Monday and Tuesday were difficult days for both myself, and Mari. It's hard to explain precisely what went wrong, but we can start with one event on Sunday night.
An innocuous post by one of the big kids in the group photo turned into a bit oh "an issue" on Plurk. A little quip I'd made last year about the big kids, calling us "Toddleedon'ts" (intended as a humorous contrast to the littler kids using a product called "Toddleedoo").
Seems that some people took offense to the term (the little kids taking offense to the big kids making a name 'for themselves' I guess?) And when the one girl posted her pic from the session, using that term again, well it set off more controversy.
I think the whole thing set us off on a bad foot the next day.
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Monday morning brought with it rain, and some severe technical issues. Thousands of particles per frame, a constant rain sound, and error upon error as our poor viewers (already struggling with the load of 'CAMP') began to fold under the pressure.
It was beautiful tho.
Mari bailed out on the day several times in frustration, leaving me with no one to shadow. That's not her fault tho.. it's how I am.. I have sidekick's disease or something.. I like having someone to follow.
I tried to get into things, but soon became frustrated that I wasn't finding the "badged" events. Some events at camp award collectable badges, some don't. If you don't do events, you can't earn badges.. but the ones that do aren't really advertized as such. One craft event might give a badge, one might not. Same with contest and action events. There's just no real way to know.
I ended up doing a few somewhat random crafting events.. being a builder, it's something I can do confidently, and I needed confidence boosting. I ended up taking a scuba diving event, and diving for pearls, then we went and made a necklace out of them (I'm not super thrilled with the result, but whatever). There was a fun event to decorate a sort of puny shaped plush animal, and I did it in photoshop. Unlike last year, this one wasn't a blatant MLP copy.
I missed a lot of events on Monday. The kind of day that Mari was having, I wanted to be available if she wanted to go do things. So I never got really IN to things. We ended up doing another picture frame crafting event. (I'm going to have so much overprimmed clutter when I get home).
Cabin Wars was some sort og "find the picture" game, ala "I Spy", and then we did a bonus round of "Bingo" much the same way. Find the relevant square on the board, and stand a player on it.
Prim dinner was served, and I had a bit of fun teasing Miss Jesie about her trying to kill me again (she had piloted our doomed balloon into camp). This time, her attempt at foul play was a dish full of strawberries. (I'm allergic to them in Real Life). After dinner, a storm came and went, and we wiled the time away with some ukulele playing in the cabin.
A late night session of Yoga came in somewhere there, but along the way, we picked up "the farters".. some of the TD babies think it's hillarious to trigger off loud farting gestures during yoga. the result? bunches of people were doing it, and then came the gasmasks, and they started passing around the gasmasks.
copybotted gasmasks.
I had to say something, and I did.. but it made me feel terrible on both sides of the issue. From the side of knowing the person who made that mask, andhow much it hurt her when it was ripped.. and from the side of not wanting to harsh on people who had no idea it was stolen.
If anything happened after that, I'm sorry to say that I really don't remember much of it. I know that Mari took me over to the place where I missed the "breedable sharks" presentation. I got the 'balloon mini game" thing and attached it for a while. But all too soon, the night was over, and it was time for bed.
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Tuesday. I'd ended up staying up way too late on Monday night, and I overslept my alarm by several hours. By the time I was awake enough to make sense of the clock, I knew I was already missing events I'd wanted to attend. I logged in as fast as I could, and flew over to where Yoga had already started.
I cammed in and grabbed a free mat, trying to catch up with the class. I didn't get a good deal out of it for arriving so late, but I left in good spirits. Mari had talked about the Archery event, and I'd been considering it too, so I wandered over after Yoga.
To say it was "Frustrating" would be as much an understatement as calling World War II "a disagreement". Technical changes to the Second Life engine have really damaged how archery systems work. Nowadays it's possible for an arrow to stop "feet" from the target, while still registering a collision. Combining that with a system made more inaccurate due to heavy lag, and you've already got a recipe for frustration.
Now add in the fact that the rules for scoring were not adequately understood by yours truly. And stir in a big helping of "my questions being missed/not answered by the busy/distracted counselor running the event." And just for good measure, sprinkle in some of the other kids getting annoyed at me for my getting frustrated.
While other kids got scores of "34", mine was recorded as "6" because I didn't know how the scoring system worked. I certainly had done better than 6, but no one was paying attention to the fact I was scoring incorrectly (and I did ask several times).
Oh, and let's not forget to mention that we were competing for a prize.
Finally I just quit and walked away. Put on my swimsuit and swam across the lake, then grabbed one of the swan pedal boats. I drove it around for a while, then contacted the counselor and apologized for getting frustrated, and for leaving.
I took my boat to find Mari, and drove it out of the water onto the land, and when I found her at the Archery range setting up a pic, I decided just to keep on going. Drove the boat across the bridge, around the canyon, and across the camp to the beach where I buzzed a group at an event that was just ending. That got a few laughs.
Mari was finished with her pic, so I went and picked her, and Nara up in the swan. Then it was more offroading, and back to the beach, then we started picking up more kids, as we tried to make it up to the top of the hill to the Mess Hall. Unfortunately, halfway up the hill, Mari crashed out, and my computer froze up. And by the time I recovered, it was time for another "Cabin Wars" event.
This was another on of those "not planning for lag" problems. It used to be, when a sim lagged, all the timers would slow down. So if you had to jump on a platform that only lived 5 seconds normally, you might have 15 seconds in high lag. These days, the opposite happens. If you only have 5 seconds, the timer will only let you HAVE 5 seconds.. but in high lag, it may take the server 5 seconds to acknowledge that you've landed, and jumped again.
The event this time was designed like a beanstalk. Hop from leaf to leaf on a spiral staircase sort of thing, but the leaves break off after 5 seconds. The leaves breaking off worked perfectly. The jumping part, not so much.
Mari came on again, but she seemed to want a break. From me, or from anyone, I wasn't sure.. but I promised her and myself that I would honour it when she asked for it. I ended up doing some more fishing mostly. Then Mari and I both headed for a thing called "WarBugs".
Warbugs are tiny little cartoon airplanes that can shoot each other. They're cute, and simple, but very hard to steer. They were fun once we got them up in the air, but oh how I wished the controls were more intuitive. Oh well, you can't have everything I suppose.
I had a lot of fun once we started shooting each other, and I'd definitely consider buying one of these planes if I had some friends to battle with.
Warbugs ended just as the Cabin dance contest was nearing start time.
Our cabin got together for one final test, and I was called on to replace the cloudy sky backdrop with just minutes to spare. One of the problems we ran into, this year as last, was that the whole thing was laid out by the Little Kids, and hadn't fully accounted for the big kids. So at the very last minute, our poseballs were burying us in the floor, and even as they were calling us down to the event, we were still fixing the poseballs.
This is a part of a much larger problem with the TD community in general, they have to a large degree, forgotten that all kids are not TD's.
Last years cabin dance off, I was the only non-TD in the group, and had to make extreme last minute changes to mod the costume to TRY and make it fit me.
To her credit, Sila (who made our costumes) did put the effort in to get the big kids matching costumes to the rest, but like last year, it ws a last minute rush of trying to figure out an alpha mask, and making default clothing layers to patch over places where the avatar was poking through the mesh clothes. Thankfully we managed to pull it off in the nick of time.
but it belies the root of the Big Kid/TD schism in the community. "We still exist. we want to participate. Expect us."
The dance event was ok, but laggy as all heck. when our turn came, my fears about Puppeteer not working properly in the lag were assuaged. Tho the set's transformation got a bit of an early triggering, and would have had greater impact had it been held off, the system worked beautifully, and it really wowed the audience as the junkyard set collapsed around us revealing a beautiful windlight sky and a dragonfly soaring into the clouds.
After our set, I'm ashamed to admit, I bailed out for some quieter time. Mari was again frustrated at the camp schedule being a mess thanks to the Dance off running over. Events she'd wanted to attend had been jacked around several times on her, and she was frustrated.
We found that one of her events had been rescheduled, and she was ble to get to that. I tagged along purely out of boredom. While Mari made a cool decorated "Camp Plate", I turned the plate parts into a pizza. I put 8 and a half slices of pepperoni on it, then decided to give it to Mari, hoping it would make her smile.
I was very surprised when Mari gave me one of her plates! It's rilly cute, I need to take a pic of it.
After that, we headed over to the trivia game, which was fun. I got a lot of questions involving Star Trek, Princess Bride, Geometry, and Errol Flynn. The team I was on didn't win, but I didn't care, it was a fun game.
After Trivia, we headed for the beach. Mari had some beach poses she wanted to try out for possible pics I guess, but we never got around to it. We ran into Isley.
We started talking about this and that, and Mari wanted to find those poses, but then she relogged and was gone for a long time. Finally, Isley and I got in a little boat, and we spent some time fishing until Mari came back online.
When Mari came back, we got together again, only to quickly find ourselves in one of Mari's airplanes.
And then I crashed out on a region crossing. When I got back in, the plane flying was over, and both Isley and Mari were saying goodnights. Which suited me fine, as I was an hour and a half up later than I wanted.
But, tis camp. And what good is camp if you can't share good times with friends? Even if they come late in the day.
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It's been a rough couple of days for me.. rougher than the above really explains. There have been a few tears shed already, and I know that things in my life will change again once camp is over. How it will change, remains to be seen.
I hope it's good changes.
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