You’re all reading each other’s blogs, right? I mean, it’s no big deal to do a post every day… and… read 2 dozen other peeps posts too… right? 🙂
I took a little spin through the latest posts:
• Alex and Hero: in a California Daze in a cute new dress from Little Bones.
• Ravalation: In Star Wars: The Old Republic, Ravanel goes for a, uh… “pony ride” on Hoth!
• Living in a Modemworld: Inara gives us the scoop on entering our pix into the SL10Bcc (Second Life 10th Birthday, Community Celebration) Picture of the Day, Photo Contest, on Flickr. And amazingly enough, the pix above is apparently not from Ravanel’s pony ride on Hoth, but an avatar of some sort on a hillside looking off to SL10B in the distance.
• Strawberry Singh.com: also focused on the upcoming Second Life 10th Birthday celebrations. In This is the Geekiest Post Ever! Berry models the mesh bear avatar that Linden Lab is currently giving away as part of the build up to the birthday events.
• Paypabak Tumblr: features Paypabak Writer’s “Pay Writer” acrostic (you see the “AY” in the strip above) which is her entry for Strawberry Singh’s weekly “Meme” challenge.
• A Cozey Second Life: amazingly, Bumblebee started her own 30-day blog challenge right before the ABC Gym opened, so she’s put the two together, hence “June 5” is already “Day 8” for her. And in Day 8, Bumblebee comes to ABC Gym to, hmm, did she say “tone my butt”? while working on her blog post for tomorrow.
• Stuffery: Oh my, so much drama today! Something about a little pig, a big mess, and Cherry winds up calling the police!
• Pics by Peep: Today Peep goes shopping at the arcade! And no, she’s not laying down, I turned her tall portrait sideways so you could see more of the springtime goodness in her self-portrait.
Chaotic Virtuality: Today Ravensong visits the Prog Rock Museum of SL. Oh, and, psst… don’t miss Ravensong’s Day 3 post where she stops by the ABC Gym to decorate her work/out/station with some pix and a Lava Lamp! If you haven’t had a chance to “personalize” your work/out/station, come on by, you know, in between posting every day and reading two dozen other blogs, and decorate a little. The Linden Endowment for the Arts Needs More Lava Lamps!
• A SECOND for Imagination: Today Purple Butterfly goes down the rabbit hole of international time zones and “Second Life Time” At least she has the good sense to do it in style with an adorable “Alice” dress, White Rabbit, Giant Pocket Watch, etc. I feel Purple Butterfly’s pain as an Australian SLer/Blogger. I have to confess that I generally favor The Americas & Europe in picking event times. My excuse is that the vast majority of participants come from those areas. However my sister Trill Zapatero has argued that there are tons of participants from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, and elsewhere in the region and that the only reason I think they don’t exist is because I schedule events at times that monumentally suck for them! Plenty of peeps have a hard time negotiating the clock between Europe & America, and in the Southern Hemisphere it’s even more confusing because one clock is “Springing Ahead” while the other is “Falling Behind.” I have 2 iPad apps that help a lot with time-zone-ification: one is just the built in “Clock” app’s World Clock feature, and the one I really love is “Weather+” which not only makes time-zones a snap, but I can also learn that it’s currently 17°C in The Hague, and 13°C in Sydney and woohoo can I do a little dance for the first and probably last time The Hague was warmer than Sydney!? Or I could note that it’s currently 24°C in Darwin and just shut up now.
• Kittywitchin: Kitty works out on the treadmill today and plans her strategy for her month of blog posts. Oh? But? Wait? Where is her lava lamp?? Hmm… must be out of view in this photo!
• Behind These Emerald Eyes: Liliana shows off her Slinky toes!
• Dark Phantom: Aarya confesses her top 3 guilty avatar pleasures! O_o
• Confessions of a First-Time Pageant Model: Today Tivi meditates on identity and community: an Academy… a Graduation… a little Dance… a little Gor… I’ll say no more!
• Vixxie’s Virtual Life: Wut? You think the haute couture runway model who’s also a Gor dancer is shocking? Yeah. Try showing up on the balcony of your own home only to find your best friend in the process of getting married without even telling you! I know! Virtual truth is stranger than fiction! (don’t forget to check out Vixxie’s awesome Treadmill with pix and a helium balloon! And please, just leave the balloon be, we already know how amusing you sound talking thru helium)
• Squirrel Seeking Chipmunk: Ooooh, who new that Lin’s friend Shayo was a virtual Tarot reader!? Hmm, maybe we can hire her to set up at the Avatar Blogger Month celebration on Sat 29 June and do readings for our avatar bloggers & friends? 🙂
• Songs from the Coalface: In a number of recent posts Becky has chronicled the production of her and Harvey Crabstick’s monumental production of Romeo & Juliet, however today she writes about another monumental work, her virtual reproduction of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. The virtual home by Fanatik, and Becky’s siting, decor, and photography of it are breathtaking. Hmm… perhaps we should organize an afternoon tour of Avatar Homes…
• Modelesque 2 Life: Birdy gets her headdress, and meditates on the contrast between the relatively easy fashion choices we make every day, vis-a-vis the signifiers embedded in garments that are not fashion choices, but life achievements.
• Hey, It Just Me: Really Nieve? Really? Are we really going to go there? OMG! Today Nieve talks about… and Aarya thought she was revealing secrets… today Nieve talks about… /me winces… the size of her inventory! Oh, hey, wasn’t that sort of the topic of VB32 – Shit Happens – ? Oh yeah – it was! (mind blown) I actually hired scripting boy genius Lord Skitch (skitch sabretooth) to build an “Avatar Inventory Count Board,” and, lookie lookie, I just installed a fresh Inventory Count board at the ABC Gym! So next time you drop by to decorate your work/out/station or tone up your blogger butt, you can also Touch the Board, and Type in your Current Inventory count! 🙂 Everyone can play, Avatar Bloggers, Friends & Visitors alike!
• Defining Moments: Serenity and her unicorn plushie go for an evening walk and almost make it to the barn where all the animals live.
• The League of Extraordinary Fashionistas: Scarlett on a new fashion find and the joys of filling out a bikini.
• Princess Brat: Princess meditates on the lemons life gives us and how to make orange juice out of them!
• Orca’s World: Orca goes travelling, sightseeing, and photo snapping in the Flocke & Bentham Forest sims in Second Life.
• Daallee: These are the Days of My SL Life: Daallee returns from an off-the-grid vacation and catches up on the latest virtual happenings, including a visit to the Gatcha Arcade where she admires and collects the latest fashions.
• It Takes a Village: Chapter 5: The Manor, in Lizzie’s 12-chapters-in-12-days story It Takes a Village, set in the Goatswood RP sim of Second Life, came out today. Well of course I can’t tell you what happened! You don’t want me to spoil it, do you? Go! Read! Enjoy!
[box type=”tick” style=”rounded” border=”full”]What a treat it’s been reading this amazing, diverse, beautiful collection of… blogs… of moments… of avatar lives. Thank you so much to everyone for participating in ABC and for sharing these wonderful pieces of the many ways to be in these worlds.[/box]
[box type=”alert” style=”rounded” border=”full”]If you find any typos, bad links, or anything else here that you’d like corrected or modified, please don’t hesitate to LMK either in the comments below, or by in-world IM or email.[/box]
For anyone who didn’t know, the Treadmill Desks we’re using at the ABC Gym weren’t only built for my avatar, my typist has one too. I talked about it here:
• Treadmill Desk
A few things to know about the Treadmill desks are:
1. The way they’re made, you can only do the animation by right-clicking on the motor unit at the top of the treadmill. I know it seems like you should also be able to click on the treadmill walking part, but unfortunately they weren’t able to be made that way.
2. They have 2 walks in them, “Sexy Walk” and “Power Walk,” and you can cycle between them with the red buttons on the motor unit.
3. If you’d like to add any walks of your own, just LMK and I can set the treadmill to sell to you for L$0 and then you can add all the animations you like.
4. You’re going to get a complete treadmill desk of your very own at the end of Avatar Blogger Crossfit month! Yay.
In addition to being my typist’s RL desk, those JBL LSR4328 monitors are also the ones my typist uses. They’re really overkill, even for a gaming rig. If all the JBL’s currently in the ABC gym were RL JBL’s, they’d sell for about €42,000 or about L$13.8 million. Here’s a little piece I wrote about my family and Mr. James Bullough Lansing:
• James B. Lansing
Agnes Sharple
Botgirl Questi
Bumblebee (Wendz Tempest)
Canary Beck
Carissa Arthurine Somerset
Eva Marie
Fuschia Nightfire
George Coghill
Ironyca Lee
Jeremy Owen Turner
Joseph DeLappe
Kathleen Cool
Katie Vizenor
Krista Hoefle
Kristine Schomaker
Lizzie Gudkov
Aero Bigboots
RMarie Beedit
Marmaduke Arado
Isabella Medici
Nadya Tolokonnikova
Nathan Shafer
Pixel Reanimator
Ravanel Griffon
Scarlett Luv
Strawberry Singh
Tabitha Raincloud
Toni Tyldesley
Trilby Minotaur
Vanessa Blaylock
Xue Faith
Yordie Sands
This is awesome! I’ve loved finding new blogs to stalk…erm…read!
Totally Peep! I wish I’d had more opportunity to publicize the event outside SL. Only Ravanel is from other worlds (SWTOR, LOTRO, Mass Effect) everyone else is SL. The amazing thing though is how diverse 2 dozen SL blogs can be. If there’s one activity that dominates it seems to be SL Fashion, but even there the perspectives are quite diverse. And we have so many other aspects of this world and perspectives on being. It’s very exciting. Thank you again to you Peep, and to everyone else “working out” with us at the ABC Gym. I know you can get the videos and workout at home by yourself, but I’ve always found that monumentally boring. I love going to the gym and working out in more of a community.
Yep. That’s my goal! 😛
Wow! This is so much fun! I’ve been reading the participating blogs and discovering bloggers I didn’t know,different aesthetics and very bold and extremely beautiful posts. Next step, commenting! I think every single one deserves a word of praise! Great job!
Yessy! I agree Lizzie! It takes on a sort of Zen quality for me in a way. How long does it take to walk from one end of a university campus to the other? If you ignore all the people, all the blades of grass, etc, you can probably do it in 15 minutes. But if you really stop and appreciate all the people you pass, their identity and diversity… if you actually experience the blades of grass on your journey… well… if you fully experience each place of your journey… it could take a LONG time!
So I find that reading your stories in the actual Goatswood environments is so much richer. Obviously you don’t have to go there, you can just read & enjoy a story. But it’s such a great invitation to experience an environment and a story in tandem. Actually your stories make me think of a sort of “Mapping.” In the sense that as we experience places we map moments or people or architectural or topographic details onto them. In a way this is how we manufacture reality, but it’s certainly a pretty idiosyncratic and subjective reality. By creating your works in these environments you are sort of mapping an alternative experience there. I suppose a lot of fiction is mapping, when Lisa See writes “Shanghai Girls,” I suppose we could call that mapping too. But I’m not in Shanghai or Hong Kong or Angel Island or Chinatown when I’m reading it. There’s something special about being able to BE in the place you are mapping your narratives onto. It reminds me of Janet Cardiff works where she sends people on audio tours to experience real, physical places, that she has remapped with her narratives and “guided tours.”
http://youtu.be/sOkQE7m31Pw
Or when Nieve brought up the avatar inventory thing… then I had to go fish out the VB32 inventory count board… which was really great to do and I wound up doing some inventory organizing to find it — haha, much needed — but anyway reading her one post probably wound up taking me 90 minutes! 😛
Fortunately the new Linden Endowment for the Arts initiative will be providing avatars with a stipend to allow them to do deep blog reading on a full time basis! Go LEA!
Great idea to profile the blogs up here Van! I’m so keen to explore them all. It’d be great to plan an event or two at LEA11 where we could all get together at a scheduled time as well too… Oh! Here’s an idea, how about we put on a scene from R and J at LEA 11, and invite the whole lot back to our Playhouse for the whole meal deal right afterwards? Harvey and I tested a scene out there and we think we know how we could do it. Whatcha think?
Sure thing Becky, that sounds great. FYI, the large SaveMe Oh “Licking Every Ass” Gallery just west of the ABC Gym is coming out tomorrow, Friday 7 June, so we’ll have a big, 64m x 64m space where you could install whatever you’d like. You can schedule it pretty much whenever is good for you.
I knew that my SL sis was participating, though hadn’t taken the time to read up on it. What a great idea! I look forward to reading on this some more.
Awesome spunknbrains! Thanks for stopping by! 🙂
And which one is your SL Sis??
Oh. I guess that would be helpful. Her name is Purplebutterfly, and her blog is… http://secondimagination.wordpress.com.