‘Stömol’: a machinima to be called cinema

UPDATE: Besides being on YouTube, the movie has been embedded in a post on What the Huck?, Huckleberry Hax’s own blog. As a full-length machinima structured, to a great extent, as a traditional movie (no judgement here, I just mean it more or less follows the tradition), science-fiction Stömol was released in a big event […]

And a UFO crashed in Second Life

The late 1940s and the 1950s produced a series of sci-fi themes in the United States that have spread and marked our cultural imaginary since then. It’s from those times that the most famous UFO-related case in history emerged: the Roswell Incident, in New Mexico, US, dates back to 1947. That’s the starting point for […]

Celebrated cyberpunk city 2019-XS reborn as Drune

Back in December and January, different blogs featured a futuristic, cyberpunk region in Second Life called 2019-XS. It was, some will have figured already, a tribute to Blade Runner, the movie by Ridley Scott which is set in a dystopian Los Angeles of… 2019. After a few posts on that great sim, though, the place […]

An ‘in silico’ experiment that faces the challenge of being viable

In silico is an expression that refers to computer-based simulations of biological processes, in contrast with processes in situ (in the places where they normally occur), in vivo (in live organisms) and in vitro (in closed and controlled laboratory environments, such as test tubes). In Second Life, it was the inspiration for the name one […]

From Blade Runner to Alphaville in a virtual cyberpunk city

I realized a couple of weeks ago that I hadn’t visited cyberpunk sims in Second Life for a while and, since the theme fascinates me, I decided to go checking them. I noticed, then, that though it has been out there for some years, I had never been to Mesa 5 before, and its structure […]

A biker in a post apocalyptic world

The motorcycle culture has penetrated the world of scientific fiction and has proved to fit very well in certain subgenres of it. Particularly, when I think of sci-fi and motorcycles, post apocalyptic and cyberpunk stories come to my mind – and I’m sure that other kinds of narratives under the sci-fi umbrella have incorporated bikers, […]

An alien visits a Japanese WWII battleship

Yamato was an emblematic Japanese battleship that ended up sunk by the American forces during World War II. However, for those who grew up in the 1970s and the 1980s, she was also the spacecraft that took Captain Okita (or Captain Avatar) and Susumu Kodai (or Derek Wildstar) and their crew to their adventures in […]

The funky end of the world as we know it

Tableau is a post-apocalyptic sim in SL – but a very particular, funky one. The story it tells, which can be found on a sign on the top of a mesa that rises lonely in its landscape, explains what I mean: it seems that the desert resulted from the war between fashionistas and blingtards in […]

When architecture beats gravity

“Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity.” Renzo Piano Back from my vacations, I recently had to build a new house for myself – my first mesh one – and started thinking of the ways architecture has been following in Second Life. Not that I’m a creative […]

A cute place

I don’t know much about the Japanese culture, and I know less about Japanese aesthetics. Still, I’m going to risk and state that D-Lab store in Second Life and its sim have a lot to do with the kawaii trend, under some steampunk influence. Notice that I’m not implying that the owner of D-Lab, dazai […]

A 4D experience: The Crooked House

The Crooked House is another classic in Second Life. I will summarize its story here, but my point is to look further into the ways and means of a 4D simulation in a virtual (3D) world. If you want to read further on the house itself, you can check the excellent description of it and […]

The forgotten land of automata

The Forgotten City in Second Life is a “light” steampunk sim, largely based on the romanticism evoked by automata. Its presentation says: “A once-great, clockpunk-ish city where the prosperous residents were served by the miraculous mechanical automatons. The people have long since disappeared, but the automatons remained – and still take care of the crumbling […]

Visiting a post-industrial dystopia

“There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die while their minds were still clean.” ORWELL, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Science Innovation Company, S.I.C., is a classic […]