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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
