The First Look viewer, when water ripples are enabled, also creates reflections. Here’s an underwater shot of me, up towards the surface, where you can see my reflection distorted by the ripples in the water. Pretty cool.
Blasting past three million
There’s been some slowdown noted on the SL blog, and on the front page, the resident statistics say there are now 3,025,109 residents, 1,014,117 of whom logged were online in the last 60 days, and 27,724 in-world right now. I haven’t noticed any major lag.
It should be noted that that’s 2,000,000 signups in the last two months.
Moon over maze
I was poking around the Morris sim (which is part of the Ahern welcome area), and in the sandbox were two large, rotating moon-like prims up in the air. When I went into the hedge maze in Rizal (the adjacent sim), I discovered that there were some great views around some of the corners!
Hatchling machinima
I figured out how to select clips; add titles, subtitles, and transitions; and export a Quicktime movie from iMovie, but I can’t figure out how to zoom the image area, so there’s a black area over to the right. But you’ll still be able to get an idea of how the hatchling egg roll went.
New Year’s Eve on the Isle of Wyrms
There was a drum circle/dance and a hatchling egg roll on the Isle of Wyrms last night. The dance ball for dragons and hatchies was giving out the same animation to all the hatchies, so three of us lined up and were dancing in unison for a while. Hatchie line dance!
I took a movie of part of the dance and the egg roll. I’ll see if I can edit it down to a clip and figure out how to post it. The egg roll is a contest where hatchies get inside hollow prims (egg-shaped, semi-transparent, and physical) while set to “always run” and try to push one another out of the “nest”. There was a L$3,000 prize. I, alas, did not win (although I was also not the first pushed out).
Dragon dance
There was a dance in Limbo tonight (every other Friday night at 7 SL time), and it was lots of fun. I tried dancing as a Spirit Dragon for a while, but it’s awfully big and disorienting. I also tried playing an elven drum for a while. But here I am dancing with an artsy shot up at flying/dancing dragons.
Live from the Wyrm hatching
I’ve been on Cathedral for a couple of hours already, waiting for the midnight (Linden time!) hatching of Daryth Kennedy’s Wyrms. I still can’t decide between the Spirit and Royal Wyrms!
By all accounts the noon hatching was a chaotic nightmare–the sim was burdened and LL was having some problems as well, as I hear. Daryth & co. had a backup plan, which entailed buying a red box, but some people seem not to have heard (or paid attention) to the instruction to buy it. Sometime after Daryth said “Go” the sim crashed. There was a big crowd in Limbo for quite a while until things began to get sorted out.
So now I’m sitting here, along with about forty others. Here’s some of the crowd (many “away”):
And here’s the Grand HedgeWyrm herself, Daryth Kennedy (in one of her many guises so far tonight):
Fantastic art gallery
I went to the Phoenicia Center for Contemporary Art (Egremont/116/63/34). One of the shows is photography by Phil Borges. He’s done portraits of people from endangered cultures, mostly Asian and African. It’s a powerful exhibit.
Creative Commons anniversary party
Tonight the Creative Commons folks threw a fourth anniversary party. I went briefly to check it out. It’s the first time I’ve really been in a large group. They seemed to be having technical difficulties with their video feed, but there was nice music streaming. I people watched for a bit:
And I think I looked stylish in my free Winter Festival T-shirt: