Memorable events from the past week...

Hey there Second-Lifers and other readers,

I have been so busy performing and blogging my performance archives, I have neglected to show you what else I have been up to this week. This has been quite a historic week as I have met the new Second Front members Great Escape and Loveless Finsbury for the first time. Well, Loveless is not directly referenced in this particular blog posting but you can scroll down this blog to read more about her... In the meantime, read all about this week and other time-faffing events below...

So, on one of these days, I was seriously bored and waiting for my friends to show up in SL so I decided to have a look at Second Life's community events and noticed that Warner Brothers was hosting a promo launch party event for their new musical releases. So, my curiosity got the better of me and I was stunned to find a bunch of people sacrificing any potential networking opportunities by sitting around and meditating to the new muzak in order to incrementally earn Linden dollars! I always thought some record-labels were cultish, but this????


Here is another angle in order to show off the first bunch of trance-endental meditation devotees. I found out later that there were different meditation zones arranged by Warner Bros. according to the avatar's preferred genres such as: Diluted Nu-Metal, Generic Pop-Punk , whiny yet slick protest rock and yes, Nettwerk style Songstress ballads.

..and here is yet another angle for you. I do not recall this at the time but Warner seems to have placed red-roses here and there...I wonder what for? I am not sure of the exact context but you will see them in some of the other pix...


...for example, in this image we find a red-rose lying there in the virtual gutter underneath the meditators. Maybe these die-hard devotees were showering Warner's A&R Guru with these red-roses? It is certainly possible and probable. At any rate, I was really tempted at this point to give up my worldly Second Life and bliss-out on a chair alongside the top-40 herd...I could either try and be a "rebel" and lounge on one of the ground-floor sofas or float up there and strike a vogue-lotus pose alongside them.

Well, the mantras as tedious and generic as they were, started to display their extremely contagious chorus-hooks so in my hypnotized state, I found myself a seat amongst the sheeple and tuned into the lyrics. It looks like Tabether Bisiani (the Lululemon gal on the left) seems to be earning the highest income that Warner Brothers has ever offered for a sit-in. She is the most genuinely into her major-label yoga! I guess you can make anywhere from $14-16 Linden dollars an hour to sit and stare into cyberspace. The avatar who has just keeled over on your right (my left) named Rich Dejavu is not so rich in fact, he (if Rich is a "he") must be a performance artist because he seems to be about as broke as I am. Ahhh..performance artists always seem to be into the ritual for its own sake and not the cash, right? Deja-vu?

Here is yet another angle of this meditation region. I just wanted to show you another two devotees who must be deep into the beta state of trance by now....heh heh! Hmmm..maybe I can get a job as a Games Host and DJ for Warner Records...I wonder what state of trance I would need to be under in order to apply for the position of A&R guru?

I eventually wandered around to the other side of the party-island to find this down-and-out fallen angel meditating on her last legs. She must have hit the ceiling and then the floor pretty hard when she fell from grace because she seems very willing and able to tolerate the song-stressed ballads just to earn a little pocket change!

Here is a better angle of my meditation session with the angel.

All of this meditating (ok ok, it was really the grating and phoney muzak) left me exhausted and pretty vacant so I took off in haste to nap in some Winter Wonderland. I must say that this area had some very nice blossoms and also quite the elaborate treehouse! Now is it just me recovering from poppy meditation or am I actually seeing avatars jeering at me from the blossoms in the trees?


I must be truly tripping because there seems to be a generous cluster of gigantic magic mushrooms here. You would think the mushrooms were trying be discrete by disguising themselves as smurfesque toadstools but I knew what they really were ;-)

Now, I require your honest opinion...is it spring or winter in this Wonderland?

Ok, so after my nap, I decided to follow the advice of Jayce Logan's Sim Trekker article and look for some freebie and speedy vehicles in the anime world of Nakama. Anyways, I got myself a free Grav-Glider plane or something like that. So, I downloaded one to my inventory and rezzed it into the freebie room. I then realized I could rez many copies of this plane and plant them into this room and even wear them like accessories. My computer crashed before I could take a decent pic of my stacked-plane fashion accessories....Well, I thought I had successfully detached all the planes from my body when I crashed but I was wrong...as you will see next...


Upon rebooting my computer, I had the urge to visit the Reuters complex again since this is where Second Front has been performing in recent days... Well, I arrived at Reuters with one lone plane still attached to my right shoulder-blade and when I finally managed to scrape it off my body, it flew into the ground-floor windows of the main Reuters office building and crashed right through it! I am not used to being an unwitting accomplice in the emerging field of unintentional terrorism!

OK, NOW I MUST GLIDE IN A TIME CAPSULE BACK INTO THE RECENT PAST AND TAKE YOU TO MY HISTORIC MEET-AND-GREET WITH THE ONE OF THE MORE RECENT CO-MEMBERS OF SECOND FRONT, GREAT ESCAPE!

From left to right: Lizsolo Mathilde, Tran Spire, myself and Great Escape. Through the recommendation of Tran Spire (another Second Front member), I finally got a teleport invite from Great Escape to visit his property in an area called Stone Pike which is basically a barnyard-like property that also has overtones of a cabinessence. Lizsolo Mathilde pointed out in her blog that Great Escape's property is located next to a zookeeper... Great Escape was immediately very generous and friendly! He offered us each a pair of angel wings! Well... he hesitated at the time this pic was taken to give us our wings until he felt he had a majority vote in being part of Second Front ;-) I have also taken note that Great Escape also has a pair of blossom trees...They must be cheap - especially when sold as a pair! ;-)

Here is a pic showing what his deck looks like...well, what part of his deck looks like ;-) Now I realize that I can be a lousy in-world photographer at times...sigh!

Here is another angle showing what the rest of Great Escape's backyard looks like. You can see a few barnyard animals strolling in the distant horizon and I did not get a close look to see if that is a dog or a cow on his deck in the upper-right of this pic but it could be one of those well known domesticated creatures. Perhaps if you click on this pic to zoom in a little closer, you might be able to detect the details... On the subject of details, here is a pic where you can see our names appearing as ID-tags hovering above our heads! We were still waiting for those wings that Great Escape offered...


We had to wait until sundown before we could gather enough votes vouching for his Second Front membership to the point where Great Escape was sufficiently "persuaded" to give us our promised pair of wings...Had we known, we would have looked for the "Force Moon" function in Second Life... I know there is a "Force Sun" function so some hacker had to have scripted the reverse by now... I must say that now we were on the Dark Side of the Moon, Great Escape was looking more and more like a doppelganger of Lucifer ;-)

It looks like Great Escape also liked to take his smoke breaks ;-) Well, the Great Outdoors is indeed a suitable place for such activities...

During one of these smoke breaks, it was getting increasingly apparent that Great Escape likes to smoke up a fair amount as he was wafting these smoke trails all around us. Perhaps his actions were foreshadowing some kind of prophecised event? Maybe he was trying to give us a subtle signal that maybe some virtual trouble was about to brew? Something must have been in the air tonight as Tran Spire intuitively decided to temporarily discard his pair of wings. Maybe Tran was worried that having too much windpower might tempt him to fly into the heart of the sun in order to force it to come closer to us?


Well, it definitely started to show that Great Escape has been burning the candles at both ends for far too long tonight as he suddenly overdosed on his own steam! We were going to revive him but then realized he was practicing one of his trademark performance techniques (scroll down to learn more about what I mean)...