The latest trend in Twitter beard-strokers is the rise of the so-called “social web”, which I suppose is an offshoot from the semantic web people have been ballyhooing about for several years.
Basically the premise is that the company you keep on Facebook, Myspace, et al will guide Google, Yahoo, and so on to give you more informed search results. The constant datamining of our public profiles will lead to a Brave New World of targeted advertising and more relevant search, so sayeth the soothsayers. There’s only one issue with the idea that I didn’t realize until now: Absurd friendships.
If you check my Facebook’s wall, you’ll find a few gems on there. “I’m going to kill your cat.” 255 characters of the letter “A” repeated. Yet another is “Josh… WTF?”
How would a socially-aware Google parse such information? Are my friends really psychopaths threatening me? How about my friendship to Fancypants Poultry, a throwaway account I use to badger people with Dada-esque nonsense?
This theoretical social web works, as long as everyone plays by the same banal social rules. You wish your friends well, you ignore/disparage your enemies, and you’re generally pleasant towards one another. But if a single person goes on a running riot through their social networks and, say, copypastas selected works from Chaucer on everyone’s SuperWall, the formula starts twitching. Add a few vague threats involving farm animals and fire, and either the software notifies the police or the algorithm falls down like a stack of cards.
It’s one thing to parse the well-known rules of language, even something so screwed up as modern English, into a machine-readable setup. To try to formulate all of the social injokes and surrealisms that make up even MY day, however, will confound future computers for eons.
Warning: The post is about my cat, Percy, of which I’m quite fond of. If you dislike cats or, even worse, cat OWNERS, please skip this and the many future adventures of Percy.
We have a cat. A kitten, really, named Percy. He’s a black and white tuxedo that we adopted from a family that couldn’t take care of him anymore… that and he was a bit too hyperactive for the older cats in the house.
(above, a picture of Percy when he was new and tiny)
Since we got him 8 months ago he’s been good times. He loves watching traffic from open windows, he’s a big fan of tight spaces and hiding in bags (the better to pounce from, I’d imagine), and he’s insatiably curious. Any new item brought into the house is immediately seized upon by feline curiosity, sniffed and poked and prodded about until his suspicions are satisfied.
One problem has been that he’s always keen to try to run out the door whenever we come home. I doubt this is because of mistreatment; we practically consider him a furry baby. He’s plenty fed, plenty hydrated, plenty petted, he just… wants to go outside. So as an intermediate solution between cooping him up in our apartment for his entire life and letting him get walloped on by skunks and other cats, we got him a leash and a harness.
Maybe it’s just me, but I have never heard of a cat on a leash. The mere image of taking a cat for a walk down the neighborhood is about as surreal as you could possibly get in this town. Yet here we were, purchasing a cat harness and matching black leash.
When we brought it home, Percy immediately started pouncing on the leash, thinking it to be another toy. He was not amused when we snuck him through it, with him biting and clawing and squirming and basically being a cat forced to do something he wasn’t in the mood to do. Eventually, we got the harness on. Backwards. Off it goes…
The second time, it’s on, we hook up the leash, and scoop him up to take him to the backyard.
In unfamiliar environments or setups, Percy is extremely cautious. He does what’s best described as an army crawl, sliding along the ground slowly as if he were under a hail of bullets. As we put him on the ground, he assumed such a position and cautiously crept towards the suspicious looking grass. His nose buried deep in freshly-green lawn, he suspiciously takes a bite, tastes, and continues sniffing around.
It was at this point that we realized that he had never felt grass before. He’s seen it, sure, and he’s probably smelled it, but to feel grass? What a bizarre thing to him, no doubt.
As he wandered around, guiding me along with the short leash, he also discovered the joy of asphalt on itchy fur, scratching and writhing about like an earthworm. Then, he found “The Tree”, a small evergreen parked directly outside one of his favorite windows. When he found that, we couldn’t get him to leave. He constantly smelled, crawled, and noshed on the hapless plant.
After our landlord’s gigantic, friendly, dopey golden retriever came out to greet Percy, we decided that such an encounter would be too much for our stupid cat’s excitement drive, so we scooped him up and put him back inside.
Ever since then he’s been forlornly looking outside, waiting for another chance to nom nom nom on the grass and scrape along on asphalt.
Maybe when it’s nice out, Percy.
On my Facebook profile, there’s a little page widget called “I am Green“. Basically you check marks next to actions that you take that happen to be environmentally friendly, such as “I reuse water bottles” or “I only use rechargable batteries.”
Funnily enough, I’m becoming a sort of de facto tree-huggin hippie. The last few years have forced me to be extraordinarily frugal, meaning that my lifestyle is becoming more based on reusing/reducing products I consume, as well as finding ways to save money by doing extra things (like gardening, which I’m starting this year). My whole Second Life gig has let me work from home, which, aside from driving 30 miles to school, means my car sits essentially unused (minus the weekly trip to the grocery store, of course). I drink flavored tap water out of a 2-liter jug almost every day, which saves of course on the curse of buying bottled water (seriously guys, stop. The bottled water you buy at 3 bucks a bottle is just tap water.) And so on and so forth.
This, coupled with my recent fascination of anti-nutritionalism (via Michael Pollan) means I’m probably retreading the same ground commune-happy hippies did back in the 60s. So much for originality.
But then, as I often do in the shower, I got to thinking. Maybe the whole reason environmentalism as a movement hasn’t caught on in this country is because it isn’t passive enough. Most suggestions to “go green” involve radically changing your lifestyle (shower once a week! Flush once a month! Drag tupperware to restaurants! Poop in a box for compost!), which, as recent economics have proven, Americans are extremely reluctant to do. Maybe the solution is to come up with easy, money-saving ways to go green, and then the “mass movement” of people frolicking in the bushes with rabbits and bees will come to fruition.
No good idea is original anymore, and thus exists a guy called the Lazy Environmentalist. He has a book and everything. Had I a time machine, I’d go back and strangle him, but alas, he beat me to the punch.
Still a good idea, though.
This blog’s going through a bit of a change; it won’t be focusing on SL nearly as much. I have many other interests aside from SL (surprise, surprise), and I also enjoy the act of writing, so expect this blog to become much more generalized in the coming weeks.
So if you’re still subscribed looking for a unique analysis of SL news and whatnot, look elsewhere, because I reckon SL-centric articles will contribute about 10% of the blog’s output.
Thanks for reading, though :)
I’m not the best whizbangery blogger in the world, so I don’t have any pics or video, but I do know this: Second Life can run on an eeePC.
The eeePC, aka “the little laptop that could”, is a hacker’s toy, a cornucopia of opportunities in a tiny, 2 lb laptop box. I recently purchased the 4g model, added another 2 gb SD card, slapped 2 gb of ram in it, and put XP on it. It happily runs with no complaints, and is even easily overclockable with a free utility by an eeePC fan.
Anyways, as a virtual worlds geek and worker, the question inevitably becomes “well, yeah… but can it run SL?”
I didn’t have high hopes, considering the crappy graphics chipset (a lowly Intel integrated set). And yet, with the current “released” version of 1.18.whatever, SL runs along at 2 fps, with absolute minimum detail.
What’s neater, though, is the Windlight client. With the same settings, Windlight chugs along at 5-7 fps, making SL, I dare say, almost usable. You can’t see anything most of the time, and building is probably out of the question (you really want to align prims on a 7″ screen?), but it’s perfect for quick logging and teleporting, maybe even meetings.
Considering this little bastard laptop wasn’t meant for it, I’m amazed it even loaded SL without any complaints. Sure, it gets hot and drains the battery like woah while displaying SL, but why wouldn’t it? It’s a Fisher Price toy rendering a complex 3d environment.
I love it.
A few months ago I made agitated rumblings about possibly setting up a casual lunch hour for content creators and business folks. As usual, after a week or two of thinking about it I got distracted by shiny things and other projects.
Well, thankfully, the Clever Zebra project, of which I’m a part of, has decided to resurrect the concept of a Metaversed Lunch Hour. Every Tuesday at Noon SLT, we invite folks to gather at our sim, Zebra HQ, hopefully bringing sandwiches and coffee. The setup is casual, although occasionally we might briefly announce Zebra goings-on (new products, events, and so on).
My vision for such a gathering is to get people talking about common ground; content creation, business, the latest news and/or gossip. i think such a group is a great idea to generate ideas, community, and social networks.
So feel free to stop on by every Tuesday. It’s casual, we won’t bite, we promise.
Bring sandwiches, though. :)
That’s the thread title Adam Zaius is teasing SLU with today.
Note the following two images:
For those of you playing at home, that would be a sculpty-like shape with a hole in it (very difficult to do without some severe prim torture in the current client), and dynamic, cast shadows from prims. He’s running on his own grid playground, using a modified SL client. My guess is direct Maya importing (or something similar), and simple ray-traced shadowing of some sort.
He’s being tight-lipped at the moment, but rest assured it’s something crazy delicious. Too bad the main SL grid will never see it.
Adam’s a genius, but the Lindens have been notoriously bad at integrating new features/fixes from the community. How many months has the Nicholaz client been out, running smoother and using less memory than the main client? Sure, there’s usually over 30 bug fixes per release nowadays, but they all seem to be “low hanging fruit” - fixing typos in the code, capitalizing letters, fixing an obscure crash on 486 computers.
Then again, there’s nothing saying Adam HAS to contribute back to the main SL client anyways. He’s smart enough to run a direct competitor to Linden Lab - he’s been a major contributor to OpenSim and LibSecondLife, after all.
It’ll be interesting to see what’s coming out from Adam’s lab. I can’t wait.
Apparently a lot of folks are making a big deal about Julian Dibbell’s article on virtual world/social network griefing. The responses in the SL blogosphere seems to be a lot of hand-wringing and concerned shuffling of feet as to how Julian’s article trivializes the act of griefing.
Folks don’t want to hear that griefers are normal people, not “deformed preteens or human manatees”, as SchwartzG just said in IRC. It’s a form of release, the same kind of stress relief people get when they squeeze a trigger in Halo and blow your guy to smithereens. Griefers look for the same release, except by engineering situations in the “social game” of virtual worlds. Instead of sniping your character with a headshot, they Mariobomb your teaparty. You’ve been pwned. Respawn and fight back, or dodge the bullets.
Ever play a game against someone, and delight in how serious he’s taking it all? And then delight even further when you keep tweaking him within the rules of the game, driving him insane? CHESS/MARIO KART/DOOM/HALO/MADDEN/CONNECT-FOUR IS SERIOUS BUSINESS GUYS, STOP IT.
I’m not going to say I don’t take some stuff seriously. I do. On the other hand, I probably shouldn’t. Life is too short to worry about the image your avatar has, or the financial setbacks a sim full of Marios supposedly costs you. Just roll with it.
The absolute best way to defuse an attack by any group of “determined hackers” is to just roll with it. Use your wit to dance around their brute force humor bludgeons. Lulz back at them. Dance on the grave of your sim. Shoot water balloons back at them. Smile. 90% of the time, the supposed attackers get bored and leave because you’re refusing to give them the reaction they’re looking for.
And of course there’s the ephemeral going “too far”, where griefy griefers start harassing family members or showing up on people’s doorsteps. That’s incredibly lame, dangerous, and not sporting at all. It’s also potentially illegal, and might also end up with a shotgun blast to the stomach of someone who thinks they’re threatening their family.
99.9% of the time, people weep and gnash their teeth at events that fall FAR below this threshold. It’s called rolling with the punches, and it’s something all of us, myself included, need to learn better.
Do folks have the same reactions to Flashmobs of Zombie Santas, or shirtless Abercrombie customers? How about the flashmob where 130 people descended on a carpet salesman in a department store and announced to him that they want to buy a carpet, but they have to agree collectively?
Commerce is serious business.
f you’ve been heading out to Zebra HQ lately, you might have noticed something being built along the side of our sparse landing point. That would be version 0.1 of the Clever Zebra project, the 60-person amphitheater.
We’re inviting the public to come to a scheduled discussion/meeting/critique of the design tomorrow, Wednesday at Noon SLT, to kick the tires and give any comments and thoughts on the design. Being as this is the first design for the project, it’s quite important that we field lots of comments and criticisms to flesh out design, usability, texture use, level of quality, and so on. We’re calling this a Release Candidate 1 , which means we feel it’s finished enough for general use, but could stand a thorough poking.
If all goes well, I’ll take up the comments and fixes and work on it that day. Then on Friday, Zebra Corporate 0.1 will be released under the GPL, for everyone to take and fiddle with as they want.
We’ll be posting a roadmap soon showing how the next couple of weeks pan out, but we plan on releasing the next two amphitheater designs within the next week or two.
So come to the inaugural discussion, and put on your nitpicking hat. Help us make the best possible product to release to the community! Hope to see you there!
What: Zebra Corporate Amphitheater Release Candidate 1 Discussion and Critique
When: Wednesday, January 16 @ 12 noon SLT
Where: Zebra HQ 138, 164 (or just teleport in, can’t miss it)
Who: Lordfly Digeridoo, Chief Creative Zebra, Onder Skall, Operations Zebra, and YOU.
I’m a bit late. But it’s still January.
1) A “household name” metaverse development company outright goes out of business after failing to make payroll. No one is surprised.
2) OpenSim becomes a viable competitor/parallel grid to Second Life.
3) The OpenSim project manages to make it very easy to import/export content to and from the OpenGrid and LL’s grid. LL turns a blind eye and quietly accepts it.
4) Botting is limited to 4-5 connections per IP. This is to curb the absolutely ridiculous traffic farming going on right now.
5) Two of the three Linden Development Bugaboos get deployed to the main grid: Mono, Havok4, and Web on a Prim.
6) Hipihi is released and has a negligible impact on SL’s userbase, primarily because both are “closed gardens”, preventing easy transfer of people’s 300,000 item inventories.
7) The US Recession negatively impacts the Linden Dollar.
8) A copyright infringement case about items in SL actually makes it to court, and finishes without an out-of-court settlement, finally setting precedent.
9) Philip Rosedale steps down as CEO of Linden Research, Inc.
10) Linden Lab increases prim limits in sims for the first time since 2004.