Fair Faire

I

Irah Anatine reporting live from Kurdistan via Second Life at the Education Support Faire.

Visiting the Educational Faire (yes, I'm groaning at that cutesy men-in-tights Ye Olde stuff), I felt very acutely today some of the pains and promises of Second Life. I guess I'm still waiting for the normal people to show up in Second Life, and I exclude myself from that company. They may be starting to trickle in...but it's been a long time in coming.

I had been putting off visiting the faire, like I put off the dentist, but since it only had a week to run, I was going to force myself. Fortunately, an interesting event announced in Metanomics compelled me even on a busy day to TP into a sim called, er, Faire (sigh) to listen to a woman reporting from...Iraq. Good Lord, SL is wonderful, innit?

Well, except she wasn't really in like hardcore Iraq Iraq, but Kurdistan, which is sort of the Hong Kong of Iraq in my understanding, which is admittedly VERY superficial. Obviously in a place where business is better, people are more nimble about restoration, conditions are freer, etc. she was able to hook up to SL.

And there's a hugely important context to her story, which is that she is a victim of the accident-always-going-somewhere-to-happen called the SLLU Meme Train. I have no idea if what she posts here is true; what I do know is that the SLLU magnetizes the loons and extremists of the hard left like nobody's business in SL, and they're impossible to reason with. It's funny, three of them used to be my tenants for ages in some very cheap rentals, until one of them pitched a hissy fit over the penny monthly total in "group liabilities" that he thought was some horrible rent-seeking imperialist usorial exploitation.

Irah has an SL partner with the rather unfortunate -- tasteless would be a better word -- name of "Gulag". I'm thinking "Gulag" doesn't happen to be the word for, oh, "Desert Flower" in Iranian, but is some kind of awful inappropriate reference to the place where millions perished in the Soviet Union. Think of the reaction if you had a partner named "Auschwitz" -- and perhaps you'll get it.

Change Agent LifeFactory Writer reporting for duty on the front lines of sectarian battle in SL.

Also on the scene, adding to the hideous skew to the left of this "educational event" was this indefatigable busybody LifeFactory Writer, for whom Irah, who seemed to have allied herself with Paulo Casaca, who is at least a credible lefist in the European parliament (feted on Metanomics) and is at least very critical of Iran and thoughtfully critical of NATO, was *not left enough*. LifeFactory kept asking pointed, sectarian, loaded questions about the financing of Irah's trip to Iraq; the association of the Babel project with this MEP; the awful, er, I dunno, running-dog implications of being associated with this evil imperialist entity called the European Parliament or something. Picture the scene, this poor woman having dialed up from Kurdistan, for Christ's sake, struggling to tell us an important story about the elections and the absence of monitors, and this sectarian SLLU meme freak (by day, a "media strategy consultant in Washington, DC" is pummeling her with microscopic examination of her credentials -- all while this big blue Babel fish kept actually swimming around us even without water, and as I calmly purchased and pocketed the big Babel flag by accident because it was left on sale. Somebody else with narrowed sectarian brow was wondering if Irah was American (no, she's Portugese). Ah, Second Life...

Aki Shichiroji's grotesquerie at the landing point of the Education Support Faire, an unwitting metaphor for the destruction of the university by the Left.

But let's see if we can try to push away all this, er, narrative frame and get to the story. Irah was telling us that amazingly, 200 women were running in these elections. God bless 'em. Maybe they have less of a chance of being shot then, oh, the late president of Pakistan. There were no local monitoring groups -- too hard and too unsafe mots likely. There were also no international monitors or journalists parachuting in, I guess because they didn't care. Oh wait -- it *might* have been because the evil imperialist U.S. armed forces barred them entry -- but check on that, because that factoid was implied by Ms. Writer during a time when Irah wasn't audible because the voice thingie was popping off and on.

What was remarkable is that even among the ruins, people are trying to restart business in Kurdistan. Irah, despite her socialist leanings and prisoner-of-conscience status within the confines of the SLLU (could somebody PLEASE make a more credible leftist group in SL!), was still interested in trying to make business connections between Beyers Sellers, who showed up gabby and pressed and blow-dried as usual, and various people running things in Kurdistan. I have no idea how you get an upstate academic who teaches accounting and sings jazz in SL after holding workshops for out-of-work computer programers in a virtual world to jumpstart commerce in a war-torn place like Erbil, but if anyone could pull it off using the personality-amplifying powers of the SL platform, it would be Irah and Beyers. One could only cheer them on in this regard, if only LifeFactory will *get out of the way* with her, uh, "media strategies". BTW, when I saw that LifeFactory described herself as a "Change Agent" on her avatar profile (barf) I hastened to write Change Agent Resister on my own profile. I don't resist change. I most definitely resist unelected, unaccountable, unrestrained "change agents".

I wish I could log on to said amplifying platform right now and pull up my notes and transcripts from this interesting meeting, but I'm having a hots of misadventures -- crashing every few minutes, deleting settings.xlm in the appdata/roaming files (the latest Linden magic fix for every ailment), but then having goddamn weird shit happening. I go in world, attend to some customers' requests, move some stuff for them, delete some spam off the bulletin board in Ross from the "regulars", adjust some buildings, etc...and come back an hour later and everything I did on 3 different sims is not "there" anymore. The stuff is all back to where it was before I touched it. It's like I've logged on and been in some sort of SL tesseract pouch that is not...not taking. Right now I'm told I can't log in because my inventory is not available. Well, that's optional, thousands of pieces of it aren't there much of the time when I log on, I'm good, I'm cool, but...meanwhile I'm going to write Ann Otoole, who always has opinions on everything related to security, and ask her about this really...detailed...SL cookie file I stumbled on in my folders.

Ok, then! Where was I.

Edufaire. Once I zoomed out from virtual Kurdistan via Babelfish and the Europarliament, I realized good Lord I was at the Education Support Faire. This event was very hastily put on by the Lindens for reasons we're still trying to fathom. Somebody needed an activity report, somebody needed to shine on for somebody -- it's not clear. Educators and their hangers-on were given very short notice to put up their booths, and not surprisingly, they couldn't do much with them.

The rich, textured communication possibilities of SL sims...

I waited at least 30 minutes on the sims, even on my brand-new spiffy computer and connection, and the stuff just wouldn't rez. When it did, it was almost not worth it, because very few of the edu peeps had done anything other than just recreate the Internet on their faire grounds. This is actually not something they can blame on the Lindens exactly and their mysterious short notice, because I notice that even when I visit these really supposedly popular and heavily-pimped edu islands in SL, I'm always disappointed when I fly into a wall of boards like a goddamn insect flying into a windshield. Splat. Here I am slam up 2-D slow-rezzing text and pictures and just not really in a virtual world.

When are these educators and their opensource script gurus going to get serious about making SL animated, interactive, and immersive?!

To be sure, some of the edus figured out to build something a little more snazzy with props. Like Fleep Tuque who is an old hand at trying to make SL sing, even with its troubles. Spotting her in the Ohio universities booth, I went to complain about another thing I found with this faire -- the actual educational institutions and their actual educational content, i.e. courses, were drowned out by all these companies trying to sell edu-stuff to these educators.

Fleep explained to me that the Lindens had called this the educational support faire, and it was about support to education, see.

We follow your every move...

I went to sit in on a talk by Carl Metropolitan about education using SL and my eye kept being dragged back by a hideous constantly-changing neon-coloured display with a giant spy cutout profile and a huge temp-rezzing Slinky on the build. It was the "artwork" of a company called I think Smart Profile whose main purpose was to help educators ban people from their land -- but not only ban them, and create access-only parcels, but also track them. Follow them. See what they do. What they click on. What they don't fly to. Etc.

Spies and change agents lurk behind every hand-eye...

Now, looked at in one way, this seems like a sort of "must have" for every nervous and timid edu type in SL, scared as they are of flying penises and inappropriate behaviour and Loss of Control and the need to justify to very skeptical rectors or board members that this virtual world stuff actually helps students learn and not just goof off like they would on Myspace (hence the tracking).

But, looked at in another way, it is damn creepy. Education online suddenly because something that is very, very far from the Ideal of the University as it has been taught through the ages, a liberal place, a font of wisdom, a place of debate and reason. Instead, it becomes very commodified. It becomes a product. The people moved through it become customers, with their likes and dislikes and hotspots and coldspots. Education becomes merely a corporate security problem -- with an enormous amount of intrusion of the educated by the educator with an enormous loss of privacy and freedom.

AJ Brooks had never heard of the video parody on Youtube called White 'N Nerdy by Al Yankovich until I used the magic of SL connectivism to share the link.

People providing consulting to educational institutions can succeed in not looking like businesses with corporate interests that seem creepy because first, they work with the non-profit field which has the well-known "halo effect," and second, they dine out on the whole opensource shill. A Moodle propagandist was there, for example, hawking the freebie nature of this wonky and non-intuitive crap that we suffered with in trying to join the massively multiplayer online educational roadwreck called "Connectivism" last fall out of the University of Manitoba with George Siemens and Stephen Downes. (The former was a sweetie pie; the latter was a grump. I was a Connectivist U drop-out because the hours I had to spend engaging with difficult material and repressive mods weren't a value-add for me in a recessional economy where I was adding RL jobs.) Moodle is one of those belief systems that you simply cannot criticize. Ever. In your life. SLAP. You are *supposed* to rag on Blackboard as being evil and proprietary, and you *have* to like Moodle because it is "free". Bleh. (Yeah, just try and criticize Moodle as in fact being the opensource=closed society I always claim it is, and see how the Mob will eat you alive.)

Jessica Ornitz's Skate Shack originally created for the sim Calico makes a cameo edufaire appearance as Gus Plisskin's Fresh Bait 'N Fried Clams Edushack Wi' All the Trimmin's .

So just like the PR pukes and Web 2.0 gurus who litter Twitter, these edu consultants with their little sole proprietorships or small consulting companies are hugely aggressive around SL and other VWs because they are the cuttlefish wending their way through the giant shark-invested waters of Big Education, trying to eat and not be eaten. Linden Lab has every vested interest in holding these people very tight and making them happy (which it has apparently only had modest success in doing so) because these are the people who make the unbeatable dynamic duo of the Second Life free software and its expensive server space seem like a "must have" to any educator.

I found it dismaying that these types of consultants had such force over SLCC -- I would rather hear from the actual educators trying to actually do things inworld and what they achieve without the noise from these pepole trying to hawk all kinds of fake opensource crap on top of which they sell their consulting services so that you can make sense of that very wonky and unusable opensource crap.

What I've always loved to pieces about SL is that I don't have to be a tekkie wonk to use it, I can be a dummy and use it without a lot of hassle -- but trust it to educators to have made it so that their students are hobbled in doing this.

Chilbo exhibit with freebies.

Let me say something about education and the problem with it as I see in about one or two paragraphs if I can manage it, and grossly oversimplify it but get to the essence. In the 1960s, educational institutions were essentially destroyed by radical and hippie students rebelling and taking over administrative offices and scaring adults into kow-towing to their mau-mauing. In the 1970s and 1980s there were all kinds of "reconstructions" of university faculties, sometimes with these self-same hippies now put in charge, incorporating all kinds of rewarmed 1930s or even 1890s ideologies of socialism, communism, Constructivism, etc. etc..Thus, the traditional universities that Stephen Downes is still battling like windmills that don't really exist anymore were gradually crumbled. You know how they used to have the Shah of Iran, and everybody thought he was awful and needed to be overthrown, and then came the revolutionary students and Khomeni and now Akhmadinejad? Well, think of the American educational scene as kindasorta like that only of course in a very mild form where they have takeout pizza and beer and co-ed dorms.

So then came the me-first 1980s and roaring 1990s where people got rich from dot.coms and needed MBAs, so really pragmatic and cynical administrators gradually came to replace those accommodating the hippies and radicals and just began selling education like a product. The Tenured Left clung to their ideologist posts and continued to infect young minds with their silly and impractical memes. This converged with other demographic historical process like masses of people who had never had higher education in their families historically flocking to colleges and universities to get a degree, which was seen increasingly as indispensable in a complexifying and globalizing marketplace. Enter technocommunism, which is the perfect blend of leftist radicalism and business, that gives you the opensource script shill along with the high-priced edu tag and you're in business.

Except now, greedy educational institutions and the businesses that cling to their backsides are now all really beginning to hurt. Let's say they had a Madoff-funded endowment. Oops. Let's say their stock was invested in failing banks. Oops. Let's say that during recessions, people go and get more education while they are fired -- except now they get a job bagging groceries at the Safeway. Oops. All over, appointments are frozen, I read that people even applying to advertised positions are being told that the positions are withdrawn. Suddenly, nobody needs Ph.Ds in history or art or even business. The economy cannot aborb them, and neither can academe, where they used to be able to find perches for endlessly spouting their useless Marxist and 'critical" crap on the taxpayers dime, or on the dime of rich families who made their fortunes in the railroads in the last centuries. At one time, in past centuries, religious institutions gave the universities of America their connective tissue, philosophies, standards, manpower, money. When that was destroyed, there was only the Marxist secular left and a lot of cynical businessmen selling barely-usable scrips at diploma mills.

So we are seeing huge upheavals in education just as we are seeing huge upheavals in the news business with the decline of newspapers and publishing houses and it will have disastrous consequences as numerous people are now having to be cheaply and quickly educated via the Internet, and end up cynical griefing copybotters like Baba Yamamoto or end up as SLLU fashion victims like Irah Anatine or LifeFactor Writer. I just don't know how this will turn out. The old left is being forced out. The New New Left is struggling aggressively to get a purchase, with a shot in the arm now from the Obama win, but with no capital to sustain their socialism. Grants, fellowships, gigs are drying up everywhere. There's a wild and crazy grabbing at Second Life as a place you can get to without gasoline or even getting out of your pajamas.

Will it work? Well, I hope it does, because I don't like spending money on gas or having to get out of my pajamas any more than you do!

Will it be good? A better world? Well, um...Tuning into Carl's lecture, I can see the road will be somewhat rocky, and yet...there is always the promise through the pain at Second Life.

Someone began asking about how they could test SL without all the cost. I mentioned that I started a parcel in the SL called Cair Paravel I for this very reason (which I'll write more about soon) because I kept running into people in the infohub or at meetings who were either in SL on educational projects already, and terribly frustrated that they couldn't do anything until their professor logged on because all permissions were locked up (this is just like the website/webmaster lock-up and serial processing that happens with content in offices -- I hate it!). Or else, they were scoping out SL, not sure if they wanted to invest even $25 on a 4096 m2, and needing someplace to go. Of course, there are gadzillion sandboxes, but they don't have a way to test media, which is what people often want to do most of all (God knows why they would come in a 3-D live interactive world and sit and watch a PowerPoint or a YouTube, but let's humour them for a bit). So I have a parcel like this called Cair Paravel I, just IM me to get media permissions.

I mentioned there were free scripts there because another humorous thing I found about the edufaire was these really showoffy businesses with names like "Laboratory" mimicking our own favourite Lab which offered freebie scripts as if they had designed them in their "labs" -- when they were all made by oldbie SLers like 5 years ago, and in some cases by people with names like Meatball Extraordinaire, who had a thriving if patchy scripting business in between sporadic attendance at his RL high school before the Lindens figured out he should be pitched over to the Teen Grid.

I get a chuckle out of seeing these businesses recycle stuff like "notecard giver" or "avatar radar" as somehow some "educational software product" ROFL when I just stick them in a box and offer them everywhere for free.

However, interestingly, one educator said, "What is a free script?" And that's when you realize that even being a dummie like me, you have absorbed enough of the Linden-induced SL culture not to be able to see the baby steps needed to bring someone into this user-rejecting world. I said they were these things you stick into prims or objects and they make stuff happen in the world, like giving out a notecard or voting on something. Pathfinder then gave the politically correct answer that free scripts are either opensource scripts that you can copy and modify yourself, or closed-source scripts that you can get a copy of and use. Sigh.

Pathfinder has sprouted wings. I find his avatar continues to radiate malevolence, and I think this goes past my own history with Pathfinder  (mysteriously scrubbed from even Herald archives but which you can still read here)  I just think if you are going to win over a bunch of scared Nervous Nelly academics and aggressive but wary edubiz hucksters, you shouldn't look like something out of an anime cartoon. But that's just me.

Here's another neat thing I stumbled on while at Carl's talk. A person who has formed a group of Chechens in the diaspora called Little Chechnya. Now that's the sort of thing I always thought SL would be great for!

So basically, the bottom line these days is this: if you have the patience and stamina, you can forge interesting connections and collaboration in SL, learn things from other people even reporting live from wartorn countries, and expand the possibilities for Knowledge. I see it as connections, but not Connectivism, which is an orthodox concept of how to use the Internet that presupposes all kinds of Marxist underpinnings that really should be thrown out the window these days as useless in the real world. I see it as collaboration, not the sort of collectivism flogged by SLLU.

But the Idea of the University, in trouble in the real world, is going to be in trouble in the virtual world if there aren't more people with more ideas coming at it, and preserving the plurality of debate and thinking. Right now, the tools of social media invented by the technocommies of Silicon Valley are very much infected with leftist memes and therefore often impractical for business or education until you can sort of shake off these overlays and open them up. You don't *have* to have an "opensource" solution to business or education because proprietary solutions are just as good and often have better customer service. You don't *have* to pay an arm and a leg to the Lindens or to some edu consulting huckster trying to serve as a VW sherpa if you just spend a little time using the existing resources already created by residents like Carl Metropolitan in SL with his New Citizens, Inc. (NCI) classes and networks.

And you don't need to make the space look like a webpage and keep your students locked out of permissions to change it. You can't get bitten on Second Life. You can put on autoreturn and keep away flying penises and you can also just teleport away or log off! Students should be given as fast a track as possible through the ideological and technological thickets people are planting for their own interests in SL, and allowed to experience the world and its possibilities on their own.

The Lindens and their special friends are trying to make an Ecology out of this that they populate and run and control. Don't let them. Pry their hands away. Make them get back to doing what they have done well in the past, which is proprietary software production with good services attached to it for reasonable fees.

Comments

[Crap Mariner]

"the SLLU magnetizes the loons and extremists of the hard left like nobody's business in SL, and they're impossible to reason with."
...
(could somebody PLEASE make a more credible leftist group in SL!)

--------------------------
Agreed on the SLLU. Nothing but Marxist griefers who, despite socialized medicine, refuse to take their meds and can't quite figure out how all those carfires start after sweet, innocent students and immigrants gather peacefully to harmlessly throw rocks at riot police. Every group they ally with is just cover for the rot at the core.

Cafe Wellstone and the Netroots folks come close to the goal of credibility. The folks at the head of those groups want to earn recognition through reason, not reaction. And I think as the Obama-Pelosi-Reid triangle rattles and shatters, they will settle in as a "we can do better than this" activism hub.

But as with all Left on the grid, it's inevitable that the Bush Derangement Syndrome kicks in, a repugnant statement leaks out, and I find myself looking for something else to do.

You'd think people would tire of it, or at the very least, leave it to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Oh well. Prims need dusting again, and the ferryboat won't set its own course.

-ls/cm

[Prokofy Neva]

I'm not so familiar with Cafe Wellstone but the Netroots are fake. I'm going to blog about that soon.

Leaving it to Stewart and Colbert is exactly what they've done, and that will catch up with them, you can't run a country from Cartoon Netwook.

[Crap Mariner]

Well, Comedy Central, certainly not, but Cartoon Network - Dexter's Lab is the BOMB.

The solution to every problem is a gigantic robot.

-ls/cm

[Prokofy Neva]

Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, it's all the same to me. I haven't had a TV in 3 years. I did used to watch Courage the Cowardly Dog, though.

[LifeFactory Writer]

This is F*ing hysterical!

The last time I was attacked online by a troll, I was accused of being a "Cheney Lackey." Now I am being accused of "skewing to the "sectarian Left" and railing against bourgeois imperialism? Hysterical.

Is there truly no intellectual context (beyond The Economist) in the whole of popular culture that has the intellectual integrity and acumen to either recognize or absorb the philosophical touch stone I proudly adhere to: "The Radical Center?"

At no point did I utter or even think a single "leftist" or other sectarian sentiment. And I must point out that the Babel Project is one of the organizations I very favorably featured in my film "Life on Life" (which you should all see, if you have not: http://blip.tv/file/1047096).

Proki-poo is a bit of a simpleton, to say it politely, and I certainly will not spend my time here clarifying for her the logic behind my very reasonable questions regarding logistics and journalistic fact-checking-- not ideology.

Someone sent me the link to this rag-blog, else I would never be here. This character Proki-poo is the only SL resident I have on perpetual mute.

Three cheers for the lonely and evolved, intellectually-sophisticated middle ground where partisanship and internet psuedo-philosphers hold utterly no sway and earn no entry.

Oh, and thanks for the press-hit, Proki-poo. As they say, all press is good press, even if it comes in the form of tabloid-style slander.

Best wishes,
LifeFactory

PS--pity I cannot bring myself to read the entire entry...I see a picture of my pal Pathfinder, who I think just pulled off an education fair, and I would sort of like to find that something nice was said about him...but I just cannot get myself to read that far into this tripe.

[cat magellan]

*portuguese*

[Jane2 McMahon]

SLLU is a perfect example of why most people are moderate...who wants to be associated with the humour- and context-challenged fringe of either side?

On the other hand, SLLU can make Crap Mariner and GenJCChristian Homewood agree...so maybe they're humour- and context-challenged uniters!

[Prokofy Neva]

LifeFactory, you are nowhere remotely near the "radical middle", a ground I'm familiar with. You are a member of the Extropians -- I haven't figured out whether they are so left they are extreme right or just simply rightist -- but middle ground and moderate they are not. If you are anywhere near the SLLU, you've illustrated vividly that you are part of the Loony Left, and as I indicated, a meme-fashion victim as well labelling yourself as a "change agent" and all that other dreck. If you're *not* SLLU -- great! But...why the drilling and drilling on credentials and affiliations?

Your questions weren't journalistic fact-checking but suspicious annoyances. Anyone with a half-second to Google could see Irah's affiliations which she explains not only on her blog, but on the objects there at the inworld display. She works with an MEP who is critical of Iran and trying to be helpful with Iraq. So, nu? What's your beef?

If you've favorably appraised the Babel project, you seemed particularly keen at this meeting to wrest some kind of statement that Babel wasn't affiliated with this particular politician. Why does it matter?

Let me repeat my unanswered question from that meeting, LFW: do democratically elected politicians bother you for some reason?

Uh...The middle ground is lonely and bars people who criticize, and who demand some accountability even from sectarian weirdoos? Huh? That doesn't sound like the middle ground, that sounds like some isolated silo on the so-far-left-it's-right horizon.

As for "your friend Pathfinder," that says it all.

In SL, group affiliations and friendship cards -- they tell a lot, don't they? I believe I returned Pathfinder's friendship card. I was pre-banned from the Extropians' island before I had even heard about them or their crazy brain-uploading ideology -- and proud of it!

I don't see anything "tabloidy" or "slanderous" about reporting what you said at this meeting. Don't blame the mirror if you have a crooked face. Are you it's your brain, and not some lower being's brain, that will get to be preserved for all time?

[Carl Metropolitan]

A point of correction and apology. The session wasn't supposed to be "Carl Metropolitan on SL Education". It was supposed to the the "SL Education Council Roundtable". Unfortunately, I type fast and am hard to shut up. Looking at your report, I see that most likely stepped on the contributions of my panel-mates Morrigan Mathilde (of The School of Mischief) and ReverendMathias Merit (of Insight Virtual).

[LifeFactory Writer]

Book reviews for "The Radical Center"

http://www.newamerica.net/publications/books/the_radical_center

[Prokofy Neva]

Carl, when you stumble on an event like this in SL, there isn't anything to "frame" it. There isn't a sign up that says "Here are the speakers and topic". The event, if it was on the Events list, is now no longer there, as the stupid Linden system dumps an event off the list sorted by type within 5 minutes of the start time, and you then have to resort by date, and then plough through numerous offerings sometimes and guess at what the title might be. This is a weekly annoyance for me doing the Sutherland Dam meetings.

The "feeling" for me was that it was an event at which you were speaking because you did a lot of the talking, but that it was very open enough to enable other people to chime in, too, like Morrigan, so I thought it was the sort of thing where backchat was welcome.

Even being on the sim for 30 minutes before that, and even with a good computer, much of the textures and build *still* weren't rezzing and there were so many avatars with their name tags blending together that I couldn't see anything, i.e. that there might be some sort of configuration that said "round table" by such a metaphor as "three people sitting up on a dais". Sorry, none of this is your fault, so you don't have to apologize.

SL has its pains and promises, as I struggled to relay here. I think your event was helpful to educationalists, which is what it was all about, I guess. I personally am very wary of all these consultants crawling all over trying to hawk crap. I just find it hugely annoying, because they aren't neutral as to the type of tools they sell, they have a decided ideology, and it more often than not leans towards the opensource technocommunist idealogy, which, as you know, I find a terrible shill, because all that means is that they force everyone by peer pressure to give away scripts, but they themselves get a consulting fee to show everyone how to work them.

You don't get a consulting fee. I don't either, although I try to make the rentals pay out over and above the cost of free land, so that I still get something even after covering the free land. It's a struggle. It's a different model, and it's not one that says "let's make everything free and pretend we're all selfless volunteers here building a better world".

When I first came to SL, I was happy to pay people to teach me skills. I could never find people to take me up on that, because they insisted not in being paid to give me a customized lesson, but forcing me to take part in their classes and join the whole opensource sandbox groupthink which I didn't want to do.

There is a difference, in my view, between community helping because you want to volunteer and you feel that providing free help and freebies is a necessary start in SL that is good for everybody, but which doesn't fight commerce or demand that everyone turn over their labour and IP, and a different philosophy, which says all scripts *must* be free and everyone has to be in a sandbox commune. I think you understand the difference.

Um, LifeFactory, I'm familiar with the concept and the books and articles around the "radical middle". I think now that anyone can see the transcript of some of your pestery questions and weirdness, we can conclude that either you have an ideological issue, or you simply have various personality tics where you have to overshare, overinvolve, pester, etc.

I'm glad I didn't respond to your request to provide a couch to sleep on or I might never get you off it, and I need it myself.

[ichabod Antfarm]

"Proki-poo is a bit of a simpleton,"

Follow the bouncing ball.

P R O K O F Y.

Wasn't that easy?

Give yourself another gold star.

[Porky]

Went there for one of the talks. On bots funnily enough. The bot kept crashing the user kept crashing heck i even counted more than 6 crashes of one of the LINDEN attendees.

Voice was all over the place, people kept lagging from one sim to the other. A tough talk to follow but an interesting one.

The talk after 'language lab' or something? It was some affiliate program promotion. The girl made a full on issue about putting down a chair to sit on before beginning she needed the chair for some reason.

Began her talk with 'why am i here to talk again?' and trust me it really didn't get better... She didn't even know her website. Oh em gee.

Liked the faire myself, was expecting more from the linden displays than an 'orientation island' thought the signs saying Education faire were very hard to read also.

Some of the resident displays were top notch. Definitely worth wading through the lag before it finishes.

[Natty Cioc]

Thank you for highlighting our booth and product. Its SmartPatrol, not Smart Profile.

[Prokofy Neva]

Thanks, Natty, that's an even more creepy name, then, and with even more creepy implications!

Yes, the Motherland should know its heroes!

[Prokofy Neva]

BTW, check out LifeFactory's machinima about Virtual Africa:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BiV_fwbDRg

It's kinda cute. You may want to get an AI meerkat after visiting this sim, too.

However, my critique of this machinima is as follows: it reminds me too much of the sort of cutesie children's television approach to things, where a kind of overbearing, know-it-all adult trying to forcibly be whimsical, whom you suspect will actually break out in some irritability any minute, is framing a story that you are supposed to "benefit" from.

But...we're left wanting. Where is the woman who made this sim, Ms. Recreant? She is nowhere to be seen. All this attention is lavished on a pet, but not on the human being who made the sim.

And, what exactly is it this sim raises money *for*. What the hell is "social investment"? Sounds horribly politically correct. What is it? Investing in whom? With what? For what reason?

We never hear anything, and instead, we get the cliche of Africa: hippos in the water, sun, some guy dancing around singing who doesn't even look African (he seems accidental).

So sure, it succeeds like Blues Clues does as a kind of kid's adventure, but...what is behind the paper cutouts?

Nowadays, I'm sorry, it's just not enough to appear and say "I'm fabulous, I made a machinima, praise me, and Lindens, put me on Showcase I rock". No. There is SO much stuff out there now that you really have to go further. And the social demand, if we're going to be all social justicey about this now people, is simply more for a sim of this nature. Social investment, indeed!