Those Darn Doors!

For the past three days I have been working on a door.  I needed a door for the landing bay set I have been building.

Anyhow I was about 1/2 way done making this landing bay when it became obvious that I needed to make at least one door for people to enter and exit.  So I stoped to make THE DOOR!

This darn thing took forever.  I wanted to use the LOD distance trick to make it open as you got closer to it and close as you walked away.   I fiddled and fiddled and eventualy got a shape I liked. I really had not spent too much time thinking of the look for the ship, but for this door I needed to have a logo on the door, so I had to take more time out to design that.  Overall I think the symbol of old school rocket launching with a ringed planet and a star is pretty cool looking and very retro. I worried that it might be too art deco looking though.

Anyhow I slapped that on top of a texture I made for some posts in the landing bay that I did not use and  I was well on my way to making a door.   Unfortunately I found out that it was the same texture I had made on the pillars around the door, so it messed those textures all up and I had to re-do the doors as a seprate texture!  Oh well I have not been building much in the past two years. I need to get my grove back.. or find my mojo or something!

So I finished the door and it worked and opened and closed and I did a test submit and I could not get it to work. LOD2 still had way too many verts in it no matter how much I cut away at it.

So today I dedided to start a different approach. I made the frame as one object. This lets me have two animations on the frame which is way cool and I can change those to solid textures if I need to make a different looking door  frame.

Then the door which opens is a seprate object. I took advantage of this and added in some animation onto that in the form of a small monitor screen and a keybaord placed on the opposite side on the collum. Maybe I can get a joke out of that… “Who designed this.. you cant see the screen from the keybaord!!!:  Oh well  Its about ready to submit as too objects. I still have some placement issues to fix on the monitor itself. It uses an addative property to make it sort of futuristic and glowy and as a result the box behind it can not touch the pillar behind it, or it would show through where they intersect.  Still that should not take long.  Then I can start work on non animated textures and such for variations. I guess I can make an airlock door and a few other things out of it.  I may also make the opening part of the door  with tome variations. Mayeb one with a broken keybaord or a montor tha is only showing static hanging from a wire or something.

It was two years ago today…

I had my old Palm Pilot (Disky called it “That which beeps”) and it still works.  Anyhow I just use it as an alarm clock these days. Except it work me up a half hour early today. I was wondering why it was all dark.

Today marks 2 years since There was closed and one of the saddest days in my life. I was so busy working on projects right up to that final hour that it was not until around 11pm on March 9th 2010 that it even really sunk in, althought there was this odd moment when I realized that the amount of digital tape I had on hand would outlast the end of the world earlier in the evening, or that final hoverboat ride with my freinds.  I guess if I had let it sink in I would not have gotten anything done.

It was so sad how this event shattered and fragmented the Thereian community. Some understood, some did not, and others will never forgive or forget. I wish my friends would all just come back home. Probably not best to dwell on the past too much.

Still plenty to look forward to now and as the years go by today will eventually be just another date on the calendar.

Here are two images of my final seconds of virtual life at 11:58pm on March 9th 2010. I went out at a traditional ‘end of there as we know it” party at the Aero Longue.

This one was taken about 10 seconds before there closed.

I had a second machine attached to the video camera, and when there shut down two minutes early I was cought by surprise, but it took a second longer to boot the old slow machine with the camera. The image froze but stayed in place just long enough for me to grab this final snapshot of the very last of my There life.

How did you spend your final There 1 moments?

Miracle Pictures Studios Returns!

It has been an exciting time in There.com recently. First the revival of There run hoods, then shortly thereafter the return of member run neighborhoods. And even more recently the return of previous developer items which can now be re listed in auctions!

However it was getting the Miracle Pictures Studios neighborhood back that pleased me the most. Although it was around for only the last two years before There closed in the winter of 2010, that terrible winter that never seemed to end, it was where I put a lot of my time and effort. Heck it was snowing here in California until June that year. I think someone was none to happy with the closure. During that final week in 2010 I spent a ton of hours there shooting videos and the like, a lot of which has not been finished yet.

Still the sheer joy of having it back again is amazing. It works just as well or even better than it did before!

I took a bunch of video footage the first three days I was decorating the place. The only saved hood layout I had was ancient, and basicly it all had to be redone.  I replaced the 55 meter walls wiht the new 80 meter walls.  I experimented with different entrances, at one point trying to make the entrance a diagonal on the corner, but the terrian was jsut too bumpy to make it work right.  The backlot had a lot of changes too with new 80 meter sections of road that were added in.   Overall I am quite pleased with the new hood and I can not wait until I cna build some new buildings for it!

The video is a tad dull.. Ok mind numbingly dull, but I am determined to record more of what I do these days in there.com so that there is a record of what it was like.

There Action News: B.A.B.S. Update 2-7-12

I filmed this the other day, then my illness got worse. Still I did get out of bed long enough to edit this.  I really need to find a decent editing program for the PC. This free program does not even do decent titles, but Windows Live Movie Maker is very fast to edit in.

 

I also picked up the old Miracle Pictures Clubhouse before time ran out on the house reservations. It is a large ranch style clubhouse.  It is not the original MP Clubhouse, but after Black Friday a There employee who was let go gave it to Disky. In 2005 we used the clubhouse in Rick Slick’s Mission Slightly Difficult as the house of  the evil Dr. Linden.

It appears in many other movies. It was the interiors in Tiki Trek and Tiki Trek II

So nice to have it back!  Stop by and visit if you like it is at Canyon Terrace 017 at the top of the hill.

 

Miracle Pictures Studios

Aside from my freinds and the creativity, one of the things I missed most in There was my movie studio themed neighborhood. I was so busy between projects, and being in the hospital twice during those final months of There.com that after I bought the hood I rarely had any time to work on the hood itself. I am making a better go of it this time around.

Mircale Pictures Studrios was purchased in a rather heated auction.. in other words it went for a lot… on March 29th, 2008. It was a lush green hood with nice hills in the background (perfect for a Hollywood style sign thing) and a bit of sesert in one corner (perfect ofr a planet of the apes thing or westerns).  Immediately I started designing larger soundstages for the hood. A 40×80 meter all black interior soundstage, and a 40×80 meter soundstage with cememnt walls.  I also designed an entrance way with a insert set of pictures that could be changed and updated. The original soundstage ( a 40×40 meter mostly black interior) was also used.

The hood was original surrounded at first by a wall. I created a special 55 meter wall section by angling a 40 meter object on a diagonal. The problem with this was that they had to be in from the outside of the hood. I also make normal 40 meter sections of wall.  The wall was problomatic as the ground slanted so much in some areas that you could practily step right over it. In the end the wall was mostly left on the entrace side and the wall near the desert. 

Upon finishing that I made a dome building for the miniature Lagoland set. I had planned on using it in the next UltraAvie movie.  This was an 80 meter round building with a backdrop of New Kansas painted on it.

July of 2008 was our 5th birthday and also served as the premier for our second feature and our first musical the all singing, all dancing, all lagging Wizard of Lag!

You can see some of the premier event in this movie “My So Called Virtual Life”

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=414Ewdy7giM

October 2008 had the studios recieveing the Community Wow award!  That came as a sprprise to me! We really did not meet the criteria for being elegiable for this award. But still it was way cool!

There is a video of that ceremony and a tour of some of the sets for Flame Warrior here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke4USiHmQJ8

Our final production for the There Film Festival (there were no more film festivals after 2008) was the Kung Fu epic  Flame Warrior. This was also the first movie shot in our new studios. 

Several sets were constructed for this movie.  The village set and the Post-Fu training area were built on two sides of the hood.

The walls around the Post-Fu training area were specialy made for the movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxVrUE_LpU8

When Lagoland upgraded to a 100 acre hood it was usggested that I move my studio to the Lagoland hood. I tried that for about a month. I even designed a slanted parking lot area outside of the gate, but with only 50 hood drops at the time it did not work out well, and later the items went back to the studio hood. The new parking lot went, but was later redesigned agian to match the flatter land at the Studios hood.  So I guess there were three different versions of that entrance.

The version shown above was the one made for Lagoland. It was revised slightly for the final version that appeared at the Miracle Pictures Studios hood. This also does not show the pictures which were made as a seprate object.

In the fall of 2009 Lagoland, after moving to a new 100 acre all flat hood failed to attract many residences, and after loosing money for almost two years, it was closed. This provided plenty of buildings and items for a backlot area at the studio.  Streets were set up in a “U” shape. The plan was to place photograps at the end of the streets showing a prespective view as seen in the 100 acre  Lagoland.

I never quite got around to making those backdrops though.   I did keep building sets.

In the late summer of 2009 I bought one of the Saturn V rockets hoping to use it ina  movie. I had it set in the studios in one corner, but the neighborhood next door complained that it was causing them lag, so I removed it immediately.  This was a big mistake. Shortly after removing the Saturn V There neighborhoods gained the ability to block out  paz’s and hoods outside of thier own. The neighbor propmptly hid my hood from thier view, however they never botherd to let me know that they had done this and that I could put the rocket back out. By the time I realized that they had done this  I had mosplaced the layout file, and was unable to set the rocket back out. So there is no video footage of it at all.  It will be nice now to get a second chance to do something with this prop now. There is a picture of the hoverbaot version of the Saturn V flying over the hood.

 It took a while but eventually by December of 2009 I had finished the bit time traveling set. Good thing too as when March 2010 rolled around and it was announced that There.com would be closing I had the standing  sets and a script all ready to shoot!  Well the script did need some modification to make it up to speed with current events. In July of 2010 the them was There Through the Ages, so the script was written with that in mind. It needed only a bit of updating to make it about the closing of There.com. Mostly only the ending bits were changed.

If you are curious how I spent my last week in There, well it was spent behind a camera. In that final week Miracle Pictures churned out Disky’s final chapter of The Beta III, Tiki Trek II, An april fools joke with fox costumes, the Bernard Bruhaha Halloween Splatacular, a talking heads movie with members telling what There.com meant to them, a pilot for a Stargate There series (to be shot in other games later)

http://youtu.be/qSTzyVESR3w

and a ton of footage for my mega documentary on there.com and several music videos, only a few of which have been finished.

But as far as the studio goes the last big production was From There to Eternity. In many ways this was my best work ever, in other ways it relies heavily on the history of there.com for it’s humor and new members may not even understand a lot of the jokes, but for those who were There it served as a bittersweet look back.  

In fact on several occasions, with people viewing this movie, I recieved the ultimate in compliment that I can imagine ever recieving. This movie made them laugh and cry at the same time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EOD7-_LyCI

I was filming at my studio right up to the final hour before there.com closed. In the very end I was doing Captain Cosmos introductions for future Broc Lee episode in case we ever decided to shoot any in Second Life or some other world.  This was my last screenshot taken inside my Miracle Pictures Studios neighborhood, just seconds before I teleported away.

Looking back I wish I had done a lot more. I never finished the movie star trailers, I never got those city backdrops made, I had only set the backlot up 1/2 when there.com closed. 

Oh well, I am very excited about having the hood back and getting started making new props and set for my new original series. I sent in my application to re-spawn my hood along with several pictures of where the hood was located. Hoepfuly soon Miracle Pictures Studios will be back!

This is going to sound very odd…

I had an exciting moment in There today as I started to host Tuesday Tiki Talk Trivia events again at the Coconut Club in Maidenflight. I meant to take some video. I intended to capture some screenshots. I ended up doing neither, but I did host the event. I was a bit rusty to say the least, and so were my questions!

I really missed hosting trivia events. I did quite a bundle of them back before There closed in 2010 and it was very nice to host one again. Yes, I did do two test events this fall in beta, but they were pretty limited and more of a test of the buzzers than anything else. So this was one step closer to truly being home. Which, in itself, sounds a bot odd.

I ran into ZachC the other day and he had the same odd feeling, that without a hood, and without designing something new to go in it, he was quickly starting to feel ‘out of place.’ Ok, so those were not his exact words, but that is more how I am feeling, slightly like a third wheel. I know that soon I will be busy with projects and objects and more events than I know what to do with.

I did apply to have my hood reactivated. I am not sure I did that correctly or not though, but while I wait I am trying to take in some time to just enjoy the There I used to know. The There that was not as crowded. The There where I was not deluged with the max number of IM’s the second I logged in. The There that provided fun events I went to instead of hosting them myse… ‘doh!

Too late!

Anyhow I had one more odd moment the other day. I was over at Nurse J’s house and everyone there logged out but me. Nice of the Nurse to trust me with all of her stuff like that. Her couch was very comfy, or at least my avatar thought it was! That was a nice time.

After a hard day in There.com, boy did my avatar’s feet hurt!

Still writing…

Well can’t get into There.come again today. I did finish the script for the second episode of my new series I plan to shoot in there. Overall I think it turned out OK for a first draft. It has more humor than the first episode I wrote, but most of it is situational humor, and not actual jokes, which it really needs more of. Once I get these all sort of pounded out I hope to go back in and go over them a second time with an eye about making them more amusing. Right now I am concerned mostly with A) advancing the plot of the series B) making sure I can film the darn thing and that I don’t go too far overboard with making too many props, sets and costumes and C) Writing stories that have small casts in easy to divide up sequences.

Episode two ran about 31 pages in this first draft format, and I write with double spaces between characters talking, but I write the full width of the page. I am betting this works out to be about a 40-45 minute episode when finished. It was a lot of fun to write the final line of dialogune in the script today:

Corko: Yes giant rogue space moths.. dozens of them came through a space porthole someone had left open, or something, and ate.. holes.. in the uniforms. I had to fight them off. I really had no idea that doing the laundry could be so dangerous!

The characters in this series go way back, as in ‘Sherman, set the Way Back machine.’ Back when I was in 7th grade I started making movies with these very same characters. Of course back then it was on 8mm film and when we started some of them were silent. I kept using the same characters all through Jr. High and then high school, but when I went away to college, for some reason, I started working on other productions.

In 2009 I decided in the fall of that year to shoot an original series using the characters over the summer of 2010. Well there.com closed down so that went on hold. Still the characters are easy to work with and I have about 6 years of previous material I can draw upon. The characters were mostly created my by friends Daniel and Tom, and to a lesser extent others like ‘Fish’, Bob, and Dean. I leave off their last names, as I am not sure they would want to be associated with this sort of thing after some thirty years. Thirty years ago we barely had the technology to edit two bits of film together. If only I had had technology like There.com to make movies in back when I was younger. Ah the things I would have created!

I think my biggest challenge is that this show has five main characters. I know I said I would never do that again, but having that many characters seems to work better from a story standpoint. If I only had three characters it would be rather dull story wise.

Casting for this will be tricky as I need reliable people that can and will show up on a regular basis. That has been consistently my hardest issue to deal with in There.com so in point B above I have tried to divide the scripts up into scenes where only 2 or maybe three of the main characters are involved, however in each episode there are several scenes with the entire cast.

I am hoping to shoot the series in stages. Perhaps doing 3 or 4 of the episodes at a time. I don’t think I can pull off the entire series at once. I guess I could divide the series into two seasons. British seasons can run form 4-6 shows and people think nothing of that. I am hoping to keep them running from 40-50 minutes in length, but I don’t have to make allowances for commercials or anything so they can just work out to however long they are.

It’s great to see There.com come back to life and almost as much fun as seeing my childhood characters from The Gorgon Chronicles return to the screen. Not sure if I should called it something else though.

Next up is episode three, a completely ship bound adventure that adds a lot of character background through flashback like interview snippets. This is basically the only character background episode in the series, and probably will need the most re-writing of the bunch.

Episode 3: The Inspector
Due to the publicity over the previous battle, a special inspector is dispatched to investigate the crew. This episode adds background to the characters through interviews. At the end Witzen ends up loosing his cramped quarters for a small broom closet like room next to the bathroom.

The treatment for this episode is one of the longer ones I wrote. It basically has the entire ending situation written out already. The treatment is a bit more than two pages. I just have to add in some more dialogue to make that part work. The series outline runs about 12 pages of single spaced gunk.

In the end this series is the exact sort of thing I would like to watch, and that’s the best reason for making it at all!

Writing about… well writing and waiting.

Off and on I have been busy writing for this original series of videos I plan on making once There.com opens up. I started writing the pilot right as my father was dying in late July. It was an odd time to write things, however I needed to keep busy, and writing seemed as good as anything else to do.

 

The first episode I wanted to do something different, so the story is mostly told form the port of voice of one character and a camera that floats around following a typical day in his life. This made the writing a bit more contrived than I would have liked to have made it. I had to write around how I would be filming this, I did not want to get so over my head that I would just give up when it came time to actually shoot it. I need to go back and do another draft of the script to add in more actual jokes.

 

This past week I continued writing on the second show in the series. I am about 2/3 done with that script now. This episode is a traditional sort of script that I might write. The camera angles are pretty conventional, and I have had a great deal of fun thinking how this particular episode will look on the screen. The show practically writes itself, thanks to the detailed mega scene-by-scene outline I wrote back in mid July.

 

I really have no excuse. I should have all eight scripts done long ago, but they seem to be coming slowly. Maybe this week I will find more tine to write. Then again I just blew twenty minutes or so writing this.

 

The basic plot for episode 2 is like:

The Uniform Field Theory – Corko comes up with a new scheme to provide uniforms to a film crew for use in a movie and the crew suddenly is forced to go into battle in their underwear. This confuses the heck out of the enemy!

 

_________________________________________________

 

 

And here is a rather poorly written first draft of the opening scene:

Tracking shot down a corridor of the ship ending up at ships stores where Corko and PI2 are having a heated discussion about uniforms.

PI2: I still do not understand.

Corko: What’s to understand?

PI2: The whole plan seems a bit confusing.

Corko: Well let me go over it again in simple terms that even a robot like you can understand.

PI2: Hey!

Corko: You see, even after 40 years of war, people never get tired of entertainment. Diversions are all the rage among the masses. And more recently, even though battles rage on, movies about the war have again become popular.

PI2: I understand the first bit. Its the part about making money I do not Grok.

Corko: Well, in order to shoot a movie about a way you have to have good looking costumes. And with rationing the way it is most film budgets just can’t afford realistic looking uniforms. And that’s where we come in.

PI2: and this is where I get confused.

Corko: It’s simple PI2, it’s simplicity itself. The film crew will use our uniforms in place of wardrobe.

PI2: But we are short of uniforms ourselves. Where will we get enough to outfit a battalion of actors.

Corko: Laundry night is Tuesday, so we wait till the others have gone to bed. The we collect the laundry .

PI2: But that’s only 24 uniforms.

Corko: Right, but then we sneak in and silently ‘borrow’ the ones they would be wearing tomorrow .

PI2: Ok so the commander always keeps a spare uniform in his locker for those ‘brown trouser moments you fleshies often seem to have, so that works out to.. Uh

Corko: 29 uniforms you non functional walking calculator! Which is just the number of the cast playing good guy soldiers for this epic new movie “Battle Beyond the Beyond!”

PI2 looks at a poster for the movie on the wall

PI2: “Battle beyond the budget” is more like it… I still don’t understand.

Corko: What?

PI2: How do we get the uniforms off the ship, and to where we they are filming this movie, and then back again before people wake up. I mean were are light years away from any system.

Corko: That’s the beauty of the thing. We don’t have to!

PI2: That does not compute!

Corko: We don’t have to go to the movie… The movie will come to us.

PI2 looks confused

Corko: Just before lights out, you will disable the ship’s sensors, just long enough for a shuttle to dock in the forward landing bay. The crew sets up, we collect the uniforms and deliver them to the forward hold, which I set up earlier as a sort of base of operations for the film crew.

PI2: So that’s what all those “Do not open! Vacuum open to space” signs were all about. Say, won’t Smitty notice those too?

Corko: I paid him a bit to look the other way.

PI2: So you deliver these uniforms.

Corko: and the weapons too.

PI2: and they film the movie in the forward part of the spaceship? I hope you charged them for that too!

Corko: Of course I getting something for that too, but they are only shooting the part where the spaceship gets boarded by the Valarians. They are on a very tight schedule and should be done in less than five hours. Then they return all but 4 of the uniforms and take off before anyone wakes up.

PI2: What do they need those 4 uniforms for?

Corko: Well there is more to the movie than just the one battle. After they leave here they go back to their studio and film all the other scenes.
PI2: Your fleshy mind is so devious… so interesting… So when does this plan go into effect?

Camera dissolves to a backwards tracking shot of the hallway during the last line.

 

____________________________________________________

 

 

As I wait for There.com to open back up I have mixed feelings about that there will not be a set opening day. While I think this is a good way to deal with the land rush issues, I also am sad that I probably won’t be around to shoot any footage, until hours after the homecoming itself. I did so want to be there when people started arriving in droves. Still it will be a very exciting time!

The abuse of the few or the one…

This post is a response to a issue raised in Mr. Wilson’s blog  entry  http://theremichaelwilson.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/mr-pickle/

If you have not seen this PAZ it is out in Duda Bay (or was.. I am not sure if its there or not anymore)  Here is a vide of it though:

 

I have given this a lot of thought. I have been thinking about this since this was first posted on the blog, and I have come to the realization that it is backwards. I am starting to feel a lot like Ben the overliteral dermestid beetle, but here goes anyhow. Look at the typewriter. The original keyboard layout made it possible for people to type very fast. This lead to the mechanism jamming. Instead of fixing the mechanism, lets just re-deign the key layout to slow down the typists and make their work harder for them!

http://www.ehow.com/about_6173704_qwerty-method.html

There has a history of this as well. If something is wrong, it must be the membership’s fault. That does sound sort of harsh, but from my point of view it is both true and wrong. And some of the following is a bit ranty… Ok maybe a lot.

< RANT >

Signs: People like Jopy and his followers put them everywhere. The wall of advertising around Karuna, sealing off of Zephyr, etc. Problem partially caused by large amounts of signs given away as levelup prizes, and low prices of signs in early beta.

Solution: this one was two pronged. I think I recall this correctly that signs were removed from shop (punish the membership for the behaviour of a few) Then later the amount of time they were able to stay in world was curtailed (punish the small amount of members who still had these signs, or who had paid lots of money for a remaining sign in auctions). This also caused further problems as it was somehow tied to skill levels. Occasionally this meant that you could not drop a sign in your own neighborhood as your skill limit was not seen as being high enough for some reason. Though later PAZ dropable signs were invented, and a remove foreign object command was implemented. However the time limit was never removed, nor was the bug associated with dropping them ever fixed. So the punishment of the membership continued/s

Quest Kits: People kept dropping them in piles, and used them to block entrances. This was annoying. This was caused by.. giving tons of them away as levelup prizes. There is a small problem with not being able to finish some quests on the same day you start them called the Out of Order bug.

Solution: Remove them from shop ‘temporarily’ while they were fixed.. back in 2004 (punish the membership of There for the actions of a few) Later an invisible quest kit was sold, but quite a few members refuse to do invisible quest kits. Members created many patch files to get around this punishment. If the membership is doing flips and twists to get around a need that they have… you are doing it wrong. Four plus years of begging and pleading for a useful community tool to be re-added to shop (not fixed, just re-added and sold, making the company money) and nothing. Yet one person sets ouf a few pickles and the way the world works is changed almost overnight. I just need to think of a better ‘squeaky wheel’ here. I probably should also mention raffle tickets.. but the hour is getting late and I am spending far too much time writing this thing.

< / RANT >

 Now we come to the drop trick issue… so right now there is what, one member abusing the system? How many people really own that many giant pickles? I should point out that I have only used this trick a few times while decorating Lagoalnd. Mostly to try and get around the 50 drop limit in my hood as I wanted to have more trees spread about. I would admit that this trick is outside the realm of what There wants you to do. But for each tree I added inside my hood I used a drop inside one of my lots to acomplish it, so they are paid for. However when I started in There, there was no fee to drop anything anyplace. There were no PAZ’s or neighborhoods. You paid the price for an item and you could decorate with it just about anywhere. So about five months later There decides to revise the way items work via the PAZ. So now the membership was being punished by paying again for the items already bought in auctions. Now a member had to pay to keep that item in world too. So $ x2 for There.com.. and the payments keep coming.

The membership grumbled and accepted this. It was the end of beta after all. So while I can see that having a pickle sitting like 500km away from the PAZ is a bit outrageous and could possible be used to abuse someone else… what difference does it really make? Financially is this person not paying to keep that item out? I suppose I could complain that my 200×200 PAZ is too pricey to keep out when I could use a 50×50 and get the same effect, but I would lack the environment and other features that I get in that large PAZ.

The next big point would be… why is Mr. Wilson contemplating punishing the majority of the members for what the few.. or the one is doing? Yes it is a trick/exploit, however the member, from what I can tell is paying to do this exploit. Time is still ticking down inside that PAZ. Refills will have to be paid on all those pickles to keep them in place. Right now with no hoods, trying to put out 40 meter road sections to make a city backdrop for my movies might be very tricky indeed without the ability to use this trick. Yes, I can see with no support this could be a big issue. I guess the issue should be weighed in terms of… the membership:

Will the membership be OK with the removal / nerfing of this trick/exploit? Will that cause the company to loose money? Will it make the company more money? I cant see it loosing them too much money unless people are really abusing others with it. I don’t know the track record with this.

Will the membership be so irritated that they use fewer PAZ’s? As in I can’t connect my two PAZ’s so maybe I will just have the one out? Will that cause the company to loose money? Will it make the company more money?

Will the membership be irritated enough to choose to not have their PAZ out? How many people use this trick anyhow? Will that cause the company to loose money? Will it make the company more money?

Will punishing the membership help the company make more money? Or will it loose the company money? Would punishing ‘the one’ hurt the rest of the membership? Would this gain the company money? Would it cause the company to loose money? ‘hmmm maybe it would cost the company money. I mean that one would not be setting out multiple PAZ’s all over the place.

I started to think back and I realized what this all reminded me of:

From my point of view I used to be able to ride my bike anywhere (an analogy for decorating wherever) and now I have been confined to this small box. Once in a while I might like to stick something outside the box.. like to create a drop zone outside my paz in space so people can take out their vehicles and the like.

Perhaps the problem could be solved without ‘nerfing’ the system, like the typewriter was. It looks like this may be happening. I would suggest that a limit of 40-60 meters would be useful as an outside limit, but I am not sure what people need for their space hoods. Would a larger distance be required? It sure would be hard to place trees out in a hood like Lagoalnd what that sort of restriction, most of mine came off a mostly empty lot near the center of town.

Also, if I have a problem with a restriction placed on me and the membership by the company, why should I take my complaint to a person who did not impose that restriction on me?

Waiting for There

After There closed in 2010 I found myself retreating into the past.  The past is safe and the outcome is predictable.   This is the formula Hannah-Barberra found so effective when they made TV series that were only 13 half hour episodes long.  Children like what is familiar to them and given the choice between watching a re-run and a new episode many will choose the one they have seen before. It holds no surprises. The ending will work out the sam way it always has.   It will always be Old Man Harrod or The Creepy Janitor wearing a mask.

For me, I did not start watching Scooby Doo episodes again. However I did watch a lot of old movies. No matter how many times you watch it King Kong always dies at the end.  My favorites are the old Geo Pal movies. I watched them on that portable DVD player I won several years back in the There Film Festival as a prize. Those soon gave way to TV series.  You can only watch Destination Moon so many times before needing to give it a rest.

Which brings me to what I was watching this weekend. Being that Halloween is tomorrow I  watched the safest and most atmospheric TV show ever made (aside from maybe Dark Shadows (which if you ever watch it has the brightest lighting of any creepy show ever))  which was…

                              Sapphire and Steel!

Now if you have never seen it this show is all about atmosphere.  Thats it.  They don’t offer many if any explanations of what is going on, or why the characters are there, but they do offer up atmosphere.  So thick you could cut it with a knife, but use a fork so you get every last morsel of creepy goodness.   Did I just write that down?  never mind it sounded better when I was thinking about it in my head.

Ok so there is a lot and there are characters which are regulars on the show.  So I guess it is not completely about atmosphere.

Plot: there is something wrong in time. Often something out of place, or some malevolent  force trying to get through a corridor in time. 

Characters: These are elements.. Ok some of them are elements. other are precious stones.. and wait.. the main character is neither.  Steel is more of an alloy than an element.  I think the person who created the show just was not a science major and di not know the difference between elements, minerals, and alloys.   Ok but I digress. The main character is probably Steel. He is played by David McCallum (of Man from Uncle fame and now on CSIS) and a close second is Sapphire, played by Joanna Lumley (just after she was a New Avenger, but before she was Absolutely Fabulous). I think Sapphire gets top billing just because it sounds more interesting that way… or maybe because it is an alphabetical sort of thing.  Steel was hard and uncaring. He wanted the job finished and often he did not seem to care at what price or cost. Sapphire showed a lot more warmth and compassion towards the humans they encountered.

Anyhow, neither of the main characters is an element, however most of the other ‘interdimensional agents’ are elements like Lead, and Silver.  The stories and situations they are put in often raise more questions than they answer and always there is that creepy atmosphere. Did I mention the atmosphere before? 

Like a lot of British shows of the day these were done as weekly serials. From 1979 – 1982 these ‘agents’ investigated creepy nursery rhymes and the like.