Behind The Scenes Of Tonights Show

Sketch Done after Show by Keiko Takamura

Thought you might be interested to know some of.. what happened behind the scenes leading up to todays Mega Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe Show. Firstly BIG thanks for all the guests who agreed to come on the show.

In a way Rose Borchovski and Keiko Takamura were hijacked at this show, but I wanted both of them on the show and the Emerald Team, we had prepared for them, and they both deserved to benifit from the huge exposure that this show got. To their credit they did not back down, and I think their interviews were wonderful.

About five weeks back, I decided I wanted to have the Emerald Viewer Developers on Tonight Live, why? Well the Emerald viewer had caught my eye..again. I had downloaded a Beta 64bit Emerald viewer for the Windows side of my Mac, that was essentially screaming along in fps for me. Now..I live very close to the City of Sydney but I get 5fps out here on the Beaches, ADSL, bad old copper wiring and 3K from the nearest Phone Exchange…and my Macbook Pro has again fallen behind Windows on frame rate for me. My Laptop has only JUST had its first birthday, when I bought it last year I had it custom designed with the fastest Graphic Card available on Macbook Pro. Being as I’m often in very overcrowded lag I needed it. I’d used Emerald before with varying results but this Beta download surpassed them all. (The download has since been recalled)

Obviously last week I noticed things in the Emerald camp started to break down, first the news about LordGregGreg leaving the team, then the latest curfuffle over the last few days. See Modular Systems website if you’ve been out of town for a while..

My COO and right hand girl, Bliss Windlow was basically doing what she does, she was schmoozing the potential Guests, Fractured Crystal the owner of Emerald was understandably nervous about appearing on TV in front of a live audience…and would only come on with Communications Manager of Emerald at the time Arabella Steadham. Which was all totally fine. As this situation hotted up over the last week, I was becoming nervous that they wouldn’t show up…we have had other guests pull out of our show for far less drama, when they felt not “up” to facing a crowd, (No names here..).

My fears were confirmed in a message from Bliss, Arabella Steadham had resigned from the Emerald Team, she won’t be appearing, Fractured would not come on without her..No Emerald Team Guests!!. So0000 we did what we always do when this happens, FIND a guest! hopefully to commentate and provide insight and opinion on the Emerald situation.  (As Keiko wonderfully sketched above) We never ever give up on a show! (Some of our dragged-on-at-last minute previous guests will attest to this!) Having sent out emails  to some likely victim…um I mean potential guests, I logged out to watch the ABC Drama for Sunday night viewing (yep we are a day in front here) thinking, “I can’t do anything untill the U.S gets out of bed anyway!”..(this was 4am U.S time) The iPhone started buzzing…hmmmmm

Bliss yells out from the email We have Arrabella!!!…and Jessica!!! I thought….we live to fight another day!

And….they have a big announcement, they want to announce it on the show!…I re-write my script another time…(I usually have a list of possible questions and the intros written to guide me in all my interviews). Then go to bed after the last blog post published at 12.30am…

7.30am..eyes open, reach for iphone…Holy Crap! Fracture’s resigned!…I have to rewrite my script again! before the show..bribe my hubby into driving my son to school, so I can read all the tweets, read the blogs the comments, and do what I need to do in situations like this..

We get to the studio to find out that some Avatars appear to have camped out there all night! reminds me of  waiting in line for U2 tickets…(not that I ever did that) The audience is talking on voice as I arrive and I hear Prokofy holding court, everyone has an opinion and lots of them!

On stage behind our large Lagg screen…I go to sit in my usual chair…even with the Lag screen up…I don’t tip right side up for quite a while..hmmm lagg is bad, and we only have 45 on the sim! We capped it at 73, odd number I know, but that’s what it was capped at, some time back, and we never changed it. Guests all arrived all suffering various stages of Lag..can’t log in…voice not working…and Emerald Team memeber Jessica Lyon notes the Sim is at 1fps….she is wondering how its managing to stay up! She also notes that there are several famed greifer types in the audience and one-day-old Avatars, some of who seem to be running attached mulitple replicating scripts…(excuse me here as I have no idea how that is done..or what its officially called) Our security guy SuperDave crashed as one by one all of us did, then couldn’t get back in…We had to restart the sim, and wanted to disable all the scripts on the sim including our group ones to see if we could stop the greifing. If that was not going to work, then we would close the sim blocking it off to all but a list of people who we recognised in the audience. People we didn’t know would be shut out..simple! We started compiling a list, of audience members…the problem is none of us could get to Estate Tools they were not loading or greyed out..

We started the sim, again…it crashed, probably as people tried to get in, and none of us with Estate powers got in…again the sim crashed…same story. Which is when we decided to flee…go to a secret location to film the show without an audience only the Emerald Team the other guests and our crew allowed in. Delinda Dyrssen tells me she and some others were being begged to allow some others to come, journalists and freinds…

During the taping, we had one of our team members relaying the chat from the Tonight Live studio where some 50 people were watching the live stream on our screen..and from the chat window on the live feed on treet.tv (that had over 300 chatters!) to me, so I could see questions coming through, joining the group chat was a nightmare for me in S.L the entire chat was blocking my screen with all sort of stuff… I beleive the atmosphere at the Tonight Live Studio was murderous, people wanting blood from our Emerald Guests….

The nice thing really, about going to the secret location, (despite the “Made For Television” drama) was the ability to relax to do all three interviews, without any fear of greif or disarray, we needed to do that.

Yes we broke all records for live viewership for any recorded show in Second Life, Wiz tells me we beat the last Phillip Linden Q&A broadcast last month, sorry Pip…I love you but…I will get the stats tomorrow some time, there were over 300 people in chat, and many thousands on the live stream.

The Emerald Team got to answer some questions from an “ordinary” user… Me…I had input from some of my team before the show, and Hamlet Au gave me the question about using a Real Life name for accountablity. The other  guests Rose and Keiko got to benifit from the massive audience, and although there were lots of people watching who just wanted to get to the Emerald Interview, I know lots of people took in their stories too, and will continue to, over the next week as they view the show on the website. (There are some great visuals during both other interviews you must see!)

Great work Treet.tv! and the PWP Team you all Rock! Treet were working overtime to save chat from crashing and oiling all the wheels..the new servers all up and running beautifully! The PWP team were position all over the grid helping out.

Best wishes to the Emerald Team, and Rose Borchovski and Keiko Takamura.

The video should be up on www.treet.tv web site in a few hours! The audio from just the Emerald interview is up allready.

Stay tuned for next week…with Carl Metropolitan, on the Scrapped community Gateway program..(Linden Lab scandle this time) and Musician Tribbs Nirvana, and Mitch Wagner for a perspective on Linden Labs new Fast Easy Fun direction and more.

Paisley