Goodbye Cruel world 1

I posted the following to SL universe this morning. I don't have much time for blogging at the moment, and so although it is probably cheating and will get me expelled from the Good Bloggers' group, I am going to repost here.

And it's goodbye cruel world - forever!
Except, it rarely is, in Second Life. I am sorry I came late to this thread, what can I say, I have been busy, I missed the blog from Ordinal although it is linked and displayed on my blog, and so I only discovered the news this week.

I can understand all of the pressures and frustrations that Ordinal talks about, and I recognise that last straw thing. Also, my avatar seems to be a lot more volatile than I am in real life, and has done a fair bit of flouncing out, deleting builds, and deleting friends from lists... in real life I am lazy and I procrastinate and if friendships fail there it tends to be from lack of picking up the phone rather than a dramatic storming out or throwing of plates.

But... I have become increasingly irritated by the public door slamming. What's it for? If you leave and *don't* delete everything we won't take you seriously? If you leave and do delete everything, we just assume that if you change your mind and want to come back, you'll come back in another body (cf Starax). The mass deletion of stuff doesn't affect LL, it just affects the people left behind... and what is it for, really? I think of it like an artist having a bonfire...such a waste. Why not simply set everything free and put it out in a box? I'm sure Caledon could have found somewhere for *that*.

Maybe people of an aspergery type of mind like to draw a line in the sand and kill it all and have done with it. But many of the "goodbye cruel world" notecards and messages I've had over the past six years have been from the Drama Queens and game players... the ones who might easily approach you in an alt and ask what you think of their main, on the offchance that you won't recognise the batshit insane from the run of the mill....

I'm not accusing Ordinal of Drama Queendom, but it's one of those things you learn not to do over the course of your Second Life: just as you should never actually send that drunken email to your boss telling him he's an idiot, or lickable, or defrauding the company, while drunk... you should always sleep on the decision to delete and leave. Even the geekiest of emotion-free geeks can be seized by the SL deletion madness when angry and frustrated. It has happened to me a couple of times, and now I try to sleep on anything irrevocable, SL or RL.

I understand the frustrations, the perms thing is a real killer, particularly if you have been working away to solve a problem with a complex object, but I do not feel so depressed about the prospects for SL. Since I arrived six years ago it seems to me that SL has been through a large number of incarnations, and it is the constant change and challenge that keeps me interested, keeps me logging on, keeps me learning. I started making animations this week, having tried on numerous occasions before and finding it too hard, I suddenly find I can do it, and understand what I am doing so much better than I did before. SL has opened my eyes to architecture and design in a way that makes me feel I slept through my first 45 years on the planet. I've learned so many skills, I've met so many people and have had fun doing that.

My teenage schooldays impressed me with the horridness and selfishness of other people. I carried on thinking girls were bitchy to all and was a loner until I discovered the marvellous companionship and support of women, once I had children and met a lot of them. SL rehabilitated strangers for me, impressing me with the kindness and generosity of random people helping each other out. I bump into some of those same people here from time to time - Khamon was one.

Despite the sky falling in drama that happens every time there is a change or a bug or an exploit or a dramatic departure, I don't see the sky falling - I see a lot of creative, inspiring people, helping each other still. I passed on the care I'd received to the people I met, and they have passed it on again. People are still more open and honest and generous in SL than I ever expected, and it taught me that, despite a lot of time and attention having been lavished upon the IP theft and scamming side of things, in general people aren't dishonest and horrible... there's just a few of those and we let them make the news all the time. I liked Jeremy Clarkson's recent column for the Times, where he suggested we should simply accept that 5% of all known people are bonkers, and stop making rules for everyone based on what they do... he said it much more elegantly and amusingly than that, here:
What a daft way to stop your spaniel eating the milkman | Jeremy Clarkson - Times Online

I'm really very sorry to see Ordinal go, and I hope she will calm down, throw out any tasks that were on her to do list that don't inspire or amuse her, and stick to the fun and engaging projects which produced so many unique and memorable products.

Best in SL: Prim avatars and Statuary

I haven't had much time for blogging in these last few weeks, but today in a search for prim avatars I found a sim and an artist so exceptional, so amazing, that I feel I must blog it and let more people know about this work right NOW.

The one thing which atmospheric builds in SL often lack is people... either because the sim limit doesn't allow you to have a crowd, or because the best and least laggy time to visit a geat sim is when there aren't so many people about.

Many people have turned to prim avatars to fill that gap, but of course one of the things about prim avatars is that most of them are completely unconvincing and make everything around them look tackier too. However, today I found a place today which sells the most marvellous prim avatars which are so well sculpted, textured and put together that I had to do a double take a couple of times to convince myself that he hadn't cheated and put a camping bot in instead. They are quite simply the best prim avatars I have ever come across.


The maker of these wondrous creatures is Ub Yifu, and the sim is Ub Yifu Sculptures. The slurl is http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ub%20Yifu%20Sculptures/128/129/25

You need to go there and check it out - the pictures don't do them justice... you're at the mercy of my connection, etc. They are well worth seeing, even if you aren't in the market for a crowd of Elven Archers and a Bear Warrior statue!

If you are in need of prim avatars to fill out a build, then tp there immediately because I have scoured SL and I haven't found anything better.

LOL!

Judge not, that ye be not judged

I was thinking this morning of the things I have learned as have grown older. I have learned that, as long as you don't go around with your trousers undone, or your breasts hanging out, people will not notice much about you. All that angst I wasted worrying about what people would think of my hair/clothes/make up when I was (much) younger, was completely wasted.

I have learned that, no matter how hideous people may appear on the outside, they want to be thought attractive, and to be loved.

I have learned that, no matter how beautiful and attractive a person may apear on the outside, this may bear no relation to how attractive they feel. Thus some of the people I think are beautiful, have a hard time believing this about themselves.

Home is home, no matter how abject or poorly kept. Places which you would have to be paid handsomely to stay in for one night, are home to other people. You can't know how a person feels about their home by looking at it with your eyes. Those elderly people who fill their homes with junk and old newspapers, feel just as much affection for their homes as the most well-kept show home.

What is right for one person is not for another. The old saying that one man's meat is another man's poison, is true for any aspect of life. You can't know how someone else will feel about folk dancing, country music or jellied eels, based upon how you feel about them.

Every person has their own path to God. This is very important to know, even if you disbelieve in God. People are often so busy trying to prove the other guy wrong, that they don't allow for the possible fact that what is right for you, with your experience of life and core beliefs, may not be right for another. Nearly all problems with religion relate to the idea that it is possible to know what it is right for another to believe.

Be the change you want to see in the world. It's no good complaining that the world is rude and uncaring if you reply to that with rudeness and lack of care. If you believe that it is right to be polite, be polite, no matter how rude others are. It's the Do-as-you-would-be-done-by philosophy.

Remember that you always have choices, chances to make things better for others, however small. That word or deed or kindness may make a much bigger difference than you realize.

Finally, my grandmother's favourite: to thine own self be true.

Be immortalized... if you can get to Cancun

He has just sent round an announcement of his current project - making an artificial reef to attract wildlife and visitors to an uninhabited area. He is still looking for people to cast - but the catch is that the models have to be free to go to Cancun, Mexico. Ah well. The details are here:
http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=c...3&e=6c39c7e400

I love the melding of art installation and environmental project, and hope you do too. I think the second of his two films is particularly moving. Especially since geting sea life to colonize underwater frames has been particularly successful.

There there

(With apologies to E.J. Thribb)

So Farewell then, There
Another virtual world vanishes.
"Your friends are here"
No, they're here...

I went There once,
I had to pay to change my cartoony hair
and was asked if my skin was white in RL.

A/S/L?

I'd rather be in SL, frankly.
Fee Berry (51 1/2)

Uzbekistan

Listened to the fantastic radio play by David Hare, based upon the memoirs of Craig Murray, ex-British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. It stars David Tennant, and is a wonderfully engaging, absorbing, horrifying sort of play.

I'd recently signed a petition against the prosecution of a photographer who is accused of the foul crime of showing the country in a deliberately negative light, so I knew that all was not well with the country. What I learned in the course of the play about Uzbekistan and the UK, horrified me.

When I visited Craig Murray's site, I was appalled to find that Sting had played an expensive concert there at the behest of the torturing regime in power... and tried to cover his embarrassment at having given support to the insupportable by claiming it was a Unicef gig (it wasn't) and that cultural boycotts don't work (oh no?).

The wikipedia entry for Sting draws heavily on Craig's page, but is none the worse for that. I am appalled, and I am boycotting Sting for the foreseeable future, removing his music from my itunes and spotify. His website contains a reverent thought for the day from Sting, which on the occasion of my visit said: "I want my children to do something that feeds their souls. It's not about success or power or money. It's about satisfaction."

I see. So the concert in Uzbekistan wasn't for money? That's strange. Wikipedia seems to think the tickets cost $250. I'm assuming Sting got paid handsomely for the concert. Shame on him. Really. I thought he had principles....come to that I thought this country had principles. I'm beginning to wonder what sort of principles those might be.