New Babbage Pub Crawl!

From the 1st of June to the 30th of June New Babbage's many pubs and bars have made an enjoyable way to explore the city.

21 bars and restaurants have hidden 21 bottles for you to find. Start your search at the Lotus of the Sea Gallery, and off you go on a walking tour of New Babbage like no other. All you have to do is touch the bottle, it will give you a prize and tell you how to get to your next stop in local chat.

Don't forget your map. 

Nemo's Treasure Hunt

Long time SL building legend Aley Arai/Arcadia Asylum has created a Nemo inspired underwater treasure hunt. As Arcadia she is best known for her collection of Hobo related freebies. As Aley she's best known for the mindblowingly awesome Privateer Space Sim.
Her underwater sim contains 20 treasure chests which give out random freebies from the build. The chests reset every 4 hours and there's well over 20 different gifties. As is usual with her stuff, all of the freebies are full perm so you can incorporate bits into your own builds if you want.

Some of the items include:


A Tunnelling Machine


Jellyfish (in this case, guava flavoured).


Sea Dragons


Nautilus vs. Giant Squid (not sure if the squid is a freebie yet, but the sub is)


Dirigible Chickens


Sea Cows


The Kraken


Merbunnehs. Yes you read that right



Nemo's Basehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif


Catfish. Yep.
There's also other items like dive suits, Gilligan's record player, Nautilus follower pets (both fish and submarine varieties) and assorted fish.

Aley's Nemo Treasure Hunt is located at LEA11.

Post New Year's Tinies and Breaking a Sim

Now that the boxes and shiny paper had been found to be more entertaining than the toys contained within, Steelhead's Friday dance saw the tiny denizens arrive to Hoo and Riverdance to their heart's content. Managed to even get the Jägers worried.


Assorted tinies, fungi, Jägers, and the Odd Werewolf. My dear wife elected to wear her "tiny skirt".

On Sunday night, Her Grace of Loch Avie held an impromptu party. Her parting quote was "We'll show them abusive use of open sims! Ha!"

And we did.


First there were sheep


Then the Gideons launched their Bible Bazookas


And Daleks and Salmon and 'splosions!

But we didn't manage to crash the sim. :-(

DJ awesomeness

The last week of 2008 has been a fun one musically. Last Saturday the Presenters of Radio Riel got together for a "Battle of the DJs". Miss Emilly has detailed playlists and even found accompanying youtube examples here.


Radio Riel staff and friends.

On NYE itself I had been asked to rake the JLU party through to midnight after the bands had finished. I lined up a few dancy tracks for the half hour beforehand and once the New Year had run in I just started playing random things. Of course being in Steelhead and already having a high weird quotient the requests started getting odd.

After being asked if I had the theme for Buckaroo Banzai and being able to say yes, and know which track was meant, Myfanwy Davies proclaimed me "Awesomest" and bowed to my DJ skills. I didn't notice until I was actually talking on air which cracked me up completely.


Miss Davies as the pink fairy and myself as the Lord of Dreams

Let's hope the last of the "naughties" is better than the previous year.

From Fuschia with Love - The Spy Who Lagged Me

The evil Pixie and the Professor had another of their stunning parties last night. Usually I'm busy sleeping at such times but with the change in Daylight Savings Time for everyone I've now moved 2 hours back from where I was relative to SL.



Dancing around Sharks with fricken lasers.

I caught the last hour of the party and enjoyed it immensly. It was nice to see Professor Avalanche again. Haven't seen him in ages.

I'll also have to set up a suitable photoshoot with the nifty new "spy" poses. I think my gift of the shark pool will turn up at Steelhead's Bond theme dance next week. :-)

Miss Emilly has some better pictures as she had her camera busy snapping.

The next one is "Bedknobs and Boomsticks". Based on that I've suggested that the Pixie will be played by Angela Lansbury and the Professor by Bruce Campbell. Should be fun!

Privateer Space

Having seen various reports about this new sim throughout the aetheric community, I thought I should go and have a look myself. Let me just say there's a VAST gulf between reading about it and seeing it for yourself. Part of the fun is finding the various SF jokes that abound in the textures and the builds. Do *you* know where Asteroid Al's is from?


This is where you start. The Galactic Truck Stop. "Last fuel for 20,000 light years". Here you can pick up an EVA suit and your own Spacebuggy for zipping around the sim.


"Take me out to the black, tell 'em I ain't coming back.."


Honest Zorg's Used Space Craft. You can pick up a Spacebuggy with TCS on it if you want too. Just be careful to take note of the No Entry signs.


Hotel New California. Yes that's the Swinetrek in parking orbit.


The police building. It was here I met the sim's creator Aley Arai. She was claiming her client was innocent by reason of the victim having fallen into a sun. Uh huh. Likely story.


A looooong talk with her (which I later realised was about 1.5 hours) and I was back off exploring. Amazing person. And quite happy to share her knowledge of how SL does (and doesn't) work.


Ringworld, from Megaprims.


Prior to this I had been under the belief that prims could not be rezzed permanently above 780 metres or so. Here am I at 2000, the top of the prims on the sim.


Space Pirates, hiding among the debris.


New Detroit. Underneath you'll find the *actual* way SL works, including "random inventory deletion server", the "Random Bug & Crash server" and the 1000 terabytes of pixel p0rn.


The surface of Mars


Ancient subterranian (submartian?) ruins.


"My God it's full of stars!" There are four monoliths in the sim. Find them all!


Surface of Da Mooo000o0ooo0n.


During the looong discussion, we ventured into the topic of Space 1999. Where upon I was presented with my very own Eagle. Now I had a chance to set it out properly!


Mining inside a gas giant.


And she's STILL building. Inspired by the Valley Forge (from Silent Running) this will become a host for alien plants. I've suggested triffids in here at some point :-)

You could spend hours in here (I did) and still not see it all. Definitely a sim to return to. Privateer Space can be found at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Privateer Space/122/134/639

Alé, Olé, Alé

Sunday afternoon also saw me online at an unusual time of day and I decided to pop over to the most recent match of Caledon FC.

This time round we were up against the Tinies of Raglanshire. Who for such small creatures certainly produce vast quantities of trash talk!


The stands with lots of little anklebiters.


The other stand, with taller spectators.


"The Enemy"


Caledon's intimidating Goalie, who was set upon with all sorts of Saboteurs intent on causing his workings harm.


At half time, yours truly was asked to join as a bench exchange.

Sadly the glory of Caledon was shortlived and we lost 5-2. But it was an interesting day and one I'd be happy to help with again assuming the timezone gods favour my presence.

Aaaaall my friends are getting ooooolder!

Friday afternoon SLT (or Friday evening GMT or Saturday morning AEDT) saw a combined Rez Day bash for many of Caledon's inhabitants. Oolon Sputnik, Terry Lightfoot, Alfonso Avalanche, Fuschia Begonia, Exrex Somme, Lapin Paris, Vi Paravane, Otenth Paderborn, Jess Patton, Kirawill Collingwood and probably others all have their anniversaries in November.

So, big party.

The theme for the party was Robotz and had some impressive outfits.


Inside the walls of Coughton Court, the walls had started closing in.


With Mechanicals, clockworks, automatons and their friends, all dancing to the funky tunes


Miss Emilly manages to catch my good side while DJing. Elrik Merlin and I covered the music with a little intercontinental handover.


Mechanical Alfonso.


Smilin' botz.

Double McBurger, large McChips, oh and a diet McDrink

Steelhead's dance this week was the nicely original Fast Food theme.

For some reason I got it into my head that Ronald McDonald was the way to go. This was partially inspired by one of the former denizens of Steelhead, Mr. Keenly Valiant, but also something that I thought would be fairly easy. In hind sight Colonel Sanders may have been the simpler option but there you go. I think I looked at every clown costume on the grid (not that there are many) from the cheap Rodeo Clowns to one that was L$2000, none of which were what I was looking for anyway. I ended up deciding to make my own. Texturing was easy enough and that was all accomplished fairly well, though the hair was proving a problem. Thinking I could simply retexture an afro hairdo I again launched across the grid looking for hair, and again met with dubious little results. Ended up wondering if SLX might have anything. Bought a L$99 afro there that was mod/copy which I thought would be perfect. However the 200 prims it's made of brought me up short when I started looking at retexturing.

I threw together a single prim hair piece and headed over to the dance (time flies when you're building!) It was sparsely attended to start with but then the people started to arrive.


Steelhead's very own musical Sheriff was Frylock, complete with goatee. (I wonder if this means there's a "nice" version of Fuzz in alternate universe?)


Gelatinous wobbly thing, Miss Orr appears to have eaten Carmen Miranda. I don't think we ever established what flavour jelly she was.


Lunar as Meatwad. I believe this is from a comic of some sort.


Tensai as Master Shake. With a memorial portrait to Keenly to the left.


My McClown. He needs work but not bad for a couple of hours work.


Exrex Somme as some sort of Chinese Takeaway I think.


Frequency Picnic as something that you see very occasionally in fast food.


Mr. O'Toole as Fastfood Nation

I dropped in to the Rock Factory, now in the brand new sim of jazzers Paradise, to see Dr. Figaro for about half an hour. She was grooving her way through her favourite Jpop stuff. Managed to scare a few people by still being McClowned. Headed back to Steelhead just before it coughed towards the end throwing everyone out. But there was plenty of party vibes going so that even after Fuzz finished for the night, Tensai found a station on Sky FM broadcasting 80s stuff and a few of us kept on dancing.

Brilliant night and loads of fun as usual.