Hello strangers and others

As Chestnut posted, she and I are busy building together, and she was sweet enough to offer me post rights here to talk about the build, and the fun we're having building together. I don't know how often I'll get around to blogging. Time, and energy, are rare commodities, but I'll try and sneak in here from time to time and see what I can add.

If you've never built in Second Life, its really an interesting experience. If you've built, but never built with someone you're missing a lot. Early on in exploring Second Life, I had the eye opening experience of helping a friend put together the little pre-fab freebie house she'd laid hands on. Suddenly, we were floating over her house, chatting about how things lined up and when it looked right, and why. I was amazed at how easy and natural it was for two of us, separated by hundreds of miles to work on a single project.

Fast forward a little over a year. Ches and I get the chance to start building on a lightly landscaped void sim. Void, or open space sims, are full sized sims, with 1/4 the prim count. The nature of the void sim implies a light hand on the overall build. The sim was lightly landscaped, and amazingly terraformed when we started looking at it.

In moments, it became a shared vision. Can we build our house there? In the little gap between the two peaks? Oh? Ok. Maybe the gap needs to be a little wider.. We dragged a few things over from my old build on an adjacent sim and began to explore.

Stone ruins in the saddle between the hills? Build it. Place it. Yuck. Blocks off too much of the view. Do we want a house, or social gathering place, which we can call home. Rez some chairs, and chat about it.

How about a deck arching out over the ocean. Oh, that's nice. Now, how to make it look light. Wood? no. Crystal. Maybe. With complete trust, ideas flow up and back. sometimes without even words. Building is a special pleasure. Building with someone who can look at your work, reach out, and move a prim out of your way, because they can see what you are thinking, is even more pleasurable. Building with someone who is perfectly happy to reach out and tweak, until its perfect, and knows that it's OK, because the build is shared is spectacular.

Over the past two weeks, our sense of the space has evolved. Several elements showed up, and have remained constant. The deck, the little balconies. A set of stepping stones, leading one around the core of the sim, has slowly become part of the vision.

The rest, we've explored. bit by bit. A possible path for a waterfall and stream have been laid out. One stream has been rejected, as too big and visually jarring. Like several other cool elements which don't fit in where we are building at the moment, it will likely show up, someplace else on the sim. The stepping stones keep slowly evolving. Some are discarded, others added, until the pattern pleases both of us.

We have several ideas in motion. How to display some of our art. How to blend the water feature into the space. How to play with lighting and setting off the space to make it clearly a separate, but organic part of the sim. The fun part, is that we will find the answer to each of these together, slowly sharing thoughts until vision merges, and we know what we want to do.

I look forward to sharing what we discover with you here. Its a voyage of discovery, and we hope you'll have almost as much fun as we do.

~ Zha

You Just Never Know

I logged early last night to tend to a RL person who was giving me that look. You know the one? Its the look that says "What the HELL is up with you? Why don't you ever step away from that @#)$$%$)$ laptop and come in here and watch reality TV with the rest of us? What is so enthralling about little virtual plywood cubes and pretending to dance? Oh and while I am asking? Why is your skin white and that hair? Its crazy" He may have had a point about the hair and the sheer number of hours I spend inworld is notable. But I will never agree about reality tv.


In any case, when I logged Zha was building so I was curious to see if she made any progress on Love last night. One really fun aspect of a truly collaborative effort is you never really know what the other person is going to do. Each next step builds off of the last and for me at least there is joy in the synergy of ideas.


We are creating a deck overlooking the water and Zha added a brass railing, which I love. The surface of the deck is translucent glass and we are still trying to find the perfect color. When I left last night the deck was pink and this morning it was a yellow green. Who knows what color it will be tonight. Ideas? What do you think?

There are a few stable elements of the build that will make it into the "final" version of whatever it is we are creating. The 3 stone terraces below were part of Zha's last build and we love them. One has benches, I added Bits and Bobs V7 to the middle terrace and the third has the all important hammock.



So after I oohed and ahhhed at the cool railings and pondered yet again the right color for the glass deck, out of the corner of my eye I spotted some prims -- really, really big prims. Mega prims even. Flying around the side of the mountain I came across this. What is this? Who knows? All I can say is, just like everything about this build I can't wait to find out where the idea takes us.

Are you paying attention?

Something has changed around here. Did you notice? I don't want the suspense to kill you so I'll tell. The change is I added Zha as a contributor to this blog. We thought it would be fun to blog a bit about our build on Shengri La Love as we progress. Zha says she wants to chronicle my inspired contributions like "You are unhappy with that because it looks like a frisbee." Or something. Anyway, watch for posts from Zha and progress reports from our build. Also, please do check out her blog here.

So far our build consists of lots of talking, laying on the ground looking at things, throwing prims around, messing with textures and some "that will never do." Searching for a vision is hard, especially since we tend to get distracted by music and exploring and maybe a little bit of shopping now and then.



Some of you have taken me up on my request that you come hang out with us at Love. Thank you friendly people! The rest of you *me squints a little* please visit any time. Please do watch out for stray prims and the odd...umm...frisbee laying around.

Poetry for Mother's Day

"I am"

I am your son
I wonder why you are so nice
I hear you like cooking me food
I see you are nice
I want you to never die
I am proud of you
I pretend I can see you when I don't
I feel your hand when I touch it
I touch your hand when I feel sad
I cry when I think about you dieing
I am jealous you are old enough to play most games
I understand you have to work
I say "Hi" when you come home
I dream of the days to come

Art Gallery Reopening Reception in Shengri La

One of the fun things about moving to a new neighborhood is exploring the area. Just across the water from our new place is the gallery of the talented SL photographer Callipygian Christensen. From the notecard at Calli's gallery:

"Resident in Sl for almost 2 years, Callipygian Christensen discovered a passion for SL photography. She creates SL photographs that capture, mood, moment and emotion. Portraits, landscapes, couture ads, amusing 'story' images - Calli creates a broad range of images in many styles."

As it happens, Callie has redesigned her gallery and is having an opening reception today! So stop by and have a look around, either between 1:00 and 2:30 or between 5:00 and 7:00. I will likely be there sometime between 5:00 and when Grace McDunnough takes the stage at the Freudian Slip at 6:00.

TOS - privacy and RL

Ok. So. How many of us have actually read the SL TOS? I can't be sure but I think most people click accept and go on their merry way without ever stopping to read the rules. Because of some icky interpersonal behavior I have witnessed recently I have been thinking a lot about how we treat each other inworld.

Some things people do *all the time* concern me because as I read the TOS they are violations so serious you could be permanently banned as a result. In section 4.1, Conduct by Users of Second Life, we are advised "you shall not...

"take any action or upload, post, e-mail or otherwise transmit Content as determined by Linden Lab at its sole discretion that is harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, causes tort, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable."

And

"Any violation by you of the terms of the foregoing sentence may result in immediate and permanent suspension or cancellation of your Account. You agree that Linden Lab may take whatever steps it deems necessary to abridge, or prevent behavior of any sort on the Service in its sole discretion, without notice to you."

After reading the TOS and talking with people familiar with these sections, I understand that if you take an IM I send you and share it with someone else and you violate my privacy or in any way harm, harass or threaten me your account could be immediately and permanently cancelled. By its very nature IM is a private conversation so sharing IM is considered a violation of privacy.

Think about that a moment if you will. How many times has someone copied and pasted IM conversation they had with someone else and shared it with you? How many notecards have you seen where private IM conversations are quoted? How many times have you done these things yourself? insert wind noises.......crickets sounds....avatars looking around avoiding eye contact.....Yeah.

So, before you send me that IM where your neighbor's partner's new pet told you he is cybering your bff who you met last week at Bad Girls? Please remember sending someone's IM to you to anyone else is a TOS violation. Just.Don't.Do.It.

I have also been thinking about the issue of RL privacy. The first life tab of my profile tells you I am happily married and have two kids. If you are clever and you read the rest of my profile you can deduce that I am from New York. If you take an extra step and read this blog you can probably learn more about the RL person who drives my avatar. If you want to know anything else please take some time to get to know me and I will likely be open about who I am. Asking me direct personal RL questions may or may not get you a direct answer depending on my mood, what I had for breakfast, whether or not it is a good hair day, and/or if I trust you to hold my personal information in confidence.

Now that we have cleared that up I respectfully request that you do not ask me RL information about my friends and expect that I will tell you. Recently I have been stunned by the number of RL questions people are asking me -- not about myself mind you -- but about other people. Please? Just don't ask me. If you want to know about someones RL ask *them* or use your mad google skills and see what you can learn. I am not going to violate my friend's privacy and I am not going to intentionally violate the TOS. Thanks for your understanding on this one kids.