Telling: Like it Is

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Let's begin with the most important:

Kate!

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A Meeting of Minds



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How the Leopard Changed his Spots
As I've said before, the main reason I began blogging was to join the ongoing exchange of public contemplation of virtual identity and its degree of relation to biological identity. One facet of that could be phrased, "How and why do you look the way you do as an avatar?" A recent thread in the SL Universe forum brought that question up in terms of gender, but it got me to thinking again about species, and you can read my derailing comments beginning here.

In his reply, Argent Stonecutter invoked the concept of "species dysphoria", which is derived by analogy from gender dysphoria. Those who claim the condition (a.k.a therianthropes) feel they are "an animal trapped in a human body" (notwithstanding that humans are animals), and said condition is claimed by a tiny fraction of the furry community. Let's be clear on that: Most of us furries are no more than cosplayers, with no psychological difficulty attending to our biological human form. I certainly do not believe I have "species dysphoria", and I feel Argent was joking about it, too. Nevertheless, I have strongly resisted creating a human avatar... but the curiosity, and the challenge to create one that resembled my biological self, have done nothing but increase in my two years in SL. So, on Boxing Day, I finally went and did it.

Behold: Lalo Sapiens


No, I haven't "given up the fur". But now I have another shape to shift into.

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OK, Dusan, I get it.

People who "buy" stuff -- or obtain it as a freebie -- from "content creators" don't actually own it. What we obtain instead is a license to use what amounts to a few lines of code that tells Linden Lab's servers and/or our (and everyone else's) viewers to accurately render that item in the manner, and to the purpose, for which it was created. I also get that in-world Copy permission does not grant permission to copy out-of-world (onto one's hard drive) and rez it into another world. (I never didn't get that.)

The simple fact is: no one but Linden Lab owns anything in Second Life.

3.3 Linden Lab retains ownership of the account and related data, regardless of intellectual property rights you may have in content you create or otherwise own.

You agree that even though you may retain certain copyright or other intellectual property rights with respect to Content you create while using the Service, you do not own the account you use to access the Service, nor do you own any data Linden Lab stores on Linden Lab servers (including without limitation any data representing or embodying any or all of your Content). Your intellectual property rights do not confer any rights of access to the Service or any rights to data stored by or on behalf of Linden Lab.
-- Second Life Terms of Service, emphasis added

So, let's talk about "entitlement", shall we?

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Maybe you've heard the story about the miracle of the lamp oil? Here's an excellent summary of the whole deal, but - just to re-cap: As was common in ancient times, certain rulers got so full of themselves that they insisted their subjects worship them as gods. One such was Antiochus IV "Epiphanes", who ruled one of the fragments of the Hellenistic empire founded by Alexander, and which happened to include Judea. In short, he caused the Temple in Jerusalem to be defiled with unclean deeds and things, including a statue of himself as Zeus, and forbade the practice of Judaism. An uprising followed, by traditionalist Jews collectively called Maccabees. Antiochus was busy elsewhere, fighting the Parthians, and the general he sent to put down the rebellion lost. The Temple was cleansed and restored, and proper worship could resume according to the commandments in Torah.

One of those commandments has to do with the menorah. You'll find it in the descriptions of the Tabernacle (Exodus 25:31-40), which was the portable temple carried by Moses' people before they crossed the Jordan, to house the Ark. Although, according to that Wikipedia article, the fate of the original menorah is unknown, possibly the Maccabees had a new one made as part of the Temple restoration. That's the "lamp" for which consecrated oil was needed.

Did you know that the Books of Maccabees which appear in the Roman and Orthodox Christian versions of the "Old Testament" are not part of the Jewish Bible? Back when I was studying to become a Jew, my rabbi explained why: the descendants of the Maccabees, whose dynasty was eventually called Hasmonean, did not preserve the tradition and became as Hellenistic as their former enemies.

The 8-day miracle? That's what we call midrash -- an allegory. Another fancy word for it is apochryphal. It's most likely derived from the Megillat Antiochus, which is at least 400 years younger than the events it alleges to recount, and may have been written as much as 300 years later than that! One suspects that the ritual of lighting candles, and the Hanukkah menorah itself, comes from that bit of apocrypha, too.

So why is the holiday 8 days long? "Because Sukkot is," said my rabbi. The Maccabean decree was for a feast of thanksgiving, and the pre-Hebraic harvest festival which became codified as Sukkot was the obvious example to follow. And why is it in what we now call December? First of all, one does not restore a holy place to its ritual cleanliness merely by scrubbing it. These things take time, especially if you've commissioned, among other things, a new menorah of (literally) Biblical proportions. Much more importantly, however -- the Hebrew date of 25 Kislev was chosen deliberately to coincide with the Winter Solstice.

There are deep psychological reasons why every civilization of every age has a festival during the darkest part of the year, no matter how they justify it terms of religion, "pagan" or otherwise. It goes back tens of thousands of years, maybe even before anyone thought of gods... but the smart ones, even then, watched the sky and counted days and figured out when the sun would start rising earlier and setting later again. Placing our Festival of Lights at the same time gave us an officially-sanctioned Jewish reason to celebrate the same thing in our own way, without being seduced into idolatry.

Hanukkah is not "the Jewish Christmas". It is older than that event by at least 164 years. And it has nothing to do with a day's worth of oil lasting for eight. It commemorates, as do Passover and Purim, a victory over religious tyranny... and it sheds needed Light into the Darkness.

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It's that time...

Two years, yesterday.

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In the Comments to my last entry, Grace McDunnough suggested I take another look at Henrik Bennetsen/Lys Ware's seminal work which founded the "Immersionist/Augmentationist" paradigm -- specifically, his discussion of Archetypes. Bennetsen's thesis is clear from his introduction:

During the course of my conversations I got an insight into how residents live their second lives. Standing on the relatively generic SL platform residents gets up to an amazing amount of interesting things. I started to think about categories to put these activities in and after a while four emerged. Residents like to:

1. Create interesting new things
2. Think about what SL is and where it is going next
3. Socializing with other residents
4. Do business to earn L$

Based on these four categories of activities I identified four resident archetypes:

* Creators
* Philosophers
* Socializers
* Businesspeople

He proceeds to describe the activities and attitudes of each type, and to observe how each might get along with the other three. It is a long and detailed analysis -- as well as revealing about the state of Second Life 3 years ago -- and I recommend it.

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