http://slbeat.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/slbeat en jessid@mac.com Copyright 2008 2008-08-27T21:00:00-05:00 http://slbeat.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/slbeat/comments/locks_of_love/ Location: Hair Fair 2008 I discovered Hair Fair last year, a showplace for some of the most clever designers in SL.  I went there a bit tongue-in-cheek, first with my stock-avatar “hair” and the second time as a gorilla (hair all over!).  It seemed trivial, but hair is important in SL. As I’ve discovered, so is the cause Hair Fair supports. I’m pleased to report that 50% of the income from Hair Fair’s vendors goes to the real-life charity Locks of Love. You can find out a lot more, including teleport links to vendors, at the Hair Fair 2008 blog, but rest assured. While I cannot grow enough real-life hair to interest Locks of Love, Iggy did buy a bandanna and will doff his fake dreadlocks on Sept 7, the final day of Hair Fair. Please visit these vendors and show your support.  More on the styles at Hair Fair 08 soon. Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts 2008-08-27T21:00:00-05:00 http://slbeat.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/slbeat/comments/little_women/ Location: The weather.com Web Page As a weather-obsessed person (odd, given that it’s “drought and more drought” here), I often check this site.  For some time I’ve been meaning to write about the little women doing happy dances along the sides of this and other commercial sites. They often advertise mortgage specials, I suppose to those 10 Americans still solvent enough to consider buying a house. They also tell us quite a bit about the intrusion of the virtual into our workaday lives. Yes, she’s an avatar. At first, these little dancing women (never men) were from video clips.  Then I began to notice that slowly, avatars made with the Poser software were doing the boogie-woogie in the boxes on my screen. It’s inevitable that such applications of avatars would appear. I first encountered this notion of the avatar while in grad school about 20 years ago, not as a 3D being but as a bunch of code resembling a rudimentary AI to do things for you when you slept or were busy in real life. Avatars might search for news headlines of interest, chart the weather or stocks or sports scores. These faithful servants would put information at your virtual doorstep when you asked. You do not, of course, need 3D dollies to gather and sort information: RSS feeds do some of this. In those Cyberpunk-infused years of the late 80s, however, we all imagined our avatars--both small applications and 3D figures out of Gibson’s fiction--taking some drudgery from daily tasks and streamlining a too-busy world. Instead, for now they hawk iffy mortgage offers and car loans, or they sit on camping chairs for absent creators.  Oh, tepid new world that has such people in it! Yet in virtual worlds, the people behind the avatars are usually present. In game worlds as opposed to social worlds like Second Life (thanks go to Mark Meadows’ I, Avatar for giving me those terms) one cannot easily leave an avatar idle. In some games, unless guild-members were standing guard, leaving the keyboard might result in an avatar being impaled by an Orc’s sword. In Second Life, a virtual business--the extension of the avatar’s inventory--qualifies as what we imagined in the 80s. It earns money while the owner and avatar are absent.  It’s sad to see how some wannabe Donald Trumps set up “businesses in a box” and then check out of SL, expecting money to flow in that never arrives. I’m told that to run a SL business well, the owner must invest time and talent to keep clients happy. Thus it’s both amusing and sad to show the next image. It comes from a once-thriving Japanese shopping mall that used to offer generous camping of the sit-on-a-bench or swab-that-floor variety.  Last week I went there to poke around for a cool (and cheap) male Kimono I’d seen.  Iggy might need it explore Hosoi Chiba after I investigate Ida Keen’s vanishing.  In any case, the mall was clearly failing, with most of the stalls empty and lots just torn down. The owner, possessing a morbid sense of humor while his business goes under, parked dozens of fire-engines that sprayed water on virtual fires throughout the empty place. I suspected a griefer attack until I checked one of the vehicles. Its owner also run the mall. And in their midst, this: The fellow blithely mopped the floor while the place burned down. He didn’t even bother to pick up a free mop!  Another afk avatar strummed a guitar nearby for 1 Linden Dollar every 10 minutes. Perhaps their owners would do better to get Poser to design dancing mortgage-women for a debt-ridden, economically foundering nation.  Or maybe these camping avatars are just the metaphor we need as America’s economic house burns down? Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts 2008-08-26T21:24:00-05:00 http://slbeat.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/slbeat/comments/iggysyll06/ Location: Favorite Reading Chair, Cranking Nirvana and Fighting Panic Showtime. Classes begin tomorrow. Designing a how-to guide for Second Life® is a tricky thing. Students need to learn the basics to avoid a bad “first hour” experience.  Given my experience that Millennials want lots of guidance AND won’t read anything linear, I used a wiki for my syllabus, putting together a number of linked handouts, rich with snapshots and a few embedded videos.  It’s designed to provide just-in-time help in a segmented, hypertextual manner. I’ve also embedded Linden Dollar rewards for completing a scavenger-hunt, so the goal-oriented writing students I teach will have a game within the lesson. Readers can now walk through the evolving draft of “Getting Started in Second Life.” Major topics are: --First Steps: Welcome to the Metaverse --Your Avatar, Clothing, Equipment --Leaving the Nest: Going to the Mainland --Communicating --Having Fun --Trouble...and Avoiding it --How to Act Like a Pro With no First Life I will apply every lesson I’ve learned with students, and I’ll try to remain upbeat, if not perky with this third class to use SL™.  They need help seeing the “point” of this gamelike non-game.  I’m not sure I’ll succeed. My Xer cynicism sneaks in, “Nevermind” blasting while I write this. There’s so much work to do...they probably think Iggy Pop is some weird energy drink. I ask one favor—the pbwiki software lacks a spell-check, so as I proof it please send any sentence-level corrections to iggyo-at-mac-dot-com. And if I have missed any major needs for novice avatars, please let me know.  I’ll send you virtual T-shirts featuring Iggy Pop and the “Damascus VA Moonshiners” mascot (and hound-dawg). Tips o’ the virtual hillbilly-hat to Tenchi, Di, Cynthia, Terran, and others who contributed ideas to the wiki. Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts 2008-08-24T21:00:00-05:00 http://slbeat.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/slbeat/comments/pappycampy/ Location: HippiePay Island James Dean…I mean Pappy Enoch, has committed an act of malicious wounding, if not attempted murder, in the virtual world. He shot “Campy,” the Muppet-like walking tent that Anywhere Camping uses as its mascot and at sites that support their “free-roaming” camping system. When his sister, Jezz Enoch, began complaining about the system being broken, Pappy sprung into action, perhaps to protect himself from the wrath of his hellion sister, who seems to have figured out that Pappy cheated her of money (and got her beheaded, sawed in half, electrocuted, and drowned in blood after being skewered on a big hook) at the Cave of Doom Funhouse. Pappy showed up at HippiePay Island armed with his double-barrel “scatturgun” an let the “purple rascal” have it at point-blank range.  HippiePay Manager Twyla Tomorrow saw the entire sordid crime, as did her pet bulldog (who temporarily distracted but did not stop the wrathful moonshiner). Have Pappy’s new-found good looks gone to your head?  This is worse than mere murder!  Campy provides income for hundreds of layabouts!  They might come gunning for our hillbilly correspondent. Armies of bots may march on Richmond Island now… I think a Jimmy Stewart avatar might have been a better choice. Pappy is living up to his bad-boy appearance. Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts 2008-08-23T21:10:01-05:00 http://slbeat.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/slbeat/comments/sl_gen_x_paradise/ Location: Virtual Office In-World My concerns about how Millennial-age kids react warily to open-ended “play” prompted me and my colleague Beeble Baxter (that giant raccoon) to write an article about these students that is now under peer-review at an academic journal.  During the research phase of this project, virtual journalist Feldspar Epstein interviewed me about our work.  Her blog entry on this topic summarizes our findings. Have a good look at Feldie’s entry in Metaverse Journal. I think that we may be on to something about why the ambience of SL™ is so often “grunge” and free-form (from its Burning-Man roots, in part) instead of goal-and-rule oriented, characteristics of the generation born after 1982. Not all of that demographic are so cautious and task-driven. I had a fun meeting today with my Millennial-Gen Writing Fellow who will be assisting a group of first-year students with the drafts of wiki projects about SL.  And for one of the first times ever, we used my virtual office, because my Writing Fellow is at home in real life.  Both she and I wonder, however, how well first-years will take to this world. A lot more on that topic will come to this space soon. Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts 2008-08-22T16:22:00-05:00 http://slbeat.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/slbeat/comments/at_ortakoy/ Location: Ortaköy Island I’m fond of the real-life Ortaköy, a neighborhood on the European side of Istanbul and up the Bosporus from the chaotic region around the Blue Mosque and other major attractions.  To American ears, the name of his village-within-the-city sounds like Orta-keh. It’s the sort of crowded-but-neighborly place where crazy (yet amazingly talented--you are or you die) Turkish drivers will slow down to let a befuddled tourist cross the street. That’s not a small favor in city that may have 25 million citizens and the worst traffic, after Cairo, in that part of the world. So with some hesitancy I clicked a link to visit ”Ortaköy in Second Life®.” I expected a replica of the famous mosque there, one of the most photogenic spots in Istanbul.  Its image often accompanies any story that contrasts the old/new vibe of the city.  The Atatürk Bridge looms above and behind the real-life mosque, and the path to the quay is lined with tourist-trap places selling overstuffed baked potatoes, evil-eye charms, and other essentially Turkish delights.  Right on the water, I found some very fine seafood places. I think the second-best sea bass I’ve eaten in Turkey (the prize goes to a place in Izmir) came from a little restaurant in Ortaköy, where the head waiter, with a flourish, let me (a picky Lebanese-American who knows good fish) peer into his ice-chest and select just the right fish for dinner. None of those details, of course, awaited me in virtual Ortaköy.  Even the Atatürk Bridge was nowhere to be seen. And the quay, thronged with children playing, men smoking and drinking coffee, people of all ages playing tavla (backgammon), tourists drinking rakı and acting foolish, were gone. Second Life’s Ortaköy is to the real thing what I Am Legend‘s New York is to the Big Apple (well, no rabid bio-war survivors attacked Iggy in virtual Ortaköy). Like the virtual New Orleans sims I’ve visited, the eerie emptiness weighed on me, but at least in the Big Easy the illusion was sustained. Wander a few houses off the virtual Bosporus and you are in an ultra-modern Turkish shopping mall, with a ubiquitous Second Life outdoor disco nearby. The real Istanbul is full of such old/new juxtapositions, but the seams are tightly sewn, and often hidden, between them. In Second Life, the seams show. I can certainly see the appeal of creating such spaces for education. Those learning Turkish could meet real Turks at the virtual coffeehouse and practice using the voice client. Fill this illusion with the noise of human voices, even though a computer, and some magic would happen. That’s a wonderful use of technology for making global connections and teaching languages.  And for places like the virtual Globe Theater, the prospects are bright for doing something students and faculty cannot easily do in real life. But it’s still only a second-best option. Until Second Life can add the smell of the sea, the murmur of a crowd, the feeling of the breeze from the Bosporus, the aroma of good food, and 400 or 500 avatars in one place, it won’t rival the real place. Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts 2008-08-19T21:00:00-05:00 http://slbeat.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/slbeat/comments/jamesdean2/ Location: Shopping Until Pappy Be A-Droppin’ Actually, Tenchi delivered the goods, in the form of a shopping list, with amazing speed.  Nearly all of his wardrobe came from one store, D2TK, and Pappy got sucked into a dance party right away with the owners and their friends. After cavorting and shopping, Pappy was quickly able to find a skin and shape on his own. He got just the right shirt on his own too, at Bailer’s Outfitters, where another dance party, a line-dance this time, was in progress when he arrived. Pappy avoided another dance marathon, though a virtual dog named Booger followed Pappy around the shop, looking hopeful.  Pappy also just had to throw some Lindens down at Mystikal Hair, the maker of my own dreads. Tenchi’s ability to find the right boots, jeans, and hat for Pappy’s (temporary) new look astounded me.  Consider this a blatant endorsement.  It’s a blog, so journalistic neutrality? Fiddlesticks. For 1150 Lindens, Pappy Enoch, that full-figured guest writer for In a Strange Land, “transmogrified” himself into a pretty good replica of James Dean’s character “Jett Rink” from the epic (and often hilariously dated) film Giant. I love that film, camp and all. Pappy actually spent 450L more, but he found that a free shape worked better than another shape he bought from Million Dollar Skin Lab, a locale for celebrity look-alike shapes I mentioned here some time ago. Kudos to the company for giving away such nice freebies. I don’t think the 450 was wasted after all--consider it a tip! As good as Iron Man was, as well as the cool Iron Man avatars I kept seeing in-world, we need some old-school Hollywood avatars running about the metaverse. Filmmaker Cecil Hirvi is correct. As this technology improves, old actors will never die. They’ll live on in virtual worlds, doing new work. Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts 2008-08-16T18:19:00-05:00 http://slbeat.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/slbeat/comments/iggysyll05/ Location: State of Mounting Panic The semester begins in a few weeks, and readers will see, from the fragmentary state of my syllabus, how long the road ahead will be. While picking a rhetoric text is easy, what should I have my writing students read as an introduction to SL™?  What videos to view? I have been reading two books on the blossoming of virtual worlds, Wagner James Au’s The Making of Second Life and Mark Meadows’ I, Avatar.  I recommend them both to educators, but neither of them quite do what I want for a class about academic writing that makes heavy use of Second Life®.  Au’s chapters “The Avatar as Entrepreneur” and “Investing in Utopia,” however, come closest to what I need. They merit students’ attention for their close look at marketing and corporate bumbling in-world. In crafting my online syllabus, I surprised myself by assigning videos about SL before giving the students readings.  When they do read instead of view, I want them to encounter SL as I did in late 2006: a Wired article about Mischief’s Janie Marlowe and another about Anshe Chung (read her press release from those heady days).  It was this news that real people were using “game characters” to make real money that so captivated me then (and often, now). A few imperatives stand out: --To orient students to SL beyond the media hyperbole that so often depicts it in a negative (and facile) way --To provide some sense of the virtual economy (useful fodder for a later assignment on marketing in-world) --To give goal-oriented Millennial students a coherent starting point for formal writing assignments. With these in mind, I invite educators and other readers to have a look at my class schedule and suggest more readings.  Have at it, profs and curious readers! Post your ideas and links to anything online in the comments section. Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts 2008-08-13T21:19:00-05:00 http://slbeat.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/slbeat/comments/idakeen2/ Location: Worried Silly on Richmond Island When I was just a noob in Second Life®, I ran across a reference to Ida Keen’s blog Baedaker, a travel guide to the curious and interesting in-world. Ida was gracious enough to let me interview her and to work with my students.  Her blog never covered adult topics, so it was a safe introduction to the world of virtual journalism and travel. Now I fear that: 1) Ida has encountered real-life problems preventing her from being in Second Life 2) The sinister totalitarian state she covered in her final blog post imprisoned her 3) She has run off with the virtual circus. I hope it is #3, because when Iggy and Ida last chatted, she was preparing for a dance routine in The Show Must Go On, a performing troupe in Second Life. Okay...I’m worried that she may be in that virtual jail after all.  As soon as the “brains” involved with this blog get the Pappy-James Dean transformation sorted out, I am heading to Suffugium, a dystopian roleplaying area where we last know Ida to be. Sounds a bit silly to non-SL folks, and maybe to many who are in-world, but when a virtual person with an active writing life just vanishes, I worry. Is this all part of Ida’s show? There are two little green dots on my map of Suffugium tonight....could one of them be the intrepid reporter, Ida Keen?  Stay tuned.  We got Pappy Enoch out of jail in Tombstone (and he didn’t even want to leave). We can do it again. I have a fast fake car, a bunch of fake firearms, and a bunch of real friends who are as nutty as I am.  Let’s do this thing! Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts 2008-08-10T22:01:01-05:00 http://slbeat.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/slbeat/comments/camping0808/ Location: Sucking Money Out of The System I’d reported, some time ago and much after the fact, that Linden Lab® had changed the traffic “metrics” in Second Life®.  Now popular places are part of a “Showcase” voted upon by residents. Mere presence of camping-zombies and bots will not help a location bring in active avatars. None of the old camping spots show up in Showcase’s top listings.  As a result, camping rates have fallen off sharply. The old “Free Spirit” group at HippiePay once gave out 2L every 5 minutes.  Now avatars try to crowd in anywhere that offers 2/15. Pappy Enoch, who covers the freeloader-and-layabout (dead) beat for “In a Strange Land,” went around to check on the status of camping these days.  He was in a grim mood when he came back.  He handed me a faded “fotygraph” of the good old days of camping and began his lament.  As he put it, “them was sum times, Wiggly. I camped on mah tractur a-cuttin’ grass (n’ smokin’ sum) wif them-thar Hippies at Woodstock I-land.  I luved chasin’ wimmin, like that-thar purty gal in knotty britches in my fotygraph. Yu cood scoop in 100L in a night, ol’ son’!” Pappy got all misty-eyed at this point, so I translated the rest of his report, below, from the original hillbilly: Land owners are trying a series of strategies to get visitors to their locales to spend money.  Zyngo games are popular draws, as are Sploder balls. For those new to Second Life, those are virtual versions of Bingo and a type of “office pool” that disburses money randomly after avatars have put in a certain amount.  Treasure-hunts, cheap or free items, and lucky chairs of all sorts still abound.  Pappy spotted a large group of avatars at one spot, crowded around a cluster of lucky chairs, hoping the chairs’ letters might match the first one in their names. Pappy just shook his head and walked off.  These avatars did not talk or interact in any way. They were just there, desperate for a few Linden Dollars and the chance to be the first to sit down. A system that permits avatars to do other things while camping, and not using pose-balls or camping chairs, comes from Anywhere Camping. In theory, the avatar can earn as much as 10 Linden Dollars every 15 minutes.  The trick involves completing marketing surveys, though the bonus is the ability to leave a camping sim and earn money anywhere in the metaverse. It’s clever, but will it prove a sustainable business model?  Without visitors paying something back to sim-owners, it cannot last. Yet time will tell, and Pappy, who does not want to do anything productive, will be on the scene to tell you. Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts 2008-08-07T11:26:00-05:00