Furillen latest

We have had a few days of rain – and some awesome pictures. You really outdid yourselves this time with some incredibly varied and creative images that demonstrate – once again – the value of a sim that doesn’t dictate how it should be photographed …

https://flic.kr/p/DPiX1n

https://flic.kr/p/EbXmyF

https://flic.kr/p/DMHx5m

This is just a sample of the pictures you’ve been making during the last few days. If you want to know why I make an effort with the sim, this is the answer.

Furillen is likely to be bathed in warm, Spring sunshine again this weekend. The experiment with rain went well. Most visitors reported minimal lag issues, and everyone I spoke to thought the torrential downpour looked and sounded great.

Having cleaned up the scripts in the rain, I’ve been preparing it all for packing into a rezzer – because as I said before, it would be great for the weather to vary at the sim. If you’ve seen me standing around at Furillen with my arm in the air and ‘unavailable’ over my head, this is why.

I’ll be looking at other variations in the weather during the next few weeks.

Before all that, though, we have some events coming up that I wanted to remind you about.

First: Today – 4 March at Midday SLT – is deadline day for Round 3 of the Furillen photography competition. Given the slightly more complex nature of the task this time around, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of entries received so far, and I’ll be sifting and sorting them into a new flickr stream later on today.

There is no voting this time. I have been putting together a small panel of judges who visit Furillen regularly and have some kind of connection with it, but no obvious vested interests. I will be a member of the panel – so if you want to bribe me, go right ahead and try, but bear in mind that my prices are really high …

As before, this is a low stakes contest, there is no big prize, and I’ll do my best to feature as many of the entries as I can on this blog.

So relax and enjoy seeing what people came up to convey ‘The Meaning of Furillen’. The winner will be displayed in one form or another at the sim.

Details of Round 4 will be announced in due course. I personally think it’s worth going on with this competition, because it adds another layer to the increasingly rich and enjoyable artistic life that we all enjoy at Furillen. It is never the primary focus of what happens there, and not everyone wants to join in. But for those who do, it provides a good challenge.

Second: While we’re waiting for the judges to do their work, we may as well party – so there will be a small Abba event at the sim on the evening (Euro timezone) of Saturday 5 March. Just costumes and music for this one. It’s a bad taste festival – you know what to do.

I’ll announce a more precise time window for this tomorrow morning, but your best bet is to have your music switched on and listen out for ‘Dancing Queen’.

Third: The rather more serious and tasteful Radiohead event happens next weekend. This follows on from what we did with Bowie, but steps things up a bit because a lot of what gets seen at the sim during the weekend will consist of art made by you. I’ve been receiving videos and pictures all week, and will start going through them towards the middle of next week.

There is still plenty of time to pull something together for the event. But to be clear: I won’t be displaying lots of pictures on the sim and turning it into a giant gallery. You know my feelings about that. So most of what gets made will turn up as part of a slide show. I’ll also be displaying pictures, movies and other information about Radiohead.

I’ll be putting all of this together during the next week.

Ever the optimist, I’m still hopeful that the boys from Abingdon School might drop their new album just in time for us to add it to the music stream. And if they do, I will – obviously – claim that I’m Thom’s best friend and he did this as a Furillen favour.

But I would – of course – be lying.

Fourth: Is there life after Radiohead? At Furillen we certainly think so, and to prove it I plan to run a series of exhibitions featuring a mix of photography from first and second life. This makes sense to me, given that the virtual Furillen has a strong connection with the real Furillen.

I’ll be giving out details about these events in due course.

Besides all of this, I am sure there will be plenty of other – impromptu – developments at the sim as the janitor continues to get to grips with his relatively low boredom threshold.

New weather patterns, a few new toys, a new building or two, some music events, and other stuff we haven’t even thought of yet.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, for a sim in which – by design – ‘nothing happens’ … an awful lot is happening at Furillen.

Hope to see you at some point over the weekend – I’ll be off and on intermittently.

But if you’re not wearing spandex, I’ll want to know why.