Friday, January 5, 2007

Chi-Chi III: Hanging the Skybox


Written 27 December, 2006

Chi-Chi

III. Hanging the Skybox


The next task was to hang Chi-Chi’s skybox at Pele.

Chi-Chi met me at the caldera, and we spent fifteen minutes trying to find her skybox.

That is, I supervised from the sidelines while Chi-Chi rooted through her inventory.

Finally, she located it.

Then it was time to drag the skybox to the ground and materialize it.

Now, you have to understand about Chi-Chi. She is an SL innocent.

Yes, despite her occupation. She is an innocent.

Whether it’s by design or simply her nature, I don’t know, but Chi-Chi understands little about how things work in Second Life. She does not know, for instance, how to move an object from one side of a room to another. Locating an object in her inventory seems to take great effort—and is sometimes unsuccessful.

I spent most of my second week in SL organizing my inventory (and thank the volcano goddess I did!). I shudder to think of the state of Chi-Chi’s. Once, at PixelDolls, she tried on a skin, then couldn’t find her old one. I will forever remember her running naked in panic through the store.

I can absolutely understand why Chi fell apart. I would freak if I lost my own skin. But it was something to see.

“I can’t find my old skin!’

“Do you know its name?”

“No!”

You know, I rather wish I was more like Chi-Chi. I think hers is the more pure SL experience. As I wrote in the intro to this series of blogs, she’s purely a social being, while me, I spend time deciding whether the coconut palm or the banana tree with young fruit looks better at coordinates 14, 37, 28 at Pele—when, that is, I’m not wiping out the island with my terraforming attempts. Yes, I should be more like Chi-Chi.

Chi did eventually manage to find her skybox, and, after six or seven unsuccessful attempts, managed to rez it at the top of the mountain, where it would be more or less centered on my property.

Then I had her select edit, and, in the Z position box, type 300. She did.

“OMG! My house is gone!” she IMed, even though I was only four meters away.

I had already told her the house would jump to its final location. I told her again.

“It’s just where we need it to be. Wait a second and I’ll fly up and give you a teleport."

I flew up to the house and saw to my astonishment and delight that it was shaped like a four-leafed clover. Way cool! Way cooler, in fact, than the rather mundane model I had favored.

I landed on the outside platform, opened the door, walked inside, and sent a teleport assist to Chi-Chi. And Chi-Chi had a home.

Until I accidentally returned it to her inventory.

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Photo: Chi-Chi’s original skybox at Pele (right). The skybox to the left is an industrial-size low-prim job I couldn't pass up. It's now the Dragon Skybar.

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