Platinum's Blog

An eventual farewell…

platinumz — Fri, 08 May 2009 03:59:56 +0000

This semester has been unforgettable learning about all the great and wonderful things that I can do in a virtual world. I can build a box or a bench or even a flag that waves. I can build millions of signs that give landmarks when you click on them as well as design them with graphics. I can build simple instruction signs as well…all of these things are just a small fraction of what anyone can do in a virtual world such as second life. The journey was very long and many youtube tutorials were visited along the way but that didn’t stop most of us from learning what had to be learned in order to commandeer our final project. The class was greatly structured in the sense that we had to learn almost everything we needed to know before embarking on a mission to create our own full-blown event in Second Life.

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Things such as prim count, how to market on Second Life and how to properly advertise on SL, how to build various different objects were all important during the formation of the final project. Also the idea of working as a group was introduced early in the course by the earlier group projects that helped us to form a good solid group backbone for our final project. Without this, our final event would have been disastrous in coming up with so many ideas, tasks, and plans in such a small amount of time with no solid relationship with the group. Also working with the right client helped our particular group to strive. Our client was Ronnie Rhode who was a volunteer for the non-profit Organization called Project Jason. She was the best kind of client because she gave us all individual tasks and group tasks to fulfill in a certain amount of time.

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All in all the class was a wonderful experience. Me and my fellow group members have to decided to stay on as volunteers for Project Jason and help assist them in anyway possible to the best of our individual abilities. We hope that we can apply the skills that we have learned in the course to further our lives as well as make a difference in the future.

Peace.

The event aftermath!

platinumz — Sat, 02 May 2009 07:37:17 +0000

Last weekend we had our big event! I am very happy to report that we successfully reached our goal of 100,000 Lindens and then some! We tallied up about 115,000 Lindens all together! Some troubles happened after the donation box maxed out because the lindens were refunded to the donors. We solved this problem by placing several other donation boxes with no actual limit on them. There were seven musicians all together and all of them did an outstanding job helping to raise money for our two NPO’s. I really liked the fact that some of them had their tip jar out and they donated it to the charity afterwards! It is one thing that they donate their time to help our cause but thats just putting icing on the cake. The musicians were by all means allowed to have their own tip jars, but they were so generous that most of them did not have it out and just told the audience to donate to our charities. Below is a pic of me dancing during one of the performances.

Me dancing to the beats!

One thing I found great about the performances was that everyone was so into the groove while it was going on. There was so much energy going on in the crowd that it felt somewhat like a real concert, without all of the sweatiness and feet stomping. I liked how when a song was finished by a performer the audience’s avatars made the funny noises like “HOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” and “YAAAAAAAAAA”. I also grabbed a crowd HUD from Ronnie (Our sponsor) to partake in that, it gave me the ability to create an applause sound to use after each performance. Each singer had a different style but they were all excellent and I dont think that one guest wasn’t happy that they came. Everyone was dancing and honestly just having a great time while at the event. We recieved many donations and good spirits from the various guests that came.

Dance Floor!

Until next time,

Peace.

Tommorow is the big day!

platinumz — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:43:23 +0000

The past week has been hectic in trying to prepare for the event! Many things have happened but all in all I am pretty confident that our event will be a huge blast! Many of the folks I IM’ed have responded wanting to learn more about the event and the charities that we are working with. I quickly responded to them by handing them a nifty notecard with all the information that they needed. The group did their own parts to advertise the event, one person went to the clubs and ask if we could advertise there and another person worked on the blogging aspect of SL in which our event would get talked about in some blogs so people will come to it! I basically joined a bunch of groups and asked permission to spam our event daily. The only problem was that only a few groups agreed to the group notice and others were like “Sorry, we’re not interested.” That response was a bit rude considering the event is for charity and all, but in the end its the group’s decision whether to advertise something or not. I had joined about 22 groups that weren’t class related to max out my total to 25. Other than that the majority of the week was fixing the area up and placing some final touches. I was given the responsibility of making a “thanks to our sponsors” section somewhere so I decided to place it on the second floor:

Thanks to our sponsors section!

The little boxes in the picture represent each sponsor that we had. It was surprising how many sponsors we got and how many things were donated to us for the silent auction and raffle activities! We now have a total of about 40-50 items in our silent auction and 5 different raffles to fill the course of the weekend, more than enough i’d say! The big day is tommorow however, we each split up into shifts so we can take part in the event at different times at which we are available. Each of us has three shifts from friday day to sunday night. All in all, it will be a once in a lifetime experience.

New Raffle section!

Dance Floor v 2.0 + Silent Auction

Until next time,

Peace.

Almost there!

platinumz — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 06:36:56 +0000

This week in SL was chock-full of promotional duties. The main task for this week was simple really, get the word out! We all had individual tasks in the group. I was to make a couple of notecards for the Project Jason and the Team Fox posters that we had up on the second floor next to their respective booths. I also had to set up to where if you clicked the posters it would offer to give you the notecard. This was done quite easily by placing a “Giveallcontents” script into the contents tab of each poster and also dragging the notecard into the contents tab of each folder, respectively. The second floor of the area is shaping up quite nicely, the raffle and silent auction have their own booths set up as well. The first floor is about the same as last time was reported. We also had the tasks of maxing out our joined groups on SL in order to help get the word out. The original plan given by Joe was to join the groups and then on the day before or on the actual day of the event we would spam the group telling them to come to our event to help the turnout a bit. While I think there won’t be that much trouble with a turnout at our event (since its a weekend long event) the majority of the people will be coming in during the live performances.

Second floor...evolved!!

Official Poster for the Event!

The event will be held next weekend starting on Friday April 24th and ending on Sunday night at April 26th. There has been officially confirmed seven musicians performing throughout the weekend! It is a very exciting prospect to know that we have helped set up such a wonderful event for a charitable cause, it is just as real as any event would be in real life and it also took just as much work to prepare. This fact was a surprise to me at first because I thought it would be a breeze to get people to come to it, but after all we have advertised our event we hope to get a consistent amount of people coming in and out of the area at all times of the day.

Until next week!

Peace.

Moving Along…

platinumz — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 06:37:31 +0000

First Floor Dance Floor and Stage

This week in SL we continued our projects and had the mission of networking with various peoples in order to get the word out for our event. Some other things we had to do was start to build up our area where the event was going to happen. We had to put up some booths to display information for the two non profit organizations that we are working with. (Team Fox and Project Jason) The first floor was also worked on and almost completed, it had a dance floor and a stage with a piano and some large crystal formations that made some amazing graphics.

Second Floor Construction!

There were also teleporters set up to go from floor to floor, they were represented by the yellow car that was present on each floor. The negotiations with the various musicians to get into the event was quite successful. We ended up contacting quite a few musicians to join up with us for our event (about 6-7 for sure). We also networked with various non profit commons members and built relationships with them to help get the word out for event.

There is still much work to be done to get ready for the final event. The second floor still needs to be set up with the bumper car event as well as the auction and the raffle. These will be set up in separate areas of the second floor, ideally they will each have their own corner. In each corner will be the activity as well as information about the organization as well as donation boxes. These donation boxes will hopefully be “littered” across the event in order to help raise our goal of 100k Lindens. The goal is a vast one, but the bigger the goal is the more we can make from the donations in total. The event is really going to be a blast when we can start getting everything set up. The week before the actual event will be the most important for the promotion, we will be spreading the word then, as of now its too early to fully advertise the event.

Until next time,

Peace

Preplanning for Project!

platinumz — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 02:35:50 +0000

This week was pretty hectic in SL as we were busy with meetings with various individuals around the SL community. There was also lots of politics involved while we were going around trying to figure out what to do for our project. At first, we had a high aspiration of wanting to help multiple nonprofit organizations in SL. We were trying to focus on helping the ones with less members but it wasn’t very successful because most of them didn’t contact us back. The organizations that responded were typically the more active and thereby the more prominent ones in SL. We first wanted to work with Project Jason, Team Fox (Parkinsons), Community Voicemail, and Giving Circles network. We first had a joint meeting with Ronnie Rhode from Project Jason and Anika Pastorelli from Giving Circles, after about an hour long meeting Anika had backed out and left us with only Ronnie to work with. At the same time I was keeping in touch with Kali Idziak from Community Voicemail, she was a great person to talk to and it was hard to explain to her what the other NPO’s were concerned with.

Meeting with Kali Idziak of CVM

Ronnie had given us a pretty concrete plan in to what we were going to do for our event. It was basically hold the go-kart racing area for Project Jason/Garden for the Missing and use a pay-to-play system for it, the fastest time at the end of the night gets a grand prize. The other NPO (TeamFox at this point) will get a silent auction OR a raffle (depending on what we decide on) and CVM will get a donation box and maybe an activity as well (depends on what Ronnie says about it). All in all, it was a hectic week with politics and it shows just how rough it is to set up an event in SL.

Go-Kart Racing Track

Until next week, Peace

Crafting a new idea…

platinumz — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:52:51 +0000

This week in SL we had the task of formulating ideas for our final class project. The main objective of our project was to promote awareness for a non-profit organization that was prevalent in SL as well as in RL and all the while create a fun event that everyone can enjoy. We had brainstormed many ideas like holding the party on a cruise ship and having many activities that are fun for a broad type of people. We first had to find the non-profit organization that we were going to cooperate with in our project, to do this we scoped out the “Non-profit Commons” or NPC in Second Life to find one to our liking.

Organization table part 1!

Organization Table part 2!

After browsing the large amount of NPO’s to choose from we finally came to a consensus on either digital campfires, or the Crohn’s and Colitis f0undation. We liked digital campfires because we were interested in what they stood for, which is using information systems to bring people of different cultures and viewpoints together. We also liked the Crohn’s and Colitis foundation for a similar reason, because it wanted to raise awareness of these diseases and how dangerous they are if they aren’t treated. This week we just tried to make contact with these organizations to see if we could get in touch with any of them so we can continue on with our plans for the project.

The Crohn's and Colitis Foundation Office in SL

Hopefully within this weekend or next week we will get a response from one of these two organizations. Until next week, goodbye!

Arabian Nights and other class projects

platinumz — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 02:09:56 +0000

Hi all, this week in second life the class had a project to do that dealt with building a themed area on a plot of land that was given to us. The point of the project was to show us the value of conserving prims and learning to build new and cool objects from scratch. On tuesday we had the grand showing of all of the class projects, there was 4 groups in total each with their own unique designs and ideas. The first to give a tour of their project was my own group with the theme: Arabian Nights. There was all sorts of attractions that we had put up such as a food stand (run by our own Aereia Enyo), a pet shop (run by Squall Lorakeet), Malaia’s Hookah Lounge (run by Malaia), and Platinum’s Mystical Carpet Shop (run by myself).

The Group in front of the Children's Play Area

Lastly, there was the children’s play area for those bored children that have parents who were smoking hookah all day. The next place we went to was Leonardo’s group’s ranch house. They had an excellent floor plan of the place and had nice room layouts as well. It was a bit confusing getting to where everyone was because it was a small area for so many people to be in at once, but they managed to explain the place to everyone without much of a problem.

The Ranch House Kitchen & Bar

The next destination was the beach! It was a very open space with a volleyball court, outdoor lounging area, tire swing, and a wooden walkway with two huts where people could relax. There were also beach chairs around for people to sunbathe in. It was cool to have an interactive type object such as the volleyball to play with and experience. They also had a killer whale that people could ride as well as a boat!

Tire Swing Mania!

The final place was a dance floor area that also was on the beach but it was part of a separate section. It comprised of a dance floor with various lights and smoke effects as well as disco balls. The place had a lot going on and then there was a gazeebo where people could hang out as well on the side of the dance floor. The next time we will be working in our final teams to come up with a good project idea!

Peace.

Dublin and other awesome places!

platinumz — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 06:58:59 +0000

Dedicated readers, Sorry about last week! I totally forgot about the blog because of my organic chemistry test and I didn’t blog about my SL adventures. To sum it up though we made flags cars and benches from basic prims. It was quite an experience as we all gained valuable building knowledge to help us for assignments to come.

This week we adventured to many different places outside of educators coop area in Second Life. On Tuesday we were honored with having an advanced user named Sitearm Madonna show us around in a place she helped create. It was a spinoff of Dublin, Ireland! and it had some of the same landmarks that the real Dublin has.

Giraffe area in Dublin

Of course there were also areas that had to remain exclusive to second life such as the Giraffe area seen in the picture above. It was quite bizarre to see this here but also quite cool in the same sense. We went through a tour unlike any other where Sitearm teleported us throughout various areas of Dublin while we all sat in the comfort of a small theater-like area.

Theatre in the sky!

It was an out of this world experience and very unique, it would be interesting if things could be carried out this way in the future in reality!

On Thursday we got into groups to present a cool area that we found in Second Life. Part of our assignment was to get everyone there and back and one piece which was by no means a simple task. Every group performed well however and there were three great tours that were shown. The first place we went to was Tiessa’s Palace and that was the place my group presented. Everyone was quite impressed with the fantastic view that the Palace boasted on the observatory deck of the Palace (sorry forgot to take a picture). The second place we visited was a carnival/amusement park area. This group had a daunting task of keeping everyone together as most people were easily distracted by many of the cool attractions the park held.

The Carnival!!

The last group presented a zoo-type area in which people could even ride the pets! It was also a very unique and cool area and just shows how diverse and creative people that create these areas can be. It just goes to show how awesome the ability to create these worlds is in the grasp of everyone’s hands.

Me riding a Bronchosaurus!

See you guys next week!

Awesome Content and Increased Customization adds to SL’s appeal.

platinumz — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 06:59:26 +0000

Our next assignment was to customize a condo and create a Hero’s Journey for our avatar. This sounds much easier than it actually was to do but it was alot of fun. The shopping around for various sets of furniture made it seem almost as much of a hassle as it is in real life to look for furniture! I only wish I were able to bargain in Second Life…haha which you probably can if the item creator is online (which is a rare occasion). The amount of customization that my fellow classmates and I had an amazing amount of customization to our condo as well as our Hero’s Journey.

A Classmate's amazing roof penthouse.

As you can see from the photo above, some of the people in the class went above and beyond the class project to create something truly original and outside of the box. LITERALLY! “Viper Hernandoz” from our class had extended his condo into an outdoor merry-go-round as well as a penthouse. Other classmates had nice add-ons such as fountains and even snow!

Snow graphics and buddha fountain.

At the end of the day I learned that I should have also thought outside the box and made my condo a little more creative than it really was. I wanted to go for the more homely realistic feel because I thought that it would bring more self-satisfaction. BUT, i was extremely disappointed because my hero’s journey and condo was quite crowded and lacked fluidity. One classmate had a labyrinth to express his hero’s journey in which was an extremely creative idea that forced the viewer to flow along with the journey.

My crib.

I was happy that I got most of my furniture for free or for L$10. This was quite amazing because the first store I went to had a bedroom set for L$4500!! In the end, I learned that Second Life’s shopping is not much different from real shopping other than the instant teleportation bit. It still helps to shop around to find the best bargain!