When you first visit Jeffrey Ventrella's site, you'll find a cute graphic that loads pretty quickly and some links reminiscent of old skool websites. The labelling is morosely cheerful, with a gray "Virtual Creatures" tag pointing to two digital miniorganisms concerned with FOOD and SEX.?Click on it, and it'll take you to another page with a small installer package. Run the program, and you'll smile. I have it open right now as I'll describe what else unfolded.

I'm not going to talk about the man's biography, for if you want to see his resume, you can Google for it. I'll explain what I find so delightful about Ventrella's work, and its relevance (and irrelevance) to SL now?since he's currently a Linden, consulting for LL since January '05, info?which I also Googled for.

This Gene Pool program looks like well-aged Amiga software right down to the font. It'd make a spanking screensaver too. Even the mission statement grabs me: "preserve, celebrate, simulate BIODIVERSITY". I'm clicking and dragging these little d00ds that look like balloon animals and they're interacting. Some of them appear to be humping, so it's all good. Hehe… I just piled a whole bunch on top of each other. @_@ Lemme get a screenshot here…

That's unretouched. The variance is amazing. Some look like slugs, some snails. Lots of hot interspecies action. The colors help too. Just a very fun, compact toy to observe and gain a window into a certain microverse, and of course, interact with it (see where I'm going with this?). Like SL, Gene Pool will totally eat up your CPU.

In the world I exist in, I look for gems. They don't have to be obscure, but they often are. Fun little trinkets to collect that would work well in a gift basket, and can amuse curious minds of all ages. I emphasize that, all ages. Except, maybe, prenatal and dead. And therein lies… life!

Ventrella's website happens to be one of those rare, accessible finds, a veritable giftbasket-cum-cornucopia of plethorial goodies. Clearly there's specs info for the technically-savvy, and plenty enjoyable little noodlings to play with too, not unlike an early Cyan game. I went through, exploring the links,?seeing what each one led to. I wonder if Ventrella would ever package up all the tidbits in a simple installer or integrated program, and you could play each one like a module, a child's busybox. What especially captivates me is that even though the graphics can be crude, the motion is convincing. What better way to spend my early morning than lobbing seeds at a virtuavian?

Each bit of hypertext you click on leads you to a new gateway. D00d's got mad skillz. Check out how he maps music to shapes too, I totally get this shiznit. In fact, one of the reasons why I'm so drawn to what's going on here is because of his ideas. I really relate, am voluntarily lodged into this vortex, this magnificent potpourri of frantic fun and a wealth of wisdom at the same time.

Ever played Gravity Tetris? Fluid dynamics workouts, complete with?dithered Macintoshesque graphics??O I know, maybe you just want to see a stickman walk with its daddylonglegs. Hot damn, these aren't just great screensaver modules (passive), or pieces of manipulative edutainment (active), they're great, period.

/me?sits back and takes a deep breath.

Jeffrey Ventrella's done a lot of work with avatar faces. That is, like, how they emote. Now, the people in There didn't wig me out as much as the dogs. (I sincerely would have wanted to see what he could do with cats.) I went up a hill with some avatars and one guy pulled out his dog, and made it do tricks.?This is really something a still shot can't do justice to, so you should see it for yourself. It's part of what I always wanted in a liquid interface.

As an autistic person, I've had longstanding difficulties reading facial expressions. It's bad learning from "real people" precisely because it requires a lot of staring. This disturbs others, and is an uncontrolled, wildly unpredictable?and quite oftentimes too, uncomfortable?environment. I see a lot of benefits in reading avatar faces. I'm a big fan of Gestures in SL and get a big whoop out of watching the kickdance loop or my "yeah" fistpump and the many other articulations.

However, there's a current drawback, and that is: facial expressions are not as elastic and natural, and therefore not as helpful and conductive to learning. I don't know of a way to get more custom ones in, and you're stuck with two choices of smile: regular and extratoothy. You can mash up others, yes, to hideously hilarious?results. It's also not the easiest thing to have a big face on the screen and play through different anims automatically, as it requires the Gestures window to be open, if not a posing stand which might be able to do this too (but they tend to be more for fullbody than the face alone).

I still don't read facial expressions well, and there are a lot of signals I don't pick up on. I'm learning though, and when the process is engaging and warms my tummy, it makes stepping forward a more amenable ordeal. :) My interactions with computer interfaces border on the liquid at times, and I'm hoping for more of this as it makes things a lot easier. A practical example of what I'd like to see more of, in relational terms, is Ventrella's Tumbleweed Browser.?I recall seeing a joint project involving Apple comparable to this a long time ago (was it Kaleida?) but it's like the seeds were planted yet the harvest never came. Being able to morph and crossfade through animations like an analog mixer instead of a binary switch, controlling degrees of presence with variable-percentage intensity, would add so many new varieties of "feeling what you say"!

For me, I am hypersensitive to little things like latency. Part of this comes from my background in music?clockwork timing and a childhood of routine?and I seem to be more finetuned to it than most. I see gaps, stutters, holes, and it bothers me a lot. Lag, in SL, correlates with this. We'll never be 100% lagfree but I'm arduously fascinated by what gets better. Those who come to SL with little computer background have every right to generally wonder, "Why are things so slow?" or "What's lagging me?"?and to learn what's going on. Those are important questions, phrased incompletely, leading to more questions and answers. Ventrella, to me, holistically seems to have a grasp on all of this. His many theories point to a more fluid mechanic (if such a thing is possible) within online spaces. This includes what he terms "Avatar-Centric Communication". Read this and change your (Second) life. Use the term "avatology" more, spread the word?like puppeteering is an art, so is manifesting possession of your avatar.

It just keeps getting better and better. Incredible schtuff.

A chat bubble that emerges from the head of an avatar (such as in There) is a form of ectoplasm which is emitted from the brain (or mouth) of the avatar. It lives in the simulated worlds of avatars, and is therefore more like acoustic energy than an IM text message. The "old-style" form of avatar chat, which appears as lines of text in a window at the bottom of the screen, is inherently disconnected from the simulated world. "Avatar-Centric Communication" (There, Inc.) aimed to solve this problem. I believe we have only begun to explore the space of this new form of communication, especially in regards the next topic:

After sinking deeper, why am I not surprised that Jeffrey also links to an incredible balloon artist? And where else can you go on the Net to play with a jiggly feces species? I did recolor this one.

In case I haven't made it clear, I'm giving my recommendation of the highest order for you?to go and visit ventrella.com. Download the toys, upload your brain, and have phun!