Before launching into the latest Second Life news, we must point out as an antidote the extremely funny get a first life dot com. For some reason, my favorite bit is (in the Questions section), "Why can't I create a dirigible with my mind?".
Because, well, you know... Why can't I?
Speaking of creating dirigibles with the mind, here I am standing next to some art ("art") that I created with my mind for a charity auction:
See the flickr page for a little bit of detail: it was a phun time! And I ignored my natural fear of primary colors and made a nice simple festive thing. (Some of the other pieces of art are really great, and also artistic! If I was more skilled I'd give you a magical SL URL that would teleport any of y'all who are SL users right there; but at the moment my SLing and my weblogging are on different computers and all, and I'm not sufficiently energetic to copy things around.)
(Oh, what the heck; sure I am! Try this link: Blekinge Sculpture Contest / Auction. Haven't tested it myself, but it ought to work...)
And as I point out on the flickr page, I don't really look like Lucy Ricardo when wearing this avatar in SL; it's just the jpg artifacting...
At the start of the auction, after all the art was all created, the founder of the Virtual Artist Alliance (and v good friend and SL neighbor) IM'd me to ask if I'd go rustle up a dance-ball so we could have dancing to accompany the festivities. Turns out I already had one among the seven or eight thousand (really!) things in my SL inventory, so I dragged it out and loaded it with a few dances, and (although I had to log out at the time) when I came back last night a few of us VAA types spent a long good time dancing and talking and waving rave sticks around and telling silly jokes. Def phun.
(Ha, it occurs to me in retrospect that "dance ball" is not an immediately meaningful concept. Turns out that in Second Life you don't have detailed control over what your avatar's arms and legs do. The only way to dance is to run a dancing animation, or to interact with some object that will run one on you. A Dance Ball is an object that will run a dance animation on people who touch it. The particular dance ball that I found in my inventory is a pretty good one: it actually has everyone do the same dance, and it more or less coordinates their movements, producing a pleasing skilled-looking effect. Yay!)
