Caliandris Pendragon

Alirium garden centre

2011-05-18T14:08:00.000-07:00

I haven't been doing too much exploring recently, but in the course of taking photographs for a job, I came across a very well put together tree by Alirium Gardens. It was so good I decided to search them out and have a look at the rest of their products - and I am so glad that I did.

The centre itself has rather annoying navigation. You arrive 1000 metres in the air and have a choice of teleports. It means that you are transported down past a wintry frost layer, to a glowy place with enormous rabbits, and eventually down the ground floor, where there is a shop.

The work by Alirium lends an impressionistic quality to the planting, as you can see from the photographs. Having done some unnatural plantings myself, I appreciate how well they have made their grasses and flowers.

Not everything is for sale, and so you may see plants and trees which can't be seen in the shop.

I like the overall design of the shop and signage, and the products, but the prices are a bit eye watering... the trees I admired as copyables were $1999... and copyable flowers $699.

Clicking the teleport board to see the summer products used in a build meant that I couldn't find my way back to the shop easily - I had to teleport out of the sim and come back again via the 1000 metre landing spot, which was a bit annoying. But the stuff is so beautiful, you can forgive them almost anything.

My two criticisms are the teleports - dumping customers elsewhere in the sim with no way back to the shop doesn't seem commercially advisable, and the use of glow/full bright - in places I couldn't see anything because of the glow... it should be used very sparingly.

Help Domenic Johanssen

2011-05-14T00:40:00.000-07:00

I'm taking the unusual step of posting the same blog to all my blogs, no matter what their subject.

Domenic Johanssen was a happy child of two loving parents. His parents were taking him to India from Sweden where they had been living, when officials boarded the plane and took Domenic away. People who are told the story cannot believe that Domenic was removed from his parents on such flimsy grounds: the Johanssens were planning to home educate (which was legal in Sweden at that time), they hadn't allowed him to have all the vaccinations, and he had two cavities in his baby teeth.

He has been in the care of the Swedish authorities since then, and repeated attempts to get him back have failed. The separation has adversely affected the health of his mother and father, and the photograps of the child now compared to the child then make it obvious that he is far less happy in the care of the authorities than he was at home.

Th Swedish system seems to be a heartless and inhumane system which ignore human bonding and puts the interests of the family last in any decision. I find it absolutely incomprehensible that a state in a civilised country could be allowed to behave like this.

I don't know what can be done. I have written to judges and officials over the past two years. In a place where home educating seems to be considered abuse, it is very very hard to know how to communicate with these people.

Everyone to whom I have told this story have been suspicious that there must have been another, hidden, reason for taking Domenic away from his parents, but that truly isn't the case. If you can think of a way to publicise, or to put pressure on the Swedish authorities, please please let me know.

Change.org|Start an Online Petition »

Kitely launches Virtual Worlds on demand

2011-04-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

Kitely have launched their Virtual Worlds on demand service. No, this isn't an April Fool's joke! What you will need to take advantage of their free beta, is a facebook account and an SL client. And, to take advantage of their free credits offer, 20 friends. Once you get to their website, you can sign in using your Facebook account, and then choose to visit their sample sim, or create your own world.

I found it a little confusing at the very beginning, finding myself in the sample sim, when I had expected to be in my own sim, but I soon worked out that one needs to go to the "my worlds" tab to create your own world... if you simply click to enter world once you have logged in, you will find yourself on a sample sim world with some empty exhibition spaces.

Having made your own world, and logged in using the SL client, you will find yourself on your own version of an SL sim. This only persists while there are avatars online inside it... it shuts down and goes into cold storage once everyone has left.

A word: if avatars come to your world and haven't been anywhere else in Kitely, the creator of the world gets 200 kitely credits. You only have this ability the first time you go into Kitely. My world is here. Kitely advertise free credits if you link Kitely with your facebook... but you only get these if you have a picture on your account and at least 20 friends.

It seems that it isn't currently possible to teleport from world to world, so you have to log out to go anywhere else. Also, it doesn't give you a chance to use the viewer of your choice - it will use the SL viewer unless you choose another as your default. Imprudence should allow importation and export of objects.

Meshing about

2011-01-05T12:31:00.000-08:00

Mesh is coming to SL. It's already on the beta (Aditi) grid, and people are preparing for the move onto the main grid. For those of us who are not blessed with 3DMax or Maya tools, the time has come to learn Blender.

Blender is an open source programme for 3D creation which is compatible with mesh in Second Life. I have been learning it (or not learning it) for years. Today I decided to update my installation, and found myself on a merry-go-round where Blender told me it couldn't find my Python installation, even though I had just installed it and... it's RIGHT THERE. Look! Python, on my list of programs.

I installed and uninstalled, trying to work out how to get Blender to recognise it. I've also been seeking out good tutorials and videos for Blender, which will teach me how to use it and not to feel like I want to kill someone.

Fortunately for me, Eelco came becack from his winter holiday and told me about Machinimatrix, which is a website written by someone in SL, who has a download of the integrated program and who does very good tutorials. They have an irritating artificial voice, but apart from that are very well produced and very simple to follow. I like the style a lot, and felt I learned more in one tutorial than I have learned from hours of watching people on Youtube.

So, I am beginning properly with my journey towards mesh building. I was also sent a link to Sintel, a film made in Blender, which is amazing.

Link distance changes

2010-12-06T13:24:00.000-08:00

Something I haven't seen any blogging about in the last week is the change to link distances in Second Life. For some time, linking prims has been subject to an arcane set of rules which left nearly everyone confused... most people link things by trial and error and find out the hard way when things won't link together, or use a tool like the Rez Foo or Rez Faux to link builds that exceed the distance allowed.

There was a change last week that means that if something would fit within a sphere with a diameter of 54 metres, it should link. This should mean that most house or office builds will link as one piece, which will be a great inprovement.

Angry Lindens

2010-10-22T14:01:00.000-07:00

There's been some shenanigins on the JIRA, which is the place that residents of SL are supposed to report bugs and problems. It can be rather complicated to someone who isn't used to it... certainly I usually struggle to establish whether or not a bug I have discovered has already been reported or not.

One source of extreme irritation for SL merchants has been the migration of goods from XStreet to SL Marketplace (SLM). Some of them have been vociferous in their criticisms, particularly Ab VanMoer, who ended up posting one of his emails to the commerce team on the SL Blog. It's exasperated, but not rude or impolite.

Thus it was a bit of a surprise that Brodesky Linden reacted angrily to a comment in the JIRA about ratings not showing up right in SLM, and said: "Why don't you stop wasting time and put in comments in the correct tickets. I filter (Ab's) emails to trash. Gmails makes that very easy to do."

This was such poor customer relations, particularly since Ab VanMoer is credited by other merchants with having assisted the commerce team in finding many of the bugs and problems which have been afflicting SLM.

To his credit, Ab tried to smooth things down, and made excuses for Brodesky's ill-mannered retort, only to find it thrown back in his face by Brodesky a few comments later: "I'm glad this has been entertaining, and Ab is enjoying all the publicity this is bringing him. You can thank him for all the emails he has sent the commerce team about changing the item that gets delivered. The first part of being able to change inventory will be out tomorrow, with the ability to edit unavailable items, followed by a release where you can change inventory items."

Given that the evidence is that Ab's emails were not abusive, but detailed and helpful, and that Ab had been very reasonable and hadn't over-reacted to Brodesky's original comment, this response seemed inexplicable.

Then, Darrius Gothly published a blog which revealed that Brodesky was being fired, not for poor customer service or any transgression, but because, allegedly, Linden Lab do not want to be forced to pay taxes in the state he lives in. Now, I don't know the facts of that assertion, but it does make an angry and inappropriate response to a customer somewhat more understandable.

I am concerned that Linden Lab are losing staff they can't afford to lose - even with Brodesky the Commerce team seem to have been struggling. Now Philip Rosedale has announced that he is leaving again, after only a few months back at Linden Lab, without having found a successor to run the show.

Seasick in Avaya

2010-09-16T23:43:00.000-07:00

Someone posted a link to Avaya, which seems to be windowed virtual world for business meetings - as long as you are on a windows PC and don't mind voice chatting with strangers on the internet. This is what I wrote on LinkedIn, in review of the world:

I'm always game for a new thing, so I downloaded the client and had a look. The fact that there is a download of a client may be a disincentive for people to try it out casually. I found the avatar customisation easy, but the control of the world and the interface was short on explanation in world - there is a basic overview on the website etc. Having to use W and the mouse to control the avatar's movements and the camera is vomitous - I'm used to navigating virtual worlds, but the fact that the camera swings about as you are trying to see where you are is a big disadvantage.

It took me some time to work out that the focus had to switch away from the world in order to use text chat - and it means that it is very difficult to get a meaningful interaction between avatars. Most people don't want to voice chat with people they don't know - this is risky behaviour in terms of the internet... people will often do the virtual world equivalent of showing you their penis (as in chat roulette). I don't know whether the people who were in the room with me at the same time were able to hear my text chat - they didn't respond if so.

"Voice chat is always on" says the quickstart guide - but this wasn't obvious to me at first having downloaded and entered the world, and would have been a huge barrier to me trying it out, if I had understood this to be the case, for the reasons above. For the demo online with strangers, it would be far better if this were an option and not always on.

The letterbox size of the window makes it seem very enclosed and restricted, and the seasickness effect of the camera movement makes one disinclined to move about much. Most of the areas around the central area seemed to be restricted access also, which seems like a big mistake to me... to invite people in, and then tell them they can shuffle around a central area, but can't access the upper levels or the rooms around the central room is likely to antagonise the very people you are trying to impress - it's a very unfriendly act. It would be better to block off entirely and not have visible, the places you don't want them to go. If you are expecting it would make them curious... I just felt resentful, that I couldn't go upstairs - particularly as I could see other avatars already up there.

Finally, the fact that it is windows only, is a big problem. You can't always guarantee that you will have everyone on a windows PC, and a lot of people in creative industries, will be on Macs. Excluding anyone on a Mac is going to be a big issue.

I certainly wouldn't choose to us this over Second Life for a business meeting, simply because of the sea sickness effect. I would fix the camera at the avatar's eye level, unless the avatar releases it to pan the camera around - that would at least make walking around a more comfortable experience? I would switch off the always-on voice, and give people more guidance in world.

It's interesting, certainly.

Rug and hair-pulling behaviour

2010-08-31T01:35:00.000-07:00

Oclee and I were planning to use this weekend to make a film of the nurse training demonstration that we have been working on for the last six months. As you will appreciate, it is pretty difficult to waltz into offices in institutions and companies and demonstrate Second Life. Even if you try to make contact with the potential client's IT bods in advance, there are generally issues with firewalls and connectivity which are hard to overcome for an hour's meeting.

I'd tried bringing a dongle and using external connections, but that really isn't much better, and depends upon what sort of signal you can achieve in the location. Thus I found myself at one demonstration, turned to grey plasticine and apparently naked.

So, we thought that a practical solution to these problems was to make a film, which shows everything the demonstration can show, but in a stable environment on a good connection. Logging into Second Life on Saturday, the first thing we discovered was that the HUD (heads-up display, something which presents like a window on the screen, within SL, see above) we have made wasn't working in the expected way. It's been a while since we did the last demonstration, and there's been an update since then. And they broke shared media on a HUD.

Our HUD links to a database which serves the images up, and the avatar making clicks in world. If shared media for HUDs is broken, so is our HUD.

Initially I was sceptical that LL could possibly have put out a viewer which breaks their much-trumpeted shiny shared media whatsit, but they did. They knew during the beta testing that it was going to break HUDs using shared media and they did it big fat anyway.

We searched the JIRA, found a lot of people complaining about the same thing. Added our comments and votes to the issue and then spent the weekend on other things. I have now found that Snowglobe, the open source viewer, is working for shared media on HUDs, although I am tending to crash frequently with any of the v2 viewers. I am going to have to try to spend some time finding out what's going on.

One tip which Oclee passed on to me, was that the preferences revert back and don't tend to "stick" for some things, especially if you switch viewers, and so it is worth checking whether you have "enable openGL vertex buffer objects" checked. (In v2 you'll find your preferences under the Me menu, and that setting is on the Graphics tab and then the Hardware button.) If you have had problems with v2, you might try unchecking that option and seeing whether that makes a difference.

I'm still struggling with a lot of the changes in the v2 viewer, not least the fact that so many things I use all the time have been seemingly buried. I'll have to see how I get on with Snowglobe. It's very annoying though, that it is broken in the main viewer, and makes it difficult to persuade very conservative institutions and companies that SL is a stable platform for development, when something that was working perfectly well a couple of weeks ago is no longer working. Coupled with the high cost of development in SL, it may well be a deal breaker. OpenSim looks ever more attractive.

The sky is falling... again

2010-08-25T01:50:00.000-07:00

It's been pretty lively on the message boards and forums since the Emerald viewer debacle at the weekend. It seems that a lot of SL residents are returning from holiday and playing catch-up because of the number of changes and announcements that have been made over the last few weeks. So, in case you've been off on a round-the-world trip, or in a cave with the troglodytes, here's a summary of what's happened over the last few weeks:

Linden Lab laid off about 30% of their workforce. It seemed initially that maybe they were slimming down the community Lindens in order to get ready for take-over or merger or public offering (theories varied) but then people began to notice that it wasn't just the people who give support who were being booted, but also the coders and programmers who knew all about mono/sculpties/flexis like Pastrami and Qarl and others.

Initially it seemed that things were going to plan. The residents held a wake for the Lindens who died, virtually-speaking, and awaited the next move with baited breath. Then, all of a sudden, M Linden didn't turn up to the SLB7 celebrations and Philip Linden was back and did. The king is dead... long live the reincarnation of the last king. Er, what?

Since the recrowning of King Philip, things have gone a bit bonkers. Among the announcements is one that the teen grid is going to be amalgamating with the main grid. It seems that the residents of the main grid were touchingly convinced that the teen grid had successfully rounded up all the under-18s and put them in a safe place where their underwear was nailed on and they weren't given any sharp things that they could hurt themselves with. Thus, they are panicking at the prospect of the 16 years and over teens joining the main grid.

Actually, SL main grid is teeming with under 18s and has been since the beginning. The only difference that the new policy will make is that the 16-18s are more likely to be accurately labelled. The under 16s will still be pretending to be adults though.

Linden Lab announced the "display names" change. Residents think this is a cynical move to allow them to link SL with social networks like Facebook. Possible it is, but it is also the case that some residents would like to be able to use their real life name when that is appropriate: ie when you are at a conference or business meeting and want people to know who you are. Not when you have discovered a predilection for furry sex in the bushes... you prolly want to use an SL name for that, preferably one belonging to someone else. Oh look, you can. And that's the main problem that long-time residents see with the name changing thing: the possibility for spoofing someone else's identity.

No official announcement has been made afaik, but one of the Ontyne support staff posted to SLU that ther jobs are disappearing and LL is subcontracting them out to an American company. I don't know how far this going to go, and whether the remaining Linden Liaisons are going to be contracted out is anyone's guess.

Linden Lab announced the ending of the Community Gateways project, with no advance warning to their partners in the Community Gateway project, and its replacement with a selection of handpicked landmarks. Thus, instead of being put into an educational sim whether they liked it or not, and having to learn enough to leave and explore the rest of the grid, newbies will now suddenly find themselves in the middle of Bare Rose or similar, and have to work out how to leave, without the benefit of the tutorials/mentors/educational events they were previously getting in the hubs and gateways of the previous system. Even the shopowners of the places which have won listing on the newbies places list, don't know how they came to be chosen.

The companies and institutions who have spent considerable sums in setting up newbie reception points, are understandably a bit miffled about suddenly losing their supply of newbies, although some places, like Caledon, report an almost uninterrupted supply of newbies due to their having got onto the List.

Talking of newbies, LL introduced a new viewer v2 some months ago, with a view to increasing retention rates, apparently. It is alleged that the new viewer is more newbie-friendly and easy to use than the old one. I don't honestly know if that is true - or how you would ever quantify it, because everyone can only use one viewer as their first viewer - but for oldbies it is a total nightmare. Things you have used all the time, like the current location and position information which used to be at the top of the screen... have gone.

Many people reverted to the old viewer, or looked to the list of the alternative viewers, and from thence has come the drahma which unfolded over the weekend, over the Emerald viewer. It seems that over the past few months, Emerald has become the viewer of choice to anything from 20 to 50% of the residents of Second Life. It's hard enough to get figures on how many people there are in SL, let alone what proportion of them are using a particular viewer.

Rumours have abounded about the dodgy backgrounds and behaviour of some of the developers working on the Emerald project. Some of the people said to have previously developed so-called "black-hat" viewers, which enabled people to do things like export objects which don't belong to them, were working on Emerald.

There's been some acrimony between the Emerald developers and others, which seems to have developed into a full-blown hate, in which one of the Emerald developers inserted code on the login page which hijacked the users computer to download data from the other developer's website. There is dispute over whether this constitutes a distributed denial of services attach, or DDoS, mainly because it was unsuccessful at bringing down the website.

Linden Lab has removed the viewer from the list of approved third party viewers, Emerald have had a lot of staff changes, with people resigning, being asked to resign, returning to post, rearranging themselves...they seem to have put most of their effort into sending out PR bots to troll the lists and reassure everyone that Emerald is a safe and trusted viewer. Which it is not, not any more, sadly.

So, there you are, you should be more or less up to date with things in Second Life. I'm making no promises though. Things change quickly, and it's often all smoke and mirrors: I suggest you put on full body armour and mosey on over to SL Universe if you want to keep up.

Emerald viewer users beware

2010-08-22T08:08:00.000-07:00

I haven't used the Emerald viewer, although people around me have been talking about it a lot for ages. There are trial uploads to test new textures, the ability to export your own products and creations from SL to OpenSim and a whole lot more.

Having set up my own OpenSim locally, I needed a viewer that would allow me to transport my builds to OpenSim from SL, legally, and so I got to the point of downloading the Emerald client just as this thread began on the SL Universe Forums. Initially it was a bit gossipy, speculation about the comings and goings of Emerald developers and of limited interest to me... read on though. By page three it is alleged that the login screen for all the users of Emerald viewer was used to attack a blog written by someone the developers at Emerald don't seem to like much. I am hazy on the history, but my attention was caught by the idea that they could embed something in their login screen which was just one pixel square, which would have my computer trying to download from the hapless blogger's website.

This means that not only did it appear that they were organising an illegal attack on a blogger, but that they were prepared to use the customers for their viewer to do it.

According to Arabella's blog, this wasn't a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS)... it was a "poor attempt at boasting that failed miserably". Like the people discussing it at SLU, I don't buy it. Notwithstanding their claim that Data Linden and Qarl Linden have joined them, I'm afraid the undermining of trust was complete for me... I deleted Emerald without ever having fired it up. Frankly, given that they admit the attack on the blogger, they are in deep trouble. I think LL should ban the viewer, as being untrustworthy.

I'm looking at Imprudence.

Edited to add: you might want to check out Talwyn Mills' summing up of the Emerald situation, as there is a bit more details.

OpenSim resources

2010-08-22T00:25:00.000-07:00

This is intended as an updatable list of OpenSim resources. I shall be posting to the blog about my experience of working on an OpenSim grid, but in the meantime, I am going to collect information useful for Open sim on this blogpost.

Articles
OpenSim business roadmap - some inaccuracies but a useful general article.

How-to information
Video about installing an OpenSim hypergrid on your computer. Other parts linked from that first part.
Opensim tutorials
Easy User guide
Linux/Ubuntu set up of OpenSim grid.

Reference information
Wikipedia article about OpenSim.
A useful list of all the server commands for OpenSim.
OpenSim and Unity working together at Rezzable

Fan sites
Koinup fan site.
Justin Clark-Casey's developer blog
Metaverse Ink

Miscellaneous
Difficult to know how to categorise Adam Frisby's site (he's also known as Adam Zaius in SL). It's a combination of reference, fan site and how to and very much worth reading.

Let me know if you have suggestions or any of the links go dead! Ping Caliandris Pendragon in SL, or contact me via my blog.

The Virtual Revolution

2010-08-22T00:05:00.000-07:00

The Guardian carries an article today about the virtual revolution, which it suggests may be as important as the industrial revolution in terms of the changes it is making to the way we work and do business. I know that a large proportion of the people I know in real life think that I am involved in some sort of game... they don't understand what the virtual world is, and what is more have little interest in it. They aren't into Computer Games, they tell me, as though this explains everything.

I have been in Second Life for over six years, and as soon as I arrived I could see the potential that the virtual world has for collaboration, creation, making links between people. At that time, SL was tiny - a grid of around 100 sims and no more than 1000 people online, many of them from Linden Lab, the owner and creator of Second Life.

The virtual world has changed a lot over the past six years. Big business has come and gone and come back again, educational institutions have dipped their toes in the water and then plunged into the world, only to jump out again.

Until recently, there didn't seem to be any viable competitors for Second Life, and so much of the development and content available in virtual worlds was on the Second Life grid. Over the last year OpenSim has made such a lot of progress that more and more companies and institutions are using it for their corporate sims. It has become possible to run your own OpenSim and to offer access to others - and to link your world with others on the Hypergrid. Things are progressing at a breakneck pace, to the point where even people who are immersed in virtual worlds are beginning to have to work very hard to keep up with developments.

As for the rest of the world, who have gradually adopted the hideous echoes of the virtual world which are available on Facebook - like Farmville - which seem to offer all the timewasting drawbacks of virtual worlds and virtually none of the advantages - they are on a different planet altogether. I find that the majority of my real life friends and family lack the vocabulary to discuss virtual worlds, lack the shared understanding of what I mean when I talk about a virtual world, and lack the inclination or motivation to change that.

Consequently, I have stopped even trying to explain what it is all about any more, and wait for articles like that in the Guardian to come along and explain things for me. Eventually, they'll get it. By that time, hopefully, I will be Queen of my own virtual world, and in a position to dispense land and virtual bounty to them. At the moment I am struggling to get to grips with my own local OpenSim, fighting with the terraforming and trying to cope with running a server. That's one thing I can say for virtual worlds... the big thing for me is that they have presented a constant intellectual challenge, and there is always something else to learn. How much there is increases with every passing day.

Hubs and gateways

2010-08-21T23:44:00.000-07:00

Well that's rather spooky. I posted at SL Universe about the changes to the Community Gateway program which have just been announced on the SL blog, and decided that actually I had a lot more to say on the subject. Logged into my blogger acount and came here to write the post and blogger suggested I might like to entitle my piece Hubs and gateways. I'm trying to work out how it knew and why it came up with that title which is absolutely appropriate to this post.

When I first joined SL six and a half years ago, there was a short orientation on an island to show one how to move, chat, fly, and then the hapless new resident was dumped in Ahern Sim to fend for themselves. In those days normal people hung out by the hubs that brought new people in, and offered them help and friendship. Of course, the world was smaller, and there were only about 100 sims to explore. Even so, I found it disorientating to know where to go... and it took me some time to get the courage to move away from the hub and explore. I worried I would never find my way back again.

As time went by, Ahern and the other hubs became much less friendly environments for people. They found it difficult to work out what was going on when they were griefed by people the moment the joined the grid. A new island, Help island, was joined to the orientation experience, to enable people to learn skills before they were dumped into the free for all on the main grid.

This was only partially successful, because people would arrive on help island and have absolutely no clue where they were or what they should be doing there. Men particularly found the lack of guidance very trying. There is definitely a gender bias when it comes to aimlessly exploring... in general, women like it and men do not. Men prefer to know where they are going and what the purpose it - and if you don't tell them, they don't like it.

Some time ago, LL chose people to run what they called community gateways. This meant that new people could choose to go to particular places, where there were new orientation experiences, tutorials and guidance for new residents. Some were good, some were very good and some were a bit dire... and none of them really satisfied the desire to be directed quickly to the things which had attracted people inside SL.

In my experience of four years of mentoring newly arrived people, they were generally quite clear about what had brought them into SL, and I always thought that sorting people according to their interests - and offering them the skills they needed to get into that - would be by far the easiest way to immerse them in the grid. I thought a series of gateways - like a castle or fortified town, would be the best option, with them choosing their gateway according to what they were interested in, with the option of returning to start over if what they had chosen didn't work out, or they wanted to choose again.

There are so many sims across the grid that are owned by Linden Lab and which are currently empty of real content, I thought it would be easy to have a place to learn how to explore, or with good landmarks for interesting places. People want and are crying out for guidance, and it isn't that difficult to give it to them.

Now Linden Lab had announced that the Community hubs are going, and that people are to be offered places to go to which interest them... but I fear that sending them straight into the grid is going to send them back into the confusion that I felt when I joined. Maybe not: there are a lot of websites and books now about using Second Life that weren't around when I joined.

I'm still convinced that proper guidance in the first few days of entry into virtual worlds can be the difference between someone understanding the nature of the virtual world and how to explore it, and overwhelming them. As it is, many of those offering the community hubs and gateways are going to continue to offer the services that they have built up over the last couple of years - the meetings and events which introduce people to the virtual world, the support for new people, mentors and guides.

There is still one big problem for creators and explorers alike: finding good content and events, knowing how to distinguish the great from the truly awful... I think the virtual world will be a lot more usable once we have an equivalent to google available in world that uses something other than how much one paid for an advert to judge where on the search list to place them.

In the meantime, my advice to a newb is to find someone to act as a virtual tourguide and mentor, to use Google rather than the internal search to find things in world, and not to expect modern gaming graphics in SL.

Grid merging

2010-08-15T17:52:00.000-07:00

Shock announcement at SLCC from Philip Rosedale about the merging of the grids. It seems the main grid and the teen grid are going to be gradually merged, with the 16-18 years olds joining the adults first.

There is much furious debating going on around the SL message boards, as though this is a shock horror change that is going to make a huge difference to people in SL.

As I have pointed out in a couple of posts myself, there are already substantial numbers of underage residents and explorers in SL. Anyone who thinks it is possible to know through any sort of verification system whether someone in SL is 14 or 84 is deluded. All it takes if for person A to set up an account, and to either abandon the account and leave it where others can find it (with remember me ticked, so they don't even have to guess the password) and even the best and most efficient age verification is defeated.

In any case, it has always seemed barmy to me that teens can have real sex at 14, 15, 16, 17, or 18, depending upon jurisdiction, and get married at around 16 and have their own babies, but they can't see pixel sex or participate? That just seems crazy, as though online sex can somehow be more damaging than the real life stuff.

If you are going to indulge in cyber-sex, you had better have a real relationship with the person you are involved with, or else you cannot know if they are maybe 14 or 74 or the opposite sex to the one they portray in SL. If you are indulging in casual genital shouting sex (ah, I'm too tired to explain) then probably you don't care who the partner is.

It's all part of reconciling yourself to the psychological challenges of cyberspace. I have had fascinating discussions with fellow residents who think that we only fool ourselves when we think it is possible to know more about the people we see in real life than we do about the people we meet online. To a certain extent I agree with that - but it isn't so easy for a 56 year old pedophile to pretend to be a 15 year old boy in real life, as it is online. Conversely it isn't so easy for a 15 year old to get away with pretending to be over 18, in real life.

I don't know what LL hope to see as the outcome of this merging. Maybe it has long been in mind and that was the reason for the setting up of Zindra. Maybe it is a cost-cutting measure that allows them to spread their thin band of Lindens a little thicker. I guess that the educational industry might be very enthusiastic for this change, because the rules about ages for the main grid and the teen grid are a problem for them. If you are running courses for people ranging between 16-19, under he previous rules it was necessary to have the under 18s in the teen grid and the over 18s in the main grid. This change allows everyone to be in the same place.

I don't know how the community in general will react to the change, or how the new teens will be on the main grid, but I don't expect there to be a substantial difference.

As in every environment virtual or real, most people will behave reasonably, without having dire consequences drilled into them or inflicted upon them. A few will break the rules and behave unreasonably, no matter what punishments they are threatened with. Those people are likely to be in the main grid already.

It makes me want to start doing SL basics classes again. I miss them, although how in hell you publicise something like that nowadays so that it isn't one man and his dog in the audience, I have no clue.

Prim torture

2010-07-01T02:42:00.000-07:00

A friend posted a link to the ultimate guide to prim torture. I thought I was pretty knowledgeable, but one or two of these are new to me. I don't think one should overuse twisted prims, but there are some great tips here for achieving shapes using prims only, no sculpties.

People, not profits

2010-06-29T01:12:00.001-07:00

I know I said I was splitting my blogs back up and this could be my blog for Second Life. However, I think the gulf oil spill has slipped off the agenda for the media in the UK, and this film is so important, I want to spread the world about it.

Kindra Arnesen speaks passionately about the need for evacuation in her area of Louisiana. It seems astonishing to me that it hasn't got more views. Her reference to Ponies and Balloons, her description of the explanations from BP for the illnesses causes by the spill, and the call for the area to be evacuated to protect the people in her parish, needs to be seen and disseminated.

Linden Lab entropy

2010-06-10T03:34:00.001-07:00

I was so exhausted after a demonstration to a client yesterday that I simply swallowed some food and collapsed for the night, sleeping about 10 hours straight. I woke up to email talking about the loss of 30% of the Lindens.

I've been in SL for over six years, and I love it. I make most of my money in working in SL nowadays, and so it is important to me financially and personally. I've seen things go up and I've seen things dip down.

The blog post indicates that Linden Lab is planning to develop a browser-based version of SL... which people are interpreting generally as a move towards a more Google-Lively version of SL. I think that isn't it, they're planning an addition to, not a replacement for SL. The rumour mill is doing overtime.

Many names of well-loved Lindens are apparently on the list for the axe. People who have given more than their time and expertise, who seemed to be dedicated and visionary are on the list. I mourn for the loss of so much enthusiasm and spirit.

I presume that this may be the precursor for some takeover or buyout, which is the presumption when a company suddenly slims itself down.

I wish... I wish that Linden Lab would make it a prerequisite for every member of staff and management... and board of directors... to spend at least 5 hours a week in world. Perhaps they should be filling the boots of the departed Lindens. I wish that they would talk to and listen to the people who have been in world for years, who have invested time and money and effort and vision on it. I wish they'd get better at communicating.

Somehow, the vision of what SL could be, and what it is, has been lost. I fervently hope it survives, but I see this as a precursor to an outflux of oldbies to the alternative worlds like Opensim.

It amazes me that I spend a lot of my time explaining to clients what SL is good for. Perhaps someone should take Linden Lab to one side and explain the same thing to them. Maybe if they were engaging with what SL is good for, and how to use it for that, they'd understand better what retains people, and what they need to do to ensure that Second Life expands and gets stronger.

Coming and Goings

2010-05-28T03:13:00.000-07:00

I know this isn't the tradition time of year for being introspective and retrospective, but looking at the blogs I read bar at the side of this blog, I realise that the sad truth is that most of the blogs I used to read are either entirely defunct or only get posted to on a very erratic basis. And that includes this blog.

Bitchy Jones has closed her blog, Ordinal has left SL, and Question Reality has been in abeyance for over a year. I shall be removing the links forthwith, and replacing them with ones which are still alive, ALIVE.

I have realised that amalgamating my blogs was not a good idea, and that it worked a lot better when SL, Quakers, family history and home education all had their own place in their own blogs. Thus I am splitting them again. It is true that I will probably post less frequently on each one individually, but at least it will mean that the posts are relevant to the people who read that blog.

Recently I have wanted to write a lot more than I have had time to do. I have wanted to examine things in more depth and write longer posts, and maybe I will be able to do that once my life settles down a bit. For now, it is what it is, I am only going to indulge myself and write when I have time and want to, and I am going to write in the appropriate place.

I'm leaving this post with a totally irrelevant picture of my 11 year old self up a mountain with my Dad in Austria. So there.

Not about fruitbatsex

2010-05-22T17:31:00.000-07:00

I don't often read BoingBoing any more because the design, although modified STILL SHOUTS AT ME and I just can't bear it. However, Oclee pointed out a story about an academic who, according to the story on BoingBoing, has been accused of sexual harrassment by a colleague because he showed her a peer reviewed paper about fellatio between fruit bats.

The implication of this article, and of the blog which apparently originally publicised the story, PZMyers, was that if showing adult colleagues a peer-reviewed paper could possibly constitute sexual harassment, the end of academic freedom was nigh, and the sky was falling.

The BoingBoing article contained links to the paperwork in the case, the original statement by Dr Evans's colleague. In this, as you can see, she asserted that there had been inappropriate behaviour from Dr Evans on other occasions, and he was often at pains to engage her in unwanted conversations about a range of things, including Casanova, and fruitbatsex.

Whether these assertions are justified or not, I have no idea, but someone thought it was right to publicise the case, and the outcome, because they disagreed with it.

I have no special knowledge of the case, or of the people involved, but I know myself that even when behaviour is very intimidating and sexually aggressive, it can be hard to put together any form of evidence. I once worked with a man who took every opportunity to squeeze past female staff, making as much contact as possible. It seemed inevitable that, if one had to negotiate a tight corner, he would suddenly arrive and need to squeeze past.

He talked about the "morals of young people today" and seemed under the impression that anyone under the age of 25 (this was the 1970s) was likely to fall into bed with anyone, at the slightest encouragement. He seemed to think that talking about it might persuade young girls to throw themselves at his feet.

He frequently grabbed necklaces from inside t-shirts, and made up spurious rules for young women employees to follow.

To me, at the age of 19, he seemed slimy and objectionable, but I couldn't imagine that anyone would seriously act upon my opinion, and so I put up with his behaviour and left as soon as I could.

Some people are inclined to sing the "political correctness gone mad!" song in relation to this - or any - case of sexual harassment, but sometimes, a string of possibly unrelated incidents from one person's point of view, adds up to something much bigger. Sometimes it has seemed to me that someone is completely unaware of the effect that their constant attention has had on a woman... on other occasions it has been completely obvious that someone knows and revels in the fact that they are affecting the other person in an adverse way.

I don't know if Dr Evans did or did not sexually harass this woman, but I dislike the fact that he seems unable to accept that she may have seen his approaches to her as anything less than positive. He has commented multiple times on the comment thread on the PZMyers blog, and seems to be basking in the attention, on his own website and on twitter.

It seems that fruitbatgate is about to get attention from the New Scientist and other publications... it will be interesting to see if the reporting is any more balanced than the article in the Irish Times.

In a final note, it seems that some of the thousands of people who rushed to sign a petition in favour of Dr Evans, have reconsidered that in the light of the full story. I'm somewhat at a loss to understand how anyone felt it was right to interfere in what was a private disciplinary matter, and I have to wonder who leaked the documents originally.

Privacy beware

2010-05-21T02:33:00.000-07:00

I've been getting pretty alarmed by the changes to Facebook. It seems that the squillions the people who set it up have made from the thing isn't enough for them, and so they recently set up to share information from all the profiles in a new setting called "Instant Personalization" that shares data with non-Facebook websites and it is automatically set to "Allow." Go to Account>Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites >InstantPersonalization > Edit Settings, and uncheck "Allow". You...also need to uncheck all the boxes in the "What your friends share about you" tab.

What is this rubbish? Shouldn't stuff like this be opt in, and not "scrabble around trying to find out how to switch off something they set automatically on"?

I recently fell out with Geni, the free genealogy website for the same reason. I used it for my speculative genealogy, putting in place a lot of information I have gathered over the last twenty years. Suddenly they announced that they planned to share all my information with everyone else, except for living people and a couple of generations.

Never mind that I don't want to do this... or that the speculative nature of my family trees may make them worthless for other people. I know what will happen, people will import or merge my information, however worthless, with their own information.

There is no option for not doing this, except closing the account. There was no warning when I set up my account that this would happen. It shows an utter lack of respect for the people using their service. I had uploaded pictures, joined family to the service, used it to keep in touch with cousins. I have to trash all of that because they don't respect people's ownership of their data.

It makes me angry when people treat me as though my opinion is of no consequence. I don't believe that companies will continue to be successful if they treat people like this. I will migrate to the new, privacy-aware facebook, Diaspora, as soon as they are up and running. I plan to leave my facebook in place, with just my professional details in place, and remove all personal information.

Modelling RL policy in virtual worlds

2010-05-11T03:48:00.000-07:00

Woke up to a note in my inbox this morning from LinkedIn asking for participation in a questionnaire on the use of virtual worlds for modelling real life policy and obtaining reactions to it.

The website from the consortium running the questionnaire is dense and uses a lot of meaningless words in its descriptions. I presume they wrote it by committee over a dodgy video conference link between the various participants.

I filled in the questionnaire, but found it a most unsatisfactory experience. have a good vocabulary and a high standard of written English, but I was having to read and reread the questions and explanations.

I am a passionate advocate for the uses of virtual worlds, but I am sceptical about the uses of virtual worlds for the modelling of real life policy and understanding public attitudes to it. I loathe the idea of having all my actions as an avatar logged, which is one of the suggestions.

I suppose that if I could see a positive point to the exercise I could overcome some of my objections, but frankly I do not see how you can usefully model real life in virtual worlds. Although I try to ensure my avatar has the same character, ethics and way of dealing with people as my real life personality, it is inescapable that the roles I play in real life do not apply in Second Life. I do not have to be a wife, mother, daughter, sister in Second Life.

Where, in real life, I would have to consider the impact of my actions on my children and my friends and neighbours, and thus would not walk along the street in heavy BDSM gear with a slave on a leash behind me, in Second Life I do not have to consider such things, I can behave however I choose to behave.

If I want to explore the sex exhibition currently on in Zindra, I can do that without worrying that anyone will catch me examining an attachment or piece of equipment... I am free to do as I like.

At the same time, all the concerns that I have in real life...paying the bills, deciding what to have for dinner, educating my children, looking after my elderly relatives... those things don't follow me into SL... I escape them in SL. My attitudes and my concerns when I am living my Second Life, are entirely different. I'd be surprised if other people who spend substantial time in SL didn't feel the same.

It seems to me that this is just a vehicle for soaking up a lot of EU money and achieving nothing much.

Family fortunes

2010-05-02T01:49:00.000-07:00

I needed a break from the screen yesterday, and so I started sorting out the pile of miscellaneous correspondences and photographs which has been accumulating in my boxes. This is the stuff which I want to keep, but hasn't found a home... it doesn't need any actual action, but needs to be dealt with.

In among the filing were a group of things which have been on my conscience, in some cases for *years*. There's the book I am almost sure belongs to a friend, the card which includes new addresses for a friend of my husbands, and a card which announces the marriage of one of my oldest friends. In among that lot were some typewritten notes from a family history contact, who was expecting something in return which I have not found and sent to him. Unfortunately my son Ali was very ill at the time - which means it was five years FIVE YEARS ago that I promised it.

I decided I must do that this weekend, and so in normal fashion, a simple task of filing had rapidly transmuted into a long list of things to do, not least to track down the document I need to send. It's a freedom of the city, which I need to copy before I send it. That's been the hiccup, as it is too long for my scanner. But in the five years FIVE YEARS I have been prevaricating about doing this, I have learned how to scan in and splice together images.

In the course of looking at the family history, I realised that I had had more information about this branch of the family than I had thought, but because I hadn't fulfilled my part of the bargain - and still haven't - it didn't seem right to use the information. Having looked in more detail, I can see there is a problem with it.

This particular ancestor was a relatively well known one. His name was Charles Jearrad, and he was an architect, who with his brother Robert, is most famous for the architecture of Cheltenham. Much of the Regency architecture in and around Cheltenham was designed by Robert Jearrad and his brother Charles.

Charles Jearrad seems to have been a fairly colourful character. He married my great great great great great grandmother Margaret Doyle in 1800, when she allegedly eloped from her boarding school. It may be this fact that persuaded him to allow his daughter Christiana Jearrad, to marry as a minor to my great great great great grandfather, John Walton Robey.

I discovered that Margaret Doyle died after a long illness, in 1817 and Charles Jearrad remarried, to a Letitia Nash. However, on looking at the registers, there are two marriages for Charles Jearrad and Letitia Nash... one in 1808, and one in 1817. There is also a list of entries for births between Charles Jearrad and Letitia before 1817.

It looks at present as though Charles Jearrad had two families, and went through a bigamous marriage with Letitia while his wife was still alive, and then another when she died, to make quite sure that his children were legitimate. It's very odd and demands further research.

It also looks as though Margaret Doyle was a member of the famous Doyle family from Bramblestown, Kilkenny. This is a very strange coincidence, as this is just outside Inistioge, the small town that I recently discovered was home to my Father's mother, who I had been searching for, for 20 years. This Doyle family produce six Major Generals in the course of a few years, have connections to many families. At resent it seems certain that Margaret's grandfather was Charles Doyle, of Bramblestown, but what I cannot yet discover is which of Charles Doyle's six sons was her father. That requires a lot more research too.

Looking for information on Charles led me to the knowledge that many of the registers of St George's, Hanover Square, are now available as digitised books on the Internet Archive. I love the internet archive. But I must tear myself away now.

Never mind the quality...

2010-05-01T00:33:00.000-07:00

According to the New Scientist, scientific research shows that it is quantity and frequency that make one a good blogger, not quality or controversy. Whether you are postive or negative, hardly matters. If you want to be successful, it's quantity that builds readership.

That explains a lot. I have tended to spread myself rather thin over the blogs I write, and consequently, my contributions when I have had busy periods have been few and far between.

Not that I have been short of things to blog about, but it is one of the ironies of life that the time when one has most to say is likely to be the time when one can least afford the time to indulge oneself by sitting and blogging it. Perhaps I should learn how to blog from my phone or put more effort into spending a little time every day to do it, the way I used to keep my diaries.

Maybe I will see if I can keep to one blog a day, the way that I used to.

At the moment I am working, trying not to get too behind on my tasks, longing to spend time on my genealogy, outlining a novel and writing music. It looks as though the next couple of weeks will be mostly work, and not much of the fun stuff, but that's ok.

This means my avatar in Second Life has had a considerably more lively social life than I have, recently. I have been struggling to cope with the transition to the new Viewer (and failing, every time I have to build). Things have been dodgy in world this week, as a power outage and server upgrades seem to have conspired to add wonkiness to everything.

I've made contact with a cousin of my husband's through Ancestry.Co.UK, which is why I have been itching to do more to the family history. I was feeling very angry with Geni, the family history site, which has announced they plan to share all our research, outside the immediate family, and so I have been dismantling my stuff in Geni, and transferring whatever I didn't have to Ancestry. It isn't even that I object to sharing my information, I have always done my best to help others with their family history, as I have been helped in my turn. It's the lack of respect it shows for the rights of their members which really gets to me. I'm not even sure that deleting my data is going to take my things out of their system, despite their reassurances that it will.

The surveillance society has been in the news recently due to a forthcoming film, Erasing David. Both the Times and the New Scientist (and many others, I am sure) have interesting articles about it. I realise that I have voluntarily allowed a lot of information about me to escape into the wild, although neither Sainsbury's not Tesco can have much data about me. I have lost my cards without registering, or registered and then lost, nearly all the loyalty cards I ever had. Thus I can probably dredge up a ten-year-old W.H. Smiths card I used once, or nothing. Hah! Make what you can out of them data apples!

I think most systems in the country assume most people won't pretend to be someone else, and that's either touchingly naive or normal, depending upon your point of view. Sometimes I think that people don't think clearly about what they are saying really - although I haven't seen the film, only read the articles. OK on one level it is worrying that someone can pretend to be you and garner details of your antenatal appointments... on the other hand, does one want to live in a world where people are so distrustful of each other that your doctor's surgery/hospital won't believe you're you without asking lots of security questions? I dunno.

Light Relief

2010-04-13T00:33:00.000-07:00

Recently I have been working very hard on a project, and so I have appreciated some breaks and some laughs which I have found through other people's posts on Facebook, or through my children, or just random stumbleuponing. I recently realised that there are some people's sites I go back to again and again.

Dan and Dan films are amazing. There's the technical brilliance of making the twin thing work in a convincing way, and then the intelligence of the songs and banter... I think he deserves a show or his own, not just 15 minutes of fame on Genius.

I was only recently introduced to Ray William Johnson's twice-weekly postings of viral videos. Initially I found him a bit irritating, but he grows on you, even though he can be a bit crude at times, his comments and graffiti on occasional videos does make them funnier. This is my favourite... I don't know why the lamb is funny, but it makes me laugh every time.

Go to the top of the class...or is that the bottom?

2010-04-12T23:12:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn blogged about the Better Business Bureau rating of "F" for Linden Lab. I agreed with a lot of what she had to say, but I was wary of the cases which had led BBB to rate Linden Lab with an "F", as I said in the comments. Any creator in Second Life has to deal with a lot of people who don't understand the way things work in world, and, depending upon what one is creating, sometimes a lot of scammers.

One of my SL friends who shall remain anonymous, deals with more than his fair share of this, and I have from time to time mentored the people who have been frustrated by their inability to understand things like permissions, or linking things, or who have simply dragged the contents of folder after folder of stuff into their rug or house walls or carpet - and then blamed the hapless creator for its disappearance.

So, I was sceptical about the actual cases, but in agreement with the many of the things Gwyneth appeared to be saying about the decisions which are being made, and how consultation and changes to decisions often seem to be made after the protests, and after the damage has been done and not before.

I almost suspected that the "F" might be an April Fool's day trick, although it seems that on April 5, Linden Lab were still showing an F.

What I did not expect was that Gwyneth would out her own article as an April Fool's trick. I'm still not sure what part of it was supposed to be the April Fool... the comments on the article got very heated (as one would expect with Wayfinder and Prokofy, and then Gwyneth herself, going head to head in there).

I sent a link to the article to a friend, who passed it to a friend, who then sent a link back to the BBB page showing that LL was now rated "A" by the BBB. Elfod Nemeth, for it was he, should get the credit for the find, not me.

The quick change undermines any faith that BBB ratings are meaningful. How could a company go from "F" to "A" in a week? Either the initial rating was far too punitive, or the current one is far too positive. It's the same company, the same policies, the same customer service and the same old Linden Lab. I'm glad they are no longer an "F" though. I love my SL, and want it to continue, and I think its chances are better with an A than an F.

My feelings about Gwyneth are that she has done some damage her reputation, perhaps. An April Fool's joke needs to be purely a joke. Pretending LL had an A when they had an F or vice versa, would have been a joke. Angrily blogging their F when it was their bona fide rating at the time... how is that an April Fool's joke? I like Gwyneth's blogs, have always found her clear and sensible as a blogger about SL, but I don't know what to think about this. *Ponders*.

My virtual memoirs: 1

2010-04-11T22:52:00.000-07:00

My first experience of a virtual world was about eight years ago, when a friend lent me Riven to try. I was transfixed by the game, which involved travelling around a strange and beautiful place, as an invisible traveller. This photorealistic world had remarkably few people - just a handful glimpsed here and there, in video sequences that merged seamlessly with the game.

It was one of the defining aspects of the game that the explorer played him or herself in this strange world, and that was the reason for the invisibility of the explorer. Everything one experienced in the game was experienced in the first person, as though you were seeing it through your own eyes.

Riven was a point-and-click adventure, which meant that one clicked in the direction that you wanted to go, and the scene changed as you moved in that direction. There were some linking scenes of film which gave the impression of travelling around in a vehicle, and I spent quite a lot of my first couple of days in Riven travelling between islands for the thrill of the ride in the little cable car which linked them.

Riven introduced me to a lot of the skills which I have found so useful in the subsequent years. "Mousing over" a scene to find places where things could interact, collecting information while travelling around, exploring thoroughly for every clue.

I found Riven to be beautiful, engaging and challenging, and it took me roughly three weeks to solve it, in which time I found it difficult to do anything else. I kept journals of exploration, noting the things I found, and I was seized with the desire to make games of my own - not to play more games but to create them, although I didn't really believe that this would ever be possible.

I visited the world often, simply to travel around and see favourite places or to listen to the haunting music which Ryan Miller wrote for Riven. I dreamed about it as though it were a real place, and even felt homesick for it. It's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't played such a game, how immersive it can be. Watching someone else play a game like that isn't at all the same as sitting in front of the screen yourself. There is some magical change which overcomes one and enables the player to become something other, to believe that you are inside the world.

I had played other computer games... very early on, in the 1970s, we had a games console which had to be linked up to the tv, to play pong, a crude video approximation of tennis which involved a square ball and a couple of straight lines for bats. This was swiftly followed by space invaders, and similar shoot and destroy types of game, chess, and all sorts of text-based Adventure games.

When my company introduced Wang word processors for a short time in 1980, I had become a Master at Wang adventure game, which involved giving directions like "go west" or "turn left" and learning the layout of a cavern and where the dangers and rewards lay.

Computer games of the first person shooter type were still pretty crude at this point, and didn't really interest me. By comparison, Riven, being based in what appeared to be a real world, with segments of film seen from a first-person perspective, appeared to be very sophisticated.

I'd been online for about five years at this point, and so it was natural that I should surf to the Cyan Worlds home page and discover that Cyan were in the process of creating a new game, which was to be played online, codenamed "MudPie". I signed up to participate in the beta, without the slightest idea that I might be chosen.

Just long enough later for me to have forgotten that I had signed up, I received an email to tell me I had been chosen to take part in a closed beta test. Shortly after that, when I had signed up at a forum and sent in my non-disclosure agreement, I found myself loading the new game.

Fortunately for me, I had switched from my PowerPC Apple Macintosh to a PC, as Uru as it was called, was not available at that time for the Macintosh. I still think this was a big mistake on the part of Cyan, although I am sure they had their reasons. The Apple community had been a big part of the fan base for Myst and Riven, and so making it impossible for them to play the latest game in the Myst and Riven sequence prevented the largest part of their market from participating.

I have to admit that initially I was disappointed by Uru. Not by the game, or the world, exactly, but how cartoony and unreal it seemed after the photoreality of Riven. There were other differences. The explorer was now represented by an avatar on the screen. There was an opportunity to customise the avatar, add weight, change the colour of her hair, add a cap or travel in sandals or put on a fleecy top. But actually there were very few choices about the face or physical appearance of one's avatar.

This frustration was increased when I started to play the game, as early on in the initial section of the game I clicked a sequence of buttons to be startled by the sudden appearance of a figure of a girl who is one of the recurring narrators for the storyline. She wasn't wearing the standard issue clothing, and appeared to have both jewellery and a scarf wrapped around her hips as a skirt. I wanted her clothing, her level of customisation.

After a short while blundering around in the preface to the game, I made it through to my Relto, the island which is each player's base in Uru, and the launching pad for all other areas of the game. Much like the avatar, each island starts off looking the same, but small changes are wrought to the island as one collects items from other places. One relto looks very like another, though, except for the number of books on the shelves, or the addition of a tree or sticks and stones to the island's surface.

From this island, it was possible to reach the neighbourhood, an enclosed town where it was possible to meet other people. I didn't, although I followed the instructions to collect my ki, a communicator that made talking to other people possible, and from there it was possible to teleport to the city in the cavern. It was here that I first made contact with another player - and promptly ran away.

All washed up

2010-04-10T00:35:00.000-07:00

I have hardly had time this week to celebrate the fact that parliament threw out the clauses in the new act which would have changed arrangements for home educators. In the last few days of a parliament, there is a process during which the government does its best to get legislation passed, and it has to do some horse trading with the opposition. It's known as the wash up. In this case, in order to get the main parts of the bill passed, they had to drop the home education clauses, along with one which would have made sex education compulsory etc.

Whether you home educate or not, the measures that Ed Balls and his merry band were trying to bring in had serious consequences for all parents. The idea that the authorities should be given the right to enter one's home, without any fault on the part of the parents being suspected, was a terrifying one.

It may be a false impression gained from media reports, but it seems that social services under react when they ought to be reacting - as in the case of Khyra Ishaq, the girl who was starved to death in Birmingham - or they overreact, as in the many cases reported by the Daily Mail over the past year, in which parents have been forced to flee in order to avoid their children being taken into care for spurious reasons. In one case, because the children were overweight. In another because the mother had allegedly allowed the now estranged father of the child to shout at her in front of the child, something which social services claimed was "emotional abuse" and which I hazard a guess nearly every parent has been guilty of at some time or another.

Currently we have a very poor system of child protection, it seems, and the consequences for children who are being badly abused are dire. People are reluctant to report suspected abuse because the alternative can be so much worse.

Over the last year, I have come to see the large charities which are charged with animal and child protection in this country, the RSPCA and the NSPCC, in a very different light. I think it is a danger for established charities that they become all about the money and not much about the original causes which lead them to the work in the first place. How the NSPCC could look at what is happening in social work in this country currently, and decide that the area of most concern to them is how home-educating parents are controlled, I cannot understand. They should get back to their business, and look at the terrible conditions for children who have been taken into care by local authorities, and what happens to those children. Or in the case of Khyra Ishaq, they could look at their actions which failed to protect the child when serious concerns for her welfare had been expressed by both teachers and neighbours.

The issue is not whether the authorities should have the power to enter someone's home when they have serious concerns for the welfare of a child - they already have that power, for home educating families as well as schooling families. The issue is whether allowing them to add a clause which allowed them the right to march into any home educating family's home, whether they had concerns or not, would have enabled them to identify abusers any more effectively. I strongly believe that the authorities need to put more resources into the families already causing concern, and not to waste time persecuting families where there is no concern.

I fervently hope that the election result is not a clear win for Labour, as they have vowed to replace the clauses and put the bill through parliament if they win.

Amazing pictures of earth

2010-03-26T00:54:00.000-07:00

Edited: to stop amazing being every other word, as well as the headline.

I thought I had better take advantage of free access to the Times online before it runs out in June and they start charging me. There were two articles which caught my eye - an interview with Martin Freeman about the release of Nightwatching, the Peter Greenaway film which has been finished for months (and showing at the festivals) and yet hasn't been released until now. I find his work rather challenging, but the wonderful lighting and composition of this film seems likely to reward the watching of it. The trailer features the exhilarating music of Giovanni Sollima too - which I can hear 100 times without tiring of it. Go here for another piece which I can listen to for weeks, plus an extremely clever film by young film maker Lasse Gjertsen.

The other article was about an amateur photographer who took such stunning pictures of the earth from the atmosphere above, that NASA called.

I used to work with an editor called Ted Crowley, who was also an amateur photographer, and used to take ariel photographs using remote controlled technology, before computers were a usable adjunct to the planes and helicopters used for it. As it happens, in addition to amateur photography, he was also a playright, with a huge German following, unknown in England.

It seems that where the scientists at NASA would have used rockets and a few hundred thousand dollars to take similar pictures, Robert Harrison used £500-worth of materials including loft insulation and duct tape. He even uses a GPS device to be able to retrieve his camera once it plummets back to earth.

It's a case of necessity being the mother of invention, and demonstrates that professionalism isn't necessarily better than amateurism.... I see that A.A. Gill, at the Intelligence Squared debate on the future of news/journalism recently asked if people would be happy to have citizen dentists in the same way that they appear happy to have citizen journalists. Well, possibly. Up to the advent dentistry as a profession, citizen dentists were all that was available. And many of the people who made amazing discoveries in science would be considered amateurs today.

Being a professional journalist isn't a guarantee of quality, as anyone who reads Jan Moir in the Daily Mail can attest. Sometimes you just get an outpouring of a person's internal homophobia and not anything resembling journalism. Even A.A. Gill is not immune to allowing his personal feelings as an anti-fat grouch from showing through. Sometimes a "citizen journalist" can write more passionately and informatively than the most professional of the professionals.

It seems to me it is only in the last century that people have become obsessed by the idea that one has to go through a series of professional examinations in order to become whatever it is. While I agree that you probably don't want someone who trained in their garage to be the one taking out your appendix or your wisdom teeth, I think it would be sensible to recognise that sometimes the application of the laws about medicine have mitigated against the public interest. Dr Kelley, a dentist who discovered a dietary approach to cancer, was prosecuted several times for having practised medicine without qualification, even though he was only sharing his successful treatment of his own cancer with his dentistry patients.

And sometimes, a passionate amateur can outperform the professionals.

Medical training build

2010-03-22T02:55:00.000-07:00

Eelco and I have been working flat out on a demo for a healthy authority here in the UK. We've not had a lot of time to come up with the specific demo, but we have been working on a medical training project for some time, and so we already had some groundwork done. Nevertheless we're feeling quite excited. We'll be using a robot patient, and I have been training her to answer questions appropriately.

At the moment, if you ask after her legs, she may tell you that one has been bothering her rather a lot, or she may tell you she has no legs. We've progressed quite a long way though, and have a scenario going. I have been making poses and anims, building a flat for the patient, and props for the scenario we're using.

The major problem is always trying to make sure that you understand what the client is looking for. It seems to me that there is a great future in medical role play in Second Life, but the major use I can see for it, is the way that in Second Life, learning new information can be made to be part of a journey - a journey which will help you to recall information later.

I would love to have the chance to make games which teach people, and I hope that this may be my opportunity. And with html on a prim working, and robots, and working with some really great scripters, it could be absolutely stunning.

Eelco remarked that he's surprised that we haven't seen more about the use of AI and robots in SL, but then I pointed out to him thatwe haven't really publicised what we have been doing in that area - and where, apart from blogs - would we do that, really? I still think this is the major thing missing from Second Life, a proper place to exchange information and to find specialised objects, products and builds.

Many different schemes and systems have been set up, in world and out of it, but none of them seem to work the way I would like them to. Huds and nominations websites and al those things designed to find the best of SL still end up with terrible places in the top 10. And nearly every system can be gamed.

Goodbye 2

2010-03-19T13:12:00.000-07:00

The Huffington Post reports that Cornell University are taking steps to try to prevent more student suicides, there having been several in the past week. It seems that Cornell is surrounded by gorges and students have to pass over the bridges to make it into college. Of course they present a temptation to anyone in despair.

The college is checking the bridges, but mre than that is checking up on the students in the residences, trying to ensure that anyone who feels equally desperate is helped.

I have long been astonished that youth suicide is not countered more actively, worldwide. It seems that the brighter students with the most potential are somehow at more risk of suicide. It isn't the teenagers who expect to be at the bottom of the class who take their own lives... often it is those with the most to look forward to who commit suicide.

I can remember a posting to one of the UK Home Education boards in which local education authority bod had tried to persuade a family that the threatened suicide of their daughter was not a reason to withdraw her from an unhappy situation at school. Fortunately the parents disagreed, feeling that the possibility that she was unhappy enough to contemplate suicide was reason enough to take her seriously and remove her from that situation, whatever the LA thought.

I joined the "to write LOVE on her arms" group on Facebook, and I support the work they do to help people. It was their group which directed people to watch the plea from Walter Koenig on the day that his son was found dead, having taken his own life. Andrew Koenig was an actor. His parents made an impassioned plea for people to notice if someone close to them was showing signs of depression. His father Walter talked about the emails he had received from people:

"Hundreds of emails from people who said they were depressed...or had somebody in their family who showed signs of this kind of behaviour ... or had in fact lost members of the family because of this...the only thing I want to say
if you're one of those people who feel that you can't handle it any more, if you can learn anything from this it's that there are people out there who really care...it may ultimately not be enough... before you take that final decision, check it out again: talk to somebody... for those who have families who have members who they fear they may be susceptible to his kind of behaviour, don't ignore it and don't rationalise it...extend a hand."

Andrew's mother added: "For both the families and people who are suffering from depression...
they don't realise there is help and they need help... I would ask you all to familiarise yourself with signs that you may rationalise away - don't rationalise it away if there is something that's bothering you... there is love ...there was love available to him. That's the hardest part. He was much loved and he had much to contribute in this world."

I think perhaps Andrew Koenig's father was exactly right... depressed people don't know they need help, don't seek it out, they retract into themselves and don't make contact with other people. Maybe what's needed is not a last resort phone line ike the Samaritans, it needs something more active, more out there, which extends a hand to people in despair who won't seek it out otherwise.

I've been thinking that there are so many people in the world who would like to be needed, and so many others who need somebody. In these days of social media, there ought to be some way of matching up one with the other that would be a win-win. I'd like to hope that universities everywhere will be checking up on their students, making sure that there isn't someone in despair buried in their halls of residence, needing help. And we must all take responsibiity for anyone we know who might be feeling this way, and extend a hand to them, wherever they may be.

Goodbye Cruel world 1

2010-03-19T04:25:00.000-07:00

I posted the following to SL universe this morning. I don't have much time for blogging at the moment, and so although it is probably cheating and will get me expelled from the Good Bloggers' group, I am going to repost here.

And it's goodbye cruel world - forever!
Except, it rarely is, in Second Life. I am sorry I came late to this thread, what can I say, I have been busy, I missed the blog from Ordinal although it is linked and displayed on my blog, and so I only discovered the news this week.

I can understand all of the pressures and frustrations that Ordinal talks about, and I recognise that last straw thing. Also, my avatar seems to be a lot more volatile than I am in real life, and has done a fair bit of flouncing out, deleting builds, and deleting friends from lists... in real life I am lazy and I procrastinate and if friendships fail there it tends to be from lack of picking up the phone rather than a dramatic storming out or throwing of plates.

But... I have become increasingly irritated by the public door slamming. What's it for? If you leave and *don't* delete everything we won't take you seriously? If you leave and do delete everything, we just assume that if you change your mind and want to come back, you'll come back in another body (cf Starax). The mass deletion of stuff doesn't affect LL, it just affects the people left behind... and what is it for, really? I think of it like an artist having a bonfire...such a waste. Why not simply set everything free and put it out in a box? I'm sure Caledon could have found somewhere for *that*.

Maybe people of an aspergery type of mind like to draw a line in the sand and kill it all and have done with it. But many of the "goodbye cruel world" notecards and messages I've had over the past six years have been from the Drama Queens and game players... the ones who might easily approach you in an alt and ask what you think of their main, on the offchance that you won't recognise the batshit insane from the run of the mill....

I'm not accusing Ordinal of Drama Queendom, but it's one of those things you learn not to do over the course of your Second Life: just as you should never actually send that drunken email to your boss telling him he's an idiot, or lickable, or defrauding the company, while drunk... you should always sleep on the decision to delete and leave. Even the geekiest of emotion-free geeks can be seized by the SL deletion madness when angry and frustrated. It has happened to me a couple of times, and now I try to sleep on anything irrevocable, SL or RL.

I understand the frustrations, the perms thing is a real killer, particularly if you have been working away to solve a problem with a complex object, but I do not feel so depressed about the prospects for SL. Since I arrived six years ago it seems to me that SL has been through a large number of incarnations, and it is the constant change and challenge that keeps me interested, keeps me logging on, keeps me learning. I started making animations this week, having tried on numerous occasions before and finding it too hard, I suddenly find I can do it, and understand what I am doing so much better than I did before. SL has opened my eyes to architecture and design in a way that makes me feel I slept through my first 45 years on the planet. I've learned so many skills, I've met so many people and have had fun doing that.

My teenage schooldays impressed me with the horridness and selfishness of other people. I carried on thinking girls were bitchy to all and was a loner until I discovered the marvellous companionship and support of women, once I had children and met a lot of them. SL rehabilitated strangers for me, impressing me with the kindness and generosity of random people helping each other out. I bump into some of those same people here from time to time - Khamon was one.

Despite the sky falling in drama that happens every time there is a change or a bug or an exploit or a dramatic departure, I don't see the sky falling - I see a lot of creative, inspiring people, helping each other still. I passed on the care I'd received to the people I met, and they have passed it on again. People are still more open and honest and generous in SL than I ever expected, and it taught me that, despite a lot of time and attention having been lavished upon the IP theft and scamming side of things, in general people aren't dishonest and horrible... there's just a few of those and we let them make the news all the time. I liked Jeremy Clarkson's recent column for the Times, where he suggested we should simply accept that 5% of all known people are bonkers, and stop making rules for everyone based on what they do... he said it much more elegantly and amusingly than that, here:
What a daft way to stop your spaniel eating the milkman | Jeremy Clarkson - Times Online

I'm really very sorry to see Ordinal go, and I hope she will calm down, throw out any tasks that were on her to do list that don't inspire or amuse her, and stick to the fun and engaging projects which produced so many unique and memorable products.

Best in SL: Prim avatars and Statuary

2010-03-16T14:01:00.000-07:00

I haven't had much time for blogging in these last few weeks, but today in a search for prim avatars I found a sim and an artist so exceptional, so amazing, that I feel I must blog it and let more people know about this work right NOW.

The one thing which atmospheric builds in SL often lack is people... either because the sim limit doesn't allow you to have a crowd, or because the best and least laggy time to visit a geat sim is when there aren't so many people about.

Many people have turned to prim avatars to fill that gap, but of course one of the things about prim avatars is that most of them are completely unconvincing and make everything around them look tackier too. However, today I found a place today which sells the most marvellous prim avatars which are so well sculpted, textured and put together that I had to do a double take a couple of times to convince myself that he hadn't cheated and put a camping bot in instead. They are quite simply the best prim avatars I have ever come across.

The maker of these wondrous creatures is Ub Yifu, and the sim is Ub Yifu Sculptures. The slurl is http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ub%20Yifu%20Sculptures/128/129/25

You need to go there and check it out - the pictures don't do them justice... you're at the mercy of my connection, etc. They are well worth seeing, even if you aren't in the market for a crowd of Elven Archers and a Bear Warrior statue!

If you are in need of prim avatars to fill out a build, then tp there immediately because I have scoured SL and I haven't found anything better.

LOL!

2010-03-13T07:27:00.000-08:00

Judge not, that ye be not judged

2010-03-10T00:32:00.000-08:00

I was thinking this morning of the things I have learned as have grown older. I have learned that, as long as you don't go around with your trousers undone, or your breasts hanging out, people will not notice much about you. All that angst I wasted worrying about what people would think of my hair/clothes/make up when I was (much) younger, was completely wasted.

I have learned that, no matter how hideous people may appear on the outside, they want to be thought attractive, and to be loved.

I have learned that, no matter how beautiful and attractive a person may apear on the outside, this may bear no relation to how attractive they feel. Thus some of the people I think are beautiful, have a hard time believing this about themselves.

Home is home, no matter how abject or poorly kept. Places which you would have to be paid handsomely to stay in for one night, are home to other people. You can't know how a person feels about their home by looking at it with your eyes. Those elderly people who fill their homes with junk and old newspapers, feel just as much affection for their homes as the most well-kept show home.

What is right for one person is not for another. The old saying that one man's meat is another man's poison, is true for any aspect of life. You can't know how someone else will feel about folk dancing, country music or jellied eels, based upon how you feel about them.

Every person has their own path to God. This is very important to know, even if you disbelieve in God. People are often so busy trying to prove the other guy wrong, that they don't allow for the possible fact that what is right for you, with your experience of life and core beliefs, may not be right for another. Nearly all problems with religion relate to the idea that it is possible to know what it is right for another to believe.

Be the change you want to see in the world. It's no good complaining that the world is rude and uncaring if you reply to that with rudeness and lack of care. If you believe that it is right to be polite, be polite, no matter how rude others are. It's the Do-as-you-would-be-done-by philosophy.

Remember that you always have choices, chances to make things better for others, however small. That word or deed or kindness may make a much bigger difference than you realize.

Finally, my grandmother's favourite: to thine own self be true.

Be immortalized... if you can get to Cancun

2010-03-10T00:30:00.000-08:00

He has just sent round an announcement of his current project - making an artificial reef to attract wildlife and visitors to an uninhabited area. He is still looking for people to cast - but the catch is that the models have to be free to go to Cancun, Mexico. Ah well. The details are here:
http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=c...3&e=6c39c7e400

I love the melding of art installation and environmental project, and hope you do too. I think the second of his two films is particularly moving. Especially since geting sea life to colonize underwater frames has been particularly successful.

There there

2010-03-03T02:35:00.000-08:00

(With apologies to E.J. Thribb)

So Farewell then, There
Another virtual world vanishes.
"Your friends are here"
No, they're here...

I went There once,
I had to pay to change my cartoony hair
and was asked if my skin was white in RL.

A/S/L?

I'd rather be in SL, frankly.
Fee Berry (51 1/2)

Uzbekistan

2010-02-24T14:31:00.000-08:00

Listened to the fantastic radio play by David Hare, based upon the memoirs of Craig Murray, ex-British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. It stars David Tennant, and is a wonderfully engaging, absorbing, horrifying sort of play.

I'd recently signed a petition against the prosecution of a photographer who is accused of the foul crime of showing the country in a deliberately negative light, so I knew that all was not well with the country. What I learned in the course of the play about Uzbekistan and the UK, horrified me.

When I visited Craig Murray's site, I was appalled to find that Sting had played an expensive concert there at the behest of the torturing regime in power... and tried to cover his embarrassment at having given support to the insupportable by claiming it was a Unicef gig (it wasn't) and that cultural boycotts don't work (oh no?).

The wikipedia entry for Sting draws heavily on Craig's page, but is none the worse for that. I am appalled, and I am boycotting Sting for the foreseeable future, removing his music from my itunes and spotify. His website contains a reverent thought for the day from Sting, which on the occasion of my visit said: "I want my children to do something that feeds their souls. It's not about success or power or money. It's about satisfaction."

I see. So the concert in Uzbekistan wasn't for money? That's strange. Wikipedia seems to think the tickets cost $250. I'm assuming Sting got paid handsomely for the concert. Shame on him. Really. I thought he had principles....come to that I thought this country had principles. I'm beginning to wonder what sort of principles those might be.

10 presents for a new mother

2010-02-17T07:42:00.000-08:00

A friend asked me today what would be a suitable present for a new mother, which wasn't something I had had to think about for a while. I assumed there were likely to be dozens of websites with information, but most of the ones I found were commercial websites with expensive wares to sell or tacky stuff with "mum" engraved or outlined in bling or stencilled into it.

So I decided to make my own list. I have put in links to a random selection of companies, but with the exception of Amazon, I haven't used any of the companies myself and so this is not an endorsement of their services.

1. Muslin cloths
The number one gift in my estimation for a new mother is muslin cloths. It may seem boring, but I have to say that this was the most useful thing I ever received. MUCH better than all in one stretch baby suits which are invariably the wrong colour or size or weight for the time of year.

Muslin Cloths can be used on one shoulder for baby sick in the early weeks, to drape over to discreetly breastfeed, or as an impromptu baby changing mat when necessary. Later on, they can be used as bibs and wipes, and grandparents can boil wash one for straining jam....

2. Triangular or L-shaped pillow
This comes under the boring but really useful heading! A triangular pillow or two can come in extremely useful in the months after birth. It can be used to support a newborn who is breastfeeding and make positioning much easier. It can be used to prop a mother up in bed, or to find a comfortable position in an armchair. You can sit on it if you have stitiches or piles. When babies get to the rolling stage, it can be used to contain the baby while dressing or changing him, and when he gets a little older to prop the baby up. A ittle older than that, it can be used behind a baby who has learned to sit up independently, but occasionally keels backwards when he loses concentration.

3. Lavender oil
Pure Lavender oil is a very useful thing to have in the baby changing bag. It can be put on a muslin cloth and draped near a baby with a cold, to clear the nose and soothe - it's much gentler and effective than eucalyptus, which is very harsh for a baby. It can be used as an antiseptic, as a scent to drive out the bad smells of baby digestive systems, and, diluted in a carrier oil, as a massage oil for mother or baby.

4. Food
For the first-time mother, this is one of the times in life when you can eat biscuits or chocolate with a clear conscience. Snacks that would be suitable for the night-time feeds would also be very welcome, particularly home-made flapjack with lots of dried fruit and honey in.

5. Books
This is a bit of a minefield. There are any number of babycare books out there which offer advice and training programmes for babies. Buying a suitable book is fraught with difficulty... a breastfeeding earthmother would probably hurl "The Contented Little Baby" book as far as she could (and hooray for that), whereas an uptight four-hourly bottle feeder may not welcome any book which indicates that she isn't loving her baby if she isn't breastfeeding.

Books which try to give new mothers confidence that they know their baby best, and which respect the idea that not everyone is the same, are safest. For myself, I liked the Penelope Leach book about child development that I was given as a present, on the birth of my first baby. I ignored the advice in it about buying lots of toys and consequently had a mountain of bright plastic rubbish after a couple of years. I found a baby medical book reassuring on occasions, and I liked anything with a bit of humour in it. Baby massage books are popular.

Avoid any book purporting to show women how to revert to their normal size after a couple of months, or which may imply she is fat. It comes as a shock to many women that they don't immediately shrink down to their pre-pregnancy size, and they don't need anything that reminds them of that.

6. Scented stuff and cosmetics
Avoid scented bath stuff as a woman ought to avoid putting anything (except maybe a couple of drops of lavender oil in her bath after birth. There are some lovely natural massage balms and oils out there, many of which are suitable for mother and baby.

7. Scarves and pashminas
Both of these are useful for concealing breastfeeding, and for draping around to keep the sun from the baby.

8. Babyholding vouchers and pampering paraphenalia
Many mothers can't bear the idea of leaving their precious baby for an evening, but would welcome the chance to have a bath and pamper themselves knowing that someone is around for the baby. From a partner, close female friend, mother, mother-in-law or sister, I think this could be the pinnacle of new mother presents: a nice novel or luxury magazine, some chocolate, some freshly squeezed orange juice, some nice moisturising body lotion, and someone to look after the baby while you indulge yourself.

9. Acid-free scrapbook, notebook or keepsake box
A beautiful acid-free notebook, scrapbook or box is a wonderful gift to a new parent. They will received notes and cards, photographs and ephemera which will rattle around in drawers for years if they aren't gathered together in one place. Acid-free ensures that the book won't self-destruct in 10 years.

10. Stairbag
It isn't until you have a baby constantly on one arm that you start to appreciate the need to take things up and downstairs when they occur to you. Leave aside the scrambled brain that pregnancy and birth can leave you with (whatever recent research says) which may lead you to find yourself on the upstairs landing for the third time without a clue what brought you there, something you can stuff things into is very usefu to have. I was going to recommend the stairbasket, but I read a review about how useless those are....

If none of these suggestions appeals to you, there is no substitute for buying the thing the mother herself says she needs. Within your budget, find out, and buy that, whether it is a thermos flask which can have soup in it for night time feeds, slippers that won't trip her up when going downstairs with the baby, or a new pillow and pillowcase.

Busy rez day

2010-02-12T23:53:00.000-08:00

Spent Friday working like the clappers on a project and then realised quite late that is was my sixth rez day in SL.

For those who don't frequent the virtual world, six is akin to 85 in the real world; I meet very few people who are older than me.

I may find time to reflect on what being a resident in Second Life has meant to my life...but later! I have to spend the weekend building, terraforming and rezzing stuff for an urgent project. I'll brb, lol.

Elfod tells me there is an anti-Valentine party at his place this evening... not sure what the dress code is for an anti-Valentine's party, but if I am not catatonic by then, I shall go!

A history of the looted world

2010-02-12T00:22:00.000-08:00

I can't be the only person who has listened to episodes of "A History of the World in 100 objects" and thought... ok, why do we have *that* in the British Museum. Just as I felt uncomfortable as a child reading the tales of derring-do from the books my mother's generation read in the 1940s, which described Germans as Huns and American Natives as Red Indians... where the white man was always cultured, scientific and right, and the Barbarians began at Calais. Nowadays I feel that same sense of my cultural conscience pricking whenever I go near to a museum which is filled with the plunder of previous ages.

I listened to the factional tales of the Codex Sinaiticus on Radio 4 last year, which is split up in four different locations due to its having been removed from the monastery of St Catherines in Sinai, where it was kept, and thought... how can we, morally, hold onto so much stolen property as though we had some right to it? The only reason it is in four locations is due to its theft, on the pretext of academic study of what is the oldest existing bible, although the facts of the theft are disputed between the different institutions holding the pieces, according to the Radio 4 programme and Wikipedia.

It seems to me that academic reasoning for keeping artefacts which we have, in previous generations, looted from all corners of the world, is shaky at the least in a world where travel is fast and cheap and cameras, videos and 3D interpretations of objects as possible. The idea that we need the Elgin marbles to be in London is ridiculous.

I have no problem with artefacts found in Britain being kept in Museums, and I realise that the provenance and chequered history of some items may make it debatable where their true home should be. But some things... the Codex Sinaiticus, for example, have clear home from which they were looted. And those should be returned.

So the pleasure of listening to people on the History of the the world in 100 objects is marred for me by the feeling that quite a quantity of the things which are mentioned were stolen or looted from their rightful home, and should not be in the British Museum anyway.

Much less conscience pricking - and to me, more interesting - are the items submitted by listeners, with their personal stories about why they are significant to them or to world history. It seems to me that it would be great to have a place to display these things in real life - a public museum space. You could probably get an arts council grant to do it....

While I'm musing in this rough ballpark, the other thing which drives me to distraction is when museums containing artefacts owned by the nation insist on charging ridiculous amounts for the right to reproduce them. For example, the image above, which shows the disputed Codex Sinaiticus, is copyright The British Library. What? Their photograph which only contains the image of an object which does not belong to them, but which they retain in their possession. I don't think so.

In the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, I think it should be possible to take photographs and use them however you wish. And I think the museums should make their reference photographs available free of charge, creative commons. If education is really their aim and raison d'etre. they would change their policy on this, pronto.

Family History

2010-02-10T22:27:00.000-08:00

I've been researching my family history for well over twenty years, and I have learned a lot about my background in the course of those years. I started with the great grandmother who was talked about a great deal in my childhood, although she had died before even my mother was born. She was very unusual for her time, having been one of the first ballet dancers, working in both the respectable establishments such as the New York Metropolitan Opera, and the music hall. Unusually for her time, she had travelled all over the world, and I was given photographs by my grandfather that were taken in New York, Sydney, Glasgow, London. Despite his pride in her, he often said that he didn't really have a mother, and pictures of the family show him, aged about 10, dressed in a crumpled blazer that speaks eloquently of maternal neglect.

I started my family history with a significant advantage, as I had spent a considerable amount of time with my grandparents as a child, and had asked questions often, and remembered the answers. I wish - oh how I wish - I had asked more questions when my grandparents and the other people of their generation were still around. But I have been lucky to have so much information to start with, in my mother's family.

I was contacted recently by a descendant of my great-great-grandmother's sister, and reflected that while I have very little photographic evidence of that generation and the one before, as the 21st century passes it will be commonplace for people to be able to look at photographs of their direct ancestors... colour photographs, showing people who look very similar to living people. I wonder how that will change people's perception of the past and of their ancestors.

When I look at the pictures of my great grandmother Spivey, she is posed in a studio, in black and white, wearing a variety of outfits for dancing, including a gypsy, ballet, ethereal greek, or in her day clothes, looking oddly Victorian (although she was an Edwardian as an adult) and other worldly. I wonder whether I would see her differently, regard her differently, if she was in colour, and in clothing which I could imagine wearing myself?

As the century progresses, people who die will not only be available in colour imagery, but in video. They'll have myspace and facebook pages. Both the things they are proud of, and their inconsequential tweetings will remain after they have died. Will people feel that they know them better? Feel more connected to them, once their late great grandparents have a website or a blog?

It is something which fascinates me. Apart from the photographs my grandfather gave me, and the odd family document, I have very little beyond my great grandmother's generation, most of what I have, I have researched and discovered myself. Although you can work out the facts of someone's life... who their parents were, who they married, what they did, how many children they had, there is very little way to discover who they really were. Will we know more when someone's facebook page remains after their death? Sometimes it seems to me that there is more and more data available, but it may be just so much noise. How long will pages remain, and what sort of memorial will they be?

I've always tried to keep up to date with the current events in the family, recording marriages and children for future generations. It amazes me how quickly families fall out of touch. Children who grew up together, grow apart, set up families of their own and cousins lose touch with cousins. Will that happen less now that we can all keep in contact through our social media pages?

Trying to think about what sort of legacy you will leave to future generations, will they want the unvarnished truth, that their great great grandmother wrote erotica and had a virtual life which ran alongside her real life... or might they rather not know that? Hard to say, and hard to know what the impact will be of the unvarnished truth. I have been distressed in the past to hear of diaries censored or destroyed, because for most people those sorts of things are the ony trace of ourselves that we leave behind currently... and I feel that honesty and openness are the only ways to make sure that sort of legacy means something, even if it might be embarrassing to learn that Uncle George liked to wear women's clothing, or Aunt Emily once used to be a stripper.

On the other hand... who really tells the truth about their life? It takes a rare person to have enough self-knowledge and courage not to rationalise and justify the things they do, not to put a spin on the events and happenings of their life. Even if they manage it personally, unless you put a publication embargo of at least 50 years on the naked truth, it means that you maybe revealing secrets from other people's lives too, when you speak the truth about your own.

I like to think that some essence of myself will live on in the things I have written, and in the things I have composed... but actually, the lasting effect of my presence in the world must be the contact I have had with others, and it is hard to know what difference that may have made to the world, good or bad, positive or negative.

Maybe in the end it won't matter what photographs or facts are left behind, it is the person that you are, and how the person that you are has changed the people you have lived with. In the end, the main memorials to who you are, are the people who grieve your passing and in whose hearts you live on after your death.

Conmen and unsolicited callers

2010-01-25T00:30:00.000-08:00

I have a shameful secret. Months and months ago, we were given a new fridge. The old one was moved into the back garden, and for a while was used for storing various things. My daughter drew over it in indelible pen, her trademark footballers and young men.

After a few weeks, we agreed we should get the council to come and take it away. The fridge migrated to the front garden and my son tried to sign up for collection through the council website... but their form was broken. Time passed.

As long as I don't actually have to scale a mountain of discarded fridges to get to my computer, I don't much notice stuff. The fridge was hidden behind our people carrier, and it was only occasionally that I thought, gosh, must phone the council. The trouble is, it would go right out of my mind as soon as I crossed the threshold, or it would be out of hours or whatever. There's no real excuse, it was lazy and unnecessary - although if the online form had been working, we would hae done it straight away.

It wasn't until I heard someone say, in a stand up act, last weekend "you don't want to be sent to live in the sort of council estate where the neighbours have a fridge in the garden" that I realised that what I had done or not done might be annoying the neighours. Despite this, I still didn't call the council, because I forgot again, after the weekend, being focussed on all the stuff I have to do, and my tax return.

Then, there was a knock at the door. It was a charming young man with an Irish accent, who asked if I wanted the fridge disposed of. I said no, the council would come and get it, I'd just not contacted them. He said that for £20 he would take it away to the dump, and it would be gone, no need to wait. I hesitated, because nowadays £20 is not a small amount of money, and I knew I could get it done for nothing by the council. Bu I was feeling so guilty for not having done anything about it before... I said yes, they shifted it into their van, and I handed over the £20.

Last night, my husband came home from the pub with the news that the flats down the road had suddenly acquired a new decoration. A rather recognisable fridge, with very recognisable decoration had appeared in the car park. All the neighbours are wondering if we had moved our fridge from our garden to theirs, to get rid of it. The nice Irish boys had moved it 50 yards down the road before dumping it out again.

What with that, and the fact that a new large dog somewhere in the road is barking incessantly at night, which I am sure our neighbours will think is our dog, as I have more than once mistaken the other dog's bark for Toby... we're beginning to look like the problem family of the neighbourhood. They already think we're nuts for home educating.

The moral of this story, is not to procrastinate and not to accept kind offers from charming callers at the door. If it seems to good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.

My Blog

2010-01-24T23:16:00.000-08:00

I've been blogging for 12 years, off and on. I started my first blog within a few weeks of going online, in 1998, and I blogged nearly every day for the next six months. It was like a diary and yet not a diary and I was feeling my way around the newness of it all... one of only a handful of UK blogs at a time when the majority of websites and online journals were American.

A few years ago, I realised that the subjects I blogged about fell under certain headings, reflecting my interests... home education, genealogy, Second Life, Quakers. I realised that the people I knew in home education would probably not be interested in my Second Life material, and those who were genealogists were probably not interested in Quakers etc. So I split my blogging between different blogs, one for each subject.

The trouble is, I'm busy doing all those things plus trying to earn money, and so I don't have that much time to write for my own enjoyment, and so I tended only to blog once every few days. That meant that all my blogs looked sluggish and uncared for, and it was an effort to maintain them and to maintain a train of thought with any coherence. So a few weeks ago I decided to maintain this blog as my main blog, and to blog about whatever took my fancy.

I've been wavering about my decision ever since for the good reasons that I feel that my interests are quite separate... but I am continuing with it for the time being. I've decided to try to label my posts more systematically, so that it will (hopefully) be possible for someone to subscribe and see at once whether the current post will be of any interest to them.

I don't often get feedback except in Japanese or Chinese... and I tend to delete those comments because I don't know what they say.

Life has been a bit stressful and difficult over the past few weeks, and I have wanted to blog about things, but I always bear in mind that when I blog, it isn't just my life I am blogging, but the lives of those nearest and dearest to me. I'm in a bit of a bind, because to blog the way I'd like to blog, I would share things about other people and what they do, which I can only do safely if I anonymise the blog... but if I did that, set one up so that I could talk freely without breaking out details of other people's lives, I would have to keep off the unique collection of interests that I blog about, or be fairly quickly recognisable.

So. I've decided that I'll continue with this random blog for three months and see where it takes me. Feedback welcome.

Anti-science, pro-homeopathy

2010-01-19T04:10:00.000-08:00

I don't really read BoingBoing any more, except when I mosey on over to make a suggestion for an item, but I spotted the article about the 10:23 event in Boots, and it made me very cross.

The group describe themselves as pro-science, anti-homeopathy as though those two things go together hand-in-hand. The reason I feel cross about it, is that I have personal experience of homeopathy which leads me to think it has a discernible effect, even though convetional medicine cannot tell me what it is. Conventional medicine can't explain the effect in acupuncture either.

It is the arrogance of people who say they are pro-science, believing that they can use logic to decide whether or not homeopathy is effective, rather than science, even though they profess to be pro-science. You can't. A lot of things which don't seem to make sense are scientifically proven, not least the behaviour of water, which is central to homeopathic method.

There are so many complex things tied up in my response to this protest. Firstly, no-one is forcing them to use or take homeopathic medicines... but that's not good enough for them, they want to prevent other people from using them. Even if the effect in homeopathy is solely part of the placebo effect - and I don't think it is, personally - there are no side effects or drawbacks to homeopathic medicine, which is more than can be said for most allopathic medicines.

And finally... they may be mistaken. New Scientist reported last year that experiments in Belfast designed to prove once and for all that there could be nothing in homeopathy in fact proved the opposite - that there may be an effect which is not understood by science. It seems to me that there may be something very important to be learned about the way that substances interact with water, which could be scientifically established.

Unfortunately, this group are too busy trying to impose their views on you and me to actually look at the science. It's very useful to have a group of people who can tell without experimentation, without experience, without any specialist knowledge, what will work and what won't. It doesn't seem terrifically scientific though.

I hate arrogance, and I hate people who profess one point of view while living another. And I don't like being told what I can and can't do. In any case, as I pointed out on the BoingBoing comment thread, 180,000 people were apparently killed by their stay in hospital last year. It is possible for a person to kill themselves by discontinuing needed medication and only taking homeopathy, but I really don't think homeopathic treatment will have killed anyone. That alone is reason enough to demand the choice of using it.

Aid Haitus

2010-01-17T02:15:00.000-08:00

It's been painful to look at the news over the past week, since the earthquake in Haiti. It's too easy to imagine how many people must be trapped there by very small amounts of concrete or debris... I saw film of a sweet little girl of two, who was able to walk out of the building she had been trapped in once a little bit of the structure was moved.

Often when these things happen, I tend to do what I can, donating money if I can afford it, and then I stop reading the news, because I think it can simply make one depressed, without any prospect of being able to change things.

One thing made me very angry though. Some people broke into the remains of a supermarket, and it appeared that either the UN peacekeepers (!) or local police, were firing at them for that.

If you have been caught in the middle of a disaster of the scale of Haiti - or Katrina before that - I do not think that looting food from a destroyed supermarket should be illegal and prevented. It makes no sense to me that humanitarian aid should be inhumane. If there were foodstuffs and water available in the wrecked supermarket, and people who required foodstuffs and water still not reached by the aid which is flooding to Haiti, then they should have been allowed to take and distribute it. It's different if they are looting TVs and people's possessions. Or trying to make a fast buck out of the food.

I can't understand why the surviving members of Haiti's government and local government aren't organising what can be organised, and that's one of the things that could be organised: commandeering the water and foodstuffs that are available in the ruins.

America has promised help and aid, and although we may be suspicious of their motives, there is no doubting that they are sending massive numbers of people and equipment. What America has proved over and over is that they are a lumbering administration which takes a long time to take decisions, with a massive hierarchy. The length of time it took them to respond to the effects of hurricane Katrina in their own country showed that they take a long time to get their act together. It seemed that journalists from other countries around the word were achieving more in terms of on-the-ground help initially than the army and officials who were there.

It is frustrating that, once again, news teams seemed able to respond, get to the area in question with their equipment and supplies far faster than any government could get aid to the same area. That the UN were concentrating on trying to rescue their own personnel was understandable... but when they progressed to policing the area rather than trying to help the people who are stuck there without food and water and medical help, it made me angry.

I hope that the delay in getting aid to the people who need it is purely logistical, and there aren't people from agencies and governments around arguing the toss about who should be in charge of what. Unfortunately, due to sheer numbers and firepower, it seems likely the Americans will be in charge. I hope that works out well for Haiti and not badly. I hope America has pure motives and not the usual power-, land-, oil-, and money-grabbing motives which seem to be behind nearly everything they have done in the past few years, when they have marched into other countries. I used to have the same faith in Obama that the Americans had, but the fact that Guantanamo is still open has undermined that trust.

In the end, in this sort of situation, it should be people and not things or assets, which are important. For many people, trapped in their homes, time has already run out. For many thousands of others, their health and continued existence depends on the people who arebringing aid, defeating the logistical challenges, getting the right stuff to the right people, and doing it quickly. I pray that they will.

Friendship

2010-01-02T03:25:00.000-08:00

I was contacted on Facebook earlier today by a couple of people asking to be my friends, which started me thinking about the subject in general. I don't know these people, they are friends of friends, and Facebook had suggested that they might like to friend me.

Friend means different things in different places, and has different implications. I would never add someone to my MSN list unless I felt I knoew them fairly well, although I have added people I have only met in SL, and not in real life. When I joined Kaneva I found that people regarded friending as simply a way of building up a profile, and at the beginning everyone would fall on a newbie and friend them.

In Second Life, most of my friends are people I know pretty well, because I purge my list after a month or so... if I have allowed someone to befriend me and they haven't talked to me since, then I will purge them from my list.

Facebook has always been a mixture of friends, family and people I know a bit in different places. I wrote to the people asking to befriend me and asked if I actually knew them - I knew their names but I didn't know them personally. I've been a bit alarmed by the changes in privacy policy, realising that I post pictures of my children, and they post things too, which I wouldn't necessarily want just anyone to be able to see. I'm beginning to realise that I haen't been as protective of my privacy as I ought to have been.

I did something I have been meaning to do for some time - I removed the people from my friend's list that I simply knew by repute or because we had inhabited the same mailing lists etc, and pared my friends list down to people I feel I know really well. Then I felt less mean about refusing the friendship requests I had this morning.

My feeling is that I have quite a lot of public places where people can contact me - on twitter, by email, in Second Life. I don't need to invite them into my facebook in order for them to contact me if they wish to do so. Sorry if I purged you.

Boxing Day at Mildew Mansions

2009-12-26T12:46:00.000-08:00

Mildew Mansions was what a friend christened the family home when I was a teenager. He helpfully painted the fridge green to follow through with the mildew theme, something which did not endear him to my mother. You will gather, dear reader, that she still lives in the family home, which is a rather oddly rambling house, fashioned from a labourer's cottage core, which has all but disappeared under the ravages of several families with no taste and one with no money (mine).

We arrived around midday for the traditional cold buffet, clutching our contribution, a beautiful pasta salad made by my son. I usually make the pasta salad, but I was feeling a bit rough this morning and didn't want to risk preparing food for the consumption of others. It was probably a hangover, as I did have a couple of glasses of Asti yesterday.

My sister Sam and Nige, her husband had stayed overnight, along with my sister Amanda, her children Lucy and Peter and Lucy's boyfriend Ryan, forever known as Byron in our family because my mother constantly forgot his name when he and Lucy were first together. A couple of bat-eared bushbaby creatures which they tell me are dogs, but I do not believe them, completes the family.

My brother Adrian had already arrived. His wife Gerry is unfortunately ill and has been vomiting frequently since Tuesday, and so decided not to come to lunch. Good call. Vomiting lunch guests are rarely welcome - I hope you feel better soon! My brother Mike was already there, although his partner Mel and partner's son Barney didn't join us until later. Amanda's daughter Holly and her boyfriend phoned from the other side of town to say they were lost. I heard Amanda say "stop saying house names to me, they don't help at all!" Holly arrived and then eventually my sister Lisa arrived with husband Valerio and children: twins Alex and James, aged nine, and Becky, aged 14.

Conversation during the day frequently returned to the subject of Lucy's breasts, which may seem extremely odd until you know that she has recently had a breast enlargement operation at the age of 22. Although I think those sort of decisions are personal, and nobody's business but your own, there was a surreal element to the freedom with which family members would prod and poke her breasts, and invite others to do so... rather the way pregnant women suddenly find themselves public property for complete strangers to feel their stomachs, a woman who has had a breast enlargement operation apparently has to put up with people constantly wanting to compare the feel of natural breasts with the enhanced ones.

At one point her grandmother encouraged her to show her aunt her scars, in full view of two startled uncles and her sister's boyfriend, but although she is extremely proud of the result from her operation, and hasn't had to buy a drink since it happened, even Lucy seemed to baulk at the general flaunting of her figure to all and sundry and so she didn't reveal more than a bra strap.

As is traditional, lunch was very late while we waited for Mike to fetch Mel and Barney, and then we all fell upon the cold turkey and ham, which was augmented with relishes, salads and aforesaid pasta salad.

The pudding course was even later, with my mother's famed alcoholic bread and butter pudding, and some experimental dishes such as mars bar cheesecake, which I didn't fancy.

Once all the food was cleared away, the traditional present giving took place. For the last few years we have tried various systems for present giving. We had a secret santa for the adults and everyone bought presents for all the children for a while. Then we went to a system where the adults did a secret santa, and the teenagers too, and only the children under 10 got a present from everyone. But - surprise - teenagers don't seem to be very good at buying presents for each other, so they mostly put ten quid in a card. Then they grumped about only getting a note in a card for Christmas....

So this year we decided each family would buy for everyone, spending £3 per person. This was interpreted widely, with some people making foodie presents... my brother Adrian gave some chilli vodka or ginger vodka, my brother Mike had made home-made biltong, and a variety of biscuits, my sister Sam had made fudge and chocolate truffles and packaged them beautifully with cellophane and candy cane decorations.

There was a general crackling of paper as people tore the wrappings off their presents, and then a party popper fight broke out for a while. The twins received a number of foam bullet guns and disc-throwing guns for Christmas, and rallied with a number of supporters, bursting downstairs to rake the assembled family with a combination of plastic disks and bullets, empty party poppers and glowsticks.

The men in the family gathered in the kitchen to discuss special recipes for biscuits, while everyone else gradually sagged and fell asleep. My sister and son joined the cat in the bedroom and had a chat. She told me I must be proud of him, and I am, I am proud of all my children.

We left with bags and boxes bulging with presents, and came home in Sam's car, exhausted. It's the same weird feeling every year... weeks of anticipation, then over in a flash.

Happy Christmas

2009-12-25T16:03:00.000-08:00

Spent the day at my mother's, with a few of the family. Only 11 to lunch today, 23 expected tomorrow. Took some spooky pictures of Kate with my cameraphone. Like this one the best.

And now for something completely different....

2009-12-10T04:06:00.000-08:00

The BBC website used to be my main port of call for information about breaking news, and for background information on news stories. Indeed, when I first came online in 1998, they were about the only source of information in the UK - nearly all the other websites used to be American.

It saddens me that the news service seems to be going rapidly downhill... I am noticing more and more grammatical and spelling errors on the site. OK, I know, pot calling kettle black, but a) my keyboard is demonstrably the worst in the world (as shown by consumer polls/scientific testing) and b) This is a private website, not a professionally written and produced one.

Most worryingly, I see things which I think are of national importance, and require national debate, and they barely warrant a mention on the BBC site. They seem to be content to stick a few headline stories on the front page, and never to mention others at all.

The recent publicity over the family in Scotland who lost custody of their newborn baby - and all their children - allegedly due to a weight problem in the family, warranted no reporting at all. The many cases of Social Workers stepping into cases where any reasonable person would not, or conversely not intervening in cases where the man on the Clapham omnibus would have done, (which have been thoroughly reported by that bastion of news reporting, The Daily Mail) have not rippled the surface of the BBC website at all.

Their perverted sense of "balance" seems to mean that they are driven to offer balance where no balance is required. To me, balance implies a fair, non-subjective reporting of a case. It doesn't mean that if you wheel out a creationist to comment on something, you have to drag out Richard Dawkins at the same time. There are many circumstances in which no balance is the balanced way to report. It's hardly likely that a report on an anti-racism initiative would need a racist to balance it, for example.

A story I noticed this morning which seemed to offer promise of being interesting, about an apparent window of opportunity to deal with distressing memories, was grammatically incoherent in places, for example: "In the study, the volunteers were wired up to electrodes and given a shock each time they were shown a picture of differently coloured squares to make them fearful of the image - which they did." Which they did? Which they did...what? Argh. It puts me into grumpy old woman mode.

I think the editorial policy is changing to introduce more and more entertainment stories, and their editorial values seem to be dropping rapidly in inverse proportion to the sensationalism of the stories. There was a non-story on Tuesday about how David Furnish (partner of Elton John, popular singer/songwriter) was worried about George Michael (popular singer) and how unnamed mutual friends were asking John to intervene in some unspecified way. It was the most ridiculous non-story I have ever read, and it's barely even gossip, let alone news. Oh look! It's still there!

Then again, suddenly you find something wonderful on the BBC website: this is a slideshow with a voice over about the XMM-Newton observatory's first ten years. This is where I find it hard to remain grumpy. Perhaps it's rather English to have such an eclectic and eccentric mix of the amazing and the awful, on one site. I'd happily give up the awful in favour of a properly editorial approach to the news, however. Bring back the BBC news site! I miss it.

Gothic pleasures

2009-12-10T01:49:00.000-08:00

I went to Gypsy Moon to see what was happening with their store. Most real-life clothing works very badly in Second Life, as American Apparel and others have discovered. Most people appreciate the chance to dress their avatar in things which they wouldn't wear in real life, and are looking for something different.

Gypsy Moon is different in real life though, and I think the clothes could potentially work very well in Second Life. I've been a bit disappointed with the things I have bought from them before... skirts look a lot longer on the box than they do on the avatar, their model must buck the trend and be petite instead of 8 feet tall.

Arriving at Gypsy Moon I discovered it was under construction still, and the build is marvellously gothick, dark and brooding. I right clicked a piece of the build to see who made it and found the name Morphe attached to it.

Teleporting to their store, I found myself on the Snow Crash sim, in what appeared to be a gothic builder's yard. There are some fantastic builds here: stone dragons, dramatic shield maiden statues, crypts in all shapes and sizes.

It's clear the builder, Abel Dreamscape, cares about his work. There is an explanation of the name Morphe, instructions for increasing the level of detail on sculpts,

and in his profile, the advice: "take what you do well, and perfect it".

I was finding that it took a long time for the detail on sculpts to pop in. I stood for some time in front of this carriage and still couldn't see the wheels properly, so I followed the instructions and it did make a difference.

There are complete castle prefabs, builders' full perms packs of components like arched windows and doors, and a whole lot more. If you're looking for a castle, or a small crypt even, I recommend you go and see the things on offer here.

In SL, as I have often said, it is a question of balance: you have to balance up what you want to do with the possible lag and problems of usability, and that's still the case. That means trying to limit the number of textures, sculpts and scripts which you use in a small area, to try to make the experience a good one for your visitors. I think castles lend themseves to the sort of compromise you need to make, because it is possible to limit the number of different textures used, and keep to the same group of sculpties, while still being able to indulge your imagination.

The building packs I picked up sorely tempt me to build a castle. It's been a long time since I had a castle to call my own....

Please advise

2009-12-09T06:39:00.000-08:00

Staring at a book I was entering on a web page, I realised that my brain had recognised that there was a spelling mistake on the cover: Practicing Peace ought to be Practising Peace. Knowing it, and yet having to double check (because surely the author/editor/publisher would have checked?), I found a page with grammatical information, which noted that Advice and advise work the same way as practice and practise. The -ce form is the noun and the -se form is the verb. I've never connected the two/four words before.

Why is it that people rarely mix up to advise and advice, but often mix up to practise and practice, then? Interesting.

Edited to add: My son says it is simply the fact that the sound of advice and advise is different and the sound of practice and practise is the same. This raises a lot of questions I am interested in, about why I had never connected the two in my head before, as it offers an easy way to remember which spelling is appropriate for practice and practise. It indicates why English is such a nightmare for people to learn, when practice and practise sound the same and advice and advise do not. And makes me wonder again whether people are right to draw instant conclusions about people based upon how they speak or how they spell.

Creative commons images: war and medicine

2009-12-07T01:48:00.000-08:00

The Wellcome Institute has recently released a library of images under a creative commons attribution license. I had assumed that these would be medical pictures and of limited appeal to genealogists and family historians, but in fact they have a large category on the subject of war which includes general shots of soldiers on the battlefield, being transported by horse drawn stretcher, in the trenches.

Their "war" category covers historical wars and battles, such as the Boer war and the Boxer rebellion, and includes paintings and drawings too. There may be much to interest anyone, but particularly family historians who are looking for general illustrations for their websites and printed histories may find something to fill a hole.

Young Geoffrion Opening

2009-11-28T13:20:00.000-08:00

I was fortunate to be online at just the right moment to be summoned by my friend Enjah Mysterio to the Mysterio gallery in Grignano, to see the opening of Young Geoffrion's show there.

It was a little difficult to find my way in; once the gallery rezzes properly one can see an entrance on the first floor and another on the roof.

I was stunned by the glowing colours of Young Geoffrion's work, and spent some time looking around at the variety of work. Some of the pieces reminded me strongly of Hundertwasser, one of my favourite artists. My favourite, which is called Florence, can be seen over Enjah's shoulder in the picture above.

There was a crowd of fahionable young residents looking through the scripted sketch book and around the exhibits, sipping wine or, Young Geoffrion's preference, cider.

At one stage a young man with a hammer and sickle welded to his back came in and started a political discussion.

The show will be on for a couple of months, and I fervently hope that Young Geoffrion will allow prints of the work, which would make wonderful Christmas presents, to be sold. Please do go and see it.

Watch out, we're about

2009-11-13T09:54:00.000-08:00

Great post about the CRB madness on one of the unschooling blogs. You can read it for yourself, but it poses the question why a group of women would be seen as a threat to children.

I supect that the writer probably intended to question the idea that any adult is a necessary danger to children, but the question is even more significant when asked about women.

There seems to be a movement to identify women as offenders at the moment... maybe it is a natural reaction to the Little Ted's scandal, to look for women behaving badly. Maybe it is a change in the way women behave. But after 20 years in a criminal defence office, my sister says she has never been involved in a case involving a woman.

The statistics are difficult to disentangle, but they show that men are hundreds of times more likely to offend than women, and that women are more likely, not less likely, to be imprisoned once found guilty of an offence.

I feel that it is only a matter of time before this government requires parents to pass some sort of test before they are allowed to procreate... or maybe when it comes it will be necessary to pass some sort of fitness-to-parent test before you will be allowed to procreate at all. When ARE people going to be starting to say NO?

Christmas on Nemesis

2009-11-13T09:43:00.000-08:00

The Christmas shop is open on Nemesis Sim in SL. As usual we have high-quality candles and giftboxes and trees. This year there's something new for people who struggle to afford the prims for a tree... I have made a dressing for Linden pine trees, which, though I say it myself, works really well.

There is also the ice Cathedral and Ice rink and ice caves to explore. Type Nemesis into the map and teleport there now!

You're next

2009-11-08T02:11:00.001-08:00

I make no apology for writing a blog about the real world once again. The government is currently considering the recommendations of the Badman report on home education. I expect the 99% of you who don't home educate are planning to surf to another page at this point. But hold on! This affects you too!

For the whole of recorded history, there has been an assumption that the local authority will not break in and enter your property unless they have evidence that you are up to something illegal or are in danger of harming another person. Basically, if you adhere to the law of the land, an Englishman's - or Scotsman's, or Welshman's, or Irishman's - home has been his castle. They have no automatic right of entry without information or evidence that compels entry.

In relation to home education, that rule is proposed to change: the government is proposing that the LEA should have automatic right of entry, in order to see and interview the children, in the case of home-educated children. This is a BIG change to the law. Can it only be applied to home educators? I don't think, in all conscience, not that I think they have one, the government would be able to apply this rule to home educators alone without an immediate challenge on the grounds of discrimination. Thus, I think that if they go along with this recommendation, it will apply to all parents.

Now... we've all looked on, horrified, as tales of children being beaten and killed have surfaced in the press. The child who was starved to death by her mother and her boyfriend - how horrifically awful is that? The authorities present their case for access as though they had no right at all to gain entry to the child's house, and *that* was the reason they loitered around outside and didn't get to see her before she died.

Hold on a moment though. Concerns had already been raised by neighbours and others about the state of the children. The local authority has for a long time had the right to enter the home and seize the children if they believe that they are at risk of harm. They could have done so in this case, had they chosen to. The fact that they got it wrong and didn't is not anybody's fault but their own.

What they appear to be saying is that in order to fulfil their responsibilities towards children who are being harmed, they need the right to enter *anyone's* home, in order to talk to and ascertain that the children in our homes are OK. Does that seem right to you? Would you be ok about being frisked every time you left a shop in case you'd shoplifted? Or having a forensic accountant look over your bank accounts when you put in your tax return in case you hadn't declared some income? Of course you wouldn't. The whole of our system of law is based upon people being innocent until someone has the evidence to prove them guilty. Are we really wanting to change that?

I am appalled by how dishonest the whole system appears to be. Since the amalgamation of social services departments with education departments in LEAs, they don't seem able to decide how to monitor welfare and education and have begun to mix them up in a horrible concoction which means that parents will have no power and no means of satisfying authorities if the authorities choose not to be satisfied.

For most parents, losing their children is the very worst punishment they can imagine. For home educating parents, doubly so, as they actually enjoy the company of their children. Is the government really proposing to oppress parents in this draconian way, and can anything but bad come from it?

Bear in mind they want access to homes even if they are totally satisfied that the children are being educated suitable to their age, ability and aptitude, and even if they have no suspicions or concerns about the welfare of the children. I have just one question, why?

I believe that the authorities see parents who are home educating their children as a dangerous anti-social fringe of society. They read reports every day which link non-attendance at school with anti-social behaviour and the likelihood of getting into trouble with the police, and they appear to make no distinction between an electively home-educated child and a child who has been expelled or is truanting, even though they are very different.

I cannot agree that it is in the best interest of families or children to increase the powers to intervene without evidence, and I hope the MPs trusted to examine the Badman report feel that way too.

I think that some LEAs have been unhappy about their powerlessness in law to compel parents to comply with their rules on education. Many of them are completely ignorant about the efficacy of alternative methods of education, and there is a big education lobby of people who make money from education, who spend a lot of money trying to convince the government that this or that system works better or will work for children who are not achieving. I think there are a lot of vested interested in education from academics, institutions, companies, who don't want anyone to know that actually, doing nothing that looks like school is MORE effective in educating your children than school.

The authorities reject this idea without even trying to examine the very good evidence that exists that a loving parent who will talk to their children and support them in their endeavours, whatever they may be, will achieve more than schools. They look at an unschooling parent and make assumptions that unschooling means unparenting and uneducating and those things do not necessarily follow at all. They have until now been powerless to act if an articulate parent who knows their rights refuses them access to their homes, and they don't like it.

From my point of view, it seems highly unlikely that if a social worker can go into Baby P's home and leave him in the care of the people that tortured him to death, they could go into an average home educator's home and conclude that the children are at risk from a lack of curriculum, but this is precisely what I fear may happen: they may assume that they know what they are talking about in the realm of education because so many of the people who work in LAs in education are failed teachers and think that they know what education looks like.

It seems that hardly a week goes by without some injustice or other in the field of child welfare, and it invariably seems to me that the authorities are idle and do nothing in cases that require action, like Baby P, like the child who starved to death in Birmingham, Khyra Ishaq, like hundreds of others who have been beaten and abused... and then they take action when no action is required, such as the family who have lost their children do to obesity problems in the family, including a newborn who *may* have been returned, the child who was seized after a police raid on her family, the child whose mother went on the run because the authorities threatened to take her child into care because her ex-husband had moved near to her locally... the list goes on and on.

What shocked me when I read reports about cases which have ended in children being taken into care, is that more cases of emotional abuse have been brought than physical abuse. From the description of the case where the mother went on the run around Europe to avoid having her child taken into care, the authorities had already seized her son for some weeks because they accused her of allowing her alcoholic husband to shout at her in the presence of their son.

Show me a family who says that they have never raised their voices to each other in front of their children! I wonder what planet those social workers have been living on if they believe that a functional family never loses their tempers or raises their voices. If that's being dysfunctional, it's pretty amazing that most children aren't in the care of the local authority.

Of course, you are free to ignore this post, may already have surfed off into the sunset. But if you have children and don't want the local authority to be able to march into your home at the drop of a hat, I'd suggest that you support home educators now.

Edited 10 November to remove comment about parents needing a lie down after spending time with their children, which I accept may have been offensive to some.

Broken by fixing it up

2009-10-27T06:51:00.000-07:00

Once upon a dark and distant time, I heard people mention BoingBoing and I didn't know what they were talking about. That was about six years ago. I was introduced to Boing Boing and lo! I saw that it was good.

Once upon a time, I couldn't imagine logging into my computer without checking BoingBoing. That was about a year ago. I knew the names of the bloggers, I could navigate my way around the archives or the past week, I posted the occasional comment - not too often, just when something grabbed me. I made a few suggestions, and some of them were taken up.

Boingboing is heralded as a directory of wonderful things... and it was. Not all of the things were wonderful, some of them were pretty devastatingly not wonderful at all, like the reports on miscarriages of justice, the growth of CCTV and the demonising of photography, but what was most definitely wonderful was the way in which you could sometimes see a story and know, just know that the comments would have you howling with laughter, or inhaling your morning cup of coffee - or blowing it all over your keyboard.

The people who met in the comments queue on Boingboing recognised each other, and could see who in the archives was a brother or sister soul who shared the concern about Guantanamo, or the despair at the re-election of Bush. Intelligent, articulate, clever, sceptical people, who wrote great one liners and better paragraphs.

But now, now... they redesigned it, and it seems irretrievably broken. Not for everyone, maybe. For me. I can't navigate around the new design, I can't find my friends, or at least the people I saw everyday and now can't find for the same stupid comments you find on 1001 blogs on a 1,000,001 webpages elsewhere on the internet. Instead of being elegant and simple and letting the blog content do the talking, it SHOUTS AT YOU really loudly, with LOUD colours and loud headings and even LOUDER people commenting.

It isn't that they have changed the content particularly, but they seem to have taken away my ability to navigate easily from place to place, and somehow it looks all wrong, and isn't something I want to spend time looking at. How can this be? It's amazing what a huge difference it has made... it has turned it from a place I coudn't imagine not visiting regularly, to somewhere I never want to visit. Very strange. I expect that they want younger readers, more readers, to attract attention. Maybe they've achieved that. But they've lost one regular reader, and I miss my old BoingBoing. I'm off to the internet WayBack machine to see if I can find it anywhere.

Heritage Key: Tutankhamun

2009-10-26T17:33:00.001-07:00

Successfully visited Heritage Key for the first time today. This is a new virtual world venture by the Rezzable people, run outside Second Life, but using Second Life technology. Avatars have been deliberately handicapped by being unable to build or create in world.

I had been able to get in and set up an avatar before, but the teleportation didn't appear to be working when I had been there previously. I dislike the clothing, skins and hair which is provided, as I am used to much more sophisticated products in SL, and I particularly missed my animation override, as I hate walking like an SL newbie, because it always has been extremely jerky and badly done.

Heritage Key is in alpha testing (so it says) and purports to show you the treasures of the Tutankhamun excavation. When you walk into the teleport spiral, you end up in a gallery where you can pick up some slightly less awful clothes, and in the future will be able to buy things with points gained by answering quizzes.

I somehow blundered to the compass point and found the balloon to travel to the valley of the kings. This isn't as impressive as it sounds, as the valley is just a few mountains and some gateways to excavations which are all apparently closed, except for the one for Tutankhamun. Even that one only seems to have a couple of rooms open to the public. There are a lot of things to click on, but these mostly seem to be audio clips of someone reading information in general about the Carter excavation or the Pharoah and not specifically about what you can see in the world. A lot of the things around the excavation site seem to be very skin deep scenery rather than interactive.

There is a game to play, which infuriatingly advises you to take a pickaxe to the dig areas denoted by orange flags, and to dig for things - and then tells you off for doing that. In a few of the locations this gains you some (modern) objects that you would have had to pay good points for. This seems to lack logic - it would be a lot more fun if you found ancient artefacts that might be useful, like a lamp, jewellery or a clue to something else. In some of the designated pits it tells you that you have destroyed the artefacts by attacking them with a pick!

I thought I would be able to explore the Carter dig, and to go into the tomb to see the things he found as he found them. In actual fact there is a strange teleport halfway down the tunnel to the tomb, and then only two rooms with a few artefacts able to be explored.

To see the sarcophagus and fabulous coffin of Tutankhamun, one has to travel to the gallery, which is laid out for all the world just like a real life museum, which seems to miss the point of having it in SL at all. There is a facility to enlarge the items in the gallery, but this immediately kidnaps your camera under the ground - not ideal for newbie visitors.

Finally I travelled to the Life on the Nile area, but once again, this was laid out as a museum exhibit, instead of being the living example I was expecting. There were a few families of hippos and the odd crocodile, and a few desultory artefacts lying around on the river banks... a seat here, a bowl of eggs there and a basket in a few places.

It would have been so easy to make the use of things clear by allowing visitors to sit on and activate them. I had been expecting cooking, fishing, farming, living to be going on in this place. Maybe a home of the time and place to explore with the living and eating areas. Instead of that I found a couple of wildlife tableaux and a shop for free clothing.

Make no mistake, there are some breathtaking exhibits in this virtual world. There are some fantastic objects which are very close to the real life version, I imagine. But they are exhibits in a very old-fashioned museum sense, and don't - in my view - use many of the advantages of a virtual world in which *anything* is possible.

The Sorrento

2009-10-15T05:16:00.000-07:00

My friend Quantum Destiny has released his epic prefab "The Sorrento" for sale to the general public. It's going to be very hard to do justice to this amazing build... it's huge, detailed and... and... amazing. It's out on his Quantum Destiny sim for all to see and marvel at. He's my friend, but I hope you know that I wouldn't tell you it was amazing unless I believed it was. It is.

He's been working on it for months, and has now released it in two versions: a full version which is 2554 prims, or a stripped down version which is 2179. As he says in his documentation for the build, it is suitable for a group of friends to share, or as a trophy house for those who wish to impress.

It's something which has to be seen to be believed. Quantum has cleverly provided a free footprint, to enable people to check whether they have enough room for the build, as it will likely take up at least a quarter of a sim. It is big... the swimming pool is beautiful, and if you look carefully, can get some idea of the scale of the build by spotting my avatar in the pool below. The picture is taken from a huge balcony. The size means that it is possible to hold a party more or less anywhere - and invite friends who are still having problems with moving around small houses. It is spacious and yet cleverly in proportion, everything is just so. If you're looking for a prefab which is way out of the ordinary run, you can't go wrong with this. At L$12,750 it isn't cheap, but the work that has gone into it more than justifies the price, as I am sure you will agree when you see it in the...prim.

City simulations

2009-09-30T02:53:00.000-07:00

Looking for something completely different (bio-processors) I found an article in New Scientist about city simulations from photographs posted by the public on Flickr. The simulations have a watercolour impressionist feel about them.

The simulations were constructed using photographs posted by people of landmarks, and took hours rather than the weeks or month that one would expect for people to find, organise and position hundreds of pictures. The future possibilities as the software evolves, are mindblowing. Maybe one day it will be possible to explore the world virtually without leaving your armchair... set training operations in real landscapes... the potential uses for this are quite amazing.

Come as You Are Party at Tiny Tin

2009-09-27T02:31:00.000-07:00

I've been up to my eyes in work and so haven't found much time to blog recently. I decided to take the evening off yesterday when I received a "come as you are" party invitation from Elfod Nemeth and Canolli Capalini yesterday. Actually I was pretty pleased with how I was... in SL. In real life I was in my casual sweats and looking like an inmate of a home for the socially challenged, but fortunately they haven't linked up my computer webcam to SL yet, so nobody knew that. I'd been making poses again, and was casually dressed and looking pretty good, I thought. So I went along to Tiny Tin in the Vernian Sea... to the mushroom brewery.

There were quite a few people there. The hosts, Elf and Olli....

Hyasynth Tiramisu, the designer behind silentsparrow, which is a fantastic gothy victorian clothing shop for men and women, with gorgeously textured clothing. I love the fact that she makes things which are versatile: they can be used for RP Victorian Steampunk, or by choosing which elements you wear, can be made to look contemporary.

And a variety of good looking adults and a smattering of children....

They were all so frightfully photogenic that I spent my time taking pictures, instead of the inventory sorting I usually do when I go to parties on my own.

I shouldn't forget to mention DJ Dregg Gothly, who chose some great music to go with the party - music I only ever hear in SL.

It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't been to an SL party what fun they can be. The experience of being in the same place, listening to the same music, doing the same thing can be very immersive - yet would look very boring if you were watching another person at the screen doing that. It's something which is very hard to convey, it needs to be experienced. It was way past my bedtime when Val Trafalgar won the best dressed in...whatever contest, and I stumbled off to bed.

There's loads to do and see at Tiny Tin, even when there isn't a party, and I encourage you to go see it!

Any Pose

2009-09-23T01:32:00.000-07:00

Some weeks ago I bought the gadget "AnyPose". So many weeks ago that when I rezzed it, the automated updater dropped a new one on me!

I'm making stuff for JeansForGenes at the moment, and one of the things I am making is a tote bag, for which I needed a certain arm position. I searched briefly for a full-perms version and then suddenly thought of the gadget I'd bought.

The manual does not make life easy - in fact I am considering writing my own, simpler version of this manual. It's a such a great, easy-to-use product, it's a shame that reading the manual makes one want to run and hide in a cupboard.

Most non-techie people faced with a gardget like this want to be taken step-by-step through the process. I found it quite hard to work out what to do, even once I had worked out how the things worked. How do you save a bvh file, again?

The product consists of a stand and a HUD. You wear the HUD, rezz the pose stand and stand on it. The HUD shows the avatar joints, and all you have to do is to click on the joint you want to move, and then on the arrow keys to move that joint. For making simple sits, stands or bag-holding poses it is simplicity itself. You can see what your action is doing to the avatar, and alter the pose until you are happy with it. I pulled a chair onto the pose stand, to make my sit, as seen in the photograph.

The problem for me came when I tried to work out how to save the pose so that it could be uploaded to SL and used in objects. I read and re-read the instructions but they didn't seem to help much. They gave me several ways to capture the text which included the instructions for the pose, but no way of knowing how to save it as a bvh file. There was some stuff about saving it as an all files file in notepad....

It's SO simple. You either click the button so that the gadget emails the information, or you click the button so that it opens in a web window in world. Copy and paste the text as indicated into a notepad text document, but when you save it, name the document anymypose.bvh, and select "all Files" instead of text document as the file type. It will then upload to SL with no problems. (The procedure is just like uploading a photo or sound.)

You have some decisions to make on uploading, about the priority given for the animation and the whether to loop it or not. I have *so* many things I would like to do, I don't know where to start....

To celebrate my first pose in SL, I am giving a chair containing it away free from my store on Nemesis.

Biting the hand...

2009-09-16T23:46:00.000-07:00

Oclee tells me that Stroker Serpentine and Munchflower Zaius are suing Linden Lab for allowing IP theft, in effect. I found the story here and here and here and here. Ungrateful GITS. It will be particularly ironic if the thing that damages their businesses in SL is not the IP theft, but the fact that residents boycott their work in SL because they are in danger of killing the world as we know it for all of us.

I shan't be buying anything they make, until they desist. I encourage you to do the same.

Don't get me wrong... I don't like the scammers who steal people's work at all - have pursued a fair few myself. But the idea that it is all about money - that they would threaten the company that runs the world they rely on in order to obtain money. I think that's just stupid. To damage Linden lab is to kill the Golden Goose which has allowed Stroker to make money out of virtual sex goods, and Munchflower out of Gothy clothing.

It seems that the obsession he has had with IP infringement has finally taken over. They can defend it as wanting to change the rules etc... but I think it's still a gitty thing to do. I hope everyone avoids their products until they desist.

New free texture site

2009-09-16T23:00:00.000-07:00

Stumbled over a new texture site this morning which looks like the beginning of something great. Texture Lovers is a site for creative commons, commercial or non-commercial, non-attribution licensed textures.

There aren't many textures on there at the moment, but those that are there look to be good quality. Some of the websites which offer free textures impose limits, or restrictions on the use of the textures, but this one doesn't.

Free Michael Jackson tribute dance

2009-09-13T01:26:00.000-07:00

I woke to find an offline IM in my email inbox from Easy Babcock. As a tribute to Michael Jackson, Sine Wave has produced a four-minute-long, two-person dance called Liquid Felon. I rushed along to Sine Wave, found a willing partner in Shiyojin Kaligawa and tried it out.

Sometimes I have found Sine Wave dances a bit fast for SL, but this one is pretty well crafted, and seems to go on forever. It's definitely one worth having.

It was SO long it was hard to see when it restarted, but a couple asked us to let them have a go and so we ceded the platform to Katrin Daffyd and Philly Tigerpaw, seen above dancing the Liquid Felon.

Being online

2009-09-10T00:06:00.000-07:00

This week is a time for reviewing the year and wondering what I've done with it. I am finding that time is speeding up in the way that everyone says it does. Christmas and birthdays seem to be getting closer together with every passing year.

I'm beginning to feel that I am separated from my contemporaries by my immersion in online activities. Working as a writer, knowledge-base writer and Second Life builder, I spend quite a bit of time online, but it's much, MUCH more than that. Many of the online forums and websites have their own language, not quite a jargon, more a series of running jokes. The "unicorn chaser" of BoingBoing, the "who'll bring pie?" of the SL forums, the Trout Recreant rating system from SL Universe, and knowing what being Ruth'd is, or what a Box-on-head moment is in Second Life. Understanding lol or ROFL or AFAIK or IMNSHO.

The people I resonate with in the virtual world and online are passionate, honest, in favour of civil liberties and against restrictions that make no sense (like the current ones on photography in public places) and they care about them, protest against things, work towards making things better. They are familiar with and aware about issues of IP ownership and personal freedom, scathing of people who are inauthentic. It's a state of mind and intelligence which is hard to pin down but absolutely recognisable to those who know what it is.

They are connected to the issues of the day and to each other, and they recognise each other too. It's a whole new world which I feel is passing other people by, either because they aren't online or don't want to be.

My real-life friends are fantastic people, also passionate about a wide variety of things, interested in lots of things, intelligent and interesting... but many of them have hardly anything to do with life online and nothing at all with virtual worlds. Many of them seem asleep to the dangers of identity cards, the threat to civil liberties and the reason why such things are important. It is odd trying to match up the people I resonate with in virtual spaces and those I am friends with in the real world, especially when the latter have so little interest in or time for the former. It means that I do have two separate lives, which are almost impossible to reconcile. I still find myself passionately advocating for virtual worlds when challenged - "why would you pretend to be something you aren't?" or "why don't you switch off the computer and do something in the real world?" - although I have given up on trying to persuade family and friends that the virtual world might have something to offer them. It's one of those things you have to learn by experience.

I'm assuming that if we don't manage to kill ourselves and the planet in short order, the cohesion of the virtual world and the real world will get easier. My sons and daughter use a variety of ways to keep in touch with their friends, including online messaging, texting, email, facebook, webcams and skype. I've noticed that even the boys are used to juggling several activities at once, and they rarely simply watch television, finding that too little to keep them interested. Often they are playing a game, talking to friends and watching television all at the same time.

There will always be people who decline to use computers and online methods of communications, but I guess that will be an increasingly small number of people as time goes by. I've had some of the funniest moments, some of the most romantic, and some of the most moving in an online or virtual setting. I can see enormous potential in virtual world for education and communication. I just hope that, one day, some of my real life friends will discover it too.

Steampunk hunting

2009-09-08T14:33:00.000-07:00

I went to see Elfod's new shop in Vernian Sea... many apologies to the people who followed my now-out-of-date link and found themselves drowning in the aforesaid Vernian Sea. Elfod has made a great barge, and has lined up three outside Tiny Tim... one to stand on, one for the shop and one for backdrop.

Of course that didn't stop me trying to explore the shopping barge! While I was stumbling around (and fell in the sea myself) I noticed a poster, which announced a grid-wide hunt in September for all Steampunks, alongside a box of freebies. If you go to Elfod's shopping barges, you will be able to click on the poster, and receive the first landmark for the hunt.

There were quite a few people in the first couple of locations with a group tag for the hunt on, so I presume this is a successful way to bring prospective customers into stores, by ensuring that the treasure hunt attracts the right sort of customer in the first place. Seems to me it is the sort of event that calls for a group of like-minded people and a concerted effort. It looks like fun...and lots of freebies too!

Authentic German soundscapes

2009-09-02T00:45:00.000-07:00

I've always been a huge fan of Acoustic Alchemy, Hastur Pieterson's shop of sounds. I sent him my compliments after a first visit to his shop, many moons ago, because it was so well laid out and organised with the customer in mind.

I think sound is one of the things which often gets overlooked in SL. Too many builds around the grid are smothered in those freebie sounds and therefore sound the same... it's the equivalent aurally of covering somewhere in Linden trees: they do the job but are a bit samey, there's no variety or texture to them.

Hastur has worked hard to provide variety and to provide them in a form which is usable for even the most novice of builders. Now he's releasing a whole collection of sounds which he has garnered from a trip to Germany. The press release tells me: "Hastur Pierterson and Velma Aldwych recently traveled to Germany to attend the Facets of Virtual Environments conference in Berlin. During the twelve day stay, Hastur took the opportunity to record as much audio as possible in Berlin and the surrounding areas. The resulting ninety-five Atmosphere Orbs are an amazing mix of both urban and natural backgrounds.

“This was a great opportunity to bring more sound recordings into virtual environments from real world locations. Soundscapes are a very critical and often overlooked element when developing a unique and memorable venue in Second Life.”, said Hastur Pierterson. “In the last year we have made over one hundred recordings up and down the California coast, Nevada, and Arizona. Germany is a perfect destination for our latest expansion of field recordings.

“We coordinated with Jan Northoff (aka January Lightfoot in SL) and Tobias Neisecke, the founders of YOUin3D.com and creators of the famous BERLINin3D sims, to identify specific locations around Berlin that were mirrored in the virtual world and then bring those soundscapes into Second Life.

“It did not matter which direction we walked or which building we entered. Every place we went had a wonderfully unique audible background. Train stations, subways, museums, markets, cathedrals, restaurants, city parks, and busy street corners. I had to empty the digital recorders every evening to keep enough free space available for the next day.”

You can see a list of the sounds available here. If you've never thought about the sounds in your builds, why not check out Acoustic Alchemy? They have sea sounds, distant church bell sounds, natural forest sounds... you may be surprised at what a well-chosen sound can add to your building.

Don't forget that in addition to Hastur's wonderful sounds, I told you about Elfod Nemeth's great footsteps gadget, which allows you to add realistic footstep sounds on appropriate materials for your builds - I've now edited this to fix the shop location. Check that out at his shop on the Vernian Sea.

Amazing quality freebies - get them while you can!

2009-09-01T00:37:00.000-07:00

Quite often I pick up a box of freebies and find that the quality of the items leaves a lot to be desired. Actually, I think that if I examine my own freebies from four or five years ago, I'd probably think that too.

However, from time to time someone offers something exceptional and I think this is one of those occasions. Miabella Foxley is offering a "box of everything" free until September 9th. You can't go and buy the items from a shop or on Xstreet: you have to join her group and then download the only notice in the group to get the box.

Here are the full instructions. Log into your SL account, click search at the bottom of the screen, then click the people tab in the search window. Type in Miabella Foxley and search for her profile. On the first page of her profile, you will see a list of her groups, which includes M.Fox Boxed. Double click on that group and the window for the group opens up. Join the group, go to the group notices page, click to download the only notice, and you will have a box in your inventory.

Go somewhere that you can build, drag the box out of your inventory and right click it, choose open, and then click the button at the bottom of the screen once it has loaded, to save the items to your inventory.

Everything you see in the photograph and a lot more is included in the box. It is a great shame that so much of it is no mod, and a large amount of it is no transfer, but the items are of very good quality, and many would be useful to dress a build - stacks of books, books with papers, an electric fan to name but three.

I'm not sure whether this is a question of being unable to pay rent on a store, a publicity stunt, a cry for help or a symptom of frustration, but I think it will certainly draw attention to Ms Foxley's work.

New SL youtube videos

2009-08-26T13:31:00.000-07:00

Second Life have released three new videos, filmed by Ill clan studios, to publicise the Second Life we al know and love: What is Second Life? Shopping in Second Life; Virtual Land in Second Life.

They're pretty good - not too many words, slick editing, not too long, and they convey the message. They'd have come in useful for the slogging around to marketing companies I have done in the past few years.

Oh! and they have a new website too. It's where their website always has been, which makes the tinyurl "sneak peek" message of the day on the login screen very...odd.

Pathfinder sims

2009-08-25T06:12:00.000-07:00

As for buses, so for blogging... you wait weeks for a new SL post from me, and then get a whole bunch on the same day. Actually it's a displacement activity that avoids me doing what I should be doing - I'll be on to that next.

Having visited Golgothica on the advice of Kora (see previous post) I then went to the Pathfinder sims. This is the slurl for one of them. Initially I must admit that I was a little concerned that I had fallen into thehands of one of those shiny cults which dresses up its cultishness in management-training speak. Then I wondered if it was a cover for a Christian group, who would suddenly appear out of the woodwork to save me. As far as I can see it is neither of those things exactly.

The build does bear some resemblance in parts to the Kingdom of Sand, or maybe it is simply that I begin to recognise the style of Baal Zobel, the builder. I didn't have a lot of time to explore, and parts of the sim still seem to be under construction, but it seems to have some interesting ideas within it, and videos of someone called Adrian Gilpin (Adrian Pathfinder in SL) showing people how to, um, live. There's more information on his website here.

Edited to add: I should have visited the "prices and booking" page of the Pathfinder website. £3500 for a weekend, not incuding travel to Marrakesh! See there's the reason SL is great: it doesn't cost you £3500 to visit a sim, and you don't kill the planet - or bankrupt yourself - getting there

Best of SL: Golgothica

2009-08-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

I hadn't realised until this morning that my post on the Kingdom of Sand had drawn a comment from Kora, the owner there, pointing me in the direction of the other builds by Baal Zobel. I am outrageously busy at the moment, but I see exploring in SL as part of that work, as I so often get ideas or learn things from the way that other people do things. So I went this morning to explore Golgothica. You can fnd an SLURL to it here.

The conventions for getting to the build seem roughly the same as for the Kingdom of Sand: you are teleported to an area where you can buy into the role paying game and get clothing that is appropriate, or you can get a guest tag to wear, which will make the teleports work for you. I bought a weapon, which incuded a game controller etc because I was misled into thinking it was essential, and then found I could have worn the guest tag instead... something which contradicts the notecards which are thrown at you when you arrive. Never mind, the income from the weapons helps to keep the sim going, and having seen it, I am glad to support the effort.

Once you are fit to go to the sim, clicking on the crystal ball transports you to the village. It's a no-fly zone, so you have to explore in order to get around. Golgothica is a role playing game with different roles and groups to join. I set my group as traveller and went off to explore. The building, texturing, design is wonderful, and I am sure I simply scratched the surface of what is available there.

I would so love to build something like this with an educational purpose... a sim from the 17th century maybe. Once upon a time I was dismissive of the benefits of role playing and trying ancient crafts for example for oneself, but I have seen enough episodes of Time Team to know that you can learn things by trying out ancient crafts oneself, that it is impossible to learn from any book. It seems to me that there might be things to learn from a role paying historical sim... and things to teach.

My ideal would be a game that is fun and interesting to play, but which provides ones with real information. However, just providing the role playing for fun is good too, especially when the construction is of the high level found here.

Keeping up

2009-08-25T01:20:00.000-07:00

When I first came to SL, it wasn't too difficult to keep up with developments. Back then there were only just over a hundred sims and a thousand avatars. There was only one mall, one club, a handful of shops, and it was possible to know nearly everyone in SL.

Gradually, as people joined and the land mass grew, it was possible to keep up by spending inordinate amounts of time exploring, by reading the SL forum and keeping your eyes open... looking at the clothes and shoes and furniture you liked and finding out where it came from.

Then the tide of new people and places began to make it impossible to know everyone and everything, but to keep abreast of the best. This seemed to be remarkably easy for a long time. Although the number of sims exploded, the number of well built, interesting or beautiful sims did not, and so the same sims turned up on the best of lists, over and over again.

Now... now there are so many people, making so many things, and building so many places, it has become impossible to be an all-knowing repository of what is good in SL. The SL search has improved, but not enough to make it a reliable source of information if you are looking for the best hair/skin/clothing. People have set up systems of all different types, allowing you to rate places and things, but I haven't come across one yet which actually allowed the best things to rise to the top. Usually, whatever system you use, it can be gamed by the unscrupulous or the desperate, to bring the same old same old floating up into the popuar list.

Frankly, the best quality top ten list was when the Lindens used to nominate places - and I'm not just saying that because one of my builds was once on it.

I don't know how the face of SL will change in the light of the new adult area. Whether it will, as hoped-for, restrict the adult content in one area, it's impossible to say. Probably if the traffic for the adult areas appears to be higher, it will attract support. But then people with private islands aren't (currently) being asked to move them to the new continent, and so there will still be adult content outside that area. As green dots attract green dots, and so the more people go to a place, the more people will go to it, it will probably become popular if it is popular... if you see what I mean.

The nice thing about the huge world SL has grown into is the variety of things on offer... the bad thing about it is the difficulty of finding the things and the peope you might like. Anyone who cracks that problem will have instant celebrity. Meanwhile I seem to have built up an enormous number of Myrl Karma, and have NO idea what to do with it....

Tamiflood, or let's be seen to be doing something, even if it's the wrong thing

2009-08-18T22:27:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I had occasion to phone the National Swine Flu helpline. My son, who is on immune suppressant drug therapy, had developed a sore throat and wasn't feeling well, and I was frankly worried about him.

Unfortunately, one of the side effects of the immune suppressant therapy is that he may not spike a high temperature even when he has an infection. The doctor he used to see at Great Ormond Street was a lot more emphatic about this than his current team at UCH: he said it would be a medical emergency should he have a high temperature while on the therapy, the current set, not so much, as far as I can gather from their email.

Anyway, I got through to an adviser on the helpline, and the first question he asked, was did he have a temperature? I rehearsed my argument that this may not be a good indicator for my son, given his immune suppressant therapy, but I got in reply a variation on "the computer says NO" as they were using high temperature as their main sorter symptom: if you have a high temperature you move on to the next level of questions, but according to the system, if you don't have a temperature, you can't have flu.

The end result was that I was advised to phone my GP, the duty doctor at the GP said that the guidelines were clear, he had to be seen by a GP in order to be diagnosed, and so I had to take him along. The GP we saw was bemused as to why I was there, and diagnosed a throat infection.

In the meantime, I looked up Tamiflu and its pros and cons. I found it pretty hard to find any good evidence about it, but by the time I had finished my researches a few things were clear. It looked as though there were some pretty severe side effects for quite a lot of the people who take it; it may only reduce the length of the symptoms by a day; flu is becoming resistant to this therapy; there is little good evidence that it is effective in reducing complications in vulnerable people.

It is hard for me, as a layperson, to know what sort of risks I am taking with my son's health if I refuse a treatment, but one of the most shocking discoveries was that Tamiflu had been implicated in the suicide of around 60 teenagers in Japan - something which had led the Japanese to advise that it should not be prescribed for children aged 10-19 (my son is 19). There was an argument that depression was a part of the normal symptom of flu, and that may be so, but I think the post-flu depression and throwing yourself off the nearest tall building are different by such a magnitude that it is obvious there may be something sinister about the action of the drug. I, however, don't know what the normal suicide rate would be for the large number of people prescribed Tamiflu in Japan. Good evidence of the drug's effectiveness OR its dangers seem to be quite hard to find online.

A couple of days ago, the Guardian reported that the government's own advisers had advised that Tamiflu should not be prescribed for Swine flu. All the indications were that it was a mild illness for the vast majority of people, and their suggestion was that people should be tld to take paracetamol until it went away again.

The government, however, decided that they could not tell this to people, most especially since they were sitting on a monumental pile of Tamiflu in case of epidemic. The trouble is, the pile was really for a variant on bird flu, where the reported death rate was 50% and the illness severe, where any reduction in complications and prophylactic effct for family members might have been worth the risk of side effects.

So, the likelihood is that by flooding the country with Tamiflu they have potentially screwed its effectiveness for a more serious epidemic, and for no demonstrable good effect. Like many other people, I assumed this was a wonder drug which would provide good protection from the serious complications, particularly for vulnerable people like my son... but it seems I was misled in this.

It's hard not to overreact and to overestimate the dangers of swine flu as an individual: the message of the papers in the last few weeks seems to have been "It's a mild illness... BUT YOU MAY DIE!" I know it is probably the case that many hundreds of people die every year from Flu and I simply don't know about it. Do you know anyone who has died of flu? In my case, not until the swine flu hit the country, and a six year old locally got a sore throat one day and was dead two days later. That's scary, and of course makes people worry that they - or their children - are next. It's no good telling them hundreds die every year from flu if they haven't ever heard of anyone dying from it until swine flu hit here.

But the government are paid to take objective decisions for us as a community, and not to panic and throw a drug, which may be rendered useless as a treatment, at us if that's pointless and unnecessary. I feel quite angry that they don't provide us with good information to enable us to participate in decisions about our health, for example, some guidance over how the flu progresses if you are that one in a million - currently - person who may die from it, and what symptoms it is appropriate to panic over.

I've always been quite suspicious about the government's ability to make good public health decisions, and this hasn't really helped.

NHS rules, OK?

2009-08-17T00:33:00.000-07:00

Until I joined SL, I swallowed quite a lot of the propaganda about American Healthcare. OK, so if you were poor or suffered from a chronic illness or had no insurance, it was possible to lose your house and your everything in trying to afford healthcare, but for those who have insurance, it's the best in the world, isn't it?

Contact with real people in the virtual world has disabused me of that notion. While I have the option to sign up with any of the local GPs, my friends in the US can only sign up with the family doctors who are approved by their insurance company. When my GP decides I need to be referred to a consultant at a hospital, I can veto the local hospital and choose one which suits me. They are stuck with the approved list again.

Only rich people access the best of American healthcare... and they have to be very rich not to need to count the cost if they need intensive care or ong stays in hospital.

At the other end of the scale, I have friends in SL whose grandchildren can't even afford the diagnostic tests, let alone the treatment, for hormonal disorders, and another who suspects that their GP refuses to refer them to hospital at all, because they prefer to collect the fee for seeing and treating her themselves.

Any health system has its good and bad points, but one of the most impressive in the NHS is that healthcare is universally available to all, separate from your ability to pay for it. When my son was prescribed a liquid diet for six weeks, I didn't have to worry about how I was going to find the £15-£20 a day that would have cost me if I had been paying for it. I was provided with the liquid.

My family have had good and bad experiences at the hands of the NHS, and I would imagine that this is true for any healthcare system. Medical science isn't a science at all, but an art, and a dark art at that. Many of the people who die every year in both healthcare systems will die as the result of treatment, or reactions to treatment, or inappropriate care. Estimates about the number of "unnecessary" deaths varies, but I wouldn't expect it to be much different, despite the differences in the way the systems are run.

What our system has in favour of it, is that there will be no unnecessary deaths outside the system, because patients were too poor to afford a treatment that could save their life. And that's a big thing, a great thing, and something worth celebrating.

Standby me... for Iran

2009-07-25T05:03:00.000-07:00

Recommended this link to BoingBoing before I realised that I might blog more effectively if I put links and comments on my own blog, rather than into the black hole which is the Boingboing recommend a link page. So here I am.

There is a version of Stand By Me, not meant for sale, intended for downloading in Iran, available on the page linked here. It features Iranian singer Andy Madadian, and Jon Bon Jovi among others. I like this idea a lot. Maybe I'll use it.

Rare books

2009-07-25T02:23:00.000-07:00

One of the frustrations of genealogy on the net, is how often the things I would like to see are obscured from view, even when out of copyright. Libraries with books published in the early 19th or even 18th century, still obscuring their content on Google books, Oxford journal's "notes and queries" from other centuries... things which can't possibly be in copyright, still kept away from ordinary researchers unless they pay access fees.

Some of these things can be found on the Internet Archive... and now there is a new place to look, in the rare book room. Scholars who want to look at various printings of Shakespeare folios, people who have an interest in history and want to see what was published by a scientist in his lifetime... there's all sorts of fascinating material from libraries all over the world.

This is my vision of the future, with free access to art, history, books and literature, freely available to all on the internet. Until we have complete intellectual freedom, how do we know what we could become? How far could I go with my genealogy if everything was free?

Strange Looks

2009-07-17T01:24:00.000-07:00

When we came back from camp on Tuesday, we had all caught the sun. I was lobster-coloured across my neck and chest, Ali had a red nose and cheeks, Kate had a red nose.

Gradually the red faded to brown, as it does. (Along with the memory of foul stenches and blocked loos.) What it usually does not do is to get darker by the day, even thought you have kept out of the sun and moisturised. Every time I saw my son, his skin looked a little darker, until he appeared to be turning Asian. I asked him what was happening, and he simply shrugged and indicated I was going nuts.

Until yesterday evening, when I saw that his hands and palms were considerably browner than the rest of him. The after-sun lotion he bought includes artificial tan. Each time he has slathered it on, he has been adding tan... but as he wasn't aware the after-sun lotion contained tan, he hasn't done this in an even way - and hasn't washed his hands either. I agree with him that the Nivea people ought to make it more obvious that the after-sun he has contains tanning lotion... it looks very little different from mine which does not.

HES Part the Third

2009-07-15T03:13:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday morning, it was again too warm to stay in the tent. I made a cup of coffee, but then needed to go to the loo. I went to use the loo nearest us and found that only one was open because the company who were emptying them had locked two of the three (because people were parked or camped too close to them).

I quickly became aware that there was a large queue forming, and became utterly unable to go. I left that loo and walked to the next group of loos which were close enough to the main blocks that people would be likely to make the journey to the main block. They were dreadful... one was covered in excrement, the next was wet all over and with urine pooled in the gearstick lever.

I decided to make the jouney to the main block, which has always been better than the individual moulded plastic loos. They are like the sort of blocks you get at weddings, three women's loos in a unit, and urinals for men.

It was a spectacularly unpleasant experience. Despite the fact that they had only been cleared the night before, the stench was incredibly awful. This was a combination of the chemical, excrement and the overflowing sanitary bin... I was heaving before I had locked the door, and knew I would throw up if I stayed... I staggered out into the blessed fresh air and made for the disabled plastic cubicle next door.

If anything, this was worse... there was chemical and effluent leaking from the loo which stank, AND someone seemed to have put hand towels down it, but I was too desperate to care.

As soon as I had finished, I sought out Andy to complain. I could see that he was working flat out, flattening cardboard boxes to put around the two water taps, because they were getting muddy. It isn't that I don't understand that he was doing his best at the festival to make things as good as possible for the families... I do understand that. I was cross because you have to get the lavatory facilities right for the rest of it to be worthwhile... if people are having to live with terrible conditions they can't enjoy anything else.

He said that they were working hard to keep things usable, but that there wasn't much he could do if the company didn't come and clean out the loos when they had said that they would. I said I thought they didn't have enough, and they certainly didn't have enough if 2 out of 3 were going to be locked by the company cleanig them... he wasn't aware that they had been doing that, and said he would fix it...

By the end of our conversation several things were clear. Things weren't going to magically improve on the loo front. They were working flat out but were still unable to bring it up to an acceptable standard. And I couldn't make it to the end of the week.

I've done a lot of things I didn't enjoy for my children, and I hadn't been expecting to enjoy the week camping in a field, but I was able to do it because I thought they would have a good time. But my edler son was worried all the time that he would pick up something bad from the loos, I was struggling to cope with the awfulness, and though my daughter was enjoying being able to play football and play on the boat, she too was finding the loo situation challenging.

My husband was on his way to pick up Ali anyway, and so I decided I would go with him. My younger son was happy to stay on his own, and wanted to move from the noisy teen area to the less noisy area we were in.

The person I felt most sorry for was Kate, as she didn't want to go home with me, but didn't want to stay without me either. I felt terrible. I also realised that once you added up the money I had spent on tickets, buying equipment and shopping, we could probably have hired a cottage by the sea for a week.

We packed up the car, leaving Tom to take over the main tent and all the food I had bought. Ai and John will go back on Saturday to collect him and our equipment.

As my sister said, I had thought on Saturday that I lived in a dusty and badly maintained house. I hadn't reaised it was a heavenly sanctuary. Being able to use my own bathroom, have a bath, go to the loo was amazing.

It's changed my perspective on hme educators too, however in a much more negative way. It's a dilemma I have felt before, when considering people who do a school at home version of home education, which I think is the worst of all worlds. If I am going to defend my right to home educate the way that I see fit, then I need to defend the rights of people who do it in ways I don't agree with, maybe?

I don't know. I have been pro-choice for many years, while realising that I could never, would never have been able to do that myself. When I was diagnosed with toxoplasmosis with my first baby, even though they tol me he had a 10% chance of being very severely affected by the infection, I knew at once that I could not, would not, harm my unborn baby. Even if I had known for sure he was in that 10% I would not have been able to abort... and watching a programme about how horrible and inhumane late abortion can be, I felt that it was wrong to allow late abortion unless in the most extreme of circumstances where the mother's ife was at risk, etc.

However, I don't assume that I should be able to tell other people what is right for them: one of the tenets of my beliefs is that we all have our path to follow and that what is right for one may not be right for another... but I do not know whether that is actually an amoral position... or immoral.

The same is true of parenting and home education: if I defend other people who do things I would NEVER do, is that an immoral position to take? People who lettheir children have the freedom to drown themselves at 3am? People who ignore the right of othe people to get some sleep, or not to have their equipment broken?

HESFES Part the Second

2009-07-15T01:40:00.000-07:00

I found quite quickly that I had made a few mistakes in buying food for a camping trip. It's been a while since I did camping, and I had bought far too much perishable food, which we were going to struggle to eat in time.

I made my first visit to the loos nearest our tent, and quickly realised this was going to be challenging. For those who haven't experienced plastic moulded loos, they have a door with a dodgy swivel lock, and once inside, a minimal amount of room to move about. There is a shelf which has a loo moulded into it, with a separate seat and lid, with what looks like a gear stick next to it.

There is a moulded sink too, which initially dispensed water on pushing on a foot pedal, but the water ran out along with the loo paper before a couple of hours had passed, which left one unable to wash one's hands. Fortunately I had bought a quantity of wet wipes and loo paper.

The most noticeable thing about those loos is their smell. There is a sweet smell from the bue chemicals which are used to flush the loo, and the smell of urine and excrement, mixed in. In the heat the odour builds up, but it also becomes very strong if the loo is blocked by people throwing paper towels down the loo.

I was convinced that there weren't enough loos for the number of people. It was hard to calcuate because although it clearly stated that one loo would serve 7 people working a 40 hour week, it was hard to work out how many people it was reasonable to expect it to cover if they were being pumped out every 24 hours. I assumed that maybe 14 people if they were pumped out reliably. I didn't tour the whole campsite and count every loo while I was there, but I would be surprised if there were more than 25 or 30 loos on the whole site. It wasn't enough.

I don't know whether you could argue that it was or wasn't enough on the bare statistics of 1200 people and the number of loos, but the fact is that many people sent their children unsupervised to the loo, and so they began to be blocked up by children throwing paper down them. Going into the loo to discover that not only had it been blocked, but people had continued to use them after being blocked up was pretty unpleasant, to say the least.

On Saturday night, it rained heavily, and the ten began to leak. It's not leaked before, but it seemed that it had been packed away damp last time it was used (we lent it out to someone) and I was pretty cross to find it was full of bit of rubbish etc too. I moved all the beds and stuff to the middle of the tent and put down newspaper and buckets. It rained and rained, although it had stopped by the next morning.

By Sunday morning, I had visited most of the loos in search on one which was usable, finding many which were blocked or so horrible that the stench was impossible to stomach. The day was hot and so the smell began to be overpowering once inside. Other people began leaving the site by car to find loos.

The Cinema tent was closed on Sunday with a notice saying this was due to vandalism, and there were signs of that both in the condition of the loos and the tales of bad things happening around the camp. However, some of it was due to the inadequacy of the facilities. In the ladies, there were tiny sanitary bins which were full to overflowing... it is easy to criticise people for adding material to an already full bin, but in the circumstances it was hard to know what someone could do, apart from ensure that they had plastic bags with them for disposal.

Ali had a shower in the morning, having been awake virtually all night due to noise, and described it as not just cold but refrigerated. Other people had showers later which were superwarm, and we discovered latterly that it seemed to be a choice between relatively normal temperature - but in the dark; superwarm and asphixiating conditions, with a light; or cold with a light. 12 showers for 1200 people did not seem enough, and there were long queues for the ones with a reasonable temperature but no lights.

Tom got up later, and came and told me his tent seemed to have fallen down in the night, and that all his clothing and bedding had got set before he got to bed. It then emerged that two boys from our group had thought it would be a jolly jape to undo the tent poles on Tom's tent, so tha it had collapsed and in the rain, leaked badly. Having been fairly philosophical about what had happened, thinking it was a combination of wind and poor tent design, he was extremely upset to find that it had been Luke and Aidan, and this affected him quite badly. When it was rumoured that they thought this would be a good joke to be repeated every day, he moved his tent away from the group he was camped with, to a secret location.

The day passed very slowly. The trouble with a field-and-a-tap type of camping is that everything takes so much effort... washing up meant boiling kettles of water and balancing the washing up bowl on my knees, rather than being able to take them to a communal sink and do them all in one go.

I tried to go to the conference session on legal issues in the Badman report, but thought I staggered around the field looking for the conference tent, I didn't find it. Latterly I discovered it had been one of the smaller tents, but having wandered around in the blazing hot sunshine, and having visited one of the block loos (no loo paper, two out of three didn't lock, all disgusting), I was in need of a lie-down.

I forgot to mention the state of the field. It was deeply rutted where large vans or lorries had been driven over it, and had serious cracks too, because it seemed to be extremely dry. This meant that walking across to the main tents, which were some distance away, was extremely tiring. In the dark, with bicycles abandoned all over the field, guy ropes and tent pegs ago go, it was extremey hazardous without a torch. That didn't stop some men going off to the loo without a torch, resulting in wet loo paper and wet everywhere during the night.

By Sunday evening, Ali was desperate to sleep, but couldn't get to sleep because people around his tent were so noisy. As I had room in my tent, I went over and helped him to move his bed and bedding, and he moved into our tent. Fortunately it was dry that night, or else he might have had to sleep clutching a bucket. I went and asked the people next door to switch off their generator at 11.30pm do that he could sleep... I think they didn't realise how loud it sounded from our tent, as it was hardly possible to hear on the other side or through their caravan, but it was very loud where we were.

Next morning, the tent was impossibly warm by 8 am, and we all got up. Ali was feeling a lot better after 8 hours sleep, and more positive, but by the time he had tried to go to the loo, was wanting to go home. Me too... I traipsed around the field trying to find a loo which was usable, and felt sick all the time. As Ali is on immune suppressents, and there was still no water in the loo sinks, I was fearful that he would pick something up.

All the workshops were cancelled and an emergency meeting had been setup for 12 midday. I discovered that there had been vandalism again, and that one of the loos had been burned down the previous evening. People were going from tent to tent, telling people about the meeting and asking parents to come.

I'd already heard from the children that there was some conflict between the officials and some parents. Allegedly one child was damaging equipment in a tent and someone had asked him to stop. The parent came across the tent the berated the official for telling the child what to do....

We expected a chance to express our opinions, as in previous years there has been a "people's court" arrangement that gave everyone who wanted one a chance to express themselves. I must admit that I thought they would be talking about the unhygenic condition of the toilets....

Many people gathered in the music tent, and a microphone was set up for Andy, the rganiser to use. He imediately declared that this was not a discussion group, and that he wanted to inform us about a number of events. He praised the location, said it helped to be away from places where people could invade or disrupt the event, and leaving behind the Yobs who might have done this in previous years by being out of the way from commercial campsites.

The things he announced were... that someone had stolen bottles of Jack Daniels from the cafe, and vandalised equipment; someone had set fire to a loo and destroyed it; theydid not plan to call the police or claim on insurance, and didn't have any money left, so please could we all pay a surcharge to cover the cost of the cubicle; and could we keep control of our children as some under-10s had been found jumping unsupervised into the river - at 3am!

Having expected that the inadequacy of the toilets was going to be discussed, and that we would be given the opportunity to contribute our opinions, I was pretty frustrated by the meeting - and outraged that I was being asked to contribute more money to it. They seemed to think it was a one-off piece of vandalism, but there seemed to have been at least three cubicles where the person had tried to start a fire... one was partly damaged, one was destroyed and the last simply had a pile of ash and burned loo paper in it.

Andy asked to be left alone for the rest of the day, as dealing with the falout from the theft and vandalism was stressful, and I respected that, but I came away feeling that I needed to tell him how I felt about the loos. This was a family camp which was worse than the most drug-fuelled festival....

The Ali and Kate had fun on the boat which one of the others had brought along, although I was worried about them being able to cope if they fell in the river. Both of them can swim as novices, but we have swum very rarely. The river was slow moving and they are sensible, so eventually I gave permission for them to go on the boat.

Tom was off doing his own thing, which seemed to be a festival arrangement of getting up late, eating and going to the music marquee, taking until the early hours and then falling asleep. He seemed completely unfazed by the loo thing, athough of course it much easier for men to go pee in the hedgerow.

I was feeling a bit awkward about the group I was camping with by this time. A few families I didn't know at all had joined the group later on Saturday, and had designated their Gazebo as a communal area. The children were gathering there to chat. I was invited in to join them in a general way, but I found it quite hard to do - and so did Ali, interestingly. I was surprised by how territorial I felt... how resentful I felt if a stranger invaded the area I regarded as my space, and how awkward I felt walking through the next door family's space in order to get to the communal area. It felt as though I was invading other people's space, and I didn't like it at all.

I think if I had been invited to come NOW, and chat to people, I might have done it, but I felt awkward, particularly as I didn't know either of the American families, including one of the boys who had taken Tom's tent down. I might have worked mysef up to it by the end of the week. It really surprised me that it was an issue for me.

By the time we got to bed that evening, they were both dropping with tiredness... and we became aware that there was a party going on beside us. They were playing loud music, incuding a live saxophonist with the loudest saxaphone. Once it got past midnight I began to resent the selfishness of it. Once it was past 12.30 I was really boiling, particularly since even ear plugs didn't help - the saxophone and raucous laughter penetrated the ear plugs.

Eventually, I went out past tents with open candles in them, and asked them to be a bit quieter, and said I thought it was a bit boody selfish. As I understood where we were to be designated a quiet area, I felt well within my rights to tell them off. The folloing day I discovered that the quiet area was the far-flung bit of the field, which is not where we were camped... although I still think that playing loud music and shouting and singing at 1 am on a campsite is pretty selfish behaviour.

HESFES Part the First

2009-07-15T00:51:00.000-07:00

I should warn my readers... this set of blogs is not about virtual reality but the real thing... the odiferous noisy place that is first life.

I home educate my children, and have done for ten years. In that time we have joined clubs and groups and camps for home educated children, and I even ran a support group myself for a while. I hve found that each has had its own flavour; people home educate their children for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, and that makes a big difference to how their children are, and how they behave, what attitudes they have.

HESFES used to be the Home Educators' Seaside Festival, because until this year it was situated near to the sea. It's been running for eleven years on a not-for-profit basis, run by Andy and a team of volunteers. We attended some years ago, when the camp was run in Charmouth, at a commercial but run-down campsite. I had a terrible time, which I put down to the difficulty of pleasing all my children at once: my elder son was old enough to be interested in the music events in the evening, but my daughter, who was only about five or six, was too tired by the evening to be interested, and too old to be pushed in a pushchair etc.

There wasn't a lot on camp that interested them, but being near the sea, we were able to go for walks away from the campsite, and we went on a memorable fossil walk with a crazy professor type who route marched us and a random selection of people around the coast from Lyme Regis.

Last year my younger son went on his own, in the care of his girlfriend and girlfriend's mother, to HESFES which had moved to a commercial site in Colchester. There was some trouble there when the festival was invaded by people from outside, and some conflict between the organisers and the campsite owners over commercial food sales from the tented cafe which is usually a feature of the camp.

So... this year, HESFES was to be held away from the coast, in a field which stood alone, but had "plenty of flushing toilets and hot showers". Tom had had such a good time last year, that I asked if the others wanted to go too. They did, and so we saved and planned and bought the necessary equipment (we have tents and basic cooking gear etc) and looked forward to it.

I thought it would be easier this time from my perspective. At 14, 16 and 19 the children are old enough to be able to go to the music in the evening without me if they chose to do so, and they would be big enough and strong enough to help with tasks like getting rid of the rubbish and collecting water.

I had been asked to camp as part of a group, but was wary of this. I find groups of people I don't know very well a bit challenging, and find it hard to relax. My family tend to rub along by shouting and carrying on with each other, which might be a difficult thing - I was worried that this might offend people.

Although it scared me that the field was out of the way, I assumed that plenty of flushing toilets and hot showers meant that the important facilities were available, and I could buy and bring anything else that we needed. I wouldn't have a car, so it was important to predict what would be needed and ensure that I brought it. I was keen to attend the home education conference too, which takes place during the week.

So it was with a holiday air of anticipation that we packed the car on Friday night, remembering to incude battery-powered chargers for phones and a giant water carrier. I was concerned that the weather forecast was predicting rain at lunchtime, because there is nothing so awful as trying to dry yourself out in a wet tent, and so we left at 9 am on Saturday morning. The journey was uneventful, travelling in a convoy with the equipment and tents in my husband's car, and all but one of the children and me travelling in my mother's car.

We followed my husband, who had a SATNAV on board... although on the return journey this proved to be unreliable, leading my husband (and my mother, following) up a small country road to a lovely church at the dead end, and then sulking for a while because they had been forced to turn around and drive back the way they had come. It seemed to suffer a nervous breakdown and declared "take the fourth exit" on a three-exit roundabout, so appeared to have lost the will to direct operations once an instruction was ignored. ( I have to say I think there is commercial merit in a SatNav with emotion - one which shouts, "what on earth do you think you are doing? Get back to that turn off, and do as you're told!" rather than simply sulking and refusing to say anything.)

We found the HESFES turnoff, close to The Hop Farm, which is a local attraction, and drove down an unmade-up pot-holed road, through fields alarmingly full of rusting army tanks (which we discovered were gathering in preparation for a War and Peace exhibition next week) through other fields, through woods. When we had just about decided that this was someone's cruel idea of a joke, we arrived in a huge field, with a tented entrance desk.

We swapped our tickets for too-small wristbands, with an exhortation to wear them in order to gain entrance to any workshop, a programme and sticker for the car. I was directed to what I erroneously thought was the quiet area. I asked after the group which we had been invited to join, but only one family had arrived at that point... and they had no idea where they had gone.

I decided that this was probably just as well, and decided to set up my tent wherever seemed good to me, and we found a spot on the edge of the field, becoming aware with a very sinking feeling that the three blue plastic chemical loos in the middle of the area indicated that the "flushing toilets" that had been promised in the literature were not what I had assumed they were.

Maybe it seems naive for me to have assumed that the "plenty of flushing toilets" were proper toilets, but this part of Kent was for many years the place where East End families spent their summer holidays, picking hops, and living in camps. Many places in the area which are just fields, do have proper brick loos and showers.

We set up camp, noticing the threatening weather, and the boys went off to pitch their own tents in an area far,far away from me, across the field. They decided not to pitch in the teen area, which was placed very close to the main music marquee. Shortly after they left, one of the families who were part of the proposed group drove up, shortly followed by another and another. It seemed that the group had come to us, instead of us going to the group.

John (who wasn't staying) went off to get water, and to check out the main facilities, and came back to report that there were only two taps for 1200 people, and that there were more substantial loos, but that they were still chemical toilets. And 12 showers.

I was beginning to get a bad feeling even as we unloaded the car and I left the others sorting things out while my mother and I went off to get supplies from the nearest supermarket. This was said to be 3 miles away in Paddock Wood, but it seemed further than that. We arrived to find the route to the supermarket closed off due to the summer carnival procession, and so had to turn around and come back... during which manoeuvre we got lost. We found ourselves in a neighbouring village where there was a fete going on.

By the time we made our way back to Paddock Wood, the route was open again, so we went into Waitrose in Paddock Wood and I spent a huge amount of money on things which wouldn't go off without refrigeration, water and a few luxuries to keep us going. I took off my wristband for HESFES as my hand had started to go numb.

We returned, unpacked the car, and I waved off my mother and husband, and set to organising things inside the tent as best I could.

Alternative to Badman review

2009-06-15T07:01:00.001-07:00

Cross posting to all my blogs. I am trying to organise an alternative report to the Badman review. I am co-ordinating that effort through the new ning account for UK free unschoolers.

Best Freebies in SL: animations

2009-06-11T01:00:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I blogged about the best freebies in or for SL. This morning I visited Animazoo, which is an animation company in world, and a maker of motion capture suits in the real world.

Animazoo has a wide variety of dances and moves, which look to be a lot more SL-friendly in general than Sinewave (many of their anims are very fast and look odd in SL, athough some Sinewave anims are great). They have quite a few free, no-transfer, animations, including dances. They're definitely worth checking out.

There's also a weblink to free resources on the net for animations, including a link to the real ife Animazoo page where there are more free animations, in the bvh format which can be uploaded to SL.

The free tool outside SL which can be used to generate animations is avimator or Qavimator, both of which can be downloaded here.

You'll find the animation forum on the SL forums useful while it is still there....

There and back again

2009-06-10T11:15:00.000-07:00

Well... where to start? I was supposed to go to the opening event for the polyclinic I have been working with over the last few months on a training environment in Second Life. It's been planned for ages. When the tube strike in London was announced yesterday I thought that would be the end of my plan to attend the event, but when I spoke to one of the people I have been working with this morning, he asked if there wasn't any way of getting in to the event. I knew it was going to be difficult, but I thought it was possible, and so decided that instead of assuming it wasn't possible to do it, I'd try to see if I could get there.

I actually had an appointment tomorrow too, and so it seemed like a good test to see if the travel conditions were possible or not. I arrived at West Ruisip station around 12.08 and was surprised to find there was a fifty minute wait for a train. Stupidly I had assumed they might put on more trains, but I hadn't checked the timetable (obviously). I used the time well though: I watched Seth Godin and Ray Kurzweil on Ted Talks. Very instructive and thought-provoking they were too.

There were a few people there who had traveled from Uxbridge to get the mainline to London - most without any idea how they would make their onward journey. I began to worry that the train, when it arrived, would be like the Tokyo underground, with more and more people arriving at the station. It was crowded but there were seats.

I had thought about taking the bus from Marylebone, but the buses were all full and I could see the main road was nose-to-tail traffic, so I decided to get a cab. When I saw how gridlocked London roads were it didn't seem like quite such a good idea, but at least the cab was able to take shortcuts to try to avoid the worst of the traffic, something which buses (if you could get on them) couldn't do. I grabbed fellow passenger who was trying to get a bus to Islington to share the cab.

I got to the Health Centre, and was in time to be introduced to Alan Bennett, who was doing the official opening. I explained that I was making a virtual training environment and Roy MacGregor, who is one of the doctors working on the project indicated the video I had spent the weekend putting together in SL.

I didn't want to seem like an effusive fan and so didn't mention that I am familiar with his work and love it. It was only afterwards that I realised that really, unless you have time to get to know a celebrity, probably that is the only thing that one can say that would be interesting to someone in the public eye, but the moment had passed.

He told me that the camera crew who were setting up were following him around for a profile they are doing on him, but unfortunately they weren't filming at the moment I was talking to him, and he moved on to other people before they were. There were various journalists and photographers in the crowd, one of whom was from the PCT as this story and photograph was on the website by the time I got home.

I took a variety of poor pictures on my phone. Unfortunately, though I was in a good position for the speeches, the group moved to the cake table for the cutting of the cake ceremony which meant I was some way away through a crowd. If you want to see good pictures of the building, which has already won awards and is up for more, you can see them here.

Both Roy and Alan Benett made a speech on the opening of the Kentish Town Heath Centre, which I thought was the first purpose-built polyclinic in the country... but maybe not, as I didn't hear them actually say this in the speeches. It was clear that the project to make a community-based polyclinic in Kentish Town was one which had been achieved mostly by the inspiration and energy of Roy... it really does take someone exceptional to move this sort of project into reality.

Roy Macgregor thanked all the people who had played a part in the project to build, and had to swallow hard and give himself a slap on the face when his voice cracked a couple of times on thanking his family for their part in supporting him, and of the people it was al for - the patients. He then handed over to Alan Bennett who made a wonderful speech paying tribute to Roy, as the instigator, and main motivator of the project, and to the National Health Service. He mentioned in his speech that the US health industry were using examples from the NHS as evidence that public health does not work, but this health centre is a wonderful example of how well it can work when it works well.

And it is. I have been working with doctors from the practice over the past few months and I have been amazed by how dynamic and caring the group of doctors are, and what a high standard of service and care they offer to their patients. Now that they are housed in the new purpose-built centre, they are providing a community resource which, as Alan Bennett noted, is a community in itself.

I met an interesting man during the ceremony and the cake and fruit juice reception which took place after the speeches, who told me that he was a psychotherapist originally from New York, working with patients with HIV/AIDs. I learned from him that more people tested positive for HIV in the UK last year than in all the previous years put together, and the alarming news that roughly half the people who are positive, don't know they are infected.

It struck me that there has been very little publicity about HIV/AIDs recently. The therapist's view was that all the money in HIV/AIDs had gone to fund the combined drugs therapy for people with the infection, and very little into education or publicity. His view was that the scary tombstone adverts of the 1980s ought to have be continued (as similar ones were in America). I don't know about this. In the past, the pattern of infection in the UK was quite different from the US. I think that probably because they had blood stock infected with HIV, the spread in the US seemed to cover the whole of the population more or less from the start.

In the UK, notwithstanding the dire warnings and general advertising that went on at the beginning, the infection remained in the gay community and intravenous drugs users, along with immigrants from African nations, for some time. It looks as though that profile has gradually changed, however, and we haven't been made aware of it.

We were given canvas bags from Camden PCT, with a number of free gifts within. A bizarre collection which included a stress ball (to help with giving up smoking) and a pen, a bowel cancer screening kit and pen (!), and a sheaf of leaflets. I dunno about these. I'm not sure what the role of Camden-PCT-promoting canvas bags is. People can't generally be sold a PCT : they are stuck with whichever one is local to them.

Having had contact with Camden PCT in various ways over the last year, not least my son's surgery at UCH over New Year, and the Kentish Town Health Centre, I do not need persuading that they are getting some things so right that they ought to be a model for other PCTs to follow. But a canvas bag freebie is neither here nor there in that judgement. I don't know why they think it is a worthwhile investment for them.

I left at about 3.15 pm, and had a long and tedious journey which I shall gloss over for your sake. It involved a walk, a bus, a walk from Kings Cross to Warren Street, a realisation that with all buses full and blisters on my feet I wasn't going to get to Paddington without a taxi, a taxi, a mainline train, another bus and another walk. A journey which would normally last about an hour and ten minutes on a good day took over three hours. In all I spent about six hours travelling and £40 on taxis, buses and cabs. It was worth it to shake hands with Alan Bennett, and to be part of the celebration of the new centre.

Gone Viral

2009-06-06T17:57:00.000-07:00

It's not often that you see things happening before your eyes... a few weeks ago Susan Boyle's first performance on Britain's got talent seemed to go viral within hours... I knew something was up when I was passed the same URL about five or six times in Second Life (TM) in the space of a couple of hours. That 'ardly ever 'appens.

Today, after I'd worked my socks off to get something done and found that due to a technical fault, it was only half done... I wasn't feeling very good. Mainly because the technical fault was mine... instead of recording film in SL, carefuly set up, rehearsed and then filmed, I found that I had been filming when I thought I wasn't and not filming when I thought I was. Erk!

So I moseyed on over to BoingBoing and found the wonderful Lisztomania mash-up by Avoidantconsumer. You can see that this film, a mash-up of Brat Pack video footage and the track from Phoenix, is just genius. It mixes a catchy song with all the toe-tapping bits, and even seems to fix a wrong by letting the boy-next-door best friend get the girl. You don't have to waste too much time looking at the official video to realise that this is miles, miles, miles better.

It incorporates footage from bratpack films, including Mannequin... one of the worst films in the world. In fact I think this mash-up is about the most artistic thing that has ever been associated with that one.

As one of the commenters said on the youtube video comment thread, it makes you want to dance... and makes you feel 15 again. It did me. It had more than 165 thousand views when I watched it, and is accruing more as we speak I have no doubt. People will be blogging and emailing and sending the link, because it is THAT good. Athough there was an indication that the use of the band's song was an infringement, they have put it up on their myspace, and seem OK with it. I should think so... it's going to make their name known all over the world.

To make it even more wonderful, there is a response video from a group of Brooklyn oh God... what do I call them not to sound like Methusalah? Youngsters sounds like I'm granny...young people...argh everything sounds either patronising or annoyingly outdated... group of Brooklyn amateurs have made an original video based on the Bratpack mash-up from Avoidantconsumer. It's great. The dancers may not have the panache of the professionals, but they make up for that with charm. Again, the number of views is rising rapidly... and when you look at the number of views the other videos on the channel have previously attained, you can see that some internet magic is at work. Or it could be that the music is just really memorable, catchy and dancable. One of the girls in this video is particularly memorable.

I have no idea how many views there will be by tomorrow or next week... but they've gone viral, for sure, and they're taking the band's music with them.

The Kingdom of Sand

2009-06-02T03:45:00.000-07:00

In my alt avatar I am working on a set of good links to builds around Second Life. It's a tremendously difficult thing to do, because I don't want to link people to things which would be inappropriate, dens of iniquity or outrageous commerce.

It's hard to know where to draw the line, because many of the best builds in SL do have a commercial connection, whether it is malls and shops incorporated as part of the build, or a company connection.

In the case of the Kindgom of Sand, which is a role-playing game, the sexual side of the game may offend people even while they are admiring the build itself. I am indebted to the blog "my so-called Second Life" for the slurl to this build in Purgatorio.

The build is quite simply brilliant... really well textured and made. It is a fantasy Arabian city carved out of the desert, with turrets and minarets, docks, bedouin camps and dunes. The terraforming and texturing of the sand has been done extremely well, so well that it puts many sims to shame.

They have used a set of textures over and over again within the build, but with such imaginative use of the variety of shapes and architecture that it never feels samey at all. I didn't gather much about the game except that it seems to be a master/slave fantasy roleplaying game in which the men are the masters and the women the slaves... although there was a male in a slave cage when I visited, so perhaps it is more varied than that.

Slaves seem to spend a lot of time running away, and masters capture them. For a group of consenting adults I think it looks a lot of fun, but experience in SL has led me to wonder whether the macho men are actually driven by 15 year olds in fact... I think I would only play this sort of game with someone I knew, and even then....

Exploring the sim with an explorer tag on makes one immune to capture and enslavement, and so I walked about taking photographs and observing the sim acivities. It was very popular - so popular that when I returned with a friend to show her the build, I could barely walk... we were pacing on the spot in many places.

I admire the way that texturing has been used, and the attention to detail in the way that textures have been used... there is an accomplishment in composition and construction which is very rarely seen in SL, where the builder has worked within the constraints to make something that really works well. This is an object lesson in building a place that is interesting to explore, well textured, both realistic and a fantasy in one build. It is a great shame that the inclusion of the game may put people off visiting it, because it is one of the wonders of SL, and I am glad to have seen it.

Microsoft's Project Natal

2009-06-01T23:14:00.000-07:00

Watched the video on the BBC website of the reveal on Project Natal, which enables players to interact with a character on screen in a very natural way. The film shows a woman interacting with a boy character "Milo" on screen. In the course of the short film, she picks up some goggles, dabbles in the stream and passes a sketch of a fish over to Milo.

It's an impressive glimpse into the future possibiities, although it made me wonder just how interesting interacting with a robot boy, dabbling the hands in virtual water and sketching fish actually is, compared with talking to a real person, dabbling in real water etc - and I speak as someone passionately devoted to virtual worlds. One of the best things about Second Life is the fact that the people you meet are real people with real lives and real emotions - but more than that - real experience and a real history. For a virtual character to be at all interesting they need some backstory and something to entice you to be interested in them. If the boy had been from the 15th century, or the 30th or from a lost tribe or far-off planet... it would have been just as exciting, but more interesting.

I also worry a great deal about the future of our children, interacting with characters who appear to be normal chidren but are not. I believe that human beings are designed to model themselves on the people they interact with. Our psychology is going to take some time to catch up with a world in which some of the people we interact with are not real people, but robots. In fact it may never do so... it is said that the reason we find it so easy to immerse in virtual worlds is a good evolutionary tactic: for hundreds of thousands of years it has been essential to assume that anything we see happening to us IS real. If you take two minutes to decide whether that spear winging its way to your head is real or not... you're dead. So your brain assumes it is real and reacts accordingly.

This is the reason I felt the same vertigo crossing a virtual chasm as I would crossing a real one... and why it will be easier and easier as the technology develops to regard the Natal's Milo as a real boy. It seems to me probable though, that this boy will adhere to a certain set of rules about ethics and morality, which real boys tend not to do.

The most exciting uses must be educational for these things, and yet that always seems to take a back seat to entertainment. I think that play is an important thing for children and adults, and that we should encourage people to be playing as much as possible... what I would love would be the chance to make games and play which are truly educational and inspirational... real education and not the ersatz one which schools dole out in ever-smaller chunks to an enforced audience.

We need to be careful though. My experience with home educated children and my own has proved to me that the most important thing is the interaction between a loving adult and the children, and how responsive that person is to the child. If television has become the default nanny for a lot of children, then an interactive boy may be an improvement on that. However, neither the television, nor the astonishing Milo, should ever be a replacement for a loving and engaged adult, I think. It is too obvious to me that this could easily be the case, and very quickly, if we are not alert to the seductive power of immersion. Maybe the introduction of other real-life attribute might solve the problem: sulking, telling tales, getting grumpy? Otherwise Milo may quickly become the preferred friend of all children, everywhere.

OK, I give in

2009-05-25T04:49:00.000-07:00

I've resisted Xstreet, formerly SL exchange, for a long time. For those who aren't familiar with it, Xstreet, SL Exchange, SL Boutique and OnRez were or are online marketplaces to buy and sell SL items.

Once upon a time I didn't like the fact that it had connections to Anshe and I disliked her approach to business, particularly when she threatened to sell Craig Altman's full perm animations for $10 each.

I made an account at SL Boutique, latterly OnRez, but I was very bad at maintaining it. For those who haven't tried to list things on one of these it is almost as painful as invoking the DMCA procedure for removing scammed items: you have to drag an item to a magic box, and then collect a lot of data for the item... how many prims, location in world, permissions, price, name, pictures.

Once you have all the information and have dragged the item to the box, you have to set up each item separately, on the website. It isn't difficult to follow the instructions, but it is hellishy boring. I have decided I can cope with four items a day.

It made me realise just how much stuff I have in my inventory which I wouldn't want to sell any more. In the course of finding a photograph for one of the items I came across a folder of really old builds I had made... and I realised that I have a large proportion of these still in my inventory. I have kept some really terrible stuff I made in my first year, for sentimental reasons, and a huge amount of old clothing which I no longer sell. As I have the pictures, I am beginning to think I should let the actual objects go... but as in real life, where I have thousands of books and art materials and genealogy stuff cluttering up the place, I find it soo hard to let go of them. Supposing I am one day blessed with half a dozen sims, mightn't I want to get out these things and celebrate my progress?

It would almost be a museum to progress in the virtual world. Ah well. If I had six sims to build, I would almost certainly build new stuff, a virtual fantasy world, and not drag crude old items out of my inventory. Maybe I should simply learn to delete.

The Susas at S and S Gallery

2009-05-17T15:07:00.000-07:00

My friend Rose Borchovski is opening a new exhibition of her work the Last Susa at the S&S gallery of fine art. The official opening is Thursday, May 21, at 1-2pm SLT, I am told.

I should decare an interest at this point. Rose asked me to come up with some minimalist music for the exhibition she was preparing. Now, I don't usually do minimalist, but I thought about it and played around a bit, and the end result can be heard in the room with the striking pictures.

If you would like to hear my music - including one version of the Angelic music of the Susas, it can be found on my MySpace page.

Do visit the exhibition though - it's meant to work as a whole piece, and I think it does :-).

Edited May 18 to add details of official opening.

The best eyes in SL

2009-05-10T12:31:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's because they are the windows of the soul in first life, but I have never been quite satisfied with the eyes I have in Second Life.

More than any other buyable attribute, they can go so wrong... be too small, be too shiny, be too hard, or be too blank in the middle. I have dozens and dozens of eyes in my inventory, but none of them really satisfied me.

Then this morning I stumbled upon Wild Lilies in Second Life, billed as the biggest eye shop - and I think that's probably right. I haven't seen another which comes even close to this.

I found the perfect eyes for me here - the soul series is big enough, with the right amount of shininess, the right size of pupil, the right depth of reflection. I'm very pleased. All my other eyes are going in the trash bin!

Material Footsteps

2009-05-06T16:39:00.000-07:00

I heard this evening from my friend Elfod Nemeth that his latest product is in the shop on the pier in the Vernian Sea. I saw the product being demonstrated the other day and I was really impressed. It allows builders to set the materials of their builds to create footstep sounds that are appropriate to the material.

You can see - or hear - it demonstrated on Elfod's build in the Vernian Sea. It works for more than one avatar at a time, and adds a lot of realism... much better and more realistic than the footstep effects that you can get in shoes.

Music

2009-05-03T01:34:00.000-07:00

I've been writing music almost as long as I remember. Unfortunately, I haven't had access to any form of recording equipment for a long time. Last year I found Finale Notepad which was a free program (they're charging for it this year) and was able to start writing music notation straight to a page and hear it played through the synthesizer immediately. Unfortunately that program didn't have any way of exporting the music, except as notation sheets.

A few weeks ago I decided to buy an upgrade to the software in the form of Finale songwriter, which has more of less the same facilities as Finale notepad, with the addition that the music can be exported as music. I've since been using any spare time I have to start translating the music I have on the old program into the new one. As it doesn't seem to be possible to cut and paste or import, this is quite a long-winded business of writing over every note... and the problem is that I get bored with that, or can hear a way to make the music better, and therefore I seem to be writing new things all the time instead of systematically taking over the music from the old program to the new, which is what I intended to do.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of announcing that I have music on myspace now. Along with quite a lot of pictures of my avatar, who is half my age and much easier on the eye than I am, lol.

Things I write transmute anyway... I wrote a piece I called Eelco one day, which turned into a folk song about being abandoned by an avatar - I did record vocals for it, but I have such basic facilities (audacity and a keyboard and no talent for the technical side of it) that I deleted them this morning having tried for some hours to record them well enough yesterday. I wanted them to be up, not because I have any illusions about my abilities as a performed, but because I wanted them to show what was intended... I am a composer rather than a performer... I'd love a performer to want to sing my song. Well if I am totally honest I would like someone to record me and make it sound good - but that's a bit of a tall order.

Anyway, hope you like the music... it would be great if someone would leave a message on the myspace page, it's a bit disconcerting that there have been a couple of hundred people through in the last couple of days and none of them has left a message- especially since it seems likely that they are mostly known to me through facebook or SL or RL. Ah well, my son pointed out that I hardly ever leave messages on facebook or youtube unless I know the person concerned or I am really touched by whatever it is... and even then sometimes not.