Side Project: Oh Google, Please Help me!

Me and time management have issues. I am very much an all or nothing sort of individual, and it makes scheduling anything difficult for me. My brain doesn't want to work along those lines, ignores my pleasant paper reminders. I tore down the "Get Out of Debt Plan" a month ago. It's not like the man or myself sticks to it at all. We both made sincere attempts to reduce spending, but a more realistic plan needs to be worked out. Like, with actual numbers and stuff.

Life is cluttered beyond the finances though. The root of the entire problem is that we aren't the best at scheduling our days. I have a firm block schedule in place, but in practice, I am finding that it is not enough structure to me. The blocks need more slices, clearer defined times. Yet, how do I do this without walking away and ignoring it like I do my other lists?

This is where my call to Google for help comes in. I have tried the Calendar function before, but it didn't translate in more motivation to take nature walks or hit the Absolute Write Sci-Fi chat like I had hoped, due to a complete lack of checking that email address for the reminders. As I am now quite fond of Gmail and Reader, this is no longer a problem.

How far do I go in my slices, however? My other efforts to schedule often suffered from being too detailed, and thus, too hard to follow without feeling I had put myself in a straight jacket. The current "schedule" consists of six blocks of time: wake up time, morning school, lunch, afternoon school, dinner, after dinner. The after dinner section consists of two slices already - family time and after kid's in bed time. I thought this obvious openness would give me some structure without overwhelming me, after a long period of life being too chaotic to even dream of scheduling it. It has helped me bring structure, just not enough. I flail in the mornings and evenings, so many things that I could do overwhelming me and leading to inevitable shutdown, fried brain mindlessly roving SecondLife, Twitter, or Reader instead of writing something, ANYTHING, or doing one of a hundred things around the house.

Housework is never "done". It's one of the reasons I despise it.

I feel an overwhelming need for more balance in my life. Over the coming months, I hope to use the Google Calendar to its fullest, bending its functions to my will and slicing the broad divisions of my schedule into more structured pieces of a whole that will be more productive. Today I am about spent after weeks of insomnia, agonizing over how to better organize my time. Seriously. Being less productive than I feel I could be makes me depressed, until I burst in flaming tears. Tomorrow I'll come to a conclusion about how to divide my broad blocks, following my friend's suggestion of "give yourself a choice". All slices of time will have two options. It works with the boy's schooling, it could translate to the rest of our time.

Where does Google fit into all this again? I hope to use its connection of Blogger, Buzz, Reader and Gmail, along with the Calendar and Document functions, to make my real life and online life more streamlined. Let's see if email reminders work when my lazy ass actually checks the email account they go to, shall we?

Full Steam Hunt

Just got back to me office after checking out a few places on the 2nd Annual Steam Hunt, a grid-wide scavenger hunt that has shown me all the various awesomeness the steampunk culture has added to our virtual home. A few of these places were fixes by the owner, and two others were in hopes of being able to find some well hidden gears. I succeeded in finding one that had eluded me.

I have been on a few other scavenger hunts since I rezzed a few months ago, stumbling upon the first at the shop of one of my friends. The Bitten and Frost Hunt was a great idea, and did introduce me to many cool things on the grid, and other hunts, but the two path concept lead to confusion that the organizers and store owners could not seem to eradicate. I eventually gave up about 50 stores into the Bitten Path, having been lead astray by other hunts and non existant snowflakes quite enough for my taste. I dabbled in various Christmas hunts, and my inventory exploded with much higher quality free stuff than I was used to.

I had to take a break from hunting during the Valentine's season, though I do have a few bleeding hearts in my collection from stores I frequent anyway. The Steam Hunt is very well organized. I happened to be on late last Sunday, so received the notecard containing all the landmarks in a group notice right at midnight on the first of March. You can join the hunt group yourself and receive the hunt information here. They are also on top of fixing any broken links in the chain of stores.

The purpose of these hunts is for there to be a benefit for all parties involved. The theory is, by hiding a small object - usually associated with the theme of the hunt, the Steam Hunt uses bronze spinning gears - you keep the hunters in your store long enough to count towards the traffic rating of your shop and also, long enough for things to rez properly and customers to be won, groups joined, and landmarks picked up because the hunters wish to return another day. But why let yourself be exploited in this way?

Well, the contents of the gears are not your average freebies. Some joker put in this crazy, oversize, mechanical steampunk bonnet, but overall, everything I have opened has been fab. The dress at Arieala Andel & Serrita Ember Store has garnered ten compliments this weekend. The jewelry set from Amaranthus is high quality as well, my avatar is wearing the earrings. This is a stretch for me in any life. Jewelry has to be perfect, or I just won't bother.

There are plenty of adornments for male and female avatars. +ezura+ even has a guys' suit in their hunt gift, as do about half of the clothing designers participating. I have two new pocket watches to try out, and all bracelets and necklaces seem to have male and female versions, at least in terms of size. Gadgetry and fantastic buildings abound as well. Builder's Brewery created an awesome Steampunk Cottage just for this hunt, and the Tripod house from Enzo's is a green windowed whimsical dream. The monocles from my favorite dark Alice in Wonderland store, ..::Rasetsukoku::.., and Mire, an excellent men's store, are perfect for any aspiring inventor or creator.

So how do you get all this great free stuff for your very own? You go hunt about the stores, of course, searching high and low for those elusive spinning bronze gears. Some stores have hints, some do not. Some participants try to hide the gear near their steampunk inspired creations, others shrink it and hide it behind, or even embedded in, their displays. The hiding of the gears is at the participating creator's discretion. Now, I will admit to not being the most observant person in the world, and I found 127 of 130 gears. You can too.

My favorite friend while on a hunt is my camera controls. If you do not already have them up on your screen, they are under View in the upper taskbar (unless you are using the Beta of Viewer 2.0, in which case they are on the bottom). The control to the left rotates your view, the slider in the middle is zoom, and the control to the right moves you side to side and up and down. You can only zoom so far, so sometimes you will have to play with the two crosshair controls to see behind things and find the gears, or whatever object is being used for the particular hunt you are on. There are at least ten hunts going on gridwide at any one time. Linden Lab would do themselves a favor by adding these scavenger hunts to their main site, it's a good way to get a new person oriented with the controls of their avatar and the true vastness of this virtual world we call home.

In short, if your inventory has been feeling a bit lean, you feel the need to get out of the house on a LOW budget, or you just want a slew of new things to play with, head over to the start point or any of the stores listed in this blog and get yourself full of steam, like my clockwork squirrel buddy and I.

Milkwood Poetry Festival

Time for a little shameless plugging, folks. I have been accepted as a reader for Milkwood's 1st Annual Poetry Festival. This scares me, but in a good way.

I have played the role of hermit writer for a long time. The draw of SecondLife for me lies in the opportunities to connect with other writers here. Part of connecting with other writers is reading your work out loud, and it has been a long time since I have participated in an open mic. Fear and transportation have gotten in my way for about five years now. The grid takes care of my transportation issue, at least.

Fear is a harder thing to handle. The literary community in world is full of talent, and I have come to respect the work of my fellow writers here. The lineup of the poetry fest reads like my most wanted list. Flawnt Alchemi is leading off the festival at 1Pm Friday, at the Bookstacks Performance Space. I adore his use of language. Rosemary Serenity will be reading at Storybook Dell, 1:45PM, her introspective musings on human nature always inspire me. Another must see for me on Friday will be Stosh Quartz at the Stone Circle, 2PM. I enjoyed her poetry workshop at the Haunted Library the few times I could make it. The other workshop she's involved in, Saturday mornings at 10AM, at The Blue Angel Poet's Dive, has been a quest of mine from my first Saturday on grid. It would seem a perfect time for me, with the afternoon just settling in here and laziness the name of the game after a week of schoolishness. Various rl and sl things have gotten in the way, and the time of the workshop does, well, float around a bit. I will catch a full one this Saturday morning. Maybe.

Back to the poetry fest and my quest to get over the inevitable stage fright that settled in when I received a request from Harriet Gausman, the lovely mistress of Milkwood, for an author biography. My brain screamed help and my fingers flew to the Google search bar. I found some good advice, and spent an hour crafting a little blurb about myself, rather skewed towards my avatar persona, such as it is. Self promotion is a skill that I am still learning, partly by reading, mostly via trial by fire. I feel relatively squeemish doing it, but there's nothing to do but try. At least I am reading on Saturday.

Friday afternoon will be spent taking in the sights of Milkwood to the accompaniment of words whose beauty may surpass the view. While I furiously take mental notes and get my setlist of poems ordered for my own reading Saturday at the Stone Circle, of course. The grid has given me a wonderful new source for deadlines. Harriet is a gentle taskmistress, though. I work better under pressure, it makes me force my brain to a stop and go forward with an idea.

I am on after Rosedrop Rust, a poet I enjoy and respect a lot. The one open mic I can get to with any regularity, Literary Night at the Hotel Chelsea, has been graced with his presence on quite a few happy occasions. His particular brand of word whimsy is always enlightening, and slightly twisted. His poems make me smile. After all that joy, maybe my fears will be erased and I can sail right through my thirty minutes of personal horror without so much as a stutter. I'll just imagine all the avatars are wearing underwear, yeah. Or is someone willing to do me a favor and come that way?

I didn't think so. Damn.

The party of poetry at the Stone Circle on Saturday also includes Klannex Northmead, pirateneko poet extrodinare - pray he reads Peaches, everyone - and Huckleberry Hax, who in addition to being a poet also writes stories using the uniqueness of the grid as a setting.

Sunday's readings are going to be housed in the cozy Haunted Library Room, perfect for the weaving of words on an early spring afternoon. That last statement about spring may be wishful thinking, but let me have my dreams people, please. The dumping of snow on the east coast led to one aborted Blue Angel workshop attempt, and one complete miss. Corwyn Allen, reading at 3PM, shared a deep and descriptive work in progress at the part of a workshop I did make it to. I look forward to hearing his words, while ensconced in a rich, velvet covered chair, surrounded by dark bookcases, and in front of a roaring fire.

Right now, the yearning for that moment is making the draft in my office more noticeable. April, save us! I shall take solace in the writer's fantasy that is Milkwood, and let the words of my fellows and my own leap of faith propel me through March, to glorious spring.

The entire lineup of poets for the 1st Annual Milkwood Poetry Festival is as follows:

Friday, March 5th, 2010
Flawnt Alchemi - 1PM - Bookstacks Performance Space
Morgue McMillan - 1:30PM - Outside Milk Wood Library
Rosemary Serenity 1:45PM - at Storybook Dell
Stosh Quartz - 2:00 - 2:30PM - at the Stone Circle
Kezhen Yheng - 2:30-3PM - at the Stone Circle

Saturday, March 8th - Stone Circle
Rosedrop Rust - 1:00 - 1:30PM
June Stormcrow - 1:30 - 2:00PM
Donjuan Writer - 2:00 - 2:15PM
Morgue McMillan - 2:15 - 2:30PM
Klannex Northmead - 2:30-3:00PM
Huckleberry Hax - 3:00 - 3:15PM

Sunday, March 7th - Haunted Library, Milkwood
Wolfgang Glinka - 1:00 - 1:30PM
Kamille Kamala 1:30 - 2:00PM
IU's Man in Black - 2:00 - 2:30PM
Aianna Oh - 2:30-3:00PM
Corwyn Allen - 3:00 - 3:30PM
Manx Wharton - 3:30 -4:00PM

This is an event enabled by voice. Please do not feel pressured to speak, only encouraged to listen. All times are SLT.

I love having fine print.

The Meaning of Art on Second Life®

The SLCPro event this week certainly came with a lot of announcements about Linden Lab's current projects, including the release of the Viewer 2.0 Beta to the public and the unveiling of their new Third Party Viewer Policy. After losing myself reading about all these developments in the blogs, the one that stuck out as the most interesting to me was the establishment of a Linden Endowment for the Arts. While the prospect of LL putting this much behind a particular community on the grid is intriguing, what really drew me into this conversation was the questions that immediately sprung up in the comment section of the forum about WHAT sort of arts the endowment was meant to support.

Niko Linden admitted that if you ask one hundred people their definition of art, you will get a hundred different answers. The vagueness of the post that sparked all the debate of what art was deserving of such a program may have been due to the project being in nebulous stages, or a move to gauge the breadth of art that is on the grid by the contents of the applications they receive. The comments on the blog may be the most pointed feedback they find on this new initiative, and the Lindens involved with the initial planning stages that led to the post do appear to be listening.

What is art is an age old question, and this virtual world of ours draws in residents that wish to express their creativity in many forms. Do we, as writers who may not be involved in much of the content creation aspect of the grid, deserve to be eligible for an endowment to support our use of the grid to expand our sources of inspiration and ability to network? Are musicians not real Second Life® artists because their exploitation of the platform is more in the way of being able to personally access a worldwide audience? Should the Linden endowment only benefit those that integrate their art with 3D capabilities to the "fullest" extent they can?

There aren't easy answers to any of these convoluted questions, but then again, that seems to be the way of much in the social experiment of the grid. I personally think that the Lindens should bestow their grace on any art or artist that breathes new life to the grid through their creations, no matter what aspect of the environment is making it an unique experience.

The ability to hear original music through the live venues of the grid has been a godsend for me, I would never get to as many shows as I have in the last month without Second Life®. It is not the same as going to a bar or an arena, but that has a lot of benefits as well. No crush of people, no expensive tickets, cover charge, or drink prices, and you can still talk with your friends. Depending on the artist, they may even have an SLCD for sale so you can take the music home. A more personal way of finding new music than Myspace or Facebook, and more entertaining as well.

Visual art is also a driving force behind my grid explorations. There is art in many of the builds of the grid, sometimes in the most unexpected places. The ability to buy original art to hang on my virtual walls is also a great bonus of the Second Life® experience for me. I enjoy seeing the work ofl visual artists in the environments they wish to build around it. There is a lot of experimenting going on with 3D visual art on the grid as well, and the shared media aspect of the new viewer can only serve to heighten those possibilities.

As writers, we are mostly using the grid for networking and workshopping our current projects with fellow writers, but shared media may open many new doors for us as well when it is more universal. I believe it will make it much easier to network, and also easier to share our work between ourselves and amongst the rest of the residents of the grid. Some would say ours is the art form least deserving of an endowment from the Lindens, as most sharing of content in the literary world of sl is done through audio or offsite forums. Notecards are still the most basic of notepad documents, and texturizing our work is not really an option for novelists. I have some great ideas for doing my poems in illuminated form as scanned textures, but have yet to start that project. The upcoming poetry festival at Milkwood will hopefully inspire me to truly get to work on that project.

Should the endowment be for art that could not exist without content unique to Second Life®? Or should the Lindens be accepting of all artists that have a presence on the grid? The meaning and purpose of any art is such an endless source for human discussion, it will be very interesting to see what eventually comes of these initial plans, and what it means for all the artists of Second Life®.