I uploaded the above test clip for the longer machinima that I posted about a little while ago.  It took an immense amount of work to get this far, and this is only a tiny clip of a somewhat awkward avatar doing a single animation.  I used Jing for the video capture and downloaded Soundflower for the system audio redirect.

I think I’ve complained before about having a hard time finding a variety of avatars on Second Life.  Well, this lady is definitely in a different  mode than my usual avatar.  “Wearing” an identity like this one is deeply uncanny, and the reactions and perceptions of other people you meet in Second Life are absolutely different.  I decided to follow a fairly popular strain of visual interpretation at Çatalhöyük in dressing her as a goddess figurine in the bandeau that I made for a decidedly younger character.

Once again, the exercise of recreating this small scene raised more questions than it answered:

She’s weaving reeds, so it must be summer.  Were there cicadas?  Yes.  Why would she be doing this inside by firelight during the summer?  It would be excruciatingly hot and smoky.  What about her vision?  I’ve put her in a less than optimal situation for weaving, that’s for sure.   Why isn’t there anyone with her?  Could she hear other people?  Maybe sheep! We’ll add some sheep sounds. I think she’d be humming to herself.  But what sounds?

It’s a lot of interpretive responsibility, wearing these second skins.

Remember this?

So, it turns out that most of the red pigment in B.49 was made out of cinnabar.  From wikipedia:

Because of the high toxicity of mercury, both the mining of cinnabar and refining for mercury are hazardous and historic causes of mercury poisoning. In particular, the Romans used convict labor in their mines as a form of death sentence.  The Spanish also used shorter term convict labor at the Almadén mines, with a 24% overall fatality rate in one 30 year period.

Doh.

-or-

The Porno Baskets of Çatalhöyük

For Cal Day I’m furnishing the inside of one of the reconstructed Neolithic houses so we can change up our tour a little bit from our open house.  In a lot of ways it has been a great mental exercise–having to figure out if I thought the ceiling was plastered, move the ladder to the correct angle coming out the top, decide if I wanted to put a goat/sheep or three on top of the house, things like that.  I’m still not very good at the build tools in Second Life yet and we’re running out of time, so I’ve been getting things as close as possible on my own and then faking the rest with different purchases.  Of course, these purchases are a little…off from what we know about the artifacts, but I’m doing my best.

I went hunting for baskets the other day, with the lovely preserved basket impressions that we get in the middens in mind, and found a few serviceable examples.  The island where I got them was medieval themed and I thought nothing much of it until I found that most of the materials had some kind of action programmed into them.  The plates turned you into a serving wench, the bucket made you scrub the floor, things like that.  An interesting take on Latour, if I do say so myself.

Except…when I saw some of the other items.  And I’m not just talking about the bed!  I figured out that the whole island was themed after a series of science fiction books set in a world called “Gor” where the women are enslaved to the men as part of a “naturalized” social order.  Well then!

So, these baskets.  While they don’t have anything preprogrammed into them–at least I’m somewhat certain of that–they are basically BDSM set dressing.

I’m reclaiming them for the Neolithic.

Just a quick reminder that I’ll be around on Second Life for most of today (especially after 12) at Okapi Island (125, 93, 47) for Remixing Catalhoyuk Day.

We’re getting some neat coverage; a writer for Archaeology magazine was out a couple of days ago, and I talked to the editor of the Second Life architecture blog today for a bit.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Okapi/128/128/0

My name is “Clementine Glass” on there, for what it’s worth.