Journeyman

We're not having bad weather --

it was a three cat night, with temps into the 20s last night. Left the window open for ventilation...

not a tornado in sight, no flood in the basement or streets, just a suddenly cool Maine spring after am unseasonal warming spell. Frost this morning, yes, but it'll burn off before I need to scrape the windshield. My fault, this is, i guess -- last week i put the snow shovels away. For those suffering from the weather's capriciousness, my condolences.  At 5:55 wind was from the NE at 2 mph, most recent gust was 5 mph, decidedly unlike the weekend where we were running with gusts in the 20 to  30 mph. As the sun comes up, I expect a better breeze.

Over on  Sharon's LJ she's posted information about the closet clearing project, and Partners In Necessity still in the cross-hairs. Bibliogeeks may be interested in knowing that if they have a PIN bound in black with gold lettering on the spine beneath their paper cover ... well, see
http://rolanni.livejournal.com/ ...

And, the question of what's real and what's not comes up again: do you own your Second Life, or is it a service?
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/05/10/virtual.property.second.life/index.html?hpt=C2

Catch you all later.

For one thing, the Second Life Book Fair is nearly upon us...

and SRM Publisher (following link ought only work if you have Second Life installed...) has a fancy booth that 's ready for visitors there ... if you're into virtual worlds, please come on by! If you'd like to share that link with someone in plain text .... http://slurl.com/secondlife/Wallaby/208/49/53/

... if you're a Friend of Liad, a member of Science Fiction Rangers, or have other sfictional connections in SL come on by -- we may need folks to help stand around and look busy! You can volunteer to me (elan neruda in world) or to Shawna Montgomery for particular hours, too.

Also the link for the Hellspark order page ought to be working now...

And now off to other excitements!

Among the other excitements


New and Improved Version 2.2

After yet another morning of driving around in RL, I've been spending some time this afternoon in SL looking at the submissions for the science fiction photo contest... interesting. The actual judging has started i guess, since every time I stop by the gallery I drop one out of my mental "Best In Show" list...

IN RL I see Locus Online mentions us in their New and Notable/ New in Paperback listing today... that is, they list Balance of Trade's Ace edition. Cool.

More later...

Due to requests in various threads and email, I'm asked to talk about the Friends of Liad Park meeting in Second Life on Sunday.

It was quiet; and that was my fault, because I didn't mention the idea until quite late. Still, we averaged about three people at any one time, and -- perhaps oddly -- a number of folks showed up after the expected ending time. We also ended up with several people stopping by during the day on Monday, and later Monday evening.

Mostly we all showed off. Some showed off dragons perched on shoulders, others had adventures with dragons afterwards. We eventually managed to get a working copy of our first snippet selection -- that'd be snippets from Changeling -- available for reading at the FoL park bandstand/pavilion; as time goes on we expect to have snippets from most of our chapbooks and books in a readable-in-Second-Life format, available for Friends of Liad members at the park and also at Nifty Snippets, where we expect to make them available to the general SL populace for the princely sum of 1 Linden (amounting to about 1/3 cent, US, I suspect.)

We also shared some of the places we visit, practiced teleporting, practiced building things (please don't make it a habit to build things in the park, go to a sandbox...)and sat around and chatted about things in SL and RL. Rolanni was in writing form so she stopped in and out dress as Kit depending on her muse, Dulsey, and how hard I was laughing....

Once in Second Life there are several ways to find Friends of Liad Park. One is to use the "Find" tab at the (bottom center) of the Second Life screen and then select "All" on the right side at the top... to get a small window where you should have success with any of a number of searches. For example, Friends of Liad Park tends bring up a short list from which you can select the park and then teleport in. You can also use the "places" tab for similar results, and simply typing "science fiction" into "places" or "all" will also give the option of selecting the park. I will note that at last test "scifi" was not a valid search string for the FoL or FoL park!

We now have around 13 members of Friends of Liad (that's signed in as members in Second Life) and a smaller number signed up for ElseCon. My first attempt to start a group for folks with beards (and people in favor of folks with beards) was not successful, but I may try again, in time...

The park at this point (which is in the region named Clay, you can teleport directly to 9,230,130) consists of some "mature flat land", a couple of benches (donated by Kit Jimenez) and a pavilion with various SF related books in it. There's a Tree-and-Dragon sign on the wall of the house next door -- and on the roof of that house is a cube looking a lot like the cover of Crystal Dragon. I hope to be adding a small pond; if I can that will make it a very musical place since we already have a windchime. I'm also looking into affording a welcome robot for the park. Depending on interest level it's possible that the house next door could be removed, or if someone's *really* interested, the egyptian style home,mansion/temple perched more or less above the park is for sale and could be added to the property quite handily. We'd need to hold a bake sale or two to afford that, since it looks like the sale price would work out to about $170 or so in US$!...I've seen a couple of small outdoor stages with seating we could add, assuming we have enough "prims" available.

Oh yeah, if you get into Second Life you can also visit Second Childhood Carousel in Boreal (178,252,125, handily next to the still a-building Nifty Snippets shop. If Kit has time she can explain about the joys of the Independent State of Caledon and the clock shop there. As for me, as I type this the sound and image of the surf at Caledon waits beyond this text, and it's breakfast time.