The real me is having a nap, tyvm

So there’s a slightly disturbing post on the official SL weblog, by the newly-minted Wallace Linden, titled “Will the Real You Please Stand Up“.

The title is imho very unfortunate, because although the theme is officially “let’s start a conversation about the tools that we want and need to manage all of our various identities in whatever ways we want to”, it’s easy (especially with that title) to read it as having a subtext something like “get used to the fact that we’re going to be bringing RL identities more and more into SL, whether y’all like it or not”.

I hope that’s not actually the subtext.

But anyway!

I wrote a reply to it, and here it is:

Just to add my voice to what seems to be the main trend of the comments :) I think that the current “1st Life” tab (made searchable, ideally) is a fine place for people who want their RL information disclosed to disclose it, you can’t use RL names as SL names because RL names aren’t nearly unique enough, and any effort the Lab spends on “integrating” with Facebook or Twitter or similar “social media” puffery is effort that I’d rather than Lab spent on something more useful.

By now we’re quite familiar with the positive network effect of being connected to other people in a social network or Web service like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, or the like. The more people you’re connected to, and the more people they’re connected to, the more useful the network becomes.

Hahahahaha. No. The more people you’re “connected” to, and the more people they’re “connected” to, the more useless the network becomes, because it is full of notices about how someone needs your help in fighting a dragon, or has found a cache of machine guns, or has posted a picture of their niece’s new dog.

Certainly expose the APIs and things (as long as you can do it SECURELY) that people can use to create Facebook integration frobs and whatnot if they want to, but don’t waste precious Lab time writing the frobs yourselves. Make the 1st Life tab searchable so if someone wants to look for someone who claims to be the RL drummer Trivett Wingo, they can do that. But please don’t make it so that if Trivett Wingo wants to have an SL AV that lets him get AWAY from his crowds of adoring fans, that AV will end up being stigmatized as a result.

The thing not to miss here — and it bears stating despite how obvious it sounds — is what all these online “identities” have in common. At the center of them all, the hub that ties all these personae together, is the very real, non-virtual, analog and offline “you.” Whether the connections are public or not, your Second Life avatar, your World of Warcraft toon, your Facebook profile, your LinkedIn employment history — all of these and more are just different aspects of a single entity: the person reading these words. They are all already connected to each other, via you.

Is this Linden Lab officially disowning the hardcore Immersionist Digial People among the Resi’s? Or just you needing to be educated about them? This may sound incredibly obvious to you, but there are a significant number of Residents who would disagree. Surely you’ve been around SL long enough to know that?

Please keep in mind, as you go about thinking about these issues, that there is no single “right answer” to these questions that you raise. Your job is not to “start a conversation” that will result in some Official Consensus position that the Lab is then free to go off and impose on everyone, whether we agree with it or not. Your job, as I see it, is to enable the conversations that will help the Lab be more aware of the huge variety of Residents, and the uses to which we put SL, and to therefore avoid doing anything that would mess that up.

Thank you. :)

Give the real money first

There’s alot of really admirable charity activity in Second Life; builds and events and auctions and awareness-raising and all.

In the back of my mind there’s always a worry, though, about the actual fund-raising that SL charitable activities do. With a handful of exceptions, the amount of real-world money raised in SL tends to be on the small side of middling, in RL terms.

I know that for myself, I feel pretty generous if I give 1000L to some charity donation box, whereas I’d feel sort of cheap giving US$5 in real life. But 1000L is of course less than US$5, so it’s sort of silly. And if giving 1000L inworld makes me feel subconsciously like I’ve Done That, so I never get around to giving say US$25 in real life, that’s not a net gain.

SL donation tends to be extremely convenient, of course, and if that leads to people who would normally not bother to give anything at all giving a few hundred or thousand Linden dollars, that’s great. But for people who want to, can afford to, and can remember to give real money, I think it’s a good idea to do that first. And if you (we) then dive into the SL activities, the Red Cross benefit sales, benefit concerts, and all the other things happening in and around SL, that’s terrific; every additional bit is that much more good done.

But I would recommend at least considering giving the real money first…

Dept. of OMGWTF

I had an alternate title I was going to use for this posting:

Linden Lab: where every day is April Fool’s Day.

but I decided that would be a little harsh.

Anyway! It has belatedly come to my attention that there is a new public-facing Linden: Wallace Linden, who will be “Conversation Manager” at Linden Lab.

“Conversation Manager” is a chilling-enough phrase, certainly; the whole problem with the conversation between the Lab and its Residents is that it is too managed. But perhaps it’s just an unfortunate choice of words; from Wallace’s posting it sounds like his main job will be to prod other Lindens into actually posting things to the official “blogs”. This is a fine thing to have someone do, although one wonders if a simple “post stuff to the blog or you will lose your foosball privileges!” wouldn’t have sufficed.

It would be wonderful if someone could change the culture at the Lab so that the blog postings could be the actual thoughts and feelings of the Lindens who run the place, rather than the chirpy marketing releases that they currently are; but someone whose title is “Conversation Manager” isn’t really where I’d expect to see that come from. (Maybe he will surprise me!)

But anyway the actual OMGWTF thing is that prior to joining the Lab, Wallace Linden was (among other things) a founder of the Herald (Alphaville Herald, Second Life Herald). This is like, like… I don’t know, what is this like?

This is like finding out that the new White House Spokesperson’s previous job was as a managing editor at the Weekly World News (“Alien Vampires Demand Access to Government Blood Banks!!!”).

The Herald is basically a humor magazine thinly disguised as a tabloid news sheet. It is all about the buzz and the hitcount, and not so much about the facts; facts do creep in, but it’s very hard to tell them from the satire and the simply made-up stuff. Not to mention the pictures of pretty naked AVs. I don’t know what it means that this is the sort of content preferred by the Lab’s new “Conversation Manager”.

I’ve had a couple of discussions in the last couple of days about how one might explain this. Leading candidates include:

• He Knows Someone.
• Entirely Random (“whoa I promised I’d hire a Conversation Manager this week; anyone know anyone?”; “there was that guy who wrote that book?”; “which book?”; “I dunno, Wallace… something?”; “great, he’s hired!”)
• There is actually some perfectly good explanation that the Lab is keeping to itself for the Usual Mysterious Reasons.
• Second Life is prospering so wonderfully that those scamps at the Lab can afford to do this sort of thing just for the pleasure of freaking ppl out.

I hope it’s some combination of the last two, myself. :)

So anyway anyway, welcome Wallace Linden, and please ignore your job title and try to make the conversation as genuine and unmanaged as it can be…

Enterprise Warcraft(tm)

Since covert propaganda lackey investigative reporter Adric Antfarm recently spilled the beans in a weblog comment, I will take this opportunity to confirm the report: the next incursion of Global Megacorporations into the Virtual World space will indeed be into World of Warcraft.

Having sucked dry fully leveraged the potential of the Second Life(tm) World(tm), we at the controls of the heartless behemoth that is world capitalism will shortly announce Enterprise Warcraft(tm), an enterprise productivity enablement platform that combines the sensory immersiveness of a Second Life dance club with the strict warrior discipline of a party of level 80 Orc hunters.

Why base an enterprise virtual space on the World of Warcraft, you ask? As compared to Second Life, the World of Warcraft platform offers several advantages to the corporate purchaser:

• Easy sharding: since the World of Warcraft server architecture is already based on a number of separate “realms”, there is no need for redesign to obtain an isolated environment: we will simply add a set of “Corporate” regions to the current “Americas”, “Europe” and “Oceanic” regions. Players (known as “employees”) will be able to connect to realms in Corporate regions only if they have a paid-up Enterprise Warcraft (EW) account (these start at a low introductory price of US$5,000 per year.)
• Built-in hierarchy: unlike the hippy egalitarianism of Second Life, the WoW platform is all about rank and hierarchy. In EW, a character’s level is limited by the player’s rank in the organization. Rank-and-file employees may not advance beyond level 50, nor possess gear beyond Superior. Senior managers are given pre-built level 50 characters with Heirloom gear, and executives begin with level 80 characters in Epic gear (fully gemmed and appropriately enchanted). Lower-level characters will be forbidden from using the “ignore” function on higher-level characters, and from declining their duel challenges.
• No troublesome creativity: while it has proven infeasible to entirely wipe out user creativity in Second Life, creativity in World of Warcraft is limited primarily to sneaking sexually-suggestive guild names past the censorship filters. By limiting EW players to a set of Enterprise Quests(tm) centered around corporate goals, management can assure that employees are not distracted by independent thoughts. And there is no sex in WoW! (That patch that lets you see Draenei females naked will be restricted to senior executives and authorized system administrators.)
• Flexible interface: for Enterprise Warcraft, the open-source programmers that became mindless zombie slaves valuable collaborators during the Second Life project will be redirected to writing EW UI add-ons, in support of calendar management, project scheduling, and computing golf handicaps.

In addition to the changes mentioned above, Enterprise Warcraft will include an enhanced dungeon and party structure that more accurately reflects corporate culture and organization. First, the large monsters that are the main target of a run will no longer be called “Bosses”, but will instead be referred to as “Team Goals”. The traditional five-member party of one tank, one healer, and three DPS (damage-dealers) will be replaced by a mininum ten-member party, consisting of:

One tank, whose role is to absorb monster attacks and take the blame for all technical problems that occur during a run.

One healer, who attempts to keep the tank alive long enough to finish the run and achieve the Team Goals.

One DPS, whose role is to actually kill the monsters (this role is de-emphasized in Enterprise Warcraft).

Four Project Managers, who shout contradictory instructions at the tank, healer, and DPS during battles, and call for frequent stops to perform detailed analyses of the battle statistics and try to determine why the run is taking so long, and why the Team Goals have not yet been met.

Two Middle Managers, who run ahead of the tank and aggro any mobs encountered.

One Senior Manager, who has no role during the actual battle, but who determines whether the tank, healer, or DPS will be punished after each wipe, and who allocates all XP and loot after the run. (The Senior Manager automatically receives half of the total party XP gains for each run. If the Team Goals are not met, the Senior Manager designates either the tank, healer, or DPS for a level-based XP penalty.)

While the release date has not yet been officially announced, I am confident that within a year or two, the media will be reporting that the EW hype is now over, and that World of Warcraft is dead…

The Classic Dungeonmaster

Another WoW posting; feel free to complain. :)

In the relatively recent Word of Warcraft achievement system, there’s an achievement called Classic Dungeonmaster, which involves getting nineteen sub-achievements, each of which requires defealting the last boss of (or otherwise completing) some classic (i.e. included in WoW even before the first expansion came out) dungeon.

Spennix has been taking a break recently, since I’ve been having fun leveling lower-level characters like Deminestia, and since Spennix is mostly a soloer and so isn’t all that enthusiastic about the new easier group-forming stuff in the latest patch. But it occurred to me / her / us that it might be fun to go for this achievement, since as a moderate-geared 80 she can probably solo each of these dungeons, it will give me a little experience with them so I will be better prepared when Deminestia or someone gets to them, and if we are going to do it ever it would be good to do it before the older parts of the world are torn apart by Cataclysm.

At the moment we have just a few left to do! Here is Spennix doing a victory dance over the temporarily dead body of evil Archmage Arugal:

She is modelling a female-gnome-sized copy of his robes, which for some reason he was carrying on him when she defeated him. :)

Here she is during the cleansing of the Scholomance, temporarily turned into a skeleton by some rude bad guy:

And here she is at home in K3, showing off the Bad Mojo Mask that she got from the boss of Zul’Farrak:

Pretty silly, eh? :)

The next one on her list is Sunken Temple (actually the Temple of Atal’Hakkar, but no one remembers how to spell that). The final boss of that place is a big phantom dragon, but he’s asleep and you can’t defeat him until he wakes up. He doesn’t wake up until the big High Priest guy is defeated. And you can’t get to the big High Priest guy until you bring down the glowing green barrier, which you do by defeating five or six little sub-priest guys who are scattered around the instance. And the instance is a flippin’ maze and we are always getting lost.

So here is Spennix taking a little nap with the sleeping final boss, getting up the energy to take care of all of that:

Zzzzzzz…

The main reason I’ll never be a Serious WoW Player is that I like having fun doing silly easy stuff like this at least as much as I like going on Big Serious Raids for Awesome Gear, which is what the Serious Players do.

(Click on each picture for the flickr page for a larger version.)

An Art Challenge!

This just in from Sabrinaa Nightfire:

Call for Artists!

Erato of Caerleon is having another Imagine Create Challenge. This time the challenge is to create a work of art that uses no texture.

Here are the rules:

1. You may either use the Default texture, transparent texture, white transparent or Blank texture on your work. You may use color and shine and transparency.

2. The maximum size of your piece is 10×10m foot print. Your piece may be taller than 10m

3. You may use a maximum of 40 prims.

4. Only low lag scripts may be used (as determined by our script police)

5. All work must be submitted to Sabrinaa Nightfire by midnight on Friday, February 12, 2010.

The management reserves the right to not show any piece that we determine is inappropriate for this show.

This will be a judged show with a panel of judges determining the first, second and third place entries.

The show will open at 1pm slt on Sunday, February 21, 2010.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Please contact me, Sabrinaa Nightfire.

We look forward to a great show. Please feel free to pass this notecard along to your friends too.

I think I might actually make one for this one. If I don’t get distracted. :)

Have to decide whether to make something random that just happens to not use any non-allowed textures, or whether to make something that is all about its lack of texture.

(And if I do get distracted, at least I helped spread the word!)

Fishing the Pristine Waters

Deminestia, who got her first mount just the other week, is now level 46 or 47 or something, has her first Swift Mount, is wearing mail, crafting stuff using Thick Leather, and running all sortsa instances that I’ve never seen before (because the only other WoW character I’ve had at this level is Spennix, who leveled almost entirely by questing, not in instances).

Here she is, with her still-faithful Dragonhawk Fido, fishing in the Pristine Waters part of Maraudon, after the first time I ran that part of the (three-section) instance.

Sitting and fishing is so relaxing. :) I should post some fishing pictures from SL sometime…

… And a star to steer her by

One of my very very favorite Solstice-time presents this year was this amazing Tall Ship; the Tradewind from Trudeau Classic Sailing Yachts.

It’s really an astounding ship, big and grand and detailed and authentic. It has many many prims, and in fact most of the ship is worn as an attachment because of that; the part that you rezz on the water is just a basic (invisible) outline, and the sitting poseballs. (It holds the captain, and I think up to three crew / guests.) It has an optional-rez cabin with a bunk that sleeps two, and you can change the color scheme, authorize other people to sail it, and do lotsa other stuff that I haven’t tried yet.

I liked it so much that when I got some RL cash for Christmas I converted half of it to Lindens, and used a fraction of that to buy a little daysailor from the same place; the Trudeau Twenty. It is an incredibly sweet little boat:

Here I am moored next to a recreation of a Piranesi drawing:

(I love Piranesi’s dark fantastic work, but I was having too much fun sailing to stop and give it a thorough lookover; will have to go back there sometime.)

A wonderful feature of the Twenty is the boom tent. You can drop anchor and rez the boom tent, which includes a mattress with sleeping poesballs, for a nap or an overnight:

It’s practically a houseboat! (Now I have to play with the Tall Ship more, and see what surprises it has that I haven’t found yet.)

(Oh, and that’s an automated airship in the background, just pulling in. Have to take that tour sometime, too…)

Wind and Sailing in Second Life

Speaking of sailing in SL, a v good friend suggested that I say a word about how the wind works, for SL-sailing purposes.

The simplest sailboats, like my Skipjack “Indolence”, just go wherever you point them, as fast as you tell them to go; they are actually powerboats with decorative sails, and don’t care about the wind at all.

The Trudeau yachts, on the other hand, use a pretty sophisticated model of sails and wind, and have HUDs that tell you where the wind is coming from, let you raise and lower and take in and let out and reef the sails, and so on, and the behavior of the craft (including really nice water and sail sounds) is directly related to how the sails are set compared to how the wind is blowing. For some value of “wind”.

There are at least three kinds of wind in Second Life that a sailboat can use: the “built-in” SL wind that scripts can detect, a custom wind as specified by the sailor (it’s really nice, if you don’t want to tack painfully upwind in a narrow channel for hours, to just tell the boat “pretend the wind is coming from right behind us”), and “racewind”, which is a shared wind for an area that is broadcast by a scripted object, so that all the race-compatible boats around can see the same wind, and race fairly.

All these kinds of wind are described in more detail on the Wind page of the Second Sailing Wiki, which I recommend to anyone interested in the details.

All of which shouldn’t scare anyone off from SL sailing; it’s not actually hard at all, just lots of fun. I haven’t sailed in RL in years, and even then it was just simple one-sail boats on little lakes; but figuring out the controls on the Trudeau craft didn’t take me long at all (once I figured out which arrow was the wind-direction indicator!), and I’m finding sailing with an actual wind (of whichever kind I’m in the mood for) to be a lovely soothing thing to do.

Try it, if you haven’t! Maybe I’ll see you on th’ waves. :)

Happy *ISHH*!

It’s the time of year when everyone deluges each other with greetings and good wishes of various sorts, because it’s the middle of the winter in some places, and the anniversary of various things, and the start of a new calendar year in some calendars, and because the days have just stopped getting shorter, and because this is when everyone does that.

I usually do a solstice card in SL, but this year I was lazy through Solstice and never quite got around to it. When I logged in today there was a great poem from Beth Odets about *ISHH*, for “Insert Seasonal Holiday Here”. That’s a pretty good approach, but I didn’t want to steal it.

So I just did an early New Year card:

Note how we are looking symbolically out at the sunrise. I’n't it deep? :)

I went through my friends list, and for each person doubleclicked to open an IM window, and dragged an object with that image (and a little snow-particle prim) into that IM window. Once for each of the 300-odd persons on my friends list.

I feel virtuous!

Blood Elf Riding Chicken

The Blizzard folks must have done focus groups or something, and decided that retention, or buy-in by new members, or whatever, was suffering due to things taking to long at low levels, because they have really wildly sped things up down there.

Last Wednesday some friends persuaded me to roll up yet another WoW character :) so I could hang out on the server that they are on. Being into hunters lately, and them being Horde, I rolled up a Blood Elf hunter, named Deminestia (the first time I’ve used an automatically-suggested name unmodified; I like it).

I was curious to see what the notes for Patch 3.3 meant about having lowered leveling requirements at low levels. Turns out what they meant was that they’ve lowered leveling requirements at low levels, and you level really frigging fast.

(And they’ve also left all the existing quests in place, which means there are now far too many quests in any given area; if you try to do all available quests, like Spennix used to back in the day, you’ll be far too high level by the time you get to the last ones.)

And then once you get to Level 15, you can start to use the new “Find a Dungeon”, which will automatically hook you up with like-level characters from all the realms in your battlegroup, and magically transport you to an appropriate instance. One result of which is that you level even faster.

Having run Rage Fire Chasm twice and Shadow Fang Keep once, here’s Deminestia with her faithful dragonhawk Fido, on Friday, at level 20. After less than three days of playing! And pretty casual playing, at that (no staying up all night or anything).

(Prettier larger)

And since they’ve also wildly lowered the level and gold requirements for mounts, here she is on her brand new Blood Elf Riding Chicken:

(Also larger)

That is one embarassing mount. :)

I’m curious to see whether all this speeding up of the first twenty levels will just make the next sixty drag, as I get past the point where they’ve accelerated leveling, and no longer have a mount to work toward (since I already got one). Of course there’s still swift mounts, flying mounts, swift flying mounts…

Nosing into Hobbit holes

This morning the Lab announced that the previously-announced Hobbit Holes — I mean, Linden Homes — are now available for inspection on the new continent of Nascera (not “NASCAR”).

So I blipped over to look around.

There I am (elf guy in green mohawk for visibility) standing next to the same model Home as in the prior posting(s), with viewing of parcel boundaries turned on. Note that the parcel boundaries are drawn very closely around the house; the bit that I’m standing on is the Linden-owned protected land that separates the lots. So if you have a Linden Home, you don’t own any yard (or “garden”, for those of you in the United Kingdom). Except, in the case of this house, on the roof. :)

The covenant for the (oh alright) Linden Homes is inneresting. Here it is in lengthy detail:

Welcome to Linden Home for Premium Account holders. Linden Home is a residential community, located on the Continent Nascera, owned and managed by Linden Lab, currently in a limited beta. For more information, see our blog: https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/land/blog/2009/12/04/home-is-where-you-hang-your-avatars-hat

The purpose of Linden Home is to provide an opportunity for Premium Account Residents of the Second Life virtual world to quickly own a home and belong to a community. Linden Home is available to Premium account holders with 512m2 of available tier. Premium accounts are provided 512m2 available tier at no cost.

As a Premium Account holder, you are eligible for Live Chat and Ticket support from our Support Portal. If you need support for your Linden Home, go to the Support Portal and submit a ticket. Select the Land and Regions Issues ticket type. Under the resulting Region Request dropdown, select Linden Home.

Linden Home is governed by this Covenant, Linden Home Terms and Conditions, Terms of Service (TOS), and Community Standards (CS).

Rules
Linden Home Restrictions:

Linden Home has unique restrictions in addition to those outlined in the Linden Home Terms and Conditions. By accepting a Linden Home, you agree to additional restrictions as follows:

* Linden Home is for residential use only.
* Business use of any kind is prohibited, including parcel rental, rental boxes, classified ads or other forms of advertising, and event listings.
* Land cannot be terraformed, sold, deeded to group, joined, or divided.
* Land cannot contain sky boxes, temp-rezzers, or individual prims beyond the allocated size of the Second Life Viewer build tools – 10×10x10m (no megaprims).
* Linden Homes may not be removed, modified, exchanged, set or deeded to group, or transferred.
* Linden Homes should be kept presentable and in-theme.
* Linden Homes should not be used as sandboxes.
* Linden Homes do not include traffic tracking.
* Ownership is limited to one Linden Home per Premium Account.

Linden Home Benefits:

* Use your Premium account’s 512m2 tier-free allocation towards Linden Home.
* Ready-to-move-in themed home on 512m2 parcel.
* Select your own Linden Home theme.
*

* Decorate your home with furnishings.
* Invite your friends to your home.
* Meet your neighbors and make friends.
* Linden Homes are allocated 117 prims.
* Set Home to here at your Linden Home location.
* Set land and objects to group.

Linden Home Etiquette:

Living in a community includes courtesy towards your neighbors. Here are some guidelines for etiquette in Linden Home Regions:

* Use local chat say, rather than shout.
* Adhere to the Maturity Rating for the Linden Home Region you are located in.
* Respect your neighbors’ privacy.
* Review general Second Life Etiquette suggestions and incorporate them into your Linden Home experience.

Help References
The Second Life Knowledge Base (KB) includes many helpful articles for beginning landowners and Residents new to the Second Life virtual world. The following resources will help you get started with your Linden Home experience:

* Linden Home
* Linden Home FAQ
* Second Life Quickstart Guide
* Knowledge Base
* Video Tutorials
* Invite friends to join you in Second Life using SLurl
* Shopping
* Grid Status updates
* Blogs
* Second Life knowledge Q&A
* Abuse Report

We hope you enjoy your new Linden Home!

Interesting. I have no profound comments on it at the moment, but there it is. (Speculation on the two Mysteriously Empty Lines in the “benefits” section is most welcome.)

One thing the original posting said that interested me was “most will not share a border with other Residents”. I was thinking in terms of a checkerboard pattern, where doing that requires like double the area. But clearly these parcels aren’t a checkerboard pattern. So looking at the neighbors, again with “show parcel boundaries” turned on:

(may or may not be clearer larger).

While we aren’t sharing any borders in the picture here, the lots are separated by very thin strips of protected land. So it’s nice that your neighbor’s tree can’t stick through your wall (without crossing Linden land), but you’re still going to look out your window and see mostly the neighbor’s house.

I’ve looked only at the fantasy-themed area so far (I got distracted, what a surprise!), but I’m sure other people are out there also nosing around, and will have published lotsa good information before I even get to hitting “Publish” on this… :)

Update: For instance, Ari Blackthorne’s pictorial catalog of pretty much all of the houses in all of the styles! (I think I like the hobbit ones the best…)

Random pictures of me doing things in places

Hanging around the big Falln store for no particular reason the other day, and camming around like I always do everywhere, I came upon a nice Asian / Oriental furnishings place, embedded in but quite different from Falln, called I think “Little Boy Blue”. The products were very nice, and some were very nicely priced :) and I bought some.

Then wanting to actually put some of them out somewhere rather than just leave them in inventory forever, I decided to redecorate the Extropia pod a bit. Here’s part of the result:

The tatami mats and the bamboo decoration in the corner and the little cabinet and the incense burner on the table and the Buddha and Ganesh on the wall are all from LBB. The table itself and the kneeling pads for it were a gift awhile back, and came from somewhere else. The table and lamp to the right are from RELIC I think. Other things are from other places. :)

Has kind of a nice open feeling to it I think…

Vaguely relatedly, a Zazen Coffee House:

Just a lovely tiny build (SLURL). Came across it through some complicated serendipitous path involving searching for the Philosophy House group to join it again after having to temporarily drop it ’cause I needed a group slot. Or something. :)

Later on, skating in the nice flat empty lot (empty except for skating devices :) ) out behind Snook’s Garden Centre in Caledon Morgaine:

(And yes, those are Christmas lights I’m wearing. :) A free gift from hoorenbeek.)

Then I flew my Barney Boomslang hoverpod up to the mysterious island that looms in the sky above Caledon Morgaine, and found an enigmatic fenced mushroom garden to relax in:

(The music stream was playing When You’re Evil; somehow it was just perfect…)

And then, sometimes it’s good to get down to ground level and just sit…

(Click through to flickr for mostly the same words, comment boxes, etc…)

Free Hobbit Holes!

I mean, Linden Homes! :)

In a recent posting to the official Second Life “blog”, the Lab has announced that they will soon be beta-testing a program in which Premium members can get a free plot of land, with a pre-installed Hobbit hole house on it, to live on. For free.

These Linden Homes will be limited in various ways:

Therefore these parcels will be unlike normal land in that they will be restricted in various ways; the house cannot be removed and the parcels cannot be sold, joined, terraformed or divided. Events and classifieds cannot be created for these parcels; only Premium Members can own them, and only one per account.

If you can’t remove the house, I imagine you also won’t be able to modify it so that it consists of a single invisible phantom prim buried a meter underground. :)

My initial visceral reaction to this was sheesh here we go again with the Lindens sort of dipping down and futzing around with the world and the economy.

Sort of like having Athena Herself open a free pizza-place on the corner. Okay, maybe she only offers three toppings, and no Sicilian crusts, but I’m not sure how happy I’d be about it if I had a pizza joint in the same town. Or, alternately, if I was a big fan of Sicilian pizza!

I’ve read Jacek Antonelli on the subject, and she is hopeful that this will turn out to be a good thing even for the people that might look on it as wildly uneven competition.

I’ve read most of Second Thoughts on the subject (I admit I didn’t read the entire long chat transcript); Prokofy Neva thinks this is all part of the Lindens’ systematically destroying the mainland.

Whether or not the Hobbit Holes program succeeds in its stated aims, my larger impression is that, as I’ve noted before, the Lindens still think of Second Life as a thing of theirs, that they can of course do whatever they want with. They are not Deistic creators, setting the world spinning and then keeping their hands off; they are hands-on deities, reaching down and twiddling in ways both small and very large, not worrying all that much about what mortals might be swept asides in the process.

I have the feeling that the internal economy is in some sense not real to them; they probably know it exists, but it doesn’t figure at all largely in their calculations. They like being able to show big numbers in monthly press releases, but on the other hand they regularly do things that have large and disparate impacts on various sectors of the economy (freebie policies on xstreet, the Zindra exile, now the Hobbit Holes), and the only sign that they’re aware of this is typically some vague reassuring noises in the forums and the weblog.

And as I’ve probably also said before, this is entirely within their rights. It’s just a continuing sign that the way the Lab as a whole views the world, as a thing that they are doing, and that we are allowed to play in, and that they will periodically fiddle with in ways they think we will overall like, is quite different from the way that I would like to view the world, as a place where the Lab creates only the basic ‘physics’, and the Resis then create an actual functioning world on top of it. To me it is much less fun and interesting to see what a few dozen people in a California company would do with a world than it would be to see what thousands of random people from all around the world would do.

I’d like to be able to say that the world is gradually moving from the former model to the latter, but I don’t see it. It’s all too easy to tell a story in which things move the other way: in order to attract some possibly-imaginary set of neophobic corporate and mass-market users, the Lab wants more control, not less, over the way the world develops. And so over time the doings and the imaginations of the Residents become less and less important.

I hope that’s not the story we end up telling, ’cause I like Second Life, and I would hate to see it all cleaned up and sterile and dull and controlled. I hope that either the Lab decides that reducing Resident influence on the world is in fact not the best way to grow the business (and I think that it isn’t, myself), or we get some sort of compromise, where (sigh) parts of the Grid are all sterile and clean, and parts are allowed to remain as wild and wooly and unpredictable as (well) our imaginations…

Update: oh, and here is Ordinal, who I intended to quote from but forgot:

It is not First Land though. Those days are behind us. Now, residents are Content Creators or Content Consumers, and the assumption is that they are Content Consumers from Day One and will not move from that position.

Exactly. And exactly what I fear for the future of SL.

Thoughts on a third-rezday plummet

Just me and the sky and a prim

When I first came to Second Life, three years ago last Sunday, I was mostly intrigued by the idea that you could make things there, in this “virtual world” where the laws of physics would be perhaps kinder, and more mutable, than in the real world.

Although we all know that the difficulty of The First Hour Experience is one of the Big Problems with the platform today, I wasn’t a victim of it: I was hooked after about ninety seconds. A whole, and apparently pretty large and complex and random, world to explore, without having to drive anywhere or get dressed or even get out of bed! And (see above) where anyone could just stick out a hand and build random things! Amazing!

For awhile I and/or it was crashing so much (you kids don’t know how easy you’ve got it these days!) that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to stand it, but it and I got used to each other, and I stuck around.

It’s been a fascinating three years. As I say probably far too often, I came for the building and scripting and stuff, but stayed for the people. I still love the building and scripting, but I’m pretty sure that I spend less time on that than I do on talking to friends, dancing in clubs, meeting new people, and generally hanging out.

There is for obscure reasons a tradition in some subcultures of Second Life, that involves leaping naked from the sky, holding an umbrella, on one’s rezday.

How sure are we about this?

So there I am, again ‘way up in the virtual sky, on a slightly more sophisticated virtual sky platform (my floating rocks build, which is still up there over the Hughes Rise park), with my virtual umbrella, pondering the drop.

It really is a significant drop, isn't it?

This would be a good place for Deep and Significant Thoughts about Second Life, virtual worlds, the real world, the nature of consciousness, and so on. If any thoughts like that come to me while I’m typing here, I’ll try to pass them along. :)

Being Dale has, I’m about 100% certain, been a good thing for me. And continues to be. Different people have very different attitudes toward, relationships with, their virtual selves. For me it’s pretty simple: I am Dale Innis. Saying that I identify with my avatar is as much of an understatement (and an overstatement) as saying that I identify with my RL body. (Much more on that thought here.) My Second Life friends are friends of mine, just like my First Life friends are friends of mine. I don’t necessarily know where my SL friends live in RL, or what they do for a living, or whether they are married or have children; but since I can’t remember that sort of fact about my RL friends for more than five minutes either :) that’s not a very large consideration for me. The main difference, really, is that it’s so much easier to visit the SL ones.

Completely naked?

(Yes, completely naked; don’t complain to me, that’s the tradition.)

I continue to think, as I said all those years ago, that when we eventually look back on these very early days of virtual worlds, we will see it as the beginning of a huge and important change in the ways humans live their lives. Exactly what that change will be, I don’t pretend to know. I used fiction to speculate about it some back in Meaties; I like that story quite a bit (he said modestly), and it’s one possible answer to that question. It might even be something like the right one; time will tell.

It's pretty chilly up here.

Lots of people that I know in SL, and even more people that I know of, have been talking lately about the Good Old Days of Second Life, and how it’s going downhill, and the best parts are over, due to some combination of floods of newcomers and ‘bots, bad media reporting, stupid and/or malicious actions by Linden Lab, drama and trollishness, personal burnout, and whatever else.

I do sympathize with the feelings, and I am often puzzled by how completely clueless Linden Lab seems to be about communicating at least with the more engaged and articulate and clued segments of their customer base. I continue to attribute it to organizational randomness rather than to any self-destructive attempt to drive customers away, or even a desire to replace unruly individual customers with large wealthy better-behaved corporate ones (I think the Lindens would like to have both, and are just not all that good at communicating with the former).

And for myself, I’m still having a great time. :) I have my first real store-like things, I’ve been exploring lovely places and having adventures with friends, actually enjoying official organized events, and (of course, still, always) building random odd things (and things that build random odd things).

There have certainly been days and nights when I didn’t feel like going inworld; so I didn’t! But in general when the day is done and I have no more chores, and I can settle down into a comfy chair or bed with my laptop (yay, laptop!) on my lap, and fire up a viewer and find myself in my Park, or my Extropia pod, or wherever, and the IMs from friends, and the freebies from last night’s Midnight Mania boards, and the announcements of new Midnight Mania boards, and the scripting questions, and… all begin to flow in, and I open my inventory to decide what to wear and do some token inventory-sorting, it feels kind of like coming home.

Okay, deep breath...

Not that I’m knocking First Life; that’s pretty wonderful also. And when talking about Deep Things I think it’s a mistake for me to think of them as two different things. I have a life, and part of it is spent in Second Life, and part of it is spent in other places. And it’s all good. And, in the Spirit of the Season here in the US and A, I’m thankful for all of it.

One, two, three, WAHOOO!

In Second Life, I can be a boy, a girl, a panda, a child, a tiny elephant, or a bright shiny sphere. I can fly, I can walk under water, I can build a dirigible with my mind. I can meet people from countries I probably couldn’t find on the globe, and I can meet someone from down the street without knowing it. It has its share of people with issues, of griefers and trolls, of misunderstanding and even some cruelty, but well, that’s humanity for ya. I can build, create, explore, do art, try things out, experiment with my own shape and size and color and consciousness, and hang out and talk with other people who are doing the same kinds of things, and also very different ones.

That makes my life richer. Not my First Life, or my Second Life; just my life.

And not only mine.

Plummeting into the unknown future

So to my friends, my friends-to-be, my “would have been friends except we never actually both logged in at the same time”, and everyone else who’s made these last three years such a blast, and who will I’m sure do the same for the next three, five, seven, a million years, my warmest thanks, and if there’s anything I can do to help make your own journey more interesting and enjoyable, just drop me a line…

How to keep a geek happy :)

I am out of frame to the right of this picture, in the Homestead Island Sandbox on OSgrid, one of the OpenSim-based grids on the net. It’s a bit lonely in terms of socializing, and things crash and otherwise don’t work more often than in Second Life say, but still…

That little semi-transparent flying saucer that you can see, passing in front of the sign just under the word “Island”, is fliting around the sandbox, randomly laying down those colored squares that you see scattered about. All over the whole sim! (They delete themselves after five minutes.)

Sometimes it’s nice having a whole region to oneself. :)

Eat at Joe’s!

No, no, wait, that’s not it, hold on… I mean: buy boats at Dale’s Motorsports! :)

I have finally finally finished populating at least the first set of products (“products”) on the tiny parking space in Busy Ben’s Vehicle Lot that I won six months of lease on in the lottery, as previously mentioned. Here it is all set up:

No more “Coming Soon” signs! I’ve had the first three products (the basic boat, a really cheaup nomod limited-time demo version, and a lifetime subscription to future upgrades) out for quite awhile, but the last product (the one at the top there in the picture) took a bit longer. It’s the most complicated, since what you actually buy is a device that lets you and anyone else who comes by your land rez temporary boats to use; so it’s a product within a product, and required lots of testing.

And also I am really easily distracted. :)

(In case you are wondering, the complex pink texture in the left side of the picture there is from the quite large and flashy boat-selling display in the lot next to mine. Their boats look much more realistic, but higher prim!)

Then, due to great good luck and great good friends, I got the opportunity to set up another store in a place with quite a bit more space, in Waterway West New York, which is one of a whole bunch of sims run by Southern Tier Health Link New York.

My piece of pier is quite a bit bigger than the parking space at Busy Ben’s, so as well as the four Seaspray products, I’ve got a few of my photographs (appropriately water-themed) out for sale, and some places to sit an’ stuff, as well as a boat-rezzer so people can zoom around completely free.

I should do a whole weblog posting just on the NY HealthScape sims, ’cause they are cool. While I’m getting around to that :), here’s a Chestnut’s Choices from back in August, that talks about the place a bit. And here’s the Snapzilla photos of Panacea Luminos, the head honcho. And here’s a Second Citizen thread about the opening of a marvelous art exhibition there. Come by!

Viewer 2.0: Another reason to love Imprudence?

… or Emerald, or Meerkat, or CoolViewer, or…

If Tateru is right (and she usually seems to be right about these things), the story goes something like this: a Long Time Ago, when the Grid was young, the Lab dreamed about the Next Big Version of Second Life, under the obvious name Second Life 2.0. As the months went by, though, and SL turned out to be fsking wonderful and wildly popular, and much of the Lab’s time was taken up in keeping the Grid from crashing, rather than aiming at a Big Flag Day when everything would suddenly change, things were introduced more incrementally (the end of telehubs, the introduction of flexies and sculpties, and so on). On the client side, we got Windlight (which is still not done, grr), the abortive attempt to introduce viewer skins (which failed because everyone hated the first one they did), and not much else.

Now apparently the Lab is still thinking in terms of the Next Big Rev of the viewer as a comparatively large and sudden change, under the name Viewer 2.0. What will Viewer 2.0 be like? Hard to say.

Last year when bopping around the official Wiki, I came across the Landmarks and Navigation Project page, which contained among other things a rather painful section called “Food For Thought”, which argued that it might be a good idea to get landmarks out of inventory, and to “deprecate” user picks, apparently based on someone from an outside design company hired to think about Viewer 2.0, observing that:

• in the ten minutes they’d spent in SL (or there.com, or Metaverse, or maybe it was Club Penguin, who can keep these things straight?), they hadn’t found landmarks and picks useful, and
• web browsers don’t have them, so they can’t be good.

Also in the Food For Thought section were some thoughts on how to make search in SL more like Web search, since as we all know SL is basically a website, and Web search is perfect for websites.

I winced heavily at this, as would anyone who’s actually used SL and knows how important LMs and Picks are, and (since it’s a Wiki) I went in and made some changes to make it less painfully clueless. Shortly thereafter, someone commented on Second Thoughts that this whole “Food For Thought” thing had been essentially retracted in an SLDEV posting, where the external team says that actual Resis had told them that getting rid of LMs and Picks was an awful idea, so those things were no longer on their list. (Why they were, and are, still in the Wiki is a bit of a mystery.) So I reverted most of my Wiki changes, and just stuck in a note pointing at that SLDEV posting.

The “Landmarks and Navigation Project” page has been pretty much moribund since then, and I haven’t heard the name of that particular outside design company (“VectorForm” I think is was) mentioned again. The Lab hired “Big Spaceship” (apparently another design company, not a children’s cartoon) to improve the user experience, and they applied modern user-centered design principles by adding lots of extra black pixels and decorative design elements to the Second Life website. The decorations were removed or scaled back when Residents complained about not actually being able to see much information because of all the screen space they took up, but I believe the extra black pixels are still there on the homepage, helping save electricity or something.

Last March, the Lab put up a weblog posting about its goals for the next viewer (under the name “Viewer 2009″); they were very vague, on the order of “make it better”, only with UI buzzwords.

Then back last June, Tateru Nino got hold of an early Viewer 2.0 prototype that had somehow found its way onto the public daily-build servers. My main impression of it was that it wasn’t all that interesting, except that it added the ability to organize one’s friends list (a good idea!) and replaced the right-click pie menus with traditional dropdowns (which seemed like a bad idea, in a sigh-whatever sort of way).

Shortly after Tateru’s posting about it, that viewer vanished from the build servers, and as far as I know it hasn’t been heard from again.

Then just the other week, Tateru (again!) posted an interview with M Linden in which (being M Linden) he says various painfully chirpy things about the Viewer presentation at SLCC09 (which I didn’t see) and the new viewer in general, including talking about (sigh) getting rid of the pie menus, and also notably referring to:

the browser-like location bar where you enter a region name (e.g., p squared), hit return and voila you are magically teleported there. It is really slick and every time I use it I smile.

This worries me because:

• He says “browser-like” as though it’s obviously a good thing,
• He either doesn’t realize that the slick new thing he’s describing is basically already on the Map dialog, or he’s assuming that the people he cares about don’t know that, and
• If that’s what makes him smile, I have no idea what else he might think is “slick”.

He also said “I really like the sliding side panel.” Gah. Too much emphasis on form over function imho. He didn’t even say “we’ve done studies, and determined that this sliding-panel design is better than what he have now.” He just “likes”, it. Oh boy.

Over on Second Thoughts, Prokofy Neva opined that the passage I quoted there probably means that the Lab was going to get rid of landmarks as inventory objects, in favor of just cutting-and-pasting in and out of the location bar that makes M smile. I think this is pretty unlikely, myself, because of the apparently very strong negative feedback that VectorForm got when they originally floated that thought. But you never know! I have signed Prokofy’s petition on Landmarks, and I’d urge you to do the same (if only so that M doesn’t see a petition with just a couple dozen names on it, and think “heh, I guess people don’t care about LMs anymore!”).

Apparently some other people don’t like the new viewer nearly as much as M says he does. The Herald (an SL humor magazine) published what is apparently a collection of early tester comments on the current incarnation of Viewer 2.0, and the impression that I get from reading it is that, once again, it’s been designed by some wet-behind-the-ears UI designers, who don’t have any deep knowledge of Second Life or Resi usage patterns, but who do like “slick” stuff like sliding panels and cutesy icons.

Do read it for yourself and form your own opinion on what’s going on. But it made me shake my head.

However! To some extent it doesn’t matter. Viewer 2.0 itself can’t actually get rid of landmarks in inventory, because landmarks being in inventory is a server-side thing. If the Lab is really clueless enough to make LMs hard to manipulate and trade in the mainline viewer, I’ll just keep right on using Imprudence, or Emerald, or any of the other third-party viewers that are owned by people with a bit more practical sense. They will continue to have nice useful landmarks unless the Lab actually breaks them on the server, and there would be so much uproar about that due to broken content that I really can’t imagine them doing that.

This goes back to what I said the other day about third-party viewers: not only do they speed up innovation and unleash creativity, they also allow us to mostly just ignore any silly mistakes the Lab might make with the mainline viewer. It doesn’t entirely free us from the consequences of such mistakes, because some people (and especially newborns) will always be using the mainline viewer, and if it becomes harder to interact with those folks, and harder to help them out, that would be unfortunate. And more subtly, some changes to the mainline viewer could cause cultural changes that would eventually impact all of us (if for instance landmarks were made less useful, landmark-givers would probably become rarer).

But in general I think the third-party viewers are a real help here. While I don’t think they’ll go as far as removing landmarks as inventory items, the Lab will make mistakes with Viewer 2.0. But because no one is locked into that viewer, no one has to suffer from those mistakes if they’d rather not, and since they presumably know this, the Lab may think a bit harder before making random changes based on someone thinking a sliding sidebar looks slick. Even if it’s M Linden who thinks that…

My commercial empire!

I mentioned last time that I won a spot in Busy Ben’s Vehicle Lot, in the Boats section.

Monday was the first day we could move in, and I’ve moved in!

Well, sort of:

Right now the only thing you can actually buy is the Preview Version of the Seaspray 1.1; a nice 1-prim 1-rider zipping-around boat with no fancy features, for a mere 25L. (What a deal!) That’s a model of it spinning around in the middle there; it comes in red. :)

(But it is mod.)

Soon the Basic Version will be available, which will have lots of customization features (125 colors, nine textures, shine and glow and light), locked and unlocked modes, fast and slow modes (the current one is pretty fast, and not hard to lose control of while zooming), and like that. That one will be 50L.

And later there will be an auto-updating version, and a rezzer so you can let your guests produce their own auto-cleanup copies, and, and, and…

Unless I get distracted. :)

Busy Ben’s (I’m in slot 44).

Blake Sea Ferry

I have a vendor spot in the “Boats” area at Busy Ben’s Vehicle Lot, and I’ve been working on a boat to sell there, hanging out in the Blake Sea – Azimuth rezzing area as a workspace for no particular reason. And every once in awhile a big empty boat would pass by.

The other day I sat on the boat to see what would happen, and found myself in the pilot’s seat, pretend-steering the ferry between various islands. I happened to be IMing nice friend Mallow at the time, and TPd her over to see. When she sat, she appeared in the pilothouse next to me, co-piloting away:

(Nice pale Windlight sky preset whose name I don’t remember.)

I know I’ve been sort of skeptical about Linden-run builds in SL, and that includes, directly or indirectly, alot of the stuff in the Blake Sea.

But I can’t deny that they can be fun, and also really lovely…

See you on the high seas! :)

The Photography of Prandi Capalini – show opening!

Art opening tomorrow! You should go! Everyone will be there!

The Photography of Prandi Capalini

an exhibit of the SL photography of Prandi Capalini
at The Small Gallery, Shengri La

Sunday November 1 – Sunday December 13

From his first postcard to Snapzilla 6 months ago, Prandi has provided a unique view of Second Life through the eyes of an old wandering sailor. Saturated monotones and exceptional use of light give his images the feel of a different time and place, and lead the viewer to wonder what story each one shows us a glimpse of. With over 900 images now shown on Snapzilla, Prandi has selected his favourites to be shown inworld for the first time.

The Fashion Research Institute invites you to the opening reception of this exhibit on Sunday Nov 1st from 11 AM – 12.30 PM SL time.

Drop by and meet the artist, and enjoy viewing his work in the tranquil tropical setting of Shengri La.

If you cannot attend the opening, feel free to drop by the gallery anytime and enjoy the exhibit.