A Month of Chucking

This past Sunday marked the one month anniversary of the opening of the Chuckling Priestman Comedy Club.  In that short time, the Chuckling Priestman has gone from a non-descript empty building in one of SL’s commercial districts, to the hottest comedy club in SL.  Offering live shows 5 nights a week, with more shows on the horizon, we have very quickly become the place to go for comedy in Second Life.

New content at GAS … First Life, Second Life, Third Life, more

By Lyle Bateman
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

My comedy and geek sides have been meshing a bit more lately. About a month ago, I popped into Second Life again, after trying it a couple of times a year or so ago and giving up on it. At the time I first signed up, the interface was very primitive, and truth be told, I was never able to quite “see the point” of the game. However, as my comedy career has unfolded over the past year or so, I’ve been thinking more and more of trying to find a venue online where I can showcase some of my work. YouTube and MySpace are fine for videos, but there aren’t a whole lot of places where you can easily do a “live show” online as well as easily generate an audience for the show.

To read the rest of this entry, check out Geeks Are Sexy, at http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2008/03/18/first-life-second-life-third-life-more/

Swinging from the rafters, SL style …

There are obviously a lot of differences between doing shows for a virtual crowd in Second Life and doing shows for a real crowd at a place like Dickens, but one of the similarities is that you can almost always find some humour in the crowd itself. One of the things that makes SL unique, however, is that the crowd is largely limited only by its imagination, and I end up seeing a few rather odd things at my shows. The picture that leads this entry off was taken while performing at Last Laugh Virtual Comedy Club on Saturday night, and close examination will show three of my audience members hanging upside down from the ceiling. While I can’t say that never happens at Dickens’ shows, we usually don’t get people swinging from the chandeliers until well after the show is over, and more often than not, its comics doing the swinging, not the audience.

Laugh Lines Virtual Comedy Club opens with a bang

Last night I did my third show in Second Life, at the gala grand opening for a new virtual club in Second Life called Laugh Lines on the private island of Freeport run by Crusader Arado, who also MC’d the show. Salamander Maroon opened the show at 7PM SLT (about 4AM for her in the UK) and despite the late hour for her, she did a heckuva show, with an appearance by her new character, de-motivational speaker Gail Warning. It was probably a much better show than I could have put on at 4AM, so good on ya Sal. Next up was my good friend Chuckling Darwin (aka Derek Sweet), doing the longest set of his career to date, RL or SL. He had a great show as well, and we both agree that his material seems to work better in the SL environment than RL. I ended up headlining the show, as the 4th comic who was supposed to appear wasn’t able to make it, and I had a great time on Laugh Lines’ stage. Its taken a few shows for me to get used to the timing with voice chat in SL, and I still need to work a bit on my use of animations and gestures during shows, but I am finding SL to be a very unique, and very fun, place to do comedy.

Elron and Chuckling in SL

This past Saturday I did my first full show in Second Life. I have a regular gig on Saturday nights at the Last Laugh Comedy Club, and Feb 23rd marked the first incarnation of that. My good friend from Dickens, Derek Sweet, popped in under the guise of Chuckling Darwin, his SL persona, to help me open the show, and we ended up having a great crowd turn out. Derek and I both joked that the crowd at Last Laugh was about twice the size of what we often get in RL at Dickens or at the Laugh Shop, one of Calgary’s other RL clubs.

Elron Priestman performs in Second Life

When I first started in the stand up comedy thing, the world was a different place. The time was 1991, and very few average people even had cell phones. The internet was a small-time network that was hard to navigate and contained little content, and was over shadowed by “Bulliten Board systems” like AOL and Compuserve in the “online world.” The idea of bringing multi-media attachments to aid your comedy show was a virtual impossibility, with laptops whose harddrives were a fraction of the size of the RAM in many laptops today. In general, in 1991, doing anything other than standing on stage talking to the audience was a very difficult technical challenge, while today, the incredible increase in computer and communication power means that there are things we can do on stage, relatively easily, that simply would have been inconceivable in 1991.

In To Africa … a Computer Geek in Lagos – New content at GASlagos, nigeria, seismic processing, geeks are sexy

Its been too long since I wrote something for Geeks Are Sexy. I’ve been in a fairly non-geek period of my life recently, focusing on my stand-up comedy side rather than my techie side. In that spirit, I thought I might combine the two sides a bit with some (hopefully humourous) recollections of my life as a system administrator in Lagos, Nigeria from 1993-1998.

See the rest of the post at Geeks are Sexy … http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2008/02/16/in-to-africa-a-computer-geek-in-lagos/

New content at GAS … Earthrise …

By Lyle Bateman
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

I’ve been a space geek ever since I was an 8 year old kid, and spent a summer inside glued to the TV watching the Apollo-Soyuz linkup in in July 1975. I’m a little too young to have watched any of the moon landings … the last one was 1972, when I was 6, and at that time, our family didn’t have a TV set. But after catching the bug from Apollo-Soyuz, I spent the next few years learning everything I could about space travel and the Apollo program. Since that time, I’ve been a confirmed space geek, fascinated by any new developments. (continued at GAS)

Click here to read the rest of the article at GeeksAreSexy.net

New Content at GAS: In the Spirit of Gutenberg: Blogs and the Democracy of Ideas

I’ve added a new post over at Geeks are Sexy on blogging. Check it out … here’s an excerpt …

By Lyle Bateman
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

From a perspective of some six centuries later, it’s pretty easy to see the revolution inherent in the idea of movable type, and the printing press. Once a hugely expensive endeavor confined to the scriptoriums of only super-wealthy patrons, book production was suddenly a fraction of the cost.

Read the rest of the post at GAS …

Dark matter or dark confusion?

Awhile back, I wrote a couple of posts about an interesting observation from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory that seemed to indicate the existence of dark matter. The picture to the left is a false colour image of a collision between galactic clusters. The pink regions show jets of super-heated gas shooting out from the clusters, while the blue regions show the gravitational “footprint” of the clusters as determined through the process of gravitational lensing. This is seen as evidence of dark matter, because in theory, the gravitational footprint should match the “observable matter” in the clusters. Instead, we see a footprint that doesn’t match the observable matter at all, and supporters of existing cosmological models see this as evidence of dark matter, which doesn’t interact with other matter in any way beyond gravitationally and therefore isn’t slowed down by interactions with other particles. They claim this “proves the existence” of dark matter.