Culture

Robin's office hour was a washout as she's on holiday. Jack's office hour was calmer than normal and Jack is definitely considering options on what to do about parcels set for sale for what many call extortionate amounts, although no change in policy at this moment in time. Thanks to my underworld sources I have a full transcript to read.

However I spent half an hour trying to get out of Jack's office hour to go to the Terry Pratchett live Q&A, alas the sim was full until ten minutes before the event started.

Just as I was celebrating, I crashed. However fate wasn't going to prevent my mission, oh no, I got right back in there. I did however notice that a couple of Linden's (rumours that they were playing hooky are unfounded!) managed to sneak in at the back, hmmm!

There now follows a transcript, edited, abridged and hopefully with the right answers to the right questions!

We all waited calmly and then he appeared:

TerryPratchett Morpork: Hello everybody! Sorry, I’m new at all of this kind of stuff and so can anyone tell me how to get the rocket launcher?

TerryPratchett Morpork: …and I’m not really into all of this YourTube into MyFace kind of stuff!

Michaelx Beerbaum: Question is if Second life will appear in one of the books?

TerryPratchett Morpork: As far as I am concerned, my books are Second Life.

Matty567 Dallagio: Why was "Nation" not set on Discworld?

TerryPratchett Morpork: Good question; for one thing, the fact of it being on Discworld would change all kind of things that I could do. After all, Nation is hardly full of laughs. Setting Nation on a thinly disguised “alternate” world does, I think, give it more power and urgency.

{ Read more }

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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