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.
Located here:
The House of the Harping Monkey is a fantasy tavern, the outgrowth of podcasts and a really cool forum at harpingmonkey.com
Lately, I have been hanging out there a bit, and I can tell that there is a “magic of place” going on here. That there are people showing up out of the blue who see the Harping Monkey and come to just see what it’s like. We had NaNoWriMo writers in for a write-in. We’ve had lots of random people just show up, and people who show up all the time if there are any other folks nearby.
So check out the Harping Monkey. It’s not your typical mythical fantasy tavern.