Imagine a world that stretches to the horizon, where trees sway in a virtual breeze that blows across all the simulators. In the far distance you can see an amazing complex city - dozens of flying avatars arc into and out of it. Lights detail the buildings. Your friend drives up to you and gets out of her hover car. You take a snapshot of her and playfully drop it onto the mirror shades of her sunglasses (she can see it the instant you drop it into the world). She asks for some help with the code that drives the car - you click on the fuselage and pop open the script, edit the thrust levels, save, and have her test it. She gives you an earring she is wearing — a jewel lit from within that lights up the detailed tattoo on her cheek. You get on next to her as she heads for an Unsafe area kilometers from the city. You pull out a rifle that you bought, confident that the arms merchant who built it knows her stuff. The roar of the bike’s engine mixes with the wind in your ears as you cruise down into a dark canyon, dodging a bridge that hadn’t been completed the last time you flew this route. This is what you can do today in our game, thanks in large part to the adoption of our server grid.

2003 description of a new, brighter, collaborative and borderless virtual world, called Second Life.

(amazing find by Gwyneth Llewelyn)

I never really considered to jump on the OpenSpace train, but of course a lot of my friends were hit by the latest development, and it’s still not clear what permanent damage the community will suffer.

I just found this touching video (via: Victorian Æsthetic), and wanted to share it.

Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them.

(Laurette Taylor)

Gary Hazlitt from The ProjectFactory has produced another great video, showing the current state and the diversity of Virtual Worlds in 2008 (right here, right now). More info of author, HQ download, a discussion of the movie and info about the different worlds.

While I seemed to be one of the first (mortal) users to have Second Lifeŧ Voice running on Linux, I usually don’t use it, and with the recent updates, it didn’t work anymore. Now here come 2 kludges to fix your Linux Voice with the current Clients:

1. Install a pulseaudio enabled libopenal. This may or may not be nessecary, depending on how recent your system is, it’s described here.
2. On systems that don’t have a power management enabled CPU, libvivox seems to bail out (Jira Entry). The fix is funny, you create your own “/proc/cpuinfo” in your secondlife-directory/lib, and change the lines starting with “power management:” to “power management: “. Note the gap.^^ Now you just “patch” the libvivox (with good old sed) to read from there, instead of the /proc interface.
3. Voila, I have a white dot over my head, and can see other people in the chatbox. Now I’ll run get some batteries for my Mic.

Cool findings, thanx to Peace Howlett and Xaden Kjeller!

Hey, it’s been a while, that I was actually at the Loveparade in Berlin… (And I’ve been to the Fuckparade/Hateparade much more often… ;-)) But: Second Life has changed my musical spectrum in such a way, that I am much more influenced by Techno, Drum&Bass, Industrial Hardcore, Happy/Gabber/Braindead music, than I could ever have imagined.

Soo, here it is, the flyer is still fresh:

newBerlin Loveparade in SL! 4 Sims, 14 Trucks, 50 DJs, 4 LiveActs. Nuff said. (Don’t lick that paper^^)

Ach Darlings, wenn man erstmal drin ist in der Machinima-Mühle, lässt einen das im Leben nicht mehr los. Dabei habe ich mich dem Genre ja ursprünglich von der anderen Seite des O-Dingsbums genähert, indem ich im zarten Avataralter Special Effects für Bebop Vox‘ Phantom of the Opera programmiert habe. (And that was my very second job ever in SL, thank you Bebop^^)

Äh, hat dieses Posting irgendetwas damit zu tun, dass ich gerade House of Wax mit Paris Hilton sehe, wofür sie als schlechteste Nebendarstellerin 2005 gekürt wurde? Nainn!

(thanx to Moni Duettmann for the cool video and the super sophisticated technology!)

“Wir haben keine Rezession, wir haben reale Zuwächse, wir haben Vollbeschäftigung.

Aber damit das alles funktioniert, müssen wir auch alle sparen, und wer sparen soll, muss vorher gut verdient haben, sonst geht das nicht! Und ich hab da ein persönliches Langzeitmotto folgendermassen formuliert, das möcht ich hier gern sagen dürfen, das lautet so:

Etwas lernen, etwas leisten,
gut verdienen [Chor:*Aaaahaaa*]
anständig und ehrlich seine Steuern bezahlen,
ordentlich was auf die hohe Kante legen
und im Übrigen: Das alles nich übertreiben,
damit man genug Zeit und Muße hat,
sich der weiss Gott angenehmen Seiten
– die es ja auch noch gibt –
des Lebens zu erfreuen!
[Chor: *Lalalala lalalala laaa*]

Es war damals richtig, und es ist auch heute noch richtig. Wir werden es sehen. Wir werden es diese Woche sehen, wir werden es nächste Woche sehen. Es ist ganz klar, nicht? Wir haben keine Rezession, wir haben reale Zuwächse, von über 3 %, wir haben Vollbeschäftigung. [...] [Chorus]

Wenn das jedermann täte, und wenn ich noch hinzufügen würde, ausserdem noch SPD wählen und die Gewerkschaft stützen, dann wäre die Gesellschaft besser dran als sie es bisher war.”

(Helmut Schmidt, Raucher, Bundeskanzler von 1974-1982)

Kamera, Video, Choreographie, Schnitt, Regie, Idee, Umsetzung, Funfaktor, vi(v)a: Nuschi

Madteaparty Hofmann — our graphics genius — recently celebrated his birthday at the Themroc club. And we really, really had a live band playing over ninjam here! The Rails play a cool punk/new wave mixture, with guitar, organ and voice. Everything worked very well, and they were really sweet.

Oh, yes, the evening wouldn’t have been purrfect without DJane Tasty Hax! (Somehow, something deep inside me resists to call monday morning sunday evening, but hey, that’s just a transition stage. After all we are consenting, globalisationalized grown-ups, aren’t we?^^)

Aaaand: I heard that there will be a Drum&Bass DJ session there next time. So:

Stay tuned, Drop in, Be afraid!