That Awful Quiet Time

May 17, 1997 my father passed away and was buried 15 years ago today. Not very long before that — within about seven months, I guess — I had attended funerals for a grandmother, a couple kids from school, a neighbor, and a couple relatives of one of my sisters-in-law. Not long after that —about seven months, again — I attended my niece's funeral, another neighbor's, and someone that I'm afraid to say can't come to mind right now.

Those times were filled with an awful quiet for me. A time of ... well, empty.

Since then, I've been to a few more funerals — a teacher's, a friend's, another neighbor. Later next week I'll be going to one more. One of my mom's (I hate "step-mom" so I just say "mom") sisters died May 17, 2012. Yes, that date. I looked it up to be sure. Today her husband and seven boys are taking her to a crematorium. This is another awful quiet time as we wait for details of the arrangements of the whole-family service, feeling helpless with nothing to do.

And so it goes. Two of my current neighbors, a husband and wife, have had family at hand 24-7 for almost a week now and I suspect that soon there will be another set of funerals to attend. The quiet again.

It seems May is that sort of month. My friend Honour posted today about an awful quiet in her life, the passing of Kev Sweetwater a few days ago (Web). Yes, I knew Kev, but only in a tertiary fashion. I can't say we ever exchanged more than a few words — probably about bacon. But when my friends hurt, I hurt and I share that awful quiet.

I can't think about this sort of thing in an organized fashion. Dates slip from my mind and become aches prodded by subconscious reminders at the appointed times. It was probably my subconscious that prodded when the other day I was cajoled into applying for a parcel at SL9B. On the application I promised to create a version of the Memorial Park on the Isle of Lesbos to fit an exhibitor parcel, but I let it be known that I'd be more than happy to transport a full-sized copy to take many spaces at the celebration as a memorial to all our friends in Second Life. Perhaps it can bring a bit of peace to the awful quiet.

Of Scams & Serenity

The other day I had to answer the phone. Yes, my family makes the mute girl answer the phone. If it is someone we know then the caller understands they that I'll use a simple Tap-Tap code for responses or that they'll have to wait for Mom or my brother to pick up an extension. For businesses and such that don't know me I have one of those keychain voice memo recorders handy with "The person you have reached is Mute. Ask to use the TTY or please wait" ready to play. Often that earns a hangup, but that's okay as most calls to our house are in violation of the FCC Don't Call Registry policy. We report them but nothing much happens.

Enjoy a small repast in the tea house (SLurl). The region is filled with quite a few themed buildings, all marvelously crafted, to compliment the Asian-style Linden Homes near by. Each structure is a joy to explore.

But while you enjoy this photo essay of the rather serene Shareta Osumai Info Hub and Tea Garden, let me tell you about a couple of recent calls that were probably scammers trying to have me set up our computer for open access.

Many sights to see (SLurl) and Free Textures! Like all the Linden Home Infohubs, you can grab a copy of the texture set the Moles used to create the themed areas so you can coordinate your builds with your house. There are also tons of free items, like flowers, masks, foods, and more, in the Shareta buildings. Windlight: [TOR] MIDDAY - Anime Ciel

"Hello, I am from the technical company and we have traced an error to your Windows computer," the caller with a very heavy Indian accent started after what sounded like things being thrown in the background finished. I hung up. We don't have a Windows computer. Someone was trying to social engineer their way into our computer ala Kevin Mitnick (the famous "hacker" was more successful in asking for access when he hacked than in actually breaking encryption codes). That was a few days ago.

Venerate the moles! Whimsey is everywhere, as usual, when you are dealing with the LDPW (SLurl).

The same person called back today with the same opening so I turned on the speaker phone so my brother, CC, (who was sitting with me at the computer as I was taking these pictures of this extraordinary build on the Mainland) could take over. "How did you know I had a Windows computer?" CC asked. "Well, sir," the technician started, "we can see when you access the Internet what sort of computer you have and we can tell there is some data coming from your computer."

"Ah," CC replied sagely. "What should I do?"

"Turn on your computer, sir."

"Its already on."

"What applications do you have running, sir?"

"Safari," CC replied, referring to the Apple-branded Web browser, "and a dictionary app and Second Life." "Very good sir, could you please close them for me," was the response. CC sat back and I kept snapping away and going from place to place with Zyx Resident logged into SL.

Amazing, organic landscape, with all the flora and all the structures arranged in harmony (SLurl).
Windlight: [TOR] SUNSET - Oriental Delight 2

"Thank you, sir, now ..." and he described things to look for on the keyboard, including the Windows key that we didn't have "... then press the Windows key and the R key. What do you see?"

CC was trying hard to not laugh and trying to shush me, because my laugh is sort of a short bark and I would have been heard over the speaker phone. But he managed to control himself. "Nothing, different, actually. The problem is, I don't have a Windows key. And if you weren't so sucky at computer technology or actually had data showing what computer I have you'd know I'm on an Apple computer."

Stunning views everywhere you look (SLurl). The buildings are very functional, too. Most have seating for several people so if you wanted to have a group meeting somewhere unique, this would be a marvelous choice.
 Windlight: [TOR] SUNRISE - Barcelon 1

CC was on a roll, not giving the other party a chance to even breath. "If you did know anything about technology you'd have realized that I've held you on the line long enough to trace this call, find out where you are, who you are, what you are doing, and report you to the police and the FCC. Now if you could hold just a few more moments I'll have your personal information like where you live ..." then paused.

I can't stop taking pictures (SLurl). You can grab a ride in a mole-motivated rickshaw near by. Windlight: Amsterdam 

It was a good 15 to 20 seconds before there were more sounds of things being thrown on the other end of the line but CC said "Keep waiting, I'm almost done" and managed to scrape out another 10 seconds of dead air before there were grunts and the line disconnected.

A fitting end to this photo essay (SLurl). Windlight: Burn

Lesson One: You don't screw with my brother. He's not stupid and he knows people — people you don't want to know. While in this case there really was no trace on the line and no one is being told about the call, CC could contact various people to investigate if he had thought it was a serious risk to our personal safety.

Lesson Two: Beware of social engineering. It is easier to get someone to get your passwords from you than to guess it or break it. I can get away with amazing things because of my handicap because people just don't want to deal with me. Same with using my mother's wheelchair to get things done.

Lesson Three: Explore the Mainland. It is far more extraordinary than you would think and it is pretty risk-free.

Earth Day & My Rules

A rainy day here in Maine, USA as a Nor'easter approaches to drench us tonight so it isn't the most exciting of Earth Days in Real Life. While I'm struggling to figure some nice connection with the special day and Second Life, Honour McMilan is taking the high road and writing about her rules for Second Life blogging to compliment nicely Earth Day-ish pictures. Go ahead, Honour, and make the rest of us again look like hacks. Sheesh.

Svarga (SLurl) is a fine place to celebrate Earth Day in Second Life.

I don't pretend (much) to be a journalist so I really don't follow rules outside the AP Stylebook or the grammar tips I get from the A Way With Words podcast. To put it another way, I watch how I write more than what I write. This is a blog. I'm beholden to none because I really write more for my own amusement than for any other reason. If I manage to entertain, impress, or inform anyone else in the process, it is purely by accident though pleasing nonetheless.

Dating back to 2006, Svarga is (or was) home to a very early experiment in virtual artificial life, with plants propagating on their own with the help of bees (as food for carnivorous plants and to pollinate others).

As I write, though, there are some personal guidelines that I do try to keep in mind ...

It is perfectly okay to bite the hand of the people who own the world I play in, but I try to not go so far as to alienate them should the opportunity to be an LDPW Mole come up or that I might get another chance to appear on the official blog again. Fair, well-reasonsed criticism — positive or negative — founded with documented facts is healthy. For this reason I've kept pretty silent on the recent news that there will be no Linden-sponsored Second Life Birthday celebration like there has been in the past. I don't know all the internal politics or finances and it would be unfair to speculate.

A L$25 donation to Taras Balderdash for the charity Modest Needs earns a note card with your fortune, just pay the orb in this underground chamber below what looks like an empty marketplace.

Pure speculation and opinion is also perfectly okay, but should be clearly identified as such. It would be one thing to claim that The Lab hires only satyrs for staff since the fall of M Linden, but proving it would be another thing even if I had a reason to spread such rumors. Not that I follow drama if I don't have to anyway. Life is too short and if I really want drama, I'll rent a movie. Or see another psychiatrist.

Focus, focus, focus. This is primarily a Second Life blog so I try very hard to not write about anything else, especially Real Life. You may have seen posts about Lego Universe and my Apple iPad and other seemingly random, off-topic posts, but they do tie back to Second Life in some (usually highly tangental) fashion. Since changing the subtitle of this blog to "Real Me. Digital Life. Virtual Spaces." I've opened up the possibility of expanding post topics but have more or less avoided doing so.

Very little has changed in Svarga since 2006. The shop is gone, as is the giant sea serpent and a nice cuddle hammock. You can still pay L$1 to feed the birds but you can no longer rez the seeds you get so don't bother. Somewhat recently a Stargate showed up but it looks entirely appropriate.

With all this in mind, I freely pillage Honour's rules and steal "Rule #5; Don’t take yourself seriously. We’re bloggers not gurus" for myself. If I ever appear to be more than I am, I expect and appreciate when someone takes me down a peg or three. While I grudgingly (or not so grudgingly, at times) agree with those who tell me I write well, I freely admit but sometimes forget that there is always someone much better than I am at any task I set myself or any activity I participate in at any given time. Having a blog doesn't make me an expert at all. Anyone can blog. Only in the last few years has the community of professional journalists acknowledged that this free-form, un-regulated forum often can and does contain proper reportage and punditry.

I'm not a professional like Hamlet Au, but as you can see, I try to keep at least some guidelines to my writing, if not actual rules conforming to professional standards.

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From the bee tour: "In European mythology Svarga or "Heaven" is the residence of the god Svarog."

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Windlight Sky: [TOR] Sparz puft
Water Preset: Glassy
No Shadows or post-process re-touching

Random SL Thoughts

While watching the new Mupppet movie (Web) I thought I'd grab my iPad and add some random SL thoughts to my blog:

It was nice to see how many people dressed appropriately for the setting while visiting the new Premium Wilderness regions. My outfit was from my collection of tropical BINA Tende cloth sets. Many folks were in khaki with pith helmets, medieval garb, or even military camo.

While zipping about with my temporary alt Yclept, the one I used to visit the new Destination Islands, my avatar was taken to a different Infohub each time each time I hit the Home button, up to about 10 or so total.

There seems to be a fan group for Linden Moles in-world but it looks to be "dead" and I want to start my own anyway. After all, I am a member of the Molly Linden fan club. I should look to see if Michael Linden has a fan club.

Not all the Infohubs were labeled as such, such as Korea1 and Korea3. These two regions made me think that a shrinking world population might be best accompanied by a shrinking land area. Almost all the buildings were hollow, though ready to accept stores or apartment dwellers. With so many empty spaces on Mainland and all the emptiness like I saw in the Koreas, it might be more efficient and more economical to condense spaces and bring people together. The World can always expand later.

The other night my wife and I were exploring an Estate region that appeared to have had no visitors in quite some time despite the startling beauty we found. I'll feature it in a post sometime this week because anyone interested in abstract architecture and amazing — buildscapes, for lack of a better word — and a mystery/quest that I need to explore further. I wonder how folks can afford a region that generates no income. I guess having an RL income helps. It sucks to be poor.

I've been trying for a couple days to get Shared Media on a prim to work without any success. There was a time I could get it to work and even successfully used it at a Second Life Birthday exhibit.

When the heck are they going to announce a theme for the next Birthday anyway? I wanna build! NOW!

Here is a random SL pic from my archives since I can't really make a blog post without a picture (I'm just that way, I guess):

You aren't seeing double. Angela (right) and I are trying the same demo hair. She's much cuter, of course.

Today, my brother found that the Hatton-Jergans Trench (SLurl) is 80m below sea level, possibly making it the deepest submerged point in Second Life. Take that, James Cameron! Well, it is possible to go deeper, actually, but neither of us have see it that we can recall.

CC also found an amazing number (12?) of identical avatars simply standing around on the sea bed in several of the surrounding sims. What do folks us bots for these days?

Usra, Daniel, and M

Most of you know I have an alt named Usra. She's heavy into the Loco Pocos theme and tends to take over my posts when those adorable avies are concerned. In fact, she posted on the Lucky Kitty Crew blog today about some prize hunts involving Loco Pocos creators (Web). After that she headed over to the new Welcome Islands and Discovery Islands to wish people a Happy Easter and to give out Easter eggs. She ran into friend Daniel Voyager (the other bunny in the pictures below), blogger/reporter (Web) and M Linden, CEO of Linden Lab (Web). Sadly RL beckoned, but not before Usra helped out M with an LM to the fabulous Bare Rose clothing adjustment tutorial and talking about the new islands meant to introduce new Residents to Second Life. No chance to grill him on the use of Megaprims there, but the addition of a tutorial sandbox is being looked into and there are discussions about live helpers being present (remember Mentors?). Here are some pix (no, I didn't note the names of the other people):

M Linden (on the far right in all the pictures) kept commenting on how much he loved Usra's avatar so I gave him the URL to the Lucky Kitty blog post I mentioned then he broke out his Devil avie ("Now that explains a lot," Usra joked) and his ghost avie. I remember he was among the Lindens that filled the Loco Pocos sim last Halloween buying avies for the holiday. He seems genuinely nice and very interested in the fun aspects of Second Life. Much of our conversation was focused on the magic of the the world and how the new welcome experience was designed to foster that impression. Sadly, Lindens still hide from the presence servers so my attempts to hug him failed. Haven't hugged a Linden yet because of that, but maybe one day ...

I Miss Linden Trees & Particle Rain

The tree that is controlling both my lives right now is partly gone. This is a shot from the day it fell. Dunno how tall it is ... 75 feet? One of the oldest trees in the neighborhood I'm told. The base is in the back yard of the house behind ours.

This shot is from the front of the house and shows the part (abut 15 feet) that had to be removed just to patch the roof. Three guys removed the part and patched the roof in under an hour for $400! I wish 400 RL dollars was as cheep as 400 Linden dollars. The rest of the tree is there until Thursday.

Half of the kitchen/dining ceiling needs to be replaced and one of the walls. Maybe not the window but nearly the entire roof was damaged by the tree or the winds over the last couple storms. Some were up to 90 m.p.h. and the recent rains totaled over 6 inches for our area. I miss Linden trees and particle rain.

Where is Uccello now?

Staring at a tree sticking through the ceiling of the dining room is where I am. So we have partial power, water everywhere, and the fresh scent of pine in the air. My main computer is dead and I'm going to be busy for a few days. Please send note cards if it's important.

Where is Uccello?

When last week's storm hit New England some 140,000 homes in Maine lost power and ours was one of them. I saw the sparks fly off a transformer as we lost lights and heat. We toughed out two nights and one day with temps near freezing and a very weak WiFi for my iPod Touch to help us stay in touch and get news. The second day we found a motel that accepts pets and moved our small army.

Flashlights and dynamo-powered radios are good as are blankets and good friends. Now that I have a charger for the iPod I can keep checking e-mail and logging into SL with TouchLife, a very good iPhone/iPod app that supports most functions one would need for basic access. My avies with larger inventories are crashy, but I can often hang in for a while, so long as I don't get fancy.

My messages are capping already so if you send anything from here on out I won't get it. Feel free to comment here and I'll check back when I can.

Many huggs!

Can SL and RL truly be seperate from each other?

Here is the Mix'n Match blog swap (Web) post from Stuart Warf of The Insane Life of Stuart Warf (Web).

When I was assigned this topic of "Can SL and RL be truly kept separate?" My instant reaction was to say that they can't be separate. In the current state of technology it is hard to keep something like SL and RL separate. But then it dawned on me that my situation isn't entirely the same as others in Second Life.

Now there are many reasons why somebody would want to keep their Second Life separate from their Real Life. A simple example of this could be that the person just wants their right to privacy. There are multiple reasons why an avatar would want privacy though. Someone could have a high profile job in some area and want Second Life as an escape without anyone finding out who they are. Some companies do have policies that require them to say who they work for in their contract which can cause all sorts of issues and see it fitting to just not mention who they are in order to maintain a simple life and escape.

In todays digital climate it's hard for someone to keep their real life identity a secret once they have revealed it, thanks to things like Google. So people who are aware of this decide to just keep their real life information separate from their virtual life.

Another way in which SL and RL can be separate is via roleplaying sims where you can act out a different life as a character and interact with a world. Examples of this could be the fantasy world of Avillion or the Star Wars world of Little Mos Eisley.

However there are many beinifits to not keeping SL and RL separate. Depending on what you do outside of the virtual world, you can be more open about who you are as a person in reality. A great example of where this typically happens in social networks like Facebook. Social networks like these can help you get to know your SL friends more and maybe even make new friends.

Other ways to interact with other avatars are microblogging websites such as Twitter and Plurk. Not only can these services give you another communication window into peoples lives.

When I look at who are probably the most open of avatars in Second Life I think these people are the podcasters, bloggers and active community members. Podcasters love to talk openly about things which says to me that they are also open in Real Life about their Second Lives.

Personally I think that SL and RL can be separate if you really try it but you limit yourself to what you can do in the virtual world. What I mean by being limited is that you miss out on a lot of the things you could enjoy in the world. If your trying to cut your real life off and be someone totally different in Second Life then ultimately it won't last forever. You can easily not tell people your in Second Life in real life but that can cause problems and that's why I figured that when I entered the world, I'd talk about it to friends and family.

Another thing that I've found while being in the virtual worlds is that aspects of it changed me in real life. I have become increasingly confident towards people (and I know that this has also happened to friends on mine in Second Life as well) and I truly believe that because of things like this that SL and RL cannot be separate.

RL vs. SL

If you were to see me in Real Life (RL or iRL) you'd see me in eyeglasses. Not by my choice. They are always dirty, sliding down my nose, and just a plain nuisance. When I got a driving learner's permit I was told my eyes were good enough to not wear glasses. When I got my passport I was told to wear them for the picture if I have them even if I don't need them for seeing everything.

So why do I wear eyeglasses in Second Life™(SL)? Well, these free Lloyd glasses from PrimOptics are rather cool. er ... no, that can't be it as I usually wear another style. In fact, a rather plain pair is in my Quick Me folder, the one I drag onto my name tag when I need to get back to a basic avatar or set of clothes (skin, hair, eyes, shape, clothes, accessories).

Really, I'm not sure. Maybe it will be a passing but recurring faze like when I was a lioness for a month or when I was a neko for many, many months. Recurring as I've worn eyeglasses in SL before as a standard item then stopped for some time.

Certainly I see well enough in SL though using SL has hurt my RL eyesight. And that might have been the trigger. I started again wearing eyeglasses in SL as standard fare when I started wearing them iRL. What this means I don't know. It can't be vanity. Otherwise I would have expanded my waist and tummy in SL when it did iRL.