Life sucks. May I have seconds?
I was a fool to think I could resist Second Life forever. I’m not made of stone.
I can’t remember when I first heard of Second Life. It bobbled to the surface most recently last month when John Edwards’ virtual campaign headquarters was vandalized by some merry anarchists (Their statement: “We simply did it for the lulz… The fact you were so bent out of shape to make a blog post on the OFFICIAL JOHN EDWARDS BLOG about how some people placed a bunch of shittingdicknipples on your lawn is mighty telling.”)
I’ve played MMORPG‘s before. In fact, I played them before they were massive. Electronic Arts had a very primitive online game platform in the early eighties — I forget what it was called — which included crude modular, build-yourself-yourself avatars.
The current crop are beautiful to look at, but the gameplay tends toward repetitive and boring. Especially if, like me, you don’t particularly want to interact with other people that much. I spent a lot of my Anarchy Online time running across the desert watching the sun rise over fantasy alien landscapes. Cool, but finitely interesting.
SL isn’t that sort of game. Aside from the ground under foot and the basic body shapes, every object there was created by its users. Clothes, buildings, furniture. These can be made, copied (or copy-protected), bought and sold in the local currency, and the local currency can be exchanged in both directions for US greenbacks (though how it goes from Linden dollars to realworld dollars, I have no idea via whatever credit/debit/PayPal you set up with them. Current exchange rate $L1,000 = $US4.04). And Linden Labs has wisely declared that all things created in-world are copyrighted by their creators.
There’s a basic built-in 3D modeler included, and a simple scripting language that goes with. So you can build physical objects and give them behaviors. Yeah, that’s what I’m after. A second life that’s identical to my first. Come home from a long day 3D modeling and Photoshopping and coding to an evening of the same.
I’m not being sarcastic. That sounds really fun.
Basic account is free (you have to pay money if you want to own land apparently, non-paying members can own land, but not on the mainland), so…here we go. Avatar creation first. 
Initial appearances are grouped in broad classes such as goths or nightclubbers, M and F. My first thought, naturally, was a furry…but then I thought, ugh. Furries. (I have since learned there are many on SL who wear animal costumes that aren’t furverts).
Physical appearances can be changed at any time, so it doesn’t really matter. It’s just fun to play with the buttons and knobs. I decided to start out as a small Japanese woman with no hair. I’m going for a “leave me the hell alone” look. In addition to broad body types and clothing, SL breaks physical features into a number of fine sub-categories that you can play with, too. Arch of the eyebrows, tip of the nose, length of the chin. I wanted something that says “I’m as sexless as the angels” (I really, really don’t like grownup games), so I twiddled the knobs until I realized I was the spitting image of a shaved Michael Jackson. That freaked me out, so I shifted male and bulged my jaw and forehead. Hootie-hoo, Monkeyface! Oh, well. I’ll fix it later.
So, behold! Monkeyface McShavedaperson! Looks like a gray, no? I’m pretty sure that tattoo on my arm says, “I’m a giant dweeb for getting mixed up in this.” Either that, or, “ow! Holy shit! Compound fracture of both arms!”
And thanks very much to Sarah D. for the hotdog ‘n’ stuff.
March 7, 2007 — 9:58 am
Comments: 7
I dreamed last night…
That my boss had one of my co-workers put to sleep. I was like, “look, if you’re not happy, isn’t it enough to fire her? Do you have to have her lethally injected?”
And he was like, “no, I really think this is for the best.”
— 8:15 am
Comments: 2
Eeee! My first celebrity endorsement
Many thanks to Pirate Ballerina for drawing attention to an humble weasel yesterday. PB is the blog for all things Ward Churchill (not fired yet!). Plus, related ethnic studies, fake indians and sock-puppetry. It’s been a favorite read of mine for some time.
Update: seeing Sissy in my logs reminded me that PB is my second celebrity endorsement. Sisu was the first. Good heavens — wouldn’t want to diss the furballs.
March 6, 2007 — 6:32 pm
Comments: 1
Damien Weasel, Cat Scientist (episode two, hydrology)
Damien is an ordinary gray stripey tom, but it’s interesting how much he shares with bengals. Bengals are a mix of some South American wild cat and ordinary gray stripeys…but I wonder how many of their famous weirdnesses they actually owe to the domestic side of their heritage? Damien’s fascination with water isn’t quite as powerful as a bengal’s, but I have to scrape him out of the sink to brush my teeth.
There’s a Norwegian guy on YouTube who’s filmed his bengals a lot. He caught them making peculiar chattering noises at birds out the window. Damien does this, too. I think of it as mimeenking — it sounds like he’s saying “mee…mee.” The “M” sound is rather hard for cats, as I learned when I caught my mother trying to teach the family cat to say “Mama.” It’s a noise Damien makes when he knows he can’t reach something interesting; like a fly buzzing around at ceiling level, or me, tapping on the window from outside. It’s a frustration sound.
— 8:06 am
Comments: 17
Engineer humor: no laughing matter
I like working with engineers — it’s that refreshing lack of nuance — but I don’t think I’d want to own one. In private life, Weasel is all about the gray areas.
I made a smartass remark in a meeting once about a ball valve (it had a drainage cock!) and was rewarded with a solemn exposition on the inner workings of valves. I thought the non-engineer across from me was going to ‘splode trying to hold it in.
It’s not that engineers have no sense of humor, but their humor has a certain… literalness about it. I used to joke that engineers are the reason we have to print “This Page Intentionally Left Blank” on the blank pages, or they’d be calling me up and complaining. Until the day an engineer said, “oh, engineers think that’s funny, too. Because once you print ‘This Page Intentionally Left Blank’ on it, it’s no longer blank.”
See? Engineer humor.
A very senior engineer once told me engineers are the way they are because they spend five years learning how to do the calculations, at the end of which they are given a book with all the answers in. Fucking furious. You would be, too.
I was copying files to a CD in front of an engineer once, and he looked at this animated dialog box
and said, “I love to watch this. No matter how many files it copies, that piece of paper never misses the folder.”
I think he was kidding.
March 5, 2007 — 10:38 am
Comments: 5
Engineers are from Mars, Scientists are from Venus
I want to be very, very careful when I talk about work. I need my job. I really like the firm I work for — if we had a company song, I’d sing it. Without irony or sarcasm or anything. But it’s a stuffy old corporation; I’m pretty sure that ethics agreement I sign every year means they’d rather not be associated with someone who dresses up like a weasel and says “fuck” a lot. So, you know, discretion.
Broadly speaking, my employer is a Research and Engineering firm. Working there has given me an increased respect for engineers and a somewhat diminished respect for scientists. Engineers are what I always thought scientists were supposed to be: dealers in the empirical.
Science, it turns out, is a shockingly consensus activity. Less about mining those precious nuggets of truth, more about getting the other kids to notice you. I sometimes prepare models and illustrations to support scientific papers. We joke that an illustration goes through seven rounds of revisions as it moves down the hallway, and the last reviewer changes everything back to where it was in the first place. (Oh, how we laugh!)
Peer review = peer pressure. If you liked Junior High, you’ll love science.
Here’s how an engineer goes about it. He takes an aluminum rod and attaches weights to the center until the rod bends. He makes note of the weight. He does this five times, takes the average, and calls that The Weight At Which An Aluminum Rod Will Bend.
Here’s how a scientist does it. He looks at the literature on The Weight At Which An Iron Rod Will Bend and predicts how the aluminum rod will bend based on a comparison of the tensile strength of the two metals. He then passes it to Bob who is obsessed with meta-studies. Bob wrote a special program that sifts through piles of published material on metallurgy (regardless of source or quality) and spits out conclusions. He passes the result to John. John secretly thinks Bob is a maroon, and is delighted to point out that Bob’s program lumped metric and imperial units together and Bob’s contribution will have to be thrown out. So it goes to a research assistant whose job it is to make the imperial to metric conversions before it goes back through Bob’s data sifter. Then it goes to Bill, who points out that the original Weight At Which An Iron Rod Will Bend study was seriously flawed and recommends using The Weight At Which A Steel Rod Will Bend study as a starting point instead. Back to square one. Finally, it goes to the head of the department, who blows his top because “the last time we went on record with a precise numerical metal-bending prediction, we got our asses sued off,” and shit-cans the whole thing.
See, engineers have to make actual stuff. If an engineer makes a duff calculation, the bridge falls down and lots of people die. He might even get fired. When a scientist turns out to be wrong, it’s all part of the rich interplay of ideas that is woven into the very fabric of scientific investigation and shit. No scientist ever got famous dreaming up boring theories, so the temptation is to pull something big and interesting out of your ass and throw it against the wall. The career consequences of being wrong are minor.
I’m generalizing grossly, of course. And if I can generalize more grossly still, judging from snippets of conversation I hear walking through the company cafeteria, engineers lean rightward politically, scientists leftward.
I think of this whenever I read that “scientists say” something. Particularly when that something is big and interesting and looks like it was pulled out of an ass.
Get back to me when engineers start saying it.
— 7:53 am
Comments: 2
Friday, March 02
March 2, 2007 — 5:09 pm
Comments: 13
Big fat hypocrite
Can’t stand it. I know it’s been blogged to death, but every time I think of it, I get another painful flareup. The burning. The itching. I’ve got to get this out.
On Monday, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research published a press release revealing that Al Gore’s mansion in Belle Meade uses more electricity in a month than the average family uses in a year. And I keep coming back to that. Belle Meade.
Belle Meade.
The words Belle Meade give Nashvillians a little involuntary shiver of class envy. Like Beverly Hills or Manhattan. It’s a startle response. Shhhhh…be still. Very large money is passing nearby.
I grew up near his farm in Carthage, but somehow I never realized he had a mansion in Belle Meade. There are no mere houses in Belle Meade.
Belle Meade is where the Nashville money is. Not the tacky hayseed country music money — that’s way on the other side of town, in places like Hendersonville. Belle Meade is lawyer money. Newspaper money. Plantation money. Gentile money. Multi-generational inherited money. Old money.
It’s a whole separate, incorporated township inside Nashville, with a mayor and a town hall and a police force. Residents pay taxes to both cities. They can afford to. I’ve heard it said Belle Meade is the fifth richest per capita city in the US. A membership in the Belle Meade Country Club would set you back thirty grand in 1978. God knows what it is now.
Belle Meade is the huge, snoring carcass of the old Old South. The Battle of Nashville, the South’s last gasp on the Western front, was fought in the front yard of Belle Meade Plantation; there are still bullet holes in the famous white limestone columns.
All down Belle Meade Boulevard, becolumned and verandah’d antebellum piles snooze in the hot Tennessee sun. I have stood, a poor and distant relation, in the vasty vastness of a few of those gilt and marble caverns. I was a small, gray, disconsolate object in a mad sea of European rococo excess.
When one denizen of Belle Meade bought an automobile in 1935, it came with the negro to drive it.
Now, I have no objection to the wealthy, on principle. Even those who inherit wealth they had no hand in creating. I find it rather irritating that I’m not one of them, but I don’t advocate hunting them down like dogs or anything. In fact, I’d feel better about Al’s house if he’d inherited it; I could forgive him preserving a bit of extravagant family history in an extravagant way. But he apparently bought his manse in 2002, and added to it extensively since. Without making it conspicuously greener.
But, damn it chaps my ass to be preached a doctrine of personal austerity by some ex-beardyweirdy who, it turns out, lives like Scarlett Bloody O’Hara befo-ah the wo-ah. Does anybody really believe you’re walking the conservation walk when one of your three houses uses twenty times the amount of energy the average family consumes?
Carbon credits? Kiss my ass! Putting money into renewable energy research doesn’t somehow, magically wipe away a lifestyle of gross waste and profligacy. If you really believe the earth to be in imminent peril, wouldn’t you invest in greenliness AND live modestly? He can live how he likes — he can obviously afford it — but he can’t live like the Sun King and hector me to turn out the lights when not in use or we’re all gonna die.
I’m waaaaay over on the skeptical side of the Global Warming teeter-totter, and this level of pointless improvidence makes me feel a little sick. Shouldn’t the True Believers be fucking furious?
And if they’re not, what exactly are they true believers in?
— 11:42 am
Comments: 24
Curse of the Cat People
Not Cat People. You’ve probably heard of that one, mostly because of the 1982 (sort of) remake. Curse of the Cat People is a (sort of) sequel. It’s a movie I caught once, a thousand years ago on the Late, Late Movie and never forgot. Now, thanks to the Miracle of Amazon I own a copy. Boy, was I not disappointed.
This movie is beautiful to look at, particularly in this clean, silky DVD version. I’ve watched it three times (including the commentary version. I’m a little sorry about that. It explained some things about the plot that I think I liked better unexplained). It’s odd and sweet and really should have been released with a different title.
It’s the story of a dreamy, strange little girl. I mean, strange. None of the kids will play with her and her dad punishes her for playing alone. So she gets an imaginary friend, who turns out to be her dad’s dead first wife (the Cat People lady). Yes. This movie made me go “wait…what?” a lot.
One of the best films I’ve ever seen for capturing the scary, hallucinatory feel of childhood. It’s just too weird and messy to have attained “beloved classic” status. Commentary Guy said people who like this movie really, really like this movie. I guess that’s me. For less than ten bucks on Amazon’s Born Again, you can find out if it’s you.
March 1, 2007 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 4
A message from Weasel’s liver: I’m okay. Really.
My mother used to say, “all I have to do is tell you not to put molasses on the cat, and they next thing I know, you’ll be putting molasses on the cat.” Then, really, the best thing she could do was stop telling me not to, don’t you think? Sticky, sticky cats. So in honor of this thread at Ace’s — the one about how people who blog their personal lives are rewarded with very low traffic — I’m going to tell you about my trip to the doctor.
It’s annual physical time. Yes, that glorious day of the year when my middle-aged nakedness is examined up close and in detail by a stranger with boundary issues. My doctor is an elderly Jewish man. That was quite deliberate on my part. I couldn’t bear to have some young smartass sticking shiny chrome instruments where metal objects Do Not Belong and hectoring me to eat more green leafies. (And the Jew part? Smart enough to run the world, smart enough to manage my hypertension. ‘Nuff said).
It looks like my strategy of living on vodka and cocktail shrimp is paying off. My good cholesterol is now so freakishly high, he’s pretty sure my heart is incapable of stopping. After I blow the brain aneurism, they’re going to have to cut my heart out and whack it with a broom to calm it down a little.
We’ve got a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about alcohol. At least, as long as my liver numbers are good. And my liver numbers are excellent, thankyouverymuch. In fact, ALL my numbers are smack in the middle of the dial. I ran right out and had a roast beef and cheese sub with sweet potato fries.
What I’m going to do when old Doc Jew retires and I have to see some impertinent puppy who doesn’t know the difference between a physician and a celebrity lifestyle coach, I do not know. Whip out the Mighty Heart of Weasel and smack him with it, I suppose.
There. Because it doesn’t matter what anybody says, I know you care.
February 28, 2007 — 5:38 pm
Comments: 8