Author Nara Malone

Opensim Has Lost Its Anchorman

admin — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 21:58:10 +0000

Mal was the voice of Opensim.

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Cook Naked: Celtic Feast of the Waxing Light

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 00:00:53 +0000

Happy Imbolc ! This post was originally a character blog from that beloved fictional Chef’s of the romance world, The Dungeon Gourmet–Jacques Bond. I’ve managed to recover access to our posts at the old Passionate Reads archive and this one celebrating Imbolc is just the right thing to share today. Enjoy: From the Dungeon Gourmet February, she is the dark heart of winter. It is easy to go flat, blah, and feel like the sun will never be back. The wait seems endless when we’re shut inside with the ice storms and howling wind rattling the windows. Have heart. We are at the turning point, yes? The light is on the way back. Today we celebrate the waxing light, the returning sun. Let’s use the day like a good spice to kick out the winter blues. Even us kinky ones get weary and flat and have no energy as the winter grinds on. Now in the dungeon world, festivals of waxing — celebrated with candles — this makes our hearts leap. So, today we talk about how to take the simplest thing and bring it to life with the unexpected. Let’s start with the name. Here in America you call it Groundhog Day. Mon Dieux! Rodents are not sexy, mes amis. I suggest you go back to the old ways, the Celtic Feast of the Waxing Light. Wax is sexy. Candles are sexy. Groundhogs? Mon Dieux. So, to the feast. In the old times, cupboards went bare this time of year. Some flour. Some sugar. It’s hard to make a feast. Small wonder we celebrate the feast of lights with pancakes. The round cakes were cooked to golden, little gold orbs to honor the sun’s return. I know you shrug. You think, blah. Only blah if you choose, mes amis. Only if you choose. It is true of cooking. It is true of writing. It is true of love. There is always a secret thing, a little something you can add to turn ho hum into mmm. We keep it simple, because who has the energy for lots of ingredients and sifting this into that. So, take an ordinary box of the pancake mix you just add water to. Here is the secret: don’t use water. Use eggnog. You can get the ready-made. No need for big troubles here. And really, here is the other secret, that eggnog taste comes from the spice, the nutmeg. If you want to put milk instead of eggnog, you could. But, no skimping on the spice. Get whole nutmeg. Ah, the scent of the nutmeg when you grind. You breathe and you taste it. This alone will chase some gray from your day. You don’t need a fancy nutmeg grinding tool. A little Microplane® like from your tool chest would do. Handy little toy. Keep an extra one in the toybag, a little lover’s footplay and peppermint lotion…sigh… Sorry. My mind wanders. So, I like to put the nutmeg, just a sprinkle on top, after I pour batter on the griddle. What is it about watching hotcakes on a griddle that soothes a Dom’s soul? And the scent of the nutmeg as the heat reaches them is heaven. It is supposed to be an aphrodisiac, the nutmeg. I believe this. Yes. I believe. When the cakes are just right, turn them. Make a big platter filled with cakes. This is a feast. Now we have one more ho-hum to bring to life. The syrup. Get real maple syrup. We splurge here, but even so it needs more. It needs something to make the eyebrows pop up on the first bite, yes? Bourbon. Warm the syrup, then add a splash of bourbon. You will know what’s right. To your taste. This little nip will warm her right to her toes. No Popsicle toes in the bed tonight. Now fill your plates, light candles, look across the table into your lover’s eyes. Winter is for loving, yes? Get extra candles, mes amis. They make good play when the meal is done and the feasting begins. The scent of candles, the sound of the match strike, drips that fall like velvet rain on your lover’s body, her sighs. Welcome the sun, mes amis, but embrace this last bit of winter together. ~Bond The Dungeon Gourmet

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January Goal: Repurposing Mistakes that have no Undo Button

admin — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 18:16:08 +0000

I’ve always been a little afraid of the Blender 3D modeling software. My early attempts at figuring out how to use it yielded masses of self-replicating windows. But the software has evolved into something a tiny bit more intuitive. It’s actually possible to turn out something reasonable in under a month. That was the goal I set myself at the start of this year: make a gingerbread boy and rig him to bring into a game engine. Which I did. But the result was not quite the AAA quality I imagined. He was just awful enough to be awfully cute, so instead of trashing him I used him in another learning project I had going for January: Learning to make animated stories and launching a Next Dimension Tales YouTube Channel. That probably wins the impossibly unrealistic New Year’s goal category. And yet, I’ve managed to create Both the channel (with help of other Nara’s Nook members: Shannan Albright, Siobhan Muir, and Dorena Bree) and some small video stories. While I still have a long way to go learning both Blender and animated Storytelling, I made a start and met some goals. That’s not a bad way to close out the first month of the year.

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The Small Creators Great Twitter Migration

admin — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 00:30:36 +0000

Plumbing Issues are for the Birds It’s been a crazy couple weeks. Right after this weird dude showed up at Twitter with a sink, my hot water heater at home blew up. I did that whole thing of mopping up the water with stacks of towels, hauling out the old heater, and ordering a replacement. Only instead of replacing with the same old thing and looking at having to do it all again when a new tank outlive it’s life, I decided to try a tank-less water heater. Hopefully the upgrade will prove satisfying. I logged back into Twitter. Looks like the new plumber is really crap at his job and Twitter pretty much blew up. I’ve been using Twitter for 15 years. I followed character tweets and ARG clues from Twitter users when the site was new. When I had my first book release back in 2010, I didn’t have internet service out here in the sticks. I went to a beauty shop in town and let them smear glittery purple goo in my hair and do a bunch of other stuff so I could hook up to their internet and tweet and blog my first book release. So many tweet memories. It’s hard watching friends fly off and seeing Twitter implode. Interesting that Facebook and Twitter are in their death throes at the same time. Clueless billionaire boyz wanting to be cool kids have royally screwed up things for the small creators and businesses that have grown to depend on these resources.. Doesn’t matter. Social media will eventually remake itself, an upgrade into something more distributed and diverse. It’ll be harder to silence the next wave of indie thinkers and artists.We’ll let new ideas, on how to go forward, simmer over the holidays and maybe the new year will open our eyes to new directions. In the meantime we should all reach out and let each other know where we can be found out there in the remaining islands of social media. In an effort to support that goal my creator friends and I are reaching out and will do a week long series of posts at the various sites to find all like-minded creative souls, following, subscribing, sharing or possibly tooting and plurking. Who knows. How to participate: We will post tweets on twitter inviting you to share links to the appropriate type of social media for that day. Drop your links in a comment to each of us and then we’ll follow, RT, and share your links on all our various social media. You do the same. Here is the schedule: Schedule of Tweets on Twitter: Friday, November 11 2022: Blogs around the interwebs – Blogger, Discus, WordPress etc Saturday, November 12 2022: Alternate ‘Twitter’ like Mastodon, Countersocial, etc. Sunday, November 13 2022: Visually centered social media like Instagram, Pinterest, DeviantArt etc. Monday, November 14 2022: Video focused social media like YouTube, TikTok, etc. Tuesday, November 15 2022: Discord, Reddit, Patreon, Radish Wednesday, November 16 2022: Old faithfuls like Tumblr, Linkedin, etc. Thursday, November 17 2022: Still working but for how long like Facebook, MeWe, Ello, etc. And here are our profiles on Twitter: Tweets by SiobhanMuir Tweets by nara_malone Tweets by DorenaBree I will not be commanded, I will not be controlled, and I will not let my future creative work be silenced by a weird dude who carries around a sink to look cool. ~Nara

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Adventures in 3D Storytelling

admin — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 22:47:12 +0000

We celebrated 10 years of 3D storytelling at Nara’s Nook grid this year. The above pic was from the launch day of our Immersive Edge story regions back in 2015. It’s always been challenging, and crazy and an endless adventure. We never grow tired of it. While it looks like we’ve been absent for awhile, we’ve been growing our skills and expanding techniques. This year’s group project has been the Story Islands. You can find them at world.narasnook.com: 8900 Once you land on the default region, search for “story” on the map and teleport in. We brought books to life as interactive beach reads on a series of islands this summer. We even threw in some horses to ride around and swim with visitors between the islands. Nook members Siobhan Muir, Dorena Bree, Torn MacAlester, Neo Cortex, Shannan Albright and Nara Malone contributed to the islands build. At the end of the summer we entered my interactive tale called Find the Hero in the GameDev.tv game jam. This was an experiment in telling interactive stories via WebGL so that both visitors to our virtual world and visitors on the internet could share the experience. Shannan Albright, Sheep Freak, and Neo Cortex also contributed to the Find The Hero project. You can play the game right here. Find The Hero by Nara Malone, Shannan Albright, Neo Cortex, and SheepFreak

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Blogging With a Pencil

Nara Malone — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 11:52:52 +0000

It’s been a long time coming. I have been looking for a way to blog on the go without lugging the gaming laptop everywhere. Running through an airport to catch a plane about to leave you, with a monster laptop bouncing around in a backpack and hammering your spine is not fun. Add to that, writing longhand helps me shift into that creative state of mind, where words and ideas flow and time falls away. So now let’s see if the iPad and pencil can make blogging easier to fit in my schedule.

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Why The Tech Giants Want to Buy the Metaverse…

admin — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 19:39:00 +0000

We make magic here I’m talking the homegrown and handmade sort of magic. Stories that cast a spell. Art that transports you to another reality. Music that picks you up and puts you back together after a lousy day. The kind of magic made when ordinary people with no power or influence do powerful things. Why they’ll fail Biting into homegrown tomato—one carefully tended and left on the vine to go ripe in the July heat, one so fragrant you can breathe in the flavor, one fattened on summer rain—is an experience that will turn you away from the pale, fragrance-free, flavorless things produced on a factory farm. Art needs time to grow, simmer, needs to be born in a soul. Tech giants can’t commercially produce the emotional connection everyday artists inspire. They’ve failed before, but they’re back with a new marketing angle. So, who’s up for being half a person? ~NotNara

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Indie Writer Life: The Great Homestead Swap

admin — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 18:43:08 +0000

The dog has forgiven me. The cat...not gonna happen.

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Beach-Reading Season Is One Week Away!

admin — Fri, 21 May 2021 17:27:29 +0000

Learn about the selkie legend and the #TurnUpTheHeat challenge that can fill your ereader with hot stories in time for the start of beach season.

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My Wildling Neighbors: The CoyWolf

admin — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 13:45:56 +0000

Coywolf, there and not there so fast I might believe the forest dreamed him.

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