Seeds of Fire in Dream

I read this week­end that one of my favorite places to hang out in Sec­ond Life has shut its doors and gone away. The out­growth of one of my favorite pod­casts, the Harp­ing Mon­key was a fun Irish pub style place, where I first learned how to sword­fight and where I enjoyed Irish music and cool art shows and the like. 

And now, it’s gone. 

This is part of the Sec­ond Life­cy­cle, which I am start­ing to under­stand as this: 

1. Dis­cover Sec­ond Life. Be amazed, con­fused, and bewildered. 
2. Spend every wak­ing moment in Sec­ond Life. Learn build­ing and scripting. 
3. Decide to buy land. 
4. Decide to open a business. 
5. Get your first Tier bill 
6. Have some kind of dra­matic explo­sion asso­ci­ated with your land or your business. 
7. Get your sec­ond Tier bill. 
8. Stop hang­ing out on SL so much. 
9. Get your third Tier bill. Ask your­self, “Why am I pay­ing so @$@$@##$ much for some­thing that does not give me joy? 
10. Close your busi­ness, sell your land. 
11. Hang out every so often, just to see neat things, play with nice toys, and talk to those folks who are still in SL whom you care about 

I don’t enjoy flux in my life. I’m one of those peo­ple who doesn’t like to move, doesn’t like to change things. So, Sec­ond Life really kicks my butt in the area of change. 

But maybe it’s a Change / Chaos sim­u­la­tor. Maybe it’ll be good for help­ing me get over the anx­i­ety over change. 

Any­way, Harp­ing Mon­key in SL, you were a fun place. Sorry to see you go. I loved your whole setup, from the Tudor-style pub to the charmingly-hidden smoochie-booth to the par­ties we had there. 

And if you want to still enjoy Harp­ing Mon­key good­ness, the pod­cast, forum, and web­site are still up and run­ning and will be prob­a­bly long after Sec­ond Life is but a memory. 

http://harpingmonkey.com

I was speak­ing to a friend of mine in Sec­ond Life last night, and I was try­ing to explain what it was like on the old text-based MUSHes I used to hang out in, back in the 80’s and a lit­tle in the 90’s. She could not believe that we actu­ally wrote descrip­tions in text of every­thing, includ­ing our­selves, and that we had mul­ti­ple “cos­tumes” which were really just saved descrip­tions. It was hard to get across the idea of a “room” in MUSH. 

But it quickly became very clear to me that Sec­ond Life owes a great deal to MUSH and sim­i­lar early vir­tual world plat­forms. I just wish there was a way to sim­ply and eas­ily cre­ate the things that I used to merely describe with a lovely, long piece of descrip­tive texts. 

We haven’t really got­ten a good text-to-speech soft­ware solu­tion; I think that a text-to-3D con­verter will take a bit longer.

I’m los­ing faith that Sec­ond Life will ever be any­thing close enough to a sta­ble plat­form for any­thing valuable.

Last night, I went to a very sim­ple con­fer­ence in Sec­ond Life. The orga­niz­ers had planned for the pos­si­bil­ity that SL would crash, indeed, the audio por­tion of the pro­gram was not even hosted any­where near Sec­ond Life. SL was mainly being a sense of place kind of provider, noth­ing more. 

It still crashed.

Not only that, but it locked every­body out of that space, so we couldn’t even come back in-world to participate.

Luck­ily, we had the audio por­tion, still, and went for­ward. But it was vastly disappointing.

If one is to actu­ally pro­duce and coor­di­nate and run an inter­ac­tive RP story in Sec­ond Life, one will need to get to a point where SL is actu­ally sta­ble first. 

And, the way things are going, I doubt very seri­ously at this point that it will hap­pen any time soon.

And I find it dis­ap­point­ing to the extreme.

Hey you. Yes, you. Go vote for Sec­ond Life here:

http://stingyscholar.blogspot.com/2007/01/beggin-and-choosin-awards-2006.html

And while you’re at it, vote for Podiobooks.com, too.

The Stingy Scholar wants to rec­og­nize the best free edu­ca­tional resources dur­ing the year 2006, and these two resources are being nom­i­nated. Take a look!

Want to hear a story?

You can at The Bear’s Grove Online. “Heart of the Hunter” is a episodic swords and sor­cery tale writ­ten and per­formed by myself. You can lis­ten to the file in-world at The Bear’s Grove online.

Alter­na­tively, you may wish to visit the web­site directly at http://bardscircle.bearsgrove.com or sub­scribe to the feed.

The lat­est Sec­ond­Cast has an argu­ment between Cris Mid­night and Walker Spaight about Prok’s being har­rassed by Plas­tic Duck. I believe Cris took a con­cil­ia­tory view, but much like “nego­ti­at­ing with ter­ror­ists,” in my expe­ri­ence, a har­rasser will only be encour­aged by some­one who shuts up when they are being har­rassed. They will go on to harass oth­ers in the future, and will also likely con­tinue to har­rass their orig­i­nal vic­tim. There is no harass­ment that is “due” Prok; even if Prok ticks you off or says things that you don’t agree with. Prok shouldn’t be harassed, shouldn’t have to put up with that, and Prok’s fam­ily shouldn’t have to deal with it either.

If you want to know more about that, here is Prok’s blog entry about it. NSFW, Prok uses fiery language.

I’m encour­ag­ing Prok and any­one else who has endured online harass­ment to seek out help at WHOA (Work­ing to Halt Online Abuse) at http://www.haltabuse.org/

I recently received as a present from a friend a 256 MB video card. I am very happy with it. I no longer crash every five min­utes.

Most impor­tantly, I can finally see things in Sec­ond Life. I have been able to make the draw dis­tance a rea­son­able amount. I’ve seen things that I never knew were there! Every­thing loads a lot more quickly, although my ter­ri­ble band­width still means that it’s a bit slow.

Last night, I sailed through canals on a lovely sail­boat. Next, I think I want to try rollerskates!

I was vis­it­ing a friend and she showed me her blank new island sim. Amaz­ing. I’ve seen details and lit­tle ani­ma­tion enhance­ments on that thing that I haven’t ever seen on any other part of Sec­ond Life.

The frames per sec­ond are amaz­ing. When I took out my new cut­lass, I was able to go HACK HACK SLASH SLASH and make it work very quickly.

Ahhh, so *this* is what Sec­ond Life is *sup­posed* to look like.

Still, I have to ask LibSL and oth­ers to *hurry up* and make the Sec­ond Life Lite viewer. I want some­thing where I can log on to SL and have a graphics-lite envi­ron­ment that even a crappy com­puter can dis­play. Maybe even just a chat client.

Or a “shop­ping client.” What would it take to get that? Hmm. You could cre­ate a viewer that logs you on to SL, but is very restricted in terms of move­ment of the cam­era. In fact, there is just a slide-show style click-through. You can tele­port to var­i­ous par­tic­i­pat­ing shops. They have pre-programmed posi­tions in the shops your cam­era will automag­i­cally fol­low. All you can do is click on Pay or not. Set-up could be sim­ple: you just place a prim object where you want each shop­ping posi­tion to be, and the shop­ping client cam­era avatar fol­lows those posi­tions just like Alt-Zoom’s spe­cial cam­era sys­tem does.

Now *that* would be nifty. You could add chat func­tion­al­ity to that. But make it VERY sim­plis­tic. I won­der if that could run on older, crappy com­put­ers? Of course the idea is that you have that for your lesser machines, and one bet­ter, top of the line machine at home to use to access SL.

I just wish my crappy 128 MB GeForce 5200 card wouldn’t keep hav­ing a thread locked in dri­ver and crash­ing my whole sys­tem on me. This has hap­pened so many times now that Win­dows no longer even sees it as an error; it just says, “Oh Well, you lose.“

I’m told that it’s a really old video card, but it was a jump up when I bought it.

I’m hop­ing to get a new one soon. A friend of mine is giv­ing me her old one — even­tu­ally

Looks like the Sec­ond Life mag­a­zine “In The Grid” has decided to high­light role­play­ing in Sec­ond Life.

To which I say, “Huz­zah.” Don’t for­get to check out Wash­town and Haven, whilst you’re also talk­ing about escorts and Gorean Masters.

I still long for the kind of RP that comes from a planned, spe­cific event, instead of just ran­domly impos­ing your char­ac­ter / story / real­ity on some­one else.

Well, I was in Sec­ond Life last night for the RPG Pod­cast­ers / Night Pan­das hol­i­day party. Mostly we danced the jig on the pool table and shapechanged into tiny ani­mals. It was fun, but not really a RP experience.

Our first Night Panda event involved invad­ing a strip club as tiny ani­mals. Hey, tiny ani­mals need nekkid women too. We weren’t grief­ing, we were just being whimsical.

Any­one who has ever known some­one who put together a sexay female avatar knows that it’s expen­sive: the skin alone will cost $1000L and up, then there’s the hair, the eyes, etc., etc. Not to men­tion clothes. And there are some who buy their shape, as well. So, the dancers deserve to earn their liv­ing, to my mind, they’ve really spent a lot of time and energy and Lin­dens to look the way they do.

I won’t waste my read­ers’ time com­plain­ing about the state of the Grid. Right now, I can’t tell whether it’s Sec­ond Life or my crappy video card that’s caus­ing most of my prob­lems. I just know that I peri­od­i­cally just up and reboot with­out warn­ing. No error mes­sage other than “thread caught in dri­ver” — what­ever that means.

And it doesn’t seem to make sense what causes the reboot, either. You’d think that maybe some­thing com­pu­ta­tion­ally expen­sive would do so, like a poofer or vehi­cle move­ment, or what­ever. But I’ve been rebooted dur­ing both easy and com­plex graph­i­cal situations.

I have recently found Bear’s Marina, but I am hop­ing to be allowed to join his group, because Bear Plun­kett runs a series of areas where, if you join his group, you can rez a sail­boat near a dock, so you can then turn around and sail into lots of water areas.

I love sail­ing on Sec­ond Life. It’s very sooth­ing. I sit on my lit­tle Fly­ing Tako, which was free, by the way, and I sail along with the wind. It’s very relax­ing and meditative.

I got a pirate cut­lass and some more pirate gear, and I think I want to look around to buy a pirate ship. Now *that* would be awesome.