SL issues

Niki reminded me of this first thing this morning, and it's worth a separate post, It's all about separation of SL & RL. It's a bit of an adage that "What happens in SL stays in SL" but that's not strictly true. There are a number of ways things can go, depending on people's circumstances & motivations, and these are RL things.

Say you're single in RL. You get into SL & find someone else, who's also RL single. You date a bit online, & maybe get together in RL. That's the first permutation, the simplest.

Say you're single in RL, and you get involved with someone in SL who doesn't like to mix RL & SL. They may be SL single, which you can check out I guess - are they partnered? - but you won't know about RL unless & until you get close.

People also have different attitudes to what SL's all about. Initially, many people think it's like a game - my Ken doll with your Barbie, bit of fun, & that's it. Some go the exact opposite way & think SL is just a medium for communication between humans, & if you fuck in SL it's exactly the same as doing it in RL. Things go wrong when the two types mix, obviously.

So, what if you have an RL relationship and an SL one? What motivates people to do that? I think there are various possibilities. One is, in RL you're disabled, have mental issues, are physically unattractive, fat, or whatever - your avatar is gorgeous, & this lets you be gorgeous with someone who isn't looking at your weeping sores or whatever & forcing themselves to settle for you. I'm dealing in hyperbole here maybe, but if you feel inadequate SL is a great way to be way more than adequate. You can be a superman with a 12" dong, or a world-class beauty.
Maybe your RL relationship doesn't satisfy. Your RL partner is a bit of a pig & you're with him for the sake of the kids. Maybe he's great but just not into furry yiffing or up for being tied to a cross & ravished. Maybe your partner's not interested in sex any more. The *average* marriage in the UK, you get a bonk 3 times a month. Many people I know would love it 2 or 3 times nightly - SL can provide an outlet. Maybe you want to try being a sub or a dom(me), or having numerous partners at once, but don't want to risk coming out to your RL partner for fear they'll be disgusted & leave you. It could be that you're happy with your partner & vice versa, and they're happy that whatever extras you find in SL, they're the one you love & stay home with, the one who you curl up in bed with after a session of SL based fun - and maybe your fantasy life in SL informs your RL & inspires you to greater romantic & sexual efforts with your RL partner. It's not all just a crutch & there are many who make things work.

I'll keep this hypothetical for now, but say you have a number of people, "A" is in a RL marriage with kids, but has been dating "B" for over a year. "C" is single in RL but partnered to "D", who's RL married. "B" is engaged, but B's RL partner is ill & not into sex. "A" enjoys plenty of kinky fun with "B" when he can get online, but A's RL partner has a low libido, so B's basically all A has. C is jobless in RL so can do SL 24/7, allowing for sleep, so ends up with "B" when "A"'s not about. C leaves D, breaking D's heart, for B, who breaks A's heart, because they plan to take it to RL, and yes, break B's RL partner's heart. Once they get together, C will have to support B because B is mentally ill. C will have to cope with B waking up screaming in the night, and won't be on SL while B is on during the day. Potentially, they will have torn up 4 relationships for one that can never work, and given the track record, while C's at work, B will cheat on him too. All this because of bleedover from one to the other, and because of lack of communication about expectations, wants & desires. Both A & D suffer from depression, too. Happy, happy, joy, joy. In all likelihood, B will end up on the streets, & B hardly leaves the house because of fear of open spaces & crowds.

What happens in SL, in these circumstances, should stay in SL. Just my thoughts, anyway.

Another night of SL...

Last night was pretty good in some ways - I hung out with Fledge for a while at Rudh's rented place, where Suzari & Infalle dropped by, then when everyone was off eating or whatever I TPed into Dublin. I met a few new people I'd not met before, & made a couple of friends - *waves* to Nikita Weymann, who's a fellow blogger (http://nikitaweymann.wordpress.com/ - must remember to put that on my blogroll sidebar). Niki got stuck while the Lag was general all over Ireland, as James Joyce might have said if he did SL. Also met Ells Furse, who it turns out lives near another SL mate of mine so I made a quick intro. Iago was pretty chuffed to meet someone new. He's a gregarious sort, is our Iago :-) I got chatted up by a blonde barbie-doll avatar (hey, nothing against barbies, lots of people have them, & an avatar's just an image after all - I'm a maggot sometimes ffs) who was interested in my katana, so I directed her towards Samurai Isle & she went off happy. Then I ran into Faith Hilra, who I'd not much talked with before except in a "Hi, How are you, nice gear..." kind of way, on account of I had a serious SL thing going, & she was partnered herself till recently, but wow, we had the best conversation ever. I won't go into details but we have a lot of stuff in common & I don't think anyone could have understood how I've been feeling lately nearly as much as her. In a way it was a pity because I'd managed to just about skin over that wound - it's still a sticky nasty mess, but it was on the mend a bit, but we needed to have that conversation - kind of like having a wound healing when there's still a piece of morgul knife in there; needs to be addressed, however horrible it is.

Off dahn to Landan Tahn, My fortunes for to seek!

Well, more like Yet Another Course - this time EJBs although frankly I'd do better to learn Spring + Hibernate + XML Schemas + WSDL right now. Got my iPod stocked up with the following:
Slayer - "Reign in Blood" & "South of Heaven"
Slipknot - "Iowa", "Vol 3: The Subliminal Verses", and "Slipknot"
System of a Down's *entire* catalogue plus
Serj Tankian - "Elect The Dead"
Rammstein's entire catalogue,
Sepultura - Roots
Nine Inch Nails - "The Downward Spiral" and "With Teeth"
Linkin Park's "Hybrid Theory" and
Disturbed's "The Sickness"
Should keep me going for now. I've a load of happy bouncy Israeli Psytrance too, but I need to get a bit of a "Grr" going. I'm starting back at the gym this week. No more marathon SL or WoW. I'm dying from lack of exercise. Time to open my arteries before they clog right up, the bladeless way.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Hee Hee

Embedded Video

Well, I liked it anyway, even if it's nothing to do with anything much.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Cultural stuff

A few thoughts on music, inspired by this post over at Throwing Music:

I think we're seeing a divergence between two movements here. On the one hand you have the Music is Big Business types, represented largely by the RIAA, for whom music is a saleable commodity. Record industries these days tend to go for safe bets, acts they know will sell - to the extent that they will manufacture a band themselves by auditioning talented but malleable young people, making them over to fit the brand image they've had created by image consultants, getting them trained to do their little dance created by a 3rd party choreographer, and sing a song written either by a band that was once popular in its own right, or by a 3rd party songwriter who rarely if ever records their own work. They have them surrounded by minders, record company people & so on, and nothing they ever say or do is anything other than a product made to sell by a large corporation. The people who sing & dance in these boy and girl bands believe at first that they are a star, but actually they're just a cog - "welcome, my son: welcome to the machine. What did you dream? It's alright, we told you what to dream." - that kind of thing. Small wonder when such stars, like Britney Spears, set up so high on a pedestal of the global media's making, fall down & shatter into a thousand drugged up pieces.

Then you have the other side of things - the often exceptionally talented, sometimes visionary, musicians who will never be a big seller, and thus will never be picked up by the machine. Previously, these people would hardly have figured at all, they'd maybe have played a few pub gigs, gone on tour possibly, been written about in fanzines and maybe appear at niche events like Meera Luna, Convergence or Whitby Goth Weekend (yeah, I'm an aging goth, so these are the events I know best), but now anyone can burn a CD. Anyone can publish a website. Anyone can publish music. All the grassroots people need is enough publicity to get the hits on their websites, and they're there.

Now, if such people were to compete on a one on one basis with the big record labels, I suspect the record labels would win out. Why? Because they're experts at PR & publicity. They have access to broadcast media & can confect wants for this lowest common denominator crap they peddle. It's what they do all day every day anyway. What they can't do is do it for the love of the thing & rely on goodwill to make their money. The small guys can do that because they can keep a day job going, but when it's a matter of pleasing shareholders, big business does better when it can make predictions of profit & reach or exceed those targets.

So, if we want confected crap as our main diet, fine, relax - nothing to see or do here. But if we want original, talented artists to do their art *as* art, we as consumers of art need to become patrons of art. Seek out the little guys, go the extra mile to find them, then subscribe to their stuff, buy their mp3s, CDs etc. Go to the gig, buy the T-shirt. Seek out Creative Commons media, add to it, riff with it. This is music as culture. Culture belongs to everyone.

iGTD/iGTD2/OmniFocus

I'm kind of kicking myself over this. I've been using iGTD for a while, and although it has the odd bug, it seems to do what I need. So I had a look at iGTD2, and I can see why they did what they did with it, scrapping contexts in favour of tags, but I *like* contexts. So I thought I'd look into the much vaunted OmniFocus. Again, interesting, but it seems to hide stuff almost at random if it's not assigned to a project. I don't like that - I want to feel I can trust my GTD app not to hide that vital task from me til it's too late.

So, having shelled out for OmniFocus, it's iGTD I'm sticking with. Let that be a lesson to me.

Video post - review of "Cloverfield"

Global Warming & such

I'm kind of amused by web sites that say what to expect from climate change in the next few years, as if all it'll mean is maybe, worst case scenario, the atlantic conveyor current, aka the Gulf Stream switches off, leaving the UK with Russian style winters. Almost nobody mentions the Clathrate Gun Effect, or the possibility of a Runaway Greenhouse Effect. Basically, in Alaska & Siberia, there are tonnes of methane trapped within the ice crystals. When the Earth gets warm enough for the poles to melt, these methane clathrates will melt, releasing all that methane into the atmosphere. Essentially, when the poles melt, we'll reach a point of no return, like a drowned body that gets deep enough that the water pressure crushes the gases within it till there's no buoyancy, and the body will never again surface, or like a house fire that finally burns through the wall of the gas main. The Worst Case Scenario with global warming is essentially mass extinction, possibly the end of all life on earth. Methane clathrates are one of the main suspects in the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, during which 96% of all marine species and 76% of all land-based species became extinct. More about this here.
Of course, the real worst case scenario, is Venus. Think about it.

Don't go to Dubai!

A friend of many of my friends has been incarcerated in Dubai for possession of an over the counter jet-lag remedy WHICH YOU CAN BUY OVER THE COUNTER IN DUBAI not to mention the US. He's facing a possible 4 years in an Arab prison. How the hell can they arrest someone for possession of a legal drug? It's like being done for having a bottle of aspirin. The chap in question looks oriental, and there's a LOT of institutionalised racism against orientals in the Emirates. I suspect they picked on him purely because of this. So, please don't go to Dubai. Sign the petition to get him released, and before you consider giving the Dubai tourist industry or any of their businesses your hard-earned dollars/ pounds/ shekels/ whatever, check out the other stories of how Dubai treats foreigners.