Triviathon

Another blog post where Lou is late to the party, but I would be seriously remiss if I didn't mention this last weekend featured Triviathon, a 24-hour all-trivia-all-the-time event benefiting Relay for Life. The brainchild of trivia hosts Cully Andel and Triain Kandr, the idea was to run 24 hours of continuous in-world trivia to benefit charity. Of course, the best time to throw an event like that is on the weekend, and that means running up against a lot of popular Second Life trivia games like (ahem!) Lou's Clues. So Cully and Triain had a great idea—invite the hosts of those games to be part of Triviathon. Thus, on Saturday instead of setting up my little chair and cheat sheet at [MonoChrome], I rezzed into Trivy Isle and followed Trivia Grandmaster Thornton Writer up on stage in an effort to raise some money to fight cancer—a very worthy cause that, in one way or another, I'm sure impacts everyone RL and SL.

I didn't get any screenshots of my set—I was too busy trying to cram my questions into a one-hour time slot!—but Lette Ponnier managed to get a picture of me and "my little friend" the Victorian Mad Science Death Ray Mk II (made by Tali Rosca)—pummeling trivia fans with questions and excess protons. I was also randomly giving away some Jez's Oh's fabulously cute small avatars (available at [Oblique]!) and I didn't completely fall on my face or have massive script glitches, so I'm going to count the gig a raging success!

Although not all of SL's trivia hosts were represented, aside from myself the event featured a bunch of SL's best and brightest showrunners, including AnaMaria Quintessa, Triain and Cully, Chadd & Shale (I got to do Zoo Bar trivia again!), Josh and Circe, Nelly & Lotus, Maggie, Billy2Times, Devin, and even event host Hummingbird Forster took at turn at the stage, along with former Armada host Mako Kungfu and Chaos mistress Lette Ponnier.

I wasn't able to attend all 24 hours of the event, but I popped in whenever I could and five folks managed to hold out for the entire event for special prizes! I don't know how they did it, but Rain Ninetails, Lette Ponnier, Juke Badger, Devin Velinov, and FlutterBye Skytower where there for the whole darn thing—and they were reasonably coherent at the end. I tried to get a shot of the winners, but Second Life wasn't cooperating—not everybody rendered fully. Perhaps they hadn't been changing their pixels often enough.

Left to right: Juke Badger, Cully Andel, Devin Velinov,
Lette Ponnier, Rain Ninetails, and Flutterbye Skytower

The conservative goal of the Triviathon was to raise $20,000L—and I'm pleased to report that the event raised far more than that. Last I heard, the total donated to Relay for Life was $65,056L. Yes, that amounts to about $260 CAN, which isn't a terribly huge amount in the grand scheme, but for a trial run in an online community that's never tried to put together an event on this scale, I think it represents a solid success.

Plus, as part of the deal, Juke Badger's avatar got a haircut. That may not benefit cancer research, but, wow, it's sure a tremendous social good.

(If you need me, I'll be in some remote sim hiding from Juke.)

Of Corn and Cabals

Halloween is a huge deal in Second Life, in part I think due to the holiday having become a month-long heavily-commercialized celebration of weirdness and debauchery in America over the last umpteen years. All October Second Life was replete with zombies, axe murderers, blood-splattered avatars and walking corpses…in addition to a number of very creative seasonal builds with jack o' lanterns, ghosts, leaves, spiderwebs, and other creepy things. As with real-life Halloween, some of it was horribly tacky, some of it was magical, and some of it was weird. At least in SL none of it smelled funny.

Ghost-ish Lou climbs a dead tree in The Corn Field:
no signs of civilization.

In celebration of Halloween, Linden Lab briefly opened up The Corn Field, a near-mythical area that's normally off limits to Second Life residents. Apparently, back in the early days of SL, the Lindens would send misbehaving avatars to The Corn Field, a region where it was always night and which was completely isolated from the rest of the grid. The Corn Field had a one-way teleporter that went nowhere, a tractor, a couple of dead televisions…and nothing else but rows of corn. Residents banished to the Corn Field couldn't go anywhere, talk to anyone, or do anything. I guess The Corn Field was supposed to be the equivalent of sending a misbehaving child to their room without supper—a harsh disciplinary measure, but short of an outright ban. The idea is based on the original Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life," where a mind-reading six-year-old demands everyone think happy thoughts or he will wish unhappy people away into an infinite cornfield. Or turn them into misshapen ghouls.

Lou starting at Philip Linden's glowing underwear-in-effigy

For Halloween the Lindens set up four creepily identical Corn Field sims, and dressed them up for the holiday with a sinister scarecrow, creepy things hidden in the rows of corn, along with graves, skulls, and the obligatory dead tree. At times, Linden Lab employees were wondering the fields, scaring people and occasionally handing out Linden teddy bears. There were also some mannequins of avatars "banished" to the Corn Field, including an all-black shadow of Linden Lab founder Philip Linden, for some reason wearing glowing briefs. I don't know what the point of the effigy was; it seemed to bear on the edge of tasteless given that Philip Rosedale—the typist behind Philip Linden—recently announced he was ending his day-to-day involvement with Linden Lab, having stepped down from the CEO role in April 2008.

The vertically-enabled: I pose in front of Juke Badger and Devin Velinov.
Bear in mind the camera angle makes me looks taller than I am!

But not everything has been creepiness and glowing underwear—some parts of Second Life are reassuringly normal. For instance, although my avatar is a bit taller than Real Life Lou, I continue to be abnormally short by SL standards, where anyone under about 2m is considered a bit petite. Here I am standing in front of friends Juke Badger and Devin Velinov, two of the tallest avatars I see regularly. The contrast makes me laugh—I barely come up to their hips, and Juke's hair is almost as long as I am tall!

The Not-At-All-Secret Secret Trivia Cabal meeting in Secret Primhenge:
Prim-mistress Jez Oh, me, Lette Ponnier, and Lillian Shippe.

And I'm happy that stepping back a little from some of my in-world work means I'm spending a little more time with friends: for instance, this was an impromptu gathering of [MonoChrome] (and [Oblique]!) creator and prim-mistress Jez Oh along with Buccaneer Bowl crew captains Lette Ponnier and Lillian Shippe…in Primhenge. Kinda sorta. Maybe more about that later. It might just turn out to be wicked cool.

Two Bucc Chuck

I've been remiss in keeping up with the Second Life trivia scene—partly because I'm spending less time in-world, but mostly because I'm spending that time wrapping up projects and "doing work" rather than hanging out with friends and having fun. But I definitely want to highlight the most recent Buccaneer Bowls, the team-based trivia events that are the highlight of the Second Life trivia scene every month.

For folks who don't know, the Buccaneer Bowls are played by up to ten teams of three to four players each, rather than being a free-for-all like most open-chat trivia games. There are five rounds of five questions each, with the first three correct answers scoring points for their teams. At the end of each round, the team that scored the most points is eligible for a bonus question: if they get the bonus, the team gets more money, but if they lose the money is distributed to other teams that placed in the round. And the money is pretty substantial in Second Life terms: $10,000L is up for grabs in the game. That's only about $40 CAN, but it's enough to ensure the top trivia players all show up if they can. (Plus, as teams, they can gang up on each other! Rumble!) But even with the fierce competition, no one has to go home empty-handed: in an effort to keep lag down, avatars with an Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC) under 500 get $100L just for showing up (ARCs under 1000 get $50L).

The Buccaneer Bowls have been running since January 2009, with Lette Ponnier, Lillian Shippe, and Thornton Writer ably running the ship, herding the cats, doing all the logistics, writing the questions, plus conducting and scoring the games. The ninth and tenth Bowls took place in September and October, respectively—and they took place at a location near and dear to my heart, Jez+Sinn+Mandy's club [MonoChrome], where I host my Lou's Clues trivia game most weeks. The September Bowl was held in the Club proper because of a last-minute snafu with the planned venue: Jez volunteered the club when the planned location turned out not to be available. And it worked out pretty well–lag didn't seem to be much of a problem, so the Bowl came back to [MonoChrome] in October…although for October there was time to roll out a schooner (supplied by Karmel Kips, I believe) for the Bowl's nautical theme.

The Frivolous Corsairs in September:
me, Olmstead Fanshaw, and Rain Ninetails

During October, the Frivolous Corsairs fielded a team of three: me, captain Rain Ninetails, and special guest star trivia giant Olmstead Fanshaw. Unfortunately, Olms wound up carrying the weight (I was almost useless with a migraine) but we still managed to tie for a fourth place finish out of eight teams. The almost-unstoppable (but very deserving) Triviators strode away with the month's crown.

Frivolous Corsairs in October:
me, Rain Ninetails, Glimmer Mattercaster, and Lebn Bucyk

In October, the Frivolous Corsairs fielded a team of four: me, captain Rain Ninetails, trivia titan (and original Corsair!) Lebn Bucyk, and rising star Glimmer Mattercaster. And we did pretty well, managing third place out of (I think) nine teams again—BoomFireCirceSchism managed to come out on top as the champions for the month. It sort of seems to be the Corsairs' fate to be second fiddle when we do well: I think we've landed in second place three or four times, and we actually had a real shot at coming in first this month…at least, until I biffed a tie-breaker for the last bonus question.

Nonetheless, a fabulous time was had by all, and I'm already looking forward the next (the 11th!) Buccaneer Bowl! What's sort of amazing about these things is now everyone is on their best behavior, and while there are lots of japes and jibes and snarky comments, they're all made in good humor and everyone works to make the events a success. And of course, a tremendous thank-you to Thorn, Lette, and Lillian for putting these events on every month, and keeping the bar for quality and fun so high. Huzzah!