Train Riders

We've been getting huge numbers of visitors on Whimsy lately. The other day Sweetie, in dragon form, and I enjoyed watching the riders of our little steam train have a good time.

Sayonara, Delilah

Meet Delilah.

Delilah is a 13-prim fish I picked up for free at New Citizens, Inc. in early 2007.

Created by Forseti Svarog, Delilah swims in slow circles about one meter in diameter.

Whimsy's undersea areas are lushly decorated, and on our three sims I must have had 30 Delilahs circling.

Delilah is modifiable, so for variety I created albino, pink, silver, verdigris, and zebra-sriped versions. Here are a couple of the variants:

New Gulls

Last weekend Sweetie dragged me away from Whimsy to a place called ebrink Designs to look at seagulls.

We both liked them, and she bought them. I bought them, too and began to replace my Garth Fairchang gulls.

Garth's gulls are stationary on rez, and don't start until you give them a command in chat. ebrink Fugue's gulls begin flying as soon as they are rezzed and are devilishly difficult to catch. I quickly learned to have the edit window open and an already existing object selected when I rezzed them; that way I didn't have to chase them down.

ebrink's gulls weigh in at four prims and fly marvelously and make appropriate gull sounds. They use little script time, so what's not to like?

And so, I saved eight prims per bird on a dozen or so birds. Eighty prims is no laughing matter.

I still miss the way Garth's gulls flew, though.

Garth Fairchang's Seagull in Flight
No One Else Makes Birds that Wheel and Dart like Garth Did

Retiring the Fairchang Parrots

A Face Only a Mother Could Love

Garth Fairchang was one of the earliest residents of Second Life; he first came in world in 2003. With Pituca Fairchang, his wife in real life and Second Life, he owned and operated Fairchang Estates. Alas, Garth died in 2009 of pancreatic cancer.

It must have been around 2007 when I learned Garth was giving away his creations. I took myself to Fairchang and picked up one of everything from birds to automobiles to yachts.

The best of the lot were Garth's parrots and gulls. They were brilliantly scripted and lovely when in flight, but when viewed up close, they were just butt-ugly.

I placed both parrots and gulls in considerable numbers on Whimsy-- gulls mostly on the beach, of course, and parrots around the caldera of the volcano Pele, where they put on a great show, darting and wheeling in a realistic fashion. They were beautiful in the air-- and consider-- this was in a day when most birds flew only in circles.

The gull weighed in at eleven prims and the parrot at twelve-- not bad for the time, but when there were perhaps 25 birds on Whimsy, they required a lot of prims. Garth's birds were the best available, and the price-- free-- was not to be argued with.

All was fine for a couple of years, and then Second Life's Havoc physics engine was updated. The gulls were unaffected, but the parrots suddenly began to fly backwards (Sweetie suggested we leave them that way). Garth didn't respond to my IMs and notecard-- I had no idea he was dying and unavailable to fix them-- so I did surgery, creating a gull-parrot hybrid I called a paragull by modifying Garth's prims and scripts. Like Garth's originals, the paragulls were hideous.

Still, they served admirably for a half dozen years, tirelessly filling the air above Pele's caldera.

Today's animals tend to be a lot smarter than those of old, and far better looking, and they use only a fraction of the prims. Since I had just replaced the many ancient Delilah fish that had been circling on Whimsy and Whimsy Kaboom and Whimcentricity, I thought it was time for a parrot upgrade-- especially since Sweetie had discovered flying seagulls to replace the Fairchang gulls.

I bought a couple of inexpensive parrots on Second Life Marketplace, but was unimpressed. Then I found I already had the ideal parrot-- a lovely blue and red flying bird made by Jahna Bing that weighs in at six prims and flies beautifully.

Today there are a dozen or more new parrots on Whimsy, and four or five on Whimsy Kaboom-- and I have about 75 freed-up prims to use for other purposes.

Parrots at the Volcano (Sweetie's Photos)

More About Parrots in the Next Post!

Playing at the Volcano (Sweetie's Photos)

This evening Sweetie and I found ourselves in the lower gardens on Whimsy. Here are some of her photos.

Note the shadow of a parrot (not the one in the background, another) on the wing of her dragon avatar. Coolness!

We Heart Interactivity!

Sweetie Rides a Manta Ray on Whimsy Kaboom

Entirely too much of Second Life is static. It's often beautiful, but lacks sound, lacks interactivity, lacks changes of elevation, Sometimes it seems to be entirely about mood.

I loved the trashy trailer park SLeezywood for its delicious funkiness, but aside from an interactive shopping cart I found on my last visit, it was entirely static. The only fun to be had was looking.

Sometimes looking is enough, but sometimes one just wants more.

Sadly, SLeezywood now seems to be gone.

Sweetie and I have worked hard to make Whimsy and environs interactive. There are rockets and jet skis and canoes and hang gliders to ride, pose balls that allow you to swim through several hundreds of meters of ocean, train rides, creepy tip bots that turn to face you as you try to sneak past them before they notice you, a squid that squirts ink at you, Intan singles and couples dance balls, dozens of games ranging from Greedy Greedy to bowling to mahjong, a soap box that makes you rant like a mad person in the Boston Commons, a volcano that periodically launches great hot steaming semi-molten boulders (and which can be coerced into erupting), musical instruments to play, a cannon that fires upon touch, and a wide assortment of poseballs. There's a robot bartender which (literally) falls apart when he moves to make a drink for you, robot-operated elevators, and a robot sanatorium with a thousand interactive features.

Whimsy's skies are filled with parrots and gulls and albatrosses and builds all the way up to 4100 meters. On the ground an assortment of animals interact with and occasionally (I'm thinking of the Splash Aquatics piranha here) attack visitors. Our seas are filled with plants and wandering creatures and railroad tracks. The land is covered with paths and swinging bridges.

Sound is everywhere-- from waves crashing onto rocks to dozens of bird calls to the chirping of crickets to croaking frogs to whale song. If you wander about at night you'll find all sorts of subtle lighting effects.

There are a thousand things one can do on Whimsy. You can teleport from one beautiful-- or dangerous-- place to another; separate doors lead you to serene or risky places. You can wade in the lava pool of the volcano Pele and, if you're lucky, fall through to beautiful pools underneath the fire and chaos. You can climb a rope to the top of Mr. Tiki or ride on Bob, our giant granite Paleolithic slightly-deified drinking bird. You can explore an underwater lava tube while wearing interactive boots. You can sit by a tranquil pool, meditating. You can squish your puny bioform flat and transform into a robot or chase a comet at our earth orbit build.

Visitors have a good time on Whimsy-- and Sweetie and I have a good time when we leave our interactive home to go exploring. We just wish more of the beautiful places weren't quite so unchanging.

Water Feature

This little water feature can be found on the side of the hill at the upper gardens on Whimsy.

It began one day about six years ago when Sweetie threw up some hollow blocks. I added moving water and sound, creating a small stream that gurgles down the hill for 12 meters or so before disappearing into the ground.

We had been looking for a place for a hand-washing animation we had picked up at Bits N Bobs, so I made a bamboo pipe with a stream of water issuing from it and positioned the animation appropriately.

For years a galvanized zinc bucket sat beside the spring. Yesterday, at Sweetie's behest, I replaced it with a wooden bucket of my own construction.

Wouldn't you know it, a family of birds immediately moved in!

Treet TV

I don't spend a lot of time watching the in-world Second Life television network Treet TV, but I continue to be utterly amazed at the production values and the immense amount of work Saffia Widdershins and her crew put into the wide variety of shows they air. Since 2007 they have produced a wide variety of programs-- dramas, talk shows, fashion shows, sports events, tutorials, business-- and they've been doing it for seven years now.

Saffia