Second Pictures

4/365 would you like to learn to fly…

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4/365

i figure i should get a theme to my 365 pictures instead of just doing something random. it makes me put forth effort and actually make something instead of just a lazy photo. i’m sure there will be those as well but this is one of my more artsy attempts. i was listening to “one of my turns” from the pink floyd album THE WALL while i was trying to come up with a good idea for this one. and i ended up just illustrating the song in my head. so i guess yesterday’s theme was “illustrate a song”

and i do apologize for not posting this yesterday which was day 4 because i was lazy after making the picture.

the straight jacket there is from :guiled: and is available for the serial killer hunt going on at the moment. the chair is from some japanese place that i cannot think of the name of right now. the background is a mix of textures from my favourite texture place: resurgerie, and a filter forge texture that looks like a padded room.

oh yes and you should probably click on the photo so you get the big picture cause my blog made me shrink it. (i need a new layout…)

3/365 i thought what i’d do was…

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3/365

"I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life."

– the catcher in the rye

adventures in japan: Giftmas Edition

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its giftmas time and lucas and i decided to go check out probably the BEST giftmas event on the entire grid. the love soul and nipponbashi sims are COVERED IN ZOMBIES! santa zombies to be technical, and they need your help to put a stop to their evil rein of terror.

here we are in our battle gear for... er... aren't you cold?

lucas and i carefully donned out battle gear in preparation for the task at hand… ok i donned battle gear.

(actually he put on the santa suit but sl would not let me see it so lol this is what he was wearing when he got here)

you start out with a choice between reindeer or santa suit, a hud and a pillow starter weapon. the object of the game is simple, beat the shit out of zombies, level up, and collect prizes along the way!

dead

the pillow sucks but it has a great death animation :p

what did the five fingers say to the face?!?!

i finally leveled up and found a ticket for the death hand which is quite useful though i keep running out of energy very fast D:

we kicked this thing's ass

lucas and i took to the streets of nipponbashi and battled many scary boss zombies. i died many times.

someone translate this lol

we also browsed some of the shops and cafes along the way. someone translate this for me.. because i want to know what it says lol.

the-cake-is-a-lie

i found out that the cake really is a lie.. and often contains traps.

sexy-go-round

and lucas found a merry go round that makes you sit on a pig in a slutty pose.

i saw this and thought of you arahan

we even found awesome gift ideas for arahan!

meshes and shadows…

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its been an annoying couple of weeks for me on second life due to some strange teleport issues that only affect me when on an old style ui viewer such as snowglobe or imprudence. so i’ve been using kirstens viewer since it allows me to actually leave my home. since i’m on it i’m playing with shadows since i can :p

test build 40 of the s20 viewer is very nice and anti aliasing seems to have improved from previous builds. still not great but getting a lot smoother.

101310_023

my front patio is looking gorgeous… its kind of tempting to stick with this viewer. the UI is starting to give me less of a headache but kirstens does not include rlv or temp texture uploads 🙁 i wish someone would fork it and patch it…

today was also the start of the mesh beta so i grabbed that viewer as well and tried stuff out! its pretty crowded right now so it was hard to log in to the test regions but i finally got in and uploaded a dumpster i’d previously made in 3ds max back in june.

OMG MESHES!!!

this is what it looked like in 3ds max

low poly dumpster

now its time to stop goofing off and work a bit more! lots of cool stuff coming out at [ LuNi ]

thank you linden lab!

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i know i have been bitchy about decisions LL has made in the past. but without them i would not have second life, so in the end, i will always respect their wishes.

when the blog post and email came though that emerald viewer would be blocked from second life i was so happy. thank you linden labs for not dropping the ball on this! thank you for protecting us from a malicious viewer even though there were so many people using it!

seriously, if you are dumb enough to keep clinging to the emerald client after all that has come out about their devs, then you deserve to have your information stolen. LL is not at fault for this, the people behind emerald who were making poor choices and stupid decisions were at fault. this is not a plot to make people use 2.0, if it was, they wouldn’t have mentioned that there are other clients to choose from, they would have just said, hey, use our viewer now!

as i mentioned in my last blog, lordgreggreg’s post sent me running to imprudence for fear of my privacy and i have no reason to look back. even with emergence and now phoenix, i refuse to trust any of these people, because too much has gone on involving them. i do think jessica seems a bit more level headed than the rest of the devs that appeared in interviews and blog posts. i know there were many behind the scenes that had nothing to do with what happened, however for those who did know, i have nothing but contempt for you.

i wish people would stop trying to ruin second life. it is my second home. it is my escape from the horrible first life i have to live with every day. adding stress to my second life just makes things worse for me and i’m sure others as well. why can’t people just have fun and stop making things harder for everyone else?

if you haven’t tried imprudence, i really suggest you do. its a great client and the devs are super nice. they are trying to do all they can to make the users happy and are very concerned with keeping our private information PRIVATE. they supply weekly experimental releases which contain new fixes and new features, and there’s nothing that i miss from emerald.

on top of all of it. IMPRUDENCE HAS WORKING HIGH RES SNAPSHOT!!! if you are a photographer you know the pain in the ass that comes from having to manually step up your image size to a larger size than your screen so you have better detail control. high res snapshot is supposed to do that for you but every other client i’ve used, this function did nothing. on imprudence it actually works! images are bigger than your screen and all you have to do is check a box 😀

i don’t really like the 2.0 ui otherwise i’d probably spend more time in kirstens viewer. the shadows in that viewer are spectacular, as you can see from these shots of the new [ LuNi ] store:

in with the new

in with the new

that strange shadow cast there is from the broken glass texture on the outside of our store’s orb

in with the new

an unexpected result but a cool one!

the only other major thing i dislike about the kirstens viewer is that anti-aliasing is broken 🙁 once she fixes that, it will be an amazing photo client. that, the ui, an the lack of features that i require as a creator (temp textures!!!) keep me on an old style viewer.

anyway, stfu about LL being bad because they blocked emerald. they might have just saved your bank account and other important information. you have tons of alternatives.

imagine peace

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i was pretty shocked to find out a couple of days ago that yoko ono has a sim in second life! lucas found out about it on twitter and retweeted the invite to go see a lighting of the imagine peace tower. he and i went to the second lighting of the night and we were pretty disappointed that it was fairly empty. we did meet up with crap mariner there, and i listened while they and lucas talked about the early days of the internets (which always makes me feel like a baby) we hung out for a while and i took some photos.

peace of crapabove us only skyno hell below usits easy if you tryimagine there's no heaven

and no crap was not having problems rezzing. they have become a shadow of their former self.

you can check out the imagine peace tower here.

where was i?

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a lot of people have been asking where i’ve been. i’ve gotten quiet and pretty much all of march i was rather inactive on my blog, flickr, and other stuff. well the first reason for that is just real life depression, and i’m slowly trying to work though that. still a lot of stuff to get used to after the death of my father.

the second reason for this is that lucas and i were working on a sim for a store owner who contacted him. although he doesn’t usually do custom work, we were asked to build them a 100% custom build. everything from textures to sculpties to terraforming, all of it was 100% made by us, no prefab work at all. and he would have free reign on the idea of how it should look. that perked his interest and we decided to accept it.

it ended up with too many things changed to what was laid out to make the effort worth while, so we decided to part ways with them after the initial month.

fortunately we got some really good material out of it that might turn out to be sold at the store. among other things, it gave us a new store build to play with too.

to leave this entry i thought i would share some pictures that i took while we were building the sim.

most of this work is lucas’ i’m not much of a builder so he’s the star here. i made some cool textures though and it taught me a lot about making textures for builds.

what we did in march

lucas had a cool idea for this place including some stuff he never got the chance to build. one thing he was able to build was the heart.

in his own words:

“i wanted to imagine a sim having a heart, literally. and since we’ve kinda worked with ‘heart themes’ in the past this was an idea that kept appealing to me. to imagine a transplanted heart growing inside of a sim and spreading its arms out to touch and make everything its own.”

to give you an idea of how big that heart was… that little hard to see dot to the right is lucas standing there… so just imagine how massive it was in person.

what we did in march

what we did in march

the store build was based loosely on the house from edward scissorhands, and i’m really kinda glad we get to keep it, because i love it. and yes i’m trying to talk him into making prefabs, but feel free to try begging him yourself as well :p

what we did in march

what we did in march

i made this awesome window light thing! it came out pretty cool for my first try at something like this. i also made the textures for the store including that awesome shattered window.

in the end i can’t say i’m not disappointed that we didn’t get to finish the sim. we had some great ideas for the rest of the place that we never got a chance to make. i hope that lucas will put some of this stuff up for sale in the future.