and when it all comes crashing down, what can you do?

I should have known there would be problems when I introduced God to Echo Bazaar:

Man or Astro Man?: Well, I went insane
Man or Astro Man?: Nightmares at 10
emilly.orr: DUDE
emilly.orr: I've never gotten above eight!

I'm still not sure how one can get above eight. At eight I'm always slapped right into Yep, you're bonkers-land. How do you go two points past madness?

God works in mysterious ways.

Man or Astro Man?: THERE WAS A WELL
Man or Astro Man?: I looked
emilly.orr: And it talks to you
Man or Astro Man?: there were voices
Man or Astro Man?: I know, it wasnt a good idea
emilly.orr: Don't buy the Fourth City rags, either
Man or Astro Man?: I bought those too
emilly.orr: *snerks*

Yeah. God--at least, my God, the PBR-drinking, stay-up-til-dawn-partying, asking-me-for-chick-advice one--doesn't exactly learn by doing, unless the doing involves FIRE.

Man or Astro Man?: I really had it coming
Man or Astro Man?: I clicked to see where I was and it said
Man or Astro Man?: Your nightmares have overcome you. You are as mad as a bright brass button. Everything around you is red and gold.
emilly.orr: Apparently.
emilly.orr: Hee!
Man or Astro Man?: You can drink water and lose persuasion or talk to people and loose watchfulness
Man or Astro Man?: so Im losing a lot of watchfulness

That makes a stupid amount of sense, too. God doesn't change? There's some security in that...limited though it is.

It's a strained and archaic joke which I must, perforce, repeat here...One Name2KService to rule them all? Maybe. You've got two options there: Miss Ordinal Malaprop's original script offering on her post (linked to the main), and Schmoebag Hogfather's (wau, what a name) alternative. What's the difference? One (Miss Ordinal's) is a single script that can be dropped in a single prim. Mr. (I'm assuming Mr.) Hogfather has a different approach: open a new window, type in the query string, his device will poll the Second Life website for the UUIDs of people you want to send the package to, without ever having to access their UUIDs yourself.

(Of course, before that lovely little program was developed, at least two well-known browsers already lift the UUID numbers and place them lovingly on redesigned profiles. But it's still a nifty idea.)

There's already a website on how to learn Na'vi. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, there are multiple books written in Klingon at this point...

Continuing in the media vein, Mr. Allen pointed me towards the Wilhelm scream notes on Wikipedia, and that's good to know, but sadly, what I'm really after is the female version--and I suppose the question really is, is there a female version? I think I've heard it in Total Recall, but I can't seem to track down the precise place. I also know that there's a moment very clearly in Spiderman--where the Green Goblin turns and attacks Spiderman in the burning building after posing as a woman in trouble)--and in the film Copycat (where the lead character Helen receives a threatening email about a dancing girl who's about to die).

Is there a female version of the better-known Wilhelm scream?

And to tie up the media section, let me introduce you to the Akinator. He wants to guess what you're thinking. He's also available as an off-the-web app for the iPhone. He's still learning, but he's not bad with the less arcane stuph.

Mr. Dirk Talamasca tipped me to the phantom prim sit issue on JIRA; I thought it was just me. I've been having the worst time just sitting on things, sculpted or not, so I thought it was just that I'd forgotten the Art of Bench. Please go vote for it; there's a lot of powerful ("powerful" equalling scripters/makers/teachers/inventors on the grid, that just might sway a few Lindens--maybe) names on the list, so hopefully this is a JIRA bug that will be identified and fixed.

In a brilliant case of miscommunication, the owner of the sim that Autogenic Alchemy and Lady Disdain had their new main stores on decided to repurpose the sim for non-commercial concerns. This meant every commercial client--not just us--had to move.

We thought we had three weeks. We have less than one.

So of course--me being me--I pulled up everything and put it down on the Overlook, the new parcel. It's a gorgeous place, it really is, and the view is incredible. You can see it anywhere you look, because at present? There's nothing on the ground.

Because--no matter what browser I use--there seems to be a unique flaw in the ability of Second Life, at present, to hold fixed coordinates in memory. I picked up the Witch House in Black Sands, carried it to the Overlook, placed it down, took everything out of edit--and watched as two walls moved--in different directions--a full ninety degrees from where I set them down.

I've been building for several hours over the course of two days, high overhead, and what's come out is a small little fenced parcel, with fog, and gravestones, and I'm trying not to take it as an omen for other things. It doesn't help that this:



is the current avatar. Yes, the needle goes straight through.

It also doesn't help that the sim of Twilight Tears, of which the Overlook is a part, is a gothic-themed sim. This was a view at the neighbors across the small river:



Their tree drips blood.

This is not a bad thing, by any means, but I'm discovering that most of my gothic decor is very, very primmy. The cupola, f'rinstance:



or gazebo, or whatever the word for that thing is, clocks in at fifty prims. Plus particle effects. The altar:



(one of the first things I bought in SL, as it happens), while still amazing and I adore it, is forty-eight. And includes blood spatter, three poses, and fog.

The standard deal I have to gain access to this land (it's not owned by me, you see), means I have use of two hundred and fifty prims. I'm just not sure how that's going to work out, with what I have.

--

[Update: in the day and a half I've been holding to this blog entry, I decided screw the primmy props, and screw the Witch House, though likely, it would have dropped cleanly onto the site with only a need for retexturing the outside. No, I went for something far more odd:



I present to you the Graveyard Shop. Yes, I planted a lot of gravestones and tilted vendors on them, and I still have to work to update the landmarks in the vendors. And I'll probably still have a skybox overhead because I don't want to leave the clockwork citrus collection--soon, with any luck, to develop three more members--outside. So those and the rugs and likely the texture sets will all be inside another skybox...somewhere.

[Hee. I'll put up a freestanding door.

At any rate, we're up, we're running--at least Lady Disdain, in the all-new outdoor venue. Mr. Allen is still working on getting his shop up and running.

We have until Wednesday to clear everything off of Black Sands. Here's to us succeeding.]