More Tweeria Fun: Item Crafting

One of my favorite activities in RPGs is creating items. I spend more time at that than gameplay sometimes. I like to understand my character/class, figure out what most aids them in their playstyle and then create awesome items for my avie.

I've been allowed an "approve items" position in Tweeria, the new "lazy Twitter role-playing game" from Tweenk, which is in closed-beta testing now. I get to look at all the player-created items and approve them for circulation. As of right now there are no formal rules for items, so they all get approved in a day or three. Later, rules will cover what can be made, how much power it can have & etc.

What's been interesting to me is to see many people making items and keeping within the feel/story of Tweeria. Lots of creative & interesting descriptions like this:

I am a Mage-class character so I make most items with my power-stats; Intellect, Dexterity & Luck. I've also made a few Warrior-class swords & armors emphasising Strength & Hitpoints.

The creativity of the players in creating items is something nice to see. It also keeps the game from being only an RPG treasure-hunt or "collect 'em all" thing. Anyone can craft an item, and the best ones are very-well targeted at the character class, showing a lot of prior RPG gaming & character-development knowledge.

 By the way... you can sell your items too! I have quite a stash of gold built up from my creations; they are popular with Mage-class characters. It's nice to see that other knowledgeable players appreciate a well-crafted item & give you feedback by purchasing it.

Tweenk and friends have been working hard on the new game; you can read about it on the Tweenk blog.

Even more fun than the original game, Tweeria is a lot of fun to troubleshoot at this point. Lots of features have been added, like Raids, Spell Creation & items for plain old fun (like my Dragon mount). Beta is going well so you should be able to join the game soon.

You can still join the original game Tweenk and get a feel for how the game works with your tweets.

Tweenking in Tweeria

Gamester Tweenk, who was responsible for Tweenk, the lazy Twitter Role-Playing Game, is at it again with Tweeria, which is in closed-beta right now as the mechanics & delivery are being worked on.

You might remember me bragging about the Tweenk Nyms Guild and my boss character. The new game looks really fun, with purchaseable items to flaunt your wealth, the ability to make your own spells and items (and have other characters download them) and the ability to post alternate artwork for your character.


 It's Tweenk on steroids and really appeals to an RPG fan like me with the ability to make custom items. In fact... this is the graphic for my first created item:

Ring of the Lucky Apprentice

For Lvl 2 mage characters, a boost to DEX (5), INT (5) and Luck (10)

Huzzah! I knew all those hours at the Enchanting Table in Oblivion and Skyrim would pay off someday!

More details will follow as to the beta shakedown and public alpha of Tweeria.

[my bought-and-paid-for alternate avatar art]

Beginnings: All I Ever Wanted Was A 3D Life

I've finally been able to create a virtual machine running Windows95 and install Netscape 3.0 just to be able to access my old VRML (virtual reality markup language) constructions for documenting \o/

Sure, you may think it looks primitive now, with prims, sculpties, Blender, Maya & so on, but in those days (1996-1997) each object (think 'prim') was constructed by hand; the mathematics were punched into something like 3D Studio Max, POV [Persistence of Vision] or Caligari's trueSpace in text notation and then rendered at the speed of... a frozen slug; it sometimes took hours to render a complex figure such as the Temple Of The VRML Equinox (ToVE); that is, if your computer could handle it & didn't crash mid-render.

If you made a mistake with your calculator or messed up a comma, semicolon or parenthesis you could return to a borked render or no render at all. It was really brain-busting and frustration was all too common. Yet persistence paid off; you could make entire 3D worlds that people could access from any browser and participate in the 3D space.

And you thought LSL was bad! I know that the Temple, my most complex contruction, took over 20 pages in notepad/text to render. You had to control not only the geometry but the lighting, shadows, texturing, placement and perspective in mathematical/text notation.Additionally, every object inside the Temple or my other worlds was either a call to an inworld function (like email) or to a site that offered further study of the materials like Quabalah or Geomancy; the Temple boasted over 100 links to arcane subjects. This was Giulio Camillo's concept of the Theatre of Memory taken into a virtual space.

Yet still beauty was made. VRML was a wonderful technology & you might see why I just nod when someone now speaks of "worlds which are accessible in any browser!" because we had that in 1996-1997 with features that are still not implemented in current Virtual Worlds (like inworld terminals or email abilities) and many things that excite builders now... video on a "prim"? Check. 3-dimensional sound with complete control of spacial audio? Check. Inworld messaging (chat)? Check. Full lighting and shadow control? Check.

Sadly, VRML was one of the first victims (along with Netscape) of Microsoft's War On The Internet; MS's pollution of the HTML standards & its sabotage of Sun Microsystem's VRML (along with HTML, mere subsets of SGML) is a well-known story (and may be why your oldschool computer people spit when the name Microsoft is mentioned).

Luckily, technology comes to the rescue in the form of virtual machines running old OSes and old browsers and has allowed me to give you this glimpse of the forerunners of today's virtual realities/worlds.

There is a large set of photos up at Flickr for those interested.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Fili - Poet's Rede complete

Finally through with this Talking Stick, bespoken to a poet. There are 16 layers of finishing, alternating between clear, iridescent & color glazes, giving the surface a deep and shimmering look & which causes the ink undercoloring to flash and emerge depending on the angle or the type of light hitting it.

The feathering band, evocative of a Plains Indian coup-stick, is bone, sterling & amber glass beading on a hemp cord, which can be removed from the stick and worn as a feathered chest-piece or just removed for heavy hiking/walking use.

There is a small hard-rubber tip at the ground end to keep the stick from scratching floors.

Here is a full photoset on Flickr showing a lot of the detailing. As the stick shimmers & changes with a light source it is one of the harder things to photograph, so there are many photos there.


If you'd like to know more about my process with this piece, you can look at this post describing that process.


Fili will be wrapped & packaged and on it's way to the poet this coming week. I hope she finds it as inspirational as I did - it is filled with the magic of Nature and the words of 45 poets from ancient to contemporary times.

Media: "Philip Rosedale Was Wrong About Second Life"

It has come to our attention that Philip Linden, née Rosedale, has gone on record saying that we, the Media, have it all wrong; that Second Life was not a failure. This is not only demonstrably ludicrous; it is a smear on the good name and reportage that we, The Media, strive to give our collective feed animals viewerships. It is therefore encumbent upon us to respond to this laughably-wrong pronouncement with one of our own.

Mr Rosedale's view of the future of the internet was wrong, because it's the future now. It can be easily-demonstrated by those with even a smattering of internet skills that Second Life did not in fact take over the internet. If it had, you'd be seeing 3D avatars everywhere, but you don't, do you? How many people do you see shopping for hair or skins on WalMart.com?

Likewise, even though you can purchase a flying car or a jetpack in Second Life, you can't get them at Ford.com or even Lexus.com. Just try it. They will look at you funny (if you're lucky) or summon Security (if you're not). Sure, there's been 3D movies, but everyone got a headache from those stupid cardboard glasses. People voted with their wallets, and what they voted for was flat isometric cows.

 

Second Life is certainly not as profitable as Facebook, given Facebook's giant fart performance in the stock market. In a cage fight, Twitter could take Second Life one-handed, with leg irons on and an eyepatch. No one can debate that. The failure of Second Life to not be reddit, Instagram, Plurk, You Tube, Google or even Habbo Hotel is so true, it is a cliché.

 No; despite all the hoopla about Second Life (even including Anshe Chung) that splashed the pages of all the top Web 2.0 buzzsheets in the early, heady days of the "let's try to generate a business with an idea to rope in ginormous amounts of users to somehow generate immense fortunes in well-timed IPOs and figure out how to make a profit from there" days, Second Life was not the future. It had no LOLcats; it had no LulzSec or Louise Boats. It had no videos of protestors getting pepper-sprayed; there was not a single SEO consultant at Linden Lab. It did have zombies, but in a "been-there, done-that" kind of way, and there were no bath salts involved. Second Life was not about apps or tablets or smartphones. Second Life had nothing to do with Mitt Romney or the TSA. You cannot eBay Second Life; it is not available on the Kindle, and there is no Raspberry PI in Second Life.



Philip Rosedale's failure to predict the future and take over the internet (leaving us all as breathless and squirming as a Japanese schoolgirl touching Harry Potter) is nothing more than the truth. If Mr Rosedale could predict the future he would have done the smart thing - figured out the winning numbers of several multi-state lotteries and bought his own island like Larry Ellison. Sure, Mr Rosedale owns several "islands" in Second Life, but do they come with former plantations and native slave girls??? We rest our case.


[Next time you try to pick a fight with The Media, Rosedale, you'd better have a better record of predicting the future than we do.]

Did you say...

Vaginas in the News!

Twitter hashtag #VaginaMovieLines catches fire in protest

Microsoft OR vagina

The Male Gaze: What, Where, Why?

The Vagina Dialogues & Sen. Ryan McDougle [R-VA]

Republicans, Get In My Vagina!

and finally, when search engines go bad:

To Kev Sweetwater

When the night has come and the land is dark
and the moon is the only light I see
No I won't be afraid No I..I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

If the sky that we look upon should tumble and fall
and the mountains should crumble to the sea
I won't cry; I won't cry, no... I won't shed a tear
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

Darling darling stand by me
Oh, stand by me
Oh, stand
Stand by me
Stand by me



Whenever you're in trouble won't you stand by me
Oh now now, stand by me; oh stand, stand by me, stand by me

Darling darling stand by me
Oh, stand by me
Oh, stand
Stand by me
Stand by me

Goodbye, Kev. Thank you for being my friend.