Not long ago, thousands of SLers logged on all at once in the grid-wide stress test. Of those people, only a handful won the coveted SL pendant. Guess what finally arrived in the mail today?
Lookit! Innit purty?
Back to “real” life
Real life demands that I pay attention to it again, so I’ve spent the last few days finishing up projects, tying up loose ends. After today, I won’t be able to spend much time in SL, except on weekends.
Abbotts Aerodrome will continue to run as usual. In fact there’s more now than before… I recently added a new teleporter system to help people get around. It’s slower than a regular “sit target” teleporter, but it has more special effects. It was something to do.
And for fans of Apotheus’ 737 and my airship tours, I’ve added two new AI flights.
Every 15 minutes you can catch a flight on a single-engine light plane (“Whistler”) to the city of Nova Albion and back. Every 20 minutes, you can catch a flight on a stripped-down L-18 Lodestar transport to the northern continent and back.
Hm. As I type that, it occurs to me that the flights will synchronize occasionally and rez two planes simultaneously on the runway. I’ll have to fix that… or hire an air traffic controller.
So have fun with those, and I’ll see you on the weekend! If you need immediatel help with something, you can try me at my e-mail address: cubeyterra[at]cubeyterra[dot]com. Change the “at” and “dot” to the appropriate punctuation.
Victory on the cutting board of battle
Today my parents donated a whole salmon, fresh off the boats, to the Cubey Salmon Fund. Alright, there’s no such thing, but don’t tell that to my parents. I scored a pink salmon out of it.
As a longtime resident of the British Columbia coast, I know all about how how to prepare salmon. I’ve seen it all done before, from the rod to the plate. Catch it, clean it, trim it, wash it, and cook it. Nothing to it.
I’ve eaten a lot of salmon too — barbecued, baked, smoked, raw — but as I looked this little fellow in the eye, it occurred to me that I’d never prepared a whole one before, myself.
Then it made a face at me. You know, sticking out it’s tongue at me. Or maybe that was my imagination.
I hesitated for a moment. How could I let this happen? I’ve caught salmon bigger than this, but I have to admit that I usually let someone else deal with the messy bit in the middle and go straight to the eating part. Don’t misunderstand — I’m no wuss when it comes to raw meat, but here was an obvious gap in my experience. It was time I faced up to my responsibilities as a coast-dweller and prepared myself a fish. So I rolled up my sleeves (mentally, since I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt) and set myself to the gruesome task.
I took out my kitchen knife and prepared for the first incision, whereupon it slithered out of my hands and into the sink. Pretty feisty for something this long out of the water. Dragging it back ashore to the cutting board, I managed to hack off its head before it knew what was coming. Strangley, this didn’t seem to improve its mood — it was good and mad now.
Some minutes later, when the dust of battle settled, I found myself smeared to the elbows in salmon guck. My kitchen counter was fairly swimming in the blood of my enemy, but the glorious victory was mine! Qapla’!!
It seems to me that people should become more involved with the preparation of their food. Too often we’re insulated from the realities of a carnivorous diet, and it would be greatly educational to experience more of the process. For example, we should buy more whole chickens. And when we want steak for dinner, we should hack off a chunk of a cow (assuming it’s already dead, of course). And when we want tofu, we should have to shoot and skin our own tofu beasts. We’re far too insulated from the brutal carnage of the tofu hunt.
So tonight, as I feast on salmon, I’ll feel more like a true west coaster than ever before. Nevertheless, I’m so glad it was already gutted when I got it.
A pleasant surprise
I stumbled across this pleasant surprise in the forums yesterday: Robin Linden has announced that during a one-week test new users will have the option to arrive in DaBoom or Abbotts instead of the usual Welcome Area in Morris/Ahern. For the duration of this little experiment, Linden Lab will record the stats. How many will choose Abbotts Aerodrome over The Edge nightclub? What kind of first impression of SL will a new user get from these places?
In response, the Aerodrome crew will be trying to add more stuff for newbies to play with. To start, I have a few more Test Drive buttons in my hangar: Tigershark, Cormorant, CLAWW, DS3 drop ship, and Futura 6 hovercar.
And there’s also the usual free things to do: skydiving, airship flights, dogfights, and swilling prim-coffee at Terrabucks.
Rain dance
For my last week before I head back to cubicle land, I decided to go camping and spend some quality time in the great outdoors. I wanted to surround myself with the majesty of nature — the trees, the water, the train roaring through the pass, and the loud gang of boom-box-laden hoodlums from Surrey.
It would have been nice. Last night, the prediction was sunny skies all week, but today… today the forecast is nothing but rain. The surest way to make it rain is to haul my camping gear out of the closet.