There are times when Second Life can be very much the time vampire. I pretty much wasted all of Friday evening auditioning gestures for the avatar. Big mistake. Nearly all the gestures put the avatar through some really undignified temper tantrums and gave off annoying sound effects, mostly sound bites from movies and cartoons. I thought myself better off without them.

Except for maybe “Dance Magic Dance”, by David Bowie, from the movie Labyrinth. It matches my character’s level of exuberance. It fits. Angels are indeed emotional creatures, capable of expressing joy at a lost sinner’s return to Christ, and Skye would be a poor angel indeed if he could not dance for joy.

I’m happy to report that I’ve achieved an acceptable halo of stars for my avatar, by uploading the stars in a Targa file with an alpha channel that makes all the space around the stars turn invisible. Then I applied the stars as a texture to the inside and outside of a ring primitive shape, which turned the ring invisible except for the stars. My halo is complete.

I’ve achieved so much this weekend, I would die a happy fox, If I died right now. But I’m not pushing up the daisies yet, so I press on toward putting a bear in that robe. Pantheris Mansala remarked that I learned more in a matter of weeks than he learned in two years. A great complement.

And newsworthy, too. If I had a TV news program on SL, I’d interview myself. I really would.