Monday Morning Randomness

As you loyal readers of this blog know, I usually have some kind of topic or theme that I write to in each post. Well, guess what? My brain, at least as of right now, just isn't going to cooperate on anything so organized and well thought out as that. So, here's a collection of thoughts that are ricocheting around my cerebellum for no good reason.


1. Zak Claxton Happy Fun Show, Episode 3.


We did ZCHFS #3 on Saturday, and it was fun. Fun... but poorly attended, with about 6-7 people viewing. That's my fault. I really didn't promote it very much beforehand. Also, by doing shows on a Saturday, you run that risk that people have lives outside of what's happening on their computer monitors. See, people do things like take their kids to Little League games, or go to swap meets, or hang out on beaches, or see movies, or go to malls, or even mundane crap like doing laundry and grocery shopping, and many people do these things on Saturday afternoons. But really, the point of the show is for me (and whoever happens to tune in) to have a good time, and we totally did! Mission accomplished.

Episode 3 started with a look at the Oscars (since Kat and I had managed to not see any of the nominated films, it was a lighthearted look at best). Our musical recommendation of the week was Laura Veirs. Laura and I have a lot in common, with the big difference being that she's successful and I'm... me. Her music is amazingly good, though... do check her out. Finally, we got to the music portion of the show, and in case you were keeping track, here's what I played on Saturday:

*What Are You Like (Indigo Girls)
Loser (Beck)
Six Underground (Sneaker Pimps)
You're Like a Cloud (Zak Claxton)
Falling Down (Zak Claxton)
Always Tomorrow (Zak Claxton)
Thanks Anyway (Zak Claxton)
This Afternoon (Zak Claxton)
Lines on your Eyes (Zak Claxton)

So, it was fun and cool. No complaints here. And yes, we're continuing the show... Episode 4 is on Saturday March 20 at noon, as usual.


2. Second Life Viewer 2


Sheesh. I'm going to completely pretend that the issues about the beta version of Viewer 2's borked events search don't exist. Too many people are writing/talking about that, and the jury is still out as to whether Linden Lab is planning on changing/fixing that. No, I just wanted to mention a couple of things (probably among many) that are actually cool in Viewer 2.

• Placing HTML on a Prim
Did a bunch of testing on this, and it works. Like, really works. I tried all kinds of things, and only got it to break a little (which could have been as much of a problem with the web coding as it was with SL's ability to render it). Anyway, very cool. One of the main applications of it for a guy like me is to try and run a live video stream of myself into world (say, on Ustream) while I play in pixel form at an SL show. Could be great. Kat and I are starting to plan something like that, and it's already been done by a couple of artists, proving the theory that it works. One caveat, as seen in this video of a show by Lance Rembrandt: the audio from the standard media stream and the audio from the HTML object will both come through into world, and they won't be synchronous, so you'll need to be careful in setting it up, and might have to let the crowd know to turn one or the other's volume down locally. Still, cool stuff.

• My lips... they move!
Not while I'm singing, unfortunately. But Viewer 2 does indeed have avatar lip synchronization to Voice speech as a standard part of the viewer (and is on by default, rather than hidden deep in a menu option). If you're on Facebook, here's a link to a little vid I made last night upon discovering this neat little feature. While it has been available in earlier version, no one at Triana's weekly music trivia game had seen this before. Anyway, it should definitely make my next machinima project a bit more engrossing.

3. A short break from shows this week.


Not for any particular reason. I did a flurry of shows in the last couple of weeks, and I do have one scheduled for next weekend (Sunday 3/14 at the Notes Shack, 1PM). However, it's shaping up to be a pretty busy work week, but in much less mundane news, I have several songs -- brand new songs that no has heard yet -- that I'm working on right now. Kat has heard them in the process of creation, and she's pretty excited. I'm keeping my enthusiasm in check until they really start coalescing. But I'd like to use my "free time" this week to work on some new stuff, and that will likely replace any time/energy I'd use to do some live shows. So, I'll be absent from the stages of SL for six days, but hopefully will come out of it with some new tunes being wrapped up.

4. There's more, but...
I nearly fell asleep while writing this post, and I don't want to torture you with any other rambling crap. Hope your week is lovely, and if anything noteworthy actually happens (you never know), I'll be back to tell you about it. It's what I do.