Coal's Notes

Wow. So tonight, I took my life into my hands. And got into a car with Mera behind the wheel. Several months ago, Henrietta and I tore around Midnight City on her motorcycle, and I'm still scarred, so I don't know what I was thinking, hopping into the passenger seat of Mera's new Dominus Shadow. Especially when I saw this parked nearby...

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are indoors in that picture. In Mera's own store. I hope she can get the tire tracks off of the laminate...

Eventually we made it out onto the open road. We went around a corner and then...

Too quick over the region border and we all went in different directions - including the car. :P I had to relog because I couldn't teleport anywhere or stand up.

Posted by Coal Nelson at 08:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

After linking to Jacek's blog in my last post, I figured maybe I'd better read the last few postings there. I have been terrible at keeping up with other people's blogs (no, it's not just my own I've been neglecting) - the new job doesn't allow for coffee breaks, let alone reading blogs! Reading that blog made me realize something: I know a lot of really intelligent people. People who think about things; people who are really smart! I mean, yeah, I kind of knew that - Dol's got the music and cynical commentary thing nailed (to the cross!), Mera - my god, is there anything Mera can't do?, Akela's got mad writing skillz, BushidoBrown knows everything ever about comics and has his own crazy lyrical style, Tateru's got an intensity of focus that's like a laser-beam... I could go on, but it's past my bed time and I need to work in the morning. However, I know if I don't finish this post now, it'll never get done, and that'd be a shame.

Every single one of my friends are above-average people. I'm sure everyone thinks that of their friends, but in may case, of course, it's true! :D So, my friends (yes, this includes the 80 gazillion folks not mentioned above, including coworkers and even those who don't even know what Second Life is (pity them)), I salute you. Give yourselves a pat on the back and take the day off. Tell the boss I said you got a free pass.

Posted by Coal Nelson at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

According to my sources (who shall remain nameless, because I forgot to ask if it was okay to quote them), "in addition to file uploads and downloads, Linux client got SHINY today. Also object occlusion and other neat stuff" Ooooo.

Jacek Antonelli (who may or may not be my super secret source) made this cool image:

(after a drought of postings, I'm making up for it by three in one night!)

Posted by Coal Nelson at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Every time I look at this picture I want to shout, "Wonder Twins Power! Activate! Form of... a purple gorilla! Form of... a purple bucket of water with a big smile!"

Of course, I fold under any sort of peer pressure, so I dug through my copious inventory and was able to join in the fun.

Posted by Coal Nelson at 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Another great Frogg and Jaycatt show last night - anyone who hasn't seen these guys play really needs to - if they haven't maxed the sim! Last night, they were at the Big Horn Lodge, a place Henrietta Strangelove has invited me to a few times, and where she does a World Music Party every other week. Zenigma Suntzu DJs there on Sundays (or did at one point anyway) and is also quite good. Haven't spent time there on other days - but it's got a nifty family room in the basement sorta feel. Picture from last night below the fold.

Today was my first day sponsoring the Thursday Building Shelter - I had Mera give away one of the rocket headspinners. :) I got a few more commission-type requests recently (including one last night) and will need to get going on those, maybe later tonight. :D

Posted by Coal Nelson at 07:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a very nice Friday night - one of those nights where it's hard to convince yourself that you need to log off - even if you've got (as I did) work at 8am the next morning. I mean seriously, who needs more than five hours of sleep? (Besides me?)

A few of the Shelter folks decided to try out the Balloon Tour before the grand opening. So nine of us embarked in a balloon that sat eight (Travis stood or tried to, for part of the first ride). We ran into trouble almost immediately. See the lighthouse in the picture? We got stuck there. :P Too many attachments was Traven Sachs' diagnosis. So we went back to the beginning and tried again, but got stuck a little way further.

Finally we reduced the number of folks going on the tour - 6 people with minimal primage made it around. It was really quite fun. If you try it, remember to turn your draw distance up at the beginning, and not, like me, at the end. We went over the island where the teens first wind up when they graduate to the main grid. :D

Hung out with the gang at the lake for a bit, then we all trooped off to see Frogg and Jaycatt (this is my weekly relax-with-a-drink-and-good-music time). Mera and Travis both attended, which is rare, but nice. After the show, a bunch of us went for another balloon ride, then hung out in the lodge-ish building (not sure what to call it) near the balloon launch for a while, just gabbing.

Did I get anything done on any of the 80 zillion projects I've got on my plate right now? No. Was the time wasted? Absolutely not. :)

Posted by Coal Nelson at 02:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

What? You don't think that's a catchy title? I've been dawdling over posting because I need to wade through the pics I took at FireEyes Fauna's birthday shindig last weekend. :P But revealed to us, during those festivities, is that the title of the next hit from Jaycatt Nico will be entitled: Furry AgePlayers From AOL With Numbers In Their Names. Or something along those lines anyway. I may be mis-remembering. Understand: I have no problem with furries. If you want to be a dog/cat/bear/wolf (hi Akela)/fish/penguin... actually you don't see many fish furries, do you? Anyway, if you want to be an anthropomorphic representation of some sort of fauna, go nuts. Just quit over-using that purr sound, it makes me mental because I think the hard drive's acting up.

I also don't have a problem with ageplayers. However, if they act like whiny brats when I know they're fully adult enough to understand the annoyingness... um. I'll be annoyed. Yeah. There's a threat. Go Coal. You've got 'em on the run now. :P

AOLers - I know lots of folks who use AOL. Someday, I hope, they'll be comfortable enough with the internet and computer technology to venture beyond it's limited (and expensive) purview. SL might just be the right spot to put in the crowbar and wrench open their minds to the wide world. I just wish they would force their 1337-speaking kidlets to learn to touch-type, spell, capitalize, punctuate, etc.

People with numbers in their names... well. In some cases, it's very 1337 I'm sure. I tend to encompass such far-out ideas as capitalization, spelling and punctuation. I read Tomato Nation's Vine column. I know what Garner's is, even if I frequently ignore the rules entombed there. This apparently doesn't make me old school (or even OLD SKOOL zOMG LOL1!!!1!), it just makes me old ("Waaah!"). It's hard for me not to end sentences with periods. I try to avoid typos.

The funny thing is - in a medium like this, or like SL, or any text-based communication medium - you start to extrapolate from people's writing skills to the rest of their lives. I knew someone who read and wrote flawless english. I had to really focus to understand what the hell she was saying when I met her in person - her accent was so heavy and she didn't have the fluency that she did in text. And I've met people, from what we used to call the "hugs and snugs" crowd on the MU* I frequented, who would spend hours in banal text chatter and came across as they types who'd dot their Is with hearts and use flashing text on their webpages - but offline, they were witty and intelligent conversationalists.

In other situations, names with numbers just represent the massive population that is served - there might be thousands of John Smiths offline, but there can be only one (bad movie reference) in SL. So you wind up with John35981 Smith. Which, frankly, is just someone who doesn't get that this name is how you will be represented to the community for as long as you stay in SL. You do not need to be called by your real name in SL. In fact, I'd think you'd have to really luck out to see your RL last name go by at the right time. With the huge repository of words in the english language, plus unlimited recourse to other languages, plus the ability to just make up a word that sounds neat... well, John35981 seems pretty damn sad. We should pity this guy. I guarantee that once (if?) he "gets" SL, he'll be on live help or the forums begging for the ability to change his name.

Or he'll just make an alt. Named Mary3421 Smith. There's no helping some folks.

Posted by Coal Nelson at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

it's not just Soylent Green anymore!

Continuing on with my explorations of those nifty keen Debug Settings thingies in the Client menu (ctrl-alt-shift-D for those of you playing along at home!) - RenderTreeLODFactor has this description:

Controls level of detail of vegetatopm (multiplier for current screen area when calculated level of detail)

*snickering* I thought I was the only who accidentally wound up with my fingers on the wrong keys when touch typing! :)

Took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize "vegetatopm" wasn't some obscure technical term! ;)

NOTE: Since these aren't in a menu that is visible by default, and it's in a menu item called "Debug Settings" I'm going to guess that they aren't really meant for general consumption, ergo "use at your own risk" and spelling errors be damned! ;)

Posted by Coal Nelson at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

After reading a lot of Dolmere's posts on the typing animation, I got curious. Plus... that new Client menu taunts me. I don't know what all the stuff does, so I spent some time poking it with a stick. The one thing that *really* caught my eye is the "Debug Settings" (near the bottom). You can set values for particular things here - and they seem to persist for the next time you log in (but not if you switch computers, like any other preference). "PlayTypingAnim" is one of them. If you select it and choose false - no typing, no noise. Freaky, huh?

Posted by Coal Nelson at 08:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

For some reason today, my mental eye is aimed at the past. Back in the olden days (when computers were made of wood and ran on corn cobs and grease), I used to hang about on various different MUSHes. In fact, I helped run one for a bit. :) The folk who ran these "games" (and some of them were games in the same way SL is a game... as in not at all) were called Wizards - a terminology left over from the days of yore when all MUDs (from whence MUSH came) were based on RPGs. As a wizard, you had many powers, you could sneak about invisibly, read and change object code on stuff you didn't own, and, like our very own Lindenfolk, you could boot folks offline temporarily or permanently. One of the ways to do the latter was with the terrifying and hilarous @toad command.

When someone was @toaded, the database no longer recognized their db# (like UUID#) as a player, but instead thought it was an object. Obviously, the offender could no longer log in. It also renamed them to something along the lines of 'A slimy toad named X'. Some games (I'm using that because I'm never sure whether there should be a "e" MUSHes , and plus, I don't want to leave out MUCKs and MOOs and all the rest of the MU* spectrum) would have galleries of the greatest toads they'd dealt with. Oldtimers could bring newbies by and point at the inanimate objects and say, "That, my child, was name obscured to protect the guilty, the most obnoxious twink the world ever did see." Or something like that.

It was a giddy and awesome power. Wouldn't it be funny if there was a Linden Lab version of this? We could go and fire watermelon guns and throw virtual rotten apples at that person who brought us the giant physical pushy prim springs... I think the general public would maybe be more reassured if the victims could actually witness that the perpetrators were brought to justice - and nothing says justice like a toad. But then again... people would probably vie for spots in the toad pantheon - for some, negative attention is better than none at all. :(

Back in the olden days (when we made our own routers out of bit of string and used bubblegum, and galdurnit, we liked it that way!), the internet was a smaller place. The wizard could look at the IP the twink was logging in from, figure out which ISP it belonged to, and where it was located, find a telephone book for that city and look up the home number of the user. I am aware of several instances where parents got phone calls telling them that their wonderful son was up to no good on his computer (and it was almost always a preteen/teen boy who was causing problems) - and that would be it. No more attempts to hack the db, because someone was grounded and had his modem taken away. We've come a long way from those days.

Twinks, by the way, were early griefers. I think I prefer that word to griefer for most situations, because of its supercilious tone - it almost sounds like twerp. Like they're not even worth worrying about. It's a word that should be used more, I think. Yes, the guy who shows up randomly on your land, wearing nothing more than a giant flexi penis, is not there to promote testicular cancer awareness... but I don't know if calling him a "griefer" isn't giving him too much credit. Likewise, the girl that stands on the border of your parcel shouting obscenities. Roll your eyes, "what morons! Don't they have anything better to do than to be twinks?" And freeze them, eject them, ban them, mute them. They are not worth any more concern than that.

The real griefers are the toads who make it so everyone and their brother needs to reset their passwords. :P

Posted by Coal Nelson at 06:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The following post is not really about my Second Life, except as it's impacted by my first life. My job has been keeping me busy enough elsewhere that I don't post here as often, so I guess that's kinda related, right? So I'm just going to rant a little below the fold, and you folks who aren't interested can go read someone else's blog instead.

I have a new job. I love this new job a lot - it's stressful and fast-paced and gives me plenty of opportunity to gripe good-naturedly about the nature of humanity (you should only worry if I'm not griping, really, because that means I'm fetal in the corner, whimpering at the horribleness of it all). I was so thrilled at being offered it that I took a substantial pay cut. Like more than half. My old job paid well, but it was familiar enough that there was no challenge and the only promotion path would have taken me places I wasn't interested in going. I had no emotional investment in it - my passion was all channelled elsewhere, more recently to things like SL and the theatre.

My old job was also full time. The new job is part time. :( You know I had to have really been interested in the position to be willing to give up a full time position for this. I'm in my thirties and have a mortgage and other adult-type responsibilities. And it's embarrassing to have to admit to folks that I work a part-time hourly position. But I have no regrets on giving up the old job, and I wouldn't trade the job for the world.

You'd think that fewer hours spent on the job would mean more time for goofing off in SL, but...

Most of the folks I work directly with are as into their jobs as I am. Many of us to the point where we spend a lot of our off-duty time doing things that... well, okay, basically working for no pay. Not exactly the smartest thing to do, since our employer benefits from this free overtime - which probably puts some of us at full-time hours - without actually having to pay us for those full-time hours. Not a great bargaining position, but... did I mention I love the job?

So I'm in this bind: I really love my job, so I don't want to rock the boat, but I'd really like a steady salary (benefits wouldn't suck as well). "You don't get unless you ask," you say. I have. And I know a couple of my coworkers have. It's not that the requests are denied... it's that they're ignored. It's like the request never even happened, it's been sucked into some alternate space-time continuum where everyone gets made VP on their third day of work. And I don't want to harp on it, because (a) that's annoying and (b) see above, re: love the job. I don't want to lose even the part-time position. It's like sex; even when it's bad, it's pretty damn good.

Which is only part of what's so frustrating (the job, not sex).

It'd be convenient if I could throw up my hands and say, "Argh! Management!" and storm off to grumble in a corner and plot their overthrow. But I like the management. Most of their decisions are essentially sound and seem pretty well thought-out. They seem pretty pro-active as far as offering nice benefits (for the salaried employees). They're nice people; I enjoy spending time with them. Why don't they seem to see that they're making me feel like what I do isn't valued? I suspect it's some sort of blind spot. Most will agree that there aren't enough of us part-time folks to do the job right (Argh! Why won't you make us full-time then?!?) and they have plans to change that through a combination of reorganization and hiring more staff (see above, re: Argh!).

But the plans seem vague and there's no real deadline, nor any mention of whether we'll all still be scrounging to make ends meet when the damn thing is implemented. It'd be one thing if we were being kept part-time because none of us had skills that were needed in a full-time capacity... but it became rapidly apparent during my first week on the job, that twice the current staff would be able to stay busy with no real effort. And hiring new folks is a laborious task - all the paperwork hoops to jump through, wouldn't it make more sense to just expand the hours (and even maybe the duties?) of the existing staff?

Part of it may be that I'm not working out of the office, but from my house. I'm not there, in their faces, going "Hellloooo?" I'm not seeing the 40 million things that I know keep my salaried comrades-in-arms hopping all day. I'm not hanging at the water cooler, picking up on the gossip, taking the general emotional temperature of the company. The entire firm could be on the verge of collapse due to internal politicking, and I'd never know.

Dammit. I'd be a good salaried employee! Okay, so you folks that are reading this don't know that, but look at how much time I'm devoting to the company as a part-time person - enough that my time spent flaked out in SL hasn't gone up, it's dropped. :P Enough that I'm ranting in my goddamn Second Life blog about it, where it really has no relevance.

*sigh* I feel better now. Venting is so cathartic. Time to go back to work...

Posted by Coal Nelson at 03:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Hi! I'm a complete twit. Pleased to meet you!

Got an email from the lovely folks in the billing department at Linden Lab today letting me know they were unable to bill my tier to my credit card and thus my account is on hold. :P Ooops. The credit card on file expired in August. Should you consult a calendar, you'll notice it's now September. I've updated the info now and sent them an embarrassed apology. :)

Still... the gas company and my ISP, both of whom also bill direct to the credit card, emailed me a notice before the end of August to remind me that I needed to supply a new card - I don't remember seeing a similar message from Linden Lab. :( Happily, I'm able to log in, so whether it automatically went off-hold when I supplied the new info or if they hadn't got around to putting it on hold yet (the email was only a few hours old), no reisdents were harmed during the course of this experiment.

Posted by Coal Nelson at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I spend a fair amount of my free time hanging out at game show events at the Shelter, and I have met some really fantastic folks there. But I do have a pet peeve. It's up there with my old beef about folks who don't disable the typing noise during live music events (which is no longer a concern, since I can turn down the sound effects volume in Preferences to remove the typing noise). My beef is folks with chatty bellies.

I've been to a couple of meetings and such where someone has had accidentally had talkative genitalia, and the owners tended to be very embarrassed and normally would teleport off in a flurry. But quite a few times I've been at game shows where someone with a pregnant avatar thinks nothing of spamming the room with comments like "X's baby bonds with her mother" or "X's baby is hungry". Um. I really don't care about your unborn child. I'm sorry if that makes me a heartless bitch, but... at least now we can mute chattery objects.

At Jaycatt and Frogg's performance on Friday, Jaycatt's Mom (Momova Singer - that's such an awesome name), finally said something to a woman whose stomach had been complaining of the baby's hunger. Sumar kindly walked her through muting the belly. I had muted it early on in the evening. I've found that making comments on spam-filled babies/bellies tends to meet with offended anger from the parent. How dare I criticize their darling child. Um. That's not a darling child, that's an object made of prims. It's not like an avatar, with an actual human being behind it - it's a scripted object reciting grammatically-questionable phrases at set intervals in a crowded room. It's an annoyance - as much of annoyance as a particle-rezzer or a ton of bling jewelry.

And besides - RL or SL, I don't want to commune with your unborn child. If you do, use llOwnerSay() or llInstantMessage(). Jeez.

Posted by Coal Nelson at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Chatted with Dolmere tonight about blogging. He agrees that lots of smaller posts seem to work better than long posts which require much deliberating. Maybe it's due to the teeny attention span that SL sometimes induces in even the most-focused of us. I get halfway done the post and wander off to get a drink from the fridge, or deal with something at work, or get sucked into a game show at the Shelter, or whatever. And then I come back and try to pick up a train of thought that's not just been derailed, the tracks have been turned into a pedestrian walkway!

So I'm going to make an effort to shorten things up here. For example, I was going to natter about the excellence of Jaycatt and Frogg tonight, and possibly include a picture. Except... I'm still at the concert and if I load up PSP to edit the pictures, my laptop will hate me and I'll disconnect and the server is full so I won't get back. :( Not a chain of events I'd like. Be nice if the Kelham region could support more than 40 folks simultaneously.

I'm glad to finally be able to catch these guys live - I'm told I missed a bunch of great stuff streamed from the SLCC, and I missed their performances last weekend due to scheduling stuff. However, despite needing to be up at 7am tomorrow, I am determined to stay up until the end of their show this evening!

Okay, I can't resist trying to edit just one picture...

Yay!

Posted by Coal Nelson at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Just realized that in an earlier post, I mentioned that GavinLeigh Wake was blogging about Burning Life

Posted by Coal Nelson at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Don't pass out, but this will be two entries in two days. Wow! What a record. I'm inspired to write today because of Akela's comments over on the SL Insider page. He's a friend of mine, and it's been a real pleasure to read his blog stuff (when I have the time - they churn out a lot of content over there!) and to watch it really become a success (I think?). He's also a damn good writer. The phrase, "Enjoy squatting like a toad in your fetid miasma of seething hatred and self-importance" is particularly well-phrased. Reminds me of a "break-up" letter my best friend in high school and I composed to her cheating (soon-to-be-ex) boyfriend. "Disgusting, degenerate piece of swamp slime dredged up from the bowels of the earth," took us all afternoon to compose. We were particularly proud of the alliteration.

But it's not his fantastic prose that has inspired me to blog today. Well, okay, it kind of is. It's about how seriously we all take SL. I was about to tell a non-SL friend about the blog and I realized... they won't get it. They don't know who Aimee is or Prokofy, (or Akela, for that matter) and I'm not sure I could explain in a way they'd understand. These folks are "famous" within SL. Whatever that means. That and a handful of change might let you make a local call... depending on what's local to you.

I think there's always going to be some perception of a FIC, because there's always a group of folks that feel like they're the "have-nots". I'm sorry to hear that Akela's getting slammed for writing with a perceived pro-Shelter bias... but, you need to write about what you know. And a lot of the folks he's writing about I've never met, which is odd, because I spend what I think of as a lot of time at the Shelter. I go through phases when I spend less time there and phases where I'm there all the freakin' time, but that's because it's one of the more welcoming spots in SL. It tends to have a kind of transient population too, so that if there's someone you don't particularly like... wait a week and they'll have moved on. Or not. At which point you learn to tolerate them. Welcome to adulthood.

And I guess that's what I'm blogging about (took me long enough to get to the point, I know!) - if you don't like the people, and you don't like the management, and you don't like the functionality of the program... um? Time to move on, maybe? Just a thought. If I was that miserable, you'd better believe I'd be seeking better uses for my free time.

Posted by Coal Nelson at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)