In Memoriam: Jesse Malthus, 1990-2007
Tateru Nino's weekly take on mixed reality...
There were all sorts of things that I was going to write about this week, but mostly, aside from our weekly metrics, I'm going to talk about the only thing that really matters. People.
Resident Jesse Malthus died this week, and it should serve as a strong reminder about what is important in our lives, and what makes Second Life important. People are the ultimate in mixed reality.
Jesse's death - when I heard the news, I didn't know if I should believe it. I know I didn't want to believe it. It's a common misperception that people with Asperger's Syndrome are insensitive. We're not. Given the circumstances that surround the condition, we tend to be a little hypersensitive at times. It may not be apparent what we are feeling or how, but it is not that we do not feel it.
Jesse's death hit me very hard. I'd spoken to him not so many hours before the accident that claimed his life. I didn't know he was seventeen. I didn't know that his candle was to be snuffed out a little more than a day later. I tried to disbelieve the news for an hour or so, to believe there was a mixup of identity and that it wasn't our Jesse - and then I cried, and I've been crying most of the time since then. Oh, it's pure selfishness, self-pity and loss. That doesn't make it any easier to bear.
What was he? Who was he?
Jesse was a techie's techie. A geek's geek. Hungry for knowledge. Willing and able to learn. Kind and generous, enthusiastic and thoughtful, he was (even at his age) a poster child for the open source philosophy, and a supporter of public ideals such as Creative Commons.
Jesse seemed to be virtually indefatigable when it came to help and assistance of others, and to the application of technology for the assistance of others. A likable boy, in twenty years, he likely would have been better known than the likes of Linus Torvalds or Alan Cox. By seeking out knowledge and applying it, he has positively affected the lives of every Second Life resident in subtle ways, whether they realise it or not.
Recently I've lost three people in Second Life to death. Ginny Gremlin, one of my best friends and students. Feliciaa Feaver, all too soon after we began speaking. Now Jesse.
Call it a game, call it a platform, call it a country, call it whatever the hell you want. It is a communications medium that is represented as a 3d world. It brings people together, for good or ill. It brought me, all too briefly, together with these people, these wonderful, genuine, human beings. While I am hurting for my loss of them, even diminished by their deaths, I am richer for the time I was able to spend with them, however much or little, than I would have been if we had never met.
Asset databases, simulators, login servers. These aren't what Second Life is. They are the background and circumstances that the culture and peoples of the world increasingly express themselves against. The most important aspect of Second Life is the people who are in it. If Second Life didn't exist, to paraphrase Voltaire, it would be necessary to invent it. Linden Lab are truly only the people who got it going. If not them, it would have been others. It's an idea whose time has come, because the people will it into existence.
As Second Life grows, we will meet more great and wonderful people through it, who will touch our lives. Who will move us to tears when they die. Those deaths will become less of a rare occurence. It's a net gain, though. Don't be afraid to care, to love, or to cry when people pass away. And learn from each of these three wonderful people - you need not do big things to make a difference, so long as you work at the little things, every day.
We enrich each other.
Mixed Reality Traffic
Thomson Training and Academy of Second Learning combine to teach many RL and SL topics.
Each week we build an aggregate mixed-reality metric from the traffic figures of several notable sites, and match it to figures for a selection of "native" content.* Here's our current mixed reality site lineup:
|
Mixed Reality Site |
Comparable Native Reality Site |
|---|---|
|
The Weather Channel: 50.55 (down 3.50) |
Svarga: 21.83 (up 0.14) |
|
The L word: 48.93 (up 28.38) |
Isle of Lesbos: 175.82 (down 1.78) |
|
Circuit City: 39.45 (down 0.27) |
TOP/Tech: 51.02 (up 13.38) |
|
Sears: 31.99 (down 1.02) |
Home Depoz: 5.03 (up 0.04) |
|
AOL Pointe: 10.49 (down 0.62) |
Zephyr Heights: 4.0 (up 0.61) |
|
Thomson training: 5.21 (down 0.05) |
NCI: 254.69 (down 101.64) |
|
Nissan: 4.82 (up 0.1) |
Dominus Motor Company: 16.45 (up 1.11) |
|
Sony BMG: 3.28 (down 0.02) |
The Shelter (Music Venue): 13.54 (down 13.95) |
|
Magnatune: 1.43 (down 0.05) |
Rave Island: 31.33 (up 0.16) |
|
The Pond: 1.38 (down 0.25) |
The Shelter (new residents, events): 85.26 (down 57.16) |
| Tateru's Overall Mixed Reality Index: 19.75 (up 2.27) | Tateru's Native Reality Index: 65.89 (down 66.11) |
The Weather Channel remains steady at the top while Showtime's L-Word unexpectedly climbed back up this week with some more events taking place on the side.
We're still trying to get a handle on the changes to the Shelter, but interestingly person or persons unknown planted a device at NCI this week specifically designed to reduce the traffic figures at the site, resulting in a large fall this week for NCI's ratings. Linden Lab are dealing with the perpetrator, but this additionally skews the numbers this week.
Next week, we'll see to replacing some of the lower-ranking mixed-reality sites on this list with others.
Mixed Reality Shorts
- A large book/authors/publishers fair in Wallaby (direct link).
- Use Linden Dollars in Second Life to order and pay for Pizza (press release).
- Virtual Technology Expo, April 20-22 on Silicon Island (direct link).
- Transtellar builds a presence and storefront for Bongo Beat records, selling full MP3 tracks for Linden Dollars.
- Samsung rains virtual phones to promote their new line.
- Brazil's TAM airlines offers virtual flights and a virtual loyalty program.
- A video of Stanford Humanities Lab’s How They Got Game Workshop #1 with Linden Lab's Director of community affairs. Description and video.
*A Note on Mixed Reality Traffic Metrics: They are derived by monitoring Linden Traffic over the course of a week, averaging those figures and dividing by the parcel size, to remove some of the problems where the Linden metrics tend to prejudice increasingly towards larger parcels. Where sites have multiple parcels, the most favorable figure is used. Sites with multiple sims are not able to be properly calculated. Figures primarily indicate ordered rankings that roughly reflect holding or retention efficiency per square metre.
The selected entries are broadly representative of the sustained retention of a site, per square metre, or efficiency of interest. Hamlet asked me to include more native sites to match up with the mixed reality sites that we track, for comparison's sake; a bit tricky to pull off. Nevertheless, we've selected by feel, theme or genre as best we could. Some are businesses, but I can't say as I'm interested in endorsing them as such - after all, I've got no personal experience of them - but they fit our comparison criteria, and were selected largely at random.
Insensitive? Certainly not. Some very well spoken words about a man I never had the fortune to know, and some eloquent words about what Second Life is really about. Thanks for that, Tateru.
Posted by: Laetizia Coronet | Monday, April 23, 2007 at 02:34 PM
Give yourself a pat on the back, Tat. By far the shortest Mixed Media Monday to date, and yet the most eloquent and moving of them all.
Between the massacre at Virginia Tech, the death of Jesse and the wretched collective yelling of people suffering from SL's recent spate of technical issues, it's definitely worth remembering that, yes, your inventory list isn't really as important as your friendlist. Been telling people that for ages - hasn't gone down as well as one might have thought...
Posted by: Patchoul Woollahra | Tuesday, April 24, 2007 at 02:29 AM