Back in June I visited an island created by the Mexican Tourism Board. They recently opened two more Visit Mexico islands that feature an array of activities to keep you entertained.

When I arrived, I was drawn to the sculpty single-use rental horses.



After riding around for a while I decided to try to find a hang glider that I had read about, but no matter what I did, I simply could not figure out how to dismount from that horse. I tried to detach it, stop wearing it, and even delete it from my inventory but there I was flying around while riding a horse.

When I finally did find the hang glider, it looked a little weird with a horse hanging off my butt.



I can't be certain, but I think it might have messed up the physics of the hang glider a bit. At one point I was upside down with the horse stuck in a tree - definitely "beyond my expectations" but I don't think that was what they were going for.



The build also features a zip line, from which you can enjoy vistas of the surrounding jungle canopy. Really would have been nice if I didn't have that horse hanging off my butt :)



The best surprise of all awaited me at one of the zip line transfer stations - animated sculpty monkeys!! I finally had to log out and log back in to get rid of the horse because they deserved proper photos.



There was a whole troupe of them on the ground by the river. There are some other jungle creatures there as well, but I won't ruin the surprise in case you want to go explore.

I'm a horrible blogger lately, but I did make some progress on Episode #2. This episode provides three tips that will make your videos look more professional.



You could also title this video "three pet peeves": the little things that you don't notice until someone points them out, and from then on, you will never be able to overlook them again. I got so tired of seeing these buggers pop up in my own footage that I actually taped a checklist to my monitor so I wouldn't forget.

Oh yeah, in Episode 1 I forgot to warn people that the "record" hotkey might be mapped to a gesture. I didn't really "forget" - it's kind of funny to think you are starting to film and instead bust out in some funky dance move :)

I'm ba-ack :)

The real world has been a beast lately, but I've also been pretty busy in the virtual world. My latest is an experiment that I'm calling "The Machiniminute". This series of minute-ish tutorials will cover the basics of machinima production. Enjoy !

Thinking I might score another shoulder pet, I sought out the second bottle type in the Coke Vitual Thirst promotion. The first location I tried seemed to have the first bottle, but so I tried the second location which turned out to be inside a Blaze store.



The lag made the puzzle a little more challending than the first one, but still finishable on the first try. Indicentally, the place was packed with Germans shopping for formalwear.



The "interactive experience" can best be described with video :)



After this, the "prize" portion, a branded kick scooter, was a bit of a letdown.



The site listing the locations mentions that the experiences and prizes are copy/transfer. It would really be cool if the experiences were copyable, but they aren't that I've seen.

Four months after the original promotion, Coke revealed the winning entry in their Virtual Thirst competition. There are three types of puzzle bottles scattered across the grid (you can find their locations here), each producing "a different type of interactive experience and a different prize".

I have only visited the first one so far, at which you have five minutes to rotate the pieces into position.



When you complete the puzzle, fireworks launch and a snow globe appears.



The snow globe contains some picture-worthy poses, although I'm a bit skeptical of "pet the penguin"



I watched them fish for a bit



And then they invited me to try



And then I climbed on the ice wall



This concludes the interactive experience (because it disappeared while I was writing this blog post). The "prize" portion is a shoulder-mounted pet polar bear. He's quite cute and has some good animations. I mentioned before that I somehow lost my pet cat - I hope this little guy does not suffer the same fate.

I found the Titanic (no scuba gear required)

Over on New World Notes I read about a new sim created by "a real world company offering actual ocean tours", and as a real world enthusiast of such tours I decided to investigate.

It turns out that "Dive" was created by PADI (the Professional Association of Diving Instructors) - an industry certification organization. In the main building, there is a tremendous amount of information about scuba diving, and down on the beach they are offering (limited quantities of) free scuba gear.



It became clear that the suit had too many attachments in the head area to support the Virtual Bailey avatar (I hate when his head disappears).



So I changed into my other main avatar and walked down the beach to the water. As soon as I reached waist height, my avatar automatically stopped walking and began swimming, intermittently dischanging bubbles from the virtual regulator.



The swimming motion, speed, resting position, and buoyancy all accurately convery a real world diving experience. There are plenty of underwater areas to explore, with varied marine life and even a wreck! According to the heads-up-display gauge, my dive lasted 17 minutes!