Places to visit in Second Life #9: Emvee Cuba

Long time no posting in this series, but after a visit at this place i wanted to follow posting about places to visit.

Last Saturday Menno Ophelia told me about the opening party of a new sim he was working on. He works for Metaversatility, an in-world development company, actually the name of the region where Emvee Cuba is located is Metaversatility. When i arrived i was totally dazzled by the beauty and the awesome work on textures on the buildings.

The “theme” of the buildings is some like Havana, as i said the texture work and detail is amazing. A central plaza with cats, dogs and chickens around, some alleys, some water channels with hanging clothes between the buildings. Some tables to sit with friends and chat, even nice beaches.

The full place is a pleasure for the view. I’d like to remark the beautiful work on shadows that gives a strong sensation of reality. In one area of the place there are some stores and a beautiful Café. Also i found very cute a detail, a painted sign in some walls saying “Viva la Rezzolution!”, in a dreamy and virtual Cuba is actually kinda funny.

A part of the beauty of the building itself there are some interesting things you should know: In the central plaza there is an Ice-cream shop (”Tienda de Helados” in Spanish), there, at the end, you will find some Freebies, a disposable photo cam, some cabs and some T-Shirts. About the T-shirts, the texture is designed for ladies, so if you are a man and you wear them it may seem you have big boobs (but well, are free and that’s the point).

There are some “PhotoSpots” with poses made by Torrid Midnight to take nice pictures, this are marked with a disposable cam where you should sit to play the animation. And talking about photography… there is something you should know too: Metaversatility organized a photo contest in Emvee Cuba, look here to see the rules and how you can participate.

Visit Emvee Cuba!

Adam and Steve

Some days ago I was talking with some friends during a “shopping hair” exploration. After joking about a lot of things someone mentioned that “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” sentence, and then I thought it may be a fun idea to make my version, inspired in the work “Adam and Eve” painted in 1507 by Albretch Durer and now in the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid.

This is a joke, because i think humour is the best way to fight against some intolerant people… Well, is not only a question of humour, is just that intolerant people are so ridiculous that sometimes is better to laugh than to be angry.

Always though respect for others life and beliefs is important, but, sincerely, someone that is too worried about who the others go to bed with and dedicates his energies to spread just hate and pain doesn’t deserve my respect. So to all that religious extremists i say: “It was Adam and Steve!”.

Inside the Arthole

Some days ago I posted something about the new exhibition of Arahan Claveau and Nebulosus Severine (featuring Ichibot Nishi). I’ve been at the opening, was totally great to enjoy the place and the DJ sessions of Arahan and Nebulosus with great people, mostly friends. At the opening was too concentrated to take pics, but i visited Arthole again yesterday and took some pics.

I’ll try to show you most (but not all you can find there):

First level of the Arthole is, basically, some old works by Arahan and Nebulosus, but redone under a new perspective. I’d like to remark the two lockers at the sides of the landing point, that were shown in the Salon de Disruptif exhibition at the Heldscalla Gallery last year. This lockers are, in my opinion, the most personal work in the Arthole.

In the second level, some new works by Arahan and Nebulosus. Spatial, conceptual, dynamic, … are some of the adjectives that come to my mind when i was seeing the artworks, well, not sure if seeing is the right word, possibly immersed is better.

Finally, in the third level, the installation “λ.mnemonic” by Ichibot Nishi. The first thing that calls your attention is some perfect silicone breasts forming in the wall the word “SILENCE”. Then after some moments the breasts start to fly around, freely.

Of course the breasts is not the only object you can find in this installation. Is better you explore for yourself the space and take your own conclusions. Ichibot didn’t wrote any explanation about this work in a notecard, i presume he wants us to have our own conclusion. Anyway, in my opinion the installation is about the “thing-ification” of the body of the woman through plastic surgery and the beauty standards, I mean, the body of the woman understood as a thing. Maybe the artist didn’t wanted to express his worries about this issue, but, well, just Ichibot knows…

I’m not an art critic, I just know two kinds of art, the art i like, and the art i dislike… Arthole gallery is full of art i like.

Visit the Arthole.

Laughing!… specially about oneself…

I always thought humour is essential in our lifes, and always, the best subject of your humour must be oneself, or some parts of oneself.

Part of my image is some kind of masculinity, and i think i’m quite masculine, but wanted to laugh about it with this series of pics:

OMG!!! 5 minutes to my show left and still didn’t make-up my pretty face!!!

Make-up, make-down, make-back, make-forward…

“With all you… in stage… the exotic.. the exciting.. the forbidden… FEMME MORTALE!!!!…”

I’d like to thank specially Mr. Arahan Claveau for his help in this mischief.

Keep laughing!!!!

Walking around… in the movies

from www.flickr.com posted with vodpod 

Machinima is growing a lot in Second Life, and that’s a good thing. After Flickr opened the possibility of posting video a lot of people is experimenting and trying new things. Flickr, as a place to share creativity, helped a lot of people (including myself) to learn and explore with SLphotography, and now is doing the same for machinima.

Anyway, there are a some places where you can find SLmachinina, here you are some links:

• Second Life Video group in Flickr
• Second Life Video in Koinup
• Second Life Group channel in YouTube

As i said in a previous post, there is a lot of awesome creators doing awesome stuff.

This one was specially fun to do. I used that “rolling” background by four Yip (she makes really interesting stuff, look for her in Search into SL and visit her gallery, it worth it). Special thanks to Eric Quimby for his help and for the work of his legs.

Poor, oppressed and under the rain

Image by Torley published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

“Bad weather, oppressive regimes, poor economic conditions — that’s what makes an SL user.”
Philip Linden (AKA Philip Rosedale)

Yes, he said that in an interview for Reuters, not a joke, just part of an interview.

Of course maybe Philip wanted to say Second Life is a good way for some people to have access to some kind of contents under “adverse” conditions, but the sentence is too categorical, too emphatic…

Most of the residents in Second Life have their RL residence in USA or in Western Europe, or in other countries like Brazil, and the regimes there are supposed to be democratic.

I agree some people live in countries with some rainy weather, but most of us (I mean MOST OF US) life in areas with a non-extreme weather, or even really good weather.

But, for me, the worse on Rosedale’s affirmation is the “poor economic conditions”. First, poor people can’t have a computer, and second and even more important, they can’t have the broadband Internet connection Second Life requires, specially in some continents like Africa.

I would say some other comments about this, but i just prefer to say Mr. Rosedale is, with this sentence, “not quite in touch with reality”. (Rheta Shan dixit)

Second lie… a Twitter smile

I use to post in Twitter often, some call it “microblogging”, and i think it is, and at the same time some like a chat, a place to see what friends do. I’d like to have a widget here in this blog, but for the moment WordPress still don’t permit it for security restrictions in the use of Flash. Click here to see my Twitter page.

But yesterday i discovered a new “Twitterite” called “secondlie” and started to follow him (or her)… and OMG! is hilarious! acid!!! sarcastic! You should visit his Twitter page here! Totally full of fine (and not so fine) irony with Linden Lab and the posts in the Official Linden Blog.

Some examples of the secondlie posts:

“UPGRADE: In honor of earthday you cannot create any new prims anymore. Please just recycle your existing ones. Look in your trash folder.”

“Something’s broken somewhere, yeah, we know it. It’s been fixed. Just shut up already, okay? Reboot or something.”

“Still working on Auction services. So Igota4096primeoceanfrontherecanIget2000linden2000! 2500linden2500linden2500! 3000… going once… 3000!”

“Announcement: We’re just a few weeks away from hiring a new CEO. She just needs to lose in Pennsylvania, concede to Obama, and she’s ours!”

“HOT TIP: When you log off, we use your avatar to sled down virtual mountains. We also look at your underware and read your notecards.”

“From Youtube Linden: Check out my new tutorial videos! Find out what happens when you mix Diet Coke and Mentors.”

And, for me, best one until this moment:

“Getting Lag while in world? Try lowering your “Expectations” settings in the “We Don’t Give a Rat’s Fanny” menu. And get a new PC.”

If you have a Twitter account, follow secondlie!!!

Some stats and a big “Thanks”

Just for curiosity i was checking some stats and numbers on this blog, and i had more than one nice surprise.

The first post was published on June, 8th 2007 (oh.. some months blogging). Now there are 115 posts published with a total number of 452 comments.

This blog had 11,848, oh… wait, 11,856 visits until this moment :O

My best day ever (talking about visits) was Wednesday, August 22, 2007 with 228.

Akismet protected me from 834 spam comments (and worked quite good until the moment).

All this stats can seems quite modest for some people, but for me are awesome! This is a modest blog, I just pretend to talk about my ideas, my passions, my friends, and is wonderful a lot of people found interesting this.

There are wonderful blogs about Second Life, with more information, more updated, more centered in a question or theme… but this is mine, with my small second life (and some of my first too). That’s why i think is a good moment to say the biggest “THANKS” to all the people that visited, commented, shared his point of view… YOU are the best!

Windlight and Machinima contests in Koinup

Koinup organized a couple of interesting contests of photography and machinima in SL. Be sure to take a look, i think both are really interesting.

Please, if you are interested check the Windlight contest rules here and the Machinima one here.

I still didn’t posted a Machinima for the contest… but i posted (for the moment) this pic to the Windlight contest:

Hope you like it.

UPDATE (Apr, 22 2008): He he, finally i posted a machinima in the contest too, more a experiment with colour lightning in Windlight, sorry for the low frame rate.

from www.koinup.com posted with vodpod

More about issues in Hi-Res Snapshots

Some days ago i wrote a post about some problems i was having with Hi-Res snapshots to disk with the Windlight Second Life® viewers (not only the “Test Software” ones, also the “Main” client right now). I didn’t tried for the moment the new 1.20 release candidate, in the Official Linden Blog they said is better not to use it for the moment in a Mac using an Apple Mighty Mouse (this is my case), but it seems is happening worse and to more people in the new Release Candidate.

So… there is my JIRA issue report #WMR-3711, and now, as i saw in a post in Vint Falken’s blog, there is another one related, the JIRA issue report #WMR-6240. Also some other problems with snapshots as you can see in this post by Ana Lutetia in the JIRA issue report #WMR-6031. As you can see a lot to fix in snapshots.

If you are having this problems too, please, go to the JIRA, comment and vote for this Issue Reports.