Torley Lives

Enter Vince Plunkett, and I've mentioned his name before with good reason. He's created Avimator, an EASY PEASY FREESY way to make .BVH-format anims for SL, and upload them into the kit and kaboodle. He's not some external corporate-type, but an actual Resident of SL who understands the needs and gravity of the situation. And he's plugged a giant hole.

Content creation should be quick and easy to setup. You can rez a prim and quickly shape it, you can draw a squiggle or bark a yelp and upload it—but poses and animations are a different beast.

No greater testament than being in Midnight City the other day with Aimee Weber, Catherine Omega, and Dave Zeeman. Dave was playing in Avimator and happened to produce something within minutes that he brought into SL, which looked eerily like the spastic motions of a night terror. I suggested it reminded me of a Silent Hill monster, and so, attaching an appropriately-shaped red prim, he became Pyramid Head and had me laughing. The set was perfect too: Aimee's shaded science lab.

When I have a moment, I'm going to play with Avimator and see what I can come up with.

What we need to have are more very high-tech concepts that are very approachable. There's this word, "folksonomy", that I've never liked. It sounds like some kind of alien evisceration device, and if that sounds paranoid, let's just say I like "tagging" better. There's times when I'm dear to jargon, but I believe to use a tool properly, it's best to reduce the complexity of how to describe it to the most palatable common-denominator possible, and not even a lowest one. An example from my life is "techno", which I interpreted to mean "TECHNOlogy-based music". The "technical" definition is much narrower, and to this day, we still have a nightmare of electronic music substyles. It's verbose, it's a turnoff, and it prevents people from actually doing.

Sometimes, it's nice when you're thrown in the midst of an unexpected situation and you react. You may blurt out honest exclamations that wouldn't have come to fruition otherwise. Think too much and what comes out is too polished, too clean, too meaningless—I know I've been there before. It's like, throw someone in the middle of an alien landscape… "WHAT THE HECK?!?" The thrill!

At the turn of the century, I used to look at the website of the band, Psykosonik, for updates on their experiments. It's no longer at the original location, but as grace would have it, Archive.org have some temporal incarnations of it stored. Psykosonik had some virtual reality explorations open. I think one of the truely profound things I realized early on (and I'm glad I did) was the lonely hopelessness to be found in many of these "worlds". Myst, one of my favorite games of all time, initially took place on a deserted island.

One of the places I originally heard about Second Life was on CNET. Incidentally, this is also where I heard of Psykosonik's VR bits, albeit, further back, when I had a satellite dish that worked and watched more TV. I don't watch TV at the present. I have a lot of fond mid-90s memories, including surfing the Internet for the first time. This was before the rise of Googledom, and I was content to dream up queries of websearches at school and come home and plug them in. At the time, I used an array of search engines. I feel recluctant at present to go further than Google, but I know if I don't, I may miss out on something great. Now, in 2006 AD, I often do the same thing at home… think up queries to plug into Second Life's finder.

Which is unforgiving.

I'm not the best speller, much as I may attempt to be (which is not to be confused with being a bona fide literary champion), and FIND doesn't make allowances for mispellings. And searches are inclusive. Searching for "pet cats"—as a dear friend gave me an example of—looks for that exact string, not the separated words "pet" AND "cats". So "Earl's Pet Cats" would come up, but not "Cats and Pets and More Galore!". I often wonder how many queries are missed.

Here's another one to chew the cud over: ever see one of those Mafia peeps who has their SL family listed under Profile Picks? I know plenty. Picks is intended for places, not people or things, and yet… heck, even I use it to show a history of… me! 10 isn't enough; there's space for at least 15, barring scrolling. And, it's a one-way dead-end. Consider what it'd be like if we could store freebies and link to other people's profiles.

Think about that for a moment.

In our world, there are lots of "codes in the open" that can be deciphered by anyone willing to learn more. I fancy a lot of symbolism myself, not being a fan of impregnable secrets that discourage the curious. For example, when I laugh "RUR RUR RUR", this is done for several reasons (beside my trademark flair). One is a blunt reference to Rossum's Universal Robots. Why? In part, because of my technological fascination. Also in part, because as a child, my Dad dubbed me the "robot boy" due to my repetitive motions, which were later found to be because of Asperger's Syndrome, and which I eventually ended up putting to very good use as a pianist. It's not quite the equivalent of my own handkerchief code, but over time, it's amassed.

One reason why I wish I had a time machine is because I'd like to go back in time and view the early years of many people who've inspired me. It'd be kind of voyeuristic, but I always got a kick out of those TV show episodes showing the origins of a certain character. Highlander: The Series was full of those. "How did you come to be this way?" is the operative question. Mom always told me I'd have greater appreciation for my Dad if I had seen him working hard in the cafe. I don't think I understood quite what that meant, until recently.