Reel Expression

Dig it kats n kittens: I’m leaving for SLCC in Tampa tomorrow morning. I’ll be back on Monday night and I may write up something about it. Or I may not if I just spend the entire time drunk like last year.

So there will be no new products until next week. I have them made, but didn’t have time to do the ads since I’ve only been in Lincoln for 2 days after visiting the nieces and nephew during the long weekend.

During the recent weeks since SL doesn’t agree with this laptop, I’ve been working on my website. I got everything I had planned to get done and have still a lot of tutorials to write. But if I have to write another word on writing screenplays, this bloody laptop might end up in the pool.

reelgeek.co.uk

I’ve also been prattling on about doing a machinima review blog with Alle. Well… that one is up too! Ok, no reviews yet, but Alle has been busy with RL work. Soon though! If any of you out there makes machinima in SL and would like to submit for a review, there is information on the site for you.

Machinima Paradiso

Cheers!
Luth

Can anyone tell me when the blog started not working with internet explorer? I use firefox and I haven’t looked at it in IE for a while. If I know when it all went to shit maybe I can figure out how to fix it.

Update:
Ok… I fixed it enough so the sidebars and footer show correctly but the background and header isn’t working still. At least its readable now :) I’m still working on it.

Cheers
Luth

I try not to read the feeds very often because every single time I just get annoyed. I look at them to find new shit to buy, but It seems that every day there is a huge drama mess. So and so did this. So and so said this. Why the fuck is the SL industry so bloody catty?

I come from a smallish creative industry (film) where it was beaten into our heads a number of times of the rule “don’t talk shit.” The basis of this is probably one of the most logical ideas I’ve heard in a long time. In the basic form its if you talk shit about people, you are shooting yourself in the foot for future projects. In a small community, everyone knows someone that you know. You say something shitty about 1 person, you’ll probably not get to work with them or their mates again. If I work for a producer who is an absolute moron and I spout off about how badly I think of him. He’ll still continue to get more work even if he uses a fucking dissolve between each cut and ruin the project, him and his mates will not hire me again. And more then likely, it’d be more then just his mates since no one wants the option of being slandered.

Working in SL is a whole nother beast and it seems that many people have thrown out the idea of actually working together on projects. So yeah, there is really is no reason why animators should ever work together, but you don’t see me calling out names. You don’t see Torrid calling me a cunt. You don’t see Dove (LAP) writing out long posts about how any other animators suck.

However, fashion creators are thrown together in fashion shows. I’ve heard stories about some organizers have actually feigned technical difficulties at the exact moment certain competitors took the stage. I’ve read certain “fashion reviewers” (and I use that term loosely) who are content creators themselves and have said some really nasty things about others. Including but not limited to, calling out content theft based purely on rumour and no research at all. I’ve seen blogs that are for stores bitching about specific people. And frankly, I think its fucking stupid.

There is really nothing I can say here that will ever curb this childish poop throwing behaviour. The only thing I will say is that it does you absolutely no good to do such things. For one thing, it does give more exposure to whomever you are calling out, especially those of us who randomly find your blog and may actually like the other persons stuff and attitude better. Then you have the fact that there are many people like me who refuses to ever buy anything from a creator who behaves like this. When I buy something it’s just as much about whether a I like it as is wanting to support the creator who made it.

Sorry for the mess today. I’ve been working on getting a slide show of my newest releases on the sidebar and been knee deep in code. Sadly the only way I can preview it is to actually update the blog with it.

I searched all over trying to find a type of slide show that worked. The one I was working on prior to finding the current version, was embedding the flickr slide show itself. In case you are wondering, you can find the code here. I really liked that one because then I could just point it to a specific set in flickr and it’ll update automatically. The only problem was that it didn’t resize the text, repeat or show the titles. Luckily, I found a little gem called pictobrowser that pulls all the images off a the specific flickr set and you can set the background.

It doesn’t automatically run through all the images, which wasn’t what I was looking for in the first place. However there are bonuses to that because it takes less time to load and the person looking at them defines how fast they go. I found that you can click on the large image itself for the easiest way of scrolling through them.

Along with the side bar of recent releases, I also set up a full products page which has a lager version set up by categories of: Pose Sets, Couples Poses, AOs and Furniture. And because I am anal retentive, the pictures run from newest -> oldest.

Plus I removed the general photos page. Partially because it is redundant but mostly because I don’t understand CSS (or at least the way the templates use it) enough to get it to work with the blog. I mostly got the plugin to insert the ad images from flickr easier, and that does work very well. But the way the templates and stylesheet works for the photo album isn’t even remotely close to anything I’ve ever seen. The instructions left out a number of key steps some I found and others I can’t.

The only problem is is that the pictures in the posts don’t link to anything anymore. The old ones that is. New ones will go to flickr. I have 123 posts, most of them with some sort of picture and I don’t know when I’ll be able to fix that. So sorry!

Usually when editing the blog template, I check to see how it looks on my 19” monitor and 15” laptop. However, I don’t have them here with me now. If you see anything unusual going on, please let me know.

Cheers
Luth

Here’s a sneak peak of the shoes set that should be released in the next few days. It’ll be either Friday or Saturday. Let me know what you think.

Cheers
Luth