Artificial Boy

(( At the beginning of last year I made 10 predictions, then evaluated their accuracy at the end of the year. This year, I predict…

1. There will be a major blow to freedom of expression in the Second Life World™
2. One or more of LL’s products will undergo an abrupt price change, and there will be protests.
3. Linden Lab will face a challenge regarding customer privacy. For example, perhaps it will be revealed that LL has provided server logs and chat logs to be used in an investigation or as evidence in a legal proceeding. Or, perhaps it will be revealed that a court has granted a wire tap on specific communications and activities in Second Life. Linden Lab will cooperate with authorities and not take any inordinate legal risks for the sake of their customer’s privacy.
4. Perhaps as a result of this, someone will build automatic two-way text encryption into a third-party viewer, similar to pidgin-encrypt
5. LL will announce that certain services are only available in the official Second Life viewer, and perhaps some authenticated third-party viewers. In particular, the abuse reporting tool will be restricted to prevent forged snapshots.
6. The will be a change in the permissions system, perhaps to accommodate grid interoperability.
7. There will be a welcome improvement to the offline message system.
8. Someone will die.

Hmmm.. looks like only 8 this time. Maybe I’ll think of two more by tomorrow. Maybe not. Have a good 2009, everyone.
-Big Adz ))

I clicked on the age banana at The Vortex and it said that today is my 1000th day! Wow!

Meanwhile the rest of Second Life, and the outer-space world of course, is celebrating the turn of the New Year. Epic Epoch! Read the rest…

((
On January 1, 2008 I made 10 predictions for the new year. One of them was voted #3 most popular in New World Notes a few days later. Now that 2008 is nearly over, let’s see how I did with all of them. If I did well enough, I’ll post something similar for 2009 shortly. Read the rest…

Through the 1st Second Life Bloggers Mix-And-Match program, Kanomi (of T I N Y D A N C I N G) wrote for the blog of Rik & Osiris Pfalz on the topic of “being a child avatar in Second Life” in a post entitled, Second Childhood.

“Dani lives in a nice big town where only little kids and good mommies and daddies are allowed! She’s a lucky girl and her mommy loves her just bunches and bunches!”

As we skated up and down the streets, looking like children, acting like children — in for a penny, in for a pound; I’m nothing if not a method blogger — my own memories kept returning, and I’m afraid towards the end I bent poor Dani’s ear about Candyland and Risk, or how me and my sister used to sneak into our neighbor’s yard and tiptoe through the courtyard, playing pirates or Robin Hood, or how I remembered reading every single Oz book when I was eight or nine…

read the rest at rikpfalz. Kanomi’s own post about it is here.

Excellent use of in-character, out-of-character text, Kanomi! I’m glad your day as a kid av brought back some nice memories.

-Big Adz

Ohmygosh How Could I Forget Pinocchio?

Pinocchio is the original Artificial Boy. Read the rest…

I made a gallery of other artificial boys I know! I’ll add more if I find any! Maybe someday it will be a public gallery of other artificial children like me. For now its in my playhouse and only close friends can see it. Sorry.

(( Adz identifies with famous artificial boys, David featured in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), and D.A.R.Y.L., a 1985 film by the same name. Read the rest…

Kids5B exhibit Our Stories – Why We Became Child Avatars by Taiven Janick and Sage Kostenbaum and contributors, Alton Icarus (72, 98, 24). My story is there, as is David’s, and Sokmunky’s, and many others. There were some kids there who I hadn’t met yet, but I read them all anyway. The stories are sometimes both amusing, describing the well of creative energy tapped simply by changing shape, and sad, bringing up real life child abuse. Many are emotionally powerful. One story was so awesome, and accurate, and touching, and said it all so perfectly, I IMed the author and made a new friend. I don’t want to say who it is without permission. Visit the exhibit to read for yourself.

Not your ordinary toolbelt! Read the rest…

Response to Open Forum: What Was *Your* First Hour In SL Like?. Hamlet Au asks, “I wonder, however, if all this is looking at the problem backwards. Forget figuring out why 90% of those who came, left. Instead, isn’t it more important to run a resilience study, and locate the commonalities between the 10% who stayed, and build on that? So I put the question to readers: if you’re an active Resident, what happened in your first hour in Second Life that kept you here?”
Answer:

Join Date 4/4/2006

My first hour
Trying to make my avatar look like a child.

My second hour
A Linden-made sign in Waterhead had a notecard full of landmarks. One of them was captioned “who wants free ice cream?” Indeed!

…Trying to fly across the ocean towards the red beacon, and realizing that the dark blue regions were impassable.

…Arriving at the ice cream shop and eating an ice cream cone by myself.

My third hour
…Feeling lonely and brainstorming where to find like-minded people. The best i could think of was adoption agencies. I searched for one and found one, but it was empty. The second one I found was populated, and I stayed there for more than a week.

Epilogue
The ice cream place is gone now. I took my first set of foster parents there, when arranging to meet them for the first time. It was empty for that visit, too.
The adoption agency is long gone now, too.
*sniffle*

Prompted by Botgirl.

Avatars be kind to your players!