Tinies In Space

I made an outfit! The first in ages, it seems. It's a Space Marine-style armour/explorer outfit, in preparation for Raglan's upcoming 3rd anniversary Sci-Fi themed month.

There are three variant colours - blue, red and silver.

The Linden House

I got (another) e-mail from the Lab the other day, reminding me that I qualified for a Linden home (I've been a premium member of SL for a while, initially when I owned a half-sim size piece of land). Curiosity got the better of me, and within a couple of clicks, I'd been sent a Landmark from Governor Linden to a place on the sim named Fern. So, I went over later that day, and to my surprise, it's actually rather well done.

When you go to register for a house, you're presented with four options of homes; these are contained together within different themed regions: Elderglen (a fantasy-fairy theme), Shareta Osumai (a Japanese-style theme), Tahoe (chalet-cabin types) and Meadowbrook (I guess it's like a California beach-house). Of those choices, I figured Elderglen would be the nicest option for me, so plumped for that. I was then presented with a choice of 4 house types: Abbot's Haven, Elven Treehome, Shire's Heath and Wizard's Retreat. Obviously, I went for the Shire's Heath style!



The houses are quite densely packed together on the sim, but far apart enough so that you can chat without encroaching on someone else's conversation. Elderglen is nice, with the homes within the region surrounded by giant mushrooms, trees, wishing wells and fairies. When I got into mine, I found that it's a single room house, with a nice little roof garden; however, at each of the region's infohubs, there are complete texture packs that you can pick up for fre, allowing you - as I did - to add dividing walls inside to give yourself some other rooms.

There is also a control panel built into the house, that rather niftily allows you to customise your house textures. Clicking on the control panel takes you to a webpage within the SL-website, specifically for your house. There, you can choose from a number of different colour and texture options, hit Apply and then a few seconds later watch your house start to transform.

It seems a nice little retreat (the sim next to Fern is uninhabited, so I took the opportunity to turf up the grounds on my Raglan Ranger motorcycle!), but ultimately, it feels that - despite all the wonderful work that's gone into the look and general ambience of the sims - the place is a little soulless; and there is nothing the Lab can do to change that. The soul of a sim comes from it's residents, of whom so far I've met one, an elven woman. It's a nice idea to give Premium members this oppiortunity (essentially reintroducing the First Land initiative from a few years back), but I can't help but think that new Premium subscribers might get the impression that SL can be a lonely and somewhat isolated experience. I'd have liked to have seen more Lab-sim owner interaction perhaps; for example, the Lab could attach a sim to the Raglan cluster (but retain ownership and maintenance of it themselves, although managed by the adjoining sim's owner), open it up to Premium members who want to live amongst a tiny community, abide by the rules of that sim and give them access then to a host of activity and people. It's a complete generalisation of an idea, I know, but it would help create a bit more of a community atmosphere. Despite my neighbour having the same taste in house as me, their 'Love 1' and 'Love 2' poseballs suggests they don't necessarily have the same kind of approach towards this virtual world.

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!



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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!