: IW or even The Longest Journey's Stark/Arcadia split. Huzzah for parallels!

Came back to Midian City to find the sky was a blood red (one big prim overlayed), like many spirits were going to come out of the heavens and wreak havoc. A genuine Ghostbusters moment. Midian's good to take pictures of because there's so much variation in texturing and geometry.

In some of the lonelier parts, you can almost imagine, "We're almost at the gas station! Honey, get the bow and arrows, we've got some zombie ass to kick!" Another thing to look out for in SL cities is how they do their trash cans, dumpsters, and garbage bags. Trust me on this one.

Sun exposed to massive doses of RenderGlow:

(Some sense of narrative; maybe that's why Midian's sky went crimson? All this reminds me of that.)

Setting RenderGlow to other extreme settings (RenderGlowSize = 0 makes for a trippy frozen overlay) will get you far:

Wild.

More fun office hours, during the week I dart in and out of world so unpredictably, so it's nice to commit to scheduled times where Resis can come and meet me. IN AVATAR, more personal than IMs. :p So if you're interested, this week they're again gonna be @ 6 AM & 2 PM PDT on Friday. And Exaemo Dmytryk's shoes rock.

Bridie Linden came to visit me too. We're working together on corraling hot bugs, and she just made her Linden Bear! Go Bridie!

I think this is the first transparent texture she's made too. She's got quite a knack for cartooning, so I hope we see more of her art inworld.

Lindens bears are collectible and fun, to get one, just ask a Linden! That includes me (altho please email me, torley at lindenlab dot com, rather than IM so it won't get lost, I can tag and prioritize my emails better).

Remember what I said about junk in cities a few paragraphs up?

Tee hee hee. Seagel Neville let me know about the regions of KABUKI and sick, and they've even got a YouTube promo. In-transit, I had to share the good news on Jamlet's New World Notes! More pictures of what these Japanese have been up to, like pimpin' out trucks — that's by SAZAE Yoshikawa!

It's really cool, because I remember when I got a lot of questions about "Where are all the cities in Second Life?" and on the mainland, they're still relatively rare. You're more likely to find a chaotic morass of… stuff. But on estates (private islands), where there's more control over your environment, this emerges.

So uh that was sick, here's KABUKI:

Chock-full of superfabulousness. I even like the Casshern-like soldier d00ds:

That dead one either got shot, or tripped and isn't gonna wake up.

Let me talk about Casshern for a bit: the movie features the reanimation of the dead. I didn't see the anime it's based on, but this flick is so highly stylized. I might even say it has its own RenderGlow on most of the time! WATCH THE TRAILER OMG. On a budget of ~$6 million, the special effects are kickass, and while the complex story makes sense up to near the end, it's a dang shame it hasn't seen a domestic release Stateside yet. Lots of robot-slaying, deep philosophical questions, grand architecture that can't be pinned to any one period of Earth's history — what more could you ask for? So for anyone looking for inspiration to create the next great SL city, I recommend watching Casshern. And headbangin' to the soundtrack. (For smiling out loud, there's a collab between Satoshi Tomie + Shiro Sagisu on it!)

COMPUTER WORLD / IT'S MORE FUN TO COMPUTE

You know you can get in my good graces by talkin' Kraftwerk! My wife's working on this project, and a lot of what you can see here is by Shukran Fahid and Stella Costello. Again, this is a scene I'd like to see 100 years later, after the brilliant students have attained such a degree of intelligence (not through formal education but self-discovery) that they've been taken by aliens, back to their homeworld, and the school stands fallow. With no one to take care of it, things wear and decay, and then a stranger in a dark, flowing coat walks in…

Like San Francisco, but not, bridge by Saeya Nyanda and houses by Menno Ophelia:

Someone should: (1) fly the U.S.S. Voyager through the former and (2) reenact this commercial with the latter.