Meriken Co. has a nicely sculpted and textured freebie octopus to wear on your head! It’s even wearing a festive holly cluster. Such a stylish cephalopod!

You can get it at Meriken Co. in SL.

Thanks to Peter Stindberg for telling me about it!

Instead of going through the chore of opening your friend’s profiles and dragging the item onto them, one by one, until you get RDNDI (Repetitive Drag-N-Drop Injury) — just put the item and a list of recipients into your Deliverator and let it do the boring part while you munch on gingerbread cookies and watch TV.

The Deliverator can be yours for just L$500, and will serve you dutifully and lovingly, again and again. ;)

P.S. Don’t forget, Cephalopodmas is just 3 days away! A Squidogram always makes for a slimy and surprising souvenier for that special someone. Just L$50, with 5 packs and 10 packs at a discount!

We’ll be having a casual discussion in Second Life tomorrow at 1PM, and anyone is welcome to attend. The topic will be ways to improve the SL user interface and usability. Lex Neva has kindly let us use her new plot of land in Hippotropolis for the chat. Thanks, Lex!

• Topic: User interface, usability, accessibility, etc.
• When: September 16 at 1PM SLT
• Where: Hippotropolis (SLURL)

It should be a fun chat, kicking back and talking about how we can make SL better. I hope some of you will drop in!

The topic will be Imprudence, my latest jihad against common sense and the will of the masses. My henchman and I will be available to answer questions and talk about my master plans to remove everything useful from SL and impose my own brand of horribly crippled (yet oh-so-pretty) software upon you all. Whom I despise.

Where: Benjamin Linden’s office in Second Life.
When: Thursday, September 11, 3-4 PM PDT

It should be fun; I hope to see you there!

(P.S. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

After bumming off my friend for two years (thanks, Mera!), it’s about damn time I got my own domain. I set aside some time the past few days and performed the migration — and it was a complete success!

If you’re reading this in an RSS reader (I can hardly blame you), you should stop by the site to check out the theme. It’s based on the theme “Cloudy” by aoemedia, but I’ve brought it down below sea level (and therefore affectionately refer to it as “Murky”). People I’ve shown it to seem to get a kick out of the header, especially.

You may be wondering what the heck “tentacolor” means. I know I would, if I didn’t already know! As I explained in a blog post almost exactly one year ago, it’s a play on the Italian word for tentacle, tentacolo. As you can see, I’m embracing my cephalopodic reputation with all 8-to-12 wriggling, slimy, cuddly tentacles!

Ia! Ia! Tentacolor lives!

A new revision (2008-05-28) of the Blender to BVH exporter is available. Here are the noteworthy changes:

• Added GPL2 as licensing option.
• Added hand and foot control bones (scale 1.5 to enable).
• Bone adjustments to make Auto-IK work better.
• Auto-IK enabled by default.
• Minor skeleton tweaks in the knees.

A note about Auto-IK: for this revision, Auto-IK is enabled already, to make it easier for beginners to pose the armature. Just grab and pull on the arms or legs (but not the hands or feet; those won’t work), and the limb will move around. If you don’t want Auto-IK, click off the “Auto IK” button in the panel on the right (about 1/3 of the way down the screen).

A note about the hand and foot control bones: by default, they have no effect. But if you scale them up to scale 1.5 (select the bone, press S, type 1.5, press enter), the corresponding limb will try to reach for the control bone, using IK. You can use this to keep the feet planted on the ground, for example. If you don’t want the control bones cluttering things up, you can hide them by selecting them and pressing H; get them back with Alt-H.

By the way, a tip about using IK targets (like the control bones): it works best if the limb is already (without IK) in a pose similar to how you want it. So, IK just gives it that extra “snap” to keep it in place. If you only use IK without posing first, the limb might bend the wrong way and you’ll have to see a doctor.

Enjoy.

• Blender to BVH Animation Exporter (revision 2008-05-28)

P.S. This doesn’t mean I’m maintaining it… :P

Just in case you didn’t have enough giant megaprim sculpty octopods in your life, you can follow the pictoral story of the creation of my Giant Octopus sculpture from start to finish.

Last year at this time, I was waxing existential about my days in Second Life. For some reason I can’t remember, my continued presence in SL seemed uncertain back then.

So here’s hoping that one year from now, I won’t remember the reasons why it seems uncertain now, either.

Check out all the snapshots from the latest Creators’ Playgroup show and tell!