Fast post on two new controversies flying around the interwebs.
First, is the declared war on Scientology. A group called anonymous has decided to stand up to this cult and go at them with everything they have. Their official declaration came in the form of a YouTube video. Watching this is strangely thrilling, and still gives me the Heebiegheebies.
The second is a branding and trademark issue within the Second Life community itself. A book artist named Richard Minsky has trademarked the word “SLArt” for his own uses and had begun contacting anyone who has used the term in any way.
The controversy is that SLArt is a rather common term in Second Life, primarily used by the art community (Obviously). By trademarking this term, he has effectively denied its common use to the rest of the universe. Normally, this would be met with some grumbling and a little shouting, then die out as these things do. However, in this case, Minsky has offered to “license” the term to anyone using it for a small fee. This action leads to the impression that he is not defending his trademark for the sake of preserving its reputation for his work, but rather that he trademarked the term for the purpose of making a profit, as well as being a jerk in general. This has lead to some notable anxiety in the community. Anyone familiar with Second Life would know immediately how this type of action would be received.
As Mr Minsky has in the past paid over $1000.00 for one book just to prove a point (I’ll let you find the story, he’s not getting the press from me..), I don’t think he needs the money.
As further evidence of the lack of interweb savvy of Mr Minsky, he has been caught editing his own entries on the very wiki he had served with a infringement email. He forced the owner of the wiki to move it to a new name, then created his own page with glowing information on his projects. The community has responded nicely and manages to keep his entry updated with the latest information on the controversy.
Feeling pretty good today. The GF and I have had some significant quality time over the last couple of days, and it has gone a long way to calming the raging inferno of internal conflict. Seriously, I’m getting too old to feel like I’m 15. And yes, I appreciate the silliness of that comment.
Some small updates on general life: We have started working out again. We are both out of shape in various ways and need the exercise. Jack has taught me how to build in Second Life. I’ll be taking snapshots an uploading pictures to my gallery in DA. I have the most adorable monster built so far. I am contemplating several real world projects to replicate some xkcd strips in sculpture. Specifically This one for starters.
Fast note on building things in Second Life. All things in second life are built with simple shapes manipulated and placed together. Much like an extremely advanced form of Lincoln logs or Legos. When your putting something together, the objects are set to not be physical by default. In other words, they are treated like phantom constructs. they just float there. Lets pretend. Say you spent several hours teaching yourself to build and lovingly placed 25-30 odd shapes together in a precise arrangement to form a cute one-eyed monster. The last thing you would want to do is forget to link all the objects together, then accidentally set the properties for all objects to “physical”.
The end result is that gravity suddenly takes hold and your entire sculpture crashes to the ground in 30 randomly scattered pieces. Your rage would slowly build to unimaginable proportions as you contemplate throwing the laptop into the TV.. then you realize you should be mad at yourself as it’s plainly your fault. Slowly you start to rebuild.
Jacks obsession with Second Life is beginning to pay real life dividends. She is, at this moment, in a lunch meeting with the vice president of marketing for the company I work at. They are contemplating ways to utilize Second Life to promote the (insert company here) brand. The opportunity just came tripping past. One of our support managers was talking about someone needing a new laptop because they wanted to check out this “second” thing.. I asked if she meant Second Life. She said that was it, and we started talking. Eventuality, she dumped me into the VP’s office and said this is ****, he knows everything. We talked for an hour, but it all boiled down to “I don’t know everything, but I know someone who does.” and I passed him Jacks card. So, lunch it is.
