Whats your Second Life?
I am currently listening to SL Under the Radar’s part 2 of The Toilet Bowl and it got me thinking, what on earth is Second Life to people. What is it that they do?
Me?
I am an evil tyrant who wants to wage nuclear war on Nowhereville who is secretly an evil timelord.
Why?
I love Doctor Who and thats why I am an evil timelord. The nuclear war thing is because I am scared of Nuclear War. I used to have regular nightmares about Nuclear War but for some reason, since I started playing around with nukes in Second Life it sort of eased my fears and I haven’t had a nightmare about it in a long freaking time.
Thats a sort of insight to why Warf is Warf. What about you? Do you do anything wacky that you wouldn’t do in Real Life that you do in your Second Life? Is this post entirely pointless to you?
Biography
Currently…
I am Stuart Warf. An avatar who was born on the 2nd of May 2006 in Second Life. My avatar is an evil timelord who’s TARDIS was left stranded in this world remaining in the current timeline until I can escape this virtual world (In case you don’t know, Heres a Doctor Who Wikipedia Page). My hobbies include Physical Prim tricks, building and podcasting. I currently live at Podcast Island where the SLPN Studios lie.
A Brief History of Stuart Warf
I originally joined Second Life in 2006 when alot of the podcasting community discovered Second Life and thought that it had amazing potential, which they were correct but failed to see it and left when the eighties has-been left. During 2006 I, along with Gomem Desoto, formed a group called The Podmafia (the actual group name is The Pod Mafia), which later in August - September had 5 episodes of a podcast called The Podmafia Podcast, which originally was aimed at going around places in Second Life and teaching the masses about podcasting.
Then came 2007. In the early beginning I was partnered but that soon ended. So became my life of living. For a month I resided in SoHo, but for some reason I just didn’t like renting there. So I left but still hung out to see the crazy and wacky stuff going on there. It was around this time when I temporarily brought back The Podmafia Podcast for 3 episodes. Then came Life, Living in Nowhereville. From around March until August I rented land under Madison Carnot while hosting the Take it or Leave it at Nowhereville. This however stopped for me when Take it or Leave it ended. But that was short lived when Crap Mariner injected new life into Nowhereville shortly after the Second Life Woodstock event that took place in the Five Islands. During August Podmafia Podcast came back after troubled times and stayed strong with Yxes Delacroix as host. I re-rented at Nowhereville under Crap Mariner and continued to live there.
So in comes 2008, When I launched SLPN, a network dedicated to podcasts for the metaverse. During the year I continued to work on SLPN by bringing in new shows and new challenges such as live podcasting in Second Life. Up until July 2008 I had continued to live at Nowhereville. However after some thinking and a polite request I decided to leave Nowhereville and move to Podcast Island…
That’s the story so far…
Last Updated on the 18th of July 2008
What the Plurk?
Since Yxes wrote a post about Plurk…I will too.
Plurk is a Twitter-like webapp that in my opinion is brilliant. Why do I like Plurk so much that I have mentioned it on Podmafia two times and blogging about it now? It’s because Plurk is simply better than Twitter.
To me Twitter is a chaotic mess that you can’t really catchup on without going through pages and pages of tweets and adding people more and more to see what was replied to and by who. Not to mention that it is intertwined with the Fail Whale.
Plurk makes it easier for me to catchup on what’s been happening with people and also to read the threads of conversations. It also seems to be a good way of getting traffic fast. Case and Point, Yesterday I was flying around Second Life when I got an IM asking if I wanted to try out the PlurkHUD. Since I am a sucker for BETA I tried it out and gave my location away with the tool. Then GoSpeed turned up and GoSpeed told people where she was. After a while a whole crowd of people came and was just having fun and while Plurk is currently small in size of community it is seemingly quicker to get traffic.
Am I a plurk fanboy? Yes. Do I think people should leave Twitter. Yes. Will it happen. I don’t know.
But if you want to add me…well add me!
Finally Declared Dead…to iTunes
A long time ago in the summer of 2006 I tried to start a weekly podcast called "The Weekly Warf Show" but it was kinda…really…boring. So it went into my archive of Podfade.
It was of course submitted to iTunes, but I deleted the show and its feed last year. However iTunes has only just caught up with this revelation
Dear Podcast Owner
The podcast located at the URL shown below has been blocked or removed from the iTunes directory as a result of technical problems with the feed.
Name: The Weekly Warf Show
Feed URL: http://www.podshow.com/feeds/warf.xml
I wonder how many dead podcast feeds still lie on the surface of the iTunes store…
Downtime Sucks
OK so Stuart Warf has not been in Second Life a lot recently…
So, in this blog entry I am going to be clearing things up with reasons (or excuses) to my disappearance.
- XBox 360 + GTA 4…
It is a good game and it is quite addictive…apart from the annoying 12 year olds who use voice and scream down your earhole and grief the games… - My PC is Broke’d
Well…this really is the main reason why the disappearance of Warf happened.So, on Friday 9th of May 2008 my motherboard (after some other difficulties) practically died. After days of trying to diagnose the problem I pretty much figured out that it was a brick. But just in case, I contacted the MSI technical support via my laptop. It took them 6 days to reply… and the advice was pretty much useless.
So…where do I stand now?
Well I am looking for the reciept so the motherboard can be returned and I am hopefully going to be back online with my awesome machine by the end of the week.
So… While I wait for the conclusion to this chapter in my PC’s life, I will probably be doing some blogging and get some SLPN stuff sorted out.
More on the Dazzle
OK, so a previous post of mine about Dazzle got some traffic and I was informed that the idea of Dazzle is that it can indeed be skinned. Thats great. Infact Itazura Radio even linked me to some skins that are already being shown on the Second Life wiki.
After some prodding around on what it can do I’ve come to some conclusions and formed an opinion.
The current methodology of skinning is far too complicated for newbies and people who aren’t fans of editing code. I personally don’t mind getting around the code and copying & pasting stuff but some people just may not want to touch it.
Secondly, there appears to be no menu in the preferences that allows the changing of skins on the fly.
Also, there are no tools currently that could help people create and customise their own skins.
So here is my proposal on what I think needs to happen. Firstly, the Linden’s need to get their act together and bring in an easier system of importing GUI skins. They should do this by adding a new tab on the preferences called “Interface” or “Skins” (or anything else that describes it. Calling it just a Skin could confuse some people because of the avatar skins).
Next they need to implement a new structure on how skins can be stored. IE. SecondLife\Skins\* (* being the name of the interface)
Then the lindens should make a program that makes it easy for people to create GUI’s as easily as possible. If the lindens don’t do this then it should be fairly easy for someone to make a GUI application in something like Visual Basic .NET or whatever the tools are for the Macintosh. Preferably an open source tool since then its free for all and people can contribute and improve the code and stuff.
Thats my opinions for the designing. I personally don’t mind editing code but I would trade it any day for a simple little tool that can help me easily make a GUI for the new Dazzle interface.
SLPN’s next phase!
OK. Live Podcasts. I have already talked about this on the SLPN’s blog about us moving to live podcasts. Well as of this week we shall move to the live podcasting aspect that I have been intrested in doing.
So how is this going to work?
Well certainly not with video, at least for now. My approach is to do it with audio in a radio enviroment because it is easier to stream for some people who have lower bandwith. Also it’s what I know best. And as much as I like a challenge I prefer doing it in audio for now. It’s live because we will record it in front a live audience and as we move on, we will get the video in the mix as well.
So the week begins most likely on Tuesday with a new show called “The Warf Show” which I will be doing on KONA radio which will replace the Podmafia Re-Broadcast. With Podmafia being a podcast, there isn’t much sense to rebroadcast it I think. It might be this week or next week though. But I will be recording it for podcast purposes.
Then there is MetaNews Weekly which WILL happen this Wednesday at Nowhereville at 9AM SLT. 9AM SLT is 5PM for all the UK folks so that will be a fun little challenge. The hosts of that show are Malburns Writer and Tara Yeats in-world.
There is a SLPN Live group that I have set up for people who want updates for when shows are happening and such like. The group is not the only solution. We also have a Subscribe-o-Matic board for all those updates as well so if you DON’T want to waste one of your precious groups, well your not left behind.
Judgement Day Part II
Corporation’s find SL
Judgement Day Part I
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Plurk
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Hostgator
