Blogging | Second Life Shrink

Just to clarify…

May 25, 2009 by johnny 2 Comments

Someone was moved enough by my last post to write a response on their own blog; I think that’s only the second time that that has ever happened. Unfortunately Lillie Yifu seems to have misinterpreted what I wrote to some extent; specifically she thinks that I was agreeing with Prokofy Neva’s take on the Rheta Shan gender question, leading her to accuse me, somewhat unfairly I think, of being a publicity-seeking sexist bigot.

Ms Yifu’s blog does not appear to have a comment facility, so I’m posting my reply here in the hope that she’ll read it:

Hi Lillie,

Thanks for you interest in my post. I’m sorry that it seems to have annoyed you so much. You may want to go back and read it again, specifically the part where I describe Prok’s position on Rheta’s gender as “flimsy”. Just to clarify; I don’t agree with Prok’s opinion, and I think the arguments he advances to support it are entirely specious. I only brought it up to emphasise what a incorrigible troll he was. The main point of my post is that people are exploiting the story of Rheta’ life and death to advance their own agendas, in Prok’s case his ongoing campaign to be the most disagreeable person in the SL blogosphere.

On the mortality numbers question, I chose that particular age range because I happened to have that data at hand. You’re right that the age profile of SL is probably a bit older; that actually strengthens my argument, since the annual death rate would be more like 1400, the point being that AFK deaths are quite commonplace, not rare events as Prok and the other sceptics suggest.

Anyway, I hope this will prompt you to revise your opinion of me.

Best wishes,

Johhny S
secondlifeshrink.com

It’s my own fault; I should just write what I mean, instead of dressing it up in overblown pseudo-intellectual rhetoric that is just asking to be misconstrued.

Filed under Blogging, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Second Life

Like tears in rain

April 28, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

After my last two posts I had to dig out my copy of Blade Runner to see if it was as good as I remembered. Now I’m getting older the themes of identity and mortality are probably a bit more relevant than they were in the past, which may go some way towards explaining why the film seems to be more profound every time I watch it.

During the climatic rooftop scene, where the android Batty is mourning the ephemeral nature of his memories, I found myself thinking that, if he wanted to preserve his experience for posterity, what he needed was a blog, or, even better, a Twitter account:

roybatty I’m watching attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. 2 minutes ago

I’d be the first to admit that my blogging is at least partially motivated by a desire to leave some permanent trace of my existence. It’s the equivalant of stone-age man leaving hand prints on a cave wall; perhaps future archeologists will be as puzzled by the significance of my random jottings as we are by the daubings that were the social media of our Neolithic forebears:

Grod @Zoug I can has mammothburger? 12000 years ago

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Psychology Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Film, Nostalgia, Psychology, Social Media

Lists are a good idea after all

April 3, 2009 by johnny 3 Comments

ArminasX has revamped his list of Second Life blogs, and this time we have made it on, at a rather remarkable #108.

If Second Life Shrink was a player on the WTA tour we’d be Virginia Ruano Pascual – perhaps not the best-known or most glamorous personality on the circuit, but a solid performer who has quietly racked up nine grand-slam titles in a seventeen-year career.

Filed under Blogging, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Second Life, Statistics

Here comes the summer

April 1, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

March saw an increase in our traffic for the sixth straight month; our daily average is well ahead of what it was this time last year. There’s no great mystery about how we’ve done this; new posts are appearing much more frequently (helped by having two of us working on the blog now) and we’re making a conscious effort to include more links to relevant blogs, which does seem to be generating some return traffic. I’ve tried to raise our general profile by registering with Technorati (where our rating is a semi-respectable 2493137) and Blogged (editors’ rating 7.4, “very good”), signing up for a few Second Life blog rings, and leaving comments around the SL blogosphere; this has been less successful.

Even when we go a few days without a post we still get a steady flow of hits. I think that’s because we’ve been around long enough to build up a critical mass of posts, meaning we show up on most Google searches that include the words “Second” and “Life” somewhere, even if it is usually on page 3 or 4 (though we’re back on top for the “Second Life Shrink” query). Our two top posts this quarter have been Olivia’s pieces on Star Trek and Vampires, which I guess tells you something about what’s popular in the SL universe.

I’m not sure that we’re going to be able to keep the pace up, now that the days are getting longer and the attractions of summer beckon. We’ll see how it goes.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Second Life, Statistics

History is a random aggregation of opinion

March 24, 2009 by johnny 3 Comments

ArminasX Saiman over at Second Effects has compiled a list of the top 585 Second Life-related blogs, and Second Life Shrink fails to appear anywhere on it. I know that this really shouldn’t annoy me – we’re way too cool to care about being on some lame list, obviously – but it is somewhat irksome to be told that our intellectual endeavour is less significant than a virtual hair blog. At least I’m not the only one who doubts the veracity of the rankings.

More positive feedback has come from the unlikely source of the Thoughts about notes* blog, whose author, the imaginatively-named “Blogga”, ripped off one of my posts in its entirety last week. I was alerted to this by Sheila Bastard, an Australian blogger who had one of her posts plagiarised too, and who is mightily pissed-off about it.

I can see where Sheila’s coming from, but I actually quite like the mash-up effect of Blogga’s creation. He or she is like the blogosphere personified, a mass of contradictory opinions that the author just can’t keep inside, despite the world’s indifference. I’d like to think that my post was carefully selected for inclusion in Blogga’s project, though I suspect it was probably plucked at random from an RSS feed in some automated process. He/she should keep going with this for a couple of months, then print the whole blog as a book; it would make interesting reading, a snapshot of the preoccupations of the blogging population at what might just turn out to be a pivotal moment in history.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Second Life

Command-X, Command-C, Command-V

March 18, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

On a more positive note, Cut and Paste has come to the iPhone! So now I can post all those interesting links in my blog without having to resort to writing them down on a piece of paper! Maybe this new media world isn’t so bad after all.

Filed under Blogging Tagged with Blogging, Computing, Internet

Intelligence Failure

March 18, 2009 by johnny 3 Comments

I can still remember the story on the front page of the only copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that I ever bought – it was a report on the assassination of Rajiv Ghandi, which means I must have purchased the paper on the 22nd of May 1991, when I was travelling up the Pacific coast on my way to the Cascade Mountains.

If if I ever make it back to Seattle (which I hope I do one day, because it is probably the nicest city I have ever visited) I won’t be able to buy the paper again, because, as of today, the S P-I has become an online-only operation, after 146 years in business.

The print newspaper model – where investigative reporting was subsidised by advertising sales – has collapsed, as ad revenue has migrated to the web. What will fill the news-gathering vacuum left behind? The idea that an army of bloggers will ever replace the likes of Woodward and Bernstein is patently ridiculous.

Information may seem to be more freely available then ever, thanks to the ubiquity of the internet (in the developed world at least), but the real knowledge, the stuff the Man doesn’t want us to know, will be buried even deeper in the mass of celebrity trivia and idle speculation that passes for news in the blogosphere. We are doomed to a new age of ignorance. Only musicians can save us now.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Politics Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Nostalgia, Politics

Paranoid

March 13, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

Shortly after publishing my last post I tried to log on to Second Life, to meet up with Olivia, but I kept getting knocked back, with a message saying there was some unspecified “problem” with my log-in. Then Olivia emailed me to say that she wasn’t able to sign in either.

Suddenly it all became clear to me. The Lindens had been so badly stung by my criticism of their “adult content” proposals (and all my other subversive posts) that they had kicked both of us off the grid in retaliation. They were obviously logging all the traffic on this IP address. They probably had my phone bugged as well, and, come to think of it, the postman who delivered the mail this morning wasn’t the regular guy either – he must be working for them too…

I enjoyed my status as Linden Enemy #1, The Blogger They Could Not Silence, for five minutes, before reluctantly checking out the grid status page, and confirming that it was a universal glitch that was keeping everyone out.

Oh well, I can dream. At least it gives me an excuse to link to some vintage Black Sabb.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Psychology, Second Life

Is Olivia a Punk Rocker?

February 19, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

We’ve changed a few things here at SLS this week.

We finally got around to registering the “secondlifeshrink.com” domain after months of dithering. This may well bring the wrath of the Lindens down on our heads, but we figured that we could reasonably claim that the blog is about the general concept of living a “second life” rather than any particular trademarked product. If that doesn’t wash, well we’re sure the freedom-loving SL-blogging community will rise in our defence.

From now on we’ll be posting under individual bylines, and we’re planning a basic division of labour; Olivia, who has more time to waste on the grid, will handle the Second Life travelogue pieces, while I’ll keep on churning out the pretentious, pseudo-intellectual analysis stuff.

In the true SL spirit of constant re-invention I’ve taken the opportunity to change my pseudonym to the vaguely-punky “Johnny S”; Olivia has decided to stick with her posh-bird moniker for now, despite there being plenty of suitable alternatives.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Second Life Tagged with Blogging, Culture, Music, Second Life

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