Pais Kidd’s Weblog

I must again nod to Dusan for his relentless blogs that seem to custom-gleen things about SL, virtual worlds, and the metaverse that interest me.  And even though I blew past his first reference of a book by Tom Boellstorff’s ‘Coming of Age in Second Life’, the when I saw the second one I followed links that lead me to the first chapter online.

Tom is doing what I sometimes I think I do as an amatuer - to be immersed and living in SL and to be making anthropological observations about what it means to be human and viritually human. I am stealing time from RL as I write (which is to say I didn’t have time to read and contemplate all of that chapter), but as I took a look at the sample chapter, a paragraph gave me a whammy:

“The idea of “virtually human” appearing in this book’s subtitle can be interpreted in two ways, indexing two lines of analysis I develop throughout. First, although some insightful research has claimed that online culture heralds the arrival of the “posthuman,” I show that Second Life culture is profoundly human. It is not only that virtual worlds borrow assumptions from real life; virtual worlds show us how, under our very noses, our “real” lives have been “virtual” all along. It is in being virtual that we are human: since it is human “nature” to experience life through the prism of culture, human being has always been virtual being. Culture is our “killer app”: we are virtually human.”

I can get behind this way of putting the phenomenon of SL in perspective. My challenge to all of us as we pioneer this new landscape of being is that we take the opportunity to evolve our human-ness and perfect our culture.

Wow. The mind is an interesting thing. When I pondered my writing “human-ness” I remembered one of my favorite poems, I realized it could be a Pais-mantra:

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:

your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness

— electrons deify one razorblade

into a mountainrange; lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish

returns on its unself.

A world of made

is not a world of born — pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this

fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if — listen: there’s a hell

of a good universe next door; let’s go

- e.e. cummings

I was listening to the Alan Parson’s song “Some Other Time” where the question is asked, “…could it be that somebody else is looking into my mind, some other place, somewhere, some other time?” and in my mind’s eye I saw Pais sitting at his computer, in SL, and on that computer was Pais, sitting at his computer…  the old recursion thing… or what Dusan would maybe call a “strange loop”… and I was goofing around with it last night… check it out (click the image to load animated gif version)

Maybe it is not so much recursion, but really the human-avatar loop experience is a bit of what I remembered from reading the Upanishads - “How can the knower be known?” Those philosophical mystic dudes sure can blow a guy’s mind(s). Woot!

I was thinking about people visiting Kids5B using adult avatars and seeing all the kids and thinking, like a lot of adults have asked when seeing my avatar, “Wow, cool, I want to be a kid. How do I do that?” Of course, most of us know it is a matter of doing the appearance edit and tweaking, which is easy to to do get to a “youth” sized av like mine, but to get to a little kid size, it takes some more serious effort.

So I got the idea that we could try to automate the process as much as possible, plus make it fun, and this is how I came up with the idea of the “adult to kid” transmogrifier. Perhaps your remember that the transmogrifier was a feature in the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes”.  As it turned out, a number of others had the same idea.

Of course, my skills are pretty bad, so others have done all the things that make this work. First off, Danny helped find a site on the Kids5B area to locate this. Then I was failing miserably to create a build of a large box to act as the location for this, and Myrtil came a long and created one that looks really cool. Next, we needed a lot of stuff to use to cobble together the components of kid avatars, and numerous people collected and donated skins, shapes, clothes and stuff that were all made copyable/mod so they could be given out. Finally, we needed a brilliant scripter with a sense of humor to create the “transmogrifier” that could not only automate this process, but make it fun, and that was Jeremy.

I put together a video showing how it works. This is pretty much the first video I have done of this sort, and it is fairly crude, but I think it gets the point across.

Thanks to everyone that helped with this. We will be making it operational soon. Jeremy has now made it operational - try it out.

25 June 2008 Update: Kids5B is officially underway and I got a couple reports that it has been a popular spot. In fact, Rai told me this morning he witnessed the transformation of a group of adult avatars who, after being transmogrified to kids, ran over to his skate park and began shredding. Ah, so cool when a plan comes together, no?

I have been thinking about my time in Second Life as a kid avatar. This has become a contentious issue, and I see it as more than just a SL issue about avatars, but as a watershed issue about freedom and tolerance in our collective cultures as we adapt to new technologies.

I hope to create a couple essays here to add to other entries where I describe being a kid or putting perspective on the intolerance and ignorance of others.

Today’s title is taken from a line from a Grateful Dead song - I remember a t-shirt that combined the pink triangle symbol and the Dead’s “Steal your face” logo.

I remember someone explaining to me what the logo meant - how it was to remind people to be tolerant of others, in this case people who were gay.

The first time I saw raw hate in SL was in the first week of Pais’ existence. I had found a place called “Nemo Beach” that was (and still is) a hangout for kids. I remember I was having a fun time trying out my new kid avatar and joining in the chat with the other kids there. Suddenly a couple of adult avatars appeared.. one was a bulky, huge, bald guy that looked kind of like those fake wrestlers on TV. The other was a female shape with huge gazongas hanging out of her (presumably) sexy leather outfit. In short order she brandished a shotgun and blasted a kid right in front of me, and since damage was enabled on that sim, he was killed and disappeared. At that point I had not seen any fighting/killing in SL, let along griefing, and was also unaware that some people took exception to people having kid avatars.

My first reaction was shock… one minute it was a sunny day with kids chatting and joking on a sunny beach… the next I saw a sweet kid get violently murdered. The adult avatars chatted to each other and laughed. I tried to ask why they did that, but only got confusing gibberish from them.

One of the first people I had met at Nemo was Koffee, and I IMed him, told him what I saw and asked for help. Kids started appearing from everywhere, most dressed in Loki’s kid pirate kid (wooden sword, tin pan hat, and garbage can lid shield, like in the image below)

Seeing all those kid avatars attacking the griefers with wooden swords, bows & arrows, and such was such a funny scene and endeared me to SL and being a kid more than ever. (Meanwhile, Koffee showed up brandishing guns in both hands and blasted the creeps off the sim).

Since that incident, I have seen griefing many other times and it is sad that these incidents of hate and other negative aspects of human behavior find their way to SL. Loki has a link to a video done buy some jerks another time I was at Nemo, they were dressed as some sort of Sparta motif (shortly after that movie was out) and I remember that time my buddy Nefu was showing us his experiments with prims and these guys come running out to grief us. We just stood, letting our ‘no push’ tools do the work for us, as they shouted things like “pedophiles” (apparently telling us their inner fears about themselves). (It is really only one scene of this around 1:26 minutes into it, Nef and me are standing passively next to the big prim he was working on). I can’t see how this kind of behavior, even going to the effort to film and post it, causes satisfaction in these people.

The pink triangle in the “Ain’t No Time to Hate” logo reminds us of how the Nazis marked gays. It seems that humanity is not learning any lessons, as hate continues motivate people to act out against others who are different from themselves.

Well, life is too short for hate. Like the song says, “let me know your mind… what I want to know is are you kind?”

Pais knows he’s an avatar and he’s got some notions about what that means. Each day he learns and grows a bit more. Like a kid sitting in a church service he’s been hearing things about other dimensions of life. For the most part, he brushes those thoughts aside as he focuses on his life of fun with his pals and pretty much a zero-responsibility life. Some times when he’s sleeping online with his tribe he wakes up remembering dreams of a kind of world that has similarities to the world he knows but is also very different. As time goes on in the life of Pais, he’s found himself talking to his fellow SL denizens about the other side of himself and learning about theirs. The universe may very well be infinite like they say – at least there are more than one [uni/meta]verse to which Pais has connections.

The way that Pais came to visit a place called ‘real life’ is that through his real life counterpart, we visited the real life homes of friends he first met in second life. It was an amazing adventure in a lot of different ways. Part of the adventure was what is typical for a real life person on holiday abroad, but with the added dimension of visiting someone at who lives at the destination. For me, this was a great enhancement, making it more possible to be a traveler and not simply a tourist. Being immersed deeper in the lifestyle of a place – stuff like being able to ask all those little questions one has about the mysterious details of another country or just doing ordinary things like grocery shopping and making dinner.

The main part of this adventure for both Pais and me was meeting the RL versions of friends he first met in SL. This may sound simple, but there were a lot of interesting flips in our minds between what is Pais and what is his real life counterpart. Over time as our trip went from an invitation during an SL converation to visit, to a notion in my mind, then to an actual plan and an imminent departure, Pais and his other self were starting to share levels of anticipation and downright nervousness – my real life self was taking Pais to meet the real life selves of people he has only known online. Not only that, but my real life self is shy to the point of not being comfortable visiting family and others he knows well, let alone people he has only seen as avatars. Pais, however, has always been less inhibited and more outgoing. Often during the trip I was finding my RL self being a bit more like Pais.

I arranged just over two weeks of holiday that would be divided between visiting Pais’ little brother, Sacha, in France; and then Pais’ neighbor and close friend Robin, in The Netherlands. Also while with Robin we were hoping to hook up for a visit with Johna and Gabe.

Most anyone reading this blog is likely well familiar with relationships in the metaverse and how strong emotions can be. In these virtual interactions we can form ideas about people based on knowing their avatars, and for some an insatiable curiosity builds about what that person is like in real life. I have constructed a number of mental models of how the process of getting to know and accurately experience a personality behind an avatar may work. I have even theorized that as two avatars interact, it may open some sort of telepathic channel between the two real people that allows them to connect on levels we cannot scientifically measure. Part of the real adventure of this trip would be to gather some anecdotal evidence, as it were, comparing the avatars Pais knows to the real people behind them, and thus test some of those theories.

If I were to boil this whole blog down to one question, it would be “what is it like to meet in real life someone you first met and became friends with in SL?” And if I were to answer that question by generalizing from the experience gained from the four people I have now met this way, I would have to say the first part is a kind of shock wave composed of seeing a real person - a person that looks differently than their avatar, and having the full bandwidth of reality in which to interact, while at the same time trying to adjust between my regular persona and that which I project into Pais. One of the symptoms of this shock wave I have noticed is that at some times I am not able to make eye contact at first – I think at first my mind is holding our multiple identities at once, and eye contact connectivity walks over signal of the projected personalities we have from SL and gets too confusing. I think if I were to be a spy or an actor, this kind of swimming and surfing of persona would be more natural.

A component of this initial shock wave, I think, is an artifact of how much we may have preconceived notions or stereotypes that say what connection between what a person looks like and who they actually are. We are told not to judge a book by its cover – that someone’s appearance, age, race, heritage, etc – has nothing to do with who they are – yet we do this stereotyping and pre-judging to some degree all the time.

After the shockwave, I found myself interacting with my SL friends in their RL appearance and in very quick order there was a rapport as if we have known each other for a long time… but wait… we had.

Pais and his friends are kids. There are other blogs here that talk about why and such. The point here is that we are all cute and young in SL but adults in RL, so we are not possibly going to be as cute in RL. I remember talking one time to one of Pais’s other little brothers who is a lovable and adorable kid avatar, and he was saying how his RL appearance was nowhere near as cute. So in my mind I conjured up various horrid-looking RL appearances and juxta-posed them with his avatar and the personality I knew through his text conversations. I then came to the conclusion that anyone that could create and project a persona like that, no matter their RL appearance, was the quality of the person I should continue to focus on if I ever met them in RL. To put it another way, I think SL has been teaching me to judge people less by their appearances. To go a step further, to also not limit my own self to my appearance, and to embrace the many facets of my self.

There are people that say that SL is for people that have no RL. There may be a little truth to that – at least insofar as one has to have time from one’s RL to participate in SL. For me, time that previously went to the mindlessness of television has been upgraded to the social connectedness of SL, and I have found interstitial moments of my day to visit there.

This is a image of Sacha’s snuggly and also very talkative cat, Bubble, that I took from my MacBook’s camera on top of the screen. Below is a Bubble’s avatar (also talkative) at my SL home

What is SL like for others in their day-to-day life? It is in this way it was interesting to be with my friends while they were at their computers, in-world, and I at my computer borrowing their bandwidth in the same room, while also in-world. There was a one point I actually found it easier talking to the avatar than the person – this is to not to infer anything negative about the person, but rather I think it reflects upon the familiarity of our SL selves. It reminded me how when I was a kid, conversations with my school pals was so easy and fluid, but talking to adults, or in front of them, seemed to take some sort of extra effort.

OK, so far we have a lot of words that talk around the edges of the trip and meeting people, but then what happened? There’s a lot I won’t talk about here. After all, I only want to be known as Pais here, and not my RL self. I want to give my SL friends the same level of privacy, so there are no specifics like pictures of us in RL. However, I can share the outline of my trip.

One of the cool things was just being able to do stuff together. For instance, one thing we have in common is enjoying food, or at least, when in SL one of us will say, “I am going to get something to eat” it is not unusual to ask, “what are you making?” and after hearing that, perhaps continue talking about our favorite foods, how we prepare them, and so forth. So one part of my trip that was fun for me was not only some really excellent meals in restaurants together, but also things like going with Sacha to his local grocery, shopping for food and wine, then coming back and watching him make a couple meals that he had described before online. Or with Robin, a couple times while were were talking in SL I was in my kitchen making myself an impromptu concoction that I described as I made it; then in RL, he and I shopping at the market in his town (that has been in the same square over centuries) and me improvising a meal for him from the ingredients in his kitchen.

There were the normal touristy things we did, of course. Both Sacha and Robin were generous with their time and their car’s odometers, driving me all around. My previous trips to Europe have been without private cars and primarily within the confines of cities. I have been looking forward to a trip where I could explore the countryside more. Sacha and I went in the Paris vicinity to the Louvre, Versailles, and such, northwest through Normandy to St Michel and southwest to Lascaux and St Emilion in the Bordeaux region. Sacha then drove me to Amsterdam to meet up with Robin. Robin took me through the countryside of Holland. We explored an island to the north called Schiermonnikoog (dutch language still cracks me up), as well as exploring Robin’s town – he even hired a walking tour guide for us, and I was amazed how much I could see, learn, and think on a tour that was personalized just for me. My flight home was from Amsterdam, so we spend a couple days there, where I we also met up with Johna. He’s an amazing guy - I wish we had more time together. Gabe was not able to make it. We hit Amsterdam on Queen’s Day, and it was totally nuts, but still totally fun to be hanging out with such cool people.

“Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” - David Foster Wallace.

As I finish writing this I have been home for several weeks. It has been hard to write this, even harder to finish it, because there was so much I learned and experienced that went well beyond the typical holiday trip abroad, and I still have no way to fully express it. I wanted to capture a sense of how what started out as my exploring and otherwise goofing around in SL has ended up affecting my life in so many ways. This has been such a positive experience. I met wonderful people, and then had a chance to meet them again in real life, visit in their homes, share a bit of their lives, and find out they were even more wonderful.

At the same time there was a journey from Pais to my real life self and back again. This is something that is subtle as catching the mists of our dreams as we awake - different aspects of our selves that play hide-and-go seek. Pais is the part of me outgoing and socially brave enough to cause me to embark on such a journey, before that, I thought he was the one along for the ride. As this resonates, it gives me lots to think about

I want to thank Sacha and Robin again for being Pais’ friend, then inviting me to come and visit them in real life. You were generous and I (and Pais) enjoyed ourselves immensely. I hope I have a chance to sometime return the favor. I also got to hang out for a day with Johna, which was also a hugely fun time. I am so fortunate to have met you three, as well as the many other wonderful friends in that miasma of pixels and interconnectedness that is the metaverse.

–

I have linked to different sets of images, here’s a link to the full set.

As Pais rides his fusion-powered skybike he didn’t think he was creating greenhouse gases in his second life or the real world, but it could be to exist in the metaverse, we create a significant carbon footprint in the real world.

I saw the following in my latest copy of Wired:

According to Julian Bleecker, cofounder of design think tank the Near Future Laboratory, the average Second Life avatar requires 1,248 kilowatt hours of electricity to “exist” for a year — 153 kWh for the servers and 1,095 kWh for your PC. In terms of carbon emissions, that’s roughly the equivalent of driving 1,800 miles in a BMW 750Li.

You can find the write-up they are referring to at the Near Future Lab here

I guess one way to rationalize this (suggested by Dusan this morning was we chatted) is by being in a virtual world we may be avoiding activities using more energy in the real world. For instance, some people are using SL as a virtual meeting place to avoid the cost and expense of traveling to a meeting.

Another option is that Linden Lab could look over at what Google is doing - using/producing green energy to run their server farms - as well as funding, supporting, encouraging sustainable practices elsewhere.

I was over reading Dusan’s blog and a paper linked in its comments that sent me into a little mental spin. Normally I’d just comment at his blog, but quite frankly, I didn’t read all of the stuff there yet and I wanted to hatch a bit of this thought I was formulating about myself. I was just at a conference about newer web-enabling technology of how we deal with information to make it more computable. One thing that struck me there was how many people there seemed to have no qualms about laying out their identities on the web. One guy gave the URL/URI for his RDF FOAF and said “this is me”. I didn’t grok it then and after trying to ponder it for nearly a week, I still don’t get it, especially because he said, “this is not my web page, this is ME”.

Maybe I am paranoid or shy, but I don’t see how a network of all my life needs to be web-enabled for all to surf.

As Pais, I have a blog. No other part of me has a blog, especially one using my real name. When I saw “Virtual worlds don’t exist”, even without reading more than a few pages I remembered how earlier in the day I was backing myself out of FaceBook and LinkedIn because I was getting friend requests, pokes, and other associations that may work well enough with fragments of my self but I didn’t want laid out for all the sniffers, yokels, background checkers, identity thieves, and who knows what else to see.

Then I thought of Pais’ blog, where that fragment of me can talk and share in his own circle, and not have to muddy or be muddied by my other selves. Then I wondered if I should create alts for my work self, my family self, my college buddies self, my various hobbies selves, and so forth. All of these only need be connected to my legal identity when they need be.

These are twisted times for identity. We have an administration that wiretapped the entire country’s phone and email. We have marketers that are profiling our buying tastes and habits. We have people that assume our identities to take our money and property. Why do I want to connect up all the dots? Instead, perhaps I need to diversify my life, my mind, and my identity.

I met a person in SL with dissociative identity disorder. Well, actually I met first one of their personalities in one alt that introduced me to another personality who had another alt. The alts are different sex and age. After meeting “them” and getting to know them both, as well as talking to one of them about their multiple personalities and their RL(s), I pondered about how much I also have partitions of self and identity, although not as dramatic as my friend.

I have come to like being Pais, like an author that publishes some of their stories under a pseudonym to allow them freedom from the restrictions of the rest of their work, splitting off a chunk of identity for a reality partition makes more sense now than ever before to me.

I have been meaning to say a few words about PrimBeach for months.

Somewhere in my notes I have a number of observations and thoughts about not only this particular DJ/dance club, but some of the questions I think about when I see dynamics of our groups and communities in these places where we gather for events.

But then on 18 March 2008, rather suddenly, Flo pulled the plug on the club and issued a statement about closing in his blog. I am not going to try to rehash what he has said. I think if he wanted that he would have allowed comments on that post.

I respect Flo’s decision. I know how much time, effort, and love he put into making not only V2 of a beach club happen, but V1 as well. 

One reason I didn’t post on the closing of PrimBeach V2 until now is I was looking for some images I had of a fireworks show that looked really cool. So it goes. Maybe they will turn up later. Meanwhile, the above image is not the greatest, but it shows some of my favorite parts of not only the club, but the spirit of the club.

I loved the club because it was open to the sky and the water. You can’t see from this image, but the dance floor was glass so when you were listening to music, chatting, playing trivia, dancing, and stuff; you could see the water and the fish below. On this particular day, Lugo was so funny because he was swimming with the fishes in scuba gear beneath the floor. It had us all cracking up - we’re living as kids, here, so having fun is the premium expression of our art form, as it were. Check out the kid sitting on top of the dance ball over the middle of the floor. I dunno whether he was goofing on us or if he tried to click it to dance and ended up selecting ’sit’ instead.

I have good memories of PrimBeach, and I commend the Flos and the Calebs and the Lokis and the Geminis and the Koffees who create places like this for us to gather, be entertained and feel a sense of community. There are also the people that DJ or entertain, work behind the scenes, or donate funds to make these clubs function. All these people deserve our appreciation.

There are a lot of well-funded types like large corporations that try to create a presence in SL that get pretty much zero traffic or interest because the are just not getting what “It” is. SL and the metaverse in general is pretty much a barely-settled wilderness, and people like Flo are creating outposts for pioneers to gather and live. I thank them for their efforts and I look forward to seeing and being a part of the next thing that springs forth in our community.

It is no news that kid avatars in SL get continual flack. Some people who can accept that a dragon avatar is not really operated by real dragon fear that a child avatar must be owned by an underage account holder. Other people, who are likely viewing their experiences through the haze of their own sexual confusion, accuse adults with child avatars of pedophilia. While either of these cases are not impossible, they are also not likely. They are certainly not what I have encountered among the kid avatars I know. However, in a climate of accusation and suspicion, we find ourselves constantly needing to defend ourselves and our motives.

I was checking out a blog by Dr. Kourosh Dini, (kinda cool, he evoked quantum physics to consider our existences in multiverses) then I poked around a bit more of his other blog articles and saw one entitled “On Being More Childish”. The article is not about kid avatars in SL. In fact it starts out talking about how tough it is to be a kid these days. But then he talks about the value of being “childish”, and I think he makes some good points:

“Being “childish” is something that should be celebrated or commended, even. Adults who retain the child within their selves are often those that are most successful in the marketplace and in the adult world. They are the happiest with what they become and with the goals they choose for their lives.

When something is childish, we should consider it with awe and wonder. Childhood is the beginning of life. It is a time of power and energy. It is a time of growth and of creativity.

Creativity and growth seem somehow inextricable to me. If this is so, and we wish the best growth of our society, there needs to be an allowance for the greatest creative powerhouses we have – namely, children and adolescents. This does not mean we should allow kids to run for governmental office. Clearly, there are adult-centric rules in place for a functioning society.

What I am saying though, is that the curriculum of Play somehow feels lost.

The greatest artistic and scientific works and achievements seem the constructs of Play. From the soul of the human mind, by force of the divine or nature, the descriptions by which the great masters create their works denote their delivery via the conduit of Play.

Could it be that the trouble we are seeing with the kids of today is that so many adults have shed those aspects of their selves that are creative, playful, wondering, and awed because those traits are viewed as somehow childish and therefore negative?”

See? Maybe us kids just want to play, create, have fun, or otherwise goof around being childish. And that can be a good thing.