The Committee of Me

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.

PrimBeach V86′ed

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.

Globalized Pais

I happened upon this interesting graphic from The Economist with polling results comparing US and British attitudes.

 

(click the thumbnail to see the graphic)

It occurs to me if I posted something yesterday in a reactive mode to SL, why not share an observation that is more proactive about my experiences.

Pais visits daily with his family, friends, and neighbors in SL. None that I know of live within 500 km of his RL home. Months ago one I talked about time zones w/r/t the global nature of relationships through SL, but now that my friendships have deepened, as I look at trans-Atlantic attitudes in places like the article, I am reminded how munch my own world view has been expanded by Pais’ playmates in SL. Way cool.

Being a kid

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.

 

Your World. Your imagination. Your escape or augmentation?

I was reading Felixe Thorne’s Rambles and I wanted to link to his post called “Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love”. I thought about making comments on his site, but since he didn’t really discuss it there, I thought it more appropriate for me to give my take of it here. Felixe has provided YouTube copies of an episode of the BBC’s Wonderland broadcast with the same title as Felixe’s post. Links to videos are on Felixe’s post or here: part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4.

Here’s a synopsis from the BBC website (I would link but it is a daily listing and I didn’t see a way to do a permalink):

“Carolyn is a 37 year-old mother of four in the midst of a passionate affair that is tearing her family apart. She’s spending up to 18 hours a day with her lover, and her husband is in despair. But the extraordinary thing about this affair is that Carolyn’s lover is man she has never met. Because he’s not a human being. He’s an avatar (or computer generated figure), who exists only in the virtual world of Second Life. And their relationship exists only in cyberspace.

The population of the virtual world Second Life has grown to over three million in the three years since it was created. It’s a world in which you can buy the things you could never afford in real life, and have the body and looks of a movie star for just a few dollars. But as relationships develop in this strange animated world, the risk is that they start to become more real than those in your first life.

In the face of fierce opposition from her husband of nine years, Carolyn flies 5000 miles to London to meet Elliot, the creator of the avatar with whom she has fallen in love, in order to see if a relationship formed in cyberspace can work in the real world. And she leaves behind her a family left rubbing their eyes in bewilderment and anguish.

This is a film about those who’ve become so disillusioned with their real life that they’ve sidelined it in favour of a virtual life. It’s about people who’ve cheated on their life partners and risked losing everything, for the promise of a life that’s so far only been experienced in the pixels of a computer screen and the dream world of their own fantasies. Deals with adult themes”

First off, I think it is indicative of the seeming need for a show like this to exaggerate the aspects that might titillate an audience that juices on Schadenfreude for not mentioning in this synopsis another pair of people they feature that met in SL, fell in love there, then met in real life, and got married simultaneously in both worlds.

This why I chose the title for this post “Your World. Your Imagination. Your escape or augmentation” because the Wonderlands episode shows two sides of a difficult balance we all must find as we add the metaverse to our palette of realities - are we escaping/neglecting the real world with our second life, or are we augmenting?

The Wonderlands episode has a lot going for it - it deftly tells a story showing us people in both their real and second lives, then we follow them as they jump a chasm of being avatars interacting meeting each other in real life. I was able to identify with many aspects that were portrayed. I have mused with a number of my SL friends about times we felt we were spending too much time, or that we were overwhelmed by our emotions, or that we were otherwise addicted to SL. We see Carolyn, who neglected her husband, kids, and house, sitting at her computer in the corner of a bedroom that appeared in the midsts of a redecorating job gone bad (the walls were mostly painted except the spot around the computer, making me wonder if she refused to move from her seat there as someone tried to paint the walls). I’d like to think the only things I have neglected for SL is theta-wave vegging with the Tivo, or drinks in the pub; with the worst neglect of which I am guilty is not getting sleep a couple nights.

One of the impressions I was left with when the credits of the episode were running was that it was like seeing a documentary on some sort of [other] addiction, such as alcohol or drugs, and how when something that can bring benefit or pleasure to us is used too much the imbalance can have very detrimental effects on our lives. When I see such a show I normally think, “sheesh, I am glad I am not one of them…”, but this was a little closer to home. Pais has been trying to learn to better understand and handle his emotions, his perceptions of himself and others, and other aspects of living in a metaverse of projected personalities.

We also might want to think about how our friends and families who don’t otherwise know about SL come to form their perceptions. There was a scene where one of the people in the episode was describing their second life, and I recognized the way they looked away from the interviewer, kind of into space, searching for how to describe some of the things we come to accept as normal in SL but can sound absolutely bizarre or unfathomable to the non-initiated. I have found that it is best not to talk too much about SL to people who believe in only one form of reality. Shows like this may give more reason to be that way, since it tends to over emphasize what can happen if we allow SL to take us out of balance, and this will certainly give some people the wrong impression.

Thanks to Felixe for providing a way for those of us not in the UK to see the BBC Wonderland broadcast.

A year of Pais

I haven’t posted for months and I would guess that now this blog, and perhaps Pais, is completely off your radars, but I feel the need to put some thoughts together to share with you.

One reason for my lack of blogs is that some of the events in Pais’ life are such that I can’t find a way to put them in a public place. Either they are so tied up with other’s lives that a public forum is not appropriate, or they are so personal in my own life that I cringe at the thought exposing them.

OK, so a week ago Pais marked his first rez-day, meaning it was a time to reflect on his life so far and the world he lives in.  I remember one of the first observations I made about SL was how my emotions were so much more involved in the interplay that in any other computer/network interaction, and I marveled at how involved I got with so many wonderful personalities I met. I would see other’s talking about SL and saying the now clichéd statement, “SL is not a game, so there are no winners - everyone playing it is a looser.”  Well, if that is what they found in SL, they should move on. What I find about SL is you get out of it what you put into it. This not only is in terms of “your world, your imagination”, but also along the lines of the Beatles’ lyric, “And, in the end, the love you take/Is equal to the love you make.”

SL has added new dimensions to my life. It has been a place where wonderful experiences have been shared with people I have come to treasure deeply. When I think that much of the time I have been in SL I may have simply been watching television, and then I start to think about how virtual worlds can evolve in the future, I know that this is truly a huge phenomenon.

When I think at Pais writing this public blog I think how much of the time he is mostly in corners of SL with his like-minded pals. But “out here” are lots of people that still don’t seem to be comfortable with one of the key elements of Pais - that he is a kid. I have already written about this here trying to explain what it means to me from a couple angles. I fear the ignorance and intolerance by others, combined with the reactionary way the Lindens respond, may one day mean that kids are not allowed.

And now we get to the thoughts from today that made me want to write a new blog entry….

I was talking to the wise and kind Johnathan today, and as usual I was telling him about some of Pais (and my) inner struggles and he was helping me to understand them as he does so well. We got on the topic of who my adult role model was for my RL self… and I was stymied. I realized that one thing I had done, over the course of my life from childhood, after seeing the foibles of adults, was to reject most adult role models, choosing in my mind to cherish and nurture my inner child. Maybe a victim of self-imposed arrested development, maybe it is a chronic Peter-Pan syndrome that makes me guilty of not truly becoming a fully productive member of society, I have always had a Pais-like self image in my core as a mental role model of what is right and best in the world. He is sweetly innocent, yet just on the edge of being grown up to know enough of the potential evils of the world. In Pais’ view, adults have compromised themselves so they could own their part of the world, and the more they harden their identities to make their way the less they are open to wonder and beauty. To Pais, and adult is one who grasps power and things, and although this is important to survival, such grasping and holding means, like in the Zen koan, that one’s hands cannot be open to receive new gifts from the universe.

Events and Milestones

This weekend us kids helped Robin Fegte celebrate his 12th birthday. The image above is a poster that was set up with part of the decorations at the party. I gotta apologize for setting the world to daylight before I took the pics. My attempts to fix them later was also munged.

Robin is such a sweet kid so it makes sense that all his friends at the part were also some of the nicest people I know showed up. There was lots of goofing around and cool music, including live tunes by Janor.

We’ve been having fun with those hug ring things that allow any number of people to get into a group hug. Take a look at the image at the top of one of my other posts to see some of us using this neat pose thingee.

The images above and below are our attempt to set a record at the number of people in a hug… but it was probably way too many… and turned into hilarious chaos. Meanwhile Janor was playing a really trippy rendition of the Grateful Dead song “Dark Star” so as I was dealing with script and prim errors, standing in some strange air hug, I could only laugh at the scene. I am pretty sure we maxed it out and I don’t know how many actually got in the hug. Sacha was shouting that we were bringing down the sim and was citing various error codes - like a bunch of kids would care until the thing crashes.

Of course, Pais is a contemplative boy and after the excitement of the party he was sitting alone waiting for his bestest buddy Flo to get back from some RL stuff, and I was thinking about how events like rez-days, birthdays, and holidays. As Dusan would say, further down the proverbial rabbit hole, bringing our RL celebrations, event milestones, and holidays with us.

I think about how we gathered together to mourn the passing of our friend Dummie Beck. It was real. We knew a real person was behind this avatar and he had passed. As we were standing at Nemo paying our respects, I flashed back to one of my early experiences in SL starting at that very beach. Loki showed up at the helm of his airship and a bunch of us kids jumped on for a ride. As we went over one of the neighboring sims, we saw below a gathering that looked as if it was a funeral. I remember thinking how incongruous it was - it simply was beyond my comprehension at that time that a RL milestone such as that would ripple into the SL metaverse. I wondered if it was a RL passing or a role-played passing, or some other permutation. As the fates had it that day, as we crossed over a sim crossing, it caused the airship to glitch and it dumped about a dozen boys down onto the proceedings. I remember thinking that is was so silly to see the juxtaposed sobriety and gaiety, but now I hope we didn’t mar the event too much if it was as real to them as our day with Dummie’s memory was to us.

I have to admit, seem to have brought my disdain for Christmas starting at Halloween in the commercialized habituations we have. I guess Pais’ human doesn’t bring all the aspects of childhood to his character, since when he visited some friends working on creating a Christmas tableau, he couldn’t help but seeing the next weeks of the calendar in his mind as a grinder of something being foisted on him rather than happy expectations of a cool yule.

Ok, so when I saw the snowman in the bent-over position, I couldn’t help but whisper to a certain unnamed mischievous boy with me that it looked like the snowman was having a little Christmas poo… hehehe… and he added a couple brown prims you can see in the above image to take it the rest of the way. Maybe as the winter solstice gets nearer I will begin to feel less cynical about the holiday - in any of my metaverse projections.

Recursively Virtually Real Neil

I was tipped off by reading Dusan’s blog of an SL event yesterday. In the above image you see myself and Robin attending a live simulcast being graciously hosted at the Eternal Flames Pier (the lady on the left was most hospitable, thank you, ma’am). The fact that we watched a virtual version of an in-world event is why I echo the recursion theme from Dusan’s memes. Apparently one could only get into the location where it was taking place by invitation. I assume they needed to control numbers to insure the sim operated well. Meanwhile the irony of a virtual view of a virtual interview is ponderable, mayhaps.

The interview was with Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, who collaborated as screenwriters for the new film Beowulf. I have enjoyed around a half dozen of Neil’s novels having been introduced to him through his collaboration with Terry Prachett in Good Omens. I was interested enough in the interview, but more on experiencing the event in SL.

As a side note, I am new to blogging and as I found the link on amazon to the book just now, I saw that Neil has already blogged a bit about his SL interview and it was syndicated into the book’s page. That nifty trick of dynamic semantic webbery is is cool enough, and the immediacy and intimacy with Neil is even more cool when a rambling entry ends with him saying:

….

Later. Mr Gaiman has drunk too much champagne to continue this blog entry.

& so to bed.

Pais hoots and sniggers. Perhaps he is one of us…

And I think that was part of what I was trying to grasp. Why would one want to see an avatar version of Neil talking about a movie screenplay?

The first answer is another question; why might I have gone to see him in RL? After all, he’s an author, it is his written words for which I know him. Yet we all seem to crave to share space with the famous. Of course, I was not sharing space with him - we were on different continents - yet we were sharing SL, and there was something in that knowledge that seemed to make it more interesting to be at the event, rather than (for example) to read a transcription later.

There was a little comment Neil made at the end of his interview that gave me a start - I forget how he turned the words exactly but the gist I got was that he was saying goodbye for the moment, but he will be around in SL. He said this as if this was something he familiar with doing (I tried to scan his blog to see if he’s mentioned it, but the site is not loading). Other famous people have also mentioned having anonymous avatars in SL, and the implications are pretty interesting. I am not the kind of person that gets willy-nilly at the notion of meeting someone famous. I don’t collect autographs. When I have rubbed elbows with the famous, rich, or powerful I try to keep my cool and perspective that we are all human and fawning over over a celebrity is not only impractical and undignified, it also prevents the chance that one may actually connect with them as a person. So pointing out that celebrities are in our SL midst is not a call for stalking and outing, it is to remind us to stay attuned to the potential to find wonder and magic in all that we meet.

This point is driven home by the passing of one our own, Dummie Beck. Now that he is gone, one of the laments to be heard is a regret for not knowing him better, or for not answering that last IM…

To Perceive is to Create

I guess Pais’ blog topic will be a little philosophical today, but trust me, we are definitely sticking with the topic of his second life. The title I chose, “To Perceive is to Create” is actually one of those multi-layered statements that at one level can reference the notion that we are not really existing in a real world we sense and then construct a perception of that world in our mind, but reality is actually in our minds and by focusing we create a physical world.

Wait - don’t leave yet - I know this statement is a little in the “like, wow, maaaan, ever look at your hand, dude?” department… so we can scale back the ‘to perceive is to create’ axiom into the more pragmatic notion that whatever we choose to focus on becomes the world for us. Read: what is it about SL that keeps us wanting to spend time there?

So what Pais is really thinking about is the nature of his reality and his existence.

Does he exist? Of course - you are reading his blog.

Why is he here? Ah, if we could distill this answer well enough, we would be onto the answer so many seem not to grasp.

I had been talking to a friend who works for a library. They said the library had people creating a SL presence. I inwardly rolled my eyes, thinking that this was just like so many other RL businesses that seem to think they are magically progressive if they create an in-world version of themselves, yet in most cases after they spend scads of money they have a some lame sim with a pile of fancy custom prims in some sort of construction, zero traffic, and their logo hanging pathetically in the midst. My theory is they don’t stop to consider the nature of the reality of second life, and why those of us that live here are here. It is this Pais is contemplating while reflecting on his existence.

Scan through my recent blogs and you can see that my relationships in SL are important to me. Take a look at Pais or Flo and you see we wear dog tags.

We made these dog tags to commemorate when we became partners. This was a huge event for me. We went a step further, as you can see in the image of RL dog tags that we had made and shipped to both of us. To me this illustrates how strong a connection can be that is formed in SL, it is the root of Pais’ reason to be alive, and I am coming to believe it is the aspect of SL that must be understood by anyone trying to incorporate SL as part of their RL business model. How is it we connect with others within SL? What gives it the “juice” that energizes our imaginations and our emotions? If we understand this, we understand ourselves better, but also understand what are the next steps to becoming more human in an otherwise synthetic world (referring to both SL and RL here)

I was looking for a compelling use of SL as a too to augment some bona fide RL need and found a Harvard Law School course that uses it called “Cyber One: Law in the Court of Public Opinion“. Here is a excerpt from their site, talking about the use of SL in their course:

The course will be offered as a distance education course to students at the Harvard Extension School. The experience of the Harvard Extension School students will include videos of the live lectures at Harvard Law School as in previous Harvard courses offered through the Extension School.
The Extension School audience experience will be mediated by participation in a 3D virtual environment called Second Life. Even to many seasoned computer and Internet users, the idea of a 3D virtual environment may sound more like a thing of science fiction or a video game. In fact, it is a cutting edge development in teaching technology. The Second Life environment for Harvard Extension School participants permits us to foster a sense of community among students taking the course at a distance. It provides a rich medium for students to interact directly and satisfyingly with their instructors and their fellow students.

At first when I saw this I was pretty dismissive, thinking why bother to use SL when they could get pretty much the same results using websites and more standard web-based video teleconferencing tools. But I read the professor’s blog taking about their first classes in SL and looked at some other first-hand descriptions and I realized my dismissiveness was pretty hypocritical. The simple fact is that Pais finds real connection with his friends, family, and especially his beloved partner, Flo, in SL. I project part of myself into SL as Pais and when I see him interact with others, as well as the media content and chat, it all comes together into a compelling reality. We can see from the class that uses this that students that are otherwise connecting remotely to the school can have an in-world experience that helps them better connect with other humans in their classes, providing a dimension that is otherwise lost with “extension” learning. Maybe there is really something to this.

It seems to me that if any real world business wants to create a presence in SL, if they don’t understand some human essence of ‘to perceive is to create’ and how it makes being in SL worthwhile, they are going spend a bundle on a zero traffic sim. At the same time, we as residents can also learn to capitalize on the more human side of our natures here, also evolving the experience.

Trick-or-treat’n

Alloy came up with the idea that we get together in our halloween costumes, get ourselves all rowdied up, then TP en mass to places to run around for a little Halloween fun.

I dressed in my skeleton costume that I accessorized a wee bit - you can see the boney version of my neko tail. What you can’t see in the above picture is the wicked cool eye attachments I added that allowed me to shoot red laser beams out of the eye-holes of my skull. What I didn’t realize when I first got them was not only do they cause that they hit to burn (which is hilarious) but they are also deadly - I accidentally killed someone who walked in to the laser’s path while I was playing with them. Heheheehe. They came in handy later when we were at the Greenies place trick-or-treating and I encountered a big old cat.

I was saying hi to the Greenie guy in what turned out to be the cat’s food dish and the cat got a little scarey. I thought it would be cool cause I had my cat ears on, but when got really threatening, I jumped on my sky bike and torched that old dirt bag puddy-tat.

Hehehe, don’t worry cat lovers, he wasn’t really hurt.

Check out some of the other guys I was with

Pretty funny, huh? That’s Alloy as the ghost, some lady with purple hair that we were asking for candy, Rod with the punkin-head, Nefu as the spaceboy, and Flo was shredding around on a skateboard dressed as Loki.

Here’s another pic of Flo, he was dancing at Aspen and I didn’t get a very good snapshot.

Speaking of Aspen’s Halloween Party, check out the winning costume that Gavin Little was wearing. I got front and read images cause it was so cool.

He is dressed as several kid’s hangouts, like The Vortex, Flo’s Beach Club, and Nemo Beach.

The model of the Vortex even had a working tip jar, but I wasn’t able to click on it cause it was so freaking tiny and Gavin couldn’t hold still, but what the heck, he won a boat load of linden$ by winning the contest.