SL Relay For Life Sailboat Races

Greetings fellow SL sailors. The second annual SL Relay For Life will take place about three months from now, on the weekend of July 22-23. The SL Relay For Life is a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society (ACS) that is modeled on the RL Relay For Life, which the ACS sponsors in cities around the US every year. In RL, people form teams and walk as part of a relay for a 24-hour period. In SL, people will form teams and "walk" their avatars as part of a relay for approximately 12 hours. Jade Lily is the main coordinator, and she is working with Randal Moss from the ACS. You can read more about it at http://www.cancer.org/docroot/GI/content/GI_1_8_Second_Life_Relay.asp

Last year the SLSF sponsored a sailboat relay which took place during the main relay. In our sailboat relay, we had at least one sailboat sailing around a circular course at all times during a 14-hour period. Along with the non-stop relay, RFL participants could make a donation (in L$) and race a sailboat against the clock for the chance to win prizes. I made three special edition Takos for the relay: "Tako Belle", "Tako Yaki", and "Tako Schmako". We raised a couple hundred dollars for the cause (I can't remember how much exactly), and overall the SL RFL raised over US$5000, which I believe is still the record for a SL fundraiser. Go to http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/Default.aspx?Search=relay+for+life to see a bazillion pics of the event, including the sailboat races.

Jade Lily asked me if I'd like to run the sailing event again this year, and I said yes. Now I need to find people to help me. I still have most of the stuff that I built for last year's race course, including leaderboard and start line, but I'm sure we'll need new things built, scripted, textured, tested, and documented. We'll also need people to volunteer for shifts, both for sailboat relayers and for helping out people who want to race against the clock. I haven't thought about all the particulars yet, but we have three months to plan, so that's okay. It could be that we decide to run the sailing event differently from last year.

If you are interested in helping out in any capacity, please let me know. I'll put your name on the list, and invite you to a planning meeting in the near future. Please pass this information on to your friends if you think they may want to help out. If you want to help out with the main Relay, and not just the sailing part, watch for announcements on the Forum or contact Jade Lily or RC Mars.

I'll post more information to this thread as I think of it. Feel free to add your thoughts or questions here as well.

This is a cause very close to me, Kanker.

Count me in for anything I can do to help.

Kanker,

I'll help with it again.

I would love to do a shift. I don't have any building/scripting skills, but I can sail a boat. Um at least I think I can.

I'd be happy to help out with any scripting needs.

Count me in!

So I'm a little tired, my thoughts aren't quite coherent, and I'm not all that knowledgeable about Relay for Life. I have some ideas anyway.

I thought perhaps we could do a little more than a race against the clock. We'll have people wandering by who have never seen a sailboat in SL before, let alone sail one. Some might have sailed them, but never quite got the hang of the controls. This is a great opportunity to introduce people to sailing and give them the whole experience. The more we offer them, perhaps the more they will donate because we gave them something worthwhile for the money.

Some things we could offer:
- sailing lessons
- a class on how to modify the Tako
- a class on racing the Tako
- racing against the clock
- racing against each other
- displaying modified Takos in a boat show
- pirating
- a special version of the Tako

This will take quite a bit of organizing. Not only will we need to schedule people to sail the boat around continuously for the relay, but we'll need to have people willing to do the classes and lessons and schedule times for these.

We'll need people to help with the setup of the docks.

If we do a special version of the Tako, we'll need someone to design and script it possibly.

We need to know how donations will work as well. I was thinking along with donating to race, you donate for the classes as well.

For a planetarium project I work on, various donation levels will net you different items. Perhaps we could tier our donations in a similar manner and have various sailors donate items like sailing HUDs, clothing, mod boats... 100 lindens gets you a HUD, 200 gets you a shirt, 500 gets you the best mod boat ever. Something like that. I really have no idea what donation amount we should be asking for. I know for the planetarium items, we ask for a donation amount that seems way more than the item would go for regularly because really the idea is that you're donating, not buying the item.

I wonder how the promotion would work. Obviously there will be promoting for the event as a whole, but should we promote the sailing aspect in particular?

Any other thoughts?

I like it. Perhaps I could take SYC's Novice Lesson One and create a slide show dock side that our skippers could use to introduce visitors to the basics and take them for a loop. Uh, I mean take them for a ride. Uh, I mean. Well you get the idea.

I THINK THAT'S A GREAT IDEA. COULD YOU UPDATE YOUR SLIDES TO USE MIXED CASE IN THEIR TEXT? THEIR INTENT AND FORM ARE A REALLY GOOD TOOL FOR HELPING BEGINNERS OVER THE INITIAL LEARNING-CURVE HUMP, BUT THE BLOCKS OF ALL-CAPS NARRATIVE AT THE BOTTOM OF EACH SLIDE, UNDIFFERENTIATED AND UNFORMATTED ACROSS MULTIPLE LINES, ARE VERY DIFFICULT TO PARSE AND ALSO COME ACROSS RATHER INTIMIDATING TO THE UNINITIATED. THAT IMPRESSSION IS RATHER CONTRARY TO NOVICE-FRIENDLY ROLE THEY'RE INTENDED TO SERVE.

But adapting SYC's novice classes to run throughout the relay is a fantastic idea!

It would require modifying a Tako to let non-owners pilot, but we could even have the relay-laps incorporate taking new skippers out for coached lessons each time around, trading out coaches between laps with us taking the helm ourselves to sail solo when nobody's queued up for a lesson.

We could make the Official Relay Boat, the sixteen-hour job, be all sparkly and a special color or something, and lots of other boats could also be on the water as other people came out to practice, race, or just sail alongside the relay for a spell. Maybe set up a Tako rental/sales unit at the dock so novices could continue to practice after they've finished their personalised lesson in the Official Relay Boat, and donate the proceeds to the Relay for Life?

Regarding all caps: Let's see if others feel the same. Yes ALL CAPS are more difficult to read all things being equal. I'm not sure all things are equal when you have a smallish text area such as currently presented in the novice lesson. The all caps mode was chosen to increase visibility in what is essential a sign. But I am open to input. As I say, let's see if others have trouble with the caps.

As to ride along coaches with students: One thing I have noticed that creates a time bottleneck in the SYC classes is the time it take to instruct the novice how to create a second HUD and pass it along to the coach so that both can see the numbers. THIS QUESTION IS FOR KANKER: Is it possible to program in a dual HUD function where a non owner can click on a boat and get the HUD for that boat? It would save us a lot of time and provide a very necessary tool for teaching.

I don't have trouble with the caps, I simply don't like them. In my experiences across the world wide web, typing in all caps is viewed as shouting at the person. I know that's not always the intent--some people really just want their words to be more visible--but that's the psychological impact of the caps.

Since the chat feature will show the name of who is talking, if someone knows they need to listen to MarkTwain White, they simply tune in to any words that are preceded by the name. Or that's what I do, anyway.

I don't know why I never said anything directly to Mark about this before, because really it's... stylistic choice? Yet, I do have to admit there's the occasional conversation in-world where a couple of us will make the comment "WHY IS MARK SHOUTING ALL THE TIME?" Sorry for not bringing it up before, Mark.

But enough about that, I do agree that getting a HUD passed on to me seems to eat up time on a sailing lesson for some reason. This is mostly do to the fact that the person is usually wearing the HUD at the time, so can't pass a copy to me. Then I have to tell them to take it off, pass me a copy, put it back on... It seems simple enough to describe right here, but it takes a surprising amount of time to do in-world. I've gotten good enough at remembering to tell the person to take the HUD off before trying to pass me a copy. That seems to work well enough. The only way I can see to make it easier is if a passenger can ask for a HUD, skipping the part where they even have to ask for a copy.

i vote for all lower case and no punctuation on another note the hud issue is being looked at and could be resolved very soon

For clarification (Mark already knew what I meant):

The all-caps issue refers to the captions printed at the bottom of the slides, not to in-world chat or PA systems.

Okay, it's only been three months since my last RFL update. It's now two weeks away, so I figured we should actually meet to talk about what we are going to do for the sailboat relay. The meeting will be tomorrow (Sunday) at 1 PM-ish (depending on the World Cup final) at my dock in Gray. If you have some brilliant ideas about how to raise money, or just want to help organize and run it, please attend! Any questions?

Yeah... how'd that meeting go?

Right, so I found out how that meeting went in-world, so I wrote up a notecard about what ideas people seemed to have and what was needed to bring it all about. Anyone feel free to comment!


I missed the big planning session for the SLSF's Relay for Life, but the cliffs notes version tells me that we're working on four ideas:

1. continuous boat relay -- for the twelve hours of the whole event, we will have someone steering a Relay For Life boat at all times; much like people walk in shifts for the actual relay, we would sail in shifts out of a pool of volunteers

2. time trial -- like last year's RFL, there will be a time trial that anyone can attempt at any time. fastest time by the end of the night wins some prize.

3. lessons -- at scheduled times, there will be organized lessons for the masses; lesson style depending on the instructor volunteering at the time. as well as the scheduled lesson times, there will be some sort of lessons board that people can read at any time.

4. races -- at scheduled times, there will be the usual regatta fare for the masses; racing style depending on the instructor volunteering at the time. winners of each regatta period wins some prize.

TENTATIVE Schedule
July 22/23
6 pm -- SL Relay for Life Opening Ceremony -- no scheduled sailing event
7 pm -- lessons
8 pm -- regatta
9 pm -- lessons
10 pm -- regatta
11 pm -- lessons
12 am -- Midnight Madness -- no scheduled sailing event
1 am -- regatta
2 am -- lessons
3 am -- regatta
4 am -- lessons
5 am -- regatta
6 am -- SL RFL Closing Ceremony -- no scheduled sailing event

WE NEED VOLUNTEERS!
We need people to help run lessons, run the races, man the relay boat, donate prizes, whatever else I can't think of... When can you volunteer? What would you like to do? Let us know!

WE NEED REALLY AWESOME IDEAS!
Have one? We could use one. Wanna know my awesome idea? I told Kanker he should sell a special edition Wee Tiny Tako, to be used for the Wee Tiny Tako regatta at 5 am. Pretty awesome, eh? Only I was told it would be an even better idea to add "awesome ideas that you can impliment without further labor on Kanker's part."

If you'd like to know more about this event, please contact Kanker Greenacre.
If you are interested in helping with this event, please contact Pacifien Massiel.
If you would like to take over planning this event, please contact Pacifien Massiel. She will be your faithful lackey.

Well, I guess someone needs to speak up first:

6 pm --
7 pm --
8 pm -- Myrrh Massiel
9 pm -- Myrrh Massiel
10 pm --
11 pm --
12 am --
1 am --
2 am --
3 am --
4 am --
5 am -- Myrrh Massiel
6 am -- Myrrh Massiel

C'mon folks, sign up to run the relay Saturday night! Copy the schedule into your reply, add your name to the shifts you can work. IM your friends to do likewise! ^_^

6 pm --
7 pm --
8 pm -- Myrrh Massiel
9 pm -- Myrrh Massiel
10 pm --
11 pm --
12 am --
1 am --
2 am --
3 am --
4 am -- Pixeleen Mistral
5 am -- Myrrh Massiel
6 am -- Myrrh Massiel

6 pm -- (time trials, first lesson start at 7 pm)
7 pm -- Kanker
8 pm -- Myrrh Massiel, Kanker
9 pm -- Myrrh Massiel, Kanker
10 pm -- Kanker
11 pm -- Kanker
12 am --
1 am -- Kanker
2 am -- Kanker
3 am -- Kanker
4 am -- Pixeleen Mistral, Kanker
5 am -- Myrrh Massiel, Kanker
6 am -- (we'll stop after the last race at 5 am)

how do u gat into the world?

6 pm -- no sailing event scheduled
7 pm -- Kanker, Pacifien Massiel
8 pm -- Myrrh Massiel, Kanker, Pacifien Massiel
9 pm -- Myrrh Massiel, Kanker, Pacifien Massiel
10 pm -- Kanker, Pacifien Massiel
11 pm -- Kanker, Pacifien Massiel
12 am -- no sailing event scheduled
1 am -- Kanker
2 am -- Kanker
3 am -- Kanker
4 am -- Pixeleen Mistral, Kanker
5 am -- Myrrh Massiel, Kanker
6 am -- no sailing event scheduled

I'll see what I can do to help.

6 pm -- no sailing event scheduled
7 pm -- Kanker, Pacifien Massiel
8 pm -- Myrrh Massiel, Kanker, Pacifien Massiel
9 pm -- Myrrh Massiel, Kanker, Pacifien Massiel
10 pm -- Kanker, Pacifien Massiel
11 pm -- Kanker, Pacifien Massiel
12 am -- no sailing event scheduled
1 am -- Kanker, Svar Beckersted
2 am -- Kanker
3 am -- Kanker
4 am -- Pixeleen Mistral, Kanker
5 am -- Myrrh Massiel, Kanker
6 am -- no sailing event scheduled

I'd log in if I COULD and do my shift. but SL has other ideas...

It's the thought that counts, Pixeleen .

No one is sailing anyway. I thought I saw a green dot on the mini-map a little while ago, but it must have been a hallucination. On the plus side, lag has gone way down!