Telling: Like it Is

It had to happen eventually... and it finally did. On January 26, some anonymous person in Souderton, PA (a Bucks County suburb of Philadelphia, as it happens) became Visitor 10,000 to this blog. The hit was generated by a link from Google Images to the overview shot of Perry posted last July, shortly before the 5000th visit.


That dashed line indicates that I forgot to check Sitemeter and missed recording Visits 8000 and 9000 (the graph was generated in LibreOffice and edited in Gimp -- long live Open Source!) Easy to see, I'm averaging 1000 visits a month over the last 7, which projects to 15,000 in June.  Not quite as easy to see: this blog isn't gaining a lot of new readers, but it does have a loyal core following.  Thank you!

In other news...

Spring arrived in the region of Harbour on January 16, and it couldn't have been too soon.  Of the five of us who call the sim home, three have had more than enough snow in their RL view already.  We need a virtual break from it, if we can't get a real one!


The snow lasted a little longer in Falconvale, InWorldz... but a little gentle persuading on my part finally worked.


And, speaking of eventualities... The sales floors in the sky above Falconvale now number four:


Each of them, you may recall, is a single prim 150 meters square (22,500 sq m).  That brings the total to 90,000 sq m, which is 37% more area than the sim it floats above. Someone asked what our prim count was, with all that going on up there... it's around 13,300, still less than a standard island in Second Life, and still less than 1/3 of the allotment in InWorldz.

On the physical/organic side, the new job is great -- above and beyond the mere fact that I have a job at all (it does, however, reduce the amount of time I can spend in Avatarian mode; more so, blogging about it). One reason I'm tired of winter already, even after having missed it for five years in Texas, is that I want to get out and explore my new surroundings, and right now it's a bit chilly here for that.

One other "loose end": soror Nishi blogged early this morning about the upcoming Firestorm viewer from Phoenix (as did Daniel Voyager, yesterday). I watched the "vidtut" (links in both of those blogs), and was suitably impressed.  At last, someone's doing what I and many many others said should have been done since Two Point "Oh Shit", almost a full year ago: make things optional! So, while the folks at Imprudence/Kokua are still spinning their wheels working on polishing their final version of the 1.x, I'm going to be joining the inevitable hundreds (thousands?) who will take Firestorm Preview for a spin once it's released, some time Monday.

See ya on the Grids :)

.

The Oldest Prim on the Grid is a larger-than-real-size US 5-cent piece (a.k.a "nickel"), created almost 9 years ago (11 Feb 2002) by James Linden as a proof-of concept for the application of photographic images -- "textures" -- to prims. It, or a copy of it indistinguishable from the original, is preserved in a museum on the region called I-World Island.




I-World Island, in turn, is the sole surviving "product" of the I-World Team, founded by Kate Linden not long after her arrival at the Lab at the end of September, 2007. Surviving written records of the group and their island are very few... almost all of them are Office Hour minutes of the Documentation Team (of which Kate was also a member). The earliest which mentions "I-World" in any context is from February 22, 2008. The first to mention the creation of this island is from April 4, 2008. By consensus, "About Land" gives February 15, 2008 as the claim date. With the exception of two parcels, it is now "owned" by Maurice Linden of Support; the remaining pieces are the southeast square, called the Kiosk Area and owned by Elle Linden (one of the I-World Team members), and the central performance space is group-owned by "Blue Snow", founded by Teeple Linden for organizing events there.

To the best of my knowledge (ably assisted by Marianne McCann), the I-World Team was established to focus on the "international" -- that is, non-Anglophone -- user experience. In the stark absence of almost any historical information, I can only guess about the Team's short life and eventual demise. One of the first clues was: all of the instructional signs and exhibits are exclusively in English. The only concession to speakers of any other language can be found in kiosks like this one:


Note that only four languages are represented: French, German, Japanese, and Korean. Speakers of Spanish, Italian, Portuguese (including SL's large Brazilian contingent), Greek, Turkish, anything with Slavic roots -- indeed, any language at all other than the Big Five -- were (and, I suppose, still are) left to their own devices.

On the other hand, it is equally probable that I-World fizzled because the pre-existing linguistic communities were already strong enough to care for their own among new arrivals to SL... which is to say, I-World was a solution to a problem that didn't exist.

Besides the nickel, the museum houses a sparse and motley collection of items from Second Life's past. This, for instance, is only the fourth known screenshot of "Linden World" (SL's alpha phase) to be found in-world (though there are others on the Web):


It's also the only one to show Oldjohn Linden's statue "The Man" in its original setting. Here's an exhibit of sorts more-or-less from SL Beta:


From right to left: a dispenser for the uniform of the Gold team in Jetball, which was once played in Rizal; a copy of Blue Linden's bear; sundry memorabilia from the Tax Revolt of August 2003 (see my blog entry for Blue -- the region, not the Linden); and a copy of Philip Linden's bear... which, unsurprisingly, was farmed out to someone else (Nicole Linden) to create.


In another nearby alcove are these items (from left to right this time): a copy of Mia Linden's bear; an easel that's supposed to have a painting animation (but scripts are disabled); a Mentor staff; and a special commemorative bear:


The irony is as thick as Mainland lag... And it doesn't stop with drawing attention to last year's disbanding of the Mentors occurring almost simultaneously with "Volunteer Appreciation Day". Not a single member of the I-World Team (Kate, Matthew, Elle, Rika, Chiyo, and Sejong are the names I could find) is still employed by the Lab -- in fact, of all the Lindens mentioned in this post, the only ones who still show up in in-world Search are Teeple and Philip. The sim remains -- for now -- as do two more adjacent to it: the snow-covered ones in the photo above, I-World Festival 1 and 2. 1 has on it the left-overs from something called "WinterFaire" held in 2008; 2 is bare, except for multiple copies of the same leafless tree. Both of them are "Access Denied".


I have heard that there's been some talk in the SLogosphere lately about abandoned land, and what should be done. There's no arguing with Tyche Shepherd's Grid Survey reporting that the percentage of abandoned mainland has been rising... but "mainland" -- that is, regions which are parts of continents -- cannot be summarily taken off the grid the way islands can, for nonpayment of tier. An abandoned parcel is not an abandoned sim, and if everyone else on the sim is paying tier, the Lindens are stuck.

Nevertheless... if cost reduction is a target for the Lab, they should look to their own vast collection of redundant islands. I count 44 Welcome Islands (4 of them public), 9 Discovery Islands (which were allegedly discontinued), and 8 "Viewer2 Tips" Islands, all in the same area of ocean as the I-World group, and 12 Voice Islands off to the north-northeast. In the map inset up at the top of this entry, you can easily see two "Isle of View"s (Isles of View?) which are only used for two weeks in February, and some other garish thing that looks like wrapped presents and is called "TinselForm Me". It's attached to a double row of 13 that appear to be a "showroom" of pre-formed islands belonging to Estate Services. There are others... and we're getting close to 100 Linden islands whose purpose for remaining there is dubious. How many servers is that, and at what monthly cost?

Still -- I-World Island should not be summarily poofed without first rescuing the artifacts in the museum there... and I have a quick and relatively easy suggestion for the Lab, regarding those: Take them to the Governor's Mansion, and commission someone to arrange the hodgepodge into a real museum, with explanatory placards to give the curious a real sense of history.

Can any other virtual world say that it's almost 9 years old, to say nothing of being the benchmark by which others are measured? Maybe it's time to be proud of that. M apparently ordered T to publicly deny that Second Life has a culture -- "plausible deniability" while they were ruining it, I guess -- but no amount of denial can stand in the face of the evidence. It needs first to be acknowledged, then presented in a meaningful and comprehensive way, and then celebrated.

---

There's a new photo album online of photos from I-World Island... I'll be adding captions and notes over the next day or so.


.

Remember this?

It's the full map of Second Life as it was on November 23, 2010, which I posted at the end of the first part of "Seconderth". There have been some changes since -- such as, the addition of yet another continent full of Linden Homes, about half the size of the squarish landforms you see there, south and east of the original continents (and which all, curiously, have the same name: Nascera).

Back when I began "Seconderth" and covered the region of Da Boom, I inadvertently fell into the perpetuation of a myth, while trying to debunk another. That is, while noting that all of the Original 16 sims came online together, and that Da Boom was therefore not the "first", I took for granted the appellation of Da Boom's southwest corner as "the Zero Point".

Much more recently, I began looking into an idea to find, photograph, and blog about the "ends of the world": the farthest you can go in each direction. I happened to recall that Tyche Shepherd's excellent Second Life Grid Survey includes the map coordinates of each region found, and thought it would be a relatively simple matter to verify my reading of the World Map by checking coordinates... thinking that everything south and west of Da Boom would have negative numbers.

I was wrong, and here's why:


Da Boom is not the (0,0) point!  It may still be considered the Anchor of the Grid at (1000,1000), but there are no negative coordinates on Second Life's map.

As you can see, there was once a sim at (0,0), serendipitously named so that it immediately follows Da Boom on Tyche's list... but it no longer exists. (The X in the last column indicates a deletion from the grid).  It was the farthest southwest possible to be on the map -- and if you recall that each sim is 256 meters square, the lost region of Da Motor City was 362 virtual kilometers (256 * SQRT 2) from Da Boom.  That's about 217 miles for all of us non-metric types; 3 to 4 hours drive on an average Interstate.

Which brings me to the other reason for this post: Dale Innes has written a full-perm script which he's offering through his blog, which you should read. Put it into a wearable prim, and it will tell you which continent you're on, or which ocean the island is located in, wherever you rez. Dale calls it "Another blow struck for Geographical Awareness!"

(quoting my own comment there):

And might I say, another blow struck against the perception that sims are like websites, SLurls are nothing more than URLs, and there is no distance traversed from sim to sim when teleporting. That all happens to be true, in a literal sense, but perception is what matters in immersive virtuality…

I.e., it just feels more like a World when you relate to the map of it.

.

It's been more than two months since I first floated a trial balloon about a literary webzine to collect and publish stories with what I call an Avatarian slant -- which is to say, they include elements to be found only in virtual worlds. This idea pounced me from out of nowhere, after I read Cubey Terra's "The Oldbie", and Pathfinder Lester's response to it, "Jetpack". It received much encouragement at the time... but little participation, since.

To this date (and not counting Path's kind permission to reprint "Jetpack"), I have four submissions in hand... hardly adequate upon which to build a premier issue of a 'zine, assuming all four are suitable for publication. I will be contacting each of the authors privately about their work, in that regard. I also hope to receive more... but, as you may agree, four in 10 weeks is not an inspiration for optimism.

Having re-evaluated the project in light of the above, I conclude that my original prospectus was far too ambitious. There will not (at least for the time being) be a separate 'zine - instead, there will be the equivalent of guest columns in this blog under an "Avatarian" header. The other option is to abandon the project entirely, which I am not yet willing to do.

In the prospectus (first link above), I went to some length to try to explain the type of story I was looking for, and some of the type I was not. As it turns out, I omitted one from the latter category: fan fiction.

There are those who use the term fanfic solely as a pejorative for "amateurish"; I am not one. Fan fiction is simply stories written using characters and/or settings "borrowed" from another creator. I first came across it nearly 40 years ago, when the source material was the original Star Trek series, and I have no doubt that there is fanfic about every popular TV series, book, film, etc. to have come along since. (There may be a corollary to the famous Rule 34 in this, as well...)

While much of it is written by neophytes, and therefore of painfully lesser quality, not all of it is. If you also include the type of writing known as a pastiche -- copying a well-known writer's style, either in deliberate homage, or subconsciously, owing to strong influence -- there are a number of works which might also be called "fanfic" in the broadest sense. For instance, the body of stories about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson not written by Conan Doyle, or -- gods help us -- the recent book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

(I have on my own shelves a book titled War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, a collection of stories by contemporary authors written in the style of well-known people who were alive at the time of H.G. Wells' fictional Martian invasion, reporting related events from their own locations and perspectives. Some of them are excellent; some... not so much.)

I understand fan fiction's legitimate place in the spectrum of written entertainments. That place, however, is not here. While it may be all well and good to tell a story (canonical or otherwise) involving people and places (imagined or real) that "everybody knows", it is not the sort of thing that lasts. Fan fiction relies upon its readers having foreknowledge of the characters, settings and backstory, with the result of complete opacity to anyone not "in on it". It leans on the popularity of someone else's imagination, not the quality of one's own effort... and because of that, it has a limited shelf-life, as well as limited appeal.

Literature, on the other hand, seeks to draw its readers in, including -- or perhaps especially -- those who may never have been exposed to the subject, the setting, or the kind of people to whom the story happens. It requires a great deal more work on the author's part: "world building", the science-fiction writers call it, as well as establishing characters the readers will care about, and whose existence on the page is not dependent upon their existence elsewhere.

Now comes the most difficult, and potentially most rewarding, part of being an editor: talking to the authors about their submissions.

.