The horizon’s just crossing up over the sun when they show. Two people. Look like men, but that don’t mean much out here.

“We have come far, and are weary,” says one. Weary? They’re not even breaking a sweat. Must be packing some mighty fine implants to be just strolling across the badlands like that. They’ve no stuff with them, not even guns. If they don’t need guns out here, I don’t need any trouble with them.

“This shack ain’t no hotel,” I say. “But plenty of rocks to lay on. Be my guest.”

Well, there’s no fire from heaven coming down. Guess I passed God’s secret customer test. I didn’t let on, but the wings really give them away.

---

The Wastelands
“Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

Abba Jerome visited Abba Genarius on the day of Our Lord’s birth, and gave him a box of Egyptian sweetmeats.

A year later, Abba Genarius visited Abba Jerome, and gave him that same box, still full, saying, “Thank you for this opportunity to resist the weakness of my body.”

A year later, Abba Jerome visited Abba Genarius, giving him that same box again, saying, “The virtue of abnegation cannot be contained.”

A year later, Abba Genarius gave the box to Abba Jerome, saying, “I cannot open this while my brother stands in want.”

Then they laughed and ate them together.

---

Rock dwellings, Cappadocia, Turkey

This story first appeared on Crap Mariner's 100 Word Story Weekly Challenge. It was inspired by the prompt word, “box”, and a book of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

Leftover Soup fanart of Maxine Hellenberger

I've been following the web comic Leftover Soup for about a year. The artist is running an end-of-year invitation for fanart of the comic. So here is my interpretation of Maxine Hellenberger as an avatar in Second Life.

First video.

Second video.

Pictures below the cut.

H22O, a build by Squonk Levenque. Squonk created the Treptower Park and 2304 Rain builds, both now gone. He is known for rain, and H22O contains even more rain.

One arrives at a pair of floating islands in the sky.

A teleporter takes one down to a bleak room, which turns out to be the base of a lighthouse. Outside, unceasing rain falls on a watery landscape. A giant stone man crouches on hands and knees, his head plunged into the sea. A small figure faces him at the end of a pier.

Tura has built an art gallery.

The Mondrian-Johnson Gallery of Modern Art.

The theme for the B2B competition build in July 2014 was to make a building based on the architecture of Philip Johnson and the art of Paul Mondrian.

I knew something of Mondrian's art, but I had never heard of Philip Johnson. So I went to Google Images for inspiration. I didn't really get an impression of a single style running through his oeuvre, but I eventually found motifs in some of his works that tickled my brain.

I’ve made a second draft of a mesh parachute harness. The first I made by laboriously extruding a rectangular cross-section inch by inch around the avatar. I’ve since learned how to extrude one curve along another, so I made the second version by wrapping Bezier curves around the body and extruding a rectangle along them. Then I converted it to a mesh, and with some help from the Blender Avastar group uploaded it and adjusted the balloon to join onto it.

This is still a fairly raw draft. The weight assignment needs a lot of work. Making an animated pose to go with it is going to be interesting, as to keep the harness joined to the balloon, the avatar has to be animated as if the chest bone were the root, which should remain fixed while the rest of the avatar moves.

Circumnavigating the volcano in Mahulu

The web site is live. Anyone with a copy of this balloon (which is only me at the moment) can log their journey and later see a map of the route, drawn on the SL world map.

Tura has made a balloon.

Kanin region

At Tura’s workshop.

Tura is building a new home.

Snowglobes

•

Snow falls endlessly

On the night before Christmas

In the toy village.

•

In the snowy fort

No soldiers patrol the walls

Are they all on leave?

•

Snow on online pines

If no-one logs in to see

Did the snowflake fall?

•

Presents! All for me?

Take as many as you like

They're copiable.

I wrote about getting 64 boxes from a single sculpt, for a row of dentils. The boxes end up being connected by unwanted strips, which can be hidden in the beams that the dentils are attached to. But to make separate boxes with no visible connections, you need to make sure that the interface between them in the sculpt map consists entirely of quadrilaterals that collapse to a single line or point.

Tura has made some snowglobes.

There are four different scenes, each made as either a table ornament, or a bauble to hang on a tree. Particle snow falls endlessly.

This is the full size version of a picture I sent Crap Mariner for his arm brace. Get well soon, and remember, the secret to rehabilitation is enjoying the pain! The more it’s hurting, the more it’s working! Er, don't go overboard on that. This is not medical advice.

”Waking up in the future was all very well, but I wasn't sure about the new body...”
Photographed at In Silico

The robot arm comes from this build I did for the recent Single Frame Story challenge on the theme of ”objectification”.

Tura runs. Tura always runs.

MadPea Base

LSL tutorial: Communication between parent and child

Back when I started to write complex scripts, one of the first puzzles I needed to solve was this: Object A rezzes object B out of its inventory, and needs to send some startup information to B. How can it do this?

When A rezzes B, the only information it can pass to it in the call to llRezObject is a single integer. When object B wakes up, its on_rez event receives that integer as the start_param. But suppose you need to send more information than that? Then A has to send it by encoding it into a string and speaking it. The channel it is going to speak on can be sent as the start parameter.

This won’t work:

In A:
llRezObject( channelNumber, ... );
llSay( channelNumber, ... );

In B:
on_rez( integer channelNumber ) {
   llListen( channelNumber, ... );
}

The reason is that A cannot assume that B is listening, or even exists, by the time that A speaks. Spoken messages are never queued: if no-one is listening, they are not heard. How can A make sure that when it speaks to B, B is already rezzed and listening?

"The sun does not shine above us, but within us."

My entry for this week’s Single Frame Story Challenge on the theme ”Illumination”.

Whiskey Day and Botgirl Questi have started a new challenge, to create a single picture that tells a whole story, based on a word or phrase.

The first challenge is ”Last Words”, entries due by this Friday night, 10 August.

This is my entry. (Also on Flickr.) It's best viewed at full size.

Tura has written a story about an elf.

The Writers’ Dash is held every day at 6am and 6pm Pacific Time in Second Life, which works out to 2am and 2pm in my timezone. Which means I can only participate in real time at 2pm on Sundays. But I can have a go any time for practice. This is my first attempt. The subject is ”Elf”. It took 40 minutes, not the prescribed 15.

Tura is very drunk.

Tura rarely wears mesh.

This is one reason why. There’s a set of standard shapes that have been worked out from analysing many avatars’ proportions (which you can get for free on the Marketplace). The nearest one to my shape is ”small”, for which the non-bone body settings are:

Body Fat: 7

Torso Muscle: 35

Breast Size: 52

Love Handles: 28

Belly Size: 3

Leg Muscle: 50

Butt Size: 38

Saddle Bags: 33

As it happens, all of my sliders are within a few points of these settings, except one: Torso Muscle. Mine is 85. ”Small” is 35. I tried dialling it down to 35 and...no. No. Tura Brezoianu is not that shape. Tura has really strong shoulders and arms, and 35 looks skeletal to me. This is a basic part of what Tura is. Even the ”large” size of this dress isn’t big enough at the top, and then it’s far too large lower down.

...carnal nightmares of rooted flesh that wallowed and fought and coupled in noisome ooze...

— Clark Ashton Smith, ”The Maze of the Enchanter”

A build in progress I glimpsed on SL. I wonder if there will be foul things with chancrous blossoms flaunting themselves on infernal obelisks. Shall living parasitic mosses of crimson crawl on vegetable monsters that swell and bloat behind the columns of accursed pavilions?