Further progress

Been making more progress on the new build thanks to Rosa and FireEyes :)

Rosa is handling most all of my landscaping and park related items, and FE helped me figure out how to not fall through the floor crossing the sims, and how to use a "Sit" script to make the bleachers a bit more functional.

The place is really shaping up!

A productive weekend!

Well, lots of stuff going on! I'll describe some of it here. EricAtRandom and Rosa have been building a wonderful Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy themed-build on some of our land in Embu. Starting this Thursday (hopefully!) we plan to start airing the Hitchhiker's Radio Series from the beginning. Each episode is a half hour, so we'll air two of them each Thursday until we either get tired or demand ceases. Why Thursday? Because I could never get the hang of Thursdays... Look for it in Events! Perhaps if interest is high we will also do trivia related activities during the show.

I had been thinking of going up to the next land tier level for some time now, provided I had a reason. Now, I do! I have been entertaining the idea of having a venue that split across two sims, to allow for 80 person attendance, for quite a while. This last weekend, Coal Nelson informed me of a great location where I could do so! So, I bought the land on Saturday. Yes, my butt is still a little sore from paying Anshe's prices ;) However, I have spent the last couple of days building a model of what the venue might look like. Checked it out with Rosa and Frogg and they seem to think it's pretty cool, so now I've got a good portion of the base of it built. It's going to incorporate the castle theme from Rosa's "Gardner Castle Stage" with my island deck build from Kelham! Look for more on this eventually...

Okay, have to run to lunch, write more later!

Another dull Friday

Ug, so here I am back at work on a day when most everyone I know gets to enjoy themselves in SL. Oh well, at least I can buy nice things I never have time to use :)

The only redeeming thing about today is getting to do our regular Friday show tonight. I always dread losing the time off to "work" at a show, and long for when it's over and I can relax. But... When I'm actually in the swing of playing, I truly enjoy myself... It's not just an act, folks, I really am having a good time up there. Knowing it's Friday and I have two days without my job interfering is a good mood booster, along with a nice shot of Bushmills :)

Added!

After checking out EricAtRandom's cool blog I figured out how to add my Flickr pics to mine too! The pictures at the top are the last ones I've uploaded to Flickr, including ones I take with my cell phone as I am out and about!

The Joy of Alpha Textures

Been messing with alpha textures and made this cute pic ^^

Turning the corner

Well, things are improving a bit on the SL front... Last night I sent a very nice message to the person who sent the email, and I hope that plus all the support from other caring folks will help him through what must be an extremely difficult time. This is why it is good to have friends. :)

Deep breaths

Okay... A little calmer for me now... I've been venting on some various message boards :D

Here's a picture somebody drew of my avatar I thought you all might like to see. Mouse Widget (in-world name) did it, and did an amazing job!

Man oh man

Just heard the latest news about the place I mentioned in my last blog post. I have a lot of conflicting feelings at the moment, but the largest one is sympathy. There are good people in the world, and you know when you run into them. The person who wrote me the email is one of the good ones, one of the REALLY good ones. These kind of people do NOT deserve this sort of treatment, and it absolutely sickens me what this good person has had to endure for longer than I suspected things were amiss. I'm not a religious person, but with God as my witness I will do whatever I can to keep the hounds at bay from the caring soul who has let me share a friendship with himself and what I still think of as the Friendliest Place in SL. I think you all know who and where I'm talking about. This place; this wonderful place for people to come to be free of the hassles and drama of SL, is important and extremely necessary, especially in these "one million user" times we are in. My heart is with you and your struggles, T, and I support you and the Place completely. The good things in life should be honored and encouraged, and this Place is a very good thing. I hope others are with me when I say "we will not go gentle into that good night!"

Blech, Monday

Ever since one of my best friends for 15 years lost her job at the place I work, Mondays have been worse than usual. In fact, most all the days at my job now suck. I haven't been writing blog posts because of my mood, but I feel I should at least put something out here to explain why. I've also worked here 15 years, alongside my friend, and now I just wish I could leave here too. The only happy thought I get from being here is that I will have the money to do the things I want when I leave. My friend appears to have been the only "real" person here. The rest are all just being nice. Oh yes, I'm the center of sympathy these days. And you know something? I'm the only one who has bothered to contact my friend since she was laid off. People ask me how she's doing, but more in a "how was your weekend?" way. They don't care to know, they just want to feel better for having taken the time to ask. It's all a bunch of self-serving bullshit, really, masked in a forced smile.

And the fun doesn't stop there... My two favorite places to hang out in SL are also not helping my mood any. At one of them, people couldn't care less if I'm there or not (by the amount of hellos I get, anyway). At the other, there's so much internal strife that it's threatened to tear it all apart.

Maybe it's just a Case of the Mondays, and the depression from being at a soul-sucking, non-caring company to waste 8 hours a day for a paycheck. Nah....

Sorry folks

Sorry, it's been a while since my last blog post... I was keeping up pretty good with it, then had to do that Tradeshow thing. Then, during the Tradeshow, I got a call from my very good friend at work. We've worked together 15 years and suddenly, without warning, they laid her off. So, I've been a little down in the dumps about it.

Did have a really good Lusk show for Michi and Liam on Saturday though, which I thoroughly enjoyed (and I think they did too!). Ask me nice in-world and I'll tell you where to listen to the MP3 ;)

Nothing special

I just wanted to show this picture I found on FARK today cause its funny :D

Show tonight

Just a quick note: Frogg and I are doing a show at the Sunset Arts place at 5PM (I have to rush to get home in time from work). Astrin will be playing afterwards, and there's talk of all three of us doing a collaboration in the middle! Be sure to stop by! :)

Tuesday fun

Hello there! Forgot to write yesterday so I'm writing today. Last night I went to a Ruby Tuesday's with my ex-roomie, that was kind of fun, except it was a 45 minute drive each way to it. Then, this morning, I run into him at the store, and he tells me he's calling in sick and was sick yesterday! Awwww man! I really hope I don't catch his cold after being in the car with him for an hour and a half. Especially since I am about to start my bookshow thingy in Portland from Wednesday through Saturday. That's a picture of some dude looking at the floor map I took at a show a few years ago.

But yep, that's right, no shows from me, and no Friday show! Well, unless Frogg decides to do one of his own, like I did... ;) I should be logging in from time to time, from the convention center, which has WiFi. I now have a laptop that runs SL, so hopefully in my off-times I will be scooting around being cattish :D

I don't really leave town until about 4PM on Wednesday, but I am still taking the day off work. Mostly to make packing and laundry easier, and not have to rush it tonight.

Metajams!

Morning everyone... I don't normally post on a weekend, but I'm still waking up, saw the link, and thought, hey! Nothing special really... Last night we had our "metajams" concert finally. It went really well! Such a big undertaking, two whole hours of simultaneous broadcasts (one musician collaborating with another somewhere else in the world). I have to say, it was ended up being pretty cool, and being a spectator for the other acts, you could hardly tell people were not in the same room! Komuso was in Japan, and he played with Frogg and I and a few of the other folks, from the UK, or Atlanta, or what have you. Just amazing, and a real treat to hear how people you've heard play solo would sound mixed with another person you'd heard solo. I think it's going to be the "next big thing" in SL live music :D Ricardo Sprocket would like to do some dual piano with myself and Frogg, and a few places have asked Cylindrian and Frogg and myself to do a set as well! I'm really looking forward to it...

Today I have a going-away party show at noon, a little help with Frogg at about 5:45 at Muse Isle, and then a 7pm show at the Gin Rummy, Danielle's place! Can't wait! Now, I just gotta wake up!

Yee! I got my shirt!

Wow, hope people don't expect this many posts from me all the time... But I had to show off my new shirt... Had it made at Spreadshirt. Woo hoo! Maybe I just love my av :D

I can't imagine anyone except me wants one, but just in case, here's the link to order one (it's high, like over $20 for a shirt, but I don't get anything from it, that's just what it costs from Spreadshirt).

Hmm, maybe I'll make a Frogg & Jaycatt shirt too! Would people actually be interested in that kind of thing?

And recipes, too!

I also really enjoy cooking, and you can see the "family recipes" here. Here's a picture of me and a friend making "Sour Cream Enchiladas". I don't cook as much anymore, since Secondlife, but having a laptop to carry down to the kitchen does make it feasible! I only cook things I can't buy. So, if I've got a hankering for a taste of something, and there's a store equivalent, I'll get it instead. But sometimes you just gotta make it to be able to eat it.

Flopsy's Big Adventures

Many people don't know that I have a little stuffed bunny that has been all over the world. Click here to read about his adventures! He hasn't had any as of late, but he did go to Japan (which is father than I've been).

Happy Friday!

I always love Fridays, for two reasons: Work is a lot easier to get through when you're thinking about two days off, and I get to play my regular Friday show with Frogg!

Just got up, getting ready for work. Stayed up way later than I wanted to last night, helping someone out with figuring out how to stream live music into SL. I got an IM from Teeple Linden, asking if I was available, about 8:45PM or so. I normally go to bed around 9:00PM (to get up this early). So I said, sure, and he TP'd over. Turns out he didn't just want to know how; he wanted to get it up and running that night. Also, turns out he's from Argentina and isn't the best a English or PC configuration. AND he wanted to stream from his local PC (where you don't have to rent a streaming host). He already had Winamp, so I led him through downloading and installing the Shoutcast plug-in and the Shoutcast server programs. Finally got them configured and got him to plug his mic in. I was sure it wouldn't work, because most routers need to have "port forwarding" in order to let people connect directly to your PC, but luckily his didn't! We finished about 10:30... Ug... Still, got it working! Mentioned it to Teeple, and got the response that I went "above and beyond the call of duty" :D Also, this guy could very possibly be the first South American live musician in-world! How neat would that be?

Oh, and get this... hehe Then he asks about how he can play with another musician. Obvious innuendo aside, I explain the bit about using two streams, then start realizing he's got someone in mind already. Thinking I'd probably have to explain this all again to a friend of his, I asked "Who is it that you have in mind?" and he says "u". LOL Me?! I told him, well, sure, mabe someday, but I've never heard him play, he's never heard me play (obvious, because he was surprised to hear I played piano). I told him to stop by the show tonight to have a listen. He wanted to jump in on a song, but I explained it doesn't really work that way, and that he should really practice playing in SL on his own, with some venues or something first. Plus, October is all booked up anyway (and we're only on day 6!).

Anyway, still waking up... Writing more when I get to work!

Slowly... slowly...

Taking a long time for work to be over, today... So, here's a funny cat pic :D

Why is it that the first half of the day flies by, then you just get used to having that free hour for lunch, only to be tortured by having to waste another four hours before you can enjoy that lunchtime freedom for another four hours, then go to bed and do it all over again? Wait, that's not bitter, is it..? lol

Yes, I'm a furry!

On Secondlife, I usually wear the avatar of a siamese cat, courtesy of Luskwood Creatures. As a little kid, I never cared much for cats, and preferred rabbits. I had an entourage of plushies I slept with, and eventually had the entire top bunk of my bunkbed all laid out with stuffed animals. Then, I got my nickname "Jaycatt". My first name is Jon, but I go by my middle name Marc. My father had a habit of calling me J. Marc. My family used to go camping a lot, and my father once mentioned that I had a habit of sneaking up on him quietly, like a cat. So he started calling me J. Cat. On one of the camping trips, we were at a hardware/grocery store on the Oregon coast called Coast to Coast, and they had a large display of "Johnny Cat" cat litter. He thought it was hilarious to dub me "Johnny Cat", and I fumed for the whole trip about it. After the trip, I still got called "J. Cat" but more in a funny way related to the litter. I despised it for years, until I needed a nickname for a BBS and was happy to have one. It's since grown on me, a lot, as you can tell! I still wasn't very fond of cats until I moved out of my parent's house and ended up with a pet cat found by one of my old roommates. Now, I love cats!

I never considered myself much of a furry person, until Secondlife. I was in a human avatar for about two days when I noticed that there were cat avatars to be had. What better way to use my nickname! I got one and started wearing it full time. Growing up, I was always interested in the anthropomorphic cartoon shows (even though my father called them "mindless cartoons" and ridiculed me for watching them). I eventually moved on to Tiny Toon Adventures, and after high school was enthralled by Animaniacs. I've always been a big fan of cartoons, and love anthropomorphic animals. Primarily because they remind me of the cartoons I enjoy, and plus they're just so kee-ute! Elmyra from Tiny Toons put it: "I love kittens, I love kitties, squeeze them all to itty-bitties!" I discovered the Lusk area soon after, and started hanging out there off and on, watching the avatars and chatting with the furs there. For the longest time, afraid of being typecast (or attracting what furs call "fursecution"), I would tell folks that I was just a guy in a cat suit. However, over the last few months from this writing, I have embraced my furry persona :D I've even started collecting furry comics, started thinking about going to conventions, and dreaming about one day owning a partial fursuit of my Jaycatt avatar. Hope that doesn't scare anyone off... I'm not into the sex thing (yiffing) in any virtual capacity, I just like the fuzzy wuzzies :D

I am a musician... No, really!

I'm also something of a musician, at least people seem to think so :D I think I play pretty well, but I don't consider myself overly talented (except in my own style). I started taking lessons around age 7 or 8. At the time, my sister (two years older than I) was taking guitar lessons. I really enjoyed the guitar, but I didn't want to always be worse than my sibling, so I took up my next favorite instrument: piano. I had already been playing with a fun little toy called the "Magical Musical Thing", which was sort of a Thomas Dolby'ish piano/guitar. The first songs I tried to learn were the themes from Tron and E.T., which I played with until I could get the melody down. My folks finally got me taking lessons from a wonderful lady named Crystal Mills (sounds like a brand of coffee, don't it?) . At first, I learned songs she wanted me to learn, but after a year or so she started asking me which music I preferred. I did focus on some classical music, but my sister and I had recently gotten into listening to the new style called "New Age", and I obtained some music books from the band "Mannheim Steamroller" who produced the "Fresh Aire" series (7 albums total as of this writing). This music became one of my biggest influences, and I still use a lot of the same chord patterns and techniques today. I took lessons up until I was about 16 or so, and then got bored with them and decided I would rather work on my own material. Who needed to learn music written by someone else, if you could just buy the album and hear it that way? I started writing music, for fun, after school. Wasn't much else I could do with an early 386, and I had recently discovered MIDI and tried my hand at multi-track recordings. A lot of my current music came from this period (Jazzanna, Contemplation, Reflection, Happenstance, and Jaycatt's Boogie). There are many others that ended up on my CD from this period too, that I need to relearn to be able to play live.

So, now I'm on Secondlife playing music. I played SL for about two months before I was asked to fill in during Frogg Marlowe's breaks. It got to be so much fun that I ended up doing longer and longer sets, until I eventually had an hour worth of my own material. Having the hour lets me do my own shows, which is very cool :D Frogg and I have also started collaborating on duets, which I really have the most fun playing. It's nice when the pressure is off and there's another performer taking up the slack if you hit a wrong chord or don't quite know what to do during a certain part. We now both have our solo CDs for sale (Frogg actually has two, the current one and an earlier one that dedicated fans should ask him about ;)). We're working on a CD containung our duets, but it's hard to find the time to record for it.

I love online chat!

I'm a big fan of online chat, from way back... When my father got our first 300 baud modem, I signed up with Compuserve and was enthralled by the "CB" radio section. With it, you could type and chat with people all over the country, for the price of a local call (and subscription, of course). I thought this was the coolest thing ever. Later, bulletin board systems took the stage, but since most of them only had one phone line, chatting wasn't an option. Then came The Sierra Network. It was primarily for playing games like Hearts and Gin, but there was a chat room where folks could gather and talk. I met quite a few people there and got completely hooked into online socializing. When regular internet access became popular, I joined up with Yahoo and visited their chats often enough to become part of a fun little group called "Bored @ Werk" (work was misspelled because it was a four-letter dirty word). That was a blast, but we all eventually split up. I then travelled to a spot called "Groupboard", which was a nice chat client, but also included the ability to draw on a whiteboard while you talked. Got to see some excellent artists there, and when you were bored, you could just sit and watch people create things. I've got a link for it over to the side, for folks who are interested. Back then, it was mostly a 20+ crowd, and we would stay up all hours chatting and drinking and hassling newbies :) These days, it is mostly frequented by people aged 12-17, and so I have pretty much stopped visiting. I guess I'm just not interested in anime roleplaying or the petty squabbles for power that age group tends to attract. Now, I'm on Secondlife, and it's what I had been looking for all along in terms of online socializing. I couldn't be happier!

Welcome to my blog

Hi there, my name is Jaycatt Nico. I'll start this first day in the blog to talk a little about myself. I'm not new to the whole journal thing; back when I was about 15-18 I kept a series of written journals that I occasionally look back on. Most of them elicit a "Oh yeah..." response from me when I reread them. Anyway, I'm on the computer for my job most of the day, and well, also at home, so I figure it will be easy to post regularily as long as I keep the link on Firefox's toolbar :)