Fool O’Beans

January 22, 2009 by Leave a comment

A while ago I wrote about searching for the Church of the SubGenius on the grid, and being directed towards the Fool O’Beans Coffee Shop, only to end up in an empty field.

NTropy Sellers has been in touch to let us know that the establishment’s slurl had been messed up for some reason, and to kindly provide us with the proper reference.

fool_o_beans01

Any place with a giant bong is always going to be cool with us, so we’ve added it to our venue rota.

Filed under Second Life Tagged with

Gigantic

January 22, 2009 by Leave a comment

Attentive readers will have noticed that staffing levels here at SLS have increased by 100% since the start of the year. Now that we are obliged to have editorial meetings we’ve been looking around for quiet places to hang out and talk.

For the time being we’ve settled on the Grey Hare Coffee Shop on Adelebsen Isle:

ed_meeting01

Adelebsen Isle seems to be a centre of Tiny culture; the only other residents we’ve seen around are delightful little fellows like this:

tiny01

We’ve tried talking with the small folk, but they tend to just scurry away. I don’t know if they are naturally timid, or if they just don’t deign to converse with anyone over 50 centimetres tall.

Our other favourite place is the Loki Absinthe Bar in New Babbage, but we tend not to get a lot of work done when we’re there:

ed_meeting02

Here’s today’s song, which is a bit tangential, but I think both title and artist are at least marginally relevant.

Filed under Blogging, Second Life Tagged with , ,

Prosaic reality

January 16, 2009 by Leave a comment

On second thoughts, maybe I shouldn’t wait for Twitter to go bust before selling my Google shares.

Filed under Economics Tagged with ,

Poetic Truths

January 15, 2009 by Leave a comment

I was feeling that I had slightly overdone the negativity in my last post, so I decided to check out the reports on Gwen Bell‘s “Chicks who Click 09” conference, which took place last week. I figured that a gender-based discussion of virtual interaction was bound to be quite interesting, and I was sure that I could find something positive to say about it.

The list of speakers wasn’t too promising however; mostly marketing people and motivational gurus rather than serious academics. Then there was the fact that one whole day out of a two day meeting was devoted to skiing and networking, which suggested that the organisers were perhaps aiming for a less intellectually rigorous ambience.

The formal proceedings of the meeting haven’t been published yet, so all I have to go on is the tweets exchanged by the participants. The medium doesn’t really lend itself to deep and meaningful discussion, but even so the conversations were pretty vacuous.

Some of the comments were almost archetypal in their pseudo-profundity, like “We’re moving from an era of fear-based branding to one of hope, thanks to @barackobama.” It’s like there’s a formula they teach you in Inspirational Writing 101; [Fatuous Generalisation]+[Imaginary Transition]*[Zeitgeisty Buzzword]=[Comment that sounds Meaningful so long as you don’t think about it for more than two seconds].

There was one contribution that I thought made some sort of sense, though perhaps not in the way its author intended. “Twitter is your canary in the coal mine” wrote zenawiest, and I couldn’t agree more. When the “Social Media” industry curls up and dies I’ll know that it’s time to sell my Google shares.

Well, I did start this post with the best of intentions, but I’ve ended up serving another dish of cheerless cynicism, with a side helping of intellectual snobbery and a schadenfreude garnish. I should maybe take up Twittering, it might help me lighten up a bit.

[Update: Read a more balanced review of the event from someone who was actually there.]

Here’s today’s tune. I had thought that the lyrics would be a suitably obscure reference to the content of the post, but of course several bloggers got there before me. All their blogs seem to be defunct, one, poignantly, after just one post; I think that this one is the best.

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , ,

Modern Romance

January 9, 2009 by Leave a comment

Now and again I come across something on the internet that reminds me how disconnected I am from the world of the young. (Actually for “now and again” read “every 20 minutes or so”).

Occasionally though I read a piece that doesn’t just make me feel old and out of the loop, but cynical and misanthropic as well, and not in a good way. The latest example of this is Gwen Bell’s blog, and specifically this post: “A Guide to Falling in Love + Growing a Modern Romance Online“.

Gwen feels qualified to write about this because she met her boyfriend Joel, who is now her fiancé, via Twitter. The story is rather sweet in its own way, especially the bit where her beloved proposes by making an elaborate sign and hanging it up in their favourite coffee shop. They are due to wed later this year; you can follow the build up to the nuptials on their joint website, as well as on Gwen’s Twitter feed.

So why does this happy tale awaken my inner curmudgeon? “A bad-tempered, difficult, cantankerous person” sums up my personality pretty well at the best of times I guess, but the sort of unselfconscious narcissism that drives people to use a service like Twitter, or to write “A Guide to Falling in Love + Growing a Modern Romance Online” based on their own personal experience of doing so once, is something of a bête noire for me.

(I know that I am the author of a blog which deals mainly with my random thoughts, so we’re deep within “pot, kettle, black” territory here, but, come on, Twitter? Like even your closest friends are so interested in what you are doing right at this minute that they need a constant update on your mundane daily activity? RandomTweets.com, a site dedicated to finding anything on Twitter “humorous, weird, inspiring, newsworthy or just plain cool”, hasn’t been updated since July 15th, presumably the day the webmaster went insane after reading “I’m shopping!!!” once too often).

Gwen’s “Guide” contains so much that feels completely alien to my concept of “Romance” that it’s hard to pick out examples. You really have read the whole thing to appreciate it. This is my favourite bit though (with Gwen’s emphasis):

Joel and I have shared a calendar for about 6 months now. We each had our own Gcalendars (free) associated with our Gmail accounts, and then we set up a joint calendar for shared events. Once a week we go over the details of the week together. We roll over events that we missed.
Most important, we associate a time and date to things so that we get a reminder sent to our phones before it’s time for it to start. Believe it or not, this seemingly small point is a crucial ingredient to the success of our relationship.

This is how the kids live these days? A boy can be so overwhelmed by information that he will forget he has a date with his inamorata unless a computer phones him up to remind him?

If I’m honest though, I have to admit that I’m the one with the problem here, not Gwen. She has the confidence of youth, and I have what Socrates called True Wisdom, that which “comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us”. I could never write a “Guide to Love”, not because I haven’t been around that particular block more than a few times, but because the experience I have had has convinced me that, when it comes to affairs of the human heart, we all have to make our own way. So good luck to Gwen and Joel, may they have many happy years together, and avoid True Wisdom for as long as they can.

[Socrates also said “Enjoy yourself — it’s later than you think”, so from now on I’m going to try to lighten up some of my more dour posts by ending with a link to the song that inspired the post title. Though, come to think of it, this one is a bit of a downer.]

Filed under Blogging, Culture, Psychology Tagged with , , , , ,

Art star

January 6, 2009 by Leave a comment

After buying a couple of posters from the Warhead Rock’n’Roll shop, at L$25 each, I figured it would be cheaper to make my own, since uploading image files is only L$10 a go.

After a quick google for pictures of suitable concert posters I set to work creating objects in Second Life for the first time. They turned out fairly well I think, though I guess making simple two-dimensional shapes isn’t that much of an achievement.

interior02

Pretty neat huh? I should go into the virtual poster business.

Filed under Culture, Second Life Tagged with , ,

Ninja Tool

January 4, 2009 by Leave a comment

Looking at my blog stats I discovered an incoming link from “The Samurai Factory Official Website” which, as far as I can tell, is a Japanese record label. That’s more than a little impressive, in my book anyhow, but what’s really cool is that SLS is listed in their “Ninja Tools” section. Obviously no black-clad assassin can contemplate going on a killing spree without first getting armed with some sharp cultural commentary.

Since I read no Japanese it is possible that I’ve completely misinterpreted the site, and that they are in fact mercilessly mocking my writing rather than likening it to the keen edge of a samurai blade, or, perhaps more likely, that they have co-opted SLS into some sort of search engine optimisation scam. Perhaps a reader with the requisite language skills will be good enough to translate the Samurai Factory site and enlighten me.

Filed under Blogging, Culture Tagged with , ,

New Year, new me

January 2, 2009 by Leave a comment

Since it’s a new year I decided to update my av’s look a bit:

new_look01

I spent a while adjusting the various facial features, but the main innovation is the addition of prim hair. I had wanted a Johnny Ramone style, but I couldn’t find an exact match, despite visiting numerous hair emporia, so I eventually settled for a unisex mid-length cut, which is pretty close to what I’ve been wearing in real life for the past 20 years or so.

I also did some decorating; painting my cabin interior black and putting up a couple of posters, for that underground club look:

interior01

Filed under Culture, Second Life Tagged with , ,

Mad? You call me mad?

December 31, 2008 by Leave a comment

I’ve spent this evening in a relatively sedate fashion; dinner with friends, a few drinks. I can still recall the days when New Year’s Eve called for copious drug ingestion and a visit to the Peppermint Lounge. Maybe I’ll do that again next year.

Happy New Year!

Filed under Culture Tagged with , ,

A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall

December 26, 2008 by 4 Comments

What is there to do on Boxing Day except sit around eating, drinking and randomly surfing the net? Lots of things probably, like spending quality time with my loved ones, or taking some exercise, or doing something socially useful by serving turkey to vagrants at the homeless shelter, but I fearlessly embraced the crisps/lager/web option, so that I would have something to post about.

I did try to stay on-topic by browsing through Second Life-themed blogs. Amongst the numerous posts on various pressing issues in the world of SL fashion, there were contrasting views on what the future holds for the grid.

There are definite signs that SL residents are feeling a chill from the cold financial winds that are blowing through the real world. “The Quiet”, an iconic piece of SL sculpture, is due to disappear next month, as its creators can’t keep up with the rent. More generally, hundreds of sims are being abandoned, after Linden Labs increased the tier fees and decreased the prim allowance on the class of land known as “Openspace”. The flight of corporate investment is an old story, though you don’t read about it so much now that Reuters have closed their SL bureau. Even The Electric Sheep Company, who pioneered SL marketing for RL companies, are talking gloomily about a virtual recession.

Not everyone is downbeat though. Dennis wants to convince us (and perhaps himself) that the virtual economy is likely to grow in 2009. Perhaps not coincidentally, Dennis is in the business of organising virtual trade shows.

My own view is that Second Life will survive, since there does seem to be a critical mass of users who are willing to pay a few dollars a month to play out their various fantasies, or at least watch whilst others do so, but nobody except L-Labs is going to be making any serious money.

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

← Older posts

Newer posts →