BioCouture

Keep referring people to this and having to look it up again, so here is is. You too can wear organically grown faux leather that looks pretty much like dried skin.

BioCouture

If the product doesn't take off, at least they have a future making props for post-apocalyptic horror movies.

Okay, I will probably want this when the transparent vinyl jumpsuits of the 1970s make a come back, this time in organic fabric. With any luck it will happen when I am in my 80s and I can really shock the see-thru socks of people. We came so close to getting over our hangups, but then we fetishized the solutions and slipped backwards again.

Waterfalls

I did something unusual yesterday, at least for SL. I went for a walk.

Now, I will often buzz out in a random direction flying over sims looking for interesting things, but this time, I hopped on the nice Linden road half a sim from my mainland holdings and just went for a walk. Or perhaps, since I was being something that walks on all fours, a canter.

Walking about on mainland SL can be a wonderful experience, at least in places where people haven't destroyed the Linden public works that allow you to walk around, or even take the train. It immerses you in the random creativity of people and forces you to experience what is there instead of taking you to some known or intended place. Sometimes it even makes you go ... I never realized this was right next to that, and I go to both of them all the time. And it is only something that can be experienced by getting out of the insulated private islands and wandering about the mainland.

On this day I found quite a few interesting things, the first two of which are here as a set. They are waterfalls. Both wonderfully done. Both probably looking much better at night, which it was. The locations are where I was standing when I took the pictures.

Hamlin (28, 8, 80)

Paw Paw (44, 42, 83)

It helps, maybe, that there was a small plot of land selling bunnies and playing ChouChou on the audio stream right at the top of the first waterfall.

Follow Up

The music in the video in my previous post is by ChouChou, a Second Life band devoted to exploring new frontiers of creating music.

That is awesome. Especially since they seem to be part of a movement. Check out the in-world music store where you can buy real MP3s and AIFFs. It even comes with music previews.

You can get ChouChou's songs on iTunes (though if you buy them through Second Life then Apple can't take most of the money on the sale), and check out their "live" concert images.

The story that disappeared on the earth.

Some truly awesome machinima.

Record Player

An interesting promo package from an interesting company.

Image via treehugger.

Idea via GGRP Sound.

Flow

New animations from CCP, makers of EVE Online, make their new Incarna look very promising.

Not to be greedy or anything, but I want a way to do this in Second Life.

via Massively.

Big Moon

Was playing with the environment settings in an alternate Second Life client when I happened to look up.

Looks close enough to visit.

Want!

Okay, I so totally want my own galactic shuttle. Wonder if it would make a good house?

Via Wallpaper*.

And a House to Live In

The Shelf Pod. Finally a place for my books. Found in Moriguchi, Osaka via What We Do is Secret

Am I allowed to confess the extent to which this house fills me with desire?

An Office to Work In

Selgas Cano Architecture Office by Iwan Baan via ArchDaily

And yes, I so would want an office like that.

Asian Design

Some views on Asian design from Nomad Ink Studios via SwissMiss.

The Impossible Weirdness of Being

It’s impossible to legislate weirdness, which is a sad thing for the city’s architectural heritage.
from New York Magazine

Little Sydney

Some more tilt-shift time-lapse photography. The real made virtual.

I just think it is a really neat effect.

Lamp

Linux, Apache, no wait- ... Just a plain old lamp.

Well, a pretty awesome lamp I found while poking around foreign sims in Second Life this week.

That is me floating next to it for scale.

Retro Spies

Spy Vibe, a site devoted to 1960s spy style.

And some analysis of The Prisoner's opening credits, just for good measure.

Interpretive Dance

The 2009 AAAS/Science Dance Contest

I think it speaks for itself.

Oh why, oh why did I not go into the sciences?

via boingboing

Because Camp Should Be Painful

Asian Drill Pop

Pretty much NSF.

Perhaps for people like this ...

Perhaps the designers in this morning's post item had people like this in mind.

Next Nature <-- Posthuman Blues <-- Alex Sandwell Kliszynski

New Look

New cleaner look gleefully pilfered from the templates collection and updated with my own images.

They are not quite as well integrated as the originals, but then again, I must've agonized over them for whole minutes before that meh, good enough state was reached. The images themselves are off on Flickr because Blogger is weird about template images.

Just don't forget to look at the one all the way at the bottom too.

Builds: Sky Fortress 1

I think I've already mentioned that one of my big peeves is Second Life is skyboxes that don't look like they have any right to be floating in the air (or in space).

So here is another one of my solutions to that: a large retail skybox patterned loosely on old Chinese fortresses. The real fortresses wouldn't have the towers and would have small windows scattered about on the face, but I work within the limits of Second Life and the intended uses of the build.

The other thing lacking, which would be found in the originals, as as will be found lacking in later pictures, is that the interior should be a honeycomb of apartments running around the edge and ringing either a central courtyard or covered commons space. That would have increased the size considerably. This already has a 50m square footprint (2500sq.m.). To make it fully featured in Second Life would have at least doubled that and made it a full quarter sim build.

By the way, my other pet peeve is people who build entirely flat sims that aren't supposed to look like Kansas farmland. Flat just means I'm too lazy to deal with imperfections and the landscape and work them into my design, so I'm just going to flatten everything and give it the personality of a mall parking lot (though I must confess, none of the real life malls around me have parking lots that flat either ... even Phoenix isn't that flat).