at the back of the wardrobe

First of all a little background. I’m writing a novel, for NaNoWriMo, so I’m not in world much at the moment, but one thing I did yesterday was look for a writing group. I found one on the Events listing, though it was too late for me to attend, but it had an interesting exercise, to write about the oldest wearable thing in your inventory.

That got me curious, so I went looking through my inventory for my oldest things, and I put them all on.

The oldest garment  that still remains in my inventory is this t-shirt, which was one of a bunch of things I got from the various freebie places, and dates from 2 days after I was “born” (I think it took me 2 days before I left Help Island). This one was from either Velvet or the Freebie Dungeon. Most of the freebies I deleted, mainly because they were both not very good, and also instantly recogniseable as freebies. This t-shirt was the only one I liked so I kept it. Green goes well with ginger hair, and it has thistles on the back, and I am very fond of Scotland.

I apparently didn’t keep any of the jeans or other pants from the freebie places, and my oldest pair of pants is actually also my first ever purchase in SL – this pair of jeans was purchased from the Rebel store, by Rebel Hope, and it’s still one of my favourite pairs of jeans.

I can’t actually remember what skin I wore before this one I purchased from Signature. I think I just wore system skin, because I remember having a ginger beard right from the start.  My first hair I do remember – that was the ubiquitous “Dirty Biker” hair which I tinted to ginger instead of black.

When I think about my hunt for the right skin I recall it having taken ages, and if I’d been asked to guess I would have said a month. Apparently it took only two weeks, and I’ve worn this skin ever since. There are a couple of other freebies in my inventory (a few Eloh mods and a group gift from Belezza) but I’ve never worn them. And, honestly, I never will. I can’t imagine any reason why I would want to wear another skin when the one I have is absolutely perfect. All I’ve done since then is purchase a few more beard options.

This hair came from Laqroki and was purchased on the same day I got the skin. I wore it for a long time, and I still love it, despite the awful alpha isues. It looks great in still photos but not so much moving around.  The shades are also from Laqroki, and I also picked them up on the same day. I think they were a store gift.

I didn’t bother showing the shoes because I don’t have anything left even from my first month in SL. I think I mostly wore the sneakers from the “Boy Next Door” avatar.

So, considering that everything in this pic, I got when I was 2 weeks old or less, I think I did pretty well. Mind you I did have a lot of help in the early days.

Now I suppose I could go back even further, to my first SL avatar which I had briefly in 2006 before I got bored with it…

Unfortunately I have no idea where any of these things were from. The tanktop had a wolf on it and I wish I knew where I got it because I loved that top, and would have it again if I could. The jeans look like the basic freebies. The hair, from the looks of it, I’d guess Here Comes Trouble. No clue on the skin. I looked awful.

So… what’s at the back of YOUR wardrobe?

Happy coincidence

Shortly after finishing my last post, I was browsing through the Events>Discussions page in SL, when I came across a name I recognised, Lizzie Gudkov, who I’d first met at SL’s Portmerion-inspired Village Sim, where she used to host some really interesting philosophical discussions. Lizzie left The Village, and so did all the other interesting people, so I stopped going too. (There was another reason I wouldn’t go back but I’m not discussing that in public).

Anyway, Lizzie has set up a new discussion group at her own venue LnL Square, and by sheer coincidence it was just about to start, so I went along. It was lovely meeting Lizzie again, and some other old faces from The Village that I remembered too.  By another coincidence the topic of conversation was “SL Drama” (a topic I remembered from before) and somewhere in the discussion came that old Immersion vs Augmentation debate which I’d just been talking about in my blog.

After the discusion I stayed to chat a while, and four of us ended up on the MHOH2 hunt for an hour.

It was great fun, and I’m so glad to be able to catch up with old friends again.

Oil and water

This post came from a thread in the official SL “flogs” (as bad as they are, and in need of much flogging there are occasionally some good thought-provoking threads there).

This one starts with the common profile-statement “RL and SL are seperate and I do not mix them”. The Immersionist side of the Immersionist-Augmentist debate.

A fascinating subject, and lots of thought-provoking answers. To me, if I see that in someone’s profile I assume that either their avatar is nothing like their RL self (possibly a different gender) or else they’re married and not intending for SL relationships to become RL relationships.

In a sense, both of these apply to me and yet I still don’t feel like I do keep SL and RL seperate at all. My avatar may be taller and fitter and better-looking than I am in RL, and I don’t do voice or share RL pictures or phone numbers with SL friends. I am married in RL so I’m not in the market for a RL relationship. I have no urgent need to meet up with SL friends in RL (although I would not object to doing so if the opportunity arose). But despite this, my avatar is still me in every possible way. Aside from identifying personal information, I am open about my RL with SL friends. I can’t even say “my avatar is the same as me” because that would imply that we are two alike but separate things, and I don’t see my avatar that way at all. It’s just me, as I wish I looked, as I look in my dreams. In The Matrix movie, they call it “Residual Self-Image”.

And yet while I am very much myself in SL, I have no issues with people who see things differently- for whom their avatar is a roleplaying character very different from their real self (I have a couple of roleplaying alts too). It’s odd really, that I seem to fit on both ends of the I-A scale – both being very much true to my RL self in my avatar (although one of the biggest turnoffs for me is someone who asks too many questions about what I look like in RL and what I do, as opposed to what I think), and at the same time having no need to drag SL friendships into RL.

I have the following in my profile (and the same in Salo’s profile as well, actually):

I respect others’ avatars as they choose to present themselves, whether that matches RL or not is mostly irrelevent to me. I would hope to be treated with equal courtesy.

This means, basically, that I don’t care if your RL self doesn’t match your avatar – I’ll treat you as you present yourself inworld until you instruct me to do otherwise. Because it really doesn’t matter, for the purposes of a SL friendship – I’m much more interested in the words you type. And it shouldn’t matter to you that in RL I’m not a fit, red-haired hunk, I’m just a short, weedy nerd with glasses and greying hair.

Short stuff

Salo has been tweaked again.  It started when I tweaked my height back down to 6′4″, and then I realised that Salo was actually TALLER then me which just won’t do. So I had this idea to make her height much more realistic to RL… so now she’s 5′9″

And she looks TINY.

This pic was taken this afternoon, the guy next to her is just some random stranger.

Now, given that she has an androgynous shape, with no breasts, and an androgynous skin with no makeup, I’m just wondering how long it will be before she’s accused of being a child avatar.

Folky folk

One of the reasons I joined SL to begin with, way back in 2006, was because of the live music. In the end, I hardly went to any, but lately I’ve been going to events and I’ve found a superb folky British singer-songwriter called Russell Eponym.

He plays a mix of his own material along with some more well-known folk classics, like “Last Thing on my Mind” and “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” and intersperses with friendly chatter, and will acknowledge every guest by name. He even ad-libs songs about members of the audience. I got mentioned twice, I think by the end of the song he was forgetting who he’d included and who he’d missed. The way he chats between songs reminds me of a RL musician I know, Pete Ryder.

By some odd coincidence, there was a guy there tonight wearing exactly the same skin that I wear. Except he’d stretched it to about 7ft 6 tall. (I still think it looks better on me).

There were two girls in matching skins and hair and Regency outfits, one in red and one in green, dancing in unison. That was neat too.

Stroker & Munch vs LL

You probably know this already, but Stroker Serpentine and Munchflower Zaius have initiated a class action lawsuit against Linden Lab for failing to protect content creators against copyright theft.

I have a very bad feeling about this.

While they declare that their intention is “not to bring down Linden Lab” I am concerned that if they win the case* then this may well happen anyway. Even assuming that the fines and damages costs are affordable – which I’m sure they are – it seems likely to me that the courts will require Linden Lab to set systems in place to make content theft and selling of counterfiet goods totally impossible.

Now already there is rumbling in the Lab about a certified content-creator program, whereby only avatars with RL info and payment info registered with LL, and who are in good standing (ie never been banned or suspended – oh look that rules me out) would be able to sell content.

Personally I don’t see how this can work, at this level.  First of all there are millions of avatars, some already involved in content theft, who have never been banned or suspended, because LL is so incompetent at acting on ARs. They are quick enough to ban the innocent while the guilty get away with everything.

Secondly, it still permits the content theft to happen, and relies on a system of reporting to root it out and remove it, after the fact. Often that’s too late – by the time they find the stolen content it’s already in full perm circulation.

Finally, how do they police “selling?” They might prevent an unlicensed creator from listing on X Street, or listing in Search, but it doesn’t stop them actually transferring the stolen goods and making money from it. Even if LL bans them from letting an object for sale, they can still use a vendor, or pass things on by direct inventory transfer and taking a direct L$ payment for it. Bottom line here, is nothign will change and the grid will still be overwhelmed with stolen content.

The extreme that I fear, is that LL will ban unlicensed creators from creating anything at all. That the “Build” button and the “Upload texture/file” facility will be greyed out and unavailable for anyone who is unlicensed. This will give Linden Lab absolute control, and they won’t have to follow ARs. Second Life will become like IMVU or Blue Mars, where only a limited few are able to create anything at all, and the rest of us are limited to purchasing only from licensed stores who are free to raise prices as high as they like.

Now, a world where creation is impossible for me, is of no interest to me, and becomes nothing more than a proprietary chatroom like IMVU. I am sure that a vast number of residents feel the same. This, I think would lead to a mass exodus of people like myself, who cannot be licensed, and yet who still want to make things, even if it’s only for fun. Whether or not Linden Lab’s profit margin can handle the loss of all the players like myself – I don’t know. But I doubt it.

So I have been trying to think of some alternative solutions, whereby the content theft is eradicated, and yet still allow content creation.

The first thing, which I regret but fear is necessary, is to forget the Open Source client project, and restrict LL access to official (or officially approved) viewers only. This is the only way to prevent copybot-clients from being able to connect to the grid. By all means allow people to make their own viewers, but those people should be “certified” too, and their code should be inspected by Linden Lab before the client is able to connect to the grid.

Secondly I think the solution to the sale of stolen content lies in an overhaul of the permission system.  Suppose the default state of any prim, even for the creator, is no-transfer. And that only these “certified content creators” have the ability to toggle the Transfer permissions box and enable the item to be passed on. That way, everyone is still free to create content for their own use, but they can neither sell it nor give it away unless they are licensed to do so. It also means that if stolen content is found, there can be no doubt that the person who owns it is the person who made it, since it won’t ever have been transferrable.

A system like this would not depend on reporting of content because the stolen content could not be sold anyway, it defaults to “failsafe”, which is, I think, what a court would demand.

Yes, it would be a shame that I would not be able to share my creations with my friends, but if my friends are sad about that then the blame for it would lie squarely on the shoulders of the thieves and copybotters who made this all necessary in the first place.

*All of that said, I really don’t think this case will pass anyway, because the implications of a win are just so vast. It’s a bit like suing the inventor of the VCR because there are pirated movies being sold.

Another thing I haven’t seen pointed out yet, is that Stroker has set up a rival company “Eros 3D” which will be an adult virtual world. So he is effectively suing his main competitor. I don’t think the courts will look to favourably on that, and neither do I.

Then it will be an even bigger shame, that the case fails and nothing changes, except Sexgen and Nomine disappear from the grid, and the copybotters and thieves continue to profit.

ARRRR!!!

Ye scurvy landlubbers, it be Talk Like A Pirate day, so splice the mainbrace and hoist the colours, and set sail o’er the high seas for pillagin’.

I be dressin’ like a Pirate, aye, threads fit for the Captain’s table no less. So let me introduce meself, I be the Dread Pirate Ginger-beard. (That’s Ginger-Beard, not Ginger-Bread, ye scurvy dogs).

Skin: Signature Daniel (as always)
Hair: Discord Designs Odin, Flame
Beard: Discord Designs Nick, Flame
Coat: Upload Fee Only – Alucard jacket Black & Gold
Skirt & Waistcoat: Mire – Sovereign, Rust
Pants: SF Designs – Tan suede trousers
Boots: Shiny Things – Old Boots
Hat & Flintlock: Freebies from Jabberwock Pirate RP sim (also the location for the photos)
Eyepatch: home-made.

Alter Ego challenge

I was inspired by Avalon Birke’s post in which she challenges bloggers to post up two pictures of themselves, illustrating two different aspects of their personality. So here’s the two sides of me. On the one hand, the scruffy, flannel-shirt-wearing, grungy hippy who never really grew up. On the other hand, the mature, dapper and well-mannered gentleman, out for a stroll around Caledon.

Almost Sorted

The banning drama is almost resolved, thank goodness.

It turns out to be a series of banking issues on both my bank’s part, and D’s bank (D = daughter’s bf). I’ve been talking on the phone and in support ticket with a particular Linden who has been incredibly helpful and supportive. So I’m back, now, although we’re still waiting for word on the rest of the family.

I was surprised, when I logged in again for the first time after the ban, and found I had more L$ than I was expecting. I looked at Transaction History and saw an entry “Linden Grant”, of an amount that probably accounts for my missed days on Premium, but also is about the right amount to cover the cost of those international phonecalls.

So I have to say that my faith in Linden Labs customer service is restored; they’re certainly a lot better at handling things over the phone than by support ticket.

Runes of Magic

About a week and a half ago, I discovered Runes of Magic. This is a (mostly*) free-to-play MMO which I decided to give a try, and so far I’m loving it.

Although ROM is still in beta and is very small – there are only 5 regions on the map yet – I’m actually loving it so far. I’ll say it’s like World of Warcraft but there are some major differences, some of which will be familiar to Guild Wars players.

*Now, although its free to play, there are extras you can buy with “diamonds” which can be purchased for real money. You can buy diamonds with game gold in the auction house but you’re talking millions here (although 1G in ROM is like 1 copper in WoW). Many of these extras are cosmetic but some are kind of useful, like a permanent mount which you can have from level 1 if you so choose. Although you can “rent” mounts at any time with game gold instead. So while its often easier to go the diamond route, there’s no necessity to, if you don’t want to pay.

As with WoW, everything is seperate for Europe and the USA, although unlike WoW, it’s easy to register for one not where you live, if you so choose. I’ve registered accounts on both sides of the Atlantic, although that was problematic until I realised that I needed to manually edit an .ini file to switch from one to the other.

Character Generation
You can at present, only be human, although elves are coming out in the next expansion. There are no Factions (like Horde vs Alliance), everyone is on the same side, although there is opportunity for PvP if you wish, there are PvP servers, and on the PvE servers there is still duelling and arena fighting.
You have a choice of one of six classes to begin with: Warrior, Knight (equiv to Paladin), Scout (equiv to Hunter but without pet), Rogue, Mage and Priest.
Character appearance is much more versatile than WoW, and characters are well frankly, much more attractive. More like Guild Wars here, only with many more options. Hair colour for instance, you can pick from anywhere in the RGB spectrum. You can even change height and bulk of the body.

Here is me, at level 10:

Beginning
Once you have your character named, you can enter the world. You’ll be offered the chance to follow a tutorial. If this is your first time, take it. Even if you’re familiar with WoW. The interface is just different enough and it’ll save a lot of frustrated mouse-clicking later. Plus it only takes about 10 minutes and you get a gift bag with a trinket in it.

Early quests are very tutorial-like. In WoW you get taught via quests how to use the flight-masters, and in RoM you get taught via quests just about everything; using portals, getting a house, gathering and crafting, using runes.

Levelling is fast – actually it’s TOO fast because your level soon outstrips the level of the quests that remain, so you end up with the dilemma of whether to stay back and finish them, or skip onto the better ones. I’ve been inclined to stay back and do them all for completeness’ sake. Every time you level you get to spend talent points on class-related skills, and you also get a gift bag containing some nifty piece of gear appropriate for your class and level.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that loot drops are more appropriate to your level. In WoW, if you’re killing level 10 mobs they’ll drop gear of level 5 or so. In RoM a level 10 mob will drop level 10 gear, or even higher sometimes. So you’re always getting chances to equip your character up-to-par. Also collection quests have a high enough drop rate that you’re not tearing out your hair and grinding for hours.

Gathering and Crafting
You’ll be familiar with these if you’re a WoW player. The gathering skills are herbalism, mining and woodcraft. No skinning here. The crafting skills are blacksmithing, armour-crafting, tailoring, carpentry (makes bows, staves, clubs and other wooden weapons), alchemy, cooking. Food isn’t necessary for health recovery but it does give you buffs. These skills level in the same scale as your character level, ie 1-50. You can choose ALL the skills at apprentice level (1-20) but beyond that you start being selective, although you still get plenty more choice than in WoW. Gathered materials sell for a huge price in the Auction House. And armour & weapons are cheap. Go figure.

Your House
Every player gets a free house. Here you have a storage box, you can switch character class (more about that later) and you can invite friends in and decorate as you wish (or as you can afford). Guilds can also purchase a guild castle, as they could in Guild Wars.

Runes
Everyone in RoM can do runecrafting, which is basically using magical stones that you find in the field, to put magical effects on weapons and armour. Its a little like enchanting and a little like jewelcrafting in WoW, but not quite either.

Daily Quests
not just for the top level characters, daily quests are for all. Every town or village has a noticeboard, here you can pick up dailies and do up to 10 a day. Dailies pay Prius tokens as a reward, you’ll need these later for your Arcane Transmuter.

Transport
Transport round the world happens in several different ways and all are available to characters of any level.. You can rent or buy a mount from level 1. Renting is kind of expensive. The cost of buying one with diamonds is about £8 on the European servers.
You can use teleport portals. Maor towns will have these. It will cost game gold to use them.
You can keep your own Transport book. You need Marking Ink and Transport Runes (you’ll be given some at lvl 5 although you can buy them any time with Prius Tokens). basically with marking ink you can set a teleport point anywhere in the world in your book, and at any time you can use a transport rune to take you there.
Or you can just run, and do some gathering along the way. The slowest but most profitable way.

Dual Class
Level 10 is the magical level. Three things happen, the most significant being that you get sent off on a quest to the capital city of Varanas to train in your second class. Incidentally the cities are MASSIVE – so big they have teleporters to get from one district to another. And the graphics are just stunning. Then you go to your house to swap classes, and you start back at level 1 in your new class. From here onwards, you have two classes to level uip. You gain experience only in whichever one is your primary, so you have to level them seperately. You can swap them over any time you visit your house. In my case I picked Warrior as my first class and Scout as my second; the same combination as my first Guild Wars character.

Arcane Transmuter
At level 10 you get an Arcane Transmuter which is a gadget that assists with the runecrafting and can make some really nifty buffs on your gear. The components cost though, either diamonds, Prius tokens or gold.

Off to the land of the Goats
Also at level 10 you get a teleport spell that will take you to another starting-area where you can level up your new class. Here you’ll find a whole new region and a new set of quests. The NPCs here are all goats. They’re not blue space-goats though. To be honest, the OCD part of me nagged about all the unfinished quests I’d left behind so I only stayed here a couple of levels before returning to where I was before – and discovered also that the first newbie starting area spawns a whole bunch of new starting quests after you’ve switched classes. So I went back to where I was. I guess I’ll go back when I’ve finished the first region’s quests, although I’m now lvl 13/10 and still have a long way to go yet. Like I said before, I think there are too many quests.

There’s plenty I’ve not seen yet. Instances. Guilds. (Most guilds don’t seem to be recruiting characters below lvl 25/25). PvP – which I’d rather pass on anyway. I’m sure I’ll have more to report later.

So… if anyone wants to join me I’m on Mactanacht (EU) or Govinda (US). Casteylan’s the name on both servers (no surprise there).