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31 October 2006

 
Trying to figure things out...


So, there's a virtual world I'll call VR for virtual reality.

People visit VR and not all stay.

As in any world the thing that makes people stay is developing relationships - friendships or larger-scale things like being part of a group of like-minded people.

People make content that they sell to other VR people.

Corporations are attracted to VR as they can market their goods in a cutting-edge way, gain press, reach people they might otherwise not reach - and more I'm sure.

Corporations can provide the VR company with needed revenue.

Corporations are interested in being in VR as they see a large number of people joining.

Long-term VR residents benefit, and benefit from, all aspects of VR.

Content sellers benefit from a short-term VR tourist only if that tourist buys content.

Corporations benefit from short-term tourists if the tourists visit their headquarters in VR - becoming click-throughs, in a way.

As I see it, there needs to be support for groups and forms of social creativity which are not foremost intended to generate profit, as that is the link that keeps people from moving on.

I don't think corporations will be interested in a VR with no stable population.

I'm just thinking about this.

I'm very likely missing a lot, and anyway I'm cogitating, not reporting. If you have thoughts please say them in comments. I know I haven't even scratched the surface and I'd value your input.

I feel like LL is trying to negotiate a difficult piece of unknown territory to find a balance to benefit everyone. It's terra incognita, and there's no map - however human nature and business models are the same as they have always been.



30 October 2006

 
I was very happy to again see Ishi on Sunday at Spangle, and it was with great pleasure that I met Young Geoffrion then, too. I was mistaken in my first impression that she and Ishi had arrived together, as they had only met upon arrival and were immediately sent to fight each other under Comhrag's instruction.


 
'''drat'

Anyway, maybe I will be able to post soon.

There has been an outcry about a clothing-making problem in Second Life that has completely by-passed me. The UI is such rich ground that there are multiple ways to do things. I've never been one to use "save as" to make clothing - typically I make a copy, rename the copy, wear it, and change the textures and save. Apparently many people wear the original, change the textures, then "save as," which I'm too crabby and mistrustful to do.

I've been making few clothes since the texture previewer went all Giacometti on me a number of months ago. It'll be fixed sooner or later; meanwhile I'm making tents and working on Combat Cards and the music hall/vaudeville idea. There's always a lot to do!

Candide told me yesterday I was dead wrong about the attachments, and that it doesn't matter what people wear as attachments are phantom and all handled client-side. I'm relieved to be wrong. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Yesterday I was a zombie sumo wrestler and Candide was a comely white-skinned lass in a fetching red gown. We fought and I killed him... her... the funny thing was that when he was chatting I heard a man's voice. I wasn't really aware I heard anything, but now that I think about it, yes, I do hear everyone. I'm sure my voices don't coincide with their real voices, yet I hear them just the same.

LL has upped new island cost and monthly tier by quite a bit, creating an outcry. The outcry mainly seems to be directed at the early notification by LL of certain big customers who were subsequently able to buy grandfathered-in old islands (on class 4 servers) from unsuspecting sellers. The tier is going from 195 to 295 so, even apart from the new initial cost of islands, the grandpas are quite the bargain, especially when purchased from someone unaware of their brand-new scarcity.


 
There's some kind of bizarreness going on with my blog - I'm not sure this will post as things haven't been, but I'll try.



28 October 2006

 
Doc fights Comhrag, while Candide and Os sit on a tomb and watch, and Amulius watches from the righthand side.


 
I've beren working night 'n' day for the Combat Cards beta Horror Series release tomorrow as well as doing... eh... RL stuff that is making me sick. Anyway, yesterday I met Ishi and took her picture in her skin she made from her anatomy studies. She was fabulously fun and nice.

Click and follow the links to see the rest of the horror cards.


 

My friend Zhan has just begun worked on a growing sequoia that slowlt attains an immense height. As I say, he just began this (yesterday?), so at present it's a growing trunk but in the future it will have branches.

It grew (set to demonstrate quick growth) to this height from nothing.
Then I went to see some things and stumbled across FEZ's museum - I was glad to see it as I'd wanted to visit, but it was completely by accident.

Fab TagCloud by FEZ.



27 October 2006

 
Trying to Work in a Sandbox: Attacked and Abused

I was trying to work in Plum when a strange boy used a freeze spell on me - after that I said I was trying to work - heh. He did it more and hurled firebombs at me while sat frozen and filled out an AR then tped home.

[1:45] Fry McFly: Hey
[1:45] Fry McFly: whats up
[1:45] You: trying to work
[1:45] Fry McFly: ok sorry
[1:46] You: ok
[1:46] Fry McFly: You suck Gay ass monkey balls so why should i not freeze you, you stupid prick of a cunt mother fucker
[1:46] Rick S: prat
[1:46] Fry McFly: PRICK
[1:47] Rick S: Small minded moron. Small things please tiny minds
[1:47] Fry McFly: lol
[1:47] Rick S: Wow that is so scary. Obviously in the real world you have no job and a small penis

I think I should call his mother up and get him grounded.



26 October 2006

 
A Name for Comhrag's Zombie Card:Looks like a job for the nursery mothers!

Os: Doc suggested Highland Hack - can you think of a better one?
Comhrag:
Vikki and the mothers at the nursery are on it - hopefully have something this evening!


 
NPR story on Second Life



25 October 2006

 

I took Comhrag's picture today and made a card, made a graveyard at Spangle, helped Doc test by fighting, scouted diners for a zombie waitress Enjah very kindly agreed to create (thank you, oh quintessential good egg), made a waitress pose, met up with Peabrain who showed me his sim and intoduced me to his friend - they invited us to perform on their land and said they'd build for us - w00t! I can't figure out what we are doing until after Hallowe'en, though.



24 October 2006

 
Men With Cramps: The Warriors - Part II

bwuhahaha


 
I made another custom tent today...



All the swoopy drapes are hard to join, and every little change means adjusting everything. It took me hours to do, but the customer was happy.



22 October 2006

 
Because I've got a big problem going on I am distracting myself with shiny things. One shiny thing: Someone asked me to build an enormous tent, yesterday, so I worked on it all day and have one texture version done, although I want to do two different ones. It's quite huge - 30x20m with a bump-out at the back. I started in Wanderton Sandbox, then wound up going to Newcomb, Island, Island Extension, Plum, and a private sim's sandbox as sandboxes crash a lot. Some idiot old enough to know better crashed Island with physics-enabled balls, right as I was changing something. I try to keep out of sandboxes although I used to love them.



Falk B, whom I met on Aditi, gave me book devices to swap my books onto, that work much better than the old freebie devices I'm using. He's a very nice man.

I think the ninja boys, who had been quiet, must be used to school now as I have had nonstop new ninja boy activity, including one yesterday who balked at the price of my clothing, asked me to help him learn to make textures which I spent about 40 minutes on, asked me for 10L for an upload (which I gave), came back today and wanted to buy the thing (having discovered it isn't easy) and asked me for my textures (I said no). I don't know why, but I always like these boys - they crack me up. They are honest (except one yesterday) and are really quite respectful. I don't blame them for asking things, but I also don't mind saying no.

People have always bothered me a lot for tents but since I put the tents in a vendor I've been selling some every day. I'm not much of a merchant. I like making tents, and since the texture previewer is broken and I don't want to make clothing, it's good timing that people are asking me for custom tents. This new tent is the Taj Mahal of tents, in a way, and I had a lot of people come and ask me about it in the sandboxes. It's nice to hear, "Wow! You're good!" and also have someone say, "You built this in one day?" I also had three people take note as they want to buy the big tent when I'm done, and one man bought some from my vendor then came and bought some from me directly (he needed permission changes).


 
Someone on the SL Forums asked:
"Are we going to see an increase in the prim limit for the various lands in the near future? It would greatly increase our creative possibilities. Thank you."

My guess would be that any increases we might've had have gone onto people's heads as 100-prim hair and into other attachments, and won't be turning up as land-based prim limits anytime soon.

See: My post on the 400-prim pair of Adidas.



21 October 2006

 

Meme Meow

Salazar send me this picture - a Fidget was sleeping near the Miramare Infohub. I suddenly realised that Fidgets are spreading throughout the Grid in a cool way. I get an IM every couple of weeks from someone saying, "I saw a sleeping cat and I saw you made it - can I buy one?" I give them cats for free, sometimes copiable but always modifiable. I made it almost two years ago, but it has an attractive, gestural look, and although it could be much more realistic that would mean higher prim - and so not something most people could display. I decided to put a box giving Fidgets for free in ElvenGlen. This is interesting.


 



20 October 2006

 



19 October 2006

 

So - things are quite different on Aditi. There's a web tab on the profile so I'm taking advantage of it to make a quick blog post on this, my Fourth Blogiversary.

After the first blogpost I made in the F1 web window I was not particularly moved to make more. This is much more useful as a new Combat Cards fighter can be directed to my profile to see what I know is there.

Things look a lot different. I need to go back and investigate.


 
Busy, busy, busy

Contemplating Eggy's dead fly in a barrel. The fly drowned in a thimbleful of water on the leaf.
I was at Spangle, having just made a brain.


 

My blog is four years old today. It's been an amazingly packed four years including my mother's cancer and death, my father's Alzheimer's and death, There, Second Life, the end of my 16 year period of working at Wa He Lut, and many other things, most of which you should be happy I'm not bringing up. My blog has helped me hold together.

I've always kept journals, and in fact found one the other day that had pithy commentary on things going on in my life at that point. It would be nice to look back and see ANY time period that wasn't absolutely fraught and completely stress-filled, however I have never actually had that. Maybe it's in my future or maybe THIS - right now - is as good as it gets.



18 October 2006

 
I had a photoshoot with Aliasi today. It was great except the top took so long to rez (and I didn't know what it was supposed to look like) that I wound up with perhaps two shots with everything fully visible. However - I think the shots I got were really good.



 
I love the treasure trove that is YouTube. I was looking for Tetrazzini the other night and found the brief and charming clip of her singing with a recording of Caruso. So many of these voices I am wholly familiar with, but have never seen the singer outside of still photos. There's a lot of Mario del Monaco on YouTube - wonderful to see. He was criticised at the time for lack of modulation, but I love his power, and besides, my very first opera record was Mario del Monaco's Pagliacci (from a junk store or a garage sale I think).

Because I'm like the Coneheads (no, I'm not from France but I prize "low tones) I am usually content to follow Ruggiero Raimondi around, as well as other fabulous basses and baritones (those Bulgarians...). I'm not a big soprano person - anyway, I like men. Opera has suffered a little lately from the very stupid idea that singers need to conform to society's idea of physical beauty - not only the women, but the men, too. Why anyone should want that garbage to slop over onto our opera stages I have no clue. There will always be a place for charisma and stage presence, but those are separate from mere adherence to body shape, although it seems not everyone knows that. I'm happy when there is a nice physical presence that matches that we think fits the role, however, that takes a backseat to voice quality, or at least it should.


 
Doodles

Are doodles still around? I remember my father's little aeroplane doodles. My mother doodled floorplans and women's heads. When my brother was a boy he doodled battleships. I doodled horses, flowers, and abstract shapes. To my recollection neither of my sisters doodled.

I have collected abandoned shopping lists for decades, and even now, though I rarely find any myself, I sometimes open a letter and find a sheaf of lists gathered for me by one friend or another. Had I been writing a list I would've encrusted the page with doodles, but not all, or even most, of my lists are doodled-upon.

Pencils are the best things EVER - there are a few manmade objects that are perfect in every way and the pencil* falls into that elite group. Back at the Lut when I taught the whole school I'd have children (presumably expressing their powerlessness) who would snap their pencils into pieces or deliberately snap the point and grind the pencil in the sharpener until it was a mere nubbin. I'd tell them all about pencils and how lucky we are to have pencils, and request that they think about pencils and not just destroy blithely and unthinkingly. While they thought I was funny in many ways, they did in fact know I always told them what I felt to be true, and respected my passion.

* A pencil:
smells good
makes a wonderful subtle and beautiful mark on paper and other surfaces
is erasable to a high degree
is cheap
is simple
is accessible
comes in many degrees of hardness, thickness
comes in various shapes such as carpenter's pencils
acts to relay the texture of the paper and the crumbling graphite to the hand, brain, and ear
is usable for non-drawing activities when needed, such as a weapon, a poking stick, etc.
many more


 
Meaningless Second Life Statistics

I just now noticed the 'total residents" number is over a million.


 
Montserrat Caballe sings Casta diva

Here's a fabulous Casta diva with sublime vocal perfection but less visual passion than Callas. On the other hand, I've always like the old fashioned stand-there-and-sing style, and anyway, should a priestess really be required to act it up?

I spent hours lasts night listening and comparing Una voce poco fas and tonight spent hours listening to and comparing Casta divas. I listened to this about ten times.

*goes back and listens a few more*

Sublime.


 
Maria Callas sings Casta Diva

I've been reading Parterre box (blog about opera) for years and found parterrebox and La Cieca on YouTube - lead on, oh valiant ones!
Here's a parterrebox upload: Callas singing Casta Diva, from Bellini's Norma. It gets no finer.



17 October 2006

 
Snapping Eggy
Doc came up with the idea of having an SL Thriller zombie on Combat Cards as a way to incorporate some SL history. I asked the famed Eggy if he would model, and he agreed. We hadn't set anything up, but when I logged in yesterday I went to Spangle and made a blank screen. I IMed asking him when he would be available and he replied, "Now," and dropped onto my head. He quickly changed into a zombie and started dancing, and I began snapping. "This will take ages as it's high-res." "Are you done yet?" "It's not easy being a super-model." He went away and shaved and came back and we finished up.

I had 9 raw Eggies on a blue screen, and went off looking for backgrounds. I wanted urban, neutral, not too dark. I started in Nova Albion, went to Suffugium, Manhattan, Devil's Moon, Midnight City, and Chaos, wandering part of the time with Enjah. In Chaos as we sat at a sidewalk table she spotted a video and pointed out that the girl in it had fake breasts. I never would have noticed, and in fact had released my camera constraints and was taking a picture 4 blocks away.





I tried a few background and altered the eggies and backgrounds a bit... Finally we had 3 to choose. The final one would get polished up and the others would go into the scrap bin.






The final card? It's not finished yet :-D



16 October 2006

 
Damned Firefox ate almost all my bookmarks...

So I took it to Jessie and flamethrowered it.

For a while.
Then went and restored the bookmarks from backup.

Maybe I'll go back to Opera.

I took pictures of Eggy today for the Combat Cards horror series - he was a zombie for the occasion. Specifically, he was a zombie from the Thriller video made by a group captained by Ulrika Z. in 2004. It seems like ancient times - it was just two years, but how things have changed. Anyway, Eggy told me he turns into a pumpkin at 2pm, which I thought was a figure of speech until I saw him turn into a pumpkin before my very eyes. He still typed as a pumpkin, though.


 
I live in the United States, which has, incredible though it might seem, changed in the past 6 years so much that it's like living in The Handmaid's Tale. I couldn't believe it when George Bush took the election in 2004, and although everything he does is mind-bending to me the most mind-bending part is that he doesn't even feel the need to cover up much. After the 2004 election I threw up my hands because, even though it's doubtful that he won the election, it's indisputable that a lot of people voted for him. I think of those people in the following categories: greedy, evil, stupid, fearful, unimaginative and lacking in empathy, immoral, selfish. I doubt they think of themselves that way, but I don't understand why, if any of those terms don't apply to them, they would then support Bush. There never has been any reason apart from those that would appeal to the greedy, the evil, the stupid, the fearful, unimaginative and unempathetic, the immoral, and the selfish. I know lots and lots of really good Americans. I know they aren't all GESFUIS. For all those in the GESFUIS categories, however, I have one question: Is this what you wanted?


 
Tito Gobbi Credo

Gad - another major favorite of mine.


 
Franco Corelli - Puccini - Tosca - E lucevan le stelle

One of my alltime favorite singers singing one of my alltime favorite arias. A wonderful singer.



15 October 2006

 
Maria Callas - Carmen - Habanera

Damn that Aristotle Onassis.


 
Aurora (Northern Lights)


 
House-Proud Spider

I've watched spiders and ants and things all my life, from my very early years. Actually, any group of beings is fascinating to watch as you see them interacting in ways that begin to form patterns and make sense. Anyway, I looked up from my monitor and saw a spider (I usually have a great huge one at this time that I think of as my Hallowe'en decoration, but this year the fat one in that long line of related decorations was smashed when Chris and Connie brought my paintings back ane did some spider suck-up for me) - just a medium-sized one (an inch or so from foot to foot) of a different variety engaged in web-cleaning. It was laboriously pulling a fir needle (about an inch and a half) end over end using its silk as a rope. It pulled the needle parallel to the ground with silk and its mandibles, then the needle dropped a bit and the spider repeated the process. I tried to get a decent mpeg but I'm too hopeless, however I got a picture of it engaged in its work. What a champ - it certainly has a nice web. Looking out the window I see lots of webs festooned with needles, but no other spiders seem as houseproud as this one.


 
For some reason I couldn't sleep last night, so I was tossing and turning unil 4 or 5 in the morning. I was thinking (while I was unable to sleep) about how, when I was young, I was a very restless sleeper and would rip the bed apart and sometimes wind up facing the opposite direction* to that I had started out in. I wore pajamas as a small child (and put the bottoms on my head and hopped around claiming to be a rabbit), then later having teh dreaded nightgowns. Standing out in my memory are some embroidered mid-length nighties that were very pretty if you like embroidered things. Maybe they came from my mother's mother, Mummy Barbara, in Hong Kong - I have a vague feeling that they might've. Anyway, I was so restless a sleeper that nighties would wind up around my neck strangling me. I'd've been better off with spray-on insulation or Gertrude Ederle-style grease, I think. Or maybe I should just've taped the nighties to my knees.

Anyway, then I started thinking about the old 8's and super8's I have on tape that were taken by my Uncle Tony (WSAFTN***) and my sister Deborah. Some of them are quite old, and in on segment I'm about 5 and my cousin and I are going to bed. I'm bouncing up and down kissing my cousin good night and settling in, all documented for posterity by my uncle.

When I got up I dragged through a billion discs looking for the movies, and through another billion Hi-8 tapes. I did find the VHS tape. Too bad - I'd hoped for an easier way to get access to the thing. I realised I'd just (in the past week) chucked out two video-editing programs and blithely tossed the husks (folders) as well - and I know damn well that the video was in those folders as I was making something when I just... stopped.

Anyway, I hope I can dredge the snippet up out of the VHS... I'm back. Wow, that was weird - the whole thing didn't even look familiar - hooking up my video camera to the TV (which has been unplugged for years). Plugging in the TV and VCR took ages as the electrizzities in this house (in this case the sockets, actually) is so crappy that I have to wiggle and/or bend the plugs to get them to conduct anything. Anyway, I sorted it, and it yielded THIS! Something no one in their right mind would be interested in seeing!

Going to Bed in 1959



* Longitudinally, and not as someone thought, just rolling over and facing the other way. That annoyed me, that a person** though I thought rolling over in bed was being a restless sleeper.
**Who shall NOT be named as I can't remember who it was.
***Who skied away from the Nazis.



13 October 2006

 
Sumo Zombie


 

Standing inside a flower.


 
If you are an artist you want to see a painting in an unobtrusive frame that finishes off the edges without standing out. It would be awful to have a viewer say, "Wow! Nice frame!"

The same thing applies with museums, which have tension between art people and architects - the architects have been known to build museums that are large-scale versions of "Wow! Nice frame!"

It just occurred to me that it's the same with websites. There are some people for whom the website is the important thing in itself, whereas for someone showing content like photographs or paintings the website is just a frame.



11 October 2006

 
Camping... on the preview grid?

I was on the Aditi grid just now which was uncharacteristically hopping due to the main grid's update-downness at that point. I went to Grignano, which was afflicted with teh uber lag, and couldn't believe it when I saw massed green dots in the northwest corner, i.e. where there are camping chairs. I went over and asked - "I'm curious - why would anyone camp on the preview grid? They continued to talk to each other (the non-zombie ones) and ignored me completely. Why WOULD anyone camp on the preview grid?

For non-SLers, camping chairs and dance pads are objects upon which an avatar can idle for hours or days, provided by casino owners and the like, which pay out a tiny amount of lindens. In return, all those zombified people suck up the sim resources so actual living people who have things to do have no resources with which to function, and therefore have to leave the sim (or have already been denied entrance). This is VERY BAD when the sim is where your home or shop is. On the preview grid (the purpose of which is testing the new code) nothings transfers to the main grid. The state of the grid is ephemeral, so even if you "earn" 63 linden by camping your money doesn't transfer, your purchases (should you make any) last only until the grid changes and a new snapshot is employed, and besides that, LL gives everyone on the preview grid 5000L so they can buy things necessary for whatever test they are doing (testing, say, vehicles - you can buy a vehicle). Are these people just doing what they are accustomed to doing? What the hell is wrong with them?



10 October 2006

 
A new creative exercise at the Photography Studio in Grignano
Contest 20: DANCE

The contest themes are always loose - any interpretation is good. The theme is dance - any kind of dance, even "dancing leaves." Are you at a dance? Dancing? Dressed as a ballerina? Firing your six shooter to make your rival dance (old west griefing). There are many more possibilities than just those.

To Enter:
Enter textures of Second Life screenshots.
Textures can be no bigger than 512x512 - rectangular photos saved as 512x512 regain their proportions once they are put on a prim.

Title entries with your name + title <---= so I don't lose it in my inventory
Send them to Osprey Therian with MOD permission and COPY perms.
Give me an IM so I know to look for them.

Don't send them in a notecard - I say this as I look at textures every day but I rarely look at notecards. If I don't get your heads-up the entry gets buried under the billion spam notecards I get per week.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3 Entries is the limit.
Category 1 -- Second Life - snapshots
Category 2 -- Second Life - manipulated imagery
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Entries accepted until November 3rd at 5:30pm
I'm trying to steer back onto the proper time course after getting mixed up, but I want to keep contests about a month long.

The show will go up on the weekend - and we will have an awards ceremony, probably at 3pm on Monday, November 6th.

The Photography Studio is located in The Brownstone East, Grignano
Grignano is a pg sim.



09 October 2006

 
Last night I spent a few hours hanging the Black and White show, and pressed a newbie into service as a judge. He's a real photographer, so it isn't as silly as it sounds. I have met a number of new people in the past couple of days: photographers/a filmaker/artists/a programmer. Grown-ups, in other words, who are smart and interesting and full of humor.

Today I held the awards ceremony, expecting to wing it alone, but Enjah popped in for a minute. I entertained people as best I could (including turning into a jackalope so flo and Barney and I could show Tinies to a new person who had lamented he'd never seen any. Barney was a Tiny gargoyle I think; flo was a gargoyle or maybe a dragon. Then I went off to hang with Enjah at her house.

Later we played steel drums on the roof of the Brownstone East for a long time - I was lucky enough to get Joe, a stranger-turned-friend, to play, then Enjah came, then Salazar, then various strangers popped in for a bit - the drums sound great when every one is being played.

Salazar took this picture (which I messed up but will re-do if I get a chance).

After that I finished the alteration (shorten and change buttons to fit his shape better) of the custom that has been hanging on for a month. I hope it's done, finally.


 
Here's an interesting article in Wired about using skills built in virtual worlds in the real world.


 
More global attacks - the great and unique thing about Second Life is the freedom and power we residents are given. There's nothing comparable. Other online worlds control things to a great degree, but Linden Lab has created my dream environment by letting Second Life residents utilise almost the full power that is available. I don't want to see our freedom to create diminished because of a lot of immature asshats. Hang in there, LL! What you are doing is of incredible value. I hope this rocky place in the path is temporary.

From the forum:

Jopsy P - I'm beginning to see why this particular attack is more difficult to clean up.
They used to cut off the hands of thieves right?
Perhaps it's time to start lopping off griefer fingers.

Bloop C - The griefers would probably just rerez more fingers.

Ha ha!



08 October 2006

 
As Enjah was telling me the sad news we both started being ultra-spammed by objects in another global attack. It seemed like very bad timing, as we just wanted to talk. We set "busy" then she was logged off and we went to Gmail chat. Then it told me I was being logged out as the region was going down. I saw a billion blue notices before I went busy:

I blued out the purported owner as that group/person didn't send these. As in a former attack the attackers used an object owned by the group/person to generate the spamming object in order to kill 2 birds with one stone - that is, hurt both LL and the group/person.

Don't ask me why the notice says "a object."


 
Enjah's son died today.

Steve had been struggling, in the past year, with heart difficulties that wound up requiring open-heart surgeries and ended with congestive heart failure. He leaves two teenaged children and a wife.

His mother loved him very much, and is coping as best she can.



07 October 2006

 
"The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself."
William Blake


 
Gad. I decided it would be a good thing to register my name on WordPress to post on the Linden blog. Although I don't have any great desire to post right now, it seemed prudent to register my name as anyone can take any unused name. To be able to have Osprey Therian not ospreytherian I had to make a blog. I made one for a group, but immediately saw that if I want to invite people they need already be WordPress members. Gak, what an annoying thing. I have been on Blogger for years so my opinion is suspect, however WordPress seems annoying and less flexible than Blogger. In Blogger I can lift the hood and play around in the code and can invite anyone with an email address (they have to sign up if they accept the invitation o' course). And the invitees can even have *gasp* .hotmail or .msn addresses. Maybe I'll warm to it.



06 October 2006

 
The Lindens are getting really fast when it comes to controlling global attacks, however the attacks are coming far more frequently now. I don't mention them much anymore as that's all I'd be writing about if I did. One reason for the increase is the current sign-up process intended to give Second Life access to people in countries that make owning credit cards a problem. It's working for that, but it's also made it child's play (literally) for a griefer to make a disposable account. Hey, brought down the grid and got banned? Sign up again and be inworld in five minutes. At least that's how I understand it. There's a computer ID in there somewhere, but I'm not sure how it works. Another reason for the increase is that an online group has a grudge against Second Life and has been spending a great deal of energy trying to pwn it. For them this must fall into the entertainment category.

Typically the attack is in the form of a self-replicating object that is given to unsuspecting people. Those people rez the object and blammo - a bazillion objects, all bearing the name of the unsuspecting rezzer, spring into being, multiplying faster than they can be deleted. There have been some variations such as the objects mobbing people.

There was another attack, tonight. Somehow the cure was as bad as the disease this time for some sims which were wiped bare. Luskwood, an old mainland sim, is shown in this screenshot. The huge trees with the landing platform would normally be where we are standing.

ElvenMyst was wiped, too. As were many other sims that the Lindens have to roll back to a time before the attacks.


 
I was hanging out with Candide for a while this morning. We talked about sumo wrestling a bit - he started out by mentioning my sumo video (very VERY short). It's odd that in Western society (I suppose) we have such rigid ideas of what people should be like. The entire idea of ideal specimens is bizarre, but even more bizarre is the current ideal of a woman. As well as just the outward physical manifestation is the aspect of the hidden human conditiuon. It's like we want to appear complete, invincible, beyond criticism - ideal, in fact. To do that we have to, or want to, hide things that are part of our human-ness. From that I deduce that in our society we are subject to attack by others for things that are just human traits, and that we seek to reduce those attacks by being protective of ourselves to a high degree.

It turns my brain in knots to think about this. Anyway, I mentioned at the time how I felt sumo wrestlers seem to exist with a kind of exposure that is far beyond what ordinary people tolerate. Why are we so unforgiving of each other? I might be alone in having always thought of sumo wrestlers as tender and rather touching. If humans can somehow manage to have this capacity to, say, sweat and be unbothered by sweating and to watch someone sweating and be unbothered by it, then why are there 400 bazillion antiperspirants in the market? It's not 100% an American thing although Americans have taken the denial of the body to stratospheric heights.

Oh yes, you might say, fresh sweat is no problem, however humans become smelly in their juices. That's true enough, but I think we have gone far, way too far, into the direction of hatred of the body and equating traits of the body with weaknesses. Is it all motivated by fear? Fear of offending, fear of criticism? Fear of being seen as less than perfect?

Lucia has a poem about this whole thing in The Body Mutinies, in the poem:

On the Sunken Fish Processor Tenyo Maru
Just as we pray that the Tenyo Maru keeps its hull intact
as it yaws and rocks
on the ocean floor off Cape Flattery, a quarter million barrels
of crude oil inside -
so too are we warned about breaching the social contract,
that glass eye rolling
in our human creek. For what might happen if we lift
the codicils on belching?

My Uncle Tony in Quebec (the one who skied away from the Nazis) had a female relative visiting from Poland who was embarrassed to bring up the fact that she could taste and smell the dishwashing liquid on the plate, and couldn't eat. As people have embraced artificial scents more and more we smell them less and less - which surely is true, too, if for the odors we are trying to erase. We'd all instantly annihilated by the sheer force of the smells if we got into a time machine and went back even a hundred years, I'm sure.



04 October 2006

 

This morning Salazar sent me some pictures done using his lighting idea, so I went in and tried it out. After a few minutes I left and haven't been back in. I've been feeling crappy so I suppose that's the reason. Light: white, red, pink; white, pink, blue.


 
Strangely, when LL closed those parts of the forum where Second Life residents could squabble and babble and argue both productively and unproductively, something seemed to go POOF. It might be with just one segment of the population, but I have noticed that since then (9-11-06) sales of my various things have been erratic and mostly nonexistent, and I've felt "funny" and in hermit- or avoidance- mode. It's a bit like, I think, having a blocked ear that affects hearing out of the unblocked ear.


 
Last night I dreamt about 3 little birds, which were not fully grown and were somehow copies of one of them (as could be true in Second Life). They were a rich brown* and small, like wrens. They lived outside, and it was cold and dark, but I was going somewhere and called them, and they jumped inside my shirt to warm up. I got to where I was going and they jumped down and wandered off... then... something.... can't remember what - maybe someone was singing - prompted me to say the birds were needed, so I called them and they came running over. I moved my right hand in an "up! up!" movement and they flew up and around. My older sister was there and she said, "I think it's too cold in here for them," to which I replied, "Deborah, they live OUTSIDE."

I have no clue what, if anything, the dream signifies. I usually think of dreams as just random snippets that rise to prominence with about the significance of bits of vegetables that float up in a pot of soup.

Yesterday I closed my windows. I did so as the night before I'd been really cold. I think I usually close my windows sometime in October and open them some time in April.

*I had a friend when I was a teenager, who was named Rich Brown. He'd say in a mock musing manner as though trying to describe a color, "It's kind of a RICH brown." I never saw him again after about the age of 17 although we wrote for years longer and he even, unprompted, mailed me some hash when I was in England.

On Thursday I was talking to Frank:
Me: Well, one good thing about m.s. is that I have time to think about my life.
Frank (disgustedly): You're just sick. You don't need to have m.s. to mull things over.
Me: Yes, but I'm always trying to think of some way that having m.s. is kewl.
He's right, but I can't help but think that trying to find something good in a crap situation is not the worst thing I could do.

The other day I was talking to Enjah:
Me: I've just realised I may not think the way other people do.
Enjah: You've just figured that out?
Me: Yes, today.
It was like a lightning bolt from the blue that morning, when it suddenly occured to me. I presume I'm like everyone in that when I think about something there are things that are so ingrained in me that I don't even know they are there - assumptions or the way I think things definitely are as a base. Sort of like the way ordinary lightbulbs color everything yellow, yet we don't think "It's yellow," we just accept that as normal. Anyway, I had been thinking about Syd Barrett, who was supposed to be an artist yet didn't seem** to produce any artwork. I'd just read a thing his sister had written saying he hadn't been mentally ill. The assumption popped into my mind in a kind of schematic way: artist = paintings if 0 paintings then artist = something awful interfering. The interesting thing to me is not anything, rightly or wrongly, about Syd Barrett, but just that I have an assumption of producing artwork (or anything, I expect) if possible, as a base.
**Maybe there are bazillions of paintings in storage or under his real name.



03 October 2006

 
ZOMG Old Pix from the Lut!

A few years ago I sorted out some photos from my Wa He Lut years with the idea of making an interesting display for the children (as they know all the people in the pix, some of whom are their parents, cousins, siblings etc.). The stack was floating about for ages then disappeared right before I was going to do it, so I never did. That's ok - sufficient unto the day, etc., etc. But I just found them! Uh, not exactly hidden, but oh, well.

From the top:
-Sokai is rehearsing for the play we put on, and I'm cracking the whip, about '91. That's my condemned trailer in which I taught for 5 years. Water used to flow across the floor when it rained.
--Bob - I actually had to bribe my supervisor with a painting to get her to let me have him as a student as he was such a mean child.
---Sonia and I are at the pow wow in... 92? Sonia was a really important student.

-Spap-Ull and Gary - '91.
--Moi, apres le deluge - after the flood in '96 we spent a couple of miserable years at a school owned by St Placid Priory. A student took this photo of me looking at the yearbook paste-ups.
---SJ sent these things to Sonia, who took this photo. I had set them up as penpals.

-At the Bellevue Art Museum with Sonia.
--Josh and Jesse sketching at BAM. I had them trained to take the sketchbooks everywhere.
---I'm on the right, in '91. I had drawn with chalk on the pow wow refreshment stand so the older class could paint the designs. Here I'm touching up and finishing.

-Colby and I look at the designs her company bought from the children, which were put on T-shirts after being colored by a graphic designer. We're at the San Francisco Street Bakery in around... '97.
--'90 or '91 with I think Kathy, Amanda, and Sokai, with one of our school dogs. I can't think of his name... he was shot a few years later.
---Before moving to St Placid's Judy and I held art and writing classes in the Coachhouse at the State Capital Museum in Olympia. It was fun in some ways but a pain as we had to cover the floor, etc., to protect the surfaces. It was nice being part of the museum for a few months, though.

-Class at the museum in '96.
--Sam drew this picture of me on the board - buahahaha!
---A student (Cody?) took this photo of me during a field trip to gallery in Tacoma in... '98? Dun remember.

The school is on the bank of the Nisqually River at the site of the fishing rights struggle in the Sixties.


 
A page with information about Mark Warner's plans to hold a town hall meeting in Second Life.



02 October 2006

 
Salazar came and scanned me with his grandma's Gini, to see if he could figure out why I'm shrinking.

controller: Scan Complete......Results Pending......
controller: name : Osprey Therian
controller: gender : female
controller: race : human
controller: height : molecular structures in flux, tissues are gradually compressing at a microscopic level, possible causes - fluctuating Grid harmonics, disruptive frequency bursts from temporally unstable regions of the Grid


 
Article about Moopf in the NYTimes.



01 October 2006

 

buahahaha supernerd

 

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I want to ask for thoughts about improving the world -- what do people need? How can things be organised?