This is the best stupid Second Life argument I’ve ever been in.

I’m just pleased with how my last sentence there turned out. And the intended recipient will never read it! She is too busy being wrong on the internet someplace else.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

(Dreamwidth crosspost: comments)

There used to be an empty lot I had to go through on my way to the mall. One morning at the end of March or beginning of April, still sleepy, I was walking to the mall, and found that there was suddenly construction in that lot. Cement had been poured, and the ground was higher than it had been. This seemed unlikely to me; for a moment I wasn’t sure if I was in the real world or in a video game. I tried to check my inventory.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

There are some little windows in the classroom so the parents can watch classes from the waiting area. Obviously, when there are other kids out there, they come over to the windows and wave and pop up and down like prairie dogs and so forth.

So the other day Mr. Yodeler was in the classroom, and Mr. Weepy was outside waiting for the teacher for his other class to show up. Mr. Weepy came over and knocked on the window. Mr. Yodeler walked over to it, looking very solemn. They both pressed their noses up to it and kissed through the glass. Then they giggled, and loudly proclaimed one another to be “baragumi.”

I know that “bara,” which means “rose,” is used as a term for gay guys - I mean, that part of the whole interaction seems pretty clear - but I’m not sure about the “gumi” part. According to my dictionary it just means “group,” but I think I’ve only ever heard it used referring to military and police units. When I google for this in romaji I get stuff about the anime Sakura Taisen, which does, in fact, use the term to describe a (deeply offensive-sounding) all-gay military unit. But I don’t think a couple of four-year-olds are likely to have seen this show, since 1) the art makes it look kind of porny, and 2) Sleep-san liked it, which probably means it’s both kind of porny and too complicated for little kids. I could be wrong? Anyway, I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to ask the manager to clarify this one for me. His sense of humor can be somewhat lacking.

(The first google result in Japanese is somebody’s Second Life store, and I am deeply unimpressed by those dresses.)

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Look how pretty my Warcraft and Second Life people are!

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Deeply unscientific survey! Here are links to a bunch of images of a Second Life avatar’s face, with different skin textures applied: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

I would be extremely happy if people who had time went through them and told me in the comments on the LiveJournal (rather than on the website, which is behaving badly) 1) what ethnicity each one “reads” as to you, as short or long or vague or specific as you want, 2) optionally, some kind of description of your own racial/cultural background (like, “white American,” “1/2-generation Taiwanese-Canadian”). This is for a Top-Secret Grumpy Research Project about Second Life skins.

Today I finally did my laundry and grocery shopping. I think it’s been three weeks since I did laundry? I had some really good green tea ice cream at a restaurant a few weeks ago, so I bought some at the store. It turns out that not all green tea ice creams are necessarily edible.

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

The other day I searched the Second Life map for Lothlorien. This is what it looks like:

There are two different ways to search for places within Second Life. One is the default “search” function, which acts like a normal search engine (a crappy one), and lets you choose whether to search people, places, classified ads, etc. The second way is to open up the map and use its search function. This works differently.

Second Life is divided into a grid. If the owner of the sim changes his/her mind about what to do with it after choosing the name, or wants to squat a name he/she thinks will bring in traffic, or rents the whole thing out to someone with slightly different ideas, the name might not have a lot to do with the actual contents. The Harry Potter-themed Wizard’s Alley is in a sim called “Sunset Harbor.” I don’t think there’s any harbor.

I decided to see what other inappropriately-Tolkien-named areas I could fine.

Originally published at I Am Completely Serious. You can comment here or there.

I’ve talked about nice things enough! This time, I’m going to make fun of somebody’s house.

Click the picture to zoom in and read the text. It is hilarious.

* It is a “Luxury Lodge,” with ad copy visually calculated to make one think of a ski lodge - the little bare-wood structure at the top of a sharp slope that the signs are in, the snowy picture (there’s no snow in the actual sim). And it has “privacy windows,” and you can also get a “vacation lodge” version of the house. So far we are doing a pretty good job here of invoking the Western stock symbols of wealth and privilege, but can we take it further?

* We can! We can call something “exclusive.” “Owners Group: An Exclusive Group for Arc Owners.” This group is only for people with big ridiculous houses.

* It’s called “The Arc.” This is my new favorite marketing thing ever. It conveys moral superiority, legitimacy conferred by authority, escape or sanctuary from a teeming rabble and/or hostile world, a sense of vast size and weight, and wood. It’s so perfect.

Originally published at I Am Completely Serious. You can comment here or there.

This will be short because, though DB Bailey’s stuff is incredibly awesome, I don’t know that the vocabulary yet exists to allow me to explain why. There is no critical lexicon for 3D environmental design! Someone make one so I can use it! This is too hard!

When you’re working in CG, it’s obviously possible to do a lot of stuff you can’t in real life. You can make stuff turn into something else when you look at it from a certain angle, or turn invisible when you go around it. You can make invisible walls, and visible walls you can go through. The thing is that, in the twenty years or so that 3D video games have been common, we’ve gotten used to these things happening. They’re called “bugs.” When we see them, we are not impressed.

Sometimes we should be impressed!

Originally published at I Am Completely Serious. You can comment here or there.

Today I am making a really long post about design decisions made by the makers of a Second Life Gorean role-play sim. I hope you’re up for that.

Kingdom of Sand/Purgatorio/1001 Nights is, as is often the case when a Westerner devises a fantasy culture incorporating slavery, based loosely on the Middle East. Yeah, okay, fellow white people. (That’s you I’m looking at funny, Jane Yolen. Frank Herbert. Jennifer Roberson. C. S. Lewis.)

Second Life has a lot of Gorean areas, and visually, most of them are kind of a mish-mash of medieval Western European and Middle Eastern elements, with the European predominating. My understanding is that the books leaned more the other way, but there’s a lot of cross-pollination between the Gorean areas and the (obviously Europe-inspired) Elven ones - enough that some of the more conservative Elven-themed sims, like Avilion, will often warn you immediately upon entry that you better not go practicing any slavery in here.

You’ll also find branches of the same clothing and weapons sellers in both types of areas, and when Goreans and elves build prefab, they buy from the same people. (Julia Hathor, Baron Grayson, and Kriss Lehmann probably account for 25% of the Elvish and Gorean landscape.) The Gorean sims tend to read a little like NC-17-rated versions of the Elven ones.

Kingdom of Sands sticks to genre convention:

Cobras are the shorthand. Carpet sellers are also good.

Originally published at I Am Completely Serious. You can comment here or there.

(Note: Having finished writing this, I remembered that Matt Thorn wrote an essay on this issue, and googled it, and, uh. It looks like a lot of what I’ve said is just regurgitating stuff he said. Sorry, Mr. Thorn! Here, go read that.)

Most manga set up one or more “default ethnicities” within which the mangaka feels free to give the characters a pretty large range of physical variance - as in, members of the “normal” group can have whatever hair and eye colors the mangaka feels like (as long as they’re black and white, I mean), various facial shapes, and slightly dark skin (if the mangaka’s not allergic to that). CLAMP, for example, generally gives the full range to Japanese, Chinese, European, and mix-thereof characters. In this way, the Japanese and Chinese and English characters can’t be physically distinguished.

Then there might also be one or more “non-default/exoticized ethnicities.” An exoticized ethnicity isn’t allowed the full range of variance - some attribute (90% of the time hair color) gets coded as a racial marker, and can’t vary within the ethnicity. Example: The volume of CLAMP’s Tsubasa where they go to a Korean world, and everybody has black hair.

(Actually, I think that Kurogane’s feudal-Japan world is also limited to black hair, which raises questions about the human tendency to exoticize/racialize our own histories/ancestors…)

The more typical example, found in 90% of manga set in in modern-day Japan: Bisco Hatori in Ouran High School Host Club gives the full range of hair-color variance to Japan, but limits European or European-Japanese-mixed characters to blond hair. Hence the weird dissonance between the art and the writing, where people say that the mixed-race Tamaki and Nekozawa “stand out” and have a “foreign flair” because of their pale hair - while plenty of pure-blooded Japanese characters like Honey, the twins, and Haruhi’s dad also have light-colored hair.

( Actually, I'd better cut for length here... )

Several new and bewildering comments appeared on the entry where I made fun of a Second Life build and the designer and one of her employees showed up to respond. I thought at first they were a real person, but now I’m wondering if they might be some kind of spambot. Turing tests are either funnier or sadder now that we have the internet to show us how often people fail them.

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.

Women do not revere the venom cock as men do. Unless maybe they do?

NSFW cut. (Though honestly, I don’t think you can really tell what it’s supposed to be without the helpful descriptive text.)

Because Silver Rose Designs, which I already liked due to its very nice free clothes, has Kraehe’s dress from Princess Tutu. And this is important information about which, at present, no one but me cares.

The designer also has outfits from that one show with, like, the alchemists, though she has sneakily called them something else. They’re not quite as impressive, though.

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Seen at the Horai Senmaida a couple weeks ago: a Kakashi scarecrow:

(I’ve also got some other, non-Naruto-related pictures, but Flickr won’t let me upload stuff right now - it keeps kind of stalling out at 99% on the first photo in the batch. Seeing as this coincides with a bunch of weird Windows Explorer glitches, I’m guessing that this might possibly be Vista’s fault.)

Am I going to write about Japan? No! I’m going to write about Second Life again!

(There are a lot of images, a couple of them NWS, under the fold, so don’t click if you’re on a slow connection/in a designated sultry-Cheetah-temptress-free space.)

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.

I got a job last week, which will end when I leave for Japan in a month. I took a phone call from a crackhouse proprietor Friday, and Monday 1) learned that the person had been a crackhouse proprietor 2) was instructed in our standardized response to phone calls from crackhouse proprietors. The response is “no.”

But I’m going to post about Second Life.

The thing about Second Life is that it’s the internet in 3D.

It is, basically, just some very large servers where people can make and explore public 3D areas, communicate with other users, and try to sell those other users t-shirts. You have to pay the company if you want to make your own area or upload something (like a t-shirt), but making an avatar and looking at other people’s stuff is free.

So they’re a web host, and like most web hosts, they don’t really mess with the paying customers’ content unless they stand to lose money. Hence stuff like an obsessively detailed reproduction of Midgar from Final Fantasy VII - no lawsuits yet, so it’s good to go! Recently they’ve been getting worried about the lolicon role-players, and they’re addressing this in ways fen will find familiar.

Because anyone with money can build an area (called a sim), and anyone at all can make an avatar, there’s a lot of crap in there. It is normal to encounter a six-foot-tall green penis sitting in a crudely-sculpted flying car with some audio looping in the background telling Craig how much he completely sucks. Craig will respond on his own plot of land next door, with an equally penis-positive Photoshopped image of Leonard Nimoy, and a recorded cuss that only plays once because he couldn’t figure out how to get it to loop. Noted guy Theodore Sturgeon predicts that 90% of the content on Second Life relates either to penises or to the question of how much Craig completely sucks. (The answer being, completely.)

So, you remember when you first got on the internet, and had no idea how it worked, and just typed stuff into Yahoo or whatever to see what showed up? I’ve been doing that with Second Life for a few weeks now. It is insanely addictive.