FRAGILE NOTES

It falls short of fact when a band member and/or songwriter tells the world that their latest CD or song is fantastic. Roll your eyes and begin to get skeptical i say. And should you read anywhere in this post any hint that the guys just had a whole lot of FUN recording this, or that we have gone back to our roots to create magic. Then i say switch off. Tune out. Throw up.
This song, Fragile notes, is the latest song written by Experiment and Bright. Mostly the beautiful lyrics from Experiment's hand, and mostly my music. It took a month or so to finish because after i recorded the first demo of it Experiment had some different ideas for the phrasing of the song and it took me some weeks to get the original phrasing out of my head so i could sing it without reverting to the earlier version.
I believe this is some of Experiment's finest work and i am sure the song will fit wonderfully into many of our gigs in SecondLife. May you especially enjoy the lyrics, below, and also the song. Click on the title of this blog entry for a link to the song. I hope.
Hugs.
Bright

Fragile Notes

Words Are Falling From The Sky

Like Tears Upon The Stage

Thoughts That Lie Beneath Life’s Dust

Escape Onto The Page

i Take My Heart and Lay it Bare

With Fragile Notes, Upon The Air

My Winter’s prose, Turns Into Prayer

Never cry,  For I’ll Be There (i'll be there)

Salt Adorns His Tired Eyes

Like Rust Around His Heart

Mem'ries Made of Broken Glass

Reflections From His Past

Hear Soft Voices From My Soul

With Stories That They'll Leave

I Take The Feelings From My heart

Place Them Gently at Your Feet

Paper Blank With Written Words

Yet No Words Can Describe

The Music Weaves Itself Into

A Love I Cannot Hide

Take My Heart and Lay it Bare

With Fragile Notes Upon The Air

My Winter’s prose Turns Into Prayer

Never Cry For I’ll Be There (i'll be there)

It's Not Time To Let it Go

Though The Winter Winds of Age Blow Slow

And I’ll Be There For You

It's Not Time To Let it End

For The Winds of Age Won’t Let Us Pretend

But I’ll Be There For You

It's Not Time To Watch it Go

Though The Winter Winds Will Let Us Know

And I’ll Be There For You

Incredibly 150 songs

Hi folks. The SOAR song TELL ME ABOUT TOMORROW is about to become the 150th original song sung by SOAR in SecondLife. It is a song especially for anyone who has ever wished for just one more day with a parent.
Clicking on the title of this blog, and/or the following link will take you to where you can listen to it.
http://www.box.net/shared/490fjumdk4n445s3dyd2


Warm hugs
Bright

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

Um yeah - i've been missing from my blog for like ages. It has been such a busy month that some things were bound to fall off the bottom of the list. And did i mention the weather! LET THE SUN OUT! And quit it with the wind already.

And now - to some brief updates.
The Colour Factory. Rebuilding is going GREAT and maybe this Friday we will be able to reopen for shows. The Friday after for sure :) It is sweet as. More info as soon as it is finished.
SOAR Gig Schedule. As most of you would know Charles is just back from a family holiday in New Zealand, and Experiment is unable to do our full schedule of shows for the time being. This means that there will be a few more SOAR shows done just by me, Bright, or Charles and Bright. We will be sure to advertise the shows we do each week with all three of us so you can get your full SOAR fix then :)
New videos. Never ceases to amaze me the sweet things people do for SOAR, unasked. This week it has been a handful of new youtube videos for some of our songs. Thank you SO much for doing these. HUGS. They join other beautiful videos done for us in the last couple of months. HUGS for you people too :) These are most easily found by going to www.brightoh.com and following the links.
New songs. Well write songs is what we do :) and we are up to 22 new songs written this year and debuted in our shows in SecondLife. And there are more to come, hopefully. A couple of the new song covers are included in this blog entry.
Blog threads. Before my month off from writing this blog i had begun a number of threads that i intended to make regular features. I will get back to these shortly :)

As always, from the boys in the band, and Mari, thank you all for the joy and friendship that you bring to our lives, and for the reasons you give us to write songs. BIG HUGS
Thanks for reading
Bright

A GOOD CRY NEVER HURT ANYONE

This is so very heartwarming, and wrenching.
A life you couldn't imagine.
Talent that you can't buy.
Humility to put me to shame.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BewknNW2b8Y&feature=share


Enjoy all that this man and video are straight from Korea's Got Talent.
Hugs
Bright

SUPERMARKET TRICKS 101 - packaging

Yo! I love shopping at a supermarket. Well, overall, as it is contingent on parking and queues. But something puzzles me. A lot puzzles me. So one by one i am going to go through some of the tricks supermarkets play on us and you sweet people will let me know if i'm missing the meaning of life in all this somewhere.

Let's start with a simple one - as i was only very recently enjoying a cheap garlic bread from my local supermarket. 
NO NAME ITEMS. That's pretty much the generic name for low cost versions of any product. There are no name versions of a big range of stuff too. The word on the street outside my local pizza joint is that the goods in the no name packaging are often exactly the same as in normally packaged/higher priced versions, and that they are made on exactly the same production line in many instances. So how do supermarkets justify having different lines of exactly the same product i hear you ask, well in some instances they do annoying stuff to put price conscious people back in their rightful place in society. My fave is milk in cartons.
What happens if you buy the cheap milk is this - when you pull on the tab to open the container of milk it either doesn't work at all and snaps off in your hand, OR, it comes off so easily that you aren't paying attention, and you lose a quarter of it on the floor, the bench, the carpet, the table, your dress or your jeans. But, that is supermarket revenge delayed, and supermarkets want your trauma at having the audacity to buy the cheap milk to also be immediate and public. This is how they do it. Implanted in the barcode of the item is instructions that checkout aisles can read and the checkout assistant goes into annoyance/embarrassment mode - time to change over till - person before you appears to forget their CC pin - printer roll on the register runs out - person in front of you insists on finding the exact 98 cents in the bottom of their bag.
You know this is true.
You only don't know all this is true if you've never bought a no-name item :) Personally i can recommend the garlic bread :)
Okies on with my day.
Thanks for reading. I would love to hear your stories too!
Hugs
Bright

Adventures in the METAVERSE 1 - Alternatives to SecondLife

Yo! I love this topic. In all the time i have been in secondlife (SL) i have been aware that there were alternatives to SL, but whenever i tried to open the door to them they were closed. I tried left-click I tried right-click. I gave up. It was clearly a place for nerds and linux types :) and i went back to the wonderful world of SL. And it is truly wonderful.
Recently more of my friends have been muttering alternatives to SL noises - in particular Inworldz and Avination so i have been looking around again. This time i found at least some of the doors open and even welcoming and i want to tell you about them - just in case you are in anything like the same position as me on all this stuff - curious and interested, but lost. It will be inaccurate and your worst source of definitive information so don't feel bad about stopping reading as soon as you start slapping your forehead with the palm of your hand :) And i will break all this down into easy to chomp morsels, always from the perspective of someone who knows SL and is curious about alternatives.


CONCEPT. Best place to start is prolly with a definition of the Metaverse from wikipedia - the Metaverse is our collective online shared space. The term was coined in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional space that uses the metaphor of the real world. Cool! I see where SL fits into this then.
WHERE DOES SL FIT. It is just a part of the metaverse. Keep imagining that the metaverse is a virtual real world, well then SL is like a continent on that real world. This means that there is a lot of space for more secondlifes. And there are.
WHO OWNS IT. No-one owns it. You can create your own part of the metaverse OR you can attach yourself to parts of it created by other people - such as SL, Inworldz and Avination (and many others). It can be very cheap (host your own virtual world on your puter) or expensive (own an island sim in SL $295/month).
DO YOU NEED SL TO ENJOY THAT PART OF THE METAVERSE. No. Plenty of other places do pretty much what SL does. However, depending what makes up your enjoyment of SL you may find that no other place does things as well as SL. So i'm not trying to find a replacement for SL, i'm just trying to add expand my metaverse.
WHY THE HYPE ABOUT SL THEN.  SL do this part of the metaverse better than anyone and they are the biggest by far, and were for a long time and for a variety of reasons (not all bad) in a monopoly position for people like me wishing to explore the metaverse.
WHY THIS WHOLE THING IS CONFUSING. Same reasons as the real world. Why dont PCs and Macs talk together better. Why isn't their just one generic phone and computer recharger device. Why are some avatars gorgeous like me and other like Experiment and Charles just plain ugly? Because there is a battle for control and fame and fortune going on in the metaverse just like there is in real life. As wonderful as the internet is some of the exploitative parts of the capitalist model in real life working against real people, in particular lack of competition and monopolies, are at work in the metaverse. Many people are trying to nail down a part of the metaverse as their own and try and turn it into their own fat cash cow. DON'T LET EM. As much as i love ebay and amazon and google and apple and secondlife and facebook and twitter etc, we will all be better off when their is true competition in the parts of the internet that they dominate, so that they will continue to innovate and provide good value for the consumer.
CAN WE JUST BE CONTENT WITH SL. Sure we can. BUT. Linden Labs are controlling your experience of the metaverse (as is their right) when you choose to be in their part of it, SL. But, they do control you. They could let you teleport to inworldz and avination and a thousand other places if they wanted to. They could let you have 45000 prims instead of 15000. They could let you make a prim 256x256x256 instead of 10x10x10 if they wanted. They want a closed metaverse where they own your avatar, where they control what you can do with content created in SL, they want to promote their own currency and establish an economy free from true market forces (read this as inflate the value).
WHAT ARE WE TO DO THEN. Well my answer to my own questions is just to widen my experience a little. There are open source worlds out there, fledgling SL's, indie SL's and they all have something to offer in  expanding your experience, and freedom of experience, in the metaverse and that is just what i am doing. I love and admire the vision of LindenLabs and SecondLife and never want to leave it, but the anarchist in me doesn't like to be controlled and manipulated so i'm off to explore.
Remember back at the start of this topic i said that i now felt that other doors to the rest of the metaverse were opening, well that's what the next post in this series will start to explore. Maybe, like me, you will be pleased to find them open now.


Thanks for reading.
Bright.
Hugs.

LOVE WINS - If I Could Wish

LOVE WINS is the second song written as part of our LOVE LETTERS from SECONDLIFE happening in secondlife (SL). The lyrics started out as a letter dropped on the grounds of the Colour Factory in SL waiting for a reply, and in this case, a song.
The letter/lyric has already received its first reply and you can read this on the loveletters website and in the loveletters conservatory at the Colour Factory. Puff.
The song cover for this song was adapted from a wonderful photo taken by our friend Lucky Trouble - you can see her work on flickr. Thank you Trouble :)
Click the TITLE of this blog entry to go and have a listen to LOVE WINS. 

If i could wish upon a star

i'd wish a dream upon your heart

I would paint i would sing

i'd throw caution to the wind

If i could take you anywhere

i'd take you everywhere you've never been

the pyramids the eiffel tower

to the other side of the moon

If i could tell you anything

i'll tell you why you're my everything

you are pink and i am blue

but on your own you changed my world

If i could write i'd write to you

i'd share the wonders of loving you

you are spring and i am fall

but with you i have it all

If i could buy you anything

I'd buy the house that you adore

we would love and we would live

there together for evermore

If i could change one little thing

i'd make the world a smaller place

so i could walk right to your door

from the other side of the world

Chorus

Because love wins it's everything

and i'm nothing if i cant tell you every single day

no other thing makes me sing

with all the joy your love gives me every single day

Hugs

Bright

Between mist and snow, my friend the rain.

Just can't imagine a world without rain so i just wanted to write a post to the rain to let it know. This post is the first part of my blog series - WHAT I LOVE.

I bet it rained quite often, right up to the time i first started to notice rain. I remember swimming in a river, a calm still river, and stopping and stalking it like a crocodile with my eyes just above the water level, watching big drops of rain splash into the river just inches from my eyes. And umbrellas! man they are fun. They don't always work that well but who doesn't enjoy walking in the rain under an umbrella - even just a bit - until your hair goes frizzy. I like your hair that way - honest. And then there was driving in the rain and being hypnotised by the windshield washers - you know the noise they make - unless they don't make that noise on fancy cars :) And sometimes on long country drives when it started to rain heavily i would pull over to the side of the road and just sit there listening to it beat down on the roof. 
And a house with a tin roof!!! They are the bomb! You ever really listen to the sound of the rain on your roof - how it transmits every slight variation in the intensity of the rain - how you can hear and follow the passage of the wind as it first eases off and lets the rain fall more directly onto the roof but then as the wind increases the intensity of the rain flows and cascades over the roof. 

Who never imagined and who is yet to find out how sweet love making is under a tin roof, or on a tin roof - erm, i digress :)

Some people live in places where it rains a lot and some in places where it hardly rains at all. Some people live in places where it only rains in the monsoon season and others where it only rains in winter but everyone has something in common - we all know when the rain isn't what it is meant to be. I have friends who live where it rains on lots of days during the year, and when it does it rains lots, and they have rich deep soils that soak up the rain so that every tree and grass and root and flower and pumpkin patch is happy any time of the year. I have other friends who live where the cycle of rain and growth is more pronounced, where grass begins to grow after the first rain in early winter and ceases when the rain stops  for the year sometime in early spring.

One thing people all around the world know is when the rain isn't the way it usually is. Too much and floods rip across the landscape - too little and dams and streams and water holes begin to dry up and the scourge of drought on all living things begins to take it's hold.

And so rain, you are on my list of what i love. On the list of things that i will tell martians about when they arrive and ask me what is so special about this place our earth. I will always notice you and miss you when you are gone. You, can rain on my roof anytime.

Wanders off to check the rain gauge :)

Thanks for reading folks.

Bright

FACEBOOK ME erm ADD ME erm JUST DO SUMFIN

OMG!! Twitter has been a HUGE success so far. I have 8 followers and i'm following 19 people - hehehe. I have a young niece who was giving me the low down on twitter the other day and her explanation of how to do it and to judge how well you are doing it, went like - she is following Britney Spears and is on of 17,ooo,ooo doing so. Britney follows 70,000 people, and my niece is one of them. Her point is clear - i am a twitter loser :)

So here is the thing - Britney!! follow me and i will follow you, It's all up to you pumpkin.

Oh yeah, the reason for this post. I can never have enough friends :)

Tweet me at BrightOh1

Add me at FB Bright Oh

Thanks gang

Bright

Celtic Amazon Warriors Hunt For Life

The Colour Factory is happily following up its involvement with Relay For Life (RFL) at the Fantasie Faire with our inclusion in the HUNT FOR LIFE. Here's the goss on it :)

The Hunt for Life is a Fantasy/Roleplay themed hunt with awesome stores taking part and fantastic prizes! The Hunt for Life is being run as a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society through the RFL in SecondLife.

The hunt runs from May 16 until July 16.

You can read the Hunt blog - just look for the link in the right hand column.

The vendors used to accept donations for the hunt huds are provided by the RFL SL group which is a BBB accredited charity - www.bbb.org/

More information about RFL SL - www.relayforlife.org/secondlife

All hunt queries to Mairearad Islay in SL or via her hunt blog.

Checks Bright's picks in SL for a landmark to the hunt HQ in SL (for purchase of the hud to use in the hunt etc)

Thanks for reading.

Hope it's a great event for you Mairearad :)

Bright