Don't Mess With My Head!

So, a week or so ago, along our route at the recent Fashion Fair for Life we came across this female mannekin with a light bulb for a head.

It was a bit creepy, but we figured, what the hey!

They Sweetie tried on a demo for a mesh dress in the store, and this is what happened:

Yep, that's right! The demo wiped out her head.

I'm certain it never crossed the creator's mind, but hiding or defacing a woman's visage is misogynistic in the extreme. What happens when women in some Middle Eastern countries don't wear burkas? They get acid thrown in their faces. Where do male spousal abusers make sure to hit women? The face.

It was max creepy. Neither of us made a purchase.

Now wouldn't you know it, just down the path there was another store that wanted to sell us mesh heads.

Sweetie wasn't about to buy a mesh head, but wanted to check out the demo. Here's the result:

Eek! Avatar hair! And I had NO IDEA I our eyeballs were half-spheres!

Then Sweetie actually got the head on, and things settled down.

"You know, don't you," I said, "it's difficult to think of you as glamorous when I know how your eyeballs really look."

That earned me this look:

Yes, yes, Sweetie had found the HUD and was trying out the facial expressions.

"You know," I told her, "the smile is fetching."

"Look!" she said. I "have a uvula!"

I'm not going to touch that one.

Cheyenne at a Distance (Photos by Sweetie)

The human-- well, avatar-- figure can give a sense of immensity to a landscape.

Accident-Free Since 2014!

Whimsy's little steam train is popular; visitors sometimes ride it four or five times around its circuitous route.

In the interest of safety, the left side of the engine's cab bears a notice one usually sees in the workplace-- Accident-Free Since ___. It's at the bottom, below the instructions no one ever reads.

Every year, as December draws to a close, I update the sign for the upcoming year. Thus, the train proclaims it has been accident-free since... whatever year it happens to be.

This year has been the exception. Last fall I updated my desktop from Windows XP to Windows 7 and my ancient version of Quark Xpress stopped working (although it would run on the XP emulator were I to get around to configuring it). And so the engine has until now read Accident-Free Since 2013. That was technically true, since the the train is extremely reliable-- although perhaps that is debatable, since every train trip ends with a pre-planned train wreck. I leave it to you, gentle reader, to decide for yourself whether a deliberate crash is an accident. I would say no, but go with your conscience.

So anyway, today, at the end of the route the carriages, instead of jumping home, flew to a nearby piece of scripted track which was nearby on the land as decoration. Why they malfunctioned today after having performed faultlessly since 2008, I can't say.

The carriages wouldn't obey by command to jump home, and neither would the engine, which was smart enough to stay around and attempt to recover the carriages. I deleted the track-as-decor prim and moved the carriages back into an approximately correct position. I sat in the engine and started it and the train promptly began to function perfectly-- that it, it crashed just as it was supposed to.

Why the carriages got confused after so many years remains one of those mysteries of Second Life.

Considering what had just happened, I felt compelled to update the sign on the engine. I could have recreated it with the free graphics program GIMP, or I could have configured the XP emulator built into Windows 7 Professional, but I decided a patch was good enough.

So now the train accurately lists its last accident-free year: 2014, and I no longer feel guilty.

Aurora Borealis at the Sub-Orbital Asteroid Retreat

Sweetie just created an outstanding aurora display 4000 meters above Whimsy at our sub-orbital asteroid retreat. Check out the photo above.

I had an aurora once, back in late 2006 or 2007. I may even have documented it in this blog!

Let me see if I can dig up a photo...

Yup, here's one!

I thought they were gorgeous-- Sweetie, not so much.

So I have been borealisless is Second Life for some seven years now.

Way Too Cool Retro Cars at FFL!

1961 Corvette C1 and 1957 Chevrolet Nomad Truck Conversion

Sweetie and I walked for miles last weekend at Fashion Fair for Life-- an event in which a percentage of all sales is donated to the nonprofit cancer-fighting Relay for Life.

We bought a bunch of outfits, but whe we reached the FFL Amble sim I paid more attention to the cars that were placed for decoration than to the vestments.

Most and maybe all of the cars were made by Surplus Motors or Jupiter Motors. Some were factory standard, some were slightly modified, and others were radically modified.

1935 Ratrod Bobber

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.