Andromeda Media Group

The Quest for Xanadu

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 12:02:00 +0000

Understanding Organic Behavior in Virtual Worlds

“Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it?”
― William Gibson

The Imperfect World

There is something to be said concerning the nature of imperfection and its role in any virtual world – whether that be an elaborate immersion with an HMD or some sort of XR Augmented Reality. It’s all really the same premise with different context.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, I was introduced to this epiphany and it has since shaped my comprehensive understanding of the intricate mechanizations by which virtual worlds operate. Not as compartmentalized notions independent of one another, but as a massively interconnected ecosystem.

It’s never been so simple as “Make a sound loop here” or “Increase the graphics fidelity”. There are always underlying considerations for each and every decision made in a live virtual environment which can affect a cascading change across the entire ecosystem itself.

In a way, we could say this is similar to introducing an invasive species into an area and watching it decimate everything.

Such is the case with today’s thought experiment, and why I’ve decided to pick up the digital pen to craft yet another post after so much time.

As per my previous assertions however, I’ll try not to retread old ground with this and instead introduce something new to the conversation.

Somewhere around 1995, a small company at the time had stumbled onto the “killer app” of virtual worlds. Rejected by the original parent company, Worlds Inc, the designers raised enough money to buy the rights to the new creation and embark on their own.

Worlds Inc was under the impression that they were selling off a failed experiment, but little did they know they were giving away what would be the biggest breakthrough in virtual worlds at the time. Alphaworld, and later ActiveWorlds would become the template for future virtual worlds afterward, whether we acknowledge this or not.

In a world dominated by Web Worlds discussion and VRML and X3D pages (at least in technology circles), ActiveWorlds went in the opposite direction. It created a custom browser (not a VRML plugin) that had servers and (most importantly) would allow the multi-user virtual world to edit that virtual world in real time.

For a short time, ActiveWorlds was on top of the tech world. A virtual gold standard to aspire to. But that changed very quickly, as the company behind it weren’t actually able to understand what made it work so well that it appealed to those end-users.

In a way, they had captured lightning in a bottle and just as quickly lost it.

This isn’t a new phenomenon today, as I’ve seen the same situation play out countless times since then. Each contender trying to figure out what component or configuration created that ecosystem so they too could capture that lightning.

Many thought it was raw graphical power that was the secret, and they were very wrong. Some thought maybe the publish model of Worlds Inc was a good bet (it wasn’t). Over time, many virtual worlds came and went due to their inability to understand the organic nature of these virtual worlds and what makes them appealing in the first place.

Of course, over these twenty years, I’ve known full well what makes them popular and what was likely to crash and burn. Even as they were putting out fancy press releases and marketing, being interviewed with technology blogs and magazines… You as my reader are free to look back as far as 2005 and see for yourself that I’ve landed about 98% of my forecasts with alarming accuracy.

If I wasn’t so confident in this understanding, I would never have agreed to work alongside some of the brightest minds from the largest multinational corporations. I would never have signed on to work with IEEE Virtual Worlds Standard group, and I surely wouldn’t have agreed to co-author a seminal paper on the subject of the past, present and future of virtual worlds.

There are two possible outcomes when you’re staring down a journal like ACM and submitting a paper, or working with folks from IBM and other multinational corporations to help define an entire industry. One does not simply predict the rise of Zero Barrier Retail and how it can manifest (Amazon Go).

Either I’m completely delusional, or I actually understand something most people don’t.

Over the past twenty years, it has overwhelmingly been proven the latter under countless instances.

After all, you are perfectly aware that the day Philip Rosedale announced High Fidelity, I raised concerns and outlined that it would not work out the way he was promising. It was no surprise to me that shortly after my interview with NWN talking about how High Fidelity was not the Metaverse nor would it likely ever be just by overall design, that Philip would make a rebuttal and then shortly after shut down the public servers to focus on enterprise solutions out of the scrutiny of the public.

The numbers just weren’t there to support his promises and assertions. They weren’t there from the beginning and they weren’t there when he claimed to be making The Metaverse later.

But this isn’t a post about kicking anyone in the teeth, though arguably Philip does a good enough job doing so to himself consistently.

What this is about is something that has been persistent in the virtual worlds industry for twenty years. Even sitting in the conference room with Ebbe Altberg at Linden Lab, and trying to convey talking points on a white board, even then something important came up from him that I’ve heard before many times in the industry.

Most importantly that places like Second Life seem to have a userbase limit of around 100,000 and then some sort of glass ceiling. Of course, they’ve all tried the A|B testing and focus groups to find out what users prefer, but that doesn’t seem to be helping.

Nor would it ever likely be of much insight to begin with.

In this point alone, we’re living in the “now” when we should be figuring out the future. In the immortal words of Steve Jobs:

“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

In this statement, most companies are horrible at predicting the future. They pour over market research and analytical forecasts to see what the supposed trends are going to be.

This is how SANSAR came to be, originally betting the farm on VR Headsets being the future.

It was a bad call then, and you as the reader already are well aware, I had said so when the hype originally began. The difference between market research and forecasts, the A|B testing, and the attempt to preempt the future with some offering is that it doesn’t actually take into consideration the overall understanding of that ecosystem but instead tries to dictate it based not on anticipating what people will want but what self-interested companies and market research firms are paid to tell everyone in order to create that hype and therefore demand for their reports and services.

That’s what has always set me apart from the mainstream, and also why I have such an uncanny ability to forecast accurately.

I’m not telling anyone the real trends and outcomes because I want to be a Debbie Downer. I’m just stating the likely outcomes ahead of time and also stating why.

So what can we learn from this?

Well, we can say that the end-user doesn’t actually know what they want (mostly) but that is because the companies don’t even know what those end users want or why. So we’re asking all the wrong questions, focusing on the wrong parts of the equation.

While we do get answers for doing this, we more often than not get inconsequential answers that do little or nothing to move the needle of progress forward.

We’re no closer today in understanding that lightning in a bottle than we were in 1995, despite widespread efforts in attempting to recreate it.

Lightning in a Bottle

That being said, I’m overgeneralizing. Of course I know why that lightning in a bottle happened multiple times and then immediately was lost. However, it’s not enough that I understand the situation because what ultimately matters is if the people who are in charge of these virtual worlds systems understand it as well.

Those are the people who make these decisions, (not myself), and so those are the sort of people who plot the course for better or worse (usually worse).

As of this moment, it is safe to assume that they do not understand the organics of the ecosystem. Otherwise, why else are these systems still (for lack of better words) floundering?

I’m not implying that a place like Second Life is a failure, or even SANSAR for that matter. But they are failing. There’s a difference, and more importantly it’s more about the big picture and perception. It’s about the overarching nature of perspective. When taken alone without comparison, then yes, these are two massively successful endeavors with a rich and glorious offering.

But taken within the total ecosystem, they aren’t faring too well. Minecraft is nearly as old as Second Life and still consistently has 91 million players each month with 15% of that over the age of 30.

“Pff… Minecraft. That low resolution kids game?” I hear you say.

Yes, Minecraft. That game which allows for Path Traced Lighting, weather and more. The “more” part we’ll get to in a bit because it is vitally important in understanding why Minecraft has tens of millions of “players” over the age of 30 and Linden Lab is wrestling with a glass ceiling of 100,000 and less.

The image above is actually Minecraft, and while this is an extreme case where you’d pretty much need an nVIDIA RTX card to handle it, the point is that the graphics in Minecraft can and are evolving well beyond anything I’ve ever seen in Second Life and maybe SANSAR.

But that’s not the real point here.

What we’re getting at are a couple of points, really. SANSAR on Steam wasn’t going to help Linden Lab out. I could have told them that from day one just based on common sense. I probably did say something to the effect when the other blogs reported it.

Adding the ability to create quests in SANSAR is pretty neat, but only in its own bubble. Which is to say, the moment you put SANSAR in the same market as AAA games, you’re coming up short immediately in direct comparison. For all the advancement SANSAR is by comparison to Second Life, when compared to the typical AAA game market and player, you’re in the territory of Lowered Expectations out of the gate.

Loki Eliot in SANSAR… presumably doing Loki things.

“But SANSAR looks incredible!” I already heard you say.

I never said it didn’t. There are a number of advancements besides graphics that also are impressive for a virtual world. While Minecraft can handle path traced lighting, it’s not the potential for high end graphics that is the secret sauce. Nor was using the Crytek Engine the secret sauce for Avatar BlueMars.

See where I’m going here? SANSAR looks suspiciously to me like a new version of BlueMars. That alone is enough for anybody in the industry to throw red flags.

In a manner of “Whoa there, Nelly! Take a step back and rethink where you’re going with this. You’re flirting with a perfectly avoidable failure.”

It’s not to say SANSAR is doomed. It’s still operating, people are still working on it internally to improve it. So it really just needs a better understanding of the organic ecosystem applied for it to really flourish.

Second Life only has the glass ceiling because the people who engage with it regularly mostly “get” the point of it being a social virtual world that is user generated – a platform.

Outside that community, people more or less just don’t “get” it. How do you play this video game? What’s the point?

It’s a mismatch of target demographics, and an internal misunderstanding of what the nature of the product is which appeals to the masses. I don’t really think anyone actually knew what the magic was to begin with and were just as caught off guard by the sudden success as anyone else. But the minute they ran with it, they inevitably ran it into a wall.

One mustn’t mess with forces they do not comprehend

The Oracle Has Spoken!

Ok, not really.

The killer app of virtual worlds are the people themselves and the enabling of their ability to create and exist in a dynamic and organic ecosystem.

In a perfect world of understanding, the company (Linden Lab) offers nothing more than the tools, platform and services to enable while not interfering with that ecosystem. In a perfect virtual world, a company like Linden Lab doesn’t duplicate services or offerings that already exist via the user generated ecosystem, nor do they call it Premium. That’s not a symbiotic nature, and instead is acting the part of the invasive species.

In a perfect virtual world, a company like Linden Lab offers only added-value proposition as premium that only they can offer, and which augments the ecosystem without duplicating services.

That being said, this is far beyond any blog post or single whitepaper I could ever hope to write. There is no real way to reduce twenty years of experience and implicit understanding of such a vastly complex ecosystem into a single tweet, a one hour meeting, or just a quote or interview.

There really is no way to convey all of this in a keynote speech or presentation.

All I can say to the entirety is that the understanding is like understanding chaos theory. It’s not necessarily the knowledge that matters but the ability to see the patterns in the chaos, then articulate how best to navigate that chaos.

More or less, this is why I’ve become infrequent in my writing here. It’s why I stopped doing interviews, and it’s also why I have no desire to do any keynotes or presentations.

We’ve reached a point where the understanding and insight is beyond that which can be articulated in concise form, and also tends to retread old ground (at least to me). Overall, the industry is going to do whatever it is they intend to do regardless of forewarning or sound forecasting. Jumping on trends, subscribing to the hype, propping up the corporate talking points – and as a matter of fact, I wouldn’t expect otherwise. It has been the only constant I’ve come to expect in twenty years.

So to all those companies: You do you :)

This is now at a point where I’d just have to be hands-on in the process for anything further I could explain to make sense. It’s now a contextual situation.

Current Events

Linden Lab Lawsuit: Not really something I care about, really.

Arguably they probably could have just had her meet with the legal department to sort out the perceived issues and gotten confirmation that such concerns were taken care of, or had she raised to them issues which they were unaware of, some sort of action plan to sort it out. Of course, nobody really knows the situation entirely and it could just be bad actors. From the outside looking in, that’s about all I have to say about the situation.

It’s not for me to decide what is what. That’s what the courts are for.

Strawberry Linden: Congratulations :)

Tilia:

Inactivity fee – This is new, but it does make sense. Much as we probably all hate it, if you have money in Tilia and you’ve abandoned the account for whatever reason, they’re going to charge the upkeep fee and take the money.

The Verification process thing. Let’s talk a minute about that.

I understand it’s a legal requirement. The process was fine for me here in the United States, but I’ve heard a few mentions that people in other countries it didn’t work for them. Hopefully it gets worked out, because a lot of content creators and stores are run by international users…

Second Life Mobile: Recently wrote up a short ten page document outlining some concepts for Active Design and arranging a mobile version of SL and UX. No idea if Ebbe actually read it or if anything outlined in the write-up would be used.

Your guess is as good as mine.

The Future of Engagement

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Sat, 01 Dec 2018 08:41:00 +0000

Why I Don’t Believe In Virtual Worlds…

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

Back in the mid 1990s, there was this new thing called virtual reality that was taking the world by storm. The term itself became so saturated and misappropriated that it no longer held any real meaning. By the end of the 1990s, it had jumped the shark.

It was specifically because virtual reality had no proper definition of what is and is not, that marketing and companies latched onto it like a bunch of hungry vultures looking to peddle whatever it was that they were making. During this time we saw the lowest common denominator spring up under the guise of legitiate offerings – Nintendo Virtual Boy, VZone, PowerGlove and more.

In the early 1990s, there was of course things like Worlds Inc, which was a virtual world where you had to pre-design the spaces and download them up front before you could enter. Their claim to fame at the time was that Aerosmith themselves had a world there that you could explore. The interactivity of it all was sparse at best and Worlds Inc soon faded out in favor of it’s in-house successor ActiveWorlds in which the end-users could create the environment in real time. This in and of itself was a major breakthrough in the days of dial-up connections.

What is most interesting about the Worlds Inc model was that rooms, or spaces were compartmentalized and each had to be downloaded in entirety up front before entering. It was a failed model at the time, and later on others tried to adopt the same model with similar results. There was no sense of continuity with these spaces nor contiguous spatial presence. Each space existed on its own.

The irony of that tidbit of knowledge is that Alpha Tech, or AlphaWorld as it was known early on, actually was an in-house system competing against the “Gamma” Tech of Worlds Inc that they already used.

Worlds Inc didn’t see the merit of the AlphaWorld model and so discarded it in favor of their existing Gamma tech model.

The artists and designers at Worlds Inc raised the capital themselves to buy the rights to AlphaWorld and soon launched their own system independently and became ActiveWorlds.

The interesting thing about ActiveWorlds was that it immediately ditched the self-contained room model and download up front aspect for spaces, instead implementing dynamic asset downloads in a sprawling world. The main world, AlphaWorld, was a public building space where anyone could claim land and build. More importantly, this land mass was roughly the contiguous size of the state of California.

There were no border crossings like in Second Life – so you really could drive a vehicle for hundreds of miles uninterrupted. While I can hear the numerous outcries of RP enthusiasts from Second Life waiting to respond with “Umm, Actually…” – I’ll point out that while you can drive vehicles in Second Life the experience is lackluster by comparison to literally everything.

Yes, you can race a car on a track with others, but the audience to watch the race is limited and most tracks during actual races pretty much require you to remove everything including your shoes just to sit and watch.You can fly a plane in Second Life but you and I both know full well that every 1024 meters you fly you’re going to hit that sim border crossing, and it’s not very smooth. We both know full well that you can sail a boat around some waters in Second Life but the experience isn’t actually that good.

That’s the self delusion kicking in. Telling yourself the experience is top notch when it isn’t even close. As a matter of fact, to the mainstream world that experience is completely unacceptable. I’ve had responses to that implying that I somehow don’t know about all these options and shouldn’t making comments on them…

And yet, there I am in my own UNO Mark II super-car in Second Life. Let me tell you about that experience:

The car itself is fantastic and a feat of virtual engineering. It has dials and guages, color options, tons of tuning options, etc. This car can tear up a track in no time flat. It has fifteen gears, and under the best circumstances my friends and I have only ever managed to get it up to tenth gear before the car is moving too quickly for the sim to keep up.

Needly to say, we’ve launched this car over embankments into the water, over the railings, and managed to cross a finish line at high speed launched upside down.

I love this car to death… but I’d enjoy driving it more in Forza Motorsport.

Assuming it’s real life counterpart, the Mono were available as an option:

Which it actually is:

And when you’re comparing you flight/sailing/driving experience from Second Life to anything mainstream, you’re flatly outclassed at literally every conceivable turn. The assertion that the experience in Second Life for those things is somehow on par with anything at all is downright laughable.

You among your fellow RP’ers will agree that it’s a great experience, but that sentiment doesn’t hold up to outside facts.

In ActiveWorlds however… we could very well drive on a track uninterrupted and quickly, we could have 50 or so spectators without incident. Nobody was ever asked to take off their shoes. Of course, our vehicles never reached a level of fidelity like the UNO/Mono.

Of course, I digress… so let’s get back on topic.

During those years, ActiveWorlds saw a rise in popularity but never did become mainstream. Though it is to note that they were the predescessor of something you may know today – Second Life.

It was during those mid to late 1990s that another key figure from left field happened to notice this virtual world trend and who worked in another quintessentially 90s company – Real (who did early streaming video via realPlayer etc).

When he departed from Real, he went on to form Linden Lab and start his own virtual world system which borrowed heavily from ActriveWorlds in the process while innovating in some areas to modernize the approach. It is because I saw these similarities in approach that I chose Second Life to migrate to from ActiveWorlds in 2007.

The interesting thing to understand here is that while you know this person as Philip Rosedale, what you likely didn’t know was that when asked why he didn’t make Second Life sooner, he was quoted as saying that the technology wasn’t possible at the time.

But this is a fabrication at best, as ActiveWorlds existed from 1994 onward and shares many of the key structural elements with the successor of Second Life – even if the predescessor is a much less refined example, it still doesn’t negate that it served a similar premise and shared many key architectural developments in how a virtual world was deployed and for what purpose to the end user. The key interaction paradigm itself was what Rosedale took away from the 90s through prior example.

That last part isn’t what bothers me, but instead it’s the deliberate and selective amnesia about that inspiration and process which grates on my nerves. It isn’t something that is unique to him, but across an entire industry as a whole. We continue to conveniently forget that our “new” ideas are actually unoriginal at best and have been done before. So long as it serves our own narrative and product, we’re willing to have selective amnesia.

That is something that bothers me enough to where I believe there is a certain level of futility when making honest assessments for the current and future of virtual worlds as a whole (including augmented reality). It does no good to forecast to a group of people whose best interest lays in deliberately not acknowledging contradictory information to their own offerings.

The bigger problem is that, much like the 1990s, the entire industry has their head in the sand and any form of constructive criticism or forecast that contradicts their marketing narrative is ignored. There’s simply too much riding on those systems and products to admit anything contrary to that self-agrandization.

During the mid to late 1990s, we also saw a myriad of companies proclaiming that the future of virtual reality was in fact online web worlds. To this end we ended up with plugins for web browsers to play WRL and VRML content, and more specialized systems like Blaxxun Contact to manage multi-user social aspects in those worlds.

Somewhere in all of that, Virtual Reality hit mainstream for awhile and we saw movies and expensive VR Arcades popping up with headsets and $5.00 to play Wolfenstein 3D for five minutes…

What is most important to note in this editorial is not the history itself but that today you can quite easily see the modern day versions of all of this replaying out like a bad franchise reboot.

Second Life? It’s an iteration of ActiveWorlds.

SANSAR? Iteration of BlueMars, which is an iteration of the Worlds Inc model.

VR Headsets? VFX1

VR Arcades? Been there and done that twenty years ago.

OpenSim? Iteration of the countless third party ActiveWorlds systems that sprung up independently.

Web Worlds? They didn’t take off in the 1990s, so why on Earth would anyone think they would take off today?

We have reboot-itis in the industry. Take an old idea, add some more polish to it, and hope the average consumer doesn’t know we’re repackaging the old stuff to sell again.

There has been, and continues to be, a lack or real innovation in the industry – at least where that innovation counts in the bigger picture.

It’s no wonder the mainstream audience doesn’t take to these current offerings and in fact openly mock them.

They aren’t as willing to have selective amnesia as the companies that are trying to sell the products are.

Innovation

Just as we patterned our original conceptions of The Metaverse on Cyberpunk novels of the 80s, so too the narrative must evolve. When I was part of (and technically still am) IEEE Virtual Worlds Standard group, and prior to that asked to submit a definition of The Metaverse that fit modern times to the Solipsis Decentralized Metaverse project, I thought long and hard about the future of virtual worlds as well as the history that helped us define virtual worlds up until that point.

I extrapolated that information among many cyberpunk descriptions and distilled it into a common thread for an all inclusive criteria for what The Metaverse would look like, how the architecture would support it, the experience overall.

What I ended up coming to as an answer was well ahead of its time, and for many years thought to be impossible. Even today, many in the industry still insist it’s not possible or that their particular methodologies are really the future.

I was asked to define this in 2007, and above you can see my answer. It was just the synopsis of the full answer, which was given in the ACM Paper a few years later, and then reiterated in IEEE Virtual Worlds Standard group, and now the running definition worldwide.

The Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space,^[1] including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the internet. The word metaverse is a portmanteau of the prefix "meta" (meaning "beyond") and "universe" and is typically used to describe the concept of a future iteration of the internet, made up of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe.

I want to note that the definition above was written by me verbatim and stands as the most comprehensive definition of The Metaverse that exists unless you count the 38 pages of the ACM paper that goes into heavy detail or the expansion of that for IEEE in the P1828 overview.

The entire point of the definition was to outline that Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse consisted of a single large planet that was persistent and traversable. That being said, Neal Stephenson wasn’t the only author to portray cyberpunk and virtual reality space during the time, and so I took into account a much larger Metaverse, a Universe structure, in which The Street was merely a gateway location in the bigger system.

Ergo, why the Solipsis Decentralized Metaverse definition I provided split things up into a hierarchy the way it did.

Whenever I hear anyone proclaim confidently that they are building a true Metaverse or already have one, my first reaction (as should anyone who hears such a claim) is uncontrollable laughter. If you aren’t checking off any of those boxes, sit your delusional ass down.

From the mouth of the guy who wrote the modern hierarchy and definition of Metaverse – allow me to tell you with absolute authority what The Metaverse will look like and act like:

OASIS from Ready Player One.

Full stop. No bullshit. No room for half-assed or sub-par.

If your virtual world system is not on par with a fully scalable virtual universe that is persistent and single shard, if it does not contain a full ecosystem and methods by which to support the building of entire virtual civilizations, if it is simply a rehash of the things that were done in the 1990s, then it’s not The Metaverse.

Not in your wildest dreams.

We live in a time where the current industry is crowing about their 100,000 userbase and how a couple of hundred people showing up is proof that they’ll be the next big thing.

But in contrast – Minecraft puts you all to shame.

They have on average 91 million players. Of that demographic split up, ages 30+ make up 21% which comes out to about 19 million players.

There are nearly a hundred million people that prefer Minecraft over anything this virtual world industry is offering.

Your numbers are at best laughable by comparison. We don’t like to compare those numbers but instead just compare other big fish in the small pond to each other. High Fidelity, SineWave, SANSAR, SecondLife, VRChat, etc.

When I see charts from Wagner James Au asking who is most likely among those to become “The Metaverse”? I have to pin a post-it note to that chart and say “None of them”.

On that post it note reads: Minecraft and Dual Universe make this a moot point.

When I said in OSCC last year that what the virtual world really needs is to add purpose – resources, gathering, etc. Nerf teleports, add scarcity…

Universally I was asked “Who would possibly want that? The market doesn’t want that…”

Except for those 91 million players of Minecraft that enjoy just that and probably Dual Universe where 30,000+ players have paid about 100 bucks just to get an account when they are in pre-alpha.

How many people are knocking down the doors of High Fidelity like that? Nobody. Hows the response to SANSAR lately? Not so good. I’d go down this list but you get my point.

They (High Fidelity) are giving out gift cards to entice people to show up for their stress tests, giving away VR headsets at conferences for PR… effectively they have to bribe people to show up. Now back to that prior situation where tens of thousands of people are paying a hundred dollars to get into a pre-alpha of Dual Universe.

And yet, Mr Rosedale asserts he’s building a true Metaverse?

I don’t think so.

The other issue here is – we’re talking about somebody who told you this before, and spectacularly misjudged what the market wanted, and slammed Second Life into a brick wall.

Lest you forget… Mr Rosedale is heading High Fidelity because he was ousted as CEO of Linden Lab. You’ve heard that song and dance from him before, bought into it, and took the ride into the brick wall with him at the wheel before. His inability to anticipate market wants/needs, deliberate misunderstanding of organic trends and fostering a Metaverse type structure, and his penchant for over-hyping his product is why he’s no longer CEO of Linden Lab.

If it’s all the same to you – I’ll take that assertion of his with a monumental salt lick.

Just as I took it with a massive grain of salt when everyone was jumping on the VR Headset bandwagon again. Linden Lab bet an entire project (SANSAR) on the mass adoption of VR Headsets… while I flatly said it won’t pan out.

That isn’t news now, but in hindsight I might as well have been predicting the Titanic would sink while people were boarding. Again, the people most invested both monetarily and emotionally in their chosen virtual world platform or devices do so at the complete disregard for the reality of the situation.

It’s much the same for why I politely bowed out of the Metaverse Alliance, though I’m sure my name is still up there as an advisor (which I’m happy to be). The reason here is that OpenSim is not the future… no more than Second Life is. Trying to retrofit OpenSim and strap stuff onto it just isn’t helpful in the bigger picture. It serves a niche purpose at best and for that it does well enough, but mainstream it will never be. It is (at best) a stop gap.

The Future of Engagement

Coming up on the 8th of December, I’ll be participating in OSCC as a panelist for The Future of Engagement discussion. I’ve opted not to do my own presentation this year, and if you’ve read this far, you’ll understand why.

When I asserted that the main problem with virtual worlds and adoption is the Bored God Syndrome – illustrated by an episode of Twilight Zone (entitled: A Nice Place to Visit), and asked what Minecraft has that draws 91+ million players that SL, and others do not offer – I was met with the stock answer “Ease of Use”.

This illustrates my point entirely. Ease of use is but a small part of the equation, while the underlying premise and narrative itself – that scarcity model and hero’s call to adventure brings purpose to the otherwise purposeless virtual life.

Minecraft adds overarching meaning and the tools to achieve those ends. It adds scarcity model – and that is far more successful than anything the virtual worlds industry has come up with to date.

Nobody can seriously say that their virtual world system even comes close to those numbers.

Of course, that premise is one of the overarching criteria for The Metaverse. You saw it in OASIS. Which brings us to the other point at hand -

The reason your systems aren’t mainstream and likely will never be is because in order to be mainstream it has to appeal to the mainstream ideal of what the majority of people associate with as The Metaverse.

As of right now, hundreds of millions, if not billions of people on Earth think OASIS is The Metaverse. If you aren’t bringing that to the table, you’re going to get laughed at.

I have to agree with the notion of OASIS as Metaverse model because that’s exactly what I defined it as in 2007. Since 2007, I’ve had people constantly tell me I was wrong, or that The Metaverse is whatever they want it to be… I’ve had people tell me that the definition I came up with wasn’t even possible.

And yet here we are today.

Dual Universe exists. Nearly exact to my definition of The Metaverse. Single shard, persistent, full scale universe.

It’s still in alpha at this point, but even their alpha puts everything else to shame right now. I’m not even worried about Dual Universe as a game being The Metaverse… that’s irrelevant. What is relevant in this discussion is that the underlying structure and execution of that architecture is the basis for a full scale Metaverse on par with OASIS.

Dual Universe is the canary in the coal mine. It’s telling everyone to wake up and pay attention to the future, to real innovation… If for no other reason – it deserves to be in the discussion along side all the other so-called virtual world players, even if it makes everyone else look bad by comparison.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UaYZeXHJ6Q

Things like XAYA deserve to be in the discussion, especially if you combine it with Dual Universe. Minecraft also should be thrown into that discussion, because they are doing something right with the emergent behavior aspect we so desperately need (and could implement in Second Life) to a larger degree. It’s also something that Dual Universe took a keen interest in when developing their system.

That doesn’t mean I think Second Life could evolve into that Metaverse, but I will say that they can evolve further to be something similar in the meantime. Linden Lab isn’t entirely out of the running yet – they’re just betting on the wrong horse in this race at the moment.

The only thing that ultimately matters now is this:

Who is going to implement all this and when?

Answer those two questions, and you’ll know who is really ahead of the industry, and who to keep an eye on. You’ll also know who is selling a line of bullshit.

What I said in 2007 was and remains true. When Novaquark bills itself as “The Metaverse Company”, as the person who defined the modern Metaverse, I have to agree with them so far. They’re the only place that checks off the boxes I originally came up with.

Maybe not The Metaverse, but by god that technology will likely be the basis for it in the long run. If your system isn’t following suit, you’re pretty much relegated to a niche audience in the long run.

I don’t believe in virtual worlds, because I believe in The Metaverse. Nothing short of OASIS level virtual Universe. I’ve always held this belief, I’ve written the definition of Metaverse with this overarching structure in mind. Anything less is just a virtual world – however compelling… it’s still just a nice place to visit.

Virtual worlds are the equivalent to the participation trophy. They are constantly rehashing the past with a new coat of paint and trying to sell it like it’s the future. I don’t believe in virtual worlds… and now you know why.

If we all want better, it’s time to stop believing in virtual worlds and start believing in The Metaverse instead. Hold it to the highest criteria, don’t accept anything less.

Peace and Happy Holidays :)

Organic Nature

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Wed, 30 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Impossible Audio in #SecondLife

When it comes to creating an immersive virtual environment, the goal is to allow the participant to suspend disbelief. Unfortunately, when it comes to places like Second Life (and SANSAR), we find that even the best designed sims always seem to forget the basics.

You know what I’m talking about today, and you’ve likely experienced this for yourself, (or rather didn’t). You teleport to some highly recommended sim somewhere only to find that the music is blaring 24 hours a day. When you turn the music off, you begin to understand why -

The whole place is eerily dead silent.

So what gives?

Audio immersion is a fundamental design staple when it comes to virtual worlds, and there are a few ways that designs either go about it or decidedly do not.

On the low end, we have our typical sim that just forgoes the immersive audio altogether in favor of sticking a music stream on the parcel. You’ll find more often than not that these locations are also quite sparse in their overall design, having a shopping mall or no real coherent planning.

Let’s say we happen across a sim that actually took some time to plan out their audioscape. Even here we’ll find that the audio often seems flat and repetative.

There are plenty of options on Marketplace when it comes to ambient audio, with the most populated option being from SoundScenes. What I am about to say is in no way an indication of whether Hastur Piersterson has done a great job or not with his product. I believe given the circumstances, the SoundScapes series of ambient audio is just fine for everyday use in your builds and I’d definitely recommend it.

One thing you’ll notice, (however), is that with the SoundScapes lineup the quality seems to be entirely hit or miss. Of course, this is totally subjective and I’m merely looking at the reactions of the customers who will give certain audio cubes a 3 star rating or 5 stars.

This isn’t a situation relegated to just SoundScapes, and it is something that persists across most (if not all) ambient audio systems in Second Life.

Much of the problem comes about from understanding what the limitations of SecondLife are in relation to audio itself.

44100khz
Mono Channel
10 seconds or less

That doesn’t seem to be a lot to work with up front, but if you understand how audio works, this is more than enough for a virtual world, especially when you understand why Second Life insists on uploading Mono tracks only.

The first bit of information we need to understand is that Mono tracks are required for Second Life to properly pan the audio points and add doppler. Well, not entirely… but this is the main stated reason because this is how the audio engine works in Second Life.

The problem here is that when you’re doing ambient audio systems in Second Life, you take these awesome stereo tracks and effectively crush them down to mono, in the process you lose what is called “side information”. A Mono track will effectively take stereo and average the left and right channel into a mid channel.

Mono mixes will always sound different to stereo ones, and there is little that you can do about that. On a technical level, the mono mix contains only the 'mid' information whereas the stereo mix has both 'mid' and 'side' information.

The reason a stereo mix 'sounds massive' is because of the quantity and nature of the side signal. If there is a lot of out-of-phase information in the stereo mix it will tend to sound very big, but this information will largely be lost when listening to the mid signal only.

This is why most audio in Scond Life sounds “flat” or low quality. We’ve simply stripped out the side information and uploaded the equivalent of average.

Now, you can get away with some tricks here in Mono and we’ll get to that in a moment. I want to address the 10 second limit first.

When we step up our game (pun intended) and start using ambient audio, maybe somebody has created a looped player in a cube (which is the most common approach), you find that 10 second loop sound annoying as hell and fake. It’s simply not organic enough to introduce randomness or it is so short that you can tell when it is looping.

This destroys the immersion.

Years ago when I was in ActiveWorlds, the AWGate world had a looping track of forest and birds. The problem was that this looped every 60 seconds or so. Those bird calls became predictable and ultimately annoying.

We could, of course, implement cubes that play some clips at random to break it up. We get the random crow in the distance or whatever. But let’s stay with our baseline for now.

Ok, so let’s say we step up our game again… this time we’re chaining together multiple 10 second clips to extend that loop further.

Excellent… we’re onto something now. But again, most stop around 30 seconds or 1-2 minutes in the high end. At the very least, we should be shooting for a 2 minute loop.

But what of the sound quality?

We’re still stuck with this crushed mono track, right? We’ve lost that side information and saved the mid range average. This still makes our audio sound flat.

Curse you Linden Lab!

Hold on… there is a light at the end of this tunnel.

We know that Second Life doesn’t allow stereo files (singular), and we have to upload in Mono only in 10 second maximum length. But that isn’t necessarily a limitation if you understand audio editing.

So let’s say that we understand now that combining a stereo track into a mono track will effectively lose the side information and flatten our audio.

But what if we isolated the Left and Right channels of a stereo track, and saved them separately as Mono tracks?

Of course we split them up into 10 seconds or less clips to chain together in-world.

Now we’re sitting with a split stereo audio… of which Second Life will gladly accept for upload. Those two channels saved individually also retain their side information, making them sound bigger when played back together in sync. There’s more depth to it and spatialization – far more than you’d get out of a mono track.

Now we’re stuck with solving the problem of how to play them simultaneously in Second Life. This is where the solution gets a little more complex because we can’t just code a single cube and let it go… I mean you could but that would be kind of a nightmare and limiting because you’re using a single item contents and dumping everything in there.

So let’s say we have our main cube, it’s a controller cube. The entire purpose of this object is to orchestrate the left and right channels of audio, which are in two other objects running a clone of our audio script and listening on an internal channel for the controller to tell them what to do.

You have the left channel audio files in one object, and the right channel audio files in the other object, both listening for the controller cube to tell them when to start and stop.

This should sound eerily similar to a Night/Day system except instead of day and night and two separate loops, we’re treating the two internals like left and right speaker to play simultaneously and giving them specialized audio that syncs together.

By doing it like this, we side-step the mono midrange problem and retain our side information, making the combined audio seem “bigger” and more robust. It just sounds more natural.

Of course, Second Life will pan those audios and add doppler because it thinks it’s just two separate tracks in mono and doesn’t know there is a correlation.

The purpose of doing it like this is predominantly to retain that side information which gives our audio depth. Now we have something that sounds more natural in the process, and whether Second Life is panning them is irrelevant because they are being panned in relation to each other, and that is what counts to retain the symmetry of the audio. We effectively are doubling the audio information being played back in-world, which to our ears sounds better.

These are what we can refer to as baseline ambient audio systems. Our “first layer” foundation. We build from here to create a totally immersive environment. Once we’ve sorted out the original audio information limitation and solved it, it becomes easier as we build with it.

Yes, we can have multiple cubes synced up but I’ll be the first to tell you that you actually don’t want to do that. If you have multiple cubes like this playing out of sync, it by defaults makes your environment seem organic and “random”.

As you move around the environment, they cue up out of sync with each other but in sync with itself (if that makes sense).

In the audio editing phase of such a project, we can apply some more tricks. What if we applied a wider spatialization to the stereo track before splitting it up? In-world, it would sound richer and more organic (within reason).

Once we understand how the audio system works, and a bit of audio theory for editing, we should be able to figure out how to get around the limits within reason.

I wouldn’t suggest that we can nail down true binaural audio in Second Life this way. If we approached it slightly different then yes we actually could.

Let’s say we applied the same technique to a pair of virtual headphones in Second Life. The headphone has two objects, one for right and left channel, and the headphone is the controller to them. We apply the same technique of stereo splitting and synchronization as above but now from a fixed position in relation to the listener.

With this setup, we could replicate full binaural audio in Second Life, albeit in a manner which is highly controlled. You wouldn’t get real-time panning like this, but in the bigger picture, maybe you could invent a pair of ASMR headphones for Anxiety Relief that plays back a head massage for fifteen minutes in binaural?

At this point you should understand that there is a bit of a downside to this, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.

Synchronized Stereo Costs Twice As Much

Developing such a system in Second Life would also entail that your sound cube systems now cost you roughly twice as much to make, obviously because you have to upload double the audio files.

You therefore wouldn’t want to apply this technique to everything, but instead figure out where this technique would best be suited.

There is also another cost factor when trying to do this for a Day/Night system. Instead of two sets of audio in mono, you’re now using two stereo sets and so the cost of a Day/Night ambient system would run quadruple to had you just had a single mono loop.

I suppose in the bigger picture, we’re talking about that up-front cost and investment, and whether the benefits outweigh the costs. I’d imagine we would have to charge a slight premium for these HD Audio systems, but as long as it was still reasonable I think the end-user would still pay for it.

For me, the benefits definitely outweigh the costs. Audio using such a system sounds far better in Second Life than the typical flat mono loops we’re used to. It has a better dynamic range, it sounds less flat and more robust – even though Second Life pans the audio around as you move, that side information is still there and (interestingly) compliments it (I’ll get to that in a moment).

One could most definitely add the ability to “widen” the audio field in-world by allowing the end-user to expandor contract the left and right channel distance – which is just a fancy way of saying move those two cubes internall farther or closer together.

The Cetera Algorithm & HRTF

The Cetera Algorithm is a reference to Starkey Labs and their hearing aid technology which makes the hearing aid seem invisible to the brain. Cetera removes the barrier between sound and the brain’s ability to process signals, and helps retain the subtle differences in arrival time between left and right ears so that your brain can process positional audio.

In the world of virtual reality, we also refer to this as understanding teh acoustic properties of Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF) which model 3D sound in both the room and how it arrives to your ears. That inference pattern of information is unconscious, but means a lot to the brain when trying to determine position, whether something sounds “real” or not and so on.

Let’s take an audio journey as an example:

Synthetic HRTF Audio Test

Of course, this is a massive oversimplification. So far as Second Life is concerned, yes it can be done but it likely will not anytime soon. We’re not talking about simple panning of left and right chanels with a mono track, but instead a panning stereo track, and even then we’re talking about a stereo track that was recorded in a very specific manner. Yes, we can effectively fake it in Second Life to a degree and under very controlled circumstances, but for our purposes here we’re discussing how to at least up the ante with stereo and the extended information at that level.

Suffice it to say, when somebody says that the difference between CD audio and Vinyl is “all in your head”, they don’t quite seem to understand how right they are (for all the wrong reasons).

While we may not get a full HRTF Model in Second Life, we can approximate things a bit. We can also take this information and subtle cues approach to help us further our understanding on how to approach and apply audio in the virtual world, even with our current limitations.

If we know that the extra information is paramount to our brain in order to process the audio better, then we can look for ways to reasonably retain that information and higher frequency whenever possible for a more natural listening experience.

Planning Your Scene

Even if we know all these crazy details about human hearing and perception, and create a tool by which exploits both how Second Life works and effectively doubles the perceptual audio resolution, there is still the understanding that the best tools are only as effective as the person using them.

For instance, we don’t actually want all of these ambient cubes synchronized to each other. With themselves, yes (and for obvious reason). But because of the nature of Second Life itself, and because such a system would invariably have a delay anyway for preloading and so on, it’s not a big deal and it’s actually more preferred to have the cubes not synced together because then they are offset around your sim playing out of sync with each other and effectively randomizing the soundscape based on where the end-user is location and moving.

The next part to understand is that we aren’t using these singular cubes as the end-all to be all. We have to plan ahead for a soundscape, and include those little details to layer things beyond the baseline.

A random cube that plays maybe crows during day and owls at night, or woodpeckers or whatever. That’s a good addition to the baseline.

The real trick here is walking around the sim as you’re building and asking yourself:

What does this sound like?

There’s really no such thing as “silence”. Whether the soda machine is making a compressor hum, there’s distance walla in a city (like white noise), the door opens, a bell rings entering the store, whatever… Things make noise on their own or when interacted with.

It all adds up.

AES Audio

A lot of this post comes about from a long-term project and R&D from AMG (Andromeda Media Group) in Second Life. One of the projects has been improving audio by thinking of things these systems could really use, and that we weren’t happy with out of the box.

There is, of course, more to it than “We’ve doubled the audio resolution”, however impressive that may be. Things like Dynamic Crosstalk Suppression (DCS) are also included in our current prototypes.

Should another audio brand in Second Life wish to upgrade their own systems with this information, I wouldn’t mind. Whatever makes the experience in Second Life better overall is a win for everyone.

That being said, I’m not going to explain how we’re pulling off Dynamic Crosstalk Suppression. That’s our little secret.

As a final note, let’s recap how to upgrade our ambient audio systems in Second Life:

Stereo Synchronization
Understanding Audio Information
Using loops measured in minutes, not seconds
Optional Stereo Widening before splitting
Understanding the circumstances of how it will be heard
Dynamic Crosstalk Suppression
Optional User Defined Channel Widening
Using additional randomized audio to break it up

A Tale of Two Labs

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Fri, 02 Mar 2018 01:10:00 +0000

Insight from my trip to Linden Lab and Beyond

Clarity From Chaos

The sun shone down that day, caressing the silver Passat on I-5 as my assistant and I rolled through the unending fields of almonds which so graciously seem to blanket much of the California hills. Aside from the occasional confused cow (which I named Carl), there was little else to keep my mind occupied.

The radio in these parts seemed to assault my senses with either Spanish, Country Music, or Evangelism. It was clear I needed to turn that noise-box off for a bit and clear my head.

Sipping Carolina Honey Argo Tea (my favorite pretentious tea), I contemplated what was ahead and the shear insanity of it all.

After all, I somehow decided one day out of the blue to cart my balls around in a wheelbarrel and invite Ebbe Altberg, Samy Montechristo and Orion Simprini to hang out. It’s at this point, I usually get the obligatory “How did you get a meeting with them?” question.

A: I simply asked.

Now, whether that speaks to me being important or not is up in the air. Maybe if you asked, they’d schedule you in as well?

Ok, Michelle will schedule you in… she’s Ebbe’s assistant. Maybe the guy wanted a court jester for an hour? Maybe Ebbe stared out the window as I left and said “What the hell just happened?” Who knows…

At least Orion and I have talked back and forth for years and have always wanted to hang out with each other… so weirdly, asking a freakin pop-star to hang out is less crazy than asking the CEO of Linden Lab if he wanted to hang out, but I figured “Why the hell not?”

We had been on a road trip down to San Diego (from Portland, Oregon) and decided a few pit stops along the way were essential if we were going to make the best of this coastal crusade.

Of course, a few days in San Diego with friends were mandatory, as were a few days in Carlsbad at the Grand Pacific Palisades Resort. Walking into the place, a staff member asked if I would like some champaign as my assistant was checking us in. Pretty fancy stuff, that. I’d highly recommend booking there if you’re in the area, especially if you get the concierge service.

Further on our way back up, I had arranged to meet up with Orion Simprini (lead singer for the Orion Experience) around Los Angeles. He and I had been bantering back and forth with each other since around 2011, and with both of us from the Tri-State originally (NY, NJ, PA), we always figured hanging out would be easy…

And yet, all these years our schedules and locations never managed to coincide. Until today, where I sat at the corner of Manhattan Avenue and Pier Avenue at Java Man Coffee House by Hermosa Beach sipping my mocha latte, and listening to Children of the Stars when the man himself strolled up.

We hung out around Hermosa Beach on the pier, kicking our feet up and blowing each other’s minds. Orion was really interested in the idea of doing 360 music videos and VR experiences, so I walked him through the different approaches and what they all meant in terms of production and control.

My boy just sat there with his mind blown at the world of possibilities. At the end of it all, we both hit on a film project that seemed crazy enough to work and I agreed to be a technical advisor and collaborator.

“In the virtual world, you’re God. Nothing exists in your space unless you put it there, and how good it is depends entirely on your attention to detail.”

Of course, you’re not here for that story…

The San Francisco Treat…

As awesome as hanging out with Orion was, I still had other business to attend and a tight schedule (as my assistant loves to keep reminding me). So we bid farewell and continued our drive back up to Redding where we would spend another night.

On the 21st, I was scheduled to roll into San Fransisco and stroll into Linden Lab…

People have asked me a plethora of questions about this visit, and I’d like to preface with the disclaimer that the moment you walk into Linden Lab and sign in, you also sign an NDA. For the sake of not disclosing confidential information, this post will focus on just things that I’ve said, the obvious general information (that already is discernable or public) but not specific answers from Ebbe.

Just to make clear: I absolutely do not speak on behalf of Linden Lab, and anything disclosed here is either:

A) My opinion

B) Common sense (and/or public)

What I knew going in, was a bit scarce. So I simply took anything I saw there in the offices as “NDA” and that Ebbe has been trained by ninjas to seek and destroy.

I hadn’t really spent a ton of time in SANSAR prior to this day, but I did think it was kinda impressive for what it was. When answering the Facebook question about Ready Player One and Linden Lab, I was answering generally that they hadn’t dropped the ball there – but wasn’t going into details.

When Ebbe strapped me into the Oculus headset and toured me around SANSAR, I just took everything as “under NDA” as a precaution. Of course, Ache’s Garage was impressive and answers the “Did they forget about a Ready Player One Tie-In?”

Well, no… but I’m guessing if you keep up with the news in the world of Linden Lab (and our wonderful bloggers around the grid) then Ache’s Garage is old news by now. I haven’t been keeping up on those news bites, so Ache’s Garage is new to me (and impressive).

I did get some interesting insights though during that discussion that maybe weren’t openly reported… more general thought experiments from Ebbe. I wouldn’t necessarily say this is top secret, but more like – we really hadn’t thought of things like that yet but it would be common sense if we thought about it.

Of course, Linden Lab worked with Warner Brothers and Intel and HTC for Ache’s Garage. It’s a great CES demo for sure – at least for the stage that SANSAR is at. Steven Spielberg has seen it first hand with Ebbe – but that is par for the course since I know Spielberg is really anal about how his creative works are represented elsewhere – so Ache’s Garage (like anything else) would need his blessing. Hearing it out of Ebbe that way made me chuckle internally because it’s not the first time I’ve heard similar in the industry about Spielberg.

Would Spielberg or Ernest Cline pop into Second Life or SANSAR for the movie release? I’d prolly say no, but then we already know that Ernest Cline has an account in Second Life, so how do we know the dude isn’t hanging out right now?

Spielberg… ok, that’s likely a “Hell no”. He doesn’t have time for that beyond a cursory one time stop-in. He’s Steven effing Spielberg.

There’s a good reason why SANSAR would be the go-to for companies like Warner Brothers for virtual world experiences. It’s generally because they want absolute authoritarian control over their intellectual properties, and Second Life (being you) scares the ever loving hell out of them.

To them, Second Life is like the inmates running the asylum. Of course, I always have contended that the chaos is manageable with the right approach.

And while SANSAR looks gorgeous, it still feels quite sterile. It’s more a static museum of spaces, versus Second Life which is entirely organic in nature. Each has a purpose, and I’m absolutely enthralled by the future.

But it still stands that the general public wants more than “pretty” when it comes to VR. They want (need) it to be of substance.

[HTC] Ready Player One – Aech’s Garage

Picture: Inara Pey

Of course, I could be wrong about Linden Lab throwing the doors open for Ready Player One… but I’m actually hoping I’m not wrong. Because opening the floodgates to SANSAR right now, with Spielberg in Aech’s Garage would be very, very, bad for SANSAR.

SANSAR is a work in progress, and noticably so. That doesn’t mean it can’t be better over time. But if you were to try and throw it into the spotlight partially finished, the public would shred it and hold it up as an example of why Virtual Reality is failing and not succeeding. The public would compare it harshly to other more polished systems… and that’s unfair at this stage of development. In short, it would be the same mistake Philip Rosedale made with Second Life, so I’ll give Ebbe the benefit of the doubt and assume he knows not to repeat history.

I believe SANSAR is a good beginning, but it’s late to the party. There’s places like VRChat and Sinewave.Space that are much farther ahead as a platform to develop VR content with.

I’m sure there are other platforms as well, but I can’t be bothered to write out a laundry list.

Not that it matters. When it comes to VR Headsets, we’re still in a phase where engagement is measured often in minutes (20-30 minutes), whereas non-headset VR worlds like Second Life see an engagement rate measured in many hours.

SANSAR is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Why Linden Lab is so hellbent on pushing SANSAR while effectively ignoring SecondLife, or treating it like the wicked red-headed step-child internally, is anybody’s guess. But I’ll touch on this more later in the post as I feel it deserves its own section to qualify.

That being said, the insight gained here was along the lines of all the assets these companies have already sitting around in 3D Models. IKEA for instance has their entire catalog in 3D models, Warner Brothers obviously has a massive asset library at their disposal, and so on.

So there is this opportunity to connect these Intellectual Properties into the virtual world – and that’s something Ebbe and I discussed while I was there. Not just “officially” converting existing assets from these companies into say, Second Life and SANSAR, but (and since I brought it up, I’ll assume it’s not covered in NDA – just the answer that Ebbe gave me) by converting the pre-existing user-generated content in those systems from IP Infringing content to Sanctioned under a “Brand Ambassador” program.

If you read this blog, then you know I’ve talked before about the premise of VIPER Licensing – and the question would be:

We all know if you cut off one head of the Hydra, ten more grow back. Why fight this when you can effectively leverage it so everyone wins?

The idea is to let Linden Lab be the “Steven Spielberg” figure and pre-negotiate those licenses on behalf of the userbase, create a best practices guidelines for the usage of those IPs, and then stamp the pre-existing content that we all know exists on Marketplace but “shouldn’t" as brand ambassadors.

Of course, Linden Lab would up your transaction fee to 25% on real world branded merchandise you were making virtually. 10% for Linden Lab and 15% for the IP holder (Coca-Cola, etc). But that still leaves you with 75% of the revenue, and a massive amount of creative freedom without the DMCA fears so long as you follow guidelines for representing IP in a way that doesn’t tarnish the brand.

Now, I can’t tell you what Ebbe said in that office concerning this. Whether Linden Lab explores this is anybody’s guess, but I put it on their whiteboard and tried my best to explain it to him.

The IP problem still persists in SANSAR as well, since an arcade full of Nintendo IP likely isn’t sanctioned by Nintendo for SANSAR. And while I absolutely think this stuff should still exist (and will, regardless of what we do), I think there is a better way to address how we deal with this prosumer culture in the 21st century and especially with user-generated content platforms.

DMCA just isn’t getting the job done, and likely is throwing gasoline on the fire via Streisand Effect. Being authoritarian about it all and trying to tightly control the creation process by requiring approval for uploaded assets would likely stifle and kill SANSAR, unless Linden Lab negotiated all those pre-existing assets from IP holders into SANSAR and SL themselves… which kinda defeats the purpose of user-generated content, and companies never seem to know what use cases people need in a virtual world, so people will still end up filling in the gaps with their own content.

So maybe the best approach is to leverage and manage the chaos instead of trying to eliminate it?

Land Prices

Another conversation I had with Ebbe was about those land prices. It was a question posed in the Facebook post so I made sure to ask. It was kind of a side-note to another conversation about the structure of Second Life being based on land sales, and a way to balance the equation through other means.

I won’t say what those other options were that were presented in the conference room. I will say that Linden Lab is fully aware of the land price “issue” and looking into ways to lower the costs.

Now, after I had stated this for Wagner James Au on his blog (New World Notes), I was contacted in-world by a few Land Barons who (you could say) were slightly paranoid about this situation. If land prices went down, they would reason, then everyone would just buy land and get into business for themselves, putting them out of business and killing their investments…

I don’t see it that way, honestly.

I think competition is healthy, and spurs innovation. So I guess you just can’t get away with an auto-mat system and a couple of volunteers working for tips and commission anymore. May have to invest in treating those companies more like companies, I guess?

Like I said, if land prices came down – it’s not without a sacrifice somewhere. Linden Lab is a company, not a charity. So you better believe they’re making the money up somewhere else if they do.

As per the responses given to Wagner for NWN, I’d like to point out that I was using a cell phone and in the middle of a 4 hour drive up the coast. Not exactly the best situation to collect thoughts, which is why you can consider the NWN post a “rough draft” so to speak where this post is collecting my thoughts better.

F!@#ING LAG!

The other obvious question while meeting with the man himself came as a side question from Facebook that I saw concerning addressing lag in Second Life. I had already planned on presenting something that would drastically reduce lag (and bring a plethora of other benefits) in the right hands, so “reducing lag” in Second Life is a side-effect of this particular topic at hand.

The thing about Second Life is that lag is often inevitable. The way that game engines work is that you’re either in edit mode or the simulation is published. When you play video games, it’s all published and locked down. This gives the engine a chance to pre-bake textures, add in lighting calculations and optimize the scene. Before that, in all game engines, there is the live editing system which lets you place and design the scene with assets in a lower quality mode prior to optimizations and lighting calculations (and so on).

Unreal Engine: In-Editor Testing

Now, we can say that the “low quality” edit mode has come a long way over the years whereby it is on par with amazing graphics nonetheless. I remember editing levels in DOOM in the 90’s where it was just a top down map in wireframe before calculating the nodes and publishing the map, where I would then walk around to explore.

Second Life (as with any live edit system like ActiveWorlds) is just the game engine in permanent edit/preview mode. Those extra optimizations to the scene cannot happen and so things are slower.

That doesn’t mean it’s hopeless.

We can begin by optimizing our assets for a game scene, and choosing a balance between complexity and looks. There is, of course the idea that Second Life could introduce the idea of User Generated Zones.

For this, I’m borrowing from my years in the ActiveWorlds universe (before Second Life existed).

Zones

The idea of Zones is simply that you use Prims with extended properties to better control spaces in a scene. Whether that is to say – Particles originating outside this zone do not enter it (or vice versa), or to say Assets within this zone do not load until a user enters the zone.

These are all options that were and remain available in ActiveWorlds to this day (20 years later). The idea of user generated zones would instantly make things like Screen Space Particles (Weather) possible without it raining in your house. Doing this, you could also (in theory) run a script that changes the weather on the sim based on a location API call to a weather service.

The zones can also be used for user-generated culling spaces, which (if used properly) can drastically reduce lag in a virtual world – expecially in a highly dense and populated sim.

Of course, there are other benefits to Zones. One of which is assigning smaller spaces in 3D for builders or rights. An example here would be:

Think of an apartment building. There are maybe 20 apartments in the building. Now let’s say you could offer each apartment privacy, localized building, etc like parcelling without the all or nothing blunt instrument but instead using a more surgical approach.

For a more in-depth idea of what zones can do, just click the link above for the ActiveWorlds Wiki description.

Weather

Suddenly, weather built into Second Life doesn’t seem so crazy anymore. When last I checked, Windward Mark was wholly owned by Linden Lab (its parent company). So if Linden Lab got Windlight out of the acquisition, I would imagine they also got the weather system that came with it by default.

Yes, I personally backed up the Windlight demonstration video from Windward Mark Interactive about 7 years ago on my YouTube Channel precisely for this purpose.

Even if they somehow didn’t get the weather system, it’s not like a screen space particle system isn’t a turn-key solution these days from other 3rd parties or even in-house.

It’s there… sitting on a shelf unimplemented. The point made above concerning implementing Zones solves the original problem for not implementing Weather in Second Life 7 years ago. Of course, Zones solve a ton of other things while it’s at it.

Particles

About the only thing I have to say about particles is that it should be integrated into the toolbox (create) menu floater with the rest of the tools.

Yes, you should still be able to script particle emitters if you wish by hand, but there’s really no reason to have left the WYSIWYG editor for it out of the toolbox.

Again, ActiveWorlds made this happen years ago, so it boggles me why this is still a point of contention in Second Life development.

One of the things you’ll notice on the Wiki link is that there is a Particle Type drop-down. Sprite is selected in the picture by default and it’s the “Screen Space Particle” used (most often) for Weather effects.

“What about the user made HUDs sold on Marketplace to handle Particles?” you may ask.

It is my contention that when your user base creates elaborate work-arounds to fill in functionality gaps for your product, it’s time to make it a priority for native integration.

See Also: Somehow nobody thought a web based marketplace system would be needed officially for Second Life until XStreet sprang up via the end-users and eventually was bought out by Linden Lab.

This should have been native in the toolbox from the beginning, and it’s mind boggling that this many years into Second Life, it still isn’t.

Of course, I say that about weather and zones as well…

Making Mirrors

Of the other subjects that I brought up was how to implement mirrors in Second Life without causing a ton of lag.

I’ll just let the link above explain it.

The Tale of Two Labs

And now we get to the bigger question.

As noted by Bixyl Shuftan, and his apparently keen eye, Linden Lab has laid off about 12 people recently, and their VP of Product apparently has resigned to go work elsewhere.

In relation to my view of Linden Lab during my visit, and what Bixyl has found from Glassdoor reviews by former employees as of recent (which I’ll share here):

The other review from an anonymous employee, "Make LL Great Again" was less critical. But he still had a negative outlook, "Company is too focused on its new product; those who work on the mainstay feel set aside and taken for granted. HR is nearly non-existent; most team members are remote or barely in the office. Too many org changes lately have left folks feeling insecure, morale is low and sinking. I hope they can turn it around." His advice to the Lab's leaders, "You have some really awesome people there; get out of their way."

While I was at Linden Lab, I definitely got the feeling that SANSAR was the main focus with a near total avoidance of discussing Second Life or its future. It’s technology evangelism at its peak.

As far as Ebbe is concerned, he’s all-in for SANSAR while Second Life is … somewhere in the basement level with the engineers.

On one side of the equation I can see why Ebbe would be all-in for SANSAR. I’d assume Linden Lab spent a stupid amount of money developing it and couldn’t afford to pull the plug, and so he was likely told to produce an ROI come hell or high water.

Welcome to the board of directors world.

In a way, I’d assess that Rodvick made a mess and Ebbe is still trying to clean up and/or salvage things.

That being said, I have to agree with said anonymous former employee.

As a CEO, Ebbe has a choice to make – He is the captain of the Linden Lab ship, but he also decides what sort of captain he wants to be:

Captain Picard or Captain Ahab.

Right at this moment, he’s showing qualities of Captain Ahab, in the blind pursuit of SANSAR (Moby Dick). But I believe he’s intelligent and an overall great guy. Smart enough not to sabotage his own efforts and company.

After all, Second Life is still the goose that laid the golden egg. It didn’t die, it’s just being actively starved and strangled by the aforementioned organizational changes and CEOs.

Which is really unfortunate, because I also believe Linden Lab also has some brilliant and creative people there with their hands tied, and who absolutely love Second Life and want to make it better.

While I don’t have a Linden nametag myself, I pushed my devotion for virtual worlds as far as I could take it by crossing the country (New Jersey to California) and making sure I was physically parked in front of Ebbe at Linden Lab, with a whiteboard, to discuss some of these things (and more).

That’s some devotion right there, and… sadly, is as far as I can/could take things short of working at Linden Lab officially.

What Linden Lab does with the information is up to them. I’ve done all that I can in the process, and will turn my attention back to other projects.

I don’t suppose I’ll be coming back to San Francisco unless somebody gives me a damned good reason.

Arcade Exchange Update

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 23:12:00 +0000

Revision 2.95

Marketplace: http://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/22206

What’s New

AES (Audio Engine System)

When we first built the arcade series, we weren’t entirely knowledgeable about scripting in the high-end. Of course, there was the llPlaySound command to handle short clips, but when you’re dealing with arcade machines that have audio loops measured in minutes, even for the attract modes, you can see how this falls short as a solution. Stringing together the audio commands with llSleep in between only goes so far, and when you begin extending the amount of files needed in that loop, the rest of the menu system begins to stall while it waits for the audio and sleep commands to complete.

This has been an ongoing issue for the life of the Series III Arcade Exchange, but we’re proud to announce that as of Revision 2.95, it is no longer a problem.

We’ve re-written the audio engine system (AES) to be more dynamic, pre-load items in advance, and handle hundreds of audio clips in a loop without interfering with the main script.

What his means for you: The menu system is now responsive, even when playing the audio loop, as the AES has been separated into its own script and handler to multi-task.

As a result of the AES upgrade, your arcade machines are now able to loop many minutes of audio when toggled – in many cases, an entire run through the game itself.

That being said, please keep in mind that the pre-loader is not an indication of actual time to pre-load but merely an estimation. The actual time to pre-load and play those clips is entirely dependent on your connection speed and other various factors such as sim lag and Second Life itself. You may not hear the entire loop the first time through because of this, but we’re pretty certain the second time through you will.

Support Call Decal

On the back of every arcade machine, there is now an Andromeda Games Support Decal (Upper Right Corner). Because your arcade machines are under “Second Lifetime” Warranty, you can always trade-up to the latest revisions or have broken machines fixed for free. However, it hasn’t always been clear who to contact or get in touch with to handle this. Sure, we put that warranty information into your Instructions card that is included, but we also know that customers aren’t always interested in reading.

As a result, we’ve put the support call decal on the back of every machine, and made it an active call sticker. Which is to say, if you click on them, it’ll give you the warranty information, and contact for support. It’ll also page me (Aeonix Aeon) in-world and let me know who is requesting support and what machine you’ve invoked it on.

We don’t think it gets any easier than this, really.

Various Updates

There have been some amount of various issues (minor) which have gone unfixed in the past on our arcade machines. While not all game-breaking, they did warrant another look during this update and a correction. TRON, for example, had a minor alignment issue with the side panels which left a small gap. The Glow was set way too high, and so on. It is also currently one of two arcade machines that do not have an animated screen (Space Invaders being the other). With this machine there are some technical limitations in-world which we haven’t quite sorted out yet – the screen is not uniform and due to the complexity involved with the build (geometry and faces) it isn’t feasible to animate the screen as of yet. We’re still looking into it.

Fix-It Felix Jr has had the animation set for the screen re-done with better quality, and the audio is now much better without the lag. However, this game is only available in the Arcade Exchange Mega-Pack as a bonus.

Joust had the same panel alignment issue as TRON, and so it was also corrected in this update.

Tetris as of 2.91 and earlier is now broken – the game itself no longer works. The 2.95 update corrects this.

Instruction Card

The instruction cards on all of our Arcade Exchange have been entirely redone for legibility and to include new information. This includes a better explanation of your warranty so you know what is and is not covered. I’ve made the card more unified with ASCII headers and such, so now it should be quite easy to discern all the main topics as you scroll through. The same has been done to the card for “How to fix Flash for Second Life”.

Marketplace Availability

During the long tenure of the Series III Arcade Exchange, our customers will have noticed that the original premise of the name meant that you could purchase only the Polybius arcade machine on Marketplace and then trade it in-world for the one you really wanted. While available in-world via our vendor boards at certain locations, we didn’t make them available on Marketplace directly.

That is until recently.

There are many pros and cons to doing this, and most importantly is that being a near perfect replica of the original arcade machines in real life poses a bit of a problem. Many hours of debate and discussion have happened over the years about this very issue – IP Infringement.

While we absolutely will not contest that our arcade machines are IP Infringing, there is a deeper explanation about why they should be left on Marketplace. If you read below, we’ll get into those details.

Marketing

One of the other things you may have noticed as of recently is that the ad-copy and marketing for our products has been updated to be more uniform and professional.

Having a real life marketing background helps in this case, in that I used to work for Pulse Point Media as a VP of Operations.

Now, just as a reminder, when I use “we” and “I” in these posts, it’s a matter of who in AMG I’m talking about. I refers to me (Will Burns, the founder) and We refers to the rest of the team involved with the products (such as RobsterRawb Jaxxon, Jon Dragoone, et al) inclusive.

When writing these blogs, I’m writing them on my own and so it’s always coming from “me” as a representation of the group interchangeably. Just wanted to clear that up in case you were wondering.

In any event, as I have had years of marketing experience, I decided to go ahead and apply that to our forward facing image by creating proper ad-copy for our arcade machines. A unified look and feel so to speak. It is purposefully reminiscent of an Atari logo in a subtle fashion.

I think it’s something you don’t normally see with a lot of items on Marketplace or in-world. Of course, the bigger brands do this properly, but that’s the difference between the big kids and inexperienced. Doubly so for the listings involving Arcade Machines on Marketplace – but we’ll get to that below.

The ad-copy is mirrored on our boxes now, and the look/feel is also in our magazine advertisements (as you see above at the beginning of the post). We regularly advertise in both Attention! Magazine and Playdolls as a two page spread. It is clean, gets attention, and gets to the point with a visual and short, witty slogan.

We’ll be using this format going forward.

Backstory

In the course of the Series III Arcade Exchange, we’ve undergone quite a lot of updates and revisions. Originally conceived in 2010 before Second Life had mesh ability, it was a major overhaul when we started updating them all in higher quality mesh.

Back then, and even today, we spent quite a lot of time sourcing our materials and pouring over reference photos for the arcade machines in real life. There was and still remains a lot of points to why we would go to such painstaking trouble with these builds for what amounts to a virtual product with a limited audience.

VIPER Licensing

One of the biggest issues with doing something like this is the obvious elephant in the room: IP Infringement. In the modern age, it is considered the scourge of IP Holders, and takes up quite a lot of time attempting in vain to police their Intellectual Property online.

The standard tools for this give those IP Holders the legal precedent to DMCA or issue a Cease and Desist order. On Youtube, we see this as “Copyright Strike” where a claim is filed against a video.

But does this really solve the problem? It’s a never-ending battle that is both costly and time consuming, with little result. You win battles but arguably are losing the war.

In the example of the fan created game AM2R (Another Metroid 2 Remake), it was a brilliant game made by fans out of the love of the game. In my opinion, it absolutely did justice to the franchise and IP. However, it still remains that they did not have permission from Nintendo to use that IP and so Nintendo issued a DMCA to take it down.

But here is where it gets tricky.

The tools of DMCA and C&D are not effective in the bigger picture. If anything, it is akin to cutting the head off of a Hydra and being surprised when it grows back a thousand heads. What DMCA and C&D invoke in the modern age is known as the Streisand Effect – which is to say the thing you want to get rid of instead draws more attention and becomes more available as a result.

In the case of AM2R, this was true. Yes, the fans who made it took it down and complied with the DMCA, but those who had already downloaded it simply mirrored the files all over the world and on BitTorrent.

If anything, AM2R ended up with far more visibility in the media and higher accessibility as a result of the DMCA from Nintendo. In short, it had the opposite effect they wanted. Their strategy backfired spectacularly.

Back in 2013, I wrote a chapter in a college textbook whereby I outlined the solution to this miserable state of affairs: VIPER.

In the beginning, I outlined that IP Holders rarely (if ever) have a clear avenue to pursue in the instance of user generated media. For instance, most companies have a clear protocol to handle either a Producer of content or a Consumer of content, whereby a producer is seen as a large media firm that can pay a large licensing fee up front and a consumer is just the person who is expected to buy such items or be exposed to what the producer has created.

But what about the prosumer culture? The user-generated media made by the consumers as non-professional producers?

This is where we get into the grey area of legality and approach as we look at spaces like Second Life. Yes, those companies have every right to issue DMCA notices to take content down – but is it effective? In this case, the answer is absolutely not. If anything, it only exacerbates the problem as we see with AM2R.

You take one down and twenty more pop up to take its place.

So the premise of VIPER is to be an effective tool for IP Management in a user-generated content environment. Something that Second Life is sorely lacking, and companies in the real world do not currently subscribe to, which is exactly why we see this Streisand Effect continually playing out despite their best efforts.

VIPER is an acronym for: Virtual Intellectual Property Engagement and Recourse. The premise is simple: to manage IP on the prosumer level effectively and without the content explosion back-fire otherwise seen with typical DMCA approaches.

In the case of the Arcade Exchange, the premise is quite clear – to make available the best options for those media examples as a poison pill approach to IP Infringement. If high quality versions exist, it makes the countless low quality knock-offs irrelevant and so they will slowly cull themselves. By leaving the best options to fill a need in a space whereby a company would otherwise not be engaged, it has far more positive impact in regard to IP Management and Protection than had the same companies sent an army of lawyers to issue a paper storm of DMCA notices.

In short: Absolutely, these arcade machines are IP Infringing. By no means should DMCA take-down be implemented as a recourse. They are there to actually cull the plethora of existing knock-offs that are low quality, and in effect have the actual intended outcome that the constant DMCA take-downs and account bans have tried to accomplish all these years.

VIPER is a mindset that follows one of the biggest rules in user generated worlds; Whether that is the hobbyist at home making a fan game, somebody making creative content on YouTube (Adult Wednesday Addams for example), or virtual worlds like Second Life: Work within the system.

In this case, “the system” means not the legal recourse you’ve been given (DMCA etc) but the mentality of the community by which the IP is existing.

In order to understand VIPER licensing mentality, you as a company must ask a few questions to qualify the action:

1. Will a DMCA result in the desired outcome, or will it backfire and cause a Streisand Effect?

2. If our end-goal is to reduce or eliminate the IP Infringement, protecting our intellectual property, then would engagement in the system to fill the supply where there is clearly a demand actually achieve this end?

3. What is the least involved manner by which we can accomplish #2 on this list?

4. Does it make sense to engage and ask for a marginal licensing fee on each sale of said item in a virtual world (percentage) or is it enough to sanction the item as a preventative measure to cull the majority?

The answer in this case is obviously to identify the best version of the IP Infringing material and sanction it. However, one must also be willing to leave the other low quality versions alone to their fate as a result. This is how to eliminate the Streisand Effect in virtual worlds and elsewhere while actually accomplishing your end goal.

That doesn’t mean as a company that you should be saying “This is an official product” of our company. What you’re really saying here is: This is a licensed product in a virtual sense, we acknowledge it, and it represents the IP and brand in a positive light. It is the responsibility of the content creator to handle the sales, the marketing, the updates, and customer interaction.

In the event that said virtual item no longer represents the IP in a positive light, then you have a dialog with the end-user about how this can be corrected (reasonably). Again, we’re not going into things DMCA-Akimbo. After all, you’re running the risk of punching a hole in the dam of IP infringement and letting the torrent of knock-offs take its place.

We clearly don’t want this to happen.

This is also entails that companies (internally) set up some sort of “Best Practices” guidelines exactly for this purpose, and to convey to the end-users (consumers) that should they wish to use the IP in this manner, these are the rules they must follow.

Of course, in this document, the point is to be fair about it. So don’t go into it with massively unbalanced disincentive. In example – saying “Sure, you can make and sell this in a virtual world, but we expect a 90% cut on money earned.” or “Sure you can make this but you cannot sell it in the virtual space or make any money on it.”

Let’s be real here. If your goal is to cull the IP Infringement and protect your IP, it does you no justice to create a hostile environment whereby it makes more sense to just ignore you and do as they please, albeit in a less visible manner.

The Art of Deceit

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 19:57:00 +0000

Persona Ambiguity in Virtual Worlds

Also known as a continuing misrepresentation, lying by omission occurs when an important fact is left out in order to foster a misconception. Lying by omission includes the failure to correct pre-existing misconceptions.

In the Metaverse, whether a virtual world system or the Metaverse as depicted in Ready Player One, there is a curious complacency inherent for the act of being dishonest. It’s one of those things which is taken as read and even adamantly defended. We have a right to reasonably privacy in the online world, and this includes basic facts about ourselves with which we would like to not disclose in favor of living our idealized avatar life.

Maybe you’re married, so your avatar persona is single. Maybe you identify differently than your genetic gender, and so you play the opposite in a virtual world. Maybe you’re trans or cis. In the book Ready Player One, Art3mis had severe insecurity about her real life self because of a wine stain across her face.

These are all general reasons why we find the virtual world so appealing. It allows us to take on the illusion of our ideals, even for a short time. But that illusion is addicting when your virtual life is better than real life, and you fall into the rabbit hole.

That being said, when you’re dealing with real people behind the avatar, we’ve long since forgotten that lying is still lying. In a matter of speaking, we’ve come to insist on our right to lie. Whether overtly or through omission of information which would clearly be attainable simply by seeing you walk out the door into public.

There is, I believe, a difference between keeping personal matters private and keeping public matters private. If you are married, you wouldn’t normally take off your ring and go dating under the premise of being single – and if you would, then that is generally known as being dishonest and cheating on your spouse. However, this is common in the virtual world and generally thought of as acceptable because we don’t associate relationships (romantic) in a virtual world as “cheating”. It’s “just a game”, is what we tell ourselves.

And so, we can disassociate the lying and justify it as harmless. We even act surprised when a virtual relationship falls apart when the truth comes out. We attempt to play the victim of our own deceit and place the blame on the ones we’ve been lying to for having the audacity to want honesty.

But that’s not how things really work. Even if you are in the virtual world, it is still cheating on your spouse. The actual term for it is emotional cheating.

Simply knowing whether the person you are dealing with is a woman or a man is of public knowledge on first glance, and if you’re transgender or something, that too should be discernible or at least up to disclosure – otherwise you are lying either overtly or by omission.

There has been, in the last ten or twenty years, this crusade to demonize honest people and shame them for seeking the truth about situations or people they are dealing with – and I have no sympathy for the people who attempt to pull this tactic. If you’re one of these people, I will personally go full Sherlock Holmes on you.

When Wade begins the thought experiments about whether his teacher in the OASIS is a woman or not, or whether Art3mis is really a girl or some hairy knuckled guy, we see a horrid reaction from typical SJW (Social Justice Warrior) types decrying his actions in “forcing gender assignment” – but it isn’t that simple, nor is he mentally trying to assign gender out of malice.

In the Metaverse, people lie. So what he is really trying to do is ascertain the truth about a particular person he is dealing with. If you’re on the “lying as a right” side of the coin, you’ll see this as invasion of privacy – I have the right to be dishonest when dealing with you, and how dare you try to get the truth!

This obviously causes a lot of drama and headaches in the virtual world, especially when you deal with interpersonal interaction. On the one hand, you have people who are masking their real identity and circumstances to a degree which is unhealthy, omitting even the basic observations to live out their chosen illusion, and on the other hand you have the people you interact with who (at the baseline) deserve even the basic disclosure if you value their friendship or more.

I’ve personally had (and have) friends from the virtual world who are playing female and end up being the hairy knuckle guy behind the avatar. Now, did I have a romantic relationship with them? No… because I have a rule in virtual worlds that simply says:

How do I actually know what your are saying is true?

Which is to say – I am more than willing to acknowledge what I know, and more importantly what I don’t actually know by asking How do I know this?

Send me a picture of “yourself” and it doesn’t count in my eyes. How do I actually know this other than taking what you say at face value? Being a moderator over on OKCupid has given me the insight into just how far people will go to construct and maintain their illusions/delusions*. I’ve seen people set up entire Facebook pages filled with stock photos to pretend having an interesting life, and for the less technologically inclined, just swiping photos from an open profile is good enough to suffice. Women (and men) posting pictures from obscure porn sites and cam girl directories as their own persona. The list goes on and on. You don’t use voice? Well I assume then (and usually correctly) that something shady is going on.

*Not to mention a particular insight into what the business model of dating sites actually is – hint: they’re counting on your failure.

And there is yet another point to be made, in that when we are lying by omission like this, or overtly, we ultimately do not value the relationships we form. At the very least, those relationships – whether cursory or deeper, should remain cursory at best and taken with a grain of salt because they are coming from a place of deceit as a foundation.

Ultimately, what this situation signifies is that we have a lot of damaged goods running around the virtual world. This is the harsh reality we come to the Metaverse to escape from, in our idealized perfect little world. We’re in relationships in VR to escape a bad marriage. We’re transgender in real life but play a female (or male) in VR. We’re overweight in real life so we’re wearing a porn-star Barbie avatar, or six-pack abs Greek god if you’re a male (and a penis the size of your forearm).

The general rule of thumb is and always has been – take whatever the persona is representing, and reverse it. That’s likely what their real life looks like for them:

Porn-star body? You’re probably very insecure and overweight in RL
Young, single? Statistically speaking, you’re in your mid-forties, have kids and are married – either in a bad marriage or an indifferent one.
Predominantly focusing on sex in-world? You probably haven’t been laid in years.
Don’t use voice? Your avatar is the opposite of you or; You’re lying about something and being on voice would effectively get you busted.
Same goes for using a cam in video chat. Doubly so.

You can cite the predominance of horny guys in SL wanting you to be a whore on camera as your reason all you want… but there’s nothing forcing you to comply with their wishes, any more than if you were sitting over a cup of coffee talking and they told you take off your clothes.

There’s a simple response to that – No.

Which is why, if you want a meaningful relationship beyond cursory with me, whether that is friendship or more, the actual truth needs to be known, and just like Wade in Ready Player One, if you’re digging deeper into interpersonal interaction with me, then I’ll start looking for the truth and who I am dealing with beyond the make-believe persona.

The list goes on, but the underlying issue is the same – you’re in the virtual world to escape reality instead of deal with it in a healthy manner or supplement it.

There is a common saying which I noted years ago – an observation as such, and it holds mostly true:

The better your real life is, the less you need a Second Life.

You’ve seen this before, I’m certain. The friend who just disappears off of your contacts for months or even years. You didn’t have a falling out, they’re perfectly fine and in good health… as a matter of fact, they’re better than fine and they’ve been improving their real life.

My best friend Julie spent a god-awful amount of time in Second Life when we first met. Over the years, she met Jason in-world… they spent a ton of time in Second Life together. They eventually met in real life, and that became an ongoing thing, they’d spend less time logged in. Eventually they got married in real life, and she moved to Texas. Now they rarely log into Second Life.

My friend Al spent a lot of time in Second Life, which is where he met his girl Honey. They are into BDSM and for a good while they were a couple in Second Life, her being a submissive and him being a Dominant. Then they got together in real life, they had a kid together and settled down. Both rarely log into Second Life anymore.

I’ve seen this countless times in the virtual world over the past twenty years. Even if they aren’t meeting people and eloping to the real world together, you notice that when people start making positive changes in their real life, they log into Second Life less often because the surrogate they needed at the time no longer applies.

These are examples of using a virtual world to supplement your real life and not replace or escape it.

Of course, one could ask about people like myself who regularly log into Second Life and participate in the community. I believe folks like that still apply to the above rule – because we start out in Second Life as ourselves. I’m in the virtual world to supplement my real life experience and not replace it with a fantasy. You would know this simply by looking at my profile and even my Real Life tab, where you’d see an actual picture of me and a ton of real life information and what I’ve done. But none of that information you know about be isn’t really anything more than you could find out just by looking at me or in a public manner. A cursory Google search would bring up most of it.

You may ascertain that I am a male, age 38 (yeah, I’m getting old), and that I live in New Jersey. You may guess that I’m fairly average in height and weight – though if you ever asked, I’d flatly tell you that I used to weigh between 300-350 lbs but now weigh about 165 because I stopped bullshitting myself and decided to get in shape. You’d know I am unmarried, have no kids, and maybe I look pretty good by statistical odds otherwise. You’d also know that while I do spend a lot of time in front of a computer, I regularly go for 3+ mile walks multiple times a week.

And that is just the thing… you would know things about me that could be ascertained just on cursory glance or very little inquiry. None of that information is taboo to me, because it’s just minimal disclosure and common sense. They are all things you deserve to know about me in order to make up your mind as to whether you want to associate with me.

If you’re lying by omission or overtly, you are effectively disrespecting the people you are interacting with, saying you don’t trust them, and ultimately insulting them by robbing them of the right to make up their mind for themselves if/how they want to interact with you.

And therein is the root of our drama problem in virtual worlds.

Do I have ambiguous friends in the virtual world? Absolutely… One of them played female for years before showing me they were actually that hairy knuckled man (grey beard and all). Did it change the context of interaction between us? Yes, of course (to an extent). But I’m still friends with them nonetheless. We could even go as far as putting the virtually famous Bryn Oh in that ambiguous group.

I’ve “known” Bryn in the virtual world for many years now. I have absolutely no fucking idea if Bryn is a woman, man, trans, a kitten with a tineh netbook, nada. In the virtual world, Bryn Oh is just Bryn Oh, and around me (at least) favors the female interpretation, and so for the sake of pronouns I identify Bryn Oh as Female – even though for all I know Bryn is a guy.

For all I know, Bryn is both and cis, but chooses gender identity as she pleases and often times both or none. Would that change my view of Bryn Oh if I found out definitively? Absolutely… but not like you would imagine. The exchange would go something like – “Oh, well that’s interesting.”

And then I’d continue treating Bryn Oh like Bryn Oh because it’s only when you want a much more involved relationship with me that reality comes into play and those things make a difference. Being my friend in a virtual world? Doesn’t matter with those details.

Wanting a romantic relationship or something deeper with me? Yes, it absolutely matters. Because at that point, and this is something you need to understand, it is no longer your decision alone. The minute you involve somebody else in the equation, it becomes their decision as well.

Does that mean they might choose not to associate with you anymore if they find out what you’ve been hiding? Yes, and that’s real life for you. Otherwise you’re creating a hostage situation built on lies.

And that is why it’s better just to be honest.

That doesn’t mean tell everyone your phone number and street address. But only information they could figure out by seeing you face to face, and information that is actually relevant to the situation at hand. Like being married, open relationship, etc before you try a relationship with them. Honest communication is paramount.

No, the situation won’t always be ideal and the consequences are still there for disclosure. But you can’t win them all… you can only be respectful of others and their involvement in your life and yours in theirs.

The History Problem

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 17:25:00 +0000

Alt-Right Idea, Wrong Approach

I’d like to begin today by stating clearly, and in no uncertain terms, that racism, hatred, exploitation, and white supremacy in general are reprehensible. I feel I need to preface this post before ya’ll get the wrong idea about me. I’m originally from South Florida, which was part of the Confederacy during the Civil War, while my grandparents lived in North Carolina, and I absolutely did grow up around a hell of a lot of racism. But that isn’t who I am today nor was it at any point in my past.

To be completely honest, this is a post I’ve been avoiding writing for some time. It is such a dark subject matter to address, and the intellectual outcomes of this writing aren’t what you’re going to want to hear when it comes to these subjects.

That being said, if you really want to put an end to racism, exploitation, slavery, and hate, then it helps to actually understand the premise of the situation in better detail. This means there are a lot of inconvenient truths to swallow about not just a “them” mentality but also ourselves. It’s easy to point fingers at others to condemn, but we get up in arms when it turns out we’re also at fault for the thing we so despise.

So let’s begin with a simple statement, one that will make every reader (except white supremacists) recoil in horror:

White supremacists are actually correct.

Before you wander off or fire up the comments section to tell me off, please hear me out in this post. The reasoning behind that statement isn’t what you (or a white supremacist) is going to expect – and in fact, doesn’t make them look good in the bigger picture. So bare with me, please.

Charlottesville, Virginia

Let’s summarize what is happening here. A bunch of white supremacists from different groups come together in Charlottesville, Virginia under the premise of “Unite the Right”. My understanding is that a Confederate monument was being protested to be taken down – one side saying it has no place being up as it glorifies a screwed up past, and the other being the white supremacists who feel it should remain. A fight ensues among both sides and all hell breaks loose.

The main problem here is that for all the good intentions of the tolerant protestors – equality, no racism, etc… their premise is and always has been that the ideals of the Confederacy aren’t those of these United States in modern times.

I beg to differ.

When we look back on history, and specifically the Civil War, we were taught that it was about slavery and the right to own slaves. That the Confederacy seceded and fought, while the Union (North) was against slavery.

This is a total fabrication at best, and an example of how easily we’re misled.

The honest truth of the matter is that both sides were fighting for slavery. The Confederacy was fighting for overt slavery while the Union was fighting for covert slavery. Because the north merely changed the semantics of the process, and people are on the whole really dumb, everyone saw the overt “freeing of slaves” and totally missed the covert slavery institutions taking their place.

Back in those days, it was common to have slave traders, slaves working on plantations, indentured servitude (which England was fond of – sending prisoners to the Americas to work off their debts). Essentially, it boils down to more powerful societies exploiting weaker peoples and societies for their continued gain and dominance.

This was the overt slave trade, exploitation and white supremacy at work. When you’re on top of the world, why bother trying to hide it?

Well, there’s a reason why: Because public opinion of the practice and attitudes was shifting, and it’s hard to continue those practices when the population are against it.

But how, then, do you keep all the benefits of slavery, exploitation, and white supremacy without wearing it on your sleeve?

Enter modern times.

Modern Slavery

And now we get to the heart of the matter, the reason I was so remiss to write this post. Slavery, white supremacy, hatred, exploitation, imperialism… none of that went away at the end of the Civil War. It was merely rebranded as something else, and the method by which was made palatable to the public who accepted it.

Let’s begin this section with a simple premise:

Capitalism in and of itself is bad. That isn’t to say Communism is good either, but when you operate on a system that requires “haves” and “have nots”, therein is an incentive to exploit the have nots, and an incentive to make sure they remain have nots so that you can continue to benefit from it.

It is in your best interest under Capitalism to make sure there are far more disenfranchised and kept “under heel” at a disadvantage for your own personal gain.

You see it in the minimum wage, or even “right to work” states. You see it in how the legal system effectively screws over and actively targets poor people and minorities to catch them in an inescapable circling of the drain leading to jail-time.

You see it in the for-profit prisons, their 95% occupancy clauses, and their exploitation of inmates for “work release” to business and corporations.

You see it in the society disproportionately stacked against minorities, immigrants and actively sabotaging them in order to supply that legal slavery and keep minorities and the poor at a marked disadvantage so that a bunch of rich white people can continue to benefit.

Worse off, the people behind this are in plain sight; They are your senators, congress, and Government. Backed by places like ALEC, an extreme right-wing group helping to craft the very laws that perpetuate this slavery, exploitation and disenfranchisement. They are the major corporations like Nike, Nestle, and Apple. They are GEO and CCA – for profit prisons.

While you’re busy targeting the white-supremacists on the streets and fighting to take the monuments down, and ban the Confederate battle flag from being flown under the guise of “It is not representative of the United States”, you’ve missed the fact that it actually is representative.

Or more aptly, your representatives.

Welcome to America

Tearing down statues and banning flags, or petitioning to get Dukes of Hazard off the air is probably the most ignorant thing any of us can do. Because if you’re so against the Confederate Battle flag and Confederate Monuments, under the guise of it not representing our moral compass in this country, the only person that’s lying is ourselves. In which case, if the symbolism such monuments and flags represent are reprehensible to you, and you insist on removing them, then I have a simple suggestion:

The whole damned country is operating on this reprehensible behavior as a foundation, not just in the past, but in the present day – while an oblivious population rallies against a moral indignation and history.

History, I might add, is an easy target because it can’t fight back. History cannot defend itself, and so is a great empowerment exercise for those who want to pretend to care about these issues.

We can turn a blind eye toward the actual racism, slavery, and exploitation happening today all over the country and worldwide as a norm, while protesting the statues and flags (symbolism).

If you want to stop racism, slavery and exploitation – leave the monuments and symbolism alone. That’s not your biggest problem. It’s not the racists in the streets you have to worry about, it’s the ones running corporations and your governments – local, state and federal.

Turn your attention to the real problem at hand if you want to solve it.

Because those Alt-Right folks showing up and protesting/rioting… those are just the symptoms of a country that has clearly shown them that that is exactly how the real world works.

Of course they have this notion of white supremacy… because it’s fucking true under the Red, White and Blue.

That doesn’t make it right, and that doesn’t make it any less appalling or reprehensible. But it’s the truth, and that truth is damned ugly.

The sooner we face that ugly truth, and the sooner we can go after the real culprits to change this fucked up system and country, the faster we’ll actually eliminate racism, slavery and exploitation.

Until then, you’re all just chasing red herrings.

SANSAR Dreams

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Tue, 01 Aug 2017 20:43:00 +0000

Don’t call it Second Life 2

As I sit here with my coffee, I find myself in a precarious position. Sure, the sun is shining and the wind delicately meanders through the leaves outside for a serene atmosphere, but something still doesn’t feel right.

In my mind, I find the duality of SANSAR and whether to call it something good floating haphazardly among countless other random thoughts.

On the one hand, I could take the easy route and just be an unabashed cheerleader for the new flagship virtual reality “experience” like so many others, but then I wouldn’t be giving it an honest review.

I remember back in the day, I had made mention on numerous occasions about the “SL Cheerleaders” who effectively have their lips planted firmly to the PR department of Linden Lab in exchange for preferential treatment. Yes, I’ve included folks like Strawberry and Draxtor in that group – but more often than not there was a missing context.

I don’t necessarily believe these are bad people. After all, they’re just performing their part and it is a crucial aspect of their purported fame in the virtual world. They talk it up, no matter what, and they get the exposure and access. It’s a sweet deal and it makes total business sense, however much you are willing to trade integrity for it.

But even today it is a bit of mental gymnastics to watch even Strawberry make videos trying to say nothing but good about SANSAR and having an immense amount of trouble finding those talking points.

What I see from SANSAR is a lot of smoke and mirrors – selective journalism from cheerleaders trying to narrow that angle of view to omit the bigger picture and show only the good, or in this case a totally non-critical viewpoint.

Even when we see pictures of maybe 50 avatars stacked on each other at Drax’s build in SANSAR, we see headlines like “People are piling up in SANSAR to get a look! It’s so popular!”

But we both know that’s not the case. For one, if they’re all piled up on each other at the entry point, that means they’re all logging in and not interacting or even moving when they get there. Secondly, it’s mostly a flash in the pan experience so to speak… if you logged in right now, that location is likely empty, barring all the folks reading this and logging in to check the validity of that claim.

And therein is a bigger point to be made about all this hype, which is exactly all it is… just a load of hype.

So I sit here with my coffee, contemplating how to go about this post. Believe it or not, I don’t enjoy shitting on every project. I know a lot of people spent years working on this project and it would be unduly harsh of me to tear it up. But it has to be done for the sake of honesty and integrity in virtual worlds journalism.

Nothing Special

Let’s get some things out of the way up front.

SANSAR is nothing special, regardless of what the hype machine is trying to sell you. As a matter of fact, it looks suspiciously like a clone of Avatar Reality BlueMars, though not using the Crytek engine.

Which brings me to a major sticking point – it’s built predominantly as a controlled and publish only environment. Don’t mistake SANSAR as “the next Second Life” because it’s anything but.

When you have a publish environment that is highly controlled for assets, then yes… obviously it’ll likely look a lot better. That’s the entire point of a publish environment, in that you can set things in “stone” and then apply additional shaders and effects to the scene because the scene nodes are “compiled”.

Insomuch as this aspect, the question begs to be asked:

If you’re looking for a published scene system that looks prettier but takes away the live editing and organic aspects of Second Life, then why not just use Sinewave Space? They’re essentially SANSAR but far better in that regard.

Authors Note: Sinewave Space actually does have a live editing ability alongside the publish model.

If we are to look at the “VR Headset Focus” of the SANSAR Model, I believe it’s a mistake to build an entire system like SL or even SANSAR on the premise of betting on the ubiquity of VR headsets. Sure, it’s a nice inclusion for a niche audience (because that’s what it is and will be for the foreseeable future), but it makes zero sense to build an application for a niche audience and then split that niche audience into an even smaller niche to cater to.

It’s a lot like getting into the automobile business and catering to just Bugatti Veyron owners with a bit of a nod to the peasants driving a Honda Civic. If your goal is to have market saturation and be the ubiquitous go-to for virtual worlds, this is not how you do it. Instead of trying to build an entirely different platform, one should learn what worked the first time and replicate those variables with better execution.

What Project SANSAR represents is a team of coders and executives who believe they actually understand the future of virtual worlds and attempting to make a flagship project based on faulty comprehension. Focusing on the wrong aspects of what makes shared virtual spaces like Second Life amazing, and distilling those out-of-context talking points into a product of its own misses the point entirely.

The sum of the whole is greater than the parts.

That isn’t to say they’re bad people. No… just very misguided on their understanding of what makes an amazing virtual world system. Second Life as a popular platform came as a sort of spontaneous quirk that Linden Lab wasn’t entirely prepared to either comprehend nor handle when it did happen.

Remember: It was billed as a game, and had game aspects before the inkling of open-ended, user generated, virtual world snuck in and things were rebranded to focus on those aspects in the rise of popularity for it.

It was a lot like building a video game and realizing that the modders are doing unintended things with it, however amazing… then you start catering to what the customers want and use it for to capitalize on it.

Hell, Second Life as a concept isn’t revolutionary (regardless of how Philip Rosedale would frame it). I mean, while he himself has said he had the idea in the mid-1990s but didn’t think it was feasible which is why he continued working at Real, that in itself is a fabrication… Because you know what else existed in 1995 when he insists such a virtual world system wasn’t feasible?

ActiveWorlds.

And while Activeworlds looks outdated by today’s standards, it would be a disservice to it if I didn’t also state that if you know what you’re doing with the platform, you can create worlds in there that are on par and sometimes even better than Second Life. After all, they have Zones and the ability to implement screen space particles for weather. Not to mention they actually have a built in particle editor that is dead simple and powerful to use, unlike coughs Second Life who (for the love of God) has access to Windlight and Nimble (the weather system that came with Windlight).

Oh, that and mirrors. Activeworlds has working mirrors and figured out how to do it without lagging the place up in the process.

But I digress. Yeah, that’s how old this open-ended virtual world concept actually is. Second Life is special not because it was the first or even the best. It is special because it improved on an already existing formula, even begrudgingly.

After all, they didn’t have the foresight to implement a marketplace online until years after XStreet did it – which goes to show that you, the virtual world inhabitants, are far more responsible for pushing the ideal virtual world system than the companies that produce the platforms. Your third party viewers and dedicated teams of volunteers are proof of this just the same. Your outright ingenuity in how you use the virtual world is just as responsible for its advancement – when mesh was implemented in Second Life, you used it as clothing and mesh bodies, and so on… Linden Lab didn’t think of that one (apparently) and so you didn’t have stuff fitting correctly.

Though even mesh was a non-Linden Lab innovation for an SL platform. It showed up years in advance via the RealXtend viewer and implementation, all while Linden Lab was saying it wasn’t possible. Once again, you are the innovators here – or at the very least, the driving force of it.

It is you who are continually driving that advancement – with or without the company running the platforms. OpenSim is a good example here, though not as coherent as a proprietary system like SecondLife.

What SANSAR is, in a nutshell, is a company trying to wrestle that power back from you and severely constrain your ability to innovate – to make themselves the sole channel of that innovation, and the sole purveyor of it. At the baseline, this is removing a large portion of the “magic” formula that is Second Life in the organic nature and trying to bottle it into bite-sized snippets under tight control.

It defeats the entire point.

Out of Context

The most interesting part about SANSAR is that if you took it out of context, it would be fine. But coming from Linden Lab, that isn’t quite possible. On its own, it’s a pretty nice piece of software – albeit nothing revolutionary in any manner.

When an “experience” is filled up – as in, you reach a set concurrency limit, the scene just creates a copy and starts teleporting the newcomers to the new copy instead. The term for this is “sharding”, and this alone makes me shake my head. Given the opportunity to start from the ground up and redesign the virtual world experience platform using modern approaches, Linden Lab immediately screwed up and built a sharded system. This is going to haunt SANSAR for the entire shelf life of the project.

What I see with SANSAR is a missed opportunity from Linden Lab to really push the boundaries and reinvent their flagship namesake, Second Life with modern technology and approaches, applying what they’ve learned since its inception. That being said, it seems like Linden Lab hasn’t learned anything over the past fifteen years.

Here we find that Linden Lab had the opportunity to design a single shard system and do it right this time, but failed to do so. After all, Novaquark is designing Dual Universe as a single shard universe and is what I would say an iteration of Second Life should have been from the get-go. It’s pretty bad when a crowdfunded system is kicking your corporate seasoned ass.

This isn’t news, if you remember the tenure from Rodvick Humble (Rodimus Prime).

Instead of moving forward, we see a company taking steps backward in their application of understanding the virtues of virtual worlds, while others are sailing ahead with innovation.

When I was giving my presentation at OSCC, I brought up Dual Universe as the winning baseline for the future of virtual worlds specifically because of its innovation in single shard technology. Allowing thousands of people to simultaneously be present in a single location persistently is a major factor.

Though that opportunity is now missed when it comes to Linden Lab and SANSAR due to its baseline model. In Dual Universe, you have a shared, persistent virtual universe that you can build in like in Second Life, but more importantly you can build a spaceship and literally fly, seamlessly, off planet and go land on another one.

That is absolutely incredible – a word I’d love to use about Linden Lab and SANSAR but is not justified.

What about Second Life?

Here’s an interesting tidbit about Second Life versus SANSAR that most probably wouldn’t know:

You can create a sim in Second Life that is comparable to SANSAR if you know what you’re doing. Just like you can use 20 year old ActiveWorlds to create worlds that would be comparable to Second Life.

That’s it… the big secret. See, if you baked all of your lighting and exercised control over the sim settings, you can come up with something similar to SANSAR. Will there be lag? Well, that depends on a lot of factors.

If you know how to create content that is game optimized, use standard tricks of the trade to do mesh and bake in lighting effects instead of forcing it on the high-end machines only, then Second Life can look absolutely stunning and on par with AAA titles. Albeit you don’t get things like HDR and God Rays in your shaders with Second Life, and sure you prolly don’t have Bloom effects like in SANSAR, but let’s be honest -

We already have shaders in Second Life, and adding HDR, Bloom and God Rays (etc) to the Advanced Lighting Model would put it on par with SANSAR.

But what about the lag, I hear you say?

I’ve already outlined here how to remedy the situation with the single shard technology approach that Dual Universe is using. However, that being the case, I’ve previously outlined how Second Life can retool their server approach on the back end to virtually eliminate that lag on multiple fronts.

1. Have the idle servers kick on to help co-process simulators that are popular. Much of the problem is that a single region is on a quad core server, which is fine until you push it to a breaking point. If they get to that level, there’s no reason why you should have thousands of idle servers and countless processing power just sitting there twiddling thumbs about it.

2. Remember SLGo? Linden Lab totally dropped the ball on that one. Yes, it was a third party system that Linden Lab wasn’t in charge of – but the take-away should have been crystal clear if they were paying attention. The cloud streaming system which allowed even a crappy tablet or phone to run Second Life on Ultra Graphics should have been built into Second Life itself as a Premium option. This is added value proposition in a nutshell. It was a unique added value proposition that wasn’t replicating pre-existing services from their community – and that is what counts.

3. The Fu** Off button. Yes, that’s what I originally called it when I jokingly asked for it on Twitter. You have one now in your viewer and it simply derenders everyone in the room except friends. Why is this important? Well, because a majority of you lot have no clue about optimizing your avatars for looks and speed to be considerate of the sim and surrounding avatar resources. All of your high-end mesh attachments and high-resolution mega textures for skins and items may work when it’s just you and one other person, but it absolutely tanks a server and other computers when there’s a group in the same area.

4. Content creators need to up their game (collectively). The very thing that makes Second Life awesome is the organic nature of user created content and world creation, but it’s a double edged sword – because those same content creators are making things without the explicit understanding of optimized game assets. So we see these high poly, massive texture using, monstrosities being sold for all manner of use which in turn brings anything but a NASA launch console to a screeching halt. Then on the other side of the coin you have badly designed assets that look like absolute shit. Because of this dichotomy of melting pot mentality, we have a mixed bag in a virtual world where one minute you could see a breathtaking sim and the next a bunch of assets from the turn of the century.

As I’ve already said, I don’t see any reason why Second Life couldn’t look as good as SANSAR here and now, and even be optimized enough to drastically lower lag. To do that, it’ll take a concerted effort on our part as content creators and world designers, as well as on the part of Linden Lab to apply better management approaches to how SL runs.

Final Thoughts

SANSAR for all the hype isn’t special, however much it may look pretty at this time. The publish model alone harkens back to the early 1990s with Worlds Inc, and more recently BlueMars. In my opinion, it is the theme park to our virtual world lives.

Which is to say – it’s a nice place to visit, but we live elsewhere. When you want a short term experience, SANSAR is a good vacation (though Sinewave Space is still better at it), but when you really want to spend time in a virtual world that is organic and user-generated – you should stick to Second Life.

If Linden Lab understood the reasons why we love Second Life, they would have never made SANSAR the way they did, but instead made a true successor to Second Life.

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noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 10:35:00 +0000

We broke Firestorm, and that’s ok.

For those who read the prior post about the Adventures in Unicode, you may have come away thinking that Firestorm was the clear winner in extended character sets with everyone else falling short.

After all, it appeared that way from our end as well.

That is, until we ran one last test and brought over Tonya Souther, (one of the Firestorm devs who originally implemented the Noto font and Unicode for Firestorm), over to the workshop to click on the ONYX radio.

There may have been a very large explosion involved…

The following are screenshots provided courtesy of Tonya:

Firestorm Linux

Firestorm OSX

Firestorm Windows 7

Revenge of the Tofu

It would seem the Unicode implementation for Firestorm is not consistent across operating systems!

At first glance this looks bad – after all, this means using Unicode in the menus for content is an entirely hit or miss situation now. However, upon further inspection, there has to be a reason why the Unicode shows up sometimes while failing in other situations.

Overall, this is a shared experience issue. If you were to listen to Linden Lab over the past number of years, then shared experience is a number one priority. The user experience should be consistent for all in-world users, and now that the Unicode inconsistency has been identified, we know this is not the case.

While Windows 10 machines will show the full menu icons via Unicode, Windows 7 machines are missing two, while Linux and OSX Firestorm installs will get a bunch of Tofu altogether. According to Tonya, this shouldn’t be the case at all if Noto is packed into every Firestorm version. If anything, the Noto font bundle with Firestorm should make the Unicode display consistently across viewers and operating systems.

But this isn’t the current case, as demonstrated by the ONYX radio menu at the Andromeda Media Group workshop.

The entire purpose of Noto as a font is “No To(fu)”.

What Happens Now?

Under normal circumstances, this would be the end of the line. However, because it was Tonya Souther (one of the devs who implemented Noto for Unicode compatibility in Firestorm) who found the glaring issue, she insisted on fixing it as well.

This is, after all, a Major Bug in Firestorm that breaks the shared experience.

After I filed the JIRA for this, Tonya jumped in and personally assigned herself to the cause – taking up the crusade against Tofu for the benefit of everyone in Second Life.

JIRA FIRE-21404

This sort of dedication is what makes the Firestorm team so awesome. I could have filed the JIRA and then have the devs just say “Yeah, whatever…”, but in this case the Firestorm dev was right there in person, helped document the glaring flaw, and owned it like a boss.

Why This Matters

For years, one of my biggest gripes about Second Life is the inconsistency for supporting Unicode characters. You are probably just as keen on this issue as well, since there are plenty of times you’ve seen people with “fancy text” names or some sort of decoration characters in their profile or chat which showed up as a bunch of [] characters instead.

Because these characters show up for some but not all, I would call this a major break in “shared experience” protocol touted by Linden Lab. The “simple” solution to fix this would be something along the lines of -

1. Extend the Noto font for Firestorm to support a large number of common icons and glyphs, but not “everything” like all the foreign languages. By focusing on the icons/emoji/glyphs of Unicode as a fallback font, and then making sure all versions of Firestorm use it, we ensure a consistent display of characters in Second Life.

2. Unifying the Font.XML file for Windows, Linux and OSX to make sure they all point to and properly use the extended Noto font for the Unicode compatibility, regardless of your operating system.

Because this is a “shared experience” issue, fixing it should be a priority. Therefore, if/when Firestorm team makes the Unicode implementation consistent among their own viewers, the code and fix is open source and can/should be included in the Default Second Life Viewer (I’m looking at you Oz Linden), and also other 3rd Party Viewers.

However – in order for Linden Lab to include such a fix in the Default viewer, they would have to probably bring back the font.xml implementation that seems to have been taken away (for unknown reasons). This would likely be true for other 3rd party developers as well.

By making the Unicode implementation consistent and reasonably up to date, we can see better use in local chat, menus on products in-world (accessibility), and more. Fixing this would have sweeping changes in the entire Metaverse in how we see various menus, information text in chat, and more displayed – with glyphs and icons now being more universal we can all expect a consistent experience for the same characters being displayed.

I applaud the fact that Tonya Souther was so quick to assign herself to fixing the glaring issue, and look forward to seeing a unified Unicode implementation in the near future.

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noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Tue, 11 Jul 2017 01:09:00 +0000

The Not-So-Shared Experience in Second Life

On June 20th, 2017 the Unicode foundation updated the international standard for universal character mapping to version 10. Unicode 10.0 adds 8,518 characters, for a total of 136,690 characters. These additions include 4 new scripts, for a total of 139 scripts, as well as 56 new emoji characters.

If you are a regular user of Second Life, then you’ve very likely seen these Unicode characters in use for things like announcements, custom names, and various decoration and fancy text for profiles.

But there is a bit of a problem.

While the Unicode standard is now up to version 10.0.0, a majority of Second Life viewers (including the default viewer) doesn’t really support a majority of the Unicode standard characters. So much for that “shared experience”, right?

The Unicode set comes in quite handy when you want to add a visual element to your displays. For instance, there are a number of Unicode characters for icons and emojis that, while useful in a frivolous manner for text decoration, are very useful as universal symbols to denote common tasks.

For instance, if you wanted to use the age-old icon for “Save”, you’d use the floppy disk icon, right?

What if you wanted an icon for “Favorite”? Well, the obvious symbol would be an icon of a heart, like this: ❤

If all you saw with those two characters was [] for each, then you’re out of date for your font and/or Operating System. As far as I can tell, most modern operating systems and programs can see more recent Unicode characters by default.

The problem is that with Second Life, the Unicode support is all over the map at best. The default viewer (and most third party viewers) simply do not support a wide range of Unicode characters. That diskette icon from before would show up as a tofu – which is the name of the empty block symbol “[]” you see whenever the font you are using doesn’t have the symbol being used.

You’ve probably seen a lot of those “tofu” blocks in Second Life as you wander around and see people’s custom names, gestures and whatever. This is your viewer failing to support a wider range of Unicode characters which are standard internationally. More importantly, it’s your viewer not including fonts that support those Unicode characters.

The default viewer for Second Life comes with a few fonts installed, and they all fail the wider scope of Unicode support. Third party viewers like Singularity use Dejavu in a reduced format as the default font set, and doesn’t support a lot of Unicode characters up to version 7, which is actually from 2010 (7 years old!).

I won’t even get into the recently released Unicode 10 standard. That’s probably out of the question entirely, but it isn’t too much to ask for consistent support for a four year old Unicode character set.

Comparative Testing

While a majority of the Second Life viewers more or less fail a more comprehensive Unicode character test, the one viewer that actually fares better than all of them (including the default viewer) happens to be Firestorm.

As a test, the ONYX Stereo Receiver in Second Life uses Unicode icons on the menus in order to better differentiate. Keeping in mind that we didn’t use any Unicode past version 7 to be “safe” – we assumed characters that have been around for 4 years would be supported without a problem by now.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.

Here’s the visual comparison -

Default SL Viewer

One thing you’ll notice among the viewers that fail the Unicode test is that they all effectively crap out around Unicode 3 or 4 support in their included font(s). With Second Life Default viewer, you’d think Linden Lab would have the foresight to support a much wider set of characters in their included font.

Singularity Viewer

Next on the list for testing was Singularity Viewer, the third party viewer that I recall being the staple for Phoenix and older viewer style holdouts. Here, again, you see it fails the Unicode test on the ONYX menu.

Further research finds that Singularity uses Dejavu (much like Firestorm) but nothing else… or whatever else it has in the Fonts folder still doesn’t support a newer Unicode standard, so there are no fallbacks.

Black Dragon Viewer

So maybe I’m choosing “crappy” third party viewers, then? The low end of the spectrum, and that’s why they don’t handle Unicode so well? I wish that were the case, really… as below, you’ll see that even Black Dragon viewer fails the Unicode test.

Firestorm Viewer

And then there is Firestorm.

Notice anything different? Well, what do ya know… all the Unicode characters in the menu show up fine in Firestorm.

What’s Different?

When you look inside the Firestorm Fonts folder, you notice that there are more fonts in there than you’d find in Singularity or the Default Viewer, and while Singularity and the Default viewer also uses the Dejavu Sans font like Firestorm, all this tells us is that DejaVu isn’t the solution.

So what font is responsible for adding extensive Unicode support in the Firestorm viewer?

I’d like to say our secret sauce just might be thanks to Google.

See, I noticed in the Firestorm distribution that there includes the Noto family of fonts along with the other fonts in the folder. Noto (short for No Tofu) is a font family designed by Google to support extensive Unicode characters.

It is a free font and (from what I can see) doesn’t include any real restrictions for bundling it in your applications, and is actually encouraged. Which is probably why it shows up as part of Firestorm, in turn enabling all Firestorm users to see extended Unicode characters by default.

Specifically included in the Firestorm Fonts folder are:

NotoMono-Regular.ttf
NotoSans-Bold.ttf
NotoSans-BoldItalic.ttf
NotoSansCombined-Regular.ttf
NotoSans-Italic.ttf

The way that the viewers work in the XML files which declare the fonts in use is – you name a main font, and then you name off some “fallback” fonts when the main font doesn’t have a particular character to display (like with Unicode or foreign languages). So when the main font “fails” to find a character, it goes to the other fallback fonts listed to see if the character is in there. At least that’s how they used to work… and now (apparently) only Firestorm kept that ability.

As far as I can tell – Only Firestorm seems to have included Noto (and a few others) in their Font folder, and therefore can render much more Unicode than everyone else. Of course, they declared Noto in the XML file as a fallback font.

Which begs the question:

If it’s really this simple to update Unicode support for Second Life viewers, then why is Firestorm the only viewer that seems to have done so?

I’m actually quite surprised that I haven’t seen any of the other third party viewers do this, nor even Linden Lab with the “official” viewer. This has got to be (hands down) the quickest “shared experience” fix they can all do.

Just include Noto in your viewers.

Until then, we’re stuck answering a design question when creating items in Second Life:

Do I use Unicode icon characters in my text and menus, do I omit the Unicode characters, do I include a toggle button to show/hide them, or do I say “To hell with it…” and just build with Unicode characters knowing a majority of people use Firestorm?

This will be the question until everyone catches up and includes better Unicode font support in their next viewer releases, catching up to Firestorm.

Until then, I’m probably just going to use the Unicode characters in menus whether you can see them or not. It’s a simple fix, and you (the users) should get on your respective viewer developers to include better support for it ASAP.

Yes… even Linden Lab.

Addendum

After a bit of tinkering/testing, I had the idea that maybe one could simply copy/paste the Firestorm Fonts folder to the other viewer Fonts folder, XML files and all for the fallbacks… but it seems the other viewers just ignore it all.

This is curious to me as there was a time when the Default viewer used the XML setup to declare the fonts and fallbacks. As a result, I believe two things are going on:

The Default viewer (and other 3rd party Viewers) no longer have the XML functionality built in, or it’s disabled hard coded.
Firestorm kept the original XML functionality and put it to good use.

Which now begs the question:

If the third party viewers are open source, including Firestorm, then why is this functionality only in Firestorm? Even more, why would a function that was in the older Default viewers be taken out, if it allowed for such an obvious standards and compatibility fix with little effort?

This is quite possibly one of the easiest “Shared Experience” fixes to include, and (before Linden Lab thinks of it), no that doesn’t mean make Firestorm remove the functionality. That would be the most bone-headed thing Linden Lab could do.

As a result of the other viewers ignoring the XML files, this means that (unfortunately) you will have to petition your favorite viewer developer to put the functionality back in and include the same font set as Firestorm to fix the Unicode compatibility for your particular viewer of choice (including Linden Lab).

Because apparently, they’d all have to include the XML function back into their viewers and include the fonts in the folders of their own accord.

My recommendation, then, is the following:

If you’re not using Firestorm, go to your respective viewer JIRA and file it as a feature request. In the year 2017, there is little reason a modern application shouldn’t be up to date with Unicode compatibility. We should all be raising a little bit of hell over this one…

So go get’em, tiger!

Speed Demon 2

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Sun, 02 Jul 2017 02:32:00 +0000

Browser Enhancement Tricks

Today’s Topic: Browser Enhancement for Speed

Difficulty: Easy

Introduction

In this blog post, I’d like to discuss some simple tricks you can apply to your web browser to speed up common tasks above and beyond the stock browser offerings. The following “hacks” will let you skip a lot of the clicks involved with doing everyday tasks and cut right to the chase. These are tweaks that I have done personally with my own web browsers (Chrome and Opera) but should also work with Firefox if you’re using that particular web browser. If you’re using Microsoft Edge, then there is a special place in hell just for you.

The main question we’re answering here is:

In the course of our everyday web browsing, we find ourselves doing a lot of repetitive tasks to get to what we want. For instance, searching your favorite sites for content, using the Speed Dial, and so forth. So let’s speed this up a little bit and make our lives easier.

Search Operators

There is nothing scary here, and this trick is quite simple once you get the hang of it. Essentially, all browsers allow you to add custom search operators aside from the built-in options like Google, DuckDuckGo, etc. But how can we “hack” this feature to our advantage?

Well, let’s say you routinely search Youtube for videos.

Normally, you have to type in youtube.com, wait for it to load, and then click in the search box to do your search. If you’re a speed demon like me, then you want to skip all those steps in between for your favorite sites and just cut right to the chase.

The first step to this is right-clicking the address bar.

On that resulting menu, you’ll see something like the picture above. “Edit search engines…”

Very likely you’ll see a list under the main list that says “Other search engines”

By clicking on the “Add new search” you’ll be presented with another pop-up to define your new search keyword.

For instance, let’s look at adding a custom Youtube keyword.

Obviously we name it in the first box – in this case “Youtube”. In the second field, we choose the keyword to use in the address bar as the shortcut. For this example, I’ve chosen “youtube”. The last is the address to use for this search keyword.

This is where it gets a bit tricky. In order to get the search string for this, simply do a normal search on the site you want to set up a keyword for. In the results address at the top, copy and paste it here in this field when setting up the keyword with one change:

Whatever the string was for the thing you searched for (Let’s say you searched for Rick and Morty"), you replace that with %S as a wildcard.

Then hit Save on this dialog and you’re done. Whenever you type Youtube into the address bar, you can follow it with the search criteria directly and hit enter to skip right to the youtube search results for what you just typed.

In your address bar, you can type Youtube [space] [Search String] and it’ll skip right to the search results.

What else is this useful for? Well, let’s say you want to keyword something like Wikiwand to search for articles. The same process applies, but the address is something like:

www.wikiwand.com/en/%S

And you can set the keyword to be “wiki”.

Pretty much, you can do this on most sites that have a search option. I’ve set it up for Youtube, Wikiwand, Torrent, Freesound.org, Porn (why not?), Discogs (album info search), and yes even Google Play Music, where typing “play” and the search criteria in the address bar will jump right to the search results in my Google Music Library.

Author’s Note: Wikiwand is a much cleaner and modernized version of Wikipedia. I highly recommend using it over the standard Wikipedia site.

This is such a useful trick that I feel gimped whenever I set up a new browser install and can’t use these custom search operators. Trust me, once you set yours up, you’ll feel the same after a short time and wonder how you managed without this for so long.

Suggested Keywords

Wallpaper

https://alpha.wallhaven.cc/search?q=%S&search_image=

Games

http://armorgames.com/search/games?type=games&q=%S

Music

https://www.emp3i.co/mp3/%S.html

Icons

https://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=%S&price=free

Marketplace

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/products/search?utf8=✓&search%5Bcategory_id%5D=&search%5Bmaturity_level%5D=GMA&search%5Bkeywords%5D=%S

Obviously use these responsibly and legally.

Additional Uses

It goes without saying that this trick can be used for single word tweaks for your favorite sites. For instance, if you use Google Drive a lot, but don’t want to type in drive.google.com all the time, just set up a keyword named “drive” with the address normally, and from there simply typing “drive” in your address bar will take you there.

Log In and Synchronize

This one is optional, but can save you a ton of time when setting up a new browser install. In your browser settings there is the option to log in and synchronize all of your settings. I highly recommend setting this up. In Google Chrome and Opera (Chromium based browsers), it’ll backup all of your bookmarks, extensions, themes, keywords, etc. When you set up a new browser install, and log in, the browser will “magically” set itself up the way you had it before – installing all of your themes, extensions, bookmarks, keywords and other settings automatically.

No manual import needed here – just sit back and watch it all work automatically.

This is such an awesome time saver that we at Andromeda Media Group are incorporating it into the ONYX land radio system by default. Because who the hell has time to keep messing with notecards and settings every time you rez a radio in Second Life?

Extensions

This is where the suggestions begin to get subjective, but I’ve found the following extensions incredibly useful for management, themes, and ease of use in Chrome, Opera and Firefox.

For the remainder of this post, we’ll be using our respective extension stores for the corresponding web browser -

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions

https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/

FVD Speed Dial

The first out of the gate is FVD Speed Dial. While the built-in speed dials for Chrome and Opera are pretty good, FVD Speed Dial takes it to a whole new level with customization, organizing your speed dial bookmarks via tabs, and more.

Once you set up FVD Speed Dial, and get your dials organized, it’ll be a quick and easy task to open your most used sites.

LastPass

I don’t know about you, but I hate remembering and typing in passwords and repetitive information to fill out forms. With LastPass as an extension, it’s a one and done deal with a master password or auto-fill option.

Tampermonkey

When it comes to websites and how they look/feel/operate, sometimes the designers just don’t get it. Or maybe you just don’t like how things are laid out to your liking? With Tampermonkey as an extension, you can use scripts which will alter how those sites look, feel or operate (and sometimes adding new functionality altogether).

Installing Tampermonkey isn’t complicated, and it’s mostly a hands-off operation. What makes it powerful though is not just that it is the backbone of scripts to alter sites but when paired with script repositories, such as Greasy Fork, you can customize your favorite sites till the cows come home.

A side note – Tampermonkey is mainly for the OCD power user that wants new features or more control over things, and the mileage will vary for each script in use.

When the scripts work, however… it opens up a whole new world of possibilities for your favorite sites and customization.

Stylish

What is Stylish you might ask? Well, it’s an extension that works a lot like Tampermonkey but mostly for the purpose of applying themes to your favorite sites. Want Google with a dark theme? Facebook with greyscale? There’s thousands of custom themes for popular sites. With Stylish, it’s also pretty simple to find, apply and change them.

Download Chrome Extension for Opera

For this next one, if you’re using Opera, then installing this extension will let you install and use (most) Chrome extensions in Opera by default. With this, you’ll be able to go through the Chrome Store as well as the Opera Store to get your extensions.

Mileage may vary, as some extensions use API specific things not supported cross browser. In which case, you can usually find the browser specific version in the corresponding store.

URL: https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/download-chrome-extension-9/

If you’re using Firefox and don’ see the corresponding extension in your web store, just pick the extension that is a close approximation.

Mercury Reader

The Mercury Reader extension for Chrome removes ads and distractions, leaving only text and images for a clean and consistent reading view on every site.

Features:

Disable surrounding webpage noise and clutter with one click
Send To Kindle functionality
Adjust typeface and text size, and toggle between light or dark themes
Quick keyboard shortcut (Cmd + Esc for Mac users, Alt + ` for Windows users) to switch to Reader on any article page
Printing optimization
Sharing through Facebook, Twitter and Email

Pure URL

This add-on automatically removes all garbage like "utm_source=*" from URLs. These fields are provided for the Google Analytics and they are not a necessity.

Example of URL with garbage fields:

http://bigpicture.ru/?p=431513&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bigpictures+%28%D0%9D%D0%9E%D0%92%D0%9E%D0%A1%D0%A2%D0%98+%D0%92+%D0%A4%D0%9E%D0%A2%D0%9E%D0%93%D0%A0%D0%90%D0%A4%D0%98%D0%AF%D0%A5%29

Pure URL:
http://bigpicture.ru/?p=431513

Wrap Up

And there you have it – some simple extensions and tweaks to make using your internet browser much faster for common tasks. These are all tested and used by myself, and most I couldn’t really do without.

Have any tweaks or extensions of your own you’d like to add? Feel free to leave them in the comments below.

ONYX

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Sun, 04 Jun 2017 01:50:00 +0000

It’s time to set your land stream to “Epic”

The sim was relatively quiet that day as the land stream carried on, oblivious to whomever happened to be in earshot. My only company in the empty showroom was a strategically placed bot behind a counter attempting to reaffirm its purpose in virtual life, however inconsequential, and my friend Brian.

I closed my eyes for a brief moment, and when I reopened them, I was reminded that what I was seeing wasn’t some sort of practical joke.

“So this is it, then?” , I asked. “I mean… I expected more.”

Brian stood quietly beside me, acknowledging only that he, too, was laying witness to what was before us.

We were standing at the XANcast showroom, looking at their “best” land radios and I use best very loosely in this context because, (and let’s be honest), it was little more than a badly textured prim with a script.

In the corner was no better; A badly designed jukebox with flat and misaligned textures on a few prims.

“Why doesn’t anybody do any better in here?”, Brian finally replied.

I paused for a few moments before answering, “I don’t know. But I think it’s time we found out.”

Down the Rabbit Hole

About a week prior to this, I had been staring at my own PIONEE receiver sitting in the workshop for Andromeda Media Group and the thought occurred to me that the quality wasn’t very good. It, too, was a badly textured single prim with a script in it.

PIONEE Receiver in White – 200L$

I went looking on Marketplace for a new radio system, and was immediately struck by how little options there were. Not that you couldn’t find all manner of radio designs on marketplace to manage your land streams, but they were all very similar across the board when it came to functionality.

All were driven by a notecard based script that let you put all of your stations in and they would open a simple menu to let you select among them.

This accounted for (I’d say) about 99% of the radios available. Most were made out of prims, or a single prim badly textured; To wit, we’re talking about a picture of a real stereo slapped on a box. However, there are well-done mesh land radios and jukeboxes available… and while I had gotten my hopes up, it turned out that they, too, were running on that notecard driven system as well.

What surprised me more was that they were selling between 10L$ and a few hundred. After all, my old PIONEE was still listed on marketplace for about 200L$.

During this time, I had decided to try my hand at building my own radio to at least improve the quality and functionality over the PIONEE. The notecard driven system wasn’t too big of a deal to implement, and within an evening I had the initial reference model for what would become the ONYX land radio.

Of course, I did make it in prims but kept it a respectable 6 land impact and added features I hadn’t seen before as a test. When all was said and done, I had a well organized land radio that actually had ambient audio feedback for changing stations, clicking the device, and a TTS voice during setup to guide you through it. Very user friendly.

But something was still bothering me about it all… why didn’t anyone make a better land radio? What was with all of these notecard driven systems? As I was mulling this over, our main genius at Andromeda Media Group took a look over the reference receiver and asked if I would like him to do a custom mesh version.

The answer was “Knock yourself out, Amigo.”

While Jon was going about the mesh aspects of the ONYX, I dug a little deeper into marketplace and found exactly three land radios that weren’t notecard driven (ignoring the Always-On brand), and it was these three which really started me down the rabbit hole.

If you own a land radio in Second Life, you’re probably familiar with XANcast, Trigitec and SHX. All three of these brands offer something the other radios didn’t – namely they were all driven by the Shoutcast directory and dynamically updated.

XANcast Promo – 2017

This gave them a definite advantage in that they had access to 300+ Genres, thousands of streams, and automatically updated listings. At the time, I wasn’t aware of how much of an advantage it actually gave them, and as it turned out… the answer was a total monopoly.

And yet, when I went to look at them in the showrooms… the quality was piss poor at best. Even the best model offered by Xancast – the 876, had a dynamic character display on it but was mostly just a single knob put on it in prim and a box that was badly textured (yet again). This alone put the receiver at 17 prim, and for some reason… XANcast thought it was reasonable to charge 695L$ for it.

It wasn’t much better at either SHX or Trigitec, either.

Trigitec follows the same “bad prim build” example, and the models they offer aren’t anything to call home about. Oddly enough, SHX offers similar radio designs to Trigitec – as if they are in competition only with each other.

Is it really just a coincidence that both SHX and Trigitec have a land radio model that is just a skull?

I returned to the workshop shaking my head, when I finally asked “How hard is it to build a Shoutcast enabled land radio in here, and why hasn’t anyone else done it?”

Jon answered succinctly, “It’s actually not too hard, you just need the API key.”

And that’s where things got even more interesting.

From there, I decided to look into what was involved with obtaining a Shoutcast Partnership and that magical API Key to query their database. Immediately I ran into what was very likely the reason nobody else had made better land radios and why XANcast, Trigitec, and SHX essentially had the monopoly.

Reading through the Shoutcast forums, I saw post after post of discouraged developers telling their story about trying to apply for a Shoutcast API key and partnership but getting a canned response saying they aren’t issuing them at this time. This had been going on now for what appeared to be a few years at the very least.

Knowing that Trigitec’s last known system update was around 2014, this made a whole lot of sense as the pieces started falling into place. XANcast is probably under that premise as well, and SHX. Suddenly I realized that these three brands had effectively gotten their API keys and partnerships before Shoutcast stopped issuing them, and when Shoutcast went on extended hiatus like they did, it made it impossible (or very expensive) to build a radio in Second Life with the same abilities as those three brands.

Shoutcast wasn’t issuing API keys or partnerships
The only other option was 3rd party APIs which charged a fortune

Now it all started making sense.

They got in early, and kept their access when everyone else got locked out. No new contenders in the land radio business meant that they were effectively the monopoly among Shoutcast enabled dynamic systems in Second Life.

It’s a smart business move, and it worked out great for them. Normally I wouldn’t have any issue with this except for a few nagging bullet points.

They were effectively abusing their position
They were offering shoddy products
They were charging far too much*

This is a perfect example of bad business practices and not doing right by the customers or the Shoutcast brand which you rely on.

While I thought this was all incredibly shady practice, I hadn’t really committed myself to going toe-to-toe with them. I was going to just build a decent mesh receiver with some nifty options and go from there.

Meanwhile, Jon had mulled it all over himself and decided to build a dynamic 32 character display into the ONYX unit, and then added a color dial to change the colors. Again, still adding options that were better than a majority out there, so we weren’t worried too much.

Better yet, the receiver was only 5 Land Impact. While close to the reference model in prims, it had a lot more detail and functionality.

It’s On Like Donkey Kong

The ONYX itself was coming along nicely, and so I decided the best way to launch it was to arrange for some radio commercials in-world and maybe a couple of magazine ads. I got in touch with my friend Scorpinosis Nightfire and asked if they were still running the radio station and magazine (iMoogi Radio and NuVibez).

He answered in affirmative and then asked, “Why, boss… what are you up to?”

Well, I decided to tell him what were were doing with the ONYX and that we were scouting stations to advertise on, collecting metrics and pricing so we’d know what kind of budget we would need to launch.

He kindly set up a meeting with Filipa over at iMoogi (she runs the place now) in which she and I sat down and started talking, and that is when the involuntary twitch kicked in.

It turns out that Trigitec charges for them (iMoogi) to be on their stream list (pinned to the top). It used to be 6,000L$ every 6 months, but they’ve recently decided to jack that up to 9,000L$ every 6 months arbitrarily.

Now, I can’t speak for any other station that may be paying Trigitec for those spots on the list, but I feel it is safe to assume they are all getting charged in the same ballpark.

When asked why she doesn’t just go somewhere else with that business to someplace more reasonable… her answer is what finally made me decide to flip to “total annihilation” mode with ONYX.

“Because there isn’t anywhere else to go. They have the monopoly.”

Unleash the Hounds!

Heading back to the workshop, Jon was merrily tapping away at the internal code of the new ONYX receiver on the workbench. When I explained to him the situation in detail, he went quiet.

I know that look he gets when he’s about to go “Beast Mode” on something, and it’s usually the same reason I go that route – because now it’s both personal and a matter of principle to stomp the competition.

It’s no longer a matter of “Let’s do this as a personal project for the hell of it.”

No, this (in the famous words of Bugs Bunny) means war.

It’s time to get serious

It didn’t take long for Jon and I to formulate a plan and set it into motion, but we both agreed that in order to do this we needed the proverbial key to the kingdom. Which is to say, somehow we needed to get a Shoutcast partnership and API key.

This seemed like the first impossibility standing in front of us. We both knew Shoutcast had been known to be giving canned responses and not issuing new partnerships for a few years, but while I worked out an alternative route to handle the dynamic system (3rd party API), I still thought it couldn’t hurt to at least try to convince Shoutcast to give us a fair shake.

So I went into it all with a full proposal, the background of Jon and I, why we felt it was necessary that we would have a Shoutcast Partnership and API key of our own, and yes… I even outlined the three brands abusing the monopoly that (ironically) Shoutcast had inadvertently created.

I hit send and kept my expectations low.

Meanwhile, Jon continued working on features for the ONYX – adding a functional front panel with buttons. There’s something you don’t normally see on any radio in Second Life… the buttons actually work and aren’t just there for show.

While not all of them work, a majority do what they say: 8 Preset buttons on the front, Forward and Back Tuning, Display Button, Power/Standby and at some point Volume – though to be frank, the Volume just controls the volume of the unit and not your land stream volume. Because the ONYX has sound built in for various things, the volume switch will control the volume of that.

ONYX Front Panel Buttons

Obviously the Bass, Treble and Balance knobs are for show. We’re good, but we aren’t miracle workers (usually).

After the weekend came and went, Jon asked if Shoutcast had gotten back to me yet, and the answer was (unfortunately) “No.”

We both sorta wondered what was taking so long with them, because if it was a canned response, it should have been simple. Of course, I got the response the next day (Tuesday) and instead of a canned response… what I received was actually an email from the Shoutcast team issuing us our API Key and partnership, and asking us to let them know when the product is ready to launch.

Armed and Dangerous

Forwarding off the information to Jon that Shoutcast had sent me, we were now officially in a position to be on par with the top three receivers in Second Life, but if you know nothing else about myself and Jon, know this:

Good enough isn’t good enough.

Why settle for only matching the competition? Might as well go for broke and add features that nobody else seems to have at all, right?

If you have a dynamic 32 character display on the unit, why not

Include a VU meter
Digital clock as a display option
Why not add a Sleep Timer or a Scheduled Timer
Why not have options that would be useful to venues in Second Life like Guest Stream Management
and much more…

There’s a host of options that can (and likely will) be added for launch, most of which aren’t on any other system (Universal Profiles).

But I think the most important take-away is simply a commitment to better design overall.

In the bigger picture, that is the real focus. Why have a messy menu layout (XANcast, Trigitec, etc) when you clearly don’t need to? That’s just lazy design, if you ask me.

So obviously we are putting as much thought into the menu layout as with everything else. We want it to be clean and accessible without any clutter.

Attention to details like this are really what make a system like ONYX shine.

When Will Then Be Now?

In the famous scene from Spaceballs, Dark Helmet asks “When will then be now?” when looking at Mr. Rental. I suppose the same question could be asked of us concerning the release of ONYX.

When will then be now?

To which the pat answer is always -

Soon.

When will then be now!?

ONYX is in development and will be for a little while longer. We want to make absolutely certain it is rock solid (pun intended), has a bunch of features we know you’re going to love, and also that it sufficiently is able to trounce XANCast, Trigitec and SHX in the land radio department.

When the ONYX launches, trust us… you’ll know.

Because it’ll likely be the last land radio you’ll ever need.

Games People Play

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Tue, 14 Feb 2017 13:47:00 +0000

A brief look into the world of BDSM

What is it about the allure of fantasy which piques our interest as adults? Whether we’re talking about cosplay or something a lot more complex, the underlying story is still the same every time.

And yet, when we look at the world of BDSM in the context of Second Life we more often find there are discrepancies involved with the understanding of the lifestyle in and of itself. That isn’t to say these stereotypes and misunderstandings do not exist from the real world, (and we’ll cover that shortly), in the virtual world it would seem that they are exaggerated even further while intentionally focusing on only the stereotypes.

For this wonderful Valentine’s Day, I would like to focus on a relationship centered post – but because I deal heavily in virtual worlds, it couldn’t be simple like a vanilla approach. After all, if you’ve read this blog long enough, you’d know by now that I absolutely love taking the side roads into the less traveled.

That being said, as the title implies, this post is about the Games People Play or; What a D/s and BDSM lifestyle actually look like versus the stereotypes. It goes without saying that we’ll be covering some basics as well as the difference between BDSM and Abuse. So if you’re a bit squeamish, or are easily “triggered”, now would be a good time to change the channel.

This is (after all) an adult oriented post.

Beginnings

On the surface, one may believe that the topic of D/s and BDSM is something of a mismatch for this blog (not to mention me personally). But that simply isn’t the case.

When I set out to transition from a Nidus focused blog into a virtual worlds inclusive space, part of that was with the intention to explore a wider swath of the virtual worlds community overall. As you and I both know, alternative lifestyles and virtual worlds may as well be synonymous, since there is little better opportunity to explore such things than through the interaction of avatars.

In the context of Second Life, let’s begin on the premise that D/s and BDSM within this context should be considered the “training wheels” of the lifestyle.

Now, that isn’t meant to belittle whatever dynamic you may be a part of. Instead, what I am getting at is that due to the context of interactions within this virtual space, there is a lot lost in translation.

You get much of the mental aspects, but therein is the downfall. D/s and BDSM are predominantly tactile experiences.

When it comes to me personally, I’ve been in the lifestyle for roughly nine years and running – though I had the benefit of getting into the lifestyle as a real life tangible long before I bothered with the virtual world side of things.

Of course, one may be asking:

But if Second Life and alternative lifestyles are nearly synonymous, then why did you make it a point to avoid the lifestyle in virtual worlds?

The answer may surprise you.

See, it actually had nothing at all to do with professional involvement. As most people already know about me, I really couldn’t care less what the opinions of others for me actually are. I’m usually straightforward and matter of fact. An open book (so to speak).

So if not the professional or public stigma, what gives?

The problem all these years was simply that what I saw in the alternative lifestyle circles inherent in virtual worlds played more to the stereotypes than to an actual D/s or BDSM dynamic. Often times masking the dishonesty, manipulation and abusive behaviors of pretend “Dominants” and the insecure, co-dependent, damaged goods known as “submissives”.

This (I believe) is why D/s and BDSM have that negative stigma. When somebody is being genuine and real about the whole dynamic, willing to sit down and have an open and honest discussion from a standpoint of common sense and logic… well, you tend to get a very different viewpoint about these alternative lifestyles.

The Wrong Way…

There’s this ongoing saying in the D/s BDSM world inherent in Second Life that “There is no right or wrong way to do this”, but for somebody looking at this from the perspective of a real life Dominant, I have to raise an eyebrow and laugh outright for the absolute line of bullshit that is. Not only is it a line of bullshit but it is also potentially dangerous to people who aren’t informed otherwise.

Is there a right and wrong way to practice breath play? Yes, because if you fuck up, somebody is dead. Ask David Carradine.

Allow me to paraphrase:

Actor David Carradine was found dead in the closet of a Bangkok hotel room Thursday with a cord wrapped around his neck and genitals, leading Thai police to suspect his death was not a suicide but an accident resulting from dangerous sex practices.

Carradine, 72, best known for his role in the 1970s television drama "Kung Fu," was found by a chamber maid at Bangkok's Park Nai Lert Hotel naked and dead, slumped in a closet with cords bound and connecting his neck and his genitals, Bangkok police said.

Citing Porntip Rojanasunan, the director of the Central Institute of Forensic Science, told the Bangkok Post that the actor may have died from auto-erotic asphyxiation, the practice of cutting off one's air supply to heighten sexual pleasure. Carradine had been in Thailand since May 29 to shoot his latest film, "Stretch."

The running joke about “real” Doms and their Dom Hats and Belt Buckles… then the “there is no right or wrong way to be a Dominant or submissive” to justify what extensively would be abusive/victim behavior is appalling to me.

The one thing I would impart on those looking at the lifestyle for the first time is simply that while there are infinite variations, there actually is a right and wrong way to do anything… including everything inherent in the lifestyle.

When I speak about “true” Dominants, my differentiation is between Dominant and Domineering. Traits inherent in an honest, trustworthy, respectful, and consensual Dominant – in short: Somebody who exhibits leadership qualities.

A submissive isn’t a door mat. He/she has a choice in the matter and despite what any Dominant may tell them, they are equal in the lifestyle.

It is a lifestyle that is entered into out of mutual respect, consent and most importantly by choice.

In the bigger picture, there absolutely is a right and wrong way to do things in this lifestyle, and anyone who tells your different is going to get you permanently hurt or killed. The line of “no right or wrong way” is the sort of thing you would expect to hear out of one or two types of people:

Somebody who was told this themselves when being taught
Somebody who is manipulative and abusive looking for victims

While we can say such things as SSC and RACK exist as acronyms, they are only baselines as a reminder. Safe, Sane, Consensual and Risk Aware, Consensual Kink are pretty much predominant mantras but there are others. The reason for this is because people in the lifestyle can’t seem to agree on what is safe or sane when it’s time to play so many people just “wing it”.

My general definition of safe and sane may not be the same as yours, but it goes something like:

What is safe and sane relies merely on understanding the disincentive to cause permanent or debilitating damage (physical or mental) to your partner including death, but also to include personal life and family, jeopardize their wellbeing or the wellbeing of their friends and or family, or destroy or cause harm to their career.

With the exception of scarification or branding, which in itself falls on the more extreme end of the scale in this lifestyle, the rest holds true. You don’t want to break bones, scar or disfigure your partner, or cause permanent injury, compromise their health (physical or mental) or cause death in the process.

What actions which are taken during a scene may appear as though they are out of control or “going too far”, but (and this goes back to our right and wrong way), a well balanced Dominant will always be in control of themselves and the situation at hand – every stroke, every decision is well calculated and thought out beforehand. It is our responsibility to actually know when you (as a submissive) have had enough and act in your best interest.

That isn’t to say that a Dominant isn’t acting in their own best interest as well. Some things are purely for the satisfaction of the Dominant – though I fall back to the overarching definition of safe and sane.

In order to understand this differentiation better, let’s take a look at “true” Dominants versus the pretenders.

The One True Morty

The biggest misconception about the lifestyle is that it is a disempowerment of a submissive in totality or in part. A dominant will never be wrong, always call the shots, and nothing is too far. A submissive, therefore, comes into the lifestyle believing that in order to be a “good” submissive they have to do whatever they are told without question.

If anything, this line of thinking is the biggest load of bullshit ever perpetrated in the lifestyle and is responsible for causing some of the worst situations imaginable. We ultimately do a disservice to submissives by telling them this and reinforcing these horrible behaviors.

Even when entering into a TPE (Total Power Exchange), the rules of engagement are meticulously discussed and agreed upon before anything is committed to, and even then the submissive has the right to use a safeword when they’ve had enough. Which is to say, the parties involved always are in control of the situation.

So when you see a dynamic whereby the submissive is “always doing what she is told” like a “good girl”, it is with express understanding that the submissive and Dominant have agreed to these interactions ahead of time. Even then… if the Dominant is going too far, breaking those agreed upon boundaries, etc, the submissive always has the right to refuse service.

After all, if you don’t believe somebody is of sound mind or body to be leading you, then you obviously would revoke their right to do so. Even with the TPE “slave”, he or she has outlined boundaries well in advance and only gives that near total control out of trust and respect which has been well earned by the “Master”.

I believe this is a point to consider when you are encountering self-entitled “Masters” in the virtual world… they often believe that they have control over every submissive they meet and act as thought they do. Of course, we know this isn’t true because the submissive never did consent to their control or to be in their service. In short, “Dominants” like this are simply ego driven and delusional.

More to the point, by perpetrating the lie of inequality, we empower predators covering as Dominants who are using the lifestyle as cover to justify their actions.

When I first entered into the lifestyle years ago, I had a predominantly negative view of it all merely because there were so many negative examples of dysfunction that I saw in the lifestyle. But once I had things better explained to me by my own mentors, and that what I was seeing were toxic people masquerading as Dominants, preying on submissives, and that there is a more noble cause to being a Dominant… well, it suddenly made more sense.

Allow me to pass on a little bit of wisdom that I was bestowed years ago when I first got into this lifestyle, and hopefully you’ll understand better.

Leadership

It is said that a natural born leader embodies a set of characteristics which dictate how they act and react to their surroundings and circumstances. They are individuals which inspire others to follow their lead through practice, patience and confidence. What makes them different from other “Dominants” in Second Life is that they embody the leadership role realistically.

Effectively speaking, when I first got into the lifestyle, I was lucky enough to have been mentored by individuals who had their heads on straight – each giving me invaluable insight and advice not only about how to be a respectable Dominant but (not surprisingly) how to be a better leader in all things. They instilled in me the confidence and drive to strive to be somebody that others look up to as their milestone.

Others may look up to me, or use me as the litmus test for others to aspire to not because I am better than anyone else but because I strive to be better than I was yesterday. I’m not in competition with you or anyone else, but instead I am competing with myself. In the end, I am looking to lead by example.

Let’s go over some of the basic qualities inherent in leadership roles:

Focus

You aren’t easily distracted from your responsibilities and goals. You can set those goals, manage and maintain the course to achieve them.

Confidence

There is a fine line between confidence and arrogance. Being confident comes from a past understanding of your performance and ability to follow through, it is something which resonates with others as self-evident. A leader instills confidence and ‘followership’ by having a clear vision, showing empathy and being a strong coach.

Transparency

As a leader, the only way I know how to engender trust and buy-in from others is to be 100 percent authentically me — open, sometimes flawed, but always passionate about the tasks at hand. It has allowed me the freedom to be fully present and consistent. They know what they’re getting at all times. No surprises.

Integrity

The difference between needing to be right and doing what is right. If you focus on becoming authentic in all your interactions, that will rub off on others, and the rest takes care of itself.

Inspiration

Others gave me great inspiration and fantastic advice, and I was fueled by my beliefs and an internal drive and passion. That’s why I’m always willing to offer motivation — to friends or strangers. I know the power of inspiration, and if someone can stand on my shoulders to achieve greatness, I’m more than willing to help them up.

Innovation

Innovation is always seeking to better yourself and others. You are looking for better ways to accomplish things, how to better one self or another in the process.

Patience

Patience is really courage that’s meant to test your commitment to your cause. The path to great things is always tough, but the best leaders understand when to abandon the cause and when to stay the course. Having patience is fundamental to being a leader in that one must have the innate ability to see the forest for the trees (big picture) and understand both short and long term goals.

Stoicism

It’s inevitable: We’re going to find ourselves in some real shit situations, whether they’re costly mistakes, unexpected failures or unscrupulous enemies. Stoicism is, at its core, accepting and anticipating this in advance, so that you don’t freak out, react emotionally and aggravate things further. Train our minds, consider the worst-case scenarios and regulate our unhelpful instinctual responses — that’s how we make sure shit situations don’t turn into fatal resolutions.

Authenticity

It’s true that imitation is one of the greatest forms of flattery, but not when it comes to leadership — and every great leader in my life has led from a place of authenticity. Learn from others, read autobiographies of your favorite leaders, pick up skills along the way... but never lose your authentic voice, opinions and, ultimately, how you make decisions. Being authentic is akin to: Be honest in your dealings. With others and yourself.

Open-Mindedness

One of the biggest myths is that good leaders act with dogged determination to stick to their goals no matter what. It’s nonsense. The truth is, leaders need to keep an open mind while being flexible, and adjust if necessary. Your commitment should be to invest, develop and maintain great relationships.

Decisiveness

‘Make the call fast, make the call loud and don’t look back.’ In marginal situations, a decisively made wrong call will often lead to better long-term results and relationships than a wishy-washy decision that turns out to be right. The ability to make decisions clearly isn’t based on not knowing something, but instead comes from a place of expertise in a given field in which you can reliably make judgement calls on the fly. That being true, however, does not mean being close minded or refusing to defer decisions when you should instead be expanding your understanding further in order to make better decisions. In short: Know what you know, but most importantly, Know what you don’t know and make it a point to learn.

Personableness

We all provide something unique to this world, and we can all smell when someone isn’t being real. The more you focus on genuine connections with people, and look for ways to help them—rather than just focus on what they can do for you—the more likable and personable you become. This isn’t required to be a great leader, but it is to be a respected leader, which can make all the difference.

Empowerment

You seek to elevate others and delegate tasks which can and will allow them to achieve the best that they can be, applying their unique strengths to the given situation rather than their weaknesses. You seek to work on their weaknesses in private while allowing their strengths to shine in public.

Positivity

In order to achieve greatness, you must create a culture of optimism. There will be many ups and downs, but the prevalence of positivity will keep things going. But be warned: This requires fearlessness. You have to truly believe in making the impossible possible.

Generosity

My main goal has always been to offer the best of myself. We all grow—as a collective whole—when I’m able to build up others and help them grow as individuals.

Persistence

All great things take time, and you must persist no matter what. That’s what it takes to be a leader: willingness to go beyond where others will stop.

Insightfulness

It takes insight every day to be able to separate that which is really important from all the incoming fire. It’s like wisdom—it can be improved with time, if you’re paying attention, but it has to exist in your character. It’s inherent. When your insight is right, you look like a genius. And when your insight is wrong, you look like an idiot.

Communication

If people aren’t aware of your expectations, and they fall short, it’s really your fault for not expressing it to them. In a leadership role, whether it is in business or BDSM, my mantra has always been: I am only as good as you keep me informed, and you are only as good as I keep you informed. Otherwise, we make reasonable decisions based on bad information which in turn creates bad decisions and actions.

Accountability

It’s a lot easier to assign blame than to hold yourself accountable. But if you want to know how to do it right, take note: When you screw up, take responsibility and then go above and beyond to make it right. Own your own actions and strive to elevate yourself above the pitfalls of the blame game. This is accountability. It’s not only taking responsibility; it’s taking the next step to make it right.

Restlessness

It takes real leadership to find the strengths within each person and then be willing to look outside to plug the gaps. The “outside looking in” approach is a willingness to offer that constructive criticism and offer solutions to help inspire and guide others to a happier, healthier and more fulfilling life. This mentality also requires that we be honest with ourselves first and foremost, lest we use self-delusion to stunt our personal growth and potential.

BDSM versus Abuse

Now that’s we’ve taken a look at some of the qualities inherent in a leader, it should become obvious now that many people you interact with (including those pretend Dominants) actually exhibit the opposite of those qualities. This is why they are often referred to as “Toxic” Doms. More importantly, however, they are toxic people in general.

In the D/s and BDSM lifestyle, these are people who are “fake” Dominant or (more aptly) Domineering archetypes.

Selfish vs Selfless
Opaque vs Transparent (Dishonest vs Honest)
Disrespectful vs Respectful
Govern through fear instead of Respect
Arrogant vs Confident

I could go on for an entire article just on this, but to be perfectly clear, we’re talking about somebody who is truly in a leadership role versus a dictator.

The latter will more often than not be self destructive and toxic to others. Manipulative, isolating, antagonistic, threatening, controlling and so on.

Of course, the obvious comes up when making these lists out:

Isn’t the point of being in a BDSM or D/s dynamic as a Dominant to be controlling?

Well, not entirely. Context here is king (or queen).

What a Dominant in the lifestyle really does is follow the consensual lead of the submissive. As a Dominant, you are fulfilling a role of responsibility to a submissive to help them attain certain things out of the dynamic – whether it is self-fulfillment, betterment or just to get their ass whacked while tied up.

Ultimately, and I believe this is sorely overlooked, a Dominant is listening to their submissive’s wants and needs in that negotiation, and then accepting the responsibility of helping that submissive achieve those needs. It just so happens that such wants and needs have a positive effect for the Dominant in reciprocal fashion.

A Domineering individual achieves those ends through physical and emotional manipulation, fear based repercussion, isolation, antagonistic and intimidating behaviors. In short, they are abusive individuals. Either physically or mentally (maybe both).

Now, the end-all to this is a simple declaration:

The difference between BDSM and Abuse is Consent.

If you didn’t agree to it, it’s abusive.

The reason I say this is because there are plenty of circumstances in D/s and BDSM where those Domineering behaviors are explicitly sought out and consented to by submissives of sound mind and body. Therefore, what looks like abuse from the outside looking in could simply be an agreed upon dynamic to the untrained eye. It all stems on that one lynchpin of consent.

In the grand scheme of things, the bigger issue among the lifestyle in Second Life (and sometimes real life) is that the context of consent isn’t there, and then we have submissives who are finding themselves in abuse situations thinking it is healthy BDSM… not that something is wrong with their partner but instead that something is wrong with them and their inability to “serve”.

The goal of a “true” Dominant versus a Domineer is to elevate a submissive and help them achieve their goals. A Domineer will intentionally try to break a submissive mentally and physically to deter and prohibit their happiness and fulfillment.

Key Elements of BDSM

Communication
Consent
Trust
Respect

Key Elements of Abuse

Physical/Emotional Damage
Fear of Partner*
No Communication or Consent
No Trust or Respect

* Keep in mind the distinction between fearing your partner and fearing pain. For example, you may flinch when being spanked despite having asked to be spanked, and you may enjoy being spanked. However, you trust your partner to respect your boundaries and do not fear them – rather the opposite: You trust them enough to take the responsibility you have given and not break that trust.

Dominant as Life Coach

A lot of what people believe concerning BDSM as a lifestyle revolves predominantly around kinky sex as the generalization. Unfortunately, this is a very misguided belief and more often than not fails to characterize what BDSM and D/s is all about.

When I first got into this lifestyle, my mentors also explained to me a simple analogy as the baseline of being a Dominant:

In effect, you are a life coach. Your responsibility to a submissive is to help identify needs, wants and together reach those goals. You lead through guidance and the submissive will follow through. A submissive should naturally wish to please and follow through, because they respect your judgement – and not because they fear you. They have taken the role and handed you the reigns because they believe you have what it takes to guide them on that journey.

With this premise, both should be able to find genuine happiness with themselves and each other.

Tony Robbins is an excellent Leader

From a baseline perspective, BDSM may encompass no sex at all and be entirely non-sexual in service and direction. Take the “service” submissive for example:

If you’re simply into the lifestyle as service only, there isn’t always a sexual aspect to this. You could merely find fulfillment as a glorified personal assistant. Maybe a homemaker archetype? These are types of submission just the same and often cited in religious circles (Christianity also).

At the core of it all is something I believe many forget or simply ignore, which is the need for discipline.

When we speak of discipline (for the sake of this writing), we are speaking of The controlled behavior aspect and not the act of disciplining another person for correction. In this context, think of the etiquette and presentation of an individual.

There are many ways to instill discipline in another person, through corporal actions or more intellectual means. Personally, I avoid corporal punishment tactics because I am more of a life coach mentality as a Dominant. The punishment or correction (repercussion) is aligned in such a manner whereby it becomes self-evident and does not require reinforcement.

This might vary from dynamic to dynamic depending on what was agreed upon and personal styles, so keep that in mind.

That being said, a service submissive may look no different than a vanilla relationship, and more to the point a BDSM relationship may look quite similar to a well balanced vanilla relationship outside of the bedroom/dungeon.

After all, BDSM isn’t always about sex. So you can kindly ignore the glorified porn videos capitalizing on BDSM… those situations are about as common as normal porn video plotlines. It is (after all) about playing out a fantasy or ideal.

The big picture is that two (or more) consenting adults have found a dynamic which makes them happy together.

But what is happiness?

Well, in the words of the famous Anthony Robbins:

If you’re not growing, you’re dying.

When we are making progress and improving, we’re happy.

When we aren’t, we tend to be miserable.

Interestingly enough, we can then say that (in spite of the kinks and taboos), BDSM and D/s are the practice of adults in a relationship dynamic (sexual or non-sexual) which is meant to bring happiness and fulfillment to the parties involved.

Of course, that is where we can say – and how you go about getting there is varied and there is no right or wrong way.

So long as we understand the happy, healthy, safe and sane methods to reach those goals – what you will find is that in the bigger picture, BDSM and D/s are far more practical and disciplined than you might have thought.

In the bigger picture, we are exploring amazing things about each other with dynamics and at an elevated level of trust and honesty that becomes required in order to partake in this lifestyle without causing lasting emotional and physical damage to another human being.

Overall, what BDSM is about is realizing a better self with the help of another.

You can take out the kinks and leave out the sex… and you’d still have a lot of parallels with BDSM mentality. Even if you know that those four letters stand for… now (hopefully) you know what a monumental amount of good it can be applied to.

And of course, there’s some kinky sex involved depending on who you’re with.

Epilogue

For the past few years, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to lead discussions regularly in this lifestyle at a myriad of locations in Second Life. As of the new year, I had made the conscious decision to take a step back from those circles and not lead discussions for awhile. The biggest reason to this decision revolved mostly around the alarming drama and abusive situations I’ve noticed in various groups in-world.

There is a lot of misinformation and (unfortunately) a lot of predatory individuals leaving a trail of abused people in their wake. I may in the future decide to return to that discussion circuit but for now I am enjoying a semi-retirement from all of that with my girl.

Quick Fix

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Sun, 29 Jan 2017 07:23:00 +0000

Fix That Annoying Win10 Taskbar over YouTube Videos in Full Screen

Affects: Windows (7,8,10)

Includes: Chrome Browser, YouTube

Read Time: ~ 5 minutes

Let’s set the stage:

You’re watching YouTube and decide to set it into full screen mode. So you click that little button and (as expected) the video fills your screen. Except one minor detail:

The Windows 10 taskbar is still visible on top of the video.

It’s safe to say that this little bug can drive the most patient person insane. Do you enable some magical option in chrome://plugins? Is there some setting in Chrome that you missed? Do you uninstall Flash Player?

Well, there are some short answers for most of this which I’ll cover today.

Unpin Chrome

The first culprit could simply be a glitch with pinning Chrome to the taskbar. Some suggestions I’ve seen involved removing it from the taskbar and re-pinning it again. I’ve had marginal success with this at best.

Flash Fire

In chrome://plugins you can also check to see if multiple versions of Adobe Flash are enabled. Just hit the Details button on the top right to see. If they are, just disable the ones that aren’t the Pepper player native to Chrome.

Restart Explorer

The solution that seems to have worked for me is simply to restart the Windows Explorer process in Task Manager. Seems a little scary for those who never have done this before, but rest assured it’s perfectly safe.

Step One

Right-Click on your Taskbar
Select Task Manager

Step Two

Locate Windows Explorer in the Task Manager List
Select it and Click Restart below

What This Does

Essentially you’ve rebooted the computer without rebooting it.

Sometimes the Windows Explorer process gets a little finicky or glitched up depending on what is going on and over what period of time you are running the computer. When things go awry with the taskbar, sometimes you just need a quick restart of the process itself to sort it out.

This can also happen due to other factors -

Windows Update
Registry Errors

There is also the possibility that when you boot up the computer, the loading process itself might have messed something up with the shear volume of items vying for attention on Windows Start.

In any event, this will give it a fresh start and (hopefully) resume your ability to run YouTube videos in full screen again while using Chrome.

Have any additional tips or suggestions?

Feel free to drop them in the comments for others.

Speed Demon

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 09:03:00 +0000

Making Everything Faster!

Operating System: Windows 7, 8 & 10

Topics Discussed: Chrome Browser & Computer Speed Tweaks

It’s a well known fact that Google Chrome tends to be a memory hog at times, and we are often quick to believe that this is always the reason our beloved web browser starts coming to a crawl. However, this isn’t always the case, because the reason it uses so many processes and takes up memory like it does is because it is running tabs in separate processes (for stability).

In this manner, should a website in one of your tabs go awry, it doesn’t take down the entire browser with it. Of course, that isn’t to say Google Chrome is innocent when it comes to slowing to a crawl or just taking it’s sweet time getting anything done. Over time and extended usage, Google Chrome can and often will begin slowing down to that ingratiating snails pace.

In fact, all web browsers will begin to move at the speed of smell over time if we aren’t maintaining them.

So what’s going on?

Well, the simple answer is that the browser has collected a ton of unoptimized junk in the cache in conjunction with a number of other possible culprits which may be contributing to the lesser experience (which we’ll be addressing).

If you’re running around the internet using a monster gaming rig worthy of the PC Master Race, then none of this will likely apply to you. But for the rest of you dirty peasants of computing, I’m certain you’ll find some of the tricks and tweaks below helpful.

For this post, I won’t be addressing an oversimplified “Top Ten” sort of list, but instead we’ll be covering a Comprehensive Tune-Up. When all is said and done, not only should Google Chrome be hauling ass, but (mostly) your computer will be too by comparison.

That Magic Box of Wonders

So let’s start by talking about the sad shape your computer is in. You know… that magical box of wonders that delivers cat pictures to your Facebook?

I know I said this was a post about speeding up your Google Chrome browser, but here me out. After all, Google Chrome is just a program running on your computer, and you’d be surprised to find out that if your computer isn’t running its best, then the programs you are running will also suffer as a result.

GASP! SHOCK!

For many of you reading this, you may not have touched a Disk Defrag in years, or even run some basic computer cleaning tools to clear out all that garbage. In the worst case scenario, you may even have a ton of toolbars and PUP running in the background hogging things.

A PUP (potentially unwanted program) is a program that may be unwanted, despite the possibility that users consented to download it. PUPs include spyware, adware, and dialers, and are often downloaded in conjunction with a program that the user wants.

In order to get to the bottom of this problem, it helps to understand your computer in terms of a symbiotic ecosystem where everything relies on everything else. So if seemingly unrelated parts are suffering, it’s going to drag down the experience for everything else. Therefore, before we get into Chrome specifics, let’s take some time to eliminate outside influences which may be swiftly kicking your browser in the teeth while it’s trying to do its job.

As a quick disclaimer, nothing in this article has been sponsored by the recommended companies I’ll be mentioning, and I’ll just be making recommendations based on things that have worked for me, personally. These are all things I’ve done before for clients when working on their computers in a professional manner over the years and they have been proven to work in those cases reliably. So if you’ve ever wondered what those tech folks were doing behind closed doors to clean up and fix your computer when it’s running slow, now you know.

Clean-up in Aisle 7

As with anything, there isn’t a single “magic bullet” approach to getting something done with this. Many other websites will give you ten tweaks for Chrome itself like experimental options, flags, and add-ons but they aren’t addressing the entire ecosystem at play. Ultimately, this isn’t just about making Google Chrome faster, but maybe your entire computer as well.

Of course, this comes without saying that there is only so much one can do in order to make a computer move faster if you have an older system. At some point, we all have to concede that the problem is just that the computer is very outdated and needs an upgrade. (I’m looking at you Windows XP users)

Barring that, however… these are some preliminary things you can do in the meantime to set the stage for speeding up Google Chrome (and your entire computer in the process).

CCleaner

To begin, let’s grab a copy of CCleaner off of the Piriform website.

CCleaner does a pretty good job of clearing out all that junk piling up in the background and taking up space, and it comes with a built in Registry checker. Between those two options, adding the Tools option for Startup tweaks round this out as a solid first step, and you’re going to want to do this step first before anything else (trust me).

You’ll want to install CCleaner Free, unless you feel the need to go ahead and purchase the Pro version.

Step One: Go to Cleaner on the left side, then click Analyze at the bottom.

Step Two: When the cleaner is finished analyzing, just click Run Cleaner.

Next, click on Registry to the left.

Step One: Click Scan For Issues at the bottom.

Step Two: If anything comes up (and often you’ll get a large list), just click Fix Selected Issues…

It’s at this point, CCleaner is going to ask if you want to back up your registry “just in case”. You can if you want to, but in all honesty I’ve used programs like this for many years and haven’t had a problem occur after allowing it to fix the registry.

You may want to rinse and repeat the Registry portion fix a few times to catch the straggling registry errors and correct them. When the list comes up clean for scanning for issues, you’re good to go.

Quick Explanation: For those who aren’t aware, the Registry is where your computer is keeping settings and other miscellaneous information about programs like what program opens what files, and so on. Problem is, this can get bloated and out of control as you uninstall programs because it leaves a bunch of invalid entries. The reason this is a problem is that the computer has to load the Registry when it starts the computer – so obviously, the larger that list is, the longer it’ll take to start the computer. Though on more modern systems this could be negligible. As a result, it is really just a good practice to occasionally go through and clean that up with a program like CCleaner on a regular basis – maybe once every couple weeks should be fine.

Auslogics Disk Defrag

If you’re like most people who use a computer, regularly defragmenting your computer hasn’t occurred to you. If anything, Defrag is that program that came with your computer (Microsoft), assuming you knew where to find it.

While the built-in defrag program works fine, sometimes you’re going to have to up your game and get a program with a little more oompf to it. For this, I suggest Auslogics Disk Defrag. It has a plethora of options, including algorithms for SSD drives and more. The Pro version (that you see above) has a host of other tools at your disposal as well (like health of your hard drive and such).

While the version shown here is the Professional version, the Free version should work just fine for your needs at this time. By all means, if you want the paid versions of these programs, support the developers and buy them.

Auslogics Disk Defrag is pretty straightforward. You’ll want to select the hard disks you want to defragment (usually just your main drive) and hit Analyze. After it’s finished with that, go ahead and press Defrag.

Now, you’ll notice there is a drop down menu option for Defrag, and these are more advanced methods for doing the job. Each option is tailored to specific needs, and there is even one there for a more thorough sort of defragmentation.

Choose whatever suits your needs best for this, and if you’re unsure, just stick with the default settings and let it do its thing.

Spybot Search & Destroy

Remember when I mentioned earlier PuP, spyware and malware? Well, after we’ve finished CCleaner and Auslogics Disk Defrag, now it’s time to double check to see if there is any of that on your computer. Spybot S&D (Search and Destroy) is a program that is built just for this purpose.

After you install the program, it should walk you though the basic steps from updating the database, running your first complete scan, and then immunization.

There’s a lot to cover with this one, so go ahead and take some time to familiarize yourself with the program a bit and remember to click that update periodically to get the latest definitions from the server (it doesn’t auto-update in the free version).

There are other options out there (Maybe Bazooka or MalwareBytes, etc) but this is the one I’ve been using for years and it works wonderfully.

The Nuclear Option

There is a program I’ve left off the main list because it is more of an advanced nuclear option when it comes to cleaning up your computer. Essentially this program removes the unwanted programs, toolbars, advertising popups, and all that crap that seems to be plaguing so many computers. If your browsers have also been hijacked, this will usually solve the problem.

Essentially, if you already know that things have been getting out of control (Toolbars, hijackers, adware, etc) then this is what you use to kill it with fire.

Malwarebytes JRT

I’d love to show you some pretty graphics when it comes to JRT, but this is really all there is. JRT, or Junkware Removal Tool, runs in the Windows Shell (or DOS as you old timers remember). It is absolutely no-frills and has one purpose in mind:

Kill all junkware, PuPs, toolbars and whatever else sneaky and unscrupulous folks might have snuck into your system. This is pretty much the nuclear option when you want to make sure none of those nasties are left over.

This program works extremely well, but a word of caution is in order: It might work a little too well for your liking. For instance, killing off bloatware that came with the computer that vendors love pre-installing, etc.

So as the program itself says – use it at your own risk, and it is provided “As-Is” without warranty.

Antivirus Ahoy!

Ok, so let’s assume you have an anti-virus already installed. Usually I can guess which one for the average end-user (sit down, power users… I already know).

So let’s take a guess and say maybe MacAfee or Norton?

shudders

If it works for you (and you’ve paid for them), then go ahead and keep them.

There are a lot of better options out there (in my own opinion). One thing I have noticed over the years though when dealing with client computers is that MacAfee and Norton (and also Panda) seem to cause way more problems than they are worth.

Here’s a quick recommendation that I would suggest if you were going to get rid of MacAfee, Norton, etc.

Avast!

I’m going to be honest: I used to use AVG for years as my antivirus program, but in the past few years it has started getting absolutely ridiculous with the advertising and popups. So much so that I’ve come to the conclusion that AVG is in and of itself malware.

So what did I change my antivirus over to? Well, after evaluating the options I finally decided on Avast. Just reading through the list of features was impressive and as I’ve been running this antivirus for awhile now I’ve noticed that it is insanely fast.

They’ve offloaded a lot of work onto cloud systems or something, so when you go to run your initial scan (or any virus scan), you might expect a couple of minutes for the entire thing to go through and complete.

When I first ran the scan, I was expecting a good half hour or hour before it was done, so I went to make a cup of coffee and came back to find it had finished.

Adding a cherry to the top of this, Avast doesn’t seem to really eat a lot of resources or footprint on my system.

So if you’re running AVG, MacAfee, Norton, etc… you could very well be dragged down by their bloatware running in the background.

Just some food for thought.

There are other antivirus solutions too (just to mention).

Things like Kapersky and whatnot. As I said before, I’m just going by what I’ve done personally to speed things up and make it all a well oiled machine. Your mileage may (of course) vary.

Intermission

Like you didn’t see this coming…

Holy smokes! We’ve been quite busy in this post today, haven’t we?

We’ve addressed the majority of the computer itself and done what we’ve could to clean up and sort it out. There’s plenty more that could be done, but then we’d be delving into the voodoo level of things that most consumers wouldn’t feel comfortable messing around with.

So let’s get right to it with a list of things you can do right now to speed up Chrome Browser (if it hasn’t sped up already).

And Now – The Main Attraction!

Of course, when we talk about speeding up our Chrome Browser, we’re going to have to get into some options that aren’t run of the mill. This means that going forward, we’ll be taking a look at experimental options, flags, and other little tweaks that can improve your browser experience above and beyond the normal default settings.

Enabling Experimental Features

If you didn’t already know, the Chrome browser has a special page of experimental features. These features are still in development and it will be applied soon in the future as a default setting (maybe), but gosh darn it why should we wait for the cutting edge?

It’s time to get our tinker on and strap the Flux Capacitor to it for good measure!

Let’s head over to the chrome://flags options in another tab and get to work enabling those advanced features. While on that page, enable the following options:

Faster Image Loading

Press Ctrl+F and find “num-raster-threads“, you will see “Number of raster threads” feature. You need to change the value of it to 4 from default if it already hasn’t been changed.

In short, what this will do is give Chrome 4 threads to render images with instead of something smaller, thus speeding things up considerably if your browser was set to default.

Faster Closing Windows & Tabs

Press Ctrl+F and search for “enable-fast-unload“. Click on Enable, this will make closing of tabs faster.

Essentially, you can think of enabling this as the “Kill it with Fire!” option. When you close a tab or the window, it’ll just go ahead and kill it without bothering to be courteous about waiting for the scripts or whatever is loading to give it the OK.

GPU Acceleration

Press Ctrl+F and search for “ignore-gpu-blacklist“. Click on Enable link, this function will ignore those GPUs which has less performance & video RAM and it lets chrome to use the available VRAM.

An obvious word of caution here: Everyone is running different hardware, so your mileage may vary. This might even cause your computer to crash in some isolated cases. That being said, you should be pretty safe in enabling this as it definitely does give you a speed boost in Chrome.

Smooth Scrolling

Press Ctrl+F and search for “smooth-scrolling“. Click on Enable, this will do what it says.

Smooth scrolling is a hit or miss option. Some people absolutely love it, while others think it was an option that spawned from Satan’s ass-crack. The theory here being that while it doesn’t necessarily speed up Chrome, it does give you a perceptual fluidity of interaction which can go a long way toward making the bigger experience feel like it’s performing better.

Regular Settings & Options

Ok, now that we’re done with the Mad Scientist stuff in chrome://flags let’s hit Save to make sure the settings stick before moving on. Of course, it will kindly let you know that restarting Chrome needs to happen before any of it kicks in (unless Chrome restarts for you automatically).

In any event, we’re now down to “Regular Stuff” that we can do in the normal settings… so let’s take a look and make sure these things are done:

Enable Prefetch Resources

Go to Setting> Advance Settings> Privacy.

This option is pre enabled in latest Google Chrome browser. This feature does just what it says “Prefetch resources to load pages more quickly”. Resources means “Javascript” or any other types of script that the page might have will be stored in you PC locally and retrieve it when needed.

Disabling Unneeded Plugins

Obvious answer is obvious, right?

There is no doubt that the Google Chrome’s plugin are quite helpful but they often make the Google Chrome experience slow and affects the performance. That doesn’t mean you should go in there and burn the whole place to the ground. Instead, this is a job for a scalpel and not a blunt instrument. Just figure out what’s in there that you really don’t use and cull the list if you can.

Go to Settings – Extensions – Dustbin button after every extension that you want to delete from your browser.

Clearing Browser Data Regularly

Basically, the saved cache and the other kinds of saved data like the login details, browser history, saved forms, etc. dumps a heavy weightage on your browser. So, it is kind of better if you clear them which will make Google Chrome faster.

Go to Settings and scroll down a bit.
If you see Advanced options, enable it to see the rest
Under Privacy you’ll find the magic button

You’ll see a window like this pop up asking what you’d like to clear out.

Just remember, if you get rid of the cookies too, then you’ll probably be clearing out any saved logins for websites that you may have had. But on the flip side, there’s a lot of ad trackers in there spying on you just the same.

That being said, this will definitely give your Chrome browser a fresh start and smooth sailing going forward.

Allowing Chrome to Run In The Background

This one is optional and depends on your personal preferences for how you would like to manage your computer and what’s running. That being said, if you choose to allow Chrome to run in the background, it’ll be pre-loaded in memory when you go to “run” the browser and therefore show up faster versus a “cold start”.

Click on the Chrome menu (or press Alt+E)
Select Settings.
Click on the link titled 'Show advanced settings'
Under the section headed 'System' tick/untick the box next to “Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed” depending on your preference

Pretty much, the theory here is that since Chrome processes like plugins essentially use Chrome as their operating environment, then Chrome will be waiting in standby when you go to run the browser itself with everything pre-loaded.

Adding the Flux Capacitor

After a section that advocated removing plugins from Chrome, this final section will seem a bit hypocritical – but bare with me. The following plugins are ones that I use and they are immensely helpful in the goal of making Chrome faster and better overall.

Data Saver

If you are vaguely familiar with Opera as a browser, then you know that they have an option built into the browser that compresses websites server side to make loading on your side faster. This is a god-send for people on mobile who may have a limited data cap. Of course, this same approach is a god-send for people who want a faster browsing experience overall.

But ok, we’re using Google Chrome… what now?

Well, Google has something similar but it’s not built into the web browser by default. It’s a plugin called Data Saver, and it essentially does the same thing as what the Opera browser does.

Huzzah!

AdBlock Plus

Obviously, if you aren’t using an AdBlocker by now you’re wasting a ridiculous amount of bandwidth and time using Chrome. While some advertising is a good thing (and you can make whitelist exceptions), the majority of websites lately just bombard you with advertising from every conceivable angle.

Advertisements that aren’t loading are images, videos, etc that aren’t eating up your bandwidth and slowing down the websites you’re trying to visit. Ergo, AdBlock Plus makes Chrome work faster.

It’s in your best interest to install AdBlock Plus for a faster, safer, and less annoying internet experience.

Mercury Reader

What is Mercury Reader, you might ask? Well, it allows you cut out all of the clutter on a website and present the content you want to read without all of the distractions. Originally the Readability extension, Mercury Reader is the evolution of that premise.

If you’re really looking to speed things up while on a website trying to read the content, then this extension can be a life saver. Your eyes will thank you later.

Last Pass

If you remember earlier about clearing your browsing history and the possibility of losing your passwords and logins? Well, it’s a good idea to clear out those cookies just the same because they contain a ton of personal trackers that allow companies to spy on your online habits.

Of course, you don’t want to lose your passwords in the process, which is where a plugin like LastPass comes in. LastPass is an award-winning password manager, saves your passwords and gives you secure access from every computer and mobile device. Simple as that.

So there we have it!

By the time you’ve gotten through this entire post today, not only should your computer be running a bit (or a lot) quicker, but so should your Chrome Browser.

I you have any other suggestions, tips or tricks, feel free to leave them in the comments.

The Poseidon Aquarium

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 02:27:00 +0000

Anything else is just a fish-tank in #SecondLife

Price: 400 L$

Permissions: Copy | No Mod | No Trans

Available Here:

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Poseidon-Aquarium/10425741

Full Featured Aquarium at a Reasonable Price

I’d like to formally introduce you to one of the most sophisticated aquariums in Second Life. It looks like any ordinary fish-tank, but that’s the point. The Poseidon Aquarium is based off of a real life aquarium tank, right down to the most trivial of details.

This aquarium is partially made in mesh, with the back filter being entirely custom made with materials and sound (you know, that familiar sound an aquarium makes?)

The surface water is animated with a subtle ripple, while even the gravel was lovingly custom made in mesh and textured with the highest quality. But we didn’t stop there…

Click the hood of the unit and you’ll be presented with a full menu of options, from pre-loaded backgrounds to a large selection of built-in gravel colors.

And yet, we weren’t finished.

Is the background not to your liking? We’ve even included the ability to use your own by selecting [Custom] from the menu, whereby you can insert the UUID of whatever background you want to have for your aquarium.

With a high attention to details, we’ve even made the light a working option with that all familiar “click” when you hit the switch. But we didn’t simply make a light that turns on and off (because that would be too easy). No, we went one further and made sure that the light in the Poseidon Aquarium actually fades the tank to dark and light when activated.

Over the gravel, you may also notice built in animation for light rippling around (because that’s how light works with water) and this should give you an idea about just how focused we were in creating this aquarium.

And yet, there’s still more.

Fancy feeding those fish in your new fish tank? We’ve included that option built into the menu as an effect. Clicking the button will randomly drop fish food into the tank while you watch the flakes randomly drift into the water.

Of course, we didn’t stop there. No, when we set out to build this aquarium, our goal was simply to create something that addressed all the issues we thought all of the competition were lacking at the time.

Sure, you can spend over 1,400 L$ on a pre-made aquarium but that seems a little high priced for something you really can’t customize. Likewise, you can also spend 50L$ on other fish-tanks as well, but they aren’t as feature packed as the Poseidon Aquarium. Isn’t the fun of owning an aquarium making it your own by customizing it? From choosing the fish, to how you decorate your aquarium, we found all the other options lacking.

Even when it came down to the stand that the aquarium sits on, we custom designed it to be a perfect compliment to your Poseidon Aquarium with built in texture changer for four wood types (it’s not a flat texture like most aquariums in SL).

With an easy to use interface built into the side of the stand, you can easily identify what color you’re choosing in a visual manner. With a single click, it’ll change over.

Simple as that.

And yet, we still continued to add attention to detail. For instance, the front of the tank itself has a temperature strip attached for authenticity.

The volume of the ambient sound (filter and water) can also be changed from the main menu, and even muted if you so desire.

9 Built-In Backgrounds + Custom Option
12 Built-in Gravel Types
Working Light & Ambient Sound
Partial Mesh
Volume Control
Fish Food Animation
Texture Change Stand
Endless combinations!

About the only thing the Poseidon Aquarium doesn’t come with are the fish and decorations. It is at this point you’re probably scratching your head and asking “Why would the aquarium that has everything not have fish and decorations?”

Well the answer is simple.

We really did think about this while it was being made, and we asked ourselves what one of the best things about owning an aquarium was? The answer is that you own an aquarium, but every aquarium is different… which is to say, aquarium owners are able to decorate it any way they want, put whatever fish they want into the tank and really make it theirs.

Maybe you want to own a Super Mario Brothers themed aquarium?

It’s completely doable with the Poseidon Aquarium set because we made it customizable and left the fish and decorations to you. We want to give our customers the freedom of expression while providing the most advanced aquarium that we can in the process.

Set the gravel color, use a Custom background, and make up some SMB props for your tank (which should take maybe twenty minutes if you’re in a rush). Add a few fish to your tank and viola!

Want to go into business making aquarium props for the Poseidon Aquarium set? Go right ahead! We’ll probably be releasing some sets of our own over time, but we’re more than happy if you did as well.

How about a 3D background in Mesh?

Sure, why not… right?

They sky is the limit with the Poseidon Aquarium, and we look forward to seeing how you have made it your own.

What Kind of Fish Do You Own?

You’re probably wondering about this, and you have every right to. After all, most aquariums on marketplace that come with “fish” are really just a fish texture on a prim spinning in a circle or keyframe animated (or even a particle emitter). Of the sculpted and mesh fish out there, most will tell you that they swim in Linden Water. So what are you to do?

Believe it or not, we’re big fans of the *SnoWStylZ* brand of fish for the Poseidon Aquarium. They are fully sculpted, low impact, and scripted to move around like… well… fish. Chrom Snook has done a wonderful job with these (and the many other types of) fish offered via the SnoWStylZ store on Marketplace.

For a mere 80 L$, you can fill your tank with excellent looking fish.

SnoWStylZ Store:

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Colisa-lalia-Dwarf-Gourami-Sculpted-Free-Roaming-Fish-SnoWStylZ/4907417

Where Do I Find Those Books?

Another excellent question. All of the books (and more) shown in the product images on the shelf are available from our store:

The Universal Book Prop

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/22206

Each comes with a held version and a shelf prop included, so you can use it on the go and have a copy sitting on your shelves at home.

As of this writing, we have 22 classic books available for purchase (50L$) and they are all functional props – meaning that clicking on them will allow you to rad the book online, download an epub version, and even an audiobook version if it is available.

This fully functional and highly customizable aquarium set is used in my own home in Yarnia, which is where the product pictures are taken.

Additional Details

Land Impact

Aquarium: 12
Stand: 6
Fish Food: 1

* The Poseidon Aquarium is (unfortunately) not compatible with the *SnoWStylZ* Fish feeding system, as we actually have no idea how it is implemented to talk to the fish from the creator. This is easily remedied (however) by setting your SnoWStylZ fish to “Holiday” mode so you don’t have to feed them. Maybe in the future (if Chrom Snook would allow) we can make our Aquarium Feeding effect actually feed their fish properly. This is on our list of things to look into proper in the first quarter of 2017.

Revenge of the Prosumer

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:05:00 +0000

Anything you can do, we can do better…

Ah, where to begin on this one?

It would seem that companies such as Nintendo haven’t learned how to deal with the prosumer culture in the post-millennium age. Of course there is the obligatory DMCA for things like Another Metroid 2 Remake (AM2R) which was/is a fan made recreation of Metroid 2 with luscious graphics (updated to a 16 bit feel), but more importantly (for this post) I’d like to touch on Nintendo’s latest prosumer blunder:

The NES Classic Edition.

A little back-story is in order here.

So essentially, Nintendo had this bright idea to make a mini version of their classic NES system pre-loaded with 20 NES games. This seemed like a great idea for nostalgia collectors the world over, except there are a few problems if you’re keen to notice.

It’s essentially a customized emulator on hardware
It only offers 30 games to play
Nintendo completely screwed up the supply chain

What ended up happening is that Nintendo simply didn’t make the supply of these NES Classic systems high enough for the demand, and in fact had restricted the supply so much that they ended up sold out before they even went on sale to the public. Whether this is because of scalpers buying the entire supply of a store, or the store employees themselves buying them up before they went on sale, what we can say is that as a result of this extremely limited supply, the NES Classic is now showing up on eBay being resold for as much as a few hundred dollars per unit.

If we haven’t learned anything from this situation (or prior situations), then as a company you’ll just sit there with a smug smile thinking you control the entire supply and demand process, and that the peasants will take whatever you give them.

Which, we should all know is patently untrue these days.

The consumer actually has more choices than whatever Nintendo is willing to offer when it comes to this, and it is Nintendo themselves who created the situation by which the consumers would opt for those alternatives instead of paying Nintendo for a coveted NES Classic, or paying an arm and a leg on eBay for one on auction.

This is, after all, the age of the prosumer (as I’ve outlined before); Which is to say that when a company who owns intellectual property doesn’t offer what the consumers want to buy, those consumers will now go ahead and make something better themselves and ignore the company.

Case in point – Another Metroid 2 Remake and Pokemon Uranium.

A company such as Nintendo, in their archaic thinking, simply sends their lawyers out with a DMCA storm and threats of lawsuits to take down the content and kill the projects. Of course, these fan-made games comply and take down the direct links to the files being hosted. The lawyers at Nintendo pat themselves on the back and move on, thinking they’ve killed the Hydra.

Of course, we should all know better than that.

This is the Internet. So long as somebody, somewhere, has a copy of the installation and people want access to it, then that access will be made available all across the world in hundreds (or even thousands and millions) of locations and methods.

In effect, the people of the world will simply mirror the files all around the world, or they will put them up on Bittorrent sites for peer-to-peer sharing.

Companies like Nintendo are the sort that believe cutting off a single head of a Hydra is enough to have killed it, when in fact the Hydra simply grew thousands of heads and continued on whether they liked it or not.

This is historically known as “The Streisand Effect”, named after an incident where a photographer took pictures of Barbara Streisand’s house and put them online. Barbara Streisand promptly tried to file a cease and desist (DMCA) to get those pictures removed from the Internet, which the photographer complied with but then the entire Internet made the pictures available in thousands and millions of locations around the world as mirrors.

Barbara Streisand’s Estate in Malibu, California

The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet. It is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware something is being kept from them, their motivation to access and spread the information is increased.

It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose 2003 attempt to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California, inadvertently drew further public attention to it. Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cease-and-desist letters to suppress numbers, files, and websites. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity and media extensions such as videos and spoof songs, often being widely mirrored across the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.

You would think that nearly 15 years later, companies would already know this and try to avoid the consequences. But alas, they continue making the same, tired, mistakes.

For example:

Another Metroid 2 Remake

Pokemon Uranium

Obvious Disclaimer is Obvious: Blah blah, not condoning piracy. Downloading these are at your own risk. Nintendo reserves the right to kick in your door and force feed you 30 year old Nintendo Cereal while holding your eyes open like in A Clockwork Orange to make you watch the Super Mario Bros Super Show on endless repeat… later beating every coin from the Mushroom Kingdom out of your mooching ass. Links listed here purely for educational purposes…

Once again, the Prosumer wins, and Nintendo spends a stupid amount of time and money trying to shut down something while only throwing fuel on the fire.

Let’s make something clear:

In the age of the prosumer, it is completely pointless to try and stop the proliferation of something. There is supply and demand – and if the companies which own these intellectual properties are not meeting that demand, then the consumers who want such things will meet the demand themselves. The prosumer isn’t going to bother asking Nintendo for permission to do something, either (let alone any other company). They are just going to do it with or without you.

I know, it sucks ass right? If you’re a company with IP, you’re likely losing sleep over all of this and slamming your fist on the table in board meetings trying to figure out how to stop this proliferation of unauthorized media.

The sooner you come to grips with the realization that you cannot control the entirety of your IP, but with some common sense, you can help guide the direction of it and reward good behavior, the easier this is going to go in the long run.

If you make any attempt to stop the proliferation of your Intellectual Property in a hyper-connected world, you will more than likely fail miserably. Of course, you also have to come to grips with the reality that “good behavior” is entirely redefined in the modern age.

The only thing you can do is see the demand and meet it with a superior product. Barring that, you need to have a plan in place which collaborates with the prosumers to create those products. You may not exercise authoritarian control over your IP in this case, but at least you get to have some manner of say in what happens, giving hard limits to the prosumer you’re working with but ultimately letting them express their creative freedom.

So, back to the NES Classic and Nintendo’s blunder (once again).

As I’ve established, it’s essentially running an emulator… and it comes with 30 NES games built in.

That is Nintendo’s first mistake. Breaking the first rule of Prosumer culture is sure to do you in -

If you are appropriating something that the prosumer community already has had access to for many years, and trying to pass it off as your own, you had better bring something to the table which is superior than what the prosumers already have or else they will.

In this case, Nintendo thought appropriating an emulator and branding it for themselves was going to win them brownie points. This falls under the thinking “We can release an emulator but you can’t because we think it’s illegal”.

Which is a total farce at best, and sleazy corporate practice. Some jack-ass in a board room somewhere thought it was a brilliant idea to grab a free emulator, throw in a few games and repackage it for sale.

It would be a good idea if it wasn’t for the fact that much more powerful emulation options exist, in the same package, for less money, on pretty much every conceivable system known to mankind.

In the case of the NES Classic, there is the RetroPie Arcade.

Lesson 1: Don’t try to pass off an inferior emulator when better options exist from the people who originally made the emulators and hardware.

For instance, you can simply get a Raspberry Pi 3 kit and emulate pretty much everything from NES, SNES, N64, Atari, Arcade Games, Master System, Genesis, Playstation, XBox, Gamecube, and more all on the same system.

Game Over, Nintendo…

And of course, we (as prosumers) can simply 3D Print an NES Classic shell to house it all in. But then we can go one step further (because why not?) and 3D print little NES Cartridges that actually work in the Mini NES via NFC Tags.

This is something Nintendo should have thought of, honestly… because this version of the NES Mini that somebody simply built themselves is by far superior in every conceivable manner to the official NES Classic.

With the NFC Mini NES Cartridges, Nintendo could have had a product that could expand indefinitely, and opened the door to selling the entire NES library as additional games beyond the built in 30 games.

How would that work, you may ask? Let’s take a look…

And then a prosumer blows Nintendo out of the water… surprise, surprise.

Well, since the NFC is really just telling the system what game to load from a pre-installed list, and the NES Mini (Pi3 version) has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi access built in, it could just download the game if the person doesn’t have it already.

And when the owner doesn’t have the mini-cartridge to plug in, the owner just doesn’t get to play it (I guess). But then Nintendo would be back to square one by trying to limit the options through their own channel when the prosumer can build something better that allows people play literally every classic game that exists in a single package.

To be perfectly honest, the entire NES Library itself only takes up roughly 200 MB of storage (I just checked).

Let’s say the NES Mini had a built in storage capacity of 32GB, as these flash storage mediums are pretty cheap now at the 32 GB range (about $40 retail).

Then a fully functional NES Mini can hold every NES, SNES, N64, Master System, Genesis, etc game and probably have room to spare.

Here’s the breakdown -

The entire SNES library clocks in about 1.2GB, the entire NES library clocks in about 200MB (including Famicom Disk System games), and the entire N64 library clocks in at about 7.5GB total. You could easily throw in the entire line of Gameboy games (Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance) and still not hit the end of that storage.

So let’s say Nintendo put the entire NES through N64 library on an NES Mini… they would only be using about 10GB of that 32GB storage. Well, Nintendo can’t do this because the legal hoops they have to jump through due to all the third party publishers and their games would be ridiculous. But this highlights a major flaw in the way companies do things today concerning the usage of Intellectual Property – in that just because Nintendo can’t do it, doesn’t mean the Prosumer isn’t going to do it.

And in fact, they already have done it. Just because companies and IP owners can’t get their collective shit together and unify on the same page for the greater good doesn’t mean the prosumers aren’t going to skip them and do it without you.

So we have an NES Mini with a functional NFC reader, loaded with every game from multiple systems and built in emulators (plural) from multiple classic systems.

Well damn, son… the Prosumer kicked your ass.

Look at it like this:

Companies are like the overblown, clueless Villains and the Prosumer Culture is essentially One Punch Man. They will collectively kick your ass in a single blow, and not even be trying, while you will be throwing literally everything you’ve got at it. Just by getting into the fight, you’ve already lost and haven’t realize it yet.

Every company versus the Internet…

Your only hope is to work with them and not try to defeat them.

Rule #1: Work within the system

You may not have defined that system or the culture that resides in it, but you are ultimately subject to it whether you like it or not. The same holds true in general (The Internet) and billions of people worldwide. The times are changing, and we need to evolve to work within these new sets of rules or we will ultimately be our own undoing. (See also: Blockbuster Video)

Don’t be like Blockbuster Video…

And that’s the point of today’s post.

Nintendo (and really any company) should ask an all important question before they try to release a new product based on their existing intellectual property, or file a DMCA notice, or incorporate some sort of DRM technology:

Is there a better option available than what we are about to do, and if so, can the consumer make it on their own? How can we work with them for the mutual benefit of everyone involved?

Then, of course, if the answer to that question is a resounding Yes, then the company should reach out to the community first and see about a collaboration to make that new thing with them.

Ironically, it is Nintendo themselves that already used this to their advantage in the creation of Super Mario Maker.

How in the hell Nintendo got it right and then promptly forgot everything they just learned is beyond me.

In the case of AM2R and Pokemon Uranium, Nintendo should have offered some sort of partnership, clearly denoting those games as Fan-made and not officially from Nintendo, but existing with the full blessing of Nintendo. The same would be true in the case of the ingenious NES Mini design… except that they could have reached out to enterprising prosumers online asking if anyone wanted to design a better version of what they were thinking about – ie: Nintendo explains the premise and what they would like it to do, and why… and then see if any prosumers (fans) can make it better. Then Nintendo would work with those fans to create the end-product that is far superior.

This is how a company should operate in the age of the prosumer culture. Because the prosumer culture is going to operate like this with or without you, and trying to cut off the head off the Hydra isn’t going to slay the beast, but instead just make it multiply.

In the Age of the Prosumer, you either have the most powerful ally in the world on your side (your biggest fans) to create amazing things, or you’re fighting the most powerful collective in the world (your biggest fans) and losing.

When in Rome, Nintendo… Do as the Romans do.

In case you were interested in the details of how the NES Mini was created, you can find those details here: http://www.daftmike.com/2016/07/NESPi.html

The Evolution of Virtual Worlds

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 23:30:00 +0000

A brief overview @ OSCC this Saturday

This Saturday @ 10am PST in Keynote 1
Open Simulator Community Conference

It can be said that I have a very excellent ability to see the writing on the wall and predict the trends before they happen when it comes to various things.

After all, I predicted that the Cubs would win the World Series this year (and how it would happen), I’ve predicted that real world locations would become sponsored locations for mobile gaming to entice players to visit (Pokemon GO), and even in a comprehensive report for Sears Holding Company that the future of retail is Zero Barrier (everything is tagged and automatically scanned just by walking out with it) which Amazon is now testing in live physical stores.

So you can imagine that I get asked the sixty-four thousand dollar question about the future of the Metaverse quite a lot…

While I can't get into a comprehensive presentation or cover all the talking points in 20 minutes (because, let's face it... we've been at this for many years and still haven't hit all the bases yet), I've chosen to highlight a handful of trends that I think are important and will change the entire paradigm of interaction for the Metaverse.

I will, however, be on a later panel that same day (3pm PST) where I'm sure more will come up, and I'll be available via my booth at Expo 3 for a sit down discussion if you'd like.

I look forward to seeing you there!

http://conference.opensimulator.org/2016/

#OpenSimulator #VirtualReality #SecondLife

Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 02:16:00 +0000

Somebody just saved the world.

So it’s the aftermath of the 2016 elections and we’re now welcoming (begrudgingly) our new commander in chief, Donald J. Trump.

There are millions of people today pointing fingers, gnashing teeth, and highly upset that Hillary Clinton didn’t win. I’ve seen people on Twitter pointing the finger at people like me (and even directly) for not supporting Hillary Clinton to stop a Trump presidency.

I get it… I really do.

But let’s look at this reasonably for a minute.

I’d like to begin by saying that I am in no way a supporter of Clinton or Trump. You should already know that from my last post. They are both psychopaths by definition. To make matters worse, I see a nation that went from Occupy Wall Street protests, against the 1% – the culture of greed, corruption, and destruction at the expense of the “99%”, to a nation that willingly supported the literal embodiment of everything it just got done saying was the problem with this country and the world while wholly ignoring options that were exactly the thing they wanted from those protests (candidates like Jill Stein).

I’m having a bit of a hard time trying to reconcile this disconnect from common sense in our general population.

But when we look at the bigger picture, I think things start adding up a bit more.

Let’s begin by saying – Trump didn’t actually win. For all the people going on about those who didn’t support Clinton enough to stop Trump, just stop… you’re making yourselves look bad.

Hillary Rodham Clinton actually had the popular vote, and still lost. Which is to say, the public did support her in overwhelming numbers which should have been (in any other election) a guaranteed path to victory.

There was literally nothing you or I could have done to influence that further. It wasn’t the vote that counted in this election, or influenced it. It wasn’t lack of popular support at all. So please stop pointing fingers at people and trying to blame them for getting Trump elected. It’s an idiotic and tired argument.

The reason Donald J. Trump is now President of the United States of America has absolutely nothing to do with yours or my votes. He won because of the Electoral College, which is to say that the electoral college stepped in and overrode the majority vote against the will of the people.

I’m not really sure the reality of what just happened has set in with anyone. Let me spell it out a little clearer for you:

Tens of millions of popular votes definitively supporting a candidate enough to have gotten her elected as the next President of the United States were just negated against the popular will of the people.

For all of the people patting themselves on the back for voting Trump, you can stop now. Your vote had nothing to do with it. If it did, he would have lost because he didn’t have enough votes to beat Hillary legitimately. In fact, nobody’s vote actually counted except those cast by the Electoral College. People you don’t know, and who weren’t elected or selected by you, just cancelled your votes.

What the F@#K Just Happened?

As I was saying in my prior post, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are psychopaths. Both exhibit a majority of the behaviors in the 20 point checklist to define what a psychopath is.

But only one of those two psychopaths were genuinely dangerous to the world.

The intelligence community on the whole, knew how bad Hillary Clinton actually was, and continually tried to warn the American public by leaking all of those emails to show us. It wasn’t Russia… it was our own Intelligence Community (FBI and CIA) staging a coup for the greater good.

Unfortunately, the problem is that no matter what they released – the American public simply refused to believe it, and their boss (Comey) in conjunction with the Department of Justice (Loretta Lynch) were both in the pocket of Hillary, and so no matter how bad the evidence was, no matter how blatant it was, no matter how much of a monster Clinton turned out to be – with direct evidence to prove it, Clinton was effectively shielded from repercussion all the way up to the current standing President (Barack Obama).

In the position that they were in, the corruption went all the way to the top (literally), and their hands were tied. At least, in the more obvious ways.

I don’t blame the entire FBI or CIA for being in the pocket of Clinton… just the higher ups that made the final decision. But that leaves an entire agency of intelligence community that were looking at this information and knowing full well what was going on, and having their hands tied about doing anything about it.

They were stuck sitting there watching a nightmare come true, and being made powerless to stop it. They were staring down a complete and total corporate coup against the American people.

In the bigger picture, the intelligence community was hoping it would be enough to present the blatant corruption and criminal activity to the public and have the general public change their mind. In effect, the FBI and DOJ were being held hostage by Clinton – unable to do anything because she had them by the balls (so to speak).

In a way, I would likely say that Clinton had them “under heel” because she was blackmailing them or had enough sway over key players to ruin their careers and lives. This also explains why Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren suddenly joined forces with Hillary Clinton out of left field; We’re talking about two politicians that have spent their entire career literally opposing the very corruption that Hillary Clinton represented.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have even (on multiple occasions) absolutely opposed Hillary Clinton and pointed out how corrupt and criminal she actually is.

That being said, the rabbit hole went a lot deeper, and I don’t think the general public really appreciates what just happened. If anything, we as a general population, should actually be thanking the FBI and CIA for overriding the popular vote and making Trump our next president.

I know… you just read that and grabbed the gasoline to burn down this blog. But hold up a minute and hear me out. I don’t support Trump (remember?).

The FBI and CIA literally just saved the world.

Whatch’a Talking ‘Bout, Will?

It is a common fact that the intelligence community knows a hell of a lot more about the real situation in the world than we, the public, likely ever do. What we think is going on is often just a fabricated story for the public while what is actually going on is kept behind closed doors (normally).

You can see this in a movie called Lord of War, which is probably the only Nicholas Cage movie I liked. Lord of War was actually based on a true story.

Allow me to show you how the world really works, sunshine.

Welcome to the real world…

Yes, this is exactly how the real world works, kids… Some of the most ridiculously over the top criminals are in a position of power whereby they simply cannot go to jail. If anything, they are routinely rewarded by the highest positions in the world to continue doing that job.

It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s just how the real world works.

The job of the president is effectively to continue the illusion of choice, and keep people pre-occupied and divided. Throw the population a bone now and then, but behind closed doors it’s business as usual. The entire point is just to keep the citizens of the country complacent and distracted.

Of course, sometimes… you run into somebody who goes a little mad with power and jeopardizes the entire system. There is such a thing as too much corruption because if you are willing to abuse every conceivable method to take total control, and are willing to instigate going to war with Russia and China, which in turn would likely lead to our entire obliteration… well then you’ve actually gone too far.

You don’t threaten the entirety of humanity and the United States with the abuse of power, and that’s exactly what Hillary Clinton was doing.

The average citizen of the United States seems to be completely oblivious to the actual situation that unfolded in this election.

Let me spell it out:

Hillary Clinton was going to start World War III, with Russia and China.

This was actually a concerted effort starting with George W. Bush and the Iraq War after 9/11. Which again, I hate to tell you, actually was an inside job. It’s no more implausible than knowing that the United States government intentionally allowed Japan to attack Pearl Harbor and didn’t warn anybody for the sole purpose of convincing America to join the World War (which we were staunchly opposed to). This is how easily manipulated the general public actually is.

The entire path to Syria is/was premeditated.

This should be obvious if you listen to General Wesley Clark…

Premeditated War

But the reason given to General Wesley Clark was “I don’t know”.

Of course they didn’t know. Legitimately. Because they weren’t making the calls, just following the orders.

The real reason we went into Libya to assassinate Ghaddafi was simply because he was the head of the African Union and was proposing the Gold Dinar as a standard currency disconnected from the United States Dollar. Which in turn would have been the nail in he coffin for the United States, because in the Middle East, all it would take is for OPEC nations to adopt the Gold Dinar for Oil, and the Petrol Dollar collapses overnight.

This is the thing that General Wesley Clark didn’t know at the time, but he was partially correct about only being out there to secure the oil.

Who do you think was involved when Ghaddafi was assassinated?

Yep. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

And there we have it…

Were there terrorists? Well, it depends on your perspective. The only thing Ghaddafi was guilty of was challenging the United States Dollar by being a sovereign country.

It’s easier to topple those regimes, however and that’s exactly why we chose them in the first place. It’s also the reason we don’t dare go anywhere near North Korea – because they have nukes and aren’t afraid to use them. Unfortunately our “easy” target of Syria became a problem when Syria (not being completely stupid about actual global politics and seeing what we’ve already been doing out there) invited Russia to help them out in the conflict and not the United States. The only country the United States isn’t so eager to get into a war with (aside from China)… which put the plan to go into Syria on the back burner, or should have.

If we got into a war with Russia, they would absolutely destroy us. The reason being is that they are allies with China, and the combined might of those two countries poses an actual threat to the United States.

Syria, pretty much just saved themselves from the United States bullies.

Problem is, Hillary Clinton didn’t think this was a problem at all and still insisted on getting involved with Syria (No-Fly Zone). So to her, this was business as usual, even though the intelligence community knew we needed to do a full stop to avoid total obliteration.

Common Sense

Which is to say, we might be arming the world… we might be corrupt and always at war as a business opportunity, but even the most corrupt people in the government know it’s bad for business to risk obliterating themselves and everyone on earth just to make some money. There is a common sense limit, however ridiculously corrupt that limit is – it doesn’t include mutually assured destruction. You can’t spend the money if everyone is dead.

Hillary didn’t seem to take the hint.

Absolute power had corrupted her absolutely, and she was ready to march us into total decimation.

As the General above states: instituting a No-Fly Zone wouldn’t require going to war with Russia and Syria… actually enforcing it would.

This was even relayed by Vladimir Putin himself in the World Economic Forum, in no uncertain terms:

Blatantly clear…

When Vladimir Putin himself is warning the United States, it’s time to back off and take a chill pill. But not Hillary!

But why Trump!?

Because they needed to choose a candidate that wouldn’t raise suspicion if they elevated them to win. If they went with Jill Stein, it would immediately be suspicious because she was around 5% and it wasn’t plausible for her to win, let alone the Electoral College to vote for her.

So they chose Donald Trump.

At this point it’s probably not such a bad idea to be on good terms with Russia, now is it? And now that Donald Trump is President, we’re on good terms with Russia again.

World War III averted.

Thanks to a bunch of unknown FBI and CIA operatives who had the guts to cut Hillary off at the pass through the Electoral College.

That being said, I’ve used the whole “they” pronoun and alluded to the FBI and CIA the entire time, but curiously (if you were paying attention), I also began this post with a picture of Anonymous.

Well, it’s because I believe there is an obvious connection to be made.

Before the election, Anonymous on their Facebook page made it a deliberate point to start supporting Donald Trump, even though Anonymous doesn’t necessarily agree with most of what Donald Trump stands for. In all actuality, Donald Trump is pretty much the embodiment and personification of everything that was opposed during Occupy Movement, which Anonymous was very happily supporting.

If you were to look at their website you’ll notice that Anon has no love of Hillary Clinton. But that isn’t necessarily an endorsement of Trump… Remember, Anonymous was there during Occupy and so the ideal of that mentality would have been represented by Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders… So what gives?

Well, when you think of Anonymous, you probably just think of a bunch of hackers in a basement someplace – some disenfranchised millennials. But the idea of Anonymous is that it could be anyone, anywhere.

As a collective, Anonymous has been getting alarmingly more sophisticated (and seemingly precognitive) in predicting what is about to happen.

There has (also) been the inclination that maybe Anonymous had been “infiltrated” by the FBI or CIA. But what if… what if members of the CIA and FBI were actually participants of Anonymous for the greater good?

I think that would explain a hell of a lot.

See also Lord of War. Plausible deniability for doing things well outside of the law, but things that needed to happen in order to combat the corruption ongoing which had a total disregard and immunity from the very same laws.

And so, Anonymous becomes the effective go-to hive mind when shit needs to get done in the intelligence agency, and the intelligence agency feeds Anonymous with just enough information to be effective.

Therefore, you suddenly see warnings from Anonymous about WW3 on their site, youtube channel etc… and very anti-Clinton. But we know Anon aligns better with Occupy Wall Street than actually aligned with Wall Street…

So it was a strategic maneuver to elect Trump in order to effectively save the world from total annihilation at the hands of Hillary Clinton.

The up side to this is that Jill Stein did get 5% of the vote this time around, which (by election laws) means the Green Party is declared a minor party and given ten million dollars in funding to work with for the next election.

I think in the grand scheme of things, if we wanted to save the world in the long run and implement all those progressive values we were protesting for and supported wildly in Bernie Sanders… we had to make sure that there was a planet left to work with in that future.

Short term loss, long term gain.

Checkmate, Hillary Clinton.

Let’s hope Trump isn’t as much of an idiot as he makes himself out to be, or else all of this was for naught and we’ll be right back to marching down the road to oblivion again.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I feel like I need to go download those Playboy photos of our new First Lady.

Doublethink

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 05:23:00 +0000

1984 Was Not Supposed To Be An Instruction Manual

TL;DR You should probably vote for Jill Stein. She isn’t a psychopath. Continue reading for a more comprehensive reasoning. This is worth your time to read, I promise you. A topic like this just can’t be properly vetted out in 140 characters on Twitter or via a social media post. So this is my answer to all the Hillary and Trump supporters out there.

To say that the current political climate for the United States elections is a heated situation would be a total underestimation.

The lesser of two evils no longer serves as a valid choice when those choices have reached a point of diminishing returns whereby the difference between two choices has become increasingly inconsequential, and therefore, indistinguishable from one another in effectively being a better option over the other.

What does one do when both options are equally bad?

Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t?

In the United States political system there are multiple options which can be utilized in order to break the cycle of irrational thinking. Outside of the Republican and Democratic parties, there are Third Party Candidates.

But what happens when the two major parties of a country have become so corrupted that they have absolutely no interest in losing the control and power which they have? In this instance, we see the implementation of corruption, lying, and deliberate doublethink mentality barraged upon the population who (apparently) are easily manipulated into believing it.

In this post, I will be exploring the candidates in a way that explains why they are or or not a good choice for this country. Before we do, it would serve us best to first define what our problems actually are as a country (and planet) so we can identify if these candidates are actually in a position to fix those problems.

Identifying the Problems

Climate Change

This isn’t up for debate. If you think Climate Change is some kind of hoax, then you must know a lot more than the scientists at NOAA and NASA. Climate Change is a number one priority for the human race and this planet as a whole. By systematically ignoring the wanton damage we do to this planet, we are on a path to human extinction.

Human extinction, if the concept hasn’t sunk in, is where humanity as a whole ceases to exist forever. That’s the death of about 8 billion people or more.

In short, our own actions and inactions are going to cause the complete and total genocide of humanity, and every living thing on this planet, unless we change our ways (and quickly).

With our usage of Fossil Fuels, we continue driving our planet into oblivion. Our dependency on these fossil fuels will be our undoing. It would be safe to say, then, that we have a priority to reverse this trend to extinction and to find better alternatives to fossil fuels, and I would go so far as to say nuclear reactors. Both are a danger to the environment for the long haul.

During 2016, literally every single month was the hottest month on record. In India, a heat wave hit that was so harsh it literally melted roads.

In the worst case, temperatures hit a ridiculous 123.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

I don’t know about you, but I’d call this a priority.

Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, and so on…

With the inclusion of Fracking into the equation, and the wastewater disposal from these sites, we’re blatantly destroying the environment with the full blessing of the agency that should be completely against it (the EPA). This cannot be explained as anything other that completely asinine.

More so when you realize that oil and gas companies refuse to disclose 10 percent of the hundreds of chemicals they use during hydraulic fracturing, according to a new analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency. The revelation comes in a major installment of the EPA's study of the potential risks of fracking on drinking water.

Let us not forget the contamination of our drinking water and flaming tap water problem in towns near fracking locations.

This is unacceptable

And while we’re on the subject of water contamination, let us not forget the story of Flint, Michigan.

Profits over people?

To make matters worse in a situation like this, Nestle was allowed to pump the clean water while the residents were left with lead poisoned brown sludge. Nestle, unsurprisingly, filtered and bottled that water and sold it back to the residents of Flint, Michigan.

Profits over people (again)

I think it’s safe to say that this sort of behavior cannot be tolerated anymore and any candidate (or constituent) that is willing to defend these behaviors should be labelled a threat to humanity.

Obvious Solution

The obvious solution to all of this environmental catastrophe we are wreaking is to make a concerted and unified effort to switch our energy to renewables and to enforce much stricter regulations on polluting entities. By incentivizing renewable energy over subsidizing Oil, Gas and Coal we create new jobs to take the place of the old jobs while eliminating our dependency on fossil fuels.

It’s good for humanity, good for the environment, and likely will put a stop to needless wars – since that’s what we’re constantly going to war over (oil).

I will side with a candidate who promotes these ideals because it’s common sense. It doesn’t require more than three seconds worth of thought to understand it is the best option.

War (What Is It Good For?)

Absolutely nothing. Say it again, now.

The United States spends 54% of it’s entire budget on the military, which is the highest in the world. So much higher is this spending that it beats the next six countries on the list and they are our allies.

But we don’t have the money to put into the actual country itself for Education, Social Security, Science, Medicare & Health, and so on?

Are you fucking kidding me?

Look at that graph. Look at it.

Over half a trillion dollars just for the military alone?

I would support a candidate that wanted peace and to effectively reduce the military requirement of this country in order to put that money toward actually making this country a better place.

Education

Get rid of the corruption and we solve this.

It is no secret that our students are at a major disadvantage in today’s situation. Grade school through High School is continually and systematically cut in funding, while getting a College Education has left us a nation full of graduates who can never pay back the ridiculous and absolutely predatory debts required to afford attendance.

Total student loan debt in the United States has tripled over the past decade to a whopping $1.232 trillion.

If we can afford over a half a trillion dollars for our military, we sure as hell can afford to educate our kids properly (and freely).

There is no reason whatsoever (other than greed) that people must enter into crippling debt just to get an education that is required in a job market that is all but drying up to begin with.

Unless we’re counting the possibility that corporate interests want it all. So maybe we should stop those corporate interests and the representatives of that system from running the country?

Obviously, being educated is a threat to that establishment – so is it a wonder that actually getting a good education has become increasingly something that only wealthy people can afford?

We should probably put an end to that corruption and collective dumbing down of our nation.

In the bigger picture, then, it makes sense to support initiatives (and a candidate) that wants to fund public education and cancel student debts which have gotten out of control. It would make sense to support a candidate that would enact measures to ensure that undergraduate college is free to the public.

Bernie Sanders wanted to do this, but as we already know… Hillary Clinton completely and utterly screwed him out of the nomination. This isn’t even something you can debate on – it was flatly in the Wikileaks disclosure of Hillary Clinton’s and her campaign’s emails.

So, a candidate that wants to find ways to continue those policies to make America better for everyone is probably a candidate you and I should support.

Health Care

Did you know that pharmaceutical advertising to the general public is actually illegal in most of the world, except curiously the United States. In most of the developed world, they also have Single Payer Healthcare which has drastically lowered the price gouging of insurance companies and drug companies on the average citizen.

It’s a simple premise really… you pay your taxes? Congratulations, you’re fully covered. Just go to the doctor when you need to.

Why aren’t we doing this already?

Well… the answer is effectively greed. There is simply too much money being made by ripping off the American people to warrant any change. I mean, why would the crooks want to change the system that benefits them most? Why would lawmakers want to hurt the interests of their biggest supporters?

(see also: Congress, United States Government, et al)

Meanwhile in ‘Murica!

It’s not like The United States can justify the inflated and exorbitant healthcare costs with better quality of healthcare, either. As a matter of fact, while we routinely pay the most for healthcare, we actually rank last in quality.

I hate to burst your bubble, but we’re getting royally screwed.

$15 Per Hour Minimum Wage

Also: Universal Basic Income Transition

The current Federal Minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 per hour. While many sates have minimum wages that are marginally higher than this, and some states have recently enacted laws to raise their own minimum wages to $15 within the next 2-6 years, those marginal increases just aren’t enough to live on when taken into account the actual cost of living.

When we take into account the actual cost of living index per state, the minimum wage in those states is a poverty wage at best by comparison.

Include the absolutely crap-tastic jobs market where the norm seems to be part-time at minimum wage and we have a serious problem. See, “part-time” also means “under 40 hours per week” which is to say 36 hours a week is just fine. Part-time also often omits things like comprehensive healthcare coverage, so what little these people are making gets cut even further just to pay for that too.

But it gets worse – Companies like Wal-Mart intentionally pay their workers as close to minimum wage as they can get away with, thus forcing those workers to rely on government subsidies (welfare, food stamps, medicare, etc) just to make ends meet.

And since you’re working “part-time”, at near minimum wage, you have to juggle at least two part-time jobs to make ends meet. Good luck working the 80 hour work week, kids.

But that’s not even the crux of the problem.

The more we enact $15 minimum wages in the United States, the more those companies are going to get rid of those jobs as a result, either by outsourcing to a foreign country (slave labor) or by implementing various automation methods to get rid of those jobs.

So again, enjoy your $15 per hour job while you can get it. There will be less of them, and just as many people out of work as a result.

In a time when we used to employ a handful of people for the “front end” of a store (cashiers), we now have closed most of the front end and replaced those jobs with self-checkout. Where we used to have associates on the floor to help you out, companies (like Lowes, Home Depot, etc) are toying with the idea of using robots on the floor instead (Pepper, etc).

If you think this is something that’s just coming in the distant future, then think again. Lowes is already deploying these robots today.

There goes 70% of the associate jobs

So maybe the problem isn’t $15 minimum wage, though this is a short term application, but instead maybe we need to seriously start thinking about a Universal Basic Income to offset all of this automation.

Stack Up

Out of interest of brevity (because we can write on this for thousands of pages), let me just cut to the point. I’d like to first point out that the Republican and Democratic nominee are both psychopaths.

It’s a major claim, but let’s take a look at what traits a psychopath would have before we move on.

Signs and Symptoms of Psychopathy

The signs and symptoms of psychopathy are identified most commonly in scientific studies by Hare's 20-item Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. This checklist identifies the following as the symptoms and signs of psychopathy:

Superficial charm and glibness
Inflated sense of self-worth
Constant need for stimulation
Lying pathologically
Conning others; being manipulative
Lack of remorse or guilt
Shallow emotions
Callousness; lack of empathy
Using others (a parasitic lifestyle)
Poor control over behavior
Promiscuous sexual behavior
Behavioral problems early in life
Lack of realistic, long-term goals
Being impulsive
Being irresponsible
Blaming others and refusing to accept responsibility
Having several marital relationships
Delinquency when young
Revocation of conditional release
Criminal acts in several realms (criminal versatility)

Here’s the stack-up between candidates so far as I can tell.

Donald “Oompa Loompa” Trump

Narcissistic, xenophobic, pathological liar. Bigoted, racist, and the embodiment of literally everything we literally just got done saying was the problem with this country during the #Occupy Movement.

Known real estate con-man. Reality television and self-aggrandizing, self-entitled spoiled brat who lives in a fantasy world where he is the center of it. May also have very tiny hands.

Superficial charm and glibness (Narcissism)
Inflated sense of self-worth
Constant need for stimulation
Lying pathologically
Conning others; being manipulative
Lack of remorse or guilt
Shallow emotions
Callousness; lack of empathy
Using others (a parasitic lifestyle)
Poor control over behavior
Promiscuous sexual behavior
Lack of realistic, long-term goals
Being impulsive
Being irresponsible
Blaming others and refusing to accept responsibility
Having several marital relationships

Criminal acts in several realms (criminal versatility)

Narcissism & Inflated Sense of Self-Worth

Extreme Narcissism

Lying Pathologically

Pathological Liar

Conning Others; Being Manipulative

Using Others (parasitic Lifestyle)

Criminal Acts in Several Realms

Con Man

Promiscuous Sexual Behavior

Poor Control Over Behavior

Being Impulsive, etc

Role model?

And What About That Wall?

Might I remind you (Republicans) that it was Ronald Reagan himself that told Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall” in Berlin. Walls don’t work…

Tear down this wall.

There is a sense of bewilderment that in the year 2016, the Republican candidate would even suggest building a wall between our country and another, not to mention being so ego-driven that he would insist that Mexico would pay for it.

That’s not what we, as a country, are about. Have we learned nothing from the past? Japanese Internment Camps… Slavery… Genocide (Natives)… Racism… Xenophobia?

Is this what we’ve become? Count me out.

Building a wall simply wouldn’t work, and what’s worse… it would send a very bad message to the world. A message that we, ourselves, have become the very thing we opposed not so long ago.

You forgot about planes…

Aside from that… would you really trust a known real estate con-man when he tells you we should build the biggest, most expensive wall in the history of our country?

Hillary “I’ll Say Anything For Your Vote” Clinton

Narcissistic, xenophobic, pathological liar. Bigoted, racist, and the embodiment of literally everything we literally just got done saying was the problem with this country during #Occupy Movement.

I’m just going to jump right into this one, because there is just way too much to cover.

Superficial charm and glibness (Narcissism)
Inflated sense of self-worth
Constant need for stimulation
Lying pathologically
Conning others; being manipulative
Lack of remorse or guilt
Shallow emotions
Callousness; lack of empathy
Using others (a parasitic lifestyle)
Poor control over behavior
Promiscuous sexual behavior
Lack of realistic, long-term goals
Being impulsive
Being irresponsible
Blaming others and refusing to accept responsibility
Having several marital relationships

Criminal acts in several realms (criminal versatility)

Superficial Charm and Glibness

Promiscuous Sexual Behavior

What suddenly warranted re-opening the investigation into Hillary’s emails? Well, they found a bunch of emails that were supposedly “lost” just residing in Anthony Weiner’s possession. We’re talking about the guy who was busted for sexting a 15 year old girl. the content of those emails documented the involvement of the Clintons in what is known as the Lolita Express.

Just damn…

Callousness; lack of empathy

Jill Stein’s Platform

A Green New Deal:

Create millions of jobs by transitioning to 100% clean renewable energy by 2030, and investing in public transit, sustainable agriculture, and conservation.

Jobs as a Right:

Create living-wage jobs for every American who needs work, replacing unemployment offices with employment offices. Advance workers rights to form unions, achieve workplace democracy, and keep a fair share of the wealth they create.

End Poverty:

Guarantee economic human rights, including access to food, water, housing, and utilities, with effective anti-poverty programs to ensure every American a life of dignity.

Health Care as a Right:

Establish an improved “Medicare For All” single-payer public health insurance program to provide everyone with quality health care, at huge savings.

Education as a Right:

Abolish student debt to free a generation of Americans from debt servitude. Guarantee tuition-free, world-class public education from pre-school through university. End high stakes testing and public school privatization.

A Just Economy:

Set a $15/hour federal minimum wage. Break up “too-big-to-fail” banks and democratize the Federal Reserve. Reject gentrification as a model of economic development. Support development of worker and community cooperatives and small businesses. Make Wall Street, big corporations, and the rich pay their fair share of taxes. Create democratically run public banks and utilities. Replace corporate trade agreements with fair trade agreements.

Protect Mother Earth:

Lead on a global treaty to halt climate change. End destructive energy extraction: fracking, tar sands, offshore drilling, oil trains, mountaintop removal, and uranium mines. Protect our public lands, water supplies, biological diversity, parks, and pollinators. Label GMOs, and put a moratorium on GMOs and pesticides until they are proven safe. Protect the rights of future generations.

Racial Justice Now:

End police brutality and mass incarceration. Create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to understand and eliminate the legacy of slavery that lives on as pervasive racism in the economy, education, housing and health. Ensure that communities control their police rather than police controlling our communities, by establishing police review boards and full time investigators to look in to all cases of death in police custody. Demilitarize the police.

Freedom and Equality:

Expand women’s rights, protect LGBTQIA+ people from discrimination, defend indigenous rights and lands, and create a welcoming path to citizenship for immigrants. Protect the free Internet, legalize marijuana/hemp, and treat substance abuse as a public health problem, not a criminal problem.

Justice for All:

Restore our Constitutional rights, terminate unconstitutional surveillance and unwarranted spying, end persecution of government and media whistleblowers, close Guantanamo, abolish secret kill lists, and repeal indefinite detention without charge or trial.

Peace and Human Rights:

Establish a foreign policy based on diplomacy, international law, and human rights. End the wars and drone attacks, cut military spending by at least 50% and close the 700+ foreign military bases that are turning our republic into a bankrupt empire. Stop U.S. support and arms sales to human rights abusers, and lead on global nuclear disarmament.

Empower the People:

Abolish corporate personhood. Protect voters’ rights by establishing a constitutional right to vote. Enact electoral reforms that break the big money stranglehold and create truly representative democracy: public campaign financing, ranked-choice voting, proportional representation, and open debates.

I seriously struggle to think of the sane and rational person who can read through that platform and still manage to support Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump willingly.

“If you don’t vote for Hillary, you’re going to let Trump win!”

No, the people that voted for Trump or Hillary are the ones that elected them into office. We are responsible for the choices we make – not others. Stop trying to shame and blame third party supporters for bad choices the majority keep on making with gleeful abandon. That’s what you’re doing… like a bunch of lemmings running for the cliff.

I’ll leave you with this bit of a rant from Debbie at Sane Progressive explaining why people like us are simply done with the total clusterfuck of this Idiocracy.

Best explanation so far.

We can do better than two psychopaths for presidential candidates

Ready Player One

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Wed, 10 Aug 2016 21:59:00 +0000

A Glimpse Of The Metaverse

As the room around me loaded into view, the rickety wooden stairs moaned under the weight of my descent. With each careful step, the musty air of the basement greeted me among the phosphorescent glow of retro nostalgia against the far wall. Unfinished structure enclosed the space, revealing the studs at a regular interval as if I had wandered into the skeleton of years gone by.

Aside from a few worn couches to my right, there was the obligatory shelf containing a plethora of Atari games accompanied by an old CRT television by which was connected to the artificial wood grain and black plastic containment of pixelated wizardry which defined my childhood.

This was no ordinary basement in Second Life, but rather it was the Basement from the book Ready Player One, lovingly recreated by the VSTE staff for their book club discussions.

Over the summer, they and a handful of students have been reading the novel which is currently in production for a feature length film by none other than Stephen Spielberg.

Pulling out my virtual reality copy of the book, I held it in my hand.

It was a personal creation of mine, a Universal Book Prop that I thought was relevant for the occasion – borne of my attention to detail in the existence of both the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Complete Sherlock Holmes I had conjured through digital spellcasting, otherwise known as the toolbox.

But it was the arcade replicas against the back wall which I felt most proud of for this Basement – Joust, Tempest, and a Pac-Man machine specifically created to have that iconic 1981 US Quarter on the marquee. In this moment, I felt like Halliday, the creator of OASIS and the very same mindset permeated throughout me as I surveyed the room.

On August 8th, 2016, I had been invited to attend the final discussion for VSTE for the book club, of which Ready Player One had been chosen, and it was here in this recreation of The Basement that we gathered together. Some wearing outfits inspired by the characters, while others appeared in casual clothes.

I was wearing my favorite long coat jacket, a type of Civil War era style (I would imagine) and a simple pair of blue jeans with white sneakers. Of course, I had on my obligatory glasses, which in a virtual world seems like a hipster accessory at best, but I’ve always strived to represent myself in avatar form as closely as possible to my real self.

As I greeted everyone in the room, I quietly took a seat at the end of the garishly colored sofa, admiring the decorations in the room and attention to minute details – just as Halliday would have wanted it.

And so it began, my foray into the realm of educational inspiration in a virtual world, partaking in an immersive experience straight out of a book that all in the room were familiar with. Participants from around the world, all gathered in this virtual world experience.

For a moment, my mind drifted to the OASIS system as I found parallels to Second Life as a sort of pre-cursor. Would something like the OASIS be the revolution we’re waiting for when it comes to a full scale Metaverse?

In a way, I believe that to be true. However it comes with a few caveats.

Into the OASIS

While not the highest fidelity attainable, the open sandbox type virtual world model in and of itself happens to be the best choice for underlying mechanic when it comes to the Metaverse. However, that is where things get more muddled in comparison.

See, in a construct such as OASIS in Ready Player One, it is explained that making a character is free, but any sort of substantial fast-travel is going to cost you. In effect, a tax on teleportation. There is (of course) the marketplace type system whereby the user generated content, plus system level artifacts (created by Gregarious Systems) and resources could be bought, sold and traded.

Sure you can teleport at will, but because it was tied to a scarce resource model (credits or energy) you would notice that other means of hierarchy arose. A long while back, I had proposed a similar type of system as a checklist of what a Metaverse would likely encompass, and while the OASIS in the fictional sense of Ready Player One comes very close, it isn’t spot on.

For instance, you would likely have to have a resource mining system in order to facilitate the raw materials needed to create items. This in and of itself helps regulate the prices and availability of items which we can sell, trade, etc. Especially if those items will degrade in some manner during usage or over time.

As it stands in Second Life, items simply do not degrade or effectively break. So when you buy something off of marketplace, that item is pretty much infinite and lasts forever (or until you trash it).

There is also the underlying idea that virtual worlds should be on spherical planets, with a full “outer space” to explore. Somewhere in the digital universe are other planets, or if you’ve made one (instead of exploring) it would be nestled at a coordinate somewhere in space.

This follows the OASIS line of thought. If you build a space faring vehicle, you should be able to launch into outer space and explore other planets.

In the same manner, you should be able to mine for resources to facilitate the creation of items using an in-world toolbox (user generated content and environment). There should also be a centralized Marketplace for the purchase and sale of those creations.

By way of comparison, Second Life isn’t really a Metaverse system. In my original definition, it would look a lot more like OASIS from the book Ready Player One, with the caveat that the planets themselves wouldn’t be a central company (OASIS) importing pre-existing virtual worlds under a single umbrella (World of Warcraft, etc) but instead, a company like OASIS would create the underlying toolkit, SDK and APIs to hook into OASIS and allow those third party systems to participate in a decentralized manner.

So maybe Blizzard Entertainment would merely add the APIs and such to the existing World of Warcraft, allowing it to exist in OASIS as a planet, but still housed primarily on Blizzard’s servers for their world.

As a result, we would see something like a combination of OSGrid, HighFidelity, and OASIS put together. Recently, I came across a video which highlighted these basic premises together under a single engine – While it is still in early technical alpha phase, I found it quite intriguing.

Dual Universe

The real life version of OASIS

If I were to build a Metaverse system from the ground up, my first inclination would be to begin with Dual Universe as the underlying engine. In turn, Dual Universe uses CSSC (Continuous Single-Shard Cluster) technology that they have developed themselves, but is along the same lines as how Improbable works in order to facilitate the massive multi-user scalability which enables them to do a full universe like this on a single shard.

CONTINUOUS SINGLE-SHARD CLUSTER

To handle potentially millions of players simultaneously in the same universe at the same time, NovaQuark have developed their own technology, that they call a Continuous Single-shard Cluster. The challenge is to handle situations when thousands of players will gather in tight spaces, like in a city, or a space battle and to do this without interrupting the gameplay. This involves what they call "Dynamic Space Splitting", server nodes are assigned to regions that are more densely populated, and these change the frequency of updates of remote entities to maintain a fluid experience for nearby entities.

Upon reading their definition of CSSC, I’m quite excited because they are essentially putting into practice the very idea that I said would be able to break the concurrency limit for a single shard full universe. When I originally suggested it in the research paper, and later to Linden Lab (who effectively patted me on the head and ignored it), the idea was simply this:

If you have many servers running and each server handles a region – why not take the compute power of the entire datacenter and intelligently increase or decrease the processing where it is needed?

In effect, all the areas that see low traffic would have tons of compute cycles going to waste, while the high traffic areas are crumbling under the weight of crowds. Why not just assign the extra workload to the unused computer power in the entirety of the datacenter throwing effectively a distributed supercomputer at the areas that required it, taking from the areas that didn’t?

As Dr. Gilbert, Dr. Dionisio and I had written in 3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse: Current Status and Future Possibilities in 2013:

“From the surveyed work, an overall architectural strategy based on DSG (with a high-performance “world state” system like Red Dwarf at its core), peer-to-peer openness as seen in Open Cobalt and Solipsis for broad distribution of load (not an exclusively technological challenge), and reduction/optimization techniques like action-based protocols appears to hold the most promise for massive scaling of an integrated virtual world system.”

ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 45, No. 3, Article 34, Page 31

In the same train of thought, I also suggested that everyone’s cache be part of a redundant, distributed peer-to-peer file storage cluster (much like how Ownerless File Format works). Then you add in the peer-to-peer architecture of something like Solipsis in how your avatar updates in relation to others (cascading information) and you have a very powerful system capable of millions of concurrent users in real time for a persistent contiguous virtual universe. While there is still the underlying centralized computer clusters from the main company (like Linden Lab) a lot of the power ends up being offloaded in high-concurrency areas through the Solipsis methodologies.

In contrast, Second Life technology, whether it is represented by Linden Lab or a derivative of OSGrid (OpenSim) uses many shards with a fraction of the concurrency per region. It’s not very efficient as a baseline architecture, but it’s good for what it is considering how long ago it was created.

Something that bothers me, though, is how the instances of published spaces are still the normality in new projects (like SANSAR). I wouldn’t expect SANSAR or even hifidelity.io to have a full universe contiguous and single shard like Dual Universe does.

So I would be borrowing the mentality of decentralized planets, each maybe owned by a different person or entity and running independently, but all hooked into an OASIS style universe represented accordingly.

Of course, the planets are spherical and able to have user-generated content on them, as well as editing the terrain and so forth. This takes care of the age old question: Where will I sail my boat? With this underlying setup, there is no such thing as “region crossing” because it is all entirely contiguous and fluid transition – whether you are moving around a planet or leaving the atmosphere into space.

If anything, by structuring a Metaverse like this, we not only allow but create a need for these standard methods of travel. By introducing the resource scarcity and need into the simulation, we organically watch civilizations grow out of necessity. The towns, cities, highways, space ports, airports, and so on. Trade routes arise organically as a result.

The thing here is – Dual Universe likely isn’t going to take these latter routes for a Metaverse, but stay a walled garden only.

Nonetheless, the potential is already there if it ever wanted to be something bigger like the OASIS system.

Up close with Dual Universe

The Paradox of Movement

Another unanswered question concerning the recreation of the OASIS would simply be “How do we allow people to move freely in this virtual universe?”

This is a major question to ask, because as of yet we haven’t really answered it. With Oculus Rift, HTC VIVE and other head mounted displays for virtual reality, the best practices manuals all directly state that allowing free movement of the avatar/character should be avoided or else you’ll cause motion sickness (cybersickness).

The solution, as of this moment, isn’t really a solution so much as nerfing the virtual world altogether.

Teleport Movement mechanic is the chosen strategy… and I’d like to say that while it does work, I think we can do much better than that. For most of these games and experiences, we’ve taken a highly complex simulation of a 3D world in lush detail and nuance, and then turned it into a point and click adventure.

There is only A + B point to point, but nothing in between. With systems like Dual Universe (and Second Life) you need to be able to move around freely and not via point to point teleport. You need to be able to simply walk from one location to another without getting sick.

Sadly, the HMD alone can never solve this (no matter what Oculus or HTC tell you). Because at the end of the day, the visual systems might be fixed to reduce or eliminate sickness, but movement hasn’t been fixed. The problem is now down to the visuals telling your brain that you are running or moving, while your inner ear tells your brain that’s a lie.

Scenes in Ready Player One where Wade is sitting in the van with the headset on wouldn’t likely be possible for using OASIS because he’d get very sick from doing so.

More plausible is when he is later attached to the full haptics rig for OASIS, in which case I’d absolutely agree it was possible. At the very least you need a good omnidirectional treadmill to let your physical body know when you are actually moving around.

But I digress (as usual). The point is: The Metaverse is arising out of unrelated parts and projects, and it is now possible to actually build it properly.

Until then, I guess we’ll just have to use out imagination, read a book, and watch the movie next year when it’s released.

Let the hunt begin!

Pokémon Go or;

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Sun, 17 Jul 2016 20:27:00 +0000

How I learned the difference between AR & MR

It was a fairly calm evening last weekend while my friends and I sat in the pickup truck filling up for gas. The night air in the rural backwoods of Pennsylvania was calm, and the air humid from the July heat. Out of the corner of our eye we saw another car pull up, but instead of looking to fill up their tank, two older gentlemen jumped out while one of them loudly proclaimed:

“I’ve only got three Pokeballs!”

Did we slip into the Twilight Zone? What drugs were these guys on?

But then the obvious sunk in and the lightbulb went off.

These guys were driving around town playing the latest Augmented Reality game from Nintendo and Niantic Labs, aptly named Pokémon Go.

In what seems like a total invasion of augmented reality gaming, Nintendo and Niantic have unleashed what can very well be considered a “killer app”. Within 24 hours of its release, the market share for Nintendo skyrocketed by 9 billion dollars, and has in the last week alone been deemed the most traded stock in Japanese history.

Thanks to the fad-tastic launch of Pokemon GO - more popular than porn - Nintendo stock has exploded over 93% in the last 7 days (the most ever) to 6 year highs. But the Pokemania was really in the trading volume where 476 billion yen changed hands for the highest daily turnover on the Tokyo Stock Exchange this century... – zerohedge.com

Holy crap, that’s amazing…

But of course, there is now the apparent discussion/debate about whether or not Pokémon Go is actually Augmented Reality.

Whether the discussion is from VentureBeat or Scientific American, both will tell you that Pokémon go is not Augmented Reality because it breaks some rule about immersion, and so it’s not true Augmented Reality.

Well, you already know where this is going if you’ve been a long-time reader of this blog, so let’s get right to the point: Pokémon Go is Augmented Reality.

VentureBeat doesn’t seem to understand the difference when it comes to this topic, and so their entire write up about it is describing what is known as Mixed Reality and not Augmented Reality. So if you know anything about the terminology, you’ll immediately understand that while they have their heart in the right place, they just aren’t competent enough to be calling that shot. You’d immediately realize the author of that write-up is describing Mixed Reality and not Augmented Reality.

This Pokemon Go commercial is showing Mixed Reality

The promotional videos for Pokémon Go essentially are confusing the terms as well – in that the above video shows a Mixed Reality view and not the bare bones Augmented Reality of the actual game. The video above is showing a digital Pikachu that is immersed in the real world and is real world aware and can interact with the real world. Which is actually doable, but you’d need better hardware and software to pull it off. SLAM mapping of the real world environment, a Depth Sensing Camera, better GPS, and so on. In this notion, yes… immersion is a criteria for sure.

This is a far cry from the reality of the situation in which a 3D render of the Pokémon is simply superimposed onto your video feed.

Ok, so let’s be straight up for a minute.

Augmented Reality isn’t really one defined thing aside from “Superimposing digital information onto the real world”. It is mostly an umbrella terminology, and often used interchangeably with Mixed Reality. Augmented Reality is a spectrum and not a singular point on the map.

From Heads Up Displays (Google Glass, Air Force Pilot Helmets) to something in the realm of HoloLens and Magic Leap (and beyond). You can pretty much just have an arrow on screen pointing directions like your GPS Map, and if it’s overlaid on the real world (via your video camera) it can be AR too… albeit very rudimentary.

So today, I’m just going to take the Mixed Reality aspect and use that to define advanced augmented reality while saying AR itself can (and often is) just rudimentary and low awareness overlay. When we use the term Augmented Reality, what most of us forget is to ask “What degree in the spectrum of AR is this experience?”

So Pokémon Go is Augmented Reality… but

Oh, you should have known this one was coming.

Pokémon Go is Augmented Reality but it is probably the lowest common denominator to barely qualify. As in, it’s nothing special and a highly stripped down experience in the AR realm.

Essentially, it is AR by technicality alone, the bare minimum requirement to qualify.

It uses the real world location and your camera to “augment” your view with an overlay of information.

I think that qualifies as augmenting your reality. Even if it’s half assed, it’s still doing it in the most basic fashion. It’s no worse than calling Google Glass augmented reality even if the information isn’t spatially aware or embedded in the real world.

There’s no requirement for Augmented Reality to be “immersive”. That is far too nebulous of a notion to take seriously for an umbrella term. Saying it’s not immersive is missing the point entirely. If you wanted immersive AR, then we’re talking about Mixed Reality (AR that is real world aware and can interact with it).

Let’s not assign the “immersion” test to AR as a whole, but only if we’re talking about Mixed Reality (other end of the AR spectrum closer to Reality). In which case, then it would be a requirement to qualify not as AR, but to qualify as Mixed Reality.

Pokémon Go is mainly designed around maps, letting players find and catch in the real world characters from Nintendo's Pokémon franchise. When they find a Pokémon, players can enter an “augmented reality” mode that lets them see their target on their phone screens, superimposed over the real world.

There’s the key term: “superimposed”.

Early AR systems do exactly this. They simply superimpose the digital content over a video feed (or the real world via see through displays), but the digital objects have absolutely no flipping clue about the real world around them other than the GPS location and access to the Compass to figure out where the player is facing. There are a ton of games on Google Play that already use this form of AR – it’s been around for a very long time. The only reason you’re paying attention now is because Nintendo made a Pokémon game using it.

Technically Speaking

The problem with this debate overall is that in the bigger picture few people actually understand the terminology involved or that Augmented Reality is also used interchangeably with Mixed Reality as the umbrella term constituting the entire spectrum of augmented virtuality.

It is a nebulous sort of terminology and nobody has really sat down and figured out what they really mean, or I should say that few people have bothered to pay attention to those who have.

So let’s do a quick rundown to clarify:

Virtual Reality: an artificial environment which is experienced through sensory stimuli (as sights and sounds) provided by a computer and in which one's actions partially or wholly determine what happens in the environment.

In simple terms: The entire environment is virtual.

Augmented Virtuality: an artificial environment which is experienced through sensory stimuli (as sights and sounds) provided by a computer and in which one's actions partially or wholly determine what happens in the environment, whereby media or information from the real world is included. The real world information is virtual world aware and can interact with it accordingly as if it were the native environment.

In simple terms: The environment is mostly virtual with a dash of real world thrown into it. For instance, maybe a video feed or something.

Augmented Reality: a real world environment whereby digital information, in two dimensions or three, is superimposed onto the real world through a display. Also used as an umbrella term describing the entire spectrum from Heads Up Display to Complete Mixed Reality.

Mixed Reality: a real world environment whereby digital information, both two and three dimensional are immersed into the real world through a display and robust access to computer vision and sensory data. It is real world aware and can interact with it accordingly as if it were part of it. Also known as “Hyper Reality”. It is the juxtaposition to Augmented Virtuality.

This is what Mixed Reality Looks Like

Reality: You pretty much know what that is, unless you’re an existentialist. In which case this blog is just another illusion.

Let’s Continue…

So, I get into this breakdown simply because we really need to think about it before we have this discussion. There is an Augmented Virtuality on the scale which says that the real world is a minor component in the virtual world. Essentially it means a sort of percentage mixture in combination with the degree in which the augmented elements are immersed in that baseline space.

With Augmented Virtuality, we’re saying that the Real World is the artificial component in the Virtual World predominance. Likewise, we have the similar opposite in Mixed Reality whereby the virtual world is the artificial inclusion to the real world baseline.

But then that leaves Augmented Reality down the center, which is to say that Mixed Reality is a more in-depth version of the underlying concept of Augmented Reality. Notice when I said earlier that in AR, digital items are superimposed on the real world?

The underlying meaning of that statement was that by being “superimposed” on the camera view, basic augmented reality simply has limited or no concept of the real world it is inhabiting. That Pikachu isn’t going to be hiding in the bushes and jump out because that digital object has absolutely no idea there is even a bush there to begin with.

Basic Terminology Map

| AR Spectrum |

<— VR --- Augmented Virtuality --- AR--- Mixed Reality --- Reality –>

Augmented Reality as a spectrum goes from:

1. Heads Up Display

all the way to

2. Pikachu just ran under my couch and Team Rocket just blew a hole in my living room wall to battle me (Mixed Reality)

And before you say that last one doesn’t even seem possible, it’s been done already as a demonstration by (of course) Microsoft and their HoloLens:

The other end of the AR Spectrum: Mixed Reality

Deliberate Ambiguities?

Maybe Nintendo just forgot to add the small print saying “Not actual in-game footage” to their promotional videos? Who knows… It’s a hype word that covers a large spectrum, much like using Virtual Reality is at the moment.

What the basic augmented world knows is simply the GPS location and your Compass reading, maybe some other MEMS data (Altimeter, Barometer, etc) which are more or less built into every smart-phone today. That’s pretty much it. Pikachu in “AR” is the bare minimum required to be augmented reality. Again, no worse than calling Google Glass augmented reality.

It works within the limited confines of your smart phone which isn’t using things like a Project Tango enabled phone (SLAM Mapping, RGB-D Depth Camera, etc) so Pikachu isn’t going to run under the couch or jump on the table anytime soon.

Now, Mixed Reality on the other hand, is the type of Augmented Reality that has full out immersion and likely has the sensors and equipment to actually have a full three dimensional understanding of the real world the digital world is inhabiting. Mixed Reality is when the Virtual World and Real World co-exist as one entity and the digital world can interact and act upon the real world (and vice versa).

By this understanding, then, an Air Force pilot using a Heads Up Display (again, similar to Google Glass) is also using a rudimentary form of Augmented Reality.

The underlying notion at the bare minimum level is “Does this technology superimpose information onto the real world?”

There’s no criteria in there about “is it immersive?”

For that criteria, we’re talking about Mixed Reality and not just Augmented Reality as the overarching catch-all. And since it’s a spectrum we’re not talking definitive but to what degree of immersion?

Pretty much none –> all the way to “I can’t tell the difference”

At the end of the day, it’s not about whether it is “Augmented Reality” but instead we should be asking “What is the quality of the experience within the spectrum?”

You can call both a Bugatti Veyron and a Power Wheels toy a “car”, and I think that’s what we really need to better understand.

Pokémon Go is closer to the Power Wheels toy end of the AR Spectrum while the commercials promoting the game are at the Bugatti Veyron (Mixed Reality) end of the spectrum.

Alright kids… Class Dismissed!

Every time I had to type Pokémon in this post, I had to go find that damned accent for the e. Feel free to tip me L$ in Second Life (Aeonix Aeon) to help pay for the therapy from this trauma.

Point & Click Adventure

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 02:24:00 +0000

The paradox of not moving in virtual reality

I’m not completely sold on the hype of Virtual Reality, as much as I really want to be. I believe it is a wonderful resurgence of technology and absolutely has a place in various circumstances, but it’s not a cure-all magic entertainment bullet like the industry keeps trumping it up to be.

For one, the motion sickness problem is still there.

I know, a lot of folks who have tried the Oculus and VIVE will say “But I didn’t get sick!” and you’re right. Absolutely, 100% unequivocally correct.

But therein is the problem. See, the reason you hardly get sick in VR with these headsets has less to do with the technology (though that does play a part), and more about the fact that instead of solving the problem, we’ve simply made it a point to avoid it.

Avoiding the problem isn’t the same thing as solving it. The problem is still there, but really we’re in this weird logic like owning a Ferrari and saying don’t actually drive it.

In the Oculus Best Practices document, they simply say that allowing the user to move around on their own should be avoided, and instead we should minimize the flow of movement. Of course, there’s the obligatory part about not forcing their camera view out of their control and such, but let’s focus on the main aspect here for the sake of this post.

The main issue is that there is a disconnect between what the eyes perceive as motion and what the inner ear is telling the brain about said lack of motion.

No amount of fancy HMD is going to fix that. No matter how well you can trick the visuals, you’ll always have the disconnect unless the user:

A. Walks on an omnidirectional treadmill
B. Isn’t allowed to freely move around

The industry at this juncture has chosen option B, which relegates a majority of VR experiences to a glorified Point and Click Adventure game from the 90s. A good example is Myst. It was roughly the same mechanic for movement… you pointed and clicked, then your view would fade to the new one scene by scene.

Of course, VR is more complex than that, but the analogy is the same. They’re not going to let you freely roam around anytime soon because you’d get sick almost 100% of the time the moment they do.

So we have the point and click teleport movement standard in VR today which neatly avoids the movement issue altogether without actually solving it.

Not really a solution so much as it is a blatant admission that the motion sickness problem wasn’t actually solved.

After all, Oculus games come with a “Comfort Rating” from Comfortable to Intense, with Intense being a high likelihood the game will make you lose your lunch (high motion, etc).

As eloquently explained on PC Invasion:

The comfort rating is a warning to people who may suffer from nausea, a physical response to the effects of VR that makes you sweat and then feel sick and disoriented. It’s extremely unpleasant as I have found out on many occasions on quite a few different VR systems in the past decade or so.

Oculus are covering their backs making sure users know there’s a real risk of a game being unplayable. There’s been no mention of refunds or a test period so owners should be aware and think hard before spending $60 on a game from the Oculus store.

In Second Life, you’d simply move from point A to B in a fluid motion. Unless you are travelling long distances (and then you would teleport). But in any game that allows free-form exploration for VR, you’re going to find this point and click movement mechanic. The ones that ignore the teleport movement mechanic are the ones you will almost certainly get sick using. Which is why a lot of people who used the Oculus headset for Second Life ended getting nauseous.

It’s really just the discontinuity between the movement you are seeing and your inner ear saying “Hey, we’re not moving… something is wrong”

So in order to truly have solved the VR Movement problem, we’re going to need something like this Walk Mouse omnidirectional treadmill.

That’s when we can start actually moving around in VR without getting sick. Otherwise, we’re relegated to the point and click VR adventure.

Then, of course, there is my personal beef with referring to 360 videos as “VR” because by god it simply is not virtual reality.

I think, in the grand scheme of things, what will kill the VR industry quickest will be companies looking to make a quick buck by calling their technology or product a VR product just to lend credence to it.

We’ll then end up with all kinds of gimmicks with “VR” in the name or “intended for VR use” when in all reality it’s a lot of quick fads at best. I consider 360 video one of those gimmicks – the lowest common denominator at best. I mean, look… we had that years ago. That’s the sort of thing that Myst actually used in the 90s (QTVR) which is really just a panorama video. Now, when it started, it was just a panorama viewer (still images), but later it allowed for video as well… the Myst games series used it extensively (as I recall) and there were video portions. It was still rudimentary, but you know… so was everything in 1995.

Of course, Myst IV was released in 2004, but still… it’s 2016 as of this writing, so the idea here is still a valid point to make.

Notice the player looking around?

To see it again making a comeback is cool and all, but I wouldn’t call it virtual reality. By doing so it actually cheapens the image of VR all over again.

The controllers for VR aren’t even a new idea either. Hate to be the bearer of bad news on that one. There was a similar wireless controller set for VR in the 1990s as well. It used a magnetometer to track the position.

There is, of course the Magnus VR Glove system currently in development, which to me is still a rehash of the Dataglove from VPL in the 1990s (Jaron Lanier), but still I would prefer a Dataglove over the VIVE or Oculus controllers simply because it would allow me to actually use my hands naturally.

Just in case i wanted to pick something up or manipulate things with actual detail and not pointing giant wands at it.

Ultimately though, the real eye opener about all of the advancements in VR is that the end-game is actually not virtual reality, but instead its cousin Mixed Reality.

Before this goes any farther, let’s take a moment to understand that Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality are not the same thing. A lot of folks tend to use the terms as interchangeable but they really aren’t.

Augmented Reality is not real world aware. It does not interact with the actual world in which the digital objects “reside”. In Mixed Reality, the digital objects are real world aware and can interact with the real world.

It’s the difference between overlaying a 3D version of Mario on a video feed, but it has no idea about the real world – in effect the video is just an inserted flat background, while Mixed Reality would allow Mario to jump on your couch and duck under the kitchen table.

As much as Pokemon Go! is a big hit now, it’s actually just Augmented Reality. The 3D Pokemon in the game are just overlaid on the background video but have no real idea about the surroundings (see the picture). Which is why we have so many hilarious Pokemon Go! pictures online now (Pokemon appearing in odd places).

But therein is the bigger picture. I am not totally against Virtual Reality… I just think it’s very nascent in implementation and has a lot of room to actually improve to solve the bigger issues (instead of trying to ignore them).

We could use a lot more intuitive control interfaces for VR that wireless sticks with buttons on them. The headsets could be wireless (and should be). Resolution per eye should be 1080 or higher, not 1080 total. We absolutely need to solve the motion sickness problem once and for all, and I believe a low cost, folding (for storage) omnidirectional treadmill platform would do this job nicely.

But in the end… again… all of those advancements are going to be utilized by Mixed Reality systems, which will end up just blowing the VR out of the water and would come with almost none of the motion sickness problems.

After all, you’re actually moving around in Mixed Reality, so there’s no treadmill needed. There are plenty of CV algorithms that can track your hands internally via built in cameras, which a Mixed Reality system would have natively to begin with. So all in all… I look forward to using Mixed Reality far more than Virtual Reality.

Who wouldn’t want to treat reality like Second Life?

Yeah… it would be amazing.

Oh, and by the way… I’m back =^-^=

Hiatus

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Thu, 07 Jul 2016 18:16:00 +0000

Hello blogger, my old friend…

As it has become obvious, I have taken an extended hiatus from blogging on the A3D site in order to pursue other projects and clear my mind for subjects to write about going forward.

I would like to extend a sincere apology for the abrupt departure after the December post The Gathering: Of Scissors, Candy and Conversation but it was unavoidable.

If all goes well, and my chaotic schedule normalizes, I would like to return to this blog and continue writing on a regular basis, A heartfelt thanks to those who have remained subscribed in my absence is in order, without you (my readers) I would be merely writing into the void. Though I’ve always written as though this were the case, regardless.

Please remain patient as I reorganize priorities and put this blog back on track (hopefully) bringing to you more of my musings and ramblings about the virtual reality industry and related materials in technology. I will note, however, that this will not only be my focus in writing.

Sometimes I just have some random thought experiments I’d like to explore further, some science fiction and fiction I’ve been working on, as well as a lot of interesting books I’ve been reading which I’d like to write commentary, and so this will also become the norm (if it hasn’t already over the years).

No, the blog isn’t “dead” so to speak.

Yes, I will be returning “soon” to pick up where we have left off.

~ Will

The reports of my death have been exaggerated…

The Gathering

noreply@blogger.com (Will Burns) — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 01:11:00 +0000

Of Scissors, Candy and Conversation

The rain was unrelenting as flickers of lightning illuminated an otherworldly figure of a petite, yet supernatural woman. As she fidgeted with her scissors and sized me up... it was apparent that the line of questioning elsewhere hadn’t been to her liking, and (as I recall) she has stabbed journalists for less in the past; Or she would have liked to if it weren’t for pesky laws which forbid it. Whether by careful planning or by judicial acquittal, she claimed innocence masterfully.

Running her delicate fingers over the scissors tucked into her pocket, I could see the intricacies of her mind turning over the consequences, shifting realities internally while weighing options.

When I had asked Bryn Oh for an interview, it had slipped my mind that she (of all people) could conjure at will the depths of imagination. So, too, she had transported me that night to a bare looking room cast in shadow and light to sit with her while trying my hand at this conversation.

Far below, willing participants in her Immersiva sim were exploring the latest installation, named simply “The Gathering”, fraught with danger and hidden treasure. For those willing to brave the onslaught of giant balls rolling to their doom, there was magic and intrigue to be discovered. I imagined that Bryn took a particular delight in watching the countless souls traverse up the valley, only to be rolled over and sent back for another try.

Flashes of electrified illumination cast shadows against the surface of soaked walls on occasion, briefly imprinting eerie doppelgangers of a horn-figured paradox. Outside, thunder crackled as if to mark the time, and Bryn coughed slightly while generously offering an unnerving smile. Her eyes piercing across the room, I rustled my notes hastily searching for where to begin.

“So before the winds changed and blew us off course in our prior conversation... you were about to tell me a story.” Barely looking up from the written words, I was keen to find any excuse not to be caught in her gaze.

Bryn raised an eyebrow and smirked, “I was?”. The outline of her fingers came to rest upon the handle of the scissors momentarily as I glanced up from the pages.

“If I recall... you were beginning to explain that the premise of The Gathering, as a whole, is an exploration about Avatar Identity.”, I stammered slightly under the pressure, though quickly regained my composure, “While not connected in a story, it has a shared theme?”

Bryn smiled softly, leaning back into the chair. Her hands now both in plain sight and animated as if to pull collected thoughts from the ether. “Oh... well that is a part of what I was interested in for this one, for all of them really. How to say...?”

A few moments passed in contemplative silence before the pale figure before me sprung back to life, the lightning flashing once again as if to pull her into the present reality.

“So when we go to a gallery we stand back from a painting and look at it in a fixed position while others stand around us in a physical space we share. We are are relatively close and generally from the same area.. the local city or country.” Leaning forward, she waved a hand gesturing toward the room and, as if obeying her whim, the projectors on the walls began to display scenes of art galleries to illustrate the premise.

“When we watch cinema we are not part of that experience either.” Pointing at the projections on the wall, Bryn continued, “It tells us a story and we listen. It’s about someone else who did this or that. They might show us a street of houses and the camera takes us to one, and if we want to stop to look in a mailbox... well no, we can’t.”

One after the other, the visions upon the walls morphed as she continued speaking, her finger occasionally outstretched and pointing as she leaned forward. For a brief moment, there was silence again as the rain continued falling; The individual drops of water rolled relentlessly down the walls, each claiming innocence for contributing to the flood below.

Tapping a slender finger pointedly on the glass of a surreal octopus table, it’s tentacles underneath cascading in collusion to balance the surface above, she continued, “In this space...we arrive from all over the world. The person beside you isn’t really beside you. They may be on the other side of the world, yet you share the experience together.”

“Even if you don’t speak you still interact, and when you run from the balls cascading down the valley.. or stand in the rain room or look at the projectors, you are a part of the work as are they. So the artwork is not just what I’ve built but everything in it at that time.. including the avatars and how they were designed, etc.”

“So when I look at this build, it’s kind of play. Other works are elaborate narratives which I write and plan out for months, but every so often I just want to play and experiment. That is more what this is.. a big sketch in a sketchbook which may give me ideas for other things.”

Sinking further into my chair, I continued to take notes. The cushions underneath me were exceedingly comfortable, and somehow despite the torrential downpour inside this room, we remained dry.

“When I built it...”, Bryn paused momentarily to softly close her eyes, “I imagined how it would be used by the avatars who came. But it was built with nobody here... so you really do have to try imagining [all of the possibilities in advance]. Now that the installation is live, filled with participants, I kind of cam around and look at what happens. I might see a few people rushing across the field avoiding the giant balls... and then along the walls people walking up every surface.. then the odd person flying a chair. The fun is seeing people do things I didn’t expect.”

It was in this moment when my interest was further piqued, and I took the opportunity to lead in further, “What sorts of things do you notice them doing which you didn't expect?”

“Well often just little visual things.”, setting a cup of tea onto the table she continued, “Like the other day I saw a giant dragon on its hind legs running like a maniac across the valley, which was hilarious. I don’t even think the guy who used it knew it could run. And then I saw another person walking up a tiny pole.. and they went up it like a corkscrew circling and circling until they got to the top. I saw people with the wall walkers on trying to walk through the house that builds itself. I hadn’t thought of that when building the installation.”

“That must have been... awkward to attempt.” I mused.

“Yeah, but they seemed to enjoy it...”, I could see the gleam in her eyes as she delivered a reply. It was the dynamics of the situation which interested her the most and it showed through Bryn’s enthusiasm.

“I wonder how the walker poseball would handle that? Walking up walls that haven’t even fallen into place yet.” I continued.

Bryn laughed, “It looked pretty crazy. It’s also interesting to see how many people get naked publically in the projector room, and who is modest. That comes back to identity and how we project onto our avatars. Anyway, to me it’s fascinating to just watch the whole thing... not sure if anyone else shares this interest, but I like to watch.”

Her laughter broke the tension, and so I joined in with my own quip to lighten the mood. “And here I thought you just were looking for an excuse to get everyone to take off their clothes. I can see it now, ‘Ok, for this next exhibit... everyone has to get naked... C'mon... off with it...’”, I joked.

“Well, the projections do work best with the nude body... or white clothes.”, Bryn leaned back into her chair again, a wry smile crossing her lips. “Did you get naked, Will?”

Without hesitation, I responded, “Nope.”

Bryn feigned surprise, “Oh? Why not?”

“Avatar identity of course. My avatar is a projection of my real life self in here and so it shares the same idiosyncrasies and quirks. My own sense of morality and modesty is imbued in my persona.”

Playing Devil’s advocate, Bryn leaned forward cunningly, “It’s just pixels...”

“In much the same way as your Bryn Oh avatar doesn't moonlight as a stripper in a night-club, I’d imagine there are two trains of thought for avatar identity.”

Bryn leaned back into her chair. Sitting crossed legged she feigned confusion for a moment as she rested her chin to her hands, “And how do you know she doesn’t?”

“If you did, God knows my pixel ass would be there in a heartbeat because it would be a once in a lifetime event.” I continued jesting.

“Well that what’s interesting. Many of us cherish our avatar... identify with it as an extension of self. It carries with it the same sort of behaviors, morality and social restrictions that we carry in real life.”, Bryn smiled again. She knew she was toying around as a devil’s advocate, but it helped for her to clarify the situation and get us thinking.

Shifting my notes, I found similarities in how the conversation was progressing and those which I’ve had before with others.

“There was a similar minded conversation between myself and Dr. Gilbert over at Loyola Marymount University a few years back. He heads the P.R.O.S.E. project; Psychological Research On Synthetic Environments.”, I continued.

Bryn piped in, “Oh, he liked virtual strippers too?”

I couldn’t help but smile, “Well there is a reasoning there but I'll get to it in a moment. He and I discussed that a lot of the time it comes down to two trains of thought for the virtual world participant.

1. Avatar as entirely generated persona. It's just pixels.

There's not attachment or solid identity... no emotional connection to the avatar. In that case, a lot of those avatars as "persona" become expendable.

2. Avatar as extension of persona.

You get an attachment and personal empathetic investment in your avatar.”

“Yes, I think in Second Life many are like that.” Bryn replied. “But let me ask you: If they take off their clothes in public in the projector room... are they more immersive or less?”

It took me a few moments to really mull this question over. It’s a complex and layered situation to really take in... quite a profound rebuttal from the pixelated spectre sitting across from me.

“I believe neither.”

“Maybe it just comes down to their personality type?” Bryn continued.

“I believe it says more about their perspective on the representation of self in a virtual world than it does about how immersed they are. Either way, you are immersed... but in what direction of perspective scale defines what is different.”, I elaborated further. “Whether we are immersed or not wasn’t necessarily the question”, I continued. “The manner in which you approach your avatar identity only defines how the experience is translated to your particular situation. Each is just as immersive in it’s own way.”

Bryn took a few moments to really let what I had said sink in. As the dust settled in her mind, it became apparent that the purpose of such a question was merely to explore an outside perspective. “Hmm, that’s interesting. I was curious in a way...”

“I put out a note saying to take off their clothes... so they are given permission. ”She paused mid-sentence, “I can’t seem to frame this...how best to explain?”

“You set up a Bryn Oh nudist colony?”, I laughed.

The lighting in the room cast an ethereal hue on Bryn’s smile as she continued, “For some, they might never do that... but they might long to. But with permission and encouragement they can bypass their identity as modest and do something they want to...”, she paused momentarily, the look of subtle disappointment crossing her face. “Yeah, I didn’t explain that well...”

Nodding in encouragement, I offered my own insight.

“I understand. It's sort of like...”

A few moments passed as I paused to collect my thoughts.

“Yoko Ono did that once to Conan O'Brien. It was many years ago, so my recollection may be a bit foggy, but he had her on the show one night and asked if she had anything interesting to show off... a project or whatever. So she had this very large silk bag which she said was big enough for two people. And asked him to get inside it with her. It was an exercise of trust, as she put it, and one of the performance pieces she would do.”

Bryn laughed out loud. The relative absurdity of the situation coupled with the inevitability for what was about to happen in the story began to take shape in her mind.

“Of course, he did... but was like ‘I don't know why I got into show business...’. So they both get in this giant silk bag and they are both kneeling in it together. You can't see them, but you can see the shape of them in the bag together. Conan goes ‘ok, now what? and Yoko says something like ‘Now we take off our clothes’.”

It’s at this point, Bryn is genuinely amused at the situation unfolding. Leaning onto her hands in a cross-legged fashion, she listens intently.

“So Yoko just starts stripping inside the bag, and tossing clothes out of the hole onto the stage. Each time, asking Conan to do the same. The entire premise, according to her, was what he would be comfortable doing while inside that bag with her.”

“Oh, that’s great!” Bryn exclaimed.

“Throughout the process, Yoko Ono and Conan are stopping to negotiate what he’ll take off next, and while he puts on a great show with bravado, you know full well he’s really nervous whispering with Yoko about what he’s going to take off - So it turned into this negotiation of what Conan would take off in the bag each step of the way.”

Laughing, Bryn questioned, “Did he?”

“I think Yoko got him down to his pants when he stopped and they left the bag.” I replied.

“I really like that idea...”, Bryn mused.

“So your projector situation... and premise.. reminded me of that.”

Reaching for her tea, Bryn sat back again in the chair and stretched out her legs playfully. “To release inhibitions when there is permission, and "art" is a great excuse. To term it art...”

“See... now I'm just imagining you running around buck ass naked and throwing an orgy - ‘It's not obscene... it's ART... now moan harder, ladies!’” I offered. The thought of being able to get away with pretty much anything so long as you called it “Art” was compelling, and often rang true.

For a moment or two, Bryn paused in reflection as if grasping at an association floating through the air, “There have been some people... art crowd bloggers... asking if the gathering is ‘Art’...”, she trailed off.

“Is the Gathering... Art? That's a good question.”, I began. “But maybe it can be answered by asking other questions. ‘Did it make you feel something? Did the experience invoke emotion or contemplative reflection?’”

Bryn nodded gently, “I believe the term ‘art’ has lost all its meaning really...”

“I think.. a lot of the time.. art is simply what makes you feel.”, I offered.

“Well, some want to see something that looks like "real life" art. That’s then how they will know it is art.” she continued.

Shrugging and taking a sip of my juice, I replied, “That's a very limited scope for art then. In the virtual world you can do so much more... without the constraints of real life.”

“Yes, and the virtual space need not follow those rules.”, Bryn added.

“Your self-building house just isn't possible in real life. It's kinetic art and it is magnificent. It plays on the very reliance of the dynamic personal experience to work. I believe that art in a virtual sense... can be far more empowering and fantastic than traditional space. But maybe it has to be... to make up for the loss of tangibility? Virtual worlds cater to an emotional type of tangibility. The experience is all psychosomatic, but it's just the same as powerful in many respects (if not more).”

“Yes, and there are many types of art here too... For me, I am interested in the immersive abilities of the medium. What I kind of like about virtual spaces, is that people come here and fall in love with other minds. How to explain...”

Tapping her fingers on the table, the glass echoed throughout the room. It was plain to see that Bryn was really struggling to put this into perspective.

“In real life...”, she began, “We go out on a Friday, hoping to meet someone. We go to a club...It’s dark so we can’t see others very well. It’s loud with music so we can’t talk to others we meet. We drink, smoke pot or whatever so we are not quite ourselves and this is where we try to find people to share ourselves with. But in a virtual space we don’t see each other or know even what gender we speak to... we just talk and listen. It’s poetic, really...”

“Well... I've long since given up fighting pronouns with you... I just chose female for the sake of sanity in addressing and writing about you.”, I smirked.

Without missing a beat, Bryn replied, “I am pretty sure you are a muffin...”

It was at this moment that I noticed very keenly how Bryn had begun fidgeting with her scissors again.

Suffice it to say, the conversation went off the record and the issue of avatar identity took a personal turn for a few minutes.

Changing the subject quickly, and saving my own skin from a fateful visit from the scissors, the conversation (however ironically) pivoted to that of the Scissor Moth.

“Where was the inspirational spark for the Scissor Moth chapel, and the moths in general for this?”

With a gleeful grin, Bryn’s hand glided gently from her scissors and back within eyesight as she began to expound upon the details of a topic which she so loved.

“Well, to start I love moths. They fly like they are broken and that appeals to me. So the story is essentially, and this is just how I envisioned it as I built it, but I imagined a town where suddenly these giant balls started to appear and smash everything along the valley. The side streets survive and people continue. The balls become a part of their life, and then over time they begin to worship them. If you checked, you would find each ball has the name of an angel. Across the way is a chapel with the Scissor Moth...”

“I believe I was too busy running from them for my life, like everyone else...”

“Yes, wise not to stop..” Bryn smiled.

Eager not to allow the conversation to idle, lest her wandering hand return to the comfort of her scissors, I continued forward. “Ok, Scissor Moth... This intrigues me. How does that work itself into the the overall thinking?”

“If you click the moth priest, there is a machinima inside called Scissors which is related to the theme...”

“I must have originally missed the video link while taking pictures. I did find quite a lot, however, even what seemed like... a giant fossilized prehistoric moth skeleton on the top. At that point, with all of the moths, I just assumed it was a prehistoric mega moth skeleton.”, I gently chuckled.

“I did also see the tiny Juniper toy ... and as a kitten I was all like ‘Yay! A tineh Imogen play set!’ But I was adulting that night, so I resumed the photoshoot.”

“Yep, that was by the hidey hole.”, she nodded.

“I see Milkdrop made an appearance in this installation as well... walking a giant moth.”

“Yes he did. I am still slowly flushing out his character, putting in various spots and kind of feeling out his personality I guess.”, The pale figure shifted her position on the couch.

“I find it curious - at least from my personal perspective. I mean with...”, I trailed off.

It’s then that I noticed Bryn fondling her scissors again lovingly. Casually snipping away at the air at some unseen fabric and humming a soft tune, swaying back and forth with her eyes closed before snapping her gaze into my eyes intently.

“I’m sorry, Will... you were saying?”, her lips curling in an evil little smile.

“Nothing... not a damned thing. You know me... I'm always spotting details and making connections...”, I laugh nervously as Bryn laid the scissors squarely on the table with a hollow clink where I could see them. A subtle reminder not to venture too far for the public.

“I came up with the name for the character on a whim. Just sounds nice... a little drop of milk.”, Bryn smiled broadly as she gazed first to the scissors, and then to me. She had made her point crystal clear.

“M..M..Milkdrop...isn't that... some sort of drink? Korean or something?”, I stammered.

“Oh, no... but actually... someone told me it is a candy... an old one. Kind of like a Milkdud.”

“See that ... makes sense, and also makes me want to find that candy. Of course I had the same problem with Petri Wine. After listening to Sherlock Holmes on radio shows in the 1930s... and so forth... their sponsor was Petri Wine. I ended up eventually going ‘Ok, I feel like I need to try some of this wine now’”

Bryn tilted her head slightly to the side before a look of understanding crossed her face, and in a moment... she was pulling the top off of an antique candy dish set on the table. I hadn’t noticed it before, but then maybe I had been preoccupied with the scissors and the petite woman sitting across from me to have... or more likely it seems that, (like everything else), Bryn had taken it upon herself to materialize what she desired.

“Care for a Milkdrop candy, Will?” Bryn smiled. “I’d hate to be a terrible host...”

“Oh, that’s quite alright. You’ve been nothing but gracious, Bryn... I couldn’t possib-”

“I’d hate....”, Bryn began as she deliberately eyed the scissors, “to be a terrible host. I’d feel quite badly if I were, and you wouldn’t want that... right? Now hold out your hand.”

I shook my head slowly and held out my hand as Bryn requested, in which she placed a single Milkdrop candy. It was when I placed it in my mouth that the candy dish disappeared and Bryn smiled warmly before continuing.

“People won’t let you play... There is pressure to always create a new work that is bigger and better than the last one. From Rabbicorn, Standby, Anna’s Many Murders, Virginia Alone, Imogen and the Pigeons, Singularity of Kumiko, Obedience, Lobby Cam and so on. The Gathering is kind of playing, learning and experimenting.”

“There's always a pressure though in a public light. They expect you to constantly be doing bigger and better things... one-upping your last thing.”

Bryn nodded in agreement, “Yes, which is not so easy.”

“It gets tiring trying to keep up appearances...”, I added.

“Well the sensible ones understand, I find. They understand the process.” Bryn settled back into her seat before smiling warmly and patting the cushion next to her on the couch. “Why don’t you come over here for a bit? It’ll be easier that way.”

Slowly, but surely, I rose to my feet and shuffled around the octopus tentacles to the couch before finally settling in next to her.

“Please, continue...”, she smiled.

“I mean.. for me.... I couldn't even fathom how to outdo stuff I've done. I think that's why I sorta fell back into the obscurity and enjoyed it. There's only so much I could do... and the constant spotlight and expectation was too much.”, the tentacles on the table continued shifting the weight of the glass surface elegantly from one to the other before us.

Bryn leaned a little closer, her gaze carving my mind to pieces, “Yes, I can imagine...”

“At one point I was like... juggling constant interviews, Metaverse TV once a week, making all sorts of appearances, talking with students... trying to write the blog consistently and so forth. It got to be totally overwhelming.”

“What kind of tea do you drink, Will?”, Bryn offered as she began pouring.

“Well, I’m not really a big tea drin-”

“Have some tea...” she smiled, graciously handing me the cup.

Taking a sip of my tea, I continued, “Sometimes you need a break to let your mind rest. Just be normal for a while and not trying to beat expectations. Time to putz around with what things interest you... and not because it is part of some bigger master plan.”

The lights in the room made their way around again, casting our shadow against the soaked walls as Bryn continued to smile. Nodding in agreement, she added, “Oh, I mainly do that... just experiment whenever I can.”

“That's why I play around with the arcade machines and stuff now. It's interesting from an intellectual standpoint... to learn about them... but it's not a part of anything officially... just me enjoying an intellectual curiosity and learning.”, I added.

“Yes, almost relaxing...” Bryn once again closed her eyes and leaning back into the cushions, took a sip from her tea with a smile.

“So tell me about the sketches. Being a sort of independent thought process... that seemed to kick start it all. I remember when you were starting with it... and you wanted to show me the sketches, get my opinion. Was it just a sort of ... musing at the time... a little short story?”

“Well those began when I was commissioned to create pen and ink drawings for a coffee table book. They liked my paintings but wanted pen and ink. So I was like.. ‘Yeah, I can do that’, not really ever having done it before. It’s quite different from conte, pencil or charcoal etc. So I began researching master pen and ink people. George Cruikshank, John Tenniel, even drawings by Van Gogh, and discovered illustrations from Edward Gorey.”

“By researching, you mean ‘Finding them and absorbing their talent’?”, I smirked.

Bryn laughed, “You make me sound like a creature from space. A 1950's horror movie.”

“If I'm gonna imagine you as a mystical pandimensional artist... might as well give you magical abilities while I’m at it...”, I chuckled.

“Well I just really studied how they created space. So with pen and ink.. well traditional pen and ink... you buy nibs.. which are metal ends you stick in holders. You dip them into an ink jar and get a bit.. then take it to the paper and draw until that little blob runs out... and you dip and so on back and forth for hours. Then after two hours, a big blob of ink falls on your drawing and you swear and throw it away, then start again. For me it came from being ink greedy... I wanted to draw longer so I would try to load up the nib with a big blob of ink. Comes back to haunt you eventually...”, Bryn laughed.

“Is it wrong that I'm sitting here imagining you pouring over a page for hours and suddenly screaming ‘DAMN IT!’?”

“That’s not far off. Perhaps more foul language than that, though...”, she laughed.

“Birds flying off in the distance as your cursing echoes through the alleyways?”

“Yeah, it’s super annoying. So those drawings were studies, learning how to do it. And the poems were influenced by Edward Gorey as I was studying his work too. So then I did the coffee table book but had these studies that really came out well and didn’t know what to do with them... So I thought I would bring them into Second Life and make them into 3d scenes that felt like crosshatch drawings. It’s essentially just a little whimsical story that reflects how I feel when I am at my art openings...I am the bird creature.”, Bryn laughed softly, a smile caressing her pale face in the lighting.

“Poking the ham? That's really interesting actually...”

“Yep .. they spoke of religion and politics quite heatedly.. while Bryn Oh poked the ham repeatedly.”

“I won’t even make a lewd joke out of that one... you walked into it. But that raises an important premise. One would think that you are not invisible in your own installations...Or that people try to ignore you? Maybe they do.... I do notice that. For all the people who show up in here... Few really strike up conversation with you or approach.”

“Yes, not often. But it’s more than people posture...”, Bryn replied.

“Strangely enough, I can sympathize. I've actually had that quite often in real life too and people... well they have this internalized notion about you. You're on a pedestal of sorts and unapproachable to them and even when you make it a point to show them otherwise... they can't see past it. It's always been a fascination to me to see that. Persona and circumstance overshadows the reality of you as a person, I believe.”

“That’s very possible...”

The hours wiled away through the evening as Bryn and I continued our discussion, talking about things like we normally would. Occasionally poking fun at each other, or just musing about different things going on in life. The one thing I can say for certain about Bryn Oh is that – while we can project the sort of person she is onto her avatar... we can produce an internalized ideal of who this person is, we often forget that behind the avatar is just a person...

Nothing mystical or magical about Bryn... but there is a bit of humbleness, a reluctance to brag, and overall... I get the impression she is a very kind person who enjoys humor (sometimes dark and twisted). There is a certain level of brilliance involved, a creative genius at odds internally with ideas and implementations.

So I’ll leave you, my dear reader, with a final thought:

Fame is millions of people having the wrong idea about who you are. Sometimes people forget... you’re only human.