The Iraqi Game of Risk, 10 Years On

Location: Salad Bar, 10 Years On

I will never forget the argument beside the salad bar.

A conservative co-worker in our Physical Plant on campus knew I opposed Bush's war of choice, and he confronted me as I got my lettuce. Students, largely disengaged then as now from geopolitics, looked on at the two old people fighting in public.

"It's going to happen! We clean out the nest!" He said, emphatically.

"Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan, not Iraq, and that brute Saddam did not attack us on 9/11." I try to reason.

"You don't get it! This will be easy! We will turn the tanks right when we are done, and get Iran fixed too." He was gloating, and the students, the age of those who'd be dying in Bush's Middle Eastern game of Risk, were rolling their eyes.

"It won't be so easy; Iraq is a modern invention, a bunch of ethnic groups crammed together by the old Colonial powers. They'll turn on each other as soon as the brute at the top gets two in the hat."

"You are just spouting the typical liberal line." He was done. So was I. I reached for the dressing.

Ten  years ago, it was still the Freedom-Fries Era, of  salad-bar "Old Europe" vs. red-meat "Real Americans."

I was getting a salad, then wrote letters and op-ed columns. He got a burger and put a flag decal on his huge pickup truck.

What does it matter that I was right in the end? It was not a Risk game, and 4,500 dead Americans and God knows how many dead Iraqis later, that nation is a powder-keg. If it does not explode again, it will be the will of the Iraqi people and the resilience of their democracy, purchased with so much blood, that see it through.

Bush went back to his ranch and oblivion. We have that consolation at least about a man who set America firmly on a long-term decline with two wars paid for on debt, tax-cuts in the midst of those expensive conflicts, and exhortations not to sacrifice but to go shopping in defense of what he called a "sacred lifestyle."

Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their minions who massaged lies into a war did not see prison.

Afghanistan remains a missed opportunity, after an ADHD President and his war-criminal Svengali of a Vice President decided a bigger opportunity loomed. Then a clownish and finally, small man put on his flight suit to declare not just "mission accomplished" but, essentially, "game over, baby."

Except that it's not, and our tanks have come home. Yet the game goes on. Memories of tortured prisoners, religious civil war, and dead civilians will linger in Iraq.

My adversary over the celery stalks just says hello now. That was my last conversation with him and I don't need to rub my correct assessment in.

How's that for some shock and awe?

Channeling My Inner Geek

Location: Google Sites

Once again, I'm stepping into the fray to teach first-year students in my seminar Cyberspace: History, Culture, and Future. I get my share of geeks in the course, which is wonderful fun. Today I worked on an "about me" disclosure for the syllabus. It will be a romp, with Ernest Cline's Ready Player One and the Second Life House of Usher simulation as a final exam project.

Setting the tone is everything for such a class, from scaring off lazy-bones who won't want to exert themselves and luring in my fellow geeks. I think my description, that follows, does pretty well. I only forget to add that "Han shot first" to solidify my geek cred.

About Me 

I'm a Richmonder by birth and a lifelong geek, free-lance writer, hobby farmer, model-builder, and non-computer gamer (board games and role-playing games). I lived in Spain after college and have traveled a good deal overseas, especially in the U.K. In Spain I was attacked by a pack of wild dogs while reading James Joyce. Knowledge of Jack London's Call of the Wild saved my life, whereas Joyce provided no help at all. I now advocate that everyone read a lot.

In terms of my tastes in futurism, it's either dark stuff like Cyberpunk and post-apocalypse or, on the brighter side, Star Trek (original series) not Star Wars, please, save for Lucas' original films I & II. I'm decent with graphics, basic Web design and HTML coding, and hacking farm and older computer hardware. I fool around with cars, some of them quite fast, and I used to street race until it nearly killed me enough times to make my brain mature.

I listen to a lot of music, often loud and mostly on CDs or vinyl; I also rip tunes from these tactile media and make playlists, though I find ripped music on tiny devices tinny. I'm fond of first-gen Metal, Glam Rock, old-time music, some Americana, traditional country, and electronica by artists like Brian Eno. I don't have time for most TV or pop culture of the present era. I am easily bored but if interested in something, I will recall every detail for years. I cannot code my way out of nested loop. Facebook is for saying respectful things to family and stupid things to my friends. I am not very professional online.

The best student evaluation I ever got read (about a lit course on Invented Worlds) "this class is crazy, but Doctor Essid is just the man for the job."

Though in terms of birth-year I should be a Boomer, I find that generation smug and entitled. I was young enough to think I could ride my bike to Woodstock, and Vietnam was something that adults fretted about (until my older brother got drafted). After seeing America peak in 1969 with the Apollo 11 landing (I'm serious) I watched the slow slide of things, coming of age in the dreadful 70s with other Gen Xers, when everything sucked except Led Zeppelin.

As I grow older and crankier, and though I have published an article about Millennials and online engagement, I find your generation's online habits bizzarre, overly serious, and frightening. Worst of all, I consider most of you addicted to those little boxes in your palms constantly. I have a flip phone and don't text. If I don't know who is calling by voice, I also do not answer.

Stay the hell off my lawn, too.

Unless you have read Jack London when I call the dogs out on you. Hint: find the alpha and challenge.

Iggy & Pappy Swap Recipes

Location: Watching the Meat Thermometer

Well, it's that time again...for country ham. The real thing, Yankees: not some water-and-smoke-juice-injected mild ham but a smoked-in-the-smokehouse-by-rugged-and-somewhat-tipsy-Virginians ham.

Rule one for all-day cooking, such as that required for perfect ham: keep the drinks handy.

At the recent VWER holiday party, both Iggy and his ol' pal Pappy Enoch showed up to cut the rug and do some ice skating.  Pappy tried to give out Iggy's recipe for a perfect Martini, but Iggy needs to restate it here for those who could not attend. If you visit Richmond, you'll have to go to Thai Diner Too with us, so Yoko and her husband Jack can mix you one of Richmond's finest drinks (and best-kept secrets). Iggy's recipe is a pale shadow of theirs.

Ignatius' Almost-As-Good-As Yoko and Jack's Martini

• It's best to begin with liquor, shaker, and glasses that have been in the freezer or at least in the refrigerator. Cracked ice is better so, after shaking, one gets little icebergs in the mix...yum.
• Do not cheap out on the olives. They lose their savor fast, so look for gourmet ones with pimentos...do not get yuppie with Kalamatas, please. Spanish olives such as those from Serapis have been Jack's secret for a while.The company has an olive museum: 'nuff said.
• Per drunk: 2 oz top-shelf Gin (Tanqueray and Hendricks are Iggy's faves). Heretics may substitute top-shelf vodka (and if so, use more pearl onion than olive on the skewers. Martinis are not meant to be sweet).
• I rarely make a "dirty" Martini, but if so, I tip in some of the olive brine in the next step. Do not add more than a splash.
• Add liquor to shaker, where about 8 cubes of ice made from filtered water lie in ambush.
• Allow Gin and ice to become acquainted for 30 seconds or so, while gently agitating the open shaker.
• For very dry Martini, pour in a splash (perhaps a teaspoon) of dry Vermouth. My version of "dry" is about a tablespoon, but some tipplers add even more. I prefer merely tipping the Vermouth bottle in homage to the Gin and ice.
• Install the shaker top and check for leaks. They can be a heartbreak. Then shake it like it's a '72 Chevy Vega driven at 70 mph on a washboard road.
• In your glasses, add a skewer with at least 3 olives or, for Iggy's favorite, two olives with a pickled cocktail onion in the middle.
• Pour the martinis. Repeat at own risk.

"Well, that am some rite good city-boy White Lightnin'," Pappy notes, "But a natural-born human bein' man gots to eat too. Write 'er up, boy."

You will find these smoked hams, ones that can store without refrigeration until sliced, in country markets and gourmet shops (they do exist!) throughout the South.  Yankees and other unfortunates can order them and when prepared properly, as the chef at Edwards shows us in the video, the results are dramatic and delicious.

Our chef does not consider how to soak the ham. Doing this loses much of the salt but keeps in the smoky flavor. It may still be too salty if you slice it thickly, so practice thin-slicing on some lesser meats, then proceed.

Here's my advice for this year for getting yonder ham ready:

• After scrubbing any mold from the ham and rinsing, store it in a cooler. Cover with water and close.
• For at least two days, but no more than three, change the water twice daily. Flip the ham over when you do.
• For the last turning, add 2 liters of Doctor Pepper to the water. This is the Pappy Enoch way, y'all.  Then you are ready to follow this gent's advice:

Pappy: "Whee Hoo! Let's eat!"
Iggy: "What he said. Where are the olives?"


The only ham I've had that I prefer to real country ham is Jamon Iberico de Bellota, and that costs $30 per pound, if it can even be found in the US. Jamon Serrano is close, and vies for my love of ham, but I digress. Must be that Martini!

Boxing Day Update: the ham was astounding, the best in years despite overcooking to 165 degrees. Several pounds have been hoovered up by hungry Southerners. Note to self--new meat thermometer, then recheck near end of cooking time with my digital one.

Awry in a Manger: Merry Christmas, Y'all

Location: Checking Baby Jesus' Head

It is time for Rebar Jesus again. Welcome to a journey not to Second Life or OpenSim, but just down my street.

I will not name the local church, but they set out a series of stick-figures, apparently made of welded metal rods, drape them in Biblical costume, and poke their pointy bits into the ground. The entire ensemble of Wise Men, shepherds, and proud parents flutter in the breeze to show the lines of the metal skeletons beneath. The manger, such as it is, looks like a soccer goal with a few 1x6” boards strapped across.

It is not Scroogey of me to deplore this Yuletide atrocity to one of the world’s great monotheistic religions. My disdain comes not from a lack of Christmas Spirit: our house features window-lights that go up on Solstice night, the longest of the year, to remind us that the light will return. I pick a cedar and we cut ourselves each year, with my grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s ornaments placed lovingly there. put it up on Christmas Eve, the old-timey date for putting up a tree, and take it down on King’s Day, January 6, when the Melchoir, Balthazar, and Caspar laid their gifts before the baby Jesus.

I am fond of the old customs, some from times before Christianity: we even walk outside to wassail our fig tree, then come inside by the fireplace to watch the Charlie-Brown Christmas special, as we drink egg-nog and wish for peace. But there is no peace to be had from Richmond’s bad Nativity scenes. At one time, the cultural doyens of our city could rein in our excesses, so that homes, under the Spartan rigor of Williamsburg’s simplicity, featured only white lights, one to a window, and any excesses, such as real pineapples, were placed in the wreath on the front door or kept entirely out of sight. Has the reader ever spotted a dancing Santa or string of red “tube lights” along Duke of Gloucester Street? No. If such a thing were to rear its ugly head, some matron whose family went back to Jamestown would rip it down and have a man in Colonial garb burn it up in a cresset.

Now, in these fallen and consumerist times, the Misses Propriety and Prudence Decorums of Richmond are long gone, and look what has happened. Just down the street from the Rebar Holy Family who could not find shelter at Home Depot, there is “Flatland Jesus” jig-sawed rather artfully from half-inch plywood and painted well. I almost like this one, until pass it in the car. At a ninety-degree angle, the parents of the Christians’ Savior of the World vanish. The church should have sprung for one-inch plywood, I guess.

The phenomenon of terrible Nativity scenes has spawned a Web site, as all things awful do, featuring Star-Wars-Lego nativities, Peeps crèches, and Elvis mangers. My favorite, pictured: all-meat Nativity with Jesus as a Vienna sausage.

Click and you'll find that the rest are there, glittering in their foulness like the tree-lot full of abominations that Charlie and Linus navigate until they find a little green tree, still made out of wood, making Charlie realize “I think it needs me.” Christmas needs you, Richmonders of taste and restraint, to save it from your fellow citizens on the tacky-light tour. Slow down from your shopping and manic preparations, like Snoopy on Crack, to watch that TV classic again. Then act accordingly. Trust me. I know Christmas. I trod the boards in the role of Scrooge for our sixth-grade holiday play.* Other cities manage this. New York, that place of craziness at all seasons, puts on the dog, rather than looking like one, at Christmas. The nativities of Midtown, not to mention the live one in Radio City’s Christmas Spectacular this year, were magnificent in 2011. There was not a bobble-headed goat to be seen. And as for the long-legged Rockettes angels? Well, I’ll be good so I can go right to Heaven.

Yet there’s one more tacky manger story to tell: my own.

Under that big cedar we cut, I lay out my remnants of my parents’ Nativity scene. It was once nice, or should I say, they once were. The set consists of about ten different ensembles from several decades and in all sorts of scales. My late mother was rough on Christmas ornaments, including a clay Holy Family I picked up for her in Madrid. One of the Castilian shepherds is now missing his left hand, and when I went to adjust Jesus’ crooked halo last year, his neck cracked and his head fell right off. Thank God, in all His or Her names, for teaching humans how to make Gorilla Glue. The baby now rests peacefully in his little bed of Spanish straw, surrounded by old Woolworth’s plaster magi, a handmade sheep that I think comes from the late 1800s, plus a Major-Matt-Mason Astronaut and plastic Santa.

Christ’s halo rolled under the corner of a large bookcase and I’ve yet to fish it out. But that child’s smile is still as divine, as if the little baby is laughing at our follies and our scurrying rush at Christmas. Someone far older and wiser is looking through those infant eyes. Come, and adore Him.

So if a pink flamingo or cement lawn-gorilla ends up in you neighborhood’s Nativity scene, don't blame this Unitarian-Universalist. I have an alibi ready.

*Scary Factoid: Novelist James Howard Kunstler was also a sixth-grade Scrooge. I wrote Jim about this, and he assures me I'm no Scrooge. But I'd bury every tacky-light contestant with a stake of holly through their hearts! Humbug!

Waitin' For the End of the World

Location: Unpenitent

I'll take a break from invented worlds on screen to one that is happening in the flesh now: the myth of The Rapture. A Unitarian-Universalist like me, who disbelieves in Hell or Satan, who feels all faiths lead to the same destination though along different error-strewn paths, scratches his head at the invented world of The Rapture.

But some folks believe 100,000 (or so) souls will be taken up tomorrow, and Twitter is abuzz with jokes. I asked William Gibson if he is "taken up," could I have the typewriter he used to compose Neuromancer?  Pranksters in large cities are going to leave empty suits of clothing here and there on the sidewalks.

My one Rapture Tweet: "You got Raptured and all I got was a lousy 1983 Chevy Cavalier."

Even when I was a Catholic, I learned that this notion of Rapture is not only a Protestant "heresy" but also a recent one not based upon biblical ideas. The notion started in America.

I won't belabor the point or even allow comments on this post. I'll just editorialize one point: whatever holy books (inspired by God, edited by humans) say, any god who would create a hell and then cast people into it is not worth worshiping. I do believe in a God of love, not an angry old man on a throne who would cherry-pick a few humans. Perhaps oblivion awaits the evil: that's a mystery to me. Enough Catholic teaching remains with me to be comfortable with the idea of Sacred Mystery.

I believe that we were given this good Earth as a gift and it won't go up in fire and Tribulations unless we bring them down ourselves through poor stewardship. And if that occurs, I feel that God would be the first one to weep.

So see you all on May 22, while the End-Times calculations get reset yet again.  And we can get back to the cheerful nonsense of our daily lives.

Update May 22, 2011: The sky did not roll back like a scroll as farmer Iggy (real Farmville, not the game) mowed a field and worked on the backhoe yesterday. The earth did not open beneath my wicked feet as I sipped a beer and listened to the whippoorwills at nightfall.  No final trumpets sounded as I filled an old briar with "And Now to Bed" pipe tobacco, blended on the Isle of Jersey. I plan to go there one day.

Midnight came and went, and those awaiting the Rapture had to recalibrate their Doomsday clocks.

As my pipe smoke wafted up to the stars, so perfect beyond the light pollution of the cities, I gave quiet thanks, which is about all a Deist can do before a Creator who put matters into our hands. I gave thanks for this life, this world, and human ingenuity.

As for human foolishness and the desire to live in special times? As for a not-so-subterranean wish to see others not like oneself suffer?

I did not dwell on those things.

A Visceral & Negative Reaction to Virtual Worlds

Location: Pondering

Reading Hamlet Au's interview with Rod Humble, Linden Lab's new CEO, coincided with an event in class that merits some prognostication.

I've long called for a new name for the product, but I fear that Linden Lab and other VW makers face more of a challenge than that.

Mr. Humble will need to figure out a way to earn the trust of more Millennials, if that's a demographic LL wants. I encountered a visceral, rather angry reaction from a small group of 18-22 year olds today after one student simply asked "what is this Second Life thing you research?"

A short, non-evangelical reply of mine followed, explaining what I've done in SL and now am doing in OpenSim. I noted how embodiment leads to more participation at meetings than does a teleconference, and I explained how a literary simulation in a virtual world expands the notion of reading to a different sort of participation.

A heated but interesting discussion followed, mostly about how the avatar masked a person behind it and could lead to increased mistrust. Something about having an avatar mask and another name pushes so many buttons in my "typical" group of bright, careerist students (one exception, a blogger/gamer in the class).

Paraphrased reactions:

• Our generation wants transparency
• How do you know the person behind the avatar is who they say they are?
• This will *never* fly in a business setting, especially if someone comes to a meeting wearing a set of wings or a raccoon head
• Even a setting like Protosphere, with business-only avatars (I got a quick screenshot) is not serious enough and could lead to mistrust.

Etc. etc.  I could argue that they'd change their minds after a few weeks using a virtual world, but the class is not even remotely related to the topic.

I get this negative reaction in every class that hears about virtual worlds. I hear similar stories from colleagues at different sorts of schools.

Maybe we educators are wrong about these spaces. They'll have to be photo-realistic and connected to real-life identity, even more surely than a Facebook profile, for them to reach widespread adoption. For Gen-Xers, however, that sounds too boring to contemplate. We were used to identity being in flux.

It might help if young people learned to relax and have fun again. And that is not only the voice of a grumpy geezer, but a voice that inverts the usual "you young folks need to work harder!"

Yet I've never seen a more serious generation of students, in 25 years of teaching, than these. And they are sheltered. That worries me, because even with complete transparency and apparent knowledge of others, you can be cheated and abused.

Sad to say, but they'll just have to discover that without a virtual world.

Update 2/10/11: Students e-mailing to say how much they enjoyed the debate: good sign of more to come.  Also fixed spelling of "Visceral."  I had "Viscereal": strong cereal, indeed, these debates.

Communications Self-Analysis: A Blogger's Day

Location: Doing That Blog Thing

My students in the first-year seminar are spending one day tracking how they use a form of collaborative communications technology: something like Facebook, texting, telephony, or even...blogs. I told that that "fair is fair, so I'll track one of my days, too." The interesting aspect of this post is that I don't know what I'll find. How much time do I spend reading and writing blogs?


This is not me by any stretch. I'm reminded of the American version of The Office, where boss Michael Scott tries his best to be relevant. And he fails.

Yes, sometimes blogging does seem like a massive waste of time, doesn't it? Yet the technology also offers students an easy-to-master way to create multimedia projects.  It's a shift I'd argue that faculty must make in higher education, in order to remain relevant (or merely employed) in a time when state employees, including faculty, will increasingly be called to task to justify their work. I doubt that those of us working for private institutions will fare better, if we get a reputation for not using the literacy tools that are common beyond the gates of our cloistered campuses.

So how does someone who blogs spend the day? Here's my timeline for a day when I have some free time.

• 8 am: checked the following virtual-world blogs: New World Notes, Dwell on It, and (non-guilty lowbrow pleasure) The Alphaville Herald.  No comments made.
• 815 am: Checked my blog list here at Blogspot's dashboard. Read Dio's new post at The Ephemeral Frontier. I noted that she uses the term "meatspace" to describe the real-life profession of a boat-builder in virtual worlds. More echoes of Gibson.  Left two short comments for her. Read a much-deserved pan for the awful "Spider Man" musical at the NY Times. Left a sneer of my own about how stupid popular entertainment has gotten. It seems that many stories at the Times are merging with their blogs. Will there even be a difference in a few years? Blog-review done by 8:30 and I began this post. Time for my daily writing for me (not on a blog) and then, off to work!
• 11:00 am: While riding the bus, I finish reading an article in Cees Nooteboom's wonderful anthology about travel, Nomad's Hotel. How on earth could Nooteboom do that in a blog? I decide he could not. He is such a talented and subtle writer. I hope he wins a Nobel Prize before he leaves this world.
• 1:30 pm: After checking e-mail (and answering some blog-related questions from class!) I return to student blogs after a couple of days' absence. The rewrites of the first semi-formal project look promising, and I find myself reading all the other posts, since the students expect an estimate of participation grades.
• 2:00 pm: I avoid the temptation of posting a comment to New World Notes, since I don't think I have the facts straight on a copyright issue from the early 1980s and don't want to look misinformed. Back to student blogs!
• 5:30 pm: Getting ready for a night class, I could not resist leaving another remark at New World Notes.

What have I learned from tracking a day of blogging? The technology has kept me in a web of contacts, be they students, writers of other blogs, or readers who comment here. That was not easily possible for a writer before this technology blossomed.

I'm mindful now of Hannah Arendt's quotation, “For excellence, the presence of others is always required.” My work as a blogger or teacher is not necessarily excellent, but working with and in response to others has sharpened my skills and blunted any delusions--deserved or not--of excellence.

These technologies should put the lie to anyone who claims that writers work in garrets these days.

Under a Virtual Moon: Healing and the Light of the Moon

Dancing in my Moon Temple.

Location: Second Life

Things settled down in the Anam Turas group, with regular Sunday morning Open Pagan Discussions, Tuesday night healing ritual, and Friday evening Tarot discussions. In fact, it got a touch boring making my weekly rounds. Then, due to scheduling conflicts, the Tarot discussion stopped. The Tuesday healing ritual got a little spotty. I thought the group was pretty much over.

Before I could give up completely, Aoife Lorefield started an astrology discussion. This wasn’t generic what’s-your-sign stuff. There was deep planetary tracking interpreted by Aoife’s penetrating insights. Before each new moon we learned about  that month's particular astrological focus for “Yin Intentions”, or wishes. She created the Rising Moon group for moon location updates. New moon rituals were held.

I’ve had varied results with the New Moon Wishes. Usually about half of my wishes come true. One month I got all of my wishes! On the down side, for six months I’ve been waking up when the full moon is directly overhead. Its an inconvenient yet nice-to-have energetic connection. Hopefully I’ll get a notion about how to use that energy. 

United Healers of Second Life

About the time Aoife started her group, ConnieJean Maven came along with a Reiki Meditation Healing Ritual and spun off another group, United Healers of Second Life.The Anam Turas healing circle involved dancing and heavy emoting. ConnieJean’s ritual involved quiet, seated meditation on pads laid out in an energy grid. I found the contrast instructive and learned to recognize energy whether active or passive. 

The first time I took part in the meditative healing circle I was filled with calming energy for days afterwards. The second time, the first life people whose names I placed in the healing circle were healed and energized. As a bonus, the good energy I had sent out came back to me. And that keeps on happening. There was also a chakra healing meditation focusing on the throat chakra. The next day I was talking my head off. 

The Anam Turas Tuesday night healing circles have returned. Although the scheduling has been a bit bumpy over the holidays, the Rising Moon meetings and United Healers circles are still happening. All of the groups are open groups. You should be able to find them with in-world search. Join up and try the energy. You could have a better New Year.

Under a Virtual Moon: Becoming a Pagan Groupie

A Lammas ritual on Gaia Rising.

Location: Gaia Rising

As a shy and hesitant neo-pagan solitary, finding and practicing with others was a little scary. It was much easier to find a group in Second Life where an avatar could stand in for the real me. Although the partying pagans of Artemis Tavern were friendly, I craved quiet and reverence. I found that in the Anam Turas group. 

On their sim, Gaia Rising, I found a sacred grove area. Seeing an altar with nicely detailed tools laid ready for use was much better than the line drawings or descriptions I had found in books. While the tools were decorative and unscripted, the ritual area had a magical cauldron to incinerate notecard wishes, a clickable ball that closed the circle with white particles, and stone bowls on pillars (which fired up colored particles on a click) at each of the four directions. 

I practiced there and in the circle dance areas, the singing chakra meditation bowl gazebo, and at a grove dedicated to the Green Man. Paddling along in a canoe, I discovered a shamanic journeying blanket. Seeing all these ritual areas laid out in a matter-of-fact way and being able to try them dispelled my fears.  

I remember quietly sitting in my first Anam Turas ritual hoping no one would ask me to do anything and yet wishing I could. There I was in quasi-fairy blue-skinned winged avatar with a monk, a dragon, a few robed human AVs with pentagrams, a humanized otter and an AV covered in a violent shade of violet. I felt right at home. And I did finally get the courage to call a quarter for a subsequent ritual. 

Those SL experiences gave me the confidence to participate in first life groups such as: the Earth Centered Spirituality workshop and group in my UU church, a local urban pagan church and a local rural pagan church. Eventually getting the courage to become immersed by participating in a pagan festival and retreat.

Gaia Rising is still a welcoming place for exploring paganism. Their one sim has expanded to four. Each Sunday there’s an informal discussion of all things pagan. Avatars from around the globe chat, in voice and in text, about their lives and direct experiences with natural energy. Perhaps I’ll see you there. 

Weekly informal pagan discussion on Gaia Rising.

Avoiding Boredom and Needing Solitude: Why We Build?

Location: Fixing a Virtual Roof

When I am social, in either my physical or virtual lives, it tends to be with folks as smart and, believe it or not, broadly learned as my colleagues in the sciences. I'll party with those wild-men from our Physics Department this weekend. Woo hoo! Pass the tortilla chips and don't ask me to do any integrals!

I eat lunch daily with them, and a sampling of mathematicians and chemists, every day.  Otherwise, I don't "hang out" too much, go to virtual or brick-and-mortar clubs, or get too involved in in-person or virtual forums beyond the handful of blogs I follow and the events at my UU Church.

So Robert Hooker's post about identity in Second Life and his feelings that it does not capture one tenet of Postmoderism, Donna Haraway's "Cyborg" from her famous manifesto, got me thinking about what virtual worlds do mean for me.  Sometimes I'm happiest when there's not another avatar in sight, as has been the case for my SL road-trips (I'm considering continuing that little series, since I rather miss it).

I discovered a connection that I've been trying to articulate for a while in two articles, one in press and one about to go to the editors, about collaboration. Here's what I said in reply to Robert at his blog, as Hiro Pendragon and I both sought clarity about some of Robert's claims:

I'm not in Hiro's league as a builder, and I cannot script, but whenever I get bored with virtual worlds, I build. If you want social-constructivist epistemology that's at the core of Postmodern pedagogy in my field, writing, do a collaborative build with others and then make an immersive simulation.

That's a pretty Postmodern move, appropriating the tools a corporation provides to make something new, even subversive, and ephemeral, one of Hakim Bey's TAZs.

So I've begun to focus less on the avatar and more what avatars (and the users driving them) create.

I had been bored in SL for a long time before I moved my educational activities to Jokaydia Grid, where I'm building everything almost from scratch.

At the Virtual House of Usher, I've done little with the avatar of Roderick Usher, other than making his hair messy and giving him a nicely "Roman" nose. He is bone-stock. Instead, the build has been the identity I'm crafting. Poe's House appeared to be sentient, and its "leaden" presence influences the fate of all three characters in the tale.

I've never been bored, even once, while making things. Next week I'll be helping to build a cedar closet in the physical world and sticking the final bits on the exterior of Usher. Both will be nearly solitary pursuits and, like writing itself, rewarding only insofar as they lead to more creations.

Under a Virtual Moon: As in Second Life, So in the First

After "Belief-O-Matic" revealed my best religious fit as Neo-Pagan, I was eager to find out more. Coincidentally, I signed up for Second Life. Since Neo-Pagan was much like Pagan, searching on that term quickly brought me to the partying pagans of Artemis Tavern. When the tavern DJ, who also happened to be a landlord, heard that I was looking for a quiet plot to build a grove, he prepared a vacant parcel for me.  

Elaine Mumfuzz, noob neo-pagan.

I added a bunch of free and reasonably priced prim trees, building my grove with a clearing in the center. There I placed a meditation pad, a freebie magical goddess fountain and a field of particle flowers. After a few weeks of dancing the ubiquitous "dream dance" in my sacred grove, I felt more grounded and peaceful in first life and more tuned in to the ebb and flow of energy. 

Borrowing from rituals in world and resources off world, I created simple rituals to manifest intentions in both worlds. Sometimes I performed a ritual in SL and repeated it in first life and other times vice versa. The energy barriers between SL and first life dissolved. To explore those changing energies, I transformed the plot variously into a standing stone circle, a fire altar with candles, a simple prim cave, and covered it with sculpty water. My first life practice areas did not correspond exactly but that didn’t seem to matter as long as I worked similarly with the energy in both realms.

I moved on to terraforming, having found a water parcel in a quiet residential neighborhood. I transformed the parcel from a grove with a tree house, to beach property, to goddess meditation temple, and then to underwater nature center. In first life, my practice became increasingly complex as I began working with the cycles of the moon. In SL, I built a moon altar at 1400 m, leaving the ground area for public display.

I can tell you it is possible to do too much. I remember one new moon when I performed two in-world rituals and two off-world rituals within 24 hours. Instead of multiplying the energy into a frenzy of manifestation, I was becalmed. The energy stopped and nothing happened – fortunately. Since then I’m a little more careful, experimenting gently to balance in-world and off-world practices. 

So, I have learned whether in SL or first life, it is the same. What matters most is intention and infusion, whether in electrons and pixels or earth and moonlight. 

Two Places at One Time = Nowhere

Location: Campus Walk

I'm a big enemy of multitasking. When students do it and try to write, the work usually sucks.

When they walk across campus texting, a requisite part of their avatarian lives of constant ease and narcissism, they fail to notice how nicely we appoint everything to make campus pleasant. We should just pave everything so they don't trip.

I'm on this rant because lately, every third student has this "two thumbs on the keypad" walk and they often bump into others. I'm good at avoiding them. As for texting while driving: instant arrest, impounding and sale of vehicle, suspension of license for 5 years. But I don't see that (even though I love to rant on it) very often. I live and drive in town, where death would be a result of texting and driving, and fast. What those in America's suburban hells do rarely enters my life.

On a less lethal but equally moronic note, this "two places at once" phenomenon supports Sven Birkerts' observation from his brilliant The Gutenberg Elegies, where one outcome of networking constantly would be a "waning of the private self." As I've often said in my rants, perhaps the unmediated moment of self-reflection is simply too much to bear. Being alone with oneself might just reveal an inner emptiness that would make Camus and Satre shudder.

Another outcome of youthful, and for that matter, adult, multitasking is an inability to see chaos and disorder just beyond the membranes of our safety-bubbles. Our bubbles, distractions of consumerist bliss and networked companionship, can pop quickly. I'm going to close with Jim Kunstler, whose blog this week featured this Yeatsian moment:

"what happened to reasonable, rational, educated people of purpose in this country to drive them into such burrow of cowardice that they can't speak the truth, or act decisively, or even defend themselves against such a host of vicious morons in a time of troubles?"

Well, lots of resolvable, rational, and educated young people are too busy checking in with their hive of friends to pay attention. And come November, we'll reap the whirlwind of their wavering attention spans, as the wrathful and ignorant gain influence in our government.

Cyberpunkish Musing: Utopia? Or Dys?

Location: RL Desk, Fixing Class Web Site

Over at New World Notes, I have followed the discussion of Neal Stephenson’s response to the erroneous claim in an NPR story. The reporter misused a quotation by the author about Google Earth to claim that Second Life is what Stephenson imagined in Snow Crash. Can we map the template for a cautionary tale over this novel and (to my mind) the better crafted The Diamond Age? That has been my reading of both books.

I’ve been troubled by years about the craving others manifest for that future and, indeed, any future with a transhumanist immersion in consensual hallucinations. It worried William Gibson a lot, too, because, like Stephenson, he set out in part to warn about the power of media. I've lost the citation where he acknowledges the irony of what happened after the book appeared. But as he noted in the now quaintly dated documentary Cyberpunk, his fanboys and girls viewed the Neuromancer trilogy as a sort of utopian roadmap for the digerati in their leathers, high-end computers, and industrial-space housing (at least until they can join the exodus of mind to cyberspace). For Snow Crash, though Hiro Protagonist is just what Stephenson names him to be, my sympathies lie with Raven, Mr. “Poor Impulse Control.” I suspect that Stephenson made him an admirable villain to remind us of who gets left behind, and may fight back, in the sort of libertarian nightmare depicted in the novel.

Raven’s glass knives are the ultimate reminder that Meat is greater than Mind, if I may mix my cyberpunk tropes a bit.

So, here's a different future from Neo-Luddite, Peak-Oiler me. Not as darkly sexy as Snow Crash or Neuromancer...but reality is always drearier and scarier than SF. As Gibson noted in a recent post, "The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely…more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian." Read the rest of this post at Gibson's blog to see why he's not simply, to use his words, one of those "aging futurists, who of all people should know better. This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing."

I'm not sure that my vision of the future will be so good for many who use virtual worlds and crave better ones. It will be both quotidian, in Gibson's terms, and very difficult.

We'll run out of cheap resources before we build consumer-grade immersive fantasy-lands online. Our efforts will be more mundane, to marshal our technical powers for survival in a time when not only highways but power grids enter a period of permanently cascading failure. There will be no fusion reactors, Mars missions, everyday nanotech, or Singularity. We'll be spinning windmills, stripping mountains (unless we Greens can stop it) for coal, and going to war for the last oil fields. We'll be growing our own food and patching our own roads to maintain local commerce as we rip apart vacant big-box stores for building materials or repurpose them as village markets as suburbia unravels.

"Good enough" technology like Protosphere will be used to avoid travel for those left-standing in business, as a permanent energy crisis sets in. The masses, in a dilapidated society, will play games and not create anything. That's not too different from what many social SLers do now. The games these futurians, looking for a bit of escapist fun, will be good enough. Virtual worlds will remain a niche for a few creators and academics.

Utopians and technophiles hate my saying this, but the future is going to look more like a more advanced version of James Howard Kunstler's dystopia in World Made By Hand, not the high-tech dystopias of Cyberpunk.

If I'm wrong, the smart-drinks are on me in The Black Sun, when we build some immersive and compelling virtual world far better than SL. If I'm right, I'll give lessons in splitting and stacking wood and fixing old-timey tractors on my farm. We'll make a run to get some bio-diesel from the local co-op and drink some Shine on my porch.

We’ll know the direction of futurity in a decade or so. It will be quite a ride.

Palestinian Site in Second Life Stirs Controversy

Location: Lord Ansar's Protest Site

Philip Rosedale's first crisis, as Interim CEO of Linden Lab, may have arrived. I happened upon a huge controversy in the Linden Lab blogs today, over a site designed to protest Israeli tactics against Palestinians. I won't run the strongest images here, but the bodies of the dead are shown as prims draped in flags, and a captured Israeli solider is displayed in a cage.

At first I hesitated to go. I've some relatives who are Lebanese Maronite Christians and others that are Shiites. My Druze friends have relatives who fought on the side opposite my relatives in the Lebanese Civil War. So rather than editorializing my own strong opinions the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, I'll just report.

So far, as I learned from the Linden Lab blog post, one item has been subject to an abuse report to Linden Lab. I understand that it depicts The Al Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The creator, an avatar named Lord Ansar, permitted me to take photos and ask questions.

Iggy: you dress as an armed jihadi. Does this exhibit actively support that form of jihad? Or do you have another reason?

Lord Ansar: just because i like Mojahideen, i support them even with my look. . .its not somthing to be ashamed of. . . its something to be proud of

Lord Ansar: Palestinians are proud of resistance

Iggy: Do you think that Linden Lab will make you remove this protest?

Lord Ansar: i wish that that they will not ... Second life is a full life like Real life with all thoughts and all sides every one can do his own Land i think i didn't put anything wrong here

Iggy: anything else you would like to tell my readers?

Lord Ansar: if Lindens ask me to remove a specific thing i will do

Lord Ansar: as they did they asked me before to remove killed children pictures and i did

Lord Ansar: i want all the world to know the truth of zionists and zionism .. because media is not saying all the truth

Lord Ansar: and wish that Palestine will be free again. . .one day we will live in peace

Iggy: Inshallah, Ansar. Thank you.

A wish for peace is probably all that most folks will agree upon in this debate. The site is going to stir many strong emotions, and perhaps some legal action, given the content.

Do these pictures "speak for themselves?" Go and have a look yourself and decide (teleport link).

I have read that there's a growing Palestinian movement, including even Hamas and Hezbollah, for non-violent resistance to the Israeli government's tactics in the occupied territories. That would be worth an exhibit, too.

Blogger Challenge 4: RL & SL Age

Location: Rockin' Along in an Old Rockin' Chair

Alicia's posting of the BBBC challenge goes this way: Is your avatar more or less your current biological age? Do you portray a younger avatar, or older? Why is this?

You are, as the overused saying goes, as old as you feel. Except when my knees creak or my muscles tense up from hard physical work--and I do a lot of that on our farm, in our vegetable garden, and in the woodlot--I don't feel old.

Iggy looks like me at 30, though ironically, I have better stamina now than I did then.

The Iggy avatar, however, could not appear older without becoming a cartoon of an old guy. Aged skins were hard to find, and when I did find them and put on demos, the results were not pleasing. I wanted a bald-headed freak avatar with a gray beard, my actual look IRL, but with a well muscled torso. I'm fit and trim IRL because of my biking, yoga, and my physical work outside in all sorts of weather. I embrace my age.

I'm also a typical Middle-Eastern peacock about my appearance, and it saddens me to see how many guys in their late 40s let themselves go. They have big guts, flabby arms, and double chins. They put on Rogaine to rent some hair, though if they are fair skinned that's usually a good choice.

Dark skinned guys work out better as bald-headed freaks :)

Final note, since folks have asked: I added the dreadlocks after a friend in SL insisted I do so for a photo shoot, and I find it hard to say no to friends. Then, in an act of whimsy, I kept the dreads, added a tophat, occasionally a bowler or cowboy hat, and there I am.

Blogger Challenge 3: Relationships

Location: Doldrums of Slacker Land

Time for some analysis. I just cannot motivate myself during the time when my annual report, assessment data, and other tedious rituals of summer oppress me. Thus I completely went slack after my first two answers to Alicia Chenaux's Blogger challenge. In fact, I am rather bored now with SL, but Alicia managed to apply the jumper cables nicely to my attitude. I'll cover the rest of her challenge topics in coming days.

The third of her challenges involves this question:

How hard do you think it is to find a relationship in SL? If you have an SL relationship, have you met in the physical world? Would you meet them? Do you think it would change your SL relationship if you met?

I'm going to have to talk about this from a distance. Mrs. RL Iggy put it clearly when I began SL: "cyber" is the same as RL infidelity. Fair enough, but what do I think about the idea of an SL relationship?

While I've not been involved romantically with any ladies I know from SL, I do think it possible to have a satisfying intellectual / platonic friendship and even form working partnerships for writing or professional presentations. That would include men as well as women. AJ Brooks and I drafted a grant proposal, Dan Holt and I share ideas about writing classrooms, Viv Trafalgar and I have worked on a conference presentation and are drafting an article based upon our advice for developing literary simulations in virtual worlds. I plan to meet both AJ and Viv next year in person, when we travel to a few conferences. I doubt it will change much in SL, since I chat with them in real life.

I consider several of my VWER colleagues to be friends, and I plan to meet Kali Pizarro when, fates willing, Mrs. Iggy and I trek across the U.K. on foot in 2012. The nice thing about all these SL-to-RL meetings is how it gets us in touch with a network of folks who share an interest in these irreal spaces for professional reasons, a circle hard to find on one lonely campus.

Moreover, they put up with a lot from Iggy, who can be a smartass and dumbass.

So while I don't know how folks manage the pixel-to-person transition for romantic relationships, professional networking can develop into friendship and real-world collaborations out of Second Life.

This is Your Brain, Hooked on Gadgets

Location: Doing ONE Thing at a Time
image courtesy of UCLA Magazine

I was pleased to see "Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price" in The New York Times, and it's a decent follow up to my recent post about why I resist getting an iPad right away.

My own students love to multitask, and, frankly, often their work lacks depth because it has been done haphazardly and with partial attention. Too many students get Cs or lower because of this. Even though I encourage multimodal work that includes more than text, the core of the idea under discussion must be sound, and the execution must be excellent to earn an A.

A few of us in academe, notably Michael Joyce in his book Othermindedness and elsewhere, have celebrated the ways in which we think laterally and associatively, under the influence of networked technology. Joyce once praised "successive attendings" as more important to our future than a sustained attention span.

I won't deny that appeal and the power of lateral and associative thinking, because brains like Thomas Jefferson's thrived on it. But sadly, for most of us multitasking seems an either/or proposition. Michael Joyce has always impressed me with his expansive mind, like his fellow poet Walt Whitman's, able to contain multitudes.

Most of my students, as well as this writer, can contain only a few things at a time. The result of trying to overload the brain often comes with a price, and for students, it's likely the one paid by Connor, the son of one of the people interviewed for the Times story:

Connor’s troubles started late last year. He could not focus on homework. No wonder, perhaps. On his bedroom desk sit two monitors, one with his music collection, one with Facebook and Reddit, a social site with news links that he and his father love. His iPhone availed him to relentless texting with his girlfriend.

Connor began getting Cs in school, largely, his parents claim, because of his multitasking. And that is what happens too often to my students. Parents can--and too often do not--encourage better habits by example and, old schooler that I am, punishment. But Connor's parents are both heavy multitaskers, so dad interrupts vacation time to check mail and make calls. That's a different world from that of my med-school-bound friend John, when he was in high school. After one B on the report card, John got pulled from our gaming group until he again got straight As.

John got the scholarship to UVA. I limped in and out of Virginia with a C+ GPA. I will admit that I had a lot more fun.

Some diversions were different then: paper-and-dice games, dorm bull sessions, movies in an auditorium and not on a computer. Others, notably women and beer, remain the same. But the effects of dividing my personal time were pernicious. Luckily, I had no cell phone or laptop when I burrowed into the depths of the Alderman Library to read and prepare drafts in writing.

Now, every square centimeter of our campus library has wireless access, and the students don't look up as they cross our beautiful grounds. Their thumbs are busy, texting. With that goes a chance at introspection. As this shift has happened, I've grown less afraid that my students won't know the fable of George Washington and the cherry tree than I am that no one but me and a few other old folks will notice the cherry trees blooming in front of Ryland Hall. This is the emblematic price we pay for multitasking. Cherry trees are the unnoticed wallpaper for student walks, not a vital part of their college experiences to remind them that beauty and youth fade quickly.

One of Sven Birkerts' great fears in The Gutenberg Elegies, the waning of the private self, is coming to pass. There's no quiet time alone for those I teach. You can get a 2010 sense of his thinking in "Reading in the Digital Age," from The American Scholar. The waning process is well underway. How do we fight it?

I've learned, the hard way, to tell those who IM me at Gmail, despite the busy status, that "I'm busy." In Second Life I'm relentless about not answering IMs when building. I check mail three times daily at work, and that's it. I do not answer the phone, ever.

I've recaptured acres of time, as a result. But I have a strong will, strong to the point that I'll hurt others' feelings if they interrupt my work. My students, for whatever reasons related to peer pressure and a lack of counterexamples, live in a hive.

As a beekeeper, that's a metaphor I normally enjoy. But humans are not honeybees.

As a student put in in the UCLA story where I found the image for this post:

"If I'm reading for one of my classes, and doing other things as well, then I am not paying my full attention to the reading, and therefore learning less."

Other than "focus on one, maybe two, tasks until you are done," I see no other way around this dilemma. The task is hard, but the reward, as Birkerts notes, is no less than living what Socrates would have called an examined life:

Concentration is no longer a given; it has to be strategized, fought for. But when it is achieved it can yield experiences that are more rewarding for being singular and hard-won. To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one’s essential position.

Shadows on the Wall: Plato's Cave in Second Life

Location: Chained to rock

Special thanks to Cathy Anderson, of the SLED mailing list, for alerting us to this build

Jack Green Musselman and Jason Rosenblum had a vision to simulate Plato's idea that the Real is invisible to us. We are removed from the essence of things, like prisoners chained to rocks and made to look at shadows cast by hidden puppeteers.

Where better place for that than in Second Life? Thanks to St. Edwards University, the cave has a home. Teleport to it with this link:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Teaching%203/85/206/23

From the note card provided at the entrance:

Just Imagine... You and your friends and family and fellow citizens have spent your entire life chained together with your heads facing front and your eyes watching an inner cave wall. Unknown to you there are real people and animals behind you near the opening of the cave, near a fire, and they alone are free to cast shadows over your heads onto that inner cave wall. Your entire life is spent inside the cave thinking the shadows before you were, in fact, all there was to see and know. However, one day you escape from your chains and leave the cave.

On your way out you cannot believe that there was a fire used to cast shadows. But you do get out and then you really can’t believe what you see. At first your eyes are blinded by the sun but then you come to see the real world is so much more robust, more detailed and more beautiful than you ever imagined inside the cave. Now that you know how things really are you feel you must tell your family and friends and fellow citizens. Returning to the cave you try to convince the poor souls who remain that they’ve lived a lie in the shadows their whole lives, but of course they don’t believe you... Then, reflect on these questions...

• Could you ever go back and live in the cave? Why or why not?
• Why won't the others believe you if you try to convince them of the truth?
• In what ways might Plato's allegory be relevant to life in today's society?
• In what ways might Plato's allegory apply to your own life's experience?

I've spent my entire adult life obsessed with such questions, which is one reason I stopped watching television, stopped supporting chain-stores, turned my back on suburbia, and began to resist the assumption that technology can solve every problem.

Convincing others of these concepts, let alone that we live lives of illusion and temporary comfort, has proven difficult when the shadows are so seductive.


Yet the pedagogy of the Cave is likewise compelling. Will it inspire a few more prisoners to break their chains?

Read about the creators' vision for it, and how students reacted, at http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/plato-cave-second-life

Addiction To Second Life?

Location: Mixed Reality Event

Last night, I had the chance to listen as Wagner James Au moderated a panel with Philip Rosedale, Cyn Linden, and Jason Springarn-Koff, director of the documentary Life 2.0. The film screened at Sundance this year, and I'm looking forward to seeing it.

The topic was addiction. My own definition goes as follows.

Over the 3+ years I've been in SL, I have met individuals--never educators, I'd add--who spent enough time in-world to begin degrading their real-life jobs and relationships. That's not a definition from the DSM, but it seemed addictive behavior.

If the individual were making money or creating art, however, I'd make an exception. One of my neighbors draws for hours on end and is beginning to get noticed in the East Coast art scene. He's following his bliss and hearing a muse's call, something that, as a writer, I appreciate.

But I'd be curious to know what other experienced SLers consider the marks of addiction to the virtual world. We joked last night about being addicted to breathing, since we do it so much.

At a certain point, however, many other activities cause harm. What then are the harmful side effects of spending too much time in SL? And how much is too much?

Opinions?

Virtual Conferences: Less Schmoozapalooza

Location: In Recovery, Louisville CCCC

image "borrowed" from multiple sites

Another reason to prefer virtual conferences in place of actual ones: for too many conferees, big events like CCCC and the dreaded MLA meat-market have become places to pal around with the bright lights and impress just the right person.

At a prior CCCC, I spotted a well known scholar of computers and writing pinned in a corner by what I'd describe as a rabid "fan." The scholar is an old friend, so I walked by, inconspicuous nutjob that I am, and made a funny, but pained, face. He nearly cracked up, since he knew exactly what I meant...it's painful to have to play this particular game as an academic. Yet he is accessible to all comers, as are many pioneers I've met in the field of computers and composition. Not so long ago, it was once a tiny field.

I suppose avatars get mobbed at events, too, but there is always the faux system-crash as a way to escape that. More seriously, however, SL luminaries are available because they are connecting from home or office. The sessions end, folks walk around, and odds are you can ask a follow-up Q in person or at least get permission to ask it later, via notecard. Given academics' crowded professional lives, that's a lot less likely after a traditional meeting.

Perhaps is SL truly becomes huge, with millions of users, this familiarity with its "names" will end.

So will I continue to go to big national conferences? At times, yes, but increasingly I plan to attend smaller meetings and, when I can, avoid traditional conferences of any size. In the case of CCCC, which did not fall during a break, I have a few days work piled up before me. A virtual meeting could be visited, as I did for VWBPE, between classes or after lunch.

Obligatory drinking reference (again): We cannot go out for drinks with colleagues at a virtual event (in any way that matters to me). Thanks for that note, Dan. At the same time, I can get to know colleagues well enough in advance to be sure that I would want to have a drink with them, when we meet in the flesh.