Presented at TXDLA and USLA Conference in April 2012

It's been a long time since my last post I apologize. I have been very busy in real life as well second life.

First off I got to present at two conferences in April in TXDLA and USDLA about our virtual learning spaces initiative. It was very exciting and stimulating and we received pretty good feedback on our presentation. Below is a copy of our presentation.

After that storm blew over, I had to work on getting ready for the Home & Garden Expo benefiting Relay for Life 2012.  Most of the work I did involved taking old designs and re-implementing them so they were less resource intensive. The effort paid off, most of my chairs went from 26 land impact to 7 or sometimes even less. Most light fixtures of mine are now 2-3 land impact max and they still look as good as ever.

I sculpted to the degree I considered to be still faithful to the original. I refuse to bend my creations beyond recognition just so that people can cram too many of them on their land. It is good to have houses with few furnishings, I do not want to see over-crowded mission homes.

The Home Expo gave me a chance to have a real deadline to get this work done by and also I was very lucky to get invited to the Prim Perfect Sim at the Expo. Prim Perfect crew were the perfect host and I felt very welcomed and walked away very happy.

This year the Home Expo had an insane number of sims and creators. The amount of content available was astounding and I must admit I did not get to see all of it due to my SL client crashing every 5 minutes ever since mesh was deployed and the last two updates to the Release Client seem to have introduced an infinite loop that maxes out the CPU on Macs and causes a crash. I guess I am going back to Imprudence Client.

Well that's not all. There's more, I will post about it in the next post.

Fashion for Life 2012: It's time!

I am proud to tell you all that I participated in this year's Fashion for Life event by building the sim named Volta hosted by the wonderful designer Sonatta Morales. Harper Beresford was the host and organizer of Fashion for Life in 2012 and she relied on a team of many others who made this event possible. Please look for a list of the organizers at the bottom of this post and links to the Fashion for Life Event Blog and Info pages.

First off, I was a little scared by the size of the project, a whole sim build that needs to be completed in less than two weeks and a space that will house a big store and twenty four other smaller stores all built according to pre-determined standards and specs. It all seemed too limiting and stressful at first. However I believe it is good to challenge one's self from time to time and see what you're made off. So I jumped in and accepted Harper's kind invitation.

They placed me on the Future wing of the 9 sims arranged in the shape of a plus sign. Sonatta Morales with her vintage fashions seemed a strange pick for the future and I think she too wondered when she found out... until I saw her work and she saw mine. I do believe that Sonatta and I are a match made in heaven. I rezzed my heart out to make her the fashion temple she was worthy of and she did an incredible job adapting to the building and bringing her own flair, details, props and of course brand new designs for Fashion for Life 2012. I have never worked with another creative soul with so much happy cooperation and mutual understanding and respect. She is wonderful.

Now the other designers were also wonderful. I never had one designer complain. They all moved in quietly, set up their own presence in the shells I created for them and the outcomes -- the stores are just lovely. I will post the stores with designers moved in onto my flickr account shortly and have them displayed here. For today, I am only posting the slideshow with the empty stores ready for designers.

The concept of the sim was future as I said above. However I did not imagine an all metal, sterile or worse dirty and post apocalyptic future. I imagined a neo deco future ripe with details, proportions -- a medley of everything I consider to be good from the past.

The moon in the background is the planet Melancholia veering close to our planet but we never know whether it just grazed past us giving us wonderful views or if it is going to collide with this world of beauty. The earth's crust has become unstable, revealing ashes, magma glowing through under the walkways and around the edges of the sim. Who knows what the future of this planet will be but in the meantime it's a lovely place to be. That's what I had in my mind when I built Volta.

Fashion for life is about Fashion so ultimately this event is not about my build, it is about the stores within the build and the wonderful creative designers that give us the purpose for the build. So with no further ado here's the sim layout and designer list:

Dream Seeker Volta for Fashion For Life 2012 Designer List:

1. Virtual Impressions

2. Madison’s Creations

3. SIGMA Jewels

4. Sascha’s Designs

5. Kunglers

6. Eclectica

7. G Field

8. My Precious Fashion House

9. Mohna Lisa Couture

10. Akeruka

11. BAIASTICE

12. Miamai

13. Sonatta Morales

14. Kakia Designs

15. Styles of Edo

16. EarthStones

17. Orage Creations

18. Xen’s Hats

19. Felicia’s Fashions

20. Blacklace Lingerie

21. Donna Flora

22. ::je suis…::

23. J.H. Couture

24. Alpha Auer

25. Jador Fashion

Here is the slurl to teleport to Volta:
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/DreamSeeker%20Volta/246/128/24

Here's a slideshow of the Volta sim in FLickr:

Here's a youtube clip of me flying around in Volta just before designers moved in:

Finally here's the credits for all the wonderful people that worked on this project:

Lead:
Harper Beresford (harperberesford at gmail.com)

Designer Liaison:
Bonadea Avedon
Designer Liaison and Raffle Coordinator:
Anne Daumig

Building Lead:
Syngen Sohmers (syngensohmers at gmail.com)

Builders:
Cory Edo
DB Bailey
Grace Loudon
Anoron Hanson
Frederick Lancaster
Cierra Anatine
Nigel Riel
Rathmeous Dagger
Roscko Cobalt
Troy Vogel

Interpreter:
Cameron69 Resident
Dream Seeker Estates Liaison:
Samantha Ohrberg

ACS/RFL liaison:
Stingray9798 Raymaker (stingray9798 at gmail.com)

Webmistress:
Harper Beresford (harperberesford at gmail.com)
Efforts and funds committed to FFL go to support American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life.  We are entirely volunteer driven and 100% of the funds raised are presented as a charitable donation to ACS from the residents of Second Life.

Full information about Fashion for Life 2012 can be accessed at:
 http://www.fashionforlifesl.org/

Nepenthe House at Dunes of Costa Del Mar Estate is Complete

A few months back Farris Fargis, a good friend of mine, approached me for building him a large house on his new island. I was honored that he thought of me though he had owned a copy of my Odaesan House and used it as his estate house for some time before packing it up and selling his island in 2010.

I accepted the project with some reservation as I find it more and more difficult to build large homes in SL, due to the fact that I think it's hard to make these large scale projects look real and/or sensible to the eye.

To some degree what I did with Odaesan House was in my mind a fluke, as in I got lucky back in 2006 when I built it. It somehow worked despite it's rambling size and the length of its front and rear facades.

This time Farris wanted something of a cross between the general style I build and the Hearst Castle. I started the project by first defining the outline of the landscape and topography as no one house can stand on its own without the land and setting it reciprocates. Once the island was better defined, it was time to "mass" the house into place. This is an exercise where I estimate the size, placement and volume of main living areas of the building using simple blocks. This allows me to get the sense of scale and helps me establish a balanced relationship with the setting I am working in -- namely the island.

After the massing stage, I started building small components of the house. At first I was a little stifled by all the freedom given to me by Farris as he pretty much had said, "oh do the fab job you always do, be creative, there are no boundaries". Any creative person that's worked on a big project knows that utmost freedom brings utmost pain as the project becomes a battle of wills with one's own creative side. On one hand you want to finish and hand over the project to the owner, on the other, your creative side wants to explore further and see if there's a better solution to the problem at hand.

As part of the house started to take shape, I rolled back the project at least once if not more times to remove some of the elements. My fear always was that due to the large size of the house, the building would look like a mosque or temple. I did not want to build a mausoleum, I wanted to build a house.

Finally in November and December the house started to move forward at a pretty steady pace and I worked about 1-2 hours a day on it slowly chipping at the problem from various angles. In late December and early January I completed the house and handed it to the owner -- furnished and decorated.

Farris wanted to use his own furniture as well as the furnishings I placed in the house. It was an interesting exercise in design as I had to let go off of having absolute control over everything. Nevertheless, we worked together seamlessly and got along great and I would like to think that the end result is to Farris' liking.

Below are some snapshots of the house. The house is open to the public for visiting but if you do visit please remember that this is someone else's house and be courteous please.

The SLURL for the house is:
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Dunes/184/181/37

Cyber Bullied

I have been the target of a vicious cyber bully famous for her ornate lengthy posts about fake-crises most of which revolve around how she is tormented in SL. This person has had an axe to grind since I posted some tongue in cheek rebuttals on a now discontinued online forum about SL.

I just would like to say that anything you may have read about me on this person's awful blog is just a fabrication of her disturbed and sick mind. There little if any connection with real facts and that was just last year's posts.

Furthermore this year, she has moved on to claiming that I attacked her estate and caused her sims damage etc. I do not have time to go and set some time aside to create an alt account and spend hours ruining the landscape of her already awful looking sims terraforming them beyond recognition. She has gone too far in this latest bout of drama and pulled in my real life info from google, and reported me to Linden Labs as an attacker.

I have reported her to Linden Lab as a cyber bully, a perpetrator of drama and lies and worse a person who divulges real life info about SL avatars -- a crime punished severely by LL in most cases -- except hers. I also have a cease and desist letter ready for her next attack and am in touch with attorneys in her state to serve her in her own state as well as my own. I have contacted the company that hosts her blog and Linden Lab informing them of my intention to serve them both for hosting content that's disparaging to my person and invading my privacy online. So all the weapons have been drawn, I just do not wish to fire them as I feel getting into a legal battle is exactly what this attention whore of a person would love to have -- I can see the blog posts already.

This person's so called estate -- an amalgam of ugly shaped plots with buildings and "landscaping" dating back to 2006 is an eye sore for the mainland and has maintained its status as such since its founding. Her estate requires no giefer attack to look like it's been griefed, it's already abhorrent looking and an opportunity for innocent passersby to experience the wonderful Sudden SL Blindness Syndrome, luckily curable by some offline time and rest.

This blogger is the closest thing we have to a cyber bully in SL and it boggles my mind that Linden Lab has continued to enable this sick disturbed and certifiable person who has poisoned anything and everything that has had the misfortune of falling into her radar. She has written reams of bad publicity generating material that makes SL look like a joke online to all that may stumble upon her well indexed pages from google.

This blogger is one of the biggest liabilities SL has had. Furthermore although I admit she has been to some degree brutalized and attacked regularly, her fate has been a result of her own behavior in SL towards others. More than likely if you hate everything and everyone, twist the truth, lie, use demagogy and persistence and length monologues to claim you win arguments by bullying people online -- you will find yourself hated, marginalized, ignored or worse attacked and pestered by those who have nothing better to do. Everything she has suffered from in SL is a direct response to the awful person she is and has been to SL and everyone in it.

After 7 years in SL, I must admit, the only way I can explain to myself why this ugly person with an uglier heart has continued to exist in SL despite all the shit she has pulled is that she must have a relative at LL or worse she must have something that could expose Linden Lab in a very unfavorable way. I can not imagine why else this person would still be allowed to have a membership.

While I wish her much healing and wish that she finds peace, I have the feeling she never will until her last breath. I just wish she can find her heart first in her body, and then find in that tiny heart to avoid writing slurs and ugly prose about me and my creations until her last breath.

That's all I have to say...

Finally some references:

• Primer on Prokofy and how to deal with her:
•  Benjamin Durankse Write up
• Her Profile on Encyclopedia Dramatica:
• http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/Prokofy_Neva
• The Jim Jesus Blog post:
•  Prokofy Neva, the biggest idiot on the internet

Mesh is here, New Light & Shadows are here!

We should expect to see a major overhaul of merchandise in SL in the next year or so as the arrival of mesh will no doubt prompt content creators to revisit old creations and revamp them.

Much of the light fixtures etc will also require a redo as the new light and shadow settings set the lights as much brighter than the legacy engine that was only able to render so many lights at a time. I am not sure if the light & shadow code is settled enough to start making the alterations. I went ahead and dulled down some of my "too bright" lights just in case. Redoing the light fixtures was easy as I simply edited the scripts inside them.

Redoing prim items as mesh will be a much longer, much more laborious process and will require me to learn a whole bunch of new skills.

I used sculpts in my furniture due to market pressure but I made few sculpts and bought most of the sculpts I used. I was never happy with the sculpts however as they performed terribly with LOD (level of detail) settings.

TXSTATE OpenSim Virtual Campus Opening Soon

This is what I have been working on for the last couple of months: A new version of the old TXSTATE Bobcat Village campus in SL built in opensim on our own grid at TXSTATE.

The challenge really has been downloading all the buildings despite all the insane TOS requirements that ruined such great apps as Second Inventory.

The hurdles I speak of are:

• Huge Prims: Creator name does not match mine, and the new TOS forbids the download of blended creator objects.

• Sculpt Textures: Depending on the whims of the download software these too can be a problem as I did not create them and that makes the object a blended creator object.

• Door / Window / Sit Scripts: Paskis Doors and Windows and Piero Padar's Perfect sitter are scripts I use every day to make my SL easier as a content creator. Who would have thought that relying on the smarts of these two great coders would come back and bite me in the you know where down the line. Any item that has these scripts needs to be first stripped off of scripts, exported, imported and somehow scripted from scratch using my own scripts or some open source scripts I found on the net.

• Animations: As I do not create any animations, all the animations I used in my chairs are not impossible to download and re-use.

Don't get me wrong, the things I am trying to download, I own full permission to. I guess the full permission only covers the grid they're in and nothing beyond.

I wish there was a way to invite these builders to the grid we are working on so that they can come in under their own name, be paid, and make their scripts and assets so that their work can keep serving the public.

Clearly TXSTATE grid will not be in the business of selling furniture, but it would be nice if our furniture could have the nice animations my SL furniture has.

In terms of tools I used to export things: I used Second Inventory heavily but it was klugedy to go back and forth between the SL client and SI interfaces. Imprudence offers a much better export function however I noticed that it does a VERY sloppy job of exporting textures --- even those I made myself.

I honestly think LL came up with this new TOS edit just to sabotage the steady migration of SL generated content to other opensim based grids.

But either way, difficult or not, it is happening and here are some snapshots to prove it:

New Items at Mission Home Store

This picture does no justice to the amount of work I have done in the past couple of months.

Practically I have retextured, and "touched" almost all of the living room furniture items. I have also made additional new items.

My next steps will be to revisit the Marketplace store and update the MHS offerings there.

Right now the best place to shop for Mission furniture in SL has been and still is the Mission Home Store. I have been in business since 2006 and have been building since 2004.

Come down to the store and see the new items in person, you won't regret it:
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mission%20Home%20Store/219/135/24

Quick Flythrough of the Mission Home Store Island (Vintage)

This is an old recording I made earlier in 2010 before I left the FLWVM project and Builder's Brewery.

Believe it or not, I shot this with a Flipcam that I was holding with one hand while with the other I navigated my avatar. I had the cam pointed at my Apple Cinema display. It seems the two were in perfect sync and you care barely tell this was shot with a handheld.

If I was going to use this footage professionally, I would probably edit the colors a little bit to cool it all down as things are quite saturated. But you seriously can not beat the frame rate. :-)

New Modern Mission Style Bedroom Set now available at MHS!

Well I bit the bullet and purchased a mission style sculpt set from a vendor to give this thing a try. I think the end results are quite good. I had to make a custom texture to accentuate the quality of the sculpts but it was overall a lot of fun creating this set. The end result was a more modern take on my design sensibilities. I think this set will offer a more progressive and prim savvy alternative to those who are mission style fans but do not have the means to host some of my furniture in their smaller land lots.

The set is Mod/Transfer permissions with the exception of the bed that's delivered with Mod / Copy permissions. Total number of prims for the set is 19. The suggested retail price of the bedroom set is L$500. The set includes:
1 Bed (4 poses Male / Female with Multisitter functionality)
1 Armoire
1 Dresser
2 Nightstands
1 Vanity with Mirror

Petit Lake House Released

As everyone seems to be obsessed with smaller homes and fewer prim counts, I find myself working on smaller and smaller projects and more and more prim efficiency.

Though the new restrictions on size and prim count do provide a lot of inspiration at times. The Petit Lake house is the end result of such restrictions.

The Petit Lake House measures 10x10meters in terms of footprint. It is a single room residence with one sliding door. The structure is one linked object except for the door and comes with a rezzor for convenient placement on desired land lots. It is 37 prims total.

I tried to roll in most of my recent lessons learned into this build and I would like to think that many SL residents will find this little house to be a great addition to their already existent estate or perhaps find it just the right fit for a small residence on its own on their favorite piece of SL.


To visit this house in SL, teleport to:
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mission%20Home%20Store/186/68/23