Tooter Claxton

New avatar: Norman Schwitzkopf

2009-02-05T11:37:00.000-08:00

People who came to visit me at Glidden the last couple of days were a bit puzzled to see me standing in the middle of a huge number of weapons. Don't worry, I haven't joined the NRA and I'm still your treehugging and peaceloving Tooter.
I was making Norman Schwitzkopf (or 'The Negotiator' as Dingle Doigts calls him); an avatar made up entirely of guns, revolvers, pistols, grenades and rpg's.
This conflict manager will quickly settle any arguement.

Get ready to spread democracy across the grid and yours at my shop in Oculea for L$ 250

New avatar: Prvoky

2009-01-28T05:23:00.000-08:00

Prvoky is a Paramecium Aurelia. It's transparant, and it has flexy hairs and mouths all over. How sexy is that heh?
The box comes with two versions; one has a brain that reacts to chat. Well some of it. Not much really.
Because I have only extremely well educated and intelligent buyers, I'm sure you all noticed that the skin of Prvoky is actually an inverted picture of space taken by the hubble telescope.

Oh yeah, before I forget: that thing inside at the bottom is it's rectum, not a penis.

Available at my shop in Oculea for L$ 250

Content theft! Plagiarism!

2009-01-18T14:59:00.000-08:00

Remember the hobo fish tank I made february last year?

Banksy did the same thing in real life last october at his Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill show in NYC:

How about that heh? Well it was a full perm freebie...

New freebies

2009-01-09T14:29:00.000-08:00

There. I've been back for a couple of weeks and started building again. There's a new avatar coming up and I've finished some things I had started on earlier last year:

RX3000 racecar

When I was a kid I had a toy car that looked something like this. As usual it's really really fast, just like the DX-4 muscle car. Oh okay, I've already gotten complaints about this. I confess: they're both really slow. Here's why.

The Queen of Calleta

The Hobo group now has an entire island, thanks to the Big O(rhalla Zander) and Rezzable. The idea was to make everything on the island free ánd full perms. I'm not sure if that still is the case, but I made this little boat full perms anyway. You need transportation to the island, right?
Also holds a couple of cases of Kumi Kumi (beverage,). In case you get thirsty on your way over.

Bakfiets

Almost forgot, but I also made a bakfiets. We use those over here in the Netherlands to move stuff. I made it for the SLLU to put posters a.s. on, so it's not driveable. Just to put out and put stuff in. It's not in a freebie box yet, but will be soon.

As usual, the freebies are available at my shops.

Pud loses her cherry!

2008-04-27T23:19:00.000-07:00

P. and J. have escaped from the kitchen at Greenies to explore second life. And they have been running into all kinds of trouble. Episode two was already shot at my salon, and now there's episode five in which P. loses her cherry to my punk rat avatar. She forgot to tighten it. Don't worry, there's a happy end when J. gets it back for her.

Steff Ling has made five great Pud and Jel videos so far. And there's more to come I hope.
Apparently Rat was a bit of a slacker during the shoot, as you can read on Steffs blog. On its blog it complains about the rat being a lazy actor.

There's a better quality video of this episode on blip tv.

Murder at the salon

2008-04-18T02:23:00.000-07:00

Keiko Takamura got killed by a monster in my salon! Ah well, fear not; it's only virtual ketchup. Read about the video and the song on Hamlet Au's New World Notes.
This is an interview with her on MTV:

Click To Play

Statue by Olza Koenkamp

2008-04-18T01:36:00.000-07:00

Olza Koenkamp is a polish artist that I spend a lot of time in the sandbox with. I love the avatars and art he makes; defenitely among the weirdest and greatest in SL. Some time ago he opened his first (main) store and I asked him if he wanted to make a statuette at my land in Oculea to serve as a landmarkgiver to his new shop.
He then made a statue of me, ha! I asked him if he maybe misunderstood my offer, but no, it was all on purpose. So there it is, at the railway station. I made a little fountain around it (go and try sitting on it:) and a couple of days later Olza had added two beautiful colored slugs crawling into the water. Great surprise :)

Thanks a lot Olza!

Go check out his psychosomatic rebuilders shop! The avatars are awesome.

New avatar: Onyomanya Copeseek

2008-04-17T05:12:00.000-07:00

Made a shopping addict avatar; two skinny legs under a pile of bags and packages shedding money and credit cards. My favorite scripteuse Paladin Pinion did the script, based on Arduenn's drop script that I used for the driveable dumpster.
It has all the famous brands; Fartier™, Lag™, Yves Sans Lag™, Bling™, and of course Torley Linden™'s brassiere brand Melons™.
I gave a copy to Torley (which he apparently appreciated :) and I just noticed he wears it in one of his awesome tutorial video's. Yay!

Available for L$ 250 at my shops.

Justice Commons art show

2008-04-15T23:38:00.000-07:00

(Yeah yeah, so I am almost over a month too late posting this. I had things to do. Important things. Really.)

The Global Kids digital media initiative (sponsored by the MacArthur foundation). opened the International Justice Center in Second Life. As part of the opening ceremonies (which also featured RL streams of Luis Moreno-Ocampo and Kofi Annan a.o.) there was to be an art show themed around justice, curated by Bettina Tizzy and In Kenzo. I was honored to be asked to join great builders Pavig Lok, Tuna Oddfellow, AM Radio, Juria Yoshikawa, Dancoyote Antonelli, Filthy Fluno, Elros Tuominen, Chance Abattoir, Adam Ramona, Josina Burgess, Velazquez Bonetto and Junivers Stockholm in the art show.

I made an inside out jail, with the free world inside. With privacy laws being trashed in the name of security all over, the world is looking more and more like one big jail, right?
It has a bunch of cctv's moving about (I used puppeteer to do that) and a script (custom made by the wonderful Paladin Pinion) that does a full 'scan' of your avatar when you get close to the sculpture. The inside has a wallpaper of a garden and a door that says 'universal penitentiary'.

The sculptures are still there, so go have a look at the Justice Commons sim. It's a great exhibition and worth the visit.

There's been a lot of blog coverage of the show, some youtube here and youtube there, and there's the large post on Bettina's npirl blog. If you find more, please leave a link in the comments will you?

New freebie: Hobo Vardo

2008-03-21T12:59:00.000-07:00

A long time ago I promised Reggier Rimbaud to build her a new vardo (or gypsy wagon). Because she's a fun person and because it would be a fun build. I finally got around to building it and I like the way it turned out.
It has way too many textures for such a small build (comme d'habitude) and it takes ages to rez them all but it does have a lot of details to look at. My favorites are the canned lettuce and the picture of a young Pavig Lok. But there's also beans. a picture of Rimbaud (the poet, not Reggier) canned sock, culinary books on roadkill, beans, gastritis, a bean plant, a dental plaque, lots of rats, beans, money, a (new! improved!) filthy bed, beans, a gun, flags, and much more.
So somehow a beans theme also slipped into the build, and I have no idea why. Maybe I was hungry? Flatulent? Probably both.
I added a whopping 15 poses which are fun to find. But you can also use the spoiler notecard.

Reggier threw me a party* when the vardo was done: 'Tooter Claxton appreciation day', lol. That was really fun until Orhalla came with the bad news about Patty1 getting injured in Iraq. You probably read about that by now here or here or here. So I'm a slow blogger. Patty1 is back inworld, laughing out loud still hurts, but I saw she had a party last night, so that must be getting better too. Good!

The vardo is available at my shop. It's free to take.

Some more pictures:

* In the invitation Reggier mentioned I got a job at the LDPW, Linden Department of Public Works, which I don't. At least not yet anyway. Blue Linden im-ed me with an invite to apply, that's all. Which I did. But then he invited everyone didn't he? Haha.

Expanding my empire

2008-03-21T12:41:00.000-07:00

Thanks to all the silly people that run around in my avatars I could afford to up my tier and buy an extra 4000 m2 in Oculea! Some of it is across the tracks from the shop, behind the station and bank, the biggest piece (3000 m2) is close to the Hobo infohub, near the Calleta border.
I have some plans for the extra 1000 across the tracks, (be patient. Very patient.) the strip in the south will remain empty until I finished there.
For now I put up some fences and a sign to comfort my new neighbours:

SLLU Building

2008-03-21T06:59:00.000-07:00

Across the tracks from my shop in Oculea is the infohub of the SLLU group which I am a member of. The Second Life Left Unity group 'seeks creative, non violent means to foster revolutionary social dialogue via the virtual world platform of Second Life'. In practice this means organizing, hosting and participating in demonstrations, exhibitions, discussions and other lefty events. Yay! (more here).

I made a new building for the hub. A nine story tower block that rises high into the Oculea sky. The building is made to give free space to 'non governmental organisations', left and protest groups et cetera. If you know of such a group -in real or second life- that can use space in the building, contact me or someone else of the SLLU group.

At first I wanted to make the entire thing temp rezzed, so I could be primhogging like a... well... mad cow! I made fifteen different cubicles with which I could add new floors in no time. Which I did of course, higher and higher, until the building was over 400 prims big. But when I had it all set up in the temp rezzers and tried rezzing it I found big chunks were vanishing randomly.
Damn. Back to the drawing board.

Aley Arai to the rescue! She patiently explained to me how temp rezzers work. If I remember right -correct me if I am wrong, please- it makes the prims rez like any 'real' prim, but they get taken away and rerezzed very quickly so the prim counter of the land can't keep up with it. This works fine for small low prim structures (like my hobo ruin) but the primmy monster I had built took too long to rerez and that was why I was seeing parts of the building disappear from time to time.
As I have said before, Aley also showed me some nifty tricks with megaprims that I used to rebuild the SLLU tower block. Always great to get advice from the best builders in SL, thanks Aley!

I have now rebuilt it. It's as high as it was, 9 floors, and only slightly less complex in it's construction than the first version. It's still modular, so I can add more floors quickly when needed. And I managed to stay under 200 prims. Not bad.

The ground floor will be used for exhibitions and other temporary activities, the other floors for the groups, and the top floor for meetings and fun.

Help us fill it!

Dumpster

2008-02-22T08:20:00.000-08:00

Found some extra time on the backside of my to do list (I like that side) and made a quick freebie; a driveable dumpster. Arduenn Schwartzman was so kind to script it so it throws out garbage bags while you drive.

Available at the usual freebie outlets . Oh and I put a bunch of freebies on Slexchange.com too!

Malls malls malls

2008-02-02T01:48:00.000-08:00

I get spammed for opening shops in new malls quite often. Some invitations are not spam, sent by people I know, and who know what I sell, and I appreciate that.

But most are sent by people who have a lot in common with eachother:

For starters, they can't build and they like huge shiny empty blocks. They place some of those in a row, put a rental system in and call it a mall.
They all seem to be suffering from a strange type of the Gilles de la Tourette syndrome too when they write the land descriptions. They ****FREE LINDENS**** have BEST CAMPING IN SL an uncontrollable ///DANCE DANCE DANCE\\\ all caps FREEBIES! tic FREE $$$!!!
And they either can't count or they're massacring their visitors. They always claim to have tens of thousands of visitors but by the time I get there (I usually wait for a week or two before i go there) the number has dropped down to a couple of hundred!!

Amazing.

Filling my neighbour's front lawn

2008-01-27T11:09:00.000-08:00

Across the tracks from my main store there's a piece of land owned by one Milk Shu. As far as I can tell Milk hasn't been online for over a year now. I've IMed him (or her), sent notecards, but to no avail. His profile is very minimal; no groups, no picks, no interests, nothing. The only thing in there is a single 't' in his about box. T for Tooter maybe, who knows.
Anyway, he has left his land open to build for everyone, and people have been leaving ugly plywood textured prims there. As you can see on the left in the picture above. So I put in the last 6 prims that were available and wrote him a note that I would cover his land with a build if he didn't respond. It's been a month, and today I built a 6 prim bank there, using some megaprim tricks I learned from Aley Arai.
Harods bank is closed, btw. They moved to Tristan da Cunha. But there's still a huge pile of money in the tower:

Maze: win an avatar

2008-01-02T23:57:00.000-08:00

I made a maze on Cookie island. Follow the right path to the exit and write down the letters you passed to make a sentence. Write that on a notecard and send it to me and you get a free avatar. There are several sentences, but only one is the right one, so you may have to try again.
The maze itself has 4 x 15 cubes that temp rez when you get within 10 meters, so you'll see it appear it front of you, and disappear behind you.

at Thinkerers Cookie

Fish!

2008-01-02T12:54:00.000-08:00

I was playing around a bit with (sort of) random rotation, and whaddayaknow, next moment I had built a freebie fishtank for the hobo's. With captain Orhalla on the package.
That was the easy part.
Then I wanted to make it full perms. Damn, that's difficult. I had to send it to Pavig three times to check before I got it right (thanks Pavig!). Turns out you have to set each-and-every prim to full perms, as well as the objects in them ánd all the scripts!
Everything full perm by default! To the barricades! Storm Linden Labs!
I bet Ruth looks better with a full perm too.

You can get it at my shops with freebies shortly. For now it's in Pavig's docks at Calleta.
Go get a copy. Just click it and you'll get one.
Click it 30 times and you get thirty; you're all set to make modern art.

New avatar: Zechckenyaii the Muscleman

2007-12-29T04:05:00.000-08:00

I started building a bodybuilder long ago, but i made a fresh start yesterday. Zechckenyaii developed these muscles lifting books of Kant and Hegel (which he still does when he types), and he looks very good using the standard /muscle gesture. He has a tattoo of course.

I used Eloh Eliot's texture as a base for the face. That skin is available as a full perms freebie, which apparently is a big thing in the world of fashionistas. Pretty common for us hobos though:)

Available at my shops for L$ 250

DX4 grand turismo car

2007-12-27T04:03:00.000-08:00

Made a european muscle car yesterday. It has that quality design that was around in the early eighties, when everything was big and square and ugly. This one has a mix of east german and french car design, and it has been left out in the yard for quite a while. But don't worry, I cleaned the windows a little so you can see where you're going.
Available at my shops, for L$ 50.

That's the new swim suit I made btw.

dancing cops

2007-12-27T01:57:00.000-08:00

As you can see on their blog, Hansode Miasma and his girlfriend Mina Jun (who makes awesome skins and clothes) have a lot of fun with my police pig avatar. Now they've done a nice video too:

Hansode said they would change the music, but I really like it as it is :)

Yes! Oh my! Yeah!

A letter

2007-12-27T01:09:00.000-08:00

Dear Mr. Tooter,

Please be nicer to your brother. Don't make him eat aluminum foil or sleep out in the rain. And please do not beat him. It all seems to be affecting his memory very badly.

I did buy Brunnhide, as was so kindly suggested by him, all those wonderful features will surely come in handy. But he continued to beg after the purchase, forgetting that I did indeed buy just mins. before. Your continued ill treatment seems to be destroying his brain. It must be the tazers.

Thank you,
Firery Broom (sic)

Dear Firery Broome,

thank you for your concern about my brother. Don't worry. He is in good hands. You probably don't know that my brother will some day be the sole heir of the Claxton fortune. However, my brother also suffers from anxieties and together with our medical staff I am working hard to cure him so that he may enjoy his future wealth in good health.

My brother is an agliophobe, which we try to cure with a 'hands on' approach, which indeed does include tazering him from time to time.
But the main focus of our therapy is to cure him of his chrometophobia, which we do by making him sell avatars, over and over again. I hope you understand that leaving a fortune in the hands of a chrometophobe is dangerous and I assure you that everything we do to him is done with the best intentions.

We hope you will continue to support our therapy by buying an avatar from him every now and then. Kicking him in the keister while you do this also helps a lot.

thank you,

Tooter Claxton

I'm in the movies! Mask

2007-12-21T10:04:00.001-08:00

I'm a bit late to blog about it (as usual) but my picture is in this awesome morph movie of Robbie Dingo:

Be sure to click on the YooToob logo and watch Robbie's other video's! Watch the worlds is a masterpiece where he rebuilds van Gogh's painting in Second Life. (Too bad that cheesy Don McLean song keeps playing... hurray for volume control!)

new vehicle: John Beere tractor

2007-12-21T09:34:00.001-08:00

Damn, it's been a while since i made a vehicle. There's that crappy scooter and motorcycle and the very, very crappy airplane at my shops, but I sort of gave up on vehicles a long time ago. I can make them look kinda good, but I can't script, so they fly and ride like the driver is having a fit. Ah, but not this tractor; I borrowed Arcadia Asylum's script from her yellow cab that you see all over second life, and now it's a nice, smooth, slow ride.
Modelled -sort of- after a 1960's John Deere tractor. I saw on Flickr that fellow hobo and dutchman Rask has already raced it on the Mercedes test track.

Available for L$ 150 at one of my shops.

New avatar: spider

2007-12-21T08:20:00.001-08:00

I made this spider a while back with tiny prims, life sized. But now I have scaled it, added a bodycrusher and attached the legs to the limbs and now you can wear it as an avatar too.
The legs were a bitch to align. And it looks ridiculous when you sit down or fly. But hey...

You can buy one for L$ 150 at one of my shops.

boxed freebies

2007-12-21T08:11:00.000-08:00

I put my freebies into new black boxes. Even the crappiest stuff gets a bit of class that way :).
Get them at my Salon in Oculea, Zimmy's Freebie Underground (F.U.) or the SLLU freebie shop.

Hobo squat

2007-12-20T11:46:00.000-08:00

Zimmy had built a (sorry Zimmy) rather boring and huge structure on a little piece of land he owns, right next to the Calleta Hobo Railroad infohub. This infohub is a wonderful and attractive place built by SL's best dressed man Orhalla Zander which has grown into a meeting place for builders, artists, hippies, banana phone fetishists, rastafarians, newbies, punks, cowboys a.s.o. This Hobo group has a couple of things in common; they goof around and build a lot, help eachother and don't care too much for money.
I offered Zimmy to make a new structure that would fit the scenery a little better and built this favela / ruin. It has three floors, and a lot of little niches, boxes and huts for the hobo's to crawl into.

The outer textures are made from pictures I took of demolition sites in my hometown, the inside walls are from photos of a bombed building in Lebanon.
And again, this one is also free to copy; just click on it. Just be sure to have the edit window open when you rez it, as it consists of three unlinked floors. It was too big to link.

top floor

second floor

Ground floor.

Visit the Calleta Hobo Railroad infohub.

Calleta on flickr

New avatar: Ludovico

2007-11-10T12:46:00.000-08:00

I suck at making sculpties. The only thing i can do in Blender is what a three year old does with clay. But I finally found a way to put those amorpic blobs to use.
I needed an avatar for the halloween parties (got a lot of invites and managed to only do short visits to the NPIRL, Hobo and Ville Spatiale ones) and I wanted to do something Clockwork Orangy. In the key scene of the book, Alex gets a 'ludovico' treatment, and so does this avatar. The head has a lot of tiny (or 'torchered' as Arcadia calls them) prims that were a pain in the ass to align, it's got a touch of steampunk, sculpties... the works.
I made one leg (and both arms) invisible with invisiprims and joined the visible leg to the other one, so he hops around in his straitjacket when he walks. Too bad Arcadia isn't around anymore, I'm sure she would have given me a fun name of an asylum to put on the straitjacket. The record player (playing Ludwig Von of course) on the back is the one i made for De Fuckups' build, slightly altered. In the contraption above that has a rotating orange. Corny, I know. I couldn't resist. Orange in the title doesn't even refer to fruit, but to the Indonesian word for man; orang.

Available for L$ 250 at one of my shops.

Yona Friedman's Ville Spatiale

2007-10-26T04:30:00.000-07:00

I got an invitation to build a shop in the SL version of Ville Spatiale. Ville Spatiale (google) is an architectural/social/urban planning experiment by Yona Friedman that he made in the seventies. It has never been done in real life (although it has influenced a lot of people later) but german art curator Helfe Ihnen has built it in SL.
I made my shop there in 4 hours, and i like the result.

It leans towards the customer and the arms that have the avatars in them are scripted to point towards him or her too.

This is what the back looks like:

And if you're wondering how everything became this white, here's how: All hard work. Hehe.

(mop, bucket and trashbags are free to take at these freebie outlets: Stain Groningen, Zimmy's Freebie Underground (F.U.) and the SLLU freebie shop.)

ad farm

2007-10-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

I decided to go into adfarming too. I want my name on bright ugly signs all over the metaverse! Yay!
Nah. Just kidding. I did build this little adfarm. Free to take and modify at Oculea, Zimmy's Freebie Underground (F.U.) and the SLLU freebie shop.

Ah, les beaux arts!

2007-10-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

Hobo arts mogul and typo king Thinkerer Melville invited me to build something on his arts & communication sim 'Cookie'. I had an idea what I wanted to do, asked american scripteuse Paladin Pinion and polish artist Olza Koenkamp to join our new 'One man's garbage' group so we could build together.
My initial plan proved to be a little too complex. I wanted to use Altavista's babelfish to make repetitive translations of what viewers would say, and then publish that on a large sign. The meaning of their words would get completely lost during the translations, and the sign would show nothing but gibberish. For example, that last sentence would come out like:
"Smysl word can obtain that it it loses motion vs, it shows during the period or disordered the demonstration of language cannot."
after being translated into different languages over and over. I like that. I think it's funny.
But Paladin found that it would take some scripting on a webserver too (working on that) so we settled for a grumpy sign that would just react sarcastic or negative to words said in chat. We considered giving it alternate 'moods', but as it is provoking so many (mostly negative) reactions we might just keep it this way :).
The build itself has Olza's word receiver sitting a big pile of ears I made (that was easy, ha). On top of it is scaffolding which holds the sign. This is what it looks like. Go and try it.

Groningen SL; Stain

2007-10-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

About half a year ago I built our local tower, the Martini Tower, because our local municipality wanted to 'do something' in SL. Turned out they didn't have any funds yet, but building that tower got me invited into a group (run by Ivo Krupinski of DMA media) that was already planning on a duplicate Groningen in SL. So I put the tower up at their place. They have a group of fun and very skilled builders and scripters, some of whom i have even met in RL, and of course i promised to help, but never really found time, as I was building other -cough- important stuff.
But I did manage to reserve two shops along the way somehow. And I could put my magazine stand / shop out on the street, so basically i didn't need to use the space for my store. So I got some stuff from my inventory, added some, and built a rock club. Something Groningen SL lacked, and which is one of the major tourist attraction in the real Groningen. I called it 'Stain'. Because it's -well of course- filthy, and also the word stain means rock in our local dialect. I based the logo on the one I made for the (rl-) Vera Club about 12 years ago. They still use it, why shouldn't I?
It's almost done (i.e. I'm almost out of prims) and now the question arises on wtf I'm gonna do with it... I'm not much of an SL party or concert organizer. So basically I either need someone to do something there or a good idea to get it to run by itself. Suggestions anyone?

My rude brother

2007-09-25T14:22:00.000-07:00

I have always wanted a nagbot at my shops. The idea was to have a bot talk to the customers, just like those annoying 'greeter bots' you see at other stores. Only difference would be that my nagbot would not leave it at a simple 'hello' but just go on and on talking. Then I met Paladin Pinion a couple of weeks ago, an excellent scripter. I asked her to make the script for me, and she finished it in no time!
So now I'm writing conversations for my brother (the one that is in my stand) to have with my customers. And that's a lot of fun to do. Very simple too; I just write the lines in a note and add pauses. He starts talking when someone is within 10 m. of the stand. Here's one of the conversations: (the numbers are seconds paused between reading the lines, 'agent' says the first name of the avatar that is closest to my brother)

sigh...
20 I'm so bored.
15 I sit here all day and no one buys anything.
20 I'm sooooo bored.
15 But I can't leave.
17 My brother Tooter will hit me when I leave the stand.
15 Yeah he hits me a lot.
20 To the outside world he may seem like a mild mannered clown
10 but he's cruel and mean.
18 And when I don't sell enough avatars, he makes me sleep outside in the rain.
20 I don''t like sleeping in the rain. I get sick.
18 But he makes me work even when I'm sick.
15 One time when i was so sick I couldn't get up
10 and he used a tazer on me. To get me up.
15 See? he says, You're awake. Now go and work!
10 That's what he says
15 He makes me eat aluminum foil too
12 when I don't sell over 10 avatars a day
20 I haven't sold any avatars yet today
10 I'm scared
15 Would you buy an avatar please, [agent]?
10 The day is almost over and I'm scared.
15 Please help me [agent]!
20 Please buy an avatar!
10 I beg you [agent]!
10 please?
15 Please [agent]?
120

I expect sales to shoot up in the coming weeks, haha. There's another one where he complains about the smell of the customer's old avatar, one about mixing leeks and sprouts and many more to come...

P.S. I found another use for the script: There was a Bright clothes contest (that i couldn't go to) at the Emerald club tonight. I sent one of the contestants a prim named 'Jenny's bright clothes' with the script in it. It talked on and on about quantum physics and string theory. Haha. She won the contest!

More press, yay.

2007-09-24T12:40:00.000-07:00

The elegant miss Bettina Tizzy honored me with an article on the Not Possible in Real Life blog. Bettina's NPIRL is one of the best groups I'm a member of; we get to see all the great builds in Second Life before they're shown to the public. That results in fun field trips with fun people, most of whom are exellent builders and content creators.

There's a picture of my hippie extinguishers (mistaken for fire extinguishers) on Second Arts. The Burning Life festival is kicking off this weekend but I doubt if I'll attend. I'm a bit fed up with the BL group to be honest. A bunch of hippies calling themselves anarchists arguing over who gets to be the leader. And about every other minor detail. Doesn't get more pathetic than that does it?

Judging by the amount of question marks on the following pages, the Japanese are very puzzled by my work. Here's one, and another, and an older one (I can tell by the pictures). Of course I tried translating them with altavista's babelfish, it helps a bit but it's still confusing:

About my factory: The doubtful building which is the town end, is countrified. It is the building of the atmosphere which matches to the movie of that hand. Here I was thinking had built an avatar factory, but no it's the doubtful building of the atmosphere! Movie? Hand? wtf? But no worries because Also quality of the clothes and the small article is very very. Good to know. Slightly more disturbing was That Lemon buys, when we assume, the Voodoo doll calling but I was glad to learn that Lemon was the name of the girl blogging. Phew.

Synthia Picassole avatar

2007-09-24T11:54:00.000-07:00

Oh yes, another new avatar. A naked woman even! And completely PG because she is nude For The Sake Of Art!
I have wanted to make this one for a long time but I never did because I thought it would be a lot of work. But it wasn't that bad. Hardly took any texturing and the only thing that took some time was placing the invisiprims. So here she is, another quick and dirty build (or slap dash as Pavig Lok calls it, elegantly sloppy says Bettina Tizzy, haha) after all.

Synthia is mostly transparant, so you can watch her from many different angles.

The av is available in all my shops, for a measly 250 L$ (approx. 0,63 euro), as usual.
The above mentioned Homeless Howard avatar is a freebie (and full perms); available at my main store, at the Avatar Factory in Calleta, at Slexchange and that other online shop that used to be Slboutique... errr... oh yeah! Shop on Rez!

New avatar: Herr Doktor Gehirnschneider

2007-09-15T05:07:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I finally found some time to make a new avatar. As you can see he turned out looking like Marty Feldman a lot. Strange.
With a look like that he'll win any staring contest in SL, I'm sure.
I named him Herr doktor Gehirnschneider, which is German for braincutter. I don't know; somehow German seemed appropriate.
He carries around some equipment on his belt and I made him a typer (for those who don't know: a typer is something that appear when you type -chat- in Second Life) of a surgical knife and a brain with a flexi spinal cord hanging out.
I used the beard of my Homeless Howard avatar for his hair. Turned out kinda primmy, but with the lag today I doubt if anyone will notice.
The rubber boots were a pain in the ass to make, and to be honest i'm not really satisfied with the way they turned out. Fashion design is not my thing obviously. Not even when it's supposed to look cheap.

The card pinned on his chest looks like this:
That SL Centre for Amateur Neurosurgery might just appear somewhere in SL one day :) When I have enough money to buy more land.

This morning I took some pictures of Zimmy, Th3oth3rmo and me in my factory in Calleta.

The av is available in all my shops, for a measly 250 L$ (approx. 0,63 euro), as usual.
The above mentioned Homeless Howard avatar is a freebie (and full perms); available at my main store, at the Avatar Factory in Calleta, at Slexchange and that other online shop that used to be Slboutique... errr... oh yeah! Shop on Rez!

Exploited warplanes

2007-09-09T02:36:00.000-07:00

I had a look at 'Exploited' the new SLLU (Second Life Left Unity) exhibition on slave / child labour, last night. The movie on the roof shows in every ugly detail how children and poor people from third -and second- world countries are being used to provide us with cheaper products. The exhibition downstairs has photos and posters (most of which I had seen before) dealing with the same issue. All in all a good exhibition, and of course a great initiative, but I think it misses a link to everyday products. Then again; there is a garden where you (SLLU members or everyone? Don't know) can build your own addition to the exhibit. If I find time I will.

Afterwards I browsed around the neighbourhood a little and found a small airstrip nearby with very well made planes from WW2. Browsing around some more I stumbled upon two frenchmen; one was Antib Milo, the maker of the planes, and the other was Krispy Alexandre, who owns the sim both the airstrip and the exhibition are on. (I like it when people offer space to builders to make good stuff in SL.) Them being french and me being dutch we talked cheese of course. About the daily trouble that comes with eating Roquefort as breakfast for example.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/isla%20montevideo/198/220/21/
The Exploited exhibition is a bit to the south.

ltr: Antib Milo and Krisp Alexandre.

Hair implants

2007-09-08T02:33:00.000-07:00

I moved some of my hair to the top of my head. Really makes me look 10 years younger I think. The sign on top is an ad for other bald people:

Tootermat

2007-08-31T16:50:00.000-07:00

In between crashes I found time to build a camera, which i'll be needing for my paparatzi avatar. That will be an extra version of the rat avatar. Nikon and Nikkormat owners of the seventies will recognise some of the features. You can get a free copy of the camera at the salon, it's on the counter of the hippoburger stand. Free to copy modify and give away.

Temporary swimming pool

2007-08-26T06:14:00.000-07:00

The Neumoegen (a typo of the dutch city Nijmegen maybe?) sim north of my shop crashes a lot. Not as much as Calleta of course, but still. Everytime it crashes it leaves a giant swimming pool for me:

I'm going skinny dipping!

Yes ladies, that's hair. And a 'Very punk' tattoo. And two bags of moneys on my hips to help me float. What are you waiting for? Propose already!

Ooh goodie, compliments!

2007-08-26T04:50:00.000-07:00

I am as vain as I am pretty, so sometimes I take a couple of minutes on a sunday afternoon to google myself. I found the Second Life Merchant Times wrote a whole new article on my new store 10 days ago. "A shop as good-looking as its products" he writes, and he's not being cynical I think.

I also found an interview with Pavig Lok in the Second Life Insider, where he mentions me as one of his favorite content creators. Whoa. There's my name in one paragraph together with such SL celebrities as Mis Ordinal, Fade Dana and the wonderful Arcadia Asylum (best builder in SL, imo)! Besides that, I'm a big fan of Pavig's work (there's Greenies, of course, and all his freebies and goggles, fleas and so on, oh and I really like the docks near the Hobo info hub) and I'm so honored I'm almost falling off my chair.

Pavig's docks

Burning Man

2007-08-25T18:01:00.000-07:00

Got tp'd over to the Burning Man hippie festival tonight. I have seen pictures of the real thing (comes very close to SL from what I saw) but I didn't know there was a Second Life version too.
Things were kind of hectic as everyone was hunting for land to build on, but Zimmy had already claimed some land and asked me to build on it.
A fire extinguisher seemed appropriate. And about the same size as the Man...

A quick and dirty build, but I like it nevertheless. Apparently there was a theme (I had no idea) to the festival - global warming- and it sort of goes with that too. Well whaddayaknow? I was going for the burning hippie theme myself.

Salon des Clochards Riches

2007-08-25T10:18:00.000-07:00

Rhee, the sim where I had my main store was filling up with huge ugly buildings and add farms, so I decided to relocate my store and bought some nice land in Oculea, right next to the railroad tracks, and close the Hobo hub and some of my other builds.
As I have rebuilt my main store into a tiny magazine stand (->) I had plenty of room to build some sort of club. This is what came out so far:

The Salon des Clochards Riches. The oh so eloquent Bettina Tizzy managed to translate my ranting about the Salon into a nice short text I can use as a description for it:

"The Salon des Clochards Riches (Salon for Rich Hobos) - etabli August 2007 - is a shabby-luxe gathering place for digital bohemians and great loonies with a penchant for the absurd, a taste for pointless things, and a even a parlor game or two. Expect our once-monthly jamborees/vaudeville revues to center around such riveting topics as the history of wallpaper or the sex life of the striped peruvian millipede. It has been suggested that the tone for these occasions will be on the grand scale of a B-movie. Ridiculous, illogical and meaningless presentations, performances and films will be given serious consideration. We anticipate that demand for tickets will be high so lamentably, I am also having to recruit bouncers."

Thanks, Bettina!

Go take a look for yourself, there's more to see and almost all is free to copy. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Oculea/182/217/49

Alpha Tootorial

2007-08-25T05:27:00.000-07:00

For Zimmy, who wants to make a semi-transparant texture...

And if you don't want those ugly white outlines at the edges of your 'object'; use a dark background. Even though it won't show, the selection still anti aliases to the background, that's why.

Introduction

2007-08-25T04:50:00.000-07:00

Hey there,

I'm a graphic designer and I have been playing in punkrock bands for the last 30 years. I have two kids, and when they go to bed I spend my nights on second life.

In there I build stuff. Sometimes it's crap, and sometimes even I like it. I hang around with people that are a lot better at building stuff than I am. I suck at scripting, so I just take free (or 'liberated') scripts and alter them, or I ask a friend to script something for me.

I live in The Netherlands. When I say that to people in Second Life they usually think I'm some weird goth freak, but no; the country actually exists. It's an urbanized swamp about half the size of New Jersey located between Great Britain and Germany and 16 million rude people live there. If you americans keep driving those ridiculously big SUV's for a couple of more years, the whole country will be flooded. So keep it up, because I'd really like to move to a sunnier place.

No idea what Second Life is? Second Life is the most absurd place on earth, very dada. If you have a broadband connection and a fairly good graphics card you can travel there from the comfort of your own home: start here

Links

2007-08-10T13:47:00.000-07:00

My shops and other stuff:

online:
Slexchange
Shop on Rez

inworld:
Main store and salon in Oculea
My avatar factory in Calleta
My band De Fuckups' studio in Lebeau
shops at malls and stuff:
Tooter Claxton at ZZ Land (stall, freebies underground)
Tooter Claxton at SLLU shop (freebies only)
~~Tooter Claxton at ZZ Calleta RR station~~ (stall) Closed
~~Tooter Claxton at Emerald City~~ (stall) Closed
~~Tooter Claxton at Wietje's Pull d' Vagin~~ (stall) Closed
~~Tooter Claxton at Meribel Mall~~ Closed
~~Tooter Claxton at Starfish~~ (stall) Closed
~~Tooter Claxton at Blissville~~ (stall) Closed
~~Tooter Claxton at Groningen centrum~~ (stall =bar + freebies) Closed
~~Tooter Claxton at Dogtown Alley~~ (stall) Closed
~~Tooter Claxton at Indie Apparel~~ Closed
~~Tooter Claxton at Ville Spatiale~~ (special shop, limited amount of avatars) Closed

Friends' blogs
Not possible in real life
Arduenn, my twin brother
Atomic Avatars by Volitoile no wait, here's a new one -> askazombie
Geo Meek on YouTube
Tenshi's Shopping Cart Disco
Pavig Lok's twitter and blog
Thinkerer Melville
Senor Dingo
Hansode and Mina Jun's blog... and site.
Blaccard Burks
Steff Ling's Rusty pixel

Magazines, newspapers
New World Notes
Second Life News Network
Second Art
The Second Life Herald
SL Newspaper (contestant for the Fugly Site award)
FЯee Life magazine