Dylan Rickenbacker wrote a harrowing, four-part story of Second Life addiction, which begins here, and proceeds to successive chapters from the bottom of each installment. A talented and successful freelance writer in real life, Second Life begins as a work respite for Rickenbacker, but gradually becomes something more compelling:
I discovered the Shelter, which is to this day my favourite haunt in SL. And I discovered that SL is a very sexy place. Something deeply biological was going on inside me when I looked at all those beautiful lady avatars in their low-cut tops and short skirts; something that kept me on a permanent high while I was in SL and made the prospect of taking the deep plunge back into RL increasingly unsavoury for me.
So much so, as it happened, that his career, family, and long-term future gets sent for awhile into the hazard. His break from the addiction (in the negative sense) doesn't require him to cut from off Second Life, however -- there's too much in it that's genuinely valuable, friends and creativity and more. Instead, what he learns to do is make his avatar a more integrated part of his first life, and integrate the demands of his first life with his activity in the virtual world. For instance: "I set myself a rule: no SL or other distractions until I had done at least half of my quota. This sounds like a no-brainer, and indeed the idea wasn’t new, but now I saw a chance to actually stick to it." But that's getting ahead of ourselves: the story, well worth a weekend read, begins here. Hat tip: SL-ama Drama, image via Rickenbacker's blog.
Waiting for Monsieur Marker on his Second Life home near a jetty
Chris Marker, the extremely exclusive French artist who created the masterpiece short film La Jetée (it was the basis for Terry Gilliam's great movie 12 Monkeys), is an occasional Second Life Resident experimenting with SL as a new artistic medium, and even has a home made for him by MosMax Hax. (Direct SLurl teleport at this link.) Bettina Tizzy first noted this last year, but up until recently, I didn't know his avatar name. On some occasions at least, as I discovered last month, it's Sergei Murasaki: that's the Second Life name he took during a May in-world appearance for the Harvard Film Archive, where some of his movies were screened. I missed it, but fortunately someone was there to publish the chat transcript. Now nearly 90 years old, here's Monsieur Marker on Second Life machinima, and his project for metaverse transcendance (with typos amended):
And though she plans to return after her babies are older, this respite means asking her "digital companions" (as she calls them) to accept her change in focus:
Some of you aren’t interested in my life outside of Second Life, and hey, that’s alright too. I totally understand that. This started out as a Second Life blog, and I do intend to keep it that way. But unlike real life, or first life, or whatever you like to call it, my Second Life can wait a little while.
Instead, she recommends SL friends stay in touch with her via Plurk and Twitter. If you've been in a similar situation, having to leave Second Life for awhile (or permanently), what did you do with your network of beloved avatars? Did you leave them all without any advance notice, keep in contact with every one of them, or something in between?
Here's a few glimpses of yesterday's Second Life vigil for Iranians killed in the democratic uprising, taken from my brief visit. Lasting longer than 90 minutes, reports attendee Laraa Short, about forty people ultimately showed up for the vigil. No one there was reportedly from Iran, but some have family members who are. It wasn't only a time for mourning, but coordinating and growing the nascent "Support Iran" group which organized the event. What we're seeing here, then, is an immersive offshoot of the informal Internet community that has sprung up in the last couple weeks in random, often unexpected places -- on Twitter, in YouTube comment threads, on blogs like the the Huffington Post, and more. While those asynchronous communities mainly express their support through text, or simple gestures like changing one's Twitter avatar to green, this new Second Life adjunct brings 3D and real time to the experience, adding a sense of shared space and embodiment to this community's shared values.
Here's an important but so far very rudimentary addition to Second Life's official wiki: a list of real world trademarks known to be in SL, either officially, as part of the trademark holder's presence in SL, or unauthorized and unofficial. Given the ongoing disputes over which trademark belongs in what category, and the lawsuits which have been threatened over them, it would be highly useful to see this wiki page further developed and maintained. It's not an easy task, however. Right now, for example, the page categorizes trademarks in only three ways: "Companies who have licensed trademarks in SL", "Companies that have no interest being involved in SL", and "Companies being possibly infringed upon". But where to put, say, "Companies who have licensed trademarks in SL, but are also infringed upon by content creators using their trademarks in unauthorized ways"? That's a fairly common occurrence, too. Or "Companies who originally licensed trademarks in SL, but since abandoned their presence, making the trademark status of their remaining content in Second Life highly ambivalent." Am I missing still other categories? Via Gwyn.
Tonjampae Amat reports on Portuguese culture in Second Life
Update, 3:30pm: Added photo of the President Silva, after the break
Portugal has a well known natural aptitude for new technologies (the high mobile phone penetration rates, the success of the electronic traffic system of Via Verde, the immense popularity of the children's computer Magalhães). It is not such a big surprise, then, that the Portuguese President, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, evidently became the first head of State in the world to make a speech that was broadcasted to citizens and communities through Second Life.
Even if you can't attend New York Law School's famed State of Play metaverse law and economics conference today and tomorrow, you can participate in-world via AvatarCamp, a mixed reality summit based around the NYLS event. That begins with a video stream of SoP starting today at 6am SLT/9am Eastern, at Vesuvius Island. [Direct SLurl teleport at this link]
The last time I tried to visit the Second Life islands owned by the United States Navy's Naval Undersea Warfare Center several months ago, I was blocked from entering most of it. This machinima above shows what they've been doing in Second Life, including rapid prototyping, data modeling, and VoIP-driven conferencing, much of it between other branches of the US military which also maintain a Second Life presence. Leading to a sentence I never thought I'd hear, outside of science fiction: "What you see here is the United States Coalition of Second Life having a weekly meeting. Representatives of the Army, Air Force, and Navy, meet in virtual space to discuss about collaborative issues and common practices in virtual worlds."
The Center ranges over several dozen sims, which seems like an excessively large footprint, especially since the Navy is using it for real world work. As a US taxpayer, I wonder if it'd be more cost effective to shrink the public-facing presence in Second Life to a handful of sims, and conduct the possibly-classified work [See update below] in a much cheaper OpenSimulator grid behind the Pentagon's firewall. In any case, most of Warfare's campus seems open now, and you might enjoy a tour. (Wonder what founding Linden Cory Ondrejka, a former Naval officer and weapons systems engineer, would make of it.) When I just visited, the welcome center was streaming Prince's "Rasberry Beret", an excellent if surreal way to be greeted at the entrance into the virtual foyer of the organization that develops (in the homepage's words) "submarines, autonomous underwater systems, and offensive and defensive weapons systems associated with undersea warfare." [Direct SLurl teleport at this link] Hat tip: Amanda Linden.
Update, 4:18pm: In Comments, the US Navy's Maccus McCullough says their "hardcore classified work is what we have Nebraska [the Lindens' new firewalled version of Second Life], OpenSim and Qwaq for." Why the large landmass? "[W]e simply need the prims. Our Parameter Evaluation Plot to demonstrate immersive sonar training at USS Providence is composed of thousands of prims."
Shortly after President Obama was elected last November, I noted that two of his FCC transition team members, academics Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach, were involved with Second Life in its early years. That's Kevin and his avatar, Eli Gorham, at left; his Supernova conference in 2006 included a heavy SL component, which he described then as "an extraordinary playground... [giving] you tremendous freedom to experiment". He's still a part-time advisor with the Administration, helping craft a Broadband stimulus grant program. Werbach will be back in-world this Wednesday at 1pm Pacific to appear on the Metanomics show, for an extremely apropos topic: "The Age of Obama: Virtual Worlds, Open Government, and Policy". (All the event details at that link.) Kevin tells me he can't discuss the particular policy advice he gave the Administration about virtual worlds, but I suspect he'll provide some great insider perspectives on how they're being shaped. Read more about him on his site. (Avatar screenshot courtesy Prof. Werbach; photo by Joi Ito, from his Flickr stream.)
