Reading Radar

Have you ever wondered “Why am i Here?” No? Well, whether you have or haven’t, you should really get Here now and find the answer to your question.

The inimitable Torley Linden has created himself a sim that you can’t miss. You can try, but you can’t miss it. I tried. I failed. You see, Chug put a link to it in the Destination Station. And since it was there, and I’d read about it in Torley’s blog, I had to check it out. I had no choice, no freewill, no way of getting around it.

But, that’s cool, because it’s actually a fun sim. It’s certainly not like any other sim I’ve been too, and this should be right up Mathaios Brandenburg’s alley. I do admit to growing weary of seeing the same old pretty human cities recreated in cyberspace when anything is possible, imaginative options are endless, and we choose to create a mirror of RL. But Ha HA!! Friendly Greetings, because THIS is not THAT!

Upon teleporting in, you realize You are HERE! somehow.. not sure how, something subtle perhaps.

We all know about the watermelons, the piano, and other famous Torleyisms, but he must have something for big birds too. Not the sesame street kind, but realistic huge birds that could peck your head in.

There’s kind of a watermelony easter island thing going on near the landing area.

There’s also a 60+ prim cube that I really wanted to twist and scramble like a Rubik’s cube, but no such luck. I couldn’t get it to do anything. Bummer. Torley, I wanted to twist your cube, man.

Here I am, trying to blend in with my green shirt. Where’s my PURPLE PANTS, DAMN IT!?

And playing the piano, the way I can only in Second Life.

Up There is a vid tut station for watching video tutorials. I didn’t bother to try to find out if you could change videos. The one they had playing there was about changing SL time or daylight settings or how to be a man that looks like a woman.. I’m really not sure anymore.

From there I went to meditate on what I’d watched, with Big Torley watching over me to make sure I didn’t pee in the pool or something.

Speaking of Big Torley, that’s a head that could fill a sim.

We found a couple weird things, like this interesting dance/pose/something something.

And a man eating plant with a link to some videos on building or something on top of it.

Personally, I kind of dug the Starship Watermelonrind.

Torley also posted some of his philosphy in “read me from across the sim” high letters.

I dug the fact he had a small parcel that allowed terraforming just to let people do it, and play. Very cool. I made what looked like a triple dinosaur horn thingy, whatever dinosaurs had horns. I’m sure some dino or other must have. You can’t be a respectable species if one of your kind doesn’t have a triple horn on its head.

After that, we found a natural pool area with floatation devices. I chose the monkey. It’s my way.

We talked to Jack1.24Gigawatts (actually it was JackSomeReallyLongNumber) for a few minutes and then poofed outta there. But not before I took one last look at the sim called Here, created for and by the man named Torley. Truly the only one-name SLebrity (or celebrity, for that matter) that I can stand. And this sim is very Torley in that it’s education oriented, providing resources for learning more about SL, and just generally showing that you don’t need to take a sim, build a town, and generally bore the shit out of people in some apparent desperate need to make sure they’ll never come back.

So git on ova theya, ya heah? And check out the torley meister’s sim sim, sim ba la dim.

I was all set with a nice long blog post on community the other night.. thoughts about why it matters, what it is, how to build it and how not to build, it but… hey. Every time I get serious, people tell me that’s not like me and that I should lighten up. So screw it. Instead, here’s 20 minutes of video on the now defunct Narnia build we toured in SL on the Papillon Isles sim.

Warning: It’s 25 minutes long! Or something close to it.

By the way, did you know you could get these videos on your video capable iPod? You can… here’s the rss link. Plug this into the “podcasts” category in itunes. http://slpnvideo.blip.tv/rss

As for community? Eh. Figure it our for yourselves. At least those of you who keep telling me that my role in it is to be the village idiot.

Doh. We explored Privateer Space a couple times. We blogged it. We videoed it. Now it’s closed its doors and declared its asteroids off limits. Why? Not really sure.. but I would like to see if Aley Arai would be willing to do an ep of SL Under the Radar and talk about it or not.

This was by far one of our favorite builds of the many we’ve explored in SL and it’s a shame if it’s to stay closed.

While everyone else goes over the SL5B sims inch by inch, Chug and I went to one of the locations she posted up in the Destination Station to look around. The name of the place is Whimsy, and there’s actually three whimsy sims and two Eccentricity sims in a group of five sims there.

There’s a lot of island theme here, but not with the typical bent. This is different, and the topography and the builds and the look of everything here is interesting, and extremely well done… it was fun to just fly around and look.

On the south side, there’s pirate ships and elephants… sculpties still have some issues, but they can also look really good in the hands of the right creators.

There’s life under the sea in these sims too, most of which I’ll let you find for yourselves, but the octopus here concerned me a bit. When your leg comes out between your eyes, one of your parents wasn’t living a clean life. That’s all I’m saying.

There’s jungle…

There’s oriental architecture.

And not to be left out, there’s a volcano demanding virgin sacrifices, or at least some kind of sacrifices. There can’t be any virgins left in SL, they’re all paying women who are really men to make sure of that.

I liked the terraforming a lot. It’s unique and very well done.

We wound up in this cove area, which looked like a relaxing little spot, and that’s where we teleported out from.

You can find Whimsy linked to in the Destination Station on one of the many boards that Chug has put up. I knew the place would be a great way for others to find cool places to explore, but thanks to her work there, it’s probably going to give me a lot of new places to check out too.

What can I say? It’s fun being a spider monkey!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0enBoRZbF-0&hl=en]

Exploring Bay City the other night, we came across a guy named Marcelles Dreamscape. I don’t know if he’s related to Nika or not, but his companion had the same last name. But who cares about her, check out this guy’s ‘fro. I LIKE it!!

I really should have asked where he found that. I just know Keeme would want one.

Previously, I blogged about how Itazura Radio came up with the concept of the Destination Station on Podcast Island, and how he planned for it to be a home base for the “homeless” to set their Home to, after they’ve joined the group so SL will let them do so. And of course, I mentioned the fact that it would be filled with destination boards to click on to go to a variety of fun and interesting sims and builds to explore. Tonight we started getting some of those boards operational with a few of our recent explorations.

True, there’s only a handful now, but we’ll keep plugging away and adding more. Instead of putting Chug’s explorations for the SL Under the Radar podcast in the podcast suite, we’ll put them on destination boards here instead. It will make it easier and more fun to find and click on something to go to.

When someone clicks on one of the boards, two things happen. First, the map opens with the destination on it, ready for them to TP to should they desire. Secondly, they are asked if they’d like to receive a notecard with information on the destination. If so, they get a notecard explaining more about the location (and typically an embedded LM for future use as well).

Hopefully this will be a fun place to hang out and watch video podcasts upstairs or find places to explore downstairs, and maybe set as home for those who don’t have a real place they call home or feel comfortable using to rez in or rez out.

If you hang around Podcast Island enough, you’ll soon realize that Itazura Radio has a history of coming up with nice builds and interesting ideas. Recently he came up with the idea of kind of a hub for people without home locations in SL to set their home to, provided they just join the group. He’s calling it the Destination Station, and that’s really what it’s going to become.

Inside, there’s a fire and a cozy roundabout couch for sitting around and yakking (there’s that word again) it up with friends.

Upstairs he’s got some video podcast screens, and woohoo! They point to the SLPN In Your Face! video podcast.

Okay, so what about the Destination part of this? On the walls are boards that we are going to start filling up with links/images to various locations around the grid. Chug’s explorations, stuff we’ve seen, locations of interest that our friends have come up with, etc. The idea is they can tp directly to the location of choice from the Station.

I like it. It’s got a nice open, comfortable feel and it will be nice once we start filling up the place with destinations.

Back on the art track, since a lot of the places we’ve gone recently seem to be about art… Awhile back, the same time we did the Far Away explore, Chug read in a blog about a place that was going to be shutting down, so we thought we’d wander over and take a look. Turns out it was up to its description: Callistie - Madcow Madhouse. I really have no idea why I’m providing a SLURL since you can’t go anymore, but hey. Whatever. It existed. Really.

Madhouse it was, but an interesting, well done madhouse. We usually like a lot of interactivity, and there was some here, but some of the things we assumed would be interactive weren’t, like the drums and pipes near the landing point. Still, it was a really well done build and, now that it’s gone, maybe it should live on in pictures.

Come on in! You land on a weird platform, and immediately notice that this build is a little different than the rest.

Finding a theme here isn’t too hard - this fellow gives it away (hint: think bones).

Some things in the sky caught our eyes, and we headed over to check them out. They seemed to be friendly enough, in the same way that a dead grizzly is friendly.

Chug’s always been the smarter of us on our explorations. Here she gives more reason she’s brainier than me.

Ok, now where?

Flying around, we see some interesting things, some of which aren’t entirely explainable in terms of purpose.

I guess this makes Chug crabby?

At any rate, she decided to take control of the situation with some mystical powers.

I tried too, but all that happened was me burning my hand on the glowing orb. These things need a user manual.

There were some creatures I call “reindeadeer” and look… three of the people I work with showed up to say hi. That was unexpected.

All this makes an avatar hungry, so we decided to get a table.

I’ll have the ribs, please.

Apparently a restaurant that’s killed itself for some reason is the place to eat. Seems odd. But ok.

Ok, well. That’s how it was. And now it is no longer, this madcow of an art gallery.

Yay, Episode 4 of SLPN in your Face is up, and it’s on an exploration jaunt over to “the Far Away” (blogged about recently here).

The best news is that starting with this episode, the podcasts will be ipod formatted. I tested it out on my iPod Touch and it worked and looked great. Thanks to Gomem DeSoto for pushing me to get with the program and make that happen. It just makes sense and it’s actually a lot of fun viewing these on the iPod.