I had a lively, lovely time at yesterday's first Snowball Fight — Residents vs. Lindens! It was appealing to see not just what was happening inworld, but other channels of communications, like Twitter. Katt Linden & I were rapidly tweeting firsthand accounts, including being on-the-scene.
My wife, in her Melon Elf avatar, was there to film lots of great shots. I bundled those clips up shortly after and edited it into the film you see above. (Click through to see this post in its original format on my blog if you're using a feed reader.) It has an airy vibe like Brian Eno's "Apollo" (that's my music you hear), which wasn't an easy decision. At first, I thought to include the inworld SFX of snowballs splatting and all that, but like those poetic scenes in films where you see everything with a soft focus in slomo, I thought this would provide a really relaxing, ambient take on what was infact a hectic activity!
Along with this were some raw movie recordings on Flickr and Xfire. ( A totally uncensored look into an exotic world. 
) Also, various photos… ooh a panorama!
If you have awesome Second Life winter snapshots, be sure to show them off to the world in our Winterfaire Flickr group. I'm technically on vacation now but I'll still be checking daily and exploring inworld as my alt aka "pleasure account", Torley Olmstead.
Alas, I think I've soundly established that my Mac Pro, for all of its horsepower in other apps, doesn't perform Second Life as smoothly as my Q6600 on Windows — I had too many lag problems when filming. There's also seems to be a weird bug where if you partially cover up SL with a window while it's in the background, the whole system gets less responsive. I plan to report this formally at the Issue Tracker if it's not a fluke. There are also annoying periodic "lag spikes" which appear to correlate with certain graphics rendering and aren't nearly as bad as the ones I reported previously, but still unacceptable for filming video. On the bright side, SL on my Mac appears much more stable than the Windows one, which crashes consistently if I take multiple photos in a session. More to come on that front…
I'm thankful to have both platforms because I was switching back and forth during the snowball madness. But despite those technical difficulties, the warmth of the people, the Resis of SL shines through, and that's what I came here for. And if you missed out, it's not over yet, because today, Dec. 24, THE SNOWBALL FIGHT CONTINUES. Check out the "Enjoy Winterfaire in Second Life!" post and I hope you're having a jolly, jovial time this holiday season!
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Haha, Yes, it was a manic fight indeed. I guess it's going to be more manic today, and I'm going to be back in it again.
I've lost track of the times I got hit by snowballs when my attention wandered for a few seconds too long! XD