Telling: Like it Is

Tymmerie Thorne (Girl Wonder Speaks) and Jerremy Darwin hosted a Hallowe'en party for their friends and the SL Bloggers group.   I took too many photographs to post here, so I opened a new album in Picasa to display them.

Thorne-Darwin Halloween Party

I wasn't astute enough to note everyone's name. Please, if you're in any of those photos and I didn't say so, leave a comment there!

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[11-21-09] Edited to redirect link to an album at secondlifebloggers.ning.com
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Yesterday (10/27), while reading through the other blogs I follow, I came to Pixels and Policy and a post entitled "Players May Soon Use One Avatar for Multiple Worlds"... and found that the length of the comments I felt urged to write exceeded Typepad's capacity to upload them. Long story short: I've now followed in Dusan Writer's footsteps (see "You should read:", below).

You can find the results here.

Not precisely as-submitted: PixPol saw fit to rearrange my paragraph breaks, and add a couple of sub-heads to fit their usual style... but otherwise, word-for-word.

"And here's another clue for you all"*: Check your sources. While I was turning my comments into a proper essay, and re-reading the links that PixPol had originally provided, I found all but one of them to be anywhere from 18 months to 2 years old, and one of those touted an application which has yet to be released. It strikes me that a person trying to find the signal of a new trend out of the noise would, at least, examine publication dates and sniff the air for the hint of vaporware.

The important thing, however, is Pixel and Policy's openness to feature publication of contrary opinion. For that, they are to be roundly congratulated.

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* "Glass Onion", The Beatles

Dale Innis's Weblog: "Imprudent Emerald Meerkats", wherein he cuts through the BS flying thick and fast about Linden Lab's most recent trial balloon on policy change -- specifically, 3rd-party viewers.

Dusan Writer on "Pixels, Policy, and the Barbarians at the Gate" -- not at his own blog, but at Pixels and Policy. An excellent essay on the general topic of governance in the Metaverse, and on becoming "Kremlinologists" in Second Life.

Synchronicity? Maybe... or, maybe some issues become "strange attractors" in the chaos of our thoughts about what it means to inhabit virtuality.

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... then you should come back and read this blog ;)

Hi, friends! Have I got a deal for you!

I built this little car -- the LaLo -- 6 years ago, and it caught on, mostly through word-of-mouth recommendation. The LaLo had features none of our competitors had! You could decorate it any way you wanted -- even start up a business of your own to sell customizations to other LaLo owners! You could use the Internet to listen to any kind of music you wanted. It could tell you how to find your friends so you could visit them, and how to find stores, art galleries, museums and parks, and other places to just play. It wasn't the only car like it on the market, but there were fewer around then, so we here at Telling Motors did pretty well. Why, we even let you have one for free!

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In the last few weeks, certain channels of comment about Second Life (and, one infers, channels within SL) have been flooded by the issue of content theft.  This thread at SLUniverse, where I first ran across the topic, has grown to at least 47 pages in two weeks!  (I'll get back to that in a minute...)  Meanwhile, anyone who pays attention has at least heard of the suit against Linden Labs filed by Nomine and Eros LLC (a.k.a. Munchflower Zaius and Stroker Serpentine).  The latest piece of news, only two days old as I write this, is the Lab's clever exploit to identify and bust (i.e., permaban) 50 people using something called "NeilLife", a poorly-hacked copy of someone else's 3rd-party viewer, to illegally copy content.

As I combed through that 47-page thread at SLU, I found two things of particular importance.  One of them was the alleged source of the third-party viewer that was the cause for alarm which began that thread.  As the discussion developed, a lot of attention was paid to a griefer group that calls themselves "Patriotic Nigras" (PN).  We furries are very familiar with that particular bunch -- they've got a real hate on for us, for reasons I can't quite fathom, but if you've ever wondered why "Yiff in Hell, furfags!" shows up so often from those particle-spewing replicator cubes, they're to blame (or maybe their copycat wannabes).

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October 3, 2009 was the sixth birthday of Luskwood, the oldest surviving furry gathering place in Second Life.  (If there were others established before it, which have disappeared since, I've never heard them mentioned... but considering that the 6th birthday of SL itself was just four months ago, there can't have been many competitors for the title.)

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