I suppose it should be expected...

Someone's trying to run a pyramid scam in SL.

I didn't take a snapshot...aside from the one that went with the abuse report. It's a little pyramid with a dollar bill texture, and I found this particular one sitting around in New Citizens Plaza. Click on it, and you get the SL version of the standard instructions.

I'm not sure whether the goal is to make the originator L$ or to pollute SL with myriad little pyramids. Maybe it's both.

You understand that these schemes don't work, and why, right? (If not, check out the appropriate Wikipedia entry.)

I hope this is nipped in the bud.

Seacliff (graphics-intensive!)

I'm hard pressed to rank the scenic places I've seen in SL, but if you were to insist, Seacliff would probably be at the top. It has lush greenery (some of which you might recognize! more later...), and many places from which to enjoy it, often suspended high in the air.

(Alas, Blogger isn't letting me intersperse images and text, so the images are all going to be together. And previewing it, I see that I was truer than I knew... so I dare not show you the balloon from close up.)

The seating is a delightful surprise. People more familiar with botany than I am (help me, dear!) can tell you what plant inspired them; I just think I remember seeing a picture of it once.

One thing I do know, and fellow former OS/2 users have probably already noticed and are chuckling by now... look closely at the ground beneath my feet. OS/2 users will recognize it as some of the stock wallpaper that came with the operating system!

Whatever your operating system, do visit Seacliff.

You can get anything in SL...

Of course! [slaps head] If you can get tattoos in SL, why not cleavage?

(Mustn't imitate Yakov Smirnov...)

Please find attached a photo of me, with new cleavage. (I should've thought to wear a pendant. Maybe in an update.)

UPDATE: I couldn't decide...so they're both here. The images aren't all that big, so I indulged my vanity a bit.

We all agree that the blogosphere will be a better place if not all things available in SL are demonstrated, so I won't. Not that I'd even go there anyway.

First SL Dream

Well...I had my first SL dream this morning. Like many of my dreams, it was fragmentary and surreal; I've tried lucid dreaming but haven't had any real luck.

I dreamed I was in a large hall, at some kind of reception or party. People were all around, chatting with one another. A woman there was at least fifteen feet tall, and I remember wishing I were that tall.

Hmmm. If there's any deep meaning there, I don't see it. (Just as well; I don't think I want to know any meaning of the dream I had long ago in which Wayne Newton appeared.)

Speaking of music...

...this morning on CBS TV there was a segment of the Sunday Morning program about Sting and the new CD of John Dowland songs he and Edin Karamazov have recorded, Songs from the Labyrinth. It wasn't in SL, so I couldn't take snapshots! >sob<>, as others might for his other work. :)

P.S. Many thanks to Mordecai for letting me know about this CD a week or so ahead of time. I had no idea Sting was doing any such thing.

Live Music in Your PJs (OK, you're in your PJs...)

Long ago, royalty could afford to hire live-in musicians.

For a long time, the rest of us got to hear what musicians happened by, or more often, what we could come up with on our own.

The amateur music tradition largely died off over time, perhaps thanks to technology that let most anyone listen to recorded music at will. Now we're mostly consumers of music—patrons, in a sense, like the royalty of old. (Indeed, Todd Rundgren is trying to bring the notion back more literally with the (lamentably lacking a Linux version) PatroNet.)

This morning, I felt a bit more like that royalty—not that I had a musician at my beck and call, but that thanks to SL, I was alerted to and could attend a live musical performance at 7:00 a.m. my time.

The musician: Jaynine Scarborough, a beautiful alto (in all senses) and guitarist. That's her in the snapshot, taken in the gorgeous setting of Venna where the impromptu concert took place. If you have any chance whatsoever to hear her, take advantage of it.

Where but in SL?

Cybernetic dreams

Cybernetic dreams, Nimue Galatea's blog, is in my list of links. It is full of interesting information and insightful advice. Do visit it.

"She's suddenly beautiful..."

Through SL, I have met many wonderful people, and I'm sure I'll meet many more as time goes on—but the unique gift of SL is the chance to be beautiful. Yes, I know that beauty isn't confined to the conventional notion thereof, but anyway, thanks, Linden Labs.

For Loui

Tonight I met a gentleman from Northern Ireland who expressed an interest in learning about computers, and about Linux. I was a bit amazed at how long he listened to me talk about it.

In any case, he lost the suggestions I made to him, and I promised I'd enter them here. I beg the indulgence of those already familiar with the subject matter.

• You can download an "ISO" file that contains a Linux "live CD' version and burn it to CD, with the resulting CD being bootable. When it boots, it will run Linux and not touch your hard drive unless you tell it to, so you can try Linux out without interfering with an existing Windows installation. There are a lot of these distributions, some that will fit on a CD, some that need a DVD, and some that will fit on a flash drive. I personally recommend Ubuntu Linux, but there are a lot of them, all with their advantages and disadvantages. distrowatch.com has many articles and reviews of Linux distributions.
• If you run Linux, you can set your computer up to "dual boot" so that you can choose either Linux or Windows when you start the computer. Alternatively, if you have a lot of RAM, you can run Windows on a "virtual machine" under Linux using other packages like VMware. (You need a Windows license to do either, which you presumably have if you're already running Windows.)
  
• If you continue to run Windows, for safety's sake, run under an account without administrative privileges unless you absolutely need those privileges. Unfortunately, the history of Windows has meant that a lot of companies that make software for Windows are lazy, and needlessly do things in ways that require administrative privileges. Even "run as" doesn't always work.
• If you continue to run Windows, by all means stop using Internet Explorer; it's like wearing a big "kick me" sign on your back. Run Firefox or Opera.
• Google turns up well over a million hits when one looks for "Northern Ireland" and "computer user group". I'm sure there is a lot of overlap there, but find one near you and attend the meetings.
• There is a huge amount of instructional material online. You needn't take classes to learn about computers, though it may help.
  

Second Life Imitates Art

It's a little bit early in the year, but check out SecondCast #37, "Rock Eating Birds." It's a cleverly done SL version of the Mercury Theater on the Air's famous Halloween broadcast of an adaptation of War of the Worlds.

All I can say is, next time I'm on the grid, I'm searching for Yoyodyne Propulsion Labs, and checking how many SL-ers are named John.

You know you're into SL when...

...you think more about how clothes would look on your avatar than how they'd look on you.

Second Love?

In some ways, it's too easy to fall for someone in SL.

You're together only for short intervals, and on your best behavior. There's no need to worry about bodily sounds, odors, or emissions. One's avatar may take time to rez, but it won't fall ill. Kind of like grandparents, who can visit the grandchildren for short intervals and needn't be around when the diapers need changing or the flu strikes—none of the tests that real love will survive.

OTOH, can't one say that about the initial rounds of dating in RL? Does one's true self eventually show through in SL, just as it does in RL?

I wish I knew, and I wish I felt I could live up to what others think of me.

Wearin' my mask...YAY! Lookin' like a bear... yay.

Here I am as a raccoon, dancing away in Luskwood.

I like my human avatar. (I take that back. I love my human avatar.) Excursions in fur, therefore, won't be common for me. It is fun, though, to see the world from a different point of view. (Not to mention the differences in others' behavior. A 4'5" busty raccoon doesn't receive the attention that a 7'2" busty, leggy redheaded human gets. Why would that be, I wonder?)

Actually, people with furry avatars have my respect just for the practical and logistical considerations. The tail uses the same component as some clothing, and it's another thing to have to keep track of and animate. Then there are the larger-than-human avatars, such as dragons—I imagine those have to be constructed from whole cloth.

(Title from the demented classic, "The Raccoon Song" by Jan Hobson and her Bad Review.)

Fear of Barbie

Looking at the SL forums, "Barbie" appears to be quite the insult. (For that matter, I guess it is in RL, too.)

One school of thought appears to be that because you can control your appearance in SL, it's reasonable to judge you by it. That strikes me as uncomfortably close to "She was asking for it by the way she dressed."

I'm torn. I would like to avoid being judged a "Barbie"... but I like being tall and slender, and having long legs, and—let's be honest!—large breasts, and in SL, I can. I revel in it! I don't think I should have to apologize for that. On the other hand, there's not a single official beautiful body shape, and I've seen a wide variety of beautiful or handsome people in SL, even if they don't think of themselves that way (*cough* Mordecai *cough*). Thank goodness.

Actually, I wonder whether imperfections will become prized in SL, like tea ceremony vessels that contain intentional deviations from "perfect" form or symmetry?

(Now, of course, I'll start second guessing myself about blog posts, and worrying about whether I'm just showing off in choices of example or reference—"Ha! A Barbie wouldn't mention the Problem of Evil, now would she?" But that way lies paralysis and self-censorship, and I do enough of that in RL. Must not go that way.)

So...dust off your IDIC and wear it proudly. Can't we all just get along?

Omphalos, or "Do I have a navel?"

Only on SL question #2...

I've been on SL over a month, and aside from one brief experiment with a bikini, I've not dared show my midriff until today. I know, it makes no sense; on SL, everyone can be beautiful... but there it is.

So, I used the top from one outfit, but didn't care for the short shorts—not with a word across the back. I've never understood why anyone would wear clothes that paste a word across one's backside.

Anyway, I put on some faded blue jeans, and headed out into the virtual world... and had a very good time indeed (thank you again, Mordecai!). At one point I went for the mobile cam POV, and thought I noticed something—or didn't notice it.

Back in the 19th century, a fellow named Philip Gosse wrote a book titled Omphalos, the Greek word for navel. He was trying to salvage creationism after Charles Darwin proposed his famous theory, and argued that God created the world just as if it had evolved--Adam and Eve had navels, even though they had never been attached to a mother's umbilical cord, etc. It was blown off by the religious and skeptics alike, the former because it implied that God is a cosmic liar.

Thoughts of Gosse and of Barbara Eden, whose navel remained unexposed throughout the run of I Dream of Jeannie thanks to NBC Broadcast Standards, zipped through my head, and I asked "Do I have a navel?" Had I given voice to the question, it would have been quite plaintive.

I was assured that I did indeed have a navel, and much panning and zooming persuaded me of it. (Innie or outie? Hard to tell; it was just a dot even at high magnification.) OTOH, I do wear a skin. Do new users have navels? I wonder...

...but it occurs to me that this is the archetypal waste of time, as I am contemplating... no, I can't say it.

What's in a name?

Back when I had to choose a name, I looked over the list of surnames and was immediately struck by "Yeuxdoux." (Someone at LL is a philosopher; I've seen a "Quine" in SL.) It seemed so cute I had to choose it.

I know very little French; most of it's picked up by singing Machaut virelais and rondeaux and a few other French Renaissance-era songs (e.g. "Belle qui tiens ma vie"), along with the very dangerous game (as any Spanish speaker faced with the Portuguese janela can tell you) of guessing based on what I know of other Romance languages...so I parsed it as "sweet eyes" (isn't "doux" the plural of "douce" as in Machaut's "Douce dame jolie", vide billets-doux? Hmmm. Maybe it's the masculine). Others on SL have said "soft eyes," and indeed Google's translation seems to render it thus.

Googling "yeux doux" turns up "faire les yeux doux," variously rendered "to look amourously [at someone]" or "make {goo-goo, sheep (?!?)} eyes [at someone]".

Perhaps I should have done all that Googling before choosing the name, but I still like it.

"Dream...do you dream?"

LL has gotten rid of non-technical forums, it seems, so I'll just raise the question here. (I know of at least two people other than me who read it... Hi, Mordecai and Celebrity!)

I've barely been in SL a month, and I have yet to dream that I'm in SL. I am sure it will happen someday (and there are some times in SL I'd very much like to re-experience in a dream, where the UI is more capable if not totally under one's control), but I'm curious about what others have experienced. (And I hope that I don't have a recurring dream of the sort I had in college, where I was hours late for a lecture, headed there anyway for some insane reason, and wearing only my underwear.)

So, as the title asks: do you ever dream you're in some area of SL? (The title is from the lyrics of CSN's "In My Dreams," BTW.)

Speaking of dreaming... a photo, trying to recreate a virtual night spent in a lovely building with rugs and pillows there to lie upon. This is intended to be sunrise afterwards.

Not SL-related, but...

Check out the solar-powered dress. It's built up of small circuit boards that are networked to a control unit on back, solar powered, and has LEDs that light up. It sounds like it has a WiFi connection.

(ObSL: I suppose one could construct a work-alike, but suspect it would take a lot of prims...)

sl.me.com revisited

It still loops endlessly... but, you can go to just plain me.com, and sign on. Not bad, but they have some very annoying popups that urge you to fill in various items in your profile, or to chat, etc. Grumble, grumble.

Worst of all, when I tried it this morning, it insisted that I install Flash version 8. This Linux user would love to, but Adobe/Macromedia haven't yet seen fit to release a new version of Flash; we're still stuck with version 7.

(Hmmm... I should see whether some SL tailor has a version of the BSD daemon outfit that one young woman wore to a conference.)

Suspension of disbelief

As nice as SL is, in a few years we'll look back and wonder at its primitiveness. Despite that, I just had a lesson in how one can be drawn into it.

On Serenity Island, a bit down the path from the teleport target, slightly past the bench the pigeons hang around, there's a small building with pillows and blankets one can lie upon, and sheer curtains that resemble mosquito netting. In the background one can hear crickets and birds and the occasional wolf (which makes me shiver) and breeze (ditto), and if you have the music turned on, there's tasteful instrumental and vocal music. I recommend turning the music down so that both it and the sound effects are audible.

I'm sitting in RL on a too-short, not terribly comfortable folding chair; the other chair broke, and money's a bit tight... but my avatar is lying comfortably on soft pillows in the depths of SL night, crickets chirping, the theme from Harry's Game playing, and the best of company (Hi, Mordecai!). My actual self is relaxing. I wish I could stay for a day or two.

In the words of the old movie cliché, "Thanks. I needed that."