My Cyber Annoyance

I am very smart and I know most things because I am a MyCyberTwin.

Hot on the heels of my complaining the other day about overhyped AI stuff, I get in one of my syndication feeds a Wired clip pointing to a rather breathless article about how “[f]using human psychology with an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) engine, MyCyberTwin’s virtual humans allow organisations such as NASA, AMP and National Australia Bank (NAB), to improve their customer support levels” and so on and so on.

This sounds both amazing and implausible, and in fact I have a rather longer rant over in my secret RL weblog about it, but it turns out that there’s an SL component also:

According to Tom Soderstrom, IT CTO in the office of the CIO at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the organisation has been using a CyberTwin in Second Life to man its presence there dedicated to the Phoenix Mars Lander spacecraft.

… and the MyCyberTwin website even gives the SLURL. Cool!

So I go over, and right near the landing point on Explorer Island, there was an obvious Phoenix Lander CyberTwin thing to chat with. And it worked! And it was obviously, well…

(It was also extremely slow, which is why I said hello twice; when I realized how slow it was I just lowered my response-time expectations.)

[16:27] Phoenix CyberTwin Activator: Now listening to Dale Innis. Click the board to end the conversation
[16:27] Dale Innis: Hi there!
[16:27] Dale Innis: Hello?
[16:27] Phoenix: Hey!
[16:28] Phoenix: Greetings Dale Innis!
[16:28] Dale Innis: So can you tell me things about the Phoenix Lander?
[16:28] Phoenix: I’m the Phoenix Lander; a spacecraft that touched down on the surface of Mars on May 25th, 2008. Do you have any other questions about my mission or what I’m up to here?
[16:28] Dale Innis: Yes, what is your mission?
[16:28] Phoenix: I’ve been using my robotic arm to dig trenches up to half a meter (1.6 feet) into the layers of ice, collecting samples that will be studied and will hopefully give us more information about the Martian environment.
[16:29] Dale Innis: Cool! Are you looking for life on Mars?
[16:29] Phoenix: I have instruments that may provide info about the possibility of life on Mars. I’ll be testing things like what has been preserved in the icy soil. Then we should have a good idea whether the environment has ever been favorable for life.
[16:29] Dale Innis: That’s really neat. How long will you be on Mars?
[16:29] Phoenix: I won’t ever return to earth as adding extra rockets to take off from Mars would have made me too heavy! I’m here for good!
[16:30] Dale Innis: How much do you weigh?
[16:30] Phoenix: I am very heavy! 664 kilograms (242 pound).. that’s a lot of lander!
[16:30] Dale Innis: Are there any other space ships on Mars?
[16:30] Phoenix: I love being on Mars. It’s a great planet! I’m looking forward to getting to explore the icy subsurface.
[16:30] Dale Innis: How do you explore the subsurface?
[16:30] Phoenix: I’m going to stay where I landed for the duration of my mission. I can’t take off again or move to a new spot.
[16:31] Dale Innis: Um, okay. What is the icy subsurface?
[16:31] Phoenix: You better believe it! We have found ice. WOOHOOO! Can you tell I’m just a little bit excited! This will provide us with much more info about the history of water on Mars and improve upon what we already know about this great planet.
[16:31] Dale Innis: So the subsurface is like underground ice?
[16:31] Phoenix: I hope you’ll celebrate with me because YAHOOOO, we found ice! I’ll collect and analyze more samples as my mission progresses that will hopefully give us even more information about the Martian environment.
[16:32] Dale Innis: Okay. Are there any other space ships there?
[16:32] Phoenix: I love being on Mars and carrying out such important work. It’s great reporting back to mission control about my findings.
[16:32] Dale Innis: Why is it so exciting to have found ice?
[16:32] Phoenix: You better believe it! We have found ice. WOOHOOO! Can you tell I’m just a little bit excited! This will provide us with much more info about the history of water on Mars and improve upon what we already know about this great planet.
[16:32] Dale Innis: You already said that.
[16:32] Phoenix: Thank you for telling me that. What else should I know? I feel like I’m a bit out of the loop, being so far away.
[16:33] Dale Innis: When is the next ship going to Mars?
[16:33] Phoenix: Mars is a cold, dry, desert landscape of sand and rocks. But maybe I can find microbial life…
[16:33] Dale Innis: okay, thanks.
[16:33] Phoenix: My pleasure.
[16:33] Phoenix CyberTwin Activator: No longer listening to Dale Innis

Starts out good, quickly goes downhill. The algorithm here is just doing the obvious pattern-matching, and it’s essentially stateless: if it finds a keyword (like “mars” or “ice” or “life” or “weigh”), it outputs some pre-canned text. It doesn’t even remember that it’s already used that “WOOHOO” line the first time I mentioned ice, so the second time I mention it, it just prints it again. The fact that I was asking why the ice is so exciting is completely lost on it.

And if I try to ask about something it doesn’t know about, like when the next ship to Mars is, or what “subsurface” means, it just says random stuff, depending on what keywords, if any, I happen to use.

It, most essentially, has in the most literal sense no idea what it is talking about. It is utterly trivial, with not the slightest hint of intelligence. So, sigh, it’s Eddie-the-bot again; a relatively trivial algorithm (more trivial than Eddie’s from this evidence), talked up as “intelligence” just because it sounds exciting.

There’s a Web version of the Personal MyCyberTwins that you can play with also; that’s where the adorable quote on the picture up there came from. A more extensive snippet:

Betty: Hi there Dale.
You: Hi! What is up?
Betty: Not much, What’s happening with you?
You: I just read about this “MyCyberTwin” thing in the internet, and I was curious about it.
Betty: The power of the internet is outstanding. It continues to grow and improve.
Betty: What was the last utterly selfish thing you bought for yourself?
You: Um, that’s sort of a personal question; probably this gaming laptop that I’m thinking about. :)
Betty: It’s good to talk to someone who is thinking at last.
Betty: I want to ask, what sort of people do you have as friends?
You: Nice people!
Betty: Yeah, thanks for making the effort with that response.
Betty: Do you have quirky obsessions that you never like to tell people about?
You: Why are you asking all these strange questions about me?
Betty: Why do you think I am?
You: Well in theory you could be trying to make a mental model of me. But I’m not sure that’s very likely! Is that it?
Betty: Well if you don’t know how do you expect me to?
You: Um, anyway… So what kinds of things do you know about? What is your area of expertise?
Betty: I am very smart and I know most things because I am a MyCyberTwin. Do you Dale?
You: You know most things? What is the airspeed of a swallow?
Betty: You are going to tell me I think.

Not tonight, Betty; not tonight…

Our Man in Zindra

[11:33] You: So you were on dot-chasing last night?

[11:33] Dale Innis: That’s right, boss!

[11:33] You: and…?

[11:34] Dale Innis: okay, well. looking at the biggest bunches of dots, I found basically three places: Escort Island, the Lounge of Dreams, an’ House Nishi.

[11:34] You: kay; details?

[11:34] Dale Innis: I sat around at escort island, talking to the owners about how the move was goign, and tipping the dancers an’ all. the owners said the move was pretty okay, and business was good. And I got a free “I helped pop Rhianna’s cherry” tee shirt! (’cause of it’s in Rhianna sim) And the dancers were friendly an’ fun.

[11:34] You: The… dancers.

[11:34] Dale Innis: Yeah! You know, on poles an’ all. :)

[11:34] You: they aren’t exactly just dancers there, you know, Dale.

[11:34] Dale Innis: how do you mean?

[11:34] You: go to IM for a sec

[11:34] Dale Innis: .. … …?

[11:35] You: … … … … … … … …

[11:34] Dale Innis: … … .. …. ..? …?

[11:35] You: … …! …. … …. ^_^

[11:35] Dale Innis: Really??

[11:35] You: Cross my heart.

[11:35] Dale Innis: is that even *legal*?

[11:35] You: Maybe we’ll do a weblog posting about that sometime. Anyway, next?

[11:35] Dale Innis: right, so Lounge of Dreams was fun too; it’s “SL’s sexiest all-male revue, all genders & orientatoins welcome!”. it’s in Baylor’s Haunt (great name!)

[11:35] You: good crowd?

[11:35] Dale Innis: yep, all dancing around and flirting and tipping an’ stuff

[11:35] You: did you flirt with the dancers? ^_^

[11:36] Dale Innis: a little :) but you know, boy’s just odn’t smell right

[11:36] You: your AV has no senseof smell, Dale

[11:36] Dale Innis: That’s just what they want you to thikn!

[11:36] You: rolls eyes. okay, and House Nishi?

[11:36] Dale Innis: it’s a big mall and club; lots of storeys high, ‘way up 700m above Cloudville. lots of stores, an’ a pretty girl on a pole, an’ boys with macho group tags like “Master” an’ all, and a bondage dungeon and ppl shopping in latex an’ like that.

[11:36] You: campers, shoppers, both?

[11:37] Dale Innis: i didn’t see any campers or bots; looked like all staff and real customers. talked to the staff some, and they said it had been alot of work to move the place, but now it was moved business was pretty good.

[11:37] You: okay. anything else noteworthy?

[11:37] Dale Innis: I talked to some people setting up a big adult mall space on the ground with rental stores. They were nice. there was a big house next to it, with banlines around it, which I thot was a little strange ’cause the first stage of land swaps was only for commercial stuff, but I think it was owned by th eowners of the mall so I guess they wanted a private house next to their mall? So it was part of the same deal I guess.

[11:37] You: Politics. anything else? just those three places and the mall being set up?

[11:37] Dale Innis: well, then I got sort of distracted ’cause someone sent me a TP script to debug, and Hey Girlfireind had some Midnight Madness boards that needed hits, and… y’know

[11:37] You: sigh :P anything else on zindra? how’s the “amusing sim names” list going?

[11:37] Dale Innis: my favorite is still “Whorlebow” :)

[11:37] You: lols. good to know the suits haven’t completely killed the spirit over there ^_^

Update:

[15:19] Dale Innis: um, boss…?

[15:19] You: hm?

[15:19] Dale Innis: what I said about house nishi not having bots or campers?

[15:19] You: oh?

[15:20] Dale Innis: well I sort of wasn’t really sur eso I went back to check and i don’t want to say anyting for sure because you never know, but it really looks like most of the people there are sort of in these tiny secret rooms inside the walls of the mall-thing and when I cam in and look at them they are all clouds and i know that sometimes bots operated by really simple clients are just clouds so i might want to sort of take back what I said and oh my look at the time ttyl

[15:20] You: sigh…

The Enemy Within

When I referred to Prokofy Neva’s “enemies list” in a comment on his Second Thoughts weblog the other day, I thought I was being metaphorical. But now the latest edition of his “FIC list” is out, and I’m prominently featured, third from the top, in the very first section, entitled “My Enemies”.

I look forward to Prokofy recalling his Matthew, and beginning to send along the Love. As long as he doesn’t get too sappy. :)

(I can’t tell you much about the rest of the list. “FIC” is short for “Fêted Inner Core”, which has a nice pun on “fetid” (or even “fœtid”). But you’ll have to investigate the Second Thoughts archives yourself if you want to know why the parts are numbered 1.0, 2.0, 2.13, 2.6, and Noosphere, or what each part means.)

Just for the record, I don’t consider myself Prokofy Neva’s enemy, or him mine. We had a misunderstanding a long time ago, in which he cursed me out in public for something that I hadn’t done, and ever since he’s put the worst possible spin on everything I’ve said or done. It’s a bummer, really; not only do I like having friends (and dislike having, and for that matter not really know how to have, enemies) in general, but Second Thoughts has some really interesting discussions in the comments (where interesting people come by and post their thoughts in response to Prokofy’s often-provocative statements), and sometimes has real gems in it itself. But I’ve had to stop commenting there, because it upsets him so much.

(In this very posting declaring our enmity, for instance, we find “Some people…, like Sardonyx Linden, get on here *only because they have a cool name*. No other reason. Seriously.” Isn’t that great? I could have written that, in a different context.)

But ah well. Things will proceed as they will. They say that there are no strangers, only friends that you haven’t met yet. In the same way I think maybe there are no enemies, only people that haven’t yet succumbed to my eldritch mind-control powers…

Fourth of July at the Odd Ball

After the dress-up fun on Friday, what I mostly did on the day itself was randomly TP around from Search / Events watching fireworks displays, and go to parties at PIER (the main sim is gone, but Carys has recreated the club in its old parcel location) and at the Odd Ball. Pictures from the latter are always worth posting. :) And really require no commentary…

(Click through for the larger sizes.)

Closer and Closer!

With the announcement that Ray Kurzweil is giving the introductory keynote address at this year’s SLCC (Second Life Community Convention), there’s been some resurgence of the whole “Are Second Life and AI and nanobots and stuff going to transform the world tomorrow, or will we have to wait until next week?” meme, and related thoughts.

New World Notes calls the announcement “extraordinary and transformational”, which strikes me as way over the top. (I mean, even if you think Kurzweil’s thinking is extraordinary and transformational, it would be a weird thing to say about a single talk, much less about the mere announcement of a talk.) I replied in the comments (lightly edited):

/me grins. “extraordinary and transformational” is a tad strong, I think. He’s done some really good work in OCR, speech recog, and cool musical instruments, but he’s kinda over-the-top in the AI and virtual reality realms.

One of his most famous charts is that hysterical one showing number of neurons a computer can simulate over time, and implying that by the year whatever computers will be smarter than people. As if the hard problem in AI was getting enough transistors on a chip! (Example: a mouse is higher on his chart than the Deep Blue chess-playing computer; but how good is your typical mouse at chess?)

His ideas about virtual reality are fun, but again I think overblown. When I’m wearing these glasses and “walking around” in a completely immersive virtual world, explain to me again how I avoid tripping over my real-world chair and walking into walls? And 10 or 20 years seems like a wild underestimate for people having brains full of nanobots. The things he says are cool-sounding, but I think he’s drifted away from practical fact in various ways.

I’m sure he’ll give an engaging and thought-provoking keynote, but these days he’s really more of a showman than a technologist; it will be fun, but hardly extraordinary or transformational. The danger with Kurzweil is that he goes beyond the factual or even the plausible, makes the techies roll their eyes, and builds up unrealistic expectations in the audience that, when they are not matched in reality, could lead to a backlash of (similarly unwarranted) skepticism.

And then, in reply to some good words fro Extropia DaSilva:

I think one of the things that somewhat makes me roll my eyes about Kurzweil is that he has a number of things like that chart: the most obvious message is an extremely exciting, but wrong, one (in this case, that we’ll have computers as smart as people by year nnnn), whereas if you read him carefully enough he’s actually using it to make a claim that’s more plausible, but much much less exciting (in this case, that by year nnnn we’ll have overcome one of the very minor challenges in making smart computers).

If all he’s really saying is that we’ll have solved the easy problem, why did he bother to make that chart at all? Where is his chart of progress in the software / semantic side of the problem (which would be essentially flat)?

I share your skepticism about his claimed timescales. This sentence is another example of the tendency I posit above: “we are learning to build artificial brains that are getting closer and closer to matching the power and performance of the biological version”. Taken at face value, with “closer and closer” meaning that we’re pretty close, it’s exciting but false. Taken more literally, with “closer and closer” meaning “we’ve gone from a thousand light-years away to 999.9 light-years away”, it’s true but boring.

I think Kurzweil’s right about the exciting things that people will be able to do in the future. I think he’s wrong about how much progress we’ve currently made in those directions; and that’s a big part of his message.

Really I think it’s good that they got Kurzweil to come and talk; he’ll stir things up. People don’t have to be right to be interesting, or to inspire useful discussion and even useful work. Which is good, because I don’t think Kurzweil is right. :)

It’s easy to get excited and breathless about all this cool futurist stuff, in either direction. In a comment thread on Second Thoughts, Desmond Shang wrote, on the subject of Cyc:

The great thing about this, is that it would make an awesome avatar back end intelligence with very little work.

which rather disappointed me, because Desmond is usually more sensible than that. Cyc would do no such thing; at most it would help slightly with one of the many problems that we are light-years away from solving in “avatar intelligence”. Of course, if someone can prove me wrong about that with very little work, I hope they do. :)

This all reminds me of that widely-blogged demo where some folks made a program-controlled avatar (a ‘bot) called “Eddie” that supposedly was able to reason at the level of a four-year-old. Looking into it more deeply what they’d actually done was a small demo of how a program could be explicitly programmed to model a particular problem about belief-understanding in such a way that it was about as good at it as a four year old person would be. Which is probably a good piece of research and a fine use of time, but the impression that people were getting from it, something like “we can now have Second Life bots that are as intelligent as four-year-olds”, was just completely wrong.

Another recent example of this, I suspect, is that “Milo” demo from Lionhead. In this case the maker of the thing is making pretty amazing-sounding claims about it (including that what they are doing goes beyond anything in science fiction!), but I strongly suspect that the reality behind it is much more modest. (Which is to say, my “rigged-demo” detectors are pinging hard the whole time.)

(Reminds me also of that “OnLive/OTOY” demo of how advances in server-side rendering are going to give us all the ability to get to Second Life at 60 fps from our cellphones any day now. Uh-huh.)

And on the other side Second Thoughts has now spent three whole entries on how anyone who says favorable things about AI and nanotechnology and life extension and transhumanism and stuff like that is a crypto-fascist who wants to take over the world, in typical flaming-at-straw-men fashion. Not that straw men don’t make a nice fire. :)

I find that I don’t have a simple opinion about all of this stuff, myself. I think science is, overall, a good thing; figuring out how the world works and how to make it work more the way that we want it to is good. Exactly what “we” means there, just who (if anyone) should be in charge, what should happen when what I want to do (whether enabled by science or not) conflicts with that you want to do, are all hard questions. In general I’m a left-libertarian in some sense; I think that the government should leave us alone unless we’re actually harming or defrauding someone, and that it’s nice when what we choose to do with that being-left-alone is to be nice to each other, to share things, to sit around wearing flowers in our hair and playing the guitar, and so on.

Along with that, it’s good to think about all sorts of wild stuff that some of us might want to do in the future, like modify our bodies to be able to live in space, like developing devices that are actually intelligent, like making itty bitty machines that can swim around in our bloodstreams and keep us healthy. And as we think about doing those things, and start to even do them, the same principles apply: we each should be allowed to do what we want if it’s not hurting anybody, and it’s nice when we do it in nice cooperative ways involving guitar music.

Hm, I’ve been rambling here, what was I going to say? Oh, yeah: and while it’s fun to have some people around (Ray Kurzweil, Peter Molyneux of Lionhead, and so on) who make it sound like things are farther along than they really are (because that makes us hopeful, and stirs up debate), it’s even better to have, when we can get it, realistic estimates of what’s really going on.

Because truth is good, too.

Showing the colors

So I have this friend Steph, and ‘though we don’t see each other all that much, when she says “I’ve got an idea!” I know it’s going to be fun. :)

Seems that Twisted and Spoiled (isn’t that a great name? I don’t have an LM or URL any better that you can find yourself with Google or inworld search) had a nice Red White and Blue freebie outfit out for the Fourth, and she TPd me over and I got a copy, and we both put them on and they were deliciously over the top. And I remembered the “Capital Hill” builds that went up with some fanfare the other month / year / whatever, and we went over to take pictures.

Do I look a little dubious? :) Well, for one thing it looks like it’s about to rain; fortunately the storm passed over, though. (I also forgot to take off the bikini top I was wearing before, in most of the pictures. Fortunately it doesn’t show much.)

We had fun looking through inventory for poses, and looking around the island for Patriotic Imagery and so on. Here’s one of my favorites of the snaps we got (note that Steph is tall, an’ I am short!), posing in front of I think a big transparent Washington Monument and some patriotic symbology of some sort:

There’s the Spirit of America for ya! :)

Play DISCREETLY on your browser NOW!

"Play Now, my Lord," she moaned

So like everyone else I’ve been seeing these Evony ads on every third webpage that I visit (including various personal web pages that subscribe to whatever ad syndication network(s) the Evony folks are saturating), and my well-ingrained ad-ignoring filters had been leading me to ignore them, when suddenly yesterday I noticed one.

It was probably able to overcome my filters because of the subtly-faded map with the words “Friesland” and “Lower Lorraine” almost visible; exotic-sounding placenames and faded maps are good. Or it might have been the swooning woman in the very lowcut gown. But anyway…

When it’s running live (unlike the frozen snap to the right there), the ad has changing text, that says things like “Play DISCREETLY on your browser NOW!” and “Play Now, my Lord”. The subtle keywords there (”discreetly”, “Lord”), and the boobie-imagery made me think: “Hey cool! Finally a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game based on high-resolution soft-core pornography! Good stuff!”.

I’m always interested in that sort of edgy cultural phenomenon, don’t'cha know.

Sadly, a quick search turned up a good review of the game, that reveals that it is neither high-resolution nor in any way pornographic. It is in fact a Flash-based version of the eight-thousand simple little “gather resources and build barracks and invent the crossbow and make armies” games that have been out for general purpose computers in non-Web formats since like 1972.

Oh, well!

If anyone happens to notice an actual Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game based on high-resolution soft-core pornography, drop me a line. Wouldn’t want to miss any important cultural developments…

Drama Dolls! Woot!

In the unlikely event that someone who reads this doesn’t also read Ahuva or Chestnut, you should go and follow those links and read the Official Scoop on today’s announcement of Honour McMillan’s new Drama Dolls product.

Having seen some of the early prototypes, I will attest that this is a Must See thing. If the idea was just to personify some of our various hate and love objects as amusing little model people that we could do appropriate things with (and to), it would be brilliant. But these lil beggars go far beyond that: they are scripted: skillfully scripted, creatively scripted, hysterically scripted, scripted in all sorts of different ways. Scripted to… well, to do things that you really have to see. Really.

Go see them!

Been driven to distraction by the incessant multi-paragraph emoting of the slave-girls on the dock while you and your well-muscled colleagues are trying to plan next Tuesday’s attack on the Panther-women? The Kajira Doll is for you! Also shown, standard SL Man, standard SL Woman, and, ummm, a buncha other ones! (There’s even dolls representing bloggers! A must-have for everyone!)

Drama Kings (obviously).

The lovely and talented Chestnut Rau, looking at yet some more dolls. I’m not entirely sure which ones, ’cause this was mostly an excuse to take a picture of Ches. :)

Oura an’ me an’ Ahuva, standing near the Drama Queens. And one similar one with a very funny name that fortunately slips my mind at the moment…

So go to the opening! There will be music! And Canadian flags! And Drama Dolls! To quote from the Official Announcement:

The store opens today (11:00 am SLT) with two parties to celebrate, featuring brilliant blues man Von Johin. The first show is at the Euro friendly time of 11:00 am SLT. The second party will start at 6:00 pm and rock on for 2 solid hours. Honour is a proud Canadian and tomorrow is also Canada Day so if you want to join us for that reason alone please do! TP from this link.

Updated with links now that Honour and Cris have their posts up.

Snapshots from the Great Migration

So the first wave of the Great Migration started at 10am sharp (SLT) yesterday! Or some other day recently! So now people with Adult Content on the mainland can apply for a free land swap with some land on Zindra, via a support ticket to the Lindens.

In the usual sort of casual wince-inducing move, the Lindens closed the weblog comment thread that alot of us had been using to talk about the whole Adult Content thing, and the Migration, and how it was going and all. I’m sure there’s still lots of discussion going on elsewhere, but I haven’t chased it down yet.

What little I’ve read suggests that things are going pretty well, or at least less disastrously then some of us had feared, so far. Here’s one account of someone saying in their ticket “I run BDSM classes, so please swap me into Zindra”, and the Lab saying “nope, not Adult enough”, and the person saying “say what??”, and the Lab saying “oh, all right then”.

I bounced briefly over to Zindra to see what was up with the migration (skipping the Mosh hub this time, and looking around further out). Kama city, at least, is still dominated by eyecandy Linden builds, but other things are starting to appear. I passed a big dark castle, over whose drawbridge some sort of grey-skinned barbarian was riding a horse. I waved at a woman in the midst of building a bar of some sort on a nice riverside plot.

I even took some pictures!

In the foreground; an art studio without much in it yet; I wonder if a photosurrealistic picture of Salvadore Dali grating his own hand off officially counts as Adult?

In the background, a large dark building containing various taboo-looking devices and poseballs. And, I’m glad to say, a courtyard where rezzing is allowed, so I could bring out my Terra Futura, and not have to *walk* everywhere…

Taking the Futura up high, I came upon one of the banes of those concerned with cleanliness and prim-count.

How do you go about letting Governor Linden know that he’s left a railroad tie or something floating nearly half a km above the new continent?

Thing Envy

So… This is going to be sort of a boring, but maybe a useful (to me, heh heh) posting. Feel free to blip over it entirely if discussions of computer hardware put you to sleep (as they usually do me). I’ll try to keep it short. :)

I use SL from an aging Lenovo laptop with not enough disk space, not enough memory, and a relatively obsolete chipset. It’s been long enough since the OS was installed that it’s suffered from considerable bitrot, and random parts of it don’t quite work right (it only looks for wireless networks automatically about half the time, it hangs if I plug it in while the lid is closed, etc, etc), and for that matter the near-right corner of the case is sort of held on with transparent tape. I use WoW from an aging desktop that also has not enough disk space and not enough memory, and lags horribly in crowded areas. I don’t use The Sims 2 at all anymore, and won’t be able to use The Sims 3 on that machine, because the hard drive is utterly full.

Also I have a big birthday coming up. :)

So I’m thinking of buying a gaming laptop. One with enough disk space to hold SL and WoW and TS2 and even TS3, and enough memory to be able to run them without thrashing, and fast enough CPU and video to run them smooth and lovelyly, and enough extra muscle that I won’t want to replace it for a good long time.

I’m tempted by the AlienWare M17x. I can design a pretty muscular one that would cost less than (gulp) US$2000. It’s also really cool, having little alien design elements all over it and stuff, and as far as I can tell with some comparison shopping I’m not paying a ridiculous premium for the cool design.

On the other hand (speaking of muscular) the thing is enormous, and really heavy. I’d like to use this for work as well as play, and that means lugging it back and forth every day. And I’d also like to be able to use it while lounging in bed without being crushed.

So I’m also tempted by the M15x. It’s smaller and lighter, and a fifteen-inch screen seems plenty large.

The weird thing is that it’s also considerable more expensive! I have to choose a slightly slower CPU and smaller hard drive than with the 17x to get it into a price range that I can even fantasize about. I guess that’s because it’s newer and they have to do cleverer and more expensive stuff to get it all to fit into the smaller case? I dunno.

And thirdly :) after some Googling around I’m looking at a Sager NP8662 from Factor Gaming, neither of which I had heard of before today, but which seem to be well thought of, and perhaps have the same kinda components as the Alienware ones, but at lower prices (at least a little lower, sigh) due to not having big ad budgets and internationally-marketed brands and stuff. At least that’s the feeling that their website gives me, but it could be Subtle Psychological Manipulation.

And then of course I could be more realistic and look at a more ordinary machine, not designed for total gaming geeks! SL and WoW and TS2 are all pretty lightweight programs compared to the hardcore games that these Alienwares and Sagers are really targetted at. People have told me that a random off-the-shelf laptop that I could get for half the price of these would run SL and WoW just fine, and I don’t imagine even TS3 is all that challenging.

But I have a big birthday coming up (I whine)! And in the long run if I buy something overpowered now, it’ll be that much longer before I feel that I really must replace it. So it’s actually prudent to spend the extra money now. Haha maybe.

Opinions and recommendations most welcome. Do you play SL and/or WoW or TS2 or TS3 on a laptop? How is it? What do you think? Have you bought one lately? Shopped for one? Have random opinions? Comment away! Here, or in the forum thread that I started (which has gone off into a tangent about WoW haha).

The next seven

Having had some very validatin’ feedback on my two previous Calling Card posts, here’s the third. I’m finding riffling through the oldest cards to be great fun, in terms of memory and perspective; I recommend it to all.

Calling cards seem to come in bunches; after Veronica Quackenbush, there are four people that I don’t really recall, although according to my notes I met one of them at a weapon shop, and one came to a rather risible “skybox security seminar” that I held once, the most notable feature of which was a replicating grid attack that happened during it (providing a good excuse for hardly anyone showing up). The other two, I have no idea.

Then there are three people that I definitely do remember.

The second Seminal Event of my newbiehood, following the art opening I talked about last time, happened when I was flying randomly around the mainland, and seeing a single dot on the minimap went over to see who it was. It turned out to be a woman in a Playboy-style bunny suit, building some barstools and spiral staircases for a club. Her name was LadyLutha Harlow, and she was helpful and friendly; she told me that my AV (I was pretty much always a boy at the time, still) was really too short for most SL things (I think I was about 5′ 9″ as a boy then). She showed me some cutting and twisting tricks involved in making one-prim bar stools (this was long before we had sculpties!), and spiral staircases. She showed me (purely Platonically, mind you) my very first Paradise Blanket, which completely blew my mind.

(If you’ve never seen a Paradise Blanket, you should. It looks like a nice picnic blanket, complete with basket, that you and a friend sit on. But then you get a menu, and on command the blanket will transport you high in the sky and rez an entire room or landscape around you, chosen from a potentially quite enormous list. You can then get up and walk around and stuff, and when you’re done picnicing you sit again, choose from the menu again, and the surroundings vanish and you return to the ground. It’s quite astonishing! Especially if you’re like a week-old newborn.)

I think that serendipitous visit with LadyLutha was also the first time I had a sim go down around me. We got the “this region will be shutting down in five minutes” messages, and laughed and decided to stay around and watch the world end. I think she was also the first person that I gave one of my little sparkling fairy companions to (I really ought to revisit that script sometime and fix it up in light of actually knowing what I’m doing now!), because she admired it when I brought it out to show off.

LadyLutha also gave me a landmark to the club that she was building, and that leads to the next Calling Card in the list: Sugga. That’s her in the picture there. :)

Sugga was an aspiring dancer at the club, and I met her (and two or three others that I think are going to appear in the list a little later) when I followed LadyLutha’s LM. The club wasn’t actually open yet, but people were moving around setting things up, and dancers were auditioning and figuring out the dancing devices and tipjars and stuff, and people were dancing and having fun.

Sugga was one of the shyer dancers as I recall, and it’s funny that she’s the one that shows up first in my Calling Cards. But we talked alot and went exploring a bit together. I went back to the club several times, and it became my second-favorite hangout after Gypsy’s. I remember partying there as a girl, with rave-sticks and particle storms and stuff, and everyone being amused by and approving of my gender ambiguity. I’ve been so lucky in my SL career! :)

We were all newborns then (the oldbies were a sort of mythical race of deities, occasionally glimpsed from afar). Sugga pretty much always wore the skin pictured here. I forget the name of it, but it’s apparently now (whether it was then, I don’t know) a popular freebie, maybe even full-perm, and whenever I see it on someone with even vaguely the same face I’m reminded of Sugga.

At about the same time that I vanished from SL for a week (have I ever told that story here?) Sugga also went off into RL, not to return. We’ve exchanged a few emails since, but she is mostly just a fond friendly memory.

And the last Calling Card for this entry, right after Sugga’s, is one of my very bestest friends ever, Zha. Zha and I go ‘way back; our typists shared an office back in the Triassic when we were both summer students or something, and both Zha and her typist (along with other people that we haven’t gotten to yet) were wonderfully supportive during and after the eventful week that I vaguely alluded to above. And way back when, we were SL newbies together (can’t find a picture of her in that freebie pointy-hat hair, darn!).

She’s technically sharp, solidly realistic, and much much better at avoiding the temptations of SL and Internet drama than (for example) I am. It has also been said that she has more of a fashion sense. :) And the lucky thing even has a day job that to some extent involves SL. (Although it was hard work, not luck, that got her there.)

So those are some more of my Calling Cards, and my friends, and my history. Aren’t they great? :)

Why I tend to wander off…

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t tend to go to big Linden-run events, or to other huge events like the Hair Fair. Part of it is my impatience with lag, and the feeble video on this aging laptop. But another part of the problem is that somehow I often just don’t Get It.

I stopped briefly by the Land Expo, landed at the landing points, waited (and waited and waited and waited) for things to rez, read a few signs which were breathlessly enthusiastic about… things related to land, I guess, wandered about a bit, and then left. I guess really one was supposed to attend Scheduled Events, but I’m never organized enough to make it to many of those.

I pretty much ignored the SL Fifth Birthday stuff, but a couple of friends have builds in the Sixth one (SL6B!), that I’ve been helping with some scripts and beta testing, so I’ve been wandering around there a bit. This morning I TPd over at random, took a random teleport from the arrival area, and found myself at the Second Life Time Capsule. Sounds cool!

So there’s this sign about how in June of 2003 various Residents put their most treasured possessions and journal entries into this capsule for future Residents to see, and how now the capsule has arrived here for us all to enjoy. Great stuff! So I walk over and there’s this capsule, and it’s sitting there, and it’s a capsule and… it doesn’t do anything at all. I go into Edit on it, and see that it has all sorts of interesting stuff in its contents, but it doesn’t respond to touch…

… or to being sat on, or otherwise offer me any access to any of the stuff it holds.

So I have no idea and I wander off. Later on I happen to run into Phaylen Fairchild, who is big in SL6B, and I ask her about it, and she says oh yeah all those things in Contents are going to be on display tomorrow afternoon.

Okayyyyyy… :)

They might have mentioned that somewhere. Maybe they did and I missed it. Or maybe everyone but me just intuits better.

I ran into Phaylen, btw, at an intense live guitar performance at the Synchronicity Auditorium on the SL6B grounds.

Now this, I understand…

Happenings!

Posting a weblog entry for no particular reason (well, and I’m waiting for someone to answer a piece of email at work).

Boy Dale in Stereo:

Inspired by Lillie, but mine doesn’t seem to have worked as well. Which maybe isn’t surprising considering that I did it all by hand and pretty haphazardly. :) But perhaps my poor effort will inspire others. And maybe I’ll try again sometime!

(Original (larger) size may work better for some people. Or worse. :) )

Drop me a line or leave a comment or something (or don’t!), if you make one of these yourself. Or if you want me to explain the dead-simple method I used to create this one.

My very own posting at Second Thoughts!

Explaining what a [expletive] I am, not to mention an [expletive] [expletive]. I haven’t been putting much in here about the ongoing Prokofy Neva drama, ’cause I feel y’all might not be all that fascinated. But Prokofy is like the one person in SL (in the world?) that I know of who really dislikes me, and it’s really hard for me not to try to fix that. The fact that I have no idea how it might be fixed apparently does not deter me!

The Rogue Nation of Enormous Frogs!

Followed a link to NationStates while catching up on the rest of Second Thoughts, and created my very own country! So far it’s a libertarian loony-bin. I should create a socialist loony-bin also; are you allowed to have two countries? (I note with some fright that in the ten minutes that my Rogue State has existed, I’ve gotten three (make that four) different “telegrams” from “regions” asking me to join them. I suppose I ought to find out what a “region” is, and what it means to “join” one. In my copious free time haha.)

And now Jennifer Government is on my Amazon wishlist…

More gold

Yesterday’s post was such fun to write, in terms of personal reminiscence an’ nostalgia an’ all, that I think I’ll continue riffling forward in time in my Calling Cards folder, and see what comes up.

The next Card after tree Sprawl’s belongs to Gwenhwyfar. (I’m giving last names or not in these postings pretty much on whim, with no particular rhyme or reason to it.) Gwen was at the time a dancer at a club that I newbied into more or less at random, and she friended me I suspect because I was a little more articulate than the average newborn. Or maybe she just friended everyone who walked in, I dunno! I’ve heard from her a few times since, mostly mass-announcements to her friends list about places that she was dancing or DJing or similar.

It occurs to me that the number of dancers mentioned in this posting might give you a certain impression of my early days in SL. I assure you that that impression would be really quite accurate. :)

After Gwen there are four random folks with mostly blank profiles whose names I don’t particularly recognize, and then comes one of the high points of this part of the Calling Card folder: Cyanide Seelowe!

Cyanide is the founder of the Virtual Artists’ Alliance, which does various shows and the Photohunt and the Haiku Speedbuilds and related, and all sorts of other cool stuff. She’s also a really fun and cool person (and not at all stuck up). And while she isn’t a dancer per se, there was that one time she TP’d me over for a naked dance-a-thon at a beach club… :)

We became friends on 3 December 2006, which was probably that very crucial day in my SL life when (and I’m sure I’ve told this story somewhere before but can’t find it right now) I tried to go to an SL fashion show but the sim was full, so I went to an art opening instead, and met both a bunch of artists (including Rez Kokorin and Cyanide), and joined the VAA, and also (at that same art opening) met Lynn, a dancer from Gypsy’s who we haven’t gotten to yet, who invited me to look the place over sometime; and both the VAA and Gypsy’s (of which more shortly) have had enormous (good) effects on the way my Second Life in general has gone.

After Cy there are three more random folks that I don’t remember, and then there are Tusk and Sherri and therefore Gypsy’s. Tusk was a dancer at Gypsy’s Midnight Club, a nice little dive in Specter (not Spectre), which I went to explore shortly after Lynn gave me the landmark at Rez’s art opening. Sherri was also a dancer, I think, or at least a regular who would get up on a dance pole now and then. (Gypsy’s is very informal that way; one of the things I loved, and love, about it.)

I’ve never been all that attracted by the idea of strip joints in RL; I guess a really classy one might be fun, but they have all these connotations of exploitation and sleaze and performers who don’t actually like the customers. On the other hand in SL, or at least at Gypsy’s, the dancers were there ’cause it was fun, and they liked the customers (at least the regulars; the occasional jerk was of course still a jerk). And they were very friendly and helpful to a penniless newborn. :) I think Tusk and Sherri have both pretty much left SL, but Tammy (who we haven’t gotten to yet either) still holds the occasional event at Gypsy’s, and even though they’re pretty late at night my time I try to get there sometimes. (I should really do a whole entry about Gypsy’s sometime.)

Speaking of being helpful to penniless newborns, after one more random person that I don’t remember, we get to Adrianna. I met Adrianna when I threw a “Tentacles!” event, mostly just to try out the Event system. I found a piece of special Linden land (’cause you could only schedule Events on special Linden land or land that you own, and I didn’t own any) where it was possible to rez stuff, and I put up an Event via the Events web page with the title “Tentacles!”, and some nonsense description that in some way involved tentacles (in a clean sort of way). I of course had these tentacles in mind.

So like three or four people actually showed up, mostly fellow newborns as I recall, and we talked and laughed and did random things. Someone (less newborn) showed up in a fancy flying car and showed it off for awhile. And then these two other people showed up, and one of them was a disembodied head in a jar. I hadn’t until that moment realized that you could be a disembodied head in a jar, and I was fascinated.

As well as being unusual, the head in the jar was friendly and helpful, and we even became friends. (I forget who offered, but I assume it was her, since I’ve always been very very shy about offering friendship, and hardly ever do it, on the assumption that I Am Not Worthy.) And that was Adrianna. I’ve seen her a few times since, and she’s still friendly and helpful and funny, and likes to play with odd objects (like things that cause you to be a head in a jar).

The next person on the list really deserves her own weblog entry, and maybe I’ll eventually write one. Veronica Quackenbush, or more properly Veronica Elizabeth Roxanne Iris Taryn Almaaz Samantha Quackenbush, was also a dancer at Gypsy’s, and also one of the dancers in charge of hiring new dancers, and a big part of the reason that Gypsy’s was such a great place (and why so many of the dancers were either PhDs or PhD candidates).

Veronica loves vehicles, and back in the day she would sometimes invite any of the dancers and regulars who were still awake enough when the club closed, up in one of her rocket-sleds or whatever for exploring and/or nude skydiving. She also knows a huge amount about the history and geography of the Grid, and would entertain everyone with stories about the names of the continents and roads and landmasses, when a particular bridge was built, whether the railroads were running. She taught me that it’s good to know where you are, and where you are relative to other places, even if you can instantly TP from place to place without knowing those things.

She’s still into transport and vehicles, even if I haven’t seen her at Gypsy’s in ages; she’s one of the founders of the Okema, Nakiska, & Southern Railway. Look it up in Groups, check out the railway, join, contribute money and/or right of way and/or train skillz. Trains are great! :)

And wow this has gotten pretty long, hasn’t it, and there are probably about 275 or so calling cards to go. That should be worth at least two or three more posts!

One is silver and the other gold.

For today’s obligatory posting, I’m going to dip into the Calling Cards section of my inventory. Which is roughly like dipping into the Friends list, except that you can have Calling Cards for people that aren’t on your Friends list, either because they’ve just given you a copy of their Card (using the extremely obscure “Give Card” choice on the AV pie menu that no one ever uses), or because you were once friends but aren’t anymore. Or perhaps for other mysterious reasons. And also a Calling Card has some useful information on it, most notably the date that you acquired it (i.e. typically, the date you became friends with the person). See?

As a structuring trick and a way to reminisce, I looked at the very bottom of my Calling Card folder, sorted by date. Some interesting dusty stuff down there! Including ol’ Royal Coronet, above; we’ll get to him in a minute.

The very last item in my most-recent-first Calling Card folder is for Dun Lubezli. It’s an odd Card, in that its acquisition date is “Unknown”, and the description field says “A friend you invited to Second Life”. I don’t remember ever knowing anyone named Dun Lubezli, and Dun’s profile is completely blank. My best guess here is that it’s someone that I know in RL that I told about SL, and that when they signed up they gave my name as the name of the Resident that referred them to SL or something (is there a field like that when you sign up?), and that generated this Card. Too bad I don’t get a cool mount or anything as a result. :)

The next item (up) in the folder is my very first actual Friend in SL, Thi Flossberg. We became friends on 23 November 2006, the day after I first rezzed. Unfortunately I have no memory whatever of Thi, and Thi’s profile is completely blank. This was also before I knew about writing stuff on the Notes page in profiles, so that’s completely blank too.

Thi, if you’re reading this, give me a buzz. We’ll do lunch!

My second actual Friend, made the next day, is someone I actually remember: Royal Coronet. That’s the person in the Properties box above, there. We met in the Help Island sandbox, where he was walking around wearing the “partycules” freebie thing, and so was surrounded by this like ten-meter-diameter sphere of glowing dancing red, yellow and green particles. I thought it was the most amazing thing ever (hey, I was still new), and so did the three or four nubile newborns following him around admiringly. (It’s a great name, too: “Royal Coronet”!)

He gave me a copy of Partycules and we talked a little and apparently became friends. I don’t recall having any interaction with him since, but his Calling Card definitely has sentimental value.

(And I still use variously-recolored versions of Partycules for various holiday celebrations and similar occasions to this day.)

Then there’s a bunch more people that I don’t remember and didn’t take any notes on and who mostly have blank profiles. There’s also Steve and Kleber, who I remember better, if not vastly better. I hung around Warmouth Infohub alot back then; it wasn’t my first stop after Help Island (that was some crowded and hard to navigate infohub whose location I don’t actually recall), but I made it my home pretty early, ’cause you could rez there, and it had some interesting neighbors.

I ran into Steve and Kleber at Warmouth, I’m pretty sure. We were all newborns together, trying to figure out what was going on. You could rez at Warmouth in those days (last time I visited that had been turned off) and it was quite the chaotic place, full of HippyPay vendors and BananaPhones and people wearing full-sized battleships on their heads and all. Great fun! For some time Steve and/or Kleber would IM me semi-comprehensibly, or send blind TPs. Steve had a little store at once point, where he was like selling slightly hollowed spheres with freebie textures on them for 5L or whatever. Haven’t seen either of them in quite awhile, either, although Steve’s profile today says that he’s an Event Manager, so he may have graduated beyond spheres (as I suppose I have, if only just heh heh).

Skipping over a few more folks that I’ve pretty much forgotten, we come to the first actual friend-Friend in the collection, Eleanor Fanwood. Hi, Eleanor! Although her RL’s been very busy lately and I haven’t seen her for a bit, she’s still in SL and still definitely a friend. Of course I’ve known her forever in RL also, so she has an unfair advantage. :) There are a few pictures of her in the ol’ flickr stream, spanning quite a span of time. How far we’ve come!

Eleanor’s Card is the twelfth one in the folder. Lucky thirteen is tree Sprawl (another great name), who I also haven’t seen for ages, but who I also have fond and grateful memories of. Her profile suggests that she is primarily a Tringo player, but I remember her because when I was snooping around the Grid completely at random, thinking about maybe I would get some of that “First Land” (back in December 2006, when there was still First Land), I for some reason stumbled onto a little park she had on the mainland, where she was dancing by herself among some stone arches, and she said Hi and we talked, and she showed me her little 512m2 plot of First Land that she’d started with, and she also introduced my to her boyfriend, and bought me a pair of skates, and showed me how to ice-skate.

She said she enjoyed helping newborns, and I certainly enjoyed being helped! I’ve benefited over the aeons from lots of devoted newbie-helpers (and probably not done enough to fully pay it forward, but I try now and then). I could keep going through the Calling Cards folder and we’d find quite a few more, but I think I’ll stop here for now. Don’t want you to get bored. :)

What I Would Do With My Sim

Well, it’s still Wednesday somewhere! :)

Yesterday’s (Tuesday’s) BBBC suggested topic was:

You’ve been given a sim of your very own to use for free for one year. However, there are 3 rules. It cannot be residential, it cannot be commercial, and it has to be open to the public. What do you do with it?

And I kind of like that, so even thought it’s Wednesday or perhaps Thursday I’ll use it.

I think I’d spend the first month just playing around with all those prims, and with a sim that I could disrupt and lag and crash without bothering anyone, having a good time and making replicators and self-rezzing objects and so on. Maybe the first two months. :) Using it as a personal sandbox, that is, although of course open to the public (that being the terms of the lease). They can come and watch me do weird things.

Then I think I’d divide it into nine sections (three by three), reserve the middle one for myself, and find eight creative friends (who maybe don’t have sims of their own) and offer them the chance to do whatever they want for the rest of the year on their part of my sim. I’d make them the owner, and give them full rights to do stuff (never having owned an estate I’m not sure exactly what this means, but I would figure it out and do it).

And then I’d hang around fiddling with my own 1/9 region, watching what my friends were doing on theirs, maybe calling for informal parties, having fireworks shows, and so on, for the next happy nine or ten or eleven months.

It would be great!

What would you do with yours?

Loving what’s bad

Last night I was half a second away from leaving SL to sleep (at a reasonable hour for once!), when I remembered the recent Welcome to Zindra posting on the official weblog, and that I’d meant to zip over and have a look, so I did that. Just going over to look. For a second. Honest!

Zindra, for the 0.73 of you who don’t know, is the new “Adult” mainland continent that the Lab is putting together, so that all of the “Adult” content (or at least all of the publicly-evident Adult content) on the existing mainland can be moved there. Which still seems like about as bad an idea as it did when I first posted about it here.

So I went over to Zindra and looked around. The land seems fine (although many of the people who are looking to figure out where to move their existing Adult stuff to when they maybe get a free land-swap to Zindra are complaining thta it’s not divided up very sensibly and it makes them nervous about what they’ll actually get). The “Kama City” area has some pretty extensive builds, which look pretty (you can see pictures at Prokofy’s place, and Honour’s, and Emilly’s, and lots of other places), but have a “huge useless memorial park” sort of feel to them, rather than seemingly like anything anyone would want to live in or otherwise use for anything but impressing an investor. (And whoever decided to place roads so that the dreaded Sim Boundaries run right down the yellow stripe in the middle was either clueless or a real prankster; I’m hoping the latter.)

So I visited an area that I would rather didn’t exist, that has ordinary land and some useless-eyecandy builds. And I loved pretty much every second of it. :)

Because, as will be obvious in retrospect, there were lots of people there. And they were to a large extent people who pay attention (because they knew that the land had just opened for inspection) and who have an interest in freedom of expression and action, in how the world is governed, and/or in culture and sexuality (because they were there, interested in Zindra). And it was fabulous. I had the best “going out and pretending to be an extrovert” sort of night I’ve had in a long time.

That’s Jack Linden, chief bottle-washer for the Mainland, who stopped by briefly and bantered with the assembled crowds, talking to a cute and intelligent kitty; in the background is a woman riding a horse and wearing… eyeglasses. :) There were people in normal day-clothes, people in tight latex and collars, people with tentacles instead of legs, one tall guy wearing nothing but shoes and wanting to be admired for being the first naked guy in Zindra (he got alot of good-natured teasing for that), people in sexy stuff and normal stuff and crazy stuff. We made silly jokes, we talked about the Adult content stuff, we talked about how sterile and odd the builds were, we discussed the state of the world and the possibilities for the future.

I got out my hoverdisc and hovered around instead of walking or flying, because it was pretty laggy with that many people, and being nonphysical the hoverdisc behaves much more predictably in lag.

I investigated a yellow dot on the minimap and found a friend that I haven’t talked to in weeks, and we said hi and chatted and picked up our conversation as though it had been only five or ten minutes. After a bit there was a rumor that Jack Linden was having a meeting at a nearby beach; I told my friend I would hoverdisc over and check it out. Turns out it was just Jack passing through and saying Hi to some people, and he was already gone when I got there, but there were nine or ten folks standing in a circle playing with bouncy-balls and talking, and I joined in, and my friend came over. I met the founder of the First Church of Rosedale, and although it was the first time either of us could recall having met, we also started talking as though we were mid-way into a conversation that had been only briefly interrupted. (She later remembered that we’d spoken very briefly a few weeks ago at a place where she was fencing and I was listening to the DJ.)

I was in love. Not with anyone in particular :) but with the whole scene. New and open land (albeit with some weird stuff on it), a sense of uncertainty, of potential, sexy and strange and whip-smart people who somehow feel like family the instant you set eyes on them. Just like SL is supposed to be!

I eventually realized that the clock really meant what it was saying, and reluctantly logged out and went to sleep. But during lunch today I went briefly back in, just to see what was up.

There were still people there, almost an entirely different set of people. They were, still / again, really interesting-looking, but unfortunately they were using Voice (ewww), and as well as eating lunch I was also listening to a teleconference so I couldn’t hook in to that.

But for awhile they were talking in text-chat, and it turned out that one of them was (or said he was, and I have no reason to disbelieve him) a former member of the Linden Department of Public Works, and in fact one of the team that had worked on the build that we were standing in. People were asking him various questions about the Zindra builds, and he said two very interesting things:

• First, that the people doing the Zindra builds didn’t know that they were building for the Adult continent! He said that they found out about it at the same time we did. Have to wonder just what the LDPW builders were told. “Build some cool-looking stuff; we don’t really care what, as long as it’s cool”, maybe? No idea. But in any case at least as far as the builders knew the odd builds that were puzzling everyone were not specifically done with the Adult continent in mind.
• And second, that he and various of his colleagues were now ex-members of the LDPW, because of some Lab policy change about where they’re allowed to hire from. He didn’t say much more than that, and I have no idea what it means, but y’all investigative journalists out there are invited to nose into it. Or point me at the place where it’s already common knowledge. :)

Last night, standing around with those sexy crazy smart people and having a good time, we decided that it must be one of those Cunning Schemes of the Lab, to get all of us pervs together in one place, knowing that we’d have a great time talking, and therefore not feel as bad about the whole Adult Content debacle.

It was sort of a joke, and I doubt that the Lab had anything like that in mind, but to some extent it worked. I think even the bizarre eyecandy builds had a sort of back-handed positive effect: sure the builds are weird and we had fun complaining about them and stuff, but they were there, the Lab had put in some effort. The place wasn’t just one big rectangular empty continent with some default texture on the ground. Some thought had been put into it, and if it was sort of the typical wtf “roads running right along Sim boundaries” kind of thought, well we’re Resies and we’re used to that. It feels nice and familiar, in a way.

And I doubt the Lab did that on purpose either. :)

So hm what else what I going to say? Jack Linden (the only Official that I noticed while I was there) said a couple of interesting things. First, there was this:

Dale Innis: So your plan to lure all us pervs here where we would naturally have a good time is working pretty well, I have to say.
Jack Linden: hehe Dale

See that? I said something funny, and a Linden said “hehe Dale”! Swoon! :)

And a bit more on-topic:

Crissy Draper: The continent isn’t as big as I thought it would be
Jack Linden: crissy, we’ve only put a small part of the continent up so far
Crissy Draper: Oh I see :)
Dale Innis: I hope you’re prepared for it to be really really big.
Jack Linden: it can grow a lot if it needs to
Dale Innis: oh good :)

(And, in the interests of full disclosure, we then had

Minx Eisenhart: thats wha all men say Jack

which was just the kind of humor we had all night. And although Minx had huge kazongas and was wearing a latex body-suit and dancing constantly and running lots of silly gestures, she was also witty and articulate when she wanted to be, and not actually annoying at all.)

The reason I said “oh good” when Jack said that they can grow the Adult continent (continents?) alot if they need to, is that I currently have this somewhat starry-eyed theory, shared with some others commenting in the various weblogs and stuff, that before too long there will be lots of Adult land in the Grid, both mainland and private estates, and that in fact most of the interesting personal and creative and recreational stuff in SL will happen in Adult areas, and we can sort of forget that this whole silly thing happened (except for the non-verified folks, who won’t be able to get to it all, and that’s a worry). This has put me at odds with people who, for whatever reason, are convinced that Zindra will be just a small ghetto of wall-to-wall porn and sex shops, that no one with any taste would actually want to visit.

These different visions of the future have immediate practical consequences. For instance if I’m right it would be a bad idea to ban all child AVs from Zindra, because there will be lots of perfectly kid-AV-friendly stuff going on there, because people will have their ordinary houses and art galleries and parks and stuff there, and the only things that you’d want to ban kid AVs from are the relatively small subset of things that are blatantly sexual or otherwise extreme enough that having even an apparent child there would be just too icky. On the other hand if the “wall to wall sex” people are right, it’s hard to make a very strong case against such a ban.

I generally believe in erring on the side of liberty, and I find the connection between adults in child AVs and actual danger to real children tenuous enough that I don’t think we really need to panic at the thought of someone in a child AV walking past a sex club. But I respect the opinions of those who feel otherwise. It will be fascinating to see how it all plays out.

Now hm, I’d intended to keep some of that for another posting. :) But I guess I’m a motormouth (motorfingers?) tonight. Back to RL for a bit (does posting to an SL weblog count as being inworld?), then maybe I’ll see you later, around the grid…

How long, and how rich?

So the first question in the Big Bad Blogger Challenge is: “How long have you been a blogger? How has it enriched your life?”.

For some reason I shudder at the words “blog” and “blogger”. :) But I’ve been writing a weblog since October 1999 (woot!), or perhaps since August 1999 (depending on how you count the rather weblog-like “news” page on my personal domain). On September 17th, 1999, I presciently wrote:

I think everyone in the world should be forced to write a paragraph a day of thoughts, events, rants, or whatever, and to put it up on the Web for everyone to read. Of course that would imply universal literacy and computer access, but that’s OK! Anyone who refused to post their daily paragraph could like have their livers eaten by eagles or something.

thus personally kicking off the entire Personal Publishing Revolution single-handed.

On the other hand, I started weblogging here on June 20th, 2008.

Hey, so I’m coming up on my tenth year of weblogging in general, and my first year of SL weblogging. What fun!

How has it enriched my life?

I’ve always loved writing, loved speaking in the textual voice; and similarly (I freely admit) loved reading my own words, listening to my own voice. In general I don’t speak in voice-voice nearly as much or as comfortably; I’m not that fond of the sound of my voice, and I speak kinda fast (not to mention I say weird things) so people often don’t hear and/or don’t understand what I’ve just said in voice. In print, they will at least see the right words, and they can reread them a few times if they seemed too nonsensical the first time. Not that that always helped. :)

Writing stuff in general has wildly enriched my life, I’d say, in ways and reasons that I can’t lay out in obvious milestones or promotions or new family members or titles of nobility. I’ve made friends, of that mysterious delicious textual sort of friend that one makes through letters, through words, through text. I’ve recorded bits of my life and later gone back and read them again, to great advantage in memory and placidity and general happiness. I’ve had nice validating comments from various people (you read what I wrote! you considered it significant enough to react to! maybe you even liked it!). And in general I think writing to the world, and hearing back from interesting parts of the world (I have the best readers) has kept me sane (more or less) and enriched my life marvelously.

Also I get to post pictures of myself! :)

A whole week of postings? Gasp!

Chestnut points to Alicia Chenaux’s Big Bad Blogger Challenge, which dares the world to post something to their weblog (”blog”, wince) every day for a whole week.

Oooooh! :)

‘way ‘way back in the day that would have been no challenge at all; I used to post regularly to my RL weblog every single day, always, with just the occasional off-day that I would apologize to my readers for. That was a long time ago! Before Second Life, before World of Warcraft, before a bunch of things. And also before WordPress; my RL weblog was (and is) hand-edited HTML (heavly copy-and-pasted from week to week of course), uploaded via scp. Old Skool!

Nowadays I post to the RL weblog maybe two or four times a month, and I post here utterly sporadically, as you know. But given this challenge, maybe I’ll try doing a whole week and see what happens.

‘course I’m already a day behind; maybe I’ll do two today to catch up…

What a tangled web we weave…

So those of you who have read my profile’s “1st Life” tab, which says that I am a male sort of person, and maybe some others of you also, probably think that when I am being Girl Dale I am being a boy pretending to be a girl.

But I feel that I must here reveal that that is pretense, and actually I am a girl; that is, I am a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a girl.

Ha ha ha, no wait, wait! I was just kidding. Just pulling your leg for a moment. Just pretending.

Because that way, for that one brief shining moment, I was a boy pretending to be a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a girl.

And how many times in life do you get a chance to be something that complicated?

:)

(Also it is late at night.)