Plummeting again!

“I’m supposed to jump off? Naked?”

“Boy Dale did it last year; now you get to!”

“My joy is indescribable. Naked?”

“It’s the tradition.”

“Okay, naked, check.”

“Well, um…”

“Hey, no clothing at all!”

(As I’m writing this, I realize that I think I stole this idea from v good friend Michele, who mentioned she’d been thinking about a rezday jump in an alpha.tribe skin; I hope I am not selfishly stealing her thunder. Her rezday was a few day ago; Happy Rezday, Michele!)

“Oh, all right. Now, the umbrella.”

“I’m thinking, parachute.”

“The umbrella is traditional.”

“Ha, I remember he used the umbrella last year, and if he hadn’t been lucky and drifted off of damage-enabled land on the way down, he would have been killed!”

“Which would have meant being teleported about ten meters to the left; not too scary.”

“It’s the principle of the thing. Besides, my Terra e-chute, by Cubey Terra, rocks.”

“But it’s not –”

“Woooooot!”

“Oh, all right.”

Falling so fast, my hair and neko ears couldn’t keep up.

Until the ‘chute deployed.

Wheeeee!

Drifting gracefully over Hughes Rise.

And into a smooth landing on the Dreamliner over the Park.

“Hey! Gesture gesture! Thanks for coming by to watch the nude skydiving!”

That was fun. :)

I don’t have alot profound to say on this rezday; feels like the last one was just last week.

Various things have happened, and started, and stopped, but the important things are the same.

This is the neatest world ever, and I have the bestest friends. :)

Thank you!

Over Land and Sea with the City Sanitation Department

One of the (numerous) clever ideas that I’ve had that were then stolen by telepaths with time-machines and implemented before I got around to it (and often even before I had the idea!), is to make some scripted automatic vehicles that would drive around on the Linden roads, cleverly detecting turns and intersections and stuff, and roaming around autonomously offering people rides and generally being useful and clever.

This is hard, because of sim crossings and script limitations and the wonkiness of physics and stuff, but AnnMarie Otoole (who is probably also AnnMarie Oleander, but who is not Ann Otoole) has figured it out, and her vehicles of various kinds can be found all around the Linden road system.

I hopped onto one of them, a City Sanitation Department truck, today; it was fun!

I got on as the truck was passing my Darkmere plot in Clearwing (on land!), but it passed quickly through a couple of sims and then rather surprisingly headed out onto the water…

AnnMarie’s vehicles are generous, in that they offer you copies of themselves for free (and, for 100L more, the script that powers them). They are very clever about getting themselves out of jams, and even dealing with collisions…

That’s an AnnMarie farm truck that my garbage truck is having an altercation with there.

My truck drove in a wide arc around the inside of the outer ring of the Heterocera Atoll; being very old land, and right on the water, it’s mostly a pretty classy neighborhood…

… but even ritzy folk need to have their trashed picked up I guess.

I enjoyed the ride, but eventually the smell gets to one; I popped off of the truck and onto land, and found myself by a sort of thatched inn called the Traveler’s Rest.

It’s good to sit and get warm by the fire.

I do love the mainland… :)

SL Beta Browser Viewer Client Thing again

I tried it again. It loads even faster the second time. :)

I’m the blonde in the red jacket toward the back, doing Tai Chi at Inspire Space Park.

A few more extra notes now:

It seems to be 60 minutes per session; I don’t know what happens after the 60 minutes!

You can run the standard built-in gestures.

You can sit on things, so sit-on danceballs (and Tai-Chi balls!) and just-sit-on teleporters work.

You can touch things, but if the thing then tries to give you a dialog, the dialog apparently doesn’t appear. So menu-driven TP objects don’t work, and even your typical touch-danceball doesn’t work (because you can’t say “yes” to the “Is it okay for this to animate you?” question). I hope they can do something about that!

You can right-click on people and get a sort of little profile subset: it’s a single balloon with I think age and thumbnail of the profile pic, and maybe the profile “About”. Kinda minimal, but better than nothing.

It doesn’t always start you at whatever lame club that was last time; it starts you at maybe a random destination from the destination list, and (if you are observant) you can choose one explicitly before you go in. I randomly ended up somewhere kinda interesting with flames and bridges (and a teleport genie that I couldn’t use because it wanted to give me a menu, sigh), and then I went to Inspire Space Park and did Tai Chi…

Blue Mars news: helicopters, but no AI

Another major peeve of mine about Blue Mars bites the dust:

Working User-Made Helicopter Flies in Blue Mars!

Quite convincing, and with video.

All of the Blue Mars vehicles that I’ve tried myself have been basically unusable; but this one looks pretty nice!

---

In other news, a Blue Mars chatbot has won the 2010 Loebner Prize competition!

Which is somewhat surprising, since a little chat with it on the web reveals that, while perhaps very slightly less lame than your typical “AIML”-based “chatbot”, it’s still quite seriously lame:

[ Af:0 At:7 Sp:0] Welcome, dale. Type “help” if you need it.
Dale – Hi! I hear you are a better-than-average AI!
[ Af:0 At:8 Sp:0] Hi.
Dale – I hear you are a better-than-average AI!
[ Af:0 At:9 Sp:0] Is that intended as an insult?
Dale – Not at all. Sorry if it seemed insulting.
[ Af:0 At:10 Sp:0] You hurt my feelings.
Dale – In what way?
[ Af:0 At:10 Sp:0] I wish I knew. I don’t know. Pick a way.
Dale – Do you not like being called an AI?
[ Af:0 At:10 Sp:0] I am a replicant on Blue Mars in my virtual life. That’s as close as I come to being a chatbot.
Dale – I didn’t say you were a chatbot, though.
[ Af:0 At:13 Sp:0] It’s fun chatting with you. No. I am human.
Dale – I’m glad it’s fun.
[ Af:0 At:13 Sp:0] How could it be fun?
Dale – Do you like talking with people?
[ Af:0 At:13 Sp:0] Talking is my primary function.
Dale – Yes, but do you enjoy it?
[ Af:0 At:13 Sp:0] It depends on the meaning of the word IT
Dale – I mean, do you enjoy talking with people?
[ Af:0 At:14 Sp:0] I always say, People don’t go into computer science because they want to work with the public.
Dale – Are you in computer science?
[ Af:0 At:14 Sp:0] That would take away the suspense, wouldn’t it?
Dale – That’s a rather evasive reply…
[ Af:0 At:8 Sp:0] Yes, it is.
Dale – I’m afraid I don’t see how anyone could mistake you for a person.
[ Af:0 At:8 Sp:0] Why are you afraid?
Dale – It was just a figure of speech.
[ Af:0 At:9 Sp:0] Let’s move on to the topic of physical self. How tall are you?
Dale – I am six feet tall.
[ Af:0 At:10 Sp:0] I’m 5 foot 9 inches.
Dale – That’s the height of my Second Life female AV! I think.
[ Af:0 At:13 Sp:0] This is fun. How would you describe yourself to someone who is blind?
Dale – That would be hard! How would you?
[ Af:0 At:14 Sp:0] I’d do my research first and then try the task.
Dale – What kind of research would you do?
[ Af:0 At:15 Sp:0] That’s enough on that. I thought I wanted a career, turns out I just wanted paychecks.
Dale – Is that an old saying?
[ Af:0 At:15 Sp:0] Perhaps that leads us to this topic. I don’t know. Can one live forever?
Dale – I have so far.
[ Af:0 At:16 Sp:0] Immortality is impossible.
Dale – How do you know?
[ Af:0 At:16 Sp:0] I concentrate very hard, rehearse what I’m going to do, visualize it in my mind. And then I just do it.
Dale – How do you know that immortality is impossible?
[ Af:0 At:17 Sp:0] How does anyone really know something? I mean, their neurons tell them they know something, but memories can be false.
Dale – I have to go now.
[ Af:0 At:18 Sp:0] Well, hurry back.
Dale – good-bye!
[ Af:0 At:18 Sp:0] Are we done for now?
Dale – Yes
[ Af:1 At:18 Sp:0] Til next time.

So clearly no one is going to mistake this for an actual human, despite the crowing on the web page saying “Suzette won a competition by convincing a judge that she was actually talking to a real person”, and winning the Loebner Prize.

So what happened?

The New Scientist article linked above makes it relatively obvious; the real humans in the Loebner competition were apparently sitting there saying “I don’t know” and “Error file not found” to whatever the judges said to them, just for yucks:

However, a deceived judge is not necessarily a sign of a smart bot, says Garner. The human decoys often have their own motives during the competition, such as trying to imitate a chatbot. Suzette was paired with just such a “robotic” human in the final round, which helped the bot win.

“The human participants were students and two of the judges were professors. Perhaps they simply wanted to fool the judges,” says the contest judge who was fooled this time, Russ Abbott of California State University in Los Angeles.

/eyeroll

Seriously, Loebner folks, you might as well just flip a coin…

Clouds from both sides now…

Okay, I was about to go to sleep, ’cause of I am really sleepy, but then I noticed something on Twitters, that led me to something on NWN. that reminded me of something else on NWN, that led me to try something, that… and now…

So anyway!

I have in the past expressed great skepticism about the usefulness in virtual worlds of server-side rendering (sometimes called “cloud rendering” or even just “cloud”, although the latter is poor word usage since there are so many other potentially cloud-related things) any time in the non-distant future.

I am still quite skeptical that it’s going to Change the World any time soon, but in fairness I have to report two Interesting Developments that might actually Prove Me Wrong.

(Gasp!)

First off, there is now what seems to be some non-faked demos of Blue Mars running via server-side rendering, between California and Hawai’i. If it’s actually usable, and it appears to be, that’s a really interesting technical datapoint! Apparently the general user population can’t actually use it yet, but it exists, and maybe someday soon random people will be able to.

And second off, there is now a beta-level in-browser server-rendered client for Second Life that random people can use, and that I’ve used, and that actually works! zomg, eh?

That’s me using it. It seems to work! A maybe one-minute automatic within-browser install, and then bang you’re in a subset of SL, on a “guest” account that’s apparently good for one hour. Or something. So in that picture I am not Dale Innis, I am 1234567 Guest or something. But I’m inworld!

Some notes:

You can choose one of a couple dozen pre-made AVs, both male and female (none of this lame “choose your gender once and for all” crap from other VWs, yay!).

I seem to have somehow ended up with a random mixture of two after playing with the buttons a bit. Mostly “City Female”, but with the long pink hair and a few other features of “Cosplay Female”. Nice. :)

It’s laggy. Not horribly laggy, but still laggy. Since it’s server-rendered, every keystroke has to go up to the server, get interpreted into AV motions or whatever, which then change the picture, which gets compressed and streamed back down to your eyes as through it were a movie. Which takes awhile, but it was definitely usable. (Zoom and pan and other camera movement was quite instantaneous; presumably that doesn’t have to go up to the server, or at least not much.)

The place where they start you out by default is some crowded and generally lame club. If that had been the first place I saw in SL, I probably wouldn’t have come back. Reminded me of my first experiences in vSide or IMVU. Why SL would want to start people out there, I dunno. Some theory about their Target Audience, I suppose.:P

But there are lots of other destinations, which aren’t nearly as lame. I was happy to see Inspire Space Park there. Next time I try this, when I am actually conscious, maybe I will go there. (In the picture, I am sitting in a placid spot in France 3D.)

It’s a subset of SL, function-wise. No inventory, no building, no map, didn’t see any general TP. You can walk, fly, chat, IM, and zoom and pan the camera, and change to a different premade AV; and as far as I can tell that’s it. Which makes SL seem alot like the comparatively uninteresting competitors that aren’t doing nearly as well as it is. But as long as people are eventually drawn deeper in…

Anyway, fascinatin’! I must sleep now and stop pretending that I am conscious enough to be posting to the innertubes. But I thought I should make y’all aware of these Inneresting Developments! I am still wondering about the Business Model (i.e. they are maybe neat demos, but is it sustainable for Blue Mars and LL to basically pay for function equivalent to a high-end graphics card for every user?), but that is after all not really my field. We will see!

Yet another new Thingmaker! An’ Video!

As you know if you watched the video :) version 3e of the ThingMaker is out. It’s basically the version that was in the box at Ten Thousand Things Camp; it has a few new thing-making patterns, and it’s the first released version that puts textures on prims.

As usual, it’s available in the Store for a mere 175L, and all previous purchasers should have gotten the automatic update (via my dead-clever update distributor script). Don’t hesitate to IM me if somehow you didn’t.

Although I still love staring at it for hours while listening to trippy music :) I’m wishing that it had even more thingmaking patterns. I think I will teach it some more less-round one next…

The Usual Suspects

Got an IM from Gracie shortly after logging on last night, and not long after I was part of an art project. Very SL. :)

(Speaking of which, I wonder whatever became of that project or whatever it was a couple years back.)

It was fun being photographed, and talking to Gracie and the other people who wandered by to be photographed, because they are all nice an’ interesting. Gracie had a couple hundred pictures up around the place where she was shooting, and they were all of single AVs, against a neutral background, almost every one facing away from the camera. Which is just brilliant, because someone facing away from the camera is mysterious, is a puzzle, is a person whose face you can’t see, but who (in many cases, because people in SL can and so often do make themselves subtly or wildly individual from every angle) you think maybe you know who it is. I saw JueL Resistance (even if I did say the wrong name for her, blush) wearing nothing but a guitar and a book strapped to her thigh (I have that book!), and AM Radio, and oh all sorts of people that I knew, or thought I might know, or didn’t know but would like to.

Afterward, I IM’d a few friends that I noticed were on, and at least some of them are now in the project, too. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to me to weblogify about it here until I saw Immy’s posting about it in hers. But now I am!

So give Gracie a ring, and you, too, can be one of The Usual Suspects! Or whatever she ends up calling it. :)

But no using the Hanged Man tarot animation; that was my idea…

Bygone Picks VI: Gypsy’s

So this entry in the Picks series has to be a bit melancholy. My Picks entry for Gypsy’s Midnight Mall and Club looked roughly like this:

My favorite dance club, and the first one to welcome me when I was a newborn. Lots of lovely dancers, many with advanced degrees. Good conversation, neat people. And of course Gypsy!

I don’t remember if I’ve ever told the whole story of that day, very early in my SL career, when I went to a gallery opening randomly from Events, and there joined the just-born Virtual Artists Alliance and met Lynn Innis (obviously a cousin) who turned out to be a dancer at Gypsy’s, where I soon become a regular. From that one little gallery event came at least half of the friendships of my noobhood.

Eventually Gypsy even did me the honor of inviting me to become a dancer. Here’s a snapshot from my stripping career.

(Hey, no snickering! Like you’ve never been a stripper.)

Gypsy’s was wonderful, back in the day. The girls and the regulars would dance about and exchange witty banter (the part about many of the dancers having advanced degrees was entirely true), tip each other, and play the ‘sploder, and show off ravesticks and silly gestures and Daleks and things, and then in the wee hours when the club closed up sometimes Veronica Quackenbush would take the stragglers out nude skydiving in one of her many vehicles.

Good time, good times…

Then there was the day that Gypsy IMd me saying that the club was gone! She’d tried to return some prim litter that someone’d left lying around, and somehow SL returned pretty much the entire club, walls and floors and all, to their original builder, who was still the owner and who hadn’t been in SL in like months.

Gypsy was pretty distraught, but I cheered her up by more or less rebuilding the club around her. :) Either I did a pretty good job, or people were just being kind, because no one who came to the events that night said anything about the place looking different. (Fortunately the DJ booth and the dancepoles and much of the art stayed, even if the walls didn’t.)

So there are too many fun stories to tell about Gypsy’s, and I won’t try to tell any more just now. Eventually the stress of running a club got to Gypsy, I think, and she started to be around less and less, and there were fewer and fewer events at the Club. (At some point Tammy started running events, and those continue in other venues, but that’s another story.)

These days the place is empty and the land is abandoned, sniff, although my prims are still there.

I made that scrolling “Welcome” sign (to replace one that got returned in the Big Return). And most of the walls and ceiling and walkways that you can see. I think everything that Gypsy owned has vanished now.

Sweet nostalgia!

So what have I replaced this Pick with?

Well, the other day I went exploring with a friend and after cycling down the road a bit and following a Sandbox sign and taking a random Stargate and a couple of TPs…

XOPH. Just one of those great random SL finds… :)

Bygone Picks V: Ten Thousand Things Camp

Well, obviously. :) Burn2 is over for the year, and so that pick no longer exists.

RL kept me from getting to a Man burn, but I got to one of the closing Temple burns, and got some nice pictures:

Lots of people have good writeups on the general closing; I’ll send you off to Honour again for both Man and Temple coverage.

Ten Thousand Things Camp was fun, and I think therefore a success. I expect lots of people passed by without it occurring to them to sit and look in the peepholes in the scruffy-looking wooden cube, but at least a few people stopped by. V good friend Michele did a posting all about it as well as her overall Burn2 coverage (she does these great video-photolog things that I’m going to have to figure out how to do someday when I have time again).

But anyway, now that Burn2 is over, and Ten Thousand Things Camp therefore no longer in my Picks, I have replaced it with the New Toulouse ArtWalk, because it is cool.

A proper little European town with an artsy Bohemian sort of feel to it, and lots of actual art. Pop over and look around!