Virtual House of Usher: Viv's Machinima

Location: Brooding in the Crypt

As part of an article Viv Trafalgar and I are co-authoring, she produced a video of our soon-to-vanish Second Life build of Poe's House of Usher. Many thanks to Jake Rose for composing an original theme for this video.



It's delightful to record the feeling of the House and more delightful still that an editor for an academic publication wanted machinima and still images in an online article. The scholarly world does change, slowly, and some things cannot be fully apprehended in print. Poe knew that; his most evocative work often stretched language to its limits.

A I watch Viv's video, I sense how much I will miss aspects of this House, and of course the wonderful content by builders such as Morris Mertel and several Steampunk geniuses.

We'll have a new House in Jokaydia Grid next year, ready for another group of students to try to save Madeline from her brother, and Roderick from himself, in an immersive re-imagining of Poe's shadowy masterpiece.

A Future That Almost Happened: A Review

Location: Looking Skyward

I've really been enjoying Megan Prelinger's book Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957 - 1962. I've lamented the end of America's "reach" in space before in this blog, but Prelinger's book is more than a eulogy for a dead set of dreams. She shows us clearly how the aerospace companies of the Space-Race era recruited employees, wooed politicians, and projected a can-do spirit for technologies that seem alien and exotic to us, like the Nerva Nuclear Rocket. Even companies making ball bearings sexed up their ads with moon bases.

It's all a hazy memory from childhood for me, and those are the sorts that so often retain their power best. Madison Avenue was not interested in prediction, in the ads that Prelinger presents. The clients for the era's "Mad Men" wanted to hire the best engineering talent and beat any competitors in getting the next DoD or NASA contract. Showing what might happen in ten or twenty years was a great way to tap the talents coming suddenly out of engineering schools post-Sputnik.

I'm certain that Republic Aviation or Sperry did not care, or even conceive it possible, that they were going to break the hearts of hundreds of thousands of geeky kids who saw their ads in the public library, skipping copies of Hot Rod and Sports Illustrated to hunt down ragged back-issues of Aviation Week. There was money to be made in beating the Reds to the moon and even in preparing for what would have been humanity's final technological war. Along the way, we got some amazing space art, some of it heavily inspired by the covers of Astounding, others seeming sprung from the walls of exhibitions by Abstract Expressionist painters.

The images in the text, and Prelinger's analysis, reveal a sense of inevitability that the industry sought (and needed) to project, as well as insider information from the post-Apollo days, such as this pronouncement at engineers of NASA's Project Rover with its NERVA engine:

"Long-range research and development work that cannot be expect to have a real need or application until the 1980s must be terminated at this time."

To think that, for a shimmering moment in the last years of the 1960s, alongside the wishes for a Woodstock Nation (who became the ever-more-conservative Boomers of the 80s and went for Reagan) we had promises of a lunar base and Mars landing by 1985. I'll never forget the lonely and dog-eared copy of a NASA book on human-crewed Mars exploration that somehow made it onto a table with Apollo documentation in 1973, when I met the Apollo 17 crew in Richmond. It was an artifact for a future that almost happened.

At this distance this "other science fiction" of the years before Watergate all seems improbable. Yet had public interest and America's economy not waned in the 70s, a great number of these visions would have come to pass. Others, like nuclear-powered projects that exploded a series of small bombs in earth's atmosphere to reach escape velocity, would have run up against the potent dangers they posed to the earth's biosphere. If anything, such schemes prove that the engineering minds employed by the aerospace titans back then were not holistic thinkers and did not reckon with long-term costs.

In 2010 "routine" space travel seems unlikely, America has no concrete plans after the last shuttle retires, China manages a 1960s-style orbital mission every few years, Europe needs to bail out economies and not dream of space. Of course, millionaires can pony up a stack of cash for suborbital joy rides with Richard Branson, touching the Void for a few very expensive moments.

Perhaps I'll always be too much a creature of the 20th Century to find solace in other technological developments and too much a Peak Oiler to believe that our species will reach so far again with anything aside from robotic explorers. Experiences in virtual worlds can be immersive, but I'm still chair-bound as I manipulate pixels, not headed out with the first group of colonists to establish the Lunar International University's first campus.

The type of future on Prelinger's advertisements provided a dream of a transhumanism unlike that of today's merge-with-the-computer futurists. As a spacefaring race, humanity would be one with its spacecraft and colonies. We'd have left the cradle and have transcended our biological origins with hardware. Perhaps today's Transhumanists can upload their intelligences into robotic probes and reach for the stars.

Forty Years on, that possibility repels me, so I'm still waiting for my "ride" to the final frontier. In another forty, I'll get it, but it won't be in a spacecraft and I won't be able to blog about it.

Here Come The Teens (Hide Your Pose Balls & Censor Your Profiles)

Location: Linden Lab Blog

Terrence Linden seems to be assigned the tough jobs by his employer. He's an urbane man who visited the Virtual Worlds Roundtable a while back, just before the price-hike for education and nonprofits. We all liked what he said to us, then, though a week later I'm sure a few educators were saying entirely different things.

Now Terrence got the short straw and has to explain to residents how safeguards will work when 13-17 year old teens are permitted on Second Life's Main Grid next year. I waded through the comments to Terrence's post, I wondered what the changes might mean for those who teach, host sims, hold events, or develop educational content.

Our Profiles

First, we'll have to police not only our profiles but also those of visitors who come to our events on any sims zoned "General." Linden Lab is clearly not doing this, and though certain terms can be blocked automatically in classified listings, does the Lab have the ability to consider every photograph in a profile pic?

I just was at a VWER meeting with a woman whose name and profile noted her BDSM interests and even status as a teacher of these erotic arts. At a meeting with teens, I'd argue that she could not stay, nor could those with naughty group-titles or pictures in their profiles. Are we to AR such folks to prove due diligence? While I could care less what an adult does in private, once teens are legitimately "in the house," inaction will no longer be an option. Could a group who hosts events be sued in a US court? The sim owner? Linden Lab? All of above? We'll soon find out.

Naughty Cam, Naughty Click

For 13-15 year olds, to me it seems that Linden Lab's safeguards are sufficient. They will be locked down to estates where they have been sponsored.

But for 16 & 17 year-olds, who will be able to come to the Mainland, I agree with Ceera Murakami, who opined "Parcel bans to NOT prevent someone from camming into a parcel and buying content from vendors. They do NOT prevent anyone who is banned from interacting with content in the parcel they are banned from. The only "safe" thing to do with the arrival of the teens is to remove 100% of the content that is not G-rated from the mainland. Period. The vast majority of the Mature sims on the Mainland are within camming distance of one or more G-rated sims."

Linden Lab currently lacks the ability to police camming and clicking. One of my students, in Fall 2009, found many adult items in plain view on the Mainland just walking down the Linden-built roadways.

After the Teen Grid merges, no teen, in theory, will be allowed into a "Moderate" sim, the analog to the Mature sim. This, too, needs to be tested carefully before teachers bring their teens to the Mainland. My student later walked into a night club in a Mature sim to find a couple on a pool table, talking very dirty in public chat while warming up to have cybersex in front of the other patrons. Only my student and the loving couple can be seen here.

My student was not looking for this sort of content. He was part of my gender-or-race-change assignment, and he used in-world search to find popular social spaces to see how other residents would react to his female avatar. Not wanting a turn on the pool table, after an "Ewwwwww! Old folks doing it!" (and a snapshot!) he left. He was also 18 years old.

The Logical Fallacy of "It's No Different from the Internet"

How is our diddling among the pool balls different from what a minor might see on the 2D Web? A lot tamer, if it were only snaps. But I want to head off a rather facile complaint that "SL is no different from the Internet." In a PG-rated word, bullshit.

As an interactive environment, SL's content can "talk back" and educators make a great deal of how immersive it all is. We cannot argue that the environment is both more realistic than other online experiences and yet, when it comes to adult content, no different.

As meshes come to the grid, we'll make a big step closer to a photo-realistic metaverse.

My European colleagues will be scratching their heads over a lot of my concerns, but while the USA is not Iran, we have many thin-skinned moral conservatives who would not mind filing a law suit or two. We have conservative-activist Attorneys General in states like mine with ambitions for national office. A few appearances on some law-and-order TV show "protecting our children from online smut" would further such careers.

And we are a litigious nation.

It May All be Moot

While 16-17 year olds will be able to register from home, at school it may not be an issue. Even after the change, many schools will not touch SL with a 10-meter prim pole. My wife's county does not let any flavor of SL through its firewall, and having exceptions granted is a tedious business.

Personally, I'm not even bringing my of-age students to SL in 2011-12, since I'll be using Jokaydia Grid and my Usher simulation. Any who explore SL for class research will sign my usual waiver. By then, this mess may be sorted out. Or not. Linden Lab needs new customers, and getting teens in-world seems to promise that. I'd argue that they could have already signed up in droves for the soon-to-close Teen Grid, had Linden Lab spent money on marketing.

If Linden Lab wants more concurrency and dots on their map, they should have instead encouraged in-world shopping and fixed some of the extant problems with their grid. Merchants like Morris Mertel have closed their in-world (and teen-friendly) shops to go to the online marketplace.

I'm just glad my colleagues and university won't be dealing with this legal jungle.

Roll Out The Barrel (And Give it Away)

Location: In the Hold of The Grampus

Poor Arthur Gordon Pym. He had to face hostile natives, starvation and forced cannibalism, the death (and rapid decomposition) of his best friend, and the not-so-deft hand of would-be novelist Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's one attempt at a novel is interesting, but hardly a coherent work. Like the poor man's mind and personal life, Pym is a mish-mash of chaotic events and violent outbursts.

At least the long-suffering Grampus, one of two sailing vessels wrecked and ripped to pieces, in an almost pornographic manner by Poe, can get some good flotsam and jetsam when I rebuild it.

In a tip of the hat to Yadni Monde, who made so many freebies that I used in the SL version of The House of Usher, I made a barrel for the wreck and the cellars of Jokaydia Usher. The process was easy, using two half-spheres streteched and "dimpled," with prim tops and bands. I'm not a cooper, but it was fun making them. Next I'll do some one-prim crates, another greatly appreciated gift of Yadni to SL residents.

To what end? I'm envisioning a terrible family secret not in the story, part of the experiments in intertextuality that my colleagues and I began in Second Life. Howard Usher, the father of Roderick and Madeline, knowing that the family was near bankruptcy, revised an old crime from his ancestor's past: Sir Howard became a wrecker, leaving lamps near the most treacherous spots on the Yorkshire Coast, then plundering what remained after the "accident."

I don't know how poor Pym will fit the expanded story spun on Nevermore. Perhaps someone or something devoured him!

The mystery will be solved, for the curious and persistent explorer. At seven prims a barrel (I know, I could probably get by with three and good textures) I could not resist putting barrels here and there and leaving clues in or under some of them.


When I had a barrel done, I took one to the Newbie Dome at the grid's Welcome Area. It's free to copy, as are the ones at Nevermore. The nicest part of this new grid is the sense that we are all building things and giving them to colleagues for their projects.