Fishy Treats

Posted on: November 29, 2005

The title of this entry comes from something Iumi Cline said to me. Yes, I have dancing seals flapping about in my head.

I HAVE REALIZED A DIVINE TRUTH.

THIS TRUTH = the fish used to make my sushi shoehat have (had?) legs.

This is a profound revelation, one which I shared with Stella Costello upon awakening and realizing it. Its gravity's rainbow is quickly amplified when you deduce that fish with legs not only taste better ("Fitter Happier" like Radiohead sings), but are directly symbolic of evolution. This isn't some Darwinian shiznit, this is really how life came to be in Second Life. Along with polygonal snakes and birds, leading up to primitars and the modern-day avatar.

I'm known for my rapid-fire bursts of energy, but an area I really excel in is being a sniper: taking longshots from sims away and aiming, not with a violent weapon, but beaming out love. I've never played Killer 7 but I can relate. Dayum.

Today, I read Gwyneth Llewelyn's newest blog entry in several sittings. It's a long mutha, but worth every word like a Universal Constructor putting together a perfect children's toy. There's a picturebreak in the middle, one that had me absolutely giggly because of how literally that looks like a NetHack map without the lines connecting each room to another in some frigid orgy of object-oriented programming. Cubes: look bad on the outside, possibly fulfilling and joyous within. Hopped inworld for a spell, Gwyn was in the middle of typing a reply back to my IM-to-email, and we continued the convo for awhile.

What is an avatar?

The usage of "Avatar" to mean "The graphical representation of yourself in a shared digital world" was first used in 1984-1988 in a product that was then called Lucasfilm's Habitat. Chip Morningstar coined the usage. I was with him at the time. Yes, it was derived from the Hindi usage. This significantly predates any other similar usage that I am aware of.

F. Randall Farmer said that in a great compile @ jill/txt. This also predates Second Life. I've mentioned Habitat before, and it'd be criminal if I didn't say the word again. While P@P ROX! (blandly called "point-to-point teleportation") fury runs rampant on the SL Forums, so does myopia, while more relevant issues "hide in plain sight" and are left for snipers such as myself to mine (and mind). Ooo check out Randy's Virtual Communities Reading List too.

I am becoming increasingly aware (as a sentient being) of my intuition in these matters.

I've had times going off about us Resis (which is effectively a warmer term for "avatars") becoming increasingly controlling of the microworld and macroworld as we see fit, within SL. Having more choice over where our bodies land when we beam ("P@P ROX!") is a true analogue to being able to consciously finetune a metasexual arousal. This is not a chinstroker's concept—why, have you ever seen a newcomer freak out over continually being loop-animated by a disappeared drink or unable to stop dancing? That's what it's like to lose control of your body. FEAR.

Let's talk more about control.

CrystalShard Foo released The Rez-Foo! Programmatically, problem is as follows: big builds can't be linked as a single object due to technical limits. As a result, when rezzing a house, esp. for someone new to it all, bits get lost or misaligned and it's a really crappy experience. Rez-Foo!, which I ended up seeing in action courtesy of the scriptkitty herself, essentially allows YUGE constructs to act as if they are a single linkset. That's the simplest way I know to put it. No worries about selecting each part, and no manual object-shifting to be bogged down by.

I'm publically hoping this tech will be put to good use widely, cost offset by the sheer utility and how much easier this makes moving around massive things (up to a 1/4 sim in size). I'll just say it makes castles as easy to flip as flapjacks!

Another thing I'll namedrop for now is the "Libraries in Science Fiction" article by James Gunn, a great read, among others. It got me thinking about how civilizations (or lack thereof) organize their data for future accessibility. I came into the world of Second Life early on having lived in an actual library, which was the Second Life Public Library at the time, direcuratored (love that verb) by my Jadey. Along with my frequently-stated hole of there not being more anime-related content in SL would have to be the gripe of not having better information retrieval mechanisms. I don't just mean this in a search enginey way, but I notice there's loads of gold info in the forum archives that hasn't been mined.

Someday I'll have a crazy dream pertaining to this and do something about it.

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