SL psychology – Ahuva’s Blog

Taking Another Step Away

I treated myself and bought a new computer. It arrived yesterday – a Lenovo Yoga 730. I got the active pen as well, about which I know nothing. 🙂 I gather it lets me draw on the screen. How can someone be so ignorant about their new computer? I don’t pick my own computers. I (like Blanche DuBois) often depend on the kindness of others, in this case coworkers, not strangers.

Way back at the end of the summer I asked a former coworker for advice on a new computer. He’d given me great advice when I was searching for a hard-core gaming computer to handle Second Life and Open Sim. That was all the way back in 2010 and I got an Alienware. I still have that Alienware and it is still going, but I can’t upgrade it and USB ports are a bit different now, and so are operating systems.

Somewhere between then and now I bought myself another computer that could handle gaming and virtual realities. That one was the same machine that we’d bought our son, with a few enhancements added. I never got a chance to use it. First my son broke his, so I gave him mine. Once it returned to me, my sister’s computer ceased to run her programs so I lent her mine. Permanently. 🙂 I love my sister. So here I am, without a modern functioning computer. I back up all my iThings to the Alienware, but I’ve discovered that I cannot write from it to the iThings. I had to do my last phone update by using my work Mac. It’s time already for a new machine.

I took the list of suggestions from the first coworker and showed it to my former teammates, whose opinions I have ALWAYS sought and trusted. I told them all that the only thing I do anymore is read mail, blog, social media, and process photos. They all agreed on the Yoga 730 and they all told me “buy the pen, you’ll like it”. Okay, I did. I haven’t even opened the box yet, *grin*, but I’m sure one of these days I’ll figure it out.

So why “another step away”? Because I suspect this machine will NOT run Second Life. I loved my time in SL. I’ve written about how much fun I had, how it challenged me, changed me, shaped me. I’ve written about the friendships I made that exist today and moved from virtual reality to RL reality. I still, foolishly, maintain my premium membership, although I have surrendered all my land. I want to go back, but there is no “back” – we have all moved on. Some of my friends are virtually dead, others have passed away in physical reality. Buying a non-gaming computer is yet another step away from the past.

You can take the woman out of SL, but you cannot take the SL out of the woman. No matter WHICH computer she buys.

An Unexpected Gift

They say that revenge is a dish best served cold, meaning it happens long after the fact. What do they say about gifts that appear long after the gifting? There must be some equally apt phrase. Maybe it’s “good things come to those who wait”.

fricker1 I have finally decided to upgrade my blog from a free account to a paid account. I have no good reason. Or rather, I suspect the final straw is NOT something that will be handled by a paid account. The last week or so I’ve been getting trackbacks from spam sites. It was annoying. I’ve also used over 75% of my media storage. I thought I’d investigate and see what I’d learn.

I had a wonderful, informative, upbeat chat with the online chat support. Do you know that they are called “Happiness Engineers”? I think that is a GREAT title. The person with whom I was chatting was a fantastic representative of that concept. She gave me a discount code to give me 2 months free. I noticed something odd when I went to pay. The screen was showing me a $15 credit, bringing the bill to $33. When I put in the discount code, the amount was just over $39. ???? I asked my happiness engineer where the $15 credit originated. She said “The $15 credit is applying the value you have left in your current plan to the upgraded one.” Well that was odd. fricker 3 My current plan was a FREE plan, I had never paid any money to WordPress. The HE agreed my plan was a free one and she investigated further. “I show $15 in gift credit from a user named “Fricker Fraker” back in 2009. Dear reader, I kid you not – tears came to my eyes.

Fricker – I don’t know where you are, or how you are, but thank you, thank you, thank you. What a sweet, generous gesture on your part. Which is exactly how I remember you.

Ahuva ❤ Fricker

The Spirit of SL

I have been determined to get inworld and visit some of the great seasonal sites as well as catch up – again – with friends. My day had been somewhat up and down. A VERY good up was news from my surgeon about my foot. *smile* His words were music to my ears: Push it Ahuva – USE that foot, wear shoes. At this point you’ll do more harm by NOT using than by OVER using it. Yes! Since I’d already managed to get into a pair of boots with 2.5 inch heels, that was both reward and incentive. *laughing* Those 2.5 inch heeled boots are my “flats”, btw.

Logging in I got more UP day. Hunter was on and we chatted for a bit. I don’t remember the last time we both were on with a few moments to relax and catch up. While we were saying “bon apetit” in parting, Patricia Anne logged in. Oh my, I don’t think PA and I have talked since perhaps the summer. Maybe even the spring. It seems like years. We had a great time chatting and catching up on both RL and SL. I’d been listening to Taunter while I chatted. She was singing at a formal attire venue so I had a chance to take one of my gowns out of inventory. 🙂 The risque brown one that would never ever work for me in the material world. Was lovely, as always, to listen to Taunter sing. When she was done, I headed to Fogbound, my home away from home when it’s NOT Friday night. (Then home away from home is Tribeca, of course.)

Once there, I saw more friends – Mae and Yanik. *smile* Bob was playing great Blues and the mood was perfect. Y joined me shortly after I arrived, so I got up to dance! We also had a LOT of catching up to do. I guess that’s true for me for all my friends. Since the last time I managed to get in was nearly 2 weeks ago, there’s a lot to cover.

As we danced I did the usual cam-around-the-room. I noticed a great looking pair of red boots. So nice, I thought I might like to find a pair for myself. I clicked on a boot and checked the object profile and took a screen shot for future reference. For the record: N&N City boots by candice OHare! I IM’d Alessandra, she of the lovely red boots, and told her I thought her boots were great! She said thank you and I said you’re welcome. I smiled, thought no more on it, and continued chatting with Y. Well. I saw an incoming box and checked. Alessandra had gifted me with a pair of the boots!!!!!! So generous! A simple compliment generating such a thoughtful gesture.

Yes, there may be griefing. Yes, there are trolls who announce unpleasant things in the local chat. Yes, SL has its share of not so pleasant beings. But SL also has the beautiful lovely people who reach out and make the world a happier place to be. Thank you SO much, Alessandra! You are a star!

Blurred Boundary

All who know me know how I feel about shoes: they are jewelry for the feet. In SL Ahuva is known for her hair and boots/shoes. In the tangible world it’s probably much the same. *grin* In that spirit, I show you my latest footwear: Oxford by Hades. (Hades used to be known as Metropolis.) I saw these shoes at a Steampunk festival in the early summer months and fell in love. I traveled out of state to find them so I could size them. *grin* When they didn’t have my size, I turned to the internet for gratification.

I know that there are those of you who say that my shoes are the reason I limp. Wrongo. Just to make it VERY clear: there is NOTHING wrong with the left foot and it wears the same shoes as the right foot. nyah, nyah, nyah. I’m so glad the weather got cool this week. I figure I’d best get in all my fav shoes before the surgery just in case….

My coworkers are the best, as I believe I’ve mentioned before. They may think (know) I’m just a little bit crazy, but they do support me in my eccentricities. Thanks to Michael for taking the pic of the shoes. Thanks to Bill and Michael for finding this song for me: Kirsty MacColl singing “In These Shoes“.

Como se puede bailar? Es un escandolo
(But the way she dances, it’s a scandal)

If you love Grandma….

I know I rarely post anymore. My work life has become extremely full, fun, challenging, exciting, and exhausting. 🙂 I’m still in SL, I’m still reading about SL. I am still a big advocate of virtual worlds. If I’m not sharing that here it’s because I spend most of my time being self-indulgent in SL, seeing friends, dancing, chatting, and not so much time thinking about posting those experiences.

BUT:

There is a wonderful SL blog out there: Prim Perfect. The other day one of the authors posted about the user community within Second Life. Like many, many others, I found this post to be articulate, informative and right-on the money. Her theme was about age and virtual worlds:

But … what if Second Life wasn’t the place to attract a young audience? What if it was, instead, a perfect place for people of more mature years (with larger, if more shrewdly managed wallets)?

There are a lot of thoughtful comments on this post. I’d like to point you to Vivienne Daguerre’s comment on January 29, 2013. She had a lot to say, but my favorite sound bite is this:

For people my age, SL is a good thing, keeping us learning and our minds active and sharp. If you love Grandma and want to help her fight off the effects of an aging brain, bring her into SL!

I’d only say that SL can help people of any age learn and keep the mind active and sharp. My new job role is in community-building. Virtual worlds give access to communities to people who might otherwise not find a community. Age can take away access to a physical community, but virtual worlds and our minds can give us a place to belong anytime.

Summer Night

Where has the summer gone? We finally had a few days where the temperature was in the 80s, and the evenings were not only bearable but actually pleasant, with breezes even. Simba is still here, defying the odds. *grin* That’s m’boy. Of course, we never told him the odds. 🙂 We were delighted to see see him not only come up out of the basement but climb “his” tree.

Simba’s not the only one still “here”. I am, too. I still make it into SL weekly, sometimes even more than once a week. I lack the energy and time to write about it, however. I’ve taken pics intending to blog but…. well…. you know how it is. Today I have a day with ONLY ONE meeting scheduled. I have been anticipating eagerly a lunchtime walk. Imagine my disappointment when I got to the door and it was raining. I considered walking anyway. But I decided that sitting in wet clothing in this EXTREMELY air-conditioned office would be unhealthy, not to mention uncomfortable.

My work laptop can actually get me into SL these days (I burned out the video card/cable on my old machine) but it’s still pretty laggy. I was reading some posts, some tweets, some plurks. I’m really out of touch with the blogarrazi these days. From the little I saw today, the tone and tenor seems pretty much the same. Not even the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Drama, Innuendos, Crises, Final Farewells. I think I’ll take a page from Honour’s blog and include a link to some music. *grin* And you thought I didn’t read your posts, Honour.

Credit to the posting on youTube for the video:
Uploaded by MontyPython on Jun 7, 2010
Not The Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy) DVD, Blu-ray and Soundtrack available from June 8th: http://www.notthemessiahmovie.com/

AH4B

I’m four.

Sometimes that’s hard for me to believe. Four years and I’m still here. So much has changed, yet so much is the same. I have nothing pithy to say, nothing interesting. Dale assures me that the tradition for a rez day is to jump naked. Dale offered to assist me in this (I suspect in the naked part, not so much in the jumping part). *grin* Unlike Chestnut, who is reveling in a new, super-duper computer which is rezzing SL on ultra, I am on the road, with only my work laptop, not my gaming computer. This machine is laggy to the nth degree in SL. Getting naked with lag? Could be a bad idea. But I figured why not? So I got up early, rezzed in, undressed, and jumped. Alone. 🙂 Here you have it – Ahuva’s naked rez day leap. The photo titles speak for themselves. Well, maybe not completely. No question but the ducks were a bit taken aback. *grin*

Crystal Ball Musings

I’m not very good at predicting ‘THE FUTURE’. You know – what will be a hit, what life will be like in 3 years, much less 10 years. I have a mom’s sense of the future: if you try to carry all those things at once you’re going to drop something. My vision tends to be personal and short-term. I really thought virtual worlds were about to burst into the big time. I was lining up my career to be a part of it. I guess I was blinded by the light of my love. Not only didn’t it happen, but it seems to have receded nearly out of sight (for me). I think about this chain of events and wonder, as so many others do, why it hasn’t happened. I still believe that one of the major issues is that there are no tools (or almost no tools) available for the business or corporate user to access in SecondLife or OpenSim. Things may have changed, since I am out of touch, but if the applications were present, I think I’d know from (1) blogs/Twitter/chat and (2) Virtual Worlds would be gaining positive publicity and hype. Obviously, other people have other ideas as to what is and isn’t happening and why.

A little while ago, many in the SecondLife Premium User community were introduced to a new SL offering called Premium Wilderness. I was involved in my own personal issues at the time and didn’t head over there but I read several of the posts and tweets about it. As you would expect, easily 50% of the comments hated it and 48% of the comments were neutral and I will guess that 2% dared to like it. But one of my favorite things to do in SL is go to sims where someone has taken the time and effort to make rides and interactive environments – like going to an amusement park. Or – perhaps more similar – like the interactive computer books and games my son played when he was a wee little thing. So I took a quick trip there. It has possibilities. Having been in SL now for almost 4 years, I have to say that I think some of the effects were very nice. Others – not so much. It could have been me, but not one of the objects on which I tried to sit had a pose that fit. That was disappointing. I did really like the sound effects. 🙂

I understand the frustration of folks who think all of LL’s efforts should be on improving their existing product. I have to tell you – software development doesn’t really work like that. My group – oops, my former group – has been successful through 3 major take-overs because we were NEVER just working on what we had – we were ALWAYS developing the NEXT thing. We (they) are here and many many others who started with us are not here. Yes, it’s very, very hard to fix bugs, add enhancements and design new applications. But that’s what the good software developers do. I was liaison with support and with the clients – I DO understand the client experience and emotions.

Quite soon after the furor over Wilderness Experience was quieting down, Arianne Barnes (who I consider to be one of the most insightful virtual world bloggers around) posted on 3D Virtual Worlds vs MMORPGs. Arianne hit on one of the factors that SL devotees believe is KEY: User created content: “Basically, everything that makes 3D Virtual Worlds popular, can now be found in MMORPGs too, except user created content.” She goes on to say: “The MMOs are incorporating the stuff that makes 3DVWs popular. If they are to survive, the 3DVWs need to start incorporating what makes MMOs popular.” This makes a great deal of sense to me. I DO recommend you read the entire post, not just my excerpts here. Arianne is pro-3DVWs. She is not one of the many crying “the sky is falling, the sky is falling”. As a matter of fact, she points to LL Realms as a way Linden Lab is incorporating the popular MMO features. Virtual worlds are big enough for all of us – content designers, socializers and gamers.

While I have been pondering on how I wanted to approach this subject, Tateru Nino (another of my favorite bloggers and sources of information) posted about two MMOGs that ALLOW for user created content. It’s not quite the same as how it is done in SL, of course, but it’s happening. Maybe this is the mirror-image for Wilderness Experience? Of course, it may be late for both MMORPGs and 3DVWs – Facebook is neither of those and yet somehow the same (for some people. NOT me. DO NOT shoot me, folks). Facebook is pulling more people into their phones and off their powerful computer graphics cards. Prokofy Neva posted recently that Facebook is not only harming television, but that “The mobile phone is the new virtual world.” Prokofy mentions that Facebook pulls in those people who do NOT like being an avatar (my manager was among those) and people who do not like being anonymous and faceless (many of my engineering/scientist coworkers were among that demographic).

So where are we going? I don’t know. I still think that virtual worlds are going to become more mainstream, that corporations will utilize them more than is done in the present. I think that what we have now, however, is not going to be what becomes mainstream. I think we are evolving. I don’t think that “The Future” will be a hybrid of Facebook/3DVW/MMORPGs replacing all 3 of those constructs. I think there will be some other sort of synthesis – 3DVWs and MMORPGs. But of course, as I’ve already said – my crystal ball is usually opaque. *grin*

Disillusioned or Comprehending?

Linden Lab has decided not to sponsor SL9B this year. As expected, the SL community is debating whether this is a good thing, a bad thing, both, or a non-event. I’ll give you the link to Honour’s post and you can blog-hop from there if you want. Let me get this part out of the way: I have mixed emotions and thoughts. I can argue all those points of view. That immediately disqualifies me from the conversation, imho. 🙂

So why am I posting on this issue if I’m not discussing it directly? I attended a presentation the other day that I found very interesting, informative, and I think it relates to the LL/SL9B situation. The presentation was by David J. Lanners on Ethical Influence. Most of the talk was on working with other people, both on your team and people outside of your team. The part that resonated most strongly with me was Lanners’ summary of Abraham Zaleznik’s work on the difference between good managers and good leaders. I’m paraphrasing, but basically the point as I understood it was:

If you want things to stay the same, hire a good manager. If you want risk, innovation and change, hire a good leader.

As I do not have permission to share the slide nor the material directly, please understand that what I am posting here is my understanding of what was said and the notes I jotted down from the talk. Any mistakes or flaws in theory are mine.

Good managers are systematic and patient. They are objective and they compromise and reconcile differences. Leaders, by comparison, are emotional and subjective. They are uncompromising and intuitive and, interestingly, anxious. By the way – please note that a good leader is not “better” than a good manager, nor vice versa. They perform different functions.

I think that your reaction to LL/SL9B will be governed a lot by whether you think like a leader or think like a manager. Are you are looking for a leader or a manager for your SL experience?

I don’t know if I’m a leader or a manager. I think the best compliment I have ever received was from one of my mentors who said “She makes things happen.” I look at the adjectives for leaders and managers and I see myself on both lists and on neither list. *grin* But here’s my thinking at this moment….

Maybe a good manager might help at this stage. Someone who could find the proper person at LL with the authority to have a conversation. The manager could try to negotiate a compromise: LL provides sims and the residents (users) can run the event. It’s been done in the past (I believe for SL2B and SL3B). Once the manager changes LL support to limited LL sponsorship, it will be time for the leaders to stand up and bring SL9B on home.

Oh wait. I guess I DID comment directly 🙂

Sanctuary

Things are a bit turbulent in my life these days. My husband suffered a serious accident and much of my time, energy and thoughts are dealing with the aftermath of that. Most of the “heavy lifting” part came immediately after when I was helping my sister with 1st night seder for 26, then my 2nd night seder for 16, Pesach brunch on Sunday, and putting back all the tables, furniture, dishes, etc. on Sunday and Monday. Yeah, some people will do ANYTHING not to help. *laughing* But since my husband already helped with a ton of the preparatory cleaning, his timing wasn’t all THAT escapist.

I’ve not been inworld much lately. I mostly get there for Friday nights at Tribeca and maybe another evening or two for some music or a chat. Since the accident, I’ve been inworld every night. It is my community, my support network. Immediately after the accident, people were in an out of our house for three days. They were visiting my husband and here for the holiday. But then comes Monday and everyone goes back to their routine. Except for the 2 of us. Our routine is a bit disrupted. So we get a few phone calls, a few emails, a few pokes on Facebook and that is as it should be. But I find that I am craving some sort of balm for my stress. I’m finding it inworld.

I don’t know how you get people to survive the first hour experience. I don’t know what makes one person decide to live in SL and another decide to leave. All I know is that I am still at home in SL. This is still one of my major communities, one of my major networks of support and love. There is nearly always a friend online. I can reach out to a friend and say – please, come dance with me, I need to feel arms holding me for a bit. I have friends who give me virtual hugs which I can feel on my skin. I have friends who will distract me with chat or listen to me vent my frustrations with the medical process. Always there is the music. I have blues music playing on my home property if I don’t want to interact beyond a chat. I go to FogBound where there is always a DJ playing fantastic music. I am a regular, a Fogette, and there is always someone there to say “heya Ahuva, how are you today?”. Monday nights I usually catch Taunter performing live. Last night karma was kind and one of my favorite live performers returned to SL.

Last night (BigJim Allerhand (BigJim Adam in RL) returned to Club CTO. He’s been absent awhile now while he was winning acclamation in the physical world. He was playing with Uncle Leeeroy and CharlieJosh Digfoot. They play blues and pickin’ til you are moving right along, playing the air washboard. You know a musician is A-1 quality when the other SL musicians are there in the crowd. Taunter left for her own performance before I snapped the photo, but there is at least one other big-name SL musician in that crowd, not including club owner Cranston Yordstorm. There were a lot of familiar faces there – folk that I see when I’m listening to Von Johin and Ziffy Zarf and Noma Falta and other top-notch performers.

Yep, I’m going to be inworld again tonight (after I do this evening’s running about). I’ll be sure to stop in at FogBound and then be wherever the music takes me. My sanctuary of sound.