Sometimes, “persistence” gets a bad rap because it’s coupled with “annoyance”. As in, a “persistent salesperson” who refuses to consensually leave you alone, until you make that choice to walk away or put down the phone. It’s true depending who you are and which perspective you’re experiencing, aggravating annoyance may be another’s pleasant persistence.

We, meaning humans in many societies, are taught to pursue their dreams and never give up. That’s a sound general message, but lacks the detail to inform you when there are things worth quitting so that you’re freed up to do something you prefer more.

Persistence is an art and science, and while there’ll always be subjective frames of reference, some people are more pleasantly persistent than others. One modern example is Mike Belmont aka M dot Strange, who labored for over 3 years to create his wild animation masterpiece, We Are the Strange:

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In Second Life, I’ll usually take on a specific avatar appearance and keep that for a few days or even weeks, then switch to something else. I never forget my past looks, as I save each one in its own folder with a date. If you don’t know how, see this video tutorial:

Then in turn, they’re all inside My Inventory > Body Parts > :: AVATARS :: (I gave it a fancy name to stand out). For example, 4 recent transformations on my alt, Torley Olmstead, are:

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Text is a funny thing: conventionally, it imbues someone with an indefinite amount of time, such that they may collect, edit, and share their thoughts. In other words, there’s a much further distance from initial idea conception to getting the word (ahem) out.

On the other hand — with respect to prior inventions like the telegraph and fax machine which prompted quicker communication — “realtime” chat on computers has shortened the distance greatly.

As a result, I’ve noticed this amusing distinction: people I know and admire who can write intensely intellectual papers peppered with words I never knew existed, yet resort to “how r u?” when instant-messaging me. People who do prosper with correct punctuation in “IM” and all that usually tend to be faster typists — their bandwidth of the written word is a “fatter” one, so to speak, and they have more slack to play with, more grace for spending a few seconds to ^H and correct errors.

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is that it’s like hundreds of warring little tribes with too few chiefs to guide and unite them. And that is why despite its conceptual thrust of innovation, electronic music continues to largely sputter and stagnate faceless blobs, crushed mercilessly around a few visionary pockets. A hyperbolic interpretation of Sturgeon’s Law comes into effect, but I’m sure we can lower than crud-factor much further.

Superstar DJs and talented producers abound, but few popular leaders weave wonders across borders — and if they do, they’re usually not recognized as being “purely” electronic (see Madonna, who’s enlisted some top aces like William Orbit and Stuart Price). Whatever that means; and it might as well mean nothing. There continues to be a disconnect between the “popular” and “artistic”, and massive failure to recognize that one can be both.

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If your net-surfing adventures today have been disrupted by missing images, files failing to download, and other wack borkery, it could be related to the Amazon S3 service failure. Linden Lab and Second Life are affected too, because we host a number of things — including the viewer downloads and my video tutorials — via S3. We’ve redirected the former, but the latter are in limbo until this ceases.

Aside from a lack of elegant upload tools, S3 is generally very reliable and the last time I’ve encountered such a problem (in memory) was on Feb. 15, earlier this year. But today’s outage is worse, going on for several hours now, and it’s also added to Twitter’s woes — yup, no images on your Twitter account is related.

The blogosphere is burning, and I wish all the best to the folks working on getting things back to “normal”; you can see updates on the AWS Service Health Dashboard and click “more” for updates.

I of course posted an update to my latest Second Life blog post and am anxious for this to be over.

Buddhism isn’t just about meditation and denying self-gratification to attain a higher state of being. When I was bute a chylde, I visited a Buddhist Hell Theme Park in Thailand. Fun for the whole family: sculptures depicting tongues being torn out, lots of spikes and bodies on said spikes, and certainly heaping amounts of simulated fire and brimstone that would make other religions’ demons feel inadequate.

With great joy, my wife and I visited Higashiosaka (click to teleport), the first Buddhist Hell Theme Park in Second Life — the first I’ve ever seen, and likely the first there ever will be. Filled to the prim (pun intended) with scampering souls, corpse-crushing demons, and good ol’ Saṃghāta, that mountain that keeps squashing the sinners.

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I was trawling popurls, and noticed several headlines speculating about  Steve Wozniak being an iPhone line-cutter. Not long after, false alarm flinched back, but the masses had already laid judgment. Much can be said about general human tendencies to overreact and underperform.

I’m not so concerned about this more appropriately being tech-tabloid fodder than actual news, but I do care when rubbish gets printed without followup. The original story appeared on CNET, and after Woz himself commented, nothing done to correct the error aside from a brief:

Updated at 10 a.m. PDT with comment from Steve Wozniak.

Greg Sandoval, the reporter, didn’t even link to the comment to clarify confusion, nor summarize what it was about. Saying “I’m wrong, sorry” would’ve taken a minute or two at most.

Jack Loftus of Gizmodo, which echoed the slop, went further, retitling their article and posting a concise update.

I hope Greg Sandoval, Doug and Patrice Broussard (the cited sources), and others have already reached out to Woz to apologize — he’s a friendly enough guy, and much as this gives him publicity, it’s for the wrong reasons.

If you’re willing to spend the time to get something wrong, you should be at least as willing to invest in making it right.