Blogger Beatitude

Following a recent problem I had with Blogger, I had planned to move this blog over to my usual web hosting service. I had already installed the WordPress software, and was just getting ready to configure it, when my website server suffered a massive service outage. I use a small French web service called Ouvaton, which is supposed to be cool because it is a cooperative. But when one of the hard disks in their RAID burned out, they screwed up the replacement process so badly that the service was out for more than 24 hours. Small is beautiful, but imposing an accidental Denial of Service on several hundred customers is ugly. Is it utopian to wish that cooperative endeavours could also actually be effective and efficient?

That outage made me reconsider my decision. At least I can count on Google to maintain Blogger in a permanent state of adequate service. And they fixed the bug that caused my firewall to give me intrusion messages each time I looked at my blog. So if they can manage to avoid getting into conflicts with my anti-virus software, I think I can put up with a small amount of snooping about my consumer behaviour patterns. I've suddenly transitioned from Blogger Blowout to Blogger Beatitude. In the rest of this post I think I'll leave aside the big issues for a while, and just tell about what I've been doing in Second Life lately.

I've been going in-world rather infrequently, and for relatively short periods. I did however manage to attend the first meeting of the recently-elected new Representative Assembly of the Confederation of Democratic Sims, held on February 3rd. The meeting room in Neufreistadt was packed with a large crowd of observers. The session began with the new RA members taking oath to serve the CDS, its Constitutions and Laws. The RA members taking the oath (with their party affiliations) were as follows:

* Patroklus Murakami (CSDF)
* ThePrincess Parisi (NuCARE)
* Brian Livingston (SP)
* Sonja Strom (DPU)
* Bjerkel Eerie (CSDF)
* MT Lundquist (NuCARE)
* Beathan Vale (SP)

The first task of the new RA members was then to select the next CDS Chancellor. The two candidates for this position, Alexicon Kurka and Jamie Palisades, each briefly presented their reasons for wanting to fill the function. The RA members then stated in turn their preferences. The votes were three for each, and the hinge vote was left to ThePrincess Parisi. She dramatically built up the suspense, chopping her announcement into slowly-posted chat fragments, as follows:

*The next Chancellor of CDS ....
*On behalf of the members of New United CARE I proudly
*cast my vote for
*Alexicon Kurka

So Alexicon became the new Chancellor of CSDF, and the meeting broke up. The avatars hurried off, some actually walking downstairs to fly somewhere, the majority just teleporting away or logging off. I teleported to my house in Colonia Nova, and found myself in a woman's body, and with only half of my hair. The condition seemed to last, so I finally just logged off.

Other than that, I've been spending time teleporting around Second Life to see other regions. After reading Sleazy Writer's guest post on my blog, about what he calls "Sausage Land," I went to check out the Southern Continent. I can only agree with what Tony Walsh said, about the continents looking like God swallowed a yard sale, a Goth castle, a suburban mall, and a carnival, and barfed it all back up (as quoted by Prokofy). For comparison, I went to visit some Island regions reputed for better zoning, such as Anshe Chung's Dreamland and Adam Zaius' Azure Islands. Curiously, I found these to be rather barren stretches of boring "paradise." But perhaps I need to explore them a bit longer to discover their charm.

Then I read Prokofy's Tiny Reporters post, about Julian Dibbell's in-world interview with Prokofy, when Julian was researching his now-infamous Article on Griefing for Wired magazine. Prokofy starts by taking Julian to see the famous giant Refrigerator that mars the landscape in Ravenglass, facing the huge Celtic tower built by Foolish Frost. So I went over there, and found everything that Prokofy describes, including the Tatoo Parlour at the foot of the Celtic Tower.

I also read Prokofy's On Being Done With the Lindens post, in which he describes an extortionist "ad farm" put up by Umnik Hax in Highcastle, which contains a winking Happy Face with a Star of David for an eye. Prokofy maintains that this use of a Star of David is racist, in that it seeks to arouse anti-Semitic feelings. I wanted to go see that too, but when I tried to use Search to find Highcastle, Search told me there was nothing that corresponded! I've since been told that there is another way to search for sims, using the map, but I have yet to do that. In the meanwhile the Lindens have announced their new anti-ad-farm policy, so when I finally do get to Highcastle, the Unmik Hax horror may be gone.

And so it goes. Between a bit of touring in-world, and a lot of reading of Second Life blogs, I'm getting familiar with the place, with its populace and its particular culture. I imagined that one day I might proudly remind my children that I was an early pioneer of virtual worlds. But when I tested this idea out with them, their reaction was disappointing. They think I'm just a misguided fart making a fool of himself playing at a children's game.