Now playing in New World Notes!

THE IRRESISTABLE ICONOGRAPHY OF GUNS 'N BABES

"My own SL nickname, 'Nethermind', is from a graphic novel that I wrote when I was 13, called 'Women Of War'," Ms. Bliss tells me. "Basically, it was a renegade troupe of superhero females that kept the balance of power in the world by less than socially acceptable methods-- it was sort of an anti-heroine saga. When I saw the Pixel Dolls clothing line paired with Seburo weapons one night, it brought all those memories back. Additionally, my good friend Kiedis was hosting several spy-related musical events at Belle Feu during this time, so he was a great help in the brainstorming for that last panel... Kiedis and I have spent many long hours at Sunset Jazz club listening to Astrin Few and Flaming Moe. After a great set one night, we took these shots, aiming for a Mr. and Mrs. Smith scenario in a seductive setting. The dance has many meanings in the entry: it's a dance of reignited passion, a dance for control, and ultimately a dance to the death. I found it more mysterious to allude to his assassination rather than show any actual firing..."

FURRY LIKE ME

"I made it for you," Relee Baysklef tells me, giggling. "I know you're interested in us furries, and I thought you might like to look the part when you report on us."

The veteran squirrel has invited me into her Aerodrome lab (the palm-locks on her sliding doors are paw-shaped), and given me a mysterious envelope to drag over my avatar. And when I do, my human head goes bulbous, my body goes round, my torso shrivels.

"Ahh there you go," Relee says, watching approvingly. "Shrink shrink shrink. Since your name is Hamlet, I thought you might like being a hamster."

In seconds the transformation is complete. As is my urge to pun.

"UNFURGETTABLE!"

"It's got a little hamster tail," Ms. Baysklef points out, "and the head, but otherwise normal."

"FUR GOD'S SAKE!"

Relee just giggles more.

ART FOR ART'S SAKE

When the students arrived to take Nylon Pinkney's inaugural life drawing class last week, they found the live model they were supposed to sketch had gone AWOL. Artemis Fate had come to draw with them, but when the model didn't show, the sleek catwoman with ebony skin stripped her clothes off, tossed them into inventory, and struck a pose on the stage herself...

Can I join the SL Blog ring?

Sure, Nimue! If you can, please post a link to your blog in this topic . I check that one whenever I update the blog ring...

THE FETED INNER CORE, REVEALED!

Many said Prokofy Neva was mad, and that his descriptions of a so-called "Feted Inner Core" (or FIC), a secret society of Second Life aristocrats, were little more than fevered rantings. How was it possible, after all, that a cabal of subscribers had become so powerful, they'd gained direct control over an entire world's future? There were intimations they existed, to be sure, but even those seemed like the glimmerings of a receding mirage, to most. Including, I confess, to me.

Until last sunset, that is, when someone quietly and anonymously slipped a series of annotated screenshots into my inventory. They depicted a well-known Resident (and suspected FIC grand council suzerain), caught in the act of unspeakable machinations. What follows, unabridged, is the journal of this unknown investigator's discovery...

A new world visionary ponders the future role of Second Life...

[C]yberpunk godfather, Austin bon vivant, and Wired blogger Bruce Sterling posted his own characteristically imagistic, sardonically optimistic speculation in reply:

"No bread? Let them eat prims."

"I would guess that the flashpoint comes when somebody designs something out of prims that actually enables Gappers* to eat... I have to wonder what the reaction to SECOND LIFE would be if somebody simply ported satellite links and laptops right into a starvation-riddled refugee camp. Learning to type would be no picnic, but really, given the utter boredom and cramped conditions in real-life refugee shelters, wouldn't SECOND LIFE be hugely popular? Who on earth would have more fun there than someone whose first life was utterly dysfunctional? How much would it cost to just try the experiment and see?"

YOUR CHEATING HEART

Beaux Grayson was on the sundeck of his home, curled up on the couch with a slender brunette, when his wife walked in.

"And went," as Beaux subsequently put it in a message he sent to his Second Life friends, "NUTZ."

She demanded to know who this woman in thigh-high boots on the screen was, laying there with her husband's avatar. So Beaux told her. "I gave her the facts (married, English, kids, etc.), but not the name and that we have known each other about two weeks." He tried to be as open with her as he could; he begged her to join him in Second Life so she could be with him there, especially on those days when he was traveling on business, and going in-world from his hotel room, when there wasn't much else to do. ("I could go out to bars, but found it 'safer' to have my social interaction on-line."

Whatever explanations he gave her, they apparently weren't enough...

MIDNIGHT MOVIES

I've always wanted to watch that movie where the legless crackshot midget straps himself to a fleet-footed armless midget so that together, they become the ultimate gunfighter-- but I never thought I'd have to shrink down to miniature form myself, to finally check it out. El Topo, the ultimate 70's cult film, Alejandro Jodorowsky's meditation on God, death, and one man's quest for meaning in a savage world, is now being streamed for free viewing in a tiny theater on the North side of Garmisch, just off the highway past the Lookers NightClub & Casino.

LINKS OF THE WEEK

Prototype Linden just passed me a link that's too cool not to add now: Landmarker, a web-based map of Second Life that lets you folksonomically tag locations, add Snapzilla and Flickr-based screenshots to these places, and search through locations tagged by other Landmarker users-- sort of a del.icio.us for Second Life...

MYSTERY STREAMING THEATER

The place: rooftop of the Elbow Room bar in Mare (100,44), last Wednesday.

The targets: government and corporate films from the 50s and 60s, including "American Women: Partners in Research", a tribute to the influence of housewives in the creation of coffee percolators, and "Innocent Party", fear-based edutainment on the perils of contracting STDs, along with an unidentified science fiction film featuring a mad scientist and a woman's head.

The players: your acerbic host Elex the Bartender, assorted bar patrons, Hamlet Linden, a blue dragon, and cyborg counter-terrorist agent J.C. Denton from Deus Ex.

The object: Sixty minutes of abject ridicule, in-jokes, political satire, silly risque, and no-prisoners, free-fire sarcasm.

Highlights below, followed by a behind-the-scenes from head Elex Dusk...

For E3 week, many of the developers in the Game Competition are talking about their own games:

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/

Just go to NWN, start on Monday, and keep reading throughout the week!

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/05/dunking_lindens.html

I'm fairly sure if Honda had to issue a product recall on its latest line of hybrid vehicles to repair a major manufacturing defect, they wouldn't make the CEO sit on a gangplank in his rainbow skivvies while a mob of irate customers heaved balls at the nearby target. Then again, if the alternative is a form apology letter, it might not be a totally bad idea...

THE LONG ENGAGEMENT OF LAURA SKYE

In their first lives, Dave Barmy asked Laura Skye to marry him more than two years ago, in the month of December 2003. She'd agreed to do so at the time, but some things happened since then, which required him to ask again. Namely, they both got Second Life accounts, and then he paid for the services of an in-world working girl, and it almost brought their real life partnership to an end. That’s all covered here, but at the time of its publication, Laura had only let me know that his act of online infidelity had almost ended their live-in relationship.

She hadn't told me how it scotched their wedding plans, too...

BUSINESS MODEL PROTOTYPE

With a community so large and competition so potentially fierce, it isn’t enough anymore to create a cool thing and hope it catches on through mere word of mouth. No, you also want to do some advance consumer research, and when you’re about ready to launch your product, create a solid distribution and marketing strategy...

EVOLVING NEMO

Surina Skallagrimson once created a school of fish, but at the start, most of them were pretty damn dumb. Some of them would wander off and get totally lost, for example, while others were undone by the fundamental laws of Newtonian motion, and simply crapped out in mid swim.

So she did the most obvious thing: she killed them all off, pretty much. The ones that were just a tad less stupid than a box of rocks she spared, and replenished the rest that she didn’t. These she sent back to swimming, and the cycle began again. To all the failed fish, death; to the few that showed potential, a chance to join a new generation of the species.

Repeat this process a few hundreds times, and you really start to get somewhere...

People keep talking 'bout war in Jessie, war in Jessie, war in Jessie.
And I'm here to say, Dudes, you want a war, I GOT YOUR WAR RIGHT HERE.

"They can detect surroundings and maneuver around objects," Eckhart tells me, when I meet him in Rausch under a no-fire truce. "When they fire, they detect your velocity; and to target, leading when they shoot." In other words, his 'bots gauge your speed, and fire their energy bolts slightly ahead of you, to make sure you intersect with them.

"Whenever they are attacked," he continues, "they tell all other 'bots, and they gang up on you. Unless a 'bot is currently engaged-- then it just adds you to an enemy list..."

GRINDING THE WORLD

The great thing about the Tony Hawk skateboard games—and this is pretty much true of every great game—is that when you’re finished playing them, the experience is so compelling, you see the real world for a time through the scrim of the gameplay. Spend a few hours pulling stunts in digital Tony Hawk land, step away from the Playstation, and for awhile there, the whole world outside looks like a skatepark, with every banister and railing a potential place to grind on, every sloping wall and street ramp your own private Ollie launchpad.

I thought about this after bumping into the latest Jack Digeridoo joint, a superhip, intermittently dreamy skateboard video scored to Beastie Boys and Folk Implosion, featuring sweet grinds from rooftops of shopping malls, and high Ollies off the glass atrium in the Welcome area...

MAKING LOVE

Phil Murdock had a hankering for his neighbor Snow Hare; to launch a romance with her, he hit on the most logical solution available to him: he got on his motorcycle and crashed it into Ms. Hare’s living room.

“Break the ice,” Phil shrugs. “Nothing like a motorcycle crash and a ‘sorry’.” He’s a brawny, bare-chested guy with close-cropped hair (not unlike the photograph in his First Life profile), and keeps a nickel-plated .45 crammed in the front of his leather pants. “It’s been love ever since.”

That was last June; their first month together in-world was a whirlwind of clubbing, shopping sprees, and building. Come July, they started creating custom animation to sell. Phil would design them off offline in Poser, then upload and attach them to their avatars, so they could try them out. By that time, they both knew their feelings for each other were real and deep, and not just confined to their avatars. Trouble was, in real life, they lived several states and 700 miles away from each other.

And so to move things along, they hit on the most logical solution available to them: they created a kiss...

BIG GAY OLMY'S BIG GAY SIM

... What I love about this place most is the sculpture created by Stoneself Karuna, at Athena's shore. It begins with a strewn pile of discarded closet doors. Those doors seem to rise off the ground, and in their rising, transform into open frames in a multitude of colors, and free from gravity's pull, move together toward the sky.

SIMULBLOGGING

... In other words, you are watching me in-world while watching myself in-world. While watching me blog about it here.

STRIKE A POSE

I was skeptical that all this was possible, so I gave Hiro the text of a soliloquy from, well, Hamlet, and challenged him to incorporate some dozen animations into it. In a few days, he came back with a Posecube for me to wear, and built a stage for me to stand on, while I typed Hamlet's "Oh what a rogue and peasant slave..." soliloquy in the chat window, line by line. On every trigger cue, my avatar bounded across the stage or shifted positions-- at "Who calls me villain?", looking around suspisciously; at "About, my brain!", sitting down and thinking furiously, and so on...

FATED INNER CHOMSKY

Everything you think you know about your world is a lie. You may believe you live in a free society, but it’s really controlled by an elite upper class that has shaped its development from behind the scenes since its inception. You assume you have a fair shot at making a decent living or having your legitimate grievances heard through democratic redress, but the system is rigged so the elite ever has its way. No real dissent is possible, either, because the elite controls the media—rather, the media is part and parcel of the elite— and through it, all protest is marginalized, all consent is manufactured.

This summarizes, more or less, Noam Chomsky’s sociopolitical analysis of America, as expressed over nearly four decades as one of the country’s most notorious iconoclasts, through copious essay, innumerable public talks, and worldwide media appearances.

It also happens to summarize, more or less, Prokofy Neva’s sociopolitical analysis of Second Life, as expressed through innumerable posts on Second Life’s official Forums. Until, that is, after several months of accusation and acrimony, Linden Lab permanently suspended Neva from the Forums...

AMERICANA REBORN

I lift my shining prim besides the golden door...

INTO THE ARMS OF AMERICA

Getting a little more love from the world after being in an online world...