It Started with a Picture

This past weekend, I attended Burning Life for an assignment for my English class. I took a bunch of pictures to add into my blog as well as my Koinup account. I was just snapping away and uploaded them all to Koinup. About a day later I got an email that someone had added me as a friend me on Koinup. This confused me for a few reasons. I did not even know that you could friend someone on Koinup. I had no idea that people even looked at my works. Finally I did not think any of it was any good.

I have not yet asked this person to write about him, so for now lets call him Jean-Pierre. Apparently Jean-Pierre thinks that this picture is “favorite” worthy. His world is also Second Life, and by looking at his pictures, I can tell he is no noob. He has more than 1,600 pieces of work, and nearly 1,000 comments. From looking at his pictures, I can tell he has been all over the Second Life world.

My work pales in comparison to some of his photographs. This is a picture he had on his home page under the title “Last Month Coolest Work”. To me, this title does not do the picture justice. The way he was able to frame the sky, sea, and cottage amazed me. I find it almost humorous how the same person who took this picture, favorited one of mine.

Personally I like this picture much better than the one he liked. It is almost of the same scene. You can see the same Ferris wheel looking carnival ride in both pictures of my pictures. The main reason I like this one over the other is because of the time of day. I took this picture at night and the dark sky in the background along with electricity pattern on the supports make the picture much more interesting. The balloons also give this picture more vibrant colors.

Where I Went…

My friend Sarah and I decided arbitrarily chose to go to an event called NlightN Nootan. It was basically a huge techno dance party in a venue that resembled a scorpion. It looked like a lot of fun, but I could not get many aspects of Second Life to work all at once.

Once the setting rezzed, I was very impressed. I had no idea how much detail was involved in Second Life. I had seen some parts very detailed, but never so much so detailed.

No matter how good the setting looked, it still does not change the face that it was so slow. Even though I was plugged into an Ethernet cable, my connection was still very slow. I even closed all of my Safari windows and iChat, but this only made a slight difference. Rezzing took forever as well. After nearly twenty minutes, half of the people dancing were still colorless outlines of their avatar.

When I tried to actually join the party and dance, my avatar would only dance for about ten seconds at a time, and then he would stop. At one point, me trying to dance crashed my Second Life window. It just froze and I Mac’s color wheel of death. When I forced quit Second Life and tried to reboot it, it told me “Second Life has seemed to crash last time”. I felt like this was adding insult to injury. No duh it crashed. It then also would not let me re-log in until a few minutes had passed.

Although I was very impressed by the aesthetic values of the dance party, and the rest of Burning Life, I was thoroughly unimpressed by the stability of the connection. In total I crashed twice, and even flying was difficult. I would try to go in one direction, and nothing would happen. Then I would randomly fly very far without touching any keys on my keyboard. I got lost a few times this way.

I don’t know if this lack of stability was due to the mass of people logged in to Burning Life, or what, but more stability is needed for a better experience. I still plan on furthering my Second Life experience by attending more events and parties.

Where to go...

For this assignment, we have to pick an event to go to. This was planned very well because Burning Life is this week as well. Burning Life is a Second Life representation of the real Burning Man festival. My friend Sarah and I are planning to go to one of the events this Saturday, seeing as that was the only day either of us have time to do anything.

My professor told our class about how the real Burning Man festival just kind of happens. He described it as a huge festival that just appears does its thing and goes away. In Second Life, the links to the areas are also only open for a short period of time. After that time, Burning Life gets destroyed.

In the prompt for this assignment, it said that last year students had to go out of their “comfort zone” to travel to burning life. To me I do not feel as though this is the case. I feel as though I am this brave. My Second Life avatar is just that, an avatar. It is not really myself. Anything that he does will be seen as him doing it, not me even though it is me who is controlling him.

I don’t really know what to expect from my first real life Second Life party. I am excited mainly because of all the hype I have heard about Second Life events. I have heard about hackers trying to crash servers and cause chaos. My professor told us that there could possibly be hundreds of avatars at any one event. He also said they would probably come to these events more so than others because of the sense of urgency. Burning Life is only around for a few weeks, and then it is gone. On top of that, these events may only last for a few hours or so.

Overall I cannot wait to attend this, or any event in Second Life. I am a little bit anxious to actually travel to a place in Second Life where regular users will be. I want to see how that act and what they do in something they actually know how to use. I am unfortunately still a noob, and have a hard enough time getting from place to place. Maybe I can learn something at this event.

Photo Hunt Part Deux!

My professor told me about a place where it simulated schizophrenia and the mental effects caused by it. The place was full of representations of different symptoms. These symptoms were animated to move like how a schizophrenic would see them.

This is a picture of the first area. It is showing an office setting, and at first glance is only looks like the computers are opening and shutting by themselves, but the group of binders is also spinning. It seems like something that would just be annoying and something someone could just ignore, but to a schizophrenic I can see how it would be more than just a nuisance. They could possibly have to deal with this every day for the rest of their lives.

The next part really caught me off guard. The floor was originally there, but after I passed some sort of trigger position, it vanished to what it looks like in the picture. The caption said that some people would see the floor this way and try to only walk on the stones. In the picture I tried to time it so that my avatar would be looking down at the floor as I took the picture.

This final room was by far the scariest. There is a meaningless TV, which seems to do nothing… until you turn your sound on. This whisper of a voice is just saying things to you. My professor said that one of his colleagues had nightmares from this place, and until this room, I could not see how that was possible. I did not let the sound play long enough to hear what the voice was actually trying to say to me, but one of the captions said that voices try to tell people to take officers’ guns.

Overall I thought the exhibit was very enlightening. Before I visited here, I did not know anything about schizophrenics or schizophrenia. I do not know how I would deal with most of these symptoms.

Dragons & Aliens & Monsters, Oh My!

I keep hearing about how people are able to become things like dragons and aliens and other nonhuman beings, but I have yet to see any of this. I have also heard about some major companies are forced to set a dress code for their employees to prevent looking unprofessional. It would give a bad image of a company is half of their employees came to a serious meeting as something other than human.

I feel the reason I have yet to see any of this behavior is because of where I have been so far in Second Life. I have really yet to explore the majority of the world. I have only really been in the educational places and other places in the scavenger hunt. Something tells me that it is doubtful I am going to see someone dressed very eccentric on the Second Life campus of Vassar.

I am really anxious for my first real person encounter in Second Life. I have really yet to see ANYONE in Second Life other than a few of my classmates and my teacher the first time we met. I really need to spend more time in Second Life if I am ever going to get the full experience Second Life has to offer. I still have to visit places that I have heard about in class. My teacher told me about a schizophrenic mind re-creation that has been known to give people nightmares. Things like that excite me.

One more thing I would like to put out there. I feel like Second Life is so vast, there are not enough residents to completely populate the world. I don’t know any of the real numbers, player or places to be, but I would think that there is a lot more places to be than people to be there. If anyone has any comments about this, let me know.