August 30th, 2007 by Caleb Booker
[Update: I've just found PlayNoEvil's discoveries about Integrity. Click here to check it out.]
There are two little bits of news that people are, largely, shrugging off as inconsequential.
First there’s the news that the IRS is thumbing through records in Second Life, looking at your financials. What’s next, monitoring internet bingo winnings? Our family’s Monopoly score sheets? This, of course, is happening to you whether or not you’re a US citizen. Don’t worry, it’s for your own good. It protects you. Oh, don’t take my word for it. The comments are there for immediate placation: “This is no reason for alarm and has been around for quite a while,” and “Interesting article. I’m not sure about this point though”.
So we have the old “since it’s been happening for a bit it’s impossible for me to be concerned about it”, followed by “I’d rather ignore the personal issue and focus on the legal one.” This from two regular folk. Hold that thought for a moment.
We then have the other issue that Linden Lab decided to hire Integrity to rape us for our personal information. Of course we have a choice not to participate, but then again if you chose not to participate there are some extra ban lines awaiting you on the grid arbitrarily strewn everywhere in the name of safety. Whose safety? Oh, yours of course.
Nick Wilson (57 Miles) sees no problems here, and neither does Prokofy Neva. That’s tough for me because I deeply respect them both, but I’m having an extremely tough time seeing things their way. I’m not going to bother debating the issue with them though. It’s not like any of us are going to convince each other of anything. Nick’s comments from an old podcast were pretty clear on his stance to the best of my recollection, and Prokofy… well… Prokofy never met a corporation he didn’t like. I’m not anti-corporation by any means, but in contrast to Prokofy I’m a green anarchist. To Prokofy the corporation is America, and America is bigger than God.
Ooooh he’s gonna give me such hell for saying that!
A lot of this seems a bit random, but I’ll explain myself after the jump.
Continue reading ‘Everybody Loves Big Brother’
August 15th, 2007 by Caleb Booker
Onder Skall (me) chills at a Twitter Geek Meet with Tateru Nino, another person with a curious name.
Myg recently asked the question: why did you pick your name? I thought it an excellent question for… well… almost everybody I know really. SL names especially tend to be out of the clear blue. Why did Nick choose “57 Miles” again? He told me once but I can’t remember… and why “Urizenus Sklar”? Or “HeadBurro Antfarm”? Why no caps to “dandellion Kimban”? I could go on and on… so I thought I’d better ask the question to my social circle too. Why did you pick your name?
My story, the story of “Onder Skall”, is rather pathetic I’m afraid.
I want to tell you that it’s oh-so meaningful. I want to say that it was something logical. Maybe I was referring to something all dark and evil and “Onder” is German for “Under” so maybe… maybe there was a layer of meaning in there. Maybe it was something sappy like “the sense of wOnder that I have for virtual worlds”, or maybe it was obsessive fandom like “it was an homage to Alice’s brilliant wOnderland blog“. Yeah, even obsessive fandom would be cooler than the truth.
The truth is that I’d just read the sci-fi classic Ender’s Game before establishing the account, and couldn’t think of any name other than “Ender”. I popped an “O” in there instead of the “E” so that at least I wasn’t totally copying, and I picked “Skall” for the last name because it sounded like “Skull” which would have been cooler but… wasn’t… ya.
>> Onder Skall loses 23 creativity points.
So, why did you chose your name? Guaranteed your story will be way cooler than mine!
August 14th, 2007 by Caleb Booker
So I logged into the freshly opened vSide, created a new avatar, and took a look around… and it turns out it’s the same old Doppelganger space, just revamped. Crap. Here I was passing on the hype that they were building something new, when it’s really something old dressed up with new ads. Ah well.
[Edit: I should explain that - vSide locations like "PCDLounge" and the "Tyra Banks" club have been around for a long time. Existing users of the old worlds were just rolled over into this new one. A few of them are bitter about the change, but hey, everybody's always bitter about change.]
I gotta say though, the place is HOT.
One thing that wasn’t exaggerated was the animation. Everything was smooth, easy, intuitive, and fun. The first club was right next to the welcome area and there were plenty of people adding you as a “Friend” to game the respect system. You get locked out of content if your respect score is too low, and you start at zero… so it’s understood that it’s a system to be abused.
The streets themselves were only semi-realistic. While the textures are just awesome and they do recreate the urban “feel”, this is a city that doesn’t support vehicles. It’s all catwalks and walkways, with no streets. I mean, I don’t care, but it seemed a bit odd that there wasn’t a faster way to zip around the city. Still, at least everything is gorgeous while you walk through it and the water is nice.
I have a personal test for all 3D environments: how do they handle camera angles in close quarters? Second Life is horrible in close quarters, as is … well… almost everything. But just look at this:
Gorgeous. You could hang out with five people in this narrow hallway and have absolutely no problem.
Anyhow, apart from that it loads fast, streams a pretty good variety of music everywhere, and you can get apartments… an area that deserves MUCH further investigation! I’ll keep you posted there on possible meta-economies. I’ve already run into prostitution.
[Update: I've just found PlayNoEvil's discoveries about Integrity. Click here to check it out.]