Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld
Second Life, virtual worlds and virtual realities
Wishing everyone all the very best for 2013. Thank you for taking the time to come read this blog, give feedback and comments, and for all your retweets, replurks, loves and support throughout 2012. It’s has been and is, deeply appreciated.
I celebrated six years of continuous presence in Second Life in November 2012. To mark the event, I started to put together a little video – but have only just got round to finishing it this last week. It’s probably best viewed within this page, as my limited image resolution (1440×900) doesn’t scale very well after being processed by the video editing software, and not all the places I wanted to remember in the video are still available / open for me to go back to and image at a much higher resolution.
Anyway, it’s a small celebration and I hope you like it.
Update: Following advice from a friend on YouTube, I’ve tweaked things slightly, and uploaded a video based on adjusted rendering settings. Hopefully, it should be a little better, quality-wise.
In many respects, 2012 has perhaps been my busiest year in SL. This is partly because of the way this blog has gained readership and popularity over the last couple of years, some of which went / goes far beyond anything I’d imagined. Articles-wise, it’s been something of a record with 620 published since January 1st; which given I hit 1000 on this blog this year, and it has been around in its current form since 2009, tends to say a lot (I’m just not sure what, exactly!).
Another reason is that I’ve been reconnecting with some of the things I used to find a lot of fun in SL, and have been fortunate enough to have been introduced to new pastimes. So in addition to my review of the SL year as seen through the pages of this blog, I hope people won’t mind if I’m a little self-indulgent in looking back at some of the things I’ve particularly enjoyed in SL over the year.
Skydiving was something I used to enjoy a lot in SL, having been a member of several clubs and participated in competitive and team jumps. However, it somehow got left behind at some point; no clear idea why, so it was good to go digging into my inventory and pulling out all the old kit and giving things a go again. I’ve yet to team-up with Ziki and Caliburn; maybe that’ll be something for early 2013…
Only a short step away from skydiving is flying. While I’ve fiddled around with things flight-wise in the past, I’d never seriously given it a go in its own right.
But then, I’d never really bothered to explore Blake Sea and its surroundings, either, until LL presented me with a sailboat and I succumbed to the call of the oceans (of which more anon). I wasn’t sure what to expect, flying-wise, so I initially opted for two freebie offerings from the Marketplace in order to wet my toes a little.
Since then, I’ve gathered a small collection of aircraft (including the brilliant little Warbugs – thank you, Lindall!), but have to admit the Terra Stingray from Steve “Cubey Terra” Cavers is my favourite. It is simply a joy to fly – and the fact that it can operate on and under water makes it as much fun to have as my KR Engineering “Fisher’s Menace” Neuspa. To anyone even remotely considering trying out flying, I cannot recommend the Terra Stingray highly enough.
I’ve had great fun flying all over the Blake Sea and the surrounding continents over the last few months; when wanted to simply get away from things and enjoy doing something in SL, flying offers a wonderful choice, particularly when you have a very capable aircraft around you like the Stingray, which may not be the fastest going, but which can certainly handle region crossings with aplomb.
Exploring Second Life has given me ample opportunity to try to improve / refining my snap taking techniques. I’m nowhere near the league which includes the likes of Honour Mcmillian, but I’ve tried to improve my snaps from the perspective of framing, windlight, etc, – particularly as I prefer not to post-process.
As regular readers know, I get bitten by the building bug every so often. Until recently, this manifested itself by me routinely taking a proverbial sledgehammer to my home and knocking seven bells out of it before replacing it with something else. usually, when I start banging prims together, I have some idea of what I’m aiming to achieve. Other times I don’t, and it takes several attempts to get things sorted to a point where I’m completely happy.
Things have obviously changed since moving full-time into my Linden Home. While I can tinker around with the insides of this to my heart’s content, I can’t really go knocking it apart and replacing it. However, it doesn’t mean I’m ignoring the old building bug when it comes to call. Which it recently has.
I’ve no idea why, but I’ve had starships on the brain for a while. Maybe it is a hold-over from living in my little “skystation / space station” before jumping over to my Linden Home. Maybe it’s just that I love Bear McCreary’s music for the reimagined Battlestar Galactica television series. Whatever the reason, it eventually drove me to go out and buy a copy of the LJ Jayde starship by Smith Fizz. Call it an impulse buy; at 80 metres long, this is not the kind of behemoth you find hanging from string from an hobbyist’s ceiling…
I’ve actually been aware of Smith Fizz’s work for a number of years – when I was involved with someone way back, we looked at a number of his ships with a view to getting one as an SL home. Well; seemed like a good idea at the time, even if we subsequently didn’t. Get one that is.
My first task on getting the ship – and with due respect to Mr. Fizz, who did not have the advantage of large prim formats when designing and building the original, was to do a little bit of prims shaving from the basic hull and also removing a few bits and pieces I feel are extraneous – such as the tiny wings. In its “stock” build the ship comprises 871 prims. With the new maximum prim size, and some trimming around the hull, I reduced this by some 211.
Next up came the major issue of the ship’s interior. Part of this is actually very clever. You see, Smith Fizz, working with Thomas Connover, has developed a scene rezzing system (not, I hasten to add, a temp rezzing system). This means that the forward section of the ship can be used to generate a number of interior rooms, which is quite handy and offers plenty of scope for those wanting a sci-fi role-play environment. The problem is that time has not dealt too kindly with some of the offered interiors, which now look more than a little, well, dated.Some of them also, while very clever in how they work and the flexibility they give, also have bits sticking through the sides of the ship. This isn’t something you notice while moving around in the ship, but cam out, and for a self-confessed obsessive like me, it’s a red rag to a bull…
So, my first act was to grab a new rezzing system from Smith Fizz (wonderful system if you have limited space and want to put it to multiple uses – just make sure everything going into it is at least COPY), and start re-modelling. I’m still working on things, but I’m rather pleased with the results to date.
The first room to get the Pey touch was the lounge. I have no real use for kitchens in SL, so the space devoted to this and a dining area in the original design were lost on me. Instead I reduced the overall rezzing space by adding new interior walls (providing a forward “vestibule” area in the process) and then went for a sunken look, with updated sculpted sofas and recliners, with a small bedroom area beyond a partition (I still can’t shake myself of incorporating one into personal builds). A touch of the Orient to the wall textures and an echo of Fallingwater in the ceiling, and I was done – and in less than a third the prims of the original.
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Is it really a year since I last wrote about logging-in to Second Life for the first time as Inara Pey? Wow. Back then I covered the arrival of my fifth rezday with something of a retrospective on SL itself. The times certainly have been interesting.
I’m not about to delve into another retrospective as with last year – you can follow the link above or wait for my Review of the Year. What I will say that this year, while it has been very uppy-downy for me at times (don’t worry, I’m not going to delve into that either! Suffice it to say there are a couple of people out there – and they known who they are – to whom I’ll always be indebted for their time and shoulders), has also been something of a renewal of SL discovery for me.
Given all the doom and gloom which swirl around SL, one can never underestimate the value of getting out and about and simply exploring. While there may well be clouds gathering on the horizon, it is still not too late for the storm to be averted – and in the meantime, there is still so very much to see and enjoy – as I hope my “Destination” articles in this blog have shown over the course of the last couple of years.
This year has also seen me start into a couple of new pastimes in Second Life – flying and sailing. I get an enormous pleasure out of the two, for very different reasons. Flying, at least in the right aeroplane, can be an enormous amount of fun. I’m totally in love with my Terra Stingray (which also doubles at times as a very good boat), and more recently my Warbug has brought an entirely new meaning to the word “fun”.
Sailing is an altogether different pleasure; one more easily shared with friends in easy conversation, broad sails overhead a fresh winds from behind under warm skies. Whether I’m out in the middle of Blake Sea or hugging the coastline around one of the continents or navigating my way to a destination like Second Norway, just being out on the water – like its real-life equivalent – is strangely liberating. I don’t care if I don’t have the biggest, fastest, best-looking or easily operated boat in the world, I’m having enormous fun out on the open seas…
All-in-all it’s been a great SL year for me; one capped-off by having friends old and new with whom I can share it, both in-world and through these pages. And while I don’t want to particularly seem to be plugging it, the fact that so many people appear to enjoy reading this blog (wrats, um w-a-r-t-s and all :)) does genuinely touch me.
I’ve no idea what the next twelve months will bring; Second Life is officially ten years old in 2013, so I can’t help but feel whatever it is won’t be a closing of the doors, and I still feel that while they may not be working on anything big and sexy, LL are still plugging away, somewhat hamfistedly at times it’s true, trying to improve SL on a technical level, improve our in-world lives and give us more toys to play with.
All things considered, it’s been a great year; perhaps my only disappointment is that Linden Lab don’t seem to be in the mood to celebrate with me. While others get their rezdays marked with a Linden Cake, I see nary a crumb :(. Ah well. Maybe next year. To the rest of you out there, however, whether near or far, thank you for your friendship, your support and your encouragement.
It really is appreciated.
