Tag: Real life

Posted on

I can’t recommend this book

And I was so excited about it: Designing Your Second Life: Techniques and inspiration for you to design your ideal parallel universe within the online community, Second Life by Rebecca Tapley.

The strengths of this book are exactly as the title suggests: design guidance and inspiration. It is not a how-to book—and Tapley is very clear about that. It does have a few step-by-step elements, but few are sufficient to actually accomplish the task described. The chapters that most directly address design elements are the best: chapter two, Designing Your Avatar; three, Designing Your Look; and eight: Designing Your Empire, although none are free of the flaws found throughout the book.

The biggest problem I have with the book is the errors. The second problem I have is misleading opinions. And thirdly, the editor, if there was one, did a terrible job. A few examples:

Errors

p. 15: “512 sq/m [sic] (the smallest possible parcel)” (16 m2 is the smallest possible parcel.)

p. 19: “You can buy mainland property, or part of a private island, or pay Linden Lab to create an entire private island to your specifications. However, you should add in the cost of upgrading your account from Basic to Premium if your Second Life account is currently free.” (No premium account is required to own land on a private sim.)

Opinions with which I take exception

p. 10: “So using the Search feature in-world is tremendously flexible, scalable, and responsive to whatever updates or other changes might happen to SL at large.” (I find it powerful but inelegant, difficult to use, and nothing if not undependable.)

p. 17: “Or you can also earn Lindens quickly and easily by just sitting in a chair, dancing on a disco pad, or filling out a survey.” (I guess it all depends on what you mean by “earn,” “quickly,” and “easily.” Not to mention that you’ll be reviled by most active, long-time residents.)

Bad editing

p. 15: see above (m2 or sq. m. would be correct.)
p. 16: “Second Life is three hundred and sixty degrees different.” (360º is facing back where you started; thus, not different at all.)

And that’s it for chapter one.

Over and over again she uses or introduces terms that have not been defined, or describes scenarios that, I believe, can only be understood if you’re already familiar with Second Life.

Considering the fact that her last chapter, about developing a full sim, takes a Gorean estate as its example, it is indeed bizarre that for nearly two-thirds of the book Tapley keeps referring to things as “naughty.” Finally, on page 122:

By now you’ve probably figured out that “naughtiness” is a synonym for that big elephant in the middle of the virtual living room: sex in Second Life. On the one hand, nobody’s able to really ignore it. Sex and sexual behavior are everywhere in SL. Yet on the other, many residents of SL feel strongly about having naughtiness sprung on them. They don’t want to see it, hear it, or be propositioned with it unless it’s their choice.

If you’re feeling nasty and catty and/or catch me when I’m feeling nasty and catty, I might share with you the rest of the dog-eared pages and marginal notes.

Posted on

One child avatar’s motivation

Tateru Nino’s been doing brief profiles/interviews of new and established avatars over at Second Life Insider. And the most recent subject is Neo Rebus:

Neo’s a Second Life kid (a child avatar) who’s been around forever and likes to build and script “and have fun and annoy stiffnecked adults. That’s what’s great about being a kid, I get to be a bit more free about saying what i wanna say and stuff to adults, where another adult couldn’t say it.”

Um, but Neo? Your typist is an adult, not a kid, and whatever persona you assume and whatever actions you take are chosen by an adult, so if you act intentionally annoying, I’ll treat you like an annoying adult, not like a kid. It is just this aspect of some child avatars that boggles my mind.

I don’t find it entertaining when adults act childish in my First Life, and I hardly want to deal with it in Second Life, either.

Now, it may be that I’m just stiffnecked and can’t tell the difference between childish and childlike. But you know, I don’t like annoying children, either, it’s just that I put up with them (or even indulge them) because they are children.

Posted on

Faces of Faith video

Yesterday I was on a panel for a University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism fellowship program project. The fellows had researched and created reports on “Faces of Faith: God Sex Family” and decided to bring their reports into Second Life. As part of their weeklong exhibit, they organized this panel of SL religious figures (video). It was a real privilege to be on the panel.

The panel was actually done via conference call, which was streamed into the parcel audio. There were a couple of times when I just wanted to reach out to my keyboard and interact directly. There was a good turnout, in spite of some confusion over the time.

Posted on

Bizarre SL client behavior

This morning, when using either the Voice First Look or the trunk SL client, I get this instead of the usual welcome screen with photo and stats:

ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://secondlife.com/app/login/

The following error was encountered:

• Access Denied.

Access control configuration prevents your request from being allowed at this time. Please contact your service provider if you feel this is incorrect.

Your cache administrator is webmaster [a mailto link to “webmaster”, not an email address]

Generated Sat, 28 Jul 2007 15:32:53 GMT by web14.lindenlab.com (squid/2.6.STABLE12)

Posted on

Hurry, hurry, hurry!

Check out Long Now « welcome to blueair.tv for SLURLs for “four completely unique installations of Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings as remixed by Angrybeth Shortbread.” They’re only there through tonight (Sunday), as they are concurrent with the RL premiere installation. Totally wild. The Hooper location isn’t included in the in-world TPs, but make sure you go there&emdash;rotating cubes in space that you can sit on (especially good in mouselook with names turned off).

Posted on

Yea-sayers and nay-sayers

There’s a very nice summary by Christopher Mims of a presentation by Mitch Kapor, chairman of Linden Lab, (complete with slides) over at Scientific American: Second Life chairman’s stump speech takes us down the rabbit hole. Kapor, of course, is a yea-sayer. Christopher Mims is, if not a nay-sayer, certainly a skeptic. Much of the public conversation about Second Life as a business platform is neither here nor there for me, and so I often find critics’ objections or cautions to be irrelevant. Mims has one statement, however, that reveals a narrowness of vision that goes beyond Second Life:

This is the part of the speech where Kapor tells all the haters to talk to the hand. I’m not sure what this proves other than that in any transition, there are people who lack vision. This doesn’t mean that the folks who say similar things about Second Life are wrong–it just means that Kapor left off the ten million other quotes that would have represented legitimate skepticism of technologies of dubious value. Like, say, the airship.

Yes, it’s that little gratuitous dig at the airship. What world does he live in? Does he pay for gas? Has he heard of global climate change? Does he know what a massive amount of non-perishable goods are shipped by truck, train, or freighter, all powered by non-renewable fossil fuels? Airships would be an excellent solution to many—not all, of course—long-distance transit needs.

If we’re going to survive in anything like the style to which we have become accustomed, we need to get real serious about what parts of that style are essential, and which are not, and above all we need to become more creative in our thinking. Airships of dubious value? They may not turn out to be the best (or even a good) solution to our long-term long-distance transportation needs, but to dismiss them out of hand as part of a rhetorical argument reveals a mind-set that isn’t going to help us get closer to solving some of the worst problems facing us.

Posted on

RL people

I’ve met two of my SL UU acquaintances here at the UUA General Assembly: Cathryn Cleanslate and Chara Allen. Both have been a delight to meet, and it makes me eager to have other opportunities.

In a similar vein, my (RL) friend Jan sent a note saying she had spoken at Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting and Association, and had mentioned me, and that two people had asked to be remembered to me: Harmony Bright and Turtle Boogiewoogie.

Posted on

SL statistics as percentage of country population

I got a geeky urge, and played around with the SL statistics for May 2007. I added country population (July 2007 estimates, according to the CIA World Factbook) for the top part of the list as sorted by number of avatars, as well as selected countries from lower down the list.

Antarctica, 211 active avatars (who knew they would keep statistics?), is number one with over 5%, based on the peak summer estimate of 4,000 residents. If based on the winter population estimate of 1,000, the percent would increase to a whopping 21%. American Samoa, 419 active avatars, comes in with 0.73% of a population of 57,663. Netherlands, 17,130 active avatars, is third at 0.10% of a population of 16,570,613.

The United States, predictably, drops from 1 (130,033 active avatars) to 19 (only 0.04% of 301,139.947). Most European countries at the top of the avatar numbers move ahead of the US.

Here’s the abbreviated list sorted by % of population (google docs).