Ava Ganache

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Pictures of feet, for no other reason, than… the shoe must go on.

Possibly the clearest thinking on globalwarmingness I’ve ever heard.  And this guy is 90…

BBC News – Today – Lovelock: ‘We can’t save the planet’.

“Trying to save the planet is a lot of nonsense, because we can’t do it.  We’re full of hubris, and we think we can do this kind of thing, but we’re not clever enough yet, and I don’t think we will be in time.  The sensible thing to do is enjoy life while you can”.

Prof. James Lovelock.

(I’m not sure if you can see the video clips of the interview if you’re not in the UK… it’s a BBC thing.  There may be interviews with Prof. Lovelock elsewhere in the intertubes).

Here’s something I’d all but forgotten.  Once upon a time, the mainstream LL viewer showed this behaviour often.  Now, in a flash of brilliance, the Emerald viewer has resurrected this feature.  I wonder if they’ll reintroduce the ‘shoe-up-the-ass-after-tp’ feature too.

Nostalgia is wonderful.  This had me bent double with laughter…

I downloaded the newest emerald viewer yesterday, and started playing.  I like playing, but you probably know that, especially if you’ve ever read my older blog thing.  One of the features of Emerald is the ability to render shadows.  Shadows!

It’s hard to believe how much difference a few shadows make to the way a scene looks, until you see it.  You’ll get an idea from the images below, I’m sure, but it’s the dynamic nature of the shadows that adds the extra realism, I think.

It’s not flawless though.  It’s a big drain on graphics card resources (at least for me, with an nVidia GTX260 on Linux).  Interestingly, the resource drain appears to increase over time – it gets progressively slower, but it doesn’t appear to be a memory issue – as soon as I switch from ‘shadow’ to ‘normal’ rendering, the framerate recovers but the memory usage is unchanged (and it doesn’t appear to increase over time when ‘shadows’ are turned on, either).

It also has some issues with alpha (transparent) textures, and with producing screenshots.

With any luck, the images below should give an idea of what I see…

A 'Snapshot to disk', without shadows - my 'normal' view of things

A 'Snapshot to disk', with shadows enabled. The alpha textures, and the sky, have vanished.

A screenshot, with shadows enabled. Looks pretty good, but the framerate plummets. There are white artefacts around some objects, and antialiasing is disabled by force - as you can see better below

A better view of the white artefacts and jaggies (at the sides of the picture frame, for example). My eyes looks odd too.

You’ve realised by now, of course, that this was really just an excuse to publish four photos of me flashing my knickers, right?

This may all have sounded a little critical, but it’s not meant to.  These innovations are the lifeblood of sl – and it’s both a good thing, and a bad one, that they’ve come from developers of a third party ‘unofficial’ viewer.  A little more tweaking, and testing, and with luck it’ll be fast and stable enough to use full time.  Sadly, for me it’ll remain an interesting feature but not one I can use full time.  Yet.

Just when I thought I had a decent, effective sl blogging thing going (even if I have been a bit quiet recently), suddenly WordPress change the ‘post by email’ code.  And, would you believe it, I can’t send postcards from sl.  Again.  It drives me absolutely crazy.  I guess the problem lies with sl (as usual), but why, oh why, oh why?

All I can do is stare at her monitor, then hang my head.

Sometimes, SL can be a pig
In this case, several pigs. Corwin’s prize at the end of the ‘Winter Choice’ card collection thingummy, and a present to Vextra. I think she must have a thing for little piggies, but I hope that’s not why she loves me.