Sex, Love, Art and Slavery

Rheta and Codie at Bloggers Ball and Slave Auction

Oh, what a weekend! Where to start? Okay...

Rheta Shan contributes land to start new Visual Arts Center
About a month ago, Rheta Shan, winner of Dusan Writer's UI Design Contest, posted an offer to donate her mainland plots for charitable or artistic use. Since I had been romancing the idea of creating an open source stage set area for those creating comics, machinima or other image-capture projects in Second Life, I emailed her right away. After a bit of email correspondence, we finally had a nice GTalk chat and she was kind enough to offer the land for my project. I'll post more on the project over the next couple of weeks, but for now I just want to send Rheta a big thank you.

Artist's Way group begins
On Sunday morning, I attended the first weekly meeting of Sophrosyne's The Artists's Way group. We'll be supporting each other as we go through the exercises in the book and work to enhance our creative life within Second Life.

I break my bank on slave purchase
I had no plans to buy or be sold when I arrived at the Second Life Bloggers Ball and Slave Auction later that afternoon. By the time I left, Zoe had purchased me as a slave, and I was the proud owner (for 24 cumulative hours) of the Number One Couple in Second Life: Codie and Gabby!

I first met Codie while I was still an obscure newbie in Second Life. I believe I had a question about her MachinimaCam and sent an IM out of the blue. We got to chatting and before you knew it we were talking about video, polyamoury and the joys and perils of virtual relationships. Over the months we chatted here and there and crossed paths quite a few times, including the recent mass migration from Twitter to Plurk. Over the months, I've come to realize that Codie is one of the authentic Lights within Second Life and models loving, emotionally-close and red-hot relationships for the rest of us, along with her extended family including main girl Gabby.

I don't know Gabby very well, outside of following her Plurks and keeping an eye on her blog. But our brief conversations have always been lovely and I'm REALLY looking forward to getting to know her better.

So what plans have I for my 24 hours of total power???? And what does Zoe have up her gun-toting sleeve for poor innocent Botgirl? Stay tuned.

Some decisions are easy

As I finally drifted into unconsciousness last night, I had every intention of leaving today's post with just the photo you see above. But I woke up a few minutes ago with two lingering dreams related to Second Life that I want to share.

In the first, I was walking along a beach with Rheta Shan, talking about new interface ideas. No, there weren't any extraordinary revolutionary concepts revealed. It was just a relaxed stroll with the surf at our feet. Since Rheta and I know each other almost exclusively through blog comments, social media and email, it was interesting to experience such a happily casual inworld encounter. (Sorry Night, no hot sex to describe.)

In the second dream I was walking through an airport with a female human who had helped me secure an overseas airplane ticket. We must have been in LAX because we were passing a long line of people (humans) from the Virtual Worlds conference who were waiting to check-in for their returning flights. The oddest thing about the dream was that as I walked by, quite a few of those in line recognized me and waved hello. It didn't seem odd that we recognized each other in human form, or that I had a human form.

The dreams remind me that all of our experiences intermingle indiscriminately within our subconscious. Our lives in the atomic world, social networks, virtual worlds, etc. form a single tapestry: One whole cloth, rather than a string of swatches folded on some inner shelf.

Botgirl Jumps to Bigstage.com as Virtual Actress

Cute, huh? The video above is from my home stage at bigstage.com. The new beta lets you create virtual actors by uploading three still images for each one. After a bit of trial and error, I got the best results by using photos with no hair and then adding a coif from the site's selections.

Once created you can place your actors in short video clips. I couldn't get their embedded video to play here properly, so I captured one from my screen and threw it up on Flickr for the clip below.

Unfortunately, the software needed to upload photos is not available for Mac or Linux yet. Outside of the basic avatar image, there is no means to add user-generated content. Nevertheless, although the clips are limited during the beta and the avatar-to-movie conversion is a bit sketchy, this could be a lot of fun once they fine-tune things. It always makes me tingly to jump from Second Life into another world.

Google Jumps on Botgirl's Comic Bandwagon

Okay, maybe Google's choice to introduce their new browser with a comic had nothing to do with my shining examples Just Leap in Review, Botgirl vs. Human Comics and other narratives on this blog. But it seems to me it's a good indication that the comic form is becoming an acceptable means of mainstream business and marketing communication.

Scott McCloud, who authored the Google Comic, helped inspire me to get started creating comics through a number of his books on the art of reading, writing and drawing them.

Another inspiration for my move into graphic-oriented work was Dave Gray, who teaches that anyone with the art skills of a five year old can become an effective visual communicator.

More on this and other cool topics later this week, including Avatars Gone Wild Version II. But for now, I gotta run!

Botgirl Selected to Present at the Second Life Web Comics Comic-Con and Conference

I got word yesterday that my proposal to present at the first-ever Web Comics Conference in Second Life on October 3 was accepted. The day-long event will bring together practitioners, educators, academics, students, journalists and others on October 3. Activities will include presentations, roundtables, panels and "festivities." I'm scheduled to take part in the Creators Commons, hosted by Rachel Edidin of Dark Horse Comics.

The conference web site should be up soon. I'll post a link as soon as it's available. I took a couple of high resolution SuperBot pics to celebrate yesterday and posted them on Flickr.

UPDATE: Here's a link to the schedule.

Charlanna Beresford stars in first edition of Kissing Majic photo series

My recent struggle to capture the perfect kiss inspired me to start this new photo series featuring Second Lifers kissing chatbot Majic Questi. New World Notes columnist Charlanna Beresford was kind enough to be my first victim, I mean subject.

If you would like to kiss Majic and be part of the series, send an email to kissingmajic AT gmail.com with your Second Life name and a brief note enticing Majic to choose you. Or add a comment to this post.

The kiss I longed for was nowhere to be found

Last night, I worked from mid-evening into the wee hours trying to stage a kiss for a particularly important scene. After going through poseballs, love HUDS, friends' poseballs and finally a scripted bed, I couldn't find a single worthy shot.

I have never felt so frustrated and blocked in my creative work by an aspect of Second Life that resisted an easy solution or alternative.

Kisses are hard. Oh, that's a bit of an ambiguous sentence. What I mean to communicate is that compared to typical shots, a realistic and emotionally moving kiss is really, really difficult to capture. Any clumsiness in the angle of the heads, the positions of the arms or hands, the facial expressions, bad body intersections, etc. stand out in ways that can not be easly fixed in post-production. It's possible to luck out with an animation, but I think this will take some custom tweaking.

Any ideas? Maybe I should host an event, inviting people to bring their favorite standing kiss poseballs to the set? In any case, wish me luck.