I can’t quite remember where I first heard of Draxtor Despres, I think it may have been on Metareality Podcast. I know that I discovered, late in the day The Adventures Of Flufee, which was a joint venture with people such as Pooky Amsterdam. There were clues there though as to what may come later, although the site was largely about the avatar of Flufee, there were also highlights featuring destinations within Second Life.
When Flufee had to halt his adventures, we may have wondered where Draxtor would go next. I don’t know if The Drax Files were in the pipeline before Flufee closed but they certainly arrived with a bang in 2013 and continued to impress throughout 2013 with fifteen wonderful video interviews.
The feedback for this show has been wonderful :
“His machinima are actually better ads than I’ve ever seen LL put together themselves“. – Nika Talaj.
“This is the right narrative to describe #SecondLife. Excellent work” – Indigo Mertel
“All this talk about Second Life and Relay for life.. this tells it perfectly! ” – Aine Flanagan
“This story gave me goosebumps. Outstanding work as always Drax!” – Freeta Kayo
“Draxtor Despres? Is he that German bloke?” – Ciaran Laval
Now Draxtor is moving on to the next stage, by launching The Drax Files Radio Hour. This show is a collaboration with Frau Yardley of 1920’s Berlin fame.
Now the first difference between The radio show and the video presentations is in length, that’s for us the viewer/Listener rather than Drax the producer. The Drax files videos are about five minutes long, the radio hour, is, as one may suspect, an hour long. So therefore you need more time but being as it’s a radio show, you can listen to it whilst doing something else, that’s the beauty of radio!
The show opens with an introduction of friendly greetings from Torley! Then we have the familiar theme tune and it’s on with the show. This show differs from Metareality Podcast in so much as it plays clips from people who have been interviewed, this therefore means you hear input from more people but it’s not always a live recorded discussion. This works quite well and in this first episode we hear from the likes of Tyr Rozenblum, Eboni Khan and Cathy Foil in a discussion regarding Fitted Mesh in Second Life.
Then there are general discussions regarding the NSA being in Second Life, Occulus Rift, Furries being creative and the curious confusion of Lily Allen :
About 5 years ago someone asked me to stream a gig live on second life for hundreds of thousNds of bitcoins, “as if” I said. #idiot #idiot
— Lily Allen (@lilyallen) January 5, 2014
I’m not quite sure what Lily was offered but I suspect it may have been Linden Dollars rather than Bitcoins.
The Radio Hour has an accompanying blog post, which I linked earlier. This can assist in your understanding of the issues being discussed but bear in mind that the blogroll hasn’t implemented target_blank for the links, so you will end up being taken away from the page if you click on those and will lose your place in the recording.
Also remember that this show is based around opinions on many matters, so there will be matters you will disagree with, matters you will agree with, matters you will feel are inaccurate, they welcome feedback, just be polite about it.
Overall this seems interesting to me, but I’m a fan of Draxtor’s work so I may be biased here. This should be more good publicity for Second Life, with a second show scheduled for next Friday and a future interview with the former Babbage Linden in the works some time soon.
So there we have it, this is Drax with his second symphony, re-written by machine and new technology. He is, a radio star.