By pure chance, on Thursday evening I was half-way paying attention to the Caledon state channel when people started chatting about fireworks. As luck would have it, the weekly Unitarian Universalist worship service had just ended, so I decided to TP over. The fireworks in question were on a sim that was displaying an installation by the artist AM Radio (he of David’s Marat and The Far Away), and it was the final night of the installation. What luck! Here are a few of my photos, which cannot do justice to the work.
The sky is falling (again)
Two very nice responses to recent articles in [our favorite virtual world]’s most notorious rag on gasp! content theft and open-sourcing code.
First, Miss Ordinal Malaprop’s straightforward analysis of new “copybot” scares:
There is nothing at all new about any of this.
Be sure to read the comments to see Second Life’s notorious antagonist in action.
And today we have Mr Barney Boomslang’s ranting sarcasm on the dangers of open source:
Oh my, the doom is near, everyone off to the bomb shelters, man the lifeboats, the sky is falling!
(No comments to entertain the masses on Mr Boomslang’s blog.)
Overcome by fabulousness
Last night while acting as the Radio Riel host for a treehousewarming party for the Davies clan in Steelhead Harborside, I was quite overcome by fabulousness. (No, not mine, the home’s and the assembled company’s!) Luckily for me, Miss Myfanwy Davies was prepared to assist not only her guests but her event staff:
Just for the sake of a modicum of self-defense regarding the outfit, I plead temporary insanity by virtue of being egged on in Caledon state chat by Lady Edwina Heron and Lady Diamanda Gustafson earlier in the day. (The Caledon Second Anniversary treasure hunt prepared by said ladies and their minions being an enormous success and the occasion for the foolish chatter on the state channel.)
I’m sorry not to have gotten a photo that would do justice to the tiara and <ahem> lovely hair sent to me by Lady Edwina to accompany the tutu, similarly gifted. I was also holding a rather large, winged steampunk wand for most of the evening.
Size and social cohesion
Fascinating blog post at Phasing Grace: Dunbar’s Number – Groups in [our favorite virtual world]. (Dunbar’s Number is a theoretical ceiling to the number of stable social relationships an individual can maintain, often casually said to be 150.)
From a modern world perspective and using social network analysis, Chris Allen hypothesizes that that different group sizes impact a group’s behavior and their choice of processes and tools. Based on empirical data from MMOG and online communities, he suggests that for non-survival groups, the equivalent Dunbar number falls somewhere between 60-90.
Grace makes a fascinating comment that seems apropos to Caledon:
Allen argues that group dynamics have more than just the Dunbar number as a break point; three group size nodes emerge and Allen provides some insight into the group construct as it relates to size. Groups with too few people suffer from insufficient critical mass, experience group think, are unable to sustain conversation and the infamous ‘Echo Chamber’ effect is evident. Read some of Eric Rice’s ‘Echo Chamber’ analysis regarding the failings of artificially small groups, aka elites. Overly large groups have far much too noise and cannot sustain an equal and unstructured trust. Cliques and inappropriate politics emerge and social contracts start to break down. From a [virtual world] perspective, an example of this might be the recent [ordinal number following First] Citizen forum meltdown. Note that it’s the group size that creates the breakdown of the cohesive bonds, not the ‘newbs’. When group sizes grow beyond these normalized sizes, even the most senior members of the group can suffer the ill effects.
Don’t you wish you were a Radio Riel host?
[missing funny image of a tipjar with an outrageous sum hovering over it]
(No, I didn’t really make L$16,000 in tips. It was a joke.)
David’s Marat
Among the fantastical builds of AM Radio is a reproduction of Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat. I visited the other day and took my turn in the tub:
Lag: myths and solutions
Gwyneth Llewelyn has posted Lag Myths Dispelled
While it’s undeniable that all highly attended events are laggy — it’s a limitation of the technology — I was surprised to see that almost all “rules” are based on very old limitations of the SL technology, which plagued us in 2003-2005, but that have since then be “fixed” by Linden [Research, Inc.], as both the client and the server software have dramatically improved.
Improved, yes, but the lag is still with us. And, in a desperate attempt to fight down lag, people are coming up with ancient “recipes” for fixing lag — unaware that they’re not really helping out, but just repeating old myths, that simply don’t reflect the state-of-the art of LL’s technology these days. Lag will remain with us for many more years, but not for the same reasons we had it in 2003-2005.
Gwyneth not only dispells three myths, she makes some suggestions about what you can do to reduce lag.
Watch out in Murdann!
I’ve just bought a tornado HUD. Mwa ha ha ha ha!
February literary salon
You are most cordially invited to join me at my monthly salon, Tuesday 19 February at 5pm SLT, at Ormsby Hall, Caledon Murdann.
The discussion this month will draw upon selections from the writings of William Morris.
Yrs, &c.
Otenth Paderborn
Free THiNC book available through shop.onrez.com or on the dock in Caledon Murdann.
Continue reading “February literary salon”
Amazing map sims
I visited an absolutely amazing set of sims devoted to the map collection of David Rumsey. These photos can’t begin to do it justice, and I simply must go back to explore more fully.
Here you can see the topographic maps of Yosemite used on a 3D topography of Yosemite (to scale), which fills four sims. I am standing on the observation deck just to the left of center in the photo, which is situated at the intersection of the sims. In the distance you can see two globes, which have orreries inside them. (Click on the photo for a larger version.)
Sitting on the orrery inside the celestial globe. You can see me to the left of the sign.
Another shot inside the celestial globe. Although it has rotated, you can still find me sitting on the orrery.
(A tip of the hat to NPIRL.)