Relay for Life in Second Life 2012 ended with a donation total of $348,919.

And no, that's not Lindens.

I think everyone was pretty happy with the general outcome this year. While this year was quite a bit less than last year, repeating a donation of over a quarter of a million dollars is definitely nothing to sneeze at.


To all the donators, coordinators, committee members, organizers, builders and teams:

Thank you!


As I explained in my last blog post, I had been asked to bring back "Paper Boats in a Paper Sea" for the main Relay for Life event in Second Life. I think I under-estimated exactly how much it would take to fill 1/4 of a sim without making it look like my shop and art display exploded all over a parcel. I had decided to create custom content for the event. I also had to display the names of the committee members, somehow.

Since I had a strange corner parcel that worked best at a diagonal, I had to wait until I actually saw the parcel in-world before I could begin designing my display. I sketched my draft the day the sims came online.

I had 9 days to complete it.

Issues began cropping up immediately, importing sand sculpts. The technique I used for the Fantasy Faire display, for some odd and unexplained reason, was no longer functioning. Not that this is a surprise. We're in Second Life, after all. I ended up scrapping the sand and decided to just terraform instead. To make matters worse, the entire week we struggled with crippling lag and repeatedly crashing sims. A few times I had to retreat to my Home sim to complete assets and position objects because I could not do it on location.

Admittedly, most of the time working on the parcel wasn't creating content for it, or managing out how the interactive display would work. It was setting out all the bleeping grass. Grass, stepping stones, flowers, trees. Landscaping. At one point my two helpers (Iloh and Saikatsu Epsilon) and I did nothing for several hours but set out grass. The lag certainly didn't help. Eventually Iloh shoved me aside and decided to take about 75% of the gardening into her own hands, if not more. Thank goodness, too. She did a stunning job!

While I'd never seen Iloh do any landscaping before in Second Life, it was as if it came second-nature to her. With minimal instruction and critique on my part, she managed to help churn out exactly what I needed. It took a lot of stress off the fact that I was sleeping in 4-hour chunks and working in 8-9 hour intervals.


I made several clusters of stepping stones, customizable wooden signs and some of the most beautiful crystals in Second Life from scratch. All low-prim and customized Level of Detail for optimal performance. I coordinated the positions a few of my sculptures and my new Dancer's Triad. Rocks, plants, particle effects. The finishing touches on the installation itself. We decorated the seating areas with 'chairs' in the form of floating bubbles by HPMD*, and put out some of their wonderful trees and bushes. The crystals were a mad dash (I created them in 8 hours) but they were worth it. They definitely tied everything together.

The last object was placed at 5:56 AM July 14th. 4 hours shy of the start of the event.

Surprisingly, I managed to stay awake and coherent long enough to witness the opening of the event.

Then I took a 12-hour nap.

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