Taunt - Online Games, Photoshop, Second Life, IMVU

My New Beastie Tee

My New Beastie Tee
Sanch was out shopping at the big Victoria Gardens Mall in Cucamonga and grabbed me this most awesome Beastie Boy tshirt! I am proudly wearing it around the pad today as I sip my coffee and plan the overthrow of the free world. We are both slowly whipping the house into shape for sale; Sancho is on the tile grout this week and I am on garage and filling boxes with crud. Oh! I have a moving tip for anyone about to move and this tip is also a pet peeve of mine. Don't you hate when a friend asks you to move and you go over to their place and nothing is packed? It drives me up the fucking wall because it is a waste of my time! I think the logic goes like this...people think "ohhhh, we can just grab a few boxes out behind the back of the grocery store". Well first off...they never even make the trip over to the grocery store and secondly...they try and convince themselves that the six or seven old cardboard boxes they have lying around will be big enough to pack the house. Grrrrrrr! Cheap Moving Bastards! Buy some damn boxes I always say. lol. Now the best box of all is the classic 16"x12"x12". This is a small box but boxes need to be smaller than bigger or they way 7000lbs and you bust a nut trying to move them. These little boxes filled with books  are 40-50lbs.

So my moving tip is "Buy lots and lots of boxes"! Don't be shy and don't be cheap. Here is where I buy all my boxes at Uline. Check this out...they even have the moving kit specials. I bought the small shack moving kit and give it a 10 out of 10. Yesterday I went back and ordered another qty25 of my favorite small boxes and some air bubbles for fun. Our goal is to pack the shack in the next 2-3 weeks, move to a rental on May 1 and get the painters and stagers in. Try and then get our house listed for June 1 or more likely July 1 since things never go as fast as one might like. Temperature check! Here and PS. Hmmm not too different today..71 and 79. Summer is on the way!

Yahoo Voice
For a year or two I've wanted to try VOIP. I thought about Vonage but chickened out...thought about Skype...and then Yahoo started to offer low priced phone numbers for $3 a month and 1 cent a minute to a landline. I really wanted to get one but they were only in Los Angeles and New York...recently they added zillions of area codes! I grabbed my first evah VOIP number and ordered a YIM cordless phone to go with it.
http://voice.yahoo.com/

The sign up was pain-free and fun but I have to admit I am in some pain today. The 24 hour online chat support is slow...10 minutes or more to get a person. And because the security is so tight, I can't use the phone at this time. They have charged my credit card from 1 cent to 99 cents and I have to enter that value into the account. Sadly my credit card company says the value was $1 lol and that won't fit into the box! Later today I will play tech support hell and try and get things corrected. I am excited to have voice mail on my computer...this is something we used to do a few years ago but the software got buggy. One trick we used was to create a third yahoo account and put the phone on it and then use an old computer to run that yahoo client...then Sanya does not need to be on my computer getting phone messages or me hers. Check out the fun wireless.

Babydoll's New SL Clothing Tutorials!
Check out some of Babydoll's new clothing tutorials linked to from her new website!. Like most designers, she is peppered with questions from customers wanting to learn design...and it makes it a lot easier to show them web tutorials rather than repeating the same answers over and over. Babydoll is working on 12 lessons with two bonus lessons.

Amsterdam Sells For 50 Large?

Amsterdam Sells For 50 Large?
Babydoll sent me the link to this great SL ebay sale by Stroker Serpentine and I cannot confirm or deny this sale but it looks like the built-out sim went for the Buy Me Now of $50,000 US and of A. Now that is some sweet cash in the underpants. If anyone knows more details on this story or press coverage, please pass it along.

Second Life Press
Not a bad little story on Second Life and virtual worlds. These stories are on the redundant side these days as each author experiences a virtual world for the first time or shares his or her experience with the rest of RL. This author is considering buying land.

Classified Chit De-La Chat
Here is a tip that some new designers might think about when making signage...to make classified ads that are clear and pretty, they tend to scale to around 1024x725.5 or 726. I am seriously considering making my future signs in Hair Shack No.2...that exact shape, thereby allowing me to paste the sign art right into the ads; no muss, no fuss, and time saved. The classified shape is an annoying one because SL rescales all jpgs so it tends to get a little blurry no matter what you do since the shape is not a power of 2. The danger of making signs that match the ad dimension is that "what if Linden changes the complete format of the current system?" They might and probably will, but I tend to think that is at least 12-24 months away. If you want to save time and kill two humans with one stone, you might ponder this trick.

Hair Shack No.1 Almost Full!
I'm not exactly sure but I think it's been around nine or ten months since I released my very first hairstyle in SL and now the Taunt Hair Shack on Taunt Island will be 10 hairs away from the Full-Pull once Hair Faire week finishes! 90 Hairdos! yay! I feel so damn slow! hehehehe. I think that equates to maybe two hairs a week. This summer will mark a year of adventure...the thrill and spills, the crying and bellyaching, the frisky fun. Once I fill the shack, I want to take and break and make a few new tutorial videos, and then completely re-do and re-think textures and start Shack No.2. This is all months away but I like to plan. My old roommate Jock used to say "he didn't plan to fail, he failed to plan" hehehe. My goal is to simplify and cut back on the extreme colors, raise prices, and get a little faster while having a little more fun as well. Time will tell.

Domain Name Auction Considerations
I've got two or three domain names that I'd consider selling if the price was right and with the move to Palm Springs, I might once again try cashing out one or all of them. I've been holding lips.com since 1994 and taunt.com since 1997 and occassionally test the selling waters. Right now domains are going for huge premiums again and I'm quickly getting lured. The Traffic Domain Conference had their March Live Auction a couple weeks ago in Vegas and here are the results. This week I plan to contact two or three lip balm manufacturers about Lips and see if they are interested. If they pass, I will probably list lips.com, taunt.com, and wildbikini.com with Traffic for their June conference in NY and place reserves on each of them to see what happens! The bad news is that if taunt sells for a big bag of cash, I would continue my making 3D content in SL and IMVU, but I would most likely take a break on blogging about it. This is generally what I've done in the past on my other blogs and a break every year or two helps to keep things interesting for me. I'll let you know what I do before I do it and won't be going anywhere...just changing how I advertise type of deal.

20-50 Million People Play Virtual Worlds
Another Second Life story with a few good statistical tidbits scattered throughout.

Single Women Achieve Orgasm More

Single Women Achieve Orgasm More
Every once in a while you need a good frisky headline to things started. hehehe Check out this study which shows that women orgasm better alone then with a man. The study also suggests that 80% of women are sexually active in their 40s but only 27% in their 70s, perhaps because 70% of men in their 70s could not maintaint an erection!

Great Report from Virtual Worlds 07
Here is a story with lots of pictures from the New York Virtual Worlds conference with names like There, Second Life, Electric Sheep, Makena, Rivers Run Red all in attendance.

More From VW07
Toyota and the Scion Brand going big into Whyville and more good tidbits in this story on the virtual worlds conference.

5 New Hairtsyles Today

5 New Hairtsyles Today
I wanted to release five new styles today and five next week at Hair Faire. Teleport on over to the Taunt Hair Shack to try out Sensual, Sometimes, Slap, Shadow and Sunset. On four of them I tried Bettie Bangs. For the show I did four Boss bangs and one Bettie.

Special Thanks to James Linden
I guess I found a new bug in the SL classifieds! James wrote me yesterday because I advertise so heavily that my profile was overloading the servers. zomg! He asked if he could reduce my ad count and find a safe total that would not overflow. James tells me the;ll fix the bug next patch and they've already fixed the bug that was making advertisements sometimes randomly disappear. Yay! I suggested to James that they consider an advertising system more like Google Adwords and he said they are working on an upgrade but no timeframe was set. I'm excited to hear this good news and will anxiously await. As business grows in SL, so will the importance of advertising...a more fair market system would help the whole economy.

SL Jumping Shark?
Here is a story suggesting that SL is losing some of the luster. I think they are grasping at weak statistics. It is much the same as dot com...there has to be a testing and shake-out period where companies begin to understand how virtual worlds work. Most want to hang a shingle and walk away...like a stagnant web pages of the 90s.

Scandal and Pirates Coming Soon!

Scandal and Pirates Coming Soon!
Above is picture of Babydoll prancing around in a new frisky Pirate outfit she is working on along with my new hair 'Scandal' that will be available at Hair Faire or in my store during hair faire week. I have been experimenting with "Bettie" bangs as well as the classic Boss Bangs. I am still learning the Bettie's and of the five bettie's I tried, this was my favorite.

Moving To PS Stories
I don't have many gamer stories today so I will put you to sleep with some of my 'moving to Palm Springs' tall tales. Have you ever looked at model homes and thought "wow this joint is so cool with all this neato furniture"? Sean the Agent tells me that the business of making empty rooms look appealing is called 'Staging". There are companies that do nothing but offer staging services for new home tracts. I have been searching some of them on Google. If staging is less than 5k, we may give it a try because I would like to clear my house out, paint it and clean the floors, and leave it empty but it is a little easier to sell a house with furniture than an empty shell...so currently we are researching 'staging'.

The next question is rent vs mortgage. Since we bought a house from a tract that is not built yet, if we try and sell our house now, the timing will be hell since builders always over-promise on time and then whoever bids on this house will want us out on a specific date and it will be a tangled mess of contingency clauses. Therefore I prefer to either a) make the move and then clean this house up and sell a month or two later...drawback is two mortgages pounding on me for maybe one to six months or b) move now into a small rental, prepare this house for sale and get it sold before moving into the new house. The drawback is that you have to float one mortgage and one rent...but that is cheaper than two morts. I believe system b would save us approximately $5k and I prefer to get moving on things rather than waiting around...I also think it would be a little easier to sell our home in the summer with the grass is nice and green, the pool is warm and not full of 82lbs of leaves and crud from fall winds.

Both Sanya and I are excited about moving and are attempting to make it as painless as possible but I am stressed as usual. lol I'm going to search for some rentals later today and see what's available. I want to cancel our cable and phones and get a new Yahoo phone number! It will be cheaper and the voice mail will be on the computer.

IT Tech Question On Explorer
I think I might of asked this once before but I'll give it another try for the IT folks...in IE7, I have my favorites open on the left and there is a mix of folders and links. In the old days, I could simply left click loose links and drag them onto a folder, release, and they would drop inside the folder, just like in Second Life inventory. But now, this no longer works...I can't drop the individual links into closed folders...I have to open the folder first and then drop with link in with the others. Any ideas what is causing this? email andy at lips dot com or comment away!

From Moving to Movies
The Host
Now I want to blab about movies a little. Today we are off to this obscure flick called The Host. Supposedly it is the top grossing movie in South Korean history. I always enjoy rare foreign films so I will let you know how it goes.

300
I think everyone should see 300 because of the art style...desaturated and gritty. Most of my friends loved it...I thought it was cool but it is just not my type of flick (I've struggled liking movies like 300, Sin City, Sky Captain and The World Of Tomorrow, and Brazil). I know these stylized movies are all awesome, I personally have trouble getting into them.

Curse of The Golden Flower
If you have netflix, here is a movie I really enjoyed that has huge war scenes, kind of like 300 and in some aspects the scenes are even more epic in terms of numbers of special effect warriors...it is sub titled so it is not for everyone. Curse of the Golden Flower. Here is the netflix.

Cocaine Cowboys
I gotta tell you about this DVD I watched a few weeks ago called the Cocaine Cowboys...it is simply a shocking documentary on Miami in the 1980s. If you think Scarface was exaggerated...think again! The Cuban Drug Lords made the Al Capone mafia look like choir boys...seriously. There was a three year period in Miami where there were 2-3 murders a day, every day, and generally machine guns were involved. lol. 600 murders a year! The money was insane, and everyone was corrupt and gangs were killing gangs. Miami Vice was close to reality in some ways and not others. This is non-fiction and a great documentary and I would recommend it.

Monday Quick Spew

An Interview With Eric Ries of IMVU
Here is a great interview with IMVU co-founder Eric Ries. I like that the story has many insights into what went wrong with the early There model which I had always felt was VC (venture capital) driven. IMVU has a clear target on what needs to be done and how to succeed and not burn through cash.

Treat Virtual Loot Like Fish
A quick story on virtual gold and taxes.

Thoughts On Bragg Vs Linden
I was sipping the martini's with my Mike the Lawyer, my bro-in-law, and we got to talking about intellectual property rights and the Bragg lawsuit. For those of you unfamiliar with it...basically a lad found a hole in linden code and bought property at below market rates. Linden cancelled his account. He is suing for the loss of cash he would of made and fees and such. There are compelling arguements on both sides of the case. Currently I think Bragg may have the stronger case but I can think of examples on both sides of the issue. I've linked to the stories on this topic a couple times...here is one if you want to get up to date.

Teaching Sanchy SL
My wife has shown some interest in learning second life to start a little business of her own. I am excited and want to crack the whip on her and get her producing. lol I am also curious to see how things develop if she sticks it out. I wrote up a page with 10 lessons I need to teach her and I think the two of us will slowly plow through them over the next month or so. I'll let you know more is she gets ready to open a business. She now has an account and is signed up...next lessons is "getting sexy" with skin, hair and shape.

Week 10 Of Zbrush Anatomy

Week 10 Of Zbrush Anatomy
Today is the last advanced class for Sparkle and I out in Hollywood. Zomg I am like the worst in the class hehehe. I don't know where all the muscles go and I seriously need some life-drawing experience. Even so, it has been fun and a learning experience. I think today we are doing legs and hands. I can't wait to try the new Zbrush in May but I'm already scared there will be a hundred new things to learn. I need a break from classes but there are a couple that look cool and have caught our eyes...I know the Maxon Bodypaint class would be super fun, as would the Photoshop 3D 2D texture painting class. One class that our instructor encouraged us to try is Ecorche where you study humans and animal models with their skin removed, and I think you then have clay muscles, and place them on the model, learning how the muscles truely all join together under the skin.

Massively Multiplayer Market Valued Over 1 Billion Now
And that is in the west alone! Here is a great article on making cash in virtual worlds and gold farming etc...there is chatter about SL, WoW, Habbo and more.

Chad Vader
I am enjoying the adventures of Chad Vader on YouTube.

Wireless Plasma
Bruce the Engineer has tipped me off to wireless plasma TVs. Samsung and LG.

Internet Out 9 Hours

Internet Out 9 Hours
Our internet dies around 11am and just came back up a short while ago! Time Warner Bastards! hehehe I then forgot about blogging and am tipsy and tired at this point so I just want to say hello and hugs. With no internet, Sanch and I did house chores all day, getting the house cleaned up ready to sell at the end of the year. I should have a few stories tomorrow am and it is my last Gnomon class in zbrush! I will be both sad and happy at the same time. Sad to be done school but happy to get some time back and having only one class should be a lot easier. It looks like the hair shack did not burn down while internet was gone...yay! See you tomorrow and Monday.

Small Bizarre Hack?

Yikes! I am off to a bday party and got the wires crossed with the wife thinking she said 430pm when she said 4, so I gotta do a very fast short post today!

Small Bizarre Hack?
So I get this tech support IM from a newer player asking for help with boots, dress and hair. I wrote him back "unless I drank too much tequila, I don't believe I sell any boots or dresses at this time?" I let him TP me over and his friend had this odd file where I am the creator! It was like a bald base but was damaging her skin. Any ideas on if this is a copy bot hack or some wierd issue? It is also full perm! The couple could not remember where they got the item but thought at some freebie noob store. Please let me know if you have any thoughts on the issue.

Learning To Walk In Maya

Learning To Walk In Maya
Last night in Intro To Maya, Sparkle and I learned some animation basics as our teacher showed us how to make a simple alien-lad walk! Here is my tiny video (not sure if you would need to right click and save as).

Making A Living In Second Life
Dr. Bartle sent in a quick comment yesterday that we can further debate.

Richard writes
Latest stats show 559 people "make a living" from Second Life, most of whom aren't working alone.
http://tinyurl.com/ynvrku

Again I think those numbers are very exciting! I'm somewhat hesitant, like the author, in that the big developer side of SL is very dot-com feeling. Big companies are tossing money at SL and this cash is mainly going to be wasted in the short term. On the small developer side...I wish I could tell you some of the numbers I am hearing! These numbers are as big as the early web porn numbers used to be. hehehe.

In the last twenty years I've started approximately nine small businesses; three of them were complete failures, three of them broke even, and three of them did pretty well. I agree with Doc Bartle in the sense that the media is "over selling" second life...almost promising gold on the street for anyone and everyone. I disagree with Doc Bartle in that I do believe there is huge opportunity here. Whenever you have an emerging industry at the introduction and growth stage, where sales are increasing at an increasing rate, you have a very good industry to start a small business in. If anyone walked up to me on the street today and asked "I'd like to start a small business...are there any you would recommend?" I would then ask that person, "Do you like photoshop or do you love computer games?" and if they answered yes to either of these questions, I would highly encourage them to try 3D content creation in Second Life and other virtual worlds.

Whenever you have an emerging industry with above average profits, the window of opportunity is short. You usually find two to three years of above average profits and then competition reaches a level that profits match that of all other industries and no-longer seem above average. The is just the natural ebb and flow of business and is almost like evolution in a way.

I want to make a quick graph...let's take the SL business statistics of people making over $2000 a month and chart it...let me crank open excel. Here is a chart. This chart will probably go from 0 to 500 in a little over two years. To me this means...a rare emerging industry with substantial growth rates and above average profits in the short term. To me this means...get out the shovel and dig for gold! hehehe I have spent most of my adult life looking for these industries and found three or four of them: the sign store growth boom of the early 90s (when paint was abandoned for computer cut vinyl, the internet BBS boom of the late 90s when dial-up BBSs were hot like AOL 2.0, the dot-com boom and subsequent stock boom of the early 2000s, and the adult internet boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. If you find such an emerging market and you're entrepreneurial, it makes sense to at least try a business in this new exciting marketplace.

Will It Sell? Amsterdam in SL for $50,000
Babydoll sent me a link to the Amsterdam build in SL which is now on ebay starting at a 20 large opening bid. Check it out!