Now playing in New World Notes!

New links to new articles, posted fresh daily. (Well, 3-4 times a week, usually.)

And feel free to post comments on each of them here, if you prefer not to use the publicly-viewable Comments section of the blog.

THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN SECOND LIFE, PART I: BARBIE FAUNA

Barbie Fauna partly owes her presence in Second Life to a headlong tumble from the back of a prize stallion some seven years ago.

"One morning back in 1996," she tells me, "I was riding the same horse as I had been all year, and out of the blue, he tripped, and I heard that loud pop, and then landed head first into the track, and heard my neck crack three times..."

NEW WORLD NOTES' LINK OF THE WEEK
Every week, I hope to highlight one or more current entries from other Second Life bloggers. I'll be scanning my SL blog ring for cool, provocative, informative entries to point to, but I also welcome everyone to send me links to their own SL-related writing, or that of others: e-mail me at [email]hamlet@secondlife.com[/email], or IM Hamlet Linden in-world.

This week's link comes from...

eeeps

There I go again, Hamlet, missing the obvious.

Pardon me.

Heh, it's not a cut off, it's a teaser!

If you'd like to think about and discuss Martin Luther King Jr. and how his legacy relates to SL, here's a place to do it:

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/01/happy_mlk_jr_da.html

And as promised, the first part of the Philip Linden interview:

GREENSPANNING THE GLOBE-- PHILIP LINDEN INTERVIEW, PART I

It's a little like interviewing the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board-- if Alan Greenspan was a heavy metal guitarist who lived in a stucco mansion on a hill, and there was a torch-wielding mob outside. (Figuratively speaking, of course.)

Hello Hamlet!
Just wanted to say Good bye. I will miss you.

I hope you don't leave, Andie; please IM me and tell me what's going on!

Meanwhile, Part II of the Philip Linden interview:

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/01/greenspanning_t_1.html

Hamlet,

I understand that my question thread I posed was a long one - and I'm sure it just wasn't possible to include the entire text of my question. But I feel like I got a flippant answer from Phil on my question - likely because the entire text of my question wasn't presented to him. I was *really hoping* he would have read my whole question as I posted it, and responded in short-format in NWN. It looks like all Phil saw was the couple sentences you pulled out of my question.

Here is the link to my original question, as posted:

/18/89/32720/1.html#post345314

Here is the question, and Phil's answer, as posted on NWN:




Phil is answering my question completely out of context... Now I feel even more frustrated than before I even responded to your thread and posted my question in the first place.

I didn't ask Philip if he would be "removing" the restrictions on event posting. I asked if he would be "loosening" the restrictions. I understand Phil's concerns over residents abusing the event calendar, but there is a HUGE difference between asking the event calendar to allow 2 or 3 similar events in one location per day, and the 1000 events per location per day that Phil lists in his example. SL has residents across many timezones, and there are certain events I'd like to make available to them.

How can I get Phillip's attention, Hamlet? Can I call LL? Is there an email address I can paste my question thread in and send it to him - where it will actually get read? Could you ask him to read it?

Thanks!

Travis

Travis, I encourage you to re-post your question in the appropriate New World Notes entry, and I'll encourage Philip Linden to answer it there. You're right that it was impossible to include the massive context of your original post into a single question-- it was difficult for me-- so I recommend that you try to re-frame it in as concise a manner as possible-- i.e., 2-3 sentences.

Thanks, Hamlet... Will do

Repost in this entry, I mean:

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/01/greenspanning_t_1.html

Hammy's my hero.

JENNA FAIRPLAY AND MASLOW'S HIERARCHY OF BOOTY

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/01/the_five_people_2.html

For the longest time, Jenna's nightclub, The Edge, has been among the most popular spots in Second Life, so when I clicked her place at random, I was expecting that our interview would be all about how her phalanx of casino games, live DJs, and half-naked pole dancers had transformed her into the ruling impresario of the in-world club scene. I wasn't quite expecting her to tell me that a Jewish-Russian immigrant psychologist who taught at Brandeis was the one who'd taken her to the top.

"Well," she explains, "I go by Maslow Hierarchy." In Maslow's model, human need is shaped like Jenna's pyramid nightclub, with the base being the fundamental requirements for survival, the second layer being safety and security, and at the pyramid's apex, self-actualization.

"I didn't know Maslow had booty in his hierarchy," I note...

THE SOLDIER'S MISTRESS

... As the conversation on the war in Iraq winds down, I impulsively invite him to tour our own war zone, in Jessie. At the time of our talk, a group of dedicated wargamers had converted the damage-enabled “free fire” area into a Western European town, circa World War II.

“The WWIIOLers, they're called,” I tell Dane. “A lot of them are [real life] vets. From the [American] South, too, so you'll see a lot of Confederate flags.”

Dane laughs, glancing around. “Yeah, I saw.”

But when we arrive, the only person in Jessie is an old bald dwarf in stockings and high heels.

“I just want to dance,” Jackee Satyr announces. To prove his point, he performs a minuet on top of an arch draped with German flags.

I ask Jackee where all the other WWIIOLers went.

“I think they got bored,” he says, and returns to his ballet steps.

ALL WORK AND NO FAIRPLAY

On whether losing some clubs will be good for the diversity of the Second Life world.
Nope. Problem is to the new player. They want to make Linden [Dollars] and bottom line is, sex sells. And there is a demand. Always will be. And as clubs fail, up rise the sexual venues. But more extreme. More grief reports. The [Lindens] will only bring up what they look to take down. The explicit content. Look at who beat me for the first time in months. Won’t name the club, but the name, the picture, their posts, say it all. [And indeed, on examination, all of these are highly explicit. - HL] Sex sells and is for most new players the path they take [to make Linden Dollars], ‘cause it’s the easiest...

ALL WORK AND NO FAIRPLAY, UPDATED

Hamlet Linden: So how's life been this past week?

Jenna Fairplay: Difficult... with all the changes, as you know, clubs are suffering. Those who are doing good are supported by outside sources, it seems, and those who aren’t are feeling the pinch. Many new clubs that were to open didn’t, and those that tried didn’t last...

THE GATES COME TO SECOND LIFE

The thing that people seem to love most about The Gates in Central Park is, it brings people together. Stockbrokers and artists, working class families and socialites in Prada, everyday people of New York all come together and share the same experience, as brought to them by the mad vision of Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude.
After Aestival Cohen and her friend Lex Neva launched their own Gates project in Second Life, the everyday people of Second Life showed up too: a samurai warrior, a little girl with Margaret Keane eyes, a space commando and his dropship, an industrial designer with two adjustable chairs in his pocket, a transformer robot, a half-naked man with massive pecs, a furry in a flying vintage automobile, and so on...

ANSHE AT THE GATES

The Gates of Central Park came down last week in New York City, as planned, after they'd completed their successful run. Last week, the Gates of Briarcliff Manor were also uprooted from that hilly island. And though their creators also saw them as a tremporary art installation, it wasn't part of the plan for them to be steamrolled so a German land speculator could turn the place into a gated resort community for the French.

But this is, more or less, what happened...

THE TRAGICS OF TRINGO

... Unsurprisingly, success means a level of in-world fame for Kermitt Quirk.

"I dunno if I'd call them fans," says Quirk. "I don't get packs of people running after me or anything. But if I turn up to Tringo games people seem very amazed to actually meet 'the creator'. But then," he adds, grinning, "they start cursing me when the right pieces don't come out for them."

Just as unsurprisingly, Tringo has its share of Resident detractors, who believe the game has come to overwhelm their society.

In a testament to its influence, Jinny Fonzarelli, a British Philosophy/Theology student and Resident who runs Thinkers, a group devoted to discussing political and metaphysical topics, now plans to dedicate an upcoming debate to "The Tringoization of Society". Which would be, if you like, a cultural debate held within a game about the mini-game that's beginning to impact the community of the larger game.

"It ain't really Tringo I object to," Fonzarellis tells me. "It's the fact that it's everywhere, all the time. Games are meant to be an escape, not where you live. Between Tringo and pointless contests, I know many people feel their Second Life has been immensely devalued."

THE FREEFORM IDENTITY BEBOP OF EBONI KHAN

I met Ms. Eboni Khan, a Black Republican Buddhist Fortune 1000 executive who is testing the appeal of upscale social events with no explicit sexual content, by moving my mouse over a list of Residents online during the day, and clicking on it with my eyes closed...

VIRTUALLY TRUE: EMBEDDED JOURNALISM IN AN ONLINE WORLD (A SXSW TALK)

Or, how Hamlet Linden became a way better journalist than me...

WATCHING THE DETECTIVES

Laura Skye had an inkling that her lover was unfaithful, and had gone back to tomcatting in the racier nightclubs, where the working girl avatars come with loose clothing and even looser morals. So she hired herself a private investigator, to do some snooping.

"I found out he went with an escort," she tells me at my office, "and we had a big argument. And then he promised no more. But I didn't trust him." So she clicked on the Find button-- Second Life's equivalent of the yellow pages-- and put "detective" in the search slot.

Which is how she wound up at the office and the private cave hideout of Markie Macdonald, P.I.

SWEATING THE DETAILS

"I'm a Chinese girl," the new resident tells me, by way of introduction. "My work is playing this game for my boss in real life, and my boss asked me for 500 Lindens a day, or I'll be fired, and I'm poor in Second Life and real life, so don't have any chosen.

"So," she concludes, "I'm in trouble now, sir."

"Why does your boss want 500 Lindens a day?"

"Because," she explains, "500 Lindens equals US$2, and US$1 equals 8 Yuan. So I have to finish this task… Do you know my job now, please sir?"

And of course I do know what her job is. The wonder is that I haven't met her kind sooner. At the moment, she's a voluptuous blonde woman with white angel wings, and a spear in her hand. But she's also the latest incarnation of an even more elusive figure-- and perhaps one that's just as fantastic...