Linden Lab's Project Shining and Educators

Location: Valley of Disillusionment

Of the many vexations with Linden Lab, no other exceeds my anger at their inability to understand how the US academic calendar works.

In October 2010, they threw us all for a loop when they decided to jack up tier for educators in the midst of our fiscal year. At the time, educators reacted with confusion, shock, and finally, justifiable anger. Since then, even SL stalwarts have noted the decline in educators using Second Life with their classes, as evidenced by the dwindling of college & university sims, posts to the SLED list, and lower participation in meetings such as our VWER group.

Now, with the mix of classes I teach, as well as research interests, shifting,  I prepare for what is likely my last-ever use of a virtual world in the classroom. I've planned a suitable finale at the Virtual House of Usher, but then I read the Firestorm Viewer blog, noting an easily overlooked Linden Lab announcement from June 2012 about "Project Shining."

On the surface, the switch to "server-side baking" will reduce one of SL's vexing problems of avatars not rendering properly. That's of interest to every category of user. For the technical details well explained, I point readers to Inara Pey's post on this topic.

Yet once again, the Lab prepares a massive change to its viewer software without considering what educational institutions might do mid-term in a semester. Project Shining will apparently roll out this month, just in time for my students' final examinations involving Usher.  For some schools, it will mean more and finding a Plan B viewer that works on a few computers: lab software often gets changed over summer and winter breaks. This is one reason my school, even during SL's honeymoon era when our IT staff had avatars, never installed any viewer on our lab images.

Now these folks, like many IT staff nationally, have forgotten their SL flirtations and have focused on the new (and more promising) shiny object, mobile devices.  No way I could get an SL-based project on their radar.

Yet thanks to the good will of Evelyn McElhinney of Glasgow Caledonian University, Usher returned to Second Life, with the structure of the House built at Jokaydia Grid and many props added from SL builders such as Morris Mertel and Trident. I've been shopping for a combat system too, all of which would support the hard-working, long-suffering content creators of the virtual world. They are probably the only group to suffer more than educators from Linden changes. Every time a server-code update breaks a script, it means more work for them.

The last time Usher ran for my class, I used my Jokaydia Grid's build, soon to be packed up as a final OAR as I end my work in OpenSim as well. Jokay's grid has moved to OSgrid and I've not yet logged on to check if my Plan B works. Expect an update here, and soon.

Thus I'm not sure we'll use Second Life for the exam. Expect an update on my decision after Jessica Lyon of Firestorm meets with VWER members later today, to talk about what her team is doing to be ready for the big update.

A Killer App That Killed iPhone for Me

Location: Verizon Store

image credit: screen capture from Google Streetview, on my campus near Westhampton Lake.


I'm not a gadget boy, but soon I'll make the shift from a flip-phone to a smart one.

And it won't be an Apple product. Why? Google Street View.

When Apple, for perfectly logical reasons, dropped Google Maps from their iOS 6 plans, they dropped me. I tend to by loyal--fanatically--to the Mac OS, and I'm a long-time hater of stodgy, backward Microsoft (Kinect and their fabulous two-button USB mice excepted).

As a tech user, there are some features that I refuse to abandon, and Street View is one of them. I have used it when traveling abroad to find a car-rental place or hotel that I'd never have found in the maze of York, England's medieval streets. Before Street View, I once walked to the wrong town looking for my car, just outside Bath. After Street View, I led a bunch of friends directly to the right restaurant in Istanbul, London, New York City, and San Francisco. My e-mail to Apple reads:

I am about to get my first-ever smart phone. My wife loves her iPhone 4, but without Street View being integrated into the OS tightly, Apple has lost me as a customer. I'm a 20+ year loyalist to the Mac OS, but I'm drifting away with iOS.

Just a word of advice to the geniuses at the Genius Bar: give me back Street View...now.

So yeah, it matters, Apple. I don't want to have to leap through three hoops to get Street View. I want it instantly, when I click on an address. The Phone app on the iPhone does that so well, with a "call" button in Google searches on Safari.

Instead of working with a competitor or launching a bunch of Apple vans to canvas and photograph the planet (how DID Google manage that?), Apple gives us a "flyover" view that won't help me find a restaurant or business from a human's-eye perspective.

Make my new phone an Android, please, Mr. Verizon Man. And if you show me a Windows Phone, my next post here will be written from jail after a headline reads "Professor arrested after stomping on crappy phone from stodgy company late to party where they never innovated anyway."

But Google? Bring  it on.

Who IS a Virtual Worlds Educator?

Location: SLED List

It may be easier to say who is most assuredly not.

A few weeks back, a colleague in VWER asked me "who is an educator" in a private IM.  I replied "well, if you teach at an accredited school..." but then I realized that some folks provide education to others in informal circumstances.

A story about Saj, one of my best students ever, came back to me. Saj is an Indian national who graduated to become a well known economist. He credited his considerable talent in mathematics to informal tutoring done, at a dining room table, by a retired professor who would work out equations by hand for a dozen Indian boys.  The teacher used recycled "green bar" computer paper for the teaching, and one by one he would write down equations and solve them for a horde of pupils who watched and memorized. They had a hunger to learn: Saj learned his "maths" by this method, and he had to watch the professor's work upside down, since Saj was the newest pupil and could not get close enough at the table to see the equations in their proper orientation.

So an accredited position does not an educator make, the material or virtual worlds.

But what makes  you NOT a educator? In the recent SLED-list discussion of Linden Lab's decision to offer SL through Steam, many participants fretted about rising graphics requirements for the virtual-world client. Then one soul chimed in:

"Game gfx have always been scalable. Just for the few that plop down a couple  hundred dollars on a new GeForce will gain the full experience.  Best $200 I ever spent!"

Easy for him to say! Imagine an educator telling students, "to take the course you must own a desktop PC and have this graphic card, or buy one, for something you will never, ever do again while enrolled here."

I have begun to reply to this SLED participant several times by e-mail, but I don't think I could do so politely.

Clearly, this person has not recently taught at a college, where nearly all students employ laptops of various, and usually middling, sorts. Nor has this person taught at any K-12 schools, where budgets are strained and computer replacement cycles run in the five-year range. While volunteering at one middle school in our city, I found that to order a replacement USB mouse from Central Office took six weeks.

Sure. Drop in a new graphics card, class! While a professional might spend that amount for a desktop upgrade...let's be serious. This is not the voice of any educator I know.

So let's try this an a definition: an educator is someone who not only works in an educational setting, be it a lecture hall or a dining-room table. An educator also understands the facts on the ground in these settings: what students need, what they can or cannot do, their level of motivation.

I am sure that a student like Saj would find the money to buy a new graphics card, if that were what he needed to excel in his studies. But most of my charges? It would mean dropping the class at best, grumpily slogging along and slamming me in my evaluations, at worst.

Now here, from the same discussion, in the voice of an educator:

"Interestingly the lowest res graphics game ...Minecraft...is incredibly popular...I don't think kids expect good graphics as much as they expect engaging learning, challenges that are relevant to their lives and acceptance that the world today (Google and the information repository it can search in your pocket) is different from the world 50 years ago (where you had to remember a lot of stuff). "

A new graphics card is a pain in the butt; engaged learning will pull the learner alone to all sorts of challenges, including those posed by rapid technological change.

The Antisocial Network: Facebook Takes a Holiday

Location: Facebook...no. Not Facebook

Well, for me, Facebook is an experiment that has...failed.

I had to create an account to moderate our Writing Center's FB presence, but inexorably my little site drew family members, friends, and status-updates from me.

And I don't like it one bit. So while I can't leave Facebook, I'm not going to update my status for a while, at least until after the November election. I find that at log-in, I'm assaulted with political spam from said "friends" and family, and often it's of the Right-Wing variety that makes my eyes cross.

Or perhaps it's the revelation--hold the friggin' presses--that some dunce who friended me "likes" Wal-Mart, a place I'd as soon crush with Cat D-9 bulldozers as enter for shopping.

Facebook can be useful to maintain distance contacts with old friends, but this year I've made the vow to see friends in person more and even mend a few old fences. In person. Not with pixels or cat videos or posts about some ill-conceived article that I simply must read.

Luckily, I can log in through our Writing Center portal to FB and not even see the wall of status updates. With a click, if I so choose, I can visit my own wall. I can post updates to the Virtual Worlds Roundtable Group. I can certainly access content such as Cloud Party without directly logging in to FB .

And that way I can bloody well avoid all the spam normally seen at login.  What did Bilbo Baggins say at his final birthday party in the Shire? "I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."

Meanwhile, I'm going to be doing more of what I've increasingly done all this curmudgeonly year: reading (and learning about e-book technology for my upcoming first-year seminar that will only use e-texts), smoking my pipe, sipping a cold beer in the cool of the evening, and, as has been the case with my explorations of Second Life, not going online as often as I once did.

I never spent a great deal of time at Facebook, no more than an hour each week. But somehow that hour felt like it had been through time dilation.  Having an hour back seems sweet, indeed.

Mobile: Shiny? Yes. Hyped? Yes. Fad? No.

About the image: Got your own SL meme? Thanks to Hamlet Au for alerting us to this hilarious meme. Have a crack at adding your own caption here.

Location: Before My Crystal Ball

The other day at VWER, a colleague who should know better claimed that tablet-based computing is a fad on campus, the newest and shiniest object for technologists and administrators. I disagree, even though I have long resisted using a tablet.

This summer, my work will focus increasingly on mobile. I'm not going completely back to Flatland. I'll be finishing some work on Usher, both at SL and Jokaydia Grid, given that I might run the simulation again in the Spring of 2013. Yet I'd be nuts to devote much time to these platforms, given the energy generated by the technology that students and colleagues are actually using already.

It's something of an apples-to-watermelon comparison, when looking at virtual worlds and mobile computing. That said, I remain convinced that SL in particular is a "legacy app" because of its limited return on investment. Readers of this blog may have to get used to a few new directions here, but I'll continue to cover my and colleagues work in virtual worlds.

As for this post? I don't think the SL evangelist is teaching on an actual campus today. Here's why.

Reason 1: Students have mobile hardware on them 24/7

When Second Life was being hyped in mainstream media, students were not carrying technology, by and large, that ran it well. As I noted as early as my first class with SL in the Spring of 2007, if an application did not run well on wireless and on a laptop free of an AC adapter, it might as well not exist for students.

In the five years since, that gap has widened as SL and the promise of public virtual worlds remain down in the Trough of Disillusionment. Gartner analysts predict 5-10 years for mainstream adoption.

Meanwhile, after diving in to the Trough in the 90s, e-readers began climbing out. Media tablets are past the Peak of Inflated Expectations, but they remain two to five years from mainstream adoption. Part of that involves standards. No one knows who will dominate the tablet wars that are surely erupt as Windows 8 devices roll out. I don't really care, as I'm still a novice even with my iPad 2. Microsoft has deep pockets and, despite my disdain for their OS before Windows 7, they can build great hardware; my MS two-button mouse is King Mouse, even when I compare it to the sleek Apple cordless I use at work.

Even as tablets begin to jockey for market share, the mobile experience has gone from students' ways of contacting each other socially to the default device for using the Internet. These devices are already "always on and always on you," to quote from Sherry Turkle's Alone Together, a text I'm devouring on my iPad. One after another student tells me, in brief e-mails sent from iPhones, that their laptops are being reserved for times when they have to "type a paper." That means Word, and that means print.

I'll blog more about the reading experience on a tablet later.

Whoever gains (or in Apple's case, maintains) dominance and establishes the standard matters less to me than the fact that SL and OpenSim do not run well, if at all, on tablets.  Unity 3D does for iOS and Android. I cannot make content for that platform yet, and may never do so, but I'd like to try my hand at exploring others' work.

Concurrent to all this churn, we are  moving to tablets on our campuses for consuming media. If Moore's Law holds true, these devices will become better and better at creating content.

One does not wish to be on the wrong side of history, and I think SL evangelists are clearly on the wrong side, unless they are early in their careers and have a Plan B for research and teaching.

Reason 2: Mobile apps directly relate to classroom work

Save for simulations, as I've noted at length here, there are few compelling reasons to use a virtual world of any sort in the classroom. Many of us don't even need a "world" for a class: we need one or two sims and good content.

The bigger world of SL helps this teacher only insofar as it gets me together with colleagues to share ideas. For some social-sciences or writing courses, I could see the advantage of studying a lively online culture, though IRB reviews could be a nightmare for publication. For language classes, live contact with speakers of other languages would be good.

Otherwise, why DO we send students in-world?

For mobile technology, especially e-texts and note-taking apps, the advantage in a classroom setting, traditional, online, or hybrid, are immediate. Students need not lug heavy books to class, work, or bed. The devices link them directly to research sources. Virtual worlds, in comparison, are clumsy add-on apps that do not play with other applications well. Hence the notecards, LSL minefields, database failures, and other peculiarities that keep VWs from becoming mainstream in the near-term future.

Meanwhile, students working with a colleague in Physics are walking around campus at night and pointing their iPads at the heavens. On their screens, Sky Safari. It is intuitive and easy and can be done on the prowl with our campus wireless. Don't try that with a virtual world.

Reason 3: "Fast, Easy Fun"...We got it wrong before

We will all have characters in MOOs. We will all study literary hypertext. We will all have avatars in immersive 3D virtual worlds.

We'll all pilot flying cars on our commutes, too.

None of these technologies were easy for mainstream users. Some were fast, and to me all of them could be fun.

Remember Linden Lab's marketing push a while back, given Philip Rosedale's pitch that SL should be "Fast, Easy, Fun"? Hamlet Au nailed the challenges Linden Lab faced then. I would claim, based on my experience in OpenSim, that the challenges are even higher for mainstream faculty.

Not so for tablets and smart phones. They are fast and easy. Changing apps is a lot easier for a noob like me than was changing my outfit in SL.

And used judiciously, they are fun.  Too many users are addicted to them, but that's beyond a faculty member's control.

Mobile devices as "Flavor of the Month"? Hardly. More like "future main course."

Hamlet's List: The Case for Stratifying It

Location: Head on Desk

Every month, Hamlet Au publicizes a list of Second Life's fifty most popular places. Here's the current one. The data come from Louis Platini's Metaverse Business site.

A commenter at Au's blog noted that segregating the list by maturity rating might give current and potential SLers a better idea of the platform's uses.  I agree...it's not censorship to sort the thing by rating or at least purpose.

Adult content, on the Zindra Continent and private estates, could be assessed with a click. So could education and arts (even if it's erotic art). So could roleplaying sims.

Concurrency at social sites of any rating tends to trump sites used sporadically by a group of avatars for, say, a business or academic meeting. Bowling Green State's virtual campus hosts up to 50 of us for a big meeting of VWER; the rest of the week, concurrency is probably far lower there.

Hamlet's list distorts what can be done in SL. Last month we did have Gerontology Ed Island among the dance-clubs and more salacious sites....now it seems to be all fun and games, of one sort or another.   I've not been to #7, "London City," so it may be a virtual version of the real thing.

As it is, the list hurts those new educators who might enter SL and embarrasses the rest of us. Au is the best known writer about Linden Lab's metaverse, so I'd hope he might change matters next month.

I imagined this scenario in a comment to Au. Here is is again.


Dean Wormwood: Thank you for coming in today, Professor Lag. I wanted to ask you about this Second World thing you use with classes.

Lag: Life, sir. Second Life.

Dean: Yes. Well, it's a lively life!

Dean shows Lag Hamlet's list
Lag raises trembling hand to forehead

Lag: Oh.

Dean: So, do you know what "bukkake" is?

Lag: Um...new type of Sushi....um...region in Second Life dedicated to Japanese culture.

Dean: Nice try. I Googled it...now don't tell me "Gor" is a poorly designed site about the former Vice President.

Update, 8 October: Hat-tip to Hamlet for publishing a new post with PG-rated regions. Of course, many educational sims have Mature ratings because of disturbing content or museums that feature nudity.  But this is a good step!

Cloudy Day, Fixed

Location: Hiding in My Fake Office

I was ready to wear Miso Susanowa's head as my avatar, I became so frustrated at being stuck as a cloud.

With both the 1.23 and 2.6 viewers, as well as Imprudence, the forecast remained "mostly cloudy."

My colleague from VWER and moderator-in-training, Grizzla Pixelmaid, gave me a surfer-dude starter avatar. Putting on "Craig" saved me for a moment, even if his smiley gesture messed with my "no perky people" rule.

Soon all was right again with the fake world and I reassembled my usual persona.

Many thanks, Grizzla!

My 2011 SL Resolution: Instant & Epic Fail

Location: VWER Meeting

We just gathered to share our resolutions for 2011 plus our accomplishments and sorrows in 2010.

What was in my head? Here it is, readers:

"I'm going to be less harsh to Linden Lab as I move on and do a lot more at Jokaydia Grid. Time to move on and all that."

Someone wave the "BS" flag, please.  Well, I'll try to be less harsh, since I'll be in SL a lot less.

How's THAT for a New Year's Resolution!

Happy Solstice to all. A new year is just around the corner.

Copyright Sniffing at Second Life Marketplace?

Location: Frank Lloyd Wright Virtual Museum in Second Life

Cry, "Infringement!" and let slip the dogs of copyright!

This is quite the black Friday for those fearing over-zealous IP enforcement.  Tateru Nino and Hamlet Au have covered the snafu of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation's decision to not renew permission for The Frank Lloyd Wright Virtual Museum, an homage to the architect's work built in Second Life. I won't cover that, since both bloggers have done such a good job already.

Neither of them note, however, the red meat Linden Lab has thrown to prowling law-dogs, when LL pushed commerce to their online marketplace.

Hamlet notes that one reason for the reversal of an earlier decision to endorse the SL build was the Foundation's outrage over Wright-themed items on Second Life Marketplace. Never mind that the items were not made, sold by, or endorsed by the group in Second Life.

A concurrent event could make this situation far worse for, say, anyone in SL who makes a sneaker that resembles, not that I've ever seen such, a Converse All-Star. Tateru also reports, in another post, on a bill in the US Senate, "The Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act," that would permit "prosecution of similar designs for clothing, which need not be limited to physical clothing, but also of virtual items. Formerly, only the trademark text, logos or other iconography on clothing was protected – but now the whole design" would be.

By making changes to search in SL that made many merchants close their in-world stores and migrate the online marketplace, Linden Lab began to reap revenue for each transaction in a way they could not from in-world locations. Of course, it lost tier payments for those merchants who closed their shops. What the Lab probably did not anticipate is how easy it can be to comb through a Marketplace search for "sneaker," even without a SL account, then flag copyright violations. Many interns and junior partners at law firms will be busy for years on this.

I suspect that the quarry will simply find a new home.  Such a waste of legal talent, when copyright holders, such as Wright's Foundation, might instead encourage homage in fan-created items.  After all, no one is making a replica of Falling Water in the world outside my window, then putting it up for sale as "just like Wright's masterpiece!"

It's ironic that Wright chose the term "Taliesin" for his studio.  In Welsh myth, the trickster/demigod/bard stole wisdom from the Goddess of the Underworld, Ceridwen. The goddess pursued Taliesin, who kept changing forms to evade her and her wrath. She finally got him, changing herself into a hen who ate the trickster, who had become a grain of wheat.  Ceridwen became pregnant and birthed a beautiful child, and she was unable to slay the reborn Taliesin.

Ultimately, Taliesin got away with his affront to a deity. I suspect that the sleek and greedy hounds of Copyright Law will make a lot of money chasing the protean figures who follow Taliesin's example. And yet, after a long chase, the hounds will lose their quarry in the wilds of the Internet.

Will Linden Lab lose business? No doubt. More commerce may come back in-world, but some will just shimmer and vanish, like Taliesin's becoming a salmon and swimming away.

A Conspiracy Theory I Like

image: the lovely Olivia Hotshot ponders

Thank you, Pappy Enoch, for sharing this comment from The Alphaville Herald's story on the Royal Screwing of educators by Linden Lab. Comment by Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia, who obviously knows how screwed "customer service" can be if you must grapple with the bureaucracy of a university or try to push a reform through a faculty meeting.

I have a crazy conspiracy theory about this:

Linden Labs knows it’s going bankrupt. In fact, it knew it was going bankrupt back in 2007. Back then somebody looked at the books and said “we’re going out of business somewhere in Q2 of 2011 and there is nothing we can do to fix it.”

So Linden Labs just wants to go bankrupt quietly, without getting sued by well funded legal departments like large corporations and educational institutions tend to have, so they needed to get rid of them.

First they drove out the corporations using horrible customer service. They hoped this would send the academics running for the hills as well, but they underestimated the lousy customer service experience that is the modern educational system. Academics give each other worse customer service than Linden Labs gives it’s customers, so that didn’t work at all (seriously, you ever talk to a bursar or financial aid department, or god forbid, a professor? They’re all sadists!).

Then they tried targeting the academics by killing the academic SL wiki and booting Woodbury over dirty politics while continuing to increase pressure with horrible customer service while claiming the JIRA and knowledge base are being “upgraded” periodically. That got at least half of them out, but academics are a tenacious lot.

Then SL took out the big guns. They decided to kill the teen grid, which should kill at least some of the academics, right? That didn’t get rid of enough of them. They still have some large schools with scary legal departments in SL, and they need to leave quick before SL files chapter 11.

In desperation, LL decided to double the price of academic sims in 3 months. Now they’ll be rid of almost all of them, they hope. Now they can go bankrupt in peace.

Want a shirt? Drop me a line in world and it's all yours! Get 'em and hack it into OpenSim! Hell, ask me and Iggy Strangeland will send you one to your grid of choice.

Show your Linden Love. They sure showed it to us.

September Roadtrip: Mini Me, Broken Road

Location: Rock-->me<--Hard Place

When I'm not on my bicycle, a Mini Cooper S is my favorite ride, a wicked-fast but economical rascal of a car. A scamp but not a cad. It has more personality than would be legal if boring people ran the world. Well, they do run it. . .but they've yet to ban this sort of frugal fun.

So I had to get a Mini in SL, eventually. Thanks to ALV Rau, I found a Cooper a lot like my RL car, though it's not an S model and lacks the black bonnet stripes and top that sold me on the actual vehicle. Caveat: I dislike red cars, but black is always in style and Mini Me is at least as much black as red. Visit AL Motors in-world to have a look at the typical (but well done) SL Supercars and other unique items, like a Seat 600 (Spanish version of one of my faves, a Fiat 500).

With high expectations, I set out. How did Rau's virtual Mini hold up in SL?

Well, size matters a lot. Compared to the '59 Caddy or the Dominus Shadow I often use for road trips, the Mini can turn on a virtual dime, a virtue that commended my RL car to me as well.

I began my journey at Yadni's Junkyard. I had high hopes of making this circumferential journey back to the same spot.



Rau's driving HUD was a welcome companion on this trip. I could shift, monitor my speed, and do other tricks without losing sight of my driving. It's not nearly as good as using a wheel and pedal that a dedicated game could have, but I'm fast-fingered and can manage a keypad and a mouse for this sort of experience.



The car's interior is also well done, and though not a perfect match for my actual Cooper it shows a lot of care on the builder's part.


Normally, that level of detail would making driving a virtual car an immersive experience, but the Department of Public Works was on lunch break, I reckon. The upgrade to Server 1.42 did not improve sim-crossing much. A few sims, at first, loaded so smoothly I had great hope. But then I came to it: world's end at the Calisto/Atlas sim crossing.



Stuck there, I did something I'd never dream of doing in my real car: I texted. Yes, I got on IM and began to rage against the stupidity of a company that could not get such a basic service to work, especially after spending untold hours of staff time building a highway network in a world where we can fly and teleport.

What can Linden Lab do? Well, fixing it would be a modest suggestion. Hamlet Au reports that Linden Lab has just hired a Kim Salzer, an "an alumnus [sic] of Activision/Blizzard and Electronic Arts" as the Lab's VP of Marketing. Good news, if the Lab wants to "game up" SL, but Ms. Salzer will need to get the coders working hard on fixing the physics of sim-crossings. Otherwise, even a single vehicle cannot make a short run through nearly empty sims.

Otherwise, don't market SL with images of racing vehicles. It won't happen without some major changes, and SL's fleet of cool vehicles will remain simply eye-candy for dream homes and RP sims.

I'll attempt the same route next month and see how it goes!

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.

August Roadtrip: Breakdown

Location: Side of the Road

Is this my final road trip in SL?

It's getting nigh impossible to travel by vehicle in SL. I say that while using a brand-spanking-new laptop with 8 GB of RAM, SL client 1.23 (no Viewer 2 for me), and my work connection, far faster than my zippy FIOS connection at home.

I may have to reconsider these monthly adventures. SL is having trouble and Philip Rosedale's window of opportunity for fixing it is limited. SL users will keep leaving. I don't think there's much of a driving community, anyhow. Perhaps the racers stay on low-lag sims they own, on special tracks. That's hardly the free-wheeling adventures I imagined when I saw the road-grid on the continents.

I realize that driving will never match the experience of a console game, but unless lag is reduced and sim-crossings made easier, the Lindens simply need to stop with their road-building plans.

Or maybe we can walk on them. Anyhow, here's what happened. Mind you, until my crash, I was moving rather slowly through empty sims.

I began at Starting Point: Gun Club Bar & Vehicle Rezz Area. My soundtrack: T.Rex and Iggy Pop

I found good cliffside views on road through Duck Sim. I can ignore all the "for sale" signs and continued evidence of crappy builds that focus on games of chance. If anything, the best casinos in SL before the ban were well made: today's parlors full of Zyngo and other games look like a loser's arcade at some ready-to-close amusement park.

If only the metaverse would fall into ruin, it would be more stately than this slow and continual slide in the tawdry and soiled version of what it might have been. Many ruins have a certain grandeur.

Driving past the Isabel infohub was fatal.; I crashed like the Hindenberg. When I returned, my car was at the Infohub with some noob named Pepe in a passenger seat. I planned to just roar off with him in my clutches and then use the ejector-seat option at the right moment by that cliff and sheer drop to the see, but Pepe got a good look at me, then ran for it before I could get the car to even move.

When it works, traveling in SL reminds me very much of Iggy Pop's song "The Passenger," because as fake as it all is, I do like it that we made this crazy world on the Lindens' infrastructure.


He sees the stars and hollow sky
He see the stars come out tonight
He sees the city's ripped backsides
He sees the winding ocean drive
And everything was made for you and me
All of it was made for you and me
'cause it just belongs to you and me
So let's take a ride and see what's mine.

Well, it does not belong to us, since Linden Lab changed their motto. And we may have to walk under that hollow sky. Fix the physics, Linden Lab.

A Positive Challenge to SL Bloggers

Location: Darned Crow-Dinner Again!

Lalo Telling, whose blog I greatly enjoy, alerted me to Alicia Cheneaux's Big Bad Blogger Challenge. The challenge: post three positive things going on in SL for the blogger.

Here, Lalo and Alicia, you have it:

• Richmond now has a little showcase of my students' work in SL. I'm awfully proud of these youngsters.
• It must be a slow night at Treet TV. Iggy will be holding forth on "Designing Worlds" tomorrow, part of a panel discussion. I plan to be as positive as I can!
• Pappy Enoch reports that after six weeks of squatting on abandoned land, the Lindens have not yet evicted him.

How's that?

And thank you.

Did Fake Superheroes Get Woodbury University Campus Deleted?

Location: Chronicle of Higher Education Web Site
image: Comrade Enoch waits to meet with with Technocommunist Cadre at Woodbury U, in happier times.

I came across the story of how this all occurred, and I'll share my reply to the Chronicle's tale here. Woodbury University's virtual campus, long known for tolerance toward its students' wilder bursts of creativity, has been pulled from the Linden grid.

A group of in-world superheroes, known as the "Justice League Unlimited" appears to have escalated its long-running war with many Woodbury students and friends of the university. JLU members have long been accused of working at the behest of Linden Lab as a force of unpaid rangers. See Professor Henry Jenkins' excellent account of this "war" fought in cyberspace.

But on to the current removal of the campus. One respondent at the Chronicle asked,

"Did Woodbury transgress known and well-publicized rules? Or did Linden Lab swoop down on Woodbury in an arbitrary way that the university could not have predicted? In other words, is this about a TOS violation or freedom of speech?"

Linden Lab is busy reinventing itself as a corporate-friendly provider of business meeting space and "Sims" style suburban roleplay--their recent ads show happy white heterosexual couples building dream-homes.

The company has consistently marginalized academia by, most recently, effectively laying off their leading advocate to higher ed, Pathfinder Linden, by removing his position in the company.

The Lab has also marginalized creatives by implementing a new viewer technology that makes user-generated content more difficult.

Woodbury had a right to do what they pleased on their land as long as they did not violate the company's Terms of Service.

That Linden Lab relies for enforcement on a band of self-proclaimed superhero-avatars is pitiful, and it reflects the end of a promising and creative virtual world as we all knew and enjoyed it. If Woodbury students used racist names and engaged in griefing, then they--not the university--should be punished according to Linden Lab's established abuse-reporting procedure.

I hope the Woodbury admins will look to Open Sim and host their own servers, with the right to back up IP and allow students creative freedom.

The JLU: image stolen from courtesy of Henry Jenkins' blog.

Unless that's the Silver Surfer in the upper right, there's not one Marvel superhero in the bunch...go figure. Marvel heroes fought the Man, instead of doing his bidding.

Updates:

4/21/10: Untidy work by me attributed some referenced content to Peter Ludlow...they come from Henry Jenkins.

Prok (see comments) may well be correct about the provenance of the poster. When I contacted him for clarification, Comrade Enoch, after putting on his Red Army brain-control device that transforms him from a Virginian peasant...I mean hillbilly...to a happy worker, reports that he had equipped his Cuban Robusto with a "load" provided by a Jamaican comrade. Thus he had no idea what planet he was on, let alone which sim, as he "marched in lockstep with the revolutionist cadres to free the oppressed poultry slaving under the iron heel of the bourgeois oppressor who has reduced mere eggs--the origin of life--to just another commodity produced by alienated labor."

4/22/10: Scott Jennings, at Broken Toys, writes a very different take on this drama-fest that is far more critical of Woodbury U. He skewers SLers' self-absorbed view of our virtual world with canny brilliance, such as noting how the ACLU must be falling over itself to "defend the civil rights of spoiled children and middle aged men pretending to be pixies to harrass other spoiled children and middle aged men pretending to be pixies."

Lindens Market Suburban Life With Fake Kid

Location: Torpid State of Smoldering Discontent

So this vision is the best that Linden Lab can do for us today? This is pretty far from what creative residents have built on Linden Lab's infrastructure. The Lab currently seems to be casting about, wildly, for customers. The campaigns flail back and forth, from the far slicker and interesting "put some steam in your punk" images that ran a couple of weeks back to...this.

It's The Sims. Uh, yeah.

As a wag at the Alphaville Herald put it, soon we freaks may have a stark choice: we can look elsewhere for the artists and creators or "be here and have a nice life that looks just like your real life. While in SL, you can watch (at 8fps) your avatar mow your virtual lawn and chat with the other seven people with active accounts."

While the Lab has segregated the new 'hoods into themed areas, they don't seem to have learned the trick for their advertising. If you want us all to continue to live in SL, Mark Kingdon, you had best learn some real-life demographic facts and pitch ads like this in venues likely to attract the right eyes, not the scoffers like me who equate "suburban" with "boring and resource-piggish and soon-to-collapse."

Linden Lab makes a big mistake if they think that the fake suburbanites can live on the same continent with the cool freaks and geeks. Linden Lab used to pitch to this crowd, not so long ago (in the Rosedale era).


Yes, these are my people.

Boring and cool folks don't mix too often in real life, either. Some very rich hipsters and society types mingle downtown with the pierced and inked around here, especially on gallery nights, but you just don't see the boring class of business clones who swam upstream to spawn in the the cul-de-sacs "venturing downtown," as they put it.

Thank God. I don't want to hear about their homes or their trips to the Outer Banks or their TV shows or their kids. And in SL, I consider child avatars really creepy, even if they are just playing "kid" to some fake mom and dad.

Am I too cruel? Perhaps a fake house in a fake utopia will be a way to relive the glory-days of suburban bliss when Peak Oil puts the lie to that living arrangement, forever.

Linden Lab, you've lost your soul. Get back to images like the following from your old days, so you look cool and not lame-o-max-o, ya'll.


My wife, giving me her opinion, dislikes the "man boobs" in the last image, but she agrees that either Projects Mayhem or Gangsta look better than Project Mow-the-Lawn.

I need to go play Pharaoh in Heritage Key now. At least those 'burbs are stylin'.

A Blast at the Chronicle's Second Life Coverage

Location: Mixing a Drink (of water--Mama taught me no Martinis when you are pissed off)

Marty Keltz of The Virtual Worlds Story Project poked me with a stick today, when I was already testy. He let me loose on "After Frustrations in Second Life, Colleges Look to New Virtual Worlds" in the usually well informed Chronicle of Higher Education.

So visit the story and watch the fur fly. Marty, if we meet in NYC or Richmond and you are drinking man, the famously secret great Martinis at Thai Diner II are on me. If you are not a drinking man...you drive us home. And his partner in TVWSP, Jenaia Morane, gets her drinks on me, too, for her riposte, "Ignorance Abounds."

Here's my reply to Mr. Young:

The author does a disservice to those of us who have worked hard building immersive simulations in Second Life. That said, I'm not a fanboy of Linden Lab (though I have taught four classes using their world and in networked classrooms since the early 90s). It takes time to teach well in SL, and it's advisable to spend at least a semester studying the world before bringing students in.

So I want to note, first, where Mr. Young gets it right.

First, the author understands the power of simulations, which is the most compelling application for virtual-world technology.

Bravo. Young's also correct in stating that educators "need more control than Second Life gives them." Much of the blame for that rests with the company, not the world itself.

Here Mr. Young misses a really key part of this story.

Too often since the short-lived "media hype" era for SL ended in 2007, Linden Lab has taken its education customers for granted. Examples abound. They don't understand that many first-year students outside the US are 17, not the minimum of 18 needed to create an account. While ramping up system-requiremnents to look more like higher-end games, the company doesn't consider the systems that students will use to connect to SL. Doing so on a typical student laptop via wireless can spell disaster. They have not provided educators with ways to back up our simualtions on local equipment, except for a laughably expensive "enterprise solution" or third-party clients of limited utility.

With OpenSim worlds, for all their warts, a school can host its own virtual world and control its own IP.

Mr. Young could have written a far stronger indictment of this particular virtual world's shortcomings, however, had he not shown his lack of skill in SL and, say, taken a look at the fine (and not so rosy) study of experienced users just released by the New Media Consortium:

http://www.nmc.org/2minute-survey/virtual-worlds

It's painful when a reporter shows his "noob" status. He states--and this had me alternately laughing and groaning--that "I regularly get stuck between pieces of virtual furniture, wander around aimlessly looking for the person I'm trying to meet up with, or lose patience as I wait for my online avatar to walk between virtual classrooms."

That, Mr. Young, is your fault, not SL's. I learned such basics within my first semester with SL. My students last term had those "level one" skills down in...two weeks.

There are many reasons to doubt that virtual worlds will soon attract a large number of faculty. But The Chronicle should have sent someone "in-world" who at least possessed enough skills to avoid his own bias about using the interface. I'm not angling for that job...I'm too ticked by Linden Lab. But at least, as I teach my writing students immediately, one begins analysis by noting one's biases and lack of expertise.

BTW, "RIP Second Life" is, as we'd say "in world" a lame link to have.

Thinking about Aesthetics in SL

Location: Blind

"My God, I'm blind."

Have you ever said that when you looked upon really poor taste? Taste so bad that it's good?

I won't reveal the identity of the happy avatar couple or where I found this photo.

I'm glad they are happy. Maybe I'm just a grumpy professor and Spring still seems far away.

But why? Why?

"Why not?" is not an acceptable answer.