Thursday, September 25, 2008

yu can haz teh POWAH!!! - Creative combustion and a gift economy in the desert

Beginning this Saturday and for one week, scorched earth awaits you. Burning Man, the annual event that Burning Life is modelled after, is about dreaming your dream in a radically awake and alive state.

I scowled and shook my fist at the heavens yesterday because 22 sims brimming with the creative art and builds produced by hundreds of talented minds is too much to absorb in just one week, but now I am going to put all that behind me and immerse myself in the joy.

The temperatures at Burning Man are brutally hot. And cold. The dust storms whip the camps for hours at 50mph. Lag is Second Life®'s weather. Be brave, be courageous... it will all be worth it.

A core element of the Burner's culture is gifting, with no strings attached. It is not about trading or barter. Just a way to say hello, or thank you, or hey you!

One such gift will be from artist Truthseeker Young.



His vase of flowers contains a single stem flower staff and an animation with particles. Put them together and "yu can haz teh POWAH!!!"

Posted by Bettina Tizzy at 10:40 PM

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6 comments:

Solo Mornington said...

Bettina says: "Lag is Second Life®'s weather. Be brave, be courageous... it will all be worth it."

Well, no. Lag is more like Second Life's second hand smoke.

Remember kids: If you have an ARC above, say, 300, then You Are The Problem. :-)

September 26, 2008 at 7:46 AM
Truthseeker Young said...

um, no, solo, not quite...

I was at Burning Life at roughly 2am this morning, with NO ONE else around. I'd stripped myself of all attachments, scripted objects, etc., and replaced my skin with a blank white 32 X 32 texture. Couldn't get any lower ARC than that. You know what?

LAG LIKE FRIKKIN MOLASSES!!

Seriously, I could barely move, and had real trouble setting anything out.

Please spare us the party-line about ARC.

That inconsistent, illogical, purely political "tool," -- useless for anything but finding somebody to screech at (as tho the drama-mongers *needed* any more ammo) -- is a passive-aggressive joke played on us by the Lindens, who finally just couldn't take anymore of the bitching about lag on their PR-blog.

If the Lindens now want us to start punishing each-other for using *their* tools to create "Your World, Your Imagination," then at the very least, they have the responsibility to provide us with *accurate*, *transparently-benchmarked* measuring tools for EVERYTHING in-world, not just avs. And they damn-well better do something about these lousy avatar meshes

See, now? ya went & got me started...

September 26, 2008 at 1:32 PM
qpop said...

An avatar with a rendercost of 1 ie wearing only non-prim hair and clothing only (you don't get penalised for the texture count here) will make avatar rendering as easy as possible for everybody else around you.

The next best thing to do for yourself in a potentially high lag environment is to turn your draw distance down as far as you can go - even reduce your graphics level if you are lucky enough to have a kick ass graphics card and cant get as low as 64m draw distance.

Things in your environment that will lag you regardless - scripts (especially those that involve physical changes or constant listening scripts these will lag the server as well as your client). Huge texture files - anything over the minimum needed for clarity at the size you are going to finally display the texture is added lag for your viewers - in many cases 256 or 512 on a side is more than sufficient - often even smaller files can be used. The number of prims on the server and how they are distorted can also add to server lag - and will effect your rezzing times...

Though even when the sim my Burning Life build was on was empty on the day I grabbed my plot I had appreciable delay in rezzing even a simple box (though movement etc was fine)... which makes me wonder exactly what they have the BL sims on...

September 27, 2008 at 3:02 AM
Caelestaeia Valeeva said...

Is BL open to the public yet? I've tried to TP into the sims but can't get in because I "do not have access to that teleport destination". Darn...

September 27, 2008 at 7:29 AM
Caelestaeia Valeeva said...

I got in! The group wasn't open-enrollment at the time of the posting of my question, but was opened shortly thereafter. Yay! I've met some fantastic people, both builders and patrons, thusfar, and it's fantastic!

September 28, 2008 at 11:09 AM
Juko said...

I'm struggling to find people's work at BL - are builders not providing info or is the system for doing that borked? The list on the BL web site isn't very helpful for example.

I'd love to know where Truthseeker's piece is for example :-)

On the ARC - I saw one av with an ARC of 6000, at a BL event! I think that's pushing it, PR or no PR lol

September 28, 2008 at 11:59 PM

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