second life conceptual
Since a month there’s a new blog on the block, concerned with exploring “↑Second Life“ (SL): ↑Second Life Conceptual by Gaynor Gritzi, Who seems especially interested in seizing the inworld heights. The latest post reports about ↑flying a jet-pack at 50,000m while leaving unending vapor trails in the sky. Rigged up test-pilot Gaynor looks like a hybrid made of James Bond, a NASA-astronaut, Rocketboy, and Buzz Lightyear. The story on the ↑maiden flight of a retro rocket ship—which ended in desaster—has some hilarious passages: “This was the last photograph taken before the retro rocketship crashed and burned. Wreckage was spread over a wide area, and the pilot was feared lost.” Until that sentence I deemed the post to be a specimen of those suspension-of-disbelief tongue-in-cheek style write-ups, which really can be good reads when they are well done. But then the story goes on with a shift in the level of narrative and adds a phantastic twist, mixing the realms of inworld-experience with those of technical pecularities of SL itself:
And if you’re unlucky? Well, you’ll be going through a heavily lagged sim, and not going as fast as you think you are, when the nose of your craft will push through into a sim where there’s much less lag. And suddenly, the front will be going much faster than the back, and the plane will get stretched longer than the distance where it’s possible to link prims—and suddenly bang, your plane disappears, and you fall through the air, to end up at location (-300,-250,-500) or somewhere near. And your plane? It’ll be returned to you over the course of the next three or four days, one prim at a time.
And then you’ll get an irate IM from someone because one of the noisy, particle generating engines has landed in their next door neighbours’ garden, they can’t delete it, and it’s driving them mad.
Second Life is not built for flying rocketships!
If you dig things like that, there are several ↑reports on height-record stunts in SL, and of course downright ↵over-the-top stunts in other games, documented as movies—I try to refrain from again pointing to ↵Q3A-trickjumping … D’oh!
