Islands, No Drones, Environmental Racism and more.

Casita Gaia, Gaia Village is taking up most of my creative energy these days. Need to rebuild, again, on an island I actually own. Had an offer too good to pass up on the purchase of an island. See CasitaGaia.com for the vision with which I'm working.

Also gathering some WPA graphics for a box of textures in SL. XstreetSL sales have been up recently.

And I updated the CODEPINK Hut on Commonwealth as well as the Environmental Rooftop Fest at Sugar Hill on top of the Museum of the African Diaspora with information about the No Drones actions at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

So much to do. Also trying to write an essay on the feminine nature of virtual worlds.

Peace. :)

MediaMaster Service ended in late January 2009

MediaMaster is no more. My land isn't streaming my own music any longer. I'm sad. If any one has any info on similar type products or services, please let me know.

Island Life - Open, Homestead, and Otherwise

Looks like my social and business over-extension isn't going to go away. I now have two islands! Not real islands in the sense of coughing up thousands of dollars U.S. and then paying hundreds a month for 17,000+ prims (the building blocks of the visual virtual world) but rather Open Space islands that will soon be called Homestead Islands while the term Open Space island will be reserved for islands that are only for open sea or forests, gardens and the like and will be limited to around 700 prims.

At this time I plan to keep the two islands I have for the time being.

The Women's Building Place Sandbox is very popular.











And work is underway to create Casita Gaia a island HQ location for my businesses. I will have to decide whether to keep all my other stores open within a few days as rents on them come due. More business discussion in another post. I will have to go into options and let you see how I weighed the facors and whether money or fun trumped the other one. I will interested to see what I decide too. LOL.


I'm renting both these open spaces from Delicious Demar who has been a friend for almost my whole life in SL.

Space Junky & Tibet

Attended a Space Junky concert on Friday night. Found out about it through an SL volunteer mentor who showed up at my Olympic Boycott Info Event. I wasn't sure I wanted to spend Friday night dancing by myself at a concert to the music of a group to whom I had not previously listened. I watched a suggested video of Space Junky's called Temple of Love and read about the possibly mystical and certainly marvelous experience in a Tibetan Temple associated with the song and video's evolution. Very neat.

So I decided to go to the Space Junky concert for Tibet linked to the Candle for Tibet light event on August 23rd. Dropped a notecard on their PR person, Bella Dutton. I wanted to make sure I would be one of the sims in their count of the SL venues burning Tibetan Olympic torches during these games. This is Bella at the concert.

I then TPed to the Inspire Center on Shangria that is in the shape of a star.

Everyone looked up for a minute before the start of the concert.
The set, lighting, arena -- in other words, atmosphere -- were all very much like a RL concert.
Here is another shot of the stage so you can maybe see what I mean about the quality in the attention to detail. The lead singer with Space Junky is the person from whose perspective the text on the Temple of Love page on the Current site, linked above, is written. Need I even mention her devoted following.


The band and production credits from the Space Junky in Second Life blog:

• Shakti Cianci - Lead Singer/Keyboards
• Valentis LeSabre - Producer/Manager
• Zaphod Rahja - Guitarist
• Zavier Corleone - Drums
• Bella Dutton - Publicist
• Tommy Parrott - Staging/Lighting Director
• Izzy Cole - Tour Photography
• Nemesis Greatrex - PQE Specialist
• Wizard Gynoid - Calendar Queen
• Tegg Bode - SJ Mascot

The drummer, Zavier Corleone, has an impressive set of percussive recreations, no?

Here you can see Shakti Cianci and Zaphod Rahja and a view from the stage.

********************************************
August 23rd - the night before the close of the Olympics -- please participate in the Protest of Light.

Find more photos like this on Candle4Tibet

BlogHer in SL Schedule

Register here: http://guest.cvent.com/EVENTS/Info/Summary.aspx?e=68d83da2-b7b5-4ec1-979a-30c1f11e17df
The Second Life Agenda (All times Pacific Daylight Time):

DAY ONE, Friday July 18th (PDT)
9:00-9:15 AM (live from San Francisco, CA)
Welcome to BlogHer '08 from the Westin St. Francis Ballroom in San Francisco

9:15-10:15 AM
"Speed Dating" for BlogHers in Second Life

10:30-11:45 AM
Second Life Break-Out Session #1: The Intersection of Blogging and Second LIfe

12:45-2:00 PM
Second Life Break-Out Session #2: Second Life and Security

2:30PM-4:30PM
Second Life Activity in Exhibitor Area

4:30PM-8:30PM
SecondLife Open Mic and Party

DAY TWO, Saturday July 19th
9:30-10:30 AM (live from San Francisco, CA)
BlogHer '08 Morning Keynote: Hybrid Media

10:45-12:00 PM
Second Life Break-Out Session #3: SecondLife as Educational/Training Tool

1:45-3:00 PM
Second Life Break-Out Session #4: Using Second Life for Good

3:30PM-5:00PM
Second Life Activity in Exhibitor Area

5:15-6:15 PM (live from San Francisco, CA)
BlogHer '08 Closing Keynote: Living the Truman Show

BlogHer 08 in SL

I'm getting it all together for BlogHer in SL! Woot! Can't wait!

If you don't know about it, zip on over to the registration info page. I'll be on a panel there about the intersection of Blogging and SL. But I will also be having office hours this Friday, as I did last Friday at the CNN iReport Hub on Future Island.

I'm putting up some new blog bling on the side of this page. Click it and you can find out about the conference.

Busy busy avatar.

Getting back to a regular schedule of posting. :) Keep your virtual fingers crossed and knock on a wood texture. Had a hard drive crash and burn. Grrrr. This always happens just before a big nationwide protest in RL. And I'm on a Mac!!! Now I am having problems reloading GIMP via the new X11 bridge. Grrrr & double Grrrr.

Been zipping in and out of other virtual worlds such as OL and more (reviews coming soon) and working on projects in SL too. Busy Avatar.

I will be posting about a conference I will be attending in SL over the next few days on Dr. Dobbs Island. More info coming soon. Should be good. I have my new suit ready to go.

More soon.

Virtual hugs and kisses.

Hope to have a few rather large splats of blogging to catch up with all that has been happening. Opened a new store "Seasons" in Barcelona on the new sim across from the Cathedral, but I'm going to close it. Over expansion of a sort. Too many new projects at one time. Guess I will just keep my one store there, Casita Gaia, next to the Cafe. Started updating the store a couple days ago.... but I'm also creating a new space for myself on Anhalt Hill that I call Virtuality. I will have all my stuff there. Buildings for sale, furniture, textures, the works, and I will have the open space that I initially created on Echo Island - a cafe for meetings and a cuppa joe in this new spot. Open to all of course. I suppose some folks would just go for the island at this point, but I'm more cautious. I have about a 1/4 island that I purchased with just the first month's rent as the purchase price. There are a few honest and ethical sorts out there doing the SL land baron thing. I probably angered the established tenants with my terraforming, but I needed mountains and beach.

I mentioned Echo Island. I'm going to miss Monday, the owner of Echo. He was a neighbor on the mainland, and I purchased a spot from him not so long ago. I just outgrew the parcels he had available. He gave me a beautiful ballerina music box as a going away gift. *Sniff, choke back tears, ahem.* We're only a T.P. away, but I like having him as a neighbor. Hope he will still serve on VKG's board.

The biggest thing going on behind, above, and through all this is the consulting company I've worked to build in the last few months. The Virtual Knowledge Group with me as the founding director is taking off nicely. I've real customers paying in not only Lindens but also U.S. dollars. Not as good as Euros at this point, but what can a person do? All my electronic existence is based in RL in a place called Tucson, Arizona. I've helped so many folks along the way since my rez day in July of 2006. It only makes sense to channel some of what I've learned about business and plain old life in SL -- I am collecting my info for eventual (sooner rather than later) sale as a "business package" I will market on SL Exchange that will have an In World book as well as some of the more useful freebie/transferable scripts available in world as well as links to some of the vendors I trust. So far I've helped, and am helping avies set up shop through private tutoring. I also have examined the marketing of some successful businesses so that I can help my customers figure out what approach to take in marketing their business.

SL Capitol Hill has useful info

Unlike the real thing, the Capitol in SL has useful info and interfaces. I discovered this when I was at the G8 protest on Capitol Hil a couple days ago.

On the Southside of Capitol Hill clicking on a sign takes you to a web page where you can register to vote if you are a U.S. citizen.



You can also check out U.S. Presidential Candidate info areas in SL (run by individuals not by actual campaigns from what I can tell) and get a landmark from which you can teleport to these candidate info areas.

You can also contact Senators and Reps through another board there on the South Capitol steps that links to website access to a database on districts throughout the United States.

This is going to be an interesting next 17 months as the U.S. Presidential election comes to SL in a big way for the first time.

Addressing ALL the Issues

Blair Holt, real world child, dead at 17, chicken shit Democrats who won't cut ties with their RL corporate masters, countless hundreds of thousand dead in the cradle of RL civilization, species chased by short term profits hurtling over the cliffs of very very real climate change...

So why am I spending so much time in SL? Well.... I don't exist in the real world although I am very connected to it. What? Is this just babbling by some schizo chic? Elements of identity do not all necessarily mesh and co-occur simultaneously. I'm not willing to debate this. It is true. The self is so complex and so processually-defined that looking at it as a static entity that occurs here or there or now or then is at best naive and inadequate.

I've been waiting for a "Jetsons" world, a 2001: a Space Odyssey world, the promised virtual media life that has been available only in our solitary imaginations ever since my RL counterpart's childhood a few decades ago. I wanted to create an imaginary world with others. Suspension of disbelief with others rarely occurs after childhood. I'm talking about group play - group imagination. Mature western adults, almost entirely, experience suspension of disbelief only when engaged in reading, watching and other relatively passive interaction with fictions. Games, online games, allow shared suspension of disbelief but only in a passive way, the actions, options, and goals of such games are clearly delineated. Even though people participated together it was largely as though these groups were participating in a reenactment of a novel. While this analogy isn't a perfect one by any means, it is essentially a good one.

Now the thing that Second Life offered to my RL counterpart that other games had not was shared suspension of disbelief with singular and joint creativity. After thinking about this for almost a year, I have come to the conclusion that this is why the community of users in Second Life has grown from less than 300,000 a year ago to over 6,000,000 today.

Another aspect of what SL offers that other gaming does not, or why it is attractive to women like my RL counterpart is that shared creativity and information rich context is everywhere in SL. Those are also key to traditional solidarity or bonding within feminine society.

Lots of avatars with whom I've spoken have told me that sex and gambling are the essence of what SL is all about. I don't think that is so. It is at the core of what SL is for a large group of people. I cannot confirm it at this time, but I think that large group is largely composed of RL males. Not that women don't gamble and have sex. I personally would love to know the numbers per female avies (avatars) that are "backed" by males.

Anyway, SL allowed me to come to life in a way that nothing else had since I a little girl playing Jungle Barbie p.o.ed her mom because she rearranged all the house plants for the jungle and had Barbie running around topless because that is what people in the jungle do. I think the persona that I (Ana) have adopted and developed definitely is a continuation of the persona initially created among those houseplants and informed by National Geographic.

A lot of this is speculation and will remain so as being a part of the thing or process being investigated usually taints objectivity. But I did notice some very interesting reactions within myself to things that went on in and people in an SL "meeting."

I became semi-active in a group in SL, SL Netroots, last fall after the RL election when I stumbled into an after-election debriefing conference for "progressives." I even gave a presentation at the conference. I suggested a mirror action to the RL Jan 27 March. I attend a lot their meetings. I ranted about one of their speakers in another post. I don't want to post to an outside wiki, or yahoo group. I want to develop SL as a new vehicle for networking and global progressive cross-fertilization. I don't just come to SL for RL politics. It is something that interests me as my very existence depends on freedom of information and communication. I will talk about "Net Neutrality" at some point and how it is perfect doublespeak.... but some other time.

Lots of folks come to SL for sex and gambling. I don't know much about gambling. Never really got it. And sex... well that isn't any one's business but my own. And I am only 11 months old. That is too young for sex, right? LOL. I am very intrigued by the cultural limits SL and "the LIndens" place on sexuality. Bestiality via Furries is okay. BDSM is okay. Cannibalism via vampirism is okay. Public fornication is okay (in certain places.) Prostitution is okay. But what is called "age play" is not. I agree emotionally. I think having sex with a child avatar is reprehensible, icky, sicko and seriously perverted... but... all folks here in SL are adults. So why is it okay to torture, do sheep, and eat flesh, buy and sell flesh but not okay to pretend you are a 9 year old? I do understand why. You don't have to answer in a comment. But it is an inequity to think about.

The other thing about sex in SL that is weird is that you can't really tell what sex or gender an avi really is unless you know the person in RL. I've been hit on in dress shops by "lesbian" female avatars that I'm sure were guys. Women just don't come on as rudely, crudely, or brashly as guys.

There are lots of women in SL. Real women. Why is does SL appeal to women? Creativity. You can't be sexually assaulted. It is a verbal medium. It gives us the chance to do what we can't in RL (but that is true for males to some degree as well). It gives us a chance to create the rules. 17 year old children don't get shot on buses on the south side of Chicago while going to their grandparent's store to work after school.

Bitching about Real Lifers

Went to an SL Netroots wkly mtg. My RL disgust with the Democrats wimpy and ultimately lying and scheming behavior carried over to the SL meeting.

Daily Kos is having some sort of a meeting YKSL -- and I don't get it. I know everything mainstream has a tendency to get me p.o.ed but.... I fail to understand why Yearly Kos is coming to SL and charging $25 U.S. to attend via a stream into SL. Jimbo, spoke to the Netroots group this week about it. No. 1 on my P.O. factor was that most of the time he was initially telling us about it, I thought, "Oh, cool, they want to show SL folks what they do." But the attitude that came through to me was that they were going to show SL folks how to be "Progressive." I am so tired of liberal thinking mainstreamers telling real progressives how to be progressive. I usually bite my tongue, but after this last week on the RL Capitol Hill I simply cannot stand the duplicity of the Democrats nor the "backers" of the party (the people) who should be the party. The DLC is Corporate America. The DNC are predominantly big boys in the Dem Party who want to be the DLC.

We need to revolt. It is our constitutional duty to do. I do not condone violence, but it is time to cut the main parties loose and do something completely different. I'm with Cindy. Screw 'em.

The SL folks who do Netroots are wonderful people, they work their butts off for what they believe in, and Drew has done great stuff for the SL YK thing... but they seem to think Progressive = Democrat. Wrong. Maybe I've got it wrong but I don't think so. I hang out with Anarchists and Communists from time to time and Progressives are the right wing of the Left Wing. Democrats are not Left Wing. Republicans are not Right Wing. Nearly all Democrats and Republicans are neither left nor right wing, but are the chicken in the middle. Buh-gack.

Ok, that is one peeve. The other is the mainstreaming of SL. RW groups come to SL... pay someone (usually) to set up their presence and expect folks to flock to them. SL is the early stage of what I call Artificial Reality. V.R. is a long long way away. An artificial reality that is effectively indistinguishable from reality would be a virtual reality. SL is not VR. There is a real AR culture developing in SL though and "outsiders" who come to SL and want to bring RL to SL are not really "getting" that there is a culture developing here and you have to interact in it to become part of it.

It is fine if YK wants to have a meeting in SL. But charging $25 U.S. to attend. That is a bit rude in SL culture.

I work my virtual butt off (and a cute butt it is) to "make tier" and I don't expect to develop more connections in SL that cost me money. If anything I would like to make contacts that help me spend less money.

Oh well. Enough for now.