School

With permission of Fanda Ryba I would like to offer you a translation of his article about Bwindi Orphans Project. It concerns a new school for the orphans in Uganda, see here for more info.

If it was all so simple in real life as it is in the virtual world. It would be sometimes too nice, but sometimes also not. If children had amongst themselves man like Shiny Iceberg in Ugandan village Angola. He would build the school them possibly without a blink. And maybe he also would fit the WC door by all manner of useful sensors. These children have maybe amongst themselves some like Shiny. So, their Shiny have to more learn. But where? Well, he has to go to the school. Do you think that he has a chance to prove himself in the classroom with other 150 classmates?

So, you know that there is some fund-raising campaign both in SL and RL to build the school.
Bigger chance could be given to all Shinys to learn something there. Do you know ever how this school should look? We acquired plans of the school that should be … What should … It WILL build even many of you. Therefore, Shiny Iceberg took the tools and he dared to call even me (Fanda Ryba) for some pair of helping works (but only to hold the timbers and to mix the clay in mix-machine). Now, you can scan through the model of the school that will serve the children in real world, the children, which receive school fees from some yours personally.

So, where is this school? HERE!!

(Pictures with permission of Fanda Ryba)

Antinomies

So, it is here again! Hour between dog and wolf has already passed, but I am remaining somewhere in wasteland. There are only the following things as my companions – a muesli stick, a silent railway station, vibrating engines of some train, a ticking railway station clock and then nothing.

Second Life is maybe only wasteland too. Sometimes we roam and grope there. We look for something and somebody and we still do not find anything and anybody. Is that vainness or? No, it is only my motional effusion at so moved hour, when strangely influenced brain is producing these lines.

I would only like to dream and fall asleep in the arms of some honey or only to fall in the embrace of beauty and nature of the lost gardens of Apollo. Small interruption of a local drunk, who is talking to himself and bit diffusing early morning glooms and fogs. Some bird screams in the darkness maybe brings beneficial Sun.

Small mouse is running around the rails and it is an observation of reality of our world. After long waiting, a rescue is coming. It is the leaving train, in which, of course, I am sitting. The escapes from and the returns into the world of Second Life separate only PC switch on and off and log on, log off. Such as the Yin and Yang principles are the antinomies each other, then also Second Life and Real Life drown one in other and they take from the other, what they need.

Burning Life in Flames

“Rise ancient city from sand of desert and show its own beauty!”

In fact, I do not know where I have heard it. However, even I already long time ago heard the sounds of wind in sand dunes and saw the flashes of the fire flames. Yes, the Burning Life festival is in full swing and the individual installations already are covering the big space of Second Life now. I also have not withstood and have clicked to some places using of the interactive map at official website of Burning Life. What arises from that, you can see on several pictures below.

Temple

Tokyo Stage

Berlin Stage

Snakes

Funny

Long Way – Point Nine – Job

Work is a word of which interpretation at the first sight is not so simple. You understand it in physical point of view, and then we talk about mechanical work, electrical work or other ones. But in result, it will be again some kind of energy. On the other hand, we can talk about physical work using human powers and muscles, which result in fantastic constructions and buildings. They were created during course of human history on many places of our globe. They are again human pieces of work, which were launched outside our planet and gravitate many planets and moons or head distant star, as for example the space probe Voyager.

There is a basic dilemma, which I have solved and I am still solving during my Second Life wandering: to work for myself and to make lindens for me or on the other side to work for someone else and to be paid for that. At my SL beginnings, I got down to some job and I worked for me myself. Actually, I worked with my friend together. Unfortunately, this job was cancelled.

However, another job came along. I have written about it there – newbies support. This one captured me, it was creative job and I do it from its morning till now. Nevertheless, man still seeks something new and perspective. Later, it was work in magazine Globe. How one can say it, this work became “my living love”.

“Ça va,” as Frenchmen say. I felt for writing and correcting of articles. I looked forward to every new Globe issue. My native language is all for me, because I see and hear everyday, how people use it, in newspaper, broadcasting, TV or infinite (or finite?) medium as Internet is. I am really disturb, how people use their language. So many orthographic and grammatical faults in newspaper and using of terrible neologisms make me angry.

Thereafter however, it comes some break point. Maybe it relates to autumn with its rainy and foggy days, when people have spleens. All is otherwise the next moment and the we realizes how we are tiny.

... somewhere in Norwegian Forest ...

Inventory

Quite normal morning, but not so normal. There is rainy and misty autumn day and Sun is hidden behind clouds as I am seeing through the window in some train that is approaching Prague again. It is this time a business trip, but with pleasure program. The unusual thing happened that morning. I waited at the Brno main railways station in the hall full of people. When I walked through the hall and waited for my colleague, I had found some green-black wallet, which lay on one stone block by closed ticket offices. When I opened it, there were ID-Card, Train-Card and some little money inside. After handing it in Railway Center, I heard an announcement of station loudspeaker that owner of this wallet can withdraw it in Railway Center. I hope that it happened, but I do not know and maybe I will never hear about it.

Forget or lost things, it is perpetual pain perhaps of every avatar in Second Life. Inventory, which achieves monstrous dimensions, is chaotic. Directory takes after directory, item takes after item. Random erasure including Trash can cause the big loss of some favorite thing. I happened also me, when I completely deleted one of my first favorite hairs, which I bought for my hard earned lindens. I would like to try to describe my system of inventory ordering, which I proved.

1. Names and titles

It is the same as by usual work with PC and the directories in it without regard to work wit the operation systems like Windows, Linux, Mac or others. Short and apt titles are the best without diacritical – English does not handle – and better do not use too much special symbols like &, @, #, $ or other. On the other hand, these symbols are suitable to move given object to the highest position in the list. Since all is in alphabetical order, then the special symbols are the first, then numbers and finally letters. I recommend this method for example for Landmarks (LM), when the most used LM you can put to the front position using *.

2. Directories

Since I do not build anything in SL, so then Clothes directory is the most used one by me. At the beginning, it was terrible, when I have all things together on one pile. Maybe you think that the icons on the left side of the object title can help. For example a shirt can have three different icons: Undershirt, T-shirt or Jacket according to that how they dress avatars, even if it is superficially same thing. It is similar by pants, shorts or underwear. Finally, I made the optimal classification of clothes. It looks like that (the subdirectories are in brackets). Of course, I tried to translate them into English; the original names in Czech are underlined:

01 Kalhoty – Trousers (Jeans, Pants)
02 Samurai – this one is only for two samurai suits, which are quite complicated and they have many objects
03 Obleky – Suits – it is clear, there are all possible and impossible suits, including formal clothes and others
04 Kosile – Shirts (Rukavy bez – Sleeveless, Rukavy dlouhe – Long sleeves, Rukavy kratke – Short sleeves, Top)
05 Boty – Shoes
06 Ponozky – Socks
07 Spodni – Underwear
08 Kabaty – Coats
09 Shorts, Trunks
10 Rukavice – Gloves
11 Plavky - Swimsuits
12 Bryle – Glasses
13 Doplnky – Accessories

3. LMs

So, it is also some special chapter. It is worst, when you buy some goods, mostly clothes, hairs or some accessory, then there is automatically LM to shop in pack. And if you buy many such things from one brand, then you have multiplied LMs to one place after click on Mini-Map. The next thing is the name of LM. The coordinates on the end are useless, as far as I would like to have a short LM name or to adjust it. I found that it was better to give some two- up to four-letter code (capitals), which someway characterizes LM, for example, CZ for Czech and Slovak sims, BUS = business, CLUB = clubs, SHOP = shops, etc. One should be careful, because the number of characters is limited. Where are the times pf the operation systems, when it was allowed only 8 characters for some name. It was a space for creativity.

The same thing will be also by objects, Body Parts and others, but here I would like to give the space for your imagination.

Long Way – Point Eight – Courses for Newbies

“Knowledge is power.”

We learn ourselves during the whole life, whether we want or no. Sometimes it is a spontaneous thing, at other time we have to do it. It means we have to attend some educational institution, which is usually a school. It begins sometime in a kindergarten and continues at basic school right to higher variant of education. Well, after that there are other educational methods like a self-study, courses or a university of the third age.

The Second Life environment is like created for that to organize courses, tutorials, meetings, etc. After coming of a voice chat into SL, the education moved to another qualitatively higher level. Well, even if phraseology and speech style of some avatars was not correct or standard. By the way, do you know that when Linden Lab announced the implementation of voice chat into SL, the big protests appeared, also demonstrations? Nevertheless, in August 2007 you can communicate with other avatars using your own voice.

So today, there is no problem to use voice chat by different activities in SL. 8th March 2008 was an important day for me. I gave a lecture at the first course from the series of the lectures for the newbies in our community in city Bohemia. Of course it was without voice chat only with text chat. There were purely rational reasons for that. Some people did not have installed voice chat and did not want it or were not able to use it. Because of my text writing, the whole lecture was hard to lecture preparation and management. Unfortunately, I have no any pictures form this time, but the lecture room in Telefónica O₂ building was rather full. And actually what about talked I, respectively wrote I, there? Here is the handout of this lecture for interest:

1. What Second Life (SL) is?
1.1. General presentation of this phenomenon.
1.2. History.
1.3. Definition of some names.

2. SL enviroments.
2.1. Terrain – sims, islands, space, area, objects.
2.2. Avatar – human beings, possibilities.
2.3. Communication – languages, media.

3. Entrance.
3.1. SL main portal.
3.2. SL client.
3.3. Security.

4. What can I do in SL?
4.1. Earning – money, camping, surveys, Earn2Life, job.
4.2. Communication with avatars.
4.3. Entertainment.
4.4. Objects creation. Building.

5. Ethic and behavior in SL
5.1. Question of avatar age in real life.
5.2. Reciprocal behavior among avatars.
5.3. Weapons, violence, bans.

6. Premium Account

This series of courses continued with other topics later. And as it is seen today, some of them are repeating because of big interest, for example, course about scripting.

Actually, I am realizing now that I could reincarnate me only for image into avatar shape, which I had by this lecture.

Lag

It is nice sunny morning and I am again speeding to Prague after long time. Again, it is a comfort of international train Eurocity Carl Maria von Weber, which is going from nearby Vienna, through my loved Moravia, then through Czech basin to Prague and later to Berlin and it terminates in Ostseebad Binz in neighboring Germany.

After the initial difficulties caused by usual delays, I am inside and I am fully enjoying drive in the first class and the second breakfast in dining car. The insolated landscape full of the fields is changing behind the train window. The fields have already yielded their fruits and there is only a contrast of brown (fields) and still green (trees and grass). It means that summer has no ended and autumn did not approach yet. We are just leaving Moravia due to the arrival to the Ceska Trebova station.

Since I get out not until ion Prague, I travel the pure distance 262 km = 262,000 m (162.80 mi = 286 526.68 yds). For instance, you can imagine that it is the distance of about 1,203 sims in Second Life. However, it is valid only in that case that we are moving along edges of squares in on direction. The question is where we would finish. One thing is certain; the teleport would take several seconds unlike RL. There we have to take into account time about 2 hours 48 minutes.

Somebody says in one Luc Besson’s movie: “Time plays no role.” Unfortunately, this premise is not valid either in RL or SL. We are dependent on time. Even we made it up ourselves. Time does not follow from any physical laws or any physical properties of our world or other worlds.

The next moment, the train stopped somewhere in a wasteland. There are any rails nearby. They run somewhere in other place, where time has stopped maybe. These rails are really there, but they are full of weed. Hell! Delay is increasing by another 20 minutes. It is totally already 50 minutes! Oh, we are not alone in this situation. The Super City Express Pendolino has stopped nearby us. Then we all are lost in the wasteland.

After that, it occurred to me that the preceding situation is an analogy with world of SL. Surely it is a lag! Tom Boellstorf written in his book:

… small talking about lag is like talking about the weather in rl [1].

Lag exited because Second Life, like all “massively multiply” virtual worlds during my fieldwork, was based on a “client-server” architecture, where most of the virtual world was housed on servers rather than the personal computers of residents [2].

It is therefore incorrect to assume that “everything in the new computer world is temporary and fleeting. … Time is now a resource, not a reference point.” [3]

I cannot move from my place, either in time or space. I am as a newbie – absolutely bare. I have nothing. I don’t know, what is happening. How it is working. Is there any hope?

Yes, it is. Courses for newbies.

References

1. T. Boellstorf: Coming of Age in Second Life An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 102
   
2. ibid, p. 103
   
3. ibid, p. 105

(It was written down in dining car of EC Carl Maria von Weber on 09.09.2009. It was served Prague’s omelet with roasted potatoes. Further, it was served Chardonnay, a sacramental wine from Archbishop's cellars in Kroměříž)