A paradise for builders!

Hey, all of you builders out there!

Have you ever had troubles with prim-counting (no, no, not 1, 2, 3 – rather like this: Hell, I guess I have to make my house with less windows – not enough prims on the land anymore!)?

Have you ever fought with mega-prims? (Right size – well, more or less – but you prefer to put a not really fitting mega instead of 3 or four “normal” but precisely fitting prims)?

Have you ever been cursing about uploading textures – every damn picture you upload you have to pay for and than you find out, it is not exactly the one you want anyways? And maybe you just want to try different ones?

Have you ever been moaning under the load of tier inflicted upon you by Linden? Given up your land because you wouldn’t/couldn’t pay those tiers anymore?

Have you ever than worked in one of those sandboxes and crazy griefers got on your nerves and wouldn’t let you work in peace?

With other words: Have you ever been looking for a splendid place, where you can work in peace, calmly, stretching your prims the size you want (NO limit!), in sandboxes without annoying griefers, without barely a limit of prims on a property?

Than maybe you should take a look at the wild, Wild West – oh, I mean CYBERLANDIA of course!

Cyberlandia is an Italian opensim where I have been working a lot lately and I tell you: It is fantastic! It is pure joy to build there:

You can build in sandboxes without griefers and hardly a prim-limit and NO time limit! Meaning: you can just leave your work there and go on with it the next time you go.

You can stretch your prims almost endlessly… far beyond the limit of 10x10x10!

You can make buildings (or whatever) with all the details you wish – the sim I work on i.e. disposes of the unbelievable number of 45.000 prims!

You can roam through your photo collection or the internet to find just the right textures, upload them, try them out, upload some more to find just the right one for your needs… it is gratis!

And – if you wish and have a potent pc at home, you can integrate you very own sim/island/land, which you install on you pc, thus making Cyberlandia bigger and more colourful!

So…. Is Cyberlandia a perfect place? No, of course it i s not! Sometimes a sim crashes, sometimes some sims are down, sometimes there surge problems that you might wonder, what the hell is happening.

But! Some great people are working a lot to better it, you can see the improvements practically day by day.

And! The ambience is friendly, open, helpful…

Now, if you have become curious – how do you get there? I will show you the few steps you have to take to become a citizen of Cyberlandia:

1. You download and install the client “Hippo OpenSim” – i.e. here http://mjm-labs.com/viewer/download.php
2. You have to go to the website http://www.cyberlandia.net/ to register your ava – you can very well do this with your SL name. Or a totally different name, you have free choice
3. you wait a second for an incoming mail to confirm the registration, open it, click the link
4. you start the Hippo-Viewer, find the button “Grids” right next to “LogIn”, click it, select “Cyberlandia” as your grid, (click on the “Default” button next to it to open Cyberlandia each time you start the viewer)
5. Log in!

You will find yourself at some kind of welcoming area and – you will find your ava looking like the first time you logged into SL! Now – there are no shops in Cyberlandia but don’t panic: there is a very nice freebie-area where you can get shapes, skins, eyes, hair, clothing… after a while you will learn anyways how to bring a good part of your SL-belongings to Cyberlandia if you want to :))

Do as you did in SL on your first arrival: Look around a bit, get some orientation – of course you can do all the things you do in SL: walk, run, fly, sit. And don’t hesitate to ask someone you might find online, to help you out.

If you stay around Cyberlandia long and often enough, you might even learn some Italian: “Per favore, amico, voglio… voglio…. Oh hell, how do I say that I like this place and want to be your friend?”

:)) With a little bit of luck you just get a big smile, an offer of friendship and a very understandable English answer (or German for that – if you happen to have bumped into me).

So – what can I say? Ah yes: see you in Cyberlandia!

Lotja Loon
Zapping OS-Reporter :))

All the photos of the article as well as the slideshow on the side were taken by Fiona Saiman. Thanks a lot, Fiona!

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Let's be lazy ... yaaaaaaawn ...

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„Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving in drinking, except in being lazy.“ (G. E.Lessing)

The First of May is ante portas and in all those locations, where it is celebrated as „The day of labour“ there will be a great call from union’s side: WORK! We need work for everyone!

Do we? Really? Don’t we rather need a sufficient salary for every one? Conditions to live in dignity (also those who can’t work, be it because the don’t have a job, because they are too old or too young, be it because they are ill or whatever reasons they may have not to work).

Now, having worldwide a systematic unemployment, this calling for work seems more stupid than ever – especially since we can see, that the porcentage of work is being shifted from the sector of production to the sector of service rendering – which means sinking salaries and at the same time higher requirements for the workers in the productive sectors – at the same wages, of course! Jobs are being annihilated to bring workers to work for less. The job-argument seems to kill all other arguments and is used even by those, that ruin their health, their pride and even their lives for the „holy“ job.

I have read a very handy little book again, written by a very smart and ironic man: Paul Lafargue, son-in-law of good ole Kart Marx. It is called “The right to be lazy”. And what can I tell you? I just love it! Let me quote some parts of it for all of you – maybe you will learn to love it just like I do…

„A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work.

(…) meanwhile the proletariat, the great class embracing all the producers of civilized nations, the class which in freeing itself will free humanity from servile toil and will make of the human animal a free being, – the proletariat, betraying its instincts, despising its historic mission, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work. Rude and terrible has been its punishment. All its individual and social woes are born of its passion for work.

(…) Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.

(…) Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production.

(…) the proletarians have given themselves up body and soul to the vice of work; they precipitate the whole of society into these industrial crises of over-production which convulse the social organism. Then because there is a plethora of merchandise and a dearth of purchasers, the shops are closed and hunger scourges the working people with its whip of a thousand lashes. The proletarians, brutalized by the dogma of work, not understanding that the over-work which they have inflicted upon themselves during the time of pretended prosperity is the cause of their present misery, do not run to the granaries of wheat and cry: “We are hungry, we wish to eat. True we have not a red cent, but beggars as we are, it is we, nevertheless, who harvested the wheat and gathered the grapes.”

(But) instead of taking advantage of periods of crisis, for a general distribution of their products and a universal holiday, the laborers, perishing with hunger, go and beat their heads against the doors of the workshops. With pale faces, emaciated bodies, pitiful speeches they assail the manufacturers: “Good M. Chagot, sweet M. Schneider, give us work, it is not hunger, but the passion for work which torments us”. And these wretches, who have scarcely the strength to stand upright, sell twelve and fourteen hours of work twice as cheap as when they had bread on the table. And the philanthropists of industry profit by their lockouts to manufacture at lower cost.

(…) Thus far my task has been easy; I have had but to describe real evils well known, alas, by all of us; but to convince the proletariat that the ethics inoculated into it is wicked, that the unbridled work to which it has given itself up for the last hundred years is the most terrible scourge that has ever struck humanity, that work will become a mere condiment to the pleasures of idleness, a beneficial exercise to the human organism, a passion useful to the social organism only when wisely regulated and limited to a maximum of three hours a day; this is an arduous task beyond my strength.“

To tell you the truth – I really prefer this:

or maybe this?

or a little bit of this:

Lotja Loon,
lazily somnabulating SL-reporter

Zapping RL - Dalí and the Horror

"One of these days it will have to be admitted officially, that what we call reality is a yet bigger illusion than the world of dreams."

(Salvador Dalí)

Back from Spain (RL) have I started to sort memories and impressions of the 6 months stay there… And I must admit that I spend a lot of time (again) in the different Dalí-Museums. This Spanish artist fascinates me and disgusts me, I love some of his works and others short of frighten me – they seem replicas of terrible nightmares, of pain suffered and causing pain. I imagine that Dalí must have sustained horrors and I remember having read about sexual abuse in his childhood. Maybe that could explain his obsessive and pretty paranoic paintings – but can it also explain his political behaviour?

Dalí is maybe one of the best known surrealistic artists – he was affiliated 1929 to the surrealist group around André Breton, but already 1934 Breton accused him to support fascism, of excessive profiling and greed. Dalí proved Breton to be right some years later when he called the Spanish dictator Franco to be „probably the most intelligent among the politicians today“. He acclaimed the greatness of the unvincible Spain, agitated against Satre, Miró and Tàpies, who took part in an enclosure in the monestary of Montserrat (Catalunya) to protest against so called Burgos-Process, calling them cretins and imbecils. 1975 finally he send a telegramm to the moribound dictator congratulating him on the execution of the five basque ETA-fighters accused in that jugdement, saying inter alia, that „more yet must die and soon there will be no more terrorists left in Spain“. (The death penalty and later killing of those basques raised a storm of protests internationally - not only among left-wingers...)

I roamed all through SL to see if I could find something about Dalí here… Sure, his name appears here and there, but taking a closer look it turns out to be next to nothing. But I had the urge to somehow publish my sensations,my feelings, about the things seen, found out and learned. So – in the end i tried it with some photos… a tiny series one might say. I would like to call it: „Turned to Stone“ - it best explains my state of mind...

Lotja Loon
Zapping RL-Reporter for a change

Codo a codo

Tus manos son mi caricia

mis acordes cotidianos

te quiero porque tus manos

trabajan por la justicia

si te quiero es porque sos

mi amor mi cómplice y todo

y en la calle codo a codo

somos mucho más que dos

tus ojos son mi conjuro

contra la mala jornada

te quiero por tu mirada

que mira y siembra futuro

tu boca que es tuya y mía

tu boca no se equivoca

te quiero porque tu boca

sabe gritar rebeldía

si te quiero es porque sos

mi amor mi cómplice y todo

y en la calle codo a codo

somos mucho más que dos

y por tu rostro sincero

y tu paso vagabundo

y tu llanto por el mundo

porque sos pueblo te quiero

y porque amor no es aureola

ni cándida moraleja

y porque somos pareja

que sabe que no está sola

te quiero en mi paraíso

es decir que en mi país

la gente viva feliz

aunque no tenga permiso

si te quiero es porque sos

mi amor mi cómplice y todo

y en la calle codo a codo

somos mucho más que dos.

(M. Benedetti)

The man with the big ears

Would you like to see some more photos of the "man with the big ears" who seams to dominate the medias RL and whose appearance - in the midst of the economic crisis suffered internationally - gives so many people new hope and a new believe in the Unites States of America? Who wouldn't have guessed by now, that I am talking about Barack Obama, the new president of the US...
Well - if you want to see more of him - go to see what Winn Wellman has gathered and put together as a slide show in his Museum of the African-American Experience! Its amazing and delightful :))
Ah, and he added something more, which I liked a lot and think it is worth to listen to:



Now, if you want to read the text - in the Museum you find it!

Lotja Loon
zapping, delighted SL-reporter

Blacks in SL - Blacks in RL

Today I want to tell you about the “Museum of the African-American Experience” and it’s most astonishing, congenial and friendly curator Winn Wellman. But first let me tell you just how I found this museum myself…
I have been wondering once in a while about me never meeting blacks in SL. Strange – could it be due to the fact that I move around in European circles SL? But I do visit other sims occasionally and in RL I do know blacks even in Germany. But I also must admit, that I didn’t really do much more researching on the topic than asking myself. Until one day – not very original – I entered “Barak Obama” in search and found this great place. For all of you, that might have asked themselves the same question occasionally (and the ones who didn’t, but might…) I would just love to help you finding!

The Museum is stuffed full on three stores with pictures and an endless flow of information, some among the pictures at the wall, many more in very useful and interesting note cards.
On the ground floor you find the horrible story of slavery documented in pictures and documents – and I was really glad, to learn about black revolutionary acts and of heroism as well as of the murderous time of slavery.

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Slavery was a hard time, not a happy time
The slave trade was people living, lying, stealing, murdering and dying.
The slave trade was a Black man who stepped out of his hut for a breath of fresh air and ended up, ten months later, in Georgia with bruises on his back and a brand on his chest.
The slave trade was Black mother suffocating her newborn baby because she didn’t want him to grow up a slave
The slave trade was a kind captain forcing his suicide-minded passengers to eat by breaking their teeth.
The slave trade was a bishop sitting on an ivory chair on a wharf in the Congo and extending his fat hand in wholesale baptism of slaves who were rowed beneath him, going in chains to the slave ships.
The slave trade was a greedy king raiding his own villages to get slaves to buy brandy.
The slave trade was a pious captain holding prayer services twice a day on his slave ship and writing later the famous hymn, ‘How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds.’
The slave trade was deserted villages, bleached bones on slave trails and people with no last names.
The slave trade was Caesar Negro, Angelo Negro and Negro Mary.”
Lerone Bennett
Before the Mayflower

You find here as well the movement to abolish slavery, the fights of the Civil War, the Racial Segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, up to some examples of great archivements of Afro-Americans.

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And you find here two of my absolute favourites:
Billie Holiday’s endlessly sad song “Strange Fruit”



Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

And the fantastic gesture of Tommie Smith and Juan Carlos raising their fists in black power salute during the Star-Spangled Banner at the Mexico City Olympic Games 1968!

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Oh… before some of you fear, I will make this posting now into a replica of the Museum :) I will just give you a short summon now: The second floor is dedicated to Blacks in sports and the third floor to Blacks in Fine Art, culture, cinema and music.
I assure you: I have returned over and over again and still am finding more information – for example new web addresses to read about yet some more parts of African-American history.

Thank you, Winn, for sharing this this sad, murderous, angry, heroic, intelectual, outrageous, ingenuos, humane, resourceful, corageous history in such a plentiful way with all of us, who want to see!

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Speaking with Winn...
Winn Wellman: I grew up in Barbados and was fed a steady diet of European history. Believe me: it was a bad thing to learn history from a white man who didn’t like black people. So I was told that the leader of Barbados’ slave rebellion was a horrible villain. I was 13 years old and he was one of my heroes. To me Bussa, who started the anti-slavery-rebellion in Barbados was the greatest hero in the history of my country. And than this white man telling me that this slave was evil. He had a supervisory position and the whites felt especially betrayed by him.
Lotja Loon: And what prompted you to install this very museum here?
Winn Wellman: Easy: SL needs one and there was none. It was very interesting in the beginning - I build this huge box and thought it would be impossible to fill it… then that huge box became the 1st floor and now I have 3 floors. And: every prim in here was made by me, every pic uploaded by me…
Lotja Loon: really a great job!
Winn Wellman: You know, making this Museum I learned a lot about my own history even. It is making me open my eyes bigger. The problem is only, people come to SL to escape reality…. Not to waste time in museums. The ones that come back look around maybe, but they want to have fun. And this is not FUN! This is not a disco!
Lotja Loon: True. But it is fascinating. And some people also can read… :)) even in SL.
Winn Wellman: I think so, you think so… but not enough other people think so.
Lotja Loon: Don’t you give up!
Winn Wellman: Shoot!!!! I am not quitting. Not at all!
Lotja Loon: Good! I am sure; SL needs people like you and places like the Museum. SL is a great place to learn, to study, and to experiment! Like your Museum! Thank you for all of it!

Lotja Loon, zapping SL-Reporter

We must always take sides!

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"We must always take sides.
Neutrality helps the oppressor,
Never the victim.
Silence encourages the Tormentor,
Never the Tormented"
(Elie Wiesel, Rumanian born Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor)

I have found a most solemn place - a place to look, to learn, to ponder, think and reflect: The US Holocaust Museum. They have build up there an exhibition about the "Reichskristallnacht" - as the Nazis called this pogrom against the German and Austrian Jews on November the 9th of 1938.

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In this night, the Nazis coordinated an attack on Jews, devastating their homes, buisiness, shops, cementaries and Synogues.

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In one single night 91 Jews were murdered and 25.000 to 30.000 taken to different concentration camps.

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This night marked the beginning of the systematic eradication of a people who could trace their ancestry in Germany to Ancient Rome and served as a prelude to the Holocaust that was to follow.

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The exposition of the Holocaust Museum not only shows more or less brief information about this horrendous night, but has quite a few interviews of eyewitnesses, that you can watch and hear on video (english) and a very impressive rebuild of a destroyed and burned out synagogue.

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I highly recommend this place to anyone interested in History, especially German history and the history of the Holocaust and I do hope that the curators of this Museum not only keep up their great work but do add more chapters of this sad history!

Lotja Loon
zapping SL-reporter

DREAM, DREAM, DREAM

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Lying in Grass
(Hermann Hesse)
Is this everything now, the quick delusions of flowers,
And the down colors of the bright summer meadow,
The soft blue spread of heaven, the bees' song,
Is this only a groaning dream,
The cry of unconscious powers for deliverance?
The distant line of the mountain,
That beautifully and courageously rests in the blue…
Is this too only a convulsion?
Only the wild strain of fermenting nature?
Only grief, only agony, only meaningless fumbling,
Never resting, never a blessed movement?
No! Leave me alone, you impure dream
Of the world suffering!
The dance of tiny insects cradles you in an evening radiance,
The bird's cry cradles you,
A breath of wind cools my forehead
With consolation.
Leave me alone, you unendurably old human grief!
Let it all be pain.
Let it all be suffering, let it be wretched.
But not this one sweet hour in the summer,
And not the fragrance of the red clover,
And not the deep tender pleasure
In my soul.

Igor Ballyhoo, photographer and artist, born in Bosnia, living in Serbia, since about a year in SL...

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shared his dreams with me – he will share them with you, if you want to see… you can walk through his dream like they were boxes, you enter and leave them through keyholes, guided by a little red light… And - I suppose as it is with every artwork worthwhile to be named one - you can find you own perspective, your own subjectivity, provocation, interpretation, yeah, maybe even your own dream in each one of Igor’s dream cubes.

I guess you already get an idea of my fascination…

When I met the “real” (SL-) Igor, my fascination didn’t diminish – on the contrary! And while I still thought, I was making a nice little interview with him about his DREAM, he had already enrolled me in a conversation about all kind of things: nationality, flags, individualism, his real life; about war and growing up, about literature and cyberpunks, about griefers and sandboxes… and a bit about his DREAM(s) and ideas too. Now, revising my chat history, I realise, we have talked for more than an hour and that 15 pages just are a little bit too much for a blog… So I decided to comment the photos of Igor and his DREAM(s) with some fragments. By the way, taking some photos of him didn’t prove to be at all easy. And not because of my shaking hands, having a professional and darn good photographer in front of me. But see for yourself!

Start your trip through the DREAMworld as if you were peaking through some keyholes.

Where and how we live is what makes us to what we are. Igor: Where and how we live is what makes us to what we are. And it makes also a part of our dreams...
Lotja: so, do you think it was only my perception of seeing so much drama in your photos?

Igor: dreams are the filter that all of us have, they take all your feelings and put it try a prism, disolving and reasambling reality in to some new picture…

Igor: I have no idea about my pictures being dramatic. That is, I guess, a subjective definition.

Lotja: ok... well, maybe they touched something in me
Igor: yes and that is good because every touch makes u feel alive and that is all that matters. It is my idea of art: to be subjective and expressive. To leave marks around for other people to read.

Igor: most people need borders, that is why they still exist... and they define their own needs, that is part of being a person.

Igor: how can u tell someone what is best for him? I can go around and try to talk to people, offering my ideas, but I can't insist that they are the best, the final solution...

Igor: all of us is being influenced the whole life by almost everything, so we change our believes all the time... when I was 18 I was in war for 6 months, now I cant belive I was part of it...

Igor: we can never change whole world and we can't afford to stop trying to do that.
Lotja: true, i guess its a matter of changing little things in our surrounding and not to allow everything from everybody - and a matter of dreaming.
Igor: but I have only great ideas, I should be president or something - even if I am bad manager! And if everyone would look at what I do, it would be great, no borders, no nations, only individuality and everyone is individual anyway and I don’t even need bodyguards :)

Yeah! Igor for President! But until than, I only hope he will make a lot of phantastic, provocative, sensible and very, very beautiful artworks in SL and in RL!

Lotja Loon, dreaming SL-Reporter

PS: Don't forget to look for yourself!
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Portabello/132/128/1186/?title=DREAM

MOSTRA ECCE FEMINA

The 26th of November is a date, you should keep in mind: It's the inauguration date of an exceptional expositon in Learning Dream Island: Mostra Ecce Femina! On 4 floors of a truly ingenious building by Geordie Robbiani you find this great show that illuminates all aspects of women's lives... From birth to death, passing for all the things that make up a woman:

• childhood (little girls are dressed in pink!),
• puberty,
• the women as lovers,
• wives,
• working women,
• the woman in art and culture,
• women of different societies and religions,
• women in history
• the fight of women for equality (suffragettes)
• violence against women
• women's strength
• womens struggles

It really is wothwhile and you just schouldn't miss it!!!!
So remember:

See you there!
Lotja Loon, zapping SL-Reporter (woman:))
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vulcano/33/202/471/


For the english version of this beautiful poem of Gioconda Belli, Nicaragua, please click here

Why are north European women blonde?

According to a study of Peter Frost, anthropologist at the Canadian Université Laval, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males. Frost argues in his study, that blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages some 10.000 – 11.000 years ago. Until then, humans had the dark brown hair and dark eyes that still dominate in the rest of the world. As the climate got colder, there was no more sustenance to be found in plants and fruits and people had to rely on herds of mammoths, reindeers, bison and horses. To find these roaming herds required long, dangerous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leaving a high surplus of women.

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The increase in competition for males led to rapid change as women struggled to evolve the most alluring qualities. Frost believes his theory is supported by studies which show blonde hair is an indicator for high estrogen levels in women.

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“Human hair and eye color are unusually diverse in northern and eastern Europe (and their) origin over a short span of evolutionary time indicates some kind of selection,” states the study and that the high death rate among male hunters “increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women, one possible outcome being an unusual complex of color traits.”

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The hair color gene MC1R has at least seven variants in Europe and the continent has an unusually wide range of hair and eye shades. In the rest of the world, dark hair and eyes are overwhelmingly dominant.
Just how such variety emerged over such a short period of time in one part of the world has long been a mystery. According to this research, if the changes had occurred by the usual processes of evolution, they would have taken about 850,000 years. But modern humans, emigrating from Africa, reached Europe only 35,000-40,000 years ago.

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Film star blondes such as Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Sharon Stone and Scarlett Johansson are held up as ideals of feminine allure. However, the future of the blonde is uncertain.

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Lotja Loon (tomato-blonde)

zapping SL-reporter