Okay, I confess I was mostly testing out google's beta groups software, in the interests of exploring it for possible e-learning applications ... but as usual I kicked the tires by creating something ORU.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/okalrel

posted by Lynda at 17:28   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
The sequel to The Lorel Experiment, my story Drops of Humanity, is coming along, finally. I'm up to 8300 words. I was hoping to reach 20,000, but I don't think the story is in need of that much goings on.

posted by Anonymous at 15:49   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 1 comments

 
Well, I have Blogger comments working OK, but at the moment the only way to see them is to click on the date at the bottom of the message to bring up the post as an individual page. Then all the comments show. See Alison's post "Oh Ick" for a demonstration.
There must be a way to improve this, but this coming week I really have no time to look into it - but I will soon, I promise.

posted by David at 09:26   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 3 comments

 


Trees, courtesy of Arbaro (Esperanto for tree), an open-source platform-independent Java program that EXPORTS .obj format (that can then be loaded into Vue). The program takes the tree specifications in as xml and there is a generous pack of pre-prepared settings. The first picture shows the poplar and aspen, the second ... willows. I have had to back off from the full quality and resolution shown on the Arboro page, particularly for the willow, because of the size of the files - was having trouble importing them - so the willow looks a little spindly, but I have by no means explored fully what I can do to compromise between the limitations of my system and the possibilities of the program.
posted by Anonymous at 08:42   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 3 comments

 
It had to happen. Comment spam. Counterfeit drug-peddler spam to boot.

Sorry everyone. I have just killed comments rather crudely because our basic Haloscan account doesn't give me many options in dealing with it - we can't edit older posts, can't delete in bulk, can't ban by topic but only IP address and can't close comments on older posts. Bah!
posted by Anonymous at 22:32   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 2 comments

 
Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I have been hankering to build my own clothes for Poser. To do so, I had to come to grips - to a small degree, anyway - with a program that could work with meshes, in this case the powerful, quirky, open-source Blender. The various tutorials I have read (see, for instance PoserFashion) always seemed to start with exporting a figure from Poser and then importing it into the 3d modeling program to use it as a dressmaker's form. I started with an installation of Blender 2.32, and discovered that there were no file formats that Poser exported that Blender could import. So I surfed, and I found my way into the fringes of Python import/export scripts. Fortunately, before I tackled installation of same on the Mac (Panther on the G4, by the way, runs Python), I had the bright idea of looking for updates. Bless them: in the latest update (2.35), they have bundled a whole bunch of Python import/export scripts. I exported the basic 'judy' figure from Poser in every format offered and tried importing them one at a time. The .lwo one works. It is TEENY when it gets in there, just a little dot, but I had been warned in some of my surfing that there were scale issues, so I now know how to resize in Blender. Now, working with Blender required figuring out key strokes for the other 2 keys in the 3 button mouse and even more, finding and turning on numpad emulation. Once I succeeded in doing that, I tried various tricks like - starting with an imported torso and straightening out and extruding (modeller jargon) the bottom border to add a skirt to a top. Then I worked out how to start from scratch and do a plain skirt. And then I encountered what I think is the famed normals problem. Basically, Poser thinks of things as one sided. It doesn't render the back sides of things normally. It doesn't even display them. I'd build a skirt, export it from Blender, import it to Poser, and it would look like a bunch of ribbons. It would drape more or less OK (dynamic clothing covers a multitude of sins), but the color would render banded. Somehow if I do more than make a tube - if I move vertices around - the normals get flipped ... Gnnch. So the next time I have a chance to spend some time on it, I will be tackling the normals problem (maybe this is why I haven't yet found a tutorial on modeling Poser clothes in Blender). For this and more on Poser's dear little ways, see 3d model creation for Poser which is so enlightening I will forgive the silliness of spaces in a for-the-web filename.

And then there's Vue. I love my Vue. Despite the crashes. So when Vue5 was released, I bought the upgrade. Only to find that the minimum system configuration required twice the speed of my little G4. I thought what the heck, and installed it anyway. What I wanted was trees, and there are more trees in Vue5, (not to mention a renderosity renderer. Renderosity gives the effect of colours reflecting upon each other, the effect I was trying for in the Demish entryway. [We will leave aside the 26 light sources. I was very young in the craft then.].) I hit the tree button. And it crashed. I turned off all the known incompatibilities (that I'd learned to do with Vue4) and it crashed. I thought, this is a new release, I wonder if it needs patched. Lo and behold, it had gone from 5.01 to 5.02 while I dithered about the installation, and I upgraded and it does run (though I haven't tried any of the advanced features, like that renderosity renderer. Yet. Stay tuned for lamentations on how my Mac melted). I have a whole lot of funky alien plants, but I still have no nice willow tree.

(By the way, with the introduction of Vue5, Vue4 dropped to a third of the price. E-on keep older versions of their software on the market - very kind to users of less powerful machines. Most manufacturers, they upgrade, that's it.)

So then I had the idea of trying another search engine than Google, popped over to AltaVista, thought I would look for scripts rather than models, and found POV-tree, which is a GUI interface on top of a POV-Ray (another open source modeler/renderer) script for building trees. Java is installed in the Mac. I downloaded the program, opened it, made a maple tree, just like that. Unfortunately, the current version of the program doesn't save anything besides POV-ray meshes; the author has disabled the exports for .obj in expectation of a commercial version but doesn't know when it will come out.

So now I'm going to have to find a way to get the POV-ray mesh into Blender (more searches for Python scripts - heaven forbid I have to learn POV-ray), and then export it as .obj or .3ds, both of which I know I can get into Vue. Unfortunately my job is about to eat my life, except for the little bit reserved for my History class paper, so it may be a while before I can offer a solution to that, as well.

There was an interesting article about technology development and simplification in the Economist, with the usual little barbs about techno-illiterate over-25s who will never adapt - I mean they don't use IM. I am tempted to write a letter to the editor pointing out that there are many more interesting things to do with technology than use IM.
posted by Anonymous at 21:35   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Delighted to discover that the Okal Rel Universe web story, "Going Back Out", is listed at http://www.qualitylit.com/archive.php?section=fiction as quality online story.
posted by Lynda at 07:09   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 
Alison and I had a debate, once, about rel-skimming tactics. She wanted PA leaders (Vrenn in particular) to be able to neutralize, or at least seriously mitigate, the highborn advantage in reality skimming warfare by developing tactical strategies that could be used by nobleborns or even commoner pilots. I was cranky about that because it negates a lot of hard work establishing the military/economic underpinnings of the order of things in the Sevolite empire. That concern aside, something I read today in Barbara Ehrenreich's book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War , reminded me of the issue. While making a point about the importance of mankind's formative epochs, as prey, Ehrenreich describes mobbing behavior used by modern primates against predators. In essense, the weaker mob gangs up on the lone hunter to achieve what no individual in the group could have managed solo. So there's some Earthly, behavioral precident for the idea that organized groups of inferior pilots could trump the highborn advantage. That probably isn't a bad thing, on the whole, for the viability of a culture that relies on transportation that can double as a much too lethal weapon. If it was easy, however, our Neolithic ancestors would not have been as impressed as they were by lions, and the Okal Rel Universe would never have developed as it has, with such a high premium placed on being highborn. For all the reasons I arranged the Okal Rel Universe the way I did, therefore, I tend to veto tactics that sidestep the tough questions by trumping highborns in the field of their one, greatest strength. Why the Okal Rel Universe is arranged to give highborns that advantage and make them the headache they are for those who have to live with them, is a topic unto itself, but I concede mobbing tactics or their reality skimming equivalents could play a role that was interesting, so long as there are limits to their effectiveness and they require conditions (such as nerve, training, etc.) that can't be come by easily and are prone to their own weaknesses. After all, if you want to write interesting stories about living with lions, you can't hand your protogonist a fool-proof elephant gun that reduces the conflict to a question of how to dispose of the corpses.

Thematically, I believe we will always have lions to live with, whether they are aristocrats, millionaires, generals or Sevolites; and that people deal, every day, with unequal playing fields in whatever sphere of influence their culture deems most important. I make no apology about asking those who work in the Okal Rel Universe, creatively, to accept the dominance of highborns where it comes to reality skimming, because it underpins a lot of what is fun to explore, fictionally. Doesn't mean characters can't or shouldn't resent it (like Gadar, in the web story "Going Back Out"), or even concoct creative tactics to reduce the impact. Just so long as we stick to Okal Rel of the "shared universe" variety, and abstain from wrecking the environment for future "generations" ... and origin authors. Alison and I negotiated the question of anti-Sevolite tactics, in the end, as I expect we'll have to negotiate the innovations of others, over time, in many quarters.

If worst comes to worst, with multiple cultures and 1,000 years of history to play with, there's likely to be a place or time that's suitable for nearly any story situation. For example, people who wanted to write stories featuring no-holds barred, utterly destructive, no-survivors, down and dirty space warefare based on reality skimming and everything the Old Regime Reetions could throw back at Sevildom, could set the story during the Killing War. But we couldn't have stories like that set in "peace" time, within the empire, because it would be as inappropriate as someone who lost a legal battle, or a small squirmish over a colony, dropping nuclear weapons on a trading partner's capital. My point, in some sense or another, is nearly always that there is more to any conflict than winning at any cost. Of course, that begs the question "what cost is too much". Which is the question I am most interested in, on the whole. To play devil's advocate to my own position on that, though, it must be admitted that new tactics or technologies have always perturbed the history of conflict in alarming ways, and that is a fair question to explore, too. In fact, an intimately related one. But I've already wandering over too much territory, here, for one post. :-(

posted by Lynda at 16:35   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 

Courtesan Prince on Edge Website

E-mail from Janice, at Edge, on the "friends" list prompted me to go look and see the "new" icon on the Courtesan Prince promo at the Edge website. So I took a clip. :-) Also like to "blog" Alison's blurb (below) for Courtesan Prince because I've been admiring it in the privacy of my own brain since she trumped my own offering to Janice with it.

The courtesan, the pilot, the anthropologist, the leige. From two
cultures that should never meet, come four people who do. From the
dangerous fringes of space to the decadent center of the Royal
Court, their ambitions, desires and convictions will unmake the
past and shape the future.

posted by Lynda at 01:54   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

 

Based on applying funky filters to faded out scan of hand written text

posted by Lynda at 17:14   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments