Op/Ed

Last September, I bid farewell to Y2P as a contributor. Embedded in my farewell article was a silent vow that, should the WSE declare insolvency or otherwise withdraw as a virtual exchange, I would return to cover the event.

In his December 2008 address, Luke Connell announced that his exchange would be severing all ties to Second Life and Second Life-based companies. Though the announcement provoked some applause and cries of victory from the virtual exchange cognoscente, the majority dismissed the address with an indiscernible shrug – comfortably nestled in the latter camp was yours truly.

In the two month period between my announcement and Connell’s, RL had whisked me away. Until two weeks ago, most of my involvement had taken place via email. When the holiday break afforded me a bit of leisure time, I sat down to make good on my promise, but the words didn’t come. The distance had given me a new perspective. So I stepped back, caught up, and drew some disturbing conclusions.

Where the WSE is concerned, it’s gone from Second Life. Good riddance. The periods of unannounced halts, disinformation, fear mongering and revisionism -which I’ve flippantly dubbed “retConnelling”- are someone else’s problem.

But this by no means constitutes a victory. When I think of the “old investors” whose money has hitherto been made unavailable to them while “new investors” deposited and withdrew at will, I can only conclude that the sole winner here is Connell himself. But that was always the case. Besides, people like myself weren’t trying to beat Luke Connell at a game he dominated. We were simply creating an archive. As VSTEX PR Director Samantha Goldflake likes to say, “The internet does not forget.” I concur. { Read more }

This was just a little too easy to have fun with:

Umm - seriously? A bot that tells people to log out and hang out with real friends and family?

I like Second Life just about as much as anyone who's spent a significant amount of time inworld, but the truth of the matter is that using Second Life really doesn't help real world social skills... or does it?

I'd love to see who makes the $10K. Maybe it will be LukeConnell Vandeverre.

We all know at least one person who we suspect has an alternate avatar. If anything, it's amusing to consider someone who is all prim and proper tossing on a fresh avatar and running around scantily clad. Personally, I think that Gorean simulators are made up completely of human men engaged in a digital form of homoeroticism. This will not endear me to Goreans, but then - I don't want to be liked by Goreans...

And I won't even get into virtual attempts at stock exchanges such as the WSE. For all I know, everyone on the WSE - aside from a few - could be all running in an air conditioned room by the person or people behind LukeConnell Vandeverre.

Pure speculation, of course. But that speculation, because of the nature of Second Life and the way that it can be used, lends itself to a deep sense of mistrust. While corporations may be embracing (and now, not) the ability to have an avatar, I don't think that they truly have a plan for multiple avatars. Why? There is no easy solution; sock puppets just evolved.

When I read about a man with 36 Second Life avatars, I was a bit surprised. 36. And apparently they are all registered.... which is all fine and dandy, but how does one find the time for 2 avatars, let alone 36? And if you look at the pic, you can see that there's a significant amount of hardware involved - enough so that one could talk to one's own avatars.

Why log in to talk to one's self? I do that without logging in...

And this leads me to the question: How much is too much?

I haven't broken anything significant yet. This, generally speaking, is a good thing.

More functionality being added as I type this - but the host is whining as I make the server do backflips so I have to wait until a few more things are done before I celebrate.

Yes, the theme is different. It's still a little too pink for my liking, but that can be changed once I get the core of the site doing what I want it to.

Comments will include updates to functionality, etc.
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10/18/2008: Changes of note -

• Captchas are now enabled in the hope that this will deal with the spam comment issue. Experimentation elsewhere has shown it to be worthwhile; if spam becomes a problem again we'll just go back to moderating anonymous comments.
• People can now email subscribe to comments.
• The TinyMCE text editor, which was used for blogging, hasn't made it into the new version of the site because of resource usage. This may be changed, depending on whether the new editor doesn't drive people bonkers.
• Links added to permit people to share things on a variety of sites.
• Spam users deleted - these were accounts where people never logged in but had a user profile which told us all to buy their viagra.
• Color scheme has gotten one vote (in comments, below). I'm not sure that I'm pleased with it, but hey... 
• Incremental additions of functionality still happening. Update, test, fix, update, test, fix. Not like WSE.
  

I came across a blog which referenced this article by Ari Kaplan which discusses Second Life in the context of marketing for attorneys (an under-appreciated aspect of modern society, perhaps?). Within the article, I found this:

...Second Life makes people feel as if they have physically met one another, Lieberman says...

Just to clear the air here - I don't feel like I've physically met anyone on my friend list within Second Life. Maybe I have some exotic condition which doesn't permit me to feel that I have physically met people because I've come across a prim-haired digital representation of them, complete with animation overrides that go from the laughable to the grotesque.

Frankly, when I see a rockstar looking male avatar, I think of a balding middle aged man stumbling his way across the keyboard between bites of pizza. And no offense, ladies (those of you that are real), I think the same of all the Ms. Universe pageant entries in Second Life as well.... (I also think that all the women on Gorean sims are just men, which makes the whole thing extremely pathetic). I somehow know that people are not as they represent themselves in Second Life - but that perhaps the way they have themselves represented communicates what they want others to think of them.

Meanwhile, I'm a penguin most of the time. Go figure. I can tell you that in the real world I am not a penguin, and I don't burst into flames and spontaneously do back flips.

I do not think that people whose avatars are furry are really furry in real life. I may revise that opinion the second I encounter a large group of furry folk frolicking in Central Park (without costumes).

But that's what I think. { Read more }

A while back, I remembered hearing something about Linden Lab's Showcase, and I recall being less than impressed. Initially, I thought that this would be something that would skew inworld businesses to anyone who, for all intents and purposes, is a favorite of a someone at a company which has always been found to be just a little more favorable to those it... likes. Be it a book on the front page of SecondLife.com, or ear-muffs that allow music to be played, or what have you. This, of course, is a travesty to all those many people out there who have never had the good fortune to be on the cover of a magazine, or gain some level of respect and/or notoriety by having a way to put letters together to form words to form sentences on a website.

But I forgot all of that. I logged in with an alternate avatar, and was poking around out of sheer.... boredom. The events list is, as always, clogged with lackluster events. Everyone wants our avatars to join their groups, reminiscent of Facebook. Everyone wants to give away freebies, or even in some cases sell them. The selling of freebies is something no one seems to care about anymore, perhaps because Linden Lab just doesn't... do anything about the DRM of Second Life to assure once something is free, it is always free.

So I looked in search and found the other tab. The one called, "Showcase". Without even thinking about all the stuff I wrote in the first paragraph here, I took a look.

The 'All' link is the default, and had some interesting things there... the other tabs also have some interesting things, and are almost decidedly not inworld business related. Whew. I was wrong. Maybe.

I found it odd that there was fashion listed there. I look up to the right, see the link to fashion and roll my eyes. It's what I thought. Linden Lab is playing fashion police and skewing fashion to the folks it would like to skew fashion toward. { Read more }

Better late than never! Having just logged into Second Life, I found this in a notecard which is dealing with a performance today:

Date: 09 September 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Maedin Tureaud

Beginning this Friday, September 12, the Second Life Shakespeare Company (SLSC) presents a modern play to open their Autumn 2008 season. The play, One's a Pawn of Time, is a fast-paced and clever one-act play about relationship drama that may arise through hasty time travel. Written by Mike Dederian, the play is directed by Rob Knop (Prospero Frobozz in SL) and will feature the voice actors of Second Life residents Jeremy Jester, Lorne Harlequin, Kinji Lockjaw, and Maedin Tureaud.

Performed in Second Life, most of the shows will be free to attend, and audience members will be required to turn on the voice feature in order to hear the dialogue, though microphones must be strictly turned off. Two of the shows, promoted as "very low-lag", will require a ticket fee to limit the audience size. Set in the confluence of 4 island simulators, the SL Globe theatre is ideally situated to accommodate large audiences and stage performances that are as low-lag as possible. In keeping with SLSC convention, the set, costumes, and avatars are custom-made for the play. Ina Centaur, artistic director at SLSC, confirms the tailoring of details: "The set for the production continues the RL tradition of preserving the structure of the Globe stage in set design and also our SL tradition of extravagance in visuals." { Read more }