Wales has given us many great exports besides coal. One has been the beauty of its poetry, and the other the beauty of its music. In the video clip below, from 1970, Tom Jones does something other than sway his hips — he recites for us from countryman Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Accompanying him is The Treorchy Male Choir, singing holiday carols in the lovely sounds of the Welsh choral tradition.
This is a multi-page story; just click on the “Pages” links at the foot of each page to move back and forth.
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The woman gazed at the ident-block on the door’s security panel with a nervous expression. She had passed any number of such panels on the way up to this office, but none of them had read:
Sherman, Ariel Chairwoman / CEO Fantasial Productions ILC
It felt strange to Taraia to be interviewed by the CEO of a corporation for a job … especially when the job was really an entrance-level position. Her college advisor had told her that Lady Ariel was peculiar in this way; she wanted to get a feel for new-hires outside of the production aspects of her theatre’s show and night club. Was it because, again according to her advisor, promotions came from within the corporation, and so she might have closer daily exposure with the Boss than at two or three removes …?
I’ve been wound up with outside affairs this past few weeks, and I just managed to squeeze in a run through this year’s Fantasy Faire. There were several extremely creative regions this time through, and I snapped my favorite views in photos, so to preserve their memory and share it with others.
There will be two sections here; the first is a gallery of landscapes, while the second shows what I wore, built mostly from offerings at the various vendors. You can click on the gallery for larger views, and there’s a link at the bottom for full size. (Some of these are 1920 wallpapers.)
When I was writing this up, I found not just one quote to use, but two. I’ll title this with Joe Jackson’s song and include the video at the bottom. But following is another sonnet from Harper’s beloved Poetry Magazine archive (which really is a nifty source of material!)
How can I offer you the dull, frayed song Of love I know? Each word would stumble on A memory; and I should see a long Blurred line of faces grimacing upon A musty curtain of the past …. Ah, no …. Let me be silent …. Words would only sound A monotone: a toxic, cloying flow Of echoes would sift through, and eddy round My voice, and all the rapture that I feel Would turn into a harlequin and steal Away beneath the vivid, measured hum Of mockery. Ah, dearest, may there come An ecstasy of stillness in each day, That you may sense the thoughts I dare not say!
I love this song, and this video illustrates what we do in Second Life (as I did in my photos above) quite nicely, transforming ourselves for a time into whatever life we want to live, to change away from the humdrum and pains of daily Real Life.
It’s taken me a few weeks to get back into gear, what with coping with current situations, and Diana’s temporary leaving. But I’m back in harness, and should be able to keep going with some careful juggling of money.
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You’ll find several churches in the Ville de Coeur regions, and one cathedral, which I discovered through the Destination Guide. (Yeah, we’re spending a lot of time in the Mediterranean lately. That’s how it’s working out.) This church (which holds services most Sundays at 11:00 a. m. SLT, as I understand) is a fairly faithful recreation of the Real World’s Amalfi Cathedral, also called Il Cattedrale di Sant’Andrea (dedicated to Saint Andrew).
A 2017 photo from my space station. The view of space here is created by a photosphere generator, which makes a 256×256 spherical bubble around the generator, with the unit at the center point. Imagine if I could set the environment on this level to space without needing to use a generator. This can expand space role-play tremendously — just one new use for EEP.
What looks like excellent news from Linden Lab, put up on the Community Blog, and brought to my attention by Daniel Voyager’s plurk today. LL has released the Environmental Enhancement Project to the main Grid. For users of the Linden viewer, at least, the new abilities will be available to all Residents on all sims. And that includes, as I’m seeing this, sims that you rent, even if you don’t have owner environment privileges. (Third-party viewers don’t have this yet, as it will take a code revision. However, I think we can expect a scramble to integrate the new code into Firestorm and other top TPVs. Firestorm users such as myself should probably expect an update notice at some indeterminate point.)
Some possibilities:
You don’t need to be an estate owner to change the environmental settings.
New environmental settings panel
Custom day cycles
Changeable textures for the clouds and moon
Different settings for different altitude settings
Changeable locations for sun and moon
Save settings in Inventory instead of an XML file, and import existing XML files to the new settings
Creators can set permissions for next owners
Settings can be applied at the parcel level, for everyone to see
Here’s a really nice aspect to enhance your possible revenue stream: the new settings can be saved as Inventory assets — and given, shared or (ka-ching)sold. This could result in a whole fresh category on the Marketplace, or new stores for EEP files. (That’s E-E-P, by the way, not “eep.” Which, of course, means everyone will promptly ignore the Lab, just as they do by calling them “Linden Labs.”)
It’s as good a time as any for a holiday trip, as the Europeans would call it, down to the Mediterranean coast.
I was thinking of calling this article “Harper’s Morning Macchiato,” ripping off Morgan’s piece from a week or two back. But it doesn’t alliterate as well (sigh).
Never start a morning without caffeine of some kind. (That is, if you can handle the buzz.) Fortunately, this mobile coffee shop was handy.
Second Life® with Harper, Conan, Jem, Diana and Morgan
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