Didn’t find the time to write about the Stampcard Rally like I promised, and by now it’s over anyway. As you might/might not know, I’m in the middle of finding a RL job, so going through some times where my SL time has been severely limited.

But I found a new toy to occupy me the times I do hop into Second Life anyway: a simboard. I guess the best way to describe it is as a hoverboard. It looks like a snowboard, but it floats above ground. It comes with a bunch of tricks and is moddable – you can change the sounds, prims, textures, and even animations. There’s even a completely organised Second Life SimBoard Association, with pro competitions and its own TV channel.

A friend showed me how it worked a while ago, so I started to learn it myself. As far as controls, I guess you can compare it a bit with Tony Hawk Pro Skate games. It’s got a very arcade feeling with 1080 jumps, triple backflips, wallclimbing and other insane tricks that aren’t possible on any real life board. Then again, it’s a fracking hoverboard – it’s not meant to be a life-like simulation. And it’s fun! Screw physics.

Simply having an arcade feeling doesn’t mean it’s easy to control however. I can’t count the amount of times where I ended up buried in the dirt or landing on my face during a trick. Luckily, the board also supports floating over the water surface, so I’ve started learning the controls and tricks by surfing on the lagoon outside our home island. I figure falling in the water hurts less than falling on concrete.

I also modified the texture on my simboard. Not by much – I took the freely included template and change the top of the board into something more fitting for me. Maybe once my texturing skills get better I’ll work on the sides and bottom as well.

The board also has a built in engine to modify its behaviour, though I haven’t tweaked that too much yet. I don’t know which would be good settings.

The board costs 500 L$ at SLSBA World – and trust me, it’s all worth it. This cost includes the texture template and a huge manual to read through. One more thing: I haven’t even scratched the surface of all the options yet this board has. I’m still learning myself. But I love it so much already. ^^

Finally found some time to update my blog again. I have a few stories on my backlog to write. I’ll start with the Hair Fair. I assume you’re bored of reading about Lag Fest ‘08 since it’s covered on every little hellhole, but whatever.

I ended up spending less than I feared, but more than I hoped for. In other words, there were more decent male hairstyles than I expected, but not as many as I wished for. I ended up with buying 5 styles and keeping one of the freebies.

My first job when I got to Hair Fair was to locate Dernier Cri and rush for them. Sadly, they only seemed to have new styles for women *sobs*. So a day later, after the worst lag moved away, I returned and decided to travel through the place on a box. Yes, apparently flying through the fair on a box is the best way to view it. Lag is minimal this way compared to just walking or flying. It’s even easier if you find someone else willing to ‘drive’.

From left to right, I’m wearing Roni by Discord Designs; Tyler by Mirada; Normal Hair (freebie) and Noble Asymmetric by Find Ash; Dylan by PixelDust.

The style shown in the top left picture is a glowing fantasy hairstyle by booN which I decided to buy as a fatpack. The blaze version is my favourite as it looks most fiery, but it comes in many coloured versions.

Now that’s dealt with I’ll discuss the fair itself. It looks pretty good. The Mayan theme looks quite fine – and it seems they didn’t use many high-lag prims like toruses etc for the theme itself, so that’s fine. Also, by adding the demos to OnRez a day in advance they did share the load a bit I assume (though they did succeed in crashing that website). Those are the good things.

On the negative side, it seems many fair booths were built by people who had to overcompensate for something. HUGE sculpties (which never rezzed so resulted in the entire booth being covered by a red blob), entire safari landscapes and so on. When the rest of the place is lag-free it’s nice to see those things. But in a place as laggy as this, come on. Yes, you were allotted 400 prims. So what? That doesn’t mean you have to use them all if your vendors only use half that amount. Novocane and Bewitched were probably the biggest sinners, though definitely not the only ones.

However, lag isn’t the fault of the vendors alone. The fair organisers could (and should) have stepped in when they saw people decorating their booths like this, so it’s hardly fair to blame it all on some store owner who might not be used to working with a sim that’s this laggy.

Also, the place was full of retards with their AOs/Mystitools/1000 prim attachments attached. Deprim or GTFO! If you really want to look good while visiting the Fair, wait until the crowd has disappeared. I’m sure that the final days of the fair will be less crowded, and then you can run around through the sims all on your own with as many fucking attachments as you want.

Let’s hope for next year they’ll switch to a system more alike that of the Creators Stamp Rally which distributes the lag evenly throughout the grid (and which I’ll write about tomorrow I hope). It has been shown for several years now that Second Life is not stable enough for huge centralised fairs such as the Hair Fair without crashing sims or insane lag.

Since I’ve had to make two political posts in a short period, and since those simply don’t belong here, I’ve decided to resurrect my old first life blog. I will not mention any politics here anymore.

Yes, the first life blog is in Dutch. Very simple reason for that. My ideology is irrevokably connected to my existance as a Flemish person under the oppressive Belgian regime. Anyone unfamiliar with our culture and history misinterprets my beliefs and comes up with degenerated opinions regarding my politics without understanding them even the slightest bit.

People who fluently understand Dutch in general are more familiar with the Flemish culture and history than outsiders, so perhaps they will make less retarded statements.

From now, only posts regarding Second Life directly on this blog.

I only recently switched to my TheAbyss skin, before that for 9 months I used a skin by Nora, the espresso version of Hunter – part of her Entice line.

Now, Nora posted on her blog that her store will close down on the 18th of August. Until then, her skins will be available at 100 L$ per pop. This means you can get a complete set of skins for 1200 L$, which includes 6 different facial hair types, 3 older skins, and 3 skins with eyeliner. I also bought both of her demon skin lines for 300 L$ each.

On top, once her new skins are finished they’ll be released as Attribution/Share-Alike PSDs. Kind of like Eloh’s opensource skins. Can’t wait to be honest. I’ve been trying for a while to make an OS skin with Eloh’s base, but her male version just doesn’t cut it. Using Daman’s shape I look like a drag queen. I guess I could try to build a shape that goes better with it, but I’m lazy, so

I’ll definitely be making my own version if Nora decides to make a dark version of her male skin as OpenSource.

Back from my trip to Wacken Open Air at least. Had a blast the past days irl.

Anyway, a day or two before the trip I was visiting the stores on my list of places to go to, and one of them was Action Surf & Skate – a skate and surf store (they also have a blog where they mention new releases).

I was looking for a surfing board, but noticed they’re currently beta testing their new system – so I settled for a beach buggy instead and figured I’ll get the boards later on once the new system is available.

I bought the red beach buggy, which is available for 1299 L$ outside their store (SLUrl). I saw 7 models in total being displayed. They range from bright camo, to monochrome, to even a pink hello kitty buggy. As far as looks go, suspension height is customisable through a menu, front and back separately. Outside of that, what you see is what you get.

Complimenting the great looks of the buggy are the animations of driver and passenger. The picture on the left is with only a driver in the car since there wasn’t anyone else around the island when I decided to write this post. Both animations are pretty relaxed. The driver is sitting back with one hand on the steering wheel, while the passenger will lie in the seat, leaving his right leg dangling over the passenger door. Looks great for a casual ride over the beach with a friend to scope out the waves and the chicks.

The looks are only one part of a vehicle though. The behaviour of the vehicle is another part, and quite important. I have to say this vehicle is not my favourite to actually drive in. The buggy comes with two pre-sets: race and drift. Race seems to be made for long, straight roads since you barely seem to turn at all, no matter how much you hold the directional arrows. Drift on the other hand makes it seem like you’re driving around on an ice skating ring covered in green soap – the slightest tap to the directional arrows makes you spin several 360s in a row. I personally find both pre-sets a little extreme to use out of the box.

Luckily you can customise this driving behaviour. Down force and Turning speed are the two options you can change, both having 6 steps. Using trial and error I decided after a while that race mode with the turning speed increased made for a relatively fun driving experience.

You can also shift the forward speed through 13 gears. Any gear above 1 I only used once – for the sake of science. Gear 1 was more than fast enough to drive around our OpenSpace sim and go from one sim border to the next in a matter of seconds. Gear 13 I can only describe as FTL.

Last but not least, the sounds. The engine sounds very good to me, and so does the rev option in the menu. The chirping brake sounds make me think of driving on asphalt however. Sure it’s impossible to detect the material you’re driving on in Second Life, but since it’s a beach buggy I figured an asphalt driving sound might not be the most suited.

As for my global opinion on the buggy now. I’m happy I bought it. I think it’s a great item to show off on our beach since all our visitors so far liked it. It looks -very- good after all. After you customise the behaviour a bit it also becomes fun to ride around in or let your guests drive, in unlocked mode anyone can drive it without limits. Lastly, the price is also very fair for a vehicle. If I look at the price of my motorbike and my old car, this buggy costs about 1/3rd to 1/4th of those.

Definitely a fun addition if you own a beach and enjoy the surfing world.