WauloK’s BangRocks Blog

I got my Second Life back again. I thought I’d give it one more go and went to the Second Life Support website and submitted a ticket and they answered. They asked me a few questions and got my account password reset! Yahoo!  Now I will be able to get back into it as soon as I get broadband attached at my new rental.  Striker has been bugging me for ages to get broadband and get back on Second Life since he’s started living in there hehe.

The new place also has Foxtel CABLE which means I won’t miss out on Channels 7 & 10 any more.  Sweet!  Gonna cost me $100 to get the connection moved and they won’t be able to connect it up until 16th July - two weeks after I move in! Oh well. At least I’ll have FTA and can watch stuff already saved on the hard drive of the Foxtel IQ box.

Had a great time at Mil’s book launch the other night. You can see one of the photos in my Flickr RSS feed in the top corner of this page. I was a photographer for them. She gave me her camera and I wandered around snapping photos of people.  There was a burlesque dancer called Kitty there as well, only she didn’t strip off enough for my liking. Apparently she usually goes down to tassells on her nips but a couple of times the tassells didn’t hold and um.. it was a bit embarassing and funny, so she didn’t take her top off this time… dammit!  Check the links from Mil’s blog on her MySpace.

A couple of my friends are flying down from the USA in October.  Runindeer (a really good friend from #crossroads EfNet IRC channel) and Lilith & Prez (really good friends from #Sydney & #Aussies EfNet IRC Channels) . I’m going to try and fly down to Sydney one weekend to catch up with everyone. Unfortunately all my Annual Leave will be used up with that week I took off and looked for a new rental, plus with my parents coming next month and Xmas hols.

You may remember I used to post a lot about playing Second Life. I did enjoy the game quite a bit. I haven’t had any broadband for many months, which you would have also seen. But, now that I do I cannot get into Second Life.

My account is locked out. A friend tells me that Second Life had a security scare (well many) so they forced everyone to reset their passwords and locked all accounts. Well, logging onto the game gives an error that the account is locked and “Please go to this webpage to reset your account”. When you do it emails a link to reset your password. However, when you click the link it says “Please contact Tech Support” as the link doesn’t work.

I emailled them and after a week (!) they said they couldn’t help me via email and that I had to ring up.

Well, I woke up early Saturday morning and called them (USA time was about 4pm). The announcement was there is a “5-6 minute delay”. I stayed on the line for 10 minutes when it dropped to Voicemail and asked to leave a message, so I rang back again and the same thing happened (no 5-6 minute delay.. it’s much longer) and eventually it timed out again and dropped to Voicemail (Lucky it’s a Toll-free number!). I left a message.

A few days later I still had not heard back so did it all over again. Only this time I rang back another 4 times and was on hold 10 minutes each time until it dropped out. 5-6 minutes seems rather an understatement. After the last call I left a message again with my character name, my real name, my phone number and a description of the issue.

I’ve still not heard back after all this time. No emails. No phonecalls (I left both my mobile and home number). They just ignore Tech Support requests all together.

Well, SL chews up a TON of bandwidth and since I only have 2Gb per month I may as well give it a miss. The only way back in is to create a new character, which isn’t that big of an issue since there was only two people I really talked to in the game.. one rarely and one often.. but I don’t think I’ll bother.

I haven’t played Second Life in so long, so I spent the last couple of days catching up with friends. I finally installed Skype and chatted to a couple of them. One from the UK and one from NZ.. talk about funny accents. Yet, they had the gall to say that *I* had the accent!

I spent about $L4,000 on new avatar stuff. I bought a new shape, new clothes, new skin and a new rental home to live in. Below, you can see my new stuff:

In Second Life a friend of mine gave me a place to rent for only $300pm which is also larger than the last place I was renting. The bungalow I had previously was $360pm so that’s a great saving there. The new home is a Japanese Dojo house which looks quite nice and only takes up 17 prims so I still have my 100 prim limit which is the same as the bungalow in Cub.

I’ve just started a new job hosting "Jacks or Better". It’s mostly like Poker but (as the names suggests) you need a pair of Jacks or higher to get a score. It’s a multiplayer game and everyone puts money into the ‘pot’ at the start of the game. The winner takes all. My job is to announce the scores during the game as everyone is too busy matching cards to know what their score is and whom is in the lead. I add a fun commentary all the while and keep them entertained. I’ve been accused of being TOO interesting and people have to try hard to concentrate on the game and not read my funny chat  They seem to appreciate it, though and told me usually the games are pretty ‘ho-hum’ and quiet and that it’s great to be entertained while they play. Last Wednesday night I received two ‘tips’ of $50 each so I’m pretty damn happy about that. I get paid enough to pay my rent and have some left over to spend on purchases or my own creations. In Second Life you have to pay to upload sounds (wav) and textures (tga) so having a job really helps. There is a weekly auto payment for logging on but $50 doesn’t go far hehe.

I was going to give up creating stuff as I’ve not sold a thing but I received some encouragement. They said not to give up yet and keep going. I just need to find a spot in a popular mall to market my things. It’s a bit of a catch 22. I need money to rent the space but I won’t make lots of money for selling stuff until I rent a space. I might concentrate more on clothing and avatar attachments (hair, jewellery, etc) as someone pointed out "Everyone has an avatar but not everyone has a home to put furniture and the like". Makes sense and I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. Everyone seems to like bling so perhaps I should give that a go.

I took my friend Emily along to a place where someone has made AI fish. They have put in the ability to produce offspring with some dna properties along with the ability to ’shoal’ and hunt for food. The more successful they are at hunting for food, the greedier they become and can pass this on to their offspring as a ‘greed’ property. The greedier they are the faster they are as well, so that gets passed on too. The slower fish cannot get to the food in time and tend to die out. They also have the ability to avoid predators which one or two have been added. There’s a few different types of feeders, each of a different colour. The fish’s tail will change colour depending on which type of food they like and are seeking. It’s quite an interesting experiment. I sat on one of the fish and was taken along for a ride while it swam around. Quite funny

Have you ever wanted to try out a Multiplayer online game but were scared of the ongoing monthly payments?

Why not give Second Life a try?

You get to play games, design clothing and objects, get a job to make some money to buy more clothing, cars, boats, jetskis, hoverboards, etc.

It’s so much fun, I’m on there most nights of the week and have made so many friends.

You can even rent/purchase your own ingame home. I only have a small bungalow as that’s all which suits me, but some people have huge two storey homes with picket fence and lounge suite and all!

I’ve just been busy designing furniture and clothing for Second Life. I have a long way to go on the clothing side of things, but my furniture is getting better all the time. Check it out on my ZigZag Designs website!

There’s even a seedier side to it for those of you whom are into BDSM and other such activities

If you are not interested in that, don’t despair. It’s all in certain "Mature" areas and you may never ever experience this if you don’t want to.

It’s all free now, so what are you waiting for? Go sign up with the above link and get your Second Life account today!!!

So what have I been up to in Second Life?

Now I’m hosting SLingo on a regular basis, I have a decent income. This has allowed me to get my own place. A friend of mine, Amber, spent Saturday buying and setting up furniture in a home she shares with a friend of hers. She put a double bed upstairs with a couple of leather chairs and a rug along with lamps and a picture. I hung around there for the evening chatting to her and resting on the lounge suite she installed downstairs. She had a photo on her PCs desktop of a creek in the forest she took a photo of some time ago and wanted it in-game so I got her to email it to me and I created a picture frame with the photo inside, which she hung on the wall.

This got me thinking and I decided to find my own place to live, so I spent several hours visiting areas to find low-rent accommodation and trying to chat to people to find somewhere to rent off them. I talked to one girl whom had places but then she got very busy and stopped talking so I posted a request on the forum and someone answered me in-game. I visited a few places he had and finally settled on a bungalow in the Tiki area owned by the Cub Water Club. It’s L$100 per week with up to 100 prims (3d objects) allowable. That’s enough to get me started. I was going to purchase some furniture but decided to make my own. I started off trying to create a lounge but could not get it right and in the end turned it into a single padded chair I called the "Industrial Chair" as it has what looks like metal pipes cut in half for the feet and backrest. You can check it out at the usual place: http://www.ZigZagSoft.com/

I also created a TV out of the demo textures you can get and a cube and placed that on a table I had which I edited to remove the red and white checkered tablecloth and changed the legs from wood to black metal and changed the tabletop from wood to glass. It looks quite nice. I also created a rug with a rug texture and a cube prim squashed and stretched out. I made a light out of a half-sphere prim and stuck it in the roof. It doesn’t seem to give off a lot of light tho. So, I’ve gone back to doing some more design stuff. I might keep making some furniture in the future and put it all together as a suite to sell via a vendor. Maybe a chair, lounge, lamp, rug, tables all together in one package and make them copyable so the buyers can make two chairs with a couple of lamps and a couple of tables as they require. I think a package of lounge objects is more likely to sell than single items. Especially if they all match nicely.

I started working on an idea for a new game for Second Life. I can’t talk too much about it as I don’t want my idea stolen But it should be a nice change from SLingo and TRingo for players. It’s not usually a multiplayer game, but I’ve changed some rules and added extra stuff to make it more fun and playable. I created some test cards to try out the game on paper first with Bec and she had a quick go last Friday night. It’s not really her cup of tea, but it showed the game could work at any rate. How much fun it will be will depend on the players I guess. Particularly if they are playing against each other to become the #1 winner and take out the ‘pot’ of money as donated by players. I will have to see how much SLingo and TRingo games sell for since the creator doesn’t make royalties from the game, only the initial sale.

While looking for places to stay, I came across a land that’s made cartoon-like. It even has chupachups for trees! It looked quite cute. Another place I went to had a Time Machine and I travelled back in time and saw a Tyrannosaurus Rex coming at me before being transported to Pompeii when Mt Vesuvius was erupting! Then it was back to the current time. It was a fun ride which I probably would never have known about had I not just gone looking around.

Since I had been flying all over the place to check out potential places to live, I found it very slow and cumbersome. Particulary when you wanted to cover vast distances. I popped onto the forum to see if anyone had created a jet backpack to fly me around faster. I checked out one going for L$200 but someone on the forum mentioned checking out Cubey Terra’s Aerodrome. I teleported over there and flew to the Aerodrome trying to find where the jetpacks were on sale but found nothing. Shortly afterwards a person parachuted down into the building and had an avatar in the shape of a fox. I asked him if he had seen any jetpacks around and he said "Hmm. Jetpacks. I think I have one in my inventory". So I asked him how much it’d be and he gave it to me for free!!!! I strapped it on and went flying. MAN! Does it go!! I kept crashing into mountains and things because I was going so fast heheh. Well. That’s all I was after, so I thanked him and headed back home to do some more work on my place.

I’ll have to upload some photos of my Bungalow some time in the future. Keep an eye on ZigZagSoft.com for more designs from me.

In Second Life, Amber (a friend of mine) and I were looking around for somewhere less laggy to play SL-ingo (Second Life bingo - very addictive and fun) when we found a practically deserted place.  There were only a couple of people there and so we joined in. I had a chat to the owner and soon he asked me if I wanted to host SL-ingo games myself. Well, I didn’t have a job in Second Life to add to my income and we just love playing SL-ingo, so I accepted the job. I now host a SL-ingo game twice a week at night Australian time. I don’t think there were any hosts for early morning games so this was a perfect opportunity. There are a couple of other SL-ingo games on at the same time (where we used to hang out) but they are very laggy areas and it’s annoying trying to play. They are also very noisy with lots of other games around talking and beeping, etc. "SOUTH I" where I host is very peaceful and there’s no noise anywhere nearby nor any other game machines. My job is to start the games, accept donations for the jackpot, close the games, pay the winner and keep the conversation going so people have somewhere fun to come to. I also can start impromptu games for my friends at any time. I had an official game last night as my first hosting attempt and had a great time. At one stage we had about six other people playing and others drifted in and out of the game. It ended up being a great time for all. Now I have somewhere to make money from while playing a fun game I always liked to play at any rate.

After my hosting ended at 9pm AEST, we headed over for a game of TRingo. It’s a cross between Bingo and Tetris. It took a little getting used to, but I was doing okay. I didn’t win any games as many other people have had much more practice at it, but I still had a nice time there.