What Would Be Your SL Oscar Gown This Year?

My article from last year, “Ready for Oscar Night,” has been one of my most enduringly popular pieces to date.  Who doesn’t love Oscar fashion when it’s good, after all?  (For many of us, that’s the only reason we watch the show.  This year, after this list of nominees, that may be the only reason I watch.)

So, fashionistas, we’ve got about a month or so.  What would be your choice for your walk down the red carpet this year, assuming you were one of the elect to get invited to the presentations and the Governors’ Ball afterwards?  I’m considering mine, but I want other ideas as well.  Send me a good photo of your choice, along with your description, to harper.ganesvoort (at) gmail dot com, and I’ll publish the ones I like the best.  I’ve also opened a group in Flickr for “2009 Second Life Oscar Fashion,” and you can post your pictures there as well.  If you do this, I’d suggest tagging them with “sloscar2009″ (all one word) for easy finding.  (No videos or machinima, please.)  Cutoff date is one week after Oscar night.

Please keep pictures clean, and no larger than about 600 pixels in width for the blog, as that’s about the size limit on this blog’s template in a 1024 screen; you should be centered (preferred), or to the left of the shot.

I Want to Be Like Barack!

I checked this site out after spotting Morris Vig’s blog article.  You need to register to get your processed shot up on it, like with so many other places, but it’s brief and fun!

The inspiration here, of course, is President Obama’s now famous campaign posters.  If you don’t mind people complimenting you on your ever-growing narcissism level, upload a picture to this (preferably a GIF or PNG with a transparent background), and let them process it.  You can tweak it yourself afterwards.  Then, of course, you need to register to save it to the gallery (sigh, grin).

What are the results like?  Take a look at this, based around one of the photos taken of me by Connie Arida last year:

I’ve got a new poster for me wall!

We’re Kinda Past Christmas, Guys!

A bit of a pet peeve, more than anything important.  But has anybody at the Lab taken a look at a calendar?  We’re past Christmas, and Winter Festival time, and everything else.  Let’s get the snowmen off the login screen, why don’t we??

“What are friends for? For moving!”

So says Spider Robinson in Callahan’s Key (or words to that effect).  In Second Life, it’s not that easy; the only one who can pick up your swag is yourself.  So you have to do all the toting and shoving by your lonesome.

Why am I mentioning this?  Because I’ve just moved — again!  This time I was compelled to by situations far beyond my control.  My landlord’s account was locked by Linden Lab for some mysterious, unexplained reason, and so his rent boxes all went dark.  Fortunately, his property-management group has some estate islands that are under another avatar’s name in the group, and the displaces avatars have been offered first shot at the empty houses and apartments.  I found a pretty nice place for only L$100 more a week.

To be truthful, I was contemplating moving already.  As I think I noted when I leased the place in Hrosskell, I keep landing in apartments on the border of sims.  Well, the property across the region line was changing hands quite frequently; but it seems to have settled down, and someone’s built houses there — with hulkin’ big rotating signs saying “For Sale” overhead.  Not quite an adfarm, but close enough to it to kill my view, and I was getting sick of it.  This situation here just accelerated the speed at which I took off.

So here I am again, in a house with bare walls.  But filled with light; I may have some problem hanging all my art here, at least on the first floor.  Plus I’m right up on the water (and there’s three more islands that I can swing through on my JetSki), and a big upper deck.  So I’m making the most of it in the meantime.  I’ll publish pictures of the new place when I get it more fully decorated, here and on Flickr and Koinup.

Request for Chat Transcript from Today’s SL Press Conference — (updated)

If any members of the Second Life Media Consortium, present today at the press conference held by the Lab, have a chat transcript, would they please send me a copy for my reading?  I was unable to attend due to RL work, and I want to see what I missed.  Advthanksance!

UPDATE: I’ve just found out from GoSpeed Racer that the Lindens present answered questions in voice.  However, GoSpeed also tells that Radar Masakumi obtained permission to record the proceedings, and she anticipates the tape will appear in an upcoming podcast on Radar’s blog.

Linden Lab Acquires XStreet SL and OnRez — Is This Good?

Linden Lab has decided to get into the actual merchandising end of the grid, instead of being just the invisible overlord.  The Big Blog (which links to their press release) informs us that the Lab is purchasing XStreet SL and OnRez, the off-Grid catalogues of virtual goods that are delivered to you in world.  Not surprisingly, they plan to consolidate the two services into one, doing all their selling under the XStreet banner and dropping OnRez.

What do you feel about this?  I’m not sure I’m thrilled with this, but it may be mostly because I’m a storekeeper on OnRez, and I’d have to move everything over to XStreet.  Something about loss of competition also whispers to me, though.  I’d like your opinions to help me get my own together.  So what are your thoughts?

Zaara Opens New Island Store in SL — (updated)

I’m running out of group slots, so I haven’t joined the newsgroup for patrons of Zaara Kohime, the owner and designer of Zaara, and therefore didn’t know that she has moved.

In case, poor fashion-driven soul, you haven’t heard of this place, ’tis truly bizarre of you, for Zaara is becoming one of the finest designers in Second Life.  In case you haven’t tired of me crowing about this woman’s work, her dresses are supremely elegant, her textures and colors mouth-watering delicious, her saris the most versatile I’ve seen so far — I’ve yet to wear one to Frank’s Place, but I think it would fit right in with the formal scene there [1] –and her ghagra skirts wonderful to move in!

Zaara kept store in the Tesla sector for a time; but she’s moved and opened up her own island just yesterday (Monday, January 12).  I’m not here to talk about the clothes, though, but about that new island; Zaara worked on it herself, and it’s as much of a gem as her clothes are.  Click on the thumbnails starting on the next page, and follow.

What Kind of Dates?

Am I desperate to find something to write about after nearly a week?  You bet your sweet bippy I am!  (And if that doesn’t date me, nothing will.)

I was hunting today for a new AO for my avatar, and I came across this.  I won’t say where; I even obscured the name of the product, to take no chances.  What matters is the rest of the sign.  Take a look; take a good look.  If you can’t get it, shame on you!

Now, yeah, I’ve wondered if I should start dating, but what’s a “udate”?  Something specific to Second Life?  Anybody know this term?

(Laughing)

Harper Now Tweets (Finally)

I’m finally giving in.  I’ve hauled myself (virtually, of course) over to Twitter and signed up for an account there.  Since I don’t write an article for this ravenous creature called a blog every day, but I’m in world almost every day, I figured it would be a good way to let my dedicated readers know that I’m actually doing something between longer writing sessions.  Especially on weekends, when I can’t always get to the keyboard for extended periods, due to family demand on the single computer in the house.

Of course, the best laid plans of mice and men….  The widgets for Twitter are like the widgets for Ning — they’re scripted.  The idea, of course, is that Twitter is a dynamic service, and the widget would automatically update when you post a fresh tweet.  But this blog is (currently) hosted on wordpress.com, not .org, which means that scripts are a no-no.  It’s for our safety, of course; there are Evil Scripts out there.  But it still gets frustrating when I have a neat widget that can’t run.  If this was a self-hosted blog, it would be no problem; you can run scripts in your widgets and plugins on a self-hosted wordpress.org blog, since it’s not on Matt’s own servers.  I’m not quite to the point of committing to an expense for what’s essentially a diversion enterprise.

Time will tell if that changes.  For now, I’m sticking with the free service.  So, if you’re interested in following my tweets, or even Following them, head for my page at Twitter.  I’ve just started, of course, so there’s not much there yet.  But give me time, give me time….

FLASH! Mark Kingdon’s GMail Inbox Contents!

Our intrepid spies have pulled off a major coup in the ongoing struggle to free all information necessary for full understanding of our relationship with Linden Lab.  Read this post, and see just what goes on behind the scenes of the Lab, as reflected in the contents of M Linden’s GMail account!  Read carefully and fully….

Our spy, of course, was Prad Pravithi, who also released to us the plans for a new computer keyboard designed exclusively for Second Life last summer….

Thanks to Hamlet Au and New World Notes