No worries. I just wanted to point out that one doesn't need to spend money in order to get a lot out of second life, especially as an individual user (as opposed to an institution with a formal presence.)
The talks and lectures I've attended in sl have far exceeded in quality and content of most rl lectures I've attended. The people I've met have been incredibly creative and intellectually fascinating. The instances of griefing have been extremely rare, and I've only accidentally wandered into a sex sim once. Despite the panic and worry about exposure to unseemly people, I've found them very easy to avoid. I'm still not convinced that SL's demise is imminent. Things are changing, yes. And finance and profit are key motivators for that change. It costs money to run huge numbers of servers and a graphically-intense program with tens of thousands of users logged in at any given time. Linden Lab is feeling the crunch. This topic comes up and panic sets in on a regular basis. But until/unless there is another world that can meet user expectations, SL will remain the virtual world of choice for many, many users. I've explored inWorldz, Blue Mars, Active Worlds, Cobalt, OpenSim, Rocket World, and probably some I've since forgotten. None of these are anywhere near where Second Life is. There is a very vocal group of educators planning a mass exodus from SL due to recent price restructuring, but there is a quieter group of educators and librarians who are committed to staying. I suspect those seeking greener pastures will find that you get what you pay for. I wouldn't be surprised if this all blew over and some of these people "suddenly" found the extra money to stay in SL. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sal Armoniac Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2010 12:18 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Av Rights On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 8:32 AM, Pat Rapp <[email protected]> wrote: Just to clarify: Spending money to create 3 dimensional art is not the only valid form of involvement in SL. None of my five avatars has money to spend in SL, but that doesn't mean they (or I) are not actively involved. (i.e. "The two avid residents.") Just sayin'. : ) Okay, revise to 3 avid SL residents. Your contributions to SL are much appreciated, Pat, as are your contributions to the JVWE. And scratch the money part of it. Maybe I wince too much when I hear about the demise of Second Life because I'm seeing it happen. Forgive my comment; what with the sale of the Nineteenth Ward coffee shop we worked so hard for and its beautiful location, along with the removal of the educational discounts in SL AND the intense pleasure I get making machinima so recently, I'm feeling that all rare things and wonderful must suffer the leveling effect of commerce and profit. I'm in a weird place right now, in the middle of a class on making machinima, and seeing all these things happening that will undermine it and perhaps prevent me from teaching it again. Sorry. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sal Armoniac Sent: Friday, October 29, 2010 4:52 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Av Rights I notice that the pooh poohers are two people who got in for a while and lost interest. ;) And the two avid residents are spending money to create their 3 dimensional art. More in response to Dana...but this is it in essence: LL is going to sell to a web developer. Where it goes from there I don't know. There are alternate VRs springing up, but none with the huge capacities of SL which admittedly engages or repels those who try it out. Maybe Dana and I find in it a canvas for expressing something we couldn't do in any other set of media. Sarah On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Dana Paxson <[email protected]> wrote: Hey, Eric, great cross-post! Wanna dance? On 10/29/2010 9:52 AM, Eric Scoles wrote: I'm increasingly thinking that SL-style virtual worlds may never be mainstream in the way that web-based social networking is. I'm thinking most people will bypass that adoption phase and go straight to augmented reality. I also think the successful future path for Second Life / Linden Labs is in interfacing somehow with Augmented Reality. (And the real path to absolute dominance for Facebook is to project into Augmented Reality, not retail. But that's another thought for another time.) I realize both of these ideas arguably miss at least part of the point of Second Life in that the SL avatar is an avatar -- you can hide behind it, and certainly some (prob. a lot of) people do that with their SL (or WoW) avatars. But what Facebook has taught me is the degree to which people are willing to expose themselves. Too, Augmented Reality is sort of dimensionally contextual (tessar-contextual?) in that people and places may look different depending on the network-identity of the person looking at them. So you can be different things to different people, depending on how they're connected to you. And if there's a gateway to VR from AR, you can be in virtual places that are connected to or overlayed onto LR [Literal Reality]. (I was going to call it 'RR' for 'Real Reality', but I don't want to pick a fight.) Up until recently I would have thought this level of augmented reality was years away, but I gather it's pretty much just not very well distributed yet, to paraphrase the Chairman. You can already be AugReal with an iPhone or Android phone; the Apps For That are as far away as people's imaginations, at this point. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] <mailto:r-spec%[email protected]> . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] <mailto:r-spec%[email protected]> . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] <mailto:r-spec%[email protected]> . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
