Slow down [1]
All Streets. All Roads. Always forever now. We’ll split it right down the middle, like they split God’s country. I’ll metrate, you emerge. Let’s go.
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That was the week that was [1]
High speed controlled flow of electrons —
Marshall asks if your PR person know how to make an OPML file; welcome skepticism regarding OpenID; observe that your control addict organization is a densely networked soup of socially constructed value ‘objects’. Better to stay on the outside, where there is a name and a price for each thing, object or otherwise.
Community organizing parts I II III.
Collections of movie title sequences, moving components of invisible organizations, redacted del.icio.us links, and by-the-numbers horror story plots.
New Camino browser release; gorgeous, with Hicks Camino theme. Django has built-in goop for serializing and unserializing+filtering whatever ‘objects’ — that unword again — you care to model.
2008-04-20
My Second Life moment
I habitually miss out on meetings in Second Life because I don’t have the client installed, etc. — so this afternoon I took that bold step, and ended up spending a solid few hours exploring.
Liana took me to some cheerfully Victorian environment; I figured out that you could create and shape objects, so I made a donut.
Later on, after I’d acquired some menswear, Liana showed me the way to the Black Lodge. (There’s always a Black Lodge. Seems to be a real White Lodge shortage — but, that’s life, first or second or otherwise.)
In a moment of nostalgic weakness, I honored the Ministry of Information by visiting the Michigan Library Consortium in Second Life and picking up a free MLC t-shirt. It’s about as crappy as it sounds: a set of empty buildings where you can use laggy computer objects to search the catalogs.
The nicest area I found was ZERO POINT, a sculpture park which cheerfully remediates a generation’s worth of Radio Shack attract mode VHS crap, early nineties computer animation meatloaf c/o dead-ender Silicon Graphics overspill, except that instead of blurry rotating goblet composites and morphing quicksilver faces and sharp-jointed glassy bugs, you have a truly awesome mouselook trudge through tunnels that approximate Tranquility levels being sucked into toothless black holes. The pictures don’t do it justice, since everything is moving, or at least palette-shifting.
I played around with the object building kit, fantastic chunky 3D modeling fun, but you have to get involved with the game economy to do anything serious (i.e. huge, persistent, or using your own textures and media).
The key fact about Second Life is this: most places are empty, and the places that aren’t are running some scammy popularity-contest almighty one-eyed Linden dollar angle. In Second Life, the streets find their own uses for things, but it’s an attention economy, and there aren’t that many streets — why walk when you can fly or teleport? So the choice is, for the most part, between half-baked, mostly-empty built environments, or hugely overcrowded XXX nudie fashion beaches, where bulked-up or slimmed-down avatars brandish their anatomically correct, hilariously outsized prostheses and/or mega sparkling lens-flaring silver and gold, tops low-cut or not at all. You can buy clothing and you can buy junk trinket objects. You can make boring objects really easily, but — but. In my case, I had a lovely little roughshod statue garden going, singing Adam West Batman cubes and all, but then a litter of cigarette-smoking furries walked through and that was that. Why would I build my stuff in a desolate sandbox where nobody would see it? Why build it there, where it’d disappear after I was gone (much, presumably, to the relief of the narcotic-puffing mammal pride). So, I picked up my objects and went home: ⌘Q.
All the above to note that (1) my handle in Second Life is ExoMicroBioUnitAlpha Raymaker and please say hello if you see me, although (2) today was probably the greatest amount of time I’m going to spend with this hollow thing.
2007-06-18
Enjoying my last week on the “gown” side of Ann Arbor
I’ve had some sort of U-M affiliation for very close to a decade at this point. Oscillation between town and gown looks like it’s about to achieve equilibrium on the other side. Ironically enough — given the department I’m expectorating from — it’s the library privileges I’ll miss the most.
2007-04-11
2007-03-23
Only suburban
A good nuclear free community is hard to find, but Brandon managed.
