Horns on the street in Costa Rica

So I still don’t use voice to speak of (haha!) in Second Life, for pretty much all of the reasons I gave so long ago; but that doesn’t mean it’s all bad, and when good things happen I do like to mention them.

The other night I was hanging about as usual, and some of us were on voice and some weren’t (which is always an interesting dynamic), and gradually noticed this sound of distant music.

“There’s someone playing a horn out in the street outside my window, can you hear that?” someone said; someone who happens to be physically RL-located in Costa Rica, which is a place far away from here.

“Yes!’ We could indeed.

And that was extremely neat.

I took a little online survey about SL the other day, and the first question was like “What do you primarily use Second Life for?”, and the possible answers were things like education and training and business networking, and buying and selling, building and scripting, and stuff like that. I had to check “other (specify)” just to write in “social interaction”.

If the second thing hadn’t happened before the first thing, maybe I would have written “listening to the horn from the street in Costa Rica”.

(This is why I’ve said in various places that virtual worlds will be important for business not primarily because they are directly useful for business, but because they will revolutionize the way we live, the ways we interact, and that means big changes to revenue streams, and that means business.)

But business aside, this is the kind of thing I love about SL; lying around writing scripts into parts of the world that didn’t used to do anything, watching fireworks on demand, sitting listening to live music and browsing the audience’s profiles, and talking to friends I’ve never met, hearing in the background of their voices the sound of horns on the street in Costa Rica…

Flowing Purple Light

These gloves and boots are amazing (there’s a corset and a neckpiece also, which I don’t have); a photo can’t really show it, because the amazingest thing is that the lights you see there as sort of purple highlights are flowing, moving across the item in eye-seducing ways. (And there are menus that let you control the rate and direction and color of flow, as well as other things like I think the color of the rest of the object, that I haven’t played with yet).

Also the boots and gloves are both mesh, but fit me and I like them anyway! I am very slowly becoming more of a mesh wearer than I used to be (i.e. not at all).

Boots
Gloves
Inworld store for those and lots of similar

And purple corset set from Rag Dollz sometime a long time ago so good luck finding it. :)

Good customer service: Chop Zuey

I don’t usually talk about stores and things here, ’cause this isn’t a stores and things sort of weblog (it’s more a “scripts and pictures of amusing weird things” sort of weblog), but I thought that in this case one good turn deserves some publicity…

I got an email about three things that were incoming from the Marketplace (“Items will be found in the Objects folder”), but in fact they were not found there, or anywhere else. I looked in Recent, and in Objects, and in my entire inventory by item name, and by suspected creator, all to no avail.

I waited overnight and searched again. I cleared cache and relogged and endured the wait while all (hem hem) 75,000 or so inventory items reloaded. And still there was no sign of them.

From the web page in Marketplace I found the owner’s name, and read the instructions in her profile about what to do in case of nondelivery (including clearing cache and relogging), and (per instructions if all else fails) I wrote a notecard with a copy of the email and dropped it to her.

And the next day I had an email saying that I had had three items redelivered from the Marketplace (“Items will be found in the Objects folder”), and lo and behold there they were, and there was also a now copy of my notecard with a brief note from the store owner saying that they had been redelivered and I should let her know if there was any problem.

And that was good!

The store in question is Chop Zuey, who makes Couture Jewelry, as in say:

(That is, needless to say, not me there.)

So if you are looking for some nice couture jewelry, especially of the big festive sparkling type, and you want to frequent a place that is nicely responsive to its customers’ problems when they have them, this is a place to put on your list.

(And as to why the Marketplace messes up deliveries so often that store owners have instructions on what to do prominently displayed in their profiles, well, that’s a whole nother thing…)

Stupid Signs!

Presented without comment…

Just fond amusement. :)

Open Letter on One Billion Rising

So you’ve probably heard about One Billion Rising, which was a Big Global Event yesterday, in RL and SL.

I don’t tend to talk about Big Global Events here, ’cause you’ve already heard about them, and I don’t generally have anything novel to add. (I’m more into the Tiny Local Events.)

But a friend pointed out a Whiskey Shots post taking a contrarian view of the whole thing (WordPress thinks “contrarian” is spelled wrong?), and I found myself this morning posting a couple of comments to the comment thread on it, and I thought I’d share them here as well.

I should be clear that I admire Whiskey Day, and sometimes :) admire Crap Mariner (although generally least when he gets into macho mode, as here). I felt moved to present my thoughts because the tone of the comments was so largely negative about OBR (turns out Whiskey’s opinion isn’t all that unpopular after all!), and I wanted to add some positive to the thread.

And also because I thought it was sort of true and significant stuff to say…

I don’t know, we don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. Sure things like OBR aren’t going to solve the problem, but then no single thing is going to solve the problem. OBR works on consciousness raising and solidarity, and those are important things, and easy to underestimate. Maybe a few, or a few thousand, women will see something about it and get that extra push of confidence and support that will lead them to leave an abusive relationship, or get to a shelter. Maybe a few politicians will see something, see a bunch of voters expressing concern, and think hm maybe I ought to actually read that bill on violence against women, rather than just voting against it because my party says to. Really fixing the problem requires changes to society, and that happens slowly, and needs pushes from lots of different directions.

Heck, it’s got us talking about the subject! :) Maybe someone will see Whiskey’s note about the newsletter she is writing for, or what Celestiall said about the 2nd Amendment Sisters, and find out more, and donate or volunteer.

If it was a choice between OBR and something more effective, then OBR would be the wrong choice. But I think the choice is more between OBR and not-OBR. I doubt that lots of the energy that went into OBR was taken from something that would have done more good. The media coverage that it got would probably otherwise have been devoted to some celebrity’s nipple-slip or The Latest Funny Cat Pictures From The Internet.

If you know of something better than OBR, definitely go out and do it! But that doesn’t mean that OBR didn’t make the world a better place, even if it didn’t solve the problem all by itself…

… And I can’t keep myself from mentioning also that I’m pretty uncomfortable with this whole “the real solution is for women to dance on the graves of their abusers after they kill them” meme. It’s a cute weblog-comment soundbite, but are we really saying that an abused little girl should just kill her abusive uncle? That a woman facing a gang on a bus in Mumbai should just hope that her gun will be more effective than theirs? That an abused wife should just kill her husband the Sheriff and hope that the justice system understands?

Are we really going to say to a woman in need, look, we’ll spend millions of dollars to protect Disney’s copyright on Mickey Mouse in foreign countries, but if you need protection from rape you’re on your own; hope you’re well armed! That’s not something I’m comfortable saying, myself.

Again, what the Second Amendment Sisters, and anyone working to empower women for self-defense, are doing is great stuff. But it is ALSO not going to solve the problem by itself, and I don’t think it’s a legitimate reason to put down things like OBR. There’s a danger, I think, that it becomes a facile sound-bite, and a way to make this all Someone Else’s Problem. In this case, the victim’s. And that’s not a place I’m willing to go…

And even before I’ve pressed “Publish” on this entry :) Crap has responded; mostly missing the point so far I think, but by the time you read this maybe it will be a long and fascinating exchange. Come on over! :)