Second Thoughts

The Lady in the Back Seat

I was just reading the January 28, 1935 issue of Time magazine. I got the hard copy off ebay because one of my hobbies is to collect everything about Kathleen Norris, the 20th century author who published in the 1920s-1940s (not the modern author by the same name).

And what's significant about the advertising then from 1935, which is of a familiar type to those who browse vintage sites, is that they illustrate something about how people grappled with technology.

There isn't much written about how people over the ages have adapted to technology -- except yes, of course there is, by all sorts of overnight specialists writing quickie Mcbooks. But there isn't really good, enlightening, well-researched stuff, it seems to me. There aren't studies of say, the Scobles of yesteryear and how they tried and wrote about technology and how ordinary people dealt with it. What you do find now is a lot of urban legend sort of hack stuff, of the sort Clay Shirkey puts out (like his fantastic notion that during the Industrial Revolution, gin carts were brought around and people kept perpetually drunk, and this is how they "coped"). Tekkies who write about this topic usually tend to exaggerate how technology has shaped and changed people, and exaggerate their adaptation to it -- and exult their own role, of course.

We would tend to think of something like the automobile as well-established and already affecting people's lives and already transforming society by 1935. Of course, I think you could say that it wasn't until during and after World War II and the national parks system and interstate highways were built in the U.S. that you could talk about a car culture. In the earlier days, cars were like horses, kept in barns and with staff assigned to them, mechanics who had to work them full time, constantly fixing them and driving them.

What we tend to not realize, because there really isn't any place where you'd find it, is how unfinished something like "the car" is when it was "already established". If you read the novels of Kathleen Norris, you realize that in the 1930s and 1940s, people going in cars were like people going on plane trips. They always arrived tired, dirty, jaded, and cold. They'd have to be wrapped up in blankets for the journey, I guess because it was drafty and perhaps there wasn't internal heating.

This ad for a car lets you know just how uncomfortable cars were, by the way the ad is touting a brand new invention by General Motors that fixed what apparently was a common problem -- neck whiplash just from riding in the back seat, i.e. not from an accident:

PainPoint

PainPoint is a new program available from, um, I think Microsoft or some start-up that maybe MSFT is about to buy, I didn't quite get the specifics. Like PowerPoint, it's fairly easy to use, but dumbs down thought.

PainPoint is a fabulous new interactive software tool that enables you to manage your customers with alacrity and simulated concern and leads to optimalization of suppression techniques for massive customer conflict.

Here's how PainPoint works -- it's proprietary but has lots of customizable modules.

1. To get started, conceive of a drastic and painful measure that will boost your bottom line, and have the austere brilliance and will to execute it flawlessly, without divergence. If you have trouble coming up with ideas like this, we have another software package, Machiavelli, which enables you to prototype and map various YouRule scenarios that will help you devise the right decision.

2. Announce the harsh decision on a Friday night before the weekend when you have only a skeleton staff, or the night before you yourself leave on holiday.

3. Close comments on your corporate blog, and siphon comments off to a forums, which is heavily moderated.

4. Let people howl and scream and carry on about your harsh decision. Have some minions periodically arrive and say soothingly they are listening, or they sympathize, but they are waiting for instructions. Let the forums go for 1500 -- 2500 -- even 3500 entries is not too many for a PainPoint thread -- promise you will "read every one" and sound as if you mean it.

5. Allow existing or newly-created inworld groups to vent, complain, hate, screech, spread disinformation -- but strategically select one or two very visible community members who symbolize the issue and knock them down hard if they use the "F" word or step out of line. Then appear to have succumbed under community pressure to be lenient on that community leader's punishment -- or to blame a subordinate for the penalizing and apologize.

6. Hold an impromptu fireside chat, and strike a pose of weary contemplation and burden with the world's problems, soliciting "help" in "solving our mutual problem" from your angry customers, whom you now treat as bosom friends at your hospital bedside.

7. Externalize, globalize, universalize the problem. The problem isn't, say, evil leaders with bad policies on food or health care who cause little children to starve, the problem is "global hunger" or "poor nutrition" which is like the weather, and has no address or agent. Externalized forces of Nature like "lag" or "networks" or "the Internet bottlenecks" can be invoked as an agentless phenomenon, much like a hurricane, that we must "all work together as a community" to solve.

8. Divide the community. Figure out which responses are the most radical, which are the most moderate, and which are your most conservative loyal sycophants thinking your PainPoint decision is "right," and then play them all off against each other. You can maintain 24/7 capacity with PainPoint, which can quickly pull key words and repetitive phrases for you, tag community members, red-flag rabble-rousers and portray to you in real time a dynamic "picture" of "where this is all going". Plant firmly in everyone's minds the idea that "some people" have overused the resources and broken the rules and "sadly" we will "all have to pay".

9. Remain starkly silent when some community journalists attempt to play "gotcha" and "hypocrite" and try to accuse you of the very thing that you are accusing the community members of doing. Remain silent for a good long time. Let them blog, rant, rave, post Flickr photos. On about day 3, come forward and say, "But those were never openspace sims, those were full-prim sims, it's merely that our Moles prototyped them and built them on OS sims and moved them."

10. Use PainPoint's sentence-generating feature, which enables you to move the slider on "Vague" and "Unspecific" and "Future Points in Time" to come up with "solutions" that can spread along a continuum of "Maybe, If You're Good" to "Not On Your Life, Even Until the Heat-Death of the Sun". Make it appear that you are making a reluctant and even sorrowful "promise" that in fact states nothing whatsoever.

11. Continue to seed through long posts, chats, groups, blogs actual phrases that say exactly what you will do, which remains unchanging and unswerving from your PainPoint No. 1 state, but swathe them in yards of cotton batting that makes it appear as if you *might* change your mind.

12. Issue another blog or two that makes it appear that you have "backed down" after "considering the painpoints of the community" -- but change nothing.

13. You've now got a set of data that shows the community's key painpoints -- numbers, tags, vectors, profiles. You'll see a rich set of cues that will show you a) who will break b) when they will break c) why they will break d) what they will break over. At this point, you may want to adjust *one little thing* unrelated to your original harsh decision. This might be something like "we will provide you with new ways to monitor your OS performance so you do not overload the sim," but without changing a thing about the new pricing structure.

Lindens in the Content Business: Magellan's Latest Adventures

Tipped off from some FIC on the forums who follow the Magellan legend closely (and always seem to get early wind of this peripatetic Linden's latest travels), I headed out to the still-new Nautilus continent to see the Lindens' new builds.

With no full sims going on the auction for months, the Dept. of Public Work Lindens and their mole friends have lots of spare sims to play on. I was expecting from the forums post to find one or two sims with some builds, which they'd use to anchor a continent and give it a story, or perhaps make an infohub out of it (there is an infohum sim called Hyannisport that has lain fallow for months, apparently also slated for use someday).

To my surprise, I found something like 20 sims with an enormous ruins build -- the Citadel, the Temple, and miles of wall and fallen rock. As described, there is a giant bore, that has something to do with Magellan, with bottles of beer and slices of pizza strewn around. Apparently there is lots more, but I couldn't find it all, with my draw distance forcibly dumbed down to 64 due to incompatibility with Windlight.

The Lindens are definitely in the content business. I have no idea what they are going to do with this giant build spanning many sims. Make it an attraction in Showcase for newbies to visit? Hold events? Rent out the many tented Middle-Eastern looking buildings as stores like the Galleria or Busy Ben's?

Railroaded

This is a story I can only tell one side of, because as is often the case in our closed society of Second Life run by a single executive authority, the other side is in a black box. That is, from the transcripts below, apparently Michael Linden is going to ask his boss about the right essentially to keep resident content from being destroyed (would that boss be Cyn Linden or Jack Linden, I'm not even sure who really is "in charge" of something like the Department of Public Works, but I think it must be Jack).

Perhaps some of you recall the meeting we had a few months ago at the Society for Virtual Architecture discussing the railroads of SL. The old Linden line on the atoll continent stopped working due to physics issues or something. Various residents continue to run their own rail stock on that line, or make their own railroads. Crucial to this operation is an invisible guide rail, that makes it possible to use the rail line not just as a rut, but as something with an actual feel of a railroad -- where it rocks back and forth, hugs corners, announces stops, etc. I have a great Hellbound Train made by Jer, one of the rail enthusiasts, which I occasionally drive around Tuliptree or Obscure, setting forests on fire when I crash. It even has a gun turret which I haven't figured out how to operate yet.

Naturally, getting the railroad working again now that physics are said to be improved with Havoc 4 would be a really fun thing in SL, where the track is laid in the atoll continent across several dozen sims. Nigel Linden is no more; he used to take are of this.

So it turns out that the DPW "moles" want to strip out this guide rail, that would prevent resident-made trains from operating, and put in something else, or just retool the old Linden line. Of course, fear of "crashes" is a bit silly in a virtual world; if there were crashes, what of it? No harm done. The train re-rezzes. Residents could also find out the schedule and plan accordingly. It doesn't seem as if this guide rail causes lag or prim overload anywhere -- but that's how it is told to me.

What's frustrating about a thing like this is that all the efforts of all the hundreds of railroad enthusiasts is now in danger of being destroyed, even though this is supposed to be "Your World/Your Imagination". The residents burgeoned with their own contests, displays, clubs, machines, etc. while the LLRR lay fallow, and now it's as if they are being punished for it. I really LOATHE the idea that these moles are getting to decide what content should go in everywhere, in views that we have to look at, and can't participate in the decision-making about. Hence the publication of these memos, which were sent out to about 300 people already.

The issue here isn't just one guy trying to save his vehicles, from what I can tell, or a class of vehicles. It's saving *what is here now* against the "Bright Future" the Lindens are sketching out that they *might* put in tomorrow, which is more complex. And that's what rankles.

Off to See the Wizard

A group called MOO that I know nothing about has made a sim after the Wizard of Oz theme. It's called "The Magic of Oz". I don't think it's the usual corporate thing because they offered people to rent stores on the build. I got a tip from Jessica Ornitz to go check it out, and discovered it was in a quick preview, and was about to shut down.

So I flew around taking pictures with my crappy non-Windlight viewer, hence -- not the best.

They did the whole thing in sculpties -- which I don't usually like. Maybe it's because sculpties look like giant balls when I arrive on the sim and fly about and take awhile to rez into stuff. But these sculpties more or less work.

There isn't any real big nod to Hollywood or to Frank L. Baum's original book's illustrations. So it's Oz by way of Straylight and Elves and Hobbits. The Munchkin part is very elfy -- and it works. Sculpties enable you to make lots of warm, organic shapes which are perfect for this build.

Moth Temple Infohub

I haven't had as much time to blog in recent weeks, not only because of the start of the school year and extra work, but because during those times I'm on SL or am thinking of SL, I've been working at the new build by Jessica Ornitz at the Moth Temple in Iris.

This project has taken two years to come about, in the way that things in SL can take forever because basically, nobody pays us to be here lol. Back in 2006, suddenly the land around the Moth Temple in Iris, one of my favourite places in SL with a brilliant Asian temple built by Xenon Linden, went up on the auction. This was about the time the Lindens were starting to auction off all that unused telehub land I guess. Of course, originally, they had talked about having NO telehubs at all in the New Continent (as Hetero-whatsis was called then, the atoll continent with sims names for types of moths). But then it turned out there was absolutely nothing technically difficult about putting up a telehub whatsoever. It was literally a matter of putting out an object, and hooking it up as the teleporting position, as we all do on private islands ourselves. The object didn't even have to be visible.

When it was seen how hard it was to sell land and have any commerce on a continent without telehubs (the Lindens were delayed apparently in their p2p and map pinpointing implementation and weren't quite ready), they were forced at first to put one in at Iris and one in Hyles -- and later more. They were hoping to prevent urban sprawl or mall lag (which is one of those fictions of SL) so they sequestered about 10,000 m2 around the temple. The first buys on that sim went to malls anyway, but one was a very tasteful and nice mall exactly in the same atoll textures, but it went belly up as malls often do. Suddenly, the Lindens put that 10,000 m2 up on auction, and in 3 separate pieces (thanks!) making it a chore to claim. Clubside Granville, who has pumped a great deal of time and money into SL, stepped up to the place and bid on the auction, having to bid against another guy who owned some land on the sim and said *he* wanted to make a preserve, and bid so that it wouldn't become "a mall" even though we told him it wouldn't -- annoying. Miraculously, Clubside was able to secure all three pieces and we dubbed it "Moth Temple Preseve" -- but there it sat for two years.

Well, first I tried to find a volunteer builder, as I really didn't have any funds. I was hoping to get Rez Menoptra, who had done this amazing build over in Waved (sadly, now gone, even though it was sold to a store owner who did keep it for awhile). His style was perhaps "too modern" for the ancient primitive temple build, but I thought it might be an interesting contrast, and he would know what to do with the space. At first he said he might consider it, as he loved the atoll sims, but then it was 2007, the year of numerous big corporation contracts and Rez was hugely in demand by the Electric Sheep and others where he put up even more amazing builds, most of which are now lost in the electronic sands of time...

For some unknown reason, the Lindens pulled all the lanterns and all the moths that used to come out every night at like 7:48 at dusk to cling to the light. I have no idea why. I asked about it; no one knew. Eric Linden, their maker, was gone from Lindenhood -- and didn't have that account anymore that had once owned them. Rez came up with one pole and lantern that he had somehow gotten from a Linden -- but it wasn't copyable, and the moths didn't come out...Sad...

I put up an old Spanish galleon and some orientation stuff and some markers for the Land Preserve and had to call it a day. I didn't have the money or time to go further. Clubside provided the tier on the land as well -- a very kind soul. I then hoped to get Jessica Ornitz to work on the build in 2008, but she kept getting busy on corporate and educational builds -- she's very much in demand, too. I wanted to do something like the Memory Bazaar in Ross, built on the Memory Palace concept.

Clubside did some more nudging, and finally I said, let's do it, we decided to split a modest fee for Jessica between us and get the show on the road. So please come and tip generously, and donate tier to the SL Public Land Preserve, or just join the group for $50 one-time fee and help support this effort, as it is now being born on just a few shoulders, and specifically Jessica's generosity of time and talent to keep going the extra mile. Oh, and you can rent ad space on the flags there for $200 a week!

Meet Me in Second Life?

Crap, looking like Death Warmed Over, Velouria, and Intlibber, rendering as a gray as if he had logged in from a public terminal. Yes, I have the special advanced top secret SL 3.0 browser (a copy was secretly sent to me by an inside source) that renders all Extropians as grey so you can stop the spread of their influence.

My topic was kind of jumbled tonight, as I both wanted to discuss whether SL is really ready for -- or beneficial to -- business meetings, after getting some PR hype from a company promising to enhance this, and also reading about humdog, who died in RL, and thinking about her seminal piece Pandora's Vox, and how I came to see some truth to it, although I think my arguments against her Marxist/victimologist framework in "Boad Ho" remain valid.

But the topics while disparate do come down to whether you can use SL technologically, and spiritually or psychologically, to form relationships, whether for business or romance. There's a lot to hobble you, and yet a lot to offer as well -- and I think everybody's ideas and expressions here give you a window to the good and bad.

I have no idea why Intlibber had to parachute in to pontificate about the wonders of the Singularity and Extropianism, but I guess these born-agains take their tent revival to any sim that hasn't banned them -- and of course he will be immediately expelled as a supporter of the Woodburies and b/tards griefing me and my tenants. What an ass.

SL seems to me now like a kernel that does contain the popcorn but it's a question of whether the skillet has the right few drops of oil to start and then whether it keeps from getting the batch burnt.

No, It's Not Really About the User Interface

I took an instant and visceral dislike to the entries in Dusan Writer's contest to design a new user interface. Well, hey, what's a picnic without ants. It's not just that most of the people are people I just dislike as avatars in SL because I've had to counter them on forums (for example, the Nacon problem is much like the Wagner problem, even a work of genius from that slug will be forever tainted by his horrid, vicious little "dearie" persona on the Herald -- ugh!).

Truly, too much is at stake to let this sort of public discussion be yet another arty cliquey FIC thing where the Lindens are overthrown by a small grouplet lobbying for certain geek affectations. I want people to retain, and they can only retain if they don't encounter modern sleek geeky stuff -- seriously.

I truly would like to be at this party and be appreciating people's hard work and all that -- but I don't. It's art school. It's more of the same problem. It's designers and geeks being designery and geeky in their imagination that they are making Art for the People. The one possible exception is Roy Cassini, who at least had a cleaner, sharper interface along with a concept for tutorials which was incremental -- but I've been in games that tried that method, and even the OI tries that method with it's "quest" -- and no, you can't make people bat through screens.

For example, one of their ideas is that you should get rid of the task bar on the bottom, and put sidebars just like they claim the "mass" use of big-screen computers. Uh, wait a sec here. There aren't these masses with big screens -- even the new computers in the below-$1000 range just aren't that big, although they are flat screen LCDs now and not clunky terminals. But they have that envelope problem that occurs when viewing some movies. I find it hilarious that the same gang that would have a heart attack if you put back frames on websites, that being on-so-1990s and passe, would come up with a viewer that essentially puts frames back by running buttons and bars along the side and dragging your eye to the side. Uh, no thanks.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a task bar on the bottom. It's what we like to call the "normal way" to do things -- on a PC. Yes, we don't have Macs. No, we don't want something fanning out like Safari, ballooning up your last-used application at you like a surprise attack instead of becoming available through a normal cursor move. Most people have task bars on the bottom. It's fine. Of course, perhaps some things could be taken out of it ("build" would be my vote of a thing to bag completely and hide in some other experts' accessible menu for when people are ready for it).

I've always thought there are really only two tasks to fix the viewer, neither of which anyone wants to do (the Sheep in part did one of them). The first it to take the SEARCH button, down at the bottom, and move it up to the top. I'd even change it back to the word FIND to get away from Googlianisms -- it in fact used to be FIND. In a world, you want to find, not search. I'd make it bright and blue and in the center, but not a bigger balloon cartoon. One gets the feeling that some of these designs are like people shouting English at a foreigner in the belief they need it louder to understand. Nacon has a particularly bad idea taking up half the real estate of the viewer with long lists of friends AND below that long lists of groups. They're perfectly fine tabbed one under the other. It's not like you need to constantly access 25 groups and 100 friends such that you need to have a console spread out like you're an air traffic controller. And if you DO really have to access those people, taking up half the view you have to fly in isn't the solution.

What is the Birthday Announcement?!

By Guest Author, Dr. Meridian Maginot, Clairvoyant

Some months ago, when speculation abounded around Philip's stepping down from the CEO position and a possible IPO or something from Linden Lab, I went to the various oracles and other devices which -- as I conceive of it -- don't so much see into the future, as pay very, very close attention to the present. (A lot of what passes for "the future" is merely the present unfolding or manifesting).

The fortunes told weren't so helpful -- see what you think:

The Oracle of The Past whispers: The sun near signifies happiness and popularity. Near snakes, mice and dark side of clouds presages vexation.
The Oracle of The Present whispers: Roses indicate beauty and rugged health.
The Oracle of The Future whispers: Wine is the symbol of cheerfulness and gaiety.

No snakes nearby that I could see -- so far so good, but what did it mean?

It's Time to Regulate Bots

Please come and vote for my JIRA proposal MISC-1213 for a new feature: Label Bots, Enable Land Menu to Ban Them, and Allow for Use Only by Premium Accounts.

I would have thought there would be such a proposal already on the JIRA -- I couldn't find it.

It's time to regulate bots. The Lindens never met a script they didn't like but they must learn to balance the happiness of sandboxers (those wishing to use Second Life for experimentation with the software itself, including themselves) with settlers (those wishing to live or work in Second Life for other purposes). None other than Pathfinder Linden recently spoke on a radio show of how wonderful the artificial intelligence experiments are on Second Life, and how such bots should be allowed to roam free across the grid.

No. Not on my lawn, please. Please don't tell me about "the Internet" as we all now about robot.txt. And we also know that increasingly, social media sites like Facebook are *NOT* open to endless scrutiny and scraping by widgeteers' and other Googlian bots. Second Life does not *have* to become an endless playground for the few to monitor and scrape the many; it can strike a balance. Bots should not be banned; but they surely can be regulated.