A few years back The Season's Story hunt was all the rage in SL.  I was one of its fans.  But due to time factors and other things, the group behind this hunt disbanded and the hunt ended.  A few people from that group created a new event in the spirit of Season's Story and called it Arcade Gacha.

Arcade Gacha or more like GOTCHA!  I love and loathe Gachas in SL.  Gachas are little quasi-gambling machines where you put money and hope to get a good prize.  Mainly a rare.  Which in the picture above the rare is a beautiful little cottage for your avatar.  Lately I haven't been doing much in SL but I do try to attend this event.  And I spend too much money at it.  But how can anyone resist?  Look at another vendor offering victorian treehouses!

If home items aren't your thing, there are plenty of vendors offering fashion items, clothing and avatar skins/hair.  Pets are very popular as well.  The popular pet to collect this fall are Shibu Inus.  But if you really want to be one with the animals, there is a gacha specializing in Raccoon Avatars.

There is so much more available.  So if you have time during September try to get on the sim and buy!  See the rest of the vendor offerings HERE.

Remember when Pepperidge Farm Remembered?

When WOW was still white hot and The Guild was all the rage in MMORPG circles?



Remember the Team Zaboo vs. Team Fawkes shipping wars?  Well I do.  I seem to be drawn to shipping wars.

Truthfully I haven't been playing many games lately.  I've been pulled into the MOOCs 8th circle of hell in which I spend my time watching video lectures, debate Greek myths in class forums and write 2 to 3 paragraph essays.  All of this voluntarily, mind you.  It doesn't leave a lot of time for MMORPG busy work.

I do have time card time for WOW and I still log in from time to time.  I've been meaning to finish the new legendary quest line for LOTRO.  But...life just doesn't give enough time.  Sigh.

But I remember when...when I spent too much time in games.  It was fun and it was frustrating, I'm not sure if I would do it all again.  But it was strange and amazing time when these games were almost mainstream.

Dinkies - That Funky Feeling

I came across the Dinkies cat avatar last year at Fantasy Faire.  It was so adorable, I dropped a lot of cash collecting different breeds.  At the time, there weren't a lot of clothing and accessories for them. But at this year's faire, there were clothes galore for them.  It made me take out my avatar for a spin.



I never thought to look for videos on youtube for the avatar but they are there, quite a few.  The one I linked to on this post is fantastic.

Second Life Music Videos

It has been a long time since my last post.

What have I been doing?  Well I've gotten back into Warcraft a bit.  My thoughts on that later.  I'm still in and out of LOTRO, Rift and Elder Scrolls Online.  I've even dabbled in the Candy Crush mobile world (horrible time suck and phone power suck).  But I have to admit, I no longer have the fire, the resolve or the desire to play these games long term anymore.  They require too much from me, more than I can give now.  It just reminds me that I'm a heck of a lot older than I was when I first got into WOW and I no longer have the extra time I did when I was younger.

But I'm still regularly in Second Life.  Quite simply because the game only gives what you put into it and no more is required.  There is no grind, no leveling or other elements that turn it into a kind of half-ass job.  To me, it serves as a micro-vacation in that I can go "places" to sight see and relax.

Even though I have been in SL for so many years, it still strikes me as being extremely futuristic.  It transports players into worlds that are one of kind, made by other average Joe/Jane players.  It is sometimes unprofessional and messy but it still has fire.  Something that is missing from regular MMORPGS nowadays (although I'm holding out hope for Camelot Unchained).

NWN has linked to an SL music video recently.  It looks amazing and yes, SL can look amazing.  The old 2007 screen captures used in the media are just poor news reporting.

This is the SL, that regular SL players know and live:



Another vid with typical female SL avatar looks popular right now.

Come Smile with Noodles

So Ciaran Laval linked to a company that has a new demo showcasing an Oculus VR experience.

What does it showcase?  Nothing more or less than a nod at the latest dystopian novel that Tech heads want to make flesh..."Ready Player One".

Thanks to Digital Cybercherries, you can go back to a 1980's arcade and even listen to old tunes.  If you've never experienced said time, no matter Digital Cybercherries has recreated this sad little mess for you to experience.

An experience that ironically captures the pathos of VR itself.  A time when people stopped looking at one another and just stared into a box.  It was the natural outcome of television but so much worse.  Because now we gained an actual gateway into psychosis.

But now with this new groovy VR step, you can live the psychosis.  You can be in the 80's with the box strapped to your head, entering a black box space only to stare into a virtual black box with old arcade graphics.

Are you living?  Or are you lying down on that bed with Noodles hitting that opium only to smile like a daft idiot.

Oh in the past, everything was so much better.  Its much easier to hide there and not face the problems of today.  Easier than actually getting out to do something about inequality and loss of freedom/privacy. It's so modern, so futuristic, so like "Ready Player One".

As usual the tech heads failed to take away the one main theme of the book they idolize.  The character Halliday created his VR to hide from the world.  When he hid, he lost out on love and life because an hallucination was more attractive.  In the process he pulled his whole fictional world into that VR opium dream along with him.

Noodles likes the past, he wants to go no further.  Do you want to join him?

Long Live the New Flesh

There is a ramping up of motion capture hype in regards to Philip Rosedale's new VR Hi-Fi.

And of course, it is all another sign of what Mediabastard (another SL alumnus) calls the aptly named Media Induced Psychosis or MIPS for short.  Mediabastard was the one who really tuned me into Marshall McLuhan and the Medium is the Message theory.



Watch the video, then read the comments...also read Ciaran Laval's blog about the video here.

Now imagine if you were face to face with someone in deep conversation.  But what you saw were the "expressions" that were "captured" for the Hi-Fi avatars.  Honestly...would you accept those expressions in every day life?  Or would you deduce that there was something wrong with your conversation partner if his/her mouth continually hung open?

One of the things that Mediabastard and Jaron Lanier write about is dumbing ourselves down to accept the new media hype, the latest thing.  Lanier wrote that current AI is only acceptable because we have to take ourselves down to its level.  In a way that we would never do for another human being.  In essence, we are denying our own humanity and highly evolved senses to buy into AI/VR media hype.  Because it is cool and the idea is exciting, we are willing to accept the good enough, the very large shortcomings.  People may think, that it is only temporary but it isn't.  It changes us.  This technology is not making us better.  It is devolving our own advanced social processes.  This would not be the first time we have all degenerated because of technology.  Lanier pointed out that people now feel more comfortable typing into devices rather than having conversations.  That young people have a harder time with eye contact due to technology.  He also concluded that this is no surprise since technology is developed by a group of people who by and large have problems with the interpersonal aspects of life.

Technology people are more likely to suffer from forms of autism or have conditions on the spectrum.  They use technology to cope with a world that at times baffles them or even frightens them.  I have nothing but empathy for them.  Not being able to hold a comfortable level of eye contact nor being able to properly read facial expressions is akin to being blind on a very basic level.  Imagine all the visual information about friends, loved ones, and strangers that is lost simply because you can not see it.

These are the kind of people now involved with motion capture in VR technology.  They can't see where they are going wrong.  But they are asking people who do know, to get excited over the promise of Mocap not the shoddy way it is designed.  The great majority of it depending upon all of us dumbing ourselves down to accept a facsimile of "human expression" in VR that in real life we would rightly conclude is evidence of mental disability.

Mocap could lead to problems of a new generation not being properly able to read real facial expressions much in the way young people now cannot hold eye contact.

Where Mediabastards MIPS theory comes in, is that no one can see that they are making gargantuan amends to accept these poor simulacrums because the ideas are so alluring.  We are embracing the illusion, the psychosis over the reality.  THAT is quite frightening.

So...death to videodrome...long live the new flesh indeed.

Ready or Not Player One

Above is my current avatar standing in one of the patches of land that I rent.  At the time it was taken, this SL visit was just like any other day.  Little did I know that a few days later I, and other SL players, would discover that Second Life is basically over.  And not over by any other company than its parent company Linden Lab.  Due to a planned or unplanned leak, Linden Lab has confirmed that it is building another virtual world.

At first I was excited.  Second Life needs a great many quality of life upgrades which are mostly out of reach due to the age of the platform.  A new place with better avatar tools would be great.  But as I came down from my high, other more logical questions started to surface.

Mainly about land. The land market is now essentially dead and that is a little frightening.  Because Second Life's revenue stream is land.  Prokofy Neva wrote a great post about it from the rental business viewpoint.  This could potentially be a fiasco that could be a bigger than the Zindra shakeup a few years back.  Ebbe Linden answered a few basic questions on Sluniverse.com regarding the new world.  He mentioned that they were thinking about lowering land costs in favor of item taxation.  A concept which I thought was strange.  Does the lab think that they can make more from adding fees to creators and buyers?  Did they have an accountant look into this?  Or is this another pie in the sky idea from some insane ideology that Silicon Valley people love to worship?

How will LL plan to deal with all the landholders, including myself, who are now holding the bag for worthless land that costs a monthly fee?  Granted I only hold almost a quarter of mainland.  Not a lot compared to people like Anshe Chung, Prokofy Neva, etc.  but it is still a big investment compared to most single users in the world.  This isn't including the land I rent from themed estates that I love such as Winterfell and 1920's Berlin.  I admit I spend much more on land in Second Life than I should.  But I look at it as an entertainment expense on par with going to the movies.  When all is said and done, I would spend the same amount attending the local movie house.  But I get more joy from Second Life than I've ever received from passive film watching.

Will there even be land, as we know it, in the new place?  Already people on sluniverse are screaming for no setup fees or tier fees.  They are campaigning for bubbles (like the failed Cloud Party) that will disappear when their users are not logged into the world.  So there will be no world, no places to visit, and no homes or landscaping to admire.  That would be a deal breaker for me.  I simply would not move over but stay in old SL until the lights go out.

According to Ciaran Laval's site, he pointed out a Linden post on sluniverse that Second Life isn't on par with World of Warcraft but more like the old Everquest.  Which just flabbergasts me.  Why is an employee of the company downplaying the success of the company's core product?  What possibly good could that do in the public image?  This indicates to me that LL, as well as the rest of the VR tech community, are still beguiled by the Snowcrash/Ready Player One fantasies.  Fantasies that have been shown time and time again to be just fantasies.  WoW didn't get made with fantasies that there were about 10 million people out there waiting to play its game.  They were hoping for old Everquest success of a few hundred thousand to a million people.  That they attracted more was an outlier.  So developing the next VR with the idea that millions of people will pile on is laughable.  Especially when it has been proved that only a small number of people feel comfortable with the avatar experience and an even smaller who are capable of self directed play time.

Recently there was a news story which stated that children who don't learn their letters through penmenship (just by typing or tracing letters on a computer pad) are not forming the same neural connections as people who did learn their alphabet by writing.  Technology is literally changing the human brain.  And I'm beginning to suspect that this has a large bearing on Virtual Worlds.  Mainly because the audience for a free form virtual world that only LL offers (SL) has an audience that skews older.  The known, guaranteed audience for virtual worlds are old as in old enough to have gone through the schooling system before new technology.  This is something that must be taken into account and in fact should worry virtual world creators.  If this is the case (as it appears to be)  their audience is old and getting older with no one to replace their numbers.  I speak from experience.  I'm in middle age and getting older than that soon, I love SL but my young niece was wary of it.  All the people who grew up in new technology either gravitate to on the rail games or just hang out in Facebook like interfaces but mainly text message/twitter.  Twittering, by its very nature, doesn't encourage exploration, it doesn't encourage deep thinking.  What it does encourage is burp like exclamations about lunch and bathroom habits.  That is not the kind of thinking that takes well to virtual world experiences.

Despite warning signs, I really hope that it will be Linden Lab that creates the next popular platform.  Mainly because I'm more comfortable with the devil you know over the devil you don't idea.  Linden Lab does like doing things its own way but it also has consistently changed its direction due to public feedback.  Granted many changes were due to outcry but at least things got changed.  Worlds don't get made without protest or the ability to protest.  Unfortunately the fascistic turn that real world and the tech world are experiencing actively discourages protest.  Where will that leave us?

Right now, we are left in a holding pattern.  Land will become a lot cheaper as people dump their holdings in preparation for the new place.  But I don't see much of this land being purchased.  Who would want to buy something that will not carry over to the new place?  I'm at the max of the tier I can pay, I should probably dump what I have but I can't do it.  Not yet.  I already came to the conclusion that I will not recoup my expenditures.  Not only will the land market suffer but I see people holding back on home purchases such as housing and landscaping.  Maybe fashion will be able to hold up.  But really why spend loads of money on things that will not transfer.  This is worrying because by all accounts the new place will not even be ready for another two years.

Whatever the case someone's goose is being cooked.  Just whose it is, is not clear.