Much Ado About Nuthin

Wow, it's been nearly three weeks since I blogged last! What a lazy toad I is!

This post might be better served if I had something to show for the past fortnight's inactivity, but I'm afraid it's been pretty much that. Not a lot going on at all. Watched some ballet on Raglan Shire, watched a gig there too, paid some rents on some shops, and generally ambled around. I have actually been working on the Shire Times newspaper, looking to get another edition of that out in the first week or so of June, so that's something, at least.

My staff on the Times has reduced to...well, me. Many of the regular contributors are off doing their own thing (in RL and SL) now, so I'm pretty much having to jot everything down myself. Qyhat does her fashion piece still, but everything else I'm stitching together myself. That makes it hard. And often a bit depressing. I'd rather have other folk writing stuff, not because it's easier for me (it isn't - I still have to proof read and edit everything), but because it serves as a community voice, not just my voice.

I've been wondering where to take the Times, to allow others to take a more active role in participating, but it's difficult to know exactly what to do. My best option at the moment, and the one I'm now implementing is that instead of bi-monthly, it will become a quarterly publication instead. That gives me at least 6 weeks in between each issue before having to think about the next.

Now, back to writing. Oh wait...

Tired

Phew, flying those timezones really takes it out of you! At least, that's my excuse.

So since I returned to SL from the US of A in RL, I haven't done a great deal, but thought I'd blog to be honest about it!

It's Art Walk month in Raglan, and I helped Kitti Dumpling get her selection of pictures set up on the Raglan tree gallery. Her pictures look good, if I say so myself. I made a fancy bohemian top hat based on a stovepipe hat I'd seen at a very exclusive clothes shop in East London; so far I haven't done anything with it other than give it away to a couple of folks. I also managed to find a rather splendid (if prim heavy) new art deco-themed building to serve as the office for The Shire Times. I wanted somewhere to double as a movie studio, but I'm a) out of prims and b) unable to get my fancy new TV bought for me by my buddy Bo to work; or at least play my YouTube clips. Oh well!

As much as I'd like to have submitted something to Art Walk, the fact of the matter is, I don't actually have anything to submit. I keep going on and on about how I want to do this or that in terms of art, or sculpture, or whatever, but never seem to get around to doing it. I'll make more of a concerted effort this year, I hope.

Once I settle back into more of a routine, I'll find some inspiration to do something extra, no doubt. For now, ART!

Redux!

Wild West movie got a slight makeover...kinda! I added some 'old-film' style effects to it!



Looks pretty cool! And the stuttery footage (caused by SL being laggy) now doesn't look so out-of-place!

Submitted to CNN's iReport too. Nicole of iReport e-mailed me when I submitted the Parry Gripp video to say how much they liked it, but because of the music, they'd have difficulty using it. Hopefully, this time around, there won't be any problems!

RL holiday in a day. 10 days out of world. :(

Wild Wild West

New movie time! Hooooo!



For Raglan's two-year anniversary month, we played Cowboys & Injuns - kinda. The square became a dusty Wild West street. I have shot this in bits over the last week or so, increasingly concious that I have an RL-holiday coming up that will keep me off-world for a fortnight, so it started to become a bit if a rush job. But overall, am pretty pleased with it.

Tinies Live

So, yesterday in group chat, some folk were getting very upset about the suggestion that Linden Lab could be trying to phase out tiny avatars. Jack Linden's name gets bandied about in the article. Lots of tinies get worried.

Now, being the upfront trouble-maker that I am , I don't see why you should mess about waiting for a Linden to tell you what's what. You go and ask them. So I did. An IM to Jack Linden saying "are LL considering banning tiny avatars?" And this is the reply I got.

[10:40] Jack Linden: (Saved Wed Apr 01 17:29:56 2009) good lord no.. why would we do that? is this an April Fools joke perhaps?

So there you go, tinies. We're safe.

Machinima Artists Guild

Visit Second Life Machinima Artists Guild

Hehe, check this!

Lowe Runo invited me to join the Second Life Machinima Artists Guild (this is my profile page there!). It's a group of Second Life Machinima-ists, and a whole bunch of talented folk. Hopefully I can pick up some tips to improve from there.

I also managed to find a great piece of music for my planned Wild West video, so will try and get going on that ASAP. I'm gonna miss the latter half of the event due to RL holiday (Big Apple, woot!), so have to have something done within the next fortnight!

I also kept meaning to get around to posting this blog post from Vlad Bjornson at Shiny Life, who offered some very lovely words about my Coldplay video a while back. Thanks Vlad!

Extrovirtual Video Promo: Tiny Wings

I recently collaborated with the Queen of Tinydom, Ms Wynx Whiplash herself to create a video promo to advertise her new product project - tiny wings!




Due to a claim by Warner Music Group that they own the copyright to the 158-year-old piece of music The Ride Of The Valkyries, the video would be muted if uploaded to YouTube, hence I had to put it onto the vastly-superior Vimeo, and embed it for you here too.

Thanks to Arizona Noel, Shady Fox, Xandra Bracken and Karmagirl Avro for their help in taking part, and a HUGE thanks to Wynx for her generosity! I hope it was worth it. I kinda like it; it turned out to be a lot more difficult to film and edit than I originally envisaged. I'm gutted that I can't get it to my YouTube channel alongside my other stuff in this form, but I might consider trying a different piece of dramatic music: Holst's Mars, perhaps?