Work For It

Generally, I like to keep this blog lighthearted and fun and I still intend to do so, but I also feel the need to keep it informative and that's what this post it all about. Something happened last night that I just have to share with you all.

First of all, last night was a blast! We threw a party for D. V. S. Magazine's 1st issue. Lysola puts it out and the party was her idea. We held it on our nude beach at Goetz. We decided to rez out all of the old club stuff; the contest board, trivia ball, sploder and dance controllers. I DJ'd the event so I put out my tip jar too.  People started showing up right away and were there ever a lot of them! At one point, my radar told me there were 33 people partying there. I believe that is the largest in-world audience I have ever had. I sure wish I had not been too busy to take pictures though. It would have been nice to publish them here. Hopefully next time?

So it was very busy for me. First of all, the contest board failed, then people started paying me directly as in tips. That meant my tip jar was not working. Lysola paid me L$600 to start a contest but nobody could join the contest unless they belonged to the group, even though I had the contest board set to no group! Yes, Rach and I determined last night that it's time for a new contest board. Even though I wrote to the creator of that board asking a question that the instructions did not address, I never heard back from him so that tells me he's either not in SL anymore, or doesn't care. The contest board is years old and that's a long time in SL. Anyway, I messed around with that contest board, doing everything I could think of to get it to work properly. Nothing. I rezzed out an older version of my tip jar and that started working so it fixed that problem. I had to announce in chat and over the music stream that the couple's dance controller could also handle single dances. And while all this was going on, I was handling the usual IMs from friends who didn't want to come to the party and numerous music requests. And it's those requests that prompted me to write this post.

It seems that some people (and I won't name any names) like to "stump the DJ". Yes, they are not making requests of songs they want to hear, they are making requests that are difficult pieces of music to find. I am naive I guess. I figured these people were wanting me to play music that would entertain them. Little did I know at the time that they were trying to stump me. So I searched long and hard for these requests and found all of them. All of them except for the last one. With about 30 minutes to go in the event, I was asked to find a song and play it. I could not find it anywhere so I let the person know and that person happily announce in local chat that they had "stumped the DJ". I thought it was a joke at first and laughed it off. Then I got back into her IM and apologized for coming up short on that request. She informed me that it was okay, she was trying to stump me and she succeeded. She told me she wanted me to "work for it". What?!?! Really?!?! I didn't say anything more about it then and there. I was too busy helping people and playing music. I could not believe she felt I was not working hard enough on the other requests. 

So I got to thinking about it after the event. Okay, each song I download costs about 99 cents which is fine. In this case, the tips I was getting for each song was L$50. That translates to 20 cents. So she was putting me through all the bullshit to find her difficult to find song for a mere 20 cents? And in reality, I'm out 79 cents after she has tipped me for it *IF* she tips. Often times, people don't tip. So what was my purpose there last night, to throw a party and entertain, or to provide sport for someone? From her perspective, it was to provide a challenge for her to stump me. That is not what I had intended to do last night at all.

I enjoy playing what people want to hear, but if by taking requests I'm providing sport for someone trying to stump me, then I will no longer take any requests. 

Close Encounter of the Nerd Kind

I don't have any pictures to illustrate what this posting is about, but I remember it just like it was yesterday, which it was. It was fun, funny, frustrating, insulting, and enlightening, all at the same time, and then some!

Last Friday night, House of the Rising Sun was rocking to my tunes. We were having a blast at our Nakie Friday dance. No, there's not gifts, prizes or cash prizes. There's just a bunch of us who get together and like to party. This Nakie Friday dance was exceptionally short on an audience. starie speculated that because the day before was Valentine's Day and it was on a work/school night that everyone waited to go out wining and dining on Friday night. It would seem that she was correct in her assumption. But toward the end of my two hour set, I get an Instant Message (IM) from my girl kaz, who I have under my protection. This concept will be covered in a future posting. Anyway, she sends me an IM with a copy of some guys IM in it stating something similar to, "you and me fuck now?". She replied with something like, "didn't you check my profile first? You have to contact Otto Turbo for permission to play with me." So I asked her if she wanted to play with this guy and she replied with something like, "oh hell no!" So I told her I'd be finishing up my set in 10 minutes and that I'd be there to cock-block the guy. Yeah, yet another future posting subject.

Anyway, DJ anniecakes was taking the stream from me so I gave her a countdown of my final song times and she grabbed the stream and I excused myself from the party due to a "land issue". So I teleported (TPd) home. kaz sent me another IM telling me that he's flying around the sim, trying to find her platform she was on. He tried flying this way and that and finally found her direction and location and flew toward her platform to land next to her. She then asked him, "did you contact Otto Turbo about fucking me?" He replied that he had. She relayed this information to me and I told her that he did not contact me. So she wisely TPd me to her platform. Sure enough, there she was and there he was. She had placed me nearly on top of him. I said hi to her and graciously said hello to odonnell Rewell. Write that name down, "odonnell Rewell". He managed to say "hi otto" to me before he went gray in color and my computer locked up.

What a terrible time for my computer to crash! But I was not too surprised. Earlier in the evening, I had been using Photoshop and even though I closed that down, the program actually stays in Windows for whatever reason Microsoft sees fit. But I also had my music streaming software, two different browsers and of course my resource hogging Firestorm SL viewer running. So I figured if I was going to crash, I was not only going to restart the SL viewer, but I was also going to reboot Windows to clear everything out of the memory that might have had something to do with my crashing.

So it was an agonizing 8 minutes later before I was able to run Firestorm. In this time I'm worried what might be happeninig to kaz with this lying dick-head "odonnell Rewell". I finally logon to Last Location. You can select that option with Firestorm just in case you do crash, which I did. Sure enough, kaz was still there and in IM pleading with me to leash her. This "odonnell Rewell" was still there and he was still gray to me. His avatar was not rezzing in and kaz's wasn't rezzing very well either, but I did manage to type in the command to attach my leash to her before, you guessed it, I crashed again! Locked right up? What the hell is going on?

So this time I'm determined to not repeat my first mistake and tried using a completely different viewer and log into home instead of my last location. Sure enough, it worked. Things were rezzing in fast! Now wait just a minute. Why is this? The first thing that came to mind was kaz's well being. She IMd me and said her graphics card on her computer kept locking up. Okay, she's still up there trying to rez into her platform. So I quickly call up my mini map and locate this "odonnell Rewell" on it. First of all, she informed me earlier that he was trying to find her by flying through the air until he finally located her. Secondly, I show up and that was the last thing he wanted because he lied to kaz about asking my permissions. Thirdly, I was no longer anywhere near him and things were working quite well. I quickly realized he was doing something to overload our video cards. Something his avatar was wearing was too much for our computers to process, hence his grey appearance. We were under attack. What a dick-with-ears this "odonnell Rewell" must be. And to think I thought the whole encounter was quite amusing. Poor kaz.

So I quickly got his name from the mini map, called up the parcel owners screen and banned him. A few seconds later, his avatar was pinned to coordinates 0, 0, 0, on our sim. Less than a minute after that, he had "died" and was automatically sent home. He was probably laughing the whole time he was attacking us, but we had the very last laugh. I TP'd kaz to me and unleashed her then told her I was relogging to my main viewer just to make sure. Sure enough, everything was fine with it. I discussed what had happened with kaz and told her what I did. We then figured she was unable to eject people so I took a few minutes in our group and made sure she had that ability in the future.

The people such as this "odonnell Rewell" are commonly referred to as "griefers". I wrote an article about them sometime last year. The get their entertainment in SL by antagonizing others. Basically, he was out looking for trouble and he found it. Fortunately, we were able to figure out what he was doing and take the appropriate steps. Will I report him? No need to. I just did. To all you land owners in SL out there, be sure to add "odonnell Rewell", about a 2 year old avatar, to your parcel ban lists. Oh sure, he can easily create another griefing avatar, and once he uses that one to grief, we'll ban him too. But he wont' be using "odonnell Rewell" to pick on any other property owners again.

Racing

Racing has been mentioned here in this blog before, but only briefly and only to point out yet one other aspect to activities available in a virtual world. To be sure, racing in Second Life pales in comparison to racing in Real Life or even racing in a video game. In RL, you can feel your body slam into the sides of the seat when you corner. You can feel the accelerations, smell the smells, and that concrete wall doesn't look very soft at all! In a video game, body leaning, sound, even control feedback can be simulated. In SL, not so much. You have 4 cursor keys for accelerate, brake, left and right turns. Not very controllable. No feedback at all. Yes, you can setup a steering wheel or "joystick" in SL. I have tried it but didn't care for it. That was years ago though. Maybe they have improved the interface? I might try it again someday and report back to you here. But for now, I only race a couple of times per week and for only 20 minutes at a time.

Neva's garage area in the center of the track. The oval track is above

There are numerous places to go to for racing. There are many places that have racing groups or leagues. They meet at specified tracks and dates and times and have competitions. They have beautiful, challenging tracks. There are drag racing tracks, oval tracks and winding road course tracks. There are also winding tracks with dips and hills. Very challenging and exciting racing. Nearly all of these tracks have some sort of scoring/timing system which is activated when you drive over/through the start finish line. Due to this fact, you do not really need someone there to race against, you can race against time and see your best time up on the scoreboard.

The road course and ramp system.

That's what we have at our parcel, Goetz. I built two tracks. One is a winding flat road course and the other is a low banked oval. Both have timing/scoring devices. The timing on a track in SL is a bit tricky. Because just about anything is possible in SL and your ground vehicle can actually fly if you want it to, built in gates have to be included to ensure that each one is passed through so that nobody cheats at their lap times by constantly crossing the finish line, circling back quickly and passing through it again, over and over. So these gates are placed at various strategic locations around the track and are rendered invisible so that the racer does not know where they are. So long as the racer stays on the track and passes through the gates, their times will be recorded properly. But if they cheat and skip a gate, their time is disqualified. This also means that the racer is required to go around the track in the proper direction. It's always going to be counter-clockwise for any oval track that I create.

The banked oval track

So the group of us me, Neva, Joe, cat, Dylan and more, can race around these tracks and try to beat each other's times. The winding track can be reached from the infield. There is a metal gate to open and a ramp that runs up to the raceway. This track has bleachers on it for spectators that Neva purchased for me as a gift. This track has 12 turns if you count in and out as two separate turns as I do. At the time of this writing, Dylan holds the track record with her Jet Bike. I realized that her time could not be approached unless using the same type of racer that she used, so I went out and bought me one. It turns on a dime! I was able to get within 1 second of her best time but so far, that seems as close as I'm going to get. At some point in the near future, I will be resetting the fast times just so that we all have fun setting new fast times. But for now, she is the fastest on that track.

Me, in front of the scoreboard next to the finish line

If you leave the track and drive past the gas pumps and up the ramps, you will end up in the pit area of our oval track. There is a concrete barrier which swings aside when you click on it for access to the racing surface. This track also has a scoring/timing device and Joe currently holds the lap record. I am able to manage 2nd place on both tracks so far, but I plan on breaking at least one of these track records before resetting the scoreboard. This track has some banking in the turns as well as the straights. You can get up to some ferocious speeds here. This is a very good track for testing out new vehicles.

Despite the high walls on both tracks, drivers manage to fly over them and onto the neighbor's parcel or fall down onto the ground or water of the sim. I try to maintain a small fleet of go-karts and cars there for visitors to use down at the garage area. Feel free to drop in anytime. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Goetz/214/120/1803

There are other places to visit too for racing. There's the 777 group sim. They have tracks and ramps that lead way up into the sky to race on. Just following the ramps up into the air is fun to do and you don't need to race against time or someone else. Just drive as fast as you can. Then there are other sims that you can enjoy multiple tracks on too. But some of those require you to join a group and be a member of their league before you can race. One of them, with a couple of very nice road race tracks is EMH motors. The only way you can join their group is to purchase one of their cars and contact them via Instant Message and wait for them to get back with you and invite you to the group. You can purchase a 24 hour pass from them for use of the track, but that's not really practical. The cars do not cost very much and are worth it and once you are in the group, you have free access to the tracks indefinitely.

So racing against an opponent or an opponent's time is yet one more aspect of SL that you can get into. It's challenging to say the least. I see no reason I should ever have to hear a friend of mine contact me and say "I'm bored".

The Fun Part

Yes, fun is what it's all about. Why exist in a virtual world if not for fun? Oh sure, people have their bad days, and each avatar has a real person behind them and not every day is sunshine and daises  But if you are having a very bad day, then either logon to Second Life to relax and unwind and have some fun, or don't. If you decide not to, it should be due to the fact that even playing around in a virtual world is not going to be enough to raise your spirits. Yes, you have friends there who will try to lift your spirits, but they cannot be expected to sacrifice their free time for yours. If you are feeling that down then maybe SL isn't the place for you at this time? Personally, if I'm feeling blue, I logon to SL in an attempt to lift my spirits and it almost always does just that. And last night was no exception.

No, I was not exactly feeling down, but last night sure did raise my spirits. I DJ'd at House of the Rising Sun last night. Tuesday nights there are never really packed. I mean, we don't have a paying contest and there is no theme, just a handful of avatars who like to have a party on any given night. Even though Rising Sun is a blues place, I played more 80s rock than blues. People seemed to like it for a change so I just kept it up the whole night. The jokes and banter lifted my spirits and the music was all upbeat too, so it was fun.

The night before that, Lysola interviewed me for her new SL magazine called D. V. S. It's got information about different destinations, clothing, entertainment and much more in it. It appears she is going to be publishing it quarterly so look for this issue soon. In it, I talk about what it's like to DJ in SL and what it takes to get started in the entertainment aspect of SL. She asked some good questions. She is also a very fine photo editor. She made a picture of me for the magazine and I used that pic for my tip box at Rising Sun last night. I felt the need however, to point out to her that I do lots more than just DJ.

Over the weekend, I started working on some bed projects I had been putting off. I have an inventory full of sculpted bed kits and I also have a sex animation engine that Stroker Serpentine gave to his friends back when he left SL. So I have been attempting to make use of those before they become too old to hold interest. Yes, while Stroker made over a million real dollars on his animations (so say the rumors), the newer animations are much smoother and easier to control. I need to hurry and get these sex bed projects completed before the animations are no longer desirable.

Now this situation will raise anyone's spirits.

So I have been working on a 4 poster bed. It's pretty good looking. I gave it a wood grain texture and green crushed velvet sheets and pillows, and covered it with a green patterned quilt. I have a version where you can click on the quilt and it pulls down to the foot of the bed, or a version where the quilt stays in place. The pull down version is a bit tricky because the scripted quilt cannot link to the bed or the sex animations will not function. The sex engine has to be the root prim of the bed for it to function. But the quilt has to be a root prim too to function. I may or may not get this figured out, only time will tell. I will go into more detail about linked prims and root prims in a future article. Suffice to say, I like working on virtual goods and trouble shooting things. It focuses me and relaxes me. It's part of the fun I talk about in this post.

But SL is also a very social place. It's filled with people behind the avatars so when my submissive girl kaz wanted company, she comes to me, kneels and just pretty much watches me work. Now, I don't mind being watched at all, especially if my work is entertaining to her, but it was not. I can't help but feel self conscious of her boredom. And yes, that's what it came down to for her is boredom. So in the end, I abandon my work to go and play greedy or something with my patient observer.

But back to working on the bed. I was aligning the final end posts of the bed, matching up the shaded textures with the sculpted prim when the bed vanished. I was zoomed right in tight on it and it just disappeared. I figured I must have hit a short-cut key by mistake while typing in IMs, so I zoomed out and found that just about everything had vanished! Yes, my sandbox, which normally has a bunch of beds, unopened packages, projects and even cars and teleporters laying about, was cleared. All that remained were the platform itself (1100 meters up in the sky) and a teleporter disc that belonged to my alternate, Nugget. Everything that was in Otto Turbo's name had vanished from that sandbox platform. So I sought out a reasonable explanation of what just happened. Maybe I accidentally had everything on the platform selected when I also by mistake hit a delete items keyboard short-cut? Easy enough to figure out. I teleported home, which is on the ground of the sim. To my dismay, my house was gone. Nothing I owned in my name remained on the entire "ground" of the sim. Trees, plants, swimming toys, everything was gone! I still was not too worried.

I thought about it a minute and figured someone must have returned all my stuff to me accidentally. So I called up my inventory and checked the Lost And Found folder which is where most stuff would go to if someone returned things to me. There was nothing there. I had over 3,500 items on that sim and not one of them was returned to my inventory. How can this be? Right then and there was a good time to panic. So I looked around me. Looked to the next parcel over. I saw on my mini-map that the property manager, Miriam was there. That explains it sort of. She was working on the neighboring parcel because the neighbors there had just moved out. So I contacted her via Instant Message. "Hi Miriam. Did you return all my stuff to me? All of my items on the sim have vanished". She told me that there was a "Linden" working there with her and that "Linden" must have accidentally deleted my stuff. Deleted? Oh crap! So I quickly check my map to find this "Linden" to contact him/her about my stuff. There was nobody else on the entire sim except for Miriam and Majyck. Apparently, these "Lindens" can be invisible and can delete your items in an instant. I find this very disturbing. I mean sure, Linden Labs owns Second Life but why are they invisible? I mean, why hide? But was this Linden hiding? Obviously Miriam knew he/she was there. I just shook my head and asked Miriam, "Oh no. Now what can I do to get my stuff back?" She told me that they could perform a "rollback" and reset the sim to when my stuff still existed. Wow. I must have like 10s of thousands of L$ tied up in my stuff, and it really was at that moment, all gone. So I was relieved to see that a rollback is a possibility.

And sure enough, a sim wide message window dropped down warning us there were 5 minutes before a restart. You do not want to be on a sim when it restarts. You will be kicked out of SL. So I took off to another sim and asked Maj if she wanted a TP to where I was. She did. We ended up on some Linden land that had some small islands to explore on it. One of them was a sheep that Maj took to right away. I know she wants one but I don't think they are for sale. Anyway, about 6 minutes passed so we went back home. Sure enough, all my stuff was there. I thanked Miriam and wanted to thank the Linden but still could not see him/her, and went back to my sandbox to work on my beds. The beds were there but my changes to the positioning of the posts were gone. Maj IM'd me and told me that her work on a lantern she was doing had all been reversed. There went an hour of her life, down the drain. It was about 20 minutes of my work vanished is all and I can live with that. It's much better than all of my stuff being deleted.

I had no idea something like this could happen. I cringe to think of what it would have been like to have been offline when my stuff was deleted and not able to realize it until the next time I logged on, which could have been days. Would that Linden have been able to rollback that far? I shudder to think about it. Years ago, I purchased a piece of external software that allowed me to back up my inventory onto my computer's hard drive. Come to find out, it would only back up items that I had created. Back then, I had not created much of anything, but I had spend thousands of L$ on various items. I had, and still have, houses, buildings, cars, boats, aircraft, watercraft, clothes, shoes, hair, skin, eyes, shapes, textures (oh the thousands of textures!), all that I paid good money for. But none of that stuff could be backed up by that software because they were created by others. I strongly feel that Linden Labs should provide some form of export or backup system that not only provides a way to download and save your own creations to your computer (which is available now), but also items that you have paid money for. I did not create the house I'm living in now, but I did pay good money for it and I feel I should be able to back it up somehow.

Whisper, the bride to be.

But back to the fun. One of these nights over this past weekend, I got an IM from my SL sister Whisper. She told me she was getting SL married. Wonderful! I just love weddings. All the planning and the formally dressed avatars and the vows and the gathering and everything. And this wedding was going to be at Sweetheart's ballroom. Very impressive. Sweetheart's has been around for a long time and was always popular but is much more fun now that they have new owners. So I was impressed. What burst my bubble? It was Whisper telling me that the ceremony was "right now" and asked if cat was coming. Well, cat was away on business in her 1st life so she was not going to be able to make it. I had to wonder how long she and her fiance' Fabio had been planning this. The likely answer to that question was probably an hour or so.

Whisper and Fabio

So I popped on over there and dressed up in one of my tuxedos. I was to give Whisper away. As it turned out, there were no aisle walking animations. There was no altar! We just stood at the end of a hallway up near a wall and went into a group IM as they did their vows. No officiant or anything. Well, I cannot say that my "bubble" was entirely burst because it was pretty romantic. I would now have to compare it with eloping, which is quite romantic. Dylan and her man Mike were there too. I wish cat could have come but real life must come first. Without it, we could not have our 2nd life.