Keeping to the motto ’stick with your crew’ - and because I still feel quite guilty about decapitating him a while ago - I decided to do some effort and help Winter Jefferson with campaigning for Hottest Male Avatar 2008. Do you dig hansom, witty guys that aren’t afraid to leave bite marks? Then Winter’s the one to vote for! ‘Nuff said. Go vote!

Image CC Attribution Non-commercial No-derives so you can Plurk, Twitter, Rezz, Texture, Print, … our lovely Winter as much as you want. The version I have is large enough to do a desktop background, IF there is any demand for that (lemme know which dimensions you need).

Tags: contest, winter jefferson
Categories: Contests, Photoshop, Portrait
2 Comments »

Rezzable & Language Lab have come together to celebrate cultural diversity in SL by holding a Global Music Festival for the month of September. Throughout the festival, September 6-28th, Rezzable is sponsoring the ‘Captured Proverbs’ Second Life Photography Contest. This is not your typical photo contest; it is a celebration of the RL diversity that helps make SL special. This is your chance to showcase your Real Life Culture by taking the best photo in SL that represents something typical to your home country & culture: it’s proverbs. Prizes are abundant, with 30,000L$ and lots of in world goodies for the first prize winner. For more info - I’m not going to write this all down twice! ;) - visit the ‘Captured Proverbs’ SL Photography Contest for GMF webpage on the Rezzable website. For those wondering, ‘GMF’ is - of course - short for ‘Global Music Festival’. Enjoy the creative process and snapshotting!

Tags: contest, language lab, photography, rezzable, snapshot
Categories: Art, Contests, Rezzable, Second Life
No Comments »

The human <3's her hair. Mind you, she does not always takes great care for it - dreads, breads, bells & wistles, coloured thread, ... all this could be found inbetween the real hair in the past, but that meant more hair to hide behind, and more hair that she could feel gently gliding over her shoulders when moving her head. As she definitely has more than the 10 inch of hair needed to donate to Locks of Love (I'm sure she has 20 inches and can make a double donation) I told her about it, and suggested she'd take scissors, get rid of the hair, put it in an envelope and mail it the USA for the good cause of making wigs for children that are bald because of illness. Will you believe she blatantly refused?!! I told her it would grow back - a luxury we don't have, inventory lost is inventory lost, but no... that did not help.

So no other option for me left, than to attempt to do something for the Hair Fair 2008 and thus for Locks of Love my-humble-neko-self. I’m currently working on phase I: getting as much people as possible to know about the Hair Fair, using both my blog, the Rezzable Blog - they are sponsoring SL Hair Fair 2008 with the 4 event sims - and Flickr. Hair Fair 2008 is organising a photocontest on flickr - read more about the rules and submit here - and behold my entry:

I risk the chance to be instantly disqualified - no text! rule - but I figured the huge amount of colour and glowy, sparkling hair needed some explanation. :d The only problem I have with this photograph is that it is not very ‘Vintish’. I have black, ebony hair. I’m sure of that. But I wanted the effect that you get when you backlight blond hair. And I had no blond hair in my inventory, so I had to do with red. And then there was that beautiful colourful sunset that I could not help but using… and in the end, it seems to.. colourful.. to magically, fairytale happy. What you?

Anwyay, phase II of the ’support Hair Fair 2008 plan will be shop until you drop and add a few bandana’s to the collection on bandana day. Does anybody know of a creator that sells them with cut-outs for neko ears? :d

Tags: bandana, contest, flickr, hair fair, locks of love, rezzable, second life, special events
Categories: Contests, Fashion, Second Life
1 Comment »

I’m not a frequent visitor of the Metanomics sessions, not because they are not interesting - far from - but mainly because of lack of time. But tonight, there’s one that is a definitely must attend. Metanomics will be hosting an entire show on the User Interface. This event will take place this evening, Tuesday at 2:00 PM SLT. (That’s 23h normal people’s time and 22h UK time. ;)) During this broadcast, Dusan Writer will reveal the winners of his L$800,000 contest to design a better user interface. Adam Frisby will discuss his exploration of the viewer possibilities associated with OpenSim, including XBAP (and Xenki), one possible method for creating a viewer that meshes seamlessly with your browser. After this show, you may never want to look at Second Life the same way again! Residents may participate in the live broadcast at one of the Metanomics sites in-world or through Chatbridge technology which allows people to participate by voice while outside of Second Life. Seeing the recent discovery of the ‘SLim’ trademark filed by Linden Lab, I assume there will be some more discussion also, on what people expect/hope SLim to be.

If you are in the crowd there, do come and say ‘hi!!!’ I hereby also reserve the right to give the winners 3 - and all the other contestants 1 - animated virtual kisses. *Waves* See - or hear - you tonight, then?! ;)

Be prepared, and read:

1. My quick write up of the first presentation of the contestants of their user interface design to the jury
2. The entries from all the participating finalists

More information on tonight’s Metanomics event:

1. The official event listing on metanomics
2. RSVP for the event on Facebook

Tags: contest, metanomics, second life, user interface
Categories: Contests, Second Life
2 Comments »

As you all might know, Dusan Writer promised a worthwhile bounty - 800 000 LS - for the best theorical new “GUI” design for the Second Life client. Today together with Keystone Bouchard, Eristica Strangelove, Ordinal Malaprop and Dusan Writer and an impressive crowd I listened (and read) to 5 of the 6 presentations of the contestant. Woot! and Impressive! Obviously a lot of thoughts went into these designs, and each of it had some great ideas that Lindens could implement. Shall Lindens do so? I don’t know. But as Marc Linden recently stated: ‘We also launched a new initiative to completely redesign the viewer from top to bottom – recognizing that new users don’t need such a dizzying array of features, and experienced users, land and business owners and content creators need better tools that are more thoughtfully designed and organized for their needs. Everyone needs better inventory management and search is due for an overhaul. We hear you. We’re on it.’ Contestants are McCabe Maxsted, Rheta Shan, Jacek Antonelli, Damien Fate and Roy Cassini. Links to their entries you can find at Dusan Writer’s blog.

Some of the great suggestions that dazzled me:

1. Getting rid of the taskbar below, using the sides of your screen more, to accommodate the mass that is using multimedia widescreen monitors and laptops.
2. Making it possible to change perms on objects from within the inventory window, not needing to open properties for each and every object.
3. Grouping all communication options in the lower left corner. (A constant throughout the UI design suggestions.)
4. ‘Send to’ option in inventory window.
5. Option to ‘favourite’ inventory objects, and sort to see only fav items.
6. Sort by creator for inventory.

Features/ideas that were not mentioned in the presentations but that I would love to see added:

1. Sort friends in groups, need be this information is stored locally.
2. Option to ‘colour code favourite’ objects in inventory, sort objects by colour. Eg. Only show items that are annotated as blue, as they are work ones. Or green, as they are personal. Or pink as they are SLex related. Etc.
3. Return a full functional record film/machinima recording function.
4. Client functionality is skinnable. Content creators can in some way distrubute a viewer that is kept up to date by LL. Certain functions & menus can be disabled (eg. fly, rezz objects, chat, … compare it to the restraint life client), LM’s & objects added to library, arrival points set, windlight settings, etc. When the viewer needs to be updated, it keeps the information from that file about functionality. At any point a user can click ‘revert my viewer to the standard one’, or return to the presets, which can be multiple from different companies.
5. Buying and selling L$ in general to be more prominent present in the Second Life UI.

What about you? What do you think about the entries, and what would you like to see changed in, added to or taken out of the Second Life client as we know it?

Tags: contest, second life client, user interface
Categories: Contests, Second Life
15 Comments »

Certainly once, you have felt surrounded with reality in SL… a true moment of emotion, a real expression on a friendly face…. is the tagline for Koinup’s ‘One Second of Reality’ photography. The aim? Right, you can guess it already: To capture an instant of reality, and have viewers believe the photo was taken in RL. The challenge here is to share with the community what for a second seemed real to you. We hope you will go beyond still-life shots and try to show us emotions that are real, no matter where - Second Life - or what is happening. ‘One second of reality’ aims to find out where reality begins for you. Try to mesmerize the jury and make us believe the photo was taken in RL.

The prizes

The winner of the “Jury Prize” will receive his/her work printed and framed in high quality format and the winner of the “Community Prize”, the coolest work in Koinup, will receive a complete package from Never 30 including a N30 studio, poses kit, lights… and more. Both winners will have the chance to participate to an exhibition in a RL gallery: LaCantina, located in the center of Paris. Winning photos will also be displayed on Orange Island (Orange 1, 195/134/30) for a minimum of three weeks.

The Jurors

Winners of the “Jury Prize” will be picked by a contest jury composed by Margharita Balzerani (curator at “Le Palais de Tokyo”, Paris, contemporary art museum), Marco Manray (photographer SL and author of the book “IO, REPORTER IN SECOND LIFE”) and ‘moi’.

The ruleset

1. In order to take part in this contest, you must have an account on Koinup. Registration is free.
2. The theme of the contest is “One second of reality”. The aim of the contest is to capture an instant of reality, and have viewers believe the photo was taken in RL. (As far as I care, this means you can have a Neko in there, as long as it looks real.)
3. The challenge here is to share with the community what for a second seemed real to you. We hope you will go beyond still-life shots and try to show us emotions are real, no matter where they happen.
4. Photos can be taken in-world using any available means (such as Second Life photo studios) except RL photographic backgrounds.
5. Photos can also be post-processed using programs such as Photoshop.
6. You are allowed to use tricks, and encouraged to share your technique. SLURL are welcome.
7. Photos should be submitted to the contest by posting them on Koinup. To submit a photo to the contest, please insert the tag ‘orangephotocontest’
8. Photos already posted on Koinup before June 9th cannot be submitted to the contest. Please submit new works.
9. The contest is restricted to Second Life residents and is a photography contest; artistic media other than photography are not allowed.
10. No brand logos or hidden advertisement. No sex, violence or offending contents. Black and white accepted.
11. Each participant can submit up to three photos.
12. Photos will remain on Koinup after the end of the contest.

My definition of ‘Real’

Of course, the ‘reality’ of a SL photograph lies in the eye of the beholder, and this beholder spends way to much time inworld, so I’m having problems with the real / not-real border. ;) BUT there are a few things that help me convince things are real:

1. Convincing shadows. Even when shooting with a softbox IRL, there _are_ shadows, they just are subtle. Regardless if they are subtle or over-present (film noir), make those shadows match! Second Life gives you total control about where the sun comes from (the height your avie finds itself, the time of the day, location of the sun and the height of the sun.) Use that! You even want to consider testing if the ‘Shadow’ branch client runs on your system.
2. Second Life tends to oversaturate things, giving them their comic/3D animation look. Try to start of with a hazy, foggy setting, and lessen the fog/haze until it’s just perfect. Better not enough gamma brightness than to much gamma brightness! It happens IRL photographs too, bleached out areas, but it’s not something that looks good most of the time.
3. If you are shooting indoors, you definitely want to put your ’sun’ strength to almost zero and the ‘ambient’ light up to compensate. Harsh shadows almost exist inside. Except if you have only one hard lightsource (extreme spotlight, or one sunny window.) If you have multiple light sources, you might want multiple (soft) shadows.
4. COLOUR TEMPERATURE! Back in those old real life photography days, you used to have separate sets of film & lens filters, depending on the colour temperature. This is - although or brain filters it out IRL - each type of light source emits a different coloured light. A good example is: shadow areas are blue, sunsets are yellowish. A good article about this can be found here. You can give a slight hunch of the colour temperature, but SL pushes it. Also, when doing for instance ’sunset’, it forces that colour temperature in extremis on the complete photograph although that does not necessary need to be the case, were it shot IRL. If you have two different light sources, you’ll need two different colour temperatures.
5. Reflections! Almost every object reflects in real life. Wearing a bright green sweater? Not a good idea! It will probably make your face look green. Your eyes? Right… they reflect light. If you have a metallic, shiny object, it is bound to reflect parts of the environment around it, and it’s colour on the environment.
6. Sense of depth. Depth Map + Lens Blur. Or manual blurring. Does not need to be exaggerated, though. This happens IRL when you shoot either a) Macro stuff or b) in Dark areas.
7. Motion blur. Definitely something that needs to be postprocessed. Only if you’re up to it! ;)
8. Step off the standard viewer wide-angle lens. Standard RL photography lens is 50mm. Press ctrl+0 twice. At least. (ctrl+9 to reset)

And there are more: round shapes should be round, shadow on clothing textures should match the atmosphere of your photograph, … . Guess you can’t include them all in one photograph, but I’m damn curious what people will come up with! Here are already some of the entries. Oh, and one final thing, obviously fake photoshop sun reflections in your photograph, are NOT the way to go! ;) To participate, go to the Koinup contest page.

Tags: contest, koinup, photography, photoshop
Categories: Contests, Photography, Photoshop
2 Comments »

A few weeks back the three first price winners of the Koinup WindLight Contest were announced. Today they were celebrated in world with a live performance of Jax Streeter and an exhibition of their photographs and 7 ‘honourable mentionings’ at the Rezzable ‘Cannery’.

Seeing there works on display in the virtual world was sure as hell impressive, and so was the music and the guests… Miss Ravenelle and Mister Torley ‘Linden’ Olmstead. Woot! I must admit, this was the first time for me to see Torley IRL.. euhm.. IVL and I was kinda stuttering. First thing Torley said to me? ‘Is that a watermelon drink you’re holding?’ :p

Jax Streeter gave the best of his virtual self and played one hell of a set - with ‘Avatar Superstar’ as my favourite song. As promised, I bumped the song 9 times on TheSixtyOne.com and gave Mr. Streeter my underwear layer. He has at least one new fan after this gig! /me hums: ‘No matter where you’re from. No matter who you are. In this world… you are… superstar… avatar. Play like you are. Act like you are. Rezz like a superstar, avatar!‘

More photographs of the exhibition opening in the Koinup Windlight Exhibition Opening Flickr set. For those curious: All photographs except the one of Torley Olmstead were shot with the ‘Pirate’ WindLight Preset.

The winning entries and 7 nominees for the Koinup Windlight Contest will still be on display in-world for a few week, so if you missed the opening, you can still go and see them. Correction, you should still go and see them! Directions: Open your map and search for ‘Cannery’ (or click this SLURL), upon arrival at the Cannery sim, you’ll see a big sign saying ‘Koinup & Rezzable’. Click the TP disk located under it, and we’ll get you right to where you need to be… but you won’t hear a live concert of Mr. Streeter.

PS. A certain Miss Mira owns me bandages for my poor little sour paws. Never ever give me a lighter before telling me to detach it when I plan on typing! ;)

Mr. Jax Streeter performing ‘Avatar Superstar’:

Tags: cannery, contest, jax streeter, koinup, music, rezzable, torley linden, windlight
Categories: Art, Contests, Music, Photography, Rezzable
1 Comment »

Le jeudi 24 avril soir, j’ai gag…. euhm… wait… I won! I won! I won! What did I win? Best ‘photograph’ - virtual world photograph, that is - in the Dr Muglerstein’s Machinima & Fantastic Picture Experience contest. Yeeey! Winning in the category ‘Art de la métamorphose’ with my Valentine Squid pic - I love it even more now, it also won me the Koinup contest - I’ll receive a large print of me kissing the squid. And it will get to hang in Paris somewhere. Yeeey! All hail squids! ;)

Other winners are:

1. Machinima - Marie Lauridsen
2. Instantané Paysage fantastique - Amelia Fayray
3. Instantané Portrait d’avatar mutant - Maya

I must admit I am a bit jealous of the machinima winner Miss Lauridsen. She will get a real life sculpture of her avatar, crafted by Standard Non Standard. I’m extremely curious how that one will look, and if the French company ‘Standard Non Standard’ is better at replicating avatars than the company we all now from the ‘take your avatar to work day’ ads. What they have up at their website under 3D printing (click ‘impression 3D’) seems promising.

But despite my jealousy, I’m already really happy I won in the first place. I did not expect that to happen at all. You can see the winning machinima, photographs and the other submissions at the Dr Muglerstein Island in Second Life. Oh, and don’t be surprised if they say ‘allo’ in stead of ‘hi’. ;)

Tags: contest, french, mugler, photography
Categories: Art, Contests
5 Comments »

I hate it when the internet eats my copy. Ah well. Less time waisted for you people on reading my blog! ;)

I could not choose between these two fabulous entries, so there’s a shared first place. The two winners for my ‘10 000L$ Bounty for Best Trademark Parody’ are:

Kanomi with
the Tiny Dancing® Brand Center

Niko Donburi
who added another two verses to his ‘Dear Linden’ song.

The other great submissions are listed in the comments on the original blogpost. Hooray to all, there’s some incredibly funny and marvellous stuff you guys and girls created!

Tags: inSL, linden lab, parody, second life, trademark
Categories: Contests
5 Comments »

Yeeeey! We have reached a dazzling 5000 comments - that does include track- and pingbacks, but not the 30.000 spam comments Askimet caught for me - here at vintfalken.com. Yes, I know, vintfalken.com is not a group blog, so why am I saying ‘we’? Well, none of those ‘conversations’ on my blog posts could have taken place without YOUR input, so thank you so very much! ;) Yes of course, some might say I just like to listen to myself speak, but I must point out that is not the case, and I utterly love people commenting here, sharing their thoughts and opinions, tips, solutions, complaints, dreams, hopes, good and bad jokes, … .

So as a big ‘thank you’ I’ve asked some kick ass Second Life creators, if they were willing to hand out some merchandise to the persons who made comment 5000 - 5005. As both Stephen Venkman and Kailie Quinn could not keep their mouths shut at the time I reached 5k - hey, I’m not complaining, please continue commenting here! ;) - and I got more than 5 things to give away, I’m just going to give something to everybody featured in the top 5000 to 5010, minus myself.

This means that:

Stephen Venkman - known for his Second Life photography - gets Miss Juliet Ceres’ beautifully created ‘Fitz’ avatar. Fitz was my favourite avatar to run around in during the last week. I just could not stop looking at myself walking when wearing Fitz and I would just *smile*. I’m sure Mr. Venkman will look dazzling as a mechanical steam-powered kitty! *purrrrsss* Read more on the Fitz avatar on the NPIRL blog. If you want one of your own, Miss Ceres has more of them available in-world.

Kailie Quinn - aka Katarina Malthus - gets Miss Ceres’ skilfully sculpted Wastelands Armour, an all time favourite of me. Perfect for wearing when you are in an hostile environment, or just want to look ‘though’. Maybe she can use it to collar Mister Venkman in ‘Fitz mode’ and take him for a walk? ;) As said before, Miss Juliet’s stuff can be found in-world at Virago.

Wordfromthe Wise - who participated in the ‘10000L$ bounty for best trademark parody’ contest - will receive CodeBastard Redgrave’s marvellous Machinimacam, which enables you to make better, more interesting machinima. You don’t have to limit yourself to filming your own avatar walking anymore! ;) I wonder if his - or her - next entry for a contest will be a machinima now?

Kanomi Pikajuna - ‘Kanomi is important. Kanomi is special. Kanomi matters. She is the friend to all. Everybody likes her! Everybody likes the nice girl who is the friend to all. She is nice and important and she is special and important and the nice special important friend to all! Kanomi is important! Kanomi matters!‘ - receives not one, but three different prizes, all created by virtual fashion designer Sofia London. Soon Kanomi will be the proud owner of a lurveBite after glow dress, a guy beater tank top and the black ink dress.

Notorious clothing collector Veyron Supercharge - well, as long as the clothing does not reveal to much, that is - has won famous designer Rebel Hope’s awesome Cleopatra outfit: ‘Cleopatra is a 23 piece costume including bodice, pants, skirt wrap, two options of snake arm bands, prim shoes with jewels w/base, jeweled ankle bands, scarab jeweled bracelets, ankh and jeweled staffs (one with a crossed arm pose), lighting system to cast a beautiful light on her upper body, crown of jewels with sculpted prims, sculpted jewelled necklace, Cleopatra cross arm pose separately also, and the box is Cleopatra’s Needle and is included in the package.‘ The throne she will have to buy herself, though. Or… does anybody feel like being her Marcus Antonius? ;)

Last but not least, Mister Tao Takashi will receive a an exclusive beta version of ‘The Ordinal Wilks&Co Vertical Clock-Loading Pistol’, created and donated by steampunk creator Miss Ordinal Malaprop. Rumours go that the pistol refusing services, or misbehaving occasionally is intentional. As this is an exclusive beta, I do not own one of myself, nor could I supply a photograph. So I’m very curious at seeing the ‘Ordinal Wilks&Co Vertical Clock-Loading Pistol’ depicted and tested. Mr Takashi, fire away! ;)

(As all winners were unaware they were entering a contest, they will be notified by email and asked if they want to receive the gift before they are being shipped.)

Tags: contest, vintfalken.com
Categories: Contests, Vint Falken, Vintfalken.com
8 Comments »