Reading Radar

Ok, so that’s not quite what they said, but walls do abound in Second Life, and Pandora Wrigglesworth has noticed.

Very cool. There’s no end to the interesting ideas she comes up with!

Arminasx Saiman and I were talking about SL related blogs and podcasts the other day, not particular ones, but just the fact that audiences for both are by default, limited in number.

I’ll grant you that there are a number of popular SL related blogs (this not really being one of them) but the fact still holds true that only a limited group of people is going to have interest in subscribing to an SL blog compared to the number of people that might want to subscribe to something like Lifehacker or The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Bearing in mind that with a blog, web searches bring traffic in that might not otherwise find the blog, and that once there, the material is at least right in front of their faces and there is at least a small chance they might stay and read, and I have to think that blogs are much more likely to attract new random followers than podcasts are. People may randomly stumble across a podcast but then they have a barrier of deciding to listen, and that entails downloading it or subscribing unless they use the blog’s player control. But I doubt people will typically fire up an hour long audio file that they found by accident.

Given all this, I’m wondering, how do I grow my SL Under the Radar podcast? I don’t mean I want to have 40,000 downloads a week (that would be more than my hosting can handle) or that I want to rule the universe, but I’ve noticed the podcast has plateaued in terms of listeners. It just feels like things could be more active, and even so with my current listeners. Am I doing a good enough job of getting you involved and a part of the podcast? I don’t know. I’m not sure where people stand on that question. I think SLPN has some work to do in this area too, and it’s something I think we should start considering more heavily.

I don’t have time or inclination to just promote my podcast all over the web. Truth be told, I hate self-promotion. But among the SL podcasts, I think mine’s one of the good ones. I know that’s rare coming from me, the eternally self-effacing man with the mic, but I don’t say that vainly. I think I’ve had good guests who are genuinely interesting people and it makes me even enjoy listening to my own podcasts again after uploading them just to hear them, and get a sense of their thoughts and personalities.

I think I can say without being egotistical or having a overly inflated view of my work that this podcast should be at least one that gets thought of when thinking of SL related podcasts to subscribe to. So this leads me down the path of doing some thinking about how to be taken seriously without having to become overly serious about my material. And while recognizing I only have so much time to work on it. I think that’s the hard part of podcasting for me, being able to take advantage of limited opportunities for recording time.

For the moment, all I can ask is that if you enjoy any of the SL related podcasts, let your friends know. All of the podcasters I know in SL take their podcasts seriously and work hard on them. Feel free to drop them a line and let them know what’s working, and what’s not. You, the listeners, are the reason we do this in the first place. If you’re not enjoying it, we podcasters won’t be either.

Life’s just getting weirder all the time. Somehow Podcast Island got designated as a community service hub. What’s that all about?

I’ll give these guys one month and if they don’t shape up, I’m orbiting them AND their trailer. No exceptions, no apologies. Hey, got any raccoon tamales left?

Life can let you down in a lot of ways, and Second Life is no different. It just lets you down in totally new ways. Have you ever, in RL, had to learn new complicated procedures to sit on your ass? NO? Didn’t think so.

Awhile ago Nika Dreamscape of Diamonds and Rust featured The Loft on her excellent and informative blog, Second Homes. Being the supportive type that I am, I went and looked at their store, and I found some stuff I liked. I liked their small skybox as a small office for working on scripts, etc, and I rezzed one over Podcaster Island. Take a look if you want - check my profile picks for location. My homemade computer desk, Macbook Pro computer, and chair are in the back of the skybox. I should put them for sale for some tiny amount.

Anyway, I bought some deck chairs… one of the things we put in below on the Tiny Beach is a kind of a tiki house thingy that looks cool in the water. Wanting people to be able to hang out and talk about the weather and how they fell and broke their hip last month, I put out these deck chairs. Well… they look great. Then I realized, these things are primarily made as couples chairs. That’s not what I wanted. But I thought, ok, they have options for single sit poses, and I can set them so that only I have access to the menus, so I can make sure they get used as single sit chairs for hanging out on the deck. Sounds great, right? The only problem is that THE MENUS ARE SO CONFUSING AND NOTHING SEEMED TO WORK THE WAY I THOUGHT IT WOULD BASED ON THE MENU CHOICES and so they wound up being deleted. Gone. FOREVER!! Mother… flippers.

I want to reiterate again that I’m not bitching about the loft per se, but I would ask vendors: If you’re thinking about using the MLP system in your products, do yourself a favor and just go run in front of a bus. Mmmkay? Really, that’s all I’m asking. Off yourself, or off your furniture, but just off something. For the good of Avatarity.

Arri made a great video for 7th Son Obsidian, and I had it on my computer and never finished it all the way through. Somehow.. I lost it. iTunes store doesn’t seem to have anything before episode 6.

Anyone have a copy? Arri?

Remember the muppet who would come up on Sesame Street and try to sell people letters he had hidden in his coat? I’m going to play “OpenSim” muppet and sell you something for free. “You wanna buy a sim?” “A SIM?!” “SHHHHHH!” “a sim?” “Riiiiiiiiiiight…”

Interspersed with other blog posts most likely, I’ll be blogging about my experiences with getting OpenSim running on a Mac Pro (Quad Core, blah blah blah) under OS X 10.5.4.

At this point I should probably mention WHY I’m doing all this. As you probably know, IBM and LL jumped an avatar from SL into an IBM OpenSim, or vice versa, or both. You may also know that OpenSim is really looking like it could take the underlying LL simulator technology and make it gain widespread use and acceptance, hopefully in an interoperable manner with SL. In theory, people with fat pipes or good dedicated hosting setups could run their own sim, and people could hop between other sims on the grid in SL, and this OpenSim based sim.

Right now it’s all in its early days, but it’s fun to play with anyway. If nothing else, I can be a generic looking avatar on a sim of my own and guarantee that I can work on scripts and not be interrupted. Well.. I think I can. At this point, I’m not sure if OpenSim is backwards compatible with current LSL technology, or it’ll be mono only (that’s my guess) which is not deployed in SL yet, or what.

Anyway. Enough theorizing and pontificating.

There’s actually a few steps to getting it up and going. OpenSim requires Mono, the open source .net framework and c# language. On the OpenSim instructions for how to install on OS X, it links to an older version of Mono (1.2.5_5).

Unfortunately, this link refused to work, so I headed over to the mono site at mono-project.com to see what they had. Turns out they have a lot of download options.

They show 1.9.1_3 as the current version, but it also called it Mono 2.0 beta, so I decided to try an archive version. Unfortunately, none of their URLs worked either, but they all referenced ftp.novell.com, so I fired up Transmit and headed over there myself. I navigated to /pub/mono/archive/1.2.6/macos-10-universal/6 and downloaded the dmg for 1.2.6_6.

Tomorrow if I have time, I might try installing this and seeing what happens. Then once I install the OpenSim server on the Mac, I’ll even find out if that version of Mono is what I needed. Isn’t technology fun? Of course it is.

On the podcast sometime in the past, the topic of lightweight or mobile SL clients for portable devices such as cellphones came up, and Torley shows that this is no longer a wish, but a “now is.”

Vollee has an sl client, complete with windlight sky and water visuals, running on several cellphones. While it’s not ready for the iphone yet, it will soon be, making me wonder if it will work with the ipod touch and wifi or not. It does say 3G or wifi enabled phone in the faq…

When their iphone version is ready, i’ll definitely load it on the ipod touch and find out.

Yeah, it’s the Live Show direct and live from the old SLPN headquarters on Nowhereville!!!!!!!! Umm. Three weeks after it happened. Oops.

Hey, sue me. Or wait, don’t. I spent all my money on a new boat, but it handles nice. I guess you could sue me for that, but it’s non-transferable. Sorry.

Avatars live forever. People don’t. Yet.

There’s no doubt that one of the things science and medicine are working towards is immortality. People don’t want to die. But in the rush for endless life, they forgo thoughts of the rightness or wrongness of this, of what it means to be human, and whether or not we’re built for this. And why we clearly are “rezzed” with an endpoint built in.

One podcast I’ve recently started listening to is the Big Ideas podcast. This is the audio from a tv show that has as its premise lectures delivered by notable thinkers speaking on some topic of expertise. Sounds boring, right? It’s not, at least none of the lectures I’ve listened to. These are perfect for biking to work, btw, because I find I can get them about half done on the way in and finish them up on the way home.

Anyway, one episode featured Leon Kass talking about immortality. And death. And dying. Asking questions about whether or not extending life significantly or even eternally is really the right goal that science and medicine should pursue. He brings up points about the effect life has on us psychologically, and the selfishness of wanting to keep life for ourselves possibly at the expense of the natural way of keeping life intact, which is to say, procreation and continuation of the species through subsequent generations.

It’s an interesting topic. We live in a society that flees from death with its arms and legs pumping as hard as they can. We worship youth with a reverence unmatched by that of devotees to almost any religion. Plastic surgery is rapidly becoming a “have/have not” divider, and the emphasis on appearance and youthful attitude has never been greater. In my mind, we’ve over legitimized the importance of it to the point where parents are so desperate to be their child’s best friend, they no longer want to be parents in terms of discipline, structure, and any of the other adult supervision constructs that teach kids they can’t just do whatever, whenever.

It certainly must be a topic that SL’ers have considered. Your avatar does not die. It does not grow old. It does not gain weight and lose its eyesight. And no doubt the avatars are a standing testimonial to our every living desire to be beautiful, overly idealized, strong, youthful, eternally young creatures. How many guys log into SL and immediately go into steroid mode? A lot. How many women want a waist you could put one hand around but want enormous breasts that curiously have never heard about gravity? A lot. It goes back what I see as a problem with humanity. We refuse to shake our mental constructs even in a place where we could shake off every last one of them if we wanted. Even in a virtual world, we’ve chosen the same thing we can’t let go of in the real one. The thing that can literally crack some people if they think they have to give up. Perfection. Eternal youth. Idealization.

I know I pick on face lights a lot, but they are really to me a symbol of this. We’re so obsessed with perfection, that having shadows on our faces is called unnatural? No. It’s not. Not unless you live in a photography studio. And if you do, and you think that’s how everyone should look, please. Stay there. Don’t come outside.

If the virtual world has ever brought stark contrast in your mind to your RL plight of heading towards the eventual inevitable, listen to this lecture. It’s an important topic, aimed at an increasingly myopic society willing to trade the interests of future generations for their own selfish ones now.

I couldn’t find a link to the audio for this episode on their website, but if you go to the itunes store page for the podcast, it’s listed second from the top in the show listings. Grab it there (http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=129166905). Or directly from their rss feed, the link to the file is show as http://www.tvo.org/podcasts/bi/audio/BI_Full_20030321_LeonKass_0×0_40k.mp3 and the rss feed link is http://www.tvo.org/TVOspecial3/WebObjects/TVOMedia.woa?bigideasfeed .

I’m not sure how long that episode will be around, as the web site and the date shown for the show in itunes differ (2005 and 2003, respectively) and the web site didn’t have an apparent audio link to the Leon Kass lecture.

Cheers, old timer. And be advised: we are going to die someday. It’s how we’re built.

Have you ever wondered “Why am i Here?” No? Well, whether you have or haven’t, you should really get Here now and find the answer to your question.

The inimitable Torley Linden has created himself a sim that you can’t miss. You can try, but you can’t miss it. I tried. I failed. You see, Chug put a link to it in the Destination Station. And since it was there, and I’d read about it in Torley’s blog, I had to check it out. I had no choice, no freewill, no way of getting around it.

But, that’s cool, because it’s actually a fun sim. It’s certainly not like any other sim I’ve been too, and this should be right up Mathaios Brandenburg’s alley. I do admit to growing weary of seeing the same old pretty human cities recreated in cyberspace when anything is possible, imaginative options are endless, and we choose to create a mirror of RL. But Ha HA!! Friendly Greetings, because THIS is not THAT!

Upon teleporting in, you realize You are HERE! somehow.. not sure how, something subtle perhaps.

We all know about the watermelons, the piano, and other famous Torleyisms, but he must have something for big birds too. Not the sesame street kind, but realistic huge birds that could peck your head in.

There’s kind of a watermelony easter island thing going on near the landing area.

There’s also a 60+ prim cube that I really wanted to twist and scramble like a Rubik’s cube, but no such luck. I couldn’t get it to do anything. Bummer. Torley, I wanted to twist your cube, man.

Here I am, trying to blend in with my green shirt. Where’s my PURPLE PANTS, DAMN IT!?

And playing the piano, the way I can only in Second Life.

Up There is a vid tut station for watching video tutorials. I didn’t bother to try to find out if you could change videos. The one they had playing there was about changing SL time or daylight settings or how to be a man that looks like a woman.. I’m really not sure anymore.

From there I went to meditate on what I’d watched, with Big Torley watching over me to make sure I didn’t pee in the pool or something.

Speaking of Big Torley, that’s a head that could fill a sim.

We found a couple weird things, like this interesting dance/pose/something something.

And a man eating plant with a link to some videos on building or something on top of it.

Personally, I kind of dug the Starship Watermelonrind.

Torley also posted some of his philosphy in “read me from across the sim” high letters.

I dug the fact he had a small parcel that allowed terraforming just to let people do it, and play. Very cool. I made what looked like a triple dinosaur horn thingy, whatever dinosaurs had horns. I’m sure some dino or other must have. You can’t be a respectable species if one of your kind doesn’t have a triple horn on its head.

After that, we found a natural pool area with floatation devices. I chose the monkey. It’s my way.

We talked to Jack1.24Gigawatts (actually it was JackSomeReallyLongNumber) for a few minutes and then poofed outta there. But not before I took one last look at the sim called Here, created for and by the man named Torley. Truly the only one-name SLebrity (or celebrity, for that matter) that I can stand. And this sim is very Torley in that it’s education oriented, providing resources for learning more about SL, and just generally showing that you don’t need to take a sim, build a town, and generally bore the shit out of people in some apparent desperate need to make sure they’ll never come back.

So git on ova theya, ya heah? And check out the torley meister’s sim sim, sim ba la dim.