Joe Essid directs the Writing Center at the University of Richmond, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is a Richmond native who attended the University of Virginia and earned a Master's and PhD at Indiana University. His research interests include technology in the classroom and Southern literary humor. His academic writing has appeared in Computers and Humanities, The Writing Lab Newsletter, and anthologies about technology and writing. He is a contributor to Style Weekly and has appeared in Eighty One and RVA. Ignatius Onomatopoeia is the "avatar" who represents Joe in the game-world Second Life. Ignatius will be wandering the virtual terrain of Second Life while his creator writes here about what may be either "the next big thing" for the Internet or the latest darling of the cyber-hip... the reader can decide.
E-mail contact: jessid@mac.com | Web address: writing2.richmond.edu/jessid

Location: Motorsports Racetrack

This region, as well as the adjacent Autosports offer a variety of driving adventures.

I’ve not tried the dirt track at Autosports yet, but Tenchi and I, with varying degrees of success, drove the NASCAR-style banked oval. 

That’s us in my car, repainted red for racing—with a mouse-click (no masking tape or dust-masks needed). We are on the approach to the outer track. There’s a smaller oval inside it.

On both days we ran the track odd things happened. The first time, Tenchi brought her Lancer, but Second Life® was acting up and her avatar (not her car) crashed. For a weird few seconds, the empty Lancer did doughnuts in the warm-up area…then vanished. This was of course not the track’s problem, but Linden Lab’s® ongoing stability issues.  The whole region went off line not long after.

Both days experienced drivers made me eat their dust.  It’s doing to take long time to get decent at this track, at least at anything beyond first and second gears. I shudder to think of what would happen were I to get on the track with 10 or more vehicles.

As with other sports in-world, there are teams and scheduled competitions. I intend to keep practicing.  For the bold, there’s also a car lot with racers for sale. 

All in all, this is a nice “build.“ The track is big and the distant turns look real as one roars up to them.

The physics of the racing work better than on the open road, though the location of the raceway, at the junction of two simulators, can lead to odd results during high-speed crashes—the car will send up hanging on edge, “neither here nor there.“

Rather like its driver

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Second Life® Home Page

We’ve all laughed at how awful the default avatars could be in Second Life. Their dreadful appearance probably contributed to the low retention rate of first-time users (Wager James Au, in New World Notes, often cites that only 10% of us stick around after our first log-in).  As a recent blog from Linden Lab® admits in its title, “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.“

I’m very pleased that Linden Lab has teamed up with some very good skin and clothing designers to produce a line of avatars for newcomers.  These pictures cannot lie; the old avatars look awful in any photo, and these will provide much better starting points.

Good job, Linden Lab! Now if you could only make other aspects of the first hours in-world more rewarding.  Then get the roads to work better…or maybe not.  I like the challenges of surreal driving. 
Back to Tenchi’s and my racing adventures, in the next post for the week ahead…

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Lost Highway, and not asking directions

Well, the joy is back…oh yeah. Driving like a nut and racing Tenchi, my black Dominus Shadow against her pink (!) Mitsubishi Lancer Evo. I may be an old-school racer-boy, but even in pink, that Lancer is HOT.

We decided to begin a Ross sim and do a closed course. This was our map, which we quickly forgot as we got lost: 

My driving is better these days, but Second Life® still has a few problems when you really kick a premium vehicle (one with gears or a supercharger) into high speed.

Still, some of the fun means driver error and crashes. I hope “Hugsy Penguin” forgives us for smashing up in front of his/her shop…

Both of our cars feature multiple gears, so we could “kick it up” into third or fourth on big straight-aways.  With my sound cranked I could almost imagine that we were racing real vehicles.

Until, however, we hit the borders between a few busy regions. Then the car would disappear and my avatar would assume a driving position without the car at 10,000 feet.  Needless to say, I had crashed in an SL™ sense, and I had to restart Second Life.

Even that glitch added to the fun, because while I was logging in again, Tenchi was adding to her lead…until she dove into the water and her car became a submarine.

“Hah!” I yelled, as I raced past her, her Evo trying to run along the side of a wall.

Later I rode shotgun to get some great snapshots while Tenchi did the driving.  Finally, Linden Lab® is getting the experience of the open road good enough to lure us out.  All we need now are some signs!

Now that Linden Lab is building major new roads, I am so ready for the challenge of a SL road rally.

Next up: Tenchi and I gun our machines around the big oval.  And wreck horribly. I will never make fun of NASCAR driving again.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

by Dianna Defiant, Guest Writer
Location: Our Virtual Advice Desk

Dear Di,

I’m thinking of leaving Second Life. Even if I do not delete my account, I may rarely log on for a LONG time.

I’ve a large friends list.  Some are good SL™ friends, and they’re going to be hurt by my departure.  What is the etiquette here?  Send a “goodbye” note?  Throw a going-away party, like I’m going on a long trip or relocating in real life?

What would you do?

Vanishing Act

Dear Vanishing Act:

People in SL come & go - it is common to see friends either leave SL completely or cut way back on the in-world time. Being here for almost 2 years now I have seen both - and seen both handled differently. If you are only friends with these people inside of SL and do not communicate with them any other way than in-world, and probably won’t talk to them much again, then I think you should tell them of your plans to cut back or possibly leave. I hate to have to wonder what happened to someone who suddenly disappears. If you just want to leave SL but don’t want to leave your friends, there are several things you can do. If you know them well enough, exchange email addresses to keep in touch. If that is too personal for either of you, set up your preferences so you receive your IM’s to your email address - you can reply that way also. Or, there are a couple of programs out there that allow you to see & chat with online friends without actually being on SL. Not quite sure how they work but do know someone who used to use it. I can’t recommend them, but here are 2 I found in my search…

http://slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=231265

http://sl-pop3-im.bashora.com/

P.S. Don’t delete your account right away. Put you avvie in cryogenic stasis and wait. You might want to come back later and you’ll already be fixed up and have inventory. If you delete and decide to come back, you’ll have to go through that WHOLE fixing-up/getting clothes/hair/etc. AGAIN!!

XXOO
Di

Questions for Di?  Iggy will forward them to her! E-mail iggyo -at- mac -dot- com

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Still on the virtual road…mining the class wiki

Student responses to a more guided experience in-world, continued…It was a fun semester.  Time to send out a special thanks to the class mentors, especially Tenchi, Di, and Cynthia. She’s at the right of the image here, with me and a group of students from this year’s Conference on College Composition and Communication in New Orleans.

Thanks to Pappy Enoch for not getting any kids injured, jailed, or married to one of your cousins.

Reaction #2: Initially skeptical students let go and begin exploring:

I got curious one day in Second Life®  and decided to do some searches. For some reason the first thing that popped into my head when I brought up the search menu was hell. . . . .Hell is a very interesting place. . . . a rather picturesque plot of fire and brimstone that is home to many Second Life citizens. One of the first things I found when I arrived at the train station in hell is that you can rent land there. Why suffer in eternal damnation when you can build a house on a burning plain?

Reaction #3: Awe blossoms in the metaverse:

Second Life has proved to be something of an enigma to me. I believe it was Tenchi [Morigi, a class mentor] who corrected me for calling SL™ a game. Now that I’ve spent probably 10+ hours in-world, I’m seeing that she could not be more right. SL is indeed NOT a game. Quite frankly, it is something that seems to defy definition. Many say that it is an experience. But to me, even calling SL an experience fails to capture its scope. If I were to define it, I would call it a simulation of what would happen if men were gods.

Reaction #4: Negative reactions tend to be more considered, as in this student’s reaction of visiting the Africa sim:

It was a cute experience, but I am aware that it is not even close to resembling the real continent of Africa, nor will it prepare me for my hopefully upcoming journey. However, these photos all represent some stereotype of the Dark Continent - all exotic, all unique, and all very “African.“

Or this student’s realization of how little doing online surveys in-world pays:

5 minutes and $26 lindens latter I realize that earning money this way is not for me.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land®“ Archive for old posts

Location: Still on the virtual road

Earlier I ran a column of my students’ mid-semester’s observations to Second Life ®  . Now I have some from the second part of their journeys in-world.

I added more structure to the experience for this class, as compared to one I taught a year and a half back.  We had Second Life residents who served as mentors, the students had more structured tasks, and we had a few gatherings on the university’s island, such as the fly-in that student Drax Marksman did for me one day (pictured on left).

As in an earlier class, students’ initial reactions were mostly negative.  They felt that there “was no point” to Second Life, unlike for a goal-oriented online game.  On the other hand, some students—out of laziness or loathing—simply refused to go back in-world for one required part of their final projects, even though they lost a full letter-grade for this omission.

I was disappointed that more students did not learn to build, though we provided a sandbox area, yet I was also excited to see some of the students venturing into Steampunk and other roleplaying sims.  Overall, if the students I teach are representative, theirs is a rather timid demographic when it comes to online engagement. They love being in social networks, but mostly these involve individuals they already know.

But on to what the students said!  The reactions will run for two consecutive entries here. More may follow later…as well as more student columns.

Reaction #1: Gamers find more to do these days in SL™ and SL-style interaction in games matters more now than it may have recently:

Role-play itself is a rewarding activity for many people, of course, but why this setting? There are plenty of other more positive settings in Second Life….I doubt many people who visit Midian would really want to live there - whoever they are in real life likely would not survive the experience - but they all go there in Second Life, to get a taste of the darkness.

and this:

The concept of socializing in virtual worlds seems like nothing out of the ordinary; many people in our world regularly visit clubs in Second Life in the same way that characters in Stephenson’s Snow Crash frequent night clubs in the metaverse.. . .Globalized social gaming is also a major factor in today’s video game industry; although this feature was originally associated with computer games, the rise of Xbox Live and Playstation’s online community are redefining the demands for game development.

Yet gamers remain gamers:

The joy of Second Life is that you can be Santa Claus. . . holding an M16 and a laser-pointing brigade of weapons and yet not know how to shoot.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Governor Linden’s Mansion

It must have been some type of macabre send-off for Ruth.  Today, trying to meet Tenchi for our road-race, I had as bad an experience as I’ve ever had here, canceling out the great road-trip completely.  Hordes of us materialized not at our last locations or our homes, but at none other than a region dedicated to the history of Second Life®.  I suppose it will be used for the upcoming fifth birthday celebration. 

All of us were, at first and for quite a while, nude, gray, and Ruth.

This morning Linden Lab® lost the connection to its internet service provider.  Lovely.  Once again the entire Metaverse, with its virtual economy and culture, collapses over an error that never seems to happen to more established companies.  Or not longer happens…recall how, in the mid 90s, these sorts of snafus occurred on regular basis?

I’m not a betting man, but the new CEO had best stabilize this mess. The last several days have been horrendous for connectivity to the company’s servers.

Tell me, MMORPG players, how often doe this sort of stupidity happen at World of Warcraft? Not often, I’d wager…

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Where I Began My Adventures in This Strange Land

After writing about Pappy’s less-than-successful road-trip some time ago, I decided to try again.  I’ve heard that Linden Lab®  is working to improve vehicular functions (presumably without making carmakers update their models) so crossing from region to region would be easier.

There are also rumors of a new highway network.  To test this out, I hopped off my bike in Bliss (my bike ride will resume soon).  I then returned to the one large highway I had found, not long after arriving on the mainland a year and a half ago.

I’d tried, then, to drive the winding road from the Ross Infohub area in my freebie motorcycle, but it didn’t handle well and I crashed continually. But for this try, I’ve a far better ride: my Dominus Shadow.

The physics of driving in-world are now better, and I was not even using my fastest internet connection.  Sometimes the road would not appear as fast as my car moved, but despite this occasional lack of “rezzing” and the warning signs about bridges, my trip was as fun as most driving games I’ve played.

The scenery was very nice on this part of the mainland, with a few exceptions such as a tawdry billboard.  One used to see more of these things in-world.  They seem to be relegated to the nooks and crannies or in regions I do not visit.

After about 20 minutes of driving up and down the roads and testing my navigational skills (where WAS that left turn I took?) I made it back to Ross intact.  I then popped the Shadow into flight mode to fly past the pyramid where I first tried to camp for virtual money. The business is still there, though the campers have moved on.

I banked over Jessica Ornitz ‘s and Prokofy Neva’s Memory Bazaar at Ross Infohub, always one of my favorite places in-world. It’s well designed, right down the the dye-baths for textiles, something I’d seen in Cappodocia at a rug factory.

Donning my Second Life®  Mentor tag, I helped a few newcomers who appeared at the very spot I emerged into this Strange Land.  I’d certainly come full circle, a road-trip in itself.

Now to challenge Tenchi Morigi to a motor rally on the roads near Ross…

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: On the Virtual Road

Cecil Hirvi’s new machinima, Elegantly Forbidden, is an entry in a contest to promote Hosoi Ichiba, a new region in Second Life®  that captures the look of medieval Japan. It’s a worthy place to show off the newest features of the Second Life client. It renders sky and water with a clarity that rivals photography.

I was taking a road-trip in my car, in the newly improved virtual highway net, when I caught up to Cecil and asked him for more information. You can view the video at this Blip TV address.

Ignatius : tell me a bit about your inspirations.

Cecil : First of all, the sim itself is a very beautiful construction.

Cecil : the details were so good, I just felt I could really do something visually pretty.

Ignatius : true—the best builds are just like that

Cecil : I hadn’t really stretched my cinematographer skills either so it looked like a good film to try out the fun light and water tools in the candidate viewer.

Ignatius : what was the toughest part, for you as a filmmaker?

Cecil : working with an actor who only spoke Japanese.

Ignatius : you use a babbler? [A Second Life translation device]

Cecil : I needed a couple of translators…the babbler is so inadequate.

Cecil : It felt like I was making a foriegn film

Ignatius : how so?

Cecil : Well, the Japanese culture is fairly unknown to me, and I needed a consultant on the set with me!

Ignatius : amazing—like a RL shoot

Cecil : Artotem Tolsen, helped me understand some of the finer details of the ancient Japanese culture….

Cecil : ...which is why the outfits on everyone is completely legit

Ignatius : and this story is based on an ancient tale? poem?

Cecil : Originally I was going to use haikus by Basho and others…but realized it would have been too difficult to match the words with the scenery..

Cecil : ..so I decided to write them myself

Ignatius : well, if I may be an biased viewer..they were very lovely.

Cecil : Thank you. I hadn’t written a haiku in ages and had to get to speed on them…

Cecil : fortunately my RL gf is taking haiku courses.

Ignatius : did you get feedback from your judges?

Cecil : the contest ends mid June…but its received a lot of hits on youtube in a short time and many people responded well to it.

Ignatius : cool..I’ll be sending more your way

Cecil : Great.  I guess there just aren’t many haiku-based machinimas out there! Lol

Ignatius : thanks for your time, Cecil. 

Cecil : Thanks Iggy! 

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Camping with the Bots

It’s no secret that many older Second Life® residents hate “bots,” the minimally customized, and often glaringly ugly, avatars, cranked out by the thousand, to earn a pittance at locations paying visitors to stay around.

Others have recently covered the “death of Ruth,” that default female avatar who lived under the skin of all of us.  With the upcoming release of the latest viewer, Ruth will vanish. 

Bots might soon join Ruth in oblivion. 

Tipped off by a friend who works for a camping site plagued by bots, I took a close look at the latest “release client” for Second Life.

I noticed, in the search feature, that something was missing: “Popular Places.”  This is a little “tweak” by Linden Lab® with far-reaching consequences.

This aspect of the in-world search engine measures popularity by time spent in a particular location.  The use of bots—by owners of property in some cases, by “gold farming” operations in others—drove places to be popular out of all proportion to any real interaction by visitors.  I’ve read, and I’ve lost the reference, that a gold farmer with three computers each running five bots could, in theory, rake in $200 every day.  That’s good money anywhere, and it may be pulling in the gold-farming operations in southern China that have been using World of Warcraft and other games to collect income (as reported last year in the New York Times).  These operations are also known as “game sweatshops” and Wikipedia provides some interesting background on this phenomenon.

One can see this in the lead photo, kindly provided by an unhappy camper who despises bots.  As the woman dances away on a camping-pad, the male avatar behind her—a bone-stock noob—slumps in “away mode.“  Note his dancing twin in the background. They are likely to be bots, and even when they do not earn money, they take up room that real avatars might use.

Camping rates have fallen lately, in part I’m sure because bots suck out money without doing the marketing surveys that many camping locations depend upon.  Advertisers and marketers pay the owners of the location a commission based upon surveys taken, and bots do not do surveys.

A bot-filled club seems straight out of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” All of these silent dancers or loungers, many of them identical, go through a parody of interaction while no one chats.  It becomes pointless for any real resident to go there, if they can even get into the door.  Bots fill up all available space like a creeping fungus, to and past the 100-avatar maximum permitted in a region.

There’s a funny video of a frustrated shop-owner trying to get rid of camping bots…to no avail.

Perhaps Linden Lab will soon finish the job for those of us who hate bots.  And “gold farmers,” from Richmond to Shanghai, will weep and gnash their teeth as their income vanishes.

I suspect that the Lab has an economic motive in wanting to be rid of bots.  Second Life has trouble with its current peak “concurrency” of over 60,000. The central database has crashed several times. What if by getting rid of a few thousand bots who merely suck money out of the world, the Lindens want to get more residents in-world who will spend money? 

Just a thought, but it would be a shame to see all camping vanish; it provides good income for newcomers to Second Life.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Bliss Gardens’ Callahan’s Isle

This time of year, when I’m not in as much of a rush to get to work in the morning, I slow down on my walk to the bus-stop or I take the long way on my bike.  I rarely drive in, as I might do in a rush during the academic year.  It becomes time to lounge over a cup of coffee and goof off a bit…I might even write a blog!

Likewise, my wandering in Bliss Gardens have little hurry or purpose, other than to showcase some of the best “builds” I have seen in Second Life®.  The only shortcoming so far I’ve found is the water…given how spectacular water can now look with the new SL graphics settings, it would be interesting to see Bliss again with different water-effects. I’ll double check this on the next leg of my journey. I’m using the latest “release candidate” version with graphics set to mid-range on my laptop.  That renders water in stunning detail in most places.

But it’s a minor gripe. The panoramas rival anything I’ve seen in real life, though, as Beeble Baxter is quick to remind me every time I look at his blog, one does not get a full sensory experience of “breeze on skin, coarse warm rocks & scent of loamy woods.”

Despite that, I continue to see Bliss and its kin as wonderfully conceived 3D artwork, through which I wander with my keyboard.

Beauty abounded. A hummingbird decided to check me out as I took a photo-break at a picnic area, just the sort of stop I’ve made along the 57 miles of the New River Trail State Park. There I meet other cyclists, walkers, and riders on horseback.  Of course, I get exercise, other than in my wrists and fingers, on that trail.

Then again, I cannot ride off a cliff and descend by parachute, as I did shortly after entering Callahan’s Isle.

I did not get a snap, but as I rode along an attractive woman (are their any others in this world?) came along in the Bliss tram-ride, a nice feature that Luna Bliss added to her paradise.  As I would on a real bike as a tram approached, I pedaled off the trail and we exchanged pleasantries.

Sure, in SL I could have “friended” her and we may have stayed in touch.  But it was more pleasant, and realistic, just to say “have a good tour!” as she glided by, a vision of unreal beauty in an equally unreal place.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: OMG Zombies! (Zombie Theme Park—I don’t make this stuff up, gentle readers)
By Drax Marksman, Guest Writer

Iggy’s Note: Thus begins a series of dispatches from my students…enjoy.

I have been to all kinds of place in Second Life®, including Dublin, Milan, the International Space Station, Richmond, and Hell. I’ve seen it all, or so I thought. Given my recently rekindled interest in zombies I thought it appropriate that I go look for zombies in Second Life…and I found them!

In fact, all it took was typing “zombies” into the Second Life search engine. The very first result that showed up was a location boasting masks, games, and zombie hunting. I had to check this out. The zombie game I chose to try was “omg zombies.“

Iggy’s note: Dare you teleport to this location?  Here’s the direct link.

When I clicked on the link I was taken to a shed in the woods on the outskirts of town. Inside the shed were posters and a pumpkin head. There was also a weapons stand where I could purchase weapons that would help me take out the undead. If I so desired, I could also become one of the undead.

I first tried my hand at zombie hunting. Sadly, the weapons all cost $L100 or more. There was, thankfully, one free weapon…a rock. After collecting my hand full of rocks and attaching the zombie hunter combat interface I set out to kill the undead. I must admit. If I ever have to fight zombies I most certainly don’t want to have to use rocks to do it. It took quite a bit of effort to kill zombies with a rock, and I sustained many injuries in the process. There were even a few instances in which I died while attempting to stone a zombie to death.

After tiring of zombie killing I decided to switch sides. This was much better than zombie hunting. All I had to do was run into the zombie hunter and some of his life was taken away. Run into him enough times and he died.

The game could be improved with cheaper weapons to lure more zombie hunters to play.  Until I can get friends to join me, I’m off to join the undead army.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Bliss Garden Center

Among its other attractions, Luna Bliss’ creation features “the largest cave in Second Life.“  Since Second Life® lets real estate be “sky high” in a literal sense, making such a cave is easy: just put a roof, or in this case a garden shop, far above the ground. This creates a cavern to end all caverns.  And straying off the path in the shop often results in comic falls through the floor and into the depths below.  If only I could do that in real-life botanical gardens to keep lazy-bones taking short-cuts off the paths!

This image gives an idea of how far one CAN fall…Ms. Bliss provides a glass floor near the shop that gives a dizzying perspective of the cave.

Before setting out on my bike-trip to the cave (the subject of a blog soon) I walked down the path a ways to get these shots of private residences clinging to the precipice.  As I often do in-world, I got the feeling of walking through interactive artwork in 3D.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Bliss Garden Center

I’ll interrupt my bike ride for charity to consider recent problems in Second Life® concerning stability.  The angst goes on.

April was the cruelest month for Linden Lab® and its customers, to borrow T.S. Eliot’s phrase—as every journalist once did in a better-read era. 

Consider this bit of teeth-gnashing from the company:

April was not a good month for Second Life Grid availability. Our internal outage tracking tool estimates that about 630,000 usage hours were lost to global system failures over the course of the month, which is about 1.9% of the total (up from 0.06% in February and 0.22% in March), and resident surveys clearly indicate great unhappiness coinciding with these failures.

You may read Ian Linden’s entire honest blog entry on behalf of the company if you wish. 

What do these sorts of global failures mean?  These are not caused by an individual avatar, but by the company.  Imagine, if you would, getting up one morning to find your real-life car gone.  You’d assume it had been stolen by criminals or at least towed away by police.  In Second Life, however, a failure of the central database can result in inventory items or money simply vanishing.

This cannot continue.  During a recent failure, items could not be “rezzed” inside SL, and many shown in avatar’s inventories simply were “not found in the database.“  Now imagine that you car is not only gone, but your closet and dresser are empty, leaving you standing in your pajamas.

Or maybe naked.  And you are bald too (Second Life’s hair attaches to the avatar as a separate item).  Here’s the company’s little warning to us:

[7:39 pm pacific] We are continuing to have problems with our asset server cluster. Please avoid any kind of financial transactions or attempting to rez no-copy objects.

[8:42 pm pacific] Asset servers are returning to their proper operating state. The road may still be a bit bumpy for a little while, but a smooth ride will soon be returning.

Bumpy road?

More like potential catastrophe if Linden Lab does not keep essential services up and running.  My only hope in this matter is the commitment to stability that the new CEO has made.  We’ll see.

And I’m bald every day IRL. I can live without my virtual dreadlocks for a while.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Bliss Garden Center

I decided that were I to tour Bliss Gardens properly, I should do some good for a real-life cause.

At a vendor in Luna Bliss’ Garden Center I discovered the Bikes 4 Africa initiative.  I’m an avid real-life cyclist, and it or my feet are my usual ways of getting around town.  This virtual cycling program is not about losing weight or reducing pollutants, however; sales of the virtual bikes fund the purchase of real-life bikes for Africans, who use them as vehicles for commerce as well as personal transportation.

The efforts have been going on for some time.  See Alanagh Recreant’s blog for more about the initiative.

Here’s an appropriate bit that sums up how the project works:

“It takes the sale of 108 or 167 virtual bicycles to buy one real world DUNLOP or RALEIGH bike,” says co-executive director Erna Sittig who is Enakai Ultsch in Second Life. “We hope residents will help us meet the greater needs by purchasing a real world bike in addition to - or instead of - a virtual one”. It seems that the favourite bicycle at the moment is the BLUE LADY, selling at L$250 (approximately $1 USD), buw we predict that the upgraded version selling at L$750 will exceed the sales within a month of two. Then again, we are optimists!

I purchased a L$750 bike and began my travels.  I found the pedaling easy enough—in fact, effortless when I climbed the steep wooden pathways of Bliss Gardens.  Getting up a hill without breaking a sweat is something I wish I could do in real life!

This past semester my students either fell in love with the 3D artwork that makes up the best scenery in-world or, sadly in my book, said “it’s not as good as real life.”  That’s a shallow view of the metaverse.  I’m not about to trade in my real bike for this one, or neglect my exercise in favor of pressing laptop keys.

Traveling this virtual terrain offers something different from a real-life bike ride; I revel in the same feeling I get in an art museum.  It’s a delight to pedal through Luna Bliss’ superb gardens, all the while knowing that my purchase helps villagers’ commercial ventures.  Not First-World guilt here: just a notion that I can do some good while having some fun in a virtual world.

Direct teleport links in SL: Garden Center Bike Vendor

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

Location: Virtual Desk, Givenchi Skyloft
by Guest Writer Tenchi Morigi

Iggy’s Note: Tenchi wrote a long entry for my class Wiki on this topic.  If you want to find her full photo-essay of exploring virtual New England, point your Web browsers here.

A good friend of mine sent me a landmark earlier last week. It was directed to the New England Sim Cluster which consists of 29 Sims which recreate the typical New England flair and are a great area for all enthusiasts of watersports.

Since she bought a nice motorboat, client 19.4 (Iggy’s note—Linden Lab’s ® latest release, with much greater graphics resolution for sky and water) was released and Siana, Give and I haven´t spend a lot time together we decided to go on a virtual boat trip.

This is only a very small part of what we have seen during those 3 Hours which we cruised around on those 29 Sims. To show you everything would have by far been too much. Unfortunately the pictures of the Nantucket habour and the adjoining village were somewhat messed up and so I left them out.

So if you are interested in sailing or boating, scuba diving or whatever or if you are just looking for a nice place to hang around and chill with your friends ... this is it.

Iggy’s Note: Aviation and car cultures are also large sub-communities in-world, so I thought it fitting to include Tenchi’s snap of her ride home, at dusk in a helicopter.  As Linden Lab plans to improve the performance of vehicles so they can cross regions more easily (or at all) air-travel and road-trips, not to mention regattas, may become fun pastimes in this virtual world.

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Location: Bliss Garden Center

After fretting about real-life illusions that make the inventions in Second Life ®  seem innocuous, I thought it wise to indulge my taste in beauty.  I keep a garden, and am kept by one, in real life, growing herbs and vegetables from seed and tending them with organic practices. It’s not always easy, though it is rewarding.  When I do get to a really nice greenhouse, I always enjoy strolling along and looking at the plants, garden furniture, and sculptures.

Second Life offers virtual homeowners just that sort of service, but in the case of the Bliss Garden Center, run along with several sims by Luna Bliss, there is no need to start from seed.

Other bloggers have covered Bliss Gardens, the regions around the garden center. So I’ll focus later on the stunning gardens and consider what’s on offer at Ms. Bliss’ personal paradise.

She’s created a stunning range of plants.  My snapshots can only begin to suggest the enormous number of hours of this labor of love. 

More than a few are faithful reproductions of real-life plants I can see blooming outside my window as I write this: bearded irises, English and shrub roses, bunches of flowering herbs.  The trees are well rendered, and they provide grand backdrops for a virtual gardener.  I really like this idea: a gamelike setting where gardeners compete to make the most interesting original creations or even try to replicate aspects of a famous garden like Kew or Bodnant or Richmond’s own Japanese garden at Maymont.  We seem too quick to dismiss such aesthetic play as a waste of time…I consider it painting with virtual plants and, in the case of Bliss many gardens, true works of art.

Other items for sale are whimsical, especially the garden furniture and waterfalls.  The garden center divides plants by types, just as one might in a real greenhouse but there’s one difference.  These plants require no water or degrees of shade or sun, so there’s no need for shade-netting or garden hoses coiled underfoot.

While Bliss’ is no substitute for a real garden center, it does offer a lesson or two about the future of online entertainment.  I keep thinking of the blockbuster release of Grand Theft Auto IV, an event as big as movie premiere and prominently featured in the New York Times.

To most gamers who will dedicate hours and hours playing that game, my strolling about a virtual garden center must seem “lame” indeed.  Some lunkheads, poisoned by testosterone, would even call my desire to pick out just the right plant “gay,” as if having good taste and a love of beauty were not the proper activity for a hetero male.

But most days I’d rather shop for plants—my time in Jessie, packing a virtual gun, aside—than engaging in virtual violence. And if Bliss Garden Center can thrive, then perhaps the future of online play is not so monolithically bleak and violent after all.

Nice thoughts for a glorious Central Virginia spring.  Happy gardening in real life!

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Location: Shopping for Freebies

When I saw the sign pictured here, at first I actually got a little angry.  “Be Eighteen Again, Forever”?  Uh-huh.  Good enough reason to get a real life.

But when I thought of the mirror that Second Life holds up to our world, I rethought my revulsion.  Consider how Americans live an illusion; I cannot speak for other nations.

How many of us:

—Act as if oil is not a war-starting resource in scarce supply within our borders and, realizing that, try to cut our use of it?

—Believe that our lifestyle, called “sacred” in one presidential speech, cannot be modified to have a lighter environmental footprint?

—Shrug whenever our corporate-owned media discuss flag-pins on lapels and fail to mention that we spend billions monthly on an endless war while education for poorest Americans languish?

—Ignore the warning signs that Hurricane Katrina sent us about the desperation of many African-Americans and the vulnerability of our coastal cities to rising seas?

—Pretend that governmental and private debt will never influence the ways we live?

—Believe a bigger car, house, or even TV screen will bring happiness to our lives?

—Borrow more money instead of saving when we want something?

—Deploy “remedies,” from Botox and Rogaine to red convertibles, for the ageing of our bodies?

—Toss up our hands and say “nothing can be done”?

That last is the most pernicious illusion of them all.  It would be better to pretend to be 18 forever with an avatar.

Am I cynical?  No.  I believe that most people care about our collective futures and can change reality.  We did it in the Civil Rights era and are doing it again as we struggle to save our and other species from a very ticked-off Mother Earth.

But I’m jaded, to be sure. Reality does that to one with the years and the persistence of certain illusions that others see as real.

Too often my students—and what is the social aspect of college life but a temporary retreat from the pressures of reality?—say that SL a dangerous escape.  For some residents, it is.  And sometimes it seems less scary than the illusions around us in the real world.

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by Dianna Defiant, Guest Writer
Location: Our Virtual Advice Desk

Dear Di:

What’s the etiquette in Second Life for letting your friends know that you are online? Should I keep that little box checked so friends get that notice when I come online or leave? Or will that be an annoyance?  I feel terrible sometimes when I fail to say hello to every friend on my list, because I know that they saw me come in-world.

Yours,

Guilt-Ridden

Dear Guilt-Ridden:

Wow - you must have way more friends than I do ...

Here’s the thing about SL. They can see you’re online & you can see they are online - so it’s a two-way street. Now let’s assume that not everyone is glued to their SL screen - a lot of people will not notice the pop up announcing your arrival, so they won’t even know you are on. And when you log on, unless you make the effort to look at your list, you won’t know who’s on either. The general rule of life (any life) is that people are WAY more concerned about themselves than they are about you. So if you don’t say “hi” to someone one day I doubt they will lose much sleep over it. Anyway - here’s my system in SL: I say hi to my online friends but I ALWAYS ask them right off if they are busy. If they say they are I say ‘ok IM me later if you want’. And if someone IM’s me and I am busy I also tell them.

And another thing - if you uncheck the box and never let anyone see when you are on, they might assume you don’t want to be contacted and that’s what you’ll get. Be honest with people and respect their time and others will do the same to you. Or - you can get friends in all different time zones so everyone is not on all at once

XXOO
Di

Questions for Di?  Iggy will forward them to her! E-mail iggyo -at- mac -dot- com

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Location: Richmond Island

It did not take long for a sleazy bounder to take advantage of us at Richmond Island.

The end of the semester is a busy time on every college campus, and in a momentary oversight of arranging matters for a Business-School course using the island, we had not reset the permissions to create items on our land.  I saw Kevin, our island manager, in our (real life) library and he told me the sordid tale.

In little more than a few days’ time, an Italian opportunist, now banned from Richmond Island, had built a house there and rented it out!  We had to evict the tenant (gently, given Kevin’s lack of Italian) and ban the landlord.

Linden Lab wants none of this type of fight—they leave land violations of this sort in the lands of the owners. It’s another example of their anarchocapitalist intentions…though I wonder if they wouldn’t intervene if a major corporation’s property had been abused in that sort of way.

There is a silver lining this this, however; we can keep Pappy Enoch occupied in his original job for the university. He’ll be standing guard with his “scatturgun” to run off “enny I-talian cosy-nostrils or even un-orgynized criminals, tho if’n I runs intu purty I-talian gals, I will bee errspeshully gentul wif ‘em…”

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Location: Big Easy Sim, Brass Section

You may have missed the party, but I managed to go not once, but twice, to a sim called “Big Easy” that really does a good job of capturing the spirit of the Crescent City.

This region was designed for charitable events, not pub-crawls or shopping, and recently I came across this from Linden Lab ®:

Update: Join us TODAY for the The Day of Remembrance, a new community event commemorating the life, spirit, and creativity of all the residents who have left us.

Interactive Installations:

Help build a temple and raise money to benefit the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. By touching the building materials, and making a donation, the temple will build itself before our eyes.

Walk in the Memorial Garden, where you can plant a flower for a resident who has died in Real Life.

Meditate in the Memorial temple, where you can light a candle for anyone you wish to remember.

Tenchi and I met to have a walk about New Orleans and find out when a jazz funeral would take place. We were pleasantly surprised to find a crowd of avatars, though the parade would take place some hours later.  We listened on our computers to amateur jazz players, as well as folk and rock musicians, playing live and streaming their music to the event.

We then strolled to the St. Louis cemetery, recreated in the virtual world and quite solitary and serene, compared to the ongoing activity in Jackson Square.  We both felt that this type of creative space captured the promise of Second Life quite well.  We had walked, not flown, to the cemetery, and even our wild outfits might be straight out of the real-life Big Easy, where one sees just about anything.

Thanks, Tenchi, for the idea for a hoo-doo man avatar.  My outfit brought to mind the sights and sounds of Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo.

I returned later to march in a parade to commemorate those Second Lifer residents who have died in the past year. We ended up at a stage where a poet read an homage to the dead. 

Of course, on the way I had picked up a tuba and brought up the rear of the procession, behind a pink kitten in a schoolgirl outfit, a winged horse with gangsta bling, and a few ladies of the evening.

In other words, it was just like New Orleans in real life.  But at least I had found a community event in SL ™ not dedicated to making money or shooting things!

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