Jayjay Zifanwe

Two years ago, it may be slightly less, Jayjay asked me if I would like to build a little something on the University of Western Australia's new sim.

Art was not really the business that the UWA was in, it was, and is, a university who decided to get a virtual campus for, no doubt, a mixture of PR reasons and because they could.

Today, Jayjay stood on stage and gave away 660,000 L$ as prize money to the best machinima entries in the UWA Machinima Challenge, their third.

So, any talk of sponsoring the Arts in SL, or of endowments is always going to have to, in my mind, measure up to what the UWA have achieved in two short years.

Jayjay is far to modest to take the credit for this, but, in reality it is he who has made this work. Sure he has had help from hard-working assistants and he has an enlightened board of people at the university who have understood his enthusiasm for this project, but, ultimately he has brought the threads together and 'sold' the ideas. He will, no doubt say that it is the artists who should be thanked for their talent and commitment to the project, and that is surely true as well, but, without a liaison officer, someone to transmit the ideas, the prize money wouldn't have been there and the whole thing could have faded instead of grown like it has.

There will be a full list of prizes and winners on the UWAinSL blog, and others will no doubt blog the results. I will simply post the machinima that was, in my humble opinion the best there. It took joint first prize and, within the rules of the competition, managed to bring the Clock Tower ( a signature piece of architecture at the campus) into the story without forcing the issue or simply as a token shot.





ERIC BOCCARA of the Netherlands' piece, called Juroney, was a deserving winner, and congrats to him for his hard work.

Expect a full list here.. once Jayjay has had a bit of sleep...

:))

on Service and Servers....

Now, I had sort of planned not to write about LL anymore, for a couple of reasons....

The first reason is that Miso has put The Situation under her microscope and summarised it so well that really I need only to point to her post every time the Boys shoot themselves in the foot... I could even develop a short hand to signify a cock-up covered by Miso's post.... "Reply Part III"?...whatever...

The second reason is the rise in the number of fangirls who want to give me a hard time every time I criticise LL, I know they are all in denial, so I'll just wait til Sunday when they are all sitting on the Right Knee of God..... Peace on Earth.

...but I could hardly deny a friend a hearing. ... and JayJay is not normally so annoyed. Now, no one could accuse JayJay of being a serial complainer like me, but he has been trying to get LL to make it possible for Voice to cross his sim boundaries. He has been in contact with them about this problem for more than 3 weeks now. ...(just a side note here,.... LL has Voice crossing sim boundaries on their sims it seems...)

So...after being given the run-around for three weeks it now transpires that it just isn't possible .... now I understand that this is because some servers are in Dallas, some in DC, San Fran...and (spookie) Phoenix. [thx to @ChuckBaggett for the research] Now...for the signal/data to travel from DC to San Fran does not take zero time. This was a point that was made when we first heard of this plan back in 200X, and it lies behind the reason why LL will never fix sim crossings..... (or chat? in spite of renewed rumours)

But.. what has annoyed JayJay, and rightly so I think, is that he, as customer, was never informed of this when he bought the sims....and it is a basic flaw lurking in his University's Campus arrangement....

Miso's take on this that the servers are like 1Gb laptops (slight paraphrase) is a very good analogy. I had to upgrade. Everyone has to upgrade. The Savoy Hotel (I learned last night ) closed for 3 years to upgrade (cost £200million)... but LL won't upgrade, just get you to wear fewer clothes...and become short-sighted (64m)...Duh!!!

Anyway.... as JayJay couldn't blog it himself (his blog is taken up with Machinima stuff), I am happy to air his problem online .....and hope he will correct any mistakes I've made in comments.

...and mentioning Machinima... I must clarify that just because I am annoyed with the concept ..or the decisions ... of the LEA does not mean I hate everyone who has put in their hard work into trying to make a silk purse from a pig's bottom.... it's not personal... you aren't Mr/s Linden..... jeez ...XXX

...and just because I am boycotting SL8B as well as LEA doesn't mean I hate all Lindens either. I just don't like being told I can't use megas (for a start.. there are other reasons).... Don't get all personal, I can take it as well as dish it... relax. Without self reflection through criticism we'd all be as dumb as... Hmmm... [insert dumb persons name]....


In other news... well... Tateru has word from one of the Boys, Oz Linden, about the Most Hated Viewer In History... here. "If TPV's don't keep up, things will break".... that is his view... mine is : if you don't fix that bloody mess you call a viewer everyone's gonna migrate to IWz..... the idea that things break magically is a sort of schizoid view of life.... things get broken by people, or animals possibly..... but let's assume the Boys don't have a room full of an infinite number of Boy monkeys typing the 800,000 lines of code in the search for perfection.... (oh, and chat).... Who broke it, Oz?? You did.


So, otherwise, the weather is fine, and I'm off to drink a white wine spritzer and make a tree.

:))

The new huge UWABOSL Amphitheatre

It takes a bit of vision, a bit of money and guts.....




...the biggest venue in SL is not (of course) sponsored by the Boys, but exists due to the balls and generosity of Frolic Mills (Best of Second Life) and the University of Western Australia, under the guiding hand of Jayjay (who is fast becoming Artist Hero of the Year)...




The build itself is by Patch Thibaud and, more or less finished tho the pixels are still drying.....




.....whoops....who left that fungi lying around..??




It has the theoretical possibility of showing 50 avis onstage with a 150 audience, being built at the junction of 4 sims....

...this obviously poses it's own problems, but the capacity will no doubt justify the technical difficulties of moving around over sim boundaries...(another bug LL has had years to fix)..

I am personally amazed at how much UWA has achieved here in SL in such a short time (compared with how little LL has done for artists in such a long time) and am very impressed that Frolic Mills has the foresight and openhandedness to give back to the culture that has made him rich.

Good old-fashioned sponsorship.....well done.

Now...if anyone has a show they want to put on..... or if you would like to be the Director of such a huge venue......contact Jayjay until a new Director/Events manager is appointed......

...in the meantime, I would like to say thankyou on behalf of us all to those who actually DID this.


:))