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Girls’ Night Out: Super busy, super fun
By Celebrity Trollop | December 15, 2006
First, let me thank all of the awesome content creators who set out top drawer freebies for the attendees last night at iVillage Loft: TorridWear, Simone, Shai, The Random, Gurl6, Mystikal Hair Designs, Callie Cline, Ingrid Ingersoll, and Pixel Dolls (Nephi set out freebies for guys and gals. Nice!)
OK, let me start with some of the criticisms. Yes, there were a lot of attendees, including a lot of newer SL residents who were just learning about what a HUD is, and not comfortable using one to navigate around the world, or even wear it once they had it. Suggestion (hi Cider!): We should have a Girls’ Night Out bootcamp or two on the “off week” when there isn’t a tour, so that newer residents can get the hang of the platform before we whisk around the grid at breakneck speed.
Second, given the level of participation, it might make sense to run parallel tour tracks, each track with its own guide. It wouldn’t be too difficult to encourage people to “register” for a tour until it’s “full.” It might even be possible to script a little “signup” poster which gives touristas the appropriate HUD for their chosen tour, on a first come, first serve basis.
Finally, it might even be better to have multiple tour guides for each group. Having a tiny bit of experience in this regard, shepherding 20 avatars around Second Life is eerily similar to herding cats. Especially if you need to offer extra help to newcomers.
All of that being taken for granted — for this avatar driver at least, I thought the Girls’ Night Out tour was immensely entertaining and *gasp* educational.
Check out Steller Sunshine’s beanstalk in Welsh! I disabled camera controls, and flew my camera up to several hundred meters for this shot! I love how tiny our avatars look at the base of the beanstalk. Listening to Steller talk about the super early days of Linden World was fascinating. Did you know there used to be a height tax on prims? (Those of you with neighbors who’ve built 300m full bright rotating boxes are probably thinking, “Why don’t they bring that one back??”) One of the best parts about Steller’s presentation was a super cool archival photo of Philip Linden wearing a box on his avatar’s arm — this was the release day of being able to attach prims to an avatar. Steller rezzed the photo on a prim at the base of the beanstalk if you want to see it in world — otherwise I sent some pictures to Snapzilla, including the M.C. Escher-like picture of a picture. Find my iVillage photos on snapzilla by searching on the tag “ivillage” to see them.
Next was a stop at Pixel Dolls in Chartreuse. (Yeah, we really socked it to those older sims last night! But neither of them crashed, much to Nephilaine’s amazement.) Readers probably already know that Nephi has been designing fashions in Second Life for a long time. Almost 3 years now, which as Ingrid Ingersoll pointed out is like 100 years in Second Life time. (I must say that Nephi looks wonderfully spry for her age — I kid! I kid! <3) This was the most interesting part of the tour for me because Nephi typically doesn't engage in interviews terribly often and she's so busy that pinning her down can sometimes be a challenge! I will admit that I sort of hogged the questioning, but hopefully the questions were interesting enough. One question which seriously piqued my brain was what sort of fashions Nephilaine would pursue if she was completely able to do so without any market influences. The answer surprised me. She said she'd like to make complete avatar kits -- shapes, skins, clothing, prim attachments, and animations. After the tour group had moved back to the loft, I had the chance to ask some follow up questions such as, "How much do you think such a thing would cost?" Nephilaine estimated it'd probably cost about L$50,000, which seems to make it a remote possibility at best.
Finally, but certainly not least, we were all back at the loft to hear a kick ass show by Cylindrian Rutabaga. She played a set featuring tunes by female singer/songwriters, some on her guitar and some on her keyboard. And for a song or two, an avatar named Pe Yue, shaped as a giant cockroach, sat right next to Cylindrian on her keyboard stool. It was a totally classic only-in-SL moment.
It was a lot of fun — although as with most things there’s things to consider for improvement next time too! I think the next event will be on December 28th, so I hope you can make it to that one. For my part, I’m expecting more goodies from a different set of content creators will be available!
And if you were wondering if Arianna Huffington showed? Well, I wasn’t physically watching her drive her avatar, but I do have two photos of an avatar that looks uncannily like Ms. Huffington, the first name of Arianna, wearing Allegro by Blaze on my hard drive. (I didn’t use them because they’re not especially good pictures, tho.) If you want to see them, email or IM me.
Here’s what Cider Starbrook wrote on the official GNO blog.
Topics: Events, External Resources |
It was a very fun event, Even for guys! Sure a few bumps, but that is bound to happen on the first one. I really enjoyed meeting neph and steller, both of them have been inspirations to me in SL.
Posted by: BARNESWORTH on December 16th, 2006 at 12:00 amI just wanted to pop in and say thank you so much to Celebrity and all the designers that generously offered christmas gifts under the tree for this first Girls Night Out tour! And thank you all for coming, you guys made it the success it was! I would have loved to put a big BETA sign above the loft, because the first run through anything is going to be more about lessons learned than anything else, and boy did we learn a lot…but I’m glad people had fun despite the growing pains. :)
Posted by: Cory Edo on December 16th, 2006 at 9:32 am