Life During Wartime

November 5, 2011 by Leave a comment

Tonight is the night that we in the UK display our liberal values of tolerance and inclusivity by letting off fireworks to celebrate the fact that Roman Catholics are constitutionally barred from becoming Head of State.

I quite like pyrotechnics, but in recent years the ubiquity of cheap Chinese imports has meant that, in the run-up to Bonfire Night, even a quiet middle-class neighbourhood like mine reverberates with explosions for half the night. Obviously it’s nothing like living in an actual war-zone, but it does get to me a bit. Another sign I’m getting old I guess.

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The Physical Impossibility of Running an Art Gallery in Second Life

October 29, 2011 by Leave a comment

Readers may recall that about 18 months ago we ran a review of the virtual installations at the Primtings Museum. If you want to see the gallery’s lovingly-sculpted recreations of famous artworks you had better hurry; Artistic Director Ina Centaur has announced that the space is to disappear some time in the next few days, along with the associated sims of the SL Globe Theatre.

I went over there this evening, to walk up the staircase one last time:

and to contemplate mortality:

(On a brighter note, the other art space we covered in that review, The Leominster Galleries, is still going strong.)

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Time takes its crazy toll

October 17, 2011 by Leave a comment

The news that Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore are to separate has caused a wave of consternation to sweep around the internet, as all we ageing Sonic Youth fans are forced to confront the fact that a band that seemed young and vital back when we were young and vital has members who have been married for 27 years, and are in their 50s.

I guess I’m not alone on The Diamond Sea…

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Kloutless

October 8, 2011 by Leave a comment

I really need to get back into gear with the blogging and the tweeting; last time I looked my Klout score had declined to a miserable 16, which is not going to get me into any of the cool parties.

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Steve Jobs R.I.P.

October 7, 2011 by Leave a comment

I’d love to say that my first-ever computer was an Apple II, but it wasn’t, it was a ZX Spectrum; I just fantasised about having an Apple II, which seemed like a properly futuristic machine when I read about it in Omni magazine in the 1980s. I never actually got round to buying an Apple desktop, even when I had the money; at some point I was seduced by the counter-cultural charms of Linux, and have stuck with that ever since.

I do however have an iPhone, and I think I can say without much exaggeration that it has changed my life. I guess that an Android smartphone would have had the same effect, and preserved my open-source purity, but Apple got to me first, and, at this point in my life, I can’t be bothered with the dislocation of changing software ecosystems.

I am planning to get an iPhone 4S, despite the lukewarm reviews, since my current model is a 3G, which is getting to be embarrassingly clunky. It’ll be interesting to see if Apple’s products can retain their cachet now that Steve Jobs is gone, or if people will finally notice that everyone and their granny has an iPhone or an iPod, and Apple are just another producer of (somewhat overpriced) consumer commodities.

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Enmeshed

September 25, 2011 by Leave a comment

So, I’ve been working on a couple of other projects, and haven’t had much time for virtual world stuff recently, but I was looking for an excuse to slack off the other night, so I decided to go on to the grid to collect this month’s free premium gift. Here I am, sitting on my fine new sofa, trying to look intellectual:

Moving the furniture around was fun for about five minutes, but to be honest I’ve never found the dolls-house aspect of Second Life particularly interesting, so my attention soon wandered.

I had downloaded the 3.0 viewer, so I thought I would check out some of the new mesh objects that are now available, to see if they really would be the revolutionary force that I had predicted a couple of years ago.

Here’s a ukulele I found at the Mikki Miles Mesh Department, along with various other musical instruments:

and they have some interesting-looking creations at MeshAvatars:

It certainly looks much nicer than the usual prim-based stuff, though I’m far from a connoisseur in these matters. It seemed quite expensive by SL standards, which made me wonder how much trouble it actually was to upload these things, since prefabricated examples can be found pretty easily on the web, and the mesh creation tools aren’t that hard to master (I’m told).

The answer to that turned out to be “more trouble than I can be bothered with”, what with having to register with the Lab as a mesh uploader, take a test in intellectual property rights, and wade through the technical details of the actual process, not to mention paying the upload fees. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there with more patience for this than me though, so I still think that there will eventually be an influx of cheap mesh items that will put the old prim merchants out of business. I suspect the relative obscurity of SL might be their best hope of a reprieve.

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Benign neglect

August 14, 2011 by Leave a comment

I’ve shamefully neglected this blog over the summer, which I rather regret, since there has been a lot going on which I could and should have written about, like the war in Libya, the News International phone-hacking scandal, the massacre in Norway, the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, the US debt-ceiling stand-off and, just this week, the rioting in London and other English cities.

I suppose that the world has managed to scrape by without the benefit of my opinions for a couple of months; anyone who has read this blog for more than five minutes could probably guess what my take on these events would have been anyhow.

What have I been doing instead? Well, as I’ve alluded to previously, I’ve been working on another writing project, one with somewhat greater pretensions to serious literary merit than the idle musings that make up my output in this space. I’m pretty excited about it at the moment, but, if past experience is any guide, my interest will wane soon enough, when I remember that proper writing is actually quite hard work, and I am far too lazy to keep it up for any length of time.

I expect that things will stay quiet here for the next month or so, and after that it’ll be back to the usual diet of lightweight psychological, cultural and political commentary, leavened with a little whimsical nostalgia. I have managed to read a few books over the holidays, so I may throw in a couple of reviews too, we’ll see.

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Off the wagon

July 30, 2011 by Leave a comment

So, that’s me back from my digital sabbatical, though, to be honest, it wasn’t really one of those straight-edge digital sabbaticals that one reads about, since I took my cellphone (though I did manage to cut down my usual rate of calling and texting), and I only gave up the mobile internet because I was in a region remote enough to have no wi-fi hotspots, and prohibitively expensive data roaming charges.

Still, I’ve come back with a renewed appreciation of life off the grid. I was a bit restless for the first couple of days, but after that I hardly missed it at all, and passed my time at a leisurely pace, reading books, listening to music, thinking, writing a little, and even doing some exercise.

I had just about convinced myself that I wasn’t really addicted to the internet after all, but, I’m sad to say, I hadn’t been home more than a few hours before I succumbed to the temptation to quickly check my blog stats, then while I was online I thought I might as well see what people were saying on Facebook… and it was all downhill from there. Last night I spent three hours watching Beavis and Butt-head clips on YouTube. Rapid reinstatement indeed.

Strangely enough I haven’t had any notion to visit Second Life yet. Perhaps the pleasures of SL are too rarefied to give me the quick fix I’m looking for; it’s a fine malt compared with the bathtub gin of social media.

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It’s Summertime

June 11, 2011 by Leave a comment

Readers may have noticed that we’ve gone into our summer recess a little early this year. This is mainly because I am easily distracted by fair-weather pursuits like getting stoned and lying in the park, but also because I have a couple of other projects on the go at the moment that have seduced me away from the virtual world.

So, in lieu of actually writing a proper post, I’ll link to some topics that I would have covered in more depth in the last couple of weeks if I weren’t such a slacker.

In the wake of the Ryan Giggs super injunction fiasco, the attorney general for England and Wales has warned Twitter users that they could face legal action if they breach privacy orders. This may sound like an empty threat, since most Tweeters, myself included, are outside the jurisdiction of the English courts, but I suspect that the authorities may try to restore respect for the law by launching some selective prosecutions, especially now that Twitter have shown a willingness to hand over user details without much resistance. (To be fair to Twitter, their TOS have always made it clear that they will rat you out if the Man comes calling). It’s another reason to believe that social media is perhaps not the unstoppable force for change that its most vocal advocates would have us believe.

On a related subject, the BBC have just finished screening All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, a trio of documentaries by Adam Curtis critically examining the effect that computers and their associated ideology have had on popular consciousness. It’s excellent stuff; if you’re quick you might catch it on the iPlayer, otherwise look out for a repeat.

And finally, as we’ve noted before, proof that our municipalities are woefully unprepared for zombie attack.

The holidays are looming, so that might be your lot until July, unless it rains a lot.

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See My Friends

May 30, 2011 by Leave a comment

Alarming news in the Telegraph this week; apparently the average 20-something has over 1000 “friends” on social networking sites. It makes the 67 friends of my real-life Facebook account look pretty pathetic, but I’m positively gregarious compared with Johnny, my Second Life avatar, who can muster a mere 20 virtual chums (though some of them are fairly impressive, like Peter Ludlow and Bettina Tizzy). I suppose he could add in his Twitter followers, which would yield a slightly more respectable total of 94. Despite this seeming lack of interest, Johnny is “influential to a tightly formed network that is growing larger“, according to internet reputation assessors Klout, but I would take that with several pinches of virtual salt.

At least Johnny’s account seems to have survived Facebook’s latest purge of avatar profiles; being under the radar does have some advantages I guess. The site’s continuing hostility to pseudonymous accounts is mystifying, since they seem essentially harmless, and boost the membership total, which is a key metric in the social networking industry. Maybe avatar profiles use more electricity or something.

It does make one doubt the wisdom of the Linden Lab strategy of encouraging residents to use Facebook though, since anyone who spent time creating a profile and carefully building up a circle of friends, only to see their work disappear in a flash, will, I imagine, be feeling pretty pissed off with the whole concept. Most long-term residents live in a perpetual fog of dissatisfaction anyway, so I don’t suppose it makes much difference.

I wonder how long it will be until Johnny heads across the river…

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