My Mom and Bro came back to the family home… it's been awhile. When they arrived, they found me on Second Life. I've talked about it at great length to them, they got sick of it for awhile but I've told them of my newfound joy. Bro (whose name is Merritt) and I watched Kung-Fu Hustle, sub not dub, and we found it even better than Shaolin Soccer.??(There's even a sly nod to it in there, as well as other stylish parodies.) Stephen Chow did an exceptional job bridging the worlds of international cinema: there's a lot of cliches in the film, as well as cliches that are absurdly twisted, and things you expect to happen but?turn out quite?differently, yet pleasantly?(like a love story, or who the "bad guys" really are). It's got such a high rating on IMDB too, relatively speaking (I was going to say "for a martial arts flick" but that sounds perorative).

My lack of theory of mind sometimes frustrates me. It also makes me a better explainer. I don't need a psychiatrist because I've got this blog, and through efforts spread over time, I definitely can see the improvement. My confusion glares through at inappropriate moments, but I'm told it's what makes me so endearing too. (I'm happy to be thought of this way, as it wasn't always this cheery.) I'd like to share a quote from Philip K. Dick:

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."

That's crazy talk! But o so true.

There's been exciting things happening on Teen Second Life. 782 Naumova wrote me to personally share adventures from his blog, The Second Age. He's got a great thing going, and it reminds me that for those of you reading this who aren't in SL, it's like a view into another universe, and so's this for me. Snapzilla even has a teen sector. I sometimes wonder what'd it be like if there were other grids layered above and below the current one, so it would be more, well, three-dimensional.

Lots of bughunting going on, if you've been engaged in the SL 1.7 Preview?and have noticed anything amiss, be sure to file a bug report from the Help menu and check out this thread for bugs reported by your fellow Residents, including yours truely. I don't know how I even find some of this stuff, it just strikes me in the natural course of being myself. Most of the bugs I've sent in have related to UI issues. Some say this is merely aesthetics; I of course, having such strong sensitivity and perception into these matters acculumated over time, heartily disagree. There are times I can almost feel an "emotion" emanating from a machine, and not just: it's the byproduct of interactions between the user and the computer. Sometimes I see these hostile, tense lines, like a halo, an aura, and it displeases me greatly. I'm very partial to my User Interfaces and have tastes that are useable and practical, shared by many. In some ways,?I am merely a composite, a reflection, something that wouldn't have come to be were it not for the energy of others. I might just be an invisible, unheard spirit, roaming cyberspace…