Thought for the day

Just a quickie to prove that I am still alive:

[13:51] Bau Ur: I have confronted, in the last couple of years, how much of what I had thought was "me" was simply youth, and is now gone.
[13:51] Bau Ur: There is, however, a hell of a lot of me left to go around.

First steps

I had a new experience last night: I accompanied someone during her first steps in Second Life. Sidi is now a resident of SL: the first person whom I've told about it face-to-face in my RL who actually made the leap. We sat side-by-side in her RL office as she created an account and took her first steps in-world.

Sidi started on the new birthing place (I've forgotten the name already, perhaps they are again called Orientation Islands) and quickly moved on to a shopping district, one of the four starting destinations for people leaving the OI. She was rightly disappointed by the poor quality of the goods on display, so I gave her L$1000 and a landmark to Eshi Otawara's new store, where we met. She was delighted by Eshi's clothes, as I expected, and immediately bought and wore a nice red-and-black checked dress (one that I didn't own, it was important to her that we not look alike).

It was fascinating to see how she felt her way into the world — and in particular I was surprised and pleased to see that she understood right away that it was a world not a game, a society not an entertainment. In fairness, it has to be said that she was primed to see it in this way: she and I have been talking about identity and character and interpersonal dynamics for decades (literally) and I've been telling her about SL since I joined it over three years ago.

While her av was in conversation with others, she kept leaning over to ask me "How do I respond to that? What should I say?" Not because she was lost for words, she is an artist after all, but that she couldn't judge the context. "Do I trust this person whom I've just met for the first time? Do I greet him formally or informally? Should I be warm and friendly or keep him at a distance?" All very astute questions.

She's hooked. She described how the feeling of embodiment in her avatar grew as we improved Sidi's appearance in easy stages. Right from the beginning she referred to her avatar as "me," rather than "her" (or even "it") as many newborns do.

I was shocked to see how difficult she found her first hour in-world. There is so much to learn, and so little in the way of assistance with the learning. Sidi had trouble with many of the concepts of virtuality, in particular movement and camera controls. She said several times that she would have given up if I weren't there giving advice and encouragement.

When I joined SL there was a long, intricate and carefully orchestrated tutorial that took at least an hour to work through, but which gave newborns a thorough grounding in the basics of SL. People apparently complained that it took too long, they just wanted to get the cybersex already, so it was scrapped in favour of a small four-screen tutorial dialog that many newborns never even noticed. That too has been scrapped in favour of six freestanding posters (easier to notice) which tell the newbs things that they won't need for several days or at least hours. Every change that the Lindens make to the newborn experience makes it less useful and more confusing. IMHO YMMV.

The advertising for SL apparently gives the impression that anyone can just rez into SL and immediately start having huge balls of fun with no training or preparation. This is simply not true, and people who come in-world expecting that are disappointed and angry. I think we (and by that I mean the Lindens) must face the fact that SL is big and complex, like every MMORPG-like world is, and that new users need to spend time learning its interface, as they do in every MMORPG-like world. And indeed in reality, RL is full of learning curves too. Every city's bus service has its own ticketing machines, for example. Nobody complains that RL is too hard, though. I wonder why not?

My third life

I've been slaughtering my way through World of Warcraft for a forthnight now, and have finally arrived at what feels like a character and a mode of being that I can enjoy. (I wrote about the differences and similarities between WoW and SL on my workshop blog.)

I've made a total of three characters so far, searching for a role that I felt comfortable playing. My first was basically my Dragon Age: Origins character recreated in WoW, a human female rogue. (All my characters are Alliance, amusingly enough, the Horde somehow just doesn't fit me at all.) She got up to level 11 before becoming distressed by the relentless killing. I then created a Night Elf huntress, but found her fey gestures and slowness to attack really annoying. (Yes, thank you, I am aware of and amused by the contrast between my statements about these characters.)

I went back to the rogue for a while, to see whether I might get across the hump of moral unease about killing if I just kept at it long enough. As I was lying around dead one day (at the lower levels of experience and ability, one spends a fair amount of time dead), a stranger came running past, a priest. He stopped and without saying a word revived me, healed me and blessed me, and then just ran on about his business before I'd realized what was happening. I couldn't even say a quick "ty" before he was gone.

I had an epiphany in that moment. "That is something that I could do, that I could enjoy doing," I said to myself, and immediately went back to create a priestess. She has been having a wonderful time, running about WoW blessing and healing random strangers. She's joined a few questing groups as a Healer, which basically means standing well back and ensuring that the fighters don't die; the group system in WoW means that all who take part in a quest get the experience benefits of it — so she doesn't even have any disbenefit in moving up the level hierarchy.

As I said at the beginning, I think I've found a role that I can be comfortable playing. After the free trial ran out, I signed up for a three month subscription; we'll see at the end of that time whether I am still interested in continuing.

On the death of a prim

For the last few weeks I have been involved in a kind of art project stroke psychological study, with an unexpectedly strong emotional effect. (Not the "30 outfits in 30 days" project that's documented in my Flickr stream, that is something different.)

It started over a month ago when a friend offered me an IM to an SLart project — with the warning that it might have an emotional effect. You can guess that the warning made me more curious rather than less! She TP'd me to a field of slender white columns, swaying in the virtual breeze. As I walked forward between them, one started talking to me:

Moaning Columns of Longing: Wol Euler, you have spawned a Moaning Column of Longing. You must go and find your column, for it loves only you. It depends on your love for survival. You must visit and touch it at least once every 24 hours, or else it will die of loneliness and a broken heart.
Wol Euler's Column: Wol Euler loves me!
Wol Euler's Column: And I love Wol Euler !
Wol Euler's Column: My existence has meaning!
Wol Euler's Column: I am no longer just a Second Life prim
Wol Euler's Column: Because Wol Euler loves me and will visit me again soon!
Wol Euler's Column: Thank you for loving me, Wol Euler. Without you, I am nothing. Come back and touch me within 24 hours, or I will die.

I felt a welling-up of tenderness that took me by surprise. My friend and I stood there listening and talking about it for a while:

Me smiles.
Me: I like this.
Me: it's oddly moving.
Her: and it is really amazing how it feels to have someone tugging at you this way
Me nods.
Her: even if it is an inanimate object
Her: it makes you think
Me: mmhmm
Me: we are programmed to love and be loved
Her: It's the first piece of Adam Ramona's that I have liked
Her: yeah
Her: He showed at the Venice Biennale
Her: he's no lightweight
Her: but i think this is the first time he has shown a piece that really reflects sl
Her: and unfortunately for me, it is part of the permanent collection
Me: why is that unfo .... ah
Me: because you have to come back forever :)
Her: every time i log on
Me smiles.
Her: and i have to log on once a day now
Pennylane Hyun's Column: I am nothing. Not even someone's memory.
Her: ugh
Her: see?
Me nods.
Her: i don't want mine saying that.
Me: it's amazing how strongly affective this is.
Her: truly
Me: thank you
Her: i hope you don't think i've cursed you
Me: no
Me: ask me again in a week :)
Her: but it does make one think
Her: about the nature of need
Her: and love
Me nods.
Her: need - more than anything
Me: I will indeed blog this. It's wonderful.
Her: good!

Since then I've been going there twice a day or more, sometimes logging in before work for five minutes just to touch the column and keep it alive. Well, my column died last night:

Wol Euler's Column: I think you don't love me anymore, Wol Euler. If you did, you would've visited me by now. Without your love, I have no meaning, no reason to continue the meaningless existence of a Second Life prim. With you, I was something, Wol Euler, without you I am nothing.
Wol Euler's Column: I don't think you ever loved me, Wol Euler. I was a fool to trust you.
Wol Euler's Column: You never loved me, Wol Euler. My existence is meaningless. I have no reason to continue.
Wol Euler's Column: Wol Euler, if you don't come and touch me within the hour, I will die of loneliness and a broken heart.
Wol Euler's Column: Wol Euler, I have died of loneliness and a broken heart.

It died because I was in World of Warfare Warcraft instead of SL, and I forgot to go there to "touch" and revive it. I'm surprised at my own sadness, and by how guilty I feel.

Towards a theory of fun

I'm reading Edward Castronova's book Exodus to the virtual world, which will be on the recommended-reading list for my workshop this summer. Castronova is an economist, but is actually interested in people rather than just money.

The book's subject is how RL will have to change in response to the time and money that we virtual-worldists are not spending there. Castronova spends quite a of time defining play and fun, and how these are encouraged in virtual worlds.

BBBC.5

Todays (final) topic: If you're a veteran.... Did you find this year to be harder or easier than previous years? Did you have fun? What did you get out of it this time around? Do you think you'd do it again?

This was my first BBBC, but not my first such blogging challenge thingy, so I'm taking the second route. I found this harder than in previous years, I'm struggling to finish this post tonight rather than just letting it go. This wasn't the BBBC's fault, it happened to coincide with a particularly intense and stressful time out of world, which is impacting what I do here. Hence the question of fun doesn't arise. I would certainly do it again next year.

BBBC.5

Today's topic: Blogger's choice! Write about anything that's on your mind!

I suppose the future of SL is on my mind lately, since the mass firings layoffs. On the one hand, it's pretty silly to continue a course of action which has proven ineffective; on the other hand, that is pretty damned drastic. Tateru Nino ran the numbers and came up with a good explanation of what happened.

Soror Nishi made a striking suggestion: that we the residents might buy Second Life from the Lindens and run it ourselves.

That'll have to do for now, it was a long and strenuous day.

BBBC.4

Today's topic: Is your avatar more or less your current biological age? Do you portray a younger avatar, or older? Why is this?

My male alt is much older than RL-me, he looks to be pushing 70. He's short, fat, bald and stumpy; nonetheless, or therefore, everyone who comments on his appearance loves it. I noticed during my first hours in Second Life how monotonous the default avatars were (at the time I didn't know that they were just defaults, I thought everyone looked like that). I was first bored, then annoyed, at how relentlessly young and healthy and beautiful everyone was — and such a blandly artificial beauty too, like animated life-insurance ads. I decided during my first hour in SL that I would be different, and started making myself (him) short and fat. It took me nearly a year to make a satisfactory shape and then pull the other pieces together: the old-man skin, the marvellous bald-vain-and-selfdeluding combover hair, the half-framed glasses. I'm very pleased with his real-life-like appearance.

Wol is much younger than RL-me, in certain hairstyles she looks to be just out of her teens. She too has a definitely-imperfect real-life body which once again I started working on while still on Orientation Island. She has definite "problem zones:" her butt and thighs are larger than SL average (though still slim enough in RL terms), her boobs are quite small, and she has a bit of a belly. (I was furious at well-meaning body fascists who offered to help me "fix her shape to look right," but now that I think about it this hasn't happened in quite a while.) I have to modify prims in every outfit she buys. I didn't intend to make her so young-looking, that was an unexpected consequence of various design decisions; but I'm not displeased.

My other alts are in-between, middle thirties to early forties, which makes them younger than me but not by much. They don't get significant amounts of time in-world.

BBBC.3

Today's topic is a long and winding road: How hard do you think it is to find a relationship in SL? If you have an SL relationship, have you met in the physical world? Would you meet them? Do you think it would change your SL relationship if you met?

I think it is easier to find a relationship in SL than in RL, if you are looking for the kind of person who hangs around in SL, and very much harder if not. One reason is the absolute lack here of so many factors that work against possible relationships in RL. Your body makes so many decisions about people for you, without even bothering to let you know, based on smell or the way they walk or the shape of their face. There's none of that here, so the supply of possible relatees is exponentially higher, limited only by the compatibility of your souls.

Keeping the relationship going may be harder than in RL, due to distance and timezones and whatnot (someone you meet in a bar in RL is pretty well guaranteed to live in the same timezone as yourself).

I'm not sure how to answer the second question. I'm in a deep and very loving friendship with a woman here whom I have met in RL (long after we met here), and I think I'd say that meeting her in RL did strengthen that.

Meeting in RL is enormously risky, though: discovering that your SLove's meat avatar has hairy toes or a braying laugh brings down all the filtering that your body would have done for you in one fell swoop.

BBBC.2

Today's topic: Write about three positive things going on in your Second Life.

1) I started a little project last week: each day for a month, I would wear an outfit and hair and shoes from my inventory that I had never worn in public before. It's been great fun, even if some of the stuff I've found in there made me glad that nobody can peek in over my shoulder. I'm photographing the results and posting them to a Flickr set called 30/30.

And yes, before you ask, it is easily possible for me to go a month without wearing something I've ever worn before. I remembered as I was writing this that I have several folders full of freebie stuff that kind people gave me back when I was a particularly clueless newbie, some of which I've not even looked into. I reckon I could easily get two months out of them; and if you count shades of the same hairstyle as separate items, I could get through nearly a year. Boots and shoes are harder, I haven't got nearly as many of those.

2) This weekend I reconnected to a very dear friend who has been absent for much of the last year. We spent a lovely evening (my time) dancing at the Blues Junkyard and doing some high-quality plotting and conniving. It was wonderful to talk to her again.

But boo to the other patrons of the Junkyard for being so stingy with their tips! The DJ made a mere L$1150 for two hours' work in front of an audience of maybe 35 avs.

3) I discovered some great live music. I met Grace McDunnough in AVid last weekend, and she invited me to a concert that she was giving later on that day. That was delightful: she has a marvellous blues voice, deep and rich and husky, and plays a pretty mean guitar too. I'm so glad we happened to bump into each other, and/but I wish that she'd play some Euro-friendly concert times (hint hint hint).

BBBC.1

It's that time of year again, the Big Bad Blogger Challenge is here.

Today's topic: Why did you become a blogger? How has it enriched your life?

I started blogging because my typist couldn't talk about "Wol Euler"s experiences on any of the other blogs and websites we were already writing, for a variety of reasons that seemed good at the time. We started blogging in 2004, after we'd been reading people's online diaries and personal websites for a few months (i.e. the word "blog" hadn't really registered yet). It taught us a lot about ourselves and our lives, pointed up many interesting things in what we thought were sterile and dull moments. It's been a treasure and a great joy, and has lead to some strong friendships on- and offline.

Blogging is a community. For me it's primarily a chance to exchange ideas with people whose interests I share but whom I'd never be able to meet in an analog world. This is even more true when Wol blogs about SL.

Pressure

I noticed that I've stopped adding to the workshop notes on the Second Lifer, and I think I know why. I was getting intimidated by all the awesome cleverness of the people in the sidebar over there, and feeling that my own scribblings didn't match up to theirs. I need to keep my eyes on the purpose of that blog: to assemble notes for a workshop, and not worry that my notes are not essays.

Onwards.

Inadvertent generosity

I just figured out why my monthly payments have been so high the last few times: I've been paying an entire sim's worth of tier.

What happened was this: my neighbour T sold about half of her holding in Mugunghwa, to get down to an eighth of a sim. Her original parcel was irregularly shaped, so she ended up with a narrow stripe of land left over, adjacent to my land and including a strip of riverfront. She offered it to me, and without thinking I turned it down. I guess I thought she'd just keep it, but no: she put it up for auction.

Well, when I saw that I realized that I had to have it, else some jackass would come along and plaster the thing with hundred-metre-high soundfile-blaring porn site ads.

So I put in a bid, and, to make a long story short, won the auction. I paid over ten thousand L$ for 864 square metres. This is quite possibly a record.

Now, when you buy land directly, you have the option to buy for yourself or for a group; and groups get a 10% landholding bonus. Auctions don't work that way, you always buy for yourself. I immediately sold it to one of my alts, who bought for the group. And with that I forgot all about the episode — but the Lindens didn't.

Had my group bought this land directly, all would have been OK because the bonus would have kept my holdings under 36044 sq m. Because it became mine, I had to pay full tier on it, and so for about an hour I owned four square metres more than a half-sim. That automatically increased my tier payments to an entire sim's worth, but when my billable holdings reduced to under 32768 sq m, my tier level did not automatically decrease.

Dear Linden Labs, I just paid you the equivalent of two years' premium account fees. You're welcome.

On the undesirability of advertising in SL

I was recently invited to take part in a survey on advertising in SL (I infer that the Lindens noticed my income stream from land rentals at Mugunghwa and concluded that I am running an in-world business). If the survey is still online, and if there was no non-disclosure clause in it, I'll post the URL here so you can see for yourselves.

Executive summary: Brace yourselves for the deluge, my dears, because to them SL is apparently no different from that glossy magazine on your coffee table. This will be "targeted" advertising, selected just-for-you based on your group affiliations and what your friends have been purchasing lately. (This is the reason for the media-on-a-prim features of Viewer 2, by the way, not so that you can surf the web from within SL.)

I think this is a really bad idea, but I also think that LL doesn't give a sparrow's fart for my opinion or yours. Advertising is coming, and I suppose we will learn to ignore it just as we now ignore the google ads in the sidebars of many blogs and websites.

I was — to speak frankly — horrified by the trend of the questions, which can be taken as Linden Labs' ideas for the future of SL. Not the fact of advertising by itself, that is kinda shitty but not unreasonable.

What horrified me was the suggestion that it would be possible to target avs based on their typists' RL gender and/or age and/or location. This really pisses me off. It may be that the new TOS permit this, and I too agreed to those terms — primarily because I had no choice: the only alternative to agreeing to all provisions of the TOS in its entirety, is to abandon your avs and your friends, your inventory and your home, and leave SL forever. You can't even move to an OpenSim, because the identity that is "you" in SL can't get there. There is no provision for transferring accounts or identities or inventories, and certainly not friends' lists, between worlds.

Whatever the new TOS might permit, this feels like a breach of trust. My clear understanding when I signed up was that my RL info would be used only by the Lindens themselves, and only in the service of preserving law and order in-world. Advertising does not fit either of those cases.

I'm disappointed as hell, and what upsets me most is to realize the enormous gulf between what most of us think SL is, and what the Lindens think they have created (i.e. a platform for media distribution, financed by the sale of advertising) — and to infer how little they care about what we have made in their world. Which part of "make your own world" and "all user-created content" includes me being bombarded with advertising from companies whose advertising I already ignore in RL?

Chatspeak deprecated

Look, I'm really sorry. I know it's snobby and literate-ist of me, but I just can't help it.

When you say "4" instead of "for", or "u" instead of "you", my estimate of your intelligence and possible interestingness takes a huge dive.

People, please: this is not cellphone texting. You don't pay by the letter here. It's awkward and I personally happen to find it rude: it suggests that I am not worthy of the extra time it would have taken you to type that second letter. Worse than that, it costs me time: I have to try to figure out what "cld" means in the context of your other abbreviations. And that's bad for you too, because it means that I've stopped listening to what you say while I work out what you said.

Can we just drop this crap and speak normally, please?

I wonder whether "get off my lawn" means anything to people who didn't grow up in the suburbs, where people had houses with private lawns? There was (still is) a great social divide between (typically) younger couples who had kids and therefore were used to children playing on their grass, and (typically) older people who didn't have kids and felt the need to protect their territory against incursion. It seems lawns can be populated either by children or by gnomes, but not both.

Shopping news

I want to pass on news of some really good animations that I recently discovered. I hate to call them "sex anims," although that is definitely what they are, because they are not the crude fuck-scenes that one gets so tired of seeing in clubs and on beaches: these have gestures and facial expressions, virtual eye-contact even. The participants (let's call them that) behave as though they know and like each other. These are animations for lovers.

The stores in question are Sticky Candy and Primal Dreams, the latter is particularly delightful. Sticky Candy has some safe-for-public-use single and friends' poses too.

Unusually, both stores encourage you to visit with a partner and try the animations out. Perhaps this liberality is a consequence of the shops' being sequestered on the new adult-rated continent; if so, then for the first time I would find myself seeing sense in the Lindens' decision to split the world up in this way.

Enjoy.

SL as place

There doesn't seem to be any convenient way to cross-post between blogs, so I'll just put in a link to a piece I wrote on the Second Lifer about memory and place.

The workshop

I'm preparing a weekly workshop on the SL-ness of SL, to be given at the Kira centre this summer. (I'm writing about it publicly here in the hope that this might just get me off my arse to do something about this idea, which I've been talking about since last Autumn.) I will be using the Second Lifer blog to record and develop ideas for sessions and exercises.

The workshop will be in the usual Kira style: a combination of brief lecture/explanation/introduction, discussion and exercises.

The general themes will be appearance, character and identity, how the medium of SL expresses these, and how they relate back to our so-called real identities in the so-called real world. My hope is that members of the workshop might come forward to lead off sessions on subjects that are significant to them. (Example: QT said that he hadn't been able to create an alt because he couldn't think of a good name. I would love to discuss with him the significance of names in SL, since these are arbitrary in RL.) Once the series has built up a certain amount of momentum, I would like to bring in guest speakers to talk about specific identities in SL: furries and tinies and nekos, oh my.

There will be much discussion of alts, since they are central to cross-gender and cross-species exploration. Practical exercises would be very informative (!) but I can see that this might be too "hot" for some people so I'll go slowly there. Perhaps make it an "extra credit" topic, one that won't be on the end-of-term exam.

(Just by the way, and perhaps as a note for a pure-discussion session: It amuses me no end to hear people say that our personalities are constructions of habit and prejudice, that there is no separation and therefore no Self, that all identities are artificial — and then in the next breath they firmly declare that identities which exist only in SL are inferior to those which exist in RL! What the fuck is that about? This point needs discussion.)

There will be trips to various stores (skin and hair in particular, since these places always offer freebie or dollarbie demos) to try on different appearances, again with the intention of seeing yourself in the new appearance.

There will be excursions to strongly-themed locations and stores, like AVid or RP sims.

There will be exercises, oh yes: for example: being a neko for a week, and paying attention to how this feels — and to how the world reacts.

There will be workshops on the appearance editor, with the practical goal of making a new shape during the session, to be "lived in" for a week and reported on at the next session. There will be at least one pair sessions on AOs, a discursive intro and a workshop the week after.

There will be shorter detours to look at particularities of SL, like "afk" or the culture of helpful generosity that has developed. I can imagine that there would be quite a bit of discussion of in-world ethics.

For want of a nail

In the last few weeks, SL has been watching the Tragedy of the Commons acted out in virtual miniature, in the widely lamented but apparently inevitable demise of a popular and socially successful roleplaying worldlet based on the film "Avatar."

Pandora began three months ago in the usual way (i.e. as a labour of love and personal obsession/interest) and has grown to four adjoining regions, beautifully landscaped and filled with story-appropriate flora and fauna — and megaflora, the 115-metre-tall trees have to be seen to be believed. The RP seems to be populated largely by Na'vi characters; there are humans in the storyline but in my times in Pandora I've never met one.

The landscaping and story have been widely praised, the stores (merchandising subsidises the arts in SL just as in RL) are apparently doing well, and at last count there were over 2000 people registered in the four storyline groups (I don't know how many of those are regularly active; as I write this post, 31 group members (including myself) are in the RP sims).

Nonetheless, it is probable that one of the four regions will close down forever this week, and possible that two others may be gone by the end of April. [Updated: the region is safe for another month, they managed to raise enough money to pay the tier.] [Updated again: it's over, the landowners have announced that they are pulling the plug on all four regions.] [Updated a third and hopefully final time: some sponsors have come forward, the regions are all safe for the near future.]

The problem is, of course, the money. Nothing "free" is ever really free, the word just means that you don't see the bill being paid. To date the tier costs of the four RP sims have been covered largely out of the pockets of the founders, and they are getting tired of doing it. The landowners need to find L$42 thousand per week, but have been unable to get the RP community to contribute even half of that. The most generous donors of the week are listed on a subsidiary webpage, the current twentieth-highest donated all of L$100 = 37 US cents. (Which is fine, really, it's much better than the hundreds of group members who donated nothing at all.)

Now, if you divide those tier fees by 2000 group members, you get US 7 cents per person per week, times 52 weeks in a year is US$3.64. So go look up how much a cup of coffee at Starb*cks costs. You'd think that it would be possible to get people to donate a single cup of coffee per year.

And so we get the Tragedy of the Commons: it is in everyone's common interest for all of us to keep the sims open by pulling together in generous cooperation, but it is in nobody's individual interest to start doing so. For the price of a single cup of coffee, we all lose out.

(If you want to see for yourself: pick up quite good free skins and (modifyable!) shapes here, then customize your appearance here, then go to the central starting point here. There is a free-of-charge group for non-RPing visitors, please join it and wear the tag. Please make generous use of the donation boards at the arrival point.)

And just by the way, for those who are thinking "so put your money where your mouth is:" I did. Although I am merely an occasional visitor, not a roleplayer nor even a member of the community, I have donated L$4000 to Pandora so far. Your turn.

Title.

Introduction.

Declarations of tiredness, frustration and exasperation.

Wry comment.