Second Life Blog.

Second Life is an interactive online community in which people from around the world can communicate and interact with one another via virtual avatars (not the ones from the new movie). The site was started on June 23, 2003 by a company known as Linden Lab.

The community allows for a variety of activities to occur. Users can simply communicate with one another, participate in events, or even play a role in the virtual economy and buy and sell goods for Linden dollars. These Linden dollars can be purchased for USD (the dollar) or traded online. some users have actually made profits from the online community. The profits have ranged from anywhere around $10 to a few successful millionaires.

As of January of 2010, Second Life reported that the community had over 18 million user accounts. These accounts have contributed education, arts, music, and a variety of other concepts to the online community. The community shows no signs of slowing and is a popular social networking site in the online community.

Poem Post

For this font poem project, I was really hoping to achieve a basic understanding of how the presentation type could truly effect the message it sends across.

Because of this intent I choose a few lines from a poem that truly effected me. I choose the the first few lines from Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven". I choose this poem because it was the first poem that I read that really broke the traditional model of poems for me. So I figured it was only appropriate to use this poem for the first time that I wanted to brake the traditional model of using type.

The most challenging part of this whole project was trying to find the right typeset and the right positioning of the type set to accurately display the mood and emotions set by the poem. The only real way to solve this problem was to try, try, and try again. I had to go through countless combinations of using different font settings and font positioning to get a final result that I kind of wanted.

Despite the frustrations of trying to find the right type setting and positioning, it was very fun experimenting with the different kinds of font and seeing how they looked in different locations. This project is definitely a great learning experience and will greatly help for future projects.

Sadly, there is nothing I'm particularly proud of with this project. I feel as though I could have done a better job with it and that I could made it look better in the end. I wish I could go back and fix it up a bit, but unfortunately I cannot.

If I had more time for this project, I would have tried experimenting with more colors, layers, and filter effects. It would have been really cool to use some of the exquisite corpse techniques on this project, and I feel it could have produced a very stimulating image.

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With this project I was hoping to achieve the basic skills of being able to create and animated gif. To achieve this goal however, I had to consult my notes, the professor, and my reading materials many times. Also, I felt I had to study the poetry and Poe to see how a poem like like should be put into an animated gif.

The most challenging part of this project was to get everything to appear in the right place and to create a sense of timing. To do this I had to go back many times into photoshop and create and recreate gifs and images. The whole process was time consuming and offered up a bit of a challenge. However it was entertaining and i feel as though I learned alot from this project.

The thing that I most enjoyed about this project was gaining the knowledge to create an animated gif and the end result. It was very satisfying to see a final project that moved from still pictures. I would really enjoy creating another animated gif at some point.

What I am most proud of with this project is the final result. I felt that the end result was a good reflection of what I learned and applied to the project.

If I had more time I would have like to make the gif last longer and show more. I feel as though my gif wasn't fluid enough a final product. I would have liked more resources to make it more entertaining as well. But, if I get the chance to do this in the future. I will definitely take advantage of it.