Metaplace Update: Hillbillies Arrive in Metaplace!

Location: Tenchi's World

My Second Life friend Tenchi Morigi, also my "Mysterious Mentor" for class and frequent mischief-maker on this blog, made the leap to bobble-head land to create a Metaplace account.

Her first act? To make a trailer worthy of Pappy Enoch himself (who is off on work-release from the alien zoo where he's been held hostage, but that is a tall tale for another time).

Buying Stuff:
I had to one-up Tenchi, so I visited her world (I'm now a sixth-level Mad Scientist) and with 200 of my Metaplace Coins I purchased a bulldozer from the marketplace. Unlike SL, with its in-world shops and Web-based Xstreetsl site, Metaplace combines both functions in a marketplace that a player can invoke while wandering about. I guess that there are in-world shops too, but my travels have been limited so far.


Modifying an Item:
Pulling up the "my stuff" box, I placed the dozer on Tenchi's land. I've no idea if she gave me permission to build there or how long the object will remain. Then I used a "behavior tool" to add a few features to the vehicle.


It now wanders Tenchi's land randomly. It did not run me over, however, as I was secretly hoping, so I could yell mad-scientist dialogue into chat such as "Curses! The infernal thing will not bend to my iron will and superior intellect!"

Well, I could have picked the machine back up, but no hillbilly paradise would be complete without a demonically possessed "Killdozer," straight from the 1970s Movie of the Week by that name.

Intuitive Play:
The "scripting" of the object was instant and involved no Byzantine lines of code, something I despise in SL but am learning to do, reluctantly. In many other respects Metaplace is intuitive, but I still have to unlearn many SL habits. I can only zoom in on IggyO when I'm in build mode, but once I did that, when I returned to Play Mode I was still in a close up. This proved ideal for the shots I took for this post.

Coda:
Now that I've begun my career of chaos, I need a few items that may not be in the marketplace:

• Tesla Coil (for ambience)
  
• Giant Robot (for mayhem)
  
• Death Ray (ditto)
  
• Sniveling Assistant Willing to Rob Graves (for spare parts)
  
• Grant Money (for...well, every scientist needs that)