Fun with Texturing an Airship

Tags

airship, building, houses, Isla Okiddo, learning

This wonderful airship at Isla Okiddo was a delight for me to find. There’s art, books, comfy seating and great rugs. And tea!! It started me on one of those diversional little journeys that happen in Second Life.

The airship is from Garden of Dreams. It really does fly. Navigating safely around the grid is beyond what I’ve been able to learn so this one isn’t for me. I looked at other airships, including boarding the Albatross in Dryland, (which was closing and is likely gone by now.

The Albatross is huge.

I then found a free, copy/mod Steampunk Airship on the Marketplace. It rezzes as an object and is stated to be 66 LI but mine turned out to be 67. It is static and isn’t huge, which is fine with me. Best of all there are lots of faces that can be textured which is one of the few things I’ve learned how to do so far.

 

I would dearly love to be more creative but when it comes to building and there are all these words like sculpties,  prims and UV maps, mesh and such, my human starts to tune out and suddenly realizes the plants could use some watering or that there’s ginger flavored bacon in the fridge.

But the approach of texturing was doable for me and I had fun with it. The airship is already textured with what’s found in the library. I used some painted metal I picked up in a hunt, some fine wood, better than the weathered boards the home came in and I left the glass alone.

I had previously bought some textures from PixelCat, somewhat in the same way my human collects vintage  and ethnic fabric. I used the Steampunk Copper and Crushed Velvet and was pleased with the result.

The indoor area and deck are spacious enough to be livable. You can stand up below deck but it felt confining to me and I wouldn’t use it. There are scripts to open the doors of the indoor area and to go below deck. You could add one to make it fly if you wish.

I was told there’s a way I could reduce the LI down and was offered to be shown that in due time. For now, the airship is tucked away in my inventory. It has dawned on me that I’ve bought so much stuff without paying real attention to some of it being modifiable. If it doesn’t work as is, I never look at it again. But it seems to be the next step is to modify items until my human is willing to  wrap her head around actually learning to make things.

 

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Shopping for the Post-Apocalypse and Thoughts on Cooperation

Tags

behavior, learning

taken in the Wastelands

These are a few photos from a long ramble around the Wastelands over a month ago. My visits to post-apocalyptic builds had a purpose; I was asked to help a friend who’s creating a sim.

I visited lots of places, took lots of photos and these are my three favorites. The Wastelands was the most enjoyable of all of them for me. I’m still taking little steps daily to de-clutter and organize and I simply can’t keep all the pictures I take. Most of them have been deleted.

Are you like me, with about twenty unwritten blog posts in your head that you simply don’t sit down, type and publish?

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to write about but have been expecting too much of myself to get it more right. So I’ll just write it in my combo blurt-it-out/beat-around-the-bush way. 🙂

I believe that any skill we learn and most of our accomplishments are never wasted. They may seem to be failures and wastes but we can’t always sense how they alter us.

I can be a good listener and while it’s reasonable that I’d witness an SL friend’s challenges I tend not to want to do so with people I’ve just met. But I hear way more than I’d like to about lack of opportunities in real life. How hard it is. How there’s no place for many to fit in.

It’s been obvious for quite a while that many of us need to create our own jobs. We learn to freelance. Have gigs instead of careers. Especially for males, many of the roles that “should be” are long gone.

Did you know that last year, 2012, was the United Nations International Year of Cooperatives? That Co-ops are the fastest growing business model?

What does this have to do with Second Life? Even though much of what goes on in virtual reality is play and recreation, when we interact with others on projects and socializing we can learn to work better with diverse people. Oh, it’s easy to say that it doesn’t matter and hide behind anonymity. To act like a jackass just because life and all is so hard.

My skills and understanding have improved from “playing” in virtual reality and it’s helped me with clients and service providers in real life. I can better sense that line between when it isn’t personal and is worth the inconvenience and when it’s a swampy road I’d best not walk down.

Now I certainly don’t want to tell others how to live their own life but when I’ve listened to enough helpless whining from someone I might give them the link to this post. And ask: “What are you going to do about it?”

“What are you going to do about it?”

I’m not sure what the name of the place above was but it was near the area of the Wastelands; it may have recently closed.

I’ve often been attracted to helping people with projects when they have clarity of vision. I have to watch that so I won’t let it turn my own projects into shadows.

In the situation with the post-apocalyptic sim creation, almost none of my ideas were used. I would be asked for help, would do some research and my friend would go with something else. Or change her mind and vision. Several times.

In a way, my showing her something that is not her vision helps her to find what she does want. This sort of dynamic used to make me crazy. Now, I’ve learned skills in handling myself better so this is all easier.

In real life I do a lot of work on my own. But I also must work with people who are quite different from me. People who tell me, “That’s impossible; that will never work.” Sometimes it does; many times it doesn’t. But it’s getting less stressful and I’m more successful. I’m learning to navigate and negotiate better.

And in virtual reality, many of these insights slide in easily like when driving or in the shower or gardening.

We can’t do everything ourselves.

Aspirational

Tags

awareness, Consciousness, Health, learning

Our personal environments such as homes, desks and cars can reflect what our interior selves are like, whether it be our minds, moods, energy systems or some combination of them. Some organizational and de-cluttering professionals point out that much of our excess stuff is “aspirational”. We aspire to be the kind of person who’s into fine wine or the kind of person who productively writes or the kind of person who consistently takes care of our body with exercise and physical movement.

A dictionary definition of “aspriational” is rather limited, indicating a social climbing focus. Since we’re all so diverse, we all aspire to different things for different reasons, which may not appear to be social climbing to others at all.

The metaverse can be a playground and canvas for us to explore aspirational aspects. The above photo reflects how I’d like to have my interior self organized sometimes. I wouldn’t want to literally live in a place like this in first life for very long; my inner processing would quickly alter it.

This is my London skybox apartment in Second Life. It’s very tidy, serene, spacious and everything is in it’s place. It has little in common with my first life except for the white walls with lots of art. Tomorrow, I’ll show a photo that much better reflects the landscape of my mind at times. I’ve been sitting on it and three others for several months now and I wasn’t going to share because I feel it’s very revealing of aspects of myself, some that are often misunderstood and unappealing to others.

But what the hell; now I find it rather amusing. If you happen to read this post, maybe it will bring you to some reflection of your own life. And if you want to share, whether it be something about your first or Second Life, this is an invitation to do so.

Virtual Lunar New Year Feast

Tags

Arcachon, Grey, learning, Lunar New Year, RolePlay, roleplay, Shadowrun, treet tv

Fried nian gao. Lu rou fan. Ramune and Blueberry cheesecake. I knew what blueberry cheesecake was but not the other meal items before I was treated to a meal for the Lunar New Year over a week ago in Second Life.

I’ve gradually made my own holiday traditions and I like to mark the Lunar New Year in real life but I wasn’t expecting the delightful roleplay I became engaged in. Many of the players on this particular sim have businesses as a sort of front and also for a sense of living in a community while most of our nuyen or credits are obtained through Shadowrunning. I manage the Golden Dragon Tea and Bath House. There’s a diner, a strip club, a pawn shop and also a bakery which usually just sells pastries. Most of the food is of synthetic ingredients in the year 2080.

But on this day when I went into the bakery, the manager made me a virtual meal of traditional Taiwanese food made of “real”, not synthetic ingredients. It came complete with Wikipedia and google links for info and photos of the fried nian gao and Lu rou fan. She described the textures to me and I very much enjoyed the roleplay.

I actually learned about ramune, which is a Japanese soda,  a few weeks ago when  the bakery manager requested it in the Golden Dragon.  It comes in lots of flavors and she requested kiwi. The internet is overwhelmingly full of information and this was a more memorable way to learn something new. It reminded me of the treet tv show about Arcachon which I viewed recently, having visited Arcachon myself several weeks before.

I’ve only recently discovered treet tv when one of the blogs mentioned the show about griefing. The sim Arcachon, like others, is in trouble. I found my visit there to be delightful with many activities to explore and the show really demonstrated the wonderful ways the sim is available to be used as a learning tool regarding language and the culture of the lovely French region.

I eat a very healthy diet and have been experimenting with ways to add a few more Asian foods into my cooking. It’s easier when something gently arrives unexpectedly on my radar instead of my trying to take in a bulk of information.

For me, it’s heartwarming when someone has the time and patience to share what they know in Second Life, which is oh-so-much-more than a game. When you do that, when you can, you might never know what that sort of kindness means to another human being behind a pixel avatar.

Not Shopping Today Either

Tags

awareness, Consciousness, learning, Story Telling, values, Writing, writing

Not Standing Next To The Bullshit.

“Katia continues with her writing and the dishes remain soaking, the sheets remain unchanged and the time moves on. She actually has to remind herself that this is not a failure; she really cannot be in more than one place at one time. The horrors of taking on the energy of others, the horrors of people who felt overwhelmed by duties making her feel a failure because they focused on what she hadn’t done instead of what she had accomplished for them. It’s in her cells and nervous system now. Whatever choice she has made, a part of her could say that it was the wrong one; she has been programmed.

There are people and organizations she can finally see clearly as her oppressors, those she wanted to please and could be easily manipulated by with the withholding of appreciation and approval. They’d wrung everything out of her that they could because it was the way the world worked in places. They thought that they deserved it to make up for what had been done to them, for their losses and for their conditioning of overwhelm, for Katia’s stupidity for actually caring and mostly because they didn’t have the blessing and curse of feeling what it’s like to be someone or something else.

They give her nothing now; they do nothing for her but make noise in her life. She no longer cares what they think of her; she thinks of them rarely at all. What of value can they withhold from her now, when she turns and walks away?”

The Discerning of Appropriate Information

Tags

awareness, choices, Consciousness, learning, Story Telling, values, Writing

Time Out

“Right now it is shining more than the enormous amount of frightening, yet also dull information and the distractions and the conflicting opinions bouncing around her world. She can look at it and put it in a simple, beautiful container in her mind and practice—next step, next step, next step– and then move to play with the simplicity of another beautiful container that holds what is her own chosen priority.

Almost everything she’s been taught about living has been wrong. She has to write her own manual now and it is a great responsibility and a great adventure. It is clunky and awkward work. Many mistakes are made. It is like having to transform into another species with no appropriate elder to explain the process and the signs and gently point out the wheat from the chaff. She moves between feeling the trembling of her hands working with the material of the moment and pausing to listen to the soft voice amongst the cacophony and babble of the world. Sometimes, for a brief moment she can attend to both.  It takes a lot of energy yet it appears to look like nothing is being accomplished to those mostly focused in the third dimension. There’s no more time to try to explain.

She has been saved by her ego many times; she can see that now. That ego that has been pointed out with head shaking and frowning scorn by the well-meaning when she didn’t stay in the line, get with the program, keep up with the pace, do it the way it worked for them in their shoes and on their path with their resources.  Only one reality, they seemed to think, and the one belonging to the most intimidating, the most rich, the most confident, arrogant, complacent and smooth is the one that wins. Sometimes that looked like the only game in town.”

Island Oasis Neighbors

Tags

houses, Island Oasis, learning

I log into Island Oasis virtual world at least briefly almost every day, mostly to make sure my rental box is updated and that all is well.  None of my neighbors have been around while I’m on but changes happen while I’m not there.

The empty high prim houses are gone and other residents have taken up some of the islands. Across from my front door someone is creating an original build. I spend most of my time in this world at home and it’s very relaxing. Yesterday afternoon I went motorcycle riding at the Speedway and Airfield and ended up laughing and my avatar looked like this:

Making Things in Island Oasis Virtual World

Tags

creativity, Island Oasis, learning

This is a two prim puppy bed I made. It took an embarrassingly long time to make it, linking the two prims together. Pet beds are something I haven’t seen in Island Oasis and actually might be useful. I’ve made it in about four textures. The puppy here is way too many prims and so it stays in inventory along with two cats. I needed to size the bed so I  rezzed the puppy.

I have a copy of the puppy bed in my yard in case anyone’s flying by and wants to pick one up. I pretend the puppy is hiding somewhere instead of being stashed in inventory.

This is a 4 prim bench I made which took quite awhile. It also comes in several different textures. There’s a problem with my AO. When the avatar sits on things, it’s in really wacky poses and when the poses look more normal, the avatar stands up after a few seconds. Anyway when I sit on this bench, the poses are even more awkward. After I took this picture I sat the avatar down and she was totally underground except for her feet and ankles sticking out.

I don’t have the time and interest to figure out why, but maybe something is wrong with this bench besides just being funny looking. Of course anyone may help themselves to a copy of the bench if they want.

I had some items auto-returned to me and they were likely something I lost in the sandbox.

If I made another project, it might be a dog house.

On a Brighter Note

Tags

Cherry Manga, creativity, Island Oasis, learning

The Cherry Park

The Cherry Park

The Cherry Park

Recently I visited The Cherry Park which is the creation of Cherry Manga. There were lots of magical things to see and even a mysterious haunted tower. I’ll have a few more photos tomorrow.

It was an enjoyable experience. I needed the break after signing up for an account at Island Oasis, which was an impulse decision after reading this. It wasn’t too difficult. I messed up getting my free island there but otherwise I’m doing O.K. for  the amount of time I had to learn.

The rental box for the free island needs to be clicked on once a week, which makes sense so they aren’t totally abandoned. The rules state that if it isn’t, the resident’s prims will be returned. I flew around and saw what looked like empty islands but on closer inspection they were rented. I got a bit hasty and when I saw a pink “available” rental box I clicked it and then noticed that someone had a gazebo, chairs and plants on the island. It seemed her items weren’t automatically returned when the rental expired and I never meant to grab someone’s space out from under them. I’ve put in a notecard about it and hope there is no awkwardness.

What surprised me the most is that I’m now interested in learning to build. When I saw all the free textures available and found the sandbox with all the instructions on signs along the fence I was suddenly less intimidated about learning to make  things. I might still be traumatized by how challenging Second Life was for me to learn. It’s difficult for me to learn things when other people are around, both in real life and in virtual reality.

My avatar is named Wren Grey there. She isn’t as pretty as Pearl but we won’t tell her that. She has no interest at all in role play or dancing so I guess she isn’t much fun. But it seems she wants to try to make furniture and houses.

We’re All Beginners At Something

Tags

Inspiring Orientation, learning, Pearl Grey, Photos

A Very Large Room At Inspiring Orientation

These photos were taken several weeks ago at Inspiring Orientation. Information can be found under Newcomer Friendly Spots on the Destination Guide. Pearl would have loved to have visited a place like this when she first rezzed in SL.

And It’s Very Bright!

I’m moving around better than I was several days ago. I’ve got an idea for a new project and have been at war with myself over the feasibility of taking on something new when I’m not clear on all the parts to it. It may be a false start but it won’t leave me alone so I’ve taken some hesitant steps with it. It makes me feel more relaxed about Second Life as I’m lowering my expectations now. The ideal vision and the actuality of it are far apart.

There Are No Guarantees When One Begins A New Journey. Taken At Inspiring Orientation.

Even if the new project doesn’t get far, I’m expecting to learn something from it that will be of use to my life.