Grendel's Children and Avaria featured in new Nitwacket machinima + A chat with Flea Bussy

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Perched high in the sky over the four Avaria sims in Second Life® is a place that holds as much magic as the virtual constellations that surround it, for within the Grendel's Children store are the seeds of imagination and playtime where grownups go to shrug off the stress of their daily real lives and explore other parts of themselves. This, the largest emporium in virtual worlds for non-human avatars, is the land of pretend... turbo-charged.

Flea Bussy, the founder and lead creator of this empire, didn't set out to provide tens of thousands of people with therapeutic tools, but I can personally attest to their power. To put it in purely quantitative terms, I must own over 200 avatars from Grendels (not including color variations) and I've worn every single one more than once.

It's been nearly 18 months since I last did a serious post on Grendel's, and Pyewacket Bellman's latest machinima - gorgeous! - featuring Avaria and several of their newest avatars prompted me to touch base with Flea.

I thought I'd kick it off by asking him to update me on some of the fast facts I published back then. His responses in italics:

FAST FACTS ABOUT FLEA BUSSY

* Rez day: 6/29/2006
* Flea is only 22 years old!
I'm now 20 years old! Wait, no, that's not right, how do we do this again?
* Works an average of 20 hours a day, 7 days a week
Works 25 hours a day, sleep was given up in the 24th hour! 365, all year!
* Was kicked out of art class
* First store opened on September 1, 2006
* Grendel's Children has produced more than 800 avatars
Grendel's has made way too many avatars to count. It hurts my little brain! [Note from Bettina: Many, many hundreds more]
* Average price per avatar: $150L to $250L, with many freebies available
Average price per avatar: $1L to $150L, with many , many, many freebies available

Favorite recent creations?

Flea: Does my staff count?

You and several members of your staff collaborated in-world while in Skype conference back then. Are you still doing this?

Flea: Oh, depends if we have to have little meetings on new ideas or such. Otherwise it's just normally us typing in the box actually. [Bettina: Working in Maya, plus Skype, plus the SL client is a formula for lag.]

How has the environment changed for avatar creators in the past year? Copybotting, more advanced sculpty work, a stabler grid, etc.

Flea: We wouldn't know, we kinda just stay in Avaria. I'd assume that those things like a stabler grid might exist, but, only in stories n song, you know, mythological stuff! We've never noticed anyone bothering to copybot what is almost all free here anyway. It's probably more work to copybot our stuff then just get like, $5L and buy it.

Avaria & Grendel's Children from Nitwacket Machinima™ on Vimeo.

The Avaria sims, were rebuilt in just 5 days and are now unified by a single river cutting through sandstone canyons and lined with hardwood forests and surrounded by drier pine uplands.

Terraforming: Flea Bussy, Ryan Snook, Psyra Extraordinare, Sanje Batra, Constant Riel, and Toady Nakamura

Rocks, sculpts, caves, tree and plant creation: Flea Bussy, Ryan Snook, Sanje Batra, RaptonX Zorger, Merlin Falworth and Toady Nakamura.

Prim installation: Flea Bussy, Ryan Snook, RaptonX Zorger, Sanje Batra, Psyra Extraordinare, Constantine Riel, Merlin Falworth and Toady Nakamura.

Village: Flea Bussy, Ryan Snook

Scripting - Craft System: Flea Bussy
Scripting - Drakelets: Piper Zuhal
Scripting - Geysers, sun dial, sound prims, rockfalls: Toady Nakamura
Waterfall and statuary particles; water and motion - Flea Bussy

Teleport to Grendel's Children directly from here, and don't forget to explore the Avaria sims below.

See also:

* Flea Bussy's empire: Grendel's Children, one wacky avatar at a time...

* Climbing walls, sky dancing (in HD!), and weightless sex/showers - Part IV in our Gravity in Virtual Worlds series

* Flea Bussy - Makin' stuff for the love of orks 'n goblins

"at home" with Truthseeker Young

Posted by Alpha Auer... ;-)

How easy can it be to write about someone that you really like and yet maintain your objectivity? Well, if the reasons that you like the person have something to do with the context of what it is that you have to tell, I personally see no big conflict of purpose...

Truthseeker has imagination. This is why I befriended this person. Truthseeker has a sense of humor. Again, this is why I befriended this somewhat androgynous personage, of whom I have absolutely no idea as to their gender, their age, or anything else related to their Real Life flesh and blood existence. And guess what? I am not even remotely interested in any of that. Truthseeker is possibly my one true solely virtual friend and I have befriended him/her through my interest in his/her art work, writing a glowing review of one of his/her installations basically during a time when I did not know this wonderful person from Adam/Eve. So, methinks that it is perfectly possible for me to write a blog post that does not reek too strongly of nepotism about the extraordinary home and the charged virtual days of my colleague Truthseeker Young.
...




(Photographs courtesy of Truthseeker Young.)

The obvious place to start I suppose would be Truthseeker's avatar. This slender creature of vague Meso-American or possibly African descent undergoes the occasional modification but some features have stayed in situ, more or less since we met: The back pointing open jaw, displaying an ominous set of teeth ready to bite the living daylights out of anyone who would dare to sneak up on this seemingly frail individual from behind... The staff, of course. The staff has had its share of transformations, however it is always there, in all of its glory... And of course, the goatee. But is this just a plain old a goatee? Or some magic appendage that seems to miraculously sprout forth from Truthseeker's chin?

...

And then of course, there are the stories that happen around Truthseeker:



We are crouching on the rooftop in anticipation of any kind of "undesirable element" to creep up. In which case, I guess we will proceed to pour hot virtual oil on them or something?

As it turned out later, an eminently sensible strategy it was too. Recently the place was in fact taken over by some highly undesirable squatters...



Alpha Auer: You were invaded???
Truthseeker Young: More like infested! A mother fighterjet & her miserable little young tried to roost in my front yard! Execrable vermin...

One day later:



Truthseeker Young: oh! OH! OMG!!! d00d, where's my gun... ohhh, nonononono...this ain't good...

One day later:



Truthseeker Young: aah, crap! I thought I'd chased them off, but last night when I came back home, they were back, and they'd built a NEST outta my FENCE!!
Alpha Auer: the "crouching on the rooftop watching vigilantly" pose thingy isn't helping you too much over there is it? :)
Truthseeker Young: /me glowers & mutters curses from the acceptable distance established by the mother jetbird

(Photographs courtesy of Truthseeker Young.)

...

And then there is Truthseeker's house, what this proud parent of a three year old Real Life minx calls the "space_age_bachelor_pagoda", rezzed high up in the skies of Extropia. When first I saw it, it was a thing of floating splendor, imagination and grace, the likes of which one would be hard pushed to find maybe even in places like Bangkok.



But, recently this magnificent dwelling has acquired a far more anthropomorphic cast - indeed to the point where Truthseeker could not help but remark that he/she thought the house looked somewhat stoned.





...

We make art in Second Life. We rezz sculptures and buildings. Installations and soundscapes. Entire sims even. But isn't the thing that we are really busy creating, the thing of paramount importance, the thing that has never really happened before (or only in a very narrow "staged" context), our "self"? Indeed our many selves? Our very lives? The endless stories that we spin, the tales we tell to ourselves and to others. The magnificence of the fairy tale narrative come to life as an avatar.

Avatar Art?

It seems to me that we all do it. That every person who becomes immersed in a virtual world becomes involved in this strangest and most hard to explain and analyze of creative processes. At least this is my sense as well as my own personal experience. However, when a person possessed of the levels of visual talent, of imagination, of intelligence and of humor that Truthseeker so obviously is, becomes entangled in this magical mesh of make-belief the outcome becomes what I have tried to feebly describe above.

Extraordinary!

You can teleport to Truthseeker Young's home directly from here. More images and stories of Truthseeker's virtual life can be found on his Flickr photostream here.

Magical retail destinations - Even in Second Life, they are rare: The 109 Prim Circus

Via one of our favorite content creators (and illustrators) of all time, four Yip, we learned of one exquisitely magical store that, were it not for the fantastic items for sale there, would still be a destination in and of itself.

The 109 Prims Circus is a steampunk/fantasy store created by Japanese Onakagoo Epin (rez: 11/22/2006). Unlike most stores and malls in Second Life® - sadly and exceedingly unimaginative and boxlike - this retail outlet is a jewelbox containing all sorts of lovely things.

These photographs do not do the place justice because I had to crop the heck out of them due to a bug in the latest Release Client viewer.




Housed within a sphere megaprim, the store is its own environment


Two functional merry-go-rounds with crystalized and ghostly horses go round and round


Steampunkish pods contain the store's offerings, and oh what delightful items they are, worthy of many more blogposts


One gorgeous item for sale, and very reasonably priced, is a steampunk crescent moon

Teleport directly from here.

Use Second Life and get brainier - Imagination made tangible

In his book The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge explained,“experiments have shown that we can change our brain anatomy simply by using our imaginations.” He goes on to say, "...the faster you can imagine something, the faster you can do it.”

Unless you are a neuroscientist, it is difficult to appreciate the seismic shift that is taking place regarding our understanding of the brain, but scientific evidence is piling up: the more imaginative and creative we are, the better our brain works. In fact, no matter what our age may be, it seems that the more we stimulate our brains, the faster we produce new cells or neurons.

Here's someone who's imagination is firing on all cylinders... rebecca's profile on her Flickr stream reads as follows: "the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars"


Dreamscape Escape - This would be easy to do in Second Life®, but we have to love the thinking that made this happen in Real Life. It does beg the question, though... what would Rebecca be capable of in virtual worlds?

Now then, I've said it before and I'll say it again.. Second Life is the most affordable and complete tool I know of to commit hardcore creativity. It is also the place where the distance between imagination and tangible creations is the shortest. I personally know hundreds of people in Second Life who are capable of dreaming up something completely new in the morning, and by evening are already sharing it with others.

It's easy. No, it's magical. No, it's easy and magical - Plus, a Black Swan writing contest

When I was five years old, my dear and wondrous grandmother - who undoubtedly would have had an even worse case of NPIRL-itis than I do - took me to a "thousand and one nights" themed restaurant for dinner. We were greeted at the door by a sheik... the tallest man I have ever seen... and led to our table through a candlelit path by a veiled and supernatural beauty.

Later, to celebrate that I had eaten all the lamb on my plate, that same belly dancer branded the evening's experiences on my mind for all eternity when she ripped a gold coin off her belt... and gave it me!

For years, I begged to be taken back, and my grandmother's answer was always the same: "It will never be that perfect again, so why upset the memory of it?"

The restaurant was in a strip mall, the sheik was surely a local high school basket ball player, and the belly dancer, well, she was just sweet. That coin? I still have it today... the gold paint worn off by me and the five-year-old fingers of my envious friends who were sometimes allowed to hold it.

Years later and just one week ago, I visited the Black Swan sim to see the "Night Dreaming" stone girl for the first time. No one had told me what to expect. "Okay...sculpties," I thought, and touched her to learn more, thinking I'd soon be teleporting off. Suddenly she was transformed into a living, glowing nymph, and I was that five year old all over again, shivering and thrilling all by my lonesome.


These photos by ColeMarie Soleil

Her creator, Light Waves, assured me today that there was no magic to it at all. "The effect is very simple," he said and proceeded to explain the process in his gentle and breezy manner, in terms that even I - a half-baked script-hacking dilettante - could understand.

Well, I don't care if it was simple or complicated. Easy or hard, the effect was sorcery, in my opinion. It transported me to my magical place and I'm not coming down.

The point is - and no, I don't own stock in Linden Lab - Second Life is the most affordable and complete tool I know of to commit hardcore creativity. Every single one of us - whether we are paying members or not - has tools at our disposal to enchant, mesmerize, and even disturb our fellow residents through the use of a simple script or a texture overlay or... but we just have to ssstretch our imaginations... which is the most powerful exercise of all.

Which brings me back to the Black Swan sim. Everything about it is mysterious and unexplained... so the online speculative fiction and dark fantasy zine, The Future Fire, has invited Second Life residents to participate in a creative writing competition that must have a discernible link to the artwork at Black Swan. Go there (teleport directly), flex those brain muscles, and you might become the author of the best entry. The winner of the first prize will receive (USD) $500, and be published in The Future Fire as well as in Second Life by Black Swan, but hurry... the deadline is December 10, 2007.

As for me... I am still buoyant, and I'm headed back to visit the stone girl. Unlike strip malls in the eyes of a five year old, her magic still holds up, and is locked inside me forevermore.