Reading Radar

Chug and I have been ice skating on pavement on Podcast Island almost since I met her, but it’s been awhile. So when I logged on and found that she’d sent me a couple pairs of the latest Skoopf skates, I was ready. And I have to say, the new Steamers are my favorites - they are in steampunk style. Man, if TFG was still coming in-world once in awhile, I’d have him whip up a pair of his own and see what he could do, style-wise. I had to think of him when I saw these.

She also got me a pair of the monsters because I was always laughing about her “mice” skates. Both types of skates are highly customizable - lots of options here.

You can click on the picture to get to the flickr page for the image, then click “all sizes” to see the original size.

My steamers:

Both of us in steamers:

Chug’s steamers:

And the monsters:

Go get a pair and come skate Podcast Island’s friendly streets with us! And if you’re better than us, we’ll just orbit you. No problem!!

Technorati Tags:
3d, PodcastPickle, secondlife, virtual

Starting next post, all pictures will be on flickr, so that I can link to the smaller images for the blog post, and if you click on them, you’ll get larger images for easier viewing. Last post, they were on flickr but only in the same size as viewed on the blog.

Also, I am gonna do another podcast someday, I have interviews with Guy David and Itazura Radio recorded and ready for 2 new eps. I’m gonna mention too that for the 3 remaining streets on Podcast Island, I’ve decided to name them after Pickle, Itazura, and Chugabug. They’ve been there since the beginning, or almost the beginning for two of them, and they’ve never left even during lean times when everyone else bailed. I think that’s worth a street name…

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3d, PodcastPickle, secondlife, virtual

Chug saw something in someone’s profile… how often do our explorations start that way? Ummm… not often. Really no more than… 99.9999% of the time. At the most. Anyway, October is a state of mind, not a month. At least it is in SL, on the October Country sim. For the sake of my brevity, let’s call it the OC, shall we? No? Well, tough luck, it’s my blog and I’m calling it OC.

OC features the October Hotel high upon a treacherous ledge overlooking a town below. The town is under construction. We met the sim owner Martian Wei, who was very friendly and helpful, and he indicated it should be completed before long.

But who cares about the town, everyone knows when there’s a hotel on a hill in dark, gloomy surroundings, you need to explore and expect a few surprises.

We wandered in and found no one at the desk… so we thought maybe we should apply for the job. Unfortunately there were no spare name tags, so we decided maybe we should just go look for someone.

We found one person…. but they weren’t real helpful. Needed some rest too, by the looks of them.

They are into weird art here - I sure hope that’s not a relative of someone!

We headed downstairs and found some corridors… and a crate with something totally alien inside.

Then we found something odd.

A tunnel. A hole. A whole tunnel. We proceeded.

Chug found something that was inexplicable, yet purposeful. Was it used for carving Turkeys? But in October? Hmmm.

Oh, well. Whatever. We moseyed on, and found a comforting fire. I thought this was supposed to be scary? Maybe they’re gonna make us all sing songs?

Somehow we found our way back the to the place we were before. And then we went upstairs.

Dazed and confused, we stumbled back outside, and discovered a lighthouse up on the ridge across from us.

We wandered down into the town, where a friendly squirrel was gathering nuts. I guess we were part of his collection?

Oh, yeah, while up on the lighthouse tower we met Martian Wei. Do him a favor and go check out this sim. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s a really well done build.

And look for some things down near the graveyard that I didn’t get pictures of. Stand on the bridge for awhile. It’ll be worth it.

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3d, exploring, secondlife, virtual

it’s snowing on Podcast Island back by TFG’s diner. Oh, if only he were in-world ever… he could see for himself!

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3d, PodcastPickle, secondlife, virtual

Well, … four of them don’t. I’m talking about Podcast Island and Podcaster Island. The deal was, if you remember from episode 18 of SL Under the Radar, you go looking on Podcast Island or Podcaster Island, find one of my online indicator boxes, click it to leave an IM for me, and if there are any unnamed streets left of the 8 total streets, you get to have it named after your podcast, your your blog, or your neighbor’s goat… as long as it’s not pornographic or perverted.

Right now, 4 of the 8 streets are unnamed. The rest go to Airsafety Zuhal, Guy David, Jett Whitfield, and Crap Mariner (that’s the order they found the indicator boxes in, I think). Just look at these streets… some of them are waiting for YOU!

So Podcasters.. wake up!! This is a chance to have a street named after your humble show.. I say humble.. it probably dwarfs mine into insignificance.

Grim Babies (sorry, I don’t have the slurl, please search for YOURSELF FOR ONCE!!! ummm… sorry) had a haunted house, and we (airsafety, chug, and I) went. It had some spooky stuff but also some puzzles and some other diversions such as the dance balls:

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3d, exploring, halloween, secondlife, virtual

Sometimes in life it’s fun to see how people react to you if you aren’t what they expect. In second life too, where you’d think people would grasp that not everyone’s gonna be “REAL LIFE SERIOUS” all the time, or might wanna be something other than what they really are just because they can, it’s surprising how people treat you if you look like, say… a hobo.

Chug and I took the hobo gear we got at the SleezyWood sim trailer park and went to The Endless, a sim set up like a section of NY and with a lot of trendy this, that, and the other. Blah blah blah. The cool parts were beneath the streets in the subways with all their disgusting filth. It fit us perfectly, barrel wearing bums that we were.

I’m not sure I’d give this a two thumbs up. Well, I can’t, I got splinters in one of my thumbs from the barrel and now it’s got gangrene. Oh well… one less appendage to freeze in the winter.

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3d, exploring, secondlife, virtual

SL’s not always about fun and games. It’s not always about the wacky good times of lag, missing inventory items, attachments up your butt, and niceties like that. Sometimes someone builds something in SL that gets your attention and helps you remember things in a meaningful way.

The Wall is one such place in second life. Everyone’s heard of the Vietnam Vet’s Memorial , aka “The Wall,” but most of us have probably never been there. The Wall in SL can help change that… ok, it’s not the RL location, but it gives you a really well done sense of the place and the enormity and solemnness of the real memorial.

With something like 56,000 + names on it, this memorial reminds us how just one war brought so much pain to so many lives… that many sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers who never came home. That many parents, siblings, wives, and children who had to deal with the loss.

We’ve killed too many of them in our history.

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3d, exploring, secondlife, virtual

Rocky’s got a new hobby, I guess… Apparently all the lindens he makes from being a dj aren’t enough?!

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3d, secondlife, virtual

Artie Slade, who you may recall from episode 18 of SL Under the Radar when he IM’d me in-world to say hi, IM’d me again recently to mention a browser based second life login application called ajaxlife.net and that he was gonna check it out…

I’d heard of it too, but had never bothered to see what it was, so Artie’s comments got me curious. I decided to look for myself.

Turns out it’s a web based login to second life! Didn’t I just say that? Umm yeah. Problem is, the young developer has pretty much given up on it for reasons stated in her blog. And right now, the site seems to be down again. But I was able to use it one night, logging into an alt account (yes, I have one, and yes, he’s walked right up to Crap Mariner before, after all those accusations of having an alt and Crap probably can’t tell me his name, hehe) and see what SL looked like in a browser. Turns out it looks like a static image. Huh?

AjaxLife.net, it turns out, lets you log into your account, mess with your inventory, look at the map, teleport around, chat with friends of yours who are online, do searches for people, and … well, I think that’s it, but you can’t see jack diddly. It’s kind of a Stevie Wonder experience if I’ve ever had one.

Logging into SL through ajaxlife.net:

Looking at my inventory:

The Map (I was on Blaksleeworld):

“Are you really sure you wanna teleport to place x?”

Looking at a script from inventory and loading an image from inventory:

Logging out:

What’s it all mean? What’s it good for? Well, I’m not really sure except that it’s extremely cool that a 15 year old girl did this on her own initiative, and it would be cool if someone could write a web page that emulated the browser portion of the SL client enough that you could see where you were, and who was around you as well. For now this type of thing is a good way to log in, chat with someone online rq, and maybe tp into a bad neighborhood with no way to see the local punks headed your way. I’m assuming it’ll come back up again…

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internet, podcast, secondlife, virtual