As I was washing laundry…
Great ideas always come to me as I am engaging in the most trivial tasks of life. And you can guess, since it is the weekend, I was washing laundry… and catching up with my Wired reading. I had so much to do lately so I am couple of issues behind. Reading Wired became this guilty pleasure that I tend not to allow myself. I am not behind on my Battlestar Galactica, god forbid, but Wired…well, that’s another story.
Lately, one of the issues that have been preoccupying my mind has been what my next chapter will be on. I mean, yeah, I will finish my chapter on print novel, and write a chapter on hypertext, for sure, but those are easy. What i have been occupied with is what am I going to choose for my alternate reality game chapter. That will take more research, possibly field work, more time investment. Planning on starting that next fall, but as my Second Life chapter is coming to a close (I anticipate to work on it for a month or so and wrap it up), the AGD chapter is bugging me a lot lately. As always, I haven’t seen the solution right before my eyes: Lonelygirl15. I knew about it, read a bit about it, talked about it, and yet it took a Wired article to bring me back to my senses.
Lonelygirl15, vblogging of a 16 year-old girl on YouTube (fictional of course) is a weird type of story-telling that could have only emerged in the age of media convergence. As a topic, it is current, it is sexy, it is original, it is interesting, and more importantly, I am already turned on just by thinking about it. A marriage made in heaven.
So I will start reading about it as soon as Second Life chapter comes to a close, while I am writing my print and hypertext chapters. By fall I should be good to go.
I love it when it all comes together. We’ll see how many times I’ll change my mind. As one of my chairs once told me, writing is like dating, you have to date a lot of guys to decide on who you will settle with.
Bloghud
Last night I finally purchased bloghud, the blogging system for Second Life, which was introduced to me by a friend of mine, Spin Martin. What I like about it tool is that it merges different platforms into Second Life. It is a blogging software that allows you to blog in-world to an outside blogging client (Typepad, blogger.com) with complete SLurl which takes the reader to the exact location that you blogged about, it can function as del.icio.ous and allow you to "bookmark" for favorite locales in Second Life and share it with others, it allows you to post, browse classifieds, events and such… You can do everything in Second Life with this sucker. It is even flickr integrated. What more can a woman want??? Media convergence at its best. Totally cool, I think. Exciting times… Now all I have to do is to learn the darn thing.
Masakazu Kojima
I interviewed the leader of W-Hat, a famous goon group accused of causing constant unrest in Second Life last month. Masakazu Kojima, when she appeared to talk to me in Baku, surprised me with her Japanese anime look: a little girl with pig tails and a pink outfit who, according to her profile, likes to color. The leader of a group infamous for causing trouble who happens to look like an innocent little girl… Well you can imagine my delight in the situation. Today I IMed her to ask her if I can take her picture. And I did. Here are some of them for your pleasure (all of these materials are vetted by the IRB, of course):
What a cute little girl who is allegedly leading one of the most "dangerous" groups in town. I find this attitude quite subversive. Goons and griefers are performing the counter-culture of SL and doing this by using cartoons and anime. I guess anime isn’t that far off…
Academia, the Ivory Tower in all its Blackness
Everything looks so perfect from afar. But once you get into
it, it gives you a bad after taste. Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say.
You almost feel nauseated with the stuff you see going on. Academia is no
different if you ask me. One struggle after the other, on and on and on…
I never had the option to decide whether or not I truly
wanted it, I was born into it. Faculty brat, big time… And so I have seen its
ugliness from my parents growing up, but more so during the last several years (and
counting) up close and personal. In theory, it should be a supporting
environment for the newcomers and people should respect one another. Yet I get
the feeling that there is a serious power struggle between the junior faculty
and the graduates who will become the future junior faculty (the same thing happens
between the junior faculty and senior faculty, as I have seen mostly in
other departments due to my connections). But I have to say, it is harder on
the graduate students who are trying to find a place within this new structure.
If they are not careful, they find themselves in the middle of other people’s
fights, struggles, and personal lives without knowing how it happened, when it
happened. It just happens, just like that. Grad students are sometimes used to
fight other people’s battles, professional or personal. No really, they do… I’ve
seen it happen in the ugliest sense of the term for a lot of people. Better
keep quite I guess, if you want to be with the “in crowd.” Any different
somewhere else? It turns out, not even fuckin close. Life sucks, not a whole lot you can do about it.
As I am teaching Kafka’s Trial
this semester in my Film and Literature class, I keep thinking about the
dystopia we call “academia.” K., the protoganist, speculates at the beginning
of the novel, right before his sudden and inexplicable arrest (an arrest which
is really not explained throughout the novel): “Someone must have been telling
lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested
one fine morning.” It is surely remarkable that a simple statement like this
can capture the corruption that has saturated our culture on every level. Shall
I give my students the bad news and tell them that they themselves will experience
the same thing at certain points in their lives? Naaa, they’ll discover it
pretty soon if you ask me, up close and personal.
Ranting…
I lived quite the reckless life at times, and like everyone else, made my share of my mistakes. And sometimes was used for other people’s wars to manipulate situations, and honestly, suffered a lot of because of it. Not once, but twice, I think. As some of my hard earned connections disappear before my eyes because of the past connections I made, I ask myself, when will I finally be exonerated from the past that keeps coming to haunt me?
Get a first life, it sucks!!!
Here is a parody site of Second Life web site. It is done exactly the way SL Web site is designed, only the message is subversive. Just how I like my messages, "undermine and take over." Here is the original Web site. You can find the spoof site here.
Here is a post that the author published indicating that he had the full blessing of Linden Lab to continue with his parodic Web site:
I Got a Proceed and Permitted Letter From Linden Labs
Yesterday I launched this one-page Second Life satire site. Today I awoke from my nap to a letter (via the comments on the announcement) from Linden Labs, the creators of Second Life. ‘Ah, well’, I though, ‘here come the lawyers’.
But no. To their enormous credit, they sent me what I can only describe as a ‘proceed and permitted’ (instead of ‘cease and desist’) letter. Here’s an excerpt:
We do not believe that reasonable people would argue as to whether the website located at http://www.getafirstlife.com/
constitutes parody – it clearly is. Linden Lab is well known among its
customers and in the general business community as a company with
enlightened and well-informed views regarding intellectual property
rights, including the fair use doctrine, open source licensing, and
other principles that support creativity and self-expression. We know
parody when we see it.
Good for them. It takes a lot to accept when you are being made fun of.
Second Life: The Virtual Utopia of the Future
Pixeleen’s post yesterday on Second Life Herald once again demonstrates the creative skills of goons. One of the goons, Isometric Bacon, (whom I interviewed two weeks ago) created this absolutely fantabulous black and white promo movie about Second Life. I leave it up to you to judge it’s worth:
The missing link
When I first came to Bloomington, Indiana in 1996, I had no clue what I was going to miss for the next eleven years to come. I distinctly remember the first time I went back to Istanbul. I was by the sea, in Bosporus, the ferries coming and going, and all of a sudden, I hit me like a two-by-four. I heard the sea gulls screaming in the sky and I remember telling myself "Well that’s something I haven’t heard in a long time…" Only eight months had passed then. And now I am verging on eleven years.
Every year, I make a point in traveling to Mediterranean, and each year I realize yet another time, how much Mediterranean culture, the beauties it provides, the blue sky, the dark ocean, the golden sand is ingrained in me. So much so that, if I don’t go there once a year, around this time, I begin to get restless, wishing I was somewhere else remotely close to the ocean. This summer I decided to go to Italy instead, and now I am at that point, again… So much so that, I log onto Second Life, hang out idle on some island so I can hear the digital sound loops of the waves and seagulls while I work on my writing. Isn’t that pathetic or what? Reminded of me of the movie Dark City, how the protagonist is looking for Shell Beach where he grew up in. Needless to say, I watched it again yesterday. Damn, it’s such a great movie. I decided to show it in my Film and Literature class.
Plastic
I’ve been trying to interview this goon forever and finally we got a chance to hook up at the same time and it just so happened that he had some free time in his hands last night. Apparently, he lives in Australia, hence the IM tag. I didn’t know this before, but apparently Plastic Duck’s original avatar was nothing like a duck (as it’s imitators now have), but a weird robot shape. Apparently, the goon that I interviewed last night designed the current avatar that is posted everywhere. Funny… Who would have known? When I asked him what this obsession was with Duck, as he rarely is in the game anymore, he confirmed what I already knew: "As everything in w-hat we like to be controversial and push
the boundries of what’s acceptable. Plastic Duck is probably the most renowned
griefer in secondlife, and thus he has this stigma about him. I created the
cartoon version of plastic initially for a bunch of ‘helpful griefing hint’
like cards (that didn’t actually say anything helpful, it was just the
absurdity of it that I found amusing). I continued making plastic themed stuff
for the same reason really, because the idea of this evil malevolent duck that
foils the Lindens at every turn is hilarious to me. It’s not even about the
person who was Plastic Duck anymore, it’s the fact that he has come this iconic
figure that everyone knows about, and we like to perpetuate this image and keep
it absurd. I thought by disneyfying him, I could make him less of a
‘threat’ and more of an absurdity that people would understand is a joke." Here is a new build in Baku (010907), mount Rushmore made up of Plastic Ducks: 
Here is a spoof children’s game designed for Plastic:
Open-sourcing Second Life
