Also Disappointing

We seem to have missed the registration deadline for the September STEAM hunt by a matter of days.  We had been checking the hunt blog intermittently for info on when they were taking new applications, but for some inexplicable reason, the blog was never updated in any way from the March hunt.  We’re not sure where or how they did advertise it, except possibly by word of mouth, through the people who were already participants in the March run.  I imagine that works out fine for them, since there’s already a gazillion participants.  Not so well for us…

D has a letter in to the organizers, to see if they’ll let us slip in under the deadline.

Last Day on the Pulse/ Sn@tch City Prom Hunt

The Pulse/ Sn@tch City Prom Hunt ends tonight, so if you haven’t made it over there yet, best bump it up on your To Do List.

I have to confess, I was so busy setting up my own boxes, I never got around to looking at everyone else’s, or picking up a few gifts for myself.  (There are pictures of much of what’s available in the Sn@tch blog, naturally.)  People who visit seem to be enjoying it, though.  Dragonia even saw the Tiphareth Red bowties mentioned in the Retail Therapy fashion blog.  Bonus!

Pulse/Sn@tch City Prom Hunt

Hey, check it out!–  we’re, like, real merchants, in a hunt and everything:

(No, I did not do this art, those of you who are wondering.  Ivey at Sn@tch did.)

Here are the two fabulous TD items you can find, both of which are currently exclusive to this hunt:

The TD Tiphareth Red Bowties are free;  the TD Rose Stained Glass textures will cost $L30 for a pack of 12 that contains transparent and opaque versions of six different colors.  Smashing!

Here’s your limo:  http://slurl.com/secondlife/Pulse/71/76/596

Two Plus Two

Selling a LOT of copies of the Charred Black shingles lately.  Something to do with the upcoming Zombie Hunt, maybe?

I figure, if I keep at it long enough (and keep succeeding,) eventually D is going to come home with a hunt item or freebie or other product she found that’s made with a texture I did.  That’ll be interesting.  *laughs*

Texture Algebra (Solving for EEEEEE)

Generally the way it throws down is this:  D is working on a build, and she says to me, “I need a [x] texture for [y].  You think you could knock that out for me?”  And I say, “Uhhhhh…  yeah.  Probably. Lemmee see what I can do.”  And then I go research [x] and [y] a bit, after which I crank up Photoshop and disappear for a while.

When I come back, I throw her a jpeg through Skype and say, “How’s that?”   Sometimes she goes, “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!  That’s just what I wanted, thank you.”  Sometimes she goes, “Nnnnnh…  can you make it [j] and [k]?”  And maybe I can make it [j] and [k], and then I get the eeeeee,  or maybe it would take me a week and a half to do, in which case I scrap it and try a different approach.  Or maybe while I was working on it, she finds [m], something she already has in the can, or [n], that was on sale cheap and she likes better, and she uses one of those instead.  Or possibly she changes [a] [b] [c] [d] and [f], and decides [x] is no longer appropriate for [y],  probably because [y] no longer exists.  In which case I go back to playing Civilization 5.  (Damn you Gandhi!  We denounce you too!)

Every once in a while, though, the effort to provide [x] for [y] results in [Z], an end product that is an order of magnitude above what anyone was expecting, including myself.  Which is how we got the Tiphareth Designs Weathered Victorian Shingle textures:

16 color variations to date and counting, including (naturally) Dragonia’s Dark Plum. Shinglicious.

I’m thinking of moving the various TD entries to a store blog.  I should probably have one.  Like I need another web site, though!

Next!

Did I mention we moved the store?  We moved the store.  We teamed up with our friend Sarah from Uru and got a deal on New Kadath, a whole entire sim.  Much more space to build, and many more objects allowed.  So naturally we rebuilt everything:

As usual, it was a team effort, although the building was mostly D’s, and Luna Garden there was mostly mine.  And it was fairly exciting.  Only– [SL minutiae] nobody except me had full powers on the land, because I was listed as the sole owner.  Solving that required deeding the land to our Land Ownership group, and that process created an unintended side-effect.  I had parceled off the land into smaller sections for the store and the garden, so as to be able to create different landmarks for them, have different audio streams on them, and so forth.  When I did so, I never bothered to adjust the prim multiplier for each parcel.  As long as I was the owner of all the land, it didn’t matter;  an overflow of objects on one parcel was made up for by drawing resources from the other parcels.  But SL considers group-owned land as its own entity, with its own distinct ownership– even if the owner of a surrounding parcel is part of the group that controls the deeded land.  So when I deeded the largely unused portions of the sim to the group, the ones where all the free resources were, the parcels the store and the garden were on suddenly registered as massively over their prim count for their size, and SL automatically restored the balance by returning everyone else’s objects to inventory.  Like, um…  the store building.  Oops.

That’s not a total loss, of course, since being returned to inventory is not the same thing as being deleted.  You can just rezz it out again (in this case, all in one chunk, since it was linked.)  But it is a pain in the ass.  And in a related development, it turns out that D has been frustrated by her attempts to work on terraforming, because the in-world controls for doing so are fairly clunky.  So it looks like what’s going to happen now is, we’re going to purchase a RAW file–  a tweakable, pregenerated basic terrain sculpt made by someone else–  and apply that to the sim, then rework the location of the store and the other features to conform to the new terrain.  [end SL minutiae] So whatever the NEW new version winds up looking like in the end, it probably won’t look like that screen shot anymore.

I did manage to cobble together this picture out of 7 or 8 raw-stock shots I took in the garden:

Also, somewhere in that forest is an item I designed to Jack’s specifications and put there at his behest.  We think alike, him and me.  :)

Screening Calls

Asian screens are a dime-a-dozen in SL.  (Almost literally:  many of them retail in the L$30 range, which works out to about 11 cents US, and if they’re Copy, once you’ve bought one you can trot out as many duplicates of it as you want.)  I suspect it’s because they’re fairly easy to make.  All you have to do is be decent at creating (or stealing) textures, angle a couple of prims and BANG!  Good-looking Art piece.  Using a sculpt to do it may knock a prim or two off, and scripting it may make it more functional, but mostly it stands or falls on the art.

Anyway, here’s my hat in the ring:

The raw stock I used to created the art is a photograph I snapped right outside my apartment door, two days ago.  My neighbors caught me doing it, and then I had to explain why I was taking close-ups of snow.  :)

I haven’t decided what it will retail for yet.

update: I decided to retail it for L$30, since that was inside the target range of what one might expect to pay, and since the artwork is original, and since I am including both a transparent cloth and a fully opaque version in the shipping pack. Seems like a good deal for the money. At least to me…

Dragon Magick Wares & Tiphareth Designs

So, D and I have a store now.  Or rather, an in-world store location.  It’s actually kind of two stores in one physical environment, as you can see:

 

Dragon Magick Wares, that’s her.  (Did you guess that?)  Tiphareth Designs, that’s me.  Originally we had planned to run everything under one name and banner, but we started out selling stuff on the SL Marketplace a few months ago, because that was easier and cheaper, and the structure of SL Marketplace currently requires everything associated with one storefront to be done through one avatar account.  Which would have been…  burdensome.  So instead she does her thing, and I do my thing, and I help her with whatever she needs, and she helps me likewise, and everyone goes home happy.  See?  Happy!

The store is in Sn@tch City, and has a teleport to a rezzing platform where you can whistle up any of D’s very cool houses and check ’em out before buying.  It also contains demos of some of my products and textures, most notably the Magic Circle and single-prim Reanimation Tome.  If you’re in SL, and have a hankerin’ to visit, you can find it HERE.

Do drop by.

UPDATE: As of 3/1/2011, the store is no longer located in the structure pictured above, nor on the Sn@tch City sim; we’ve moved it to the nearby New Kadath region. Details HERE…