Penn's Mighty Sword

Just in case...

2009-08-15T16:27:00.002+01:00

Just in case you're still looking here: I've moved the blog to http://penneuler.com.

Make a new bookmark / update your RSS reader as appropriate. The new RSS feed is at http://penneuler.com/feed/.

There are new posts about, pornstars, potatoes, and prefabs.

Moving!

2009-08-08T10:57:00.002+01:00

I'm trying out WordPress, so the blog is moving to:

http://penneuler.com

See you there!

Rehomed

2009-08-07T22:32:00.004+01:00

I have a new plot!

Bit of a building site at the moment - I had to untangle various unhelpfully-named coalesced objects so there's a bit of duct tape and bailing twine going on right now.

Also, I've discovered the joy of WordPress so I might be moving my blog to that soon.

Shafted!

2009-08-06T20:26:00.001+01:00

I woke up this morning to an inbox full of "your items were returned from..."

Turns out my landlord sold all his sims without telling anyone. Or at least, not telling me or my neighbours.

So I'm temporarily shopless and homeless while I decide what to do. Poop.

Robots restore faith in humanity

2009-04-25T09:20:00.004+01:00

Tweenbots - an experiment in human-computer interaction - are little cardboard robots left out in public somewhere with a flag on their back that says where they're trying to get to. They roll forward at a constant pace, but only change direction if someone is kind enough to pick them up and point them the right way.

The unexpected result is that people really do go out of their way to help these anthropomophised little dudes. One man even pointed the robot back up the way he had just come, saying, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

More about Tweenbots

Keep sailing, guys

2009-04-17T18:58:00.008+01:00

I've been dressed as a pirate in SL for a few weeks now, but today it's a mark of support for The Pirate Bay, who have been convicted of something tenuously related to copyright infringement.

"Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn't even give them the ashes."

- Peter Sunde

I defy anyone to tell me, with a straight face, that this is anything other than the result of the Swedish legal system being bullied by foreign money.

Full story at the BBC.

Evil Plan (tm)!

2009-04-10T16:38:00.002+01:00

Your objective is simple: World Domination.
Your motive is a little bit more complex: To show them all

Stage One
To begin your plan, you must first seduce a military general. This will cause the world to sit up and take notice, terrified by your arrival. Who is this unholy menace? Where did they come from? And why do they look so good in classic black?

Stage Two
Next, you must desecrate the pyramids of giza. This will all be done from a island of mu, a mysterious place of unrivaled dark glory. Upon seeing this, the world will gibber like madmen, as countless hordes of mad scientists hasten to do your every bidding.

Stage Three
Finally, you must demonstrate your unholy weapon, bringing about an end to sanity. Your name shall become synonymous with all that is wrong with the world, and no man will ever again dare interrupt your sentences. Everyone will bow before your unbreakable will, and the world will have no choice but to fall madly in love with you.

Get your own evil plan here.

Open-mindedness

2009-04-06T18:50:00.002+01:00

What a great video. This should be shown in schools:

Creating LOD-friendly versions of existing sculpts

2008-10-28T17:29:00.000Z

WARNING: Stuff for builders ahead (but not that hard)

Sculpties are great. You can make all kinds of shapes out of them while keeping your prim count nice and low. That's why this window is two prims, not seven or more:

Trouble with sculpties is that they were designed for organic or smooth shapes. That means that when you view them from a distance, they lose some of their geometry. For example, here's the defalut sculpty shape, an apple, viewed up close, and far away (but blown up to the same size in Photoshop):

It's still basically apple-shaped, even at distance... and of course, at distance, it only occupies a handful of pixels on your screen, so you can't really tell that it's less appley than before.

This process of simplifying sculpties the further they get from you is called "LOD culling" (LOD stands for Level Of Detail) and it's a performance trick - it means that you don't have to render the full detail of things that aren't near you. Most of the time, when we use sculpts the way Linden Labs intended, it works fine and keeps our framerates up.

Trouble is, us builders love to pervert the course of technology and we use sculpts to make things like that window up there. Railings, bookcases, stairs, and ladders all get done too. And when you "simplify" the geometry of a window frame, you don't get a simpler window. You get a tangled mess:

YIKES!

Not good, right? That happens because every single vertex (3D point) in that window is defining an important corner, whereas in the apple, the points are all just in a smooth curve.

So what can we do? Well, we can exploit the fact that LOD culling is affected by size. For example, here's a big window and a small window, side by side, from a moderate distance away:

See how the big window hasn't "broken" yet, while the little one has? But that big window is far too big for a house. In fact you could drape a canvas over it and live *in* it. So what we need is a sculpt that looks smaller than it really is.

And luckily, that's dead easy. What we need to make, effectively, is a model of a small window. A large instance of a small model = a normal sized result.

Sculpts, you may or may not know, use colours to represent points in space. Three dimensions = three colours red, green, blue). So the dead centre of a sculpty is represented by a medium grey colour, which is at 50% red, 50% blue, 50% green. It's drab:

While a normal sculpt is bright and colourful, because its points are all over the place:

(That's a piano pedal, by the way.)

So to make a sculpt "smaller", we need to make all those colours closer to the middle of the colour-space, i.e. closer to 50% grey.

To do that, in say, Adobe Photoshop ('cos that's what I happen to have here,) open up the sculpt image and create a new layer.

Then pick the 50% grey from the colour pallette:

Click the fill tool:

Click in the image to flood it with grey.

Now change the transparency of the grey layer to, say, 50 or 60%:

The sculpt image now looks faded, like this:

Finally, save that as a PNG or a TGA and import it back into SL.

When you apply it to a sculpt, you'll see that it now looks much smaller than it used to. But if you select the object and hold down ctrl and shift (to go into resizing mode,) you'll see that the object's real corners - its "bounding box" - are much bigger than the object looks:

So now SL thinks that your normal-sized window is actually much bigger than it really is, so it draws it at full detail from much longer distances. And you can have pretty that looks good even in long-distance photography:

Credits:

The window I used as an example is from Rhode Design.

The trees you can see in the last photo are from Sculptomancy, and they already use the technique in this article.

Caveats:

SL does things for a reason. LOD culling is there to save people's framerates from imploding. If you do this to every sculpt you make or use, all you'll do is make your place really laggy. Stick to just outdoor prims, like doors, windows, and trees. My stairs, for example, aren't like this, because you can only see them from indoors.

Tagged...

2008-10-27T18:41:00.004Z

Thanks, Laleeta. You shouldn't have. No, really. You shouldn't.

It goes like this:

Link to the person that tagged you
Post the rules on your blog
Share 6 non-important/habits/quirks about yourself
Tag 6 random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs
Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website
Let your tagger know when your entry is up

Okay, 6 random things about me:

I like whisky, but I'm a snob. I'm tackling a bottle of Glenmorangie at the moment, but my all-time favourite is Balvenie Doublewood. And I've had a few bottles of Bunnahabhain recently. I'm also in the pro-peaty Islay malt camp, so I like the occasional Laphroaig.
I won't watch or read anything to do with Harry Potter until a year after the last movie has come out. I suspect I will love it, but it's just been totally overexposed.
I... like... yoghurt. Sheesh.
I spent some time today evaluating the differences between Genshi, Mako, Cheetah, Jinja2, and Django templates. Jinja appeals because it's conceptually similar to Django's template language, but more powerful... but then again, harder to extend. Genshi and Cheetah have unappealing syntax. Mako has its roots in HTML::Mason (via Myghty) and I used to love H::M to bits back in the early noughties. So I think I might look into that some time.
Fucking blogger fucked up and raped itself in the arse so hard while I was writing this post that I had to ditch it and start again.
I don't know anyone with a blog who hasn't done this meme already.

So I'm not tagging anyone. Ner.

Where Penn is this week

2008-10-22T22:51:00.003+01:00

Reasons for absenteeism from SL, number #3638:

"I've been busy building a streaming radio station with online playlist requests."

KazooKeylele - what the Internet was made for!

2008-10-21T22:21:00.000+01:00

Pirate Seagull Ghosts

2008-10-17T17:48:00.000+01:00

Quaintly Tuqiri: I like how the seagull flies right through your house

Penn Euler: Yeah, ignore him :P

Quaintly Tuqiri: Impervious to walls and minor obsctacles of that nature

Penn Euler: Ghost seagulls

Quaintly Tuqiri: LOL

Quaintly Tuqiri: They don't look scary enough!

Penn Euler: From the crew of a seagull pirate ship that foundered on this island hundreds of years ago

Quaintly Tuqiri: o.O there might be buried treasure here!!

Penn Euler: Not scary enough? see, that's what they *want* you to think!

Quaintly Tuqiri: Oooh I geddit, it's a disguise

Quaintly Tuqiri: Sneaky!!

Penn Euler: Yes, apparently the ship was carrying a load of roman amphorae

Quaintly Tuqiri: With wine?

Penn Euler: Yeah, *roman* wine

Quaintly Tuqiri: Ooooh...

Penn Euler: But the captain seagull, he got greedy and drank the ancient booze, and ordered the helmsman seagull to "pull over," because he wasn't feeling well

Quaintly Tuqiri: LMAO

Quaintly Tuqiri: What a waste of great booze

Penn Euler: And sadly, because seagulls have brains slightly smaller than dried peas, the helmsman obeyed, and thus the ship crashed into the rocks

Quaintly Tuqiri: Oh noes!!

Penn Euler: All aboard were lost, and the cargo of fine ancient wine sank to the bottom of what is now the harbour, and the souls of the seagulls were doomed to roam/fly the land until their captain can "get a goddamn painkiller"

Quaintly Tuqiri: LOL

Quaintly Tuqiri: How is he gonna get one??

Penn Euler: Good question

Penn Euler: I left some out on a plate, but his poor little ethereal beak went straight through them

Quaintly Tuqiri: LOL

Penn Euler: It's a tragic tale, to be sure

Quaintly Tuqiri: Indeed it is

Quaintly Tuqiri wipes away a tear

I went to a wedding

2008-10-15T23:59:00.004+01:00

Can you believe that until very recently I'd never been to a wedding in SL?

Don't worry, I have now. I was invited to the wedding of Chezza Slade and Busta Rustamova.

"It's gothic", said Charisma as she tp'ed me over. I threw on a tuxedo and some eyeliner. That should be enough, right?

Wrong. This was gothic like... well, see for yourself:

I couldn't take my cam off the bridesmaids, who were ethereal in their beauty, standing neatly in a line.

The service itself was unnervingly normal, though.

And the happy couple, dressed in black and red or not, looked great:

The house that Penn built, pt. IV: Credits

2008-10-15T18:32:00.000+01:00

Credits to the makers of the all the lovely things I used in making this house:

First of all, I found the incredible Distressed texture shop. I could wander round in here for ages gawking at all the lovely stuff. Some of it is good enough you could just frame it.

Here I am, gawking:

Secondly, Rhode Design. As you may know, I make sculpts. I could, theoretically, make all the sculpts that I needed for the house. What I actually wanted, thought, was to just get on and glue the darn thing together, so I was happy to splash out for for some nice ready-made sculpts. Rhode Design provided the full-perms door, windows, stairs, and curtain sculpts. The curtains even came pre-assembled with the open/close sculpt-changing script.

Here I am on a stairway to nowhere at Rhode design:

Lastly, the inimitable Torley Linden's own sim, Here. There's a ton of stuff here. Er, at Here. I came for the placeholder textures, and was reminded of Torley's library of other free textures, some of which are a bit spacey but other of which might be useful. Here I am expanding my consciousness with Torley's textures:

But you really should have a good look round the whole sim. There's some lovely stuff here, like this enormous, glowing, 80's robot:

The house that Penn built, pt. III: Interior

2008-10-15T00:19:00.000+01:00

The interior of the cottage I built, unfurnished. Here's the ground floor, with the front door on the left, and the stairs and back door ahead. The walls are roughly plastered and given a pink wash, while the floor is staying a neutral beige carpet.

The ground floor again, but taken from next to the back door. You can see the heavy oak beam that holds up the top floor here:

This next picture show the overall interior space very well. You can see the chimbley going right up one gable wall, with hearths on both levels, and the dog-leg stairs. I love interesting interior spaces like this:

This one is taken from above the landing on the left of the last picture:

The top floor has a lovely spring-green colour scheme which complements the pinknes of the walls and carpet. Note that the curtains downstairs are red, but up here they're green. Although this is an attic space, there's plenty of light, with four skylights and a gable window:

Here's the front door up close:

And the sculpted curtains, which open and close in three stages:

So the current quest is to find furniture to fill this place!

The house that Penn built, pt. II: The cottage

2008-10-13T19:00:00.000+01:00

So after the harbour, the next thing was to find a house. My home island has a distinct building style influenced by Breton architecture. Houses tend to have steeply pitched rooves, thick granite walls, and small windows. It's a cosy look.

I found one place that was selling a Breton cottage for only 999L, but after buying it and plonking it down I started finding all sorts of faults with it, like the walls being too narrow (granite walls have to be thick, for stability), and the fact that it had two chimneys and only one fireplace. It also had cutesy little window boxes and a front lawn which didn't work at all for me.

At first I was going to modify the heck out of it, but I needed to mock something up to know what I was aiming for. Here's the translucently psychedelic mockup I created:

But then, I started texturing...

And adding doors and windows...

And by then, I'd built a house. Isn't it cute?

(To be continued)

The house that Penn built, pt. I: The harbour

2008-10-12T21:52:00.000+01:00

So after the dissolution of my old island, I found myself inhabiting a section of an OpenSpace sim with my old prim count. But on an OpenSpace sim, that's like half a goddamn sim.

I wanted to make it something like home... my RL home that is. I'm from a picturesque little island in real life, but I live in a city. However much I love being here, I still love the quiet, rural island life.

So I started by building a little harbour:

It's not really functional... in fact, there seems to be a cute little seating area:

Here's a close-up of the end of the quay:

I like taking people for rides round the island in the little floaty boaty.

And if you dive into the harbour, you'll find this underwater garden:

I'm thinking of putting a 7 Seas fishing thing in, and then trying to build the motor boaty you can get out of it. Definitely one of those invisible aquaria down in the harbour so there's some fishies down there. And maybe a sunken galleon.

Sweaty armpit dance

2008-10-12T18:07:00.000+01:00

I have to share this picture.

Left to right, it's, Laleeta, Charisma, Asthenia, me, and Sai I THINK.

[2008/09/24 14:57] Asthenia Pinazzo: its like the sweaty armpit dance

ARC Rant

2008-10-11T21:50:00.006+01:00

I've seen a lot of posts pointing out that ARC (Avatar Rendering Cost) is arbitrary and imperfect. Peter Stindberg even said it has been "debunked".

http://stindberg.blogspot.com/2008/08/avatar-rendering-cost-debunked.html

http://www.secondeffects.com/2008/05/arc-from-here-to-infinity.html

That's like saying that graded exams have been "debunked". We know it's not perfect, but it's what's possible. Yes, it is only a rough indication. The idea is that an avie with ARC 5000 is harder for your machine to draw that an avie with ARC 1000. There may be no difference between two avies with ARC 4900 and ARC 5000, because yes, there is a big margin of error.

That was explained way back, when Pastrami Linden introduced ARC on the Official SL Blog:

Note that these weightings, and their resultant totals, are not a *perfect* measure of your cost- but more of a relative counter to weigh against other avatars. Point: it’s close, but it’s not scientifically perfect. For that, you’d have to delve deep into batch sizes and draw calls. These weightings and their description/rationales were written by Runitai Linden, one of our most senior graphics engineers and a man who knows rendering efficiency!

We all get fed up with our machines turning to molasses in busy sims when we're surrounded by people wearing bling, long flexi hair, flexi skirts, etc.

ARC is just a way to tell people when they're getting it wrong.

So people get rude about it? That's the fault of rude people, not ARC itself.

So there are edge cases like a particle emitters which emits one particle every other year? So what? Who wears one of those? And even if they do, it's only 16 points. ARC is only meant to be a general guide. 16 points either way is nothing. You'd have to wear hundred of the little buggers for your ARC to become seriously wrong.

As for "expression" - this is like people playing their tinny MP3s out loud on the bus. Maybe they're expressing themselves, but they're forcing me to experience it, and I don't want to experience their music. Likewise, in a busy sim I don't want to experience your blingy, flexi, 300-prim furry avatar. Feel free to wear it whenever you aren't in a busy place where you're making my computer groan under the load.

Summary:

i) If you don't think ARC is precise, then congratulations, you just got the goddamn point. It's rough, and for general comparison only.

ii) If you got yelled at for having a high ARC in a busy sim, then the person who yelled at you is rude but for pity's sake please go and take off some of that junk.

Angry man

2008-10-11T19:55:00.001+01:00

I did make a comic. Clicky here.

Back once again with the renegade hamster, D for Damager, Power to the people

2008-10-10T22:44:00.004+01:00

My home has been destroyed!

The lovely island where I lived for more than 8 months, made friends, laughed, loved and frollicked, was finally shut down forever on the 25th of September. I took a couple of pictures of the final hours.

Here I am with Charisma, standing on the site where my house stood before I dragged a big selection box over it and returned it and everything in it:

All alone in the middle of a very big ocean.

Over on the other side was the home of my freinds Jaken and Anni. I took a snap the day before of their island, still with their stuff on it, surrounded by... wide, flat sea:

I brought Charisma over here and stood there getting all nostalgic for a bit (8 months is a long time in SL), talking about chapters in my life and how this one was coming to a close. Her response was beautiful and profound:

[13:57] Penn Euler: and now, you're the new chapter in my life

[13:58] Charisma Kingsford smiles

[13:58] Charisma Kingsford: there will be new memories

I haven't seen you in church lately

2008-09-06T00:16:00.003+01:00

Sorry for my recent quietness, and indeed generally low attendance in SL. I've been feeling kinda sleepy all week, combined with the fact of having finished the piano, and a fairly stressful time at work, means I haven't had much spare energy... and a new relationship has cropped up, which is where the energy I do have is being invested :)

So apologies to all the people who think I'm ignoring them. I'm not. Well, I am, but it's not because I hate them :)

I need to watch silly YouTube vids, play directed games (as opposed to SL's very undirected experience), curl up on a sofa with Charisma and recharge the the ol' batteries a bit.

Penn builds a Piano

2008-08-22T19:41:00.007+01:00

Finally! The Tuqiri Piano is complete and on sale. It's a gorgeous grand piano in just 20 prims, which beats the competition by at least 10 prims, and in some cases 60 prims.

Yes, it really is that pretty! Here's a close-up of the shiny, shiny pedals:

There's an animation in the stool from Bits'n'Bobs. Here I am wearing a tuxedo with my hair all combed and nice, playing it:

Head to my shop (slurl) to see it, or check the SLExchange listing.

Plaudits to Quaintly Tuqiri for inspiring me to make this thing.

I haz clever meme

2008-08-15T07:35:00.000+01:00

What sex are your friends - THE RESULTS

2008-08-13T12:09:00.001+01:00

Thankyou to everyone who answered my survey about what sex your friends are. The results are a bit mixed, but lets see what we can learn:

First up, absolutely no-one thought that there were more male than female avies, and only a small number of people thought it was 50-50. So we're all agreed that female avies are the majority.

Looking just at the female respondents, a pattern emerges which I thought I might see: women have mostly female friends in real life, but mostly male friends in SL. In fact, none of the women who said their RL friends were "more female than male" gave the same answer in SL (they split, half saying "more male than female" and half saying "about 50-50".

The same pattern comes through with the guys (albeit with fewer respondents - big surprise). We generally have more male friends in real life (although there was some spread, and one guy reported that he had almost exclusively female friends), but mostly female friends in SL.

Interestingly, the guy who had almost exclusively female friends IRL was the one guy who who had more male friends than female in SL.

Conclusion:
The gender makeup of your friends in SL tends to be inverted from the gender makeup of your friends in RL.

Addendum: You can play with the survey results yourself at HeySurvey.

5 things you didn't know about me

2008-08-09T15:20:00.004+01:00

Late to the party, here's my take on CeN's 5 Things meme:

In RL:

I have alarmingly long hair
I'm an Americanophile and think the UK should become the 51st state while it's still worth it.
I have a master's degree in computer science.
I am writing this on a train, on my phone
I love cooking, but I live on my own so I don't have an audience often enough.

In SL:
I have lived on the same island since January, and my new shop is rented off the same landlord.
I don't have an SL family. I'm not judging those who do, I just don't.
I hardly ever voice. I know very few people who do.
I have had a go at creating one of everything - building, sculpting, scripting, posing, texturing, sounding. Right now sculpting is the funnest.
I love finding new hair, shoes, skins, whatever - but most SL fashion for men seems to focus on either the frat boy or the pimp look. I hate those looks.

A selection of YouTube-flavoured treats

2008-08-08T23:39:00.003+01:00

You think wat, we free entertainment ah?!

2008-08-07T20:00:00.006+01:00

I accidentally lit the blue touchpaper yesterday by putting my Singaporean best friend Chantalelisa Jewell head to head with my new Malaysian friend, Quaintly Tuqiri. I wanted to hear them arguing in Singlish.

Chantalelisa was a little hesitant to get started, but soon got into the swing of it:

Chantalelisa Jewell: u say wan
Chantalelisa Jewell: i just follow
Quaintly Tuqiri: of cos i say lar if not who say?
Chantalelisa Jewell: confirm not penn say. he so blur like sotong
Quaintly Tuqiri: he memang dunno wat we talking wan
Chantalelisa Jewell: ok ok
Quaintly Tuqiri: so bad hor we all
Chantalelisa Jewell: we no bad, penn bad
Penn Euler: you're right, i have no idea, but it's great!

But then somehow I became the target of a combined Asian assault!

Quaintly Tuqiri: yalar penn go ask us to fight!
Chantalelisa Jewell: he want to kena slap
Penn Euler: yipes!
Quaintly Tuqiri: ya asking for trouble man!
Chantalelisa Jewell: whack him upside down
Quaintly Tuqiri: kenot simply disturb girls wan you know
Penn Euler: Alla mak!
Chantalelisa Jewell: inside out, then he know
Quaintly Tuqiri: ya we have the women power!
Chantalelisa Jewell: wah he so smart wan..use alamak
Quaintly Tuqiri: haha now he scared dy
Penn Euler: I'm calling chari over to hear this, it's awesome
Chantalelisa Jewell: no no, enough already
Quaintly Tuqiri: you think wat, we free entertainment ah?!
Chantalelisa Jewell: want to hear must pay ah
Penn Euler: i'll give you both a free piano!
Chantalelisa Jewell: so cheapo
Quaintly Tuqiri: we perform for you must have marnee ler!
Chantalelisa Jewell: u think money grow on trees is it?
Quaintly Tuqiri: yalor!

Thankfully Charisma arrived at this moment to lend moral support:

Quaintly Tuqiri: hi charisma!
Chantalelisa Jewell: this apek confim money no enough
Penn Euler: i'm being ridiculed in Singlish!
Chantalelisa Jewell: hi Charisma
Charisma Kingsford giggles
Quaintly Tuqiri: apek or ah beng first???
Chantalelisa Jewell: oh ah beng
Quaintly Tuqiri: i think he ah beng lar
Quaintly Tuqiri: he too young to be ah pek
Chantalelisa Jewell: cos he a bit young to be ahpek
Quaintly Tuqiri: yalor
Chantalelisa Jewell: now he bring his ahlian
Penn Euler: i think they're being rude about me, but it's hard to tell
Charisma Kingsford: mmmm-hmm!
Chantalelisa Jewell: hehehehe
Quaintly Tuqiri: but mebbe need some yellow hair first then only real ah beng
Chantalelisa Jewell: lol
Quaintly Tuqiri: eh ah beng got wear suit wan ah?
Penn Euler: what the hell is an ah beng?!
Chantalelisa Jewell: ok, that is enough singlish/manglish for the day
Quaintly Tuqiri: haiyor, you dunno, mah google lor
Quaintly Tuqiri: don so lazy wan!
Chantalelisa Jewell: yah lor, can don be so laxy

So what the heck is an ah beng? And why was I being called one?

Chantalelisa Jewell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ah_beng
Chantalelisa Jewell: so pampered
Penn Euler: Ah Beng is a term commonly given to a member of a group of young Chinese men in Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore and Malaysia. These Chinese men, whose age range from their early teens to late 20s, usually centralise in the busier and more developed cities in the region, but are usually seen as originating from smaller or more rural towns.

Finally Quaintly called Aureis Trevellion over, who is also Malaysian, and she saved me by injecting some sense into proceedings:

Chantalelisa Jewell: hello Aureis
Quaintly Tuqiri: wah your shoes so the pink!!
Quaintly Tuqiri: Aureis, Penn, who finds Singlish/Manglish very entertaining
Quaintly Tuqiri: he a bit strange wan lar
Quaintly Tuqiri: don layan too much k
Quaintly Tuqiri: Aureis oso Malaysian like me
Aureis Trevellion: yes...but not as strange as quaintly
Chantalelisa Jewell: so we now can suan him
Quaintly Tuqiri: but she no speak Manglish wan
Quaintly Tuqiri: too proper oredi
Quaintly Tuqiri: ya but she infected by the Brits lar
Quaintly Tuqiri: how can liddat!
Chantalelisa Jewell: u don no meh
Aureis Trevellion: oh shut up...you don't actually speak like this either you know?

Thankyou, Aureis! But even more, thankyou to CJ and Q for keeping me so well entertained!

What Penn got at the Truth sale

2008-07-31T09:50:00.007+01:00

I expect y'all visited the heaving nightmare of the the Truth sim, didn't you? It was one-out, one-in all evenig for me, and it was like wading through molasses on a January day once I was there. Here's how I got in:

[12:15] Caillaigh Elfenbeim: whoever wants in at truth, cue up, im tping out
[12:15] Caillaigh Elfenbeim: ready....
[12:16] Caillaigh Elfenbeim: set...
[12:16] Caillaigh Elfenbeim: go....
[12:16] Cailin Navarathna: lmao
[12:16] Penn Euler: I GOT IN!!! Thankyou Caillaigh!
[12:16] Caillaigh Elfenbeim: yay!
[12:16] Caillaigh Elfenbeim: you're welcome

It certainly was busy... this picture hardly seems to do it justice:

I got loads of stuff, which I may or may not blog later - I suspect there'll be a lot of people blogging their wins. I managed to find Chari there, and we struggled towards each other in slow motion. After an hour of compulsive purchasing we were both very glad to TP out to somewhere we could walk unimpeded and had a little fashion show for each other.

Firstly, we decided that matching hair is slightly more tragic than matching anoraks:

Along the way I'd bought 4 fat packs of hair, and one of them made me just look like Alex James. Coupled with a "hitman" suit, also from Truth, I was told that I wasn't allowed to change, ever again:

I reckon I'm going to keep that hair for a bit.

Chari liked it so much that I got glomped:

I didn't get enough pictures of all the pretty things she bought, but here's a cute burgundy dress:

That's it for now. I'm going to be away from SL for an extended weekend (back Tuesday afternoon UK time/Tuesday morning SL time), so the piano is on hold till then :'(

Penn's busy weekend

2008-07-28T17:43:00.002+01:00

I was totally busy while I was on SL this weekend, but somehow I hardly generated any pictures from it.

The main thing was working on the the low-prim piano, which was going really well until I totally arsed it up and made it look like a panda. At that point I had to forget that I was a man and sat down and had a damn good stamping, crying hissy fit all over it. Anyway, no pictures because it isn't finished and frankly right now it's awful.

Then I was running round the grid looking at malls because my current mall was moving and I didn't love the replacement I was being asked to move to. I ended up taking the plunge and renting a 64x64m commercial plot from the same guy I rent my home plot from. Lots more work to do now turning it into a shop. No pictures, because right now it's an explosion in a prim factory.

Yesterday morning featured Onigokking round a dildo tree. Dat's srs bidness, dat iz.

Then there was a shopping trip with Wry last night, but there are no pictures because... well, because I suck frankly.

Whoooo, spoooooky

2008-07-24T18:53:00.005+01:00

I was over at BAPFH looking at houses after Caillaigh Elfenbeim asked if anyone had any recommendations, and I had to go round the corner and look at the graveyard at Tableau again. It's such a cool place.

But this time I dicscovered something new. Ambling through the pretty green haze, I fell into an open grave...

And ended up in this weird underwater club:

I had to enteratin the non-existent crowd, of course:

Kabaka's new fireworks

2008-07-23T08:34:00.009+01:00

Kabaka seems to like it when I pimp his awesome shop, so here I am playing with his new and updated airstrike fireworks:

The big change is that these are now customisable for speed, rate, and colour by editing a notecard, so you can create pretty coordinated displays:

That's Eva, preparing to garotte me if her hair got singed.

Naked pictures of me

2008-07-23T08:33:00.016+01:00

Apart from shoes, I was also hoping I might see a new skin or two on Monday's CS Gridwide Hammer Hunt. I'm not that big on swapping skins normally (I have a great skin from FNKY which I wear all the time) but really, I wanted an excuse to post naked photos of myself because I have a lot of attractive female readers and basically I want to expose myself to them.

The first skin I got from the hunt was this mime-like Sinsation skin from Bodies By Oh, which scared Chari and nauseated my neighbour:

Interesting note: I spent ten minutes carefully colour-coordinating my cock for this shot before realising that I ought to just crop out that bit for the blog.

I actually love the way this skin is drawn, and if I wanted to look like a mime, I'd consider wearing it (assuming my friends had failed to carry out my instructions to kill me if I ever say I want to look like a mime.)

BUT, and please, Bodies by Oh, take this as constructive criticism: how is this supposed to make me want to buy skins at your place? Yes, it's well drawn, but it has no applicability to most people's avies. If you'd given me a freebie that actually looked good on me, I'd now be thinking about visiting your shop when I next want to spend L$ on an actual new skin.

Um. Okay, there was also a box of Rawk Out skins from lessthan3. The dark tan was yellowy, and the pale skin looked odd on me, but the light tan was a nice compromise, and kinda made me look like Elvis:

Now sure how often Elvis flipped the V's, but never mind. And that's non-free Tommy hair from Gurlywood for men I'm wearing there. And hey, I just noticed how this skin gives me moobs! That's coming right off.

Unique Needs! provided this "tattooed warrior" skin and shape:

Just for reference, here's my natural look. It's Antonio skin (tan) from FNKY wrapped around the Dylan shape from KMADD (it's actually the skin recommended on the style card you get with the shape), capped off with Ego hair in sable from Naughty Designs:

Yeah, feast your eyes on that picture of hunky loveliness.

--
EDIT: The survey results are being put back a bit while I introduce a few more groups to it.

I haz dun a hunt nao

2008-07-22T23:52:00.011+01:00

It sucks being male. That's why there are so many women on the grid. Don't talk to me about PMS and childbirth and sexism, those don't happen here - just shoes and dresses and sexy skins. Us guys have to make do with dingy little corners of sim-sized stores, with a handful of dull, dull shirts while you girls twirl around in your latest pretty dresses.

*I* want to twirl around in a pretty frock sometimes. But that's not the subject of this post. Instead, this is about the fact that some designers finally heard us and organised a hunt for us guys.

Admittedly, on Saturday, I didn't even know what a hunt was except that girls would occasionally go "squeeee!" about one and that it involved shoes sometimes. It turns out that a hunt is where a bunch of freebies are hidden round either a store, or a sim, or in this case, the whole grid, encouraging you to explore places you might not otherwise have gone, and in return you get neat stuff.

So the CS Gridwide Hammer Hunt was created for men to get in on the fun. And I did it. I teamed up with Merrick Thor initially, then a few other passers-by as the hunt wore on.

I accumulated a lot of freebies, many of which were, I'm sorry to say, fugly as arse. But there were some gems in there, such as these sharp polo shirts from Mischief for Men:

Bluebells' prize was a blue casual suit:

Twisted Rose had two prizes, one of which was this really buff t-shirt, which I have pretty much fallen in love with. Sorry ladies, it's me and the t-shirt all the way now:

I forgive them for the migraine-inducing floor just for making this t-shirt.

I half hoped I'd get some shoes out of it, but the only ones I'd even half wear are this Grunge Hustlers from Sn@tch:

There's probably a whole load of ettiquette about commenting on freebies, and I really don't want to hurt anyone's feelings here, especially not Ivey Deschanel's because she's really nice and made the hammers in Sn@tch bigger after she heard me whinging :D So I'm picking on Sn@tch here because I know she's cool and isn't going to have a tantrum if she reads this. There were worse offenders.

Here's the problem: these shoes do not make me think that I'll go to where I got them next time I want to spend L$ on a new pair of shoes. Just for reference, here's a pair of shoes that I love, my Jaywalker sneakers from Detour:

See, if someone had dropped a pair of these or something similar in the hunt, I would have a new favourite shoe shop.

Sn@tch does generally rock, as does Ivey herself, so please don't think I'm generally down on them. Okay, was that crawling enough? I'll do a special post on Sn@tch to make up for it :) There were far worse offenders in the hunt, place that just made me think, what are they trying to achieve here? Offloading excess stock of their first ever designs?

Anyway, when I work out how to put a fold in a Blogger post (like an lj-cut in LiveJournal; any help appreciated) I'll post some nudey pics of the skins that were in the hunt.

Oh, and stay tuned tomorrow for the results of my "What sex are your friends?" survey.

Kabaka's Shop

2008-07-20T23:43:00.008+01:00

Very sleepy, so short post... my buddy Kabaka Kwaszes sent me some twirly firesticks the other day to share with people, so here's Chari, twirling:

He also has an awesome new shop, where you can see his airstrike fireworks:

That's Chari on the right, shielding her head, and Alicia turned out and is on the left hoping her babydoll doesn't catch light.

---
Quaintly IMed me and asked about a low-prim piano. I deemed this to be a good challenge. Here's some of the work in progress:

Loooong way to go yet. Althoug it is low prim, like about 5 in that picture :D

---
Onigokko lives on. Some shop had some free food-related outfits which I went to get and it took about 0.0002 seconds for the onigokkos to come out.

I can't remember what the shop was or who was wearing what oh my god i'm so sleepy i can barely remember what I'm doing right now o halp

EDIT: I'm so sleepy I didn't even see that ::MIA:: logo in the goddamn picture... find it in search... I'm sure it's great... free food... zzz...

---
My pal Wry is fixing up his new avie, here he is with a 90% noob avatar (one of the new ones) plus a different freebie skin and some rocking new hair:

I'll work out what the shop was etc. and put up some "after" pics later in the week.

Can I haz bed nao?

Spedoinkle! Buffy RP?

2008-07-18T20:10:00.005+01:00

Yeah, I finally tried some non-kinky RP in SL. Charisma is a huge Buffy fan, and so am I (although my Buffy trivia is miniscule in comparison). She'd tried some Buffy the other night and it piqued my interest, so we met up with her RP friends and did this cool sequence where she and I were rescued from a demon dimension by a Slayer.

Here we are in our RP-bodies (we look nothing like this normally):

She's a wiccan, and I'm a teenager infected by a demonic virus with its own personality. Here she is "injured":

And if you're thinking that she looks adorable when "injured", you're right ;)

General Onigokko

2008-07-18T19:49:00.004+01:00

One of the best things about having joined the CH'Know group is that not only am I now friends with all sorts of funny and intelligent people, but we sometimes end up meeting up for silliness.

For example, last weekend I had a bunch of them over to do modelling shots of the stone benches, and something posessed me to hand out an object called onigokko_shippo, which you wear and it makes you run round in cicles like a loon. Suddenly, everyone was all over it!

Well, I found the shop of the guy who made it, Gonzo Shan. And I called the Ch'Know girls over to see it. Things got silly. Quickly.

Eventually the Meara-Puft man stomped in and flattened everyone:

So anyway, go to Gonzo Shan's shop and pick up your own onigokko - it's in the freebies section, in the box with a picture of people running round on it:

Questionnaire: What sex are your friends?

2008-07-15T20:05:00.005+01:00

I have an almost exclusively female friends list in SL. That's not been a policy, just how things have worked out. My RL friends are pretty much 50-50 male-female. What is your experience? Do this little questionnaire and next week I'll tally the answers and see what's going on.
Fill out!
EDIT: The link to the questionnaire is now fixed at the top of the page as well.

Following the herd

2008-07-15T09:18:00.000+01:00

Okay, this is going to be one of those memes where everyone turns out to be the same thing, isn't it?

You are a Rubik's Cube

You are engaging and popular. People are drawn to your colorful personality.

As much as they try, people can't stay away from you.

And while you seem easy to understand, people can't figure out what direction you're coming from.

What Kind of Puzzle Are You?

Fridge meme

2008-07-15T07:40:00.001+01:00

Yeah, workaholic, that's me.

What Your Fridge Says About You

You aren't greedy, but you don't really deprive yourself either. You strike a good balance with the stuff you buy.

You are not careful with your money. In fact, you rarely think about how much you are spending.

You are a very adventurous person. You love to try new things, and you get bored very easily.

You try to be responsible, but you don't always succeed. Your heart is in the right place though.

You are likely single - and a workaholic.

What Do the Contents of Your Refrigerator Say About You?

IPHONE UPDATE: yay! I now has a signal.

This week's must-buy list

2008-07-13T23:13:00.007+01:00

It's been an acquisative weekend for me. First of all Chari gave me an @home YouTube TV:

Thanks, babe!

Then I had to get a new sofa from Melino Style so we could sit and watch TV:

Sunday morning, after the photoshoot, Meara mentioned her MystiTool HUD and then gave an impromptu demonstration. I had to quite literally buy one then and there. No one screenshot can do justice to it, so here it is rezzing an impromptu table (the sort that spawns seats as people sit down):

Then some time in the evening a Ch'Know group notice went out from Alicia which basically said OMG BOOTS SQUEE LOLOLOL MERRICK - the upshot of which was some rather awesome new men's boots at Tesla:

I got the black ones too because I am a MALE SHOE WHORE:

The girls of Ch'Know

2008-07-13T20:58:00.004+01:00

So this morning I got a bunch of hawt babes over to help model the Dawson Stone Benches:

Yeah, I got my arm round Quaintly ;)

At some point it all went a bit loopy:

iPHONE UPDATE:
The phone itself rawks. Seriously, it totally shreds. But in an act of classic British retardedness, O2 and and Carphone Warehouse have between them managed to get absolutely everything wrong about this release, so at the moment my iPhone is basically an expensive iPod Touch. Maybe tomorrow it will start to function as a phone.

I just want you all to know that...

2008-07-12T14:55:00.000+01:00

I'm blogging from my iPhone 3G.

Prove yourself to me

2008-07-11T09:20:00.005+01:00

Spontaneous post based on this posting by CeNedra Rivera, wherein she says:

I’ve met some jerks over my time in SL that insisted I speak in order to prove I’m female. First, I don’t have to prove anything to anyone. Second, if hearing my voice is a requirement in order to be my friend, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out LOL. I’m mean I know.

That point about being asked to prove that you're female is interesting. Sometimes you do have to prove something. Does your guy know for 100% certain that you really are a girl? All he has to go on is mutual friends' words that they've heard your voice, and maybe you're all in it together. For that matter, are you sure he's not a woman acting out a fantasy?

(That's a hypothetical example, by the way. I'm not actually suggesting that Cen is lying to her bf or vice versa.)

Maybe this is wrong of me, but I do respond differently to people based on their RL gender. I like to flirt, it's fun and harmless, but I am not comfortable going any further with someone who I know is male in RL.

Maybe only 10% of the female population of SL is transvestite, but that's enough to make me want to seek a little assurance before anything happens. I certainly wouldn't ask a female avatar to prove herself right after meeting, but I might well at some point in our friendship.

I think female players, need to understand that we, as male players, sometimes feel like we are walking through a minefield where the mines don't blow you up, but have remarkably deep voices and large hands.

Lastly, I'll just add that I have absolutely no problem with TV avatars themselves. Two of my best friends in SL are TV, and we get on like a house on fire. I also have a girl alt who mostly comes out to test furniture poses these days but used to be an RP character. So TV avatars are a-ok with me, and you certainly don't have to prove your boob credentials to be my friend, as long as it's understood that I'm not comfortable interacting with a TV avatar in any way that I wouldn't interact with a guy.

Am I a chauvinist? A sexist? A bigot? A homophobe? I have abolutely no idea and would be interested in feedback.

Now you can make me rich online

2008-07-08T23:12:00.005+01:00

The products from Penn's Enlargement are now on SLExchange and OnRez.

And because I hate to post without a piccy, here I am in top hat and tails, busting some Jacko moves at Rhapsody in Blue:

Comedy moment from tonight:
Marissa Fredriksson: Does he know he's crashed?
KouWainohia Bergbahn: I don't think so.
Fable Sinatra: oh nooo
Charles Coleman (on voice): Who's crashed?
Fones Rang: u
DOC Sideways: You

But apart from that, where the hell is everyone? My F-list has been dead all night!

Thanks Alicia

2008-07-08T23:09:00.002+01:00

A selection of the gifts that Alicia Chenaux just gave out to the Ch'know group:

Rave beads, rave batons, greedy thought bubble, and of course BLINGIS.

PENN'S ENLARGEMENT

2008-07-07T20:37:00.004+01:00

Now open, selling the 9-prim Adirondack chair and a variety of other weird, lovely low-prim goodies. And yes, there are freebies too.

Stop in and say hi - I'll be hanging out in there for a little, and I'll just get bored if no-one comes.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Fantasy%20Land%202/161/104/23

EDIT: Big thanks to Elora Henig for proof-shopping my new shop and helping me make it clearer what was on sale.

Best in.. pink and yellow and green and blue?

2008-07-07T02:12:00.008+01:00

Just rounded off my night at a Best In Blue event at Krystal Rose with Tweny and CJ. Started off quite well, we were even wearing blue:

Then someone fired up one of those acid dance balls, and suddenly we were all in them:

Then the chick next to me pulled out this thing:

And in the space of a couple of songs the dance floor started to look like:

If you look carefully, you'll notice that there were only like 6 people there. But we made our own fun.

What the hell is an Adirondack?

2008-07-07T00:21:00.003+01:00

A few posts ago I banged on about interesting projects, and CeNedra Rivera came up with the goods: an Adirondack chair that isn't 30+ prims.

Well okay. Okay then.

Chair: 9 prims. Footrest: 6 prims. Table: 7 prims.

Next!

"Penn Euler" is worth 76 points

2008-07-05T09:54:00.003+01:00

There's a real art to choosing a good name for your avatar in Second Life. My first ever one used my real first name and the surname "Eponym", because I thought that was clever. It turned out to be really stupid.

Then I tried a couple of avies with non-gender-specific names so I could go TV for RP areas. I still have one of them as an alt, but eventually I just went with the old saw of naming myself after a celebrity.

ArminasX Saiman has been doing some long hard thinking about avie names, and has produced a quizzy thing where you can find out how good your choice of name was

Score your avatar's name

"Penn Euler" scored 76!

Really, I should not be left alone

2008-07-04T23:40:00.003+01:00

Oh geez, this is what happens when all my American buddies are offline celebrating their funny little holiday. I get bored and start playing with black magic.

I just cast some weird spell, and this... thing appeared. What the hell is it?

Apparently it has the ability to find out anyone's key and tell you if they're online. Dark magic, I tell you. Nothing good will come of this.

Apparently the only way to lift the curse is to give copies of it away to as many people as possible. Leave a comment or IM me if you'd like one.

The difference between you and Banksy is...

2008-07-04T19:37:00.003+01:00

This is where I go all blogosphere and start referencing other people's blogs:

I read Alicia Chenaux's blog, Ch'know. That's what got me into blogging. Via her blog, I joined her Ch'know group.

The other day she blogged about a fairly obnoxious sign making fun of those anti-content-theft posters you see around. It was probably supposed to be funny, but the result was just stupid.

Then last night (my time; probably quarter past brunch SL time) someone reported that this had happened outside Alicia's shop:

Yes, someone had stencilled a copy of a Banksy work and the words "GREEDY SHOP" on the pavement (sidewalk :P) outside the Ch'know shop.

The "someone" turned out to be one Hell Yifu, who at the time had this in his/her/its profile:

"I am Second Lifes banksy... piss me off and i'll piss you off."

No. You're not. Banksy creates his own works. And they're clever enough to work without being captioned. And the objective of his work is never to piss people off, but to make people aware of some deep subjects. And sometimes, be funny.

Also, Ch'know doesn't charge more than 100L for anything, and it's all really cute stuff that Alicia has made. And the top floor is full of lovingly assembled boxes of high-quality free stuff, so "greedy" is just not the right word.

You fail, Hell Yifu, or whatever your normal name is. You fail forever.

By the way I have a shop where I sell fires for $L400 each! Outrageous! Gosh, I hope no-one drops a copy of a Banksy picture outside my shop! Wow, that would suck!

Happy 4th July, Americans!

2008-07-04T19:18:00.004+01:00

Allow me to take this opportunity to say that I hold absolutely no grudge against you for stealing our colony.

Correctly labelled

2008-07-03T20:45:00.005+01:00

Just as I was taking the screenshot for that last post, I noticed that my textures had gone all screwy and I needed to rebake. But before I did, I took a screenshot:

Goshy, I just can't think of a better part of my screen to have frozen and painted onto my body. Just in case anybody wasn't aware that I'm an ULTIMATE COCK, it's there in 3"-high lettering. Hi! My name is Penn, and I'm an ULTIMATE COCK.

Yes, I know this probably wasn't visible to anyone else but still.

Escher House

2008-07-03T20:38:00.003+01:00

If you only do one thing in SL today, visit the MC Escher Relativity House [slurl].

Yes, it's the house from *that* drawing by Escher.

Interesting versus profitable

2008-07-03T17:57:00.004+01:00

Something I keep wanting to bang on about in SL is the difference between interesting and profitable.

Some people make their real-life living from SL, and I say well done to them, but I make my real-life living in real life. So what I do in SL, I do for entertainment.

A while ago I upset a chap because I wouldn't take his commission to build something for him. He was offering a very fair sum of money, but the problem was, what he wanted was already covered by a dozen competing products. Imagine it was something like a networked rent box system. It wasn't that exact thing, but you get the idea - there's several very good, well-tested ones out there.

I knew that without working for weeks, nothing I came up with could be better than the existing solutions. And anyway, booooring!

So I turned him down, and he thought I was being snotty with him or something. I don't know exactly, the instant he used a double interrobang ("?!?!") at the end of a sentence I TP'ed out.

So what is interesting? Well, it's hard to predict, but often it comes up because of something someone has said. Her Royal Highness Lady Dawson of Dawson Manor mentioned that she couldn't find any decent stone benches for her garden [1]. I looked on SLX too and saw the selection of bent prim efforts available. So I showed her a picture of a RL Haddonstone bench,

and said, "you want something like that". And she agreed. And I stroked my beard (for I have a beard, you see) and began to plot. I could see the top and sides as one prim each, and although my sculpting skills were/are limited in the extreme, I enlisted a little help, and the end result is the Dawson Bench, as featured in my last post.

It was fun because it was an unusual challenge, I have now made the best stone bench in SL [2], and it improved my sculpting skills.

I am liable to launch into full production mode when someone gives me an interesting idea. I may or may not sell the result. I may or may not give it away for free. The main thing is that the actual construction needs to be an unusual challenge.

[1]: In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that if Lady asked me to make her a Christmas tree decoration out of my own small intestine, I'd do it, and probably smile about it too.

[2]: Go on, prove me wrong.

Sculpties

2008-07-03T13:37:00.005+01:00

No welcome post for me - I'm just going to get you on your knees and ram my sculpties down your your throat.

Yes, I make scuplts. Here's one:

It's a candle, with baked lighting. There's only a tiny amount of glow on it. The rest of the "brightness" is actually built into the texture.

Here's a planter:

Yep, that's one prim. I *love* scuplties!

My latest work is a stone bench:

If you are overcome with joy at these marvellous creations, please leave a comment.