an analysis of the avatars we make for ourselves

from The Secondlife Newspaper

take a look around. Take a look at your alts.
Who is that Goth looking chick with piercings all over her body, sexy tattoos, black nails, showing her boobs and working the pole, while you… the one on the keyboard… is wearing an apron, keeping an eye on the timer so the pot-roast wont burn and shouting "Billy stop fighting with your sister!!!!!" ?
Who is that guy with the muscles and the shades, looking like a commando, blowing away anyone who trespasses with a weapon that would be too much for the Terminator, while you… the one typing… just came back from helping your neighbor rescue his cat from the highest tree in his garden… and now types "brb", because the wife needs help with the dishes???

keep reading . . .

Tweak GIMP to be More Like Photoshop

lifehacker.com

We've shown you how to make GIMP's interface look like Photoshop's, but these tips will actually add many of the functions and capabilities of Adobe's flagship photo editor to its open-source counterpart.

Design blog Smashing Magazine put together a fantastic list of tweaks to really soup up the capabilities of GIMP. They cover how to enable layer styles, add CMYK color separation, liquid rescale, and more. If reading about GIMP in this week's image editing Hive Five has motivated you to try out the excellent open-source editor, make sure to check out the link below to get off to a strong start.

Handy Tweaks to Make GIMP Replace Photoshop [Smashing Magazine]

petlover

I'm a petlover in RL and now I am a petlover in SL. There are opportunities to have pets in Second Life. In this picture there is a butterfly on my shoulder (no name), a pug named Harold, and a cat named Steve. Harold is mine, and Steve belongs to my SL friend Grizzy. Harold follows me around and can even do MIB stuff, but, alas, I cannot pet him :-(. Steve, on the other hand, can be petted and does various happy things when I do (rolls, stretches, etc).

what is Second Life?

We have a debate going on in our household as to whether Second Life is a game or not. My son, who plays World of Warcraft, says it is a game. Sometimes I will agree. Well, for Christmas he gave me the book, Second Life: A Guide to Your Virtual World.
In it I fell upon a quote from a popular science fiction book, Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson.
Reading the reviews for that book, it seemed to me that the term Metaverse and the title Second Life had something to do with it. So I did a search for Metaverse, and found a really good description of what Second Life is.

So, Second Life is a Metaverse. There are open source Metaverse platforms and there are several commercial ones (including Second Life). World of Warcraft, on the other hand, is also a Metaverse, but a specialized one: an MMORPG. Pretty cool.

putting your real face on your avatar

I don't know about you, but I look LOADS better when I'm smiling. But I went ahead and put on my best neutral face to try out putting my real face on my avatar (SL landmark their website). After lots of fiddling with the shape after importing it into Second Life, I think I've made it look about as good as it is going to with this picture. If I do this again, maybe I'll use a younger version of my face, with plenty of makeup. I'll keep it on for a while, to show my closest SL friends. After that I may return to my ultra smooth cartoon face :-)

Second Life Google Profiles

Free Texts and Studies online

The Living In The Universe Sim has lots of text books available for free. They point to resources that are available online. Some are full courses with curricula.