First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait

October 31, 2013 by Leave a comment

Sad news about Lou Reed this week. I have to admit that I’ve never been a great fan of Reed’s post-Velvets work – I have a copy of Transformer of course, but it’s on vinyl, so I haven’t listened to it for years – but The Velvet Underground & Nico is still one of my all-time favourites. I’m especially fond of I’m Waiting for the Man, which always reminds me of the one and only time I bought dope in NYC (at Washington Square Park rather than uptown), when I managed to score $20 worth of the city’s finest cardboard.

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CD

October 16, 2013 by Leave a comment

So here we are at post number 400. Looking back over the six and a half years it has taken us to get this far, I can’t avoid noticing that we have strayed somewhat from the purpose we outlined in our very first post:

My intention is … to wander around the likes of Second Life and report back on what I find, enlightening readers with erudite comments on the interaction that occurs there.

Regular readers will recall that the main reason for our recent lack of SL-related content is that my desktop computer is far too ancient to run the current iteration of the viewer. It’s about 18 months since I resolved to get a new(er) box, but I haven’t got around to it yet, partly because I’m too cheap to buy a brand new machine, and too lazy to order and fit the parts to upgrade my old one, but mostly because I never actually use my desktop these days, as my IT needs are all satisfied by my smartphone, from the comfort of my couch.

I had been waiting for Linden Lab to release an iPhone viewer, but there were no signs that was ever going to happen, so last week I finally lost patience, bought myself a cheap Android tablet, installed TPV Lumiya, and got myself back on the grid:

image

This set up is less than perfect; although Lumiya does have a fairly decent 3D mode the draw distance isn’t great, and it tends to slow down alarmingly if there are more than a couple of other people about. It’s hard to go to specific places too, since it isn’t possible to type in coordinates directly; instead one has to acquire and click on an SLURL via the web, which is a bit of a hassle. (Of course I haven’t bothered to RTFM, so there might be an easier way to get around; if anyone knows, please enlighten me.)

Nevertheless we are, potentially, back in the virtual world business; look out for some SL updates in the weeks ahead, before my attention inevitably wanders…

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My God Is The Sun

October 15, 2013 by Leave a comment

Normally around now is when we start posting gloomy pieces about the falling leaves, the lengthening nights, and the looming onset of yet another brutal North European winter (usually shoehorning the change of season into some clumsy metaphor for the dread of mortality), but this year my characteristic summer contentment has persisted well past August for the first time in while, and I’m actually feeling fairly upbeat about the coming months.

This may be because I had a relatively straight-edge summer – I didn’t sign the pledge or anything, but I did largely eschew intoxication in favour of healthy outdoor pursuits. Back in high school they told us that a natural high was sweeter than any drug, and while I probably wouldn’t go that far, I will say that it was different, and it’s certainly left me in a better physical shape than I’ve been for ages. Perhaps it’s this echo of youthful vitality that’s allowing me to face the winter without the gnawing subconscious fear that I won’t see the spring, or it could just be that I spent enough time in the open air to be healed by the fire from above.

Either way, I can feel my natural slothfulness reasserting itself, so I expect I’ll soon be slipping into my default winter mode of minimal exertion and comforting overconsumption, and undoing all the good work I did over the summer. On the positive side this should mean that I have time to devote to more cerebral pursuits, like reading and watching movies, or even blogging, so there might be a little more activity in this space than there has been of late.

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September 11th 1973

September 11, 2013 by Leave a comment

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the US-backed military coup in Chile, which overthrew the left-leaning government of Salvador Allende and ushered in the brutal rule of General Augusto Pinochet. The suffering endured by opponents of the junta in the years that followed has been well documented, but despite this Pinochet escaped justice, thanks to his friends in the West.

Still, it’s heartening to know that workers in this country were on the right side, even if the government was not; while Pinochet was praised by the powerful for his early adoption of monetarist policies, weapons shipments to his regime were stopped by union action. Many Chilean refugees were welcomed into working-class communities and some remain here to this day – I count their children among my friends. The memory of that solidarity will continue to inspire long after the dictators are forgotten.

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Green Typewriters

August 31, 2013 by Leave a comment

And we’re back… Slightly longer summer break than usual this year, for various reasons, not all connected to idleness. Mostly connected to idleness though.

But who can blame us for staying away from the internet? What with twitterised death threats, cyber-bullying, extreme porn everywhere, topped off by the NSA snooping on us all, browsing the web these days feels less like strolling around a virtual utopia, and more like dodging the cops in the town’s sleaziest neighbourhood.

It’s hard to believe that only a couple of years ago everyone was saying that social media was going to save the world, and even nominating the internet for the Nobel Peace Prize. One might almost suspect that these scare stories (mostly concerning phenomena which, while obviously serious, have been around for years) were being hyped up by the authorities, and their allies in the old media, to convince us that we should steer clear of any online content that isn’t government-approved.

Anyway, I’m thinking that we should take a tip from the Russians, and start producing SLS on paper, with typewriters. We could hand out hard copies in the street, to anyone who looked vaguely interested. Our productivity and readership couldn’t be any worse than they are now…

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Constitutional scepticism

July 5, 2013 by Leave a comment

In our usual slacker style we’re a day late with this, but I thought we should do our small part to publicise the Stop Watching Us petition, which calls on the US Government to respect the Constitution’s 4th Amendment prohibition of unreasonable surveillance.

I haven’t actually signed it myself, partly because I’m not convinced it will achieve anything other than providing the authorities with a handy list of self-identified subversives, but mainly because I’m a hard-core communist who views with disdain the naive liberal notion that the constitution of a bourgeois republic is anything other than a fig-leaf of legality designed to distract us from the reality of capitalist power relations. As of this morning there were 552,411 people with a more optimistic view of citizens’ rights under constitutional government though, so if, like them, you are less cynical than I, you should probably sign up.

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The blogging dead

June 28, 2013 by Leave a comment

I should have known that our obsession with the undead would end up turning us into a zombie blog – devoid of fresh content, but lurching on, in a grotesque parody of life.

The funny thing is we still get a respectable amount of traffic – a steady background buzz, with occasional inexplicable spikes. If I sold out my principles and put some advertising on the site I could just sit back and watch the fractions of a cent roll in.

Anyway, I’m feeling sorry what whichever low-level NSA analyst has been assigned the thankless task of trawling through our output looking for subversion, so I’ll try to make things a bit more interesting in the weeks ahead. Unless of course the sun appears, in which case we’ll be staying out for the summer….

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Roboshrink

May 29, 2013 by Leave a comment

Slightly alarming news from Los Angeles, where researchers at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies have developed a virtual therapist. The system interacts with the client through an avatar named Ellie, analysing verbal and non-verbal responses using a webcam and a gaming sensor. The current version uses a real psychologist in the next room to guide Ellie’s questioning, but future iterations promise increasing autonomy.

Ellie’s creators say that she is not meant to replace human therapists, but rather to assist them by taking care of routine information gathering and screening, leaving us old-fashioned flesh and blood shrinks with more time to do the actual healing stuff. That sounds fairly benign, but I can’t help worrying that if our managers hear about a worker who doesn’t need paid, never goes off sick, and always sticks to the treatment protocols, then it won’t be long before we’re all out on the street.

But, you may say, won’t patients resent being fobbed off with an ersatz therapist and demand to see a real live doctor? Well, according to the research, most people find computer-delivered treatment perfectly acceptable, so, yeah, basically we’re doomed…

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The Joy of Six

May 26, 2013 by Leave a comment

Well, against the odds, we seem to have staggered our way through another year of blogging, though we’ve only managed 30 posts in the last twelve months, and the bulk of those were brief notes on general cultural and historical topics rather than the commentary on virtual life that is supposedly our raison d’être. There were a couple of pieces that I thought were up to our old standard, and a few more that were mildly diverting, but the general verdict is “Must try harder”.

One could argue that I should acknowledge that the well of inspiration is running dry, and wrap up this project before we descend even further into irrelevance, but I’m loathe to completely give up on my blogger identity, however tenuous my grasp on it is, so I expect we’ll trundle on for a while yet.

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Break On Through (To the Other Side)

May 21, 2013 by Leave a comment

Sad news today of the death of Ray Manzarek. Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that I was a big fan of The Doors as a young teenager. Like many another adolescent boy I initially styled myself after Jim Morrison, but it wasn’t long before I realised that I wasn’t really cut out to be a Dionysian love-god, so I adopted Manzarek as a role model instead. I had the glasses, the long hair, and (in my mind at least) the cool intellectual demeanour, but not, alas, the musical talent, though that didn’t stop me contributing dodgy organ licks to various teen garage bands.

I fell out of love with The Doors in my later teens, as I grew up and realised that Morrison was actually a bit of a dick, but in later years (probably fuelled by nostalgia) I have gotten into them again. I’m not sure that the shaggier blues and psychedelia of their mid to late period really stands up today, but their early numbers still sound fresh and exciting, underpinned, as the obituaries have noted, by Manzarek’s snaky rhythms. I can clearly remember the first time I heard The Doors, on a cassette a friend gave me, taped from his old man’s vinyl, and listening to it now takes me back to the days when the right music could promise a glimpse into a seductive world of adult possibility. Of course I know now that what seems deep and profound at the age of 13 is generally less so when one reaches some sort of maturity, but it’s nice to be reminded now and again of how fun life was before the cynicism of age set in.

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