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…

Vocabulary +5

Today, within the space of about two hours, Jack managed to trot out the words “condiments”, “montage” and “apocalypse”.

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…

Salute!

My small, trusty Bodum French press, after years of service, bit the big one this morning, apparently from complications resulting from a fall.  It had previously taken a tumble out of the dishrack and survived a three foot drop onto tiling, causing me to marvel at its resiliency.  But when I poured the hot water into it this morning and stirred, it popped a perfect triangle of glass out of its side and onto the cutting board (along with a good measure of coffee.)  Bummer.

Also, that was the last of my coffee…

Perhaps someday, or in a different timeline, I will switch over to the macchinetta.

Wait a Minute

Why does a medication intended to help me with dizziness have dizziness listed as a possible side effect?

Playing The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

Jack:  [squints at rail map with indications of moving enemies]  “Nnnnnh…  That may not end well.”

[pushes Save Game button]

—

Ace:  “I’m not gonna blow the whistle.  Screw the whistle!  You want a hero who knows how to blow the whistle, or you want a hero who knows how to blow it up??”

Spirit

This year’s cider label:

At the risk of being blunt, it kind of felt like polishing a turd:  Jack did the center artwork, but he did it more at my request than of his own initiative, and even he wasn’t really thrilled with it.  Nor did he have a clear motivation behind it.  Head still stuck in Halloween I guess.

He did decide he wanted the addition of a back label, though:

For those of you who aren’t parents (or librarians), the text content is a direct paraphrase of the Flip-o-Rama “incredibly graphic violence” disclaimers from Dav Pilkey‘s Captain Underpants books.  Another thing we never seem to get past…

Anyway, it’s good to have the bottles labeled, and the cider is strong and tasty.  Empress, your display bottle is ready…

Robotics Camp: day 3

At the end of Day Three, the glory of the Orangutan Robot was finally revealed! Check it out in action:

We tried it on a metal wire first, and that gave it a lot of problems, both because the smooth metal of the wire didn’t allow its “hands” much purchase, and because the action of the motor causes lateral swinging that tends to make the arms miss when grabbing at a thin-width target. But it works superbly along a pole or broom handle, like they used in his class, and as you can see, pretty damn fine on an extension cord.

Aside from the fun of just building it, Jack also apparently organized the entire class into a Battle League, wherein they would send pairs of Orangutanbots at each other from opposite sides of the pole, and owners would score points for knocking the opposing bot off. I should probably have just seen if Battlebots had an after-school program…

The Legend Of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

Drawing the path the boomerang takes with a stylus! And on a freeze-framed screen, no less!

Today’s kids have it so easy. :D