Woot! Yeah!!! *salto* *looks at L$ balance and smiles* Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!! *slides neck size slider a bit to the right* I’ve won the SL Bloggers logo contest. As promised, in this .ace file (nah, you’re not hotlinking) you will find:

1. The SL bloggers logo, color version on a gradient background. (.png)
2. The SL bloggers logo, b&w version to do with as you please. (.png)
3. An SL bloggers favicon. (.ico)
4. The SL bloggers official button. Wear it on your blogs with proud! ;) (.png)
5. A 468×60 banner that says ‘Blogging the metaverse, one post at a time…’ (.png)

All files are rather large for your image manipulation please. You can bug me if you need even bigger ones, but you better have a good reason. Especially when we’re on a damage enabled sim. =d

I know Timothy asked for more banners in the SL Bloggers logo blogpost, but I hardly doubt if he will use them all. So, pick a size that fits your blog and let me know what you want. And if you want any text on it. Or be creative and make your own with one of the files above. Happy blogging & blogtuning to all! ;)

There is an SL bloggers female Tshirt template too - probably to short for the male avies - with cute little SL blogger buttons on the back. Sadly enough there is a velcro patch layer upon it that says ‘Vint’. :p If anybody is interested, *miauw* at me and I’ll put the one without patch up on SLexchange OnRez and Metamart, so you can add your own prim patch on the velcro.

Tags: logo, sl bloggers
Categories: SL Blogs
18 Comments »

As avies tend to resemble their owners - a bit - I am not that fond of weddings. So I was a bit hesistating when Yves Welles - a neat fellow belgian avie - asked me to shoot his. I had some prior bad experiences with shooting laggy weddings and somehow I tend to look at the whole wedding thing with a slight dose of irony but as I remembered his fiance to be a beautiful lady and Bruges / Brugge to be a beautiful setting, I said yes none the less. ;)

La pièce de resistance:

Yves and Elise, I wish you both the best and brightest SL future together one can imagine!

The other photographs are in the Yves Welles & Elise Bourne’s dream wedding @ Bruges set on Flickr. I did my utter most best to keep the ‘dreamlike wedding’ feeling in post processing and to not fall back to my normal ‘harsh’ post processing of Second Life photographs. But I’m curious what you guys and girl avies think.

And no, I did not cry at the wedding - Vint does not cry - and yes, I spend ages retouching poseballs / making them vanish in Photoshop. Dear SL wedding organisers, is it that much asked to hide the poseballs when they are not used?!

Tags: bruges, elise bourne, photography, wedding, yves welles
Categories: Photography, Second Life
12 Comments »

A lot can happen in a week’s time. Especially if it involves OpenSim: green dots on the mini-map get fixed, avatars now look in the right direction when staring at a fellow avie, physics is enabled and a lot more solid/stable and megaprims holding entire regions are born imported using XML.

So? Time to celebrate and throw an OpenSim party at Zion/Ruth. (That it’s a great way to test performance as well, well… :p)

Short ‘Vintish’ machinima from the OpenSim crash party (and there are rumours that other - probably better - machinima’s are being filmed/processed as we speak):

Icky, ugly, YouTube compression! :( :( :( Anybody knows a better video hosting thingie with embed functionality?

For those who need a recap on how to login to OpenSim Ruth: if you want to try Ruth out for yourself, and test the OpenSim, Testa User to Testz User are available for your exploration pleasures. This is how you do it:

• If you have a shortcut to the Second Life client on your desktop, copy it and name it ‘Second Life OpenSim Ruth’. If not, create one.
• Right click it and look at it it’s properties. Normally under ‘Target’ it says: “C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe” -set SystemLanguage en-us. Just add -loginuri http://ruth.petitbe.be:9000/ to the end of it, so you get “C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe” -set SystemLanguage en-us -loginuri http://ruth.petitbe.be:9000/.
• Use that shortcut to open the Second Life client. You should automatically connect to Ruth. As user name you can choose from Testa User up to Testz User, and the pass for all is ‘test’.

And the second option, which is my prefered one:

• Go to ‘Start’ and then choose ‘Run’.
• Type cd c:\program files\secondlife\ (or whatever path your SL client is located).
• Press enter.
• Type secondlife.exe -loginuri http://ruth.petitbe.be:9000/ .
• Press enter.
• See the Second Life client starting up and login with Testa to Testz User and password ‘test’ or bug Dalien (gently!) to get a private, personalised account.

If you see any Vint Falken running around, you can assume safely that’s me, so say ‘hi’. ;)

Tags: machinima, open sim, ruth
Categories: OpenSim
11 Comments »

1. Troy McConaghy - Open Source Holo-Emitter for SL - Open Source holodeck / holo emetting system from Troy McConaughy.
2. Interfacing your human to your avatar with a game controller - Oh, hush! - Tobie reports on her using a game controller for controlling her avatar without having to use the arrow keys. Neat. My human considers. :p
3. Cisco launches Second Life-like site for resellers, developers - Cisco launches a webbased virtual world for channel partners. No flying or playing ‘dress up’ though.
4. 3pointD.com - Cruxy’s Bitchin’ Music Map For Second Life - Cruxy have released a music map for Second Life that lets you see which Cruxy artists are being played at which locations in the virtual world. Neat!
5. Dutch Politicians Furious With Prosecutor for Dropping SL Ageplay Investigation - ‘There is only a prosecutable case if the virtual children are so realistic that you can’t tell whether they are real or not. You have to be thinking there is really a child involved. SL is too much a computer animation.’
6. Under The Grid - Releasing the Second Life server software - Second Life Insider - Philip Rosedale estimated that server-side simulator software would be open sourced within approximately twelve more months. There are a number of interesting blocking issues involved in opening up the server software.

Categories: Links
3 Comments »

1. Fashion Victim - The LuxAce Lighting HUD - Looks like one of the more ‘functional’ facelights. Gabriel Watanabe is claimed to be working on a ‘wearable SL distance controlled flash’ device too.
2. Second Life Versus Kittens: A Clear Loss - Ordinal Malaprop compares Kittens to Second Life. A hilaroius, but true story. ;) (And make sure to read Crap’s reply too.)
3. Second Effects - More from Rezzable / Greenies ? - ArminasX Saiman went to take a look at the other - non-Greenies non-Cannery - Rezzable sims still under construction.

Categories: Links
4 Comments »

Recently, and a while ago, there has been some discussion around if ‘photoshopping’ Second Life snapshots and calling it SL photography is trickery or not. Imho, photoshopping Second Life snapshots is no more trickery then the photoshopped First Life images you see in every fashion machine. Believe me, those real life models do not have a seamless, smooth skin either. ;) Neither are RL light circomstances always perfect or is the appropriate setting present/affordable.

This snapshot I took from Tiessa Montgolfier at the SL Bloggers officers’ meeting gave me the necessary cleavage opportunity and inspiration to play around with shadows a bit more than I normally do. And yes, I did mention to her there is no limit on the ‘hugeness’ of prims on OpenSim. Just imagine: megaprim boobs! ;)

Post processing fun

Amongst others:

• Different layer modes + opacity (on whole layer).
• Shadow/highlights.
• Do liquify.
• ‘Drop Shadow’ blend (all different settings, but I kept the light settings constant) mode on
  • complete Tiessa.
  • the prim breasts.
  • just the top.
• Manual dodging and burning on the details: collar, limbs, stockings, face, … .
• Gaussian blur 1px on the whole layer (masked out some of the details).
• Some overal spot correction (clone stamp with 0% hardness).
• Color correction on the prim breasts.
• Grew a rainforest to improve the view.

And the results?

Impressive cleavage.

Tags: photography, photoshop, post processing, quotes, shadows, tiessa montgolfier
Categories: Photography, Photoshop
49 Comments »

(keep in mind that only SL Bloggers group members may vote)

Tags: logo, sl bloggers
Categories: SL Blogs
17 Comments »

I was one happy Second Life blogger when on August 21 2007 VintFalken.com reached 2000 comments when Shockwave Plasma hit the ’submit’ button on this post, pondering her return to Pownce. As I do not reach 2k comments each day - or week, or month as a matter of fact - it was worth doing something extra for this:

Now, originally this is a rather big file, so I do want to give Shockwave a real life print - if she is interested in having one, that is. But: this one is on me (on my google adsence revenue, actually ;)) and I don’t want her to feel obliged to give out her RL address / data to me. So I’m looking for:

1. A good online photograph printing service
2. that allows to give out gift certificates by e-mail or code number for an amount I choose
3. and allows Shockwave to use that gift certificate for a photograph I upload
4. and delivers to that part of Earth where Shockwave Plasma’s owner resides.

Suggestions, anybody? (Or any other solution, of course.)

PS. Next celebration of important milestone in my Second Web Life is 50k views - 44,778 as I type - on the Flickr stream. Codie is waiting for me to reach that as she promised me we’d celebrate ‘50k’ together in ‘Par Tay’ style. =)

Tags: portrait, shockwave plasma, sl to rl, vintfalken.com
Categories: Portrait, VintLabs, Vintfalken.com
10 Comments »

1. Very Hungry Kitten - Video - Blame Shoshana for this one ending up here. But he’s so so so so sooooooooooooo cute. When I grow up and am a mature Neko, I want to be just like him! :d
2. SLart at the Cannery - SL Photo Guru Shoshana Epsilon Teaches Skills at Cannery - Shoshana is teaching class this Saturday. Subjects will include Put Light on the Subject, Isolate the Subject, and Adding Clarity. The seminar will be taught Saturday September 8 at 11am, and again Sunday, September 9 at 5am SL time.
3. SecondNews.org - Yet another Second Life news service, close to release. I wonder what this one will be like, and why the different SL newspapers/blogs don’t team up, in stead of just ‘multiply’.
4. On-Demand Streaming for Second Life - Mashable - Origin is now also supplying streaming audio and video into Second Life for it’s customers. If they use anything else but than the default media & audio streams, this is interesting. If not, where’s the news?

Categories: Links
23 Comments »

‘… Finally, and due to a technical problem - of Linden Lab - during the count, the votes were lost without possibility of recovering them, reason why the result of the process was the one that already has commented. In any case, the reading of the note in cursiva in both letters is interesting: “This is a satire - what it means that is fictitious, not “a real” election. Has treated, then, of an experiment - of political shade, without a doubt - in “real time” within the virtual world? Of to have been thus: Directed by whom? Linden Lab? To analyze the behavior/interest of the residents in the self-government, its political tendencies… or is a previous test to possible elections in SL?‘

Is what I read when I Google Translate translated this document Dolmere pointed me to to English. Lokikn Allen, the author of ‘el metaverso político’, promised in Dolmere’s comments to translate the article in English. Although if I’m not mistaken, he says he makes that promis as a politician, so… :p

But a few things:

• This was not an actual political experiment, and no way Linden Labs was involved in this. It’s just something Myg & Alex, Wrath, I and some others came up with. We showed some ‘worst case’ scenario’s for Second Life’s future and some real good utopia ones. And we have proven that a lot of Residents do have ideas about Second Life’s future and do wish to be involved in one way or another, besides just being treathed as ‘targets for RL corporations’.
• The votes did not ‘really’ get lost. There was no voting held as there is no way for us to detrone Governor Philip Linden. We were rather sure that at that moment in time - and maybe even now, who knows - by our readers public, he would not have been reelected. As inventory loss was one of the huge grid problems we were facing at that moment in time, it was the best way to solve the problem to give him another term as Governor of Second Life. As we clearly stated: this is satire, SL political role playing.
• I had a lot of fun being ‘Candidate Vint Falken’. *grins* Eventhough Candidate Vint Falken was roleplaying too and there was a lot of satire in my campaign, I did get to ‘tackle’ one issue that I’m really worried about. And response was positive and showed that I was not the only one worrying.
• I still want to see that machinima someday, Wrath. ;) *even bigger grin*

Tags: SLelections 2007
Categories: SLelections2007
6 Comments »