Moth Temple Infohub

I haven't had as much time to blog in recent weeks, not only because of the start of the school year and extra work, but because during those times I'm on SL or am thinking of SL, I've been working at the new build by Jessica Ornitz at the Moth Temple in Iris.

This project has taken two years to come about, in the way that things in SL can take forever because basically, nobody pays us to be here lol. Back in 2006, suddenly the land around the Moth Temple in Iris, one of my favourite places in SL with a brilliant Asian temple built by Xenon Linden, went up on the auction. This was about the time the Lindens were starting to auction off all that unused telehub land I guess. Of course, originally, they had talked about having NO telehubs at all in the New Continent (as Hetero-whatsis was called then, the atoll continent with sims names for types of moths). But then it turned out there was absolutely nothing technically difficult about putting up a telehub whatsoever. It was literally a matter of putting out an object, and hooking it up as the teleporting position, as we all do on private islands ourselves. The object didn't even have to be visible.

When it was seen how hard it was to sell land and have any commerce on a continent without telehubs (the Lindens were delayed apparently in their p2p and map pinpointing implementation and weren't quite ready), they were forced at first to put one in at Iris and one in Hyles -- and later more. They were hoping to prevent urban sprawl or mall lag (which is one of those fictions of SL) so they sequestered about 10,000 m2 around the temple. The first buys on that sim went to malls anyway, but one was a very tasteful and nice mall exactly in the same atoll textures, but it went belly up as malls often do. Suddenly, the Lindens put that 10,000 m2 up on auction, and in 3 separate pieces (thanks!) making it a chore to claim. Clubside Granville, who has pumped a great deal of time and money into SL, stepped up to the place and bid on the auction, having to bid against another guy who owned some land on the sim and said *he* wanted to make a preserve, and bid so that it wouldn't become "a mall" even though we told him it wouldn't -- annoying. Miraculously, Clubside was able to secure all three pieces and we dubbed it "Moth Temple Preseve" -- but there it sat for two years.

Well, first I tried to find a volunteer builder, as I really didn't have any funds. I was hoping to get Rez Menoptra, who had done this amazing build over in Waved (sadly, now gone, even though it was sold to a store owner who did keep it for awhile). His style was perhaps "too modern" for the ancient primitive temple build, but I thought it might be an interesting contrast, and he would know what to do with the space. At first he said he might consider it, as he loved the atoll sims, but then it was 2007, the year of numerous big corporation contracts and Rez was hugely in demand by the Electric Sheep and others where he put up even more amazing builds, most of which are now lost in the electronic sands of time...

For some unknown reason, the Lindens pulled all the lanterns and all the moths that used to come out every night at like 7:48 at dusk to cling to the light. I have no idea why. I asked about it; no one knew. Eric Linden, their maker, was gone from Lindenhood -- and didn't have that account anymore that had once owned them. Rez came up with one pole and lantern that he had somehow gotten from a Linden -- but it wasn't copyable, and the moths didn't come out...Sad...

I put up an old Spanish galleon and some orientation stuff and some markers for the Land Preserve and had to call it a day. I didn't have the money or time to go further. Clubside provided the tier on the land as well -- a very kind soul. I then hoped to get Jessica Ornitz to work on the build in 2008, but she kept getting busy on corporate and educational builds -- she's very much in demand, too. I wanted to do something like the Memory Bazaar in Ross, built on the Memory Palace concept.

Clubside did some more nudging, and finally I said, let's do it, we decided to split a modest fee for Jessica between us and get the show on the road. So please come and tip generously, and donate tier to the SL Public Land Preserve, or just join the group for $50 one-time fee and help support this effort, as it is now being born on just a few shoulders, and specifically Jessica's generosity of time and talent to keep going the extra mile. Oh, and you can rent ad space on the flags there for $200 a week!

I made up a list of things I thought should go in the build and that would fit with tutorials, but of course we were faced with the problem of two giant barking cliches: a) "nautical but nice" seaworthy stuff b) treacly Westernized dippy Buddhism.

If the thing wasn't to be awash with ruddy-faced captains saying "ahoy there mate" with captain's wheels and New England weatherbeaten shingles and boxes of cranberries, or worse, filled with badly-textured not-quite-2-dimensional sculpty buddhas and mismatched flickering Zen Lite (TM) textured icons, what to do? These cliches create perilous waters even for the very determined in SL, and of course, we ourselves succumbed here and there.

I was particularly proud of Jessica's build in Refugio, which was supposed to be sort of "Russia" and "Europe" with snow, mountains, brick buildings, cupolas, etc. I made trouble by insisting on keeping a huge yellow Art Deco apartment building on site, but hey, it's Second Life. Jessica did a little Russifying and put in posters from Odessa and that sort of pastel blue and yellow that you only ever seem to see East of the Elbe, but...as I put it...it was Russia by way of Schenectady. It had bricking that you could just as well see down at the hardware store on Main Street in Penn Yan, NY or Lansing, MI (and of course, our Pennsylvania Yankees did come from Europe...some kind of Europe...anyway...).

The solution Jessica came up with was good: make a Cambodian wharf that was the site of a sort of desolate canning factory and fishing village with various shacks and dives and some of that amateur public sign art which fills up Flickr in the Cambodia category. That sort of saved it from the treacly Buddhism, I think -- although we're still likely to put out some sort of floating lotus horror in a moment of weakness, so be vigilant.

Xenon Linden had said back in 2006 in his lecture about the build that in fact he did model it after a RL temple in Thailand.

Working on a build like this is of course an interesting experience, one of my SL favourite things to do. I'm unable to build for the most part, although I managed with sheer force of will and determination for an hour to finally hack together a crude knockoff of Xenon's moth fixture on the temple as a "souvenir". ("Moth Temple Souvenir: Spread the Faith!" I'm sure everyone will want one for their e-home!). The thing that always startles me about building every time I try to do it, is that first, rezzing out the shapes are so easy. Even twisting or cutting or sheering them in funny ways or making surprise things on them like dimples is so fun and easy. So there they are, all these lovely shapes.

But...then you have to put them together. And suffering from astigmatism and just lack of spacial sense, I can't seem to bring them close enough together to link them in some proper way. They link at one view, but as soon as I zoom out, I see they aren't even near each other, and the thing gives me a message about how the parts are unlinkable. I'm baffled at how people figure this out. It reminds me of piano, where I could never put my hands together, after carefully learning each hand's parts. It's odd, I have a vision of something, very, very clear in my mind, but it lacks sort of depth perception or something because as soon as I come into the reality of Second Life, I can't think of how to execute it. This truly does involve "skillz" as Barnesworth Anubis always used to explain to me.

The amazing thing about Jessica is that I can say "This wall needs a tin Vernor's Ginger Ale sign" or "this factory needs a fish hacking station and a conveyor belt" or "these people fishing need camp chairs to sit on" or "but where are these villagers going to load their fish" and within an instant -- or certainly no more than a few hours for the complex build like the factory, she just renders it, perfectly, just as you might have imagined it!

And sure, it's Cambodia via East Michigan. But every Asian build in SL needs a little bit of Lansing to temper it from abject kitsch, does it not? It's the Flint, Michigan in Lordfly, for example, that gives expansiveness to builds that might be horrid cliches out of some comic book or MMORPG. This is the broad American soul of which Whitman wrote, "I am large...I contain multitudes."

This is a troubling problem found in literature, of course. In fact, I just got to the bit about Cronshow's death and Upjohn's self-serving posthumous essay on his poetry in W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. Is Somerset Maugham overrated? Would a better author have stayed on his subject, taking us to see the club-footed Philip Carey in a cafe, wincing at Upjohn's rhapsodizing at his expense, characterizing the funeral of Cronshow as "middle class, ordinary, prosaic funeral of him who should have been buried like a prince or like a pauper. It was the crowning buffet, the final victory of Philistia over art, beauty, and immaterial things."

Oh, rubbish. You can see this elitist SL hatred of the mass and crass of which the British leftists are particularly guilty, hey, back in 1915! And here what Philip did for Cronshow was the milk of *humankindness*. Philip was a prince! Rather than let Cronshow die picturesquely in a poorhouse, he brought him *home* to his shabby but respectable student's quarters and nursed him, and then paid for a coach for his funeral in Kensington -- Upjohan would have had the dypsomaniac poet in a pauper's grave to be able to wrench more sentimentality of his exploitative review!

I'm not so sure but that Edmund Wilson was right about his critique of Somerset Maugham, although at the time, before reading some of these awkward philosophical passages, I thought he was being a sourpuss. The passages depend on the reader's sagacity for full effect, but they force the reader to abandon the empathy with the hero which ought to be the proper task of the author to cultivate in the reader.

The fact is, indeed we need to *bring home* the sordidness of the masses and we cannot be content with merely placing aesthetic experiences in front of them (and I'm afraid Maugham is worsening the damage here by rushing Philip into another homoerotic friendship with an odd fellow with nine children obsessed with El Greco in the next chapter! Can it get worse! It can!).

No, people need "things to do," and that's why they get fish-feeding and clickability and fishing and...stuff. Yes, I'm going to put in Casandra Jackson's tacky Wok This Way fast-food pushcart because if you don't have takeout, good Lord, what kind of Asian build have you made here! Surely we need to temper the absurd molecular flamey flights of fancy induced by Xenon's build endlessly immolating .. something...perhaps the residents of SL?! Perhaps their dreams of "your world/your imagination"?

(BTW, I have to tell you about this *really, really weird thing that happened once*, I swear to God. I managed to get myself seated on that big hot air balloon about the burning fires at the temple. It wasn't so easy to do I seem to recall but sitting down can be tough in SL. So there I was sitting, but then I decided to go check out the Aztecha Sky Temple build that Foolish Frost had made for me to become a newbie village and mall back in the day. So when I teleport to this site, which is right above the Magellan's Crash build, I arrive, *and the balloon is still attached to me*. It's like...it's a balloon tour that goes to those sites. I couldn't undo it. I was in it -- it came with me.)

Coming at a build like this, you always face an octave, and there is a point when the minor notes can't make it to the major notes. You suddenly realize on day one, whoops, this space isn't as big as we thought nor does it have enough prims and it's in three weird sections separated by pesky Linden water, etc.. Clubside came to the rescue again, donating his personal land to the group, and Xerxes Goff also chipped in with an old 512 he wasn't using which he let go for a reasonable price. You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many prims in Second Life.

There's then the main problem that Jessica faces, which of course was familiar to Michaelangelo or Charles Dickens, the need to have to work to some pesky client's wishes, which of course get in the way of Art.

Somehow, I forget exactly why, the Ross build dynamics went differently. I gave Jessica an overall concept, and she built the entire thing before I looked at it -- and it was perfect. Then I went about trying to put in tutorials, and then saying, "Oh, we need a money changing station...or, can you add a space here for dressing," etc. I just let the objects inspire me, i.e. if she had the brilliance to put a photo "Ginzburg and Kerouac in Casablanca," I made that be the tutorial on how to organize a group lol. She had a lot of great touches, check it out if you haven't seen it. No doubt I've overcluttered it by now, but the need to make the visuals for the "memory palace" stuff then starts to exert itself -- I try not to overwhelm.

Somehow, with the Cambodian thing, I was hanging around likely more than Jessica was comfortable with -- I really believe you have to let builders just do their thing, and not hire them in the first place if you don't trust them - but I was getting stumped on how to lure the newbies out of the temple, where they land, into starting places where things they'd need answers to would be there. So I began to put in some stuff myself, like the job shack or the opium den, which was inspired just by seeing this empty room with a kind of magenta red cracking painted walls with only a stove. Somehow it seemed "necessary".

From the beginning, I had the idea of "net = tutorials on searching" i.e. "catching stuff" yet making nets is really hard. What, you're going to weave 3,874 flexiprims together ??? But I found a few at a Gorean store as they constantly make these very realistic vignettes and interactive objects to move along their creepy slave narratives. They are good builders, that immersive pulp fiction inspires it in them.

But hopefully, I didn't transgress any of Jessica's inspirations, and she does have veto power, so when I plunked out a big port crane that was marring the view, which I wanted to explain "search optimization," she tactfully opened up the back of the factory and created a ledge to put it on out of sight : )

Jessica has undoubtedly created the very best dead fish in all of Second Life. It is more dead than the deadest fish of real life you ever saw.

And there was so many other nice touches -- I won't spoil it, as you should just come and see for yourself.

I still have to struggle with the tutorials. I had a major decision to make, which I wish someone else would have been thinking about as much as me and could comment about, but...nobody else seems to be interested in the "memory palace" method. Most tutorials in SL are delivered on boards, where you have to wait for text or pictures to rez faster or slower, and then read.

You can't get by without reading in SL, but I thought if you made the OBJECTS the center of the learning experience, rather than boring boards, you could remember them, their placement, your interaction with them -- that would help. For example, in Ross I just put in a snake charmer's basket and snake with a tutorial about scams in SL like island fraud and money-take objects. So you are drawn to the biting snake to get the message, and you will remember it more later as the snake-like bites of SL -- and if you forgot some of the scams listed, you could always come back there and find the snake and click and get the list again. That was how I conceived of it.

In making Memory Bazaar, I decided to have the contrivance of a gentleman explorer going around and clicking on things, and having questions that he'd have in his mind appear in the object. Hence, "What is a sim?" or "How do I get money?" as questions in the Talk script. Then the answer comes in a notecard from the blue-screen drop-down -- a huge obstacle in trying to make tutorials work in SL which is awfully hard to get around -- in fact ironically, the whole reason we even have "yes or no" questions hobbling recipients of cards is due to notecard spammers, and a particularly bad set of notecard spammings to which I and a few others were subjected to where we literally got tens of thousands of cards and messages, and our accounts had to be shut down and cleansed by the Lindens with a special script. This "yes no" prevents that from happening, but also scares newbies -- they are afraid, like the question "this object wants to animate you" that it will be a scam harassing them.

So this time, I decided to put some objects not with a question, but with the answer already in Talk, and not any notecards. Of course, I will still put in notecards because I think it's useful, but I hope that the rather curtailed answers in the Talk will work.

It has taken me more than a year to keep refining the Ross build, removing irritations, trying to fix problems, finding better answers, updating as the viewer changes, etc. Part of the reason it takes so long is that it has to be a leisure activity on a Sunday afternoon, but part of it is because it's so laggy for me in SL now, especially on an infohub with 10 or more people on it, I can barely move, and keep freezing. My machine no longer really runs SL. I also can't band recurring infestations and griefers who harass me when I try to work or have events. That problem won't be happening in Iris : )

It's amazing to me that with some environmental sound effects, a few "props," and great landscaping with swampy-looking trees, you can really create an ambience. It isn't Cambodia; it can't be, we aren't Cambodians, and real Cambodians would make something perhaps not even like Cambodia. It's the age-old story of course of Western Orientalism, but that can't be escaped and it is better to play with it in the imagination in SL rather than think you will escape it or overcome it with fake political correctness. There are a thousand cliches, but there are cliches about the West, too. In fact, even Flint, MI has its moments of transfiguration....

Comments

[Cherowolf Redgrave]

Hello Prokofy. Jessica (and you) have done an amazing job at Iris. Whatever you paid Jessica you surely got more than your moneys worth. I am honored to be a part of the Iris community. I have tried to blend in as much as possible with my small parcel. I do wish that my neighbor two spots over didn't have their ban lines up. Its very annoying when trying to fly along the walkways. Oh well, it can't all be perfect. Thank you for transforming Iris into a beautiful show place. Chero

[Prokofy Neva]

Hi, Chero, thanks for your support. I know you have the little church there and an "Iris preserve" of your own. I hope this build will bring more traffic to you, and it seems to go together in its way. Yes, those ban lines are insane, we have to try to get those people to remove them, they are never there, and they make no sense, it's a mistake perhaps. Also the dufus with the build that has been unfinished for a year, and the hugely ridiculous price on his land.

[Stephanie Misfit]

Very nice build and a great contribution to the community :)

[Yumi Murakami]

I believe there's a simulation called OLECS (Object Local Environment Coordinate System - http://www.nhk.or.jp/digista/blog/works/20070517_fujiki/index.html ) which is all about the exact spatial phenomena you experience. It even got made into a console game called Echochrome. It's fascinating.

And, other than that, that's a nice build and I really love your idea of teaching. In fact, I've been wondering if it would be possible to make an OI with no words (completely international!) and that sounds like something that could be used..

[Clubside Granville]

I just wanted to thank Prok for getting the build together and hiring Jessica who I want to thank for such a wonderful build!

I also wanted to point out the near travesty this situation was when I first learned of it. With few remaining "early" builds to begin with, the Lindens decided to keep this one but offload the surrounding area. The Fall of 2006 was filled with wall-to-wall casinos and Iris had them creeping in on the edges along with other blight, enough to force out a wonderful concert spot where I first heard Frog Marlowe perform. The Atoll continent seemed to also be running the slowest servers, or the quantity of water aided in a region with an atrocious frame rate compared to areas I more regularly frequented. Maybe others don't care much for preservation, particularly in a world at that time just celebrating its third birthday, but for me it was precisely this set of circumstances that got me interested in helping.

Now two years on Iris is a frequented Infohub with some nice builds and new user support with only a few blemishes. Hey, does this mean we can get into the Showcase?

[Horus Vale]

Sounds nice, I'll go check it out. Though, I'm sorry I missed the lanterns with the moths. My avatar is just not old enough to remember that. But, maybe something like it can be brought back there in the future.