Summer Vacation: Day 5

Sorry I haven't been keeping up :) Part of being on vacation for me is letting things slide ;D

Okay, so my last post was... Let me check...

OH YEAH!! Sunday!!!

Okay, so after I described my wonderous walk, Brian and I went in-world and played around for a while. We actually treked across a considerable swath of SecondLife! I don't remember exactly how it started...

He was asking me about this device I have called a Host Watch. It keeps in-world time, but it also has a slew of other abilities, as well! One of them is the ability to rez object -- like vehicles -- on other people's land.

Here's the significance of that: Let's say I want to go driving around. But I don't have a stretch of road next to my property. I fly around until I find a stretch of road, then tell my watch to "rez" my car. (If you've seen TRON, rezzing is the opposite of derezzing. If you're too young to have seen TRON, go back and watch it; you may be surprised by some the concepts and how they've actually come to be -- in different forms -- in the ACTUAL evolution of computer programming. And while you're at at watch Michael Crichton's LOOKER! There's A LOT there -- in reguards to HOW marketing works -- that came to pass a long time ago; even though we're much farther from duplicating humans in the computer than they thought we would be by now.)

Anyway, I was testing out my Host Watch, seeing just where all I could rezz my vehicles, and I ended up sailing a strecth of water I hadn't sailed before. I was sailing not too far off from some of his land -- a patch that we use to build stuff on. He noticed that if I followed the waterway I was on, I could land no too far from where another patch of our land is -- a patch that contains the Whitelight Entertainment building.

It's my vacation... I had the time :)

So I went sailing, and Brian decided to catch up with me and we sailed together! (He has very generously moved the best computer into the dining area, so I get to use it... But that means he was on the eMachine... So I navigated and he just followed me and prayed the computer he was on didn't crash.) After we landed we discovered we were just a sim ("sim" stands for "simulation" or "simulator", in SL terms, and describes a HUGE square of land... and everything on it, and above it, including the sky -- ALL the way up) away from out land. So we decided to continue the trek on foot.

We played around with using vehicles, but they got stuck several times, so we just walked the rest of the way. (We could have easily just flown, but that would have violated the spirit of this trek.)

Just as we're arriving, my SL gf logged in and IMed me! She hadn't seen the Whitelight building, so I offered her a teleport to where we were and showed her around. Afterward we went to a store called Omega Concerns and both she and Brian bought their own Host Watches.

Brian noticed a patch of land with a tribute to the Twin Towers, so we all went there and checked it out. (The Twin Towers have profound personal significance for my SL sweety.) Also on the land were automated horse-drawn carriages and some horses; my gf and I hopped in a carriage and Brian hopped on a horse.

And from the Whitelight building to the store to the carriages, we had the MOST ASTOUNDINGLY FUNNY coinversation I've been a part of in a VERY LONG TIME!!!

See THAT'S one of the things I love MOST about SL!!! You can be flying attach choppers or dancing or just whatever you can imagine, and if you've got cool, smart, funny people with you you can find yourself enjoying HOURS (literally) of just GREAT conversation!!! It can be profound, it can be intelligent, or it can make you roll on the floor laughing! I mean, the three of us could have had that conversation in the living room, no ploblem (except my baby doesn't live around here) but the fact that it took place as 2 of us were riding a horse-drawn carriage and the other of us was on a horse circling the opposite direction to us just ADDED to the atmosphere! (AND the jokes! Burnt-out situational comedy writers need to spend some time in SL!) I actually saved the conversation, it was SO FUNNY, but I wouldn't feel right publishing it.

So anyway, the last half of my Sunday was just SPECTACULAR!!!

Monday... Umm...

Monday Mom took Brian and me shopping :) That's always fun!

I believe I played 2 or 3 levels of BUFFY, too :)

I don't remember SL being particularly memorable... excpet that I sold a couple of my Superman avatars that I designed to look like the movie Superman(s). The other one I've seen in-world is more like the 1950s/1960s comic book incarnation. But with SUPERMAN RETURNS coming out this summer, I figured some people -- like myself -- would want a movie incarnation.

And I was correct, apparently ;) More on that in a sec.

I also got to IM with my daughter for an hour or so! That was cool!!!

TUESDAY...

Tuesday was THE DAY!

You may recall that on Uber Friday I reported having purchased a couple of tickets to the 10p advance screening (BEFORE OPENING DAY) of SUPERMAN RETURNS...

Well yesterday WE SAW IT, BABY!!!

Don't worry (Tommy) no spoilers here ;P And I don't want to overhype the movie, either, BUT I LOVED THIS FLICK!!!

Listen, if you're into the Superman movies and are waiting till the weekend to watch it, or waiting until the crowds die down (like next weekend, when PIRATES opens) go ahead and watch the first 2 SUPERMAN flicks again! One, it'll prime ya for how much further sfx and screenwriting have come in the last 20+ years, but more than that it'll prepare you for some very clever nods in this flick to its predicessors! (Is that how you spell it?)

I notice that one of the big differences of Superman in film and recent TV, and all the other incarnations -- THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, any animated series before 1997, the radio series and even most of the comics themselves -- is that the film medium concentrates on Superman's humanity. See, it's hard to care about an imortal man who is invulnerable. It's hgard to emotionally invest in The Man of Steel.

But what Richard Donner and Tom Mankiewicz showed us is that just because your body is invulnerable to pain doesn't mean your emotions are! And Bryan Singer and Michael Dougherty & Dan Harris (the screenwriters; Singer came up with the story with them but Dougherty & Harris wrote the actual script) are smart, smart cats! They get what makes Superman work in the film medium and they tailored this movie to give us the most bang for out buck!

I seriosuly LOVED it! And Brian did too! We had so much fun talking about it afterward that we had to pop in the 2nd flick to catch up on stuff we weren't sure about! (He's been playing the first flick since Friday, when I got I and II in the mail. So it's fresh in both our minds.)

I started reading the novelization of the movie because I couldn't wait for the movie to come out. I got about halfway through it. Now I'll be finishing it because I want to re-experience the movie!

And today, Day 5...

Um...

Woke up with an itch to animate, so I began creating the head of my first character for a quirky little short I may or may not finish. (It took me all day today to get a single chicken head in 2 possitions, lol!)

I got to spend time with my sweety!

I also got to help Mom out!

I emailed her a copy of our short script "The Caretaker" but she doesn't have Acrobat Reader. So I took a copy in doc format to her place and printed it out for her. I also tried to salvage the short stories that she had written over the last few years, but it wasn't possible. Some new hoity-toity version of Microsoft Word corrupted the pre-Windows-XP files and now they're gibberish! So basically, my mom's gonna have to REWRITE THE STORIES SHE WANTS TO KEEP!!!

I don't get why programmer creating what they think is the Next Badass Program can't avoid trying to reinvent the wheel!!! If it's NOT BROKEN than don't friggin' "fix" it!!!

My friend Tommy spent I-Don't-Know-HOW-MANY months shooting his adaptation of "The Tell-Tale Heart" -- his first baby, his first masterpiece! But he made some post-production choices that didn't work out (he was WAY ahead of his time tenologically) and after he had learned a better way to approach it and went back to recut the original footage, he discovered that the codec he used to store the raw footage NO LONGER EXISTS!!!

What happened to Tommy and my mom is the result of someone, like, figured out a more efficient way to store money than banks, and then they burned down all the banks in the world... Without giving people a chance (or a mean) to withdraw their money BEFORE the banks were burned down.

Blah.

I'm on vacation. Rant over.

Anyway, Mom sent me home with homework: I got to burn her first mix cd for her tongiht :) It's really cute! How many mix cds include Captain & Tennille and Sonny James?!! :D (She's got some Phil Cillins and Elvis in there... I'm NOT saying my mom's square or anything.)

OH! And while I was burning I got to listen to Lux Radio's adaptaion of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL!!! believe it or not -- Sci-Fi geek that I am -- I just haven't gotten around to watching the movie yet! But I got to HEAR it this evening!!! :)

ALSO, today alone I sold 5 Superman avatars!!! (If you're not initiated into SL, wearing a Superman avatar would be like wearing the costume... as well as the body. You've got the hair, the muscles the blue eyes... ALL of it. And in SL you can already fly!)

I put the avatar out for sale a couple of weeks agao, and I sold, like, 3. But then I sold one Monday, 2 yesterday and 5 today! :D AND... I supect that after more people see the movie, more will want to buy the avatar! ;) (It's a GOOD movie!)

I think that brings us pretty much up to date.

Brian's building stuff in-world on the cool computer, so I may steal the PS2 away from him and try to get somewhere in Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. (I'm so used to using the keyboard with Laura Crogt that the PS2 controler is just awkward...)

Hope your Hump Day went well, and I hope the rest of your week IS EVEN BETTER!!!