Clock Island

Another case of seeing something interesting on a random flickr is Clock Island. It's sort of quirky and adorable, and mildly reminiscent of Dali (in that numbers fall from the sky and run around and you can walk around inside a giant hourglass, there isn't the melting involved).

There's also a scavenger hunt, which I am a sucker for, in the case of finding the 12 gold numbers. I've found four or five, and beyond a couple of obvious ones, they head straight into the realm of dirty pool. Inside objects, buried underwater (at least there is a subtle pointer), randomly falling from the sky with no discernible pattern... However, it's still great fun, although the assisting text and whole design concept is in Japanese, so one who doesn't speak the language is left thinking that they've missed something. There are also a couple of freebies hidden around- there's a lovely number dress that sadly isn't modifiable (I believe it would be quite lovely in black, but alas it is stuck in white), and a neat little pointer thingie that can be somewhat tricky to find as well. Maybe sure you have your sound on, aural clues abound in giving you an idea where you ought to be looking.

Unfortunately one of the elevators looks unintentionally broken, and the intentionally broken one...I have a feeling it's doing something, but I don't have the clues to know what exactly, as my Japanese extends to only very simple and nonsensical phrasings (Your shoe is big).

Spinning fuses earrings and necklace

These necklaces and earrings glow, and the elements inside them spin around, giving a somewhat pulsing effect. I will probably only be offering one colour at the Jewelry Exposition (I'm leaning towards the blue), due to prim limits and all, but they are all available directly from me- just IM Allegory Malaprop if you would like some, or to see an in-world demonstration of the movement. Please let me know whether you would prefer modify/transfer/no copy, or modify/copy/no transfer. Separately, earrings and necklaces are L$50 each, or get a necklace and matching earrings for L$80. I shall figure some sort of bulk pricing for you if you are interested in full sets of colours.

Current colour selection: Metal choice of silver or copper, and element choice of blue, green, pink, red, or violet. Custom colours available on request.




(It should perhaps be mentioned that my proclivities towards steampunk tend heavily towards taking the word literally. For instance, I regularly have my hair styled in a green mohawk when visiting Caledon and New Babbage, and my attire, while inspired by the trends, may not always fall within the general accepted rules. Thus, these fulfill my scientific curiousity as well as my occasional tendency to wear things that provide their own light source in dark venues- while I tend more towards the venues in which the majority of people are wearing black except for those who see neons and enormous tie-on hair as a way to buck the trend, these could be considered accessories for your steamraver, a truly horrifying thought.)

Devils Moon

I saw a picture of Devils Moon in a random someone's flickr, (off of one of those sidebars of all sorts of people with SL flickr's) and was intrigued.

They have an absolutely marvelous street effect. I love it. It's magnificently clever, the street looks wet with rain, with great reflections of the city above. Now, as you well know, I'm sure, real reflections haven't made the proper viewer yet, and when they do they're going to be murderous on people's systems. Instead it's a partially transparent street with the city built upside down underneath. It's a fantastic effect, and it only makes me cringe a little bit on the amount of prims they have to "waste." They've made up for it with some really fantastic textures that make you think things are more high prim than they are, and while there are places where they haven't mirrored things exactly (generally a "prims don't cut that way" problem), it's mostly things that you wouldn't notice unless you were really paying attention. It's also a brilliant (modern) Japanese influence cyberpunk city, which is always good- that is what lured me in in the first place, after all.

I'm smitten, and I need to bring Max when he has the time.

Apparently there's also some sort of combat game at one of the neighboring sims that run by the same people, and there are free ice and roller skates when you 'port in. So far I'm just enjoying the scenery though. Even though I don't really appreciate strip clubs, there's a perfectly seedy strip club with a hidden "cuddle" room up in one of the high rises. I think it's by far the most realistic strip club I've seen in SL (but then, I don't frequent them- but still, even empty you can smell the sweat, desperation, and alcohol).

Murder in New Babbage

There have been a couple of murders in New Babbage recently, how exciting. The first I discovered in the newspaper, but today I found a second body. He had a note on him suggesting that some of the urchins of New Babbage may be in danger as well, as well as a recorded cylinder of the disaster to do with the experiment.
New Babbage, sadly, makes me chug like crazy, and I've never been able to spend much time there. Which is very disappointing, as it's an amazing place, and I'm looking forward to the new underwater sim (which, I hope, will include that lovely Relay for Life build! I've been making a diving suit in preparation).

(Speaking of chugging, after a chat with someone I've met at my sandbox, I believe that voice chat is causing massive hangups on not just my system, but also the systems of many, even though I leave it turned off completely. *sigh* It isn't even a feature I would use- I dislike the sound of my own voice, tend to be quiet most of the time, often have music playing that would simply add noise to the background so no one would be able to understand a word I said, and don't have a mike anyway.)

Ring boxes

My rings come with a lot of instructions, because while you can just wear them and everything works, you can also make them work better for you particularly by doing a few things of gradually increasing complexity. The getting your hands dirty instructions are included in the rings themselves, because that's where you need to be to do those things. But you can also make it fit better just by editing it the way you normally would, in a particular way. So for that, I figured I should add it on the same level as the ring itself so people who are daunted easily would find it, since it isn't hard. This meant I needed ring boxes!

Now, I largely blame my RL friend E for this. She has a ring box collection, and the two of us ended up finding elephants and penguins and all sorts of adorable little velour boxes this one place (and she walked out with 10, I think it was). Secondly, I blame this great big peach room:

that had been in my sandbox for a couple of days. The back of the peach slid around to close it the door as well. It's gone now, but it was there when I made my first ring box:

which I still don't know what I'm going to use for, and I'm sure I'm going to change the texture (this was just a free thingie I had handy for a placeholder), but not only does it include my script and instructions, it also opens and closes on touch. Because, well, I had to. It isn't particularly of the style of the two sets that I really needed boxes for (I have other rings, but I haven't gotten the full sets together yet, and besides, Helios needed to be sent off), so after some thought, I went with these for Helios and Astraios:

Yes, they do have the rings sitting in the boxes themselves as well. Max made me stop when I started talking about making a pose to be able to hold them as well though, since really, that's the height of silliness. Also, they'd never get done.

Sandbox etiquette

Can anyone explain to me what the deal is with sandbox etiquette? Or, more accurately, the lack thereof. Some day old started up a conversation with me, by going to my level of the sandbox when others were perfectly open and free (I'm usually at ABC recently, it's nicely tiered with level, so there's a lot of space to not be in someone's way. Also, there are chickens), and then started building next to me. Ok, this is not particularly awful, I understand some people are all about the social aspect, blah blah. But she quickly lost interest in talking to me, and started building massive structures. I'm zoomed in on my shoe because it's got fiddly little bits I'm putting on, and I look up at one point to find out I've been shoved all the way over against the rail by her building. Ok, whatever, not getting in the way of my building. But then, she drops a frigging house on top of the shoe I'm working on. What the hell? What is wrong with you people? Is common courtesy really so alien?

I understand the griefing jerks, they are intentionally trying to be bastards- one dropped an attachment with full mod so I could inpect the scripts before wearing, so I knew it was a push that would shove me across the sim, but then he whinged until I put it on (which I did just to get him to shut up, after getting to a decent stopping point and getting all of my things together)- didn't help that he barely spoke english, so it was just wear _item name_ over and over again spamming my chat channel, not even understanding when I was saying "you know, I know exactly what that's going to do, and I'm not in the mood, I'm in the middle of building right now." At least it beat the other gems I've gotten now and again, that one left after I tried his toy- I've had people sit on my items so I couldn't link them, stupid hovers and proximity pushes, etc. At least it isn't as if I can't take my toys and go somewhere else though, so while I will report them, I don't find them as obnoxious as the people who will just drop a house on me because they aren't paying attention. Sort of funny, isn't it?

Ring scripts, supplemental

For coding in the positions for each hand state, getting the position is easy. Simply use the regular positioning editor to put your ring where it belongs, and copy over the coordinates. However, things become a bit more difficult when it gets to rotation. In the prim editor, rotation is dealt with with degrees. Degrees make sense to you and me, it's what we were taught in school as children. However, degrees are not infallible, in fact they can cancel each other out and cause all sorts of problems really. So LSL keeps degrees in this bizarre format called quaternions. It does all this sine of the cosine of the inverse of the opposite angle cubed minus 11 to tell where things ought to be. That wikipedia page does make it out to be more confusing than it is, and it's a ridiculously confusing thing inherently (but wikipedia tends to not really help when it comes to technical things, as it doesn't explain anything so anyone who doesn't already know exactly what it is could understand).

However, LSL has a handy and easy way to bypass this. Put this little few lines of code into a script in your ring, and then when you wear it move it into position and rotate to your heart's content. Then, when you're copying over the position, touch the ring. It will send you a message telling you what the rotation is in quaternions to copy over! It's just that easy!

default
{

    touch_start(integer total_number)
    {
        llOwnerSay((string)llGetLocalRot());
        // This will tell you, and only you, the owner of the object, what the rotation is when you touch it.  If the object is attached to you, it will be the rotating in relation to the attachment point, if in a child prim, its rotating in relation to the parent prim.  Drop it in a parent prim and drop it on the ground, and it will be its rotation relative to the world.  If for some reason you want to announce the rotation to everyone in the sandbox, replace the above line with llSay(0,(string)llGetLocalRot());
    }
}