Hello OpenLife®?

I have been away from Second Life® for one week. My mother died and my sorrow as well as all the things that needed to be taken care of after her demise kept me in Real Life.

The support and the affection that I received throughout this week from my RL friends and relatives (and especially that of my students who came out in full force to be with their nasty old school marm) has made me wonder as to how wise of a thing it is from an emotional standpoint to be spending such extended periods of time in a second life, to which I am after all only connected to through this ephemeral thing called technology. One power outage, one satellite failure - and I am pretty much on my own here, aren't I?

The trouble with all of these good intentions of cutting down on my virtual life and giving my real life more of a priority is that at this point Second Life has become the place in which the very concept of creativity excites me in a way that I have not felt excited about creativity in a very long time indeed.

Real Life art and design had been leaving me thoroughly cold for quite some considerable time before I had even heard of Second Life: Real Life art I gave for the reasons here, and Real Life design for the deplorable symbol of status and income that it is. The remarkable thing that metanomics has brought about is a world in which neither the production nor the consumption of creative output is an indicator of financial resources. After all, the poorest of poor avatars can create the most stunning of outputs in a sandbox. And kitting yourself out through the acquisition of the creative output of others is not an indicator of your financial status but only of your ingenuity, your imagination and your resourcefulness. After all, in a world where the equivalent of a few real life dollars will buy you the fanciest of cars how can what your Rolex watch tells us about your wallet be of any possible consequence?

There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that at this stage the Residents of Second Life are in the process of creating a social structure unique to the metaverse. But unlike the one in Real Life, what seems to me to be happening here is that (maybe even for the very first time in human history?) we may have the emergence of a true meritocracy. A meritocracy in which nothing but your imagination, your creativity and ultimately your hard work will determine your social status. Wow!

I returned to my second life this morning to find out that in the meantime all hell has broken loose. The Openspace pricing and policy changes announced earlier this week by Linden Labs are very hard to forgive indeed. Surely, Openspace abusers can be held under check through different means? How about charging such Residents based on the calculation of additional prim usage on an Openspace? And not only is this hard to forgive it is also hard to understand: Second Life is no longer a sole option. The competition is already here and it is hard core. Bett has already signed up at OpenLife®, I shall be doing so the very minute after I have posted this, especially now that I have read that OpenLife is also expected to have a working economy by the end of this year. And surely Linden Labs must be aware of the colossal resources that are spent at IBM for the development of a fully three dimensional world wide web which, as we are given to understand, will operate very much along the model of today's virtual worlds.

I am hoping that Second Life will revise this decision. Although it does not personally affect me, it bothers me: My island is an educational island and who is to say that tomorrow there will not be policy changes related to educational islands also? That what we have here today is only the thin end of a truly nasty wedge yet to come? But beyond that it bothers me since it tells me something about the governance of Second Life that makes me very uncomfortable indeed: Shortsightedness.

Get your *own* grid! Thomtrance O'Toole provides step-by-step instructions for OpenSim + binary executable

I like to think that everything we publish on this blog is significant and valuable information, but what I am going to share with you here, today, has the potential to be transformative, and for some, will be on par with a religious experience.

ThomTrance O'Toole is a deceptively easy-going, self-proclaimed mad Celt Goa King and the owner of Happy Clam Island, the home of Organica. There - together with his busy clan of 'Happy Clams' - he blissfully DJs vintage Goa trance tracks and promotes global sustainability and Permaculture. Make no mistake... this man is no light-weight. In fact, he is profound, and I am deeply honored to call him a friend.



Several weeks ago, ThomTrance O'Toole IM'ed me in the most excited tones to say that he had pursued a thread of an earlier conversation we'd had regarding OpenSim. I entreated him to share his findings with me via notecard so that I could distribute said information to the rest of the NPIRLers. ThomTrance is always teasing me gently, and this time was no exception. Here are the contents of that notecard:

Today, I blamed Bettina Tizzy for ruining my life.

On the boundary of the phase transition from a two dimensional NET, to a 3D Metaverse, the bleeding edge is where life begins, where we take small steps into the new Metaverse... being able to create a region of your own, a sim of your own, beyond the boundaries of Second Life, is one of these steps.

OpenSim, an open source project is now in Alpha release 0.4, and I am here to report that yes, Second Life is possible outside of Second Life.

Today, at Bettina's prompting, I tracked them down, downloaded the source, and built the alpha release. Running the executable in stand alone mode, on my desktop, I quickly, and easily established a server.

And it is a *piece of cake* to set up and log in. (Download file - about 18MB - to login = 10 minutes!!!). Note that I have the source code and have built the code into a binary... an .exe, which I will give you via the NPIRL blog.

Now here is the interesting part: I used my Second Life client (1.18.2) to connect to this server, and logged in with the user I created when I originally started the server. Connecting to "ThomSim" , I was presented with a raw island, and a Ruth avatar. (Don't mess with the estate.XML until ye know what ye are doing thom, he said, after needing to reinstall it after doing exactly that).

But this space, this sim, even though I could build on it, and terrain it, and change my av, existed in my desktop, outside the grid of Linden Labs! My head is still spinning, as I realize that this opens up our Metaverse to new grids, all accessible through the SL client . Like the Web in 93, with just a few small servers out there serving up primitive HTML pages, I can see this as a turning point for our Metaverse, a freeing event that will allow us ALL to host and build regions and creations in an ever expanding Metaverse.

Granted, this is an alpha release, not everything works, plenty to still work on, but to login to SL......MY own SL running on my desktop, was a thrill I have not experienced in years.

In the coming week I will prepare some detailed instructions for the non-coders among us, and Bettina will have a link soon to a binary executable from her wonderful blog. A sim of your own coming to a desktop near you.

Until then, Love and light,
thomTrance

P.S. I can see me completely immersed in this project now, so thank you Bettina - for "ruining" my life!!

We haven't seen much of ThomTrance these past few weeks...

But ZOMG, look, look, look at the AMAZING information ThomTrance has created for us! Follow this link to find his gift: step-by-step, easy-to-follow instructions that even non-coders can use on how to get your own grid PLUS a binary executable.

I just hope we don't lose you forever! Please report back to me periodically, would you?

... and ThomTrance spoke yesterday of creating the Not Possible IRL grid. I'm pinching myself. Blessings, ThomTrance. <3

Top 10 Art Installations of Second Life, and more

Make no mistake. We are on the prowl for all the greatest Not Possible IRL builds, and if someone beats us to the punch on something truly splendid, then we will hand them to you on a silver platter, as we must today.

NPIRL'er and New World Notes' scribe, Amalthea Blanc, blogged the very fine and challenging article Top 10 Art Installations of Second Life yesterday, featuring several of our members and a couple of tremendous people we've missed along the way.

Tayzia Abattoir... (insert hand wringing here) you were so right! DanCoyote Antonelli's new show is... is... Well, I missed the boat and cannot justifiably blame it on absent LMs. Everyone, get thee over there and do as DanCoyote recommends: change ALL your settings with wild abandon and discover this vertical masterpiece.
DanCoyote Antonelli's Arts and Letters show

More than one of the individuals featured in Thea's piece are artists-PLUS. They stand for something even greater than their own art work. Case in point: Keystone Bouchard. His Gallery of Reflexive Architecture is at the apex of of the NPIRL experience and invites the avatar to move through, over and under his undulating, interactive sculptures.
Gallery of Reflexive Architecture



But perhaps even more exciting is his use of Second Life to plumb what he calls the "3D Internet" to virtually and collaboratively design via Open Source Architecture, or Wikitecture 2.0.

And get this... if ever there was an activity that underscores our collective shout that SL "is NOT a game," Keystone's RL architectural firm constructs buildings in-world first, allowing their RL clients to log in and experience the build before brick meets mortar.