My Second Life To Do List

My to do list:

1) Write Chestnut's Choices. Today is Tuesday and I usually try to have an outline of the post by the end of the day today. This means a few hours of intensive time in LL's events search. Usually on Tuesdays and Wednesdays people send me information about really cool things, breathlessly wanting to get in under the deadline. I am almost always able to do that but it sure makes my week stressful. I do so appreciate knowing about your events and late is better than never, but I can do a much better job if folks let me know what they are planning early. (Please consider this a plea for help and not a complaint.)

2) Rebuild the beach at our park. We are thinking of making a spot where we could host live music now and then, so the build needs to be able to hold a group comfortably with as little lag as possible. I am pondering ways to make it interesting while keeping texture load times reasonable. The space is directly across from the Cave Rua so an idea that blends nicely with that classic SL build is important to me.

I am in the standing around and staring, waiting for my muse to show up stage of building. Wait. You mean not everyone considers standing and staring a critical portion of the build process? Wow. Who knew.

3) Landscape Thornebridgetown and build a certain someone a new office and possibly come up with a innovative idea for a meeting space. My motivation is high but my creative spark is still out getting coffee apparently. If you know of interesting meeting spaces in SL that are non-traditional, fun and comfortable for brainstorming please do drop me a note. I would love to see what others have done in the hope that it will spark an idea and get my creative building juices flowing. I am looking to create something that is unusual and makes good use of 3d space. Floating lotus flowers - yes! Chairs in rows - no. LMs are appreciated.

4) Find time to go to some of the amazing events I hear about from you. Its a sad fact that I am often so busy working that I don't get out to as many events as I would like. Last night I was at Molaskey's Pub listening to music for 3 hours, which I used to do on a regular basis. I have not been there in ages and it was great fun to hang out and listen to great music with good friends. Isn't that what SL is supposed to be about?

Shane Kirshner at The Patio

My dear friend Rosie Barthlemess has opened a music venue called The Patio. It is the sort of place where musicians can grab the stream and play in a causal way. Rosie herself occasionally sings there when the mood strikes as well.

Early this morning Rosie sent me an IM to come down early for a set by Shane Kirshner. I have been feeling ill and was only too happy to drop the building project I was working on and head over to The Patio.

Shane plays acoustic guitar and sings and I really liked her voice. Her chat was amusing and personal enough to be engaging. There were close to 40 people in the sim, which is pretty impressive considering the performance was thrown together at the last minute, not advertised much, and it was 6am SL time. I really enjoyed the show, which was the perfect way to start off a slow Sunday morning. Check Shane out!

http://www.myspace.com/
http://www.google.com/calendar

Intellectual Property Protections in Second Life and the Little Guy

As most anyone has heard by now, Eros LLC has filed a complaint against Linden Lab to prevent intellectual property rights infringement in Second Life. If you want to read more go here, here, or here.

I think the future success of virtual worlds is entirely dependent on people being able to protect their intellectual property. People simply will not take the time to create if they believe their work can be stole with impunity as has been going on for years within Second Life.

There are a lot of very smart people debating how best to protect intellectual property in the virtual world where it is so very easy to steal. I am hopeful that new tough standards and effective recourse will be available to protect content creators very soon. If Linden Lab and other virtual world leaders are not able to come up with a workable solution, it seems clear the courts will force a solution on us.

Here is my worry. I am not a professional content creator and I do not sell the things I build. Having said that I love to build in SL. I really hope whatever new system emerges will allow people like me to continue to be able to create. Blue Mars appears to limit content creation to "professionals" and because of that fact I have no real desire to spend a great deal of time exploring there.

My request of the big content creators, Linden and the court system is this -- please don't establish a system that leaves hobbyist builders like me looking in from the outside. Please remember the little guy.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Writing for public consumption is a creative act and not simply attention seeking behavior. Still, on occasion I do feel like SL blogging and photography are pure narcissism. On those days it all feels like "look at me" and I think about deleting this blog forever.

In truth, there is a world of difference between healthy self esteem and Narcissism.

I have someone in my RL who has been diagnosed by a health professional as having Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Let me tell you, it is really, really difficult to deal with people who have NPD. When they are part of your family you can't easily eliminate them from your life.

What is NPD? The definition from the Mayo Clinic's webpage is:

Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance and a deep need for admiration. They believe that they're superior to others and have little regard for other people's feelings. But behind this mask of ultra-confidence lies a fragile self-esteem, vulnerable to the slightest criticism.

Here are the diagnostic criteria :

• Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance
• Being preoccupied with fantasies about success, power or beauty
• Believing that you are special and can associate only with equally special people
• Requiring constant admiration
• Having a sense of entitlement
• Taking advantage of others
• Inability to recognize needs and feelings of others
• Being envious of others
• Behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner

I bet you have seen people like this in SL. I know I have. Luckily we *can* eliminate them from our second lives.

(oh, yesh...I am crabby. Why do you ask?)

Email Accounts for Your Avatar

Today on plurk I read about LindenPost.com, which allows you to create an email address for your avatar for the low price of $100 Linden per month. It looks like LindenPost.com is a pretty old website and may not even be active at this time.

Looking at the website made me think about avatar email addresses, which people may not realize is pretty easy to do and can be very useful. Like most people, I get a lot of email and having an avatar email address helps keep my RL activity separate from my digital life. I have two email addresses but mostly use chestnut.rau@gmail.com. Gmail has great features such as virtually unlimited storage and gtalk which is a great way to keep intouch via IM. If you don't have an email account for your avatar you may want to consider creating one.

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Last night I attended the New World Gala party at RMB City along with a *lot* of other people. I plan to go back to explore some more as it was really hard to do with 65 avatars in the sim. This picture shows the swan that flies around in the clouds. Now I did not know swans could fly that high, but I was also unaware that koi the size of buildings flip out of the water and land on the other side of the sim either. Please do take a moment to explore RMB City as its a pretty cool place.

Controversy About SL Art Exhibit

One of my favorite art galleries is running an installation that includes more than 100 sculptures by Starax, some of which are for sale. This installation has raised questions about sharing rare virtual art in an environment where copybotters run free.

Starax is considered by many to be one of the best, if not the best, virtual artist to rise to prominence in Second Life. His early fame was secured by the creation of his magic wand, which produced a 15 minute long show of sculptures and effects. A few years ago he disappeared from the grid but then reemerged as Light Waves who built "Embrace" (above) and many other works for Rezzable. Some suggest the same person is 3d Soup who created the Odalisk. You can read more about this incredible person and his work at the NPIRL blog.

To many, Starax is the "father" of virtual art in Second Life. He is revered. He is loved. His work was collected by devoted followers and much of his art is tucked away in their inventories. When the work is displayed it is often in private. Why is the work hidden away?

There is great fear that Starax's work will be stolen by a copybotter and ripped copies will appear for sale. Theft of his work would diminish the value of the originals which are in short supply due to high cost and the fact that many are no transfer. Sadly, copybot fears are quite legitimate. Unscrupulous people steal content all the time and it appears there is little that is being done to stop them.

If you are looking for a link to the Starax/Light Waves installation, I am not going to share it here. I am sensitive to the worries about copybot and now that I am aware of the concerns, I am not going to do anything more to contribute to the theft of the art. At the same time, I do I think hiding great art away from view is also a crime of sorts. People who are new to SL don't know who Starax is and they should be able to see and appreciate his work. In order to fully appreciate why Odalisk is breathtaking you have to understand the history of SL sculpture. One way to do that is to see the parade of animals produced by Starax's magic wand.

So, what do you think? Should early Starax work be on public display?

New York, New York on Septemeber 11th

I love NY every day. This September 11th I remember what happened here in 2001 with Cat Power's fresh take on an old tune.

The Mystery of the Phantom Prim

I have been adding to my sky box build. I added a second room and a swimming pool.


There are a number of phantom prims in this build. The curtains are phantom so you can walk through them. I made the main section of pool water phantom so when you walk into the pool you actually are *in* the water. I needed a non-phantom prim underneath the water so people don't fall to the ground 650 meters below.

So I built and fussed with placement and then decided to link everything up. When I clicked link I suddenly found myself free falling. Why? When you link phantom to non phantom prims the entire build becomes phantom, which I may have known or may have forgotten. In any case, I was falling to the ground.

It took me a few attempts but I somehow managed to link up the phantom prims with the regular prims, which builders who know more than me say should not be possible. Please don't tell Linden Lab, ok?




(I know, I know. I should have taken the pareo off before I went in the water.)

Use Your Free MP3 from Amazon to Support SL Live Music!

Free music from Amazon? YES! Go here

To celebrate the milestone of surpassing over a million followers to Amazon MP3's Twitter feed, you can get one of millions of songs valued at $1.29 or below on us.

Why not use this opportunity to get a song from a musician who plays in SL? Go to Crap Mariner's TunesinSL page to find links to SL performers.


(Winston Ackland is on iTunes! Follow the link on the TunesinSL page)

See my post on New World Notes for more great live music in SL this week!

Pondering what comes next

I have lived on Shengri La Love since May 2008. Today I was informed the island will be deleted and I need to collect my things.

I guess it is time to move on.

SL Hourly Wages Take a Nosedive

Ok. I HATE the new Linden Lab events page on the redesigned webpage. It takes forever to load on my lightening fast fiber connection. It is cumbersome to navigate. It takes *a lot* more page clicks to get to the information I need.

This new "improved" webpage makes it about 50% harder to do my job. I am really frustrated. That.is.all.