A Great RFL Show

Just a quick post to say what a great show (or shows – we put two on now to limit audience generated lag, one at 2pm & the other at 2:50pm) we had yesterday. They were organised by Elliebob Bean for the Race for Life cancer charity and raised over L$17,000 for the worthy cause. Osprey has a post here and links to a great little machinema by Waeyla Tenk over on YouTube here. And as an extra treat, Kumi Kuhr sent me this link to a real life flea circus video

Here are some pics – I even managed to get some great ones of Kitty’s brilliant act at last!

 

The Lost Journal: A Telegram from the Doctor

I thought the posting of the mysterious (possibly hoax) journal would be an end to it. I’m often wrong and this was no time for fate to throw me a straight ball. Sally, the crab I dispatched to carry the journal to Dr Mason’s lab(1), returned bearing a telegram.

JOURNAL RECEIVED STOP THANK YOU STOP MOST WORRYING STOP MUST STOP THE SPREAD OF EVIL STOP IT MUST BE STOPPED STOP BLOW IT UP STOP ONLY WAY TO STOP IT STOP NEED TO ATTEND TO THINGS AT THE SANITORIUM STOP MEET YOU AT THE ISLAND STOP COORDINATES GIVEN TO NICE CRAB STOP GO AHEAD AND SCOUT STOP TAKE CARE STOP JEREMIAH MASON STOP DR STOP

I looked down at Sally, who looked up at me.

She blinked.

I blinked.

She blinked.

“Ahem,” I coughed deliberately.

She blinked.

I blinked.

She blinked.

“The coordinates?” I prompted before we blinked ourselves into a coma.

Sally bounced a good inch off the ground as she remembered and began to trace the numbers into the sand with her claw. I memorised them, erased them with my boot and made preparations to leave. These preparations included giving Sally the launch codes to a small thermo-nuclear warhead I had found here or there and stored in the sunken cave just off shore(2). She had strict instructions that if I did not return within two days, she was to reduce whatever the hell was out there to naught but glass and shadows. She saluted and marched off to find some shrimp to munch on.

With my backpack full of food, water, spare rounds for my Webley, dynamite and Elemental, I teleported over and emerged from the queer third space of intra-grid travel in a jungle much the same as mine. The air smelt the same, the humidity was similar, even the trees and the insects in the reminded me of home. I had the feeling that the journal hadn’t floated that far to reach me. Maybe the next island along, I wondered.

Checking my current location, I found that I had actually been deposited some distance south from where I had expected to be. Odd, but not unheard of. I would just have to walk the rest of the way there. On my own. Through the thick jungle. And it was getting dark. I took my pistol in hand and began to hack at the undergrowth with my machete – Dr Mason could follow my path, I reasoned, I just hoped he would come sooner rather than later…

To be continued…

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(1) Lovely lass and a keen worker. This was her first assignment. Didn’t she do well. Hope she remembers the launch codes – but not too early though 0_o

(2) Don’t ask. It’s best you don’t know. And if you see it, try not to knock it over or bang it, please.

Links to other blogs & tales:
Jeremiah recieves the package here and here.

 

A Trippy Tree House

An LM? Someone sent me a landmark? “Come,” it invited “and bear witness to Nish’s Star Shine!”(1) Always a lover of mysterious invites, I checked and donned my backpack and teleported over.

With the sound of a thousand ducks quacking in silence, I popped out of the strange third-space that enables teleportation and immediately felt the wind on my fur; cool and clear. I was high. I sniffed the air. About 450m high, thereabouts. I was in a large roundhouse with a conical roof. The doorway was wide and open with a beautiful tree growing next to it. I stood beneath its bows and gazed down at the world beneath me – and the view was stunning. Directly below me was Kekekabic(2) and all around stretched the continent of Sansara with snowy mountains to the west and an inland sea to the east, its waters darkening as evening gave way to twilight.

I moved back inside the hut where there were only two things to catch my eye. One was a sign from Nish encouraging me to “Jump in the fire and be Reborn!” and the other was a hole cut into the floor in front of the sign in which flames flickered and twittered.

What could I do but dive in?

I fell and fell and fell…

Through darkness and cold until…

I emerged into a universe of colour and motion and sound!

Pure grid energy exploded around me, spinning and dancing about me. A singularity continually recycling and renewing it, pulling it in and spewing it out anew. A globe passed close by and before I knew it I was as one with it. I found myself meditating and at peace.

I closed my eyes and felt the world around me slipping away. When I opened them again, I was adrift on a calm, blue ocean.

Had it all been a dream? Did the floating treehouse and its trippy secret really exist? And most importantly of all, where was I and how would I get back? NISSSSSH!

Fin. Quack.
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(1) I paraphrase…

(2) Also the home of Nish’s Explorer’s Cafe and shop – see my previous post here.

 

Little Bear Lost…

A Watery Bear Hunt

Lost! The note from Soft Linden said his bear was lost in the watery sim of Ilruree. The boat was sunk and his newly found bear lost again. I had to do something! A quick TP over to the sim found me balancing precariously on a wobbly box on a wobbly submerged platform bobbing about in a wobbly sea.

A big wobbly sea…

A very big wobbly sea…

A very very big wobbly sea indeed!

What with having fur and heavy boots, I didn’t much fancy a soaking and seeing as I’d lent Frank out to stud (the lucky devil!) I decided that this hunt was short of only one thing – my trusty canoe! I popped it out (my canoe, you mucky pups) and set off at a leisurely pace to look for the missing bear.

All of a sudden, a dot on the horizon caught me eye and I paddled towards it to investigate.

Yes! All my struggles and tribulations had not been in vain for there, bobbing about in a life preserver, was the bear himself! And what a fine specimen he was too!

For a brief moment, I forgot the worries and cares of the worlds and was simply a happy gazelle.

Fin. Parp.
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P.S. This short tale was requested by Juko and I hope she liked it

 

Cali’s New Show

Way back in the mists of history I met Calligypian Christensen at Os’ photo studio and she took some pics of me. We’ve been friends ever since and every few months drop into one another’s lives. Usually this is at an art event Cali has organised and last week was just such an ocsasion. Over in Victoriana Square, the multi-talented Miss Christensen has opened a six week show of her amazing photography and I would urge everyone to drop in and see her great photos (and buy a few too – I have several in my gallery now and they are wonderful!)

The Mayor was on hand to greet visitors

See more of this exhibition in this report by Hibiscus here!

 

A Warm Front in the Cold War

“A Warm Front in the Cold War” – Extract of a SL novel by Lady Heady Antfarm.
================================================
(Soon to be found at Grignano Books)

“Ah, so you think your American bravado will save you?” Major Ilyka Italot stood before the captured B52 pilot, her leather-clad hands resting confidently on her shapely hips.

“Honeypie, all youse is gonna git out of me is my name, rank and number. But if you’re a good girl I reckons I can stretch to kiss,” Captain Hank Wayne the Sixth of the United States Navy Air Force Wing Marines Crops quipped with a wink and a smile. At least it looked like a wink and a smile. It could have been a nervous tic. Even he wasn’t sure now.

The Russian Major (theatre studies minor) stared at the handsome imperialistic pigdog sat before her. From the toes of his strong, athletic legs to the curls of his boyishly charming hair, she hated his capitalistic guts with a passion.

“You Americans! You think that with a joke here, a wink-smile-thing there you can just charm country peasants such as myself, don’t you!” She hissed at him, her anger rising and making her chest heave.

Hank Wayne watched her chest heaving inside her uniform. He was no longer listening to her and had no idea what she was saying, something about heaving breasts he guessed.

“YOU MAKE ME SICK!” she shouted at him and slapped him hard across his cheek, an action that proved too much for her collective-sewn blouse and caused both of her magnificent and perfectly round breasts to leap out of her regulation five year bra and burst from her blouse in a shower of buttons, torn fabric and magnificent, round, large, lovely breasts. And nipples.

“By Lenin’s Tomb!” exclaimed the Major’s second-in-command, a small man in the Urals, who fainted dead away at the sight of such a forbidden and foreboding spectacle.

“By Lincon’s Beard!” exclaimed Captain Hank.

The Major, proud of her magnificent people’s bosom stood in front of him unashamed of her nudity. And with a rack like that, why should she be? “You Americans! You know nothing about hardship! Struggle! Pain! We Russians know these things. And in Russia, these things know you!” she bellowed cryptically.

Captain Hank had no idea what the broad was on about, but he nodded and made vague reassuring sounds. If being married three times had taught him anything, it was how to keep his mouth shut at the right time or risk losing all chance of landing his bomber.

“You think that with your B52s and your up-and-over garage doors and your popcorn you will win the war? You are fools!” Her passion burned brighter inside her, its warmth flooding into all the hidden nooks and crannies of her Amazonian body. She looked the western swine full in his handsome face and she kissed him hard and deep. She tore her clothes off and then his until they were both naked. She stood astride the chair he was chained to and noted with pleasure the generous size of the salute he was giving her military honours.

“Prepare to cross Checkpoint Charlie, Captain Hank Wayne…” she whispered as she lowered herself onto his refuelling rod…

(For more by the same author, click here)

 

What I hate about WordPress…

After that strong opening, let me say that I LOVE WordPress. I love its ease of set up. I love its look and feel. I love its widgets and options and tinker-ability. I just love it. Next to its 52inch plasma screen HD beauty, Blogger looks like a clunky old portable TV with hoop aerial and no remote (1).

But what I do hate about WordPress is how frigging hard it is to use on a phone. I don’t mean to read – that’s easy enough (3), but rather to edit a post which is a full-on knacker-throb of godlike proportions.

WP recently revamped their dashboard and it looks ace on the laptop or PC – all lovely drop down arrow menus and roll-over menus and mmmmm, just lovely. Really easy to use. Really lovely. But really, REALLY hard for my windows mobile powered phone running Opera Mobile 4.5 beta to deal with. SO VERY REALLY HARD.

This is a typical example – yesterday two posts were published at once due to an oversight on my part when scheduling them. No worries, just pop in and change one to a later date and it’s gone. 30 to 60 seconds on my PC. Fully 30 fucking minutes on my phone. THIRTY FUCKING MINUTES. By the end it was a battle of wills. I won. But it was a pyrrhic victory at best.

The problem seems to be (4) that the fancy dashboard page and roll-over menus take so bloody long to load or render in Opera Mobile that it’s almost impossible to navigate a page, let alone change something and press the publish/update button.

What we (by ‘we’ I mean the WP WM community, i.e. ME!) need is an app that at the very least allows for easy logging into the blog and editing of posts. I’d really like a sync option so I can alter a post offline and then just upload the changes, but this may be asking for a blowjob off God for all I know (see 4). There is one app I know of that sync to WP, TBlogger, but the developer isn’t working on it any more and it’s not stable on the latest WM so is bugger all use. Gah!

Look, any app developers out there be advised that I’d pay cold hard cash for a good WordPress blogging app. Get to work you devilish little code monkeys. In the meantime, I’ll post this via the email-to-blog system WordPress have just introduced. Nice, but not how I want to blog (5).

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(1) I’ve no real idea about LiveJournal but that seems ok – maybe a 28inch flatscreen LCD to stretch the metaphor a bit further. Other ones I can only guess at. They all seem a bit Social Networky to me. I write a blog so I, ME, MOI can have a platform to shout into your earhole about how brill I am. I do not want people voting how much they liked my posts. I want them to put funny and witty comments after the posts so I can carry on being amusing with my amusing friends. I am, as I have said, a selfish social networker. If I had a wall, only I could write on it, although I would welcome amusing post-it notes from others. Selfish you see (2).

(2) Ohh, and I LOVE reading other people’s blogs – I want them to amuse and/or charm me with their brilliant posts and I want them to extend the fun into the comments section too. I’m not so selfish that I expect anything different than I offer on my own blog. Tsk, what do you take me for? But I usually drop blogs very quickly if I get no reply in the comments. I’m easily hurt like that.

(3) Flash embedded stuff is a problem, but that’s hardly WP’s fault – come on Adobe, sort it out! And Opera Mobile, for god’s sake just replace flash embeds with a picture rather than struggling manfully on before crashing out and weeping in a corner, you dolt.

(4) What do I know? Fuck all at the last count.

(5) Here’s my Wish List for a mobile WordPress blogging app:
Has to support multiple WP blogs & users – I have more than one blog
Has to work offline – I write all posts offline and publish later.
Has to be able to edit all aspects of a live post easily.
Has to include Categories and Tags.
Has to include Cut & Paste (not as often included as you’d think!)
Has to be able to embed links.
Would like a HTML & WYSIWYG edit view for creating new or editing existing posts.
Would like to sync with blog.
Would like to include the Extract section.
Would like to see the Media section so I can include saved Media into posts.
Would LOVE it is it also handled other blogging platforms (like MoBlog does) as I am part of Blogger blogs too.

 

Nish’s Explorer’s Cafe

My mate Nish is on a road trip (well, sea trip mainly, but you know what I mean) and when she opened a blog to document it I found out she had a shop & cafe. I had to go!

Located on a sim crossing in Kekekabic (huh? who makes these names up?), her shop straddles the linden road that runs through it (it reminded me of Shyft’s old place in Monstara which did the same) and looks amazing. I especially love the working ssteam train on the roof!

Under the train is a lovely little steamy eco-system – it’s crying out for some cute little frogs and I think I’ll send some I find on my wanderings to Nish for re-homing

The bridge leads across the road to the cafe itself – just look at the old chugger!

The cafe is as welcoming as the owner – the walls have slideshows where Nish will add photos from the members of her Quest explorer’s group (join up and send her your snapshots!) and you can buy her many fab creations here (the Star Wars binocs are lovely, but your really must get yourself one of her trains or the Quest 1 Explorer’s Vehicle)

So drop on by, relax and plan the start of your own road trip adventure!

SLURL to be added

 

The Lost Journal: Epilogue

So there you have it folks. The journal I found washed up on my beach could well be a fake, an elaborate joke, a meticulously detailed prank. But it may just be real. And I don’t feel it is my place to take that chance. That’s what I’ve risked mockery by publishing the extracts I could make out. And that’s why I decided to post it over to Dr Mason’s labs in Steelhead. After all, it does mention his father, Jeremiah, directly. I posted it a few days ago by carrier crab – it must have arrived by now.

Links to other blogs & stories here:
Darien discovers Jeremiah has HBAA’s package here.
Darien hears of Jeremiah’s departure to join HBA here.

 

TSMGO – Another Great Show!

Rarely since the early days of The Show Must Go On (1) has there been such a sense of anxious expectation about a performance. After a run of lag-ruined shows, our brave troupe had all but decided that unless the show due to go out on Saturday 9th May went well we would have to shut the theatre doors until grid stability crept back up from the depths of the tar pit it has found itself in of late. Needless to say this was not a decision taken lightly or without much regret all round, but how could the show go on when lag meant that, well, the show couldn’t even start?

Over the weeks since the last (first) show of 2009 we performers had talked for hours and hours about it. We had planned, plotted, practiced and planned some more to try everything we could to overcome the dread lag beast. We had lost sleep with worry that all out efforts would be in vain. I, for one, had become convinced that huge part of my Second Life was about to come to a horrible end.

So there we stood, we daft few. The curtains were drawn, the crowd gathering. Os had reduced the seating and put out a sign to explain that we would hold two shows, one after another, to accommodate everyone (2). We were nervous. IMs bounced back and forth. We were really nervous. But it felt good. There was an energy; an electricity and it rippled through us all. We all knew the stakes and were all going to do our best to give the best performance of out lives.

Then Enjah deleted the back of the theatre, Kitty fell through the void to the floor way below and Lucy crashed out due to a huge lightning storm that took the interwebz out for her.

But we were strong. Os whipped out a new rear end for the theatre, Kitty managed to get back up intact and Enjah dove into the breach and filled in for Lucy. Lucy’s interwebz came back on just in time for her and Karuna to do their excellent Doctor sketch near the end of the show. In short, we laughed in the face of everything thrown at us and came out with the best show ever!

The first audience were friends who’d read my notecard and some people who’d seen the NWN article and as the curtains opened on the first part of the flea circus act, we performers took one huge breath and threw ourselves headfirst into the fray…

The flea sets worked perfectly! All exploded or caught fire on time, just like Enjah & Os planned. Kitty’s new song was hilarious (she is such a flirt, she puts me to shame! Lady Heady would love her, Dharlink!). Lucy’s MD sketch ran like a well oiled comedy-machine and the elixir sketch was joyful – I mean that too because it came at the end of the show and by that time we all knew it had been a great success so a weight lifted from our shoulders.

The second audience was almost entirely made up of friends of the show’s biggest fan, Mikiyo, along with some of the lovely peeps from the ever brilliant NPIRL. The audience was wild this time! Mikiyo had whipped them up into a frenzy and they loved us! We ran a tight ship – every cue was hit and mark met. This year is a funny show from start to finish and the laughs came thick and fast until, regrettably, the curtain closed for the final time on the poor departed fleas. May dog have mercy on their tiny souls.

All in all a great success, but the real success of the evening was that the troupe can quite confidently, without fear of contradiction, say that… The Show WILL Go On!

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(1) I’m only guessing here – I wasn’t around then.

(2) Although the show was supposed to be a secret, someone (coughsorrycough) had let a notecard escape into the wild where it had been picked up by New World Notes. We were expecting lots of people and knew that lots of people = lots of lag. (3)

(3) Even with my notecard and the NWN publicity we didn’t get lots. I’m sad about that, even though it probably saved the show. If it had been for Mikiyo inviting his friends as the second act began, we’d have been playing to 4 or 5… yikes!