At first blush, it seems absurd. At second blush, you may be blushing precisely because of how obvious it is. I thought about this possibility shortly after reading about the rumored new visualizer in iTunes 8. While not a revolutionary leap, consider the gap: most VJ (Video Jockey) software is hard to use but can produce spectacular effects. Their much simpler siblings, music visualizers which "read" the music to provide trippy animations which match what you're hearing, offer some of the same effects but with a limited degree of control — you may be able to cycle through visualizations at the touch of a key like MilkDrop can, but compositing and other fundamentals of a full-fledged VJ program are out of the question.
Why does this make sense? I'll explain: several years ago, it seemed laughable that Apple would enter the audio sequencer market — there were plenty of fine 3rd-party solutions, including Emagic's Logic line. Well, in 2002, Apple bought Emagic, and Logic went Mac-only. Further in the timeline, Apple took the guts of Logic and wove it into GarageBand, an easy way of making your own music, and the audio studio equivalent to what iPhoto does for budding photographers, or what iMovie does for aspiring filmmakers.
It's time to debunk the mindjunk and chop the slop… about me!
Torley paints a happy spin/fluff on everything
What kind of crap is this? This criticism is functionally useless.
And you now have a choice of how you want to hear me:
Normal Torley
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Not-Normal Torley
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To put it more diplomatically: read back through my blog posts (both personal & professional), Issue Tracker comments, forum posts, etc. and you'll see 1,000s of times when I not only acknowledged problems (from little UI bugs to critical crashes/content loss), but actioned them onwards.
After you've read all that, or even an ample portion and made the connections, then you have a solid base to work from. But people who go, "Torley's just in lala rose-tinted neon land!" would benefit from doing research. This isn't a SL problem. It's a human problem which speaks more about the person saying it than me. (E.g., someone has a problem with being happy, or is intensely suspicious of exuberant enthusiasm and wrongly perceives it as being "fake".) And it's often paired with passive-aggressive behavior, because I hardly ever get those questions sent to me personally; they tend to be scattered comments on blogs and whatnot, where I'm unlikely to see them.
Simple: if you have a genuine concern I can help with and want to collaborate on advancing it, contact me directly. Ask questions, don't make unfounded assumptions, and it's likely we'll do great things together.
Think that's controversial? It is, and with good reason: in an era where Stephen Colbert (playing a character… many people don't know that) and Jon Stewart are regularly touted as being more entertaining and informative than so-called "serious" anchors and reporters, we choose what comes to us.
In many cases, that means we'd rather listen to what makes sense and appeals to our values, what makes us feel that we're right. Opinions we can agree with, facts — well, nevermind the facts, Ma'am — there's a newspaper or a blog for each & everyone. And in cases where those voids aren't filled yet, they will soon be, often out of passion and/or moneymaking opportunities.
On one hand, there are rational signs of danger: pseudoscientific quackery being touted as "herbal cures", bigfoot bloat, CNN's front page prioritizing celeb gossip that rivals Perez Hilton sans the crude white scrawlings (but isn't that what the people want?), and too much nonsense to… make sense of.
On the other, not only is it in our power to choose, we feel more active getting a voice out there, lending a slant to stories we care about. I know this daily through popurls, the mighty 1-page aggregator. The sites it tabulates are many of the Net's prominent voices, with politics, sex, scandal (a mix of the aforementioned two), and WTFness colliding with more casual human interest and tech tales. It is a stark, gripping overview of what we want to matter.
It wouldn't be long until people paid news to be written for them.
Second Life needs remarkable marketing & promotion. If you don't care, heed my caution, for this video can induce love surges and compel you to experience inworld for yourself.
And if you're already a Resident, stay tuned for future followup, and share this with a friend who should be in SL with you.
