Prim Disease

I’ve been having it bad lately. I can’t see a car on the street without at least considering for a moment how to cut, shape, bend and otherwise torture prims to make a Second Life representation of it. I call it prim disease. Take for example this ugly, rusty Fiat 126, parked on a street corner in Cosenza.

(The Fiat 126 was produced in Italy and a host of Communist countries. It is all of three meters long, 1.30 meters wide and about that high as well. It’s noisy two cylinder engine can still be heard everywhere on Italian streets. The thing gained popularity in Communist Poland as locally produced Polski Fiat. But I digress.)

I already see, in this picture, that the sides would have to be path cut, hollowed out cylinders, and the hood as well. The front windshield would also be made like that, slightly tapered towards the roof. Connecting it all would be path cut spheres on the corners. But to make it really look good, I’d have to cross the prim limit of 31 per vehicle - including driver and passengers; they each count for one prim. Or enter the world of the sculpty, for which I really have no time.

But suppose I would give it a try - I’d love to be the one in a rattling, rusty 126 between all the invariably posh cars churned out by the rest of the SL car industry anyway. I’d go to Google Advanced Image Search and get a load of pictures of the thing from different angles. Bust most of all I’d look for a line drawing to upload into SL and stick on a prim, which I then upscale until the drawing is life size (and you’ll be surprised how many things start looking decidedly small when you make them true to life size in SL).

With that prim as my backdrop (some use it as the floor) I start the path-cutting, the twisting, the tapering and the shaping. And when all of that is done it’s time for texturing. And the important thing for textures is to never use one monotonous colour. Add some dirt, some light smearing, anything to liven it up a bit. And use a block texture - I use ten by ten numbered blocks, each in itself divided into ten by ten pixels. You apply it to your vehicle and make screenshots from every angle. Then you take your block texture into Photoshop - now you can see exactly where the elements of your final texture need to go, and how the texture gets distorted on the surface of your prim.

With a car like this I’d use a combination of pictures and Photoshop-generated elements. Just using pictures gives weird effects with the shading and makes your work look like a box with pictures stuck on it. And I use a texture for every part of the car - combining textures with SL-generated colour picker surfaces really looks quite awful.

But I digress again - the problem with prim disease is that it won’t stop and pretty soon you’ll have a head full of ideas and no time to work them out. Welcome to my world…

(Picture taken by myself; line drawing sourced from Car Blueprints.)

(SL and Second Life are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc.)

Call Support

Really, let’s not go hating noobies now. But a little lighthearted fun doesn’t hurt noone. With thanks to the incomparable Erykah Badu.

/me is not worthy, not by a long shot.

Call Support

I get tired of yo shit
You don’t never give me nothing
See every time you come around
Ya askin for sex, jobs, dough and support

See why can’t we be by ourselves some time
See I’ve been having this on my mind for a long time
I just want you to leave us in peace
Like it used to be, noobie
Cuz you don’t know how to act
So matter of fact
I think you better call Support (call up)
And tell them come on
help you sort yo shit (come on, come on, come on)
You need to call support (call up)
tell them I left you alone

Now every time I ask you ‘cover up yo ass’
You say ‘no’ but turn right around and ask me for some cash
Whoa, hold up, listen partner, don’t you have a clue
all that freebie junk is good ’nuff for you
you know it’s true, noobie

Every time we go somewhere
I run into some noobie smurf
Who needs some help with his second life
They never even bother to search!
They don’t never have to think
Don’t have no class
Behavin like an ass turnin things into a mess
It’s like a zoo I’ma tell you the truth
show some groove or get the boot

I think you better … (call up)
And tell them come on help you sort your shit (come on, come on, come on)
You need to call Support (call up!)
Hold on - But you may as well abort

Leaving both lives - and leaving something behind

This morning I read the sad news of the death of The Sojourner. I didn’t know her, I never visited any of the good things she was involved in, and so I really can’t say much about her at all. I express my deepest condoleances to all who knew her and I am sorry to hear about their great loss - from what I’ve read, she seems to have been a most remarkable person.

But it leaves me with a nagging question. During our time in Second Life we gather up huge inventories. Most of it is probably junk, but some things are very dear to us. I love my Booperfunk Dynamite Short Locks and my Solar Eyewear Gliese shades for example - Tish just ain’t Tish without them. And all the half built stuff in my inventory… meaningless to most people but most revealing about my personality. And then there’s the notecards and the snapshots, the small gifts and the souvenirs.

What happens to that? What does the Lab do when someone dies and they hear of it? Will the account just expire after a year, after which the inventory gets wiped from the server like it never existed, or is there a way to set up a last will and testament, making sure your most cherished items will remain in-world? And can that be arranged while bypassing the no-transfer settings of most of our store-bought items?

Sad questions maybe, but valid ones nonetheless. As our world grows in age, so do we. As our world grows in numbers, more of us Residents will at one time leave both lives behind us. And it would be so painful to be left in-world without a tangible token of our late friends, albeit that ‘tangible’ is not exactly the right word.

Tish Goes Real-Life

I would like to announce the opening of a new English language blog, the successor to my Dutch languare RL blog. It is called The Edge of Europe, it will be political and personal, and you will find it here.

(Yes it’s WordPress. I’m used to it, it functions rather well, despite my gripes in the previous post.)

Gravatar, or what’s wrong with the web

After posting a remark under one of Torley’s blogs I noticed how, instead of his usual Torley-tinted cube designs, there was now a small square next to my name that said Gravatar. A clickable link. I clicked.

I never heard of Gravatar. I never visited the Gravatar site. I never signed up for it and never asked for it. And yet the first thing I see on that site is that I am “logged in as Laetizia”. My old, Dutch email address was there - now defunct - and it said something about how I can’t change that. The FAQ furthermore told me that they are not deleting accounts “at the moment”. Like Facebook, once they got ya they don’t let go.

What’s up with this? Another fantastic new tool to identify myself everywhere - but these boneheads apparently don’t realize that there are people who use two names. Like an SL and an RL name. These boneheads didn’t realize that an email address changes. That I don’t want to run around with a stack of passwords to log in and out everywhere and change identity and that I was just fine with the way things were, thank you very much.

I don’t know about you but I flip out over this. I want a big red button that says NO, I want an email address of some governmental body which will force them to pull my account, I want to hack into their servers if need be and blow the whole spiel up. If my email address appears on the site of an organization I have never heard of before, the alarm goes off. And if they log me in just like that, two alarms go off. And if on top of that they tell me they do not erase accounts, the damn fire brigade pulls out of the station in my head.

I think it is coupled to WordPress, host to this blog - and Torley’s. And I am mad enough now to pull the whole blog because of it. It’s one thing to force feed me a new gadget with an option to opt out, which is the old Microsoft way. But that was on your computer, not on the internet, and that at least had the option to switch off. Goodbye talking paperclip nonsense. But this blog… first they gave me their 100% off-the-mark “possibly related posts” that I cannot get rid of, and now this!

I was going to start a Real Life themed blog on WordPress. But a) it automatically logged me in as Laetizia which is pointless, and b) now they pull this one on me. So I don’t think it is going to happen.

Gravatar.com collects your email address as part of the gravatar service. We will never rent, sell, or otherwise distribute or make public your email address.

“As part of the gravatar service”. Good thing they don’t run the water supply - they’d be pumping it into your house and flooding you out of your bedroom before you even ordered to have water. As part of their service.

(SL is a trademark of Linden Research, Inc.)

Facebook - the site you cannot leave

It’s like an addiction to some, Facebook, but honestly I never saw the fun in sending virtual hugs to someone or ‘buying’ one of their photos for virtual profit. Furthermore, since I have Facebook I am finding a lot more damaging cookies hidden in my system, and Firefox crashes on me regularily - which hardly ever happened before. And to top it all off, one application (Triumph) sent me an email telling me that that application itself sucks. Someone is messing with things there. So I want out.

Well… those Facebookers have another idea of ‘out’ than I have. It begins when you click ‘deactivate’. You are not going to be cleared out, hell no. You can always come back just by logging in. They’ll send you a reactivation link. There is no option to erase your account. And so, after deactivating, I had to reactivate it again because that irritating stream of whimsical emails just kept coming. So-and-so added me as a friend, someone bought my photo - I had to stop that barrage of timewasters.

First I tried to change my listed email address to a nonexisting one, thinking I’d strike two blows: ridding myself of all that baloney and clearing my real email from the page. Well… those Facebookers didn’t want that to happen. You can change email address but it will only come into effect after a confirmation mail has been sent. And so it has to be a real addy.

Alright. OK. Fine. I just happen to have that flag contest email, residentsflag@hotmail.com, remember? Let them send their crap there. That worked… until I saw my profile. It lists TWO emails now, the flag one and the one I wanted to have removed. Apparently you cannot remove an email from view, once given.

Well then, I manually emptied my friends list, I manually removed all those third-party applications, I manually told them not to send me emails in any event (and you have to do that per event, in the old Windows95 way where every irritating feature was on per default), I manually removed profile photo and photo album, I manually cleared all my personal info… and deactivated again.

And don’t think you can just deactivate. You must give a reason, either from the list or the ‘other’ option, in which case you shall type in some reason or other. The Facebookers do not accept having no reason to quit.

As I said, it’s like an addiction to some, and as a smoker I know a thing or two about addictions. And I do believe that Facebook is making it very hard to kick the habit when they act like this. I really think they should just clear out my profile and everything connected with it if I tell them to, when I tell them to, and that option should be an easy one. It should imply that all emails connected to Facebook and third-party applications thereof stop as well. When you are addicted and trying to stop, the last thing you need is a site that’s pulling you back in all the time.

Mail from the Lab

Dear Laetizia Coronet, Your submission in the Mentor Directory has been removed. This may be because you have submitted a new listing, or because you have requested its removal. You’ve been removed from the Second Life Mentor group.

Of course, this is due to the AR that Mia sent out after our little run-in on April 19th. And of course I did not ‘request’ this, as the automatically generated message says. That mail is about as wrong as can be - as is this whole sorry affair.

And so, after a year of mentoring, a year of gaining experience in this crazy job, I am no longer a mentor. And eventually this happens to almost all of us, keeping the mentor group as a whole inexperienced and inept. Because sooner or later you are going to lose your cool for a second, and those love spreading hippie idiots of the Lab are going to turn into the police they say they hate, and throw the book at you.

Want my advice? Don’t become a mentor. Don’t become an unpaid worker in the client relations department of the Lab. You get no benefits apart from a laggy party sometimes and a line in Mia’s (and Amber’s, etcetera) profile that says ‘Volunteers Rock!’, which they’ll repeat way too often during their teambuilding efforts - which reminded me of those I attended when I was a forklift driver. I hope you get the picture of the kind of level we’re talking about here. Amateurish doesn’t begin to describe it.

From day one I realised, thanks to this teambuilding thing and the memories which that brought back, that these people are not my friends - they just act as if they are. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’ll be friends with Lindens by becoming a mentor - it’s their job to be friendly and go Woohoo and join in the traditional pie fight. I suspect they are encouraged to put themselves on Facebook as well and be ‘friends’ with everyone. And well, if your goal is to befriend ‘a Linden’ you need to get your head checked anyway - I don’t know about you but I befriend people because I like them as a person.

Don’t become a mentor. Thanks to the example set by people like Mia a lot of mentors act like the police, even amongst themselves in the mentor IM channel, which by now is so strictly policed you can’t ask anything without being attacked by 20 of your colleagues. And because a lot of the mentors act like the police, you won’t get much love from the community either, unless you stay at the orientation islands to help the newest newbies around that impossible build with that impossible HUD.

Despite the obvious flaws and the obvious fakeness of the Lindens’ attitude, I enjoyed being a mentor. I enjoyed my colleagues and the way we used to think about the job, and the way we changed certain things in-world by leading through example. But that mostly came from the Mental Mentors group and not from the official one. And it most certainly did not come from the Lab at all. They just follow automated procedures and send automated mails, as the corporate hotshots that they are.

Perhaps one day they’ll replace Mia and Lexie and Amber with bots. What an improvement that would be - then at least you’d know you’re dealing with a machine.

What’s in a name?

In the real world there is of course more than one Catherine Fitzpatrick - in fact, the first hit of my Google search for that name points to someone of Greenpeace Australia - and I really don’t think it’s the same person who is behind the famous Second Life persona Prokofy Neva. And that’s without expressing any preconceived notions about Neva’s political views. In Second Life there is only one Prokofy Neva - each and every one of our names is unique, even though we do have a Gwyneth Llewelyn and a Gwyneth Llewellyn these days.

Not so on Facebook, of course. Facebook doesn’t rely on the uniqueness of names, simply because names are not unique in the real world. Anyone can open a Facebook account with any name - in fact there’s more than a handful of Catherine Fitzpatricks on this community site. But, again, there’s only one Prokofy Neva. And I don’t think it’s too much of a guess to say that the Prokofy Neva on Facebook is not the Prokofy Neva we all know:

Oh yes, we are sometimes made to believe that griefing in SL is a very interesting phenomenon worth five pages in a magazine once famous and respected (and nerdy) enough to be featured in The Simpsons as one of Lisa’s reads (Homer - with typical acciddental aptness - misreads the name as ‘Weird’). So tell me what’s interesting about taking the whole business of ‘attacking the seriousness of Second Life’ off the world and into the Internet at large? That’s not griefing - that’s stalking, that’s harassment, and that’s sick. That kind of behaviour deserves that feared ride in the FBI party van. Or at least the party van of any of a host of mental institutions.

You can argue that Neva is partly responsible for such pranks - it doesn’t help to shout ‘terrorism’ at the first sight of a lolcube - but isn’t that argument dangerously close to saying that a rape victim ‘asked for it’ by the way she dressed or by being in the place she was in? Neva has the right to call it terrorism, or Communism (another favoured label of his), or Catholicism for all I care. Opinions, however overstated they are, are not invitations to stalking or griefing.

And it raises another question - who has the rights to our Second Life names? I do think that someone who’s been using the name Prokofy Neva for such a long time should have at least some rights to the name, when used in connection with Second Life. I dare say that even I have some rights to the name Laetizia Coronet, being that I have been using it since November of ‘06. But is the use of my name protected in-world? I think not - only the name Linden is, and misusing it makes one a target for disciplinary action.

Maybe the ToS can be read in such a way as to prohibit misuse of names, but I am not sure that if I come across a Prokofy Neva Porn Shop, the Lab would take action. It wouldn’t hurt to have it written in plain English somewhere in the ToS: use of the unique name of other Residents without their consent is prohibited.

Come on, Lindens. After all the protection you’ve granted yourselves it’s time you grant us some.

(Second Life, SL and Linden Lab are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc.)

We Need A Flag! (updated)

[Update, may 11th: I received the first two entries, and both of them interesting and thoughtful! Thanks for sending these in! With my own design, that makes three. Don't worry, voting will be anonymous]

Let’s face it. We never had a flag - that was a logo on a stick and it would look good outside a Linden Lab office, but it was hardly what you’d call a real flag. And now even the name of the famous logo is copyrighted, so use of it as a symbol for all of us is right out. It’s “theirs” now…

The other day I was building an airplane and airplanes often carry a national flag. Now I have a choice of flags to use, being that I am a Dutch person living in Italy. But what if I want to sell my plane? How many non-Dutch people will want to have a Dutch flag on their plane? How many different textures would I have to make?

Suppose you are building a grand square on your sim and you want everyone to feel welcome there. A grand square looks good with flags, so how many different ones are you going to stick in the ground there? Five? Ten?

And let’s not forget the many army and police roleplayers. OK, so especially toy cops are not my friends, but they could do with some uniforms with a flag insignia. It just looks good, believe me, I am not impartial to the looks of a well-cut uniform.

Therefore, we need a flag representing Second Life Residents. But I can’t do that by myself - I cannot expect to post my design here and have everyone rally behind it and adopt it as the flag for all of us. So I need your help.

What can you do? First and foremost, start designing! More on that later. Secondly, of course, link to this blog on your own blog or copy the text, spread the word, translate it in another language, get the ball rolling. And third, I need people to judge the flags, or to judge a shortlist of flags if many come in. I’ll seek out some specific people myself but I think that average Residents should be a part of the selection process. Why judges? I want to avoid the inevitable: people pushing all their friends to go vote for their flag. It’s not a popularity contest. I will make sure the vote is anonymous - no names attached to flags. Of course, judges cannot run in the competition.

The fourth thing we may want is some prize and I’ll be happy if any of you has anything on offer. This includes Linden Lab, but I want to make clear that this will be the flag of the Residents, not of the Lab. If Linden staff want to participate in any way, they can as far as I am concerned - they are Residents - but I will not actively seek any Linden support or endorsement at all. I would like to one day go to M or Philip or Robin and present our flag to them!

Now about the design. I had a whole list of personal things I wanted to say, but it’s better to keep you all open-minded. I respectfully point you to the website of Flags Of The World which is a great source for information and inspiration. Please note that all elements in a flag have a meaning - and I would think it’s a good idea to explain your flag when you send it in.

Some things however need mentioning. I don’t like timewasters, so an all grey Lag Flag is not going to the judges. Neither are flat-out copies of existing national flags. I don’t expect you to know all city-, provincial-, regional and other flags, but straight copies of country flags should be avoided. Another thing I do not accept for judging is a red flag with a white circle and a black symbol in the middle - ha, ha, it’s a faux Nazi flag. Don’t waste your time on that, or mine. And finally, any flag with a religious or political symbol, or a combination of those, can never represent all the Residents, and so is not worth the effort.

Keep in mind that your flag should represent all of us, as diverse as we are in age, background, location and culture.

Sending in a flag for this competition means that you waive all copyrights to it, should it be chosen as the winner. Anyone must be able to use it. Please send your designs to residentsflag at hotmail dot com, do NOT forget to mention your Second Life name and watch this spot for more news!

(Second Life and Linden Lab are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc.)

Shivers

These weeks, the electricity company Enel presents a TV ad with the motto l’energia che ti ascolta - energy which listens to you. One of the two or three similar clips has sent a shiver down my spine, the first time I watched it. Not because of the choice of music - I think it’s rather outrageous to use the Velvet Underground’s beautiful Sunday Morning with it’s sombre overtones in an ad - but because of the little girl appearing seven seconds after the start. You may or you may not agree with me, but to me she looks a lot like my avatar. Just compare this screenshot with the banner above my blog:

Suddenly Sunday Morning gets a whole new meaning. Watch out, the world’s behind you…

You can watch the full clip on YouTube.

Also on YouTube, the full Velvet Underground song.

ps - Ignore the WordPress idiocy of “possibly related posts”. It’s a load of crap, I didn’t ask for it, it doesn’t work and there seems to be no way to switch it off. Windows98 revisited…