try to leave out the love that goes against the grain, but I can rationalize it if I have to

Steampunk Wallpapers? Why, yes. To that end, all hail the Propnomicon! I'm fairly sure that's going on my o'ercluttered equivalent of the blogroll. He's a lot of fun.

Working a bit currently (aka, cursing the Zbrush designers hourly) with actual sculpting programs, and baking textures designed for sculpts. As Zbrush is about as intuitive as an obsidian scalpel--in a locked box--in a small ornamented chest--covered with hieroglyphs--in the lobby of the hospital next to the operating room--well, things could be going better.

In the meantime, dropping a link here I found in searching somewhere: a fairly general list of 2D and 3D design resources, most of them royalty- and copyright-free.

Michael Wilson of Makena Technologies just might be responsible for Wallace Linden's pigheaded optimism about aligning RL info with SL avatars: according to this article, he's quoted as saying "The problem with most virtual worlds is that they are islands. So we're currently working on a very deep integration with the major social media companies."

Ah. So, therefore, extrapolating: all virtual worlds should seek this "deep integration" with major social media companies, because otherwise, they are severed from the fluid cross-communication that all social media companies share? How does that work?

Okay, I've joked about the WoW gateway in Second Life, but really, by and large--people play WoW; they may also play in SL; they may also play in other games, on or offline. This is not the problem. The problem is what the CEOs and mid-management officers (see, Mark Kingdon/M Linden and Walker Spaight/Wallace Linden for this) seem to be taking from this: namely, that more is better, that integration with everything one might be potentially interested in (like those icon scrolls below viral links, that invite the viewer to link to Digg/Twitter/Facebook/MySpace/Buzz/Discus/and whatever else is out there at present) is what keeps people awake and alert and, somehow, paying money to the things that make them happy. (Which is the part where I lose understanding--the LOLcat folks, to take the obvious example, got big enough to sell site advertising and get the book deal; the lady behind Cake Wrecks signed on a coffeetable volume. But the sites, in and of themselves? WERE AND ARE FREE.)

MMORPG strikes again with a very thought-provoking What were they thinking?!? article (for once, do follow all the links; they're amazingly worthwhile. Plus, Jennings (apart from the ubiquitous its/it's errors that plague so many online writers today) is really, really funny.

Normally, I don't bother linking slash stories--good or bad--on this blog, because first, there's an annoying plethora of them in virtually every fandom you've ever heard of, and second, there's not much of interest to the readers of this blog.

Today only, I'm changing this, but only because of the staggering piece of vile dreck that is My Immortal. It is stunning to the forebrain, inconceivable on nearly every level, will make any teacher who spends their days imparting knowledge to students curl up in a fetal ball by their laptop, and even worse, it's spawned a comic.

Dear gods, the pain.

Speaking of insanity, though...I do wish to state hereforth that I am not responsible for the next bit of lunacy:



Sir Edward Pearse came up with the original concept, and Lord Bardhaven provided me with the appropriate "steampunk" name for her. NOT my fault. Blame THEIR brains.

With help from Icons My Way, and of course, all rights reserved to Sanrio, because Hello Kitty is their baby. (Thisissatiredon'tkillmeSanrio.) It's not perfect--I may go back and tweak the concept further--but it is sized for wallpaper (the large version, I mean.)

*coughs*

*slinks off, pointing at the MEN who deserve blame for this, with the small feeble cry of "Not me! Not me!" as she goes*