Whiskey Day's Challenge v.3

Whiskey Day, a very funny lady, has started an ongoing series of challenges for us Inworldz bloggers which have been taken up and enjoyed by many.

The third in her series is to find somewhere you haven't been before, on InWorldz and blog it...

Now, I haven't taken up her challenges as religiously as some, but this week it fitted in with circumstances...

I was at the UWA awards yesterday, and some excellent pieces got chosen for prizes and the full list is documented here. (My personal fav, Miso's piece which I bogged a few days ago was listed...:))

...anyway...Ginger Alsop and I were chatting thoughout the whole thing and she was telling me about her build in InWorldz... we shared a joint prize for Best Unscripted Work, and she won another prize on top of that!

So, I went out to Nexus Central today to see her work on InWorldz..




..and I liked it a lot.

While it is very nice to stumble on those very warm and homely builds where you could chill and laze around, I do feel that VW's give the possibility for Heroic Architecture. There is no gravity, construction problems etc...and the chance of really sculpting structures is seldom taken. Where some have chosen to 'reach for the skies' there has, in SL been a tendency to settle for a stereotypical cartoon-style futurism. This build is really just exploring the geometry and scale that VW's give.




Now, as the ground textures and the subtle style of this smaller build show, Ginger is not a person with just one talent and I, for one, am excited to see how this all progresses...

It's at Nexus Central if you want to find it on the Map, very near to Jeri's sims.

Supercool.

:))

GoodBye Idontknowwhothefuckyouare... sorry

Well, you can imagine my surprise when I logged onto the SL website to do a bit of financial control and general management to find, when I checked out who was online, that I had friends on my list who I don't know...

Handmadeandroid, Luscious Lily and Oliver Slipstream are NOT people I have ever friended.

Luckily I am still running 1.23 and Imprudence because, I'm sorry, but once these new contrived names start appearing on my friends list....they are gonna be culled.

It's not because I don't like you, I just don't know you.

I hate FaceBook because people use their real names, often without telling me who they are. They may be Joe Swift in RL but that is absolutely no good to me when I have met them as Quirky Av..

If you have an urgent need to change your name and do so without telling me... what else can I do but drop you and see if you get back to me with an explanation of who you really were.

I have trouble enough keeping up with who is who without playing silly buggers.

Send me a notecard if we are close, if not....live long and change your name often...


:))

Losing My Memory

There’s an old saying, “If your head wasn’t screwed on...” etc.

So...as my Bio Memory is so full of years of crap, films, music, people, languages, plants and old TV adverts that got stuck deep in my cerebral cortex as a child, it seemed like a great idea that I could buy Memory on a Stick.

Having access to a Windows run PC a few weeks back I was able to buy my first Stick and download loads of stuff that is “PC only”... I named it “My Memory” which may have been my unconscious telling me I was Riding For A Fall...

This morning I thought I would fish it out as I was planning on using the library PC to do some import/export thing with Second Inventory, a PC only programme. So, I looked through my desk...

Now, there is a particular glazed look that comes over me when I am staring at something that doesn’t quite compute... My Memory wasn’t there.

When did I last have it ?? No idea. [Words of a song come back to me “I know I had it when I came back from that memory enhancement seminar”.]

I could have put it somewhere “safe” and so started that increasingly inane activity called Search. More and more unlikely places get examined until you know you are verging on the desperate.

The second search through the same desk can be excused, after all, I may have missed it in my first incredulous realisation that it wasn’t where it should be... but... the third scramble through the same draws holds a certain lunatic idea that maybe it may have crept back into the draw when I wasn’t looking..or..what?

No, the third search attempt on the same areas must lead to the mental awakening that My Memory now has to be classed as Missing, presumed Lost.

The crazed workings of the brain wonder if some miscreant has crept into my house, past cash, jewellery, electrical appliances and stolen My Memory. But I have to draw the line at looking through the draw for the fourth time, at least for the moment.

I have lost My Memory. It takes a bit of accepting, but it may, or may not, “turn up”. Amazingly in life some things do not turn up. They just get sucked into a vortex of Lost Things where they fester and mould until the end of time. That is apparently a part of life.

So...being in this slightly insane mind set I decided to look for the Xmas lights. They are the only real decorations I like, little neon blue strings which get put up in my front room and look so good I usually don’t remove them til Spring... any bit of colour helps to get through the dark grey season. I had looked for them earlier in the week and they weren’t where they were supposed to be either...so I assumed they were in the loft.

Loft entry entails gymnastic maneuvers befitting a modern circus troupe, and possible muscle damage. It only took me 20 minutes to find the torch.

The Xmas lights weren’t on the loft. ( I say ‘on’ rather than “in” as a remnant of my Norwegian speaking days...a habit I can’t shake).

So, plainly a total waste of a morning..

My conclusion... simple...

My Memory has stolen the lights and is holed up in some dark corner celebrating Yuletide without me.


:))

The Star Factory

Maeve Eiren is hosting a debut show at her new gallery in Avalon.

The invite goes as follows...

"This coming Saturday (the 4th) at 2 PM SLT, you are invited to ice-skate and dance to the live music of The Born Again Pagans.

Come check out the artwork (by soror Nishi, Sunn Thunders, and hexx Triskaidekaphobia) hanging inside and on the roofs of The Star Factory gallery, then have a stroll through the Art District of Avalon Town.

This is a first for soror’s 2D art to be seen in SL, a look back at my vintage steampunk-y decorations, and some cool photography by hexx.

The fantasy garden, where we’ve frozen the inlet, is magical, especially at midnight.

The gallery is a new no-fees hangout for art exhibits and charity events.

Contact Maeve Eiren, if that sounds useful. Better yet, come meet her, have a skate, a dance, and a look at all that’s on display."

Now, the Born Again Pagans, many of you may know... probably the most laid back musicians on any grid, but the fact that Hexx is a photographer is something that is a small revelation...

Sunn is already well known as an artist and always worth checking out...

...and I have helped plant up the garden....

it's kicking off here at 2 pm on Saturday...(tomorrow)...

:))

Full Perms and Other Grids.

It’s almost impossible to have a proper discussion on Twitter, in my opinion, or, maybe I am just too wordy to make it work. There is the possibility of stating a point of view, sharing a link or telling a joke, but that’s about it really.

So, I need to take time out in these pages to explore the subject of selling and buying goods full perm for people to take to other grids.

It started as a question by Chestnut yesterday where she asked me if I would sell stuff so that it could be taken to other grids. I replied that there wasn’t really a mechanism in place that permitted me to do that in a satisfactory manner. That is an incomplete answer, partly due to the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter. The full answer goes like this...

If it costs me $30,000 per annum to live and I manage to get online 1000 hours per year then, even if all my costs are met through my RL work, it is a delusion to think that making a product in VW’s is cheap for me. My overheads are, in an economic sense, in the order of 30$ per hour.

To say “well, SL is just a hobby anyway and no one makes any money out of it, so why bother..” is incorrect as an attitude. It is incorrect because it undermines the potential economic reality which VW’s could attain with time. It is like saying VW’s will always be a stupid game for losers and you don’t need to take the economy, and by inference it’s players, seriously.

The economics of production and sales do need to be modeled on a potentially viable basis or we are all just ‘playing’....(not that I have anything against play, but some people do use VW’s to pay some of their bills, or at least tier).

So.. if a product has hidden production costs in the shape of ISP, utilities, dentists bills...etc... then we have to think in the order of 10$ per hour (which is the legal minimum wage in the UK) to 30$ ... something in that range.

Now, if a tree takes 8 hours to make, including Blender, Gimp, and construction time, that means it has cost me 80 to 240US$ in real terms. If I ever want to turn this production into a business I should be looking to sell this tree for 3X (that’s a traditional business model) the cost of production.

I’m hammering away at this, because there seems to be a lack of understanding of the basic economics in an emotional frenzy of loss when people have to leave stuff behind in SL, almost blaming the creators for not making everything full perm.

So... my tree has to earn me somewhere between 240$ and 720$ in the course of the tree’s sales life. The Sales Life of a product could be many years, and, if I sell the tree for 1$ it will have to be in order for me to recoup my initial investment.

Asking someone to sell you a product full perms vastly shortens the Sales Life of the product. A full perm object can be in everyones SL invent, free, within 2 or 3 years... on a small grid...a month or a week.

So...my point?? Well, my point is that unless people are prepared to pay RL prices for full perm goods then they are being unreasonable.

I have been asked to build “the best night club in SL” but was turned down when I quoted 30$. I was asked to create an exclusive logo for “under 20$”... so there is without any doubt due cause for creators just to refuse point blank to sell things full perm. Many buyers are completely delusional on prices, and that is not their fault necessarily, as someone will build a night club for 29$ or a logo for 19$... but that doesn’t make it right.

I know someone who made exclusive commissioned T shirts, full perm for 50L.... but I don’t think that’s a good thing.

..so...when Jim Tarber says, in Twitter, that he won’t buy anything that’s not full perm, there is insufficient ink for me to respond fully.

There is, as yet, no possibility for me to sell something that can be used on all grids by a buyer without it being full perm. ...and full perm stuff gets handed out free, thereby destroying any Sales Life that product might have.

Now, I realise that this is not the final word on Inventory transfer, but I wanted just to start a discussion by presenting a creators point of view....

:))

UWA.... time to vote...

Yes, time has come round again to go get an eyeful of the best recent builds on the grid at UWA. After a slight pause UWA is back on schedule with it's monthly showing of what's new and good in artland here on SL grid.




So, as usual, I thought I'd throw a few crumbs your way to entice you over for a better look......the one above is a piece by Typote Beck, and like a few of them, it's scripted, so photos only give you a small idea of the actual piece...




Miso Susanowa has a great piece in the show which is a thoroughly appropriate and, as usual, intelligent comment on the question of art and the art business.....it is scripted as well so the photo is just a tease.




Kyra Roxan, creator of my recent hair sculpture...(here).. has two very cool pieces on show, this one being the more organic...as that is my kind of interest...



...and Kalie Fang has a very organic and rather mesmorising piece in the show.... above...




Zola Zsun's tree would, of course, not fail to get noticed by this writer as it is yet another worthy alternative to the photo-on-a-stick trees that plague this grid...

Now, that is only scratching the surface of the works on show there. Alizarin Goldflake is showing some of her amazing work which she used in a stage set for an Alaskan theatre piece..

...and Saveme Oh is creating her own theatre, as she does, on a specially defined area of the show where she has a tiny parcel where she is unbanned.... it's like a SaveMe Oh enclave, a sort of performance art ghetto. I find it very funny. Jayjay and SaveMe have created an ongoing soap opera/performance which I love.

So....the final voting day is Saturday as the awards are announced on Sunday.... pop over and cast your 3 votes.

...of course you have time...

...always time to look at art.

:))

Craft again...

Yes, my first build on Craft Grid, all went well. I uploaded nearly 2000 textures for free and Luce Laval has given me a plot to work on next to Wizzy. There is a Hypergrid portal just behind where I build... it quite strange like something out of Dr. Who....

Lots of well known names have popped in and Oberon has his own sim too.

I have been given space in the Museo del Metaverso to show a few pieces... which I will no doubt do. I can't use Second Inventory yet as I don't have Windows on a PC...and, looking at the price of the software, it would be a lot cheaper to buy an old computer than the new software...so that's something to think about....

.....anyway...all went well ant this is the "Craft Mystical Bean"...not found on any other grid....yet...

:)))