Good Lord! Kaneva!

Social media can be creepy. It's my birthday tomorrow in real life, and already, the social media machine is going into overdrive. Services that I completely forgot I ever registered for are now sending me birthday greetings which they "just now" because I've put my birthdate somewhere -- and maybe not even on their service.

In some places, it's already tomorrow, so I'm already getting birthday greetings from Eurasia because people on Live Journal or Facebook or whatever get automatically reminded, and then they feel like they "just have to" say happy birthday. I do the same. How can you not?

Then there's those coupons -- the Dunkin' Donuts people at least give me a real free coffee, but all the Coldstone icecream people do is hawk a cake for me to buy -- and I am not going to shlep all the way over there to do that.

When I got a greetings from Kaneva, I thought somebody's old server was just refusing to die. Didn't Kaneva shut down like 4 years ago, in 2007, after the peak of the virtual worlds?

Kaneva always seemed to me to be sort of "like" Second Life, because you got a room, you could buy stuff, and you could even sort of make stuff. It seemed promising, but also filled with a lot of teenagers and those kind of methed out uneducated working class people of the great United States that don't make for very compelling companionship.

There's some kind of "rave" system where you just keep plussing everybody, and they are unabashed about it, unlike the fastidious Linden Lab, that gets all bent out of shape if somebody "games" the ratings system. Well, why not? It's a game, those rating systems, so why not game them!

But no. Kaneva in fact revamped and reissued and now claims to have "60,000 apps" or something. It seems like it is a cross between a world and an app -- which is of course what you have to be these days.

It's a browser-based world, and that has its pluses and minuses. It runs easily, but it also means you have to load each place you're going to. That means landing, being frozen and unable to move out of the way, and people piling on your head -- just like Second Life, which isn't in your browser. See, that's the dirty little secret of browsers.

You also have to go outside of the world in order to read messages offline.

But other than those annoyances, you zip around because it gives you XPs to win easily to take you through the tutorials and the text for what you're to do is dropped down right in front of you, you'd have to be on drugs not to notice it -- and I guess, some are.

There are tons of RL pictures and stuff -- if you like that sort of thing. I don't. I went to a girl's house opening called "The Doll House" that consisted of a dinette set and walls plastered with pictures of herself. That was dull.

So I went to an ice beach, which was sort of an ice place with penguins but also palm trees. Cool.

For some reason, I have grey hair and look like a newb -- and I have the word NEWBIE written across my head, which is too bad as I was in the beta but I guess I wasn't saved.

I immediately fell for a griefing trick as some dude in ghetto blaster duds had a sign on him that said "If you don't like me, press ALT F4". And you know, I just *had to do that*. And what happens when you do that -- well, you immediately log off as if you have crashed. Rickrolled!

Walking is accomplished by arrow keys -- but not the num pad arrows, the other ones, which takes a bit of getting used to. I was trying to find MAP OF THE WORLD which is promised was down below, but it wasn't. That is, I carefully looked at each icon below, and it wasn't that. I tried to find where I could go to change out of my newb stuff, the usual errand of the newly-born. But it was going to require more doing so I gave up.

Meanwhile, it already gave me an apartment with a kind of Manhattan skyline pasted in, it had a build mode to move stuff out of inventory, some of which I won already from doing XP stuff, and it said I could host an event at my pad and invite my friends. What's not to like!

I could also make a community, so perhaps I will go back and do that. I'm glad to see a virtual world that has survived and returned and tried to invent itself anew.

 

Comments

[cube republic]

Another gemini ;) explains everything¬! Happy Birthday Prokofy

[mama bear]

kaneva is never be better. don't do number one anymore.kaneva change around alot and ruin their computer. update on fire. bloody hell