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· thearidians.org (11) newest: We\'re Back apollo 18th Feb @ 15:32 EST
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January 2007
Yummy Photos
apollo [thearidians.org] Thu 25th @ 20:25 EST
apollo, aradia, photos, snapshots
My sweet Aradia has been adding some really cool photos to our gallery lately, which I think show off how cute and hot her lovely avatar is. Aradia always pays such wonderful attention to detail and finds the loveliest skins and outfits. She has a great eye for a photo too. I've been adding some photos myself, and one of them even reminded me to talk about how hard it can be to take thematic photos in SL. That's a topic for another post though.
December 2006
Exploring Virtual Worlds
apollo [blog] Fri 29th @ 16:15 EST
aradia, human condition, musing, philosophy, real-virtual
One attribute of Second Life that enthrals me on an intellectual level is the notion that, although the world itself is virtual, the experiences garnered whilst there are ostensibly real; if two beings can recall scudding across the night sky from sunset into night chasing the falling star over the rim of the world then what separates that experience from a walk in the park or a kiss in the rain? In my mind what defines our realities is the filters we choose to apply to our sensory inputs and the ripples that fan out into the collective consciousness from the results of our actions.
SL facilitates communication in ways that are largely familiar and comfortable, but it also goes beyond that. It allows us to establish a presence in a world in which we can optionally and selectively partake. Unlike the corporeal realm, we need only log into Second Life when we desire to. We have freedom to chose our path, make our mark; define our reality and our perceptions of it in many imaginative and unique ways.
The truly fascinating aspect of this freedom is in how some residents choose to surrender it. They start businesses or seek employment in world, they join organizations and find themselves logging in at disadvantageous times in order to gather merit, they embark on all-consuming projects that leave time for little else; they keep themselves as busy as with their first life, if not more so. I do not say this disparagingly mind, I merely write it as an observational truth in order to give background to this musing post.
In some cases it seems that if you give a person freedom and choice they will choose the familiar, whether out of fear or laziness or lack of speculative vision I do not know. As the technology of communication becomes more advanced and commonplace though, the obsolescing distinctions between "real" and "virtual" will need to be revised and the nature of the human condition explored still further.
Although I appreciate activities in SL "in the moment" as they occur, I am often also thinking of these higher-level subjects as I run around. SL is interesting to me on many levels and that multifaceted nature is a part of why I continue to log in. In a related vein, being able to enjoy SL with my wife and see her and our relationship through these different filters is the other part of why I continue to log in. We are able to share experiences in SL that we could never share in the real world - such as making cute scripted objects in collaboration with one another - and through that we are able to enjoy aspects of each other that would not be the same in any other medium. That, to me, is the true power of Second Life.
Site Launch
apollo [thearidians.org] Sat 16th @ 20:38 EST
apollo, aradia, site launch
I, Apollo Aridian, Second Life resident, landowner, explorer, dragon and writer, am pleased to welcome you to this portal into in my SL world. Actually technically this is a portal into our SL world, a website for my real life and second life wife and I to write about our SL experiences, but since this is going to be a holiday surprise for Aradia she hasn't written anything here yet because right now she doesn't know that the site exists.
I know what you're thinking: if this is the site launch then why are there several posts before this one? Well, in order to add some meat to the bones of this site launch I have been making notes as events happened in SL and as soon as the site hosting went live I retroactively backdated them to their respective time periods.
This website will be infinitely more interesting once the surprise is revealed to my wonderful Aradia. She has some thoughtful insights and perspectives on the SL world and has a beautiful writing style to express them with. You can read back over the things I've written to get an idea of the way I write, but do please come and visit again to pick up on some Aradia magic.
November 2006
The Urge to Build
apollo [blog] Tue 28th @ 20:30 EST
aradia, building, lag, musing, slurl
I have a love-hate relationship with building. I believe it can be one of the most fun things to do in SL, but I believe it can also be one of the most frustrating. Sometimes the frustration happens on an artistic level when the expressiveness and creativity simply refuse to flow, but more often the consternation is a by-product of one of the primary factors that makes building in SL fun in the first place; the shared nature of creation there.
In order for SL to support a truly shared building environment where the results of one person's editing actions are reflected in the world in real time, it is necessary to send data back and forth every time a prim is moved or resized or has any of its properties changed. This makes building in SL highly dependent on the overall responsiveness of your Internet connection, the general latency of your route through the Internet to Linden Lab, the amount of congestion on "The Grid" and the lag of the simulator server you happen to be building on.
That's a lot of potential for lagged building but I think in the end it is worth dealing with because it can be so much fun to build something with friends, or in my case to build something with my wife and share our time together in that way. For example we built a Rose Garden together, which is layered with the type of spontaneous creative touches that can only spring forth from the collaboration that is made possible by SL.
The power of being able to say "What if we did this over here..." while throwing down rough prim shapes is staggering, especially when your building partner can take those shapes and modify them to suggest another idea or different slant on the proceedings and then they can be cleared away in order to demonstrate a new idea with the minimum of fuss. The dirt mound with the shovel and the rabbit is one example of how the garden build grew organically in this way.
That said, trying to build under heavy lag does make me throw my hands up in the air and scream. Especially when I'm experimenting with the build tools trying to discover new shapes or looking for a particular prim form to express an idea I have, and I can't get the tools to respond to me. In those moments, it would be nice to be able to build offline.