Lately I've been listening to fantasy and science fiction while driving. Here are a half-dozen that I really enjoyed.

• Biographical Notes to "A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-planes" by Benjamin Rosenbaum
• Captain Fantasy and the Secret Masters
• Castor on Troubled Waters
• Exhalation
• N-words
• Rapunzel

My christmas present arrived today: an EWI4000s (eewee)
"electronic wind instrument", i.e. wind controller/synth.

Now I can play bass ... without learning to play the
bass, as it were. A number of the built-in voices
sound reasonable enough to use as a regular instrument,
I think, and not just an electronic effect.

Getting the hang of the octave control (the left thumb
goes in one of seven positions, with rollers between
will take some time, but the top side feels pretty
familiar.

Time to start playing some music again.

For my second little exploration project in second life, I thought I'd try a little juggling ... but all I managed was this short sequence. (Look for the little pink ball.)

Even that short sequence - reaching into my pocket, pulling out a ball, and tossing it into the air - was more work than I expected.
 
The animation tech itself was straightforward once I found an extremely nice blender script from Jacek Antonelli, the animation exporter and its tutorial. (I like using blender as an animation tool.)
 
The real problem came trying to coordinate the motion of my hand with a ball that would react to second life's version of gravity - that doesn't fit so well with the second life system. The biggest problem is that there's no API for determining the position of the hand during an animation. When held in the hand, the ball can determine where the center of the avatar's body is, or where it is relative to the hand, but it can't tell where the hand is.
 
The best approach I could come up with works like this :
 
While holding an invisible ball in my right hand, the "pocket juggle" script runs, which triggers the "reach into my pocket" animation, makes the ball visible while my hand is in my pocket. When it's time to throw the ball, the one in my hand becomes invisible again while creating a new, visible, physical (so gravity works on it), temporary (so it doesn't clutter up the world), phantom (so it doesn't collide with my hand and jump off any-which way) ball, and giving it an upward velocity. The position and creating time of the moving ball are all hardcoded numbers specific to this particular animation and this particular avatar's size.
 
Blech.
 
Definitely a learning experience. Working within the second life system continues to be extremely awkward. (Edit the script locally; turn on "see invisible things"; take the ball out of inventory; open the ball to find its script; replace with the new script; save the ball back to inventory; attach the ball to my hand; turn off "see invisible things"; run/test the script. Repeat.) As a platform I like the ideas, but developing with it is painful.
 
I think part of the lesson is that trying to color outside the lines in the second life system is difficult. I'm not sure that bodes well for using it as a platform for the dance tech I'm interested in.
 
Anyway, now my avatar can flip a little pink ball into the air.  And you never know when *that* might come in handy.

Update: the code and second life objects are available at Xstreet.

Last night I was practicing milonga with Melinda
at the Brattleboro Tues practica, and mentioned
these two youtube videos - seem to be the ones
I always come back to when working on my milonga.

 Geraldine Rojas and Javier Rodrigues in 2006, one is
in a teaching setting, the other a performance venue.

 

 

 So nice.

I've been exploring second life for about a month now,
though more as a technical platform than a social fru fru.
 
In that time, I first customized my avatar a bit
with something like my face (including glasses and a ponytail),
then played around with transportation a bit - though there are
many devices in-world that do a much better job than
my attempts - and just now have finished generating a 3D
spirograph pattern, shown below.
 
Technically, the whole system has some intriguing features.
But the programming language (Linden Scripting Language,
or LSL as it's called) is amazingly painful. Beyond the
awkward work flow (click on the object, open it up, double-click
the script, edit it in-world, save a copy to an external
editor, drag it into inventory, ... working with these
things is gruesome), the language itself is - well,
see for yourself.
 

 
Yup, xPoints[3] is just too easy. After all, maybe
there's an integer there right? Sigh.
 
Did I mention there's no way to create libraries
and reuse code? Deeper sigh.

Here's an image of a line art sculpture, my first scripting project.

Next: on to animations. I'm sure those'll be
lots more fun.
 
- Barrachois Sabra

Update: the code is available at Xstreet.

This is a test of the "posterous" thingy.
 
First question: does it do html-ish tags
like this bold word?
 
Second question: what does it do with
links like http://cs.marlboro.edu ?
 
Third question? Does it wrap really long lines like this that go on and
on and on?
Or how about this on the next line?
 
I guess that's enough for a first try.