Giant Prim Escapes From Second Life

A giant prim has escaped from Second Life and was last seen heading off to sea. I have no idea what’s going on here – it comes from a Japanese web site, and Google translate doesn’t help any. See the original here…..
http://ameblo.jp/gochabako/

UK Government Planning In Second Life

The Telegraph posted a story with the headline ”Ministers spend thousands on virtual site which is not promoted online“.

It says “The Second Life innovation centre cost £20,000 to build, and it costs a further £12,000 a year to maintain, according to figures released by the Department for Work and Pensions.”

So I went to have a look. And what there is is a pair of semi detached houses, one developed, one not, with lots of info buttons on the developed half, which tell you about the planning & building regulations for particular things (sewers, satellite dishes etc.), and when you click on them they take you to a web page with further details.

While the build is a touch bland (though that could also be said for most real life new house builds these days) it seems like a useful thing, but I doubt anyone is going to go through all the trouble of signing up with SL, downloading the software and then go through the steep learning curve to get started, just to get some advice about building regs that is more easily available via a website.

There is a noticeboard there where you can leave your comments if you wish, and the traffic count was 13 when I visited.

Visit it here….
http://slurl.com/secondlife/second%20places/118/235/28/

And there’s a cute little lolcat in a basket in the kitchen.

Landscape Of The Wind – Art From The Atmosphere

This is a variation on my Art from Clouds & Wind piece.

In this one I’m using the wind to change not just the colors of the components, but also letting the wind velocity adjust the height of the  individual components of the landscape to obtain a kind of rolling hills effect that is constantly changing..

Just to give you a sense of scale, that’s me in the middle of the picture above.

In the gallery below, I was playing around with changing the attributes of the actual component parts.

I would love to show you a video of it in action, but SL was working against me and ruined every attempt that I tried to video it. Boo hoo.

Landscape of the Wind

Shape Collage – A Free Automatic Photo Collage Maker

Just been playing around with Shape Collage by Vincent Cheung – a free little program for collaging your pics together into shapes. It’s easy to use, just select which pics you want to collage, select the shape from the templates, or draw your own, or use text, and a few clicks later it’s done.

The only thing to watch out for is using the automatic features – the first collage I made ended up 15,000 pixels wide – far too big for my puny computer to display.

Download Shape Collage for free here…..
http://www.vincentcheung.ca/shapecollage/

Shaping the future by Charles Stross

Science fiction writer Charles Stross tries to imagine the future in this piece originally given as a speech in 2007.

There’s nothing here specifically about virtual worlds, but his thoughts about the future of computing might come as a surprise. It’s not computers that the future belongs to, but bandwidth.

” It’s like the difference between having an experimental test plane that can fly at 1000 km/h, and having thousands of Boeings and Airbuses that can fly at 1000 km/h”

Interesting and thought provoking stuff……
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_the_future.html

Windows Vista A Bigger Fiasco Than Second Life?

According to FiascoAwards.com, Second Life is up for an award as one of the biggest fiascos of the year. Go and vote if you think differently.

“The hope of the organizers is that the Fiasco Awards become a popular Award. Since its launching, the project has received through the web 23 nominations for the 2009 Fiasco Awards. Among these, the jury has chosen nine finalists: Google Lively; Windows Vista; Second life; Autonomix, the Free Software packs distributed by Public Administrations; Maresme Digital; Mobuzz.tv; DAB, the digital radio; and SAGA, the Administration and Academic Management System of the Catalan Government.”

Although it seems to me that classing Second Life (been around for almost nine years now) in with Google Lively (lifetime five months) is a bit harsh.

Beneath The Tree That Died By AM Radio

There’s a new build by AM Radio – “Beneath The Tree That Died”.

It explores the same themes that his other works explore – deserted landscapes, old cars, radio parts, things floating in the air, with some nice Twilight Zone style doors as teleporters and a landscape of radar dishes.

Well worth a look – and don’t forget to pick up your own free Mary Poppins umbrella…..
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Welsh%20Lakes/106/128/1028/