Where is Mystical Cookie?

Written 17 May, 2009

Where is Mystical Cookie?

Mystical Cookie, owner of a number of sims and creator of the wonderful Mystitool (which has been called the Swiss Army Knife of Second Life) has been missing from the grid for several months. Reportedly her tier has not been paid to the Lindens for some time now.

Mysti's friends and residents are gravely concerned. They've been unable to find out if Mysti is okay and fear the worst.

How sad! Mystical was by all accounts a wonderful person-- and she was certainly a brilliant scripter. I hope she is well and comes back soon.

An Adventure in Landmarks

Chey Finds Herself at a Nasty Sex Place When Sorting Landmarks

Written 15 May, 2009

An Adventure in Landmarks

For the last week or so I’ve been sorting landmarks. I started with the first that showed on my map and I'm up to the E’s now. I must have tossed several hundred out-of-date and no-longer-matters landmarks. Anything to keep the inventory count down!

Hehe. My friend Fnordian Link told me the other night he has 51,000 items in his inventory. I probably would have 51k too, had I not offloaded all my textures and photos and put most of my useless junk I can’t quite bear to throw away into prim storage on Whimsy. Fnord does a great deal of building, which accounts for his inventory size. At least three thousand items in my inventory are things I’ve built.

I’m maintaining my inventory at a svelte 20,000, thank you very much. Sweetie, who has been in world six months longer than me, has around 15,000 items, most of them poison-edged weapons and thermonuclear devices.

Teleporting around to out-of-date landmarks has been interesting. Poof. An empty field where that big high-couture store used to be. Poof. Mackleby Mackle’s Security Device: “You have 15 seconds to get the hell of my property. Have a nice day.” Poof. Destination no longer exists. Poof. “I’ll take that ho there. Cheyenne.” “Sorry, Dave. She’s not one of ours. I’m not even sure how she got here. Can I interest you in Sexxxyluv1234 Bartlett instead?” Poof. I fall 500 meters to the ground. Poof. I’m underwater. Poof. I’m trapped under the floor of a store. Poof. I bounce between red fences. Poof. I’m in a stupid build in the sky with no way out. Poof. You are not allowed into this destination. Poof. Destination no longer exists. Poof.

I’m renaming landmarks as they go so they make more sense and alphabetize properly. **!~MC’s Poseball Palace~@** loses its tildes, exclamation points, and asterisks. HOTSEX CLUB goes to lower case. And all those landmarks with just the sim name get more descriptive names, provided I can find whatever brought me there in the first place.

It sure would be handy if the pushpins of landmarks that lead to no-longer-in-existence sims turned black and red-fenced destinations were radioactive purple.

I figure I have only about a thousand more jumps to make before my landmarks are all up to date.

I am NOT compulsive.

Whimsy Tortoise

Written 17 May, 2009

Whimsy Tortoise

If you should see this fellow in the upper gardens at Whimsy, say hi and then touch him.

Paper Couture

Written 15 May, 2009

Paper Couture


You understand, don’t you, that this is not a fashion blog. That doesn’t mean I can’t blog about fashion sometimes.

Or a lot.

Or that I can’t fill the December pages of this blog with pictures of me in every sort of coat.

Sweetie and I love Paper Couture. The main store is here, but we usually shop at the P.C. store on the ever-changing Tableau sim. We try to get by there about once a quarter to see the new designs.

For reasons of international security I can’t show Sweetie in her Paper Couture. gowns, so you’ll have to live with photos of me.

Photos (Top to Bottom)
Petal Puff
Silk Gypsey
Gilded Peach and Gold
Cardinal Entrance

Hair by Sirena (1-3) and Lala Moon (4)

New Features Lead (Eventually) to Higher Quality Merchandise: V. Avatar Attachments

Sirena Camille Hair Up

Sirena Camille Hair Down

Written 15 May, 2009

New Features Lead (Eventually) to Higher Quality Merchandise
V: Avatar Attachments

I once saw a display at the annual Hair Fair that depicted Second Life hair across the years. The introduction of torii and flexible prims made a huge difference—and so did sculpties. Hair is far more realistic than it was before 2006. Scripts can make hair even better. I’m particularly fond of Sirena hair, which is scripted to be worn up or down; a simple voice command or the removal of a hair ornament will initiate the change.

Sculpted prims have made big improvements in garments—especially in coats and casual garments. Sculpted shirt sleeves and tails, pant cuffs, collars, and belts are now commonplace.

Nowadays most shoes and boots are sculpted. When they’re not looking like big round blobs on your feet, they look great, for the most part.

As the scripting and building tools continue to improve, and as new features arrive (everyone is looking forward to being able to navigate the web from a prim), Second Life will continue to become more and more sophisticated. This will of course, place bigger and bigger demands on our video cards and processors and hard drives, but hey! Progress is inevitable.

(You can see some of the sculpted clothing attachments in my forthcoming non-fashion blog about Paper Couture).

New Features Lead (Eventually) to Higher Quality Merchandise: IV. Water Features and Off-Sim Products

Written 15 May, 2009

New Features Lead (Eventually) to Higher Quality Merchandise

IV: Water Features and Off-Sim Products

As content creators have become more familiar with sculpted prims, the ocean areas of Second Life have become more complex and compelling. By now everyone is familiar with the swirling eddies by Naiman Broom at Las Islase (and there are now competing products). One can now buy whirlpools, choppy seas, dozens of kinds of waves, and huge prims that sit just below the surface of the water, coloring shallow areas to look like the Caribbean.

Water Effects and Offshore Rocks on Leaf Shermer's Eccentricity Sim

Water Effects on Whimsy. Note the Coloring and Sparkles in Foreground

Lately we’ve seen the introduction of lots of products that can be placed beyond the border of a region, making the sim look larger than it actually is. They can’t actually be reached (unless a poseball is carefully placed alongside them), but they are visual treats.

Off-sim builds range in size from single rocks to entire mountains, and some are made to look like entire sims (the most dramatic example being on the Aggro sim..

Every Bit of This is Off-Sim

New Features Lead (Eventually) to Higher Quality Merchandise: III. Sits

Written 15 May, 2009

New Features Lead (Eventually) to Higher Quality Merchandise

III. Sits

When I first came to Second Life there were pose balls everywhere. There are still plenty, but savvy furniture-makers are using EasySit*  and similar programs to position avatars in relation to sofa cushions, barstools, and beds. This not only does away with unsightly poseballs; it reduces prim count.

Many content creators are now using scripts that allow the selection of multiple animations, allowing avatars to select or cycle through as many as a dozen animations in their furniture.

* IM me if you would like a free sitmaker program.

New Features Lead (Eventually) to High Quality Merchandise: II. Scripting

Written 15 May, 2009

New Features Lead (Eventually) to Higher Quality Merchandise

II. Scripting

When I first came to Second Life, most scripted objects used fairly simple code. There were exceptions—Mystical Cookie’s Mystitool and Ananda Sandrgrai’s free Mahjong table and Ziggy Puff’s free Zhao AO come to mind—but I spent a great deal of money for birds with locked scripts with only one line of code to make them circle endlessly..

Nowadays there are thousands of scripted objects that take advantage of the latest developments in Second Life’s scripting engine and the SL viewer. In fact, it was the recently-blogged Damani media player that made me think of writing this blog. At just two prims, it allows selection-by-click that would have formerly required 40 or more prims; this is possible because it uses a new ability of scripts to tell just where a prim is clicked.

Damani Media Player: Two Prims, Lots of Click Action

Scripters are now taking full advantage of the Linden Scripting Language’s ability to communicate with the World Wide Web. My new Damani weather system, for example, can read the real-world weather conditions at my home zip code and duplicate them on Whimsy. When it rains at my house, it rains on Whimsy.

Web-enabled vendors and rent systems like those at Hippo Technologies are far easier to set up and maintain than earlier vendors, which read data from notecards—and they provide better metrics. Other web-enabled products maintain databases that allow automated delivery of updated products and notices of sales or special events.


Movement of prims has also improved. Birds and fish no longer merely circle dumbly; they patrol semi-randomly around a home position and move their bodies while they’re doing so (we have a great flamingo from Animania that struts and frets around on the beach at Whimsy). Many builders are taking advantage of the prim automation program Puppeteer or using their own scripts to automate houses, animals, and other objects.

New Features Lead (Eventually) to High Quality Merchandise: I. Sculpties

Written 6 May, 2009

New Features Lead (Eventually) to Higher Quality Merchandise

I. Sculpties

Sculpted prims have been around for—what?—eighteen months?

The first sculpted objects for sale were crude. Even if the sculpted shape was itself elegant, the textures that wrapped around them weren’t. But over time content creators have learned to map textures onto sculpted prims with great accuracy and have become wonderfully clever at making complex shapes that can cut down dramatically on prim usage.

Witness this cluster of palm trees from Tobias Novi at Tree House Designs. Only two prims are used to make four trees.


And compare it to this cluster of palms from Lilith Heart's Heart Garden Centre, made with conventional shapes and weighing in at 30 prims for three trees and some grass..


I much prefer Lilith’s beautiful painted textures to the more photoreal textures used in the sculpted palms, but we’ll nevertheless be placing some of the latter on light-prim Whimsy Kaboom.
Now witness this sculpted walkway and cabana from Antreas Alter at Real! Waves. It uses only eight prims fore everything—the hut, the cushions, the fire, and the long walkway.

Compare to this tiki hut by Babe Daligdig of JC Solutions. I long ago removed an array of palm leaf clusters and the ladder from Babe’s build to cut down on prims, but it still uses 42 prims.


I like Babe’s tiki hut better, but it’s difficult to justify the additional prims.

I’m certainly not knocking Lilith’s work, or Babe’s. When they made their palms and tiki huts there WERE no sculpted prims. Lilith has begun to work with sculpties, and I imagine Babe is working with them too. But the immense strides made with sculpted prims and their lower prim count make their sculpted competitors attractive enough to purchase—even though I like the originals better, and even though I don’t like to use a lot of sculpties because of the problems in rezzing them..