I Am Completely Serious

I got a job last week, which will end when I leave for Japan in a month. I took a phone call from a crackhouse proprietor Friday, and Monday 1) learned that the person had been a crackhouse proprietor 2) was instructed in our standardized response to phone calls from crackhouse proprietors. The response is “no.”

But I’m going to post about Second Life.

The thing about Second Life is that it’s the internet in 3D.

It is, basically, just some very large servers where people can make and explore public 3D areas, communicate with other users, and try to sell those other users t-shirts. You have to pay the company if you want to make your own area or upload something (like a t-shirt), but making an avatar and looking at other people’s stuff is free.

So they’re a web host, and like most web hosts, they don’t really mess with the paying customers’ content unless they stand to lose money. Hence stuff like an obsessively detailed reproduction of Midgar from Final Fantasy VII - no lawsuits yet, so it’s good to go! Recently they’ve been getting worried about the lolicon role-players, and they’re addressing this in ways fen will find familiar.

Because anyone with money can build an area (called a sim), and anyone at all can make an avatar, there’s a lot of crap in there. It is normal to encounter a six-foot-tall green penis sitting in a crudely-sculpted flying car with some audio looping in the background telling Craig how much he completely sucks. Craig will respond on his own plot of land next door, with an equally penis-positive Photoshopped image of Leonard Nimoy, and a recorded cuss that only plays once because he couldn’t figure out how to get it to loop. Noted guy Theodore Sturgeon predicts that 90% of the content on Second Life relates either to penises or to the question of how much Craig completely sucks. (The answer being, completely.)

So, you remember when you first got on the internet, and had no idea how it worked, and just typed stuff into Yahoo or whatever to see what showed up? I’ve been doing that with Second Life for a few weeks now. It is insanely addictive.

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After running through the tutorial sections, the first place I went was Elfland, because it was in one of the “travel brochures” they give you in the orientation areas. (I’m pretty sure Elfland isn’t actually called Elfland, but I can’t remember what I’m supposed to call it.) It’s made up of a whole bunch of little islands, which I think are all owned by different people.

Here I’m in someone’s house. They didn’t lock the door, which means they don’t really mind people looking around. Though I’d say it’s polite to leave if the owner comes back.

Landowners frequently rent out certain parts of their land to smaller-time users. The rates depend on the area’s traffic for more commercially-oriented people, and on complicated social factors for more socially-or-artistically-oriented people. (I mention this here because I’m thinking this land may have been rented - I took these screen shots a while ago.) In this case, the house probably belongs to the renter, who can take it and put it someplace else if she ever moves, or store it in her inventory if she can’t find some new land she likes.

There are some sims that are heavily-zoned “residential areas” where you just move into a pre-existing house the owner designed. I think I’ve got some pictures of one later on.

Another building in Elfland, this one in a somewhat different style…

It has a Stargate.

(That thing in front of the Stargate is, I think, some kind of bench, but it’s not working. I mean, in the sense that I couldn’t sit on it. The bench wasn’t working.)

Here I’m inside. Despite the number of people building there, Elfland is actually largely thematically consistent, but above and beyond the Stargate, this building was kind of jarring.

The architecture’s sort of Roman-looking, and that book is emitting Excalibur, and there are roses, and a hovering globe, and, and…

…and CDs on the table.

Elvish dictionary on a non-architecturally-consistent podium. All those terms are insults. There were some come-ons on the other pages.

Still in the same building. Because space costs money, people leave unfinished or experimental stuff out in the open a lot, rather than spending extra for private work areas. I think that’s what happened here. (The rest of the room was clearly arranged according to some sort of plan, but these seem pretty random.)

That orb in the lower left makes you rotate really fast if you sit on it, incidentally. Just an FYI.

You can sort of see the Eldritch Sparkles in this one. Eldritch Sparkles are an important part of Elfland decor.

Yes, of course I went through the damn Stargate. Yes, of course I dialed “random”.

You can write scripts to attach to your objects to make them do things other than just look pretty - the better-quality Eldritch Sparkles are scripted to move around or fade in and out. The Stargate’s script activates when you click on it, and then gives you a list of commands you can type into the chat box. (I wasn’t taking very careful notes of designers’ names at this point, and I totally need to go back and find out who made the Stargate. I’m betting you can buy them.)

On the other side of the Stargate.

It still looks kind of like Elfland here, but I’m way off in another region now - it’s a coincidence I ended up someplace in a similar style. The next time I random-dialed the gate, I ended up at a deeply unattractive beachhouse.

Another view of that house.

Here I was messing with the screenshot settings. (My name is Vine Pichot, but I don’t remember my reasoning on that one.) If you go to Flickr and zoom in, you’ll see that there are three little orbs on that bench with labels saying “Embrace 1,” “Embrace 2,” and “Come Hither.” Those are poseballs, and they let people make their avatars - surprise! - pose.

This is used for sex, yes.

(I’m a complete screenshot genius. Yes I am. Yes.)

Inside the house.

You cross large distances in SL by “teleporting,” and sometimes when you teleport into an area, the owner forces you to set down in a specific spot, even if you’d been aiming for someplace else. When that happens, your intended destination - in this case, the Stargate - is marked with a red beam and an arrow.

Using one of those poseballs.

I love this house with the intensity of a staring contest with a photograph of Antonin Artaud.

Overhead view. A staring contest with a photograph of Antonin Artaud would be extremely intense, if you were weren’t sure.

You can fly around. It’s frequently required - some architecture assumes you’re going to be flying, and so either has no stairs or has non-or-barely-functional decorative ones. Some people also put little scripted teleporter objects on each floor of their buildings to move you up and down.

A different house, which I do not love. The door’s locked, anyway.

The door and ground look weird because, though the polygons have already generated themselves within the client, the attached textures - which are just JPEGs or whatever that the designers uploaded - haven’t finished loading yet. This is something that happens a lot, but it seems to be particularly a problem with amateur designers. I’m guessing they just use textures that are too high-res without realizing what they’re doing.

I decided to see how long it would take this to load - it was something like seven or eight minutes.

Incidentally, the house that I loved loaded pretty fast, and was designed (not owned) by a woman whose Second Life name is Julia Hathor. She’s not an amateur; she’s apparently an artist in real life, and appears to do a pretty good business selling Second Life houses and furnishings.

I found ancient Egypt nearby, but I can’t get in. That text says “no entry no entry no entry,” which means the owner’s made that area private. There are a lot of places like this.

Sometimes the load-time screws up and the insides of buildings are visible before the outsides. When that happens to private areas, you unsurprisingly usually see sex toys.

Ohh, I am going to give ancient Egypt such a talking-to.

This is what it looks like when stuff’s still loading. In low-traffic areas on a fast connection, it mostly just happens when you zoom into a new area real fast. In high-traffic areas or on a slow connection, things look this way pretty much all the time.

Up on the balcony in that building (once it finished loading). All the doors here are locked.

I touched that orb there, and the attached script gave me a notecard (basically a .txt file) with a poem in it. Poem-givers are pretty common architectural accessories - I saw several in Elfland, as well as a Complete Works of Shakespeare-giver.

Same building. It only looks like the sides are open - they’re not.

Eheheh - trying to fly in those windows somehow I accidentally fell down into that narrow little moat around the building. It looks like it’s got a basement, or possibly two, for the foundations to go down this low - most houses’ don’t. (I don’t know that because I fall in people’s moats a lot, I’ve just looked at a lot of building sellers’ shops.)

Observe the really obvious boundary. Usually this means either 1) two different people own adjacent plots or 2) someone is working on a project they’re not done with. I think it was the latter in this case.

Boat.

Yup. Boat.

That floating text shows up above any object that’s for sale when you hover the mouse over it. There are areas where everything’s for sale. That gets kind of old.

Things look pretty tacky over there. Let’s check it out!

It turned out to have a privacy barrier around it (invisible here because I’m further back). Some people also probably make their land private because they have no taste and fear the censure of their peers.

I found someone else using the same kind of tent nearby. I have no idea how this design would make sense in real life. Is it supposed to be… billowing? In two directions at once? (It wasn’t in motion.) I don’t know.

This pavilion with windblown curtains, here? Curtains weren’t actually moving. This is not uncommon; the sort of animation moving fabric requires is apparently hard on bandwidth.

On the subject, clothing. “Normal” SL clothing is made by uploading an image file with pictures of the front, back, and sides of the garment. The client then sort of glues this around your character. There are some settings to make stuff looser, but that’s basically how it works. That skirt I’m wearing - which someone’s Elfland tourist bureau was giving away free, along with the rest of the outfit - is this type of clothing, so it doesn’t flow.

To get skirts/coats/capes/etc that flow moderately realistically, you need clothes built using the in-game 3D tools, “prim” clothing. (Simple 3D forms are called prims, or primitives.) Most hats, and realistic-looking shoes, also have to be prims, because they project away from the avatar’s body.

A bed covered in poseballs. I did not try them. I was clothed.

Around this point, I got bored and headed back to the Stargate in the pretty house, where I again dialed “random” - but I’ll save the previously-mentioned ugly beachhouse for my next epic travelogue, as this one’s gotten a little too epic.

If you have an account want to try and find these places, here’s a teleport link to Elfland and here’s one for the A’ksha Mesa. My Flickr set for this is here.