Prim Disease

I’ve been having it bad lately. I can’t see a car on the street without at least considering for a moment how to cut, shape, bend and otherwise torture prims to make a Second Life representation of it. I call it prim disease. Take for example this ugly, rusty Fiat 126, parked on a street corner in Cosenza.

(The Fiat 126 was produced in Italy and a host of Communist countries. It is all of three meters long, 1.30 meters wide and about that high as well. It’s noisy two cylinder engine can still be heard everywhere on Italian streets. The thing gained popularity in Communist Poland as locally produced Polski Fiat. But I digress.)

I already see, in this picture, that the sides would have to be path cut, hollowed out cylinders, and the hood as well. The front windshield would also be made like that, slightly tapered towards the roof. Connecting it all would be path cut spheres on the corners. But to make it really look good, I’d have to cross the prim limit of 31 per vehicle - including driver and passengers; they each count for one prim. Or enter the world of the sculpty, for which I really have no time.

But suppose I would give it a try - I’d love to be the one in a rattling, rusty 126 between all the invariably posh cars churned out by the rest of the SL car industry anyway. I’d go to Google Advanced Image Search and get a load of pictures of the thing from different angles. Bust most of all I’d look for a line drawing to upload into SL and stick on a prim, which I then upscale until the drawing is life size (and you’ll be surprised how many things start looking decidedly small when you make them true to life size in SL).

With that prim as my backdrop (some use it as the floor) I start the path-cutting, the twisting, the tapering and the shaping. And when all of that is done it’s time for texturing. And the important thing for textures is to never use one monotonous colour. Add some dirt, some light smearing, anything to liven it up a bit. And use a block texture - I use ten by ten numbered blocks, each in itself divided into ten by ten pixels. You apply it to your vehicle and make screenshots from every angle. Then you take your block texture into Photoshop - now you can see exactly where the elements of your final texture need to go, and how the texture gets distorted on the surface of your prim.

With a car like this I’d use a combination of pictures and Photoshop-generated elements. Just using pictures gives weird effects with the shading and makes your work look like a box with pictures stuck on it. And I use a texture for every part of the car - combining textures with SL-generated colour picker surfaces really looks quite awful.

But I digress again - the problem with prim disease is that it won’t stop and pretty soon you’ll have a head full of ideas and no time to work them out. Welcome to my world…

(Picture taken by myself; line drawing sourced from Car Blueprints.)

(SL and Second Life are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc.)

Shivers

These weeks, the electricity company Enel presents a TV ad with the motto l’energia che ti ascolta - energy which listens to you. One of the two or three similar clips has sent a shiver down my spine, the first time I watched it. Not because of the choice of music - I think it’s rather outrageous to use the Velvet Underground’s beautiful Sunday Morning with it’s sombre overtones in an ad - but because of the little girl appearing seven seconds after the start. You may or you may not agree with me, but to me she looks a lot like my avatar. Just compare this screenshot with the banner above my blog:

Suddenly Sunday Morning gets a whole new meaning. Watch out, the world’s behind you…

You can watch the full clip on YouTube.

Also on YouTube, the full Velvet Underground song.

ps - Ignore the WordPress idiocy of “possibly related posts”. It’s a load of crap, I didn’t ask for it, it doesn’t work and there seems to be no way to switch it off. Windows98 revisited…

The Second Life Calendar

I guess it’s a first. And I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it comes from Italy. This is a country where the cameras pan close-up across the bodies of female TV presenters, from their feet up to their fake blonde hair, almost by default. A country which, in it’s veneration for female beauty, to my more northern eyes seems stuck in the seventies - the golden age of sex sells-advertisements. And so a serious newspaper like la Repubblica publishes a series of calendars on it’s website every end of the year, most of which are somehow connected to female nudity.

This year, in the amateur section, there is Il Calendario di Second Life 2008, a collection of twelve black and white screenshots of topless avatars, worked over in an editing program, shot in a virtual photo studio and on location in the SecondNation sim. The calendar was created by Ryder McLeod or, in real life, Gianluca Neri of the Macchianera (’black spot’) blog, and the final selection of models has come about by a vote of visitors of SecondNation. The whole calendar is downloadable for free, in PDF, to print and hang in your office - if you so desire.

It’s a bit odd, to say the least. Sure, we are looking at the avatar of, for example, Lady1986 Arida (the winner), but we are actually looking at a skin someone created, hair someone created, clothing someone created and maybe also a shape someone created, sitting in a pose someone created, with Lady1986 doing nothing more than clicking the ball and choosing ’sit’. I mean really… even after two bottles of cheap Italian wine I could still do that, and my avatar would look none the worse for it. I think the calendar lacks credit for the many content creators whose work we are admiring.

Secondly, although the pictures are quite good, the photographer has chosen some of those quirky Second Life accessories that never really fit, like a floating necklace, and there’s also a pose (October) where the model’s hand disappears in her leg. I mean, come on, there are ways to avoid such problems. Choose a different pose, take off the necklace, or for God’s sake pick a different picture to feature on your calendar.

On the upside it’s at least not a Linden issued calendar, which in these times I’m sure would be filled with girls in full ski gear lest a nipple would be gazed upon by an underage eye. And hey, it’s free, it’s marketed for neither Linden dollars nor euros, and if you print out the high definition pages, you’ll have something tangible from Second Life to gaze upon while the grid is down.

As for me, it doesn’t rock my boat. It’s all pixels to me. In the words of a certain Giulia, who reacted to the Macchianera blog: “This calendar gives new meaning to the phrase fake boobs“. And really… I never liked fake boobs.

I’ll be back before 2008!

Meanwhile, Merry Christmas to all! And yes, that is a palm tree in 17.5 cm. or 7 in. of snow last Sunday morning… right outside our appartment block in southern Italy.

On the brink of returning…

Yes, there’s DSL here now and I think it’s fast enough for SL, too. But no, I am not back yet. The installer from Telecom Italia (Alice.it) won’t recognize my Realtek NIC and won’t install. And tomorrow I’ll go back to Holland for the holidays - without laptop. I am working on it, believe me, but for now it’s a no-show.

Meanwhile I am reading the news from so may months of absence and I see that some Lindens have shed their last name. You can make of it what you will, but let’s get beyond the touchy-feely stuff and look at LL as just another corporation where people come and people go. Not a very big deal at all - unless you are an older generation of Resident from the time when SL was a small family of fairly fanatic users. Nowadays I fear most Residents have never met a Linden in virtual person, and couldn’t care less.

Of course I haven’t the insight to judge what all of this means, and I have never met the apparently mythical Cory myself. But people eventually move on, the time when people spent a lifetime in one company is over. So I am not unduly worried.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t care about Iridium, Cory and Chad. I hope they made the right choice for themselves and I hope they will do well. As for Second Life… we’re in the hands of the Gods as usual. Old Gods, new Gods, it’s of little consequence to us petty Residents.

News Flash

Yes, I miss you, Vint, and all of you out there. Heck I almost miss Prokofy Neva and I find myself wondering if all the places I used to go to, all the people I used to meet, are still there. And what has changed, of course! Here’s what happened on this end of the wire: About a week ago a man showed up in a little red car of the company Telecom Italia. He was already an hour late – but finally we were to get a phone and DSL. At least, that was the deal. The man however told us he had no orders to install sockets in our new house, or to deliver a phone, and just gave us a box with a modem – no wait, make that a damaged, unsealed box with a modem inside. For all we know, Zio Antonio from Cavallo Morto (there actually is a hamlet here called that – it means ‘dead horse’) could have returned it because he spilt his cappuccino all over it. We have no way of knowing, because we have no way of connecting it. We have two empty yellow plastic boxes in our walls, with neither wire nor socket.  Now I don’t know the level of service you people in your various countries are used to, but we ordered our phone/internet connection late October, and we may get connected in January – if they don’t repeat the same commedia dell’arte again. You never know around these parts. I am meanwhile going bananas over here with my cellphone uplink at a whopping 115 Kb per friggin’ week. Which is appropriate, because bananas come to mind when you consider the service level of various big companies in this our beloved Republic.  BBC World informed me that Telecom Italia is in financial trouble. One wonders why… On a bright note: all is well with us, (the rest of) our house and our life together, and Italy truly is a beautiful country. I wish you all the very best, and having already missed my rezday (somewhere in November I believe) I fear I will be missing Xmas and New Year’s too. So here’s wishing you buon natale and the best wishes for 2008 too…  Can someone please contact my landlord and tell him to not yet return my stuff? I paid until November, he knows it may take a while longer but his is the only shop I have right now. And I can’t remember his name for the life of me. It’s the owner of the hangar in Caldbeck where I sell my aviator jackets. Please take a minute to have a look and send an IM. Mille grazie.  

Repubblica Wants To See You Both

On the website of one of the main Italian national newspapers I found the following article (translated):

Real Life and Second Life

Here Is My Avatar

Rome - The 3D metaverse that was created in 2003 by the Californian company Linden Lab, populated by millions of users, gives everyone the possibility to live in a digital world with a new face and a different look.

But how are we different in this our second life? Send us a picture of yourself and your avatar (with respective names) and, if you want, some words about yourself.

A selection of pictures will then be published on Repubblica.it and in the [printed Friday supplement] “Venerdì”.

Send to iniziative@repubblica.it

Trust the ever fashion conscious and technology savvy Italians to start an initiative like that! I must say that I don’t think that sending a few words in anything but Italian makes any sense, but you could try. I am certainly going to send in my RL/SL mixed picture!