New World Notes

THE GATES COME TO SECOND LIFE

Image by Aestival

The thing that people seem to love most about The Gates in Central Park is, it brings people together. Stockbrokers and artists, working class families and socialites in Prada, everyday people of New York all come together and share the same experience, as brought to them by the mad vision of Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude.

After Aestival Cohen and her friend Lex Neva launched their own Gates project in Second Life, the everyday people of Second Life showed up too: a samurai warrior, a little girl with Margaret Keane eyes, a space commando and his dropship, an industrial designer with two adjustable chairs in his pocket, a transformer robot, a half-naked man with massive pecs, a furry in a flying vintage automobile, and so on.

And this is more or less what inspired Aestival to bring her tribute to Christo's Gates here.   

"It's not about a message or an idea," she tells me. "It's a thing that we all share in doing that then makes an experience. An experience that's bright, beautiful, loud, garish, occasionally buggy, awesomely big, and a real group achievement... We want to set them up everywhere!" She enthuses. "Christo covered Central Park-- we'd like to extend his achievement to cover an entire WORLD!"

For now, though, the Gates are most pervasive on the private island of Briarcliff Manor. For now, as it turns out, but not for long.

MOE, FEW, AND THEIR CONTINENTAL JAZZ COMBO

Coming to you live from two states and two countries, a night of smooth jazz in Clyde (bandwidth permitting)-- originally published here.

Though her name suggests otherwise, Jazz Gillespie wasn't actually a fan of jazz or the chimpmunk-cheeked trumpet master, before she came to Second Life. A resident from the American South (her in-world home is a replica of a traditional plantation estate), Ms. Gillespie's tastes in music actually ran more to classical, oldies, and country. (She originally chose "Jazz", she tells me, because that happens to be her real life granddaughter's nickname.)

"I never really listened to it," she acknowledges, "but was invited to one of Astrin's concerts." She did, and prompty fell in love with the form. "Now I... play jazz on my land at times," she says laughing, "and have started collecting it in real life."

GLOSSING IT OVER: A NEW WORLD NOTES JARGON WIKI

An alphabetical guide to Second Life-specific terms* frequently used in New World Notes (originally published here)...

Attachment – Avatar enhancements connected to part or all of the body, including clothes, tools, custom-made hair, etc. (Added 6/11/06)

Wearing the box head of shame

Box head – Common new user mishap, in which a noob's attempt to wear an attachment (see above) contained inside a box inadvertently causes them to attach the entire box to their head. Often used as a symbol for Second Life's difficult user interface.  (Added 6/11/06)

FIC – For “Feted Inner Core”, title coined by Resident iconoclast Prokofy Neva for lead element in conspiracy theory claiming a collusion between elite Residents and Linden Lab staffers at the expense of casual and inexperienced new users. (Added 6/11/06)

Furries – Most prominent minority SL community, Residents who roleplay as anthropomorphic cartoon animal avatars (skunks, mice, etc.).  Highly-regarded for building and scripting talents of their most prominent members. (Added 6/11/06)

Ghost - The remnants of a prim (see below) that has been deleted from the server's dataset, but due to packet loss has not been deleted from the client's dataset. Ghosts cannot be moved or deleted, but must be flushed from the client cache by an avatar moving a far enough distance or relogging. (Def. contribued by Olmy Seraph, 3/02/05)

GOM-ed (verb) - When user-made content or service is undermined or made irrelevant by subsequent software/website updates from Linden Lab.  From “Gaming Open Market”, a Resident-run site that was the leading L$ currency exchange outlet—until Linden Lab’s new LindeX (see below) service obsoleted it.  (Added 6/11/06)

Grid - Refers to the totality of simulators (see below) available and accessible to Residents (see below)-- i.e., the known world.  Often abbreviated as "MG" for "Main Grid" to distinguish it from "TG" for "Teen Grid", i.e., Teen Second Life.  (Added 6/11/06)

In-world - The state of being online in Second Life.

Lag - In general, network congestion which slows down communcation between client and server. Specifically to Second Life, lag is typically caused when an excess of residents (see below), prims (see below), or active scripts exist in a given simulator (see below). (Def. added 2/23/05.)

Leader Boards - Discontinued in late 2005, a regularly updated, automatic ranking system which posts a list of the top Residents (see below) in various categories, such as Wealth and Land Owned. All residents have access to these names and figures via the SecondLife.com website and through a button the Second Life interface. (Def. added 3/2/05, amended 6/11/06.)

Linden (noun) - Singular, refers to an employee of Linden Lab. Plural, refers to Linden Lab staff or more generally to Linden Lab policy or policy implementation (e.g., "The Lindens just changed the cost of rating people.")

Linden Dollar (or L$) - The official in-world currency. Often exchanged on the LindEx (see below), for real US dollars. (Updated, 6/11/06)

LindeX - Internal currency L$-to-US$ exchange system.  Rates set according to market supply and demand.

Poseball (noun) - An object embedded with a custome pose script, designed so that when a Resident sits on it, their avatar is automatically put into that pose. (E.G., a slouch.) (Added 4/08/05)

Creating a cube prim

Prim (noun) - Fundamental building blocks which are comprise the basis of all in-world creations. Originally rezzed (see below) as a primary shape such as a cube, cylinder, or sphere, a prim can have its form altered, its surface textured, and its physical composition changed in an infinite number of ways. Most in-world (see above) objects are comprised of several prims linked together.

Prims can be set to respond to the physical forces of Second Life, including gravity and wind. They can also be turned invisible, or made visible but without physical substance. (Added 2/25/05)

Resident (noun) - Paying subscriber to Second Life.  (Def. added 2/23/05)

Rez (verb) - "[Origin: the movie Tron. Derived from 'de-rez' - a fictional hacker term for an object losing resolution, or dissolving away.] - to create an object or to bring an object out of your inventory. To make something appear in the world. - Kathy Yamamoto"+

Script – Linden Script Language, SL-based programming code similar to C+.  (Added 6/11/06)

Simulator (noun) - Often abbreviated as "sim", a discrete area of in-world (see above) geography, approximately 16 acres in size, contained on a single server. (Also refers to the space directly above and the area below the simulator's perimeter.) Most simulators are physically linked together, to create a single, contiguous continent.

* Rather than defining each common SL-specific term every time they appear in a New World Notes entry, I'll simply link them to this guide. I will also be treating this glossary as a kind of quasi wiki, so if you have a term and a definition you want to add to it, please post it in the Comments section below, and when appropriate, I'll add it to the entry proper, with full credit given.

+ Definition taken from Kathy Yamamoto's Second Life Glossary, an in-world document first reported on in New World Notes, 10/22/03.

SHOOTING TO KILL: BEDAZZLE'S U:SL

Originally published here.

I first decided to write something about U:SL sometime last November, I think, right after I heard the howling wind and the crunching snow. Those were some of the sound effects Team Bedazzle had already incorporated into their Winter Ice Cathedral map on the simulator of Abraxas, and it was touches like that which convinced me that something truly ambitious was in the making. Since then, Linden Lab has put some indirect promotional punch behind U:SL, featuring it with some in-game screenshots and a trailer (both of which I ended up contributing some post-reportage assistance in creating.) But back in November, of course, the game was still an unknown quantity-- and for that matter, was still referred to as Project Unreal, in tribute to the classic FPS Unreal Tournament.

In gameplay, U:SL resembles a cross between Unreal Tournament and Halo, with the gritty, big-chested firepower of the former, and the slower paced, low-gravity combat of the latter. (And this last element is more a server-side issue-- since all objects and avatars in Second Life are streamed, the average frame rate runs considerably lower than most current shooters.) Now in publicly playable open Beta, U:SL is the work of nearly fifty residents from around the world, its four month development cycle a history of setbacks, workarounds, and for at least one key developer, emotional ordeal.

What follows are a few milestones along the way, as told by three members of Bedazzle's core team.

THE SOLDIER'S MISTRESS

From Fallujah to Jessie and back again, with a sister beside him-- and beside herself (originally published here)...

Dane Street has a recurring nightmare, and he has it almost every night. In it, he’s a soldier running through a palm grove, trapped in a fierce ambush:

“Taking fire, running behind the machine gunners, and a buddy of mine gets shot.” A bullet cuts through his friend’s Kevlar vest, into his shoulder and out his back. And Dane can’t rescue him, can’t reach him. “It’s in slow motion, and I see him getting shot. Trying to scream for help, but I can’t.”

In another nightmare he keeps having, Dane is riding a Humvee in the dead of night, exposed in its turret with the desert wind blowing in his face, when bright tracer rounds begin to fly past him. And then the bullets start coming closer. “A few whiz by my head,” he says.

These are recurring nightmares Dane Street has because, he tells me, they actually happened to him. A fellow serviceman was indeed shot through his body armor, and Dane really couldn’t get to him. (Their corpsman could, however, and dragged him to safety. “Very lucky to be alive, actually,” Dane notes.) The second incident happened to Dane less than a month before he was due to leave Iraq, last year.