Second Life
Precipitate Flood Reporting: Yak & Yeti

Like, I’m not one of those types who, like, swans around in totally wack stuff that’s more of a sorta club or, um, bedroom style, y’know? And so I get tipped off to these like Yak & Yeti people, who specialise in totally like gorgeous ethnic gear. India, Tibet, like that.

Click the link for like, pics and SLurls and stuff.

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Randomness
Some people have dumb names thrust upon them...

...Others seek dumb names.

Ladies and gentlemen of the supposedly intelligent world, let me introduce you to Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman Spiderman Batman Wolverine Hulk And The Flash Combined, a youthful example of the classic British idiot.

Despite his desperate desire to have a unique name, it should be noted as a Uniqueness Fail for the following reasons:

• “Captain Fantastic” comes from the album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy by Elton John.
• As already noted in the comments, the whole “Faster than umpteen DC superheroes” thing is from a Family Guy show in which the idiot father names his boat much the same.
• It’s not nearly as long as that of Mr. Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorffwelchevoralternwarengewissenschaftschafe rswessenschafewarenwohlgepflegeundsorgfaltigkeitbeschutzenvonangreifeudurch ihrraubgierigfeindewelchevoralternzwolftausendjahresvorandieerscheinenersch einenvanderersteerdemenschderraumschiffgebrauchlichtalsseinursprungvonkraft gestartseinlangefahrthinzwischensternaitigraumaufdersuchenachdiesternwelche gehabtbewohnbarplanetenkreisedrehensichundwohinderneurassevonverstandigmens chlichkeitkonntefortpflanzenundsicherfeuenanlebenslanglichfreudeundruhemitn icheinfurchtvorangreifenvonandererintelligentgeschopfsvonhinzwischenternart Zeus igraum Senior.
• He looks like Jim Carrey from Dumb and Dumber in that photograph.
• He’ll end up changing it again when he matures enough to realise how stupid he was.

In future years, he’ll be known as “that twit who named himself Captain Fantastic. What a plonker!”

Second Life
A long overdue post

Martien Pontecorvo kicks his User in the backside and finally gets a long overdue post posted.

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About
New galleries looming (revised)

I’ve been deleting a whole boatload of useless crap from my site — dead wikis, that broken Gallery installation, that sort of thing.

Pretty soon there’ll be a new gallery up and trucking along, more tightly incorporated into Textpattern. As well as offering nondescript galleries, it should also allow for “photostories” as well.

I’m using a modified script from iain7 which incorporates Slimbook for presentation of pictures. Basically, it pulls images and thumbnails from a subdirectory of your /images directory to create a link or series of links.

What I’ve done is to recode the an7_imgdir tag to format images into a table instead of a long rambling line; this wasn’t too hard and worked first time, thankfully.

On the to-do list, which may involve digging into the JavaScript:

1. Allow per-image descriptive text to be pulled per-line from a text file in the target directory
2. Random images, either as a single-row table or singly (great for excerpts)
3. Offer access to images and image IDs stored in TxP itself (this is ambitious, however)

I still have some kinks to iron out though before I finally exterminate that broken Plogger installation and get ‘em live and kicking. Despite this I could probably migrate the other existing galleries into position now, and creating a gallery page is as simple as writing a new article.

Second Life
What's holding SL back?

I was doing some needed goofing off earlier and I noticed that ol’ Hamlet Au has a couple of back-to-back entries contemplating a pair of related stories which go some way to explain why Second Life hasn’t taken off as much as it could have, and instead having a fairly static uptake.

I feel that a number of factors do hold SL back. Here’s the short list:

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Randomness
GWAR was right

America must be destroyed.

I mean, I was hoping that Obama would have a chance to get elected and either raise the IQ of the country or show his true colours, but I’m afraid America, like China, Africa, the Middle East, and most other third world countries, must regrettably be sacrificed for the good of the human race, and reduced to a trinitite glaze.

The reason? Simple. The administration at Terry Fox Elementary in Barrie Ontario called Children’s Aid on Colleen Leduc and accused her of allowing her autistic daughter to be sexually assaulted. They based the accusation on something a psychic told the special ed worker who worked with the kid. (from Boing Boing

Now, I understand, however wrongly, that the school system (if you can call it that) in the US is terrified of lawsuits, probably because all the money gets spent on sports or something. So naturally they turn schools into jails (in order to Protect The Children™) and make it almost impossible to teach anything except that Authority Is An Ass.

I salute Colleen Leduc in having the wisdom to collect the evidence that refuted these charlatans’ accusations. I castigate the nation that has allowed the education system to become so terrified of blame that it takes the word of frauds and shysters; that has allowed the profession of law to become a playground for vendetta and irresponsibility; that has allowed democratic politics to become a mere “ballotocracy” buffeted by the flatulent winds of punditry and lobbying; that has allowed citizenship to become a fragmented serfdom. I could go on.

If anyone wants me, I shall be in the asteroid belt, slinging choice bits of rock sunward.

Second Life
Shadow over Shadows

Well, it seems that Hamlet Au really set the prim cat among the particle pigeons in this post about the shadow-draft branch of SL development. As he noted, dynamic shadows would be a nifty feature, but could result in a “balkanisation” of client experience.

I think I know partly what he means. My machine could — barely — cope with SL on my underpowered Radeon. This didn’t stop me enjoying myself; I just had to wait patiently and bumble around with a very low view distance. Even now I haven’t adjusted that too much.

Even the Lindens themselves have stepped into the discussion, and I have to agree with Simondo Nebestanka that as long as you can toggle it on or off like you can Windlight shaders, that’s fine.

However. Dynamic shadows may well raise the bar for building and texture designers. For instance, do you bake shadows into textures, or rely on J Random User having dynamic ones on? Also, dynamic shadows change over time. If you’re trying for a particular ambience, do you really want to trust in people arriving at just the right time of day?

I’ve upgraded since I joined SL, but that was in response to several components including the motherboard dying, and cost more than the US$200 tag flying around. And since then, I’ve found SL getting annoying again if I turn around too quickly.

Hamlet’s also posed another question, how 3D SL should be. He notes that the most populous multiuser environments are not as bleeding edge in terms of rendering as SL is, but personally I see that as comparing pipfruit and citrus.

SL’s main feature is that virtually all content and environs are created ex nihilo by the users themselves. Other MMOs are created by closed teams of professional developers, dictating what goes where, and what the theme is. Naturally this involves a steeper learning curve, and also creates the problem of not offering a clear entry direction for those asking “what’s it all for?”

I like the idea of shadows and want them — I’d happily throw over Windlight for shadows if I had to choose between pixel shaders. There are three reasons for this:

1. Shadows offer better depth perception and stop annoying light bleedover from neighbouring builds.
2. We don’t need Phong shading and multi-bounce crap. Just trace from source/s to surface and kill that virtual photon. Heck, I used that sort of lighting system in Quake for years and still got good results.
3. I stand to make a killing from designer light fittings.

Second Life
Meshes and shadows and lighting, O my!

Over at the OpenSim project, according to UgoTrade, they’re breaking above and beyond vanilla SL with support for mesh-based models — which every game and their prairie squid uses already.

Linden Lab’s initial decision to stick with mathematically generated prims is understandable — textures, especially sculptie textures, are slow enough to download. But if there was a way of securely storing resources client side to avoid copyright violations, this could be worked around. Imagine non-anthro avatars that weren’t reliant on clever scripting, animation overrides (which can in turn be overridden by parcel permissions), and rafts of prims.

Also, it appears if you have a fairly beefy GeForce in the engine room, you’ll get some sweet new graphical features, according to Massively. These include honest to Cthulhu shadows — no more light pollution from next door! A whole market explosion for the lighting industry! — and support for arbitrary numbers of point lights. There’s a gallery of what could potentially come here, and it looks gorgeous.

Me wants. Me wants bad.

Randomness
On Holiday days 2-3

Well, today was an epic and no mistake. Roughly eight hours from Punga Cove to Torea Saddle and the Portage. My dogs ain’t barkin… they’re whinin’ with at least three blisters, one right on my heel. I think tomorrow’s going to be that retro-70s thang of socks ‘n’ sandals just so I can walk!

Now, I’m doing the Freedom Walk 4 days, which costs about NZD$560.00 per person share twin (obviously more if you’re going alone like I am, duh.) Either way, be warned that you should budget at least NZD$70.00 – $100.00 for breakfasts, dinners, bandages etc. Especially if you’re a beer nut like me; tap beer’s about NZD$6.00 and bottled (i.e. Founders or Moa) is NZD$10.00 — about standard for an upmarket Wellington joint or the Malthouse. Traipsing about the scenic bits of New Zealand isn’t cheap.

Anyway, I have some great scenery shots, including the makings of some panoramas and the hilarious scene of someone trying to pilot a rowboat and getting it so very, very wrong.

Tomorrow I walk the last 20km from Portage to Anakiwa, which I’ve walked before. However, it’s always been as part of a tramping club’s “Easy” trip which took two days to reach Torea Saddle from Anakiwa, stopping at somewhere like Mistletoe Bay or some such overnight. As such I’m going to take it easy on the grog and get an early night — I want to be packed and ready to move out by 8:00am in order to get to Anakiwa on time. If I’m early, no biggie. But the water taxi departs Anakiwa about 4:30pm and I can’t afford to be late.

Then again, I’ve made it trekking about eight hours today through some pretty up-n-down terrain. That’s something.

This weekend I’ll be home stitching panoramas and soothing sore muscles and wondering how in hell I’m going to pay all this back.

And the real nuisance? Now my next leave will require going on the Abel Tasman or something for comparison purposes…

Second Life
Keep Calm, Carry On

I just now read that Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, is looking for a CEO to actually run LL…

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