The Excellent I

What, then, shall we do?

John Cage

          What, then, does Machinima in Second Life do?

          Iono Allen makes machinima. He gained fame as a noob, with A Question Of Honour, in which long-time friend and colleague Larkworthy Antfarm also appears. It was shortlisted for an exhibition at MOMA, no less. The cinematic power of the film's unspoken story is even more remarkable since Allen had never made machinima before coming into Second Life. You will find 44 original uploads on his YouTube channel, with his latest short, Passion, notably available in full only on Vimeo, but more of that later.

Second Life Machinima is not fan-mod or art-mod, to borrow Rebecca Cannon's terms; it doesn't sit with the taxonomy of mainstream machinima with its professionally built sets and scripted or meta-scripted quests. It's quite easy to make a slick looking short when you have a game like Halo as a backdrop, and quite another thing with the homegrown props and lag of Second Life.

Role PLEA

          Maybe this is what we need. No more raging against the absurdity of institutions and form-filling-in in a virtual world. Maybe we should all just step away from competitions and workshops and discussions. And by we I mean you, naturally, because that's the kind of crap you get caught up in while the rest of us are building the future in open sim where you don't have to compose a proposal and send it to a committee just to get a few paltry prims to play with for free.

            Anyway, no point in pointing this out, you guys are trapped inside your own egos and won't be helped, and it's fun to visit the mad house once in a while though god knows I'd never want to live there again.
          Surely of all the screwed up activities SL has to offer, role playing is pretty high up there, whether it's playing traffic warden or pretending to be Scandinavian. So naturally, when a RP sim is thrust in your face as

Head Cases: Cherry Manga's Insanity

...the fatality of the big Clock playing with our lives

 Cherry Manga

For those of us who have had to deal with problems of the mind, from depression, to brain tumors, to senility, questions of what is real or unreal, what constitutes the real self are deep and substantial questions.

          It is a shame that discussion in SL about what shapes and what truly represents the self has been largely hijacked by vapid women and pervy men (often with matching Lolas Tangas). For those of us who deal on a daily basis with mental problems from depression to cancer to alzheimer's via a host of other conditions, physical and psychic, such piffle is annoying, unhelpful. Yet the need to communicate these howlingly large questions remain. What are we, if not our memories? Which of our many states of mind is the true one? Does such a thing exist?

Singularity

This post was written and photographed entirely on location at Immersiva

What viewer do you use?

This laptop has LL3, Exodus, Kokua, Cool, Phoenix, Imprudence, and Singularity. Imprudence was such a great viewer for visiting open sim, very stable, comfortingly familiar UI, but of course like Phoenix, it can't see mesh. Anyone who loved Imprudence naturally gravitated to Kokua, but that bloody UI is exhausting.

Big Wizness

If you haven't seen a hoodron, try going over to sim Clive it's the SL home from home of the Great Geometrist Wizard Gynoid.

Today, she was trying to figure out how to lip-sync in a movie. Turns out, lip sync-ing works just fine in opensim, also, by the way, Wiz, OSGrid's dan banner confirmed it, so probably it's just fine on InWorldz too. The details of Wizzy's lip syncing adventure will emerge soon. Neat, to see her in SL. The SL her has USB hair and an inability to use the letter 'f'.