Erosis - Just When You Think Everything is Normal

I was putzing around SL. On this night, that meant typing random words into the Search function and visiting whatever pops up. I ended up at a little location by the name of, Erosis, in the Ungnyo sim. When I say it was a strange experience, I say it fondly. Description from owner Senuka Harbinger reads "A-Life fish, 1 prim knots, strange mass experiments, and general use park." That says it all, doesn't it?

The 2048 square meter location sported some trance tunes, a rotating, snake-like texture, a rotating globe and a school of AI fish. Colors abounded and the music thumped in the back of my head. TP up to an interesting walkway in the sky to get to the globe. Find the school of fish in the pond. Take a gander at my snapshots. These tiny oases of imagination are what give SL its character for me.

A little snipet of a more in-depth notecard made available next to the pond containing Harbinger's A-Life fish school:

The predators in my system (sharks) are fairly easy to program behaviour; when they're hungry they eat (using the exact same program is the fish use for finding food, only they eat fish instead), and when they are full they swim around idly.

My system does have a renewable food source; fish pellets. I made them invisible to reduce the client-side visual lag, but they are still there. An estimated 1 food every 9 seconds added to the lake is enough to support an aquarium of this size for about 9 fish.

I had coded in an evolutionary segment to allow the fish to adapt priorties, swim speeds, energy till birth, etc. based off how sucessful a fish was determined by how long it lived; on average the fish in this tank live for 500 seconds. fish that live for 500 seconds have their genes within 95% of the value that allowed them to live that long. fish that live longer have an even closer margin for errer, with a 99.98% accuracy if a fish lives to be 1000 seconds. fish that live for very short periods of time have a much larger variance in their genes, up to 50% if the fish was eaten immediately after birth.

The Globe

View from the Top

TP object

AI Fish School

Some SL Xmas Flair

I popped by SiniStyle Design in the Hydes sim of SL and had to snap a few of the holiday decorations I stumbled on. Objects list creator as Krius Misfit. Some nice work. Made me grin.

Sundance in SL

It seems that Sundance Channel will have an island in SL with the main feature being a screening room by the name of Studio 4A. Additionally, there will be smaller screening rooms for SLers to get together, watch and discuss independent films and the like "on demand".

The film Four Eyed Monsters is going to be premiered in SL at the opening event for the Sundance screening room. Infromation available has this opening occurring sometime in January 2007.

I am going to check out this island first chance I get. Stay tuned.

Whatcha Sellin'?

Took a brief roll through some of the corporate sims on SL: Reebok, Adidas, Pontiac, Nissan. Some good things, some bad. I don't have any particular issues with the concept of corporations in SL, so I won't spend any effort in demeaning them from the corporate greed, ruination of SL, us vs them angles. However, I wasn't that impressed by the overall experience. The sims are empty and a few were not complete and in a general state of disarray. I twice TPd in underneath buildings. The two auto sims were more impressive, but not remarkably so. I did find the cars themselves pretty snazzy (in that they looked like they should), but the driving experience was what any savvy SL driver has come to expect. I was able to drive my Nissan into a ditch. I took a Solstice demo for a brief spin but didn't quite get my driving instincts honed before the demo was over. Reebok offered some semi-customizable kicks, while Adidas had a nice look, but did not appear anywhere close to finished.

Check out the snaps.

Today on the Linden Blog!!!!!!!

Well, here I am. Home at an earlier than usual time. How about a bit of SL?

Replicator object attack underway inworld

Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 5:15 PM PST by Torley Linden

[5:40 PM PST] Updated, there appears to be “candycanes” multiplying. We’re destroying those too.

[5:31 PM PST] We’re continuing to destroy the objects in waves.

IMPORTANT: Do NOT accept objects called “griefornament” or “candycane” or similarly suspicious ones — if someone or something tries to send it to you, discard it IMMEDIATELY.

We’re on it and nuking the replicating objects cross-grid.

I’m both inworld and updating this blog as we get more info.

Then again...maybe not.


However, let's not make anyone sad and forget to mention that The Lab is offering a tiny olive branch in the spirit of the season:

Classified Listings Auto-renewed for an Extra Week at No Charge

Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 5:18 PM PST by jesselinden

We understand this has been a frustrating past few days since the update, especially for those of you who have had classified listings up and working only intermittently. As a one-time courtesy, we have decided to extend everyone’s in-world Classifieds listings one week as of ~4:30PM PST today, December 6th. This means your ad’s auto-renew date has now been set forward one week. We appreciate your continued patience and understanding in this matter and we’ll continue to do our best to provide the highest level of service we can.

And of course, don't forget the upcoming Town Hall on Dec 20 at 2:30PM. How is it that I have been working during every single Town Hall since I found my way to the grid? Anywise, it's a throwback version!

This Town Hall will be a bit of a throw-back to earlier Town Halls, in that it will be text-only and carried via the official Linden Repeater. You can pick up the Repeater in the Linden Village in Kirkby. Please bring your technical questions for Cory Linden as this will be a Second Life technology focused event. Have you always wanted to know what makes the grid tick? Wonder if we’ll ever finish Havok 2? Interested in the future of LSL? Bring your inner geek to the Town Hall!

Second Life Hockey

I haven't gotten a chance to see this in action yet, but it sounds intriguing.

I liked the sound of this post describing a previous game (Sunday, Dec 3 posting):

we had some excitement in the 3rd period when the Whales' goalie suddenly lost all sanity and pulled out a semi-automatic. Fire was opened on the Wolves, with a new player getting blown across the ice and into the boards. Fortunately, there were no fatalities in this incident. The wayward goalie was quickly restrained and booted by Jack. However, let's face it, what's hockey without some violence? True, it usually does not involve gunfire

I'll have to get to the Jericho Hill island and check it out soon.

Register article

This article was brought to my attention by Kris Ritter here.

The article, entitled "Second Life escapists told to wake up", by Chris Williams is some sort of attempt to knock SL users for not spending 100% of their time worrying about worldly issues. Just one of 8 Register articles that pop up in a search of the site using the keyword "sadville", apparently a pet name for the virtual world of SL (and helpfully pointed out by Kris in the forum thread linked above).

The article opens with this

An anti-poverty campaign has reminded the inhabitants of Second Life that while
they fanny about wasting time and money hiding from their own trivial worries
there are people are dying unnecessarily in the real world.

A helpful reminder, to be sure. I had completely forgotten.

The article goes on to detail the efforts of the World Development Movement to make SLers "remember reality and participate in it." The article and the attitudes of both the writer and the WDM's Peter Taylor are a poor way to make a point for WDM and the real issues at stake. The article cites a "chilling survey" indicating that approximately half (43%) of US users of virtual worlds think that the virtual goings on are just as significant as those in the real world. The survey actually notes that those people felt as strongly about the virtual society they are a part of as the real physical world. Certainly, there are some kooks online, but I don't think this representation of the survey results (in Williams' article) really gets to the heart of what the survey actually says about people and their online activity. I feel strongly about SL, but I also feel strongly about Da Bears, deviantart.com, my invisible pen pals, my buddy GingerDead, my college roomate who now lives in China and is an MSN Messenger junkie, etc etc. This does not mean that I don't spend over 70 hours a week concerning myself with the problems of other people. It also doesn't mean that I don't recognize the realities of the world in which I live. In fact, there is more awareness among the SL community then there is amongst my suited colleagues in my downtown office building. They are busy gambling, drinking and watching The Office and Monday Night Football. Everyone needs a bit of entertainment, otherwise we would pine for the amount of real world time lost while we are stuffed in an office with an alley view and the sickening reality that the numbers we blithely move around on a PC actually have real significance to someone.

Here's another pitiful attempt to belittle others by Oz Stern. Typical in it's bashing and poorly edited. Come up with some new material folks and, as they say here at work, "edit ruthlessly".* At times, the diatribe seems to be hinting at some of Stern's own issues. I don't have a clue what they are, nor do I care, but he certainly seems angry about them. Here's the list of results for Sadville. I've never been a reader of the site and these penetrating articles didn't sway me to become one, however, I am curious as to what the deal is. SL isn't really worth all that bile (unless, of course, you are a hapless resident trying to make your way on the grid).

*I am exempt from this, of course, so piss off!