Inspiration

The only real answer to the question “...and where did the inspiration for this piece come from?” is “search me.”

It’s a question that people ask out of a sort of time-tested cultural thing when faced with an artists work, and one which no-one answers honestly, because if they knew the answer and could tap into it like turning on the light, then they would be geniuses, and most aren’t.

What may be meant with the above question is very close to the next question, which is “...and what were your influences?”... well, the honest answer to that is “Everything I have ever seen, heard or thought”.

No-one ever gives that answer either....and that answer means that all Intellectual Property is stolen content anyway.

So, if you try and answer the first question as if it was the second, then you end up with nothing to say when they ask you the second one.

So, with the second question they actually want you to name people, artists they may have heard of, that have been role models in your artistic work. really tho, all other artists are crap because otherwise you would give up, or do copies.

So...you answer the Influences Question with a string of names of artists who are trendy enough or obscure enough to make you look educated... only to dig a bigger hole for yourself because the Third Question is...”and who are your artistic heros?”... a question you already answered. Doh!..

The whole process of design is as much a mystery for those of us that do it as it is for those that see some product of the process and are at a bit of a loss as to how, why and where it fits into their world view.

Design seems to me a bit like juggling thousands of pieces of a puzzle, some bits are directly related to the medium you are using, your abilities, desired outcome, size, etc. The more technical aspects get decided a few at a time, like you have to decide a medium fairly early on, and size may not be a issue you can determine once a medium is chosen.

As more decisions get made, often in quick succession, then some of the pieces of the puzzle start to coalesce around them like water vapour around a speck of dust. They are sets of pieces. You may still have no idea whatsoever what the final product will look like.

These sets of pieces then have still to be juggled, kept moving...various combinations tried mentally, turned over again and again like a sort of manic obsession, endlessly varying, 24/7. This is a state of consciousness which is unlike any 'normal' state... probably not 'healthy' either. Slightly 'disturbed'. Mental.

As the sets start to come together then a hint of a product can come into view, and you may start to get an idea of what you are creating.

Inspiration strikes when, suddenly, for seemingly no particular reason you can see all those sets fit into a whole.

You try it out, in the medium you have decided upon.

From then on in, the rest is a sort of problem solving technique. Like a jigsaw, this bit doesn’t fit...those bits go well together.....

Smaller episodes of juggling and inspiration later and you have something resembling a product.

Then, with whatever skill you have, you polish, fine-tune, and, when it’s ready, you show it to someone,......you have to,..... because by this time you probably can’t stand the sight of it anymore. It has eaten up too much of your soul for you to feel benevolent towards it, it seems like a demanding child you want to get rid of.

...and the person asks.. “What was your inspiration for this piece?”

:))

Fast, East MicroFun.

Rumours, via Tateru, that Microsoft are looking to buy out the Boys and become our new Lords and Masters have spawned a whole heap of very amusing stuff. Apart from Crap's blog there have been a load of jokes centred around Clippy, the most hated feature ever to have been invented (according to me) or ever likely to be invented in the whole of human existence.

So, for those of you that don't Tweet....

Clippy Linden is now the subject of a number of really good Tweets, his basic saying (for those ignorant of it) was..."bla, bla, do you need help with that?"

#ClippyLinden says "i see you're trying to lose some inventory items, would you like help with that?" from Oh Mead HBH.

#ClippyLinden says "I see you're trying to make a TPV that performs DDOS attacks... would you like some help finding the door?" ELiSchlegal... and also...#ClippyLinden "It looks like your are trying to post on the official SL Forums. Would you like some cheese to go with that whine?"

#ClippyLinden says "I see you're trying to cross sim lines smoothly. Would you like some help laughing at you while you try that?" m_ethaniel

#ClippyLinden It looks like you're trying to lay off 1/3 of your staff. Would you like help with crushing peoples' hopes and dreams? zero.

#ClippyLinden It looks like you're trying to search for something. Would you like some help realising how futile that is? aliceinthenet.

I'm not sure "micro" and "soft" would go over very well in Zindra... #IfMSoftBoughtLL from Lalo_T



...well...this will run and run, and fast easy fun was had by all...

:)))

WTF, Linden Lab... an answer please... (stuff JIRA)

I am speechless, well, not really...but...

In my previous posts about mesh, I have shown a sort of reluctance to believe that the Lab will leave us with a mesh product/tool that will be as ecstatically amazing as a lot of people hope it will be...

Reed even went so far, in the comments to say...
"Also, can somebody clarify how mesh could be "introduced badly"? I think its pretty straight forward what LL is doing here."

Which is a bit like saying "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?"..a phrase used to good comic effect by the team on Top gear, an english TV motoring programme.

So... the above incident with Rose....!!!

Well, here we have it. Weekly or daily things happen, that is only natural if thousands of people are online together and the people running the show, who are basically renting server space, sack 30% of their work force...BUT...

THIS is surely not possible!!

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of meeting Rose, let me tell you that she is 100% telling the truth, of that there can be no doubt.

How can the security of my money and assets have any possible bugs or glitches which haven't been fixed years ago by those responsible who I pay for this basic service??

Now...Reed, ask me again...."what could possibly go wrong?"

Unfortunately I doubt that we will ever hear any more about this. There is no possible Public Enquiry, we are, and have consented to be, ruled by a dictatorship. Thats the rules. I am not complaining about that...it's just that feedback is only one-way.... (non-european, since catherine went).. and the difficult questions don't get answered.

But, I, and certainly all my readers would like to know...

What the hell happened?

:((

Stuff from a long week.

Its been a long week, or so it seems, but things are starting to quieten down, I hope. I managed to use up all my prims at Burn 2.0 (detail above) and that's well ahead of the opening date which I think is mid October.. so that's one thing finished.





Finally got going on soror Nishi Island in InWorldz, and managed to lay down the structure, unless of course I decide I hate it and start again.. some bits are good tho, so that probably won't happen...




Loved this photo of InWorldz. Loved the fact that Elenia/Tranq posted it. All our dreams and desires in a few machines. They have all been working very hard there, expansion, at this speed is quite tricky to deal with, 600% growth in a few months (concurrency) is not to be sniffed at. The Boys would kill for that sort of growth. Where I think InWorldz has a great advantage over SL is that the Founders (IWz) know, through watching LL how not to do things. Fix things and don't sweep em under the carpet to bug you for years, is probably number one, I would think.

Good interview too with Tranq and Elenia on Metaverse TV here.... leads me to think that seeing the terrible mess LL has got itself into though the use of hype and spin is surely number two lesson of how not to run a grid...as Dusan so rightly puts it, it's a world not a platform.





Beyondthematrix Boa was the 1000th person to visit Tree of Trees at IBM C, and I offered him a sort of souvenir as a 'prize', anyway, it turns out that he and his partner Ginger Ling make the most amazing watches...here... as pictured above with all moving parts etc. anyway... they like my stuff so I built a little islet for them...cool





...and my week came to a great end with The Born Again Pagans playing at Benares, courtesy of Brinda, who is surely one of the grids nicest people. I hope to have Hexx and Madame play at IBM next saturday night 3 p.m. ....I will keep you posted.

The Born Again Pagans have a free download of one of their signature songs "Run for the Money' which you can hear here, and download the MP3.

Hope you had and have a good week...

:))

We deal with it.

There has been a fair amount of criticism levelled at the recent video on Mesh which was brought out with good intentions, no doubt. Both Dusan Writer and Phaylen Fairchild are very annoyed at the 'mesh is coming...deal with it' comment at the end of the video, but more so with the comments on Dusans blog by amongst others the insecure but arrogant fool who called me uneducated and opinionated for trying to gain some clarity on a previous post.

Luckily there are people around who helped gain a bit of clarity with regard to a couple of my queries.

Now, there are a couple of comments that suggest that, as SL residents, we oppose all changes and 'new things' that LL tries to implement, one comment says...

"Thank goodness the inventors throughout history weren’t SL residents. It continually cracks me up that people in a virtual world, which is cutting edge enough that most people still don’t get it, are all anti-change and AFRAID of learning something new.
Pussies."

This guy who calls himself radar needs to look at our recent history...

1) LL introduces a new viewer that is so amazingly irritating and full of bugs that people shun it like the plague. LL tries to enlist people to work for free fixing something they broke.

2) instead of fixing search, for example, we are offered voice morphing...

3) with things gradually becoming less efficient (post) we are given a name changing possibility which is a griefers charter to cause chaos.

4) SL MarketCockup is an ongoing chaos caused by LL (Snickers post)... again...they broke it.

5) Teen Grid and Avatars United get closed presumably because LL can't make money at it.

I would personally rephrase radar's remark to say..." Thank goodness inventors throughout history did't have to rely on LL....etc"

Against the background of the above history it is no surprise that LL's clients are dubious, worried and sceptical about mesh.

Anne OToole, who only a fool would call uneducated has this to say about mesh..."Everything I have seen of SL mesh thus far looks like amateur dog shit. Like that green turd looking robot thing in that video."

There are still some fairly HUGE gaps in information about mesh that an idiot would dismiss, we have no idea of the prim cost, the maximum file size, or how the poor servers will deal with collada uploads considering what trouble they have with simple textures recently. So, it is naive and pathetic to hail mesh as the best thing since sliced carrots until we see it working.

Now, as a final kick in the private parts to such fools as Steamroller and radar, I would like to point you at the most beautiful post written by Miso Susanowa today.

In spite of everything we have dealt with, in spite of terrible customer service (European office now closed), in spite of early release of dodgy products (even viewer 2.2 isn't as good as TPV), in spite of the pervasive deafness of the Lab, we deal with it, daily, and we create beauty. So stop talking crap, get your heads out of the clouds and realise mesh may not be the new messiah, it depends a lot on how well it is introduced.


Fools.

The Trouble with Balance.

Nightflower has recently posted on NWN the results of her survey of her readers together with her own thoughts on maintaining a balance between RL and SL lives.... and she invites debate and a conversation on this topic... so...

Nightflower’s words are born of her own experience and so are true for her though not necessarily so for all.

The one sentence that jumped out at me was... “my emotional health also requires me to reject romanticization, and embrace the truth that my flesh-and-blood self is inherently more valuable than my digital projection.”

I have a problem with that. It may seem like semantics, me being picky, but my self, or anyone’s self is not flesh and blood, but pure psychic in nature. Similarly I would disagree that my avatar is a straight forward digital projection.

Nightflower also says “I love my avatar Night, and enjoy alternating between talking about her as if she were me, and referring to her as if she were a unique, sentient being. While there are some valuable kernels of truth in that viewpoint for a discussion on identity, that kind of talk is potentially destructive hogwash if we’re talking about balance.”

It would seem to me that some sort of viewpoint on identity would have to be reached before one can make a value judgement about how more or less “valuable” one part of my psyche is as opposed to another part of my psyche.

Is the hour a patient spends with her/his therapist more or less valuable than the 40 hours a week they have to work in order to pay for the therapy?

Her statement is very culturally based, these are the values we were all indoctrinated with from childhood, and may not be viable longer. (previous post, Angst and Addiction)

Though I do not consider myself a Christian there is an example from the bible where Martha complains that she does all the work while Mary just sits at Christ’s feet taking his teaching. So this discussion is not a new one.... and there is no answer.

~~~~~~

Moving on from this particular point about the relative importance of atom-based work vs. digital work, I have a theoretical aversion to the idea that balance is always necessary, or even a good thing.

Does the idea “moderation in all things” also include Moderation as one of the things to be moderate about? Is it not necessary to throw Balance out of the window on occasion?

If Mozart had not been obsessed, if van Gogh had achieved more Balance, who would have gained?

Balanced can just equal Safe, and can be the refuge for those feeling they got their fingers burnt playing with fire.... and I make no apology for re-quoting this piece from one of my previous posts on addiction...

“Talking of the conflict between conscious and unconscious elements of the Self, (like yin and yang, human and avatar)... Dr Jung says....
“When this confrontation is confined to partial aspects of the unconscious the confrontation is limited and the solution simple: the patient, with insight and some resignation or a feeling of resentment, places himself on the side of reason and convention.”

He means that if you can’t stand the heat, you get out of the kitchen. Addiction is then the excuse you have for being in the kitchen in the first place. The unwanted sides of your psyche that have manifested get repressed again, and you go back to “normality”.”

I am of the firm belief that I would rather be Mental than Balanced, but a mixture of the two is probably healthier..

:)))

Me is United

This is from my post of 31st of January this year....

"Also...I joined the newly acquired (by LL) Avatars United, which is a staggeringly forgettable social media site, for avatars. It has poor graphics and its hard to see it taking off to be honest. I thought...well...that's nice, this disproves my previous idea that everyone is out to get my Real Name and sell me junk.
However.....before I left the site, I was asked if I wouldn't mind answering a survey...for feedback. Now being the Public Spirited Being that I am, I agreed.
The first 3 things they wanted to know where.... age, sex, job...... now, I ask you..how is that gonna help their feedback, really. Duh!!"

Followed the following week by...

"Well, the big thing seems to be Avatars United this week, as I have more friends, suddenly, than I can shake a stick at, not that I would, of course,...... well....maybe one or two could do with a....

..and by the 18th February, just 19 days into my United Experience...

"Ok..well..I just cancelled my accounts... [Facebook and Avatars United]

I am sooo bored with them both.

I figure "social media" are a bit like a faxmachine...outdated. I would rather have an IM with one person in SL than 3000 "friends" on FB, and really...AU has absolutely nothing to offer.

There are privacy issues, but my data is being mined whatever I do online, it is naive to think it isn't, so it's not that that has prompted me, just boredom with an outdated , and not very social, social setting.

So, if you are a friend mine we'll talk in world..:... if you are a "friend"... goodbye, live long and prosper (if it suits)...

Avatars United is to be erased ... announcement here.

Now, it could have been Cockup Linden or Blunder who was in charge though rumours say Moron Linden was brought in specially as a vet, but the life just ebbed out of it.

Apparently some people will miss it... takes all sorts...

Now its taken 8 months for the Boys to trash something which some poor Swedish guys (well, poor rich guys now) took 3 years to build. Was it the dodgy graphix or was it just the totally obvious fact that SL needs a social media site like an octopus needs a 9th leg.

A good part of most peoples time online, (even if they live on some high altitude building platform torturing prims as a hobby) is spent socialising. Not one but many wise Educated Types have pointed out the fact that 'face to face' interaction on SL is a million times better than any other form of virtual socialising. I guess the Boys didn't know that as they don't really go inworld except for the occasional foray.

XXLMarketplace XLonMainstreet to be the next corpse?? Probably not, some people actually use it (apparently)....less laggy than the malls I guess.... but it is being refurbished. Why does that not fill me with hope... (rhetorical, so deserves no question mark).

Avatars United was fast (8 months), easy (no-one used it) and I, at least, find it quite funny...

Well, as they say in Swedish.. "hahahahahahahahahahaaahahaha .. lets go shoot an elk".

:))