6/2/2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Skin City, Second Life: The merchants of Skin City have hidden
Sones Skin City Soda bottle caps with skin and av accessory
booty prizes in the one and only 1-stop city for…
skins, shapes, eyes, and other avatar accessories:
http://SLurl.com/secondlife/Skin%20City/124/94/563
Drop by to grab the booty — finders keepers for both small
things and pricy things — including select individual packs of my
4 earliest new releases:
My legendary eyes:
![[ic-skins] eyes Soulful and Vidad 2](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2406/2471622847_e3d2f366bb_t.jpg)
![[IC-skins] eyes Ranika](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2283/2472445192_bc1a74839e_t.jpg)
![[IC-skins] eyes Ienex](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2417/2472445002_a1bc173101_t.jpg)
![[IC-skins] eyes Iata](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3231/2471622293_59d52533ed_t.jpg)
… as well as legacy eyes … new Soda caps released
several times a week starting in June!
And also… booty from these Skin City merchants:
Alady
Alessandra
Another Level
Arrogant Lioness
Ashia
B&B
Beauty Avatar
Body Project
Digit Darkes
Falln Angel
Kitheres Industries
Magika
Minnu
Nora
Playboy Designs
Shape Territory
Soda
Starfuker Skins
Unpredictable
VIP - Sculpted Talking Faces
Wunderlich’s
More soda caps added daily… as new merchants arrive and get set up!
Come for a sneak peek and the chance to find high quality skins and more
hidden in buy-for-0/1 soda caps…
and…
Come see designers incognito as they try to find the hidden caps.
(I can only tell you what I’ve hidden - don’t ask any of us for where
other booty’s hid… cuz we dunno and are out there searching
with you! o.O)
Ina Centaur,
Skin City Mayor
Category: Amusing, Projects
Skin City “Sones” Soda Cap Scavenger Hunt
Skin City, as you know, has its own fictional soda company. Namely, “Sones Soda” - not at all affiliated with Jones Soda. In fact, the labels on Sones Soda only show images from Skin City. You can pick up a bottle of Sones Soda for free from any Skin City Soda vendor.
Anyway, the “Sones” Soda Cap Scavenger Hunt is a Skin City-wide scavenger hunt that you can participate in to find skins, shapes, and other avatar accessories booty packed in soda caps scattered all around Skin City. It runs from 6/2 to 6/23. More caps added daily. Visit Skin City to find them all. Google up people’s blogs to find people’s finds! o.O
“Preshow Setup” by Skin City merchants:
Participation is simple.
1. Simply rez a Sones Soda Cap
2. Put stuff in it.
3. Set it on sale for L$0 or L$1.
4. Hide it somewhere in the city. (Record the location so you won’t forget!)
5. Poke me about your participation so I can add you to the PR list.
Scavenger Hunt Announced to…
The Skin City Update Group on Wednesday 5/28
FashCon on Monday 6/2
Category: Amusing, Projects
So in the middle of setting up Primtings after posting the call for artists earlier today… Paula Dix aka Able Whitman(?) TP’s in and rezzes a megaprim. I got the confirmation earlier today (while at Skin City) from Wiz that Mega’s were disabled. But, apparently it’s only to do with server versions. Fortunately, the Primtings sim is fairly high up there and hasn’t been rolling-restarted yet.
That means - today we just had another round of “performance art”… Ina Atlas starts the hour off with Paula Dix taking on the next two hours. (Seriuosly, was feeling kinda super tired. Didn’t get much sleep last night.)
So the summary of the day so far goes… after the usual admin stuff including the RFL prom, sLiterary, Primtings, IM hell, customer service, I got to start blocking out a Mondrian out of megaprims (Composition). Several actually. TP’ed some nice people in to help, but most left at the sheer size and variability of the boogie.
Oh, also, we’ve gained two new excellent Primtings and possibly a third! Soon to be announced to group:-) Stay tuned!
The performance art today was (is — again I’m stealing time away from it, letting Paula please the crowd) interesting in that the sim was set to rez-all and anyone could rez.
Emotionally, my fave part of this event is that sort of Catcher-in-the-rye wholesome total good abandonness thing. Kinda like being the catcher of megaprims. Sorta giddy feeling as I rez a megaprim with huge expanse that displaces everyone momentarily until I either raise it and elevate people or move it and they all fall or just phantom it to not displace them even more.
All together though this event truly is performance art and it’s totally of philosophical interest, as well. I mean, where else but on Second Life can you have an artform that’s dependent on the audience and their ability/understanding-of-tools to create, a bunch of people being spontaneously decapitated or levitated or otherwise ballooned by blossoming megaprims custom created based on the people’s voice, and also corporate-community politics that initiatied the extinction-anon of the endangered speccies? (See my post from yesterday for something perhaps more coherent. I really need to zzz soon…)
Category: Amusing, Daily Sumly
Somewhat heart-pained by the needless and superstitious discrimination against megaprims and also Sidewinder’s earlier comment about mega creator’s to be terminated by tomorrow… and then WarKirby’s warcry in AWG (or was it Adv Scripters)… I finally got about to grabbing the Nicholez viewer to… spawn megaprims!
I think I was inspired by Eshi Otawara’s vision of “performance art,” although it really wasn’t clear to me what I was doing the whole time of the event… until much later. At the end of it, the right words to call this event just spontaneously arose: once-in-a-sLifetime interactive temporal performance art.
So getting back to the multiple levels of inter-related allusions. Megaprims (aka mega’s)’s are discriminated against, and thus their lifetimes are limited — temporal like live theatre… susceptible to deletion through not time’s scythe but that of politics and misunderstanding. Poor mega’s! Poor, poor mega’s…
Performance art is about creating visual art, one part of which is both created and dies in the process of performance, and the other part survives. In this case, the artform is interactive. Visitors can drop by and request which mega to spawn. Atlas would spawn and place the prim somewhere… and after the first series of plywood prims, the usage of coloring started to become necessary to distinguish between where one prim ends and the other begins. After a while, the colors became a whole entire array covering more or less a sim — Primtings Museum. It became living modern art as more and more visitors swelled in a differential equation equal to a constant 50 for the duration of over two hours… and even after Atlas and the sim crashed and didn’t get back on until an hour later at like 1 am … people continued to come in.
The people are told to spread the mega’s, spread, spread, spread. They are the sole witness of this event. They are the only people who can bring this event’s memory onwards — as well as the mega’s generated… although
The mega’s are packed in a 2×2x13.5 “totem” on Primtings Campus.
Anyway though, In this case, Atlas’ last-minute idea to turn this collective community’s striving to spread mega’s into an artform is, perhaps, her last opus before her account is banned (RIP Gene Replacement, bless his soul. RIP Charles Fauna, bless his soul). Her performance, like the megaprims, is temporal… ephemeral… and her account far likely gone by the time you finish reading this. Fin. (RIP Ina Atlas, bless her soul.)
Category: Amusing, Reflections
I get so much done when SL is offline.
Finished makeup editions for Kassia and Dria, and also finally pdf2tga’ed the SL Shakespeare Company programme!
And now for more SQL fun @ SQLzoo…
Two Table Join
1b. Show the who and the color of the medal for the medal winners from ‘Sweden’
SELECT who,color FROM ttms JOIN country ON (ttms.country=country.id) WHERE country.name=’Sweden’
1c. Show the years in which ‘China’ won a ‘gold’ medal.
SELECT games FROM ttms x JOIN country y ON (x.country=y.id) WHERE y.name=’China’ AND x.color=’gold’
2b. Show which city ‘Jing Chen’ won medals. Show the city and the medal color
SELECT city, color FROM games JOIN ttws ON (ttws.games=games.yr) WHERE who=’Jing Chen’
2c. Show who won the gold medal and the city.
SELECT who, city FROM games x JOIN ttws y ON (x.yr=y.games) WHERE color=’gold’
3a. Show the games and color of the medal won by the team that includes ‘Yan Sen’.
SELECT games,color FROM ttmd JOIN team on (ttmd.team=team.id) WHERE team.name=’Yan Sen’
3b. Show the ‘gold’ medal winners in 2004.
SELECT name from team JOIN ttmd ON (ttmd.team=team.id) WHERE ttmd.games=2004 AND ttmd.color=’gold’
3c. Show the name of each medal winner country ‘FRA’.
SELECT name FROM team JOIN ttmd on (ttmd.team=team.id) WHERE ttmd.country=’FRA’
Category: Amusing, Daily Sumly, Designs, Projects
Written by ina on Monday, 12 of May , 2008 at 1:40 pm
Tags: bored, mysql, secondlife, sql, sqlzoo
Really bored. Asset servers failed. Crashed SL is not accepting logins. I feel like doing a problem set! (Seriously!)
SQLzoo answers to…
SELECT within SELECT
1b. List the name and region of countries in the regions containing ‘India’, ‘Iran’.
SELECT name,region FROM bbc WHERE region in (SELECT region FROM bbc WHERE name IN (’India’,'Iran’))
1c. Show the countries in Europe with a per capita GDP greater than ‘United Kingdom’. (Denmark Iceland Ireland Luxembourg Norway Sweden Switzerland)
SELECT name FROM bbc WHERE region=’Europe’ AND gdp/population>(SELECT gdp/population FROM bbc WHERE name=’United Kingdom’)
1d. Which country has a population that is more than Canada but less than Algeria? (Kenya)
SELECT name FROM bbc WHERE population>(SELECT population FROM bbc WHERE name=’Canada’) AND population<(SELECT population from bbc WHERE name='Algeria')
2a. Which countries have a GDP greater than any country in Europe? [Give the name only.]
SELECT name FROM bbc WHERE gdp > ALL (SELECT gdp FROM bbc WHERE region=’Europe’)
SUM and COUNT
1b. List all the regions - just once each.
SELECT DISTINCT region FROM bbc
1c. Give the total GDP of Africa (410196200000)
SELECT sum(gdp) from bbc WHERE region=’Africa’
1d. How many countries have an area of at least 1000000 (29)
SELECT COUNT(name) FROM bbc WHERE area>=1000000
1e. What is the total population of (’France’,'Germany’,'Spain’) (187300000)
SELECT SUM(population) FROM bbc WHERE name IN(’France’,'Germany’,'Spain’)
2a. For each region show the region and number of countries.
SELECT region, COUNT(name) FROM bbc GROUP BY region
2b. For each region show the region and number of countries with populations of at least 10 million.
SELECT region, COUNT(name) FROM bbc WHERE population>=10000000 GROUP BY region
2c. List the regions with total populations of at least 100 million.
SELECT region FROM bbc GROUP BY region HAVING SUM(population)>=100000000
Category: Amusing, Daily Sumly, Tutorials
If Michelangeo painted the Sistine Chapels anywhere but in that one well-funded church endeavor, it would be akin to a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it.
I think I have discovered that it’s not the beauty or merit of a piece that gets it the support it needs, but the level of publicity it attains. Having to both self-publicize, direct, and produce a piece makes it triply difficult – and funding as well is enervating. It takes precious life from art — and I do mean that both ways. After giving out a funding spiel describing SLSC initiatives, all I want to do is log out and poof — literally. And having to self-publicize just means I can spend that much less time on the actual art itself. Which defies the purpose of working on my own project…
If Michelangeo painted the Sistine Chapels in the streets of Sicily, people would walk all over it, and its colors and vibrancy would be stolen on the soles of countless travellers.
In school, I used to think that missing an earned point there and here due to random grading errors didn’t matter. That was also what the prof’s said. But, the truth is that a few points missed here and there add up. It’s like in an old friend’s reminisces of AP Spanish, where extra credit was granted “randomly” to students who shout out “pointa, pointa!” for answering random hodge-podge. And in the end, it was this one extra credit point she missed that made the difference between an A and a B. For her, it meant losing out on being valedictorian. Microecon is life, really. A dollar saved here and there every day multiplied by 356 days becomes a size-able fortune. Similarly, being unlucky enough to receive grades on the borderline for dozens of courses, and not having the heart to fight for the next…
And then there are stories that you’d think were published on The Onion, rather than CNN, that, although AP-style, is just so full of… story. Take this one, for example, where a judge is accused of falling asleep during a trial, requiring treatment like a queen, among other things… and the fact that she can still stand all that personal invective-type drama against her really does illustrate an extremely strong character.
It really is all about the guts and bull to fight, to get the word out.
Category: Reflections
Written by ina on Tuesday, 6 of May , 2008 at 4:48 pm
Tags: regAPI, secondlife, slregapi
The RegAPI system is in perpetual beta and often prone to downtimes and other oddities. RegAPI 2.0 is supposed to be more stable and just better — and possibly come out of beta. D. Graham tells of some reasons why the 2.0 system is delayed.
Ian Wilkes, VP System Engineering @ LL, was over here in Japan, and
discussed the restructuring of Second Life data services. In essence the
current data scheme is like spaghetti, with a variety of servers doing a
variety of tasks, all poorly. LL is currently working hard to restructure
the servers to be more efficient and handle greater loads.
Avatar registration and account maintenance/inventory are major components
of the data structure.
While the RegAPI may seem like an independent node - it is quite interwoven
with the rest of the data structure. So, there is a lot of work that needs
to be done around RegAPI2.0 before it can be released - i.e. its gotta work
with the rest of the components.
Category: Projects
Written by ina on Saturday, 3 of May , 2008 at 3:25 pm
Tags: metaverse fiction, sliterary
Category: Projects
Written by ina on Friday, 2 of May , 2008 at 9:37 pm
Tags: 300, frank miller
For the first time in a long time, I took a break from it all and actually watched through a whole movie (after devouring a profligate amount of… fruit coffee cake!). 300 was the movie, as championed by Frank Miller.
Somewhere during the movie I had the oddest of epiphanies — and I’m not sure whether it’s because moviemakers tend to come from this sort of background or whether the same mentality actually applies one and the same… but, basically, the conjecture goes like this: advertising professionals are the modern analogues of religious idols.
So, the Persians had these Immortals, the personal army of the alleged God, the Persian King. They had their mysticism and magic and all that glitter (literally). They make people fear them, believe that aluminum is steal and all that… and thus sway them to kneel to them.
Similarly, advertisers have these Innocents, the open-minded modern public, who can be led to believe in anything were a “solid” line of reasoning “provided.” They have their tricks and campaigns and all that flattery. They make people buy things, become things, and turn into things…. and thus sway them to make others pay for them. (No one cares about kneeling nowadays. Modern homage is about getting paid from effort other than your own.)
Coffee has the same effect on me as margaritas would have on others. I’m collapsing. Good night!
Category: Amusing, Reflections
