New freebies

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!

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.

Justice Commons art show

(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

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.

Malls malls malls

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

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:

A letter

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

new vehicle: John Beere tractor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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?

More press, yay.

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

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

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

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.