MMIF

The MaMachinima International Festival takes place this weekend, and I'm part of it!

It's a seven-hour long showcase of over fifty (yes 5-0!) machinima films, and my 'Le Squabbit Et Les Admirateurs' movie will be part of the proceedings, kicking off hour two, hosted by Pooky Amsterdam. The event was put together by Chantal Harvey, a keen and experienced machinimatographer herself, and is the second event of its kind. The first was held last year to such great acclaim that Linden Lab have offered Chantal and her team the use of not one, not two but FOUR sims on which to host the event. I went exploring there a little earlier, and wow, what an incredible build!


The layout means that all four of those bridges converge at the points where the four sims meet, meaning that the potential audience can be four times bigger. And the really cool thing about this event is that as well as being an in-world festival, there's also an opportunity to watch the whole event streamed at a RL venue in Amsterdam! It looks set to be another amazing event and full credit to Chantal for even getting this far with it!

Find out more about the event here at the MMIF Official site.


As much fun as it looks set to be, and I will attend at some point, I will miss the time when my film gets shown. It clashes with the time that Raglan prepares to celebrate Stillpink's recent passing, and we're holding a New Orleans Mardi Gras-style funeral parade for her, as well as unveiling a permanent memorial to her.

Speaking of whom, here's another chance to post another machinima I made, this one featuring Stillpink; she's the pink bunny with the bright pink hair!



Tweet

Stillpink Sandgrain

A fellow tiny, Stillpink Sandgrain passed away on February 14 2010 after a long battle with cancer.

She was a good buddy. We didn't meet up every time we were both on together, but I took great pleasure knowing that she was online and might (and would!) drop in unannounced at any given moment! Her energy would have you thinking she was a teenager enjoying their first day in SL. And it was infectious.

The last proper adventure me and Stills shared was in November 2009. We spent an hour or so sneaking around the houses on Cirano. Biggy houses, but not just any biggy houses - Linden houses! We got busted by Alexa Linden, but she was nice enough to invite us in, where we both aired our grievances about XStreet.

Then she was gone for a while. I understand she really fell ill towards the end of 2009, with Akay Utu (Tea Gupte's RL partner - Stillpink was Tea's RL mum) telling me that they didn't think Stills would see out the year. To her credit, she did, and then made a few more appearances online just after New Year.

Now, I'm sad, because I won't be able to have the same type of fun I did with Stills for a long time to come. But when I do see her, I hope we're given the chance to go and sneak into someone's house in Heaven! I'd like that. Stills, make sure you go house-hunting up there, but don't go sneaking in without me yet!

The picture above was taken when Stills introduced me to Bryn Oh's sims. I caught her at just the right moment. To me, this image typifies what Stills represented: someone cute, full of light and fire, lighting up every room she ever graced. A blog post has been posted here at Raglanshire.com.

Otters Are Golden

I hosted the Raglan Shire Film Festival last night; was great fun, and I was really honoured to have lots of tinies in attendance but also to have a couple of machinima veterans in Pooky Amsterdam and CodeWarrior Carling come along and watch the show too.

I debuted my latest - 'Mummer's Dance' - with Songbird1028 Sorbet, which was very well received. I picked up two Otter awards - for Best Film (Over 4 Minutes) and the Audience Award, for which I shall be eternally grateful. Songbird was also voted Best Actress for her work in this film (based on the fact that she had so much to do!), and a lot of people were mightily (and rightly) impressed that she sings too!



The overall line-up of films was fantastic. I'm so proud that the community were able to really get their paws and claws into trying some machinima, and the pay-off was that they were all well-received. There was a nice variety of music, shorts, remakes and original stories in there. For a few people, this was their FIRST attempt at machinima, both in terms of filming and editing, which is just amazing. Great job Shire!

And The Nominees Are...

Looking forward to the Film Festival at the weekend! The theatre has been built, the seats have been cleaned and fresh popcorn is popping in the machine! Last September, in an effort to try and get some more people just trying to film some machinima, I announced we'd hold a festival just before the Oscars to celebrate tinies on film. A lot of folk were immediately enthusiastic about it, but once the New Year hit, and I began chasing folk up about it, it became obvious that that enthusiasm had waned over the Christmas holiday period, and there didn't seem to be that much on offer.

But I've been pleasantly surprised over the past few days. Some people have been able to turn out little 2-3 minute clips in a matter of a week. They've been asking for advice and tips, which I've been more than willing to help with as best I can; and I've been genuinely pleased to see some of the things people have come up with! I've also been sourcing judges to look over groups of videos (split into certain categories), so that we can award a few of the filmmakers with their own golden statuette - the Otters!

However, it was never about giving out prizes. It was just about encouraging people to have a go; and they have, and for that, everyone will be rewarded with a host of brilliant and cute tinycentric movies. I'll also be showing off my new machinima on the day, keeping it tightly under wraps until the event itself.

Avatars Unite!

Well, I've spent the last 15-20 minutes looking across Avatars United, and so far it seems little more than MySpace for virtual world characters.

Still, that didn't put me off from signing up! There seems to be a frighteningly lack of security or verification though. I can't see where it wouldn't have allowed me to sign up as Chaffro Linden if I had wanted to (in retrospect, that might not have been a good idea, but still). I understand that Linden Lab have given this site some blessing - either by buying it, or just acknowledging it, I'll investigate further - but I'm becoming a bit of a sucker for social networking, despite the problems it can often bring. I've actually made many new genuine friendships from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and SL. Not just 'online acquaintances' either, I've spent time with these people in real life and continue to maintain those connections.

If you do sign up, as me as a friend! This is me!

EDIT: OK, it turns out that the Lab have acquired Enemy Within, the development company behind Avatars United; hence the massive upsurge of interest over the past few days.

It's a strange beast. To be honest, there seems as though there's little to actually explore within the site. Presumably it's meant to serve as a virtual world info-hub; I can import RSS feeds of blogs I follow (which, if they weren't virtual world related, would be pretty pointless). Like Facebook, you can send gifts to your friends and contacts, but they're going to cost you 'coins'. It also costs you coins to upload a custom background; if you don't want to invest any real-world money into the site, you're stuck with a choice of three or four. The 'upside' is, is that if you choose to have your background public, you can sell it (but only reaping back a lowly 7 coins per purchase, and there might be a sales limit per background).

Hopefully the Lab will start introducing some cross-network potential; and I'm hoping someone will come up with a Twitter-functional application, to allow shouts to appear on the Twitter timeline or Tweets to appear in your shout box. That could be interesting.

I wonder how long M Linden would keep people on his friends list then!

Traffic Signals

Yesterday I received an IM from a long-time friend in SL. He asked if I had some time to come see him and his SL/RL wife. I was running late for work anyway, and had to offer my apologies. "Why, what's up?" I enquired. He replied that he and his wife might have to leave SL permanently; not at their own accord, but because Linden Lab are on the verge of suspending their accounts indefinitely.

Why so? Because traffic at their shop site is high.

So, they must be using Bots right? Well, yes and no. They do use a couple of bots, but the majority of their permanent visitors are actually real people hanging out in a place they like. Bots are definied as 'non-human controlled agents', or scripted agents. Essentially they'll be accounts that someone has set up for the express purpose of just hanging around somewhere, in an effort to increase traffic (footfall) numbers at a particular location. It means that if someone were to search for a particular place - let's say in this instance "clothes shop" - and filtered their results by wherever has the highest amount of traffic, that shop would appear nearer to the top of the list. This is known as gaming traffic, in that its not real.

To quote Linden Labs: "'Gaming traffic' is purposefully having avatars on a parcel that is listed in search for long period of time for the purposes of increasing your traffic score. Whether their is a human behind them or not, if their purpose seems to be to inflate traffic then it is considered gaming traffic. If there is a genuine purpose to being there (like a model) then that account needs to be registered as a scripted agent so it does not count toward traffic figures."

So basically, even though you could actually be a person hanging out in a clothes store you love, with other like-minded people, and are rewarded by the store owner for your support in trying to help their fledgling business grow and develop in SL, you have to turn yourself in as a drone? Not quite, but that's the underlying threat relayed to this particular situation. Another question that was asked was, is the key definition concerning traffic gambling because you're paying people to be there? No, according to the Lab. The key definition is the avatars are there for the purpose of increasing traffic and for no other reason; but surely a model, modelling clothes is promoting a service, not just pushing the numbers up? "They can be models and you can use models and compensate them however you wish," sayd LL. "They just need to be registered if you do."

"If it is an avatar that is in the parcel listed in search for long periods of time, for whatever reason, it should be registered as a scripted agent so it doesn't count toward traffic", says the Lab. However, they followed this up by saying "if they have a legitimate purpose to be there other than increasing traffic, then registering so they do not count should not be an issue."

So, if you register yourself as a NON-scripted agent, you're fine then? Presumably. But if you don't, and somehow you're determined to have spent a particularly long amount of time on one sim alone, you'll be accused of being a Bot and threatened with having your account suspended.

I spend most of my time on the Raglan cluster. I could be logged on for 10-14 hours on any single day sometimes. What would happen to me if I didn't register myself? How am I tracked? And how would I ever know I'd have to register until I was threatened with suspension?

And what's the big deal with traffic anyway? The formula for determining traffic is so obscure, its bound to be manipulated every which way, even if it takes bots of of the picture. And I've been around SL long enough to know that if I'm searching for something, I tend to ignore most of the top traffic ranking places because they either won't cater to my needs precisely, but have used keywords to their advantage; they will probably be so overwhelemed with people I won't be able to move for lag; they'll probably be managed by people who are only interested in claiming they have "The Number One Jazz Club/Nightclub/Fight Club/Book Club" and not really care about their offer.

A better system that says one individual pair of feet on a sim within any 24 hour period counts as 1 traffic point. Failing that, why not have places listed in Search by votes? Vote for the quality of a sim, vote for its craftmanship, vote for its content, vote for its community, its layout, its music; if any of these things are worth a vote and good citizens want to share the experience they've enjoyed and allow SL to flourish with beauty and wonder, they'll visit there often and vote on it. That seems a lot nicer and a lot fairer. Quality wins - and therefore, so do we.

2010

Happy New Year everybody! 2009 was a fabulous year for me in-world, for a number of reasons, but none of it would have ever happened without the support, co-operation and challenges provided by others. Many thanks to ALL of you who I have crossed paths with over the last 12 months; I hope I was able to enhance your in-world experience to the same degree that you enhanced mine.