41 of 52 - The Traveller

Hermes Kondor is an artist I discovered a long time ago. He describes himselves as

"Spiritual healer
Student of Spirituality
Digital artist
Professional Photographer, in RL and SL"

I am impressed with his used of colors; vivid and strong, yet not over the edge. The motives are often a bit mysterious; focusing on spirituality and (as I feel it) space. His new exhibit, The Traveller, is really a must-see. Grab the taxi and discover your own spirituality.

I'm off for some live music; Max is in town:-)

35 of 52 - Live music - Offline vacation post 1

Joonie sendt a group message about a concert gig last weekend. It turned out it was a set of live-sendt sessions, streamed to SL on a big screen. Sadly, my early timezone made me miss all except an early jam session, but it was a nice expericene to be able to see the real musicians.

While pure SL sessions with avatars on stage is nice enough, you do miss the varied expressions of artists, probably because the animations normally used in such gigs are just repetitive steps and playing motions. There is a distinct lack of technlogy and awareness that would enable musicians in SL to express themselves more through their avatars.

For instance: The rythm in the music should be transfered to the animations, allowing movements syncronized with the beat. Singers should be able to guide the microphone and lower it in pauses. Different guitar playing movements playing in tune with the intensity of the music.

How nice that there are still areas of possible improvements!

Eurovision Song Contest

We often think of US as the home nation of TV, but did you know that the worlds largest TV event is actually European? You may think the Superbowl a large event; in 2010 it had an average audience of 106.5 million. But the yearly Eurovision Song Contest final has an estimated 125 million viewers across Europe and the close east.

This is basically a song-writers contest, but today the performance and presentation of the singers and dancers are equally important.

The winner is chosen by televoting in each participating country. It is a two-stage process where each country gives 12, 10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 or 1 points to 10 other countries (you can't wote for yourselves:-) based upon the number of televotes. This means that small countries (like Norway) has as much influence on the result as large countries (like Germany or United Kingdom).

The quality of the entries varies enormously, from simple and boring pop songs to innovative and beautiful works. But the value of the art is not the reason to watch ESC. It's the varied cultural expressions! I always finds it so fun and amusing to see what's popular in different counties:-)

Last year, Norway actually won the ESC, so we get to host the event this year. It has caused somewhat of a headache, because it's so expensive. Actually, the national broadcasting had to let go of the rights to show the world championship in football (ok, soccer, if you live in the US:-).

The video above is the Romanian entry. I like it because its a simple melody that gets easily inside your brain, and the video has some nice virtual reality scenes. Have fun!

Tipping the cow

I called Joonie; she was busy supporting Maximillion Kleene, who was having a concert at Gos. She TP'ed me over, and I'm glad she did. Max has a very sweet and involing voice, and I felt involved at once. No wonder there where 52 people at the show.

How do you describe a voice? It's really hard, because it was like it touched a nerve inside my neck; hitting some pleasure center in the brain that few singers finds.

No, the cow at the front of the stage did not sing. She was happy to receive tips however; falling over everytime someone showered Max with their lindens. I am more unsure about the function of the rubber duck; somehow I think that I don't want to know!

Gos is someone's mainstore; I have no idea what that someone is selling here, but the stage was nice so it might be good:-)

All in all, a great evening!

More dolls and a concert

Had a late start in SL yesterday, and when I came on, Honour had finished the DollCozy floor of the shop. Looked very nice! In the shop I ran into Emerald Wynn and a friend of her, whose name I have forgotten, I'm so sorry to say - but nice to meet fellow bloggers; and even more so when they buy dolls:-)


These guys are just too cute:-) Or are they gals? I have though of them as males since Honour first gave me one to script, but they do have this kind of unisex appearance.

Tried to script a little something for the doll exhibit, but SL misbehaved tonight and would not even open the editor.... aw, rather tired of it anyway:-) I have heard about writers block, can it apply to scripting as well?


So I looked for some live music and found a performance by Carmen Roeth at the Cute's Club (LOL they even have this "I'm cute" group tag... somehow I quickly replaced it with the Dramatic tag).


Anyway, Carmen has a great voice, a hot avatar, and is a real performer keeping contact with the audience (even when the lag in the SIM with 57 avatars made her glide off the stage into some strange never-never land). Writing this, I just love the voice, now soft, now a bit rasping, gliding through classic Jazz and some real rock&roll.

Technology moves forward; it was really amazing to be able to follow a live event with sound on a laptop with a cellular phone connection, in a sim with more than 50 people. OK, so my framerate was between 2 and 4 on low graphics setting, but I did not crash once! Just a year ago, that would have been impossible!

As for cellular connections: I have noticed that the latest version of the linden viewer, including Snowglobe, is much less demanding on network bandwidth when "idle". Earlier versions where using 100kb/s even when nothing was moving on the screen. When you run on a line with download limitations (I have 5Gb/month on my cellular), that is really annoying. The imprudence viewer used to be the answer to those situations, but now I find the LL viewer performing at least as good.

I plan some experiments with different types of viewers on different kinds of computers and connections - I have this vague feeling that alternate viewers does not really give the performance gain a lot of people claim. But that needs to be verified, and I may not have time to spare the next few weeks. Well, there will not be fewer viewers to test even if I wait a few weeks.

/me hoping the script editor will work today