Dance the Lights Bombastic

This is the Garden of Eden Ballroom and this was something which ran for years in the early days of Second Life.  The explosions were Telia's special gift and you see how good she was with them.  This type of display was where it started and she could add some major visual chaos on top of that.

(Ed: is that a play on visual kei?)

Do you think I would be so shameless?

(Ed:  yes!)

Well, there's your answer, isn' it (larfs).


That's the Silas WhizBang Stage on which I'm standing but it was highly-mobile.  I wrote a mechanism to lower it beneath ground level.  The musicos and helpers who couldn't really play but could whack the bejeebers out of animated instruments would assemble underneath ground level on the stage and take their positions playing drums of keys or so.  The best one was when there were half a dozen at least in different positions on the stage.

That part is all very well but it was still underground.  The rising out of some demonic reaches took place after a specific sequence.  First, the smoke was set off to smoke out the entire area at ground level.  The music would start at the same time but I knew it would take about thirty seconds to reach Second Life.  I would wait the required period and then start the animation to lift it up to ground level.  Presto, the band appears from within the smoke.

(Ed:  you ripped that off from Randy Hansen!)

Sure I did and I'm shameless about it.  When Lotho and I saw him rise out of the smoke in RL at Bogart's in Cincinnati was one of the most mindblowing stage stunts I ever saw.  That meant one thing, steal it and animate.

(Ed:  too bad you didn't rip off his Hendrix skills!)

Dat's a fact, Mac!


The place was entirely freeform as my tip jar was on the stage but it didn't matter if anyone used it.  Sometimes I would start playing over there and wouldn't say anything because I just wanted to play amid the chaos.  People would come drifting into the place from who knows where and that would sometimes turned into a gig.  One of them lasted about three hours as things were just a little different at the Ballroom.

Sometimes I arranged actual shows and I was so fed-up by the constant parade of campfire acts back then I decided to set up a show which was all-out rock from start to finish and that included some of the All Stars such as Alazarin Mobius, Harleykillernl Beck, and four or five others.  The Eden sim was so packed from that, people were queued to get into it and this lasted for five or six hours or so.

This was a different time as I didn't send out much for announcements because the campfire kids wouldn't come anyway.  Even so, it boomed.  There was no pay for anyone but all could see, we goin' have some rockers for this one.  Try your luck.  They sure did and that was one smokin' event.  I didn't organize shows like that too much, tho, because it's too fookin' hard!  I just wanted to play.


Major hat tip to Cat because she has been organizing SL shows continuously from somewhere around the time I started playing in Second Life.  We didn't see all that much of each other until some while later and we haven't left each other ever since.  The relationship with Telia Soyer whom many veteran SL people, dragons, rabbits, etc will probably remember.  Important as it was, that ran for about two years and then the trip took a nose dive into the ground for reasons I'm sure you can surmise.

Note:  I heard from Telia a year or two back and she was fine.  She bailed because both kids were heading to uni and that's a handful for any parents.  She was happily-married and made it clear from the start we would not see each other in RL.  I thought fair enough and there was no discussion of it after that, it wasn't necessary to repeat anything.


The relationship with Cat as partners has run about twice that long now and that's not even close to a comparison but rather it shows the depth of things in-world.  Out-world is so much a snakepit of snipers and goons and that type of thing happens sometimes in Second Life as well but we have great defensive weapons.  The easiest is simply muting the varmint and said varmint will instantly cease to exist.  That's the far and away best way to deal with snipers and goons since all those creeps want is attention anyway.

You're a transgender hating bitch.  Yah, right.  Mute (larfs).

Note: if you respond to them it will never stop.  That's true even today, maybe even especially today.  Venue owners today, other than Cat, probably wouldn't let me do the stuff I did with all the visuals and explosions.  They bitch and moan, oh, it will take the sim down.  Doing this never took a sim down and it was wild doing it.  Everything was much wilder back in that time.  It's a new class of venue owners these days and many are as boring as fence posts.

Cat remains wild and she almost begs performers, throw me your wildest, original stuff as the MusikCircus may well be the last place where jammers can do that.  Cat gives the finest aspect of Second Life as the music is always free and she wants it as wild as you can bring it.  She has played on-stage in RL because she liked performing with a drum circle.  She really is a Musiker and she knows the music side of the business rather than simply acting as a scheduler.  If she can hook you up for RL performance with her connections, she will absolutely do it.

There are special people in SL but they're larruping rare so don't you screw it up if you find one, mate.  They're dayum hard to find.