Reading Radar

If you’re thinking of voting robot in this upcoming election, you might want to watch this video first. Clearly they are planning something. I’m not sure exactly what.. I think the Wright brothers got further on their first attempt. And his driving? I mean, you’d think robots and machines would be like cops and donuts, but… not so much.

On the other hand, I haven’t seen much of the martian lately, so is it better to vote incompetent, or absentee? Not sure… I think I’ll just vote for Donald Duck again.

I was all set with a nice long blog post on community the other night.. thoughts about why it matters, what it is, how to build it and how not to build, it but… hey. Every time I get serious, people tell me that’s not like me and that I should lighten up. So screw it. Instead, here’s 20 minutes of video on the now defunct Narnia build we toured in SL on the Papillon Isles sim.

Warning: It’s 25 minutes long! Or something close to it.

By the way, did you know you could get these videos on your video capable iPod? You can… here’s the rss link. Plug this into the “podcasts” category in itunes. http://slpnvideo.blip.tv/rss

As for community? Eh. Figure it our for yourselves. At least those of you who keep telling me that my role in it is to be the village idiot.

Dizzy Banjo sent me a link to his blip.tv page tonight, for his “message in a bottle” movie. Dizzy made the exhibit for the SL5B and it’s a really cool concept. Check out the movie. And check out his other movies as well!

(Movie embedded with permission from Dizzy Banjo)

LL posted release candidate 1.20 RC 13 today (under the test viewers section, release candidates).

First off, the biggest thing about the RC’s since 10, I think… 99.9999% of my crashes are gone (crashed once in RC11 or 12 with a lockup) and no more beachballs, at least not on the MBP. On the Mac Pro, which has an ATI card, I do get very infrequent beachballs. Completely tolerable. on the MBP, it’s become a very stable, very frustration-free client.

Ok, so anyway, the new version has switchable skins now, currently offering the old brown skin and the new light blue skin. It’s up to people to make new skins for those of us who have better things to do. Now if someone could do a whole new UI, that’d be something. Skins? Meh. Who cares.

Using the old look skin:

Using the new look skin:

I have to say, when the new skin first came out, I didn’t like it. At all. It caused eyestrain. But, having used it for awhile now, I greatly prefer it over the old, dark, heavy, clunky, boring look. When you first fire up the new RC, it defaults back to the brown UI. You have to enable the new look, which I promptly did, then log out and log back in again. That should satisfy all the whiners who can’t tell the difference between the blue skin and Dazzle the skinnable interface technology. I hope. But they’ll probably just find something else to fill up every single blog post on the LL blog with replies about.

Doh. We explored Privateer Space a couple times. We blogged it. We videoed it. Now it’s closed its doors and declared its asteroids off limits. Why? Not really sure.. but I would like to see if Aley Arai would be willing to do an ep of SL Under the Radar and talk about it or not.

This was by far one of our favorite builds of the many we’ve explored in SL and it’s a shame if it’s to stay closed.

Posted Ep 32 of SL Under the Radar today, it’s a long one too. 1:30:33. Yikes. It’s kind of a freewheeling discussion a few of us took part in inside the Destination Station on Podcast Island.

One of the other things I talked about was something I took part in thanks to ArminasX Saiman putting my name forward for. Teaser image below. I talked about it briefly here, and I plan to interview Mr. Unpronounceable himself about that and other topics soon.

Have a listen, and enjoy… if nothing else, it’s long enough to while away the time while you mow your lawn, and your neighbor’s lawn, then your other neighbor’s lawn, then the renter down the street who has a ford pinto hiding in his lawn, and then… and.. umm… “plonk”.

As I took a moment to put in a boomerang boardwalk on tiny beach on podcaster island, I listened to the end of Crap Mariner’s latest “Podcasting in SL” episode with Dave Peck. A couple things struck me about the interview.

The first thing was that Dave naturally saw the Adam Curry days as the heyday of podcasting in SL. I disagree. It was the heyday of podcasters in SL, maybe, but not podcasting. I’d wager most of those guys didn’t get SL, only came in because of Adam Curry, and bailed in short order. They’re gone. Good riddance. If we needed simply a 3d chat room for people to talk about what they do outside, in RL, without really utilizing the environment they were in, then those people would be perfect. But that’s not what SL is, so they got lost and got out in short order.

This view was reinforced by the fact that he felt a lot of them got out because of twitter. Twitter lets them market, make contact, etc, without going in world. If they can’t see the difference between the two, then.. yeah. They don’t grok SL. Period.

Secondly, when asked about advice for podcasters in SL, he pretty much assumed they all wanted to monetize… which is really not necessarily the case with the people that I call the SL podcasters. Sure, a couple of us have an ad here and there, but clearly if we really were serious about monetizing, things would be different. That’s not what it’s really about.

I don’t really miss the old days. Some of those podcasters were nice enough people, but they never did figure out what to do with SL besides preach to the choir about their podcasts. Very few of them figured out how to really do much in terms of content creation or collaboration that really impacted or became part of the second life culture at all. I can see in the current crop of podcasters that podcast about SL that they’re a totally different breed.

Those old timers? Nah. They didn’t get it. The Golden Age of Podcasting in SL is now. So instead of wasting any more thought on that, I think I’ll wander off and work on a script I should have had done a long time ago.

Bellagio closed. Too bad.. their security goons will be missed.

While everyone else goes over the SL5B sims inch by inch, Chug and I went to one of the locations she posted up in the Destination Station to look around. The name of the place is Whimsy, and there’s actually three whimsy sims and two Eccentricity sims in a group of five sims there.

There’s a lot of island theme here, but not with the typical bent. This is different, and the topography and the builds and the look of everything here is interesting, and extremely well done… it was fun to just fly around and look.

On the south side, there’s pirate ships and elephants… sculpties still have some issues, but they can also look really good in the hands of the right creators.

There’s life under the sea in these sims too, most of which I’ll let you find for yourselves, but the octopus here concerned me a bit. When your leg comes out between your eyes, one of your parents wasn’t living a clean life. That’s all I’m saying.

There’s jungle…

There’s oriental architecture.

And not to be left out, there’s a volcano demanding virgin sacrifices, or at least some kind of sacrifices. There can’t be any virgins left in SL, they’re all paying women who are really men to make sure of that.

I liked the terraforming a lot. It’s unique and very well done.

We wound up in this cove area, which looked like a relaxing little spot, and that’s where we teleported out from.

You can find Whimsy linked to in the Destination Station on one of the many boards that Chug has put up. I knew the place would be a great way for others to find cool places to explore, but thanks to her work there, it’s probably going to give me a lot of new places to check out too.

Every so often listeners of the podcast tell me they came looking for me and couldn’t find me. They do know that Podcast and Podcaster Island are two good places to try though. But what about other podcasters? There’s a few great Second Life podcasts out there, and what about finding those people?

In this episode of SLPN In Your Face, which was actually made as a screencast for Crap’s SL5B podcast build, Chug and I thought we’d show you some places where podcasters can be found.

Podcasters abound in Second Life. Find the shows you like, and don’t be afraid to ditch those you don’t. Egos have no place in podcast, IMO. They just guarantee it’ll be harder to reach out and finally REALLY get to the masses.