ben x

 

The ↑movie debut by Belgian director Nic Balthazar is an absolute must, imho! ↑Wikipedia knows:
 

clan du néon

 
"Sons of the Neon Chrysanthemum' is a term for the Yakuza in William Gibson's sepulchral sprawl future. The "↑Clan du Néon" stalks French metropoles by night, it even creates the dark, but is far from illegality. Its members are against wasting energy by letting neon signs shine pointlessly all night long—so they switch them off. Not by brute force, but by simply operating the switch. I never had a look into it, and hence do not know if this is the case with neon signs everywhere, but at least in France at every neon sign there is an outdoor switch for security reasons. Normally this switch is located several meters up, so the clan members either jump up or use a stick with a coat hanger as a crossbar at its top end. Beautiful thing is, that this ain't illegal, as they are just switching off the light.

enemy dispenser
manuscript-day eleven of 100
 
Overlay text points me to a decidedly surreal element, a large switch, its socket pasted to a brick wall. An enamel sign above it reads 'enemy dispenser.' Gathering all my guts I am stepping up to the oversized button and 'engage.'
    Sudden excited shouting in the street. Outside my field of vision (FOV) a yet unknown number of bad guys has spawned. While I am hastily turning around a gun cracks. Blood sprays, the stereo headphones relay a pressed 'Ugh!' to my brain. Payne's way of quitting him being hit. Panic stricken, having no idea where the projectile originated from, I am running across the street, dodging into suspected safety behind a parked car. Crouching there, condensed breath rhythmically appearing in front of my face, I realize that I have lost health.
    The according gauge in the lower left corner of the screen, next to the bullet time hourglass, unsparingly shows me this risk-aggravating factor. When health melts down to nil, I am dead. The health-meter is designed as the silhouette of the one who has nothing to lose, the outlawed ex-undercover cop Max Payne. My silhouette. At the moment it appears to me like the oh so familiar chalked outline of a corpse on concrete. Dead man walking.
    My meditations on the balancing of the game's health- or damage-point system are brought to a grinding halt by catching a glimpse of pants legs in the corner of my eye. One of those aggressive blokes has spotted me hiding behind the forlorn car, and already came around.
    I am facing his gun's muzzle at point blank range. The bore is octagonal instead of round, I am shootdodging sideways. Although bullet time gives me plenty of opportunity to aim, I only manage to bring my crosshairs to his stomach. The impact makes him tumble backwards, but does not bring him to the ground. Realizing that he is preparing to attack again, I am leveling my Beretta with his line of sight.
    One down, nothing to celebrate, the others are storming towards me, guns blazing. Sending a fan of bullets into their general direction does no good. I am failing to hit and run out of ammunition.
    'WASD,' the space bar, the whole keyboard, the mouse, even the screen are forgotten, from now on only registered by the subconscious, I am no more actively aware of operating them. I am running, crouching, dodging, and shooting for my life. I am Max Payne, out 'in the violent, cold urban night.'
    Rushing into the fleeting cover of a doorstep, a trash bin, the bus shelter, the safety railing of the entrance to 'Roscoe Street Station.' Streetlevel standard city elements seemingly get inscribed with new meanings out of the urban warfare field manual.

raining games
manuscript-day four of 100
 
Yesterday night, while hunched over his C-64, absorbedly somersaulting over compact droids while running along platforms, hard banging against the door of his flat wrenched him out of immersion.
    'Open that door immediately,' a commanding voice shouted from the staircase outside his apartment. The order was preceded by the incomprehensible, but nevertheless authoritative yelling of a name, and of a likewise yelled address resembling the one of a nearby police station. Already close to wetting his pants, picturing himself in jail for having committed the arch-crime of copyright infringement at least a zillion times, he sprang to immediate action.
    Each inmate of his building has access to a balcony, running along the width of the facade, divided into cubicles by flimsy separating plates. He used to joke, that when he returned home from work, and stepped through the balcony door, he sometimes for a moment felt to be back in the office.
    The office he would not see for the long time of his sentence.
    Pressure upon him, he knelt down and started to gather up all data storage media he could get hold of. Quite a task, as the dispersed heaps were littering half of the floor. He knew that a friend of him, occupying the laying-battery cell next to his, was home.
    The yelling and banging not ceasing amplified his nervousness and fright to a state of terror. He rushed out on the balcony, balancing his load on both arms.
    'They're coming for me,' he cried into the neighbour's face, who happened to be outside on the balcony, 'you gotta help me!' Leaning over the parapet and halfway around the separator he started to shove the untidy bundle of diskettes over to his friend.
    The neighbour, completely caught by surprise, did not manage to properly receive the contraband. Neither did the sender manage to properly shove it over, resulting in the two of them ushering a wobbling shower of real 'floppy' disks, 5 1/4'' in diameter, down to the street.
    'What's that?' the neighbour finally asked, looking into the abyss, where the cloud of data started to settle on the concrete.
    'Our games, silly!' he spat out between clenched teeth, rushing inside again, not wanting to make the law wait for too suspiciously long a time.

warped visions
manuscript-day three of 100
 
Imagine an unspecified European traveller voyaging into an equally unspecified remote area, there coming into contact with the even more unspecified indigenous population. The society he visits lacks scripture, but pictorial representation is abound. With an instant camera the traveller takes pictures of the landscape, the village, and of his hosts.
    On presentation of the pictures the locals give to understand that they do not recognize anything. The visitor is flabbergasted, but after some explaining from his side, the villagers manage to recognize the to them familiar sceneries as represented. Time passes, the people are gathering more experience with photographies. In due course they are able to interprete all new pictures without any aid whatsoever.
    In reciprocity the traveller is shown clay vessels, over and over covered with paintings. The European only sees abstract geometric patterns, to him in no way related to the material environment. After some explanation work he manages to recognize the shape of an animal—strangely warped and twisted, like simultaneously looked upon from several vantage points. A number of pots later the drawings start to untangle before his eyes. Very much to the villagers' joy, when looking at a pot he has never seen before, he now instantaneously can voice the correct interpretation of the picture thereupon.

ignition—↵ablaze rewritten
manuscript-day two of 100
 

 
My having an appointment here and now renders the situation odd. Else there would be little wonder in the downtown Manhattan spaghetti joint being perfectly deserted at that time of night. Way past the graveyard shift, uncanny twilight, floor covered by classical black and white checker tile, rows of lavishly upholstered benches, matching diner-style tables squeezed in-between, an enormous mahogany bar in the back, and nobody to be seen.
    A cliché setting not missing its target, bringing home the menacing ambience quite nicely. Just if I would not be nervous and frightened enough yet. Since several minutes—ages, that is—I am standing here, staring into the shadows, hardly daring to move.
    Alas, there is no choice, I have to fathom the darkness to its heart. Maybe they are in another room, well separated from the main area. Some black chamber of conspiracy. Those mobsters are equally fond of cozy backrooms as they are of laying traps.
    Something is wrong in here.
    Within my mind the slightly caustic impression of petrol vapour, pleasant and repelling at the same time, kicks in way too late. Already I have undertaken my first tentative steps towards the unknown depths of the dimly lit Italian restaurant and things start to go horribly wrong. A row of until now well hidden incendiary bombs detonates and sets the 'Casa di Angelo' on fire.

penthouse
manuscript-day one of 100
 

 

The skies outside the floor to ceiling glass panes resemble all but white noise on television. Nothing of a dead channel here, they are as brilliant as two high-end TFT flatscreens can render. Screens which are quite alive—so much so that they can switch from absolute black hole darkness to blazing supernova white, and the other way round, in less than two milliseconds. Hence the nocturnal nonsky appears as a star-speckled perfect black. The crisp vista of the metropolis skyline below might represent Seattle, we are not sure.
    Finally I made it through the high-rise, up to the penthouse—it took me six full years since accessing the entrance hall. When approaching the panorama windows, the sound effect of impacting raindrops becomes louder, clearly stemming from the crystalline slabs in front of me. Only if you know it and concentrate, you will discover that it is looped.
    The polished wooden parquet flooring faintly mirrors everything in the room, including the three man-high tarot cards on the wall. Every thing's Wiedergänger stares up from below, but my mirror image lacks. What a matching metaphor for the condition of an avatar inside a virtual world. Neither deceased nor alive, undead like a vampire.
    Just like at the set of a horror movie, a lot in here is smoke and mirrors. The floor does not reflect the room, never could, as this function is not built into the 'Second Life' engine. The floor's surface consists of a semi-transparent texture, partly showing the structure of wooden planks, partly showing what is beneath. And below is an upside down version of the room I am in.

manuscript
During the last days the process of writing the dreaded book, which now definitely will be christened "maxmod—an ethnography of cyberculture" (note the humbleness, it's an ethnography, not the ethnography), was going really well. I've got a run. Recently I read an interview with Philip Roth—he produces two pages of manuscript a day, up to ten pages on exceedingly good days. Yesterday I managed to write three and a half pages, one page of those falling into a hard to write section. If I can keep up yesterday's pace, I'll be finished in a hundred days. So, in order to crank up the pressure valve even more a bit, let's declare today as day one of a hundred, and let's see if I really can do it.
 
In fact, I have to do it, or will find myself out on the street. Hence I have to tone down the frequency of blog entries on astray issues. To keep it running nevertheless, and because I believe that this belongs into the whole project's weblog, today I created the new section "↵manuscript." In there I will post bits'n'pieces of my draft, not in the order the parts will appear in the book, maybe some won't make it in the book at all, or get rewritten later on. If I really can keep it up like yesterday, entries will be steadily trickling in.
 
At 2AM last night I called it a day and, for relaxation, watched Season 1, Episode 5 (SE1EP5) of "Twin Peaks". Yes, the fandom is right, every episode I watch leaves me with a question, becoming ever more burning ... The phone number of Sherilyn Fenn? Anybody? No? All right, that settled, I am only left with making it official: David Lynch is a genius. Watching "Twin Peaks" is not just pastime, but a measure to keep myself in the write mood, just like my current rereading of "Neuromancer" for the umpteenth time is.

max payne—spying on the set

 
Meanwhile I have been forced into the process of writing up what came out of my last six years spent online among gamemodders and their kin. The heat of time pressure really is on me now, and I am writing day and night—on my big machine mainly, and when I can not stand the office anymore, I carry my manuscript home in an USB-stick, which I wear around my neck all the time, and continue writing on the laptop. The whole thing grows exuberantly, every section runs riot, and I am hoping that the whole sprawl finally grows together and will form an integral piece.
 
Although I am at the same time writing on the very last one, at the moment I am again mainly concerned with the first three or so chapters, with how it all began, with "↑Max Payne" (MP). So I am skimming through the according parts of my 63.4GB of fieldnotes, logs, texts, mainly downloaded, but partially self-created digital objects of any provenance, and whatyouhave. Additionally, in order to maintain the right ambience, I am visiting ye ole posse, am loitering around within the online infrastructure where the guys are to be found nowadays.
 
↑At the AlanWakeFORUMS I found ↑the hint to very current developments of an issue which is on the community's discussing agenda since ages—MP on the silver screen. The above picture is a detail from a photography out of a ↑flickr album, containing private on-set pictures:
 

↑Mark Wahlberg ain't a bad choice for impersonating Mr. Payne—at least facewise. When I started to play MP back in 2002 I thought that Payne was styled after ↑Mickey Rourke, and only later learned, that the avatar sported the face of the game's writer, ↑Sam Lake.
 
And, Maddie, I think you are right, it's Nicole Horne's limousine. Horne, Horne, ... ? Any relation to that family of Twin-Peaks fame, or coincidence? Hardly, as Remedy and Sam Lake clearly have stated, that "↑Twin Peaks" was a big inspiration for the town of "↑Bright Falls", and "↑Alan Wake" in general. Here is some visual back-up:
 

 

 
I am sincerely hoping that the book I am producing at the moment will be a bit easier to understand than ↑David-Lynch movies. But then again ...
 
P.S.: Here is ↑something for you geeks, plus ↑even more of it.

trobriand assets

 

giant avatars—a tutorial
how to oversize the regular second-life avatar mesh in 13 steps
 

 
A lot of people in "↑Second Life" (SL) are craving for larger-than-life avatars, but the sliders of the appearance menu only do allow body sizes within 'human limits'. You may have seen large furries or robots (like Detect's ↵Kravatac), but those are constructions out of attached prims, completely hiding the avatar itself inside, and equipped with an animation override, containing a new set of animations for the huge figure. This strategy is a workaround, as the size of the avatar's character mesh is not changed beyond the set limits. But then there are ↑rumours, like: "Due to a bug in the current code of Secondlife it is possible to generate avatars of huge size if you know how to do it. [...] Enjoy the pics and no I’m not telling how to do it." ... Thank you very much :-(
 
As I was fascinated by this possibilities, I did some research. Obviously, if the phenomenon really existed, it had to be a bug exploit maybe similar to the one resulting in mega prims. I'm not much of a coder, and gave the thing up. Then, about a year ago, I saw some work in progress on a website. There it was attempted to trick the appearance and building interface of SL, in order to achieve the desired huge avatars. As no working solution was provided, I forgot about the matter. Till recently. A random guy in a chatroom could not keep his big mouth shut, but was reluctant to give precise information, when asked directly. I dug in my files and went back to said website. Unfortunately meanwhile it seems to have been taken offline, and the Internet archive does not have a copy.
 
But now I was farely sure that the effect really existed, and worked on from the information I saved to my HDD back then. After much trial and error and a good deal of frustration I finally succeeded :-) There is no coding required, no scripts are needed, as the method indeed cleverly tricks both the building and appearance feature. It is not hard to do—clean sculpties are way harder, but a bit of patience is needed, though, because absolute precision is required! As an open-source follower, I will exactly tell you how to do it, step by step:
 

 
1) You need a single frame animation, forcing the avatar into default position, meaning having every joint of the bone rig at a rotation of exactly zero degrees. You can make an according animation in e.g. QAvimator [right side of the above picture], import it into SL, and then play it 'in world' (do not play it 'locally,' as then the process to follow will not work—locally means that the animation is only visible on your screen, as your client [the SL 'viewer'] won't relay the data to the server, but we have to alter the server data). Many posing stands already feature the required stance, so you can use one of those instead, and it is easier to position the av precisely on the grid. In case you are using a posing stand you have not made yourself, have to make absolutely sure, a) that the av poses exactly above the stand's center, b) that the pose really is the default stance, and c) that the hand morph, at both hands, is forced to the awkward 'splayed fingers' pose. The face morph does not matter, it can be any.
 

 
2) Assuming that you are using a posing stand, rezz it inworld. Then move it to an integer grid intersection, e.g. at 30,45,430 in my example— that way it will be easier to exactly align the final, and crucial, piece later on. Get your av on the posing stand.
 
3) Go into 'building mode' and rezz a cylinder. make it 1 meter large in the z-dimension, 0.1 meters in x- and y-dimensions. Right click the cylinder and 'take' it. Make four copies of the cylinder inside the inventory. Right click one of the cylinders in your 'inventory' and attach it to the right hand. Right click one of the copies and attach it to the left hand.
 
4) Right click on the cylinder attached to your right hand and click 'edit'. If it is not vertical yet, rotate it, so that it is exactly vertical. Use the degree scales for this. Move the cylinder downward in z-direction for 0.9 meters. Rotate the cylinder inward, to the body's centre exactly 45 degrees. Rotate the cylinder forward exactly 30 degrees, so that the upper end of it is still inside the hand, the lower end in front of the av's body. (We have to do that, because, except at the hands and feet, the parts of the 'stretching rig' must not be 'inside' your avatar!) Right click the attached cylinder and 'detach' it. (Now the positioning you have done is stored.) Right click the cylinder in the inventory and this time do not click 'attach,' but 'wear'. It should appear in exactly the same position on your hand as before.
 

 
5) Repeat the process for the cylinder attached to the left hand, so it is positioned exactly mirrored to the first cylinder.
 
6) Right click the next cylinder-copy in your inventory and attach it to the right foot. Make it vertical and move it upwards 0.9 metres. Untick 'stretch both sides', hold down ctrl+shift, and elongate the cylinder upwards until its upper end is on the same level as the lower ends of the cylinders attached to the hands. I can not give an exact figure here, as your av may be of a different size as mine, but that won't cause problems. 'Detach' and then 'wear'.
 
7) Repeat the process for the left foot, but do not stretch it by mouse movement! Instead look at the size of the right foot cylinder in the object tab of the building menu. Make the 'left-foot cylinder' exactly the same size. Look at the z-coordinate of the 'right-foot cylinder' and type in the exact same value for the 'left-foot cylinder'. 'Detach' and then 'wear'.
 
8) Left click the last copy of the cylinder and draw it in front of your avatar. Do not make a new cylinder for this! All cylinders have to be copies of each other—do not ask me why, as I have no idea.
 
9) Do not move it with the mouse, but use the coordinates given in the 'object' tab of the building menu, in order to assure absolute accuracy. Compare the xyz-coordinates of your 'feet cylinders' to those of the last cylinder and align the latter exactly in the middle of them, and rotate it exactly horicontal, so that it 'goes through' both 'feet cylinders'. Now you know why we placed the posing stand on an integer grid-intersection firsthand.
 
10) Now 'stretch both sides' has to be ticked in the building menu. Shrink the horicontal cylinder horicontally by mouse movement (see above) until its ends are completely hidden inside the vertical 'feet cylinders'.
 
11) Now again absolute precision is required. Look at the vertical size of the feet cylinder. Divide that size by two and add it to the horicontal cylinder's position z-value. That way the horicontal cylinder is moved upwards so that its center axis is exactly flush with the ends of the 'feet-cylinders'. This is important!
 
Now your set-up should look like this [note the moody lighting I added for drama just before the 'hard part' ;-]:
 

 
12) Hold down 'shift' and click all five cylinders, one at a time, making sure that you click the horicontal cylinder as the last one. Go to the 'tools' menu and click 'link'. SL may not allow this to you immediately, because we are mixing attached and none-attached prims, which have a different status for the server. In that case, leave posing stand and horicontal cylinder in place, log out, then relog, and try again. Only once I had to relog twice until the server complied:
 

 
Now comes the glorious finale:
 
13) When editing an item consisting out of several linked prims, you can not resize it in one dimension only—but you can resize the whole item! Right click your linked prims, select edit, hold down ctrl+shift, position your mouse pointer over one of the grey resizing cubes appearing at the corners of the whole construction's bounding box, left click and hold, then draw outwards as far as possible. It is pure magic, when you first see it, believe me. Along with the cylinder-rig, your avatar gets larger proportionally! Because a prim within SL can not be stretched larger than 10 metres in any dimension, this resizing has a limit. But ...
 
Once succesful, I have built another 'stretching rig'. This time I made the first cylinder not one cylinder, but consisting of ten linked cylinders, each 0.1 metres in length. The stretching process was accompanied by tremendous lag, but it was succesful. Unfortunately the Sim crashed a second later, before I was able to take a screenshot—but I will do more experiments.
 
There is yet one goodie left, I have to tell you about:
 
The invisible man of H. G. Wells' famous novel had to cope with a central problem: He had discovered how to make the human body invisible, but he couldn't make clothing invisible. So, whenever he wanted to run around completely unseen, he had to go bare-naked. I already feared that a similar phenomenon would spoil the oversized SL-avatar. But, as the clothes are texture layers of the character mesh, we don't run into the inconvenience of having to be naked. But it worked out even better. Everything attached to the avatar during the stretching process gets enlarged proportionally , too! Compare my prim boots in the picture at the top of this entry to the house on the left—they are almost as high as the complete ground floor. Unfortunately once you detach an item from the avatar it 'snaps back' to regular size. Hence this can't be used as a new way of producing mega-prims.
 
Try it and have fun! If it does not work for you, go through the tutorial step by step again, and make sure that you did everything exactly as described. If it still does not work for you, feel free to e-mail me (e-mail address in the sidebar to the right), or IM me (Zephyrin Raymaker) inworld and I will help out.