Home and abroad

Utopias visited: 4 (good); Artwork discovered near my land: 1 (good); Amount of land still held in Harms Way: none (good, but not exactly profitable)
Recently discovered four sims which are Art, namely the four Utopia sims which have been created by Bryn Oh. Dimitrova visited Utopia 4, and then a couple of days ago I did a Utopia hop of the other 3. Spent most time on Utopia 3 where there is a spooky statue (see pic) and a very creepy building.
When I got there, realised that it had been blogged by a couple of people on the fashion feeds: one of the features is a tree that turns slowly into a column of shopping trollies. Anyway, there is lots to see and do. Can buy the spooky statue (huge) for 15000 Linden, and is a bit tempting. Coincidentally then discovered that have another artwork by Bryn Oh on my doorstep: next door but one, so to speak. Was created for Helen Keller day last year and seems to be on Linden-donated land. Bit embarrassing that didn't notice it before, in fact.Anyway, adds further to general desirabilty of location.
Location is too desirable if anything; old land was just too laggy and busy to enjoy being on it, but now is very pleasant calmly to do tai chi overlooking the river and cherry blossom, or clamber around the mountain top tweaking the odd pine tree, or sit indoors contemplating view.
Also has distinct zones so am plannng to have some areas stable aand others which can play around with. Was reflecting on fact that thing am most pleased with is the "What Information/Literacy means to me" exhibit, and should really experiment doing more installations with words and visuals.
Have finally said goodbye to all old land in Harm's Way. Following useful conversation with neighbour on old land (who turns out to be friendly and nice, bit late to discover that) parcelled up land small and lowered price. She also said if land set to 0.5 Linden per metre would be picked up by bot and sell instantly. By tier date had only sold two plots, so set all the rest to low price and indeed they all immediately converted to Linden, not that many Linden, but still will keep me in shoes and artworks for a few weeks. Unless I buy the statue, that is.

A wasted evening or a pleasant evening?

Hours spent in SL last night: [mumbles shiftily] (bad? or good?)
Spent rather a lot of time in SL last night. Have been ruminating on whether this is Good Thing or Bad Thing. Peer pressure pushes one to latter view, but had reasonable amount of fun, so surely must be Good ...
Have been toying with idea of doing autoethnographic study and was thinking (whilst walking to work this morning in RL in pouring rain) about how might put together chatlog and pics and other people's pics to make a rich narrative of what went on. Was thinking could present this in SL, in fact ideal might be if you could be sent on the SAME JOURNEY (which implies some kind of HUD). However, believe that starting point (Relay For Life sims) are gone already. Therefore installations somewhere else in SL with giant posters and perhaps sound might do it, or COULD use one of the tour vehicles with one's commentary going on in text chat as you were flown round.
You may be thinking "surely autoethnography is some sort of cheat research" (unless you yourself are an authoethnographer, obviously). However, you can get published or even a PhD by doing it. This simple fact can be proved by googling "autoethnography aims" (as did but a short while ago).

The basics of autoethnography involve writing about yourself, but have to be illuminating some kind of reserarch problem, obviously, and also have to convince people that you are a sufficiently interesting case that you will give insights to others. Was thinking that perhaps if started by analysing a bit of data then might start refining questons. However, also realise that have just had annual Staff Review session with Head of Dept without word autoethnography passing lips, so perhaps thsi is one of those projects that will talk about for years and then lose interest in.
Anyway last night:
1) Visited Relay for Life sims, flying round the builds in a rather touristic fashion, pausing to try out any particularly cool animation e.g. shovelling coal or playing the church organ. There is big road, with donation points all along it.
2) Followed up on some items, found, notably, a v. pretty blue tree (which was Relay For Life charity item) and some goats. Bought tree but not goats. Sim with goats mostly sells wearable horses and hought horse demo which the tried out on Noyo after planting new tree.
3) Stalked visitor on my land who was outside one of my oriental houses, wearing sort of ronin outfit, in order to take pics.
4) This is point when might have gone home, but Brielle IMed me to ask if liked Scottish piping and next thing was doing a sword dance whilst the live pipes skirled away impressively. Stopped for a dram, then did some more dancing.
5) Looked at iheartsl fashion feed and saw an embedded video of this week's Fabulous Fashion which featured interview with creator of Swansong and Atomic Bambi. Watched it.
6) Remembered had Swansong dress in inventory that had never actually worn. Changed into it and saw it was good. Decided to base a look around it.
7) Tried on shoes, tights, wraps, necklaces, hair etc etc for some considerable time. Decided needed different shoes, went to G. Field where bought shoes AND tights. Also bought hair butterflies from Atomic Bambi.
8) Photographed self in rose garden in G. Field
9) Photoshopped and uploaded to Flickr, and then blogged outfit here.
10) Visited a sim. What? Why? Who knows, it was v. late by then, but think was in pursuit of some cute item. Anyway, ended up in Evans Cafe and at that point crashed out.

So, ever do analysis of the v. interesting night of 21st July, will be in good position to do so..

I discover I have many albums

No. of pics on Flickr: 2059 (good); No of pics on Picasa: 925. Plus 1000 more (surprising)
Am somewhat dim, but have only just woken up to fact that, since have Blogger blog and upload pics to Blogger blog, therefore as night follows day, have Picasa album containing pics from Blogger blog.
In early days of Blogger it was not owned by Google, and therefore pics went one knows not where into some vast bloggy picture server. Have feeling that when Blogger was bought by Google, for a while Google did not own Picasa (may be wrong about this and do not care enough to check). Anyway, have gone years now uploading pics to Blogger and it was only yesterday, when happened to click on question mark icon on the Upload panel, that was led through to info about Picasa and thence quickly to own Picasa albums.
In fact to multiple albums and also, since blog with multiple identities, multiple albums on multiple accounts. So I find that there are the aforementioned 925 pictures on MY Picasa: 2 albums of Adventuresofyoshikawa (not sure why there are two, looks like there might be a max size), plus 5 pics I uploaded on the Low Prim Living with Style blog (mostly by mistake) and 3 blogger profile pics. Additionally my Sheila Webber account had 1000+ pics that have been uploaded to the Information Literacy Weblog. Dimitrova also has a Picasa space, because of the stuff she uploads to Low Prim Living.

So this may be starting to seem a rather tedious blog post, but really did find it disconcerting to discover this large pool of my own content just sitting there out in the cloud without me realising. Was a bit as though had been placing photos with meaningful captions around my room to make artistic displays and suddenly discover that copies of all the photos were also simultaneously being chucked into a crate in the Departmental Office. As far as can see there is not a backwards link from pic to blog post (which is not surprising, as basically you are just linking from the post to the pic), but the CONTEXT or caption for the posts are therefore lost. Am not now going to waste yet more of my life creating 2000 captions. However, think is the decontextualisation of pics that find a bit odd.
Have not hesistated to make albums public (default being that Blogger albums default to private, which is something; at least they were, so to speak, in the Departmental Office and not in a grab bag in front of WH Smith). However, now that know they are there, might as well chuck them out to the interweb like my other stuff.
So if you want to see just the Yoshikawa pictures: go to .. umm .. I think go to http://picasaweb.google.com/101342941470414817695 May add link to Webber stuff as well, but would have to log out of this first, so will do it later. There is overlap with Flickr set, but not 100%.
Anyway THESE pics are of an exhibition of art created by David Hockney on his iPhone, and then of me doing Tai Chi at home, having liked the Tai Chi balls outside the exhibition gallery. Peace. Harmony. And so forth.

Sakura

Sakura bonsai bought: 1 (v. good); potted sakura hauled from inventory: 1 (good); sakura petal emitters removed from shop: none (bad)
Today went windsurfing in Bora Bora (for this photoshoot) and ended up browsing round the tikis. Discovered quite a bit of new stuff, including a whole gardening area that was new to me.
Included v. cute display of bonsai (see second picture), and could not resist cherry tree bonsai, which took home and positioned in entrance hall of the chinese house that is tucked on the hillside at Noyo.
From the start in 2007, have named my home land "Sakura" (Japanese for cherry blossom/ tree). So my first plot was called Sakura (as you can see here) and so was the land I have just given up and am still trying to sell ;-(( and now this new land in Noyo has been renamed. Have also kept in part of the original name, Urtahra (see here, Noyo was originally part of the Kahruvel Forest). I always have actual Sakura on my land, and you can see some of them outside in the first picture, a big pink tree near the entrance and some white blossom further off. I am lying on the rocky ground outside, listening to Ishbel's windchime and enjoying the view.
Also did a little bit of tinkering in the room next to the entrance hall, where have put some of my pictures (ex shop), a small sakura in a bamboo pot, an information literacy calendar, and a teleporter to infolit locations.
Have been meaning to put in more information literacy stuff, but so far that and Woolley the Sheep are it. Am wondering about putting Woolley (who contains definitions of information literacy and bleats) with the Heidi House sheep, but he might get an inferiority complex as they are infinitely better made. Well not infinitely, but a good deal.

Have also changed exhibition in my shop. Theme is now Glasgow Botanic Gardens, which visited last week in RL. Am v. fond of it: when lived in Glasgow, Botanics were only 10 minutes walk away. Background photos on walls and floor are of Kibble Palace (which houses national tree fern collection) and there are some photoshopped pictures of the carniverous plant displays plus some pics from a park in Prague. A stone dragon creature creaks and turns head to face you: have been meaning to find somewhere to use him for a while.
Display also includes falling sakura petals. This was not intention. Petals were part of previous display and spent at least 20 minutes trying to find out where the **** the petal emitter was. Tried CTRL ATL T to see invisible prims, cammed all over the shop from various angles and so forth, but thing is nowhere to be found. Anyway, falling petals not wholly inappropriate to this exhibition so in the end gave up.

Manifestations

Publication-related things: 3 (good)

1) Response to the 9th Virtual World Watch snapshot on use of virtual worlds in UK tertiary education: Silversprite decided to put it in full on his blog http://virtualworldwatch.net/2010/07/01/sheila-webber-responds-to-snapshot-9/

2) Paper by me and Adra Letov (or Sheila Webber and Diane Nahl, as we are known outside SL), which am going to present at the World Library and Information Conference in August in Sweden, and which is full text on the IFLA website: Sustaining learning for LIS through use of a virtual world at http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla76/123-webber-en.pdf

3) Was asked permission for reproduction of pic from Flickr, to go in a forthcoming book on digital literacies.

Picture (not the one that is going in the book, BTW) shows me taking some welcome morning coffee, from my new expresso maker. However, am thinking of asking for money back, since (as can be seen) coffee is quite plainly NOT expresso, but (at best) machiatto, and appears to be alarmly thick, given how far am tipping cup without anything dribbling out.

Cute

No. of poses in deer: 13 (unlucky for some?)
After last post decided should actually show cute hair from Exile (have already forgotten name of hair and can't be bothered to log back in and find out. Think it began with a K. Karen? Kerry? Something like that).
Since deer on mountain automatically = cuteness, decided to choose one of the dozen poses available when you sit on deer. Was intending to use Hug Deer pose, but turned out that this meant that ends of hair were poking out of deer's nose which ruined effect rather. Am not 100% sure about this pose, though. Is it cute, or is it just a bit weird?

For second attempt at cuteness posed in new cherry blossom hillside path that leads up from watermelon shop to shrine-y building that just put in, halfway up mountain. Surely can't go wrong with cherry blossom. Think this is probably more straighforwardly charming, but slightly vacuous.

Vacuous or whacky, which is cuter? You decide.

Trying it on

Hair bought: 2 (good)
Today visited Kin, which is shop where bought first proper hair, Kin's Ryuzaki. Rereading that 2007 post, note that at time thought hair might be "too cute". However, compared with some of the stuff have been wearing recently is relatively low on the too-cute scale. Realise that worry about being too-cute has been with me from start, but think that gradually cuteness threshold has risen.

Kin has now gone in for sculpted hair, which as always can be a bit alarming whilst it is rezzing (see first pic.).

However got. v. excited when realised that some of the demo hair at Kin is actually in MY COLOUR i.e. blue, which is something of a first. Normally demo hairs are in some random "normal" colour, and require some hope and imagination to visualise what will look like in blue.

Therefore could not resist buying a new Kin hair (see 2nd pic), which is actually a bit like Ryuzaki, but sculpted, so does not wave around in breeze so much.

Scoured walls to see whether Ryuzaki is still on sale, which it is, and was cheered by that. For months was really the only hair I wore and ended up buying it twice, since the first time around did not know about how you should COPY your hair before stretching it around (for a back up), so first Ryuzaki had to be abandoned in the end as it got somewhat malformed, with strange giant strands. Happy days.

Second hair, BTW, is a newish one from Exile (which does some nice blues). Is another "turning into me" kind of hair, since is long and straight, with a windblown effect. Evidently have learnt little from past experience since couldn't be bothered to copy it and instead started editing and stretching it straight away to try and get rid of bald patches. It still looks cute. Think the new Kin hair is more SL-me, though.