Ordinal Malaprop's blog

One thing I did forget to do is mention my Ad Builds In Second Life gallery. This is a selection of the best, worst and ugliest pieces of advertising that I have seen around the virtual world, with an emphasis on the worst - but please do note that simply being in there doesn't mean I'm necessarily saying that your ad is terrible.

Oh goodness me, so many things that I've been building recently, I just don't know where to start, but I'll begin with my growing interest in the production of automata. I think of it as my way of giving something back to Second Life when I'm not there to "entertain" people with my "sparkling" personality and "ready wit".

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First of all I continued work on Delilah, my "obedient proxy". Delilah is a mostly conical creation whose main purpose is to allow me to explore SL to an extremely limited extent while I'm not even there.

I'm in New World Notes! Well, two sentences of mine are, in the recent post about the MTV avatar fashion show:

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blockquote>But under that objection lurked a larger one, perhaps: feeling imposed upon by a media giant that didn't seem to appreciate the essence of Second Life culture. As Brodie put it, "MTV is about what is popular, not creativity." And why a fashion show, when there was so much more to the world?

Unfortunately, during testing of the Kinetic Metaphor Propagator, it emerged that people were hearing the shouts of the Political Statements and thinking that the Impeach Bush ads had started actually shouting now, a terrifying spectre.

I was at some of the speeches and demonstrations at Democracy Island yesterday, and I'll make a few comments about that, but I'd first of all like to announce a great step forward for political speech in Second Life - the Ordinal Laboratories Kinetic Metaphor Propagator v0.1.

In patriotic red, white and blue, it enables high-speed, targeted message distribution - when a Political Statement hits a free-speech recipient...

• it shouts "IMPEACH BUSH!

I'd heard about the Cornfield on the SL forums before, but I always thought it was a joke, until a few days ago...

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blockquote>Nimrod Yaffle, a resident of the virtual world Second Life, has revealed details of a bizarre and dark prison Second Life's maker Linden Lab is now using to lock up criminal avatars. Dubbed the "The Corn Field," the moonlit environment contains only rows of corn, two television sets, an aging tractor and a one-way teleport terminal allowing no escape.

One thing I've always found annoying in SL is the number of times people fall out of vehicles. I've been on a few newbie tours with the SPSL, where we descend on a Welcome Area, grab a couple of newbies and whisk them off, and without fail at least one of them jumps out.

Should anyone wish to experience the automated vehicle touring thing that I have been talking about, there's a demonstration available at my home area (see sidebar). Sit on the vehicle, touch it, it will go.

One thing is that you should remove all hovering or other flight attachments that you might have, because they will also hover the vehicle itself and interfere with its movement. I don't think that there's any way around this.

(click to enlarge)

After all of my complaints here and the addition of several "lovely" new ad blocks in my local area, finally, someone has actually created one that looks nice - see right.

It's tasteful, it doesn't glow or spin or bob up and down, and it's actually useful as well - go inside and click on the computer screen and you get an up-to-date list of other property for sale in the local area.

So what have I been making and doing?

A clockwork blunderbuss: I decided that it was time to prove at least some retrotech credentials given that I claim them, and I have long had a gun that shoots any object loaded into it (for physics testing - a terrific euphemism for "blowing stuff up") so after a meeting with the Victorian Retrotech Society I made one out of good old-fashioned wood, polished brass and iron.

Yes, I know, it's a very nice hat. See the little key at the top of the magazine mechanism? No, look closer.