Giant Prims - 2nd anniversary of "The Big Prim Problem"

Two years ago today, the Not Possible IRL group read Michael Linden's post, The Big Prim Problem, in dismay. Be sure to read that post if you have no idea what I am talking about.

A great deal has happened in two years, including a tiny window during which a number of creators were able to take advantage of a wee exploit and make many huge prims in different sizes, but none of them scalable.

While we would still like to have scalable megas with which to create, our priorities have moved to other areas, with the top one being better IP protection of virtual creations.

In any event, since that fateful day, October 12, 2007, this blog has kept a vigil of sorts. We published many posts about great content that would not exist were it not for megas, and we still care. And we still want scalable megas. In fact, I cannot imagine most of my favorite content in Second Life without them. What creations never existed because we don't have scalable prims? I suppose we will never know.

In the meantime, scalable huge prims are not a problem on OpenSims, and hardly an issue on Blue Mars were prims don't even exist. Why hasn't Linden Lab allowed them? Why?

I thought you might enjoy reading an old post that Douglas Story prepared for you, many many moons ago, and below you'll find links to just some of our old posts. This blogpost was published long before we'd figured out how to resize pics on Blogger. Sadly, ignore the slurls for the Man Angel at Black Swan and DanCoyote Antonelli's Hyperformalism, as this content is no longer on the grid.

Also, Juria Yoshikawa's Liquid Light is currently located at the "new" Chakryn Forest, the old Chakryn Forest is still there, Sabine Stonebender's Zero Point was returned to her one day by mistake and she has since had to rebuild or recreate it, prim by prim, and the FlowerBall has been relocated to Cetus Island. I'll post slurls to these things shortly.

How time flies!

~*~

Without Megaprims...

Originally published October 20, 2007

this post by Douglas Story

Without megaprims...Light Waves' Man Angel would have disappeared.
photo by Finny Yates. slurl

Ah, the power of them three little dots! I refer to the ellipse... Useful in this case because we were all ready to write a scorching propaganda piece with the theme, "Without Megaprims... All This Great Shit Will Go Away!" But now with things looking up on that front (latest word is that the all-powerful Lindens are leaning toward keeping megaprims) I only have to change the part after the ellipse to "...All This Great Shit WOULD Have Gone Away! And What A Damned Shame That Would Have Been!!!" Hmmmm...the first title was snappier though, you have to admit.

Without megaprims...DanCoyote Antonelli's Hyperformalism would have disappeared.
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Without megaprims...Rezzable's Greenies' Home would have disappeared.
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Without megaprims...the irritatingly prolific Juria Yoshikawa's Liquid Light would have disappeared.

I make something new about every seven months. With Juria, it's about every two minutes. I find this annoying. slurl

Without megaprims... Sabine Stonebender's Zero Point would have disappeared. slurl

You'll find a lot of shots here that include Bettina's booty in them. The author wishes to point out that most of the pictures here were taken by Bettina herself. Any booty issues should be taken up with the management.

Without megaprims... The International Spaceflight Museum would have disappeared.
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The thing is...the artists and builders who use megaprims tend to be the most creative, charming, and well-dressed avatars who bring us joy in SL. How lucky we are to have them!

Without megaprims... Douglas Story, Aldomanutio Abruzzo & Desdemona Enfield's FlowerBall would have disappeared.
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Without megaprims...Artoo Magneto's anyMOTION would have disappeared.
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Without megaprims...Gazira Babeli's 'Gaz of the Desert' would not have been possible.

I don't like most of the machinima I've seen. This is 23 minutes of spell-binding, slow-cut magic. See it. slurl

Without megaprims... Cube Inada's Alien Flying Circus would have disappeared.
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Without megaprims...Earth Primbee's Inspire Space Park would have disappeared.
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Yes, it's true that I took this shot myself. But you'll notice - there's no booty. My pictures are entirely booty-free.

(photo by Wellington Bahram) slurl
Without megaprims we would not have Bettina's forest home - Chakryn - by Andrek Lowell,

nor this,








nor this (spanning three effing sims!)
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nor this.
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I'm sure we've missed many wonderful items (I'm sure you'll point them out, gentle readers) but I think we made our point here. The loss of megaprims would be a cheapening, deadening blow to the fields of imagination and creativity that Second Life opens up to people. We hope that this wonderful creative tool remains open to us, for both our creative impulses and for those who appreciate same.

Yoo hoo! Linden Labs? Paging Mr. Michael Linden... Please give the waiting (second) world a favorable answer, and soon!



See also:

• The Big Prim that wouldn't leave
• This just in! The future of huge prims is looking good
• Megaprims for science
• Not Possible in Second Life? Without huge prims...
• Not Possible in Second Life? Without huge prims... (yes, another post by the same name)
• Not Possible in Second Life? Without huge prims... And another!

Bryn Oh: Vessel's Dream - Sneak peek

She is the mistress of sad art, of robotic art, of mystery and melancholy, all in a virtual space, but when you talk with her, there's a bit of jocularity, of no-nonsense to Bryn Oh that's light and engaging. In conversation yesterday, the Canadian artist got to speaking about Second Life's building blocks. "I kind of like prims. It's fun to just use them. It's like Lego."


Bryn Oh, as captured by Bryn Oh

As the discussion progressed, we got on the topic of weather and how cold it can get up north. Like -30. It didn't occur to me to clarify this at the time, but I hope she was referring to Fahrenheit and not Celsius degrees. Brrr. "Snow was my very first toy, before Legos," she explained. What did she make? "Oh, snow homes, people, and often underground tunnels, which are nice and warm inside."

Years later, Bryn is still making tunnels and secret places that can only be negotiated via camming - that act of zooming and panning one's viewer (camera) down nooks and crevices. What they lead to is often the very heart of the matter, the answer, or partial answer to the question that the installation poses, for there is always a story, a conundrum, and a sequence of events in her art that need to be discovered to comprehend the whole. She is a virtual storyteller.

Vessel's Dream is such a creation. "They will only be able to go through a few rooms before they cannot continue with their avatar," advised Bryn. "At this point they must switch to holding down Ctrl and Alt (at the same time), and using the left mouse button. With all three held down, you can now change the angle and enter the tunnel. They then let go of the left mouse button, move it over a new target and hold it down again. Letting go, they can zoom forward using the scroll wheel. It's a bit like spiderman moving like this. Again they must click on things, as many parts of the build can be activated," she instructed.

Vessel's Dream has not yet been made public, but like all of Bryn's works, it appears to be an advancement over her last. Now her machinima is helping her to tell the stories, always aided by her Machine Poetry, which one discovers here and there, like messages in a bottle, lonely and cast away on old parchment paper: Histories of sentimental, often persecuted and ill-fated angels and robots.


Machinima by Bryn Oh

Here are just some of the blogposts we've done about Bryn and her work in Second Life:

• The Machine Poems and virtual sculpted storybook by Bryn Oh
• Attaining presence: 4Jetpacks4 and Bryn Oh
• Beautiful Mondays in the eyes of the Virtual Film Archive
• Bryn Oh chronicles the fall of the angels: A story in prims
• Crap Mariner's marathon video session: 31 videos in one day: Bryn Oh's steampunk alphabet
• Self-hypnosis and Bryn Oh's Steamgarden

NPIRL Fashion: Cutea Benelli's Okeanos maritime gown

Swim with the fishes...





Get yours by teleporting to Grim Bros. directly from here.

See also:

• Get your steampunk on
• Second Life content creators save lives
• (Virtual) Prostheses!
• W Magazine's Second Life
• Awesome vid of Bogon Flux
• Wonky wacky steampunk wonderfulness
• Cutea's Flickr stream

Out of the Blue: Why I care about Blue Mars

With barely any content to speak of, no currency, audio, media, or voice, and a User Interface that allows for limited communication and camera movements, it’s not hard to understand why Blue Mars has its detractors. Despite all of its early Beta deficiencies, however, there are compelling reasons to believe that it holds great promise for current and future aficionados of 3D immersive environments.

Most Second Life residents I’ve spoken with don’t know quite what to make of Blue Mars,
but none appear to believe that it will supplant or even displace their virtual world, though I do sense a modicum of concerned solidarity and defensiveness. There’s this Capulet-Montague thingy going on… like, if you so much as praise one aspect of Blue Mars it’s a form of treason or something. Personally, I subscribe to the Romeo and Juliet canon: “Can’t we all just get along?” Or am I misquoting?

Conventional wisdom would indicate that Second Life, which – ironically – could be called a mature virtual world by comparison, with its entrenched communities, tons of content and hundreds (thousands?) of events a week, is here to stay… but Blue Mars, in its infancy, has not yet begun to demonstrate its gravitas. It will take time, money, and a growing community of dedicated developers and residents.


Would you feed this little bitty baby vitamins or Kryptonite?

In development

Every time I have a chance to speak with Jim Sink, recently named CEO of Avatar Reality, the company that owns Blue Mars, I come away feeling energized and hopeful for this budding platform. In a recent conversation, I asked him what they were concentrating on at the moment. “In order to create a vibrant virtual world community, we need to have outstanding content and we need to attract extraordinary developers. In a coming release, we’ll be offering the ability to create clothing, and we’re providing new uploading tools, too,” he explained.


Meet Blue Mars’ Ruth. Yes, these are default avatars created by unfashionistas at Avatar Reality, with a little fiddling I did around the eyes within the Face Customization editor. Please hurry up fashion designers, and make me something I want to wear

“At present, most of our energy is focused on laying the groundwork to prepare Blue Mars as a development platform. Of course, things like the UI are exceptionally important – we know how important this is to the community – and we’ve already begun to implement changes based on users’ feedback. There’s no shortage of things we need to do.”

Money makes the world go around (especially if you can cash in/cash out)

And one of the things that Blue Mars plans to do soon is launch the Blue Mars currency and, as Jim puts it, “the fundamentals of the economy.” I wondered out loud how musicians who depend on tips would make out in Blue Mars since only developers can cash out. To this, Jim had some very good news: “All developers will be able to cash out and anyone can become a developer, but Blue Mars requires more information and needs to know a lot more about you if you are going to be moving money in and out of the platform.“

Location, Location, Location (and putting a price on things)

Another impending feature will reside on the web-based Developer MyPages: Soon developers will have the ability to upload blocks of shops, set prices to items – including ready-to-use residences, clothing and stuff, and also real estate. Land! This is cool, but here I am going to dig my heels in the ground hard… there ain’t NO way I’m going to have a cookie-cutter home. Not here, not there, not anywhere. I once lived in a development and had the bad habit of driving right by my home because it was indistinguishable from all the others on the block. This just isn’t my thing. I don’t do it in real life, and I sure as heck am not going to do it in my virtual life. Yes, I’m that neighbor that annoys everyone by painting her house purple.


Blue Mars Betti in the kitchen? No, no, no! This isn't the kind of cooking I plan to do


Web to Blue Mars and back

Blue Mars has every expectation that they will be unveiling new MyPage web pages for end-users, too, from which they can edit their in-world profile, and purchase Blues, among other things.

Repeat after me: It’s a PLATFORM

Many of us, myself included, have been calling Blue Mars “a virtual world,” when it is actually a platform for many virtual worlds, and a staging area for all kinds of new – to me - talented people. For developers, entrepreneurs, artists it is a next-gen technological solution from which you can build your environments. For end users (the jury is still out on what we are going to be called… Residents? Martians? Colonists?) it is intended to be a destination offering rich diversity and choices.



These gorgeous photos of coming new content courtesy of Richard H. Childers, president of Virtual Space Entertainment (VSE), one of the first City developers on Blue Mars

“Scurvy-inducing 3D”

Jim Sink recently tweeted, and of course, I looked, “CryEngine isn't just for realism. Check out this amazing work that would look right at home in Blue Mars.”

Games… yes! Blue Mars is flinging its doors open to members of the thriving Crytek modders community, inviting them to create their own games and content. A recent scrumptious example is Monkey Island 2, in which free-lancing 3D artist Hannes Appell first demonstrated how, with a little “voodoo,” he could enhance the gorgeous hand painted 2D concept art with a basic camera projection. Those pirates sure are mean to little froggies.



He then went on to demonstrate – just for fun - how original Monkey Island 2 backgrounds can look and feel in a modern 3d game engine, by building the sets with Maya and then exporting them into Cryengine's Sandbox editor.



Hannes is a Bavarian and now lives in Germany where he will soon graduate from the Institute for Animation & Visual Effects of the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. If LucasArts doesn’t hire him after this little “experiment,” someone sure will. This video has only been posted on YouTube for 19 days and already it’s had 329,000 views and the comments beg him to “MAKE A REAL MOD OUT OF IT.” A little Blue Mars, Hannes?

Role Playing

I’m also like a stuttering deer caught in the headlights when it comes to Role Playing, but were I an elf, Trekkie, furry, or inclined to hang out in locations that attempt to accurately portray a historical era, such as Second Life’s Roman Forum or the 1920’s Berlin Project, Blue Mars’ built-in ability to control incoming content such as how an avatar looks or dresses would make suspension of belief considerably more intense.


Photo courtesy of VSE, a Blue Mars City developer

Architecture and design

I like the way h3oworldz, a CryEngine modder group, used the platform to demonstrate how valuable a "3D realtime walkthrough" a structure or set can be to demo environmental effects and scale. They would likely be interested in hearing about DB Bailey from Second Life and his success at using a virtual world to demonstrate a real life structure to ultimately sell a real life project.

Vinyl"Club from h3oconceptz on Vimeo.

Machinima

VAM United is a German group working on a science fiction movie project using the CryEngine2 game engine. They’ve created this proof-of-concept as they prepare to produce a feature-length machinima based on a “loved and acclaimed” book. I highly recommend that you watch it here for better quality, but here is the YouTube version for you non-clickers:



What will the work of the likes of Lyric Lundquist or Lainy Voom or Colemarie Soleil look like, shot in Blue Mars?

Look at this one. Tell me, with a straight face, that you can't make use of these graphics and physics to create your vids...

See also:

• August 29, 2009: This is it! New virtual world Blue Mars rolls out open Beta
• July 31, 2009: More Blue Mars – The official roll-out dates (and some musings)
• April 15, 2009: New answers and more questions regarding the upcoming virtual world Blue Mars

Eshi Otawara's Anamorphosis of John Lennon

An anamorphosis is a deformed image that appears in its true shape when viewed in some "unconventional" way.

There is no substitute for seeing this in person, but here are a few photographs.







Teleport directly from here to see this in Second Life.

The Temple of the Prim and a tribute to Carl Jung, who surely would have loved Second Life

In the garden of Jung's country home in Bollingen stands a large cube-shaped stone inscribed by his own hand with magical and alchemical symbols. In his last revelatory dream prior to his death, Jung saw a huge round stone engraved with the words "And this shall be a sign unto you of Wholeness and Oneness". - THE GNOSIS ARCHIVE by Stephan A. Hoeller

British virtual landscape artist soror Nishi believes that the prim, that basic building tool in Second Life, is akin to prima materia (primal matter), a term used by alchemists to describe the seed of life. Prima materia was originally called Microcosmos to signify the small world from which heaven, earth, fire, water, and all manifestations of life are derived, including birth, death, creation, and even the resurrection. With this in mind, what could be more deserving of a temple, worship, and even a religion in Second Life than the crown of virtual creation... the plywood prim? To that end, she has created a temple and forest to that divine source of life and death: The Temple of the Prim.


The Temple of the Prim as photographed by Lem Skall

On her blog, soror discusses the term Increatum, wherein she describes prima materia as "fertilizing and giving birth to itself," and goes on to draw parallels between it and the basic prim.

Last Friday in conversation, soror explained: “This has been on my mind for well over a year. (The prim) makes itself and therefore is like a god. Gods need temples and the prim is self-replicating like the old gods. I think there's not really much in Prima Materia. It is just empty, but it reflects the psyche. According to Jung, when people speculate about the unknowable, they say more about their own psyche than they do about the unknowable, so the prim is a bit like a mirror."


soror's signature cracked-egg trees are made with prims, as is everything in Second Life



soror went on to say, "Jung was the first (only) person to take alchemy seriously as a description of the transformation of the individual from "normal" to enlightened. He saw a direct link between the "way you make gold from prima materia' and the process of "individuation" (his word). All the chemical processes that the alchemists describe are anthropomorphic, like Mercury is a person… kings and queens. It's all like a fairy story, with characters dying, etc. These relate to dreams: Archetypes (his word) and the land of dreams... is... (should be) SL...?”

"The Prim worship thingy is magic, and magic is what Synchronicity is (also a Jung word). Jung would LOVE SL," shared soror.


Looking down into the Temple of the Prim

soror Nishi: "I came to Jung through my interest in geometry and the Axiom of Maria: One becomes two, two becomes three...etc. Maria was an old alchemist. Alchemists believed that whereas Christ had redeemed man, no one has redeemed matter, and they saw the search for the Philosophers Stone (the Self) to be an aim higher than Christianity. I got interested in geometry as a sort of universal truth. I was fascinated that it transcends language, in my teens that is."



Alchemists were challenged not only with the vagaries of their science, but also with the ongoing tribulations of securing funding for their incredibly expensive practice. These early scientists resorted to creating a narrative using anthropomorphic symbols to describe chemical reaction processes more impressively and make them comprehensible to the layperson. What they fabricated was nothing short of mythology, imbued with allegories, metaphors and archetypes steeped with rich personalities.

Hundreds of years later and in his early 30s, the founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, began working on a manuscript bound in red leather that would contain illustrations and calligraphy by his own hand. In this document – considered the Holy Grail of the Unconscious - he explored his theories on archetypes, collective unconscious (the mystery of the universally unknown), and individuation, or the process of transforming one’s psyche by bringing the personal and collective unconscious into conscious. Each of his archetypes represent an aspect of our deepest, and highest (or darkest), self.


At times, soror's landscaping is reminiscent of Asian paintings

Soror’s Temple of the Prim is also a tribute to Carl Jung, which is especially fitting given the publication this month of that manuscript that he worked on for 16 years. Locked in a bank vault all this time, the Red Book has only been seen by a few people.



Now the Ruben Museum in New York will be displaying the original book in conjunction with a series of events called the Red Book Dialogues, wherein “personalities from many different walks of life will be paired on stage with a psychoanalyst and invited to respond to and interpret a folio from Jung's Red Book as a starting point for a wide ranging conversation.” Those guests include musician and artist David Byrne, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, director John Boorman, and philosopher Cornel West.

The Temple of the Prim is on temporary display thanks to Mab MacMoragh's sponsorship and can be visited by teleporting directly from here.

See also:

• soror Nishi: "Your computer screen is stained glass"
• Soror Nishi's forests - Like a spring bouquet
• NPIRLer Lash Xevious' "Best of Second Life" List
• Burning Life with soror Nishi - Just a peek
• These are a few of my favorite things...
• Floating buildings - In Real Life

My favorite animation in Second Life

This is a shoutout to the man who created my favorite animation in Second Life... the unsung hero responsible for "lifting" avatars and sending more of us soaring than the Page Up button.

Last night I was reviewing an art installation that incorporated the animation - it's a perennial hit with artists - and suddenly it dawned on me: I had no idea who had made it. Shame on me! I rustled up my inventory and right clicked SkybornFly: Creator: YuzienBorn Janus. I'd never heard of him. Had you? Why, I'll bet that any Second Life resident reading this blog has one in his or her pantry. I hastened to contact him presto fasto.

Animators in Second Life strive so hard to emulate the graceful movements of real professional dancers through precision motion capture, but the animation I adore and would miss the most is my trans/copy SkybornFly. I know I've had it since January 2008 because I remember handing out copies of it like there was no tomorrow at Komuso Tokugawa and MoShang Zhao's fabulous realtime jam and prototype event: SynaesthAsia, captured here by Osprey Therian. You can see us using the SkybornFly beginning at 3:17 into this video or by clicking here:



YuzienBorn Janus got back to me today and I peppered him with questions:

I do believe this was the first "not possible IRL" animation on the grid. What possessed you to create such a wonder?

YuzienBorn: First? No. I saw a couple prior to mine. They were robotic, and lacked any human motion. You might have seen the zen-like hovering pose? If not, perhaps you have seen that straight up in the air 4m legs splayed thing that strippers still use. I feel I could claim the first *fluid* NPIRL anim.

It was my love of SL's electronic music culture that posessed me to make the skyborn animations. While there were many for dancing, for better or for worse, there weren't any that were really suited to a good downtempo or ambient sets (like Ribe Oh, or Transient Zeluco's). So avatars either danced (while showing appreciation, they looked silly), or just stood or sat there.

When did you create this animation?

YuzienBorn: Oh, my. I havent the slightest idea. If my inventory is correct, I made it exactly two years ago yesterday. Wow =)

Why did you decide to make it copy/trans? (Had he set it for sale, surely he'd be a virtual tycoon today!)

YuzienBorn: A combination of self-serving publicity, and self-serving competitive spirit: trying to out-do the other high-end developers that had released free products to the public. I also wanted to give a little something to the people, but that's prolly just because I was having an insecure moment and wanted attention. All selfish reasons ;)

How did you make it?

YuzienBorn: Poser.

Have you created other animations?

YuzienBorn: Yes. Aside from the boring sitting animations I made for my furniture products, I made one I adore: The animation I made for my Pika-shoes (pikachu on your feet) took me 10 hours and syncs perfectly with the song that plays. It is deliciously retarded. There are some clips of it near the beginning of this video that 2ndThoughts Brando and I made about our little electronic SL subculture.

Side Note: In view of Linden Lab's bullying this week of a crown jewel in virtual education - and an organization that has made them look good time and again - I've decided to never add a damn registered mark after the words "Second Life" again. If they want to take down this blog, so be it. TYRANTS!!

Chouchou's new and virtual musical instrument: The Babel

Sometime this October, Chouchou, the Japanese musical group that exists only in Second Life®, will unveil The Babel, a new virtual musical instrument that harnesses their uncommonly fresh sound and makes it possible for anyone in SL to play and compose with it.



Arabesque Choche and Juliet Heberle are Chouchou, and together they have released two albums and several Machinima, and their live and streamed music wafts over its mostly virtual listeners like tropical oxygen, restoring their equilibrium after the agitations of the day.

What's all the excitement about? Check out this recent and stunning live performance, shot and edited by tadakuma Koba, featuring their new piano piece - r.i.p. - which Arabesque composed for his beloved father who recently passed away from a brain tumor. "His father taught him piano and the beauty of music," explained Juliet.



Chouchou - the sim - is possibly the chill-est spot on the grid to unwind, and you haven’t really experienced all that SL has to offer until you’ve used the free Chouchou HUD, which delivers panoramic views and deliciously slow camera tracking for a brilliant cinematic effect.



While the music industry may be dying a little death with each new Napster clone, virtual worlds are enabling new technical and artistic possibilities for composers and performers. Chouchou’s new Babel marks a novel step forward in that interplay. It is a towering and sculptural staircase in a pure-as-driven-snow white setting surrounded by contrastingly black boxes that hang mid-air, each endowed with a pre-loaded mini-clip of Chouchou’s trademark sounds.

Touch a box to hear a few keys of Arabesque’s fingers dancing over a piano keyboard or some harp strings, for example. Touch a percussion box and Chouchou’s unforgettable static and cymbals are heard. You can mix these sounds any way you like to create your own compositions, or purchase a full set to take home with you and play there.


The music in this video was created with "The Babel." Chouchou hopes that visitors to the Babel will record their compositions via Machinima and upload them as a response to this video

Here’s Chouchou’s tutorial for how to use the Babel:



I met with Chouchou at the Babel to learn more.



“In the Bible,” explained Arabesque Choche, “before the Tower of Babel was destroyed, all people could speak same language. In our Babel, people from all over the world can communicate through music."

“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.” “And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children built. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”- Genesis 11:1-9 (King James Version)

Arabesque Choche studied classical music and majored in piano study: “I often play Russian post modern music, but when I listen, Ravel is my favorite composer”

Each floor at the Babel is a different “track” or composition by Arabesque, and the boxes are grouped as elements with specific codes and chord progressions, and organized according to musical rules. Beneath each grouping of elements, there are boxes that have chords that can serve as accompanists. Each box in the same "element" is compatible with those chords. Some of the stairs have sounds embedded, as well.



Chouchou expects to add floors and “tracks” featuring new compositions over time. “The tower is growing,” said Juliet. “It's alive. Those sounds – our sounds – are born in a tidy room like a laboratory at the top of the tower and fall down below to make the tower of sounds. They might look scattered and random, but they are all kept where they are meant to be with certain rules. The tower is like our virtual music album. Each level is one track of the album and people visiting the Babel are making the album with us... together. ”

“When we play music in C major, it has a strong connection with G major, which is known as the ‘perfect fifth.’ In the Babel, I made every effort to ensure that elements that are close to each other have that perfect 5th relationship,” explained Arabesque. “This prevents the cacophony of many people playing the boxes simultaneously,” added Masami Kuramoto, Chouchou’s trusted friend and promoter, “so even if there are boxes near different elements, it still works, and this is what most other sound sculptures don't get right.”

Juliet, whose ethereal voice was surely dipped in honey, adds so much to each song but had never studied singing, and instead prepared for a career in fashion. “For me, designing fashion and singing are not so different,” she said. “I just do whatever feels right, but I need good music to feel something and sing to it, and Arabesque's compositions have that effect. I'd never taken singing seriously until Arabesque asked me to sing for him.”

It turns out that Juliet’s voice is Arabesque’s instrument, too. “I had initially made additional synthetic voice elements for the Babel in the same scale as Juliet’s voice,” added Arabesque, “but then I decided not to publish those because Juliet's original voice is just perfect for the melody."

I became insatiably curious about that first moment when Juliet sang for Arabesque, and what his reaction had been. Juliet had always loved his music, “so when he asked me to sing to it, I felt like my dream had come true. Then I wrote the lyrics for Chouchou’s first song: utakata.”

“To tell the truth, I didn't expect her singing to work well with my compositions,” interjected Arabesque. “I was aware that she was talented and that she understood my music, but hadn’t anticipated that she would perform so smoothly. My feeling during that discovery was... so happy. I was so glad.”

Chouchou has just released a new song, Sputnik. Their MySpace page can be found here. You can join their in-world group in Second Life: Chouchouholic for all their updates and news. You can teleport to Chouchou, the sim, directly from here.

See also:

• Chouchou leaps from digital platform to digital platform
• Enjoy Chouchou while you can
• Chouchou gives us the Universe
• KK Jewell reports on an unforgettable Chouchou concert
• Oh, Chouchou!
• Chouchou is searching for - and finding - new ways to present its music
• Chouchou: Making music from somewhere far, far away
• Chouchou "Islamey": A club (and a video) that define Cloud Nine

Andrek Lowell's new Bentham Forest... will creep you out

Photographers are going to have a field day at Bentham. There simply isn't a Windlight preset that it doesn't look great in. It's those light rays...

This is one scary forest. I got so spooked at times, while walking around taking pics, that I could feel the little hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. In the interest of full disclosure, its creator, the hobbit Andrek Lowell, is a dear friend and also the creator of my own sim, Chakryn Forest.


The mushroom forest

"I hate this place," said Andrek, while we were standing in one particularly creepy area surrounded by glowing red eyes in the darkness. "It gets to me big time. Scared of my own creations... yeesh."


Andrek Lowell

A few weeks ago, Lauren Bentham commissioned Andrek to create Bentham Forest on a Homestead sim in Second Life®. She would later add several elements of her own, including the elder mushrooms, a shack and the lighted path to it, as well as sculptures by Pumpkin Tripsa and trees with eyes by lonetorus Habilis. Andrek included four of his super entertaining quests, as well as forest-appropriate gifts for visitors.


Dark passageway

What was your assignment?

Andrek Lowell: My assignment was to create a dark haunted forest. Her wording for it was a "dark version of Chakryn." My first reaction was, "eh..." mainly because Chakryn, light or dark, is still Chakryn, so I decided to go with a more themed version. I designed this project as a game for the mind. I tried my best to portray the feeling of unease, and dread, if not outright fear.

Did you spook yourself?

Andrek Lowell: Several times. I can barely stand going into a couple of the installations. I tweak and then port right the heck out.



The whole thing is 2,404 prims!

Andrek Lowell: About 400 - 600 of those aren't mine.

Did you do all in 3ds?

Andrek Lowell: All of this is done in Max yep, 'cept for the sounds. I did those using Audacity.

What is your favorite part?

Andrek Lowell: I particularly like the mushroom forest. I've been wanting to do something like that for a while. Other than that, I love the crystal caves. Um... there isn't much of this sim I don't like really.


Andrek Lowell standing in the crystal cave

How many quests are there? Are they difficult?

Andrek Lowell: I created four quests, using scripts by Desdemona Enfield. Two of them are pretty easy. Only one of them gives location hints. Hopefully they won't be as easy as Chakryn quests are. Two of the quests have three items to find, one has four items, and the last has five items. The quests feature items created by Lauren, as rewards for completion. I've also hidden five crates of goodies: small elements of the forest.

So, how much fun was this?

Andrek Lowell: It was hard to stop working, and I forgot to eat today, =).


The elder mushrooms - with the faces - are by the sim's owner, Lauren Bentham

What kind of forest would you like to make next?

Andrek Lowell: I want to make a new Chakryn Forest on Blue Mars, and also I've very much wanted to make mushrooms for a while. My hope is to one day create a hyper fantasy forest, where the rules of nature apply loosely, like they sorta do here: Giant things, odd things, lights that don't make sense but look neat, basically a fairy tale... large mushrooms, glittering trees, but with a warm, joyful, colorful setting.

Teleport to Bentham Forest directly from here.

See also:

• Andrek Lowell's Shadowaine Fell
• Chakryn Forest presents new works by Glyph Graves
• Chakryn Forest: Virtual nature by Andrek Lowell, or the real reason I still have a Second Life

How to view this forest: Do not count on seeing everything by camming or using your Space Navigator. Many smaller sculpties will not render. Turn up your sounds (not your music). The sounds alone are worth the trip! Look for the dark passageway, the crystal cave, the wicked red eyes...