Why Philip Linden needs a wife.

How, I have just read Philip's little PR blog where he, in common with all CEOs promises that, in spite of all the crap floating around the office, he will rise above it all and get the cleaners in....

...and, he really needs a wife.

He needs someone to drag him off the sofa where he normally sits, designing a new interplanetary spaceship on the back of an envelope, and get him to work on the real jobs. Those shelves that have been leaning against the wall in the pantry won't hang themselves, and the tap in the bathroom is still leaking...."how many times have I asked you to sort that out?"...

A wife would help him focus on realities..." You promised a meeting of residents but any sim is gonna lag up with more than 30 residents.." ...that sort of thing...his head is in the clouds.

This all, however, pales into insignificance compared to his inventory. This is a man who can't dress himself. I don't think he's changed clothes in years, they must stink to high heaven.....

....and, if anyone, in any walk of life, of any philosophical background, has any doubts about what I am saying....my final piece of unequivocal proof is...

......just look at that haircut.

Who could we fix him up with?

....there are enough embarrassingly gushing females in the "comments" for anyone to realise there would be no lack of candidates...

Just not me, right.

:)))

I am Absolutely Furious.

Actually, I have gone beyond fury into that cold, evil place where I just want to hurt people. Not everyone, just Lindens.

I know this may shock those of you who have known me for a while, either inworld or through these pages, and the reason I have flipped will seem somewhat pathetic.

However, the straw that broke the camels back, is just that, a straw. It is, by definition useless to say...."Ha! call yourself a camel and you can't even carry that straw?!" The Last Straw is just that.....

My tale of unbounded fury begins with that increasingly annoying blog, NWN, where I read, Playing with Kirstens Second Life Shadows, and I downloaded the S20 viewer.....only to find...eeek.... that it is the Dreaded Viewer 2.0 (in disguise) that pile of crap produced by 5000 blind monkeys typing random code until by pure chance The Crappiest Viewer on Earth had been created.

I dumped it immediately...

...too late... "Viewer 2 will not replace viewer 1.23 software on you computer".....simply fuck with it a bit.


Now, anyone above the age of say....3 years old... knows that survival on earth is dependent on NOT MESSING WITH MUMMY'S WARDROBE!!!.....or rearranging Daddy's tool shed either.....

Anyone who has ever lived with girlfriends/wives/sisters, knows that this is a cardinal Law of Nature....blood could flow (yours) ....the same applies to boyfriends/husbands/daddy's tools.

Except for the retarded fools that designed Viewer 2.0

Exhibit A...





I have now, whatever viewer I use, 3 useless folders. These are folders that cannot be rearranged, deleted or renamed....

"Favorites"..now...omg...this is sooo pathetic... who has a file called Favorites?... favourite WHAT for god's sake...'Miscellaneous' I could understand... but this is just stupidity....

...nothing however compared to..... "My Outfits"... well, IDIOT they are bound to be mine the 'My' is totally ridiculous, who's outfits can I hold in my invent? The Pope's?? Obama's?? Get a grip....

...and...the one called "Current Outfit"...for those fools who can't type "worn" into their search...

Now, for 3 years I have filed objects under Object and clothes under Clothing etc etc.. and that has worked out OK. Now, however, because of the alphabetical nature of these new folders I have my clothes strewn out over my Inventory... My Outfits (the name reminds me of my Most Hated File ever seen..."My Buddies"..) is now located between Lost and Found and Notecards... go figure....

OK, I thought to myself....you can do this, you can live with the idiocy of others, you have done so all your life...Governments impose stupidity daily on us plebs, after all.

That went OK, until I realised that there had been meetings in the Lab, people had sat around expensive tables discussing this nonsense, people had made 'informed' decisions and taken 'a view' that....for example... instead of giving us scalable prims...we could have "My Outfits".

The fury struck for real then, when I realised I am paying their wages... that is something I can't forgive myself for...

.. so...the only sensible course of action is to withdraw my financial support, and, although my tier is only $1057.56 per annum, I must be able to find a better home for those dollars.

I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more..... fuck 'em.


:((

Second Life vs. InWorldz..

Unusually for me, I'm just gonna let the facts speak for themselves...

The Prim.

In SL the smallest prim is 0.01 x 0.01x 0.01m, in IW it's 0.001x 0.001x 0.001m

In SL you can hollow out a prim 95%, in IW it's 99%.

In SL the largest prim is 10x10x10m, in IW it's 128x128x128m (256x256x256 if you use the Impudence viewer.)

In SL you can link prims upto 32 meters apart, in IW you can link upto 256 meters apart.

in SL a mainland prim costs 13 cents per month, in IW a mainland prim costs 2 cents per month.

Time for the Boys to improve the facilities?

InWorldz wins currently, hands down.

:))

She = Me

Following on from my recent post about the discomfort experienced when changing grids through having to modify an avatar that we have grown accustomed to using in, say, SL (here), Lalo has written a thorough and thoughtful reply and given his take on the subject which he has, probably rightly renamed Transworld Syndrome.

Now, although we have both come up with several possible reasons for this strong attachment to a 'particular pile of pixels' I have a feeling that there is more to this.

Botgirl wrote in comments to Lalo's post about the need to have a consistent form for a consistency of identity in both/all worlds.

....and that rang a few bells (Botgirl nails it again). As the avatar bears more than a passing resemblance to a character in a literary work there is the need for Her to show credibility....and this credibilty involves a consistency of identity.

If I am to immerse myself in a book or film I have to identify with the characters...... If I am to enjoy my Virtual Life I have to identify with the principle character, my avi...... She must be like Me.
Now, as in RL, I can get a drastic haircut (buy hair) which my friends will say, or I will think..."That is very 'Me""/"You"... .and after years of doing this I gradually, thro trial and error, build a look that I find credible...

...and I think the credibility is the paramount feature of the immersive experience, inworld as well as watching a film or reading a book. I have to be able to suspend disbelief and the continuity and consistency simply help me achieve this for longer periods of time. e.g. if James Bond had turned into a giant rabbit on a plane flight to Paris, I may find that amusing, but it wouldn't seem right. It would have been out of character and would be inconsistent with what I 'know' about James Bond, incredible.

Now, to turn to the Real Weirdo's, those that want SL to be an image of 'reality' and model their avis accordingly, i.e. they try to make their SL bodies the same as their RL body.. well...they are kinda doomed to failure. If we say they are looking for Me = Me, they are continually thwarted by people who are too tall, dogs that talk, flying people etc. Their Body Image cannot stand alone, the RL Body Image is always seen in relation to others (normally, the human race) and I mention this in passing as the recent LL advertising campaign has been directed at exactly these people, the one's who will have the most difficulty in achieving immersion in VWs.

.....and while I am on the subject of immersion, I have often ranted in these pages against the misuse of the term immersive art... there is no immersive art because there is no non-immersive setting in SL, every sim is immersive.
Good art is immersive and bad art can be seen in an immersive setting, but the provision of a story on a notecard or 'talking' prims has ALMOST ZERO effect compared to my relationship to my avi.

If that relationship is right, everything else becomes immersive.

So, given this hypothesis, Transworld Syndrome is a simple aim for credibility through a consistency of form (where form=identity [botgirl]) for the sake of the immersive experience.

THAT pile of pixels pull me in and keep me playing. YAY!!

:)))

Juanita Deharo

There are few who understand that SL is a medium.

Those who do understand this, and who are artists have the possibility of creating SL Art. Those who don't import dodgy photos of roses to cover 'gallery' walls or slap poor moving textures on a few badly composed prims or tell third-rate stories to cover up the fact that they haven't understood.

Juanita is one of our best artists. She is talented in both worlds, and is continually trying to push, stretch and cajole pixels in different, sometimes new ways. So anything Juanita has put her name to is well worth checking out.

After a recent trip to Bali she has put together a collage/installation at Arte Libera which opens on the 14th (tomorrow/Wednesday) at 2pm. I would recommend you visit.

She says of her piece.... "This is a sort of photo album of my very recent impressions of Bali, as if they were just pasted into the album at the end of the trip with the contemplation and realization and the memory yet to come. Just impressions and notes.

To look with an artist’s eye at a country that is not your own, to draw and write, to look through the lens of a camera at lives and cultures that are not your own, is a humbling and sometimes frightening experience. One sees things not seen from the comfort of the lounge by the resort pool.

The Bali I know is not the holiday haven serviced by stores selling cheap souvenirs to tourists, but a place where the people and the country struggle daily to accommodate great stresses of change, where tradition dominates, despite the imposition of western influences, where religion and superstition are not only a backstay and a comfort, but also a prison and a system that keeps the populace firmly held in place."

It's called Holiday Snaps.

:))

Third Life Syndrome

Saturday night at my party in InWorldz (another grid) Wizzy caught herself almost saying (and stopped herself) ...”you look like the Real Soror”. Now, she meant of course that my avi in InWorldz was near identical to my avi in SL.

Had she said that I would have understood immediately what she meant.

...and that got me thinking.

Whereas I have often mocked those poor souls who think the only way to enjoy SL is if their avi is the same height and shape as their biological physique, when it comes to virtual worlds we all (mostly) have a Third Life Syndrome... (TLS)...

TLS is that strange condition where we seek to replicate our SL looks in other worlds. In fact, for many, and for myself in a small degree, our enjoyment of a Third Life is dependent on this replication of name and looks. A virtual Virtual Me.

Now, moving to a new world, new grid, could be the opportunity to take one of those poor neglected alts, dust them off and develop that forgotten side of our psyche to a degree that we don’t do in SL... but that isn’t what we do. It is our Principle Avi that gets to move and have work done on his/her looks first and foremost.

So ... something that springs to mind is that our Virtual Body Image is like our RL body image, a deeply imprinted inner picture of how we look or should look, only in virtual worlds rather than RL. If we have this Virtual Body Image then we are psychologically different to people who don’t have avatars. This would not surprise me. This makes us part of a group of people with cultural links, it’s part of our culture.

I was involved in a piece of performance art in SL a year or so ago....I have forgotten the names of those involved... where we were asked to change gender in front of the cameras, wearing the clothes we were wearing. It was a disturbing experience, and no doubt, highlighted this Virtual Body Image without me being fully conscious of what was happening.

Now, naming and recognising doesn’t explain what a body image is, much less what a virtual body image could be. Body image is how the brain perceives the body, independent of the fact; that is to say we may perceive ourselves wrongly (i.e. our body image may be divorced from reality.)

The discrepancy in RL between ideal and current body image leads to dissatisfaction. Obviously this discrepancy should be zero in the case of an avatar, as the ideal avatar (body image) should equal the current avatar......but....

....a Third Life has a tendency to throw all our hard work (on our avi) out the window and we have to start again from scratch.

The more the identity of your avi is dependent on specific shop-bought products, the more difficult it will be to move before your fav creators have opened shops in a Third World. This may be something you can help happen, of course, if you know these people as friends.

It would be a shame, however, to let this stop us from getting a Third Life, there are any number of tricks and work-arounds we could resort to.

a) if you are moving grid for a particular reason (i.e. to build) then the way you look may be secondary to what you can achieve.

b) think of your new avi as the younger brother/sister of your SL avi

c) make a skin from a template and use in both worlds....

d) dust off an alt (see above) and go in as your alt..

e) live with the difference until the shopping gets better.

I'm sure you will have other ideas, too...

"Paris, London, New York", are often printed on top designers logos....It would, as a side note, be clever of a skin designer/maker to open, say, in Inworldz, and tell their SL client base that they have a shop there. They could then sell a duplicate skin to the same people in InWorldz.... moving would be a lot easier if you can wear the same skin as the shape is usually mod in appearance.

...and...what of Dragons? Well, there are already some fairies and furries in InWorldz, but as far as I know we are still waiting for dragons.... market opportunity for someone??

It's a new frontier out there with little competition for the brave, step past your Third Life Syndrome and go for it.

:))

Nox Rox

The soft, silky voice of Noxluna Eclipse guided us thro a pleasing mix of upbeat tunes last night at my rezzday party at InWorldz.

We had to move the party to another venue, the gremlins were playing up at Alchemy Labs, but there were 30 people there on and off, and A Good Time was had by all......... hugs to those who tried and were beaten by stuff.....

Thanks to everyone for their warm wishes.

Thanks to Nox, and Happy Rezzday to her today, yes, we entered Inworldz one day apart...

:)))