On State Fossils

I was goofing around Wikipedia today and somehow wandered onto the state fossil page. There's the usual: A bunch of dinosaurs. For some reason, Pennsylvania took a trilobite as its state fossil. While I applaud their daring, one has to admit that trilobites are not very sexy state fossils. Also, at least two other states chose it as well (each one clarifies by choosing a specific species).

But I found something amazing:



According to the State of Vermont, the Beluga whale is the super special and distinct preserved remains symbol of Vermont. What the...? Shouldn't that be the state whale or something? How desperate were they for fossils that they chose the Beluga? And even more amazing: Wikipedia chose a 'in-the-flesh' picture of a beluga in subtle mockery of Vermont.

I know fossils do not necessarily mean that the species or genus is extinct and that fossils are merely preserved remains in and of themselves, but everyone in the public assumes that if something is a fossil, it's not around anymore (except, of course, in the fossil form). There is the potential that children doing papers on Vermont will claim the Beluga is extinct! Talk about confusion.

As it turns out, however, there's a fairly legit reason for Vermont's decision. A beluga fossil was found in Lake Campaign and it became quite the hit down there. So big that their legislature decided the time was ripe to honor it and thus the beluga became the state fossil. Oddly enough, they did not appoint a state whale and the state mammal is a horse.

My home state of Pennsylvania has a state electric AND steam locomotive, state beautification plant (Crown Vetch), state beverage (it's not an alcoholic drink), and a state soil (Hazelton). So in the grand scheme of things, perhaps Vermont isn't so weird. I'll bet other states have some real gems as well.

On Voice

Last night was typical of my recent second life.

Jurin took me to a session with the cast of The Guild, which I'd never heard before and concerns the real life face of those playing online games. It was pretty elaborate as someone took the time to recreate the avatars seen on their website, and I have to say it was a pretty good job.

The amazing part was that I did not crash out of Second Life even though there were almost seventy other avatars crowding the sim (all packed into a tiny little corner which looked very funny). In fact, I was able to open up their webpage while it was proceeding, something which usually means instant death for my computer.

It's very strange. I'll be in some ocean sim, crawling on my hands and knees with no one and nothing on it. And on the other side of the coin, I'll be able to pleasantly chat with ninety people in the same sim with everyone running their mystiHUDs, AOs, and all the other scripted crap that people feel are necessary to play (I'll have to check one day whether the new starter avatars Linden Lab has chosen include AOs, I know the tiny dragon does). I hate it. I'm used to consistency. When I could barely move, at least I knew where to go to relieve the agony. Now, it's like roulette.

Also, once again Voice cuts out and kills me. The entire show was in Voice chat. My attempt to turn it on resulted in immediate paralysis. As in, the voices came in sounding like machine guns (nasty stuttering) and the viewer froze. There was a parallel stream, but it wasn't through Second Life, and half the point of attending was to get into Second Life and listen to them. If I used that option, I might as well log out. And of course, that is when Voice decides it wants to work in the first place. All too often it gives me the middle finger and I can't hear anyone.

When it's enabled, it kills me. And when it's not enabled, I'm rendered deaf and pointless. With increasing frequency all major Second Life events outside of small time inworld crews are exclusively voice and while I acknowledge the fact that the fans want to hear the voices of the actors they admire, it's annoying. I stood around supporting the bleachers and chatting to my friends in IM. Such is life.

Since I wasn't doing anything else, I listened into the local chat which, oddly enough, seemed to be how people were asking questions of the cast. When they opened up the Q&A, anyway, it did seem like everyone blurted one out. That's pretty crazy. Did everyone just listen to that podcast outside of Second Life? So anyway, I tuned into the local chat, and it was entertaining to hear what people were blabbing while the show was going on.

I'm rather scatterbrained. I don't tend to save chatlogs manually onto notecards or notepads. I have chatlogging enabled and that takes care of it for me. Once again, my memory failure struck and I do not have the chatlogs on me. Why? When I uninstalled and reinstalled Second Life, it must have reset all the settings and chatlogging is by default turned off. So I've got nothing. Zilch. And without the logs, I really can't remember the details. Just take my word for it that it was really bizarre.

It seems like I'll be busy for some time trying to fix Voice or my computer. Most likely the latter which is rapidly approaching its third birthday. If it goes, I'll be deaf and blind in Second Life. Or probably more like 'dead'.

On Resident's Choice Awards Voting

The voting has been up for the resident's choice awards for some time now, and I must say that it's immense fun. In fact, it's a bit more open than I imagined it would be.

The first step is to list your language, country, and Second Life name. No logging in necessary, I wonder, however, if you can spoof another person's name. There doesn't seem to be a system to distinguish whether the real Anna Tsiolkovsky is voting. The page stipulates that you can only vote once which raises some questions as to what the Lab will do if an avatar suddenly exhibits multiple personality disorder.

On another note, how does language and nation determine 'winners that represent the opinions of each community'? Are we going to get specific winners in each language and nation? Why the hell should the vote be influenced in any way by nationality and language? The only influence should be the language in which the questions are presented. Does this imply that some weighting system to adjust the ballots? Does a Brazilian's vote get less weight than a Canadian's? Someone please enlighten me, perhaps a mental block is preventing me or encumbering me here.



There's about forty questions, and after the initial round of 'favorite place to hang out', 'favorite gallery', and so on, we get strange and rather specific ones. Like 'favorite place to Victorianize and get Steam Punky'. I've only met one person, actually two maybe, who was into that scene. Favorite place to get my AO on and Be Tiny? Robot Rebellion? What? Awfully detailed, aren't we? Why isn't there a 'favorite place to be a caveman' or 'favorite place to be a mole' or 'favorite place to form an angry mob against the Lindens'?

It goes on:



Favorite place to be emo or be goth, guys! Post Apocalypse! I should have campaigned for 'favorite flower garden'. I like gardens. Or 'favorite place to fall asleep', I don't recall that being in there.



I do like the open space with which to vote. There's no hindrance on selecting from a chosen few, although the Lindens have certainly already singled some people out in secret. My problem, and this is specific to me and not likely you, is that I didn't think to get my list of landmarks and places and names out beforehand so many of my entries were very spur of the moment and horribly misspelled. Like Tsiolkovksy, that's always a tricky one to spell. I just used a different arrangement each time, so I had "Anna Tsiolkovky", "Anna Tsolkovsky", "Anna Tsilkovsky", "Anna Tsiolkovski" and so on.

As for places, it seems you need to know the slurls and I was completely lost. I did this around 1 AM and I was not in the mood to dig through everything. So to everyone whose sims I voted for, I apologise in advance as my vote for you is likely to be thrown out. And of course, I screwed up sim and parcel names, too. I realized the next day (after a very good sleep) that it's Blackwater and not Blackwood. Damn!

The results are to be released on the 17th this April and I am excited to see what the English United States of American voters opinioned as representing the best in our community.


Bonus Content: Check out what spellcheck says is the correct spelling of my name:

On Rainbows

Update: I cannot find a picture of it. It's one of those times I curse myself for not have a camera phone for these spur of the moment things.

I missed the shuttle and had to trudge all of fifteen blocks back home. The weather was warm and cooperative, but looking west an ominous black line was on the horizon. Me being the excellent meteorologist that I am, I misjudged the turn it would take and got caught soaking wet.

It was a schizophrenic day, well, actually more like multiple personality disorder day as the rain came off and on, the clouds would break up and then suddenly plunge the world into night.

But I was soaking wet! Stupid weather systems.

As I got home, I caught a glance of the skyline to the east, and I saw what may be the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. As the sun came out to the west, it cast its light upon the Center City skyline, causing all numbers of things.

A beautiful double rainbow, clear and glistening as the sunlight reflecting off the glass castles of Center City. Arching high over the towers tall and rich and placing its feet in the run down and blight stricken ghettos to the north and south of it.

Do you suppose those people reaped the rewards of the pot of gold? Either that, or a whole lot of breakfast cereal. When I can, I'll nab a photograph.

On Walled Gardens

For April Fool's, while some were making drama of leaving, M Linden decided it would be an ideal time to declare that new Second Life servers would be available! This was no surprise to anyone. Linden Lab regularly prints out land and rolls it out like wet toilet paper.

But lo! Look closer, my friends! As it turns out, these new servers would have the option of being completely walled off from the main grid! Yes, you will be able to run a server all of your own that does not have to deal with the main grid and all its woes. No more worrying about newbies crashing in or griefers parading around. Your little patch of land will be isolated from it all. I imagine it something like Dinotopia or Atlantis, where life goes on despite being completely isolated from the rest of the planet.

This is quite an ideal solution for colleges. They'd no longer have to deal with Second Life's troubles and nasty residents. They can do their own thing off the grid where no one can touch them. They can set up their chemistry models and displays of all kinds with no interference. Which is a good thing, I think, because honestly that's the way it is now. Most colleges have their islands isolated to their group which you need permission to join. And you can only join if you are a registered student (or special visitor). I'm not sure, but likely they won't have to deal with the downtimes either, or when the grid decides to play dead.

Businesses can use Second Life as a glorified office meeting. I know in the past that a few of them attempted to create an ad of sorts out of their island, but each them it didn't seem to pan out. Either they would have a barebones display of posters on plywood panels or a few random activities such as rollerboarding or dunk the avatar. I know I still have my cement star from AOL island's Walk of the Stars, with my handprint and name on it (my name got the shaft, however, as Tsiolkovsky was too long for the imprinting script). Both of those options fizzled, but the allure of holding an office meeting, where you can see another person face to avatar (the idea is that you'd make your avatar look like you) and be able to show off some concept in a 3D space as a prototype (even if only as a show) was and apparently still is strong. Or so Linden lab says.

Probably more but I'm too lazy to think or remember them.

So we appease those two markets. Linden Lab survives another day! Hail the conquering heroes! Corporations and Universities get their wish of not having to deal with us proles, and us proles no longer have to deal with lame islands and the constant whine of a community that is closed and too adult and 'losers who need first lives hur hur'.

Let's look farther, though. How will Linden Lab give out these islands? Do I have to be an official University or Corporation? Will the Tsiolkovsky Industrial Co. be granted the go-ahead? Or what if Linden Lab lets any old avatar buy one?

I think people would jump for them. Think of it: you and a select group of friends would have your own private sandbox to build or do the nasty in without all the world gazing in on you. It is basically the same attraction as the big businesses, except on a much smaller scale. You would have the weight of Linden Lab's power upon you to keep separate from that yucky ol' main grid with its dirty newbies and icky griefers.

The problem would lie in the cost. As some have already pointed out, to take possibly take advantage of this fat cash calf, Linden Lab would jack the price up fairly high. It's reasonable, they are arranging a server tailor made to you and made separate from their entire world. And for deeper reasons, they don't want everyone to rush in and have the grid end up a billion isolated islands, like small planets in a giant universe. At least, not yet, anyway.

So, would those people buy such a thing? Would they value their privacy and pixel sex enough to buy the special SL GRID super special awesome separate island?

We do see that they (they being everyone who participates in the act of pixual intercourse) will pay good sums for good prim genitals, and good homes and beds in which they can perform. And security orbs to make sure people stay off their lawn even if alt zoom renders that moot. They went and bought lots of those Openspaces as a cheap way to set up. They still pay good money for an island to fortify.

I'm being a prude. I'm sure the idea that you could have a private off-grid island is appealing to some. I can see people joining together to pay the support and tier for it, they already do this with regular islands and groups. In theory, this should be a good match.

But the one thing that I think shoots down that theory is that with the current tools, all this can be effectively done. Islands usually aren't joined unless a special order is put out, and putting up ban lines and access lists takes care of unwanted interlopers. And for far far less cash. The sole benefit is the (still undefined and rumored) separation, in total, from the main grid. Which leads us to ask: how deep is that separation? The best would be a complete break from the central grid and its rolling restarts and crashes and such. I think M says as much.

Aside from the rolling restarts, has the grid completely failed lately? I can't recall it doing so recently although I will admit to have a lacking presence in Second Life lately.

The cost, that's the rub. I doubt it will be cheap. It will likely be very expensive. We don't know yet because M loves a good cliffhanger and promises to tell us 'this summer' which narrows it down to June through August. July? Until we know the details, we can only know that it will be completely separated from the grid and it's implied it will be expensive. It's targeted specifically towards big business and universities (although Openspace was supposed to target island owners who wanted to pretty their islands and we saw how that turned out). And it will have a beta phase, as M mentions an offer to apply to test the beta stage.

Oh, I just can't wait!

On Comics

No, not stand up comedians. Visual print comics.

When I pick up the Inquirer in the morning, after looking at how the world became more screwed up while I slept I check out the comics page. There's something reassuring about Garfield eating a metric ton of food. Call me what you will, but I like Garfield. I find Garfield funny. I've seen opinions and papers written about how Garfield is the bane of comics and art in general, but for some reason, that's never held a bearing on me. Fat orange cats are just my thing, I suppose. There's no shortage of newspaper comics.

And there's certainly no shortage at all of online comics. Most of them are just terrible. Godawful terrible. The drawing and art will have all the talent of a kindergarten child who just learned how to fingerpaint. Their writing will make my prose look as if Jane Austen crafted it. But there are a few gems out there. If you're willing to dig through the enormous pile present. I bookmark a few of them, and when the urge strikes I check up on them.

There are hardly any comics that focus on Second Life. Or use Second Life as a medium. I can think of about two off the top of my head, and from a quick search through the internet I found three more. And I don't like any of them, to be honest.

Let's first point out that using Second Life as the visual medium is extremely difficult to do. With a hand drawing, you can quickly slap something down. With photoshop, you can do the same with a mouse or tablet. With films and real life photographs, you have control (usually) over what is in the scene. All four of those involve little work to invest in. Don't get me wrong. Getting the photo or film or any of those to actually be any good, it takes a lot of time and knowledge. But the basic bare-bones needs are accessible to any Tom, Dick, and Harry. But in Second Life, it's a much more difficult task.

You have to build your set from scratch which requires some working ability with the Second Life building tools which have their quirks and annoyances. You also have to dress and attire your avatars or models properly so they don't look like shit. This is harder than it looks for you must find a good skin, shape, hair, and outfit. If the image you want isn't on sale, you have to make those yourself and you have to subject yourself to tweaking the shapes, building hair (very difficult, tried it once), running photoshop and making good clothes and uploading those clothes and checking to make sure the upload is good to go (and uploads cost you L$10 a pop). Second Life avatars are about as expressive as Microsoft Sam and thus require lots and lots of time creating your own gestures and animations and poses to fit your comic. This is just the visual set up. The final step (although a step which requires at least as much, if not more investment) is to get the writing and scripting together because just having a funny visual is usually not enough.

Whew. That's quite a laundry list. It seems truly daunting. I am sure a good amount of people who try to make a comic get tangled in one of the steps I listed above and then probably give up. Even if the theoretical creator in question is very skilled at doing all that, the time one has to invest is very great. And frankly, someone who is gifted to be able to do all that will not be very interesting in writing and scripting a comic when he or she or it could make a killing building or designing or something else. The comic is a time-suck. It doesn't generate any revenue. I suppose you could compile a book together and sell it, but who inworld is going to bother? They will reason (rightly) that it's not worth it when they could spend that cash on land tier or toys or furniture.

Therein lies the second problem. How do you market such a thing? How would you entice and convince people that they should buy your book? So add marketing talent to the above list. Getting someone to notice and buy it so you can make tier is very hard. One idea would be to make a blog and showcase a few select pages so the discerning buyer can sample the flavor. Exposing yourself to critics isn't much fun, either. You then have to defend your work, or change it for the better which is a struggle unto itself, for you have to turn a nasty eye on your pride and joy. You have to then be careful not to get caught up and be too critical. Torley is sometimes right and sometimes the critic in question is just not going to be satisfied. You have to have the ability to make the proper judgement call between "I need to fix this because it honestly is not good" and "This is good enough/actually quite fine and the other guy is a moron".

In light of those considerations, you'd probably want and need a team. Which means you need to find the people who you can work with. And good luck to you on that. That means reliance on your team to do their part and get work done. As I'm sure anyone can tell you, all it takes is one slacker or asshole to royally ruin your product. When the team is small, this is especially heinous. When it's a very much a combined product, you fail. Once in college I had a slacker for a group member, and while it was a pain in the ass to hold up his end of the work (and in the end we reported him to the professor) the good thing was that we were all in the same field and thus the working knowledge was not difficult to distribute. With a project such as a SL comic where you have to make, script, and distribute/sell/market, you don't have that ability. If your writer takes a holiday, the artist and the advertiser may not be able to carry the day. Similarly, it really hits hard when the builder flakes off forcing the gesture maker to throw something together. "What? Is that supposed to be a Pollock painting or a fridge magnet?"

That's all quite a lot weighing on the fool or fools who are foolish enough to be fools and try this out.

I think the most famous of the lot is Plywood, which ended some time ago. I have to be honest, I never really found it funny. I found the jokes tired and forced. I give them credit for using Second Life as the visual medium, and of the entire lot I've read they certainly have done the most. When you can see the avatars, they're very expressive and the gestures and poses are well done. Well, ok, sometimes they got lazy. But usually the panels are very zoomed out and you can't really see what's going on. Sometimes the scene is kind of awkward. Their speech bubble placement gets really nasty later on and so congested it blocks the panels.

The jokes and stories are sometimes confusing. Who is the robot, why is he freaking out, and what the hell is with those bears? Ok, well, the bears were previously established as being evil by suffocating people, I guess. It's only the third comic, but there's no lead-up to anything to do with the robot. Plus, he spends about 75% of that strip almost out of panel talking to a car. Did he create the bears? I suppose it's supposed to be a cliffhanger, only it's right off the bat which makes me angry and confused. The next bunch of pages leave it unresolved, however. In fact, it doesn't get resolved until much later. There's a quick storyline about how evil Tringo and Avatar contests are and how stupid Newbies are (har har) which I didn't find funny, probably because I don't see either of those things as particularly bad things I would electrocute people over (although the comic was made in 2005, maybe things were different back then). There's the typical gender hysteria (zomg! who's what gender!?!?) which explores the whole Gender Detective aspect. After about 25 comics, they finally get to the original cliffhanger.

This one made me crack a smile, and is probably the best in my opinion. The joke is simple (even if it depends upon one knowing the pop cult reference which is sketchy). Compare it to this, where I'm not sure where exactly the joke is. It just kind of peters out. I think it might be due to the wordiness. The way the joke is ham fisted into the reader as if they could not put two and two together and assume it's worse to be a prim on a vibrator than in hair is partly due to how it's over explained. I think that's the problem with most of the Plywood comics. Too many words. It's a visual medium, they should have left something open instead of turning it into a small novel.

Dwell On It was another one, which has many of the same faults as Plywood. The camera is zoomed so far out that if I made two squiggles they would have the same resolution. Take this one, for example. It's okay in the first and second panels, since we need to establish that the newbie is running up and down a large street. But why is the third panel still somewhat zoomed out? The large empty space above and to their right is distracting, it feels lopsided. This one too. Once you've established the park bench, you should have panned the camera in a little.

I did find it more clever, though. The bit on LL censoring made me giggle. Probably because it wasn't as wordy and let the picture tell the story. In that one, we didn't get a long spiel from Tateru about the region crashing, and the Lindens somewhere cackling and explaining everything, no. She comes in, the blue box of doom appears, and she curses as she logs off. This one made be actively laugh. If the writer took a little more care in setting up the panels and adjusting the camera, it would be pretty good, actually.

There was a running story about what happens after she was forcibly logged off. It was alright, but not as good as her stand alones. She hasn't updated in a while, since November 2008, so perhaps she ended it or forgot about it. Oh well. If it seems I didn't grill this one (and the successive comics) as much, it's because there's not as much there. Plywood was fairly large with about 70 pages most of which were an actual page, Dwell On It is maybe half that with little four panel skits.

Next up is the aptly named... Second Life Comics. Not a very original title. This is even smaller, only about twenty pages. This one manages to solve the problem the first two fell into, which is placing the scenes together nicely. The panels seems fuller, I can actually see faces. Establishing shots are occasionally used, but then zooms in to focus in on the avatars who, rightly, are the center of the action. The author must have been in some graphic design course or something, I'd bet on it. The only downside is that while we see the avatars in a clearer light, their faces aren't as expressive and always seem somewhat apathetic.

Some of the jokes rely upon the visuals which is good. This one, for example. Some are just strange and disturbing. I think they were going for shock value, but I am not the kind of person who finds pure shock on its own as funny. Some I just don't understand. Did they forget something in there? Also, the "Is Not" girl looks a lot like me, only tanner. I found this one brilliant, if not a tad on the stereotyping side. At least twice the author threw in some political commentary about Palin, which was alright I guess. She makes a disturbing avatar. I'd say the writing is hit or miss. Sometimes I laughed, sometimes I scratched my head. You know what? Dwell on It and 'Second Life Comics' should pair up, because between the two I can see a very good comic.

Rabble.ca is a flickr book. This is by far the worst. As far as I understand, it was done as an advertisement for something that I didn't bother to investigate. The panels are absolutely terrible and are so poorly positioned you'd think you were on the International Space Station viewing it on the ground. Seriously, the arrangements are bad. The entire pretense of being a comic breaks down by the third page and it turns into a collage. The dialogue, as expected, is equally terrible and serves mostly to advertise. You know, I guess I'm being too harsh. This was just a quick job to advertise whatever it was. Still, it came up when I google searched for "Second Life Comics" so they asked for it.

The Herald once ran a serial called "Alien 28 versus Plagarizer". These were not meant to amuse but to tell a drama. The story is that Coke, a random avatar, meets with another avatar called Alien 28. They band together to fight the guy who stole Alien28's stuff. Like Second Life Comics, the panels are arranged and set very beautifully. They zoomed in and out at very appropriate times. Gestures and poses were nicely done. Too bad Coke, the main character, seems to be a chameleon. She goes from a pale blond to black hair and a deep tan with tattoos, every page or so. The author performed a self insert (a problem in itself), so in the day-to-day change of their avatar, they screwed up the comic as for what I can see no explanation is given.

The pretty graphics are murdered by the waves of text and speech bubbles. I'm surprised the characters can breathe, it gets so cluttered. The real problem is that, with limited space on the Herald, they tried to cram as much as possible into the three or so pages per article. The story suffers as a result, as everything gets rushed and the pages are awash with white bubbles.

Finally, I don't find the story itself that interesting. I'm sorry, but it sounds just like every other accusation and fight over who stole what that I see and hear everywhere. On the last two posts, she drifts from focusing on the content debate into individual stories: Coke gets turned out homeless and the Alien gets abducted. And that was it. It hasn't updated since January, so we'll never know what ending was in store, although she repeatedly mentioned that she only planned the first two to explain her situation. Oh well. It was that great of a concept to begin with.

The next bunch are what I have come to call "Flash In The Pan" comics. They seemed to have at most nine pages before they fired out.

This person created a comic book, an educational one about how to dress up. I haven't really read it, but it doesn't seem as if she made anything else. I should really check out her place in SL.

This one is about furry goreans. It's not spectacular, and the writing is pretty blah. It's the kind of thing you pass between friends, really. Hey, kind of like this blog! She moved all her stuff over to some other site, which I don't feel like chasing down, plus I think she got kicked out of second life from one of the posts.

Patches of Insanity died after three strips, even though the count is up to four. I couldn't find #2. Haha, get it? It wasn't that good, but it's hard when there is such a small sample. Some people take a while to get revved up. We'll never know.

Finally, this person makes virtual world comics about a bunch of different virtual worlds. There's twelve total. They're alright. Not the best, but not especially bad. Like Garfield? The graphics are good, however.

That's about all I can find on Second Life comics. Some were ok, some were bad. It'd be nice if someone would take up and make a good one. I can imagine it might help Linden Lab's already horrendous public relations. Plus, it'd be fun to read.

I'm really bored.

Adiós Muchachos, Compañeros de Mi Vida

Edit: My April Fool's Day joke was in rather poor taste, don't you agree? D:

My dear friends, all 19 of my readers, I have seen the light. All this time I have been railing against Linden Lab and making fun of Torley, and I finally have seen it. The problem isn't with Linden Lab, it is with me! Yes, their policies are right and I am the one who is at fault!

After this revelation, I have decided to quit Second Life and quit this blog. It is the only viable option. I have to leave to allow Second Life and Linden Lab to operate smoothly. I know I said I'd stick with Second Life until the heat death of the universe, but it turns out to be a lie. A terrible lie.

I'm going to go far, far away. I might never come back.

I'm going to find myself,

And perhaps

...