Do avatars dream of electric hillbillies?

Location: In the freezing cold

Oh well, where shall I start? Its difficult, since the reasons for taking a break are numerous.
LL is definately not innocent here. The experience using SL worsened from month to month while at the same time nothing has been done to improve it. The lag was constantly killing me and SL became more and more a graphical chat client.

Losing my ability to explore took one of the foundations of my time in SL from me. Additionally I had to cut short on my expenses and so had to give up my land and lost the ability to build and experiment. Even if I could have continued to maintain it, I guess that LLs current unwillingness to give the major part of developing resources to the improvement of the user experience would have spoiled it anyway.

But the main reason in fact was, that the social interaction on the grid turned in a way that made me do that last step back to the meatspace.

A friend of mine noted once that the pace of SL roughly equals five times the speed of the meatspace and I think he is right with this one. The consequences out of this are on the hand.
People pop up and vanish from day to day and the fact that you have build up a connection to them doesn´t make it easier. Losing friends (and I mean real friends) that way is a hard loaf of bread and I think that Iggy is right here, when he states that people can become friends in SL. What makes the essence of a friendship? Its surely not the physical closeness, its far more. And this essence can be transported via SL very well. So losing people at 5 times the speed of normal life can be a very sad experience. Things even turn worse, when when the friendship becomes intense and from one day to the next you get to know that the person on the other side of the monitor tells you that it was discovered she has cancer and will die in a few months. SL is surely not a game, and people saying so, haven´t understood it.

When I came to SL it was filled with people that were very like minded and that is surely the "fault" of the big hype around SL in early 2007 (no wonder it made me curious myself). Many of those have long gone and today I meet less and less avatars that have mastered more then the two sentence "wanna fuck?" conversation. Additionally the vast growth of the grid has dispersed the avatars over virtual square miles and traveling to find a person sometimes is as hard as back in those frontier days.

Those whom I am still in touch with I connect mainly via external sources now, rendering the SL client useless. IM and Mail are still very potent ways of communication and I intend to stay in touch with every single one of them.

To refresh your memory Iggy: We met when a Hillbilly started working for you as a guest writer. That charming do no good constantly asked me to meet you and write as well and the rest is history ;) as is Pappy Enoch I guess, since I haven´t heard of him in months.

[Iggy's note: Pappy is alive and as well as he'll ever be, though he's not in-world as much. He can be found as a "Pullet-Surprise Winning Reporter" for the Alphaville Herald. He's being paid in virtual chickens.]

The one that has to say "thank you" is surely me, since the experience you offered me with mentoring your classes was awesome and I would surely haven´t had that opportunity in meatspace.

I don´t know whether I will return some day or not. It will depend on my lust for SL to return which could happen. I haven´t deleted the avatar and it can be reactivated any time. So rumors about my death are hugely exaggerated.

Take Care everyone,

Logging out for now,

T

Sleep Tight, Tenchi

Location: Blue Mood

I read this at Tenchi Morigi's wiki last night:

This unit has been shut down and is in cryogenic stasis. Tenchi Morigi undergoes major rebuilding and alteration for a possible return to the grid. Any important matter can be directed to her digitally connected cortex via known procedures.

My good friend and class mentor is calling it quits, for the time being, in SL. She's not alone.

I hope she'll write here about her decision; I know she's reading this. Amid the chaos of the start of the academic term and the ungentle demands from many people, I wanted to take time to thank Tenchi for all she's done and been for the past two years.

How on earth did I meet her and Cynthia, my two German SL friends? My memory is spotty on this, but they are memorable ladies. Cynthia, also a skilled builder, is spending less time with SL. So is my long-time buddy and advice columnist Dianna Defiant.

When someone as talented and witty as Tenchi leaves SL, it makes a hole in one's life. She was never loathe to show up at Richmond Island to help students, to show off a new outfit, to recommend a place I simply had to visit. Mostly, however, it was her ability to share in practical jokes that were friendly and clever. Her and Cynthia's (also hibernating) blog "Absolutely Amazing SL Discoveries" is full of that brand of wit.

And any wag who claims that SL friends are not "real" friends can go straight to hell on the horse he rode in on.

I'll miss you a lot, Tenchi. Sleep well and dream often.

The Silence of The Floppy Disks

Location: Rummaging Through Desk Drawer

The annual office-cleaning before the semester turns up some interesting artifacts. This year, it was a 3.5" floppy disk of an external reviewer's 1998 report on our writing program.

I mused on this homely item and the fate of our media-storage technologies.

The report is on one of four or five disks I have left, after a massive dumpster-dump of the rest (I broke cartridges, one by one, to make data-retreival harder). They now reside in a strata above the cassette tapes, and those lie above the Eight-Tracks in our landfill, one day to be an archeological dig when Richmond lies in quaint ruins.

The report in question had become important again. We are in the midst of curricular change again, so instead of slapping more prims (and removing some redundant ones) in our Second Life simulation of Poe's House of Usher, I decided to make sure I had a backup copy of the report.

I have it on paper, but puh-leeze.

For a technology only a few years out of date, the floppy sounded positively Victorian once I hooked up the small USB drive I keep around just for such antiquities (I've a USB Zip Drive here too--for 100MB or 250MB cartridges).

I soon found that I did not have an electronic copy of the report on my laptop or backup hard disk. The floppy, creaks, clunks, and groans, saved the day.

Now to make MORE backups. I wonder, as I go back to adding features to the House of Usher, how transferable the skills from SL will prove, when I move on to other virtual worlds. Let's hope those skills have more longevity than, say, an Eight Track of Barry Manilow.

A Second Life Student's Pledge

Location: Butt in Chair, Working on Syllabus in Both Worlds

It's time to roll out the Iggy's Syllabus wiki again, and this semester I will ask students to sign, date, and return a sheet that I'll keep on file.

This contract contains statements to the effect of "I have read understand your attendance policy, Dr. Essid." But this year, this appears:

I will represent the University of Richmond in a responsible manner in person and online as a writer, as well as in Second Life as an avatar. Furthermore, I understand that SL will contain some content (either violent or sexual) found broadly offensive but unless I choose to research such content, it will not be part of my coursework.

This will give them an idea of what they are getting into. Another item reads:

I've checked my own laptop/desktop system and feel that it meets the minimum requirements listed at http://secondlife.com/support/sysreqs.php [and I agree] to use computers at the Writing Center or Technology Learning Center that meet the requirements for Second Life, if my system does not.

For all of their supposed savvy about working online, Millennial students' abilities with technology underwhelm me. They have not blogged or ventured far beyond Facebook. They simply do not know what they are "in for" in a virtual world.

So teachers still have a role and some job security.