Easily Amused

I like to stay logged into SL while I'm at work. (Addicted? Me?) With friends in different time zones, it's nice to have the option of hearing the IM chime if they want to talk to me. But of course while I'm working in RL, my avatar just sits there doing nothing.

So I made a stone pillar with the "birth-of-venus" animation in it, made a set of skins with the same texture as the pillar, and park myself on it in the Rockcliffe University arts center when I know I'm going to be away for a while. Of course I still breathe and blink, and my name still shows up above my head, so it's obvious that I'm an avatar and not a true work of art like you can find at Second Louvre — but it's a more amusing (and decorative) way to go AFK than just standing there slumped forward.

On a completely unrelated topic, while the main grid was having asset-related issues yesterday, I logged in to the test grid and explored the sewers and tunnels of Nexus Prime. I don't know whether or not it's under active development as a game-within-Second-Life, but what I found there reminded me quite a bit of Deus Ex (which is still my favorite computer game, even all these years after its release). But with so many twisty dark passages, all alike, I'm sure I haven't seen the whole thing. Even the "always turn right" method doesn't work when you've got passages going up and down as well.

Were they snakes, they would have bitten me.

I actually looked at the Tools menu today, and saw two items which had previously escaped my notice:


I save my changes frequently while I'm working, not only because I'm paranoid, but because all too often I'll have been tweaking something only to find out that I've been half-disconnected and all my changes have been lost. So I'll take a copy of what I'm working on, after deleting the old version from my inventory so that I don't have dozens of duplicate entries in the Objects folder.

With "Save Object Back to My Inventory", it updates the copy in the inventory so that it's identical to the in-world instance that you're working on. So much easier!

But the really beautiful one is "Save Object Back to Object Contents". Whenever I've been working on something contained in another object's inventory, I've had to drag it into my main inventory, delete the copy out of the containing object, and then drag the contained object from my main inventory to the containing object's Content tab. But this tool updates the version in the containing object's content; no need to delete anything or use main inventory as an intermediary.

I feel like a dork for never having noticed these options before.

Also, I love Class 5 sims and First Look:


48 users in the sim, and the sim wasn't lagged at all! LL claims a Class 5 sim will support up to 60 avatars before things start to bog down. They must put the hamsters on serious steroids to get that kind of performance.

And thanks to First Look, I was still pulling a respectable 18fps even when 35 of those users were directly in my field of vision. I hear rumors that, despite what the official blog says about no new viewer download, some of the First Look enhancements will be released into the main viewer tomorrow.

We're gonna have a party, yeah...

Tomorrow (Sunday), to celebrate the opening of our new sim, Rockcliffe University is throwing a party. Live music! Classes! A DJ! Dancing! Uh... more classes!

Stop by if you feel like it, check out the place, listen to some music, say hello if you'd like.

11:00 AM - Live music: Mel Cheeky
12:00 Noon - Live music: Flaming Moe
1:00 PM - Live Music: kaklick martin
2:00 PM - DJ Doubledown Tantino

Classes will probably be running throughout the day, but I haven't seen a schedule yet.