Exodus Viewer - Check it out!!

I have been hearing some buzz about the Exodus Viewer for a while.  Then this week the fabulously informative and funny crew over at the MetaReality Podcast talked with the Exodus team, and it seemed like the right time for me to check it out.  I am still making my way through the bazillion options for photography in the viewer. There is SO much Exodus can do and honestly much of it seems a bit over my head right now but you don't need to make full use of all the features available.   Just like many other viewers you can use what you like and ignore the rest.

I took Exodus out for a little photographic spin and while maxing out the settings for depth of field and shadows and gamma slowed my fps to a grind, I was without much effort able to get some nice photos.

Exodus has the customizability of Firestorm but runs a bit faster on my rig, at FPS rates close to the Second Life viewer -- when I am not cranking graphics up for photos.  For general tooling around Exodus was running quite fast and smooth for me.  I slowed down only when I enabled all the bells and whistles but I do think that is to be expected on any viewer.  I am not gonna lie, I did start to dream about a new computer with more more more and bigger bigger bigger when I was playing with Exodus for photos.  I am greedy like that I guess.  My laptop is about two years old so its not time to replace it yet but I can dream, can't I?

Based on advice from Crap Mariner I was able to quickly copy Firestorm's windlight presets over to Exodus, which is really nice as I am quite fond of clicking through presets.  For now, I am running Exodus and working to understand its capabilities better.  So far after one day of use? I like it. A lot.

A Real Life Photographic Interlude

I got a fantastic Canon digital SLR camera for Christmas. Since then I have been taking pictures of places I go in my day to day life in favor of more SL photos.  The images below were taken as we took a walk by the Hudson River a few days after Christmas.  No windlight!  No shadows making my computer crash!  Just a cold nose and a patient husband were required.  These image are straight out of my camera with no post processing whatsoever. How much do I love my camera?  Tons.

Of course I have taken every opportunity to annoy my family and friends by pointing my camera in their faces as much as possible.  In the image below both of my children are smiling and even seem to be enjoying each other's company. I am so glad I caught the moment as believe me it was fleeting.  The image was taken in Boston.

I will get back to exploring the LEA sims this week.  Look out for those posts in the coming days.  

Happy Sunday poppets!

Today is double bonus Wednesday! LEA#2 and LEA#3

LEA#2 is home to The Path which I have written about before and which I hope you have seen already. If not, what are you waiting for I ask?  Here is the SLurl and you must go.

So what in the world is happening on LEA#3 you ask? Well I am here to tell you.  LEA#3 is home to the LEA Theater where there has been a series of monthly machinima screenings.

January is the last in this series and apparently there will be changes to the way the process works.  More information will be available soon.  You can read more about the machinima screenings on the LEA blog here.    For the next few days you can still go to the Theater and view films entered for the month of January.  There are huge screens and its a great way to enjoy the films.  Take a moment to check it out if you have some time over the next week.

Over the years I have wondered why we import our thinking about structures from the atomic world right into our virtual lives.  I remember the first time this struck me as odd too.  I was living on Jokung and the people across the water worked for weeks building a house.  They were a cute couple learning how to build and I smiled at their flickering overlapping textures and unaligned prims.   I was still pretty new and I was amazed at what they could do because moving prims around was still a challenge for me at that time. It was when they added a two car garage to the house I got cranky.  There wasn't even a road on the sim and they didn't even have a car for that matter.  Why the HELL did they need a garage?

It is what we do though. We recreate offices and clubs and a myriad of other true to our daily life structures in Second Life.  We can sit upside down or swing on a branch attached to nothing or sip tea in a butter cup made of spiderwebs so why in the world would we arrange seats in neat little rows to watch a film?  But we do.  I suppose it has to do with packing a lot of people into a sim or keeping people out of each other's way at public events but still I wonder why we humans like things to be so predictable.

Yes, this little tangent was brought to you by the rings of seats at the LEA Theater.

Let's begin at the beginning - LEA 1

I promised you a bit of a tour through the LEA art sims and the best place to start seems to be at the beginning.  So that is why I started at LEA 17 the other day.  Ooops.

Rewind.

So today I visited LEA #1.  I had no idea what I would find when I opened my map and teleported to LEA#1.  I don't actually recommend this as a way to start your visit as the landing point for the sim appears to be underneath a museum.  Perhaps the LEA folks might want to rethink the landing point or maybe I some how managed to show my dorkiness early on in this post.  Either way -- TP off to one of the sides or better yet follow this SLurl to get to the Survey of Hyperformalism 2011.

More about LEA#1 after the break

Some thoughts about the Linden Endowment for the Arts

I support art in all of its 3D glory in Second Life. Since my earliest days I have spent my time and money supporting musicians, performance artists and people engaged in visual arts.  I don't know much about art in that I am not educated and I actually (shame on me) enjoyed the Damian Hirst exhibit I saw in Kiev. I don't pretend to be an art critic or someone who understands the theory and history behind great art.  I am just a person who enjoys sharing what I love with others.  Art makes me happy.  Simple.

So I should be really happy about the 20 sims the LEA provides to artists, right?  Well, honestly I have very mixed feelings about the LEA sims.  On the one hand I think its great Linden Lab is providing the land and letting a group of people who are not Lab employees manage the content.  On the other hand as someone who pays tier and hosts art exhibits I have to admit I feel like an idiot paying a lot of money for something LL is giving away for free.  I probably should have my head examined as the saying goes.

And yes, this issue contributed to my need for a break from SL.  The LEA kind of took the wind out of my sails, you know?  My art partners and I talked about it a lot.  We considered giving up our sim but decided to keep going with something we love. Still, every few days I still think to myself "why am I paying tier again?"  Zachh Cale is a more patient and hard working person than I am and when the November deadline for proposals to the LEA rolled around he put in a proposal to curate one of the sims. And the LEA board, in their wisdom, gave Zachh a sim.

I think I am going to use the LEA sims as blog fodder and spend some time looking at what your tier is buying you because let's not kid ourselves.  Nothing is free in this world and your tier and my tier and every one's tier is used to fund these 20 sims.  So, stop number one on our trip?  LEA 17 - curated by my dear friend Zachh.  He invited Yooma Mayo to build the fantastically detailed over sized prim bugs for which he is known.  I took the images in this post at the Grand Opening of Yooma's "Under the Sky" exhibit on Friday night.

I love this exhibit!  Its beautiful and playful and well worth your time, as long as you are not scared of bugs several times the size of your own body.  To go see Yooma's work search for LEA on your map then scroll down to LEA17 and teleport.  You will land right in the middle of this lovely build.  Or follow this SLurl to Yooma Mayo at LEA.  Enjoy!

Bedside musings on the risk of creativity

The fear of not being good enough rules my life.

There is good that comes from this fact.  I work hard.  I never miss deadlines.  When I commit to a task I am 100% reliable and my employers have been known to take advantage of this tendency.  If someone keeps meeting every goal you set, its pretty easy to keep setting the bar higher, and higher and then higher still.  It is not in my character to say "I can't do that."  I just keep trying like some terrified energizer bunny.

The fact is I have achieved a lot in my life.  I have a successful career, a solid happy family and a lovely home.  In SL for two years I was a paid writer for a blog with a huge readership. More recently, I have had the privilege of working with two of the most amazing art curators in Second Life and I have been able to learn from them while bringing great art to the community.  This little blog of mine has been around for 4 years and still gets page views even when I have not written a word for months.  I have much to be proud of and much for which I am very grateful -- not the least of which are the amazing people in my life who love me.

Having said all of that -- once the "I am not good enough" freight train starts running through my head there is very little to stop it from invading my thoughts and stealing my focus.  I tend to minimize my achievements and instead focus on the ways in which I could have done more.   I thought about sharing a taste of my inner dialog and even wrote out a long paragraph, which I just deleted -- why?  Well its not good enough to share of course.

See what I just did there?

All of this is to say, I stopped blogging for a while because every time I started to write I thought about all the other people who's images are better than mine and who's thoughts are more insightful and who have better recommendations about fabulous places you should check out.  I would write three paragraphs and then think "they should just read so and so and that other person and I suck at this and I am not going to blog today."  Then today turned into this week and this month and pretty soon it was looking like my blog was dead, my SL was over and my muse had left the country.

This morning I woke up and started thinking about creativity even before I got out of bed.  It seems to me an essential part of expression is committing to the risk of being creative.  Some days your work is going to stink. There is no way around that fact.  But, the key to being good at anything is keeping at it and trying to give your best effort every day.

Yes.  I do think I am back.  I missed you.