Andromeda Media Group

Challenge Accepted

2012-02-13T03:31:00.001-05:00

Dating in #SecondLife and the value of Authenticity.

It’s been some time since I stepped back into the “dating” scene of Second Life, or more appropriately, trying really hard to reconcile reality against the virtual. Being an INTJ personality type isn’t exactly the best starting point for me, because I’m a no nonsense sort of person and honesty is a big deal to me. As a matter of course, honesty will almost always win out against any other situation I could be presented, no matter how much I would like to overlook it.

I think the reason for this is fairly straightforward, in that there is this preconceived notion that a virtual world is just pixels, and can be treated like such. I know first hand that this isn’t true, and that anyone who attempts to reconcile this differently is setting themselves up for drama and severe heartache in the long run. I usually call this the “honeymoon” phase of virtual worlds relationships, because they tend to explode spectacularly in the long run regardless of how great it was in the short term.

I liken it to the scenario that Vaynerchuk said in his keynote about social media – that businesses fail at social media because they are acting like a 19 year old trying to close the transaction on the first date – they are treating it like a sprint and not a marathon. More time spent in planning the wedding than any consideration on the actual marriage.

I would like to tell you a story, and it is a story that is deeply heartfelt and meaningful to me. I’m usually not the sort of guy that gets all choked up or emotional, so this is going to be a rare glimpse of me that you are unlikely to see often.

Years ago, when I first got into virtual worlds, I ran into a woman named Daphne (Active Worlds name). Now, I’m not entirely certain if Daphne was really her name, but to me it didn’t matter. What transpired between her and I wasn’t romantic in the least, but more of a very deep and emotional connection, a relationship that really shaped me as a person going forward. Daphne was what we could call today my first virtual worlds “mom”. We see a lot of “families” in Second Life today, but I’m never quite sure that they have the same meaning and depth that Daphne had for me when I was younger. I knew her for a number of years, and by her guidance and patience, she became a second mother to me in a virtual sense, but also in a very real sense.

This is what I mean when I say that pixels and emotions aren’t the same thing. No matter how much we try to set those boundaries up front, emotions never listen to our silly rules.

After a number of years, I grew up from a teenager and even as a young adult, Daphne was still considered my virtual mom. One day, well.. the most heartbreaking experience that I have ever felt in a virtual and real sense happened.

Daphne had passed away.

I will be honest with you when I say that just thinking about it right now has me choking up. I am as heartbroken and remorseful now as I am about the murder of my step-sister London, and the loss of multiple family members over the past few years – all have the same impact on me, and when I really think about any of them, it is hard for me not to cry. She meant that much to me as a human being, a mentor, and so much more than words could ever describe. I wish today that I hadn’t lost the chance to tell her these things before she passed away – how much she meant to me, how her being in my life (even virtually) had an immeasurable impact on who I am today. I am a better person today because of her, and because of Daphne, I may be spoiled when it comes to virtual worlds because from that point on, I always chose authenticity over the fantasy.

I had lost the chance forever to tell her how much she meant to me and how much I truly and deeply did appreciate her being in my life. I’d be much lesser of a man today if she hadn’t been there when she was.

Going forward, I chose an equally fitting way to always remember Daphne in that many years later, I still have her name on my in-world contacts list in Active Worlds. I absolutely refuse to remove her name from that list, because I never want to forget her or what she has done for me in my life. I believe it is the best and most fitting thing I could do under the circumstances, and while so many people have forgotten her in the virtual world, I choose to never forget.

Later on, I also ran into Magz in Active Worlds who, at the time, was running a world called ViperX. She became my virtual world mother from that point on, and she has had the same impact on my life that Daphne has had. I’ve known Magz since I was about 17 years old, and I am turning 33 in April. Magz was and is a reaffirmation to me that emotion and deeper meaning in virtual worlds, so much that it changes you in real life and makes you want to be better, to aspire to cast away shallow behavior, is completely possible.

Magz is in Second Life now as Magzee Yootz, and even when I was younger she has had health problems. Being young and foolish, I’ve always spent a lot of my life caught up in myself or my own pursuits, too much to really look up and really accept what people truly mean to me, but thinking about Daphne the other day really hit home. Magz isn’t getting any younger, and I really don’t believe her health is getting any better. There will come a day when she will simply no longer log in, and I will never see her again.

This time, however much it would break my heart to see her pass away, I intend to tell her how much she has meant to me in my life before that happens. How immeasurable her involvement has been in making me who I am today. I’ve missed that chance countless times already with people who have been close to me, either in a virtual sense or a physical sense, and I won’t lie when I say I am wiping the tears from my eyes as they stream down my face as this reality hits me. People in my life who have either passed away or have left my life for various reasons… all are missed opportunities to tell them how much I loved them, and how grateful I am and was for them to be in my life.

This reality, virtual or physical, hits me deeper than I can ever find words for.

This authenticity breaks my heart when measured against the frivolity that I see in virtual worlds.

Authenticity is what I expect from all people in my life. I was taught to be a better person by people who are in and out of the virtual world, and who understood the meanings that really connecting with people will have. I have been taught, over the course of my life in a very personal and real way, that emotions and deeper meaning will supersede in our lives regardless of the boundaries we put up to restrict that.

In a virtual world, the people behind the avatars are very real and so are their emotions. If you are in a virtual world only as an escape or fantasy, then it is inevitable that over time your pixel boundaries will be completely and unremorsefully shattered. Reality is a cruel master indeed and doesn’t care about your fantasy, or what you are pretending to be to yourself or to others.

It is never a matter of if, but simply a matter of when.

As I have been “dating”, what I have come across disheartens me to no end. I am, for the most part, disappointed in the virtual world – but more generally I am wholly disappointed in ourselves for letting the virtual world represent something that is shallow, dishonest, hollow, and cruel. I am heartbroken that we continually pursue these things hoping to find something we are missing in ourselves, only to find that the honeymoon is over so soon. We have the choice and ability to make virtual environments into what we choose them to be, and I believe for the most part that we have chosen poorly – with few shining examples to the contrary. I believe that this balance is wrong, and should be reversed.

More often than not we are dishonest with ourselves and with others in order to facilitate a short term illusion, when I know for a fact that the power is within our own hands to make that instead into a long term reality with far deeper meaning. We can touch each other’s hearts with such meaning and immeasurable intentions – even when that person is thousands of miles away, but we more often than not choose to put up a boundary – we separate our real lives from our second lives as avatars.

This is where the problem begins, because no matter what, you are always the real person behind the persona – regardless of whatever fantasy you are playing out in-world. We start on that foundation and artificial boundary and act surprised when emotions and matters of the heart never respect those boundaries. We cannot control what we feel for others, and when emotions run deep, no amount of pixels are going to take away that meaning.

In order to find a better Second Life, we must begin by finding a better First Life. Our virtual selves will not offer the salvation we are seeking if we are not first, and foremost, honest and accepting of our first lives and willing to live them better instead of constructing an illusion to compensate. Conversely, it is for the rest of us to learn that we must also be accepting of others as well if they are willing to be authentic with you.

Authenticity implies that we are being real, and that we are not trying to substitute an illusion for reality when it truly counts. We must be accepting of our own realities before we should ever try to include others in it. This means, whether we like it or not, that in order to find what we are looking for – true and honest acceptance, we have to be honest with ourselves before we can be honest with others.

I see a lot of married women in Second Life, looking for relationships. This is dishonest to me, because it involves affairs of the heart under the constraint that we somehow believe that we have any control over whether or not we can keep our emotions from running deeper. This is both a lie to ourselves and a lie by consensus between two or more parties because if you are going through the motions of a relationship, the heart will make no distinction if it is being honest.

If you can separate this and keep the emotions from running deeper, then you really aren’t being honest to begin with in your intentions, and the relationship doesn’t mean a thing. In the most literal sense, you are simply using people. This is why it is not uncommon to find people with many alternate accounts in a virtual environment, because they are for the explicit purpose of lying by omission to people. You are in one alt with your partner, while using your other alts to be a different person altogether either for yourself or while including others under this false premise, and I never really believed that this was a fair or honest thing to do in real life, let alone a virtual life.

I know many will tell me that this is just a “lifestyle” – but it is a lifestyle that has all the hallmarks of total collapse over time. We can’t expect to enter into any relationship, romantic or otherwise, on false premise and expect anything but the truth to come out eventually and destroy the fantasy we’ve so carefully constructed. This is the root of our drama in virtual worlds – not so much that we’re deceiving others but more that we have become accustomed to deceiving ourselves.

Sure, a virtual world is just pixels and we can even say it’s just a game or fantasy. But we’ll never escape the fact that behind those pixels happens to be very real people with very real emotions and very real lives.

When it comes right down to it, virtual environments aren’t about saving a princess in a castle like in Super Mario Bros. but instead, saving each other for real.

Again, we’re back to understanding authenticity and that we are doing a very bad job at saving ourselves and others. We’re acting selfish in an environment that really begs for us to be selfless and truly caring.

All of this really breaks my heart because we’re running a sprint when our hearts are demanding a marathon. This is most present in the dating scene of virtual worlds, because the most common thing I have read in these profiles are that they are looking only for SL relationships.

We’re belittling our virtual reality and the experience on purpose when it can be so much more.

I’ve been to in-world marriages where two people recite wedding vows, and at least one of those people are being serious while the other is married and just treating affairs of the heart like another game to be played.

That’s just cruel…

Reality is harsh, but virtual reality isn’t going to give you actual acceptance unless you’ve fixed what you think is wrong with your real life first. You can run from real life all you want, and you can live a string of escapist fantasies to try and compensate, but it will catch up to you, and quite often does after awhile.

I choose authenticity in my real life and virtual life, because I know that reality will have the final say no matter what I believe to the contrary. I’ve chosen to fix my real life before having a second one, because that is the level of honesty we all need to have if we’re going to change our meaningless experience in virtual worlds into something far deeper and meaningful.

I’m honest with myself, so I can be honest with you – whether I am an avatar or whether I am face to face with you. I’ll accept nothing less than a meaningful experience in my virtual life because I know it will touch me deeply in my real life and even be interchangeable at some point.

So this is my status update for “dating” in Second Life:

I’m still single because I’m demanding more of myself, in order to be honest with others, and I expect nothing less from others in the process. I may have set the bar too high, I may be stronger in my convictions, or I may just be standing on a soapbox… but either way, I hold out hope for a better reality, and it starts with being a better person for real.

I don’t expect that I’ll find true love in the virtual world, because I have only met one single person in all my years in virtual worlds that I would consider true love and worth my time. It is a total and inconceivable miracle that she existed, even for the time she and I were together, and I know that the likelihood of lightning striking twice is small indeed – especially when the entire virtual world is filled with people looking for a fantasy.

Despite that, however, I believe that true love does exist and it can be so electrifying that even lightning will strike twice if given the honest chance.

I believe this because I know that even the virtual can be real, if we let it and are truly honest with each other. I found what I was looking for once before, and I know it is possible to find it again if I continue to look. I’m not so much “dating” as I am simply waiting for an honest woman again.

I know she’s out there if I am patient. In the meantime -

If we want a better Second Life, we have to start by making a better First Life.

Who Ya Gonna Call? Ghost Writers!

2012-02-08T21:34:00.001-05:00

Linden Lab looks for guest bloggers, finds laughter instead. #SecondLife

Are you a passionate Second Life resident who loves to write about your Second Life experience and are looking for exposure for your own existing blog? Looking for a way to connect with other bloggers and open your door to new Second Life community readers? If so, you might want to submit an original blog post (no links please) to us and it could end up being featured in the Second Life Community blogs.

As the movers, shakers, and experts on everything Second Life, we’d like to invite you to submit your original blog articles to us at blog-call@lindenlab.com with the Subject Line: Guest Blog Submission. Selected submissions will be posted to the Blog section of the Community as a featured guest post!

Dear Linden Lab – My laptop in-world sucks less than yours. I’m actually blogging from it.

If you’ve been paying attention, Linden Lab recently put out a call for guest posts from the prominent bloggers in the community, and as much as I’d love to give them kudos for trying, I have to concede that the response they received from the community was expected.

It’s about ecosystem and the community of sharing, and on this point Linden Lab dropped the ball very publicly. We live in a world of content creation and sharing, and we take pride in our blogs because these blogs represent our freedom of expression and ideas on not just the virtual world but also all the things that go with it. We’re the Digerati because we’ve been so diligent in building our own brand and avatar presence, not because we’ve been busy building it for somebody else. That’s the lesson about Second Life – It’s not about Linden Lab, it’s about us, and every time Linden Lab acts selfish in this regard the community calls them on it.

This isn’t to be mean spirited, either… it’s just the way it is in this media-as-commodity society and prosumer culture. I’ll post a video at the end of this for you (and for Linden Lab) to thoroughly explain what the hell is going on, and how they (and you) can benefit going forward.

It wasn’t so much the offer from Linden Lab that made me laugh, but the guidelines and constraints they set for submissions -

If you would like to submit a guest post for the Second Life Blog, please consider these guidelines. Only submissions that meet these criteria will be considered for publishing.

All selected posts must adhere to our Community Participation Guidelines.
All selected posts should support the inclusiveness of the Second Life community.
Selected posts must not include marketing-related links and must not be entirely self-promotional.
The post may include links to your website and blog in a brief author’s bio (approximately 3 sentences), which will be published at the end of the guest post.
Please limit the number of images included in your submission to 4 or less.
We reserve the right to review and edit. We regularly edit posts by our contributors and guest bloggers.
Guest posts must be original and may not have been published elsewhere online already.

I’ve put the offending terms in bold for which I would believe the most astute of bloggers who would be of any interest in this co-op posting would disagree with. We’re capable of editing our own content, and aside from minor edits, I’m not comfortable with a third party reconfiguring what I have said behind closed doors to suit their own needs. More importantly, the last requirement flat out misses the point of the sharing atmosphere and community which it is soliciting responses from – in that you are being asked to write content, without compensation of any kind, that Linden Lab can freely edit and manipulate as they see fit, and to top it all off, they demand that the content you are writing is exclusive to them alone.

This would exclude simultaneously posting the same article on your own blog, and to wit, makes you little more than a ghost writer for a company that is looking for free SEO content to fill their blog roll.

Like many blogs, this blog carries a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license (or a variation of Creative Commons). This means you are free to repost my blog posts in full or in part anywhere you would like, as long as you give me attribution and as long as you aren’t charging people to read it or making money on it. This does not mean I endorse you, your blog or magazine, or anything you say. It simply means you are free to share what I’m saying here with little restriction. The choice of license does not necessarily exclude commercial use of my work, but it does require that you seek written permission from me to have that constraint waived.

In stark contrast, Linden Lab is immediately shooting themselves in the foot by demanding the exclusivity of submitted articles, which is a direct violation of what many established bloggers adhere by. In the event that exclusivity is required, the next logical question from any blogger is going to be –

What’s in it for me? I mean… why should I write for you?

For this question, Linden Lab gives no substantial answer other than they assert promotion of your own blog, which to me sounds a lot like the website client that says they’ll pay you for making them look good by putting a little by-line on the bottom of the page to promote you.

No self-respecting website designer would agree to those terms, and no self-respecting blogger of any merit would agree to those terms either.

The bigger issue with all of this is that the very idea of exclusivity and tight constraints in a digital media ecosystem is a direct contradiction to the ecosystem itself – in a world of sharing, Linden Lab is asking for permission only to take and gives nothing back, and by association alone are showing that they are thinking like a traditional company that simply does not understand social media.

Despite all of this, however, I’d like to offer a better solution for everyone – far be it that I should be the Debbie Downer for Linden Lab’s hopes of building an army of bloggers willing to write stuff for them with little or no incentive.

Instead of asking for bloggers to submit content specifically for Linden Lab to publish exclusively, if they were truly interested in celebrating the diversity of culture and opinion in their community, they would instead be asking for their community of bloggers to be submitting posts from their own blogs to be reposted on the Linden blog in a celebration and expose’ of their community and wide reach. Any editing that is done to those submissions should be done in a transparent manner with the actual writer, because the writers themselves are the creative force behind what is being said on those posts – what they are saying is very deliberate and intentional.

For those of you into social media (and that’s probably quite a lot of you) the following video from Gary Vaynerchuk should be highly interesting and informative. This video should also be considered homework for the people at Linden Lab to take notes on.

It’s time to learn what a prosumer is all about–this is worth every single minute of watching it. Trust me.

Seriously… I wasn’t joking before. This isn’t a mockup. It’s my actual laptop in Second Life, on a desk that I made myself, and running a fully functional Cloud OS through Shared Media.

I wasn’t kidding when I said my laptop in Second Life is better than the one that Linden Lab used for their screen shot. Unlike their laptop, mine actually has a cloud operating system on it with a full suite of actual applications. Let’s just say I happen to like using Shared media to the absolute fullest potential.

Inference Pattern

2012-02-02T23:00:00.001-05:00

Steve Jobs gave you the iPod, but he listened to vinyl at home. #SecondLife

I've been listening a lot to binaural audio lately as a result of my recent research paper which touched on the subject briefly for the future of virtual worlds. Over time, this got me wondering about the perceptual quality of LP (Analog) versus Digital outputs and what exactly it is we're hearing that is different.

As part of the research, I came across things like "Holophonic" recording and the theoretical (if not a little quirky) explanation from Hugo Zuccarelli with unsubstantiated claims concerning the holographic nature of sound and the interpretation thereof within the brain.

Usually I would believe this to be an open and shut case, but something has been nagging me about the whole situation.

You see, the way that binaural audio essentially works is the HRTF or Head Related Transfer Function, which is the subtle difference in arrival time between each ear, coupled with the precise shape of the head and ears in which the sound waves are molded in order to give subtle and consciously imperceptible cues for spatial positioning inside the mind - often referred to as the Cetera Algorithm.

This got me thinking about what the commonality for those who listen to hi-fidelity analog audio and how they commonly describe it to be "better" but can never quite give a direct answer as to exactly how it is better.

The untrained audiophile will likely never be able to hear the differences, and to make a better point, even the most well trained audio engineers today are unlikely to be able to accurately determine the differences.

I believe this has to do with the actual difference between hi-fidelity analog and digital recording, in that the frequency response is the key to this mystery, coupled with some key understandings about binaural audio, as well as a cursory look at what Hugo Zuccarelli calls "Holophonic" audio.

The idea behind Holophonic audio is that Hugo insists there is some sort of reference information in high quality audio that is interpreted in the mind alone, and while this seems silly up front, this is essentially how the Cetera Algorithm works. The subtle difference in arrival time is calculated in our minds on a subconscious level to give us the perception of spatialized audio. This is why you know that a bird is chirping in the forest in a tree, about 100 feet in front of you, and roughly 200 feet in the air, and to your left by about 50 feet.

But when we record binaural audio, the frequency response rate likely plays a much larger role than we were originally aware of; in turn separating our audiophile experience into two categories, whereas today we like to think of it only as a single category of conscious perception my theoretical thinking distinguishes our audio into two categories as subconscious perception and conscious perception.

The standard for CD audio began around 40khz and early CDs recorded at this rate up until recently, whereby that was raised to 96khz response range, even though audio engineers will say that the average human ear cannot hear above 40khz. When you open a wave file, the standard encoding rate is 44.1khz and this is not a coincidence - it was just a little more than the stated average hearing ability for CD quality to give it some leeway. Even though (as stated in the video) the capture of the audio was roughly half of what it actually is.

When listening to binaural audio, often times we can say that the positional cues are accurate to a degree, but often times the cues for "in front" and "behind" the head are hard to make out. This is also true for positional cues such as "above" and "below" in combination with in front and behind. Looking over the information for the binaural tracks, I noticed a common thread between them and the ones which seemed to have better positional cues (where the in front, back, above, and below were much better represented). The difference seemed to be in the recording quality itself, and the frequency response.

So I looked it up further and found the video below showing the definite difference between analog and digital, and the drop-off of that frequency range. Analog Hi-Fidelity goes right up to 120khz frequency response, and should be well out of the range of hearing, while original CDs stopped around 40khz before dropping off, and more recent digital recordings stopped around 96khz before the sharp drop-off.

I suppose the digital future wasn’t as great as we were told…

What this leads me to believe is that the difference is in subconscious audio cues as maintained by the capture of the audio in frequency response. Everything after 40khz would be subconscious information much like we infer the positional cues from subtle difference in arrival time to each ear, positional audio quality, and fidelity, hinges on the superior capture and playback of upper frequency response range which is carrying the consciously imperceptible audio cues for the mind to reconstruct for a full audio experience.

In short, it's all in our heads - but in a very good way. Hugo Zuccarelli might have been spot on with his assumptions about “Holophonics”, but for all the wrong reasons. MP3 destroys this upper limit of subconscious audio fidelity due to compression models, so we actually are losing quite a lot of the fidelity of our audio by chopping off the upper frequency range. Even at 96khz frequency response, we're still stripping away subtle cues in the audio which help our mind reconstruct an audioscape, though admittedly not nearly as much information as our early "superior" digital CDs at 40khz.

I believe this is the ultimate secret to the claims of "Holophonic" audio, which for all intents and purposes is recorded the same way as a standard binaural audio track, but with what I would argue a very important difference that Hugo Zuccarelli is unlikely to say publicly:

Hugo Zuccarelli has designed ultra-low distortion microphones that are quite possibly unparalleled in the recording industry, as well as loudspeakers that are also ultra-low distortion. His frequency response ranges may be past even 120khz in recording binaural, which would likely result in capturing an ultra-high fidelity spatial audio binaural that preserves far more subconscious cues than some of our standard HD microphones and recording today.

Hence, the difference between binaural and "holophonic". Binaural, then, is the equivalent to the low-fi of 3D Audio, while Holophonic would rely on ultra-low distortion custom microphones and ultra-high capture of frequency response to capture well above and beyond the conscious range of hearing but capture an amazing amount of subconscious audio clarity that the mind is interpreting at an audio resolution superior to current digital means. It would also mean that in order to truly appreciate this process and playback, a standard pair of headphones won't cut it, nor would even your high-end headphones that range up to 1,000 dollars.

For instance, audiophiles who pride themselves on high-end headphones and balk at things like Bose or Skullcandy are in no better position themselves, as even if the headphones can reach 120khz, your audio formats and the equipment it is hooked up to much of the time destroys that subconscious fidelity before it reaches your ears (and subsequently your expensive hipster headphones).

Even your "HD Audio" card for your computer is likely well below the top end audio fidelity of 120khz, so plugging in your expensive headphones gains you absolutely no real stated benefit other than not bastardizing the audio any further than it already has been before it has reached your ears. However, the audio quality you hear is only as good as the process by which it is interpreted and delivered - so all of the components in between your ears and the audio translation matter the most.

It's only as good as the lowest common denominator in the chain.

Personally I have a pair of Bose headphones, and I know full well that they distort the bass response more than they should. This is why I use them mainly for MP3 music (where it doesn’t actually matter), but not when I need clarity like with binaural audio. I know that unless I'm using hardware capable of 120kHz frequency output and the audio file itself is recorded at ultra-high frequency response and without compression, that no pair of headphones will make it sound as clear and amazing as it should.

At least... not yet.

I think Neil Young and the late Steve Jobs were onto something here...

In the context of virtual worlds and augmented reality, if we expect to construct more compelling and immersive environments, we’re going to have to step up our game in the audio department. What this means for audio quality in general is that the trade off between quality and file size means a lot more than we previously thought.

The Breakfast Club

2012-01-28T23:59:00.001-05:00

Being honest and finding our true selves in #SecondLife

I’ve been in virtual environments for as long as I care to remember. The bottom line is that they all come and go over time. One thing that I am definitely not known for is praise when it is not earned, and if anything I am the first to point out the not-so-flattering reality of situations.

From left to right: Pooky, Crap, Qarl, Bevan, Aeonix | Picture: Breakfast Club (duh)

This is a post about the Second Life Brat Pack, or as a friend puts it “the cool kids”. We’re all part of this elevated status, a sort of digerati, and you know who you are (many more than the names on the picture above). So let’s be honest for a bit, shall we? I mean, since we’re hanging out during detention.

I can be overly critical at times, and I make no apologies for this behavior because it is criticism that is well earned and deserved. That being said, there are many who shy away from offering constructive criticism in exchange for the acknowledgment of the “cool kids” in the industry. I see this quite a lot in the virtual world sense, where many will sing the unending praise of a particular environment and refuse to say anything critical, or we too often want to be in a certain “clique” in the virtual world (or professionally) so we often just take on a mob mentality blindly.

Without honest criticism, praise is merely shallow ass-kissing. Plain and simple.

I am an advocate for virtual worlds on the whole, but not any particular environment, because I believe that what we have today is nothing like what we should have. This goes for whatever virtual environment currently seems to be “in the lead” – today that would constitute Second Life, but for how much longer is anybody’s guess.

There is a lot to criticize when it comes to Second Life (just as there is a lot to praise), first and foremost in the haphazard viewer and underlying structure of the technology, and continuing on with the loss of vision for the company overall. It is true that Second Life has achieved great things since it was created, but along the way, so much of that greatness was lost to “flavor of the month” mentality that I have become critical of what it has become as a result.

There is not a single part of Second Life that could not have been done far better than it has today, and no better example of this lackluster outcome can be shown than through the underachievement of Linden Lab for the past number of years by example.

I’m a realist at heart, so while others sing the unending praises of Second Life (or any technology) I’m usually the first to ask why such technology even deserves to be on that pedestal to begin with. I do give praise where it is earned, without hesitation – but you have to earn it. In the same breath, I am also looking for everything that is wrong with the same system not because I somehow have a vendetta or a score to settle – but because I know that if you want something to be truly better and to ascend to something greater, you have to be willing to point out where something is wrong so it can be made better. As uncomfortable as that may make people, the point is to continue making those people uncomfortable and take them down a few notches from that pedestal.

I want to make it a point to break the apathy and disillusionment. I want to return us to the days when we’d look at something and say “How can this be better?”

This is the premise behind being honest; not just about what you are praising, but honest with yourself as well. Honesty doesn’t always mean you’ll have your lips planted firmly on somebody’s rear end, and often times it will mean you are at direct odds.

That takes honesty, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m not in the industry to hang out with the “cool kids”, though I often do. I’m in the industry to make an actual difference, and if I’m hanging out with the “cool kids” along the way, that’s a pleasant side effect. I’ve had the distinct privilege (and continue) to associate with some of the brightest men and women I’ve ever known, people who are far above the concept of merely Second Life and have contributed some of the most mind boggling innovations to virtual and synthetic environments the world may ever see. These are the people I personally admire in the industry – the unsung heroes of technology and innovation that make things like Second Life, and far more, even possible. Make no mistake, I’ve even criticized many of these people directly, and we’ve had a lot of great debates about the present and future of virtual worlds.

People like Rodvik and Will Wright stand on the shoulders of those giants, and probably don’t realize it – and if they do, neither of them are admitting it. The citizens of the virtual world seldom realize this as well, because to them, Rodvik and Will Wright are the giants.

Rest assured, they are not the giants. If you want somebody to praise, try some of the real innovators in the industry such as Jaron Lanier, Julian Lombardi or Randy Farmer. These people are the innovators, the pioneers in this industry. Those are the shoulders I stand on, and am grateful in every way for their contributions to society. It is because of them that I am able to contribute and further the industry myself along with many others.

Rodvik and Will Wright’s claim to fame is that they both made a popular video game – Spore and The Sims, respectively. Jaron, Julian and Randy helped define an entire industry. To put that into perspective, that would be like Will Wright inventing the concept of video games.

It’s all about perspective, and the moment we lose that perspective our subjective opinions on the matter become trivial at best. Are we really giving an honest opinion on the situation or are we just trying to appease the cool kids so we stay in their favor? I’ve noticed lately that there are too many people more interested in staying in favor than calling to task in order that the entire industry moves forward.

The entire purpose of virtual environments stems from our collective community of progressive and innovative thinkers constantly asking “How can we do better?” and as a community calling to task those who try and pass off half-finished work as a product. Now is not the time to lower our standards or accept less than the best.

We got to where we are today not because we thought what we had right now was the pinnacle, but because we thought it constantly wasn’t good enough and could be made better than what we had. I see a disturbing trend in the digerati of virtual worlds where they are endlessly praising and outright refusing to raise criticism, or associate with criticism, in exchange for the favor of those “cool kids” they think are the giants in the industry.

I’m not as easily bribed in exchange for favoritism.

What? It had to be said… and I know Crap is trying not to laugh.

What I want is a better Metaverse – that’s my asking price.

I will bite the hand that feeds me if it deserves it, and I have no remorse about being critical. If all you do is praise without offering criticism, you’ve lowered your standards and are simply being shallow.

If you want to make a difference… truly and thoroughly, you’ll have to remove your lips from people’s asses before you can use your voice the way it was intended. Even you have to draw a line in the sand, make a stand, and declare that you’re not selling your soul for the popularity any more.

Never accept less than the best. Hold yourself and them to a higher standard.

Acknowledge that what they have done so far has enabled many people to do amazing things over the years, but never forget that those stories are created and told by the community who want to create a better Metaverse, even when the companies behind those technologies are too misguided or apathetic to tell a better story themselves.

You tell a story, and I’ll tell mine. While your story may be some script in machinima, or hanging out with your partner. While your story may be mundane or extravagant -

where your story ends -

Mine begins with a better Metaverse for everyone in the world.

Dreams in Digital

2012-01-19T02:26:00.001-05:00

A discussion about the premise of Copyright, IP and Artificial Scarcity #SecondLife

The premise of Artificial Scarcity is, at the core, flawed at best and woefully inadequate at worst in the context of the digital age. It is no secret that copyright and intellectual property is gravely threatened by the digital culture we live in today, and increasingly so at an alarming rate of advancement. Such is the nature of the Internet to effectively circumvent censorship and treat all attempts to censor as damage and route around it.

After all, the Internet is a digital system that was at its very core designed to withstand a nuclear war and come out relatively unscathed.

What is most disconcerting is not that the Internet itself is nearly impervious to the worst attempts of censorship, but that the paradigms that fostered the creation of this system are no longer relevant to the situation at hand. Worse, still, is that this understanding of distribution of materials and information in the digital age is entirely counterproductive to the existing paradigms which create these media forms.

I can give a quick lesson on the past ten years or so of innovation in this digital culture, but I’m fairly certain most of us already know the drill. Peer2Peer came about in systems like Napster, and the copyright and IP industry lost their nut trying to kill it. All that managed to do was throw fuel on the fire, leading to more advanced networks of distribution and even after those legal battles ensued – first against the networks (which by law should have been protected under safe harbor) but later against individuals as young as twelve years old and as old as your dear grandmother in what amounted to a legal paperstorm.

Astronomical fines and penalties, legal cases that no individual could possibly afford to protect themselves against, and what turned out to be further fuel on the fire of piracy in the form of the invention of Bittorrent.

Clearly the attempted enforcement of artificial scarcity within the confines of a system that does not acknowledge scarcity at all is likely to lose, or make the problem worse.

There are very interesting insights from people like Jaron Lanier who believe that artificial scarcity is a necessity in order to give digital experience value and meaning again, but I will have to disagree with his assertion (at least in part). When it comes to Jaron, I rarely disagree with his vision – but this is one of those topics where I have to respectfully shake my head.

It’s called artificial scarcity for a reason, and that reason is because it is an artificial construct in a system specifically designed without scarcity in the form of digital media in all forms. When music was simply on CDs, there was natural scarcity in the availability of the content in physical form, but in the digital world it doesn’t cost anything to copy data. There is no physical cost in duplication, and the very least of the costs is relegated to the production of the original media.

But that’s where the costs really end. Unlike pre-digital days, the costs no longer carry over past the production cycle, and such things as marketing and distribution are freely available, if not exponentially so and for free. Even the production cycle has a diminishing cost, as we can see with DJs, Mashups and Youtube.

Nobody has to pay a distribution center to get airplay on the radio any longer, or produce physical compact discs for the record store shelves. Terrestrial radio airplay isn’t as important as it used to be in the face of countless internet radio stations, satellite radio subscriptions and more.

This is the dilemma.

It’s a matter of old school thinking versus new age. In a world that became accustomed to the natural scarcity of products, and literally based their entire business model on that natural scarcity and the control of the distribution channels from start to finish, it must be terrifying to suddenly lose that control – and so we see a constant battle between copyright and IP holders (RIAA & MPAA) and the “Pirates”, culminating in toxic legislation such as SOPA and PIPA, as well as the attempt of leveraging $75 Trillion dollar fines (RIAA vs Limewire).

This isn’t a new problem, however. This goes back to the printing press itself, wherein the same arguments were leveraged and fought tooth and nail. It carried on further with the invention of BetaMax and VHS, the Cassette Tape, Blank CD Media, and the MP3 Player itself (Roxio), and even into the right to use the MP3 Format altogether (Thanks, Fraunhofer, for the legal battles).

The thing about this history is – no matter how much we cry and complain about the damages that a new technology will bring to an industry in the form of piracy, those fears never seem to materialize. Even more interesting is the seemingly opposite effect that piracy has had on the music and film industry, with the record profits of those industries plain as day despite their constant arguments that piracy is hurting the industry and costing them hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Uproxx provides an excellent insight to this by giving an overview to the situation (further reading)

Pirates are your friends (Yarr!)

Yes, I just opened up a massive can of worms with this statement, but it had to be said. Given the industry of intellectual property and copyright, it can be shown time and again that the greatest harm to the copyright and IP industry are themselves.

Let’s break this down logically…

Modern piracy is simply the enactment of a highly efficient and targeted distribution system without any centralized control or overhead of cost. We can’t necessarily claim that piracy is stealing, because theft is the removal of the original instead of making a copy. Piracy is copying, plain and simple. The only difference today versus prior to the Internet is that there was a physical component which acted as the barrier to entry – Cassette tapes, blank CDs, VHS tapes, etc. and those media forms came with an additional blank media tax to compensate for perceived losses to the industry. The only reason that piracy is equated to theft is because of the false assertion that every file downloaded is automatically a lost sale.

If we were paying attention, we’ve seen this claim for as long as these industries existed – case in point:

Clearly this turned out not to be true, as the recording industry continued to make record profits and even today they continue to post profit gains and not losses. The only losses they are claiming are entirely imaginary losses based on fabrication.

We could make a convoluted claim that even the unauthorized copying is costing the owners of the copyright and IP the premise of future revenue which is entirely estimated, and based on fuck all, as seen with the RIAA statement that they believed Limewire owed in damages an amount that exceeded all the money in the world. The RIAA and MPAA can spew out all the make believe numbers they want, but it’s not based on anything substantial. It’s a lot like me saying that because people read this blog I estimate the damages from lost revenue to be 400 trillion dollars a year. I’m just pulling a number out of my ass, and totally out of context to the total situation at hand, much like the RIAA and MPAA does regularly.

Zen and the Art of Piracy

So how do we effectively stop piracy? I’m the first to proclaim that protection of intellectual property and copyright is something that needs to happen – despite my advocacy of piracy in the same breath. It’s really about looking at the bigger picture and actually taking the time to see the widespread implications past narrow interests of the old paradigm.

For instance, think about all the money spent in the promotion and distribution of media by the RIAA and MPAA. More specifically, let’s look at the process for the RIAA wherein they spend an astronomical amount of money to A&R representatives in order to essentially buy a spot on the radio to play a new single for promoting an artist. This is a regular occurrence, and it baffles me.

When I was younger, my highschool actually had its own radio station and radio communications was one of the classes offered. Of course, I was enrolled in that class and managed straight A’s (45 days away from having my radio communications license to work as an on-air personality). Even then, the process baffled me due to the no solicitation rules. The station manager would have us regularly listening to new music coming in, and checking to see if it violated any of the rules, but that list of music always came from some A&R representing a label, whereas local bands trying to get heard would be routinely turned down. As DJs, our hands were pretty tied, as the station manager would be approving the playlist and helping to compile them.

Even if we were approving music on the list or disapproving it, most of the time that didn’t even matter. Those songs would be inexplicably stricken from the list when we approved them, or oddly added to the playlist when we as DJs decided the music was utter crap by consensus.

It more or less came down to who was willing to pay more money to get a band heard and played, and not necessarily based on merit.

The apparent point of this process is to get an artist’s material heard by a large population of listeners, and they treat this process as a marketing expense, yet if we turn the tables and look at piracy – this is exactly the sort of distribution and outcome that Bittorrent has without the overhead. Interestingly enough, piracy is based entirely on merit and not who has the most money or connections for marketing and distribution – a stark contrast to how it used to work. Today, that local band (Garageland) wouldn’t have to be bending over backwards to get their music heard, and instead they’d simply make an official website for the band and distribute their own music via Bittorrent as a marketing loss. Those local bands would simply exist on their own merit and ability – which I always felt was how things were supposed to be.

So let’s call this what it is – it’s the inability of the industry to differentiate between personal piracy and commercial piracy. Commercial piracy is the problem and by all means should be fought or at least intelligently channeled, whereas Personal Piracy should actually be encouraged to no end.

The moment we stop trying to lump together personal piracy and commercial piracy, the faster we realize the benefits that personal piracy gives us. This idea that personal piracy costs the media industry hundreds of billions a year is absurd (as absurd as the assertion that it cost the RIAA $75 Trillion dollars in damages from Limewire) – because if anything it is actually increasing the revenues through widespread proliferation of new media at a cost that is exactly zero to the distribution channel (and subsequently to the media holders). What scares them the most is that media is now based on the idea of a meritocracy and not who has the most money or connections.

Personal piracy is good as long as we’re willing to call it what it is in proper context. The best course of action for the media industry going forward is to literally, and without hesitation, pirate their own media and make it available at a high quality to the masses.

Why on earth would I suggest this? I mean, I just offered the equivalent to the digital media apocalypse as the solution to the digital media apocalypse.

Natural Scarcity

This brings us back the idea of artificial scarcity versus natural scarcity. Natural scarcity was the model that the media industry was originally built on and it worked absolute wonders. It wasn’t until the introduction of mass reproduced media that they began to panic and invent methods of artificial scarcity to sustain a model that is based on natural scarcity. Natural scarcity was the sold out concert you couldn’t get tickets to, artificial scarcity is deliberately limiting the amount of CD’s pressed to inflate worth arbitrarily or (in the digital age) creating convoluted DRM schemes to restrict the usage rights of agnostic digital media.

The future of media is authentic experience. Natural scarcity is something you cannot reproduce in a digital form, and thus holds intrinsic value over time. You can film a concert, and maybe sell the t-shirts online, but you can’t pirate the actual unique experience of actually having been there. You can create DRM and other artificial scarcity methods to continue propping up your old business models, or attempt to force the old business methodologies on new media, but the sad truth is – artificial scarcity in an environment built without scarcity is a costly and failed endeavor.

In the movie industry, I’ll just cite all the DRM and Ultra-Violet Digital lockers having no effect on Bittorrent distribution except to make it more popular. However, I’d also state that all the unskippable garbage and advertisements on those DVDs are also a major factor, just like advertisements in between and during shows on television send people off to pirate the more authentic experience of the DVD version off of Bittorrent.

Physical goods and actual experiences that are unique are the new media paradigm to embrace, while the old media paradigm (currently being propped up desperately by artificial scarcity tactics) should be relegated to marketing channels in order to promote the natural scarcity of unique experiences and sales. Sure there are people out in the parking lots selling knock-off t-shirts for $5 out of their trunks, but the only reason they manage to make a killing is because you’re charging $10 for a cup of beer, $5 for a hotdog and $40 for a t-shirt inside. The problem isn’t the counterfeiters, it’s your inflated sense of worth and douchbaggery to the honest customers and fanbase.

Instead of writing piracy off as a revenue loss, we should be saying it is a marketing and proliferation surplus without additional cost. We’re actually saving money through personal piracy, if we’d actually figure out how to embrace it and wean ourselves off the artificial scarcity paradigm, we’d see that it’s actually helping far more than it hurts. As far as counterfeiters – actually curtailing them has less to do with trying to stop them and more to do with stopping yourself.

Telling a Story

Remember when VH1 had the Storytellers concerts? Only a certain amount of people could attend those intimate concerts, and there was far more natural scarcity for the experience than listening to it in MP3 or watching the recorded show on VH1. There’s a level of abstraction there, and anyone who watched those VH1 Storyteller episodes has at least once thought to themselves how amazing it must have been to actually have been there.

Authentic experience is the new reality of media | Greenday at Storytellers – Extraordinary Girl

Hopefully you’re starting to get the bigger picture now. VH1 Storytellers was (and is) a unique experience, an authentic experience, and not easily reproduced. It had intrinsic value – far more than the DVD version or the MP3 Soundtrack. In this manner, we foster the piracy of the VH1 Storytellers albums online, and even offer the videos online without restrictions (but maybe advertising is alright). The end result is you are utilizing the piracy aspect of a lesser experience in order to strengthen the value of the natural scarcity of a greater experience. You can always offer a pay what you want model as well, but you should never be under the delusion that it won’t be pirated for free after a short period of time.

If you want to offset that personal piracy as marketing loss, sit down and figure out how to charge for live streaming access to that experience, as well as the much more valuable experience of the tickets to attend that experience in person (since it’s a limited audience). These limited experiences should be more available as the revenue source, creating a value based on natural scarcity and access instead of artificial scarcity. The more authentic the experience, the more it is actually worth.

It’s always much better to attend a Broadway show than to watch it online, but if you were streaming it online for free, you’d drastically raise awareness (the point of marketing) and increase the demand for the personal experience of actually attending that play in person as an authentic experience.

The other benefit to pirating your own media is that you are immediately sabotaging the bigger threat of commercial pirates who are trying to sell the media illegally. Why would anyone buy what they can get for free? More importantly, what is left to pirate commercially is something that cannot be pirated at all – the authentic experience. Authentic experience creates loyal customers – which is another lesson for Social Media.

I actually applaud Deadmau5 in this context for the way one of his recent concerts was handled – it was streamed live on Youtube for the first hour (maybe half hour) as a preview and then turned into a pay-per-view sort of experience. However, this doesn’t entirely grasp the full potential of unique experience or utilize it to the fullest advantage. It’s a good start, but could definitely have been done better.

Sure, the ideal here for the limited access to a live streaming concert is still considered artificial scarcity, but it is based on natural scarcity at the root and not just arbitrarily applied as we normally see. For instance, in the context of the Deadmau5 concert, it would have been better to stream the entire concert for free in SD quality and make the HD stream a pay per view stream. The first half hour would have been an HD preview of the live concert, switching to the SD quality free stream afterward unless you had already paid for the stream access in advance.

Again, we’re going on the concept of pirating your own media for your own benefit, and writing it off as marketing expenses instead of lost revenue through piracy. It’s a balance between marketing and natural scarcity, creating additional value in a digital product or unique experience.

Who got this brilliantly right?

Pomplamoose

This is how you pirate your own music for marketing benefit. Take note, media industry.

Even better would have been if those concerts were streamed using not just high definition audio, but a Binaural audio stream for spatial audio fidelity. One step further would have been to offer that binaural stream in conjunction with 360 degree video so the viewers could pan around in real time with full spatial audio.

This is a massive step up from the lower definition of a simple SD stream for free, and something that constitutes a unique experience worth more money to the fans. The more authentic the experience, the more value it has in a culture where the lowest common denominator is mass distributed media.

And that’s the point, really.

It’s not piracy we should be afraid of, but the clear indication that non-authentic experience is nearly worthless in the digital age. It is this understanding that should be shaping our decisions going forward concerning digital media, copyright and intellectual property. Authentic experience has value, and that value can be used as marketing to sell more authentic experiences with increasing tangible value. The very fact that this point is being ignored on the whole is far more troubling than the specter of piracy.

Virtual Environments

Which brings us to the idea of virtual environments and the idea of prosumer culture. In a virtual environment where the users can create anything they want, it is no surprise that they more often choose to create what is familiar – as in brands that exist to them in real life. Companies have done an excellent job in marketing their brands into ubiquity and pop culture, but seem to be utterly confused when the ultimate result of that comes to pass.

Of course people want Coca-Cola in a virtual world and any number of other familiar brands, and they aren’t in a position to have to wait until such time as those brand owners decide to give it to them. This creates a conflict of interest, because we’re trying to apply the artificial scarcity rule to a virtual environment that (much like the Internet) has no such constraint of scarcity.

The current accepted practice is to file DMCA notices and have the offending content removed, which is a direct violation of the Streisand Effect, having the exact opposite of the intended outcome. Agnostically, we look at media overall – whether it is an asset or an MP3, and we should already know that it’s not in our best interest to call it piracy, but instead call it marketing.

In the end, what is more important to the end-user is authentic experience. As long as you control the authentic experiences, the non-authentic experiences of lesser digital value should serve as marketing in order to support the authentic experiences.

Case in point – let’s go back to Coca-Cola.

The proliferation of unlicensed digital representations of branded merchandise in a virtual environment like Second Life constitute the lower quality and less authentic experience, and as such act as the user generated marketing and advertising for the authentic experiences which they will gladly pay for in real life. Accordingly, the Coca-Cola merchandise in a virtual environment, generated by the users themselves is the best viral marketing the company could ever hope for, because it creates further brand loyalty (and is in fact a display of that loyalty) which in turn leads to the authentic experience of actually drinking Coca-Cola.

Even if those virtual representations are being bought and sold, it is in the best interest not to place that into the category of commercial piracy in that the users themselves are showing a willingness to pay to be advertised to on a wider basis than you could ever hope to achieve had you spent a few millions dollars on a 30 second Superbowl ad.

Does this necessarily mean that you should be relinquishing your right to the brand? By no means! It’s more about how you choose to handle that brand in context to the environment of experience. Much like Youtube offers a ContentID matching system for videos, virtual environments should offer something similar – wherein a ContentID match wouldn’t necessarily mean the content is removed, but instead simply labeled as being owned by a certain content or brand owner.

This follows the general rule of sanctioned personal piracy as marketing. If a content creator exceeds a certain amount of money in a virtual world from the sales of a branded item, then it should trigger an automatic percentage paid to the brand owner as compensation (a virtual item license fee).

In this manner, the brand owners actually make some money on what normally is seen as purely a piracy loss, instead treating it as pure marketing and licensing gain across the board. It also costs a lot less in legal fees, DMCA and litigation because you aren’t in a mindset to try and stop the actions but instead finding ways to foster it to the extreme for your own (and the prosumers) total benefit.

The end goal should always be promoting authentic experiences and fostering additional value in things which cannot be pirated, through encouraging personal piracy and brand loyalty to the extreme.

This doesn’t mean, however, that DMCA takedown requests aren’t needed. In context, it should be treated as the absolute last resort instead of the first. Explore all of our options first before we invoke censorship as a solution, because the potential for backlash with censorship is far more damaging than trying to work within the system of digital experience and organic community.

Killing Zombies [ SOPA | PIPA ]

2012-01-18T01:17:00.001-05:00

Why I support an Internet #Blackout Protest

If the Internet looks a little dark today, it’s because of the self imposed censorship in protest against SOPA and PIPA. I’ll be participating today in this protest, because both of these legislations are broken at the core, and threaten the very premise of the Internet itself (Not to mention SecondLife) on all levels by putting in the hands of corporate interests the right to circumvent due process and existing methods of piracy alleviation through the mere whim of corporate holders. It’s legislation that elevates the premise of Web 2.0 and social media to a Felony.

This is what SOPA and PIPA look like. Strangely, they may be the inspiration for Silent Hill 3

There will be no due process, no proof, and nothing short of total obliteration without recourse of entire websites and services online wholesale for the most trivial of infractions. The worst part about SOPA and PIPA, in any form they wish to take, is that neither will have any of the intended effects that they claim to have in curtailing piracy. If anything, they will both serve to actually destroy the Internet, and exasperate the problem ten fold through what is known as the Streisand Effect. (Note: Wikipedia is blacked out today Jan 17th in protest)

I do not support even an amended version of SOPA or PIPA, because at the root, they are both designed on a foundation that is a destructive premise. While I agree that piracy should be fought, I must concede that SOPA and PIPA are both the very wrong way to go about doing so.

They both represent an industry that would very much like to buy their way out of being a better company, and problem solving in the digital age, instead of evolving without the premise of stripping away freedom of speech and many other perfectly legal means.

If anything, PIPA and SOPA constitute one of the highest forms of insult to a free world.

Arm yourself against the Zombie Apocalypse

SOPA, which is currently being considered in the House, purports to protect “prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property.” But this bill, along with the Senate version called PIPA that’s being put up for a vote on January 24, would likely destroy much of the creativity fostered by the Internet. It could cripple not only the sites you use today but also other companies that are part of the glorious thing we call the Internet through unintended consequence. That’s why Google, YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Vimeo, Reddit, and many other companies and organizations are opposing this legislation.

While the recent statement from the Whitehouse condemning SOPA and PIPA is encouraging, that is not to say that an earmarked and amended version wouldn’t pass, much like the situation with the National Defense Authorization Act. As far as I am concerned, in any form, these pieces of legislation are both toxic and shouldn’t be considered at all, even in part.

If there is one thing we should know as gamers, it’s that you don’t kill zombies through apathy or doing half a job. They’ll just rise again and come back to bite you, and unless you suddenly like the taste of brains and the smell of rotten flesh, you better do the job right the first time. No, you have to make certain that those zombies don’t get back up looking for a meal at all if you want to win that fight.

I urge you to contact your member of congress and arm them with the tools needed to kill this zombie before it’s too late, before the Internet turns into a real life Silent Hill, and before places like Second Life are snuffed out of existence entirely in what constitutes a corporate pissing match.

This is your fight, and in the immortal words of Dan Brown – Please don’t be a zombie.

Today I’ll be joining that protest. I won’t be updating Twitter, Google+, Facebook, etc… and this single blog entry is my explanation for anyone who is curious as to why. If anyone needs me, I’ll still be available in Skype for the day.

Something Completely Different…

2011-12-28T00:26:00.001-05:00

From #SecondLife to Second Fiddle in 2012

Is it a surprise that @Rodvik wants to focus on making video games?

I’ve been quite busy lately with research and development on some projects, so quite noticeably people have asked if I’m still around. The short answer is “yes”, though some other things have been keeping my attention other than Second Life. I won’t go into details about what I’ve been focusing on, but I will say that the technologies are really cool.

More importantly, however, I’ve been keeping an eye on the recent events concerning Linden Lab and Second Life through the usual channels, such as New World Notes, and more specifically the following little gem of news from them made me laugh.

I’m in no way surprised that Rodvik has decided to focus on video games that are unrelated to Second Life and “expand” Linden Lab’s offerings past their flagship namesake. He’s a video game executive that was hired to run a Metaverse company, and I expected he wouldn’t do so well at this job.

Now, when I say he wouldn’t do so well, what I implied many months ago is the only thing this man apparently knows how to do is create video games, which is an entirely different market than managing and growing a metaverse. It’s a lot like the difference between a Bugatti Veyron and a Tricycle.

The Metaverse is the high performance, open ended, user created masterpiece of virtual environments. A tricycle entertains you for a few hours without actually adding any culture or wider appreciation.

Rodvik is a master of making tricycles.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t money to be made in making tricycles, or that Linden Lab couldn’t be profitable by making and selling those tricycles, but that isn’t what Linden Lab as a company is about. At least, that’s not what it should be about. Linden Lab was and is a metaverse company, with a flagship product and culture that is Second Life. When a CEO decides that the flagship product of the company is not worth the effort to give his or the staff’s full attention to, but instead decides that the future of Linden Lab is to pretend to be Zynga… there’s something seriously wrong.

Let’s face it, Rodvik has Farmville envy.

Rodvik’s assurance that there will be continued updates and functionality additions for Second Life is not comforting, because we already know what it’s like when the Lindens aren’t able to address the JIRA, fix bugs, or ultimately create a viewer that isn’t half assed and broken. There is no reason to believe that splitting the focus and resources of an already stressed team so they can make unrelated video games will have any effect other than to justify less support for Second Life going forward in favor of coddling whatever video games Rodvik wants to roll out for Facebook instead. This isn’t speculation, this is simply common sense management in knowing that splitting an already overworked team to focus on unrelated projects will mean:

1. The new products will be poorly executed.

2. The original product will suffer from poor execution.

3. Both areas of focus will suffer from mediocre execution at best.

Because his focus is on the new games, I’m likely to say that #2 is the most plausible outcome, which means that Second Life (as far as he’s concerned) is now Second Fiddle.

The decision he has made is the executive equivalent of changing the focus of the entire company to something unrelated in order to mask incompetence in the original venue he was hired for. If he cannot expand or properly manage the flagship product, but he knows how to make cheap little video games in spades, the latter will be his and the company’s new focus to make their projected growth going forward. Like I originally said when he was hired – when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We already went through this scenario with Mark Kingdon where he decided the focus was on enterprise servers, and if I remember correctly, through all of this divided focus, that didn’t bode well either.

Now, I could theoretically interpret Rodvik’s direction as a skillful manner by which to focus his and the company’s attention on rebuilding a better version of Second Life for the long run. Something from the ground up, or a total overhaul into a new system, which later he will encourage migration from Second Life to the new system as a result.

I could interpret it that way, but I choose not to do so simply out of common sense. If this were the focus, he wouldn’t have said “… unrelated to Second Life”.

Today marks the day that Linden Lab has begun its transformation into just another Zynga wannabe. Rodvik never really left his old position as a VP at Electronic Arts working on The Sims. He simply carried his old job into his new and unrelated job. In the process, instead of focusing on the job he was given, he’s decided that the focus of the entire company should instead cater to his whims and expertise.

In the process, he’s even practiced some great acts of cronyism by surrounding himself with video game executives and industry names to justify his reasoning why Linden Lab needs to pretend to be Zynga and pay less attention to it’s own flagship product and community.

From day one, all Rodvik saw as the CEO of Linden Lab was this:

Click the picture for a link to this item on Marketplace.

The real question in the end is two-fold:

Why did anyone not expect this to happen from day one?

And more importantly

What makes anyone think that this is actually good for Second Life?

3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse:

2011-12-16T16:03:00.001-05:00

Current Status and Future Possibilities | #SecondLife

On December 1st, 2011 there arrived in my email quite astounding news from Dr. Dionisio and Dr. Gilbert that the Association for Computing Machinery had not only accepted our research paper 3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse: Current Status and Future Possibilities for publication in their next journal, but that the reviewers had given the best praise of the paper that the editors had ever seen. As I read through the critiques from each reviewer, I was humbled by their responses.

As Dr. Gilbert succinctly put it:

After my recent return from the European Summit of the Immersive Education Initiative (I'm still jet lagged as you can see from the early hour I'm writing this!), Dondi sent me the news that ACM Computing Surveys had accepted our paper with relatively minor revisions. Even more significantly, the impressions of the editors and individual reviewers of the paper were outstanding with all the reviewers suggesting that the work be considered for a best paper award, the main reviewer viewing the work as a "seminal" contribution to the field, and the Associate Editor calling the first round reviews the best he's ever seen!

What I've also learned is that ACM Computing Surveys is one of the most cited and respected journals in the field of computer science (I had no idea that Dondi had decided to reach so high in submitting the paper). To get accepted into this journal, especially with such high praise, is a great honor and once the article is published our work will be widely read and could have a real impact on the field. After we submit the revisions in the next few weeks you can crank up all your social media expertise and begin to distribute the article as "in press."

It’s definitely an honor, and quite humbling to receive that caliber of review from not one but four independent sources across the industry. My understanding of the process was that we should have expected multiple rounds of revisions before being considered for publication, so having it accepted immediately after the first round of peer review is astounding.

In the words of the Associate Editor at ACM:

These actually are the most positive first-round reviews of a journal article I have seen. If you revise this and include a document that explains how you did, and did not, address comments, I will not need to send this out for further review if it looks satisfactory to me.

Let’s put aside the banner waving for a moment, because despite how groundbreaking this all is, it is only a prelude to a bigger picture concerning the Metaverse as I usually provide in articles like this.

The Down Low

There is a lot of subject matter covered in the paper for ACM Journal, but the title says it all: Current Status and Future Possibilities.

Essentially, what we wrote was a comprehensive survey paper looking into the various areas of virtual environments, or immersive environments as some refer to it, and addressed the fundamental challenges and technologies that can further the progress. There is also discussion in the paper concerning what areas are deficient and in need of further research initiative in hopes that those areas will be focused on by some of the countless people reading and citing the paper.

Literary influences that led up to the current state of affairs are also outlined, in order to give a proper history of the subject while framing the further understandings as the paper continued on. As one reviewer put it, we presented the most comprehensive paper on the subject that we could short of writing an entire book about the subject.

As the message from Dr. Gilbert suggests, I will be making the entire paper available as a PDF when it is sent off to ACM for publication. While there are a lot of topics covered in the paper, I’ll only be addressing one of them here in this blog.

The Take-Away

One of the biggest things that can be taken from the paper concerning the future direction of the Metaverse (in my opinion) is the implicit understanding that centralized networking is our Achilles Heel. It always has been, even before we really got into the hardcore 3D Immersive Environments like we see today. All the way back to Lessons from Habitat in 1991, Bandwidth being a scarce resource has always been a concern in something like this, and centralized networking was pegged as a culprit.

Yes, we can alleviate that stress by offloading across a datacenter, or buying more powerful servers. But the limitation is still there, and all we end up doing in the process is kicking the can down the road instead of actually trying to solve the problem at the root.

Whatever the future holds for immersive environments, it is likely that decentralized networking will be a major part of it in stark contrast to our massive datacenters today and centralized bandwidth.

To Boldly Go…

There is also a hint toward the data itself, in that the distribution of that data would likely not be the same as how we are accomplishing this task today. I’d like to say that in order for a powerful Metaverse to really evolve, the data has to be agnostic. The best way to understand this is to imagine the replicators in Star Trek and how they work.

When the captain walks up to a replicator and says “Tea. Earl Gray. Hot.” the replicator isn’t looking for a cup of tea in its inventory. Nowhere on the ship is there a room with thousands of cups of hot tea on a shelf waiting to be beamed to the replicator. Essentially, there is a holding tank of sorts on the ship which contains the raw molecular “soup” of materials, and the replicators are simply using a digital recipe to pull the components and “replicate” that molecular recipe.

A replicator works almost like magic. Just like the plot to every Star Trek series.

If we apply this understanding to purely digital files, the same process works. Let’s say that the replicator is a software program on your computer whose sole purpose is to reconstruct digital files based on digital fingerprints (keys) that you give it. Since we’re already talking about a decentralized network as our future, the “holding tank” full of agnostic data to be used for those reconstructions of files should be spread across every user of the network.

Why not? We all have a cache folder sitting on our computers from virtual environments and web browsers. What if that cache folder was simply agnostic data and available to the entire network of users in a P2P manner?

First off, it would mean that our cache’s are meaningless to human interpretation. Completely random data not representing anything in particular until we give it the fingerprint to reconstruct the file we need. Secondly, it would mean that the data becomes multi-use data.

That last point is very important. It means that 1GB of multi-use data represents or contains any file that is 1GB or less. We can say that Photoshop CS5 is under 1GB for the installer, correct? So that multi-use data would contain Photoshop CS5, and anything else that is 1GB or under. The key, so to speak, is that while such a system just about invalidates the premise of current copyright law, making it impossible to prosecute somebody using such a system, it brings up something even more interesting.

11 Herbs and Spices

It’s not the data that is really copyrightable, but the means by which such data can be arranged in a unique configuration as a representation of a work. What is really copyrightable happens to be the unique fingerprints which tell the system how to reconfigure multi-use data for a specific file output that is no longer multi-use, or in layman terms – it’s the digital recipe.

Another interesting side effect to multi-use data is that you’re not storing a 1:1 representation of anything. Since the data is multi-use, that means (for the most part) that you don’t need the storage equivalent for a copy of every single file in the system. All you really need at the very least is enough agnostic data available in order to cover the largest file on the network.

If the largest file you have on the network is about 50GB (and I’m being very generous here), then on a multi-use data system, you would need no more than 50GB of data total for everything you ever store into that network. That’s the bare minimum. Yes, at that level it would take longer to reconstruct the data, but it would still work. the more agnostic data you have in storage, the faster that reconstruction goes. Think of it like over unity…

Needless to say that a multi-use data structure in combination with decentralized networking would mean that, in example, the entirety of the Second Life asset servers could be housed in about 100 terabytes or less (for redundancy), and the reliability of that system would mean that the odds of anything in your inventory ever disappearing would be so close to nil as to make no odds.

And that, is how you solve the root of a problem instead of addressing only the symptoms.

A Rosedale by Any Other Name…

2011-11-22T06:49:00.001-05:00

clearly is not the same when it comes to @Rodvik in #SecondLife

As reported by Wagner James Au on New World Notes (and probably other places), Kim Salzer has left Linden Lab for greener pastures elsewhere. As the former Head of Marketing & Product at Linden Lab, Kim found quickly that a Metaverse is a wholly different platform than a video game. This is a valuable lesson that can be learned by Rodvik and Will Wright who remain at Linden Lab in official capacity and guide the vision of Second Life ongoing.

The problem is that the vision lacks actual vision.

Rodvik Humble at SLCC | You can only bullshit your way for so long.

I’m not as enthusiastic about the direction that Kim Salzer was looking to take Linden Lab and subsequently Second Life, in that from the start I had my reservations concerning her appropriateness and understanding of Second Life as a Metaverse construct and not a video game. It was not a stretch of imagination to believe she, along with @Rodvik, was making a left turn with their understanding of Second Life and how to address it going forward.

I expected that she would, coming from Activision/Blizzard and Electronic Arts, see Second Life as just another video game and focus solely on that aspect with her efforts which would, in turn, be expedited by Rodvik who is coming from the same background of video games. After all, they are both veterans of the video game realm, and seeing Second Life with similarities to a video game, they would be more than likely to blanket their approach likewise thinking that if there is a minor similarity with video games, then the entire approach being the same as video games would be most appropriate.

But the fact remains;

Second Life is patently not a video game.

It is not a game... it is a Virtual World. Wikipedia defines a Virtual World as an online community that takes the form of a computer-based simulated environment through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects. – APixelLife4me

Why is this such a hard concept to understand at the executive level of Linden Lab? First we see Mark Kingdon completely ignoring the community and trying to make Second Life about Enterprise Solutions, and now we see Rod Humble trying to treat it like a video game. We may never truly have insight as to what was really going on in Philip Rosedale’s vision, but I’ll bet the virtual house that there are people in the existing community who can come damned close to revealing that vision with clarity.

I find it nothing short of irony that a high profile woman working for Linden Lab, the makers of a vast virtual environment, would cite “the regular commute to the company's San Francisco office from Los Angeles” as the defining factor for her moving on. Second Life being, among many other things, a platform which by its very nature facilitates in-world communication and telecommuting opportunity for business use. It becomes, yet again, a moment where we take pause and wonder if they truly understand the nature of the product as a platform for content and communication. If anything, her stated reason for departure glosses over the fact that her tenure at Linden Lab enacted some of the most draconian policies which directly led to some of the worst PR disasters I’ve seen, PR disasters which could have been trivial to avoid on the whole, yet were not only facilitated but actively fostered to fruition with the blessing of Rod Humble.

Ginny Business Center – Because it has nothing to do with machinima, Meeroos or Vampires.

After all, there is countless business ongoing within the virtual environment itself, and even regular business meetings and such for marketing and other business use, yet the memo hasn’t reached Linden Lab, as we see by their action… or more appropriately their inaction. This constitutes a systemic failure on the part of Linden Lab to immerse themselves in their own product and environment, and thus become the champion example of the benefits of their technology. If the company isn’t willing to seriously utilize their own product, then it becomes little surprise that no other company in the real world would want to either.

Focusing on the in-world games such as Meeroos, reopening the development of further gaming aspects to facilitate further gaming development in-world, and focusing on the A.I. framework to facilitate the equivalent of NPCs and unintelligent “bots” disturbs me because it shows a contradiction in understanding for what truly matters with Second Life. It was the blatant position of stonewalling and ignoring the community that led to a very public community effort to raise the money and hire Qarl to code Parametric Mesh Deformer, in light of policies that likely stemmed from Kim Salzer.

As I’ve said before, that’s the sort of colossal PR screw-up that is grounds for termination, and company-wide re-evaluation of priorities. Again, I’ve been on that evaluation end of a company a number of times and have made those observations and decisions. It’s not easy, but it’s far better than the alternative of consistently running a company into the ground and causing widespread public damages to your own brand. Doomsayer or not, I still called it in advance – she didn’t stick around too long and her misunderstanding of what Second Life actually had rendered her nearly incompetent in relation to the job position she held, doing far more damage to the long term image of Linden Lab than we may possibly imagine.

It is the real, breathing and living people that make Second Life what it is. The community are using the platform (because that is what Second Life actually is: A virtual environment platform which is use agnostic) to create a wide range of virtual goods and services, fostering an in-world economy and literally creating most aspects of the virtual environment and not a multi-million dollar design team in-house. So again, I find it counterproductive when I see Linden Lab essentially undermining that community time and again by pillaging the existing ecosystem for “added value” and applying those things to exclusive Premium Accounts or even worse, polarizing the vision of an agnostic system by seeing only ways to facilitate games or machinima.

What good is artistic measure when Linden Endowment for the Arts may as well be defunct – seeing the demise of Shakespeare Theater and Frank Lloyd Wright Museum in-world? What good is having a platform that is suited for immersive education when you aren’t intelligent enough to subsidize those educational institutions and indoctrinate the future generation to your technology? Even Apple had enough sense to donate computers and equipment to schools for free or drastically reduced cost for this very same reason, and write it off as a charitable donation.

Where is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Second Life? Where is the Aerospace Museum? Where are the Universities? I’ll tell you where – They’re rapidly jumping ship and moving over to OpenSim or elsewhere, because Linden Lab essentially screwed them over royally in exchange for cuddling Meeroos and Vampires.

Loyola Marymount University – Coming to an OpenSim near you, thanks to Linden Lab.

It’s not a priority… but Meeroos and Machinima are. Being a Vampire is the marketing focus. I’m not saying that Meeroos, machinima and roleplaying vampires aren’t important in SecondLife, but they are all things which can be integrated and put to use much better than they are currently presented today – especially not at the expense of cutting the things which have greater importance for breaking the stigma that your platform is nothing more than a video game niche’.

This is what you would expect from a group of people who do not really understand what Second Life is, or that there is a thriving ecosystem of community which the system itself is built for. Instead, it is the sort of myopic maneuvers that you would expect from somebody coming in and seeing only a video game, while surrounding themselves with video game veterans. After all, it is no surprise that the message isn’t reaching Linden Lab when they surround themselves with video game “yes-men” and “girl Fridays”.

The focus also on machinima is endearing but still heavy handed, as is promoting as an official stance that you can be a Vampire on Marketplace. Again, these are the sorts of attitudes you would only expect from a video game executive mentality, but clearly not from somebody who has a deeper understanding of virtual environments on the whole.

Of course, I cannot mention Marketplace without noting the unbelievable amount of grief content creators receive concerning the usage of marketplace and their own inventory. This content is time and again sabotaged, leaving little recourse for the content creators except to wait it out and manually change their listings in order to compensate. If you want to know what sort of horror this creates, simply ask Avril Korman at @DamnedGoodesign

This isn’t a Public Discussion

Furthermore, as James Wagner Au reports,

“Kim was instrumental in implementing a corporate policy that tightly controls information and internal communication within Linden Lab, both between departments, and between Linden Lab staff and the community”

This direction has been extremely clear over the past year and has had wide-reaching detrimental effect. A recent altercation with Oz Linden in the JIRA left me completely taken aback at the shear ignorance of his response, which I know must have stemmed from Kim’s own ridiculous policies of tight control. At least, I seriously hope it wasn’t the sort of attitude that would come out of his own accord. It was this same asinine approach that led to the string of events concerning Parametric Mesh Deformation as well, and I point the finger clearly back to Kim and Rod for that – because the Linden staff are only taking their marching orders.

One would believe that actually correcting the broken feature you spent years on is a priority.

Essentially, in a JIRA that is designed for discussion, bug and feature reporting/requests, and targeting a demographic of the community which is on average technically savvy and of the highest contributors – their biggest proponents to the world – these are the sort of people you want to have discussions with, and when possible in the safe harbor of the JIRA and in-world, I was informed by Oz Linden that the JIRA was not an open forum of discussion. Even though the discussion was pertaining directly to that particular JIRA and whether or not it still held relevance in light of current roadmap implementations.

What’s worse is the dismissive attitude overall for community requests which possibly mean the absolute most to the community and Second Life as a whole. Case in point: Parametric Mesh Deformation, which is a necessity in order to make the much touted Mesh import feature of actual use on a wide scale. Instead of understanding the absolute need for this correction, it was officially dismissed and largely ignored by Linden Lab until such point as the community not only publicly raised the capital independently but went ahead and contracted a former employee of Linden Lab to do the job Linden Lab was unwilling to acknowledge or do.

This, in itself, is absolutely unbelievable. It shows that Kim Salzer (facilitated by management at the highest levels) clearly did not understand the repercussions of her policies in the bigger picture, and more importantly neither did Rodvik Humble. For instance, it would be common sense to actually encourage on-topic discussion in the JIRA and with Linden Lab employees because it is a safe harbor. The JIRA is the first arena of discourse behind relatively closed doors and a first line of defense for addressing issues properly before the most passionate of your own community takes that discussion worldwide and public through social media and blogs – much like you are reading here.

If anything, the very concept of Agile Development is a system of work habit literally designed to handle rapid iteration and changes as they arise. So where was that Agile Development practice when the need arose to focus on Parametric Mesh Deformation? Better yet, where is that Agile Development prioritization when Linden Lab is writing out their roadmap going forward? Is it not disturbing that in the process of rapid development by Linden Lab, major features and components of the system overall are left in the wake indefinitely?

Whatever happened to finishing what you start? Where are the mirrors, what happened to Dazzle and the ability to skin the viewer, what happened to the other half of Windlight technology itself? What happened to making Windlight Settings an in-world asset tradable and able to be used by double clicking the asset in inventory?

“They are not on the short term roadmap” is the common answer. But more importantly, they aren’t even on the long-term roadmap either. Windlight being a system acquired in 2007 and left half dead on arrival for now going on 5 years. Mirrors following suit shortly after, and so too Dazzle. Whatever happened to sincerely blending the Web and 3D together in a seamless manner using a layer over the 3D Canvas like you do with the login screen itself? Blending virtual worlds with the web has been the dream of the industry since it began, and here we are twenty years later and no closer to realizing that dream on a wide scale*.

* Note: And I don’t mean pre-created environments or pseudo-plugins that cram a full viewer into a web page.

Viewer 2 shows full well what having half-baked priorities and implementation looks like. We have an address bar at the top and no UX logical connection for why it should be there – even though I’ve clearly and concisely explained why it should be there if it were to be finished properly.

Built-in Web Browser Uses New Canvas Rendering Layer [VWR-22977]

If public perception from Linden employees are such a concern, simply institute a policy which states the following:

The views and opinions of Linden Lab staff do not necessarily reflect or represent the attitudes or opinions of Linden Lab as a company and should be taken as personal opinion only.

Then you remove the gag order from your employees and allow them to converse with the community freely, as long as their opinions and expressions are respectful and do not incite. When you allow the community and your employees to speak freely, you’ll find that there are grievances and issues which should definitely be looked into, and you’ll find that the sentiments of the community may also reflect the sentiments of your staff. If you want true feedback and direction, you have to be willing to face when you are screwing up and make changes for the betterment of all. The alternative is surrounding yourself with people who will only serve to lie to your face and tell you everything is under control when the empire is crumbling down around you.

This is why the community itself gets it right, even when Linden Lab continues to get it so wrong. The community isn’t afraid they’ll be fired from Linden Lab for telling it as it is, but those employees are. You’ll never likely hear a more honest evaluation of what Second Life is doing right and more importantly what they are screwing up beyond recognition than from the most prominent members of the community. They speak the raw and unfiltered truth of the situation.

The fact that they are often speaking that unfiltered truth from the confines of OpenSim should be the most telling indication in and of itself.

I’m not the sort of person that will lie straight faced despite knowing full well the situation is rapidly deteriorating or highly likely to have profound negative consequences. I’m also not the sort of person that isn’t capable or willing to point out the raw and unfiltered consequences (good or bad) that current actions are likely to have. For that, you’ll have to hire people like Kim Salzer, a woman of professional pedigree but no professional experience within the context of a Metaverse. All the professional pedigree in the world didn’t make up for the fact that she was wholly unsuited for the position she was offered, nor had any willingness to truly understand that position. No amount of business pedigree made a difference in the ongoing public relations nightmare that has been the status-quo at Linden Lab since 2007.

By all means, not having this hang-up often makes me the messenger of very harsh realities, and there are quite a lot of people who would rather I didn’t put these things forward unfiltered. I get called all manner of names from people across the board – but it doesn’t phase me in the least. Nor will it phase me – because I continually prove to be correct well in advance despite not being the perpetual ass-kisser. Virtual reality needs a reality check – and I have no problem being one of the messengers, because you’re nobody until somebody hates you in the professional world.

I’m more than qualified for that position, too, as a Synthetic Environment SME with well over 15 years of actual, hands-on experience in virtual environments and technology research. There are people more qualified than myself, and I readily admit that. What I will also admit is that those people and myself are the last to be heard in a priority that is horribly skewed in the industry. We aren’t the sort of people who are going to tell you only what you want to hear, and in fact are likely to tell you what you don’t want to hear (but is highly necessary).

It’s time to understand what innovation and creative vision really mean on a wide scale.

The issue here is that the JIRA isn’t likely to show up in a Google search for Second Life, but all of those social media posts and blog entries will, in abundance. So one has to ask the obvious question of whether or not Kim and even Rodvik really understand the repercussions of those policies of restriction and how much damage it does to the image of Second Life and Linden Lab in public when enacted. Just like the Internet itself, censorship and restrictive control is treated as “damage” and is routed around in a virtual environment, much to the grand demise of the company trying to enact them. This also applies to IP protection policies in a virtual environment where every single user is capable of creating every part of the world at will. Second Life and Linden Lab owe its existence to the very fact that it is the very users of the virtual environment platform which are wholly responsible for a majority of the in-world content and services.

The best policy Linden Lab could muster on that front was a typical non-solution. Make everyone take a questionnaire about IP policies and swear on their scouts honor they would be honest and uphold those policies.

From day one, the Mesh policies for IP protection were widely violated – even on the Beta grid itself in plain view, and it wasn’t a surprise (at least to anyone outside of Linden Lab). It is wholly unenforceable as a solution, and any company thinking they can adequately enforce the public sentiment to the contrary is outright delusional. However, there is an actual workable solution to curb and enforce IP protection that actually becomes beneficial to Linden Lab, real world brands and the content creators in-world simultaneously if they really thought about it.

The underlying point to this is that not only is something like JIRA a public discussion forum, but outright denying that safe harbor for discussion wherein Linden Lab has some expectation of PR damage control in order to push those people out into the open of the Internet in general serves only to create collateral damages. This is a fundamental understanding that one would expect to see from the likes of a high profile Marketing Director at a major corporation. Second Life on the whole is a community driven experience, and absolutely demands public involvement and discussion on all levels. No amount of restrictive policy at Linden Lab is going to turn that tide, and all attempts to do so will end in failure on a grand scale.

Not-So Agile Development

Let me be perfectly clear. Agile Development policies are absolutely not an excuse to make half finished and broken products the official face of your company. Agile Development is a method by which rapid iterations can be worked on and implemented, facilitating rapid solutions and stability in shorter periods of time before making those changes the release candidate or official software release. When you miss that underlying point, you end up adhering to Agile Development even when it means putting out broken products to maintain the development roadmap timeline.

New features do not become release candidates until such time as within rapid development they become stabilized and proven within a high degree of stability across many use cases. To push them out half finished and widely broken, and call them the official viewer of your company is disastrous at best and lazy coding at worst. There is absolutely no sane person that will today state that the Official Second Life Viewer is remotely a stabile or finished product worthy of being the public face of Linden Lab to new users or existing veterans.

Again, I will not fault the actual staff at Linden Lab for this, because they are taking their marching orders from management and higher up. They are only doing their job, even when that job includes severely breaking the community and power that the wonderful platform they design and implement has.

Copy + Paste Premium

No.

Absolutely, unequivocally no.

If I had a rolled up newspaper, I’d be swatting the ever-loving hell out of Rodvik right now and yelling “Bad CEO! Baaaad!”

At the very least, squirting him with a spray bottle.

Premium accounts serve professionals in Second Life more than consumer demographics. It should be billed as a Second Life Pro account, and not as something that desperately searches in vain and steals existing community structure for added value to appeal to consumer usage that has all of those added value available to them without the monthly surcharge.

You cannot poach the existing offerings of the community and offer them as added value for a Premium Account. There is absolutely nothing of added value in rehashing existing offerings from your community and calling them exclusive access only. If anything, you are deliberately polarizing the community and alienating your biggest supporters.

The community does not need exclusive sandboxes, they do not need Linden Homes, they do not need “exclusive” gifts, and they do not need a company so narrow-minded as to deliberately undermine existing content and practices within their own community for short term expectation of profitability – a result of which is one of the many reasons OpenSim exists. Targeting new users with this premium content is little more than a slap to the face of the existing ecosystem, and functions on the premise of the P.T. Barnum business model (sucker born every minute). Linden Lab is literally preying on the fact that new users simply don’t know that a majority of those “added value” offerings exist in abundance without a premium account, and many times far better in every way imaginable.

Contrary to popular belief, Linden Lab does not have the luxury of continually driving their product into the ground without repercussion, nor do they have the luxury of playing the P.T. Barnum vision statement.

When new users who buy premium see this, they feel like Linden Lab ripped them off.

There is a healthy land rental market, there is a healthy custom homes market whereby the entire infrastructure facilitates the sales of those custom homes and rewards content creators. There are sandboxes maintained by the community – and if anything, a “premium” sandbox offering only makes sense to professionals in the very slightest of sense, only because one of the major real incentives for having a Premium Account is the ability to actually buy your own land, defeating the point of premium sandboxes. There are countless amounts of merchandise available to free members, so offering “exclusive premium” gifts is insulting to that foundation and misses the greater value of the community by ignoring what already exists and subsequently playing favorites with content creators.

Instead of poaching on the existing ecosystem and delivering it to the consumers, why not instead promote Premium Accounts as Second Life Professional accounts, showcase the existing content, land rental, and marketplace in conjunction with Second Life Verified Professional Accounts – which in turn encourages more users to pay for Second Life Professional accounts to become high visibility content creators to the consumers? Encourage it from the foundation of the Second Life ecosystem, and not the tip of the iceberg. In this manner, you are rewarding existing producers of content across the entire virtual environment, collaborating with them to foster a balanced and sustainable prosumer ecosystem instead of sabotaging it.

:: The most important paragraph in the virtual universe ::

What can you offer as Added Value and incentive for purchasing the Second Life Professional account upgrade? It makes you a Verified Professional in Second Life, and eligible to participate in submissions for Real World Brand Names coming to Linden Lab looking for virtual product representation for marketing purposes. Those Professional accounts then get to include those brand names within their own in-world store for added revenue and notoriety (Verified Vendors on Marketplace), Linden Lab benefits from increased volume of legitimately branded sales through transaction fees, and the Real World Brand Name receives innovative and brilliant viral marketing in-world for a fraction of the cost and orders of magnitude of meaningful longevity. This also solves the problem with supply and demand for real world branded IP in the virtual world in that verified professionals will facilitate the supply aspect of those brands readily, thus reducing the consumer need for illegitimate products.

For somebody who is largely ignored at Linden Lab, I seem to have just succinctly and brilliantly outlined a wide-scale marketing strategy that Kim Salzer couldn’t accomplish in all the time she worked at Linden Lab, despite her video game marketing pedigree.

The funniest part about all of this is, it will never be considered by Linden Lab. They will continue looking in all the wrong places for somebody capable of coming to the same conclusion as above, and they are likely to continue finding more Kim Salzers instead.

I wish with all my heart this wasn’t the case, I really do.

The sad alternative is that at literally every possible level of engagement, Premium Membership not only misses the point and deliberately undermines the community, but it is the very example of misunderstanding the ecosystem that is a virtual environment such as Second Life. It is the expectation of a video game professional in a world where only 10% similarity to a video game exists, and applying video game management practices as though they constitute 100% of the very different ecosystem you are working within.

What we have is excellent vision and perilous execution at best.

The Second Life X-Factor

As I said shortly after Kim Salzer was hired, if you cannot recognize the potential and the x-factor that a virtual environment like Second Life offers within your first week on the job, you shouldn’t be doing that job, let alone making sweeping policies concerning it.

Clearly this was the case, and she didn’t last long – regardless of whatever politically correct reason she gave as her reason for leaving. It’s in her nature to act as a marketing person, spinning a bad situation into something else, but for some reason she could not foresee nor adequately react to the myriad of situations which arose as Director of Marketing and Product for Linden Lab. see also: the most important paragraph in the virtual world above

The job of Marketing Director means it’s your job to reverse corporate ghost towns like this.

It’s very simple:

Facilitate and expedite the existing prosumer community to be paired with real world brands wishing to utilize your platform for long term marketing potential and ROI on behalf of the prosumers, Linden Lab and those brands.

This has been the missing factor since 2006 and is highly likely the underpinning cause to the hype bubble and subsequent collapse of the Second Life brand in relation to real world brand proliferation.

All of the infrastructure is in place today, with the exception of official policy and vision from Linden Lab to utilize it all to their advantage. Worse still is the misunderstanding of what exactly the ultimate power for the Marketplace itself holds in terms of long term ROI strategies. If you want innovation and something new, look no further than this as it brings to the table something fresh, new and massive potential for rethinking the way we approach virtual world marketing and community based producers and consumers. It also serves as a solid method by which to harness the creative power of the community, while helping to curb IP infringement on a wider scale, all while bringing in a successful revenue stream to Linden Lab and the in-world content creators.

What’s not to love about this?

At the base of it all, Linden Lab should first make it a point to realize that even “free” users of Second Life are highly valued customers. The free users outnumber the premium users by far, and they are providing a massive secondary revenue structure in their purchasing habits, making them one of the most valued commodities in the virtual world, even though they are routinely treated as the very last priority.

Instead, Linden Lab focuses on direct revenue streams at the expense of lucrative secondary streams, which in turn serves only to fracture the entire ecosystem overall. This needs to stop if they ever want to return Second Life to another Golden Age of virtual environments. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory should not become the battle cry of Linden Lab.

The Virtual Light At The End of the Prim Tunnel

I know full well that I come down hard on Linden Lab and many other virtual environment companies. I offer a cynical and harsh reality check to current situations. However, keep in mind that while the things that I’m pointing out are those that are the negative sides of things, they are also alluding to the positive side as well when you read between the lines.

What I do not want to see is blatant and ignorant decisions which harm this company and the community. What I do not want to see are all of the educators leaving Second Life for other virtual environments, what I do not want to see are perfectly good content infrastructures squandered for short term gains.

I want nothing more than to see Second Life and Linden Lab return to their rightful position as the darling of virtual worlds, and I want nothing more than to see them rise again and taken seriously on a worldwide basis. Most importantly, I want the CEO of Linden Lab to succeed at doing all of this.

I want to see Second Life as a viable platform for Education, The Arts, Collaboration, Business and Real World Brand Marketing. I want to see this once amazing ecosystem of prosumers return to their golden age and find balance once again in conjunction with understanding at Linden Lab. I want to see Linden Lab actively promote and utilize their own system in the myriad of ways that I know it can be used for, to be the champion of their own technology on an ongoing basis.

What I want to see is that Linden Lab can not only work hand in hand with OpenSim and the greater community as part of the greater Metaverse, but that doing so would be the most beneficial thing possible. What I want to see is that the spirit of open communication and collaboration be restored between Linden Lab and the community which continually helps to build this wonderful and awe inspiring environment. What I want to see is that Linden Lab understands that doing all of this will give them everything, while ignoring it will leave them with nothing.

What I want to see more than anything, is the future of Second Life.

Down With The Sickness

2011-11-16T03:04:00.001-05:00

We live in a very sick world. Here’s how we fix it for real. #Zeitgeist #OWS

Usually I’m the sort of person who writes exceedingly lengthy articles about complex ideals or viewpoints, much of which I am fully aware the average person (aside from the most technically devout) essentially tune out in an age of Attention Deficit Media.

However, this post concerns something entirely different, and is my official position concerning Occupy Wall Street and the worldwide protests in solidarity. It includes a full video lecture that is likely one of the most important that you could ever watch on the subject, and I highly recommend, just this once, that you put aside your attention deficit and take the time to digest the information that will be presented in this post.

I’m an avid supporter of Occupy Wall Street but for entirely different reasons than the #OWS crowd are supporting it for. While the people are protesting inequality, corruption and greed, they are still at a phase of understanding where they believe working within a system that is inherently corrupt will bring them a solution.

There is literally no way to pay the mounting debts of this nation, or the world. Period. End of story. Every bank note in your hand is a representation of debt, with interest that can never be repaid. It is the representation for everything that is absolutely wrong in this world today.

Take a good look at it.

We cannot fix a system inherently designed by nature to deprive a majority of people on this planet in order to provide an excess for a few. A system designed for cyclical consumption and consumerism, infinite growth, in a world of very finite resource. It is a logical impossibility.

Nobody, not you nor I, will ever be able to vote these facts out of existence. There are no laws that we can possibly write and enact that will change these immutable laws of nature, or of the nature of this parasite we call money.

I support Occupy Wall Street because they are a catalyst to realization, if not still premature. They know something is terribly wrong with the world and this country, and have a vague idea what the root of that problem is. However the solutions they propose at this time are nothing more than addressing the symptoms of the problem, and are doomed to failure on the whole.

I still support them, because they are a much needed catalyst, and I am patient enough to wait for those protesters to truly have a revelation as to what the root of the problem is and how we can truly fix it. They, and you, will inevitably realize this immutable fact sooner or later.

If you realize this immutable fact later, you will likely be fighting for water, food and basic resources. Wars, famine and disease running rampant in what used to be a 1st World Country.

The choice is ours.

You can take an hour and forty-five minutes of your day to change your mind and help change the world through education, or you can spend that time looking for pictures of cats on the internet.

Weigh it out for yourself. Life is short, use it wisely.

Social Pathology – Full Lecture | The Zeitgeist Movement

It’s a Matter of Trust

2011-11-03T18:58:00.001-05:00

Should the inmates actually be running the asylum? #SecondLife #OpenSim

When we think about virtual environments, often we’re in a perspective of one dimensionality; We can relate to a particular virtual environment that we’ve been involved with for a length of time but we find it much harder to expand that personal experience to reach into multitudes of other virtual environments or even the possibility that they are merely components of a larger system which we can describe as a complete Metaverse construct.

Take, for instance, Second Life. It is the product of a company that we know as Linden Lab in California, United States, but in and of itself it is a walled garden virtual environment with no real incentive to be part of something larger unless that something larger has itself as the central authority and gateway to the whole. This is not altogether uncommon in the virtual environment industry, and as we look to other systems that are similar, there is little (if any) interoperability among the many which exist today.

We can, of course, look at systems such as BlueMars, ActiveWorlds, VIE, and countless others (Kaneva, web.alive, Jibe, OpenSim) but the underlying concern is that despite the advancements being made individually, they are all essentially symptoms of technology lock-in.

In relation to Second Life and subsequently the OpenSim based Hypergrid, we see what is essentially a minor evolution in open thinking. OpenSim being the natural progression of Second Life into a larger and more decentralized grid of interconnected virtual environment spaces which do not necessarily reside under the authority of a single company or entity, yet connect together much like we see the structure of the World Wide Web.

Much of what I contemplate when dealing with Object Interoperability for IEEE Virtual World Standard Group is to really break all of this down into the base components and take a hard look at what we know should be happening (an end-goal) versus what we actually have today. Whether or not I’m a user of Second Life, ActiveWorlds, Kaneva, BlueMars, OpenSim, or any number of other virtual environments is inconsequential to me in much the same manner as whether or not I use any particular flavor of operating system or even what particular websites I frequent online using a web browser (Firefox, Chrome, etc).

I do happen to lean more toward SecondLife as my chosen flavor of virtual environment, not because I believe it is somehow the best choice, but merely because I believe it represents a fundamental and underlying truth to what an open and interconnected Metaverse should look like. This is, of course, despite the very glaring shortfalls of the company responsible for maintaining and progressing the software responsible for SecondLife, in that while the company (Linden Lab) is acting in a manner by which is self-interested and a walled garden, the underlying technology itself is agnostic and has much potential if applied correctly. I see a lot of this progression happening more on the side of OpenSim based systems, and while I am still not convinced that OpenSim has a stake in the overall future of interoperable Metaverse standards, I do give those dedicated developers quite a lot of credit for at least trying.

That is not to say that I have somehow written off OpenSim or the efforts that are being made in that community. One must realize that I’m looking at this ecosystem as a whole and not for the individual components which may or may not comprise it. Which brings me to a bit of a history lesson concerning virtual environments, and rules by which I base my overall understanding for interoperability on; The Lessons Learned From LucasFilm’s Habitat.

Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer: Creators of the first Graphical MMO – Habitat

I know I quote this document more than a preacher in a pulpit on Sunday, but I have every reason to do so. Essentially, for a document that was written and published between 1989 and 1991 by two men who more or less invented the massively multiuser graphical online environment, it outlines many of the fundamental things which we should have been focused on in the development of virtual environments but somehow seem to have been openly ignored. For instance, in relation to the punk-ass kids in virtual worlds (such as Linden Lab) today who seem to have no respect for the grandfathers of the technology or the wisdom they passed down, we can apply the following lesson:

The implementation platform is relatively unimportant.

The presentation level and the conceptual level cannot (and should not) be totally isolated from each other. However, defining a virtual environment in terms of the configuration and behavior of objects, rather than their presentation, enables us to span a vast range of computational and display capabilities among the participants in a system. This range extends both upward and downward. As an extreme example, a typical scenic object, such as a tree, can be represented by a handful of parameter values. At the lowest conceivable end of things might be an ancient Altair 8800 with a 300 baud ASCII dumb terminal, where the interface is reduced to fragments of text and the user sees the humble string so familiar to the players of text adventure games, "There is a tree here." At the high end, you might have a powerful processor that generates the image of the tree by growing a fractal model and rendering it three dimensions at high resolution, the finest details ray-traced in real time, complete with branches waving in the breeze and the sound of wind in the leaves coming through your headphones in high-fidelity digital stereo. And these two users might be looking at the same tree in same the place in the same world and talking to each other as they do so. Both of these scenarios are implausible at the moment, the first because nobody would suffer with such a crude interface when better ones are so readily available, the second because the computational hardware does not yet exist.

The point, however, is that this approach covers the ground between systems already obsolete and ones that are as yet gleams in their designers' eyes. Two consequences of this are significant. The first is that we can build effective cyberspace systems today. Habitat exists as ample proof of this principle. The second is that it is conceivable that with a modicum of cleverness and foresight you could start building a system with today's technology that could evolve smoothly as the tomorrow's technology develops. The availability of pathways for growth is important in the real world, especially if cyberspace is to become a significant communications medium (as we obviously think it should).

Given that we see cyberspace as fundamentally a communications medium rather than simply a user interface model, and given the style of object-oriented approach that we advocate, another point becomes clear:

Taken directly from the document, we see that the mode of implementation seems to have turned out quite different than what was rightly proposed. We see in this walled garden ecosystem that there is much more effort put into the platform (but strangely not in actually finishing any particular feature or part of the platform: Windlight, Mesh, Marketplace…) than the content agnostics. Taken together, by any measure, this should be regarded as a fallacy up front. Indeed it has become somewhat of a misstep in that we’re faced today with content that is locked away in proprietary methods, servers, and ultimately out of reach to all but the most determined content creators who jump through countless hoops to export and re-import their content from one environment to another manually. With the introduction of mesh based content into SecondLife, one would believe that a step has been taken to alleviate this issue, but if anything it has only exasperated the issue further by offloading the content creation outside of the walled garden and still leaving the onus of responsibility upon the content creator to systematically import that content from system to system manually. Of course, this lesson also applies to interoperability in a manner by which the actual assets and media are dynamic and standardized as well, allowing greater flexibility on the end-user for a myriad of access types.

The platform should be inconsequential, while the focus on content and facilitating the propagation of that content in a controllable manner automatically, should be the focus.

When I was a guest on CrossWorlds with Mal Burns (shown on left) recently I made it a point to hammer this point home, even if it was subconsciously on my part. Like anything regarding interoperability, we’re faced with a cascading domino effect whenever we try to look at any particular aspect or make changes to it. It isn’t as simple as changing a single thing and having the whole ecosystem work out, but instead we look at how those small changes affect the rest of the system down the line. When we shed this light on Linden Lab, we see how the seemingly inconsequential side projects and diversion of attention to vaguely related things has shown time and again that even the smallest infraction of these rules can result in a snowball effect later on with all of the related systems – sociologically and technologically.

For instance, in order to enact a universal and decentralized asset system for a greater Metaverse, we must also look further down the line of influence and ask what else must be taken into consideration for that to happen. In regards to this, we can see we need the equivalent of a trusted identity standard as well as a certificate of authenticity for the servers themselves in order to facilitate the asset server and exchange even across SecondLife and OpenSim based systems.

This isn’t too far fetched, however, because there already exists the underlying basis for this even if it isn’t entirely being utilized. Whether this trusted identity comes from an internal methodology or whether the virtual environments which are increasingly connecting to your social media will offer the solution is up for debate. I can see the trusted identity aspect going in either direction, or even a combination of the two as simple as logging into SecondLife with the ease of a Facebook Connect, Google Account, Twitter OAuth or other method already in widespread use. My bet at this time is placed squarely on OpenSim in being the likely candidate for implementing this before Linden Lab, and thus pushing the overall Metaverse closer to reality.

If we were to look at the SecondLife Premium Memberships, the question immediately becomes what such a service offers in added value to the customer that isn’t already available to the overall community without that level of premium access. To this point, Linden Lab is still seemingly scratching their heads with the addition of Linden Homes, Premium Gifts (furniture, etc) and even adding customer service into the mix as an incentive. None of these things are a proper match for why anyone should pay for a premium membership, and it is no surprise that none of these things has really increased the uptake of premium membership purchases.

Sandboxes, homes, furniture, and customer service aren’t added value.

After all, we’re focusing on the platform but not the reality of the content agnostics. Without a premium membership there is a fairly healthy land rental ecosystem by which anyone can merely rent land and set up their own house which they can readily purchase on the marketplace. Premium gifts aren’t much of an incentive either if countless items which are similar are also available to non-premium members for purchase and use. The question becomes, then, what exactly are the real added value things which a premium membership actually offers that are not available without it?

We can evaluate this from a truly agnostic viewpoint and consider that the ability to actually purchase land as opposed to renting it is a viable added value for having a premium membership, as well as the ability to increase your L$ purchase and selling limits. This is a beginning to understanding what a premium membership is actually good for, while premium gifts, Linden Homes, and other inconsequential things should be discarded (at least metaphorically).

While it does play into the mentality of new users who wouldn’t otherwise know where to look for those same things, I must stress that this isn’t necessarily a good thing, mainly because it is essentially preying on a new user’s inability to know there are alternatives, not to mention deliberately undermining the existing systems and community which are already in place (ie: Committing the cardinal sin by going out of their way to violate the most important rule of virtual worlds: Work Within The System). To me, this seems like a very shaky revenue stream (P.T. Barnum mentality) to pursue in that it relies entirely on the ignorance of new users to sustain. This in and of itself explains a lot of the business focus of Linden Lab in looking for avenues by which they can increase total concurrent users through outside means – maybe internal projects which somehow utilize the Skylight in-browser viewer in a Facebook page.

Why exactly does anyone actually need a Linden Home? It undermines the existing community.

Now that we’ve identified the base added value for Premium Memberships, we can also assume that customer service itself should never be a premium service. A customer is a customer whether they are paying you outright for a premium membership or whether they are readily subsidizing a revenue stream through the in-world marketplace and transactions. After all, a system such as SecondLife is literally built on the premise of user generated content and in-world currency transactions, and the marketplace itself should be earning a healthy revenue stream through transaction fees to Linden Lab for the countless transactions which occur daily.

When we sort these things out concerning Premium Memberships, one pile which says Added Value and the other essentially being a Discard Pile, we’re left with the truest form of a premium membership and the associations which actually have added value and incentive by which a person should want to pay for it. What we’re also left with is an uncluttered view of what a Premium Membership should be offering as further added value without delving into gimmicks and shady practices.

A Premium Membership in SecondLife/OpenSim offers what should be recognized as a fundamental interoperability component.

When you sign up for a premium membership, you are divulging personally identifiable information for that account in order to allow both accountability and secure payment. This, in and of itself, is the holy grail for interoperability if it were ever utilized effectively. The idea of a premium membership which is tied to a trusted authority of identification, trusted enough to allow higher purchasing limits and the purchase of actual server space and regions, should also be considered the added value of a Trusted Identity in terms of assets and an avatar passport in the virtual world.

Going back to the content aspect, trusted authorities, and the ability to have access to agnostic digital content which you are legally able to access, we can see that a trusted identity is a major added value for a Premium Membership in SecondLife in that if you have that trusted identity, you should pair that with trusted certificates on the server side of operations in order to allow trusted simulators to participate in the greater Metaverse in conjunction with Direct Delivery built into the viewer.

In the same manner, paying for a Premium Membership, and being granted the level of Trusted Identity (an Avatar Passport), you should then be able to use the same login credentials across all trusted simulators and grids, and subsequently have access to all inventory content you have purchased automatically on any of those trusted simulators. In the end, it’s a matter of adding the trusted identity and trusted grid authentication into the mix which immediately solves a greater interoperability dilemma while also solving a big question for Linden Lab (and even OpenSim grids) as to what truly is added value as an incentive for offering Premium Memberships.

This approach doesn’t undermine existing OpenSim efforts for similar practices, either, and if anything should strengthen it. For instance, if we were to look at SpotOn3D and their Double Dutch Delivery system, would it not make more sense for them to instead be on board with a trusted identity and trusted grid interoperability, participating in the overall structure by becoming a trusted grid with their own certificate, and then switching their focus over to offering their own Premium Memberships which then allow their own users to have Trusted Identities which are available everywhere? The difference between this and what they are currently trying to establish is that with trusted certificates for grids, there isn’t a biased commercial entity controlling them for their own singular benefit.

Where one proprietary solution is closed off, another revenue stream opens up with much wider appeal and benefit. The idea of a trusted identity and trusted grid certificate isn’t necessarily centralized in the hands of Linden Lab to control, in that it would apply to asset servers and other grids as well in practice. For instance, a trusted identity from SpotOn3D (somebody paying for premium membership in SpotOn3D) would be able to link their account to other grids under the trusted authority; In this instance let us say InWorldz, SpotOn3D, ReactionGrid, Avination, etc all would have a certificate of trust for their grids, and my single premium membership would act as my passport across the interoperable Metaverse. I should only be paying one instance for a Premium Membership, which then becomes agnostic across the entire Hypergrid and even SecondLife.

Let’s say I am paying Linden Lab for a Premium Membership, which then grants me a Trusted Identity in the greater Metaverse. I go to log into SpotOn3D, InWorldz, Avination, or ReactionGrid and find that my Trusted Identity which I am paying Premium Membership for in SecondLife is now an acceptable set of login credentials for the entire Hypergrid.

Any number of trusted certificate grids would query the other trusted Grids to check my “Passport” for verification – a one time authentication, by which that information is then associated to me on that particular grid for immediate use going forward. After that authentication, my inventory then becomes agnostic across the entire trusted Hypergrid as a result, with purchases from places like Marketplace delivering to my inventory across the trusted hypergrid as well. This is much more preferable than to have a dozen competing marketplace systems, proprietary methodologies that only work within the confines of proprietary systems, and a slew of walled gardens competing against each other.

It is better to facilitate the ability to offer platform agnostic content which propagates across countless virtual environment spaces than to delude yourself into thinking it is both profitable and sustainable to remain a walled garden indefinitely.

This brings me to yet another point in the discussion for interoperability, as well as a fine example of the previously mentioned domino effect of changing one aspect and how it cascades into greater or lesser things down the line.

Work Within The System

Wherever possible, things that can be done within the framework of the experiential level should be. The result will be smoother operation and greater harmony among the user community. This admonition applies to both the technical and the sociological aspects of the system.

The existing system which is defined by SecondLife actually constitutes a wealth of revenue streams if only the rule above were to be acknowledged and respected. As it stands today, Linden Lab seems to be doing quite a lot to buck the hard learned lesson and run in the opposite direction.

Of course, I am talking about the potential for focusing on Marketplace and the user-generated content and in-world transactions. This is what open ended virtual environments such as SecondLife were built for, yet time and again I see these walled garden mentalities sabotaging a perfectly good source of wildly successful revenue models.

Let’s look back at the prior lesson for a moment, with the inclusion of the Trusted Identity tied to Premium Membership, trusted grid certificates, and a universal inventory access.

The obvious incentive to move forward with this course of action is the interoperability foundation aspect, however, from a purely commercial standpoint there exists countless revenue generation potential for doing so as well. Within the framework of the experiential level we see a wholly unfulfilled need for branded content within the virtual environment, despite the foundation for such to exist quite profitably for all involved. There is a disturbing lack of real world brand crossover into the virtual environment spectrum which has persisted since as far back as I can remember, and this isn’t a focus of merely SecondLife, but most walled gardens in the open content creation sandbox environments over the course of the entire industry.

On one hand, we have a perfectly capable content delivery platform in Marketplace as well as in-world, yet it is boggling to see that even today there are no real-world brands working within that system, nor is there any real protocol enabled from the company end (Linden Lab) in order to focus on and facilitate such to happen. Would it not make perfect sense to enable your own content delivery platform to allow an easy and legitimate channel for real world brands to participate under the guise of marketing in a verified manner?

How can Linden Lab marketing look at this picture and not see a million dollar revenue stream?

There is a wealth of opportunity here being squandered, and it is very disconcerting to see this continue the way it has since the mid-1990s. I’m sure there have been real world brands participating in virtual environments in one way or another, but the focus is officially supporting this channel within the system itself instead of putting the onus of responsibility on outside companies as middle-men to make those connections independently. The other point to be made here involves working within the system itself in that there is still a lack of meaningful acknowledgement or inclusion for the prosumers which open ended content creation environments have given rise to.

Instead, what we see are countless “third party” knock-off and counterfeit brand look-a-likes available in these virtual environments. This alone tells me that there is a fundamental need by the community to have these brands available, and that few if any are being met. If anything, this demand is being met with hostility and possible legal action which in and of itself is a sure sign of a broken approach to handling what could be a very profitable revenue stream for all.

In terms of trusted identities, trusted grid certificates and universal inventories, when we add to that the idea that there now becomes a widespread appeal for real world brands to participate appropriately within the work within the system rule (Marketplace), we see content agnostic approaches which can not only proliferate known brands within the confines of SecondLife but also across the greater Metaverse as a whole.

These few fundamental changes quickly show how both a level of interoperability can be achieved, while exploding the opportunity for revenue generation across the board. The idea of trusted identity, grid certificates, universal inventory, and branded merchandise channels on Marketplace have collectively solved a lion’s share of current issues, at least in theory, showing how it can be wildly beneficial to focus on them versus the current situation of segmentation and walled gardens whereby we see nothing but frustration and countless tedious hours of manual export and import of content which in turn stifles and suppresses what an interoperable Metaverse construct could offer.

Trying to convince content creators to adopt a new OpenSim platform and set up shop there is tedious, time consuming, and costly. Offering proprietary delivery systems which only a handful of grids can benefit from doesn’t do much in the way of solving the root of the problem, either. Instead we’re only masking the underlying problem and benefiting only a few who control those proprietary delivery channels.

There is a definite need for interoperability and sociological understanding of the platforms when it comes to virtual environments. Sadly, after more than twenty years since the first graphical MMO (Habitat) and even despite blatant documentation of the lessons learned from that system to pass on to future generations, neither mainstream interoperability nor sociological understanding of the Metaverse exist. Only a handful of professionals seem to actually “get it”, and clearly those aren’t the people in charge.

Make SecondLife into a Facebook game, stripped down and only vaguely resembling the actual experience. Build it for attention deficit mentality and to make a quick buck off of people who don’t know any better. Ignore the long term components or blatantly obvious revenue streams to chase whatever buzzword is on the Internet at this moment. It’s not that hard to really sum up what they’re doing over at Linden Lab, and it’s very obvious they still don’t get it. I don’t even think they want to get it, either.

Admit it… you expected a company which is amassing high profile gaming names and marketing to have some flipping idea what they’re working with. Don’t feel bad, I’ve perpetually had that feeling since 1994.

For what it’s worth, you’re not alone.

Crossworlds with Mal Burns

2011-10-27T14:08:00.001-05:00

I’ll be a guest tonight to talk about kittens & ninjas | #SecondLife

I've been invited to attend the show Crossworlds with +Mal Burns tonight in #SecondLife as a guest. We'll be talking about IEEE Virtual World Standard Group and Interoperability in Virtual Worlds. Mostly, though, we'll be focusing on what matters: Ninjas and Kittens

Show starts at 3PM SLT (Pacific) | 6PM EST
Live stream available here: http://metaversetv.com/live
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Metaverse%20Island/163/146/113

The sim doesn't open up until 2PM SLT - so grab a tent and camp on the outskirts to get a good seat :) By all means.. come down and join us.

You never know what sort of crazy stuff we’ll talk about.

Spotlight TV Open Invitation

2011-10-19T01:30:00.001-05:00

Talking about mixed media and reality tonight in #SecondLife

It’s been awhile since I’ve had time to do interviews and public appearances, but tonight I’ll be a guest on Spotlight TV to talk about mixed reality media and how reality and virtual worlds can blur for the better. Maybe a bit about Augmented Reality and the role it will play in our digital future? Join us tonight at Spotlight TV with Scorpinosis Nightfire for a conversation that should prove to be interesting (even if we’re wildly off topic).

★ Host Scorpinosis Nightfire welcomes First and Second Life author Clairwil Oh to discuss her popular virtual vampire novels and the expansion to new worlds outside of SL.

★ Academic Author of The Future of Virtual Worlds in E-Commerce, Object Interoperability Leader for IEEE Virtual World Standard Workgroup, and synthetic environment researcher, Aeonix Aeon (Will Burns) will be joining for a conversation about mixed media and reality.

October 19th, 2011
6PM SLT | 9PM EST
SLRUL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cyberstar/183/189/1710

You Say you Want A Revolution?

2011-10-14T02:20:00.001-05:00

Well, you know. We all want to change the world. #OWS

I’m an avid supporter of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, which now has a basis around the world in solidarity, and has grown considerably around the United States. However, I ‘m a forecaster by nature and the facts remain that there is little to no chance that the 1% that the #OWS movement is against will in any way find a reason to negotiate. After all, those very same people hold the rights to the land the protesters occupy, and have little to no incentive to forfeit any of their holdings in negotiation.

If anything, they see the 99% movement as a bunch of people complaining without any real power structure to actually change the situation, nor should we have expected alternate behavior from them in a world where they essentially define and call the shots. I’m all for peaceful revolution, but I also know from the cold, hard, facts and statistics that a peaceful revolution is merely a warning shot leading to bigger things.

The very laws and corruption that the protesters are against will inevitably be used against them for claims of perfectly legal opposition, albeit entirely immoral. This comes as no surprise to me, because I know this will end in a more violent revolution than we are led to believe today in our peaceful outreach of protests.

It’s only a warning shot.

At 7am in Zucatti Park (Liberty Plaza), they have been ordered to evacuate for “cleaning” with the stipulation that they cannot return as a protest as they were prior. It’s a convenient excuse, but effective because the people who actually own the park are perfectly within their legal right to demand such things. It’s a matter of slanting the rules and laws, and the 1% are exceptionally good at it.

There are those who will refuse to leave, and I expect there to be mass protests and arrests. I even expect there to be a considerable amount of police brutality. What I do not expect is that the peaceful protesters will continue being on the receiving end of that abuse – physically or through corruption, much longer.

Remember, the peaceful protests are merely a warning shot.

I’ve been accused of beating the war drums, and trying to stir up violence in a peaceful protest, but I must correct those people outright. I’m not advocating violence, because I would very much rather see a peaceful end to a means. However, that being said, I am not blind enough to ignore the very real possibility that a peaceful protest may evolve into something bigger and less peaceful as this continues. It’s not beating the war drums, it’s facing reality.

Peaceful revolution is the ideal, but never rule out alternatives. Always be prepared for all contingencies.

If we’re brave enough to face the corruption on a wide scale, we must not stop short of being blindsided by ideals that may not produce fruition. We must expect the best and be prepared for the worst, in that we may (as a whole) lessen the casualties in the future. Be they political or physical.

Somebody has to think of these things, because a majority is unwilling to. If it comes to that, just be glad there are those who have thought ahead and will have an answer for you if you get to that point.

Peace is the one thing we all want, but only a few are willing to truly fight for it if the need arises. Don’t be surprised if the militias come to the #OWS aid when they need it most. We all want a peaceful solution, but sometimes we have to be willing to truly fight when our options run out. I make no qualms about it – the American Patriots are ready to fight when peaceful negotiation and protest is ignored. It’s what our founding fathers did, and it’s a tradition of these United States of America.

Expect the best, be prepared for the worst. Never be surprised.

Will

Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Windlight

2011-10-08T01:52:00.001-05:00

Native Weather in #SecondLife with Zones @Rodvik

I’ve probably said this before, so please bare with me. Windlight as used in SecondLife has the native ability to include Weather built in. Why it was never really implemented has been sort of a mystery to me since 2007, but I’ve been told by @onikenkon on twitter that the reasoning behind not implementing the native weather system in Windlight happens to be along the lines that the Linden Lab programmers didn’t seem to know how to stop it from raining inside buildings.

Raindrops keep falling on my head…

SecondLife JIRA Report

Integrate Windlight Weather

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-23322

If you would like to see Weather natively enabled in SecondLife, I urge that you visit the JIRA page and click on “Watch” – I also invite discussion and comments on the matter.

This blog post is a companion to that JIRA in order to explain in further detail how the User Created Zones requirement would work in conjunction with Windlight Weather in order to block rain inside buildings (among many other things it would allow).

I have to say that this is quite a bizarre claim for a team of programmers whose sole purpose in life at Linden Lab is to program a video game engine. In the gaming industry this should automatically have been answered with “Implement Zones”, which in and of itself should be on the list of things one would be expected to know about when dealing with 3D game engines. Why the hell do I, a presumably under qualified dolt who can’t grace the doors of Linden Lab, know this is a solution yet the apparently overqualified rockstars who grace the name Linden leave a fundamental component in 3D game engines out of the release since its inception? It can’t possibly be that ridiculous to implement if a place like ActiveWorlds managed to code it from the ground up because they didn’t have the luxury of prims to start with.

Of course, in this same vein, I’ve also seen the idea of Parametric Deformation for Mesh proposed and marked as “Someday/Maybe” by Linden Lab, only to be picked up by the community as a fundraiser to scrape together the money to pay Karl Stiefvater (Qarl) to program this feature. With over 857 votes, 357 people watching that particular JIRA, and a solution proposed to fix the Mesh defect, you would think Linden Lab would have looked into it as a priority. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend checking out the Mesh Clothing Parametric Deformer Project and maybe making a donation.

@Rodvik, if you’re reading this (though I doubt it) I highly suggest Linden Lab tosses in the measly remainder of the donation to get Qarl to work on Parametric Deformation for Mesh as an independent contractor, and to save grace with the community. This is clearly very important to the community and should not be ignored. Matter of fact, look… stop the book tours and public appearances or whatever it is you’re doing and hold a meeting in your ranks at Linden Lab. You need to teach those programmers the difference between priority and not a priority. If you’re the one sabotaging their idea of priority with arbitrary milestones or whatever, you need to chill out and really see what you have on the table. Seriously, you’re dropping the ball and I really don’t want you to. As far as zones are concerned, you come from EA, a flipping video game company. Even you know that Zones are a staple of video games to offer design control over many aspects of a 3D environment.

But I digress…

If anything, upon hearing these sorts of things in the ranks of Linden Lab, I would have either docked somebody’s pay or seriously reconsidered whether the programmers were truly qualified to be working on that project at all.

I understand I’m quite cynical about this, but something so basic a premise as user defined zones, which are a given staple of game programming, should not be a mystery to a well paid team of rockstars at Linden Lab. I mean, this is one of those things where literally years worth of important or half-assed priorities at Linden Lab have consistently superseded a basic fundamental inclusion of a game engine. It’s such a fundamental inclusion that the mere lack of it forbids Linden Lab from properly utilizing what must have been a multi-million dollar technology purchase (WindLight).

In ActiveWorlds, the ability to define user created zones has been a staple since at least 2005 and entails essentially the following premise: http://wiki.activeworlds.com/index.php?title=Zone

In terms of SecondLife, this should actually be easier to implement than the work required to implement it in ActiveWorlds, in that ActiveWorlds is primarily a “Mesh” based virtual environment and has no concept of “Prims” as in SecondLife. In this manner, ActiveWorlds had to essentially code prims from the ground up simply for use as Zone definition spaces, whereas SecondLife already has prims as the native building system.

So what does a user defined zone really mean?

Well, in respect to SecondLife, you as the user would see another tab on the build menu for Zone, whereby enabling that Prim as a Zone (a checkbox) would turn it into a special primitive with the zone qualities contained within it. The prim would also be natively phantom and normally invisible unless you add the option to “Show Special Objects” to the build menu, much like there is an option to show invisible items. There would be the option to make the zone prim visible as well, in the case the builder is working with a lot of zones and needs them visible while building.

Here is the window for Zones in ActiveWorlds, where you can see all of the options available to the builder:

As you can see, there are numerous options available when creating zones in a virtual environment. For people who didn’t jump to the wiki link provided for zones at ActiveWorlds, that information will be found below (with some comments pertaining to SecondLife). From here on, it gets pretty technical and wordy without much in the way of pictures, so bare with me:

Tag Name

Assigning a tag name to a zone allows the user to trigger events for entering and exiting the zone.

// This would essentially be the Description field or Prim Name in SecondLife

Volume Shape

This controls the shape of the area. There are 3 types:

Cube - The zone is a rectangular area in size as defined by the Size values.
Cylinder - The zone is a cylindrical area. The X Size defines the radius of the cylinder, the Y Size defines the height, and the Z Size is unused.
Sphere - The zone is a sphere whose radius is defined by the X Size value. The Y and Z values are not used.

//This is pretty much not needed in SecondLife because we already have Prims

Priority

Priority defines the most important zone when two zones intersect. A higher priority number means the zone will have more importance over other zones with lower priority numbers.

For example, on the diagram on the right there are two shapes. On the top, the red square has a priority of 1 while the blue circle has a priority of 0. Therefore, the red square becomes becomes more important than the blue circle. On the bottom, the blue circle's priority is changed to 2, higher than red square's priority of 1. Therefore, it has become more important than the red square.

A useful example for priorities are for large weather zones, where a large zone dims the lighting in a pale blue haze for ice. However, this zone may intersect a building, where it will also affect the interior. A zone with normal lighting can be placed in the building with a priority of 1 while the ice zone has a priority of 0. Therefore, the building's zone will cancel out the pale blue haze inside the building.

Zone Properties Dialog Box

Size

This defines the size of the zone. See "Volume Shape" above for details on how these values are used.

Gravity

This controls how fast users will fall when in this zone. A value of 1.00 is "normal" gravity.

Friction

This controls how fast users will stop when walking in this zone. A value of 1.00 is considered "normal" friction. Lower values will make walking "slippery", while higher values will slow walking speed and cause the user to stop more quickly.

Water

If checked, the zone is filled with water (or whatever liquid) and a user will swim when they are inside of the zone. Note that a zone is invisible, so users will not see the surface of the water. You will need to add an object to the scene if you want to make the water surface visible.

//In terms of SecondLife, adding the top face of the zone to use the water shader as the oceans do would be a bonus.

Block Particles

If checked, this zone will be included by particles when checking for collision.

//Essentially this is how it doesn’t rain inside buildings in ActiveWorlds unless you forget to create a zone for your building or structure. The same would apply to SecondLife and Windlight Weather.

Block Lights

If checked, lights created with the light command will not be visible if they are outside of this zone.

// SL: Essentially any item outside the zone that has Light enabled will not have any effect on the lighting inside the zone.

Block World Light

If checked, the world light ("sunlight") will not be visible from within this zone. This is useful for making underground or dark areas where the world light source should not be visible.

Block Audio

Any audio that was started by action commands using the sound or media command is muted or faded, if the trigger object lies outside the zone, while the avtar is inside the zone.

Audio played within the zone can only be heard while the avatar is inside the zone and will get muted or faded as soon the avatar is outside the zone.

Audio played by the media command is faded in and out when entering or leaving the zone.

Audio played with the sound command is faded in and stops without been faded, cause of the underlying principle for the sound command only playing the nearest sound at a time.

When a noise command is triggered outside the zone while the avatar is inside a zone, the noise will not be heard. When a noise is triggered right before the avatar enters the zone, the noise will be heard also when the avatar is inside the zone, the noise won't stop playing until the trigger has finished. A noise command triggered inside the zone will not be heard outside the zone.

Ambient sound set in the world feature settings is not affected by this option. To mute global ambient sounds use the Ambient sound field with the zone settings.

//Anything outside of a zone that is playing sound/gestures/etc will not be heard inside the zone. Any sound/gestures/etc inside the zone will only be heard by users inside the zone. This would include Shared Media and Video

Block Chat

If checked, users within this zone will not see the chat of users outside of the zone. Note1: Zones do not block Public Speak either direction across the zone barrier. Note2: Zones do not prevent non-Global bots from hearing across the zone barrier.

//Private spaces for open chat without having to go to group chat internally. Essentially a zone with Block Chat enabled will use its own chat channel transparently for all people inside the zone. Very nice for nightclubs on a sim where you don’t want the text chat, gestures etc to bleed over to the neighbors.

Block Join/Invite

If checked, users within this zone cannot have other users join them and cannot invite anyone.

//SL: Can be extended to allow only certain Group members to invite others via teleport

Color

This controls the color of the fog in this zone, and the color of the water (if applicable).

//SL: This would control a native Windlight Setting within that zone.

Fog Range

This controls the near / far fog settings.

//SL: Another Windlight setting control within the zone

Ambient Sound

This sound (if specified) will repeat in the background when the camera (usually the avatar's head) is in this zone.

//SL: Only a single sound, or chain of sounds for ambient within the zone. As of this post, the equivalent would be a multitude of ambient sound spheres placed across the area to achieve the same effect. Enabling Ambient Sound in a zone would not harm the ambient sound sphere market, but lessen the need for multitudes of them.

Footstep sound

This sound is used if the avatar's feet are in this zone while walking or running.

//SL: Native sound for running or walking on various materials like sand, wood, metal, etc as defined by the space of that zone.

Camera Tag

This specifies that name of a particular camera object within the scene. When the user enters this zone, their camera will switch to the camera matching the given name, and will return to the previous setting when they leave.

//SL: Zoning a furniture set, for instance, would allow the designer to specify a forward facing camera override when sitting on the furniture – where the user could still adjust the camera as they please after that switch. How many times have you sat on a couch next to a wall in a house only to have your camera fly outside the building? Allowing content creators to attach zones to their creations will give them better control and lessen the wild camera positions.

Target Cursor

This specifies the texture that will be used as the center cursor in Move Mode (mouselook).

//SL: Possibly custom target cursors for shooting games?

Voip Enabled

Enable/Disable Voip Rights within a given zone.

//SL: Already an option as a Parcel or Sim owner, this would allow fine tuning of where VoIP is enabled in an area on a zone by zone basis instead of an all or nothing scenario.

Voip Rights

Specify a list of users who will have the rights to participate in Voip conversation within the zone.

//SL: Not restricting VoIP entirely, but giving only certain people within that zone the ability to use VoIP. Business scenarios where there is a single speaker.

In the scope of SecondLife, a Zone is simply a specialized Prim in wireframe which defines an area with special properties. When we talk about whether or not it’s raining inside of a building, we should also ask if that building is within a user created zone with Block Particles enabled, as we would ask in ActiveWorlds.

Defining zones is a staple of video game programming and quite common. To hear that there is a possibility that the programmers at Linden Lab did not know how to stop it from raining inside of buildings puzzles me.

While I admit the implementation of user defined zones would be a complex project within Linden Lab (I’m humoring you, Linden Lab, because ActiveWorlds did it from scratch with a single programmer in 2005), I must also insist that the very lack of this ability is subsequently limiting and/or crippling the technology and what is available to it – namely Windlight which was acquired in 2007 and still has yet to see full implementation.

My Moment of Rage

Waiting since 2007 for a fundamental component pisses me off

Honestly, and I truly mean this – I swear to all that is holy and good in this world, if a Linden shows up on this post and tries to sling a ration of bullshit at me in a comment to excuse themselves for why this hasn’t been properly addressed as a priority, there will be hell. Any manager worth their salt, let alone the CEO of the company, would agree in the face of such negligence to the product and community which it serves. Whether this is addressing user created zones (which instantly negates a large amount of JIRA requests through facilitation) or whether it’s the Parametric Deformation.

That level of absurdity in dismissing things is unacceptable – fundamental flaws and defects in the system should not be ignored for multiple years, and they should not be in a position where your own community walks off and raises the funds to do a job that the company itself should have been doing.

As far as user Created Zones (which would immediately allow Weather to be enabled) I’m pointing to ActiveWorlds, a virtual environment company that doesn’t even register on the grand scheme of competition any more, implementing user created zones from absolute scratch via a single programmer in another country that they have on contract – and they managed to do it in 2005. You cannot possibly tell me that an outdated, underfunded, technology with a single programmer is more adept than the entire team of programmers at Linden Lab.

I refuse to acknowledge that because it’s absolute bull. Just like saying Parametric Deformation is not a priority when it fixes a fundamental flaw with Mesh, which is the entire focus of why Viewer 3 was created.

I mean, is this really what it takes to have the major issues be addressed? Is priority assigned by how much negative publicity it’s drawing for not addressing it? Or you have to be some digerati and Linden kiss-ass for them to acknowledge you?

Geez… No wonder everybody uses Third Party Viewers. At least they are on top of things and really engaging with the community on this stuff. I apologize, but the more I think of this arrogant and dismissive behavior on the part of Linden Lab, the more it pisses me off. Waiting for years to even have a basic component in a game engine acknowledged in an official capacity and implemented is simply asinine.

I mean, the only reason I can see that the ATI 4500/5100 bug ( the one where Viewer 3 is entirely unusable) was looked at and addressed was because Tonya Souther (Firestorm) called out Linden Lab in a public interview. C’mon… seriously? That’s what it takes to light a fire under their asses?

This has got to change. It’s unacceptable.

I’d probably lose my sanity if I were ever a Linden.

True Patriots

2011-10-06T21:51:00.001-05:00

What the Occupy Wall Street Movement Means #OWS

Allow me to state this up front:

I am part of the 99%

and very likely you are as well.

You can split hairs and say you’re part of the 53% and are making ends meet, and that those people in the 99% movement called Occupy Wall Street do not speak for you. However, it is a matter of time and even if you are blessed to be in the struggling 53% (as your slogan says), you are still one paycheck away from being homeless. 1 out of every 6 Americans live at or below the poverty line with many more already categorized as severe poverty.

Even you are just as likely not to have any health care coverage at all, and you work ungodly hours (lucky, so you are told, to have the two or three part-time jobs that you have to hold down to barely make ends meet). In many cases, even you are faced with the constant decision whether you will pay the bills or actually eat. Whether you will eat or pay for your medication out of pocket. You’re lucky for all that, when the richest in this country earn your yearly salary every single day, and do absolutely no work for it.

I’ve heard the absurdity of the 53% counter-movement attributing those in the Occupy Wall Street movement as “Hippies” or “Communists” – I’ve read quotes from Republicans such as Mitt Romney (R) calling those protesters “Un-American” – I am absolutely appalled at this blatant ignorance. This guy is running for the highest office in this nation and he has absolutely no idea what it truly means to be a Patriot? I can’t blame him, though, because a majority of you have no idea what it means to be a true American Patriot, either.

One thing most Americans seem to consistently fail to understand is what an American PATRIOT really is. It is no wonder, then, that those who we elect are incompetent and themselves have no interest in the people or know what an American Patriot actually is. As George Carlin once put it: “Garbage in, Garbage out.”

An American patriot is not somebody who supports his or her government. If that's what the American definition of a patriot were, we would not have been calling George Washington, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, James Madison, Thomas Payne, John Hancock and all the rest of them "patriots" would we?

Those true patriots were all men who openly advocated revolt against their own government and even the corruption of bankers.

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”

Thomas Jefferson

3rd President of the United States of America (1743-1826)

That's what made them American Patriots in the first place.

Their government, the one oppressing them in 1775, was headquartered in London, England.

My government, the one oppressing me in 2011, happens to be located in Washington D.C.

Aside from that, there is little difference. My government today is at the mercy of large financial backers, those 1% who, while technically called upon to pay taxes and be held accountable for crimes they commit, most often do not. Those 1% are actually rewarded for their greed, corruption and manipulation of our legal and political system against the very people it was meant to serve, willfully oppressing and destroying the people and this planet for their own benefit and gain, because our politicians in the Whitehouse, Congress and Senate all are indebted to them. This was never a matter of Right versus Left in this country, Republican versus Democrat – no, this is now a matter of Right versus Wrong. This movement is isn’t about pointing fingers at a particular political party in order to justify policies or inaction – this movement is about the collective of this nation realizing that neither side from our leadership has done their job and that the real control of this country does not lay in the hands of the people, by the people or for the people any longer.

Make no mistake, oppression is coming from our government. When your vote means nothing, because both candidates are heavily funded by those of highest wealth and corruption (even in secret), and our “elected” leaders are more indebted to those financiers and bankers than to the very people of this nation, it is oppression and corruption across the board and we were warned by our own founding fathers that this would happen. We were warned by the men who defined the very nature of what it is to be called American Patriot and who fought for this country and freedoms that it represents.

To me, the citizen who

    • runs around waving the American flag,
    • pledges his support to the government in Washington,
    • and goes along with what that government says

is the same thing as what the colonials used to call a "loyalist." We Americans never used the word "patriot" to describe anybody who was a loyalist. The very term "loyalist" meant somebody who was "loyal" to the government in London and to King George III. A "loyalist" was the then equivalent of today's "statist" in that they supported the (then) state which was (then) the British government.

The true American patriot is the antithesis of a loyalist.

The true definition of what an American patriot actually is can be determined only by examining what those men who signed the Declaration of Independence (and their followers) actually did. So, let's learn what a true patriot is by taking a look at what those true patriots actually did.

1. They spoke and wrote profusely and published their beliefs and opinions clearly stating the truth, that their government was tyrannical and guilty of crimes against the liberty of the common man. They openly denounced the government and its agents, not only in print but in public speeches and gatherings. They did this despite great personal risk for doing so. This went on for some time prior to 1775.

Sounds like what our patriots are doing today in Occupy Wall Street. They’re following in the footsteps of our founding fathers, exercising their rights (First Amendment), and standing against corruption across the board which is against the liberty of the common man. If only we could all be so noble and patriotic to stand together as they do, instead of mocking our own people and trying to dismantle them. Ask yourself, who is really acting unpatriotic?

2. They conspired, both in secret and later openly, to overthrow and revolt against their government with the aim of throwing it out and establishing a new and different governmental system. In doing this, they were branded as traitors and seditionists by their government... but they did it anyway, despite the risk.

Occupy Wall Street was at first conspired in secret and now openly as a peaceful protest. It follows direct democracy in all things – not representative democracy as we have now. While they have no plans to overthrow the government, this may likely become a possibility if their grievances are not met or corrected in our government, and continued loyalty to the most greedy and corrupt in this nation continues. As more violence and opposition from those they oppose escalates, so too will their determination to be heard. Peaceful patriots will be beaten and abused only so long before they will fight back.

3. Eventually, after their government had fired the first shots, they took up arms against their government and began killing it's policing agents, who were the armed force enforcing the oppressive dictates of their government.

When the government and corrupt wealth in this nation fire the first shots, make no mistake – those peaceful patriots will fight back.

All these things were done by a small number of men, against great odds and at great personal and economic risk, but they did them anyway and that's what made them true American Patriots. They did these things, I might add, in an age when documents had to be all handwritten and communication was by means of letters carried on horseback. There was no Internet or social media to foster their revolution.

Those who would call themselves American patriots need to stand ready to do the same things today that our forefathers did in 1775, and we'd better be ready to be called conspirators, traitors, seditionists, communists and terrorists by the government loyalists and corrupted top 1% we oppose. We must not allow them to get away with branding us with those labels. Labels are the instruments tyrannical governments all use to thwart opposition. Any government born out of a revolution, as was ours, can be replaced by the same means. And it doesn't take a majority to do it, just as it didn't in 1775. When you see or hear patriots branded by the establishment using such terms, remember this:

The present American government, its establishment press and uninformed Americans using such labels here are no different from the government of Communist China branding its dissidents as "counter-revolutionaries".

A lot of people who frequent Internet websites such as this one like to think of themselves as patriots.

Are you? Unless you are now ready to do the things the real patriots did you are not, in fact, a real patriot. You are the very opposite of what it means to act as a patriot of this country.

The Bill of Rights –

Lest you’ve forgotten what it means to be a true patriot.

First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Second Amendment: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Third Amendment: No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Fifth Amendment: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Sixth Amendment: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.

Seventh Amendment: In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Eighth Amendment: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Ninth Amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Tenth Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

So, how is our government and those 1% acting against the people and subsequently duping you into being mouthpieces for their lies?

For one, the 53% movement clearly does not understand the scope of the First Amendment – criticizing the protesters for actually protesting and calling them communists when they are truly patriots. It is the same First Amendment Right that gives them and the 53% the Freedom to speak – but more so the freedom to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. If anything, those who are protesting are acting more patriotic and American than the people who flippantly mock them in ignorance from the 53% and 1%.

To say that I’ve heard this “communism” label and mockery of true patriotism coming from not only civilians but even Ex-Marines who were sworn to uphold and protect this nation from threats foreign and domestic, to uphold the Constitution and the rights afforded to our nation, is alarming and insulting. If anyone should be a true patriot, I expect our armed forces, active and retired, to stand tall in this country’s time of need.

Luckily there are quite a lot of patriotic Marines and veterans who understand what it means to be a true patriot, and have decided to stand with this nation to uphold their oath. To know thy enemy, even if it is our own government, and to stand and protect this nation from threats foreign and domestic. I applaud those true patriots and ask why the rest are so eager to abandon their nation when it is truly in need.

Eat The Rich

The real question, and massive over-generalization, that is spreading around by the uninformed is whether or not the Occupy Wall Street patriots actually want to dismantle the rich en-mass and put an end to being wealthy.

The unequivocal answer to this absurdity is No.

We don’t hate the rich. If you’ve earned your fortune and aspired to the American Dream, and worked to achieve it then we applaud you. However, that success comes with a social contract and agreement to pay it forward. I hear constant cries of “Class Warfare” whenever increased taxes for the rich are proposed, and to be honest, those cries are intentionally deceitful. It is class warfare, but those waging class warfare are not the lower 99%, it has always been the upper echelons of wealth against everyone else. Right now, we’re simply fighting back.

Take into account that the current tax rate for that bracket doesn’t even break 40% (it’s closer to 34%), which seems pretty high until you realize that number is roughly half (or 1/3 if you want to go back historically) of what those exorbitantly rich were paying before they began systematically witling away and lowering their taxes through lobbying and other not so lawful means. Not only that, but the idea of Corporate Gains Tax is a farce as it stands today, with Warren Buffet (one of the richest men in this nation) stating that even he thinks it’s unfair that his own secretary pays more in taxes than he ever will.

That tells you something right there. It should tell you that despite legal obligations to pay what little taxes (in comparison to the time when they were taxed at 94%) they owe, there are benefits and countless loopholes to bring down what is already a tax rate of around 34% (when it’s been as high as 94%) to an effective tax rate of just 17%. And somehow we’re complacent when they award themselves record bonuses and profits while not generating job growth. For the record, the job growth for August was absolutely zero, and unemployment in September rose 126% – a number not seen since April 2009.

Let us recap – 94% tax on the wealthiest Americans shortly after the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression, because prior to that, the tax rate was as absurdly low as it is now, and now all the way down to an absurdly low 17% effective tax rate for the wealthiest few at the top. And you’re dumb enough to believe them when they cry “Class Warfare” and “Socialism”?

“The way you get rich in this world is not by working hard,” said Marty Sullivan, an economist and a contributing editor to Tax Analysts. “It’s by owning large amounts of assets and having those things appreciate in value.” - Washington Post, Sept 11, 2011

Class warfare indeed. They have the terminology correct, but are apparently good at convincing you that they are truly the victim as they continue to squeeze you for everything you have. They’ve convinced you that you have no right to protest, and even to the extent that you’re willing to repeat their message even if it’s hurting you. It’s class warfare alright, but we’re the ones they’re fighting against on every front, taking increasingly all they can get their hands on and convincing you with slick ads and lies that you’re oppressing them. Telling you that if you want change, all you have to do is vote – knowing full well both parties are deeply in their pockets and answer to them and not us.

Michael Moore said it best – we’ve developed into a Kleptocracy.

The people who stand in solidarity across the Occupy Wall Street movement, and in 164+ cities around the world are fighting back. Being patriots now didn’t get us into this mess – it’s the inaction all along from us to fight back that got us in this mess. It is the complacency and ignorance against our fellow Americans acting as true patriots that got us into this mess – because the 53% are too cowardly to earn their right to be called American Patriots.

We’ll continue to stand and fight for you, the 53%, even when you are not brave enough or smart enough to stand with us. In the meantime, educate yourself. Your country needs you, and now is not the time to act like a coward.

Cowards don’t deserve the freedoms of this country. They deserve the poverty and slavery they will be crushed under because of their ignorance and apathy. Patriots fought to give you this country, and Patriots are fighting to get it back.

Support Occupy Wall Street – it is clearly your Patriotic Duty.

Taking Diaspora Seriously

2011-10-01T04:46:00.001-05:00

Why social is a large part of our virtual future. #IEEE #SecondLife

I’m a strong advocate of privacy and our ability to choose individually what level of privacy we believe is adequate for ourselves. Sure, there are constant arguments over how anonymous representation can lead to bad behavior in many, but I’m a realist about the entire situation. I see the glass as neither half empty or half full, because there is equal potential for both good and bad in everything we do.

In the case of Diaspora, I won’t say that they are the end-all to be-all social network. They may or may not have a long standing chance in the grand scheme of things – especially when facing giants like Google+ or well established social networks like Facebook, both of which have far more clout and resources to throw around to gain favor. However, that being said – I do absolutely believe in the power of privacy, choice and above all else, that just like the Internet itself, a virtual environment collective would make up the very thing which we today consider a Metaverse.

In order for a virtual environment standard to really take hold and be beneficial to all, it must be addressed from the standpoint that all will be involved or affected by it. I’ve played a part in many virtual environments in my life, and have seen some truly amazing things whether it’s creative content from individuals or truly innovative paradigms from research initiatives.

One of the research initiatives that really helped cement and shape my beliefs on virtual environments for the future was one called Solipsis Decentralized Metaverse (INRIA), and while they went with the notion of a fully decentralized architecture, I immediately recognized then that even if it was technically feasible, the reality would be more of a hybrid approach.

An early look at Solipsis from 4 years ago

I keep this understanding today during my tenure as object interoperability lead for IEEE Virtual World Standard Workgroup, in that in order to truly foster in a full Metaverse, we must take into account that no single entity should be holding the keys to the entire kingdom.

Whether this is concerning the underlying technology, the components, or a myriad of other aspects which are bound to interoperate with the ecosystem that is a virtual environment, I take these ideals into account in that it’s never as simple as defining a single thing when it comes to the Metaverse.

A Metaverse, for the most part, is the conglomeration of many types of technologies, filetypes (assets) and protocols that come together in a hyper-media environment that even transcends the web today. There is no simple answer for what components make up a Metaverse, because the further you scrutinize in detail the more obscure it becomes. What number of image formats could we support for textures? Are we taking into account emerging standards that are dynamic like procedural methodologies? Will centralized servers really play a role in future iterations or will a more decentralized approach reign supreme? How many protocols for simple text message transfer are there, and then what about VoIP traffic protocols? What sort of protocols and techniques should be used for the social media facing aspect of a virtual environment?

There are a lot of questions that need to be answered, and that’s exactly what the IEEE Virtual World Standard Workgroup is aiming to do, to the best of our abilities. I imagine the Metaverse as a hybrid of decentralization nodes – each system on a common standard, even if internally they are all very different. Walled garden mentality, in my mind, really is a hindrance to a truly open Metaverve – but if they must continue to exist, then they should at least be willing to offer some sort of compliancy to the overall network of virtual environments if they wish to retain any semblance of standards.

Being a de-facto standard isn’t enough, because in the end it’s self-serving to the company or entity that holds that de-facto, but offers little in the way of worldwide benefit in the grand scheme of things. Much like the days of AOL, Prodigy and other such services, the walled gardens are doomed to be eclipsed by bigger and better things (in this case it was the world wide web), and it was only reluctance and willfully keeping their clients ignorant of the things that are bigger and better than their own walled garden service that kept those services around as long as they were.

We live in a similar age today but have the benefit of hindsight where we can look back at those early walled gardens before the true explosion of the world wide web came about, and we benefit today from that evolution into open standards. Virtual environments today are much the same, in that they mostly are closed and walled gardens – nobody is interested in talking to each other from virtual environment to another, because it simply is not in their best interest.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

We have hindsight now, and we know that walled gardens are only the precursor to a global standard which will foster a revolution and explosion of a new paradigm. Nobody really holds the keys to the Internet, not even Google. There are countless services and products, billions of sites and pages for all manner of things (good and bad).

Remember, this is all from the standpoint of a decentralized methodology we call the Internet. No single entity owns all of the servers of the Internet, and no single entity owns all of the content. Everyone is free to make their own space as they see fit, and by and large it has been an overwhelming boon to human society as a result.

A Metaverse Standard for all, holds the ability to foster similar results in the synthetic environment age. This is why I officially acknowledge such endeavors as Diaspora on the metaversestandards.org wiki, and as a legitimate social network to be taken serious.

It isn’t because I believe Diaspora itself is an end-all to be-all winner, but more because the ideology and methodologies behind that system are the ideal brass ring we should all be acknowledging for every aspect of our virtual environment going forward. I acknowledge Diaspora officially in whatever capacity I may be allowed, simply because it is the paradigm shift which I believe will foster in a better generation of privacy, decentralization and methodologies which are beneficial to all.

Diaspora tells you that you are free to start your own node as part of the entire network, that you own the content and information that is yours. They tell you that they respect your privacy, and want to help you protect it – even saying they respect your right to personally decide if being anonymous, pseudonymous or completely authentic (as in using your real name) suits you. They do not believe in a single entity being the only option, and in fact make their source code open to everyone, while actively encouraging everyone to start their own “pods”. They respect not only you, but the very foundation that made the Internet amazing – and for this the least I could do is tip my hat to them, and the many hard working people behind it. Their ideals and goals are in line with those of the IEEE Virtual World Standard Workgroup; what they want for a social network, we want also for a virtual world standard, and I highly believe social networking is an integral part of the entire virtual world construct.

I acknowledge Diaspora because I believe in the paradigm and ideals which they stand for. In a world where Facebook is being sued because they still track you even after you log out of their system, and Google insists you don’t have a choice in whether or not you must divulge your real name, it is refreshing to see there is a beneficial alternative for all – where everyone is on a level playing field with access as they see fit.

If anyone deserves my praise for upholding the values set forth in the creation of the Internet, then I gladly give that praise and recognition to Diaspora. Clearly, among the countless ‘nyms and their avatars, so do you.

An Island Unto Themselves

2011-09-27T17:52:00.001-05:00

#Marketing in the Prosumer Culture

For many of you, this post will seem a bit dull, but the implications from it are far reaching and profound. I'd like to state up front that this sort of topic is my forte' and I regularly advise on this to what often seems like an entirely baffled room full of executives (not to mention lawyers who are ready to grab pitchforks and torches) - but as I've often said in those situations: Bare with me, because what I'm about to say is probably the most important thing you could hear on the matter.

We live in a digital culture of sharing and mashup, where 1's and 0's are interchangeable and cheap. It doesn't matter to the prosumer culture whether those ones and zeros are configured in a manner that yields a photo, mp3 or streaming video - what matters is the sharing of ideas and media that pertain to their topic of interest at that moment.

On the subject matter, the best advice I can give stems from what I like to refer to as the Gospel of Virtual Environments, but for most you would know it as Lessons Learned From Lucasfilm's Habitat. Written by Chip Morningstar and F. Randal Farmer in 1991, this synopsis addressed the lessons they learned from running a massive multi-user virtual environment in the late 1980's on the Commodore system known as Habitat, and while the graphics were definitely paltry by today's standards, the lessons are just as important today as they ever were - because they address the underlying nature of technology as well as the attitudes of people that use those types of systems.

One of the most important lessons from that synopsis was simply:

Work within the system

And while this lesson is open to interpretation, the story that accompanied it really set the stage for understanding how not to address prosumers in a digital age if your goal is to protect IP, or system type mechanics/rules.

I won't go into the entire story here (it’s available at the end of the post as a link for reading), but I will address the fundamental understandings that came out it, and how they still apply today in the digital world context.

Essentially what it boils down to is this:

If you are a company with a brand and IP to protect, you have more options today in order to enforce it than you did twenty years ago utilizing traditional methods. The landscape has changed quite a bit, and the 1's and 0's of today are agnostic, while the mentality of the prosumers is that of simply sharing for the sake of conversation or furtherance of devotion to a particular brand or image. In modern context, this still holds true on a much wider basis than it did twenty years ago, and so our defacto arsenal of "cease and desist" and litigation often times is met with an outstanding backlash in the wider sphere of digital culture, causing more damage and loss than had the entity utilized the "Work within the system" lesson.

No better example of this sort of backlash (humorously named the Streisand Effect) can be given than that of the RIAA and MPAA with many years of fighting and litigation efforts to curb or eliminate the acts of piracy among Peer2Peer networks. It is now over ten years later and such an approach has not only cost those entities more than it's worth to enforce, but has had the opposite effect to curbing the "violations" worldwide - eliminating single file P2P systems like Napster, Limewire, etc but giving rise to massive file collection P2P systems like BitTorrent where no longer single files are shared but large quantities of files as a single "set".

Where the RIAA wanted to stop music piracy by shutting down places like Napster which offered single tracks per download, they ended up fostering a worldwide backlash that is BitTorrent where finding a single track is unlikely versus searching for the entire discography of the artist for download. Clearly, this is throwing gasoline on the fire and acting surprised that the fire did not go out.

The interesting thing about all of this is simply the fact that digital culture and mashup mentality often do a much better job at proliferation of ideas and content than even multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, creating new content from multiple sources that transcend the originals – beneficial to multiple entities all at the same time, as we see in the Gwen Stefani vs Britney Spears music mashup below titled “Tick-Toxic”.

Whatcha’ waiting, whatcha waiting, whatcha waiting for? Prosumers aren’t as Toxic as you think.

Working within the system entails an unorthodox methodology, in that the proper approach to "infringement" no longer is a black or white scenario, but instead many shades of grey for the negative approaches (and in methods that offer mutual gain, 16.7 million colors of awesome) - often entirely dependent on the situational context. While cease and desist options and litigation are still a part of that arsenal of enforcement, it no longer constitutes the cut and dry option, and in fact should be the absolute last option to be enacted - instead of the first or only.

When you find yourself looking to protect IP or a brand, the first question that should be asked is no longer "How do we stop this infringement?" but instead should be "How do we monetize this situation, foster its growth and make it work for our own benefit?" - aka: Working within the system.

Working within the system entails a willingness to work with the people involved in that system on the same grounds and foundation that those people utilize within that particular system, whether that be business or individuals (prosumers) in order to foster a mutually beneficial situation while limiting the constraints that would cause a backlash and do widespread harm. Think of it like trying to disarm a nuclear weapon - you wouldn't go in and bash it with a sledgehammer for fear that you could cause a massive explosion. Instead you handle it delicately and with foresight for the bigger picture. Cease and Desist (litigation) is your sledgehammer, and should only be used as a last resort.

Instead we should first think about ways to work within the system at hand, for our own benefit (because we are still self-interested as companies) but also in a way that addresses the underlying and fundamental need of the prosumer mentality to spread and share IP, Brands and derivatives of those properties.

One of those many shades of grey happens to be simply allowing the proliferation of the IP or brand to continue while adding only monetization or supplemental marketing to the situation. This can be seen today in the general approach by Youtube where music in the user created videos is now more likely to come with a link saying who the artist is, the name of the song, and a direct link to purchase that music. This, in turn, offers a solution to working within the system and IP infringement in that the question answered was no longer "How do we stop this infringement?" and instead "How do we utilize this infringement to our own and their benefit?".

In the case of Youtube, however, while the approach is sound there is still no method to actually handle the mashup and derivative offerings that spawn in abundance from this culture – as we can see from the Tick Toxic video where both Tick Tock from Gwen Stefani and Toxic from Britney Spears is put together for a new take on two songs, Youtube only recognizes the Gwen Stefani part as the music to tag and offer for purchase (catching only half of the potential).

In the long run, prosumer integration of your IP or brand in derivatives or outright is the best form of free marketing for your brand or IP that you could ever hope for. You would never think to shoot down free marketing on your behalf, especially when things like videos on Youtube have this wonderful habit of "going viral" wherein hundreds of thousands if not millions of people share and view those videos, giving the brand or IP massive amounts of free exposure. The trick to all of this is to look at it from a marketing perspective and not a legal perspective.

Prosumer culture is the predominant force in the digital age, and we are best served by allowing that system of understanding to proliferate with little or no negative intervention. While this flies in the face of the crack legal team on call at most companies who want nothing more than to fight the good fight, the benefits far outweigh the costs in the long run - and only serve to offer additional revenue models, and widespread marketing and goodwill among this global system if approached properly with complete understanding.

What we have today are companies that essentially shoot first, and ask questions later (if they bother asking at all) with their DMCAs, Cease and Desists and litigation. This is detrimental on the whole because of the prior notion of the Streisand Effect, moreso because it fosters an "island unto yourself" mentality, cutting you off from the system in ways that would otherwise be beneficial on a massive scale, turning instead to a methodology that actually harms you and your brand/IP.

In order to succeed in the digital age, we must understand that we are not an island unto ourselves. This is true not only in social media of all types, but in the greater scope of the digital culture we rely on today. The rules of engagement here are different than we were taught traditionally, and we need to be willing to think creatively and innovate if we want to truly excel. While cease and desist, as well as possibility of litigation still remains, we need to keep our perspectives in check, resorting to that route only when all other possibilities are exhausted and explored in context.

Remember: Prosumers aren’t as Toxic as you think they are. They could very well be the fountain of youth to invigorate your brand and IP on a global scale.

Further Reading
Lessons Learned From Lucasfilm's Habitat: http://bit.ly/oPbUdr
The Streisand Effect (Wikipedia): http://bit.ly/r5FY8L
Prosumer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosumer#Producer_and_consumer

Minecraft Mayhem

2011-09-25T14:17:00.007-05:00

Things I’d love to see @Notch add in future #Minecraft updates

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Minecraft, that wonderful indie game from Mojang that has millions of players who have paid twenty dollars for a perpetual beta. It’s not that the graphics are something unbelievable, because honestly it is a game that is decidedly low resolution. I think it’s actually the fact that it is low resolution gaming that really interests me.

John Smith Texture Pack 32x32 resolution

Instead of putting their effort into some graphical extravaganza, Mojang is focusing on what actually matters in a game – the actual gameplay. Modern gaming companies can learn something from this today, because we end up with all of these games that are essentially knockoffs or re-hashing of prior games except with better graphics. There’s a reason why games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man and a myriad of classics persist today as genres which we continually find ourselves coming back to.

It’s about the innovation of gameplay, and less about the graphics.

While the “vanilla” Minecraft game is 16x16 resolution for the textures, there are “HD” modifications and texture packs which enhance the game further, even if they are not officially supported. This brings me to the point of this post, in that there are quite a lot of things which seem like a no-brainer to officially add to Minecraft but continue to be overlooked.

Official support for HD texture packs

While the base game itself should always be 16x16 textures, officially supporting high definition texture packs doesn’t seem like something too much to ask. MCPatcher is a de-facto method to effectively patch your Minecraft JAR file so it can handle texture packs up to 256x256, but it also adds HD Font support, custom texture animations, and incorporates Better Grass, among other things. These three things should be a staple of Minecraft natively.

Not everyone is interested in the high definition texture packs, but it couldn’t hurt to officially include support for them built-in. At the end of the day, the point is to look at the most common things that the players are modding and reduce their need to jump through those hoops.

Craftable Obsidian (and more)

It has continually baffled me that you can craft items out of diamond in Minecraft but you can’t craft anything using Obsidian (other than a Netherportal). There is, of course, modifications that allow this to be possible such as Obsidian Plus but I think this idea needs to be better thought out and also expanded on. For instance, Diamond is supposed to be the hardest natural substance in the world, and so it should remain that way, with Obsidian armor and items being made to be as tough as Diamonds are now, while Diamonds are made 1.5X tougher

Not just tougher, but tougher to mine. Obsidian takes a disproportionate amount of time to mine with a Diamond Pickaxe, when Diamond should be tougher than Obsidian. In this case, it should be required that an Obsidian pickaxe or better be required to mine Diamonds. Obsidian should also offer some protection against fire damage, maybe reducing fire damage by half if the player is wearing a full set of Obsidian Armor. In order to get an Obsidian block, you would do the same thing as if you were making any other block – fill the crafting grid with 9 obsidian shards (much like you’d fill it with 9 diamonds to make a diamond block, etc) which brings me to the next point, which is that breaking Obsidian should not yield an obsidian block, but instead obsidian shards. These shards are then used to create armor and items, or on a grid of 3x3 filled then make an entire block like we do with Diamond, Lapiz, Iron, Gold, etc.

But let’s not stop there… I’ve seen the idea of Netherite kicked around, and I believe this is an excellent idea – at least the base of it. A minable block type found only in the Nether that can only be mined by Diamond Pickaxe or Obsidian Pickaxe (but not Iron because it’s too weak), which is craftable into Netherite tools and armor. Netherite would be 2x as tough/strong as diamond and be immune to fire damage (obviously because it’s a native resource of the Nether). The reason that Netherite is twice as strong as diamond is because I said earlier that diamond is the toughest natural resource in the world, but Netherite is not from the normal world. Netherite would look like a bright purple obsidian shard, and the Netherite Ore would look like the image here. The Netherite tools would require Blaze Rods instead of sticks (because sticks would catch fire), so for instance, a Netherite Sword would be a single Blaze Rod at the bottom and two Netherite shards on top.

On this scale, we can say that the resources would be reconfigured as follows:

Wood < Stone < Iron < Obsidian < Diamond < Netherite < Aetherite (Skylands)

In the event that the Aether becomes part of Minecraft officially, then a resource exclusive to Aether should be the top end – maybe something like Aetherite where only Netherite or equal Aetherite can mine it. The idea is to balance the durability of resources in accordance with how much effort a player has to go through in order to obtain it. In this instance, something like Aetherite would be one of the hardest to acquire and such should be the best durability overall. You’d have to first make a portal to the Nether to get Netherite and Glowstone in order to make an Aethergate, and prior to that you’d have to mine your way up the durability scale to get to the Nether to begin with.

In this manner, Aetherite tools and armor would be 3X the durability and strength of Diamond today, but it would be very hard to get ahold of (being a rare resource much like Diamond is today in the main world, but in the Aether only). Netherite would also be the same rarity as Diamond in the main world, but in the Nether. So the Nether and Aether would both have their equivalent of Diamond resource. From what I recall, the Aether mod has a special set of craftable tools under the idea that your normal tools won’t work in the Aether. While I understand this mentality, there has to be some sort of agnostic resource like Aetherite which has a universal durability which makes it worth travelling to the Aether to get and return with items made from it.

Of course, being that Diamond, Netherite and Aetherite all would have increased durability and strength, we would adjust the strength of certain blocks to accommodate this new-found strength, making blocks in the Nether much stronger, such as netherrack being half as strong as Obsidian, but nowhere near as weak as dirt. This is, after all, the equivalent to Hell, and all that fire and pressure down there would expect things to be a lot tougher and hardened.

Which also means that it would be more likely to find Diamonds in the Nether because of perfect conditions. In the Nether, while you could find diamonds more readily (say on the same occurrence as Iron in the main world) you would likely be more interested in finding Netherite, which is the nether equivalent to Diamond and is much tougher and more durable.

Plausible Alchemy (and Craftable Glass)

With the introduction of 1.8 came also the Cave Spider. These are blue looking spiders that hang out underground and have a chance to poison you when they attack. From my understanding, the antidote to being poisoned happens to be a bucket of milk, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

A more believable antidote would be made of a mushroom, redstone, and a glass container (from top to bottom). Since redstone is also one of those superabundant resources in the game, it wouldn’t make it too hard to craft a stock of antidotes to take with you into the caverns below. Of course, the antidote item would look sort of like the icon for the combined dyes in the John Smith Texture pack (a colored type glass container). This introduces a couple of things into the mix, most notably being the glass container (ie: craftable glass), and of course a combination use of mushroom and redstone powder in a manner of alchemy to create a plausible antidote to being poisoned – whether that is food poisoning (eating zombie flesh or raw meat) or whether you are poisoned by a spider.

The other interesting thing about the craftable glass/antidote combination is that it opens up Minecraft to other potions down the road that could be useful and plausible (at least in terms of minecraft, without getting into full out magic). Let’s say this is more like an Alchemy addition.

I can imagine an elixer made from bonemeal and netherrack that acts as a Mob disguise (changing you into a type of Mob temporarily) – working only for one night per use, but having no effect in the Nether or Aether. The plausible alchemy idea creates quite a lot of uses for plants and powder combinations.

Added Balance

I have to say that while Minecraft is a wonderful game, there are a lot of things about it that simply don’t make sense from the perspective of gameplay mechanics. Obviously the inability to craft useful items from Obsidian is one of them and how Obsidian is disproportionately tougher than Diamond to mine, but more so there are little things that bug me about the balance of items and availability.

Take for instance the common apple.

Apparently you can only find apples at random in dungeon chests, but not from breaking leaves on a tree. This never made sense to me, because apples commonly grow on trees. On the Raven’s Oddizzy server that I play on, there is a mod installed that takes care of this and makes it so breaking leaves on trees gives a small chance to drop an apple, but this should be something that is native to Minecraft out of the box. The same goes for Pumpkin seeds and Melon seeds, where they are apparently only found in chests in abandoned mineshaft biomes. Breaking Pumpkin and Melons themselves should give a chance to recover seeds normally, with the plant stems attached to the pumpkins or melons naturally. While the seeds and apples could still be an item in the dungeon and abandoned mineshaft chests, I fail to see how making items that logically are common instead uncommon makes any sense. The same goes for Cocoa beans… there really needs to be a Cocoa tree added to the game that only spawns in the Swamps. Just like real cocoa trees, they only grow in hot, rainy areas.

In dungeon chests, I’d instead recommend a chance to find Golden Apples, since these items truly are a rarity and very expensive to craft normally, they would make the perfect treasure to uncover for successfully raiding a dungeon or stronghold.

Tamable Horses

I’d also say that Leather should also be craftable into Saddles as well, but only if saddles are given more of a purpose, such as adding Horses to Minecraft that we could ride only with a saddle. When I say “ride” horses, I mean it in the sense that they should be controllable on land and give a bonus to speed for movement, unlike trying to ride a pig which essentially is just you wandering around aimlessly with little or no control. Of course, horses should first be tamed before we could ride them, and so feeding them Sugar Cubes would attain that.

Sugar Cubes would be made by placing 3x3 sugar on a crafting table to yield 4 Sugar Cubes. As for feeding the horses (because you would need to do that in order to keep them alive), I’d suggest being able to feed Horses only Apples, Sugar Cubes, and Grain. Grain would be obtained by placing 3x3 Wheat on a crafting table to yield 4 Grain. Horses would also fall in line with the addition of breedable animals that @Notch is working on, except in this case there is more of a need to breed horses than sheep.

Cactus Candy

While I’m on the subject, Cactus should also be craftable further than simply Green Dye. I suggest a recipe using Cactus that creates a Cactus Candy – Sugar and Cactus (maybe the same recipe as used for TNT but instead cactus in the center and Sugar on the 4 cardinal directions). Cactus Candy would be edible by the player for 1 food point replenish, but would also have the ability to Tame Mobs that you feed it to, where the mobs that you tame would act like pets and defend you when attacked. This would be a brilliant Halloween Secret Update for 2011. Tamed Mobs would of course only last until daylight, when they would burst into flames and perish, and Cactus Candy wouldn’t work on Creepers (obviously). We could use the same recipe for Chocolate Candy, but instead substitute Cocoa instead of Cactus to create a Chocolate Candy that would not only make a mob friendly like a pet but would make the mob immune to Sunlight. The Chocolate Candy wouldn’t work in the Nether simply because chocolate would melt in that environment.

While I’m on the subject of game balance, there is of course Bedrock which you cannot break. I’d like to see that you could not break bedrock with even a Diamond Pickaxe remain true, but using a Netherite Pickaxe you actually should be able to mine bedrock (and collect it). What happens if you jump into the hole you just made from mining the Bedrock? Simple, instead of falling endlessly and dying, you would be transported to the Nether (you essentially fall into Hell), and if you don’t have any Obsidian on you when you do this, you’re pretty much screwed because there is no way to get back to the main world from the Nether (unless you’re lucky enough to come across one of your old Nethergates). Bedrock wouldn’t be craftable into anything other than to be able to build with it in blocks, which comes in handy for making an near impenetrable building.

Before we worry about whether this makes Nethergates useless, we have to realize that in order to even acquire the Netherite Pickaxe to begin with, we’d have to make a Nethergate, survive and mine in the Nether long enough to find Netherite, kill enough Blaze to get Blaze rods, and then make it back to the main world with our new tools alive before they become an awesome source of mining power. With a Netherite Pickaxe, mining Bedrock would take as long as Diamond Pickaxes take today when mining Obsidian. Anything less than a Netherite Pickaxe still would be unable to mine Bedrock.

Endermen

I absolutely love Endermen. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t use some tweaking. For starters, they should definitely be made more rare in the main world than they are today. I was under the impression that Endermen would rarely spawn, so it would be that much more scary when you did actually run into a murder of them, (I’m using Murder to describe a group of mobs, as in a Murder of Crows. It just seems really fitting).

So making Endermen more rare in the main world would obviously need a plausible reason, right? Absolutely, and of course I have one here for you. Endermen have those glowing eyes and they give off the Nethergate particles, and they are tall, slender, and flat black. To me this indicates that Endermen actually come from the Nether and are native there, and that any which are in the main world (rare) have somehow escaped the grips of the Nether only to wander the main world aimlessly. While they are rare in the main world (as in, they should be made much rarer than they are now) they should conversely be common in the Nether.

Nothing says “Holy s*^tballs!” like being in the Nether, and seeing Endermen in abundance. Think about it, their entire purpose is to move blocks, right? And with the 1.9 update it looks like @Notch and Jeb are adding actual structures to the Nether, like strongholds and whatnot. So who actually built those structures?

Endermen, that’s who.

It makes absolute perfect sense. Endermen are the lost souls of Minecraft. Doomed to forever wander a cursed world and build tirelessly. In the Nether they are the workforce creating all of the structures, so it makes sense that they are much more common in the Nether than the main world. But also because they have Nethergate particles coming from them and possess the ability to teleport at will, it would stand to reason that some actually escape the Nether (or just accidentally teleport out), and not knowing anything else, they just continue mindlessly collecting and building like they did in the Nether. This gives us also a plausible reason why Strongholds exist in the main world as well, built by lost Endermen who are roaming the main world.

Aside from this obvious sort of back-story for Endermen, it also makes sense to include them more abundantly in the Nether simply for the fear factor alone. In the main world, you at least have a chance to run long distances and have enough space to really fight and move, but in the Nether… just look at all the unending lakes of lava and you quickly realize that on the Endermen home turf, you don’t want to mess with them.

Another thought also goes back to the idea of the Cactus Candy. If you can feed Cactus Candy to an Endermen and not get killed in the process, you deserve to have an Endermen protect you. It’s going to take balls of steel to walk up to an Endermen, stare it in the eyes, and feed it Cactus Candy. Since there are way more things in the Nether that can kill you and a mob, I believe Cactus Candy should also work in the nether as well. With all the things that want you dead in the Nether, you’re going to need all the help you can get.

Golden Opportunity

Gold is one of those ores that seems to have been completely neglected in Minecraft. While you can make tools and armor from gold, the durability is pretty pointless to make it useful for anything other than decoration or looks. However, what if Golden items became useful in the Aether? What was essentially useless in the main world, would be hardened in the Aether (upper atmosphere and colder), making golden armor and items the equivalent of Iron items and Armor on the main world below, where Iron would become too brittle to be used in the Aether (Skylands), gold would have a useful purpose up there. Considering you need a Glowstone Portal to get to the Skylands (Aether) it would make sense that Gold becomes the staple commodity in that area. As an aside I am using Skylands and Aether interchangeably. I know that Aether is an extensive modification to Minecraft and Skylands are just native biomes of floating islands. Just wanted to clear that up.
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Rope (Obviously)

Made from vines, ropes let you create the equivalent of hanging ladders that you can climb. I’ve already seen a mod for this, so it shouldn’t be a big deal to officially add it. Vines growing on the sides of walls should also be climbable, but should work much like trampling crops, in that if you climb vines too much, they break.

Hookshot (Grapple)

I know this isn’t Zelda, but you can already use a fishing pole to reel in mobs (assuming you’re that creative). A craftable Hookshot would be a mechanical device you can make that officially does what a fishing pole already does to mobs, but with the added function of pulling the player if they hookshot an immovable block-type (much in the same way that pistons cannot move Obsidian or Double slab). In this manner, a double slab on the ground with an Obsidian block on top of it would make for an excellent Hookshot target, and also make dungeons really interesting to get around.

Boomerang

Again, this isn’t Zelda, but a boomerang would be very useful in Minecraft. The crafting recipe would be essentially an upside down bowl, and using a boomerang would shoot the boomerang out in front of the player a certain distance and return in a straight line. Hitting a Mob would stun it , and if the boomerang comes into contact with collectable items (drops) it will bring those back to the player from a distance.

Block Switches

Block switches would be essentially like a lever except that they are full blocks with a blended square indent on them. They would come in stone, mossy cobble, cobble and wood types with an indent state to denote being activated. Having block switches would make secret passages utilizing pistons (like moving bookcases, etc) more secret without having to use a wireless redstone sort of modification to make regular blocks act like switches.

Redstone Powered Lamps

Using Glass surrounding a single Glowstone, we’d create a single Lamp Block that is powered by redstone to turn on or off. When off, the Lamp is clear glass, and when turned on it becomes Glowstone (lit up). Don’t get me wrong, I really do like Minecraft, but one thing that bothers me is that the way the game is geared it seems that the most common mentality is medieval at best. Lots of castles and villages, but no real opportunity to progress into a more modern age if you wish. Redstone powered lamps would allow that to a further extent.

I’d also add in Light sensor blocks that a player could craft in order to detect when the light level falls below a certain range and activate. This would be useful for lampposts using the redstone Powered Lamp block, in that a light sensor block could power a lamp block up to 4 spaces away (including vertically). In this manner we could create lampposts with a light sensor block in the ground at the base that only activates the lamppost when it becomes night. Of course, if you buried the light sensor block, then it wouldn’t work (or would always be “on”) so in order to get it to work properly you’d have to have at least one of the faces of the block uncovered.

Conclusion
While there are probably many more things I could suggest for Minecraft, I think this list is long enough to make the original point. There are a lot of things that still need to be balanced and shored up with the game that seemingly have been forgotten in the rush to add new content, and I’d like for Mojang to go back and seriously re-evaluate the things they left behind.

If you can think of other things that would greatly benefit from being added to Minecraft as a native inclusion (that obviously wouldn’t outright break the game mechanics), please feel free to add them (and a link to the mod if it exists) in the comments below.

Moving Forward

2011-09-15T20:41:00.001-05:00

It’s time to dream bigger, because we’re all in this together.

We are one people, on one planet. This tiny speck of dirt we call Earth is of finite resources, yet we act as though it will never end. We are divided, and pitted against each other at every single level of the social and economic ladder. We fight for resources, we fight each other, and those who fight the most and break all of the rules set into place in order to level a playing field for all of us are obviously the winners.

Yet the price we pay is global. No person will escape the costs of this broken global society.

When we have nothing left. When all the things we take for granted today as having worth simply collapse and leave us with nothing. That is when we will begin to understand the things which truly matter as a society.

A global society.

Until that time, we will likely remain in denial… because change is too hard to accept when we have no incentive to do so. But there will come a time soon, when all of those superficial worths will be stripped from you and I, and we will have no choice but to accept change, or die. There will be no other choice, no more excuses or tomorrows.

That time is coming quickly, and we’ve already far surpassed the point of no-return. If you believe that multi-trillion dollar debts that continue to accumulate based on money that has no meaning, let alone do not exist until called into existence as further debt and interest are somehow repayable, then you fail to understand the magnitude of the situation we lay under today.

This is no longer about countries, and this is far past the point of redemption or bailouts. While Wall Street, Banks and Corporations received bailout money in the hundreds of billions of dollars, they alone are posting record profits while unemployment remains stagnant at a total of zero… zero jobs created.

Nothing has changed from 2008… but soon it will, and we will have no choice but to change with it.

It’s time to think like a global species for the benefit of everything and everyone that calls this magnificent planet home. It’s the only way to move forward.

We cannot live without this planet, but this planet can surely live without us. It’s time we take responsibility and step up to the plate as a global entity, united as one, for the betterment of all.

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward | 2011 Release

Download the DVD Torrent here: http://zeitgeistmovie.com/torrents.html

Existential Blues

2011-09-11T20:01:00.001-05:00

Time Travel, God and The Wizard of Oz.

I Believe in Time Travel

I’m going to just put that right out there in the open. I know many people will tell me that time travel is some sort of impossibility, but I like to address that as nonsensical gibberish outright. Arthur C. Clarke is known for saying “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and I wholeheartedly believe this to be true.

If we travelled back in time to the 1950s and presented them with our laptops and iPads they’d be utterly bewildered, if not think we were extraterrestrials in disguise. Likening us to the Roswell incident, and trying to whisk us off to Area 51 for examination. Worse yet, they might think we were communist spies. This is an example of how much changes over a mere 60 years of time. We’ve gone from room sized computers that can do basic math with vacuum tubes to handheld tablets that can access the sum of human knowledge via the Internet on a whim.

Let’s go back a little further, to around the 1800s. Electricity was just catching on as a way to power the world and to a latter extent we were just introducing the new fangled automobile as an alternative to horse-drawn carriages (give or take twenty years).

Even further still, and what we find to be common would have gotten us burned at the stake for witchcraft.

We’re really good at hindsight. We can look back and see how the advancement of our civilization seems so obvious, yet looking forward we immediately discount things we don’t know as if it were impossible. In a way, we’re no better than our ancestors who believed demons had to be let out through the blood in order to cure people. The notion of modern medicine to those people was as impossible as time travel is to us today.

In the same manner as proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun and not vice-versa, we brandish those thinkers as heretics for thinking outside of current conventions. What we widely believe is true today is not the sum of all knowledge, and it is all subject to change at an ever increasing rate as time moves forward.

So, time travel is definitely possible – we just don’t know all the details at this moment. Possibly.

Some would say that if time travel were possible, then we’d come back and tell ourselves about it, thus proving the existence of time travel in some cyclical proof. But of course, this is based on a conjecture about how time travel would theoretically work in our wildest dreams and has no real basis on how it would actually work in some future time. Much like trying to imagine that if time travel were true then somebody would come back in time on a magical unicorn crapping time-dilation rainbows to prove it.

Time travel, in a basic sense, would mean that all points in time – past, present and future, are of an infinite nature and do not simply include our own timeline but every variance in infinite capacity in a multi-dimensional infinite expanse. Travelling through time would then include the idea that there is world-line divergence, which is a huge variable in the equation that would likely exclude the idea that at this exact moment somebody from the future would come to have a chat.

In the world-line I write this in, there hasn’t been a future version of myself knocking on the door and it is very likely that this hasn’t happened for you either. But the real question is whether or not we’d even know what a time traveler looked like, or if we’d even believe them if they did show up.

Let’s say for a moment that a time traveler has actually visited our world-line and there are records of it. First and foremost, as a time traveller I would already assume the above in that the prior generations I’d be visiting would have little to no comprehension about what I was talking about, and would likely say I was a crackpot, so it wouldn’t really be my mission to come back and tell everybody how the next twenty years go. I’d be on an actual mission of importance and you would just be something to amuse me while I was passing through for a pit stop.

You Can’t Change Infinity

There is also the idea of divergence in that no matter what my future looked like in comparison to yours, there is always some sort of divergence which would make this time-line unfold differently among many aspects, but possibly to a similar outcome. There are many paths to the end-goal, they would say. How you got there is pretty inconsequential if we all end up at the same destination in the end. At least many of us, but not all of us.

Being a time traveller doesn’t mean you come back to give yourself the winning lottery numbers. I mean, you could, but that has no value to you in the future because of divergence. The same holds true for trying to assassinate Hitler or kill your parents before you were born. You may succeed but you’ve only done so on a 1 / infinite capacity and wasted that much time of your own in the process, and have had absolutely no change to your own time-line in the process for doing so.

So let’s put that notion out of our minds in relation to time travel. In the end, it’s really a lot like traveling across dimensions that have no real connection to your own. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, so to speak.

Back to the idea of whether we’d actually recognize that we’ve been visited by a time traveller, let alone believe them if they said so. The answer to this question alone is self-evident. I can cite examples like John Titor and despite the revelations he put forward, most of the world has never heard of him, and those who have are strongly divided as to whether he really was a time traveller or just an elaborate hoax. On a personal level I actually believe he was a time traveler, because I have no real reason to believe he wasn’t.

I do not subscribe to the idea that simply because something seems impossible to us today that it will remain impossible into the future. If anything I can quite easily see how somebody like John Titor would make an excellent candidate for time travel, and also how nothing he said while he was here on our world line made any real difference in the grand scheme of things.

He was around during 2000 – 2001 and today at 2011 the world is wholly none the wiser for the things he has put forward as indications of what is to come. That doesn’t mean that everything he said was 100% accurate, either. Again, world-line divergence of even 1% will obliterate anything specific that a time traveller tried to tell you about the future, however the base of the information would remain quite true despite the differing details.

For instance, John Titor mentioned travelling up and down the coast maintaining wireless internet towers, and in 2000 – 2001 this didn’t make much sense. It barely makes sense today with our limited cell towers and mobile data plans, but in the context of 2036 it makes perfect sense. In the time between 2000 – 2001 to 2011 we’ve gone from rinky dink bandwidth on mobile consumer communications to high bandwidth options just now being standardized but yet to be implemented. IEEE standards have released the specifications for the next generation of Wi-Fi (WRAN) that is 802.22 and has a 60 mile range. I think that is promising to a point where those wireless internet towers that John mentioned now suddenly make sense to have all around the United States.

But they have yet to exist, still. As of 2011, those long-range wireless access points aren’t in wide use (though there are some companies that offer it as a point-to-point communications option that is limited by comparison). The underlying idea here is that a self-proclaimed time traveller told the world about long-range wireless Internet towers at least ten years in advance and now we’re at a point where just the standards are in place to start building the hardware required for it.

I refer to that sort of revelation as agnostic information – short of a global meltdown, the progress for it would not be changed, thus making it a safe bet to talk about. It still has no real connection to your own world-line in the future, except a commonality thread despite two different dimensional spaces.

If a time traveller did come back and happened to cross through this specific world-line variance on his or her way through we still remain to ask the question of whether anybody would notice or care.

I apply this same questioning logic to religion where the devoted faithful believe their savior will come back. Let’s assume they already have come and gone, passed judgment and continued on their way. Would we have noticed? More to the point, would we even care until it was in hindsight and too late?

Witchcraft Trials

We’re about to make a left turn into religion, please fasten your safety belts.

If somebody came up to you and said they were the son of God and were on Earth to deliver mankind, you’d probably think they were out of their mind. Most religious today would still think that person were a heretic and condemn them, and if you’re Christian that’s not too far from what happened the first time around, now is it?

I’m not anti-God by any stretch of the imagination. I do believe there is God, but while I have unwavering faith in God, I have minimal faith in mankind. Mankind assumes way too much about God in their attempt to rationalize this entity. God doesn’t play favorites, so your religion is probably null and void. Any entity powerful enough to create absolutely everything on a whim doesn’t really give a crap about whether you’re a Christian or if the neighbors are Muslim. You’re all just humans who don’t play well together, like fighting children all trying to gain favor with their parents as some sort of one-up over the other.

Religion, to me, is the ultimate form of global childishness. We tell children that ghost don’t exist, and neither does the Easter Bunny, and that it’s childish to have imaginary friends – but we as adults drag those children to church and tell them about our own imaginary friend who we need to have unwavering faith in. The children at this point are being less childish than the adults, because they give up on at least twenty imaginary friends before they hit their teenage years while the adults can’t seem to give up a single one.

Worse still, is that our children never start wars because of their imaginary friends, and never use those imaginary friends as an excuse to hate another human being, or send our fellow humans off to die for that imaginary friend.

I am struck by the saying that “The meek shall inherit the Earth”, for entirely different reasons than the common person seems to be. On the face of it, it seems like those who are the most faithful, docile, loving and tolerant of others will in the end inherit the entire planet, and this is true, but we never seem to make the correlation as to what shape the planet will be in by the time we inherit it.

It’s like a cognitive chasm that prevents us from putting two and two together.

If we read further into things, we find that the planet will be overcome by corruption, sin, destruction and peril. Misery and woe, famine and flood. Disease and suffering will abound. Wars will rage on. A planet ravaged by mankind’s ignorance and malevolence is what the meek get to inherit, followed by countless generations of continued suffering as those who are left try to put it all back together again.

That’s a hell of a reward for being faithful. Unless, of course, you believe in the rapture. In this case, people believe the most faithful will be magically whisked away by God during that time, leaving the suffering to all the non-believers who are left.

I doubt highly that an omnipotent God would give those people, who spent their lives praying instead of actually helping the rest of mankind through action, who did nothing in their willful ignorance of others of culture, race and creed around the world, a free pass. We’re all in this together, and there is no back-door to sneak out of when the damages are done.

No, if anyone is going to stick around for the clean-up, it’s them. Just ask the last batch of people who said the Rapture was coming… everyone is still here, and God didn’t give them a cop-out to shirk their duties on this planet, or to each other.

The wages of sin is death, so the most wicked have it coming to them – call it karma. When you sit on the fence, however and let the battle rage on, you end up like Azreal the demon. Preaching things you know to be a universal lie is also a sin, and so I point to religion in that aspect – because a universally loving God wouldn’t choose sides and pit mankind against each other, but instead demand we live together in peace, as one. I’m pretty sure that’s in the Bible already, but it gets drowned out in the political and manipulative crap that it’s buried under which divides us as a people.

There is no Muslim, no Jew, no Christian, No Buddhist, no Taoist, and no religion. There is only humankind, on a speck of dirt in the cosmos that we call Earth, with a handful of universal truths meant to foster a global unity. There is only us as a collective consciousness together, sharing the finite resources that this speck of dirt has to offer. I cannot see that any omnipotent God in any capacity would have wanted it any other way. There is no good or bad, because each fosters the other in duality – mass murderers raise awareness of those remaining to enact understanding that such should not be tolerated and so global awareness is raised in defiance of evil, and so too does good lead to evil through complacency and apathy over time. It’s not about good or evil in the grand scheme of things, but a global awareness of why in perspective of it all. No God would rob you of perspective or wisdom through experience if they truly had your best interests in mind, and so asking God to change things is kind of pointless and of course, as effective as believing a gallon of milk will answer your prayers. In the slim chance you’ve eaten habenero hot wings, the milk may be your momentary savior, but outside of that moment it’s pretty mundane and doesn’t interfere.

Our savior… whomever that may be, is simply the sort of people through history who continually try to tell us these truths. It isn’t one man, woman or imaginary entity – it is within all of us, and every once in awhile one of us gives the rest a reminder. Unfortunately we have such low cosmic self-esteem that rarely does anyone ever believe they are equals.

The truth is, we are all equals. We’re just too caught up in the fighting and divisions to see that in the end the only thing that matters is life, unconditional love, compassion, and each other.

Back To The Future

The interesting thing about time travel is that in order to understand it you have to first realize that time is infinite, and so too is existence. This is where the idea of spirituality merges. Infinity in this aspect also plays on the earlier post I did concerning dividing by zero as a thought experiment because in the grand scheme of things, there are multiple infinities within the greater whole of existence.

In the context of time travel, dividing by zero to yield a negative infinity is a lot like saying reaching a point where time reverses in correlation to your current world-line minus divergence factors. We can look at black holes as a manifestation of negative infinite, or infinitely small, and dividing that black hole (dividing zero) yields a cross section of two negative infinites.

While we’re venturing into the realm of astrophysics and Roy Kerr, just because today we cannot achieve a Kerr Black Hole or divide it for a collapse of causality doesn’t mean it is less possible than the very understanding that predicted the existence of black holes to begin with, even during a time when Einstein himself doubted black holes existed.

Is time travel possible? I’d say very much so.

Somewhere in infinite infinities it was worked out (and possibly within our own world-line), and with those sort of odds it becomes likely that time travellers in our own world line have passed through. I have the same sort of confidence that time travel is possible that a religious person would have on the return of their savior, and if they can believe in something of such odds that a person would return two thousand years later to lead them, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch so say that time travel should be higher on the list of plausibility.

But that’s the fallacy of humanity. We believe in things we cannot prove, and instead demand faith, but when something has plausibility (even if it’s outside our current level of total understanding) we say it’s silly to believe it is true, and mock others for pursuing it. What a strange world I live in. I’d rather believe that nothing is really impossible, just improbable at the moment, and eventually we’ll catch up in all aspects.

I say to either side – Tempus Edax Rerum.